The Plot Thickens. Lisa Surridge
plot outcome. What emerges from this unusual archive of evidence is that although we might think of a wrapper as having afforded merely predictive clues to narrative when Victorians first read the serial, it was in fact revisited mentally as the letterpress revealed new aspects of the plot, suggesting reinterpretation and reconsideration of previously viewed visual information.
FIG. 0.20 Charles Collins, wrapper for Charles Dickens, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, part 1 (April 1870). London: Chapman and Hall. Courtesy of W. D. Jordan Rare Books and Special Collections, Queen’s University.
Unfortunately, the Drood archive is unique. For most Victorian illustrated serial novels, no such evidence of reading practices exists. In the absence of such evidence, this book uses the form of Victorian illustrated serials (wrappers, page layout, illustration order, and serial breaks) as a basis on which to reconstruct how their first readers interpreted their complex visual and verbal information as the plot unfolded over weeks or months. Given that readers could see as well as read aspects of the plot and that serial illustrations often appeared either before or after key plot events in the letterpress, we ask what role images played in aspects of narrative such as characterization, focalization, mimesis, diegesis, plot, suspense, temporality, and genre. In so doing, we attempt to reconstruct the temporal, interpictorial, and intertexual complexities of illustrated serials. A brief case study will model our method, focusing on a single illustration from one of the century’s most popular serials.
Illustrating Method: Part 2 of Jack Sheppard as Case Study
The illustration we have chosen to analyze to demonstrate our method (fig. 0.21) is from Ainsworth’s immensely successful Jack Sheppard. The monthly serial was illustrated by George Cruikshank with steel etchings and published in Bentley’s Miscellany, where it overlapped for four months with Oliver Twist (1837–39); it was subsequently published in fifteen weekly serial parts in 1840 (Sutherland, Stanford, 323).102 Jack Sheppard is a Newgate novel, not a mystery like Drood, yet it invites very similar reading strategies to those of Drood, whereby illustrations are seen first before the verbal plot and then revisited and reexamined as readers progress through subsequent serial installments. In the case study that follows, we offer an in-depth analysis of this illustration from Jack Sheppard, showing how proleptic and analeptic reading strategies function powerfully in this popular but now little-read early nineteenth-century novel.103
First, some background: Ainsworth based his popular hero on one of the best-known figures in the Newgate Calendar, the thief and jail breaker Jack Sheppard, who was executed at age twenty-one at Tyburn in November 1724 (Hollingsworth, Newgate, 132–34).104 In addition, as already mentioned, Ainsworth owed a considerable debt to Hogarth’s Industry and Idleness, which provided the model for his contrasting narratives of two carpenter’s apprentices, Jack and his counterpart, Thames Darrell. The serial owes a debt to Oliver Twist, likewise a novel about thieves and the London underworld; however, Ainsworth’s narrative follows the infamous Jack Sheppard to the gallows, whereas Dickens’s redeems Oliver and endows him with a cozy family, leaving him safely ensconced in a middle-class home. At this stage in the late 1830s, Ainsworth, Cruikshank, and Dickens were close collaborators, with Dickens having recruited Ainsworth to Bentley’s Miscellany, which Dickens had edited from its inception, and Cruikshank having illustrated Dickens’s Sketches by Boz (1836) and Oliver Twist before Jack Sheppard and being scheduled to illustrate Barnaby Rudge (Patten, Cruikshank’s Life, 2:102).105 All three men were ambitious and overworked, with Dickens and Ainsworth vying for position as the period’s most popular author; Ainsworth and Cruikshank setting their sights on being the era’s leading historical fiction writer and illustrator, respectively; Cruikshank illustrating two major serials in Bentley’s as well as other commissions, including the Comic Almanack; Dickens writing two major serials, Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby (April 1838 to October 1839), and trying unsuccessfully to start Barnaby Rudge; and Ainsworth taking over the editorship of Bentley’s Miscellany in January 1839 from an overloaded Dickens. Moreover, all three were frustrated that Richard Bentley was enjoying what they saw as undue profits from their very considerable labors.106 Out of this stormy professional relationship among publisher, star editors, leading authors, and the outstanding illustrator of the period, the serial of Jack Sheppard was born, assuming the position of lead serial in Bentley’s ahead of Oliver Twist—and prompting sales of the magazine to increase by 10 percent (Patten, Cruikshank’s Life, 2:130).
The serial opens on the night of 26–27 November 1703, the actual date of a great storm that devastated southern Britain, drowning a thousand seamen off the Downs, felling trees, collapsing chimneys, and destroying the grounds of St. James’s Palace.107 Ainsworth’s two opening installments use the night of the storm as a backdrop for a dramatic boat chase, gunshots, several drownings, a death from a falling chimney, and the narrow escape of the infant Thames, who is named after the river that nearly claims his life. The novel then skips forward twelve years, reopening with a teenaged Jack surrounded by Hogarthian signs of immorality (gin and cards), and Thames, an apprentice at the same carpenter’s shop, who evinces signs of moral uprightness that will guide him on a more virtuous course of life. The serial eventually reveals the two as cousins, both related to a noble Lancashire family; Jack is hanged at Tyburn,108 whereas Thames, revealed to be a marquis, marries the carpenter’s daughter.
Ainsworth had completed the first epoch of three in Jack Sheppard by the time Cruikshank began illustrating the serial in March 1838, meaning that the illustrator had an ample manuscript on which to base his designs. Moreover, Ainsworth’s letterpress describes the scenes to be illustrated—including costumes, architecture, lighting, furniture, and decor—with greater visual specificity than that of Dickens, indeed packing them with antiquarian detail, some of which was cut by Bentley (Patten, Cruikshank’s Life, 2:98). Ainsworth’s and Cruikshank’s collaboration was close. Although no records exist of their exchanges concerning the early illustrations of Jack Sheppard, we know that for the later ones, Ainsworth sent Cruikshank antiquarian material on which to base his designs; Cruikshank sent Ainsworth notes on particular details that he thought the author should insert into the letterpress to ensure a close match of text and image; and Ainsworth enquired of Cruikshank as to details of the illustrations to insert in the letterpress when, later in the serial, the artist worked ahead of the author in their pressure-filled publication schedule (see Patten, Cruikshank’s Life, 2:112–13). As Patten summarizes, in the Jack Sheppard illustrations, “the fit between text and picture is so explicit that neither could have been produced without [author and artist] consulting the other” (Cruikshank’s Life, 2:99).
FIG. 0.21 George Cruikshank, “The Storm,” illustration for William Harrison Ainsworth, Jack Sheppard, part 2. Bentley’s Miscellany, February 1839, 113 facing. Courtesy of W. D. Jordan Rare Books and Special Collections, Queen’s University.
The illustration on which we focus here faced the first page of part 2 in the February 1839 issue of Bentley’s Miscellany. It is proleptic, showing the great storm of November 1703 before the letterpress describes it. The steel etching depicts a dramatic scene of death and survival in the heart of the tempest and in the heart of London, demonstrating a still image’s capacity to convey extreme movement and turmoil. The illustration, like all the others for Jack Sheppard, is rectangular and bordered with a dark margin, conveying a gravitas that had largely been missing from the borderless, oval-shaped vignettes of Oliver Twist (Patten, Cruikshank’s Life, 2:100). Cruikshank sets his scene under an arch of Old London Bridge, a noteworthy location that had recently passed into history with its 1832 demolition after the 1831 opening of New London Bridge; Ainsworth had sent the artist a book, Richard Thomson’s Chronicles of London Bridge (1827),