Figure 41. “‘Maman M’a Donné Quat’ Sous Pour M’en Aller à la Foire.’” Illustration by George Du Maurier for his “Peter Ibbetson” in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, October 1891. From Special Collections, Scribner Library, Skidmore College.
In addition to the growing incompatibility between late nineteenth-century illustration and literature, illustrations—once prized as a form of entertainment—followed a pattern of other Victorian commodities that decreased in value with mass production (for example, the writing desk).11 As the illustrated book became more available and affordable for a rapidly growing middle-class readership,12 it lost its novelty. Since the illustrated book no longer assured publishers excellent sales, many Victorian British publishers no longer agreed to cover the extra expense of illustrations even if a major novelist wanted to issue a work with illustrations. In this publishing climate, Du Maurier brought out his illustrated books in the thriving US market.
Some publishers took a fresher approach to the illustrated book and published works with photographic illustrations. The New York edition of James’s works includes photographic frontispieces by Alvin Langdon Coburn, an important early twentieth-century American photographer known for his pictorialism. But, in general, the rise of photography and cinematography eclipsed the Victorian illustrated book. Although photography dates to Italy in 1515 where we find Leonardo da Vinci’s description of an early optical device called a camera obscura, the genre came into its own shortly before Queen Victoria’s ascension to the throne. In 1826, Nicéphore Niépce produced the first photograph using pewter plates, and in 1835, Niépce and L. J. M. Daguerre designed the process of daguerreotype photography. In England, William Henry Fox Talbot experimented with light to capture images on paper. In 1841, when first-generation caricaturists were commanding attention for their theatrical illustrations, Talbot patented his calotype process using negative and positive images. More photographic developments came in the 1840s and 1850s. David Brewster, Frederick Scott Archer, and Jules Duboscq demonstrated stereo daguerreotype at the Great Exhibition. A decade later in 1861, Thomas Sutton patented a camera with a single lens reflex plate, a design still commonly used nowadays. By the 1890s, photographs increasingly replaced hand-drawn illustrations in a range of popular publications—newspapers, magazines, and books.
Cinematography, the art of motion picture photography, arose at the end of the Victorian period and gained favor with consumers as the market for book illustration declined for wide-circulation publication of adult fiction in England. Building upon developments in photography, cinematography captured parts of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee (1897). Robert Paul, who sold George Méliès a film camera at the start of his prolific filmmaking career, used a rotating camera head set on a tripod to create a panorama effect to preserve this historic occasion. A French illusionist and filmmaker, Méliès began shooting films in 1896 and improved cinematography through innovations in technique and narrative. Méliès created the prototype for early film studios and produced 513 films between 1896 and 1913 (ranging from one to forty minutes in length). These new art forms of cinematography and photography competed with book illustration, which some authors feared would date their work.
Surveying Forms of Fin-de-Siècle Illustrated Fiction
Amidst changing aesthetic tastes and advances in technology, the Victorian illustrated book did not die out at the end of the century; it evolved. Illustration remained in certain serial formats, although the relationship between author and illustrator was far less intimate than in the 1830s and 1840s. Illustrated material gained new markets—principally, in small-circulation artists’ books, children’s literature on both sides of the Atlantic, and adult fiction in the US. Installment publication, the form that launched Dickens’s career, was still an easy, attractive way for a novice author to get published in England. For a publisher, parts publication was less of a financial risk than publishing in volumes and still guaranteed a writer a large middle-class readership. Stevenson published his debut novel serially in Young Folks in 1881; what we now know as Treasure Island first appeared under the title of The Sea Cook with one illustration. The work was popular, and it subsequently came out in book form in 1883 by an American publisher, Roberts Brothers of Boston, with four illustrations by Frank Merrill of Little Women fame.13 Hardy’s serial novels appeared with and without illustration, depending upon the journal in which he published. Macmillan’s Magazine, which did not publish fiction with illustrations, brought out The Woodlanders from 1886–87. Had Hardy published Tess of the d’Urbervilles serially in Macmillan’s, as he had hoped, it would not have been illustrated. Hardy published Tess in 1891 in a less prestigious periodical, The Graphic, which insisted on illustration as a publishing convention and censored portions of the novel deemed immoral for its middle-class readership.
Different from author and illustrator partnerships during the “Cruikshank-Phiz era” (Jackson 12), illustrators at the end of the nineteenth century commonly “received the completed manuscript of poetry, drama or fiction direct from the publisher,” notes Kooistra in The Artist as Critic, “and produced the illustrations with little or no connection to the writer, who was sometimes surprised by the final product” (3). This was common practice, one that Du Maurier laments in “The Illustrating of Books”: “What a fine thing it would be if author and artist could always meet in consultation over each separate design! But that seems impracticable” (2: 371). Whereas Dickens selected his book illustrators and worked with them in close collaboration, Hardy never met his principal Tess illustrator, Hubert von Herkomer, a Royal Academy painter. For serials published in The Graphic, it was not the serial’s author but the magazine staff who supervised the illustration process.14 There were four illustrators for Tess—Herkomer, E. Borough Johnson, Daniel A. Wehrschmidt, and J. Syddall. All four followed the representational school of illustration and produced illustrations with merit, although Wehrschmidt and Syddall have been considered “much inferior” to Johnson and Herkomer (Jackson 105). When fin-de-siècle illustrated serials appeared in book form, the illustrations were not typically included in the bound book, so readers today are often surprised to learn that Tess of the d’Urbervilles originally appeared in serial form with illustrations.
New markets arose for the illustrated book at the fin de siècle. The 1890s witnessed luxury books and periodicals that grew out of the Arts and Crafts and Art Nouveau movements. Much anticipated, in demand, and parodied by Punch, The Yellow Book (1894–97) was a short-lived publication under the artistic direction of Aubrey Beardsley and the literary editorship of Henry Harland, published by John Lane. The Yellow Book was distinct among its literary competitors with its yellow cloth binding (associated with aestheticism); exclusion of serials and advertisements; and insistence on high-quality essays, short stories, poems, and artwork. Moreover, the magazine presented art and literature on an equal plane. The Yellow Book published work by noted artists and authors, respectively, John Singer Sargent, Walter Sickert, Max Beerbohm, and Beardsley; Henry James, Sir Edmund Gosse, H. G. Wells, and William Butler Yeats. But the publication’s distinct use of asymmetrically placed title pages to introduce artistic and literary contributions, generous white space, and distinctive typography made it an aesthetically valuable material object.
Aesthetics motivated William Morris to found the Kelmscott Press in 1891 in response to the poor quality of machine-made books.15 Whereas three decades earlier, Dante Gabriel Rossetti worked with commercial publishers, binders, and printers to create books that were decorative works of art, Morris revived anachronistic printing techniques in what Walter Benjamin calls “the age of mechanical reproduction.” Morris favored the technique of wood engraving even though photoengraving was in ascendance in book illustration. A champion of the Arts and Crafts movement, Morris carried his artistry into furniture and home decoration (including wallpaper, textiles, and stained glass) as well as bookmaking. He believed that the illustrated book “‘gives us such
endless pleasure and is so intimately connected with the other absolutely necessary art of imaginative literature that it must remain one of the very worthiest things towards the production of which reasonable man should strive’” (qtd. in Bland 19).16
As David Bland observes in A History of Book Illustration, “Everything in [Morris’s] books had to be good—paper, ink, printing and binding” (275). Bland criticizes “the crowded appearance of the Kelmscott page, heavy type, heavy border and heavy cut all in the same plane” (275), but other critics see Morris’s books as “beautiful. They were designed to be read slowly, to be appreciated, to be treasured” (Cody). Morris designed his typefaces, made his paper, and printed and bound his books by hand. Carefully crafted illustrated editions of Chaucer (famously illustrated by Edward Burne-Jones), the Romantic poets, and Morris’s own writings are among the fifty titles Morris turned into expensive limited-edition volumes that “made an implicit statement about the ideal relationships which ought to exist between the reader, the text, and the author” as Cody argues in “Morris and the Kelmscott Press.” What Morris strove to achieve was not financially viable, however. Jane R. Cohen concludes: “Even publishers who agree with William Morris that the illustrated book, because it combines so many arts and gives such pleasure, should ‘remain one of the worthiest things towards the production of which reasonable man should strive’ know that his view is more idealistic than economically realistic” (229).
Morris’s venture gained a small following in other private presses, such as Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon at the Vale Press, founded in 1894, and Lucien Pissarro at the Eragny Press, founded (in England) in 1895. These artistic approaches to bookmaking likewise proved too costly except for luxury editions for wealthy patrons. However, illustrated gift book editions of nineteenth-century novels that had originally appeared with and without illustrations also began to appear in the late nineteenth century. The works of Jane Austen and Elizabeth Gaskell illustrated by Hugh Thomson in the 1890s were in demand; “after Cranford appeared in 1891,” notes Muir, “a ‘Thomson’ book became a feature of the Christmas market” (198). Although no longer referred to as “Christmas books” today, limited luxury editions with ample illustrations remain popular holiday items.
Illustration, which continued in serials and found a market in artists’ books and gift books, established a true home in children’s literature by the 1890s where it became “a venue for stylish artists. Children’s book illustration was considered high art,” as Linda Lear argues, “and children’s books became part of Victorian fashion, like architecture and home décor” (Beatrix 33). For children’s literature, age and gender were entering the nineteenth-century consciousness. There was a new understanding that a young child would want a book with far more pictures than words. Boys and girls would benefit from different types of reading material. Adventure tales would prepare Victorian boys for manhood, leading young male readers on journeys across the high seas to explore uncharted continents and unknown islands. Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) was a major influence on Victorian boys’ fiction, and books by Stevenson, R. M. Ballantyne, Captain Frederick Marryat, and G. E. Henty were nicknamed “Robinson Crusonades.”17 Likely, many girls secretly read their brothers’ copies of Treasure Island and King Solomon’s Mines (1885), the first in H. Rider Haggard’s enormously popular Allan Quatermain series,18 since girls’ books—designed to prepare girls for their future roles as wives and mothers—were milder than boys’ books and offered comparatively little fun or adventure.
Among the most popular Victorian tales for girls published in England are Charlotte Mary Yonge’s The Daisy Chain (1856) and school stories by L. T. Meade, such as A World of Girls (1886), and, in the US market, Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868, 1869) and Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World (1850). The tradition of books for both sexes did not disappear with the advent of gender-specific fiction. Animal tales, such as Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty (1877) and Kipling’s The Jungle Book, appealed to boys and girls. In this category of books for younger boys and girls we find Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit, Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908), and A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) and The House at Pooh Corner (1928), noteworthy for their illustrations by, respectively, Potter and Ernest Shepard.
From its crude beginning in chapbooks, children’s book illustration underwent dynamic changes in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The advent of color printing in wood engraving in the mid-nineteenth century is associated with Edmund Evans, the pioneer of the picture book who elevated standards for children’s book production and hired notable artists to illustrate children’s books: Walter Crane, who was influenced by William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement; Randolph Caldecott, whose legacy lives on in the Caldecott Medal awarded yearly to the best American children’s picture book; and Kate Greenaway, whose popular designs found extensive life in children’s clothing. Other publishing firms entered the market of color illustration in children’s books, notably Routledge and Warne and Co., which became Potter’s lifelong publisher. The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries produced memorable children’s illustrators and author-illustrators—in England, Edward Lear, John Tenniel, Kipling, Arthur Hughes, Crane, Caldecott, Greenaway, Potter, Arthur Rackham, Shepard, Edmund Dulac, and Kay Nielsen; and in the United States, Howard Pyle, N. C. Wyeth, Jessie Willcox Smith, E. W. Kemble, and W. W. Denslow. Some of these treasured authors wrote and illustrated tales that originated as stories for a specific child reader.19
The late century also witnessed a rise in the publication of illustrated adult literature in the US market. In the 1870s and 1880s, while the Victorian illustrated book was resisting book illustration for newly released wide-circulation adult fiction in volume form in England, American consumers were demanding illustrated periodicals, newspapers, encyclopedias, natural histories, architecture books, and adult and children’s books.20 Border crossing occurred in the evolution of the illustrated book well before Du Maurier published his 1890s fiction in American periodicals that, in turn, became illustrated books. Some American novels were illustrated in England before they were illustrated in America—Evangeline (1847) is a prime example of this trend. American publisher William D. Ticknor (later Ticknor, Reed, and Fields and then Ticknor and Fields) printed Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s long narrative poem Evangeline in 1847 without illustrations and published nineteen unillustrated versions between 1847 and 1865. In 1849, Longfellow’s London publisher, David Bogue, printed an illustrated version of Longfellow’s enormously popular epic poem about the expulsion of the Acadians with no less than forty-five wood engravings by Birket Foster (aided by Jane E. Benham). Routledge issued two editions of Evangeline with John Gilbert’s illustrations in 1853 and 1856. In 1866, Ticknor and Fields marketed the first US illustrated edition of Longfellow’s poem with pictures by F. O. C. Darley.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin first appeared in 1851 as a forty-week serial in the American abolitionist periodical called The National Era. Jewett and Company made an unusual publishing move in 1850s America: the company published Uncle Tom’s Cabin in book form in 1852 with six illustrations by Hammatt Billings, and, given the book’s popularity, as a lavish illustrated edition with 117 illustrations by Billings in time for the Christmas market of 1852 (it is dated 1853, however). The first British edition, published by John Cassell in 1852, included twenty-seven illustrations by George Cruikshank. Moreover, as the demand for illustrated books grew in the US market, illustrated editions appeared of newly released illustrated fiction marketed for adult readers as well as of popular texts previously published without illustrations such as Little Women, which enjoyed enormous popularity on both sides of the Atlantic.21
Mark Twain published most of his major works via subscription publishing, a marketing system that anticipates publishing on demand today. Targeted at economically privileged patrons, subscription publication granted security to a publisher even before a firm printed a
nd sold a book. Twain—like Dickens decades before him—wrote knowing his works would be illustrated and that pictures would be essential to the success of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), both subscription publications.22 These two books each include decorative covers and frontispieces and well over a hundred headpieces, tailpieces, and marginal inset illustrations by, respectively, True Williams and E. W. Kemble, who drew readers to Twain’s fiction.
Authors of books published by subscription, like authors whose works came out through serial publication, “sacrificed literary respectability for popular appeal and considerable profit” (David and Sapirstein, “Illustrators” 20); however, Twain embraced this form of publication and worked closely with publishers and editors as Dickens did with serial publishing—“choosing the most talented artists, directing their interpretations of text, selecting from the final prints, and at times removing material they deemed unfit for illustration” (21). “In many cases, Twain took illustrations into account as he wrote and edited his text,” note Beverly David and Ray Sapirstein, “using them as counterpoint and accompaniment to his words, often allowing them to inform his general narrative strategy and to influence the amount of detail he felt necessary to include in his written descriptions” (22). For Huck Finn, Twain commissioned Kemble, a staff illustrator for Life (a comic weekly), and took full charge of the marketing and production of his work.
Among this array of illustrated material produced at the fin de siècle in the British and US markets, the work of two author-illustrators, Beatrix Potter and George Du Maurier, encourages us to look beyond periodicity in an examination of the Victorian illustrated book. Potter privately printed her first picture book for young children in England in 1901, the year of Queen Victoria’s death, and went on to publish an entire series of children’s tales that has never been out of print. In the 1890s, Du Maurier published three author-illustrated novels for an adult readership marketed by a US publisher; they became late Victorian blockbusters and resonated on both sides of the Atlantic. Although their work took dramatically different forms, both author-illustrators are inheritors of the school of realistic representation and, in Du Maurier’s case, of two traditions: caricature and realism.
Serials to Graphic Novels Page 20
