Charles Dickens enjoyed close collaborative relationships with the illustrators of his novels, but now it's rare to find a picture outside the world of children's books. Is drawing a lost art, or could we be on the brink of a new golden age?
There's no escaping Dickens this year, it being the bicentenary of his birth. And along with Dickens come his illustrators: Cruikshank and Phiz, obviously, but a plethora of others including Richard Doyle, Edwin Landseer and John Tenniel. It's impossible to detach the novels from the illustrations, not least because the author meant it like that. Only Great Expectations and Hard Times were produced without pictures. For the rest, Dickens kept an iron control over his illustrators... he gave them an outline of the plot before he wrote the text and he monitored the drawings to ensure that they matched precisely with his own conceptions.
The tangling of text and drawings was obvious from the start: The Pickwick Papers began with Dickens being invited to write stories to accompany illustrations by the popular artist Robert Seymour; it wasn't long before Seymour was illustrating him. In the other direction, his best-known collaborator, Phiz, controversially took credit for some characters in Oliver Twist.
All of which raises the interesting question of why it is that this kind of collaboration doesn't happen any more. Where is the Phiz to our Boz? Why don't contemporary novels have illustrations as standard? Why are illustrators corralled into children's fiction? Up until the Fifties and Sixties it wouldn't be unusual for a mainstream publisher to illustrate adult books. Now it's easier to count – you don't need all the fingers on one hand – the publishers that do. Is it that contemporary fiction happens all in the head and cerebral stuff doesn't really lend itself to images? Are modern novelists just too precious to collaborate with artists? Is it the additional cost in an already tight budget? Are modern illustrators just not that good?
Dan Franklin at Jonathan Cape is one of the few British publishers who bucks the trend. He commissions both graphic novels and illustration for adult fiction, the latest being woodcuts by Joe McLaren for Andrew Motion's sequel to Treasure Island, Silver, which is aimed chiefly at adult readers. He identifies two reasons why it's not common practice.
