Illustrating history: the forms and affordances of Victorian illustration
Creators: name: Krolczyk, Courtney
Publisher: name: No Publisher Supplied
Year: 2023

description: A pivotal transformation in the history of book illustration can conveniently be dated to around 1850. In the middle of the century, book illustration took what I will call “the artistic turn,” when illustrators began basing their work more on the conventions of the fine arts than on the satirical print culture traditions of the previous century. I focus each chapter on a different decade (the 1830s through the 1860s) to demonstrate the historical changes that occur across this period. These chapters each investigate a generative nexus of texts from each decade: Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist and its melodramatic adaptions in the 1830s, William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair and Punch magazine in the 1840s, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’s experimental magazine The Germ, the establishment organ of the art world, The Art-Journal, and the “Moxon Tennyson” in the 1850s, and finally George Eliot’s Romola, Anthony Trollope’s The Small House at Allington, and the poetry published alongside those novels in The Cornhill Magazine in the 1860s. My first chapter establishes a concept I call “the transportability of the image.” I argue that the “image,” referring both to literal images and verbal descriptions that use visual language, is inherently transportable from one genre or medium to another. Certain genres are much more amenable to this incidental style than others, and are therefore much easier to adapt. In the case of two early melodramatic adaptations of the novel the adaptors either downplay the workhouse or remove it altogether, focusing instead the criminal aspects of the novel’s plot. Oliver Twist contains aspects of both the social problem novel and the Newgate (or crime) novel, and the explication of wide-ranging systematic issues required by the former is much more difficult to adapt into either an illustration or a scene in a play, unlike the visually oriented scenes of action that are found in the Newgate novel. The incidental structure of the illustrated novel, where the introduction of an image highlighting a specific scene forces the reader to pause in their perusal the narrative, also mirrors the structure of nineteenth-century melodrama, where the action of the play is punctuated by dramatic tableaux. This similarity in structure helps reconcile the drawn-out temporality of a serially published novel and the accelerated temporality of the drama. My second chapter begins to address the limits of this transportability as it turns to texts and images who’s own dense self-referentiality can impede their transportation to other contexts. I begin with a statue of the 1st Duke of Wellington, which appears on the cover of Vanity Fair’s monthly issues, though contemporary readers would most prominently associate this newly erected statue with the ongoing campaign against it being waged in the humor magazine Punch. Beyond this reference on the cover, Thackeray employs the magazine’s style of referential allegory in the illustrations he created for his own novel. Thackeray carries over Punch’s style of dense referentiality to his novel, and this makes the ideas and imagery contained within it much more difficult to transport those that found in Dickens’s. While the realistic full-page illustrations suggest contemporaneity and its decorative initials engage with history through allegory, these associations are reversed in the novel’s text. Both of the qualities Thackeray associates with the historical mode undermine the traditional hierarchies of genres. My third chapter focuses on illustrations that more directly engage with a painterly tradition. The Germ, the experimental organ of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, was a complete failure as a publishing venture, since it would only run for four issues. Nevertheless, it had lasting impact on the history of illustration. The magazine intentionally foregrounded newly published poetry, and both the poetry found in The Germ and its illustrations approximate the visual granularity of painterly details. The result is a form of poetry that turns away from both narrativity and lyric interiority and towards a focus on visual descriptiveness, and a form of illustration that plays a transitional role in the turn towards book illustrations that approximate the fine arts. Other illustrations to poetry in the period, such as those found in The Art-Journal, replicate the existing relationship between paintings that use poetry as their subject matter, and reference well-known poetry from the past in a way that is general rather than specific. The final part of this chapter turns to the 1857 edition of Alfred Tennyson’s Poems, commonly known as the Moxon Tennyson, which featured illustrations by the Pre-Raphaelite set alongside a group of more conventional academicians. Both sets of illustrators end up employing a liberal mode of interpretation in order to navigate the difficultly of illustrating poetry that was not originally meant to be illustrated, whether it is the academician’s reliance on more generalized stock imagery or the Pre-Raphaelites’ assertion of their interpretive authority through the inclusion of the type of granular details found in their paintings and their earlier work in The Germ. The result is a cleavage between word and image that will continue to affect the style of book illustration into the next decade. My fourth chapter looks to both novels and poetry published in The Cornhill Magazine, a publication was one of the most important proponents of the new “sixties style” of illustration. The illustrations to the poetry published in The Cornhill helped establish the anti-narrative tendencies that will also be found in the illustrations to the novels. This leads to the publication of poetry that carries on the intense, non-narrative visual description found in Pre-Raphaelite poetry. Turning to George Eliot’s Romola, we see how Leighton’s illustrations explicate character at the expense of narrativity. This is partially in response to changes occurring in the novel, as psychological interiority becomes prioritized over an exciting plot. Because Leighton’s designs can only mirror Eliot’s text to a certain extent, he tries to establish the independent artistic value of this illustrations by framing them as physical works of art that exist outside the text. John Everett Millais negotiates a similar problem by focusing non-momentous, everyday occurrences in his illustrations to Trollope, lending his designs a more general applicability that allows them to blend in with the rest of the illustrated content of the magazine. This results in in a more generalized type of imagery that, unlike Cruikshank’s highly distinctive style of the 1830s, which featured memorable, exaggerated caricatures that stuck in the public imagination, does not transport the specificities of the text. In the 1860s, both the novel and its illustrations assert their value as works of art, but this is only achieved by each shedding the qualities that are most distinctive to the other and abandoning the type of cross-media transportability that is essential to the establishment of a literary work’s ubiquity in popular culture in the process.