The Plot Thickens. Lisa Surridge
War of the Worlds, part 3. Pearson’s Magazine, June 1897, 609. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Victoria Libraries.
FIG. 0.12 Warwick Goble, “In a stride or two he was among them,” illustration for H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds, part 7. Pearson’s Magazine, October 1897, 455. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Victoria Libraries.
An important function of Victorian illustration was its capacity to introduce extradiegetic elements (from the Latin extra, outside; and the Greek diegesis, narrative)—that is, elements that are outside those described in the letterpress. An example of an extradiegetic element in an illustration is the poster indicating “MURDER! £100 REWARD!” that Browne inserted in the background of “Shadow,” his dark plate of Lady Dedlock on the stairs (fig. 0.13) in part 16 of Dickens’s Bleak House,88 serialized in part installments between March 1852 and September 1853. The poster’s reference to Tulkinghorn’s murder and the police search for the guilty brings the London street world into collision with the isolated grandeur of the Dedlock estate. A famous example of extradiegetic illustration is Vanity Fair’s “Becky’s second appearance in the character of Clytemnestra” (fig. 0.14), an image that opens the novel’s final double part (19 and 20). Here, in a striking example of purposefully extradiegetic illustration by the author-illustrator, Thackeray himself draws in the image detail that he chose not to reveal in the letterpress,89 showing his money-hungry antiheroine, Becky, hiding behind a curtain holding what looks like a vial in her hand and eavesdropping while Jos reveals to Dobbin that he has insured his life. When Jos dies three months later and Becky inherits, this extradiegetic steel etching, together with the caption’s intertextual allusion to Clytemnestra’s murder of Agamemnon, intimates that Becky is a murderess, a visual suggestion that exceeds the more restrained letterpress.
FIG. 0.13 Hablôt K. Browne, “Shadow,” illustration for Charles Dickens, Bleak House, part 16 (June 1853), front matter. London: Bradbury and Evans. Courtesy of University of Calgary Special Collections.
FIG. 0.14 William Makepeace Thackeray, “Becky’s Second Appearance in the Character of Clytemnestra,” illustration for his Vanity Fair, parts 19 and 20 (April 1847), front matter. London: Bradbury and Evans. BC–First Editions 601. Courtesy of Archives and Special Collections, University of New Brunswick Libraries.
Another function of illustration in which the visual predominates over the verbal is the interpictorial (from the Latin inter, between; and pictorius, of painting), referring to the relationships among visual images, either in the same collection or source or among sources. Whereas the reference to Clytemnestra, above, is intertextual, illustrations may similarly make visual—that is, interpictorial—references to other images, paintings, and visual tropes. In part 11 of Jack Sheppard, for example, George Cruikshank’s steel etching of Jack posing in prison for his portrait to be painted by James Thornhill (fig. 0.15) cleverly replicates the cheeky pose of the actual Thornhill portrait,90 in which Sheppard points to the door, indicating his plans for another jailbreak. Cruikshank’s etching needle renders Thornhill’s incomplete painting as well as Cruikshank’s artistic antecedents Thornhill and Hogarth, Thornhill’s son-in-law (Patten, Cruikshank’s Life, 2:114–15). Another example of illustrators using interpictorial references to pay tribute to their artistic forebears is Millais’s wood engraving of “The Prodigal Son” (March 1863; fig. 0.16) for Thomas Guthrie’s The Parables Read in the Light of the Present Day (Good Words, January–December 1863), in which the characters’ positions reference those of Albrecht Dürer’s woodcut The Descent from the Cross (ca. 1509; fig. 0.17); Jason Rosenfeld terms this “a conscious evocation” (119). Millais’s interpictorial reference simultaneously pays tribute to the woodcut as a form of high art, renders homage to Dürer as one of its foremost practitioners,91 and hallows the embrace of the father and the prodigal son by implicitly alluding to Christ’s body being taken down from the cross.
FIG. 0.15 George Cruikshank, “The Portrait,” illustration for William Harrison Ainsworth, Jack Sheppard, part 11. Bentley’s Miscellany, November 1839, 429 facing. Courtesy of W. D. Jordan Rare Books and Special Collections, Queen’s University.
FIG. 0.16 John Everett Millais, “The Prodigal Son,” illustration for Thomas Guthrie, The Parables Read in the Light of the Present Day, part 3. Good Words, March 1863, 161 facing. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Victoria Libraries.
FIG. 0.17 Albrecht Dürer, The Descent from the Cross (ca. 1509). Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; gift of Junius Spencer Morgan, 1919.
Finally, in historical fiction, which combines a plot involving fictional characters with readers’ knowledge of a known historical event, the relation between plot and story becomes instead one among plot, story, and received history: a threefold relation among narrative elements. In historical fiction, therefore, the analysis of illustrations departs in key respects from the analysis of other genres and requires additional terminology. First, while historical illustrations may and often do anticipate the letterpress, the effect of prolepsis is reduced considerably because readers already know the outcome of the historical plot. Readers may, however, await the illustrator’s interpretation of a particularly famous scene or wonder how the fictional characters’ lives will unfold in relation to known historical events. In considering the role of illustration in historical fiction, we therefore supplement our narratological approach with terminology developed by historians. They identify two modes of historical illustration: the metaphorical (from the Greek metapherein, transfer), which renders images of imagined historical scenes; and the metonymic (from the Greek metonumia, change of name), which renders historical ideas by images of actual artifacts such as paintings, buildings, or documents, showing the association of things with ideas.92 Metaphorical illustration captures readers’ imaginations, inviting them to visualize themselves as though present at historical events as these unfolded; by contrast, metonymic illustration invites readers to imagine themselves as archaeologists, examining remains of the past as these exist in the readers’ present. Adapting these terms enables us to analyze the complex temporal relations of historical as well as fictional plots of illustrated Victorian serials, reconstructing, as far as we can, their unfolding to Victorian readers.
Our narratological analysis of illustrated serials extends beyond the single serial part to consider the text-image relationships that developed over a serial’s duration, which might range from weeks to years. Over this extended period, images accrued meaning through complex patterns of repetition, juxtaposition, contradiction, and/or irony. They looked backward to earlier plot events after a week or even several months, repeated or contrasted with earlier images, or anticipated events in serial parts to come. They echoed known images from other visual media such as etchings, books, and paintings. Finally, serials reflected on their own modes of production (both verbal and visual), self-consciously