about the value of serial illustration and participated in its production to varying degrees. Thackeray’s illustration of many of his own texts indicates that he saw illustration as intrinsic to the novelist’s art. Dickens’s careful collaboration with Browne over more than two decades—during which he selected scenes to be illustrated, sent instructions as to characters’ gestures and clothing, and demanded revisions to sketches (Cohen, Charles Dickens, 64)—suggests his perception of illustration as central to his fiction. Following a model of close collaboration, Trollope greatly admired Millais’s illustrations for his own fiction: “In every figure that he drew it was his object to promote the views of the writer whose work he had undertaken to illustrate, and he never spared himself any pains in studying that work, so as to enable him to do so” (Trollope, Autobiography, 144). In contrast, much as she personally liked Leighton’s illustrations for Romola, Eliot believed that illustration could never realize the writer’s vision, and she lamented that “the artist who uses the pencil must . . . be tormented to misery by the deficiencies or requirements of the one who uses the pen, and the writer, on the other hand, must die of impossible expectations” (qtd. in Haight, George Eliot Letters, 4:55–56). In practice, moreover, the editorial process did not always permit the possibility of close collaboration. Collins, for example, did not even see the illustrations to The Moonstone (1868) for the American Harper’s Weekly before they were published: the first and second parts (from 4 and 11 January) reached him in England on 30 January 1868. He wrote to Harper Brothers, saying that he admired the “real intelligence” shown by the artist in conveying “the dramatic effect” of the story (Moonstone, 599). Similarly, a letter written by Robert Louis Stevenson published in the Illustrated London News in October 1892, thanking the artist who had illustrated “Uma” (1892),71 makes it clear that he had not seen the illustrations before publication and did not even know the artist’s name: “Dear Sir,—I only know you under the initials ‘G.B.,’ but you have done some exceedingly spirited and satisfactory illustrations to my story . . . [,] and I wish to write and thank you expressly for the care and talent shown” (510).72
The popularity of Victorian serial illustration is evidenced by the movement of images from novels into social practices and extratextual consumer products. Modern readers might assume that serial illustrations were so attached to the serial part that they would not readily be sold separately, but this was not the case. Prints circulated widely beyond novels: for example, Browne created and sold spin-off steel etchings of Little Nell, Barbara, and the Marchioness (from The Old Curiosity Shop) and of Dolly Varden, Hugh Barnaby, Mrs. Varden, and Miggs (from Barnaby Rudge, 1841).73 Moreover, Joseph Clayton Clark produced more than 840 watercolors of Dickens’s characters for collectors who inserted them into volume editions as supplemental material (Patten, “Phizzing,” 312). Serial illustrations also surfaced in tie-in merchandise, theatrical adaptations, and everyday practices. Illustrations for Egan’s Life in London were printed and sold on “trays, snuffboxes, fans, screens and handkerchiefs” and evoked in sixty stage versions (Sillars, Visualisation, 9). Stage productions based on popular best-selling novels from Pickwick and Jack Sheppard to Du Maurier’s Trilby (serialized in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine from January to July 1894) included scenes in which actors replicated serial illustrations.74 As Jonathan E. Hill observes, the new illustrated serial novels proved a boon to dramatists, who used them as “visual guides to staging, scenic design, costume, and character appearance” (“Cruikshank,” 441); individual illustrations—many of which had appeared in booksellers’ windows—provided the basis for tableaux vivants (441).75 Indeed, such was the popularity of the Cruikshanks’ illustrations for Life in London that ordinary people reenacted them for fun, overturning night watchmen’s boxes to replicate the scene of “Tom Getting the Best of a Charley” (Sillars, Visualisation, 9). At late century, Trilby propelled consumer fads for Trilby hats, waltzes, and sausages, as well as ice cream bars in the shape of feet, recalling Du Maurier’s depiction of Little Billee’s own illustration of Trilby’s bare foot.76 These afterlives and replications of images indicate the richly evocative nature of serial illustrations for Victorian readers.
The Victorian Illustrated Serial: Modern Critical Perspectives
By the 1860s, “illustration was firmly established as part of the narrative structure of the novel” (Sillars, Visualisation, 30). This fact prompts our central question: How did illustrations affect the way that readers consumed serial fiction? The work of book historians and literary scholars of text-image relations (such as Gerard Curtis, Catherine J. Golden, Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, J. Hillis Miller, Robert L. Patten, Stuart Sillars, Michael Steig, Julia Thomas, and Mark W. Turner) provides an important context for our study, modeling scholarship that explores the interplay of visual and verbal text in lieu of “authorial intention and control, and artistic sympathy and submission.”77 Patten advocates an end to mimetic criticism that “compare[s] text with picture,” arguing that illustrations are “not the text pictured” (“Serial Illustration,” 91). According to Patten, illustration “may suppose, support, subvert, explain, interpret, and critique its verbal partner, entering into a complexly reciprocal, interactive, and . . . persuasive dialogue” (“Serial Illustration,” 92). Kooistra stresses the “bitextual” relationship between verbal and visual components (Artist; see subtitle); Golden stresses the Victorian consumer of illustrated material as a “reader-viewer” (Serials, 187); Turner identifies Romola’s illustrations as a “parallel” to the written text (“George Eliot,” 17); and Miller argues for the “reciprocal” relationship between text and image: “Each refers to the other. Each illustrates the other, in a continual back and forth movement which is incarnated in the experience of the reader as his eyes move from words to picture and back again, juxtaposing the two in a mutual establishment of meaning. . . . The pictures are about the text; the text is about the pictures” (qtd. in Hall, Trollope and His Illustrators, 2).
Such appeals, relevant to all illustrated Victorian fiction, apply with particular force to serial novels, in which the placement and prominence of illustrations made images an essential part of the Victorian reading experience. Previous studies of illustrated Victorian serials have analyzed the key role of images in individual texts or the works of single authors;78 some of the most far-reaching analyze modes of illustration across a range of texts and authors.79 Such critical analyses see illustrations as variously subverting, enriching, reflecting, or complementing the written text. The most sophisticated, including those of Golden, Kooistra, Patten, and Thomas, describe illustration as an “integral, complexly dialogic, and essential feature” of the novel in this period (Patten, “Serial Illustration,” 122). Their work underpins our study.
Studies of Victorian illustration also form an important foundation for this book. Our research has been informed and guided by a handful of key resources on artists, engravers, periodicals, and illustration techniques. Bamber Gascoigne’s invaluable guidebook How to Identify Prints as well as Simon Houfe’s Dictionary of British Book Illustrators and Caricaturists, 1800–1914, Eric de Maré’s The Victorian Woodblock Illustrators, and Rodney K. Engen’s Dictionary of Victorian Wood Engravers have provided us with reliable and specific knowledge of nineteenth-century print techniques and the artists and engravers who used them. A suite of mid-twentieth-century books on Victorian illustration by Philip James, Ruari McLean, Percy H. Muir, and Geoffrey Wakeman have served as indispensable references. The work of Patten has been invaluable to our understanding of George Cruikshank’s contributions to the development of serial illustration; of Dickens as an “industrial-age author” (see the subtitle of his book Charles Dickens and “Boz”); and of the professional and economic relationships that drove the creative burst of the 1830s and 1840s. Brian Maidment’s scholarship on Victorian comic annuals and almanacs as well as caricature has refined our knowledge of Victorian illustrations’ indebtedness to Regency caricature and the comic tradition. On the topic of mid-Victorian illustrated periodicals and books, the works of leading scholars Simon Cooke and Paul Goldman have informed our understanding of the complex relations among authors, artists, publishers, editors,
