Performing Character

Abstract

How does one represent authorship in a single visual image? Dickens was one of the most frequently photographed and painted of Victorian writers. When portrayed “at work” he sits at his desk, writing intently, or sometimes is apparently caught turning away from the desk to look toward the viewer or out of the window, before returning to his writing. The act of literary creation is implied iconographically in the conventional props and posture (desk, paper, quill, etc.), and the viewer connects Dickens’s pose with the generation of that vast imaginary world of his that was beyond the camera’s reach. There have been several attempts to give that other world visibility by amalgamating faithful portraiture and fanciful allegory, in order to communicate some more detailed sense of this novelist’s distinctive creative achievement. Dickens is probably unique in having stimulated so many capriccio drawings and paintings designed to relate him to his fictional characters. The most famous of these is R.W. Buss’s Dickens’s Dream.