Serials to Graphic Novels
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13. This term appears variously in criticism. Throughout this book, I follow A. N. Wilson in The Victorians, who writes this as two words and italicizes Pickwick; notes Wilson, “Pickwick mania seized first Britain, then abroad” (19). To confuse this terminology further, Wilson also writes the phrase as two words without italicization later in this same discussion.
14. Critics of the illustrated book including John Harvey, Richard Maxwell, Paul Goldman, Simon Cooke, Robert Patten, and Jane R. Cohen have likewise argued for Pickwick’s importance to the genre.
15. There are many variations of Trilby-mania. Throughout this book, I follow Richard Kelly, author of the biography George Du Maurier, who hyphenates the two words and does not italicize the title of the novel; Kelly advances, “The enormous popularity of the book and the play led to what was called Trilby-mania” (121).
16. This term “graphic classics” is also the name of Barron’s series of graphic novels. Another major publisher of this genre has a similar name, Classical Comics.
17. There are several interpretations of this sculpture that resides in the Vatican.
18. Lessing’s eighteenth-century terminology illuminates how we read illustrations in the Victorian illustrated book where in some cases, the author and illustrator jointly determined which moments to delineate through illustration. Such is the case in George Eliot and Frederick Leighton’s collaboration for Romola, published serially in The Cornhill (1862–63). Goldman devotes a section of “Defining Illustration Studies” to the chosen moment of illustration, 25–27.
19. See Julie Gardham’s article “The Mirror of the World” for University of Glasgow, Special Collections. Along with her examination of Caxton’s Mirror, Gardham includes some of the primitive woodcuts that English craftsman made for the 1481 edition.
20. Fashionable illuminated addresses were also used to mark major occasions like Queen Victoria’s Golden and Diamond Jubilees in, respectively, 1887 and 1897.
21. In Charles Dickens and His Publishers, Robert Patten notes five types of piecemeal publishing in place by 1740: “fascicle issue, cheap part reprints, newspapers and magazines, instalment fiction, and series” (46).
Chapter 1. The Pickwick Papers and the Rise of the Serial
1. There was no installment of Pickwick in June 1837 because Dickens was distraught over the death of his beloved sister-in-law, Mary Scott Hogarth. Part 15, issued in July 1837, includes an “Address” by the author, explaining how a “sad bereavement” prevented timely publication of part 15. Some critics list the serial as running from March 1836 to October 1837. Part 1 of Pickwick was published in April 1836; however, the eight-page ad announcing works published by Chapman and Hall is dated “March, 1836,” so one might assume that part 1 is a March issue. The final double number, which contains parts 19 and 20, was published in November 1837, and page 1 of the Advertiser is correctly dated 1 Nov. 1837. However, the date “October 30, 1837” appears in an “Address” by the publisher included in the November issue; this may be the source of the misstatement that the final double number was issued in October 1837. I am grateful to Charles Parkhurst of Charles Parkhurst Rare Books for verifying and explaining these details about Pickwick that have perplexed many Dickens scholars.
2. I recommend Picturing Scotland Through the Waverley Novels to those interested in Scott’s contribution to the Victorian illustrated book. Hill provocatively challenges claims by critics including Richard Maxwell that Scott resisted illustration for his novels and included them when financial problems made book illustration a commercial incentive.
3. See Maxwell’s chapter “Walter Scott, Historical Fiction, and the Genesis of the Victorian Illustrated Book” in The Victorian Illustrated Book, 1–51. John Harvey asserts in Victorian Novelists and Their Illustrators that in general “the traditional novel had little place for pictures” (8) and that Sir Walter Scott’s work was not illustrated except for a vignette or a frontispiece.
4. Richard Maxwell likewise notes in “Walter Scott, Historical Fiction, and the Genesis of the Victorian Illustrated Book”: “During the late Middle Ages, ‘illustration’ meant spiritual or intellectual illumination. By the end of the sixteenth century the same word [illustration] often denoted the action of making something clear, typically by providing an explanatory and confirming example; to illustrate was to use one text to shed light on another” (1).
5. Thackeray uses the term “illuminate” to describe his illustrations for Vanity Fair, noting in his “Before the Curtain” preface that the serial is “brilliantly illuminated with the Author’s own candles” (Oxf. 2).
6. These works are entitled The Second Tour of Doctor Syntax, in Search of Consolation: A Poem, published in 1820, and The Third Tour of Doctor Syntax, in Search of a Wife: A Poem, published in 1821.
7. Jane Austen mentions Dr. Syntax in a letter to her beloved sister, Cassandra Austen, dated March 2–3, 1814; the full quote included in Gillian Dow and Katie Halsey’s “Jane Austen’s Reading: The Chawton Years” reads: “I have seen nobody in London yet with such a long chin as Dr Syntax, nor Anybody quite so large as Gogmagoglicus” (n. pag.).
8. Another example of Syntax, whose pointed chin surpasses his nose, is “Doctor Syntax in a Court of Justice” also for The Second Tour of Doctor Syntax, 176.
9. Likewise, in one of Syntax’s adventures from The Third Tour of Doctor Syntax called “Doctor Syntax Pursued by a Bull,” Combe comments on Rowlandson’s drawing of the frightened long-chinned figure in his trademark black suit scurrying up a tree to escape a mad bull, his hat falling off in the process.
10. In Life in London, Egan also implores his illustrators to exude “Hogarthian energy”: “May thou also, Bob and George, grapple with an Hogarthian energy in displaying tout à la mode the sublime and finished part of the creation … what must always be a welcome visitor at every residence, and likewise an admired portrait over all the chimney-pieces in the kingdom, a PERFECT GENTLEMAN” (12).
11. Later in that same chapter, Egan calls attention to the authenticity of another crowded Robert and George Cruikshank plate entitled “Bow Street. Tom & Jerry’s Sensibility Awakened at the Pathetic Tale of the Elegant Cyprian, the Feeling Coachman, and the Generous Magistrate”: “The plate is an accurate representation of the Public Office, Bow Street: and the portrait of Coachy, is a fine specimen of the talents of the artist in his personification of CHARACTER. The countenance of the prisoners, as standing in the felon’s box with irons on their legs, are also depicted with felicity of expression” (186).
12. Charles Dickens married Catherine Hogarth on 2 Apr. 1836.
13. According to the 1891 Victorian “London Census” transcription, a “jobmaster” hired out carriages, drivers, and horses. For more information, see
14. Biographers and critics from our time and Dickens’s recognize that Pickwick’s triumph was at least in part accidental. James Kinsley, editor of the 1986 Oxford edition and clearly a Pickwick fan, admits, “it started off almost by accident, with no serious design or goal, and gradually took on significance” (x). Robert Patten uses the term “accident” to describe Chapman and Hall’s lucky decision to promote serial publication: “Dickens and his publishers discovered the potential of serial publication virtually by accident” (CDP 46). Kinsley also suggests the role chance played when “Dickens was discovered (and discovered himself) to be writing a novel” (P, Oxf. ix). Hereafter, the Oxford edition of Pickwick will be cited in the text parenthetically as “Oxf.” followed by a page number.
15. For more discussion of these publication figures, see Patten, CDP, 65.
16. Dickens did not have “to invent a new comic climax every six pages,” as Patten observes in CDP (65).
17. By 1740, this affordable format was well established for a host of popular hack publications, such as lurid weeklies about Old Bailey trials and trashy romances. Serials appeared in monthly parts and as a regular feature of
a weekly or monthly magazine. Dickens—who made his career as a serial writer—participated in both forms of serialization. For example, Pickwick appeared in parts, but subsequent Dickens novels came out serially in Bentley’s Miscellany at the cost of two shillings and sixpence and in Dickens’s own two-penny weekly magazines, Household Words and All the Year Round.
18. Dickens used this expression in the preface to the 1869 Charles Dickens edition of David Copperfield; the line reads, “like many fond parents, I have in my heart of hearts a favourite child. And his name is DAVID COPPERFIELD.” See “David Copperfield by Charles Dickens Prefaces, (1850 and 1869).”
19. As illustration became lucrative, caricaturists like George Cruikshank, Hablot Knight Browne, and John Leech found competition from Royal Academy painters including John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Marcus Stone, who distinguished the illustrated book during its prime, as I explore in ch. 3.
20. For more on Pickwick and social class, see A. N. Wilson, The Victorians, 19–21.
21. Like Sketches by Boz, Pickwick proved formative for Dickens in its prison scenes that the author later developed in David Copperfield (1850) and Little Dorrit (1857).
22. This phrase is the title of Walter Houghton’s 1963 book, The Victorian Frame of Mind.
23. The club members travel by coach and so provide an authentic record of coaching inns and journeys by coach relevant to historians of transportation today.
24. Likewise, Dickens’s installments of Nicholas Nickleby became a vehicle for Post Office reform when copies of Henry Cole’s postal reform play entitled “A Report of an Imaginary Scene at Windsor Castle Respecting the Uniform Penny Postage” were bound into part 13 (April 1839) of Nickleby, the best-selling novel of 1839.
25. A Philpot is an earthenware Staffordshire jug bearing the face or figure of a well-known person or character.
26. In The Victorians, 19, A. N. Wilson compares Weller to Sancho Panza, Don Quixote’s loyal servant who acts as his squire.
27. Joe the “fat boy,” a character with no other name, suffers from what today we call narcolepsy.
28. See Michael Hollington, The Reception of Charles Dickens in Europe, vol. 1, xxxv–xliii, for a complete list of translations of Dickens’s works published between 1837–2013.
29. The Royal Doulton website lists the dates of manufacture for each Pickwick figurine and character jug. See
30. Meisel includes this instruction from the script of Stirling’s play and discusses the other two Pickwick adaptations in Realizations, 252.
31. “The first thirty-five years of the nineteenth century introduced more radical changes in book production than the preceding 350,” as Patten observes (CDP 55).
32. In Charles Dickens and His Publishers, Patten similarly notes: “It is interesting to speculate what would have been the appearance of Dickens’s work twenty years earlier, when woodblock and copperplate were the only processes perfected. There is no question that the mechanical advances and limitations in block-making significantly affected the shape of his serial fiction” (58–59).
33. For more detailed information on developments in printing that impacted production of illustrated books including stereotyping and photographic processes, I recommend Patten’s Charles Dickens and His Publishers, 56–58.
34. Richard Hoe’s rotary press made paper production even faster, permitting 20,000 impressions per hour by the year 1858; see Banham, “The Industrialization of the Book 1800-1970,” 277.
35. Cruikshank’s enormously popular The Bottle (1847) and The Drunkard’s Children (1848) were reproduced with glyphography, which Richard Vogler describes as “a cheap form of graphic reproduction inferior to etchings” (159). This mode of reproduction allowed the publisher to sell all eight plates of The Bottle for only one shilling.
36. To Benjamin, only an “authentic” and “autonomous” work of art possessed an “aura,” a term that captures a unique artwork’s original function (“its original use value” [224]) and the life of its creator. However, Pickwick and other popular illustrated serials recall a time when authors and artists were intimately involved in the creation of works over a 1 ½- to 2-year period that arguably have a type of “aura,” despite their reproducibility.
37. George P. Landow uses “created” and “invented” to describe the mass audience that Pickwick engendered in “Social and Economic Forces Influencing Pickwick’s Mass Readership” in The Victorian Web,
38. For a full account of population changes, see Sally Mitchell, Daily Life in Victorian England, 13.
39. In Daily Life in Victorian England, 13, Mitchell states that in 1901, 80% of English people lived in cities. Richard Soloway in “Population and Demographics,” 617, estimates that 75% lived in and around large cities in the industrial north at this time.
40. In The English Common Reader, 172, Altick suggests that this figure is based on the number of men and women ages sixteen to twenty-five who could sign the marriage register. Likely, the many “illiterate” adults are not reflected in this figure.
41. I am using the term “self-improvement,” not “self-help”—a phrase aligned with Samuel Smiles, who used it in an 1845 speech and published a book entitled Self-Help in 1855.
42. Much to my chagrin, I have discovered that Victorian publishers often stopped an unsuccessful serial mid-track to recoup their losses.
43. Bentley’s Miscellany (1837–40) demonstrates this trend. The first editor, Dickens, used Bentley’s to showcase his own fiction. Initially, a feature entitled “Songs of the Month” preceded the Oliver Twist installments in 1837. By January 1838, Oliver Twist became first bill and remained so throughout 1838. Bentley’s billed Jack Sheppard (1839) first for the final four months of Twist’s serial publication. Not surprisingly, at the conclusion of Jack Sheppard, Bentley’s, under Ainsworth’s editorship in 1839, repeated the same formula of promoting the editor’s own work and starting a new serial alongside an older, successful one; Guy Fawkes, another Ainsworth and Cruikshank collaboration, had first billing in the final months that the wildly popular Jack Sheppard concluded. Ainsworth—who began his career as a three-volume novelist with Rookwood (1834) and ironically advised Dickens against serial publication—earned great popularity as a serial novelist; he also collaborated with Cruikshank for The Miser’s Daughter (1842) and Windsor Castle (1843).
44. I recommend Eliot’s full chapter in The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel, edited by Deirdre David.
45. This figure comes from 1844, seven years after Pickwick concluded. Coffee stalls in 1842 typically sold baked potatoes, ham sandwiches, and bread and butter for 2 pence, or 1/6th of a shilling. For one penny, or 1/12th of a shilling, a working-class family could purchase a stale 4-lb. loaf of bread to feed the entire family; however, a fresh loaf the same size could cost as much as 8 ½ pence in the 1840s or 2/3rds of a shilling; see Bentley, The Victorian Scene, 102.
46. In Daily Life in Victorian England, 36–37, Mitchell estimates that skilled workers like shipbuilders and steelmakers could earn £100 to £200 a year, a wage similar to middle-class bank clerks, teachers, senior clerks, civil servants, and small business owners, who typically earned £150 to £200 a year.
47. Pickwick mania arose during a decade of reforms including a reduction of the Stamp Tax in 1836 and inauguration of the Penny Post in 1840. With the lower Stamp Tax, a newspaper cost one penny to send through the post. Beginning on 10 Jan. 1840, all prepaid mail weighing up to ½ ounce could travel nationwide for only one penny. With these measures, reading material became more widely available.
48. Michael Steig in “Dickens, Hablôt Browne, and the Tradition of English Caricature” begins hi
s article by comparing Dickens to Hogarth and suggests that “Dickens at times found Hogarth a useful touchstone” (219–20).
49. The stroller rants at his wife and child, manically telling Hutley that he fears they will retaliate upon him for starving them to fund his addiction to drink.
50. Philip Allingham’s “The Discovery of Jingle in the Fleet,”
51. Dickens was testing out ideas he developed in his more mature fiction: emigration for rehabilitation factors heavily in David Copperfield (1850); Pickwick’s incarceration for refusal to pay the corrupt lawyers of Mrs. Bardell (who sues him for a breach of promise) comes full force in his condemnation of the Chancery Court in Bleak House (1853).
52. The pairing of the grandfather and young girl is a visual anticipation of Little Nell’s relationship with her degenerate grandfather in The Old Curiosity Shop (1841). A few small discrepancies between Dickens’s text and Phiz’s image include, for example, Jingle’s position near the fireplace, not by the wall, and the woman watering the plants who looks gaunt, but not “haggard” as the text states.
53. Philip Allingham suggests that the barking dog vignette “parallels the granddaughter who fruitlessly tries to rouse her grandfather to an awareness of her and their surroundings” (“Discovery”). See
54. Philip Allingham goes on to note that the use of farce is not surprising since Dickens was writing several farces about mistaken identities at the time he was composing Pickwick: “The Strange Gentleman (performed at London’s St. James’s Theatre on 29 September 1836), whose plot involves mistaken identities at an inn in the north of England, and Is She His Wife? Or, Something Singular, again at the St. James’s ([Dickens] and his wife, accompanied by his sister-in-law, Mary, attended a performance on 6 March 1837).”