FIG. 0.6 William Makepeace Thackeray, illustration for his Vanity Fair, part 4 (April 1847), 124. London: Bradbury and Evans. BC–First Editions 601. Courtesy of Archives and Special Collections, University of New Brunswick Libraries.
Narratological terms also help us analyze plot events that echo or repeat one another. Narratologists distinguish between iterative and repetitive aspects of plot. Iterative (from the Latin iterare, to do again) refers to events that occur regularly: these are the narrative equivalent of the imperfect verb tense, the expression of a habitual event or state. Repetitive (from the Latin repetere, to reread or repeat) refers to different scenes with similar elements: these repetitive plot events may produce effects of echo, déjà vu, irony, pathos, or uncanniness. In Far from the Madding Crowd, Paterson’s chapter initials showing Bathsheba’s farm labor are iterative: the serial’s first chapter initial, for example, depicts her carrying a milking pail (fig. 0.7), an action that Gabriel observes every day for several days: “Five mornings and evenings passed. The young woman came regularly to milk the healthy cow or to attend to the sick one” (FMC, 1:13). The image, therefore, does not capture a single action but rather multiple iterations of the same action. Another example of iterative illustration occurs in Sidney Paget’s famous images of Sherlock Holmes in the Strand Magazine,87 wherein depictions of Holmes reading the newspaper, gazing into the fire, or curled asleep in his armchair stand for his habitual states of contemplation or trance (fig. 0.8); despite captions linking such illustrations to particular moments in the letterpress, the visual depictions stand in for Holmes’s daily activities. Thus Paget not only depicts Holmes in moments of high action but also frequently shows scenes of profound contemplation, thereby intellectualizing Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective hero.
FIG. 0.7 Helen Paterson, chapter initial for Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd, part 1. Cornhill Magazine, January 1874, 1. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Victoria Libraries.
FIG. 0.8 Sidney Paget, “I found Sherlock Holmes half asleep,” illustration for Arthur Conan Doyle, “A Case of Identity.” Strand Magazine, September 1891, 255. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Victoria Libraries.
Repetitive illustrations, rather than depicting habitual actions, show the relationship among discrete actions that involve similar plot elements but not necessarily the same characters. Du Maurier’s moving series of deathbed scenes in the chapter initials for Gaskell’s realist Wives and Daughters, for example, establishes a leitmotif among related scenes involving Squire Hamley, first mourning his dead tenant and then his dead son (figs. 0.9 and 0.10). In a contrasting genre and to different effect, we see repetition in Warwick Goble’s illustrations for H. G. Wells’s science-fiction novel The War of the Worlds, serialized from April to December 1897 in Pearson’s Magazine. Images for parts 3 and 7 show repetitive events: in part 3, a man in the tentacled grasp of a tripod-like fighting machine; in part 7, a man limply hanging from the tentacle of a similarly silhouetted machine (figs. 0.11 and 0.12). The plot events thus depicted are similar (people in the foreground, at the picture plane, grasped by an outstretched tentacle as they flee a Martian machine in the far background), as are the manners of their showing (both images are rendered in pen and ink wash, with the letterpress wrapping around them, their unruly shapes conveying the disorder that they depict).
FIG. 0.9 George Du Maurier, chapter initial for Elizabeth Gaskell, Wives and Daughters, part 11. Cornhill Magazine, June 1865, 682. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Victoria Libraries.
FIG. 0.10 George Du Maurier, chapter initial for Elizabeth Gaskell, Wives and Daughters, part 16. Cornhill Magazine, November 1865, 513. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Victoria Libraries.
FIG. 0.11 Warwick Goble, “He saw this one pursue a man and catch him up in one of its steely tentacles,” illustration for H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds, part 3. Pearson’s Magazine, June 1897, 609. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Victoria Libraries.
FIG. 0.12 Warwick Goble, “In a stride or two he was among them,” illustration for H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds, part 7. Pearson’s Magazine, October 1897, 455. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Victoria Libraries.
An important function of Victorian illustration was its capacity to introduce extradiegetic elements (from the Latin extra, outside; and the Greek diegesis, narrative)—that is, elements that are outside those described in the letterpress. An example of an extradiegetic element in an illustration is the poster indicating “MURDER! £100 REWARD!” that Browne inserted in the background of “Shadow,” his dark plate of Lady Dedlock on the stairs (fig. 0.13) in part 16 of Dickens’s Bleak House,88 serialized in part installments between March 1852 and September 1853. The poster’s reference to Tulkinghorn’s murder and the police search for the guilty brings the London street world into collision with the isolated grandeur of the Dedlock estate. A famous example of extradiegetic illustration is Vanity Fair’s “Becky’s second appearance in the character of Clytemnestra” (fig. 0.14), an image that opens the novel’s final double part (19 and 20). Here, in a striking example of purposefully extradiegetic illustration by the author-illustrator, Thackeray himself draws in the image detail that he chose not to reveal in the letterpress,89 showing his money-hungry antiheroine, Becky, hiding behind a curtain holding what looks like a vial in her hand and eavesdropping while Jos reveals to Dobbin that he has insured his life. When Jos dies three months later and Becky inherits, this extradiegetic steel etching, together with the caption’s intertextual allusion to Clytemnestra’s murder of Agamemnon, intimates that Becky is a murderess, a visual suggestion that exceeds the more restrained letterpress.
FIG. 0.13 Hablôt K. Browne, “Shadow,” illustration for Charles Dickens, Bleak House, part 16 (June 1853), front matter. London: Bradbury and Evans. Courtesy of University of Calgary Special Collections.
FIG. 0.14 William Makepeace
