Perhaps no other century relished the spectral, the ghoulish, and the spooky as much as the nineteenth. Whether it was spirit photographs, sensation novels, ghost stories, mesmerism, seances, or spiritualism, the Victorians revelled in the supernatural, even establishing the Society for Psychical Research in 1882, which drew the interest of authors such as Arthur Conan Doyle. Simon Cooke’s most recent book, Illustrating the Victorian Supernatural, is a highly enjoyable and welcome addition to scholarship on this multifaceted topic, and it is the first monograph to examine nineteenth- and twentieth-century illustrations of Victorian supernatural fiction.
To begin, Cooke suggests that materialism, as articulated by Thomas Carlyle in Signs of the Times (1829), along with the emergence of new domestic and industrial technologies, changed popular discourse in the nineteenth century (5-6). There arose among readers a desire for something beyond the merely mechanical: "a psychological need for mystery and possibility" (6). Renewed interest in folklore and the paranormal during the century contributed to this desire, soon exploited by the creators of phantasmagoria and spirit photography, as well as by authors and artists. Borrowing from Jacques Derrida's theory of “hauntology” and citing Jerome McGann on paratexts as spectral "apparitions of the text," Cooke argues that we can see "illustrations as a ghostly replication of the text" (17). Victorian illustration could allegorize a narrative or a poem, in Dante Gabriel Rossetti's terms (18), going beyond merely representing the text in visual form, as in Rossetti's illustration for William Allingham's "The Maids of Elfen-Mere" (1855), and in the ghostly absurdism of The Ingoldsby Legends (1840-47), illustrated by George Cruikshank and John Leech (21-22).
The introduction to Illustrating the Victorian Supernatural surveys scholarship on Victorian illustration, such as Catherine Golden's Serials to Graphic Novels: The Evolution of the Victorian Illustrated Book (2018), as well as on studies of the supernatural. The chapters are organized clearly by both chronology and purpose of the illustrations. The first chapter looks at early nineteenth-century caricatures and grotesques; the second explores more psychologically complex representations of spectrality at mid-century; the third and fourth chapters analyse connexions among the supernatural, gender, and politics later in the century; and the closing chapter explores surrealist and expressionist twentieth- and twenty-first-century illustrations of Victorian ghost stories and Gothic novels.
Chapter 1, "Early and Mid- Victorian Ghosts: Satire and the Literary Specter," is a lively start to the book, as it considers the fraudulent (though entertaining) practises of "apparitions, rapping, table turning, table joggling, birdsong, solemn speech emanating from the thin air, hands appearing from nowhere, musical sounds, and moving objects" (32). The chapter traces the ways in which illustrators provided sometimes humorous, sometimes more searching approaches to the supernatural (49), contrasting Cruikshank’s "comic grotesque" with George Du Maurier's "academicism and Charles Bennett's "physiognomic portraits" (38). In Cruikshank's satirical illustrations, for example, there is an abundance of melodramatic acting in gestures and facial expressions (59). However, even early in the century, illustration of the supernatural was not only comical or satirical, but at times concerned with psychological and symbolic aspects of the paranormal (61). Dickens's novels are populated by theatrically-inspired eccentric persons, but they also often include characters filled with guilt or remorse, suffering from anguished minds (62), and his novels use a great deal of Gothic imagery: for instance, Dedlock Hall in Bleak House and Satis House in Great Expectations. Cooke suggests that Phiz enhances the hints of the supernatural in Dickens’s fiction and highlights a duality between realism and satire: “Like Cruikshank, Phiz moved easily between ridicule of the phantasmal and using it with seriousness as a psychological symbol” (67). From Cruikshank and Phiz, Cooke then turns to John Franklin, focusing on his illustration of "The Coffin Maker's Carousal" from Harrison Ainsworth's Old St. Paul’s (1847) (67-68). One of the many strengths of Illustrating the Victorian Supernatural is the way in which it gives equal time to both lesser-known and famous illustrators, providing readers with a sense of the panorama of Victorian illustration.
"The Coffin Maker's Carousal" (1841) by John Franklin. [Click on the image to enlarge it, and for more information about it.]
Moving on from the comic and the grotesque, Chapter 2, "The Psychological Ghost: Stories and Illustrations," examines ways in which the phantasmagorical could be deployed to suggest more complex psychological states than simple guilt or remorse (71). Although "occupying liminal or interstitial spaces between physical and nonphysical," as Cooke suggests, "Victorian ghosts tend to be distinctly material, offering themselves to be seen" (72). One of the reasons this book is so enjoyable is the blend of humour with seriousness. There is something very Dickensian about a sentence like this one: "In keeping with the visuality of the age and its emphasis on spectatorship, they [Victorian ghosts] are rarely glimpsed out of the corner of the eye but instead occupy center stage as players in a ghostly theater" (72). In addition to Dickens, the chapter analyzes Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and Henry James and their illustrators, Leech, John Tenniel, Eric Pape, and John Lafarge — the last known for his stained glass and lawsuit against Tiffany over a patent.
As Cooke notes, "Many of the most celebrated ghost stories were written by men. Dickens, James, Collins, Le Fanu, and Kipling were prime practitioners of the form" (115). And yet, as he also points out, at least half of all Victorian ghost stories were produced by women, especially for the periodical market, in magazines such as All the Year Round, The Argosy, Belgravia, and the Mistletoe Bough (115). Chapter 3, "Ghostly Women: Gender and Supernatural Illustration," examines the Victorian ghost story as a gendered form and analyses the patriarchal view of women’s psychology, the "whore/madonna" binary, and the prevailing idea of the "weaker sex." Cooke unpacks the ways in which, for example, Du Maurier's illustrations of women for Punch and in his own novel Trilby emphasize women’s supposed susceptibility to forces like mesmerism (126). This chapter examines "the iconography of the chaise longue and domestic lassitude," as well as images of "women in a condition of languourous prostration," evincing "psychological frailty" and "childlike helplessness" (126-8). Altogether the illustrations highlight "a social structure of extreme power asymmetry" (128). The ghastly and the spectral appear in illustrations for Le Fanu’s Carmilla and James’s The Turn of the Screw and in depictions of the "ephemeral specter," Miss Havisham (125).
Chapter 4, "The Political Ghost," examines famous cartoons by Leech, Tenniel, Linley Sambourne and Joseph Kenny Meadows, all of whom showed the influence of eighteenth-century satirists such as Hogarth, Rowlandson, and Gillray. In a section titled "The Ghost, Capitalism, and Class," Cooke explores "spectrality as a mode of economic and social commentary" in illustrations like Leech's "The Poor Man’s Friend" (Punch, 1843) and "Substance and Shadow," (Punch 5, July-Dec 1843), the "hard-hitting imagery" of which was "intended to appeal to the conscience of Punch's bourgeois readers" so that they could at last see "the moral inequities of the economic system" (162). As Cooke puts it, these illustrations are filled with "ghosts and ghouls," "transparent figures" revealing "the invisible workings of capital" as well as "the bourgeois fear of revolution": "The specter of communism, as Karl Marx explains in the Communist Manifesto (1848), was the ghost of radical revolution, and the fear of this ghost coexists with the appeal for compassion in Victorian graphic satire" (170). This chapter provides a detailed examination of some of Tenniel’s political cartoons, many of them xenophobic, racist, and marked by imperialist anxiety, along with illustrations by Richard and Linley Sambourne.
Chapter 5, "Afterlives: Reillustrating Victorian Ghost Stories," brings the topic from the fin de siècle into the twentieth century and explores how the illustrations reflect the changing "culture of spectrality" (Cooke 193). The popularity of seances and other spiritualist practices at the end of the century was bolstered by the horrors of the First World War. At the same time, as Cooke argues, with social and political changes came more freedom for twentieth-century illustrators of Victorian ghost stories, enabled, as they were, to “represent interiority and psychological aspects of spectrality” (194). Art movements like surrealism and expressionism focused on “the dreamlike,” “the strange,” “the disturbed,” and the distorted (194). Thus, works by Dickens, Le Fanu, and James (among others), could be “revisualized” for the new century by artists like Arthur Rackham, Fritz Eichenberg, Ana Juan, and Charles Keeping (194). In this final chapter, Cooke moves beyond twentieth-century illustrators like Edward Ardizzonne and Felix Hoffmann to the twenty-first century, looking at illustrations of Victorian fiction by artists including Barry Moser for Dracula (1897) in 2000, Patrick James for A Christmas Carol (1843) in 2006, and David Blow for Dickens’s short story “No. 1 Branch Line: The Signalman” (1866) in 2019.
Illustrating the Victorian Supernatural brings fresh insights into well-known illustrators of the supernatural as well as a welcome introduction to lesser-known illustrators. It also demonstrates and celebrates the evolving culture of illustration of Victorian ghost stories. Both meticulously scholarly and highly readable, this book reminds us why Victorian supernaturalism continues to exercise the powerful fascination it once held over its original readers.
Links to Related Material
Bibliography
[Book under review] Cooke, Simon. Illustrating the Victorian Supernatural. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2025.
Created 28 July 2025
Last modified 4 August 2025