The Victorian Illustrated Book (review)

As the author of one of the essays in this collection explains, "What makes the nineteenth-century illustrated book so fascinating is, at least in part, that it mediated two competing systems of knowing and representing the world: the visual . . . and the verbal" (92). Today the latter has triumphed over the former; however, this volume suggests that the victory might be merely temporary. If the reader—particularly the bibliophilic reader—recognizes that "[i]llustrations are not mimetic. They are not the text pictured" (91), then perhaps the image can resume its intimate partnership with the word.

This volume explores why, how, through whom, and in what forms the illustrated book effloresced during the nineteenth century. Apropos to a book about illustration, the most striking feature of this work is its 124 beautifully reproduced black-and-white images. Included are a variety of illustrations, from wood engravings to steel etchings to photographs, by over fifty different artists, including Aubrey Beardsley, Francis Bedford, Hablot Browne ("Phiz"), Edward Burne-Jones, A. L. Coburn, George Cruikshank, William Dickes, Thomas Hardy, William Morris, John Tenniel, and William Makepeace Thackeray.

In his introduction, editor Richard Maxwell provides a succinct history of book illustration from the Middle Ages to the present. His "Afterword: The Destruction, Rebirth, and Apotheosis of the Victorian Illustrated Book" explores the significant influence that the Victorian illustrated book has had upon "symbolist, surrealist, postsurrealist, and eventually postmodern practices among artists, writers, and a range of other enterprising biblio-savants" (419).

The volume's ten essays are arranged chronologically and thematically. The first, Maxwell's "Walter Scott, Historical Fiction, and the Genesis of the Victorian Illustrated Book," argues that an antiquarian impulse helped bring pictures within (rather than outside) books. The second essay, Steven Dillon's "Illustrations of Time: Watches, Dials, and Clocks in Victorian Pictures," also considers the sociohistorical meanings with which illustrated objects have been invested. Dillon asserts that Victorian clocks do not, as one might expect, "connote regulation—discipline, tyranny, control" (53); instead, they were intended to be viewed by those who could afford leisure time, during which they wanted to forget about work.

In the third essay, "Serial Illustration and Storytelling in David Copperfield," Robert L. Patten uses the case of a plate created by "Phiz" to argue not only that "the majority of Dickens's serials are resonant dialogues between pictures and text" (123) but also that illustration should not be considered subservient to text.

The next two essays treat illustrations that scholars have tended to overlook. In "Maps and Metaphors: Topographical Representation and the Sense of Place in Late-Victorian Fiction," Simon Joyce suggests that the use of maps as illustrations reveals Victorian insecurities about liberal democracy, the British Empire, and fictional realism. Herbert F. Tucker's "Literal Illustration in Victorian Print" explains how letters and words functioning as images served to foster rather than neutralize debate over the word versus the image at a time when verbal and visual artists were jockeying for preeminence.

William Morris, a major figure in Victorian book design, is the focus of Elizabeth K. Helsinger's "William Morris before Kelmscott: Poetry and Design in the 1860s," in which she traces formal and functional similarities between Morris's designs for walls and books and his poetry. Jeffrey Skoblow's "Beyond Reading: Kelmscott and the Modern" also centers on Morris, examining how his Kelmscott Press, though inspired by the medieval book, was ahead of its time in resisting the "modern" problem of commodification.

As with that of Morris, Aubrey Beardsley's interest in the materiality of books shaped his view of the role of the illustrator, as Nicholas Frankel explains in "Aubrey Beardsley 'Embroiders' the Literary Text." Like Frankel, Charles Harmon explores the impact of illustration on the perceived authority of literature in his essay "Alvin Langdon Coburn's Frontispieces to Henry James's New York Edition...