The Victorian Mind's Eye Reading Literature in an Age of Illustration

The Victorian Mind's Eye: Reading Literature in an Age of Illustration
The Victorians lived in an age of illustration. In a matter of decades, words and images had become enmeshed and entangled, printed alongside each other in a spectacular array of printed forms. The exponential growth of illustration not only radically changed literature, but also changed the way that literature was read.

This book offers a major conceptualisation of the difference that pictures made to the reading of words. Analysing an extensive range of illustrated material and drawing on the accounts of Victorian readers, reviewers, authors, artists, and psychologists, the book describes how the Victorians characterised the effects of illustration, and how illustrations, in turn, elicited and anticipated responses from their readers. What emerges from these sources is the notion of a distinct mode of reading that determined readers' material and mental engagements with illustrated literature. The presence of images on the page was said to impact on whether readers created images in their mind as they read. Illustrations generated feelings of pleasure or displeasure; they determined what was read first, what was recalled, and what was etched in the memory.

By peering into the recesses of the mind's eye, this book identifies the cognitive mechanisms and cultural politics that were central to how the Victorians described their reading of illustrated literature. It suggests the significance of these ideas of reading for understanding the place of illustration in Victorian culture and the relation between words, pictures, and historical values and meanings. Illustration was fundamental to how the Victorians read, and to how we read the Victorians.

Julia Thomas, Professor of English Literature, Cardiff University

Julia Thomas is Professor of English Literature in Cardiff University, UK, where she specialises in Victorian visual and material culture, word and image, and digital humanities. These areas have come together in work at the forefront of the field of Illustration Studies. Thomas has published widely in these areas, including Nineteenth-Century Illustration and the Digital (Palgrave, 2017), Shakespeare's Shrine (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), and Pictorial Victorians (Ohio University Press, 2004). She has been Principal Investigator on many illustration projects and is Director of the AHRC-funded Database of Mid-Victorian Illustration and The Illustration Archive, the largest online resource dedicated to illustration.