Abstract
The original illustrations to Dickens’s serial fiction are well-known to scholars and general readers, but there has been little sustained discussion of the relationship between Dickens’s oeuvre and the cartoon. In this chapter, I consider the relationship between the illustrated novel and the literary cartoon by analysing the adaptation of Dickens in The New Yorker, a cultural phenomenon that David Remnick aptly calls “the longest-running popular comic genre in American life”. My attention falls especially on the work of J.B. Handelsman (1922–2007), a Bronx-born cartoonist who completed more than 900 cartoons for the publication between 1961 and 2006. Handelsman was steeped in Victorian visual culture, and his Dickens-influenced work culminated in a series of cartoons called “Alternative Dickens” which appeared in the magazine between 1990 and 1992. These playful Dickensian scenes blur the line between the Victorian period and aspects of late twentieth-century culture; they also mash up Dickens characters from different novels into new—sometimes slightly bizarre—comic scenarios. Using “Alternative Dickens” as its central case study, this chapter explores how Handelsman’s belated, late twentieth-century work adapts a Dickensian macrotext, related as much to a complex intermedial network of other visual and cultural forms as it is to a narrowly literary understanding of Dickens’s original novels.
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Notes
- 1.
Other examples include Martin Rowson’s “A Gruelling Ordeal”, which uses the famous “Please, sir, I want some more” scene from Oliver Twist to satirise the school meals crisis, and Chris Riddell’s “Boris Johnson and the Ghost of Christmas Present” which adapts John Leech’s illustrations to A Christmas Carol to throw light on Boris Johnson’s Brexit and Covid-19 woes.
- 2.
- 3.
Beyond “Alternative Dickens”, Handelsman completed four other cartoons for The New Yorker on Dickensian subjects.
- 4.
- 5.
Handelsman also reworks this illustration by Mahoney in an earlier cartoon not included in the “Alternative Dickens” series. See “Ch II-A. Oliver Falls Among Bleeding Hearts”.
- 6.
Handelsman also adapts Barnard’s Character Sketch of Bill Sikes in an earlier cartoon not formally part of “Alternative Dickens”. See “Bill Sikes Goes on Johnny Carson”.
- 7.
Handelsman’s own bold and direct aesthetic, “characterized by its simplicity of line” (Fox), certainly recalls elements of the 1860s style and John Tenniel in particular.
- 8.
For more on the reception history of the Household Edition, see Louttit (2014).
- 9.
See, for instance, the echo of a line from David Copperfield in “Still Waiting for Something to Turn Up, Mr. Micawber Is Ignored by a Woman who Is Trying to Look like Cher”.
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Louttit, C. (2024). “Alternative Dickens”: The Graphic Adaptation of the Inimitable in The New Yorker. In: Wells-Lassagne, S., Aymes, S. (eds) Adaptation and Illustration. Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32134-4_5
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