| | |
 Phiz, Watson and Griset, 1845-1870.The early Victorian era was dominated by two rather contradictory interpretations of Robinson Crusoe. One, which has its origins in the caricatures of William Hogarth, Thomas Rowlandson, and George Cruikshank, presents Crusoe and Friday as grotesque, even "cruelly comic" (Blewett, 89). The principal illustrator in this vein is H. Knight Browne (1818-1882), whose pen name was "Phiz." The other interpretation regards Crusoe's story as a moral parable, or as a secular Pilgrim's Progress–indeed, many illustrators made drawings for both Defoe's and Bunyan's fables. The best known of these is J. D. Watson (1832-1892), whose drawings were engraved by Edward Dalziel (1817-1905) and George Dalziel (1815-1902), the foremost engravers of their time. Watson's one hundred drawings for the 1864 edition from Routledge were both strongly realistic and pietistic in their presentation of Crusoe giving thanks for his deliverance from the currents that took his boat out to sea and in his astonishment at the growth of barley outside his cave. Charles Keene (1823-1891) depicted Robinson as a simple but emotional human being, T. H. Nicholson (d. 1870) emphasized his religious conversion, and Edward H. Wehnert (1813-1868) depicted the hand of Providence in his salvation. The heavily illustrated edition by Cassell, Petter, & Galpin of 1863, with drawings by a dozen different artists was, in Blewett's terms, "one of the last flowerings of an old tradition of literary romanticism in book illustration" (104). In its lush depictions of island vegetation and its conflicting artistic styles, the story of Crusoe is almost lost. The Victorian period was brought to an end by Ernest Griset (1844-1907), whose work combines the caricaturistic style of Phiz with the theme of trial and redemption found in Watson and Grandville. Griset's drawings, first published in 1869, evoke a Darwinian sense of a man striving to maintain his humanity amidst a natural world that threatens to reclaim him into itself. |  |
|||
| ||||