Trilby : Fads, Photographers, and "Over-Perfect Feet"

“Trilby was the first great example of how the machinery of promotion, distribution, secondary rights, and social hoopla would work,” claims L. Edward Purcell, speaking of changes in the publishing world that crystallized around the turn of the century. ¹ Indeed, George du Maurier’s 1894 novel, illustrated by the author, was—if not the first great example—at least a particularly telling one, because the machinery supporting it worked so exceedingly well. According to some sources, Trilby surpassed all previous records for best-sellers, and certainly it had many reverberations in popular culture—from the Trilby chowder club to the Trilby hats men still wear today. ²

The following case study of the social dynamics of book consumption in the mid-1890s is grounded in responses culled from groups of readers that overlap and intersect with one another: dramatists, reviewers, parodists, product manufacturers, letter writers, photographers, composers, illustrators, mesmerists and ethicists. ³ Trilby’s publication history, and the history of readers’ responses to it in the years following first publication, illuminates how the expanding media machine of the book industry worked, how du Maurier’s pictures contributed to the novel’s success, and what the tale of a model and her artist friends meant for the audience that received it.

The Climate

Richard Ohmann claims the 1890s as the inaugural moment of an integrated mass culture. As magazines gained mass circulation and more than doubled their advertising pages, he says, book publishers began thinking in terms of creating hits. ⁴ And although Ohmann’s claim is rather sweeping, such a climate as he describes was necceessary for a phenomenon like Trilby to happen on the scale that it did. In the years between 1890 and 1914, four elements crystallized together: (1) the emergence of new printing technologies and the new publications that followed, which resulted in a debate as to how books should look and how they should be produced; (2) increasing social literacy in the language of the rapidly multiplying illustrated advertisements; (3) the institutionalization of book collecting and the dissemination of its discourse in print; and (4) changes in the politics of publishing and the distribution of novels. These elements came together in the so-called golden age of British book illustration to create a kind of book that demanded and was produced for a certain kind of social reading—books and behaviors that were not so much new entities as they were fresh mutations of nineteenth-century productions and practices.

The most important new technology was the photomechanical reproduction of line drawings, which allowed a bolder, more decisive black line than earlier methods. While the Aesthetes who published the Yellow Book debated the merits of the new means of production with members of the Arts and Crafts movement, the two groups shared the idea that meaning was located in the physical appearance of the book. The 1890s saw the foundation of numerous small and private presses, some of which embraced a return to old-fashioned modes of craftsmanship and others of which celebrated the newly streamlined aesthetic. ⁵ Meanwhile, on the popular front, book illustration reached its peak in terms of quantity, ⁶ and the proliferation of small presses coincided with the widespread publication of illustrated magazines, more than sixty of which were in publication over the course of the decade. There was an enormous increase in the number and output of illustrators and there was scarcely a year in which a major monthly magazine was not started. Most important for the illustrator were: The Strand (1891), The Idler (1892), Pall Mall Magazine (1893), Windsor Magazine (1895), and Pearson’s (1896). In addition, weekly magazines such as Black and White and quarterlies such as the Yellow Book provided enormous scope for artists working with photomechanical process. ⁷ “Nearly every month or so,” complained Walter Crane, “we hear of a new genius in black and white, who is to eclipse all others.” ⁸

The gift book, or edition de luxe, of the golden age can be said to begin with Aubrey Beardsley’s 1893 Morte D’Arthur, which was produced to rival the productions...