Serials to Graphic Novels

by Catherine J Golden

  In an age of growing literacy and consumerism, savvy publishers produced multiple versions of a popular title, varying the material and color of the binding: boards for a cheap edition, and cloth and primarily leather for a collector’s edition. A “cheap edition” was affordable to members of the rising middle class. An ornate edition, like those displayed at the Great Exhibition or arranged on drawing-room tables of prosperous homes, was an aesthetic object to buy, enjoy, collect, catalogue, and exhibit, and it was often richly illustrated.

  Publishers variously packaged Richard Harris Barham’s The Ingoldsby Legends; this collection of myths, legends, and ghost stories with plates by George Cruikshank, John Leech, and John Tenniel first appeared in Bentley’s Miscellany in 1837 and remained popular in volume form throughout the nineteenth century. The book’s frequent reprinting kept caricature-style illustration by Cruikshank and Leech in circulation alongside plates by Tenniel. Publisher Richard Bentley brought out many editions of The Ingoldsby Legends including a three-volume set in 1855 with a cloth binding and minimal decoration and an 1864 edition with a richly-gilt, full-calf binding (see figs. 26A and 26B). While the spine of the 1855 edition is gold stamped, the front and back covers have a blind impress design. The fore and bottom edges of the 1855 edition are trimmed, but the top edge is roughly cut. Not a “cheap” book—the 1855 version contains a bit of gold stamping—this edition caters to a middle-class consumer with some pocket money to spend. In contrast, Bentley’s 1864 edition, marketed to the book collector, has fully gilt edges and is bound in brown Morocco leather with elaborate gold tooling on the spine as well as the back and front covers. This 1864 edition is a prime example of the kind of “artful objects suited to domestic consumption: art to live with” (Helsinger 154). Such richly illustrated leather and gilt volumes found a market among “consumers [who] expected books to be not only attractive objects in their own right but also potential elements in the decoration of their homes” (Helsinger 169). The gift book, designed explicitly for display, also brought foreign lands, popular science, religion, art, and poetry into the Victorian parlor. The popularity of such gift books lies as much in their wood-engraved illustrations, brilliant bindings, and gilt decorations as in their contents.

  Figure 26. A: Cover for The Ingoldsby Legends, or Mirth and Marvels by Richard Harris Barham, published by Richard Bentley, 1855;

  Figure 26. B: Cover for The Ingoldsby Legends, or Mirth and Marvels by Richard Harris Barham, published by Richard Bentley, 1864. Both editions come from the Norman M. Fox Collection, Scribner Library, Skidmore College.

  The binding was as important as a book’s illustrations to an artist-turned-illustrator like Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Innovative in his approach to bookbinding, Rossetti conceived of the book’s front and back covers and spine as a unified design. For example, Rossetti’s cloth binding for his sister Christina’s Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862)—though far simpler than the bindings displayed at the Great Exhibition or of Mary Barton’s “grand and golden” Bible in the Carson home—includes interlacing vertical and horizontal gold lines with triangular groupings of small circles in a balanced asymmetrical pattern evocative of 1860s’ Japanese design.22 Rossetti, who also designed frames for his own paintings, was involved in every stage of bookmaking: layout, illustration, printing, and binding. Rossetti worked with commercial publishers to create what Helsinger calls a “work of many hands” (172). In overseeing the handicraft of other “hands”—checking and correcting the work of binder, printer, and engraver, and notoriously complaining about the Dalziels for not following his instructions—Rossetti sustained the feel of a handcrafted book for works produced by commercial publishers for middle-class consumers with money to spend on books to decorate their drawing rooms and libraries.

  The Sixties

  Rossetti was a Sixties illustrator as well as an artist and a bookmaker. Critics from Rossetti’s time and our time have singled out Rossetti’s first book illustration, “The Maids of Elfen-Mere,” as a premier example of Sixties book illustration. Rossetti designed it to accompany William Allingham’s supernatural ballad called “The Maids of Elfin-Mere” included in The Music Master (1855). This edition of Allingham’s poems has seven plates by Arthur Hughes, a second generation Pre-Raphaelite painter, and one engraving each by John Everett Millais and D. G. Rossetti, founding members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (curiously, Rossetti changed the spelling of Allingham’s poem, substituting an “e” for the “i” in “Elfin” when he titled his illustration).23 Young Edward Burne-Jones decided to give up Holy Orders and pursue a career as an artist upon seeing Rossetti’s “The Maids of Elfen-Mere.”24 Often quoted is Burne-Jones’s description of the “marvellous beauty” of this illustration in his unsigned “Essay on The Newcomes” published in 1856 in the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine: “it is I think the most beautiful drawing for an illustration I have ever seen, the weird faces of the maids of Elfin-mere, the musical timed movement of their arms together as they sing, the face of the man, above all, are such as only a great artist could conceive” (60). Echoing Burne-Jones’s praise of Rossetti’s illustration a century and a half later, Helsigner calls it a “single, stunning engraving” (157), noting that this illustration along with the five plates that Rossetti contributed to Edward Moxon’s 1857 edition of Tennyson’s Poems “suggested to artists wholly new conceptual and visual possibilities for book illustration” (157).

  This illustration (see fig. 27)—which Rossetti believed the Dalziels ruined in the process of engraving it onto wood25—is stunning in its depiction of two worlds cohabiting a close, shared space.26 Rossetti privileges figure over background. Four large figures fill the page: three ethereal maids, who look as if they are from a distant world, and the Pastor’s son, who belongs to the human world but exhibits a self-absorption that disengages him from it. Rossetti moves the viewer closest to the face of the Pastor’s son, who captivated Burne-Jones. The Pastor’s son looks away from the otherworldly inhabitants, who are

  Spinning to a pulsing cadence,

  Singing songs of Elfin-Mere;

  Till the eleventh hour was toll’d,

  Then departed through the wold.

  Years ago, and years ago; (lines 5–9)

  The “Three white Lilies, calm and clear” (line 11)—with near identical faces hauntingly similar to that of Rossetti’s wife, Elizabeth Siddal—are arrested in the acts of spinning and singing; their fingers clasp the threads they are twirling, and their mouths are open as if captured mid-song.

  The town, “Düreresque … with its pointed roofs and the fateful clock tower” (Reid 35), appears through a narrow window on the top of the picture plane. The setting cues the viewer to the “fateful” passing of what turns out to be a false eleventh hour. The Pastor’s son, who loves the maids, does not want them to leave at this appointed time, so he has changed the hour on the village clock. Does the Pastor’s son look away fully knowing that he is tricking the maids into staying on earth beyond the true eleventh hour, sealing their destruction and his own? After this night, the maids never return, and “The Pastor’s Son did pine and die” (line 37). Rossetti’s book illustration also allows for the possibility that the Pastor’s son, locked in a moment of intense psychological introspection, looks away from the maids because they are not truly there—they are apparitions, symbols of lost love and the lost innocence of the Pastor’s son.

  Arguably no artist has illustrated Christina Rossetti’s long narrative poem Goblin Market more perceptively than Dante Gabriel Rossetti,27 who produced two illustrations for the 1862 Macmillan edition of Goblin Market and Other Poems (see figs. 28A and 28B): a frontispiece and a title page.28 Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti worked together intimately on these projects, recalling how in the 1830s and 1840s authors and illustrators collaborated to publish novels serially.29 Goblin Market is a coming of age fairy tale about two sisters enticed by goblin men with seasonal fruits that forebodingly ripen at the same time of year:


  Figure 27. “The Maids of Elfen-Mere, engraved by the Dalziel Brothers.” Illustration by Dante Gabriel Rossetti for William Allingham’s The Music Master, 1855, ©Tate, London 2014.

  Apples and quinces,

  Lemons and oranges,

  Plump unpecked cherries,

  Melons and raspberries,

  Bloom-down-cheeked peaches,

  Swart-headed mulberries,

  Wild free-born cranberries,

  Crab-apples, dewberries,

  Pine-apples, blackberries,

  Apricots, strawberries;—

  All ripe together

  In summer weather,—(lines 5–16)

  Saintly Lizzie withstands such temptation, but erring Laura succumbs to the forbidden earthly delights.

  The opening of the book offered Victorian reader-viewers two interpretations of the poem through Rossetti’s designs: a frontispiece with a moral allegory privileging the saintly Lizzie over her erring sister Laura (see fig. 28A), and an adjoining title page showing two radiant golden-haired sisters with the fallen Laura looking as pure as her sinless sister (see fig. 28B). These opposing readings troubled the poem’s initial Victorian readers, who were eager to determine whether the poem warned against sin or promoted it.30 Rossetti placed these images directly opposite, putting them in conversation with each other.31

  The frontispiece foregrounds “the primordial struggle between the sensuous and the spiritual,” notes Kooistra, who views “Lizzie and Laura as types for the archetypal sisters, Flesh and Spirit” (Rossetti 70). This connection, Kooistra argues, recalls a woodcut of two sisters from Francis Quarles’s “Emblem 14” in book 3 of Emblems (1635), a didactic text we can assume was well known to Christina Rossetti and her audience. In this seventeenth-century woodcut, “Flesh,” naked with flowing hair, tries to hand a prism to her sister, “Spirit,” dressed and coiffed conservatively, to prevent “Spirit” from looking toward the heavens with the telescope she holds in her hand. In the frontispiece for Goblin Market (see fig. 28A), Lizzie (placed in the upper far-left corner of the picture) in her dark conservative dress and coiffure visually alludes to “Spirit” and suggests a moral superiority to Laura, but Laura assumes center stage in this design that illustrates the poetic line, “‘Buy from us with a golden curl’” (line 125). Rossetti positions the erring sister close to the viewer. Laura, who appears disproportionately larger than pictorial scale would allow,32 oozes fleshly sensuality. She has long flowing golden locks, which she is pictured in the act of cutting to pay the goblin men for her indulgence. Rossetti also positions the goblins startlingly close to the viewer, who can observe their realistically rendered animal features—beaks, feathers, fangs, and whiskers—as well as their human hands and dress. One goblin resembling a cat clutches Laura’s lock that snakes around his neck and onto the plate of tantalizing fruits. If we read this plate as a Christian allegory, which some Victorian readers did, either Laura’s lock of hair or the lengthy tail of the goblin-cat (whose whiskers seemingly touch Laura’s golden tresses) symbolizes the serpent of Genesis, and Laura is fallible Eve.

  Figure 28. A: “Frontispiece”

  Figure 28. B: “Title-Page Illustration.” Illustrations by Dante Gabriel Rossetti for Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market and Other Poems. PR5237 .G62 1862. Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA.

  D. G. Rossetti’s title-page design (see fig. 28B) illustrates the lines that read:

  Golden head by golden head,

  Like two pigeons in one nest

  Folded in each other’s wings,

  They lay down in their curtained bed: (lines 184–87)

  In contrast to the frontispiece, the title-page design visualizes a connection between the fallen sister and the virtuous one. Rossetti provides a close-up of the two sisters with gleaming locks “nesting” in each other’s arms on an open bed. Christina Rossetti, who regularly visited fallen women at the Penitentiary of St. Mary Magdalene well before she wrote this poem, permits Laura to return to innocence with her sister’s intervention: “Life out of death. / … Laura awoke as from a dream, / Laughed in the innocent old way,” (lines 524, 537–38).

  In his own poetic meditation on a prostitute entitled “Jenny” (1870), D. G. Rossetti does not imagine such a possibility for a fallen woman, insisting: “So pure,—so fall’n! How dare to think / Of the first common kindred link?” (lines 207–08). However, Rossetti does not illustrate Laura growing gray and nearly dying, the fate of the sisters’ fallen friend, Jeanie. Rather, in the title-page design, Rossetti pictures Laura recovered: “Her gleaming locks showed not one thread of grey, / Her breath was sweet as May” (lines 540–41). The title-page design does not fully expunge Laura’s temptation by the goblin men. Laura clutches her virginal sister’s golden lock, and a dream circle above Laura’s head shows the goblin men carrying the tempting fruits that ripen altogether. Readers today might more readily comment on the homoeroticism of this illustration of two sisters nestled in each other’s arms than on their twin pureness. But for a Victorian audience, the frontispiece with its clear indication of Lizzie’s virtue and Laura’s fallibility softens the title-page design’s radical message of equal purity of “Golden head by golden head” (line 184).33

  Rossetti dabbled in book illustration and bookmaking, but he was foremost a painter. His fellow Pre-Raphaelites William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais also became illustrators. Millais produced more book illustrations than the other members of the Pre-Raphaelite triumvirate and is notable for the range of subjects he illustrated with artistry as well as his skill and productivity. In “The Illustrating of Books from the Serious Artist’s Point of View,” Du Maurier calls attention to the importance of Millais’s contribution of eighteen illustrations to Moxon’s edition of Tennyson’s Poems (1857): “a new impulse was given to the art of illustrating books” (1: 351).34 Millais worked closely with his engravers, particularly the Dalziel Brothers, and illustrated far longer than the other Pre-Raphaelites. He also provided stunning representational-style illustrations for a greater variety of new and reprinted books and periodicals. Millais illustrated poetry by Alfred Lord Tennyson and William Allingham, tales such as Dalziels’ Illustrated Arabian Nights’ Entertainments (1865), religious texts including Dalziels’ Bible Gallery (1881) and The Parables of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ (1864), Harriet Martineau’s four historiettes (published in Once a Week in 1862 and 1863), children’s books by Henry Leslie and Jean Ingelow, and fiction by Wilkie Collins, Victor Hugo, and, in particular, Anthony Trollope. Millais illustrated Trollope’s Framley Parsonage (1861), Orley Farm (1862), The Small House at Allington (1864), Rachel Ray (1864), and Kept in the Dark (1882). Critics including Judith Fisher and Arlene Jackson refer to the illustrations produced during 1855–70 as “the Millais era” and characterize the Sixties as “the representational style of illustration given to Trollope’s works” (Jackson 12).35

  For his book illustrations, Millais chose pregnant moments. He foregrounded one or two expertly rendered figures within the Victorian domestic sphere—the drawing room, library, bedchamber, and balcony window—as well as in the natural world of pasture, countryside, seascape, and forest. “While it cannot be said with truthfulness that Millais is greatly interested in landscape in illustration,” notes Paul Goldman in Beyond Decoration, “there are instances where he takes particular care to render a setting to strengthen the dramatic sense” (19). Millais takes “particular care” in rendering landscape to dramatic effect in his illustrations for The Parables of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. The setting of “The Lost Sheep” includes an occasional shrub and tree in an otherwise rocky, barren landscape. The accurately rendered ewe has a sloping forehead, rich wooly coat, and rounded rump. The sheep, now slung over the shepherd’s shoulders, forms the focus of the plate, but its striking placement—perilously close to the edge of the cliff and to the broad-winged eagle staring directly at the sheep as if anticipating its
next meal—intensifies the drama of the parable. The shepherd is rejoicing over finding what the setting shows to be so nearly lost forever. In the foreground of “The Prodigal Son,” the wayward son and his elderly father lock in an embrace that holds the viewer’s attention. Millais adds to the background two similarly well-executed wooly sheep sitting contentedly on the grass next to a pond, some trees, and a conical barn to make the setting a welcome respite for the son who finally returns home. To Goldman, “The earth-shattering moment of the Parable itself contrasts profoundly with the everyday nature of Millais’s landscape. It is this very ‘matter-of-factness’ which strengthens and clarifies the meaning of the Parable itself by making it immediate and crystal clear to the reader and to the viewer” (Beyond 19).

  Millais likewise fills the foreground of “The Good Samaritan” with two figures—the wounded man robbed of his possessions and the kindly wayfarer (see fig. 29). Small versions of this iconic image appear on the walls of abodes in caricature-style illustrations. For Vanity Fair (1848), Thackeray places the painting in “Becky’s Second Appearance in the ‘Character of Clytemnestra’” (see fig. 14, ch. 2, 69) on the wall behind Jos Sedley, who begs Dobbin to be his Good Samaritan. Cruikshank incorporates it into “Oliver Recovering from a Fever” to reinforce that Mr. Brownlow is orphan Oliver’s own Good Samaritan in Oliver Twist.