Against illustration: towards a new field of inquiry in illustration studies

Abstract

Building on recent specialised studies on the critique of illustration in individual authors or periods, this article develops a new methodology for a large comparative study of the critique of literary illustration. Notably, this article argues for the benefits of developing a catalogue of basic arguments levelled against the pictorial illustration of literary texts. By distinguishing between these arguments and by tracing these arguments throughout history, we stand to gain new insights into not only the history of literary illustration but also into broader trends in literary and cultural history, which inform the critique of illustration. These general remarks are further developed through exemplary analyses of three prominent criticisms of illustration from the nineteenth century as well of their varying legacies in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: illustrations limit the reader’s imagination; illustrations are merely included for commercial gain; and illustrations limit intellectual pursuits.

Keywords:

• illustration
• text–image relations
• literary history
• literary theory
• comparative literature
• European literature
• nineteenth-century literature

Acknowledgement

This article was supported by a Seed Grant from the University of Calgary’s Faculty of Arts.

Notes

1 Especially many of the seminal older surveys of book illustration mention the phenomenon only in passing; e.g. David Bland, A History of Book Illustration: The Illuminated Manuscript and the Printed Book (London: Faber & Faber, 1958); John Harthan, The History of the Illustrated Book: The Western Tradition (London: Thames & Hudson, 1981); and Bill Katz, ed., A History of Book Illustration: 29 Points of View (Metuchen: Scarecrow, 1994). Of these books, Katz’s offers the most detailed remarks, notably in the chapter by Sibylle Pantazzi, “Author and Illustrator: Images in Confrontation,” in Katz, History of Book Illustration, 585–600, at 594. For a slightly more detailed acknowledgment of the phenomenon, see Joseph Schwarcz, Ways of the Illustrator: Visual Communication in Children’s Literature (Chicago: American Library Association, 1982), 2–3. By contrast, there is no discussion of the matter in Edward Hodnett, Five Centuries of English Book Illustration (Aldershot: Scholar, 1988). Even some important, newer surveys spend little attention on the matter; e.g. Steven Heller and Seymour Chwast, Illustration: A Visual History (New York: Abrams, 2008); and Alan Male, ed., A Companion to Illustration (Hoboken: Wiley, 2019).

2 Gillen D’Arcy Wood, The Shock of the Real: Romanticism and Visual Culture, 1760–1860 (London: Palgrave, 2001), esp. 171–218.

3 Benoît Tane, “Le livre illustré au xviii^e siècle. L’œuvre au risque de sa défiguration,” in L’esthétique du livre, ed. Alain Milon and Marc Perelman (Paris: Presses universitaires de Paris Nanterre, 2013), 315–31.

4 Keri Yousif, Balzac, Grandville, and the Rise of Book Illustration (London: Routledge, 2016).

5 Amy Tucker, The Illustration of the Master: Henry James and the Magazine Revolution (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010).

6 Pedro Thiago Ramos Bassoe, “Eyes of the Heart: Illustration and the Visual Imagination in Modern Japanese Literature” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2018).

7 Harthan, History of the Illustrated Book, 8.

8 Harthan does not refer to any sources that could serve as examples for the argument that he presents.

9 Laurel Brake and Laryssa Demoor, “Introduction: The Lure of Illustration,” in The Lure of Illustration in the Nineteenth Century: Picture and Press, ed. Laurel Brake and Laryssa Demoor (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009), 1–13, at 5.

10 For instance, Sophie Thomas, “Poetry and Illustration: Amicable Strife,” in A Companion to Romantic Poetry, ed. Charles Mahoney (London: Blackwell, 2011), 354–73, esp. 357–58; see also Harthan, History of the Illustrated Book, 172.

11 Cited in Ramos Bassoe, “Eyes of the Heart,” 31.

12 Some of the examples discussed further below illustrate this phenomenon, notably the sonnet “To Samuel Rogers” by Charles Lamb.

13 See the discussion between Richard and Peter Pattieson in the first chapter of Walter Scott’s novel The Bride of Lammermoor (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, & Hurst, Robinson, and Co. & Edinburgh: Archibald Constable, 1819).

14 Charles Lamb, “To Samuel Rogers, Esq., on the New Edition of His Pleasures of Memory,” The Times, 13 December 1833.

15 John Holmes, “Illustrated Books,” The Quarterly Review 74 (1844): 167–99.

16 Ibid.

17 Charlotte Brontë, “Letter to W. S. Williams, dated 11 March 1848,” in The Brontës: Life and Letters, ed. Clement Shorter (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1908), 402.

18 Charles Dickens, “Book Illustration,” All the Year Round no. 433 (10 August 1867): 151–55.

19 Tsubouchi Shōyō, The Essence of the Novel [Shōsetsu shinzui] (1885); cited in Ramos Bassoe, “Eyes of the Heart,” 30.

20 See note 19.

21 William Dean Howells, A Hazard of New Fortunes (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1889), 184.

22 Sidney Fairfield, “The Tyranny of the Pictorial,” Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, June 1985: 861–64, at 864.

23 Henry James, “Preface,” in The Golden Bowl (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1909), v–xxv.

24 Franz Kafka, “Franz Kafka an den Kurt Wolff Verlag (G. H. Meyer) [1915],” in Franz Kafka (3. Juli 1883–3. Juni 1924). Briefe und Tagebücher, ed. Werner Haas, https://homepage.univie.ac.at/werner.haas/index.html (accessed on June 8, 2023).

25 See the note to Argument 12 above at note 24 above.

26 Nicholas Horsfall argues that this negative view of illustration existed already in antiquity; Nicholas Horsfall, “The Origins of the Illustrated Book,” in Katz, History of Book Illustration, 60–88, esp. 64–65.

27 Harthan writes that this criticism can already be found in the Renaissance; Harthan, History of the Illustrated Book, 53. However, he cites no examples. We find the first example of this type of critique in a letter by Voltaire to Charles-Joseph Panckoucke, dated 12 January 1778; Voltaire, Œuvres complètes: Nouvelle édition, 52 vols (Paris: Garnier frères, 1877–85), 50: 342.

28 Letter from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Coindet, dated 7 December 1760; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Correspondance complète, ed. R. A. Leigh, 52 vols. (Geneva: Institut et musée Voltaire, 1965–98), 7: letter 1183. We gratefully acknowledge a reference to this letter in Tane, “Livre illustré au xviii^e siècle.”

29 For the critical reception of Claude Joseph Dorat’s illustrated works from 1764–65, see Anthony Griffiths, Prints for Books: Book Illustration in France, 1760–1800 (London: British Library, 2004), 31–33. The idea that illustrations are pursued for commercial reasons can also be identified in the reference to subscribers by Voltaire in a letter to Claude-Philippe Fyot de la Marche, dated 8 October 1761; Voltaire, Correspondance: Mai 1761–Décembre 1761, Œuvres compl ètes de Voltaire, vols. 52 (Paris: Garnier, 1883), 41: letter 4703, 471–2. see note 46 below.

30 Harthan suggests that this prohibition explains the scarcity of illustrations in works from the Jewish tradition, but does not provide examples of texts in which illustration is explicitly rejected on the grounds of Exodus 20:4; Harthan, History of the Illustrated Book, 49.

31 Ibid., 172.

32 Henry James, “American Letters,” in Literary Criticism, Vol. 1: Essays on Literature; American Writers; English Writers, ed. Leon Edel (New York: Library of America, 1984), 683; cited in Tucker, Illustration of the Master, 10.

33 Fairfield, “Tyranny of the Pictorial.”

34 Thomas, “Poetry and Illustration,” 358.

35 Tucker, Illustration of the Master, 136.

36 Fairfield, “Tyranny of the Pictorial,” 863–64.

37 Tucker, Illustration of the Master, 13.

38 Thomas, “Poetry and Illustration,” 370. See also Amy Tucker’s discussion of James’s similar views; Illustration of the Master, 159.

39 See the note to Argument 5 at note 17 above.

40 Rachel Schmidt, Critical Images: The Canonization of Don Quixote through Illustrated Editions of the Eighteenth Century (Montreal: McGill Queens University Press, 1999), 72.

41 John D. Oldfield, “Advertisement Concerning the Prints,” in The Life and Exploits of the Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote de la Mancha, 4 vols (London: J. & R. Tonson, 1742), I: xxv. This is a translation of Oldfield’s 1738 essay. See “Advertencias de D. Juan Oldfield Doctor en Medicina sobre las Estampas desta Historia,” in Vida y hechos del ingenioso caballero Don Quixote de la Mancha, by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, 4 vols (London: J. & R. Tonson, 1738), I: ii–iii; cited in Schmidt, Critical Images, 72.

42 For instance, Rudolf Behrens and Jörg Steigerwald, “Imagination,” in Handbuch Europäische Aufklärung. Begriffe, Konzepte, Wirkung, ed. Heinz Thoma (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2015), 277–88; Harriet Jump Devine, “‘A Kind of Witchcraft’: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Poetic Imagination,” Women’s Writing 4, no. 2 (1997): 235–45.

43 The association between the positive view of the imagination and a critique of illustration is also suggested by Thomas, “Poetry and Illustration,” 370.

44 Ibid., 355; Lamb, “To Samuel Rogers,” 327.

45 E. V. Lucas, ed., Poems and Plays by Charles and Mary Lamb (New York: MacMillan Co., 1913), 100–01.

46 In a letter to Claude-Philippe Fyot de la Marche, dated 8 October 1761, Voltaire writes: “Je vous avoue que, dans ces ornaments, je demande célérité plutôt que perfection; je n’ai jamais trop aimé les estampes dans les livres; que m’importe une taille-douce quand je lis le second livre de Virgile, et quel burin ajoutera quelque chose à la description de la ruine de Troie? Mais les souscripteurs aiment ces pompons, et il faut les contenter.” Harthan claims that one can already find the criticism of illustration as luxurious in the Renaissance, but he does not provide any examples; Harthan, History of the Illustrated Book, 53. Voltaire, Correspondance, 41: letter 4703, 471.

47 On the Shakespeare galleries to which Lamb refers, see Thomas, “Poetry and Illustration,” 359–60.

48 Charles Lamb, Works, 5 vols (New York W. J. Widdleton, 1870), 2: 338.

49 The original reads: “Jamais, moi vivant, on ne m’illustrera, parce que: la plus belle description littéraire est dévorée par le plus piètre dessin. Si précis net que soit un type en littérature, [cut by Flaubert] du moment qu’il [cut by Flaubert] qu’un type est fixé par le crayon, il perd ce caractère de généralité, cette ressemblance avec mille objets connus qui font dire au lecteur: ‘J’ai vu cela’ ou ‘cela doit être’”; Gustave Flaubert, Correspondance. Édition électronique, ed. Yvan Leclerc and Danielle Girard (Rouen: Centre Flaubert, 2017), https://flaubert.univ-rouen.fr/correspondance/edition/ (accessed on June 8, 2023).

50 Charles T. Congdon, “Over-Illustration,” The North American Review 139 (1884): 480–91, at 486–87. We were alerted to the passage through its discussion in Tucker, Illustration of the Master, 13.

51 Michael Ende, Die unendliche Geschichte, illus. Sebastian Meschenmoser (Stuttgart: Thienemann, 2019).

52 H. J. Schueler, “Michael Ende’s Die unendliche Geschichte and the Recovery of Myth through Romance,” Seminar 23, no. 4 (1987): 355–74, at 363. Schueler, however, also rightly cautions that Ende uses the second half of his novel to warn against the dangers of an unchecked imagination; 369.

53 “Bilder schien es keine zu geben […]”; Ende, Die unendliche Geschichte, 11.

54 Ibid., 28.

55 Schwarcz, Ways of the Illustrator, 2.

56 For instance, Michele Landsberg, A Guide to Children’s Books (Markham: Penguin, 1985), 33–4.

57 Schwarcz, Ways of the Illustrator, 2.

58 Perry Nodelman, Words about Pictures: The Narrative Art of Picture Books (Athens: Georgia University Press, 1988), 284; also 278.

59 Marcel Reich-Ranicki, “Die Einbildungskraft ganz frey erhalten,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, March 19, 2008.

60 Nodelman, Words about Pictures, 230.

61 Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 139.

62 Harthan, History of the Illustrated Book, 278.

63 Ibid., 140. Antony Griffiths notes that 1760 is the beginning of the “boom” in French illustration; Griffiths, Prints for Books, x.

64 Claude Joseph Dorat: Lettre de Barnevelt dans sa prison à Truman son ami (Geneva & Paris: Bauche, 1766); Les Baisers (La Haye: Delalain, 1770); Fables (La Haye: Delalain, 1772).

65 Griffiths, Prints for Books, 33.

66 Ibid. Based on the anecdote in Louis Petit de Bachaumont, Mémoires secrets, 18 vols (London: John Adamsohn 1780), 14: 12–3 (entry for 4 April 1779).

67 Cited in Griffiths, Prints for Books, 33.

68 D’Arcy Wood, Shock of the Real, 173.

69 Anon., “Illustrated Books,” 168.

70 Ibid., 175.

71 Fairfield, “Tyranny of the Pictorial,” 863.

72 Ibid., 861.

73 “Je ne vois pas pourquoi Mr Flaubert ne veut pas permettre des éditions illustrées aujourd’hui, car cela ne fait de tort à aucun ouvrage et cela ne le choquait pas tant, il y a 5 ans lorsque il m’a vendu Mme Bovary avec pleine franchise et liberté d’exploitation ce qui me donnait le droit de faire si bon me semblait des éditions illustrées”; letter from Ernest Duplan to Gustave Flaubert, 11 June 1862; Flaubert, Correspondance.

74 “Sur le chef des illustrations, je trouve que vous avez tort au point de vue de l’intérêt et que vous avez raison au point de vue de l’art et du goût”; letter from Ernest Duplan to Gustave Flaubert, 14 June 1862; Flaubert, Correspondance.

75 The two novels with illustrations were Washington Square (1880) and The Turn of the Screw (1898). Later, James’s novels were republished with illustrations in his New York editions. However, the illustrations—photographs by Alvin Langdon Coburn—of these later editions were subjected to James’s rigid authorial control and approval; Henry James, “Preface to the ‘Golden Bowl,’” in The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1934), 333–4. On James’s decision to include illustrations despite his objections, see Colin Dickley, “The End of Illustration: The Photographic Novels of Henry James, André Breton, Virginia Woolf, and W. G. Sebald” (Ph.D. diss., University of Southern California, 2011).

76 See the note to Argument 8 at note 20 above. Additionally, James was also committed to an understanding of writing and pictorial representation as separate art forms; Tucker, Illustration of the Master, 158–59.

77 Cited in Charles Harmon, “Alvin Langdon Coburn’s Frontispieces to Henry James’s New York Edition: Pictures of an Institutional Imaginary,” in The Victorian Illustrated Book, ed. Richard Maxwell (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2002), 297–331.

78 Adam Sonstegard notes more generally that contemporary editions of English and North American realist literature remove all paratexts that accompanied the texts in their original publications, including illustrations; Adam Sonstegaard, Artistic Liberties: American Literary Realism and Graphic Illustration (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2014), 4.

79 For instance, Heller and Chwast, Illustration, 11.

80 William Wordsworth, “Illustrated Books and Newspapers,” in Last Poems, 1821–1850, ed. Jared Curtis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 405–06.

81 D’Arcy Wood, Shock of the Real, 6.

82 Anon., “Illustrated Books,” 171.

83 Ibid.

84 Ibid.

85 Tucker, Illustration of the Master, 6–7; see also Brake and Demoor, “Introduction,” 5.

86 The passage is here reproduced as cited in Tucker, Illustration of the Master, 6–7.

87 “Was einmal Geist hieß wird von Illustrationen abgelöst”; Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia. Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001), 160.

88 S. Jay Samuels, “Attentional Process on Reading: The Effect of Pictures on the Acquisition of Reading Responses,” Journal of Educational Psychology 58 (1967), 337–42, at 341.

89 Nodelman, Words about Pictures, 278; Evelyn Goldsmith, Research in Illustration: An Approach and a Review (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 80–120.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Martin Wagner

Martin Wagner is Associate Professor of German at the University of Calgary. He is the author of The Narratology of Observation: Studies in a Technique of European Literary Realism (De Gruyter, 2018) and A Stage for Debate: The Political Significance of Vienna’s Burgtheater, 1814–1867 (University of Toronto Press, 2023), as well as the editor and translator of Selected Works by J. M. R. Lenz: Plays, Stories, Essays, and Poems (Camden House, 2019; together with Ellwood Wiggins).

Dante Prado

Dante Prado is a doctoral student at the University of British Columbia. He has published articles on German modernism and narrative theory.