Techniques used in the creation of the earliest forms of illustrated material resurface over time, establishing the illustrated book as a recursive genre. As Percy Muir notes in Victorian Illustrated Books (1971), “Pictures came before letterpress. In a very real sense, they were originally letterpress. Our alphabet derives, through the Phoenicians and the Greeks, from the picture-writing of the ancient Egyptians—hieroglyphics” (1). The phrase “picture-writing” dates to ancient hieroglyphics, but it also aptly describes mechanically reproduced illustrated books dating to the fifteenth century. Johannes Gutenberg’s revolutionary invention of letterpress printing in 1439 made it possible to produce multiple copies of a work with speed and precision. William Caxton’s The Mirror of the World (1481), a popular one-volume digest that records the feats of ancient times, is generally recognized as the first illustrated book printed in England although some critics believe that Caxton’s Cato, published around the same time, may have been the first.19 Caxton, who published at a time when paper was very expensive, was a shrewd businessman who printed titles that would sell. Caxton remains an important figure in the history of printing because he brought to public awareness major works of medieval literature including Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (1485) and Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (ca. 1387–1400).
In addition to printed books, the fifteenth century witnessed short block books, typically of a religious nature and aimed at a popular audience. The block book, also called xylographica, was a cheap alternative to books composed with movable type. The block book is composed entirely of wood engravings that incorporate text into their artistic designs. In illuminated manuscripts of the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries, “words are recorded on a page in a way that results in a work of art,” as James Bettley notes in The Art of the Book: From Medieval Manuscript to Graphic Novel (2001, 14). Illumination was initially reserved for sacred subjects: “With the advent of printing, however, … illumination and calligraphy became a much more deliberate and self-conscious activity, reserved for only the most special occasions” (Bettley 14), such as the production of deeds and coats of arms.
The Victorians reimagined many of these illustrative practices. Dante Gabriel Rossetti reinvented the medieval practice of pictorial inscription in his poem-painting pairs, which inscribe a poem written expressly for that painting onto a canvas or frame, as demonstrated in Proserpine (1874) and Astarte Syriaca (1877). Thackeray, among others, recalled the illuminated letter from medieval manuscripts in his pictorial capital letters to preview the plot of a chapter or deepen theme and characterization.
The nineteenth century also witnessed a revival of calligraphy and medieval illumination in William Blake’s turn-of-the-nineteenth-century wood blocks that blend poetic lines and illustrations into single, hand-printed, hand-colored plates. Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794) present an unparalleled creative vision of pastoral England at the brink of industrialization, emphasizing the loss that accompanies an increasingly urban world. In writing, drawing, designing, and coloring his illuminated manuscripts, Blake not only recalled the tradition of medieval illumination but also charted a way of composing through two art forms followed by many Victorians, including Thackeray and Du Maurier. A century after Blake, William Morris foregrounded illumination and calligraphy in publications for his Kelmscott Press (founded in 1891) that kept alive medieval book arts practices that were becoming obsolete.20 Two centuries after Blake, Will Eisner and other graphic novelists similarly have composed through two art forms to present a creative vision.
Fifteenth-century block books of wood engravings illustrated with minimal text also anticipate the early nineteenth-century works of Pierce Egan and William Combe, who provided “letterpress” for artists’ pictures in, respectively, Life in London (1821) with pictures by George and Robert Cruikshank and The Tour of Doctor Syntax (1812) with plates by Thomas Rowlandson. Most influential to Rowlandson and the history of the illustrated book is the work of William Hogarth, a painter who specialized in a series of sequential paintings that tell a story, called a “progress.” Akin to block books and progresses, wordless novels composed entirely of woodcuts surfaced in the early twentieth century in Frans Masereel’s Passionate Journey (1919) and Lynd Ward’s God’s Man (1929). These latter examples of “picture-writing” have been influential to modern material forms of word and picture storytelling including the graphic novel.
The eighteenth-century tradition of graphic satire and caricature closely associated with Hogarth commanded a market for illustrated material in eighteenth-century England and the continent. Hogarth’s progresses appealed across the social classes and “graced the walls of the humblest shops and hovels as well as prosperous homes like those of Mrs. Thrale, Lord Byron, and, much later, Dickens’s own at Gad’s Hill” (J. R. Cohen 4). Two well-known Hogarthian progresses, The Rake’s Progress (ca. 1733–35) and Marriage à la Mode (ca. 1743–45), use eight and six plates, respectively, to narrate a story about a dandy’s misfortune and the foibles of an imprudent marriage. The Rake’s Progress, for example, depicts the rise and fall of Tom Rakewell, who comes to London and wastes his inheritance on high living. Gambling and engaging prostitutes, Rakewell first lands in the notorious Fleet Prison and then meets a worse fate, incarceration in Bethlehem Hospital, an insane asylum better known as Bedlam. Expressive gestures, settings, clothing, and props in Hogarth’s progresses resurface in the Victorian illustrated book and the graphic novel.
There was vibrancy in English book illustration in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Thomas Bewick’s History of British Birds (1797, 1804), which fascinates young Jane Eyre ensconced in the window seat at the opening of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), is one such popular illustrated natural history that stimulated the literary imaginations of the Brontë sisters and William Wordsworth. Bewick was both an engraver and an artist. James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson as well as George Cruikshank—who became a household name—were all printmakers and Hogarth’s heirs. Cruikshank began his career by finishing etchings that Gillray could not complete due to his madness. Of note, Cruikshank gained fame for producing comic prints before entering the field of book illustration. When he began to work with Dickens, Cruikshank guaranteed the young author a large audience. Cruikshank’s satirical prints and progresses regularly hung in the shops of popular print sellers like William Hone, G. Humphrey, and Thomas Tegg (Patten, CDP 53). Moreover, the satirical works of Hogarth, and to some extent the caricatures of Gillray and Rowlandson, influenced the creative imaginings of Dickens and Thackeray and the illustrations of Seymour, Browne, and Cruikshank, who, in turn, trained Thackeray as an etcher. As Harvey notes, “The imaginations of author and artist naturally had recourse to the same pictorial idiom” (3). This common inheritance in pictorial narrative and graphic satire and caricature distinguished the Victorian illustrated book from its earlier incarnations and led to its growth during an age of production and consumption that witnessed a sharp rise in literacy.
It is difficult to determine how many people across the social classes could read and write in the nineteenth century. Social class factored into literacy rates since “few people in the working class had more than two or three years of full-time schooling” (Mitchell, Daily 166). According to the 1841 census (produced just four years into Victoria’s reign), 51 percent of females and 67 percent of males were literate although literacy was often determined by the ability to sign one’s name in the marriage register rather than simply make an “X” (166). With the growth in literacy, there was an explosion of different types of illustrated material—crude broadsides and chapbooks as well as literary annuals and gift books—designed for readers ranging from the barely educated to the privileged, sophisticated consumer.
In early nineteenth-century England, inexpensive parts publication, broadsides, and chapbooks proliferated and catered to the barely literate and the working class. A century before The Pickwick Papers, pieceme
al publishing was well established in England and took numerous forms, ranging from fascicle publication of lengthy and expensive works to cheap parts printed separately or in installments within newspapers and magazines.21 A purchaser of the fascicle issues of, for example, Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary (1755), could take the part issues to a bookseller to be bound in a style appropriate for his or her own personal library. In contrast, broadsides and chapbooks, cheap forms of piecemeal publishing, made the buying and reading of books possible for those of the working class.
A broadside, also called a broadsheet and a street ballad, was a large single sheet printed on one side of a page; it sold for a penny and was, in essence, the poor people’s press. Hundreds of London printers published broadsides with stock woodcuts and short lines and verses that were understandable even to those who were barely literate. Broadsides included advertisements, ballads, fabricated feuds among members of the Royal Family, romances, and news stories, particularly sensational crimes. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, printers prepared broadsides for sale at public executions; these typically included a picture of the criminal or the crime scene along with the prisoner’s declaration of guilt, “last dying words,” and a cautionary verse. While both broadsides and chapbooks printed crude woodcuts along with text on a single sheet, chapbooks were made out of a single page folded into either 16 or 32 small pages to form a small book that sold for one or two pennies. In the nineteenth century, typically English fairy tales such as “Jack and the Giant Killer” appeared in chapbook form, and the main audience was children. However, as Sally Mitchell notes, “Ballads and broadsides were both newspaper and entertainment for poor people until the rise of the cheap press in the 1850s” (“Broadsides” 94).
The 1820s witnessed the growth of illustrated literary annuals and keepsake books that became popular Christmas items. Different from the broadside and the chapbook, the annual, also called a keepsake, and the illustrated gift book targeted middle-class readers and were lavishly illustrated. Lloyd Siemens notes that annuals
reflect conventional views on hearth and homeland, morality and mortality … and nearly all feature the same spectrum of sentimental literary stereotypes: the deepening of married love, the wages of sin, the virtues of the country life, and the blessings of poverty. The diction and imagery are as formulaic as the sentiments. It is little wonder that the annuals became favorite gifts at birthdays and weddings as well as at Christmastime. (27)
With the growth of the publishing industry, Christmas became a commercial holiday. Illustrated Christmas books, most famously Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843) and subsequent titles following its success, found their place alongside annuals and gift books produced inexpensively enough to attract middle-class consumers.
The gift book is a hybrid art form that grew out of the literary annual and gained popularity by the 1840s. In Poetry, Pictures, and Popular Publishing, Kooistra elevates this oft-neglected cultural artifact of Victorian material culture. “Encased in ornamental covers and advertised as Christmas presents,” notes Kooistra, “these gift books united poetry and pictures in one tasteful package for middlebrow consumption and cultivation” (79–80). Gift books, which moved poetry into the popular consciousness, featured steel engravings, rich interior decoration, and lavish covers. Printers, who played a key role in the creation and packaging of the gift book, commissioned skilled artists and engravers to illustrate the works of noted poets, such as William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, and Alfred Lord Tennyson, although some gift-book poets were considered second-rate (for example, Eliza Cook, Adelaide Anne Proctor, and Jean Ingelow).
The production of illustrated books in the nineteenth century—whether in the gift book, the part issue, or the periodical—also depended upon the related processes of etching, engraving, printing, publishing, and binding. In most cases—with George Cruikshank a notable exception—the illustrator relied on an etcher or engraver to transfer a drawing onto a metal or wooden plate for reproduction. Prior to the 1830s, an etcher applied an acid-resistant layer of wax to metal plates and used a needle to create the design before dipping the plate in acid, which bit into the exposed lines and deepened them. An engraver, however, used a tool called a graver, stylus, or burin to cut the design directly into the steel or copper plate to form deeper, narrower, and more precise lines. By the 1840s, wood engraving gained preeminence. Notorious in this “age of mechanical reproduction,” to recall Walter Benjamin’s phrasing, are the complaints of illustrators like Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who blamed the Dalziel brothers, among the finest engravers of the Victorian age, for poorly transferring his drawings onto wood. Etchers and engravers, in turn, complained that the fault of reproduction lay with the artist, who could not create drawings suitable for transfer, respectively, onto metal or increasingly onto wood.
Even from this brief historical sketch of the illustrated book’s antecedents, we can glean that the Victorian illustrated book is not bound in time; it transcends the nineteenth century in both directions and was an important literary and artistic genre in its own time. To apply Kooistra’s insight about the Victorian gift book more generally, the illustrated book provides a fundamental “way of seeing and understanding for generations of Victorians” (Poetry 86). The phenomenal success of The Pickwick Papers led to the rise of the Victorian illustrated serial and, in turn, illustrated volumes that adorned the circular tables of Victorian drawing rooms and still delight readers today. How serendipitous that publisher Chapman and Hall commissioned Charles Dickens to “write up” pictures by Robert Seymour, and Dickens agreed, but subverted his assignment.
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The Pickwick Papers and the Rise of the Serial
The illustrations are, as usual, full of excellent character. The ease and skill with which they are drawn are among the least of their merits; they have an artistical feeling and arrangement, most rare in things of this kind. But it is enough to say of them that they are scarcely unequal to the subjects they illustrate—we feel this to be extraordinary praise.
Unsigned review of The Pickwick Papers, Examiner, 1837
Beginning in April 1836 and concluding with a double number in November 1837, The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (P) came out in nineteen illustrated part issues in decorative green wrappers for the cost of a shilling each.1 An unprecedented publishing phenomenon, Pickwick attracted fans across the social classes, generated a host of Pickwick-related products, and earned glowing reviews. In his above (unsigned) Examiner review, Dickens’s first biographer, John Forster, devotes a full paragraph to the illustrations “full of excellent character.” Four decades later in his biography of Dickens, Forster describes a snowball effect in the admiration of this illustrated Victorian blockbuster far better appreciated in its time than today. Pickwick
sprang into a popularity that each part carried higher and higher, until people at this time talked of nothing else, tradesmen recommended their goods by using its name, and its sale, outstripping at a bound that of all the most famous books of the century, had reached to an almost fabulous number. (The Life 1: 129)
To Forster, “Judges on the bench and boys in the street, gravity and folly, the young and the old, those who were entering life and those who were quitting it, alike found [Pickwick] to be irresistible” (130). As the author of The Life of Charles Dickens (1872–74) and Dickens’s close friend, Forster had a vested interest in promoting Dickens and his reputation for posterity. But William Makepeace Thackeray, who was never a fan of Dickens, likewise singled out Pickwick’s importance to Victorian publishing, noting: “I am sure that a man who, a hundred years hence, should sit down and write the history of our time, would do wrong to put that great contemporary history of ‘Pickwick’ aside as a frivolous work” (Paris Sketch Book 119).
I place The Pickwick Papers at the beginning of the arc of the Victorian illustrated book because this quintessential Victorian “commodity-text … could reach, as it produced, a mass audien
ce” (Feltes 13). This chapter examines interwoven factors that contributed to Pickwick’s popularity, including the growth of commodity culture, a rise in literacy, new printing technologies, serialization, and the appeal of reading pictures, particularly humorous ones. Pickwick’s blend of comedy, theatricality, and social commentary led to the serial’s success and, in the process, created a mass market for new fiction with illustrations.
Pickwick was not the first popular illustrated serial in nineteenth-century England. Pierce Egan’s Life in London (1821), illustrated by George and Robert Cruikshank, first appeared in monthly parts at a shilling per issue and had a large Regency fan base. Life in London follows Tom, a fashionable London rake, and Jerry, his country cousin, as they experience the high and low pleasures of London life. Some Victorians including Thackeray found Life in London vulgar, and present-day scholars have lamented how “the plates and the text proper often have absolutely nothing to do with each other” (Meisel 54). Life in London entered the Regency marketplace through an array of material forms, merchandise, and productions—broadsides, chapbooks, pottery, souvenir programs, and performances—and its commodification could be seen as an anticipation of Pickwick mania. In Picturing Scotland Through the Waverley Novels (2010), Richard Hill alternately argues that Sir Walter Scott’s early nineteenth-century novels impacted the market for illustrated books well before “the more celebrated Victorian illustrated novels of Dickens and Thackeray” (4). To Hill, “The illustration of novels by a living author was an innovation in publishing at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Constable, Cadell, and Scott together created something new for a developing middle-class readership: the affordable, popular, illustrated novel” (2).2
Serials to Graphic Novels Page 4