Serials to Graphic Novels: The Evolution of the Victorian Illustrated Book by Catherine J. Golden (review)

It would seem to be an opportune time to write a new history of the Victorian illustrated book. Our culture is awash in imagery: from Instagram to YouTube to smiling emoticons. Standard works on the topic were written in earlier, less-saturated periods; one could mention Joseph Grego's Pictorial Pickwickiana (1899), J. R. Harvey's Victorian Novelists and Their Illustrators (1970) and Jane R. Cohen's Charles Dickens and His Original Illustrators (1980), among other titles. Catherine J. Golden, in Serials to Graphic Novels: The Evolution of the Victorian Illustrated Book, builds on such predecessors and extends the discussion into contemporary graphic narrative. The story that she tells is chronological, beginning, appropriately, with The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club and bringing the account reasonably up-to-date with graphic-novel adaptations of Dickens, the Brontës and Lewis Carroll.

Serials to Graphic Novels is a labor of love, generously illustrated and highly informative. In the introduction Golden explains that the volume's origins can be traced to her unpublished dissertation, "The Victorian Illustrated Book: Authors Who Composed with Graphic Images and Words" (6). That is to say, Golden has been thinking about this topic for decades, and her newest book is something of a summa. In the preface she writes, "Illustrated books sparked my desire to become a Victorianist" (xiii). In other words, she did not write this book because she is a professor of English; rather, she is a professor of English because of her love of illustrated books.

The central argument of Serials to Graphic Novels is that in Victorian illustration there were two distinct modes: the earlier, caricature style associated with George Cruikshank and Hablot K. Browne and the later realism of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and more formally trained artists. Subsequent book illustrators, from the late nineteenth century through neo-Victorian adaptations, rely on both traditions and sometimes blend the two. Dickens, ever sensitive to audience, registered the shift that Golden identifies when he moved away from the caricature style by selecting Marcus Stone and Luke Fildes to illustrate his final two novels. In charting this progression, Serials to Graphic Novels seems to be aimed at the elusive "general reader" (3), who may exist only in authors' introductions and the minds of optimistic publishers. As a result, for the initiated, the book offers much that will be familiar. Chapter 1, entitled "The Pickwick Papers and the Rise of the Serial," is a solid summary of Pickwick's sources and impact. The next chapter, "Caricature: A Theatrical Development," focuses on canonical works such as Oliver Twist and Vanity Fair. It might have been helpful if these early chapters had generated more comparison with lesser-known novels from the same period. For example, one might ask: how do the illustrations of Browne (aka Phiz) function in works by authors other than Dickens–Charles Lever, James Grant or Thomas Miller? The next chapter turns to modes of "naturalism, representational realism, or simply realism" (93). The term Golden uses to encapsulate this moment is "Sixties" illustration (although it extended from the 1850s until later in the century). This third chapter is most illuminating when it compares the earlier, caricature style with the Sixties style–in particular, in the Household Edition of Dickens's works. Golden places an image from the monthly numbers of David Copperfield side by side with a Fred Barnard drawing produced for the 1872 edition of the same novel. This juxtaposition makes her argument quite vivid. The fourth chapter, "Caricature and Realism: Fin-de-Siècle Developments of the Victorian Illustrated Book," argues that later illustrators synthesize the two previous modes; the key artist/writers here are George du Maurier and Beatrix Potter.

For nineteenth-century scholars who read Golden's book, her last chapter may be the most enlightening because it reaches past the Victorian and Edwardian eras into twentieth- and twenty-first-century graphic narrative. Curiously, this chapter...