collecting, and coloring; and the literary pictorialism of Victorian style) reflect the nineteenth-century ascendancy of illustrated print media, Victorian critics did not universally praise illustrated books. On the contrary, the relation between text and image was highly contested, with metaphors for illustrated texts ranging from duplicitous cosmetics to professional dispute and happy marriage. In 1828, Scott, whose novels were initially published without pictures and profitably reissued in illustrated editions, dubbed the illustrated book “a faded beauty [who] dresses and lays on [a] prudent touch of rouge to compensate for want of her juvenile graces” (7). In 1844, French caricaturist Jean-Jacques Grandville figured the power struggle between pen and pencil as a battle for supremacy between youth and age, with the youthful pencil yearning to explore new worlds independently (“votre tyrannie me fatigue”) and the pen berating its younger, ungrateful colleague (“jeune ingrat”) (“La Clé des champs,” 3).60 In 1850, thirteen years after the record-breaking success of Pickwick and eight after the launch of the Illustrated London News, William Wordsworth published a sonnet deriding illustrated texts, declaring that they made discourse a mere “lacquey” to the “dumb Art” of pictures:
Discourse was deemed Man’s noblest attribute,
And written words the glory of his hand;
Then followed Printing with enlarged command
For thought—dominion vast and absolute
For spreading truth, and making love expand.
Now prose and verse sunk into disrepute
Must lacquey a dumb Art that best can suit
The taste of this once-intellectual Land.
A backward movement surely have we here,
From manhood,—back to childhood; for the age—
Back towards caverned life’s first rude career.
Avaunt this vile abuse of pictured page!
Must eyes be all in all, the tongue and ear
Nothing? Heaven keep us from a lower stage!
(246)
In contrast, the Illustrated London News declared on 14 May 1842 the happy marriage of text and image: “Art . . . has . . . become the bride of literature” (“Our Address,” 1).61
While Victorian critics and authors disagreed about the worth of images in print media, one fact was unassailable: visual texts had come to dominate the Victorian print marketplace. Victorian engraver, journalist, and publisher Henry Vizetelly recalled the ubiquity of print sellers on the London streets in the early Victorian period: “The shop-windows of the London printsellers were the people’s real picture galleries at this period, and always had their gaping crowds before them. The caricatures of the day, representations of famous prize fights, and Cruikshank’s and Seymour’s comic sketches were most to the taste of the cognoscenti of the pavement” (Glances, 88). “The illustrated book is a ‘felt want,’” wrote Du Maurier, one of the most prolific and famous book and periodical illustrators of the period;62 “The majority of civilised human nature likes to read, and a majority of that majority likes to have its book (even its newspaper!) full of little pictures” (“Illustrating,” 349). At the end of the century, Oscar Wilde characterized the Victorians’ transition to a culture of illustration as one of the mass market dictating literary form: “Since the introduction of printing, and the fatal development of the habit of reading amongst the middle and lower classes of this country, there has been a tendency in literature to appeal more and more to the eye” (112).
Illustrated Serials in the Victorian Market
This book focuses on one particular product of this revolution in print media: the illustrated serial novel. As we have discussed, the 1830s saw the quick rise and grand successes of the novel in serial parts, typically published at monthly intervals and including a wrapper (of the same color paper and bearing the same cover design on every part); advertisements (usually bound in a single gathering just inside the wrapper as well as printed on the inside front and back of the wrapper); tipped-in illustrations preceding the narrative; and, of course, the letterpress itself. An alternative and equally popular form during the period was the illustrated periodical (whether in monthly or weekly parts), also bearing a cover of consistent color and design,63 in which serial fiction was integrated into the miscellaneous contents of the journal, which typically included advertisements as well as poetry, essays, and other (serial and nonserial) fiction.
The very form of the illustrated serial novel was designed to produce and respond to market demand, each installment impelling its readers to buy the next. This does not mean, however, that serials relied exclusively on so-called cliffhanger endings to serial parts, although these did exist. Equally important, as Linda K. Hughes and Michael Lund have shown, is that the serial novel took place over time, meshing its reading with the lived experiences of its readers (Victorian Serial, 8), for whom pregnancies, births, illnesses, and deaths became linked to the unfolding of illustrated narratives. Indeed, as the Illustrated London News observed in its 1870 obituary for Dickens, his serial writing had provided a temporal structure to Victorians’ everyday life for over thirty years, arriving regularly and with regular pauses: “It was just as if we received a letter or a visit, at regular intervals, from a kindly observant gossip” (qtd. in Patten, “Publishing,” 32). Such serial pauses might prompt not only anticipation of the next installment but also reflection on the past one, on the relation between one serial part and the next, and on the links between fiction and everyday life. Indeed, Christian magazines such as Good Words used the regularity of the serial format to reinforce the importance of regular reflection and prayer.
On a pragmatic level, the serial form allowed publishers flexibility and low risk: they could risk minimal capital at the outset, pay the author and illustrator by the month, plow profits from early issues back into production, and increase or decrease print runs in response to sales.64 We see the advantage of such flexibility, for example, in the sixtyfold increase in Pickwick’s sales over its serial run. Serials, then, were embedded in the market, as indeed the presence of advertisements in both the part installment and the periodical attested, to an extent far exceeding that of the volume edition of the same novel.65 As these examples suggest, serial novels were commodities advertised, sold, and bought in the burgeoning Victorian print marketplace.66 This commodity status extended to illustration, which publishers recognized as meeting the public’s “boundless . . . appetite for visualized narrative.”67
The illustrated serial, whether issued in part installment or in periodical form, was a “hybrid form” involving “multiple makers and mediations.”68 Both profitable venture and art form, it was forged in collaboration—and sometimes conflict—among the publisher, editor, author, artist, and, for much of the century, engraver, who transferred the artist’s vision onto the wood block or metal plate.69 The relationships among these players were often contested as publishers sought profits, editors competed for top authors and artists, authors angled to build profitable careers in a competitive market, artists struggled with editors as they faced strict publishing deadlines and tight page constraints, artists and authors variously vied with or worked alongside one another (both under tight deadlines), and artists submitted their original designs for translation by engravers onto the wood block or steel plate, each a substantially different medium.70 Fraught as the collaboration might be among these different interests, illustrations’ marketability rendered almost irrelevant any debate on their aesthetic value: as Edward F. Brewtnall commented in the Art Journal in 1902, “You do not like illustrations. You are hopelessly in the minority. The great majority of people,
