The face of Charles Dickens - portraits of the great author Transcript Date: Thursday, 24 November 2005 - 12:00AM THE FACE OF CHARLES DICKENS – PORTRAITS OF THE GREAT AUTHOR ANDREW XAVIER The Charles Dickens Museum is in Doughty Street, London, and is a house that Dickens lived in at the beginning of his career; it was when he became famous. I mention the word “famous” to start off with, because with the portraits that we will be looking at tonight, the level of Dickens’ celebrity was so high that he really, as you may know, was portrayed probably more times than most of his other contemporaries, other Victorian personalities so to speak. He was 25 when he moved into Doughty Street, and he was working on Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby. He only lived there for three years, but it was obviously a very important time for him. When moved there everyone knew him under his pseudonym, Boz, but by the time he left three years later, the world knew the name “Charles Dickens”. A short time after working at the Charles Dickens Museum, I became aware of a strange fact: portraits of the author were almost as numerous as his writings. I became very interested in the near obsession with Dickens’ image. This was both during his lifetime and also beyond his lifetime. He is one of the most depicted of the great Victorians. Tonight, I want to show you a wide selection of these very different and unusual portrayals, some of which have become controversial in Dickensian and artistic circles. Charles Dickens was born in Portsea, or Portsmouth as we now call it, in February 1812, and he was the son of a navy pay clerk, John Dickens. If I don’t tell you where a picture that you see is located, that it’s actually in our collection at the museum. John is described by one biographer as a “jovial opportunist with absolutely no money sense”. This came to a head in 1824 with him and most of his family being incarcerated in the Marshalsea Debtors Prison in Southwark. Marshalsea Prison has been demolished now, but we have in the museum a grille from the prison. I’m telling you about this incident because it corresponds with an episode in Dickens’ life that was to remain with him, and actually only really with him, because he only related it during his lifetime to his wife and his best friend, John Forster. When his family were in the Marshalsea Prison, he was sent to Warren’s Boot Blacking Warehouse, which was a factory on Hungerford Stairs. One of the pictures of Dickens makes him look really wretched, collapsed over his work bench in Warrens. It’s by one of Dickens’ later illustrators, who illustrated towards the end of the 19th Century, called Fred Barnard. Some of you may know some of his works. I really like his picture of Dickens because I don’t really imagine that Warren’s would have been happy to have one of their young boy workers swooning and draped over like that, and I think it’s like picking up on the melodrama of the situation of him having to work there. Certainly, it really affected him, and he of course celebrated this episode when he was writing David Copperfield. A rather nice engraving of his mother, Elizabeth, shows her in later life. Dickens had quite a cool relationship with his mother because although originally she supported his education, when the family finally came out of the Debtors’ Prison, I think she was quite keen for him to stay on working at the factory, and this was such a traumatic experience for him at the age of 12 that he really was quite angry that she had wanted him to go back there. I am mentioning her briefly because it was through his aunt, her sister, Janet Barrow, that we have the first authenticated portrait of Dickens. This is a miniature, and it shows him aged 18. It was painted on ivory by his aunt, Janet Barrow. It shows him full- faced, with a slight smile on his lips. The hair is quite long, but not as long as in the portraits that characterise what I like to call his youthful period – that’s the period from the 1830s to the middle of the 1840s. By 1837 he was getting quite popular, and two of his early illustrators, George Cruikshank and Fiz Knight (Fiz was his pseudonym), tried their hand at capturing him. We are told that Cruikshank took his work so seriously that he refused to allow Dickens to receive his uncle during one sitting. In one portrait you can see the window of his drawing room, which is in 48 Doughty Street, where have the chair in his reconstructed drawing room. Fiz also drew him, and one of the quotations I like about one particular image is by Frederick Kitten. He was an early Dickens enthusiast and he did a large survey of Dickens’ portraits in the late 1890s, and he said, “Fiz’s forte was evidently not in portraiture”! He did illustrate of course a number of Dickens’ novels – Pickwick Papers, Bleak House, A Tale of Two Cities, just to name a few – but I think that Cruikshank really wasn’t that much better That can’t really be said of Samuel Laurence, whose strength was in the use of pencil, crayon and chalk. I think there’s a bit of confusion over the number of drawings made by Laurence at this time, but one dates from October 1837. Dickens added his signature, and Laurence signed it too. Laurence was so fond of it that he wouldn’t part with it and, when he died, it was in his studio and it was sold in the sale of his works after his death. Laurence also portrayed other literary figures, including Mrs Gaskill, but a second portrait was dated 1838. Another portrait signed by Boz is in the National Portrait Gallery, although I am not sure if it is still on display. I know also there was a watercolour produced because it was on display in the museum in 1970 but it has since gone out of the public domain. Recently, an auction house got in touch with me, and a new Samuel Laurence portrait from this period has come up for sale. Laurence also portrayed Dickens’ wife, Catherine. It’s a lovely picture of her. He tried to portray her early in 1838, but she was quite ill during that year so it wasn’t until the summer that this picture was completed. It hung in the house when Dickens lived in 48 Doughty Street, so it’s nice we have it now back on display again. It’s funny though because Dickens always had something to say, or a lot of the time had something to say about his portraits, and was constantly bemoaning various aspects of them, but I think probably the most frustrating element of portraiture at the time was the lengthy amount of hours you would have to sit to an artist. I think we get the first hint of what’s going to come about Dickens complaining about this in a letter he writes to his friend Forster about sitting for Laurence in 1838: “Not a write for me today. Sitting first, then a hasty dinner, then Nickleby, who has scarcely advanced a jot.” So this is the first time I think we get the mention of him getting a bit fed up with this. In 1839, Dickens sat for his great friend, the artist Daniel Maclise. A copy is in the possession of the Dickens’ family still. We have got a copy in the museum, but it’s a really bad copy. I’m sure many of you are familiar with the image; it’s in the National Portrait Gallery if you want to go and see it. Dickens had asked Maclise to repaint the face, but once it was fully finished, he was able to report, in typical Dickens style: “All people say that it is astonishing”. That’s not strictly true because George Elliot thought that it suffered, as she said, “from odious beautification”, although Thackeray, a good friend of Dickens, said that he found it to be “perfectly amazing”. The portrait was commissioned by Dickens’ publishers, Chapman & Hall, and they had it engraved for the frontispiece of Nicholas Nickleby. There is an engraving by a chap called William Finden, who engraved a number of portraits at the time, and if you look at the frontispiece of an early edition of Nicholas Nickleby, you’ll see this in the front. What is interesting about this is Dickens then becomes rather fused with an image of Nicholas Nickleby. There is a collection of illustrations that we have in the collection at the museum. It includes the heads from Nicholas Nickleby, but what’s interesting is in the middle is Dickens, but is it Dickens or is it Nicholas Nickleby? I think it is obviously very similar to the Samuel Laurence, and like the Maclise portrait, but it’s got Nicholas Nickleby written above it, so Dickens is already in this celebrity status, having his image pushed forward. Samuel Laurence’s portrait was the first image of Dickens to be sold to the public. There is a lovely painting of Catherine, and it was described as a companion portrait to the Maclise painting. I don’t actually think it was a companion, because really it was done in the late 1840s, so it was about ten years after the Maclise one of Dickens, but it is such a lovely painting, and you can see that on display in the museum.