Charles Dickens Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Gareth Cordery

Critical Essay by Gareth Cordery

SOURCE: Cordery, Gareth. “Furniss, Dickens and Illustration: Parts One and Two.” Dickens Quarterly 13, no. 1 (March 1996): 35-41; 13, no. 2 (June 1996): 99-110.

In the following essay, Cordery argues for the aptness of Harry Furniss as an illustrator for Dickens. The critic asserts that Furniss, who illustrated the Charles Dickens Library Edition after Dickens's death, was a corrective to the exaggerated, moralizing style of Cruikshank, and thus was better suited for rendering the complex vision of the author.

Furniss and Dickens

In a series of letters he wrote in 1882 and 1883 to his friend Anton van Rappard, Van Gogh expressed his admiration for the “black-and-white” artists of the time “who are to art what Dickens is to literature … I am organising my whole life so as to do things of everyday life that Dickens describes and the artists I've mentioned draw.” One of the artists Van Gogh mentions later...
(read more)