Serials to Graphic Novels

by Catherine J Golden

  4

  Caricature and Realism

  Fin-de-Siècle Developments of the Victorian Illustrated Book

  And if the disappointed author says to [his illustrator], “Why can’t you draw like Phiz?” he can fairly retort: “Why don’t you write like Dickens?”

  George Du Maurier, “The Illustrating of Books from the Serious Artist’s Point of View—1,” 1890

  At the fin de siècle, the Victorian illustrated book experienced what some critics consider a decline and others call a third period of development. In The Victorian Illustrated Book, Richard Maxwell pronounces the passing popularity of the genre: “An established form, a cultural institution sustained by artists, writers, publishers, booksellers, and a large, eager audience, thrives for many decades, then gradually disappears; time and circumstance have apparently killed it” (418).1 Likewise, Robert Meyrick, pleased by the inclusion of the Dalziels’ engravings in the fine art section at “The Victorian Era Exhibition” (1897), reflects in “‘Spoils of the lumber-room’”: “And yet, the craft [of illustration] that had just been recognized as art was already under threat of extinction…. photographic methods of reproduction had overtaken wood-engraving in British publishing” (185).2 In contrast, Arlene Jackson in Illustration and the Novels of Thomas Hardy focuses her analysis on the fin de siècle, an oft-neglected period of illustration: “The third period (1870–1895) has no particular artist to identify with, a fact in itself significant, but is a continuation, with some differences, of the representational school of the 1860s” (12); Jackson continues, “The two earlier periods, with their opposing styles of caricature and representationalism, have had their proponents among art and literary historians[.] … The end of the decade, however, did not signal the end of this ‘golden age’ of illustration” (12, 14).

  This chapter examines the validity of both viewpoints. The illustrated book was not “killed,” nor did it fade into “extinction.” In the later decades of Victoria’s reign, however, publishing trends and intertwining economic and aesthetic factors led to the decline of illustrated literature for mainstream newly released, large-circulation adult fiction produced in volume form in England.3 George Du Maurier’s anecdote about Phiz and Dickens in “The Illustrating of Books” presents two of the interlocking reasons for such a shift in the development of the illustrated book that this chapter examines: the changing nature of the novel and new directions in book illustration. However, the Victorian illustrated book thrived in several areas—certain serial formats, artists’ books, children’s literature, and the US market. In some of these forms of material culture, we witness a reengagement of the caricature tradition as well as a continuation of the representational school, also referred to as realism or naturalism. This chapter surveys late Victorian illustrated fiction marketed to different audiences according to social class, age, gender, and nation. It foregrounds two examples of fin-de-siècle illustration—one in England and the other in America, one in children’s literature and the other in adult fiction—to demonstrate continuity in the arc of the illustrated book and a media frenzy of Pickwickian magnitude.

  Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit (1902) and her successive children’s tales demonstrate a commitment to naturalism, a trait that aligns her with John Everett Millais and the realistic school of illustration. A gifted naturalist, Potter, who knew Millais personally and received a compliment from him for her skill in observation, returned to her portfolio of natural history studies as models and inspiration for her children’s book illustrations. Alternatively, Sixties artist George Du Maurier, savvy to the transatlantic development of the Victorian illustrated book, published his 1890s author-illustrated fiction in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, a major American periodical. In his best-known novel Trilby (T, 1894), Du Maurier engages theatricality and a persistent racialized stereotype of the Jew from Oliver Twist (OT, 1838)—aspects that show Du Maurier to be an inheritor of two illustrative styles: caricature and realism.

  Why the Victorian Illustrated Book Waned as a Vehicle for Newly Released Wide-Circulation Publication in Volume Form

  Not a single reason, but intertwining economic and aesthetic factors clarify why the demand for the Victorian illustrated book fell in the production of newly released, large-circulation adult fiction during the final decades of the nineteenth century in England. These include the decline of serial fiction, cost and quality considerations, a rise in literacy, the changing nature of the novel, new developments in illustration, and competition from other media.4

  In the 1830s and 1840s, serialization, which spread payment over a long period of time, made literature affordable to those without the funds to buy a book or subscribe to a lending library. As the century progressed, however, consumers increasingly elected to pay a small annual fee to a major subscription library such as Mudie’s or its competitor W. H. Smith & Son to borrow a book or a volume of a three-decker novel rather than purchase a novel in parts; with this system, multiple readers could borrow different volumes of a single title. By 1890, Mudie’s Select Library (1725–1960) had 250,000 subscribers (Gerard 216).

  The emerging free lending library provided Victorian readers with a way to access books other than purchasing a book or a serial in parts. The Public Libraries Act of 1850 was a crucial first step toward the creation of a public library system to offer opportunities for self-improvement to all social classes. This legislation gave local boroughs with a population of over 10,000 the right to levy a tax to finance a public library. Manchester opened the first public lending library in Britain in 1852, and Charles Dickens spoke at the inauguration.5 However, the measure was imperfect because funds could be spent only on buildings, furnishings, and staff, not for the purchase of books, so libraries relied on philanthropic donations to build their collections. Important legislative amendments in 1855 and 1866 helped to rid restrictions on the establishment of libraries and the spending of library funds.

  Some public libraries and subscription libraries took out periodical subscriptions, but demand for serials still decreased since people now had access to a serial through a free or subscription library and no longer had to purchase their own monthly installments. In addition, those readers who could easily afford to buy serials refrained from doing so because the overall quality of illustrated serials declined in the later decades of the nineteenth century. With mass production, texts and illustrations grew less expensive, lowering the cost of book production. However, with mass production came substandard printing practices and poorly manufactured materials.

  By the late nineteenth century—as in the beginning of the century—the bound novel became the preferred form of publishing. Linda K. Hughes and Michael Lund in The Victorian Serial correlate the rise of volume publication and, in turn, the decline of serial fiction to the pace of life at the dawning of the twentieth century: whereas “Victorians valued slow, steady development in installments over time,” epitomized by the serial unfolding over several years, readers at the fin de siècle favored “fast-forward visions of individual and communal life,” more effectively served through volume publication (275). The goal of many late nineteenth-century novelists like Robert Louis Stevenson and Thomas Hardy was single-volume publication:

  in these years novelists and poets were conceiving of stories that jarred with the … slow, sure growth and development of serial literature; instead the appropriate form for such visions of personal and social stagnation was the single volume, an autonomous whole, in which all parts found their places in a unity of theme and effect. (Hughes and Lund 230)

  Bound editions of works by late nineteenth-century authors that appeared serially with illustrations did not routinely include the illustrations that had accompanied these same works in their serial form. Hardy’s illustrated fiction demonstrates this trend. When Smith, Elder and Co. brought out The Hand of Ethelberta in two volumes in 1876, the publisher included all of George Du Maurier’s full-page engravings and pictorial capitals. In contrast, for the bound vo
lume of Tess of the d’Urbervilles published in 1892, Harper & Brothers did not include the original Tess illustrations that appeared in The Graphic.6 Hardy’s fiction published in volume form without the original illustrations came to be considered his serious literary work.

  Rising literacy rates and changes in the nature of the novel also influenced publishing practices and the production of illustrated literature. Victorian literacy rates are imprecise since the only criterion for literacy was the ability to sign a marriage register. Presumably, many who signed their name could read or write little else, and the figures do not reflect the numbers of older men and women who were illiterate. Nonetheless, a comparison of literacy figures from the first nationwide census published in 1840—a time when the illustrated book enjoyed enormous popularity—to the census figures of 1900—when newly released wide-circulation Victorian illustrated adult fiction was waning in England—reveals a marked increase in literacy. The 1840 census (based on data up until 20 June 1839) lists 67 percent of males and 51 percent of females as literate. By 1900—thirty years after passage of the Forster Act of 1870 (legislation that made education compulsory in England and Wales for children between the ages of five and thirteen)—97.2 percent of males and 96.8 percent of females in England and Wales were literate.7

  With higher literacy rates, illustrations—once necessary to boost sales and to help illiterate or marginally literate readers follow a plot—were no longer vital to a publication’s commercial success. At the fin de siècle, the illustrated magazine remained, but it catered to a less sophisticated audience, as Philip Allingham notes:

  rural and working class readers in Great Britain (and presumably immigrant English-as-Second-Language readers in America) found that the illustrated magazine supported their reading more than conventional books, cost far less than bound volumes, and offered better value in that, in addition to a serial instalment, the magazine would feature a plethora of other articles and illustrations, often of the “educational” or “improving” type. (“Why do Hardy’s novels”)

  While pictures “supported” rural and working-class readers, more sophisticated readers still enjoyed pictures at the fin de siècle. There are two distinct types of readers, notes Du Maurier in “The Illustrating of Books”: one “likes to have its book (even its newspaper!) full of little pictures” (1: 349), and the other “visualizes what he reads (at the moment of reading) with the mind’s eye, unconsciously, perhaps, and without effort, but in a manner so satisfactory to himself that he wants the help of no picture; indeed, to him a picture would be a hindrance” (349).

  In this climate, authors who were dually talented often did not illustrate their own fiction as William Makepeace Thackeray had done in the 1840s and 1850s. Robert Louis Stevenson was an amateur landscape painter, but his paintings never accompanied his fiction published during his lifetime. D. H. Lawrence and Samuel Butler were also talented writers who were artistically gifted, but they never published their own drawings to accompany their fiction. Henry James took art lessons, which impacted his style of writing, and recalls reading Dickens’s illustrated novels; often quoted is James’s conviction that Oliver Twist “seemed to me more Cruikshank’s than Dickens’s” (A Small Boy and Others 120). But James openly resisted book illustration and agreed only to a photographic frontispiece for the New York edition of his novels. Rudyard Kipling, the son of artist J. Lockwood Kipling, illustrated only his Just So Stories (1902) while his father illustrated two of his son’s works, The Jungle Book (1894) and Kim (1901). When he became an author-illustrator in the 1890s, Du Maurier published his illustrated fiction in the US market, demonstrating border crossing in the evolution of the Victorian illustrated book. Hardy, who trained as an architect, was a capable draughtsman. He often created sketches to guide the illustrators of his serial novels, but Hardy only published his own illustrations for some of his poems as well as the maps he made for his Wessex novels and a treasure map for Treasure Island (1883).

  Fin-de-siècle illustration proved incompatible with fiction for a host of reasons. In the words of Du Maurier, “if the disappointed author says to [his illustrator], ‘Why can’t you draw like Phiz?’ he can fairly retort: ‘Why don’t you write like Dickens?’” (“The Illustrating of Books,” 1: 353). But even before the novel’s shift toward literary Modernism, some Victorians considered illustrations “improper intrusions” (Harvey 180) or “mere optical symbols or echoes” (James, Golden Bowl 333) and thus unnecessary. Good literary art, as James defines it in “The Art of Fiction,” competes with representational illustration: “A novel is in its broadest definition a personal, a direct impression of life” (384); “It is here that [the author] competes with his brother the painter in his attempt to render the look of things, the look that conveys their meaning, to catch the color, the relief, the expression, the surface, the substance of the human spectacle” (390). John Harvey claims in Victorian Novelists and Their Illustrators that Du Maurier’s late nineteenth-century “illustrations add nothing that the novel needs to have; they are simply respectable drawings of people who look just as the characters are described, posed as the scene requires: they are just such illustrations as the later 19th century tended to produce” (180).

  Such “optical echoes” appear, for example, in Part First of Trilby where Du Maurier describes and draws individual busts and a group portrait of the “Three Musketeers of the Brush” (“Les trois Angliches,” T 162)—Talbot Wynne, or Taffy; Sandy, the Laird of Cockpen; and William Bagot called Little Billee (a character some believe is based on Sixties artist Fred Walker and others consider Du Maurier’s self-portrait).8 The opening scenes of Trilby are filled with well-executed renderings of Parisian landmarks that continue in the style of lifelike representation popular in the Sixties. In Peter Ibbetson (PI), many illustrations such as “Le P’tit Anglais” also “look just as the characters are described.”

  The Modern novel, informed by the theories of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, looks inward and explores the private self. Phiz’s illustrations are compatible with Dickens’s text because Phiz’s pictures are given to storytelling, and Dickens’s style is richly descriptive—full of eye. To Harvey, Phiz’s illustrations for The Old Curiosity Shop have “merely sharpened our sense of Dickens’s own creation. An author could have no justification for wishing away such illustrations as improper intrusions in his art, or as evasions of his own responsibility” (180). Many fin-de-siècle readers did “wish away” illustration, which became increasingly incompatible with the rise of literary Modernism. As Jane R. Cohen observes, “The later introspective stories of E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf with their psychological plots, stream-of-consciousness monologues, and symbolism, together with the increasingly egocentric and abstract prose of their successors, still seem to render illustration virtually inconceivable” (230). Maxwell likewise notes in his afterword to The Victorian Illustrated Book, “James Joyce did not have, or need, a Cruikshank” (395).9

  Du Maurier’s author-illustrated fiction of the 1890s demonstrates how realistic illustration jars with psychological themes with which Du Maurier himself experimented. Peter Ibbetson presents a concept called “dreaming true” (PI 201, 204); it is a form of mind traveling in which two lovers, the Duchess of Towers and Peter Ibbetson, dream themselves into each other’s consciousness while they are asleep.10 Mary, the Duchess of Towers, who teaches Ibbetson how to dream true, turns out to be his Parisian childhood love. Prison walls separate the two by day, but at night, in “a double dream, a dream common to us both” (PI 247), Peter and Mary visit their childhood selves.

  Du Maurier pictures mind traveling by making the figures from the present time either more solid or more shadowy than the “dream people” (330) from the past. For example, in a drawing entitled “‘Mother, Mother!’” (PI 214) set in a cherished garden in Passy, Peter Ibbetson, delineated in firm lines, kneels next to his mother, drawn in faint lines. Also rendered in faint lines and clothes of “a by-gone fashion” (212) are Ibb
etson’s childhood self, Gogo Pasquier, writing in his copy book; Mary Towers, then called Mimsey Seraskier, who “took no notice of me, nor did the others” (212); and Gogo’s dog Médor, snoozing in the shade (214). In contrast, in “‘Maman M’a Donné Quat’ Sous Pour M’en Aller à la Foire’” (330), the tall, elegant, well-dressed figures of Peter and Mary look shadowy, but the “dream people” (330) from their childhood—Gogo, Mimsey, and the poulterer’s son—appear solid and real (see fig. 41).

  Peter and Mary, unnoticed by the “dream people,” try in vain to stop the poulterer’s son from falling off a high garden wall, an accident that cripples him for life. Ibbetson laments, “We cannot even touch these dream people without their melting away into thin air” (330)—but in this picture, rather, Peter and Mary look as if they will “melt away.” The faint lines of the bottom half of their forms make Mary’s full long skirt and Ibbetson’s trousered legs almost dissolve into the surrounding winter streetscape. Neither combination of shadowy and firm figures successfully conveys the psychic mystery of a character living a dual life: one actual life and another achieved by projecting him or herself into a dream where “the things and people in my dream had the same roundness and relief as in life, and were life-size; one could move among them and behind them, and feel as if one could touch and clasp and embrace them if one dared” (217).