Victorian Illustrated Book

Book reviews importance of childhood regression for the authors it investigates makes little mention of psychoanalysis: Freud makes a guest appearance on only three occasions, and Winnicott and Klein are not mentioned at all. This is a major flaw in the book, since it seems perverse not to consider the psychoanalytic value of the girl when arguing that, at some level, she performs a psychic function for the author. As a result, Robson's assertions sometimes seem simplistic, and she never explores the possibility that the girl may not only be a figure of the lost male self, but also a representation of the now-absent mother in whose image the child seeks an affirmation of its own identity. Moreover, the question of androgyny implied by the male authors' "girlhood" is never addressed. Robson makes it clear, in her introduction, that certain, perhaps expected , strands of scrutiny, such as "the origins and appearances of the idealized girl in nineteenth-century literature and culture" (11) or "the genre of children's literature" (11) will not be pursued. It is therefore interesting , and telling, that she omits to mention the subject's psychoanalytic aspect which would surely be a significant line of enquiry in a study of this nature. Tantalisingly entitled, Robson's book falls short of its potential. It lacks direction and fails to signpost the trajectory of its argument with sufficient force, often providing a crucial quotation at the tail-end, rather than at the head of a chapter. Focused on the usual suspects, her study tells us little that is new, and her reconsideration of the fantasy figure of the girl ends, as it began, in the mire of paedophilia. In her discussion of Carroll, Robson alludes to the ease with which material "can be stitched together, in the absence of the whole cloth of a thoroughgoing autobiography, to connect Carroll to the male fantasy of original femininity " (140). Sadly, one senses that, in this book, Robson is trying too hard to sew the seams of her own argument together, and the gaps and the stitches show. PATRICIA PULHAM Queen Mary, University of London Victorian Illustrated Book Richard Maxwell, ed. The Victorian Illustrated Book. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2002. xxx + 440 pp. $45.00 THE EDITOR of The Victorian Illustrated Book points out in his introduction that "It is unlikely that any one person, at present, knows enough to write a comprehensive history of Victorian illustrated books," and this indeed is a solid rationale for a collection of individually 415 ELT 46 : 4 2003 authored essays on the subject. The resulting volume reflects both the strengths and disadvantages of most collections of essays grouped around a general subject. One of the strengths of the present volume is that it avoids a too-common fault of book-length monographs: that of driving theses too hard or too repetitively. A second strength is that the variety of approaches and of topics within the overall subject reminds the reader of how large the subject is and how many kinds of analysis or commentary it invites. On the other side of the ledger, when the editor of such a planned collection extends invitations to experts in the field to submit essays, the resulting contributions are unlikely to cohere into an integrated survey —and they do not do so here. A more accurate title for the volume would have been "Explorations of Selected Aspects of the Victorian Illustrated Book." Somewhat exacerbating the scatteredness of the contributed essays is a problem unfortunately common to such interdisciplinary projects these days: art historians, like other historians and literary critics, tend to assume readers who share their professional background. Readers other than historians of nineteenthcentury art would benefit from an orienting chapter providing much more background information than does the present eight-page introduction (of which more later). Richard Maxwell's "Walter Scott, Historical Fiction, and the Genesis of the Victorian Illustrated Book," the opening essay, sets the stage for the discussion of the meaning, status, and purpose of book illustration in many of the ensuing essays. It is not only that Scott's works largely initiated the development of nineteenth-century book illustration, but that The...