The artist’s bitterness against his employers was not unnatural. At the same time, we must remember that the fact that they had on the spur of the moment to decide upon an artist, without consulting Dickens, puts the matter in a very different light. The fortunes of the venture were at stake. The author, at all hazards, must be humoured. His will was paramount, and when he insisted upon Buss’s supersession by H. K. Browne, there was practically an end of the matter. Happily Buss’s labour was not all lost, and it was with much pleasure that I seized the opportunity offered me by the editor of the {32} Magazine of Art in June 1902, to point out in that publication how perverse has been the fate which has made the name of an artist of no mean order more familiar by his few failures than by his many successes. It is not generally known that there are in existence two etched plates by Buss showing that he contemplated a series of extra illustrations to Pickwick. The one is a title-page with Mr. Pickwick being crowned; the other is rather a poor rendering of “The Break-down.”
But to return to the plates themselves: only about seven hundred copies were published when plates by Browne were substituted for them. “The Cricket Match” was wholly suppressed, and the subject of “Tupman and Rachel” was etched over again, considerably altered, but evidently founded upon the Buss plate. The latter is here reproduced for the purpose of comparison.
The “Pickwick” suppressed plate “Tupman and Rachel.”(By R. W. Buss)
“Tupman and Rachel.” (By H. K. Browne)
That every Dickens collector desires to possess one of the seven hundred copies of the first issue of the first edition which contain the Buss plates, is a matter of course, and enough has been said to make clear the reason of such desire. Should any of my readers fail to sympathise, he must take {33} it as an incontrovertible sign that he is immune from that most delightful of all diseases, bibliomania.
It need only be added that, in the beautiful “Victorian Edition” of the novel, published in two volumes by Messrs. Chapman and Hall in 1887, facsimiles may be seen of the original drawings made for the suppressed plates, as well as two unpublished drawings prepared by Mr. Buss, but not used. The subjects of these are “Mr. Pickwick at the Review,” and “Mr. Wardle and his Friends under the Influence of the Salmon.” The first is an excellent drawing, and goes far to prove that, had Buss been given time, he would have no more failed as illustrator of Pickwick than he did as illustrator of various other most successful publications. The same edition also contains facsimiles of an unused drawing by “Phiz,” “Mr. Winkle’s First Shot,” and of a water-colour drawing of “Tom Smart and the Chair,” sent in to the publishers by John Leech as a specimen of his work. From which it will be seen that the “Victorian Edition,” limited to two thousand copies, is also one which every Dickens lover ought, if possible, to possess. {34}
The originals of the Buss drawings were in the possession of the artist’s daughter, Miss Frances Mary Buss, the well-known founder of the North London Collegiate and Camden Schools, until her death a few years ago. They were then sold, and I have been unable to discover into whose hands they have passed.
So much for the Pickwick suppressed plates, which, if strict chronology were to be observed, should naturally be followed by an account of the “Rose Maylie and Oliver” plates in Oliver Twist. These, however, we shall hold over for another chapter, as they will have to be considered at some length. Meanwhile, we will deal shortly with the curious wood engraving in The Battle of Life, and with the etching of “The Last Song” in The Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi. The former is so far germane to our subject that it should have been suppressed, but, out of consideration for the artist, was not.