The Plot Thickens: Illustrated Victorian Serial Fiction from Dickens to Du Maurier by Mary Elizabeth Leighton and Lisa Surridge (review)

Mary Elizabeth Leighton and Lisa Surridge's The Plot Thickens: Illustrated Victorian Serial Fiction from Dickens to Du Maurier is an important book, in part because of the spread of its material over the whole of Queen Victoria's reign. This it achieves by suitable sampling of titles of serial novels, including some issued in parts and some run in periodicals. There is equally good spread in the creators of the words and images of target works. No other single work has attempted this, and Leighton and Surridge are signally successful in this regard. They promote the analysis of illustrated novels in terms of both their words and their images, bringing the visual and the verbal into play together in critical treatment of each chosen work. This is less original than first-time readers may assume, for earlier efforts in this direction are to be found in widely dispersed articles, chapters, and conference papers, a good number of which are not consulted in this book. But, as we might imagine a Victorian reviewer saying on the book publication of one of the serial novels under scrutiny, "It is gratifying to see that which we have enjoyed in monthly doses, now gathered together between boards." (Victorians had no reason to doubt the longevity of the hardback book, and recent experience suggests that it may be safer to rely on ink on paper than corruptible digital text.) In the present work, the introductory matter dealing with the history of the illustrated book and illustrated periodical is very necessary for the reader new to the serious study of illustrated literature, and broadly speaking it does its job. Occasional looseness, such as the dating of the dominance of the threevolume novel, may be the result of pressure of space or time, but it is regrettable in a work almost certainly destined to be a key source for university study. Anthony Trollope did not assert John Everett Millais to be the best illustrator of fiction ever with reference to all the artist's work on all his novels, but specifically with reference to Orley Farm (1861–62). Other approximations are mainly a matter of compression, but the failure to give dimensions of each image reproduced is a serious defect.

The model of the stage set in early Victorian illustration is underplayed, and the example of the myriad illustrated French novels of the eighteenth century is unjustly neglected. Leighton and Surridge stop short of regarding their material as bimedial, that is to say as text which consists of words and images inextricably linked, and which jointly produce meanings. Their use of narratology is very welcome, but its originality overstated. The ambition is three decades old and is central to the approach based on understanding illustrated texts as bimedial works. Lorraine Janzen Kooistra (The Artist as Critic: Bitextuality in Fin-de-Siècle Illustrated Books [1995]), Paola Spinozzi (Sopra il reale: Osmosi interartistiche nel Preraffaellitismo e nel Simbolismo inglese [2005]) and the late Jahn Holljen Thon (Talende Linjer: lærde illustrerte bøker 1625–1775 [2012]) show a steadily growing acceptance of the need for analysis which unites the verbal and visual reader responses. The term paratext should be used more cautiously than it often is here, since in many contexts it implies a secondary characteristic of an illustrated work, and its several meanings must be understood in a French context. Ideally, indeed, an account of Victorian book illustration should be composed in awareness of the history of French literary illustration. There is no equivalent in English of the work of Rémi Blachon, Philippe Kaenel, or Nathalie Ferrand, for example.

Nevertheless, the bulk of the volume under review, being aimed at those embarking on the study of illustrated literature for the first time, is undamaged by these considerations, and the book is a very worthy addition to the secondary literature...