The Plot Thickens - Lisa Surridge Series in Victorian Studies

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frames in the narrative. Its duality infuses with irony the image of Bathsheba’s pensive state: her husband is not dead, as the reader knows, but she will think that he is, as the witness’s testimony implies. As these examples indicate, prolepsis and analepsis are intrinsic to reading illustrated serials; the plots of serial novels are rendered less linear, more complex in the relation between plot and story, by the readers’ visual apprehension of plot events.

      So far, we have focused on the temporal relationship between image and letterpress, showing how a narratological analysis of images complicates the relation of plot and story. Another key narratological distinction is between mimesis and diegesis. The term mimesis comes from the Greek word for imitation and refers to sections of text in which the narrator depicts scenes in detail; diegesis is derived from the Greek for narrative or statement and refers to the telling of events as opposed to their showing. In a famous example, Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities opens with a chapter of diegesis, or summary, titled “The Period”—“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times . . .” (TOTC, 5)85—before moving into a mimetic scene, or detailed showing, of the Dover mail coach. By depicting specific plot events in detail, illustrations can support textual mimesis, increasing readers’ sense of being shown a scene; they can also, by depicting general background of setting or context, evoke a sense of historical diegesis.

      A notable form of illustration’s participation in mimesis was one in which image placement precisely matched its representation in the letterpress—that is, image and text appear side by side or with one immediately following the other, a surprisingly rare placement in Victorian serials. As we have noted, the limitations of Victorian print technology meant that steel engravings and etchings could not be printed on the same page as type (hence the facing pages in many cases); however, the innovation of type-high wood blocks enabled the insertion of images in the letterpress itself, allowing text and image to match precisely.86 We refer to such close placements as examples of matching mimesis, having failed to find an existing narratological term that captures their import. In this book, we use this term to refer to instances in which the illustration and the letterpress show, in their different media and in detail, precisely the same event at the same time for readers; this phenomenon is striking because it approached, as much as was possible, a Victorian multimedia visual-verbal experience. We see Thackeray playing with matching mimesis in part 4 (April 1847) of Vanity Fair, in which the letterpress’s sentence “Miss Sharp put out her right fore-finger—” is physically interrupted on the page by an inset wood engraving of Becky pointing her finger at George Osborne. The sentence resumes underneath: “And gave him a little nod, so cool and killing, that Rawdon Crawley, watching the operations from the other room, could hardly restrain his laughter as he saw the Lieutenant’s entire discomfiture” (VF, 4:124; fig. 0.6). Matching mimesis can produce high drama, as in the historical novels of the period, or irony, when used (as above) to draw attention to the minutiae of social interactions.

      FIG. 0.6 William Makepeace Thackeray, illustration for his Vanity Fair, part 4 (April 1847), 124. London: Bradbury and Evans. BC–First Editions 601. Courtesy of Archives and Special Collections, University of New Brunswick Libraries.

      Narratological terms also help us analyze plot events that echo or repeat one another. Narratologists distinguish between iterative and repetitive aspects of plot. Iterative (from the Latin iterare, to do again) refers to events that occur regularly: these are the narrative equivalent of the imperfect verb tense, the expression of a habitual event or state. Repetitive (from the Latin repetere, to reread or repeat) refers to different scenes with similar elements: these repetitive plot events may produce effects of echo, déjà vu, irony, pathos, or uncanniness. In Far from the Madding Crowd, Paterson’s chapter initials showing Bathsheba’s farm labor are iterative: the serial’s first chapter initial, for example, depicts her carrying a milking pail (fig. 0.7), an action that Gabriel observes every day for several days: “Five mornings and evenings passed. The young woman came regularly to milk the healthy cow or to attend to the sick one” (FMC, 1:13). The image, therefore, does not capture a single action but rather multiple iterations of the same action. Another example of iterative illustration occurs in Sidney Paget’s famous images of Sherlock Holmes in the Strand Magazine,87 wherein depictions of Holmes reading the newspaper, gazing into the fire, or curled asleep in his armchair stand for his habitual states of contemplation or trance (fig. 0.8); despite captions linking such illustrations to particular moments in the letterpress, the visual depictions stand in for Holmes’s daily activities. Thus Paget not only depicts Holmes in moments of high action but also frequently shows scenes of profound contemplation, thereby intellectualizing Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective hero.

      FIG. 0.7 Helen Paterson, chapter initial for Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd, part 1. Cornhill Magazine, January 1874, 1. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Victoria Libraries.

      FIG. 0.8 Sidney Paget, “I found Sherlock Holmes half asleep,” illustration for Arthur Conan Doyle, “A Case of Identity.” Strand Magazine, September 1891, 255. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Victoria Libraries.

      Repetitive illustrations, rather than depicting habitual actions, show the relationship among discrete actions that involve similar plot elements but not necessarily the same characters. Du Maurier’s moving series of deathbed scenes in the chapter initials for Gaskell’s realist Wives and Daughters, for example, establishes a leitmotif among related scenes involving Squire Hamley, first mourning his dead tenant and then his dead son (figs. 0.9 and 0.10). In a contrasting genre and to different effect, we see repetition in Warwick Goble’s illustrations for H. G. Wells’s science-fiction novel The War of the Worlds, serialized from April to December 1897 in Pearson’s Magazine. Images for parts 3 and 7 show repetitive events: in part 3, a man in the tentacled grasp of a tripod-like fighting machine; in part 7, a man limply hanging from the tentacle of a similarly silhouetted machine (figs. 0.11 and 0.12). The plot events thus depicted are similar (people in the foreground, at the picture plane, grasped by an outstretched tentacle as they flee a Martian machine in the far background), as are the manners of their showing (both images are rendered in pen and ink wash, with the letterpress wrapping around them, their unruly shapes conveying the disorder that they depict).

      FIG. 0.9 George Du Maurier, chapter initial for Elizabeth Gaskell, Wives and Daughters, part 11. Cornhill Magazine, June 1865, 682. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Victoria Libraries.

      FIG. 0.10 George Du Maurier, chapter initial for Elizabeth Gaskell, Wives and Daughters, part 16. Cornhill Magazine, November 1865, 513. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Victoria Libraries.

      FIG. 0.11 Warwick Goble,

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