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The Many Illustrators of A Tale of Two Cities 5: Rafaello Busoni (⅘)

Vignettes for Book the Third, Chapters 1-9

Now we're on to Book the Third! This will actually be the last set to have anything but the regular mini vignette drawings. 21 in total!

1 / 5 || 2 / 5 || 3 / 5 || 4 / 5 || 5 / 5

& the standard endnote for all posts in this series:

This post is intended to act as the start of a forum on the given illustrator, so if anyone has anything to add - requests to see certain drawings in higher definition (since Tumblr compresses images), corrections to factual errors, sources for better-quality versions of the illustrations, further reading, fun facts, any questions, or just general commentary - simply do so on this post, be it in a comment/tags or the replies!💫

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The Many Illustrators of A Tale of Two Cities 5: Rafaello Busoni (⅗)

Vignettes for Book the Second, Chapters 14-24

Here is the second half of Busoni's work for Book the Second - and it really is about half because there are the same total number of images again at 27 (including the above)!

1 / 5 || 2 / 5 || 3 / 5 || 4 / 5 || 5 / 5

& the standard endnote for all posts in this series:

This post is intended to act as the start of a forum on the given illustrator, so if anyone has anything to add - requests to see certain drawings in higher definition (since Tumblr compresses images), corrections to factual errors, sources for better-quality versions of the illustrations, further reading, fun facts, any questions, or just general commentary - simply do so on this post, be it in a comment/tags or the replies!💫

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The Many Illustrators of A Tale of Two Cities 5: Rafaello Busoni (⅖)

Vignettes for Book the Second, Chapters 1-13

Like I said in the first post in this subseries, I'm going to be putting a minimal amount of writing in the rest of these Rafaello Busoni posts. Here we go into the first half of his work for Book the Second, presented in order! 27 images in total (including the above).

1 / 5 || 2 / 5 || 3 / 5 || 4 / 5 || 5 / 5

(though this scene is from Book the First, the illustration was in the pages of Book the Second)

& the standard endnote for all posts in this series:

This post is intended to act as the start of a forum on the given illustrator, so if anyone has anything to add - requests to see certain drawings in higher definition (since Tumblr compresses images), corrections to factual errors, sources for better-quality versions of the illustrations, further reading, fun facts, any questions, or just general commentary - simply do so on this post, be it in a comment/tags or the replies!💫

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delay on this week’s post! it will be up before next Tuesday😎👍

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The Many Illustrators of A Tale of Two Cities 5: Rafaello Busoni (⅕)

...v. Tumblr's 30-image limit for posts...

1 / 5 || 2 / 5 || 3 / 5 || 4 / 5 || 5 / 5

Here we are in a month with five Tuesdays! This month, we'll be taking a look at my scans of the illustration work of Rafaello Busoni for this beautiful 1948 edition that I've had in my possession for over four years.

And I really mean beautiful!

And yes, I did say month, not week: Because Tumblr posts have an image limit of 30, I have to split the work of some illustrators over several posts. As of now, Busoni's is likely to be the most extreme at five unique posts - and yep, that means there won't be any miscellaneous weeks for this month, i.e. every week this month will have a post dedicated to a slice of his over 100 individual illustrations for the novel!

So...suffice it to say...there isn't gonna be a lot of writing on the rest of the posts in this subseries😂 I'll do a simple overview here of the five types of illustrations we'll be seeing (excluding the images above of course) and then leave it at that - the rest of the month will be dedicated to simply enjoying Busoni's expressive yet meticulous work in his dozens of marvelous vignettes.

So let's dive right in by identifying those five types in his illustrations for Book the First!

1: Book-title vignettes (each on their own page)

2: Chapter-title vignettes (every single chapter has one!)

3: Single vignettes (sprinkled throughout some of the chapters)

4: Color vignettes (printed on a separate page)

5: Page-spread vignettes (see how the second interacts with the first? it's one big illustration!)

I've been looking forward to posting these vignettes for over four years now - it's going to be quite the month for good vintage A Tale of Two Cities illustrations. Enjoy, and Happy April!

& the standard endnote for all posts in this series:

This post is intended to act as the start of a forum on the given illustrator, so if anyone has anything to add - requests to see certain drawings in higher definition (since Tumblr compresses images), corrections to factual errors, sources for better-quality versions of the illustrations, further reading, fun facts, any questions, or just general commentary - simply do so on this post, be it in a comment/tags or the replies!💫

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One era ends, and another begins🥹

[ VD: A video crossfading the old icon for this blog into the new one. The old icon is a photograph of a tiny pink milk carton with a striped band around it held up by a person’s fingers. A drawing of the face of a teenage Sydney Carton has been photoshopped onto the front; he looks behind him with a soft smile, blushing bright pink. The new icon is a bordered isometric drawing in grayscale with noir shading and red accents of a milk carton lit from the side, a guillotine silhouetted in the light and preserved in the shadow cast on the wall. On the front of the carton is an edited version of the TBH creature made to look like Sydney Carton. The video is set to the Beatles song “Hello, Goodbye”: It starts off showing the old icon, slowly scaling out, at the top left of which the date “2016” fades in. An additional “- 2024” fades in on the lyrics “you say goodbye.” As the lyrics “and I say hello” begin, it crossfades into the new icon, ending on “hello” while slowly scaling in. On the lyrics “hello, hello”, text fades in at the bottom right reading with some capitals, quote: “Welcome the New Icon!”, unquote, the scaling and fading in completed by the end of the second “hello.” End VD. ]

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The Many Illustrators of A Tale of Two Cities 4: Curtiss Sprague

...& a guest book editor...

This week's is a special one. We'll dive right into this 1930 edition by first admiring all the silhouette art of its illustrator, Curtiss Sprague - but see if you notice something extra along the way:

And to highlight the last one for its marvelous misquote:

Alright, have you noticed it? There's more than just ink coloring some of these pages!

Yes, this week we're not just taking a look at this 1930 edition - we are taking a look at this particular copy of this 1930 edition, which features not just Sprague's beautiful work...

...but also the work of William*, a high school sophomore 92 years ago who clearly learned the lesson from my last post! *although perhaps not clearly enough because I personally can't tell for certain what his surname is by his signature😅

Besides his coloring in Sprague's silhouettes, there isn't a lot more of his work written throughout the book - he did make sure to take plenty of notes in the blank pages, though!

There is also this brief note (please comment if you can make out the word above the date!):

As well as this subtle substitution (whoever C.E.S. is...oof!):

William's work made searching through and scanning this particular book an absolute delight - it was a grounding and beautiful reminder that students have been idly writing in their schoolbooks for as long as school has existed.

Thank you, William!

& the standard endnote for all posts in this series:

This post is intended to act as the start of a forum on the given illustrator, so if anyone has anything to add - requests to see certain drawings in higher definition (since Tumblr compresses images), corrections to factual errors, sources for better-quality versions of the illustrations, further reading, fun facts, any questions, or just general commentary - simply do so on this post, be it in a comment/tags or the replies!💫

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why is it that Sydney Carton feels so much like a classic “period piece character” — both as a man of Georgian England and as a character written in Victorian times — yet also like such a timeless, eternally-relatable person who could just as easily have existed today?

because he was… a head of his time!

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The Many Illustrators of A Tale of Two Cities 3: Enos Benjamin Comstock

...& the importance of a good signature...

We're taking an entirely different turn this week to examine the work of — well, evidently, Enos Benjamin Comstock!

I interrupt myself because I had actually originally written "an unnamed artist," as up until the creation of this post I had not actually noticed the very clear signatures at the bottom of this week's set of illustrations. For the entirety of the many months I'd had these illustrations saved on my computer, I had never known the artist's name and had resigned myself to the idea that I had no way to find it — because nowhere in the text of the 1906 edition of A Tale of Two Cities from which these illustrations are sourced did it actually credit the artist!

Here are those illustrations (sadly crunched a bit by the PDF format):

This is one of the more glaring examples I've seen so far of this phenomenon of not crediting the illustrator, but I've also seen in my research many, many frontispieces used in old editions of A Tale of Two Cities without credit to the artist who created them (more on that later, in fact)! It pains my soul.

That isn't the end of the mystery of these poor neglected drawings, though:

This list gets the number of illustrations right, but otherwise, it's almost all incorrect. By my research, it should read more like this*:

Portrait of Dickens . . . . Frontispiece "Say that my Answer was, 'Recalled...'" . 1 "How was this? - Was it you?" . . . . 52 "'You seem to know this Quarter…'" . . 214 "Here and there … Cries are raised…" . 442

*(I skipped "Facing page" solely for formatting purposes)

Pretty significant difference in subject and page number! And that's because four of the five illustrations listed to be in this edition are actually from a different, near-identical edition!

They are, naturally, Phiz's — except for that first one, which does serve as the frontispiece of both of these doppelgänger (lol, on theme) editions. Being in a completely different style, it's likely by neither Comstock nor Phiz...and, of course, neither edition chose to credit this artist either.

I sure wish I could read that signature.

In summary, the lesson here is: If you reading this are an artist, always legibly sign (and/or watermark) your work — because the culture of callousness with which the concept of crediting artists is treated is evidently much, much older than the Internet.

After all, if Enos B. Comstock hadn't legibly signed his name on the illustrations printed in this book over one hundred years ago, we of today very well might not know that he was the one to create them!

& the standard endnote for all posts in this series:

This post is intended to act as the start of a forum on the given illustrator, so if anyone has anything to add - requests to see certain drawings in higher definition (since Tumblr compresses images), corrections to factual errors, sources for better-quality versions of the illustrations, further reading, fun facts, any questions, or just general commentary - simply do so on this post, be it in a comment/tags or the replies!💫

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(okay skipping once again but I’ll make it worth it for the next non-illustrators-week post😎)

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The Many Illustrators of A Tale of Two Cities 2: Rowland Wheelwright

That's right, we're jumping centuries and mediums!

...specifically, from Phiz's engravings for the original 1859 monthly installments to Wheelwright's paintings for this 1925 edition! (warning: in the following, there is some violent imagery, and one image in the third grouping has blood)

As I'd mentioned in the announcement post, these illustrators will be highlighted completely out of chronological order to make it more organic when I continue to find more and more artists' work to add to the queue - so I wanted to start off with a particularly dramatic leap in time (and style!) to give a sense of the sheer variety of art we're going to be looking at here!

This also happens to be one of the sets that I scanned myself - most of these beautiful illustrations haven't anywhere on the internet (by my own intensive research at least!) until now. It's my joy to finally get to share them!

Overall, I want to give my own opinions and takes on the work of each illustrator as little as possible so that everyone can experience it in their own way, but the true beauty in his attention to detail in color, characterization, costuming, composition, and shadow calls for some comment.

This is the work of someone who loved and appreciated both the story itself and the act of illustrating it - I'm grateful to him for bringing these images into existence.

& the standard endnote for all posts in this series:

This post is intended to act as the start of a forum on the given illustrator, so if anyone has anything to add - requests to see certain drawings in higher definition (since Tumblr compresses images), corrections to factual errors, sources for better-quality versions of the illustrations, further reading, fun facts, any questions, or just general commentary - simply do so on this post, be it in a comment/tags or the replies!💫

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skipping this week — don’t worry, though, I won’t be making a habit out of skipping every other week now, but I’ve actually fallen into even more research for these illustrations and finally meticulously downloaded like ten more sets from the Internet Archive…instead of making a miscellaneous post for this week🙃

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oh by the way i realized i never actually said this - if you saw the post yesterday saying "don't reblog the new illustrations post it's not ready!!"...it's ready now, I forgot to make a follow-up post jhgftkjhgih

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The Many Illustrators of A Tale of Two Cities 1: Hablot Knight Browne (a.k.a. Phiz)

...& a century-and-a-half-long game of telephone...

For the first post in a series on the book's illustrators, how could we start with any but the very first one?

"Although a number of critics have pilloried Hablot Knight Browne ('Phiz') for his supposed ineptitude in the program of illustration for A Tale of Two Cities, the fact that he so astutely realized and graphically elaborated so many significant elements of Dickens's letterpress is evidence that his pictorial series reflects an extremely careful reading of the printed text...The visual accompaniment [that these illustrations provided to the novel's monthly installments] was not mere ornamentation, but an aide-mémoire intended to facilitate the monthly reader's keeping track of a discontinuous narrative over a period of seven months."

from "Charles Dickens's "A Tale of Two Cities" (1859) Illustrated: A Critical Reassessment of Hablot Knight Browne's Accompanying Plates" by Philip V. Allingham from the 2003 volume of the journal Dickens Studies Annual.

Frontispiece Cover to the Monthly Installments Vignette

For some perspective on the significance of this first set of illustrations - published initially within monthly installments of the novel in 1859 (the text of which was collected from the original weekly installments published in All the Year Round, also in 1859) - that single quote comes from an entire article on these illustrations that is itself 49 pages long.

The Mail

As such, suffice it to say that this particular post will not be a thorough examination of the history, context, and impact of these illustrations (though, for those interested, be sure to click on any links you see throughout this post for all sorts of further reading!).

The Shoemaker

Instead, it will simply be a place to observe and appreciate these illustrations for what they are, in their "original" glory.

The Likeness

...I mean, just look at these things! (I'm of course gonna break formality after this one because it's my favorite😌)

Congratulations

In terms of the odyssey of finding the proper edition of these to post, "original" is the operative word.

The Stoppage at the Fountain

These are the oldest (except for some or possibly all of McLenan's...more on that many months from now though) and certainly the most iconic of the illustrations of this novel and thus have also had the most mileage, having been passed from edition to edition to edition countless times over the last 164 years.

Mr. Stryver at Tellson's Bank

That means - as the gif at the top of this post demonstrates - that these illustrations have slowly been "translated" over time into dozens of distinct images - in ways as innocuous as a change in a shadow and as striking as a change in a character's facial expression.

The Spy's Funeral

These translations have happened in all sorts of ways over the development of printing technology - blemishes, xeroxing errors, low-quality or blurry scans, too much ink being used in printing, image compression, sometimes even actual tracing of the original illustrations! - and as interesting as they can be on their own, for someone determined to find the most accurate representation of Phiz's phenomenal work, they can be...phrustrating.

The Wine-shop

In fact, as a sidebar, the illustrations that I used for the Best Character Showdown bracket turned out to themselves be traces and not originals! I am Ashamed and disheartened! You could even say that I am yet another...

The Accomplices

accomplice in the mistranslation of Phiz's work!

The Sea Rises

Rest assured, though - although they are not from the monthly installments themselves (which as far as my research has gone do not seem to be anywhere on the Internet), these particular scans are sourced directly from an online scan at the Open Library project (contained within the Internet Archive) of the first edition of A Tale of Two Cities, itself also published in 1859.

Before the Prison Tribunal

I do wish that they hadn't been cropped the way that they have and that they were available in a (much) higher resolution, but as of now, they're the best representation of Phiz's original work that we netizens have!

The Knock at the Door

A Tale of Two Cities was the final novel that Phiz illustrated for Dickens - and marked the complicated ending to a twenty-three-year (yes) professional partnership between the author and illustrator - but his work here will mark a beautiful beginning to the long archiving project we will experience together here on this blog.

The Double Recognition

Throughout the work of this project, there will be quite a variety of sources being used - from direct scans by me to the two-tone abstractions of PDFs clearly not created for the purpose of storing image information - depending on the needs and availability of each edition.

After the Sentence

All of it goes to show the importance of accuracy and attention to detail in archiving art, which is itself an art form to be appreciated.

Hope you've enjoyed!

& the standard endnote for all posts in this series:

This post is intended to act as the start of a forum on the given illustrator, so if anyone has anything to add - requests to see certain drawings in higher definition (since Tumblr compresses images), corrections to factual errors, sources for better-quality versions of the illustrations, further reading, fun facts, any questions, or just general commentary - simply do so on this post, be it in a comment/tags or the replies!💫

[sydney-carton-of-sour-milk]

📣ANNOUNCEMENT📣 THE BIG 2024 PROJECT

At long last, I'm announcing what I've been working on🥁

Starting February 6th and continuing every other Tuesday through at least mid-December, this blog will be highlighting the work of various illustrators of A Tale of Two Cities over the many decades since its initial publishing!💫

As it stands right now, the archive will span from the very beginning in 1859 all the way through about 1992 (with a heavy density at the turn of the century) and will contain just under 500 individual illustrations by 20 individual illustrators — in styles ranging all the way from pen to painting and abstraction to realism✍️

All of these numbers will continue to grow, however, because this is an ongoing project! In fact I expect the queue to continue through a good portion of 2025 as I keep finding and archiving more and more — there's just so much out there! For this reason I am not posting these in a sorted order — I looked at what I have right now and ordered them to feel random and balanced, with some themed for certain months😎

Also! A large percentage of these (about half of the artists and well over half of the total illustrations) are coming from sources difficult or impossible to find on the Internet and are instead coming from my own scanning work: When I would discover in my research editions that I knew to have work by new illustrators whose pages weren't available for online viewing, I would seek out and buy those editions for super cheap online and scan them on my own printer's scanner — so for a lot of the old illustration work that this blog will be posting, it will possibly be the first time some of these have ever been uploaded for public view on the Internet!🤩

As far as keeping the archive organized on this blog, the organizational tag for these posts will be " #illustrators ", and I will also tag each post with the highlighted artist's name and with the decade in which each set of illustrations was initially published (as far as my research tells me)🏷️

On the off-weeks, this blog will be posting its usual miscellany, with a sprinkling of behind-the-scenes and extras for this specific project. But starting next week and continuing every other Tuesday* through about the entire year, expect a new post highlighting the work of a given A Tale of Two Cities illustrator — and be prepared because sometimes the number of illustrations on a single post will be in the tens/dozens since Tumblr increased the max image count for a single post to 30! *with the exception of April, which is going to have a special schedule for reasons you'll see when the queue gets there👀

I'm just so excited to at long last get to share this incredible archive here! I sincerely hope you enjoy this fascinating and often breathtaking look at these tiny, beautiful pieces of art history!🌟

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alright, i'm saving the full announcement for one more week, so i'm gonna call this the teaser to next week's full trailer...

...let's just say i've been very

very

very

very

very

very

very busy...

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still true! hoping to make the announcement post either next week or the week after — I’ve done the math and determined the best first day to start posting actual bits of the project will be February 6th, so stay tuned for more info to come either the 23rd (lol) or the 31st👀

gonna be on a bit of a brief hiatus for this week and probably next as I sort through life-business and do the last couple steps for the big project I’ve been working on for 2024! 👀👍