American-born but European-trained artist C. S. [Charles Stanley] Reinhart's sixteen plates for Charles Dickens's Uncommercial Traveller appeared in the single-volume, American version of the Household Edition published in 1876 by Harper and Brothers. His "Parisian" style of illustration, just in vogue when the American Household edition of Hard Times was published in 1876, is a severe departure from the careful detailism of Fred Walker and Harry French, the novel's previous (British) illustrators, but is perfectly consistent with the new realism of the British Household Edition's lead illustrator, Fred Barnard. Simon Houfe's remarks about C. S. Reinhart's penmanship conveying a sense of colouring without the actual use of any pigmentation are certainly appropriate to his work on this volume, which includes the essays published under the title The Uncommercial Traveller in Dickens's new weekly periodical All the Year Round in the 1860s. By the time that Chapman and Hall published the Library Edition volume in 1874, thirty-six of the thirty-seven essays and sketches had appeared in volume form. Curiously, the Household Edition publishes only twenty-eight of these short pieces, concluding with "The Italian Prisoner" (misnumbered "XVIII").
Frontispiece. Plate 1: Caption: Time and His Wife. [Page 91.
Plate 2: [No Caption: The Uncommercial Traveller visits the Foul Ward at Wapping Work-House in Chapter 3.] Page 9.
Plate 3: Caption: "She turned up the young woman's face as she spoke." Running Head: Oakum Head and Skirmishers. Page 17.
Plate 4: Caption: "Lemonade. Bal-loon say, and Swing." Running Head: The Witches Waiting. Page 26.
Plate 5: Caption: "Nor is it, indeed, a style of business Mr. Jairing wishes." Running Head: Plunder and Cookery at the Bull's Head. Page 30.
Plate 6: Caption: "And shook all his ten fingers in his face." Running Head: A Warrior's Vengeance. Page 35.
Plate 7: Caption: "And with his eyes going before him like a pawn's." Running Head: The Personage. Page 42.
Plate 8: Caption: "He lies on the broad of his back, with his face turned up to the sky, and one of his ragged arms loosely thrown across his face." Running Head: The Well-Spoken Young Man. Page 49.
Plate 9: Caption: "And twice I saw him stalk in, take out his pudding, stab his pudding, wipe the dagger, and eat his pudding all up." Running Head: Worst Sights of All. Page 59.
Plate 10: Caption: "I ask your pardon," said the stranger, "But do I see in there any small article of property belonging to me?" Running Head: Revisiting Old Friends. Page 64.
Plate 11: Caption: "And the bride looked up at the glass, just in time to see the Captain cutting her head off." Running Head: The End of Captain Murderer's Career. Page 67.
Plate 12: "I have seen him, in a pepper-and-salt jacket and drab trousers, with his arm around the waist of a boot-maker's house-maid." Running Head: Arcadian Loves. Page 73.
Plate 13: "Looking over too, I saw, lying on the towing-path, with her face turned up toward us, a woman." Running Head: A London Waif. Page 79.
Plate 14: "'Are you all here?' Glancing at the party over his spectacles." Running Head: Composition of the Eight Hundred. Page 88.
Plate 15: "Are you aware, Sir, that you've been trespassing?" Running Head: A Post-Chaise Found. Page 95.
Plate 16: "The face-maker . . . . becomes the village idiot." Running Head: The End of the Fair. Page 106.
Plate 17: Title-Page and Vignette. [Page 3.
Plate 17 [detail]: Title-page Vignette: Sissy Jupe as a girl, holding her father's bottle of nine oils. [Page 3.
References
Dickens, Charles. The Uncommercial Traveller, Hard Times, and The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Il. C. S. Reinhart and Luke Fildes. The Household Edition. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1876.
Houfe, Simon. The Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century British Book Illustrators and Caricaturists. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Antique Collectors' Club, 1978.
Pennell, Joseph. The Adventures of An Illustrator Mostly in Following His Authors in America and Europe. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1925.
Last modified 21 May 2011