Many dear friends and supporters have enriched my life. I thank Pam Golden (my sister whom I count as my friend), Lollie Abramson, Peri Allen, Elaine Alfert, Jeannie O’Farrell Eddy, Jo-Ellen Unger, Diana Fenton, Robyn Silverman, Barbara Black (my fellow Victorianist at Skidmore), Lisa Morey, Aurora Lamperetta, Kathryn Hefter, Selma Nemer, Maureen Cormier, and the late Norman M. Fox. They listened to me as I conceptualized this book and revised it over a period of several years. They asked me questions about my research, showed great interest in the topic, and cheered me on when I was feeling overwhelmed writing a book on an enormous topic. Some of these individuals gave me invaluable suggestions on how to keep fit, injury-free, and active as I wrote and revised this book. I am particularly grateful to Lisa for her advice on copyediting queries and to Elaine for helping me to type a portion of my bibliography. Lollie and Peri encouraged me throughout every stage of the writing and copyediting processes. I deeply miss Norman, who took great interest in this entire project; without him, I would not have had a collection of Victorian illustrated books at my fingertips.
Foremost, I thank my family for their support, encouragement, and belief in this book. I have spent countless hours visiting archives, reading, writing, revising, copyediting, proofreading, and indexing. During the first part of my sabbatical while I was drafting this book, my beloved mother grew ill and passed away, and my book—which I discussed with my Mom during her illness—ironically sustained me. My mother was a wonderful listener and an intelligent thinker; I reflect fondly on the many conversations we had about literature and art over the years, particularly in the months before her passing. I wish my mother, Nancy Posmantur Golden, and my father, Dr. Lawrence H. Golden, were alive to read this book. I am grateful to my big brother, Dr. Grant Golden, and my sister, Pam Golden, who took a keen interest in my work and offered feedback on possible book titles. My sister-in-laws, Deborah Goldman and Judy Marx, my Aunt Esther Posmantur, and my cousins Halli Glina and Caren Golden also regularly asked about my progress and were very supportive of me as I wrote and revised this book.
I am most grateful to my sons, Jesse and Emmet Golden-Marx, avid comic book readers who sparked my interest in the graphic novel. Emmet read a draft of the conclusion and offered excellent feedback. I have both of my sons to thank for an extensive library of graphic novel adaptations of my favorite nineteenth-century novels by Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, and Lewis Carroll. Will Eisner’s Fagin the Jew, a gift from Emmet and Jesse, has been invaluable to my understanding of how graphic novel adaptation can inform a canonical novel like Oliver Twist. I dedicate the concluding chapter of this book on the Victorian graphic classics to my two astronomical sons.
Among all those who helped me to bring this book to fruition, I thank my husband, Michael Marx. When I was immersed in the Victorian era, Michael—my academic partner since our graduate school days at the University of Michigan—recalled me to the twenty-first century. Whether reminding me to stop writing and come eat dinner when the clock struck 8:00 p.m., reading yet another draft of a chapter, telling me to take breaks and not to work past midnight, consulting with me while I was copyediting, or offering input on which illustrations to choose, Michael was an invaluable supporter and guide. I love Michael with all my heart. And I dedicate this book to him.
And where would I be without my beloved cats? Writing a book is a solitary venture. No matter what time of the day I chose to write, at least one of our cats was usually curled up on a cat bed close to my computer. My late cat Lee purred by me at the very beginning of this project; his photo on the wall above my writing desk remains a great comfort. Rose has always provided a calming and heartening presence that I cherish as a writer. Jules, like Lee, frequently typed extraneous page breaks and letters into my book manuscript as he pranced across the keyboard and blocked the computer screen, but he often sat on my lap as I wrote. Jules, Rose, and the late Lee are my feline muses.
Introduction
The Arc of the Victorian Illustrated Book
One’s self—for other people—is one’s expression of one’s self; and one’s house, one’s furniture, one’s garments, the books one reads, the company one keeps—all these things are expressive.1
Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady, 1881
The Victorians, as Henry James wrote, expressed themselves through the clothes they wore, the furniture they purchased, the things they collected, the ornaments they placed on their mantels, and the illustrated books they arranged on their drawing room tables. Victorian society was indeed a material culture. The fully furnished drawing room of the High Victorian era was a public space within a private domestic sphere where the middle-class family put values, personal tastes, and their selves on display.2 “If the drawing room was the center of the middle-class home, the center of the drawing room was the circular table with its display of books” (5), as Lorraine Kooistra reminds us in Poetry, Pictures, and Popular Publishing.3 One need only turn to North and South (1855) by Elizabeth Gaskell or Drawn from Memory (1957), a recollection of Victorian childhood by Ernest Shepard (famed illustrator of A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh [1926]), to find descriptions of prized books read by the fire or put on view in the Victorian drawing room.4 The claw-footed circular table with its books positioned like spokes on a wheel might include a nicely bound copy of Pilgrim’s Progress (1678, 1684); next to the Bible, John Bunyan’s classic was the most common book within the library of a middle-class Victorian home. Perhaps next to Pilgrim’s Progress is a quarto-sized, gilt-edged gift book of poems by Poet Laureate Alfred Lord Tennyson. The gift book, a mark of gentility and taste, was made expressly for table display. The circular table in the Victorian drawing room I have imagined also includes an illustrated volume of the era’s most popular novelist, Charles Dickens.
How did Dickens’s novels, first published with caricature-style illustrations in serial form—considered a second-rate form of publication—evolve into gold-stamped hardbound editions that found their way into well-appointed middle-class drawing rooms of the High Victorian era? The serial publication of Dickens’s The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1836–37)—a sequence of comic adventures—generated an unprecedented publishing boom and established a formula for publishing new fiction: an installment accompanied by illustrations came out independently in a part issue or as a feature in a monthly or weekly periodical; upon the serial’s completion, publishers bound the parts along with the illustrations into a single printed edition. Caricature-style illustration created a lively market for illustrated serials, and, in turn, stimulated production of theatrical adaptations of popular serials like Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1838) and William Harrison Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard (1839).
As the century progressed, the public began to favor naturalism in book illustration. The works of Dickens—a champion of the illustrated book whose works were originally designed with caricature-style illustrations in demand in the 1830s and 1840s—were reillustrated in a representational style by Royal Academy-trained artists for the Household Edition that Chapman and Hall published after the author’s death in 1870. The Household Edition (1871–79) came out in weekly numbers, monthly parts, and large-volume editions marketed to a middle-class reader, who could buy the entire set of Dickens’s novels to read by the family hearth.5 Dickens’s fiction thus straddles two periods of illustration, which critics often define as “opposing styles” (Jackson 12) and associate with specific illustrators; Thomas Hardy scholar Arlene Jackson calls the caricature school of illustration the “Cruikshank-Phiz era (1830–55)” and names the school of representational realism “the Millais era (1855–70)” (12).
The Victorian illustrated book came into being, flourished, and evolved during the long nineteenth century. Serials to Graphic Novels focuses on fluidity in styles of illustration across the arc of the Victorian illustrated book to foreground how illustrative styles are perpetuated and revised and a canon of illustrated books is refashioned for new genera
tions of readers. Schools of illustration, if viewed as discrete segments with abrupt shifts in emphasis, hide or obscure the Victorian illustrated book’s evolution and mask the complexities of a given style of illustration. For example, caricature, often linked with broad humor and grotesque exaggeration, is foremost a theatrical style that can stage social commentary and reveal psychological insight. Even as the Victorian illustrated book evolved, the caricature school of illustration popular in the 1830s and 1840s was not a transient first period in the history of the Victorian illustrated book. Well after its heyday, caricature retained its prominence in Punch, and publishers reissued books with caricature-style illustration into the late decades of the Victorian era.
In the 1870s, Academy-trained artists for the Household Edition of Dickens refined characters created by the caricaturists for a public that desired naturalism in book illustration, but their illustrations carry the imprint of the caricaturists. At the fin de siècle—which some critics consider a third period of the illustrated book and others call the Victorian illustrated book’s decline6—book illustration thrived in areas where we again witness a reengagement with the caricature tradition as well as a continuation of the realistic school. The representation of a minority group, such as a persistent racialized assumption of the Jew, resonates and is reimagined in George Du Maurier’s Trilby (1894), published serially in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine and in volume form. This stereotype comes again in Oliver Twist’s reimagining as a graphic novel, a modern form of material culture that is an heir of the Victorian illustrated book. Across this chronological sweep from the serial to the graphic novel, illustrative styles of caricature and realism are applauded, scorned, refashioned, revaluated, maintained, and revised.
Serials to Graphic Novels provides a record of a genre diverse enough to include serial installments, British and American periodicals, adult and children’s literature, and—most recently—graphic novels. Scholarship on the Victorian illustrated book has often taken the form of an essay collection. Richard Maxwell cautions in The Victorian Illustrated Book: “It is unlikely that any one person, at present, knows enough to write a comprehensive history of Victorian illustrated books; perhaps for this reason, much of the best work in the field has taken the form of essay collections” (xxvi), and this assumption justifies his use of the format of a collection of essays for his study.7 Although this book does not claim to be a “comprehensive history,” it takes up Maxwell’s challenge by providing a single-authored, sustained record of the illustrated book from the vantage point of the genre’s evolving aesthetics. Not unlike a biographer, I am examining artistic developments in a genre that spans a Victorian lifetime and finds new expression in our time.
Serials to Graphic Novels is intended for the general reader and the undergraduate and graduate student interested in the evolution of the Victorian illustrated book, a visual form that peaked in Victorian times and finds new expression in present-day graphic novel adaptations of nineteenth-century novels. This book revisits seminal critics and illustrated texts well known to book historians or specialists of the illustrated book. Engagement with such information brings readers entering the field of illustration studies into an understanding of how critics have previously examined the Victorian illustrated book through its separate periods as well as how those invested in the “Sixties,” a rich period of the genre’s history, have minimized or mocked the contributions of the caricaturists. Simultaneously, in its methodological approach to connect illustrative styles across decades, genres, and national borders, this book aims to offer those well versed in illustration studies a new framework for viewing the arc of a vibrant genre.
Scholarship on the Victorian Illustrated Book, 1895–2016
This study complements broad histories of the illustrated book, such as Franz Weitenkampf’s The Illustrated Book (1938), David Bland’s A History of Book Illustration (1958), Jonathan Harthan’s The History of the Illustrated Book: The Western Tradition (1981), and more recently John Buchanan-Brown’s Early Victorian Illustrated Books: Britain, France and Germany (2005). These works, tailored to antiquarians and book historians, cover illustrative traditions in numerous countries and foreground design history. Bland, for instance, discusses developments in the East and the West with attention, respectively, to Japanese, Chinese, Islamic, Persian, and Hebrew traditions as well as French, German, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, and English. Buchanan-Brown, in contrast, limits his scope to illustrated books produced in England, France, and Germany between 1820–60. My study centers specifically on Victorian England with attention to related developments in late nineteenth-century America and modern developments in England and the US market.
This book acknowledges pioneering scholarship that privileges the Sixties—principally English Illustration, ‘The Sixties’: 1855–70 by Gleeson White (1897), Illustrators of the Eighteen Sixties by Forrest Reid (1928), and Modern Illustration by Joseph Pennell (1895). For example, in his zeal to praise the work of artists turned illustrators including Ford Madox Brown, George Du Maurier, John Everett Millais, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, White queries, “is there a single illustration by Cruikshank, ‘Phiz,’ Thackeray, or even John Leech, which tempts us to linger and return again and again purely for its art?” (18). To White, caricature-style illustration is “broad farce” that is “slipshod” and “ridiculously feeble” (18). White and Reid, who were foremost collectors, gained a new generation of readers when publishers reissued their works, respectively, in 1970 and 1975, and their contributions remain influential.8 These critics championed the artistic merit of Sixties illustrators because they believed that illustrations in leading periodicals of their day were collectible art. Regrettably, however, these same collectors removed illustrations from the serials “they were designed to accompany, and separating them from the publications they were intended to promote, the collector changed their value along with their meaning” (Meyrick 179). Similarly disapproving in his assessment of the caricaturists, Pennell declares in Modern Illustration: “among artists and people of any artistic appreciation, it is generally admitted by this time that the greatest bulk of the works of ‘Phiz,’ Cruickshank [sic], Doyle, and even many of Leech’s designs are simply rubbish” (83).
Privileging the large-scale compositions of William Hogarth over the smaller-scale work of his heirs, David Kunzle carries this line of criticism into the present day in The History of the Comic Strip, Vol. II: The Nineteenth Century (1990). Small vignettes “arranged on a single page like an artist’s sketch book, and sold in a set” (20) are, to Kunzle, a jumble of “graphic bric-a-brac,” a “hodgepodge of inchoate miscellanies and whimsical ephemera” (20). Philip Allingham more kindly calls Phiz’s illustrations “quaint caricatures” (176) but similarly undervalues “the small-scale, humorous and melodramatic etchings of Phiz, Cruikshank, Doyle and Leech” (178) in an essay for Reading Victorian Illustration, 1855–1875 (2012).9 In “Defining Illustration Studies: Towards a New Academic Discipline” (2012), Paul Goldman also underestimates the caricature school in generalizing that “[g]estures were grandiose, facial expressions generalized, printing was usually light and there was little psychological depth or true interaction with text” (28).
Caricature-style illustration, after a period of scholarly neglect, became the subject of serious critical inquiry post 1970. In 1971, John Harvey published Victorian Novelists and Their Illustrators, which establishes The Pickwick Papers’s importance and privileges the contributions of George Cruikshank, Hablot Knight Browne (often known by his pseudonym, Phiz), Charles Dickens, and William Makepeace Thackeray. Harvey’s incisive final chapter, “Illustration and the Mind’s Eye,” suggests that some modern novels might have benefited from “the strength, suppleness, and sensitivity of [an illustrator’s] hand” (181); it provides the impetus for my conclusion, which explores how today’s graphic novelists and artists have revived a canon of great books. The 1970s and 1980s also witnessed Richard Frederick Kaufman’s unpublished dissertat
ion entitled “The Relationship Between Text and Illustration in the Novels of Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, and Hardy” (NYU 1979). Kaufman focused his study on the connections between the verbal and the visual at a time when the field of “Word and Image” studies was just emerging.
Much scholarship on the illustrated book dating to the 1970s and 1980s centers on Charles Dickens. I include in this list Jane R. Cohen’s Charles Dickens and His Original Illustrators (1980), Michael Steig’s Dickens and Phiz (1978), and Robert L. Patten’s Charles Dickens and His Publishers (1978). Cohen approaches the illustrated book through the eighteen illustrators who span Dickens’s literary career. Her introduction, “Dickens and the Rise of the English Illustrated Novel after 1836,” and conclusion, “Dickens and the Decline of the English Illustrated Novel After 1870,” situate the genre of the Victorian illustrated book within the arc of Dickens’s publishing career. Cohen thus recasts the Victorian illustrated book as a Dickensian phenomenon as opposed to a cultural phenomenon. Likewise, Steig illuminates the genre from the vantage point of Dickens and his main illustrator, Browne, and explores how Pickwick’s success, in turn, encouraged many authors and publishers to choose the format of monthly, one-shilling installments with two engravings per episode. In Charles Dickens and His Publishers, Patten argues that Dickens—who experimented with part issues, periodical installments, and publishing in book form before a serial’s conclusion—legitimized and democratized serial publication. N. N. Feltes’s Modes of Production of Victorian Novels, published in 1986, focuses on Victorian publishing trends. These studies have been influential to my own research on the illustrated book that began with my 1986 unpublished dissertation entitled “The Victorian Illustrated Book: Authors Who Composed with Graphic Images and Words.” In examining the arc of the Victorian illustrated book, Serials to Graphic Novels analyzes author and illustrator pairs alongside the work of author-illustrators and contextualizes Dickens’s contributions within the larger history of the Victorian illustrated book.
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