The Reading Public and the Illustrated Novel, 1890-1914

This study examines the reading practices that surrounded illustrated novels in England from 1890-1914 by bringing together documented reader responses and the physical objects to which those readers were responding. The reading evidence I am concerned with begins with the books themselves and includes reviews, scrapbooks, songs, dances, music hall entertainments, poetry, parodies, imitations, clubs, parties, home and school theatricals, legitimate dramatizations, toys, games, advertisements, apparel, and sausages, among other things. All provide evidence of what particular texts meant to the audience members who generated material in response. The period from 1890-1914 saw what is often called "the golden age" of English book illustration. Chapter One looks at reading practices and publishing trends, including the widespread distribution of newsprint fiction, the institution of public libraries, the publication of book-collector's memoirs, the decline of the three-decker novel, the private press movement and the developing rhetoric of advertising. Subsequent chapters are case studies which examine illustrated novels published in those years, first editions and newly illustrated editions of texts by four writers: George du Maurier (Trilby), Arthur Conan Doyle (The Lost World and the Sherlock Holmes stories), Lewis Carroll (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland) and Elizabeth Gaskell (Cranford). Each chapter documents the reception, publication and bibliographical history of a novel (or novels) and posits a relationship between the book as a physical object and the uses to which the fiction it contained was put. The 24 year period I'm considering saw a magnification of Victorian modes of book production and consumption. Novels were bigger (and smaller), brighter, more numerous, more collectible and more portable, cheaper and more expensive, more likely to reach a mass audience and more likely to engender public response, from parody to drama to idol-worship. Very often, those responses were tightly connected to a novel's illustrations--and very often both the illustrations and the revisionary responses anchored a scandalous or problematic text so as to bring its meaning in line with cultural norms. In each of the four case studies I've chosen, approbation of social order is effected by means of book illustration, then developed and affirmed by public response.