Effortless Art: The Sketch in Nineteenth-Century Painting and Literature

By appropriating the familiar format of the sketch, Dickens, Thackeray, and other Victorian writers encouraged their readers to credit their texts with the reflective realism of visual representation. The illusoriness of the sketch's spontaneity and freedom did not prevent the representation of those qualities from being effective. The sketches of Dickens and Thackeray acquired material value in the same way that Turner's and Gericault's did: by conveying personal experience with a vividness and immediacy that made them available for vicarious consumption. At the same time, Dickens and Thackeray were able to mask--and even, perhaps, assuage--their nervousness about their own economic coercion by stylistically disavowing the strenuous work of literary production.

The status of the literary sketch was not compromised by the fact that it attained its position secondhand, through analogy with another form of art; on the contrary, Dickens's and Thackeray's adaptations of a familiar genre provided their readers with an interpretive mechanism that made it easy to see these pieces as being not paid articles crafted by professional writers, but, in Thackeray's words, sketches "taken from nature" (emphasis added).(53) Susan Buck-Morss claims that, in the end, "flanerie was an ideological attempt ... to give assurance that the individual's passive observation was adequate for knowledge of social reality."(54) Dickens's and Thackeray's use of the sketch form put them in just such a role of spectatorship by emphasizing their status as detached viewers of the scenes they described. But their sketches reveal how much effort this passive pose could cost.

Middlebury College

Notes

(1.) Mark M. Johnson, Idea to Image: Preparatory Studies from the Renaissance to Impressionism (Ohio: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1980), See discussion 11-13.

(2.) Ibid., 25.

(3.) Qtd. in Elizabeth G. Holt, Literary Sources of Art History: An Anthology of Texts from Theophilus to Goethe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947), 517.

(4.) Lorenz Eitner, Gericault: His Life and Work (London: Orbis Publishing, 1983), 113.

(5.) Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980).

(6.) Gerald Wilkinson, Turner Sketches, 1802-20 (New York: Watson-Guptill Publications, 1974), 139-41.

(7.) Ibid., 98.

(8.) Ibid., 16, 101.

(9.) Marjorie Levinson, The Romantic Fragment Poem: A Critique of a Form (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 8-9.

(10.) Ibid., 234 n.12.

(11.) Kathryn Chittick, Dickens and the 1830's (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 24.

(12.) Washington Irving, The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., 2d ed. (London: John Murray, 1823), I: 5.

(13.) Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Age of High Capitalism (London: Verso New Left Books, 1973), 61.

(14.) Ibid., 34.

(15.) Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1990), 304.