Footnote 53: During the printing of this work, the death was announced of Mr. Charles Green, R.I., who succumbed to a painful illness of long standing.
Fred. Barnard has come to be considered, _par excellence_, the illustrator of the famous novelist; indeed, he has been not inaptly termed "the Charles Dickens among black-and-white artists." Like Dickens himself, he was essentially a humorist, and his designs, although never lacking in infectious humour, had always something in them which raised them above the commonplace. To his skilful and vigorous pencil the Household Edition is indebted for the majority of the illustrations appearing therein, as the following list testifies: "Sketches by Boz," "Nicholas Nickleby," "Martin Chuzzlewit," "Barnaby Rudge," "Master Humphrey's Clock" (incidental chapters), "David Copperfield," "Dombey and Son," "Bleak House," "Christmas Books," "A Tale of Two Cities," "Hunted Down," "Holiday Romance," and "George Silverman's Explanation,"--making a grand total of nearly four hundred and fifty drawings. There is no doubt that Fred. Barnard "knew his Dickens" as well as any man, and he produced (independently of the foregoing designs) a number of pictures and drawings of characters and scenes from the novels, to which special reference is made in the next chapter.
Mr. M. H. Spielmann informs me that, for the purposes of his Dickensian subjects, the model who sat to Barnard was the late well-known French. The tragic death (in his fiftieth year) of this popular artist in September 1896 is not yet forgotten. He had accustomed himself to the pernicious habit of smoking in bed, and falling asleep (under the influence of a powerful drug) while his pipe was yet alight, the bedding caught fire, with the result that he was suffocated by the smoke, his body being much burned.
[Sidenote: =American "Household Edition."=]
The Household Edition was simultaneously published in London and New York, Harper & Brothers having arranged with Chapman & Hall to be supplied with _clichés_ of the illustrations. For some reason, however, the English engravings do not appear in several of the volumes thus issued in America, there being substituted for them a similar number of entirely new designs by the following American artists: C. S. Reinhart ("Nicholas Nickleby," "The Uncommercial Traveller," and "Hard Times"), Thomas Worth ("The Old Curiosity Shop"), W. L. Sheppard "Dombey and Son"), E. A. Abbey, R.A. ("Christmas Stories"), A. B. Frost "Sketches by Boz"), and Thomas Nast ("Pickwick" and "American Notes").