In describing Charles Dickens’s eyes, Frederic George Kitton discovered so many diverse opinions that he concluded Dickens’s eyes must have had “chameleon-like qualities.”[1] Kitton explains that some accounts told of Dickens’s “‘clear blue intelligent eyes,’” others of his “‘glowing grey eyes,’” and that one account from 1842 stated the author’s eyes were “black.”[2] The dip in Dickens’s success due to Barnaby Rudge and American Notes must have had quite an impact upon the author if people were seeing his eyes as looking scarcely better than those of a demon! Dickens’s eyes (and their contradictory color) is what I found myself drawn to upon the discovery of this “Lost Portrait.” Painted in 1843 by Margaret Gillies, the “Lost Portrait” is indeed unique in that the artist chose to have Dickens look out to the viewer in a pose of something close to confrontation. He appears to be daring us--but daring us to do what?
As several articles describing the “Lost Portrait” have already explained, 1842 had not been a successful year for Dickens. He and Catherine travelled for the first time to America, and Dickens embarked on writing about his journey in American Notes. This travelog was unfortunately a flop for Dickens monetarily speaking. Despite popular modern belief about the sales of American Notes, Jerome Meckier explains that the travelog “sold widely in the United States,” but unfortunately Dickens failed to make much money off it.[3] Dickens’s chief complaint about American publishing companies (publication without compensation) was that he was robbed him of any real gains. As well, the depressed economies of both England and America that year did much to undermine sales of his works. Dickens had taken a gamble that Chuzzlewit would be successful in England, but the gamble did not pay off. The outcome was that Dickens was regarded as perhaps having hit his prime and passed over it. The fact that American Notes sold reasonably well did not negate its being criticized heavily, and it was deemed laughable by some. These sarcastic reviews culminated in a parody in the United States later that year: English Notes for General Circulation (under the pseudonym Quarles Quickens).[4]
So, laughed at, scared for his financial future, and worried about his career as a creative writer, Dickens began to write “A Christmas Carol” in late 1843--the same time period in which he was sitting for Gillies’s portrait. Choosing an unconventional pose for her model, Gillies highlighted Dickens’s youthful face. His features appear delicate (perhaps this is due to the absence of his later door-knocker beard), and his eyes do have that “chameleon-like quality” which Kitton noted. His eyes, brown in the background and greenish-hazel in the foreground, appear to sparkle with a hint of gold. The phenomenon of multi-colored eyes is referred to as heterochromia iridum, wherein the iris manifests in multiple colors, either in swirls, rings or spots. His eyes are especially striking in the portrait because Gillies chose to utilize the multiple colors. Besides the striking eyes, Gillies also presents Dickens as almost cherubic: with his glistening brown locks and the attention to detail in coloring his cheeks, we feel as if we are looking at a man much younger than 30. Was this youthful presence highlighted in part to downplay the confrontation of the gaze with which Dickens meets us? Did Gillies intentionally focus on Dickens’s youth so as to make the viewer feel more at ease in the midst of such a powerful encounter? This again brings us to the question: why is Dickens staring at the viewer so intently?
Michael Slater writes in his 2009 biography of Dickens that dropping sales of Martin Chuzzlewit (which Dickens was writing monthly at the time) “had re-awakened fears that his popularity might drop as suddenly as it had risen…”[5] The Man Who Invented Christmas (2017) explains this concern succinctly in cinematic form. During this period, Dickens was plagued with feelings of unease about his finances and creative abilities. One can speculate that when he felt abandoned by his fan base after depressing sales from American Notes, Barnaby Rudge and Martin Chuzzlewit (with which he currently was contending), he recalled the traumatic feelings of betrayal and loss, emotions that dated to his childhood. Peter Ackroyd writes “that everything in [Dickens’s] mature life became a kind of flight from his childhood,” but if looked at in a positive light, the perils from which he ran also created in him a “huge appetite for success.”[6] Taking to heart these points penned by Slater and Ackroyd, we can see how Dickens was experiencing a dark night of the soul in 1843. Financial defeat sparked him to come to terms with his own slightly rocky sense of self-worth, a view that had haunted him ever since his initial farming out by his family to work at Warren’s Blacking Factory. So why is he staring us down from Gillies’s portrait? The gaze confronts us, his modern fans, because it presents us with the ultimate resolution of Dickens’s internal confrontation during the pivotal year of 1843. He did come to terms with himself: he would be a success, “the hero of [his] own life,” and we would know it.[7]
[1] Frederic George Kitton. Charles Dickens: His Life, Writings, and Personality. Ballantyne Press, 1902, p 448.
[2] ibid.
[3] Meckier, Jerome. Innocent Abroad: Charles Dickens’s American Engagements. The University Press of Kentucky, 1990, p 58.
[4] In 1920, this parody was theorized to have been penned by Edgar Allan Poe, who interestingly also used the pseudonym Quarles when he first published “The Raven.” See English Notes: a Rare and Unknown Work, Bieng [sic] a reply to Charles Dickens’s “American Notes.” Quarles Quickens; Edgar Allan Poe. Eds. Joseph Jackson and George H. Sargent, L. M. Thompson, 1920.
[5] Michael Slater. Charles Dickens: a Life Defined by Writing. Yale University Press, 2009, pp. 219-220.
[6] Peter Ackroyd. Dickens. Harper Collins Publishers, 1990, p. 98.
[7] Charles Dickens. The Bath Press, 1997, p. 1.