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Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 46 · Heft 1 | 2021 Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG Dischingerweg 5 \ 72070 Tübingen \ Germany Tel. +49 (0) 7071 97 97 0 \ Fax +49 (0) 7071 97 97 11 info@narr.de \ www.narr.de \ narr.digital Notice to Contributors All articles for submission should be sent to the editor, Bernhard Kettemann, as a WORD document as mail attachment: bernhard.kettemann@uni-graz.at Manuscripts should conform to the AAA style sheet or follow either MHRA or MLA style. (Copies of the MLA Style Sheet may be obtained from the Treasurer of the Modern Language Association of America, 62 Fifth Ave, New York, N. Y., 10011; copies of the MHRA Style Book from W.S. Maney & Son Ltd., Hudson Rd., Leeds LS9 7DL, England.) Documentation can be embodied either in footnotes or in an appended bibliography, with name and date reference enclosed in brackets in the text. Footnotes should be numbered consecutively and listed on a separate sheet of paper. The footnotes will appear on the bottom of the page where they are mentioned. They should be limited to a minimum. Languages of publication are German and English. Authors are requested to provide an English abstract of their contribution of about 15 lines on a separate sheet of paper. In the normal procedure first proofs will be sent to the authors and should be returned to the editor within one week. Authors receive one free copy of the issue containing their contribution. It is our policy to publish accepted contributions without delay. Gründer, Eigentümer, Herausgeber und für den Inhalt verantwortlich / founder, owner, editor and responsibility for content: Bernhard Kettemann, Institut für Anglistik, Universität Graz, Heinrichstraße 36, A-8010 Graz. Tel.: +43 / 316 / 380-2488, 2474, Fax: +43 / 316 / 380-9765 Web: https: / / narr.digital/ journal/ aaa Herausgeber / editor Bernhard Kettemann Redaktion / editorial assistants Georg Marko Eva Triebl Mitherausgeber / editorial board Alwin Fill Walter Grünzweig Walter Hölbling Allan James Andreas Mahler Christian Mair Annemarie Peltzer-Karpf Werner Wolf Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 46 (2021) Heft 1 Guest Editor: Sandro Jung Inhaltsverzeichnis Artikel: Sandro Jung Iconological Criticism: Repositioning Illustrations within Literary Studies ............ 3 Russell Palmer Visual Criticism in the Illustrations of Robinson Crusoe: Reading Allart and Vis’ 1791 Dutch Edition............................................................................................... 15 Sandro Jung Dominant Visual Narrative, the Competitive Marketing and Metacritical Functions of Illustrations, and Robert Morison’s 1793 Edition of James Thomson’s The Seasons.......................................................................................... 43 Matthew C. Jones Wales and the East in Eleanor Sleath’s Glenowen; or the Fairy Palace (1815)........ 73 Kwinten Van De Walle The Visual Criticism of Thomas Stothard’s Designs of Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe for The Royal Engagement Pocket Atlas (1821)....................................................... 93 Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Der gesamte Inhalt der AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Band 1, 1976 - Band 40, 2015 ist nach AutorInnen alphabetisch geordnet abrufbar unter http: / / wwwgewi.uni-graz.at/ staff/ kettemann This journal is abstracted in: ESSE (Norwich), MLA Bibliography (New York, NY), C doc du CNRS (Paris), CCL (Frankfurt), NCELL (Göttingen), JSJ (Philadelphia, PA), ERIC Clearinghouse on Lang and Ling (Washington, DC), LLBA (San Diego), ABELL (London). Anfragen, Kommentare, Kritik, Mitteilungen und Manuskripte werden an den Herausgeber erbeten (Adresse siehe Umschlaginnenseite). Erscheint halbjährlich. 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Printed in Germany ISSN 0171-5410 Iconological Criticism: Repositioning Illustrations within Literary Studies Sandro Jung This special issue of Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik is devoted to the subject of iconological research and the benefits of the study of (book) illustrations for literary studies, especially for accounts that map the marketing, reception, and mediation of literary works. It positions at the centre that which is usually only considered as a marginal phenomenon of intratextual meaning-making: the interpretive illustration, which from the eighteenth century increasingly accompanied editions of literary works. Illustrations represented meaningful addenda to the typographically realised text which they punctuated. The case studies presented in this special issue not only offer concrete interpretations and contextualisations of how illustrations function but they also point to methodologies that can usefully be adapted for use in relation to other illustrations and illustrated works. It is a general preconception that script literacy, the ability to read and write, represented the dominant form and mode through which eighteenthcentury audiences encountered and understood literature. Literature, as in “belles lettres”, was available to a fairly small percentage of the population of Britain, especially if another dominant medium, the printed and bound book, is identified as the primary source and medium of knowledge of and familiarity with literary works. For books were expensive. Copies of the first edition of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), “adorned with Cuts” and selling at a price of 5s., would have been out of the reach of the masses. The price was certainly not cheap and positioned the work as reading material for the leisured classes, confirming also that even as “popular” a work as Defoe’s did not become mass reading through William Taylor’s “authorised” edition. Richard D. Altick’s contention that prices of the fashionable new literature in the eighteenth century were “prohibitive … to all but the rich” (Altick 1998: 52) rejects the mythified notion of Robinson Crusoe as a work of the people before the late eighteenth century. His research on AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 46 (2021) · Heft 1 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.2357/ AAA-2021-0001 Sandro Jung 4 mass-reading takes into account the correlation between income, buying power, and the purchase of books to understand how economic access to printed works affected the consumption of literature. Robert D. Hume goes further than Altick when he notes that “the number of families that could afford more than occasional book purchases cannot have been more than about 10,000 or 15,000 at any time in our period. Most book buying has to have been done by the top 1 percent of families, and extensive book buying by the top 0.5 percent” (Hume 2015: 375). Taylor’s printed text was not the only version of the work through which knowledge of the adventurous protagonist would have been promoted; for, as demand for the novel increased, and it was reprinted in newspapers without the copyright holder’s sanction, savvy booksellers undertook to benefit from the media event that was Robinson Crusoe by issuing not only reprints of the complete text but also redactions in the form of abridgments. The latter were published as sixpenny chapbooks, and it is through the proliferation of chapbook adaptations of the novel that the work became more widely available among different reading communities, even though it cannot now be determined which version of the work readers consumed. Those readers who were able, in financial terms, to choose which edition and version of Defoe’s narrative to purchase would have had a range of different “texts” at their disposal. Most of these, from as early as 1719, included illustrations, addenda (including the map in Part 2) that had been part of Taylor’s first edition, and illustrations - at times, large numbers of them, executed as woodcuts - routinely featured in the chapbook versions that appeared from 1722 onwards. These illustrations materialised through different technologies, the copper-engraving capable of creating effects of tonality that the cheaper woodcut could not produce. While illustrations are commonly conceived of as symbolic capital, the comparatively larger number included in chapbooks of Robinson Crusoe indicates that they possessed the essential function of serving as reading tools. The image per text-page ratio in chapbook versions of Defoe’s work is usually high, the 1722 edition printed by E. Midwinter including 28 woodcut images: that is one image per 12 pages of printed text. The 1726 edition published by A. Bettesworth, J. Brotherton, W. Meadows, and E. Midwinter, unlike the 1722 edition, included a frontispiece based on that of Taylor’s 1719 edition, as well as 24 small woodcuts. In the course of the eighteenth-century, the redactions of Robinson Crusoe radically reshaped the original text by omitting more than three quarters of the work, reducing the text to 32 or even fewer pages to issue it as a chapbook. The Banbury printer, John Golby Rusher, issued his 16page version of Robinson Crusoe in c. 1815, and these 16 pages contained five woodcuts, a ratio of about three pages to one illustration, a text-image constellation that contrasts with that of the 1719 edition, where the entire text had been accompanied by a single illustration only. Iconological Criticism: Repositioning Illustrations within Literary Studies 5 The frontispiece to the first edition of the novel had provided a visual synopsis of some elements of the narrative, including not only the protagonist’s civilising the island, but also, in the background, the shipwreck that led to his island existence. This synoptic capturing of different actions and details (such as Crusoe’s dress) was far from unambiguous, however, as the different interpretations that have been advanced of it confirm, Robert Folkenflik arguing against reading the illustration synoptically. He suggests that it is “based on a particular episode” (311) and concludes: “The ship … is not emblematic of the shipwrecked soul but represents Crusoe’s deliverance in this novel of guilt and redemption - a complete reversal of how the image is normally read” (312). Janine Barchas also recognises the “interpretive dissonance” (42) of the scene depicted, and while supporting the view that it represents a “summary frontispiece” (47), she nevertheless insists that it “proves irreconcilably out of step with the modernist realism and novelistic ambitions of Defoe’s text” (47). So, the addition of the frontispiece was certainly meaningful, as the image was specifically produced for the novel and reflected intentionality, but the exact signification of the illustration, which has also been read as an authenticating author portrait, cannot be determined. The illustration lacks the descriptive caption that would subsequently be added to most illustrations of Defoe’s protagonist, a paratextual aid that guided the reader-viewer’s meaning-making. Increasing the number of illustrations that embody concrete moments from a work added cost to the production of the print publication and had to be justified. This outlay was negotiated, however, against projected sales and questions that related to the consumption and comprehension of the text-image hybrid. For a larger series of illustrations provided a more textually anchored and unambiguous visual narrative of the text; at the same time, it also catered to reader-viewers who may not have possessed the visual literacy to make sense of the synoptic-symbolic inscription of Taylor’s frontispiece to Robinson Crusoe. The numerous woodcuts in abridgments thus functioned as part of a series the concatenated reading of which provided a reductivist, alternative rendering of the work. These woodcuts amplified the printed text by visualising moments of action and contemplation that drove a visual reading. The series of images transformed the print publication into a picture book where the default ratio of images per page sequence contrasted strikingly with publications that featured more expensively produced copperplates. The latter plates had to be printed on rolling presses, whereas the woodcuts could be printed simultaneously with the typeset text, making the woodcut the default visual medium in low-end publications. If used repeatedly and over long periods of time, illustrations promoted paradigmatic interpretations. They provided a baseline that readers would use to shape and formulate their own understanding of the text. Even though the exact meaning of Taylor’s frontispiece of Defoe’s protagonist has been debated, the reprinting of the image ensured that it became a Sandro Jung 6 mnemonic device that readers would remember, especially since it would be reprinted for more than 80 years - in both Britain and beyond. This visual interpretation represented only one privileged reader-viewer’s apprehension, of course, but the ubiquitous meaning of the plate was not contested until differing visual interpretations were advanced. These contesting designs may explicitly have revisited the same scene but cast the protagonist differently. However, in the first place, the addition or replacement of illustrations was not a semiotically motivated attempt to clarify meaning. Rather, it was an effort, on the part of booksellers, to differentiate their print product from those of their competitors. Above all, the issuing of illustrated works, and especially those that sold well, was regulated by the property value of the work and the publisher’s investment to secure control over the publication of it - that is the copyright holding publisher’s ability to regulate the physical, illustrated appearance of his edition as part of a copyright monopoly. Illegal piracies of Robinson Crusoe certainly existed, but they did not question the super-iconic status of the frontispiece by commissioning new illustrations. Rather, these piracies aligned themselves with the copyright edition, pretending to be further authorised editions, when, in fact, they were not. Editions with new illustrations that were consciously conceived to replace the earlier ones, which had not possessed a high execution standard and looked outdated by the end of the century, were undertaken only in the 1780s. Even though elaborate illustrated editions would be produced of works that would not subsequently be equipped with book illustrations, the largest share of the market for illustrated books fell to staples of the publishing trade such as Robinson Crusoe: it was not only a steady seller, but the large number of publishers undertaking new editions of the work identified continued capital value that could be mined in ever new editions. In the process of seeking to differentiate editions from one another, visual artists in a range of acts of discrimination chose some episodes, scenes, and characters over others: they generated new illustrations which, within the physical space of the printed codex, would be understood relationally, just as much as the designers relationally considered earlier illustrations when deciding which subjects they would visualise for their own projects. Illustrated editions are thus indices of reading experience, allowing - if a text was visualised repeatedly and for different audiences (including readers from different countries) - diachronic views of the ways in which illustrators made sense of the meaning of the typographic text. They are simultaneously part of the construction of an economic canon and underpin the paratextual framing of the aesthetic canon. Whereas literary studies have generally privileged the latter, at the cost of addressing questions related to the production of literature as materially affected by economic processes, increased attention to the competitive marketing of editions and the role that illustrations play in the marketplace for editions of literary Iconological Criticism: Repositioning Illustrations within Literary Studies 7 works and other print publications enhances our understanding of intermedial meaning-making. In fact, the privileging of the typographic text at the centre of script literacy has obscured the actual historical appearance of editions, which are rarely republished with all of their paratexts in modern editions but which repeatedly included instances of figurative texttechnologies such as engraved images. Likewise, literary scholars’ reading for complexity has generally privileged complex, high-cultural visualisations, which have been detached from their contexts of production and consumption, as well as from relationships they would have entertained with other text objects and media. Deracinated, these editions have been elevated as semiotic systems that make possible a recovery of reading experience. Yet high-end editions such as Samuel Richardson’s 1742 edition of Pamela, which featured 29 full-page plates by Francis Hayman and Hubert-François Gravelot, were not representative in the ways in which they presented a literary work, the cost of £1 4s. reserving this up-market edition for the financial elite (Jung 2016: 514-516). In addition, these illustrations required a high degree of visual literacy and immersion in the fashionable consumer culture of the day (which is reflected in the plates themselves) that many readers would not have possessed. This almost exclusive focus on high-end illustrations, on the part of modern critics who are little concerned with the recovery of historical reading practices, rather than with an individual case study, has culminated in a decentred approach. Such an approach relegates to secondary importance the majority of book illustrations and illustrated works, as well as such central practices as the reprinting of illustrations. For a literary history that pays attention to the dynamic formation of literary reputations, however, illustrations represent metacritical interventions that represent, comment on, and make sense of literary texts on their own but also in relation to contexts of their marketing and dissemination. They are just as much part of the reading of literature, although readers engaging with them (and, through them, with literary works) are reading at a remove from the typographic work. Yet this second-degree reading history is decidedly more tangible than the often fragmentary traces of reading experience that can be recovered through studies of annotation and personal recordings of responses to particular works. They involve two specific kinds of literacy, as well as the ability to read intermedially. Assuming that book illustrations were produced to be understood (rather than considered as merely ornamental) by their beholders, it is likely that artists had in mind a particular audience that they were confident would be able to decode the visual meaning of their designs. The simpler woodcuts that accompanied chapbooks were less demanding in what their designer intended and were able - given the constraints of the medium - to convey but also in what he expected his reader-viewers to attribute in terms of meaning. Like the particular printed texts they accompany, printed images need to be understood in light of their own particularity, Sandro Jung 8 ideally both synchronically and diachronically, as well as in which ways they relate to existing models of visual interpretation. Yet, scholars need to mitigate readings of particularity against contextual readings, including the reuse and appropriation of existing illustrations, which often run counter to a reading for uniqueness - since the reprinted image is no longer unique, although it may have appeared such to readers. Reading an illustration for its supposed uniqueness as opposed to its ability to evoke more generally modes and kinds (as opposed to specific interpretations) may not recover the designer’s intention or how this historical reader chose to translate visually that which appeared important to him. In fact, illustrations do not always entertain a synchronised relationship with the text they visualise but one that complicates meaning and interpretation. Book illustrations have recently been defined as “a portal between the text and its cultural context” (Haywood, Matthews, and Shannon 2019: 5). The methodologies to recover the “portal” function necessitate that reading be understood as a process that requires various levels of competence to unravel discursive constructions in different modes and media. Illustrations are acknowledgments of the symbolic or real capital value publishers assigned to the text for which they commissioned them, irrespective of whether they expected a shortor long-term return on the investment in an illustrative apparatus. They are devices that advertise the work they frame, relating the typographical text to a sphere of the visual that is extratextual but, at the same time, relies for its comprehension on shared competence. Like systems of literary genre, illustrations relied on (iconic) conventions and devices that allowed artists to deploy a visual language of gesture, objects, and activities that was expressive of different modes, ranging from the tragic to the pastoral. The four articles in this special issue address different aspects of how the study of book illustrations can usefully complement examinations of textual framing and reception that contribute significant metacritical insight into the meaning of the works they visualise. They demonstrate the use of conventions deliberately chosen for a particular text that support the generic understanding of the work, while also impressing upon readers the need to understand illustrations relationally, as part of readers’ prior experience of and embeddedness within visual culture. So, illustrated works train ways of seeing as much as ways of apprehending narrative action and character delineation. They provide an aid to readers’ visualising and mental embodying of typographic text. The opening essay by Russell Palmer introduces the first ever consideration of the illustrations of the 1791 Dutch edition of Robinson Crusoe published in Amsterdam and Rotterdam, an illustrated venture which provides a map of the unknown artist’s engagement with the archive of illustrations that had been produced in Britain and abroad since the first publication of Defoe’s novel. Palmer embeds his discussion of the plates within a narrative of how repeatedly illustrated moments are rendered differently over time Iconological Criticism: Repositioning Illustrations within Literary Studies 9 to affect the ways in which readers make sense of the image-text construct. He offers a systematic account of the relationship between the plates in the 1791 Amsterdam/ Rotterdam edition and those published in the first Dutch edition of the work but also others. The result is an essay in transnational illustration research, which does not trace the mobility of images as much as the ways in which the redaction of existing visual apparatuses or the departure from previously paradigmatic visual-interpretive castings of Robinson Crusoe creates new modes of apprehension through which to read the illustrated work. Palmer’s diachronic study relativises the previously almost exclusive focus on British illustrations by documenting that, far from emulating earlier British plates and occupying a derivative position within the illustration history of Robinson Crusoe, the Dutch illustrations were critical interventions that were not, at all times, synchronised with the text they accompanied. In fact, the illustrative apparatus in the Dutch edition functions as a commentary which creates and develops emphases that reinforce or altogether change Defoe’s textual meaning, in the process providing a subtle critique that attentive reader-viewers may have gleaned from their thoughtful contemplation of the plates. In its focus on how illustrations resist synchronised readings - an object of much illustration research that highlights the harmonious intermedial relationship - Palmer’s essay points to an element of the text-image dynamic that has largely been obscured in work that concentrates on a single illustrated edition: the importance of establishing related and relational contexts that facilitate a more complex understanding of the intermedial, critical reception of literary texts. The following chapter, on the 1793 up-market quarto edition of James Thomson’s The Seasons, continues the relational contextualisation of a visual apparatus. It examines the set of plates commissioned for the volume and argues for the plates’ representing a critical counter-model to illustrations included in earlier editions. The critical-interpretive function of book illustrations, which is seldom explicitly described or theorised in the period, is explored in the context of a rare and hitherto neglected critical essay, published in 1803, on the function of engraved illustrations that focuses on an edition of The Seasons issued in the late 1790s. Issued by the Scottish firm of Robert Morison & Son of Perth, the 1793 edition boasted plates by two London artists who provided designs that, in terms of their subject matter, departed from prevailing, dominant visual narratives that had been popularised in London. Whereas earlier editions and those with which Morison’s competed in 1792-1793 had aligned themselves with an emphasis on the interpolated tragic-sentimental episodes that had featured centrally in book illustrations since 1778, the plates in Morison’s volume centred on subjects that had not largely been visualised before. In yet another respect, these illustrations differed from those included in competing editions, for they featured poetry captions that allowed only a partial textled interpretation of the subjects depicted. These ambitious genre paintings Sandro Jung 10 in engraved form offer narratives far more complex than the vignettes or captures of a single scene or moment that had characterised earlier plates. The article embeds its discussion within the contexts of the marketplace for illustrated editions of The Seasons, paying particular attention to the Morison firm’s striving for innovation, as part of its cultural-patriotic programme. This seeking to excel on the British book market is linked to the firm’s national, Scottish ambition to produce an edition that would outdo all editions produced in England. The illustrations were an integral part of this venture, and even though they grew out of a visual culture largely centred in London, their difference in subject, format, and mode presented them as advancing a new visual interpretation that would even affect the production of material culture, the plate designs being subsequently adapted for use on furniture fabric. Just as in Palmer’s contribution, the relationality of text and image, but also between different editions, is shown to be essential to an assessment of the critical potential of printed illustrations. In Morison’s case, transnational relations operating between the Scottish and English markets for illustrated editions of Thomson’s classic, as well as the extra-textual use of visualisations of scenes from the poem in the visual culture of the metropolis, are essential to understanding how illustrations functioned multifariously - and not always as entirely synchronised with the illustrated text. Whereas both the 1791 edition of Robinson Crusoe and the 1793 edition of The Seasons had introduced high-end volumes that would have been accessible to only a small number of affluent book buyers and collectors, Eleanor Sleath’s illustrated novel for children, Glenowen, or, the Fairy Palace (1815), the subject of Matthew C. Jones’s essay, includes a fundamentally different kind of illustration. By no means the elaborate copper-engravings discussed in the earlier essays, the smaller and much simpler images included in the edition of Sleath’s novel nevertheless have the ability to serve as visual nexuses of a range of discourses such as Welshness, the East, education, and the imagination, which are visually amplified through these images. Though much more economically produced than the illustrations examined previously, they utilise space convention and architectural structures to reflect particular developments in the novel’s plot. They serve as directional scripts that are not naturalistically evocative of actual loci. Instead, they are inscribed with discursive constructions of the landscape such as the picturesque, which give concrete embodiment to a particular notion of Wales, even though the illustrations on their own lack this specificity that is established only through an intermedial reading of the text and images. The small size allotted to the novel’s characters in the engravings testifies to their integrated role within the landscape or the architectural settings in which they appear. They are not unmistakably the central focus of the images, as they would be in illustrations of children’s chapbooks, but these figures anchor the settings that Sleath’s text defines as both Welsh and eastern, the picturesque of the landscape being harnessed Iconological Criticism: Repositioning Illustrations within Literary Studies 11 as a category used to support the expansive views both of the actual setting and the broadening of the children’s educational horizons. Jones demonstrates that an integrated reading of the typographic text alongside the images results in more than the sum of its parts, for on their own these simple illustrations do not reveal the complexity with which they are imbued as filters of the text, when read through this text. So, once again it is the relationality between the text and the images that conditions the particular meaning that neither the text nor the images alone would convey. These images are relationally embedded with printed images of the landscape that increasingly made scenes and individual loci from across the British Isles available to the middle classes, for instance through the annual illustrated diaries featuring topographical scenes, such as William Peacock’s long-running Polite Repository. The final essay in this special issue, by Kwinten Van De Walle, unlike the other essays, does not focus on book illustrations that appeared in an edition of a literary work. Instead, he concentrates on a set of 12 small illustrations - vignettes - produced by Thomas Stothard, which appeared in the 1821 number of The Royal Engagement Pocket Atlas, a long-running annual diary that boasted illustrations of literary works. Van De Walle focuses on the relatively uncommon constellation where a literary illustration is accompanied and glossed by only a single line of text. The entire text of the work, which gave rise to the visual series as a whole, is physically absent and needs to be inferred, the fragmentary snippets of poetry underneath the vignettes being insufficient to understand holistically what is depicted. These snippets of poetry, detached as they are from Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, the subjects of the vignettes in 1821, recreate the novel by highlighting highly focused moments, contained within the physical space of the miniature illustrations at the heads of the diary pages. The visual apparatus contained in the number of the Pocket Atlas upsets the ordinary ratio between text and image by privileging a visual reading of scenes that cannot, at all times, be related meaningfully to the text reproduced, unless this intra-textual reading of text snippets and vignettes be complemented by the extra-textual utilisation of an edition of Ivanhoe. Van De Walle offers a reading of Stothard’s iconic sequence, contextualising it in light of book illustrations contained in editions of Scott’s novel. In the process, he draws attention to how Stothard creates emphases in his visualisation of particular characters, that jar with illustrations made for inclusion in text editions. He demonstrates that the nature of the illustrative apparatus of the Pocket Atlas allowed for a decidedly more critical and subjective realisation of subjects than the illustrations meant to accompany the full-text of the novel. Van De Walle’s essay showcases the importance of different formats of illustrative apparatus as well as how they can function. He reveals that at the time the 1821 number of the Pocket Atlas was published, different visual castings of Ivanhoe existed, which did not furnish a single-minded interpretation of the work. Rather, that illustrated volumes - editions of Sandro Jung 12 the text but also such non-edition publications as the Pocket Atlas - advanced disjunctive and heterogeneous readings, which did not align with one another. The contributions to this special issue focus on issues related to the interpretability of visual text by probing connections that book illustrations entertain with typographic text: they concentrate on phenomena of the process of intermedial meaning-making that are both intra-textual and extra-textual. In the process, they provide contextualisations of the rich relational factors (especially the diachronic archive of illustrations) defining the meanings of illustrations in editions of literary works and in publications such as the Pocket Atlas. The articles collectively argue in favour of a critical function of illustration that expands typographic meaning, at times as a result of competitive marketing strategies, at others in line with different national traditions of representation and ideological inscription, while yet at others through an effort to concretise the abstract in an effort to fix meanings that might otherwise be in flux and ambiguous. These studies provide consideration of how, on the basis of evidence that can be recovered from bookand reading-related information (such as paratexts and epitexts), reader-viewers would have understood illustrated works as a particular instance of textuality that had to be apprehended intermedially; but they will also have realised that each medium demanded its own method for understanding how the illustrations operated meaningfully and that extra-textual relational meaning-making practices depended on the work concerned. The authors of the essays have used book-historical approaches to comprehend illustrated works as media that promoted textual understanding in the literary economy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These approaches to the material text have stressed that the illustrations would have been grounded in a visual literacy that was inextricably connected with how texts would have been understood. As a result, the recovery of the materiality of textual meaning will also recover the central importance of illustrations. For these were textual iterations with a difference: they contained metacritical meaning - a version of the work - which relied for its full understanding on readerly attention being focused on the printed image to unravel its textual inscription. Works Cited Altick, Richard D. (1998). The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800-1900, 2 nd edition. Columbus, Ohio: Ohio University Press. Barchas, Janine (2003). Graphic Design, Print Culture, and the Eighteenth-Century Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Folkenflik, Robert (2016). “The Rise of the Illustrated English Novel to 1822”. In: The Oxford Handbook of the Eighteenth-Century Novel. Ed. Alan Downie. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 308-336. Iconological Criticism: Repositioning Illustrations within Literary Studies 13 Haywood, Ian, Matthews, Susan and Shannon, Mary L. (2019). “Editors’ Introduction”. In: Romanticism and Illustration. Eds. Ian Haywood, Susan Matthews and Mary L. Shannon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1-21. Hume, Robert D. (2015). “The Value of Money in Eighteenth-Century England: Incomes, Prices, Buying Power - and Some Problems in Cultural Economics”. Huntington Library Quarterly 77.4. 373 - 416. Jung, Sandro (2016). “The Other Pamela: Readership and the Illustrated Chapbook Abridgment”. Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 39.4. 513-531. Sandro Jung School of Foreign Studies Shanghai University of Finance and Economics Visual Criticism in the Illustrations of Robinson Crusoe: Reading Allart and Vis’ 1791 Dutch Edition Russell Palmer Eighteenth-century book illustrations are widely seen as interpretative devices that help readers understand particular passages of a text. This article considers illustrations as comprising an element of the text capable of offering criticism on the typographically realized text, thereby altering the author’s original narrative or enticing readers towards interpretations that differ from those presented by the typographical text alone. In order to demonstrate the potential for illustrations to develop a visual commentary, this article works through the visual narratives proffered by the illustrations included in a 1791 Dutch edition of Robinson Crusoe (Amsterdam: Allart and Vis). Robinson Crusoe was a profusely illustrated and widely read novel during the eighteenth century, and mediations of the work frequently crossed European borders. Allart and Vis’ edition departs in their choice of illustrated subjects from those of many of their predecessors and contemporaries, offering a new graphic interpretation that provides visual criticism of Defoe’s text. Book illustrations make up one central component of the eighteenth-century illustrated edition. They comprise the material manifestation of a series of decisions relating to the subject to be depicted, which illustrator(s) to commission, the techniques of (re)production, down to the paper used for printing. The decisions entail the involvement of multiple agents - booksellers, artists, engravers, printers and (sometimes) authors - and result in something that not only enhances the appeal of a volume, but may also increase its monetary value and marketability. Illustrated editions of literary works contain normally a handful of illustrations, compared to perhaps hundreds of pages of printed words. Nonetheless, images convey powerful messages that do not always cohere with those engendered by the AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 46 (2021) · Heft 1 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.2357/ AAA-2021-0002 Russell Palmer 16 typographical text. There is an assumption inherent in the very term “illustration” that the image interprets the typographical text. While this may be true in many, or even most, instances, images included in eighteenthcentury editions sometimes also had the ability to encourage specific readings of a text and particular reading practices, producing narratives of their own (Jung 2020: 171). These images’ agency was fed by their material realization, their placing and sequencing within the codex. Their materiality made them inseparable from the book into which they were bound and the text of which they were constituent parts. In order to understand a “text” in its fullest possible sense, we must consider all elements of its material iterations. In this respect, I wish to extend Jerome McGann’s textual condition, a process in which “the various lines of agency often become obscured” (1991: 97), to include the agency of the objects produced: books and their illustrations. 1 “The primary requirement of book illustration”, according to Robert Folkenflik, “is to illustrate the text” (2002: 515), but which text? The text itself is “open, unstable, [and] intermediate” (McKenzie 1999: 60), and not bound to any one material iteration, yet it is through books and their constituent parts that texts and their illustrations are most frequently encountered. In this article, I examine the engravings of a Dutch edition of Robinson Crusoe published in 1791 in order to investigate how these illustrations come to take an obtrusive material form with which the reader cannot avoid engaging. Furthermore, I show in my study how, through their obtrusiveness, they direct a reader’s interpretation and offer commentary on the linguistic text. Book illustrations are usually understood as visual (as opposed to textual or metatextual) media and when bound sequentially into a book, they may create a “visual narrative” of their own, independently from the typographical text, which need not be read. However, it is through their materiality that they exert their presence and act. William Mitchell argues that “all media are mixed media” and in fact “there are no ‘visual media’” (2005: 261): captioned book illustrations are not exclusively visual and the images bear traces of mechanical reproduction, such as, in the case of copperand steel-engravings, indented impressions in the paper. Moreover, a book illustration exists not in isolation, but is bound into a book, which itself must be held or rested on a surface in order to be read; the reader must engage with the physicality of the text (the book) as she or he turns the pages, a process in which each page is revealed and comes into being anew. Each viewing is unique, though the assemblage of printed signs, animal skin, cord, paste, and paper, loses its affective potency as it retreats into the background of the reader’s perception, serving as a vessel or “tool” 1 My intention is not to collapse all forms of human and nonhuman agency into one or deny the distinctiveness of human agency (Kipins 2015: 50), but rather to highlight the ways in which objects enable and encourage certain human actions and to acknowledge the active role of things in the creation of people (Gosden 2005: 194). Visual Criticism in the Illustrations of Robinson Crusoe 17 through which one or two facets - the mechanically printed words and images - come into stark view. However, in order to become generative, to produce a narrative of their own, illustrations must do more than be present, they must matter. They must in some way shape readers’ engagement with the linguistic text; their ability to do so is inherent in their “literariness”, their ability to function “as a literary element of the text” (Barchas 2003: 34). Some images have no coherent or inherent connection with what the linguistic text describes, narrates, or what it induces the reader to contemplate or imagine, and therefore possess no literariness. Such images fail to materialize their textinterpretive agency and merely provide a pictorial interlude or backdrop for that conveyed linguistically. In contrast, those which can engage a reader influence the order in which plot lines are construed, how characters are envisaged, and how pages are turned. A woodcut of an unidentifiable ship on an equally unidentifiable ocean, not connected to any particular instance within the adventures of Robinson Crusoe has no literariness; it cannot contrive easily with other images to produce a visual narrative. It may retain a level of attraction to the viewer and even help identify the work as belonging to a particular genre, for example maritime adventures, but it ceases to have any generative qualities with respect to promoting particular readings of or offering criticism on the text of which it has become part. The bibliographical encodings of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe have received attention from numerous scholars, from the authorial alterations made during the author’s lifetime to posthumous editions (Barchas 2003: 41). In 1995, David Blewett dedicated an entire book to the illustrations of the work as rendered in English and French editions, employing an approach which, as Sandro Jung (2020) has much more recently demonstrated, disregards the transcultural mobility and dynamism omnipresent in eighteenth-century European print culture. The success of Robinson Crusoe both in Defoe’s native England and in mainland Europe spawned many illustrated editions, abridgements, and subsequent robinsonades, and it is clear that translations of the novel found a range of enthusiastic audiences across eighteenth-century Europe. Two translations of Robinson Crusoe appeared in Dutch over the course of the eighteenth century and both were illustrated (Table 1). The Jansoons van Waesberge, Amsterdam booksellers, published the first translation only a year after the publication of the original in London, issuing it as the first part of the The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures under the title of Het Leven en wonderbaare Gevallen van Robinson Crusoe in 1720 (Staverman 1907: 34). In the same year, the Jansoons published the second part, giving it a separate title page but issuing it together with the first part in a single octavo volume that also contained twelve full-page copper-engraved plates. A year later the same booksellers published a translation of The Farther Adventures in a second volume, containing eight full-page plates and a Russell Palmer 18 fold-out map. In 1722, the Jansoons published The Serious Reflections in a third volume, including a further seven full-page plates, plus a half-page engraving of Crusoe’s island, bringing the total number of illustrations for the edition to twenty-eight, not including the foldout map. All are unsigned. The Jansoons reissued their edition in 1735-36 and in 1752 it was reprinted by another Amsterdam bookseller, Jan Morterre. Over seventy years after the initial appearance of Robinson Crusoe in Dutch, Johannes Allart, Amsterdam, and Dirk Vis, Rotterdam, issued a new edition in 1791, entitled Levensgeschiedenis en lotgevallen van Robinson Crusoe. Also in three octavo volumes, their edition featured only The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures and The Farther Adventures. A decade earlier, Pieter Meijer had insisted that the Robinson Crusoe cycle should begin and end with The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures; that The Farther Adventures was added by booksellers merely to make more money and The Serious Reflections ought to be totally omitted (Meijer 1781: 69). We can never know the motivations behind Allart and Vis’s choices, but published in an influential periodical, these comments may reflect differing levels of appreciation for Defoe’s works found in the Dutch-speaking world. Issuing only the first two novels was also in line with practices abroad, and the 1790s in particular witnessed an increase in this trend in English-language Robinson Crusoe publications (Free 2006: 91-92). However, such editions commonly conformed to the more usual practice of allotting separate volumes to each novel or combining them in one; either way, the production structures of specific editions did not generally divide Defoe’s works across volumes in the way Allart and Vis’ edition did. The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures occupies the entire of the first volume and 256 pages of the second, The Farther Adventures completing the second and third volumes. The title page to the first volume boasts that the publishers are presenting a new improved edition (“Nieuwe verbeterde uitgave”). Advertisements refer to the edition as newly translated from English and that may well be the case, due to a number of “corrections” made when compared to the Jansoons’ text (Buisman 1960: 82). Differences in vocabulary and grammar are present, too. For example, when describing himself, Crusoe terms his umbrella a “kiperzol” in the Janssons’ edition (1720: 379) and a “parasol” (311) in 1791. Past tense forms of verbs are frequently amended to present tense forms; and orthographic conventions adopt the “ij” in favour of the “y” vowel. Perhaps in order to convince prospective purchasers that their text is indeed a new translation, Allart and Vis make a detailed printed account of the work (“een uitvoerig bericht”) freely available to booksellers and their customers all over the Netherlands (Groningen Courant 1791: 1). Unlike the Jansoons and Morterre, Allart and Vis do not include a preface from the translator (or themselves) in their edition. Visual Criticism in the Illustrations of Robinson Crusoe 19 Jansoons, 1721 Allart & Vis, 1791 Volume 1 (Deel 1, Stuk 1) Volume 1 Untitled frontispiece Untitled frontispiece “Crusoe gaat met zyn Makker, van Hull Scheep” “Crusoe ontslaat zich van de Moor, en vlugt” “Crusoe gestrand zijnde, raakt gelukkig aan land” “Crusoe begin een Logement te vervaerdigen” “Crusoe, verschrikt door een aardbeeving, klimt over zijn’wal” “Vervaarelyke Droom van R: Crusoe” “Crusoe maakt potten tot zyn provisie” “Crusoe maakt potten” “Crusoe maakt een Kanoe” “Crusoe bereydt zich Kleederen” “Crusoes klugtige manier van speysen” “De manier van Spijzen en huishouding van Crusoe” Volume 1 (Deel 1, Stuk 2) “Crusoe ontdekt de plaats der Canibaalse maaltyden” “Crusoe ontdekte met verschrikking de Plaats der Canibaalsche maaltijden” Volume 2 “Een Cannibaal onderwerpt zich aan Crusoe” “Een Cannibaal onderwerpt zich aan Crusoe” “Crusoe verlost een Spanjerd uyt de handen der Cannibaalen” “Crusoe verlost een Spaniaard uit de handen der Cannibaalen” Crusoe werd geproviandeerd en gekleedt” “Crusoe, van zijn Eiland vertrekkende, stelt de gevangen in vrijheid, en wijst hen hunnen nieuwen Capitein, die aan de nok van de rae hangt” “Vermaaklijk voorval van Crusoe’s knecht, Vrijdag, met een’beer” Table 1. Caption subject descriptions of the illustrations in Jansoons (1720) and Allart & Vis’ (1791) editions of The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. Russell Palmer 20 The eighteen plates are distributed unevenly across the volumes, with the first containing six (including the frontispiece), the second seven, and the third five. Ten of the plates accompany The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures, leaving eight to illustrate The Farther Adventures. The title page describes them only as “new plates” (“nieuwe plaaten”), and advertisements claim they are “completely newly invented plates, by J. Buis” (“met geheel nieuw geinventeerde platen, door J. Buis”) (Groningen Courant 1791: 1). The first claim appears to be accurate. The subjects of some plates are seemingly depicted for the first time and while other episodes, such as Crusoe potting, appear in earlier Dutch and non-Dutch editions, the exact rendering in these instances differs from earlier representations. The second claim is harder to verify, as none of the engravings are signed. Jacobus Buis (1724-1801), or more commonly “Buys”, was an Amsterdam painter and engraver (Bryan 1886: 204). Leotine Buijnsters-Smets lists Allart and Vis’ plates as being his designs, engraved by Reinier Vinkeles (1984: 100). Vinkeles was a draughtsman and engraver, who himself designed over 1,500 book illustrations (Bryan 1889: 674). Together, Buys and Vinkeles defined the face of Dutch book illustration in the second half of the eighteenth century: Buys worked at least 61 times with Vinkeles and 48 times for Allart in the years before and after 1791 (Buijnsters-Smets 1984: 91, 99-106). Vinkeles had a copy of Robinson Crusoe in his own library, along with translations of Gulliver’s Travels, Don Quixote and an English edition of Pamela (Jung 2005: 128), and while it seems likely that Buys and Vinkeles were responsible for the 1791 Robinson Crusoe plates, Buijnsters- Smets does not divulge her evidence for attributing the engravings and I can find no corroborating evidence. Therefore, no firm attribution can be made. 2 By the time Allart and Vis published their edition, Robinson Crusoe had become familiar to the Dutch reading public not only through the Jansoons’ and Morterre’s editions, but also through illustrated French editions, especially those issued by bookseller Zacharie Chatelain and his partners, which included his sons (Table 2). François l’Honoré & Chatelain published the first in 1720 in large 12mo (De Boekzaal 3 1721, 58), reprinting it in 1722. Chatelain marketed his subsequent 1727 and 1743 reprints as the third and fourth “editions”, which he published on his own. In 1764, Z. Chatelain & fils issued a new edition, reprinting it in 1776 and issuing a newly typeset edition in 1777. Meanwhile, the l’Honoré & Chatelain edition received a further reprint in 1765. In addition to the editions issued by the Chatelains, the Aux dépens de la Compangnie issued an edition in 1765, C. J. Pancoucke published an edition in 1766, and E. van Harrevelt 2 I am grateful to Ton Broos, who supplied references and corresponded regarding the likelihood of Buys and Vinkeles working on the edition. 3 The full name of the Boekzaal is Maandelyke uittreksels, of Boekzael der geleerde waerelt. Visual Criticism in the Illustrations of Robinson Crusoe 21 of Amsterdam published an edition in 1770. Some years later and shortly before the publication of Allart and Vis’ edition, Charles Garnier chose The Life and Most Surprising Adventures, The Farther Adventures, and the Serious Reflections as the first three volumes in his 36-volume series, Voyages Imaginaires (1787-1789), “A Amsterdam; et se trouve à Paris” and also in French. Cailleau, Paris (1761, 1782) Chatelain, Amsterdam (1764, 1776, 1777) Garnier, Amsterdam (1787) Frontispiece: “Robinson allant à la Chasse; voyez la Pag. 217. 2: partie, la description de son habillement” Frontispiece: “Robinson allant a la chasse Voyez la page 217 2 e partie la description de son habillement” (“Robinson allant à la Chasse [1777]) Tome Premier Tome Premier Tome Premier “Robinson reçoit des remontrances de son Pere sur les dangers de s’embarquer” “Robinson reçoit des remontrances de son pere sur les dangers de s’embarquer” “Robinson remercie le Ciel de l’Avoir sauvé de grand peril qu’il vient de courir” “Robinson remercie le Ciel de l’Avoir sauvé du grand peril qu’il vient de courir” “Grand Dieu! comment est-il possible que je sois venu à terre” “Robinson trouve de la consolation dans les paroles qu’il vient de lire dans la Bible” “Robinson trouve de la consolation dans les paroles qu’il vient de lire de la Bible” Tome Second Tome Second Tome Second “Robinson sauve la vie à un sauvage qui par reconnaissance se fait son esclave” “Robinson sauve la vie a un sauvage qui par reconnaissance se fait son esclave” “Il prend un de mes pieds et le pose sure sa tète pour me faire comprendre sans doute qu’il me juroit fidelité” “Robinson sort de son Isle pour aller a Londres il emmene avec lui Vendredi et son perroquet” “Robinson sort de son Isle pour aller a Londres il emmene avec lui Vendredi et son perroquet” Russell Palmer 22 “Vendredi tire d’un grand danger le guide de Robinson” “Vendredi tire d’un grand danger le guide de Robinson” Table 2. Caption subject descriptions of the illustrations in French translations of The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. The pricing of Allart and Vis’ offering marks it out as a relatively expensive edition of belles lettres. In their advertisements, Allart and Vis point out to their potential customers that, given the large number of new illustrations and map, their edition should be priced at f 12-0, but they were in fact selling it at the “cheap price” (“goedkope prys”) of f 7-15 (Oprechte Haerlemsche Courant 1791b: 2). 4 A much cheaper two-volume edition of the Saxische Robinson, of Crusoe de Twede, also illustrated, sold for only f 2- 4 (Oprechte Haerlemsche Courant 1791a: 1), which compares more favourably with the pricing of other well-known translated works, including Rousseau’s Julia of nieuwe Héloise for ƒ 3-0, Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison and Clarissa selling for f 3-60 per volume, and Goethe’s Werther for f 3-0 (Broos 1981-1982: 215). Allart and Vis’s Robinson Crusoe appears not to have sold out immediately. In 1804, Willem van Vliet of Amsterdam offers the complete edition for only f 4-10 (Boekzaal 1804: 65), a year later it sells for f 4-50 (van Veen 1980: 7n7), and twenty years after its publication, an advertisement in the Boekzaal (1811: 517) offers it again for f 4- 10, noting that very few copies are left (“Nog zeer weinige Exemplaren”). Allart and Vis may have misjudged the market in producing an expensive edition of Robinson Crusoe at a time when the tale was migrating from the adult market towards the children’s. In what follows I focus on the plates included with the The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures, or the first one and a half volumes of Allart and Vis’ edition. Examining each plate in its turn, I offer comparisons with earlier renderings of the same textual moments, especially those which accompanied earlier editions of Robinson Crusoe in Dutch. The lack of previous systematic scholarship on illustrations produced for late eighteenthcentury editions of Robinson Crusoe necessitates a certain amount of searching for precedents in order to understand whether or not iconographic precedents exist and if so, how the plates in Allart and Vis’ edition differ from what went before. As Sandro Jung has recently demonstrated for early editions of Robinson Crusoe, the enthusiasm with which Defoe’s tale was taken up in Continental Europe demands that one must look transnationally (2020), and I do not therefore limit myself to discussing Dutch lan- 4 A marketing device used a year earlier by John Stockdale in advertisements of his 1790 London edition, illustrated by Thomas Stothard (see Jung 2020: 176). Visual Criticism in the Illustrations of Robinson Crusoe 23 guage editions or those printed in Amsterdam. However, my primary purpose is to demonstrate the ways in which the images bound into the 1791 Dutch edition offer criticism of the linguistic text by creating a narrative that deviates from Defoe’s text or the Dutch translation of it. In order to understand how agency and narrative are materialized in the edition, it is essential to consider the illustrative plates not only individually, but also as parts of sequential sets that comprise their own visual texts. Together the plates and the material make-up of the volumes offer multiple visually-led readings. They encouraged particular reading practices over others. Due to space constraints, I limit myself to considering volume one independently before addressing The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures as a whole. The analysis is based on the inspection of three copies of the edition, held by the British Library, the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in the Hague, and the University of Michigan Library, in each of which the illustrations occur in the same sequence and bound into the volumes at the same points. Russell Palmer 24 Figure 1. Frontispiece, Levensgeschiedenis en lotgevallen van Robinson Crusoe (Amsterdam, 1791). Courtesy Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University (call mark: General collection Defoe 52 P791). Visual Criticism in the Illustrations of Robinson Crusoe 25 The first image to greet the reader, assuming a beginning-to-end reading, is the frontispiece of Crusoe (Figure 1), which shares many features with the Bernard Picart-inspired e arlier Dutch frontispiece (see Jung 2020: 175). It lacks the “treacherous water” and foundering ship, which in the early English and French portraits David Blewett interprets as adding a timeless, synoptic element to the image (1995: 27). Rather, it reflects Crusoe’s description of himself found on page 310 (1791). Crusoe stands in his goat-skins and breeches. An axe, a saw, and a pouch hang on his belt and a wicker basket on his back. The right hand is holding a parasol, while his left supports the butt of his fowling piece resting over his left shoulder. In the background, his shelter and its palisade wall are both clearly visible, as is the stone tablet lying on the ground and announcing the novel’s title. Significant deviations from the frontispieces used by the Jansoons and Morterre appear in Crusoe’s demeanour and the background, which together create an altogether different image of the novel’s protagonist. Although the posture of the body is broadly the same in both frontispieces, there are marked differences. An erect deportment and confident facial expression replace the tilted head and grimace of the earlier depiction. Rough sandals that expose his toes and upper feet are substituted for a full covering, giving an appearance not dissimilar to that of stockings and shoes, despite his admission that he had neither (1791: 310). The sky and a sandy foreground flood the image with light, which reflects off Crusoe’s furs and emphasizes the shade afforded by his parasol. Despite concluding that onlookers will think he looks like a barbarian 5 , the narrator Crusoe, as rendered in the 1791 frontispiece, appears as a rather elegant figure in a comparatively orderly environment. The bare-footed savage is transformed into a much nobler creature than the one presented in previous Dutch-language editions. 5 “doch alles was zo misselijk gefatsoeneerd, dat ik eene zeer barbaarsche vertooning maakte” (1791: 310). Russell Palmer 26 Figure 2. “Crusoe gestrand zijnde, raakt gelukkig aan land“, Levensgeschiedenis en lotgevallen van Robinson Crusoe (Amster-dam, 1791). Courtesy Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University (call mark: General collection Defoe 52 P791). Visual Criticism in the Illustrations of Robinson Crusoe 27 The caption to plate 1 reads “Crusoe gestrand zijnde, raakt gelukkig aan land. / Pag.108” (“Crusoe is stranded, happily touching land”). 6 Notably, it is the only plate numbered with a specific page number, although the indicated page does not correspond with where the binder has bound the plate; it is sandwiched between two passages that describe Crusoe gesticulating heavenwards (Figure 2). On the page preceding, Crusoe describes raising his hands towards Heaven and thanking God for sparing his life: “Ik was nu gestrand, en gelukkig aan Land geraakt, wanneer ik mijn handen tot den Hemmel hief, en God dankte, dat hij mijn leven in dit geval had gelieven te bewaren, ’t welk ik wenige oogenblikken te vooren met geen reden had durven hopen” (“I was now stranded and lucky to reach land, when I raised up my hands to Heaven and thanked God that He had saved my life at a time, where only moments before I had not dared to hope”) (1791: 88). On the page following, the text reads “Vervolgends ging ik langs strand wandelen, hief mijne handen op, en begon de wonderbaare manier van mijne verlossing te overdenken, maakende duizend gebaarden, en bewegingen, die ik niet beschrijven kan” (Subsequently, I walked along the beach, raising my hands up, and began to contemplate the wonderful manner of my redemption, making a thousand gestures and movements that I cannot describe”) (1791: 89). The movement engendered in the second passage by his walking along the beach with upraised hands jars with the kneeling position portrayed in the image. Pictured kneeling on one leg and raising his arms up in supplication, Crusoe gazes not directly upwards, as befitting a thankful supplicant. His torso, stance and palms all face the viewer, yet his slightly up-turned head faces away. With long, bedraggled hair flanking his facial expression of exhaustion, his eyes, rather than following the direction indicated by his tilting head, peer out from the image, directly engaging the viewer. He wears an overcoat; not fastened by the five visible buttons, the gaping garment reveals a buttoned waistcoat, under which are a shirt and a neck tie. On his lower half he wears breeches, stockings, and buckled shoes. The sagging wet clothes add to bodily features that give the impression of a corpulent body, which is accentuated by the narrow shoulders and a relatively wide waistline. The lower buttons of his tunic appear strained. The image is not static, there is dynamism. His right leg indicates upward movement, which suggests that as well as supplicating, Crusoe is lifting himself off the ground, raising himself up. Simultaneously the plate represents Crusoe’s call on God and his inner resolve to pull himself out of the sea and get on with living, hinting at what will come. Most previous visualizations illustrate Crusoe’s shipwreck by depicting him clinging to a rock against the backdrop of a ship foundering in a stormy 6 Historical meanings of Dutch words are taken from the “Historische woordenboeken” hosted by the Instituut voor de Nederlandse taal at http: / / wnt.inl.nl/ search/ Russell Palmer 28 sea. In the background of plate 1, waves break against the beach and foam swells around some rocks, denoting a turbulent ocean: the illustration shows Crusoe’s arrival on the island. While the plate appears unique to the edition, being neither borrowed from previous editions nor used subsequently, illustrating the moment Crusoe lands on the island and gives thanks to God has precedents. The 1761 French edition by Cailleau, Dufour and Cuissant, printed in Paris, pictures Crusoe walking along the beach whilst gesticulating upwards and gazing towards the sky. He faces his capsizing ship, which is visible in the background. The image is not only repeated in Cailleau’s 1782 edition, but also appears in Z. Chatelain & fils’ 1764 edition, their 1776 reprint, and their newly typeset edition issued a year later. A further image of Crusoe praising God occurs in the first instalment of Garnier’s Voyages Imaginaires (1787). It also shows Crusoe in similar clothes to Allart and Vis’ plate, but more youthful looking and standing. He looks out to sea, or may even have his eyes closed, while clasping his hands together above his head. The plate is signed by “C. P. Marillier” and L. S. Berthet”. 7 Although it illustrates the textual moment in which Crusoe walks along the beach thanking God, this plate may nonetheless have served as inspiration for Allart and Vis’s image, yet there is another possibility still. Rather than originating in an edition of Robinson Crusoe, it appeared in Abram Conelis’s Dutch-language 1776 edition of Hendrik Smeeks’s robinsonade, Krinke Kesmes, published in Amsterdam. In it, a young shipwrecked boy rejoices and thanks God for having found the buried chest of his lost ship, which is pictured sinking out at sea. The two images both depict a central, though differently rendered, supplicating figure. Resemblance to Allart and Vis’ plate derives from the pose of the supplicating boy who, kneeling on one leg, juts the other forward and leans it inwards, making the renderings of the two characters’ lower bodies strikingly similar. Significantly, the plates used in the Cailleau, Chatelain and Garnier editions all place Crusoe on the beach or on the grass just beyond it, which is supported textually: “je montai sur le haut de rivage, et je m’assis sur l’herbe” (Defoe 1787: 108). The Dutch translations are more specific and describe Crusoe climbing over the dunes to reach the grass (1720: 106; 1791: 88). These descriptions of Crusoe’s landing differ markedly from those in German and English editions, which describe Crusoe clambering up cliffs to reach the grass at the top (Defoe 2003: 38), a scene which is illustrated in plate 1 of the 1790 London edition, printed by the Logographic Press, designed by C. Metz and engraved by R. Pollard. Allart and Vis’ plate is faithful to the text they print in depicting Crusoe kneeling on the grass beyond the dunes, but it also illustrates a specifically detailed moment that does not exist in the same way in non-Dutch versions of the 7 Clément-Pierre Marillier designed a series of plates engraved by Louis-Sébastien Berthet that Garnier included in his three volumes of Robinson Crusoe. Visual Criticism in the Illustrations of Robinson Crusoe 29 text. Therefore, this precise image could not have been produced for readers of other languages. Figure 3. “Crusoe, verschrikt door een aardbeeving, klimt over zijn’wal”, Levensgeschiedenis en lotgevallen van Robinson Crusoe (Amsterdam, 1791). Courtesy Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University (call mark: General collection Defoe 52 P791). Russell Palmer 30 Plate 3 - as the second plate is numbered - is entitled “Crusoe, verschrickt door een aardbeeving; klimt over zijn’wall” (“Crusoe, terrified by an earthquake; climbs over his wall”). Rocks tumbling down onto the roof of his shelter signify the effects of the earthquake, while the strained trunk and bending leaves of a palm tree in the background testify to the winds (Figure 3). Crusoe rests his ladder against the palisade wall and, with his right foot on the first rung, has begun to make his exit. So far, the plate renders an accurate depiction of what is textually described in both Dutch and English editions (Defoe 1791: 156 & 2003: 153). In addition, the artist employs the visual convention of the raised hand to indicate that Crusoe is shielding himself from imminent danger. The action is not textually supported, but adds to the drama and dynamism of the image, which captures the action of the moment, illustrating both the danger and Crusoe’s impending escape to safety. Our protagonist has clearly been caught unaware, as he is not dressed for venturing outside of his walled enclosure. Rather, he is depicted in either the same clothes or very similar ones to those in which he arrived on the island and he does not yet wear a moustache. The foreground is clean and the view afforded into his shack reveals an orderly interior, just as he himself is presented. The scene is one of orderliness and calm that has been interrupted by the chaos of the natural disaster. Unlike the first two plates, the subsequent three illustrate new renderings of subjects that were also illustrated in earlier Dutch editions. The first of these - numbered plate 4 - is entitled simply “Crusoe maakt potten” (Crusoe makes pots). Unlike the caption accompanying the Jansoons’ plate (see Table 1), it does not offer any reason for Crusoe’s potting, leaving the reader to decide whether he pots from necessity or for pleasure. Crusoe the potter is common to many illustrated editions, but the composition of the 1791 engraving is altogether more balanced than that reproduced in the earlier editions. In the background, more of the sky is visible, and the image is framed on both sides: on the left of Crusoe’s shack, the rock to which it is attached and a tree form a column that is countered on the right by the rising plumes of smoke emitted from the kiln. The outline of the mountains, which corresponds with the height of the top of Crusoe’s head, horizontally divides the image. In earlier Dutch renditions, his shack dominates the left half of the image. Crusoe occupies only the lower third of the plate, in which he sits centrally, balancing a large pot on his left knee while supporting his seating with the other outspread leg. The implausibility of resting a large ceramic vessel on one’s knee for fine moulding around the rim, as it appears, is high; large unbaked vessels are delicate and heavy, and best worked on the ground or a large flat surface. In contrast, the 1791 engraving positions Crusoe slightly to the side, with a basin and its platform taking centre place. He sits on a large flat surface, possibly a rock, with the solid cuboid “potting table” wedged between his spread legs, an object that bears similarity to items visible in Plate 1 of “Potier de terre” in Diderot’s Encyclopédie (1765). Crusoe’s poise and posture is not only Visual Criticism in the Illustrations of Robinson Crusoe 31 more believable than in earlier renditions, it also demonstrates a greater acquaintance with the practicalities of potting. Crusoe works contently under the shade (or shadow) of the rock that in the previous plate was the cause of his alarm. Wearing the same attire as in the previous plate, his fully stockinged and shoed appearance again contrasts with the wilder image of Crusoe portrayed in earlier editions. Working with his hands, he engages with the vessel he has made from the earthly bounty of the island, seemingly at ease. In other renditions of the scene, including earlier Dutch illustrations, he is accompanied by his parrot Poll. Allart and Vis’ plate foregrounds the relationship between the potter and his materials. He pots alone. Figure 4. “De manier van Spijzen en huishouding van Crusoe”, Levensgeschiedenis en lotgevallen van Robinson Crusoe (Amsterdam, 1791). Courtesy Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University (call mark: General collection Defoe 52 P791). Russell Palmer 32 In the following plate, the viewer glimpses for the first time Crusoe with other islanders. Entitled “De manier van Spijzen en huishouding van Crusoe” (“The manner of Crusoe’s eating and household”), the scene depicts Crusoe dining and surrounded by his household of domesticated animals, or his “family”. The only non-domesticated animal, Poll, has been tamed and caged (Figure 4). She pokes her head out from the cage to look in Crusoe’s direction, while his dog sits at his side, glancing expectantly up at his master. The two cats sit either side of him, staring at each other from beneath the table. Based on the linguistic text, Clint Wilson III argues that the “table and chair offer a daily signifier that separates himself [Crusoe] from his nonhuman context; they make him human again” (2019: 296, original italics). However, we have already seen Crusoe sitting at a table, albeit of a different kind, as he pots. If in the potting scene we witness Crusoe mastering his environment, here he takes his place as the chief of his fellow islanders. Enthroned on his stool and surrounded by his attendants, Crusoe is not only the head of his household, but as the only householder, he extends his authority to cover the entire island. The caption draws specific attention to the manner of his food and eating. Unlike the caption to the Jansoons’ image, which emphasises the farcical (“klugtige”) way in which Crusoe eats and therefore his self-mockery, Allart and Vis’s neutral caption paves the way for a scene of orderliness and improvement. It conveys a level of European civilization: a glass bottle most likely containing rum, a colonial product, replaces the earthenware jug in the Jansoons’ earlier image, and the table is no longer cluttered with anything but the food and drink receptacles and their contents. Three sides of the glass bottle are distinctly visible, indicating that it is neither round nor square in profile, as is described textually (Defoe 1791: 182, 218), but hexagonal. Crusoe eats not with a knife and his hand, but directly from the knife, as if it were a fork, demonstrating a more refined manner of eating. Furthermore, the observant viewer will notice that the little finger of his right hand, which holds the knife, is extended. As Pat Rogers observes, “Crusoe is not just interested in structural alterations but also in improving the internal living arrangements” (1974: 375), to which we might add that he is also improving himself. The neatness and rustic refinement of within extends to outdoors, which visualizes elements of eighteenth-century improvement through a peaceful and ordered landscape (Rogers 1974: 388). The palisade wall shows no sign of the trees Crusoe plants in Defoe’s narrative; the trees which grow as wild as to create an impenetrable wall are, in fact, omitted from all the plates. Instead, the palisade wall forms a fence beyond which the distant untamed environment of the island is barely discernable. The fragility of Crusoe’s self-made civilized domesticity and his role as master are acknowledged in the next plate, as the prospect of human company is introduced. Visual Criticism in the Illustrations of Robinson Crusoe 33 Figure 5. “Crusoe ontdekte met verschrikking de Plaats der Canibaalsche maaltijden”, Levensgeschiedenis en lotgevallen van Robinson Crusoe (Amersterdam, 1791). Courtesy Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University (call mark: General collection Defoe 52 P791). Russell Palmer 34 The caption to Crusoe’s discovery of a cannibalistic feast departs from the Jansoons’ purely descriptive caption - “Crusoe ontdeckt de plaats der Canibaalse maaltyden” - by commenting on the manner with which Crusoe reacts (Figure 5). The additional adverbial phrase “met verschrikking” (“with horror”) warns the reader that Crusoe’s graphic rendering should not be read as mere astonishment or surprise. This is not to suggest that the depicted scene would otherwise be ambiguous; the verbal and visual messages are mutually reinforcing. Compositionally, the earlier Dutch engraving and Allart and Vis’s are similar in that trees are used to frame a view behind Crusoe of the island’s interior. Crusoe stands at the end of the pit in and around which are strewn the dismembered and skeletal remains of the cannibals’ feast. In the later plate, though, the human remains are larger, which makes their rendering not only more realistic - the size of the skulls in the earlier engraving are so much smaller that Crusoe’s own head as to suggest either a child or smaller primate - but also more obvious, and therefore intrusive. There is absolutely no question as to the object of Crusoe’s gaze. His upper body leans forward towards the pit, with his raised right hand denoting his fear. Together with the positioning of his legs, the artist graphically portrays the exact moment of discovery, in which Crusoe struggles to contain his horror and stop himself falling into the pit. The vitality of the scene contrasts starkly with the barely dynamic Crusoe encountered in earlier Dutch editions. Apart from differences in the bodily poses, the wide-open eyes and gaping mouth of the later Crusoe complete the visual rendering of fear and repulsion. Crusoe is depicted in his outdoor attire, as in the frontispiece, yet the scene is nonetheless one of a civilized man meeting savagery. The plates contained within the first volume do not complete the edition’s illustrative apparatus of The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures, but they must be considered on their own terms. They form part of a separate book that need not always be read in conjunction with the remainder of the Defoe’s text found in the second volume, which is a distinctly separate object. Though advertisements make it clear the set of three volumes were marketed and sold as a single work, a single edition, practices and the practicalities of reading dictate that the images contained in each volume will have been “read” at some point as individual narratives. Notwithstanding the likelihood of some readers, perhaps later generations, possessing only one or two of the volumes, it is impossible for anyone to read all three volumes at once. It is through these material pre-conditions of reading, what McGann refers to as “production structures” (1991: 82), that the book and its illustrations are able to act. The volume engages the reader with a sequence of images that is limited in its scope and number, emphasizing certain scenes and diminishing through exclusion the impact and memorability of episodes rendered only typographically. Moreover, the plates organize the text in such a way as to affect the perceived narrative, Visual Criticism in the Illustrations of Robinson Crusoe 35 whether it is the narrative codified in the typographical text or that encoded in the visual apparatus. And while these narratives need not differ from one another, I contend here that “the verbal text and the documentary materials” do not “operate together in a single literary result” (McGann 1991: 81). The overall narrative of Defoe’s work has been broken, cut short. When viewed in the order in which the illustrations are bound (and numbered), the frontispiece represents a prolepsis, figuring an image of Crusoe that does not occur textually until page 310 (1791); an image which by the late eighteenth century was already well-known across Europe through not only previous editions but also its use in robinsonades (Blewett 1995: 32; Festa 2011: 456; Jung 2020: 174-175). Given the common occurrence of Crusoe in his goat-skins and the widespread use of frontispieces in eighteenth-century editions of belles lettres, I do not, on the one hand, consider it as especially important in framing the narrative beyond evoking notions of being shipwrecked on a deserted island and surviving. On the other hand, the frontispiece - because of its familiarity and associations - offers specific narrative framing to plate 1 and all subsequent plates, relating to the reader that Crusoe is on an island and he has survived, even prospered to a fashion. The frontispiece operates as metonymic device, relying not on what is visualized, but on the visual and cultural literacy of the viewer. Its appearance at the very beginning enables the visual narrative to mimic the dual notions of time offered in Crusoe’s own recollected narration of his adventures and the progressive march of time offered in his diary. Having glimpsed at the future, the viewer must now travel back in time to start at the beginning of the tale. From this point on, the subsequent plates chronicle Crusoe’s progression to the textual moment encapsulated in the frontispiece, but deviate in doing so from the narrative offered by the linguistic text. Visual narration begins with Crusoe’s arrival on the island in plate 1. Its caption, along with the associative frontispiece, conveys the shipwrecking, and the viewer is confronted with a beached and supplicating Crusoe. The Providential act of surviving a shipwreck gives Crusoe the opportunity of a “Christian rebirth”, argues Richard Phillips: he “starts out as a man with almost no identity, and is constructed as the story proceeds” (2013: 31). In the linguistic text, this rebirth is possible because of the previous trials and sins of the protagonist, from Crusoe’s initial appeal to God during the storm after eloping from Hull and the subsequent shipwrecking at Yarmouth Roads to his escape with Xury and his original sin of paternal disobedience. Some or all of these episodes in Crusoe’s pre-island adventures were frequently illustrated in English, French and German editions, as well as the earlier Dutch ones. The occurrence of plate 1 over a hundred pages into the book means that Crusoe’s pre-island history does not figure in the visual narrative. A past is indicated nonetheless - the man who reaches out to God in thanks is wet and bedraggled, but he is also clothed in “the trappings and symbols of his civilisation” (Phillips 2013: 31) - but the past is unknown, imagined Russell Palmer 36 by the reader and not necessarily that of Defoe’s text. The visual narrative encourages a reading that foregrounds the island adventure, rather than any tale of Christian moral progression (the edition also lacks a further device of moral guidance, a preface). Readers could literally have skipped the first hundred or so pages, using the plate as an indicator of where to start reading. Robinson Crusoe is transformed into an island adventure, obliterating the story of religious progress and reconfiguring the moral tale. While the second plate, which pictures Crusoe’s escape from falling rocks during an earthquake, may be read as Divine intervention, it also demonstrates the potential dangers which abound in his new foreign habitat and starts to visually chart Crusoe’s improvements of that environment. His dwelling is fenced off from the wild of an island that is never visualized in any detail. Nevertheless, his mastery over the island is visually represented by his potting, through which he turns clay - the island itself - into something useful, as well as the recreation of European domesticity. While his rough and ready abode may not have drawn direct comparisons with readers’ own homes, there are nonetheless cues to his civilized manners. His dwelling is uncluttered and orderly. In both the earthquake and the dining scenes the viewer is admitted only to the public areas of his dwelling; no caves, cellars or “kitchens” are visualized. Crusoe is rendered “a good householder” (Rogers 1974: 377), but also a civilized and sophisticated man: from his eating habits to always appearing shoed 8 and, whenever fitting, dressed in his native clothes, rather than his goat-skins. Depicting neither Crusoe’s dream nor his conversation, the Christian narrative hinted at in the initial plates subsides into one of human endeavour and improvement. Moreover, the tale also becomes one of a man on his own on an island, deracinated from his natal environment. Crusoe is pictured continuously devoid of any human company. The production structures of the edition separate the illustrations in volume one from those in subsequent volumes, mimicking Crusoe’s own stranded state. At the same time, as Crusoe claims dominion over his island, the material and visual apparatuses of the volume draw readers towards a narrative that focuses entirely on the island as a place of isolation. Both Crusoe and volume one act autonomously until the final plate: Crusoe independently of other humans and volume one without its companion volumes. A tension exists between isolation and the true relational (co-dependent) character of both Crusoe and the first volume. Discovery of cannibalistic remains and picturing Crusoe’s horror visualizes this tension. Crusoe is not alone after all, just like the volume. In order to resolve the tension between Crusoe’s separation from the world 8 The fact that Crusoe always appears shoed would have meant that, should the scene in which Crusoe discovers the print of a bare human foot in the sand have been featured, there would have been no ambiguity as whether the footprint was his own or that of someone else. Visual Criticism in the Illustrations of Robinson Crusoe 37 and his presumed escape, the reader must overcome the physical separation of volume one from volume two. The final plate operates as a visual cliff-hanger by offering “circumstantial evidence” for the presence of others (Folkenflik 2000: 467), enticing the reader to perform that very act. The first four plates contained in the second volume complete The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures. Crusoe’s independence and isolation are replaced in images that portray our protagonist as fearless, redeeming, and powerful; the savage is tamed and civilized, and white Europeans overcome barbarity. Unlike the plates of the first volume, all four plates visualize multiple human characters in addition to Crusoe. The first depicts the scene of Friday swearing his allegiance to his rescuer. Friday, who is not named for another six pages (52), kneels with his head on the ground, placing his new master’s foot on his head with his right hand. Crusoe holds his hand over Friday, extending his index finger in warning, or perhaps a blessing. In the background lie Friday’s dead and wounded aggressors. This plate and the next, which portrays Crusoe rescuing the Spaniard, represent re-visualized and reversed rather than re-imagined renderings of the engraved scenes in the Jansoons’ edition, although both are more artistically rendered than their predecessors. Greater attention is paid to the facial expressions of subjects and while the Jansoons’ edition illustrates Crusoe rather illogically looking at the Spaniard while cutting his bonds, he is here seen observing what he is doing, while the Spaniard looks on at his rescuer anxiously. Named in the caption, the cannibals are visible in the distance, dead and fleeing, pursued by Friday, who appears almost as a second Crusoe figure and takes aim at them. By the time we reach the penultimate plate, Crusoe is transformed. No longer in his goat-skins, the English captain has furnished him with provisions and clothes (a scene illustrated in the Jansoons’ edition) and Crusoe assumes governorship of the island. He stands to the right, with Friday behind him wearing English clothes and shoes for the first time, visualizing his place in Crusoe’s civilized European world as his servant. Both look at the group of English mutineers, who are described in the caption as “prisoners” (“gevangenen”). Gesturing towards the English ship anchored a little from the shore, beyond the longboat and positioned at the centre of the image, he points out their old mutinous captain, hanging from a yard arm. The image portrays a graphic warning of the fate that awaited the mutineers if they were to break the conditions of their release. Crusoe is the undoubted focal point of the plate. The startling white of his new attire stands out from the tones of grey in which the rest of the scene is depicted, and his dominant pose, with an extended arm, allows him to appear larger than the other men. Resplendent, all physical traces of his island life are erased, including the facial hair. Crusoe takes his place in the colonial racial hierarchy in which he and his white Christian countrymen reign supreme. Ready to rejoin his civilized world, the only accompanying aspect Russell Palmer 38 of his island existence is Friday, who is depicted dark skinned, in darkercoloured clothes, and who stands obediently behind his white master. Figure 6. “Vermaaklijk voorval van Crusoe’s knecht, Vrijdag, met een’beer”, Levensgeschiedenis en lotgevallen van Robinson Crusoe (Amsterdam, 1791). Courtesy Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University (call mark: General collection Defoe 52 P791). Visual Criticism in the Illustrations of Robinson Crusoe 39 It is the remnants of his wild island life, personified in Friday, that are the subject of the final plate (Figure 6). The scene depicted directly follows the wolf attack in which Friday demonstrates his bravery by shooting a wolf and rescuing the party’s guide (as illustrated in several French-language editions, see Table 2). It shows Friday clinging to the end of a tree branch, facing an advancing and ferocious bear. The rest of the party look on from the saddle. His weapon and hat lie on the ground below, alerting the reader to his unarmed state, but also that in losing his hat, he retains a little of the wild when compared to his European onlookers. At first glance, this scene depicts danger and possibly bravery, but the caption steers the reader towards a comic interpretation: “Vermaaklijk voorval van Crusoe’s knecht, Vrijdag, met een’beer” (“Amusing incident of Crusoe’s servant, Friday, with a bear”). Instead of presenting Friday and his people as ingenious for their way of rendering an otherwise lethal opponent benign, Friday is cast as the fool. Although a textually-supported interpretation of the exact moment, it denies Friday both the cleverness Crusoe credits him with and the admiration and applause he receives from his audience of onlookers in earlier and later moments in the novel. Rather, his previous bravery is omitted and his racial inferiority is carried through to the end. Regardless of the visual portrayal of Friday, the concluding plates provide a narrative in which Crusoe is transformed from the eighteenth-century improver and colonizer portrayed in the visual narrative of volume one, claiming control of the land and its resources, to a man who holds sway over people as well. From his rescuing of Friday and the Spaniard from the savages to his merciful release of the English prisoners, Crusoe is cast as a benevolent overlord or colonial governor. Read as a whole, the plates that visualize The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures offer a metatextual commentary on the protagonist. Crusoe is visualized as an active being, as a man who has the skills and inner drive to survive and succeed. His struggles and failures are omitted or, in the case of his arrival and the earthquake scene, offered up to the reader as demonstration of his ability to overcome adversity. He is a man in charge of his own destiny. From his arrival on the island and the beginning of the visual narrative, he settles and gains knowledge of his new environment, a knowledge which affords him a position of power when faced with others, who he rescues from their reduced states of liberty. An isolated island existence is central to the visual narrative. In volume one, the entire narrative is confined to Crusoe’s island and it is only at the very end of the novel that Crusoe is visualized in Europe. In omitting his earlier exploits and foregrounding his island existence, the narrative eclipses the themes of travel and adventure proffered by the typographicallyrendered linguistic text. As Pat Rogers has pointed out, “Robinson Crusoe may owe much to travel-books, but its hero spends twenty-eight years virtually standing on the spot” (Rogers 1974: 375). Nevertheless, emphasizing the island motif was not common in illustrated editions of the eighteenth Russell Palmer 40 century, nor was it a peculiarly local phenomenon. Eighteenth-century English abridgements “were designed to emphasize Crusoe’s travels and adventures” (Howell 2014: 299), as were chapbook editions (O’Malley 2011). Only in the nineteenth century did English abridgements begin to “give little mention to Crusoe’s imperial career, prior to his arrival on the island” (Phillips 2013: 32). Dutch adaptations and imitations of Robinson Crusoe also frequently privileged travel and adventure over an isolated island existence (Buijnsters 1969: 8). A focus on the island-based events also transforms the didactic nature of the tale. Rather than a Christian storyline of rebirth and redemption, the moral becomes one of human endeavour. While a story of human endeavour, the visual narrative does not merely proffer one of simple productivity. Renderings of Crusoe’s environment and the ways in which he has adapted it for his needs foreground the “practical petit bourgeois colonialism” that Phillips locates in later English abridgements (2013: 32). Crusoe improves his “estate” while never letting himself become truly wild. Despite his appearance in the goat-skins, he is frequently pictured in his European clothes and never with bare feet, unlike in so many other illustrated editions. The Crusoe depicted never ceases to be a civilized European. The illustrations contained in Allart and Vis’ edition facilitate multiple readings through their visual renderings of textual moments. By spreading the novel over one and a half volumes, both the linguistic and the visual narratives are broken, yet both actively guide and encourage the reader to specific, if different, interpretative ends. Acting through their materiality, the position and order of the plates invites the reader to skip sections of the typographically-realized linguistic text, particularly at the beginning and end of the novel. Not only do the illustrations present a much shorter narrated time, but the frontispiece also disrupts the linear temporal structure, altering the narrative time. The visual renderings of his environment contradict those painted by Defoe’s text and by supplying Crusoe the potter with a table, the plates further destabilize the order of events within the linguistic narrative, especially given the difficulties Crusoe recounts with levelling his dining table. The artist’s portrayal frequently offers criticism of Defoe’s text through embellishments, many of which are textually unsubstantiated: from employing artistic conventions, such as Crusoe raising his hand to shield himself from falling rocks during an earthquake, to introducing hexagonal glass bottles and raised little fingers in the dining scene. The visual paratexts and production structures of the edition provide a critical commentary on Robinson Crusoe that reformulates potential readings in ways that not only mark it out from earlier Dutch and non-Dutch editions, but also contribute to the transnational textual condition of Defoe’s classic. Visual Criticism in the Illustrations of Robinson Crusoe 41 Acknowledgements I would also like to thank Ton Broos for his helpful discussions regarding the veracity of Buys and Vinkeles as the likely artists and engraver of the 1791 plates. I am grateful to Sandro Jung for commenting on previous drafts and to the anonymous peer reviewer for their helpful suggestions. Works Cited Barchas, Janine (2003). Graphic Design, Print Culture, and the Eighteenth-Century Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blewett, David (1995). The Illustration of Robinson Crusoe, 1719-1920. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe Ltd. Boekzaal (1721). “La Vie & les Avantures surprenantes de ROBINSON CRUSOE”. Maendelyke Uittreksels, of Boekzael der geleerde waerelt; Dertiende deel. Voor July 1721. T’Amsterdam, By Gerard onder de Linden. 58-93. Boekzaal (1804). “W. van Vliet, te Amsterdam”. Maendelyke Uittreksels, of Boekzael der geleerde waerelt; Honderd en agt-en-zenventigste deel. Voor January 1804. Te Amsterdam: By d’Erven D. onder de Linden en Zoon. 64-65. Boekzaal (1811). “Ten geschenken voor de jeugd”. Maendelyke Uittreksels, of Boekzaal der geleerde waereld; Honderd en drei-en-negentigste deel. Voor November 1811. Te Amsterdam: bij d’Erven D. Onder de Lindon en Zoon. 517. Broos, Ton (1981-1982). “Misdruk en mispunt: Johannes Allart (1754-1816) II”. Spektator 11: 212-223. Bryan, Michael (1886). Dictionary of Painter and Engravers, Biographical and Critical, Volume I: A-K. London: George Bell and Sons. Bryan, Michael (1889). Dictionary of Painter and Engravers, Biographical and Critical, Volume II: L-Z. London: George Bell and Sons. Buijnsters, Petrus Jacobus. (1969). Imaginaire reisverhalen in Nederland gedurende de 18e eeuw. Groningen: Wolters-Noordhoff. Buijnsters-Smets, Leotine (1984). “Jacobus Buys als boekillustrator”. Documentatieblad werkgroep Achtiende eeuw 63-64. 91-107. Buisman J.Fzn., Michael (1960). Populaire prozaschrijvers van 1600 tot 1815. Romans, novellen, verhalen, levensbeschrijvingen, arcadia’s, sprookjes. Amsterdaem: B.M. Israël. Defoe, Daniel (1720). Het leven en de wonderbaare gevallen van Robinson Crusoe, behelzende onder andere ongehoorde uitkomsten een verhaal van zyn agt en twintig jaarig verblyf op een onbewoond eiland, gelegen op de kust van America by de mond van de rivier Oronooque. t’ Amsterdam: by de Jansoons van Waesberge. Defoe, Daniel (1787). Voyage Imaginaires, Songes, Visions, et Romans Cabalistiques. Tome Premier. La vie et les aventures suprentantes de Robinson Crusoe. A Amsterdam, et se trove à Paris: [Charles Garnier]. Defoe, Daniel (1791). Levensgeschiednis en Lotgevallen van Robinson Crusoe, behelzende onder andere ongehoorde uitkomsten, een verhaal van zyn agt-en-twintig jaarig verblyf op een onbewoond eiland, gelegen op de kust van America, bij de mond van de rivier Oronoque. Te Amsterdam en Rotterdam: bij J. Allart en D. Vis. Defoe, Daniel (2003). Robinson Crusoe, ed. with an introduction and notes by John Richetti. London: Penguin. Festa, Lynn (2011). “Crusoe’s Island of Misfit Things”. The Eighteenth Century 52.3- 4. 443-471. Russell Palmer 42 Folkenflik, Robert (2000). “The New Model Eighteenth-Century Novel”. Eighteenth- Century Fiction 12.2-3. 459-478. Folkenflik, Robert (2002). “Tobias Smollett, Anthony Walker, and the First Illustrated Serial Novel in English”. Eighteenth-Century Fiction 14.3-4. 507-532. Free, Melissa (2006). “Un-Erasing Crusoe: Farther Adventures in the Nineteenth Century”. Book History 9. 89-130. Gosden, Chris (2005). “What Do Objects Want? ” Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 12.3. 193-211. Groningen Courant (1791). “ROBINSON CRUSOE”. 28 June 1791: 1. Howell, Jordan (2014). “Eighteenth-Century Abridgements of Robinson Crusoe”. The Library 15.3. 292-343. Jung, Carlien (2005). “Reinier Vinkeles (1741-1816). Groot kunstenaar en eigenzinnige achttiende-eeuwer”. Mededelingen van de Stichting Jacob Campo Weyerman 28. 118-129. Jung, Sandro (2020). “Book Illustration and the Transnational Mediation of Robinson Crusoe in 1720”. Philological Quarterly 99.2. 171-201. Kipins, Andrew B. (2015). “Agency between Humanism and Posthumanism: Latour and his opponents”. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5.2. 43-58. McGann, Jerome J. (1991). The Textual Condition. Princeton: Princeton University Press. McKenzie, D. F. (1999). Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Meijer, Pieter (1781). Tafereel van Natuur en Konst, Achtiende Deel. Amsterdam: by Pieter Meijer. Mitchell, William J. T. (2005). “There Are No Visual Media”. Journal of Visual Culture 4.2. 257-266. O’Malley, Andrew (2011). “Poaching on Crusoe’s Island: Popular Reading and Chapbook Editions of Robinson Crusoe”. Eighteenth-Century Life 35.2. 18-38. Oprechte Haerlemsche Courant (1791a). “De Wondervolle Reize”. 25 January: 1. Oprechte Haerlemsche Courant (1791b). “ROBINSON CRUSOE”. 30 June: 2. Phillips, Richard (2013). Mapping Men and Empire: Geographies of Adventure. London: Routledge. Rogers, Pat (1974). “Crusoe’s Home”. Essays in Criticism 24.4. 375-390. Staverman, W. H. (1907). Robinson Crusoe in Nederland: Een bijdrage tot de geschiednis van den roman in de XVIIIe eeuw. Groningen: M. De Waal. van Veen, Coenraad Frederik (1980). “Een bibliografische excursie op het gebied van het 18e-eeuwse Nederlandse kinderboek”. Documentatieblad werkgroep Achttiende eeuw 45. 3-19. Wilson, Clint, III (2019). “A Table of Prohibited Degrees: The Appetites and Affinities of Robinson Crusoe”. The Eighteenth Century 60.3. 293-310. Russell Palmer School of Foreign Studies Shanghai University of Finance and Economics 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 Wales and the East in Eleanor Sleath’s Glenowen; or the Fairy Palace (1815) Matthew C. Jones In this essay I examine the four illustrations of Eleanor Sleath’s 1815 children’s novel Glenowen as nexuses of Wales and the East in the English imagination, proprietary education, and the powers of the imagination. Welsh and eastern identities intersect in the images, which include, for instance, Welsh peasants and “fairies” in Indian shawls together, and the “fairy palace” adorned with Oriental imagery nestled within the Welsh mountains. I argue that through images that depict mollified portrayals of these hegemonic intercultural relationships for children, and framing them such that they fortify contemporary mores surrounding childhood education and imagination, Glenowen perpetuates Welsh and eastern colonialisms. Consequently, the novel also exemplifies how the relationships between cultural hegemonies and education were translated for children in word and image. In addition to considering their roles in Glenowen, this essay also brings into conversation scholarship on these major themes, and presents new avenues for explicating the interactions between book illustration, children’s literature, and British colonialisms. 1. Introduction From the moment that Rosa, the orphaned child protagonist of Eleanor Sleath’s Glenowen; or The Fairy Palace, receives her book of fairy tales, she has no question that fairies are real, and that they can impart wisdom to those with whom they come into contact. She doubts that they have the same degree of powers that the ones in the old stories did (“these, however, were probably the fairies of other countries, or of ancient days” [65]), but certainly they still exist; indeed, there were two kinds, “one benevolent, the other malignant; [and] rewards and punishments were awarded by them to the merits or demerits of those with whom they interfered” (66). Throughout Glenowen, Rosa’s convictions ring true, as she is visited and AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 46 (2021) · Heft 1 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.2357/ AAA-2021-0004 Matthew C. Jones 74 guided by a fairy figure who gives her presents for making progress in her education and for her benevolent actions. Through young Rosa’s eyes, the myth of the fairy, who adorns herself with Indian shawls and Chinese silks, is supported by her exotic Welsh origins and eastern appearance. In these ways, Glenowen unites turn-of-the-nineteenth-century English discourses on Wales, the East, education, and the imagination, and translates important elements of each for young readers. Furthermore, it brings these themes together not only in its text, but also in four illustrations, which serve as portals through which readers can observe these ideas filtered through a child’s imagination. The novel’s stated purpose is to educate young readers in terms of virtue and benevolence, with these lessons often being ventriloquized through Welsh and oriental figures. Thus the images do not merely portray exotic, and in this case colonized, populations in benign and child-friendly ways; they reinforce these contemporary hegemonic relationships and contribute to their perpetuation by making them legible to young minds. Through the images, child readers visualize the formal and philosophical educational lessons the text delineates, and are also informed that contemporary cultural constructions of the Welsh and eastern other are not only accurate, but are worth preserving in their present hierarchical forms. Thematically, the four illustrations are a tapestry of contemporary discourses of Wales, the East, and education. I will approach these visualizations through a focus on their content: each contains a building, and, chronologically, they progress from a Welsh peasant cottage, to a church building, to the “fairy palace” (in reality a mansion in Wales), to what can be understood as an improved Welsh cottage. The viewer’s perspective expands throughout the novel, including more background geography in each successive image. This, I argue, correlates with the expanding worldly education and imaginative powers throughout the novel. Yet, despite the inclusion of more background detail in each image, they all remain very simple in design (with only a single structure and a few human figures in each), and even the details of the architecture and surrounding environment are not elaborately executed. This signals that the images themselves, as well as the novel, were designed specifically with child readers in mind. With the aid of these illustrations Sleath conveyed challenging and erudite lessons and ideas, such as the benevolent affections, the picturesque, and intercultural relationships, for young people who would likely not yet have been immersed deeply in these discourses. Indeed, the content and construction of Glenowen’s images make the novel unconventional in terms of current scholarship on the nineteenth-century novel, and thus necessitate a deeper analysis than the work has heretofore received. With these points in mind and before turning to these illustrations (in the order in which they appear in the novel), I will first provide essential contextual information on the major elements of the story. This will begin with a survey of the small amount of scholarship on Glenowen. I will then Wales and the East in Sleath’s Glenowen; or the Fairy Palace 75 provide an account of eighteenthand nineteenth-century notions of Wales, Welsh life, and their roles in the English imagination, as well as of the presences and utilizations of the Orient, such as the increasing cultural awareness and invocations of literatures such as The Arabian Nights (characters from which Glenowen recycles). Establishing the presence of these discourses serves as inroads for assessing the importance of Sleath bringing them together in a manner legible to children. However, I will first summarize Glenowen’s plot (to assist in locating the images later in my analysis), and introduce some crucial details of the material and publication histories of the novel and the book market into which it was released. The story follows young Rosa Evelynn and her older brother Charles, and begins with the death of their mother Mrs. Evelynn, who leaves them to the care of her good friend Dame Morgan, a Welsh peasant in the fictional Welsh village of Glenowen. 1 We follow the children through key moments of their formal and extracurricular educational developments. That is, at the same time that their arrival and tutelage at the local school is explained (the English origin of Rosa’s teacher being emphasized), we also witness their growth as individuals in terms of their benevolent affections. Rosa, for instance, becomes the social protector and close friend of a classmate of a more lowly economic and social status (named Jessy), and Charles offers financial assistance to an indigent traveler. As a reward for her progress at school Rosa is given a book of fairy tales, the contents of which she begins to graft onto the world around her. On the second anniversary of their mother’s death, Charles, Rosa, Jessy, and Dame Morgan visit her grave to lay flowers (this being described as an indispensable Welsh ritual). At the graveyard they observe an elaboratelydressed woman in Indian silks visiting the same grave. With no explanations regarding the unknown woman’s identity, Rosa concludes that the figure is a benevolent fairy. Soon after this, Rosa, Charles, and Dame Morgan receive anonymous and exotic gifts, followed swiftly by the benevolent fairy appearing at Dame Morgan’s cottage, whereupon she is named “Peribanou” (inspired by Rosa’s reading of Arabian Nights). She offers to have the children over to visit her mansion, and while there they are overwhelmed both by the size of her domicile and by the wealth of exotic material artifacts and curiosities with which it is populated. This leads to the home being identified by Rosa as Peribanou’s eponymous “fairy palace”. Throughout this time Peribanou indulges Rosa’s fancies and allows her to believe that she is indeed a benevolent fairy. The story closes with Peribanou identifying herself as Mrs. Macdonald (formerly Mrs. Appowen), a widow who was once betrothed to the children’s father, and who has inherited immense wealth from her husband’s ventures in India. It concludes 1 An exact location within Wales is not confirmed, but multiple references are made to Caernarfonshire in northwest Wales, the location also of Snowdonia and thus a charged locus of Welsh tropes for Romantic-era authors and readers. Matthew C. Jones 76 with Mrs. Macdonald adopting the children, and rewarding Dame Morgan for her previous guardianship thus: “‘…and here is something… with my signature’ (giving a written paper into her hands) ‘which will immediately entitle you to an income, more than sufficient for your comfort: added to this, your cottage is your own. It is the just reward for your fidelity’” (190). The rather uncomplicated and unornamented plot complements the presentation and publication of the book itself. The book was published by the noted children’s literature publisher John Harris in 1815 2 , and was advertised in The British Review and London Critical Journal in the “List of New Works published from July 10 to October, 1815” as such: “Glenowen, or the Fairy Palace, a Tale. By Eleanor Heath [sic]; illustrated with Engravings. 18mo. Half-bound 3s” (572). Its modest price stands out even among the non-illustrated works that accompany it in this catalog (which includes not only novels and poetry but other categories such as “Philology”, “Politics, and Political Economy”, and “Theology, and Theological History”). Around 1800, novels were often printed in three volumes that tended to cost five to six shillings a volume and fifteen to eighteen altogether, placing Glenowen, printed in a single volume, significantly below the mean of the time (with Glenowen only slightly predating the sharp increase in cost around 1821, associated with the novels of Sir Walter Scott, to 10s 6d per volume and thus 31s 6d altogether) (Eliot 2020: 291). What this means is that, through Glenowen, Sleath was making the multifaceted themes accessible to a far wider audience than most novels were being allowed to reach at the time, and was even doing so with illustrations. 2. Sleath’s Glenowen Glenowen has not previously been studied in detail, despite passing scholarly references, which testify to its potential, for instance through its synthesizing of discrete genres and forms. 3 Grenby (2011: 510) discusses Glenowen in terms of its bringing together children’s and gothic literatures: Some authors were even prepared to attempt children’s fiction in modes widely deemed unsuited for the young… Eleanor Sleath, author of The Orphan of the Rhine (1798), … was responsible for a more coherent attempt to introduce the Gothic to children. Her Glenowen, or The Fairy Palace (1815), … tells of two young orphans abandoned in a picturesque Welsh village. A ghostlike stranger is seen; mysterious gifts appear; the children are summoned to an eerie mansion. Eventually, all is explained as the ministrations of a benign lady, once 2 See also Glenowen’s entry in Moon (1976) (entry 806). 3 What little scholarship there is has often focused on her 1798 novel The Orphan of the Rhine, which is one of the “seven horrid novels” referenced in Northanger Abbey. For an introduction to Sleath, see Czlapinski and Wheeler (2011). Wales and the East in Sleath’s Glenowen; or the Fairy Palace 77 betrothed to the children’s father, who has encouraged their belief that she is a fairy so that she may aid them anonymously. In another short reference, Townshend (2013: 32) situates Glenowen as a vehicle for making a more specific claim regarding Sleath as a pioneer of redirecting the gothic for young readers from adults: Sleath’s … highly imaginative fiction for children vacillates deftly between Gothic in its lighter and darker, sportive and terrible manifestations; suggestions of ghosts and hauntings effortlessly combine with a celebration of the fanciful powers of the unfettered imagination. The point to be made, though, is that, with Sleath, the earlier tendency in Wollstonecraft, Barbauld, and Edgeworth to reserve the Gothic exclusively for adult readers is no longer in operation… Townshend’s statement shares with Grenby’s the suggestion that in Glenowen Sleath unifies the Gothic and children’s literature in original ways. These summaries constitute the extent of any exegesis of the novel, its noteworthy originality notwithstanding. Yet, despite their inextricable roles in the plot, the uses of the Orient and Wales in the story are not probed. Indeed, as we shall see, the gothic is not manifested in “ghosts and hauntings”, but in Rosa seeing the world through the lens of eastern literatures and cultures. Thus, where Glenowen is invoked in support of theses regarding Sleath’s bringing together of children’s and Gothic literatures, the overt eastern elements of its story have not been considered. The significance of its Welsh setting is overlooked throughout. 3. Wales and the East in the English Imagination, c.1800 The world of the story is Welsh. At the end of the story Peribanou reveals that “My father’s name, as you have doubtless been informed, was Appowen” (182). Dame Morgan is introduced as “belonging to almost the lowest class of the Welsh peasantry, and of course wholly uneducated”, but at the same time “a striking example of the power of a virtuous integrity to procure a high degree of esteem from those who, having had superior advantages, are destined to move in the higher ranks of society” (8). Wales is the terra firma setting of the entire story, the only exceptions being where characters describe action that has taken place elsewhere, such as where Peribanou reveals how she has acquired her Indian goods. The story ends with the promise that Rosa and Charles’s story is still remembered in Wales: “Their names are still remembered in Carnarvonshire; and it is still usual in the country, when particular blessings are desired, to say, ‘may you be as deserving, and as fortunate, as the Orphans of Glenowen’” (193). Matthew C. Jones 78 Wales was a frequent setting for English authors of this period, as well as a regular destination for tourists, who sought to replicate the experiences of such figures as Thomas Pennant and William Gilpin. 4 For novelists, poets, and travel writers of this period, to quote Morgan (1981: 100), “the picturesque was more important than the true”, meaning that these authors’ works tended to reinforce stereotypes of Wales and its people - that it was a country with great poetic and artistic potential but was populated by individuals who could not comprehend or appreciate it. Such stereotypes were given further life by the fact that virtually all of Wales was non-English speaking, even as late as the turn of the nineteenth century (Franklin 2013: 11); the Welsh sounded foreign, even if they could appear otherwise to be English. English, as the modern language of commerce and philosophy, being illegible to the “ancient” Welsh people, lent further credence to such beliefs. The Welsh language and the fact that much of Wales was monolingual played a central role in discourse in which Wales and Welsh people were, for reasons ranging from artistic to anthropological, recognized as distant both in terms of location and of stadial development. As in the case of Glenowen, they also facilitated a faraway, “fairytale” setting for children. When, soon after Rosa receives her fairy book and becomes an auto-didact of fairy life, the story’s narrator states that “Wales may, with propriety, be termed the present scene of fairy-land” (65), they are framing Wales in a way that would be acceptable to the early nineteenth-century English-language reader. 5 As a site that is both recognized as reachable yet culturally otherworldly, Wales is the ideal setting where English-speaking British children can bear witness to Arabian fairies coming to life. Indeed, Sleath contributes another dimension to these contemporary portrayals by providing illustrations of Wales’s foreignness for child readers and imbuing them with overtones of various cultures of the East. The images of Dame Morgan’s cabin and Mrs. Macdonald’s majestic fairy palace make eastern symbols more real while at the same time reinforcing a sense of Wales as a place far away. Analogous to the Welsh geographical symbolism in the story is the author’s reliance upon references to the East, associations which take both figurative and material forms: for instance, Rosa titles the “benevolent fairy” Peribanou after reading The Arabian Nights, and when Peribanou reveals that she is actually Mrs. Macdonald she also explains the Indian origins of all of her mansion’s goods and curiosities. In the case of The Arabian Nights, Sleath was tapping into cultural associations that had taken deep hold by the time Glenowen was published in 1815. As Caracciolo (1988: xvi) explains, since the original translation into English in 1706, the Nights 4 For more information on Wales’s popularity as a tourist destination at this time, see “Curious Travellers” (n.d.). 5 For more on long eighteenth-century Wales in the English imagination, see Constantine (2018), Jenkins (2002), and Jones (2019). Wales and the East in Sleath’s Glenowen; or the Fairy Palace 79 grew into what was for England “the major example” of “how the Orient served as ‘alter ego’ to the West, evoking dread as well as fascination”. When Rosa reflects on her introduction to the tale of “the Good Prince Amhed and the Fairy Peribanou” as “a kind of mental banquet entirely new” (63), her enthusiasm mirrors the contemporary influence of the tales on adults and children alike, and at the same time signals to readers which contemporary associations Sleath is invoking. 6 4. Romantic Childhood and Imagery Before commencing my analysis of the illustrations and how they present a convergence of Wales and the East and their accompanying themes of distance (in terms of culture as well as proximity), however, it is important to understand the print and cultural historical moment Glenowen was entering. The first point to bear in mind is how book illustrations at this time were received and appreciated; as Haywood, Matthews, and Shannon (2019: 2-3) explain, “Before the modern meaning of the word (a picture commissioned to appear only in a book, representing a moment or scene from the text) appeared for the first time in 1817, and became dominant in the 1830s and 1840s, the concept of a pictorial accompaniment or embellishment suggested that an image was as much a product of art and visual culture as it was of the book”. Thus, in the period in which Sleath published the novel, illustrations were still to be interpreted reflecting their readers’ lives in material terms; to quote Jung (2015: 2) in his analysis of images that accompanied James Thomson’s The Seasons, “readers of the poem viewing these illustrations relate them not only to the text they accompany, but also to the reading subject’s existence within a society that is reliant on visual media and symbolic forms”. In the same vein, he writes also that “illustrations added to editions serve both as intra-textual interpretive markers and as referents to an extra-textual economic and cultural world that anchors the subjects represented in the visual and material cultures of art, music, fashion, and luxury objects, as well as the practices of collecting and exhibition” (ibid). Haywood, Matthews, and Shannon (2019: 5) carry these considerations into the Romantic era, observing that “the illustration was a locus of bibliographical, commercial, ideological, and aesthetic concerns, and a portal between the text and its cultural context”. In the case of Glenowen, we must also consider that the text and images engage with its themes and convey its messages in means legible to children. Furthermore, despite the novel’s didactic ambitions, very rarely do the children’s lessons come from a traditional authority figure such as a teacher or parent. Rather, the majority of instruction is delivered by either the Welsh peasant Dame Morgan, or 6 For more on India in the British literary imagination at this time see Rudd (2013). Matthew C. Jones 80 the “fairy” Peribanou, meaning that while the novel is indeed a “locus” of these concerns, it conveys them in unconventional ways, with its images both illustrating corresponding moments in the text but also acting as points of contact for ostensibly-dissonant figures, subjects, and ideas. These points are evident in the images of Dame Morgan’s Welsh cottage in Wales and Peribanou’s exoticized mansion, which directly engage with contemporary cultural discourse and imagery of both the Welsh peasantry and of literary and material luxuries extracted from the East. As the illustrations both include children and are drawn specifically for child audiences, we must likewise consider contemporary notions of the child. The publication of Glenowen accompanied contemporaneous reappraisals of childhood and the child. Rowland (2012: 9) states that it was in this period that “the demographic and social changes affecting childhood and children were given full cultural and artistic expression”, and further that Romanticera authors “created images of children that powerfully condensed and encapsulated the new ideas of childhood that had been circulating and gaining pace over the course of a century”. The “Romantic child” is understood in this period to be “essentially an idealized, nostalgic, sentimental figure of childhood, one characterized by innocence, imagination, nature and primitivism”, with the child ultimately culminating as “a figure of the primitive” and a figure that “represents the childhood of the race as a whole”. Rowland goes on to argue that, in opposition to these conventions, “the figure of the child… carries historical associations and cultural charges and is, thus, very far from the figure of autonomy, nature and idealized innocence so often presented as the ‘Romantic child’” (ibid.: 9-10). Glenowen by and large supports Rowland’s claims: Sleath constructs Rosa and Charles such that their capacities for benevolence and imagination are immense, and frames their world in such a way that the children are rewarded for these capacities (that is, theirs are not “primitive” minds). The novel also presents us with the far-reaching implications of Rowland’s observations. On the one hand, Charles and Rosa materially benefit from the cultural hegemony into which they enter (graduating from Dame Morgan’s humble cottage and limited education to Mrs. Macdonald sponsoring their higher education with wealth acquired through Indian colonialism). On the other, they are also quietly made to understand that these forms of cultural hegemony are to the benefit of all parties involved. The novel’s ending reinforces this vexed element of the Romantic child. On the one hand, at the end of the story Rosa is demystified of her beliefs that she is in the company of fairies and other mythical entities. On the other, it is the educated and worldly Mrs. Macdonald who ultimately instructs the children and removes their childlike fantastical filters of the world around them. This action serves to save and rescue them from what is described in the novel as their “orphanhood”, but in reality is merely their upbringing under the Welsh peasant Dame Morgan, which thus equates “orphanhood” with a Welsh peasant upbringing. Indeed, when Wales and the East in Sleath’s Glenowen; or the Fairy Palace 81 Mrs. Macdonald saves Rosa and Charles, she provides salvation for Dame Morgan as well, through presenting her with a cottage, which is understood to be a material improvement over what is presented as the typical Welsh cottage she had inhabited up to that point of the story. Yet, as the images reveal, Dame Morgan’s “new” Welsh cottage looks much the same as her original one did. The text reveals that Dame Morgan is content with her new circumstances, which visually are indistinguishable from those with which she started. After being informed by Mrs. Macdonald of her allowance and cottage, we learn: “Dame Morgan’s emotions did not, for some moments, allow her to articulate. ‘May heaven preserve and bless you, my dear and honoured lady! ’ she at length uttered, and then burst into a fresh flood of tears” (191). The images confirm that her situation has not improved in any discernible way, which affirms for readers that neither her situation nor that of her analogous real-world population need to. As I shall demonstrate, the images’ content presents us with similar progressions over the course of the novel. Throughout the text, exoticized figures are the primary source of education, or provide the voices that approve of and reward the children’s good behavior. At the same time, the images buttress the implications of the text (for instance, showing how a Welsh peasant can educate young children), and ultimately fortify the social relationships upon which these exchanges are built; they assure readers that these visualizations are conducive to the educational messages of the novel. 7 5. Glenowen and Its Illustrations The dedication guides readers toward a focus on the interpersonal relationships that are cultivated in the novel: “To all Parents, Guardians, and Friends of Young Persons In early Youth, the following tale, intended to encourage the pursuit of all useful acquirements, and to promote the benevolent affections, is respectfully inscribed by the author”. From the outset, readers are to focus on the discourse between children and other figures, and to deprioritize the worldly station or origin of the person with whom the child is speaking. In this cultural arena, such people as peasants from Wales and fairies from the East can convey educational messages as suitably as school teachers can, and in the novel we are introduced to this dynamic visually before we are textually. The first image is a frontispiece, and thus readers are borne into the fantastical setting wherein these themes converge before the text of the story begins (Figure 1). The frontispiece image is labeled “Dame Morgan’s Cottage Door”, and depicts the two children we will come to know as Rosa and Charles standing in the doorway while Dame Morgan sits outside, beside the door, reading to the children. 7 For more on childhood and illustration in the Romantic period see also McGovran (1999). Matthew C. Jones 82 Readers are drawn to the doorway itself, and to the fact that the focus is into the house rather than away from it. Readers are here to direct their gaze to “Dame Morgan’s Cottage Door”, rather than, for instance, merely being informed that the image is of “Dame Morgan’s Cottage”. Figure 1. From Glenowen: Or, The Fairy Palace, a Tale (London, 1815). Courtesy Baldwin Library of Historical Children's Literature, Special and Area Studies Collections, George A. Smathers Libraries, Gainesville, FL. Throughout the story we witness how the relationships between Dame Morgan and Rosa and Charles exemplify the benevolent affections. Schmitter (2013: 202) reminds us that “affections” in the eighteenth century “had a broad metaphysical sense indicating a property, quality, or attribute”, and that they commonly served also “as a synonym for ‘passion’ in general and for a specific class of states that were refined kindly, or simply directed towards other persons”. The “benevolent affections” were by the turn of the nineteenth century generally associated with Reid, who, to quote Kroeker (2011: 123), identified them with “the love of parents for their children, gratitude, compassion, esteem, friendship, love between the sexes, and public spirit”. Dame Morgan’s doorway thus accrues a second meaning: in addition to being the literal door in the image, it also signifies the entering into a benevolent friendship between her, Rosa, and Charles. We see in the image that Rosa and Charles are already listening to the wisdom Dame Morgan is imparting, and behaving in manners associated with the benevolent affections (such as courtesy and respect). Wales and the East in Sleath’s Glenowen; or the Fairy Palace 83 We are made to understand that Dame Morgan’s relationships with Rosa and Charles exemplify the benevolent affections from the earliest moments of the story. Mrs. Evelynn’s dying request to Dame Morgan is that “You will teach them … to love God and each other”, and we are assured that “Dame Morgan promised faithfully to fulfil the injunctions of her friend and mistress” (9). In the image we see Dame Morgan following through on this promise, as it is likely her reading the scriptures to Charles and Rosa as described on page 16: Charles, though yet only eight years old, discovered an eagerness for instruction, that he might be able to read the beautiful stories in the Bible, several of which Dame Morgan recited from memory, commenting as she proceeded on the various scriptural characters, and recommending to their imitation such as were distinguished for any particular virtue. (16) We learn soon after that “In a short time even Rosa began to listen to [Dame Morgan’s] pretty stories, and was anxious to learn her letters that she might read like her brother” (18). Dame Morgan thus introduces the children to notions of virtue and Christian values regarding how to treat other people, which come to be the foundation and rudiments of what will become their fuller worldly educations and their imaginations. It is only after absorbing all of the early lessons that Dame Morgan is capable of furnishing that the children go on to school to begin their formal education, which is where Rosa receives the book of fairy tales that will nurture her imagination. In the opening pages, then, we are introduced to Dame Morgan herself in specific terms that describe her as a benevolent individual, and ultimately such that she comes to metonymize Wales in the contemporary English imagination. Once more, Dame Morgan is introduced as the children’s only friend; on her deathbed, their mother states: “you and Rosa, my love, will soon be left without any earthly friend, except your dear good nurse, Dame Morgan, who has promised to take care of, and be kind to you: you will love her for her own sake as well as for mine, she is the best and steadiest of my friends” (4-5). Throughout the early chapters of the novel, in addition to exercising the benevolent affections, Dame Morgan also embodies what was associated with the “natural benevolence” of the Welsh, such as when she is described as “a striking example of the power of a virtuous integrity to procure a high degree of esteem from those who, having had superior advantages, are destined to move in the higher ranks of society” (8). Yet we soon after learn the limitations of Dame Morgan’s tutelage: as the children’s mother was dying, she rested “well assured that, under [Dame Morgan’s] tuition, though [Rosa and Charles] might not become shining, they would at least become virtuous characters” (8-9). By limiting Dame Morgan to providing the fundamental components of benevolence and virtue, Sleath allows the children to step beyond her doorway in two ways: literally, they expand their purviews beyond their native Matthew C. Jones 84 Welsh confines, and figuratively, they open doors to expand their scientific and imaginative educations, with figures from far beyond Wales greeting them on the other side to assist in these pursuits. Rosa’s teacher at the village school being introduced and validated in national terms serves to reinforce Dame Morgan’s limitations being in part due to her Welshness: “Mrs. Haywood being, as Dame Morgan observed, an English woman, and what was more, had had, according to her ideas, a lady’s education, and was therefore, in every respect, qualified to become the preceptress of her little charge” (20). But, if the children’s empirical and applied educations were to take place in ostensibly non-Welsh oases, they were able and encouraged to explore the bounds of their imaginations in Dame Morgan’s cottage. It is, of course, this same Mrs. Haywood who gives “a present of a book of fairy tales” to Rosa (63). It is at home in Dame Morgan’s cottage, however, where the girl reads the book and where her imagination takes flight. By the time readers reach the second image, of the church yard where the children visit their mother’s grave and first encounter Peribanou, they have witnessed Rosa’s imaginative powers grow (Figure 2). The children have thrived in school, and have continued to cultivate their benevolent affections. By this time, Rosa has befriended the impoverished Jessy, and provided her social haven after other girls in the school have denigrated her because of her poverty and the poor condition of her stockings, with Rosa’s deeds operating as another lesson for young readers. “Don’t cry, Jessy”, Rosa implores, and continues, “I will sit by you, Jessy; for I love you a great deal better than those young ladies, and what signifies a fine frock and sash? ” (34). Rosa goes on to learn to sew herself (under Dame Morgan’s tutelage), and knits a new pair of stockings for Jessy (59-61). It is specifically as a reward for both Rosa’s selflessness and progress in school that Mrs. Haywood gives her the book of fairy tales that comes to serve as the palette with which she constructs the world around her (Figure 2). As the plate entitled “Visit to the Church Yard” includes both Jessy and Peribanou, it serves to demonstrate for children the benefits of social benevolence (having a friend with whom to mourn), and of the complementary relationship of education and the imagination (without having done well in school, Rosa would not have received the book of fairy tales, and the woman at the graveyard would not have become Peribanou but would have remained a mysterious and nameless figure). Wales and the East in Sleath’s Glenowen; or the Fairy Palace 85 Figure 2. From Glenowen: Or, The Fairy Palace, a Tale (London, 1815). Courtesy Baldwin Library of Historical Children's Literature, Special and Area Studies Collections, George A. Smathers Libraries, Gainesville, FL. As the image’s perspective has expanded now beyond the doorway to include the building and its surrounding environs, it also invites readers to transfer the occasional picturesque rhetoric of the text to geographic space. In the text on the page that immediately follows the image, for instance, the party has not yet arrived at the graveyard, nor has it observed the mysterious woman. The text informs readers how to understand the mood of the scene: “It was a sweet and silent hour. The song of a lonely bird, mingling at intervals with the lowing of cattle in the valley, and the sound of a distant waterfall, alternately swelling and dying upon the evening breeze, alone broke the almost universal silence that prevailed around” (45). Soon after we learn that these effects combined to overwhelm the whole party: The solemnity of the scene, and of the occasion, had arrested the agile foot of youth. Rosa, who at other times could scarcely move without a bound, kept pace with her aged attendant. The glowing smile no longer dimpled her cheek, or played about her cherry lips. A soft melancholy had diffused itself over the open, and usually animated countenance of Charles. Jessy was respectfully silent; whilst Dame, with tears of tender recollection stealing to her eyes, surveyed with mournful satisfaction the juvenile group that attended her. (45-46) Matthew C. Jones 86 Dame Morgan’s “satisfaction” signals to readers that the children are appropriately performing their sorrow based on the Christian values and virtue that she has bestowed upon them, which informs the image in two ways: it indicates to readers that the actions we see the figures taking in the image are appropriate (Charles kneeling, Rosa strewing flowers), and it complements the above points regarding Rosa’s progress in terms of her education and imagination. Readers are directed to assess the image in picturesque terms and to bring these directly into conversation with the imagination more directly only a few pages later, where the narrator declares, “Wales may, with propriety, be termed the present scene of fairy-land” (65). The reminder of the Welsh setting would directly call to readers’ minds Gilpin’s (1782: 1) Observations on the River Wye, in which he delineates the manner by which travelers can identify and appreciate the picturesque. The Observations served as a manual by which to appreciate nature in “true” ways (he writes that “observations of this kind, through the vehicle of description, have the better chance of being founded in truth”). At the same time, strong links of Wales with the mythical and otherworldly permeate the text, and remind readers of the importance of the powers of the imagination. Artifacts from the fairytale past of Wales further encourage such applications; another moment from the story reveals: “In the vicinity of Glenowen was a druidical stone, where the fairies were reported by the villagers to make rings, and perform their midnight revels”, a site where Rosa and Charles would join girls from Rosa’s school “to play and dance round it, as the fairies do, often wishing for a sight of these wonderful little elves, whom she almost believed she should sometime see” (65-66). The narrator interprets the situation for us: “No wonder then that Rosa should have believed in fairies, interwoven, as they were, with the traditions of her country” (66). Thus, the image of the churchyard synthesizes a “true” depiction of mountains, structures, and people, with an “imaginary” setting upon which children can appreciate Rosa’s flights of imagination. Within these dichotomies Rosa attempts to discover the identity of the mysterious woman “wrapped up in a large Indian shawl, and covered with a veil, which entirely concealed her face” (46). Rosa would not read the Arabian Nights and thus make the connection to Peribanou until later, but the expanding scope of the imagination’s powers begins in the illustration. The central subject is, as in the first image, a structure, and specifically the church itself. Now, however, we are greeted with a panorama within which the building plays a relatively minor role. It indicates how far from the cottage doorway the characters’ and readers’ scopes have expanded. We witness in the foreground the children and Dame Morgan in the active roles of decorating their mother’s grave, and slightly in the background the figure who will come to be identified as Peribanou, and still further in the background the mountains of Wales. The view expanding beyond the con- Wales and the East in Sleath’s Glenowen; or the Fairy Palace 87 fines of the cottage doorway allows for the reader to expand their perspectives in tow with Rosa’s expanding imagination. Here, this manifests in the bringing together of Peribanou’s oriental qualities with hints of the Welsh picturesque. As we shall see, the third image, of the “fairy palace”, approximates the oriental and the picturesque further, again in step with Rosa’s flourishing imagination. By this point of the story, though, Peribanou as a sentient individual adds herself as a living entity who supplements the insentient and immaterial foci of the narrative (geography, books of fairy tales). More importantly, by assuming the identity of a fairy, she rewards the children’s educations, their growing benevolent affections, and their powers of imagination. She achieves this by addressing their temporal precociousnesses as a fairy, which encourages the further cultivation of their imaginations more than if the praise were coming from an earthly figure, such as Dame Morgan or their teacher Mrs. Haywood. We first witness her reward their behavior in the anonymous notes that accompany the gifts that Peribanou sends to Rosa, Charles, and Dame Morgan. She addresses her note to Rosa with “…for Rosa Evelynn - the little girl who despises no one, and behaves well to every body”, and that for Charles with “For Charles Evelynn, - the good boy, who loves his book better than play, who is kind and obliging to every one, and whom every body loves” (86-87). Thus, contemporary philosophical notions of benevolence and affections, which revolve around how well people treat others outwardly, are put into terms that young readers can understand. They derive from an imaginary source that has already been exoticized through being couched in terms of Wales and the East. Peribanou’s approval takes place in moments of action and dialogue as well, such as when Charles offers to return a watch that Peribanou had given him because he feels he has inadequately performed his duty as his sister’s protector (after she had received a small injury from a fall): “‘Generous and most excellent youth,’ exclaimed Peribanou, in a tone of rapture, ‘the fault, of which you confess yourself to have been guilty, has served only to elucidate a principle of innate virtue, which, by increasing my esteem, renders you still closer to my heart’” (170). Here, both Charles and readers learn of how to cultivate and identify their own affections and acts of benevolence, and receive this information from a creature constructed by their imagination. Similarly, earlier in the story, when after Peribanou asks Charles if he would leave his sister to come live with her and he responds that he would never leave his sister, she answers with “What sweet affection … and how much do I admire you for this amiable disposition toward your sister” (128). These didactic moments accompany Peribanou’s indulgence of Rosa’s convictions that she truly is a benevolent fairy. Matthew C. Jones 88 Figure 3. From Glenowen: Or, The Fairy Palace, a Tale (London, 1815). Baldwin Library of Historical Children's Literature, Special and Area Studies Collections, George A. Smathers Libraries, Gainesville, FL. For the third image, of what is believed by the children at that time still to be Peribanou’s “fairy palace”, we witness that the structure that serves as the central focus of the image has receded even farther into the background than had the church building, and that the more panoramic view allows for richer geographic features to supplement the reader’s view of the “fairy palace” (Figure 3). As before, this widening perspective correlates with Rosa’s richer and deeper education and imaginative powers. As Rosa is able to establish a fuller rationale for how such ceremonies as dancing around druidic stones might invite the presence of a benevolent fairy from the East, readers likewise are presented with how Wales and the East can operate in a coordinated way visually. This is achieved by the images serving as complements of the harmony of Welsh and eastern allusions in the text; indeed, the image’s including the children and the buildings alongside one another serves to reinforce for readers that Wales and the East can operate together in these imaginative ways. In this image, readers are given a demonstration of how the eastern “fairy palace” fits within Welsh mountains, and how the mansion can harmonize with the picturesque surroundings. The reader is prompted to view the image in picturesque terms on the page that immediately precedes it (the page with the image appears between “and” and “those”): As they descended from the mountains, and saw spreading before them a rich and extensive vale, Charles, to whom the scene was quite new, burst out in an Wales and the East in Sleath’s Glenowen; or the Fairy Palace 89 exclamation of delight at its fertility and beauty. Woods, winding streams, and the sweetest acclivities, their gentle slopes tufted with groves or ornamented with plantations, formed indeed a decided contrast to the scenes presented to them at Glenowen, and those they had already passed. It seemed an Elysium in a wild; for what they now beheld was in the highest state of cultivation, and ornamented in some parts by the hand of taste. It appeared the land of wonders - for a new wonder awaited them. (104) In this instance Sleath imbues young Charles with a comprehensive awareness of what makes a scene picturesque (by way of terms, such as “ornamentation” and “taste”, that faithfully echo Gilpin), effectively inviting readers to receive the “new wonder [that] awaited them”, the “fairy palace”, in similar terms - despite its exterior and interior bearing no resemblance to what is associated with Wales at all. 8 In essence, by guiding readers into the rhetoric of the Orient in this manner, Sleath makes the Orient picturesque. Indeed, although the “fairy palace” is set in Wales, it is never intended to be understood as a Welsh building until the very end, where Mrs. Macdonald reveals herself what led to her return to the area. It is, again, paradoxically an exotic structure nestled among the more familiar Welsh hills. She retains an air of fantasy, even as she reveals her true identity: so here I am, my dear Charles, and my pretty Rosa, no longer the Fairy Peribanou, but the comparatively humble Mrs. Macdonald. My air-blown wand has flown from my hand, and melted into its original element; my Fairy Palace is transformed into a mere ornamented villa far more fit for the residence of a private gentlewoman, than for one of those kind of semi-deities called Fairies. (188-89) The children’s fantastical flights of imagination must come to an end, but the imaginative potential inherent in the exotic and material world remains. We witness this as well in descriptions of the architecture itself, wherein we are greeted by magnificence that rhetorically matches the settings that preceded it: “The floor was of marble; - the walls were gilt and empannelled; and from the center of the ceiling was suspended, by a magnificent gilt chain, a lustre of cut glass, of various hues…” (112). But, we are reminded frequently that having entered this doorway, we are no longer in Wales but in the East (far, indeed, from Dame Morgan’s cottage): “this was a preserved eagle with extended wings, which was sitting on the dome of a shrine, in which was seated an image of the famous Hindu god, the four-faced Brahma” (113), “ornamented above and below with drapery of Chinese silk” (114), “Stands of flowers, intermingled with Indian vases, containing the most delicious sweets, filled the room with odours” (114). 8 For more on Gilpin and the picturesque see Andrews (1989). Matthew C. Jones 90 These decorations are not, of course, visible within the plane of the illustrations, but they do directly inform how the reader is meant to interpret the world inside the “fairy palace” that adorns the image. The mountains and river confirm we are in Wales, despite the eastern ornaments and the children’s imagination taking us to another world once we enter the “fairy palace”. For readers the boundless yet invisible world of the imagination is constructed in exotic terms, and is supported by the boundless and visible world of the Welsh picturesque. 6. Conclusion The final illustration does not present any new images or subjects, but rather positions the viewer to more fully observe and appreciate the image with which the story began. The image is titled “Visit to Dame Morgan’s New Cottage”, signifying the new cottage gifted to her by Mrs. Macdonald. This image, then, brings us back to the origins of the first image, but with a fuller perspective: the first image was narrowly focused on the darkness inside Dame Morgan’s cottage, complementing the children’s, and especially Rosa’s, undeveloped education and imagination; the final image is largely a copy of the third one, with the fairy palace substituted by the new cottage, complementing the children’s concurrent growth in terms of their imaginations, educations, and benevolent affections. This image retains the vistas of that which includes the fairy palace, inviting the viewer to appreciate the Welsh cottage in the same picturesque terms with which they viewed the fairy palace. This final image accompanies the closing pages of the text, where “Mrs. Macdonald and the children accompanied Dame Morgan to her new abode”. Within the world of the story, neither the material world that inspired the children’s imaginations nor the imaginations themselves diminish or disappear as their circumstances change. They retain access to Wales and to Mrs. Macdonald’s relics from the east, with the added utility of a sound education and domestic stability. For similar reasons, the image likewise serves as a fitting avenue by which to conclude our analysis. Just as the reader finishes the story with a wider and deeper view of the same subjects with which they began it, we witness how Sleath’s conscription of Welsh and eastern symbols and imagery serves to successfully augment the story’s conceit without in any way challenging the cultural practices that served as foundations for the symbols’ legibility. Glenowen translates into children’s literature contemporary tropes of Wales and usages of eastern materiality (such as The Arabian Nights), while also bringing these various themes together in the medium of printed illustration. But by invoking contemporary cultural tropes, allusions, and imagery to assist in Glenowen’s narrative’s conveyance to its happy ending, Sleath quietly supports the hegemonic dynamics that make them legible to reading audiences, or at the very least does not call them Wales and the East in Sleath’s Glenowen; or the Fairy Palace 91 into question. In these specific cases, this means that Sleath challenges neither the contemporary trends that relegated the Welsh, in stadial terms, to a distant point of cultural development, nor the social practices that glorified the withdrawal of exotic goods from colonial spaces. Indeed, the representatives of these two colonialisms, Dame Morgan and Peribanou, reward children for their intellectual progress, the novel inculcates to children an air of veneration of the hegemonic relationships as they are. This point guides us to Sleath’s true achievement in Glenowen: approximating Wales and the East, and bringing both into harmony with contemporary ideas of education and imagination in the novel’s illustrations. Acknowledgements I wish to thank Sandro Jung and Elspeth Healey for their insightful commentary and helpful suggestions, which immeasurably strengthened this essay. Works cited Andrews, Malcolm (1989). The Search for the Picturesque: Landscape Aesthetics and Tourism in Britain, 1760-1800. Aldershot: Scolar Press. Attar, Samar (2014). Borrowed Imagination: The British Romantic Poets and Their Arabic-Islamic Sources. Lanham: Lexington Books. Banham, Rob (2020). “The Industrialization of the Book Trade, 1800-1970”. In: A Companion to the History of the Book. Ed. Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose. Hoboken: Wiley Blackwell. 273-290. The British Review, and London Critical Journal, vol. 6 (1815). London. Caracciolo, Peter L. (1988). “Introduction: ‘Such a store house of ingenious fiction and of splendid imagery.’” In: Peter L. Caracciolo (Ed.). The Arabian Nights in English Literature. New York: St. Martin’s Press. 1-80. Constantine, Mary-Ann (2018). “Wales and the West”. In: David Duff (Ed.). The Oxford Handbook of British Romanticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 121- 136. Curious Travellers [n.d.]. curioustravellers.ac.uk/ en/ . (Accessed 9 March 2021). Czlapinski, Rebecca and Eric C. Wheeler (2011). “The Real Eleanor Sleath”. Studies in Gothic Fiction 2.1. 5-12. Eliot, Simon (2020). “From Few and Expensive to Many and Cheap: The British Book Market 1800-1890”. In: Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose (Eds.). A Companion to the Book. Hoboken: Wiley Blackwell. 291-302. Feather, John (2020). “The British Book Market 1600-1800”. In: Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose (Eds.). A Companion to the Book. Hoboken: Wiley Blackwell. 232- 46. Franklin, Caroline (2013). “Wales as Nowhere: The tabula rosa of the ‘Jacobin Imagination”. In: Mary-Ann Constantine and Dafydd Johnston (Eds.). ‘Footsteps of Liberty & Revolt’: Essays on Wales and the French Revolution. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. 11-34. Matthew C. Jones 92 Franklin, Michael J. (Ed.) (2006). Romantic Representations of British India. New York: Routledge. Georgieva, Margarita (2013). The Gothic Child. New York: Palgrave. Gilpin, William (1782). Observations on the River Wye. London. Grenby, M. O. (2011). “Children’s and Juvenile Literature”. In: Patrick Parrinder (Ed.). The Oxford History of the Novel in English. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 495-512. Haywood, Ian, Susan Matthews and Mary L. Shannon (Eds.) (2019). Romanticism and Illustration. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hudson, Kathleen (2020). “Adopting the ‘Orphan’: Literary Exchange and Appropriation in Eleanor Sleath’s The Orphan of the Rhine”. In: Kathleen Hudson (Ed.). Women’s Authorship and the Early Gothic: Legacies and Innovations. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. 113-132. Jenkins, Geraint (2002). “Wales in the Eighteenth Century”. In: H. T. Dickinson (Ed.). A Companion to Eighteenth-Century Britain. Oxford: Blackwell. 392-402. Jones, Matthew C. (2019). “On Nineteenth-Century Welsh Literacies, and the ‘Blue Book’ Education Reports of 1847”. In: Dino Franco Felluga (Ed.). BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century. Jung, Sandro (2015). James Thomson’s The Seasons, Print Culture, and Visual Interpretation, 1730-1842. Bethlehem, Pennysylvania: Lehigh University Press. Kroeker, Esther (2011). “Reid’s Moral Psychology: Animal Motives as Guides to Virtue”. Canadian Journal of Philosophy 41. 122-141. McGavran, James Holt (Ed.) (1999). Literature and the Child: Romantic Continuations, Postmodern Contestations. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Moon, Marjorie (1976). John Harris’s Books for Youth, 1801-1843. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Morgan, Prys (1981). The Eighteenth-Century Renaissance. Llandybïe: Christopher Davies. Rowland, Ann (2012). Romanticism and Childhood: The Infantilization of British Literary Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rudd, Andrew (2007). “India as Gothic Horror: Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer and Images of Juggernaut in Early Nineteenth-Century Missionary Writing”. In: Shafquat Towheed (Ed.). New Readings in the Literature of British India, c. 1780- 1947. New York: Columbia University Press. 41-64. Rudd, Andrew (2013). Sympathy and India in British Literature, 1770-1830. New York: Palgrave. Schmitter, Amy (2013). “Passions, Affections, Sentiments: Taxonomy and Terminology”. In: James Harris (Ed.). The Oxford Handbook of British Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 197-225. Sleath, Eleanor (1815). Glenowen: Or, The Fairy Palace, a Tale. London: Harris. Townshend, Dale (2013). “The Haunted Nursery: 1764-1830”. In: Karen Coats, Anna Jackson and Roderick McGillis (Eds.). The Gothic in Children’s Literature: Haunting the Borders. Hoboken: Taylor & Francis. 15-38. Matthew C. Jones University Writing Program University of Florida Gainesville Michael Fuchs University of Oldenburg The Visual Criticism of Thomas Stothard’s Designs of Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe for The Royal Engagement Pocket Atlas (1821) Kwinten Van De Walle This contribution examines Thomas Stothard’s illustrations of Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe for the 1821 issue of The Royal Engagement Pocket Atlas. An analysis of the twenty-five images in the illustrated diary-cum-almanac demonstrates how Stothard develops a multifaceted and multi-layered visual narrative which captures and elucidates the original text in a variety of ways. Rather than simply serving a decorative function in a fashionable print medium, then, the illustrations can, and should, be read as acts of visual literary criticism. They function as explanatory and analytical responses that promote different possible readings and interpretations of the original, typographic text. Highlighting two main aspects in the novel, the world of medieval romance and the female protagonists, Stothard’s images represent an innovative and unique moment in the extensive reception history of Scott’s popular Romantic novel. According to A Glossary to Literary Terms, literary criticism implies the “general principles, together with a set of terms, distinctions, and categories, to be applied to identifying and analyzing works of literature, as well as the criteria (the standards, or norms) by which these works and their writers are to be evaluated" (Abrams & Harpham 2012: 67). This process encompasses such activities as the “interpretation of [literature’s] meaning, analysis of its structure and style, judgement of its worth by comparison with other works, estimation of its likely effect on readers, and the establishment of general principles by which literary works (individually, AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 46 (2021) · Heft 1 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.2357/ AAA-2021-0005 Kwinten Van de Walle 94 in categories, or as a whole) can be evaluated and understood” (Baldick 2001: 54). Over time, the concept ‘criticism’ has come to encompass a wide variety of approaches and has been used to qualify a multitude of different types of texts, in different forms, engaging with literature through explanation, analysis, and evaluation. The term is unfortunately not commonly applied to literary illustration. Illustration studies scholars are still routinely required to validate their research in relation to traditional literary studies, specifically in terms of what their work contributes to the understanding of literary works. Early theorists have pointed out the relevance and value of literary illustration for literary criticism. Edward Hodnett established a functional correlation between literature and illustration. Recollecting the old adage that literature should delight as well as instruct, he posits that literary illustration likewise “exists primarily for the edification and pleasure of the general reader” (1982: 3). Stephen C. Behrendt asserts that illustrations historically represent “serious and considered attempts to provide - in the non-verbal language of visual art - sophisticated critical and interpretive statements about the texts they adorned” (1988: 29). Reflecting on how illustrations affect readers’ understanding and interpretation of the text, he defines the illustrator as a third party who interposes between author and reader and who can “only be regarded as a critic - as an interpreter or elucidator” (1988: 30). Visual criticism in the form of literary illustration, then, operates like textual criticism in that it fulfils explanatory and interpretative roles for the benefit of the reader. The main, and only, difference is that in illustrations the criticism is expressed through the visual medium. Despite recognising their critical function, scholars frequently still regard illustrations as secondary to the primary, typographic text, which they hold to body forth the author’s ideas most directly and fully. Illustrations are accordingly depreciated as visual offshoots, deriving their existence and meaning from the text. As research by Sandro Jung (2015a, 2018) has indicated, however, illustration played a central role in the promotion and dissemination of literary texts, in the process impacting their reception and cultural reputation. In this sense, illustrations should be approached as an integral part of what Jerome McGann has termed the textual condition. His theory stipulates that texts are “autopoietic mechanisms operating as selfgenerating feedback systems that cannot be separated from those who manipulate and use them” (1991: 15). Literary illustrations are thus not just mere by-products or responses, but inherent stages in “a ceaseless process of textual development and mutation” (McGann 1991: 9). They are visual manifestations of texts, generating new meanings and interpretations Consolidating these theories, I would argue that the visual mediation of a text is a product of meaningful acts of criticism. The illustration of a literary text historically implied a substantial financial expense on the part of publishers. It was consequently in their best interest to secure a profita- The Visual Criticism of Thomas Stothard’s Designs of W. Scott’s Ivanhoe 95 ble return on investment. Even though the decision was economically motivated, the process involved a strategic estimation, or critical assessment, of the potential cultural validity of the text in question. Artists commissioned to produce the illustrations interacted critically with their source in two ways. On the one hand, they had to decide on the right subject for their illustration(s), to determine “which of all the possible moments of choice are the ones that are most significant in terms of contributing to the reader’s understanding of the text and of reinforcing the emotional effects” realized through the text (Hodnett 1982: 8). At the same time, the artists’ translation of the text into the visual medium was always transformative and interpretive. Illustrators’ craft thus involved the evaluative and interpretive facets of literary criticism. The potential buyer of the illustrated edition, finally, had to assess which illustrated text (or sometimes even which illustrated edition of the same text) to purchase. This evaluation was informed not only by the medium, the format, and the execution of the illustrations, but also by the way in which they invested a text with symbolical capital and cultural prestige. In short, the various agents participating in the production and consumption of literary illustrations, in different ways, were engaged in multiple acts of criticism. This contribution will demonstrate how critical processes of visual meaning-making and interpretation similarly informed the visual apparatus of the historical illustrated pocket diary-cum-almanac. Generally overlooked by and often even unknown to literary scholars, book historians and print culture scholars alike, the up-market illustrated almanac was an object of fashionable upperand middle-class consumption in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In his work on the subject, Jung has indicated how publishers of illustrated pocket diaries often capitalised on and contributed to contemporary cultural tastes by means of visual embellishments (2011, 2012). Consolidating existing research on The Royal Engagement Pocket Atlas, I will study Thomas Stothard’s illustrations of Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe in the Pocket Atlas for the year 1821. My examination adopts a comparative illustration studies approach, in that it considers the images in relation to other printed book illustrations and embeds them within the broader context of contemporary visual culture. At the same time, however, it conforms to G. Thomas Tanselle’s theory that textual criticism can be applied to, and supplements the study of, other verbal and non-verbal media: “The textual study of any work, mixed or not, can proceed more thoughtfully and logically if it is conducted with an awareness of the relationships among the media employed by all arts and the conditions set by each medium in regard to textual change” (2005-2006: 3). The main premise for my analysis is that illustrations, similar to verbal texts, are regulated by a set of organisational and compositional codes. They are medial constructs that are ideologically inflected and should be read as distinct critical, i.e., explanatory and interpretive, responses to the text. It is, therefore, possible to undertake a close reading of the illustrations Kwinten Van de Walle 96 alongside other contemporary visual and non-visual responses to Ivanhoe to unravel how Stothard visually reacted to Scott’s novel, in the process establishing an alternative reading of his own. Even though illustrated pocket diaries circulated in large numbers on an annual basis, research on the subject has been relatively limited. 1 Ephemeral in nature, the diary would often be discarded after use, as a result of which survival rates are low. 2 A study of the print form and its illustrations is rewarding, however. It facilitates insight into late eighteenthand early nineteenth-century fashions, consumer practices, and commodity culture. Moreover, literary pocket diary illustrations can demonstrate contemporary critical-interpretative, as well as ideological, engagements with and responses to literary texts. Even though the vignettes are physically demarcated from the engraved text on the printed diary page, as well as specially removed from the typographic text of the edition of Ivanhoe, the latter is evoked through the short captions accompanying the illustrations. These text-image composites constitute epitexts: they appear independently from the text of the literary edition, yet still derive meaning from it. The images are situated in a virtual space, which enables a more creative engagement with the ways in which the vignettes are understood as meaningful - irrespective of whether readers are seeking to relate the illustrations to specific textual passages or not. Produced by the Southampton-based publisher, Thomas Baker, between 1779 and 1826, The Royal Engagement Pocket Atlas was one of the longestrunning and most influential diary-cum-almanacs in the long eighteenth century. 3 From 1784 onwards, each issue contained a set of twenty-four engravings illustrating a specific literary text. The vignettes, bordered by an oval, octagonal, or rectangular frame, appeared in pairs (two per month) at the top of the diary pages of the Pocket Atlas. The illustrations were engraved by William Angus after designs by Stothard, who was one of the most prolific illustrators of his time and who had been elected Fellow to the Royal Academy in 1793 (Coxhead 1906: 8 & 30). Measuring about 2 by 4.5 cm, the vignettes were an essential component and branding device. Whereas in the latter part of the eighteenth century Baker selected popular literary texts the copyright of which had already lapsed for illustration, from the beginning of the nineteenth century onwards, he frequently chose texts by living authors for illustration. In this manner, he 1 William Peacock’s The Polite Repository, or, Pocket Companion, one of the leading examples in the history of illustrated pocket diaries, was said to have had an annual print run of 7,000 copies (Jung 2013: 63). 2 Some illustrations have been preserved and collected in albums, but there is usually no clear indication, apart from the caption, which texts the images were supposed to have illustrated. 3 Jung has worked extensively on The Royal Engagement Pocket Atlas, especially on Stothard’s illustrations of poetry (2011, 2015b, 2019, 2020, 2021). The Visual Criticism of Thomas Stothard’s Designs of W. Scott’s Ivanhoe 97 took advantage of and further added to the popularity of more recent publications. This strategy is especially visible in his illustrating the works of early Romantic poets. He commissioned illustrations for such texts as Robert Bloomfield’s The Farmer Boy (1802), George Crabbe’s poetry (1810), and even Lord Byron’s works (1814 and 1818), in the process “creat[ing] an institutionalized Romantic canon” (Jung 2019: 144). In what follows on Stothard’s illustrations of Scott’s Ivanhoe for the 1821 issue of the Pocket Atlas, I am not only adding to current research on the mediation of British literature in Baker’s diary, but also making a contribution to Scott studies more generally. Even though Stothard illustrated at least nine of Scott’s works for the Pocket Atlas between 1807 and 1824, these visual responses have, to date, been overlooked by Scott scholars. 4 This is a major lacuna in the documented reception history of this canonical Romantic author, and one which I aim to address in this article. The selection and chronology of Scott titles for illustration in the Pocket Atlas reveals Baker’s awareness of, and ability to capitalise on, current trends in the literary marketplace. Ivanhoe was the second of five Scott novels illustrated in the Pocket Atlas, after Guy Mannering, which had been the subject for the 1817 issue. In this respect, the pocket diary series reflects Scott’s career transition from critically acclaimed poet to immensely successful and popular novelist. A veritable cultural phenomenon, Scott’s Waverley novels were consumed by a large number of readers and were translated into a variety of other media, serving as inspiration for paintings, stage adaptations, and chapbook abridgments. 5 Even though poetry was still preferred as “the most significant, high-profile aesthetic and ideological” subject of literary illustration (Haywood, Matthews & Shannon 2019: 13), Scott’s novels were rapidly reshaping the cultural landscape. The illustrations in the Pocket Atlas reflect this development. Whereas Baker rarely had prose titles illustrated before 1817 6 , no fewer than five of 4 All of Stothard’s illustrations of Scott’s works for the Pocket Atlas were published within one to three years of the original publication date (in the list, the first number is the year of original publication and the second the year of the Pocket Atlas): The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805/ 1807), Marmion (1808/ 1809), Lady of the Lake (1810/ 1812), Bridal of Triermain (1813/ 1815), Guy Mannering (1815/ 1817), Ivanhoe (1820/ 1821), Kenilworth (1821/ 1822), The Pirate (1822/ 1823), Peveril of the Peak (1822/ 1824). None of these illustrations are included in the online database Illustrating Scott: A Database of Printed Illustrations to the Waverley Novels, 1814-1901. Project director Peter Garside has however made reference to Stothard’s vignettes in one of his articles on illustrations of Scott’s works (2013: 134). 5 For a discussion of painterly responses to Scott’s works, see Gordon (1971) and Altick (1985). The standard work on dramatic adaptations is Bolton 1992, while a list of chapbooks inspired by the Scottish author is provided in Parsons 1965. 6 The exceptions are Samuel Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison (year of appearance in the Pocket Atlas unknown), John Hawkesworth’s translation of Fénelon’s Les Aventures de Télémaque (1798), Tobias Smollet’s translation of Le Sage’s Gil Blas (1800), and Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield (1805). Kwinten Van de Walle 98 the last ten issues of the Pocket Atlas were published with vignettes of novelistic works, all of which were Scott titles. Baker’s reorientation of illustration subjects was prompted by, while simultaneously feeding into, the popularity and prominence of Scott’s novels. Scott’s Ivanhoe, A Romance by the Author of Waverley represented a shift in the author’s oeuvre as well as in the marketing and publishing of his novels. Building on the success of his earlier Waverley novels, Scott in 1819 turned from Scotland in the eighteenth century towards England in the Middle Ages. He capitalised on readers’ increasing fascination with the nation’s (medieval) history. In the process, Scott established “a brand of historical fiction that crossed the boundaries between high literature and popular entertainment, between commerce and culture, and that offered, in a hitherto unprecedented way, an imaginative engagement with the past in the form of colourful stories” (Rigney 2012: 5). Issued towards the end of 1819, though dated 1820 on the title page, the novel appeared in a new material package under the incentive of Archibald Constable’s new London-based partners, the publishing firm, Hurst, Robinson & Co. The publishers made the novel available on a higher-quality paper in a three-volume octavo, instead of the four-volume duodecimo format of Scott’s previous works. 7 The edition sold for 30s. (Millgate 1994: 808) and featured seven illustrations: six full-page copperplate engravings and an engraved title page embellished with a vignette. 8 Centrally highlighted on the title page, the illustrations were executed by Charles Heath after designs by Richard Westall, both well-established names in their respective trades. 9 Around the same time, a further three illustrations appeared alongside extracts from the novel in the new series of The Lady's Magazine; or Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex. 10 Westall once again supplied the designs, which were engraved by the Heath firm, though this time by the senior partner, James. The Heaths seem to have taken advantage of their share in covering part of the illustration costs for the first edition of Ivanhoe to issue these unapproved engravings (Garside 2010: 174). Rather than 7 For more information on the development and production of the first edition of Ivanhoe, as well as the challenges and obstacles encountered by the various agents involved, see Millgate (1994). 8 The illustrations were also collected and published in an individual suite shortly afterwards. 9 Charles Heath was the son of James Heath, who had provided many engravings for illustrated editions of literary texts and had often engraved Thomas Stothard’s work, most notably in the context of Harrison’s Novelist’s Magazine. Richard Westall was a Royal Academician and frequent book illustrator who had also painted for the Shakespeare Gallery and the Milton Gallery. 10 The illustrations appeared in the first (February), third (March), and fourth (April) numbers of the first volume of the new series of The Lady’s Magazine, launched in 1820. The Visual Criticism of Thomas Stothard’s Designs of W. Scott’s Ivanhoe 99 taking action, however, the publishers tolerated the publication of the illustrations in The Lady’s Magazine, as it further boosted the appeal and sales of Scott’s latest novel. Issued about a year after the publication of the first edition of the novel, Stothard’s designs for the 1821 issue of the Pocket Atlas represent a notable early intervention in the illustration history of Ivanhoe. As will become clear, Stothard not only responded to Westall and Heath’s illustrations, but also expanded on them significantly. In addition to the twenty-four diary page head vignettes, this issue of the Pocket Atlas also included a full-page frontispiece engraving. Altogether, the set of illustrations presents the most extensive visual (re)interpretation of Scott’s novel, one which would quantitively not be surpassed, as later illustrated editions of Ivanhoe never contained more than twelve images. 11 When read sequentially and in their entirety, Stothard’s designs advance a strongly narrative interpretation of the text. Moreover, representing the third published visual response and available at a more affordable price than the illustrated edition of the novel, the vignettes reached a substantial group of consumers shortly after the novel’s publication. The first vignette on the verso page for January depicts the opening scene of the novel and introduces the characters Gurth the swineherd and Wamba the jester, both “thrall[s] of Cedric of Rotherwood” (Scott 1998: 19) 12 . Gurth, represented on the left, can be recognised by his tunic, the ram’s horn hanging from his belt, and his trusty dog, Fangs, sitting at his side. Seated on a large stone from a nearby druidic monument is the court fool, Wamba, clearly distinguishable by his jester cap. The characters’ clothing and their suggested social standing in the image corresponds with their textual description. The only detail missing, probably for pragmatic and technical reasons, are the neck collars, which would have confirmed their status as servants to the local lord Cedric. The caption “thou speakest but sad truths” relates to the characters’ discussion of the linguistic differences between the respective Anglo-Saxon and Norman-French nouns for animals and the meat obtained from them. In the very first image then, Stothard evokes the political-historical conflict between the Saxons and the Normans at the heart of the novel. Even though it will not feature centrally 11 The edition of Ivanhoe issued as part of John C. Nimmo’s 48-volume edition of Scott’s Waverley novels (London: 1892-1894) included a total of twelve illustrations. The second-largest set for a competing illustrated edition of the novel issued at the same time as part of a 25-volume collection by Adam and Charles Black (London & Edinburgh: 1892-1894) consisted of only ten images. 12 All subsequent references to the primary text are taken from this edition and will parenthetically be provided in the text. Kwinten Van de Walle 100 in the vignette series, its importance for the narrative is highlighted alongside the negative consequences for common people such as Gurth and Wamba. Figure 1. January vignette (recto). The Royal Engagement Pocket Atlas for the Year MDCCCXXI. (Southampton: T. Baker). Reproduced with permission from a copy in professor Sandro Jung’s possession. The recto image for January resumes the socio-political dimension introduced in the first illustration (Figure 1). It depicts Prior Aymer of Jorvaulx Abbey asking the serfs for directions to the nearest place of hospitality to find shelter from an approaching storm. Even though the size of the vignette did not allow for a depiction of the Prior’s rich and splendorous attire, his wealth is represented by means of the silver bells on his mule’s bridle. At the Prior’s side is his travel companion and the novel’s main antagonist, the Templar Knight Brian de Bois-Guilbert. For similar pragmatic reasons, Bois-Guilbert is depicted in full armour instead of the more travel-appropriate garments he is wearing in the novel, so as to make it easier for readers to identify him as a knight. Even though his armour lacks any further discernible elements, the turbaned, foreign retinue following behind help establish Bois-Guilbert as crusader who has recently returned to England. The meeting between the travellers and the serfs is also the subject of the title-page vignette in the first edition of Ivanhoe. Westall in his design focused on Bois-Guilbert’s violent reaction to Gurth’s defiance towards him. Atop his rearing horse, the Norman knight raises his riding rod towards the swineherd, who has assumed a battle-ready posture. The Prior is barely visible in the background as he is looking on. Stothard, by contrast, opted to depict the moment preceding the altercation. In doing so, he distanced himself from Westall’s dramatic and figurative style, adopting a more narrative mode instead. Even though Stothard in this manner refrained from depicting the first physical manifestation of the Norman- Saxon conflict in the novel, the friction between the groups is suggested by the striking contrast between Gurth and Wamba’s dress and that of the The Visual Criticism of Thomas Stothard’s Designs of W. Scott’s Ivanhoe 101 Prior and the knight’s well-equipped and mounted company, as well as the Prior’s patronising tone as implied in the caption “I ask’d you my children”. This brief comparison between Westall and Stothard’s designs reveals the wide range of representational and interpretative possibilities offered by the illustration medium. In opting to illustrate the same scene, Stothard responds to both Scott’s text and Westall’s design. His vignette derives its meaning not only from its visual representation of the former, but also from its inter-iconic engagement with the latter. Each illustrator distils “images evoked by the written word and translates … them into finite graphic images” (Hodnett 1982: 19), but each in his own manner and with distinct interpretive implications. The images possess similarities, especially in that they depict the same passage and the same four characters, but it is in their differences that the reader can find the key to the divergent interpretations. Westall concentrates on Bois-Guilbert’s agitated demeanour to achieve a sensational effect and to draw the potential reader into the violent action of Scott’s story. Stothard’s more subdued representation is more appropriate for the narrative mode of the vignette series. The second vignette visually represents the Saxon-Norman conflict only abstractly evoked in Gurth and Wamba’s conversation in the first image, but not in an explicit manner, since this will be the main purpose of the verso illustration for February. In this vignette, the viewer is for the first time presented with the eponymous hero, Wilfred of Ivanhoe, though in the disguise of a simple palmer. After guiding the Prior and his company to Cedric’s estate at Rotherwood, the unnamed palmer is invited to take part in the evening banquet organised by the Saxon noble. Seated at the main table from right to left are the now unarmoured Bois-Guilbert, the Prior, Cedric, and Cedric’s ward and one of the last descendants of the Saxon kings of England, the Lady Rowena. In the background behind the table are Wamba and a number of other servants. Commanding the most attention in the left-hand foreground of the image is the figure of the palmer, as he waves an accusatory finger in Bois-Guilbert’s direction in response to the latter’s boast that the troops accompanying King Richard I on the crusade were inferior to the Knight Templars. Other than reincorporating the Norman-Saxon conflict in the form of Ivanhoe and Bois-Guilbert’s antagonism, the illustration with the caption “second to none” represents Ivanhoe’s strong and passionate defence of the valour and strength of the English nobility in the crusades. Adhering closely to the text, the image establishes his character as the main Saxon upholder of Norman chivalric values and the “symbol of a new, unified England” (Duncan 1955: 299). In the verso vignette for February, Stothard revisits another scene which was a subject for illustration in the first edition of the novel, namely that of the palmer’s audience with Rowena. After hearing the pilgrim mention Ivanhoe’s name during dinner, Rowena invites him to share any information he might have, since she is anxious and curious to hear any news Kwinten Van de Walle 102 of her childhood companion and love interest. The kneeling hero is surprisingly not depicted in the easily recognisable black garments of the palmer, as had been the case in the previous vignette and in the plate to the 1820 edition of Ivanhoe. Instead, he is clothed in a lighter and plainer habit, which serves to accentuate Rowena’s dress. Seated on her thronelike chair, surrounded by four burning candelabras against a simple and undecorated background, she is depicted in the centre of the image in the stately “magnificence of a Saxon princess … born to exact general homage” (55). At the same time, her elegant, yet plain light dress symbolises her female virtue and innocence, thus foreshadowing how suitable a match she is for Ivanhoe. An analysis of the first four illustrations exemplifies the careful configuration of Stothard’s vignette series and how it frames a particular reading of Scott’s Ivanhoe. Because the illustrations are located in close physical proximity at the head of the diary pages and share the same representational mode, they invite a sequential reading and combine into an elaborate, intratextual visual narrative. Focusing on shared themes, highlighting character relationships, and visualising major symbols, they offer a medial (re)interpretation of the original text and invest it with new meaning. Put differently, the illustrations develop a critical-interpretive reading, which feeds back into the user’s experience and understanding of the text. At the same time, however, the owner of the pocket diary would not necessarily have grasped the full extent of Stothard’s hermeneutic reappraisal of Ivanhoe. The user need not and most frequently will not have read the set sequentially or in its entirety, instead engaging with individual images through the practical day-to-day use of the diary. In a conventional illustrated edition of a literary text, interpretative images appear immediately adjacent or, in the case of frontispieces, at least in physical proximity to the verbal text. Even in this setup, as a result of the medial differences, “the verbal and visual texts displace one another, albeit generally very rapidly, within [the reader’s] consciousness” (Behrendt 1988: 30). In the case of the Pocket Atlas the illustrations are entirely removed from the typographic text of the edition, consequently fully displacing and even replacing it. The resulting potential dissonance between text and image is further complicated by the ambiguous function of the captions. Scott’s text is evoked through the captions, but due to the lengthy format of the novel the quotations are entirely decontextualised. Furthermore, the image does not always relate to the caption in the same manner. In the recto vignette for April, the depiction of a knight depositing a coronet in front of his preferred lady is a direct and self-contained visual manifestation of the accompanying caption. By contrast, it is considerably more difficult to determine how the caption “Thou speakest but sad truths” relates to the depiction of the two figures in the verso vignette for January. In the latter case, a full The Visual Criticism of Thomas Stothard’s Designs of W. Scott’s Ivanhoe 103 understanding of the text-image construct would be contingent on correctly placing it within Scott’s narrative context. Even a comprehensive reading of the April vignette as part of the novel Ivanhoe would depend on the user’s ability to identify the depicted characters. Due to the physical removal of the Pocket Atlas illustrations from the typographic text then, readers would only be able to derive the full meaning of Stothard’s visual representation and reinterpretation, if they were able to recognise the individual scenes and to situate them within Scott’s narrative. The vignettes thus promote different possible readings and practices of engagement with Scott’s novel, depending on a partial or complete viewing of the series as well as readers’ familiarity with the text. The multifaceted nature of Stothard’s enterprise will become apparent from an examination of the remaining illustrations in the series. With the verso vignette for March, the reader is transported to the tournament at Ashby. Whereas Westall devoted only a single illustration to the subject, Stothard dedicated no fewer than five vignettes to the events: he depicts Ivanhoe, who entered the tournament as the anonymous Disinherited Knight, during one of his individual jousting matches (March verso); as he deposits a coronet before Rowena, thus appointing her the Queen of Beauty and of Love (March recto); a scene from the general group bout on the second day of the tournament (April verso); Ivanhoe as he is made to kneel in front of Rowena to receive the champion’s crown (April recto); and finally, Robin of Locksley, more popularly known as Robin Hood, during the archery competition (May verso). Figure 2. April vignette (recto). The Royal Engagement Pocket Atlas for the Year MDCCCXXI. (Southampton: T. Baker). Reproduced with permission from a copy in professor Sandro Jung’s possession. Even though Stothard depicts specific scenes from the tournament, in some of the images there is a marked deviation from the text. In the two images with Rowena, notably, Ivanhoe is depicted with an open visor (Figure 2). This small, yet significant detail is in stark contrast with Scott’s narrative, where the knight takes particular care to remain anonymous. It is only at the end of the tournament, after he has defeated his Norman opponents and is about to be crowned champion, that the marshals forcibly remove Kwinten Van de Walle 104 his helmet. Westall in his design rendered this scene in all its dramatic intensity, depicting Ivanhoe, his face now clearly visible, as, wounded, he collapses on the stairs in front of Rowen’s seat. Opting for a static composition developed across a diagonal line, he highlights the surrounding characters’ dramatic reaction to the discovery of Ivanhoe’s true identity. Stothard’s composition of the same scene, by contrast, is more balanced. It lacks the intersecting diagonal line and is organised across horizontal and vertical lines instead. As the caption indicates, the vignette depicts the moment “the Champion was made to kneel”, just before the helmet is removed, in the process creating a moment of tension and suspense. Similar to his representation of the encounter between Gurth and Wamba and the Prior’s company, Stothard distances himself from Westall’s style and opts for a more suggestive and narratively driven representational mode instead. In deviating from Scott’s text and his predecessor’s earlier designs, Stothard’s visual series not only supplements and supports, but also recreates and reimagines Scott’s narrative. This supplementary text-interpretive dimension and another reason for the artist’s motivation behind this visualisation can also be found in the Ashby tournament sequence as a whole. An examination of the vignettes and the captions indicates that, even though the images refer to specific passages from the narrative, they also provide more generalised depictions of scenes at a medieval tournament. The viewer can observe multiple knights as they “encounter” one another in combat (March verso & April verso); another as “he deposited the coronet” (March recto), a custom traditionally imagined to have been upheld at chivalric tournaments; and finally, a bowman at an archery tournament “again ben[ding] his bow” (May recto). By introducing more generic and self-contained depictions of knights and competitors in moments of martial prowess and chivalric heroism, Stothard’s illustrations develop an alternative visual narrative which moves beyond the confines of Scott’s text. They not only offer a specifically interpretative visual reading of Ivanhoe, but also produce a more suggestively and generically inflected tale evocative of the distinct romance scenes and settings in Ivanhoe. Stothard’s vignettes thus display an awareness of the novel’s positive reception with the reviewers as well as with the general public. Scott himself was commonly praised for the ways in which he explored Britain’s romanticised and mythified national past. The reviewer for the Monthly Review, for example, expressed his “unfeigned praise of the extensive research, the playful vivacity, the busy and stirring incidents, the humorous dialogue, and the picturesque delineations, with which ‘Ivanhoe’ abounds” (1820: 88-89). The reviewer for the Edinburgh Review similarly praised Scott for the way in which he made the medieval world come to life for the reader: The Visual Criticism of Thomas Stothard’s Designs of W. Scott’s Ivanhoe 105 [The author] has made marvellous good use of the scanty materials at his disposal - and eked them out both by the greatest skill and dexterity in their arrangement, and by all the resources that original genius could render subservient to such a design. … And has at the same time given an air both of dignity and reality to this story … he has made such admirable use of his great talents for description, and invested those traditional and theatrical persons with so much of the feelings and humours that are of all ages and all countries, that we frequently cease to regard them … as parts of a fantastical pageant. (1820, 7) It is because of these qualities that Ivanhoe was such an instant hit and became “arguably the best known, most widely disseminated, most internationally successful and most enduring of all Scott’s works” (Rigney 2012: 79). Capitalising on and further enhancing consumer interest in Britain’s mythical and historical national past, Ivanhoe and Scott’s other medieval romances were a vital factor for the nineteenth-century Medieval Revival (Chandler 1965) and still influence people’s conception of the Middle Ages to this day (Rigney 2012: 80). Recognising how this thematic dimension had added to the novel’s success, Stothard made sure to capture the same elements in his visual mediation. The fact that Stothard’s vignette series created meaning on various levels, however, implied that the Pocket Atlas appealed to a variety of readers, ranging from those who had an intimate knowledge of Scott’s text to those who were only aware of its favourable reputation and reception. In the latter case, the images simply capitalised on the fashionable popularity of Scott’s Ivanhoe, “thus underscoring the cultural status of the individuals purchasing and using the Pocket Atlas” (Jung 2021: 63). The developing of multifarious meanings for different readers is not only evident in the vignettes depicting the Ashby tournament, but also in two other groups of images that share the same theme or subject. The first group comprises the sequence of three vignettes depicting the novel’s second anonymous character, the Black Knight, and his evening with the Holy Clerk of Copmanhurst. Reflecting the narrative shift in focus towards the stranger who saved Ivanhoe’s life at a crucial stage in the tournament’s general bout, the illustrations depict the Black Knight’s arrival at the hermit’s hut (May recto); his presenting himself as the Clerk opens the door (June verso); and their jovial dinner conversation (June recto). Once again, despite illustrating specific scenes from the text, the vignettes can easily be read as more generic representations of knights and clergy typical of medieval romances. The recto vignette for June also evokes the popular ballad tradition, a formative part of Scott’s life and career. The caption “Joy to the Fair” is repeated several times in the Black Knight’s English ballad “The Crusader’s Return”, the first of “many a song [that] was exchanged betwixt them” (152). Featuring centrally in the knight and the hermit’s evening of revelry, the ballads, believed to have originated in the minstrelsy, helped further ground Scott’s narrative in a medieval setting. Most, if not all, of Kwinten Van de Walle 106 Stothard’s vignettes similarly succeed in visually reimagining the novel’s many staple romance elements. An owner of the 1821 issue of the Pocket Atlas will thus have had a chance to experience and familiarise themselves with the medieval world of Scott’s novel through an entirely different medium. Figure 3. June vignette (verso). The Royal Engagement Pocket Atlas for the Year MDCCCXXI. (Southampton: T. Baker). Reproduced with permission from a copy in professor Sandro Jung’s possession. Despite the generic simplification prompted by the individual images, the series sequentially continues to develop its complex intratextual narrative. Stothard’s depiction of the Black Knight, especially in the verso image for June carries strong visual symbolism (Figure 3). The knight’s posture, as he stands in front of the hermitage’s door, “the torch glanc[ing] on his Armour”, is decidedly stately and chivalrous. Leaning gently on his sword with his right hand, the tip of the blade on the ground, and steadying his horse with his left hand, he remains unfazed in the face of the hermit’s imposing, armed figure and his agitated dogs. The depiction and posture of the Black Knight is repeated and only slightly altered in the verso vignette for September, in which he reveals his true identity as King Richard I. In this manner, the earlier image compositionally foreshadows the revelation, while also highlighting the innate chivalry and nobility in his character. It likewise offers a visual reinterpretation of the hermit’s original behaviour in Scott’s novel. Whereas in the text the clerk seemingly reluctantly replaces his hostile attitude towards his intrusive guest with a “churlish courtesy” (142), in the image it becomes an instinctive response to the true and kingly nature of the Black Knight. In representing Richard I as a noble and chivalrous king, the illustrations notably eliminate the ambiguity in Scott’s original character. Even though the narrator considers Richard in a positive light as the Norman king recognising and honouring the loyalty of his Saxon servants, he adds a deeply critical evaluation of the character towards the end of the novel: “In the lion-hearted King, the brilliant, but useless character, of a knight of romance, was in a great measure realised and revived; … his feats of chivalry furnishing themes for bards and minstrels, but affording none of those The Visual Criticism of Thomas Stothard’s Designs of W. Scott’s Ivanhoe 107 solid benefits to his country on which history loves to pause, and hold up as an example to posterity” (367). Stothard thus glosses over Scott’s more progressive and critical vision. Instead, he glorifies Richard as the archetypical knightly king in line with the generically uncomplicated reading of the novel as a medieval romance. The second group of images appealing to contemporary consumers’ fascination with the Middle Ages focuses on the architectural seats of some of the feudal lords in the novel. The recto vignettes for July and August both feature Torquilstone, the residence of the Norman baron, Reginald Frontde-Boeuf, and the site of the most extensive confrontation, in the form of a heavily fought siege, between the Normans and the Saxons. The recto image for September depicts the castle of Coningsburgh, the home of Athelstane, the last Saxon contender to the English throne. The portrayal of these fictional locations not only served to emphasise the medieval narrative setting, but also indicates another way in which Stothard responded to the latest fashions. Whereas Baker had decidedly fixed upon literary illustrations for the branding of the Pocket Atlas, some of the other illustrated pocket diaries capitalised on and fed into developments in other cultural branches. William Peacock’s Polite Repository, the longest-running British illustrated pocket diary, for instance, included engravings of country seats of gentlemen and nobility, and national monuments, in the process “contribut[ing] to the emerging tourist industry in Britain and foster[ing] a vision of the nation and of Britishness as represented by its architecture and landscape” (Jung 2013: 64). A large portion of Stothard’s illustrations for the Pocket Atlas focuses on another subject which contributed to Ivanhoe’s instantaneous popularity and offered the artist the opportunity to expand his visual narrative. A total of nine vignettes feature one or both of the two prominent female characters, Rowena and Rebecca, the latter the Jewess who nurtures Ivanhoe back to health after the tournament. It is especially Rebecca who was beloved by the critics and the reading public alike. Reviews frequently singled her out as one of the best and most memorable characters in the novel. They variously labelled her as “heroic” (ER 1820: 39; MR 1820: 85), “divine” (ER 1820: 50), and “amiable” (MR 1820: 85; British Review 1820: 441) and praised her for her beauty and virtue. The reviewer for the British Review, though critical of Scott’s introduction of Jewish characters in the novel, nevertheless acknowledged Rebecca’s “attractiveness and exquisiteness” and applauded her “beautiful and noble-minded” character for her “virtue and honour” (BR 1820: 397, 415, 414). The Edinburgh Review called her “almost the only lovely being in the story” (1820: 53), while the Monthly Review even went as far as describing her as “obviously the heroine, though perhaps not so intended” (1820: 77). The latter assessment also carried Kwinten Van de Walle 108 over into various of the contemporary stage adaptations and chapbook versions of Ivanhoe. 13 These modified versions regularly attributed a more central role to Rebecca, as apparent from such titles as Thomas Dibdin’s Ivanhoe; or, the Jew’s Daughter (1820) and William Moncrieff’s Ivanhoe! or the Jewess (1822). She sometimes even became the titular character: for example, in Rebecca, the Jewess. A Tale (1822) or Michael Rophino Lacy’s opera The Maid of Judah; or, the Knights Templar (1830). It was not unusual for adaptations to rewrite the ending of the novel or to produce a continuation, and to have Ivanhoe marry Rebecca, in response to the popular opinion that she would have been a far better match than Rowena. Stothard’s vignettes offer complex, contrastive interpretations of these characters and their roles in Scott’s narrative. The illustrations initially attributed the most importance to Rowena: all of the images in which she features occur in the first half of the series, with the exception of the verso vignette for July. The depiction of her character is consistent with that in the recto image for February. Her dress is light, sober, and elegant, and she always sits in throne-like seats or elevated positions highlighting her social prominence, such as at the master table at Rotherwood or in the stands at the Ashby tournament. Stothard emphasises her dignified spirit and nobility of character to express her aristocratic Saxon lineage. In this manner, he promotes a reading of her character as vital for the unification of the Norman and Saxon identities, symbolised through her marriage with Ivanhoe at the conclusion of the novel. Figure 4. July vignette (verso). The Royal Engagement Pocket Atlas for the Year MDCCCXXI. (Southampton: T. Baker). Reproduced with permission from a copy in professor Sandro Jung’s possession. Stothard develops a markedly different visual representation for Rebecca’s character. The verso vignette for July functions as the transitional image in which the focus shifts from Rowena in the first to Rebecca in the second half of the vignette series (Figure 4). Depicting the first meeting between 13 For a detailed overview and a consideration of the dramatic adaptations of Ivanhoe, see Bolton (1992: 342-372). For a list of chapbook versions of the novel, see Parsons (1965: 202-205). The Visual Criticism of Thomas Stothard’s Designs of W. Scott’s Ivanhoe 109 the women in the text, it introduces Rebecca to the visual narrative, while also being the last vignette to feature Rowena. The encounter occurs shortly after the tournament at Ashby. Abandoned and robbed of their horses by their hired bodyguards, Rebecca and her father Isaac are looking for travelling companions to face the perilous journey ahead. They come across Cedric’s party first and, after Isaac’s unsuccessful petition, Rebecca appeals to Rowena instead. The illustration of this scene not only foregrounds the ways in which female compassion and sensibility symbolically counterbalance the harsh and inherently racist rationality of the male characters, but also introduces a strong distinction between the two characters. It faithfully renders the way in which Rebecca in Scott’s original text “knelt down, and, after the Oriental fashion in addressing superiors, kissed the hem of Rowena’s garment” (160). Portraying Rebecca in a subservient position in front of Rowena, who remains physically elevated on her horse, Stothard establishes her social inferiority, which is also verbally emphasised in the caption “knelt down”. Figure 5. August vignette (verso). The Royal Engagement Pocket Atlas for the Year MDCCCXXI. (Southampton: T. Baker). Reproduced with permission from a copy in professor Sandro Jung’s possession. The image also sets the tone for the depiction of Rebecca’s character in the rest of the illustrations. Even though both women are subsequently abducted and each dishonourably beset by a Norman suitor - Rowena by King John’s loyal follower, Maurice de Bracy, and Rebecca by Bois-Guilbert, Stothard elected to focus only on the Jewess’ trials and tribulations in the remainder of his vignette designs. In the verso image for August, she is “standing on the very edge” of the ramparts of Torquilstone castle, praying to the heavens as she attempts to escape Bois-Guilbert’s advances (Figure 5). The last three vignettes of the series similarly centre on Rebecca’s distress during her captivity and trial at Templestowe, where Lucas de Beaumanoir, the grandmaster of the Templar Order, threatens to have her executed on suspicion of witchcraft. In the recto image for November, a seated Rebecca helplessly stares at the pyre upon which she is to be burned, while ominous figures loom in the background. In the verso image for December, Stothard takes some artistic liberty and inserts her into the scene of Kwinten Van de Walle 110 Ivanhoe’s final duel with Bois-Guilbert. Appearing in the background of the image, Rebecca clasps her hands together in a supplicating motion and raises them upwards in a posture closely resembling that in the verso vignette for August. In the concluding image to the series, finally, she reappears on the foreground, seeking consolation in the arms of her father Isaac, who “recalled her scattered feelings”. A clear pattern emerges from the illustrations of Rebecca’s character. She consistently appears in heightened moments of anguish and adversity, a helpless victim to the events befalling her. In this manner, Stothard pictorially identifies and analyses Rebecca as the prototypical damsel in distress of medieval romance. This interpretation is most clearly articulated in the aforementioned depiction of Rebecca on the ramparts of Torquilstone, a subject which had also been chosen by Westall for illustration. Once again, Stothard adopts a conspicuously different approach. In Westall’s composition, Rebecca, pictured in full Oriental dress and richly ornamented turban on her head, has one foot on the ramparts, the other elevated from the floor to suggest her fleeing motion. Her arms are stretched out sideways, her gaze lingering on the doorway to the castle turret. In a moment of dramatic intensity, Rebecca hovers indecisively between two perilous choices: to the left, a fall to her certain death; to the right, the unwelcome advances of her assailant, Bois-Guilbert, suggestively present in the form of the Templar’s hands materialising from the doorway. In Stothard’s design, Rebecca firmly “stood on the very Verge” of the ramparts with both feet, her hair loose in the wind. Whereas Westall still assigns an active role to Rebecca as she struggles with the difficult choice ahead of her, Stothard strips her of all agency. Throwing up her hands in despair, she seems to surrender herself to her tragic fate and prays for deliverance instead, while Bois-Guilbert reaches out to grab her. By depriving Rebecca of her agency and portraying her as utterly helpless, Stothard offers a one-dimensional reading of Scott’s character. In the novel, she does assume a more active role at times, most notably when she tends to Ivanhoe’s wounds after the tournament and refuses to leave his side even at the peril of her own life. She also provides a more nuanced and critical reflection on the chivalric pursuit of honour and glory during the siege of Torquilstone. Too weak to take any action or to procure their escape, Ivanhoe laments his inability to assist the Saxon besiegers and to win glory in honourable battle. Rebecca calls attention to the fundamentally violent nature of knighthood, denouncing it as a “sacrifice to a demon of vain-glory” at the expense of “domestic love, kindly affection, peace and happiness” (249). Scott also endows her character with strong tragic potential. A morally upright and benevolent figure challenging the social and religious status quo, she does not hesitate to use her father’s financial wealth and medicinal knowledge for the benefit of her fellow human beings. She is nevertheless consistently reviled and even persecuted as a heathen Jewess or objectified and pursued as the exotic other. Not even the The Visual Criticism of Thomas Stothard’s Designs of W. Scott’s Ivanhoe 111 chivalric Ivanhoe manages to relinquish his religious prejudices, thus resulting in her departure from England at the end of the novel. Stothard’s designs for the Pocket Atlas, by comparison, unequivocally transformed Rebecca into the innocent maiden, whose life and virtue require repeated protection and saving by the romance hero. According to genre convention, this reinterpretation of Rebecca’s character as the damsel in distress also sets her up as destined to marry her noble saviour, Ivanhoe, at the end of the narrative. Stothard’s vignettes thus visually recast Rebecca in a role which aligned with the public’s general opinion. Figure 6. Frontispiece. The Royal Engagement Pocket Atlas for the Year MDCCCXXI. (Southampton: T. Baker). Reproduced with permission from a copy in professor Sandro Jung’s possession. As much as this visual representation of Rebecca’s character seems to be at odds with both Scott’s text and the depiction of Rowena’s character in the first half of the vignette series, Stothard eventually reconciles their respective roles and function within the novel in the frontispiece to the 1821 issue of the Pocket Atlas (Figure 6). The plate depicts the women’s second and final meeting in the last chapter of Ivanhoe. The recently wedded Rowena receives a visit from Rebecca, who wishes to express her gratitude for Ivanhoe’s saving her life at Templestowe before setting off for Spain. In the image, Rebecca, easily recognisable through her turban, kneels down on one knee and kisses the hem of Rowena’s bridal dress, while the latter raises her hands in surprise. In the background, the bride’s trusted handmaid, Elgitha, looks back towards the women, while she closes the door, thus endowing the scene with a sense of intimacy. Kwinten Van de Walle 112 The frontispiece not only illustrates the emotional encounter, but also brings together and unifies the different strands of the visual narrative focused on the female characters. In a composition which echoes that of the depiction of their first meeting in the July vignette, Stothard once again places Rowena in the socially superior position. This aspect is further augmented through a deviation from the original text. In Scott’s narrative, Rowena’s face is still covered by her bridal veil. She only removes it at Rebecca’s request, which not only allowed the Jewess to behold her ‘rival’ in famed beauty, but also put the women more on the same level. By omitting this detail, Stothard’s design avoids this moment of interpersonal equality. The image thus solidifies Rowena’s social station and definitively reasserts her symbolic importance in the narrative. The Saxon princess is the only suitable match for Ivanhoe: their marriage represents the resolution of the Norman-Saxon conflict and serves as the “ceremonial pledge of the future peace and harmony” between the two peoples (398). In this manner, Stothard carefully caters to readers’ preference of Rebecca’s character, while also adhering to and supporting Scott’s original narrative. Within the visual apparatus of the Pocket Atlas, the frontispiece occupies a unique and prominent position. On the one hand, it provides the concluding image of Stothard’s visual series. At the same time, however, the frontispiece is actually the first image which users would have encountered upon opening the diary. Issued in a larger, full-page format and executed by a different engraver, John Romney, it appears markedly distinct from the diary page vignettes. In this respect, the frontispiece has an ambiguous relationship with the rest of the illustrations in the pocket diary. Placed in frontal position, the plate with its delicate rendering of the two female characters was aimed at the polite tastes of the diary’s prospective buyers. Reflecting the refinement of its genteel users, the frontispiece enhanced the commodity value and symbolic capital of the Pocket Atlas. The frontispiece also impacted Stothard’s visual mediation of Scott’s novel. Even though it is compositionally - i.e., it shares the same representational mode and subjects - part of the vignette series, it is both physically and medially removed from the other illustrations and acquires a more independent status. Similar to frontispieces in illustrated editions of literary works it functions as a means “to assert generic status, to guide interpretation, and even to instruct the reader” (Barchas 2003: 34). In this case, however, the frontispiece operates as a gateway into the illustrated text of Ivanhoe as well as the visual text developed by Stothard in his designs. Focusing on Rowena and Rebecca rather than the eponymous hero or any of the other male characters, the frontispiece foreshadows how Stothard’s vignettes promote a visual reading centred on the female element in Ivanhoe. Indeed, the compassion and gentility governing the interaction of the women functions as a critical alternative to the novel’s male-dominated society. The interpretative reading developed in the illustrations demonstrates how the chivalric pursuit of honour and glory too frequently The Visual Criticism of Thomas Stothard’s Designs of W. Scott’s Ivanhoe 113 victimises women, as exemplified by the depiction of Rebecca’s misfortunes. The Jewess only manages to find safety and security in the presence of her Saxon counterpart, Rowena, whose character is established as sufficiently dignified and confident to withstand the threats of the patriarchal medieval world. An additional argument in favour of this particular reasoning is the fact that Stothard was the first to bring both women together in his designs. Thomas Stothard’s designs for the 1821 number of The Royal Engagement Pocket Atlas represent a significant intervention not just in the illustration history, but also in the transmission of Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe. The third and most extensive early visual mediation, the vignettes engage intericonically with existing illustrations, while also introducing new narrative subjects in response to the work’s contemporary reception. Mainly focusing on two aspects that made the novel popular and fashionable, the world of medieval romance and the female protagonists, Stothard provided new ways for readers to engage and familiarise themselves with the original text. Rather than simply rendering individual scenes or characters, however, he actively reimagined and reinterpreted the story by means of a dynamic and multi-layered visual narrative. His portrayal of Rowena and Rebecca in a group of compositionally linked and interwoven illustrations in particular reflects the diverse ways in which complex readings could be promoted through the visual medium. What provides Stothard’s illustrations - not just those of Ivanhoe, but of the other works as well - with such a singular status is their distinct text-image relationship. Published in the ephemeral print medium of the pocket diary and epitextually removed from the original text, the images invite diary owners to develop an interpretation outside of the conventional illustrated edition. Readers sufficiently familiar with Scott’s novel would have been able to comprehend Stothard’s innovative visual adaptation. But even if their knowledge of Ivanhoe were not extensive enough, they would have been able to enjoy and understand Stothard’s series as a portrayal of medieval romance. Methodologically, an analysis such as the one developed in this contribution demonstrates how the study of literary illustration can be of considerable value for the field of literary studies. Abandoning traditional notions of the fixed, abstract text in favour of a more flexible understanding of the dynamic mutability and transformative potential of texts, scholars should approach and examine illustrations as just another textual response to a literary text. An inherent part of the textual condition, illustrations are a manifestation, translated into the visual medium, of a literary text on “the double helix of a work’s reception history and its production history” (McGann 1991: 16). They represent a stage in what Arjun Appadurai has termed “the social life” of a text (1986: 3), during which several cultural agents - author, designer, engraver, publisher, reader, and consumer - at a specific point in time and space creatively engaged with the text and imbued it with new meaning. Kwinten Van de Walle 114 This innovative reshaping of the text through illustration should, as I have argued, fundamentally be approached as an act of visual literary criticism. Stothard’s vignettes of Ivanhoe serve as a clear example, as they simultaneously performed various of the component elements associated with criticism at the outset of this contribution. They provide nuanced critical analyses, for example, of the roles and functions of Rebecca and Rowena. They offer varying, complex visual-critical (re)interpretations of Scott’s medieval romance novel through the selection and representation of specific subjects and passages, the composition of and intratextual connection between the different images, and their meaningful similarities and contrasts with the original text as well as other visual and non-visual responses. Finally, the very fact that Ivanhoe was selected for illustration was the result of a critical-evaluative assessment: Baker capitalised on and further elevated the popular reputation of Scott’s novel by including it in the fashionable Pocket Atlas’s “growing archive of images that visually interpreted culture” (Jung 2013: 76). Literary illustration, as exemplified by Stothard’s designs, thus represents a unique resource for the textual study of literature and its historical reception. Acknowledgments Research for this article was conducted during a postdoctoral fellowship sponsored by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. I would like to thank Professor Sandro Jung for his insightful feedback on an early draft of this article, as well as for generously allowing me to use the copy and the illustrations of the 1821 issue of the Pocket Atlas in his personal collection. Works Cited Abrams M. H., and Geoffrey Galt Harpham (2012). A Glossary of Literary Terms. Tenth Edition. Boston, MA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning. Altick, Richard D. (1985). Paintings from Books: Art and Literature in Britain, 1760- 1900. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Appadurai, Arjun (1983). “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value”. In The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Baldick, Chris (2001). The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Second Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Barchas, Janine (2003). Graphic Design, Print Culture, and the Eighteenth-Century Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Behrendt, Stephen C. (1988). “The Functions of Illustration - Intentional and Unintentional”. In: Joachim Möller (Ed.). Imagination on a Long Rein: English Literature Illustrated. Marburg: Jonas Verlag. 29-44. Bolton, H. Philip (1992). Scott Dramatized. London: Mansell. The Visual Criticism of Thomas Stothard’s Designs of W. Scott’s Ivanhoe 115 Chandler, Alice (1965). “Sir Walter Scott and the Medieval Revival”. Nineteenth- Century Fiction 19.4. 315-332. Coxhead, A. C. (1906). Thomas Stothard, R. A.: An Illustrated Monograph. London: A. H. Bullen. Duncan, Joseph E. (1955). “The Anti-Romantic in Ivanhoe”. Nineteenth-Century Fiction 9.4. 293-300. Garside, Peter (2010). “Illustrating the Waverley Novels: Scott, Scotland, and the London Print Trade, 1819-1836”. The Library 11.2. 168-196. Garside, Peter (2013). “Print Illustrations and the Cultural Materialism of Scott’s Waverley Novels”. Essays and Studies 66. 125-157. Gordon, Catherine (1971). “The Illustration of Sir Walter Scott: Nineteenth-Century Enthusiasm and Adaptation”. Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 34. 297-317. Haywood, Ian, Susan Matthews and Mary L. Shannon (2019). “Editors’ Introduction”. In: Ian Haywood, Susan Matthews and Mary L. Shannon (Eds.). Romanticism and Illustration. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1-21. Hodnett, Edward (1982). Image and Text: Studies in the Illustration of English Literature. London: Scholar Press. Jung, Sandro (2011). “Thomas Stothard’s Illustrations for The Royal Engagement Pocket Atlas, 1779-1826”. The Library 12.1. 3-22. Jung, Sandro (2012). “The Illustrated Pocket Diary: Genetic Continuity and Innovation, 1820-40”. Victorian Periodicals Review 45.1. 23-48. Jung, Sandro (2013). “Illustrated Pocket Diaries and the Commodification of Culture”. Eighteenth-Century Life 37.2. 53-84. Jung, Sandro (2015a). James Thomson’s The Seasons, Print Culture, and Visual Interpretation, 1730-1842. Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press. Jung, Sandro (2015b). “Thomas Stothard, Milton and the Illustrative Vignette: The Houghton Library Designs for The Royal Engagement Pocket Atlas”. The Yearbook of English Studies 45. 137-158. Jung, Sandro (2018). The Publishing and Marketing of Illustrated Literature in Scotland, 1760-1825. Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press. Jung, Sandro (2019). “Reading the Romantic Vignette: Stothard Illustrates Bloomfield, Byron, and Crabbe for The Royal Engagement Pocket Atlas”. In: Ian Haywood, Susan Matthews and Mary L. Shannon (Eds.). Romanticism and Illustration. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 143-170. Jung, Sandro (2020). “Ephemeral Spenser: Stothard’s Vignette Series of The Faerie Queene for The Royal Engagement Pocket Atlas”. Eighteenth-Century Life 44.2. 78- 110. Jung, Sandro (2021). “Thomas Stothard and Samuel Rogers: The Pleasures of Memory illustrated for The Royal Engagement Pocket Atlas (1808)”. The Book Collector 69.2. 59-73. McGann, Jerome J. (1991). The Textual Condition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Millgate, Jane (1994). “Making It New: Scott, Constable, Ballantyne, and the Publication of Ivanhoe”. Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 34.4. 795-811. Parsons, Coleman O. (1965). “Chapbook Versions of the Waverley Novels”. Studies in Scottish Literature 3.4. 189-220. 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KG \ Dischingerweg 5 \ 72070 Tübingen \ Germany Tel. +49 (0)7071 97 97 0 \ Fax +49 (0)7071 97 97 11 \ info@narr.de \ www.narr.de Engelbert Thaler (ed.) Teaching Transhumanism 1. Auflage 2021, 173 Seiten €[D] 39,90 ISBN 978-3-8233-8495-3 eISBN 978-3-8233-9495-2 Onco-mice and cloned sheep, drones and auto-automobiles, neuro-enhancement and prosthetic therapy: Is transhumanism a “movement that epitomizes the most daring, courageous, imaginative, and idealistic aspirations of humanity” (Ronald Bailey 2004), or rather “the world’s most dangerous idea” (Francis Fukuyama 2009)? This volume attempts to elucidate what we understand by the term „transhumanism“, what topics and problems we face, what media are suitable for classroom use, what lesson scenarios seem effective, what benefits we may reap, and what challenges we have to cope with when we teach transhumanism in English language classes. narr.digital ISSN 0171 - 5410 Mit Beiträgen von: Sandro Jung (Guest Editor) Russell Palmer Matthew C. Jones Kwinten Van De Walle