The growth of illustration in periodicals is . . . part of the pattern of popular fiction, although to what extent it increased readership is a moot point. Certainly it rapidly increased after the great era of wood engraving associated with the forties and fifties . . . . [Both book and magazine] . . . publishers found they could provide pictorial accompaniment to text more cheaply as mass production cut costs. Where in the forties and fifties a publisher might see roughly £120 of the £400 spent on a 30,000 run of a monthly serial going for illustrations, by the sixties his costs were cut by one-third. (Reginald Terry, Victorian Popular Fiction, 1860-80, p. 27)
n Illustration and the Novels of Thomas Hardy
(1981), Arlene M. Jackson notes that in the 1860s and 1870s, "[t]he
illustrations for Belgravia and other magazines . . . often cost £2-3
per square inch for drawing and engraving" (40). Given the relative
costs of illustration versus text, it is perhaps not surprising that in
its table of contents Belgravia gave prominence to its "List of
Illustrations" (e. g., Vol. 34, iv): "The magazine was proud to announce
to its audience that artists such as Fred Barnard, Arthur Hopkins, and
R. Caldecott were among its contributors" (40). Such
illustrators of the realistic school helped the reader suspend disbelief
and focussed on dramatic moments in the text, avoiding morally 'unsafe'
scenes and issues. Thus, the mimetic illustrations tended to make even
so daring a story as
The Return of the Native,
with its obvious parallels to Flaubert's Madame Bovary
(1856), acceptable to the broad readership that Hardy had to
address if he were to remain a professional writer of prose and turn his
back forever on architecture.
The prestigious publisher Cornhill, which had carried the pastoral Far From the Madding Crowd in 1874, and which, from its inception in 1860, had published such prominent writers Thackeray and Trollope, rejected Hardy's manuscript ofThe Return of the Native. So did the even more illustrious Blackwood's, and so too did its rival, Temple Bar. Wishing to avoid Tinsley's Magazine, which in 1872 had published A Pair of Blue Eyes, Hardy now tried Belgravia, A Magazine of Fashion and Amusement, established in 1866. Dalziel notes
the incongruity of a story about characters described by contemporary reviewers as of "low social position" appearing in a magazine whose pretentious title was intended to attract lower-middle-class readers wishing to move vicariously in fashionable, upper-class society . . . . (86)
Although by 1870 the British reading public by Terry's estimate numbered perhaps 200,000, Hardy had had little success in marketing his early novels until he had serialised Far From the Madding Crowd, which like many other Hardy stories bears striking resemblance in some respects (including bigamy, illegitimacy, and fraud) to the sensation novels of M. E. Braddon (who with her husband, John Maxwell, edited Belgravia) and James Payne (whose By Prory ran in Belgravia in 1877). However, by 1888 Mudie's Catalogue listed eleven titles of Thomas Hardy, a number of works equal to those of George Meredith, a respectable showing, though well behind R. Ballantyne's 39 titles. One may well wonder to what extent Hardy's being, as he once remarked to Cornhill editor Leslie Stephen, "a good hand at a serial" (letter, 18 February 1874) helped boost his popularity. Certainly being published in Belgravia, which also brought out in serial such works of Collins as The Haunted Hotel (like The Return of the Native, in 1878), must have led to his popular acceptance as an entertaining as opposed to a merely instructive writer.
An important part of that appeal to a mass readership must have been the illustrations accompanying the dozen or more serial instalments of novels running in Belgravia. As Meisel observes in Realizations (1983), these monthly illustrations must have "helped immensely to bridge the intervals . . . , and found a use, during the accumulation of monthly parts . . . , as a handy aide-mémoire" (53). The image is far more lasting, in fact, than the momentary impressions of scene and character derived from the initial reading, and may connote more than the text itself denoted. "The collaboration of picture and text in the art of the novel is thus ultimately an attribute of style [i. e., the artist's interpretation of the text], operating as a presence and influence in the language as well as in the narrative organization" (Meisel 56).
These pictorial influences, however, have been weighed by only a handful of Hardy's modern critics, who have experienced his novels in volume rather than magazine format. Even when a modern attempts to experience Hardy as his first nineteenth-century readers would have done, reading the chapters in their original serial groupings and pausing to reflect and anticipate as the magazine reader would have done, without the illustrations that initial reading cannot be recreated. The difference between a part-reading in volume and an authentic serial reading is that the illustrations, published usually as frontispieces (in the case of The Mayor of Casterbridge in The Graphic for the first twenty weeks of 1886) or to face a particular page, condition the reader's response to the text, causing him to compare 'word- picture' to plate. In fact, out of the twelve illustrations for The Return of the Native, eleven are intended to depict specific moments, as the quotations which serve as the picture-titles suggest (the only exception to this rule is the frontispiece for Belgravia,Volume 35, March 1878, "The reddleman re-reads an old love letter").
Although they set the scene, providing both background details and strong notions about the appearance and behaviours of certain characters, the serial illustrations do not necessarily curtail the imaginative experience. Rather, they 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 coming instalment. Then, too, an initial illustration tends to provide the reader with a "realization" (in the sense that Martin Meisel uses the term); that is, the reader, having scene the picture, awaits its arrival in the lines of the text, so that the passage illustrated provides a moment of stasis, of reflection, and possibly even of comparison between the artist's and reader's conceptions the scene. The reader must then mediate between the two images.
The graphic artist therefore was not merely complementing the work of the novelist, but was acting as co-presenter and interpreter. The collaborative project of an illustrated, serialised story required personal harmony and aesthetic agreement between collaborators. Where correspondence has been preserved, much can be known about the relationships between certain nineteenth-century author-illustrator collaborations. Thanks to The Pilgrim Edition of Dickens' collected correspondence, for example, we know a great deal about what passed between Dickens and his illustrators, particularly Leech, Cruikshank, and the inimitable 'Phiz', Hablot K. Browne. Little is known however about the connections between Hardy and his serial illustrators, owing to the limited number of Hardy's letters that have survived. Nevertheless, the record of each artist's work affords certain clues about the relationship, as in the Christmas mumming scene, which Arthur Hopkins illustrated operating on certain cues that Hardy had provided. In the absence of information that would reveal the extent of collaboration between an illustrator and a novelist, one is forced to examine the relationships between the text (as published serially) and the accompanying pictures, just as the Victorian readers of such magazines as The Belgravia and The Graphic would.
At the time of his brief collaboration with Hardy, Hopkins (1848-1930) was living at Notting Hill. In 1875 he had exhibited his first painting, "The Mowers," at The Royal Academy; there followed "The Call to Supper" (1876), "The Quay," and "The Plough" (1877). "Though still a relative newcomer at the time when Chatto and Windus first commissioned work from him in 1877," Dalziel writes, "he had already established a reputation through his contributions to such leading periodicals as the Cornhill, Good Words, the Graphic, and the Illustrated London News" (88). An admirer of John Everett Millais, Hopkins possessed both the dramatic flair and the predilection for depicting scenes from country life that the illustrations for Hardy's novel would require. Jackson asserts that "he was not personally selected by Hardy but received the commission by virtue of his position as staff illustrator for Belgravia" (40). Since Hopkins has only one plate in volume 34 of Belgravia prior to the start of the Hardy novel, he was likely working on projects for other publications earlier in 1877. It is possible that the work he showed in 1878, "The Apple Loft," is related to his April, 1878, illustration for The Return of The Native, in which he depicts a melancholy Thomasin in just such a location. Hardy wrote Hopkins that he thought that illustration particularly good.
The letters from Thomas Hardy to Hopkins in his capacity as Belgravia's illustrator (8 and 20 February, 1878; see The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, I: 52-5) reveal that the artist was not familiar with the entire text of The Return of the Native, but was having to work with one instalment at a time. Hardy thus felt it necessary to explain to the artist the main threads of the plot and the relationships between the principal characters, and to provide sketches of a mummer's clothing and staff, which the artist subsequently employed to revise the May illustration, to which Hardy's second letter reacts. "I am glad to receive a letter from you," Hardy wrote Hopkins on February 8th, "for it is more satisfactory when artist & author are in correspondence" (Letters I: 52). Consequently, even if Hopkins was hardly playing Phiz to Hardy's Boz, the two were in a collaborative relationship, although undoubtedly one arranged not by themselves, but by the co-editors of Belgravia.
The Illustrations in Detail
- Didst ever know a man that no woman would marry?
- She lifted her hand
- The reddleman re-reads an old love letter
- I wish all good women were as good as I!
- If there is any difference, Grandfer is younger
- Tie a rope round him; it is dangerous!
- The stakes were won by Wildeve
- Unconscious of her presence, he still went on singing
- Something was wrong with her foot
- He brought the tray to the front of the couch
- Tis not from the window. That's a gig-lamp, to the best of my belief
- All that remained of the desperate and unfortunate Eustacia
Works Consulted
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Last modified 29 March 2024