Illustration

This essay provides an overview of the development of illustration – the pictures that accompanied words on the printed page – into a dominant mode of representation in the nineteenth century. It was in this period that ‘illustration’ acquired its now standard meaning as an illustrative image that is conjoined with text. The essay identifies the key features of this art form and the technological changes in how illustrations were printed that played a part in their mass proliferation. Illustrations appeared across an extraordinarily diverse range of texts and printed forms, including books, magazines, and newspapers. Their ubiquity in nineteenth-century culture imbued them with the power to shape, as well as to document, the nineteenth-century world. Illustrations did not signify independently, however, and this essay draws attention to the complex relationship between pictures and words, and artists and authors, which characterises illustration in the nineteenth century.

Defining nineteenth-century illustration

In very simple terms, an ‘illustration’ is a picture that appears together with words on the printed page. Perhaps, however, this definition is a little too simplistic. It was in the first decades of the nineteenth century that the notion of an illustration as an ‘illustrative image’ emerged, growing out of the text-based sense of ‘illustration’ as an example that clarified or illuminated an idea. The Oxford English Dictionary traces the use of a specifically visual ‘illustration’ to 1816 with the title of the topographical book, A Cabinet Illustration of Great Britain. A year later, an edition of the works of Walter Scott was advertised as containing ‘Illustrations’ by the artist, Richard Westall. Until this point, the images that we now describe as ‘illustrations’ were designated by other labels, such as ‘plates’ and ‘embellishments’, or by terms that signalled the method by which they were printed: ‘engravings’, ‘etchings’, ‘lithographs’, ‘woodcuts’, and ‘cuts’.

The creation of a specific name for these pictures suggests the significant changes to the genre that took place in this century. In particular, it speaks to the remarkable explosion of illustrated material that occurred in these years. With more illustrations being produced and circulated, they needed a name. It also signals a new identity for the pictures that revolved around their relationship to the words they accompanied. Descriptive terms like ‘plate’ or ‘engraving’ established the image as a distinct art form, but ‘illustration’ emphasised the image’s dialogue with the words and the fact that this was a bi-medial mode of representation that combined text and image.

At the very moment that ‘illustration’ was named therefore, its visual specificity was reconfigured into its conjunction with words and its facility to ‘illustrate’ them. In this sense, the very labelling of illustrations as ‘illustrations’ placed these images in a subservient relationship, both to the texts that they illustrated, and to the more ‘independent’ visual media that constituted the nineteenth-century ‘fine arts’, like painting and sculpture. The apparent subordination of illustrative images to words, though, was counteracted by the prevalence of these pictures in the nineteenth century. The single label, ‘illustration’, held together such a range of images that it is challenging even to organise and classify them (Thomas 2017, 79–80).

Illustrations were published in almost all textual genres in the nineteenth century and spanned the categories of fiction and non-fiction, appearing in works of literature, history, science, philosophy, and geography, along with attendant and sub-genres. In terms of printed material, there were illustrations in books, magazines, periodicals, and newspapers, as well as in popular forms like advertisements and songs. Within these diverse publications, illustrations could look strikingly different: they went with and without textual captions; they were integrated into pages of text and appeared on their own pages. Alongside full-page illustrations and vignettes, there were pictorial capital letters, ‘embellishments’ that were placed as headers or footers, frontispiece illustrations, and illustrated title pages. Most nineteenth-century illustrations were black and white, but there were also coloured images, like the hand-coloured fashion plates that appeared in the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, the images that were printed in the Christmas supplements of magazines like the Graphic, and the gorgeous colour pictures, largely pioneered by the printer, Edmund Evans, which populated children’s books from around the 1860s.

Throughout the century, illustrations were reproduced using a variety of printing methods, including lithography, wood engraving, etching, and photomechanical techniques. In very broad terms, we can identify a general shift in which intaglio methods like etching (where the picture was made in incisions on a metal plate) were superseded in the middle decades of the century by wood engraving (a ‘relief’ method in which the image was printed from the raised parts of the woodblock). Unlike etching, where the artist was also the etcher, wood engraving was usually outsourced to specialist wood engravers who would undertake the meticulous and laborious work of cutting out the artist’s design. Wood engraving was itself largely supplanted in the latter decades of the century by photography and photomechanical techniques for printing and reproducing images.

Each of these processes created different visual qualities in the illustrations, which, in turn, generated different meanings that could be exploited or subverted. The scratched, fine lines of etching leant themselves to comedy, caricature, and the detail required of topographical and architectural images; the shading and tonal effects of wood engraving went hand in hand with the ‘realism’ of the Victorian novel; whilst photographic illustrations brought a sense of immediacy and authenticity. In terms of illustrative styles, it is difficult to organise nineteenth-century illustrations in any ordered way, although art historical categories have provided some useful groupings like ‘Pre-Raphaelite’ illustrations (even here, however, there is quite a difference between illustrations). Illustrations have also conventionally been analysed in terms of the styles of individual illustrators. Certainly, the images produced by the likes of George Cruikshank, Kate Greenaway, or Aubrey Beardsley are instantly recognisable; but, looking across nineteenth-century illustrations, what is most noticeable is the sheer diversity of these images.

The illustration revolution

On Saturday 14 May 1842 the Illustrated London News was launched. As the first illustrated weekly newspaper, the appearance of this publication marked a key moment in the history of illustration. By the end of the century, illustrated news had become commonplace; today we can hardly imagine a newspaper without pictures. The editorial opening address of the Illustrated London News captured the rise of illustration. The previous ten years, the ‘Address’ states, had witnessed the ‘vast revolution’ that illustration has wrought ‘through all the length and breadth of this mighty empire’. Having accompanied ‘nearly every form of thought’, from natural history and science to popular literature, it was now time for illustration to move into the sphere of the news. As the Address described it, ‘We are, by the publication of this very newspaper, launching the giant vessel of illustration into a channel the broadest and the widest that it has ever dared to stem’ (‘Our Address’ 1842, 1).

In the opening Address of the Illustrated London News and, indeed, on its subsequent pages, illustration is positioned at the very heart of society and social progress, associated both with imperial expansion and the technological advances of the Industrial Revolution. The genre of illustration had risen up, was expanding at a rapid pace, and by 1842 was regarded as an unstoppable force: ‘there is now no staying the advance of this art into all the departments of our social system’ (‘Our Address’ 1842, 1).

The extent of this ‘revolution’ in illustration can be gauged by looking back a few decades. Until the appearance of the Illustrated London News and the expansion of illustrated journalism, illustrations in newspapers were rare. In the eighteenth century, a few magazines contained images, but they were in the minority. Likewise, book illustrations were not the norm. A ‘gentleman’s’ library in the eighteenth century might have contained high-end luxury illustrated works of topography, travel, and science, whilst for a lower-class audience, woodcut images could be seen in popular broadsides and chapbooks. Aside from these illustrated forms, though, most eighteenth-century publications were unillustrated, or included only the odd frontispiece. The turn of the century marked a change, when out of copyright books were reprinted with illustrations, although newly published works continued to be largely unillustrated until the 1830s (St Clair 2004, 134–5).

From the middle decades of the nineteenth century almost everything was illustrated, and it was not only the journalists in the Illustrated London News who noticed this cultural transition. Numerous commentators discussed the ‘rage’ for illustration (Holmes 1844, 168), noting that pictures were ‘called for in excess’ (Ainsworth 1843, 2) and that the ‘pictorial printing-press is now your only wear!’ (Gore 1844, 47). In this ‘pictorial’ world, most books came with illustrations, ranging from works of history, science, and the latest novels, to older works that were newly printed with images, such as the plays of Shakespeare, which went through multiple illustrated editions. The illustrated magazine became one of the most popular printed forms, whilst other illustrated genres came into their own in this period, like annuals, gift books, and children’s books. The term ‘picture book’, which is still in use today, was coined by Edmund Evans to brand the children’s books illustrated by Randolph Caldecott in the 1870s.

The burgeoning of illustrated news presented its own challenges because the images that accompanied new stories had to be drawn first by artists before they were cut for printing by wood engravers. Anecdotes tell of sketches being carried out of war zones in balloons, with teams of wood engravers at the ready to cut the pictures. These practical issues came to the fore in the very first issue of the Illustrated London News. On the bottom of the page and underneath ‘Our Address’ is a wood-engraved image that depicted a current event: a fire in the city of Hamburg, which had begun on 5 May and raged until the morning of 8 May. To get the first issue of the newspaper printed in time for 1^h May, the engravers skilfully adapted an already existing picture of Hamburg, adding the detail of the smoke billowing into the sky so that the image looked suitably topical.

The notion of a ‘revolution’ in illustration, as the Illustrated London News describes it, is testament to the enormous changes in this genre that occurred in the nineteenth century. But why this historical moment? What triggered the growth of illustration? The answers are multiple and complex, but they are rooted in concomitant changes in print culture, including the fact that illustrated newspapers and magazines could now be printed more cheaply. The adoption of wood engraving as the principal technique for printing illustrations was an important development here because, for the first time, thousands of impressions of the same illustration could be printed, and this was scaled up further with the invention of stereotypes and electrotypes (durable metal moulds of the surface of woodblocks).

With these new printing technologies, markets opened up. Illustrated magazines, with their miscellaneous features and copious illustrations, were read across social divides. Illustrations were even brought in to aid the move towards mass literacy, with many a philanthropist arguing that access to illustrative pictures would motivate viewers to learn to read the accompanying words. Indeed, the presence of illustrations instigated a different mode of reading as readers learned to negotiate between the pictures and the text. It was a way of reading that seemed highly suited to the new mobility of readers, who could take in images more quickly than they could read lines of text, a fact that explains why illustrated material was especially popular on railway bookstalls. Describing the rise of illustration, the novelist Catherine Gore asserted that this art form ‘was invented for the more ready transmission of ideas’ and was therefore perfect for ‘those sons of the century who are always on the run’ (Gore 1844, 47).

The cultural significance of illustration

The revolution in nineteenth-century illustration was not simply located in the realm of the arts. As Catherine Gore describes it, illustration was an integral part of culture, and, indeed, of everyday life. Illustrated material infiltrated the railway platform and the domestic parlour. In many ways, illustrations democratised the visual arts because, taken collectively, they appeared across such a wide spectrum of printed forms. Within this broad collective, however, specific illustrated publications were targeted at certain readers. They were often gendered, for instance, with illustrated magazines and annuals aimed specifically at men or women, boys or girls.

They were class-based, too. Penny bloods or ‘penny dreadfuls’, which emerged from the 1830s and were said to have an avid following among working-class boys, were criticised by middle-class moralists because of their sensational illustrations. At the more respectable end of the cheaper publications were the likes of the illustrated Penny Magazine, which was founded in 1832 by the publisher Charles Knight as part of the educative mission of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. For the middle-classes, the choice of illustrated material was almost unbounded, and included all manner of magazines, from the lower middle-class evangelical Good Words to the decidedly upmarket Cornhill Magazine, which serialised some of the major novels of the day. These publications were full of illustrations that were designed by well-known artists, some of whom were also established painters.

Illustrations put the nineteenth-century world on display, including their own viewers. The annual volume of the popular magazine, Leisure Hour, featured an illustrated title page that showed groups of readers enjoying the magazine. Likewise, it was the self-proclaimed job of illustrated newspapers to show the world around them. The opening ‘Address’ of the Illustrated London News emphasised the fact that illustration was able to make events visible as they transpired. However, even newspaper illustrations did not reflect their context in any neutral or transparent way, as the manipulated image of the fire at Hamburg reveals. The fact that illustrations were so prolific in this period suggests their power to constitute as well as to reflect cultural values. The seemingly innocent representation of different readers on the title page of the Leisure Hour constructs an iconography that came to be associated with those readers and their environments, and which would have influenced how they were viewed and interpreted. The fact that a ‘humble’ home is represented as comfortable and orderly, that the family unit is privileged, that men and women occupy specific roles, are features that are deeply ideological. Illustration played a key role in the formation – as well as the questioning – of nineteenth-century values. As a contemporary reviewer of illustrated books put it, illustration ‘silently exercises no little influence upon society’ (Holmes 1844, 168).

The silent ‘influence’ of illustration suggests the significance of illustrations not only in documenting the nineteenth-century world, but also in shaping it. A commentator at the end of the century remarked how picturing a ‘pretty girl’ in the imagination was inevitably influenced by popular illustrations: people would imagine a ‘Gibson girl’ if they were American (after the popular illustrations of Charles Dana Gibson) or a ‘Du Maurier girl’ if they were English (after the illustrations of George Du Maurier) (Fletcher 1898, 390). It seems that even when readers closed their eyes and imagined something, they ‘saw’ it in illustrative terms. This influence came about because of the scale of illustration and a repetition of visual tropes across multiple illustrations that resulted in the female figures illustrated by Gibson or Du Maurier becoming ‘types’ or, to use the printing term, stereotypes.

The repetition, recycling, and reworking of visual tropes and features is a characteristic of nineteenth-century illustration and emerges from the fact that illustrations were produced at speed and in such a large quantity. These illustrative tropes inform the representation of gender, but they are also at the forefront of representations of class, racial, and other cultural identities and differences. Moreover, these tropes extend across diverse illustrated material: representations of the Irish, the Japanese, or the indigenous people of America, for instance, are present in illustrations of fiction and non-fiction, and it is sometimes hard to gauge these textual distinctions by looking at the illustrations independently from the text. Such illustrations are overtly political, but even images as apparently mundane as those of the English landscape (of which there are tens of thousands) established a specific rural aesthetic and notion of ‘Englishness’ that was marketed abroad. The idyllic illustrations of Kate Greenaway, whose mob-capped innocent children dance around English landscapes, had an international audience.

As the opening address of the Illustrated London News implied, the growth of illustration was bound up in the growth of empire. Illustrations moved around the world and were frequently re-used in different contexts. A lucrative transatlantic market emerged for the sale of engravings, whilst illustrated publications cropped up in different locations. The illustrated Punch magazine, which had appeared in Britain from 1841 and was itself based on the French illustrated Le Charivari (published from 1832), was distributed in Asia, and its format and name were replicated in countries as far afield as Australia, Egypt, India, China, and Japan (Harder and Mittler 2013). In the nineteenth century, illustration was a dominant, and increasingly global, art form.

The relation between images and words

The proliferation of illustrations in nineteenth-century culture gave them a significance that is not always recognised in critical accounts of the period. However, illustrations did not signify in isolation. As its new nineteenth-century definition indicated, ‘illustration’ was characterised by its relationship to the words, a relationship that was diverse and multifarious, both in its practical applications and in the way that it was conceptualised at the time.

In publishing terms, there was a variety of practices when it came to combining the image and the text. These impacted on where the image and text were situated in relation to each other, as well as on the order in which they were produced. In the early decades of the century and in genres like gift and travel books, it was relatively common for the image to be conceived first, with authors ‘writing up’ to the picture. This is how Charles Dickens’s The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (or The Pickwick Papers) first appeared (March 1836–November 1837), with Dickens commissioned to write up to plates provided by the well-known comic artist, Robert Seymour. After just a couple of instalments, Robert Seymour committed suicide and, from this point on, the replacement artists illustrated Dickens’s prior text. It was this order, with the text written first and the artists following it, that became the conventional way of illustrating, to the extent that the very idea that the picture could come first was regarded as aberrant. In this way, hierarchical notions of the arts became embedded in the practice of illustration.

Illustrative images were culturally significant in terms of what they showed and how they showed it, and this was also central to the relation between text and image that illustration put into play. With the image following a prior text, there were choices to be made about what to depict in the illustrations and what aspects of the text should be privileged or marginalised. These choices were sometimes made by the publisher, sometimes by the author, and at other times the illustrator had free rein. The protocol changed from one illustrated publication to the next. So, too, did the working relationships between the parties. Authors occasionally illustrated their own works (for instance, William Makepeace Thackeray, and George Du Maurier), but it was more common to have a different illustrator. Of course, there could be a gap of centuries between the writing of a work and its illustration. In addition to the figures of the author, artist, and publisher, the production of an illustration in the middle of the century also involved the wood engraver.

In each of these relationships we find evidence of attempts to keep control over the images. Dickens gave highly detailed instructions to illustrators about what they should illustrate and corrected their proofs. A few illustrators expressed anxiety about the transformation of their designs in the engraving and printing process. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, for example, complained bitterly about how his images had fared at the hands of the Dalziel Brothers, one of the most accomplished wood engraving companies of the day; and the Dalziels, in turn, grumbled that Rossetti did not design his images with any understanding of wood engraving.

At the heart of these disputes were different conceptualisations of what an ‘illustration’ was and what the ‘proper’ relationship between the pictures and the words should be. These ideas came to the fore in the case of imaginative literature where the potential gaps between the pictures and the words were exposed. Discussions of illustration in this period, from those found in private correspondence to book reviews, often engaged with these issues, which suggests that the relationship between word and image in illustration had become something of a talking point. Looking across these documents, we can identify four key positions when it comes to the relationship between word and image in illustration: there is the idea that illustrative images should reflect or mirror the words as faithfully as possible; the idea that the illustrations should enhance and add to the text; the idea that the images and words should be independent from each other; and the idea that texts should not be illustrated at all.

The first position – that images should reflect the text – was articulated by the artist and engraver William James Linton, who began a review of illustrative art by referring to the text-based definition of ‘illustration’ in Johnson’s dictionary, which stipulated that ‘to illustrate’ means to brighten with light and honour, and, most fundamentally, ‘to explain, to clear, to elucidate’ (Linton 1849, 92). On these grounds, Linton makes the case that an illustration should be ‘illustrative’ in the sense that it should capture the meanings of the text (and of the author) rather than running ‘counter’ to it (Linton 1849, 93). Linton’s position was taken up, perhaps unsurprisingly, by numerous nineteenth-century authors. When William Holman Hunt illustrated Tennyson’s ‘Lady of Shalott’ in an illustrated edition of Tennyson’s poems (Moxon 1857, 69), Tennyson quizzed Hunt about the features in the image that were not there in the text and made it clear that ‘an illustrator ought never to add anything to what he finds in the text’ (Holman Hunt 1913, 95).

But ‘add’ to the words illustrators inevitably did. The movement from texts to pictures that illustration enacts is, after all, a movement from one mode of representation to another. Words can never stay the ‘same’ when they are illustrated because they are no longer words. Some critical commentators in the nineteenth century argued that illustrations should not reflect but should add to the text. The art critic, John Ruskin, made the point that attempts faithfully to reproduce the words in an image were redundant precisely because such images did not visualise anything that the readers could not picture for themselves. According to Ruskin, it was far better for illustrations to show aspects that were not present in the words and that could not be imagined by the readers (Ruskin 1903–1912, 139–40).

However, for other commentators the gaps between word and image that illustration revealed was just too great. Henry James argued that words and pictures were like meat and fish: they should not be served on the same plate (James 1909, x). James reluctantly allowed photographic illustrations to appear in the New York edition of his novels on the grounds that they were sufficiently different from his words and did not compete or even coincide with them. James’s view became more prevalent as the century progressed, with readers apparently becoming sated with illustrations. The late nineteenth-century magazine, The Yellow Book, made a feature of the fact that, although it included images, they were not ‘illustrative’ in a conventional sense, but were independent works of art that were separate from the texts. Such criticisms of illustration seem to have played a part in the decline of illustrated fiction for adults from the early decades of the twentieth century.

Conclusion

In the nineteenth century, illustration became a dominant art form. Illustrative pictures appeared in magazines, newspapers, and different genres of books. The proliferation of illustrations gave them a key role in shaping the world around them, with their content and iconographic features providing a unique insight into this cultural moment and its values and meanings. As a mode of representation, illustration is characterised by a conjunction of word and image, which incorporates an array of processes and practices in the nineteenth century, from the different mechanisms that were used to print the images to the different relationships between its constituents that illustrations put into play. Looking at the abundance of illustrations in the period and analysing the historical documents that attempt to account for and interpret them, we can begin to recognise the extraordinary significance of illustration as a defining feature of the period.

References

Ainsworth, William Harrison (1843, July) ‘To the Readers of Ainsworth’s Magazine’, Ainsworth’s Magazine: A Miscellany of Romance, General Literature, and Art 4: 1–2. 

Fletcher, Jefferson B. (1898, October) ‘The Visual Image in Literature’, Sewanee Review 6(4): 385–401. 

Gore, Catherine (1844, January) ‘The New Art of Printing. By a Designing Devil’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 55(339): 45–9. 

Harder, Hans and Barbara Mittler (eds) (2013) Asian Punches: A Transcultural Affair, Heidelberg; New York: Springer. 

Holman Hunt, William (1913) Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Vol. II. London: Chapman and Hall. 

Holmes, John (1844, June) ‘Art. VII. Illustrated Books’, Quarterly Review 74(147): 167–99. 

Oxford English Dictionary (n.d.) ‘Illustration’, https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/91580?redirectedFrom=illustration#eid. 

James, Henry (1909) The Golden Bowl, Vol. I, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. 

Linton, W. J. (1849, April) ‘Art. IV. – 1. L’Allegro and Il Penseroso’, Westminster and Foreign Quarterly Review 51(1): 92–104. 

‘Our Address.’ (1842, 14 May) Illustrated London News: 1. 

Ruskin, John (1903–1912) The Cestus of Aglaia. The Works of John Ruskin, Vol. 19, edited by E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, London: George Allen; New York: Longmans, Green. Information Classification: General 

St Clair, William (2004) The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

Thomas, Julia (2017) Nineteenth-Century Illustration and the Digital: Studies in Word and Image, New York: Palgrave.