ANOTHER MAN 97unhinged rests on a fantasy of male rivalry for an impossible love-object, and
ends in an escape from the thralls of domesticity.
Maclise painted the great romantic portrait of Dickens at his writing desk
in 1839, and a lovely portrait of Catherine Dickens in 1842. He gave Dick-
ens other sketches and paintings as well; to circumvent his generosity Dickens
once enlisted the services of his old friend Thomas Beard to buy a Maclise
painting for him, through the “pious fraud” of representing an out-of-town
buyer (3.396). When Maclise discovered the “device,” he sent the check back
to Dickens, who returned it again, insisting that he was “willing to be your
debtor for anything else in the whole wide range of your art” (3.418). The
little scuffle over payment suggests that Dickens was more comfortable on
the patron’s side of the friendship, especially when the man in question was
as successful as he was in his own art.
The same tendency is almost embarrassingly apparent in an article he
wrote on Maclise’s behalf for Douglas Jerrold’s Shilling Magazine in August
- Maclise had been invited by the Royal Commission of Fine Arts,
chaired by Prince Albert, to submit a cartoon for a fresco designed for the
rebuilt House of Lords. Representing “the Spirit of Chivalry,” Maclise’s
cartoon was eventually chosen, but not before it had been criticized for its
crowded design and simplified by the artist. In the interim, Dickens went to
bat for his friend’s work as if it were a part of himself that had been criticized,
praising it in such high and exaggerated terms that the article reads almost
like a parody. Being Dickens, he could not separate righteous indignation
from an attack on some authority, so the royal commissioners come in for
their share of contempt, while the prince receives an urgent appeal to forgo
his German taste: “But there is Justice to be done! The object of this com-
petition was encouragement and exaltation of English art; and in this work,
albeit done on paper which soon rots, the Art of England will survive, assert
itself, and triumph, when the stronger seeming bones and sinews of your
royal Highness and the rest, shall be but so much Dust” (Dent 2.79–80). Per-
haps Maclise got a good laugh from this rhetorical conquest of their former
“rival,” but he sensibly urged Forster to persuade Dickens to cut the refer-
ences to Prince Albert and his commissioners, and Dickens complied. It is
easy to see in this brief deleted passage how fervently Dickens believed that
he and his friends were destined to shape “the Art of England” for the near
and far future.
Dickens could make fun of his friends in private, and he would some-
times parody one friend in a letter to another. In an 1851 letter from his
vacation spot at Broadstairs, Dickens wrote to his old friend Thomas Beard
about various visitors the family had entertained: “Here has Forster been