The Plot Thickens. Lisa Surridge
Patten advocates an end to mimetic criticism that “compare[s] text with picture,” arguing that illustrations are “not the text pictured” (“Serial Illustration,” 91). According to Patten, illustration “may suppose, support, subvert, explain, interpret, and critique its verbal partner, entering into a complexly reciprocal, interactive, and . . . persuasive dialogue” (“Serial Illustration,” 92). Kooistra stresses the “bitextual” relationship between verbal and visual components (Artist; see subtitle); Golden stresses the Victorian consumer of illustrated material as a “reader-viewer” (Serials, 187); Turner identifies Romola’s illustrations as a “parallel” to the written text (“George Eliot,” 17); and Miller argues for the “reciprocal” relationship between text and image: “Each refers to the other. Each illustrates the other, in a continual back and forth movement which is incarnated in the experience of the reader as his eyes move from words to picture and back again, juxtaposing the two in a mutual establishment of meaning. . . . The pictures are about the text; the text is about the pictures” (qtd. in Hall, Trollope and His Illustrators, 2).
Such appeals, relevant to all illustrated Victorian fiction, apply with particular force to serial novels, in which the placement and prominence of illustrations made images an essential part of the Victorian reading experience. Previous studies of illustrated Victorian serials have analyzed the key role of images in individual texts or the works of single authors;78 some of the most far-reaching analyze modes of illustration across a range of texts and authors.79 Such critical analyses see illustrations as variously subverting, enriching, reflecting, or complementing the written text. The most sophisticated, including those of Golden, Kooistra, Patten, and Thomas, describe illustration as an “integral, complexly dialogic, and essential feature” of the novel in this period (Patten, “Serial Illustration,” 122). Their work underpins our study.
Studies of Victorian illustration also form an important foundation for this book. Our research has been informed and guided by a handful of key resources on artists, engravers, periodicals, and illustration techniques. Bamber Gascoigne’s invaluable guidebook How to Identify Prints as well as Simon Houfe’s Dictionary of British Book Illustrators and Caricaturists, 1800–1914, Eric de Maré’s The Victorian Woodblock Illustrators, and Rodney K. Engen’s Dictionary of Victorian Wood Engravers have provided us with reliable and specific knowledge of nineteenth-century print techniques and the artists and engravers who used them. A suite of mid-twentieth-century books on Victorian illustration by Philip James, Ruari McLean, Percy H. Muir, and Geoffrey Wakeman have served as indispensable references. The work of Patten has been invaluable to our understanding of George Cruikshank’s contributions to the development of serial illustration; of Dickens as an “industrial-age author” (see the subtitle of his book Charles Dickens and “Boz”); and of the professional and economic relationships that drove the creative burst of the 1830s and 1840s. Brian Maidment’s scholarship on Victorian comic annuals and almanacs as well as caricature has refined our knowledge of Victorian illustrations’ indebtedness to Regency caricature and the comic tradition. On the topic of mid-Victorian illustrated periodicals and books, the works of leading scholars Simon Cooke and Paul Goldman have informed our understanding of the complex relations among authors, artists, publishers, editors, and engravers; have deepened our grasp of the links between book illustration and artistic movements of the period, including the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; and have guided our analysis of the style of serial illustrations, particularly the wood engravings of the 1860s.
This book is also fueled by the past several decades’ explosion of scholarly interest in Victorian serial fiction. Catherine Delafield, Mary Hamer, Linda K. Hughes and Michael Lund, Graham Law, Carol A. Martin, J. Don Vann, and others have convincingly demonstrated the unique qualities of serial reading: its temporal dynamics, the importance of installments’ endings and beginnings, and the way in which a work’s duration “meant that serials could become entwined with readers’ own sense of lived experience and passing time” (Hughes and Lund, Victorian Serial, 8). Recently, Susan David Bernstein and Catherine DeRose have brought digital analysis to bear on a corpus of Victorian serial fiction, demonstrating convincingly that the language of serial fiction differs from that of nonserialized novels, bearing more references, for example, to the predicted future (“Reading Numbers,” 59).80 However, critics have only started to consider the narratological function of images in the plot, temporality, characterization, theme, and genre of Victorian illustrated serial novels. This book attempts to fill that gap.
Illustrated Serial Fiction: A Narratological Approach
Narratology—the theory of how fiction is narrated—can help us understand how novelists use plot to convey meaning and, in turn, how illustrations contribute to plot. In using the term plot, we rely on the narratological distinction between plot and story: by plot, a word that originally meant a ground plan, design, or scheme, narratologists refer to the artistic arrangement of events in a novel as opposed to the chronological order of the story that readers construct in their minds. The distinction between plot and story is least noticeable in linear retrospective narratives such as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), a novel that follows the development of the protagonist from childhood to adulthood without toggling between time frames. In contrast, the distinction is very marked in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), wherein the narrative repeatedly departs from chronological order. Wuthering Heights opens after the first Catherine’s death, plunging its reader into an encounter with Heathcliff, the younger Catherine, and Hareton, whose relationships are incomprehensible to the bewildered Lockwood, who subsequently listens to Nellie Dean’s retrospective account of the elder Catherine’s and Heathcliff’s turbulent childhoods. The novel’s plot thus creates links among generations that would be less salient in a strictly chronological unfolding, which would move from Hindley’s birth in 1757 through to Heathcliff’s death in 1802 and Catherine and Hareton’s marriage in 1803.
Although narratological analysis is often applied to letterpress alone, narratologists recognize that visual information (such as that found in comic books, graphic novels, and films) constitutes one way in which plot events are represented in texts. Yet so far, few critics have asked what might happen to the received theories of the Victorian serial novel if we were to consider illustrations as integral components of plot—that is, as visually represented plot events that accrue just as much importance as those depicted verbally by the letterpress. Turner and David Skilton are exceptions: both suggest that seeing particular illustrations changed how Victorian readers understood character and plot. For example, Turner points out that the placement of illustrations in the serial edition of Romola (which featured full-page wood engravings tipped in before the serial part, with an accompanying chapter initial leading the reader’s eye from image to letterpress) means that the reader sees Tito and Tessa in each other’s arms before Romola herself suspects her husband’s infidelity (Turner, “George Eliot,” 22). Similarly, Skilton notes that serial readers of Trollope’s Orley Farm saw “Guilty,” Millais’s illustration of Lady Mason confessing to Sir Peregrine, before reading about the event in the letterpress; he argues that illustrations play a “shaping role” in the novel (“Relation,” 305–6). Moreover, Ann Lewis has suggested the role of illustration in complicating the point of view and focalization of eighteenth-century texts, and Linda M. Shires has analyzed “perspective” and “point of view” (Perspectives, 11) as related phenomena of both verbal and visual texts. Building on these important critical contributions, this book analyzes the richly dual texts of the Victorian illustrated serial by focusing on the narratological role of illustration, arguing that the plots of such novels are “thickened”—that is, rendered narratologically far more complex—by the presence of illustrations.
As we have discussed, the material form of the Victorian serial suggested—if not actually imposed—certain reading practices for its original readers. The dual form of the illustrated serial meant that Victorian readers both saw and read plot events, often in complex order. The unfolding of the serial over weeks or months meant that readers could also perceive patterns in which images might refer backward or leap forward in the fictional plot. We are not arguing that these effects were deliberately created; many were the effects of technical constraints. In the 1820s to 1840s,