The Plot Thickens. Lisa Surridge
that Forrest Reid judges “more brilliant than any that had been seen before” (44); they included Millais, Du Maurier, Hunt, Keene, Tenniel, Frederick Sandys, James McNeill Whistler, Matthew Lawless, Frederick Walker, George J. Pinwell, Arthur Boyd Houghton, E. J. Poynter, and William Small.34 Heavily influenced by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and guided by Lucas toward detailed representation of all aspects of the letterpress, the magazine became, in Simon Cooke’s judgment, an “effective realization of the Pre-Raphaelites’ ideals” (Illustrated, 103). The Cornhill, started by publisher George Smith under the editorship of writer and illustrator Thackeray, also published the work of leading illustrators (Mary Ellen Edwards, Millais, Fildes, Sandys, Helen Paterson, and Frederic Leighton) and authors (Thackeray, Gaskell, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, and Wilkie Collins). Smith’s recruitment of leading illustrators and authors suggests that he viewed the combination of text and image as intrinsic to reading and selling both poetry and fiction; indeed, Cooke argues that Smith aimed “to rekindle the intensity of the illustrated text” as it had been achieved by Ainsworth with George Cruikshank, Dickens with Cruikshank and Browne, and Thackeray with Doyle (Illustrated, 119).35 Turning away from the graphic tradition of caricature toward a more realist style influenced by Royal Academy training (which involved anatomical accuracy learned by drawing from the nude figure),36 the magazines of the 1860s established “sixties style,” with its use of wood engraving, close attention to physiological detail and perspective, and the belief in book illustration as a high art form, with the image composed as a miniature painting.37 Across the Atlantic, Harper’s Weekly (founded in 1857 and the model for and precursor of the Cornhill) provided the leading venue for illustrated British fiction in the American market: it paid British authors for their serial fiction, securing page proofs or manuscript copy before pirating publishers had the chance to enter the market.38 The public excitement over such publications is evident in the fact that “magazine day”—the last day of the month, on which London wholesalers received the new periodical and serial publications—was, at midcentury, a “highly anticipated public event.”39
This surge of illustrated material transformed Victorian print culture and reading practices as illustration became central to both. Indeed, for French poet and critic Théophile Gautier, the sudden flowering of illustrated print matter represented nothing less than a media revolution: as he wrote in the late 1850s, “Our century does not always have the time to read, but it always has the time to see” (qtd. in Bacot, La Presse, 80).40 For modern critics, the ubiquity and popularity of Victorian illustrations should impel us to consider the effect of the substantial differences between original illustrated Victorian forms and their modern, often unillustrated, versions. Focusing on the illustrated serial novel as a case study, we argue that form is meaning. The slim orange-gold volume of the Cornhill in Effie Millais’s hands signified through its wood-engraved wrapper, its full-page illustrations, its chapter initials and tailpieces, its advertisements, and indeed its use of white space as well as its letterpress.
Why serials? We have chosen them because they represent the initial form of distribution for many Victorian novels—and because they are the form most often overlooked by modern readers. Not all Victorians read their novels in serial, as Melissa Schaub notes. But “the serial form always preceded the various volume forms of a novel, so that the serial experience would be temporally prior for any reader who did engage in it” (Schaub, “Serial Reader,” 196n2). Indeed, Schaub argues that quantitative evidence alone compels us to take serial forms seriously: circulation for the monthly installments of Dickens’s Pickwick Papers reached 40,000 and for The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–41) exceeded 100,000 (Schlicke, Oxford, 455, 432); Reynolds’ Miscellany commanded 200,000 in 1855 (Altick, Common Reader, 394); and the Cornhill sold 120,000 at its peak in 1860 (Altick, Common Reader, 395).41 Such figures are striking when one considers that an initial print run of a three-volume novel would be 500 to 1,000 copies in the same period.42
Why illustrated serials? Again, because the gap between Victorian and modern forms is widest when we consider the key role of illustration in many Victorian serial novels. Whereas today’s paperbacks usually eliminate some if not all of the original illustrations, Victorian serials often spoke to the eye,43 with illustrated wrappers and images playing a rich—even primary—signifying role for readers. Not all Victorian serial novels were illustrated. But for those that were, we describe illustrations as primary because, although visual artists usually came second in the creation process,44 their images often came first in the reading process. Victorian readers regularly saw illustrations before reading letterpress. They might see images on the wrappers of serials displayed in shop windows as a form of advertisement for that serial installment. When they held the text in their hands, they often saw illustrations before letterpress because steel etchings and engravings, as already mentioned, could not be combined with type. Such images were therefore printed separately from the letterpress (normally on weightier paper than the rest of the text) and then usually bound into serials before the letterpress, thus attracting both hand and eye. Even when serials featured wood engravings—which, as we have seen, permitted image and type to be combined on the same page—illustrations typically appeared early in the serial installment, in the form of chapter heads, initials, or captioned images that lured the reader into the letterpress. This study takes illustration as central to the signifying system of illustrated serial fiction in its original form. We therefore base our analyses not on the later volume editions of Victorian novels (which regularly omitted, reduced, or cropped original designs)45 but on the original form that Victorian readers first encountered: slim monthly parts and periodical installments. Readers of such illustrated serial fictions encountered the text as one that intrinsically combined “two systems of knowing and representing the world”—the verbal and the visual.46
Pictorial (and Unpictorial) Victorians
In Pictorial Victorians: The Inscription of Values in Word and Image, Julia Thomas demonstrates that “the narrative image was regarded as . . . a national specialty” in the Victorian era.47 Fascination with the visual pervades not only Victorian reading practices but also fictional representations of those reading practices, cultural practices surrounding reading, and prose style itself—providing compelling evidence that images were central to the Victorian imagination. Indeed, in their letterpress (and even in unillustrated novels), Victorian authors portrayed readers as captivated by illustration. The reader first meets Jane Eyre, for example, in a window seat, where she is engrossed in Bewick’s wood-engraved A History of British Birds; the young David Copperfield’s earliest memories revolve around an illustrated book about crocodiles and his nurse’s illustrated quarto edition of John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs; and Maggie Tulliver pores over the pictures in Daniel Defoe’s The Political History of the Devil while her brother, Tom, paints the pictures in an illustrated version of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress.48 Fictional scenes that show characters engrossed in illustrated books highlight the importance of visual literacy in the early nineteenth century, constructing readers as both visual and verbal interpreters.
Victorians’ relationship with the illustrations they loved was mediated by domestic practices such as copying, displaying, and coloring. Illustrations moved from book to wall when, in 1833, Branwell Brontë made a watercolor copy of Bewick’s illustration of a goshawk as training for his hoped-for artistic career;49 when Eliot hung proof impressions of Leighton’s illustrations to Romola (1862–63) in the Priory;50 when Dickens commissioned George Cattermole to make watercolor versions of his illustrations for The Old Curiosity Shop for his home;51 when, in the early 1850s, the French Maison Aubert produced green wallpaper featuring wood engravings of captioned illustrations by prominent French illustrators such as Gustave Doré and Henri Emy;52 and when Vincent van Gogh displayed wood engravings from the Graphic on his walls because he admired the work of Fildes, Frank Holl, and Hubert von Herkomer.53 In a unique example of illustrations finding an afterlife in domestic display, Dickens’s publishers Chapman and Hall celebrated the marketing triumph of Pickwick by giving him a set of silver ladles featuring characters from the book’s illustrations.54 As these examples show,