When Active Partnership Existed between Writer and Illustrator

Dinah Birch, TLS, June 23 2023, review of  "THE ART OF THE REPRINT:Nineteenth-century novels in twentieth-century editions" by Rosalind Parry

"... llustrated novels – except those written for children – have now fallen out of favour in mainstream publishing, though they have found a different kind of vitality in the development of the graphic novel. But many nineteenth-century novels were written with the power of illustration very much in the author’s mind. Charles Dickens’s career as a novelist began when he was asked to supply descriptions to supplement a series of comic sporting plates – a project that morphed into The Pickwick Papers, the origin of his long working relationship with the artist Hablot Knight Browne (“Phiz”). Much of Anthony Trollope’s fiction was first published with accompanying illustrations, and he took a keen interest in their effect on his readers. In Orley Farm, published at the height of his success in the early 1860s, he highlights a drawing by John Everett Millais (his favourite illustrator) to make a point about Lady Mason, the novel’s central character:

In an early part of this story I have endeavoured to describe how this woman sat alone, with deep sorrow in her heart and deep thought on her mind, when she first learned what terrible things were coming on her. The idea, however, which the reader will have conceived of her as she sat there will have come to him from the skill of the artist, and not from the words of the writer. If that drawing is now near him, let him go back to it.

Such moments of deference to an artist’s achievement are rare, but active partnerships between writer and illustrator were not...."

 artist; Sir John Everett Millais , 1861-62