1} Illustrations in Victorian Periodicals

For a novel in which appearances are so significant, surprisingly little has been written on how The Law and the Lady was originally represented when first printed and illustrated in The Graphic. What has been written has largely focused on Wilkie Collins’s text—and The Graphic’s attempt to censor it. Little work has been done on the lavish illustrations (involving at least five artists over the course of the serialization), each of which interprets characters and scenes in the act of representing them. Illustrations appeared at the beginning of each installment of the novel, taking up most of the page, and would have been the first glimpse of the novel Victorian readers would have seen—indeed, impossible to ignore. Arguably, these illustrations played an important role in how the novel was interpreted by the initial readers of this Victorian serial.

In general, Victorian serial novel illustration remains an underdeveloped area of study, as some scholars have noted. “Very few [critics] consider the illustrations as intrinsic to the first reading experience of the mass Victorian public,” Mary Elizabeth Leighton and Lisa Surridge write in “The Plot Thickens: Toward a Narratological Analysis of Illustrated Serial Fiction in the 1860s” (66). Using Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Eleanor’s Victory and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters they argue that illustration “richly complicates the linear development of plot in Victorian serial fiction” as well as explores the negotiation of sensation and realism during the time period (67). They view “illustration and layout as key constituents of plot rather than mere bibliographical paratext” (68).

The positioning of illustrations at the beginning of each serial novel installment is significant to their influence. Certainly editors intended them to catch readers’ attention, and to do so they had to be intriguing and interesting while not giving too much of the story away. Prefacing the text, they also invited comparison; as Leighton and Surridge observe, “The verbal text then seems to repeat what the illustration has already shown, and readers wait to see when it matches (or ironically fails to match) their visual expectations” (67). Philip V. Allingham, in writing about the illustrations for Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge (also serialized in The Graphic), argues that a novel’s illustrations do not necessarily restrict a reader’s imagination, but rather “fix certain scenes in the mind as benchmarks of the story’s action, telegraphing to the reader what one sensitive reader (a graphic artist, whose perception has sometimes in turn been corrected or influenced by that of the writer himself) has felt is memorable in the instalment about to be read” (32). Simply by choosing which scene to illustrate for each installment, the artist makes an impression on the reader and impacts his or her reading. Furthermore, Allingham believes “the image is far more lasting than the momentary impressions of scene and character derived from the initial reading” (31-32).

While original periodical illustrations are rarely reprinted in the editions of Victorian novels read today, they were a fundamental part of the experience of reading the novel when it was first published. With The Law and the Lady in particular, which has its share of memorable illustrations, contemporary readers are missing out.