Home Search Every Field Editorial Search Authors' SERIALS TO GRAPHIC NOVELS: THE EVOLUTION OF THE VICTORIAN ILLUSTRATED BOOK Responses By Catherine J. Golden (Florida, 2017) xviii + 299 pp. Guidelines Reviewed by Philip V. Allingham on 2019-10-18. For Click here for a PDF version. Reviewers Click here to buy the book on Amazon. About Us Masthead In this book Catherine J. Golden, author of Posting It: The Victorian Revolution in Letter Writing (2010) and Images of the Woman Reader in Victorian British and American Fiction (2003), and editor of Book Illustrated: Text, Image, and Feedback Culture, 1770-1930 (2000), charts the principal developments in illustrated fiction from the earliest of the illustrated serials of the 1830s to the graphic novels of the present age. Though Golden tracks changes in both visual aesthetics and contexts of production over two centuries, she highlights the products of collaboration between authors and artists. Necessarily, then, she confines her scope to such pairings as Charles Dickens and Phiz (Hablôt Knight Browne) in The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (April 1836-November 1837), and to the work of such writer-illustrators as William Makepeace Thackeray and George Du Maurier. In the final chapter, which treats "graphic classics"--graphic novel adaptations of nineteenth- century British classics, she likewise gives equal credit to the script-writer and artist(s) responsible for a synthetic project such as Batman Noël (2011). Golden tells a complex story with reassuring conviction, pausing whenever necessary to provide background and define her terms, as well as aptly quoting from illustration studies and from a larger body of biographical, bibliographical, art-historical, and theoretical criticism. Taking the reader on a Grand Tour, she ranges from the beginnings of the British illustrated book with the initial backstory of Pickwick to its multitudinous and lively descendants: children's books such as Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902) and graphic novels of our own time such as Will Eisner's Fagin the Jew (2003). The cover, designed for our own visual age, juxtaposes George Cruickshank's Oliver Asking for More in Oliver Twist, which first appeared in Bentley's Miscellany (February 1837), with Erica Awano's "She Felt a Violent Blow on Her Chin" from Leah Moore and John Reppion's The Complete Alice in Wonderland (2009). The cover thus previews Golden's discussion of cartooning and graphic novels such as Will Eisner's Fagin the Jew (2003) in her concluding chapter. Furthermore, though Golden writes for a non-specialist audience, she cites some of the standard texts on her subject such as John Harvey's Victorian Novelists and Their Illustrators (1971) and Jane Rabb Cohen's Charles Dickens and His Original Illustrators (1980). As Simon Cooke has pointed out in reviewing this book on The Victorian Web, "[m]aking sense of Victorian illustration is a complicated task." But Golden simplifies the topic by conveniently dividing it into the "pre-Victorian" or Regency grotesque satires of Gillray and Rowlandson; the witty caricatures of George Cruikshank and Phiz (Hablôt K. Browne); the poetic realism and high craftsmanship of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, J. E. Millais, A. B. Houghton, and George Pinwell; the esoteric eroticism of Aubrey Beardsley; and the sophisticated magazine satires of fin de siecle illustrator George Du Maurier. Moreover, even as she surveys changes in the technology and marketing or packaging of nineteenth-century illustration, Golden offers cogent commentaries upon such specific plates as Robert Seymour's Mr. Pickwick in Chase of His Hat (see below) from the fourth chapter of The Pickwick Papers, the first novel she examines. Her comment on this rarely reproduced Seymour illustration, one of many high-resolution reproductions that complement her analyses, nicely defines the effects achieved in this picture: Robert Seymour, Mr Pickwick in chase of his hat (May 1836). This is the pregnant moment Seymour stages. Samuel Pickwick's respectable black hat, placed brim down in the cloud of dust, serves as an essential prop on Seymour's illustrative stage. Although hats are not commonplace today, to the Victorians, a misplaced hat in public was more than a major wardrobe malfunction: losing one's hat meant losing one's dignity. Seymour hints at the future restoration of the hat by showing a flustered Pickwick, extending both of his arms to "seize [the hat] by the crown, and stick firmly on your head: smiling pleasantly all the time, as if you thought it as good a joke as anybody else" . (Golden, p. 27) As this analysis suggests, Golden identifies and explores the origins of the Victorian illustrated novel by examining in depth Dickens's nineteen-month serialization of Pickwick, and in particular the pair of collaborative relationships that produced this seminal work. Dickens and Seymour were often at odds, not merely over the moments illustrated but over their very different conceptions of the work itself. Determined to assert the primacy of the word over the image, Dickens developed a far more congenial relationship with Phiz (Hablôt Knight Browne). Like Dickens, Phiz was a newcomer to the London publishing scene and proved a far less fractious junior partner than Seymour had been. Though Pickwick was not the first work of new fiction to be issued in monthly parts over an extended period, Golden correctly ascribes the subsequent commercial success of the serialized novel to this part-published picaresque story because it set the standard and became the "model for publication of newly released, illustrated serial fiction for adult readers" (49). After first commissioning, as Golden explains, an established and popular illustrator, Chapman and Hall then recruited a relative unknown: they asked Charles Dickens, a twenty-four-year-old parliamentary reporter turned journalist, to furnish twenty-four pages of commentary each month. Though Chapman and Hall had contracted the young author of Sketches by Boz merely to "write up" Seymour's humorous pictures of Cockney sportsmen making fools of themselves, Boz quickly hijacked Seymour's project, making his text "the hand," and the illustrations "the glove" rather than vice-versa, as Seymour had expected. "Dickens," writes Golden, turned the illustrator into a "glove," molded to fit the author's "hand." Increasing the allotment of text [to thirty-two pages per instalment] and decreasing the number of plates [under Buss, and then Phiz, to just two] expanded the author's role, granting Dickens greater room for plot and character development. With this improved plan, Dickens earned more money (£21 a part); however, by cutting the number of plates in half and hiring artists less established than Robert Seymour, Chapman and Hall offset the total cost. (29) Turning next to caricature, Golden reads serial illustration against the conventions of melodrama. Defining and re- reading caricature as a kind of distortion akin to satire, she treats it in terms of its stage-craft. Caricatural illustration, she observes, incorporates stage effects of lighting and visual cuing (58), gestures and props (66), and "bodily distortion" (77), and Cruikshank, she notes, employed tableaux vivant in his etchings for Oliver Twist (1838). As Cooke says in the review cited above, "Golden charts the ways in which [the etchings] capture the immediacy of the theatre, involving the reader- viewer in a visceral experience between laughter and horror. She also concedes the limitations of caricature as a mode of illustration and the rise of a more realistic approach." This change occurred as the artists of the 1860s supplanted the practically rather than academically trained Phiz and Cruikshank. At first glance, it may seem as if the style of the comedic and melodramatic in the early serials was simply replaced for a reading public that quickly came to prefer the new poetic realism to the comic grotesque. Golden notes, however, that rather than disappearing, the traditions of the illustrated serial continued to run alongside the naturalistic idiom of the New Men of the Sixties. Later Dickensian illustration, Golden shows, particularly the Household Edition, was based upon and constantly adverted to the visual narratives of Cruikshank and Phiz. To compare, for instance, Cruikshank's original illustration of "Fagin in the Condemned Cell" (1838) with the later rendition by James Mahoney in the Household Edition of 1873 is to see their visual continuity. Though Golden argues that the caricatural style continued to inform commercial illustration throughout the rest of the century, it waned as the fifties drew to a close. Dissatisfied with the old-fashioned look of Browne's short program for A Tale of Two Cities in November 1859, Dickens turned instead to New Men of the Sixties such as Marcus Stone. To explain why illustrations declined in newly released, widely-circulated volumes, Golden cites such "intertwining economic and aesthetic factors" as the decline in the production of serial fiction that occurred as prosperity and literacy became more general (151). She notes too "the changing nature of the novel, new developments in illustration, and competition from other media" (152), that is, photography and--later on--cinema. She also cites the impact of literacy legislation during the last third of the century: The 1840 census (based on data up until 20 June 1839) lists 67 percent of males and 51 per cent of females as literate. By 1900 -- thirty years after the passage of the Forster Act of 1870 (legislation that made education compulsory in England and Wales for children between the ages of five ad thirteen) -- 97.2 percent of males and 96.8 percent of females in England and Wales were literate. (153) In particular, the development of the subscription library (Mudie's and W. H. Smith) led to increased demand for the triple-decker, so that multiple readers could borrow and read the same title at one time.