Robert Seymour

Pause a moment to remember Robert Seymour, the illustrator of Dickens’ Pickwick Papers, who committed suicide after being told by the author that he was being “dropped”. The distraught artist shot himself through the heart with a hunting gun the next day. Dickens went on to recruit first Robert W. Buss and then the illustrator whose work would ultimately become synonymous with the text: Phiz – Hablot Knight Brown. Seymour, however, was forgotten. He was a suberb caricaturist and apparently compared to Hogarth – and at the time of his introduction to Dickens, certainly better known and regarded than the author. But Seymour’s grave lay neglected in the crypt of a London church. The Guardian reports now that after a five-year campaign, the headstone has finally been moved to the garden of the Dickens Museum at 48 Doughty St. in London. Dickens has, in the past, been blamed for Seymour’s suicide; perhaps the moving of the stone to the Museum will act as some sort of reconciliation between the ghosts of illustrator and client – and act as a something of a memorial to the sometimes confused and occasionally dangerous relationship that can develop between the two.