CHARLES DICKENS IN 1851
DICKENS’S FAVOURITE RAVEN
The original of “Grip” in “Barnaby Rudge.” After death the famous bird was stuffed, and when sold at the Dickens Sale it realised £126
(Reproduced by kind permission of the London Stereoscopic Co.)
extraordinarily difficult, for it implies a knowledge of what part of a thing to caricature. To reproduce the proportions of a face, exactly as they are, is a comparatively safe adventure; to arrange those features in an entirely new proportion, and yet retain a resemblance, argues a very delicate instinct for what features are really the characteristic and essential ones. Caricature is only easy when it so happens that the people depicted, like Cyrano de Bergerac, are more or less caricatures themselves. In other words caricature is only easy when it does not caricature very much. But to see an ordinary intelligent face in the street, and to know that, with the nose three times as long and the head twice as broad, it will still be a startling likeness, argues a profound insight into truth. “Caricature,” said Sir Willoughby Patterne, in his fatuous way, “is rough truth.” It is not; it is subtle truth. This is what gives Dickens his unquestionable place among artists. He realised thoroughly a certain phase or atmosphere of existence, and he knew the precise strokes and touches that would bring it home to the reader. That Dickens phase or atmosphere may be roughly defined as the phase of a vivid sociability in which every
