The Plot Thickens. Lisa Surridge
type, meaning that such images were printed on separate paper and tipped in before the letterpress. Moreover, tailpieces would often be supplied according to how much room was left on the page after the type for the letterpress had been set, meaning that the choice to insert a tailpiece was in part dictated by space availability. Deliberate or not, however, the placement of illustrations in serials created a complex reading experience in which readers saw events in images and read events in the letterpress, often experiencing a plot arrangement that exacerbated the existing complexities of the verbal plot. Narratological terms—such as prolepsis, analepsis, mimesis, diegesis, iteration, repetition, and extradiegesis—can help us to identify and understand these complex relationships between visual and verbal plots.
A key narratological term that we deploy in this book is prolepsis (from the Greek pro, before; and lepsis, act of taking), meaning a flash-forward and referring to plot events that jump ahead in the narrative and therefore appear before their chronological position in the story. Prolepsis is distinct from foreshadowing because it involves the revelation of an actual plot event as opposed to foreshadowing’s intimation of a possible event or outcome. Victorian serial wrappers, seen before readers opened the letterpress, were proleptic by virtue of their position, anticipating plot events to follow. Although many wrappers merely gave general hints of the narrative to come (in part because authors often wrote to installment deadlines and so could not always provide the whole manuscript to their illustrators), some provided distinct representations of characters and plot arcs: David Copperfield’s wrapper, for example, shows a child’s journey from cradle to grave (fig. 0.2), and A Tale of Two Cities’s wrapper shows a guillotine (fig. 0.3), revealing the novel’s French Revolutionary setting and—as readers would eventually realize—pointing to the novel’s final plot event, the execution of Sydney Carton.
Serial illustrations were also often proleptic: typically, they were either tipped in before a serial part or concentrated in the early pages of the letterpress in the form of chapter initials and full-page plates. Even in full-page folio sheets such as those of Harper’s Weekly, readers saw illustrations before they read the installment’s letterpress. When readers view an image before starting to absorb the letterpress, they already know something—often a great deal—about the plot to follow; the letterpress then reiterates and elaborates on what the illustration has already shown, and readers wait to see when the verbal text will match (or fail to match) their visual expectations. For example, readers of Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd, serialized with illustrations by Helen Paterson in the Cornhill from January to December 1874,81 opened chapter 43 of part 10 (October 1874) to see a chapter initial showing a man digging by a gravestone; this initial faced a full-page wood engraving depicting a man kneeling over a coffin as a woman looks on in agony (fig. 0.4). Part 9 of the novel had ended with Gabriel Oak delivering to Bathsheba Troy’s home the coffin containing the body of Fanny Robin (her former servant) as well as that of her illegitimate baby by Bathsheba’s husband; to spare Bathsheba, Gabriel had erased from the coffin lid the chalked words “and child,” leaving only the identification “Fanny Robin” (FMC, 9:280). Part 10’s full-page illustration, then, proleptically shows readers, before the letterpress tells them, that Bathsheba will see Troy kneeling lovingly before the bodies of his former lover and their dead child, an event that occurs in the letterpress at the end of chapter 43.82 The chapter initial matches a still later plot event: only at the end of chapter 46 does the letterpress recount the events of Troy ordering a gravestone and planting flowers around the grave by night, the scene of the chapter initial. Readers of the Cornhill serial, therefore, saw two of the novel’s pivotal scenes in advance, prompting questions of emotional import and plot impact that would later be confirmed, replaced, or refined by the letterpress: What will Bathsheba and Troy say to one another over the coffin of his lover and illegitimate child? Will Bathsheba condone his behavior? Console him? Reject him? Will he defend himself? Lie? Leave her? Will Troy dig up the grave for some reason? Such speculation suggests that the process of reading illustrated serials involved testing multiple proliferating hypotheses against known visual information. Readers became speculators, wagering on possible relationships among characters and guessing about possible plot lines. The proleptic knowledge imparted by illustrations thus functioned for Victorian readers as what educational psychologists call an advance organizer—information known in advance that shapes subsequent interpretation,83 or in this case, plot detail that affects how readers understand the subsequent letterpress.
FIG. 0.2 Hablôt K. Browne, wrapper for Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, part 1 (May 1849). London: Bradbury and Evans. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Victoria Libraries.
FIG. 0.3 Hablôt K. Browne, wrapper for Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, part 1 (June 1859). London: Chapman and Hall. Courtesy of W. D. Jordan Rare Books and Special Collections, Queen’s University.
FIG. 0.4 Helen Paterson, illustration, “Her tears fell fast beside the unconscious pair,” and chapter initial for Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd, part 10. Cornhill Magazine, October 1874, 490 and facing. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Victoria Libraries.
In narratology, the counterpart of prolepsis is analepsis (from the Greek ana, back; and lepsis, act of taking), meaning a flashback and referring to plot events that propel readers backward in the story, thereby bringing into the narrative “now” an event that occurred in the chronological past. As we have discussed, opening illustrations of serial parts often played a proleptic role, pointing forward in the plot, but they could also be analeptic, reminding readers of a past event from a previous installment. For example, the opening full-page wood engraving for part 11 (November 1874) of Far from the Madding Crowd represents the scene narrated at the end of part 10: Troy swimming out to sea from a rocky cove and being pulled by a current between “two projecting spurs of rock” (FMC, 10:511; fig. 0.5) just before he is rescued by sailors in a passing boat.84 Part 11’s opening image shows the moment in part 10 at which the swimmer raises “his left [hand] to hail” the boat (FMC, 10:512), flashing readers back to Troy’s rescue, which remains unknown to those left on shore. Part 11’s chapter initial, showing a forlorn Bathsheba at a window, is proleptic, indicating her pensive state to come, when she will not know whether her husband is alive or dead (see fig. 0.5).
FIG. 0.5 Helen Paterson, illustration, “He saw a bather carried along in the current,” and chapter initial for Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd, part 11. Cornhill Magazine, November 1874, 617 and facing. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Victoria Libraries.
Readers of part 11 will discover in retrospect, however, that the full-page illustration of Troy swimming is in fact complexly both analeptic and proleptic because it contains in its foreground a visual detail not mentioned in part 10: the presence of an eyewitness who saw Troy swept out to sea—indeed, as the image shows, saw his arm raised to hail the approaching boat—but did not see his rescue by that boat. At the beginning of part 11’s letterpress, this witness’s account will lead the community to believe that Troy has drowned. The illustration’s caption points forward to this account with a reference to the eyewitness: “He saw a bather carried along in the current” (FMC, 11:617 facing). The illustration