parts 19 and 20 (April 1847), front matter. London: Bradbury and Evans. BC–First Editions 601. Courtesy of Archives and Special Collections, University of New Brunswick Libraries.
Another function of illustration in which the visual predominates over the verbal is the interpictorial (from the Latin inter, between; and pictorius, of painting), referring to the relationships among visual images, either in the same collection or source or among sources. Whereas the reference to Clytemnestra, above, is intertextual, illustrations may similarly make visual—that is, interpictorial—references to other images, paintings, and visual tropes. In part 11 of Jack Sheppard, for example, George Cruikshank’s steel etching of Jack posing in prison for his portrait to be painted by James Thornhill (fig. 0.15) cleverly replicates the cheeky pose of the actual Thornhill portrait,90 in which Sheppard points to the door, indicating his plans for another jailbreak. Cruikshank’s etching needle renders Thornhill’s incomplete painting as well as Cruikshank’s artistic antecedents Thornhill and Hogarth, Thornhill’s son-in-law (Patten, Cruikshank’s Life, 2:114–15). Another example of illustrators using interpictorial references to pay tribute to their artistic forebears is Millais’s wood engraving of “The Prodigal Son” (March 1863; fig. 0.16) for Thomas Guthrie’s The Parables Read in the Light of the Present Day (Good Words, January–December 1863), in which the characters’ positions reference those of Albrecht Dürer’s woodcut The Descent from the Cross (ca. 1509; fig. 0.17); Jason Rosenfeld terms this “a conscious evocation” (119). Millais’s interpictorial reference simultaneously pays tribute to the woodcut as a form of high art, renders homage to Dürer as one of its foremost practitioners,91 and hallows the embrace of the father and the prodigal son by implicitly alluding to Christ’s body being taken down from the cross.
FIG. 0.15 George Cruikshank, “The Portrait,” illustration for William Harrison Ainsworth, Jack Sheppard, part 11. Bentley’s Miscellany, November 1839, 429 facing. Courtesy of W. D. Jordan Rare Books and Special Collections, Queen’s University.
FIG. 0.16 John Everett Millais, “The Prodigal Son,” illustration for Thomas Guthrie, The Parables Read in the Light of the Present Day, part 3. Good Words, March 1863, 161 facing. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Victoria Libraries.
FIG. 0.17 Albrecht Dürer, The Descent from the Cross (ca. 1509). Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; gift of Junius Spencer Morgan, 1919.
Finally, in historical fiction, which combines a plot involving fictional characters with readers’ knowledge of a known historical event, the relation between plot and story becomes instead one among plot, story, and received history: a threefold relation among narrative elements. In historical fiction, therefore, the analysis of illustrations departs in key respects from the analysis of other genres and requires additional terminology. First, while historical illustrations may and often do anticipate the letterpress, the effect of prolepsis is reduced considerably because readers already know the outcome of the historical plot. Readers may, however, await the illustrator’s interpretation of a particularly famous scene or wonder how the fictional characters’ lives will unfold in relation to known historical events. In considering the role of illustration in historical fiction, we therefore supplement our narratological approach with terminology developed by historians. They identify two modes of historical illustration: the metaphorical (from the Greek metapherein, transfer), which renders images of imagined historical scenes; and the metonymic (from the Greek metonumia, change of name), which renders historical ideas by images of actual artifacts such as paintings, buildings, or documents, showing the association of things with ideas.92 Metaphorical illustration captures readers’ imaginations, inviting them to visualize themselves as though present at historical events as these unfolded; by contrast, metonymic illustration invites readers to imagine themselves as archaeologists, examining remains of the past as these exist in the readers’ present. Adapting these terms enables us to analyze the complex temporal relations of historical as well as fictional plots of illustrated Victorian serials, reconstructing, as far as we can, their unfolding to Victorian readers.
Our narratological analysis of illustrated serials extends beyond the single serial part to consider the text-image relationships that developed over a serial’s duration, which might range from weeks to years. Over this extended period, images accrued meaning through complex patterns of repetition, juxtaposition, contradiction, and/or irony. They looked backward to earlier plot events after a week or even several months, repeated or contrasted with earlier images, or anticipated events in serial parts to come. They echoed known images from other visual media such as etchings, books, and paintings. Finally, serials reflected on their own modes of production (both verbal and visual), self-consciously drawing attention to the conditions under which they were created. Later chapters in this book explore how the proleptic, analeptic, mimetic, diegetic, iterative, repetitive, and extradiegetic functions of Victorian serial illustrations render more complex the plots, temporal structures, characterizations, themes, and subgenres of Victorian fiction; how illustrations create intertextual and interpictorial meaning; and how self-reflexive illustrations (ones that referred to or queried the status of visual representation) complicate our understanding of Victorian novels—an understanding that has hitherto rested largely on their volume forms.
Victorian Serial Reading Practices: Historical Evidence
Concrete evidence of Victorian reading and interpretative strategies—that is, the way in which people read serial letterpress and illustrations in relation to one another and what they made of this relation—is scant: unsurprisingly, Victorians seldom recorded exactly how they read books. We do possess convincing evidence of widespread proleptic visual and verbal reading from Vizetelly, who recalled the frenzy over Pickwick: “[N]o sooner was a new number published than needy admirers flattened their noses against the booksellers’ windows, eager to secure a good look at the etchings, and peruse every line of the letterpress that might be exposed to view, frequently reading it aloud to applauding bystanders” (Glances, 123). Similarly, we know that William Charles Macready, actor and close friend of Dickens, saw Cattermole’s wood engraving of the dead Little Nell (fig. 0.18) before reading the serial letterpress of The Old Curiosity Shop: “I saw one print in it of the dear dead child that gave a dead chill through my blood. I dread to read it, but I must get it over” (qtd. in Skilton, “Relation,” 305). In 1862, Chambers’s Journal generalized about the reading public’s widespread habit of proleptic visual reading: “On taking up a book for the first time, probably three people out of four will look to see if there are any pictures before reading a single page” (“Book-Prints,” 135).
FIG. 0.18 George Cattermole, “At Rest,” illustration for Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop, part 40. Master Humphrey’s Clock, 6 February 1841, 46. Courtesy of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto.
The format of Trollope’s Orley Farm (1861–62) provides strong evidence of analeptic reading practices—in this case, the letterpress recalls illustrations from previous installments. In part 16 (June 1862), the narrator invites readers to turn back to
