Charles Dickens and the Pre-Raphaelites
Thomas J. Tobin

	Charles Dickens [SLIDE 1] was a master of portraying realistically the world within which he lived.  His novels, stories, and even his newspaper reporting are all written with an intensity of detail, a witty turn of phrase, and a specificity that “hold, as ‘twere, the mirror up to nature,” as Shakespeare has Hamlet say.  The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood had similar goals, and it seems natural that this group of painters whose credo was “truth to nature,” should have crossed paths with Dickens throughout his life.  The story of Dickens’s relation to the Pre-Raphaelite movement reads like a present-day soap opera, with accusations of adultery, a naked woman tied to a horse, a marriage of convenience, suspicions of homosexuality, a case of mistaken identity, a broken wedding engagement complete with perfidious jilted suitor, and friendships betrayed and mended over and over.

Episode I: Who Are You, and What Are You Doing in My House?

	In 1850, Dickens became aware of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood through a friend, probably Wilkie Collins, who told him about the aims of the movement: to return art to a state of “purity” by emulating the artists of the Italian trecento and quattrocento who painted before Raphael “ruined” art by his use of complex perspective and smudgy sfumato shadows.  The Pre-Raphaelites were a group of seven art students, led by John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who advocated a return to simplicity and honesty in the visual arts: they took their cue from John Ruskin, the eminent art critic, who, in his Modern Painters, had urged artists to “go to Nature in all singleness of heart, and walk with her laboriously and trustingly, having no other thought but how best to penetrate her meaning; rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing” (34).  The Pre-Raphaelites had caused a minor sensation at the 1849 Royal Academy Exhibition with their medieval-looking pictures signed only with the mysterious initials “P. R. B.”
Dickens had also at that time been reading about another movement that wanted to turn back the clock, the “Young England” movement.  Peter Ackroyd explains that
He seems to have confused the Pre-Raphaelite movement with the anachronistic idiocies of the “Young England” group, and this largely on the grounds of its name: it is characteristic of Dickens who, when he grasps the wrong end of the stick, never fails to belabour everyone in sight with it (462).
The result of this misunderstanding was an article in Household Words for June 15, 1850, in which Dickens takes the Pre-Raphaelites to task. This article is one of the items on the display table this afternoon.  Dickens, in his characteristic bombast, takes the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood to task for their apparent desire to regress:
In the fifteenth century, a certain feeble lamp of art arose in the Italian town of Urbino. This poor light, Raphael Sanzio by name, better known to a few miserably mistaken wretches in these later days, as Raphael (another burned at the same time, called Titian), was fed with a preposterous idea of Beauty with a ridiculous power of etherealising, and exalting to the Very Heaven of Heavens, what was most sublime and lovely in the expression of the human face divine on Earth with the truly contemptible conceit of finding in poor humanity the fallen likeness of the angels of GOD, as raising it up again to their pure spiritual condition. This very fantastic whim effected a low revolution in Art, in this wise, that Beauty came to be regarded as one of its indispensable elements. In this very poor delusion, Artists have continued until the present nineteenth century, when it was reserved for some bold aspirants to “put it down.”
The Pre-Raphael Brotherhood, Ladies and Gentlemen, is the dread Tribunal which is to set this matter right. Walk up, walk up and here, conspicuous on the wall of the Royal Academy of Art in England, in the eighty-second year of their annual exhibition, you shall see what this new Holy Brotherhood, this terrible Police that is to disperse all Post-Raphael offenders, has “been and done!” (12-13)
Dickens singled out for his disgust the painting of Christ in the House of His Parents by John Everett Millais [SLIDE 2]:
You behold the interior of a carpenter’s shop. In the foreground of that carpenter’s shop is a hideous, wry-necked, blubbering, red-headed boy, in a bed-gown, who appears to have received a poke in the hand, from the stick of another boy with whom he has been playing in an adjacent gutter, and to be holding it up for the contemplation of a kneeling woman, so horrible in her ugliness, that (supposing it were possible for any human creature to exist for a moment with that dislocated throat) she would stand out from the rest of the company as a Monster, in the vilest cabaret in France, or the lowest ginshop in England. Two almost naked carpenters, master and journeyman, worthy companions of this agreeable female, are working at their trade; a boy, with some small flavor of humanity in him, is entering with a vessel of water; and nobody is paying any attention to a snuffy old woman who seems to have mistaken that shop for the tobacconist’s next door, and to be hopelessly waiting at the counter to be served with half an ounce of her favourite mixture. Wherever it is possible to express ugliness of feature, limb, or attitude, you have it expressed. Such men as the carpenters might be undressed in any hospital where dirty drunkards, in a high state of varicose veins, are received. Their very toes have walked out of Saint Giles’s.  (13)
Dickens then goes on to take the idea to its most silly extreme:
In the first place, the Pre-Perspective Brotherhood will be presently incorporated, for the subversion of all known rules and principles of perspective. It is intended to swear every P. P. B. to a solemn renunciation of the art of perspective on a soup-plate of the willow pattern; and we may expect, on the occasion of the eighty-third annual Exhibition of the Royal Academy of Art in England, to see some pictures by this pious Brotherhood, realising Hogarth’s idea of a man on a mountain several miles off [SLIDE 3], lighting his pipe at the upper window of a house in the foreground. But we are informed that every brick in the house will be a portrait; that the man’s boots will be copied with the utmost fidelity from a pair of Bluchers, sent up out of Northampton-shire for the purpose; and that the texture of his hands (including four chilblains, a whitlow, and ten dirty nails) will be a triumph of the Painter’s art. . . .
In literature, a very spirited effort has been made, which is no less than the formation of a P. G. A. P. C. B., or Pre-Gower and Pre-Chaucer-Brotherhood, for the restoration of the ancient English style of spelling, and the weeding out from all libraries, public and private, of those and all later pretenders, particularly a person of loose character named SHAKESPEARE. . . (15)
And this is how things would stand between Dickens and what he thought were the Pre-Raphaelites until the mid-1850s.  Millais was especially offended, since Dickens had attacked his painting in particular, but all of the Pre-Raphaelites were rather disappointed in Dickens’s response, since they had been using Dickens’s works as the inspiration for their paintings for some time!

Episode 2: What Have You Done for Me Lately?

The Pre-Raphaelites were, on the whole, about fifteen years Dickens’s junior, and many of them grew up reading his early works.  Oswald Doughty, the biographer of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, puts Dickens in some rare company among the young Gabriel’s reading habits:
At home in the evenings, Dante Gabriel, the schoolboy, continued in the pursuits of his earlier childhood. . . . Gabriel’s taste in literature was, from the beginning, widely varied rather than nicely discriminative or sure.  He delighted in Dickens, in tales of chivalry, of brigands, of terror, and in the Newgate Calendar. (49)
Once the Brotherhood began painting in earnest, they relied on medieval sources, Shakespeare, and coming a close third, Dickens.  George Landow reports on the source of William Holman Hunt’s painting The Awakening Conscience [SLIDE 4]:
At the same time that it presents the young woman’s moment of illumination, it satirizes her wealthy seducer.  David Copperfield had given Hunt the idea of the conversion of a fallen woman. “Deeply touched by the pathos of the search by Old Peggoty after little Emily,” the painter “went about to different haunts of fallen girls to find a locality suitable for the scene of the old mariner’s pursuing love” (2.429). Nonetheless, Hunt explains that even at this early stage of his subject, he had decided not to illustrate any particular scene in the novel; and as he thought about this subject, he realized that a conventional dramatic encounter between father and daughter--or lover and fallen woman--would not convey his intentions. “While cogitating on the broad intention,” Hunt tells us in characteristically heavy prose, “I reflected that the instinctive eluding of pursuit by the erring one would not coincide with the willing conversion and instantaneous resolve for a higher life which it was necessary to emphasise” (2.249). (Replete with Meaning)
Landow also mentions elsewhere that even the friends of the original Pre-Raphaelites began to use Dickens as a starting point for their forays into Pre-Raphaelite style: Take Robert Braithwaite Martineau:
The novels of Dickens provided a popular subject for contemporary painting. William Holman Hunt, for example, drew upon David Copperfield for The Awakening Conscience (1853), and Hunt’s friend and student Martineau painted a scene from The Old Curiosity Shop [SLIDE 5]. (“Charles Dickens and the Visual Arts”)
By 1857, American critics began to notice Martineau’s work, as well; in an article for the November 1857 Crayon, a New York arts magazine, the mysteriously signed “L. L.” comments in an article on “the Two Pre-Raphaelitisms” that
another pupil of Holman Hunt’s, Robert B. Martineau, does highest credit and honor to his master and himself. His picture [is] “Kit receiving his Writing Lesson,” from Dickens’s Old Curiosity Shop. (327)
	Even John Everett Millais, whom Dickens had so savaged in 1850, painted a picture featuring Dickens’ daughter Katie, The Black Brunswicker, [SLIDE 6] in 1860:
Millais spent three months painting “The Black Brunswicker.” . . . For models Millais used Charles Dickens’s daughter Kate and a private soldier from the Life Guards. Propriety demanded each had to model separately using a lay figure to lean against. Millais wished to be historically accurate, but appears to be a compromise between the fashions of 1859 and 1815 (when waists were still kept high).  “The Black Brunswicker” was greatly admired when exhibited at the Royal Academy exhibition in 1860 and was bought by the famous dealer Ernest Gambart for £1050, the highest price Millais had yet received. (“The Black Brunswicker”)
Ten years after Dickens attacked Millais in print, his daughter sat to the artist! This is explained by a chance meeting on March 13, 1851, when Dickens was introduced to Wilkie Collins [SLIDE 7], and through him to the Pre-Raphaelites themselves.

Episode 3: More Handshaking than a Baptist Revival Tent

In 1851, the thirty-nine-year-old Dickens was an established success; his novels were popular, and his periodical Household Words was gaining in readership.  He was already a sought-after dinner guest among the London society folk, and he began to show a preference for somewhat “racy” company.  Fred Kaplan tells us that “Dickens and the twenty-eight-year-old [Wilkie] Collins had never met.  He knew, though of his intimacy with [Augustus] Egg and his friendship with a group of young painters, frequent dinner guests at Egg’s apartment in Bayswater” (283).  Augustus Egg invited both Collins and Dickens to dine in March of 1851, and soon, Wilkie had introduced Dickens to the Pre-Raphaelites through Wilike’s brother Charles Allston Collins, who was a minor follower of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, and who had almost been voted into the original Brotherhood (his acceptance as nixed by the sculptor Thomas Woolner).  On the Wilkie Collins Web Site, Paul Lewis tells us the story from Wilkie Collins’s point of view:
It was also the time when he and his brother Charles deepened their involvement with the extensive literary and artistic circle of the mid-nineteenth century. Charles was a Pre-Raphaelite, though not actually in the Brotherhood, and the family entertained a great deal, on one occasion in 1852 giving a dance for 70 people. Among the visitors were E. M. Ward, Holman Hunt, Dickens, and John Everett Millais.
And Peter Ackroyd tells the story as Dickens experienced it:
It was at Collins’s dinner table that he first met Millais and, apparently not the least embarrassed by his vicious attack upon Millais’s ‘Christ in the House of His Parents’ five years before, he wrote a short note to the painter the following day in which he expressed admiration for his genius. (720)
	A second avenue by which Dickens began to know the Pre-Raphaelites socially was through William Allingham [SLIDE 8], a hanger-on whose sole task in London society seems to have been to introduce and to record meetings among the celebrities of the day.  Allingham is often considered a minor Pre-Raphaelite author himself.  He merits mention in Violet Hunt’s biography of Elizabeth Siddal, Dante Rossetti’s wife:
[Allingham] gave up his post in the Customs and came to London to make a living by literature.  He had secured work on Household Words [SLIDE 9] through his friendship with Dickens. . . .  People were so nice to Mr. Allingham that he felt pretty sure of getting a permanent job in London, and then, Good-bye Ballyshannon! . . . This amiable, sympathetic and cultivated man who hobnobbed with established celebrities like Carlyle, Clough, Dickens and Thackeray and the Interesting Pre-Raphaelite Brethren, and wrote a regular newsletter about them all once a week to Mr. and Mrs. Browning in Florence, was welcome everywhere. (71,76)
Allingham used his friendship with Dickens to secure work on occasion: he published an unsigned essay on “Irish Ballad Singers and Street Singers” in Household Words in January, 1852. 
	By the end of the 1850s, Dickens was seen so often in the company of the Pre-Raphaelites, especially John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt, that the critics of the time began to equate the pictorial verisimilitude of the Pre-Raphaelites’ canvases with the detailed descriptions to be found in Dickens’s novels.  In 1858, the Living Age [SLIDE 10] thought that Dickens’s focus on detail was an error:
[W]ho could bear to have a long narrative of fortunes “dismal yet mean,” with characters “dark but not awful,” and no objects “tender or profound.”  Mr. Dickens has in various parts of his writings been led by a sort of pre-Raphaelite cultus of reality into an error of this species.  His poor people have taken their poverty very thoroughly; they are poor talkers and poor livers, and in all ways poor people to read about. (“The Waverly Novels” 569)
The same periodical dunned Dickens in 1869, eleven years later, using a similar argument:
That Mr. Dickens, having a doctrine to preach as well as a story to tell, should, as an artist, be, as we certainly consider him, an Idealist, not a Realist, is no more than natural.  Nevertheless, the assertion may well sound startling. The bulk of his characters, it may be said, are invariably ordinary, common-place people--tradespeople, clerks, and artizans, and their wives and families; his scenes are laid in places familiar to every one; and his plots turn on incidents of every-day life.  If he does not paint reality, then who does?  But the difference lies not in the subject-matter of the representation, but in style of treatment.  Here, again, it is a question of more and less.  All art is, and must be, idealization.  A mere copy of the facts of nature or of human life, in so far as it were possible, which it would be only to a very limited extent, would seem unlike them.  We see this in the case of the Præ-Raphaelites who insist on ignoring the legitimate devices by which painting makes up for that want of perspective involved in the enforced use of a plain surface.  Their works may be the most faithful reproduction of the natural originals, and yet by very reason of their faithfulness they seem utterly unnatural.  So it is with the novelist.  He cannot copy life by telling all about his characters, all that they did, said, and felt.
Dickens even competed with the Pre-Raphaelites on occasion in “extracurricular” activities [SLIDE 11]:
Adah Isaacs Menken, a beautiful American Jewess, actress and equestrienne, had come to England in 1864 and had taken London by storm as “The Naked Lady,” dashing round the ring at Astley’s Amphitheatre in tights and leopard skin and bound to a horse’s back, in a thrilling representation of Mazeppa’s famous ride.  Poets and writers, including Dickens, Charles Reade, Swinburne, and Rossetti, thronged Adah Menken’s reception-room in the imposing Westminster Palace Hotel facing the Abbey. (Doughty 344)
Going back to 1858, there was a fracas of another sort between Dickens and William Holman Hunt.

Episode 4: Libel, Slander, and a Broken Engagement

Dickens almost certainly didn’t write this next article, but it appeared in Household Words in April 1858.  Entitled, “Calmuck,” it is a thinly-veiled reference to Holman Hunt’s taking up with Emma Watkins, the unmarried field-worker who appears in his Hireling Shepherd. [SLIDE 12]  The article talks about one Mildmay Strong (a play on the names of Millais and Hunt), who seduces a country girl to sit for his paintings with a suggestion of marriage.  Diana Holman Hunt wrote about the scandal that “Calmuck” caused for her grandfather:
Millais had written in his diary how, smoking their pipes and leaning on a stile, they had waited for girls returning from work in the nearby fields.  I know from family papers that a girl called Emma Watkins [SLIDE 13], not Annie Miller, was the model in The Hireling Shepherd. . . . Hunt had threatened Dickens with a libel action over a sketch in Household Words which seemed to refer to his seduction of the shepherdess from Ewell.  The story had been particularly offensive to Hunt because, when it was published, he was engaged to marry Annie Miller. (22)
Less than a year later, Wilkie Collins again played the go-between, and advised Holman-Hunt to ask Dickens’s advice about pricing his latest painting.  Hunt had traveled to Jerusalem, the Holy Land, and Egypt, and on his return, wished to sell his monumental work The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple [SLIDE 14]. Paul Ripley comments that 
the first tangible results of this journey were two paintings, “The Scapegoat,” & “The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple,” which was exhibited nationally to great acclaim in 1860, & sold for the sum of 5,500 guineas, Hunt was advised on the price by Charles Dickens.
A fuller account of the encounter between Hunt and Dickens can be pieced together from Hunt’s own memoir, Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (2:189-190), which is on display today, and Gay Daly’s account in her book Pre-Raphaelites in Love: 
Hunt turned to the problem of selling his painting.  It had been six years since he had had a major work to show, and he faced the challenge of pricing and selling a picture that had taken him as much time as a dozen minor but lucrative ones.  From the start he knew that Gambart was the only buyer with enough daring and cash to pay the kind of price he needed to realize, but he hesitated until his friend Wilkie Collins suggested that he consult Charles Dickens, a wily businessman who had driven many hard bargains on behalf of his own art.
	Hunt had had a couple of run-ins with Dickens in the past, but Collins, who had collaborated with Dickens for years, insisted that he would enjoy helping out.  Hunt arranged to meet the great man at his home in Tavistock Square. . . .  His easy mix of urbanity and hearty humor put Hunt at ease, and in a few minutes they got down to business.
	Dickens asked exactly how much time and money Hunt had invested in the painting.  Pulling out all the stops, Hunt described not only the hundreds of hours he had spent at his easel but also the harassment he had suffered at the hands of would-be models in Jerusalem, the days and nights spent in painstaking research on the Temple, the intricacy of the design, the difficulty of finding Jewish models in England, the hours lost to the English fog, the problem of finding a colorman whose pigments were reliable, the inferior quality of varnishes available in the East, and a great deal more.
	When he finished, Dickens asked some acute questions about the art market and about what sort of fellow this Gambart was, to determine how much money the dealer stood to make on the exhibition and sale of the painting.  Hunt pointed out that legally an artist held rights to both his painting and the copyright, so a buyer had to purchase the copyright in order to make profits by engraving and printing the painting.  Gambart was one of the few dealers skillful enough to make more money from the sale of prints than from the sale of the painting itself; he was already making a lot of money from prints of The Light of the World [SLIDE 15]. (In fact, Gambart was careful not to tell Hunt, to whom he had paid only two hundred pounds for the copyright, that he was realizing a thousand pounds a year from those prints.)
	Working up all this information, Dickens agreed with Hunt’s estimate that he should ask 5500 guineas for the picture--a staggering sum, far more than anyone had ever paid for a single work at that time.  Hunt insisted that Gambart would never pay such a price.  Keenly alive to Hunt’s dilemma, Dickens commiserated: “Yes, we inspired workers for the public entertainment ought to think of nothing so much as the duty of putting money into publishers’ pockets, but we are a low-minded set, and we want a part of this filthy lucre for ourselves, for our landlords and our tradesmen, who most unfeelingly send us bills as though we did nothing for their pleasure.”  Hunt left the house chuckling to himself.

Episode 5: Homosexuals and a Suspicious Marriage

Wilkie Collins’s brother Charles is the strongest link between the Pre-Raphaelites and Charles Dickens.  Collins was an early follower of the Pre-Raphaelites, and his painting Convent Thoughts [SLIDE 16], although not signed with “P. R. B.,” came under attack by the critics as a prime example of Pre-Raphaelite foolishness.  Collins married Katie Dickens on July 17, 1860, and the entire marriage was tainted by scandal and rumor.  Gladys Storey, writing in 1939, explains that Dickens
was saddened by the marriage of Katie to Charles Collins [SLIDE 17], the artist and Wilkie Collins’s younger brother. He blamed himself. On the day of her wedding, 17 July 1860, after Katie had left for her honeymoon, Dickens was found by his daughter Mamie sobbing into her wedding gown saying “But for me, Katey would not have left home.” (9)  
Peter Ackroyd hints at the reason why Dickens might have been so unhappy:
His daughter, Kate, was going away from home. . . she had decided to marry Charles Collins, the younger brother of Wilkie; not because she was in love with him, she later explained, but simply because she wanted to get away from “an unhappy home.” . . .  Wilkie, a few months before the decision, said that his brother “is still trying hard to talk himself into believing that he ought to be married.”  Dickens was very much opposed to the match, not least because he was unsure of Collins himself; he had already employed him to write for Household Words and All the Year Round, and thought enough of him to take him to Broadstairs with him ten months before, but for one reason or another he objected to Kate’s marriage to him.  It has been suggested that he was homosexual.  Kate herself seems to have told her father that her husband was impotent.  Certainly they had no children, and in addition he suffered from a mysterious, wasting illness throughout most of their married life. (874-875)
At the wedding itself, Dickens even engaged William Holman Hunt with some bitter words:
[H]is real displeasure, and even grief, at the marriage were clearly visible to others.  Holman Hunt, for example, noted that “Dickens was overstrained and inclined to be argumentative,” and the two men entered a pointless argument about David Roberts’s painting, “A Recollection of the Desert: on the Approach of the Simoom,” [SLIDE 18] which Dickens owned.  Hunt pointed out to him that Roberts had painted the sun setting in the south, but Dickens, in Leonee Ormond’s account, “irritably countered by saying that he particularly liked the setting sun.”  When Hunt then suggested that the Sphinx was meant to face it, Dickens just as irritably declared that he still liked the painting as a “poetical conception.” (Ackroyd 876)
However, such a picture of the relationship between Collins and Dickens is incomplete; Collins was perpetually in ill health, but he was Dickens’s friend and often fellow mischief-maker.  Dickens’s reaction at his daughter’s wedding seems to have been over losing a daughter rather than over gaining a son, if I may stretch the old adage.  Before Katie was married to Charles Collins, Dickens thought of Collins in a much better light, and, indeed, when Collins represented not a son-in-law but a friend, Dickens was inclined to be kind to the frail fellow.  In a letter to his daughter Katie from Broadstairs on September 2, 1859, Dickens mentions that he and Collins had seen a show [SLIDE 19]:
Charles Collins and I having seen a bill yesterday--about a mesmeric young lady who did feats, one of which was set forth in the bill, in a line by itself, as
THE RIGID LEGS
--were overpowered with curiosity, and resolved to go.  It came off in the Assembly Room, now more exquisitely desolate than words can describe.  Eighteen shillings was the “take.” Behind the screen among the company, we heard mysterious gurglings of water before the entertainment began, and then a slippery sound which occasioned me to whisper [to] C. C. (who laughed in the most ridiculous manner), “Soap.” It proved to be the young lady washing herself.  She must have been wonderfully dirty, for she took a world of trouble, and didn’t come out clean after all--in a wretched dirty muslin frock, with blue ribbons. (Dickens and Hogarth 2:117-118)
Indeed, before the wedding, Dickens was still inclined to puff Charley’s talents.  In a letter to Wilkie Collins on August 1, 1858, Dickens praised Charley’s writing talents, saying that “Charley’s paper has a great deal in it that is very droll and good.  I have sent it to the Printer” (Dickens and Hogarth 1:570).  Dickens wrote to William de Cerjat on May 3, 1860:
You asked me on Christmas Eve about my children.  My second daughter is going to be married in the course of the summer to Charles Collins, the brother of Wilkie Collins, the novelist. . . . He was bred an artist; is a writer, too, and does ‘The Eye Witness’ in All the Year Round [SLIDE 20].  He is a gentleman, accomplished, and amiable. (Dickens and Hogarth 2:36)
After the marriage, however, Dickens vented his feelings about Katie’s choice of a groom:
He had little confidence that Charley Collins could take care of anyone, even himself, nervously confiding to a friend soon after the wedding that “the whole was a great success--SO FAR.”  Though he disapproved of Collins giving up painting, in which he was “achieving considerable distinction,” and falling back “upon that worse of cushions, a small independence,” he had not opposed the marriage.  But he had no doubt that Katie “might have done much better.”  The ascetic groom, who had had periods of religious obsession some years before, probably had little to no sexual experience, and faced an unknown trial and its consequences.  He had his doubts about Dickens.  In late June, just before going to Gad’s Hill for a short visit, he confided to his close friend the painter William Holman Hunt that of all the remarkable men he had known, he never knew “one who was not injured by success.” (Kaplan 420)
However, things soon seemed patched up, perhaps because Charles and Katie were living on the cheap in Belgium because Charles was too frail to work very much.  In 1864, Dickens worried about Charles Collins’s health, saying in a letter to William de Cerjat that “I have strong apprehensions that he will never recover, and that she will be left a young widow” (Dickens and Hogarth 259).  Dickens offered Charles a small place at All the Year Round on his return from the Continent, and Collins wrote occasional articles, as well as substantial parts of two of the Christmas numbers: “To Be Taken with a Grain of Salt, or, The Trial for Murder” in 1865, and the chapter “No. 3 Branch Line: The Compensation House” in Mugby Junction, 1866.  The Mugby Junction chapter is on display today.
Collins often worked closely with Dickens--in a letter to W. H. Wills on July 31, 1868, Dickens reports that he had been sitting in his writing châlet, waiting for inspiration, when “Charles Collins suggested one [idea] yesterday morning, in which there is something, though not much” (Dickens and Hogarth, 447).

Episode 6: The Mystery of Edwin Drood

Fred Kaplan relates the intimacy that Dickens had achieved with the Pre-Raphaelites by the late 1860s: in 1868, “he went back to town, partly for All the Year Round business, partly to direct Mamie and Katie’s performances at a friend’s home on Wednesday, June 1, in a play called Prima Donna. The scenery had been designed by Millais” (553).  Peter Ackroyd mentions that he was then working on the text of Edwin Drood, as well as arranging for the cover art and the illustrations [SLIDE 21]:
Thus, in The Mystery of Edwin Drood, does he bring to the landscape of his childhood and youth the themes of camouflage, secrecy, and self-division.  Certainly these were the elements which were in his mind when, at the end of September, he began seriously to work upon the new story; the extant number plans suggest that he could see his way through the first stages of the novel without undue difficulty.  He had already agreed that Charles Collins should undertake the illustrations to the new monthly series.  Whether this was at Collins’s suggestion, or at Dickens’s actual request, is not certain; but it seems likely that he was happy to grant a commission which would not only occupy his son-in-law’s time but also afford him at least the basis of an income.  In any case Collins himself, as Dickens knew very well, had a higher reputation than Marcus Stone who had illustrated Dickens’s previous novel.  In order to prepare Collins for the work ahead, Dickens asked Frederick Chapman to send down to Gad’s Hill Place copies of the old green covers which Hablot Brown had designed in the past. . . .  Charles Collins, having sketched out a cover, found he could no longer draw without weakening his health.  Some other artist had to be found at once and Dickens went up to London in order to consult with Frederick Chapman.  In the event he discovered a young artist, Luke Fildes.  Or, rather, it was John Everett Millais who found him for Dickens--the painter, who was staying at Gad’s Hill Place, went into Dickens’s study one morning and showed him the first issue of The Graphic. “I’ve got him!” he shouted and then pointed out to his host an illustration, “Houseless and Hungry,” [SLIDE 22] which Fildes had executed.
Dickens died on June 9, 1870, exactly halfway through Edwin Drood.  It seems fitting that two of the Pre-Raphaelites rendered him final service: Kaplan relates that “Millais soon came to do a death cast, but settled for a pencil drawing” [SLIDE 23] (555).  John Forster, in his biography of Dickens, relates in a note what Charles Collins wrote about Dickens after his death:
I will quote what was written shortly after his death by his son-in-law, Mr. Charles Collins, to illustrate a very touching sketch by Mr. Fildes of his writing-desk and vacant chair [SLIDE 24]. “Ranged in front of, and round about him, were always a variety of objects for his eye to rest on the intervals of actual writing, and any one of which he would have instantly missed had it been removed.  There was a French bronze group representing a duel with swords, fought by a couple of very fat toads, one of them (characterised by that particular buoyancy which belongs to corpulence) in the act of making a prodigious lunge forward, which the other receives in the middle of his digestive apparatus, and under the influence of which it seems likely that he will satisfy the wounded honour of his opponent by promptly expiring.  There was another bronze figure which always stood near the toads, also of French manufacture, and also full of comic suggestion.  It was a statuette of a dog-fancier, such a one as you used to see on the bridges or quays of Paris, with a profusion of little dogs stuck under his arms and into his pockets, and everywhere where little dogs could possibly be insinuated, all for sale, and all, as even a casual glance at the vendor’s exterior would convince the most unsuspicious person, with some screw loose in their physical constitutions or moral natures, to be discovered immediately after purchase.  There was the long gilt leaf with the rabbit sitting erect upon its haunches, the huge paper-knife often held in his hand during his public readings, and the little fresh green cup ornamented with leaves and blossoms of the cowslip, in which a few fresh flowers were always placed every morning--for Dickens invariably worked with flowers on his writing-table.  There was also the register of the day of the week and of the month, which stood always before him; and when the room in the châlet in which he wrote his last paragraph was opened, some time after his death, the first thing to be noticed by those who entered was this register, set at ‘Wednesday, June 8’--the day of his seizure.”  It remains to this day as it was found. (269n)
[SLIDE 25] Collins would survive Dickens by only two years: Millais died in 1896, and Holman Hunt in 1910.  Each of these three Pre-Raphaelites was a friend to Dickens, and all of them left memoirs in which they remembered Dickens as a great talent, a great pain the backside on occasion, and a great friend.
	I’d be happy to take a few questions, now, and then I’d like to invite you all to look at the rare and not-so-rare items I’ve brought with me today.  I’d also ask that you please not handle the items--I have brought a magnifying glass for closer viewing, and I would be happy to handle the materials for you if you’d like a closer look.

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