Readers clipped illustrations from newspapers and magazines to decorate the walls of working-class homes and workplaces; children, as in the example of Tom Tulliver already mentioned, also used illustrated periodicals and books as coloring books. Dickens showed the trend of displaying engravings by having Mr. Weevle of Bleak House (1852–53) decorate his apartment with copper engravings of aristocratic beauties cut from the Galaxy Gallery of British Beauty.55 Late in the century, Olive Schreiner represented such display practices in a colonial context in her description of Gregory Rose’s room in The Story of an African Farm (1883): “It was one tiny room, the whitewashed walls profusely covered with prints cut from the ‘Illustrated London News’” (139).56 The Illustrated London News habitually represented its own readers’ decorative use of illustrations from the newspaper in locations as far-flung as a Chinese sampan, an Australian settler cabin, and even an Inuit dwelling, where the newspaper had been left by a whaler.57 Edith Nesbit’s The Story of the Amulet (1906) portrays her child protagonists coloring black-and-white newspaper illustrations with watercolors: “They were all painting. Nurse . . . had presented each of the four with a shilling paint-box, and had supplemented the gift with a pile of old copies of the Illustrated London News” (239).58 These practices indicate the penetration of illustrated print into everyday life; as a corollary, their representation in fiction and periodical literature signals that various forms of Victorian print media were self-reflexive about their own consumption and about the domestic afterlives of images.
The surge in visual media affected not only illustrated books but also letterpress itself, as visual art and illustrated texts inspired and influenced writers’ prose. Dickens and Ainsworth explicitly modeled their prose works on William Hogarth’s art: the subtitle of Oliver Twist (1837–39), The Parish Boy’s Progress, recalls Hogarth’s idea of a moral progress—as in The Rake’s Progress (1733–35)—and Jack Sheppard, contrasting the careers of industrious and idle apprentices, looks back to Hogarth’s Industry and Idleness (1747).59 Visual culture also infused verbal texts with pictorial metaphors and vocabulary. In Adam Bede (1859), Eliot, heavily influenced by realist painting, celebrates seventeenth-century Dutch art for its “rare, precious quality of truthfulness” and bases her artistic manifesto on a literary version of Dutch realism (177). Dickens, too, wrote in a highly visual manner: as van Gogh remarked, “There is no writer, in my opinion, who is so much a painter and black-and-white artist as Dickens” (qtd. in Cohen, Charles Dickens, 5). Dickens’s very descriptions invoked the artist’s pencil, as in the opening of Great Expectations (1860–61): “The marshes were just a long black horizontal line then, . . . ; and the river was just another horizontal line, not nearly so broad nor yet so black; and the sky was just a row of long angry red lines and dense black lines intermixed” (7). Similarly, in Mary Barton (1848), Gaskell used the simile of ink drawing to describe a dark Manchester afternoon: “Houses, sky, people, and everything looked as if a gigantic brush had washed them all over with a dark shade of Indian ink” (79). Moreover, reviews indicate that Victorian critics valued visual pictorialism in letterpress: the Monthly Review said of Oliver Twist that Dickens’s novels consisted more of “a succession of forcible pictures, attractively framed, than . . . one great but compact piece” (“Art. III.—Oliver Twist,” 40; our emphasis). Similarly, essayist Frederic Harrison noted that readers looked forward to a new Trollope serial for “lively pictures of true life” (qtd. in Cruse, 281; our emphasis). On 24 May 1851, the Illustrated London News noted this general pictorial tendency in literature: “Our great authors are now artists. They speak to the eye, and their language is fascinating and impressive” (“Speaking to the Eye,” 451).
Although these related trends (of literary representations of characters reading illustrations; readers’ own practices of clipping, collecting, and coloring; and the literary pictorialism of Victorian style) reflect the nineteenth-century ascendancy of illustrated print media, Victorian critics did not universally praise illustrated books. On the contrary, the relation between text and image was highly contested, with metaphors for illustrated texts ranging from duplicitous cosmetics to professional dispute and happy marriage. In 1828, Scott, whose novels were initially published without pictures and profitably reissued in illustrated editions, dubbed the illustrated book “a faded beauty [who] dresses and lays on [a] prudent touch of rouge to compensate for want of her juvenile graces” (7). In 1844, French caricaturist Jean-Jacques Grandville figured the power struggle between pen and pencil as a battle for supremacy between youth and age, with the youthful pencil yearning to explore new worlds independently (“votre tyrannie me fatigue”) and the pen berating its younger, ungrateful colleague (“jeune ingrat”) (“La Clé des champs,” 3).60 In 1850, thirteen years after the record-breaking success of Pickwick and eight after the launch of the Illustrated London News, William Wordsworth published a sonnet deriding illustrated texts, declaring that they made discourse a mere “lacquey” to the “dumb Art” of pictures:
Discourse was deemed Man’s noblest attribute,
And written words the glory of his hand;
Then followed Printing with enlarged command
For thought—dominion vast and absolute
For spreading truth, and making love expand.
Now prose and verse sunk into disrepute
Must lacquey a dumb Art that best can suit
The taste of this once-intellectual Land.
A backward movement surely have we here,
From manhood,—back to childhood; for the age—
Back towards caverned life’s first rude career.
Avaunt this vile abuse of pictured page!
Must eyes be all in all, the tongue and ear
Nothing? Heaven keep us from a lower stage!
(246)
In contrast, the Illustrated London News declared on 14 May 1842 the happy marriage of text and image: “Art . . . has . . . become the bride of literature” (“Our Address,” 1).61
While Victorian critics and authors disagreed about the worth of images in print media, one fact was unassailable: visual texts had come to dominate the Victorian print marketplace. Victorian engraver, journalist, and publisher Henry Vizetelly recalled the ubiquity of print sellers on the London streets in the early Victorian period: “The shop-windows of the London printsellers were the people’s real picture galleries at this period, and always had their gaping crowds before them. The caricatures of the day, representations of famous prize fights, and Cruikshank’s and Seymour’s comic sketches were most to the taste of the cognoscenti of the pavement” (Glances, 88). “The illustrated book is a ‘felt want,’” wrote Du Maurier, one of the most prolific and famous book and periodical illustrators of the period;62 “The majority of civilised human nature likes to read, and a majority of that majority likes to have its book (even its newspaper!) full of little pictures” (“Illustrating,” 349). At the end of the century, Oscar Wilde characterized the Victorians’ transition to a culture of illustration as one of the mass market dictating literary form: “Since the introduction of printing, and the fatal development of the habit of reading amongst the middle and lower classes of this country, there has been a tendency in literature to appeal more and more to the eye” (112).
Illustrated Serials in the Victorian Market
This book focuses on one particular product of this revolution in print media: the illustrated serial novel. As we have discussed, the 1830s saw the quick rise and grand successes of the novel in serial parts, typically published at monthly intervals and including a wrapper (of the same color paper and bearing the same cover design on every part); advertisements (usually bound in a single gathering just inside the wrapper as well as printed on the inside front and back of the wrapper); tipped-in illustrations preceding the narrative; and, of course, the letterpress itself. An alternative and equally popular form during the period