we have watched with admiration and enthusiasm the progress of illustrative art, and the vast revolution which it has wrought in the world of publication, through all the length and breadth of this mighty empire. To the wonderful march of periodical literature it has given an impetus and rapidity almost coequal with the gigantic power of steam. It has converted blocks into wisdom, and given wings and spirit to ponderous and senseless wood. It has in its turn adorned, gilded, reflected, and interpreted nearly every form of thought. It has given to fancy a new dwelling-place, to imagination a more permanent throne. It has set up fresh landmarks of poetry, given sterner pungency to satire, and mapped out the geography of mind with clearer boundaries and more distinct and familiar intelligence than it ever bore alone. Art . . . has, in fact, become the bride of literature; genius has taken her as its handmaid; and popularity has crowned her with laurels that only seem to grow the greener the longer they are worn. (“Our Address,” 1)
This extraordinary passage identifies the period of the 1830s and early 1840s as having wrought in literature a revolution equivalent to that propelled by steam in the world of industry. Indeed, as discussed in the introduction, this period witnessed the heyday of the annuals; the grand successes of Pickwick, Jack Sheppard, and Oliver Twist; and the launch of the Penny Magazine, Bentley’s Miscellany, and Punch. The new cheapness of literature and new technologies of illustration had prompted a flowering of new literary forms and made these available to a wider audience. That much we have already seen. But the Illustrated London News’ article goes further, suggesting that wood engraving on “blocks” had not only become ubiquitous in printed material but had actually altered how people understood and imagined their world: “It has given to fancy a new dwelling-place, to imagination a more permanent throne.”
This passage suggests that the ways in which early Victorians understood, “interpreted,” and “mapped” their world and their very selves arose from specific technologies of representation1—in this case, the type-high wood blocks that made possible the seamless integration of letterpress and image. Indeed, by 1843, the Illustrated London News would describe its own illustrated newspaper pages as representing “the brain daguerreotyped” (“Newspaper History,” 56)—that is, as an early Victorian version of photographic reproduction in which the image was transferred by the camera to a light-sensitive, silver-plated sheet of copper polished to a mirror-like sheen. This figuration of print matter as an early photograph of the brain provides a striking image of visual culture as a technology of the self. As the Illustrated London News professed in the same year, the illustrated press had, in a short time, extended its reach beyond daily events to readers’ most profound inner lives, promising “to employ the pencil and burin in the work of illustrating not only the occurrences of the day, but the affections, the passions, the desires of men, and the faculties of the immortal soul” (“Our First Anniversary,” 1).
The Illustrated London News’ focus on illustration’s capacity to manifest Victorians’ inner lives coincided with a burgeoning literary movement to represent the self—a veritable flowering of autobiographies, both actual and fictional. “[T]hroughout the Victorian period,” as David Amigoni notes, “a vibrant self-reflectiveness emerged” (introduction, 23) in nineteenth-century works about the self, from William Wordsworth’s The Prelude (1805) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (1817) to Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis (1905). In prose, this interest in the self appeared in works “cast in a life-writing form,”2 including the fictional autobiographies of Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, and Pip (in Great Expectations). Critics note that books and reading lay at the heart of Victorian life writing and ideas of selfhood. Linda H. Peterson, for example, observes that the autobiographical impulse generally takes two metaphorical forms: that of the mirror (or self-presentation) and that of the book (or self-interpretation) (Victorian Autobiography, 2). The two illustrated serials discussed in this chapter participate in the latter form, wherein construction of self starts in and is related to the “act of reading” (3), traditionally of scripture but later of autobiography. In this chapter, we propose that at midcentury, following the explosion of the illustrated press, the technology of the illustrated book became a potent metaphor for inner life, memory, and self making. Leah Price has suggested that the physical book represents a route to selfhood not by virtue of its contents but instead because the unread book offers an “alibi for inwardness and abstraction” (How, 72). Our argument is related, but we focus not on the symbolic function of the book as object but rather on the material form of a particular kind of book—specifically, the illustrated serial novel—and how it provided a means of imagining the self for midcentury Victorians.
How, we ask, did the illustrated serial fictions that followed the explosion of illustrated print materials in the 1830s and 1840s represent selfhood and memory in relation to the media revolution that Victorians had just experienced? To address this question, we offer two case studies of illustrated serials that represent the emergent selfhood of their protagonists on the cusp of this shift in print culture. The first is Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield, serialized in monthly parts from May 1849 to November 1850 and illustrated by Hablôt K. Browne with a wrapper and two steel etchings at the beginning of each part, with the final double issue of November 1850 containing two images plus the title page and frontispiece. This illustrated midcentury serial explores David’s childhood and adolescence in the 1820s and 1830s and his coming to adulthood in the 1840s, locating his mother’s unhappy remarriage and subsequent death, as well as his own reporting career, failed first marriage, and eventual happiness, against the emergence of illustrated mass print culture a generation before its own publication. The narrating David casts his memories in the form of the midcentury illustrated serial novel, rendering the past as a series of recursively viewed visual tableaux.3 Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cousin Phillis, serialized in the Cornhill Magazine over four months from November 1863 to February 1864 and illustrated with a single wood engraving by George Du Maurier, is also set back a generation from its publication, this time to the 1840s. It similarly evokes the visual technology of the illustrated serial novel as it explores the young engineer Paul Manning’s painful coming of age in the moment of the railway expansion. The illustrated serial is narrated in the first person by Paul and depicts his cousin Phillis, occupant of her family’s farm, which in turn represents England’s agrarian past, now interrupted by the railway’s coming. The novel focuses on Phillis’s enamorment with Paul’s workmate and friend, the careless railway engineer Edward Holdsworth, and her grief when Holdsworth pursues career opportunities and love abroad. It deploys what Robert Scholes, James Phelan, and Robert Kellogg call the device of “the eye-witness”: “[T]he story of the protagonist becomes the outward sign or symbol of the inward story of the narrator, who learns from his imaginative participation in the other’s experience” (Nature, 261). Significantly, the novella renders this “inward story” of grief and coming of age by means of a series of both drawn and imagined portraits, images that are viewed and agonizingly re-viewed, as a serial novel would be read and recursively reread over time.
Both texts are intensely self-conscious about the self’s relation to history and technology: David Copperfield situates the emerging author in the world of newspaper reporting, novel writing, and life writing in the 1820s and 1830s, and Cousin Phillis takes as its background the railway expansion and print explosion of the 1840s. This self-consciousness extends to the technology of the illustrated serial novel: both narratives represent the self in relation to reading, to illustration, and, crucially, to intervals of time, the hallmark of the serial fiction that rose to prominence just as these protagonists gained their maturity.4 Indeed, both texts represent the narrators’ first-person accounts of their memories as a series of recursive visual tableaux or word pictures that, like serial illustrations, are read and reread against one another, accruing palimpsestic layers of significance through iteration, reinterpretation, and juxtaposition.5
“Impressed on My Remembrance”: Selfhood, Memory, and the Tropes of Serial Illustration in David Copperfield
David Copperfield is widely regarded as Dickens’s most autobiographical novel: its protagonist’s initials (DC)
