Dickens Disillustrated: The Drawings of Christian Kongstad Petersen

Dickens was an immensely popular author in Denmark from the early years of his career, with Sketches by Boz already available in English in a public reading room in Copenhagen in April 1837, and the first complete novels in Danish translation, The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist, appearing in 1840. A few years later, Danish interest in Dickens was reinforced through the latter’s friendship (doomed to end unhappily) with Hans Christian Andersen (1805–75).¹ It is therefore not particularly surprising that a thoughtful Dane born in the second half of the nineteenth century should have had a deep affection for the English author. What is less predictable and more interesting, however, is that a particular Dane, Christian Kongstad Petersen (1862–1940), developed a life-long and all-pervasive fascination with quite specific aspects of Dickens’s fictional world, channelled this fascination into his own creative work as a visual artist, and produced a series of images which, despite being little known even in Denmark, must surely be considered as among the most remarkable Dickens-inspired art that we have: images, moreover, that transcend the normal ambitions of “illustration” and constitute a skewed but deeply perceptive and sophisticated reading of aspects of Dickens that would not be properly explored in critical prose until many years later.

Christian Kongstad Petersen was born on Boxing Day, 1862. To place him in Danish political history, he was one year old when Denmark was dramatically reduced in size, undergoing the most significant of its regular military setbacks, “the definitive national trauma” of the loss of the southern region of Schleswig-Holstein to Prussia (Jespersen 22). To place him in Danish cultural history, he was a close contemporary of the composer Carl Nielsen (1865–1931). Like both Nielsen and Hans Christian Andersen, Kongstad Petersen was born on Fyn, the large island in the middle of Denmark, known as “Funen” in English.² As Susanne Thestrup Truelsen observes, “Funen has been smiled upon for generations by favourable economic conditions, thanks to the fertility of the land. This allowed for rich, well-managed estates and manors – more than in the rest of Denmark. Farming, manufacture and business flourished at the end of the nineteenth century and this trinity produced and supported the coming generation of artists” (11).³ Kongstad Petersen enjoyed a quiet provincial childhood on the east coast of Funen, in the small town of Nyborg, then with a population of about 5,000, where his father was a shopkeeper. At the age of fifteen, he was apprenticed to the relatively new profession of telegrapher, and this was to be his main source of income for the rest of his life. But he had aspirations to be an artist. He met with some stereotypical family opposition to this impractical plan, but seems to have settled for a workable compromise. At the beginning of his twenties he managed to get a better placed job in telegraphy, this time in Copenhagen, where for many years he was able to pursue part-time studies at the successful and prominent artists’ academy run by the history painter Kristian Zahrtmann (1843–1917). Other artists who attended the academy, and with whom Kongstad Petersen associated later in life, became much better known – not least, perhaps, because they continued to paint, whereas he stuck to drawing, tending moreover to draw in a way that did not lend itself to mechanical reproduction.⁴ He seems to have lived a quiet, solitary life, sparsely enlivened by exhibitions of his work (usually in group shows), brief periods of study in Berlin and Paris just before the First World War, and a few trips to Italy, in search of artistic inspiration, in the 1920s. In the latter part of his life he lived mainly in boarding houses in Hillerød, a town of about 8,000 inhabitants at that time, north of Copenhagen. But he carried on drawing until his death in 1940.

One informative, perceptive, and well illustrated book about Kongstad Petersen, by the prolific art historian Jan Zibrandtsen, was eventually published, in 1971. Zibrandtsen makes large claims...