Image

The past is not dead, but is living in us, and will be alive in the future which we are now helping to make.

—William Morris, “Preface,” Medieval Lore from Bartholomew Anglicus.¹

Prompted by the word image, this mini-essay recalls a Greco-Roman legacy of the sister arts.² While the Victorians creatively expanded the relationship between the visual and the verbal, we reconceive such a relationship again in our digital era. The nineteenth century witnessed an increase of illustrated texts. Poems inspired art, paintings inspired poems, and painters appended verses to artworks. The Pre-Raphaelite arts and crafts movement was born. Victorians flourished as satirical cartoonists; illustrated magazines and novels thrived; museum reforms engaged Parliament commissions and journalists. Developments in color theory fostered ideas about how the eye works with light, while optical devices replaced the camera obscura's focus on interiority. Color-makers created new pigments. In fact, as Martin Meisel remarked, the century's collaboration between storytelling and image-making markedly characterized theater, literature and art.³ Additionally, the visual arts helped shape, not simply illustrate, science, including the mind sciences, and numerous other fields. Notably, too, the 2017 John Lockwood Kipling exhibit at the Victoria and Albert Museum/Bard Graduate Center reveals the complexity of arts and crafts debates across the Empire—with their cultural, economic, and political implications.

Some years ago Jonah Siegel argued that, due to modern definitions, we have greatly underestimated the “power, persistence, and coherence of a culture of art that is so evidently important for writers from Reynolds to James, from Keats to Wilde, and beyond.”⁴ While cultural coherence might be questioned, our underestimation continues. The “pictorial turn” and more recent image and cognitive theories have certainly helped us understand multiple ways in which we can consider what images are and how we relate to them, whether graphic, optical, perceptual, mental, or verbal.”⁵ Yet we still downplay their collaborative influence on cultural transformation, on who we are … and who we will be.

Scholars often privilege the verbal or ignore relationships of image and text that affected both sexes and all classes in the long nineteenth century. To be sure, websites such as Victoriaweb, Victorianvoices.net, Center for Digital Humanities, Toronto, the Blake and Rossetti archives, the British Library, or BRANCH feature an array of texts, criticism, and images. Digital Humanities flourishes. Nonetheless, multiple publishers continue to offer e-books or reprints lacking the original Victorian illustrations or they limit illustrations in scholarly works, dramatically altering meaning and interpretation. As J. Hillis Miller noted, in separating images from text we miss “the meanings and forces generated by their adjacency.”⁶ Today's studies of nineteenth-century texts prove strongest when they address kinds of images accompanying a text and analyze images created by the text, within historical, aesthetic, and sociological contexts. It is clear that our cultural conditions for seeing, imagining and knowing have now radically altered. Perhaps there are reasons why we underestimate. In fact, why do some paired verbal or visual objects last and some not? According to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, texts hold virtual potentialities for their future consumers.⁷ One or the other type of representation may drop away permanently; some survive doubly, some singly, some do not survive at all. Some become agents of cultural change. W. J. T. Mitchell rightly suggests that images last when they hold an unknown within them “waiting to be described in a new way.”⁸ The greatness of Victorian literature lies partly in its dual (and then multiplied) dimensions of meaning, whether that derives from double poems, dramatic monologues with silent auditors, pendant poems, double plots, other aesthetic forms stressing dual perspective, irony, metaphor and simile, intertexts, or because of complex relationships of image and text. Such collaborations—from Goblin Market to David Copperfield to The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals to Just So Stories—sparked Victorians’ imaginations and stir our minds today. How? Such image/texts question themselves even as they put forth meanings. They demand a cognitive fluidity—even a halting and restarting—more than merely a focusing on separate visual or verbal components and more than merely thinking in terms of illustration.

Relationships between image and text in the long nineteenth century evolved, depending upon genre, tone, type, size and the placement of art and words. It matters greatly that for the full-page serial illustration, “Rebecca's Farewell,” in Vanity Fair's Chapter One, William Thackeray altered his sketch spatially, including details that previewed significant moments to come in the novel.⁹ He inserted two urns, two pillars, two coachmen, a serpentine whip, re-centered Becky and her toss of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary, and proceeded to create a double response towards his fiction—within the image itself and within the reader-viewer. Little Laura's sentiment and kind Jemima's terror are equally satirized. Conversely, it matters to an interpretation of “The Impercipient” that Thomas Hardy's title indicates deficient perception and that his illustration for the poem features the interior of a cathedral with the top of the image cut off (a truncated vertical indicates a ruin, not any avenue to heaven) and the backs of a congregation.¹⁰ Similarly, it matters that Lewis Carroll's less effective Underground images served as models for Tenniel's Wonderland. ¹¹ The relationship of visual and verbal dimensions in nineteenth-century texts varies. It ranges from clear reinforcement, to play, to repetition with difference, to argument, to collaboration, to opposition, to sly undercutting, to open questioning, to insistence on a reprocessing for reasons from ethics to allegory recognition. The field of Victorian images and texts—how they function in meaning-making and signal cultural changes that are intellectual, moral, and social—still remains underexplored.

To be sure, readers and viewers are not all alike. Laura Otis's research draws on advances in neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, and linguistics to explore kinds of mental processing, some beyond visual and verbal.¹² As we try to understand how cultural change zigzagged us towards the age of digital media and beyond, we must continue to investigate nineteenth-century visual and verbal ways of seeing, imagining, knowing.