Charles Dickens & His Original Illustrators- Cohen
[Related to Cruikshank's The Loving Ballad of Lord Bateman. Footnotes are missing- for now,
R. Matteson 2014]
Charles Dickens and His Original Illustrators
By Jane R. Cohen; 1980.
More satisfying but surreptitious was Dickens's connection with Cruikshank's The Loving Ballad of Lord Bateman, which appeared in 1839. Cruikshank, like Dickens, often entertained his friends with seriocomic songs. He particularly relished a Cockney variant of the popular old ballad of an English lord who travels to the East, is imprisoned, then released by the jailer's daughter whom he promises to marry in seven years.82 On one occasion, the artist sang "Lord Bateman" before the author who was delighted with his droll rendition. After the performance, Dickens urged Cruikshank to publish the ballad with the tune and illustrations.[83]
The flattered artist set to work. He welcomed Dickens's assistance in polishing the solemnly absurd ballad. The author altered a few words, replaced the last verse with a new one, and added a burlesque critical apparatus.[84] He obtained the services of his musical sister Fanny and her husband, Henry Burnett, to record Cruikshank's tune and mark the expression and gestures. Burnett took the music down hastily, intending to recopy it later, but the artist insisted that the crude notes and the one-sided clef added to the humor of the piece.[85]
In his enthusiasm, Dickens apparently sang the ballad to Thackeray without mentioning his plans for its publication. Thackeray, equally captivated by the noble Lord, etched a series of plates for the ballad, which he planned to publish. Only afterwards did he learn that Cruikshank was working on the same subject. "I am not such a fool to suppose that my plates can hurt yours," he hastened to inform his former teacher, "but warning is fair between friends."[86] Thackeray's plans for publication never materialized. Undaunted in any case, Cruikshank proceeded with his plans. He published the ballad in his own name, but tantalized readers by stating that neither the accompanying preface nor the notes were written by him, though he nowhere disclosed their author. Thus the Spectator, for example, found the introduction, which they supposed was Cruikshank's work, more amusing than his "ludicrous" etchings.[87] Dickens considered the illustrations a triumph of comic draftsmanship. "You never did anything like those etchings—," he congratulated the artist, "never."[88]
Despite his admiration for Lord Bateman, however, Dickens never publicly acknowledged his contributions to it. Disconcerted when the Morning Post mentioned him as the author of the ballad's introduction and notes, he begged Cruikshank to remain silent. "Pray be strict in not putting this about as I am particularly—most particularly—anxious to remain unknown in the matter for weighty reasons."89 It is possible that Dickens wished anonymity because of his agreement with Bentley not to write any other works before the long-deferred Barnaby Rudge, or because the ballad was beneath the dignity of an author who wanted serious as well as popular approval, though neither of these reasons had previously inhibited him from doing whatever he pleased. In any case, the artist kept the author's secret for almost thirty years. In 1867, F. W. Pailthorpe, an artist who executed some of the "extra" illustrations to Dickens's novels, discovered that the literary portion of Lord Bate-man was by Dickens, not Cruikshank. "Yes," the artist finally admitted, "Charlie did it for me."90 Even this revelation,
however, was not made public until 1935.
Dickens's anonymity was sustained partly because substantial evidence was advanced to connect Thackeray with the ballad. In 1839 Thackeray was writing for Cruikshank's Comic Almanac, which was issued by Charles Tilt, the publisher of Lord Bateman—a coincidence reinforced by Thackeray's fondness for the phonetic Cockney used in the ballad, whose meter, commentary, characterization and, even, the ultimate abandonment, resembled other works by him.91 Long after the deaths of both Dickens and Thackeray, speculation continued. Thackeray's daughter, Anne, finally decided diplomatically that "the notes sounded like Mr. Dickens's voice and the ballad like my father's."92 In 1892, however, an overturned table accidentally disclosed the illustrated manuscript of Thackeray's "Lord Bateman," which, perhaps in deference to Cruikshank, had never been published.93 Exactly why Thackeray never published his version and why Dickens concealed his participation in Cruikshank's Lord Bateman remain enigmas.
There is less mystery, however, about the probable models for Lord Bateman in each set of drawings. At the outset of his adventures, Cruikshank's dark, lean hero resembles Cruikshank (fig. 9); Thackeray's the savage-jawed Thackeray (fig. 10), though his hero passes through more physiognomic vicissitudes.94 (Another contemporary "Lord," portrayed by a later Dickens illustrator, Richard Doyle, on a sketch of a title page for yet another edition, which never materialized, resembles neither his creator nor his graphic predecessors but he is paired with a far prettier Sophia (fig. II).)[95] If Cruikshank's condemned Fagin seems partly to reflect the artist's disparaging self-image, his Lord Bateman could be said to represent the convivial aspect of his nature. To the end of his life, Cruikshank never tired of acting the roles of both these characters, originally delineated within months of one another. At the Greenwich dinner to welcome Dickens home from America in 1842, at the Cheshire Cheese on lesser occasions, and during intermissions at the author's amateur theatricals, the artist rendered the ballad, his coat flung over his arm, his sleeves rolled up, as he disported himself in the manner of his humorous nobleman; even in his old age, at the height of his temperance mania, Cruikshank greeted his guests in the costume of this wine-loving hero.[96]