Dominant Visual Narrative, the Competitive Marketing and Metacritical Functions of Illustrations, and Robert Morison’s 1793 Edition of James Thomson’s The Seasons Sandro Jung Offering a book-historical contextualisation of the competitive marketing of illustrated editions of James Thomson’s best-selling modern classic, The Seasons (1730), as well as the role of illustrations in a multi-medial reading history of the poem, the article examines the formation of a dominant-paradigmatic eighteenth-century visual narrative of the poem that is deliberately countered by the Perth bookseller, Robert Morison. Morison’s 1793 quarto subscription edition is shown to be the result of a thoughtful engagement with the marketing strategies of competing bookselling firms, including both the subjects and the formats they selected for their editions. The article discusses an important metacritical account, not hitherto discussed by scholars of Thomson, of how a period critic understood the interpretive functions of illustrations of The Seasons as creative reworkings and medial extensions of the poem, as well as models of how to read the printed text. It then elaborates on how dominant visual narratives were being negotiated by the publishers of different high-end editions. Embedded within the visual reading history of the poem, the article offers the first detailed study of the visual apparatus that Charles Catton and Richard Corbould produced for Morison’s edition. It also highlights the ways in which the different plates refashioned and reoriented existing interpretive narratives. My examination reveals the illustrations by Catton and Corbould to represent different metacritical instances of meaning-making that amplify Thomson’s text, rather than merely making it present on its own terms. Printed book illustrations codify textual passages by giving concrete visual form to them, implicitly singling out these very passages through their selection and the mediating attention they received from the artists producing them. These visual interpreters, who translated them into a pictorially AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 46 (2021) · Heft 1 Gunther Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.2357/ AAA-2020-0003 Sandro Jung 44 and iconographically defined framework, conceived them as lenses through which the text of the edition and especially the specific text illustrated should be understood. Their iconic renderings of particular situations, characters, settings, and objects represent interpretations and medial translations with potentially significant impact on reader-viewers. Realised and multiplied on the printed page through the reproductive text technology of the engraving, eighteenth-century book illustrations reached readers and book buyers in their thousands, thus facilitating widespread knowledge of iconic meaning through visual literacy that was otherwise shaped by art and the fashionable material culture of the period. The process of illustrative codification entails the generating of textual meaning both in terms of how visual narratives are constructed and how the multimedial dynamic of the illustrated edition functions to produce a meaning that is amplified by printed images. Book illustrations operate intratextually within the codex of which they are a part. Their presence in an edition does not, however, imply that they were specifically commissioned for the edition of the work in which readers meet them; for publishers in the eighteenth century frequently reprinted illustrations and opportunistically used them for their books. This historical practice complicates ideal readings of the inextricable, bimedial interrelationship of word and image, the latter assumed to be particularly attuned to the codex in which it appears, which ignore the commercial and material production of illustrated books and particular practices involving the use of printed images. Extra-illustrations thus complicate the individual and cumulative meanings of originally included plates, altering patterns and strategies of signification by amplifying the illustrative apparatus (Jung 2020: 301-311). At the same time literary illustrations, text-related as they are, nevertheless do not and cannot replicate all aspects of typographic textuality and verbal language. Read on their own, they generate meaning independently of the text. In fact, they are frequently neither absolutely synchronised with and authorised by the printed text nor a mimetic copy in iconic terms of that which an author articulated verbally. Book illustrations thus create order and structures of their own, even though they are brought into dialogue with the printed words on the page through the physical proximity of words and their illustrations. Their medial and semiotic distinctness is rooted in their conception and materialisation. Printed images are the collaborative effort of designers and engravers, as well as the products of extensive engagement on the part of the artist with the text to decide which visual structure to devise to represent the author’s words, images, and metaphorical and symbolic discourse by. Their apposite placement in the printed codex depends on binders whose responsibility it is to put source text and illustration in close physical proximity to allow cross-reference as well as intermedial reading. There is particular value in studying literary book illustrations, especially when these illustrations were generated over time in an economic Robert Morison’s 1793 Edition of James Thomson’s The Seasons 45 environment where different publishers commissioned competing editions. The illustrations in these volumes are relational in that they are created, albeit not at all times, as responses to one another. While dominant visual representations of the works mediated through printed illustrations are generated, illustrations deliberately departing from a supposed standard of representation or model of interpretation also have the potential to counter these standards and models, in the process giving rise to and embodying a new interpretation of the work the plates accompany. The study of a work that was illustrated only once will produce insight into how an illustrator as supposedly authorised interpreter made sense of the work; such a focus on a single illustrated edition, however, is limited in its synchronic focus in that it does not allow an understanding of this single instance of visual criticism as part of a visually mediated history of reading. By contrast, the diachronic and market-focused charting of the reception and reading histories of particular, frequently illustrated works offers insights that relate to a range of different aspects of the marketplace for literature. It illuminates how paratext and illustrative apparatus frame, shape, and canonise meaning and textual reputations, as well as how, in turn, they are shaped in response to competing editions. Above all, these histories concern themselves with comparative contextualisations of illustrations across time in order to conceive them as acts of reading that are articulated in different contexts and translated into the visual medium while adhering to predominant conventions of iconic representation. Understood as part of a dynamic and responsive marketplace, these illustrations embody strategies on the part of different publishers to create not brand identity only but also iconic meaning that is memorable and aids understanding of the work illustrated. Taken together, the illustrations different publishers commission for a work are part of an archive of heterogeneous historical (visual) reading experience. It is the aim of this article to make sense of how the artists responsible for the illustrations of the upmarket illustrated edition of James Thomson’s modern classic, The Seasons (1730), published, in 1793, by the Perth bookseller, Robert Morison, distinguished their illustrative apparatus from others by departing from models of illustration used previously. It will study how, through their choice of scenes and subjects to be visualised, the artists recast prevailing interpretations of the poem. Readers of illustrated editions not only paid attention to the typographic words on the page but also apprehended meaning from the illustrations, especially if these plates offered visual narratives, an in-depth engagement with which facilitated the training of visual literacy. Focusing on the competitive production and marketing of illustrated editions of Thomson’s poem in 1793, the article will examine in which ways Morison took decisions in terms of the iconic mediation of the work that differed from his competitors. I will show that Morison intentionally opted not to align himself with visual matrices defined by earlier publishers. Furthermore, I shall explain how he conceived Sandro Jung 46 of his project as a cultural one that promoted not only an alternative reading of The Seasons but, in doing so, also helped his own firm to cast itself as a patriotic innovator and advocate of modern Scottish literature. In the process, Morison’s edition, and its illustrations in particular, rediscovered and recontextualised Thomson’s work as much more than the interpolated episodes by which it had frequently, reductively been represented. In order to understand how fundamentally different Morison’s edition - both in terms of the range of its illustrative apparatus and the diverse functions of the plates - was from those of his competitors as well as from those that had appeared from the late 1770s, it is apposite to recover how sophisticated prints produced for inclusion in editions of literary works were supposed to function. Likewise, it is necessary to explain how the codification of the interpolated tales from The Seasons led to a dominant visual narrative by which the poem was widely imagined. In this respect, it needs to be probed how Morison’s competitors approached and engaged with this visual narrative as they commissioned visual paratext for their own projects. Few eighteenth-century commentators explicitly define the function and purpose of literary book illustration, as well as how illustrations of literary works operate interpretively through visualisation. This is surprising, given the increasing use of printed illustrations in editions, especially in the last three decades of the century. The general absence of period commentary on the paratextual-interpretive nature of book illustrations makes an early nineteenth-century metacritical discussion of the manner in which a prominent visual artist translated a literary work into the medium of an engraved print all the more valuable for the field of iconological literary criticism. In 1803, a German critic of art sought to determine the precise function of literary book illustrations in relation to one of Britain’s modern classics. In “Einige Gedanken über Bücherkupfer und ästhetische Kupfererklärungen, samt einer Probe davon an zwey Scenen aus der Erzählung: Lavinia à Palemon in Thomsons Jahreszeiten”, the author takes as his subject two recently published folio prints. These prints were based on paintings by William Hamilton, which had been commissioned as part of a subscription edition of The Seasons. The two engravers, Peltro William Tomkins and Francesco Bartolozzi, advertised this edition, of which they served as publishers, from 1792. Because of the high-end nature of the project and the costs involved, the edition was long in the making and was eventually completed in 1798, proving the most monumental edition of Thomson’s work. Apart from acknowledging the decorative purpose of the prints, the author of “Einige Gedanken” comments on their ancillary functions, that is the explication or bringing to life of different parts of the book (“Erläuterung oder Belebung dieser und jener Stelle eines Buches”), as well as their serving as commentary (33, 34). Not only does the critic emphasise the capacity on the part of the visual medium to enrich and make more Robert Morison’s 1793 Edition of James Thomson’s The Seasons 47 vivid the thoughts that informed the iconic arrangement of figures and objects on the printed page. But he also stresses the illustrator’s role to make present that which was not expressed by the author to create a stronger effect on reader-viewers and to impress meaning more strikingly and concretely. The illustrator thus is not only commentator but centrally involved in directing meaning, amplifying it, where necessary: Denn gemeiniglich verschönert, bereichert und belebt die gute Zeichnung den Gedanken, welchem sie zugehört, … wo man dem Sinne des Autors auf neuen von ihm nicht berührten und benutzen Seiten zu Hülfe kommen, und ihn noch wirksamer machen kann. (35) Figure 1.William Hamilton, “Lavinia and Her Mother”, The Seasons (London: W. P. Tomkins, 1798). Courtesy of the British Museum Sandro Jung 48 The prints, which were engraved by Tomkins as part of a series Tomkins and Bartolozzi had commissioned for their edition, depicted scenes from one of Thomson’s interpolated “parabolic” episodes, a tale introduced in “Autumn” (Imai 1993: 3). While the tale focused on the elevation of the impoverished gleaner, Lavinia, by the landowner, Palemon, the first print discussed in “Einige Gedanken” is “Lavinia and Her Mother” (Figure 1). Thomson had cast Lavinia as dutiful daughter, who, braving necessity through loss of fortune, looks after her mother in old age. In “Description of Pictures illustrative of Thomson’s Seasons, now Exhibiting at Tomkins and Co.’s, No. 49, New Bond Street” (London, 1793)”, which accompanied the first instalment of the printed text of the edition and included five prints, of which “Lavinia and Her Mother”, was one, Tomkins reproduced 38 lines from “Autumn” to gloss the print. These lines included Lavinia’s mother only once - “She [Lavinia], with her widow’d mother, feeble, old / And poor, liv’d in a cottage, far retired” (“Description”, 9) - which provided the artist with little tangible information on how to render Lavinia’s parent. The daughter is characterised as a moral paragon, whose innocence, beauty, and moral purity attract Palemon: “Her form was fresher than the morning rose, / When the dew wets its leaves; unstain’d, and pure, / As is the lily, or the mountain snow” (“Description”, 9). According to the German critic of the print, the manner in which the character is represented both verbally and pictorially promotes a strong affective response of sympathy in readers, what he terms “eine unwiderstehliche Kraft des süssesten Einflusses auf die Herzen der Leser” (“Einige Gedanken”, 36). While he reads the illustration as closely echoing Thomson’s characterisation of Lavinia, he also discovers narrative elements in the engraving that are not given by Thomson in the poem: he identifies in Hamilton’s design the endeavour to flesh out, develop, and elaborate the emotional bond and confidence between mother and daughter. It is the situation of the women’s destitution that generates in the creative artist ideas with which he then visually expands the meaning of the verbal text. Denn wenn eine Mutter, vom Schicksal jezt [sic] hintangesetzt, ihre traurigen Erinnerungen an die glänzende Vergangenheit der mitleidenden Tochter erzählt, so gestattet diese wehmütig gegebene und gleichfühlende empfangene Mittheilung, dem Künstler ungleich mehr darstellungsfähige Ideen, als wenn er, wie bey Numer 2 [the print depicting Palemon and Lavinia], seine Gedanken in das Gebiet der vagen Phantasie hinüber spielen muss, wo er die Natur verlässt und auch hinwiederum von ihr verlassen wird. (39) The author of “Einige Gedanken” concludes his account of the function of the illustration by noting that, while Lavinia is a concrete, iconic embodiment of Thomson’s character, whose significance works intratextually as part of the season in which she appears, Hamilton’s design also possesses an extratextual function beyond the codex of the subscription edition in Robert Morison’s 1793 Edition of James Thomson’s The Seasons 49 that Lavinia represents ideal womanhood. 1 Implicitly, then, it is the illustrator’s task to go, where possible, beyond the specific relationality between text and image by recognising the symbolic function of individual characters and, as a result, to present individuals such as Lavinia as idealised and as a paragon of virtue. At the same time, the artist has the ability through inter-iconic recall of other artworks that he references, incorporates, or adapts to create inferences and associations that may enrich textual understanding of the illustrated printed text. The critic then compares “Lavinia and Her Mother” with “Palemon and Lavinia”, to the detriment of the latter, for in contrast to the emotive characterisation of Lavinia in the first print, the illustrator did not capture and concretise the range of feelings experienced in the encounter of the gleaner and the master of the field, the subject of the second engraving. According to the critic, it should have been the artist’s task to clarify the rapid progress from interest to love that Thomson implicitly presents - thus furnishing a way and iconic mediation of the dynamics of the lovers’ response to one another that impresses upon viewers the romantic meaning of the poet’s tale. While the critic notes that Lavinia’s depiction in the first plate affected beholders immediately through her apparent grace, innocence, and gentle attraction (“sanftem Reitze” [43]), the artist’s creative imagination has not succeeded in conveying unmistakably the gleaner’s confusion at Palemon’s declaration of love in the second print. The author of “Einige Gedanken” attributes astonishment to Palemon at not being able to reconcile Lavinia’s menial occupation with her nobility of appearance (45). He finds the rendering of the pair in the scene reductive, since it is too fanciful and not sufficiently expressive of the love-at-first-sight moment Thomson presents. Recognising the particular hybrid medial quality of “Palemon and Lavinia”, which is a large head vignette at the start of “Autumn”, occupying the top half of the folio page (“Lavinia u. Palemon [Ueber dem Texte des ersten Blattes am Herbsthefte der Englischen Ausgabe]”), the lower half featuring the typographic text, the critic insists on the need for the artist to embody the emotional economy of the printed text. Hamilton, in the critic’s view, paid too much attention to the idealisation of the characters, in the process not focusing on the emotive experience of the beholder (“Empfindung des Beobachters”). As a result, reader-viewers need to use inter-iconic recall, establishing connections between different prints illustrating the tale, to understand their appeal to the passions (47). Illustrations are thus understood as media of interpretation as much as of “orientation” (47), and should supply extratextual gesture and expressiveness to 1 The critic concludes his encomium on the successful realisation of Lavinia: “So müsste die Auserwählte ihres Geschlechts aussehen, mit diesem in sich gekehrten jungfräulichen Blick, mit dem anspruchlosen Unbewusstseyn ihrer Würde, diese in jeder Miene ankündigen - die einen Gottgesandten zu empfangen bestimmt wäre” (“Einige Gedanken”, 45). Sandro Jung 50 enhance the meaning of the work illustrated to prevent a misconception (of which the critic declares Hamilton guilty) of Palemon as cold and wooden (47-48). While reading the two prints through the text of Thomson’s tale, the author of “Einige Gedanken” does not pay attention to how the print would have operated within the material codex of the edition. His account does not acknowledge how unusual such a set of upmarket prints would have been and how few readers would have been able, in terms of affordability, to view them as part of their consumption of The Seasons. For at a time when the addition of printed images was a costly endeavour that was not necessary for the functional realisation of the codex, illustrations possessed a special status, conveying exclusive symbolic capital. They mattered particularly because they were supplementary paratexts that in medial terms distinguished illustrated from non-illustrated editions. Depending on the quality of their execution, they were considered as artworks in their own right, even though they were the products of reproductive processes. In the hand-press era, the mass-production of illustrations on the scale seen in the nineteenth century was not yet possible. Then, the inclusion of illustrations in editions of literary works constituted an act facilitating cultural literacy through which intermedial reading practices became less esoteric at the same time that socially defined knowledge of artistic representational conventions became more common. Apart from their interpretive function, illustrations also affected the producers of editions of the texts that had already been illustrated. For first or early illustrated editions frequently provided a matrix that possessed a model function for all illustrated editions of the same work. This was particularly true if illustrated editions of a work were issued by a copyrightholding bookseller who not only established a monopoly for publishing the work but was also able to reuse the copperplates he had commissioned for previous editions. In the case of bestsellers such as The Seasons and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), the same illustrations continued to be used for decades, thereby not only introducing a “default” format through which readers of these works became familiar with the typographic texts they read; but, in appearing as pseudo-authorised metatexts through which these texts had to be understood, these illustrations also became paradigmatic visual castings of textual meaning. The repeated use of the same images provided a sense of interpretive stability through the visual medium that was challenged only when new illustrations that differed significantly from the earlier ones entered the print economy of the literary marketplace. The extended use of the same illustrations not only affected the ways in which booksellers engaged with illustrations as originally copyrighted property once the monopoly of copyright control ceased and it became possible to reprint the text. For, apart from pragmatically reprinting the existing designs to save costs, booksellers and the artists they employed, in Robert Morison’s 1793 Edition of James Thomson’s The Seasons 51 devising illustrated apparatuses for new editions, regularly adopted the subjects previously illustrated: they thereby aligned themselves with a “tradition” of illustrating the texts they were issuing afresh in newly illustrated form, while at the same time consolidating the codification of both the subjects selected for illustration and the ways in which they were rendered visually. This practice was underpinned by an attempt to furnish readerpurchasers with a kind of illustration with which they were familiar and which resembled other illustrations that had already appeared in editions. Such codification could entail the continued use of representational styles or modes, as well as, more obviously, the visualisation of scenes previously chosen. In the cases of The Seasons and Robinson Crusoe, both the consolidation and the expansion of subject range can be identified in editions published in the last two decades of the eighteenth century. Probably owing to the increasing number of paintings that were inspired by Thomson’s poem from the mid-century, Richard Altick tracing more than 150 paintings related to the poem (Altick 1986: 390), and the lapse of the copyright term protecting Andrew Millar’s exclusive publishing of the work, new illustrated editions of the poem appeared as early as 1777. For this account of the interpretive functioning of book illustration, a relational understanding of different editions and their visual apparatuses is necessary: J. French’s 1777 London edition introduced a new realist impulse that rejected the allegorical focus of the illustrations by William Kent and Bernard Picart that were included in Millar’s editions of 1730 (Penigault-Duhet 93-94); it was John Murray’s four-shilling edition, published in 1778, however, with “rough and appropriately picturesque” (Essick 1985: 863) designs by the painters, David Allan and William Hamilton, which introduced a new focus on Thomson’s interpolated stories. 2 The tales constituted “selective readings of the poem” (Van De Walle 2015: 262) that would subsequently prove dominant. Even while new editions succeeded Murray’s, resized and simplified versions of Kent’s designs for the 1730 quarto edition continued to be reprinted in low-end editions until the mid-1780s. In his edition Murray continued the dual focus on allegory and realism, opting however to separate the two strands that in Kent’s tableaux had been interconnected. As a result, Murray’s volume includes an illustrative apparatus that boasts four plates of the seasonal allegories, “emblematical figures after the manner of the Antients” 3 , which are reminiscent of the plates by Picart that Millar had commissioned for his 1730 octavo edition. At the same time, the volume features three plates by Hamilton that illustrate the interpolated episodes of Damon and Musidora, Palemon and Lavinia, and that of the Perishing Man in the Snow, the first particularly 2 In France, the interpolated episodes had already been visualised as part of illustrated editions since 1759. 3 Westminster Magazine, 6 (September 1778), 487. Sandro Jung 52 commended by an early reviewer: “a charming figure, and brings to our remembrance the Venus of Medici, from whence the Designer seems partly to have taken his idea” 4 . The story of Musidora bathing and being spied on by her lover, Damon, was the most frequently illustrated of Thomson’s tales and had already been introduced by Kent into his tableau for “Summer”. That involving the shepherd losing his way in the wintry landscape was illustrated for inclusion in editions of The Seasons only three times during the eighteenth century (Jung 2015: 18-34). 5 Murray did not select the Celadon and Amelia story to be visually interpreted for his edition. This story, which had first been painted, in 1760, by Richard Wilson in “A Summer’s Storm”, occurs in Thomson’s “Summer” and involved two tragic lovers, “a matchless pair” (1162) 6 , out on a walk when they are overtaken by a violent thunderstorm. Amelia falls victim to the forces of nature through lightning, leaving Celadon transformed into a monument of woe. Despite not electing to include an illustration of the two tragic lovers (which would have replaced the Musidora plate so as to adhere to Murray’s scheme of one realist plate per season), it is in the privileging and selection of these three stories that Murray made a decisive choice that would shape how The Seasons was visualised in later decades and concretised in the popular imaginary. And yet John Aikin’s “Essay on the Plan and Character of Thomson’s Seasons”, which was also included in the edition, as well as issued separately, countered this emphasis on the anthropocentric tales with his contextualisation of Thomson’s work as a descriptive poem of natural history, “paint[ing] the face of nature as changing through the changing seasons” (Aikin 1778: viii) and boasting “useful lessons of morality” and “affective relations” (Aikin 1778: viii-ix). Neither the allegorical nor the anthropocentric inscription of the plates presented the work they mediated as possessing a focus on nature, however. Murray’s selection of subjects to be illustrated was pervasive for another reason, for he reissued the plates in editions he published in 1779 and 1792; they were reprinted without his approval in a 1790 pirated London edition, “printed and sold by the booksellers”. That the preference for the interpolated tales was influential and consolidated an understanding of The Seasons as “anthological” (Lethbridge 2000: 90) can be gleaned from the fact that subsequent editions routinely revisited at least one of them, although several editions - especially those undertaken in the 1790s - included visualisations of several of the tales, so that by the end of the century the characters featuring in these tales had turned into widely recognised fictional individuals that did not require any 4 Ibid. 5 Thomas Stothard also illustrated the tale as part of his series of vignettes for the 1793 number of The Royal Engagement Pocket Atlas. 6 All quotations from The Seasons will be cited from James Sambrook’s 1981 edition. Line numbers are furnished parenthetically. Robert Morison’s 1793 Edition of James Thomson’s The Seasons 53 glossing. When Clio Rickman in a poem of 1808, which listed a series of literary characters, noted that “The hapless Celadon bewails his mate, / And wakes your tears for poor Amelia’s fate” 7 , her readers would have known the pair of lovers not only from a range of printed sources but also through their multifarious transmedial embodiment as part of the fashionable material culture of the day. In 1782, the Swiss painter Angellica Kauffman had designed a series of oval prints that illustrated the tales of Celadon and Amelia, Palemon and Lavinia, and Damon and Musidora. The designs were subsequently transferred to objects ranging from mourning pendants and medallions to up-market vases and other porcelain. These remediations of the tales introduced Thomson’s characters to an ever-growing range of readers and consumers. Also in 1782, Lavinia was appropriated as a stock character who featured at a masquerade, a newspaper noting that “Mrs. Blackburn, in Lavinia, looked divinely; every one wished to be a Palemon.” 8 As part of the “imaginative expansion” of the characters (Brewer 2005: 1), David Mountfort in 1783 “enlarged” the Palemon and Lavinia story, terming it “a legendary tale”; another poem, entitled “Lavinia”, appeared in Edinburgh in 1799. The composer, Thomas Billington, produced cantatas of each of the three tales in the late 1780s, that of Celadon and Amelia boasting an engraved image of the pair on its printed wrapper. So, with the exception of the tragic lovers, the interpolated tales were first visualised in print for use in editions and other printed works, but these embodied versions of Thomson’s characters were quickly supplemented by epitextual visual and performative engagements - including Frances Brooke’s comic opera Rosina (1788), which was based on the Palemon and Lavinia tale - through which The Seasons were popularised and a one-sided knowledge of the poem promoted. Wordsworth testified to the centrality of Thomson’s tales in readers’ consumption of The Seasons in 1815 when he notes in the “Essay, Supplementary to the Preface” to Lyrical Ballads: In any well-used copy of the Seasons the book generally opens of itself with the rhapsody on love, or with one of the stories (perhaps ‘Damon and Musidora’); these also are prominent in our collections of Extracts, and are the parts of his Work which, after all, were probably most efficient in first recommending the author to general notice. (Wordsworth 3: 73) Publishers of editions issued in the 1790s largely follow the trend initiated by Murray to illustrate the interpolated episodes, even though as early an edition as Joseph Wenman’s 1785 edition featured a frontispiece of the Celadon and Amelia tale by William Dodd, a plate that was repeatedly reprinted for later editions he issued. The larger the illustrative apparatuses of the editions, the greater the range of visual subject matter, although the 7 Kentish Chronicle or Weekly Post, 8 March 1808. 8 Parker’s General Advertiser and Morning Intelligencer, 19 September 1782. Sandro Jung 54 interpolated episodes had transformed into core subjects that booksellers routinely commissioned artists to illustrate. Thomson’s poem was visualised as a work of anthropocentric focus, and understood as such by Tomkins and Bartolozzi, for “pathetic narrations furnish the most interesting situations in which the pen or the pencil can exhibit human nature.” 9 This shift in visual interpretation and generic definition is especially noticeable in low-end editions that feature only a single plate: increasingly, the interpolated episodes provide the subject for frontispieces, thereby shaping, through this single illustration, the ways in which the reader apprehends the text through the gateway of the frontispiece. In fact, in the 1790s, the decade in which the largest number of British editions of The Seasons is published, it is unusual that an edition does not include an illustration of the interpolated episodes, which - through the inclusion of these tales in anthologies and miscellanies (such as volume 3 of John Roach’s Beauties of the Poets (1794), which reprinted the Palemon and Lavinia tale and included a frontispiece of the lovers by Isaac Cruikshanks) - have transformed not only into “beauties” of the poem but into metonymic placeholders. That Thomson’s characters proved medially mobile aided their recognition and popularity. In this respect, the reach of book illustrations not only extended to those who possessed copies of illustrated editions but, through the mechanisms of advertising, printed illustrations became familiar to those who might not necessarily be in a position to buy them as part of an illustrated edition. At the same time, as early as 1770 a mezzotint engraving undertaken by William Woollett, based on Wilson’s “A Summer’s Storm”, had introduced the visualisation of Thomson’s Celadon and Amelia tale to lovers of art, rather than those who read The Seasons, even though the two groups likely intersected. The mezzotint did not retain the title of Wilson’s painting but was captioned “Celadon and Amelia”. This early medial mobility of the tale testifies to the interconnections that existed between high visual culture and the illustration of books. It furthermore confirms the memorable and detachable status of this tale from the textual structure of The Seasons while nevertheless being identified with Thomson’s poem. Whereas Woollett’s mezzotint was the first of many visual engagements with the poet’s characters, and it would subsequently be reproduced in the German translation of The Seasons that Ludwig Schubart published in 1789 in Berlin, it was not marketed in relation to Thomson’s poem; rather, it was a desirable engraved version of a painting by one of Britain’s foremost landscape painters, and the depiction of landscape was as important as the scene involving the lovers in the foreground. In the marketing of later medial iterations of the interpolated tales or print objects related to Thomson’s work, advertising would frequently highlight the stories’ signature status. In this respect, the media economy 9 The World, 12 April 1792. Robert Morison’s 1793 Edition of James Thomson’s The Seasons 55 of the late eighteenth century, when printed visual culture was becoming increasingly important for book publishing, relied on mechanisms of advertising that utilised epitexts such as prospectuses and artwork on display, including as part of exhibitions, which helped them to engage well-to-do audiences. Potential purchasers would have been able to gain information on visual paratext comprised in editions not only through visits to booksellers’ shops where illustrated editions could be viewed and where plates, especially for high-end, subscription ventures, would have been available as well. They would, furthermore, have learnt about ambitious illustrated editions through separately issued prospectuses and through the publishing proposals printed in newspapers, where the subjects of the illustrations were occasionally given and where readers were informed that they could purchase the plates both as part of the edition as well as separately. Throughout the 1790s booksellers generally sought to align the formats of their illustrative apparatuses of their editions with one another, repeatedly going to great lengths to produce impressive sets of illustrations that outclassed their competitors. In this context of alignment, the high-end edition, published by the Perth firm of Robert Morison, stood out, for the designers responsible for the illustrations did not use existing visualisations as the basis for their own. While Robert Morison had himself included illustrations of two of the interpolated tales - the frontispiece depicting the Celadon and Amelia episode by the Scottish painter Walter Weir, as well as a (small-format stipple) print reproducing a portrait of the gleaner, Lavinia - in his 1790 duodecimo edition (which was republished in 1791 and 1794), the quarto edition the Morison firm published in 1793 impressed through its novelty of visual interpretation: for it did not use a single subject that had been illustrated before. 10 In doing so, Morison created an edition that in terms of its high standard of execution and visual range differed from all other editions of The Seasons published, while also advertising his set of plates as furniture prints suitable for framing and display outside of the codex of the edition. It was Morison’s aim to differentiate his Scottish venture from those editions that were produced in London, although he, like other publishers, recruited English artists to paint the canvases on which the engraved plates were based: Animated by … the very formidable opposition of no less than four different editions in the sister kingdom, R. Morison and Son determined to strain every nerve to produce a work which should lose nothing from comparison with others. They have, therefore, employed two of the most eminent in their profession 10 By the time the plates for Morison’s edition were engraved, another edition had been undertaken by John Murray. This edition boasted a set of new “secular” plates by Conrad Metz (Van De Walle 2015: 262) and included, like the Morison volume, a sheepshearing scene for “Summer”. It is clear that the Morison plates were not based on those designed by Metz, as the latter are all dated 1 December 1792. Sandro Jung 56 in London, viz. Mess. Corbould and Catton, to execute Paintings in Oil - most of which are already finished, and the Engravers are sparing no pains to do justice to designs of such distinguished merit. 11 Morison’s rhetoric of “opposition”, a deliberate act of countering with his own model of illustration competing edition ventures undertaken in Edinburgh and London, even though framed by the national narrative of patriotism he develops for a range of his titles, reflects the financial stakes his edition entailed, the price of the plates amounting to more than £200. 12 His opting for metropolitan artists from the south aligned his venture with the standard that he had otherwise - in his series of “The Scotish Poets” - sought to counter with the illustrations produced by native, Scottish talent (Jung 2014: 13-20). This effort to differentiate his project, despite Robert Heron’s “Critical Essay on the Seasons” and the association of his edition with his series of “The Scotish Poets”, as well as his insistence that with his edition he contributed “to the advancement of Literature, and the progress of all the Sister Fine Arts in our native Country” (Morison 1793: 6), was, however, primarily effected through the tableau plates. One early reviewer termed the engravings “excellent”, noting that, with their edition, the Morison firm had “done honour to their country” 13 . The subjects of the plates did not evoke a sense of déjà-vu. Instead, they conveyed a sense of visual novelty. The series of six full-page illustrations offered an alternative visual reading of the poem that highlighted specific moments of sentiment and tragedy that had not hitherto been chosen for visualisation, even though this dual focus on the tragic-sentimental had underpinned all those editions that had included illustrations of the three most frequently visualised tales. Whereas the majority of book illustrations did not, at that time, feature detailed explanatory caption titles or lines of verse, Morison’s engravings were accompanied by six to seven lines to enable readers to make sense of the specific subject represented. The edition, furthermore, boasted three nontext-interpretive plates: the frontispiece consisting of a portrait of the poet on a pedestal, embellished with three oval vignettes deriving from the series of vignettes that Thomas Stothard had contributed to the 1793 number of Thomas Baker’s annual, the Royal Engagement Pocket Atlas; a landscape vignette on the engraved title page, and an engraving depicting the “Intended Monument for Thomson”, which introduces the four seasons on the pedestal of a sarcophagus on which an effigy of the poet is reclining, a female figure (probably Nature) close beside him, on his right. While Murray had already introduced a monument for the poet, Morison innovates 11 Caledonian Mercury, 7 July 1792. 12 Edinburgh Evening Courant, 11 August 1800. 13 Anthologia Hibernia, or Monthly Collections of Science, Belles-Lettres, and History, 3 (1794): 48. Robert Morison’s 1793 Edition of James Thomson’s The Seasons 57 with his monumental frontispiece in which he characterises Thomson as a painterly poet who is ultimately, as the originator of The Seasons - through the mediation of Stothard, who is not acknowledged as artist - responsible for the subjects of the vignette scenes that had first appeared in the Pocket Atlas. That Robert Morison was certainly aware of the paradigmatic role the interpolated tales played in representing The Seasons as a whole is evidenced by his early efforts to publicise his 1793 quarto edition, which he sold by subscription. For on 10 March 1792, he issued, as a sample of the high-quality printing of his edition, “The Beautiful Episode of Palemon & Lavinia, from Thomson’s The Seasons” 14 . He relied on potential purchasers’ prior knowledge of this “Beautiful Episode”. While the story of Palemon and Lavinia will have drawn potential subscribers to Morison’s venture, this tale had primarily (and savvily) been chosen to demonstrate the high material production quality of the presswork, raising expectations regarding the as yet unspecified illustrative apparatus that may have derived from the plates of the firm’s earlier small-format edition. Subsequently, the advertisements for the different instalments of Morison’s “Elegant Edition of Thomson’s Seasons” also listed the subjects the “Capital Engravings” would illustrate 15 , a practice that had not been used before in relation to editions of The Seasons. Seen in the context of illustrated editions of the 1790s, the plates differed from those commissioned for other editions through their large landscape format - the plates being so large that they barely left any unprinted margin. Morison issued the plates in different states - as proof and ordinary copies, but also in hand-coloured variants - that further emphasised their up-market status. The year 1793 saw the publication of three subscription editions; two additional large-scale edition ventures, which had been advertised since 1792, were still underway. Altogether, however, five illustrated editions of The Seasons were published in 1793, adding to the numerous editions that had flooded the market since Murray’s 1778 edition. Morison’s was the only exclusively Scottish venture, and, at a price of 1 guinea to subscribers (1 guinea 10 shillings to non-subscribers), it was also the most expensive. The Edinburgh bookseller, Peter Hill, co-published “An Elegant Edition of Thomson’s Seasons - With Notes” and 16 illustrations, “Historical Engravings”, “From Original Designs”, with his London partners, J. Strachan and W. Stewart. 16 Even though the title page of the volume gave the year 1792, the final instalment was, in fact, only issued in early 1793. Hill had published an earlier edition in 1789, which had comprised four plates, including illustrations of the Damon and Musidora and Palemon and Lavinia stories, but his 1792 co-published edition illustrated all three interpolated 14 Caledonian Mercury, 10 March 1792. 15 Ibid. 16 Caledonian Mercury, 20 October 1792. Sandro Jung 58 tales and offered “a fine View of the Place of his [Thomson’s] Nativity”. The third subscription edition was published by the London bookseller, Archibald Hamilton, in the second half of 1793, he having issued proposals for his “Splendid Edition” in January that year. The publishing proposal stated that the volume be embellished by “Fourteen capital Engravings” “by the first Artists, from original Paintings, designed on Purpose for this Work” 17 . To distribute the production cost over the course of several months, all publishers opted for part-publication. Morison issued his edition in four instalments, each priced at 5s. 3d. to subscribers and at 7s. 6d. to nonsubscribers, whereas the Hill-Strachan-Stewart edition was issued in five numbers, each instalment selling at 2s. 6d. Hamilton issued five instalments, charging 2s. 6d. for the first four and delivering the final part to subscribers free of charge. 18 By May 1793, the first instalment of Hamilton’s edition was ready, and the bookseller announced his “EXHIBITION of PICTURES illustrative” of The Seasons, “Admittance One Shilling, Descriptive Catalogues included” 19 . Hamilton made use of this exhibition to defray some of the costs related to the edition and used it at the same time to sell the first instalment of the volume. The exhibition complicated the status of the engraved plates in that their origin, located in high-cultural art, rather than their relationship with reproductive technologies and book culture, was highlighted. Like Tomkins’s “Description”, the catalogues available at the exhibition would have served as epitexts of the edition, creating connections between the paintings and Thomson’s text but also entangled associations among the paintings, their engraved versions, and The Seasons. Unlike his competitors, Morison offered specific, plate-related information in his advertisements, apprising potential subscribers that “Specimens of the Plates may be seen at the shops of A. Guthrie … and R. Morison & Son.” 20 On the occasion of announcing the publication of the third instalment, the bookseller also introduced the subject of the plate to be delivered with this part number, “The Country Fire-side on a Winter Evening”, which he terms “a first rate painting” produced by Richard Corbould. 21 The original wrappers of each of the instalments contained further information on the engravings, the wrapper of No. 1, for instance, stating that it included two “elegant” plates entitled “Sheep-Shearing” and “Gleaning”, which were executed by Francis Chesham after paintings by Catton and Corbould. In contrast to the other subscription editions published in 1793, Morison’s edition was the only one that was issued in quarto, a format that 17 General Evening Post, 3 January 1793. 18 Ibid. 19 Star, 21 May 1793. 20 Caledonian Mercury, 29 December 1792. 21 Caledonian Mercury, 29 January 1793. Robert Morison’s 1793 Edition of James Thomson’s The Seasons 59 William Sharp and John Murray had also intended to use for their own projected “splendid” edition. Proposals for this abortive project had stated that the edition would boast 22 copperplates based on “Original Pictures, painted entirely for this Work by Mr. [Robert] Smirke”. Like Morison’s venture, this subscription edition was to be issued in different parts, each instalment to be accompanied by three large plates of the size used by the Perth bookseller, as well as a range of smaller illustrations, a hybrid format that would be used by Archibald Hamilton. The four instalments of Morison’s edition were published ahead of the first number of Sharp and Murray’s edition, which, according to the original publishing prospectus, was scheduled for publication in May 1793, one month before the Morison edition was published. 22 Three proof sheets of plates for the Sharp-Murray project survive 23 , which demonstrate that the publishers had not opted for one of the interpolated stories to be illustrated, either, instead selecting “The Lover’s Dream” as the subject of a full-page plate. Unlike the Morison set of illustrations, however, this plate adopted portrait orientation. A large rectangular vignette illustrated two children playing, one raising his arms in wonder at the sight of a rainbow. The co-published Hill-Strachan-Stewart edition combined full-page illustrations designed by Charles Ansall with smaller putto vignettes, the latter preceding each of the seasons, thereby reducing the cost that the inclusion of only full-page plates would have necessitated. Out of the 16 engravings included in the edition, ten visualised passages from Thomson’s poem, the frontispiece being a portrait of the poet and the second non-textinterpretive plate a topographical illustration depicting Ednam. A symbolic vignette is prefixed to Thomson’s “Hymn”. The publishers complemented visualisations of the tales of Celadon and Amelia, Palemon and Lavinia, and the man perishing in the snow with illustrations of lines from the poem that had not been visualised before. The plate depicting the tragic lovers, however, did not render Amelia as already having been struck by lightning, as Dodd and Weir had presented her in Wenman’s and Morison’s editions respectively, in the process obscuring the tragedy of Amelia’s death, which is not referenced in the accompanying poetry gloss, either. Like the Hill-Strachan-Stewart edition, that published by Archibald Hamilton, which was dedicated to the Earl of Buchan and contained notes by Percival Stockdale, was issued in royal octavo. Hamilton had commissioned Henry Singleton and Thomas Stothard to produce four full-page illustrations, two of which depicted Musidora and the tale of Palemon and Lavinia. The remaining plates were entitled “The Lover’s Dream” and “The Shepherd’s Care” and introduced two visualisations of subjects that had not been introduced to readers yet. In addition, a large, unframed head piece was printed at the start of each of the four parts of The Seasons; 22 The address to Hugh Blair is dated June 1793. 23 British Museum number 1843,0513.460.3 and number 1843,0513.460.6. Sandro Jung 60 smaller tail pieces concluded each of the seasonal instalments. These head pieces did not visualise particular scenes from the poem but captured the seasonal activities in georgic landscapes. Both the Hill-Strachan-Stewart and the Hamilton editions adopted an illustrative apparatus that relied on symmetry, assigning the same number and types of plates to each season. Morison’s illustrative apparatus differed from this model, allotting a plate each to “Spring”, “Autumn”, and “Winter” but equipping “Summer” with three plates. In terms of design and execution, the illustrations in Morison’s editions are qualitatively superior to those included in the rival editions. Ansall’s plates often are compositionally poor, and the plates by Singleton and Stothard fail to embed their subjects within larger contextual narratives, even though both of them were based on paintings the two artists produced. The landscape format of the Morison plates allowed more expansive visual narratives. Catton signed responsible for four of the six illustrations, designing the illustrations for “Spring” and “Summer”, whereas Corbould undertook the plates for “Autumn” and “Winter”. The latter painter was, by far, the better known of the two, and he will have been able to command higher prices than Catton, who seldom designed illustrations for books. Corbould, like Stothard, was one of the foremost literary book illustrators of the time. Catton’s work for the edition ranged from a fishing scene for “Spring” to tableaux of an agricultural labourer returning to his wife after work, sheepshearing, and the tragic rendering of a shipwreck. Corbould produced plates depicting a nut harvest, which on the wrapper of the first instalment had been referred to as “Gleaning”, and another, visualising a winter scene in which the hungry robin visits a family in a fire-side genre piece, the subject of which had already been given in an advertisement. The mention of Corbould’s name capitalised on the symbolic capital of his work, while “Gleaning” (probably deliberately but misleadingly) invoked associations of the Palemon and Lavinia scene, which was frequently referred to as the story of a gleaner. 24 24 In John Stockdale’s 1794 edition, Stothard’s plate of Palemon and Lavinia was entitled “Gleaning”. Robert Morison’s 1793 Edition of James Thomson’s The Seasons 61 Rather than introducing atmospheric vignettes that were not concretely anchored in the text or allegorical devices that invoked the seasonal divinities, the plates by Catton and Corbould promoted realistic visual renderings of passages from The Seasons and no longer highlighted stories and passages that had been anthologised and that would have been as mnemonically inscribed as the interpolated tales. Kwinten Van De Walle has observed that the plates “thematically corresponded with their southern predecessors” (271), but this thematic correspondence operates only at the level of the anthropocentric focus the artists adopt. For the manner in which the subjects are visualised differs fundamentally from the ways in which artists up to Catton and Corbould rendered scenes as paintings proper as opposed to simpler illustrations that lacked, as Van De Walle rightly notes, the detailed conception of background and scenic layering. Figure 2. Charles Catton, “Sheep-Shearing”, The Seasons (Perth: R. Morison & Son, 1793). Reproduced from a copy in the author’s collection. Even though they deploy the conventions of high-cultural art, both Catton and Corbould focus on activities undertaken in the different seasons, including aspects of the georgic inscription of Thomson’s poem. (Figure 2) While working life is shown only in the sheepshearing scene, Catton’s plate conveys a gathering of individuals that is characterised by relaxation, “happy labour, love, and social glee” (366). His plate obscures the labori- Sandro Jung 62 ous task of shearing all the sheep shown in their pen. Even the man shearing the sheep, whom Thomson describes as “tender” (414), joyfully approaches his task, the sheep, in similar manner, enjoying the removal of its wool. At the centre of the image, the artist features a pair of lovers seated under the expansive canopy of a tree, who pay no attention to the sheepshearing, although the male figure gazing at the female appears to be pointing to the sheepshearing individual with his left hand, while various figures are approaching the scene from the background, one woman carrying a large basket, another attending to a small barrel. On the left, a young boy is dragging a ram to where it will be shorn. In the background, a man is seen stirring a cauldron (filled with tar), holding a branding iron. While, at the representational level, image clusters can straightforwardly be identified, it is not unproblematic to make sense of these clusters and define in which ways they relate to one another. In fact, the meaning of the illustration unravels only as part of a continuous reading of the printed text, including the particular simultaneously occurring actions that Catton represents. As such, Catton’s visualisation is a book illustration proper, the meaning of which is further specified through the seven lines from The Seasons that are engraved underneath the image. Meantime, their joyous task goes on apace: Some mingling stir the melted tar, and some, Deep on the new-shorn vagrant’s heaving side, To stamp the master’s cypher ready stand; Others the unwilling wether drag along; And, glorying in his might, the sturdy boy Holds by the twisted horns the indignant ram. (401-407) These lines assist the viewer in establishing an order according to which the visual narrative needs to be understood, although the lines still do not reveal who the lovers at the centre are. The typographic text preceding the extract provided by Morison reveals that the lovers are the “pastoral queen” (397), “in gracious dignity enthroned” (396), and “her shepherdking” (398). Their central position within the composition will be clear to readers of the complete text; it will, however, not be accessible to those who only repurpose the plates for framing. Thus the lines of poetry accompanying the print did not elucidate, on their own, the meaning of each of the image clusters of Corbould’s painterly rendering of the scene. Instead, it was necessary to read the text (of the typographic pages) and image alongside one another, which - on the occasion of the exhibition of paintings related to one of the subscription editions - would have been facilitated through the provision of more extended passages from Thomson’s poem, such as the ones provided by Tomkins’s “Description” or Thomas Macklin. The latter furnished detailed “poetic descriptions” as part of the catalogues of the paintings and prints exhibited at his Poets’ Gallery, which Robert Morison’s 1793 Edition of James Thomson’s The Seasons 63 included such Thomsonian subjects as Thomas Gainsborough’s “Lavinia” and J. Barney’s “The Happy Cottagers” (“Poetic Description” 1794: 2). Figure 3. Charles Catton, “The Swain’s Return”, The Seasons (Perth: R. Morison & Son, 1793). Reproduced from a copy in the author’s collection. Since Catton and Corbould’s illustrations focused on extended passages that did not centralise the human concerns and drama of the interpolated episodes, they were significantly more difficult to represent visually. Whereas plates of the interpolated episodes focused on a single moment, usually one of petrifaction, in which the individuals rendered appear frozen in time, no such statuesque method is applied by Catton and Corbould. Rather, the two artists emphasise the processual nature of Thomson’s poetry in which he constructs various scenes out of a range of activities that are occurring simultaneously or in rapid succession. (Figure 3) In the case of Catton’s first design for “Summer”, the plate again illustrates much more than what is conveyed by the engraved text underneath the image. The poetry introduces the swain’s evening return from his labours, driving his flock ahead of him to their fold where they will safely spend the night. He is looking forward to his evening meal, a reward to his activity of the day, which is contrasted with the laziness of the magpie and other birds, for they, unlike the cows he looks after, do not contribute to his livelihood or Sandro Jung 64 ethos of industry. Catton decidedly expands upon the verse lines reproduced, for his illustration is a genre scene in which the exhausted swain is greeted by his smiling wife and son, the former carrying his “food of innocence and health” (221) on a tray, the latter eagerly pulling his father into the “chearful cottage” (220). The artist anticipates Thomson’s further description of the animal population of the swain’s farmyard, not only representing the magpie that had been mentioned by the excerpt but also giving expressive form to “the household fowls” (227), “house-dog”, and “the vacant greyhound” (229). Catton complements two groups of animals in the foreground, which are mentioned by the text, with a detailed still life of farming implements (such as a yoke) and items used in the cottage household (a pitcher, buckets, a milk churning vessel, a broom), which are not. These objects underpin the inscription of the genre piece as conveying a family who are happy because they are industrious. While the objects in the foreground are added to emphasise Thomson’s characterisation of the hard-working swain, the particular manner in which the dogs are realised - the one happily slumbering whereas the other has opened its mouth, showing its teeth - needs to be related to the printed text that preceded the illustration and is not mentioned in the verse caption. For it is a wasp that wakes the greyhound, although Thomson’s poem indicates that both dogs are woken by the insect. Catton’s design is animated not only through the welcome his wife and child give to the swain but also through the fauna depicted and the implements of farm life that infer activity. Various image clusters appear next to one another, and even though they are not overtly related to one another, they are to be read as part of the temporal matrix of viewing that the reader establishes when ocularly moving from one cluster of images to another. In the process, connections are established that Thomson’s text did not introduce, expanding Thomson’s poem through the visual text of the illustration. Robert Morison’s 1793 Edition of James Thomson’s The Seasons 65 Figure 4. Richard Corbould, “The Shipwreck”, The Seasons (Perth: R. Morison & Son, 1793). Reproduced from a copy in the author’s collection. Both the tales of Celadon and Amelia and of Damon and Musidora had been defined by Thomson’s images of concentration and petrifaction (Jung 2013: 592-94). They presented moments in which action was seemingly suspended, creating monumental figures such as Celadon and Musidora, who, having experienced shock and profound astonishment, are temporarily bereft of their agency. Amelia, in another sense, has been petrified through her transformation into an inanimate “blacken’d corse” (1206). Illustrations of the two tales centred on these petrified or inactive human figures; they reduced the contextual image clusters, especially the natural environment and diverse object cultures, which characterise the painterly designs of Catton and Corbould. With one exception, Catton visualised scenes that did not showcase human drama, presenting a largely idyllic vision of human life where man entertains a harmonious relationship with the environment. (Figure 4) In only one plate - the depiction of a ship caught in a violent storm, the third illustration of “Summer” - the forces of nature threaten human life, very much like the lightning that took Amelia’s life. Catton’s rendering of the imminent shipwreck frames the central mariner standing on the deck of the vessel that is being flooded by the water of the sea. The foamy waves behind the figure loom threatening, and the large wave on the right, which, in terms of height, exceeds that of the standing sailor, is captured at a moment that will likely be succeeded by Sandro Jung 66 its breaking onto the ship and taking the sailors with it to the depths of the sea. The standing sailor’s fate is reflected by the dead man floating in the water, and his wind-swept hair, the averted gesture of the right hand, the open mouth, and wide-open eyes express his shock, fear, and helplessness; his facing the impending catastrophe standing and holding on to one of the ship’s cables will not protect him from the annihilating force of the water. His left foot is already immersed in the element that will shortly afterwards cover the deck and swallow up the remainder of the ship. Two other men are clinging to the mast. The human beings appear like statues in a continually moving environment that will cause their death. In addition to the threat from the water, the ship is also irreparably damaged by lightning that is striking the mast. The lightning, which had already been the cause of Amelia’s death and which was routinely visualised by illustrators, does not kill the sailors directly but destroys the vessel that might have saved them. Catton’s image offers an expressive rendering of the petrified standing sailor who, like the man perishing in the snow in Thomson’s “Winter”, is surrounded by an ever-moving mass of water that will soon overwhelm him. In those copies of the plate that were hand-coloured, the contrast between man and the elements of nature is even more obvious in that the life-affirming colours of the man’s clothing will soon disappear in the depths of the sea. This plate stood out from the others in the set in that it belonged to the three plates illustrating “Summer”, a cluster of plates that did not accompany any of the other seasons and therefore introduced an asymmetrical pattern of illustration that no other eighteenth-century bookseller before or after Morison used in their edition. It also differed from the other illustrations in Morison’s edition in that it was reprinted, in reverse and as a woodcut image, in an edition of Robinson Crusoe that was published in Edinburgh by James Ballantyne in 1810. Catton’s illustration represented an addition to Morison’s edition that capitalised on the notoriety of the sensational death scene of Amelia by capturing the human drama of the shipwreck and the loss of human life. In contrast to artists who had visualised Amelia’s death, he did not minimise the environment, especially since it was this environment, as well as the forces of nature, the water and the lightning, which bring destruction to the mariners. The illustration did not foreground the severing of human romantic relationships, nor did it monumentalise the dead in the way that the petrified Amelia or her grieving lover was, for the sailors’ bodies will be absorbed by the sea. Theirs is a complete obliteration, which offers a far starker vision of the destructive forces of nature than that presented by the Celadon and Amelia tale where Celadon remembers his dead lover, “forever silent and forever sad” (1212). While differing tonally from the other illustrations, Catton’s plate - especially when seen in relation to the other two illustrations for “Summer” - showcased the generic range of “Summer” and demonstrated that the human tragedy of the sailors deserved a place Robert Morison’s 1793 Edition of James Thomson’s The Seasons 67 next to the plates of the sentimental-georgic passages of the poem. The depiction of the shipwreck would, however, probably for reasons related to the complexity of the composition necessary to convey the drama of the scene, remain the only eighteenth-century attempt an artist made to represent Thomson’s description of this human tragedy. That this illustration occupied a particular position in the series is also indicated by its omission when four of the designs were adapted for printing on a furniture fabric (Siegele 2004: 7). Despite some revision to the designs, including the final plate for “Winter”, which, for its application on the printed textile, was removed from its indoor setting to one in an open landscape, these images portrayed scenes specifically related to the individual seasons and they conveyed sentiment, rather than the destructive influence of nature on man. The producers of the printed fabric may have considered the illustration of the shipwreck as disrupting the idyllic-romantic-sentimental harmony of the individual seasonal scenes. Figure 5. Richard Corbould, “Gleaning”, The Seasons (Perth: R. Morison & Son, 1793). Reproduced from a copy in the author’s collection. Corbould, like Catton, furnished the purchasers of Morison’s edition with subjects that they had not seen visualised before. (Figure 5) His plate for “Autumn” depicts a nut harvest that involves a group of five individuals in which the women and child are gathering the nuts. A youth facilitates the Sandro Jung 68 plucking of the nuts by standing on the branch of a hazel tree, so that it can be reached by the woman wearing a cap, who is filling a large basket beside her. A girl is holding her apron to provide a receptable for any nuts the woman behind her is gathering. The second youth, sitting next to the girl, appears inactive, watching the other youth pressing onto the nut-laden branch to keep it within the harvesters’ reach. The lines of poetry underneath the image reveal the young man as a lover, who, with “active vigour[,] crushes down the tree” (625). The passage from which the lines reproduced are derived casts “the secret shade” (623) in which the “clustering nuts” (622) are located as an erotic space in which the virgins invoked harvest the nuts; but Corbould does not explicitly characterise the individuals as lovers, except for the seated youth raising his left hand behind the young woman who is looking at the branches above her to reap the nuts. The group is a complex composition, but the matronly figure and child in the foreground reduce the erotic inscription of the poet’s verse by presenting this scene as an enjoyable and harmonious family gathering. Whereas Catton had presented the shepherd king and pastoral queen of the sheepshearing plate as lovers, Corbould’s illustration redacts the Thomsonian text, in line with other redactions of erotic scenes - specifically the one involving Damon spying on Musidora - where erotic desire is muted or obscured through the artist’s visual casting of the two lovers’ position towards one another and the rendering of Musidora’s body in particular. Not opting to align their illustrations with existing selections of moments that other booksellers had used in their editions, Catton and Corbould not only created a new visual narrative of The Seasons that emphasised different aspects and stories of the poem. But they also offered a new interpretation of the work that no longer involved the signature episodes, on the one hand, and the allegorical mode, on the other. Compared with the other illustrated subscription editions published in 1793, Morison’s was the one using a set of painterly renderings that provided genre pieces as well as a dramatic scene, which were significantly more complex both in terms of their design and execution. In their endeavour to integrate multiple elements from passages in Thomson’s poem, Catton and Corbould went beyond the illustrative programmes their competitors devised for the other 1793 editions. At the same time, the verse glosses provided underneath the engravings did not explicate the subjects depicted in their entirety. Rather, the illustrations still operated within the complicated triangular relationship among verse caption, the typographic text (of which the caption was only a small part that inferred the season as a whole), and the visual text of the illustration. At a time when the use of colour-printed or hand-coloured illustrations was unusual, Robert Morison commissioned a number of sets of the Catton- Corbould plates to be coloured, not only to target an upper-class clientele of collectors but also to create illustrations that distinguished themselves from those included in all other editions of The Seasons. Importantly, the Robert Morison’s 1793 Edition of James Thomson’s The Seasons 69 use of colour, which in the two artists’ original oil paintings had conveyed symbolic meaning, also facilitated the construction of tonal contrasts, as in the plate depicting the ship and mariners in the storm, where in the copy in my collection the standing mariner is singled out from the background through a shirt with red stripes, the sailor clinging to the mast wearing a cap of the same hue, a life-affirming choice of colour, which will however be subsequently absorbed by the darkness of the sea in turmoil. 25 In the sheepshearing plate, the colouring not only enlivens individual characters but also facilitates greater facial expressiveness, the figures of the pastoral queen and shepherd swain being singled out through the sophistication of their finely coloured vestments. At a time when the monochrome medium was the default manner in which reader-viewers encountered engraved illustrations, the coloured engravings approximated them to the original, unique paintings, for - hand-coloured, as they were - they differed from the reproducible monochrome copies in that the colouring of each differed from the colouring of another. Produced in Scotland but retailed in both Scotland and England, Morison’s edition was conceived as a medium of cultural sophistication, benefitting from the skill of two English visual artists who produced six painterly plates that decidedly moved away from the three interpolated episodes and their metonymical value. Robert Morison ventured to include engravings that read the poem anew, while still retaining the anthropocentric focus of illustrations of the interpolated tales. The principal contrast between Morison’s plates and those included in the other editions released in 1793 was their focus on narrative, rather than the capturing of sentimental vignettes. Catton and Corbould were readers attentive to Thomson’s verse and who introduced into their painterly renderings of scenes elements that were not present in the poet’s text, thereby shaping understanding and directing meaning, as well as co-authoring, through the visual medium, different episodes of The Seasons afresh. The uniqueness of the illustrative apparatus, both in format and in the subjects visualised, can be appreciated by contextualising the illustrations within the history of illustrated editions of The Seasons. With few exceptions - the “Nutting” scene, which was illustrated in Stockdale’s 1794 edition, and the sheep-shearing scene in Tomkins’s 1798 edition - the subjects of Catton and Corbould’s designs were not revisited by later publishers of illustrated editions before 1842. Given that the codification of different passages from The Seasons had led, over time, to the repeated selection of the same scenes for illustrations, and these not being limited to the three signature interpolated tales, it is meaningful that Robert Morison departed 25 The Lewis Walpole Library copy (call number: 53 T384 730e) of the plate does not feature the red colouring, but uses warmer tones of ochre for the standing sailor’s trousers and the mast, which contrast effectively with the dark brown and black of the sea in the lower right-hand area of the illustration. Sandro Jung 70 from a dominant model of illustration to offer a new iconic reading of the work. Just like Hamilton’s designs engraved by Tomkins and Bartolozzi for their 1798 edition, Morison’s illustrations had wider medial reach than other illustrations published in editions, for they were also exhibition pieces that were framed and displayed in the homes of the well-to-do. With Hamilton’s more extended series of illustrations for the Tomkins- Bartolozzi edition, they furthermore share that they fulfilled the functions of upmarket book illustrations that the German author of “Einige Gedanken” had highlighted. In fact, Catton and Corbould, in countering the dominant and, by then overdetermined, model of representing The Seasons by means of the interpolated episodes, introduced an emphasis on the processual and dynamic. They highlighted narrative that could not be inferred entirely from a viewing of the printed image or the reading of the poetry captions and the engravings alongside one another. Rather, a holistic apprehension of the illustrations that drew on a reading of the complete text was required to understand the allusive iconic canvases of Catton and Corbould. And yet, in line with the need to clarify and amplify meaning to facilitate unambiguous understanding, as insisted on in “Einige Gedanken”, the illustrators introduced additional iconic meaning, offering not only a corrective to that which was not expressed but should have been by Thomson. The plates demonstrate that the artists read and visually commented on the passages they visualised. Their work is a record of reading experience that offered to reader-viewers an unprecedented visual apparatus, a critical tool to make sense of the poem. Works cited Aikin, John (1778). “Essay on the Plan and Character of Thomson’s Seasons”. The Seasons. A New Edition. Adorned with a Set of Engravings from Original Designs. London: John Murray. iii-xlv. Altick, R. D. (1986). Paintings from Books: Art and Literature in Britain, 1760-1900. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Anon. (1803). “Einige Gedanken über Bücherkupfer und ästhetische Kupfererklärungen, samt einer Probe davon an zwey Scenen aus der Erzählung: Lavinia à Palemon in Thomsons Jahreszeiten”. Archiv für Künstler und Kunstfreunde 1. 32- 50. Anon. (1794). “Untitled review of Morison’s edition of The Seasons”. Anthologia Hibernia, or Monthly Collections of Science, Belles-Lettres, and History 3. 48. Anon. (1778). “Untitled review of Murray’s edition of The Seasons”. Westminster Magazine, 6 [September]. 487. Anon. (1794). “Poetic Description of Choice and Valuable Prints, published by Mr. Macklin, at the Poets’ Gallery”. London: printed by T. Bensley. Brewer, David A. (2005). The Afterlife of Character, 1726-1825. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Essick, Robert N. (1985). “William Blake, William Hamilton, and the Materials of Graphic Meaning”. ELH 52.4. 833-872. Robert Morison’s 1793 Edition of James Thomson’s The Seasons 71 Imai, Hiromi (1993). “The Representation of Human Beings in the ‘Interpolated Episodes’ of The Seasons”. Shiron 32. 1-16. Jung, Sandro (2013). “Image Making in James Thomson’s The Seasons”. SEL 53.3. 583-99. Jung, Sandro (2014). “‘A Scotch poetical library’: James Thomson’s The Seasons, the Morisons’ ‘Select Scotish Poets’ Series and the Construction of a Scottish Poetic Canon”. Journal of the Edinburgh Bibliographical Society 9. 9-39. Jung, Sandro (2015). James Thomson’s ‘The Seasons’, Print Culture, and Visual Interpretation, 1730-1842. Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 2015. Jung, Sandro (2017). The Publishing and Marketing of Illustrated Literature in Scotland, 1760-1825. Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press. Jung, Sandro (2020). “Reinterpretation through Extra-Illustration: A Copy of Thomson’s The Seasons at the Library Company of Philadelphia”. The Book Collector 68.2. 295-314. Lethbridge, Stefanie (2000). “Anthological Reading Habits in the Eighteenth Century: The Case of Thomson’s Seasons”. In: Barbara Korte, Ralf Schneider, and Stefanie Lethbridge (Eds.). Anthologies of British Poetry: Critical Perspectives from Literary and Cultural Studies. Amsterdam: Rodopi. 89-103. Morison, Robert (1793). “To Dr Hugh Blair; Professor Emeritus of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, in the University of Edinburgh, &c”. The Seasons. Adorned with a Set of Engravings, from Original Paintings, together with an Original Life of the Author, and a Critical Essay on The Seasons, by Robert Heron. Perth: R. Morison & Son, 1793. 3-6. Penigault-Duhet, P. M. (1983). “L’illustration des Saisons de Thomson: Revanche de l’allégorie”. Textes et Langages 9. 89-110. Siegele, Starr (2004). Toiles for All Seasons: French & English Printed Textiles. Boston: Bunker Hill Publishing in Association with Allentown Art Museum. Somervell, Tess (2013). “Versions of Damon and Musidora: The Realization of Thomson’s Story in Revisions and Illustrations”. Studies in the Literary Imagination 46.1. 47-70. Thomson, James (1981). The Seasons. Ed. James Sambrook. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tomkins, Peltro William (1793). “Description of Pictures illustrative of Thomson’s Seasons, now Exhibiting at Tomkins and Co.’s, No. 49, New Bond Street”. London: [P. W. Tomkins]. Van De Walle, Kwinten (2015). “Editorialising Practices, Competitive Marketability and James Thomson’s The Seasons”. Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 38.2. 257-76. Wordsworth, William (1974). “Essay, Supplementary to the Preface, 1805”. In: W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser (Eds.). The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, Vol.3. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sandro Jung School of Foreign Studies Shanghai University of Finance and Economics