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Gothic Visions of Classical Architecture in Hablot Knight Browne's 'Dark' Illustrations for the Novels of Charles Dickens

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Gothic Visions of Classical Architecture in Hablot Knight Browne's 'Dark' Illustrations for the Novels of Charles Dickens View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Birkbeck Institutional Research Online Janes, Dark illustrations, revised version, p. 1 Gothic Visions of Classical Architecture in Hablot Knight Browne’s ‘Dark’ Illustrations for the Novels of Charles Dickens Figs. 1. A. W. N. Pugin, detail, ‘Contrasted Residences for the Poor’, Contrasts (1836). 2. H. K. Browne, ‘The Mausoleum at Chesney Wold’, Bleak House (1853). 3. H. K. Browne, ‘Little Dorrit’s Party’, Little Dorrit (1856). 4. H. K. Browne, ‘Damocles’, Little Dorrit (1857). 5. H. K. Browne, ‘The Birds in the Cage’, Little Dorrit (1855). 6. H. K. Brown, working sketch, ‘The River’, David Copperfield, Elkins Collection, Free Library of Philadelphia (1850). 7. H. K. Browne, ‘The River’, David Copperfield (1850). Early Victorian London was expanding at a furious pace. Much of the new suburban housing consisted of cheap copies of Georgian neo-classicism. At the same time a large part of the city’s centre, a substantial proportion of which had been rebuilt after the Great Fire of 1666, had fallen into decay. The alarming pace of change in the built environment was mirrored by that in the political realm. The threat of revolution, it was widely believed, could only be ended by a significant programme of reform but there was no consensus as to whether that should be essentially institutional, financial or moral. In these circumstances the past, and its material evidences, came to play a prominent role in the public imagination, as either a source of vital tradition or of dangerous vice and complacency. When Charles Dickens (1812-70) and his illustrators sought to picture London they returned repeatedly to architectural contrasts as a way of comparing the worlds of the rich and the poor. And due to Dickens’ progressive social vision it was not only the slums that could be envisioned as teaming with dangers and excitements in the gothic literary mode, but also the monstrous homes of the powerful. Because much of the housing stock was more or less directly inspired by notions of Georgian proportion and design the resulting illustrations repeatedly represent gothic visions of classical architecture. This article explores a series of illustrations produced by Hablot Knight Browne [pseud. Phiz] (1815–82) who was the most well-known of Charles Dickens’ several artist Janes, Dark illustrations, revised version, p. 2 collaborators.1 These images are sufficiently distinctive in style and method from Browne’s normal productions that they have come to be known as the ‘dark’ plates. Their style acts to emphasise the gothic aspects of Dickens’ presentation of Victorian Britain. Despite the fact that most of London was newly built in the nineteenth century it is a striking testament to the novelist’s fascination with architectural and institutional decay that his built landscapes have come to be associated with age and rot in the contemporary popular imagination. From 1817- 22, when he was aged of five to ten, Dickens lived in Chatham in Kent, where his father worked in a clerical capacity in the royal dockyards which were only finally to close in 1984. As part of the redevelopment of the docks an indoor ‘literary themepark’ called Dickens World was opened in 2007. Its aim is to entertain the visitor by presenting sites from Dickens’ various novels which evoke either a nostalgic glow or gothic thrills. The attraction’s website tells the prospective visitor that they may experience the ‘haunted house’ of Scrooge and ‘walk through the damp corridors of the Marshalsea Prison… [but] beware the prisoners have been known to escape.’2 This was where Dickens’ father was imprisoned for debt in 1824 and from which he, at least, was only able to escape because of the death of his mother and his inheritance of part of her estate. The Dickens World interiors are both elaborately dilapidated and in full compliance with contemporary health and safety regulations. The plain, steel carapace of the building housing the attraction emphasises its conformity with 1 Editions of the key Charles Dickens’ novels used in this article are Bleak House, ed. Norman Page (London: Penguin, 1971) [hereafter BH] and Little Dorrit, ed. Harvey Peter Sucksmith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979) [hereafter LD]. Good introductions to Browne and Dickens are Robert L. Patten, Charles Dickens and ‘Boz’: The Birth of the Industrial-Age Author (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012) and Robert L. Patten and Valerie Browne Lester, ‘Browne, Hablot Knight (1815–1882)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, 2004): http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/3675, accessed 3 January 2013. 2 Dickens World, http://www.dickensworld.co.uk/take-a-tour.php, accessed January 2013. See Marty Gould and Rebecca N. Mitchell, ‘Understanding the Literary Themepark: Dickens World as Adaptation’, Neo-Victorian Studies 3:2 (2010), pp. 145-71: http://www.neovictorianstudies.com/past_issues/3-2%202010/NVS%203-2-7%20M-Gould- R-Mitchell.pdf, accessed 6 January 2013, and Kathryn Hughes, ‘Dickens World and Dickens’s World’, Journal of Victorian Culture 15:3 (2010), pp. 388-93. Janes, Dark illustrations, revised version, p. 3 twenty-first-century architectural expectations and its effective containment of nineteenth- century horrors. The twentieth-century image of Victorian London as ancient and decrepit was powerfully shaped by the fascination of Dickens and thus, of necessity, of his illustrators, with the ancient heart of the city.3 It is important to emphasise, however, that because of the thoroughness of the Great Fire of 1666 most of even the seemingly aged architecture of London was less than two-hundred years old. Medieval gothic churches and Tudor timber- framed houses were exceptional features in a landscape saturated by the legacy of Georgian classicism. In the illustrations to The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-1) a gothic literary sensibility repeatedly placed the vulnerable Little Nell in the looming shadows of medieval walls and arches.4 Yet later Dickens’ novels, notably those of the 1850s which dealt not so much with old curiosities as with contemporary life, can also be placed in the same literary genre. Thus, for Allan Pritchard Bleak House (1852-3) is ‘Dickens’s supreme achievement in the Gothic mode’ even though it has been previously less identified with the gothic perhaps because the sinister architecture that appears in is illustrations is post-medieval, or indeed, neo-classical.5 Hablot Knight Browne’s dark plates appeared prominently in Bleak House and Little Dorrit (1855-7). These books, and the (un-illustrated) novel that appeared between them, Hard Times (1854), are some of Dickens’ most pessimistic, emotionally dark, explorations of the condition of Britain. Browne responded to this material by producing a series of images that employed a new method of engraving using a machine to score very close, fine lines that enabled the production of the effect of pen and wash work. In these compositions the play of light and dark provided dramatic impact in place of Browne’s habitual reliance on figural 3 See the overview in Shearer West, ‘London in Victorian Visual Culture’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of London, ed. Lawrence Manley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 160-79. 4 Dominic Janes, ‘The Gothic Arousal of Architecture in Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop and its illustrations’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts 35.3 (2013), pp. 1-17. See also Joan Stevens, ‘“Woodcuts Dropped into the Text”: The Illustrations in The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge’, Studies in Bibliography 20 (1967), pp. 113-34. 5 Allan Pritchard, ‘The Urban Gothic of Bleak House’, Nineteenth-Century Literature 45:4 (1991), pp. 432-52, at p. 432. Janes, Dark illustrations, revised version, p. 4 depiction and caricature. It does not appear that Dickens initiated this change but rather that ‘Browne conceived it and suggested it to Dickens who responded enthusiastically’.6 These images have proved highly controversial. For some critics they evidence a decline in Browne’s abilities as an illustrator and in his relationship with Dickens. Thus Harvey has argued that ‘a reader who judges Dickens’s illustrations from a perusal of Little Dorrit will not expect much of Browne.’7 And Cohen finds this apparent attempt by Browne to achieve a heightened painterly seriousness to have been futile because ‘Dickens’s wasteland themes, symbols, and characters… were so thoroughly visualized by the pictorial prose that illustrations could do little more than embellish’ the power of his vision.8 Thus it was hardly a positive move when Browne, in her view, ‘started to subordinate the individuality of Dickens’s characters to his own creativity. The result was a number of plates – dubbed “the dark plates” – laden with melodrama and atmosphere, that had very little bearing on the text they were supposed to embellish.’9 Yet, as this last quotation indicates, even Browne’s critics had to admit that he had managed to produce some powerful images. Thus Cohen argues that ‘the suggestively sinister atmosphere of Bleak House is due as much to them [the dark plates] as to Dickens’ prose. Richard Stein has even called the dark illustrations for Bleak House Browne’s ‘subtlest collaboration with Dickens’ and for Michael Steig, this is some of Browne’s ‘finest and most complex work’.10 This article will look closely at the classical architecture that haunts many of these illustrations in order to explore the way in which Browne attempted to illustrate Dickens’ denunciation of contemporary institutions and his employment of the literary genre of the gothic. This can be seen as representing an important stage not only in the interrogation of moral qualities of style in 6 J.
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