were serialized with new illustrations by contemporary artists. Charles Lamb, who, as the son of a London legal clerk, had access to such magazines as a child, referred in retrospect to the “pictured wonders” (871) of their pages: his was the first generation that saw text and image as intrinsically linked. The late eighteenth century also witnessed a sea change in illustrative technique: whereas copper engraving had dominated the book trade for three hundred years, in the 1780s, Thomas Bewick introduced the art of wood engraving. While the copper or steel engraver produces an intaglio print by creating indentations in the plate, into which ink is forced and then pressed onto the page, the woodcutter or wood engraver creates a relief print by removing wood from areas that will appear as white space and printing from the inked surface of the remaining block. Bewick’s innovation was to experiment with using steel-engraving tools rather than cutting away the wood with a knife—as artists did to produce the traditional woodcut—and with using the hard end grain of boxwood rather than the softer plank side. The resulting linear, black-and-white style of wood engraving was not only beautiful to look at but also practical to reproduce, as the hard boxwood block could be inserted into a printing form and thus combined on the same page as type; as well, it could be used for mass printing because of its durability.
Also inherited from the eighteenth century, steel etching was prized for its speed and practicality. The steel plate was first covered with an etching ground (a thin, acid-resistant coating often containing wax), and then the etcher transferred the design to the ground by laying the sketch “pencil side down” on the etching ground, covering it with a damp sheet, and passing it through the press.6 The lines were then drawn through the ground with etching needles of various widths, enabling the lines to be exposed to acid. Steel etching was widely used by caricaturists and prized for “its fluent line”;7 we see its mastery in designs by the talented George Cruikshank, one of the Regency’s great caricaturists and, later, a leading book illustrator in the 1830s and 1840s.
The 1820s saw the rise of steel engraving (that is, designs produced on steel plates by evacuating a line with a burin or creating dots with a tool called a mattoir, as opposed to the needle and acid used in etching). This technique migrated from bank notes to books, for which the durability of steel plates facilitated mass reproduction on mechanized presses and steel engraving’s high-quality silvery tones enabled the reproduction of elegant landscape paintings and portraits as well as of original book illustrations. By the 1830s, copper plates (such as those used by William Blake in his late eighteenth-century illustrated books) had mostly been supplanted by steel in book illustration.8 In turn, wood engraving was increasingly embraced as an art form in the 1850s and 1860s, by which point it generally supplanted steel. Notably, copper, steel, and wood engraving all involved the transfer of artists’ conceptions to the medium of the plate or block. By contrast, the final years of the century saw the widespread use of photomechanical reproduction, which enabled, for the first time, the direct replication of the artist’s pencil, ink, or wash drawing—or even a photograph—onto the printed page.
This Victorian revolution in illustration techniques coincided with technological developments in printing and transportation that enabled increasingly cheap and efficient production and distribution of print materials. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, books and newspapers were luxuries too expensive for most British people to afford. In 1815, for example, a newspaper cost seven pence,9 and around 1820, a three-volume novel thirty or more shillings, prices prohibitive to middle-class families.10 Newspapers, paper, and advertisements were all taxed, meaning that print material was priced out of the reach of many working-class readers. Moreover, for the poor, reading was additionally costly in terms of candles, made even more necessary because some people bricked up apertures to avoid the tax on windows.11 However, publishers were able to bring illustrated periodicals and books to a mass market at affordable prices as steam presses mechanized printing, the paper tax was removed, wood pulp replaced linen rags as the basis for paper, railways enabled mass distribution, and illustration became cheaper.12 On 24 May 1851, the Illustrated London News noted that this huge drop in cost and sharp increase in production had revolutionized the printing industry: “[B]y means of improvement in the art of engraving, giving facilities for publishing rapidly large editions, illustrative engravings can be given to the public at one-fortieth of their cost a few years ago” (“Speaking to the Eye,” 452).13
These innovations in print technology and illustrative techniques allowed Victorian publishers to imagine book formats that blended text and image as “equal partners in the discourse.”14 In wrapper designs that created brands for serials and periodicals, in full-page illustrations that graced books and magazines, and in tiny chapter initials and tailpieces, artists created images that might variously decorate, complement, add to, contradict, or complicate the letterpress—but that in all cases contributed to the rich meanings of verbal-visual forms. New publication formats—the illustrated comic almanac, the illustrated annual, the illustrated serial, the illustrated book, and the illustrated newspaper or periodical—all blended verbal and visual signifiers, a fact that book historians understand as crucial to our understanding of the period’s texts: as Robert L. Patten argues, “If we lose our ability to read images, we lose historical comprehension” (“Politics,” 111). In turn, Victorian readers became adept at visual interpretation: as Golden notes, “During the first wave of industrialization, literacy meant interpreting the details of an image as well as the words on a page” (introduction, 6).
The early nineteenth century saw a burgeoning market for illustrated literature, with a strong public appetite for political caricature and satire. As Brian Maidment has shown, comic annuals and almanacs as well as broadsides fed the popular taste for visual imagery and verbal-visual discourse. Print shops flourished, with Rudolph Ackermann opening his famous emporium of art prints and supplies in the Strand (P. James, English, 17). The innovation of colored aquatints (illustrations made by using acid to etch copper plates to different depths and colored by hand)15 brought color illustration to high-end books, with aquatint illustrations becoming popular in texts on landscape, flora, fauna, heraldry, battles, and events of national importance.16 Another fashionable and expensively produced illustrated book format was the literary annual, popular from the early 1820s to the mid-1850s: titles such as the Forget-Me-Not (1822–47) and the Keepsake (1827–57) appeared each fall in time for the Christmas gift-giving season, taking the middle-class market by storm with their combination of attractive bindings, steel-engraved illustrations, and poetry and prose by well-established, often celebrity authors.
In fiction, from the 1820s on, the monthly serial part, combining an illustrated wrapper with text and images, became the era’s quintessential fictional form, born of the cheaper illustration modes as well as of the publisher’s ability to print and distribute the early installments of a serial with minimal outlay in comparison to volume publication. One of the first such best sellers was Pierce Egan’s boisterous Life in London; or, The Day and Night Scenes of Jerry Hawthorn Esq. and Corinthian Tom (serialized in twenty monthly parts from October 1820 to June 1821 with hand-colored aquatints and additional wood engravings, all produced by George and Robert Cruikshank in a lively caricature-inflected style),17 a text that inspired at least sixty-five spinoff publications.18 Dickens owed his literary rise to the illustrated serial novel, starting with his comedic The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (known commonly as The Pickwick Papers and published monthly from March 1836 to October 1837 with steel etchings in every part), a serial whose sales started at less than 500 per number and grew to 40,000.19 Equaling Dickens’s works in contemporary popularity were the illustrated serials of Ainsworth, whose “immensely successful” Newgate novel Jack Sheppard (January 1839–February 1840) propelled the sales of Bentley’s Miscellany beyond those attained during the serialization of Dickens’s Oliver Twist.20 Both were illustrated with steel etchings by George Cruikshank, considered the “Lion of the day” among contemporary illustrators (Patten, Cruikshank’s Life, 2:2). Serials were subsequently released in volume form, usually with illustrations inserted (technically, tipped in) close to the
