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JOSEPH FARINGTON 279 seem to be admirably set out. Technically the work seems to be serviceable rather than attractive. These volumes are probably the most important undertaking of the Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, and they are a great accomplishment indeed. We are all indebted for both pleasure and knowledge to Mr Paul Mellon, to Joseph Farington, and to their admirable editors Mr Kenneth Garlick and Mr Angus Macintyre. Since this review was written two further volumes of The Diary of Joseph Farington have been published: volume v: August 1801-March 1803; volume VI: April18oJ-December 1804 V: xxii, 1581- 2002,17 plates; VI: 2003-2485,6 plates Phiz, not Dickens - Pictures, not Words JOSEPH GO LD Michael Steig. Dickens and Phiz Bloomington: University ofIndiana Press 1978. x, 340, 126 illus. $12.50 Michael Steig 'knows a lot about Phiz's career as an illustrator, and his book is filled with information, though of the 340 pages in the book 150 are illustrations and notes. ButSteig has an avowed object beyond surveying Phiz's career: to use the illustrations to Dickens's novels as a means of throwing light on the text. In other words, the pictures by H.K. Browne accompanying the text can be used as an interpretive device for textual criticism. This is, in my view, a procedure of marginal utility and produces the impression, in a book-length study, of strain; what might be interesting as an article becomes almost unreadable as 200 pages of somewhat fragmented commentary. I do not want to be unfair to the author. He has concentrated considerable learning on the accomplishment of an impossible task. To survey Browne's career, to examine the technical details of the pictures, to show how they illuminate the meaning of the fiction, to discuss illustration in general: who could form all this into a lively, readable, coherent text? There is a notable lack of thesis here, no line of thought to pull it all together. Steig's goals produce a number of problems, some of which are technical and reflected in the physical arrangementof the text. To discuss pictures in words is at best very difficult. To attempt this for a reader who does not have the illustration immediately in front of him produces frustration. Steig does not discuss each illustration as a separate entity. His method is to focus on some theme or aspect of the novel. or on some characteristic of Browne's technique at a given period. He cannot, therefore, bring his commentary and the illustrations together. He opts instead for placing all his chosen illustrations together so that the reader must find the relevantone and move back and forth in the text. This is tiring and makes concentration extremely difficult. Even more frustrating is discussion of illustraUNIVERSITY OPTORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME XLIX, NUMBER 3, SPRING 1980 0042-0247/80/0500-279$00.00/0 © UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS 280 JOSEPH GOLD tions not included. Although 125 examples are included (some of these are different versions or stages of the same), a great many aTe not available to put beside the verbal description. This problem is exposed by the physical characteristics of print, but its roots originate in the divergence ofthe verbal and the pictorial. In order to show how a picture illuminates the Dickens script the author must first 'read' the picture, and without realizing it Steig persistently 'reads' Browne's pictures with the aid of Dickens' writing and then reverses the process as though his reading of the illustration has not been conditioned by his knowledge of the text. We thus get a kind of tautology of aesthetics. Moreover, Steig assumes it is possible to 'read' a picture and possible to learn about Dickens from Browne. This is at least questionable . I do not believe pictures can be 'read.' They register in a different part of the brain. What pictures mean is open-ended, depends entirely on the viewer, in a way that is not true when a lexicon is present. The picture states itself completely , whereas the language is a cognitive process, an indexable energy source. One could argue quite plausibly the opposite of Steig's assumption: that...

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