Du Maurier. Peter Ibbetson. Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, June–December 1891.
The Plot Thickens
FIG. 0.0 Hands holding uncut serial version of David Copperfield. Photograph by Lisa Surridge.
INTRODUCTION
Material Matters
The Illustrated Victorian Serial Novel
This book starts with two pictures. The first, the cover image, is a painting of a Victorian woman holding a slim orange-gold volume in her lap. The year is 1873. The woman is Effie Millais, wife of the famous painter John Everett Millais.1 The volume is the Cornhill Magazine, an illustrated monthly journal launched by Smith, Elder in January 1860, which, from its first issue, became a major venue for her husband’s illustrations for fiction and poetry. The Cornhill’s wood-engraved wrapper (fig. 0.1) depicts scenes of plowing, sowing, threshing, and harvesting—a visual pun on the publisher’s original location at 65 Cornhill Street in London and a metaphor for the magazine’s ambition to harvest the best of contemporary literature for its readers. If the issue that Effie holds likewise dates from 1873, then, depending on the month, it might contain prose by Charles Kingsley, Anne Thackeray Ritchie, Leslie Stephen, or Eliza Lynn Linton and wood-engraved illustrations by George Du Maurier, Marcus Stone, or Luke Fildes. The magazine’s featured fiction—two serials per monthly issue—combined text and image, usually with one full-page wood engraving and one chapter initial leading the reader’s eye into the text.
The second image, the one facing this page, shows a pair of hands holding a slim Victorian volume. The year is 2018. The hands belong to our research assistant Michael Carelse, and the volume is a Victorian serial novel—a monthly installment of Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield, published between May 1849 and November 1850. The slim text in Michael’s hands is part 1, now preserved in the University of Victoria’s Special Collections. Like the Cornhill, this serial edition of David Copperfield was illustrated, with visual images playing a key role for its readers; each monthly installment featured a wrapper and two steel etchings designed by Hablôt K. Browne (known as “Phiz”).
FIG. 0.1 Godfrey Sykes, wrapper for the Cornhill Magazine, August 1862. Courtesy of Simon Cooke.
These images of hands and texts, and their implications, form the alpha and omega of this study. They represent the Victorian and modern reader, both interacting with Victorian literary forms. But unlike our research assistant, most modern readers do not encounter Victorian fiction in its original publication formats, such as the illustrated periodical and the independent illustrated serial part discussed above. General readers, undergraduates, and even the majority of graduate students—as well as many scholars—read works by Dickens and other Victorian novelists mostly in fat paperback editions in which only some of the original illustrations are included (indeed, illustrations are sometimes omitted altogether) and the serial breaks are at best indicated by an asterisk at the end of a chapter. The modern paperbacks that fostered our own love of Victorian novels differ markedly in material form, page layout, and illustration placement from, for example, the slim monthly parts of William Harrison Ainsworth’s The Tower of London (1840), William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1847–48), and Dickens’s David Copperfield (1849–50); the monthly installments of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters (1864–66) in the Cornhill and Charles Reade’s Griffith Gaunt (1865–66) in the Argosy; and the weekly installments of Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities (1859)2 in Harper’s Weekly and Dinah Mulock Craik’s Mistress and Maid (1862) in Good Words.3 In this book, we try to show why this difference matters.
In Radiant Textuality (2001), Jerome McGann reminds us that the material form of a text always signifies: the “apparitions of text—its paratexts, bibliographical codes, and all visual features—are as important in the text’s signifying programs as the linguistic elements” (11–12). McGann’s argument suggests that the transformation of Victorian novels from slim illustrated parts or periodical installments to bulky paperbacks has diminished their capacity to signify through their original form. Is this loss even partially recoverable? We think so. This study attempts to bridge the gap between Victorian and modern readers by using archival materials to create what Catherine J. Golden calls “a vital window” into Victorian reading practices (introduction, 3). Following Pierre Machery’s statement that “readers are made by what makes the book” (70), we ask, How does the form of the illustrated Victorian serial novel invite readers to read? This question propels us toward a critical method that is materialist, historical, and founded on considerations of form (illustrations, advertisements, chapter initials, layout, wrappers, and periodical context). Our goal is to read Victorian illustrated serial novels in their original publication formats, asking how those forms imply specific reading practices and, in turn, demonstrating how our understanding of these texts shifts if we read them as their original Victorian readers did—in parts, over time, with illustrations constituting an integral part of the reading experience.4 This project, then, takes its starting point in the archive, where modern readers can hold Victorian periodicals and part installments in their hands.
The Illustration Revolution
The slim orange volume of the Cornhill and the July 1859 installment of A Tale of Two Cities both represent in material form two moments in the Victorian revolution in illustration and print technologies. In the eighteenth century, illustration was a minor aspect of book production. Triple-decker novels or collections were released largely unillustrated, although popular books sometimes included frontispieces with portraits of the author or vignettes of a setting. Book illustration was limited mainly to poetry, canonical eighteenth-century novels, or Shakespeare’s works.5 The late 1700s saw the rise of illustrated
