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This recently discovered portrait of the young Charles Dickens (Fig.1) has not been seen in public since its inaugural presentation at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition of 1844, the year following the publication of A Christmas Carol} Considered lost, even during the artist Margaret Gillies's own lifetime (1803-1887), it is an image heretofore only known to Dickens's biographers through an engraving published in 1844 (Fig. 2). Its re-emergence following a houseclearance sale in South Africa adds a significant new likeness to the limited early iconography of the writer.2
When in 1886 Dickens' s early biographer Frederick George Kitton (1856-1904) wrote to Gillies inquiring as to the whereabouts of this portrait, he received the frustrating reply that she had 'lost sight' of it.3 There was no photographic record of what the original painting had looked like and Kitton was reduced - as everyone after him has been - to reproducing the engraving taken from the original painting in his review of Dickens' portraits. One hundred and seventy-five years since it was last seen, and after decades spent lying incognito in South Africa, the portrait is again back on public view. Here, finally, we are able to see what the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning saw in this portrait of the world-famous author: 'the dust and mud of humanity about him, notwithstanding those eagle eyes'.4
That the portrait remained unidentified for so long is possibly because it portrays a young Dickens far removed from the grizzled features shown in the ubiquitous black and white photographs of the author.5 Here he is handsome, clean-shaven, with an animated and intense gaze. The emergence of the portrait provides important new pictorial evidence of the young author's appearance (he is shown aged thirty-one), and confirms the observation of one contemporary that 'there is something about his eyes at all times that in women we call bewitching; in men we scarcely have any name for it... his complexion is extremely delicate... I should not blame him if he were somewhat vain of his hair.'6
Yet this portrait reveals so much more about the young Dickens than a record of his appearance. It was painted at a pivotal moment in his career; the sittings with Gillies ran parallel to the astonishing six weeks in...