Pictures and Words

BOOK REVIEWS was less about the medical bias against Spiritualism and more about a sneaky way to get rid of your wife so you can marry someone younger and more attractive. Owen's study of the role of women in Spiritualism is a valuable and interesting one. Her case histories, in particular, show a gift for detailed research and deft presentation. Her account, for example, of the Theobald family and their experiences of Spiritualism is a real insight into the workings of a Victorian family and their servants. Her descriptions of the decline of women mediums when past their prime are evocative of the fall of all manner of film stars and pop stars in today's world. Owen's book leaves one major question hanging though: why was it that so few women wrote down their experiences? Perhaps Owen's next book holds the answer. ANYA Clayworth Edinburgh Pictures and Words Julia Thomas. Pictorial Victorians: The Inscription of Values in Word and Image. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004. xi + 203 pp. $44.95 DESCRIBED in the opening sentence as "a book about pictures that tell stories," Pictorial Victorians examines textual and visual interactions in both narrative paintings and illustrated books. As Julia Thomas explains, some books' illustrations were produced in consultation with the author, some were gathered by a publisher from miscellaneous sources, and sometimes illustrators independently supplied their own meaningful embellishments. Many mid-Victorian painters—John Everett Millais, Arthur Hughes, Luke Fildes—also did illustrations and some, like Dante Gabriel Rossetti, were authors as well. Paintings were turned into illustrations and vice versa. Luke Fildes's engraving Houseless and Hungry, for example, appeared in the Graphic in 1869 beside an article on the homeless poor and was then redeveloped with additional symbolic and dramatic material as the painting Applicants for Admission to a Casual Ward (1874). In both narrative paintings and illustrated books, Thomas asserts, meanings are made through the "interaction between word, image, and viewer." Her goal in this book is to restore Victorian viewers to the interpretive mix by placing her analysis of pictorial narrative within historical contexts that will recapture the "highly political" meanings "bound up in the cultural events and assumptions that mark the moments of their creation and circulation ." Twenty-first-century cultural politics have also shaped the book's range: its chapters take up, in order: race, gender (female), the (female) body, nation, empire, and (female) sexuality (in the form of adultery). 211 ELT 49 : 2 2006 Thomas is very good at close readings that show how paintings and illustrations allude to other images in focus, composition and iconographical reference. The first chapter convincingly demonstrates that the meanings of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin could be shaped and shaded by the pictures used in several different 1852 British editions. The suicide of the slave Lucy when her child is taken away, for example, occupies twenty-eight spare words of text: "At midnight, Tom waked, with a sudden start. Something black passed quickly by him to the side of the boat, and he heard a splash in the water." An illustration—the one reproduced in Pictorial Victorians is by George Cruikshank—supplies a melodramatic image that lingers in the consciousness of readers who might overlook an invisible splash, and thus makes the book a much more effective political tool. By way of contrast, Thomas points to cheaper editions with engravings by various hands that undermine any "'marriage' of text and image." In two consecutive pictures of a "People's Illustrated Edition," she reports, "Eva not only changes features and hair color but ages by about ten years." In yet other editions, illustrators created additional subtexts. Sometimes the barren slave cabin found in American illustrated editions becomes an idealized English cottage signifying domestic virtue; in other versions rounded huts and exotic vegetation suggest an African landscape that deters any comparison between black slaves and suffering industrial workers. British artists, however, seldom provide the evangelical imagery ("Christ appearing before Uncle Tom ... angels taking Eva to heaven") found in American versions. The second chapter takes up Tennyson's poetry, both as a source of familiar paintings and, more interestingly, in nineteenth-century illustrated...