Dickens and Victorian Art: Relationship with W.P. Frith

Introduction
Dickens and Victorian Art: Relationship with W.P. Frith
Nanako KONOSHIMA
Narrative Paintings flourished in the 19th century England. Many artists painted pictures
telling stories, and huge amount of them were naturally inspired by the novels. i
Among the most successful Victorian costume painters was William Powell Frith (1819-1909),
who was undeniably one of the most influential artists of the period. Frith was an ardent admirer of
Dickens’s writings. He reveals in his autobiography, “It goes without saying that I had read all that
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Pictures with themes
that derived from the novels were especially called Costume Paintings, and Richard Altick, in his
voluminous work, Paintings from Books, declares that Dickens’s works produced more Costume
Paintings than those of Sir Walter Scott’s, who was artists’ favourite writer before Dickens gained
fame (Altick, Paintings from Books 464). That Dickens’s visually imaginative prose inspired many
artists, naturally agrees with the fact that numerous critics since his contemporary have praised
vividness of Dickens’s writing. Various approaches have been attempted to analyse its visual effect,
and some studies have designated influence from preceding visual culture, like Hogarth and the
tradition of graphic satire. However, as to how Dickens’s prose has been visualized, arguments have
tended to analyse only the illustrations in his books and his effect on cinema. What still remains to
be discussed is his relationships with contemporary artists, with many of whom Dickens had actual
acquaintance, and over many of whom he had significant influence as an immensely popular writer of
the day.

Dickens had written, beginning with the ‘Sketches by Boz’” (Frith 74). It is well known that
Dickens’s first historical novel Barnaby Rudge (1841) proved to bring Frith a turning point in his
artistic career. I will quote again from his autobiography:
One of the greatest difficulties besetting me has always been the choice of subject. My
inclination being strongly towards the illustration of modern life, I had read the works of
Dickens in the hope of finding material for the exercise of any talent I might possess; but
at that time the ugliness of modern dress frightened me, and it was not till the publication
of “Barnaby Rudge,” and the delightful Dolly Varden was presented to us, that I felt my
opportunity had come, with the cherry-coloured mantle and the hat and pink ribbons.
(Frith 74)
I shall examine Dolly Varden later. I would like to note here that Frith looked for a hint for “the
illustration of modern life” in Dickens’s novels. Frith, born in North Yorkshire, came to London in
1835, beginning his career as a portrait painter. It was in 1838 that he first presented his work to the
British Institution, and his first appearace at the Royal Academy Exhibition with Malvolio before the
Countess Olivia was in 1840. Frith was therefore Dickens’s immediate contemporary, who launched
his literary career with Sketches by Boz in 1836. Art was lagging behind literature in the first half of
the 19th century. Contemporary attire, especially that of men, was considered hopelessly ugly and
not fit for art. Frith thus constantly discloses his anxiety in painting modern subject-matter. His
anxiety reveals that the legacy of Sir Joshua Reynolds and his pecking order of art in Discourses,
ranking historical paintings first, still assumed the reins of Royal Academy. Frith did have his
predecessors. Benjamin West, in Death of General Wolfe, painted history in contemporary dress, and
Sir David Wilkie, in Chelsea Pensioners Reading the Gazette of the Battle of Waterloo, painted it in
everyday life. Still, what Frith aimed was not easily attained. Martin Meisel writes,
“Distanced genre painting, rural and provincial, had been well established since Wilkie,
and “modern life” clearly meant something else to the painters who felt drawn to identify
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themselves, through their art, with the energy and concerns of the present age. It is
worth remembering that few artists in the 1840s in England had gone further than Frith in
creating a contemporary genre painting with unmitigated immediacy (Redgrave’s Poor
Teacher, 1843, is an exception).” (Meisel 375)
Meisel’s phrase “unmitigated immediacy” signifies unsoftened and direct realization of immediate
social concern. His mention of Redgrave in the above context is significant and I shall examine this
point later. In my view, it was always Dickens who drove Frith into creating contemporary paintings,
beginning with Dolly Varden to his later painting, The Crossing Sweeper. Placed in between them is
an almost forgotten work, Kate Nickleby, which in my idea is a noteworthy work in Frith’s career and
in Victorian social realistic art. As far as I have been able to observe, Dickens’s influence over Frith
still remains to be discussed, and Frith’s ignored work, Kate Nickleby, deserves more attention as one
of the precursors of Victorian social realistic art.
I. Companion Pictures: Dolly Varden and Kate Nickleby
Frith painted Dolly in at least six versions, the most popular being the “Laughing Dolly,” now in
Victoria and Albert Museum, shown in Figure 1.
Fig. 1. Frith, Dolly Varden, 1842
The original Dolly Varden was bought by a collector by January 1842, and Frith borrowed it to make
two copies, one of which for his fellow artist, Frank Stone, who gave it to Dickens’s friend and
biographer, John Forster. The “Laughing Dolly” is this copy, which Dickens presumably saw. Frith
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was strongly anxious to hear the opinion of the author, who was, for Frith, “one of the greatest
geniuses that ever lived” (Frith 75), ii
“I shall be very glad if you will do me the favour to paint me two little companion
pictures; one a Dolly Varden (whom you have so exquisitely done already), the other, a
Kate Nickleby. P.S. – I take it for granted that the original picture of Dolly with the
bracelet is sold.” (Letters 3, 569)
but the “Laughing Dolly,” gaining great favour of the public,
also gained favour of Dickens. The author writes to the painter for his copy, adding another request:
In this letter, Dickens requests Frith to paint also Kate, a sister of the protagonist in his earlier work
Nicholas Nickleby (1839). iii
thusly ordered.
“Impossible” (Frith 75), records Frith as he instantly felt when he was
Dolly Varden and Kate Nickleby are completely different characters, one a “Maria” type and the
other a “Mary,” to borrow Michael Slater’s formulation (Slater, Dickens and Women 234-35). Maria
Beadnell, whom Dickens was devotedly in love with in his youth, and Mary Hogarth, who was his
beloved sister-in-law dying a premature death in his arms, are two important women in Dickens’s
lives. Their influence over the writer’s life and imagination has been meticulously examined.
Dolly Varden, “the most developed ‘Maria’ type,” according to Slater, is one of the lively, pretty,
flirtatious, “frivolous in their behaviour but essentially good-hearted” girls, “comfortably
circumstanced” (Slater 235-36). As I have already quoted, Frith tells in his autobiography that he
gained inspiration from the following passage of Barnaby Rudge:
As to Dolly, there she was again, the very pink and pattern of good looks, in a smart little
cherry-coloured mantle, with a hood of the same drawn over her head, and upon the top
of that hood, a little straw hat trimmed with cherry-coloured ribbons, and worn the merest
trifle on one side--just enough in short to make it the wickedest and most provoking
head-dress that ever malicious milliner devised. And not to speak of the manner in
which these cherry-coloured decorations brightened her eyes, or vied with her lips, or
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shed a new bloom on her face, she wore such a cruel little muff, and such a heart-rending
pair of shoes, and was so surrounded and hemmed in, as it were, by aggravations of all
kinds […]. (BR Chapter 19, 151)
As Slater finds Dolly’s precursor in Arabella Allen in Pickwick Papers, “the young lady with the fur
round her boots” (Pickwick Papers Ch. 30, 366), Dolly’s coquettish attraction is enhanced by her attire
and ornaments. In “The Laughing Dolly,” Frith makes best use of them, especially the muff and the
bracelet, “sparkl[ing] and glitter[ing] so beautifully on her wrist” (BR 159), of which Dolly is so proud.
Patricia Ingham, in her discussion of “morselisation” of women borrowing the word from Tony
Tanner and developing it in her analysis of Dickens’s women, quotes the above paragraph as the
example of men’s gaze turning metonymy into inventory, and concludes, “This elaboration on Dolly
as petticoat carries, unusually, the implication that this is not only how male eyes see her but also how
she sees herself and how she wishes to be seen” (Ingham 23). Thus Dolly differentiates herself from
all the other young female characters. Her conclusion can also be confirmed in the following
illustrations by Phiz, in which the muff is again emphasized.
Fig. 2. Hablot Knight Browne, Illustration for Barnaby Rudge
This illustration visualizes Dickens’s following text, revealing Dolly’s strong vanity: hearing that her
friend Emma Haredale was very unhappy, Dolly feels more sorry than she could tell, “but next
moment she happened to raise them to the glass, and really there was something there so exceedingly
agreeable, that as she sighed, she smiled, and felt surprisingly consoled” (Barnaby Rudge 155).
Frith’s Dolly succeeds in presenting Dolly’s coquettish vanity and attractiveness, with her hand at her
waist and laughing with her chin protruded. From the beginning, Dolly has been introduced as a
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laughing girl:
“One of [the upper windows] chanced to be thrown open at the moment, and a roguish
face met [Gabriel Varden’s]; a face lighted up by the loveliest pair of sparkling eyes that
ever locksmith looked upon; the face of a pretty, laughing girl; dimpled and fresh, and
healthful – the very impersonation of good-humour and blooming beauty.” (BR 34)
When Frith’s “Laughing Dolly” was welcomed with fervour, it was not only the style and form that he
succeeded in, but the overall realization of Dickens’s characterization. David Trotter, in his
thought-provoking analysis of Frith’s and Dickens’s presentation of Dolly Varden, begins his
discussion by aptly pointing out Dickens’s anxiety to avoid “any imputation of conservatism” in his
“labored” jokes in ‘The Old Lamps for the New Ones,” the notorious article criticizing Millais’s
Christ in the House of His Parents. Trotter indicates Dickens’s ambivalence about change, which, in
his idea, is “the proper ground for a comparison between Dickens and Frith. Both wanted to be
modern, with an urgency which everywhere shapes their work; neither knew how to be” (Trotter 31).
Through his discussion he reveals the modern characterization of Dolly, and how her social
ascendancy taking the form of eroticism was successfully captured in Frith’s work. He concludes,
“Frith’s achievement was to have captured not just Dolly, but Dickens’s own allegiance to Dolly, an
allegiance he felt deeply, and could never express directly” (Trotter 36).
Kate Nickleby, on the other hand, is a character in stark contrast with Dolly. She is in
mourning when she is first introduced into the novel with her widowed mother and brother. She is a
“slight but very beautiful girl of about seventeen” (Nicholas Nickleby 36), echoing Mary Hogarth’s
epitaph which Dickens inscribed for his sister-in-law. When Kate is first addressed in the
conversation by her spiteful uncle Ralph, she is weeping, and has to appeal for any work that she
might do that will gain her “a home and bread” (Nicholas Nickleby 39). Frith, who succeeded in
presenting a laughing girl, comfortably circumstanced, is now requested to draw a weeping,
unfortunate girl, if not less pretty. Frith notes what he came up with:
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“Kate Nickleby, too! Impossible, perhaps, to please the author of her being with my
presentment of her – but I must try. And many were the sketches I made, till I fixed
upon a scene at Madame Mantalini’s – where Kate figures as a workwoman – the point
chosen being at the moment when her thoughts wander from her work, as she sits sewing
a ball-dress spread upon her knees.” (Frith 75)
Figure 7 is the engraving of Frith’s original work:
Powell Frith.
Fig. 3. William Holl Jr., Kate Nickleby. Stipple engraving after William
The pensive expression of Kate in mourning reveals her anxiety in her new work and situation, after
the loss of her father and the departure of her beloved brother Nicholas in consequence. In the
course of the story, Kate is being imprudently courted by the villainous Lord Verisopht and Sir
Mulberry Hawk, but the essential point in the plot is not to emphasize her sexual attractiveness, as in
case with Dolly, when she is sexually threatened by Hugh in the woods and Simon Tappertit in the
capture by the rioters. Kate’s characteristic virtue lies in her sisterly love and patience, and Frith
successfully visualizes them by presenting Kate at her lonely work with her thoughts wandering, most
likely anxious for her brother now far away.
When Dickens asked Frith to paint a portrait of Kate, both of them must have been reminded
that Kate has already been a model of a portrait in the novel by the Miniature painter, Miss La Creevy.
She paints Kate in her own room, taking pains to realize her prettiness by infusing into the
countenance “a bright salmon flesh-tint,” which was her original technique. Finally she succeeds: “‘I
think I have caught it now’ said Miss La Creevy. ‘The very shade! This will be the sweetest portrait I
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have ever done, certainly.’” (Nicholas Nickleby 120)
Frith could have painted Kate like Miss La Creevy, emphasizing her prettiness as he had
successfully done with Dolly. Frith, who has succeeded in visualizing Dolly’s “good-humour and
blooming beauty,” can easily be expected to succeed also in adding “salmon flesh-tint” to Kate’s face
as Miss La Creevy does. Ingham calls this scene “grotesque,” and notes that the episode “work to
question the conventional method of representing desirable women” (Ingham 28). The
“conventional method” is apparently questioned in the claim of Miss La Creevy that follows the above
quotation. The Miniature Painter continues after the above quotation thusly:
'Look at the Royal Academy! All those beautiful shiny portraits of gentlemen in black
velvet waistcoats, with their fists doubled up on round tables, or marble slabs, are serious,
you know; and all the ladies who are playing with little parasols, or little dogs, or little
children -- it's the same rule in art, only varying the objects -- are smirking. In fact,' said
Miss La Creevy, sinking her voice to a confidential whisper, 'there are only two styles of
portrait painting; the serious and the smirk; and we always use the serious for professional
people (except actors sometimes), and the smirk for private ladies and gentlemen who
don't care so much about looking clever.' (Nicholas Nickleby 121)
This passage, as one of the few references in Dickens’s novels on painting, has been quoted
repetitively by critics who have discussed Dickens and art. Through the words of Miss La Creevy,
Dickens criticizes convention in portrait paintings.
Criticism of stereotype in art remains the main point in Dickens’s later articles on art which he
publishes in Household Words, a weekly periodical published in his own editorship from 1850. In
one of them, “The Ghost of Art,” he harshly attacks stereotypical representations of people in
historical paintings. Eight years later, he publishes “An Idea of Mine,” again to criticize the use of
models with such stock types as young men with broad chest and young ladies with long eyelashes.
He disliked them because they were not faithful representations of the reality. When Dickens praises
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the art of John Leech in his review published in The Examiner in 1848, he writes, “Into the tone, as
well as into the execution of what he does, he has brought a certain elegance which is altogether new,
without involving any compromise of what is true” (Journalism 2, 144-47, underlines mine). Truth
to nature was an important essence in Dickens’s notion of the visual arts, and it was again
paradoxically emphasized in his later article, “Please to Leave Your Umbrella,” in which he describes
a visit to the picture gallery at Hampton Court (Journalism 3, 485).
II. Kate Nickleby as Social Realistic Art
When Frith painted Kate at work, he not only challenged a new way of painting women,
dispelling conventionality as expressed in Dickens’s writings, but also succeeded in being “true” to
the reality in which Dickens placed Kate. The reality, which I refer to, is the contemporary reality
for middle-class or lower middle-class women who had to work to live. Kate is the first woman in
his novels who was compelled to work, except Nancy in Oliver Twist (1839), immediately followed
by the secondary character in this novel, Madeline Bray. Dickens describes the state of Kate and
other working seamstresses in 1838:
At this early hour many sickly girls, whose business, like that of the poor worm, is to
produce, with patient toil, the finery that bedecks the thoughtless and luxurious, traverse
our streets, making towards the scene of their daily labour, and catching, as if by stealth,
in their hurried walk, the only gasp of wholesome air and glimpse of sunlight which cheer
their monotonous existence during the long train of hours that make a working day. As
she drew night to the more fashionable quarter of the town, Kate marked many of this
class as they passed by, hurrying like herself to their painful occupation, and saw, in their
unhealthy looks and feeble gait, but too clear an evidence that her misgivings were not
wholly groundless. (Nicholas Nickleby 203-04)
Dickens thusly describes the state of seamstresses’ hard labour and low payment, which was
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eginning to disturb public peace of mind. “The Education of Young Ladies for Other Occupations
than Teaching” (1838) by Lady Ellis was published the same year, and Patricia Thomson notes,
“for the following 20 years, ‘tutor, the tailor, and the hatter’ continued to be the only
occupations that the gentry-bred with propriety might pursue. […] Before 1857 the
national conscience was no less than four times […] pricked out of its complacent torpor
by revelations about women wage-earners. First, by milliners, then by factory women,
next by governesses and finally by nurses. […] The agitations on behalf of milliners and
factory girls were practically contemporary. The tailor’s strike was followed by the
efforts of the Christian Socialists on behalf of tailoresses; and in 1844 the Association for
the aid and benefit of Dressmakers and Milliners was formed.” (Thomson 68)
In this context, when Frith chose to draw Kate at needle-work, alone and in mourning, he can be said
to have captured the meaningful significance Dickens put in her character. The harsh reality Kate
was facing was one of rising public concerns, and Dickens was to treat this topic with more
seriousness and intent in the characterizations of Meg and Lilian in The Chimes in 1844. Frith’s
challenge was justly rewarded: seeing the completed portraits of Dolly and Kate, Dickens exclaimed,
“‘All I can say is, they are exactly what I meant, and I am very much obliged to you for painting
[Dolly and Kate] for me’” (Frith 75).
The original Kate Nickleby is now lost. According to Frith’s biography, the engraver William
Holl started working on it around 1845, and published the engraved version in 1848. It remains
unclear about the precise date of Kate’s completion, but it was probably not long after Dickens’s
request in 1842. There is a significant time lag between 1842, when Frith first painted Kate in the
composition as shown in Fig. 4, and 1848, when the engraved version was widely bought, and in my
view, Frith’s choice of the theme in 1842 deserve careful attention. It was in 1843 that the artist
Richard Redgrave first exhibited Poor Teacher, and Thomas Hood published the poem The Song of
the Shirt in the Christmas issue of Punch. Hood and Redgrave were followed by a number of
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paintings with the same cause in the following decades.
According to Christopher Wood, “The fate of the overworked and exploited seamstress was the
one which seems to have attracted painters most. First to take up the cause was Richard Redgrave”
(Wood, Victorian Panorama 127). That Redgrave was directly inspired from Thomas Hood’s The
Song of the Shirt published anonymously in Punch in the winter of 1843 is evident in the fact that
Redgrave attached a quotation from the poem when he exhibited The Sempstress six months after the
publication of the poem. iv Hood tripled the number of issues of Punch by the success of The Song of
the Shirt, and it is even said that it was the most famous poem of the period. v
As Wood and Treuherz states, Richard Redgrave, together with G.F. Watts, is celebrated as “the
first Victorian social realist,” one of the “only two artists of the 1840s [who] depicted social problems
with any degree of frankness” (Treuherz 24). By his Poor Teacher (1843), Redgrave successfully
achieved his status as a pioneer, who chose to paint the piteous plight of contemporary working
women. It was in 1844 that The Sempstress was first exhibited at the Royal Academy, the work
which found fame as denouncing needle women’s hard labour, who were compelled to work long
hours under wretched circumstances, poorly paid and living under foul conditions.
It inspired not only
Redgrave, but a number of paintings in the following decades including Frank Holl, who painted with
the same title, The Song of the Shirt, as late as 1875.
Fig. 4. Richard Redgrave, The Sempstress
Compared to Redgrave’s The Sempstress, with her red eyes after her work throughout the night,
Frith’s Kate only suggest the monotonous severity of the work. The intention of a social propaganda
may not be marked in Frith’s painting. Yet Frith’s Kate can also be said to suggest hard labour of
contemporary seamstresses. It is almost impossible to clarify the date of production of a work of art,
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and we cannot say that Frith anticipated Redgrave. Hood, however, must have known Nicholas
Nickleby before writing The Song of the Shirt, having favourably reviewed Dickens’s Master
Humphrey’s Clock in 1840 in the Athenaeum. vi Slater suggests that the suffering of the starving
sempstresses Meg and Lilian in The Chimes was inspired by The Song of the Shirt (Slater 332). Yet,
as he also points out, the restricted choice of employment for the majority of middle-class or lower
middle-class girls was presented much earlier in Kate Nickleby (Slater 332). vii
In The Chimes, Meg
works from early morning until late at night, not complaining that she is tired even when she “fainted,
between work and fasting’ (The Chimes 158). Dickens writes, “In any mood, in any grief, in any
torture of the mind or body, Meg’s work must be done. She sat down to her task, and plied it.
Night, midnight. Still she worked” (The Chimes 160). Figure shows John Leech’s illustration for
this work.
Fig. 5. John Leech, Illustration for The Chimes
Leech is later to produce again works with the same topic in Punch, titled Pin Money and Needle
Money (1849), viii
and as I mentioned before, such visual representations become not uncommon in
the following decades. When Frith chose to paint Kate in the composition later to become popular as
early as 1842, and that, soon after the tremendous success of coquettish Dolly, Frith, an admirer of
Dickens, can be said to have rightly captured Dickens’s design of Kate in Nicholas Nickleby. Frith
showed his respect and understanding of Dickens’s social intention in Nicholas Nickleby which, on
Dickens’s part, had clearly anticipated the age.
Frith, who found Dolly Varden when reading Dickens “in the hope of finding material for” “the
illustration of modern life,” consequently was given a chance to depict a new aspect of “modern life,”
by Dickens’s request to draw Kate. Frith’s challenge was justly rewarded: seeing the portraits of
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Dolly and Kate, Dickens exclaimed, “‘All I can say is, they are exactly what I meant, and I am very
much obliged to you for painting [Dolly and Kate] for me.’”
Conclusion
After the remarkable success of The Derby Day (1858), the subject-matter Frith chose for his
next work was again something strongly connected to a work by Dickens: The Crossing Sweeper
(1858).
Fig. 6. Frith, The Crossing Sweeper
Frith’s crossing sweeper, though bare-footed and in torn trousers, seems living in better conditions
than poor Jo, but still, when he chose this subject matter with intention to “paint life about me” (Frith
267), Frith must have had in mind Jo in Bleak House (1853).
Frith was always an ardent admirer of Dickens’s writings. That Barnaby Rudge brought Frith
a turning point in his artistic career is a famous story. His “inclination being strongly towards the
illustration of modern life,” Frith had been reading Dickens “in the hope of finding material for the
exercise of any talent [he] might possess.” Exhibiting his first work in the British Institution in 1838,
Frith was Dickens’s immediate contemporary, and presumably it was Dickens who gave Frith the hint
for contemporary works. One of them, significant but carelessly ignored, was Kate Nickleby, which
deserves attention as one of the precursors of Victorian social realistic art. Challenging to paint Kate
in the social context soon after his tremendous success with the “Laughing Dolly,” Frith succeeded in
capturing Dickens’s design of Kate, which had clearly anticipated the age. Frith, who found Dolly
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Varden when reading Dickens “in the hope of finding material for” “the illustration of modern life,”
consequently was given a chance to depict a new aspect of “modern life,” by Dickens’s request to
draw Kate.
It remains to be argued whether Dickens really understood Frith’s true inclination and talent.
Ormond points out that Dickens’s favourite among Frith’s works which he singled out at the Paris
International Exhibition of 1855 was a scene from Oliver Goldsmith’s comedy of 1768, The Good
Natured Man, Mr Honeywood introduces the Bailiffs to Miss Richland as his Friends (Victoria and
Albert), and acutely remarks,
To the modern eye, this work, like the others [which Dickens thought highly of, like The
Rejected Poet: Pope and the Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and a Scene from ‘Le
Bourgeois Gentilhomme’], is an elaborate costume-piece, lacking the vitality of Frith’s
studies of the contemporary scene. (Ormond, “Dickens and Painting: Contemporary Art”
18)
Dickens’s enjoyment in seeing Costume Paintings was probably related to his profession. He, who
famously saw the object of his writing in his mind, enjoyed having his writing visualized. He later
made a speech at a Royal Academy Banquet, the last of his public speeches:
“The literary visitors of the Royal Academy tonight desire to congratulate their hosts on a
very interesting exhibition […]. They naturally see with especial interest the writings
and persons of great men – historians, philosophers, poets, and novelists – vividly
illustrated around them here. And they hope they may modestly claim to have rendered
some little assistance towards the production of many of the pictures in this magnificent
gallery.” (Speeches 421)
When Dickens later edited the Library Edition, Frith begged him to “allow [him] to be one of the
illustrators” and painted pictures for Little Dorrit. Frith’s comment, “The great pleasure that I felt in
the anticipation of once more trying my hand in realizing the characters of the author was my sole
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motive in making this proposal,” reveals his satisfaction in visualizing Dickens’s characters on the
artist’s part.
i See especially Sacheverell Sitwell, Narrative Pictures: a Survey of English Genre and its Painters. 1938.
ii See Frith’s letter addressed to Dickens on 9 August 1841.
iii Richard Dadd, fellow artist and one of Frith’s most intimate friends until his insanity in 1843, saw at
Frith’s studio, several versions of Dolly Varden: “Frith had been an admirer of Dickens since reading the
collection of early pieces published in 1836 as Sketches by Boz. What attracted him to BR was Dolly’s
picturesque 18th century costume, which he modelled on the wedding dress he had just inherited from his
maternal grandmother. After Dickens saw the ‘Dolly’ painted for Frank Stone, in November 1842 he
commissioned another version together with a companion picture of Kate Nickleby. It was the beginning
of a close friendship which lasted until Dickens’s death in 1870, despite Frith’s wife Isabelle – the close
friend and confidante of Catherine Dickens – banning him from her house after the break up of the Dickens
marriage, just around the time Frith was beginning the portrait of Dickens commissioned by his friend John
Forster” (Knight 5).
iv Julian Treuherz, Hard Times: Social Realism in Victorian Art. 24.
v Hood was inspired to write the poem, The Bridge of Sighs in 1844 by reading in The Times of the
attempted suicide of Mary Furley, a seamstress who made shirts at 1 3/4pence each (Wood, Panorama
138).
vi Thomas Hood, an unsigned review of Master Humphrey’s Clock, Vol.I, in the Athenaeum (Collins 94).
vii Slater continues, “Later, a number of articles in Dickens’s journals also drew attention to needlewomen
and praised, and gave publicity to, attempts to improve their lot,” and lists articles published in Household
Words by Henry Morley (Slater 332).
viii (Treuherz 25)
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Ormond, Leonée. “Dickens and Painting: Contemporary Art.” The Dickensian 80, 1984: 2-25.
---. “Dickens and Painting: The Old Masters.” The Dickensian 79, 1983: 130-151.
Stone, Marcus. Ed. Charles Dickens’ Uncollected Writings from Household Words 1850-1859. 1.
Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1968.
Trotter, David. “Dickens and Frith.” William Powell Frith: Painting the Victorian Age. Mark Bills and
Vivien Knight, eds. New Haven: Yale UP, 2006.
Slater, Dickens and Women. London: Dent , 1983.
Wood, Christopher. Victorian Panorama: Paintings of Victorian Life. London: Faber, 1976.
Treuherz, Julian. Hard Times: Social Realism in Victorian Art. London: Lund Humphries, 1987.
Photographic Reference
Fig. 1, 6: from Mark Bills and Vivien Knight, eds., William Powell Frith: Painting the Victorian Age. New
Haven: Yale UP, 2006.
Fig. 2: from Charles Dickens, Barnaby Rudge. 1841. London: Dent, 1996.
Fig. 3: Photo ©National Portrait Gallery, London.
Fig. 4: from Julian Treuherz, Hard Times: Social Realism in Victorian Art. London: Lund Humphries, 1987.
Fig. 5: from Charles Dickens, The Chimes. 1844. The Christmas Books: Volume One. Harmondsworth,
Penguin, 1971.
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