The Victorian Illustrated Book, and: Visual Words: Art and the Material Book in Victorian England (review)

In the opening of Alice's Adventures In Wonderland (1865), Alice offers a precocious and trenchant piece of literary criticism—an observation that anticipates the present state of interdisciplinary studies and the assumptions that underwrite the two books addressed in this review. Having glanced "once or twice" at the book her sister silently reads beside her, she expresses her informed opinion by asking, "what is the use of a book...without pictures or conversation?" Of course, Alice's demand for a union of text and image is immediately granted as she enters a textual world in which animated fictions and conversational pictures are the epistemological norm. That Alice's interdisciplinary expectations are no "dream" is borne out by the fact that her dream takes physical form in the book her reader holds, and that her fantastic vision of literary visuality had been a norm of Victorian publishing for forty years.

But if Alice's rhetorical question helps to anticipate the ways in which literary criticism has turned its attention to the rhetoric of images in Victorian culture and the rhetorical "use" of images in texts, two recent interdisciplinary studies, Richard Maxwell's edited collection The Victorian Illustrated Book and Gerard Curtis's Visual Words pose a version of Alice's question at once more basic and more sophisticated: What do we mean when we call an object a book and when we call an object an image? What does it mean to think of the book as an object with an artistic life of its own, and what would it mean for an image to "illustrate" a text? In different ways, both volumes usefully defamiliarize the seemingly well-defined and agreed-upon parameters of Victorian visual studies. In doing so, both texts expand what will count as legitimate objects for interdisciplinary work in the future.

The essays that Maxwell brings together in The Victorian Illustrated Book perhaps do this more explicitly and immediately—literally on page one, with Maxwell's opening essay on Walter Scott. Using the sixteenth-century connotation of illustration (using one text to explain another), before it became synonymous with the visual interpretation of a literary text, Maxwell cleverly argues for an expanded notion of Scott's internal "illustrations" of his own text through his apparatus of explanatory notes, pointing out that visual illustrators of Scott respond more to these notes than to the text (4-5). That is, narrowly speaking, illustration is pressed into the service of novelistic antiquarianism rather than historical narrative. Robert Patten's essay on David Copperfield (1849-50) also instructively brings us back to the dictionary for our theory of illustration, differentiating illustrare from mimesis: the former may mean to "enlighten," "elucidate," or "make famous" (91). The essay is, at heart, a defense of H. K. Browne's illustrations from a century of abuse. However, Patten's effort to make us see that Browne successfully pictures the "unspeakable" (102) multiple narrative and readerly points of view that cohere around David demands a kind of blind faith. But, he does argue persuasively that the illustrations, both individually and collectively, embody and perform Charles Dickens's narrative logic—an argument that provides a welcome relief from the ritual discussions of images attempting but failing to escape their static temporality and leap into narrative.

Other essays in the collection expand our sense of illustration by looking at objects in illustrated books that we might otherwise ignore. Simon Joyce's essay on maps in Victorian fiction is useful both for its theoretical sophistication and its simple common sense. Asking a question these novels have been begging since their publication (what are these maps doing here?), he moves beyond the sense of realism that novelists attempt to provide and readers—such as Thomas Hardy's fanatical...