gap between Victorian and modern forms is widest when we consider the key role of illustration in many Victorian serial novels. Whereas today’s paperbacks usually eliminate some if not all of the original illustrations, Victorian serials often spoke to the eye,43 with illustrated wrappers and images playing a rich—even primary—signifying role for readers. Not all Victorian serial novels were illustrated. But for those that were, we describe illustrations as primary because, although visual artists usually came second in the creation process,44 their images often came first in the reading process. Victorian readers regularly saw illustrations before reading letterpress. They might see images on the wrappers of serials displayed in shop windows as a form of advertisement for that serial installment. When they held the text in their hands, they often saw illustrations before letterpress because steel etchings and engravings, as already mentioned, could not be combined with type. Such images were therefore printed separately from the letterpress (normally on weightier paper than the rest of the text) and then usually bound into serials before the letterpress, thus attracting both hand and eye. Even when serials featured wood engravings—which, as we have seen, permitted image and type to be combined on the same page—illustrations typically appeared early in the serial installment, in the form of chapter heads, initials, or captioned images that lured the reader into the letterpress. This study takes illustration as central to the signifying system of illustrated serial fiction in its original form. We therefore base our analyses not on the later volume editions of Victorian novels (which regularly omitted, reduced, or cropped original designs)45 but on the original form that Victorian readers first encountered: slim monthly parts and periodical installments. Readers of such illustrated serial fictions encountered the text as one that intrinsically combined “two systems of knowing and representing the world”—the verbal and the visual.46
Pictorial (and Unpictorial) Victorians
In Pictorial Victorians: The Inscription of Values in Word and Image, Julia Thomas demonstrates that “the narrative image was regarded as . . . a national specialty” in the Victorian era.47 Fascination with the visual pervades not only Victorian reading practices but also fictional representations of those reading practices, cultural practices surrounding reading, and prose style itself—providing compelling evidence that images were central to the Victorian imagination. Indeed, in their letterpress (and even in unillustrated novels), Victorian authors portrayed readers as captivated by illustration. The reader first meets Jane Eyre, for example, in a window seat, where she is engrossed in Bewick’s wood-engraved A History of British Birds; the young David Copperfield’s earliest memories revolve around an illustrated book about crocodiles and his nurse’s illustrated quarto edition of John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs; and Maggie Tulliver pores over the pictures in Daniel Defoe’s The Political History of the Devil while her brother, Tom, paints the pictures in an illustrated version of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress.48 Fictional scenes that show characters engrossed in illustrated books highlight the importance of visual literacy in the early nineteenth century, constructing readers as both visual and verbal interpreters.
Victorians’ relationship with the illustrations they loved was mediated by domestic practices such as copying, displaying, and coloring. Illustrations moved from book to wall when, in 1833, Branwell Brontë made a watercolor copy of Bewick’s illustration of a goshawk as training for his hoped-for artistic career;49 when Eliot hung proof impressions of Leighton’s illustrations to Romola (1862–63) in the Priory;50 when Dickens commissioned George Cattermole to make watercolor versions of his illustrations for The Old Curiosity Shop for his home;51 when, in the early 1850s, the French Maison Aubert produced green wallpaper featuring wood engravings of captioned illustrations by prominent French illustrators such as Gustave Doré and Henri Emy;52 and when Vincent van Gogh displayed wood engravings from the Graphic on his walls because he admired the work of Fildes, Frank Holl, and Hubert von Herkomer.53 In a unique example of illustrations finding an afterlife in domestic display, Dickens’s publishers Chapman and Hall celebrated the marketing triumph of Pickwick by giving him a set of silver ladles featuring characters from the book’s illustrations.54 As these examples show, artists and authors valued illustration as a way of imagining a future career or marking a success; in many cases, images from serials functioned as synecdoches, recalling an entire narrative.
Readers clipped illustrations from newspapers and magazines to decorate the walls of working-class homes and workplaces; children, as in the example of Tom Tulliver already mentioned, also used illustrated periodicals and books as coloring books. Dickens showed the trend of displaying engravings by having Mr. Weevle of Bleak House (1852–53) decorate his apartment with copper engravings of aristocratic beauties cut from the Galaxy Gallery of British Beauty.55 Late in the century, Olive Schreiner represented such display practices in a colonial context in her description of Gregory Rose’s room in The Story of an African Farm (1883): “It was one tiny room, the whitewashed walls profusely covered with prints cut from the ‘Illustrated London News’” (139).56 The Illustrated London News habitually represented its own readers’ decorative use of illustrations from the newspaper in locations as far-flung as a Chinese sampan, an Australian settler cabin, and even an Inuit dwelling, where the newspaper had been left by a whaler.57 Edith Nesbit’s The Story of the Amulet (1906) portrays her child protagonists coloring black-and-white newspaper illustrations with watercolors: “They were all painting. Nurse . . . had presented each of the four with a shilling paint-box, and had supplemented the gift with a pile of old copies of the Illustrated London News” (239).58 These practices indicate the penetration of illustrated print into everyday life; as a corollary, their representation in fiction and periodical literature signals that various forms of Victorian print media were self-reflexive about their own consumption and about the domestic afterlives of images.
The surge in visual media affected not only illustrated books but also letterpress itself, as visual art and illustrated texts inspired and influenced writers’ prose. Dickens and Ainsworth explicitly modeled their prose works on William Hogarth’s art: the subtitle of Oliver Twist (1837–39), The Parish Boy’s Progress, recalls Hogarth’s idea of a moral progress—as in The Rake’s Progress (1733–35)—and Jack Sheppard, contrasting the careers of industrious and idle apprentices, looks back to Hogarth’s Industry and Idleness (1747).59 Visual culture also infused verbal texts with pictorial metaphors and vocabulary. In Adam Bede (1859), Eliot, heavily influenced by realist painting, celebrates seventeenth-century Dutch art for its “rare, precious quality of truthfulness” and bases her artistic manifesto on a literary version of Dutch realism (177). Dickens, too, wrote in a highly visual manner: as van Gogh remarked, “There is no writer, in my opinion, who is so much a painter and black-and-white artist as Dickens” (qtd. in Cohen, Charles Dickens, 5). Dickens’s very descriptions invoked the artist’s pencil, as in the opening of Great Expectations (1860–61): “The marshes were just a long black horizontal line then, . . . ; and the river was just another horizontal line, not nearly so broad nor yet so black; and the sky was just a row of long angry red lines and dense black lines intermixed” (7). Similarly, in Mary Barton (1848), Gaskell used the simile of ink drawing to describe a dark Manchester afternoon: “Houses, sky, people, and everything looked as if a gigantic brush had washed them all over with a dark shade of Indian ink” (79). Moreover, reviews indicate that Victorian critics valued visual pictorialism in letterpress: the Monthly Review said of Oliver Twist that Dickens’s novels consisted more of “a succession of forcible pictures, attractively framed, than . . . one great but compact piece” (“Art. III.—Oliver Twist,” 40; our emphasis). Similarly, essayist Frederic Harrison noted that readers looked forward to a new Trollope serial for “lively pictures of true life” (qtd. in Cruse, 281; our emphasis). On 24 May 1851, the Illustrated London News noted this general pictorial tendency in literature: “Our great authors are now artists. They speak to the eye, and their language is fascinating and impressive” (“Speaking to the Eye,” 451).
Although these
