Visualisation in Popular Fiction 1860-1960

Graphic Narratives, Fictional Images

Stuart Sillars

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134813575
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Visualisation in Popular Fiction 1860-1960 explores the important but neglected tradition of illustrated fiction in English. It suggests new analytical approaches for its study by offering detailed discussions of a range of representative texts, including Mary Webb's Gone to Earth and Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca.
Among the issues and genres Sillars explores are:
* Victorian `narrative' paintings
* Edwardian fictional magazines
* comic strips
* illustrated children's stories
* the translation of novels into film
An insightful and highly informative work, Visualisation in Popular Fiction will be of value to students of literature, cultural studies, visual art and film.

1

THE NATURE AND FUNCTION OF VISUALISATION

Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, ‘and what is the use of a book,’ thought Alice, ‘without pictures or conversations?’

(Carroll 1982: 1)

Alice's question, at the beginning of a book which itself contributed much to the tradition of Victorian book illustration, conceals an important assumption – that, by 1865, when the text was written, the illustrated book had become a primary form of literary entertainment. Defining the use of a book with pictures would by implication have been no trouble at all to Alice – it provided something that was more entertaining and less taxing than a book with neither pictures nor conversation. But when we move out of this world of Victorian certainties, to ask what the visual text contributes to the verbal, and what is the nature of the dual discourse that is produced by an illustrated text that truly unifies the two, the answer is far from straightforward.

What exactly does a picture do in a book? How does it modify the response of the reader to the written word? Does it enable him or her to enter more fully into the created fictive world, or does it present that world as more of an artifice? Does it amplify the concepts and structures of the words, or does it offer separate ones of its own, as a sort of visual commentary? If the two work together to provide a new discourse, how is it assimilated and how best analysed?

All of these are insistent questions. This book sets out to attempt to answer them by looking at works of popular illustrated fiction as it is most broadly interpreted – an interpretation which includes fiction for adults and children, magazine fiction, strip comics and film, as well as popular novels which are illustrated after their first appearance, and those which, although they do not contain any visual images, nevertheless make complex use of the psychology of visualisation.

Given the prominence of illustrated fiction as a major force in publishing since the early nineteenth century, it is surprising that it has not attracted critical attention greater in depth and in quantity. Despite the fact that many of the novelists who remain solidly within the established canon of literary studies produced work that was illustrated on its first appearance, mainstream literary study has resolutely refused to accept the visual dimensions of such texts. David Cecil's Early Victorian Novelists (1932) and Kathleen Tillotson's Novels of the Eighteen-Forties (1954) make no mention of the visual components of the novels they discuss – novels which include The Old Curiosity Shop and Bleak House in which the illustrations are of fundamental significance in the reading experience, and Vanity Fair, a novel which perhaps has more claim than any other of its age to be considered as a single discourse of word and image since both are the product of the same ‘author’. The reason for this neglect is perhaps implicit within the reference in my last sentence to ‘the reading experience’; this is not something that English critics have taken seriously until recently, with the coming of Wolfgang Iser (1978) and Stanley Fish (1980). Perhaps the Leavisite doctrine of the primacy of the text as instrument of cultural transmission is responsible, in two ways, for the neglect of illustration. First, it stresses the unique significance of the written word; secondly, its moral earnestness inevitably nudges it away from the apparent frivolity of the curlicues and caricatures of engravings which were, after all, something which appealed to the Victorian public, an organism hideously non-Leavisite in nature and taste.¹ There is perhaps another cause which is more relevant to the immediate context of the present discussion. Illustration is something which explicitly links the canonic novels of the 1830s, 1840s and 1850s to those which are, in traditional circles, regarded as of merely sociological interest since they belong to that dangerously profligate sub-culture, popular literature. Here indeed is a common pursuit rejected by those in search of transmitting the uncommon.

Whatever the reason, the gap is there. Even the Open University, with its stress on interdisciplinary studies, has produced a course in which a Victorian novel is presented for study with no mention at all of the visual texts which constituted a part of it at its first appearance.² There are, of course, some honourable exceptions, chief amongst which is J.R. Harvey's Victorian Novelists and their Illustrators', and works on individual authors and novels have furthered our awareness in specific directions,³ even if this is often in the effort to construct bibliographic or publishing history. Yet if we move out of the subject of illustrated fiction within the canon to consider its counterparts in popular fiction, there is little which goes beyond the bibliographic to the extent even of considering the work at all. Given the sheer bulk of the material involved, this is a serious omission.

The importance of illustration in popular fiction is self-evident. Many of the runaway publishing successes of the first half of the nineteenth century were books conjoining text and illustration. Magazines and periodicals of all sorts published illustrated fiction either, in the earlier years, in serial instalments or, from the last two decades of the last century, as self-contained stories. Books and magazines for children continued and developed the tradition of illustration. The habit of visualisation has continued into the twentieth century with the practice of producing fine editions of an established author's work with specially commissioned illustrations; and, in the middle years of the century, before the tyranny of the electronic narrative, the comic-strip become one of the most pervasive influences on child readers, dependent as it is upon compelling visual images to convey action. Even in a society dominated by electronic narrative, the prevalence of films based upon books has been a potent form of visualisation in popular culture. These circumstances make the nature and function of illustration in popular fiction of all these kinds something which the serious critic may no longer ignore.

II

The full nature of the complex relationship between word and image within the context of what can reasonably be called the illustration of texts is apparent if we return to the figure who is generally cited as the originator of the illustrative print in its modern sense in England: William Hogarth. Hogarth's prints are clearly of fundamental importance in the tradition of illustrated fiction for a number of reasons concerning their nature and the circumstances in which they were produced and distributed. First of all there is their conception as series of prints: from The Harlot's Progress (1731–2) onwards, Hogarth's engravings were produced in sequences of from four to twelve plates conveying a continuous narrative usually in the discussion of events concerning the same cast of characters. Often a text in the form of short verses was engraved with the image. Seen alongside one another – as they often were when framed and hung by their purchasers – they present a sequence of stages in a narrative, using the kind of structure which surfaces much later and in simplified, more intimate form, in the comic strip.

To this must be added the way in which we approach Hogarth's prints. As has been remarked frequently (see e.g., Paulson: 1975; Cowley 1983), Hogarth's prints have a ‘reading structure’ which necessitates that the onlooker begin at the left hand side and pass across the image to the right, taking in the denotative, narrative and connotative significances of its elements along the way. This explains why the engravings are lateral reversals or mirror images of paintings – which in many cases they antedate: in the painting the composition and other painterly values are significant, but in the print it is narrative and symbol, perceived in the sequential reading, which dominate.

The reading that is demanded is by no means simple: we need to decode emblematic references, specific allusions to contemporary figures, links made by parallel visual structures, and subtleties of irony and satire caused by features such as glance, posture, juxtaposition or separation of figures. That Hogarth could confidently make such demands upon his readers shows that subtle habits of absorbing a range of kinds of visual data were well established in the print-buying public, if not at the outset of Hogarth's career, then certainly by its end. Yet we should not assume from this that all of Hogarth's readers were skilled in the kind of iconographical elucidation that is necessary if we are fully to grasp the targets and effects of much of his satire. As a contemporary source makes clear, the images worked at several levels, with a ‘plain literal sense’ that is apparent to even the least perceptive reader alongside more complex levels of signification: ‘The Story should be such as an ordinary Reader may acquiesce in, whatever Natural, Moral or Political Truth may be discovered in it by Men of Greater Penetration’ (The Spectator No. 315, 1 March 1712). The truth of this is not difficult to grasp. A wholly untrained eye may discern the scenes of moral corruption in the various progresses; one with a grasp of the contemporary underworld will discern references to specific criminals and locations; one with a grasp of Catholic iconography will be aware of the ironic use of, say, a chalice or monstrance; one with a connoisseur's familiarity with European painting will understand and relish the comic presentation of, say, three whores in the classical topos of the three graces. This gives to Hogarth's work something fundamental to eighteenth and nineteenth-century popular prints and the Victorian illustrated novel which in large measure derives from them: the appeal to people of a wide range of backgrounds and experiences in reading and decoding visual narratives. Hogarth's desire to appeal to even ‘men of the lowest rank’⁴ is made clear in his production of Industry and Idleness, a sequence of twelve prints opposing the careers of the good and the idle apprentice. This was popular in its destination if not in its origin: that it had a clear moral intention should not be counted against it, since this was apparent too in all of Hogarth's productions and is another link between his work and a good deal of later illustrated fiction, Charles Knight's Penny Magazine being perhaps the most outstanding example, as will shortly become apparent.

Discussion of notions of popularity brings us on to the second important aspect of Hogarth's prints: the circumstances under which they were produced and sold. The sequences were sold by subscription, with half the cost being paid by the purchaser on subscribing and the remainder on receipt of the prints. This was a method which Hogarth followed for his subsequent sequences, and which was a common approach at the time. Johnson's Dictionary and Pope's Iliad were among the better-known works which were produced in a similar manner. This had the simple but crucial advantage for the artist and publisher – in Hogarth's case the two were the same but this was not always the case – of providing finance to begin the project and bear some of the costs of production. What Hogarth was doing, in effect, was anticipating the commercial feature which ensured the popular success of the Victorian best-selling novel – producing it in serial form so that some of the costs could be covered at an early stage of printing and circulation. But this does not mean that the prints were only available to those who could afford to subscribe to them. Their display in the leading print shops, of which there were many in London and other major cities, and their production in cheaper editions after their first appearance, gave them much wider currency.

In Hogarth's prints, we have the development of a complex reading structure, often with the aid of a verbal text, and frequently within a sequential presentation of frames. An awareness of a multiplicity of reading levels and experiences shows not only Hogarth's moral zeal but also his sound grasp of the practicalities of publishing. All of these are features of importance in the nature and circumstances of Victorian and later illustrated fiction. This does not, however, place Hogarth outside the current of his own time. His references to contemporary figures from the criminal classes, and his satiric attacks upon those in authority or who show signs of the pomposity attached to it, link him to Fielding: the novelist himself makes explicit and detailed references to the working of the artist's satiric intent in comparison with his own in both Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones. Thackeray, himself a caricaturist and illustrator whose abilities are today too often neglected, was fully aware of the link in devoting a chapter in his English Humorists (1853) to ‘Hogarth, Smollett and Fielding’.⁵

The reference to Thackeray should not, of course, suggest that Hogarth's influence and popularity continued to be felt only in ‘serious’ literary circles. In 1796 The Comick Magazine, a monthly aimed at a popular readership, advertised as its major attraction the presentation of one of William Hogarth's Celebrated Humorous, Comical and Moral Prints’ with each issue. The prints were reproductions of Industry and Idleness: that the magazine was aimed at the new literate apprentice classes would suggest that Hogarth's moralities were still capable of arousing humour among those without an education enabling them to grasp the classical allusions and iconographie complexities nearly fifty years after their publication.

Links between verbal and visual texts continue to be strong in the generation of satiric print-makers to follow Hogarth, most especially James Gillray, Thomas Rowlandson and the brothers George and Robert Cruikshank. Gillray's work, like Hogarth's, sometimes appears with lines of verse: more often, it incorporates words into the image by using speech bubbles or larger explanatory captions. Yet this in no way contradicts a more serious literary origin. Sin, Death and the Devil is a good example of the complex levels on which Gillray's prints often work. Dated 9 June 1792, it is a representation of the figures of the Queen, Pitt and Thurlow presented as a parody of the figures and composition of Hogarth's Satan, Sin and the Devil (1735–40; oil on canvas, 29 × 24, Tate Gallery, London), a painting illustrating Paradise Lost, Book II, lines 648–59. These lines are presented in handwritten form above the image, which shows Pitt as death and Thurlow attacking him with a mace while the Queen, with the keys to the Back Stairs hanging instead of serpents from her waist, endeavours to keep them apart – a reference to the Regency crisis and Pitt's attempts to assume the power of the crown. A line at the foot draws attention to the provenance of the imagery, mentioning the Milton Gallery proposed by Henry Fuseli.

What we have here is quite a subtle relationship between word and image – indeed, it is almost a satiric attack on the nature of illustration itself. Not only does it present the text which it illustrates – illustrates in a parabolic and satiric manner, albeit – but it also depends for its effect on the distance between the words and the image, the former serious and complex, the latter comic and satiric. This difference can be grasped even if the onlooker has no knowledge of Milton, or is not familiar with the bathetic borrowing of Hogarth's design.

Gillray's subtle elision of word and image is of major importance in the growth of English illustration, albeit that his work did not achieve a circulation as wide as that of Hogarth or of Rowlandson and Cruikshank: the link that is established is one of much intellectual depth as well as satiric intensity, and his influence is felt in the work of Blake as well as that of later artists. His prints attacking Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery⁶ and M.G. Lewis's gothic horror novel The Monk (1796) show a fine sense of contemporary taste; though they are not explicitly relevant to the present study as they do not illustrate literature, they are important in illustrating popular attitudes to literature, and so reveal another aspect of the supple relation between verbal and visual text upon which later illustrators were to build.

Gillray's productions are only one strand of a large and diverse stream of work in which word and image are brought together to cumulative effect. Thomas Rowlandson was a significant contributor to this range. With Augustus Pugin he produced the plates for The Microcosm of London (1808) issued by the coachbuilder turned publisher Rudolph Ackermann from his print-shop in the Strand. Its significance lies in the fact that it is one of the earliest productions in which an illustration – here a hand-coloured engraving of a London landmark – is accompanied by a short passage of text, the whole being issued in twenty-four serial parts. It thus created a mechanism for publication – image with contextualising prose – which came to be one of the dominant modes for fiction in the middle decades of the century.

Almost at the same time as working on this serial publication, Rowlandson was contributing illustrations to a venture which did much to establish the other mode of fiction publish...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• List of plates
• Acknowledgments
• 1 THE NATURE AND FUNCTION OF VISUALISATION
• 2 GRAPHIC NARRATIVES
• 3 FAIRY PALACES: IDENTIFICATION AND IDEOLOGY IN CHILDREN’S FICTION
• 4 ILLUSTRATED MAGAZINES
• 5 GONE TO EARTH AND 1920s LANDSCAPE IDEOLOGY
• 6 THE ROMANTIC CONTINUUM: REBECCA AND INTERNAL VISUALISATION
• 7 EAGLE AND THE MORALITY OF VISUAL NARRATIVES
• 8 WORKING-CLASS F(R)ICTIONS
• Notes
• References and Further Reading
• Index