Effortless Art: The Sketch in Nineteenth-Century Painting and Literature

Criticism, Summer, 1999 by Alison Byerly

The position of the journalistic sketch-artist was first formulated by Washington Irving in The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon (1820). Irving deliberately emphasized his spectatorial stance:

   I have wandered through different countries and witnessed many of the
   shifting scenes of life. I cannot say that I have studied them with the eye
   of a philosopher, but rather with the sauntering gaze with which humble
   lovers of the picturesque stroll from the window of one print shop to
   another, caught sometimes by the delineations of beauty, sometimes by the
   distortions of caricature, and sometimes by the loveliness of landscape. As
   it is the fashion for modern tourists to travel pencil in hand and bring
   home their portfolios filled with sketches, I am disposed to get up a few
   for the entertainment of my friends.(12)

Claiming no greater purpose than simple "entertainment," and no wider audience than a few friends, Irving forestalls any objections to his informal style by renouncing his professional status altogether. He is not a paid writer, but a mere observer who is generous enough to share his observations.

His "sauntering gaze" makes him a perfect example of Benjamin's flaneur, who wanders through the city streets, apparently a man of leisure, but in fact, according to Benjamin, a "strolling commodity.(13) His apparent idleness, Benjamin suggests, disguises his essentially bourgeois role: "the man of letters ... goes to the marketplace as a flaneur, supposedly to take a look at it, but in reality to find a buyer.(14) He is a professional masquerading as a gentlemanly amateur. Susan Buck-Morss notes that for Benjamin, Baudelaire represented the perfect embodiment of the qualities of the flaneur because of his "acute awareness of his highly ambivalent situation--at once socially rebellious bohemian and producer of commodities for the literary market."(15) Dickens and Thackeray, I will suggest, had a similar awareness of their complicity in the world they appeared to observe from a distance.

Irving's Sketch-Book had been received enthusiastically when it appeared in Britain in 1820, and may well have influenced Dickens when he began writing the short pieces he collected into Sketches by Boz. Dickens's intention to emphasize the parallel between visual and literary art is clear from the titles he preferred for the book: "Sketches by Boz and Cuts by Cruikshank," or "Etchings by Boz and Woodcuts by Cruikshank."(16) Dickens was in a difficult financial position at this early stage of his career. He wrote his first pieces, which initially appeared in the Morning Chronicle under the continuing title of "Street Sketches," while living primarily on his income as a court reporter. His father's debts had forced him to assume control of the family finances; Dickens mortgaged several weeks of his salary in order to pay for moving his mother and sisters to cheaper lodgings while taking his brother with him into his own unfurnished apartment.(17) Dickens's constant shifting between three periodicals that published his sketches--The Morning Chronicle, The Evening Chronicle, and Bell's Life in London--was partly the result of his constant efforts to get the best possible price for his work.(18)