Serials to Graphic Novels

by Catherine J Golden

  Essay collections have appeared foremost in recent examinations of the Victorian illustrated book. These include Book Illustrated: Text, Image, and Culture 1770–1930 (Golden 2000), The Victorian Illustrated Book (Maxwell 2002), and, most recently, Reading Victorian Illustration, 1855–75 (Goldman and Cooke 2012). Book Illustrated includes eight essays by leading scholars who examine the work of Cruikshank and Rossetti, Romantic and Victorian era illustrated editions of Shakespeare’s works, Aubrey Beardsley’s fin-de-siècle illustrations, and the rise of American women illustrators from 1880 to 1920. The introduction to Book Illustrated raises ideas about the decline of the illustrated book as a form of adult fiction that I develop in this book. The ten chronologically arranged essays in Maxwell’s collection are by some of the same noted scholars; for example, Patten, who contributed an essay on Cruikshank for Book Illustrated, wrote a chapter on David Copperfield for The Victorian Illustrated Book, and Elizabeth Helsinger, who wrote on Rossetti for Book Illustrated, provided a chapter on William Morris for The Victorian Illustrated Book. In his introduction, Maxwell addresses some of the reasons motivating the rise of the Victorian illustrated book. His afterword entitled “The Destruction, Rebirth, and Apotheosis of the Victorian Illustrated Book” considers the illustrated book’s influence on modernist and postmodernist forms of the book (for example, collage books by Max Ernst and boxes by Joseph Cornell).

  Whereas Maxwell’s 2002 collection begins with the historical fiction of Sir Walter Scott and covers the long nineteenth century, Goldman and Cooke’s 2012 collection gives shape and depth to the most distinguished period of the Victorian illustrated book. Its nine essays by a range of distinguished international scholars deepen our understanding of the Sixties by considering illustration in diverse publications—serial novels, gift books, the Bible, scientific works, and German illustrated books. Other important critical examinations of Victorian illustration were published in the early twenty-first century. Kooistra’s Poetry, Pictures, and Popular Publishing: The Illustrated Gift Book and Victorian Visual Culture, 1855–1875 (2011) places the illustrated gift book at the heart of book production and consumer culture. Mary Elizabeth Leighton and Lisa Surridge’s “The Plot Thickens: Toward a Narratological Analysis of Illustrated Serial Fiction in the 1860s” (2008) examines the role of illustration in the plot of the serial novel that was “intrinsic to the first reading experience of the mass Victorian public” (66).10

  Some recent works focus on a single productive illustrator, such as John Everett Millais and George Du Maurier. In Beyond Decoration: The Illustrations of John Everett Millais (2005), Goldman foregrounds this leading British painter’s range as an illustrator and treats Millais’s book illustrations in context of the literature they accompanied. Goldman and Simon Cooke co-edited a collection entitled George Du Maurier: Illustrator, Author, Critic Beyond Svengali (2016); the fifteen essays by leading international specialists demonstrate the multifaceted career of this important nineteenth-century illustrator, critic, and author-illustrator.

  Two recent works on caricature—Victor Navasky’s The Art of Controversy (2014) and Brian Maidment’s Comedy, Caricature and the Social Order, 1820–50 (2013)—have also been influential to my scholarship on the Victorian illustrated book.11 Beginning with William Hogarth and James Gillray and concluding with Jonathan Shapiro and David Levine, Navasky examines the political cartoon across three centuries. Of consequence to my own revaluation of caricature, Navasky’s work challenges “the many art critics, art historians, and artists who themselves have, over the years, dismissed cartoons and caricatures as fundamentally ‘not serious,’ ‘inconsequential,’ ‘irrelevant,’ ‘marginal,’ ‘harmless,’ ‘frivolous,’ ‘a benign—even childish—indulgence,’ ‘immoral,’ and ‘silly’” (xiv). Taking a narrower historical approach in Comedy, Caricature and the Social Order, 1820–50, Maidment convincingly argues that “the cultural importance and the aesthetic appeal of Regency and early Victorian caricature and visual comedy, when not discussed with outright scorn or disdain, have at least been undervalued in recent scholarly discussions” (3). Committed to a revaluation of comedy and caricature, Maidment tackles contempt for comic art to demonstrate how inventive repackaging, reimagining, and adaptation sustained a form of print culture for a new generation of consumers. Maidment follows the comic print from its decline in the production of large single-plate caricatures popular in the Regency period into new forms of Victorian publication (for example, periodicals and fiction) with the rise of wood engraving and lithography. In making a successful case for fluidity in visual culture across two literary periods, Maidment’s book informs my examination of the evolution of the Victorian illustrated book over the long nineteenth century and beyond.

  The emerging discipline of illustration studies still needs “to be recognized within the scholarly community and beyond” (15), as Goldman advocates in “Defining Illustration Studies.” Art history, book history, bibliographic studies, and literary studies have traditionally slighted book and periodical illustration. Nonliterary texts including travel narratives, natural histories, religious texts, and anatomy books invite examination as illustrated material. Reprints of Victorian texts in the forms their first audiences read and viewed them, now available through databases such as The Database of Mid-Victorian Illustration at Cardiff University, may also promote more scholarship on the Victorian illustrated book and hopefully establish, in Goldman’s words, “a proper master’s course, devoted exclusively to the subject of Illustration Studies” (32).

  Chapter Summaries

  In the opening chapter of Victorian Novelists and Their Illustrators, John Harvey presents “the large first question the monthly parts provoke: how was it the illustrations came to be there at all?” (7).12 The success of The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club made serialization a popular vehicle for new adult fiction that publishers and authors readily adopted, hoping to bank on Pickwick’s success. Pickwick generated Pickwick mania,13 a term that speaks to Pickwick’s huge fan base and the rise of commercial products related to it. Past and recent critics have acknowledged Pickwick’s importance and factors that impacted its success,14 but chapter 1 offers a synthetic reading of this material to help explain how pictures “came to be” in an illustrated serial and how the serial, in turn, generated a mass consumer market for the illustrated book. This chapter emphasizes how intertwining factors including commodity culture, a growth in literacy, innovations in printing, and the popularity of comic illustrations accelerated Pickwick’s popularity.

  Chapter 2 studies the theatrical quality of caricature-style illustration produced in the 1830s and 1840s for the Victorian illustrated serial, a thriving form of mass-market literature. Caricature-style book illustration by George Cruikshank, Phiz, Richard Doyle, John Leech, and (Isaac) Robert Cruikshank approximates the tableau style popular in the early nineteenth century. The caricaturists used lighting, props, and detail-laden backdrops to capture dramatic and sentimental scenes in works by Dickens, Ainsworth, and Thackeray as well as to stage psychological episodes and broadly comic moments. This chapter adds two Victorian author-illustrators to the above list of recognized caricaturists. Better known as a writer than an artist, Thackeray designed illustrations for Vanity Fair (1848) that cast his heroine Becky Sharp in various stage roles. To dramatize Alice’s bodily transformations, Lewis Carroll recalled popular caricature techniques in Alice’s Adventures Under Ground (1864), his author-illustrated version of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) published at a time when consumers preferred naturalistic illustration. This chapter also examines artistic limitations and scandals, leading to a depreciation of the caricaturists and a favoring of Academy-trained artists who, beginning in the 1850s, entered the lucrative field of book illustration.

  By the mid-nineteenth century, the public desired artistic book illustration with the lifelike quality of photography. Chapter 3 examines two styles of illustration—realism and caricature—during what critics comm
only label the “Golden Age” of British illustration, a period that emphasizes academic standards. This chapter frames the realistic school of illustration, commonly referred to as the Sixties, with the Great Exhibition of 1851: this first ever world’s fair of culture and industry stimulated production of beautiful objects including books with decorative bindings, culminating in a richly illustrated exhibition catalogue in a representational style (also referred to as realism or naturalism) in vogue from the 1850s to the 1870s. The Official Descriptive Illustrated Catalogue from the Great Exhibition is a material artifact from a period when Victorians valued books for their bindings, talented painters entered the field of illustration (for example, John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, George Du Maurier, and Marcus Stone), and illustrations within books and periodicals came to be viewed as collectible art worth framing.

  Of importance to my overarching argument on the fluidity of aesthetics across illustrative periods, chapter 3 features the work of Fred Barnard, James Mahoney, and John Tenniel, who refashioned caricature-style illustrations for popular consumption. Barnard’s and Mahoney’s illustrations for the Household Edition of, respectively, David Copperfield and Oliver Twist (among the first works adapted in this 22-volume series) demonstrate how Sixties artists fleshed out inventive caricature designs from the 1830s and 1840s to suit popular taste of the 1870s. This same kind of revision of the caricature tradition appears in Alice in Wonderland; John Tenniel recreated Carroll’s caricature-style illustrations with realism, adding domestic interiors and nature settings to suit the taste of middle-class readers.

  At the end of the nineteenth century, the Victorian illustrated book entered what some critics view as a time of decline and others consider a third period of development. Chapter 4 examines both viewpoints. Publishing trends and intertwining economic and aesthetic factors led to a drop in newly released, large-circulation illustrated adult fiction in volume form in England. These reasons include the waning of serial fiction, cost and quality factors, a growth in literacy, the evolution of the novel, advances in illustration, and the rise of competing media. The Victorian illustrated book prospered in some serial formats, artists’ books, children’s literature, and the US market. Chapter 4 provides a survey of late Victorian illustrated fiction that targeted audiences according to age, gender, social class, and nation. It features two fin-de-siècle author-illustrators—Beatrix Potter and George Du Maurier—and demonstrates continuity across the arc of the Victorian illustrated book. Beatrix Potter illustrates Peter Rabbit (1902) and successive children’s tales with near photographic realism, following the realistic school of illustration associated with Millais. George Du Maurier, a recognized Sixties artist, brings theatricality in illustration and a persistent racialized depiction of the Jew from the caricature tradition to his self-illustrated fiction published in the US market in Harper’s; his best-known Trilby instigated a media frenzy of Pickwickian magnitude referred to as Trilby-mania.15

  The conclusion looks forward from the Victorian illustrated book to the “graphic classics.”16 Canonical texts adapted into graphic novel format are inheritors of the illustrative schools of caricature and realism, adapted in a hyper-modern form to appeal to twenty–first-century reader-viewers. This chapter explores parallels between the serial and the comic book. It surveys graphic novel adaptations of nineteenth-century novels by Jane Austen, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Charles Dickens, and Anthony Trollope as well as Neo-Victorian graphic novels (for example, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen [1999]) and original Victorian-themed graphic novels (for example, Batman: Noël [2011]). The conclusion features adaptations of two Victorian illustrated books—Dickens’s Oliver Twist and Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland—to demonstrate how the graphic classics is reviving a genre that a century before recognized pictures play a central role in the development of plot and characterization. This chapter foregrounds Will Eisner, the father of the graphic novel and author-illustrator of Fagin the Jew (2003), for his direct challenge to a religious and ethnic stereotype of the Jew that Dickens and Cruikshank develop in Oliver Twist and Du Maurier carries into Trilby. Looking beyond Eisner, this chapter also considers how graphic novelists and artists have developed aspects of the Victorian source texts too unseemly for the tastes of the illustrated book’s original middle-class readership.

  Forerunners of the Victorian Illustrated Book

  Serials to Graphic Novels centers on the Victorian period, which Percy Muir dubs “the heyday of book illustration” (1). But the Victorian illustrated book has important antecedents—including the classical concept of ut pictura poesis, medieval manuscripts, and eighteenth-century graphic satire and caricature—all of which created an audience for the Victorian illustrated book, which, in turn reimagines techniques that resurface from these earlier dual art forms.

  The Horatian concept of ut pictura poesis fascinated the Victorians and has bearing on why—long before Pickwick—pictures in word and image collaborations “came to be there at all” (Harvey 7). Horace’s now famous phrase—which literally means, “As with the painter’s work, so with the poet’s” (358)—comes from Ars Poetica (The Art of Poetry) composed circa 19 BC. Horace advances that poetry—and by extension imaginative texts—deserves the same kind of critical attention that painting received in his day. Horace compares poetry to the more established art of painting, noting: “one piece will take you more if you stand close to it, another at a greater distance. This loves a dark corner, that will desire to be seen in a strong light, for it fears not the critic’s keenest taste. This pleased but once; that will be asked for ten times and always please” (358). In this famous passage, Horace advises that some poems, like paintings, delight those with a critical eye and endure while others, in contrast, please only for the moment or when viewed under favorable circumstances.

  Horace’s comparison of poetry and painting primed a visually literate Victorian audience schooled in classical languages to appreciate the relations between word and image in the nineteenth century, an age that increasingly produced illustrated material in a range of forms and for different audiences. However, the impulse to compare pictures and words predates Horace by many centuries. In one section of the Phaedrus (ca. 370 BC), Plato elevates spoken discourse over written discourse by comparing writing—a new invention in ancient Greece—to painting. Socrates, Plato’s mouthpiece, declares to Phaedrus:

  I cannot help feeling, Phaedrus, that writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence. And the same may be said of speeches. You would imagine that they had intelligence, but if you want to know anything and put a question to one of them, the speaker always gives one unvarying answer. And when they have been once written down they are tumbled about anywhere among those who may or may not understand them, and know not to whom they should reply, to whom not: and, if they are maltreated or abused, they have no parent to protect them; and they cannot protect or defend themselves. (485)

  Socrates warns his pupil against the new art of rhetoric, prone to sophistry. Writing, like painting, cannot speak, answer questions, or defend itself against misinterpretation. Spoken discourse is the only true form of communication. Plato criticizes the value of written and visual forms of communication in comparison to spoken discourse, but this oft-quoted passage remains important in aligning painting and writing as sister arts.

  The concept of painting and writing as sister arts helped bring about a cultural climate in Victorian England that was receptive to pictorial illustration. In the first part of his still influential book The Sister Arts (1958), Jean Hagstrum explores ut pictura poesis, tracing the interrelationship of written and visual forms of expression from the classical period through the early Christian era, the Renaissance, the Baroque period, and onto the Age of Enlightenment. Of particular relevance to the Victorian illustrated book is the work of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, the German Enlightenment poet,
philosopher, dramatist, and critic. In “Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry,” Lessing challenges what he considered to be a too literal application of Horace’s famous expression “as is painting, so is poetry” (another common translation of the phrase). Lessing’s famous treatise takes its name from the ancient Greek statue Laocoön and His Sons, which depicts the Trojan priest of Poseidon and his two sons being destroyed by two serpents.17 Although Lessing published his treatise in German in 1766, the first English translation, which Royal Academicians took seriously, did not appear until 1836, the year Charles Dickens launched The Pickwick Papers and the year before Queen Victoria took the throne.

  In Laocoön, Lessing describes the distinct strengths and limitations of painting and poetry by introducing two terms, “bodies” and “actions”: “Objects which co-exist, or the parts of which co-exist, are termed bodies”; “It follows that bodies, with their visible properties, are the proper objects of painting” (131). In other words, “bodies” are forms, colors, figures, and shapes that coexist on one picture plane. In contrast, “Objects which succeed, or the parts of which succeed to each other, are called generally actions. It follows that actions are the proper object of Poetry” (131); moreover, objects arranged in succession indicate time. To Lessing, painting and poetry have opposite strengths: materiality (through “bodies”) is painting’s strength while narrative (through “actions”) is poetry’s forte. Lessing qualifies that poets can indicate “bodies” by creating word pictures to describe people and scenes. Although painting “can only avail itself of one moment of action,” a canvas, in turn, can indicate time (“actions”) if the artist wisely chooses a moment “which is the most pregnant, and by which what has gone before and what is to follow will be the most intelligible” (132). Such a “pregnant moment” provides “intelligible” glimpses into past and future time through the scene depicted on canvas. The Victorian illustrated book is filled with narrative illustrations that function as pregnant moments, conveying the past and future through rich symbolism and telling details.18