CHAPTER III THE SUP­PRESSED POR­TRAIT OF DICKENS, "PICK­WICK," "THE BAT­TLE OF LIFE," AND GRI­MAL­DI

HAVING dealt in the last chapter with the sup­pres­sion of the well-known Thackeray wood-cut of the “Marquis of Steyne,” we naturally turn next in order to the other great Victorian novelist, Charles Dickens. Much, of course, has been written about the Buss plates in Pickwick, and much about the “Fireside Scene” in Oliver Twist. All readers of Forster’s Life of Charles Dickens know something of the wood engraving in The Battle of Life which ought to have been, but never was, cancelled; and some know what to look for in the vignette title of Martin Chuzzlewit. It is, however, time that the scattered details should be grouped, that re­pro­duc­tions of the plates themselves should make reference easy to those {27} who would identify their possessions, and that the additional information which is in some cases scattered about in various impermanent writings of my own and others should be focussed for the greater convenience of the collector.

In the first place, I shall present to the reader a suppressed portrait of the great novelist, which has, I believe, never since been reproduced. It was published about the year 1837 by Churton, but as to the name of the artist by whom it was etched there is a mystery which yet awaits solution. The plate is, as will be noticed, signed with the familiar pen-name “Phiz,” but was almost immediately repudiated by the chartered bearer of that title, H. K. Browne. It was promptly withdrawn from pub­li­ca­tion, and is now, as a necessary consequence, much sought after by the collector.10 Of it the author of Charles Dickens, the Story of his Life, writes:

A very remarkable [portrait] was etched about 1837 with the name “Phiz” at the foot. It represents Dickens {28} seated on a chair and holding a portfolio. In the background a Punch-and-Judy performance is going on. The face has none of that delicacy and softness about it which are observable in the Maclise portrait. It looks, however, more like the real young face of the older man, as revealed in the photograph now publishing [i.e. just after Dickens’s death]. This portrait is very rare, and it is understood that it was withdrawn from pub­li­ca­tion soon after it appeared. Mr. Hablot K. Browne, the genuine “Phiz,” denies all knowledge of it.

The Hotten memoir thus whets the appetites of its readers, but does not offer to satisfy them by a re­pro­duc­tion. This obvious duty I therefore here take the opportunity of discharging, and would advise the book-hunter to make a mental note of the etching in that pix of the brain where is secreted the reagent which separates the rare gold of the bookseller’s threepenny box from its too ordinary dross. The re­pro­duc­tion here given is about the size of the original etching.

So much for the suppressed portrait. Now let us take up our first edition of Pickwick, and say what has to be said about the much-discussed Buss plates and their substitutes.

Pickwick, as we all know, was first published in parts, and only one number had appeared when {29} Robert Seymour, its illustrator, died by his own hand. Messrs. Chapman and Hall, the publishers, were at their wits’ end to get the new number il­lus­trat­ed in time for pub­li­ca­tion. Jackson, the well-known wood-engraver, who was at the time working for them, proposed for the task R. W. Buss, a “gentleman already well known to the public as a very humorous and talented artist.” The publishers gladly adopted the suggestion, and the appointment was made.

All this we find very fully set out in Mr. Percy Fitzgerald’s History of Pickwick, to which I would refer the reader who is anxious to acquaint himself with details of the transaction. The Buss etchings, which we here reproduce, had for their subjects “The Cricket Match” and “Tupman and Rachel,” and are to be found respectively opposite pp. 69 and 74 of the earliest issues of the first edition of the immortal romance. They were, in the words of the artist himself, “abominably bad,” and he was immediately superseded as illustrator by H. K. Browne, who was destined to be inseparably connected with the novelist’s work for so long a period. {30}

This episode has been so often dwelt upon, and so exhaustively dealt with, that I shall not do much more than point out how those who have written on the subject have altogether missed what is perhaps the most important link in the whole chain of cir­cum­stances. So put to it, as I have said, were the publishers to get the new number out in time lest an expectant public should be disappointed, that they were forced to fix upon Seymour’s substitute without consulting Dickens. This was really the whole crux of the situation. The author only recognised the failure of the plates. He knew nothing of the difficulties under which Buss had laboured, and so naturally made no allowances, and knew of no reason why subsequent ones should be better. The plates unquestionably were poor, but we find from Mr. Buss’s own private MS., to which, by his son’s kindness, I have had access, that this was not by any means mainly the fault of the artist. He had previously had no experience in etching, and only undertook the work after much pressure, to accommodate the publishers. To quote from his own account: {31}

At Seymour’s death, Hall engaged me to il­lus­trate Charles Dickens’s Pickwick. I commenced practice, and worked hard, I may say day and night, for at least a month on etching, and I furnished the illus­tra­tions for Pickwick. Without any reason assigned, Hall broke his engagement with me, in a manner at once unjust and unhandsome.

As a matter of fact, the plates, as they appeared, were not etched by Buss at all, but by a professional etcher after his designs. And it is curious to note that each of the plates is, not­with­stand­ing, inscribed, “Drawn & Etch’d by R. W. Buss.”

The artist’s bitterness against his employers was not unnatural. At the same time, we must remember that the fact that they had on the spur of the moment to decide upon an artist, without consulting Dickens, puts the matter in a very different light. The fortunes of the venture were at stake. The author, at all hazards, must be humoured. His will was paramount, and when he insisted upon Buss’s supersession by H. K. Browne, there was practically an end of the matter. Happily Buss’s labour was not all lost, and it was with much pleasure that I seized the opportunity offered me by the editor of the {32} Magazine of Art in June 1902, to point out in that pub­li­ca­tion how perverse has been the fate which has made the name of an artist of no mean order more familiar by his few failures than by his many successes. It is not generally known that there are in existence two etched plates by Buss showing that he contemplated a series of extra illus­tra­tions to Pickwick. The one is a title-page with Mr. Pickwick being crowned; the other is rather a poor rendering of “The Break-down.”

But to return to the plates themselves: only about seven hundred copies were published when plates by Browne were substituted for them. “The Cricket Match” was wholly suppressed, and the subject of “Tupman and Rachel” was etched over again, considerably altered, but evidently founded upon the Buss plate. The latter is here reproduced for the purpose of comparison.

That every Dickens collector desires to possess one of the seven hundred copies of the first issue of the first edition which contain the Buss plates, is a matter of course, and enough has been said to make clear the reason of such desire. Should any of my readers fail to sympathise, he must take {33} it as an incontrovertible sign that he is immune from that most delightful of all diseases, bibliomania.

It need only be added that, in the beautiful “Victorian Edition” of the novel, published in two volumes by Messrs. Chapman and Hall in 1887, facsimiles may be seen of the original drawings made for the suppressed plates, as well as two unpublished drawings prepared by Mr. Buss, but not used. The subjects of these are “Mr. Pickwick at the Review,” and “Mr. Wardle and his Friends under the Influence of the Salmon.” The first is an excellent drawing, and goes far to prove that, had Buss been given time, he would have no more failed as illustrator of Pickwick than he did as illustrator of various other most successful pub­li­ca­tions. The same edition also contains facsimiles of an unused drawing by “Phiz,” “Mr. Winkle’s First Shot,” and of a water-colour drawing of “Tom Smart and the Chair,” sent in to the publishers by John Leech as a specimen of his work. From which it will be seen that the “Victorian Edition,” limited to two thousand copies, is also one which every Dickens lover ought, if possible, to possess. {34}

The originals of the Buss drawings were in the possession of the artist’s daughter, Miss Frances Mary Buss, the well-known founder of the North London Collegiate and Camden Schools, until her death a few years ago. They were then sold, and I have been unable to discover into whose hands they have passed.

So much for the Pickwick suppressed plates, which, if strict chronology were to be observed, should naturally be followed by an account of the “Rose Maylie and Oliver” plates in Oliver Twist. These, however, we shall hold over for another chapter, as they will have to be considered at some length. Meanwhile, we will deal shortly with the curious wood engraving in The Battle of Life, and with the etching of “The Last Song” in The Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi. The former is so far germane to our subject that it should have been suppressed, but, out of con­sid­er­ation for the artist, was not.

Every Dickens collector desires to possess the complete set of the “Christmas Books” in their dainty red cloth bindings, dated from 1843 to 1848. A really desirable set includes, of course, {36} the Christmas Carol,11 with coloured plates by Leech, with the green end-papers and “stave 1”; The Chimes, with the publishers’ names within the engraved part of the title-page; and The Battle of Life, with the publishers’ names on both titles. But it is only the last of these that is entitled to mention in a treatise on cancelled illus­tra­tions, and that, as I have said, not because it was suppressed, but because it should have been.

By those who are familiar with the story it will be remembered that an early part of the plot leads one to suppose that Marion Jeddler had eloped with Michael Warden, when, as a matter of fact, she had merely escaped to her aunt. Leech, who was engaged as illustrator, was immensely busy, and only read so much of the story as seemed necessary for his purpose. As a result he was deceived, as Dickens intended his readers should be, and designed the double illus­tra­tion here reproduced, in which the festivities to welcome the bridegroom at the top of the page {37} contrast with the flight of the bride in company with Michael Warden represented below. Thus was Dickens curiously “hoist with his own petard.” And the curious thing is that, not­with­stand­ing the publicity given to the mistake in Forster’s Life of Dickens, this tragic woodcut, which wrongs poor Marion’s innocence and makes a hash of the whole story, is reproduced in the reprints up to this very day. The poor girl’s tragic figure remains, and seems likely to continue to do so, a victim to the stereotype.

This episode is generally referred to as “Leech’s grave mistake,” and grave undoubtedly it was; but the matter has its bright side, which redounds to the credit of the great novelist. I take the liberty of quoting from what has always seemed to me a very noble letter when we remember that Dickens was of all men most sensitive to any shortcomings in the work of his collaborators. He writes to Forster:

When I first saw it it was with a horror and agony not to be expressed. Of course I need not tell you, my dear fellow, Warden has no business in the elopement scene. He was never there. In the first hot sweat of this surprise and novelty I was going to implore the printing of that sheet to {38} be stopped, and the figure taken out of the block. But when I thought of the pain that this might give to our kind-hearted Leech, and that what is such a monstrous enormity to me, as never having entered my brain, may not so present itself to others, I became more composed, though the fact is wonderful to me.

Of course, had it been in these days of hurried pub­li­ca­tion, Dickens would hardly have given the matter a second thought. The average illustrator of to-day is curiously superior to the requirements of his author. He either does not read the episodes that he is called upon to il­lus­trate, or, if he reads them, he does not grasp their meaning, or, if he grasps their meaning, the meaning does not meet with his approval. At any rate, he constantly makes a hash of the whole thing. Take for example Penelope’s English Experiences, by Miss Kate Wiggin, now lying before me. Look at the illus­tra­tion, opposite p. 58, of Lady de Wolfe’s butler, who struck terror into Penelope’s soul because he did not wear a livery, and try, if you can, to recognise him in the shoulder-knotted, stripe-waistcoated, plush-breeched, silk-stockinged menial with an “unapproachable haughtiness of demeanour,” which the illustrator has portrayed. {39} Nor is this one of a few exceptional cases: their number might be multiplied ad infinitum.

But to return to The Battle of Life. Curiously enough, there is another little episode connected with this book, never, I believe, noticed before, which accentuates our impression of the generosity of Dickens’s character.

Three years after its pub­li­ca­tion a somewhat scurrilous little volume (now excessively rare), bearing the allusive title The Battle of London Life; or Boz and his Secretary, issued from the press. It was il­lus­trat­ed by six lithographs signed with the name of George Augustus Sala. It was a poor enough performance, but attracted attention by its ad captandum title, and the portrait of “Boz in his Study.” It is an imaginary and far from complimentary account of Dickens’s employment of a secretary, whose occupation it is to show him round the haunts of vice in London, by way of providing “local colour” for the novels. Eventually the secretary turns out to be a detective, who has been told off by the Government to discover the nature of the novelist’s intimacy with the revolutionist, Mazzini. It is a vulgar little {40} brochure, and, for all its futility, must have been very distasteful to the idol of the day. It was therefore the more magnanimous of Dickens to ignore the part which Sala had in it, and to speak so generously of him as we find him doing in the Life, besides employing him and pushing him, as he did largely later on, in his periodicals. A smaller man would not have allowed himself to forget such youthful indiscretions, for “memory always obeys the commands of the heart.”

Judged as a work of art, The Battle of Life is perhaps the least successful of Dickens’s “Christmas Books.” Edward FitzGerald’s opinion of it was shown in an autograph letter which came into the market only the other day. “What a wretched affair is The Battle of Life!” he writes; “it scarce even has the few good touches that generally redeem Dickens.”

Whilst we are on the subject of an illus­tra­tion which should have been suppressed but was not, it should be pointed out that this was not the only occasion upon which Leech misunderstood Dickens’s purport. This we learn from Mr. F. G. Kitton’s monumental work, Dickens and {41} his Illustrators. Here he tells us that in another Christmas book, The Chimes, Leech delineated, in place of Richard as described in the text, an extremely ragged and dissipated-looking character, with a battered hat upon his head. When the novelist saw it the drawing had already been engraved, but the woodcut was promptly suppressed; there still exists, however, an impression of the cancelled engraving, which is bound up with what is evidently a unique copy of The Chimes (now the property of Mr. J. P. Dexter), where blank spaces are left for some of the woodcuts. This particular copy is probably the publishers’ “make-up,” which had accidentally left their hands.

Let us now consider for a moment a very remarkable etching which was, so far only as regards an important portion of it, cancelled in all but the very first issue of The Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi. These were published in two volumes in 1838. Besides writing the preface, Dickens was only responsible for the editing of Mr. Egerton Wilks’s manuscript, which had been prepared from autobiographical notes. A good deal of fault was found with the work, particularly {42} on the ground that Dickens himself could never have seen Grimaldi. To this he very pertinently replied, “I don’t believe that Lord Braybrooke had more than the very slightest acquaintance with Mr. Pepys, whose memoirs he edited two centuries after he died!”12

The volumes are now most valued for the twelve etchings by George Cruikshank; but the important thing from the bibliolater’s point of view is to possess the earliest issue with “The Last Song” surrounded by a grotesque border. This border, which is here produced, was removed from the plate after the first issue of the first edition. I have just had offered to me a copy of this edition containing “The Last Song” in the two states, i.e. with and without the border, for the modest sum of eight guineas!