“Alternative Dickens”: The Graphic Adaptation of the Inimitable in The New Yorker

Abstract

The original illustrations to Dickens’s serial fiction are well-known to scholars and general readers, but there has been little sustained discussion of the relationship between Dickens’s oeuvre and the cartoon. In this chapter, I consider the relationship between the illustrated novel and the literary cartoon by analysing the adaptation of Dickens in The New Yorker, a cultural phenomenon that David Remnick aptly calls “the longest-running popular comic genre in American life”. My attention falls especially on the work of J.B. Handelsman (1922–2007), a Bronx-born cartoonist who completed more than 900 cartoons for the publication between 1961 and 2006. Handelsman was steeped in Victorian visual culture, and his Dickens-influenced work culminated in a series of cartoons called “Alternative Dickens” which appeared in the magazine between 1990 and 1992. These playful Dickensian scenes blur the line between the Victorian period and aspects of late twentieth-century culture; they also mash up Dickens characters from different novels into new—sometimes slightly bizarre—comic scenarios. Using “Alternative Dickens” as its central case study, this chapter explores how Handelsman’s belated, late twentieth-century work adapts a Dickensian macrotext, related as much to a complex intermedial network of other visual and cultural forms as it is to a narrowly literary understanding of Dickens’s original novels.