Sketches for Boz
May 9th, 2008 by houghtonmodern
Best known as a novelist, William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863) also attempted a career as an artist. In 1836, Thackeray created a series of sketches in an attempt to illustrate the serialized version of Charles Dickens’ The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club.
Dickens was still rather unknown to the literary world (Pickwick Papers would propel him to fame), and had already published the first two parts of Pickwick when illustrator Robert Seymour committed suicide. A new illustrator, Robert Buss, was hired, but his illustrations displeased Dickens and his publishers, who subsequently fired him. Several artists approached Dickens in his lodgings at Furnival’s Inn, vying for the new position.
Edgar Johnson, in Charles Dickens: his tragedy and triumph, recounts what is believed to have been the first meeting between Dickens and Thackeray, who were both 24 years old:
“Dickens saw several other applicants in Furnival’s Inn. Among them came a young Anglo-Indian giant with a broken nose, one William Makepeace Thackeray, who showed him two or three sketchy line drawings completely different in style from Seymour’s elaborate etchings…Dickens found his drawings quite unsuitable.”
To Thackeray’s dismay, Dickens ultimately chose Hablot K. Browne to illustrate the next part of the work (Browne used the pseudonyms “Nemo” and “Phiz,” and went on to illustrate a number of Dickens’s works). The exchange between the two men, which Thackeray later termed “Mr. Pickwick’s lucky escape,” signaled a major turning point in his life. Thackeray later admitted that, had it not been for Dickens, “I should have tried to be not a writer, but a painter, or designer of pictures.”
The set includes the three drawings on two sheets of paper that Thackeray showed to Dickens. The sketches depict characters from Dickens’ 1836 work, Sketches by Boz. Boz is in the center, surrounded by characters from the book, which Thackeray has marked in the third drawing as “Mrs. Tibbs,” “Mrs. Bloss,” “Bung” and “Lillerbell.”
All three sketches are pencil on drawing paper.
Houghton’s collections include a number of additional drawings by Thackeray, which can be found by searching HOLLIS, or browsing OASIS.
*2007M-53. Purchased with the Louis J. Appell Jr. Fund for British Civilization in HCL and The Class of 1952 Fund. Images may not be reproduced without permission.
































