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MOVING EYES, SHIFTING MINDS: THE HORIZON OF
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ILDIKO CSILLA OLASZ

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MOVING EYES, SHIFTING‘ MINDS:
THE HORIZON OF EXPECTATIONS IN THE VERBAL AND VISUAL RECEPTION
OF MID- AND LATE-VICTORIAN ILLUSTRATED NOVELS
By

Ildiko Csilla Olasz

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulﬁllment of the requirements
for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
English

2008

ABSTRACT
MOVING EYES, SHIFTING MINDS:
THE HORIZON OF EXPECTATIONS IN THE VERBAL AND VISUAL RECEPTION
OF MID- AND LATE-VICTORIAN ILLUSTRATED NOVELS
By I
lldiko Csilla Olasz

This dissertation project complicates and enriches the current debate in reception
studies and textual criticism by concentrating on the inﬂuence William Makepeace
Thackeray, Thomas Hardy and Henry James had on the reception of their novels. Relying
on critical reviews, personal letters and diaries, the project demonstrates that the authors’
choices during the illustration process of the ﬁrst edition of their works reﬂect their
understanding of audience expectations. Consequently, my project effectively questions
the exclusivity of the verbal text in reception studies and elucidates some of the hidden
aspects of the contemporary reception of literary works.

My methodology discussion revisits the Jaussian notion of the horizon of
expectations by comparing the social and ethical role of literature during different periods
of the Victorian era, and by examining the contemporary dynamics between the
expanding literary audience, improving printing technology and increasing interest in all
things visual. Upholding the precedence of visual perception, I demonstrate that Matei
Calinescu’s notion of rereading represents the key to understanding how visual reception
affects literary reception whenever the discrepancy between text and illustrations displays
a visible shiﬁ. By observing the readers’ appreciation of Thackeray’s illustrations that
, providea comic relief for the harsh irony of the text in Vanity Fair, I emphasize the effect

of a thematic and stylistic unity between text and illustration. In contrast, Hardy’s The

Return of the Native and James’s Washington Square showcase the possible causes and
effects of dissonance between text and illustration. Hardy supervised Arthur Hopkins’s
illustration of the characters closely, but did not monitor the “visualization” of natural
environment, Egdon Heath, which permitted the inﬁltration of Japanese symbolism that
counteracted Hardy’s naturalism and fatalism. J ames’s confession of having written the
text “in crude deﬁance of the illustrator” demonstrates the inﬂuence of the emerging
authorial self-conﬁdence on the reception of prom-modernist literary work and,
ultimately, on the late-Victorian writer-audience relationship. Hence, my project provides
valuable insight into the forces that shape the literary transformation from Victorian
didacticism to modernist self-distancing, and from reception processes guided by the
author to the reading difﬁculties brought about by the intentional ambiguity of late-

Victorian texts.

Copyright by
ILDIKO CSILLA OLASZ

2008

To Arpad and Bea'

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to express my gratitude to the people who guided me through the
different aspects of my research and helped me combine my ﬁndings into a coherent
dissertation. I would especially like to thank my advisor, Dr. Scott Juengel, for his
commitment and ceaseless support. His advice and encouragement helped me through the
complexity of this interdisciplinary project and showed me a wonderful model of guiding
students.

I am also very grateful for the support and time of my dissertation committee and
I would like to thank Dr. Judith Stoddart and Dr. Sheila Teahan for their valuable insights
into British and American literature, and Dr. Phylis Floyd for her patience in guiding a
literary researcher through the intricacies of art criticism.

I am also indebted to Dr. Jennifer Nichols and Dr. Eileen Roraback for their
assistance and support on and oﬁ‘ campus.

I wish to thank the Michigan State University College of Arts and Letters for the
SCRAM Fellowship that gave me access to primary materials that would have otherwise
been difﬁcult to obtain.

Finally, I would like to thank my family. The faith that my husband, Arpad, had
in me and the warm welcomes that I received from my daughter, Bea, after long days of

work were what made this project ultimately possible.

vi

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES .......................................................................................................... vii
INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................................. 1
CHAPTER 1. “ONE CAN ONLY REREAD A BOOK”: EXPECTATIONS AND
RECEPTION IN LITERATURE AND VISUAL ARTS ..................................... 15
1.1. The Author and the Audience’s Horizon of Expectations ........................... 15
1.2. Aim and Effect in Text Illustration .............................................................. 21
1.3. Nineteenth-Century Publication Processes and Circulation ........................ 32
CHAPTER 2. “LET US HAVE AT THEM”: SATIRICAL UNITY IN WILLIAM
MAKEPEACE THACKERAY’S VANITY FAIR ......... '. ...................................... 46
2.1. Victorian Didacticism and Thackeray’s Social Satire ................................. 46
2.2. Verbal Sarcasm and Visual Irony ................................................................ 61
2.3. The Writer/Illustrator’s Expectations and the Readers’ Reception ............ 81

CHAPTER 3. “LIKELY TO INCREASE THE READER’S INTEREST”:
CARTOGRAPHIC REALISM AND SYMBOLIC IMAGING IN

THOMAS HARDY’S THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE ..................................... 94
3.1. Hardy’s Realism and F atalism ..................................................................... 94
3.2. The Fictional Wessex and Visual Symbolism ........................................... 109
3.3. Artistic Efforts and Reception Effects ....................................................... 121

CHAPTER 4. “WRITTEN IN CRUDE DEFIANCE OF THE ILLUSTRATOR”:
AMBIGUITY AND CONFUSION IN HENRY JAMES’ WASHINGTON

SQUARE ............................................................................................................. 136
4.1. James’s Proto-Modernism and Ludic Reading .......................... . ................ 136
4.2. Verbal Characterization and Visual Focus ................................................. 157
4.3. Artistic Freedom and Audience Alienation ............................................... 171
CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................... 190
WORKS CITED ............................................................................................................. 194

vii

Fig.
Fig.
Fig.
Fig.
Fig.
Fig.
Fig.
Fig.
Fig.
Fig.

Fig.

Fig.

Fig.

1.1.

1.2.

1.3.

1.4.

1.5.

1.6.

1.7.

1.9.

1.10.

1.11.

1.12.

1.13.

Fig. 2.1.

Fig. 2.2.

Fig. 2.3.

Fig. 2.4.

Fig. 2.5.

Fig. 2.6.

Fig. 2.7.

Fig. 2.8.

LIST OF FIGURES

William Blake’s “The Voice of the Ancient Bard” .......................................... 2
Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Knight’s Tale” .................................................... 23
William Makepeace Thackeray’s vignette initial for The Virginians ............. 25
, Charles Reade’s It Is Never Too Late to Mend ............................................... 28
Geoﬁrey Chaucer’s The Story of the Glittering Plain .................................... 31
Frontispiece to The Reverberator ................................................................... 31
Frontispiece to The Portrait of a Lady ............................................................ 31
Augustus Leopold Egg’s Travelling Companions .......................................... 35
George Halse’s Young England ...................................................................... 35
Covers of The Illustrated London News from 1855 and 1870 ........................ 41
Henry Mayhew’ s 1851 or The Adventures of Mr. and Mrs. Sandboys
and Family ...................................................................................................... 42
The Greatest Plague of Life ............................................................................ 42
Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D ’Urbervilles .................................................... 44
Cover page for Thackeray’s Vanity Fair ........................................................ 62
Title page of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair ............................................................ 63
Miss Pinkerton and Miss Jemima ................................................................... 64
Becky leaves the boarding school ................................................................... 65
Servants listening to music ............................................................................. 66
Amelia leaves the party ................................................................................... 67
Amelia without her son ................................................................................... 68
Amelia admired by the Secretary .................................................................... 69

viii

Fig. 2.9.

Fig. 2.10.
Fig. 2.11.
Fig. 2.12.
Fig. 2.13.
Fig. 2.14.
Fig. 2.15.
Fig. 2.16.
Fig. 2.17.
Fig. 2.18.
Fig. 2.19.
Fig. 2.20.
Fig. 2.21.

Fig. 2.22.

Fig. 3.1.
Fig. 3.2.
Fig. 3.3.
Fig. 3.4.
Fig. 3.5.
Fig. 3.6.
Fig. 3.7.
Fig. 3.8.

Fig. 3.9.

Dobbin reads Amelia’s letter .......................................................................... 70
Becky meets Sir Pitt Crawley ......................................................................... 72
Becky reveals the secret about George ........................................................... 73
Vignette initial representing Becky ﬁshing .................................................... 74
Vignette initial with Dobbin ﬁghting Cuff ..................................................... 75
Vignette initial with Sir Pitt Crawley .............................................................. 76
Vignette initial with Becky crying .................................................................. 77
Briggs and Firkin eavesdropping .................................................................... 79
William Makepeace Thackeray’s The Snobs of England ............................... 80
Vignette initial with pastoral setting ............................................................... 81
Vignette initial with narrator ........................................................................... 82
Jones reading Vanity Fair ............................................................................... 84
Final illustration in Vanity Fair ...................................................................... 85
Contemporary illustrations by Leech .................................. 88
Thomas Hardy’s F or ﬁom the Modding Crowd ............................................. 95
Hardy’s map of Wessex ................................................................................ 101
Clym Yeobright, Timothy Fairway, Granfer Cantle and others ................... 109
Hardy’s sketches for The Return of the Native illustration ........................... 110
Night scene .................................................................................................... 111
Christian Cantle and Wildeve throwing dice ................................................ 111
Eustacia waiting ............................................................................................ 112
Ukiyo-e images by Utagawa Kunioshi and Toyokuni Kunisada .................. 114
Illustrations of women by Fred S. Walker and G. L. Seymour ..................... 116

Fig. 3.10.

Fig. 3.11.

Fig. 3.12.
Fig. 3.13.

Fig. 3.14.

Fig. 4.1.
Fig. 4.2.
Fig. 4.3.
Fig. 4.4.
Fig. 4.5.
Fig. 4.6.
Fig. 4.7.
Fig. 4.8.

Fig. 4.9.

Eustacia visits Clym ...................................................................................... 1 17

Utagawa Hiroshige’s The Poet Basho’s Memorial Hermitage on

subakiyama Hill by the Sekiguchi Aqueduct ................................................. 1 l7
Eustacia in her living room .................................................. 118
Original and eastern copy of The Annunciation ............................................ 120
Hardy’s map of Egdon Heath ....................................................................... 124
Frontispiece and title page of Henry James’s Washington Square ............... 159
Morris and Dr. Sloper ................................................................................... 163
Morris plays the piano .................................................................................. 164
Catherine and Morris .................................................................................... 165
Vignette of Morris ......................................................................................... 166
Vignette of Dr. Sloper and Catherine ........................................................... 167
Catherine and Mrs. Penniman ....................................................................... 169
Vignette of a woman ..................................................... . ................................ 1 70
George du Maurier’s Trilby .......................................................................... 172

INTRODUCTION
A work can ‘occur’ only within a particular context, one that, precisely, allows it to work,
that is to transform the very relations that bring about the encounter with art
in the first place. (Krzysztof Ziarek)

It may be helpful to think of the readership not as an identiﬁable and
potentially measurable group of people, but as a concept, as a community imagined by
(principally) editors who in the period before the introduction
of reliable research techniques thereby hoped to stabilize and extend
the circulations of their titles. (Aled Jones)

It took decades for reception studies to escape the domination of the author in
literary criticism, and I believe it is time that we reintroduce the author along with some
other contributors, such as the publishers, editors and illustrators. In his Writers, Readers
and Reputations: Literary Life in Britain 1870-1918 published in 2006, Philip Waller

devotes a substantial passage to the elucidation of the social tactics some the authors of

this period used to elicit favorable reception of their works by fellow authors and critics.1
Demonstrating that these authors were not only aware of the contemporary reception
processes, but that they intuitively ventured into setting the stage for a positive reception,
is in itself an important milestone in the history of reception studies. My attention,
however, is directed towards the creative aspects of the publication process that allowed
the editors, and often the authors and the illustrators, to inﬂuence literary reception. My
purpose is to shed light on the role that contributors’ understanding of the audience’s
horizon of expectations played in the visual appearance of the literary work and
ultimately in the reception of the verbal text. In light of the last decades’ emphasis on

textual authenticity, such a revisitation of the role of the author yields a better

 

1 In part II of Chapter 4 “Reviews and Reviewers,” Waller analyzes the rise of the complementary copy
system reaching acquaintances as well as famous literary people, but he also refers to pre-arranged
interviews and extreme cases such as lunch invitations aimed to “clarify” the value of the work being
published (125-36).

understanding of what the ﬁrst audience encountered as the work and especially what
were the visual factors that inﬂuenced the reception process.

In Britain, the period that best exempliﬁes the surge of these visual factors in
literary reception is without a doubt the second half of the nineteenth century. During this
time illustrated literary editions became widespread. Nevertheless, recent reprints rarely
provide us the option to have a similarly visual experience as the contemporary audience
did. Textual critics and editors, such as Walter W. Greg, James Thorpe and Jerome J.
McGann, have been discussing for decades what constitutes the perfect copy-text for new

editions, yet in terms of illustrations, the line seems to be drawn very clearly: the original

illustrations are included only if they were created by the author of the text. 2

 

Fig. 1.1. William Blake’s “The Voice of the Ancient Bard.” Favorite Works of William
Blake (1: 14)

 

2 The textual criticism discussions build a unique connection between the author’s intentions and the
audience’s reception, however, their focus is directed more towards textual variants and verbal editing
choices than visual appearance (see my discussion of Walter W. Greg, G. Thomas Tanselle, James Thorpe
and Jerome J. McGann later in the Introduction).

Recent editions of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience (such as
Princeton, 1994; Thames and Hudson, 2001; Tate, 2007; PO Classics, 2007), for
example, include the full-page renderings of the texts and illustrations (see Fig. 1.1). In
such editions, the reader gains access to the illustrated version of the poems and he/she
has an opportunity to witness the interaction between the text and image in a way similar
to the experience of the eighteenth-century audience. These publications aim to keep
Blake’s polymath image intact by maintaining two of his three roles: he is the author of
the text and the illustrator, even if he cannot be the publisher anymore. William
Makepeace Thackeray, on the other hand, is nowadays considered to be writer above all
and although the value of his illustrations is indisputable, not all editors choose to publish
his texts along with his illustrations. Vanity Fair, for example, has sometimes appeared
with full-page illustrations, vignettes and initials (such as the Norton edition of 1994 and
the Barnes and Noble edition of 2005), while other editions contain only the ﬁrll-page
illustrations with or without the captions or no illustration at all. The key element here is
the sheer number of literary texts which are not accompanied by the illustrations of their
ﬁrst edition. We have to remember that while the present-day reproductions of
nineteenth-century novels are rarely illustrated except for the cover, their ﬁrst editions
were oftentimes richly illustrated and those illustrations visually inﬂuenced the reception
of the text. Unlike new editions, which usually feature anachronistic images, the ﬁrst
illustrations of novels were special ordered for the given publication so that the

relationship between verbal text and visual image was quite different from most of their

illustrated editions nowadays.3 The reception of these illustrations contributed to the

 

The causes of anachronistic imagery are to be found in the need for emotional appeal: highly sentimental

overall reception of the ﬁrst edition, which, in turn, had a large impact on the overall
history of the work and its readership. For a better understanding of the contemporary
reception of nineteenth-century illustrated novels, we need to analyze in depth how that
ﬁrst reception was shaped by the physical appearance of the text.

I base my project on the assumption that literary reception is always ﬁrst and
foremost visual. In fact, as many critics argue, the verbal—visual dichotomy is more an
artiﬁcial construct than reality. Mieke Bal maintains that the duality “word and image”

prevents us from understanding these aspects as closely related: it underlines the

differences and suppresses the similarities (0n Looking and Reading 286).4 This
approach is especially thought-provoking since in the illustrated texts, the reading of the
words and the viewing of the images become an integral part of the same reception
process. Samuel Edgerton claims that the Guttenberg Galaxy effect is not the
transformation of a visual culture into a word culture, but rather into “a whole new kind
of ‘image culture’” (190). The blurring of the boundaries between the two spheres, that of
the images on the one hand and that of the visual appearance of words on the other, is
best seen in illustrated texts, where the two reception processes intersect each other. My
project analyzes how the visual appearance of the ﬁrst editions shaped the reception of
the text, while the texts themselves were at the nexus of aesthetic work by the author and
illustrator, and the ﬁnancial goals of the editor and publisher. The chosen period, the

second half of the nineteenth century, witnessed a major shift in the relationships between

 

paintings are often used to raise the market value of the book, even if they were created 100-200 years
before the novel takes place. In cases such as the 1994 Norton edition of Vanity Fair with the cover image
of George Morland’s Fruits of Early Industry and Economy, a 1789 painting depicting a blissful family in
domestic environment, the visual image creates a false sense of contemporary design, clothes and gestures
and it often counteracts the theme and style of the text.

these individuals, when both literary and art works saw a transformation from the didactic
and moralistic to the artistic and symbolic: “the writers of the earlier part of Victoria’s
reign,” as Amy Cruse observes, “regarded the telling of a story as the main business of a
novelist, and . . . the new school treated [the story] as subordinate to the setting forward
of a philosophic theory and the minute dissection of character and motive” (The
Victorians 282-283). This ‘telling of a story’ relied heavily on the early and mid-
nineteenth-century view of the social role of the intelligentsia and it envisioned the writer
as an educator of society: the writer’s utmost aspiration was to choose the most useﬁrl
message for his/her contemporaries and deliver that through the most artistic, yet
comprehensible style possible; and the readers’ objective was to entertain themselves
while being thus educated. These goals, however, faded to a certain extent toward the end
of the century, when mass-literacy increased and the writer was no longer designated
mainly as an educator of society. During any period of history, literary authors and artists
strived for innovations; nevertheless, it is with the nineteenthécentury increase of the
number of readers/viewers and authors, that literature and the arts ventured even further
into new territories. The rise of the audience led to authors redeﬁning their rapport with
traditional trends and growing more artistically independent. What is uniquely interesting
in this period is the mode in which each of the two artistic disciplines, literature and
drawing, undergo this transformation and how the growing discrepancy between the two
styles impacts the reception of illustrated novels and ultimately the role of illustrations in
the publication of ﬁction.

The scope of my project is to reveal the text—illustration dynamic in a few cases

 

4
In fact, she refers to the theatre to prove that the word—image unity exists, but goes unnoticed in non-
performing arts (Bal 0n Looking and Reading 313).

of nineteenth-century illustrated literary publications and, analyzing some of the recorded

reader reﬂections, call attention to the contemporary publication procedures and

particular editing processes which shaped the audience’s reception of these ﬁrst editions.5
First we need to realize that when we refer to the audience, editor and writer, the term
‘reception’ denotes slightly different aspects for each: while literary studies concentrate
on the aesthetic reception experienced by the audience, editors and writers are often
(also) interested in the ﬁnancial outcome and the relationship between these two aspects
is complex. The sales ﬁgures of the periodicals containing the serial parts of several
literary works cannot reﬂect the ﬁnancial success of any one work, but even the book
sales ﬁgures are inconclusive. High sales ﬁgures could reﬂect the favorable aesthetic
reception of a high-class work or the success of pulp ﬁction. In some cases such numbers
denote only that the work is part of the contemporary literary norm and the members of
certain social groups are expected to buy it, but we cannot deduce that all of them were
read. On the other end of the spectrum, low sales ﬁgures could suggest an unfavorable
aesthetic reception or simply demonstrate any of the multitudes of possible reasons, such
as poor advertising or expensive publishing. My project examines a certain intersection
of the aesthetic and ﬁnancial aspects in the editors’ and writers’ expectations as well as
their efforts to improve these based on their understanding of and expectations for the
audience’s reception.

Before moving to the study of these individual cases, we have to consider some of

 

5 I would like to take a moment to clarify that while the term ‘editing process’ is not the most accurate
denotation of the choices made in the visual appearance of a literary publication, it seems the most
unambiguous. The term ‘publication process’ undeniably includes the printing process, and the term
‘editorial process’ focuses more on the editor’s duties and thus emphasizes textual editing. The term
‘editing process’ is also more useful for this project due to its gerund, which emphasizes more that it

the theoretical and methodological issues which have proved problematic in similar
projects. The contemporary aesthetic reception of the ﬁrst edition of any novel is usually
examined in detail, although most critics admit that the limited access to the
contemporary records of the readers’ reﬂections inhibits a historically exhaustive study.
The only feasible option, relying on printed literary reviews and surviving diaries and
letters, directs our attention to a very speciﬁc section of the contemporary audience
encompassing only those who were either paid to review literary works or wealthy
enough to spend time on such reﬂections. Not capturing the everyday readers’ reﬂections
and insisting on the analysis of critical reviews can lead to a fallacy that jeopardizes the
historical validity of a reception study. As Richard D. Altick emphasizes, “vox critici is
by no means vox populi. As T ait's Edinburgh Magazine remarked in January 1847, ‘the
facts’ (that is, the discrepancy between the critical consensus and the testimony of the
sales ﬁgures) ‘merely show that book-buyers and reviewers do not always entertain
similar opinions’” (120). In fact, with the spread of the novel came a certain kind of
popularization as well, since a larger part of the audience grew to disregard the views of
the critics, who claimed to uphold the ‘traditionally correct’ way of reading and
understanding literary works. On the other hand, letters and diaries represent their own
challenges: examples such as the literary reﬂections of Lady Frederick Cavendish and
Mary Gladstone are too sporadic to be reliable and too socially limited to be
representative enough of the overall readership. The majority of the audience did not join
literary discourses, so the number of the surviving reﬂections seems insigniﬁcant when

compared with the overall number of readers suggested by the sales ﬁgures. This

 

involves a course of action. My project highlights how the editing process for illustrated novels involved
many stages and many contributors—including the author.

situation is ﬁrrther complicated by the fact that in the second half of the nineteenth
century, both periodical and book editions were largely available in libraries and through

interpersonal loans, so even circulation numbers cannot easily pinpoint how many people

read a given work.6 Similar numbers in the history of daily periodicals suggest that there
were on average 20 readers per newspaper before the stamp act changes of 1855 and for
Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son published in 1846-1848 there were roughly 15
readers per copy (Altick 114). Moreover, such an analysis of the reception based on the
publication and circulation data would very much depend on location and time frame, so
the number of books sold could mean different reception in the case of Vanity Fair ﬁrst
published in 1847 in Britain and Henry James’s Washington Square, which appeared in
1880 both in Britain and the United States. My project demonstrates that, in spite of these
obstacles, there are certain aspects of the nineteenth-century reception dynamic that we
can study based on surviving materials. The inﬂuences on the visual appearance of these
novels can often be documented and by analyzing the author’s role in the editing process,
we can trace the sequence of several expectations and reception processes: the audience’s
expectations, the writer’s understanding of these expectations, his/her added expectations,
and the audience’s ﬁnal reception.

The close connection between expectations and reception was appropriately
ascertained as early as 1970, when Hans Robert J auss presented his theory of the horizon
of expectations. His approach, as I explain in Chapter 1, takes into account the “literary

experience” of the audience and considers the reception of literary works in relationship

 

6 An interesting proof for the nineteenth-century increase of interpersonal loans is the fact that libraries
sometimes could not face the demands. John Millais complained in 1852 that he heard from Holman Hunt
that Thackeray’s The History of Henry Esmond was ‘splendid,’ but he could not get a copy hour the library
(Cruse, The Victorians 269).

to the readers’ preexisting expectations (Toward an Aesthetic 22). Jauss focuses both on
the aesthetic and historical facet of reception:
The aesthetic implication lies in the fact that the ﬁrst reception of a work

by the reader includes a test of its aesthetic value in comparison with
works already read. The obvious historical implication of this is that the
understanding of the ﬁrst reader will be sustained and enriched in a chain
of receptions from generation to generation; in this way the historical
signiﬁcance of a work will be decided and its aesthetic value made
evident. (20)

Although Jauss views the reception of a work as built up over time and does not seem to
focus on the subtleties of reception processes taking place during the ﬁrst months or years
of the publication, his theory seems especially relevant when we analyze the nexus
between audience expectations, publication process and audience reception around the
ﬁrst edition of any work. Jauss emphasizes the expectations that the audience generates
based on previous reading processes (involving both the writer’s earlier works and other
authors’ literary publications), yet what is even more interesting in the nineteenth century
is the mode in which these expectations inﬂuenced the editors’ and writers’ publication
. choices before the arrival of modern market research techniques and technologies.
Editors facing a new work to be published had to rely on their understanding of what the
audience’s expectations were and what their aesthetic reception (and ﬁnancial
determination) would probably be, and this understanding differed from person to person
as well as from case to case. For certain publications the editor decided upon the
publication choices, for others the writer stepped in with his/her own understanding of the
audience’s expectations and his/her expectations for the probable reception. Whether the
writer shaped the editing process or not, the choice reﬂected the understanding he/she had
about the audience’s expectations (both verbal and visual) and ultimately inﬂuenced the

reception of the text. Hence, the reception of the published work was molded by a select

number of people’s understanding of the contemporary horizon of expectations and their
expectations of readerly reception. Consequently, my project takes an alternative route to
the existing reception analyses, and the results—in combination with the analysis of
surviving records of readers’ reﬂectiOns—yield a unique insight into the complexity of the
nineteenth-century literary publication and reception processes. In order to identify the
role of the writer in the visual appearance of the published work and to analyze the
transformation of the authors’ understanding of the audience’s expectations during the
second half of the nineteenth century, I examine the editing process of three novels by
three different authors which are uniquely representative of the range of the period:
Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1847), Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native (1878) and
James’s Washington Square (1880).

My project spans only a few decades in order to illustrate the dichotomy between
the mid-nineteenth—century and the late-nineteenth—century author-audience dynanric. For
the mid-nineteenth-century period, Thackeray’s Vanity Fair preSents a great example of
both the author’s understanding of readerly expectations and his literary and artistic
efforts to meet these expectations. At the other end, in the 1870-803, Hardy’s The Return
of the Native and James’s Washington Square demonstrate how the author’s
understanding of the audience’s expectations can fail to positively inﬂuence the reception
of the work, regardless of their beliefs about the importance of illustrations. In each case,
I rely on the writer’s letters, contemporary reviews and the analysis of the text—
illustration dynamic in my effort to examine the expectations of the writer, the role of the
writer in the editing process, the editor’s and the illustrator’s and/or engraver’s role in the

publication process and the ensuing reception of the work by the general audience. Such

10

a study yields a better idea of how the visual appearance of mid-nineteenth-century
illustrated novels often exhibits didactic elements, and how the literary works published
only three decades later differed both in style and reception. The ﬁrst novel, Vanity Fair,
displays the writer’s close attention to the relationship between the text and the audience:
Thackeray chose his theme and style very self-consciously and, with the permission of
the editor, created his own illustrations for the novel. He studied drawing, although his
work was not as artistically accomplished as some of his contemporaries (such as John
Leech and George Cruikshank). Nevertheless, his decision to use his own illustrations
instead of those of a professional and his close monitoring of the engraving process
demonstrate that he wished to determine as much as possible the published form of the
novel. His understanding of the audience’s expectations and the resulting choices he
made thus became an important inﬂuencing factor in the favorable reception of the novel.
We know that the subject that Thackeray chose for Vanity Fair, the morality of young
women, was an important topic for the Victorian public, but his ironic style was a hard
nut to crack for his contemporaries. However, when we focus on the editing process and
the visual reception, it becomes apparent that he was conscious of the contemporary
concerns about challenging Victorian morals. Even if his illustrations were not regarded
as an artistic achievement, they were remembered for their consistency with the verbal
tone and appreciated for comically alleviating the pressure of the satire of the text.

On the other hand, The Return of the Native and Washington Square illustrate a
process and reception ﬁrndamentally different from those of Vanity Fair. Here, whether
the writer supervises the visual aspect of the editing process or not, the publication and

the resulting reception suggest another cause for unfavorable reception: the writers’

ll

artistic interests depart substantially from the didactic goals of the previous period, and
the text—illustration discrepancy deepens due to the authors’ interest in a unique artistic
voice and ﬁnding themes and styles that are not driven by social expectations, but rather
by a new-found sense of artistic ﬁ'eedom and self-awareness. Hardy had learned the
importance of the visual appearance of his texts after the publication of Far ﬁom the
Modding Crowd, and in the case of The Return of the Native he guided the illustration
process, almost inﬁinging on the artistic freedom of the illustrator, Arthur Hopkins: he
clariﬁed for him the role and importance of each character early on, and submitted to him
visual sketches regularly in order to conﬁrm what needed to be included in the illustration
of the passage and how the characters should be organized visually. In spite of all of
these efforts, the illustrations differed stylistically from the text and suggested a different
reading for the contemporary audience. Hardy’s description of the events and especially
the locations demonstrate a fatalistic belief in the environment shaping the characters’
lives without them being able to act against it. In the text there his a sense of loss of the
high-Victorian educational aims of literature: nobody learns from the past; moreover, fate
is unalterable. The images, however, reveal the late-nineteenth-century inﬂuence of
Japanese printmaking on Western visual arts and the sketchy style and symbolist
overtone in the visualization of the characters’ environment counteracts the verbal
depiction. The structural placement of the elements of the background often carries a
symbolic connotation of better ﬁnancial status and higher level of education or lower
social class and hard work, which are obliterated in the text by the designation of Egdon
Heath as a unique entity determining the characters’ fate. My analysis demonstrates that

the growing dissonance between modernist tendencies in literature and the visual arts led

12

to adverse reception in spite of the writer’s efforts to ensure verbal and visual
correspondence.

Finally, Washington Square illustrates what happens when the artistic aim for
freedom collides with lack of communication between the writer and the illustrator. The
diction seems very cautious and absolutely minimalist so much so that the reader is
puzzled by not ﬁnding the clarifying omniscient authority of previous decades, but rather
the controlling authority limiting access to what seem to be necessary details for the
elucidation of the meaning. The contemporary readers felt ambiguity not only in the
depiction of the heroine’s choices and rationale, but also in the overall tone of the text:
should the reader be educated about something (if so: about what?); should he/she be
entertained (if so: does it propose to be enjoyable? maybe, comic?) The illustrations only
ampliﬁed this sense through their apparent superﬁciality and lack of focus: there are
images that portray persons that cannot be located in the text and the ones that do reﬂect
on a passage from the novel fail to concentrate on the character that is in the center of
attention in the verbal depiction. The cultural transformation that took place during these
roughly three decades is probably best illustrated by the changes in writer—audience
relationship: by the 18803 the Victorian audience did not discard a novel for not
complying with the readerly expectations; the reviews and letters suggest instead that the
readers respected the exceptional artist in James, they just stopped buying and reading his
works due to what was considered their inaccessibility for the majority of the
contemporary readership. Even if J arnes’s confession that Washington Square was
“constructed in a crude deﬁance of the illustrator” (ctd. in Orrnond 392) is a symbol of

self-sufficiency and a precursor of the art-for-art’s-sake movement, the writer’s

l3

unhappiness with the audience’s self-distancing reveals an uneasiness that is reminiscent
of Victorian writerly expectations. In my project, this transformation of the artist’s role in
society will be further elucidated by the change in authorial tone in the writers’
communication with the editors which demonstrated more of a common ground between
editor and writer during the mid-nineteenth century and a growing sense of authorial self-
awareness later in the century.

In order to further elucidate how the interaction between the writer, editor and
illustrator and/or engraver shaped the publication, how the author’s and editor’s
understanding of the horizon of expectations and their expectations of the audience’s
reception inﬂuenced the appearance of the work and thus the reception itself, I will ﬁrst
set the theoretical framework by shedding light on the role of expectations. Then I
examine the Victorian publication processes, circulation ﬁgures and reading habits to
gain a better understanding of the milieu in which these signiﬁcant editor—author
negotiations took place. Finally, in the case-study chapters I will analyze the surviving
written communication of the authors with the editors, illustrators and engravers to show
how publication choices were made and reconsidered and what their effects were on

reception.

l4

CHAPTER 1
“ONE CAN ONLY REREAD A BOOK”:

EXPECTATIONS AND RECEPTION IN LITERATURE AND VISUAL ARTS

1.1 . The Author and the Audience’s Horizon of Expectations

In 1970, J auss built up his theory of reception by bringing together expectations
and reception. His argument that a new work “predisposes its audience to a very speciﬁc
kind of reception by announcements, overt and covert signals, familiar characteristics, or
implicit allusions” (Toward an Aesthetic 23) appears to support the authority of the
creator of the text, but that is not the case. Instead, his concept of the horizon of
expectations emphasized the role of the reader’s previous experience in interpreting these
signals. His attention to the inﬂuence of the general audience’s literary experience
brought reception studies closer to the understanding of the process of reception and
interpretation. His approach was groundbreaking in the history of literary criticism, yet it
remained in the realm of broad-spectrum analysis. He deﬁned reception as “the historical
life of the work in literature” (Toward an Aesthetic 73), and when he discussed “the
horizon of expectations of the literary experience of contemporary and later readers,
critics, and authors” (Toward an Aesthetic 22), he seemed to pay little attention to the
differences between geographical areas, historical divisions and individuals.

Consequently, many other theoreticians felt the need to further specify the role of the

contemporary community in the individual’s reception process.7 My project, however,

 

7 On the one end of the spectrum lies Stanley Fish, who, in an attempt to search for the rules that govern
the audience’s reception, reached the conclusion that there are “interpretive communities [that] share
strategies to assign their intentions” (Is There a Text 171) and that a literary institution “at any one time will
authorize only a ﬁnite number of interpretative strategies” since a new interpretation “must not only claim
to tell the truth about the work . . . but it must claim to make the work better” (Is There a Text 11, 342,
3 51). A slightly different approach is represented by Wolfgang Iser, who deﬁned the scope of the reader as

15

does not focus on the individual reader—community relationship, but rather on the author—
audience dynamic. For this purpose, the notion of the horizon of expectations proves
useful as it provides a way to account for the author’s role in the editing of the published
form and the visual aspect of the reception process that would have been otherwise
incomprehensible in reception studies.

Indeed, the author has usually been viewed as more of a hindrance in reception
studies due to the role that was traditionally assigned to him/her in the interpretation of

works, and many critics in the ﬁeld focused their attention on models of readers as the

only agents of the reception process.8 Other critics subverted the long-established model
of authorial intention/message and readerly decoding. The art critic Michael Baxandall
insisted that ‘intention’ does not stand for the artist’s psychological state or historical
background, but for an arrangement of facts in the viewer’s re-enactrnent (Patterns of
Intention 41). What the receiver believes the author ‘intended’ is largely determined by
what this receiver knows (or believes to know) about the author. In semiotics, Umberto

Eco redrafted the model of communication by claiming that during the reader’s decoding

 

the “elucidat[ion of] the potential meanings of a text” (The Act of Reading 22). On the other end of the
spectrum, we have literary and art critics who claimed the importance of the individual reader/viewer and
focus on the variety and historicity of individual receptions. Louise M. Rosenblatt argued that “[t]he
reading of any work of literature is, of necessity, an individual and unique occurrence involving the mind
and emotions of a particular reader” (xii). Norman Bryson drew attention to the fact that “possession of
codes of viewing is a process, not a given, and that members of groups acquire their familiarity with codes
of viewing, and their ability to operate those codes, to varying degrees” (“Art in Context” 34). In art
criticism, Michael Baxandall maintained that “[p]ersons' experiences with the picture will vary, no doubt;
we do bring to it differing cultural equipments and individual organizations, different knowledge and
assumptions, habits and skills of construction” (Words for Pictures 119-20).

These models of the reader are quintessential to each of these theories: Roland Barthes’s observer, for
instance, emphasizes how a certain group of readers know more about the creation of the work than the
others (156); Fish’s informed reader draws attention to the conventions set by the critical institutions that
guide reception (Is There a Text 48); and Jauss’s superreader conﬁrms the role of the community’s
expectations in the process of reception (Toward an Aesthetic l47)—to name only a few. In contrast, my
project focuses mainly on the author and make assumptions about reception based on surviving individual
responses in an effort to “combat,” as Bryson argues, “the sort of transcendental viewing that reckons itself
to be ahistorical” (“Art in Context” 31).

16

the message is altered due to private codes and ideological biases of the addressee;
aleatory connotations; and interpretative failures (Theory 142). Roland Barthes even
questioned the role of the writer as an authority, and then the author took a central stage
again, but this time from the perspective of reception. Michel Foucault drew attention to
the author function (124), where the name stands for a description rather than a
designation (in Ba] and Bryson, “Semiotics” 253). Indeed, when the reader encounters
the author’s name, he/ she does not identify the name with the physical person, but what
this reader knows about the life and work of the author is converted into a description of
the author. In fact, Foucault appended Barthes’ argument that the author’s “life is no
longer the origin of his ﬁctions but a ﬁction contributing to his work” (161).9 Foucault
acknowledged the author’s name also as a component that “can group together a number
of texts and thus differentiate them from others. A name also establishes different forms
of relationships among texts” (123).lo Through all these attempts to analyze the role of
the author in the reception and interpretation of the work, an uneasiness is apparent,
which is the outcome of the search to ﬁnd the author’s role in the verbal text and/or the
reader’s mind. My project, in contrast, examines the author’s role in the editing process

and demonstrates how the author’s attempts to illustrate the text, monitor how others

 

9 A wonderful example of such ‘ﬁction’ is Charlotte Bronté’s transformation from unknown author to well-
known writer and later to admired artist: during the publication of Jane Eyre, even the publisher was
unaware who Currer Bell actually was or what the author’s gender was (Cruse, The Victorians 264). Soon
after that she was identiﬁed as the author of the novel and recognized as the writer of other novels, even
more, after her death Elizabeth Gaskell wrote her biography, which “helped to establish that Bronte
worship which has since grown into a cult” (Cruse, The Victorians 274). Although something similar does
not happen in the case of each writer, such extremes can illustrate that what the readers know about the
author can ‘contribute’ to the reception of the works.

I 0

Indeed, Foucault pointed out that in order to see the author as the same, “any unevenness of production
is ascribed to changes caused by evolution, maturation, or outside inﬂuence. In addition, the author serves
to neutralize the contradictions that are found in a series of texts” (128). Foucault identiﬁed this tendency to

17

illustrate it, or disregard the illustrations entirely, brought about the author’s inﬂuence on
the reception of the text. Even if the contemporary readers were unaware of this process it
had an unquestionable impact on their reception. My study does not explore how the
readers’ thoughts about the author might have inﬂuenced their reception of the text, but
analyzes what the authors actually did materially, aesthetical and otherwise in order to
impact the contemporary reception process.

In a sense, my project revisits the textual critics’ arguments about the role of the
editors and what constitutes the work itself. Although McGann does not necessarily share
G. Thomas Tanselle’s belief that editorial interventions introduce a “contamination of the
authoritative text” (Critique 34), he does discuss the editor’s role in the production of the
work. He draws attention to the fact that Greg’s differentiation between accidentals and
substantives in the editing process is valid for early modern texts, when the textual
versions are difﬁcult to locate (Critique 120). On the other hand, he sheds a new light on
textual criticism by asserting the essentially social nature of the work: “literary works are
fundamentally social rather than personal or psychological products, they do not even
acquire an artistic form of being until their engagement with an audience has been
determined” (Critique 44). He sees the editing and publication of a text as a “translation
of the initially psychological phenomenon (the ‘creative process’) into a social one (the
literary work)” (Critique 62-63). Consequently, McGann reaches the conclusion that “[i]n
cultural products like literary works the location of authority necessarily becomes
dispersed beyond the author” (Critique 84). In a similar fashion, Thorpe maintains that

[v]arious forces are always at work thwarting or modifying the author’s
intentions. The process of preparing the work for dissemination to the

 

‘neutralize contradictions’ as the reader’s belief in a comprehensive thought or desire the author has, that
some readers attempt to locate in the author’s other writings such as letters, drafts, etc. (128-129).

18

public . . . puts the work in the hands of persons who are professionals in
the execution of the process . . . Sometimes through misunderstanding and
sometimes through an effort to improve the work, these professionals
substitute their own intentions for those of the author, who is frequently
ignorant of their craft. Sometimes the author objects and sometimes not,
sometimes he is pleased, sometimes he acquiesces, and sometimes he does
not notice what has happened. The work of art is thus always tending
toward a collaborative status. (48)

My project takes these ideas somewhat outside of these discussions by arguing that the
visual appearance of the published text is part of the literary work to be received.11
However, before delving into the speciﬁcs of nineteenth-century illustration, editing
processes and publication statistics, we need to examine how the visual choices in the
editing process are different from the verbal editing that these textual critics discuss.
While textual editing involves mainly choosing between versions and/or updating
the spelling of the verbal text, visual editing often means the addition of another artist’s
work within the pages of the publication. Before discussing what this visual addition
means according to some of the critics, we have to remember that above all it brings
about the appearance of some of the people, objects and events in both verbal and visual
depiction. If we agree with Ellen J. Esrock that imaging is an essential part of the

reception process, then providing the image next to the verbal depiction of the scene

leads to a kind of repetition, or rereading.12 Indeed, Vladimir Nabokov claimed decades

ago that “one cannot read a book: one can only reread it” (3). Matei Calinescu agreed:

 

11 In fact, I agree with McGann’s assertion that “when the author is himself involved in the printing of his
manuscript—when he proofs and edits—then the printed form will necessarily represent what might be called
his ﬁnal intentions, or ‘the text as the author wished to have it presented to the public’” (Critique 41).
Nonetheless, my project is not intended as an argument against the accuracy of present-day copy text
choices since it focuses exclusively on the contemporary reception of the ﬁrst editions of these illustrated
novels. The exploration of the factors that contribute to the dichotomy between the ﬁrst reception and a
more recent one presents an entirely different subject, nonetheless worthy of further elucidation.

l9

when I make up my mind to read a book (not necessarily a classic), I most
likely already know something about it: I may have been advised by a
ﬁiend or a reviewer to read it, or perhaps forbidden to read it by an
authority ﬁgure or censor; I may have been given reasons why I should, or
perhaps should not, read it; or I may have simply heard it mentioned
informally as an enjoyable book, or as being original, topical, scandalous,
etc. Even the that book of the new author cannot be read totally
‘innocently.’ (42)

The spreading of reception through oral and written channels before the common reader

has a chance to read the work, relates back to the Jaussian horizon of expectations, and

the nineteenth century deﬁnitely did not lack such inﬂuences on the individual reader’s

reception process. In fact, written inﬂuences often preceded the publication itself.

Publishers wished to secure their proﬁt by spending a considerable amount of funds on

the advertising of the work to be published. 13 Nonetheless, the reception of illustrated
texts reminds us more of Calinescu’s notion of the double reading, where the rereading
penetrates the very ﬁrst reading: “it can adopt, alongside the prospective logic of reading,
a retrospective logic of reading” (18). In fact, Calinescu here argues for the linear reading
Of the text that is interrupted every now and then by the recollection of earlier passages.
Due to the accessibility of the visual image the illustrations constituted both embedded

elements in the reception of the whole work and precursors of the passages which they

illustrated.l4 Having in mind Calinescu’s argument that a rereading revolves around

 

2
In The Reader ’s Eye, Esrock examines the effects of imaging on the reception process, such as the

enhancement of memory, clariﬁcation of descriptions and concretization of ﬁction—to be discussed in the
case chapters (188-93).

For example, the 1846 advertising of Dombey and Son cost £67 and 55., a seventh of the publication
expenses, and these costs were maintained even during the decades of cheaper printing (Sutherland

Victorian Novelists 23).

14
I would like to take a moment here to discuss the basis and relevance of my assumption that viewing the

images preceded the reading of the text for most nineteenth-century reception processes. There are
perception studies which explain in depth the cognitive processes that take place when somebody sees an
image or a text. The speed of these cognitive processes proves that perception of an illustration can happen
during the turning of the page. However, the publication statistics, which I will discuss later in this chapter,

20

questions instead of the trusting approach that the ﬁrst reading ideally exhibits (14), we
have to realize that the rereading of the scenes (and of the characters and gestures, as I
will argue) in the verbal form after the image has been seen, necessarily brings about a
rereading/questioning attitude in the process of literary reception. Paradoxically, the
illustration thus becomes the basis and the verbal text the repetition, so that for every
element of the narrative that is encountered by the reader ﬁrst through an illustration, it is
the text that ﬁlls the gaps of the illustration instead of the other way round.

Consequently, we witness a certain revisitation of the gaps, which Iser identiﬁed
as the missing elements or details in the text that allow for different interpretations (The
Act of Reading 169-171). When we regard the illustration as the ﬁrst reading of a passage
and the text as the rereading, these gaps gain an entirely new role since they can largely
inﬂuence the reception process. To use Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan’s categorization, these
gaps can be either “trivial” or “crucial and central in the narrative” (128), and in the case
of nineteenth-century illustrated literary works, we ﬁnd both ends of the spectrum. I
would like to turn now to the analysis of the text—illustration interplay in general and its

nineteenth-century speciﬁcs in particular.

1.2. Aim and Effect in Text Illustration
Theories about the relationship between text and illustration differ widely: some

critics argue that the illustration is a visualization of the text; some even maintain that the

 

provide a better sense of why the visual image preceded the verbal text during the contemporary reception
processes. Throughout their lives, most writers published their works in different periodicals, and many
works were published in different editions within the ﬁrst year or two; as a result, people who were not
interested in visual imagery or could not afford the expensive illustrated editions, could read their favorite
literature without illustrations, and those who chose the illustrated editions, were interested in the visual
material and paid more attention to them than a superﬁcial glance while turning the page. I will elaborate

21

two are interwoven; others believe the illustration to add to the text signiﬁcantly and even
to compete with it. In fact, all these theories provide a better insight into the diversity of
the nineteenth-century text—illustration dynamic and the case studies will demonstrate
this variety. Some of the critics who are in favor of illustrated editions support their
theories with mid-nineteenth-cenmry examples. When Arlene M. Jackson claims that
“[r]epresentational illustration is ‘mere visualization,’ considered a redundancy because it
is only a faithful recording for several of a novel’s scenes” (63), she has in mind the so-
called Millais period in the history of British illustration. She focuses on artists’ emphasis
on the representational aspect of their works and their aim to represent the accurate visual
appearance of the characters and settings (XII). This tendency towards realism, she
maintains, appeared due to the inﬂuence of the Dutch painting school and forced the
artist to rely on models and even photographs (1, 18). Indeed, contemporary sources
reﬂect this tendency unequivocally. The last number in 1842 of The Illustrated London
News concentrates on the aim of the journal to preserve an accurate image of the period:
The life of the times—the signs of its taste and intelligence—its public
monuments and public men—its festivals—institutions-amusements—
discoveries—and the very reﬂection of its living manners and costumes—the
variegated dresses of its mind and body—what are—what must be all these
but treasures of truth that would have lain hid in Tirne’s tomb, or perished

amid the sand of his hour-glass but for the enduring and resuscitating
powers of art. (ctd. in M. Jackson 296-297)

The article continues to discuss the need of future generations to be “ten times better
assured of all the splendid realities” of Queen Victoria’s actions, and claims that the
publication of The Illustrated London News guaranties that this goal will be achieved

(ctd. in M. Jackson 297). The major claim here is that the journal has accomplished this

 

more on the different periodicals and their readership in 1.3. Nineteenth-Century Publication Processes and
Circulation.

22

aim by its revolutionary graphic news.

In literature, some of these critics see a structural similarity between the two
media. Herbert F. Tucker chooses Edward Bume-Jones’s illustrations for Geoffrey
Chaucer’s poetry (see Fig. 1.2) to suggests that “[h]ere all that meets the eye is literal
illustration: poetry supports imagery, and vice versa” (198). His close analysis strives to

support the argument that there is no “illusionistic third dimension” so that “[t]he

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Fig. 1.2. Geofﬁ‘ey Chaucer’s “The Knight’s Tale.” Richard Maxwell, ed. The Victorian
Illustrated Book, 199

illustrator’s approach to paginal space thus anticipates and conﬁrms the reader’s: the
overwhelming impression is that of a planar equivalence where, since nothing is either
ﬁgure or ground to anything else, all art aspires to the condition of literality” (198). He
sustains this ‘equivalence’ with the structural similarity:
Chaucer’s text and Bume-Jones’s not only occupy virtually identical
areas, but the visual artist has set the dark barred window into the bright
wall more or less where the barred initial W is set into its block of text—

text whose blockedness, and random tessellation within plumb limits,
imitates that of the stones of the wall. Within the image stands Emelye,

23

book in hand, on a vegetated plot that, shaped like a page, resembles the
decorated ground on which the ﬁgured “WHILOM” stands likewise; the
well that Emelye overlooks might as well, under the circumstances, be full
of ink. (198)
Such an analysis, in fact, reinforces Bryson’s belief that the role of the images is “that of
an accessible and palatable substitute” so that “the sign [must] submit before the Word, it
must also take on, as a sign, the same kind of construction as the verbal sign” (Word and
Image 1). However, it is undeniable that in such cases it is not only the image that
attempts to reproduce the structure of the text, but the text itself is formatted so that it
lends itself to visual contemplation: through its elegant serifs the Old English typeface
reminds the reader of the stylized leaves of the illustration and the decoration throughout
the page. Although such a harmony between structure and style is rare in later illustrated
editions, for the mid-nineteenth century John Ruskin formulated the period’s ideal. Miller
emphasizes that Ruskin “understood that there is an element of picture in every letter, and
an element of writing in every picture . . . In an illuminated capital one ﬂows into the
other. They are superimposed or interwoven. The place where one stops and the other
begins can scarcely be detected” (Illustration 77). A similar argument is maintained in J.
R. Harvey’s assertion that in serial novels the “text and picture mak[e] a single art” (2).
Indeed, the ﬁrst case study of this project will provide examples of such an interaction
between text and illustration, yet even during the same period there were cases that
departed from the rule.
In the case of one of Thackeray’s initials for The Virginians (see Fig. 1.3), for
instance, the illustration is meant to ﬁrrnish the ﬁrst letter “R” in a visually descriptive

way, yet the structure of the image overrides the literal reading for a short period in order

to focus the reader’s attention on the ﬁgure behind the bars and the inscription nearby

24

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Fig. 1.3. William Makepeace Thackeray’s vignette initial for The Virginians. Richard
Maxwell, ed. The Victorian Illustrated Book, 172

“POOR PRISONERS.” The image itself is an interplay with the reader: he/she is drawn
into the image by the hand that leads through the window and to the prisoner, but the
darkness of the interior and the bars visually stop the reader. As a result, the reader sees
the inscription POOR PRISONERS, but fails to observe the person who could visually
reiterate the text. This verbal—visual interplay is even more interesting when we have in
mind that the audience’s concentration was redirected to the image exactly at the point
where the literary text referred to “Reading.” Consequently, while the ﬁrst word of the
chapter re-focuses the audience’s attention on reading, the text of the illustration displays
a puzzling interaction with that of the adjacent chapter passage: the image and its text
refer to prisoners in contrast with the verbal depiction of a character enjoying his morning
breakfast and newspaper and starting out on a trip. It is evident, that such a structure does
not strive to reﬂect that of the text, but visualizes a theme of the chapter to follow.

Indeed, other critics seem to concentrate more on the differences between the two
media and the effects that these differences produce. Baxandall emphasizes the structural

dichotomy between text and illustration:

25

The nub here is not the venerable issue of what a medium can (or
conveniently can) represent: rather, the nub is what a medium must
explicitly discriminate. The things that language must be decisive about
and pictures must be decisive about are different.

It is not, by the way, that pictures do. not represent narrative ‘well’. It is
rather that they do not replicate the grammatical and syntactical
commitments of a verbal narrative well. They are committed to a structure
and balance of narration that is actively different. (Words 123)

It is well-known that the verbal linearity is met by the two—dimensionality of the image,
but what this brings about is the fact that the heavy reliance on the reader’s recollection
of earlier passages is replaced in the illustration viewing by a movement of the eye that
leads to the recognition of the forms as people and things. Moreover, when the reader
views these images as illustrations, he or she fuses the visual process with the verbal
comprehension since the ﬁgures are identiﬁed with the characters and the places with the
locations in the text. In this identiﬁcation process, the reader cannot help but become

conscious of the disjoint between the text and the illustration every time the two lead to

diverging perceptions about the characters, places or events.15 Miller highlights exactly
this communicational dichotomy between the two: “The word evokes. The illustration
presents” (Illustration 67). He draws our attention to Stéphane Mallarmé’s assertion that
“everything a book evokes ha[s] to pass into the mind or spirit of the reader” (transl. in
Illustration 67), while this is not the case of the illustrations. The ‘presentation’ in this
case does not require extensive mental and spiritual processes. On the other hand, critics
such as Hubert Damisch point out that viewing images does not involve merely

denotation (ﬁgurative application), either and that the connotation (symbolic application)

 

15
My reoccurring reference to perception theory proves that it has been an integral part of reception

studies due to its explanation of the cognitive processes happening during visual and verbal perception,
which constitute the basis for the reception process. Nevertheless, since the main interests of this theory lie
in universal processes that are not related to the speciﬁcs of any one period, it becomes less relevant for
such a historically-based study as this project.

26

of the images are complex as well (237). Miller reminds us of Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe’s assertion that “[e]very act of seeing leads to consideration, consideration to
reﬂection, reﬂection to combination” (Illustration 141), however, what is most revealing
about this argument is that ‘consideration,’ ‘reﬂection’ and ‘combination’ all refer to
individual processes, which suggests differences between the individual readers’
processes as well as between the literary reception process and the visual reception
process. The extent to which these theories diverge from Arlene M. Jackson’s claim
mentioned above that illustration is a mere visualization, can be best illustrated by
Ziarek’s emphasis on the ‘work’ involved in the reception process, “the labor needed to
let the work bring about the rupture and displacement within the usual doing, knowing,
and valuing that are constitutive of social relations” (31).

Moreover, this ‘labor’ is not only the result of the connotation of the illustration,
but of the physical elements of the illustration, too. Some critics mention the gaps of the
text that the illustrations have to ﬁll, without bestowing much relevance, while others
disagree. Even Arlene M. Jackson discusses the addition the illustration furnishes: “[i]n
the process of illustration, whatever its kind or style, the linguistic reality of the author’s
imaginative world translates into the visual reality of picture. The illustrated text is thus a
synthesis of the two media, since translation does not replace, but becomes an addition . .
. the illustrated text is always an expanded text” (64). She believes this addition to
encompass the minute elements not included in the literary text such as “mirrors,
cobwebs, objets d’art (especially portraits), and other items possessing allegoric
meaning” (16). However, Tucker draws attention to J. G. Saunder’s illustration for

Charles Reade’s It Is Never T 00 Late to Mend, where the illustration contains a relevant

27

addition to the text: it tells the reader that Anne Fielding died and was buried in a certain
graveyard. The text is continued in the image and thus requires a systematic linear
reading instead of a two-dimensional viewing in order for the reader to be able to

understand the text as a whole: “By and by the brothers came to this—

 

Fig. 1.4. Charles Reade’s It Is Never T 00 Late to Mend. Richard Maxwell, ed. The
Victorian Illustrated Book, 181

George looked down at the grave, so did William, neither spoke awhile” (Tucker 180).
Here the illustration does not only offer a visual depiction of the placement of the text
“HERE REPOSE . . . ANNE FIELDING . . .”, but through its sudden interruption of the
linear ﬂow of the text (the words on the gravestone are not horizontal, nor straight in
some of the lines) and its visual reference to death, it furnishes an interesting example of
the text—illustration dynamic when the illustration becomes part of the narrative and
breaks the diegesis.

Still other critics see an emotional addition to the verbal text that is always to be
considered a major inﬂuencing factor in the literary reception process. While Arlene M.
Jackson believes the illustrations to be the “faithful recording for several of a novel’s

scenes” (63), Edward Hodnett argues that, “[i]n realizing a passage in literature the image

28

is not always the visual equivalent of the text. It is an image which realizes both the sense
and the emotion effect of the text” (15). Indeed, when we consider mid-nineteenth-
century illustrated novels, what some critics see as the ‘faithful recording’ of the text, is
in fact a reﬂection on the ideal of the period as well: literary writing aimed to be didactic
while entertaining and illustrations claimed to portray the verbal text as clearly as
possible to facilitate these goals. As Hodnett highlights, the aesthetic value and the
desired effect intersected during this period: the illustrations were “primarily for the
ediﬁcation and pleasure of the general reader” (4). The same principle guided Thackeray
in 1844 to publish under the pseudonym of Michael Angelo Titrnarsh an article critiquing
the artists who “paint down to the level of the public intelligence, rather than seek to
elevate the public to them” (“Michael Angelo Titmarsh in the Galleries” 179). He even
added in his uniquely sarcastic tone: “Why do these great geniuses fail in their duty of
instruction?” (179). It is, consequently, when the purpose of novel writing and illustration
changed, that the discrepancies became apparent. With High Victorianism came an
increasing sense (and need) for a national unity and perspective. Peter W. Sinnema draws
attention to the idealization that was apparent in the news illustrations of the period even
in cases when the text critiqued the living conditions in the rural areas (96). Considering
the readership of the illustrated periodicals he examines, Sinnema reaches the conclusion

that “[i]nteriority, nationality, security and fellowship are bound together in sonorous

representation” (111).16 Such and similar emotional factors undoubtedly lead to a shift in

 

16 A closer look into the periodicals Sinnema mentions, especially the social status and geographical
distribution of their readership, might well suggest that this idealization of the rural conditions was aimed
toward a very speciﬁc group within the larger reading public of the period. In a certain sense the periodicals
of the time were both the effect and the source of the ideals of their respective reading circles, which
reminds us of Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of social capital and cultural capital (Distinction: A Social Critique
of the Judgment of Taste). The correlation between the audience’s horizon of expectations and each

29

the literary reception process, which, if too noticeable, can cause uneasiness for the
reader.

This shift happens especially in the reception process of the late-nineteenth-
century illustrated novels, and for these works we can best rely on the arguments of the
critics who realize that the illustrated work is entirely different from the verbal text.
Miller suggests that the illustration is not the representation of something obvious or
something hidden in the verbal text, but it brings something new altogether: “Each work
makes different the culture it enters” (Illustration 151). In a similar fashion, Paul C.
Gutjahr draws attention to the fact that packaging often “contradicts or de-emphasizes”
the text (41). He also adds that the text is “undercut by the simpler and more physically
accessible pictures that accompany the text” (59). One of the writers to be discussed later
in this project, James himself demands that the illustration is a “competitive process”
since the literary text “put[s] forward illustrative claims (that is produc[es] an effect of
illustration) by its own intrinsic virtue” (“Introduction” IX). Perhaps the best example
would be the decorated texts, where the reader’s attention is drawn away from the text as
in the case of William Morris’s illustration of the Kelmscott edition of The Works of
Geoﬁi'ey Chaucer. David Bland piercingly remarks that Morris “labeled himself a
decorator rather than an illustrator” (275) and one can see on the starting page of The
Story of the Glittering Plain (see Fig. 1.5) that the decorations are not smoothly
coordinated with the text, but rather seem to demonstrate the artist’s dexterity and, taking
over more than half the page, render the visualization independent from the text. These

decorations by Morris are probably some of those “purely visual aspects, unanchored by

 

ﬁaction’s taste presents an interesting subject for research, but it proves to be outside of the realms of this
study.

30

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Fig. 1.5. Geofﬁ‘ey Chaucer’s The Story of the Glittering Plain. David Bland, History of
Book Illustration, 275

text” that Bryson foresees to “quickly fade into oblivion” adding that “such aspects are
therefore to be excluded” (Word and Image 3). Indeed, this is James’s choice for the New

York Edition of his works during the early-twentieth century. Here the illustrations are

 

Fig. 1.6. Frontispiece to The Fig. 1.7. Frontispiece to The Portrait of a Laaiv. Ralph
Reverberator. Ralph F. Bogardus F. Bogardus Pictures and Texts, 27
Pictures and Texts, 37

31

exclusively photographs (see Fig. 1.6 and 1.7) which were taken by Alvin Coburn to
portray the city and certain locations within it, but not the characters and events in the
verbal text. It is Jarnes’s fundamental belief that nothing should “reliev[e] responsible
prose of the duty of being, while placed before us, good enough, interesting enough and,
if the question be of picture, pictorial enough, above all in itself” (“Introduction” IX-X).
In such a context, the illustrations can only be “mere optical symbols or echoes,
expressions of no particular thing in the text, but only of the type or idea of this or that
thing” (“Introduction” XI). Such an approach to the aim and role of illustrations is the
outcome of the major artistic shift of the Victorian period. However, before examining
closely some exceptional mid and late-nineteenth-century illustrated novels, we need to
look into the particulars of British publication and circulation between 1840 and 1900 to
gain a better insight into the conditions in which authors and editors build their

expectations of the audience’s reception and made their choices for illustrations.

1.3. Nineteenth-Century Publication Processes and Circulation

When we consider the historical framework of the nineteenth-century illustrated
publication, we encounter startling clues about the goals of the audience and the effects
of reading. The spread of literacy improved the level of culture and increased the
readership of the periodicals and books; on the other hand there were political and
economic reasons to improve the literacy of the general public. Similarly, it was a public
interest to foster morality amongst literary readers, and the morality of the readers
necessitated the didacticism of the literary publications. The statistics about the literacy

and reading habits of the period thus reveal the dynamic between the spread of literacy

32

and the blooming of Victorian didacticism.

Indeed, an important phase in the spread of literacy took place from 1825-1875
when evening classes and libraries were instituted for the working class (Altick 214). The
1871-1891 censuses demonstrate the effect of the 1870 Foster Education Act: elementary
education was added where it was unfeasible before, meaning 97% of the population
could sign their names by 1900 (212). Just concentrating on the 1850-1890 period, we see
that women’s literacy rose from 18.4% to 19.5% during the last two decades and men
fared even better with an increase from 11.3% to 13% (Altick 212). It is striking that
women’s literacy was so much more widespread than men’s, and the reasons might lie in
the distribution of time and work location of the two genders. In 1879 Innes Shand claims
that women have “far more leisure and fewer ways of disposing of it to their satisfaction”
(“Novelists” 110); although caution needs to be used since the article was addressed to a
higher social level of the audience and thus might not accurately represent the situation
throughout the spectrum. On the other hand, the differences of literacy and ultimately of
reading between groups was not limited to gender. The geographical area had an effect
on the accessibility of the journals: while around 1880 there were 5-6 million penny
papers published weekly in London (Hitchman 241), the provinces did not exhibit
exceptionally high numbers, if we have in mind the number of that population. Shand
highlights the role of transportation as early as the 18705, when, he claims, that many
books from the city libraries reached the villages (“Journalists” 45). Alexander William
indicates that the foot colportage system led to impressive numbers in the delivery of
periodicals to the provincial working class: in 1875 the Religious Tract and Book Society

sold 840,000 periodicals for adults, 400,000 for the young and 300,000 religious; and in

33

1876 there was a 20% overall increase with the sales reaching a yearly 1,800,000
periodicals (150,000 a month) out of which 1,450,000 cost less than a penny, 140,000
cost 1.5-5 pence and 210,000 cost 6 pence (27). Although this represents the statistics of
only one company over the period of only two years, the ﬁgures suggest that circulation
was widespread over regional borders and accessible to lower economic classes as well.
In contrast, Altick warns against the reliability of the Victorian terms of social class
where especially the middle class encompasses a wide range of social positions and
ﬁnancial situations:
The Victorians used the term ‘middle class’ so broadly and ﬂexibly that it
is virtually useless as an indicator of the level of education, attitudes, and
tastes that governed such responses. It embraced the whole social
spectrum from university graduates to self-taught small tradesmen, with
their widely disparate stores of knowledge and degrees of literary

sophistication; political conservatives and liberals; Churchmen and
Noncomformists; city dwellers and country people. (118-119)

As a result, while the contemporary reference to the readers’ social class might be
somewhat vague, the spread of education at any level through these different layers
within classes demonstrates the national improvement of literacy. While this
transformation is important for Victorian cultural history, it is also relevant for reception
studies as the increase in literacy brought about a widening of the reading audience and
reinforced a special set of goals of reading. As I will show in the next chapter when
analyzing Thackeray’s verbal and visual subject and style, mid-nineteenth-century
reception cannot be studied without taking into consideration the widening of the literary
audience and the views about the role of reading that this transformation brought about.
Gerard Curtis draws attention to the visual representation of reading in the mid-
nineteenth century (220, 240). Augustus Leopold Egg’s Travelling Companions (see Fig.

1.8) portrays reading as one of the pastimes when somebody is trapped in a seat. The

34

woman on the right seems to be absorbed by the book, while her companion has fallen
asleep. Nonetheless, the value of the work and of reading is emphasized through a
seemingly small detail: only the reader wears gloves, which suggest that the cause is not
the temperature, but her interest in handling the book carefully or her absorption in it.

George Halse’s sculpture (see Fig. 1.9), on the other hand, attempts to make a broader

 

Fig. 1.8. Augustus Leopold Egg’s Travelling Fig. 1.9. George Halse’s Young
Companions. Gerard Curtis, Visual Words, 240 England. Gerard Curtis, Visual
Words, 220

statement using the fashionable new material, Parian. It is entitled Young England and it
is part of a set of two sculptures, a boy reading a book and a girl folding the book to stare
in the distance as if reﬂecting on the book. The image of the boy seems really succinct in
depicted the location, but it stresses the boy’s knickerbockers and the bat in order to
suggest that the boy used the break during the cricket game to continue his reading (as the
book is open at the middle). These and similar Victorian images did not only portray
reading as a possible pastime when one can do nothing else, but rather reinforced reading

as a positive choice of spending one’s free time. Both readers appear content and well-

35

 

balanced; moreover, both of them are young and well—dressed. Thus these works seem to
reﬂect the contemporary social standards and make the viewer wonder: do these images
attempt to reﬂect the economic realities of the time that only people with a given
ﬁnancial status could afford to read, or, on the contrary, do they publicize reading as a
habit that can lead to welfare and social advancement? The contemporary rise of literacy
indicates the latter to be the case.

Besides such images that render reading as a behavioral model for the youth, texts
added a sense that these readings represented society at large so that readers would be
compelled to share others’ reading habits and, above all, moral views. The contemporary
journalist James Greenwood drew attention to texts such as “Society has discovered” the
thief to be transformed in order to demonstrate these tendencies at the level of word
choices (9). Reﬂecting back in 1935, Cruse concentrated on the queen’s standard of
morality, when she contended that the term “Victorian Reader . . . stands for one who
bears quite deﬁnite marks of a unique and powerful inﬂuence;” and she maintained that
“her people responded by demanding books whose morality was perhaps
overemphasized” (The Victorians 13). Indeed, William’s 1876 article published in Good
Words reﬂected brilliantly the concern and aim of the contemporary readership:

In the form of weekly newspapers a secular literature that is at least pure
in tone has grown immensely in bulk; and concurrently with that a popular
serial literature of a soundly religious and morally-elevating character,
sufficiently varied to meet the circumstances of different classes, has been

brought into something like universal circulation, superseding and
practically exterminating much that was frivolous and bad. (28)

On the one hand, such a didactic literary style easily penetrated literary reading circles;
on the other hand, it seemed to supersede the ﬁction world and become a model for real

life. While there will always be texts which exhibit a closer relationship with reality than

36

others, the didactic novels of the mid-nineteenth century were unique in their pretense
that they are both entertaining and teaching a lesson for life. As a result, the literary texts
had a closer connection to the readers’ lives than maybe in later periods. There were
some readers who could not sleep during the nights due to their recent readings (Cruse,
' The Victorians 283); there were others who looked for means to transfer elements of the
novels into their own lives. Charlotte Bronte recollects receiving a letter “announcing that
a lady of some note, who had always determined that whenever she married her husband
should be the counterpart of Mr. Knightley in Miss Austen’s Emma, had now changed
her mind, and vowed that she would either ﬁnd the duplicate of Professor Emmanuel, or
remain forever single” (ctd. in Cruse, The Victorians 272). Such a text—reader
relationship indicates a certain horizon of expectations within the contemporary reading
public, which was based on a strong sense that books show models to follow. Such
expectations on the part of the audience could not be as easily shifted towards more
modernist approaches as some of the writers hope, as we will see in the case studies.

It is also important to notice that the interest in the visual materials grew side by
side with the interest in texts, yet it targeted more the entertainment of the readers than
their moral education. Jonathan Crary underlines the change of the observer at the
beginning of the nineteenth century; Peter de Bolla asserts that the audience’s interest in
“visibility, spectacle, display” came to the forefront around the mid-eighteenth century
(The Education of the Eye 69). The appearance of the early-nineteenth-century studies in
perception and the availability later on of visual devices such as the phenakistiscope,
zootrope, kaleidoscope, stereoscope and diorama both prove this tendency as well as

further enhance the process. Observing the contemporary readers’ attitude towards

37

visuals arts, Arlene M. Jackson notices that “by the 18608 and later, the Victorian
audience had become more sophisticated in their understanding of the semiotics of
representational art through their increasing experience with magazine illustration, genre
painting, and photography” (130). Indeed, the audience’s interest in visual arts often went
beyond its reception as Bland contends that the nineteenth-century British audience of art
works “was better informed [about artistic methods and styles] than ever before since so
many of them were amateur painters themselves” (249). However, what jumpstarted this
current depends on the viewer: the illustrator George du Maurier differentiates between
the reader “who visualizes what he reads (at the moment of reading) with the mind’s eye .
. . in a manner so satisfactory to himself that he wants the help of no picture; indeed, to
him a picture would be a hindrance,” and the reader looking for concrete visual form as
“an enhancement of [his/her] pleasure” (ctd. in A. Jackson 21). He also admits that “[t]he
majority likes to have its book (even its newspaper!) full of little pictures” (ctd. in A.
Jackson 21). On the other hand, a fellow illustrator, Arthur Hopkins, draws attention to a
different kind of ‘visual enhancement’ when he shares his belief with Thomas Hardy that
“[t]he novel of the day is, practically, not illustrated but embellished with a dozen
drawings having some sort of connection with the story” (ctd. in A. Jackson 45). Whether
entertaining the reader or merely raising the market value of the book, the illustrations
became widely utilized in the second half of the nineteenth century.

In fact, the widespread illustration of literary works was paralleled by the increase of
illustrated periodicals. The major transformation was represented by The Illustrated
London News that “helped change the character of public taste, and allured it into

channels which were previously open only to the wealthy and the reﬁned” (M. Jackson

38

307). As the decades went by, the illustrated periodicals had to overcome two obstacles:
the cost of such publications and the popular belief that graphic news was unprofessional.
The latter issue was swept away within a year: the circulation ﬁgures of The Illustrated
London News during its ﬁrst year in 1842 show that the new type of publication met a
wide interest at the very beginning (26,000 copies sold of the ﬁrst number), then had a
serious decline in the months to follow, but soon managed to establish an impressive
number of 66,000 (M. Jackson 291). The cost, on the other hand, was more determined
by the development of technology (the invention of Applegarth and Cowper’s press; then
the vertical press; even later Hoe’s machines; ﬁnally the Walter Press and its newspaper
application, the Ingram Rotary Machine, which had a speed of 6500 impressions an hour
with both sides printed at once, cut and folded) (M. Jackson 325-326) and the careful
structuring of the staff (the special artist would participate at the event and send
illustrations or mere sketches to the rest of the staff, who would then create the ﬁnal
illustration, divide it into parts and distribute them among the engravers to accelerate the
procedure) (M. Jackson 315-325). In the case of novel illustrations published in
magazines, the costs did not have to include transportation and speedy productivity, so by

the 18805 the cost of an illustrated periodical that included literature was not very

expensive for the readers. '7 In book editions, however, the nineteenth-century publishers’

lists of editions advertised at the end of any printed material prove that the illustrated

 

17
A great illustration of the lowering costs would, perhaps, be the 1882 Christmas edition of The

Illustrated London News, which appeared with one color image by John Millais and 17 full-page
illustrations and was sold for merely a shilling, while Millais received 3000 guineas for the picture (M.
Jackson 304).

39

book editions cost on average 50-100% more than the non-illustrated versions.18 Morna
Daniels draws attention to the discrepancy between the “yellowback” paper covers and
the more expensive full or half-leather covers that often accompanied the illustrated
version (12). Nonetheless, in spite of the hardships in ﬁnding good illustrators, getting the
images prepared in time and keeping the costs low, the increasing circulation ﬁgures of
the ﬁrst illustrated periodicals stimulated ﬁrrther news periodicals to incorporate

illustrations so that illustrated journals appeared in other areas of interest as well, such as

sports and women’s magazines (M. Jackson 313). ’9 Along the decades, they expanded to
the literary sections and established the illustration of the literary works as a standard.
Indeed, by 1870, the role of illustration ceased to be the combination of two artistic
ﬁelds, literature and drawing, and grew more into a subordination of the image to the
text-as Curtis reveals in his comparison of the two cover images of The Illustrated
London News: one from 1855 and one from 1870 (38-39) (see Fig. 1.10). The 1855
version seems to support visually the idea of sister arts with the symbolic ﬁgures looking
at each other as equals. The 1870 version, however, shows the representative of visual
arts taking the rear seat and merely peeking into what the representative of literature is
creating. Moreover, Literature appears to be physically closer to the reader as if
preventing him/her from having a direct interaction with Visual Arts. The subordination,

Curtis maintains, is highly visible and it is evocative of the audience’s stance at the time

 

18
The Bronte sisters’ novels advertised in 1881 by Harper and Brothers, for example, cost 40-50 cents

with no illustrations and one dollar with illustrations (in James, Washington Square, annex 3).

l9 . .
The interest would be so much increased that sometimes even the articles that did not have a specral

agent’s ﬁrst-hand illustration, would be published with an illustration created on the basis of verbal news.
Mason Jackson reveals the puzzling case when the Pictorial Press learned about the royal visit to Scotland
and illustrated the verbal news of ‘seeing the shearing’ as some shepherds shearing sheep in spite of the
Scottish term meaning ‘cutting com’ (312).

40

(38-39).

  
    

 

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Fig. 1.10. Covers of The Illustrated London News from 1855 and 1870. Gerard Curtis,
Visual Words, 38-39

Beyond this transformation in the general perception, there were individual
differences between the periodicals. Those trying to appeal to the readers visually relied
on illustration in different ways and to a different extent: initials, vignettes and full page
illustrations with or without special cover pages between the text and the image. The
Graphic, for example, had a diverse reading public so the editors decided to include
illustrations not only in the magazine and on its cover, but also in a separately published
Graphic Porfolio (A. Jackson 20-21, 28). However, not all the illustrated magazines
placed such an emphasis on the visual material: while the Belgravia read by a middle-
class female audience included only the illustrators’ names in the contents and not the
writers’ names, the Comhill Magazine with a liberal middle-upper class audience

included illustrations, but did not publish their authors’ names in the contents. Finally,

41

there were a few magazines—such as Macmillan ’s Magazine and The Fortnightly Review—
which shared a more intellectual audience and argued against the need for illustrations in
literary works (A. Jackson 20-21). These choices were sometimes inﬂuenced by the
illustrators themselves. As one of the most famous illustrators of the period, Cruikshank
occasionally displayed his name as just another author of the work—as for Henry
Mayhew’s 1851 or The Adventures of Mr. and Mrs. Sandboys and Family (see Fig. l.
ll)—or mentioned only himself without including the author at all—as for The Greatest

Plague of Life (see Fig. 1.12) (Sutherland 96-99). Above all, the wide circulation of the

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Adventures of Mr. and Mrs. Sandboys and John Sutherland, Victorian Fiction, 96
Family. John Sutherland, Victorian Fiction,

98

illustrated periodicals and the publication of separate issues containing the best
illustrations of the year (such as The Comhill Gallery in 1864, Millais’s Illustrations and

Pictures of Society in 1866, Touches of Nature and Idyllic Pictures in 1867, The Graphic

42

Portfolio and Legendary Ballads in 1876, English Society at Home in 1880, Our People
in 1881, A Legend of Camelot 1898) (Reid 11-19) attest to the interest the readers shared
in these illustrations and the attention they paid to the images during the process of
literary reception. Consequently, the examination of the role these illustrations played in
the reception of literary texts enhances our apprehension of both the contemporary
reception process.

When we consider how these illustrations came to accompany the texts, it is
important to note that the process varied from periodical to periodical and hem novel to
novel, but there were some common phases throughout the spectrum: the writer chose a
magazine and negotiated with the editor, or the editor asked the writer to create a novel
for the magazine; then the serialization format was negotiated between the editor and the
writer (and sometimes renegotiated during the publication of the work!); ﬁnally, the artist
was chosen to illustrate the novel and guided by the editor and/or by the writer until the
ﬁnal proofs were submitted and the novel was published. Sometimes the “moment of
choice” as Hodnett calls the passage to be illustrated (7), was not determined by the
editor, but actually the format and/or the cost of the publication.

Sometimes the editor did not have the ﬁnal decision in the choice of illustrators,
as it happened in the 1891 Graphic edition of Hardy’s Tess of the d ’Urbervilles. Hubert
Herkomer chose to share the commission with three of his students, E. Borough Johnson,
who made six illustrations, Daniel A. Wehrschmidt with eight illustrations and J. Syddall
with ﬁve. Thus Herkomer was the author of only six illustrations of the total twenty-ﬁve
and the numbers were almost equally divided among the four artists. Although it was

normal to divide a great work among several artists, in this case it led to a discrepancy

43

between the appearance of the characters and the overall style of the illustrations. Hence
the illustrations (see Fig. 1.13) range from sketchy to detailed, from artistic to almost
photographic, and the depiction of the same character in different images varies
accordingly (the length of her head and arms, the shape of her nose and more). The

readers therefore encounter not only the illustration—text interplay, but also

             

I
\' '.
' - .
\ , 1‘"
1-" , '
. 4 2 .
. ‘1 4,. 1.
“/3 . \ . 4 '-“‘§:‘ \\
r '/ n - ’ - x 1‘ \\

Fig. 1.13. Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D ’Urbervilles. Arlene M. Jackson, Illustration and

the Novels of Thomas Hardy. Plates 51 and 47

the thematic and stylistic inconsistency between the illustrations. Having in mind the
Victorian concerns about the theme and style of the novel (the heroine is presented as an
innocent girl in spite of having given birth to an illegitimate child; moreover, social
norms are blamed for her disastrous fate), such a visual incongruity contributed to the
unfavorable reception process. Due to the devastating reception of this novel and Hardy’s
following work, Jude, the Obscure, the writer chose to shift from novel writing to poetry
for the rest of his life.

Whereas not many sets of illustrations were so problematic for the reception of
the text, there were also other difﬁculties with illustrations. For instance, it was well-
known that a good engraver could improve the illustration and an inferior engraving
could lead to the deterioration of the image. The author/artist’s interaction with the

engraver will constitute my ﬁrst case study, where the writer aimed to assure the didactic

and entertaining style of his work by a stylistic unity between the verbal text and the
illustration. While slightly unusual, Thackeray’s case is useful in the analysis of the mid-
nineteenth-century effect of the illustrations on the literary reception process, especially
when placed in contrast with some of the best writers struggling with the illustration
process and, as I will demonstrate, with their own understanding of the audience’s

expectations only a few decades later.

45

CHAPTER 2
SATIRICAL UNITY
IN WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY’S VANITY FAIR

2.1. Victorian Didacticism and Thackeray’s Social Satire

Mid-nineteenth—century illustrated novels represented neither a new notion, nor an
entirely new style, yet they catch a unique phase in the history of the text-image
dynamic. Thackeray, in this sense, is quintessential, since his choices to illustrate many
of his own novels led to a synchrony between text and illustration that was both artistic
and useful for the audience. Indeed, Thackeray’s literary style reinvents, to a certain
extent, Fielding’s social satire, and his illustrations, deﬁned by the Hogarthian tradition
and inﬂuenced by Victorian norms of visual representation, create a symbiosis in the
reader’s reception process that is hard to ﬁnd later in the century. Standing at the
beginning of the transformation of the relationship between text and illustration and
between verbal and visual reception, Thackeray’s Vanity Fair achieves a unique
combination of verbal satire and visual comedy that can be understood only through an
in—depth look at the stylistic innovations Thackeray introduced in spite of the lack of an
established audience for his works. Vanity Fair was ﬁrst published in serial version
during 1847 and 1848 in the Cornhill Magazine with the author’s almost 200 hill-page
illustrations, vignettes and vignette initials. Thackeray had previously published works,
but those were rarely submitted under his name, appearing anonymously or under
pseudonyms such as Michel Angelo Titmarsh, Ikey Solomon, Yellowpush, Major
Gahagan, F itz-Boodle (Benjamin 87), and they did not meet with the vast positive

reception of Vanity Fair. Maureen Moran argues that in spite of the similar structure and

46

style of Thackeray’s The Snobs of England and Dickens’s Pickwick Papers, the former
“bites more aggressively than Dickens’s essentially optimistic narrative” (86).
Nevertheless, it will be Vanity Fair that will take this aggressiveness to a level that can be
seen by the Victorian audience as both innovative enough to maintain interest and
moralistic enough to maintain its readership. The subject and the tone of the illustrations,
as we will see, had an important contribution to this effect. However, in order to see how
innovation and morality interact in the illustrations and how they inﬂuence the reception
of the verbal text, we need to concentrate ﬁrst on Thackeray’s use of satire and comedy
and then review surviving receptions and how the aspects of the illustrations might have
led to these receptions. Ultimately, this analysis will yield an insight into Thackeray’s
role in the reception of the verbal text as inﬂuenced by the illustration choices of the
same author.

Vanity Fair ﬁrst and foremost had to address two concerns of the period: how to
maintain the reader’s interest through the many months of serialization, and how to
combine realism with satire. On the one hand, the serial format allowed instant changes

based on readerly reﬂections; on the other hand, this caused an additional amount of

insecurity to the yet to become famous Thackeray.20 Especially at the beginning of the
publication, he wrote each part just in time for submission and did not venture too far into
the future numbers in an effort to learn the audience’s reaction and gain the editor’s
approval. At the same time, such a setup enabled some readers to inﬂuence the writing
process, as was the famous case of a reader asking Thackeray to omit two characters from

a few chapters—which the author did (Cruse The Victorians 263). Overall, however,

47

maintaining readerly interest and holding together a narrative thread including many
characters and incidents is not easy in a serial format, especially if dealing with social
satire. Consequently, Thackeray’s innovations within the genre were shaped by the need
to sustain readerly interest through-what eventually became—l 9 months. Indeed, James
H. Weatley sees many of Thackeray’s works as an example of “True Parody”: “[t]o the
good parodist—one who is not simply burlesquing external tricks of speech—a mode of
language is a mode of thought, and this assumption provides him with his materials” (7).
In other words, the author’s parodies—and for that matter, his satires—are more consistent
and their style reach a deeper level than situational or verbal ironies. Weatley claims that
Thackeray, in fact, “practices on a large and casual scale what the ‘new critics’ of [the
twentieth century] have preached and analyzed in their scrutiny of the interdependence of
‘form’ and ‘content’ in literature,” and that he is “more conscious of exactly what [he
was] doing” than Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope (7). Since verbal and visual satire
differ enormously because of what each of these media make possible, examining how
the satire of the verbal text was uniquely Thackerayan can demonstrate how his choice of
illustrating his text and monitoring the engraving led to a more consistent reception
process within the two channels.

Thackeray’s satire has been the focus of many critical studies, yet most seem to
compare his works to Fielding’s and point out—appreciatively or sometimes
disapprovingly—how Thackeray’s works reinvent satire. As early as 1847, Thackeray’s
works are seen as “clever pictures of the oddities in life . . . all very amusing and very '

spirited,” but Thackeray “leave[s] common things as [he] ﬁnd[s] them,” while F ielding’s

 

20
See Moran’s discussion in Victorian Literature and Culture of the audience’s inﬂuence on the writing of
serial editions (including even works by the famous and well-established Dickens) (7 8-80).

48

T om Jones is “perfect . . . as a work of art as well as of genius” (Patmore 121). Coventry
Patrnore in his review “Popular Serial Literature” continues to list the features of
Fielding’s work that make Thackeray’s satires incomplete: “An epic plot, with dramatic
exhibition of character, every part complete, every incident true to the manners of the
day” (121). A few decades later, Frederic Harrison sustains the same belief: “In the
comedy of manners we have nothing but T 0m Jones to compare with Vanity Fair. And
though Thackeray is not equal to the ‘prose Homer of human nature,’ he wrote an English
even ﬁner and more racy” (114). Harrison’s emphasis on the writer’s language is useful
for the understanding of the reception of Thackeray’s works: “Thackeray’s English . . . is
natural, scholarly, pure, incisive, and yet gracefully and easily modulated—the language
of an English gentleman of culture, wit, knowledge of the world, and consummate ease
and self-possession. It is the direct and trenchant language of Swift: but more graceful,
more ﬂexible, more courteous” (108). What is striking in this reﬂection is the reader’s
admiration of wit delivered in a gentlemanly way, in a “courteOus” language, which both
points to the expectations of the period and the innovation Thackeray succeeded to
achieve in spite of them. Critics perceived the new aspects of Thackeray’s style, yet
differed in their conclusion about what these meant. Some of them saw Thackeray as
lacking the perfection of Fielding, while others claimed his supremacy over previous
satirists. The variety demonstrates that Thackeray was innovative, but never crossed the
ultimate border of reception that Hardy and James later did: he never maintained the
readers’ shock through pages and chapters and he never forgot about carefully
considering their reactions.

Indeed, Edgar F. Harden draws attention to Thackeray’s admiration for Fielding’s

49

truthfulness and talent in “laughing it to scorn” in an effort to reveal more about both
Thackeray’s principles and the reception of his works (English Humourists 101).
Thackeray’s focus on F ielding’s ability for close observation and the clear organization
of a variety of characters and events reveals Thackeray’s own priorities, yet his concern
with F ielding’s construction of the main hero, Tom Jones, and his own choice to include
no hero in Vanity Fair point to the main discrepancies between the two writers (Harden
English Humourists 102-103). Harden concludes that “Thackeray . . . reminds us that the
humorist is not simply a preacher but one who by the example of his own life can guide
and inspirit us all until the inevitable shipwreck” (English Humourists 104). This
sentence reﬂects wonderfully the essence of Thackeray’s innovation: he leads the reader
through the narrative to the ﬁnal demise, but keeps his/her spirits up in an effort to
prevent loss of interest. In a similar fashion, Weatley sees satire and realism as opposites,
but he also admits that satire emphasizes realism and eventually “undemrin[es] the
insulated self-sufﬁciency of the satirist’s position” (60). Thackeray’s satire is thus
inventive in how it overcomes satire’s moralistic self-distancing from reality: it does not
create characters and situations in order to provide extreme examples to be laughed at,
but it presents people and events based on reality and draws careful attention to the
elements that present material for critical reﬂection—all the while amusing the reader.
Such a verbal text is necessarily easier to illustrate especially if the artist is the writer
himself. Moreover, the illustrations can support critical reﬂection and entertainment if
they themselves manage to point to vices in a realistic manner, but also release cynicism
through comic moments.

In the verbal text the dynamic between realism and comedy is based on

50

Thackeray’s familiarity with both modes. His realism is deeply rooted, as Sutherland
contends, in literary expectations and his own training: “there is probably an afﬁnity
between the mentalities of jurisprudence and Victorian ﬁction, shaped as both were by
the study of individual cases and the canons of (poetic) justice” (Victorian Fiction 171).
On the other hand, his satire follows F ielding’s tradition in literature and Hogarth’s in
visual illustration. However, Thackeray’s original style comes to life when these two
aspects interact at every level of the work: the character depiction and the incident
description, the individual detail and the overall aspect. In 1912, A. J. Romilly regards
Thackeray to be “a master of character”: he “creates his characters, and seems to leave
them to their own development. The interest in his novels centers, not on episode, but on
the study of men and women working out their own salvation and their own doom” (11-
12). Creating such a consistent portrayal of the characters renders Thackeray’s work all
the more interesting if we have in mind his dependence, during the early months, upon
the approval of the audience and the editor at every number.

For the contemporary readers, however, this consistent depiction of the characters
without miraculous transformations brought about a sense of realism that was quite
innovative, especially because these characters did not ﬁt into the contemporary literary
typology. As late as 1912, Romilly still reﬂects on Thackeray’s choice to present his
characters not so much as examples of immorality, but rather of unmorality (14). Indeed,
Romilly contends that Thackeray’s “faulty human heroes are protests against the
impossible heroes of romance” (36), and we need to add, against the unrealism of the
traditional satires (such as John Dryden’s Mac F lecknoe, Alexander Pope’s The Rape of

the Lock, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and A Modest Proposal). It is noteworthy that

51

Thackeray replied to his mother’s concern about Amelia’s selﬁshness in Vanity Fair with
a clear waiving of any responsibility for the apparent incompleteness or inconsistency of
the character: “my object is not to make a perfect character, or anything like it” (Letters
2:309). This refusal to shape the character into a perfect heroine situates the character
closer to her living counterparts, and projects a strong sense of realism onto the satiric
focus of the work. Micael M. Clarke argues: “His characters are individuals (not
illustrations of a thesis) with a private (and later increasingly complex) psychological life,
but they are not limited to that. These characters also interact with and are shaped by
society’s structures and values, and the two are constantly acting upon one another” (68).
Such an acute realism in a satire, however, could easily lead to wide-spread criticism and
the termination of the serial. Other reﬂections suggest that through the realism of the
work the audience perceived a certain positive approach that kept them reading the
installments. Romilly, for instance, likes to believe that there is an ultimate optimistic aim
in Thackeray’s works: “Gloomy though the outlook was, rampant though he saw evil to
be, he shows us how the inﬂuence of good men and women, and the pure love of the
family—of husband and wife, parent and child—stem the torrent of evil and keep the world
habitable” (43-44). While there is an interesting insight in Romilly’s claim that
Thackeray’s belief in human nature is supported by characters such as Maj or Dobbin,
Colonel Newcome and Henry Esmond, the identiﬁcation of the authorial intention as

reﬂecting the inﬂuence of good, especially the audience’s understanding of this aim, is

more questionable.21 It is thus the unique combination of realism, satire and comedy that

 

21 . . . . . . . .
There were readers who believed in the author’s optimism m spite of his characters’ corruption, such as

the unknown reader cited by Benjamin: “He could not have painted Vanity Fair as he has unless Eden had
been in his inner eye” (103-104). However, those who recorded such beliefs were quite rare

52

draws the readers in.

For example, Thackeray’s works seem to lack the omniscient narrator that would
be quintessential for the optimistic tone of the novels. Harden draws attention to the
“moments when [the narrator] realizes the uncertainty of his ‘knowledge,’” and adds:
“No reader can fail to see this ftmdamental skepticism and attendant melancholy”
(Thackeray the Writer 189). Through this self-reﬂexive feature of the narrator, the reader
gains a more realistic image of the characters and incidents, which distances for them the
verbal text from the artiﬁcial constructedness of the traditional satire. In fact, Lewis S.
Benjamin felt the need to clarify the role of the frequent narratorial remarks: drawing on
Thackeray’s own reﬂection that he cannot write a story that includes only incidents after
incidents, Benjamin states that “[i]t is doubtful . . . if the book would have been so
interesting had the story been more carefully follow ” (98). On the other hand, the
ironic tone locates the narrator in between an objective story-teller and a moralizing
lecturer: his evaluation appears, as Harden argues, through the mock-heroic depictions,
neither openly lecturing, nor tacitly reﬂecting (Thackeray the Writer 187). While such a
narrator could represent a problem for the Victorian reader, Thackeray manages to
maintain for the contemporary audience a positive image of the narrator. Harden, for
instance, ﬁnds it important to note that the narrator’s assumptions are essentially religious
(Thackeray the Writer 181). The success of the verbal text, in such a case, came down to
how much the audience found the narrator, as well as the characters, to conform to the
Victorian ideals, while reinventing satire.

This was especially the case for Vanity Fair, which for the contemporary

readership seemed to be the ﬁrst publication of an unknown writer. The satirical, yet

53

friendly tone was unusual in contrast, for instance, with Dickens’s recent works, and the
story appeared to be from the very beginning a reinterpretation of the familiar literary
subject of governesses. The story ﬁrst introduces two girls graduating from a private
school in 1813, Amelia Sedley, the rather withdrawn daughter of a London merchant and
Becky Sharp, the more self-assertive orphan. After having been prevented by Amelia’s
suitor, George Osborne, ﬁ'om luring Amelia’s brother into marriage, Becky begins her
work as a governess for the Crawleys. Her efforts yield a marriage proposal from Sir Pitt
Crawley soon after his wife’s death, but by that time Becky is secretly married to his son,
Rawdon Crawley. Due to Mr. Sedley’s ﬁnancial difﬁculties, George’s father forbids his
son’s marriage with Amelia, but urged by a faithful ﬁiend, William Dobbin, George
marries her nonetheless. After their honeymoons together the two couples go to the
Continent for the war and George dies the day aﬁer he promised Becky to elope with her.
Amelia gives birth to Georgy and returns to England, while Becky has a son, returns to
England later, and is eventually found by her husband in a relationship with Lord Steyne.
Upon their separation, Becky moves to the Continent, while Amelia lives in poverty and
has to entrust Mr. Osborne to raise his grandson. Later Amelia inherits Mr. Osborne’s
fortune and is joined by her brother, Jos and Dobbin, who have returned from India.
Traveling to Germany, the group meets with Becky, now widowed, who convinces
Amelia to marry Dobbin. In the end Becky tricks Jos into marriage and possibly poisons
him to inherit his fortune and reinstate her social status. The long novel thus ends with a
dubious ﬁnale, with the reader wondering whether Becky killed her husband and whether
she deserves a second chance at all. In a traditional novel, Becky would spend the rest of

her life in penance, while Amelia would achieve the much deserved recompense of her

54

selﬂessness through the past years. In spite of the unusual ending, Thackeray’s verbal and
visual style seemingly managed to maintain many readers’ interest.

Consequently, this interest that the novel brought about is especially remarkable
when we have in mind the innovations that it represented in terms of subject and style.
Victorianism tends to be seen as the pinnacle of strict morality; however, the boundary
between what was morally acceptable and what happened in reality was much more ﬂuid.
Peter Bailey highlights that historical sources as well as contemporary art suggest that the
working class families for whom respectability was common were “rarer birds than
contemporaries or today’s historians have allow ” (ctd. in Huggins 585). One especially
problematic group comprised the govemesses as their existence in the contemporary
society seemed to challenge the prevailing belief that women’s respectability depended
entirely on men’s protection (Armstrong 117). They were far from their families, without
a husband or any male relative, in the midst of another family, and therefore they
threatened the morality and integrity of the family they worked for and lived with. In
contrast, their literary representation seemed to be quite idealistic: often they were
portrayed as the ﬁnest examples of morality and diligence and their behaviour was
compensated with their marriage to a wealthy gentleman who was either single or
widowed. Such a blissful ending, however, was more ﬁctional than realistic during the
mid-nineteenth century and Thackeray chose to revisit the theme in his Vanity Fair by
showing what can happen to such a poor well-educated woman as Becky Sharp.

Nevertheless, it was not the theme that most shocked his contemporaries, but
rather the manner in which it was presented. The morally impeccable Amelia struggles

throughout her life, while her opposite, Becky seems to thrive throughout most of the

55

novel. Moreover, Amelia is depicted as a naive, almost foolish woman who is
intellectually and socially unable to survive in her social environment, while Becky
appears as the smart woman who knows how to use her education. In this sense, the
characters and incidents do not only reverse the traditional stories, but they also suggest
the need for satire to reﬂect on society in a realistic manner. Thackeray never ceases to
remind the audience through little inserted notes to the reader that “[s]uch people there
are living and ﬂourishing in the world—Faithless, Hopeless, Charityless: let us have at
them, dear friends, with might and main. Some there are and very successful too, mere
quacks and fools: and it was to combat and expose such as those, no doubt, that Laughter
was made” (Vanity 84). As the following readerly reﬂections demonstrate, the realism of
such an unhappy story was what the audience found the most unusual, yet the interest

was maintained throughout the publication and its success yielded a great contract for

Thackeray’s next publication.22
Numerous reﬂections revolve around Thackeray’s satiric tone and more

speciﬁcally the characters’ presentation, yet they also show how many of the readers
learned to appreciate the style in spite of the readerly concerns associated with the ﬁrst
numbers of the serial edition. Tom Taylor in his poem drew attention to Dobbin’s silent
love and challenged the claim that Thackeray was cynic:

A cynic?—yes, if ’tis the cynic’s part

To track the serpent’s trail with saddened eye;
To mark how good and evil divide the heart,

How lives in chequered shade and sunshine lie.
How e’en the best unto the worst is knit,

 

22 For the next novel, Pendennis, Thackeray’s monthly salary increased from £60 to £100 and the contract
was extended to 24 numbers (Sutherland Victorian Fiction 103). Sutherland maintains: “It would seem that
although Thackeray’s appeal was not massive (just over 9,000 copies of Pendennis were sold in parts and
ﬁrst book edition), he nonetheless had an exuaordinary faithful public, who would stick with him for ever,
apparently” (Victorian Fiction 102-103).

56

By brotherhood of weakness, sin, and care;
How even in the worst, sparks may be lit
To show all is not utter darkness there (5-6)

Similarly, Benjamin argued: “If a reader cannot feel the deep tenderness that underlines
all the later writings, no arguments will have any. weight with him” (101). These
reﬂections on the presentation of good and evil as closely knit and on the compassion
beneath the satirical tone suggest an appreciation of Thackeray’s realism in spite of the
Victorian literary expectations. On the other hand, one cannot help but wonder how much
the claims about cynicism were deﬂected by the comic nature of many of the
illustrations.

Indeed, the realism of the published work is most apparent in the text since the
traditional hero was nowhere to be located, but the audience could see the complexity of
the life-like characters. Romilly, for instance, believed in Becky’s “good qualities, which
might have developed had not every faculty been warped and distorted by selﬁshness and
cynicism. Her courage was undeniable, but it degenerated into impudence. The
diplomacy with which she wheedled and propitiated all with whom she came in contact
might have developed into a graceful and delicate tact, but, instead, it degenerated into
duplicity” (27). Such a reﬂection necessitated an open mind, but above all, a clear view
of the realities of the period. Indeed, this realism is what set Thackeray apart for the
readers who favored his works. Harrison stated:

Some good people cry out that she is so wicked. Of course she is wicked:
so were Iago and Bliﬁl. The only question is, if she be real? Most certainly
she is, as real as anything in the whole range of ﬁction, as real as Tartuffe,
or Gil Blas, Wilhelm Meister or Rob Roy. No one doubts that Becky
Sharp exists: unhappily they are not even very uncommon. And Thackeray

has drawn one typical example of such bad women with an anatomical
precision that makes us shudder. (120)

The reference to other authors is impressive and seems to suggest—j ust decades after

57

Vanity F air—the inclusion of Thackeray’s works in the list of major literary achievements.
More speciﬁcally, the comparison brings about a new sense of realism in Thackeray’s
character depiction: what really proves the value of Thackeray’s work in comparison to
other famous authors is his depiction of the negative character as a realistic person. Many
readers acknowledged that Thackeray achieved this goal. Sara Coleridge maintained that
“Vanity Fair present[ed] a true view of human life, a true view of one aspect and side of
it” (Cruse The Victorians 261). William Caldwell Roscoe concurred: “Thackeray thrusts
his characters in among the moving everyday world in which we live. We don’t say they
are life-like characters; they are mere people. We feel them to be near us, and that we
may meet them any day” (125). Roscoe compared Thackeray to Dickens in an effort to
highlight the realism of the former in light of the writerly choices and style of the latter:
“Dickens creates a race of beings united to us by common sympathies and affections,
endeared to us by certain qualities, and inﬁnitely amusing in their eccentricities. Still, we
all know perfectly well they are not really human beings” (125). Thackeray, however,
“makes [the character] himself expose his own absurdities, and gathers a zest from the
unconsciousness with which he does so . . . At the bottom he has a warm, almost a
passionate interest in his own creations. They are realities to him as to the rest of the
world” (129). It is noteworthy that Roscoe saw Thackeray’s satire achieved not through
the unreal symbolism of each character that is placed in a series of events to highlight a
message, but through real people that act within the realms of a copy of the world leaving
the readers to interpret attitudes just as they would in real life. His list of unheroic
characters is thus explained by his realism: “he drew men and women as they were,”

Benjamin reﬂects, “If he have not joined pure intellect to pure goodness, if he have not

58

allied the strength of Becky’s intellect with the purity of Amelia’s soul, it was not,
perhaps, because he was unable to appreciate this amalgamation of ﬁne qualities, but
because he never met with it in the world” (100). Retrospectively, a notion that a realist
writer relies exclusively on his experience for the development of characters might seem
simplistic, but it illustrates a certain depth to the contemporary readers’ belief in the
realism of these characters. Nevertheless, other realistic depictions of contemporary
society often led to a happy ending and Dickens’s vast success suggests that too much
realism was not what Victorians were looking for in their readings.

Indeed, Thackeray’s acute realism brought about some negative reception not
because it reﬂected on the corrupt aspect of society, but because it provided a
disturbingly clear mirror image of reality. Indeed, some of the less positive opinions do
not question Thackeray’s realism, but rather the need to read about such realistic ﬁgures:
“one very disagreeable quality—the most prominent people in it are thorough wordlings,
and though their selﬁshness and meannesses and dirtinesses and pettinesses are
admirably portrayed—to the very life indeed—I do not much rejoice in their company”
(Cruse The Victorians 261). The reader does not seem to be concerned that this satire
reﬂects on the vices of society, but that it reﬂects the realities of society. Without
exaggerations, the text cannot be read as a hypothetical case of what would happen if
vices were not controlled; instead, it suggests that these vices exist as depicted and their
outcomes are happening in real time. Nevertheless, the continued reading of the novel, in
the case of most of these concerned readers, suggests that in spite of these concerns both

the subject and the style maintained their interest throughout the many months of

59

publication and long after.23 In fact, late tvventieth-century critics share the appreciation
of earlier readers and ﬁrrther reﬂect on the style and technique of the writer. Weatley
draws attention to the conﬁdential rapport between the narrator and the reader, especially
the narrator’s conﬁdence that the readers will share his values and reﬂections (57).
Moreover, Weatley sees the “interpenetration of good and bad” to be fostered by the
narrator’s shifting distance through the division of sympathy: instead of associating a
good character with positive traits and a bad character with negative traits throughout the
novel, the narrator depicts both the good and the bad thoughts and actions of each
character and thus compels the reader to sympathize with different characters as the story
unfolds (65-66). The avoidance of the extremes locates the text itself between the
established categories. Indeed, Micael Clarke sees Vanity Fair as “neither sentimental nor
cynical”—situated on a unique middle ground enabled by the techniques of the Menippean
satire: parody of style, variety of perspectives, unresolved ending and the construction of
characters as both real persons and representatives of ideas (78-82). The Menippean
structure, Clarke argues, “allows Thackeray to preach his ‘sermon’ with humor, fellow
feeling and intellectual play of the highest order” (83). What is noteworthy here is the use
of quotation marks to set Thackeray’s “sermon” apart from the more clear-cut moralizing
narratives: his story reﬂects the negative social behavior instead of presenting such

behaviors with a straight-forward moral message. The unique dynamic between the

 

23 Readers who admittedly stopped reading the novel (such as Harriet Martineau, who was forced to do so
by “the moral disgust it occasion[ed]”) were rather few, while other sceptics followed the story closely
even if they felt it to be a lesser work than Dickens’s Dombey and Son, which was published during the
same period. Lord Sanderson’s father, for instance, preferred Dickens to Thackeray, but continued to read
both (Cruse The Victorians 261). At the same time, we have to recognize, there were other readers who
hastened to acknowledge Thackeray’s supremacy such as Mrs. Carlyle stating that Vanity Fair “beats
Dickens out of the ﬁeld” or as Abraham Hayward encouraging the author: “ Don’t get nervous, you have
completely beaten Dickens out of the inner circle already” (Cruse The Victorians 261).

60

realism and satirical tone of the text, the self-distanced reﬂections and the “inspirited”
guidance of the reader through the pages is what allowed the innovative subject and style
to gain appreciation instead of moral disgust. At the same time, we have to acknowledge
the role of the illustrations in this process since the illustrations themselves are located at
the nexus of realism, satire and comedy and thus they both support the verbal text and

release its cynicism.

2.2. Verbal Sarcasm and Visual Irony

The ﬁrst serialized edition of the novel, which appeared from 1847 to 1848, was
richly illustrated with initials, vignettes and full-page illustrations drawn by Thackeray
himself. In fact, the sheer number of these illustrations, about 200, suggests that the
illustration were an important element in the creation process. On the other hand, the
reception of the text is largely inﬂuenced by these visual images since most of the
characters and incidents have a visual rendering. The cover of the ﬁrst installment itself is
divided equally between the illustration and the text (see Fig. 2.1). The vignette shows
the narrator in an elevated position, dressed as a clown and addressing his fellow
entertainers, while the text draws attention to the title through its design and lays less
emphasis on the rest of the available text. The design of the typeface for the title
represents an interesting fusion of writing and drawing, but it also makes the two words
stand out more: VANITY and FAIR. The latter reﬂects back on the entertainment
reference of the vignette, and the former makes the reader look at the illustration more
closely and recognize visual representations of human vices and attitudes. The ﬁgure on

the far left seems to be critically analyzing what he hears, and he is drawn as a short slim

61

 

’ VANITY FAIR.

PEN MD "IOIL IKETOMEI OF ENGUIN ’OGIETY.

BY W M. THACKERAY.

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. .-r - I- u.

3;; .
rmmrrn AT m: Hitch” ”0.71m. “a. run “In? "ﬁg
:2 m;

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Fig. 2.1. Cover page for Thackeray’s Vanity Fair. William M. Thackeray, Vanity Fair, xii

ﬁgure with striking nose and chin. While some ﬁgures seem to be shocked by the
presenter’s story (behind the barrel, to the right) or just unhappy (further right from the
barrel, mid-front), others pay little attention (the man in the far right comer and the
woman with the baby in the front) or enjoy the narrative with a sarcastic grin (behind the
barrel to the left and the ﬁgure on the far right). Being placed in front of two historical
monuments, the scene seems to be not only an illustration of the story being told, but to a
certain extent being acted out: the variety of reactions among these ﬁgures visualizes the
subtitle of the page: “Pen and Pencil Sketches of English Society.” For the contemporary
readers the reﬂection on the author and readership in a cover illustration was quite
unusual and the satiric tone further added to its uniqueness. The rest of the cover page
would have drawn attention to the writer as being the author of the recent “Snob Papers,”
which presented characters in a similar satiric tone. This sense is further emphasized by

the title page (see Fig. 2.2) showing a clown in a self-reﬂexive position and the

62

 

Fig. 2.2. Title page of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair. William M. Thackeray, Vanity Fair, xiv
description below the title pointing out that there will be no hero included in the text.
Moreover, the title of the novel becomes an element of the setting, and through the visual
depiction of the pierced letters hung out to dry the reader gains further insight into the
style of the text to be read: Vanity Fair will be exposed and mocked at.

Similarly to this portrayal of the narrator as a clown, the illustrations seem to
provide closer images of the main characters in some of their most comical poses
throughout the novel. The ﬁrst larger illustration shows Miss Jemima and Miss Pinkerton
(see Fig. 2.3), while the text refers to Miss Jemima’s “little red nose” and describes Miss
Pinkerton as a “majestic lady: the Semiramis of Hammersmith, the friend of Doctor
Johnson, the correspondent of Mrs. Chapone herself” (Vanity Fair 1). The reference to
the lady’s social interaction and the comparison to an ancient queen seem to be
questionable, since the character is a schoolmaster in a small town, a spinster who needs

to make money. However, the image itself adds to the irony of the verbal text a certain

63

 

Fig. 2.3. Miss Pinkerton and Miss Jemima. William M. Thackeray, Vanity Fair, 2

comic element: Miss Pinkerton appears to be an older lady with a crooked nose and Miss
Jemima appears to forget manners entirely in spite of the location and leans forward to
have a better view of the carriage arriving. While such images could undercut the realism
effect of the verbal text, their careful situation somewhere in between satirical imagery
and caricature maintain the reader’s focus on the realism of the text while preventing a
straight forward confrontation with what might be seen as immorality.

Another illustration from the ﬁrst chapter introduces Becky to the reader as a
mean young lady who throws back Johnson’s dictionary received as a gift and thus
shocks Miss Jemima deeply (see Fig. 2.4). The illustration is remarkable through its
choices of representation. We do not see Amelia, she is probably withdrawn in the
carriage and crying for leaving her friends; but we see Miss Swartz in the standard
position of deep grieving: lowered head and hands covering most of the face. Miss

Jemima is one of the ﬁrst people to be shocked, when Becky realizes that she has nothing

 

Fig. 2.4. Becky leaves the boarding school. William M. Thackeray, Vanity Fair, 8
to lose if she offends her and chooses to act accordingly. And while we pay attention to
the grieving girl (the visualization of how one should behave in such an instance),
Becky’s mean face (how one should not behave) and the scared young lady (the shocked
attitude caused by Becky), we cannot help but notice the two other characters on the
carriage who continue their business without even blinking about the reversal of social
norms that has just taken place. Thackeray’s awareness of how the story will play out
allows the illustrator (himself) to choose the most representative attitudes and include
them in one of the ﬁrst illustrations. Through just a few images the sketch of Vanity Fair
is presented early on: its inhabitants pretend to follow rules but have a hard time
concealing their urges, and when they choose not to conceal their real feelings, some
bystanders become offended, but the majority does not care and the show goes on.

The notion of the audience for the main inhabitants of Vanity Fair reappears later

in the novel. In Chapter IV the servants peek into the high society’s entertainment and the

65

illustration (see Fig. 2.5) portrays a woman as leaning forward to have better access to

that which she is not supposed to hear both because of her social status and the lack of

 

Fig. 2.5. Servants listening to music. William M. Thackeray, Vanity Fair, 33

education, which is regarded as necessary for the true enjoyment of the songs being
performed (Vanity Fair 33). By showing the hidden audience instead of the participants
of the event, Thackeray draws attention not to the verbal depiction of the event, but rather
to the effect on the rest of society. The illustration, in this sense, complements the verbal
depiction in a way that is impossible when the illustrator is not the author of the text.
Fellow illustrators such as Cruikshank and Leech focused on the portrayal of the
characters, but did not venture into depicting the author, even less his/her belief about the
readership. In another illustration in Chapter XXIX, when George attends parties and
hands a secret note to Becky (Vanity Fair 290), Amelia is shown as Dobbin sees her to
the carriage and bystanders either look on the scene with a sly smile or look away not

paying attention to Amelia’s situation (see Fig. 2.6). Their elevated position in

66

 

Fig. 2.6. Amelia leaves the party. William M. Thackeray, Vanity Fair, 291

comparison with Amelia and Dobbin, draw the reader’s eyes to the onlookers more than
on the usual characters of contemporary illusuation backgrounds. Such attitudes and
facial expressions provide a reﬂection on the interactions of the main characters and add
a satiric nuance to the visualizations. Amelia here appears absent-minded and Dobbin is
rather attentive and kind, yet what the bystanders witness—what the reader can see—is
rather ironic: Dobbin loves Amelia, but that love has led him to facilitate the marriage
that now disappoints Amelia; and Amelia is helpless in this marriage and continues to be
unaware of Dobbin’s feelings. The rest of the social circle witnessing these interactions is
entertained by these struggles for the moment (as we see from the smiling faces) and then
continues as if nothing has happened (as the other bystanders who must have noticed
Amelia, but have lost interest in her by the time she got to the carriage). It will be this
disconnectedness that will allow Amelia to mourn for George many years aﬁer his death

and prevent her from marrying Dobbin until Becky reveals her affair with George. For

67

the contemporary readers, we need to realize, such choices of illustrations were quite
unique: most would expect to see George hand a note to Becky and Amelia observe the
interaction with utter sadness. Instead, the readers are reminded whom Amelia should
have married, and they cannot help but laugh sarcastically with the bystanders. Such a
thorough understanding of the possibilities that the verbal text presents for the illustration
process can be achieved only by the writer. Any detailed review of the characters and
incidents, as we will see in Hardy’s case, does not allow for such choices of illustration
subject and perspective.

The illustrations contribute also to the depiction of the characters and provide a
consistent visualization of their attitudes throughout the novel that is made possible by
Thackeray’s own drawings and his monitoring of the engraving process. Amelia
continues to be represented as the withdrawn lady who provokes everybody’s admiration

and pity. In Chapter L, for instance, the illustration following the depiction of her

 

Fig. 2.7. Amelia without her son. William M. Thackeray, Vanity Fair, 497

68

preparations for Georgy’s move to his grandfather (see Fig. 2.7) shows her sitting
outside, unaccompanied, and her facial expression visualizes her role during the next
phase of Georgy’s life: in between his visits she has to rely on her observations of him
from a distance while he helps out an orphan boy or sits in church (Vanity Fair 498).
Such a visualization of both the character’s current emotional status and her future fate is
yet another feat that contemporary illustrators could not share. Indeed, due to uniqueness
of Amelia’s character, her portrayal throughout the novel is very much in synchrony with
her role played in the verbal text. In Chapter LXII, for instance, Amelia is shown as

respectﬁllly admired by the Secretary of Legation, and the men all seem to form a circle

around her: her brother, her son, her secret admirer and the minister (see Fig. 2.8). Such

"1W WW

 

Fig. 2.8. Amelia admired by the Secretary. William M. Thackeray, Vanity Fair, 624
reoccurring positioning of the character allows the reader to visually perceive Amelia’s
shyness, helplessness and politeness that is consistent with the verbal text.

At the same time, Dobbin is always portrayed as a respectable person showing

69

utmost attention to Amelia. Indeed, when the geographical distance prevents the reader
from seeing the two characters in the same illustration, an object stands in her place. In
Chapter XLHI, Dobbin is depicted as sitting in a chair and reading Amelia’s letter (see

Fig. 2.9). He does not place the letter on the table nearby, but holds it closer as if to better

 

Fig. 2.9. Dobbin reads Amelia’s letter. William M. Thackeray, Vanity Fair, 435

see the ﬁne handwriting and to feel closer to its author. Due to the minimal lines through
the page that the reader sees, the sheet Dobbin holds up forms a contrasting white surface
against the dark background and thus the letter gains a special visual emphasis as the
representative of the missing (and missed) person. The adjacent verbal text provides the
main passage of Amelia’s letter: having learned that Dobbin would marry, she is sending
her best wishes and expresses her wish to be remembered among the closest of his friends
(Vanity Fair 435-36). For Dobbin this means that the much admired person has been
misinformed, but also that she is missing him. The illustration, as a consequence,

provides a clear portrayal of one of the most important scenes in the chapter and

70

represents visually the role of the letter. Such illustrations interact closely with the verbal
text during the reader’s reception process.

On the other hand, Becky always appears in the illustrations as a self-assured,
cunning person thus faithfully visualizing the verbal depictions. Her self-fashioned status
is ironically described by the narrator: “curious it is, that as she advanced in life this
young lady’s ancestors increased in rank and splendour” (Vanity Fair 11). On the other
hand, the reader is constantly reminded how calculated Becky’s behavior is when she
depends on her interlocutors, and what her real feelings are: “It was George Osborne who
prevented my marriage—And she loved George Osborne accordingly” (Vanity Fair 63).
Having such verbal descriptions in mind, the visual renderings of her character often
draw attention to her proud stature and her sly countenance. In Chapter VII, for instance,
she arrives at Sir Pitt Crawley’s and she has to rely on her new acquaintance to carry in
her luggage as the groom working for the Sedleys rejects the request due to her treatment
of the staff at the Sedley’s (Vanity Fair 67-69). She learns only inside the house (a
paragraph down in the text) that the helper was Sir Pitt himself, but the illustration’s
caption already announces that “Rebecca makes acquaintance with a live Baronet” (68).
The illustration again shows Becky as a self—conﬁdent young woman who is aware of her
status in contrast with the groom and the porter (see Fig. 2.10). Indeed, the groom
appears as arrogantly looking at her, but she turns her back to him and walks towards the
stairs with the cahnness that somebody will help her out and she will report the groom’s
misconduct to Mr. Sedley (Vanity Fair 69). What becomes comic for the reader, then, is
this conﬁdence in her education and skills that the porter seems to laugh at making Becky

probably wonder. The contemporary reader, however, is helped by learning that the

71

porter is in fact the baronet and thus although Becky managed to get her luggage carried

in for her, she starts out her relationship with her new boss by owing him. A closer look

 

Fig. 2.10. Becky meets Sir Pitt Crawley. William M. Thackeray, Vanity Fair, 68
at the illustration reveals that although all the three characters are close to one another,
the groom appears to be much shorter than the other two and the baronet is not only
larger, but also taller than Becky. As a result the height of each character further
emphasizes their physical location and while the groom appears to move optically further
in the background than he actually is, the baronet ends up looking down upon Becky
from a sharper angle than he would just because of the stairs. This illustration
demonstrated wonderfully both Thackeray’s ability to choose the right moment and angle
to illustrate and his talent in combining realism with comic elements without fully
arriving at caricature.

The same unique style can be observed in other illustrations of Becky as well.

When she decides to show Amelia George’s request to elope with her, Amelia appears

72

yet again in a moumful position crying, as it were, for the second death of her husband:

the death of his respectability (see Fig. 2.11). However, the angle of Amelia’s back and

 

Fig. 2.11. Becky reveals the secret about George. William M. Thackeray, Vanity Fair, 681

raised arm lead the viewer back to Becky’s face and thus the reader concentrates more on
the striking features of her depiction. At the moment, Becky appears to be extremely
casual about the news she has just delivered to the widow: instead of sitting across from
her and providing solace, she stands facing away from Amelia, leaning towards the
ﬁreplace, while glancing back over Amelia’s head as if noticing her distress and
concluding that her work is done. The casualness of her posture and pitiless glance seem
so much in contrast with Amelia’s deep sorrow that the reader cannot help but reﬂect on
the self-proclaimed description of the verbal text: “A Novel without a Hero.” Such
illustration lack entirely the dramatism of many of the contemporary illustration of tragic
moments and supports the satiric tone of the verbal text. This illustration thus not only

visualizes one of the most important moments in the characters’ lives, but it also interacts

73

with the verbal text more closely than any of the contemporary illustrated novels. The
illustration prevents the reader from perceiving Amelia as a traditional heroine since she
has just learned that she wasted years of her life mourning for somebody who would have
left her, and Becky cannot be seen as the benevolent heroine because she does not care
how she delivers the message or what the effect is. It appears that she helps others only
when she gets bored with watching them struggle and not when they would actually need
it (in this case, years earlier). This illustration, in its essence, reminds us of those ﬁgures
of the cover illustration that upon hearing the story felt the need to laugh sarcastically
instead of reﬂecting sadly on the events of Vanity Fair.

This visual release of the cynicism of the verbal text is probably best seen in the
vignette initials of the ﬁrst edition. Chapter IV, for instance, depicts Becky’s attempt to
lure Jos into marriage and the vignette initial shows her ﬁshing in a river with a large ﬁsh
near the bait, while the church tower in the background suggests the intended future: their

marriage (see Fig. 2.12). Moreover, she is sitting on the letter P of the beginning of the

 

 

Fig. 2.12. Vignette initial representing Becky ﬁshing. William M. Thackeray, Vanity
Fair, 25

74

text: “Poor Joe’s panic lasted for two or three days: during which he did not visit the
house, nor during that period did Miss Rebecca mention his name” (Vanity Fair 25).
Seeing the female ﬁgure’s sarcastic smile in the illustration, while she is ﬁshing for the
fat ﬁsh, Jos’s symbol, and her contempt for his distress, the reader does not confront
immorality in a straight-forward manner, but takes time to reﬂect on the text and enjoy
the symbolism of the illustration. Indeed, the following text shows her ﬁshing for a
membership in the family in general: she manages to become loved by Mrs. Sedley and
she softens even Mr. Sedley (Vanity Fair 25). In similar vignette initials all the characters
and incidents become subjects for ridicule. Chapter V. tells the story of Dobbin’s ﬁght at
school with Cuff, yet the vignette initial combines the dynamic image of two ﬁghting
with comic elements such as swords in the hands of children and hats made of the Daily

News (see Fig. 2.13). The editor Peter L. Shillingsburg draws attention to the fact that the

 

Fig. 2.13. Vignette initial with Dobbin ﬁghting Cuff. William M. Thackeray, Vanity Fair,
38

newspaper was published only decades later and “[t]his humorous anachronism would
have been obvious to most early readers” (Vanity Fair 38). Moreover, the satiric image

places one of the participants on a horse that appears to be a rocking toy so that the initial

75

both draws attention to Dobbin’s heroism at school and mocks it. It is in this sense, then,
that the comic elements of the vignette initials do not turn the illustration into a
caricature, but only provide a peek into the funny side of the narrative. The audience
continues reading about the attitude Dobbin’s colleagues share towards his father’s
business, which—along with Dobbin’s critical self-reﬂections—prove to him that he is
unworthy of Amelia The initial thus contributes visually to one of the main elements of
satire in the verbal text: the two good characters are doomed for years and when they
ﬁnally marry, they have to remember that they took their last chance to lead a normal life.

In Chapter IX, Thackeray connects stylistically the title of the chapter, “Family

Portraits,” the starting sentence and the vignette initial (see Fig. 2.14) to portray Sir Pitt

 

Fig. 2.14. Vignette initial with Sir Pitt Crawley. William M. Thackeray, Vanity Fair, 85

Crawley in a satiric manner. The initial represents an overweight man sitting on the letter
S and smoking a pipe while the text reads: “Sir Pitt Crawley was a philosopher with a
taste for what is called low life” (Vanity 85). The text seems a pun on the two terms
‘taste’ and ‘low life’ since most Victorians would associate ‘taste’ with high class and a

distinguished lifestyle. Moreover, the ‘taste for low life’ seems to ethically contradict the

76

self-distancing of the ‘philosopher’ so the ﬁnal understanding of the character’s
description opposes clearly his noble status. In the illustration, the man’s posture and
facial expression both strive to demonstrate what the sentence suggests: the man seems to
pay no attention to his posture and appears to be quite reconciled with his appearance
against the contemporary social etiquette. By choosing to begin the chapter with the word
‘Sir’ and showing the man sitting in such a childish posture exactly on this word, the
initial both reﬂects the satire of the text and manages to alleviate it visually: the man
actually sits on his own title! Such vignette initials thus visualize Thackeray’s verbal
style faithfully: Sir Pitt disregards social standards and his visual image disregards the
verbal text.

It is remarkable how the realism of the full-page illustrations and the comic
elements of the vignette initials work together with the verbal text. An outstanding
example would be Chapter XV, which appeared at the beginning of the ﬁfth installment
in 1847. The vignette initial shows Becky kneeling and crying passionately in the letter B

that almost envelops the scene as a framed picture (see Fig. 2.15). Indeed, the image

 

Fig. 2.15. Vignette initial with Becky crying. William M. Thackeray, Vanity Fair, 153

77

displays a sad woman that could be interpreted as a mourning widow; however, the
verbal text of the previous installment clariﬁes that Becky is upset because she married
too quickly and when Sir Pitt proposed to her, she realized that she missed the
opportunity of becoming a lady. So instead of gratefulness for the offer and happiness for
the marriage, we see her kneeling and crying as she has never allowed herself to behave
previously. The visual reference to a church interior (Becky seems to be kneeling in front
of a statue on a pedestal) only further emphasizes the satiric tone of the initial: she is cries
in front of a saint’s representation because of marrying the family member with less
social and ﬁnancial capital. The initial in this sense reminded the contemporary readers of
the last lines of the previous number and managed to pick up the tone of the verbal text
where it had been left off. The ﬁgure of the smiling devil peeking ﬁorn behind the letter
B only further strengthens the sense that the woman is not supposed to provoke sympathy
as a traditional mourning Victorian heroine. It is this verbal and visual ambivalence of
whether the reader should feel sorry for her or despise her that prevents the reader from
forming a moral judgment about Becky. And if the contemporary Victorian reader did not
form a strong opinion about the negative character, he/ she would not be so shocked when
in the end the character did not receive the punishment that a moral judgment would have
necessitated.

Having set the tone visually, the verbal text continues to reﬂect on the incident by
focusing this time on the reaction of the other inhabitants of Vanity Fair. The following
illustration portrays two women in the hallway with eyes open wide as with astonishment
(see Fig. 2.16). As the reader reaches the illustration, he/she realizes that the two ﬁgures
represent Briggs and Firkin, who having learned about Sir Pitt’s kneeling in front of
Becky, hurry to notify his sister, Miss Crawley (Vanity Fair 154). Since her intrusion into
the discussion between Sir Pitt and Becky might appear too calculated, the narrator

78

invites the reader to check the accuracy of the depiction:

if you calculate the time for the above dialogue to take place—the time for
Briggs and Firkin to ﬂy to the drawing room—the time for Miss Crawley
to be astonished, and to drop her volume of Pigault le Brun—and the time
for her to come down stairs—you will see how exactly accurate this
history is and how Miss Crawley must have appeared at the very instant
when Rebecca had assumed the attitude of humility. (154)

 

Fig. 2.16. Briggs and Firkin eavesdropping. William M. Thackeray, Vanity Fair, 154

The illustration of Briggs and Firkin in this way becomes a support for the verbal text as
it visualizes through the two attitudes the astonishment of both and their decision to
report it promptly to Miss Crawley. At the same time, the illustration reﬂects a certain
nosiness of the two—stopping just short of caricature style—and suggests their feelings
when they learn that a governess managed to achieve a proposal from Queen’s Crawley.
In a sense, the illustration thus reinforces the effect of the vignette initial emphasizing the
incredibility of a governess becoming a lady, and further leads the reader into the text:
he/she sees/reads about the proposal as well as Becky’s and others’ reactions, but it is

only pages later, at the end of the chapter when he/she ﬁnds out both from the verbal text

79

and the illustration that Becky has in fact married Rawdon Crawlcy. Similar
combinations of the verbal text and illustrations of different types and sizes manage to
maintain the reader’s interest and prevent a possible moral disgust through the comic
elements. 8

Nevertheless, the comic elements never reach a level that would prevent moral
reﬂection and reduce the verbal text to mere entertainment. Indeed, the illustrations that
Thackeray prepared for Vanity Fair are much more nuanced than the simple caricatures

of his previous publication, The Snobs of England (see Fig. 2.17). In the illustrations of

 

 

 

Fig. 2.17. William Makepeace Thackeray’s The Snobs of England, 3-4

The Snobs, Thackeray relied on unrealistic sizes and situations in an effort to emphasize
certain features of the characters, yet this easily took the readers into the realm of
laughter and inhibited a more serious response. In Vanity Fair, in contrast, the characters
might display some comic features, as the unrealistically rounded faces of Briggs and
Firkin exemplify, yet they never fully become caricatures of people (with elongated body
parts) and never act in unrealistic manners (such as running after a person with a huge

fork). Such a unique mixture of satiric realism and slight comedy supports the tone of the

80

verbal text and facilitates a reception process that is based on the interaction of the two

media, not the discrepancy between them.

2.3. The Writer/Illustrator’s Expectations and the Readers’ Reception

This interplay between the verbal text and the visual illustration was facilitated by
Thackeray’s awareness of the readerly expectations as well as his interest in the editing
process. The narrator openly admits the satiric tone of the verbal text and the illustrations
on the whole support the idea that this novel is a reinvention of the traditional story about

a governess. The vignette initial of Chapter X] (see Fig. 2.18), for instance, is a parody of

 

Fig. 2.18. Vignette initial with pastoral setting. William M. Thackeray, Vanity Fair, 99

the Arcadian images that were popular at the time, and thus a satiric illustration of the
chapter title “Arcadian Simplicity” and the nearby depiction of the Crawleys
experiencing the “advantage of country life over a town one” (Vanity Fair 99).24 Similar

references to the traditional style of novel writing that the author evades are apparent

 

24

Paintings of Arcadian images by Joshua Reynolds and John Constable and similar settings for Thomas
Gainsborough’s portraits show that pastoral images were favored by the Royal Academy of Arts and the
ﬁrst consistent effort to challenge these ideals in painting was brought about the Pre-Raphaelite

81

throughout the verbal text; however, the most extensive is probably the passage in
Chapter VI, which provides the “genteel rose-water style” version of the narrative (Vanity
Fair 50). The passage features a highly improbable discussion with the Hungarian Prince
Esterhazy peppered with theatrical elements and enhanced by caricatures and serves as an
example of how the narrative could look like if the narrator chose to follow the guidelines
of the fashionable style. Instead, the narrator acknowledges his choices directly and
addresses the readers’ concerns openly as in Chapter VI: “1 know that the tune which I
am piping is a very mild one,—(although there are some terriﬁc chapters coming
presently)—and must beg the good-natured reader to remember that we are only
discoursing at present about a stock-broker’s family in Russell Square...” (Vanity Fair
49). The statement stands at the beginning of the chapter and is visualiZed by the vignette
initial portraying the narrator with a pipe and comically lengthened nose, ﬁngers and

shoes (see Fig. 2.19). While the image of the writer gestures towards

 

Fig. 2.19. Vignette initial with narrator. William M. Thackeray, Vanity Fair, 49

Caricature, the representative of the faithful audience is even more comic: the writer plays

 

Brotherhood. The most famous examples of this transformation are probably William Holman Hunt‘s The
Hireling Shepherd (1851) and Our English Coasts (1852).

82

his pipe for a dog. Nevertheless, before the reader could become immersed in the comic
nature of the vignette initial, he/she reads the ﬁrst sentence and realizes the need to reﬂect
on the readerly expectations rather than laugh at the narrator. Such close interactions
between the text and the illustration keep the reader at the safe middle ground between
harsh satire and comic laughter that is more difficult to ﬁnd later in the century.

Indeed, the reader realizes early on that Thackeray is quite aware of the
contemporary readers’ expectations and even if he dares to reinvent the genre, he never
loses sight of his audience. After describing Miss Swartz’s fondness of Amelia and the
orphan’s promise to address Amelia in her letters as Mamma, the reader comes upon a
reﬂection:

All which details, I have no doubt JONES who reads this book at his club,
will pronounce to be excessively foolish trivial twaddling and ultra-
sentimental. Yes, I can see Jones at this minute (rather ﬂushed with his
joint of mutton and half-pint of wine,) taking out his pencil and scoring
under the words ‘foolish twaddling’ &c., and adding to them his own
remark of ‘quite true.’ Well he is a lofty man of genius and admires the
great and heroic novels in life and novels, and so had better take warning
and go elsewhere. (6)

Such an ironic depiction of one type of reader, the reference to the social snob of
Thackeray’s previous publication and the bold recommendation to read other works,
show a writer who knows what he can afford himself from the very ﬁrst pages of his
work. Indeed Margaret Diane Stetz argues that Thackeray’s keen awareness of the
readers and their expectations was a uniquely mid-nineteenth-century phenomenon
providing an invulnerability that was enviable decades later (169). The adjacent
illustration of Jones displays the same self-assuredness: the reader is shown as holding up
the edition in a pose that hints at his critical approach and snobbish attitude (see Fig.

2.20). Such a portrayal of the potential reader is more ironic than comic and keeps the

83

 

 

Fig. 2.20. Jones reading Vanity Fair. William M. Thackeray, Vanity Fair, 6
reader on the borderline between the uneasiness of self-reﬂection and the complete
release of laughter at others. Moreover, the publication is included in the illustration as a
visual meta-representation so that the image reﬂects visually how the publication will
look like in the hand of the reader, just as the text reﬂects verbally what the reader will
think and write. Such meta-language in both media is remarkable even in the era of the
famous Cruikshank and Leech, since the illustration draws attention to the verbal insert
and the interaction of the two pauses the ﬂow of the narrative in an effort to compel every
reader to reﬂect on his/her reading process. Elsewhere in the text, the narrator addresses
the readers by their gender and announces that he is familiar with the ladies’ expectation
for a “Heroic Female character” as well as with the men’s wish to read about a “domestic
goddess.” In spite of all these expectations, he dares to follow his own choices and states:
And as we bring our characters forward, I will ask leave as a man and
brother not only to introduce them, but occasionally to step down from the
platform and talk about them. If they are good and kindly, to love them
and shake them by the hand: if they are silly, to laugh at them
conﬁdentially in the reader’s sleeve: if they are wicked and heartless, to
abuse them in the strongest terms which politeness admits of... (Vanity

Fair 84)

The text here refers back to the cover image and thus is visually supported, yet the

84

interplay of the two media manages to quite deceive the reader: there are in fact no good
characters who are appreciated for their behavior. Through the many pages and the many
months of publication good characters proved to be weak, while bad characters
succeeded and failed intermittently, and they all became representatives of “Vanitas
Vanitatum” (689). The writer thus succeeds in misleading the reader both verbally and
visually just as much as needed for the maintaining of the readerly interest. If the reader
realizes at the end that the bad character does not really learn any lesson and the good
character is not unimaginably happy, the text still prevailed: the reader followed it to its

last word. In a much revealing ﬁnal vignette (see Fig. 2.21), two girls place the puppets

llI

ljllI'

  

l ’l_I [ill

        
 

Fig. 2.21. Final illustration in Vanity Fair. William M. Thackeray, Vanity Fair, 689

back into the box after the “play is played out,” yet the little ﬁgures do not resemble
puppets at all, but they seems to be small ﬂesh and blood people. As a consequence, the
ﬁnal effect on the reader is a challenging of the artiﬁcial distance that traditional novels
created between the ﬁctional world and reality: while the reader closes the pages and

reﬂects back to the story being told by a clown, he/she also recognizes that the narrative

85

is a quite truthful mirror of contemporary society. Indeed, the reader cannot help but
recall remarks that suggested the same throughout the novel: “Perhaps in Vanity Fair
there are no better satires than letters. Take a bundle of your dear ﬁiend’s of ten years
back—your dear ﬁiend whom you hate now. Look, at a ﬁle of your sister’s: how you
clung to each other till you quarrelled about the twenty pound legacy” (Vanity Fair 191).
The contemporary reader was probably startled to see realistic ﬁgures depicted as the
puppets of the story, but he/she was left with a unique sense that these characters both
represented Victorian society and prevented, through their comic elements, the reader’s
absorption into cynicism. The effect, as we have seen, had been largely caused by
Thackeray’s attention to both the writing of the text and the illustration.

Thackeray started writing Vanity Fair in May 1845, and struggled to ﬁnd a
publisher: he was refused by Colburn, proprietor of The New Monthly Magazine at the
time (Letters 2: 198). He received similar rejections for other works and in January, 1947
he reﬂected pessimistically on the lack of positive effect of the reception of his previous
works: “Upon my word and honour, I never said so much about myself before: but I
know this, if I had the command of ‘Blackwood’, and a humoristical person like Titrnarsh
should come up and labour hard and honestly (please God) for 10 years, I would give him
a ban ” (Letters 2:262). He was pressed by ﬁnances and became interested in achieving
literary success: “I think I have never had any ambition hitherto, or cared what the world
thought my work, good or bad; but now the truth forces itself upon me, if the World will
once take to admiring Titmarsh, all his guineas will be multiplied by 10. Guineas are
good” (Letters 2:261). This goal only made him more aware of contemporary

expectations and of his choices in the publication of the Vanity Fair that had just

86

commenced. On the one hand, he carefully edited the verbal text and tried to keep abreast

of the latest news and updates.” On the other hand, he paid special attention to the

illustrations of the ﬁrst edition. It is true that he did not become famous as a visual artist

in spite of his early studies and hopes.26 Nonetheless, he found it important to use his

skills not only to avoid the possible divergence of opinions, but also to streamline the

style of the publication.27 He planned and edited the text carefully to meet the length
requirements and to maintain readerly interest ﬁ'om month to month, and he continuously

monitored the engraving process to ensure the closeness of the ﬁnal illustrations to his

drawings.28 Harden reveals that Thackeray admired Hogarth’s works and their
truthfulness, yet he believed that they lacked pity (English Humourists 95-97).
Thackeray’s style is probably more closely inﬂuenced by a contemporary follower of
Hogarth, John Leech. Thackeray’s reviews of art exhibitions reveal that he believed in
the “soul of comedy” and favored “gentlemanlike,” “delightful” satire (“Second Lecture”
43). He was especially drawn to Leech’s style, since in his works this comic aspect met
with realism (see Fig. 2.22) and Thackeray felt “respect for [Leech’s] genius and
humour” (“Pictures of Life and Character” 2:86). Although he was aware that his

illustrations did not match Leech’s, he felt that he had to make sure that the engraver,

 

25
In a June 1847 letter, for instance, he requests an early copy of the George Robert Bleig’s The Story of
the Battle of Waterloo in an effort to read it before the installment about the Waterloo battle was due for
gblication (Letters 294)
See John Buchanan-Brown’s discussion of Thackeray’s early years and studies in England and France in
The Illustrations of William Makepeace Thackeray.

7
Sutherland draws attention to Cruikshank’s individualism and maintains that his fame brought about an
artistic freedom that sometimes prevented a close work relationship with the writer. Often Cnrikshank

would feel at liberty to propose changes to the narrative and in such cases he would claim to have been the
co-author of the work (Victorian Fiction 106).

28
See Chapter I of Sutherland’s Thackeray at Work, which analyzes the notes about the intended length of
passages and the conscientious revisions throughout most of the novel.

87

 

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Fig. 2.22. Contemporary illustrations by John Leech. John Sutherland, Victorian Fiction,
96-97

William Joyce did not improve them by altering them.29 A letter from 1846 reveals
Thackeray’s concerns about the set of engravings he received: “the young gentleman’s
otherwise praiseworthy corrections of my vile drawing, a certain je rte sais quoi, which I
ﬂatter myself exists in the original sketches, seems to have given him the slip, and I have
tried in vain to recapture it. Somehow I prefer my own Nuremburg dolls to Mr. Thwaits’s
super-ﬁne wax models” (Letters 2:249). Although the comparison to dolls emphasizes the
creation process behind the effect, the reference to the Nuremburg dolls focuses on the
realism of the visual depiction: these dolls, quite popular in Victorian homes, exhibited a
unique liveliness and reality-effect that widely differed ﬁom the artiﬁce of contemporary
wax models. Thackeray’s concern thus reﬂects his interest in portraying the characters as

living people instead of doll-like ﬁgures that would underline the artiﬁce of the narrative

88

itself. In addition, the time frame of the early engravings proves that Thackeray regarded
the illustrations to be important and prepared his drawings and supervised the engraving
long before the novel was published. It is evident that his interest in both the style of the
novel and that of the illustrations was doubled by the editor’s attention to timely
processing and the publication clearly shows the result. The illustrations did not represent
a quasi-visualization of the verbal text, but they provided the writer with an opportunity
to inﬂuence the reader’s reception of the characters and situations.

Surprisingly many readers recorded their reception of the illustrations. Patmore
talked about both pen and pencil and found the overall work to be “on the safe side of
caricature” (119). This reference to the magazine’s style in which the novel was
published suggests the contemporary readers’ expectations when reading its ﬁrst
installment in Punch: knowing the magazine for its caricatures, they expected a comic
depiction of exaggerated types, yet found a realistic depiction of persons and incidents
and only slight hints to comic elements. The overall reﬂectiOn on the verbal text and
visual illustration matched other contemporary readers’ thoughts about the work.
Abraham Hayward believed the publication to display “sound and wholesome legitimate
art” where he could ﬁnd the “ﬁnest remarks and happiest illustrations” (750). Other
recorded reﬂections addressed even more speciﬁcally the role of the illustrations. “We
ought to say something about the illustrations of our artist-author,” argued the reviewer of
Fraser ’3 Magazine “for he gathers laurels in both ﬁelds. The humour of the plates is
broad and sketchy, and full of the same cynical spirit which pervades the text. The

characterization is equally keen and striking” (ctd. in Buchanan-Brown 27). It is essential

 

9
2 Buchanan-Brown identiﬁes the engraver for the novel as William Joyce based on an 1848 dinner
invitation by Thackeray (19).

89

to note that Thackeray’s illustrations suggested professionalism even if some readers
recognized the lack of reﬁned artistic training. Hence, the illustrations did not appear to
aim for a complex visual text, but rather to deliver the realism of the verbal text while
deﬂecting through comic elements the moral judgment of the characters and the novel.
Decades later, Harrison reﬂected on the illustrations: “They are really part of the book;
they assist us to understand the characters; they are a very important portion of the
writer’s meth ” (Harrison 117). The readers of the ﬁrst edition seemed to agree as seen
in The Spectator “Review”: “the spirit of the scene and character . . . is more thoroughly
entered into and presented to the reader” (ctd. in Buchanan-Brown 27). Beyond all the
direct reﬂections on the role of the illustrations in the reception process, lie the more
hidden thoughts revealed less directly. Less than a year after the publication of Vanity
Fair, during the early installments of Pendennis, Robert Smith Surtees asked Thackeray
to illustrate the reprinting of Mr. Sponge ’s Sporting Tour, which was at the time
serialized in New Monthly Magazine (Sutherland, Victorian Fiction 104). Such a request
shows how much attention readers, who did not record their reﬂections, paid to the
illustrations, and how artistic Thackeray’s illustrations appeared to be due to their close
interaction with the text.

Indeed, the effects of visual reception on the reception of the verbal text are
possible to locate in reﬂections that do not focus on the illustrations, but regard the work
as a whole as a visual reﬂection on contemporary society. Roscoe saw Thackeray as “a
daguerreotypist of the world around us” (124) and Elizabeth Rigby regarded the work to
be “a literal photograph of the manners and habits of the nineteenth century, thrown on to

paper by the light of the powerful mind” (769). Although references to daguerreotypes

90

and photographs would have reminded the contemporary readers of the novelty of the
work, we can also pay attention to the essentially visual nature of these responses.
Similarly, Robert Bell claimed that “this crafty book will be recognized as the faithful
image [of Vanity Fair]” (761)—a phrasing that would. have emphasized (and still does) the
visuality of the work on the whole. Thackeray’s images do not reﬂect a photographic
style, so the reoccurrence of such references must mean that readers perceived the
illustrations as faithﬁtl renderings of the verbal text. Thus the reception of the
illustrations had a positive inﬂuence on the reception of the verbal text. In 1848, Edward
FitzGerald wrote that Vanity Fair was admired by all, yet admitted the rough start: the
novel “began dull, I thought, but gets better every number, and has some very ﬁne things
in it” (ctd. in Cruse 262). The illustrations had probably a major role in entertaining the
readers and gaining their interest. Benjamin stated: “gradually the novel made its way: its
bright wit and attractive humour began to be recognized, its broader view of life to be
appreciated, the story itself increased in interest as its characters developed, and within a
few months after the appearance of the ﬁrst number, Thackeray’s reputation was ﬁrmly
established” (95). The novel did not only bring about the immediate fame of an author,
but it also made the audience follow with much curiosity the story of a heartless woman.
In fact, Cruse contends that Becky, “[t]hat fascinating and immoral young person
managed somehow to insinuate herself into the good graces of the very moral Victorians”
(263). Overall, the author’s previous works were not bestsellers and were mainly
published under pseudonyms, yet Vanity Fair and its author became almost instantly
popular. At the same time, the illustrations could not be compared to the works of

fashionable artists such as Cruikshank or Leech, but were soon appreciated more than

91

many contemporary illustrations. The cause might well have appeared to be
unexplainable to the contemporaries: Russell claims that Thackeray’s meditative style
must have “bewitched his critics and persuaded his readers into ranking him as a
foremost Victorian satirist” (286). The simplicity of the illustrations and their slight
comic touch that released the cynicism of the verbal text could well have factored into
this phenomenon.

Consequently, Thackeray’s interest in creating the illustrations himself and
monitoring the engraving eventually paid off: he acted against the audience’s horizon of
expectations, but paid much attention to winning the readers over and reinventing satire
for the readership of High-Victorian Britain:

He knew well enough that a novel, to be popular with the great reading
public, must contain a hero and a villain, and a pretty girl pursued by the
villain and rescued in the last chapter by the hero, when the villain goes to
Newgate and the hero and heroine to St. George’s, Hanover Square. Yet,
knowing this, he went on in his own way, bravely and deliberately,
preaching his sermons, and indulging his satiric humour. He was never
guilty of playing to the gallery. He held it the duty of the artist to educate
the public to his intellectual level. He portrayed the world as he saw it.
(Benjamin 102)
Thackeray had a unique opportunity that was made possible by the intersection of mid-
nineteenth-century readerly expectations and his own style and interest in the editing of
his work. The outcome was better than anybody could have hoped for based on the
innovative verbal style and the lack of an experienced illustrator. Harrison, for instance,
claimed that Thackeray “does not belong to the order of Jonathan Swifts, the Balzacs, the
Zolas, the gruesome anatomists of human vice and meanness” (125). He saw the writer as
more than a “mere satirist and a cruel mocker” and admired the author’s talent that

allowed for Becky to remain “always a woman, and not an inhuman monster, however

bad a woman, cruel, heartless, and false” (121-22). What Harrison continuously

92

emphasized was Thackeray’s “perfect style” that was achieved through an alternation

between “the pathetic and tragic scenes” and “those which are charged with humour and

epigrarn” (111).30 This balance is appreciated later in the twentieth century as Weatley
discusses the novel’s “coherent tension, a pull between mutually reinforcing ways of
seeing” (93). Such a style seemed to be able to conform to a certain extent to the “the
general Victorian satiric philosophy,” as Frances Theresa Russell argues, “that the wisest
reaction to life is a high seriousness graced with humor, and the most acceptable attitude
toward one’s fellow creatures is a compassionate comprehension of our common tragedy,
redeemed from emotionalism by an ironic appreciation of human comedy” (316). It is
this binary opposition that both shocked the readers and raised their interest—in a way that
will not be possible for either Hardy or James. The contemporary references were subtle,
yet clear, and the satire was unforgiving, yet slightly deﬂected, as a result, the majority of
the contemporary audience had only one path for reception: Vanity Fair was “one of the

most amusing, but also one of the most distressing books we have read for many a long

year” (Rigby 764).“

 

30 Han'ison believes Thackeray’s style to be so signiﬁcant that he even chooses Thackeray’s death as the
dividing line between two major styles, one following the tradition of Tom Jones and the other inﬂuenced
largely by Darwinism (23).

For a discussion of the Thackeray’s choice to feature his characters in the dresses of the 1840s instead of

the early 18005, see Sutherland’s Victorian Fiction (1 1-12). For an analysis of the references to the 1846
London setting of the cover illustration and the consequent reminders of this illustration throughout the
novel, see Joan Stevens’ article “Vanity Fair and the London Skyline” (777-97).

93

CHAPTER 3
“LIKELY TO INCREASE THE READER’S INTEREST”:
CARTOGRAPHIC REALISM AND SYMBOLIC IMAGING
IN THOMAS HARDY’S THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE
3.1. Hardy’s Naturalism and Cartographic Reference
Hardy’s work—three decades later—provides a unique contrast with Vanity Fair
and its ﬁrst publication. Hardy’s meticulous interest in the editing process of the novels,
especially their illustration, reminds us of Thackeray’s emphasis on the engraving of his
illustrations, yet in Hardy’s novels we witness the effect of two additional aspects: the
inclusion of another artist (the illustrator) and a different linguistic style. Hardy does not
undertake to illustrate his own texts, nor can he afford (as we will see later) to choose the

illustrator, so once he agrees to have his novel published in Belgravia, he involuntarily

agrees to his novel being illustrated by Arthur Hopkins.32 He has, however, gained
valuable experience in collaborating with the illustrator during the editing process of his
Far ﬁom the Madding Crowd, during which he provided sketches for rural activities to
be illustrated by Helen Paterson (later Mrs. Allingham) (see Fig. 3.1). During the
illustration of The Return of the Native, Hardy manages to retain as much authority as
possible in the given circumstances, but their collaboration results in illustrations that
differ in style ﬁom the verbal text.

Indeed, in 1928 Forest Reid reﬂects on Hopkins’s “competent” illustrations

 

32
Interestingly, between regular and special editions, Belgravia employed in 1877 a range of artists such

as Fred 8. Walker, G. L. Seymour, H. French, W. J. Morgan, E. Wagner and J. Nash, even if Arthur
Hopkins authored much more illustrations than any of these other artists. By the beginning of 1878 and
during the ﬁrst editions of The Return of the Native, Hopkins was the only artist to illustrate the monthly
edition of Belgravia. Since Thomas Hardy, a writer who was quite famous at the time, was not asked to

94

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Fig. 3.1. Thomas Hardy’s Far ﬁ'om the Madding Crowd. Arlene M. Jackson,
Illustration and the Novels of Thomas Hardy. Plate 4

during the 18703 for novels by—among others—James Payn, Wilkie Collins, Charles
Gibbon and Justin McCarthy, and points out The Return of the Native as the exception:
“as was inevitable, being the least satisfying, missing the superbly poetic quality of that
great novel” (269). What was so distinctive about this novel was its style that combined
naturalism with poetic depictions and fatalism with visual imagery. In a sense, this novel
is a continuation of Far from the Madding Crowd, where Hardy revisits the pastoral
through the lens of Victorian realism.33 The Return of the Native, however, is closer to

naturalism and thus further distanced from both his earlier pastoral stories and from

 

choose an illustrator, one can assume that the arrangement was made between the illustrator and the editor
or publisher without the consent of any of the writers.

In fact, the pastoral in Hardy’s works has been recently much debated in an effort to reinterpret the
relationship between characters and environment in his novels. While 1 will return to the subject shortly, I
would like to state here that Far from the Madding Crowd is seen by most critics in the ﬁeld as ﬁre closest
among Hardy’s works to the traditional sense of pastoral description.

95

Thackeray’s satire discussed earlier. In fact, Ross C. Murﬁn compares Hardy’s irony to
Dickens’s and deﬁning it as “abstract,” opposes it to Thackeray’s “linguistic slipperiness”
that, as we have seen, lends itself so easily to illustration (50). Moran, on the other hand,
sees Hardy’s approach as a response to emerging modernism: “pessimism seems the only
rational response to the ‘ache of modernism’” (88). Nonetheless, her depiction of Hardy’s
choices of themes and the reception of his later works situates the writer within the
Goncourtian tradition of naturalism: “allusions to a hostile ‘fate’, plots of coincidence

and sensational disasters (including rape, adultery, child murder and suicide) suggest that

success and self-improvement are matters of chance and always short-lived. 34 For a
middle-class readership seeking endorsement of cherished ideas, this was altogether too
strong stuff” (88). What differentiates most of Hardy’s novels from the earlier Victorian
works by other writers is his use of fate in conjunction with his interest in the characters’
will, which situates his texts on the border between naturalism and modernism. The
notion that a character’s will deﬁnes his/her morality without ”the need for action is not
necessarily new, but it seems to gain foreground during the 1870-905. Citing Angel
Clare’s words about one’s aims reﬂecting the “beauty or ugliness” of the character (Tess
of the d ’Urbervilles), Stephanie Markovits contends: “With the increased emphasis on the
role of the will in determining morality, action lost its ability to signify character;
people’s deeds need not fully reveal their essential selves” (3). This shift in Hardy’s

novels yields difﬁculties both during the illustration process and the visual and verbal

 

4
3 David Baguley distinguishes two types of naturalism, Goncourtian and F laubertian, and claims that the

key discrepancy between them lies in the causality: Emile Zola’s works show the “temporal process of
deterioration” of one character, while Gustave Flaubert’s novels show deterioration as “more generalized as
the insufﬁciency of human life itself” (22). For further analysis of the two types, please see Baguley’s “The
Nature of Naturalism” published in Naturalism in the European Novel: New Critical Perspectives edited by
Brian Nelson.

96

reception process. Nowhere is this more relevant than in the ﬁrst edition of The Return of
the Native during 1878, in which the natural environment, Egdon Heath, becomes a
character and its verbal and visual representations gain special emphasis in the reception
of the novel. ’

Hardy’s emphasis on the environment of his characters has been the focus of
many critical studies; however, their arguments differ from person to person as well as
from period to period. Guy Davidson has recently argued against viewing Hardy’s novels
as an attempt to record the old countryside that was fading in the age of industrialization.
He believes that the cause for the longevity of the claim lies in the effect of Raymond
Williams’s analysis: “The authority of Williams’s reading of Hardy has been upheld by
the subsequent ‘culturalist’ turn in literary studies” (23). Davidson also criticizes anti-
humanist criticism, which sees “nature as the mute and passive surface upon which
culture does its representational wor ” and argues that these approaches are irrelevant for
Hardyan studies (25). Indeed, such arguments rely on versions of the pastoral notion that
away from the modern cities, man and nature live in symbiosis. Such a view is in contrast
with nature as a force and, even, nature as the manifestation of fate that is apparent in The
Return of the Native. What is important to notice here is that many critics turn to the
extensive work done by Michael Millgate, who drew attention to the writer’s
biographical background in the countryside that had the “reputation as a poor, backward,
and somewhat uncouth corner of the kingdom” (35). Millgate further adds that the
Agricultural Depression of 1873 brought about a considerable depopulation of the
countryside and

Hardy, in fact, was born just in time to catch a last glimpse of that English
rural life, which, especially in so conservative a country, had existed

97

largely undisturbed from medieval times until the onset of the new forces—
population expansion, urbanization, railways, cheap printing, cheap food
imports, enclosures, agricultural mechanization and depression—which so
swiftly and so radically impinged upon it in the middle of the nineteenth

century. (35)
While we must acknowledge that Millgate relied also on the contemporary critical

reviews and decades of readerly reﬂections, which prove that some of Hardy’s most
renowned novels were seen as records of a vanishing way of life, we cannot help but
notice how some of Hardy’s novels, including The Return of the Native, reﬂect not only
on the negative effects of urbanization, but also on the inevitability of fate whatever the
circumstances. However, the reoccurring references to Hardy’s depiction of the
traditional rural life are striking. One of Hardy’s interviewers, Frederick Dohnan stated in
1894 that “[o]ne cannot fail to observe, in the course of a talk with Thomas Hardy, how
deep is his attachment to the scenes he has described so well, how keen his appreciation
of the sentiment which clings to many of the old aspects and disappearing customs of
rural life in Wessex” (26). Virginia Woolf several decades later remarked: “The writer, it
seems, may well develop into one of our English landscape painters, whose pictures are
all about cottage gardens and old peasant women, who lingers to collect and preserve
from oblivion the old-fashioned ways and words which are rapidly falling into disuse”
(173). Lately, Miller has found a middle ground stating that “[t]he world of The Return of
the Native is an imaginary world, a virtual reality. It is hard to resist believing, however,
that Hardy is speaking through the narrator as a kind of anthropological expert reporting
on a vanishing way of life” (Miller Individual 159).

Such a frequent and above all non-ceasing interpretation of Hardy’s works might
reﬂect a probable cause for the poor reception of The Return of the Native: if read as a

symbolic story of the failure of those who turn their backs to the traditional rural

98

environment and its moral rules, the novel does not stand out within the multitude of
Victorian novels. However, if seen as a questioning of individual will against the power
of society and nature combined, the work can really gain depth and individuality. From
this perspective, the illustrations of the ﬁrst edition only added to the formulaic
interpretation of the text through their blatant disregard of the role of Egdon Heath in the
verbal text. Environment is a key element in most of Hardy’s novels; indeed, one of the
three categories that he distinguished in his oeuvre is called Novels of Character and
Environment. This group contains some of the novels that contributed the most to his
fame: Far ﬁom the Madding Crowd, The Return of the Native, The Major of
Casterbridge, Tess of the d ’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure. Invariably, these novels
provide the reader with bright images of warm spring and summer days, but also gloomy
depictions of the cruel elements of the environment such as the abyss into which
Gabriel’s lambs fall, the storm threatening Bathsheba’s crops in Far from the Madding
Crowd, the Chase that puts Tess at risk or the frozen winter soil jeopardizing the
Durbeyﬁelds’ survival in Tess of the d ’Urbervilles. In the midst of these novels, The
Return of the Native is unique in its depiction of the environment as a constant presence
and unfaltering inﬂuence in each character’s life.

It is noteworthy that Hardy chooses a different place for each novel: he described,
for instance, Weatlrerbury, Shottsford and Norcombe Hill in Far ﬁom the Madding
Crowd; Budmouth, Blooms-End, Rainbarrow, Kingsborough, Egdon Heath and Mistover
in The Return of the Native; Weydon-Priors and Casterbridge in The Mayor of
Casterbridge; Marlott, Chaseborough, Stourcastle, Talbothays, Flintcomb-Ash and

Kingsbere in the Tess of the D ’Urbervilles; and Marygreen, Christrninster, Melchester

99

and Aldbrickham in Jude the Obscure. Hardy can differentiate among all the locations of
his novels, because he does not invent them, but relies on his personal observations to
draw each: “I suppose the impressions which all unconsciously I had gathering of rural
life during my youth in Dorsetshire recurred to me, and the theme—in ﬁction—seemed to
have absolute freshness. So in my leisure—which was considerable—I began to write
Under the Greenwood Tree” (135-36). Millgate refers to Hardy’s notebooks to
demonstrate how the writer “possessed an extraordinary sensitivity to the sights, the
smells, and especially the sounds of the countryside at every hour of the day or night . . .
[and had] the naturalist’s habit of specifying the precise time and circumstances of his
observations” (31). Some of Hardy’s letters confnm his willingness to travel in order to
observe the location of a scene personally or to reﬁ'esh memories as in the case of his
visits to Rouen, Paris and London for The Hand of Ethelberta. Hardy even complimented
a fellow author, R. D. Blackmore, on the accurateness of the depiction of nature in Lorna
Doone: “Little phases of nature which I thought nobody had noticed but myself were
continually turning up in your book-for instance, the making of a heap of sand into little
pits by the droppings from trees was a fact I should unhesitatingly have declared
unknown to any other novelist till now” (Letters 1:38). For Hardy, the detailed
description of the environment is not a necessary annoyance in the writing process, but it
is an essential feature assuring the truthfulness of the text.

Indeed, in an effort to provide a better sense to the audience of what the
environment is and where events take place, Hardy created a map of the extended area he
depicts in his novels (see Fig. 3.2.). In fact, his references to Wessex soon brought about

questions. Historically, the term denoted the area established in the west by the Saxons,

100

 

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Fig. 3.2. Hardy’s map of Wessex. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Wessex.png

but by Hardy’s time it was not used for cartographical reference. Moreover, he redeﬁned
the geographical area by including also areas beyond the borders of the historical region.
Soon, his readers started inquiring where Wessex lay, and in the Preface to Far ﬁom the
Madding Crowd Hardy replies, requesting “all good and idealistic readers to forget
[about the location of Wessex], and to refuse steadfastly to believe that there are any
inhabitants of Victorian Wessex outside these volumes in which their lives and
conversations are detailed” (vii). However, he then adds: “at the time, comparatively
recent, at which the tale was written, a sufﬁcient reality to meet the descriptions, both of
backgrounds and personages might have been traced easily enough” (viii). The inherent
dilemma seems to be that he avoids pinpointing the real location of the ﬁctional areas for
fear of limiting the interpretational possibilities, but he also suggests that the characters
and scenes can be “traced” in an effort to strengthen the realistic effect of his text. When

he created the map of his ﬁctional Wessex and published it in The Return of the Native,

101

the similarities became even more obvious. Some places are real geographical locations
such as Pilsdon, Bulbarrow, Vale of Blackmore, Stour Head, Bath, Stonehenge and
Southampton, while others are renamed, but located and described so that the
identiﬁcation is easy: the “Great Plain,” for instance, is Salisbury Plain, “Melchester” is
Salisbury, “Chaseborough” is Cranbome, “Kingsbere” is Bere Regis, “Egdon Heath” is
Bere Heath, “Talbothays Farm” is Norris Hill Farm, “Manor House” is Wellbridge
Manor House, and “Casterbridge” is Dorchester. This map allowed the audience to
follow the paths of the characters, but it also invited interested readers to travel to the real
counterparts of the ﬁctional locations to see with their own eyes where it all happened
(Collins 36). Such excursions were sometimes encouraged by the text itself. A footnote in
the 1912 edition of The Return of the Native, for example, states: “The inn which really
bore this sign and legend stood some miles to the north-west of the present scene, where
in the house more immediately referred to is now no longer an inn; and a surroundings
are much changed. But another inn, some of whose features are also embodied in this
description, the Red Lion at Winfritlr, still remains as a haven for the wayfarer” (35).
Moreover, the Wessex Edition of Hardy’s novels included Macbeth Raeburn’s
ﬁ'ontispieces based on the illustrator’s sketches of Dorchester locations chosen by the
writer.

On the other hand, the novels succeed in transcending the here and now of the
cartographical references and portray the environment in a timeless dimension. The
inclusion of Celtic and Roman constructions (such as Stonehenge in Tess of the
d ’Urbervilles, the Ronran road in The Return of the Native, and the Roman amphitheatre

in The Mayor of Casterbridge) and references to pagan and medieval rites reminded

102

contemporary readers of the history of the area. Even more, Hardy provides historical
allusions within his descriptions as a reﬂection on the present events: “Every night [the
barrow’s] Titanic form seemed to await something; but it had waited thus, unmoved,
during so many centuries . . . , everything around and underneath had been from
prehistoric times as unaltered as the stars overhead”(The Return of the Native 4); or on
another page: “Festival ﬁres to Thor and Woden had followed on the same ground and
duly had their day” (The Return of the Native 15).35 This historical depth is what provided
the contemporary audience with a sense that these novels are more than ephemeral stories
of odd cases: “Thus it is no mere transcript of life at a certain time or place that Hardy
has given us,” Virginia Woolf declared, “[i]t is a vision of the world and of man’s lot as
they revealed themselves to a powerful imagination, a profound and poetic genius, a
gentle and humane soul” (181).

Indeed, the characterization within the novels follows the path of the
environmental depictions: it is both realistic and abstract. Hardy liked to identify the real-
life origin of his characters, but he also admitted that he changed their stories
signiﬁcantly to match his narrative: “It is easy for an author to take a person, and see the
potentialities in his temperament for the events he creates” (Collins 75). Without a doubt,
he situates his characters in an environment that brings about life-changing incidents and
he faithfully depicts what he considers to be the logical deve10pment of this interplay:
“the optimistic ‘living happily ever after,” he argued once “always raises in me greater
horror by its ghastly unreality than the honest sadness that comes of logical and inevitable
tragedy” (Blathwayt 11). Such a plot, however, counteracted the detailed depictions of

the elements of nature. While Hardy saw this as the only way to portray realistically both

 

35 All textual citations taken ﬁ'om Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native, New York: Oxford UP, 1990.

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the characters and their environment, the contemporary audience could easily be
misguided into believing some of his novels to be pastoral tales and questioning the
endings based on that tradition. The 1880 “Pall Mall Gazette Review” claimed:
Mr. Hardy’s tales are genuine pastorals, having indeed the form of a prose
to suit an age, which is pre-eminently the age of the novel, but full of a
poetry of their own. When we say genuine pastorals, we are thinking not
of the exquisitely wrought unrealities of Virgil and of Pope, but of
Theocritus, who, dweller in a city though he was, had always the true

feeling of country life, and of whom, both when he is serious and in his
humouristic touches, Mr. Hardy often reminds us. (ctd. in Millgate 218)

In fact, Hardy himself was accustomed to speak of Wessex as “partly real, partly
dream-country” (278), but his environment had nothing in common with the Romantic
“dreamy.” If certain descriptions appear to suggest the pastoral, it is because they
represent moments in the narrative that are idyllic. However, these moments, as any
other, are transitory. Millgate draws attention to the use of the term “pastoral” in the title
of the ﬁfth chapter in Far ﬁom the Modding Crowd (162); nevertheless, it is a phase only
and the word is not repeated in the rest of the 57 chapters. In contrast, the reversal of the
pastoral man—nature relationship appears in most of the novels through the negative
images of the uncultivable heath, stone ruins and ﬁres, which cause the characters’
alienation. Pamela Gossin points out The Return of the Native as the novel in which the
shift from the idyllic to the antagonistic takes place: “the fast-fading pastoral realm of

Far from the Modding Crowd has retreated even farther and only the most rural of rural

folk are still able to participate in traditional revels, dances and seasonal rites” (147).36

 

36 In fact, Maureen Moran ventures as far as to state that all of Hardy’s major novels “are stripped of
pastoral serenity, notwithstanding his sympathetic depiction of country folk,” and she adds: “the Wessex
novels characterize contemporary life as the hopeless struggle for survival against the impersonal powers of
nature and society” (88). Gossin, instead, sees the settings on a much larger scale noting that they are
“simultaneously cosmological, physical, geological, biological, and psychological [since] Hardy carefully
establishes the epistemological frameworks, problem-solving tools, and habits of thinking and feeling that

104

Such analyses of the relationship between people and environment in Hardy’s novels
reveal the continuation of the eighteenth and nineteenth—century interest in the pastoral.
Hardy, Gossin argues, “employs literary conventions and expectations, carefully
matching the ﬁctional landscape to the forces and circumstances that will be most at play
upon and within his characters’ lives and minds” (122). These expectations, built on the
pastoral tradition and involving the late-nineteenth century Victorian conventions, are
even more complex than in the case of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair.

Hardy disregarded the audience’s expectations when he chose to repeatedly
picture the natural environment as a force. In Far ﬁom the Madding Crowd, for instance,
the depiction of the storm rises above the pastoral scenes through its reinforcement of the
power of Nature: “Heaven opened then, indeed. The ﬂash was almost too novel for its
inexpressibly dangerous nature to be at once realized, and they could only comprehend
the magniﬁcence of its beauty. It sprang ﬁom east, west, north, south, and was a perfect
dance of death. The forms of skeletons appeared in the air, shaped with blue ﬁre for
bones—dancing, leaping, striding, racing around, and mingling altogether in unparalleled
confusion” (197-98). Such a force—as we will see in The Return of the Native—becomes a
character of its own in Hardy’s novels. Indeed, Raymond Chapman regards Hardy to be
one of the few novelists in his “ability to make the physical setting of the novel

something more than a scenic backcloth, to draw it into the dimension of the

characterisation” (124).37 Undoubtedly, the environment shapes the characters and their

fates just as much as they shape each others’. It is an anthropological fact that people and

 

his central characters employ to interpret and interact with the natural and social worlds around them”
(119-20).

37
Here Chapman compares Hardy to Emily Bronte and Graham Greene.

105

cultures have always been affected by the area they live in, but in Hardy’s ﬁction this

relationship is even more palpable: “it is where man belongs, in a ﬁrndamental, almost

religious, sense” (Mullins 36).38 It is exactly this sense of belonging that renders The
Return of the Native as the ultimate example of the Hardy’s interaction between man and
environment. Woolf beliefs that this is the “spirit” that Hardy feels in Nature, “a spirit
that can sympathize or mock or remain the indifferent spectator of human fortunes”
(173). From the perspective of the nineteenth-century reader, however, the writer here
comes to a full circle. His depictions of the scenes are painfully detailed and accurate, yet
Nature is rendered as a force that has its own characteristics, its own will—if you want.
Hardy might have envisioned it as “partly real, partly dream-country,” but for the
contemporary audience it was a puzzling middle point between objectivity, distant irony
and subjective manipulation of the ﬁctional environment. However, before reviewing the
contemporary reﬂections and concerns about the novel, we need to examine the textual
rendition of the characters and their environment as well as the visual depiction of certain
scenes.

The plot of The Return of the Native revolves around a few key characters and
their relationships. Clym Yeobright, wearying of his life as a diamond merchant in Paris,
returns to Egdon Heath with the intention of becoming a schoolmaster. He meets Eustacia
Vye, the unusual young woman of the community, who was raised in Budmouth, a
fashionable seaside resort. She has in vain tried to convince Damon Wildeve to escape
their environment, and now sees an opportunity with Clym, although he is clear about his

intentions of staying. They fall in love and marry, but soon afterwards Eustacia feels

 

38
Mullins, in fact, compares Hardy’s works to D. H. Lawrence’s expression of the “spiritual bond between

106

imprisoned in their marriage especially due to Clym’s choice to study incessantly and, in
the meantime, earn money as a furze-cutter. As a result of fatal coincidences and the
relentless heat of Egdon Heath, Eustacia contributes to Mrs. Yeobright’s death and her
husband reproaches her for her behavior both towards his mother and Wildeve. Thus
when Wildeve, already married, offers Eustacia a getaway to Paris, she sees her
opportunity, but is also tormented by the prospect of committing adultery. On her way to
meet Wildeve, she is conﬁrsed by the stormy environment and she is found drowned in
Shadwater Weir. Wildeve attempts to rescue her, but only ﬁnds his own death in the
hostile water and Clym is left to wonder through the rest of his life as a preacher. The
“Aftermath” suggests that Wildeve’s widow, Thomasin Yeobright ﬁnally marries
Diggory Venn, who has been in love with her for many years, but the pessimism of the
ending is not fully alleviated.

In such an environment, the inhabitants necessarin become transformed: “in these
lonely places wayfarers, after a ﬁrst greeting, frequently plod on for miles without
speech; contiguity amounts to a tacit conversation where, otherwise than in cities, such
contiguity can be put an end to on the merest inclination, and where not to put an end to it
is intercourse in itself” (The Return of the Native 10). The natural environment thus takes
over the communication among its inhabitants and, in a sense, substitutes itself for any
other focus of conversation by drawing attention to its own presence. The individual
characters are even more visibly shaped by Egdon Heath. Clym is the “native” who has
been away from the region and now is glad to return to his favorite place. He remarks:
“I’ve come home because, all things considered, I can be a triﬂe less useless here than

anywhere else” (The Return of the Native 172). He later confesses to Eustacia: “To my

 

man and landscape” (36).

107

mind [Egdon Heath] is almost exhilarating, and strengthening, and soothing. I would
rather live on these hills than anywhere else in the world” (The Return of the Native 187).
We even see him singing while cutting furze in an effort to support his studies and his
family. Mrs. Yeobright, who has been living in the area for a longer period is more self-
isolated: “She had something of an enstranged mien: the solitude exhaled from the heath
was concentrated in this face that had risen from it” (The Return of the Native 30).
Wildeve tries to stand out even within this small community by owning an inn, the Quiet
Woman, but aspires at a better future far ﬁ'om Egdon Heath. Eustacia, who grew up in
Budmouth and had to move here, cannot like the region and cannot feel at home. She
blames the place for her unhappy life: “I cannot endure the heath, except in its purple
season. The heath is a cruel taskmaster for me” (The Return of the Native 187). When
Wildeve is sorry that he has ruined her, she answers: “Not you. This place I live in” (The
Return of the Native 345). Her counterpart, Thomasin better understands the environment
and thus ﬁnds her place within it: “To her there were not, as to Eustacia, demons in the
air, and malice in every bush and bough. The drops which lashed her face were not
scorpions, but prosy rain; Egdon in the mass was no monster whatever, but impersonal
open ground. Her fears of the place were rational, her dislikes of its worst moods
reasonable” (The Return of the Native 367). Her words are not as sympathetic as Clym’s,
but similar: “Egdon is a ridiculous old place; but I have got used to it, and I couldn’t be
happy anywhere else at all” (The Return of the Native 400). Overall, Egdon Heath
provides an alternative world for the readers in which people’s feelings and desires
appear to be different, but they rely on their beliefs in fate and superstition to keep them

alive. Throughout the verbal text, the depiction of the characters’ attitude towards their

108

natural environment and the portrayal of Egdon Heath in different weather conditions
offer a sense of the area that is incongruent with its representation within the illustrations.
These discrepancies, unfortunately, could easily have led the contemporary audience’s

lack of attention to the verbal depiction of Egdon Heath.

3.2. The Fictional Wessex and Visual Symbolism
Hardy drew a map of Egdon Heath and its regions that was included in the ﬁrst edition
published in Belgravia, but all the other illustrations were created by Arthur Hopkins,
who was a well-known artist at the time and contributed two illustrations for each
monthly issue: one for The Return of the Native and one for James Payn’s By Proxy, then
Wilkie Collins’s The Haunted Hotel. These illustrations depicted the characters alone or

interacting with others, yet the environment is vaguely sketched. Indeed, the natural

 

Fig. 3.3. Clym Yeobright, Timothy Fairway, Granfer Cantle and others. Belgravia 35:
facing 25939

 

39 All The Return of the Native illustrations, captions and chapter outlines reproduced from the Belgravia
edition of 1878.

environment that the text emphasizes so much does not even appear in all the illustrations
as there are images where, for instance, Diggory Venn sits in a room reading a letter,
Thomasin talks with Mrs. Yeobright in the attic, or Clym has a conversation with some
members of the community in the inn. In all of these illustrations, the man-built
background is rather suggested than rendered in detail, and the caption reﬂects a moment
in the action, as when Timothy Fairway and Clym discuss whether Grandfer Cantle has
changed: “If there’s any difference, Grandfer is younger” (Belgravia 35: facing 259) (see
Fig. 3.3). The environment in these cases seems to appear only to place the characters
somewhere. Indeed, Hardy’s own suggestion for this illustration included sketches of the

traditional costume and the pole (see Fig. 3.4), but no depiction of the background. It is

ill. rr ,

. h o a
014.9“.de {math ‘mf 2

 

Fig. 3.4. Hardy’s sketches for The Return of the Native illustration (see Fig. 3.3). Thomas
Hardy, The Collected Letters, 1:54-55

noteworthy that Hopkins felt obliged to follow the directions so closely that he actually
copied the inexperienced hand’s inconsistencies of perspective: both the sketch and the
ﬁnal illustration show the sticks to have variable lengths, since the sticks having the same
length in this perspective would have necessitated the ones in front of the pole to have

equal length to each other. On the other hand, the elements of the illustration that were

110

not closely monitored by the writer reﬂected the illustrator’s choice alone: one cannot
help but wonder what the odd branch hanging upside down in the middle of the room is
supposed to represent.

The depiction of the natural environment, however, is even more striking since in
the nighttime illustrations it appears as the undistinguishable darkness and timing the day
it is a sketch of trees and bushes. Many misfortunes happen during the night and the
illustrations of those chapters focus on these situations. The natural environment,
however, is represented merely by the tree that is partially visible behind the building

(see Fig. 3.5) or the bushes behind Christian Cantle and Wildeve throwing dice (see Fig.

3.6). In both of these illustrations, the branches and leaves appear to ﬁll a void in the

 

Fig. 3.5. Night scene. Fig. 3.6. Christian Cantle and Wildeve throwing dice.
Belgravia, 35: facing 492 Belgravia, 36: facing 1

visual construction of the image, rather than show the power of Egdon Heath. In the
former, the outline of a tree suggests more the notion of a tree than a real tree. In the

latter, the fauna is quite detailed and through the angle of the lines suggests the effect of

111

the wind, yet both characters are facing away from these bushes and the reader can see an
open area with short grass in ﬁ'ont of them. In such an illustration the reader does not
visually perceive the inﬂuence of the natural environment on its inhabitants, but instead
starts to believe that the bushes provide shelter to the two men from the wind. As a result,
the reader might also be shocked when a page later he/she frnds out that the bushes
actually hid somebody who was observing them without being noticed.

A similar representation of Egdon Heath appears when we see Eustacia alone in
the midst of bushes and raging winds anxiously staring into one direction (see Fig. 3.7).

Through the dark horizontal lines of the sky, the reader can perceive both that it is getting

 

Fig. 3.7. Eustacia waiting. Belgravia, 34: facing 493

dark and that the intensity of the wind becomes visible, but most of the image does not
stand the scrutiny of perspective. Eustacia seems to unnaturally lean back, indeed, her
point of gravity seems to fall almost behind her feet. Similarly, the horses seem to be
slightly tilted as in a running sequence, but they are two close to be running. To these

inconsistencies with the laws of gravity is added the lighting that seems to originate from

112

the setting sun in the back in spite of the strong light following on the dress from the
viewer’s angle. In the meantime, the reader’s eyes are drawn to the oddly twisted set of
lines of the branches against the bright horizon; yet, again, these natural elements seem to
foster a better composition without visualizing the. force of Nature as a threat. Moreover,
by pointing away from Eustacia without anything behind her that would point towards
her, the bushes visualize for the reader the wind itself, but not the danger the heroine is
in. The bushes can hide a viper (a threat materialized later in the novel through Mrs.
Yeobright’s death), and the darkness puts Eustacia at risk both physically and morally. In
fact, the unnatural light of the illustration and the unrealistic curving lines of the heroine
would have reminded the contemporary reader of the Japanese prints that became so
wide-spread by 1878.

The ukiyo-e (Floating World) style started in the seventeenth century, but by the
nineteenth century it reached the British audience through art dealers, articles, catalogs,

curiosity shops, world fair exhibitions and auctions, where J aponiste artifacts were shown

and sold including prints, screens, posters, fans, paintings and ceramics.40 Female ﬁgures

 

40 The 1859 Britain-Japan trade agreement and the World Fairs of 1862 (in London) and 1867 (in Paris)
had a major inﬂuence on both the contemporary artists’ interests and the audience’s collecting habits.
Paintings and posters of the period reﬂect not only the extent to which western artists started to utilize rules
of ukiyo-e composition, drawing and coloring (see, for example, works by Claude Monet, Edgar Degas,
Vincent van Gogh, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, James McNeill Whistler and Alvin Coburn), but they also
portrayed how the larger audience became acquainted with Japonisme (see, for instance, James Tissot’s
painting Young Women Looking at Japanese Objects). Indeed, these images reached different layers of
society through the new postcard styles based on Japanese prints (Handy), and even children became its
viewers through some children’s books illustrated by Walter Crane in the style of the Japanese prints
(Meech 75). For a historical description of the development of the British Japanese trade and its effect on
the curiosity shops, see Toshio Watanabe’s High Victorian Japonisme. For a detailed review of the French
and American reception of Japonisme, see Elizabeth Nash’s thesis “Edo Print Art and Its Western
Interpretations,” which reﬂects on the progression from the curiosity to artistic appreciation and ﬁnally to
research and travel. For an insight into the Americanization and cultural consumption of the Japanese
prints, see Ellen Handy’s “Japonisme and American Postcard Visions of Japan” in Delivering Views:
Distant Cultures in Early Postcards edited by Christraud M. Geary and Virginia-Lee Webb. For an analysis
of the Japanese inﬂuence on nineteenth-century western artists, including the commercialization of Edward

113

in the ukiyo-e tradition often appeared standing alone in a kimono ﬂoating in the air,
gazing into one direction, against an abstract background or without any reference to the
environment. The titles of these prints identiﬁed the ﬁgures as famous courtesans: The
Courtesan Shigeoka of Okamotoya Brothel by Utagawa Kunioshi and The Courtesan

Katsuragi Viewing Plum Blossoms in the Night by Toyokuni Kunisada (see Fig. 3.8).

 

Fig. 3.8. Ukiyo-e images by Utagawa Kunioshi and Toyokuni Kunisada.
http://www.lawrence.edu/dept/art/jwp/Ukiyo—e.htm

Such prints were created in the 1830-1860s, so they would have reached the British
audience through the late-nineteenth-century surge of interest in Japanese prints. For the
nineteenth-century Japanese, the colorful and extensively patterned kimonos would have
identiﬁed these female ﬁgures as courtesans, but even the common contemporary British
reader would have recognized some of the connotation of the clothes, posture and

background. The image of a woman standing outside alone at nighttime challenged the

 

W. Godwin’s furniture inspired by Katsushika Hokusai’s Mango, see Lionel Lamborrme’s Japonisme:
Cultural Crossings between Japan and the West.

114

moral rules of the period in both the Japanese print and the novel illustration; moreover,
the erotic connotation of the ukiyo-e tradition would have added a sense of Eustacia’s
morality that is not based on the verbal text. David Pollack draws attention to the shape
and patterning of the clothes in the ukiyo-e images since “[i]n Japanese erotic and
nonerotic art, bodies are of themselves uninteresting, what makes them interesting is their
clothing. Ukiyo-e was, along with its most striking subject matter, a completely material
art. Ukiyo-e were thus more or less blatant advertising for women and their brothels”
(186). Consequently, picturing Eustacia alone in darkness in a pose that reminded
contemporary readers of the ukiyo-e ﬁgures suggested more about her attitude than about
the natural environment around her. Emphasizing in such a manner that she does not
abide to the Victorian standards of morality associates all the blame with her and
undercuts the inﬂuence of Egdon Heath in her choices and ultimate fate.

This illustration is especially relevant if we compare it to others that portrayed
women in Belgravia at the time. Illustrations by Fred S. Walker and G. L. Seymour (see
Fig. 3.9) depicted women in the traditional composition and lighting: these ﬁgures were
situated in the center of the illustration with a companion nearby, and there would be two
sources of light (both coming usually from artiﬁcial sources) revealing the woman’s face
and back as well as her traditional Victorian clothes. Eustacia, in contrast, appears to
wear loose clothes that once again remind us of the ukiyo-e style: although not colored,
the illustration displays more concentration on ﬂat surfaces, lights without realistic
shadows and curved lines than other illustrations of the magazine. Hopkins’s illustration
thus exposes the inﬂuence of the Japanese prints that Margaret Slythe sees as the

tendency to “break from the dogma of realism and to use human form and landscape

115

 

Fig. 3.9. Illustrations of women by Fred S. Walker (“A Nursery Romance”) and G. L.
Seymour (“Watching”). Belgravia, 34:48, 98

feature as elements of pictorial pattern” (46). These characteristics were so unlike those
of the traditional western illustrations, that contemporary readers would have focused on
Eustacia and identiﬁed the style as that of the Japanese courtesans so fashionable at the
time.

Similar stylized pose and ﬂattened perspective is apparent in other illustrations
showing Eustacia and they portray Egdon Heath in a similar way. The image of her
appearing when Clym is cutting furze (see Fig. 3.10) draws attention to the natural
elements in front of the two men, yet the tree behind Eustacia strikes as unrealistic and
reminds us very much of the ukiyo-e rendering of trees as in Utagawa Hiroshige’s The
Poet Basho's Memorial Hermitage on Tsubakiyama Hill by the Sekiguchi Aqueduct (see
Fig. 3.11). Although there seems to be some interplay of light and shadow in the

forefront, there is almost no dimension given to Eustacia (note especially her ﬂattened

116

 

Fig. 3.10. Eustacia visits Clym. Fig. 3.11. Utagawa Hiroshige’s The Poet
Belgravia, 362238 Basho’s Memorial Hermitage on
Tsubakiyama Hill by the Sekiguchi
Aqueduct. http://www.lawrence.edu/dept/
art/jwp/Ukiyo-e.htm
face) and the elements of the natural environment behind her. Indeed, the illustration
seems to be an odd overlapping of two styles: the detailed down-to—earth depiction of the
furze and the esoteric portrayal of Eustacia and the tree behind her. The peculiar
delineation roughly across the center of the illustration raises Eustacia out of her
environment and the mundane life of the local people, and seemingly situates her on a
pedestal with an arch over her head formed by nature itself. The tree thus illustrated
strikes us both as a shelter for Eustacia (it substitutes for the umbrella she has just
lowered) and as a symbolic representation of her stature and her aspirations. This sense is
further emphasized by her elevation in spite of very little reference to geographical

elevation: her feet have a slight shadow suggesting the existence of ground just beneath

her, but a superﬁcial look at the illustration necessarily highlights her raised position as

117

opposed to the (physically and socially) lower men who are associated with the nuisance
of the region, the furze around them. The text itself concentrates on the difﬁculty these
inhabitants have to encounter in their daily lives since Clym is described as singing in
spite of doing such hard work. Hence, the text creates a unique sensation of the
environment and how the two main characters situate themselves in it, but the illustration
calls attention to social differences between Eustacia and the rest of the community,
mainly Clym and transforms the narrative more into a story about class differences than
about the relationship between people and nature.

Indeed, the symbolism of the tree is further accentuated by the reoccurrence, in
another illustration, of a similarly shaped tree as if rising ﬁ'om Eustacia’s head (see Fig.
3.12). This time she is inside, but the tree outside, which is conspicuously located behind
her with no counterpart behind the servant, is more evocative of her dreams that she is

nurturing. The servant’s head, in the meantime, rises merely to the edge of the couch and

 

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Fig. 3.12. Eustacia in her living room. Belgravia, 36:506

118

thus he is visually limited to the conﬁnes of the house and, ultimately, his job. Such a
view into the natural environment is incongruent with the verbal depiction, since Egdon
Heath continues to represent a burden for Eustacia rather than a pastoral location where
her dreams might become true. Once again, the illustration and its depiction of the natural
environment point out Eustacia’s social status and wishes, and conceal the role of Egdon
Heath that the text revolves around. As a result, both Eustacia’s character and the role of
Egdon Heath are transformed by the illustrations and a major component of the text seem
to lose signiﬁcance.

The inﬂuence of Japanese prints provides a symbolic connotation to these
illustrations that cause a contradiction in the reception process of the verbal text. What
seems a natural way of visual representation in eastern traditions, becomes am additional
layer in the eyes of the western audience. For instance, eastern visual representation is not
based on geometrical perspective and appropriate dimensions which is in contrast with
western culture, where they became prevalent as a result of Renaissance inventions.
“Chinese painters like Chou Ch'en never considered that they should portray nature as if
it were seen through a window, and they never felt bound to the consistency the ﬁxed
viewpoint demanded of their Western counterparts” (Edgerton 187). In the eyes of the
western audience, however, this difference carries meaning. Given the same subject, the
two cultures rendered ﬁgures and environment emphasizing separate aspects. An eastern
copy of the Annunciation (see Fig. 3.13), for instance, does not only change the physical
features of the ﬁgures, but it also disregards the perspective of the original image and
through the sketchy lines suggests a symbolic story rather than depicting a real event

(Edgerton 201, 204). Much of this difference might be caused also by the two cultures’

119

 
 

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different approaches to people and their environment. While nineteenth-century western
thinking often viewed the two as opposing each other, eastern culture regarded man as
part of nature, hence they often located man as a small ﬁgure in a large landscape or drew
people within a sketched natural background.41 In the case of The Return of the Native,
however, a sketchy depiction of the natural environment prevents the readers from seeing
Egdon Heath as an important force, as one of the key characters in the verbal text. In
order to better understand the causes of this difﬁculty in the reception process, we need to

review what led to this discrepancy between the text and the illustrations and how the

 

41 Literature similarly differs in Britain and Japan in order to reﬂect the given culture’s ideals and beliefs.
It is of interest here to note that when Hardy’s Tess of the d ’Urbervilles was translated to Japanese, the ﬁnal
passage was removed. Mrs. Hardy recollects a Japanese professor’s explanation that “the latter portion of
the book would not appeal to the Japanese. It would be outside their comprehension. In Japan it is thought a
virtuous thing for a girl to sell herself to obtain money for the help of the family. There would not seem to
them to be any tragedy in Tess living with Alec d’Urberville” (Collins 65). Moreover, Hardy emphasized
that the length might have been an issue: “They like literary works to be short. They realize that short
poems live longer” (Collins 65).

120

author inﬂuenced through his visual choices the reception of the work.

3.3. Artistic Efforts and Reception Effects
In fact, the illustrations are not the only inﬂuence that the editing process
exercised on the contemporary readership. After the success of Far ﬁom the Madding
Crowd, Hardy searched in vain for a magazine that would publish The Return of the
Native. The difference between the two works must have been felt by its very ﬁrst
readers, because Hardy continued to receive rejection letters ﬁom the magazines in which
he would have preferred to publish his work. His choice of magazines is representative of
his wish to reach a certain audience. In February, 1877, Hardy sends a sample of The
Return of the Native to George Smith for the Cornhill, and he also sends an inquiry to
John Blackwood claiming that he does not have enough written to be sent as a sample.
His request for the Cornhill is rejected probably as a result of the lack of success of The
Hand of Ethelberta (A. Nash 58). Requesting his sample back in March, he sends it to
Blackwood ’s Magazine in April with a very cautious phrasing:
I will just add that, should there accidentally occur any word or reﬂection
not in harmony with the general tone of the magazine, you would be quite
at liberty to strike it out if you chose. 1 always mention this to my editors,
as it simpliﬁes matters. I do not, however, think you will meet with any
such passage, as you will perceive that the story deals with a world almost

isolated from civilization—moreover before beginning it I had resolved to
write with a partial view to Blackwood. (Letters 1:49)

When his novel is rejected again, Hardy writes to George Bentley in June. As opposed to
the previous letter, in which Hardy mentioned his “great pleasure in sending [Blackwood]
the ﬁrst 15 chapters of [his] new story” (Letters 1:49), the letter to Bentley shows a more

desperate writer: “I have been frequently attracted by the prominence which is given to

 

121

the serial stories that appear in ‘Temple Bar’: & at length I am induced to ask you if you
would like to include one of mine among them—a story of country life, somewhat of the
nature of ‘Far from the Madding Crowd’” (Letters 1:50). It is noteworthy that Hardy
describes his turn to this magazine as a choice, when his former choices of more elite
magazines turned him down. He also tries to build on the success of his previous novel
by categorizing the new work together with Far ﬁom the Madding Crowd despite the
vast dissimilarities.

By the time the novel is accepted by Belgravia, it is late June, and it is accepted
based on the ﬁnancial agreement, not a sample. Andrew Nash draws attention to Hardy’s
lack of experience in negotiating for serial right alone and he reveals that by offering the
novel for twenty pounds per part, Hardy actually subscribed to a lower payment at
Belgravia than Eliza Lynn Linton or Wilkie Collins (57). Hardy’s confessed
dissatisfaction with the magazine choice is understandable if we have in mind that the
magazine had been transferred to Chatto and Windus only the previous year and that it
was'still struggling with its bad reputation from its previous editor and chief contributor,
Mary Elizabeth Braddon, who led a scandalous life (A. Nash 56). It is especially striking
that even for such a magazine, Hardy was compelled to avoid sending a sample and
rather make a ﬁnancial offer that would ﬁnally ensure the publication of the novel he has
been working on for more than half a year. The effect is quintessential for reception
studies: the novel was ﬁrst read in a disreputable magazine and the writer had little say in
the editing process. Hardy manages to maintain his right to publish it in the Unites States
as well (through Harper and Brothers), but he cannot choose the illustrator: “With regard

to the illustrations I may state that, should the artist be willing to receive a rough sketch

122

of any unusual objects which come into the story, I shall be happy to fumish them. I have
occasionally supplied such sketches to the artists who illustrated my previous stories,
with good results” (Letters 1:51). The writer touches a tone that suggests his wishes, but
phrases them as an offer to help rather than expectations. His disillusionment is also
apparent in his famous footnote that waives his responsibility for what he saw as a gross
inconsistency in the storyline:
The writer may state here that the original conception of the story did not
design a marriage between Thomasin and Venn. He was to have retained
his isolated and weird character to the last, and to have disappeared
mysteriously from the heath, nobody knowing wither - Thomasin
remaining a widow. But certain circumstances of serial publication led to a
change of intent. Readers can therefore choose between the endings, and

those with an austere artistic code can assume the more consistent
conclusion to be the true one. (ctd. in Miller “Individual” 170)

The alternate ending, however, was never written, so the extant version remained the
novel. Reviewing Hardy’s communication with the editor, Andrew Nash contends that
reference is made to Blackwood’s criticism since Hardy did not submit samples to
Temple Bar or Belgravia (5 7). However disillusioned, the ending and Hardy’s choice to
never rewrite it reﬂect his understanding of the criticism he received from his ﬁrst readers
as well as his understanding of the horizon of expectations.

When analyzing the contemporary reception of the novel by the wide audience, it
is also important to note that the ﬁrst edition contained small references to the action at
the beginning of each book, so the readers would have been guided to pay attention to
certain aspects of the following chapters. The introduction to Book IV, for instance,
reads: “The old affection between mother and son reasserts itself, and relenting steps are
taken—A critical conjuncture ensues, truly the turning-point in the lives of all

concerned-Eustacia has the move, and she makes it; but not till the sun has set does she

123

suspect the consequences involved in her choice of courses” (Belgravia 36:228). The text
then proceeds to describe Eustacia’s meeting with Wildeve while her husband is asleep,
and the effects of her not responding to the door when Mrs. Yeobright came to visit
Clym. Later the audience reads that Wildeve plans to leave for Paris, and Clym learns
that while he was in deep sleep, his mother was turned away from his house, and he later
sees her die of the accumulated exhaustion and the viper’s bite on her way home. The
introductory outlines, thus, prove to be rather vague, but at the same time striking in order
to draw the audience’s interest to the “turning-point.” These outlines were editorial
interventions and inﬂuenced the reception process just like the illustrations included in
this ﬁrst edition.

Hardy’s own map of Egdon Heath (see Fig. 3.14) could not visualize the furze

and the weather, but it gave a sense of the rugged surface that made everyday chores,

    

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124

travel and communication among the inhabitants difficult. It is not accidental that Mrs.
Yeobright dies not only because of the viper bite, but also because of being exhausted
from the long walk to her son and back home. The distances of the region and the surface
of the earth is already a danger and to this the text adds the vegetation, fauna and
weather. Scott Rode argues that the role of the roads, as symbols of civilization, and the
wild areas between them is emphasized by Hardy’s map and by Eustacia’s excursions off
the roads, “the historically embedded pathways of past traditions and constructions,” and
her ﬁnal inability to ﬁnd the road out of Egdon Heath (22). Indeed, Rode sees in the map
a female torso that he interprets as the symbolic representation of Eustacia’s inscription
onto Egdon Heath (25-26).

The nineteenth-century readers, in contrast, would have encountered the map
before learning about Eustacia and her role in the novel, so they would not have linked
the visual representation of the area to the heroine. Indeed, most of the contemporary
reviews suggest that even professional literary critics fell short of recognizing the
strength of the environment depictions. A major concern seemed to be the language the
characters used. “The Athenaeum Review” states:

Hardy, who at one time seemed as promising as any of the younger
generation of story-tellers, has published a book distinctly inferior to
anything of his which we have yet read. It is not that the story is ill-
conceived—on the contrary, there are elements of a good novel in it; but
there is just that fault which would appear in the pictures of a person who
has a keen eye for the picturesque without having learnt to draw . . .

People talk as no people ever talked before, or perhaps we should rather
say as no people ever talk now. (Lerner and Holstrom 43)

Hardy responded within a week in the same journal: “An author may be said to fairly
convey the spirit of intelligent peasant talk if he retails the idiom, compass, and

characteristic expressions, although he may not encumber the page with obsolete

125

pronunciations” (Lerner and Holstrom 45). The general concern of the review, however,
reveals an overall disappointment with the style of expression, and does not appreciate
the account of Nature’s forces. Other reviews that mention the environment portrayal
refer to it only as an additional quality to note. R H. Hutton concentrates ﬁrst and
foremost on the gloominess of Mrs. Yeobright’s death and the lack of clear self-
expression by most characters, and adds only later in the review that “men play the parts

of mere offsprings of the physical universe, and are governed by forces and tides no less

inscrutable” (Lerner and Holstrom 46).42 Even such a statement does not give justice to
the obvious efforts Hardy took to build a character out of Egdon Heath. Similarly, “The
Academy Review” analyzes the deaths and misfortunes of the novel as “all very
moumful, and very cruel, and very French,” and only then brings up the description of
Egdon Heath (Lerner and Holstrom 45). Such reviews provide an overwhelming sense
that contemporary literary men regarded the depiction of Egdon Heath as a secondary
element in the novel and concentrated almost exclusively on the shocking destinies of the
characters.
On the other hand, the reviews that examined the descriptions in the text valued
its accuracy the most as in the case of the “New Quarterly Magazine Review”:
[The novels’] minuteness results not in a mosaic of detail, but in a strong
cumulative impression of the things and persons described; and though the
author’s descriptive attitude is impartial almost to indifference, he is
redeemed from the reproach of cynicism which impartial writers so often
incur, by his obvious belief in a moral order to which human action is
subject, if not responsible . . . The minuteness of observation, the sense of

natural truth, the combined unconventionalism and delicacy, impartiality
and prejudice so strongly typical of everything he writes . . . (G. Clarke

 

42

The identity of the author of this unsigned review was presumed to be R. H. Hutton, but the editors of
Thomas Hardy and His Readers, Laurence Lerner and John Holrnstrom found it important to note that it
had not been proved beyond a doubt.

126

3 :3-4)
It is interesting that such reviews emphasized Hardy’s realism and fatalism, but did not
account for one of the key elements in this aspect. “The Spectator Review” drew
attention to the realism and beauty of these depictions:
There are many tableaux of wild and powerful picturesqueness. Take, for
example, the opening scene, where the whole of the barren country on a
dreary November night is kindling to the blaze of the roaring bonﬁres;
when we are introduced to the old fashioned parishioners of Egdon,
crowding round the pyramid of furze, thirty feet in circumference, that
crowns the summit of the tumulus of Blackbarrow; and there, in his

description of the excited little mob, we have some of Mr.Hardy’s most
distinctive touches. (Lerner and Holstrom 54)

Here, too, there is a respect for the author’s ability to portray the natural environment
truthfully and smoothly, nevertheless, we see no reference to the role of Egdon Heath in
the novel until 1894, when Lionel Johnson analyzes Hardy’s works more in depth and
states in The Art of Thomas Hardy that “[w]ithout the elaborate, slow pourtraiture (sic) of
Egdon Heath, we should have missed some depth of tragedy in Eustacia, Yeobright, and
his mother” (Lemer160). In contrast, the very ﬁrst reviews reﬂected the audience’s
expectations that were based on the style and success of his F or ﬁ'om the Modding
Crowd. “New Quarterly Magazine Review” focuses on the transformation of the plot:
The Return of the Native “repeats the tragedy of F or ﬁom the Modding Crowd on a larger
scale, with stronger intellectual elements, with a deeper perception of the contrast
between human passion and natural repose, with a more subtle sense of their afﬁnity” (G.
Clarke 3:9). The author of the “The Saturday Review”, however, distinguishes more
harshly between the two works by highlighting all the elements that The Return of the
Native does not share with the writer’s previous novel: “his F or ﬁom the Modding Crowd

was launched under favourable circumstances in a leading magazine, and—with reason—it

127

won him a host of admirers . . . its characters were made living and breathing realities;
there was a powerful love tale ingeniously worked out; the author showed a most intimate
knowledge of the rural scenes he sympathetically described” (Lerner and Holstrom 154).
The general audience perceived the novel in a similar fashion. In 1901, W. H. Mallock
discusses in his “The Quarterly Review” article the cause of Hardy’s small circle of
readers: “[His works] are read and admired by a minority quite sufﬁciently numerous to
have forced them on the attention of the majority, had the majority been able to
appreciate them” (Lerner and Holstrom 162). He also believes that the seriousness of his
topics cannot be a problem for the audience since he depicts real life, yet “no serious
intellectual problems are ever obtruded by [Hardy] on [his] readers” (Lerner and
Holstrom 162). While Mallock gives up on the question and turns to the next author to be
examined, he misses some of the key features of the contemporary reception process.
Indeed, the illustrations led the ﬁrst readers into a reﬂection about the characters
without taking into account the role of the environment and, above all, what Egdon Heath
represents in the novel. Gossin shares many twentieth-century readers’ thoughts when she
argues that Egdon Heath is “a representative of impersonal forces at work in the universe,
eternal truths about the relationship of humankind and the land” (Gossin 145). From the
very beginning, the text strives to envision the natural environment as a character. The
reader can observe the frequent use of active verbs and terms suggesting the existence of
a private will of Egdon Heath:
A Saturday afternoon in November was approaching the time of twilight,
and the vast tract of unenclosed wild known as Egdon Heath embrowned
itself moment by moment . . . Twilight combined with the scenery of
Egdon Heath to evolve a thing majestic without severity, impressive

without showiness, emphatic in its admonitions, grand in its simplicity . . .
It was at present a place perfectly accordant with man’s nature— . . .

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slighted and enduring (my emphasis, The Return of the Native 3-5).

These depictions of Egdon Heath that render it almost human, create a basis for} the
characters’ reﬂection on their environment as an element acting around them.
Interestingly, the characters themselves mistake sometimes the environment for a person.
Clym, for instance, confuses his wife with the sounds of Egdon Heath and the
surroundings near Blooms-End:
When a leaf ﬂoated to the earth he turned his head, thinking it might be
her footfall. A bird searching for worms in the mould of the ﬂower-beds
sounded like her hand on the latch of the gate; and at dusk, when soft,
strange ventriloquisms came ﬁ'om holes in the ground, hollow stalks,
curled dead leaves, and other crannies wherein breezes, worms, and
insects can work their will, he fancied that they were Eustacia, standing

without and breathing wishes of reconciliation. (The Return of the Native
347)

It is a fascinating long comparison between Eustacia and Egdon Heath, which
emphasizes Clym’s expectations for human companionship and his seclusion in the
natural environment that, after all, drives his wife away from him and causes her death. In
spite of Eustacia’s wish to distinguish herself from natural environment and its
inhabitants, she grows to be very similar to Egdon Heath towards the end of the novel,
when both are considered dangerous in a way or another.

In fact, the natural environment is visibly present whenever characters are alone
or feel distant from others. When Eustacia waits for Wildeve, the reader sees a
description of the windy weather: “Part of its tone was quite special; what was heard
there could be heard nowhere else. Gusts in innumerable series followed each other from
the north-west, and when each one of them raced past the sound of its progress resolved
into three. Treble, tenor, and bass notes were to be found therein” (The Return of the

Native 51). The reader feels the power of Nature lurking over the lonely woman, while

129

the image, as shown above, suggests different connotations during the late '18708. The
description of the natural environment is exceptionally systematic and appears in
ominous ways whenever the characters encounter problems. During Eustacia’s and
Wildeve’s discussion “[t]he pause was ﬁlled up by the intonation of a pollard thorn a
little way to windward, the breezes ﬁltering through its unyielding twigs as through a
strainer. It was as if the night sang dirges with clenched teeth” (The Return of the Native
80). Similarly, when Clym leaves Blooms-End after a quarrel with his mother about
Eustacia the weather acts conspicuously out of tune: “It was one of those not unfrequent
days of an English June which are as wet and boisterous as November. The cold clouds
hastened on in a body, as if painted on a moving slide. Vapours from other continents
arrived upon the wind, which curled and parted round him as he walked on” (The Return
of the Native 210). Egdon Heath acts against the characters and the effects of the cruel ,
weather on the area is visualized through a detailed description of the landscape at storm:
The wet young beeches were undergoing amputations, bruises, cripplings,
and harsh lacerations, from which the wasting sap would bleed for many a
day to come, and which would leave scars visible till the day of their
burning. Each stem was wrenched at the root, where it moved like a bone
in its socket, and at every onset of the gale convulsive sounds came from
the branches, as if pain were felt. In a neighbouring brake a ﬁnch was
trying to sing; but the wind blew under his feathers till they stood on end,

twisted round his little tail, and made him give up his song. (The Return of
the Native 210)

This environment is so powerful that it even causes death by the mere power of heat and
distance. When Mrs. Yeobright returns from her son’s house, full of anger and pain,
Egdon Heath presents a torrid attack: “The sun had branded the whole heath with his
mark, even the purple heath—ﬂowers having put on a browness under the dry blazes of the
few preceding days” (The Return of the Native 277). It seems that Mrs. Yeobright’s own

destiny and life depends on the mercy of the environment: “Mrs. Yeobright’s exertions,

130

physical and emotional, had well-nigh prostrated her; but she continued to creep along in
short stages with long brakes between. The sun had now got far to the west of south and
stood directly in her face, like some merciless incendiary, brand in hand, waiting to
consume her” (The Return of the Native 290). Through such verbal representation of the
natural environment in the course of the novel, the readers feel Egdon Heath to have a
major role in shaping its inhabitants’ path in life.

Indeed, following closely the verbal representation of the natural environment is
quintessential for the reception process. Realizing that Egdon Heath has a will on its own
allows the novel to be seen as more than a traditional Victorian moral story with a morbid
twist. The Fauna and ﬂora of Egdon Heath appear to interfere with people’s lives again
and again. When the characters gamble at night, their light is extinguished by a death’s
head moth, which meant a bad omen for the contemporary readers. But there is nothing
more threatening, perhaps, than Egdon Heath during the storm that takes two characters’
lives. It starts exactly when Eustacia starts out to meet Wildeve and ﬂee away from
Egdon Heath:

When she got into the outer air she found that it had begun to rain and as
she stood pausing at the door it increased, threatening to come on heavily.
But having committed herself to this line of action there was no retreating
for bad weather . . . The gloom of the night was ﬁmereal; all nature
seemed clothed in crape. The spiky points of the ﬁr trees behind the house
rose into the sky like the turrets and pinnacles of an abbey. Nothing below

the horizon was visible save a light which was still burning in the cottage
of Susan Nunsuch. (my emphasis, The Return of the Native 357)

The references to death and burial are overwhelming and the reader can sense that Egdon
Heath is bound to stop the two from leaving the area. It is ironical that in these hostile
circumstances the only certain, referential point is the house in which Eustacia’s old

enemy is casting a spell on her. The reader sees Eustacia as completely alone and

131

helpless. “Skirting the pool she followed the path towards Rainbarrow, occasionally
stumbling over twisted furze-roots, tufts of rushes, or oozing lumps of ﬂeshy fungi,
which at this season lay scattered about the heath like the rotten liver and lungs of some
colossal animal” (The Return of the Native 357). Once she decides to ﬁnd her way out of
Egdon Heath, dangers are imminent everywhere Eustacia chooses to go. And when both
her and Wildeve drown, the natural environment seems to reconcile with its inhabitants,
and the later depictions of the novel reﬂect a calmer Egdon Heath.

The twentieth-century readers view these storm representations as a talented
author’s depiction of the natural environment in the most compelling ways: “These are
set descriptions, but it is the succession of minor touches, often in the form of images,
that keeps the scene ever before the reader, or rather, immerses him in its atmosphere . . .
It is details such as these that make us feel that we, too, have been there” (Halliday 130-
31). Others seem to concentrate more on the personiﬁcation of the environment: Egdon
Heath “is a living being responding to the whims of nature;it is a mood, casting a spell
over all who know it” (Leavitt 13). Woolf regards Hardy’s style as highly evocative:
“Certainly it is true to say of him that, at his greatest, he gives us impressions; at his
weakest, arguments. In The Woodlanders, The Return of the Native, F or ﬁom the
Modding Crowd, and above all, in The Mayor of Casterbridge, we have Hardy’s
impression of life as it came to him without conscious ordering” (179). Such reﬂections
seem to be in concordance with Hardy’s efforts. He emphasized the importance of the
truthfulness of his depictions in a letter her wrote to his publishers, Smiths:

Unity of place is so seldom preserved in novels that a map of the scene of
action is a rule impracticable: but since the present story affords an

opportunity of doing so I am of opinion that it would be a desirable
novelty, likely to increase the reader’s interest. I may add that a critic once

132

remarked to me that nothing could give such reality to a tale as a map of

this sort: & I myself have often felt the same thing.

{1:1 fxpense of the engraving would not, I imagine be very great. (Letters
His interest in the referential value of his text is doubled here by his awareness of the
market value of the work against the expenses incurred. Indeed, the reception of the novel
was not as positive as Hardy expected and instead of gaining £900 on the serial version
and book rights as he intended at the beginning, he had to settle for £240 for the
Belgravia edition and £200 for the book publication by Smith, Elder (A. Nash 55, 59).
While this lack of ﬁnancial success points to Hardy’s lack of experience negotiating the
terms, it also suggests that the novel did not have a positive reception either ﬁ'om the
editors or from the larger audience. One of the apparent causes is the ﬁrst readers missing
the uniqueness of the way Hardy depicted Egdon Heath (as we have seen in the
contemporary reviews) and this phenomenon can be explained by the discrepancies
between the verbal and visual representation of the natural environment.

A closer look at the correspondence between Hardy and Hopkins reﬂects that

Hardy monitored carefully the visual representation of the characters and the customs and
tools of rural life, but he did not offer guidance for the representation of Egdon Heath.
Indeed, they exchanged letters frequently about the illustrator’s choice of subject, style
and perspective, and Hardy would give Hopkins information about the subsequent events
in the following chapters as well as about the role and importance of each character:

1 Clym Yeobright

2 Eustacia

3 Thomasin and the reddleman

4 Wildeve
5 Mrs. Yeobright (Letters 1:53)

Hardy even prepared sketches of the characters to further supervise the illustration of the

133

text. On the other hand, he left the ﬁnal decision to the artist, understanding that he
knows better the possibilities of visual representation: “1 should prefer to leave Clym’s
face entirely to you. A thoughtful young man of 25 is all that can be shown, as the
particulars of his appearance given in the story are too nrinute to be represented in a small
drawing” (Letters 1:55). Hardy’s concern for the main aspects of the character’s
appearance is obvious even when he leaves the ﬁnal choices to the illustrator. In contrast,
Egdon Heath is not visualized by Hardy and the illustrations in this aspect seem to
counteract Hardy’s naturalistic style. Hopkins probably felt that he could best show his
expertise where his hands were not tied by the writer’s directions, but the inﬂuence of the
Japanese prints affected the contemporary readers’ reception process and encouraged a
focus on the characters that does not give full justice to the text. The symbolical use of
lines, light without shadows and ﬂat perspective enhanced a sense of symbolism in the
contemporary readers’ reception that supported an interpretation of the trees and bushes
as a visualization of the characters’ present status and future hopes instead of an
illustration of the will Egdon Heath possesses in the verbal text.

The discrepancies between the verbal text and the visual illustrations shed light on
the growing divide between literary works and art works during the second half of the
nineteenth century: Hardy’s naturalism aims to reﬂect the “separation of the real from the
true, of the fact from the value” (Pykett 173), while Hopkins’s symbolism relied on the
latest innovations in visual representation, but also brought about a connotation of moral
values. In this sense, many illustrators of the 18703 turn against the ideals that they most
admired in the original Japanese prints, the seamless collaboration of different artists and

craftsmen. The discrepancy between Hardy’s efforts “to increase the reader’s interest,”

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on the one hand, and the effect of his efforts and Hopkins’s choices, on the other,
demonstrates that the late-nineteenth-century supervision of the editing process is no
match for the nﬁd—nineteentlr-century case of Thackeray’s Vanity F air editing. Indeed,
Henry James’s case will further exemplify the consequence of the diverging literary and

drawing styles on the reception process of the contemporary audience.

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CHAPTER 4
“WRITTEN IN CRUDE DEFIANCE OF THE ILLUSTRATOR”: AMBIGUITY
AND CONFUSION 1N HENRY JAMES’ WASHINGTON SQUARE

4.1. Proto-Modernism and Ludic Reading

Henry James’s Washington Square was published merely two years after The
Return of the Native; nevertheless, it represents a further complication of the relationship
between literary text and illustration. The interplay between the two media has been
largely inﬂuenced by J arnes’s increasing interest in literary texts that need active
interpretation instead of passive perception. Indeed, many critics regard James to be the
forerunner of the modernist self-distancing from mass culture and consumerism that the

rise of the literate population and the literary audience has brought about in the decades

before Washington Square.43 Mark McGurl sees Clement Greenberg’s claim about the,
novel’s growing independence from the strings of Victorian social service as especially
relevant in James’s case (59). He argues that “James’s commercial failure was
recuperated as artistic honor,” and “to be a ‘reader of Henry James’ began [in the 18805]
to mean something signiﬁcantly different—and no doubt, for some, better—from one who
was a reader of novels” (76). James’s attempt to liberate the novel from the didactic goals
that Victorianism imposed on it, proved both to better engage and to further distance the
reader. Instead of reinforcing middle-class propriety, James brought about a division of
the growing literary audience along the lines of their intellectual ability to engage with
the text. While McGurl claims that James relied on the “presence of the stupid masses” in

order to raise the reader of the avant-garde text above the rest of the audience (76), James

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simply presents his struggle as a way of salvaging the best of the novel for future
generations. In the wake of the rising “nai'veté,” he argues for the “discutable”:
Art lives upon discussion, upon experiment, upon curiosity, upon variety
of attempt, upon the exchanger of views and the comparison of
standpoints; and there is a presumption that those times when no one has
anything particular to say about it, and has no reason to give for practice
or preference, though they may be times of honour, are not times of

development—are times, possible even, a little of dulness (sic). (“The Art
of Fiction” 376)

If discussion and experiment become quintessential for the development of the novel,
then illustrations have certainly a new role in the reception of the verbal text.

Indeed, Washington Square is probably the best early example of proto-
modernism that undercuts the mid-nineteenth-century text-illustration dynamic, and
gestures towards literary discussion rather than a well-deﬁned “message.” In order to
reveal just how the author and, above all, his modernism inﬂuenced the reception of
Washington Square, 1 will examine the unique ambiguity of the text, then turn to the
illustration-text dynamic of the ﬁrst journal and book editiOn, and ﬁnally reﬂect on the
author’s understanding of the contemporary horizon of expectations as revealed through
his role in the editing process. Throughout my project, I have suggested that pinpointing
the effect of the illustration-text interplay on the contemporary reception process is quite
challenging; however, in the case of Washington Square, the obvious disjunction between
the two registers and J ames’s own remarks about the novel and the illustrations make my
argument so much more palpable.

Much criticism has been written about the psychological and socio-political

causes that set James’s style apart from his British contemporaries, but I would like to

 

For a review of some of the James analysis within the realm of cultural studies, see the introduction of
Mark McGurl’s The Novel Art: Elevation of American Fiction after Henry James.

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turn here to what is more relevant for reception studies: his style itself. James saw the
Victorian novel as the author’s futile attempt to “give his narrative any turn the reader
may like best” (“The Art of Fiction” 379). This emphasis on the consumerism of artistic
creation and literary distribution must seem unfair when we reﬂect on the Thackeray’s
Vanity Fair and Hardy’s The Return of the Native, two novels that challenged the
audience’s expectations. For J arnes, however, a good novel does not only need to
challenge expectations, but it also needs to become enigmatic and controversial,
characteristics that will reach their full literary potential during High-Modernism.
James’s proto-modernism becomes most visible in his endeavor to reconﬁgure the role of
the novel substantially, and, beyond all, to reinvent the style of the genre before modern
self-consciousness and interiority appeared on the horizon. It is exactly this level of
proto-metaﬁction that renders J arnes’s technique so difﬁcult to analyze. He chooses
depictions that leave much for the reader to ﬁgure out, he includes discussions that
become starting points for critical discussions, he relies on expressions that invite the
reader to work for “a meaning,” he even refers to the constructedness of certain
characters, yet he seems throughout to be entirely unaware of the choices he makes and
the choices he leaves for the reader. What may be seen as a linguistic ambiguity in
James’s work, especially in his early novels, at a closer look proves to be an innovative
way of uniting theme and style. This unity, as we shall see, is substantially different from
Thackeray’s or Hardy’s unity, and the critics and the wider audience saw this self-
distancing early on.

In 1916, John Freeman described James as “[d]eliberate, steadfast, unhesitating, .

. . striving always to attain his end not merely by choice of subject, but equally by means

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of the form which he is never tired of saying is inseparable from the presentation of the
subject” (221). Indeed, it is this emphasis on the form that renders James’s work as a
unique illustration of the late-nineteenth-century transformation of literary works and
literary reception. James regarded the novel to be. “a living thing, all one and continuous,
like any other organism, and in proportion as it lives will it be found, I think, that in each
of the parts there is something of each of the other parts” (“The Art of Fiction” 392). In
his struggle to eliminate the traditional binary opposition between the novel of character
and the novel of incident, he touched upon the key aspects of his unifying style: “What is
character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of
character? What is a picture or a novel that is not a character?” (“The Art of Fiction”
392). His characters, as seen in his major novels, are not well-deﬁned personalities, but
an arrangement of reactions to a series of events. His events do not strive for
chronological accuracy and biographical thoroughness, but appear as occasional
opportunities for the reader to glance into the hero’s or heroine’s character. The
ambiguity thus is caused not only by the linguistic indeterminacy, but also by what
appears for the reader to be simple lack of information: the narrator seems both to follow
the tradition of omniscient narrators and to challenge the possibility of a narrator that
could supply, as it were, the reader with all the information he/ she needs.

The T urn of the Screw is an outstanding instance of the style aiding the subject of
the narrative: the careful diction supports both major interpretations (that the heroine is
insane and has visions, or that she is the only adult witnessing the ghosts’ role in the
children’s lives), so that there can be no textual proof that either interpretation is the

correct interpretation, the meaning suggested in fact by the author. Other works by James

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still gesture towards a similar indeterminacy, even if interpretability is not such a clear
focus throughout the work. The Portrait of a Lady, for instance, does not display such an
overwhelming effort for verbal ambiguity, yet the readers ﬁnd themselves discussing
what the heroine’s feelings and thoughts were. The selection of events and reﬂections
that the omniscient narrator chooses to share with the reader, seem to be incongruent with
what the reader would want to know, and that leads them to what James considers to be
the main aim of the novel: a subject for discussion. However, what is even more
fascinating in The Portrait of the Lady or Washington Square is that the narrator’s
choices do not seem to be as deliberate and well-planned as in the T urn of the Screw. This
proto-self-awareness, just one step short of the open declaration of the power the narrator
has over the reader’s wish to know more, to understand better, is what both draws in the
readers and what drives them away. The Portrait of a Lady ends with an indeterminacy
that is similar to that of The Turn of the Screw (does Isabel return to her vicious husband
to ‘save’ his daughter, or is she afraid of her own and others’ judgment if she chooses to
divorce?), but the tone of the novel is less direct about its ambiguity. Moreover,
Washington Square presents a slightly earlier model of Jamesian ambiguity that
masquerades as a novel of extreme clarity. The reader, as we will see, tries to assure
him/herself of the intended meaning of the end and to remove the uneasiness by
struggling to remember the detail that would surely clarify the ending—had it not evaded
his/her mind for a moment.

However, before examining ambiguity in Washington Square and the illustrations
of the ﬁrst edition, we need to take into account the effect of ambiguity on the

contemporary audience in general. For the ﬁrst readers’ of J ames’s works, ambiguity

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initiated a certain anxiety that quickly turned into straight-forward concern. J ames’s ﬁrst
successful work, Daisy Miller appeared shortly before Washington Square and it
generated both interest and questions. It was, in fact, during the publication of
Washington Square, in August of 1880, that James had to respond to a concerned reader,
Eliza Lynn Linton, about what he meant in Daisy Miller. The story could have easily
been seen as the depiction of a promiscuous young woman and, although the literary text
noticeably avoided clarifying the heroine’s reasons, the readers had to know what he
meant. The unfortunate ending should have soothed the spirits, yet it might have been
exactly the ﬁnale that raised questions: why would the heroine die unless she deserved to
die as some kind of modern descendant of the ancient tragic characters who dared to act
against the laws of honor? And if she were indeed innocent, why would she die? There
was no straightforward lesson to be learned from the story and the readers felt an urge to
ease the pressure of their expectations by trying to end the discussion that the story
started. James seemed to be eager to set the reader’s mind at rest claiming that the
heroine was “above all things innocent. It was not to make a scandal, or because she took
pleasure in the scandal, that she ‘went on’ with Giovanelli. She never took the measure
really of the scandal she produced, and had no means of doing so: she was too ignorant,
too irreﬂective, too little versed in the proportions of things...” (Letters 2:303).
Nevertheless, he did not seem so interested in clarifying his later works; in fact, he
seemed to grow more self-conscious in his use of ambiguity in spite of the audience’s
need to identify a clear moral undertone in his works.

For the audience, the concerns of the mid-nineteenth century did not disappear by

the 18803. The less didactic novels were seen as a possible threat to Victorian values:

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such works could contribute to the spread of immorality at a time when ﬁnancial and
political equality between the genders was a daily topic, but the social double standard

still existed and required women to display purity and stand for the moral superiority of

the nation (Poovey 9-10).44 James, in contrast, seemed to deliberately disregard the
pressure of the moral expectations and question more or less openly the need for literary
works to display and solve social issues of the day. Indeed, his ambiguity reﬂected more
the reality of the situation: not all villains were ugly as physiognomy liked to claim, nor
were all the psychological drives of a person simply explainable by the laws of chemistry
and physics. It is in this sense that James’s works were more realistic and, at the same
time, more modern than the audience expected. Moran sees “the introspective tragedies
of Henry James” as a continuation of the psychological realism that in the 1860s began to
dominate ﬁction through George Eliot’s inﬂuence (81). In fact, James appears to
represent a unique bridge between at least two of the three Victorian literary movements
that Moran distinguishes, The Pre-Raphaelite Movement, the Aesthetic and Decadent
Movement and the New Woman Fiction (117). While some of his heroines and endings
place his work amongst the New Woman novels, his depiction of the characters and
events reminds us of the Aesthetic Movement. His ambiguity can undoubtedly be

regarded as a shift away from the utilitarian views of High Victorianism, and a renewed

 

44 Henry Mayhew draws attention in his London Labor and the London Poor to the number of fallen
women increased in the Victorian Age and his concern reﬂects the general anxiety of the audience. In
Bitter Cry of Outcast London, Andrew Mearns discusses the moral degradation brought about the housing
conditions, John Ruskin’s treaties about ethics are founded on Victorian ideals of morality and the wide
public’s interest in the sustainability of Victorian morality is apparent in the publicity and aftermath of
Oscar Wilde’s trials. For a comprehensive analysis of the effects of mid-Victorian ethics on political
economy, see Geoffrey Searle’s Morality and the Market in Victorian Britain, which includes a special
chapter on “Family and Women.”

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emphasis on the artistic form of the novel.45

James believed the novel to be “in its broadest deﬁnition a personal impression of
life,” which can be rendered only if the author has freedom of expression: “The execution
belongs to the author alone; it is what is most personal to him, and we measure him by
that . . . His manner is his secret, not necessarily a deliberate one” (“The Art of Fiction”
385). He even adds: “If we pretend to respect the artist at all we must allow him his
freedom of choice” (395). The Jamesian freedom, however, is not comparable to that of
Thackeray or Hardy. Both Thackeray and Hardy reinvented novel-writing by stretching
the boundaries, but never really questioning the need for those boundaries. James, on the
other hand, believes artistic freedom to give him the right to express what seemed to be
outside of the boundaries of literary subjects in a way that did not conform to the literary
norms. This freedom requires the reader to allow the omniscient narrator to share some
aspects and withhold others, to accept a mere sketch of the characters and events that
become discutable, and to continue the reception beyond the temporally well-deﬁned
reading process. At the same time, this freedom raises James above the issue of morality
that neither Thackeray, nor Hardy dared to attempt: how can “(a novel being a picture) a
picture . . . be either moral or immoral?” (“The Art of Fiction” 404). Indeed, James both
addresses the question of ethical literary representation and eliminates it by arguing that

“the absence of discussion is not a symptom of moral passion” (“The Art of Fiction”

 

45 James Fisher in his essay “On the Ladder of Social Observation: Images of Decadence and Morality in
James’s Washington Square and Wilde’s An Ideal Husband” compares the two authors’ belief that
“decadence is more a matter of moral decay in the personas of individual characters than in the trappings of
society, however corrupt those trappings may be,” but he also admits that James’s decadence is
“considerably subtler” since he sees America as a “contradictory, ambiguous environment,” in which
characters suffer “the hypocrisies and treacheries of the established social order” (168-75). This project,
however, analyzes the interpretability of James’s works and their interaction with the adjacent illustrations,
rather than the decadent features of his writing.

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406). As a consequence, James’s novels not only disregard the audience’s expectations
for a moral lesson, but through the discutable, the ambiguous, they add an obstacle to the
audience’s reception process and the illustrator’s visualization.

The effects of Jamesian ambiguity can be analyzed on the basis of its
communicative results and its inﬂuence on reception. In A Theory of Semiotics, Eco
examines “knowledge that the addressee should supposedly share with the sender” and
draws attention to the “private codes and ideological biases of the sender, expression
ambiguities and content ambiguities” (142). However, in the case of the James’s works
the involuntary ambiguities of expression and content that Eco discusses are intensiﬁed
by the intentional ambiguities that lead to informational gaps and a variety of possible
interpretations. It is widely accepted that a novel, however detailed, cannot account for all
the details in the alternative possible world it depicts, but James’s novels seem to miss
what previous writers considered important and especially what the Victorian audience
expects to ﬁnd: the characters’ reﬂections about the past, their goals for the future, and
the innermost thoughts of the main character. Considering Rimmon-Kenan’s
categorization of hermeneutic gaps, the major gaps of J ames’s works are prospective
since the reader “is made aware of the existence of the gap in the process of reading,” and
they are permanent because they “remain open after the text has come to an end” (128-
29). What is most important to notice in James’s novels is that while the reader is
constantly reminded of these gaps and left guessing at the end of the reading process,
these gaps are “crucial and central in the narrative,” to use again Rimmon-Kenan’s
typology, and thus the reception process starts to revolve around becoming aware of the

gaps and trying to ﬁll them without the beneﬁt of explicit narratorial guidance. The

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reader of The T urn of the Screw realizes that the narrative can be seen in two different
ways and he/she tries to ﬁnd clues to decide which interpretation is the most satisﬁing,
but even the re—reading of earlier passages or the more careful reading of the rest of the
text fails to provide speciﬁc clues. Similarly, the reader of The Portrait of a Lady grows
less and less familiar with the heroine’s thinking and rationale; moreover, the last pages
of the novel prevent the reader even from seeing the heroine or reading a detailed report
about her actions and reasons. Washington Square, in contrast, offers a subtler version of
indeterminacy by showing the heroine utter the decisive words and depicting the other
characters’ reaction to her decision. This clarity, as we will see, is still misleading, since a
thorough review of the text does not prove a speciﬁc interpretation beyond any doubt.
However, we should not regard all gaps as a concern for the readers. Calinescu
emphasizes that “the notion of literary readability rests on a paradox. To sustain interest
of the reader, a text of some length must be at once accessible and difﬁcult or, in terms of
the Russian Forrnalists’ theory of ‘defamiliarization,’ familiar and unfamiliar” (31).
Indeed, Victorian serialization of novels is on the whole an experiment on how to
maintain reader’s interest in a story over many months. Dickens developed a keen sense
of how to make each part interesting in itself while taking the readers closer and closer to
the ﬁnale. Other writers opted for larger sections appearing in special editions or,
especially towards the end of the century, simply chose to publish their novels only in
book format. Nonetheless, maintaining the reader’s interest throughout a book continued
to be an issue. Jarnes’s focus on indeterminacy certainly might seem a good choice.
Indeed, many of his works can be seen as an invitation to what Calinescu calls Iudic

reading: certain works “lend themselves to (re)reading close to the ludic pole represented

145

by games with rules . . . confronting the attentive reader with such questions as: What is
really the make-believe game I am supposed to play in reading this text? What precisely
am I to pretend to believe? How am I to determine this?” (193). Sheila Teahan
emphasizes James’s ability in The T urn of the Screw to plan for each of the reader’s
questions: “It seems impossible for a reader to make any move that has not been
anticipated in the story itself” (26). Calinescu views these anticipatory moves as the rules
the writer creates for the game that the reader is invited to play. He examines the
reception process in the case of The Turn of the Screw to demonstrate how the reader’s
absorption becomes ludic:
we are willing to play the critical game so intelligently devised by the
author, an important part of which consists of searching precisely for the
textual gaps and attempting to deﬁne their strategic role in manipulating
reader interest and in creating a desire to reread. It is by identifying and
circumscribing these gaps through rereading that we are enabled to
discover not the truth of the story but the more subtle, hidden, tacit rules
by which the hermeneutical game it proposes can be played and replayed,
as well as incidental loopholes that may allow for new, unsuspected
interpretive possibilities. The secret hope of solving the puzzle
deﬁnitively, of triumphing where all other readers have failed, must not be

discounted either: this ‘let-me-have-a-look-at-it’ attitude underlies much
of the competitive rereading that forms the basis of literary criticism. (201)

Such a game should make the reader appreciate the literary work even more, but that was
not the case with the contemporary audience. Modernist authors, McGurl argues, saw
“pleasure in work, and, speciﬁcally, in the particular kind of intellectual work that
reading the difﬁcult modernist text is said to require” (1 1). At the end of the nineteenth
century, on the contrary, the author of the “Literature Review” complained that J ames’s
work represented a nuisance for the readers, because the author “le[ﬁ] everything
unexplained” (Hayes 301). Indeed another reviewer writing for Bookman found it

necessary to solve the question by claiming conﬁdently that the two ghosts are merely

146

used for “symbolism to help [the author] out with his theme” (Hayes 304). Another sign
of the readers’ anxiety at their expectations being challenged is apparent in the emphasis
of the “Literature Review” that the work “is ﬁction . . . but it is not a novel; it is full of
apparitions, generally in broad daylight, but it is not a ghost story” (Hayes 301). A
revealing reﬂection is included in the “Overland Monthly Review” stating that “J ames’s
style has become as interesting as a Chinese puzzle” (Hayes 305): it suggests the work
that the reader is required to perform and it refers to its game-like quality, but it also
connotes difﬁculty and, perhaps, even oddity. Reﬂecting back from the twenty-ﬁrst
century, McGurl contends that James’s novels were seen as a symbol of smarts-for-
smarts’-sake ideology (120).

Even if not as openly as The T urn of the Screw, earlier novels by James also
invited the contemporary audience to re-evaluate the role of the reader, but offered less of
a clear delineation between possible interpretations. Indeed, the indeterminacy of The
Turn of the Screw is easily perceptible, which renders it as the perfect embodiment of
what Eco calls the ‘open’ text: a text that “work[s] at [its] peak revolutions per minutes

only when each interpretation is reechoed by the others, and vice versa” (The Role of the

Reader 9).46 Even if unaccustomed to such literary writings, readers could easily identify
their role in the process based on their experience with linguistic ambiguity seen, for
instance, in puns. Other novels that were not that transparent about the possible
interpretations represented an even deeper dilemma for the contemporary audience. The

readers could not locate a Victorian story with a clear morale, nor could they enjoy the

 

46
In the The Role of the Reader, Eco differentiates between closed texts, which “have in mind an average

addressee referred to a given social context” and “obsessively aim at arousing a precise response on the part
of more or less precise empirical readers,” and open texts, from which the reader can extrapolate the proﬁle
of the Model Reader, and which, in the hands of a negative Model Reader, yield “another text” (8-9).

147

game they were invited to play. In fact, for some contemporary readers, James’s novels

were obvious cases of poor writing, while others recognized it more as an attempt to

secrecy and resented the role they were assigned in this game.47 It was not until decades
later (during the publication of The Wings of the Dave, The Ambassadors and The Golden
Bowl) that the readers, or at least some of them, grew to love the interpretational games
that the modernist novels offered.

In retrospect, Stefanie Markovits claims that the question “Well, what will she
do?” raised in the Preface to The Portrait of a Lady and in the ﬁrst pages of the novel,
“seems to grow right out of those repeated demands of ‘What should I do?’ made by
Eliot’s heroines, and Jarnes’s acknowledgement of Eliot in the Preface stems from his
recognition of how inﬂuential this question was for him” (131). Markovits adds:

When James replaces Eliot’s ‘should’ with his own ‘will,’ he indicates that
his ethical concerns will be more about freedom than about duty. In
addition, James’s version of Eliot’s struggle with free agency takes place
on a much more self-consciously formal level than do Eliot’s ethical

dilemmas. Together, these shifts show the move from the Victorian to the
modernist ﬂame of mind. (131)

Indeed, J ames’s novels are structured around what the character will do and leave the
reader wondering why the character did that. James’s interest in artistic freedom thus
reaches a new level in literary history: he does not only claim to be free from social rules
and moralistic expectations, but he grants the audience the freedom of interpretation:
readers can read in his texts whatever they think to understand from his texts. Whether
this tendency stems from the author’s respect for the reader or, on the contrary, a certain

sense of elitism, that those who choose to read his work should be able to recognize their

 

7
For an interesting discussion of James’s secrecy, see Calinescu’s analysis of The Private Life. Calinescu
deﬁnes literary secrecy as “the calculated and selective concealment of information” that emphasizes the

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role in the process and enjoy the mental work, the effect on the contemporary audience is
quite clear in the 18803: they saw in Washington Square and other novels from the period
a new literary representation that they had to deal with. A moralistic interpretation based
on Victorian traditions was seen as a possibility by the contemporary audience, yet the
problem arose when they could not deﬁnitively reject the other possible interpretations
that were not based on the same ethical values. Asking the writer to clarify that the
heroine was innocent is such an attempt by the reader to validate only one of the possible
readings through the authority of the writer. But very few readers decided to contact
James directly. As a result, the ambiguity led to permanent and crucial gaps, and even if
the readers’ interest was maintained, they did not appreciate being left in the dark.
Analyzing the contemporary audience’s response, Cruse argues that the
explanation of the decreasing interest in James’s novels lies in the fact that “he had made
too great demands on his public. The fastidious elaboration of treatment that had at ﬁrst
proved attractive had become wearisome since . . . it required the close and concentrated
attention of the reader” (After the Victorians 150). It is interesting to note that what Cruse
sees as the audience’s concern with the treatment, is chosen by James as a very self-
conscious writing style; moreover, what she calls the close and concentrated attention of
the reader, is viewed by Calinescu as an invitation to ludic self-absorption. The
quintessential difference between these perspectives, as I will elaborate later in the
chapter, is that James relies on his understanding of the contemporary audience’s
expectations, while Cruse researches several decades later what the nineteenth-century

audiences’ reactions were, and Calinescu reﬂects back from the late twentieth century.

 

deliberateness of hiding information and the selectivity of the readers who would have the necessary
knowledge to understand it.

I49

Many nineteenth-century readers did not recognize the uniqueness of the style; instead
they regarded it as an unhappy accident, and some of them could not help but wonder
about the choice of subject, too. Cruse provides as example Hardy’s concern that James’s
subjects were “those that one could be interested in at moments when there is nothing
larger to think of” (ctd. in After the Victorians 150). On the other hand, Cruse
acknowledges that there was a group of readers who were devoted to James. Arnold
Bennett stated: “There is scarcely an author—unless it be Henry James-whom I ﬁnd
ﬂawless, and whom therefore I can read with perfect comfort,” and Mrs. Atherton
claimed that “In the nineties . . . Henry James, and deservedly, was spoken of with bated
breath as the Master” (ctd. in A ﬁer the Victorians 150-51). Such readers, however, were
few and others either struggled with his novels or gave up reading them altogether. Anne
Douglas Sedgwick found The Awkward Age to be “a wonderful production, exasperating
at times, but in its ﬁnal effect really magniﬁcent,” and Stopford Brooke admitted frankly:
I have read Henry James’s preface and to tell you the plain truth I do not
understand half of it . . .He has now arrived at such an involved and
tormented a style that I ﬁnd the greatest difficulty in discovering what he
means. I read and read, again and again, his sentences, and it is like
listening to a language I do not know. I read his last novel but one, and I
was in the same hopeless condition. I believe his style is the ﬁne ﬂower of

modern culture and that not to appreciate it is to be in the outer darkness,
but I prefer outer darkness. (ctd. in After the Victorians 151)

Such readerly responses do not provide a detailed reﬂection on the reception
process, but elements of their testimonies can be examined closely. Bennett found
James’s work ﬂawless, but he admittedly had time to read the works “with perfect
comfort.” Sedgwick’s reading process was “exasperating at times,” and it was the “ﬁnal
effect” that led her to an overall conclusion that it was “a wonderful production” and

“really magniﬁcent.” If the “production” referred to the detailed aspects of the work, then

150

“wonderful” would surely be inconsistent with the confession that there were passages
that were “exasperating” to read. Hence, “production” became “wonderful” in this
reader’s mind once she had ﬁnished reading the novel, so it was her retrospective
response that was favourable—in spite of the recalling of the unhappy moments of the
reading process. Brooke’s response, “He has now arrived at such an involved and
tormented a style...” (my emphasis), suggests a development ﬁ'om a problematic style to
a highly difﬁcult style. In this response it is also interesting to note that this reader
complains about not being able to “discover . . . what he means” and feeling as if he were
“listening to a language I do not know” (my emphases). Thus this reader seemingly did
not expect to enjoy the reading (and the ludic absorption that Calinescu admires so much
in James’s works), but to understand what the author meant, and as soon as he realized
that he could not locate that meaning, he looked at the text as a dijferent language. The
next phase in his reception process is only logical: he recognizes the work as something
new and admirable (“the ﬁne ﬂower of modern culture”), but gives up on keeping up
with culture if it requires the “appreciation” of such works. This reasoning is especially
important, if we keep in mind that this is a devoted reader, who “read[s] and read[s],
again and again” these texts, and who is probably more interested in the intellectual work
than most contemporary readers would have been. It is noteworthy that even such a
reader earlier struggled to understand what the author meant and ends up relinquishing
the appreciation of the work, which would not necessitate the understanding of the
meaning of the work. Towards the end of the century traditional readerly expectations
shift from the exclusive interest in a clear understanding of the meaning, but during the

1880s these expectations still overlap signiﬁcantly with the ability to appreciate the

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literary work.

Indeed, James’s novels gesture towards the psychological novels of the early-
twentieth century that represent such a different approach to the role of literary texts and
especially the readers. “One is presented with a structure,” McGurl claims, “in which
realist knowledge and romantic affect operate in dialectical—mutually dependent,
mutually hostile—relation, yielding what might be properly called a literary psychology”
(50). He even adds that “The originality of James and later modernist writers . . . is only
to insist with unique stridency on the fact of consciousness, not necessarily as it correctly
apprehends the real, but as an intractably distorting or simply “forrnalizing” feature of the
real in the experience of the individual subject” (50). Such a critique suggests that the
readers’ main concerns might have been not necessarily with the more or less apparent
linguistic indeterminacy and lack of information, but what these characteristics alluded
to: that the existence of an omniscient narrator and a moral lesson is questionable if one
admits that individuals ﬁlter reality through their subjective consciousness. It is in this
sense that J arnes’s early novels lead towards the Joycean stream-ofconsciousness, and it
is because of this aspect that Urszula Terentowicz-Fotyga in her analysis of inﬂuences on
Woolf’s works contends that works by James, Woolf and Joyce are essentially
“subjectivist novels” (131). This emphasis on the subjectivity of the individual, however,
was in stark contrast with the mid-nineteenth century ideals and the transformation was
not as smooth as James hoped for. While he saw his path as a reﬁnement of his style that
would improve the audience’s positive reception, outsiders saw the process in a different
light. Joseph Conrad wrote about The Spoils of Poynton:

I imagine with pain the man in the street trying to read it. And my
common humanity revolts at the evoked image of his suffering. One could

l52

almost see the globular lobes of his brain painfully revolving, and crushing
and mangling the delicate thing. As to his exasperation, it is a thing
impossible to imagine and too horrid to contemplate. (ctd. in After the
Victorians 154)

It is remarkable that Conrad does not only try to imagine the common reader’s pain while
responding to James’s work, but he also visualizes the two participants of the process: the
reader with globular lobes of brain and the delicate work to be crushed. Such reﬂections
demonstrate that the contemporary reception processes varied largely, but one thing is
certain: the more James seemed to work on his style, the more puzzled his readers
became. The linguistic indeterminacy and lack of information that appears in James’s
ﬁrst novels led many readers to believe them to be poorly written, instead of recognizing
the delicate construction of a locale for the readers’ never-ending game of guessing all
the meanings that the text allowed.

Indeed, since Washington Square was regarded both by the author and the critics
as a superﬁcial construct on the subject, the novel is rarely studied in depth. The narrative
is short and even if it encompasses many years, only short periods are rendered in detail.
At the beginning, there is a relatively quick reference to how Dr. Austin Sloper married
the wealthy Miss Catherine Harrington and how the wife died soon after giving birth to
their daughter, Catherine. The beginning of her aunt’s, Mrs. Penniman’s cohabitation
with them is mentioned, and a significant gap is created by the sudden move to the
depiction of the father-daughter relationship during Catherine’s teenage years. Moreover,
in Chapter III (out of the total of thirty-ﬁve chapters), the text arrives at the
commencement of Catherine’s social life leaving her earlier psychological and social
development hardly elucidated. Soon afterward, Catherine meets Morris Townsend and

falls in love with him. At this time she is supported largely by the only mother-ﬁgure she

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knows, Mrs. Penniman. Morris seems to manipulate both women in his attempt to marry
wealthy, but he cannot mislead the father. In a witty conversation with him, Dr. Sloper
tries to distance Morris from Catherine by suggesting he ﬁnd a job outside of town.
Townsend, however, manages to draw on false family reasons to reject the advice, so that
Dr. Sloper’s only option is to take Catherine for a long trip to Europe. When at their
return Catherine continues her infatuation with Townsend, her father decides to ‘save’
her from an unhappy marriage by disowning her in case she marries Townsend. The plan
is effective and Townsend leaves Catherine with the doubtful explanation that he does
not want to interfere with their father-daughter relationship. Catherine never marries
while her father is still alive and when Dr. Sloper dies years later, Townsend reappears to
express his interest in Catherine. At this point, however, Catherine sends him away and
the novel ends shortly after their last conversation without the reader having a chance to
learn deﬁnitively why Catherine decided so.

Nevertheless, the novel should not be regarded as a failed literary exercise.
J ames’s response to Grace Norton, written later during the publication, on November 7,
1880, demonstrates his insistence on the artistic choices: “[Washington Square] had a
very defmite artistic intention; but most readers miss that (at all times) and I am happy
that you should have found it” (Letters 2:315). A closer look at what this “deﬁnite artistic
intention” might entail can shed light on the discrepancies between the text and the
illustrations. The novel seems to reﬂect the audience’s reception process in its main
theme, the reappearing emphasis on the individual characters’ ‘reading’ of other
characters. The story depicts a young woman who is struggling to deal with the

consequences of the discrepancy between her and her father’s ‘reading’ of her suitor, and

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the reader very much follows her path at the beginning. Once the reader ﬁnds out about
Morris’s real intentions, the constant question is what Catherine will do and what will
inﬂuence her in her decision making. The text carefully drafts the heroine so that her
choice cannot be predicted, nor her rationale guessed, and the contemporary reader is
compelled to hope for an explicit ending with a moral lesson, but cannot disregard what
seems to be the lack of clear signs leading to such an ending. Thus the central gap
(according to Rimmon-Kenan’s term) in the text becomes essentially psychological, and
not only is the reader’s interest in the heroine’s choice and reasons maintained throughout
the novel, but the reader seems to be kept at a self-conscious distance from learning
whether Catherine is a positive heroine according to Victorian expectations or a disloyal
and disrespectful daughter portrayed as a warning. The uniqueness of the novel lies in the
fact that even when her choice is ﬁnally determined (on the very last pages of the novel),
her reasons remain obscure not because they depend on the overall reading of the text (as
in The Turn of the Screw), or because they are withheld by the self-isolated heroine (as in
The Portrait of a Lady), but seemingly because the narrator keeps it a secret. The heroine
is physically present in the building, we witness her discussion with Morris and still we
learn nothing about her thinking. As a result, the text clariﬁes for the readers what its
central gaps are and requires a careful reading throughout the pages in an effort to ﬁll
those gaps, but once it suggests that there is a deﬁnite reason for the heroine’s choice (her
very clear response to Morris), it withholds that last detail from the reader as a permanent
gap. Such an ending forces the contemporary readers into the realm of interpretational
indeterminacy and leads to their anxiety about having performed the readerly tasks as

they believe they were required.

155

Indeed, the novel does not only lead the audience to reﬂect on the reading
process, but it also reﬂects constantly how the characters ‘read’ each other. In this aspect
the novel reminds us of some of James’s other works: “for James, reading is the dominant
metaphor of life and his art is designed to teach us how to read well” (Fetterley 147).
Decidedly, the novel displays plenty of occasions for the theme of ‘reading’: Morris
creates an image for himself that seems best to work on women, but fails to deceive the
men (Dr. Sloper as well as his own cousin); Mrs. Pemriman teaches Catherine that
romance is to be regarded as the most important feature a suitor can have and supports
her focus on behavior rather than internal characteristics; Dr. Sloper boasts with his years
of experience in ‘reading’ people and takes only a few steps to prove for himself the
validity of his reading’ of Morris. When it comes to Catherine, nevertheless, the theme is
not that clear: does she fail to realize the representational quality of Morris’ behaviour or
does she become a victim of the image she and Mrs. Penniman created about him? Does
she recognize Morris’s real intentions and stops short of confronting him out of decency,
or does she subdue herself to her father’s wishes even beyond the grave? These choices
and others in the interpretation of the novel yield widely different ﬁnal conclusions:
readers might see her decision to send Morris away as a proof of her growing awareness
and psychological strength, but it might also be viewed as a reiteration of her former
subdued self. Even more, readers might ﬁnd that the end of the novel reveals her true
character that was hidden before by the appearance of foolishness and submission.

While the possible interpretations invite readers to the ludic absorption Calinescu
discusses, the permanent and central gap potentially frustrates and confuses the Victorian

reader. So is the novel about the transformation a woman of Catherine’s age and social

156

stature undergoes when facing the materialistic world, or is it about the unhappiness of a
woman who needs her father’s strict rules to survive in the world? Yet another option: is
it about the lack of real choices for young women in the nineteenth-century patriarchal
society of high middle-class? Whatever the interpretation, the contemporary reader can
reach different conclusions based on different readings of the same text. The lack of clear
moral message and the possibility that the novel ironizes the choices that are available to
young girls at the end of the nineteenth century, undercut the reader’s ludic absorption
into the text and transform him/her into a sentinel watching out for signs of immorality
and lack of respect. It is at this level, which surpasses the joyful ludic level of the reading
process and steps into the realm of contemporary existential questions, that James ﬁnds
himself at home. And it is this level that still confuses and threatens most of the British
readership during the 18803. However, in order to get an accurate sense of the
contemporary reception process, we need to take into account the discrepancies between
the text and the illustrations, which added more confusion to the carefully constructed

ambiguity of the text.

4.2. Verbal Characterization and Visual Focus
The ﬁrst serial edition appearing from July to December, 1880 in the Cornhill

Magazine and 1881 book edition of Washington Square shared the same illustrations
created by George du Maurier. As a more accessible register, the visual images could
have brought the audience closer to a speciﬁc interpretation of the text and thus ﬁll the
gaps that the text so carefully maintained. The illustrations could have rendered the text
as a didactic story about a young woman who learns to trust the older generation’s

rationale in order to avoid long-lasting unhappiness, or they could have reinforced a sense

157

in the readers that there is a well-hidden satire showing how a life lived according to
traditional values turns out to be. Such an ambiguity is not to be located in the
illustrations; indeed, the images seem to bring about more confusion than visual
clariﬁcation or enjoyment.

There are six vignettes and six full-page illustrations quite equally spread out
considering the length of the novel; moreover, after the initial frontispiece and vignette,
the order follows a very strict structure: a vignette followed by a ﬁrll-page illustration,
then again a vignette, etc. Hence the novel is visually started and ﬁnished by similar full-
page illustrations: the frontispiece depicts Morris and Catherine at their ﬁrst encounter
and the illustrations end with a full-page image of the two at their last meeting—many
years later. Such a structure and choices clearly suggest that it was the publication format
that ﬁrst and foremost determined the location and subject of the illustrations: each serial
number encompassed one vignette and one full-page illustration. The images, on the
other hand are not equally spread out between the chapters: 1 the illustrated chapters are I,
VII, XIII, XIV, XIX, XX, XXV, XXX, XXXV and the breaks between these images
range from zero to six chapters. Similarly, the illustrations seem to emphasize different
aspects of the text depending on the chapter.

The ﬁrst full-page illustration is a good example, and as the ﬁrst overall
illustration that the readers of the 1881 book edition actually encountered, it yielded a
visual confusion from the very beginning, which (in spite of the wide circulation of
periodicals suggested above) proved to be decisive for a substantial segment of the
audience. These readers came across the title page facing the ﬁrst full-page illustration of

Catherine meeting Morris (see Fig. 4.1). The visual design of the text itself is essential

158

here. During the period, the title pages contained different information, depending on
what the editor deemed necessary at the time of the publication. Such title pages
suggested that the title is the most important element, while the author’s identity might
need reinforcement through additional lines referring to his earlier works that were well-
known by then. Special font design draws attention to the illustrator; still, its size is

slightly smaller than that of the author’s name and the publishing location. The location

WASHINGTON SQUARE

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Fig. 4.1. Frontispiece and title page of Henry James’s Washington Square, 2-3

and the year of publication displays expanded character spacing, yet the font is not larger
than the size used for the author’s name. Whereas a lot of conclusions can be drawn
based on the size and type of each word on the title page, what strikes the reader ﬁrst is
the aesthetics of the page. The spaces between the lines are masterfully edited so that the
text, although short, covers most of the page visually: the title of the novel is situated at
the top end of the printable area while the year at the bottom is located probably on the

last printable line of the page, the title spans throughout the page horizontally and the

159

lines containing the previous works, the illustrator and the publishing house all expand
through most of the page. Hence the careful visual organization leads to a different focus
than a simple reading of the text. A continuous reading of “Washington Square by Henry
James, Jr., author of ‘Daisy Miller’ ‘An International Episode’ etc., illustrated by George
du Maurier, New York, Harper & Brothers, Franklin Square, 1881” focuses on the title,
while the visual layout draws the audience’s attention to the lines right above the middle
of the page: the author’s name and previous works demonstrating the editor’s expectation
that those are the words that are going to be best received by the audience and that would
ultimately ‘sell’ the book. For the contemporary audience, this title page is a visual
reinforcement of the expectation that this novel will be similar to Daisy Miller that has
just received positive reception.

In contrast, the illustration on the opposite page does not build on previous
illustrations of Jarnes’s works (indeed, Washington Square was his ﬁrst work to be
published with illustrations), and its reception might not conform to the expectations. In
western culture a fully opened book would be viewed ﬁom left to right, so the choice and
style of this illustration is quintessential in the commencement of the reception process.
The image seems to represent three people talking at a social event. The location is
depicted in a few lines to suggest the size and ornamentation of the place, while the other
people present are drawn as a mere background. The audience cannot even decipher their
facial expression or the shape of their clothes. The three people in the foreground,
however, are rendered through detailed strokes to introduce the characters visually. The
gentleman is very formally dressed and his hat in his hand, his facial expression and

slight bow all suggest that he is very respectfully greeting the woman facing him. The

160

other woman, standing next to him views him with a very open and trusting look. Her
overall appearance, face, hair and dress suggest that she is very young and fashionable.
However, the lady whom we see ﬁ'om the back is hardly introduced to the viewer. The
details of her dress indicate her social status, her narrow waist reﬂects her age and her
hairstyle suggests her preferences, yet not being portrayed from the front takes away the
possibility of the viewer ‘to get to know this person.’ It is obvious that she is young and
wealthy; it is also probable that she is shy and withdrawn, but the reader does not have a
chance to see how she looks like before learning that she is the heroine of the novel. It
seems that the frontispiece tends to focus more on the community aspect of the social
event, the heroine meeting friends and new acquaintances, than on the main character
herself. In fact, the young gentleman is positioned in the foreground and through the
slightly melancholic expression he seems to gain the sympathy of the readers before they
even get a chance to read about the characters. In this respect the illustration emphasizes
a different character than the text and it visualizes the title of the novel rather than its

focus. Washington Square is not simply a location, but a community, where people’s

actions are deﬁned by social regulations rather than individual characteristics.48 Such an
interpretation of the frontispiece, however, is in stark contrast with that of the text which
reveals Morris’s real intentions and provides a critique of high society’s reliance on
appearances. The verbal passage that the illustration represents can be found on the very
ﬁrst pages of the novel and the discrepancy is already apparent: on page 5 the reader

learns the caption for the ﬁrst illustration to be “Marian Almond came up to Catherine in

 

43
Ian F. A. Bell’s Henry James and the Past: Readings into Time examines in depth the relevance of the

topographical location in the interpretation of the novel and connects the theme of materialism to the scene
of the fashionable Washington Square in New York in an effort to demonstrate how Morris and Dr. Sloper
are alike in their understanding of the social and ﬁnancial conventions of the community (17-60).

161

company with a tall young man.” Here the text seems to focus more on the names of the
two characters whom we know at the point in the novel when this social event takes
place, and it is the gentleman who is depicted through merely two adjectives, “tall” and
“young,” no name attached at all. These words, though few, tend to describe the man in a
very positive light for a naive young woman at the age of marrying. None of the words,
however, suggest the man to be respectful as the ﬁ'ontispiece does. The context of the
illustrated sentence depicts Catherine’s ﬁrst social event stressing her inexperience and
reliance on her family and friends. Morris thus is introduced to the reader only after we
learn about Catherine’s family history and the events leading up to their meeting. The
verbal reception process has not focused on Morris before this point, but on Catherine,
her father and her aunt, three very important characters in the novel that are not visually
introduced to us in the frontispiece (two of them do not appear as far as we can tell, and
one of them is situated facing away). In spite of the apparent support of the title that the
illustrations provides visually, due to its position as a frontispiece, the illustration leads
the reader into a misreading of the character and the overall focus of the novel before the
reader has a chance to form an opinion based on the text itself.

Throughout the novel, the illustrations seem to concentrate more on Morris than
on Catherine. At the beginning of Chapter VII, the reader encounters Morris as he sits
with his hat in his hand, conversing with Dr. Sloper (see Fig. 4.2). The posture,
countenance and hand gesture all suggest an open person, who is eager to answer
questions and impress his interlocutor. His position is ﬁirther emphasized by Dr. Sloper’s
calm and somewhat reserved stance. In the text, the passage is relatively short: “The

Doctor talked with him very little during dinner; but he observed him attentively, and

162

 

Fig. 4.2. Morris and Dr. Sloper. Henry James, Washington Square, 52

after the ladies had gone out he pushed him the wine and asked him several questions.
Morris was not a young man who needed to be pressed, and he found quite enough
encouragement in the superior quality of the claret” (Washington Square 54). The text
casually mentions the topic of their discussion and reveals the ﬁrst impressions they have
on each other, but it does not elaborate further. In fact, the passage is followed by a
detailed conversation between Morris and Catherine about what Dr. Sloper might think
about him, but the illustrations carefully avoid showing Catherine and thus making her
feelings and thoughts visible. Indeed, the other illustration in the chapter (see Fig. 4.3)
shows the family listening to Morris playing the piano, but while the reader sees Mrs.
Penniman’s adoring face and Dr. Sloper’s reserved countenance, he/she cannot see
Catherine’s facial expression. The choice in her positioning in the illustration is even
more shocking when we have in mind that the text highlights Catherine’s interest in
hearing Morris play: “he sung two or three songs at Catherine’s timid request”

(Washington Square 56). Such a description of a simple request seems to provide a

163

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Fig. 4.3. Morris plays the piano. Henry James, Washington Square, 57

partial insight into the heroine’s character that the illustrations have so far denied access
to. If this young lady is so well-behaved and timid, why not portray her accordingly in the
illustrations? One could argue that by withholding from the reader the facial expressions
of the heroine, the illustrator actually reinforces the verbal gesturing towards the
indecipherability of her thinking and feeling. While this might have been du Maurier’s
rationale, the contemporary reader had to come into terms with not learning enough about
the main character and with the illustrations questioning the importance of that character
on the whole. For a readership yet untrained in modernist psychological reﬂections, the
relationship between the text and the images appear accidental, indeed disturbingly
contradictory.

Once Catherine falls in love with Morris and Dr. Sloper states clearly his
intentions of preventing their marriage through disinheritance, Morris’s visual rendering
changes, but Catherine is still not shown facing the reader. In Chapter XX Morris holds
the crying Catherine in his arms, with his face evoking seemingly no feelings (see Fig.

4.4). The text, in contrast, elaborates on his countenance resulting from his discussion

 

Fig. 4.4. Catherine and Morris. Henry James, Washington Square, 154

with her. He attempts to strengthen Catherine’s wish against her father’s: “‘Don’t you
think,’ he continued further, in a tone of sympathetic speculation, ‘that a really clever
woman, in your place, might bring him around at last?”’ (Washington Square 155).
Catherine ﬁnally “surrender[s] herself, leaning her head on his shoulder” and agrees to
marry him without promising to face her father and obtain the inheritance. The caption of
the illustration captmes Morris’s reaction: “‘My dear good girl!’ he exclaimed, looking
down at his prize. And then he looked up again, rather vaguely,” yet it omits the end of
the sentence: “with parted lips and lifted eyebrows” (Washington Square 155). Even if
the text is vague about what Morris might have thought, its depiction of the “parted lips”
and “lifted eyebrows” is suggestive of a certain concern, even disappointment that is
missing in the image. Moreover, the reader does not see the heroine’s facial expression.
Even upon her return from the year-long trip to Europe, the illustration at the beginning

of Chapter XXV (see Fig. 4.5) shows Morris comfortably leaning back on a rocking chair

165

 

Fig. 4.5. Vignette of Morris. Henry James, Washington Square, 183

and smoking, but the reader cannot see the moment both the heroine and the reader
waited for the most: Catherine’s and Morris’s ﬁrst meeting after a year away from each
other. This image, in contrast, focuses yet again on Morris and his feelings and thoughts
upon her return. He is thoughtfully looking into the distance, but he also takes a very
informal position that appears to emphasize his self-conﬁdence even more strikingly,
when the reader realizes that rocking chairs do not face so closely a wall. His posture on
the chair, against his earlier eager appearance during his conversation with Dr. Sloper,
gives the reader a deﬁnite sense that Morris counteracts the rules of the etiquette not
because he can afford it and maybe. does not even know better (as Sir Pitt Crawley in
Thackeray’s novel), but because he will be able to afford it if only Catherine plays her
cards (or his cards?) well. Such a detailed work and intriguing symbolism in Morris’s
illustration only further draws attention to the lack of visual representation of Catherine’s
face, thoughts and feelings.

Even in the few cases when the illustrations focus on Catherine and show her

166

facing the reader, they are counteracting the text. At the beginning of Chapter XIX,
Catherine is shown following her father in what seems to be a hurried walk (see Fig. 4.6).
A similar passage appears in the text in Chapter XXIV, when Dr. Sloper inquires about
Catherine’s feelings six month into their trip to Europe. Seeing no change in Catherine,
the father states angrily that Morris will leave her without a penny and starts walking
towards the carriage: “He turned away, and she followed him; he went faster, and was
presently much in advance. But from time to time he stopped, without turning round, to
let her keep up with him, and she made her way forward with difﬁculty, her heart heating
with the excitement of having for the ﬁrst time spoken to him in violence” (Washington

Square 179). In contrast, the illustration manages to keep most of the father’s face hidden

 

Fig. 4.6. Vignette of Dr. Sloper and Catherine. Henry James, Washington Square, 141
from the reader and Catherine’s facial expression is difficult to decipher since her eyes,
nose and mouth are merely sketched through a few strokes. However, for a ﬁrst-time

reader the illustration is also confusing due to its appearance long before the father even

167

plans their travel to Europe. Indeed, the image stands in front of a chapter that depicts Dr.
Sloper’s conversation with Mrs. Penniman and Catherine’s decision to “appear good [for
her father], even if her heart were perverted” (Washington Square 145). This illustration,
in such a context, suggests the reader that Catherine does follow her father in spite of her
father turning away from her and probably despising her. The reader is inﬂuenced by this
visualization of their relationship especially since there is no textual basis for it, and
he/she is led to question the heroine’s resolve to come to terms with her “perverted”
heart, her non-ceasing love for Morris. The Victorian expectations and the illustration
together focus the mind of the reader on the ultimate goal: will the heroine act as a loyal
and well-behaved daughter and follow her father’s wishes through all difﬁculties? The
text, on the other hand, increasingly gestures towards a self-reliant female ﬁgure.
Catherine becomes aware of her choices, reﬂects on her abilities and even if the reader
learns less and less about her inner plans and psychological transformation, he/she is
confused enough by the text at this point to believe that» either interpretation could be
valid.

In another case depicting Catherine straight forward, in Chapter XXV, she is
admiring a shawl on Mrs. Penniman that she brought for her as a gift from Europe (see
Fig. 4.7). Nevertheless, her facial expression suggests no feelings, while in the text the
opening of the gifts takes place half-way through their discussion of Dr. Sloper’s attitude
towards Morris and Catherine’s confession that she has changed and she does not care
about her father’s money anymore (Washington Square I84-9I). Through an emphasis on
other characters and through showing her vaguely or detached, the illustrations on the

whole provide a different sense than the text. The reader who encounters the story

168

 

Fig. 4.7. Catherine and Mrs. Penniman. Henry James, Washington Square, 188

chapter by chapter is in vain looking for clariﬁcation about the heroine; moreover, he/she
is further confused by the focus, style and subject of the illustrations. Beyond the
ambiguity of the text lies the incomprehensibility of the way it is illustrated: does the
concentration on other characters and their discussions suggest that the novel does not
revolve around Catherine? Does Catherine appear to be superﬁcially drawn because she
is not meant to be a central character described in detail?

Such questions were especially crucial to the nineteenth-century readers, since
they had no means to learn about the plot of the novel before reading the text. The ﬁrst
vignette of the publication showed the contemporary audience a woman sitting leisurely
in the theatre (see Fig. 4.8), while the text describes Dr. Sloper’s life up to the narrative
present. The reader is led to believe that the novel will concentrate on the leisurely social

life of the wealthy in New York (a feeling enhanced in the contemporary audience by the

169

 

Fig. 4.8. Vignette of a woman. Henry James, Washington Square, 7

connotation of the title, Washington Square), while the text seems to argue that being rich
has its disadvantages as well. Similarly, all the illustrations up to Chapter XXV depicted
other characters or showed Catherine facing away from the reader. Moreover, since these
illustrations ﬁrst appeared in the serial edition of the novel, most of the illustrations were
requested to precede the verbal passage as the published passage always started with an
illustration (at the beginning of a chapter) and never left an illustration for the end of the
passage (at the end of a chapter). Consequently, the ﬁrst readers of both the serialized
edition and the book version encountered the visual depiction of the characters and
scenes before they had a chance to read the verbal passage and their reception of the
verbal text would have been influenced by the illustrations. The contemporary reader
would have been looking for the life story of the fashionable and respectful young man
depicted in the frontispiece, learn more about the lady at the theatre, or ﬁnd out how
Catherine solves the problem of her feelings and follows her father. It would have been at

the moment when they had to give up focusing on these goals, that they started

170

questioning the overall clarity and focus of the novel. It this inﬂuence of the illustrations
on the small verbal passages that eventually affected the overall reception of the verbal
text, and instead of allowing for a gradual immersion in the ludic absorption, the
illustrations led to the questioning of the style and organization.

In order to better understand how an author, who is so conscious about his subject
and style, could allow such a discrepancy between his text and the illustrations of the ﬁrst
edition, we need to examine James’s understanding of the contemporary readerly

expectations and his own expectations.

4.3. Artistic Freedom and Audience Alienation

Such a systematic recurrence of the discrepancies between the text and the
illustrations seems to prove the illustrator to be a poor match for James work; however,
that is hardly the case. Du Maurier was chosen to be the illustrator of a rising writer’s
new work due to his outstanding talent; James himself regarded him as a superior artist
admiring “his ﬁneness of perception, his remarkable power of specifying types, his taste,
his grace, his lightness, a certain reﬁnement of art” (Partial Portraits 342). Forrest Reid
even adds that “the observer of character, the story-teller latent in du Maurier was what
appealed most to Henry James” (19). Indeed, in du Maurier’s bestseller novel, T rilby,
published a few years later, his 200 illustrations provide a range of images of individual
characters (see Fig. 4.9) and large depictions of events which visually enhance the
reception process. The book’s fame shows that the contribution of the illustrations to the
reception of the literary text was appreciated; indeed, the fact that the Trilby hat achieved

an immense popularity suggests that the readers’ closely observed the visual images of

171

 

Fig. 4.9. George du Maurier’s Trilby, 132

the book. Leonée Ormond, du Maurier’s biographer does not question the artist’s talent,
but rather his interest in the subject: “[the illustrations] are competent, but dull; the novel
was not lacking in material for the illustrator, had Du Maurier felt any great enthusiasm
for the subject” (392). However, such a claim seems to be unrealistic since du Maurier
was conscientious in every project he undertook, not only his own novel. Indeed, du
Maurier struggled to ﬁnd the best models and create the best visual representations and
realized that he had to look for models who would perform the characters’ roles best,
instead of relying on the people who were the real life counterparts of the characters.49 It
was thus both his talent and his devotion that established his position amongst his

contemporaries. So how could such a famous and conscientious illustrator create images

 

49 Du Maurier once confessed to James that he had to reject members of the London social circle in favor
of some servants who represented the characters more visually for him. James admitted in the preface to the
New York Edition, that his novella The Real Thing was based on du Maurier’s story and thus he shared
both his beliefs about appearance and essence and his reﬂections about an artist’s search for the perfect
subject.

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that are so different from the verbal text?

The reason that seems the most obvious after examining Thackeray’s and Hardy’s
works is James’s apparent lack of interest in the editing process of this novel. Indeed,
James paid little attention to the details of publication so much so that he had to postpone
the publication of The Portrait of a Lady because Washington Square “has proved be the

editor’s measurement longer than by my own, so that instead of running through four

numbers, it will extend to six” (Letters 2:285). 50 In his letter, he seems to address the
issue very casually, which also suggest that he has recently found it out from the editor
and pays attention to it only as far as it determines the fate of his longer novel to follow.
However, this apparent lack of interest does not mean that James was not aware of the
importance of the editing process. Especially when it came to illustrating verbal texts,
James had very strong opinions about the effects of the editing process. He was aware of
the importance the illustrations gained during the last decades; it was one of his own
essays that was postponed because of the need for illustrations: “Scribner’s asked me two
years ago, to write a disquisition on the London theatres, to be richly illustrated . . .
Gilder is delighted with it, but it will probably not appear for some time, as they are
making the most elaborate—and apparently expensive—arrangements to illustrate it:
sending out one of their draughtsmen from New York to draw Ellen Terry, etc.” (Letters
2:277-278). For another essay published in Century, “London,” James “could not seem to

resist the temptation to retain some control . . . giving a gentle warning to Pennell that he

 

50 . . . . . . . .
The Vrctonan serialization of literary works was a successful result of the publishing house’s

concentration on what we would call nowadays the most up-to-date market value of the work, so the
simultaneous publication of two works by the same author was avoided at all cost except for a short,
usually one-month long overlapping. This assured the different editors that the segment of the audience that
was interested in the given writer, would not have to face a choice between the two magazines, but would
purchase both in chronological order.

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should be free and fanciful rather than ‘neat, deﬁnite, photographic’” (Bogardus 68). For
du Maurier’s eulogy, James reread T rilby in an unillustrated edition since the novel
“becomes without the illustrations distinctly more serious” (ctd. in Bogardus 70). Indeed,
James was very much aware of the negative effects of the illustrations and he often
shared his concern in his letters to his friend W. D. Howells: “I have always hated the
magazine form, magazine conditions and manners, and much of the magazine company. I
hate the hurried little subordinate part that one plays in the catch-penny picture-book—and
the negation of all literature that the insolence of the picture-book imposes” (ctd. in
Bogardus 60). And later he wrote to Howells that illustrations were “loud simpliﬁcations
and grossissements” (Letters 4:250). While many of James’s letters seem to reﬂect his
current concerns, his unhappiness with the illustrations on the whole can be best observed
through his avoidance of publishing his novels in illustrated book editions. In fact, Ralph
Bogardus draws attention to Washington Square being one of the three novels published
in illustrated book version besides the New York Edition (67).

As one can see, it was not James’s lack of awareness about the role of the
illustrations that led him to disregard the novel’s editing process, but rather his focus on
other interests. During this period, his letters reﬂect a very strong wish to achieve fame.
In July, 1879 he writes to Howells: “I must try and seek a larger success than I have yet
obtained in doing something on a larger scale than I have yet done. I am greatly in need
of it—of the larger success” (Letters 2:252). Subsequently he boasts to his mother on
September 14, 1879: “I am working away with interest and success of which you will in
due time behold (and I trust appreciate) the results—which will eventually cover you, as

my fortunate progenitrix, with honour” (Letters 2:253-254). Later, on January 29, 1880

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he writes a letter to Isabella Stewart Gardner referring to his future plans: “Look for my
next big novel; it will immortalize me” (Letters 2:265). A few weeks later, on February 2,
1880 he points out in his letter to his mother: “I am getting to perceive that I can make
money, very considerably, if only set about it right, and the idea has an undeniable
fascination” (Letters 2:269). He even postpones traveling to America to see his parents
having in mind the current career possibilities. On July 4, 1880 he writes again to his
mother arguing: “If by waiting a while I become able to return with more leisure, fame
and money in my hands, and the prospect and desire of remaining at home longer, it will
be better for me to do so; and this is very possible. When I do come, I wish to come
solidly; and in this respect a few months will make a great difference” (Letters 2:293).
While many of his letters can be seen as attempts to portray himself and his prospects in
the best possible light for both his editors and relatives, his perseverance in drafting a
long novel and his lack of interest in the editing process of the smaller works published in
the meantime, demonstrate that ﬁnancial stability and artistic career are essential for him.

It is before the appearance of Washington Square, with the publication of Daisy
Miller that his career is launched in the eyes of the wider public, and it is especially ﬁ'om
1879-1880 that James learns to better plan his publications in order to secure copyright
on both continents. He begins to understand that he is becoming fashionable and, as a
consequence, he expects to be better paid and faces all his editors with the imperative that
they provide better compensation (Letters 2:259-260). He can afford such an attitude as
long as his fame is raising: “I did the same six weeks ago to Scribner & Co., who
immediately offered me for the volume—Conﬁdence—much better terms than Osgood (a

sum down and a royalty, larger than 0’3); meanwhile I received ﬁ'om Osgood such a

175

plaintive letter, more in sorrow than in anger, that I have given him the book—a weak
proceeding, natural to the son of my father” (Letters 2:260). Such a letter to his father
depicts him both as a well-known writer and as an author who can afford ethical choices
in spite of his ﬁnancial interests. Meanwhile his expectations towards the editors change
also. In July 1879, he speciﬁes to the editor of The Portrait of a Lady, Howells that he
wants to publish a longer story the following summer “preferably told in a smaller
number of long irrstalhnents . . . six or seven numbers of twenty-ﬁve pages apiece”
(Letters 2:251). Such a request demonstrates that James begins to lay more emphasis on
what he understands to be the audience’s expectations. He chooses longer passages
probably in order to attain better control over the readers’ interest. His decision to have
fewer installments demonstrates his conﬁdence that the novel will be well received and it
will yield a better proﬁt than any of his previous works. On the other hand, as a result of
probably both the audience’s rising interest in James and James’s own style of addressing
the editor, Howells seems to allow such a forward request. During the early 18803, James
becomes more and more self-assured and daring. His requests from February 17, 1880 for
the publication of his review of Emile Zola’s Nana are even more demanding:
1° Please send me two proofs. You shall have them back on the instant.

2 PLEASE IF POSSIBLE PRINT IT LEADED. This I beseech you.
3 Please send me half a dozen copies of the paper. (Letters 2:274)

This letter to the editor Theodore E. Child shows how his tone has changed not only
towards the editor of his long novel to be published, but throughout the spectrum of his
writings. What James fails to recognize, however, is that his understanding of the
contemporary horizon of expectations is just a subjective intuition.

James’s struggle for fame and better publishing terms happens to the detriment of

the publication of Washington Square and the audience does not seem to overlook the

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mistake. James admits to having written Conﬁdence and Washington Square as a way of
ﬁnancial survival while he was writing and discussing the publication of his long novel
that would secure him the ultimate fame. Paradoxically, while he relies on these shorter
writings to provide ﬁnancial freedom to pursue the long novel he has been planning, he
does not actually work on making them ﬁnancial successes, in other words he does not
conform to the readerly expectations. It seems that he sets out to write the long novel that
will both bring him fame and embody the artistic freedom he so much strives for, but he
bases his plan on shorter works, which already gesture towards this artistic freedom in a
less sophisticated way and which deﬁnitely fail to achieve the expected
acknowledgement. It is in this limbo between his expectations of success and his
realization that he needs to work hard on achieving this success that he writes
Washington Square, a novel that does not conform to the readerly expectations, but does
not challenge them clearly; a story that could yield a modernist novel, but is not presented
so as to become a modernist novel; a work that gestures towards linguistic indeterminacy,
but misses the visual editing that could orchestrate text and illustrations. Conﬁdence is
written within the same conditions and James grows so much dissatisﬁed with its ﬁrst
publication that he starts to warn his family and friends not to read the piece until it is
republished. He writes to Grace Norton on June 8, 1880: “please don’t read it in that
puerile periodical (where its appearance is due to—what you will be glad to hear—large
pecuniary inducements); but wait till it comes out as book. It is worth being read in that
shape” (Letters 2:242). His letter to Thomas Sergeant Perry uses even harsher language:
“Don’t read, in Heaven’s name (or let anyone else read) my Scribner novel till it’s

republished” (Letters 2:255). Similarly, he refers to Washington Square as “a poorish

177

story in three numbers” (2:268), or “a slender tale, of rather too narrow an interest”
(Letters 2:308) and he describes his following novel as “better than Washington Square”
(Washington Square 315). While he warns those close to him to the problems associated

with the publication of these two short novels, the audience at large reads them with the

high expectations set by Daisy Miller.5|

There were only a few British critics who admired Washington Square, and even
those were unhappy about the difficulty of the style, as in the case of the author of the
“Atheneum Review” (Hayes 107); and James’s “conniving to the very last to keep us in
suspense as to the result” (Lang 185). However, one of the reviewers, Leonora B. Lang,
admitted that “guess[ing] with certainty how the characters will act, or what the end is to
be” is difficult for all of James’s novels (185). It is noteworthy that even the positive
response is a misunderstanding of what the novel can deliver: Lang appears to be so
much concerned about the ending throughout her reading and reception process, that she
misses the opportunity to immerse herself in the ludic . absorption that the interplay
between the possible interpretations allows for the readers. Similarly, the Spectator’s

unsigned reviewer, R. H. Hutton, protests that “Mr. Henry James strikes us as in nothing

 

5' Daisy Miller was well-received in England and due to the lack of American copyrighting, it was quickly
printed and sold in the United States as well. In Henry James: A Literary Life, Kenneth Graham states that
the novella “became a talking-point on both sides of the Atlantic . . . and Daisy as ‘the American girl’
suddenly became a new literary and cultural type—even a hat was named after her” (50). Indeed, both
British and American critics seem to praise the work due to the author’s ability to suggest Daisy’s beauty
and ignorance without, as Richard Grant White phrased it, “being exactly a fool” (Gard 61), and Mrs. F. H.
Hill draws attention to James’s depiction of her as “a real personage” as well as his “cunning” placement of
the her “in just the right distance to survey” (Vann 17). Some critics, such as the author of the “Graphic
Review,” saw him as “the perfect artist”, but also mentioned his oddity (Hayes 75); while others bestowed
on him what the reviewer of the Pall Mall Gazette calls the “full honors due to an English novelist” (Hayes
73). As for the general public the inquiries received by James prove W. D. Howells’s point that “Henry
James waked up all the women with his Daisy Miller, the intention of which they misconceived, and there
has been a vast discussion in which nobody felt very deeply, and everybody talked very loudly. The thing
went so far that society almost divided itself in Daisy Millerites and anti-Daisy Millerites” (Gard 74).
Overall, the reception of the novella was not uniform, but the work was regarded as an achievement and the
expectations of the audience were set accordingly.

I78

less humane than the indifference with which he treats his characters, after he has brought
them through such melancholy shifts in their lot as he generally provides for them” (Gard
89). To further prove his lack of understanding of the textual subtleties, he analyzes Dr.
Sloper as the main character of the novel, whose “cold-hearted experiments on his
daughter’s nature, and utter failure to do anything except rob her of her admiration for

him” only conﬁrm the reviewer’s sense that James “has no interest in the moral equities

of life” and does not care for Catherine (Gard 89).52 Interestingly, such an analysis of
J ames’s depiction of Catherine and Dr. Sloper’s behavior towards her renders the two
very much similar; however, while Dr. Sloper’s behavior could be explained by the need
of such a character in the story, James’s attitude seems unforgiveable for his heroine who
suffers so much. Such criticisms ﬁom the early years of the novel’s reception history
suggest that even the readers who were most familiar with the contemporary literary
styles found Jarnes’s style a hard nut to crack. Their emphasis on other characters and the
linguistic style of the text make much of their reception process visible for us: they did
not appreciate the complexity of the design and disregarded the text’s invitation to Iudic
absorption. While James struggled for artistic ﬁ'eedom and thought that his readers would
appreciate the freedom of interpretation they were offered, very few readers understood

any of these efforts and even experienced literary critics missed the artistic novelties of

 

52 . . . . . . .
The American critical revrews of the period suggest very much the same concerns arguing that

Washington Square displays what the reviewer of the Californian calls a design “blunder” (Hayes 115); the
“Literary World Review” labels as “literary dilettantism” (Gard 91); and the “New York Tribune Review”
considers to be “a serious blemish” because there is no character to like (Hayes 105). The “Lipincott ’s
Review” concurs adding that there are four characters who are merely upholding their roles (Gargano 47).
The “Chicago Tribune Review” criticizes that James “talks too much and says too little” (Hayes 101); and
in the New York Herald, Thomas Powell invites the reader to “imagine a cynical dandy lying back in his
easy chair and telling a story leisurely to a ﬁend or two” and claims that this provides a “fair idea of Mr.
Henry James, Jr.’s, manner as a novelist” (Hayes 101). The “Atlantic Review” complains that the wit
appears only in the author’s reﬂections, not the characters (Gard 92); and the “Scribner ’s Review” suggests

179

the work. Their reﬂections can only suggest that the reception process of readers who
were less familiar with literary styles and new trends, was even further away from what
James expected to happen. There seemed to be no worried readers asking the writer to
elaborate on the subject or a character’s rationale, as in the case of Daisy Miller. The
general audience most probably regarded the novel just as James prepared it: as short
stories of little importance. Such a reading of the novel, both by experienced critics and
amateur readers, signiﬁes that proto-modernist aspects of the verbal text confuse the
readers, moreover, the illustrations that should have visually “explained” the text failed
miserably or even added to the confusion. It is at this point that instead of making the
novel a bestseller, the illustrations of a famous artist further undermine the readers’
understanding of what role they should play in the reception process. Consequently, the
novel is judged to be one of James’s novels of lesser importance, and the reception of the
novel never recovers this ﬁrst blow.

Having in mind the recent interest in The Portrait of a Laay, The Golden Bowl,
The Turn of the Screw and other novels based on the unique Jamesian indeterminacy, it is
puzzling that Washington Square is rarely emphasized. What is quintessential here is to
realize that at the very beginning of its reception history, readers failed to recognize the
subtlety of the text, and current readers still regard the novel to be a mere attempt of a
Victorian novel to gesture towards psychological interests, in spite of its systematic
linguistic indeterminacy and well-organized informational gaps. The confusion caused by
the ﬁrst illustrations only further distanced the audience ﬁom the ludic absorption the

text required. The illustrations did not emphasize Catherine as a main character, nor did

 

that readers are led to overlook the characters and be “merely concerned with the evident cleverness of the
author” (Hayes 111).

180

they guide the readers through her psychological dilemmas, and the reception of the text
exhibits the audience’s confusion. Washington Square is unique in this sense, since it is
the novel where James ﬁrst realized the contradiction between the text and the
illustrations and the impossibility of his texts being favorably illustrated. He reluctantly
admitted later: “I am fondly and confusedly conscious that we ﬁrst met [with du Maurier]
on the ground of the happy accident of an injury received on either side in connection
with him having consented to make drawings for a short novel that I had constructed in a
crude deﬁance of the illustrator” (Orrnond 392).

It is this “crude deﬁance of the illustrator” that best explains the discrepancy
between the text written by an outstanding writer and the illustrations drawn by a talented
artist. Beyond the shortness of the story lies the conciseness of the heroine’s
characterization that is so central to the interpretation of the novel. The ﬁrst chapters of
the text, for instance, introduce the young Catherine succinctly:

She was a healthy, well-grown child, without a trace of her mother’s
beauty. She was not ugly; she had simply a plain, dull, gentle countenance.
The most that had ever been said for her was that she had a ‘nice’ face;
and, though she was an heiress, no one had ever thought of regarding her
as a belle. Her father’s opinion of her moral purity was abundantly
justiﬁed; she was excellently, imperturbably good; affectionate, docile,
obedient, and much addicted to speaking the truth. (Washington Square
16)
Such a depiction of the heroine reﬂects more the effect she has on her environment than
the actual details of her appearance. The reader does not learn more about Catherine’s
eyes, nose or hair, but he/she is constantly reminded how she would be seen by others,
“among whom it must be avowed, however, that she occupied a secondary place”

(Washington Square 17). It appears that the reader has to receive what somebody else

received about the heroine and the overlapping reception processes can be quite

181

challenging for the nineteenth-century reader. Indeed, much of what the reader learns
about the heroine is ﬁltered through the father’s expectations based on his son who died
at the age of three. He sees her as “an inadequate substitute for his lamented ﬁrst-borrr,”
as “a disappointment,” and he “would have liked to be proud of his daughter; but there
was nothing to be proud of in poor Catherine” (Washington Square 11-18). When the
narrator provides further details about her, those are incomplete as well: “People who
expressed themselves roughly called her stolid. But she was irresponsive because she was
shy, uncomfortably, painfully shy. This was not always understood, and she sometimes
produced an impression of insensibility. In reality she was the softest creature of the
world” (Washington Square 19-20). The reader learns that the heroine is shy and soft, but
there is no ﬁuther access into her thinking. Similarly, the more speciﬁc description of her
features in Chapter III maintains a certain sense of vagueness: “Her eye was small and
quiet, her features were rather thick, her tresses brown and smoo ” (Washington Square
20). It is noteworthy that even her physical characteristics seem to suggest shyness and
simplicity, and the narrative style seems to be in harmony with the heroine: we learn little
about the character that could not be seen by any outsider and the illustrations could
further deepen this sense by not showing her face through most of the novel. However,
the textual choices are more consistent than the visual ones.

The apparent lack of an omniscient narrator in the traditional sense of the word
leads to the readers’ encountering the heroine through others’ perspectives without
gaining access into what the person might be hiding. Such an information would be
quintessential not only throughout the novel when the reader is waiting impatiently to

ﬁnd out Catherine’s choice, but also in the end as it would clarify for the reader whether

I82

Catherine knew certain things all along or she grew to understand them through intense
psychological and intellectual changes. What renders Catherine as Isabel Archer’s (from
The Portrait of a Lady) true forerunner, is her conscious representation as an
indecipherable character. We do not misunderstand what her real intentions and reasons
are because she is capricious like some of Jane Austen’s female characters, but because
both her depiction and the description of her interaction with others carefully avoid
providing a comprehensive understanding of her character. By withholding the heroine’s
facial expression through most of the novel and portraying other characters instead, the
illustrations do not aid the reader’s understanding of the complexity of the verbal
depiction, but rather confuse the verbal reception process and suggest that Catherine is
not in the focus of the narrative.

In fact, the verbal text is very careful in depicting the heroine throughout the
novel and it leaves aspects of her thinking and feeling blurred. The reader does not gain
access to the confessions she must have included in the frequent letters sent to Morris

from Europe; and when she is present at discussions that decide her fate, the text reveals

hardly anything about her reactions.53 For example, after Morris’s ﬁrst visit to their
home, Mrs. Penniman mentions his name to Dr. Sloper:

“Mr. Morris Townsend; he has made such a delightful visit.”

“And who in the world is Mr. Morris Townsend?”

“Aunt Penniman means the gentleman—the gentleman whose name I
couldn’t remember,” said Catherine.

“The gentleman at Elizabeth’s party who was so struck with Catherine,”
Mrs. Penniman added.

“Oh, his name is Morris Townsend, is it? And did he come here to propose
you?”

“Oh, father!” murmured the girl for an answer, turning away to the

 

53
Darshan Singh Maini in “The Epistolary Art of Henry James” draws attention to the lack of letters

within James’s novels as a conscious choice on his behalf (389).

I83

window, where the dusk had deepened to darkness.
“I hope he won’t do that without your permission,” said Mrs. Penniman,

very graciously.

“After all, my clear, he seems to have yours,” her brother answered.
Lavinia simpered, as if this might not be enough, and Catherine, with her
forehead touching the window—panes, listened to this exchange of
epigrams as reservedly as if they had not each been a pin-prick in her own
destiny. (42-43)

The passage wonderfully highlights how little the reader has access to Catherine’s
thinking. He/she witnesses only her “murrnuring” and “turning away to the window,
where the dusk had deepened to darkness.” The dusk seems not only to cover the area,
but to conceal Catherine’s reaction as well. Her listening “reservedly” appears to
characterize less her inner self and more her social behavior; as a consequence, the reader
learns very little about what the heroine feels and has no foundation for estimating her
actions. This is the means through which James manages to maintain the question “What
will she do?” throughout most of the novel. The didactic theme of the mid-nineteenth
century is absent: “it is hard to determine the moral and epistemological authority of its
narrator, whose conﬁdent tone is sometimes disconcertingly similar to the ironically
treated authoritarian voice of Doctor Sloper” (Buelens 196). The reader is constantly
wondering not only about the choice Catherine will make, but also about the choices she
is given and how her options are portrayed. Just as Doctor Sloper is always situated in
between the image of the caring father and the ruthless critic of her daughter, James’s
depiction of Catherine’s choices or, indeed, the lack of real choices, could easily be seen
as a sign of social criticism that dares to masquerade as a traditional Victorian novel. This
ambiguity about the narratorial voice is a technique to avoid clear categorizations. As
Markovits observes, James is more interested in the character’s psychology than the

development of the plot (133); this interest, however, does not take the shape of a

184

psychological treatise, but rather that of a puzzle that is presented and never entirely

solved.54 It is not the narrator who has to show the solution, but the reader who has to
ﬁnd it and realize in the process that causes are subjective and interpretable.

Such a readerly role, however, demonstrates James’s misunderstanding of the
contemporary horizon of expectations. Nineteenth-century readers were not prepared for
such a ludic absorption into the text and could see the crucial and permanent gap in the
text only as an unfortunate accident. James had to clarify his intentions even to his
brother: “The young man in Washington Square is not a portrait—he is sketched ﬁ'om the
outside merely and not fouillé. The only good thing in the story is the girl” (Letters
2:316). In fact, James later admitted in “The Art of Fiction” that his main interest in a
work is an idea that “permeates and penetrates it, informs and animates it” (400). In the
light of this confession, his interest in a girl that is not fully depicted seems to suggest an
interest in the idea she represents, the idea that a character cannot be fully grasped by an
author or, for that matter, by a reader, and that any glimpse we gain into a character is
through his/her actions just like in real life. This writerly goal distances James’s novels,
including Washington Square, from the didactic Victorian novels and sets out to prove
that “[t]he only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life”
(“The Art of Fiction” 378). It is only understandable that in such a context, the
illustrations that compete with the visual effect of the verbal text are burdensome.

Due to their accessibility and placement (in most of the cases) before the verbal passage,

the illustrations affect the reception process of the text enormously. However, as I have

 

54 . . . . . .
Markovrts calls attention in The Portrait of a Laay to James’s “complex awareness of the relationship of

action and consciousness to the moral life,” and his preference to “leave Isabel a ﬂee agent at the end of his
narrative” (140-41). Catherine in Washington Square is very similar to Isabel since she is, against all
appearances, left to decide for herself what her priorities are.

185

argued above, the heroine’s depiction is often confusing the reader and preventing
him/her from being absorbed in the subtleties of the verbal depiction. Having the heroine
face away from the viewer in most of the illustrations, the contemporary reader would
have been misguided into feeling a need to identify him/herself with the character
according to the visual standards of the time. Esrock argues that imaging is a crucial
aspect of literary reception and that “imaging can situate a reader within the perceptual
sphere of a particular character or narrative voice” (196). The readily available images
can have an even more drastic impact if the reader seems to share constantly the viewing
angle of the heroine. Such a self-identiﬁcation was encouraged not only by centuries of
paintings, but also by the standards of encyclopedia illustration, where occupations and
machines would be explained by series of images, which often featured the worker facing
away from the reader in an attempt to show how the reader might perform the same
actions (Barrell 98-101). Nineteenth-century readers would have felt the consistent use of
this standard in paintings and drawings as an incentive to identify themselves with the
heroine in spite of the ambiguity of the text that prevented any such engagement.

The “crude deﬁance of the illustrator,” in such a context, can only mean James’s
realization that the unity of the subject and style he so much strived for was a
disadvantage for the illustration. The editor commissioned the illustrations from one of
the most talented contemporary artists in order to increase the market value of the serial,
yet they led to the detriment of the audience’s reception of the text. Hence, I contend,
when James complains about the dropping numbers of books sold (Letters 2:257), the
examination of the role of the illustrations can yield a signiﬁcant insight to the reception

of Washington Square as well as the overall decline in the readers’ interest in James’s

186

 

 

works.55 It is essential to note here the dynamic between James’s understanding of the
contemporary horizon of expectations and his own expectations. He maintained the
importance of the freedom of style: “a personal, a direct impression of life: that, to begin
with, constitutes its personal value, which is greater or less according to the intensity of
the impression. But there will be no intensity at all, and therefore no value, unless there is
freedom to feel and say” (“The Art of Fiction” 384). It is this need for freedom that molds
his works into a search for “what the character will do” instead of a dramatization of what
that character should do. James deﬁnes this freedom as “the air of reality [which is] the
supreme virtue of the novel—the merit on which all its other merits (including th[e]
conscious moral purpose...) helplessly and submissively depend” (Art of Fiction 390).
This shift away from the didactic goals of the mid-nineteenth century brings him into new
literary spheres, where not all the contemporary readers dared to venture (as suggested by
relatives’ and other readers’ attempts to discuss the works with the author). His
modernism is most visible in his wish to break away from the subjects and styles of High
Victorianism: the world cannot be transformed, James argues, “into conventional,
traditional moulds, . . . [the] eternal repetition of a few familiar cliches . . . Catching the
very note and trick, the strange irregular rhythm of life, that is the attempt whose
strenuous force keeps Fiction upon her feet” (Art of Fiction 397-98). Nevertheless, how
can such new ﬁction be illustrated?

Especially, how could du Maurier illustrate a novel that attempts to redeﬁne the

author’s and the readers’ role, when he himself struggled for artistic independence? As

 

55 . . . . . . . . . .
This drsrllusronment With the reception of his works seems to be an rssue throughout James’s lrfe, as

Edith Wharton maintains in 1934: “He could not understand why the success achieved by ‘Daisy Miller’
and ‘The Portrait of a Lady’ should be denied to the great novels of his maturity: and the sense of
protracted failure made him miserably alive to the least hint of criticism” (“The Artist” 52).

I87

James once said, “Du Maurier possesses in perfection the independence of the genuine
artist in the presence of a hundred worldly superstitions and absurdities” (Partial
Portraits 372). Washington Square is a case in point how proto-modernist literary texts
and visual illustrations misguide or even confuse the readers. Bogardus claims that du
Maurier’s well-known “subtle social satire and irony are mostly missing in the
Washington Square illustrations” (74). However, social satire is not clearly detectable in
the story. The ambiguity of the text allows the reader to interpret the novel as a lack of
real choices for young women, who live amidst the patriarchal conﬁnes of the mid-
nineteenth century, but the text does not point to this interpretation. Hence, the social
satire du Maurier excelled in was not an option for Washington Square. Bogardus further
argues that the problem lies in the fact that the illustrations “give the reader DuMaurier’s
exact picture instead of James’s” and he prefers the vignette showing Catherine walking
with her father since “[t]his rendering symbolically foreshadows the subtle power that Dr.
Sloper will exert over Catherine in order to keep her from marrying Morris Townsen ”
(74). However, such a symbolic image only confuses the reader when he/she is looking to
ﬁll the prospective and crucial gap of the text. Since the text follows the illustration in
most of the cases, the text constitutes the re-reading and the reception process becomes
problematic due to the discrepancies between the illustration and the text.

Hence, Washington Square represents a key in deciphering the shift from rising
fame and concern about interpretation (as seen in the case of Daisy Miller and James’s
elucidation of the character’s thinking) to the proto-modernist writing style and authorial
attitude towards the audience. In 1880, James appears to be conscious of the audience’s

role in the literary reception, but he is just realizing the effect of illustrations on the

188

reception process. He draws Howells’ attention to the discrepancy between his intentions
and the audience’s reception: “Miss Stackpole [in The Portrait of a Lady] is not I think
exaggerated—but 99 readers out of a 100 will think her so: which amounts to the same
thing” (Letters 2:321). Towards the end of the century, on the other hand, James grows
more and more self-conscious about his interest in the enigmatic and controversial, and
he loses touch with the contemporary audience’s horizon of expectations. The letters he
wrote during this period reﬂect an image that is very different from the earlier one he
drew of himself during the early 18808. In 1996, he openly states to Clement Shorter, the
editor of The Illustrated London News: “I confess I am afraid your artist—although I
regard my story as essentially and absolutely dramatic—won’t ﬁnd in my situations a great
deal of suggestion for variegated or panoramic pictures. But I like so little to be illustrated
(I resent it so, arniably speaking, on behalf of good prose and real writing) that I won’t

hypocritically pretend to pity him too much” (ctd. in Bogardus 60).

189

CONCLUSION

By the end of the nineteenth century the Blakean unity of writer, illustrator and
publisher was harder to ﬁnd, and literary reception altered as well. On the one hand, the
authors’ perspectives and their understanding of the horizon of expectation changed
signiﬁcantly in the three decades between the publication of Vanity Fair and Washington
Square: Thackeray’s open invitation to the reader, “Let’s have at them,” was replaced by
Hardy’s misunderstanding of what would be “likely to increase the reader’s interest” and
by James’s straight-forward “crude deﬁance of the illustrator.” On the other hand, the
audience underwent an enormous transformation, and the question arises to what extent
the growing discrepancy between the readers’ expectations and the authors’ estimation of
the reception was the outcome of the changing literary styles and authorial attitudes. The
rise of the innovative efforts that the editors implemented in order to ensure the success

of literary works suggests that there was another factor that had a considerable role in the

transformation of this period.56 Adding to the authors’, editors’ and publishers’
(mis)understanding of the contemporary horizon of expectations, the diversiﬁcation of
the readership and the isolation of groups had a palpable effect on the history of literary
reception.

While during the mid-nineteenth century the author of a Spectator “Review”
could still argue that each number of Dickens’s Dombey and Son “contained something

striking and readable for all ranks” (Altick 123), at the end of the century there were

 

5" Margaret Stetz draws attention to Hardy’s photo in the Wessex Edition when she argues: “The
disintegration of the circulating libraries at the start of the nineties, and with the loss of a dependable
market for ﬁction, forced publishers to come up with aggressive techniques for generating public interest
both in literature and in its makers. Under these conditions, anonymity and privacy were all but impossible
to retain, as publishers released photographs of authors, used details of their lives as part of normal
publicity campaigns and pressured them to talk to journalists” (172). Similarly, Sutherland draws attention

190

different groups of readers with a variety of interests and expectations. While the readers
of the 18405 shared a certain aspiration for pathos so much so that even Lord Macaulay
had to admit that “one passage made [him] cry as if [his] heart would br ” (ctd. in
Altick 132), three decades later new works tended to be widely different ﬁ'om one
another and they became more and more to be favored by small groups of readers rather
than the larger audience. Harrison criticized the lack of general appeal of the new writers
remarking: “One is too eccentric obscure, and subtle, another too local and equal, a third
too sketchy, this one too unreal, that one far too real, too obvious, too prosaic, to win and
to hold the great public be their spell. Critics praise them, friends utter rhapsodies, good
judges enjoy them, —— but their fame is partial, local, sectional, compared to the fame of
Scott, Dickens, or Thackeray” (30). We cannot help but recognize James and Hardy in
the enumeration and note that in the case of The Return of the Native and Washington
Square the groups with positive responses were even smaller.

In fact, the increase of the literary audience did not bring about better sales rates
for certain literary works, but a spread across the types of publications. This increase only
further strengthened the division into small groups and horizons of expectations, which
presented more difﬁculties when estimating expectations and contributed probably to the
authors’ lack of interest in doing so. Altick argues:

What the Victorian age witnessed was not the beginning of multiple
publics but simply the spectacular growth in both size and inﬂuence of
certain publics which had hitherto been either small or not much thought
about. In 1858 Wilkie Collins distinguished four separate audiences: ‘. . .
the religious public . . . the public which reads for information . . . the
public which reads for amusement, and patronizes the circulating libraries

and the railway bookstalls . . . [and] the public which reads nothing but
newspapers.’ All of these, except the last, had existed for centuries. The

 

to the contemporary contracts that asked a variety of authors to write a novel in Dickens’s style (Victorian
Novelists 76-77).

191

great difference was that all except the ﬁrst were growing prodigiously.
(152)

The different interests in religious readings, news and entertainment are revealing. When
expectations are so diverse, how can an author attempt to answer all except for choosing
not to answer any, but his/her own talent. Nonetheless, while the emerging modernist
authors shared a certain disinterest in the complexity of the contemporary readerly
expectations, they were often puzzled that their fan circle would be so small. These
writers hoped to carve out a group of fans for themselves who would appreciate the
innovations without the guidance of an omniscient narrator and moral message, yet what
they had to realize was that around 1880 these groups were rather small and the editors
and publishers were growing more and more cautious about what deserved ﬁnancial
investment.

In contrast with Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, the illustrations of The Return of the
Native and Washington Square show a major transformation in both the text—illustration
dynamic and the writer—reader rapport. It is this shift that enabled many writers to
search for artistic freedom from the emerging variety of horizons of expectations, and
allowed most illustrators to move away from the need to “merely visualize” the
characters and events. By the publication of James’s New York Edition, the inclusion of
vague photographs of settings seemed nothing out of the ordinary. Indeed, Bogardus
draws attention to Coburn’s images as the perfect way to arouse the readers’ interest
without denoting anything, and he regards Coburn to be the ﬁrst to pursue abstract form
in photography (184-85, 182). In this sense Coburn’s images point to the great twentieth-
century division between visual images and verbal text. In an effort to improve the

marketability of literary works in an image-driven society, many illustrations became

192

either abstract drawings or anachronistic paintings limited to the cover of the book. The
history of illustrations alone demonstrates the difficulty of addressing every reader’s
expectations and this dilemma started during the 1870-803

The decades analyzed in this project, and especially the cases of Thackeray,
Hardy and James are uniquely revealing since it is during this period that even the best
writers lose their “authority” over the audience as it becomes divided into groups of
readers. While many contemporary authors witnessed with puzzlement the
ineffectiveness of their efforts to diversify literary styles and estimate the wishes of the
rising readership, present-day critics can gain a better insight into the dynamic of the
reception transformation. In a sense these now famous writers’ misunderstandings of the
expectations are not only the cause of the changing interaction between verbal and visual
reception, but also a symptom of the shift in the overall history of reception. As a result,
the analysis of the inﬂuence of contemporary illustrations on the verbal reception does
not only provide a more complex understanding of the nineteenth-century reception
processes, but it also reveals the role of those processes in the shift in reception history
that leads to the present days. Indeed, what started out in the late-nineteenth century
became an overwhelming reality for the twenty-ﬁrst century, and what J ames’s observed
in the High Victorian culture became an incomprehensible dream for the present: “In
every novel,” he claims “the work is divided between the writer and the reader; but the

writer makes the reader very much as he makes his characters” (ctd. in Stewart 6).

193

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