Victorian Serial Reading Practices: Historical Evidence
Concrete evidence of Victorian reading and interpretative strategies—that is, the way in which people read serial letterpress and illustrations in relation to one another and what they made of this relation—is scant: unsurprisingly, Victorians seldom recorded exactly how they read books. We do possess convincing evidence of widespread proleptic visual and verbal reading from Vizetelly, who recalled the frenzy over Pickwick: “[N]o sooner was a new number published than needy admirers flattened their noses against the booksellers’ windows, eager to secure a good look at the etchings, and peruse every line of the letterpress that might be exposed to view, frequently reading it aloud to applauding bystanders” (Glances, 123). Similarly, we know that William Charles Macready, actor and close friend of Dickens, saw Cattermole’s wood engraving of the dead Little Nell (fig. 0.18) before reading the serial letterpress of The Old Curiosity Shop: “I saw one print in it of the dear dead child that gave a dead chill through my blood. I dread to read it, but I must get it over” (qtd. in Skilton, “Relation,” 305). In 1862, Chambers’s Journal generalized about the reading public’s widespread habit of proleptic visual reading: “On taking up a book for the first time, probably three people out of four will look to see if there are any pictures before reading a single page” (“Book-Prints,” 135).
FIG. 0.18 George Cattermole, “At Rest,” illustration for Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop, part 40. Master Humphrey’s Clock, 6 February 1841, 46. Courtesy of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto.
The format of Trollope’s Orley Farm (1861–62) provides strong evidence of analeptic reading practices—in this case, the letterpress recalls illustrations from previous installments. In part 16 (June 1862), the narrator invites readers to turn back to part 2 to contemplate Millais’s illustration of Lady Mason sitting alone in her drawing room (fig. 0.19), an image captioned “There was sorrow in her heart, and deep thought in her mind”:93 “In an early part of this story I have endeavoured to describe how this woman sat alone, with deep sorrow in her heart and deep thought on her mind, when she first learned what terrible things were coming on her. The idea, however, which the reader will have conceived of her as she sat there will have come to him from the skill of the artist and not from the words of the writer. If that drawing is now near him, let him go back to it” (Orley Farm, 16:178–79; our emphasis). Significantly, part 16’s passage not only suggests a nonlinear reading strategy, whereby readers flip backward in the serial, but also indicates an occasion on which the visual (the “skill of the artist”) predominates over the verbal (“the words of the writer”).
Further explicit contemplation of Victorians’ serial reading practices came at the end of the century from Du Maurier, whose career as both illustrator and author encompassed the visual and verbal aspects of illustrated serials. He recalled mid-Victorian reading practices as having been complexly proleptic and analeptic as the public consumed Dickens’s serial fiction from the 1830s to the 1850s: “Our recollections of Bill Sikes and Nancy, and Fagin, and Noah Claypole, and the Artful Dodger, of Pickwick and the Wellers, père et fils, Pecksniff, Mrs. Gamp and Mrs. Prig, Micawber, Mr. Dombey, Mr. Toots, and the rest, have become fixed, crystallised, and solidified into imperishable concrete by these little etchings in that endless gallery, printed on those ever-welcome pages of thick yellow paper, which one used to study with such passionate interest before reading the story, and after, and between” (Du Maurier, “Illustrating,” 350).94 Before, after, and between: with these references to reading images over time, Du Maurier captures the intricate temporal relations of text and image, whereby images anticipated and recalled plot events, held attention during serial reading, and sustained readers’ interest in, memory of, and anticipations of plot events during serial pauses. Indeed, Dickens himself noted in 1841 that plot events in serial texts often derived their meaning from “the intimate relation they bear to what has gone before, and to what is to follow” (qtd. in Axton, “Keystone,” 31).
FIG. 0.19 John Everett Millais, “There was sorrow in her heart, and deep thought in her mind,” illustration for Anthony Trollope, Orley Farm, part 2 (April 1861), front matter. London: Chapman and Hall. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Victoria Libraries.
In addition to these explicit accounts, we also possess one uniquely detailed source of evidence concerning Victorian serial reading practices: the speculation surrounding Dickens’s last—and unfinished—novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, illustrated by his son-in-law, Charles Collins (brother of Wilkie), and Fildes (of the Graphic).95 This serial, which started publication in April 1870, was cut short by Dickens’s death on 9 June. After his death, his publishers had enough copy for three installments (July, August, and September) before the serial abruptly ended. The incomplete novel left readers in suspense about whether Edwin is really dead; if he is, how he died; whether he was murdered and, if so, who killed him; and what is the real identity of the mysterious Datchery.96 The abrupt end of The Mystery of Edwin Drood after its sixth installment thus places modern readers in a perpetual serial pause—stuck, as it were, in September 1870, with no forthcoming installments to relieve the suspense.97
Immediately following Dickens’s death, speculation swirled concerning his intended ending of the novel. Despite readers’ desire for closure, Chapman and Hall announced in the Times of 23 June 1870 that “no other writer could be permitted by us to complete the work” (“The Mystery,” 12), and Wilkie Collins refused to finish his late friend’s novel.98 Nevertheless, unofficial theatrical productions and unauthorized novelistic completions flourished, and newspapers and magazines were filled with speculative editorials, letters, and articles.99 From 1870 onward, critics fruitlessly scoured biographical sources (John Forster’s Life of Charles Dickens; Dickens’s letters and number plans; and the recollections of the novel’s main illustrator, Fildes) for the “answer to the enigma.”100 Lacking proof of Dickens’s authorial intentions, they turned to illustrations to solve the mystery, providing an invaluable archive of evidence about how Victorian readers used illustration as well as letterpress to predict plot.
In particular, critics focused on the vignettes in Charles Collins’s wood-engraved wrapper (Cohen, Charles Dickens, 212)—illustrations that preceded the first issue, providing proleptic information to the reader, but that could be (as these readings show) reexamined for clues as each succeeding part installment unfolded. R. A. Proctor’s Watched by the Dead (1887), J. Cuming Walters’s Clues to Dickens’s Mystery of Edwin Drood (1905), and Andrew Lang’s The Puzzle of Dickens’s Last Plot (1905) lay bare this process as they scour the wrapper (fig. 0.20) for evidence of Dickens’s projected resolution of the plot. As Lang summarizes, they suggest variously that Jasper’s position in the upper-right corner under the allegorical figure holding a dagger suggests his guilt (78–79); that the figure ascending the stairs points his hand to the murderer, Jasper (79–80); that the figures at the bottom of the page represent Jasper and Drood, who is still alive (80–81); and that the same figures represent Jasper and Datchery.101 Our point is not who is right and who is wrong—but rather that, because Dickens’s death left Drood’s plot suspended, Victorian readers for once explicitly articulated how