The very form of the illustrated serial novel was designed to produce and respond to market demand, each installment impelling its readers to buy the next. This does not mean, however, that serials relied exclusively on so-called cliffhanger endings to serial parts, although these did exist. Equally important, as Linda K. Hughes and Michael Lund have shown, is that the serial novel took place over time, meshing its reading with the lived experiences of its readers (Victorian Serial, 8), for whom pregnancies, births, illnesses, and deaths became linked to the unfolding of illustrated narratives. Indeed, as the Illustrated London News observed in its 1870 obituary for Dickens, his serial writing had provided a temporal structure to Victorians’ everyday life for over thirty years, arriving regularly and with regular pauses: “It was just as if we received a letter or a visit, at regular intervals, from a kindly observant gossip” (qtd. in Patten, “Publishing,” 32). Such serial pauses might prompt not only anticipation of the next installment but also reflection on the past one, on the relation between one serial part and the next, and on the links between fiction and everyday life. Indeed, Christian magazines such as Good Words used the regularity of the serial format to reinforce the importance of regular reflection and prayer.
On a pragmatic level, the serial form allowed publishers flexibility and low risk: they could risk minimal capital at the outset, pay the author and illustrator by the month, plow profits from early issues back into production, and increase or decrease print runs in response to sales.64 We see the advantage of such flexibility, for example, in the sixtyfold increase in Pickwick’s sales over its serial run. Serials, then, were embedded in the market, as indeed the presence of advertisements in both the part installment and the periodical attested, to an extent far exceeding that of the volume edition of the same novel.65 As these examples suggest, serial novels were commodities advertised, sold, and bought in the burgeoning Victorian print marketplace.66 This commodity status extended to illustration, which publishers recognized as meeting the public’s “boundless . . . appetite for visualized narrative.”67
The illustrated serial, whether issued in part installment or in periodical form, was a “hybrid form” involving “multiple makers and mediations.”68 Both profitable venture and art form, it was forged in collaboration—and sometimes conflict—among the publisher, editor, author, artist, and, for much of the century, engraver, who transferred the artist’s vision onto the wood block or metal plate.69 The relationships among these players were often contested as publishers sought profits, editors competed for top authors and artists, authors angled to build profitable careers in a competitive market, artists struggled with editors as they faced strict publishing deadlines and tight page constraints, artists and authors variously vied with or worked alongside one another (both under tight deadlines), and artists submitted their original designs for translation by engravers onto the wood block or steel plate, each a substantially different medium.70 Fraught as the collaboration might be among these different interests, illustrations’ marketability rendered almost irrelevant any debate on their aesthetic value: as Edward F. Brewtnall commented in the Art Journal in 1902, “You do not like illustrations. You are hopelessly in the minority. The great majority of people, cultivated or uncultivated . . . do like them” (Brewtnall and Day, “Book,” 316).
Victorian novelists themselves disagreed about the value of serial illustration and participated in its production to varying degrees. Thackeray’s illustration of many of his own texts indicates that he saw illustration as intrinsic to the novelist’s art. Dickens’s careful collaboration with Browne over more than two decades—during which he selected scenes to be illustrated, sent instructions as to characters’ gestures and clothing, and demanded revisions to sketches (Cohen, Charles Dickens, 64)—suggests his perception of illustration as central to his fiction. Following a model of close collaboration, Trollope greatly admired Millais’s illustrations for his own fiction: “In every figure that he drew it was his object to promote the views of the writer whose work he had undertaken to illustrate, and he never spared himself any pains in studying that work, so as to enable him to do so” (Trollope, Autobiography, 144). In contrast, much as she personally liked Leighton’s illustrations for Romola, Eliot believed that illustration could never realize the writer’s vision, and she lamented that “the artist who uses the pencil must . . . be tormented to misery by the deficiencies or requirements of the one who uses the pen, and the writer, on the other hand, must die of impossible expectations” (qtd. in Haight, George Eliot Letters, 4:55–56). In practice, moreover, the editorial process did not always permit the possibility of close collaboration. Collins, for example, did not even see the illustrations to The Moonstone (1868) for the American Harper’s Weekly before they were published: the first and second parts (from 4 and 11 January) reached him in England on 30 January 1868. He wrote to Harper Brothers, saying that he admired the “real intelligence” shown by the artist in conveying “the dramatic effect” of the story (Moonstone, 599). Similarly, a letter written by Robert Louis Stevenson published in the Illustrated London News in October 1892, thanking the artist who had illustrated “Uma” (1892),71 makes it clear that he had not seen the illustrations before publication and did not even know the artist’s name: “Dear Sir,—I only know you under the initials ‘G.B.,’ but you have done some exceedingly spirited and satisfactory illustrations to my story . . . [,] and I wish to write and thank you expressly for the care and talent shown” (510).72
The popularity of Victorian serial illustration is evidenced by the movement of images from novels into social practices and extratextual consumer products. Modern readers might assume that serial illustrations were so attached to the serial part that they would not readily be sold separately, but this was not the case. Prints circulated widely beyond novels: for example, Browne created and sold spin-off steel etchings of Little Nell, Barbara, and the Marchioness (from The Old Curiosity Shop) and of Dolly Varden, Hugh Barnaby, Mrs. Varden, and Miggs (from Barnaby Rudge, 1841).73 Moreover, Joseph Clayton Clark produced more than 840 watercolors of Dickens’s characters for collectors who inserted them into volume editions as supplemental material (Patten, “Phizzing,” 312). Serial illustrations also surfaced in tie-in merchandise, theatrical adaptations, and everyday practices. Illustrations for Egan’s Life in London were printed and sold on “trays, snuffboxes, fans, screens and handkerchiefs” and evoked in sixty stage versions (Sillars, Visualisation, 9). Stage productions based on popular best-selling novels from Pickwick and Jack Sheppard to Du Maurier’s Trilby (serialized in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine from January to July 1894) included scenes in which actors replicated serial illustrations.74 As Jonathan E. Hill observes, the new illustrated serial novels proved a boon to dramatists, who used them as “visual guides to staging, scenic design, costume, and character appearance” (“Cruikshank,” 441); individual illustrations—many of which had appeared in booksellers’ windows—provided the basis for tableaux vivants (441).75 Indeed, such was the popularity of the Cruikshanks’ illustrations for Life in London that ordinary people reenacted them for fun, overturning night watchmen’s boxes to replicate the scene of “Tom Getting the Best of a Charley” (Sillars, Visualisation, 9). At late century, Trilby propelled consumer fads for Trilby hats, waltzes, and sausages, as well as ice cream bars in the shape of feet, recalling Du Maurier’s depiction of Little Billee’s own illustration of Trilby’s bare foot.76 These afterlives and replications of images indicate the richly evocative nature of serial illustrations for Victorian readers.
The Victorian Illustrated Serial: Modern Critical Perspectives
By the 1860s, “illustration was firmly established as part of the narrative structure of the novel” (Sillars, Visualisation, 30). This fact prompts our central question: How did illustrations affect the way that readers consumed serial fiction? The work of book historians and literary scholars of text-image relations (such as Gerard Curtis, Catherine J. Golden, Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, J. Hillis Miller, Robert L. Patten, Stuart Sillars, Michael Steig, Julia Thomas, and Mark W. Turner) provides an important context for our study,