"Delightful" – The Guardian | "Fascinating" – The Washington Post
Welcome to The Charles Dickens Illustrated Gallery! Here you will find all the original illustrations to Charles Dickens's novels (and Sketches by Boz), plus three more of the most important illustrated editions of Dickens's works. Taken together the Gallery contains over 2100 illustrations, which you are free to download, browse, share, remix, research, or use in whatever ways you can imagine. If you do use the images, please reference where you got them from. Something along the lines of 'Michael John Goodman, Charles Dickens Illustrated Gallery, www.CharlesDickensIllustration.org', would be ideal. Or better yet, get in contact and tell me how you are planning on using the illustrations in your projects.
This website is very much a gallery, and I encourage users to consider each novel's page like a room in a gallery where they can quietly contemplate each image, read the name of its title, and enlarge the illustration to full-screen size. Obviously, the art of illustration is dependant on both words and images, but this site does not place Dickens's words alongside the illustrations in order that we may look closer at the images and celebrate them in their own right, without necessarily being overshadowed by Dickens's text. In many ways, it is a call-back to the print-shops and galleries of the nineteenth-century, where illustrated prints would often be placed in the windows of these establishments, tempting potential customers to buy the latest instalment of a novel. Similarly, If this website encourages users to read more Dickens (or to further explore the work of one of the artists), then it has done a very satisfactory job.
The idea for the gallery has been floating around my head for several years now, but the catalyst for making it a reality was during the Covid19 lockdown when reading an edition Oliver Twist that did not contain any of George Cruikshank's illustrations. I found another copy of the novel (I've accumulated quite a few over the years), and whilst this one did have illustrations, they were so poorly reproduced (and half of them were missing) that they were better off not being there at all. The world of Dickens illustration is beset with poor reproductions of the source material, so for this project I have searched out what I consider to be some of the best editions that feature the original illustrations printed to a decent quality. These are invariably from the early part of the 20th Century (original 19th Century first-editions being slightly out of my price-range), and include the 'Authentic Edition' (1901-06), and the 'Biographical Edition' (1902-03), both published by Chapman and Hall. Both editions reproduce the original illustrations very well and are the main editions used for the Charles Dickens Illustrated Gallery. Please be aware, though, that The 'Authentic Edition' features coloured frontispieces (which the original novels did not have) and the Gallery does not yet feature the original cover 'wrappings' for the serial instalments, but I will be looking to add them in the near future.
Every image in the archive has been digitised by hand to a good resolution (300 dpi) and is then tidied up in Photoshop, to remove foxing and ensure that the illustrations look as attractive as possible on modern screens (including mobile phones). As an indicative example, the images, below, are of Marcus Stone's illustration 'The Bird of Prey' from Our Mutual Friend, before and after it has been treated in Photoshop. I always use the analogy that this process is similar to how old albums from the 1960s are being remastered for modern technology: everything sounds a bit sharper, there's more clarity, and, generally, it's all a bit less murky.
Read on for a brief essay about the importance of illustration to Dickens's work and Victorian print culture, plus a selection of my favourite images from the original illustrations, as well as some more information about myself and the creative process and ideas behind the resource.
I hope you find the Charles Dickens Illustrated Gallery a useful and valuable resource whatever you decide to do with it.
Michael John Goodman
BBC Interview: 'The odd illustrations of Charles Dickens's Christmas books'
PRINT MAG Interview: 'Dickensian Cool'
Dr Michael John Goodman is an independent researcher, writer and educator who uses art and design as modes of enquiry to bring together objects and artefacts so that we may see them in new ways. He has most recently created the Kelmscott Chaucer Online, a website that allows users to explore 'the most beautiful book ever printed', alongside the online exhibition 'Paint the Picture to Word: Shakespeare Illustration and Artificial Intelligence Art'. He is the creator of the Victorian Illustrated Shakespeare Archive, an open-access online resource that contains over 3000 illustrations from the most significant illustrated Shakespeare editions in the Victorian period.
Here a few of my favourites from the original selection of illustrations:
Mr Fezziwig’s Ball – A Christmas Carol
Perhaps the most famous of all the illustrations in Dickens’s novels is Mr Fezziwig’s Ball, the frontispiece to A Christmas Carol which was illustrated by John Leech in 1843. It is the only one of Dickens’s books to feature coloured illustrations. Despite selling out in days, and being extraordinarily popular, the cost of producing A Christmas Carol left Dickens with very little profit, perhaps explaining why subsequent Christmas books did not feature coloured images again.
The Last Chance – Oliver Twist
Dickens did not think this scene of Bill Sikes escaping the police across the rooftops could be illustrated. He wrote to George Cruikshank, who was illustrating Oliver Twist, “that the scene of Sikes' escape will not do for illustration. It is so very complicated”. The fact that the highly experienced Cruikshank did not take Dickens’s advice and produced this iconic image, demonstrates his skill as an illustrator, yet also foregrounds a conflict in their relationship which would come to ahead decades later when Cruikshank would claim to have invented scenes and plot points for the novel.
Nicholas Engaged as a Tutor in a Private Family – Nicholas Nickleby
Hablot Knight Browne was the main illustrator on Dickens’s novels, illustrating 10 out of 15 of them. His early style is one of comic exaggeration, often featuring many people in small rooms, while some form of drama takes place. ‘Nicholas Engaged as a Tutor in a Private Family’, is indicative of this approach with Nicholas attempting to teach four young women French while the family, including a baby, watch over him. There is a direct line here, in these early comedic Knight Browne illustrations, I suggest, to the work of Quentin Blake.
A New Meaning in the Roman – Bleak House
At the start of the 1850s, just as Dickens began to experiment more with the form and structure of his novels, Hablot Knight Browne also began to visually depict Dickens’s words in new ways, pushing at the perceived ideas of what a book illustration could and should be. He invented what is called the ‘dark plate’ technique which evokes an atmosphere of desolation, isolation and general foreboding, reflecting Dickens's thematic preoccupations in the novels. ‘A New Meaning in the Roman’ from Bleak House, which features 10 ‘dark plates’ is a good example of this new technique.
