Serials to Graphic Novels

by Catherine J Golden

  In contrast to Thackeray and Cruikshank who offer simple renderings of this iconic parable as paintings, Millais makes the biblical tale the subject of an entire plate. The Good Samaritan kneels on the ground and cradles the partially dressed, bony-chested wayfarer, who extends one arm around the Good Samaritan, creating a circular bond of caring and kindness. The partially visible face of the wayfarer registers pain. In contrast, the face of the Good Samaritan is fixed entirely on the man he tends, thus obscuring his face from the viewer. Next to the Samaritan, Millais places the front half of the donkey whose ears and legs point straight along the path the wayfarer is traveling, suggesting the kindly traveler has just dismounted from his beast to tend the man in need with provisions from the donkey’s pack. In turn, this is the beast that will carry the wounded man to an inn for much needed rest. Another traveler just ahead, who has presumably ignored the wounded man, is a foil for the kindly Samaritan, who cannot pass by another in distress. The near photographic accuracy of the illustration seems most vivid in the anatomical rendering of the donkey; the small hairs on its hide, a mane palpable to the touch, its large right eye set on the side of its skull, pointed ears, and a realistic muzzle with a well-proportioned chin, nose, and mouth show Millais’s skill in observation. Along with the donkey, the setting of this plate also includes details of “everyday nature”—rolling hills, sparse ground vegetation, and trees—to bring the ancient parable into the immediate world of the Victorian reader-viewer.

  Singling out Millais as an illustrator of women in Beyond Decoration, Goldman argues: “Millais shows a mastery not merely of costume but also of pose and emotion”; Millais is capable of making “a motionless character at the same time intent, concentrating and alive” (15). Du Maurier paid Millais a similar compliment over a century earlier in “The Illustrating of Books”: “The crown, or ‘cake,’ must be given, I think, to Sir John Millais’ pretty woman, who is alive at every point, and the most modern of all. She is also a most aristocratic person, even if she be but a dressmaker, or a poor widow with her mite” (2: 372). The frontispiece to Orley Farm is of a well-executed landscape filled with trees, a farmhouse on a hill, and a maiden milking a realistically rendered cow in a fertile pasture in the foreground. However, many of the forty illustrations that Millais provides for Orley Farm feature pretty women of various social classes—the aristocratic Madeline Staveley, the widowed Lady Mason, and the penniless Mary Snow.

  Figure 29. “The Good Samaritan.” Illustration by John Everett Millais for The Parables of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, 1864.

  “The Angel of Light,” also called “Mary’s Letter” (see fig. 30), singly features Mary Snow and demonstrates Millais’s consummate artistic skill in drawing a convincingly real woman. Mary looks refined even if she is impoverished and dependent upon Felix Graham, a young rising barrister who educates and supports Mary and molds her to be his wife. The plate captures gentility in her modest coiffure (a low bun) and her high-necked, long-sleeved, full-length dress—the billowing skirt was a Millais specialty. The illustration also reveals the realistic school’s deep capacity for psychological penetration. Candlelight illuminates the intense look on the face of Mary Snow, furtively reading a letter not from Felix Graham, her fiancé, but a new admirer.

  Millais is illustrating a scene in Trollope’s novel where Mary finds “Stolen pleasures always are sweet” but simultaneously feels guilty that her “pleasures” do not come from the pen of “her own betrothed lord,” which she could read in broad daylight (1: 264). Here Mary reads in the darkness late at night, alone, and by candlelight, which intensifies the illicitness of this act. The setting is relatively uncluttered with only a few domestic items. Her hat hung on the wall to her left and the mirror attached to the dressing table behind her, for example, in no way distract from the single figure of Mary as she finds private pleasure in transgressing social decorum. The single candle in its simple brass holder provides the lone light source in the room. Mary, leaning her body close to the candle and the viewer, seems very much alive.

  Like Millais and Rossetti, George Du Maurier began his artistic career as a painter, but Du Maurier left painting altogether to become a book illustrator when, in 1860, he lost vision in his left eye;36 believing his compromised vision prohibited a career in easel painting and fearing total blindness, Du Maurier made a decision that was not displeasing to him. In his regular correspondence with his mother during this period, he happily describes his first commissions including a Christmas book for the Dalziels and drawings for Punch and Once a Week. In an April 1861 letter, Du Maurier tells his mother he is “very anxious to be kept on at O.A.W. [Once a Week] as it is the swellest thing out, and gets one known, and the more carefully I draw the better it will be for me in the end” (D. Du Maurier 36). Once a Week (1859–80) was a literary magazine produced by Bradbury and Evans to showcase the work of innovative Sixties artists and to provide competition for All the Year Round (1859–95), Dickens’s own weekly.

  Du Maurier’s illustrations appear in Once a Week alongside plates by William Holman Hunt, Millais, Burne-Jones, Arthur Hughes, Frederick Leighton, and Frederick Sandys, artists whose paintings came to grace the walls of the Royal Academy shows. Charles Keene and Tenniel also regularly published illustrations in Once a Week. Du Maurier was delighted to publish alongside these artistic illustrators but keenly aware of his competition. In a letter dated January 1861, he asks his mother to compare his illustration of a bedside scene to one that Millais drew—“When it comes out I will send it with Millais and you shall compare” (D. Du Maurier 29). And in April 1861, he laments to his mother that to Once a Week, “My name hasn’t yet sufficient weight to force on them drawings which they don’t like, like Keene or Tenniel, and I cannot illustrate all subjects with equal facility” (D. Du Maurier 38).

  Figure 30. “Mary’s Letter.” Illustration by John Everett Millais for Anthony Trollope’s Orley Farm, 1862.

  Du Maurier is known for his drawings of tall, statuesque women—a type of illustration that pleased Henry James but bored Forrest Reid, who complains of Du Maurier: “he is content to draw the same face over and over again, so that we find the well-known lady of Punch figuring as the heroine of all the novels he illustrates, from The Hand of Ethelberta to The Martian” (176). In Punch—Victorian London’s equivalent of The New Yorker—Du Maurier published what amounted to thousands of cartoons that satirize the pretentions of the rising middle class as well as the Pre-Raphaelite movement;37 how ironic that Du Maurier reports in a letter to his mother dated January 1861 that “George Cruickshank [sic] I hear has been abusing me at the Once a Week office, saying I am a damned proeraphaelite [sic]. This can only do me good and him harm” (D. Du Maurier 29).

  As the primary illustrator for The Cornhill Magazine, founded by George Murray Smith in 1859,38 Du Maurier illustrated Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters (1866) as well as Thomas Hardy’s The Hand of Ethelberta (1876), George Meredith’s The Adventures of Harry Richmond (1871), Margaret Oliphant’s A Rose in June (1874), and Thackeray’s The History of Henry Esmond (1852). Even if his work became somewhat formulaic, Du Maurier’s artistic training from Gleyre’s atelier in Paris and later at the Antwerp Academy carries into his book illustrations for Gaskell and Thackeray. In “Oh, Molly, Molly, Come and Judge Between Us” (see fig. 31) for Wives and Daughters (serialized in Cornhill between 1864–66), Du Maurier demonstrates the realistic school’s predilection for foregrounding figure over background in a picture plane. Central to this illustration are Molly Gibson and Cynthia Kirkpatrick, stepsisters who both have affection for Roger Hamley (a budding naturalist who is Squire Hamley’s second son). In this scene set among “holly-bushes shining out dark green in the midst of the amber and scarlet foliage” (132), Du Maurier reveals that Cynthia, whom Roger loves, has a previous tie to a Mr. Preston, here pictured alongside Cynthia.39

  As is characteristic of Du Maurier’s drawing, the two women in this illustration are tall and dressed in
genteel Victorian era clothing: hats, shawls, gloves, and long-sleeved full-length gowns that rustle against the tall grasses. Du Maurier aligns the reader-viewer’s sympathies with Molly, who stands in profile and who has journeyed into the lonely wooded path when she hears Cynthia in distress. Mr. Preston is “holding [Cynthia’s] hands tight, each looking as if just silenced in some vehement talk by the rustle of Molly’s footsteps” (2: 132). In the plate, Cynthia’s eyes beseech her stepsister for help while Preston’s glare seems to speak the words Preston actually utters: “‘The subject of our conversation does not well admit of a third person’s presence’” (2: 132). The viewer can nearly feel the pressure of Preston’s grip on Cynthia’s hands and the palpable tension of “‘a third person’s presence’” in this emotional encounter.

  Figure 31. “Oh, Molly, Molly, Come and Judge Between Us.” Illustration by George Du Maurier for Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters, 1866.

  Du Maurier demonstrates his range as an illustrator in his plates for The History of Henry Esmond, which moves readers from a country estate in England during the Restoration to a colonial settlement in Virginia, from an intimate drawing room to a distant battlefield when Henry Esmond joins the British army and prepares for battle in the unsuccessful attempt to restore the Stuarts to the English throne. A war scene entitled “The Chevalier de St. George” shows Du Maurier’s skill in rendering equine anatomy.40 From the flare of the horses’ nostrils to the tilt of their heads, from their windswept manes to their strong, muscled legs, from the swish of their tails to the tilt of their bridles—the horses that move across the page look alive, a testimony to Du Maurier’s skill in lifelike artistic representation.

  For her illustrations for Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), Helen Paterson, one of few female Sixties artists and the only woman artist to illustrate Hardy, likewise foregrounds figure over background and brings the viewer close to the illustrative page. The plot revolves around various sexual triangles with Bathsheba Everdene and her three lovers: Gabriel Oak, Sergeant Frank Troy, and Farmer Boldwood.41 One memorable full-page illustration for the eighth installment, “There’s Not a Soul in My House but Me To-night,” leads the viewer into a dark wood straight out of Hardy’s Dorset. Paterson lights up the faces and figures of Troy and Bathsheba, framed by a backdrop of exquisitely rendered trees; twisted branches surround the two figures but hide Farmer Boldwood, whose face registers his jealousy of Troy. The bark, the branches, and the figures that fill the illustrative page appear close enough for the viewer to touch.

  New Approaches to Dickens’s Novels

  Dickens began his literary career in the 1830s working with caricature-style illustrators, but he chose Sixties artists for his last two novels: Marcus Stone for Our Mutual Friend (OMF, 1865), and Luke Fildes for his unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870).42 Dickens’s decision to drop Browne, his longtime collaborator, was a strategic move to appeal to “the vast new audience of middle-class viewers who wanted to view high-quality pictures in the comfort of the fireside, and craved an art that would reflect their tastes and values while not costing a fortune” (Goldman and Cooke 2). The era’s most prominent author recognized that if he wanted to maintain his popularity, his novels needed naturalistic illustrations.

  Dickens chose Marcus Stone to honor a promise to help the Stone family after his friend and fellow artist, Frank Stone, died in 1859. Marcus was a gifted young artist: at age nineteen, he had a painting accepted for exhibition at the Royal Academy; in 1877 at the age of thirty-seven, he became a member of the prestigious Academy. In 1865, however, he was just twenty-five years old and eager to make a name for himself, which an association with Dickens would secure, so he agreed to be an illustrator—a field he abandoned after the 1860s. Stone brings to this psychologically dark Dickens novel his considerable talents as an artist; he guides viewers from the grit of inner city London to domestic interiors, the English countryside, and the Thames that runs through and weaves together the characters’ lives.

  Lizzie Hexam, the novel’s heroine, departs from the Dickensian angel in the house in her physical strength as well as her lower social class status. Stone renders Lizzie’s physical prowess and emotional intensity in a compelling opening illustration entitled “The Bird of Prey.” Stone focuses on two characters, Lizzie and her father, Jesse “Gaffer” Hexam, a waterman who makes a living by dredging the Thames for dead bodies and stealing their valuables before turning the corpses over to the police. In the plate, a rough-looking Gaffer Hexam has a wild head of hair and a full grizzly beard. His rolled-back workman’s shirtsleeves reveal strong arms that grip the sides of the boat as he leans over the edge in search of corpses. The short sleeves of Lizzie’s simple work dress show her strong arms to advantage, but her open cape and wavy hair, tousled slightly in the wind, give her a feminine air. An authentic looking industrial setting frames the two figures: cargo boats sail along a shoreline dotted with factories, one billowing industrial smoke.

  The illustration entitled “Forming the Domestic Virtues” (see fig. 32) strikingly conveys social class tension. Four characters appear in this plate—Lizzie’s working-class brother, Charley; Charley’s psychologically unstable schoolmaster, Bradley Headstone, who has risen to the lower middle class; Mortimer Lightwood, an upper middle-class attorney with a conscience; and Eugene Wrayburn, a careless, rich, and insolent barrister. Stone realistically depicts the bachelors’ comfortable lodgings. There are two easy chairs, a table, fireplace furnishings, and a mantel and wall filled with decorative objects: books, figurines, an elaborate clock, and paintings on either side of the fireplace. Whereas the caricaturists incorporate specific paintings to advance plot and characterization, Stone includes paintings merely to show that both gentlemen live in well-furnished surroundings with material comforts fitting those of their social class. Clouds, a full moon, and the Thames, visible through a window, frame Charley Hexam and recall his rustic roots—Charley is the son of a man who dredges this very river to profit from dead bodies.

  Figure 32. “Forming the Domestic Virtues.” Illustration by Marcus Stone for Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, 1865.

  Charley’s coat and pants are respectable but ill fitting, a combination that speaks to his working-class background but also points to his aspirations to get an education and improve himself. Headstone, an outsider of this milieu despite his social betterment, is holding his top hat behind his back; this detail informs the reader-viewer that he and Charley have just entered the room. The tense rigidity in Headstone’s stance intimates his future psychological instability. Headstone’s coat is of cruder cloth than that of Wrayburn and Lightwood, who wear well-fitting clothes of fine fabric. Hexam’s and Headstone’s eyes lead us to Wrayburn, dressed in a light colored, form-fitting three-piece suit; Wrayburn smokes as he nonchalantly rests his elbow on the mantel. Ready to defend his sister’s honor, Charley Hexam stands in the center of the room, his left arm raised in a partial fist.

  Hexam and Headstone have crossed class lines to confront Wrayburn about his dishonorable intentions toward Lizzie. Mortimer Lightwood hangs his head as if ashamed of his friend while Eugene Wrayburn, the object of Hexam’s anger and Headstone’s defiance, looks at his confronters with amused annoyance.43 This illustration primes the reader for a future confrontation between the two rivals for Lizzie’s affection in the novel’s prime sexual triangle—Lizzie, Headstone, and Wrayburn—and hints at the dramatic scene where a crazed, self-destructive Headstone nearly murders Wrayburn, leaving him to die in the river.

  Not all Stone’s illustrations are as successful as these two. “Eugene’s Bedside” takes place after Headstone’s attempt to murder Wrayburn. Lizzie miraculously rescues Wrayburn from the river “as if possessed by supernatural spirit and strength” (OMF, Penguin 769). Regrettably, Stone illustrates neither of those two dramatic scenes. The Lizzie that Stone pictures in “Eugene’s Bedside” does not look as if she could actually lift Eugene Wrayburn from the river alth
ough we have glimpsed the strength in her muscular arms as she rows the boat in “The Bird of Prey.” Lizzie Hexam now resembles Agnes Wickfield, a quintessential Victorian angel in the house. Her hair is pinned up neatly; her hands are folded in prayer, and her gaze lovingly rests on Wrayburn, lying lifelessly on the bed.

  Wrayburn’s wan appearance, too, offers a stark contrast to his self-contented smirk in “Forming the Domestic Virtues.” Stone renders every detail of the domestic interior of the sickroom: fabric folds on a bed and bed curtains; a table laden with medicine bottles and vials to confirm the seriousness of Wrayburn’s condition; and visitors with concerned expressions—Mortimer Lightwood, Bella Wilfer, and Mr. Milvey. Although Stone includes more figures here than usual for Sixties style illustration, all the figures direct the viewer’s attention to Wrayburn, who flutters between life and death. The presence of Mr. Milvey, a clergyman, intimates that a quiet wedding between Wrayburn and Lizzie will soon take place.

  The Household Edition: Refashioning Caricature with Realism

  Dickens may well have switched his illustrators to please a new generation of reader-viewers eager for photographic realism in book illustration, but the caricature tradition left a visible mark on his fiction even as it was repackaged and reimagined for the Household Edition. In “‘Reading the Pictures, Visualizing the Text,’” Philip Allingham presents the two schools of illustration as adversarial (for example, “Phiz to Walker: Caricature Versus Realism” [16; my emphasis])44 and privileges “the ‘New Men of the Sixties’ [who] … shaped the popular taste for sober, three-dimensional realism and character study, and thereby eclipsed the public’s appetite for the small-scale, humorous and melodramatic etchings of Phiz, Cruikshank, Doyle and Leech” (178). A century earlier, J. A. Hammerton makes a similar claim about Sixties artists in The Dickens Picture-Book, noting: