In April of 1837, Charles Dickens posed for his friend and illustrator George Cruikshank. "I was sitting for my portrait to George Cruikshank ... to-day," Dickens told a friend, "and George being a ticklish subject [I] could not leave him." Cruikshank's drawing of Dickens was subsequently engraved and sold; the Dickens House Museum in London has a copy, and it is featured on the dust jacket of David Parker's new book, The Doughtie Street Novels (New York: AMS Press, 2002).