The Charles Dickens Illustrated Gallery is a new digital resource that contains all the original illustrations to  Dickens’s novels, Christmas books and collections. It also features two of the most interesting illustrated editions in the Household Edition (published by Chapman and Hall between 1871-79), along with the Library Edition (published by the Educational Company in 1910) which features five hundred illustrations single-handedly created by the artist Harry Furniss. Overall, the Gallery contains over two thousand one hundred illustrations. Users are free and encouraged to download, browse, share, remix, research, or use the illustrations in whatever ways they can imagine. My main initial reason for creating the Gallery was my frustration with the lack of illustrations in some modern editions of Dickens’s works or, even if the illustrations were included, the reproductions were not of a sufficient quality for people to engage with them in a meaningful way.

Not only was this doing a disservice to Dickens’s original illustrators who played a crucial part in the success and reception of Dickens’s novels, but also Dickens himself who conceived of his books, and the publication process, in the knowledge that they would be illustrated. This meant that because Dickens’s novels were usually published serially, in monthly parts, Dickens would have to tell his illustrators how he wanted a character or scene depicted even before he had written it so that the illustration would be ready in time for publication. In many ways the illustrations offer us an insight into Dickens’s creative process, as well as Victorian print and visual culture.

These illustrations offered readers of all different classes ways into Dickens’s stories and made them accessible, even to children, and, crucially, in a way that was affordable. As George Orwell wrote in 1940, about one hundred years after Dickens's first publications, 'Many children begin to know his characters by sight before they can even read, for on the whole Dickens was lucky in his illustrators'. They provided readers with opportunities for discussion, foreshadowed certain events in the narrative, and allowed for the development of particular themes in the text to be represented visually and symbolically. Most significantly, however, the illustrations are the first pictorial representations of characters and a world we instantly recognise today as being ‘Dickensian’. 

To appreciate the importance of illustration to Dickens’s work and wider Victorian culture, we first need to look at the publication history of Dickens’s first novel The Pickwick Papers, which was originally published serially between 1836 and 1837. If today we understand book illustration as being about the primacy of a writer who creates a text and then an artist, playing a secondary role, illustrating it, the publication history of The Pickwick Papers reminds us that this dynamic was not the always the case.

The idea for The Pickwick Papers began when the artist Robert Seymour wanted to create a series of engravings based around a ‘cockney sporting club’ and these illustrations were then to be linked together with accompanying text. The publishers, Chapman and Hall, contacted a young Dickens (who had just published the collection ‘Sketches by Boz’) to see if he would like to write the text to Seymour’s images. Dickens agreed but, characteristically, was unhappy about playing a lesser role in the creative process, and began to exert more and more control over the project, believing that the illustrations should arise from the text, not the other way around.

After suffering from depression for many years, Seymour took his own life in April 1836, before the second instalment of Pickwick had been published. The publishers and Dickens would then hire the young artist Hablot Knight Browne (who went by the pen name ‘Phiz’, to complement Dickens’s ‘Boz’) to illustrate the fledgling project. Browne would go on to become Dickens’s principal illustrator, illustrating ten of Dickens’s fifteen novels over the next twenty plus years, and Pickwick would become a literary sensation – in no small part due to Browne’s comic illustrations – revolutionising book publication in the process.

With Pickwick, then, Dickens inadvertently, and due to circumstances both fortunate and unfortunate, pioneered a new form of book publication, where illustration, as we understand it today, would be central. Before Pickwick, illustrated books did exist (obviously), but these books were often already understood to be classics, meaning that publishers were unlikely to take a financial hit. Furthermore, in the relationship between illustrator and writer, it was usually the illustrator who was the more powerful and well-established of the pair. Dickens, in the course of publishing Pickwick, turned this relationship around, and publishers, seeking to imitate the huge success of the novel, began to issue contemporary stories serially and with illustrations.

These illustrated stories attracted a wide audience which meant more profit for publishers, and serial publication meant that if a story was proving to be a commercial disaster the publishers could just stop publication – something they could not do with the more traditional book volume. After a serialisation had finished, depending on its success, the publishers would collate the parts into a book, meaning yet further profits. William Thackeray, Anthony Trollope and George Eliot are just some of the major Victorian novelists who would publish their work serially and with illustrations in this way.

Dickens was always very concerned about the illustrations to his books and controlled all aspects of the process. He always designated to each of his illustrators what scenes and characters he wanted illustrated – a characteristic that caused tension early in Dickens’s career when he was working with the famous and well-established artist George Cruikshank on the illustrations to Oliver Twist (1837-39). When he was working with Knight Browne on the novels, Dickens would briefly describe the scene and characters he wanted illustrated every month for the duration of the stories’ publication. Browne would then send Dickens his sketches for approval. Dickens was a tough task master and his creative relationship with Browne was frequently fraught, sometimes forcing Browne to completely redesign his illustrations.

When Dickens was in the process of writing Dombey and Son (1848), for example, he wrote to his friend John Forster 'the points for illustration, and the enormous care required, make me excessively anxious.' Indeed, when Browne’s illustration 'Paul and Mrs Pipchin' went to press before Dickens saw it, he wrote once again to Forster: 'I am really distressed by the illustration of Mrs. Pipchin and Paul. It is so frightfully and wildly wide of the mark' and that he would 'cheerfully have given a hundred pounds to have kept this illustration out of the book.' Despite Dickens’s demanding expectations, his illustrators always put their own personal style on their images, adding details, humour and pathos to visually communicate (and sometimes subvert) ideas central to the story. Indeed, Cruikshank’s illustration of ‘Fagin in the Condemned Cell’, where he is depicted as alone, isolated and fearful, goes a lot further in instilling compassion towards the character than Dickens’s text does.

Dickens was slightly less anxious about the illustrations for the Christmas Books, the series of five short books Dickens published between 1843 and 1848. In 1843 Dickens’s then current novel Martin Chuzzlewit (1842-43) had proven to be disappointing sales wise, and Dickens, with an increasingly large family, needed the money. So, Dickens took it upon himself to produce A Christmas Carol in the most extravagant way possible. It would have eight illustrations, four of which would be in colour, and it would have gilt edges and coloured endpapers. It was to be illustrated, famously, by John Leech. 

It is interesting to note that John Leech was the only illustrator to contribute to all the Christmas books. In contrast to his portrayal in the recent film that explores Dicken’s composition and publication of A Christmas Carol, The Man Who Invented Christmas (2019), where Leech is portrayed as old, grouchy and unhappy to be working with Dickens, the historical Leech was younger than Dickens by five years, affable, and extremely anxious to please the writer.

Despite being extraordinarily popular, the high production costs of producing the book A Christmas Carol left Dickens with very little profit, perhaps explaining why coloured illustrations were never used in Dickens’s works again. Instead, Dickens, to give the Christmas Books some novelty that the coloured images provided, commissioned a group of illustrators to provide several images for each book, sharing the responsibility of creating the illustrations between them.

These artists included Richard Doyle (who would become the uncle of Arthur Conan Doyle), Clarkson Stanfield (who Dickens would dedicate Little Dorrit to) and Daniel Maclise (who’s death in 1870 was the subject of Dickens’s final public speech). This group of artists would go on to contribute illustrations to all of Dickens’s Christmas books to a greater or lesser extent up until the final story, The Haunted Man in 1848. In addition to this group, Dickens would go on to commission John Tenniel, who designed six engravings for The Haunted Man and who would become famous for his illustrations to Alice in Wonderland (1865), Edwin Landseer, who contributed one illustration, ‘Boxer’, to The Cricket on the Hearth (1845), and Frank Stone who created three illustrations for The Haunted Man.

All these artists, with perhaps the exception of Richard Doyle, were, or became, close friends of Dickens, and would often participate in various ways to his ‘amateur theatricals’ (plays Dickens and his friends would put on for charity), either as actors, designers, or audience members. In keeping with this, the Christmas Books can be seen as ensemble performances, where Dickens’s friends get together at the end of the year to pictorially celebrate and support the writer’s annual Christmas story through their own distinct talents; providing variety, complexity, and insight into these literary ‘productions’.

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Thematically, the Christmas Books focus on memory and characters being transformed in some way, often due to something supernatural, which affords them a new understanding about the world and the life they have led previously before these encounters. The only Christmas book that does not contain the supernatural is The Battle of Life, Dickens’s fourth Christmas Book from 1846.

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The story is a domestic romance concerning two sisters, Marion and Grace and their travails in the pursuit of love and it relies on a fairly ridiculous twist ending. There is not much of Christmas in it, and even by Dickens’s standards it is quite sentimental. It is very much worth a read a though, if only for some of the cast of supporting characters like the wonderfully named solicitors Snitchey and Craggs, who can be seen working in their office in one of John Leech’s illustrations to the story.

The Battle of Life also contains one of my favourite illustrations in the Christmas books. This is less to do with any aesthetic quality to the picture, but the story around it which is both amusing and demonstrative of the Dickens’s relationship with John Leech, the main illustrator of the Christmas books. Dickens was always at pains to give his illustrators of these annual books the completed story so they knew what would happen to avoid spoiling the narrative and any other potential misunderstandings.

In the case of Leech’s illustration of ‘The Night of the Return’ we see the central character, Marion, eloping with Michael Warden. Only this does not actually transpire in the story: Dickens wants us to think this happened, as the other characters believe it has, but what is eventually revealed is that Marion has just ran away to her aunt’s house. John Leech did not read to the end of the story! Dickens was initially angry about this, writing to his friend John Forster, ‘Warden has no business in the elopement scene. He was never there!’ Uncharacteristically, certainly in relation to how Dickens treated Hablot Knight Browne in any of his illustrations that did not come up to Dickens’s standards, he did not get Leech to redo the illustration as he did not want to cause Leech any upset – evidence of the fondness Dickens felt towards him.

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The illustrations to the Christmas Books, it has been frequently noted, are not particularly festive, and anyone looking at the illustrations to the Christmas Books after A Christmas Carol and expecting similar images to ‘Mr. Fezziwig’s Ball’ is going to be disappointed.  The reason for this is the thematic concerns of the Christmas Books, which are often quite disturbing, and the fact that, surprisingly, there’s very little of Christmas in the series.

The second Christmas book, The Chimes (1844), for example, sees the protagonist, Trotty Veck, who believes the poor are wicked, going to sleep on New Year’s Eve (so this story is not even set at Christmas), and being given a vision of a shocking future for his daughter, Meg, and her fiancé, Richard, involving suicide, alcoholism, death, and prostitution. Not the most festive of subjects. The third Christmas book, The Cricket on the Hearth (1845), is not even set at Christmas or New Year. In the next Christmas book, The Battle of Life (1846), only one part of the story is set at Christmas.

The final Christmas book, The Haunted Man from 1848, is set at Christmas, and accordingly there are more festive illustrations here than in the previous few books. That said, though, there are some very foreboding and dark illustrations such as ‘Redlaw and the Phantom’ and ‘Redlaw and the Boy’. Dickens’s main concern with the Christmas Books, was less to do with Christmas as a holiday and more to do with the spirit of Christmas and its ideals of selflessness and forgiveness, as well as being a voice for the poor and the needy. To effectively communicate this message Dickens had to create some very dark scenarios to give this message power and resonance, and these can be seen in the illustrations.

One of the reasons the Christmas Books are so fascinating is because they chart Dickens’s development as a writer in the 1840s, giving a snapshot of Dickens’s preoccupations throughout that decade. After the publication of A Christmas Carol in 1843, Dickens’s work gradually became darker, and more explicitly concerned with the oppressive structures and frameworks the individual faced in Victorian society.

Dickens does not have the space in the Christmas books to fully explore these ideas as he does in his novels, but they can, nevertheless be felt indirectly. As the series of Christmas Books develops there is a growing sense that Dickens is becoming quite frustrated with having to produce them annually and that his time would be better spent focusing on his novels. This accounts for why, after the publication of the final Christmas book, The Haunted Man, Dickens never produces another one. Dickens had creatively exhausted the format he had helped to create.

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The creative collaboration between Dickens and Hablot Knight Browne reached an artistic high with the illustrations to Bleak House (1852-53), which are notable for containing ten of Browne’s 'dark plates' that evoke an atmosphere of desolation, isolation and general foreboding, reflecting Dickens's thematic preoccupations in the novel. The ‘dark plate’ technique, developed by Browne during Dombey and Son saw Browne using a 'ruling machine' to create very narrow lines on the plate which would then generate illustrations with a distinct dark and atmospheric tone. Just as Dickens began to experiment more with the form and structure of his novels, 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.

The final time Browne would work with Dickens was on A Tale of Two Cities (1859). Whether the reasons for this are Dickens losing interest in his books being illustrated, a decline in the quality of Browne's illustrations, or Dickens wanting new collaborators, the illustrator was perplexed. He wrote to his friend Robert Young: 'I have been a "good boy", I believe. The plates in hand are all in good time, so that I do not know what's "up", any more than you. Dickens probably thinks a new hand would give his old puppets a fresh look, or perhaps he does not like my illustrating.' Sadly, Dickens and Browne destroyed much of their correspondence with each other, so we may never learn of the real answer behind the end of this hugely successful relationship which did so much to create the foundations of Victorian book publishing, and our sense of ‘Dickensian’ in pictorial terms.

Dickens’s final completed novel Our Mutual Friend (1864-5) was illustrated by Marcus Stone (the son of Frank Stone who had provided illustrations to the Christmas Book, The Haunted Man), while the unfinished Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870) was illustrated by Luke Fildes. Whilst both artists provide illustrations that are technically very good and interesting, they lack the charm and energy of Cruickshank’s and Browne’s best work, where sometimes it feels like characters, ideas, and dramatic and comedic scenes can barely be contained on the page: they burst forth, straight into our imaginations.

The Charles Dickens Illustrated Gallery, then, aims to give Dickens’s ‘old puppets a fresh look’ in a way Browne could not have imagined in the nineteenth century. It takes all his, and the other artists’, original illustrations for Dickens’s novels and makes them available for anyone in the world to explore and investigate via the World Wide Web. There is a wealth of material here, organised according to novel, and in high resolution. It is a companion piece to my other projects, the Victorian Illustrated Shakespeare Archive (shakespeareillustration.org) and the Kelmscott Chaucer Online (kelmscottchauceronline.org). Between them, these resources provide us with a new and exciting insights into Victorian book history and culture.

The most challenging part in putting the Gallery together was sourcing the primary material. Obviously, I could not afford original first editions of Dickens’s novels, so I looked on the internet for relatively cheap editions from the early twentieth century. The problem with this was, as is the case today, and despite my expectations, some of these editions also did not contain the illustrations, or if they did, they were significantly reduced in number. For example, I bought an edition of Oliver Twist and it only had about half the illustrations included.

At this point I was close to giving up on the project entirely, when I discovered a series of Dickens’s works from around 1900 called the ‘Authentic Edition’. This series was beautiful, and not only did it contain all the original illustrations, but they were reproduced to a very high quality. This, then, was the key to making the gallery a reality. Most of the illustrations on the website derive from the ‘Authentic Edition’ as well as the ‘Biographical Edition’, which was published around the same time, as it was not possible to buy a complete set of the former series.

After obtaining source material of a decent quality, the rest of the process was relatively straightforward. All the illustrations are scanned in by hand and then cleaned up in Photoshop so that any blemishes or marks are erased, as well as enhancing the contrast and other visual tweaks. This all makes the illustrations really ‘pop’ visually on modern computer screens and is extraordinarily effective in getting people to engage with the images.

Alongside these technical details, it is always useful to have an underlying principle or idea for curatorial work such as this as it can provide both an organising structure for projects and be thematically interesting. An important moment for me in the creation of the website was the central concept of a ‘gallery’. In the mid-nineteenth century print shops and galleries would often place the illustrations of a new monthly part in their shop windows to entice customers to speculate about (and therefore purchase) the latest instalment of a story.

They were, effectively, the Victorian equivalent of a film trailer, producing in the viewer anticipation, excitement and intrigue. By using this gallery concept, it allowed me to place the illustrations in their own ‘shop windows’ so users can quietly contemplate each image, in their own time, whilst celebrating and foregrounding these remarkable artists who created them.

I hope the Charles Dickens Illustrated Gallery encourages users to engage more deeply with these illustrations and at the same time with Dickens’s incredible works, which become more vital with each passing year. My aim is to allow researchers to ask new questions of this body of material in a way that is both convenient and rewarding.  As David Copperfield’s aunt, Betsey Trotwood, so wisely comments “It's in vain to recall the past, unless it works some influence upon the present”.