Visual Words

Art and the Material Book in Victorian England

Gerard Curtis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429514807
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Kunst
• Subtopic: Kunstgeschichte

First Published in 2002, Visual Words provides a unique and interdisciplinary evaluation of the relationship between images and words in this period.Victorian England witnessed a remarkable growth in literacy culminating in the new literary nationalism that emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century. Each chapter explores a different aspect of this relationship: the role of Dickens as the heroic author, the book as an iconic object, the growing graphic presence of the text, the role of the graphic trace, the 'Sister Arts/ pen and pencil' tradition, and the competition between image and word as systems of communication. Examining the impact of such diverse areas as advertising, graphic illustration, narrative painting, frontispiece portraits, bibliomania, and the merchandising of literary culture, Visual Words shows that the influence of the 'Sister Arts' tradition was more widespread and complex than has previously been considered. Whether discussing portraits of authors, the uses of iconography in Ford Madox Brown's painting Work, or examining why the British Library was equipped with false bookcases for doors, Gerard Curtis looks at artistic and literary culture from an art historical and 'object' perspective to gain a better understanding of why some Victorians called their culture 'hieroglyphic'.

1
Shared lines: pen and pencil as trace

In a poetic tribute to his friend the writer and artist Edward Lear, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, wrote:

all things fair,
With such a pencil, such a pen,
You shadow forth to distant men,
I read and felt that I was there.¹

Tennyson's tribute made a fundamental association between the pen and pencil and their indexical 'trace', for, as partners in the act of marking, they can be considered at the heart of communication in the Victorian period. Pen and pencil, for Tennyson, represented joint recorders, and made a visible imprint of the author's and artist's imagination. Their shared sense of line and implement created what some Victorians and nineteenth-century Americans were to consider a 'hieroglyphic' union of the graphic and written.

J. Whitaker, in addressing the American Institute of Instruction in 1853, noted that he and his audience were living in 'an age of illustration, and with much apparent truth; for we have pictorial books of art and science. We use art everywhere; in the temple, the schoolhouse, the dwelling'.² The popularity of illustrated and engraved travel texts and artistic engravings, and the dynamic expansion in illustrated literature and journals was significant for this very fact: the images presented were the traces not just of events but of the visual imagination, and of the social and political inclinations of the event's recorder and reproducer. Artist and writer provided, through these works, a delineated and metred 'virtual' reality.

George Cruikshank's joint portrait of himself and William Hone, done in 1827, provides a vivid image of this partnership (Figure 1.1). Hone and Cruikshank, writer and artist respectively, are seated at a desk in a position

1.1 George Cruikshank, 'Hone and Cruikshank', in Facetiae and Miscellanies (London, 1827)

of mutual respect and understanding; both are in the act of scribing (Cruikshank also has an engraving tool beside him). Artist and writer have equal weight in what are seen as analogous activities. A similar image of literary and artistic co-operation appears on Gilbert Scott's Albert Memorial (1862-72, Kensington, London). In Scott's sculpture the image of poetry is united with that of painting (and sculpture) in an ideal state above even that of manufacturing and the sciences.³

In the Victorian period, 'the line', whether drawn or written, constituted a point of meeting for visual and textual systems. This point operated in a manner analogous to that of today's digital binary code, where a similar perceived amalgamation is promoted through the aural/visual, textual/graphic, synthesis of multimedia 'blending'. The line was a point where, for Victorians such as Holman Hunt and Walter Crane, the written and drawn might be seen as intermingling. Yet during the nineteenth century the textual, or written, line came to dominate while the drawn line diminished in value. By the end of the century, a number of artists felt that the basis of their partnership with writers had dissolved. Accordingly they battled to reassert the 'intermedia' and translinguistic qualities of the drawn and textual sign, and to reconfirm the value of the graphic in a hieroglyphic equality of signification. In 1871-72, in his aptly titled The Artist and the Author, Cruikshank reflected this battle, and the growing displacement of the graphic line, when he felt the need to direct a bitter polemic against two writers, William Harrison Ainsworth and Charles Dickens, claiming that he was the joint originator both of Ainsworth's The Tower of London and Dickens's Oliver Twist.⁴

Throughout the nineteenth century it was through these line systems that the Victorians and their predecessors explored the world around them. There were journals whose very titles made this evident, as with the Pen and Pencil: An Illustrated Family Newspaper. Lines were, and always had been, the primary means of recording.⁵ Line specialists of the period debated the function of this core in its various forms: systems of drawing, the proper hand for writing, legal script, engraving, shorthand, and business writing systems, and the 'image of writing'. Unlike our present society, which as Hans Witte notes, has 'grown to appreciate a text for the invisibility of its graphic characteristics', and in which the 'sign disappears as much as possible into the signification', many Victorians saw both sign and signification as carriers of their own unique values, with the act of sign making having specific significance and tangible 'presence'.⁶ The graphic value of text was appreciated as being also indexicai and iconic, and was treasured as such.⁷

The histories of writing, drawing, engraving, and printing, along with the implements involved, were regarded as topics of great importance by the Victorians. Charles Knight's Knight's Pictorial Gallery of Arts, for example, had sections dedicated to the historical development of writing and to its significance for modern civilization. Such works discussed the links of writing to printing, connecting these processes through their social, political and cultural importance, particularly with regard to the Bible's evolutionary development from handwritten and illuminated Latin (Catholic) text to a 'liberating' mass-printed vernacular - and Protestant - book.⁸

1.2 Advertisement for Elementary Drawing Copy Books, from Our Mutual Friend (no. 12), April 1865

Training in the making of lines was seen as fundamental to a child's education (as it is to this day). Two advertisements for elementary textbooks demonstrate the stress the Victorian period placed on the foundational aspect of line work. In Hannah Bolton's First Drawing Book (advertised in Bleak House, no. 9, November 1852, p. 3.), drawing (or the drawn line) was seen as helping the schoolmaster give 'intelligent assistance to the scholar; and while training the hand will instruct the mind' [emphasis added]. An advertisement for Elementary Drawing Copy Books, (Figure 1.2) in the serial version of Dickens's Our Mutual Friend (no. 12, April 1865, p. 4) offered to help students simultaneously to learn drawing and to improve their writing. The book stresses line as the essential link between writing and drawing, image and words. It starts by instructing students to copy out the alphabet, so that they could learn 'the different kinds of lines by drawing Italian letters', and ends by having them draw animals and insects. Drawing helped structure the alphabet, while the alphabet provided skill in drawing. As the student progressed, both image and text became more firmly linked, with children learning to associate the material practice of writing with its content.⁹

In these elementary school copybooks textual literacy gave rise to visual literacy, and vice versa. Drawing was linked to calligraphy, calligraphy to words and words to printed text, while images created a visual continuum and an awareness of the value of the line as graphic expression.¹⁰ This stress on the expression and mutability of line-work - for both image and word was necessary in a period when the records of commerce, and communication itself, depended upon fine penmanship and draftsmanship. Pen and pencil were essential tools whether for writing, drawing or account-keeping, and in magazines like Punch the caricature of the clerk, with quill in hand and spares behind the ear, became a stock figure. Charles Lamb, a clerk himself, noted that he lived within a 'co-brethren of the quill'.¹¹ Indeed a number of essayists, writers, and writing experts of the period came from a similar commercial 'quill' background: Leigh Hunt had been a clerk and Lewis Wallace a copyist, while Charles Dickens had been an exponent of shorthand as a journalist. J. O. Westwood was both an articled clerk and a zoological draftsman, and became a well-known expert on scriptural palaeography through works like Palaeographia Sacra Pictoria (1843).¹²

Advertisements and books throughout the century helped promote, and gender, these skills. The Domestic Copy Book for Girls taught the proper woman's hand for writing letters, order forms and housekeeping accounts, while guides, such as Business Writing and Pitman's Commercial Copy Books taught a masculine hand for commercial work. Gilbert Malcolm Sproat noted in his 1870 text Education of the Rural Poor that the primary skill to be taught in school, above even reading and arithmetic, was writing: 'good handwriting is perhaps the most immediately valuable accomplishment for middle-class boys at their start in life'.¹³ Robert Braithwaite Martineau's painting of 1852, entitled Kit's Writing Lesson (Figure 1.3), illustrates this point, with Kit, from Dickens's The Old Curiosity Shop, shown labouring over a copybook, doggedly attempting to develop that prerequisite to success, an accomplished 'hand'.

A rise in 'schools of writing', and of various hand styles (legal, civil service, business, bookkeeping), attempted to meet the demand that developed throughout the century for faster and more legible handwriting. Round-hand and copper-plate styles developed in response to commercial needs, and systems of writing such as the 'Spencerian System', in the USA the American standard for a hundred years - helped to encode a standard graphics for business hands. These systems also stressed a stylistic conformity meant to control individuality.¹⁴

1.3 Robert Braithwaite Martineau, Kit's Writing Lesson, 1852

Drawing, in turn, was seen as an essential skill for mechanics, draftsmen, artisans, scientific illustrators (the archaeologist Howard Carter's initial duties were as an expedition artist), navigators and engineers, and in military training. James McNeil Whistler was enrolled in a topographical drawing class as part of his studies at West Point, and worked as an etcher with the US Coast and Geodetic Survey. Navigational and cadet copybooks, as Vivian Crellin has noted, combined training in handwriting with technical diagram drawing, artistic drawing, copying of mathematical figures and calculations, and painting.¹⁵ Travel books, such as Elisha Kent Kane's Arctic Explorations (1856) and Fridtjof Nansen's Farthest North (1898), stressed that the illustrations and maps had been drawn by the authors themselves, thus linking text to visual accuracy and realism.¹⁶

Popular educational magazines and journals from the period, like The Popular Educator (1853; revised c. 1877) and The Universal Instructor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Shared lines: pen and pencil as trace
• 2 The hieroglyphic image
• 3 The art of seeing: Dickens in the visual market
• 4 Portraits of the author
• 5 The empty biscuit tin
• Conclusion
• Select bibliography
• Index