opportunities in reprinting previously published books, this time with illustrations; the novels of Walter Scott, originally published unillustrated, were reissued in such editions. Constable released the first illustrated edition of Scott’s novels, Novels and Tales of the Author of Waverley, in 1819; the sole illustration was a title-page vignette of Edinburgh Castle. Ten years later, Robert Cadell published the forty-eight-volume Magnum Opus edition, which included ninety-six illustrations by thirty-five artists (R. Hill, Picturing, 75); the contrast in illustrations for these two editions indicates the magnitude of the change in publishing practice.21 By 1831, Scott himself estimated that without illustrations the recent edition of his Waverley novels would have sold 5,000 fewer copies (and earned £13,000 less).22 The flowering of book illustration led to books now prized by book historians and collectors: William Allingham’s The Music Master (1855), illustrated with nine wood engravings by leading Pre-Raphaelite artists Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Arthur Hughes,23 and the Moxon edition of Alfred Tennyson’s Poems (1857), illustrated with fifty-four wood engravings by Rossetti, Millais, William Holman Hunt, and others.24 By the 1860s, the popular taste for illustrated texts had come to echo the predilection of Lewis Carroll’s Alice, who—not yet in Wonderland—asks, “[W]hat is the use of a book . . . without pictures . . . ?” (Alice’s Adventures, 9).25
The popularity of images also propelled the innovation of Victorian illustrated magazines and newspapers. The first illustrated mass-market periodical was the Penny Magazine, founded in 1832, the first issue of which sold 213,241 copies.26 In 1841, Punch was founded by engraver Ebenezer Landells and journalist Henry Mayhew; quickly sold to Bradbury and Evans, it featured the work of leading comic illustrators and caricaturists such as Richard Doyle, Charles Keene, John Leech, Kenny Meadows, and John Tenniel under the guidance of editor Mark Lemon. Inheritor of the strong Regency tradition of graphic caricature,27 Punch was soon to become the era’s leading comic illustrated periodical. Six years after its founding, Ralph Waldo Emerson described its images as “equal to the best pamphlets, . . . [conveying] to the eye in an instant the popular view which was taken of each turn of public affairs” (qtd. in Cruse, 408).28 In 1842, Victorians saw the first pictorial weekly newspaper, the Illustrated London News, whose opening statement described the “pencil” as “oracular with the spirit of truth” (“Our Address,” 1). The Illustrated London News subsequently distinguished itself by its “steady, week-by-week coverage in which pictures fully partnered with letterpress in conveying information and commentary about current events.”29 In France, L’Illustration, journal universel (started in 1843) offered to French readers a continental version of the Illustrated London News.30 The Graphic, founded in 1869 as a competitor to the Illustrated London News, announced with its very name as well as by its labor practices (which valued the work of artists and engravers) the importance it placed on the visual arts. William Luson Thomas, the paper’s founder, “commissioned artists of stature to paint images for the paper’s summer and winter colour supplements” and set up a gallery to “complement” the newspaper.31 Images, in short, had become crucial to Victorians’ way of knowing their world, as well as central to their reading practices.
Illustrations became central to literary magazines as well, starting with the journals of the 1830s and 1840s such as Bentley’s Miscellany (founded in 1837 by publisher Richard Bentley under the editorship of Dickens, with George Cruikshank as illustrator) and the London Journal (founded in 1845 and outselling the Times by ten million copies in 1855).32 Illustrated literary periodicals flowered in the 1860s with the establishment of family magazines such as Once a Week (founded in 1859), the Cornhill and Good Words (both founded in 1860), and the Argosy (founded in 1865). In 1859, when Dickens’s separation from his wife and subsequent fight with his publishers, Bradbury and Evans, led him to discontinue Household Words and start All the Year Round (both unillustrated), Bradbury and Evans promptly launched a competitor, the richly illustrated Once a Week, designed to “outdo the ‘blindness’ of Dickens’s paper.”33 Its editor, Samuel Lucas, recruited an emergent group of black-and-white illustrators that Forrest Reid judges “more brilliant than any that had been seen before” (44); they included Millais, Du Maurier, Hunt, Keene, Tenniel, Frederick Sandys, James McNeill Whistler, Matthew Lawless, Frederick Walker, George J. Pinwell, Arthur Boyd Houghton, E. J. Poynter, and William Small.34 Heavily influenced by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and guided by Lucas toward detailed representation of all aspects of the letterpress, the magazine became, in Simon Cooke’s judgment, an “effective realization of the Pre-Raphaelites’ ideals” (Illustrated, 103). The Cornhill, started by publisher George Smith under the editorship of writer and illustrator Thackeray, also published the work of leading illustrators (Mary Ellen Edwards, Millais, Fildes, Sandys, Helen Paterson, and Frederic Leighton) and authors (Thackeray, Gaskell, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, and Wilkie Collins). Smith’s recruitment of leading illustrators and authors suggests that he viewed the combination of text and image as intrinsic to reading and selling both poetry and fiction; indeed, Cooke argues that Smith aimed “to rekindle the intensity of the illustrated text” as it had been achieved by Ainsworth with George Cruikshank, Dickens with Cruikshank and Browne, and Thackeray with Doyle (Illustrated, 119).35 Turning away from the graphic tradition of caricature toward a more realist style influenced by Royal Academy training (which involved anatomical accuracy learned by drawing from the nude figure),36 the magazines of the 1860s established “sixties style,” with its use of wood engraving, close attention to physiological detail and perspective, and the belief in book illustration as a high art form, with the image composed as a miniature painting.37 Across the Atlantic, Harper’s Weekly (founded in 1857 and the model for and precursor of the Cornhill) provided the leading venue for illustrated British fiction in the American market: it paid British authors for their serial fiction, securing page proofs or manuscript copy before pirating publishers had the chance to enter the market.38 The public excitement over such publications is evident in the fact that “magazine day”—the last day of the month, on which London wholesalers received the new periodical and serial publications—was, at midcentury, a “highly anticipated public event.”39
This surge of illustrated material transformed Victorian print culture and reading practices as illustration became central to both. Indeed, for French poet and critic Théophile Gautier, the sudden flowering of illustrated print matter represented nothing less than a media revolution: as he wrote in the late 1850s, “Our century does not always have the time to read, but it always has the time to see” (qtd. in Bacot, La Presse, 80).40 For modern critics, the ubiquity and popularity of Victorian illustrations should impel us to consider the effect of the substantial differences between original illustrated Victorian forms and their modern, often unillustrated, versions. Focusing on the illustrated serial novel as a case study, we argue that form is meaning. The slim orange-gold volume of the Cornhill in Effie Millais’s hands signified through its wood-engraved wrapper, its full-page illustrations, its chapter initials and tailpieces, its advertisements, and indeed its use of white space as well as its letterpress.
Why serials? We have chosen them because they represent the initial form of distribution for many Victorian novels—and because they are the form most often overlooked by modern readers. Not all Victorians read their novels in serial, as Melissa Schaub notes. But “the serial form always preceded the various volume forms of a novel, so that the serial experience would be temporally prior for any reader who did engage in it” (Schaub, “Serial Reader,” 196n2). Indeed, Schaub argues that quantitative evidence alone compels us to take serial forms seriously: circulation for the monthly installments of Dickens’s Pickwick Papers reached 40,000 and for The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–41) exceeded 100,000 (Schlicke, Oxford, 455, 432); Reynolds’ Miscellany commanded 200,000 in 1855 (Altick, Common Reader, 394); and the Cornhill sold 120,000 at its peak in 1860 (Altick, Common Reader, 395).41 Such figures are striking when one considers that an initial print run of a three-volume novel would be 500 to 1,000 copies in the same period.42
