52. In Charles Dickens and His Original Illustrators, Jane R. Cohen points to how Robert Seymour, “the experienced artist, whose name had originally been considered the only real asset to the project, was now playing second fiddle to an obscure writer supposedly hired to concoct a story around the plates” (46).
53. A. N. Wilson concurs in The Victorians: “Seymour’s suicide was prompted by his own mental illness, not Dickens’s success” (18).
54. Indeed, Patten devotes a full chapter to “The Artist and the Author” in vol. 2 of George Cruikshank’s Life, Times, and Art.
55. Ainsworth insisted Cruikshank never actually wrote a line in either book and called Cruikshank’s claim of authorship an “‘absurd pretension’” trumped up “‘in his dotage’” (qtd. in Patten, George Cruikshank’s Life, Times, and Art 2: 485). John Buchanan-Brown advances in The Book Illustrations of George Cruikshank that Cruikshank’s claim for origination of Ainsworth’s The Tower of London and The Miser’s Daughter was “better substantiated” than for Oliver Twist (27). Harvey sympathizes: “Cruikshank’s desire to usurp his novelists is well-known as an aberrant nuisance, and I have wanted to show that, far from being simply a function of his conceit and eccentricity, this desire is understandable and deserving of sympathy. Everyone said he was the new Hogarth, and he must surely have felt he had the right to be not less than an equal in any collaboration” (34). Moreover, Jane R. Cohen believes that “The allegations of the Seymours, like those of Cruikshank, are not without some basis” (50).
Chapter 3. Realism, Victorian Material Culture, and the Enduring Caricature Tradition
1. Brian Maidment lists works by early caricaturists that commanded a market throughout the nineteenth century in Comedy, Caricature and the Social Order, 1820–50, 7–14.
2. ABE Books sells many of these late nineteenth-century reprinted publications.
3. Carroll based the character of Alice on his favorite child friend, Alice Liddell. Underneath this photograph is a drawing of Alice made by Carroll. The British Library discovered it in 1977 when cleaning the Under Ground manuscript.
4. Gleeson White in English Illustration, ‘The Sixties’: 1855-70 views the Sixties as a period of fifteen years. In Illustrators of the Eighteen Sixties, Forrest Reid notes the Sixties is “a movement rather than a decade” (1) and recognizes that fine work came out before 1855 and after 1870. Goldman and Cooke suggest in Reading Victorian Illustration, 1855–1875, 1, that the term Sixties “inaccurately” labels this style of illustration that preceded and succeeded that productive decade.
5. In Reading Victorian Illustration, 1855–1875, Goldman and Cooke say about the Sixties: “the primary aesthetic is one of ‘poetic naturalism,’ a means of representing deep feeling which was still rooted in observation of the ‘real’ world” (1).
6. A painting hung in the drawing room of a fashionable home or in a Royal Academy exhibition, but an illustrated periodical entered circulating libraries, the family parlor, and servants’ quarters. Frances Sarzano adds in Sir John Tenniel: “In the ‘sixties’ many painters experimented with book-illustration, while others made it a bread-and-butter occupation” (11).
7. Queen Victoria opened the first ever World’s Fair on 1 May 1851, visited it more than forty times, and exhibited many of her own treasures there. Dubbed Prince Albert’s brainchild, the Great Exhibition was a monumental international exposition of culture, technology, and industry with a humanitarian vision. Prince Albert advanced: “‘THE EXHIBITION of 1851 is to give us a true test and a living picture of the point of development at which the whole of mankind has arrived in this great task, and a new starting point from which all nations will be able to direct their future exertions’” (ODIC 1: 4).
8. The 990,000 square foot building that Sir Joseph Paxton designed used more large sheets of affordable, strong glass than ever before and did not require interior lighting. Writing for Punch under a pseudonym on 13 July 1850, Douglas Jerrold referred to the building as a “palace of very crystal,” and the phrase “Crystal Palace,” in turn, appeared in Punch on 2 Nov. 1850. Noteworthy among the wondrous exhibits are the Great Diamond of Runjeet Singh, known as the “Koh-i-Noor” or Mountain of Light; a pair of exquisite cut-glass chandeliers eight feet in height made by a Birmingham manufacturer; and an elaborately carved wooden cradle made of Turkey boxwood to symbolize the union of two Royal lineages, the Royal Houses of England and Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, Prince Albert’s homeland.
9. There was a British side of the building and a side devoted to foreign nations and colonial holdings in Asia, Africa, America, and Australasia.
10. Parenthetical text citations are cited as ODIC, followed by volume and page, hereafter in the text and notes. Whereas in the eighteenth century, France was foremost in book illustration, in the nineteenth century, an increasingly industrialized Britain gained prominence in illustration and book production. There were national exhibitions of commerce before 1851, such as the French Industrial Exhibition of 1844; some argue the Great Exhibition was the British response to this impressive French achievement.
11. In his introduction to section 3, class 17, in the ODIC, Robert Ellis posits that the manufacture of books and papers, “ministering not to the personal or domestic wants of mankind, so much as to their intellectual requirements … is coextensive with the diffusion of knowledge” (2: 536). Ellis’s phrase draws from a popular self-education movement, “The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge,” which promoted inexpensive publications for the increasingly literate lower and middle classes not privy to a formal education. Sharing Prince Albert’s humanitarian goals for the exhibition, Ellis contends:
morally and intellectually considered, the present Class relates to a species of industry exercising indirectly a more extensive influence over social economy than any of those into which this Exhibition has been subdivided. Books, it has been said, carry the productions of the human mind over the whole world, and may be truly called the raw materials of every kind of science and art, and of all social improvement. (2: 536)
12. See, for example, The Pictorial Bible published by John Kitto in London in 1855. It includes about 200 illustrations—initials, tailpieces, maps, and vignettes,
13. Prior to Bulaq, there was a short-lived press during the French expedition in Egypt that ended with France’s withdrawal from Egypt. Entry 248 does not appear with the other items in “Paper, Printing, and Bookbinding” but at the end of vol. 3 under “Egypt,” 1410. See Peter Colvin’s “Muhammad Ali Pasha,” 251.
14. Although the Arts and Crafts movement (1860–1910) is closely aligned with William Morris and the fin de siècle, this initiative began with the Pre-Raphaelites, particularly Rossetti, who took pride in the art of the book and who joined with Morris (as well as Edward Burne-Jones, Philip Webb, and others) in the creation of Morris’s business entitled Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co (1861–75), which they dubbed “the Firm.”
15. White notes that The Art Journal aimed to bring “fine art to the homes of the great British public through the medium of wood-engravings in a way not attempted previously” (14). There was also “an illustrated chronicle of the Great Exhibition, which was afterwards merged in a Magazine of Art” (14).
16. A shopkeeper might use pages of a book to wrap edible and non-edible items, and periodicals also found extended life as curlpapers for women’s hairdos and pie tin liners in Victorian kitchens. Defacing a book by cutting out an illustration for framing—an all too common habit that collector-authors Gleeson White and Forrest Reid practiced—seems a more minor offense than using pages of a book to wrap up fish and chips.
17. In Mary Barton, Mr. Carson takes down the “little used” Bible to find the words of Luke 23:34; “They know not what they do,” the phrasing which Gaskell includes in her novel, forms part of the line that reads in the Bible, “‘Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.’”
Carson’s action marks a profound change in the nature of the entitled mill owner who initially blames an innocent man for murder (Jem Wilson) and ultimately forgives his son’s actual murderer (John Barton).
18. Reading in the nineteenth century was also viewing. Lewis Carroll memorably calls attention to the importance of pictures in a famous line from Alice in Wonderland: “‘and what is the use of a book,’ thought Alice, ‘without pictures or conversations?’” (AA 11); this and all quotes from Alice come from The Annotated Alice, a version of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland edited and annotated by Martin Gardner, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as AA followed by a page number. Jane Eyre (1847) opens with Jane ensconced in the window seat in Gateshead, pouring over pictures in Bewick’s History of British Birds (1797, 1804) in which “Each picture told a story” (6). Maggie Tulliver, criticized for reading The Political History of the Devil (1726) by Daniel Defoe in The Mill on the Floss (1860), seems more fascinated with the image of “Ducking a Witch” than the book’s contents. For further discussion of C. Brontë’s and Eliot’s child readers, see my book Images of the Woman Reader, ch. 2 and ch. 3.
19. The unfortunate process of “extracting” (11) quality illustrations from periodicals, as Forrest Reid calls it, arose when magazine illustration came to be seen as art worth collecting. Reid, too, was a collector with a conscience when it came to “rare” magazines: “to mutilate a volume of The Cornhill or Good Words is an act of vandalism, to say nothing of the really rare magazines” (11). Gleeson White calls this process “print-splitting” and explains how to extract prints from inexpensive publications and frame them. White likewise cautions: “hesitate before cutting up a fine book, and be not hasty in mutilating a volume of Once a Week or the Shilling Magazine” (7).
20. In this opening notice, the publisher expresses a “‘desire to render an act of justice to the eminent artists … by exhibiting, with the aid of the finest printing, the real quality of those illustrations, as Works of Art’” (qtd. in Reid 11–12).
21. Regrettably, Reid does not disclose the source of this quotation.
22. Although Walter Benjamin argues in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” that in the process of duplication, an original art work loses its aura, “Rossetti finds a way to imbue his poetic objects with the kind of aura that neither craft nor commercial manufacture—and his books participate in aspects of both—is supposed to allow” (Helsinger 185).
23. For more discussion of this spelling change, Rossetti substituting an “e” for the “i” in “Elfin,” see Stephanie Pina’s “Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood.”
24. I recommend Simon Cooke’s Victorian Web entry on “Dante Gabriel Rossetti as an Illustrator,”
25. Paul Goldman, who likewise foregrounds William Allingham’s The Music Master in “Defining Illustration Studies,” underscores that “Rossetti’s single drawing for ‘The Maids of Elfen-Mere’ was to prove immensely influential on all the other artists working in illustration at the time and not only on other Pre-Raphaelites” (27). Rossetti, however, pulled out the illustration from his own copy and wrote to his mother of the “offending” drawing: “‘there are some illustrations by Hughes, one by Millais, and one which used to be by me till it became the exclusive work of Dalziel, who cut it’” (qtd. in Reid 33).
26. Forrest Reid likewise observes: “without reading a line of the text we should know that we are looking at the inhabitants of two worlds—that the boy belongs to this earth, while the Maids are only visitors here” (35). Reid regrettably does not indicate the source for this quote.
27. Laurence Housman used D. G. Rossetti’s 1860s drawings to guide his illustrations for an 1893 edition of Goblin Market published just before Christina Rossetti’s death. C. Rossetti asked Housman to look at D. G. Rossetti’s frontispiece to ascertain how the goblins should look; while Housman earned praise for recalling D. G. Rossetti’s initial designs, Christina found them lacking.
28. D. G. Rossetti also designed illustrations for sister Christina’s The Prince’s Progress (1866). In Christina Rossetti and Illustration, Lorraine Kooistra describes how publishers marketed Goblin Market for public consumption.
29. Between 1861 and 1871, Rossetti also designed bindings for Algernon Charles Swinburne’s Atalanta in Calydon (1865) and Songs Before Sunrise (1871), his brother William Michael’s translation of Dante’s Inferno (1865), his sister Maria’s commentary on Dante (1871), and his own book of poetry entitled Poems (1870).
30. Illustrators of Goblin Market often emphasize sin and sexuality versus virtue, sexuality or innocence in their depictions of, respectively, Laura and Lizzie facing temptation. In Christina Rossetti and Illustration, Kooistra includes the cheery, child friendly illustrations of Ellen Raskin for a 1970 Dutton version as well as, at the other extreme, the sensual plates of Kinuko Craft for a 1973 edition published by Playboy.
31. Kooistra’s separate readings of these two Rossetti images (69–74) are persuasive, but she curiously does not comment on their contiguous placement in the book D. G. Rossetti designed.
32. Laura’s facial features and form recall those of Fanny Cornforth, Rossetti’s first model for his painting Found (1848–unfinished) about a fallen woman.
33. Rossetti includes details from the gilt frames he crafted for his own paintings to frame the sleeping sisters in the privacy of their boudoir. Kooistra suggests, alternately, that we are peeping into their boudoir via an open window.
34. Tennyson’s Poems, issued by Edward Moxon in 1857, divides the 54 plates among two groups of illustrators—24 to established painters including Daniel Maclise, William Mulready, and Clarkson Stanfield; 30 to the Pre-Raphaelites with 18 to Millais, 7 to Holman Hunt, and 5 to Rossetti. Tennyson took little interest in Moxon’s “picture gallery,” a reprinting of poems originally published without illustrations. Reid observes, “If the public wanted them they should have them, but the pictures that mattered [to Tennyson] were those his own art evoked” (43).
35. Judith Fisher similarly divides the nineteenth century into two periods of illustration in “Image Versus Text”:
from 1800 to mid-century, Isaac and George Cruikshank and Phiz and Thackeray drew on Hogarth’s allusive and allegorical representation and on the great caricaturists James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson to create “speaking” pictures. From the 1850s on, primarily through John Everett Millais’s illustrations of Trollope’s novels … a style deriving from English genre painting emerged that increasingly subordinated the image to the text. (60)
36. Du Maurier’s French father had hoped his son would follow him into a career in science, but art was George’s passion. In 1856, Du Maurier trained in Charles Gleyre’s Parisian atelier alongside James McNeil Whistler and E. J. Poynter. Du Maurier pursued further training at the Antwerp Academy in Belgium, but while studying there, he lost vision in his left eye and returned to London in 1860 and launched a career as an illustrator. Reid includes Whistler, Poynter, and Du Maurier in Illustrators of the Eighteen Sixties (1928).
37. Henry James remarks in Du Maurier and London Society, “Punch, for the last fifteen years, has been, artistically speaking, George du Maurier” (5). To Reid, “It was the novelist in him [Du Maurier], of course, that appealed to Henry James” (176). James, a fierce critic of the illustrated book, praised Du Maurier’s book illustrations in an 1897 review of Du Maurier’s illustrated fiction for Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. See also Philip Allingham’s “George Du Maurier: Illustrator and Novelist” for The Victorian Web,
38. In addition to his work for Punch and Once a Week, Du Maurier produced illustrations for The Leisure Hour, Good Words, and The Cornhill Magazine.
39. Cynthia promised to marry Mr. Preston when, at the age of sixteen, he gave her £20, so she could buy a party dress.
40. Anot
her excellent equine illustration in The History of Henry Esmond is “Parting,” showing Henry leaving Castlewood to attend college at Cambridge. In Wives and Daughters, Lady Harriet sits sidesaddle on an elegant white horse in “Lady Harriet Asks One or Two Questions.”
41. Bathsheba marries Troy (who loves Fanny Robin, who dies giving birth to Troy’s child) and reluctantly agrees to marry Boldwood when she believes Troy to be dead. Troy, who is alive, returns and is murdered by Boldwood, who descends into madness, leaving Bathsheba to marry Gabriel Oak, who loves her all along. We are meant to believe Bathsheba and Troy are meeting illicitly in the woods. Even the title titillates since at this point in the narrative, readers are not yet privy to Bathsheba’s secret marriage to Troy.
42. Jane R. Cohen notes: “Stone, who had no ties to the Hogarth-Cruikshank-Browne tradition, would not revert to their outmoded styles, which suited the author’s desire for novelty in his work” (204).
43. “Like the best illustrations of such earlier visual commentators as John Leech, George Cruikshank, and Phiz (Hablot Knight Browne),” notes Philip Allingham, “this woodcut by Marcus Stone prepares the reader for a significant event in the narrative and compels the reader to be more attentive to nuances of the text that shed light on the characters’ motivations, attitudes, and relationships” (“Working Class”).
44. In “‘Reading the Pictures, Visualizing the Text,’” Philip Allingham favors Fred Barnard over Phiz and advances: “Barnard has given us Dickens’s characters as they step forth from the pages and into our minds: three-dimensional, substantial, active, and insistently real in settings not crowded with the symbolic details that were Phiz’s landmark” (175). In the following sentence, Allingham highlights differences in technique and training between the two schools of illustration: “These ‘New Men of the Sixties,’ in contrast to the leading illustrators of the previous generation, were formally trained rather than self-taught” (162; my emphasis).
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