[In the following essay, Skilton provides an overview of critical writing on Victorian illustrated fiction.]

WRITER AND ARTIST AT WORK

By far the largest amount of work on illustrations to Victorian fiction concerns the important issue of the generation of the illustrated work—whether or not the writer directed the visual artist in detail, or on the contrary incorporated suggestions arising from the illustrative drawings. Investigations along these lines contribute greatly to our understanding of the institution of the novel in the literary marketplace, and teach us the historical importance of illustration in an account of the consumption of Victorian fiction.

All such work examines the suitability of illustration to text, seeking in the production of the illustrated work a validation of the verbal/visual relationship, but if a reader innocent of preconceptions on the subject were to accept Michael Steig's invitation to “‘read’ the text and illustrations in conjunction with one another”¹ and approach the totality of an illustrated novel, quite different matters would clamour for attention. Established ways of looking at the nature of narrative in prose, when applied to verbal-text-plus-illustration, present new issues for discussion. The present article suggests what some of these are.

ILLUSTRATIONS AND READINGS

An illustration was most commonly produced in response to a portion of a literary text which had already been written, and it functions as a reading of part of its text, in the sense of an elaborated interpretation, which, because all parts of it cannot be thought of or held in the consciousness at one and the same time, has to be written down, turned into another object of intellectual contemplation, in order to be stabilized. The reader becomes in turn a producer, making a new work which stands at a remove from the first work, and itself requires reading. The illustrations of George Cruikshank to Oliver Twist or Hablot K. Browne (“Phiz”) to Martin Chuzzlewit or Dombey and Son, or of Thackeray to Vanity Fair or The Virginians, are in this sense “readings” of their novels. In certain plates the visual artist has “added” significant detail to that given in the text—detail consistent with the text—and the plate in question constitutes an expanded exegesis of a segment or aspect of the text. The illustration-as-reading in this case provides both information as to the progress of the action (diegetic information) and reinforces the commentary upon it (extradiegetic comment). Some illustrations bring out aspects of the text of which the writer may have been unconscious. Steig for example notes that in the phallic depictions of Quilp in the Old Curiosity Shop we see Browne as an interpreter who anticipates the pioneers of twentieth-century Dickensian criticism.²

From historical studies of extrinsic sources we know that these illustrations are indeed “readings” of the texts they appeared with, but the integrated work called “the illustrated novel” does not allow this simple assumption to go unchallenged. J. Hillis Miller clearly recognises this fact when he speaks of a mutuality in the relationship between Dickens's text and Cruikshank's plates in Sketches by Boz,³ deriving in part from the fact that word and image both stand in the same tradition of reading the London scene. Many plates to Dickens's novels have titles which refer to scenes in the text, without quoting the text itself; but many illustrations to Trollope on the other hand take a quite enigmatic phrase from the text as title, with the result, as Geoffrey Hemstedt rightly points out, that the reader must seek in the text for an explanation of the plate.⁴ It is therefore a safer generalization that from a reader point of view verbal and visual aspects of the works read each other, and that the reader is faced with an interesting weave of narrative and commentary in two media. The verbal/visual artefact is necessarily self-aware, the fact of the translation back and forth between the different media laying bare the artifice of both visual and verbal work to a higher degree than is usually recognised in mainstream Victorian fiction.

THE ACT OF READING

The fact of illustration itself affects the sheer mechanics of the reading of fiction. The original readers of the novels that Dickens published in parts were more struck than we can ever be by the two monthly plates to each part, which were posted up as advertisements for the latest issue, or of the attendant illustrations for those published in illustrated periodicals. It is also likely that Dickens's public was trained to a higher receptivity to illustration than we are. In any case the plates obviously entered significantly into the contemporary reception of the fiction. In William Macready's diary for 22 January 1841, there is an all-too-rare glimpse of an early Victorian reader confronting an illustration when he records his reaction to the number of Master Humphrey's Clock containing the death of Little Nell: “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”.⁵ Macready's reading of this installment was in an important sense ritual, and was such as we cannot recapture today: held in suspense by the process of serialisation, he was aided in a fearful anticipation by Cattermole's famous illustration as he read what he expected but dreaded to read. It is difficult to imagine that many readers of Dickens in serial or part-issue schooled themselves not to look ahead to the latest illustrations, and the order in which information came to them was therefore crucially different. Publishers were aware of this fact, and the instructions for binding up the parts of a novel usually require plates to be bound in to face the page of text from which their subjects are taken. For example “Guilty!”, which illustrates Lady Mason's confession to Sir Peregrine Orme in Orley Farm (in Trollope's opinion the intensest moment of drama in his fiction) is to be first seen (in some “ideal” reading) at the moment of the verbal revelation itself. But the month-by-month reader of the part-issue would have received the plate as one of two attached together to the issue in question, and would have looked at it before reaching the passage to which it relates.

In whatever form it comes to the reader, an illustrated novel is read in a different way. Complex plates (like some of George Cruikshank's or Browne's for Dickens's fiction) provide numerous centres of interest—places on which the eye may rest with gratification, and indeed must rest if engaged in interpretation. Hence they are necessarily experienced aesthetically in time, and can only be read over a finite interval.⁶ Where the figures and objects they present are itemised in the text, the plates also correspond to more or less extended reading time of the text, but the order of encountering the items in the one-dimensional text will be preordained as it is not in the two-dimensional illustration. The simultaneous distance and privileged closeness of word and image, with all their reciprocal cross-reference in the reading situation, call for a more expressive word than “illustration” as that word is commonly employed, with its implications of a one-way aesthetic traffic.

THE ILLUSTRATED NOVEL AND THE ANALYSIS OF NARRATIVE

There is scope for applying the kind of tools which literary analysts of narrative and of reading have at their command to text-cum-picture, and re-reading much Victorian fiction accordingly. There is no room in a single article to do more than mention some of the consequences of the re-reading proposed, and these will be glanced at under the most general headings available from our critical vocabulary, with examples taken from a necessarily small selection of novels.

OVERALL DESIGN

The most obvious of these consequences is that the prominence given by an illustration to a particular incident, episode, location or fictional person will have to be accepted as having a shaping role in the novel. Certain incidents will have to be admitted twice into the reading process, and will thus have a privileged status by the mere fact of their double presentation, and from the reader's point of view they will be available to be remembered in more than one fashion. Moreover in the cases of Dickens and Cruikshank and Dickens and Browne, the visual cross-referencing which all commentators have noticed between plates in the same work will affect the work's “structure” by emphasising certain “themes” and “structures” at the expense of others—or even introducing new ones.

CHRONOLOGIES

The interrelation of the chronologies of narrative and reading presents problems which are nowadays familiar in unillustrated fiction, but can be considerably more complex in an illustrated work where the contemplation of a plate holds back the forward impulse inherent in the verbal narrative. All description, of course, however integrated into a narrative, takes reading time which may or may not fit comfortably with narrated time;⁷ but Stephen Lutman puts this more strongly in the case of the verbal/visual narrative and writes of the “central paradox” of the experience of reading an illustrated novel such as David Copperfield as that of the “combination of a static picture with a dynamic narrative form”.⁸ Unfortunately, as many commentators have noted, we have little evidence as to how original readers, familiar from their upbringing with the Hogarthian tradition of visual satire, responded to Cruikshank's or Browne's illustrations to Dickens, for example. But the process of pausing to describe a scene as a picture is common from the eighteenth century onward, particularly in comic and sentimental writing, and an example of the practice may serve as some kind of model for the accepted and “normal” way of reading a plate. The following example, from as late as Thackeray's Philip (1861-62), demonstrates strikingly the resultant diegetic arrest. The scene is written to be enjoyed visually, the narrator proposing that comic pleasure is to be derived from an examination of its composition:

Here is a picture I protest. We have—first, the boarders on the first landing, whither, too, the Baynes children have crept in their night-gowns. Secondly, we have Auguste, Françoise, the cook, and the assistant coming up from the basement. And, third, we have Colonel Bunch, Doctor Martin, Major MacWhirter, with Charlotte in his arms; madame, General B., Mrs. Mac, Mrs. General B., all in the passage, when our friend the bombshell bursts in amongst them.⁹

The reading of this comic moment is almost ritualised as the action is arrested for the narrator to explain where the comic quality lies. Thackeray did not in fact chose this particular example for illustration in the Cornhill Magazine of which he was editor and in which Philip appeared from 1861-62, and it would have been out of character for the eighteen-sixties and for that periodical that he should have done so. Thackeray is using a narrative/descriptive device inherited from Smollett and his contemporaries, and persisting in the fiction of the period in which the action of Philip is set—the period of Dickens's early fiction—but out of fashion in the politer sixties, the “Golden Age” of the kind of illustrations Millais drew for wood-engravings to the works of Tennyson and Trollope. What the reader is invited to construct in the above passage from Philip is a plate in the style of Cruikshank. In the absence of an actual illustration, the reader is taken through the narrator's reading an imaginary one. An actual plate should perhaps be looked at in the same way, and the action—however rapid in the verbal text—should be thus interrupted for an interval of non-verbal laughter. A complication is hereby introduced into the relation between narrated time and reading time not even envisaged by the arch-exploiter of chronological contradictions, Tristram Shandy.

The illustrations to Vanity Fair, as Joan Stevens has shown, introduce another time-scheme by their clear awareness of the date of publication as well as the years in which the action is set. The celebrated vignette of Becky looking out to sea in Chapter lxiv is based on Benjamin Robert Haydon's many canvasses of “Napoleon musing at St. Helena”, which were drawing much public comment in the late eighteen-forties, and therefore has a topicality which bridges the date of the action and the date of publication, and is hence a metafictional reminder, too, of some of the chronological conventions at work. So, too, is the openly metafictional wood-engraving of Hyde Park Corner which heads “Before the Curtain”, because it shows in the background the infamous equestrian statue of the Duke of Wellington which was one of the causes célèbres of the years in which Vanity Fair appeared.¹⁰ In a similar spirit Thackeray plays quite blatantly with novel-writing conventions at the opening to Chapter xix of Philip when the narrator responds to a letter from “a fair correspondent” who

points out the discrepancy existing between the text and the illustrations of our story; and justly remarks that the story dated [sic] more than twenty years back, while the costumes of the actors of our little comedy are of the fashion of to-day.

My dear madam, these anachronisms must be, or you would scarcely to able to keep any interest for our characters. What would be a woman without a crinoline petticoat, for example? an object ridiculous, hateful, I suppose hardly proper.¹¹

Philip can either be deemed a seriously flawed verbal/visual artefact or be seen as one of those chronological mermaids, half in one time and half in another, like Shakespeare's Roman plays, which critics learn to accommodate quite easily. This novel is a typical case of a work which attends to its own relation with its readers.

The visual/verbal relation can be chronologically complex at the diegetic level, too. Some of Cruikshank's plates to Oliver Twist correspond to a sequence of narrative events which takes places over a significant time and occupies a significant space as words on the page, and are not the “snapshots” or “instantanés” they are sometimes taken to be.¹² A clear example is “Oliver escapes being bound apprentice to the Sweep,” from Chapter iii, which presents simultaneously—or achronologically—what is verbally given as a series of actions taking some moments, and having a necessary sequence to them:

The old gentleman stopped, laid down his pen, and looked from Oliver to Mr. Limbkins: who attempted to take snuff with a cheerful and unconcerned aspect. …

“My boy!” said the old gentleman, “you look pale and alarmed. What is the matter?”

“Stand a little away from him, Beadle”, said the other magistrate: laying aside the paper, and leaning forward with an expression of interest. “Now, boy, tell us what's the matter: don't be afraid.”

Oliver fell on his knees, and clasping his hands together, prayed that they would order him back to the dark room—that they would starve him—beat him—kill him if they pleased—rather than send him away with that dreadful man.

“Well!” said Mr. Bumble, raising his hands and eyes with most impressive solemnity, “Well! of all the artful and designing orphans …¹³

This extract, which shows what may be a necessary device for any narrative visual artist and is the stock-in-trade of the modern cartoonist, compresses a segment of the verbal text into one moment of time, and then opens it out again in the act of reading the picture in an order no longer controlled by the words on the page. The tyranny of the verbal text is hereby broken, even if a new kind of tyranny is incidentally imposed by the sheer definiteness of the illustration in the point of the appearances of characters and places, as James and Beerbohm among others would complain.¹⁴

FOCALISATION AND MOTIVATION

The static nature of illustrations can be exploited in the arrangement of a plot when a plate is made to provide the “diegetic arrest” which gives room for the expectancy necessary for suspense, and a plate of this kind may have no direct diegetic function. Such are most of Browne's “dark” plates for Bleak House, like “Sunset in the long Drawing-Room at Chesney Wold” or “The Ghost's Walk”. Such too is “A new meaning in the Roman” which is explicitly a device of suspense, in which the figure of “the Roman” on the painted ceiling of Mr Tulkinghorn's office no longer points down at the iniquitous doings of the living, but at a mystery hidden from the viewer behind the desk, but strongly suspected by the experienced reader to be a murder victim. These plates devoid of action and actors (yet so unlike Henry James's choice of frontispieces, or “small pictures of our ‘set’ with the actors left out”, for the New York Edition of his novels¹⁵) add much at the extradiegetic level, of course.

The problem of illustration for Henry James and other later authors was not simply a question of taste but of the necessary focalisation and motivation of description and scene-setting in general.¹⁶ By contrast there is no visible embarrassment in David Copperfield in accompanying a thorough-going first-person narrative with plates which are not focalised on him. (Lutman points out that Browne's plates give us the only “objective” view of David we have.¹⁷) If we take a typical scene from late James—a scene such as could easily have been illustrated half a century earlier—the situation is completely different. The opening of Chapter i of The Wings of the Dove is a normal example of a mode of presentation, increasingly exploited by James and his contemporaries:

She waited, Kate Croy, for her father to come in, but he kept her unconscionably, and there were moments at which she showed herself, in the glass over the mantel, a face positively pale with the irritation that had brought her to the point of going away without sight of him. … She had looked at the sallow prints on the walls and at the lonely magazine, a year old, that combined, with a small lamp in coloured glass and a knitted white centre-piece wanting in freshness, to enhance the effect of the purplish cloth on the principal table …

This passage is obviously contrived to set the scene without presenting a quasi-personal narrator outside the characters-as-actors. It is therefore thoroughly focalised—one visual point-of-view is maintained, and the character is sufficiently motivated to observe/describe; yet the scene is just such as could be depicted visually as one of those interiors, full of significant detail, which Browne found so apt for illustrating Dickens, were it not shockingly inappropriate so blatantly to introduce an observing eye from outside the dramatis personae. After all Kate Croy, being alone, even has to look at herself in the mirror to be “seen”. An illustration to this passage could not be an integral part of the book, but must stand without and be contemplated from outside the reading experience of perceiving through the characters alone. In this sense certain late illustrations, such as the New York frontispieces, are embellishments to the physical object, the book, but no more belong to the fictional work than do most pictures on covers or dust-jackets.

To take extremes, it is instructive to contrast the suitability of the unpeopled “dark” plates by Browne for Bleak House, which can be attributed to no human eye within the fiction, with the jokes by a post-modernist such as Nabokov on the problems raised by point-of-view in post-Jamesian fiction. Several such occur in Pnin, a fine example closing Chapter iv:

Presently all were asleep again. It was a pity nobody saw the display in the empty street, where the auroral breeze wrinkled a large empty puddle, making of the telephone wires reflected in it illegible lines of black zigzags.¹⁸

Any attack on the validity of impersonal narration makes illustration difficult, denying the visual artist a mode of entry into the fictional world through appropriate focalisation, and requiring from the reader the effort of standing back from the reading experience to contemplate that world as one may when the book is put down in an interval of reading.

EXTRADIEGETIC COMMENTARY

Much of the best scholarly work on the plates of Cruikshank and Browne to Dickens's novels examines the inclusion of extradiegetic elements in them. The devices found most frequently include cross-reference between plates by means of composition or general disposition of the parts, such as between “Oliver asks for more” and the hungry Oliver's introduction into Fagin's den, or between Florence Dombey excluded from her father's love and entering to comfort him in his ruin, to mention but two pairs of examples. Then there are the significant details introduced into the backgrounds of many plates, and providing symbolic or “emblematic” comment (as Steig, following Dickens himself, loosely calls it)¹⁹ on the action presented. Most of the illustrative work of Cruikshank and Browne abounds in this comment, such as the bottles, the kettle, the caged bird and the cat and kittens playing in Cruikshank's “Mr. Bumble and Mrs. Corney taking tea” in Oliver Twist; or, in Browne, the funeral in the background of “Coming home from Church”, or the paintings and statuary in “Florence and Edith on the Staircase” in Dombey and Son; or the pictures indicative of seduction and betrayal on the walls in “I make the acquaintance of Miss Mowcher” in David Copperfield.²⁰ Thackeray's full-page plates to Vanity Fair have similar but fewer significant details in their backgrounds. These things are now well known to Victorianists who nonetheless still tend to use these illustrations as aids to critical interpretation of the verbal text rather than as collaborators in total meaning production.

Thackeray's most open commentary on his fiction occurs in the wood-engraved initial capitals of which he provided no less than 283 for five of his novels. These have been examined by Joan Stevens, who identifies a group of “over one hundred drawings” which have a clear extradiegetic function.²¹ Some lend further emphasis and humorous point to a phrase from the text or to the chapter title, such as the vignette to Chapter xxxvi of Vanity Fair, “How to Live Well on Nothing A-Year”, which shows two children (representing Becky and Rawdon) flying a kite (a pun on the slang for issuing a worthless bill of exchange), some work up an idea more fancifully than the verbal text, such as the vignette to Chapter xviii of the narrator as Harlequin giving precedence to history in the person of Napoleon—one of a number which also comment metafictionally on the nature of narrative fiction. It is quite consistent with Thackeray's verbal art that there should be extradiegetic information galore in these cuts, which to some extent serve the same purpose as the introductory essays and comments by his favourite Fielding, but are reduced in scope for the taste of Thackeray's public. Like Fielding's narrator-commentator, Thackeray as vignettist passes comment at all levels from reflection on his characters' conduct to discussion of the arrangement of the story, and to thought on the nature of fiction and representation in general. No matter how aware we are from the verbal text of the implications of all these drawings, there is no doubt that to read them with the verbal text is to tip the balance of interpretation significantly towards self-consciousness.

Illustrations to Trollope providing such open commentary as Cruikshank's, Browne's, or Thackeray's on the action, or so clearly laying bare the artifice of the fiction, are rare, although some of Millais's vignettes for the initial capitals of The Small House at Allington foreground the fact of beginning, by featuring physical openings, arches, and so on, and hence stressing the disposition of the plots into chapters and installments. All commentators diagnose an overall movement away from symbolic and what is called “emblematic” illustration between the forties and the sixties, and clearly stated extradiegetic information and comment in Millais's Trollopian plates is relatively sparse. Such examples as are found stand out strikingly, like plate I to Framley Parsonage showing Lucy Robarts and Lord Lufton, where one can see from the very contrivance of the composition that something is beginning, that love is prefigured. Symbolic doves—the sort of thing rarely found in Trollope's words or illustrations—glide around behind the one-day-to-be-happy couple, and they are posed in front of a gateway to a new relationship or life. The plate thus acts extradiegetically in passing comment on the action, and metafictionally too, in reminding us of the fact that a plot is worked out “in advance” of our reading, and that, whether in serial in the Cornhill Magazine or in book form, the story, or such of it as is here prefigured, “exists”. The notorious picture of Lucy Robarts lying face-down on a bed, “Was it not a lie?”, was read by one contemporary as another case of pictorial comment on the nature of the verbal text as fiction dealing with social life and fashion and not individual character: “The subject of the plate is Lucy Robarts' crinoline, and the reader's eye following the folds of the crinoline, will come at last upon Lucy Robarts' face and shoulders, which have retired into a corner of the picture, in concession to the social claims of muslin and lace”. We must face the possibility that illustrated fiction has its own kinds of reciprocal relation with the “real world” when we find that this illustration to the immensely fashionable novel was taken by one reader as a fashion plate. Trollope at first objected violently to the plate, but later relented because “I saw the very pattern of the dress some time after the picture came out”.²² However that may be, it is true to say that in no later plates were Millais's illustrations ever again so open in their commentary on Trollope's fiction, and most seem to offer the equivalent of the most “neutral” description.

Steig and others notice the significance of many compositional parallels between different plates by Browne for Dickens's fiction. If such a process is at work in Millais's Trollope illustrations, it is far subtler and less direct. It has been proposed that Millais's use of a limited repertoire of poses and configurations in his Orley Farm illustrations leads consciously or unconsciously to a significance attaching to a particular set form—such as one figure standing and one sitting, or two or three characters seated at or near a table.²³ We may speculate that such significances are in part systematised versions of the meaning attached in life to posture in interpersonal relations; but nonetheless the fact that Millais developed such a set of poses alerts us to the possibility that the very production of drawings for forty illustrations may lead willy-nilly to a locally valid system of iconographic signification, which may draw upon and contribute to the currency of mid-Victorian visual art and the anthropology of nineteenth-century middle-class social life in general.

READERS IMPLIED AND HISTORIC

There are probably no “innocent” illustrations, and the nearly universal approval accorded to Millais's Trollope plates in their day almost certainly results from the shared literary and social ideologies of the artists and their publics. To today's reader the illustrations give a clear indication of the ideal reader-relationship proposed in the novels and to a striking extent realised for a time in the contemporary marketplace.²⁴ Large complex scenes such as “Monkton Grange” in Orley Farm are to be contemplated for supporting evidence as to social setting and public or domestic life, not taken as thought-provoking readings of the verbal text or as expositions of the action. They bolster the fictional illusion appropriate to the verbal narrative stance and are part of the very quiet drama of reader-relationship in Trollope. Those plates which are more “focussed” on a few characters and correspond closely to single moments of the action, also perform this role in relation to the illusion of reality and reader-involvement; but they draw in the reader even further in some cases by presenting rather undramatic gestures and having the settings only sketchily indicated, so that readers become engaged in piecing out the full social and diegetic circumstances with their own thoughts from the scanty visual evidence given. In Gombrich's phrase, the reader “collaborates” in producing the full significance of each illustration.²⁵ This activity of completion is gratifying to readers not least because their social knowledge is called into action, and when effectively exercised gives for the nonce a sense of belonging to the world of the narrator. One of the principal fictions of certain prose fiction is that the reader is part of a world established by the narrative—in case of Trollope's novels, the social world of the mid-Victorian professional classes and landed gentry—and it is in no way surprising to find illustration conspiring in this fiction.

INTERTEXTUALITY

A modest extension to the concept of intertextuality is required to describe the function of Thackeray's capitals and many of the references in Browne's illustrations to Dickens. The term seems appropriate for the several vignettes in the Virginians which are based on Hogarth, including the version of Hogarth's “The Good Samaritan” from St Bartholomew's Hospital in Chapter 1, which is a link in a biblical reference; the Beggar's Opera vignettes heading Chapter lxxvi of the same novel and Chapter xxxii of Pendennis, or the Othello references to Pendennis, Chapter xxiv and Philip, Chapter ix. In various novels classical figures in the capitals reinforce the important intertextuality with Latin literature, while the frequent appearance of eighteenth-century dress in a number of the novels sets up reverberations between his novels and with the same artist's The Four Georges. The proleptic hint of Retzsch's picture of Faust, Margaret and Mephistopheles from Goethe's Faust on the wall in “I make the acquaintance of Miss Mowcher” in David Copperfield²⁶ is clearly intertextual in the same sense, and without stretching the word “text” uncomfortably one may apply the same term to the inclusion of statuary on biblical or mythological themes. This visual intertextuality is most frequent in Thackeray but nonetheless striking in Dickens, in whom purely verbal literary references are little paraded.

METAFICTIONAL AWARENESSES

Intertextuality which is not attributable to a character or otherwise motivated, automatically announces the literarity of the work being read; but numbers of Thackeray's vignettes go further and pass comment on his narrative as narrative or on the genre to which it belongs. The effect of the famous metafictional “Before the Curtain” in Vanity Fair can be matched by that of the vignette to Chapter lix of the Virginians showing a boy and girl in eighteenth-century dress (he in military uniform) together on a rocking horse, which accompanies the opening sentence: “The real business of life, I fancy, can form but little portion of the novelist's budget … All authors can do is depict men out of their business …”²⁷ Then there are the vignettes to Chapter lxvii of Vanity Fair showing the characters when poetic justice is administered as boys being beaten at school, the Harlequin capital mentioned above, in which the relation between actual historical events and fiction is brought to the reader's attention; and Melpomene dictating to the writer at the head of Chapter lxiii of the Virginians, a vignette which resembles Beerbohm's richly metafictional illustrations to his own copy of Zuleika Dobson.²⁸ At one moment in Pendennis Thackeray becomes more than Shandeian in a vignette to Chapter liii in the part of June 1850, which shows Thackeray being attacked with cudgels by two of his characters, Costigan and Mulligan behind female masks, for a disparaging reference in the April number to Catherine Hayes, the prototype of the criminal protagonist of his Catherine, mistaken by some irate Irish correspondents as an insult to an Irish soprano of that name.²⁹ Few examples of this kind of physical revenge by characters on their creator are known apart from the post-modernist experiments of Flann O'Brien's At-Swim-Two-Birds. Not for the first time Thackeray's self-awareness, which derives from the eighteenth century, aligns him with twentieth-century experiment.

CONCLUSION

Re-reading Dickens as illustrated narrative is to find a more emphatic moral commentary, as firmly rooted in the graphic tradition stemming from Hogarth as in any “purely literary” line. Various other features of Dickens's writing are also brought out even more clearly, such as proleptic hints of events like the fall of Emily in David Copperfield, or suspense and atmosphere as vehicles for the social message of Bleak House. Yet apart from a thickening of intertextuality, these additional awarenesses generally reinforce qualities already recognised in Dickens's verbal text. In the case of Trollope, too, the illustrations underline the qualities which are already foremost in the critic's mind, and add to the general picture we have of a comfortable social intercourse between the narrator and his ideal readers. It is with Thackeray that a more radical reassessment may be necessary. His illustrations—the vignettes in particular—crucially change the balance between action and commentary, and between fictional illusion and metafictional self-awareness. Wary of the amplitude of Fielding's commentary in Tom Jones, he uses his initial capitals to keep alive an additional set of awarenesses—awarenesses of schooldays, for example, of Latin lessons at school, of the tradition of Hogarth and the whole eighteenth-century inheritance which could be such an embarrassment to a Victorian, and above all of the nature of prose fiction and the literarity of the product under perusal. In our re-reading Vanity Fair becomes more insistently a novel concerned with reading about the Regency period from the very different Victorian age, and the Virginians (never widely respected) about the same reading relation with the eighteenth century. Indeed all of Thackeray's novels, including Philip, display a degree of intertextuality and self-awareness which considerably enriches our reading of them.

The gains to be derived from approaching the great illustrated novels of the nineteenth century in their entirety are thus threefold: an enhanced awareness of these novels as originally consumed by their first publics, and hence of the literary marketplace of the time; the prospect of richer analyses of these novels, including all the narrative and other factors they present in word and picture; and the perception that certain novels—those of Thackeray foremost among them—speak more insistently about the literarity of the novel than we usually assume. It becomes quite plain why James found illustration something of “a lawless incident”,³⁰ and why the art of visually embellishing many later novels had to be so different, so much less intimate, so much more a matter of producing a luxury edition than in the heyday of the Victorian illustrated novel.

Notes

1. Michael Steig, Dickens and Phiz (Bloomington, 1978), p.3.

2. Ibid., p.56.

3. J. Hillis Miller, in Miller and D. Borowitz, Charles Dickens and George Cruikshank (Los Angeles, 1971); and John Dixon Hunt, “Dickens and the Traditions of Graphic Satire”, in Encounters: Essays on Literature and the Visual Arts, ed. J.D. Hunt (London, 1971), p.124.

4. Geoffrey C. Hemstedt, Some Victorian Novelists and Their Illustrations. PhD dissertation, Princeton University (1971), pp.216-17.

5. Macready's Reminiscences, and Selections from His Diaries and Letters, ed. Frederick Pollock (London, 1871), II,69; quoted by Hemstedt, pp.17-18.

6. I find inappropriate John Dixon Hunt's mention of “the momentary and therefore painterly focus … whereby the sequence of verbal narrative is offered as the result of an instantaneous glance”; Hunt, p.128.

7. “Looking at something requires time”, says Mieke Bal, for whom the question is whether the description “is incorporated into the [narrative] time lapse”. See Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, trans. from 2nd edition by Christine Van Boheemen (Toronto, 1985), pp.130-31.

8. Stephen Lutman, “Reading Illustrations: Pictures in David Copperfield”, in Reading the Victorian Novel: Detail into Form, ed. Ian Gregor (London, 1980), pp.196-225, p.196.

9. Cornhill Magazine, 5 (January 1862), 9.

10. Joan Stevens, “Thackeray's Pictorial Capitals”, Costerus, NS 2 (1974), 113-40, and “Vanity Fair and the London Skyline”, ibid., 13-41.

11. Cornhill Magazine, 4 (September, 1861), 257.

12. I am grateful to Mr Peter Miles of Saint David's University College, Lampeter, for showing me his analysis of this phenomenon in an unpublished communication.

13. Oliver Twist, ed. Kathleen Tillotson (Oxford, 1966), p.18.

14. See N.J. Hall, Introduction to Max Beerbohm, The Illustrated Zuleika Dobson (New Haven, 1985), unnumbered pages.

15. Preface to The Golden Bowl, (repr. Harmondsworth, 1985), p.24.

16. For a useful discussion of motivation see Mieke Bal, pp.130-32.

17. Lutman, p.205.

18. Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin, (London, 1957), p.110.

19. Dickens's use of the word “emblem” in Pickwick Papers is quoted by Steig (p.14) in support of his own loose usage.

20. See Steig, for the fullest discussion of the Browne plates.

21. “Thackeray's Pictorial Capitals”, p.114.

22. Anonymous review in the Saturday Review, 11 (4 May 1861), 451-52; letter to George Smith, 21 July 1860; see David Skilton, Anthony Trollope and His Contemporaries (London, 1972), p.55; and N.J. Hall, Trollope and His Illustrators (London, 1980), pp.15-18.

23. In an unpublished paper written by Mr Terry Mulvey as part of the requirement for the degree of M.A. at Saint David's University College, Lampeter.

24. See David Skilton, “The Trollope Reader”, in The Nineteenth-Century British Novel, ed. Jeremy Hawthorn, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies, 2nd series, (London, 1986), pp.143-56.

25. Meditations on a Hobby House and Other Essays (London, 1963), p.10.

26. John Harvey, Victorian Novelists and Their Illustrators (New York, 1971), p.150.

27. Stevens, “Thackeray's Pictorial Capitals”, pp.138-39.

28. Reproduced in The Illustrated Zuleika Dobson, ed. N.J. Hall.

29. Stevens, “Thackeray's Pictorial Capitals”, p. 134.

30. Preface to The Golden Bowl, p.23.