href="#ulink_c963c642-030f-5de0-9aff-ca7867cde72a">fig. 0.19), an image captioned “There was sorrow in her heart, and deep thought in her mind”:93 “In an early part of this story I have endeavoured to describe how this woman sat alone, with deep sorrow in her heart and deep thought on her mind, when she first learned what terrible things were coming on her. The idea, however, which the reader will have conceived of her as she sat there will have come to him from the skill of the artist and not from the words of the writer. If that drawing is now near him, let him go back to it” (Orley Farm, 16:178–79; our emphasis). Significantly, part 16’s passage not only suggests a nonlinear reading strategy, whereby readers flip backward in the serial, but also indicates an occasion on which the visual (the “skill of the artist”) predominates over the verbal (“the words of the writer”).
Further explicit contemplation of Victorians’ serial reading practices came at the end of the century from Du Maurier, whose career as both illustrator and author encompassed the visual and verbal aspects of illustrated serials. He recalled mid-Victorian reading practices as having been complexly proleptic and analeptic as the public consumed Dickens’s serial fiction from the 1830s to the 1850s: “Our recollections of Bill Sikes and Nancy, and Fagin, and Noah Claypole, and the Artful Dodger, of Pickwick and the Wellers, père et fils, Pecksniff, Mrs. Gamp and Mrs. Prig, Micawber, Mr. Dombey, Mr. Toots, and the rest, have become fixed, crystallised, and solidified into imperishable concrete by these little etchings in that endless gallery, printed on those ever-welcome pages of thick yellow paper, which one used to study with such passionate interest before reading the story, and after, and between” (Du Maurier, “Illustrating,” 350).94 Before, after, and between: with these references to reading images over time, Du Maurier captures the intricate temporal relations of text and image, whereby images anticipated and recalled plot events, held attention during serial reading, and sustained readers’ interest in, memory of, and anticipations of plot events during serial pauses. Indeed, Dickens himself noted in 1841 that plot events in serial texts often derived their meaning from “the intimate relation they bear to what has gone before, and to what is to follow” (qtd. in Axton, “Keystone,” 31).
FIG. 0.19 John Everett Millais, “There was sorrow in her heart, and deep thought in her mind,” illustration for Anthony Trollope, Orley Farm, part 2 (April 1861), front matter. London: Chapman and Hall. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Victoria Libraries.
In addition to these explicit accounts, we also possess one uniquely detailed source of evidence concerning Victorian serial reading practices: the speculation surrounding Dickens’s last—and unfinished—novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, illustrated by his son-in-law, Charles Collins (brother of Wilkie), and Fildes (of the Graphic).95 This serial, which started publication in April 1870, was cut short by Dickens’s death on 9 June. After his death, his publishers had enough copy for three installments (July, August, and September) before the serial abruptly ended. The incomplete novel left readers in suspense about whether Edwin is really dead; if he is, how he died; whether he was murdered and, if so, who killed him; and what is the real identity of the mysterious Datchery.96 The abrupt end of The Mystery of Edwin Drood after its sixth installment thus places modern readers in a perpetual serial pause—stuck, as it were, in September 1870, with no forthcoming installments to relieve the suspense.97
Immediately following Dickens’s death, speculation swirled concerning his intended ending of the novel. Despite readers’ desire for closure, Chapman and Hall announced in the Times of 23 June 1870 that “no other writer could be permitted by us to complete the work” (“The Mystery,” 12), and Wilkie Collins refused to finish his late friend’s novel.98 Nevertheless, unofficial theatrical productions and unauthorized novelistic completions flourished, and newspapers and magazines were filled with speculative editorials, letters, and articles.99 From 1870 onward, critics fruitlessly scoured biographical sources (John Forster’s Life of Charles Dickens; Dickens’s letters and number plans; and the recollections of the novel’s main illustrator, Fildes) for the “answer to the enigma.”100 Lacking proof of Dickens’s authorial intentions, they turned to illustrations to solve the mystery, providing an invaluable archive of evidence about how Victorian readers used illustration as well as letterpress to predict plot.
In particular, critics focused on the vignettes in Charles Collins’s wood-engraved wrapper (Cohen, Charles Dickens, 212)—illustrations that preceded the first issue, providing proleptic information to the reader, but that could be (as these readings show) reexamined for clues as each succeeding part installment unfolded. R. A. Proctor’s Watched by the Dead (1887), J. Cuming Walters’s Clues to Dickens’s Mystery of Edwin Drood (1905), and Andrew Lang’s The Puzzle of Dickens’s Last Plot (1905) lay bare this process as they scour the wrapper (fig. 0.20) for evidence of Dickens’s projected resolution of the plot. As Lang summarizes, they suggest variously that Jasper’s position in the upper-right corner under the allegorical figure holding a dagger suggests his guilt (78–79); that the figure ascending the stairs points his hand to the murderer, Jasper (79–80); that the figures at the bottom of the page represent Jasper and Drood, who is still alive (80–81); and that the same figures represent Jasper and Datchery.101 Our point is not who is right and who is wrong—but rather that, because Dickens’s death left Drood’s plot suspended, Victorian readers for once explicitly articulated how the wrapper and illustrations provided them with clues as to theme, characterization, and plot outcome. What emerges from this unusual archive of evidence is that although we might think of a wrapper as having afforded merely predictive clues to narrative when Victorians first read the serial, it was in fact revisited mentally as the letterpress revealed new aspects of the plot, suggesting reinterpretation and reconsideration of previously viewed visual information.
FIG. 0.20 Charles Collins, wrapper for Charles Dickens, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, part 1 (April 1870). London: Chapman and Hall. Courtesy of W. D. Jordan Rare Books and Special Collections, Queen’s University.
Unfortunately, the Drood archive is unique. For most Victorian illustrated serial novels, no such evidence of reading practices exists. In the absence of such evidence, this book uses the form of Victorian illustrated serials (wrappers, page layout, illustration order, and serial breaks) as a basis on which to reconstruct how their first readers interpreted their complex visual and verbal information as the plot unfolded over weeks or months. Given that readers could see as well as read aspects of the plot and that serial illustrations often appeared either before or after key plot events in the letterpress, we ask what role images played in aspects of narrative such as characterization, focalization, mimesis, diegesis, plot, suspense, temporality, and genre. In so doing, we attempt to reconstruct the temporal, interpictorial, and intertexual complexities of illustrated serials. A brief case study will model our method, focusing on a single illustration from one of the century’s most popular serials.
Illustrating Method: Part 2 of Jack Sheppard as Case Study
The illustration we have chosen to analyze to demonstrate our method (fig. 0.21) is from Ainsworth’s immensely successful Jack Sheppard. The monthly serial was illustrated by George Cruikshank with steel etchings and published in Bentley’s Miscellany, where it overlapped for four months with Oliver Twist (1837–39); it was subsequently published in fifteen weekly serial parts in 1840 (Sutherland, Stanford, 323).102 Jack Sheppard is a Newgate novel, not a mystery like Drood, yet it invites very similar reading strategies to those of Drood, whereby illustrations are seen first before the
