The Victorian Illustrated Book (Victorian Literature and Culture Series)

the long version

This volume contains a collection of essays that concentrate on the use of illustration in literature -- especially novels, poems, and children's books during the Victorian Age. Throughout the nineteenth century, but most intensely in the reign of Queen Victoria, England and Scotland produced an unprecedented range of extraordinary illustrated books. The images in these books became a central feature of Victorian culture. They were at once prestigious and popular -- a kind of entertainment -- but equally a place for pondering fundamental questions about the history, geography, language, time, commerce, design, and vision itself of the Victorians. The essays offer insights into such diverse topics as illustration in the books of Charles Dickens and William Morris, the use of words as images, the intersection of children's books and shopping, the use of maps in fiction, the decline of illustrated volumes after Queen Victoria's death, and the proposal that Victorian illustration was a major inspiration for modernist and postmodernist experiments with the form of the book.