from Hacker News

The Charles Dickens Illustrated Gallery

by rfreytag on 6/20/23, 4:33 AM with 2 comments

  • by sudobash1 on 6/21/23, 4:58 PM

    Beautiful, clean scans and a nice website. Thank you Michael.

    I love this style of illustration. As someone who dabbles in pen-and-ink illustrations, I am always so impressed to see it done well, and pleased to have a new reference to go off of in my learning.

    Three cheers for the public domain, and those who take the time to archive it and make it accessible!

  • by svcrunch on 6/22/23, 6:06 AM

    Thank you for this!

    I know that Cruikshank was the original illustrator of many of Dickens's novels, but I prefer the artwork of James Mahoney. As a point of comparison, the same scene by both artists:

    1. "Oliver Rather Astonishes Noah", https://imgur.com/a/DWeblXT, as illustrated by James Mahoney.

    2. "Oliver Plucks up a Spirit", https://www.charlesdickensillustration.org/oliver-twist?pgid..., as illustrated by George Cruikshank.

    I scanned and vectorized all the artwork for "Oliver Twist" and typeset it at http://ahmadsoft.org/downloads/Oliver%20Twist,%20or,%20The%2... (warning, it's a large PDF due to the high resolution vector imagery), but then I started a company in 2020, and haven't had time to finish "Little Dorit", which, compared to "Oliver Twist", I was able to scan at a much higher resolution and get better quality.