The Plot Thickens. Lisa Surridge
that this huge drop in cost and sharp increase in production had revolutionized the printing industry: “[B]y means of improvement in the art of engraving, giving facilities for publishing rapidly large editions, illustrative engravings can be given to the public at one-fortieth of their cost a few years ago” (“Speaking to the Eye,” 452).13
These innovations in print technology and illustrative techniques allowed Victorian publishers to imagine book formats that blended text and image as “equal partners in the discourse.”14 In wrapper designs that created brands for serials and periodicals, in full-page illustrations that graced books and magazines, and in tiny chapter initials and tailpieces, artists created images that might variously decorate, complement, add to, contradict, or complicate the letterpress—but that in all cases contributed to the rich meanings of verbal-visual forms. New publication formats—the illustrated comic almanac, the illustrated annual, the illustrated serial, the illustrated book, and the illustrated newspaper or periodical—all blended verbal and visual signifiers, a fact that book historians understand as crucial to our understanding of the period’s texts: as Robert L. Patten argues, “If we lose our ability to read images, we lose historical comprehension” (“Politics,” 111). In turn, Victorian readers became adept at visual interpretation: as Golden notes, “During the first wave of industrialization, literacy meant interpreting the details of an image as well as the words on a page” (introduction, 6).
The early nineteenth century saw a burgeoning market for illustrated literature, with a strong public appetite for political caricature and satire. As Brian Maidment has shown, comic annuals and almanacs as well as broadsides fed the popular taste for visual imagery and verbal-visual discourse. Print shops flourished, with Rudolph Ackermann opening his famous emporium of art prints and supplies in the Strand (P. James, English, 17). The innovation of colored aquatints (illustrations made by using acid to etch copper plates to different depths and colored by hand)15 brought color illustration to high-end books, with aquatint illustrations becoming popular in texts on landscape, flora, fauna, heraldry, battles, and events of national importance.16 Another fashionable and expensively produced illustrated book format was the literary annual, popular from the early 1820s to the mid-1850s: titles such as the Forget-Me-Not (1822–47) and the Keepsake (1827–57) appeared each fall in time for the Christmas gift-giving season, taking the middle-class market by storm with their combination of attractive bindings, steel-engraved illustrations, and poetry and prose by well-established, often celebrity authors.
In fiction, from the 1820s on, the monthly serial part, combining an illustrated wrapper with text and images, became the era’s quintessential fictional form, born of the cheaper illustration modes as well as of the publisher’s ability to print and distribute the early installments of a serial with minimal outlay in comparison to volume publication. One of the first such best sellers was Pierce Egan’s boisterous Life in London; or, The Day and Night Scenes of Jerry Hawthorn Esq. and Corinthian Tom (serialized in twenty monthly parts from October 1820 to June 1821 with hand-colored aquatints and additional wood engravings, all produced by George and Robert Cruikshank in a lively caricature-inflected style),17 a text that inspired at least sixty-five spinoff publications.18 Dickens owed his literary rise to the illustrated serial novel, starting with his comedic The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (known commonly as The Pickwick Papers and published monthly from March 1836 to October 1837 with steel etchings in every part), a serial whose sales started at less than 500 per number and grew to 40,000.19 Equaling Dickens’s works in contemporary popularity were the illustrated serials of Ainsworth, whose “immensely successful” Newgate novel Jack Sheppard (January 1839–February 1840) propelled the sales of Bentley’s Miscellany beyond those attained during the serialization of Dickens’s Oliver Twist.20 Both were illustrated with steel etchings by George Cruikshank, considered the “Lion of the day” among contemporary illustrators (Patten, Cruikshank’s Life, 2:2). Serials were subsequently released in volume form, usually with illustrations inserted (technically, tipped in) close to the plot events that they depicted.
Publishers also found marketing opportunities in reprinting previously published books, this time with illustrations; the novels of Walter Scott, originally published unillustrated, were reissued in such editions. Constable released the first illustrated edition of Scott’s novels, Novels and Tales of the Author of Waverley, in 1819; the sole illustration was a title-page vignette of Edinburgh Castle. Ten years later, Robert Cadell published the forty-eight-volume Magnum Opus edition, which included ninety-six illustrations by thirty-five artists (R. Hill, Picturing, 75); the contrast in illustrations for these two editions indicates the magnitude of the change in publishing practice.21 By 1831, Scott himself estimated that without illustrations the recent edition of his Waverley novels would have sold 5,000 fewer copies (and earned £13,000 less).22 The flowering of book illustration led to books now prized by book historians and collectors: William Allingham’s The Music Master (1855), illustrated with nine wood engravings by leading Pre-Raphaelite artists Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Arthur Hughes,23 and the Moxon edition of Alfred Tennyson’s Poems (1857), illustrated with fifty-four wood engravings by Rossetti, Millais, William Holman Hunt, and others.24 By the 1860s, the popular taste for illustrated texts had come to echo the predilection of Lewis Carroll’s Alice, who—not yet in Wonderland—asks, “[W]hat is the use of a book . . . without pictures . . . ?” (Alice’s Adventures, 9).25
The popularity of images also propelled the innovation of Victorian illustrated magazines and newspapers. The first illustrated mass-market periodical was the Penny Magazine, founded in 1832, the first issue of which sold 213,241 copies.26 In 1841, Punch was founded by engraver Ebenezer Landells and journalist Henry Mayhew; quickly sold to Bradbury and Evans, it featured the work of leading comic illustrators and caricaturists such as Richard Doyle, Charles Keene, John Leech, Kenny Meadows, and John Tenniel under the guidance of editor Mark Lemon. Inheritor of the strong Regency tradition of graphic caricature,27 Punch was soon to become the era’s leading comic illustrated periodical. Six years after its founding, Ralph Waldo Emerson described its images as “equal to the best pamphlets, . . . [conveying] to the eye in an instant the popular view which was taken of each turn of public affairs” (qtd. in Cruse, 408).28 In 1842, Victorians saw the first pictorial weekly newspaper, the Illustrated London News, whose opening statement described the “pencil” as “oracular with the spirit of truth” (“Our Address,” 1). The Illustrated London News subsequently distinguished itself by its “steady, week-by-week coverage in which pictures fully partnered with letterpress in conveying information and commentary about current events.”29 In France, L’Illustration, journal universel (started in 1843) offered to French readers a continental version of the Illustrated London News.30 The Graphic, founded in 1869 as a competitor to the Illustrated London News, announced with its very name as well as by its labor practices (which valued the work of artists and engravers) the importance it placed on the visual arts. William Luson Thomas, the paper’s founder, “commissioned artists of stature to paint images for the paper’s summer and winter colour supplements” and set up a gallery to “complement” the newspaper.31 Images, in short, had become crucial to Victorians’ way of knowing their world, as well as central to their reading practices.
Illustrations became central to literary magazines as well, starting with the journals of the 1830s and 1840s such as Bentley’s Miscellany (founded in 1837 by publisher Richard Bentley under the editorship of Dickens, with George Cruikshank as illustrator) and the London Journal (founded in 1845 and outselling the Times by ten million copies in 1855).32 Illustrated literary periodicals flowered in the 1860s with the establishment of family magazines such as Once a Week (founded in 1859), the Cornhill and Good Words (both founded in 1860), and the Argosy (founded in 1865). In 1859, when Dickens’s separation from his wife and subsequent fight with his publishers, Bradbury and Evans, led him to discontinue Household Words and start All the Year Round (both unillustrated), Bradbury and Evans promptly launched a competitor, the richly illustrated Once a Week, designed to “outdo the ‘blindness’ of Dickens’s