from the coffin lid the chalked words “and child,” leaving only the identification “Fanny Robin” (FMC, 9:280). Part 10’s full-page illustration, then, proleptically shows readers, before the letterpress tells them, that Bathsheba will see Troy kneeling lovingly before the bodies of his former lover and their dead child, an event that occurs in the letterpress at the end of chapter 43.82 The chapter initial matches a still later plot event: only at the end of chapter 46 does the letterpress recount the events of Troy ordering a gravestone and planting flowers around the grave by night, the scene of the chapter initial. Readers of the Cornhill serial, therefore, saw two of the novel’s pivotal scenes in advance, prompting questions of emotional import and plot impact that would later be confirmed, replaced, or refined by the letterpress: What will Bathsheba and Troy say to one another over the coffin of his lover and illegitimate child? Will Bathsheba condone his behavior? Console him? Reject him? Will he defend himself? Lie? Leave her? Will Troy dig up the grave for some reason? Such speculation suggests that the process of reading illustrated serials involved testing multiple proliferating hypotheses against known visual information. Readers became speculators, wagering on possible relationships among characters and guessing about possible plot lines. The proleptic knowledge imparted by illustrations thus functioned for Victorian readers as what educational psychologists call an advance organizer—information known in advance that shapes subsequent interpretation,83 or in this case, plot detail that affects how readers understand the subsequent letterpress.
FIG. 0.2 Hablôt K. Browne, wrapper for Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, part 1 (May 1849). London: Bradbury and Evans. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Victoria Libraries.
FIG. 0.3 Hablôt K. Browne, wrapper for Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, part 1 (June 1859). London: Chapman and Hall. Courtesy of W. D. Jordan Rare Books and Special Collections, Queen’s University.
FIG. 0.4 Helen Paterson, illustration, “Her tears fell fast beside the unconscious pair,” and chapter initial for Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd, part 10. Cornhill Magazine, October 1874, 490 and facing. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Victoria Libraries.
In narratology, the counterpart of prolepsis is analepsis (from the Greek ana, back; and lepsis, act of taking), meaning a flashback and referring to plot events that propel readers backward in the story, thereby bringing into the narrative “now” an event that occurred in the chronological past. As we have discussed, opening illustrations of serial parts often played a proleptic role, pointing forward in the plot, but they could also be analeptic, reminding readers of a past event from a previous installment. For example, the opening full-page wood engraving for part 11 (November 1874) of Far from the Madding Crowd represents the scene narrated at the end of part 10: Troy swimming out to sea from a rocky cove and being pulled by a current between “two projecting spurs of rock” (FMC, 10:511; fig. 0.5) just before he is rescued by sailors in a passing boat.84 Part 11’s opening image shows the moment in part 10 at which the swimmer raises “his left [hand] to hail” the boat (FMC, 10:512), flashing readers back to Troy’s rescue, which remains unknown to those left on shore. Part 11’s chapter initial, showing a forlorn Bathsheba at a window, is proleptic, indicating her pensive state to come, when she will not know whether her husband is alive or dead (see fig. 0.5).
FIG. 0.5 Helen Paterson, illustration, “He saw a bather carried along in the current,” and chapter initial for Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd, part 11. Cornhill Magazine, November 1874, 617 and facing. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Victoria Libraries.
Readers of part 11 will discover in retrospect, however, that the full-page illustration of Troy swimming is in fact complexly both analeptic and proleptic because it contains in its foreground a visual detail not mentioned in part 10: the presence of an eyewitness who saw Troy swept out to sea—indeed, as the image shows, saw his arm raised to hail the approaching boat—but did not see his rescue by that boat. At the beginning of part 11’s letterpress, this witness’s account will lead the community to believe that Troy has drowned. The illustration’s caption points forward to this account with a reference to the eyewitness: “He saw a bather carried along in the current” (FMC, 11:617 facing). The illustration stands poised, then, between two accounts of the same event and two time frames in the narrative. Its duality infuses with irony the image of Bathsheba’s pensive state: her husband is not dead, as the reader knows, but she will think that he is, as the witness’s testimony implies. As these examples indicate, prolepsis and analepsis are intrinsic to reading illustrated serials; the plots of serial novels are rendered less linear, more complex in the relation between plot and story, by the readers’ visual apprehension of plot events.
So far, we have focused on the temporal relationship between image and letterpress, showing how a narratological analysis of images complicates the relation of plot and story. Another key narratological distinction is between mimesis and diegesis. The term mimesis comes from the Greek word for imitation and refers to sections of text in which the narrator depicts scenes in detail; diegesis is derived from the Greek for narrative or statement and refers to the telling of events as opposed to their showing. In a famous example, Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities opens with a chapter of diegesis, or summary, titled “The Period”—“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times . . .” (TOTC, 5)85—before moving into a mimetic scene, or detailed showing, of the Dover mail coach. By depicting specific plot events in detail, illustrations can support textual mimesis, increasing readers’ sense of being shown a scene; they can also, by depicting general background of setting or context, evoke a sense of historical diegesis.
A notable form of illustration’s participation in mimesis was one in which image placement precisely matched its representation in the letterpress—that is, image and text appear side by side or with one immediately following the other, a surprisingly rare placement in Victorian serials. As we have noted, the limitations of Victorian print technology meant that steel engravings and etchings could not be printed on the same page as type (hence the facing pages in many cases); however, the innovation of type-high wood blocks enabled the insertion of images in the letterpress itself, allowing text and image to match precisely.86 We refer to such close placements as examples of matching mimesis, having failed to find an existing narratological term that captures their import. In this book, we use this term to refer to instances in which the illustration and the letterpress show, in their different media and in detail, precisely the same event at the same time for readers; this phenomenon is striking because it approached, as much as was possible, a Victorian multimedia visual-verbal experience. We see Thackeray playing with matching mimesis in part 4 (April 1847) of Vanity Fair, in which the letterpress’s sentence “Miss Sharp put out her right fore-finger—” is physically interrupted on the page by an inset wood engraving of Becky pointing her finger at George Osborne. The sentence resumes underneath: “And gave him a little nod, so cool and killing, that Rawdon Crawley, watching the operations from the other room, could hardly restrain his laughter as he saw the Lieutenant’s entire discomfiture” (VF, 4:124; fig. 0.6). Matching mimesis can produce high drama, as in the historical novels of the period, or irony, when used (as above) to
