The Plot Thickens. Lisa Surridge
the events of the image. This dilation occurs when Ainsworth, always interested in promoting a historical sense of place through his fiction, expounds upon the history of Old London Bridge in a new chapter that bears the bridge’s name as its title. In a passage that invites readers to contemplate the old bridge as historical metonym, he describes its structure and takes readers back to the days when the spikes of the “reverend and picturesque” bridge were “garnished . . . with the heads of traitors” (JS, 2:127, 128); he also traces the presence of a chapel in its early years. Only then, with Cruikshank’s metonymic image elaborated upon with historical detail, does Ainsworth narrate the action scene that matches the illustration: the collision of the skiff with the bridge, Wood’s dramatic leap to safety, Ben’s death in the torrent, and Wood’s vague perception that a man has reached the shore behind him (a perception confirmed for readers by the visual image already seen). Interestingly, this account in the letterpress faces another illustration (fig. 0.22), titled “The Murder on the Thames”: it depicts the two boats before the collision with the bridge at the moment when Wood and Ben grab Thames from the arms of the drowning Darrell. Thackeray admired this image, complimenting Cruikshank’s skillful etching of “the gloom of the old bridge, a few lights glimmering from the houses here and there . . . a great heavy rack of clouds . . . sweeping over the bridge, and men with flaring torches, the murderers, . . . borne away” (Essay, 54). This new image, then, is analeptic: we have already read about this event, so it provides a flashback to the dramatic scene of the rescue. In a complex temporal relation, the image moves readers backward in time even as they catch up in the letterpress to part 2’s proleptic first image, in which Wood and the child perch perilously in the middle of the roaring storm with their pursuer on the ledge behind them.
FIG. 0.22 George Cruikshank, “The Murder on the Thames,” illustration for William Harrison Ainsworth, Jack Sheppard, part 2. Bentley’s Miscellany, February 1839, 128 facing. Courtesy of W. D. Jordan Rare Books and Special Collections, Queen’s University.
In the rest of the novel, the letterpress returns repeatedly to the scene on the bridge—that is, the moment when Thames loses his birth family and gains his name from the river, when he is claimed by Wood, and when he enters his adoptive London home and subsequent apprenticeship with Jack. First, Thames’s very name recalls the scene. In addition, part 4 explicitly recalls the image, when Rowland remembers it in an analeptic passage: “[T]he whole scene upon the river is passing before me. I hear the splash in the water—I see the white object floating like a sea-bird on the tide—it will not sink!” (JS, 4:350). Gruesomely, the reader returns analeptically to Cruikshank’s illustration when Wild (accompanied by Rowland) returns to the bridge and plucks a rotten head from the Thames. His mention of the “starling” (the base of a bridge pier) locates the two precisely in relation to where Wood stood in Cruikshank’s image:
“You remember that starling, Sir Rowland,” he said maliciously, “and what occurred on it, twelve years ago?”
“Too well,” answered the knight, frowning. “Ah! what is that?” he cried, pointing to a dark object floating near them amid the boiling waves, and which presented a frightful resemblance to a human face.
“We’ll see,” returned the thief taker. And, stretching out his hand, he lifted the dark object from the flood.
It proved to be a human head, though with scarcely a vestige of the features remaining. (JS, 6:574)
The serial thus returns repeatedly to this key visual and verbal scene of naming and struggle until Thames is identified as the Marquis de Chatillon (but reaffirms his working-class affiliations by marrying Wood’s daughter). Adding to this process of viewing and re-viewing, theatrical adaptations offered readers a further and different way of recalling illustrations: during the “Jack Sheppard craze” (Meisel, Realizations, 265) of 1839 to 1840, such adaptations played fast and loose with the novel’s plot but used faithful reproduction of the serial’s images as a lure for audiences. The Adelphi’s poster featured twelve illustrations, including part 2’s “The Storm,” inviting readers to reexperience the serial in a live-action performance (Meisel, Realizations, 273). To match its scenery with the serial’s images, the Royal Surrey Theatre hired Cruikshank to oversee its scenery production; one of its sets included four rooms designed to recall Cruikshank’s four-panel representation of one of Jack’s escapes.111
As this analysis suggests, the serial plot of Jack Sheppard eschews suspense in favor of proleptic illustration and the known trajectory of Jack’s life; instead of suspense, readers get irony, pathos, antiquarian detail, narrative dilation, historical metonymy, and comedy interspliced with dramatic action scenes as well as quick cuts between proleptic and analeptic scenes. Such proleptic and analeptic effects, produced by the order of illustrations in Bentley’s Miscellany, are particular to the serial. They indicate the complex experience of Jack Sheppard’s initial readers as they moved back and forth in the reading process from image to text and back to image again. In reconstructing the experience of serial reading as shaped by material form, we see that far from unfolding in linear fashion, the plot of the serial novel leaps ahead visually into the heart of the action, then moves backward in time, then outward into Romantic dilation, then forward again into action, then outward again into historical metonymy and diegesis, then forward into action again, and then back into the action with an analeptic image.
We should remember, in this context, that Jack Sheppard was a household name; Ainsworth understood that his readers would already know the arc of his main narrative, which takes us from Jack’s infancy to his death at the scaffold. Ainsworth’s dramatic unfolding of the story, then, as well as Cruikshank’s images, forms the heart of the serial novel’s creative enterprise. Readers would have been asking not What will happen to Jack Sheppard? but What will happen next in this particular scene? How will this scene animate the history of London? and How will the text interpret and elaborate these stories (of Jack Sheppard and of the great storm of London) that I already know? Thus, the narrative technique of one of the century’s most successful illustrated serials encompasses artistic interpretation and elaboration as well as complex visual prolepsis and analepsis in the context of a known narrative trajectory.
Just as Du Maurier described viewing Dickens’s illustrations before, during, and after the serial, therefore, readers of part 2 of Jack Sheppard in Bentley’s Miscellany thus engaged in formal strategies of prolepsis (viewing Cruikshank’s image in advance), matching (equating the verbal scene with the visual image), and then analepsis (returning to re-view this key illustration). The process of reading illustrated serials, then, appears as profoundly nonlinear: moving forward in the novel repeatedly requires moving backward in the plot, re-viewing and revisiting key scenes, and comparing visual and verbal information. As this example suggests—and the rest of this book demonstrates—the illustrated serial novel is thus far less linear and much more complex than the received history of the Victorian novel has suggested. By means of its complexity as well as the popular forms that recalled it to memory, it involved readers in an intricate interplay of verbal and visual narrative elements.
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The illustrated serial novel, savored by readers over time and enjoyed for its verbal and visual interplay, thus demanded complex reading strategies that this book attempts to reconstruct and explore. Like Jane Eyre poring over Bewick’s Birds or David Copperfield fascinated by Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, Victorian readers had to develop the visual literacy necessary to comprehend text and image in complex relationships. Moreover, serial readers had to develop reading strategies that comprehended proleptic information, extratextual knowledge, flashbacks and repetitions, and metonymic, intertextual, and interpictorial effects. Like Du Maurier, they had to develop the capacity to read and reread the image before, during, and after the serial part. And like Gautier, they had to recognize that seeing had become essential to their way of knowing the world.
In the pages that follow, we explore what happens to the received view of Victorian novels