The Serial Illustrations of A Hazard of New Fortunes

When the thirty-four-installment serialization of William Dean Howells's A Hazard of New Fortunes ran in Harper's Weekly from 23 March to 16 November 1889, it included sixteen illustrations by longtime Harper & Brothers artist William Allen Rogers. All sixteen illustrations appeared in the first paperback edition of the novel, an inexpensive single-volume edition of five thousand copies dated 1890 and published in late November 1889, but fewer than half of the drawings appear in the few subsequent illustrated editions of the novel. ² I will provide in the essay that follows, an overview of the serial illustrations with an eye toward suggesting how they merit further consideration by scholars debating the significance of Howells's novel and pursuing its historical, cultural, political, and literary contexts. For example, the number and prominence of the illustrations seem noticeably slight given the celebrity of the author and the commercial context of the serial. Also, the style and subject matter of the illustrations appear to be useful reference points for critical appraisal of the novel's subjects and methods, including the much-explored issue of realism. ³ Finally, the serial illustrations compare in provocative ways with the surrounding story illustrations in Harper's Weekly, including many drawn by Rogers himself, indicating how the novel is both similar to and distinguished from these contemporaneous mass-market representations.

However one might judge the novel's content, both the context of the magazine marketplace in general and the commissioning of A Hazard of New Fortunes in particular would lead one to expect a prominently illustrated serial. The late 1880s was the high-water mark of illustration by fine-line engraving, and the publishing house of Harper & Brothers had been at the top of the magazine marketplace for thirty years largely because it had so successfully met the public demand for illustration at a time when producing illustrations was difficult and expensive. ⁴ The increased competition in the booming magazine marketplace of the 1880s only increased the demand. In the pages of its flagship monthly Harper's Magazine and the high-circulation Weekly appeared illustrations by a host of well-known and admired artists such as Edwin A. Abbey, C. S. Reinhart, F. S. Church, Sol Eytinge, E. W. Kemble, William T. Smedley, Howard Pyle, and Frederick Remington. ⁵ Not only was Howells a prominent participant in--and a keen professional observer of--this magazine marketplace, but also literary commerce figures prominently in Hazard. ⁶ Every Other Week, the fictional magazine venture that forms the plot of the novel, is itself an attempt to capitalize on trends in the magazine marketplace, not the least of which is the overwhelming popularity of illustration. As the novel's enterprising literary businessman Fulkerson asks facetiously, "Do I look like the sort of lunatic who would start a thing in the twilight of the nineteenth century without illustrations?" (Hazard 14).

Indeed, illustration by engraving was broadly recognized in the 1880s as the triumphant achievement of the American magazine. ⁷ It was during this period that Henry James wrote a series of casual articles aiming "to take the large, joyous, observant, various view of the business of art" as practiced by the prominent American illustrators of the day (14). Collected in 1893 as Picture and Text, James's essays take the perspective of an admiring "literary observer" graciously lamenting "the difference between the roundabout, faint descriptive tokens of respectable prose and the immediate projection of the figure by pencil" (15). James believed that the art of black-and-white illustration as practiced in the booming American magazine marketplace was a considerable example of modern artistic energy. "What the verbal artist would like to do," he asserts, "would be to find out the secret of the pictorial" and "to drink at the same fountain." Fortunately, "what is style for one art is style for another, so blessed...