What the Dickens? Author’s link to South Shields
LINE DRAWING...Dickenss illustrator, George Cruikshank, was a visitor to Shields.
THIS week saw events taking place nationally to mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of author Charles Dickens.
It’s well known that the writer was a visitor to the North East on a number of occasions – he gave some of his famous readings of his works in Newcastle, for instance,
But it’s worth recalling that our links with some of the best-loved books in the English canon go beyond the great man himself.
Here in Shields, they are, in particular, with his illustrator, the caricaturist George Cruikshank, who drew for Dickens’s Sketches by Boz and also for Oliver Twist.
Cruikshank was a close friend for many years of James Mather, the South Shields wine and spirit merchant and philanthropist who also became a driving force behind improvements in mining safety, following the St Hilda pit disaster in the town in 1839.
Mather lived at Westoe, where he was well known for entertaining the literary establishment, and Cruikshank often visited him there, and even illustrated some of his brochures. Cruikshank’s illustrations for Dickens endure in the imagination even now. In his day, he was known as “the modern Hogarth”.
Born in 1792, he outlived Dickens by not many years, dying in 1878. James Mather himself had died in 1873.
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Thursday 17 May 2012
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