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.

2} The Graphic

The first edition of The Graphic was published near the end of 1869, when the magazine emerged as a competitor for The Illustrated London News (founded in 1842). Both periodicals were "weekly, middle class illustrated folios, described by a recent critic as 'neither review, magazine nor newspaper' but 'physical giants--[...] carefully tailored to their readers' tastes, [...] provid[ing] current events at home and abroad, high standards of illustration, and unfailing devotion to the royal family'" (Delafield 137). The Graphic ran until 1932, emphasizing high quality engravings—an impressive number for each issue—which ornamented section headings and illustrated news, journalism, fiction and essays. In "Text in Context: The Law and the Lady and The Graphic," Catherine Delafield notes how The Graphic's "layout created a need to read across each issue to link text with illustration and the eye was led from one to the other" (137). Arthur Locker took over as the periodical’s second editor in 1870, a position he held until 1891.



Wilkie Collins’s The Law and the Lady ran in The Graphic from September 1874 to March 1875. Collins had already published a novella, Miss or Mrs? in the periodical in 1871. In “Text in Context,” Delafield traces the complicated relationship of Collins and Locker. With Miss or Mrs? they quibbled over the use of the word “damn,” and with the publication of the final installments of The Law and the Lady, a conflict over Locker’s non-contractual edit to a scene between Valeria and Dexter—which he interpreted as an attempted violation by Dexter and too risqué for The Graphic readers—became public. Following the last installment, Locker printed a disclaimer describing how Collins’s contract forced the magazine to print the story as it was, despite its objectionable material.

The Law and the Lady tells the story of Valeria Brinton, who marries a man named Eustace Woodville only to discover his real name is Macallan. She plays the part of detective to find out first why he changed his name— he was on trial for the murder of his first wife, given the Scotch Verdict of “Not Proven,” and allowed to go free, neither criminal nor absolved—and then to obtain a means to prove his innocence and clear his name. To do so she enlists the help of her family friend, Benjamin, the ladies’ man Major Fitz-David, the lawyer Mr. Playmore, and the legless semi-madman Miserrimus Dexter and his devoted cousin, Ariel.

At least five different artists illustrated The Law and Lady, creating 25 illustrations total. Signatures are difficult to distinguish on some of the earlier images, but include F. W. Lawson, H. Woods, and William Small. The first image of Miserrimus Dexter, for chapters 17 and 18, begins the run of illustrations by Sydney P. Hall, who finished out the novel and gave the character depictions some uniformity. While many of the earlier artists’ characters seem a bit stiff or posed (rather doll-like), Hall’s illustrations in contrast show more movement, detail—even, perhaps, mystique.

Hall was a prominent artist for The Graphic, working with the periodical almost from the beginning. Little, if anything, has been written about Hall in recent years, but 30 years after Hall’s illustrations for The Law and the Lady, he was still a known artist and still on staff with the magazine, as evidenced by a 1905 article in the The Art Journal by Lewis Lusk discussing Hall’s career. The Graphic sent Hall to the Franco-Prussian war to make sketches, and Hall became a significant part of The Graphic’s subsequent success due to these images. He also wrote accounts of his experiences which were published in the periodical. He became known for his portraits of political leaders, especially Parnell. Of course, he also illustrated fiction; Lusk notes, “Readers of Wilkie Collins’ ‘The Law and the Lady,’ a Graphic serial, will not easily forget the awesome figures of the madman Miserrimus Dexter and his grim servant Ariel” (181). Lusk’s writing is clearly a tribute to Hall: “His landscape studies of the South Downs, like his portraits, are strong and simple pieces of character in nature, suggesting even romance in certain moods” (181). Hall brought particular skill and experience to his illustrations of Collins’s novel in 1875.

While the scene Arthur Locker tried to censor does not appear as one of the 25 illustrations, another of the novel’s most-written-about scenes is depicted in the third installment: Valeria enlists a chambermaid to help improve her appearance prior to meeting Major Fitz-David (the end of chapter seven):

‘Look at your complexion, ma’am. You will frighten him if he sees you like that. A touch of colour you must have. Where do you keep it? What! you haven’t got it? you never use it? Dear, dear, dear me!’
For a moment, surprise fairly deprived her of her self-possession! Recovering herself, she begged permission to leave me for a minute. I let her go, knowing what her errand was. She came back with a box of paints and powders; and I said nothing to check her. I saw, in the glass, my skin take a false fairness, my cheeks a false colour, my eyes a false brightness—and I never shrank from it. No! I let the odious deceit go on; I even admired the extraordinary delicacy and dexterity with which it was all done. ‘Anything’ (I thought to myself, in the madness of that miserable time), ‘so long as it helps me to win the Major’s confidence! Anything so long as I discover what those last words of my husband’s really mean!’
The transformation of my face was accomplished. The chambermaid pointed with her wicked forefinger in the direction of the glass.‘Bear in mind, ma’am, what you looked like when you sent for me,’ she said. ‘And just see for yourself how you look now. You’re the prettiest woman (of your style) in London. Ah, what a thing pearl powder is, when one knows how to use it!’ (55)

William Small’s illustration seems to capture the scene well. The chambermaid—no apparent beauty herself—wears an expression as sly and snide as we might expect: “she was a middle-aged woman, with a large experience of the world and its wickedness written legibly on her manner and on her face” (54). Valeria’s expression evokes her inner qualms despite outward determination. Notably, Valeria looks very beautiful here, and as the chambermaid is seen working on her hair (which precedes the scene above), this is her before the woman “transforms” her face. Of course, we’re only seeing half her face, and complexion may be difficult to convey in an engraving, but it seems that Small intends to render this scene on the side of absurdity—the absurdity of cosmetics being a “necessity” for Valeria to reach her aims.

Collins’s novel enters into the “cosmetic tragedy” literature of the Victorian period, a discourse rife with contradiction, or competing philosophies. Briefel explains: “Although the cosmetic tragedy delineates the dangers that a woman might face in trying to enhance her image, it simultaneously warns of the dire consequences of not being able to achieve physical enhancement. It is at once a moralistic condemnation of artificial adornment and a means of conveying to women the importance of using beauty products carefully enough to conceal their flaws without destroying themselves or others in the process” (465). In The Law and the Lady, Valeria’s painting her face is a necessary means to holding an audience with Major Fitz-David, who has information she needs to solve the mystery of her husband. As Valeria notes in the next chapter, when the servant’s report that she is pretty changes the Major’s mind about not seeing her, “So far, one thing at least seemed to be clear. I had done well in sending for the chambermaid. What would Oliver’s report of me have been, if I had presented myself to him with my colourless cheeks and my ill-dressed hair?” (Collins 57).

“There is a strong sense in this literature that if she cannot control her own image, a woman will not be able to perform her social functions,” Briefel writes (465). It is true of Valeria the prevailing Victorian notion that a woman’s “ugliness threatens to have serious repercussions both for herself and for those around her” (465). If Valeria doesn’t make herself pretty, Major Fitz-David won’t take the time to see her. If she doesn’t see Major Fitz-David, she won’t discover her husband’s secret.

Collins (and by extension, William Small) is in a sense working within and against cosmetic tragedy literature, although in 1874 the critique was nothing new. Punch magazine had already been satirizing the beauty industry, including publishing a cartoon in 1872, which, except for predating The Law and the Lady, could have been parodying Small’s illustration. The image shows a maid helping a woman with a coarse face beautify herself in front of a mirror—the maid is literally assembling the woman, about the screw the woman’s upper body onto her lower as the woman applies makeup and sports an enormous hairdo.

Representing Madness and Disability

Hall’s first illustration of Miserrimus Dexter, for chapters 17 and 18, shows him in Eustace’s room—a scene from a testimony Valeria is reading of her husband’s trial. The testimony is that of the Procurator-Fiscal, and the illustrated scene is from his viewpoint. Dexter, seated in his wheelchair, is turned toward the viewer with a look of accusation—long-haired and bearded, with a dark brow and finger pointed at himself. The caption, from chapter 17, reads: “Finding there was no moving him by fair means, I took his chair and pulled it away, while Robert Lorrie laid hold of the table and carried it to the other end of the room. The crippled gentleman flew into a furious rage with me for presuming to touch his chair. ‘My chair is Me,’ he said; ‘how dare you lay hands on Me?’” (Collins 138). Eustace, all but obscured by shadow, has his hand up to his face and Robert Lorrie on the far right is shown moving the table. But Dexter, one hand gripping the wheel of his chair, head angled, commands the illustration. It’s a grand moment to first see Collins’s Miserrimus Dexter character—the moment he declares angrily, “My chair is Me.” Although only a brief moment in the Fiscal’s story, Hall’s illustration heightens all that is sensational, unsettling and mysterious about it. The wheelchair evokes sympathy, but Dexter’s Old-Testament-prophet appearance and fierce expression and gesture are at odds with sympathy.

Dexter reappears four images later for chapter 24, “Miserrimus Dexter—First View.” Again, Hall chooses a moment in the story lush with sensation. Valeria and her mother-in-law peer around a doorway to watch Dexter leap from his chair—“a head and body in the air, absolutely deprived of the lower limbs” to land on his hands on the floor (Collins 194). As in the text, the whole scene is very dark, illuminated only from the fireplace. Dexter is a dark, unnaturally shortened figure against the fire, bulky but legless.

For chapter 30, however, Dexter is the brightest, largest figure in the picture, with a shadowy Valeria watching him from the background. This is probably the most dramatic of Hall’s depictions of Dexter and one of the most arresting of all The Law and the Lady’s illustrations. Dexter’s torso takes up most of the frame. His arms are raised and he looks upward, “his face lifted in rapture to some fantastic Heaven of his own making,” his hair and beard waving about his face. A chair lies overturned in the background, but what is especially unnerving is Dexter’s “deformed body poised on the overthrown chair” (Collins 245). It appears to be a terribly uncomfortable position for someone without a lower body, and this pain together with Dexter’s upraised arms, Heaven-ward gaze, and illuminated body calls to mind the figure of Christ. This is not necessarily an association one might get from the text; in this chapter Dexter’s “eyes glittered; his teeth showed themselves viciously under his moustache,” Valeria loses patience with him, and before long “the old madness seized on him again” (Collins 238, 244). Hall’s illustration makes Dexter all the more awesome and terrifying for its religious suggestion.