[In the following essay, Turner examines the relationship between text and illustrations in Romola to illuminate the interpretation of Victorian illustrated fiction in general.]

Romola, serialized in the popular monthly Cornhill Magazine, was the only novel by George Eliot to be accompanied by illustrations in its first form. In his drawings for the serial, Frederic Leighton, now best remembered for his large paintings of classical and Renaissance themes, undertook the task of bringing fifteenth-century Florence alive for readers. It is the interface between Eliot's written text and Leighton's visual depictions that I will discuss here, to indicate ways the illustrations form a parallel text—a text that actually highlights the domestic conflict in the novel. Broadly, I argue that the relationship between word and image in Victorian serials is far more complicated than has been acknowledged, challenging our ways of reading visual images and our ways of understanding nineteenth-century serial fiction.

ILLUSTRATING FICTIONS

Founded in 1860, Cornhill Magazine was unique among the most popular ‘high’ literary monthlies for the inclusion of illustrations in each issue, which added to the magazine's tremendous initial popularity. Unlike other popular magazines such as Fraser's, Blackwood's, Temple Bar, or St James, Cornhill commissioned quality wood-block engravings to supplement serial fiction and some poetry; although some middle-class monthlies and many weeklies were liberally illustrated, notably Good Words and Once a Week, none approached Cornhill in the early 1860s for the quality of fiction and of drawings.¹ As Simon Houfe observes, illustrating for Cornhill was the ‘sine qua non of having reached the zenith as an illustrator’.² Gradually throughout the nineteenth century, as technological improvements made reproductions of drawings cheaper and as visual images became increasingly prominent in public (through posters and billboards, for example), illustrations became more frequent in print journalism.³ Reactions to the proliferation of illustrations were not uniform; in 1870 the Gentleman's Magazine welcomed illustrated papers, calling the phenomenon ‘a new mania in journalism’,⁴ but it was not always thus. William Wordsworth, condemning similar publications twenty years earlier, writes in a sonnet,

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 age!
Must eyes be all in all, the tongue and ear
Nothing? Heaven keep us from a lower stage!(5)

For the old and by now deeply conservative poet, the popular language and images of newspapers were unmanly, regressive and anti-intellectual. He did not recognize the irony of such anti-popular railery coming from a poet whose aim in Lyrical Ballads a half-century earlier had been to champion the language of the common man. Wordsworth, who wrote the poem in the mid-1840s, was doubtless reacting against such new publications as the Illustrated London News which was launched in 1842. Between the time of Wordworth's poem and the Gentleman's Magazine proclamation of a new ‘mania’ was the revolution in wood-block illustration in the 1860s which can be witnessed in the pages of middle-class shilling monthlies throughout the decade.

In 1864, in time for the Christmas season, Smith, Elder published the Cornhill Gallery, a collection of the magazine's illustrations, including many of Leighton's drawings for Romola, presented as works of art. It cost one guinea and could be purchased as one volume, elegantly bound with gilt edges, or as a portfolio with separate pictures, presumably suitable for hanging. The Athenaeum praised the ‘Art-value of the designs’ and in an advertisement, we learn that both the Observer and Morning Star called it a wonderful drawing-room book.⁶ Later in the 1860s, other publishers followed suit with collections of drawings from their magazines.⁷ That such books were published attests to the public interest in periodical illustrations and the worth of the drawings apart from their literary source. And the inclusion of full-page illustrations and vignettes in Cornhill owes as much to the publisher's seemingly endless financial support of the magazine as to the technological and economic factors in the printing trade which increasingly made mass-produced illustrations financially viable.

The ways readers viewed the illustrations which accompanied serial novels will of course have been as varied as the readers. We are not able to determine exactly how the illustrations in magazines functioned visually for particular viewers. As twentieth-century viewers, our perception of a nineteenth-century drawing will necessarily be different from Victorians, and we read into the works retrospectively and with different assumptions about visual images and visual culture. As John Berger writes, ‘today we see the art of the past as nobody saw it before. We actually perceive it in a different way’.⁸ And the way we actually ‘see’ or consume a drawing depends on how, when and where we encounter it. For example, illustrated magazines may have been especially suited to rail travel because the drawings could provide a centre of focus during a rattling and often uncomfortable journey.⁹ Or, as noted in the advertisement for the Cornhill Gallery, a collection of serial drawings might become a ‘monument of many agreeable tales’,¹⁰ implying that drawings could somehow commemorate the experience of serial reading. Furthermore, the way images are remembered is itself culturally specific, so that the way we process and recall Victorian illustrations is necessarily different from the Victorians; memory and the relation between perception and cognition are not innate.¹¹ Wolfgang Kemp has argued for the need to question how the transmission of images between eras operates to discover the difference between the ‘utterance’ and the ‘remembrance’.¹² I will not pretend to tackle the breadth of Kemp's suggestion here, but it is important to accept—to remember—our distance from mid-Victorian periodical illustrations and the gap between the representations offered and our understanding of them.

Almost no work has been done on the ways periodical illustrations in the nineteenth century were consumed. While there is an ever-increasing body of work on Victorian images, there is little work that theorizes ways for twentieth-century viewers to encounter nineteenth-century visual culture. Serial illustrations in periodicals come with their own set of particular questions. To articulate a few: how do these drawings relate to the literary text? How do they relate to other visual images within the magazine? How does each individual image stand apart from the series?

Leighton's method of producing wood engravings placed an unavoidable distance between the artist and the reader-consumer. In fact, such mediation is perhaps part of the process of all cultural production.¹³ Leighton's drawings for Romola for Cornhill meant that he drew chalk sketches on gray paper which were then recast in pen on the wood blocks. The publisher George Smith arranged to have photographs taken before turning the wood blocks over to the engravers, Swain and Linton. The engravers cut away those areas intended to appear white in the final print and left in relief those areas to be black. The blocks were locked into the printer's form and inked at the same time as the type.¹⁴ The actual printing process puts the final product which the magazine reader consumes at several removes from the initial visual representation of the artist, and often the engravers' interpretation of the ink drawing was at odds with the image envisioned by the artist.

Despite the distance between reader and artist, effective illustrations might narrow the gap between image and words, and act as the reader's entrance into the literature. In his book on Victorian Novelists and their Illustrators, John Harvey calls serial drawings a ‘valuable aid’ ‘for a public which did not easily imagine what it read’.¹⁵ While it is risky to presume that the Victorian public had difficulty imagining fiction, it may be reasonable to assert that, considering some serials lasted over 18 months or two years, the importance of an effective illustration to the reader is as a reminder of fictional events which may have occurred months or years before. Furthermore, a drawing could become a point of discussion about a magazine; family circle reading was one way readers encountered the serial and introduced elements of the novel and its drawings into open discourse.¹⁶ An article about the British artist Abraham Solomon appearing in the March 1862 number of the Art Journal describes how ‘the walls of our exhibition rooms teem every year with pictures illustrating the pages of the standard novel, or poem, or drama’.¹⁷ The article goes on to mention that ‘the constant repetition of subjects’ with which every one is familiar ‘had become tiresome and wearying’.¹⁸ Whether or not book illustrations had become iconographically staid may be a matter of some debate, but it is certain that some drawings were available in a middle-class public forum, the art gallery, and were likely to remind readers and gallery viewers of a similar, shared literary experience.¹⁹ It is worth mentioning here that even though middle-class magazine readers had become familiar with a set of drawings over the period of serialization, and despite the common exhibition of illustrations in public galleries, reviewers of illustrated novels subsequently published in book form rarely mentioned the drawings. To be fair, the Publishers' Circular made special mention of Leighton's drawings in their literary intelligence section on 1 July 1862, and a few months later they credit Cornhill with the development of quality wood engravings (8 December 1862); but, as a trade journal, the Circular's audience was specific and limited.

Illustrations have a relation to the text, but the nature of that relationship is more complicated than one of direct correspondence. Often the author's idea of images varied from the artist's, as happened with George Eliot and Leighton over the depiction of Romola in the very first drawing, ‘The Blind Scholar and His Daughter’. But the argument about accuracy is a moot one when considering that drawings are not merely extensions of the literary text, but exist within the context of the magazine and within visual culture in general. Harvey has written that serial novels are unique because ‘they do show text and picture making a single art’,²⁰ but his attempt to unify the two forms ignores the contextual complexity of the illustrations which exist physically in a collective of fiction, poetry, advertisements, non-fiction and other illustrations. The drawings, like the novels, can be examined together with those other variables which constitute the context to expose a multiplicity of textual responses. As Lynda Nead has observed in her study of representations of Victorian women,

the meaning of a given image is never simply a question of its content alone. There will always be other conditions and contexts which will affect the way in which a picture is understood at a specific historical moment and it is these broader historical considerations which have to be identified in order to discover the ways in which visual images produce meaning.²¹

The variety of complex responses to periodical reading demonstrates how the visual text may or may not have collaborated with other texts to produce meaning within a cultural formation. My interest in studying periodical illustration is not primarily in determining the fidelity of a drawing to the fiction, but in understanding how illustrations enter into the discourse of a magazine and, specifically, how they engage in the ideology of a domestic ideal based upon the separation of gender-defined spheres.

LEIGHTON'S VERSION OF ROMOLA

According to separate spheres ideology, which has been widely discussed elsewhere,²² the gendering of separate spheres in mid-nineteenth century middle-class culture naturalized women as the moral safeguard of society whose proper place is in the domestic sanctuary. The serial illustrations to Romola, however, do not promote the uncomplicated, conventional view of Victorian domesticity that we might expect of an extremely popular, middle-class periodical like Cornhill.

Although Romola is an historical novel, George Eliot makes clear in the Proem that it is as much a story about mid-Victorian England as Renaissance Florence. She insists on ‘the same great needs, the same great loves’ and the ‘sameness of the human lot, which never alters in the main headings of its history’ (3), and, she adds, ‘we still resemble the men of the past more than we differ from them’ (3). It is in part because Eliot invites us so particularly to draw comparisons between the two periods that we are able to read Romola as a comment on her own day. A reviewer of the book edition of Romola, writing in the Westminster Review in October 1863, felt, like many readers and reviewers, that the historical setting was distracting, but he recognized how very like nineteenth-century figures Romola and Tito were.²³

As her letters to the artist reveal, George Eliot was generally pleased with Leighton's drawings for her novel.²⁴ In his study, George Eliot and the Visual Arts, Hugh Witemeyer notes that Leighton was the right artist for the job because he had studied in Florence and had made Renaissance subjects an early specialty.²⁵ Eliot welcomed advice from him about particular points relevant to the novel's period, but took care to recommend scenes appropriate for illustration. Since Leighton worked on his drawings using the monthly page proofs for each instalment, he was not privy to the development of the novel as a whole, and his visual response to the novel was based upon his reading of the work in serial form.²⁶ In looking at the Leighton and Eliot collaboration, a term used advisedly, I will foreground the role of the domestic in both the novel and the illustrations and determine how the drawings construct a parallel text in relation to the novel.

The second drawing from the third instalment in August 1862, ‘Under the Plane-tree’, a scene recommended to Leighton by Eliot, shows Tito asleep in the lap of Tessa, the innocent peasant girl who will become his mistress after he marries Romola. Tito has just rescued Tessa from a conjuror in a Florentine square, and Tessa has fallen in love with this handsome nobleman who is all kindness to her. Throughout the story Tessa offers a haven for Tito away from his increasingly treacherous life. The drawing is the third consecutive illustration to feature Tito as the subject and, although he has already fallen in love with Romola, we have yet to see a depiction of the two together. The only drawing we have seen of Romola appeared as the first in the serial, which depicts her standing over the shoulder of her blind father, the man who has so far dominated her life. In terms of the illustrations, the novel has been Tito's story, and ‘Under the Plane-tree’ shows us his weak side, his need to forget the lies he continues to tell. The chapter in which the scene appears is the last in the instalment, although this is not the final scene, and the kiss between Tito and Tessa after he awakes is guaranteed to be remembered because the visual image documents the love affair.

In contrast, the first illustration in the fourth instalment (September 1862) shows ‘The First Kiss’ between Tito and Romola. In fact, this scene does not occur until the second chapter of the instalment, but the drawing immediately responds to the sexual relationship in ‘Under the Plane-tree’. The title, ‘The First Kiss’, is ironic, since the reader knows about, and has a visual reminder of, Tito's first kiss with Tessa. Tito left us in the previous instalment wondering whether Romola would ever kiss him as Tessa does, and the drawing answers that question before the written text has had a chance. In the same chapter in which the kiss occurs, Tito proposes to Romola, so the reader's knowledge of his other relationship, reinforced visually, becomes more illicit. The drawings depict early on the alternative sexual options, differentiated by class, which Tito has created, so any reference to Romola's domestic situation, from this point forward, will be measured against Tito's secret life. The differences between the illustrations are revealing: with Tessa, Tito is relaxed as he reclines between her legs in a natural, public setting; with Romola, Tito is upright, formal and must take the opportunity to kiss her in a small closet-like chamber. In Leighton's depiction of the room, a curtain has been pulled aside creating a stage for which the reader is a secret onlooker.²⁷ Tito holds Romola's hand and leans down to kiss her. Her head is lifted and her other hand hangs limply by her side. As Eliot describes it, the quick kiss was ‘all the more exquisite for being unperturbed by immediate sensation’ (123), but passionless may best describe Leighton's version. Thus the narrative formed by the serial drawings is unsettling. The only illustration of Tito and Romola together thus far, exhibiting their first and only moment of intimacy in the entire novel, is overshadowed by the earlier drawing of Tito and his mistress. Tito's treachery is reinforced because the reader has had time to reflect visually on the relationship with Tessa, so that the depiction of his kissing Romola immediately in the next instalment becomes that much more poignant. The man Romola loves and trusts is faithless, and we have the pictures to prove it.

The next and only other illustration of Romola and Tito alone together appears in the sixth instalment of December 1862.²⁸ In the time span of the novel, 18 months have elapsed and Bardo the blind scholar has recently died, leaving his daughter Romola hopeful for a new and happier life with Tito. ‘Coming Home’, the second illustration for the instalment, is extraordinary in depicting the ‘narrative impulse’²⁹ which is the distance between husband and wife that Romola has been considering just before Tito's arrival:

The next time Tito came home she would be careful to suppress all those promptings that seemed to isolate her from him. Romola was labouring, as a loving woman must, to subdue her nature to her husband's. The great need of her heart compelled her to strangle, with desperate resolution, every rising impulse of suspicion, pride, and resentment; she felt equal to any self-infliction that would save her from ceasing to love.

(251)

She is resigned to being more appealing to Tito, but the words which describe Romola's resolution are violent; she will force herself into passivity and acceptance of Tito's secrets but only through desperation, denial and self-infliction. Eliot's description of Tito's return simply designates that ‘there was a lamp hanging over the stairs, and they could see each other distinctly as he ascended’, and that Romola has changed much more than Tito since they first met. Leighton's Romola is at the top of the stairs in the upper right of the drawing, not anxious at her husband's unexpected return, but ‘subdued, less cold, more beseeching’ (252). Tito, whose back is to us and whose figure is cut off at the waist, is ascending the stairs from the lower left. A series of s-curves holds the composition together—note how the drapery in Romola's dress and the curtains move into Tito's figure—but the illustration reinforces the separateness of the couple rather than any hoped-for union. There is a sexual feeling to the drawing, mostly expressed in Romola's languid, yielding pose as she leans and draws back the folds of the curtain. But, as the horizontal line in Romola's gown echoes the levels of the steps, Tito is cut off from Romola and on a lower plane than her morally.³⁰ In the novel, there are no moments of intimacy apart from the first kiss in the third instalment and not even veiled hints at any sexual relations between Romola and Tito. Cornhill prohibitions may have precluded any serious sexual innuendo, but Witemeyer astutely comments that the drawn curtain is a motif also seen in ‘The First Kiss’,³¹ as if what we are seeing is a scene from a staged marriage.

Later in the instalment, Romola reacts angrily to Tito's suggestion that they leave Florence, and Tito's response is to lock her in the library and assert his masculine power:

In an instant Tito started up, went to the door, locked it and took out the key. It was time for all the masculine predominance that was latent in him to show itself. But he was not angry; he only felt that the moment was eminently unpleasant, and that when this scene was at an end he should be glad to keep away from Romola for a little while. But it was absolutely necessary first that she should be reduced to passiveness.

(291)

The spatial distance in the drawing represents the sort of spiritual distance described in this passage. The drawing, therefore, depicts not only the words of Eliot's description of Tito coming home, but the significance of Tito's return and its consequences. This is the last time Tito and Romola will be alone together visually, and what we notice, especially in contrast to ‘The First Kiss’, is just how far apart the two really are. ‘Coming Home’ is a poignant illustration in its representation of the sexually impotent, spiritually distant nature of this frustrated marriage. Romola, who early in the novel is a Miranda figure sexually awakened by a shipwrecked stranger, never reaches sexual fulfilment in the novel. And as ‘Coming Home’ was the final illustration in the December instalment, readers would have this image of distance, of unchannelled sexual energy, to consider until the following month.

The first drawing for January 1863 depicts Tessa holding up her baby by Tito to Baldassarre. The illustration shows clearly the sexual potency of Tito's and Tessa's relationship, and therefore acts as a strong contrast to the thwarted feelings in the earlier drawing ‘Coming Home’. The second drawing in the January instalment is ‘Escaped’, depicting Romola's first attempt to disguise herself and flee her treacherous husband. The drawing of Tessa holding her baby is, therefore, framed by images of the disintegration of Romola's marriage. Interestingly, there are no drawings of Tessa that are not either preceded or followed by a drawing of Romola. The structure of the visual narrative draws attention to Tito's two families and reinforces the contrast between the two domestic situations.

The images of Tessa are the more gentle and domestic. But at this point we ought to remember that Tessa, despite her innocence and ignorance, is in fact ‘the other woman’, and as such is a fallen woman and a magdalene figure. Eric Trudgill has demonstrated that by mid-century the figure of the magdalene was ascending in her treatment by writers.³² And certainly Eliot is careful not to taint Tessa despite her status as mistress and unwed mother. She is shown among the trees with her lover asleep in her lap, what in other circumstances would be a comforting pastoral image. She figures as the proud mother who holds her baby up for approval. And in May 1863, Tessa is depicted as the dutiful mother rocking her baby in its cradle. The May depiction, significantly called ‘Tessa at Home’ from the chapter ‘The Other Wife’, is in fact the most conventionally domestic image in the whole Romola series. We watch the scene from the same point of view as Romola, as a voyeur who has accidentally stumbled upon Tessa's quiet, peaceful domesticity. The irony, of course, is that Romola is looking at Tito's other family and is there to return Tessa's lost child to her. ‘Tessa at Home’ shows visually the cosy details of conventional domesticity that we never see in Tito's relationship with Romola—a sleeping baby, the deep interior of the home, a devoted and perhaps pregnant mother, the daily preparations for a meal. Significantly, we see Tessa's bed through the open curtains in the background. Moments later, in the course of speaking with Tessa, Romola recognizes a lock of Tito's hair and begins to suspect that the family is his, and the whole of Savonarola's teaching, which insisted on her loyalty to duty, is called into question:

She was thrown back again on the conflict between the demands of an outward law, which she recognized as a widely-ramifying obligation, and the demands of inner moral facts which were becoming more and more peremptory […]

[…] All her efforts at union had only made its impossibility more palpable, and the relation had become for her simply a degrading servitude. The law was sacred. Yes, but the rebellion might be sacred too.

(473-4)

The instalment ends with Romola resolving to live apart from Tito, and this conclusion signals an emotional—and subversive—break in the text. If women's extramarital affairs were typically cited as the reason for the collapse of households, here it is the man's sexual transgression that breaks up the marriage. In Romola's moment of sacred rebellion, then, Eliot actually reverses cultural norms of gender and sexuality. As Lynda Nead notes, ‘male unchastity in itself was not believed to corrupt the home in the way in which female unchastity was believed to’.³³ However, Tito pays for his sins through his death, and Tessa the fallen woman survives. Although it is undoubtedly true that men's sexual behaviour was treated more permissively than women's, it is important to remember that there were calls for a more significant denouncing of male promiscuity than was common.³⁴ Seen in the context of Victorian sexual constructions, Romola's independent move to leave Tito becomes all the more powerful and wilful.

The illustration for the June issue is a visual response to the tensions experienced in the last chapter of the previous instalment, a pattern used in other of Leighton's illustrations. ‘Drifting Away’ depicts Romola in a boat setting off to sea, although the events which describe Romola's second escape do not appear until the final chapter in the instalment. However, if we read just the text of the illustrations, Romola has had a glimpse of Tito's secret, comforting domestic life (‘Tessa at Home’ in May) and has fled as a result (‘Drifting Away’ in June). In Eliot's words, ‘there is no compensation for the woman who feels that the chief relations of her life has been no more than a mistake’ (507). Romola's drifting away is the necessary end for a woman who has found only disappointment from men and the negotiation between the public and private an impossible moral dilemma:

She longed for that repose in mere sensation which she had sometimes dreamed of in the sultry afternoons of her early girlhood, when she had fancied herself floating naiad-like in the waters.

The clear waves seemed to invite her: she wished she could lie down to sleep on them and pass from sleep into death. But Romola could not directly seek death; the fulness of young life in her forbade that. She could only wish that death would come.

(509)

Romola's flight from Florence is a second attempt ‘to be freed from the burthen of choice’ (510) between public devotion to duty and self-sacrifice and personal devotion to an inner moral law. ‘Drifting Away’, which illustrates Romola's suicide attempt, is taken from the final chapter in the June instalment and readers would have to wait two months, not the usual one, until the August instalment to learn Romola's fate; presumably, the delay would have created greater suspense around Romola's story as well as allowing time to tie together various strands in the novel. Such breaks and gaps of time in the narrative, constructed by the author, are the hallmark of serial literature and are lost in reading in book form.

The depiction of Romola's attempted suicide would have had resonances with Victorian representations of fallen women who were most often depicted drowning.³⁵ The twist in Romola's fate is that her suicide attempt is not brought on by her own sexual promiscuity, but that of her faithless husband; unusually, the sexual sins of the husband have led to the disintegration of the family unit. However, Romola's oppressors do not go unchecked, and in the events of the July issue, Savonarola's mission is challenged and Baldassarre murders Tito: both men to whom Romola felt devotional attachment are made powerless through acts of violence.

Romola prefigures middle-class heroines around the turn of the century like Kate Chopin's Edna Pontellier (The Awakening, 1899) and Virginia Woolf's Rachel Vinrace (The Voyage Out, 1915) whose deaths, similarly described as suicidal drownings, result from the limitations faced by women who find themselves trapped by marriage. For Romola, Edna and Rachel, a rebirth through a sea-change is a necessary element of their female development and personal empowerment. Although both Rachel and Edna die, it can be argued that their suicides are self-chosen, deliberate, positive acts of will by women who are unable to accommodate themselves to the world's expectations. Romola's passage across the sea is like a baptism, an awakening to her personal identity and individual potential. Elaine Showalter has observed that ‘water is the organic symbol of woman's fluidity: blood, milk, tears’;³⁶ Romola, Edna and Rachel each realize self-worth and will in a female element.

Romola, described early in the novel as an Antigone confused by public and private duties, becomes a Madonna figure in book three of the novel. Trudgill claims that George Eliot was quite taken by ‘the ideal of woman represented by the Virgin’ and offers Scenes of Clerical Life, Romola and Middlemarch as examples of novels in which heroines are linked to Madonna images.³⁷ Use of the Madonna promotes a view of womanhood that is pure, self-sacrificing and, most importantly, virginal. After adopting Savonarola's teaching, Romola devotes herself to the sick of Florence's plague-stricken streets and feels an unconventional domestic pleasure in her public mission which diverts her attentions away from her wrecked marriage:

The idea of home had come to be identified for her less the house in the Via de' Bardi, where she sat in frequent loneliness, than the towered circuit of Florence, where there was hardly a turn of the streets at which she was not greeted with looks of appeal or of friendliness.

(379)

Gendered spheres have been inverted; the private has become public. Romola has become the Florence Nightingale of Florence, and found some of the comforts lacking in her marriage by taking on a philanthropic mission. Significantly, philanthropy was one of the few options available to middle-class Victorian women outside the home. As F. K. Prochaska has noted, charity work was not subject to the prejudices against women's employment, and ‘it heightened women's self-esteem and gave them a sense of place and direction’.³⁸ Romola's movement into the realm of the holy is connected with what Victorian readers would have recognized as a legitimate sphere of public activity for women, the care of the sick. A reviewer of the three-volume book edition wrote in the Saturday Review that Romola's devotion to good works ‘gives her character that air of softness which it would otherwise want’;³⁹ philanthropy has made Romola more womanly. Leighton's drawing for the March 1863 instalment, called ‘The Visible Madonna’ after a chapter in which Romola is shown to be nursing Florence's needy, links Romola with Italian Renaissance Madonna iconography. As Andrew Sanders observes,

the orphans in Florence, the plague-stricken villagers, a chapter title, and one of Leighton's original illustrations, insist that we should see her as the ‘Visible Madonna’ in contrast to the ‘Unseen Madonna’, the veiled image carried through the streets. Romola becomes a manifest Virgin Mary, fleshly, loving, and involved in mankind.⁴⁰

She is seen surrounded by young children who are touched and comforted, as if being blessed by her hands. Nead confirms that ‘the image of the Madonna and Child was a paradigm of maternal devotion and purity and during the nineteenth century the image could be drained of its associations with Catholicism and taken up within English ruling-class culture as a sign of respectable, Protestant values’.⁴¹

The domestic feelings which are thwarted in Romola's marriage are exalted and given a new life in her role as Florence's Holy Mother.⁴² The Proem states somewhat sentimentally that ‘the little children are still the symbol of the eternal marriage between love and duty’ (9), and by adopting Florence as her family, Romola has reversed the barrenness of her marriage.⁴³ In ‘The Visible Madonna’ chapter, Florentines praise her as they would the Virgin, and ‘all that ardour of her nature which could no longer spend itself in the woman's tenderness for father and husband, had transformed itself into an enthusiasm of sympathy with the general life’ (389). When Romola visits Tessa at home in the May instalment, she is seen by the young mistress as the Holy Madonna and her image ‘remained confusedly associated with the pictures in the churches’ (468). The contrast between Tito's two families focuses on the two wives, and especially on the two mothers who represent the paradox between the sacred and the profane. Comparing the two illustrations of the mothers, ‘The Visible Madonna’ and ‘Tessa at Home’, Romola has adopted a public role as devoted, self-sacrificing mother of all children, while Tessa remains the dutiful mother whose proper place is in the home. Through philanthropy, Romola creates a public position for herself separate from her life with Tito. By the final third of the novel, both Romola and Tessa enjoy valid domestic duties, however much their roles may differ.

‘At the Well’, the final illustration for the serialization in August 1863, returns to the iconography of Romola as Madonna. She has survived her attempt to drift off to sea and has been helping plague victims in a distant village. The drawing shows Romola at the well from which the villagers are too frightened to drink. She is carrying a young sick child, and her pose is artificial, statuesque and unmistakably that of the Madonna.⁴⁴ We might notice similarities to Raphael's ‘Sistine Madonna’, particularly the stance, drapery and awe-struck onlookers.⁴⁵ In the final instalment, Romola has come to embody the virtues of the sacred mother, and that is the visual image which concludes the serialization.

George Eliot's Epilogue concludes the novel, however curiously, by trying to restore faith in the domestic hearth by providing a modified, matriarchal version of it. Tessa and her two children by Tito, Romola and her cousin Monna Brigida, all live together happily in Florence, several years after the events of the novel. Tito's two families have been united after his death, and Romola finally achieves a surrogate family and home. Romola's self-empowering independence is modified by returning her to the home, but as Lynda Nead recognizes, respectability for women ‘was defined in terms of their location within the domestic sphere and their consequent sexual respectability’.⁴⁶ George Eliot, whose own unconventional life with Lewes caused her to be shunned by society for many years, would have been acutely sensitive to the matter of women's respectability. The Epilogue's picture of domesticity is radical in its unconventionality, but it returns the novel to what Jennifer Uglow has called its main theme:

the way a passionate intellectual woman responds to being told what to do all her life by men, and ends by shaking herself free altogether to become the matriarchal head of a household of women, shaping a boy of the next generation of men according to her beliefs.⁴⁷

It is an extraordinary household with no father figure and with two mothers from distinctly different classes. Like Uglow, although less emphatic, Andrew Sanders believes it is a domesticity ‘which looks beyond the confinement which we normally associate with Victorian ideal homes’.⁴⁸ And undoubtedly this is true to an extent. However, it is worth noting that in the Epilogue Romola returns to the female sphere of the home, whether as head of household or not, and reinforces the domestic unit as the basis for women's role in society. Romola's compassion for Tessa, her husband's mistress, supports the notion resulting from the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act which in effect stated that women ought to forgive their husband's adultery.⁴⁹ And as Nina Auerbach has asserted, ‘reclamation of fallen women was one of the few respectable activities available to philanthropically minded Victorian spinsters’.⁵⁰ Granted, living with a fallen woman is rather different from offering charity. Still, to assert that the Epilogue finalizes Romola's feminist emancipation seems to ignore the ways in which Romola's return to the home, radically overhauled as it may be, is also a return to the domestic sphere.

It is possible that Eliot had in mind her Cornhill reader, mostly conventional and respectable women of the middle class, for whom a total rebellion against the domestic would not be a real consideration. And there is the problem of historical truth, both in Renaissance Florence and mid-Victorian England, neither of which would have granted Romola many opportunities outside of the home. The Westminster Review, reviewing the first book edition, found the depiction of the sexes too modern and Romola's aspirations too unlike the fifteenth century.⁵¹ There are several separate but coexistent discourses running through the novel. Eliot allows the possibility for Romola to become matriarch of a home which transcends class and to enjoy domestic comforts. The family was the primary image of social unity and order in Victorian Britain,⁵² and the Epilogue does not overturn the values which stem from a domestic sphere. The writer has found both the attraction to female independence and to the female sphere powerful.⁵³ Yet the return to the domestic hearth produces mixed and complicated reactions because the Epilogue both reasserts the basic social unit, the family, while fundamentally radicalizing its power structure. Like Romola, Eliot was learning to enjoy her own surrogate family in the form of Lewes and his boys, as a letter from Lewes to John Blackwood indicates:

Mrs. Lewes is as anxious about them as if they were her own boys; and it would interest you to see her with the eldest who worships her, and thinks no treat equal to having her all to himself for an evening to make, and be made much of. Among the many blessings that have come to me late in life this of seeing the perfect love between her and the children is one of the greatest; perhaps because it was one of the rocks ahead. Having had no domestic life for many years I now have such domestic happiness as can be given to few.

(Letters III, 421)

Lewes was well known for his unconventional marriage to his wife Agnes, and the two were supposed at the time to have been part of Thornton Hunt's radical ‘phalanstery’ in Bayswater.⁵⁴ Although George Eliot was unconventional in her own ‘marriage’ to Lewes, and was sensitive to social reaction against her mode of life, like her heroine she feels some comforts of a domestic role. The Spectator called the Epilogue ‘feeble and womanish’, but the Athenaeum saw in it a ‘far better life’.⁵⁵ More radical than Romola's position in the Epilogue is Tessa's, the vindicated fallen woman, as Ruby Redinger asserts:

Could Tessa […] have appeared in one of the English novels? […] Tito's mistress, she bears his children without a sense of shame or guilt, survives both his marriage to Romola and his death, and at the end of the novel is a happy mother with Romola at her side to help care for the bastard children.⁵⁶

Unlike Hetty Sorrel in Adam Bede, Tessa has no secrecy or guilt.⁵⁷ In fact, various discourses converge in the Epilogue: reformism and domestic comfort; the Madonna and the magdalene stories. The presentation of Romola's domesticity in the final episode challenges our assumptions about the proper role of Victorian woman, but our reaction is determined by our ability to accept the symbolism of a complex convergence of competing discourses.

Unlike other monthly magazines, Cornhill did not include articles which questioned the role of women in a direct way. There are no pieces on the rights of women or on redundant women as in Blackwood's and Fraser's, respectively. In Cornhill, domestic ideology is constructed largely in the domestic fiction, the visual texts, and between the lines of the non-fiction. Were we to consider Romola's treatment of the domestic together with other concurrent texts in Cornhill—Trollope's story of a jilted lover in The Small House at Allington; Anne Ritchie's The Story of Elizabeth, about a rebellious young woman made to conform; William Smith's poem ‘Maladetta’ which tells the story of a young fallen woman, illustrated with a depiction of her heartbroken parents; or, Harriet Parr's story ‘Sybil's Disappointment’ which describes how a woman's cruel treatment of her cousin whose marriage hopes are thwarted, leads to the cousin's death—all of these texts taken collectively show how the magazine's domestic ideology was even more complicated than we might expect. Leighton's visual text unsettles the readers' assumptions about the ideal domestic sphere by continually contrasting images of Romola with Tessa, complicating our response to the Madonna and magdalene figures, the role of woman and mother in the home and her responsibilities to the public and private realms.

George Eliot's Romola, Leighton's version of Romola, and the overlapping fiction and poetry, far from comforting the reader, continually challenge the Victorian domestic ideal. These texts question assumptions about the delicate position of women who, whether by choice or not, find that marriage is not an option. What is most interesting is that this fiction appeared in one of the most popular literary journals of the day, Cornhill Magazine. It is my contention, then, that Romola does not have the same unsettling power on its own as it does within the context of the periodical, where we realize how forcefully the fiction and illustrations together engage ideologically with the most controversial topics of the day.

Notes

1. See the Publishers' Circular 25 (8 December 1862), p. 588.

2. Simon Houfe, Dictionary of British Book Illustrators and Caricaturists, 1800-1914 (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Antique Collectors' Club, 1978), p. 113.

3. On the proliferation of visual culture in the early nineteenth century, see Patricia Anderson, The Printed Image and the Transformation of Popular Culture 1790-1860 (1991; reprinted Oxford: Clarendon, 1994).

4. ‘Illustrated Newspapers’, Gentleman's Magazine 4 n.s. (March 1870), p. 459.

5. William Wordsworth, The Poems, ed. John O. Hayden (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1977), vol. 2, pp. 900-901. ‘Illustrated Books and Newspapers’ was written in 1846 and first published in 1849-50.

6. The Cornhill Gallery (London: Smith, Elder, 1865) refers to the illustrations as works of art. The Gallery review appears in the Athenaeum II (26 November 1864), p. 713. The Observer and Morning Star comments are found in an advertisement in the same Athenaeum issue, p. 694.

7. Similar collections include: Idyllic Pictures (London: Sampson Low, 1866) and Touches of Nature (London: Strahan, 1866). Forrest Reid discusses these publications in chapter two of Illustrators of the 1860s (London: Faber & Gwynn, 1928; reprinted New York: Dover, 1975).

8. John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: BBC and Penguin, 1972), p. 16.

9. Houfe writes that ‘the illustrated magazine or novel was the natural companion for rapid transit where plates might hold the wandering attention in a way that prose could not’. Houfe, p. 108.

10. See the Cornhill Gallery advert in the Athenaeum II (26 November 1864), p. 694.

11. On the cultural specificity of images, see Susanne Kuchler and Walter Melion, ‘Introduction: Memory, Cognition and Image Production’, in eds Susanne Kuchler and Walter Melion, Images of Memory: On Remembering and Representation (Washington, DC and London: Smithsonian Press, 1991), p. 4 ff.

12. Wolfgang Kemp, ‘Visual Narratives, Memory, and the Medieval Esprit du System’, in Kuchler and Melion, p. 89. Note that I read both the notion of the utterance and the remembrance as plural, rather than single or unified.

13. See N. John Hall's discussion of the role of the engraver in Trollope and His Illustrators (New York: St Martin's Press), pp. 150-56.

14. Hugh Witemeyer, George Eliot and the Visual Arts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 158, describes the method of production for Leighton's Romola illustrations.

15. J. R. Harvey, Victorian Novelists and their Illustrators (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1970), p. 3.

16. Linda Hughes and Michael Lund discuss the community of magazine readers in The Victorian Serial (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1991), pp. 10-11.

17. James Dafforne, ‘British Artists: Their Style and Character, No. LIX—Abraham Solomon’, The Art Journal (March 1862), p. 73.

18. Ibid.

19. Sally Mitchell describes the extent to which fiction reading was a shared experience for readers: ‘Literally millions of people were provided with emotional experiences that they held in common because they read the same fiction’. See her The Fallen Angel: Chastity, Class and Women's Reading, 1835-1880 (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1981), p. 3.

20. Harvey, p. 2.

21. Lynda Nead, Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain (1988; reprinted Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 16.

22. See for example Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality Since 1800 (London: Longman, 1981).

23. [Justin, McCarthy], Review of Romola, Westminster Review 24 n.s. (1 October 1863), p. 348.

24. Letters, III, IV and VIII contain letters relevant to Romola.

25. Witemeyer, p. 157.

26. Ibid., p. 158.

27. Ibid., p. 168.

28. I agree with Witemeyer, who says that the two illustrations of Romola and Tito together represent ‘before and after’ images documenting the characters' growth, p. 168. Note that Romola and Tito are also in ‘A Dangerous Colleague’ (March 1863) in which Romola is depicted overhearing Tito's political machinations. The subject of this drawing again documents the distance between the two, but the two are not alone as in ‘The First Kiss’ and ‘Coming Home’.

29. Geoffrey Hemstedt, ‘Painting and Illustration’, in ed. Laurence Lerner, The Victorians (London: Methuen, 1978), pp. 148-9.

30. In Myths of Sexuality, Lynda Nead discusses George Elgar Hicks's cycle of paintings, ‘Woman's Mission’, and describes how the woman's level in relation to the man's in each of the paintings is indicative of power structures within the family, p. 14. Similarly, Leighton's two depictions of Romola and Tito together contrast how Tito, who initially leans over Romola protectively, has been reduced to a baser level morally and is literally cut off in the second illustration.

31. Witemeyer, pp. 168-9.

32. Eric Trudgill, Madonnas and Magdalens: The Origins and Development of Victorian Sexual Attitudes (London: Heinemann, 1976), pp. 287-90. Trudgill generally describes the 1840s as a period when magdalene figures committed suicide and the 1850s as the period when attempts were made to rescue the magdalene (chapter 11, ‘The Fortunes of the Magdalen’).

33. Nead, p. 50.

34. See for example, John Baker Hopkins, ‘Social Rights of Man’, Rose, Shamrock, and Thistle (August 1862), p. 341: ‘I do not want to see a social inquisition established; but is it unreasonable to demand the expulsion of men from respectable society who are living in open profligacy? I do not deny the imperative necessity of the sentence of outlawry against a fallen woman, no matter how cunningly she was dragged to ruin, or how sincere her repentance. It is a terrible necessity, but I repeat, I cannot gainsay it. Yet, on the other hand, having driven the victim from the pale of society, shall the victimizer be permitted to mingle with our wives and daughters?’

35. Nead, p. 170.

36. Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830-1980 (London: Virago, 1987), p. 11.

37. Trudgill, p. 263.

38. F. K. Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980), p. 12. The introduction overviews the reasons for women's move into philanthropy. See also Helena Michie, The Flesh Made Word: Female Figures and Women's Bodies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), chapter 2.

39. Saturday Review 16 (25 July 1863), p. 125.

40. Andrew Sanders, The Victorian Historical Novel 1840-1880 (London: Macmillan, 1978), p. 189.

41. Nead, p. 26.

42. In her chapter on Florence Nightingale in Uneven Developments, Mary Poovey discusses how women turned to nursing as a compensation for thwarted love. See p. 177.

43. In Women and Philanthropy, Prochaska notes that ‘the running of a philanthropic society could be compared to the running of a family’, p. 17.

44. It has been suggested to me that the composition of the drawing also recalls the imagery of standard depictions of the ‘Rest on the Flight into Egypt’. My thanks to Carter Foster for pointing this out to me. Also note that Granacci's ‘Holy Family with St. John’ was also known as ‘Rest on the Flight with Infant St John’.

45. It is interesting to note that Raphael's ‘Sistine Madonna’ was also George Eliot's favourite painting in the whole world; whether Leighton was aware of this or not I have yet to determine. See Witemeyer, p. 21.

46. Nead, p. 28.

47. Jennifer Uglow, George Eliot (London: Virago, 1987), pp. 159-60.

48. Andrew Sanders, ‘Introduction’ to Romola (London: Penguin Classics, 1980), p. 28.

49. Nead, p. 52 and Poovey, chapter 3.

50. Nina Auerbach, Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 153.

51. [Justin McCarthy?], Review of Romola, in Westminster Review 24 n.s. (1 October 1863), 348. The ending was, perhaps, especially too modern given the debates over single women at this time.

52. In Myths of Sexuality, Nead observes that ‘the family, then, was a sign of order; it was as perceived as the foundation of social stability and progress’, p. 36. And in The Fallen Angel, Sally Mitchell states that ‘the central image of Victorianism is the enclosed family […] Yet the very image of the family as a social order was based on a paradox. Women were inferior to men and were therefore to be submissive, protected and supervised; women were superior to men—in moral and spiritual qualities—and were therefore to be deferred to’, pp. 6-17.

53. Richard Barrickman, Susan McDonald, and Myra Stark, Corrupt Relations: Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, Collins and the Victorian Sexual System (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982) observe that, ‘even writers like George Eliot and Charlotte Brontë who consciously set out to oppose oppressive stereotypes about women and sexual relations find the ideal of woman as the benign, all-suffering restorer of cultural values powerfully attractive’, p. 12.

54. Rosemary Ashton, G. H. Lewes: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 56-7.

55. The Spectator 1829 (18 July 1863), p. 2267, and ‘New Novels’, Athenaeum II (11 July 1863), p. 46.

56. Ruby V. Redinger, George Eliot: The Emergent Self (New York: Knopf, 1975), p. 452.

57. Ibid.