Caricature

In its theatricality, caricature-style book illustration approximates the tableau style popular in the nineteenth century. This chapter examines book illustrations by George Cruikshank, Phiz, Richard Doyle, John Leech, and Robert Cruikshank that, like tableaux, capture a dramatic moment in works by Dickens, Ainsworth, and Thackeray. With lighting, props, clever casting, and detail-laden backdrops, the caricaturists staged scenes ranging from the sensational to the sentimental, from the deeply psychological to the broadly comic. “Caricature: A Theatrical Development” adds two Victorian author-illustrators to this list of recognized caricaturists. Better known as an author than an illustrator, William Makepeace Thackeray designed theatrical pictorial capital letters, vignettes, tailpieces, and full-page engravings for his best-known Vanity Fair (1848) and cast his heroine Becky Sharp in various stage roles. To dramatize Alice’s transformations, Lewis Carroll recalled popular caricature techniques in his illustrations for the first version of Alice in Wonderland (1865) entitled Alice’s Adventures Underground(1864) at a time when realistic illustration held sway. This chapter also examines artistic limitations and scandals (e.g. Robert Seymour’s suicide, Cruikshank’s claim of authoring Dickens’s works) that led to a dismissal or devaluation of the caricaturists and a privileging of the Academy trained artists who entered the field of illustration in the 1850s.

Conclusion

The conclusion looks forward from the Victorian illustrated book to the “graphic classics,” a form of modern popular culture that is arguably the heir of the Victorian illustrated book. Canonical texts adapted into graphic novel format are inheritors of the aesthetic conventions of caricature and realism, reshaped in a hyper-modern form to appeal to twenty-first-century readers. The chapter explores parallels between the serial and the comic book. It surveys graphic novel adaptations of nineteenth-century novels by Jane Austen, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Charles Dickens, and Anthony Trollope as well as Neo-Victorian graphic novels (e.g. League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) and original Victorian-themed graphic novels (e.g. Batman Noël). The conclusion focuses on two important Victorian illustrated books—Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1838) and Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1865)—to demonstrate how graphic novel adaptation is reviving a genre that a century before recognized pictures play a central role in plot and character development. This chapter foregrounds author-illustrator Will Eisner, the father of the graphic novel and author-illustrator of Fagin the Jew (2003), for his direct challenge to a religious and ethnic stereotype that Dickens and Cruikshank develop in Oliver Twist and Du Maurier carries into Trilby.

Realism, Victorian Material Culture, and the Enduring Caricature Tradition

By the mid-nineteenth century, the aesthetics of the Victorian illustrated book were changing. The public desired artistic book illustration that could simulate the lifelike quality of photography. “Realism, Victorian Material Culture, and the Enduring Caricature Tradition” frames the realistic school of illustration, commonly referred to as the Sixties, with the Great Exhibition of 1851; this first ever world’s fair of culture and industry stimulated production of beautiful objects, including books with decorative bindings, culminating in a richly illustrated exhibition catalogue in a representational style (also referred to as realism or naturalism) in vogue from the 1850s–1870s. Foremost, this chapter examines how the creative vision of the caricaturists underpins the achievement of some Sixties artists, notably Fred Barnard and J. (James) Mahoney, who fleshed out inventive caricature designs to suit popular taste for the Household Edition of Dickens’s works. We witness this same kind of revision of the caricature tradition in Alice in Wonderland (1865). To appeal to middle-class consumers of the 1860s, John Tenniel refashioned Carroll’s caricature-style illustrations by adding domestic interiors and landscape details, realistically recreating Carroll’s social caricatures.

Caricature and Realism

At the fin de siècle, the Victorian illustrated book experienced what some critics consider a decline and others call a third period of development. “Caricature and Realism” examines the validity of both viewpoints. Publishing trends and intertwining economic and aesthetic factors led to the decline of newly released, large-circulation fiction during the final decades of the nineteenth century in England. These include the waning of serial fiction, cost factors, a rise in literacy, the changing nature of the novel, new developments in illustration, and competition from other media. However, the Victorian illustrated book thrived in several areas—certain serial formats, artists’ books, children’s literature, and the U.S. market—and in some of these forms of material culture, we witness a reengagement with the caricature tradition as well as a continuation of the representational school. This chapter surveys late Victorian illustrated fiction marketed to different audiences according to social class, age, gender, and nation. This chapter also foregrounds two fin-de-siècle author-illustrators—Beatrix Potter, best known for The Tale of Peter Rabbit, and George Du Maurier, who gained fame with Trilby—to demonstrate continuity in the arc of the illustrated book and a media frenzy of Pickwickian magnitude.

The Pickwick Papers and the Rise of the Serial

Beginning in April 1836 and concluding with a double number in November 1837, Charles Dickens’s The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club—a sequence of comic adventures with caricature-style illustrations initially by Robert Seymour and subsequently by Hablot Knight Browne (Phiz)—came out in nineteen illustrated instalments for the cost of a shilling each. An unprecedented publishing phenomenon, Pickwick Papers attracted fans across the social classes, generated a host of Pickwick-related products, and earned glowing reviews. “The Pickwick Papers and the Rise of the Serial” offers a synthetic reading of reviews by Dickens’s contemporaries and work by past and recent critics who have acknowledged Pickwick’s importance to the rise of the illustrated serial. Chapter one examines interwoven factors that contributed to Pickwick’s popularity, including the growth of commodity culture, a rise in literacy, new printing technologies, serialization, and the appeal of reading pictures, particularly humorous ones. The blend of comic appeal, theatricality, and social commentary led to the serial’s success, and, in the process, created a mass market for new fiction with illustration.

Introduction

This introduction presents Golden’s methodological approach to connect illustrative styles across decades, genres, and national borders to offer a new framework for viewing the arc of a vibrant genre. Across this chronological sweep from the serial to the graphic novel, illustrative styles of caricature and realism are applauded, scorned, refashioned, revaluated, maintained, and revised. This introduction lays out how this study differs from, builds upon, and complements previous examinations of the Victorian illustrated book by providing a single-authored, sustained record of the illustrated book from the vantage point of the genre’s evolving aesthetics, paying particular attention to material culture. The introduction provides summaries of the book’s four body chapters and conclusion. The introduction concludes with an examination of important antecedents of the Victorian illustrated book—including the classical concept of ut pictura poesis, medieval manuscripts, and eighteenth-century graphic satire and caricature—all of which created an audience for the Victorian illustrated book, which, in turn reimagines techniques that resurface from these earlier dual art forms.