the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; and have guided our analysis of the style of serial illustrations, particularly the wood engravings of the 1860s.
This book is also fueled by the past several decades’ explosion of scholarly interest in Victorian serial fiction. Catherine Delafield, Mary Hamer, Linda K. Hughes and Michael Lund, Graham Law, Carol A. Martin, J. Don Vann, and others have convincingly demonstrated the unique qualities of serial reading: its temporal dynamics, the importance of installments’ endings and beginnings, and the way in which a work’s duration “meant that serials could become entwined with readers’ own sense of lived experience and passing time” (Hughes and Lund, Victorian Serial, 8). Recently, Susan David Bernstein and Catherine DeRose have brought digital analysis to bear on a corpus of Victorian serial fiction, demonstrating convincingly that the language of serial fiction differs from that of nonserialized novels, bearing more references, for example, to the predicted future (“Reading Numbers,” 59).80 However, critics have only started to consider the narratological function of images in the plot, temporality, characterization, theme, and genre of Victorian illustrated serial novels. This book attempts to fill that gap.
Illustrated Serial Fiction: A Narratological Approach
Narratology—the theory of how fiction is narrated—can help us understand how novelists use plot to convey meaning and, in turn, how illustrations contribute to plot. In using the term plot, we rely on the narratological distinction between plot and story: by plot, a word that originally meant a ground plan, design, or scheme, narratologists refer to the artistic arrangement of events in a novel as opposed to the chronological order of the story that readers construct in their minds. The distinction between plot and story is least noticeable in linear retrospective narratives such as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), a novel that follows the development of the protagonist from childhood to adulthood without toggling between time frames. In contrast, the distinction is very marked in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), wherein the narrative repeatedly departs from chronological order. Wuthering Heights opens after the first Catherine’s death, plunging its reader into an encounter with Heathcliff, the younger Catherine, and Hareton, whose relationships are incomprehensible to the bewildered Lockwood, who subsequently listens to Nellie Dean’s retrospective account of the elder Catherine’s and Heathcliff’s turbulent childhoods. The novel’s plot thus creates links among generations that would be less salient in a strictly chronological unfolding, which would move from Hindley’s birth in 1757 through to Heathcliff’s death in 1802 and Catherine and Hareton’s marriage in 1803.
Although narratological analysis is often applied to letterpress alone, narratologists recognize that visual information (such as that found in comic books, graphic novels, and films) constitutes one way in which plot events are represented in texts. Yet so far, few critics have asked what might happen to the received theories of the Victorian serial novel if we were to consider illustrations as integral components of plot—that is, as visually represented plot events that accrue just as much importance as those depicted verbally by the letterpress. Turner and David Skilton are exceptions: both suggest that seeing particular illustrations changed how Victorian readers understood character and plot. For example, Turner points out that the placement of illustrations in the serial edition of Romola (which featured full-page wood engravings tipped in before the serial part, with an accompanying chapter initial leading the reader’s eye from image to letterpress) means that the reader sees Tito and Tessa in each other’s arms before Romola herself suspects her husband’s infidelity (Turner, “George Eliot,” 22). Similarly, Skilton notes that serial readers of Trollope’s Orley Farm saw “Guilty,” Millais’s illustration of Lady Mason confessing to Sir Peregrine, before reading about the event in the letterpress; he argues that illustrations play a “shaping role” in the novel (“Relation,” 305–6). Moreover, Ann Lewis has suggested the role of illustration in complicating the point of view and focalization of eighteenth-century texts, and Linda M. Shires has analyzed “perspective” and “point of view” (Perspectives, 11) as related phenomena of both verbal and visual texts. Building on these important critical contributions, this book analyzes the richly dual texts of the Victorian illustrated serial by focusing on the narratological role of illustration, arguing that the plots of such novels are “thickened”—that is, rendered narratologically far more complex—by the presence of illustrations.
As we have discussed, the material form of the Victorian serial suggested—if not actually imposed—certain reading practices for its original readers. The dual form of the illustrated serial meant that Victorian readers both saw and read plot events, often in complex order. The unfolding of the serial over weeks or months meant that readers could also perceive patterns in which images might refer backward or leap forward in the fictional plot. We are not arguing that these effects were deliberately created; many were the effects of technical constraints. In the 1820s to 1840s, editors coped, for example, with the inability to print steel etchings on the same page as type, meaning that such images were printed on separate paper and tipped in before the letterpress. Moreover, tailpieces would often be supplied according to how much room was left on the page after the type for the letterpress had been set, meaning that the choice to insert a tailpiece was in part dictated by space availability. Deliberate or not, however, the placement of illustrations in serials created a complex reading experience in which readers saw events in images and read events in the letterpress, often experiencing a plot arrangement that exacerbated the existing complexities of the verbal plot. Narratological terms—such as prolepsis, analepsis, mimesis, diegesis, iteration, repetition, and extradiegesis—can help us to identify and understand these complex relationships between visual and verbal plots.
A key narratological term that we deploy in this book is prolepsis (from the Greek pro, before; and lepsis, act of taking), meaning a flash-forward and referring to plot events that jump ahead in the narrative and therefore appear before their chronological position in the story. Prolepsis is distinct from foreshadowing because it involves the revelation of an actual plot event as opposed to foreshadowing’s intimation of a possible event or outcome. Victorian serial wrappers, seen before readers opened the letterpress, were proleptic by virtue of their position, anticipating plot events to follow. Although many wrappers merely gave general hints of the narrative to come (in part because authors often wrote to installment deadlines and so could not always provide the whole manuscript to their illustrators), some provided distinct representations of characters and plot arcs: David Copperfield’s wrapper, for example, shows a child’s journey from cradle to grave (fig. 0.2), and A Tale of Two Cities’s wrapper shows a guillotine (fig. 0.3), revealing the novel’s French Revolutionary setting and—as readers would eventually realize—pointing to the novel’s final plot event, the execution of Sydney Carton.
Serial illustrations were also often proleptic: typically, they were either tipped in before a serial part or concentrated in the early pages of the letterpress in the form of chapter initials and full-page plates. Even in full-page folio sheets such as those of Harper’s Weekly, readers saw illustrations before they read the installment’s letterpress. When readers view an image before starting to absorb the letterpress, they already know something—often a great deal—about the plot to follow; the letterpress then reiterates and elaborates on what the illustration has already shown, and readers wait to see when the verbal text will match (or fail to match) their visual expectations. For example, readers of Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd, serialized with illustrations by Helen Paterson in the Cornhill from January to December 1874,81 opened chapter 43 of part 10 (October 1874) to see a chapter initial showing a man digging by a gravestone; this initial faced a full-page wood engraving depicting a man kneeling over a coffin as a woman looks on in agony (fig. 0.4). Part 9 of the novel had ended with Gabriel Oak delivering to Bathsheba Troy’s home the coffin containing the body of Fanny Robin (her former servant) as
