Graphic Haunting: Illustration and Excluded Masculinity in Charles Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby (1838–9) and A Christmas Carol (1843)

Abstract

Illustrations of Dickens's texts have often been seen as offering a moral encoding in which physical symmetry represents moral beauty. However, this reading does not explain the representation of more socially deviant personae, such as Nicholas Nickleby's Smike and A Christmas Carol's Scrooge. A comparison between the ‘ghost’ text and the ‘non-ghost’ text demonstrates the social breadth of the tension between illustration and text (or, as I term it, graphic haunting), due to the ability of this genre-crossing tension to uncover ‘other’ experiences haunting idealised formations of community. Fluctuations of line (Nickleby) and of colour (Carol) encode social liminality: Smike displays elements of both physical and intellectual or cognitive disability; Scrooge has no physical or mental disability but does have emotional scarring). The development of Smike's character through the Nickleby illustrations moves him from an outcast status to a place of pathos in which the audience can sympathise with him; the development of Scrooge's character in the Carol illustrations moves him to a place in which Scrooge empathises with outcast members of his contemporary society. By dramatising the emotional reality of male characters displaced from their communities, Dickens's graphically haunted texts explore the formation and permanency of a liminal masculinity from multiple angles, and consequently, question the social structures which produce exclusion.