The Plot Thickens. Lisa Surridge
David Copperfield, published between May 1849 and November 1850. The slim text in Michael’s hands is part 1, now preserved in the University of Victoria’s Special Collections. Like the Cornhill, this serial edition of David Copperfield was illustrated, with visual images playing a key role for its readers; each monthly installment featured a wrapper and two steel etchings designed by Hablôt K. Browne (known as “Phiz”).
FIG. 0.1 Godfrey Sykes, wrapper for the Cornhill Magazine, August 1862. Courtesy of Simon Cooke.
These images of hands and texts, and their implications, form the alpha and omega of this study. They represent the Victorian and modern reader, both interacting with Victorian literary forms. But unlike our research assistant, most modern readers do not encounter Victorian fiction in its original publication formats, such as the illustrated periodical and the independent illustrated serial part discussed above. General readers, undergraduates, and even the majority of graduate students—as well as many scholars—read works by Dickens and other Victorian novelists mostly in fat paperback editions in which only some of the original illustrations are included (indeed, illustrations are sometimes omitted altogether) and the serial breaks are at best indicated by an asterisk at the end of a chapter. The modern paperbacks that fostered our own love of Victorian novels differ markedly in material form, page layout, and illustration placement from, for example, the slim monthly parts of William Harrison Ainsworth’s The Tower of London (1840), William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1847–48), and Dickens’s David Copperfield (1849–50); the monthly installments of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters (1864–66) in the Cornhill and Charles Reade’s Griffith Gaunt (1865–66) in the Argosy; and the weekly installments of Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities (1859)2 in Harper’s Weekly and Dinah Mulock Craik’s Mistress and Maid (1862) in Good Words.3 In this book, we try to show why this difference matters.
In Radiant Textuality (2001), Jerome McGann reminds us that the material form of a text always signifies: the “apparitions of text—its paratexts, bibliographical codes, and all visual features—are as important in the text’s signifying programs as the linguistic elements” (11–12). McGann’s argument suggests that the transformation of Victorian novels from slim illustrated parts or periodical installments to bulky paperbacks has diminished their capacity to signify through their original form. Is this loss even partially recoverable? We think so. This study attempts to bridge the gap between Victorian and modern readers by using archival materials to create what Catherine J. Golden calls “a vital window” into Victorian reading practices (introduction, 3). Following Pierre Machery’s statement that “readers are made by what makes the book” (70), we ask, How does the form of the illustrated Victorian serial novel invite readers to read? This question propels us toward a critical method that is materialist, historical, and founded on considerations of form (illustrations, advertisements, chapter initials, layout, wrappers, and periodical context). Our goal is to read Victorian illustrated serial novels in their original publication formats, asking how those forms imply specific reading practices and, in turn, demonstrating how our understanding of these texts shifts if we read them as their original Victorian readers did—in parts, over time, with illustrations constituting an integral part of the reading experience.4 This project, then, takes its starting point in the archive, where modern readers can hold Victorian periodicals and part installments in their hands.
The Illustration Revolution
The slim orange volume of the Cornhill and the July 1859 installment of A Tale of Two Cities both represent in material form two moments in the Victorian revolution in illustration and print technologies. In the eighteenth century, illustration was a minor aspect of book production. Triple-decker novels or collections were released largely unillustrated, although popular books sometimes included frontispieces with portraits of the author or vignettes of a setting. Book illustration was limited mainly to poetry, canonical eighteenth-century novels, or Shakespeare’s works.5 The late 1700s saw the rise of illustrated periodicals such as the Novelists’ Magazine (1780–88), in which classic books were serialized with new illustrations by contemporary artists. Charles Lamb, who, as the son of a London legal clerk, had access to such magazines as a child, referred in retrospect to the “pictured wonders” (871) of their pages: his was the first generation that saw text and image as intrinsically linked. The late eighteenth century also witnessed a sea change in illustrative technique: whereas copper engraving had dominated the book trade for three hundred years, in the 1780s, Thomas Bewick introduced the art of wood engraving. While the copper or steel engraver produces an intaglio print by creating indentations in the plate, into which ink is forced and then pressed onto the page, the woodcutter or wood engraver creates a relief print by removing wood from areas that will appear as white space and printing from the inked surface of the remaining block. Bewick’s innovation was to experiment with using steel-engraving tools rather than cutting away the wood with a knife—as artists did to produce the traditional woodcut—and with using the hard end grain of boxwood rather than the softer plank side. The resulting linear, black-and-white style of wood engraving was not only beautiful to look at but also practical to reproduce, as the hard boxwood block could be inserted into a printing form and thus combined on the same page as type; as well, it could be used for mass printing because of its durability.
Also inherited from the eighteenth century, steel etching was prized for its speed and practicality. The steel plate was first covered with an etching ground (a thin, acid-resistant coating often containing wax), and then the etcher transferred the design to the ground by laying the sketch “pencil side down” on the etching ground, covering it with a damp sheet, and passing it through the press.6 The lines were then drawn through the ground with etching needles of various widths, enabling the lines to be exposed to acid. Steel etching was widely used by caricaturists and prized for “its fluent line”;7 we see its mastery in designs by the talented George Cruikshank, one of the Regency’s great caricaturists and, later, a leading book illustrator in the 1830s and 1840s.
The 1820s saw the rise of steel engraving (that is, designs produced on steel plates by evacuating a line with a burin or creating dots with a tool called a mattoir, as opposed to the needle and acid used in etching). This technique migrated from bank notes to books, for which the durability of steel plates facilitated mass reproduction on mechanized presses and steel engraving’s high-quality silvery tones enabled the reproduction of elegant landscape paintings and portraits as well as of original book illustrations. By the 1830s, copper plates (such as those used by William Blake in his late eighteenth-century illustrated books) had mostly been supplanted by steel in book illustration.8 In turn, wood engraving was increasingly embraced as an art form in the 1850s and 1860s, by which point it generally supplanted steel. Notably, copper, steel, and wood engraving all involved the transfer of artists’ conceptions to the medium of the plate or block. By contrast, the final years of the century saw the widespread use of photomechanical reproduction, which enabled, for the first time, the direct replication of the artist’s pencil, ink, or wash drawing—or even a photograph—onto the printed page.
This Victorian revolution in illustration techniques coincided with technological developments in printing and transportation that enabled increasingly cheap and efficient production and distribution of print materials. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, books and newspapers were luxuries too expensive for most British people to afford. In 1815, for example, a newspaper cost seven pence,9 and around 1820, a three-volume novel thirty or more shillings, prices prohibitive to middle-class families.10 Newspapers, paper, and advertisements were all taxed, meaning that print material was priced out of the reach of many working-class readers. Moreover, for the poor, reading was additionally costly in terms of candles, made even more necessary because some people bricked up apertures to avoid the tax on windows.11 However, publishers were able to bring illustrated periodicals and books to a mass market at affordable prices as steam presses mechanized printing, the paper tax was removed, wood pulp replaced linen rags as the basis for paper, railways