45. The caricaturists had to meet tight monthly deadlines—the novels were being illustrated as they were being written—but Barnard had Dickens’s entire novel and Phiz’s illustrations at his disposal before he began to illustrate. Although Barnard was robbed of Dickens’s creative counsel, he was a close friend of Phiz, who provided Barnard indirect access to Dickens’s original ideas. See Allingham and Louttit’s “The Illustrators of the Household Edition of the Works of Charles Dickens (22 vols., 1871–79).”
46. Gleeson White, one of the caricaturists’ harshest critics, recognizes illustrations by Barnard and other Sixties artists essentially “re-embody characters already stereotyped, for the most part, by the earlier plates of the original editions” (138). White adds in English Illustration that the Household Edition was a “bold enterprise: that it did not wholly fail is greatly to its credit” (138). White argues that many who praise the original illustrations of Dickens regard them with a nostalgic “halo of memory and romance,” but the sketches in White’s opinion cannot compare to “the beauty of truth, the knowledge born of academic accomplishment, or literal imitation of nature” evident in the Household Edition that were simply “beyond [the caricaturists’] sympathy” (139).
47. Barnard collaborated with Luke Fildes and E. G. Dalziel for the illustrations for The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870) published along with reprinted pieces and other stories in 1879 as volume 20 of the Household Edition series.
48. The Household Edition includes Forster’s The Life of Charles Dickens in addition to Dickens’s complete works. For more information on the Household Edition, I recommend Allingham and Louttit’s “The Illustrators of the Household Edition of the Works of Charles Dickens (22 vols., 1871–79).”
49. This is a Victorian term for a large overcoat similar to a frock coat.
50. David’s positioning and clothing resemble those in Phiz’s “Somebody Turns Up,” only here David looks warily at Heep. In “He Caught the Hand in His, And We Stood in that Connection, Looking at Each Other,” Barnard eliminates all background detail to foreground the two figures. The reader-viewer readily sees Phiz’s indelible imprint of a “red-sun” eyed, stubble-headed, clammy-handed Heep underpinning Barnard’s realistically rendered depiction of “writhing” Uriah (DC, Norton 204).
51. Buss’s painting Dickens’s Dream (ca. 1875) came out after Barnard illustrated this novel.
52. A pronounced nose defines Fagin in Mahoney’s plates for other scenes in Oliver Twist, such as where Fagin conspires with Monks in “‘Fagin!’ Whispered a Voice Close to His Ear.”
53. Philip Allingham suggests that the “deliberately out-of-focus tiles and blurred background may indicate the influence of early photography as the illustrator employs a selective focus on the fugitive [Sikes]” in “Illustrations by James Mahoney” on The Victorian Web, accessed 17 Oct. 2016.
54. Another realistic urban backdrop appears in Mahoney’s reinterpretation of “The Meeting” now entitled “When She Was About the Same Distance in Advance as She Had Been Before, He Slipped Quietly Down.”
55. Dickens conceived of Nancy and Rose as Oliver’s twin defenders; “Two Sister-Women” was the first descriptive headline for ch. 40. See Tillotson’s introduction to the 1966 Clarendon Press Oliver Twist, xxxvi.
56. This detail is contradictory to the text since Dickens notes that Sikes held the murder weapon soaked in blood and hair in a fire he kindled “till it broke, and then piled it on the coals to burn away, and smoulder into ashes” (OT, Oxf. 1982 304).
57. Rose Lovell-Smith argues that Tenniel’s skill with drawing animals aids our reading of Carroll’s text in her article “The Animals of Wonderland.” For example, “through his animal drawings, Tenniel offers a visual angle on the text of Alice in Wonderland that evokes the life sciences, natural history, and Darwinian ideas about evolution, closely related by Tenniel to Alice’s size changes, and to how these affect the animals she meets” (385).
58. For example, Michael Hancher in The Tenniel Illustrations to the “Alice” Books applauds Carroll “for more powerfully evoking fetal claustrophobia” (31) than Tenniel in his Wonderland rendition of this same scene of Alice outgrowing the White Rabbit’s house.
59. In his biography of Tenniel, Sarzano states: “he was untaught, except for a few lessons at the Academy Schools, which he quitted in dissatisfaction” (9), but he later notes on page 10 that Tenniel and several other artists went to Munich on a British government commission to study fresco technique. Tenniel attended anatomy lectures and studied sculpture on display at the British Museum and prints of costume and armor in its reading room.
60. For more discussion of the impact of Tenniel’s monocularism on his artistry, see Morris’s Artist of Wonderland, 2–3.
61. In Illustrators of the Eighteen Sixties, Reid praises Tenniel’s contributions, “which have made the designs for the two Alices famous” (27); however, Reid places Tenniel in a group with John Gilbert and Birket Foster and calls all three artists “precursors” of the Sixties “since they were working before that date and remained uninfluenced either by the Pre-Raphaelites or the school of naturalistic artists that succeeded them” (20). Likewise, in English Illustration, ‘The Sixties’: 1855–70, White calls Alice “An epoch-making book of this season” and adds “Alice in Wonderland (Macmillan), with Tenniel’s forty-two immortal designs, needs only bare mention, for who does not know it immediately?” (127).
62. Hancher suggests that the version Carroll showed Tenniel was not the same exact book he gave to Alice Liddell since Carroll did not finish his pictures until 13 Sept. 1864. Carroll gave Tenniel a copy to look at between 25 January and 5 April 1864, at which point Tenniel agreed to draw the pictures (27). In Artist of Wonderland, Morris states that Tenniel asked to see Carroll’s manuscript (139).
63. For more information on pantomime in the Victorian era, see Morris, Artist of Wonderland, 156–62; Morris includes many playing card pantomimes of the period, such as Harlequin Jack of All Trades (1825) and the Punch article entitled “Our Courts of Law” (1849).
64. Looking-Glass (1872) carries forward these aspects of pantomime, although Carroll did not provide designs from which Tenniel could build. Hence, I center my discussion on Wonderland.
65. Kelly criticizes Carroll’s anatomical confusion in the Caterpillar illustration in “‘If You Don’t Know What a Gryphon Is.’”
66. Foremost, Wonderland is a strange world where characters change size and shape: a baby turns into a pig, the Cheshire Cat dissolves into a grin, and Alice’s body undergoes profound distortions.
67. Morris devotes a chapter to “Alice and Social Caricature” in Artist of Wonderland, 206–22. Morris does not believe the Lion and the Unicorn are portraits of, respectively, Gladstone and Disraeli. She argues, however, that Carroll was a fan of Gladstone and suspicious of the Pope. Although her chapter informs my discussion, Morris does not discuss the White Rabbit or the Mock Turtle in her work on social caricature in Alice, the two characters central to my analysis.
68. Alice is not startled that the rabbit can talk, or that he is talking to himself and muttering, “‘Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!’” (AA 11), but she is astonished that the rabbit owns a watch and can tell time.
69. For Wonderland, Carroll changes the nosegay to a fan (AA 22).
70. Engen similarly describes Carroll’s Mock Turtle as an “armour-plated, seal-faced turtle” (80).
Chapter 4. Caricature and Realism: Fin-de-Siècle Developments of the Victorian Illustrated Book
1. Maxwell qualifies in the next sentence in The Victorian Illustrated Book: “For some reason, however, it will not stay dead … and became a crucial starting point for symbolist, surrealist, postsurrealist, and eventually postmodern practices among artists, writers, and a range of other enterprising biblio-savants” (418–19). These later developments of the Victorian illustrated book grew out of the niche market of illustrated books aimed at collectors and an educated elite, d
ating to the genre’s decline in the publication of mainstream fiction.
2. For “The Victorian Era Exhibition” at Earl’s Court in 1897, the Dalziel Brothers earned the Diploma for a Silver Medal for engravings after John Tenniel’s Through the Looking-Glass, plates from Dalziels’ Bible Gallery, and select proofs from Millais’s illustrations for The Parables of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.
3. Jane R. Cohen shapes the Victorian illustrated book to fit the arc of Dickens’s publishing career, aligning the rise of the genre with Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers (1836–37). I challenge the simple rise and fall organizational pattern that Cohen uses to describe the trajectory of the illustrated book in Charles Dickens and His Original Illustrators.
4. In her final chapter of Charles Dickens and His Original Illustrators, Jane R. Cohen likewise advances: “the technical, economic, sociological, and aesthetic conditions that fostered its rise also accelerated its degeneration” (229). Some of her insights inform this section although I take issue with her use of the term “degeneration,” which connotes deterioration and eclipses late nineteenth-century developments in the evolution of the Victorian illustrated book.
5. See David Ward’s “First Library of the People Marks 150 Busy Years” for a discussion of the opening of the Manchester Public Library.
6. For analysis of the reasons why publishers dropped illustrations for volume publication of Hardy’s novels, I recommend Philip Allingham’s “Why do Hardy’s novels often have illustrations in periodical but not book form?” from The Victorian Web,
7. For the 1840 statistics, see Richard Altick, The English Common Reader, 169–72. For the 1900 figures, see G. R. Porter, The Progress of the Nation, 147.
8. In George Du Maurier, Richard Kelly posits that “Little Billee is like Du Maurier in several respects” (113) and goes on to discuss the similarities the author shares with his fictional creation.
9. Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) was, however, published in 1935 by the Limited Editions Club with illustrations by Matisse (J. R. Cohen 230), following in the tradition of artists’ books.
10. Ibbetson returns in dreams to his early life in Passy, a Parisian suburb, especially when he is incarcerated in a home for the criminally insane after killing his devious uncle in a mad rage. The first half of The Martian is heavily autobiographical and suitable for realistic illustration. The English-French Barty Josselin, a thinly veiled depiction of Du Maurier, studies art in Antwerp, loses sight in one eye, fears total blindness, becomes an illustrator of Du Maurier’s stature, and even becomes friends with the Du Maurier’s real life artist friends, Edward Poynter and Holman Hunt.
11. See ch. 3 of my book Posting It: The Victorian Revolution in Letter Writing for discussion of how commodities like writing desks were classed and gendered items and fell out of fashion when made commercially following the Great Exhibition of 1851.
12. As industrial mechanization increasingly took over book production, the cost of paper decreased, and the paper tax was repealed in 1861.
13. Two years later in 1885, Cassell and Company brought out an illustrated edition of Treasure Island in England with a combination of plates by a French illustrator named Georges Roux, a few of Merrill’s illustrations, and Stevenson’s own treasure map. An advertisement for the just released King Solomon’s Mines (1885) by H. Rider Haggard appears within this edition, further aligning these two adventure tales for boys. Treasure Island’s most famous illustrator is N. C. Wyeth, who produced color illustrations for a 1911 American edition published by Scribner’s, which includes the treasure map that Stevenson drew.
14. See Judith Fisher, “Image Versus Text,” note 1, 85. She aligns the magazine’s control over authors and artists with the shift from monthly publication to weekly publication in periodicals like The Graphic as well as the piecemeal production of illustrations used by such magazines.
15. Whereas D. G. Rossetti considered himself foremost a poet and artist who dabbled in book illustration and design, Morris regarded himself foremost a decorator, although he was also a poet, novelist, and translator; see Bland, 275.
16. Regrettably, Bland does not include the source for this quotation.
17. Nonetheless, these adventure tales for boys maintain morals and a commitment to King, God, and Empire.
18. This was an age where the exotic African setting Haggard had experienced personally was still unexplored; to Darton, Haggard “gave English boys a better idea of the potential wonders of the Empire than could be had from any school-task” (297).
19. Kipling wrote and illustrated Just So Stories (1902) to amuse his children and their friends. Potter wrote and illustrated Peter Rabbit (1902) and other stories in the series (which began as illustrated letters) for the children of her former governess, Annie Carter Moore. Carroll first told the story of Alice in Wonderland and then wrote it down for his favorite child friend, Alice Liddell. Stevenson found his inspiration in his stepson, Lloyd Osbourne, and J. M. Barrie discovered his muse for Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens (1906) in the sons of his close friends, Arthur and Sylvia Llewelyn Davies (daughter of George Du Maurier). Although initially a play, the book version of Peter Pan included the now famous illustrations of Arthur Rackham. Milne, immortalizing his son Christopher Robin, gained fame for Winnie-the-Pooh (1926), memorably illustrated by Ernest H. Shepard. See John Vaughn’s “Victorian Children in Their Picture Books,” 620, and Susan E. Meyer’s A Treasury of the Great Children’s Book Illustrators. Meyer distinguishes these illustrators, “all born in the nineteenth century … [who] delivered to the nursery the first children’s publications as we know them today, charming books of wonder designed simply to entertain” (9).
20. The American illustrated book follows a later chronology than the Victorian illustrated book. Reading matter in colonial America primarily came from England. With the exception of the publication of The Bay Psalm Book, printed in Cambridge, MA, in 1640, small publishing firms mainly arose in America in the eighteenth century. The books produced by such firms are, in Muir’s view, “crude and lacking in either inspiration or technical ability” (250). Even Alexander Anderson, who set the standards for American wood engraving with his 1795 publication of The Looking-Glass for the Mind, “was mainly a copyist of other men’s work and seldom designed his own cuts” (Muir 251); Anderson copied woodcuts by famed British illustrator Thomas Bewick. With no international copyright in place, American publishers often created bootleg copies of popular British works, and this practice, which continued throughout the nineteenth century, infuriated Dickens, who complained about the inferior quality of these pirated editions and his loss in sales for works copyrighted in Britain only. To avoid literary bootlegging, Herman Melville arranged for near-simultaneous British and American publication of his books including Moby-Dick (1851).
21. May Alcott, Louisa May Alcott’s sister, contributed four poorly executed illustrations for the first publication that were quickly withdrawn. Reviewers called May Alcott’s illustrations “‘pretty awful’” and commented on “‘a want of anatomical knowledge’” (qtd. in Stern 87, 81). Despite Little Women’s rocky illustrative start, illustration became increasingly important to the commercial success of Little Women into the twentieth century. Frank T. Merrill provided over 200 black-and-white illustrations for a highly regarded 1880 quarto edition, the first to print “Little Women” (part 1, 1868) and “Good Wives” (part 2, 1869) in one edition. In 1915, Jessie Willcox Smith produced color plates that capture Alcott’s vision of American domesticity and a girl’s growth into a little woman. For discussion of Little Women, see, for example, a review by David A. Randall and John T. Winterich titled “One Hundred Good Novels” in Madeleine Stern’s Critical Essays on Louisa May Alcott, 87, and an anonymous review entitled “Review of Little Women, part I, 1868,” also included in Stern’s collection, 81. For analysis of Merrill’s and Smith’s illustrations, see my book Images of the
Woman Reader in Victorian British and American Fiction, 157–61.
22. Mark Twain’s books feature child characters, but are richly sophisticated in social criticism and humor. Twain’s later books marketed by Harper and Brothers contain a frontispiece and roughly one dozen illustrations.
23. To Elaine Showalter in A Literature of Their Own, Potter and Greenaway fit into the third generation of feminine novelists, many of whom became sensation writers, publishers, and editors as well as children’s writers (20). Susan E. Meyer compares Potter to Greenaway, noting, “Each of them accomplished an independence of spirit through her writing and art, liberated from her oppressive Victorian milieu by exercising her rich imagination” (Treasury 127). Meyer regrettably does not give the source for this Potter quotation or for those included in note 24 and note 25.
24. Potter said of Greenaway: “‘Kate Greenaway’s pictures are very charming, but compared with Caldecott she could not draw’” (qtd. in Meyer, Treasury 130). Anne Hobbs in Beatrix Potter’s Art notes that Potter was critical of Greenaway’s drawings but approved of her designs (see p. 12) and points to how Potter “studied pages designed by others—Crane, Caldecott, the medieval illuminators—and made up her own dummies, cleverly using italics or white space for dramatic effect” (17).
25. “‘I did try to copy Caldecott,’” Potter admits, “‘but I agree I did not achieve much resemblance’” (qtd. in Meyer, Treasury 129).
26. For a list of illustrations that Potter created for other stories, see Hobbs and Whalley’s Beatrix Potter: The V&A Collection, 106–09. Also, Hobbs briefly describes some of Potter’s early efforts in Beatrix Potter’s Art, 13.
27. To Jackson in Illustration and the Novels of Thomas Hardy: “the Millais era (1855–70) refers to the representational style of illustration given to Trollope’s works” (12).
28. See my essay “Beatrix Potter: Naturalist Artist” for discussion of how Potter seemingly turned to the field of illustration because of the many opportunities for women artists to illustrate, in particular, books targeted for women and children with themes of motherhood, childhood, romance, and fantasy.
Serials to Graphic Novels Page 32
