Oliver Twist: Clash of Media/Clash of Talents

Charles Dickens George Cruikshank

Dickens & Bentley’s Miscellany

Oliver Twist, first installment in Bentley’s Miscellany

Dickens’s handwriting

Charles Dickens Preface to OT

But I had never met (except in HOGARTH) with the miserable reality. It appeared to me that to draw a knot of such associates in crime as really did exist; to paint in them in all their deformity, in all their wretchedness, in all the squalid misery of their lives; to show them as they really were, for ever skulking uneasily through the dirtiest paths of life, with the great black ghastly gallows closing up their prospect, turn them where they might; it appeared to me that to do this, would be to attempt a something which was needed, at which would be a service to society. And I did it as I best could. (liv)

Stop thief! Stop thief” there is a magic in the sound. The tradesman leaves his counter, and the carman his wagon; the butcher throws down his tray; the baker his basket; the milk-man his pail; the errand-boy his parcels; the school-boy his marbles; the paviour his pick-axe; the child his battledore. Away they run, pell-mell, helter-skelter, slap-dash: tearing, yelling, screaming, knocking down the passengers as they turn the corners, rousing up the dogs, and astonishing the fowls: and streets, squares, and courts, re-echo with the sound. (OT, pg. 50-51).

The Bookstall

Hablot K. Brown illustration for Dickens’s Dombey and Son, 1846-48

Cruikshank on his role in the making of OT

“I suggested to Mr. Dickens that he should write the life of a London boy, and strongly advised him to do this, assuring him that I would furnish him with the subjects and supply him with all the characters, which my large experience of London life would enable me to do.”

 “My drawings suggested the characters, rather than his

strong individuality suggested my drawings” “I am the originator of Oliver Twist, and all the

principle characters are mine”

Cruikshank Sketches for OT

Cruikshank, “The Old Clothes Man,” London Characters, 1829.

Cruikshank, “The Dustman,” London Characters, 1829.

The original “Fireside Plate” in Oliver Twist.  Dickens had Cruikshank draw up another final plate for the novel.

The Cult of Dickens

Remembering Dickens, 1870

Art Spiegelman, Maus II—father’s story & son’s comic