Did Dickens know best? In February 1981, Anthony Powell reviewed Jane Cohen's book on Charles Dickens and his illustrators

Apollo, Oct, 2005 by Anthony Powell

Dickens himself took a keen interest in his illustrations, and was not an easy man to work with. He raises the interesting question of to what extent the author knows best in giving instructions for how his stories are to be depicted. On the face of it there seems no argument as to which should have his way, but one finishes Miss Cohen's book with certain doubts. Does the material of a novel stretch out beyond the knowledge of the writer? Could it be that sometimes the artist knows best? These reflections are generated by the fact that so often Dickens had rows with his best illustrators, and liked those whose work seems to a later generation indifferent.

George Cruikshank was twenty years older than Dickens, a famous figure when the writer was still unknown, and a man of considerable eccentricity. The last was sufficiently shown by choosing to depict Fagin in his own likeness, something admitted at the time, and shown here in a self-caricature. Dickens disliked Cruikshank's illustrations for Oliver Twist, which must seem to most people inseparable from the novel. Baudelaire was a great admirer of Cruikshank, speaking of him in the same tones as of Bruegel and Goya. Cruikshank illustrated something approaching 900 books in all, and contributed only to five of Dickens's twenty-four illustrated works.

Cruikshank grew fanatical in later life on the subject of abstention from drink, which he preached in pictures displaying the frightful consequences of having a drop too much, but he was unable to practise teetotalism with complete success himself. He parted with Dickens on bad terms, and nursed a grievance on the subject to the end of his life.

Dickens moved on to Robert Seymour for Pickwick, an artist comparatively well-known in his own day for comic sporting sketches. He is now forgotten, though not always deservedly. The style Seymour used for Dickens was very similar to Cruikshank's, and I should guess that, of the many people who must remember Seymour's haunting picture of 'the dying clown' in The Pickwick Papers, the large majority supposed it to be by Cruikshank. Seymour was in a permanent state of being hard up, and financial toubles, coupled with rows with Dickens about how the author's characters should be illustrated, caused him to commit suicide. His widow subsequently waged something of a vendetta against the novelist ...

Miss Cohen has produced a useful and scholarly work, and because her book is not casual journalism (where all such solecisms are common enough) one must put in a plea for more careful use of the English language: 'fortuitous' means 'by chance', not 'fortunate'; 'oblivious' (endlessly misused) means 'forgetful', not 'unaware', and is followed by the genetive 'of'; 'anticipate' means 'to use in advance', not to 'expect'; 'befriend' does not simply mean 'to be friends with', it conveys a sense of 'help, favour' ... I don't think any of these are 'American usage', which naturally one respects, but merely loose employment of English.