The Plot Thickens

Illustrated Victorian Serial Fiction from Dickens to Du Maurier

Mary Elizabeth Leighton, Lisa Surridge

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780821446492
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In the early 1800s, books were largely unillustrated. By the 1830s and 1840s, however, innovations in wood- and steel-engraving techniques changed how Victorian readers consumed and conceptualized fiction. A new type of novel was born, often published in serial form, one that melded text and image as partners in meaning-making.

These illustrated serial novels offered Victorians a reading experience that was both verbal and visual, based on complex effects of flash-forward and flashback as the placement of illustrations revealed or recalled significant story elements. Victorians' experience of what are now canonical novels thus differed markedly from that of modern readers, who are accustomed to reading single volumes with minimal illustration. Even if modern editions do reproduce illustrations, these do not appear as originally laid out. Modern readers therefore lose a crucial aspect of how Victorians understood plot—as a story delivered in both words and images, over time, and with illustrations playing a key role.

In The Plot Thickens, Mary Elizabeth Leighton and Lisa Surridge uncover this overlooked narrative role of illustrations within Victorian serial fiction. They reveal the intricacy and richness of the form and push us to reconsider our notions of illustration, visual culture, narration, and reading practices in nineteenth-century Britain.

Index

Ackermann, Rudolph, 5

Acts and Monuments. See Book of Martyrs

Adam Bede (Eliot), 11–12, 159, 160–61

Adams, Charles Warren: The Notting Hill Mystery, 77, 205, 208–23, 239

Adelphi Theatre, 48, 113, 291n21

adultery, 223, 225, 230

advance organizers, 23

Adventures of Philip, The (Thackeray), 118, 276, 285n97

advertisements, 9, 14, 56–58, 282n65

Ainsworth, William Harrison, 2; Crichton, 287n11; Jack Sheppard, 6, 40–49; The Miser’s Daughter, 281n44; Old Saint Paul’s, 289n6; reputation, 289n5; Rookwood, 285n102; The Tower of London, 89, 94, 95–114; Windsor Castle, 289n6. See also under individual novels

albums, 254–56, 262, 268

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Carroll), 7

Allen, Grant, 301n19

Allingham, Helen. See Paterson, Helen

Allingham, Philip V., 68, 137

Allingham, William, 250; The Music Master, 6, 136, 160, 299n5

All the Year Round (ed. Dickens), 7–8, 76, 78, 89, 95, 133

almanacs, comic, 5

American Civil War, 150

American Notes (Dickens), 54

Amigoni, David, 52

anachronism, playful, 124

analepsis, definition of, 23–25

analeptic reading practices, 37, 40

anatomical accuracy in illustration, 8

Andersen, Hans Christian, 57

Anderson, Benedict, 253

Anglers of the Dove, The (Martineau): Millais’s illustrations, 90–92

animal-human boundary, 226, 236–37, 245–47

annuals, 5, 18, 51

Appleton, Daniel (publisher), 144

Apsley House, 120

aquatints, colored, 5

Arabian Nights, The, 57

Archer, Thomas, 293n56

Argosy, 2, 7, 223, 225, 226

Ariosto, Ludovico, 301n21

Armstrong, Nancy, 158, 161

art, Dutch, 11–12, 159, 293n1

art books, 302n28

artifacts, historical, 90, 125; images of, 35, 44, 90, 98, 112, 125

artists: conditions for, 15; as equal partners with writers, 5. See also author-artist collaboration; illustrators

Athenaeum, 124

Atlantic Monthly, 223

Aurora Floyd (Braddon), 205, 226

author-artis...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction. Material Matters: The Illustrated Victorian Serial Novel
• One: Imagining the Self: Illustration and the Technology of Selfhood in David Copperfield and Cousin Phillis
• Two: Picturing the Past: Illustration and the Making of History in The Tower of London, Vanity Fair, and A Tale of Two Cities
• Three: Hallowing the Everyday: Illustration and Realism in Wives and Daughters, Mistress and Maid, and The Small House at Allington
• Four: Arousing the Nerves: Illustration and Sensation in The Notting Hill Mystery, Griffith Gaunt, and The Law and the Lady
• Five: From Peter Ibbetson to Pickwick and Back: The Lives and Afterlives of Illustrated Victorian Serials
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index