The Art of the Reprint: Nineteenth-Century Novels in Twentieth-Century Editions 1009272047, 9781009272049

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THE ART OF THE REPRINT

The Art of the Reprint is a vivid and engaging history of the nineteenth-century novel as it was reimagined for everyday readers by extraordinary twentieth-century illustrators. It focuses especially on four reprints: a 1929 edition of Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native (1878) with engravings by Clare Leighton, a 1930 edition of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851) with images by Rockwell Kent, a 1943 edition of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) with woodblocks by Fritz Eichenberg, and a complete set of Jane Austen’s novels (1786–1817) illustrated from 1957 to 1974 by Joan Hassall. Taken together, these reprints are indicative of a legacy crafted from historical distance, through personal, political, and artistic circumstance, and for a new century. With biographical, archival, and art- and literary-historical sources as well as close readings of images and texts, this is a richly illustrated account of how artists reinvent canons for the general reader. Ros a l ind Pa r ry  lives, writes, and teaches in Brooklyn. She did her doctoral and postdoctoral work at Princeton University. Her writing has appeared in Raritan, Literary Imagination, Public Books, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, and The Paris Review Daily.

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C A MBR IDGE STUDIES IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITER ATUR E A ND CULTUR E Founding Editors Gillian Beer, University of Cambridge Catherine Gallagher, University of California, Berkeley General Editors Kate Flint, University of Southern California Clare Pettitt, King’s College London Editorial Board Isobel Armstrong, Birkbeck, University of London Ali Behdad, University of California, Los Angeles Alison Chapman, University of Victoria Hilary Fraser, Birkbeck, University of London Josephine McDonagh, University of Chicago Elizabeth Miller, University of California, Davis Hillis Miller, University of California, Irvine Cannon Schmitt, University of Toronto Sujit Sivasundaram, University of Cambridge Herbert Tucker, University of Virginia Mark Turner, King’s College London Nineteenth-century literature and culture have proved a rich field for interdisciplinary studies. Since 1994, books in this series have tracked the intersections and tensions between Victorian literature and the visual arts, politics, gender and sexuality, race, social organisation, economic life, technical innovations, scientific thought – in short, culture in its broadest sense. Many of our books are now classics in a field which since the series’ inception has seen powerful engagements with Marxism, feminism, visual studies, post-colonialism, critical race studies, new historicism, new formalism, transnationalism, queer studies, human rights and liberalism, disability studies and global studies. Theoretical challenges and historiographical shifts continue to unsettle scholarship on the nineteenth century in productive ways. New work on the body and the senses, the environment and climate, race and the decolonisation of literary studies, biopolitics and materiality, the animal and the human, the local and the global, politics and form, queerness and gender identities, and intersectional theory is reanimating the field. This series aims to accommodate and promote the most interesting work being undertaken on the frontiers of nineteenthcentury literary studies, connecting the field with the urgent critical questions that are being asked today. We seek to publish work from a diverse range of authors, and stand for anti-racism, anti-colonialism and against discrimination in all forms. A complete list of titles published will be found at the end of the book.

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T H E A RT OF T H E R E PR I N T Nineteenth-Century Novels in Twentieth-Century Editions ROSA L I ND PA R RY

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Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge cb2 8ea, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, N Y 10006, US A 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, V IC 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467 Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment, a department of the University of Cambridge. We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781009272049 DOI: 10.1017/9781009272032 © Rosalind Parry 2023 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press & Assessment. First published 2023 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data names: Parry, Rosalind, 1988– author. title: The art of the reprint : nineteenth-century novels in twentieth-century editions / Rosalind Parry. description: Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, ny : Cambridge University Press, 2023. | Series: Cambridge studies in nineteenth-century literature and culture | Includes bibliographical references and index. identifiers: lccn 2022038893 | isbn 9781009272049 (hardback) | isbn 9781009272032 (ebook) subjects: lcsh: English fiction – 19th century – Illustrations. | Reprints (Publications) – Publishing – England – History – 20th century. | Reprints (Publications) – Publishing – United States – History – 20th century. | Illustration of books – England – 20th century. | Illustration of books – United States – 20th century. | Books and reading – England – History – 20th century. | Books and reading – United States – History – 20th century. | lcgft: Literary criticism. classification: lcc pr878.i4 p37 2023 | ddc 823/.809–dc23/eng/20221202 lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022038893 ISBN 978-1-009-27204-9 Hardback Cambridge University Press & Assessment has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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For my parents, who filled our home with books

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Contents

List of Figures page viii Acknowledgments xii

Introduction 

1

1 Clare Leighton & Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native23 2 Rockwell Kent & Herman Melville’s Moby Dick57 3 Fritz Eichenberg & Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre95 4 Joan Hassall & The Complete Novels of Jane Austen125

Coda: The Home Library

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Notes 166 Bibliography 192 Index 206

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Figures

Captions and image titles are my own, unless quoted language denotes an artist’s caption or a chapter or title. I.1 Andrew Miller, “Bookshelf,” Polaroid, 2017. Reproduced by kind courtesy of the photographer. page 1 I.2 Clare Leighton, untitled (p. 162), from Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847). New York: Random House, 1931. Reproduced by kind courtesy of the estate of Clare Leighton. 14 I.3 Fritz Eichenberg, front cover for Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847). New York: Random House, 1943. Reproduced by kind courtesy of the Artists Rights Society. 15 1.1 Clare Leighton, “He musingly surveyed the scene, as if considering the next step that he should take,” from Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native (1878). New York: Harper & Brothers, 1929. Reproduced by kind courtesy of the estate of Clare Leighton. 22 1.2 Clare Leighton, “The contour of a man became dimly visible against the low-reaching sky over the valley,” from Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native (1878). New York: Harper & Brothers, 1929. Reproduced by kind courtesy of the estate of Clare Leighton. 34 1.3 Clare Leighton, “Hand in hand they went along the path towards Mistover,” from Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native (1878). New York: Harper & Brothers, 1929. Reproduced by kind courtesy of the estate of Clare Leighton. 38 1.4 Clare Leighton, “The proud fair woman bowed her head and wept in sick despair,” from Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native (1878). New York: Harper & Brothers, 1929. Reproduced by kind courtesy of the estate of Clare Leighton. 39 viii

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List of Figures

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1.5 Clare Leighton, “They listened to the words of the man in their midst,” from Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native (1878). New York: Harper & Brothers, 1929. Reproduced by kind courtesy of the estate of Clare Leighton. 42 1.6 Clare Leighton, untitled tailpiece (p. 7), from Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native (1878). New York: Harper & Brothers, 1929. Reproduced by kind courtesy of the estate of Clare Leighton.45 1.7 Clare Leighton, untitled (p. 193), from Thomas Hardy’s Under the Greenwood Tree (1872). New York: Macmillan & Co., 1940. Reproduced by kind courtesy of the estate of Clare Leighton. 52 1.8 Clare Leighton, “Safe and Firm,” from Growing New Roots: An Essay with Fourteen Wood Engravings. San Francisco: The Book Club of California, 1976. Reproduced by kind courtesy of the estate of Clare Leighton. 54 2.1 Rockwell Kent, untitled (p. 1), from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick: Or, the Whale (1851). New York: Random House, 1930. Rights courtesy of Plattsburgh State Art Museum, State University of New York, USA, Rockwell Kent Collection, Bequest of Sally Kent Gorton. All rights reserved. 56 2.2 Rockwell Kent, untitled (p. 16), from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick: Or, the Whale (1851). New York: Random House, 1930. Rights courtesy of Plattsburgh State Art Museum, State University of New York, USA, Rockwell Kent Collection, Bequest of Sally Kent Gorton. All rights reserved. 73 2.3 Rockwell Kent, untitled (p. 190), from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick: Or, the Whale (1851). New York: Random House, 1930. Rights courtesy of Plattsburgh State Art Museum, State University of New York, USA, Rockwell Kent Collection, Bequest of Sally Kent Gorton. All rights reserved. 77 2.4 Rockwell Kent, untitled (p. 573), from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick: Or, the Whale (1851). New York: Random House, 1930. Rights courtesy of Plattsburgh State Art Museum, State University of New York, USA, Rockwell Kent Collection, 79 Bequest of Sally Kent Gorton. All rights reserved. 2.5 Rockwell Kent, untitled (p. 392), from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick: Or, the Whale (1851). New York: Random House, 1930. Rights courtesy of Plattsburgh State Art Museum, State University of New York, USA, Rockwell Kent Collection, 80 Bequest of Sally Kent Gorton. All rights reserved.

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List of Figures

2.6 Rockwell Kent, untitled (p. 487), from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick: Or, the Whale (1851). New York: Random House, 1930. Rights courtesy of Plattsburgh State Art Museum, State University of New York, USA, Rockwell Kent Collection, Bequest of Sally Kent Gorton. All rights reserved. 81 2.7 Rockwell Kent, untitled (p. 15), from N by E. New York: Random House, 1930. Rights courtesy of Plattsburgh State Art Museum, State University of New York, USA, Rockwell Kent Collection, Bequest of Sally Kent Gorton. All rights reserved. 86 2.8 Rockwell Kent, untitled (p. 167), from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick: Or, the Whale (1851). New York: Random House, 1930. Rights courtesy of Plattsburgh State Art Museum, State University of New York, USA, Rockwell Kent Collection, Bequest of Sally Kent Gorton. All rights reserved. 88 3.1 Fritz Eichenberg, untitled, from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). New York: Random House, 1943. Reproduced by kind courtesy of the Artists Rights Society. 94 3.2 Fritz Eichenberg, front cover, from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). New York: Random House, 1943. Reproduced by kind courtesy of the Artists Rights Society. 107 3.3 Fritz Eichenberg, page 1, from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). New York: Random House, 1943. Reproduced by kind courtesy of the Artists Rights Society and the Book of the Month. 109 3.4 Fritz Eichenberg, untitled, from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). New York: Random House, 1943. Reproduced by kind courtesy of the Artists Rights Society. 113 3.5 Fritz Eichenberg, untitled, from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). New York: Random House, 1943. Reproduced by kind courtesy of the Artists Rights Society. 115 3.6 Fritz Eichenberg, untitled, from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). New York: Random House, 1943. Reproduced by kind courtesy of the Artists Rights Society. 119 3.7 Fritz Eichenberg, “A Dream of Reason,” from The Wood and the Graver: The Work of Fritz Eichenberg. New York: Crown Publishers, 1977. Reproduced by kind courtesy of the Artists Rights Society. 121 4.1 Joan Hassall, endpapers for Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Sense and Sensibility, Shorter Works, Persuasion, Northanger Abbey, and Emma. London: The Folio Society, 1975.

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List of Figures © Joan Hassall, 1975. Reproduced by kind courtesy of the estate of Joan Hassall. Photograph by the author. 4.2 Joan Hassall, frontispiece, from Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1817; 1960). London: The Folio Society, 1975. © Joan Hassall, 1975. Reproduced by kind courtesy of the estate of Joan Hassall. 4.3 Joan Hassall, untitled (p. 35), from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813). London: The Folio Society, 1975. © Joan Hassall, 1975. Reproduced by kind courtesy of the estate of Joan Hassall. 4.4 Joan Hassall, untitled (p. 84), from Jane Austen’s Persuasion (1817; 1961). London: The Folio Society, 1975. © Joan Hassall, 1975. Reproduced by kind courtesy of the estate of Joan Hassall. 4.5 Joan Hassall, untitled (p. 225), from Jane Austen’s Persuasion (1817; 1961). London: The Folio Society, 1975. © Joan Hassall, 1975. Reproduced by kind courtesy of the estate of Joan Hassall. 4.6 Joan Hassall, frontispiece, from Jane Austen’s Shorter Works (1963). London: The Folio Society, 1975. © Joan Hassall, 1975. Reproduced by kind courtesy of the estate of Joan Hassall. 4.7 Joan Hassall, untitled (p. 187), from Jane Austen’s Shorter Works (1963). London: The Folio Society, 1975. © Joan Hassall, 1975. Reproduced by kind courtesy of the estate of Joan Hassall. C.1 Joan Hassall, woodblock for Brian North Lee, 1969, Joan Hassall Papers, P.132-1989. Reproduced by kind courtesy of the estate of Joan Hassall. Photograph © The Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge, 2016.

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xi 124 136

138 139 143 146 151

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Acknowledgments

This book has been authored by many more voices than mine – by the novelists and illustrators I write about and by the professors, colleagues, family, and friends that have supported me throughout its writing. This project has grown from seminar paper to dissertation to book thanks to Deborah Nord and Rebecca Rainof, without whom I would never have conceived of it; and to Rachel Bowlby, Claudia Johnson, and Diana Fuss, without whom I would never have written it; and to Caitlin Crandell, Jen Minnen, and Katherine Thorpe, without whom I would never have finished it; and also to Andrew Cole, Josh Kotin, Bill Gleason, Nicholas Dames, Mark Lilla, Brian Gingrich, Andrew Miller, Pat Gugliemi, and the Victorian Colloquium at Princeton University, who offered kind encouragement along the way. When not working from my desk in Brooklyn, I was grateful for the time I spent with Fritz Eichenberg’s Papers at Yale University and Joan Hassall’s Papers at the Fitzwilliam Museum at the University of Cambridge, the latter courtesy of the Donald and Mary Hyde Summer Fellowship for Research Abroad in the Humanities. On that trip, I found productive refuge at Oxford, courtesy of the kind hospitality of Carol Harrison and Isaac Harrison Louth. This book about illustration is much-illustrated thanks to the generosity of David Leighton and Sophie Leighton; Simon Lawrence; the Plattsburgh State Art Museum; and the estate of Fritz Eichenberg and the Artists Rights Society, who permitted the use of works by Clare Leighton, Joan Hassall, Rockwell Kent, and Fritz Eichenberg, respectively. In addition, the Folio Society, the Book of the Month, the Fitzwilliam Museum, and Random House were extremely kind. This is a richer book because of them. In the process of taking this from manuscript to book, I have been indebted to Kate Flint, Clare Pettitt, Bethany Thomas, George Paul Laver, and to the copy-editing and production teams at Cambridge University Press, as well as to the generous feedback of two anonymous reader’s reports. xii

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Acknowledgments

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I have shared segments of this project at the Princeton-Rutgers Victorian Symposium; the Northeast Modern Language Association; the Northeastern Victorian Studies Association; the North American Victorian Studies Association; the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers; the Chawton House Library; and a symposium on nineteenthcentury British literature and the visual arts at Princeton University. Many thanks for those workshopping experiences. I have also published portions with Literary Imagination and Raritan. Kind thanks for allowing me to repurpose those sections here. Last but far from least, thank you to my family – the Parrys, Merrills, Filstrups, Sapses, Rodinos, Higginses, and Duttas – and to my friends. And to Milou, for the constant companionship, and to Krish, for all the very good jokes.

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Introduction

Emily Dickinson wrote that: There is no Frigate like a Book To take us Lands away1

The books in this book – here pictured on the second of two white shelves, much repainted  – are frigates of a special kind (Figure I.1). Each is an illustrated twentieth-century reprint of a nineteenth-century novel. That is, these are new editions of older novels, graced with wood engravings or inked drawings, written in one century and illustrated in the next. While much of the history of the book tends to focus on the original edition of any given novel, most purchasers, borrowers, and readers of noncontemporary books experience them in editions that, like these reprints, are resonant with the years accumulated between initial publication and republication. With straw-brown bindings and robin’s-egg-blue boards, that thick volume second to the left is a reprint of Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the

Figure I.1  “Bookshelf,” Andrew Miller, 2017. Reproduced by kind courtesy of the photographer.

1

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The Art of the Reprint

Native (1878), published in 1929. It is clothed in the colorations of a fragrant summer day on Egdon Heath, the setting of the novel and the inspiration for the British wood engraver Clare Leighton, who illustrated its landscape in full-page tableaus and tiny head- and tailpieces.2 With gilded titles and unusually large formats, the two slimmer volumes leaning against Hardy’s novel are Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), which at their republication in 1943 would have been packaged in a single slipcase in the same forest green used for their bindings.3 Their front covers feature engravings by the German-Jewish artist Fritz Eichenberg, the first with an image of Heathcliff, braced against a tree, and the second with Jane, trailing across the frame with a group of identically dressed girls. With grey-blue spines, gilded lettering, and brightly colored patterned-paper boards, the stack of books to the right of the Brontës’ novels is The Folio Society’s 1975 set of The Complete Novels of Jane Austen. In them, the British master engraver Joan Hassall elucidated a miniscule world of brightly gesticulating characters, chance encounters, and verdant hills.4 Unpictured here but also central to the story of this book is a silvergilded edition of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851), illustrated in 1930 with pen, brush, and ink imitations of wood engravings by the American artist Rockwell Kent, who channeled his own many sea adventures into the craggy swells and surfacing whales of the novel.5 Leighton, Eichenberg, Hassall, and Kent took voyages real and imagined to Hardy’s heaths, Emily and Charlotte Brontë’s moors, Austen’s drawing rooms, and Melville’s oceans, and also transported those authors’ books forward to new landscapes and contexts. In so deftly combining and recombining text against image against personal experience, they provided an invitation to their readers to do the same. While they were far from the only illustrators to take up the nineteenth-century novel in the twentieth century, they did so with particular attention to the gap of time between their subjects and their images, and with an especially rich approach to the material possibilities of wood, paper, and ink. Mediators between text and book and author and reader, these artists interpreted these novels and then illustrated their interpretations, stunningly and strangely. Theirs is the art of the reprint. To study the wood-engraved reprint is to trace several interlinked stories: of a changing book industry, briefly enamored by the manner in which wood engravings connoted prestige and nostalgia; of an emerging engraving movement, which allowed extraordinary artists access to a much wider audience than had previously been possible; and of a growing readership,

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Introduction

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newly able to acquire books. In the early decades of the twentieth century, reprints of nineteenth-century novels  – wood-engraved and not  – had proliferated at such a rate that Virginia Woolf opened a 1925 review of new editions of works by Charles Dickens with the following reflection: Like the ripening of strawberries, the swelling of apples, and all other natural processes, new editions of Dickens  – cheap, pleasant-looking, well printed – are born into the world and call for no more notice than the season’s plums and, save when by some chance the emergence of one of those masterpieces in its fresh, free binding, suggests an odd and overwhelming enterprise  – that one should read David Copperfield for the second time.6

Easily available, seasonally marketed, and freshly bound, reprints felt almost ridiculously abundant. Editions of nineteenth-century novels in particular had been increasing in quantity and quality since 1900. Many publishers, like the British firm Chatto & Windus, had been around since the nineteenth century and were continuing to publish books from their backlists. For others, like Routledge’s Railway Library, Bohn’s Shilling Library, Cape’s Travellers’ Library, and the Run and Read Library, it was a boon that the greats of the mid-nineteenth century ceased to be copyrighted around the turn of the century. The years between 1900 and 1906 saw the launching of Nelson’s Classics, Grant Richards’ World’s Classics, Collins’s Pocket Classics, and Dent’s Everyman’s Library. Some, like Modern Library, which began publishing classics in 1925, would thrive for many years afterward and be incorporated into larger publishing houses.7 More often than not, these imprints released books that readers would already be familiar with, as in the case of Hardy’s The Return of the Native, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, and Austen’s six completed novels. But sometimes they helped nudge books onto lists of classics that might not have been there in their own century, as in the case of Austen’s juvenilia and incomplete works, published in Hassall’s set as Shorter Works, and Melville’s Moby Dick, which Kent’s editions helped popularize at a moment when interest in the novel was growing.8 All capitalized on the fact that old texts were (and are) by and large less expensive to produce than new ones. These were low-risk endeavors.9 Depending on how fancy the edition, a classic novel could be published with or without a new introductory note or set of illustrations. Whether plain or embellished, these new exteriors (and interiors) helped the classic masquerade as new; or, to extend Woolf’s metaphor, they allowed the prune to be a plum.

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The Art of the Reprint

Wood-engraved illustrations were one way – along with new bindings, striking front covers, and watercolor and ink illustrations – to present the classic in a new guise. But the wood-engraved reprint in particular is something of an accident of history. A carved woodblock is a very old form of reproduction – Walter Benjamin cited it as the first medium of graphic reproduction – that by the twentieth century seemed nearly archaic.10 In the nineteenth century, wood engraving was seen as a secondary or supplementary skill, done in large quantities for books, periodicals, and newspapers. An illustrator would draw on paper and then an engraver would transfer that image to wood. This was the primary means of reproduction until 1900, when most publishers were able to achieve the same effects as wood by switching to metal and halftone printing. Largely because wood engraving ceased to be of interest to commercial publishers, it was primarily artists curious to develop a craft sensibility who took up the medium. While as early as 1883 the etcher and printmaker Sir Francis Seymour Haden encouraged a return to original work and technique, it took almost fifty years for it to become common practice.11 In 1925, the artist and engraver (and teacher of Clare Leighton) Noel Rooke said: “There is only one way of getting a thoroughly satisfactory engraving: the designer and engraver must be one and the same person.”12 By then, as Albert Garrett, James Hamilton, and Patricia Jaffe have described in their histories on the subject, a print revival was in full swing in Britain, with corollary movements in America and Germany. As one illustration-focused issue of Studio put it in 1931: “The old simple cutting has been turned into something like engraving, but has kept its antique solidity. Dots and fine lines are freely used to suggest form, while at the same time massed blacks and whites preserve the effect of almost flat perspective.”13 A new crop of engravers, which was far from aesthetically coherent, had in common a much more playful relationship to line, dot, shadow, and shade. And though fascination with the medium lessened in the following decades, this renewed interest in wood engraving, combined with t­ echnical innovations in photoengraving and book printing, produced each of the works in this book. And though those works were published between 1929 and 1975, all of the artists who illustrated them emerged from some version of an early twentieth-century print revival. Because of the conjunction of the print revival and mass mechanical reproduction, artists and publishers were able to make great art newly accessible to more people than ever before.14 As British engraver Dorothea Braby put it, “Collaboration between all concerned  – author and publisher, engraver and typographer, papermaker and printer  – working in

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Introduction

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close harmony, resulted in the production of beautiful books.”15 Most especially, these books were born out of a willingness on the part of publishers to commission truly exceptional and often niche artists as illustrators. Leighton noted the unexpected nature of this change in an essay: It is especially interesting to see that it is not the flashily attractive artists who are engaged to do these things, but those who might be considered to be too esoteric to please the general public. This is a most hopeful sign, for there is no doubt that if the unschooled public be given the chance continually to see around it works of art of good dynamic design, it will grow to understand and enjoy them and to demand them.16

To Leighton and to many other artists who had rediscovered wood engraving, this was an exciting moment, one in which artists who might once have been thought too obscure for a mass audience were being brought to the forefront of the publishing world. Moreover, that shift amounted to an education of the everyday consumer of art. Leighton and Kent in particular were among a group of British and American artists and ­engravers – Vivien Gribble and Gwen Raverat among them  – who brought the illustrated reprint into the homes of a new category of private readers. Where only several hundred or so art books might be printed in any given run, Leighton’s The Return of the Native (1929) had a print run of 1,500. Much larger print runs became possible in the 1930s. Published just a year after Leighton’s reprint, Kent’s Moby Dick (1930) was packaged both as a collector’s edition and as a trade selection by the Book-of-the-Month Club. Kent was able to reach both the collector and the everyday reader. Just a couple of years later, John Farleigh’s illustrations for the first edition of George Bernard Shaw’s The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God (1932) made stunning use of the contrast between ink and paper. Its front cover features a Black woman only distinguished from an entirely inked page by the use of a few slender white lines.17 That edition exemplified the wood-engraved book’s transition from limited edition to wide release.18 By the 1940s, when Eichenberg’s books were commissioned, the wood-engraved reprint had gained the prestige of a craft medium and the popularity of a more widely distributed art form. Two imprints, The Golden Cockerel Press and Penguin Illustrated Classics, one with a very small distribution and one with much larger ambitions, are indicative of the trajectory of the wood-engraved illustrated reprint during this period. Robert Gibbings founded The Golden Cockerel Press in 1920 as a home for very short runs of handmade editions of contemporary and classic texts illustrated with wood engravings.

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The Art of the Reprint

Like Leighton, Gibbings had studied with Noel Rooke and was keen to reach a wider audience of readers, which is why in 1937 he became the first art director of Penguin Illustrated Classics.19 Penguin Books had been founded just two years earlier on the premise that small paperbacks should be as cheap and accessible as packs of cigarettes. At a time when smoking was very common, these books were meant to be an everyday purchase.20 Their iconic three-blocked, two-colored, orange-white-orange covers became emblematic of a mass-market approach to publishing, packaging, and distributing contemporary literature. Penguin Illustrated Classics was envisioned as a similar operation. It would print classic rather than contemporary novels and its books would feature excellent wood-engraved illustrations commissioned by Gibbings. Each edition combined the ease of a pocket Penguin with the wit and artistry of something that might have been commissioned at The Golden Cockerel Press.21 When the imprint released an initial run of ten numbered reprints in May of 1938, it included novels by British and American authors like Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, and Edgar Allen Poe, with illustrations by artists like Douglas Percy Bliss, Gertrude Hermes, and Theodore Nash. Gibbings even engraved his own illustrations for Melville’s Typee (1846).22 Each cover was done in the usual Penguin-style coloration, but with a twist: two slim vertical bars of orange framed a wide white central bar onto which was printed an image from inside the book. The importance of the interior engravings was further emphasized on the back of each book, which advertised all the volumes in the set with the names of the illustrators included. The first of the ten books published by Penguin Illustrated Classics was Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, illustrated by Helen Binyon.23 Its front cover featured a small, energetic image of Mrs. Bennett, her apron strings fluttering in the wind, waving Jane, neatly appointed in a tiny hat, off to Netherfield. In a composition that interestingly decentered Darcy and Elizabeth, Binyon detailed a column for the house in thick vertical lines, grass in minute horizontal dashes, a path arching from foreground to background, and a storm gathering in the sky, foreshadowing poor weather and Jane’s illness. This is also the edition’s first interior illustration, printed, like all the rest, with text running above and below it, so that image is integrated into story. In the remainder of the book, Binyon engraved the novel in vibrant black and white, in images like one of Elizabeth standing at the edge of a ballroom, peering into the assembly of soldiers and gentry, with she in vivid detail and they pale and blurry below the very bright light cast by two chandeliers; of Elizabeth with her aunt and uncle at Pemberley, she delicate in white and surrounded by climbing vines and branches and

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leaves of all different shapes, they focused on the splashing stream below, Pemberley grand in the background; of Elizabeth and Jane, anxiously racing to meet Mr. Bennett, who holds in his hands a letter with news of Lydia; and of Elizabeth and Lady Catherine tense in front of a “prettyish kind of a little wilderness,” dark trees in the background.24 With attention to the novel’s entire cast of characters and to the whole of its plot, Binyon made Austen’s story come alive in a charming and accessible style. Choosing this novel to be the first of Penguin Illustrated Classics’s batch of ten books suggests that Austen was of primary importance to readers of the transatlantic canon. Austen’s stories and characters, combined with Binyon’s visual interpretations, were meant to inaugurate a new era in mass craft printing and reprinting. The complete massification of the wood-engraved imprint, however, never came to fruition. Penguin Illustrated Classics’s winning combination of British and American literary and artistic culture might have been profitable in the long run, but because of World War II shortages the imprint was cancelled in 1939, just a year after it launched. Those original ten books are all that is left of it. Engraver Gwen Raverat, who had illustrated number two of the set, Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey, saw the imprint’s closure as the end of an era.25 The market for such illustrated editions was shrinking and larger publishers had stopped producing them. Instead, the wood-engraved reprint remained a smaller, more prestige portion of the publishing market, albeit one with much wider distribution than would have been possible in the nineteenth century. This meant that rather than having the trappings of, for example, a hypermodern-looking Penguin paperback, the reprints described here were more likely to have the look of a nineteenth-century book. Despite tighter bindings, fewer embossed covers, as well as different paper quality and typeface choices, these books were designed to evoke nostalgia for the less massified century in which they were first written. They were published between 1929 and 1975 but were bound in aged Victorian blues and greens and gilded with gold lettering, so that they looked both older and more valuable than they were. In America, such touches also survived. In 1949, a book designer complained: “Far too many of our American books speak with an English accent.”26 Kent’s editions, for example, which were designed to be pieces of Americana, still lived in some relationship to British type and paper (which were imported from Britain) and aesthetic (because he was inspired by British printmaking and poetry). His editions of Moby Dick, along with Leighton’s Return of the Native, Eichenberg’s Jane Eyre, and Hassall’s The Complete Novels, were designed and marketed

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to look unique and like no one else could possibly own them but were actually accessible to a new kind of everyday reader and buyer of books.27 Great books were now for everyone. Just as the everyday person was becoming a bigger buyer and consumer, there was an urgency to better describe and evaluate the kind of reader they might become. As early as 1858, in his essay “The Unknown Public,” Wilkie Collins described a new category of readers: “a public unknown to the literary world; unknown, as disciples, to the whole body of professed critics; unknown, as customers, at the great libraries and the great publishing houses; unknown, as an audience, to the distinguished English writers of our own time.”28 Collins’s essay was a harbinger of a cultural reckoning with an ever-larger public of readers, one that would be picked up in the 1920s by, for example, Virginia Woolf, F. R. Leavis, and Q. D. Leavis, and then in the 1950s by, for example, Richard Hoggart and Richard Altick (with many other authors tackling the subject in the intervening years).29 In their different ways, many of these critics had in mind Matthew Arnold’s 1869 definition of culture as “a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world.”30 One way to understand the historical moment that begins this book is that it coincides with when the Arnold school – of highly educated professional critics – felt that it was losing control of the culture that they had so long been arbiters of and when Collins’s unknown public – of less well educated nonprofessional readers – was on the rise, along with the publishers, book clubs, and illustrators who catered to them. During this time period, Virginia Woolf’s thinking about the everyday reader and the classic novel underwent an illustrative evolution. She addressed the general reader’s relationship to the reprinted nineteenthcentury novel in “On Re-Reading Novels” (1922), a review of new editions of novels by Jane Austen, the Brontës, and George Meredith. After introducing the editions – which with the exception of the Meredith volumes were all illustrated – Woolf wrote: “Some … mood of exasperation and bewilderment, of violence, yet of remorse, is abroad at the present among those common readers whom Dr. Johnson respected, for it is by them, he said, that ‘must be finally decided all claim to poetical honours.’”31 Woolf suggested that if the everyday reader were the one to determine literary legacy – the books that remain important to us long after their authors and eras have passed – then the culture at large was out of luck. Or, even worse, in some kind of danger. Her language, of exasperation, bewilderment, and violence, is quite extreme. “Somehow or other these fat Victorian

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­ ovels,” she wrote, “these Vanity Fairs, Copperfields, Richmonds, and Adam n Bedes must be read finally, if we are to do them justice – must be read as one reads Hamlet, as a whole.”32 These big fat novels – which, she points out, take much longer to read than Hamlet – needed somehow to be read finally, to be read as one reads Shakespeare’s greatest plays, with an awareness of how good and how important they are. When Woolf wrote, the very idea of a canonical nineteenth-century novel (and of Dickens being on a par with Shakespeare) was relatively new. Mere decades before, these had simply been the most popular novels of their time. This, then, was a complex moment of legacy-making. Woolf, like other Modernist authors, was grappling with the novels of her parents’ generation. And to her, in 1922, the mere release and reading and rereading of new reprints was ­insufficient to secure their place in the canon. By 1925, Woolf had left her earlier skepticism about the common reader behind. The same year that she wrote about the bounty of berry-like ­nineteenth-century reprints newly available to the everyday reader, she published The Common Reader. With essays on a wide range of authors and literary works, it was a culmination of thinking that she had been doing over the better part of a decade. She prefaced the collection by ­quoting the same Samuel Johnson line that she had cited in “On Re-Reading Novels,” but in a very different context: There is a sentence in Dr. Johnson’s Life of Gray which might well be written up in all those rooms, too humble to be called libraries, yet full of books, where the pursuit of reading is carried on by private people. “… I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers, uncorrupted by literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtilty and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally decided all claim to poetical honours.” … The common reader, as Dr. Johnson implies, differs from the critic and the scholar. He is worse educated, and nature has not gifted him so generously. He reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge or correct the opinions of others. Above all, he is guided by an instinct to create for himself, out of whatever odds and ends he can come by, some kind of whole – a portrait of a man, a sketch of an age, a theory of the art of writing. He never ceases, as he reads, to run up some rickety and ramshackle fabric which shall give him the temporary satisfaction of looking sufficiently like the real object to allow of affection, laughter, and argument.33

Bringing in slightly more of Johnson’s language, Woolf was now, as he had been, rejoicing with common readers rather than doubting their abilities. Her new figuration of these readers was more expansive, more empathetic, and more curious than the one articulated in her previous essay.

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These  new  common readers were less exasperated, more enthralled, less remorseful, more joyful. They read for pleasure and to create a kind of whole: a portrait, sketch, or theory. And that, Woolf implied, was enough – and indeed is a lot, since it is how literary legacy is truly formed. Because in The Common Reader and its sequel The Second Common Reader (1932) Woolf wrote about literature from Chaucer to Joseph Conrad, her common reader is seldom specifically attached to the nineteenth-century novel and certainly not to the reprinted nineteenth-century novel. But many of her essays do concern nineteenth-century novelists – Jane Austen, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, and Thomas Hardy among them. Moreover, because the term “common reader” made its first appearance in her published vocabulary in “On Re-Reading Novels,” it serves as a useful championing of the everyday reader’s ability to tackle big, newly reprinted nineteenth-century tomes. Between 1922 and 1925, it had become less crucial to Woolf that nineteenth-century novels be read “finally,” as she had said in “On Re-Reading Novels,” than that they be read again – freshly, newly, as the strawberry-like Dickens reprints were. Many critics begged to differ. At a moment when academics were seeking to make a scholarly field out of literary culture, I. A. Richards pilloried what Francis Mulhern has described as the “belletristic subjectivism that held sway in literary criticism” – or exactly the personal mode of reading that Woolf put forth in The Common Reader.34 In his Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture (1930), F. R. Leavis, Richards’s colleague at the University of Cambridge, argued that Matthew Arnold’s heady cultural values were difficult to uphold in an era of mass consumption. Leavis saw the literary market that I have just outlined as one in which “the accepted valuations are a kind of paper currency based upon a very small proportion of gold.”35 He was concerned that in leaving behind the aesthetic judgments of experts – of the Arnolds and Leavises – readers might be misled to read the worst and not the best of what has been thought and said in the world. In so arguing he, as Rachel Bowlby has described, figured the consumer as an easily manipulatable dupe of the advertising industry.36 Another researcher of the habits of this new, supposedly vulnerable public of mass readers was Q. D. Leavis, F. R.’s wife and frequent (and frequently uncredited) collaborator. In her Fiction and the Reading Public (1933), a historical account of British readerships from, roughly speaking, Shakespeare to Woolf, she argued that over the course of the nineteenth century “the great novelists of the age pass out of the common reader’s field of vision.”37 Leavis identified the Victorian era as the staging ground for both the disappearance of a previous version of the everyday reader and

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the entrance of a new, less educated version of that same figure. To her and to her husband, this was a problem in urgent need of a solution. To the book industry, this was less a problem than an opportunity. The common reader can, as critics from the Leavises to Richard Hoggart to Julian Barnes have pointed out, be an elusive figure.38 But for twentiethcentury publishers and book clubs, this reader was not an abstract topic of debate or research but a person to be found, wooed, and marketed to. From 1906 to 1935, every book published by Everyman’s Library began with ornate endpapers reminiscent of a William Morris print and an inscription from the fifteenth-century play Everyman: I Will Go With Thee & Be Thy Guide In Thy Most Need To Go By Thy Side.39

An everyman’s library is a library for everyone. It will “go” with you, accompanying you, and also “guide” you, pulling you along. Book, reader, and canon interact complexly. Founded in 1926, the Book-of-the-Month Club, which distributed Kent’s Moby Dick and Eichenberg’s Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, defined the classic as follows in the issue of its magazine that announced the Brontës’ novels: “The characteristic of a literary classic is that it can be read on so many diverse planes of enjoyment by so many different kinds of people. Even the same reader, as his moods change, may find that a classic gives him quite different pleasures from one day to the next.”40 A classic was a book that could be enjoyed by a diversity of people. Indeed, by the same person, in many moods and circumstances. Pleasure and canonicity here were entirely individuated, as was suggested in Woolf’s preface, and as both Joan Shelley Rubin and Janice Radway have explored in their scholarship on book clubs.41 Founded in 1947 by three men who had come up in the 1920s publishing scene, The Folio Society, which distributed Hassall’s The Complete Novels, described itself as a home for “editions of the world’s greatest literature in a format worthy of the contents, at a price within the reach of the everyman.”42 This is not the consumer as dupe, but the reader – or everyman or everyday reader or common reader – as a ­powerful force in the making and remaking of literary legacy. In this everyday reader’s version of the canon, the best that had been thought and said in the world could without harm be reprinted through new editions and circumstances. Not just without harm but with benefits: the process of reinvention made visible in each of the books I describe here was a sign of the vitality of a novel and the imagination of its illustrators and readers.

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To read is to recreate a novel within your own point of view and context. “He is thus a novelist,” Michel de Certeau suggested of the reader. To illustrate a novel in wood is to make materially manifest that highly subjective creative experience. In his Pleasure of the Text (1973), Roland Barthes wrote: If you hammer a nail into a piece of wood, the wood has a different resistance according to the place you attack it: we say that the wood is not isotropic. Neither is the text: the edges, the seam, are unpredictable … so structural analysis (semiology) must recognize the slightest resistances in the text, the irregular pattern of its veins.43

Illustrating, editorializing, introducing, packaging, marketing, buying, reading, and shelving books are just so many modes of finding the edges of a text. In particular, twentieth-century artists illustrating nineteenthcentury novels literalized Barthes’s metaphor by engraving their experiences of texts. Working through the slightest resistances and irregularities of story and wood, they revealed the process by which they navigated text, time, and block. In The Return of the Native, botanically specific plants and an oft-repeated country road speak to Leighton’s observational walks through Dorset and her repeated readings of Hardy’s novel. In Jane Eyre, the rough, gouging lines in Eichenberg’s images are telling of his (and Jane’s) alienation and displacement. In The Complete Novels, the tiny, detailed, anachronistically styled prints of the Georgian social world belie the intense, arthritic labor that Hassall carved into them. Exceptionally, in Moby Dick, Kent’s dramatic prints of sea, sky, whale, and sailor are in fact pen, brush, and ink drawings, printed to approximate the look and feel of wood engravings. Kent’s experience of the novel was best expressed by imitating the drama and craft nostalgia of the woodblock print. However, when he depicted a stormy horizon, a nearly capsized boat, or a whale foaming up the ocean surface, his lines became messy, loose, and squiggly, suggesting a drawing rather than an engraving. He dropped his emulation of the woodblock in those moments when he most needed the flexibility of drawing. And yet, for him – as for Leighton, and Hassall – the concept of the woodblock was essential: each notch or line was a part of an emerging story. Wood is an especially compelling medium through which to chart the experience of reading a novel. Like reading, wood engraving is intimate. It requires no studio. It can be done at home, alone. Made with a few gravers, a block of wood, a sandbag, light, ink, and paper, a wood engraving carries traces of the labor that made it. When Joan Hassall gave a lecture

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to explain wood engraving  – which is distinguished from the wood cut because it is carved from the more expensive end grain of a woodblock – she held up a polished, unengraved block of wood and said: The action is to contract your hand so that the side part of your hand pushes the tool, the thumb being free and used as a guide. You push the tool, and a little fine white hair of wood comes out of the surface. If that block were printed, those three lines just engraved would come out white on black, and I want to emphasize that a wood-engraver really works from black to white.44

Working with gravers that she kept in a bright green roll of felt tied up with a shoestring, Hassall would press and manipulate the wood.45 Were she to ink the entirety of the block, she pointed out, its impression would be just a square of black. Were she to ink it and then to drop a hammer onto its surface, it would be a black square with a white dent on it.46 Type and engraving share the mechanism of relief printing.47 Every single speck, line, or cut on a woodblock lifts white out of black. “This is the medium in which one brings light out of darkness with each line of the graver,” Clare Leighton said, recalling how her love of Impressionist painting influenced how she created light in her prints.48 Eichenberg, too, spoke of the importance of light: “As you face the blank woodblock or the darkened surface of a lithographic stone, you create life out of it by throwing with your first touch of the graver – the first touch of your etching needle, or razor blade. You create a source of life that spreads over the whole scene.”49 He described the suspense of watching an image emerge, almost of its own volition, as if his block were a photograph being developed or even an organic growth out of the wood.50 The woodblock was a site of revelation. Take, for examples, two renditions of a scene from Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, one by Clare Leighton and one by Fritz Eichenberg. Each is a striking transcription of reading-in-wood. In the scene, Nelly Dean, the novel’s sometime narrator, ventures outside of the Grange just after the sun rises on the dark night of the soul in which Cathy gives birth and then dies. Nelly is on the lookout for Heathcliff, who had insisted on spending the night outside, and had made her swear to bring him news of Cathy. In fulfillment of her promise and his, Nelly finds him leaning against an aged ash tree, his hat off, his hair soaked in gathered dew. He instinctively knows that she is going to tell him that his childhood love has died, and, after conversing briefly with Nelly, turns toward the tree: “He dashed his head against the knotted trunk; and, lifting up his eyes, howled, not like a man, but like a savage beast being goaded to death with

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Figure I.2  Heathcliff, Clare Leighton, 1931. Reproduced by kind courtesy of the estate of Clare Leighton.

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Figure I.3  Heathcliff, Fritz Eichenberg, 1943. Reproduced by kind courtesy of the Artists Rights Society.

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knives and spears. I observed several splashes of blood about the bark of the tree, and his hand and forehead were both stained.”51 In Leighton’s engraving of this scene, made for her 1931 edition of the novel, she imbued both figure and landscape with desperate fury (Figure I.2). Her Heathcliff has two cowlicks that spring from his head like devil’s horns. His right hand, which she detailed up until his fingertips but no further, seems to have a claw-like clutch on the tree, which is a swath of absolute blackness where he holds it. Behind him she engraved smaller trees and elucidated tiny blades of grass and twisting brambles and most imposingly the heath, swelling roundly in the background. For his 1943 edition of the novel, in an image that was featured on the front cover, Eichenberg illustrated nearly the same moment, though in his composition Heathcliff faces away from the tree instead of toward it. He shoves his angular chin up into the sky and tenses his body into the tree behind him as if to keep from being swept away (Figure I.3). Above him, branches stretch menacingly downward. What Leighton detailed with botanical specificity, Eichenberg depicted with expressive swaths of nearly unengraved wood that seem to contort with the agony of the scene. Where Leighton anchored herself in the natural world, Eichenberg worked in broader, more emotional strokes. Their engravings make apparent the ways in which they explored the world of Brontë’s story in the material of their woodblocks, becoming, in a sense, latter-day novelists of Wuthering Heights. Literary-critical interpretation, which we might see as first developing in its contemporary form exactly when these reprints first started coming out, when Woolf wrote The Common Reader, and when Richards and the Leavises were at the University of Cambridge, can strip or dissect its subject. As Susan Sontag wrote in “Against Interpretation” (1966), “To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world – in order to set up a shadow world of ‘meanings.’”52 But here in these twinned images of Heathcliff, and also in their other illustration projects, Leighton and Eichenberg did something very different from that. They fulfilled what Sontag suggested should be the actual goal of commentary: “The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art – and, by analogy, our own experience – more, rather than less, real to us.”53 The nature of illustration, which is that it runs alongside of text, means that it is fundamentally additive. This is interpretation as a special kind of illumination. Both these images, and all the ones I look at in this book, demonstrate and open up the ambiguities inherent to novels and novel reading. Far from pinning down or depleting meaning, they loosen and enrich it. In the part of the novel illustrated above, Nelly surmised that based on the

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quantity of blood on Heathcliff ’s hands and head, “probably the scene I witnessed was a repetition of others acted during the night.”54 Or, so Nelly thinks – she is only “probably” correct and witnesses only one moment completely. She narrates through her own assumptions, just as Leighton and Eichenberg illustrate through their own lenses. They can only posit their own versions of this character and of the heath. And we, in turn, sort through these entangled assumptions, building from Brontë, Leighton, and Eichenberg our own interpretation of the novel, our own (as Woolf might say) rickety and ramshackle versions of Wuthering Heights. Because, for example, Nelly says that Heathcliff might have spent the entire night dashing his head against the tree, it is impossible to tell if the images by Leighton and Eichenberg illustrate Heathcliff ’s awful night or his awful morning. Nelly is ambiguous and so are they. If our understanding of Emily Brontë’s scene and of Heathcliff ’s experience must always be somewhat conditional, then there is a kind of profound accuracy to a pair of somewhat similar and somewhat different prints by two twentieth-century artists – and to having a whole canon interpreted for us by artists with very specific points of view. Like Nelly and like us, these illustrators were translators of a mysterious story that was outside of reach, so nested was it within the multiple narrations of Brontë’s novel. And, like her and like us, they could not be more than forensic interpreters of emotions, gestures, and behaviors. Their engravings were transcriptions of those interpretations, each flick of the graver a clue discovered, a choice made, a detail noticed, a gesture invented. Wuthering Heights – and really any novel, and certainly all the novels I look at – is highly responsive to being illustrated. One principal tenet of this book is that artist-readers act upon books, changing them. Another is that books act upon illustrations, shifting their meanings. Visual or pictorial or ekphrastic elements in literature, for example, may be highlighted by illustrators, but they may also speak a kind of theory of seeing back to the illustrations. Accordingly, in the chapters that follow I will attend to how Hardy’s bursting heath lives next to Leighton’s flora and fauna and Austen’s lightly drawn landscapes next to Hassall’s sweeping hills. Ishmael will instruct Kent in the proper depiction of whales and Jane Eyre will teach Eichenberg how to read. J. Hillis Miller said of a Charles Dickens novel and its illustrations that “Each illustrates the other, in a continual back and forth.”55 Miller was describing the close one-on-one collaboration that Dickens and George Cruikshank maintained over several years and several book projects. Such a contemporaneous relationship was not available for

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Leighton, Kent, Eichenberg, and Hassall to have with Hardy, Melville, the Brontës, or Austen. These artists and authors participated in Miller’s back and forth but also in something else, something more temporal. Because it remakes the classic novel, the thoughtfully designed reprint is a tool for better understanding the past, with the hindsight of the present. Lewis Mumford famously announced that “Each man will read into Moby-Dick the drama of his own experience and that of his contemporaries … Each age, one may predict, will find its own symbols in MobyDick.”56 Every era remakes its books. Leighton, Kent, Eichenberg, and Hassall indelibly transformed their novels by reading through place, person, era, geography, and biography. They illustrated with the kind of hindsight that Simon Dentith has defined as memory at its most “active and diligent, engaged in what can seem like a ceaseless task: the effort to come to terms with, to make sense of one’s own past.”57 They were coming to terms with the characterizations, narratives, perspectives, and landscapes of a past literature through the lenses of their own experiences. As a result, The Return of the Native became a parable of lost landscape, Moby Dick a twentieth-century adventure saga, Jane Eyre an antifascist treatise on individualism, and Jane Austen’s novels theses on how to bring the past into the present through intense attention to detail. Like readers and literary critics today, these artists searched the past for details and clues that might make literature feel more alive in the present. From essays, memoirs, autobiographical fragments, self-portraits, and sketches, it is clear how thoroughly Leighton, Kent, Eichenberg, and Hassall researched elements of the nineteenth century that were unfamiliar to them, like labor practices, whaling ships, costumes, textiles, and the contours of heaths. Indeed, the artists and publishers behind the books I write about here were keenly interested in fusing text and image. Kent’s editor used that word, “fusion,” and Hassall’s said that her illustrations felt married to the language of Jane Austen’s novels.58 Not every reader will pick up Leighton’s Wuthering Heights and think: here is a set of white-line engravings – it must be a product of the British print revival. Or read Eichenberg’s Wuthering Heights and think: here is a distorted and angular scene of Heathcliff and Cathy – it must be a product of German Expressionism. What reads to some as disjunction might just as well read to others as conjunction. As such, the art of the reprint can be read as simultaneously cleaving and collapsing the distance between initial publication and later illustration. Eras glint off of each other in unpredictable ways. Each of the following chapters features a single artist and either one or several of their illustration projects. To write a holistic account of a handful

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of editions, their authors, makers, illustrators, and readers, I draw from scholarship on art, literature, the book, the consumer, and the reader, as well as from a transatlantic culture of printmaking and publishing. This is what Leah Price might call “the backstory by which books reach their readers,” with an emphasis on the richness of even just one reprint’s backstory.59 Because these artists had diverse interests and fascinating lives that spanned much of the twentieth century, this is also a book about world war, landscape, self-portraiture, adventure, immigration, socialism, identity, textiles, and whales. I begin in Chapter 1 with Clare Leighton (1898–1989) and her 1929 edition of Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native. When she engraved illustrations for the novel Leighton said: “I was Egdon Heath, feeling the hooves of the cropper ponies and the turn of the undergrowth.”60 She was this land, that road, those flowers. She was precisely in the place of Hardy’s book, embracing the layering of the fictional and real that her act of creation entailed. The passage of time and the trauma of World War I (in which she lost her brother Roland Leighton, the subject of Vera Brittain’s 1933 memoir Testament of Youth) might have suggested a need for nostalgia, but Leighton’s images of a prewar, preindustrial landscape were very much rooted in the present. She took Hardy’s England as a telescope into a rural, land-based life that she further explored in her accounts of creating a working garden and farm, Four Hedges (1935) and Country Matters (1937). In analyzing her take on The Return of the Native, I pay particular attention to how differently she treated her full-sized illustrations, which were narrative and text-based, and her head- and tailpieces, which were more observational. The alchemy of these two kinds of images mimicked Hardy’s plotting, which also oscillated between character and landscape. In Chapter 2, I focus on Herman Melville’s most famous illustrator, Rockwell Kent (1882–1971). When he designed and illustrated Moby Dick in 1930, Kent was at the same time writing and illustrating his own book, N by E, an account of his recent misadventures on the crew of a small boat sailing to Greenland. In both projects, Kent depicted ship, ocean, sailor, and creature with obsessive accuracy. Such a devoted socialist that he donated a trove of paintings to the Soviet Union in 1960 even after revelations about the regime had disillusioned many of its supporters, Kent was also a keen observer of the coastlines of Maine, Newfoundland, Alaska, and the Arctic. The specificity of his knowledge and the fervor with which he sought out adventures shows in the inky, fantastic tableaus and head- and tailpieces that he made for Moby Dick. His edition coincided with and helped solidify Melville’s canonization in the  twentieth  century  – the  so-called

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Melville Revival – while also reaching a new kind of reader through the Book-of-the-Month Club. His was perhaps the most beloved American illustrated reprint of its time, and certainly the best known of the reprints examined here. In Chapter 3, I consider how Fritz Eichenberg (1901–90) could not, as Leighton and Kent had, occupy the literal space of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Before his commission, he had neither read the novel nor been to Britain. To illustrate it from New York and in the middle of World War II, he imaginatively occupied Jane’s lucid gaze. Brontë’s first-person account was so profoundly personal that many Victorian readers thought that, as its subtitle “An Autobiography” suggested, it must be a memoir. Woolf said that to write down one’s impressions of the novel year after year would be tantamount to recording the story of one’s life. The same could be said of illustrating it. Eichenberg, who was Jewish, had fled Berlin for New York with his family in 1933, motivated by fear of retribution for his anti-Hitler cartoons. As he immersed himself in visualizing Jane’s voice, and shaping his figures, background, and compositions around her perspective, he overlaid his experience of flight, emigration, and movement onto Jane’s. His gouging, roughly hewn engravings are a self-portrait, narrativized not by his life events but by Jane’s. His Jane Eyre is also telling of a culture of collection and ownership; the Book-of-the-Month Club distributed his edition to middlebrow subscribers (as it did Kent’s Moby Dick), who then read Charlotte Brontë’s novel through the doubled gaze of its narrator and illustrator. In Chapter 4, I explore Joan Hassall’s (1906–88) illustrations for The Folio Society’s editions of Jane Austen’s novels and stories. Completed between 1957 and 1963, and then added to in 1975, these editions tend to be dismissed as blending too seamlessly into Austen’s novels. Hassall, whose style was anachronistic in the 1950s through the 1970s but fittingly like that of Austen’s time, can seem (and has been described as) apolitical, unassertive, and small, descriptors that were once negatively applied to Austen. I consider how Hassall took a craft-based ownership of the Austen canon, finding the author in even the smallest of notches and grooves of her engravings. She collected, for example, scraps of ribbon and fabric from the Georgian era, which she then copied and traced onto her woodblocks and patterned onto the covers, frontispieces, and chapter headings of her Austen editions. A counterpoint to Leighton, Kent, and Eichenberg, Hassall was less reinventing the nineteenth-century novel than retracing and reinhabiting it. Yet she, like them, was intellectually and physically invested in the work of illustration, painstakingly researching

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the historical details of her images and, despite debilitating arthritis, laboriously working and reworking her engravings. Each project in this book reverberated forwards through the life of its artist. Leighton returned to Hardy’s England in 1940 for a new edition of his Under the Greenwood Tree, which she illustrated with nostalgic energy, from America. Through her resulting engravings she found a way to belong in her new country. When Kent took a case to the Supreme Court in 1955 to fight for the right to travel regardless of his political beliefs, his memoir, which was in part illustrated with images from his Moby Dick, was used against him. When he won his case (in a decision that freed him and thousands of others to travel) those images stood as a kind of defense of the right to wander. Over the course of his life, Eichenberg embedded images from Wuthering Heights in various self-portraits, including a profile that he collaged with scraps from Emily Brontë’s novel. To love this set of books was to remain captivated by them. Joan Hassall finished illustrating Jane Austen toward the end of her career, so in her case the project was a culmination of her aesthetic and literary preoccupations and of an entire era of illustration. These biographical, literary, and artistic sequels feature in the last section of each chapter, codas to the projects that inspired this book. If in the main body of each chapter the illustrator acts upon the book in question, in the coda of each chapter the book acts on the illustrator, occupying and preoccupying them in unexpected ways. In that spirit, in my coda I consider how these reprints have continued to reverberate in the culture at large and ask what to make of the reprinted book and the home library in our current age which is, on the one hand, increasingly online, and, on the other, increasingly preoccupied with the aesthetics of books and bookshelves.

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Figure 1.1  “He musingly surveyed the scene, as if considering the next step he should take,” Clare Leighton, 1929. Reproduced by kind courtesy of the estate of Clare Leighton.

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chapter 1

Clare Leighton & Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native

When in 1928 Clare Leighton received the commission to illustrate Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native (1878), she dropped her teaching duties in London almost immediately in order to relocate to Dorset, Hardy’s home county and the inspiration for the novel. A fictional place drawn from a true geography, the setting of Egdon Heath was so integral to The Return of the Native that Virginia Woolf thought the novel more based in the physical world than in its characters and E. M. Forster hailed Hardy as more poet of British landscape than writer of plot.1 “Hardy is a little corner of England,” Forster said. “He is something else as well, something greater, for he moves in that vast region of ideas which is shared by the whole human race. But geographically, he is merely Dorsetshire and the counties bordering it.”2 To be merely and yet also absolutely a little corner of England is challenge enough for a novel (and Hardy had revised The Return of the Native several times) but even more so for a book object. This one succeeds because Leighton was so eager to occupy the same geography that Hardy had. “I was needing to devote myself entirely to the world of Hardy’s Dorset,” she recalled.3 In notes later collected by her nephew, she imagined herself becoming the landscape around her. “I went to live on a farm on Egdon Heath, so that I might become that Wessex earth,” she said.4 Her insistence that she reside on Egdon Heath (an invented place) and in Wessex (an ancient name for a real place) might cue us in to how blurred the boundary between the invented and the real is in this edition. To will Hardy’s Victorian novel into a post-Victorian, post-World War I heath, Leighton had to become this land, that road, those flowers. “I was Egdon Heath, feeling the hooves of the cropper ponies and the turn of the undergrowth,” she said.5 Carved in repeating patterns – peaked curves for hills, the same small tree several times over, a road or a river so often a motif in the distance, as in a frontispiece featuring Venn the Reddleman – the engravings that resulted from Leighton’s time in Dorset are intensely observed portraits of rural landscape (Figure 1.1). 23

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The Art of the Reprint

And when Macmillan and Harper & Brothers released her book in Britain and America (respectively), they bound it in a straw-brown spine with blue boards, suggestive of farmland and blue skies. The book, too, had become Egdon Heath. This, then, is the story of several becomings: of a fictional story, a true geography, the artist who portrayed them, and a book. In taking up The Return of the Native, Leighton fulfilled not only a personal desire to illustrate Hardy – and to illustrate landscape, which she would do to great acclaim for the rest of her very long career – but to reach a new kind of reader and to be a different kind of artist. These were ambitions that she had developed over the course of a childhood immersed in literature and art, and which she described in Tempestuous Petticoat: The Story of an Invincible Edwardian (1944), an account of her mother Marie Connor Leighton’s life. Clare Leighton, as her title suggests, saw her mother Marie as a force to be reckoned with. The author of dozens of sensational and melodramatic novels, Marie significantly out-earned her husband Robert Leighton, who wrote cowboy stories and edited the Daily Mail. Leighton opens Tempestuous Petticoat with an anecdote about a messenger boy waiting downstairs while her mother worried over how to best complete a story she was writing. The whole house had to be quiet as she worked, so that “[t]he melodrama of my mother’s stories seeped into our family life, and even upstairs in the seclusion of the nursery we three children were made aware of the urgency of her work.”6 The most important room was the study where Marie wrote, which was only cleared out once a year at Christmas.7 During World War I, Marie was fired from her serial and financial difficulties ensued. When the family moved into a new, much smaller home, there was no study, and the focus of the house became the kitchen. Marie told Leighton: “I find it the most inspiring room in the entire cottage, and I shall turn it into my study.” Without money to spare, Leighton served as Marie’s typist.8 From her mother, Leighton learned that subsistence and sustenance could emerge from the same place. This is not to say that either Marie or Robert Leighton had an uncomplicated relationship with art. As Leighton tells it, Robert had wanted to be a painter, and wished the same for his daughter. “You’ve got to be an artist when you grow up,” he would tell her. “It’s what I’ve always wanted to be myself – more than anything else. I shan’t feel so bad about it, though, if I see you painting pictures.”9 When she was six Leighton’s father bought her a beautiful set of oil paints, but quickly claimed them as his own: “Soon he must have realized there wasn’t much satisfaction to be found in vicarious painting,” especially because at six she wanted to make

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mythological creatures and he wanted her to make “landscapes or dogs or pretty faces.”10 Marie disliked Robert’s painting because she too had unrealized ambitions. “If I’m to slave away all my days on these potboilers and never have the time to write the real literature and the poems that are inside me, the very least I can ask of you is that you also work, instead of enjoying yourself with these pictures,” she told him. But Robert would not stop painting. Instead, he moved his easel into an unheated drawing room in the back of the house where he could paint unobserved.11 Where Marie’s writing was annexed to the kitchen, Robert’s was pushed into a cold room. When Leighton eventually did express interest in being an artist, as her father had wanted, her mother objected: “Clare worries me by showing symptoms of wanting to be an artist; but I shall stop that all right.”12 But Leighton persisted, and, strikingly, thrived in a professional space that her parents were never quite able to inhabit. She illustrated “real literature,” as her mother put it, with “real art,” as her father might have done. As a young artist Leighton involved herself both in a burgeoning creative community and in a growing illustration market. She studied painting and engraving in London in the 1920s, first at the Slade School of Fine Art and then at the Central School of Art and Design.13 At the latter, her teacher, Noel Rooke, was heavily influenced by the Arts and Crafts movement and passed its methods and preoccupations onto his pupils, who would eventually include John Farleigh, Robert Gibbings, Vivien Gribble, and Dorothy Haigh, among other luminaries of the decade’s artistic scene.14 Leighton differentiated herself from many of these contemporaries by choosing to work outside of the established small press circuit. While this gave her less creative control over some of her projects, it also brought her a wider audience. With Longman’s Woodcuts, Examples of the Work of Clare Leighton (1930), for example, she became the first woman to have a book of prints marketed entirely around her name and distributed in both Britain and America.15 Leighton was especially intrigued by how the ownership of fine books was expanding to a new public, as literate in language as in art. Print, of course, had been a mass medium for as long as it had been around. Dürer prints were more affordable than Dürer paintings. But Leighton saw that cheap illustrated books could hold new possibilities, writing: “Where, some short time back, the public had, if it wanted beautifully illustrated books, to pay for expensive limited editions, nowadays it can buy books at popular prices, illustrated by the same wood engravers who were once so precious.”16 Engraving, once overly precious, was now accessible to a popular audience. Leighton’s work on The Return

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of the Native, which was commissioned when Hardy died at the age of eighty-seven, was a part of this revolution in mass craft culture. As a collector’s edition for a broad audience, this book was an intriguing entry into contemporaneous debates about the everyday reader. There were 1,500 copies printed, with 1,000 reserved for Harper & Brothers – the oldest, largest, and arguably the most technically innovative publisher in the United States – and 500 reserved for Macmillan, which had been publishing since the mid-nineteenth century.17 Each edition was autographed by Leighton on a page that informed the buyer which copy this was of the 1,500 printed. The print run here pales in comparison to the hundreds of thousands of copies of Eichenberg’s Jane Eyre that were printed for the Book-of-the-Month Club in 1943. More would have been impractical, as the edition featured delicate glued-on images that would have been difficult to produce at a much larger scale. And yet a small print run would have numbered in the several hundreds at the most. This, then, was a mid-sized run made for the middlebrow collector. Accordingly, Macmillan advertised it in The Observer and in The Bookman along with such middlebrow novelists as Arnold Bennett and Hugh Walpole.18 Each ad named Leighton, mentioned her wood engravings, noted that the edition was a limited one, and listed the price as £2-2, making explicit something suggested in the edition’s jacket copy, which praised Leighton’s artistry as having “done much to enhance the beauty and worth of the volume.”19 That word, “worth,” speaks volumes. In Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture (1930), published just a year after Leighton’s edition, F. R. Leavis would complain of calls by authors and book clubs – Hugh Walpole among them – for readers to “Build a worth-while library!” and purchase “a worth-while book” and have a “worth-while experience.”20 In these dashed-together phrases, Leavis diagnosed all of the anxieties of a massreading culture. And yet, in that same essay, Leavis cited The Return of the Native as one of the last of its kind: a book that, like Shakespeare’s plays, was appreciated by both a minority and a majority of the culture.21 This edition, then – along with the rest of the reprints in this book – is in the special position of consisting of a text beloved by an old guard of critics while also participating in a mass-market economy mistrusted by that same group. It – and other reprints of nineteenth-century novels – confounds Leavis’s easy distinctions between past and current literatures, cultures, and readerships. In Leighton’s The Return of the Native, Hardy’s novel could exist as a cherished object of both great literature and (prestige) mass culture. As for Leighton, this edition exactly suited her ambitions to produce projects that were both commercial and artistic, accessible and aspirational. Leighton was not, however, the first to illustrate this novel. Originally it was

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published in twelve issues of the literary journal Belgravia, each accompanied by a spindly drawing by Arthur Hopkins, the younger and less famous brother of Gerald Manley Hopkins.22 Though four of Hopkins’s images appeared in the next year’s monthly installments of the novel in Harper’s Magazine, none of them were included in the first bound edition of the novel, printed by Smith, Elder & Co. in 1878. Eight of the images had not been reprinted in any other edition at the time of this 1929 edition.23 This is typical of the original illustrations for Hardy’s novels, which rarely followed his novels through their subsequent publications in the nineteenth century or beyond.24 Perhaps in this case it is because in the hopes of making this sometimes controversial novel palatable to the Belgravia audience, Hopkins had tended to represent only Hardy’s more conventional moments.25 With Hopkins’s images faded from public consciousness, Leighton’s engravings offered fresh visual commentary on a once-controversial novel that the intervening years had made both acceptable and classic. Leighton’s grounding in Hardy’s geography was essential in distinguishing her from a generation of new, engraved takes on Hardy by artists like Vivien Gribble, who in 1926 had illustrated Tess of the D’Urbervilles for Macmillan, and Agnes Miller Parker, who would illustrate five of his novels over the course of her career.26 Commentators often remarked upon Leighton’s adept depictions of place.27 The Return of the Native jacket copy praised her “intimate knowledge of Hardy country” and in 1939 one American reviewer said of Leighton “One feels … that Miss Leighton is at her best among the low-lying hills and fragrant hedge roses of her native rural England. She, like Hardy, is the interpreter of the moods of nature.”28 This comment came a decade after her The Return of the Native had been published and a year before her next Hardy illustrations would be released, in Under the Greenwood Tree (1872), but still Leighton, like Hardy, connoted rural place.29 In The Return of the Native, Leighton unfolded her vision of Hardy’s Britain over twelve full-sized engravings, which I will call tableaus, and fiftynine head- and tailpieces. The tableaus are carefully composed, feature at least one character from the novel, and can almost always be traced to a specific moment in the plot. They are inked onto delicate almost flimsy sheets of 4 × 5-inch paper that are glued onto white vellum. Their seams are so invisible as to feel breathed-on. In contrast, the head- and tailpieces, which are printed directly on the page, are more materially integrated into the texture of the edition. These seldom depict specific characters or plotted moments. Instead, their subjects are of the built or natural world, of roads paving their way through valleys or hills, of shrubs or carriages. Both the tableaus and the head- and tailpieces reveal the process by which Leighton transferred her

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readings and rereadings of The Return of the Native and her rambles through the Dorset countryside to wood and paper. In them, Leighton developed two modes of interpretation, both focused on landscape. The geography of Hardy’s The Return of the Native, however, was uniquely challenging to illustrate. In undated ideas for a talk, Leighton wrote: “Began as an artist. Illustrating other people’s books. Sinking self into their identity. Bridge of San Lui [sic] Rey Wilder never been to Peru. Becoming Egdon Heath. Empathy. Exhausting and stimulating.”30 Leighton would have been describing the period between 1929 and 1930, when she worked on both Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey and The Return of the Native. Leighton’s staccato outline, which might make a poem out of a quick set of notes, expresses the excitement and exhaustion of depicting Hardy’s England. Being of place was effortful. Hardy often set books in the recent past, at the turn of the last century, in part to rehabilitate his sense of town, village, and community before the railway and his version of the modern. Leighton, too, was illustrating the past, searching for Hardy’s account of it, while at the same time observing the landscape as it changed around her. In post–World War I Britain, this was demanding work. Denys Thompson and F. R. Leavis famously announced in Culture and Environment (1933): “What we have lost is the organic community with the living culture it embodied.”31 David Matless said of the aftermath of World War I: “War shook up the geography of Britain, unsettling people and their objects, transforming landscapes, moving things to where they weren’t before.”32 Many artists felt that the rural idyll had been displaced and tried to reclaim that lost landscape through painting.33 Leighton, then, was being pulled backward by The Return of the Native and the devastation of war and forward by the so-called march of progress. Becoming Egdon Heath was no easy matter. Because Leighton, too, felt different. In Tempestuous Petticoat, in a chapter on World War I, she described how before the war she and her brothers had plotted their lives together: Joyfully we worked together. While Roland was writing poetry, I painted pictures of Heaven or the Day of Judgment, and Evelyn drew warships and diagrams of the flags of all the nations. Together we made plans for our future. After triumphs at Oxford, Roland would be a poet and a diplomat. Evelyn would end up as an admiral. I would become a great painter.34

What they did not know was that Roland – at the time engaged to Vera Brittain – would never come back from the war. Marie Leighton told her son’s story in Boy of My Heart: A True Book (1916) and Brittain described

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his death and its aftermath in her more famous Testament of Youth (1933).35 Though Leighton drew an uncharacteristically realistic portrait of her brother for the cover of Boy of My Heart, she seemed reluctant to describe the trauma of his loss.36 Instead, in Tempestuous Petticoat she projected the emotions of the war onto her mother. “Life had been unable to defeat her,” she said of Marie.37 After World War I Leighton said: “Life was no longer simple.”38 Separated by several chapters, these lines are syntactically parallel declarations of change and resilience in a Britain reshaped by conflict. In 1980 Leighton said of the war: “All that was long ago. But it has left me with a deep terror of war, and a pleading with the world to see that we are not beguiled into it. The wages of war continue long after the young men are forgotten, and we who lived through it have a deep responsibility.” David Roland Leighton, her nephew and Roland’s namesake, quoted these words in her eulogy – one indication of how Leighton carried the war with her throughout her life.39 In The Return of the Native, Leighton reimagined Britain’s geography for a readership displaced by war and time. It was a mission that would remain important to her all her life. In 1937 she wrote and illustrated Country Matters, a memoir-testimonial of rural English life for which she engraved over seventy head- and tailpieces and organized her chapters around country types, like the village witch, and activities, like the local fair, and places, like the neighborhood pub. In the preface Leighton recounted how, upon hearing of these subjects, a friend suggested that she was doing essential work in memorializing a world that was slipping away. Leighton disagreed: I do not mean this book to be in any way an obituary. It shall be the record of an enduring world – a world that is as alive and romantic to-day as it was in the times before mechanization. Romance need not live only under thatched eaves, drawing its water from moss-covered wells. It can survive the invasion of the tractor and the radio … For the countryman is still close to his earth.40

Leighton insisted that her stories and images recorded a still-vital world. She believed that she had found an enduring idyll. And importantly, given her work on The Return of the Native, she said of the inhabitants of this area: “They are the kinsfolk of the Wessex peasant immortalised by Thomas Hardy, and vary from his only in minor details of dialect and custom.”41 The real Wessex, of course, had not existed for centuries, and Hardy’s Wessex was more a rural Victorian imaginary than an actual location. So Leighton, despite her preface, had to be searching for Wessex, willing blacksmiths, flower shows, and harvest festivals into her images rather than soldiers, movie theaters, or train stations. To do so, she relied on earth and landscape. “To balance the restless tug of modern civilisation,” she wrote

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in Country Matters, “there stand the hills and the woods by day and the smokeless starlight by night.”42 In The Return of the Native, she anchored her images by deftly articulating Hardy’s Egdon Heath. Landscape dominates The Return of the Native. Hardy compacted the heath into a bounded economy of sight and sound. He opened the novel: “A Saturday afternoon in November was approaching the time of twilight, and the vast tract of unenclosed wild known as Egdon Heath embrowned itself moment by moment. Overhead the hollow stretch of whitish cloud shutting out the sky was as a tent which had the whole heath for its floor.”43 An introduction to a vast stretch of wild land, these first lines are also full of limiting factors. In “The Novels of Thomas Hardy” (1928), which she revised for The Second Common Reader (1932), Woolf reflected on Hardy’s legacy by praising his treatment of setting in The Return of the Native:44 There is, in the first place, that sense of the physical world which Hardy more than any novelist can bring before us; the sense that the little prospect of man’s existence is ringed by a landscape which, while it exists apart, yet confers a deep and solemn beauty upon his drama. The dark downland, marked by the barrows of the dead and the huts of shepherds, rises against the sky, smooth as a wave of the sea, but solid and eternal; rolling away to the infinite distance, but sheltering in its folds quiet villages whose smoke rises in frail columns by day, whose lamps burn in the immense darkness by night.45

This is a set world, “ringed by a landscape.” It is life as it exists in an enclosure, “fixed to the same stretch of the English countryside.” Characters are always placed in relationship to countryside or sweeping thematics. “If we do not know his men and women in their relations to each other, we know them in their relations to time, death, and fate,” Woolf wrote.46 If Hardy was at times too melodramatic, Woolf posited, that was because he wrote in service to something unplotted and eternal. E. M. Forster might have replied that Hardy’s setting permeates his novel to the detriment of his characters and plot and to the confusion of non-British readers. In “We Speak to India” (1943), the last of a series of BBC lectures on masterpieces of British literature addressed to an Indian audience, Forster said: The strange book I am going to talk about is not a masterpiece of English literature … It is a curious, uneven, dark, difficult book, where the reader may easily lose his way; it is full of imperfections, and it should present special difficulties to an Indian reader. You – or most of you – have not yet been to England, I expect. You have never visited Wessex, as Hardy calls the country of his novels, or wandered on Egdon Heath, where he sets the scene of this one.47

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Forster’s contention that the novel would present special difficulties to someone who had not visited England presumes a failure of imagination in Hardy’s twentieth-century readers while ignoring the British-centric education systems that had given Indian audiences a more than passing familiarity with rural England. Yet his absolute confidence that this is a book about place that requires being (or having once been) in place speaks exactly to Leighton’s feeling that she had to become Egdon Heath in order to illustrate The Return of the Native. This is a novel that demands attention to setting. In his lecture, Forster concentrated on what he saw as the smallness and specificity of Hardy’s world. He focused especially on how frequently characters are overheard speaking across impossible distances: “Count up the number of times the various characters eavesdrop or overhear one another accidentally. I should think it happens at least a dozen times and one of them, the Reddleman, spends half his life holding his hand to his ear.”48 By Forster’s reckoning, the novel was deeply unrealistic. As a result, and like Woolf, he directed the reader’s attention away from craft and toward subject: “Read it rather as the work of a poet, who had a magnificent conception which, as a novelist, he could not execute. Forget the technical fumblings and the strained use of coincidence, and concentrate on the bleak background of Egdon; also on some rustic scenes.”49 The entirety of the novel occurs on a geographically specific stage. Its setting, Forster said, does the muscular work: “Egdon Heath is a wild track of land in Dorsetshire. In this novel it is an actor, and the main actor; it wrecks the happiness of Clym and Eustacia, it kills Mrs. Yeobright.”50 The lives of the characters in the novel develop in reference to this place. Forster asked: “What is the action? The tragic marriage of Clym Yeobright and Eustacia Vye. What is Hardy’s aim? To link the action with the sombre background of the Heath.”51 Plot is an appendage to the novel, which uses characters to access the heath, foreground to get at background. Woolf and Forster praised Hardy’s ability to build striking landscape but argued that Egdon Heath could not accommodate the tightness of its coincidences. Relatedly, Thomas Pavel suggests that the best reader of The Return of the Native is a gullible one: “The plot’s plausibility is limited, and what with the archaic symbolism of the heath and the farmer’s pagan feasts, it requires a reader eager to be convinced.”52 Taken another way, however, the archaic artifice of the novel might be exactly why Hardy’s landscape was so striking and Leighton’s images of it so successful. One dark evening, for example, Eustacia struggles to make out far-off movement:

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The Art of the Reprint Eustacia stood just within the heath, straining her eyes in the direction of Mrs. Yeobright’s house and premises. No light, sound, or movement was perceptible there. The evening was chilly; the spot was dark and lonely … She strained her eyes to see them, but was unable. Such was her intentness, however, that it seemed as if her ears were performing the functions of seeing as well as hearing. This extension of power can almost be believed in at such moments.53

Eustacia could not possibly see Mrs. Yeobright’s house on a night as dim as this. And yet, Hardy says, one could almost believe that she could. Her intentness is implausible, but it is also a part of the special magic of the heath, which seems to offer its residents constant opportunities for observing and overhearing each other. We could be in a fairy tale, in which the desire to be all-seeing and all-hearing makes it so. But of course, it is a fairy tale constrained by living inside of a realist novel: Eustacia wants to perceive, but cannot. Compare this to Hardy’s later Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), where characters are less likely to strain to see than they are to effortlessly blend in. At a perfectly shadowed moment in the evening, Tess’s “flexuous and stealthy figure became an integral part of the scene.”54 In The Return of the Native, characters do not become a part of the scene. Instead, they repeatedly encounter and search for each other’s presences and silhouettes. They then thrive, fail, or stumble in a complicated game of love, fate, and time set against Hardy’s vast yet constrained landscape. Leighton takes this uncanny, bounded novel as an opportunity to investigate life in relationship to a given space. In the tableaus, her favorite vehicles for these themes are Eustacia, her lover Wildeve, and her husband Clym (whom Eustacia married after Wildeve left her for Clym’s sister Thomasin). Eustacia especially emerges as Leighton’s most important and most frustrated signature. Our introduction to Eustacia from Hardy is as follows, in a chapter entitled “The Figure Against the Sky:” That she was tall and straight in build, that she was lady-like in her movements, was all that could be learnt of her just now, her form being wrapped in a shawl folded in the old cornerwise fashion, and her head in a large kerchief, a protection not superfluous at this hour and place. Her back was towards the wind, which blew from the northwest; but whether she had avoided that aspect because of the chilly gusts which played about her exceptional position, or because her interest lay in the southeast, did not at first appear.55

There is, from the first, very little to be learnt from this shrouded form and yet, at the same time, everything to be known about her. She is a tall, straight figure against the sky. Against the sky, in tension with it somehow.

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The winds play about her as she focuses her attention further afield, toward the southeast, where her love interest, Wildeve, will soon appear, trudging up the hill. Hopkins illustrated this scene with a small rectangular image captioned “She lifted her hand” from this text: “She lifted her left hand, which held a closed telescope. This she rapidly extended, as if she were well accustomed to the operation, and raising it to her eye directed it towards the light beaming from the inn.”56 Hopkins depicts the light around Eustacia as pale and grey. On such an evening, with the use of the telescope that she clutches in her hand, Eustacia really might be able to see Wildeve from afar. Leighton’s Eustacia, in contrast, is a dark silhouette against an also-dark background, slim white lines barely distinguishing her from sky and landscape (Figure 1.2). Just as Hardy wrote her, she is tall, straight, and shrouded in tumbling layers of scarves and skirts. Her face, small and intent, offers the only stretch of un-streaked white on the page, a half thumbprint of illumination. She is lit not by the nearby fire but by some unearthly light. Leighton’s image is inconsistent and unrealistic and so, by Woolf and Forster’s logic, much truer to Hardy’s novel than Hopkins’s illustration was. It also takes up the broader thematic of the chapter: a figure against sky. That is who Eustacia is to Leighton: a figure against landscape and, just as importantly, in tension with it. Much as Leighton illustrated in conversation with Hardy, discovering ways to depict Eustacia as he wrote her, she also created her own interpretation of the character. In this frame in particular, she makes a striking addition: three birds fly through the sky to the left of Eustacia. Not mentioned in the text, these are Leighton’s invention. They hover around Eustacia like familiars. Fully two-thirds of Eustacia’s body is above the horizon line so that – at least for this moment – she rises and finds herself closer to the birds than to the ground. The first bird is at her eye level while the other two tumble below, as if taking her gaze with them. Intriguingly, these birds recur in Leighton’s work. In her Wuthering Heights (1931), the same birds swirl above Cathy and Heathcliff, in the same three sizes, though angled differently.57 More beguiling still is a sketch in one of Leighton’s notebooks, where one small page is taken up by what appear to be the same three birds. Yet, here they may not be three birds at all, but a study of a single bird, seen three ways.58 Given their recurrence in Leighton’s work, these birds seem to be emblems of fragmentation: one bird, three ways, or three birds, three ways. In The Return of the Native, they carry, scatter, and distribute Eustacia’s expectant gaze, both lending her flight and refusing her the ability to wander farther afield, outside of the heath.

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Figure 1.2  “The contour of a man became dimly visible against the low-reaching sky over the valley,” Clare Leighton, 1929. Reproduced by kind courtesy of the estate of Clare Leighton.

Leighton’s picture, like the tree in Wallace Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” (1917), seems of three minds.59 It asks what it means to wait, what it means to be a figure against sky, and what it means to live in this strange heath. In a later scene on another night, again with Eustacia,

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Wildeve lamented of the heath: “It seems impossible to do well here, unless one were a wild bird or a landscape-painter.”60 The space of his home geography feels so alien to Wildeve that he cannot imagine his self – any self like him, any nonwild nonpainter – doing well. To “do well” is so simple an ask as to make Wildeve’s inability to access it extremely poignant. He proposes that he and Eustacia get away from it all, leaving for America. They never do. Looking at the portrait of Eustacia, Wildeve’s words seem prophetic. You have to be a wild bird (one of the ones in the image, perhaps) or a landscape painter (Leighton, perhaps) to do well in this heath, and they are neither. With the addition of wild birds to her tableau, Leighton places the question of how to do well in the heath at the center of her interpretation of the novel, with Eustacia as her favorite muse. The above tableau inaugurates Leighton’s edition-long exploration of Eustacia in-landscape. Hardy grandly summarizes Eustacia’s character in the chapter after “The Figure Against the Sky,” which is aptly titled “Queen of the Night:” Eustacia Vye was the raw material of a divinity. On Olympus she would have done well with a little preparation. She had the passions and instincts which make a model goddess, that is, those which make not quite a model woman… She was in person full-limbed and somewhat heavy; without ruddiness, as without pallor; and soft to the touch as a cloud. To see her hair was to fancy that a whole winter did not contain darkness enough to form its shadow: it closed over her forehead like nightfall extinguishing the western glow. Her nerves extended into those tresses, and her temper could always be softened by stroking them down. When her hair was brushed she would instantly sink into stillness and look like the Sphinx. If, in passing under one of the Egdon banks, any of its thick skeins were caught, as they sometimes were, by a prickly tuft of the large Ulex Europoeus – which will act as a sort of hairbrush – she would go back a few steps, and pass against it a second time.61

Eustacia has the raw materials of a goddess. Better fit for Olympus than Egdon Heath, she was made not to work the land – as so many residents of the heath did – but to rule it. Indeed, being a woman, being of space, seems a challenge for her. Her hair, interestingly shrouded in the previous chapter, is here dark, lovely, and, like her, restless – if it is brushed she is softened yet impossible to ascertain, like a sphinx, if it is not she is perhaps riled up. No one, on the surface, could be more unlike Leighton, who became Egdon Heath with such empathetic enthusiasm, and who delighted in her own labor and, in her images, in that of others. While in Leighton’s renderings Thomasin is always inside and in the midst of some action – in Mrs. Yeobright’s loft searching for apples or in her bedroom plaiting her hair in anticipation of her wedding – Eustacia never does anything more laborious

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than walking or standing, usually against landscape. She has only one depicted interior scene. A regal brush of her hair through tufts of growth is as close as she gets to becoming the heath. And yet, specifically because of how she exists in constant frustration with the landscape around her, Eustacia is an object of fascination to Leighton. Though Hardy once wrote Hopkins to say that he thought Clym more important than Eustacia, when he revised the novel in 1878 and then in 1895 his broadest and most obvious changes were to Eustacia, who became more sympathetic, more sexual, and more foreign.62 She seemed, despite Hardy’s initial intentions, to overtake his novel, and so (since it is such a geographically bounded narrative) to be essential to understanding its relationship to place. Certainly, Eustacia overtakes this edition, as Leighton multiplies her image in tableaus and head- and tailpieces. For example, Leighton depicts Eustacia in the tailpiece of “The Figure against the Sky” and in the headpiece of the next chapter, “Queen of the Night.”63 For the most part Leighton does not relate her head- and tailpieces to each other. They are discrete. But this tableau-tailpiece-headpiece sequence can be lined up in an almost tryptic-like progression. In the first image, the tableau, Eustacia waits for Wildeve. In the second, the tailpiece of the chapter, she is positioned as she was in the first, but with the landscape stripped away. There is no background, only her figure tall against the page, with a few grasses at the bottom of the frame to suggest the texture of the ground beneath her. In the third, the headpiece of the next chapter, Leighton creates a tiny panorama, a cut rectangle of landscape. Eustacia’s figure is again distinguished only by a slim white line, and she is dwarfed by her surroundings. Trees blowing in the wind take up more space than she does. This headpiece and the two images that precede it are a microcosm of the story of this novel: that of a character in a physical world, then alone without background, then swept up and into landscape. Like the three-birded tableau, this sequence treats Eustacia as the enigma – or sphinx – that she is. Eustacia’s sight is always set beyond – to Wildeve, whom she cannot see; to the birds, who fly beyond the bounds of the heath; to Clym, whom she sees incorrectly; and to some far-off, far-away future that never arrives. It is her special tragedy to believe that she can escape the heath. She thinks she has found a way out in Clym. In one scene, Eustacia says to him: “I see your face in every scene of my dreams, and hear your voice in every sound. I wish I did not. It is too much what I feel.”64 When Eustacia dreams, breathes, speaks, listens, and looks she is thinking of Clym and so of departure. After begging her not to be so reckless, Clym walks home alone and truly sees Eustacia for the first time: “Thus as his sight grew accustomed to the first blinding halo kindled about him by love and beauty, Yeobright

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began to perceive what a strait he was in.”65 Clym, all at once, perceives Eustacia. He realizes how quickly she wants to marry and how soon she wants to leave Egdon Heath. In “Hand in hand they went along the path towards Mistover,” Leighton depicts Clym and Eustacia before that realization, walking hand in hand (Figure 1.3). Eustacia is again tense, nothing softened, sculptural against the landscape. She looks ahead, as if trying to see something, while Clym looks at her, his head tilted to the side, his sightline intersecting with her distracted eyes. Remarkably, Leighton darkened both their eyes, so that they appear momentarily blinded. Yet, what matters more than their relationship to each other to Leighton – and, as Woolf and Forster argued, to Hardy – is how they are situated in space. Behind them Leighton illustrates a small tree, a dash of a cloud, and in front of them a tall plant. Background and foreground swell out of the corners of the scene, more alive, more affected, and more compelling than the characters that struggle to see clearly and exist well in the heath. Eustacia soon discovers just how constrained she is by her circumstances. As foreshadowed in the “Hand in hand” tableau, Clym’s eyesight deteriorates, forcing him to abandon his studies and work on the land. Eustacia finds him one day at work: “It was bitterly plain to Eustacia that he did not care much about social failure; and the proud fair woman bowed her head and wept in sick despair at thought of the blasting effect upon her own life of that mood and condition in him.”66 In a drawing of this moment by Hopkins, a fashionably attired Eustacia idly twirls her parasol as she watches two men work, her face aloof.67 In an image with the caption “The proud fair woman bowed her head and wept in sick despair,” Leighton puts all Eustacia’s sorrow into her body (Figure 1.4). Eustacia’s head is bowed, her face is covered, and she is more pained woman than imperious lady of leisure. More than in any other frame, Leighton here carves activity into the hills, branches, and trees. Clym’s body is tensely bent over the furze and every one of his limbs is engaged. His right foot grounds him as his left strains to keep the furze in place. Meantime, his right arm pulls at a branch as his left pushes away. His stance could not be more different from the unmoving Eustacia. She is still in a tableau of gaze and movement. When Eustacia weeps at his work, Clym tells her: “the more I see of life the more do I perceive that there is nothing particularly great in its greatest walks, and therefore nothing particularly small in mine of furze-cutting.”68 Whereas Wildeve looks at the scale of the heath and seems to find it both too large and foreboding and too small and enclosing, Clym works in it and finds the scale to be just right. Great walks are not so great and small labors are not so small; he is at home in work and landscape.

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Figure 1.3  “Hand in hand they went along the path towards Mistover,” Clare Leighton, 1929. Reproduced by kind courtesy of the estate of Clare Leighton.

Eustacia never achieves that sense of belonging. In Leighton’s illustrations, as in Hardy’s novel, she is increasingly weighed down by the events unfolding around her. Late one stormy night, she flees from the

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Figure 1.4  “The proud fair woman bowed her head and wept in sick despair,” Clare Leighton, 1929. Reproduced by kind courtesy of the estate of Clare Leighton.

home she shares with Clym. Hardy writes that there was never a more perfect harmony between chaos within and chaos without: “Between the drippings of the rain from her umbrella to her mantle, from her mantle

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to the heather, from the heather to the earth, very similar sounds could be heard coming from her lips; and the tearfulness of the outer scene was repeated upon her face.”69 Rain drips from umbrella to mantle to heather to earth. Hardy carefully repeats each location of falling water, as if to affirm and reaffirm the parallels between Eustacia, her clothing, and her surroundings. Leighton depicts this scene in a tall tailpiece in which Eustacia is indeed as miserable as the night swirling around her.70 Her body slants against mostly unseen rain, a large umbrella doing little to protect her. The wind is expressed through a few struggling grasses at her feet. As in every image of Eustacia since her first two proud surveyals of the land, Leighton depicts her body as mournfully curved, her face drooping toward the ground. Later that night, Eustacia’s neighbor Susan prepares “a ghastly invention of superstition,” a wax figurine of Eustacia: By warming and kneading, cutting and twisting, dismembering and rejoining the incipient image she had in about a quarter of an hour produced a shape which tolerably well resembled a woman, and was about six inches high… Susan held the object at arm’s length and contemplated it with a satisfaction in which there was no smile. To anybody acquainted with the inhabitants of Egdon Heath the image would have suggested Eustacia Yeobright.71

In this more than eerie scene, Eustacia, who is at that very moment out in the storm, is replicated in wax and then melted into the fire. “While the effigy of Eustacia was melting to nothing,” the next chapter begins.72 Leighton does not depict this scene, but her edition does perform its own replication. This next and final chapter of Eustacia’s story features a familiar headpiece: a reprint of the third image in Eustacia’s waitingfor-Wildeve sequence, the tiny panorama where Eustacia is dwarfed by her surroundings.73 Leighton’s repetition of this image suits not just the prose stylings of this set of chapters – mantle to mantle, heather to heather – but its events. And her choice is made more poignant because in its first iteration the tailpiece closed “Queen of the Night.” Now, the night does not belong to Eustacia at all. She dies that same evening, as does Wildeve. Finally, her story cannot be anything other than tragic. And yet, even after her death, Eustacia lingers. After some time, Thomasin marries Venn the Reddleman, and Clym becomes a minister. In a closing scene of Clym sermonizing, Hardy references Eustacia: From a distance there simply appeared to be a motionless figure standing on the top of the tumulus, just as Eustacia had stood on that lonely summit some two years and a half before. But now it was fine warm weather, with only a summer breeze blowing, and early afternoon instead of dull twilight.

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Those who ascended to the immediate neighbourhood of the Barrow perceived that the erect form in the centre, piercing the sky, was not really alone.74

In the last tableau of the edition, “They listened to the words of the man in their midst,” Leighton follows Hardy’s words and positions Clym in the same relationship to the horizon as Eustacia had in her very first illustration, when she was waiting for Wildeve, two and a half years earlier. Where the original Eustacia image was as darkly shaded as the sky behind her, however, here Clym’s silhouetted figure rises into the sky, which is an empty, carved out blank (Figure 1.5). Hardy said of Clym’s audience: “They listened to the words of the man in their midst, who was preaching, while they abstractedly pulled heather, stripped ferns, or tossed pebbles down the slope.”75 Leighton caught the crowd as Hardy described it, with each person sitting in some relationship to Clym, but with his or her own pose: standing and looking back, sitting a little hunched over, propped up with elbows against the grass, and so on. Like the three birds in Eustacia’s tableau, these figures gently scatter the viewer’s attention. This last image is an intriguing fusing of the visual vocabularies that Leighton developed for Eustacia and Clym. Before this, they represented alternatives of doing well: statuesque and rising into the sky or entangled and becoming like the land itself. Here, Clym both operates within Eustacia’s imperious vernacular and responds to labor’s contorting demands. In his hands he holds what looks more like a portfolio with loose sheets than a Bible. His preaching is his own, rather than from a book. He rises into the sky and yet, like his constituents, seems comfortable and attuned to the world around him, which is free of brambled furzes and windy trees. Clym seems the success of the novel. This harmonious blend of labor and leisure, however, is undercut by the fact that it takes place in the sixth part of the novel. When Hardy first wrote The Return of the Native for Belgravia, the journal insisted that Hardy turn what he envisioned as a five-part tragedy into a six-part Victorian marriage plot.76 Hardy – for whom publication in Belgravia, an often sensationalist and sentimental journal aimed at lower-middle class readers, was not a first choice – did so, but in retaliation he wrote a somewhat cranky correction to this sixth part into the 1912 Wessex revision of the novel.77 Placed at the end of Part V, it read: The writer may state here that the original conception of the story did not design a marriage between Thomasin and Venn…But certain circumstances of serial publication led to a change of intent. Readers can therefore choose between the endings, and those with an austere artistic code can assume the more consistent conclusion to be the true one.78

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Figure 1.5  “They listened to the words of the man in their midst,” Clare Leighton, 1929. Reproduced by kind courtesy of the estate of Clare Leighton.

The text of Leighton’s 1929 reprint was from plates made for the 1912 edition of the novel and replicated both Hardy’s note and his preface. The kind of doing well that Clym is achieving here had no place in the five-act

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tragedy that this novel was meant to be. There is a sense, then, that the novel itself rejects Clym’s success, preferring Eustacia’s tragedy. And yet, as a last, elliptical entry in Eustacia’s visual existence in Leighton’s edition, this image of Clym is still compelling. It suggests that Leighton (like Hardy) cannot let go of Eustacia even after her death. Whereas Hardy saw Clym as the more important character and almost inadvertently centered Eustacia in his novel and especially in his revisions, Leighton chose Eustacia as the object of her fascination. Within the edition and its context, the two are foils for each other. In 1929, as a woman working on a book she loved in a medium she excelled at for two publishing houses that could further her career and in a place she wanted to live in, Leighton could pursue her own ambitions without tragic retaliation. She could be both a wild bird and a landscape painter. Her passions were a match for her time in a way that was never possible for Eustacia. Where Eustacia could never belong in the heath, Leighton could become it through intense, empathetic, and observational aesthetic work. The activity of that work is clearest not in the elegantly elaborated narratives of her tableaus but in her smaller head- and tailpieces. There are fifty-nine original head- and tailpieces, but since many are used in multiple chapters there are ninety-two prints in all. They come in different shapes and sizes, most unframed, but some edged with thick black squares or rectangles. Spend enough time flipping through these smaller images and the larger ones begin to seem composited or collaged. For example, slice up “Hand in hand they went along the path towards Mistover,” the portrait of Clym and Eustacia, and you find a tall rectangle of a tree on the top left point of the horizon, a small square of a shrub on the top right point, and a thick frame of a plant at the rightmost part of the foreground. These are the raw materials of the tableaus. If the birds in Eustacia’s waiting scene represent a fragmenting of her vision, imagine the birds on their own. Or, imagine just a single bird. Single animals, houses, and bushes are typical of the head- and tailpieces. They are fragments of gazes, remnants of walks. Rarely is any such head or tailpiece merely observational. The plants and trees especially have affect to them. A single rough tree stump rises ominously out of a simply carved ground, one branch stretching to the right of the frame.79 A pond is an oval of white surrounded by dark trees, a frail looking space of calm.80 Such illustrations lay bare the device of the larger tableaus, giving a sense of Leighton’s walks through the heath. In them Leighton built a version of Hardy’s novel from the ground up. Through these images, Leighton confronted her reader with the setting of the novel at every slight break in the story, so that the beginnings and ends of

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chapters situate and even constrain us. She, like Hardy, invited us to occupy a much-bounded geography. In his preface to the 1912 edition, included in this 1929 reprinting, Hardy clarified some revisions he had made to the novel, which included making the topography of the heath more accurate: To prevent disappointment to searchers for scenery it should be added that though the action of the narrative is supposed to proceed in the central and most secluded part of the heaths united into one whole, as above described, certain topographical features resembling those delineated really lie on the margin of the waste, several miles westward of the centre. In some other respects also there has been a bringing together of scattered characteristics.81

Egdon Heath is gathered from diverse locales. What was miles away was made central, what was dispersed was united. Leighton’s head- and tailpieces are a kind of remarginalizing and redispersal. They take the central landscape of the text and scatter it across the edition. Like the birds in Eustacia’s tableau, these images are necessarily of many minds. And the combination of Leighton’s tableaus and her head- and tailpieces lends this edition an unspoken internal logic, one that invites its reader to alchemize text, tableaus, and head- and tailpieces into a rich account of the novel’s geography. After The Return of the Native, head- and tailpieces would take on increasing importance in Leighton’s work. She would use them with great success just a few years later when she again moved out to the countryside, this time with H. N. Brailsford, a left-wing journalist who was her partner for several years. There they lived and gardened, an experience that she would turn into the first book that she both wrote and illustrated, Four Hedges (1935), whose sequel Country Matters I have already described. In Four Hedges, Leighton chronicled a year in the life of a garden – “ours is an ordinary garden” she said – which had been all chalk and rough meadowland when she had first encountered it.82 To illustrate the life of this plot of land, Leighton utilized no tableaus and instead deployed very precise, very small images, some in the middle of chapters, some at their head and tail, with titles like Anemone Pulsatilla, Wild Arum, Oriental Poppies, Mullein Caterpillar, Bindweed, and Lapful of Windfalls. These plants and insects anchor her chapters. For example, that caterpillar, which Leighton describes as the loveliest creature in her garden, frets big holes into the leaves of her Mullein plants. On one page she depicts the caterpillar on a munched-up leaf and on the next page she shows it bloomed into a moth, wings erect.83 Such images constitute the entirety of the plot of her book, which moves month-by-month and chapter-by-chapter through learning to scythe, harvesting potato crops, and managing penny-thick ice.

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Figure 1.6  White road against landscape, Clare Leighton, 1929. Reproduced by kind courtesy of the estate of Clare Leighton.

Leighton designed her head- and tailpieces for The Return of the Native to be, like her images for Four Hedges, relatively lacking in narrative. In so doing, she echoed what Forster and Woolf described as the lack of plot in The Return of the Native into her illustrations. Professor Nicholas Dames once invited a gathered lecture at Columbia University to look at their copies of Tess of the D’Urbervilles and see where they had dogeared their pages. With Hardy, he said, they should look in between the dog-ears, at the pages they had not noticed. Hardy lives in languorous descriptions and pages of context. In a sense, the head- and tailpieces are the pages that Leighton did not dog-ear, the ones that did not have absolute relevance to plot but did enrich and deepen the experience of the novel. Hardy necessitates this kind of nonsequential depiction of landscape. Indeed, Leighton captures his unnovelistic dedication to setting in those moments least inspired by the specifics of his plot: in her head- and tailpieces. Take, for example, the ten small images that lend various perspectives on a single winding road (for the first of these, see Figure 1.6). In many, it begins at the bottom center of the frame and climbs up into the horizon. It also passes over a bridge, carries the reddleman’s cart, and slides from one side of frame to another. In each image, Leighton takes care to preserve the bright white road against the dark heath, just as Hardy described it in the closing paragraphs of his first chapter: With the exception of an aged highway, and a still more aged barrow presently to be referred to – themselves almost crystallized to natural products by long continuance – even the trifling irregularities were not caused by pickaxe, plough, or spade, but remained as the very finger-touches of the last geological change.

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The Art of the Reprint The above-mentioned highway traversed the lower levels of the heath, from one horizon to another. In many portions of its course it overlaid an old vicinal way, which branched from the great Western road of the Romans, the Via Iceniana, or Ikenild Street, hard by. On the evening under consideration it would have been noticed that, though the gloom had increased sufficiently to confuse the minor features of the heath, the white surface of the road remained almost as clear as ever.84

The heath is so untouched that its irregularities are not man’s – not a pickaxe’s or a spade’s – but time’s. With some perfect blend of steepness and flatness, and despite the addition of a road, its face remains mostly the same. Roman roads in Britain are famously straight shots through landscape. This road is notable not only for being obviously manmade, then, but also for accommodating itself to its landscape rather than the other way around. In the next chapter, Venn the Reddleman will contemplate the road ahead: “Before him stretched the long, laborious road, dry, empty, and white. It was quite open to the heath on each side, and bisected that vast dark surface like the parting-line on a head of black hair, diminishing and bending away on the furthest horizon.”85 Leighton illustrates this scene in the frontispiece of the edition and then in a sequence of images (not unlike the one in which Eustacia waits for Wildeve). At the end of the first chapter, just after Hardy’s introduction of the road, she depicts a white line of road made craggy by a darkly inked landscape, with little trees swooning over the hills. Then, in the headpiece of the second chapter, she shows the road again, this time stretching from left to right, and mostly obscured by the dark of the land. Her tailpiece for the chapter is yet another road, now climbing over rolling hills and under an arching sky. In the rest of the edition, she engraves and reengraves this road, each image another variation on the theme of a slim white line stretching against a dark black landscape. After the first few chapters, these images become less engaged with the text at hand and more independently exploratory of the Wessex landscape. Because all but one of Leighton’s road images is reprinted in the second half of the novel, it becomes a kind of visual signature for this edition, snaking and searching and rising and falling through the hills of the heath.86 Nineteen head- and tailpieces of roads create an illusion of familiar space: you see it over and over again, as you would if you had, like Hardy or like Eustacia or like Leighton, walked through the heath over and over again, rounding the same bend or ascending the same hill. Leighton’s road is a symbolic line through landscape, in continuous development, always changing. Woodcuts, too, are a discipline of changing lines and of continual adjustment. Albert Garrett defines wood engraving as a line

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in progression: “Engraving as an art discipline is based upon a line which is in a state of continuous change throughout its entire length.”87 This is Leighton’s laborious path through her woodblock, through landscape, and through text. It is a record of something difficult to depict through anything but a visual metaphor: the mysterious, adaptive, and exhausting process of becoming Egdon Heath. Like a road against landscape, Leighton’s lines look as if they adjust fluidly, comfortably. We know, however, that each requires labor. We have learned that, if not from elsewhere in our lives, then from Wildeve, Clym, and Eustacia. Ultimately, then, this road is about how we slice through, adapt toward, or live against the spaces around us. Since most of us have not had Leighton’s opportunity to become Hardy’s earth in the exact place that inspired his novel, the labor of our becoming place will be imaginative. Readerly, really. In “Of Books” Michel de Montaigne wrote: “My sight becomes confused and dispersed. I have to withdraw it and apply it again by starts, just as in order to judge the luster of a scarlet fabric, they tell us to pass our eyes over it several times, catching it in various quickly renewed and repeated glimpses.”88 Reading gives us an illusion of forward movement but actually requires several passes and comes in glimpses. Put another way, in S/Z (1970) Roland Barthes wrote: The text, in its mass, is comparable to a sky, at once flat and smooth, deep, without edges and without landmarks; like the soothsayer drawing on it with the tip of his staff an imaginary rectangle wherein to consult, according to certain principles, the flight of birds, the commentator traces through the text certain zones of reading, in order to observe therein the migration of meanings, the outcropping of codes, the passage of citations.89

Barthes’s metaphor is very different from Montaigne’s – a smooth, unedged sky is no scarlet fabric – but both suggest that reading is best understood as a series of revelations. You must approach it once, twice, and thrice. Each of Leighton’s head- and tailpieces, then, might best be thought as a record both of a glance at the landscape and a glance at the text; or, of many gazes at each. It is in these smaller images that we are most able to see the labor behind Leighton’s illustration – to understand how she took a series of observations and a series of readings and created an extraordinary interpretation of Hardy’s novel. And the allure of such an interpretation is that as readers we are invited to trace three – or more – versions of Egdon Heath: Hardy’s, Leighton’s, and our own. In 1938, almost ten years after illustrating The Return of the Native, Leighton left Britain for America. Her relationship with Brailsford had ended and she was

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ready for a change. “I needed to escape into something new and unknown,” she later wrote.90 In making the trip that Eustacia and Wildeve never could and never would, she did well. Her much-lauded works on lumberyards and farming would emerge not from her native country but from her adopted one.91 After World War II ended, she would become an American citizen.92 First, though, in 1940, when she was living in Baltimore, she embarked on one last project on Wessex. In undated notes, she reflected on the commission: Growing new roots is no easy matter, especially when it takes place in full adulthood. There is such a backlog of nostalgia to bedevil one. It holds two powers, constructive and destructive. It can sap the creative energy or give unimaginably magic stimulus. Wisely accepted, it can be a germinal power for creation. I sometimes think that what Eric Gill calls the ecstasy of memory often produces the best work. And so the first thing I did when I had left England to come to live permanently in America was to illustrate Thomas Hardy’s Under the Greenwood Tree. Nothing could have held more intensely the power to make me regret my recent decision.93

For a few short years, when she illustrated The Return of the Native, Country Matters, and Four Hedges, Leighton had belonged absolutely to rural England. Now, in a new country, she forced herself to retrace that familiar geography in Under the Greenwood Tree (1872). She worried that, stuck in Baltimore as she was, she might be bedeviled by nostalgia and regret. Instead, in a journey that she documented in illustrations, notes, and essays, rediscovering Hardy allowed her to put down roots in her new country. Rooting was fundamental to Leighton’s conception of immigration. The first line of the notes quoted above, “Growing new roots,” became the title of an essay that Leighton published in the journal Common Ground in 1944 and, later, of a small book that she published in 1976, which included both the essay and a series of new illustrations.94 In the essay, Leighton reflected on moving to America. Through one very extended metaphor, she contrasted herself with a plant that could thrive between boulders or in cracks of sidewalk cement. She rooted more deeply: “A gardener will tell you how perilous it is to transplant a flower with such a root. It must be lifted with tenderness. Snap that root and you destroy its life.”95 For Leighton, relocation was treacherous. When she eventually made herself at home, it almost came as a surprise. On one Thanksgiving Day, Leighton found herself unexpectedly moved by planting trees on a friend’s farm in Maryland: “As I placed young beeches and maples and dogwoods in their holes, I wondered at the sense of satisfaction that I was suddenly feeling. These were not even my trees. Neither was this my farm. And then I knew what was happening inside me. I was beginning to belong.”96 It was a belonging that came not just from

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planting but from a new and deeper relationship to the earth beneath her feet: “Loosening the earth, with a pick, I knew why I had intended to live in America … The earth in England is old, and has been worked long and well. There are no rocks to obstruct the spade as one digs. Something within me needed to be able to dig earth that had never before been turned.”97 Conceiving of American soil as virgin is tone-deaf to indigenous experiences of earth, but that it seemed so was expressive of Leighton’s sense of herself as an immigrant far from home. Growing New Roots contains no trace of Leighton’s earlier description of Under the Greenwood Tree. And yet, Hardy’s novel was instrumental in the exact process of becoming at home that Leighton so carefully delineated in the essay. It was almost as if Under the Greenwood Tree was a test of Leighton’s decision to leave for America. This, perhaps the least written about of Hardy’s novels, is as true a portrait of the geography that Leighton had left behind as she could find. Hardy wrote it after George Meredith told him that his first novel, Desperate Remedies (1871), had been too sensational.98 In response Hardy produced a story so small and so unsensational that Leslie Stephen said of it “There is too little incident.”99 Even Hardy’s subtitle is stubbornly un-novelistic: “A Rural Painting of the Dutch School.” In Adam Bede (1859), George Eliot found delicious sympathy in the homely realism of Dutch art.100 Hardy too, as Ruth Yeazell has described, found the simple, un-plotted canvases of Dutch art to be attractive models for novel-writing and ideal vehicles for rural nostalgia.101 And while Leighton was not an engraver in the Dutch school, she had an affinity with its landscapes, and a fascination with Hardy’s unplotted moments. In this edition, in romantic portraits, arched trees, and stout houses, she reimagined Hardy’s Britain and her own. The plot of Under the Greenwood Tree – such as it is – revolves around a tree. On the front cover of Leighton’s edition, tree branches tumble over Fancy Day and Dick Dewey, a couple in love.102 The image is taken from the last chapter of the novel, which Hardy opens with a ­description of a carefully tended grass-plot underneath a ­sprawling ancient tree: The point in Yalbury Wood which abutted on the end of Geoffrey Day’s premises was closed with an ancient tree, horizontally of enormous extent, though having no great pretensions to height. Many hundreds of birds had been born amidst the boughs of this single tree; tribes of rabbits and hares had nibbled at its bark from year to year; quaint tufts of fungi had sprung from the cavities of its forks; and countless families of moles and earthworms had crept about its roots. Beneath and beyond its shade spread

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The Art of the Reprint a carefully-tended grass-plot, its purpose being to supply a healthy exerciseground for young chickens and pheasants; the hens, their mothers, being enclosed in coops placed upon the same green flooring.103

This tree is an unpretentious shelter for rabbits, hares, chickens, pheasants, moles, earthworms and fungi. Hardy’s description is scientifically sound – a single tree really can be an ecosystem unto itself, providing a rich habitat for insects and animals.104 On the day that closes this novel, this particular tree shelters a newlywed couple and their community. And as this tree begins, ends, and titles this edition, it seems to shelter this whole, really quite simple, really quite lovely story, in which a boy and a girl fall in love and end up together without much argument on either side. And it also, in a way, sheltered Leighton as she was putting down roots in her new country. Had Leighton been commissioned to illustrate Under the Greenwood Tree in 1929 – and according to her she had been waiting a long time to do a Hardy novel, and any Hardy novel – she would likely have included the actual rabbits, hares, chickens, and fungi that lived under the greenwood tree. Her images for The Return of the Native were full of minutely engraved wildlife. The intervening decade, however, had shifted her priorities. In The Farmer’s Year, Four Hedges, and Country Matters, Leighton had chronicled her life in rural England, both in her garden and in the community at large. In the process, her style had changed. While her subjects were still specific to a time and place – like the Mullein Caterpillar in Four Hedges, for example – her mode of depicting them was softer and more imaginative. While in The Return of the Native she precisely echoed the shape of Clym’s back and the twists of the furze that he toiled over, in the “February” page of The Farmer’s Year she abstracted the relationship between figure and place, roundly arching the bodies of four laborers, the trees they worked on, and the hills behind them.105 Indeed two of the men seem so entrenched in the landscape that they might be mistaken for treetops. In a preparatory sketch, she drew and redrew those arching lines to get them right, sweeping them past the edges of her frame as if to intensify their motion.106 After many years planting, farming, and walking the land, Leighton must have known it immeasurably better than she did upon first arrival, when she illustrated The Return of the Native. Interestingly, however, it was precisely within or because of this deep knowledge that she developed a more flexible and more imaginative aesthetic. It was a style amplified in Under the Greenwood Tree, which, in addition to being a sweet, rustic story, very amenable to imaginative illustrations, was engraved at a great distance from home, without access to every single brush, leaf, and worm in Leighton’s garden. If Leighton’s The Return of the Native lived in place, her Under the Greenwood Tree lived in remembering. The curves of her roads, leaves,

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branches, and grassy and snowy hills were filtered through not just narrative, time, and place, but through a searching, longing nostalgia for home. For example, when Hardy described the sound of pealing church bells carried by a Christmas breeze, Leighton illustrated massive, oversized bells swinging over a tiny landscape.107 Or, when Hardy had a character say of Fancy that she’ll “twist the pore young feller about like the figure of 8,” Leighton responded with an actual figure eight, bold against a hill.108 The circumstances of this edition necessitated such abstractions. Indeed, sometimes, Leighton’s images were entirely of her own invention. For example, there is no exact textual reference for a portrait she engraved of the two lovers embracing with impossibly plump fields intersecting in a complicated geography behind them (Figure 1.7). Leighton illustrated each blade of grass as almost humorously independent of its neighbor and each little bush as perfectly angled into the next. Her bundles of hay were so neat as to make the scene almost fragrant with harvesting. In such an image, Leighton seemed to ask, as Roland Barthes had of a text of pleasure, “What is it for me?” How could she find her past through a book?109 Leighton’s longing for a place she used to call home is evident in her illustrations for Under the Greenwood Tree. It was a desire made more poignant because she must have known that that place would be forever changed by the war. In 1940, Leighton’s Edinburgh-based printer responded to a letter she had written him: I am glad to know that you are getting on with the electros for the Clare Leighton edition of Hardy’s Under the Greenwood Tree. It would appear to me that an element of nostalgia would not come amiss in the interpretation of some of Hardy’s writings, so you are perhaps quite right to put into your work all the nostalgia that you are feeling.110

In her letter to him, Leighton must have expressed what she later wrote: that the experience of illustrating the novel was one of bedeviling ­nostalgia. Perhaps she had also fretted about that feeling, and here the printer was reassuring her. But in the next sentence he pivoted to broader issues ­facing Britain: “Personally I rather envy your being over there, but I don’t envy the Americans their unhappy position of sitting so ­comfortably on the fence taking all the profits they can get out of work they are doing for us and only thinking of coming in with us in the event of their own skins being threatened.”111 In closing, he said that he hoped the c­ ensor would not object to his saying that “we in Edinburgh have not been unacquainted with the sound of guns…up to now tranquility does not seem to have deserted the populace. The whole world situation, however, imposes a strain upon each of us, which, even if it is only subconscious,

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Figure 1.7  Lovers in a field, Clare Leighton, 1940. Reproduced by kind courtesy of the estate of Clare Leighton.

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is there all the time.”112 Imagine Leighton imagining what he could not say because of fear of censorship. Here she was, luckily but ­problematically, in a safe, sheltered home, just as what her printer called this “whole world situation” was descending dangerously upon Britain. In the midst of war, far from home and searching for a way to belong in a new place, Leighton illustrated a time in the countryside that was quickly feeling as if it was setting in amber. When she did so, she experienced the “ecstasy of memory” that she mentioned in her notes for Growing New Roots. It is a phrase which, as she said, she borrowed from Eric Gill. A celebrated printmaker, sculptor, artist, and designer, Gill was an admirer of Leighton’s: “No-one in our time has better succeeded in presenting the noble massiveness and breadth of life on the earth on a scale so grand,” he said of her.113 He mentions the ecstasy of memory toward the end of his autobiography, which was published upon his death in 1940, the same year that Leighton illustrated Under the Greenwood Tree. Gill was reflecting on his childhood in East Sussex in the 1890s and his adulthood in southwestern France in the 1920s: There were things about our life in Ditchling, when the children were children, which have the same quality of paradise. I have written, carried away by the ecstasy of memory, of the walk home in the evening from Sauveterre to Salies, but what ecstasy of memory could surpass that of the return in the evening through Poynings under the Downs, along past Newtimber and under the round hill of Woolstandbury to Clayton?114

Note how Gill said not Britain or France but Ditchling, Poynings, the Downs, Newtimber, Woolstandbury, Clayton, Sauveterre, and Salies. He greeted each name like an old friend. And yet, though each location conjured an ecstasy of memory, there was a special quality to his recollections of those earlier years, a sense of paradise not lent to later memories, no matter how happy. And Leighton picked up on his language not only because it was nostalgic – of course it was – but because it was nostalgic for specific place. In Leighton’s images for Under the Greenwood Tree, Hardy’s England became her Poynings, Newtimber, and Clayton: her paradise. While the entirety of Under the Greenwood Tree was a record of one artist’s ecstasy of memory, an equally apt illustration of this moment in Leighton’s life can be found in the frontispiece she made for the bound 1976 edition of Growing New Roots. Entitled “Safe and Firm,” it depicts a single leafy, fruiting tree, round like the ones in Under the Greenwood Tree, but out of context, without landscape (Figure 1.8). Its roots sit in a wave that crests from left to right and then swirls up and back down again, almost forming an infinity loop. It might be about to sweep the tree into

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Figure 1.8  “Safe and Firm,” Clare Leighton, 1976. Reproduced by kind courtesy of the estate of Clare Leighton.

the air, or it might be about to land it down on the ground. This little tree is a perfect summary of so much of what Leighton was going through when she illustrated Under the Greenwood Tree. If as its title suggests it is an illustration of safety, then it is of a kind of safety that can only be found through nostalgia, which Leighton described in the essay as a great wave that “rises without warning.” To belong in America, Leighton had to first imagine Fancy’s childhood home and the site of the ancient greenwood tree, as she did in one headpiece in particular, with a thatched roof, surrounding trees, a little path in the depths of Yalbury Wood, the sun winding obliquely through the forest. Leighton’s Thanksgiving trees, and really her whole life in America, were seeded in the wave of nostalgia she experienced in illustrating Under the Greenwood Tree. So, while she may

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have erased the novel from Growing New Roots, it was Hardy who fueled the nostalgic aesthetic that characterized Leighton’s work-in-transition: the engravings that allowed her to belong outside of Britain. Taken together, these materials (a set of notes, an essay, a bound book, a Victorian novel, an illustrated edition, a wartime letter, and an illustration) are not only records of Leighton’s coming to belong in America, but registers of how a single commission lingered through her life. The Return of the Native edition, which was a great success, no doubt led to the Under the Greenwood Tree edition. It is a kind of sequel in images. And Growing New Roots, published in 1944 and 1976, continued developing the thematics of that sequel. If “Safe and Firm” is as apt an illustration of Leighton’s ecstasy of memory as her images of Yalbury Wood, it is because the work of that illustration project and of becoming at home stayed with her for the intervening thirty-six years. Indeed, one measure – among others – of the importance of the reprints in this book is that each one reverberated forward through the life of its artist in ways both meaningful and unpredictable. At the same time, the idea of Britain that Leighton wrought from Baltimore for Under the Greenwood Tree might just as well face us to the past as to the future. Because Hardy, too, was always creating an idea of Britain. His whole novel was an invitation to Britain’s imaginary past. Like The Return of the Native, it was set it in the recent past and in an invented geography, Wessex, which also evoked medieval Britain. Indeed, since Under the Greenwood Tree was the first novel he set in Wessex, it brims with the energy of discovering a place that was at once fantastical and true. Fittingly, Hardy took the novel’s title from a song in William Shakespeare’s As You Like It (1599), which begins: Under the greenwood tree Who loves to lie with me, And turn his merry note Unto the sweet bird’s throat, Come hither, come hither, come hither: Here shall he see No enemy But winter and rough weather.115

In the midst of World War II, from an artist missing home, this particular edition is a more than double invitation. It is not just Leighton’s or Hardy’s. It is a backwards looking telescope, that takes us from its reprinting in 1940 to its publication in 1872 and then further back again, to an imagined version of a sheltered place, safe and firm.

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Figure 2.1  Ishmael, Rockwell Kent, 1930. Reproduced by kind courtesy of the Plattsburgh State Art Museum.

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chapter 2

Rockwell Kent & Herman Melville’s Moby Dick

Rockwell Kent’s illustrations for his 1930 edition of Moby Dick expressed his near-compulsive desire to find something of himself in the outdoors. He shared this trait with Ishmael, Herman Melville’s narrator. Take the first page of the novel, which reads in part: Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off – then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball.1

Death haunts Ishmael, and he haunts it. He contemplates coffins; pursues funerals; knocks off people’s hats; and seeks a pressing substitute for pistol and ball and, possibly, suicide. His only solution is an abrupt departure and time at sea. Kent illustrates this moment with a headpiece of Ishmael propped up on his elbows and lying on his belly on a grassy hill (Figure 2.1). Ishmael’s whole body is tensed toward the view before him: of a wide expanse of ocean, so close that the sea breeze runs through his hair. Unseen but no doubt before him is a cliff tumbling down to the water, so that he and it are separated by a fall. It is an image whose relief can only be found outside of itself, in journey. The opening to Kent’s Voyaging, his 1924 account of traveling by boat to the edge of South America, bears remarkable similarities to Moby Dick: “Here in this happiness the heart cries out its own despair, speaks its own doom and banishment. How unobserved and silently is the deep measure of the soul’s endurance filled; it mounts the rim, trembles a moment there, then like a torrent overflows – the vast relief of action.”2 Kent shared with Melville a sense of melodrama, doom, and urgency. Like Ishmael, he acted quickly, securing a berth on a boat to South America bound for the strait of Magellan.3 Both he and Ishmael 57

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had to depart. And that is really what this illustration set is: a story of a departure, along coastlines and out to sea. A painter, illustrator, adventurer, carpenter, and socialist more likely to credit lobster fishermen as inspiration than a contemporary like Edward Hopper, Kent had an unusual affinity with this confounding novel. In a letter, Kent’s editor suggested that he might treat his Moby Dick illustrations like a diary: If from day to day you are keeping a diary and you illustrate it with sketches to supplement your text, sometimes they come in as little incidents in squares – other times they are vignettes – and other times they occupy half or full pages. A nice intimacy is established between text and pictures. There is a beautiful fusion of word and diagram, making a variable harmony which becomes very delightful.4

Kent designed and illustrated Moby Dick as if it was not just a story but in fact the story of his life. Informal and spontaneous, incidental and everchanging, his pictures fused with the language of the novel. Michel de Certeau said that “the story of man’s travels through his own texts remains in large measure unknown.”5 Kent’s illustrations are precisely the story of his travel through text, ocean, and life. Kent, like Melville, knew the sea, and depicted it to dazzling results. Also like Melville, he had an eye for the metaphysical and a sense of the sublime. His over 250 drawings, which he painstakingly inked to imitate the gloss of wood engravings, included a whale diving through starry seas clutching a boat in its jaws; a sail arching into the air, obscuring a pale sun; and a tiny boat buoyed over the surface of a monstrous ocean. Taken together, they are an obsessive, imaginative, and energetic diary in images and a beguiling journey into the sublime. When this edition was commissioned, it would have been a toss-up who was the more famous: Herman Melville or Rockwell Kent. Panned by most reviewers upon its publication in Britain and America in 1851, Moby Dick was far from an instant classic, and Melville died in near-obscurity in 1891.6 In 1919, however, a flurry of articles in celebration of the centennial of Melville’s birth launched what would become known as the Melville Revival. In the next couple of years, new editions of Moby Dick by Everyman’s Library and Oxford World Classics helped cement its reputation, as did the author’s first biographer, Raymond Weaver, who said: “The wholesale neglect of Melville at the hands of his countr­ymen … has not been merely unintelligent, but thoroughly discreditable.”7 D. H. Lawrence called Moby Dick “an epic of the sea such as no man

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has equalled.”8 And in 1929 Lewis Mumford proclaimed Melville as “the greatest imaginative writer that America has produced” and said “his epic, Moby Dick, is one of the supreme poetic monuments of the English language.”9 Later scholarship – as early as the 1930s – pushed back against the narrative that Melville had disappeared into anonymity in the years after publishing Moby Dick.10 But something did change in the 1920s: for critics, biographers, and novelists Moby Dick had arrived. For many readers, though, the novel was introduced to them by Kent.11 “It’s well worth having,” The New Yorker noted of his edition, “especially since Melville’s classic has been all too seldom reprinted.”12 Absurdly prolific, Kent was commissioned to do Moby Dick at the height of his fame. In collaboration with Lakeside Press, he illustrated a three-volume set for collectors and simultaneously, with the same press and in further collaboration with Random House and the Book-of-the-Month Club, produced a onevolume edition for a mass audience. Notably, in its first printing the editors of Random House neglected to put Herman Melville’s name on its front cover. A writer for The New Yorker spotted the omission: “Final rites seem to have been said for Herman Melville, whose name doesn’t even appear on the jacket of the latest edition of ‘Moby Dick.’ Only Rockwell Kent’s name appears, and the name of the whale itself. Possibly this is fame, but fame and oblivion are sometimes so like.”13 At the time, in 1930, Kent’s departures for far-flung shores were often breathlessly tracked by the press.14 Just the next year, in 1931, Kent was even impersonated by a conman named Harry F. Gerguson, who had sixteen other aliases, including Prince Michael Romanoff. Gerguson had gone so far as to autograph limited editions of Kent’s books and promise his illustration services to an upcoming book.15 That story was also reported in The New Yorker which, perhaps exhausted by so often writing about Kent, published the following ditty in 1937: That day will mark a precedent Which brings no news of Rockwell Kent.16

Though in the 1920s Melville had risen to fame as one of the greatest of American authors, in 1930 Kent seemed the bigger draw. That distinguishes him from most any other illustrator, and certainly from any other in this book. Kent’s commission was part of a self-consciously canon-making project in American bookmaking. R. R. Donnelley & Sons, founded in 1864, was one of the largest commercial printers of its time, especially known for the Sears, Roebuck & Co. Catalog. Its Lakeside Library had been founded in 1875 as the first of a glut of “libraries” publishing cheap collections of

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paperback reprints; its Lakeside Press had started reprinting foreign classics and commercial books in 1903.17 In 1926, though, Lakeside Press launched a new initiative aimed at preserving great American literature, promoting commercial printing, and developing exciting design. In September of that year, William Kittredge, Lakeside’s typographic chief, wrote Kent and several other artists with a pitch: In an effort to contribute something to the improvement of standards in the making of books in America, this house proposes to have designed, to print, and to publish in limited editions certain books of American interest … It is hoped that in each case a book will result which will stand for all time as the finest edition of the particular text which it preserves.18

Authored, illustrated, and made in America, the editions were meant to represent the best of the country’s literature, art, and craftsmanship. Kittredge, who was also the series editor, asked Kent to choose from a list of twenty-five books that included – in addition to Moby Dick – Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer, My Antonia, The Last of the Mohicans, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Typee.19 Without hesitation, Kent chose Moby Dick. The final series would consist of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, illustrated by Kent; Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales, illustrated by W. A. Dwiggins; Henry Thoreau’s Walden, illustrated by Rudolph Ruzicka; and Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast, illustrated by Edward Wilson.20 The print runs were for only 750 to 1,000 copies, and the editions were mostly sold to collectors.21 Kittredge said: “It is our idea to publish only American books which should have a place in every reading library and books which people really want to read.”22 This was to be a printer’s, artist’s, and reader’s canon of great American books. Each book was a distinct design project and was envisioned as the illustrated edition to end all illustrated editions.23 Kittredge was interested enough in the idea of definitiveness that he later mentioned to Kent that he was compiling a compendium of books in the English language so definitively illustrated that “it would be a mistake for anyone to attempt to illustrate them again.”24 This Moby Dick is unusual because Kittredge had such high aspirations not just for American illustration and commercial printing but for the reprinted novel. Generally publishers of reprints do not aspire to definitiveness. The first edition of a book is its first print – everything after that is a replica. Claire Leighton’s The Return of the Native, for example, was a memorial edition, not the edition of Thomas Hardy’s novel. And yet it, and the other editions in this book, became definitive by the achievements of their illustrators.

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Much as this Moby Dick is a classic piece of early twentieth-century Americana, it also lived in relationship to British publishing practices and to broader questions about anglophone literature. Design-wise, Kent’s edition, with its Victorian-inspired gilded covers, spoke to an industry with multiple markets and readerships. Indeed, whereas Kittredge told Kent that “The key note of this enterprise is American writers, preserved in books, illustrated by American artists, done in the manner of today” and assured him that all materials would be sourced in the United States, the edition was ultimately not quite as American as all that.25 Due to a ruined shipment of 80,000 pages of American paper and Kent’s aesthetic preferences, both paper and type were imported from Britain.26 The edition’s audience was also not entirely American. As one scholar put it of commercial printing from 1926 to 1930: “What one wrote, drew, or designed had to be sufficiently nouveau for New York, sufficiently well-bred for Boston, and classical enough for London.”27 American printing culture often existed in some relationship to Britain and in conflicted conversation with markets both conservative and avant-garde. And intellectually, Kent, like Melville, was very much inspired by Romanticism, and so working in the poetic heritage of the British nineteenth century.28 Moreover, Kent’s edition was such an unqualified triumph – praised by critics, beloved by readers, and remembered as one of the great achievements of a great artist – that it is in this book to speak to the tastes, ambitions, and accomplishments of this era of illustrated reprints in both Britain and America. An illustrated reprint always belongs to several moments in time and to several makers. With so bright a star as its illustrator, this edition is especially contested ground. Is it Kent’s or Melville’s? Perhaps anticipating that his name could be overcredited with Moby Dick, Kent chose not to write an introduction for the edition, despite initially having agreed to do so. In 1929, he wrote Kittredge: I have not written an introduction: and I have chosen not to after the most careful consideration. I appreciate the honor that might accrue to me through identifying myself in every possible way with this edition of “Moby Dick,” and yet I feel that for the illustrator to obtrude himself beyond the bounds of his art would be in bad taste … “Moby Dick” should be presented in this edition as it was first and finally presented to the public by Melville.29

In an effort to draw a line between word and image – and initial creator and later illustrator and designer – Kent left his own voice out of the edition. He preserved Melville’s dedication, etymology, extracts, chapters, and epilogue exactly as they had been at their initial publication in the

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United States. It was a choice that mattered enough to him that fifteen years later he quoted his letter to Kittredge at length in his memoir It’s Me O Lord. And yet, every few pages in this very hefty edition there is a headpiece or a tailpiece or a full-page image by Kent. His imagery and imagination open, close, and sometimes interrupt chapters. Though all Moby Dick’s words are Melville’s, this book also belonged to Kent. Indeed, the Random House editors’ mistaken attribution on the spine of the trade edition points to a different model of ownership for the edition: double authorship. Kent had unusual and expansive control over this Moby Dick. As he proudly noted in his memoir: “These books to the last, least detail of their design were … to be mine.”30 In deference to Kent’s prestige and in pursuit of a unique perspective for his edition, Kittredge queried Kent about everything from type-spacing to leather specimens to which paper mills he might like to use.31 Kent even visited Chicago to see the printing press and work on design elements in person.32 Moreover, in a 1926 letter, Kittredge offered to mock up the edition for Kent. That way, Kent could slice up the pages and fit them around his illustrations.33 Practically speaking, shaping the edition around Kent’s images was both an unusual and a difficult choice. Head- and tailpieces in particular are typically sized around the text, rather than the other way around. Both Leighton and Hassall, for example, scaled their images to suit the texts of their editions. Kittredge explained his logic as follows: Should you agree with my thought of running texts and pictures through the book, solid, we could set up galleys of the type, and you could cut up the galley proofs to fit with your illustrations. Such a treatment would permit of different kinds of incidental and decorative and pictorial notes, as well as half page, three-quarter page, and full page illustrations. It would be as though you were Melville, and Melville you; that, as you engrossed your book, you charted, illuminated, and illustrated it.34

Kent’s instincts were to be his guide. He was to work in various sizes and formats of images, to begin every chapter with a headpiece but only end with a tailpiece where it felt needed, and to only put in full-page images when he really wanted to. Kittredge’s reference to engrossing his book uses “engross” as a transitive verb, meaning to prepare a final printed document. And yet we might also think of its adjectival form, meaning absolute absorption.35 Kent engrossed the book and it engrossed him back. By Kittredge’s reckoning, the authorship of this edition might be equally dynamic: “You were Melville, and Melville you.” Later, when Kent sent

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him two drawings, Kittredge said: “To me, it is as though you were working side by side – Melville with words and you with pictures”36 In so absolutely absorbing himself in the narrative of Moby Dick and so carefully translating that absorption into the design of the edition, Kent achieved a radical intimacy between his vision and Melville’s. This is how you make someone else’s novel your diary. The resulting edition had the feel of something personal and special. Kittredge urged Kent to produce “such a book as you might do if there were only to be one copy, entirely done by your own hands.”37 Each image in the edition was unique. Where some head- and tailpieces in Leighton’s The Return of the Native were printed twice within her edition of Hardy’s novel, none are in Kent’s Moby Dick. Each is a fresh discovery. Many are extremely similar images of whales or coastlines. But those very similarities affirm the feel of something handmade, as if even a single reproduction within the book would ruin the illusion. By design, both the collector’s and the trade edition were meant to make the reader forget the fact that each book was not unique. In his insistence on the feel of a single, handmade copy, Kittredge anticipated “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935) in which Walter Benjamin said: “Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be. This unique existence of the work of art determined the history to which it was subject throughout the time of its existence.”38 To Benjamin, the sense of the human in art and the aura of the handmade object were being lost in the modern era. Kent’s Moby Dick was far from being a single object with a single history. Yet, Kittredge’s gamble was that each reproduction could have the presence of such an object. Kent’s achievement was to create something that could be mechanically reproduced without losing a sense of aura. Kent actually masqueraded his pen, brush, and ink drawings as wood engravings. Black and white, inky, thickly lined, and often seeming to have been crudely cut from wood, his illustrations evoked the kinds of engravings that Leighton, Eichenberg, and Hassall specialized in. They also made the edition feel truer to the spirit of the nineteenth century. As author of a recent natural history of Moby Dick Richard J. King put it, “Herman Melville never put his fingers on anything during his lifetime, from 1819 to 1891, that was not made from something that occurred in nature – iron, clay, wood, minerals, and rock.”39 Wood engravings – or the idea of them – lent the edition a more natural, less commercial, and less modern feel, and so supported Kittredge and Kent in their pursuit of something handmade and unique. And their inkiness added another

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layer of meaning, as in the nineteenth century whale oil was used to emulsify printing ink.40 Visually, Kent’s images also evoked William Blake, the Romantic poet and artist who hand-printed his illustrations and hand-made his books.41 Jamie L. Jones has dubbed Kent’s engraving-imitations “‘skeumorphs,’ artifacts with design features that resemble the essential characteristics of another medium and an earlier technological process.”42 Kent’s prints were meant to have the markings of an earlier century. In a sense any woodengraved edition in the twentieth century is a skeumorph, an artifact out of time, in search of something outside of the world of commercial reproduction while of course, ironically, being absolutely of that world. Perhaps to legitimate his later drawings, Kent does include wood engravings in the frontispieces of the collector’s editions. Each lends the volume a different affect: a man about to set off on a run; a man seeming to sit on water, one hand pushing something away; and, finally and most strikingly, a man tumbling headfirst into a black void. He is drowning. These images prepare the reader not just for the mood of the novel – introspective, adventurous, tragic – but for its purported medium.43 By drawing rather than engraving, Kent gave himself the freedom to create a visual world that he could not have produced on wood. Not that he was an unaccomplished engraver. He loved the form, having begun his experiments in it in 1918 when he was living in Alaska. In Wilderness, his journal of his time there, he noted: “Tonight I’ve made a number of pen and ink drawings and have at last drawn a design upon a woodblock. It is a wonderful surface to draw upon.”44 He later recalled in It’s Me O Lord: From that time on for many years … wood engraving was to be second only to painting in the arts I practised. Engraving, in my hands, became wonderfully consistent with the eccentricities of my own nature: with my general inability to distinguish what are termed the “finer shades”; my preference for fair over foggy days; for clean, sharp lines; for clear perception versus mystical imaginings; for stark, uncompromising realism versus unreality. You’ve got to know your mind to work with steel on wood.45

Wood engraving need not be clean, clear, or realistic. To Kent, though, its appeal was its uncompromising nature, the way in which it resisted erasure and required decisiveness. For that very reason, however, it could be a frustrating medium, as some of his later entries in Wilderness attest to: “I began work and cut all day on a block not two inches square; and it is only half done now!” And: “A wood block that I had cut proved, on my seeing a proof of it, to be absolutely worthless.”46 Kent would continue to produce engravings for books, bookplates, and short series throughout

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his life, working mostly with maple wood.47 In her Wood Engraving of the 1930’s, Leighton said of him: “It is probably he who has made the general American public aware of the wood block.”48 To have engraved Moby Dick, however, would have been to embark on an enormous and inflexible undertaking in a medium that Kent was not native to, at great scale.49 If engraving required him to know his mind at every step, drawing allowed him to hesitate, to explore, and to erase. His Moby Dick could therefore be more imaginative, more flexible, and less uncompromisingly realistic than it would have been in wood. Through his emulations of wood engravings, then, Kent was able to make this edition feel more craft-like and organic while also lending it a spontaneous and personal feel. Kent loved books and had ambitions to improve them. Returning home after a long trip as a young man, he was bored by the library that he had grown up with: “But why, unchanged, unadded-to, the same old books?  … Embalmed in leather and enclosed in glass sarcophagae, not even time could alter them”50 A library as a coffin was deeply unappealing to Kent, who called books “the living speech of intimates.”51 Andrew Delbanco cites a wide-ranging set of influences for Melville’s Moby Dick that includes Michel de Montaigne, Daniel Defoe, Thomas Carlyle, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Dante Alighieri, Virgil, John Milton, Johann Goethe, Thomas Browne, William Shakespeare, and Mary Shelley.52 Kent cited Charles Darwin, Leo Tolstoy, Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, John Keats, and Percy Shelley as responsible for a cultural and spiritual awakening in his early twenties, and populated his temporary home on Fox Island in Alaska with books by William Blake, Friedrich Nietzsche, Hans Christian Andersen, Daniel Defoe, and indigenous essayists.53 By the time that Kent finished work on a house in the Adirondacks in 1929, he had a beloved collection: “Good books, most of them; grand books, some; trash, a smattering. Books to make you laugh; books to make you cry; books to instruct and bore. Books, books: Why all these books? God knows – except that we like them, that some are as dear friends.”54 Years after being disappointed by his childhood home’s library, Kent had accumulated an eclectic set of books that included the grand, the trash, the comic, the tragic, and the didactic. In his work, and especially in his Moby Dick, Kent experimented with a form that felt stale to him. In November of 1930, when both editions had come out, he wrote to Lakeside’s vice president to say: “I have never before had any part in the making of so beautiful a book.”55 His three-volume collector’s edition, which sold for fifty-two dollars, fits snugly into a sleek,

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one-foot tall, unembellished aluminum case.56 The metal is light but the set heavy – the whole package makes a dull thud when you set it down. Each cover features a roman numeral indicating the volume number and an abstracted silver-white whale on a brown-gray background. The whale is composed from a short horizontal line at the top, a long vertical line perpendicular to it, and a half circle at the bottom of the frame. Below it, four squiggly lines connote waves. Each spine says MOBY DICK then depicts a whale tail in water, the relevant volume, and MELVILLE, with THE LAKESIDE PRESS on the bottom.57 The trade edition lacks the outward drama of the aluminum case, but it has all of the same images, compacted into a single gilded hardcover volume, designed for everyday readers. The top half of its black front cover features MOBY DICK in massive letters, and the bottom half is a silvery-white whale head coming up for air, its teeth snapping in the night, stars in the background. The spine, as mocked by The New Yorker, reads MOBY DICK, illustrated by Rockwell Kent, with Random House in small letters on the bottom and no mention of Melville. A whale tail runs nearly its length, dripping water.58 Design-wise, the trade edition (which came wrapped in a matching paper dust jacket) was remarkably less abstracted than the collector’s edition, but Kent had a common goal for the books: to feature the whale in an elegantly gilded fashion for daringly designed books which shared all key interior elements. The trade edition was Kent’s idea. As early as July of 1927, Kent wrote to Kittredge to express interest in a “small and inexpensive popular e­ dition … an ordinary pocket edition in fact.”59 Kent found an ideal publisher in Random House, a brand-new imprint created under Modern Library, a six-year-old company recently purchased by Bennett A. Cerf and his friend Donald S. Klopfer.60 Cerf and Klopfer had relaunched Modern Library by throwing out 55 of the print’s 109 titles and commissioning Rockwell Kent to design its now iconic endpapers of a figure leaping gracefully through space, based on initial designs by Lucien Bernhard.61 When they subsequently founded Random House as a home for what one New Yorker writer called “the posh limited editions that flourished in those bull-market days,” they again thought of Kent, both to design the imprint’s diminutive logo, which is still in use today, and to illustrate their first title: Candide.62 The entire first run of Voltaire’s novel sold out on the day it was published and was subsequently picked up by the Literary Guild, a popular book club.63 The relationship between Cerf, Klopfer, and Kent would serve Lakeside Press well when it came to crafting a trade edition, as Random House was unusually willing to give Lakeside Press (and by default Kent) control over the final trade product.64 The resulting edition was illustrated by Kent,

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printed by Lakeside Press, and published by Random House. It was sold for $3.50 and advertised as “the outstanding Christmas Book of the year.”65 As one scholar put it, “Resized and moderately priced, it was the edition that awoke American readers to Melville’s masterwork.”66 An essential factor in the popularity of the trade edition was its distribution by the Book-of-the-Month Club, which carried it as a book of the month in 1930.67 Founded by Harry Scherman in 1926 during the same boom in posh editions that Modern Library’s Cerf and Klopfer sought to capitalize on, the Book-of-the-Month Club kept its subscriber base abreast of the contemporary literary scene through smartly chosen books.68 As Joan Shelley Rubin has described in The Making of Middlebrow Culture (1992), the club was a part of a post–World War I movement to bring high culture to as wide an audience as possible. It wanted, in essence, to make the cultural commercial.69 And though the club is best known and most studied for its relationship to more current titles, it was also invested in the idea of the classic novel.70 Scherman had previously tried to start a Book-of-the-Week Club, distributing one classic a week for a year. For five dollars a week people could, as another founder put it, “become well read on the installment plan.”71 That club never got past its sample-testing phase, but the sentiment remained in the Book-of-the-Month-Club: for a low cost, on a monthly plan, a subscriber could become well read. Kent’s edition of Melville’s novel was a precursor to what the club would eventually call its “dividend titles,” which were often along the lines of his Moby Dick: gorgeously illustrated, somehow beautiful or exceptional, and fancy and unique feeling. Scherman said that an ideal dividend was a “classic in a fine edition … sufficiently high-priced that people are not likely to buy it” but would love to be gifted it.72 If that sounds like a fair description of Kent’s Moby Dick, that is because his edition may have served as the model for this category of books. The year after it was published, in 1931, the club devised the dividend as an answer to the pressures of publishing in the Great Depression.73 Over time, its dividend choices – which were selected in addition to the usual more contemporary book-of-themonth picks – would include novels and stories by Leo Tolstoy, Marcel Proust, Miguel de Cervantes, Charles Dickens, the Brothers Grimm, Lewis Carroll, Mark Twain, and Arthur Conan Doyle.74 These authors’ works had the benefit of being out of copyright, so that they could be chosen from publisher backlists with minimal expenditure.75 The insight of such choices was that a well-rounded sense of the literary world would be incomplete without classic novels. A reader of Herman Wouk (an author often labeled as middlebrow) could also be a reader of Tolstoy, Proust,

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Cervantes, and Melville – and also of Charlotte Brontë, whose Jane Eyre was a dividend pick in 1943, and features in Chapter 3. Moby Dick (like, not incidentally, Jane Eyre) is an absorbing book whose pages and characters can be intimately inhabited by its reader. It suited what Janice Radway in A Feeling for Books (1997) called the Book-of-theMonth Club’s “middlebrow personalism,” which she defined as a desire for an attachment to something beyond the self. “The club,” she argued, “constructed a picture of the world that, for all its modern chaos, domination by abstract and incomprehensible forces, and worries about standardization and massification, was the still the home of individual idiosyncratic selves.”76 Positioning itself against what might be thought of as the ills of mass production and a plastic age, the club stood for – or at least, said it stood for – an individualistic sense of literature and a personal version of the home library. In a world of nearly limitless reproduction, there was a desire for singular objects and specific points of view. The Bookof-the-Month Club promised just such objects and delivered just such a perspective in Kent. He said in an interview, “I like people to use their own judgment about things. Have in your house the pictures and books that you love regardless of whether people think they’re fine and good or worthwhile. Let them reflect your-self, whatever yourself is.”77 Kent’s Moby Dick felt personal in design, illustration, and content. Your book, for yourself, and your library. You should be drawn to it by your own judgment, for your own reasons, just as Kent had been. Kent was drawn to Moby Dick in much the way that he had his whole life been attracted to wilderness. Of himself as a boy, he recalled: “That upon reading Robinson Crusoe and The Swiss Family Robinson I did not run away to sea in the fond hope of being shipwrecked on a lonely island, can only have been that my then tender years – and my elders – prevented it.”78 As a student, Kent chafed against the demands of school and college. At Horace Mann, he failed to earn his degree due to a dispute with the administration, while at Columbia University he was forced to switch to a degree in literature due to a disagreement with the architecture department. Where he thrived was in the independent art programs that he attended in high school and college: the Chase School of Art and the New York School of Art.79 At the former, William M. Chase, a leading American Impressionist, preached the gospel of plein air or out-of-doors painting and at the latter Robert Henri advocated for “direct painting,” or paintings made quickly, emotionally, and without the use of sketches.80 To inspire such painting and to develop a specifically American school of art with an American

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point of view, Henri liked to read his students passages from authors like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman as they worked.81 Both he and Chase oriented Kent, whenever he could manage it, outside of the studio and into the world. Edward Hopper, who was born the same year as Kent on the opposite side of the Hudson River and was his fellow student at both schools, took Chase and Henri’s lessons to his oblique cityscapes.82 Kent took them to his stark, haunting landscapes, which he painted in farflung locations all over the world, and to his illustrations for Moby Dick, which depicted imaginary coastlines, violent storms, and ocean skies. Kent’s pull toward the outside was much encouraged by Henri’s recommendation that at twenty-four he take a trip to paint the “cliffs and pounding seas” of Maine’s Monhegan Island.83 There, Kent solidified his artistic, personal, and political commitments to wilderness, travel, and socialism. When asked in a 1969 interview about what fellow students or artists influenced his work, Kent replied by, first, describing a baseball league he had helped organize among New York art schools and, second, citing his time on Monhegan Island. He said of it: “It’s had more influence on my whole life and way of thinking than anything I ever did, outside of painting itself – working on Monhegan and living among those people as one of themselves; getting to know working people instead of dilettantes like picture painters – this was more to me than anything else in my life.”84 He remembered setting up to paint by the sea and seeing men rowing dories and pulling traps and being filled with jealousy: “I got a real inferiority complex that I could only overcome by becoming a workman myself. Which I did – as good as any of them … Because I’d come to have disrespect for people who just painted pictures – on-lookers on life; commentators on life. I was part of life itself.”85 Yearning to participate in life on Monhegan, he emptied backhouses, worked as a lobsterman and carpenter, and built six houses, including a two-room home for himself.86 The experience confirmed Kent’s fascination with landscape and his deep respect for labor. Kent’s spare, windswept paintings of Monhegan earned him early fame. Of his first fourteen-canvas exhibit, James Huneker said: “he knocks you off your pins before you can sit down with these broad, realistic, powerful representations of weltering seas, men laboring in boats, rude rocky headlands and snow-bound landscapes” and Guy Pène du Bois declared of his paintings: “They have economy, precision, dignity, and force.”87 The youngest artist up to that time to have had a work purchased by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Kent was also a public intellectual and a prolific commercial illustrator.88 Before he took the Moby Dick commission,

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he had already written and illustrated Wilderness and Voyaging about his travels to Alaska and to the southernmost edge of South America. Between 1926 and 1930, when he was working on Moby Dick, he also produced numerous paintings; illustrated Candide, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, and Canterbury Tales; edited the monthly Creative Art; and did minor illustrations for over a dozen other books as well as drawings for Vanity Fair, which he signed as Hogarth, Jr, in an allusion to British printmaking.89 In the few years after he would publish N by E (1930), Rockwellkentiana (1933), and Salamina (1935), describing his travels to Greenland and cataloging his artistic achievements to date.90 Later, he would produce two memoirs: This Is My Own (1940) and It’s Me O Lord (1955).91 Over the course of his decades-long career Kent seemed continually called to the vistas and activities of emptier landscapes and bigger experiences in Maine, Alaska, South America, and Greenland. He used to spend hours thinking of ways to get “out of the confinement and the dust and dirt and noise and smells and smoky air” of New York City.92 When he did escape, he was never happy to return. “Alas! about New York again,” he ruefully began a section of It’s Me O Lord.93 “If minds can become magnetized, mine was: its compass needle pointed north,” he said.94 Documentary filmmaker Frederick Lewis called Kent “a ceaseless wanderer who sought out some of the world’s most barren climates and captured their beauty on canvas,” and art historian Constance Martin dubbed him “a modern Ulysses.” Like Frederic Church, William Bradford, and John James Audubon, artists of the Arctic and explorers of nature to whom he has been compared, Kent saw the search for expansive vistas as a search for his own humanity.95 Kent believed in internal exploration through the external, saying: “Only the voyager perceives the poignant loveliness of life, for he alone has tasted of its contrasts. He has experienced the immense and wild expansion of the spirit outward bound, and the contracted heartburn of the homecoming. He has explored the two infinities – the external universe – and himself.”96 Through voyage, Kent could know himself. Through Moby Dick, he could do the same. But before he could illustrate the novel, Kent needed, like Ishmael, to depart. In 1928, he was living in New York City and had, in the two years since his commission to illustrate Moby Dick, done about half the necessary drawings. During this time, Kittredge, who was well aware of the many other projects that Kent had taken on during the intervening years, wrote him ever more plaintive letters, hoping that the drawings would be ready for the Christmas season, first of 1927 then of 1928.97 “Will you P L E A S E reply to this letter and give us some

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information regarding the illustrations for ‘Moby Dick’?” one read.98 Yet, to Kittredge’s undoubted chagrin, the collector’s edition would not be ready until October of 1930.99 And Kent, who was going through an extraordinarily prolific period, did not respond to Kittredge’s missives, and kept putting off completing the project. That kind of procrastination was not demanded of, for example, his work for his very successful edition of Random House’s Candide. Not that Moby Dick was not on Kent’s mind. When he completed work on it, he wrote Kittredge to apologize for his frequent tardiness and to profess: “I may even say that I now miss that single dominating interest that ‘Moby Dick’ has for three years furnished me.”100 Indeed, the single dominating force of Moby Dick seems to have been the problem. Kent could not get it off his mind, and at the same time could not finish work on it. Respite came in a chance encounter at a party where Kent learned that two young men were sailing a boat called Direction to Greenland.101 Kent eagerly joined up as a navigator. In addition to steering and more than occasionally mis-steering the thirty-three-foot boat, Kent filmed his experience – resulting in reels of sloshing water and unsteady coastlines – and sketched the boat and the sea from every possible angle.102 After he and his fellow crewmembers survived a shipwreck right off the coast of Greenland, he gamely trekked around the country, painting forty new canvases along the way.103 These were, he said, perhaps the happiest and certainly the most productive months of his life.104 He would return to Greenland in 1931 and 1934.105 On that first trip, though, he knew that “the work … on hand” was finishing his Moby Dick illustrations, and so he left for Denmark, where his wife Frances had agreed to meet him with his unfinished drawings for the novel.106 While taking the steamer over, Kent befriended Knud Rasmussen, a famed Arctic adventurer, who offered him the use of a beautiful house in Denmark, situated high on an ocean bluff, overlooking sea and sky.107 Kent’s sojourn in Greenland and Denmark yielded two illustrated books, both published in 1930 – N by E, his account of the Greenland journey, and Moby Dick. The necessary elements of completing his Melville project were ultimately extraordinarily simple: work on a boat and time on and by the ocean. In a later memoir, Kent said: “Art, to my thoughts, art for myself, has always been as though of inner necessity a by-product of living or a co-product with living – and all the interests and activities that living is – of that essential self of which they both are the expression.”108 Kent’s N by E and Moby Dick images were absolutely byproducts or coproducts with living. A life lived well was a book well illustrated.

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Moby Dick is a book full of images of whales – one translator of the novel said that Melville painted with words – that is also expressly concerned with exactly what those images look like and how they should be interpreted.109 In Chapter 3 or “The Spouter-Inn,” when Ishmael arrives at a New Bedford inn on his way out to sea, Melville offers this account of a painting hanging inside: On one side hung a very large oil-painting so thoroughly besmoked, and every way defaced, that in the unequal cross-lights by which you viewed it, it was only by diligent study and a series of systematic visits to it, and careful inquiry of the neighbors, that you could any way arrive at an understanding of its purpose. Such unaccountable masses of shades and shadows, that at first you almost thought some ambitious young artist, in the time of the New England hags, had endeavored to delineate chaos bewitched. But by dint of much and earnest contemplation, and oft repeated ponderings, and especially by throwing open the little window towards the back of the entry, you at last come to the conclusion that such an idea, however wild, might not be altogether unwarranted.110

This passage – which scholars including Andrew Delbanco argue was inspired by J. M. W. Turner’s violent ocean paintings – teaches its reader how to look at art.111 First you consider it from across the room, then you approach from a different angle, then you visit and you revisit and you ask your neighbors about it. You push through the besmoked or hazy or defaced or ruined qualities, and you look and look and look again. Ishmael’s theory is ultimately that this painting is one of a half-drowned ship in a hurricane, with a whale impaled on its masts. Yet, it takes him two pages to come to that conclusion and Melville uses that word “theory” to clarify that you or I might see something different in the painting. “You at last come to the conclusion,” not everyone else. Melville challenged his readers to read his book once twice and thrice, and to come away with theories but not hard and fast conclusions. Kent did not depict this particular scene. No heavily inked, smeared, or obscured image of a whale accompanies this chapter, even though this is a book filled with visual takes on whales. No drawing in imitation of an engraving in imitation of a paragraph in imitation of a painting is attempted. Instead, here Kent allowed text its moment of image. His headpiece for “The Spouter Inn” is, at four inches by five inches, especially large (Figure 2.2). Recall Kittredge’s urging that Kent’s images change size based on either whim or necessity. In the image, Kent depicted a nearly empty street, its cobblestones pitching downwards into the port, where a single ship is docked, its sails down, six barrels ready to be loaded on.

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Figure 2.2  “The Spouter Inn” Rockwell Kent, 1930. Reproduced by kind courtesy of the Plattsburgh State Art Museum.

The street is framed on one side by three buildings, and on the other by the entryway to the inn. A placard leans in from the top of the frame. It reads “The Spouter Inn” and is imprinted with a tiny emblem of water spouting upwards in a slim column and round spray. The playful sign and spout are Kent’s addition, a small intrusion of text and a promise, along with the ship in the background, of seas and whales to come. Inside the inn the lights are on, an invitation for Ishmael, who is only half visible in the scene, as he ducks in from the street, seconds from contemplating the mysterious painting hanging inside. It is a simple moment in an edition known for more remarkable ones, but it is also telling of the slow, careful, repetitive work of producing so many images for this novel that this project swelled from a two-volume to a three-volume edition and took four years and a sea journey to produce.112 Kent illustrated Moby Dick the way that Ishmael read this painting. He allowed Moby Dick, and the whale in particular, to appear slowly, in glimpses, one, two, or three images a chapter. As he did so, Kent continued to contend with Melville’s opinions about how to describe – and so depict – the whale. In “Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales”; “Of the Less Erroneous Pictures of Whales, and the

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True Pictures of Whaling Scenes”; and “Of Whales in Paint; in Teeth, in Wood; in Sheet-Iron; in Stone; in Mountains; in Stars,” Melville catalogs the many fish, dolphins, and curious creatures masquerading as whales in ancient sculptures, old galleries, biblical prints, book bindings, and street signs. Dismissing these as abject failures, he drives one point home. The whale must be seen in its natural habitat: The living whale, in his full majesty and significance, is only to be seen at sea in unfathomable waters; and afloat the vast bulk of him is out of sight, like a launched line-of-battle ship; and out of that element it is a thing eternally impossible for mortal man to hoist him bodily into the air, so as to preserve all his mighty swells and undulations.113

To know a whale, you have to be under water with it and see it in full. Though it might be tempting to think that advances in science and technology had in Kent’s time – and have in our time – vastly increased our knowledge of the whale, Richard J. King estimates that nineteenth-century whalemen “experienced a level of contact with marine mammals in the wild unmatched by even the most accomplished and devoted marine biologists of today.”114 Whalers like Ishmael – and the sailors that Melville surrounds him with – might have known the whale as well as it could be known. Still, in “Cetology” Ishmael describes the whale as not truly seen. It lived in the depths, it could not be sighted in full, and it represented something fundamentally unknowable: For all these reasons, then, any way you may look at it, you must needs conclude that the great Leviathan is that one creature in the world which must remain unpainted to the last. True, one portrait may hit the mark much nearer than another, but none can hit it with any very considerable degree of exactness.115

Engraved, sketched, and sculpted all over the world for all sorts of reasons in all sorts of ways, the whale according to Ishmael should really be left unpainted. Even if one image was less erroneous than the other, the act of depiction itself was a folly. Moreover, for Ishmael, language trumps image: “I shall ere long paint to you as well as one can without canvas, something like the true form of the whale as he actually appears to the eye of the whaleman when in his own absolute body the whale is moored alongside the whale-ship so that he can be fairly stepped upon there.”116 The eye of the whaleman, the text of this novel: they are to be our primary source, not any errant images. This novel has in fact been often illustrated, a lineage Elizabeth A. Schultz traced in her Unpainted to the Last (1995).117 And yet, outlining as he does both a theory of how to see well

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and a critique of the painted whale, Melville seems to preemptively reject future illustration. Kent’s images had to make a case for themselves next to such hypercritical text. Fortuitously, Kent shared with Melville a fastidious attention to detail and to natural history. When Kent’s friend Elmer Adler introduced him to a young Princeton University student who wanted to commission Kent to make a bookplate depicting a “Red Cock of the North,” Kent responded with a sketch of a rooster. Upon receipt of the sketch, the student protested, saying that he had wanted a phoenix. Kent, who had thoroughly researched roosters for his initial draft, refused on the grounds that he could not accurately depict a mythological creature. After much back and forth, Adler wrote with irritated exhaustion to Kent’s wife Sally: “I am still trying to sell a gamecock to a boy whose heart is all set on a phoenix,” and Kent wrote to Adler: “So it’s a phoenix is it? Well, well! And why not have saved me a lot of study in the comparative anatomy of birds? Am I expected to have some kind of psychic understanding of what would seem to be your and Mr. Tatum’s understanding of natural history?”118 Not every artist will dive into the comparative anatomy of fowl. But Kent did. Now, the whale is neither a rooster nor a phoenix. Yet, there are similarities, both between the animals and between the projects of illustrating them. Like a rooster, a whale is a real and researchable mammal and, like a phoenix or some other fantastical creature, it holds mythological import. Moby Dick, too, is a kind of mythology. Mumford said it was “one of the first great mythologies to be created in the modern world.”119 Kent, then, was embarking on a project as large and complicated as this novel, which is itself a curious mix of fact and fiction, documentary, and mythology. True to form, Kent began his Moby Dick illustration project with research. “Those drawings proved a monumental task,” he said, “not only in their actual making but in the preliminary research upon which they were based.”120 Kent would more than likely have known that Melville’s own expertise came from his taking three whaling trips around the world – at one point not seeing a coastline for a stretch of at least six months – and from doing additional research on whales when he was writing the novel.121 Kent did not go whaling, but he had his many sea journeys to fall back on, and he embarked on a fact-finding mission of his own, immersing himself in the literature and lore of whaling.122 He read some of the same books that Melville likely had, including William Scoresby’s Account of the Arctic Regions and of the Whale Fishery (1820).123 Kent also visited the Museum of Natural History in New York City and travelled to New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he toured the Whaling Museum; the whaler

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Charles W. Morgan; and the Seamen’s Bethel, which Melville had visited in 1840 and had used as inspiration for a scene in the novel.124 In addition, Kent gathered photographs of different species of whales and different kinds of boats, from many angles.125 Only after all of this could Kent begin. “At last I got to work,” he said.126 The whale in Moby Dick is many things: mythology, anatomy, classification problem, prey, predator, beauty, monstrosity. Like the painting in the inn, it can best be understood not by conclusion but by theory. As Ishmael says in “Cetology,” “Already we are boldly launched upon the deep; but soon we shall be lost in its unshored, harbourless immensities … It is some systematized exhibition of the whale in his broad genera, that I would now fain put before you. Yet is it no easy task. The classification of the constituents of a chaos, nothing less is here essayed.”127 We seem about to be swallowed by the immensity of the ocean, and though Ishmael proposes a systematized exhibition of the whale, this chapter and the rest of the novel show how challenging – and crazy-making – a task that is. After a lengthy zoological exploration of the whale – which is, in short, a “spouting fish with a horizontal tail ” – the chapter ends in exhaustion: “God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draught – nay, but the draught of a draught. Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!”128 Merely a draft or even a draft of a draft, this book can only attempt to get at its subject. Ishmael – and Kent – can only essayer, or try. Kent’s head- and tailpiece for “Cetology” make a striking pair and are telling of his book-length attempt at capturing the whale. His headpiece is of a whale beached on the sand (Figure 2.3). It is nighttime, the stars are out, and the sand is dark. The profile of the whale is anatomically correct, with its gaping maw and its baleen fringes. Fantastically, however, to the right of its eye Kent has placed a miniscule ladder with three tiny men climbing up it. They scale the body of the whale to meet four men already arrived at the top of its head. This is the whale as Gulliver, the men as Lilliputians. Or, the whale as Gulliver and Melville and Kent as Lilliputians, tiny next to the mass of their subject. Kent takes a very different angle in his tailpiece.129 This whale is not on the beach but in the water. It is not in profile but seen directly from behind, its tail above the water, its body floating, its head blocked out by the perspective. In neither the headpiece nor the tailpiece can you see the entire whale. The whale is too enormous to know perfectly or all at once, and yet Kent will try, by depicting it first one way, then another, then another, then another. Kent communicated a sense of the enormity of the whale in small head- and tailpieces and, less frequently, full-sized images. Since size was

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Figure 2.3  “Cetology” Rockwell Kent, 1930. Reproduced by kind courtesy of the Plattsburgh State Art Museum.

inevitably limited and scale skewed, Kent often printed unframed images directly on the paper of his edition, so that the paper itself became the expanse on which he explored the whale. Melville said that to depict the whale you had to expand to its bulk: For in the mere act of penning my thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me, and make me faint with their outreaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole circle of the sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men, and mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas of empire on earth, and throughout the whole universe, not excluding its suburbs. Such, and so magnifying, is the virtue of a large and liberal theme! We expand to its bulk.130

The whale becomes every man who has ever seen the whale, every era that it has ever lived in, every discipline that touches upon it. In Fathoms (2020), Rebecca Giggs says of a humpback whale stranded on a beach near her home: “What the whale inspired was wonderment, a dilation of the ordinary.”131 Her ordinary life was too small to contain a creature so large and wonderful. Like Melville, Giggs suggests that the mass of the whale is so huge that it actually changes us. In Moby Dick, the work of portraying it is wearying, sweeping, and magnifying. It is also at least a little tongue in cheek – Melville expands to the whale’s bulk, but does not really, but tries, and succeeds sometimes, but not all the time. Kent does the same.

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Kent’s depictions of the whale are very nearly as manifold as Melville’s descriptions of it. In mostly head- and tailpieces, his whales include a black and blunt-nosed sperm whale, surfacing at night; a whale, coming up at the same angle, a boat crushed in its jaws, men falling helplessly into the water; a whale, coming up at a similar angle but facing the other way, diving up into the air, a boat splitting in half, more men tumbling down into the sea, now with farther to fall; a whale at night in roaring seas, upside down, jaw open; an almost entirely inked whale, its teeth white against the black, floating on calm water; three whale tails in the air; seven whale tails in the air; six whales leaping playfully in and out of the water, no boats or humans to be seen; an uninked, collapsed, beached whale vanquished by a man standing atop him with a flag staked in his back; the skeleton of a beached whale; the fossil of a beached whale; a glimpse of a surfacing fin diving into the water; a whale dying in the streaming sun; the jaw of a whale, so big that it takes up more nearly the length of the page and so strong that a man hopelessly attempts to keep it open with his bare hands; water flowing off of a whale leaping into the rising sun. Some – those last two, for example – are Moby Dick, but most are nameless, representing not a single character but a keeping up with the novel’s basic insanity of whales, whales, whales, whales, and more whales (for a glimpse of just a few of these mammals, see Figure 2.4).132 Moby Dick is an ambitious catalog of the immensity of its subject, a treatise on the impossibility of ever capturing anything entirely in text. Kent’s images provide a secondary catalog, running alongside the text, keeping up with it while also commenting on the nature of its endeavor. Kent’s head- and tailpieces, somehow as repetitive and unique as the text they illustrate, are a visual essay on knowledge fragmented in leaps, surfacings, dives, bones, and jaws. Remarkably, in “Of Whales in Paint; in Teeth; in Wood, in Sheet-Iron; in Stone; in Mountains; in Stars” Kent includes a headpiece of four whales, one black and three white, rising out of the water, the latter three almost floating in the air (Figure 2.5).133 The black whale only shows its upper half or so, the next whale all but the tail, the next two whales their tails and mid-bodies. These might be four whales in action. But as the pale ones blend slightly into the background, their edges softened into ghostliness, these might also be one whale, shown four ways (a little like Clare Leighton’s birds in The Return of the Native). Here and throughout his illustrations, Kent lays bare the device of the struggle to accurately depict so “large and liberal” a theme by showing us the obsessive, drawn and redrawn whale, in parts. If there was ever a place to make literal the idea of the head- and the tailpiece, it is in this edition, in which

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Figure 2.4  Whales diving, Rockwell Kent, 1930. Reproduced by kind courtesy of the Plattsburgh State Art Museum.

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Figure 2.5  “Of Whales in Paint; in Teeth; in Wood, in Sheet-Iron; in Stone; in Mountains; in Stars,” Rockwell Kent, 1930. Reproduced by kind courtesy of the Plattsburgh State Art Museum.

head and tail are often cleaved from each other in Ishmael’s text and in Kent’s images. Even on the front cover of the trade edition, the whale head is on the cover and its tail on the spine. The book itself, this suggests, is the body of the whale. When Kent does depict an entire whale in one frame, it is a welcome surprise, and an unexpected intervention on the unfragmented. He does so in one of the most beautiful images in the edition. A whale dives down on a starry night, dragging a boat with it into the deep (Figure 2.6). Its tail is the only thing visible above the water line, and we get to follow it where no human could have: graceful in its element, moving water effortlessly, tiny fish swimming up. A sequence of stars follows it into the water, an impossible reflection of the night sky into the depths of the ocean. This striking image illustrates the last of a set of chapters on the head of the whale. In them, Melville has explored his subject philosophically, as in where does the head begin, and anatomically, as in what does it look like, and practically, as in what can it do. “Speak, thou vast and venerable head,” Ahab mutters in one of the chapters.134 Melville wants the whale to reveal itself, to express itself. But he can never get it to. Though in “The Battering Ram” Ishmael provides evidence and details as to the head of the whale, he also corrects himself, avoids the subject, and hypothesizes about things unknown. Marveling at the diving whale, Ishmael imagines what the interior of his head might look like: “considering the unique interior of his head; it has hypothetically occurred to me, I say, that those mystical

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Figure 2.6  A whale at night, Rockwell Kent, 1930. Reproduced by kind courtesy of the Plattsburgh State Art Museum.

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lung-celled honeycombs there may possibly have some hitherto unknown and unsuspected connexion with the outer air.”135 “Mystical lung-celled honeycombs” is a Melville turn of phrase if there ever was one, blending the mystical and the scientific, the anatomical and the imaginary, just as Kent’s image does. In Moby Dick, truth is a matter of circumstance and perspective. Melville ends “The Battering Ram” with this pronouncement: “unless you own the whale, you are but a provincial and sentimentalist in Truth. But clear Truth is a thing for salamander giants only to encounter; how small the chances for the provincials then?”136 If you do not own the whale – and who can own the whale? – then you cannot know it. Truth – about its life, its bulk, its parts – is a fantasy. And yet, there is something so true about Kent’s illustration. If the truth of the whale is a fallacy, the illustration seems to suggest, then here is an image imagined and extraordinary: a fantasy of the animal and of the ocean it lives in. Kent’s edition is by turns a meditation on the difficulty of Moby Dick; an encapsulation about what makes the novel extraordinary; and, in an image like this one, an invitation to sit in its beauty for a moment, before a return to its complexities. The dance of Kent’s reprint, then, is one of accompaniment, complication, and simplification. The image of the diving whale is also a kind of gift to the twentieth(and twenty-first-) century reader of Moby Dick who, in a chapter and a book about the contested nature of truth, can catch a glimpse of something entire and unfragmented. For the twenty-first-century reader in particular, it is a stunning triumph of whale over human at a time when (as Giggs describes in Fathoms) whales are washing up on beaches with bellies filled with the nondegrading toxic plastics emblematic of the Anthropocene.137 Whales are the foreground of this edition. They can be found at nearly every turn, leaping, diving, playing, attacking. Through them, Kent pursued Melville’s understanding of natural history, of knowledge, and of experience. In the background of this edition, though, as in Leighton’s The Return of the Native, there lingers another subject, subtler but just as multifaceted: landscape. In head- and tailpieces throughout the book, coastlines arise, horizons expand, and the ocean stretches out and churns up. Craggy islands and flourishes of grass give glimpses of the less watery parts of the world. And undulating horizons show the experience of being at sea. These are some of the least narrative, least text-based images in the edition. In them Kent explored something that had fascinated him ever since he first began as an artist on Monhegan Island: a search for himself in the landscapes that surrounded him.

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For Kent, where worlds met there were edges to be found. “I crave snow-topped mountains, dreary wastes, and the cruel Northern sea with its hard horizons at the edge of the world where infinite space begins,” he exclaimed in Wilderness.138 In one scene in that Alaska journal, he and his son marveled at a sudden drop of land into sea: “Suddenly the trees ended, the land ended, – falling sheer away four hundred feet below us; and we stood in wonder looking down and out over a smooth green floor of sea and a fairyland of mountains, peaks and gorges, and headlands that cast long purple shadows on the green water.”139 Kent, who at the time was steeped in Romantic poetry, found a glimpse of the sublime in the boundary between sea and peak. When he collected his life’s work in Rockwellkentiana, he saturated the front cover in blue and depicted an undulation of water and then smaller and then larger mountains rising up into the sky, beams radiating from behind them.140 “To live where fields were green in summer and white in winter; to live at land’s end if I could,” he declared in It’s Me O Lord.141 His search for the edge of the world or land’s end is apparent in his paintings, in his narratives of travel at sea, and in his images for Moby Dick. Kent’s paintings are a career-spanning exploration of the boundaries of earth, water, and sky. In 1905, in his early twenties, Kent went to New Hampshire to study with the naturalist painter Abbot H. Thayer. In It’s Me O Lord, Kent recounted how Thayer asked him why, on a clear, bright, day, he had chosen to obscure a far-off skyline. “I blurred it,” Kent replied, “you know: to make it stay back there.” It was a classic landscape technique that he had learned from William M. Chase. The horizon is understood to not be a ruler-straight line and so is blurred to create distance and acknowledge a sense of a curve. Thayer, however, invited Kent to take another look at Mt. Monadnock, the peak that towered before them: “Look at that mountain edge … Don’t you see those tiny spruces up against the sky? – so small that on your picture their height wouldn’t equal the thickness of a pin? So sharp?” Kent replied in the affirmative and Thayer said: “Well then, why don’t you paint them that way.” The moment stayed with Kent, who said: “And at those words, dogma, all dogma as to what one should or should not do in art, fell as a veil from before my eyes. From henceforth, R.K., see as a human being, thanking God and your mother for your good eyes; and as a human being, not an artist, paint.”142 To depict landscape, Kent had first to truly see it. Armed with this new nondogma, Kent first became an artist of coastlines only a few years later, on Monhegan Island in Maine. In his 1909 Calm and Free brown earth rises in a subtle hill toward the ocean.

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The line of the horizon is clean and straight, a boundary of yellow separating the blue ocean from a blue-yellow sky. In Island Village, made that same year, each element is again neatly separated. Dark green pines in the foreground give way to pale green pastures which lead into cerulean water which stops at an abrupt horizon line marked by a canvas-wide smear of white clouds.143 Kent replicated these color-blocked vistas in other paintings that he made on Monhegan and continued to create such tableaus in Greenland. On his first very productive trip in between his shipwreck and finishing his Moby Dick illustrations in Denmark, he painted Mirrored Mountain: South Greenland (1929), mirroring blue-black mountains into dead calm water.144 When he returned to Greenland in 1932, he painted many more such water views.145 Kent’s landscape style is unusual in that he splits up the world into component parts – simple, delineated, clean – and yet also has a realistic eye, searching out uneven firs, riveted rock faces, and delicate wild flowers on wide pastures. He made landscape seem neat as a layer cake without reducing it to abstraction. In hundreds of images in his travelogues and in Moby Dick, Kent reversed the perspectives of his Monhegan and Greenland paintings by depicting coastlines and sea-landscapes from the ocean itself. Where in a painting like Island Village a triangle of land obtrudes from the righthand corner as a reminder of where Kent must have set his easel, in these works there is no such safe harbor.146 Of the ice-capped region south of the Gabriel Channel that he sailed by in Voyaging Kent wrote: “The long shore of Dawson Island was before us, a treeless waste of sand cliffs, cloudshadowed, desolate and wind-swept. And the dark sea broke in gleaming surf along the beach.”147 And: Eastward of Cape Rowlett the land becomes increasingly abrupt and mountainous. Dwarfed, wind-worn forests, sparsely clothe the slopes. The naked structure of the land appears, rock faces broken sheer or glacier worn, vast slopes of ledge and gravel, stunted underbrush upon the middle heights, and plains of bog; and, on the summits, snow.148

Kent stretched his language to encompass what he saw: a waste, desolation, wind, dark seas, rocks, glaciers, slopes, ledges, gravel. Shadowed, swept, appearing, gleaming, becoming, broken, stunted. Similarly, he stretched his visual vocabulary to show the same thing over and over. For “Cape Valentine,” the treeless waste, he drew rivets of sea below a heavy dark shore, which occupies only a sliver of space before huge clouds take over, filling two-thirds of the frame.149 For “Corkhill Island” and “Haycock Point,” the sparsely clothed slopes, he penned a pair of images

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on facing pages of more rivets of water; sharp triangles of mountains; and darkened lines of sky, interrupted by vast rays of sunlight.150 For all those places and also Jackson Bay, Bahia Blanca, and Parry Harbor, he used geographically specific names, so that each cliff, mountainous range, and sandy beach felt titled and real. In such images, Kent drew what he saw, from where he saw it.151 Melville said that the only way to know the whale was from the eye of a whaleman. Kent showed the sea from the eye of the sailor. From a ship, the horizon can appear to be an edge, the place where sea meets sky, the dividing line between what we can sail and what we cannot. Of the first day of sailing in N by E, Kent wrote: [W]hile one world diminished, narrowed, and then disappeared, before us a new world unrolled and neared us to display itself. Who can deny the human soul its everlasting need to make the unknown known; not for the sake of knowing, not to inform itself or be informed or wise, but for the need to exercise the need to know? … We live for those fantastic and unreal moments of beauty which our thoughts may build upon the passing panorama of experience.152

Kent lived for such moments in which the edge of the horizon, the edge of the world, and the edge of his personal experience were linked. Like Melville, who evoked “all the revolving panoramas of empire on earth,” he sought vast vistas.153 His headpiece for this chapter is of a long, curving horizon line, black ocean below, white sun-striped sunny sky above, clouds framing the scene, a white wake behind a ship disappearing into the far-off ocean (Figure 2.7). A strikingly similar image appears in Moby Dick, of a curved horizon, a sun shining down in long, sharp rays.154 Such horizons and coastlines were Kent’s emotional and aesthetic whale – the thing he wanted to show over and over again, the thing he worked through in his images and his work, the thing that crystallized his draw toward travel and wilderness. In his ocean-going illustrations for N by E, Kent took his readers on an ice-ridden journey north, where sky, sea, and ship live in intimate relationship to each other. There, horizons could only rarely be neatly run down the middle of a frame. He wrote: “we entered upon eighteen interminable hours of blind-man’s-bluff, with ice and rocks as hazards and only luck to keep us clear of them,” and illustrated two huge entirely white icebergs rising out of an ocean whose color and textured matched that of the sky.155 The very concept of a background is useless here: visibility as understood from a ship simply does not work that way. As they continued to navigate

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Figure 2.7  A horizon, Rockwell Kent, 1930. Reproduced by kind courtesy of the Plattsburgh State Art Museum.

north, “small ice appeared, and the water assumed the color of milky jade,” and Kent illustrated the milky white of the water along with two ghostly grey icebergs.156 Here and elsewhere in the book, his horizons were blurred and his compositions disorienting. He illustrated the Direction small in comparison to the sea, tiny against dark clouds and wild ocean; and then from a different angle, one man trying to keep things orderly on board, the waves overwhelmingly large; and then on a dark night, seeming to bear straight into outcroppings of land and rocks; and then careening in the ocean, barely visible. Finally, at first port he illustrated white mountain tops, black cliffs, a still sea, and a boat sailing calmly along, all organized and neatly layered.157 It was the sea-going scenes that could not be so tidily blocked. Ishmael said “a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard”; Kent said that “A ship at sea, it should be realized, is as a universe unto itself.”158 Kent pulled from his own seagoing experiences in Voyaging and N by E to draw a rich and highly specific universe on The Pequod. As early as the headpiece for the Moby Dick table of contents, Kent depicted a tiny boat sliced in half to reveal a belly full of neatly stacked barrels and supplies.159 These, Kent’s image suggests, are an essential part of the contents of this book which is, among other things, concerned with the tools of the whaling trade. In one chapter, “All Astir,” Ishmael says that you need “three-years housekeeping upon the wide ocean.” Kent opened that chapter with a long rectangular frontispiece populated with the ingredients of that housekeeping: barrels, nets, boxes, poles, and such.160 The tailpieces of many other chapters are simple close-up images of tools neatly labeled as what they are, like the buckle of a cutting in tackle, a pipe-like bailer, a pair of slender spades, a dangerous-looking blubber hook, a thimble-shaped

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case bucket, and the chains of a jaw strap.161 These are the objects that make whaling possible, without which the narrative of the book could not proceed. In labeling them Kent signaled their importance and his knowledge of and interest in the daily workings of ships, gained from his travels. Kent’s Moby Dick images often feel, like the reels that Kent filmed onboard the Direction, choppy, alive, and unsettled, as if water were churning under his feet when he drew them. In one illustration, the Pequod, tiny against ocean and sky, is buoyed up by waves. Though it is the nominal focal point of the image, the eye is pulled to the water that crests into the horizon. In another, men row a boat away from the ship. In another, the same action is depicted, but with a flattened perspective. The line of ocean comes in straight then crests gently upwards to where the Pequod is. It is hard to tell which vessel is coming and which is going. In another image the ship is smaller than half a fingernail and barely noticeable in the center bottom of the frame as huge clouds gather above and uneven waves crash below (Figure 2.8).162 These images, all tailpieces, none made with explicit reference to Melville’s language, constitute a meditation on the sea as an unsafe, uneven, ever-shifting space and a diary-like procession through water by ship. In such oceanic landscapes, Kent’s pretense of imitating the wood engraving fell away. Kent’s Pequod-at-sea images lack both the neat layers of his paintings and the careful emulations of his more effective skeumorphs. Instead, in thin squiggles and thick black lines and uneven curves, Kent experimented, finding a way to express the longing restlessness that first bid him to strike out to sea. In one image, for example, huge, chunky cliffs frame a slight pass. The sky is dark and lined and the icebergs engravinglike, but the water pooling out to the front of the frame feels thin, hesitant, and drawn rather than engraved.163 In another, a headpiece to the “Grand Armada,” Kent worked more closely with Melville’s language, but still told the story of his own experience of the ocean, and played with the apparent medium of his image. Above four small whales cavorting in churning water, Kent articulated a miniature landscape of tumbling mountains, cliffs rocks, and waterfalls. Done in dots, lines, squiggles, and rivets, the image is stylistically dissimilar to those most often brought up to show how immaculately Kent imitated the wood engraving.164 It is difficult to quite make out the image – the whales are small and dark, the landscape all jumbled – until you read Melville’s chapter, and learn of the long, narrow peninsula of Malacca and of the vast rampart of islands that are supposed to be filled with spices, jewels, gold, and ivory and that “by the very formation of the land, should at least bear the appearance, however ineffectual,

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Figure 2.8  At sea, Rockwell Kent, 1930. Reproduced by kind courtesy of the Plattsburgh State Art Museum.

of being guarded from the all-grasping western world.”165 Kent, then, gives a glimpse from the deck of the Pequod of a vulnerable set of islands, only seemingly defended, and an armada of whales, also vulnerable, despite their fleet. He shows a world only available to someone at sea, a perspective informed both by Melville’s novel and by his own adventures. This edition is nowhere more expressive of Kent’s personal experience than in such cliffand-berg-and-boat-and-landscape-flecked head- and tailpieces. It makes sense, then, that in them there is no imitation of the wood ­engraving – this is Kent’s point of view, drawn and inked. This Moby Dick was an American edition printed by an American firm and illustrated by an American artist. The novel, too, is one of those that gets brought up as a Great American Book. As early as 1899, Archibald MacMechan wrote that “One striking peculiarity of the book is its Americanism.”166 Kent, too, would seem to be unimpeachably American. The Rockwells, who were originally German, had ancestors in America going as far back as 1630. Kent was named after one of them, who was

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named after two families that had married: the Rockwells and the Kents. However, as Kent’s biographer David Traxel put it: “One public argument that raged for seventy years was over the quality of [Kent’s] ‘Americanness.’ From the early years of the century when he first gained recognition, until his death in 1971, people saw in him either a genius whose art and character were of a uniquely American blend or a dangerous subversive who should ‘go back’ where he came from.”167 Kent was vilified for being, among other things, an active member of the Socialist Party of America and president of the International Workers Order, a mutual aid organization that was the first of its kind to offer equal insurances to its members regardless of race.168 Even abroad, his Americanness was sometimes doubted. When he lived in Newfoundland during World War I, for example, neighbors denounced Kent as a German spy in part because he had a habit of loudly humming German songs that he had learned in childhood.169 Friends even warned him that there was talk in the village of lynching him.170 Kent recounted his subsequent return to New York in It’s Me O Lord in a chapter entitled “Staten Island,” which begins with a headpiece of Manhattan, seen from across the water: “Home meant peace. And peace? – meant life. And life – with liberty and happiness – meant everything.”171 Kent was deeply patriotic and his radicalism, as it was called by critics, was to him a natural extension of his citizenship. “When I took up my brush and palette,” he said in 1961, “I didn’t quit being a citizen.”172 Kent was a determined crusader for causes he believed in, like the Spanish Civil War, the diversification of American museums, labor rights, and nuclear disarmament.173 He even advocated relentlessly against suspended railroad service near his home in New York. Of that fight, one article in The New York Times commented: “Others might have given up the fight; quitting did not seem to occur to the man who … after having been wrecked off the coast of Greenland, calmly put in a Winter painting there.”174 Kent’s survival of the Greenland shipwreck – the one he had just before exploring the country and finishing his Moby Dick images – was a sign of his grit and determination. His journeys abroad and inward had prepared him for fights at home. One particular political stand got Kent dubbed “America’s fightingest artist” by The New York Times.175 In 1937, the new Post Office Department Building in Washington, D.C. unveiled two new murals to celebrate the inaugural delivery of mail service from Alaska to Puerto Rico. They were Kent’s contribution to the nearly 1,200 federally supported Depression-era murals that had been commissioned for post offices all over the country.176 To prepare to paint them Kent, who was always looking to pair journey,

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artistry, and activism, had revisited Alaska and taken his first trip to Puerto Rico. Of the latter, he said: “I saw a country as luxuriantly beautiful as one might picture the Garden of Eden to have been. And people living in such poverty as I have never met.”177 Kent was determined that his murals might draw attention to this poverty and to the burgeoning nationalist movement in Puerto Rico, which was being actively stifled: “there clearly was … as there is today for all colonial problems the world over – but one solution: freedom. Most of us know it now; few realized it then. The least I could do was help focus our attention on it.”178 Kent shaped his murals around questions of autonomy and nationhood. In “Mail Service in the Arctic,” a group of autonomy and Alaskans sweeps through the frame, everyone in some kind of motion – handing off a letter; taking a letter; jumping off a sled with more piles of mail in it; or gesturing toward an airplane, which seems about to take off. In “Mail Service in the Tropics,” a group of Black Puerto Ricans dressed in bright white linens, many of them children, greet an arriving airplane, also with bags of letters.179 But whereas in the first mural all that work and motion felt communal, the mood here is different. The children gaze out in unexpected directions and the women grip each other for something – perhaps safety or comfort. One woman holds in her hand a letter with nearly unreadably small script. Kent had written it in Upper Kuskokwim, an obscure mid-Alaskan dialect that now has fewer than five proficient native speakers: “To the people of Puerto Rico, our friends! Go ahead. Let us change chiefs. That alone can make us equal and free.”180 From one group with a history of having been oppressed to another, Kent sent a message of liberation. When people noticed that there was something strange about the letter – and realized that it was not in Finnish, Haitian, Aztec, or any number of other languages guessed at – a flurry of articles ensued.181 One journalist in Alaska felt that the people in the mural had been depicted to look “like a bunch of rebels,” and some Kuskokwim-speakers felt the need (or pressure) to affirm their allegiance to the United States.182 A journalist in Puerto Rico protested that his people had been portrayed “as a bunch of half-naked African bushmen,” and Puerto Rico’s legislative body objected to the all-Black portrayal of the island.183 Kent later wrote that he was frustrated by how “racists made [the mural] ground for bitter criticism.”184 But it does not seem to have occurred to him that he had spoken in the voice of one complex, diverse population, whom he did not consult, to convey the message of another complex, diverse population, whom he also did not consult. By Kent’s measure, however, the success of the murals lay in their notoriety. “The message had struck home,” he said.185 Puerto Rico rarely

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made the national news and post office murals tended to be less Diego Rivera, more Norman Rockwell.186 Though he did not take full credit for orchestrating this publicity stunt until he wrote It’s Me O Lord years later, Kent did use the opportunity of a 1937 interview with The New York Times to clarify his position: I wanted the people of Alaska, having heard that the movement for independence in Puerto Rico was in full swing, to wish them Godspeed in their aspirations. What finer aspiration could a people have than a burning desire for independence. It is one of the finest aspirations of the American tradition. After all, we established our independence in 1776 on the principles of self-determination of peoples. Woodrow Wilson expressed the same thought after the World War: the rule of self-determination by small peoples. Perhaps I should have had him sign the message for the Eskimos.187

Wilson was well known to hold racist views, so Kent’s inclusion of him here is a possibly tongue-in-cheek allusion to politicians who only claim allegiance to the ideals of free governance, self-determination, liberty, and justice, for all. In a sense, this whole project was a test of Kent’s commitment to depicting the world as he saw it. He would not paint a horizon as blurred if it was sharp or a place as politically content if it was not. The skies in his murals are beautiful: orange and purple for the Arctic sunset and azure and yellow for the tropical sunrise. But whereas Kent often used his gimlet-eyed realism to show such landscapes as sublime and unpeopled, here he portrayed them as profoundly peopled. As a white artist often in pursuit of the peripheries – in edges, horizons, and coastlines – he was perhaps especially well positioned to depict people who were too often treated as marginal on the walls of a very central place: a federal building in Washington, D.C. Whether in a mural, painting, illustration, or memoir, Kent was fundamentally committed to the free movement of people and ideas. So, he responded strongly when in 1955 his application for a passport to tour the Soviet Union was denied.188 Kent would be unable to travel there or anywhere outside of the country unless he signed an affidavit renouncing any association with or belief in communism. When he refused, his passport was revoked. He then embarked on a protracted legal battle that he took all the way to the Supreme Court in Kent v. Dulles.189 In one hearing along the way, Kent’s accounts of his political beliefs in It’s Me O Lord were used against him. Kent had never hidden his activism. It was right there, in chapters with titles like “A Day in Court” and “Politics.”190

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While the trial of course did not focus on Moby Dick, Kent had included a number of references to the novel in his memoir. He had written of his trip to Greenland, of his efforts to research whales and whaling, and of his relief when he finished his illustrations. Selections of his Moby Dick images also appear throughout the memoir, along with other drawings, prints, and illustrations made over the course of his career. Kent called such insertions “complementary to the text rather than illustrative of it.”191 Had a lawyer or clerk or researcher flipped through It’s Me O Lord in order to use it against Kent, then, they could have alighted on an image of a ship’s lantern up in the sky in a chapter on lecturing or a drawing of a leaping whale in a chapter about later works.192 Moreover, since Kent’s chapter “Puerto Rico” is a cogent summary of the scandal of his post office murals and a ringing indictment of colonial policies, it is unlikely that anyone fishing for politically compromising information on Kent would have passed over it. And so it is very likely that in the chapter they would have noticed two prominently placed images of Ahab, one in his cabin and one on the deck of the Pequod, and so would have entangled Kent’s politics with Melville’s novel. The book that Kent had illustrated like a diary of his own life became, first, a visual complement to his actual memoir; second, a condemnation of his Americanness; and third, because he won the case, a defense of his most deeply held beliefs. In a very Melville-ian way, Moby Dick was Kent’s memoir and his memoir was Moby Dick. When Kent v. Dulles was decided in Kent’s favor in 1958 it allowed he and thousands of others, including Paul Robeson, to travel.193 “Freedom of movement is basic in our scheme of values,” Justice William O. Douglas wrote in his majority opinion.194 A secretary of state would no longer be able to withhold the passport of any citizen because of their beliefs or associations. After a lifetime of travel, Kent, who was then in his seventies, was instrumental in a landmark decision that allowed for exactly the kind of wanderlust he had built his life around. Kent told the story of the case and of his subsequent trip to the Soviet Union in Of Men and Mountains (1959), a pamphlet that he described as concerning “the European travels of the author and his wife, Sally, following their release from continental imprisonment.”195 This account now reads like a naïve embrace of a violent regime, but Kent was sincere in his beliefs. Remarkably, he opened the story with a frontispiece that evoked the headpiece of the first chapter of Moby Dick, in which Ishmael faced away from the reader and tensely toward the sea.196 This time, though, the figure is not Ishmael but Kent, and he seems not desperate but delighted, his arms outstretched,

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welcoming the journey he is about to embark on. Kent borrowed the title of this tale of release, which he wrote, illustrated, and printed at a press near his home in upstate New York, from a William Blake poem: Great things are done when men and mountains meet; This is not done by jostling in the street.197

We are back at the edge and the sublime, in pursuit of more knowledge and more experience. On one of his tours in the Soviet Union, Kent learned that the celebrated Russian director Sergei Eisenstein had loved the passage from Kent’s This Is My Own about art “as a by-product of living.”198 Kent did first; he painted, drew, engraved, and wrote afterwards. Travel, motion, and activity were a necessary prerequisite to creation, whether in the making of N by E or Moby Dick. Perhaps that is why Kent fought so hard for other kinds of motion – of railways, of messages from one people to another, of the freedom of movement. He wanted others to stretch their eyes along jagged coastlines and vast horizons and, perhaps, catch sight of whales leaping in or out of the water. They could, like Ishmael and like Kent, depart.

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Figure 3.1  Collapsed, Fritz Eichenberg, 1943. Reproduced by kind courtesy of the Artists Rights Society.

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chapter 3

Fritz Eichenberg & Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre

When Fritz Eichenberg was commissioned to illustrate Jane Eyre (1847), he could not have known that his engravings for Charlotte Brontë’s gothic Victorian masterpiece would serve as a sort of imagistic autobiography of his life. Yet, irresistibly, they did. Take, for example, an engraving that appears midway through the edition (Figure 3.1). Jane has collapsed outside of a stranger’s house. She is nearly flattened into the stone beneath her body, her hand barely propping her up, her bonnet falling down her back, tendrils of her hair undone. A clergyman and a woman peer down at her, their faces illuminated by the light of a single candle. In the novel, having left Rochester behind, Jane had spent a chapter wandering dejected through craggy heaths and unfriendly villages. Exhausted and starving, near death or even suicide – “Oh, this spectre of death! Oh, this last hour, approaching in such horror! Alas, this isolation – this banishment from my kind!” she exclaims at one point – she had collapsed at the doorstep of a clergyman whom she would later understand to be her cousin St. John.1 He took her in, fed her, and offered her work as a school teacher. This engraving depicts the fraught moment of that fortuitous encounter. As an early adolescent in World War I Germany, Eichenberg had had a strikingly similar experience. Domestic food shortages had left him so weak that he had blearily wandered around the apartment building in which he and his family lived, just above a hat factory run by his mother. At that time, he knew that he did not want to be a milliner, but he was otherwise uncertain of his future and bored by the local art school where he was enrolled. Mostly, though, he was famished, so much so that he lost his bearings and collapsed in a stranger’s hallway. He, too, was flattened into the floor. When he regained consciousness, he found himself being tended to by the residents of the apartment he had fallen in front of: a Catholic priest and a woman who purported to be the priest’s niece, though Eichenberg would later come to believe that she was actually an illicit live-in girlfriend. The eccentric but kindly pair took him into 95

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their apartment, revived him, fed him, and sent him home with books filled with prints by artists like Honoré Daumier, Francisco Goya, Mary Rowlandson, and William Hogarth.2 These artists introduced Eichenberg to the end-grain woodblock illustrations that would be his life-long vocation. He had found his calling. This day – which like Jane’s featured a fall, a rescue, a clergyman, a woman, and a profession – took place decades before Eichenberg had read Jane Eyre. It was not in imitation of Brontë’s novel, and when he later recounted the experience to an interviewer, Jane Eyre did not come up.3 Yet, the echoes of her story suggest that this engraver, who in 1943 had neither read the Brontës nor been to Britain, imagined his life into Jane’s. Inside this edition, Eichenberg overlaid his experience onto Jane’s at the same time as he shaped his figures, backgrounds, and compositions around her gaze, perspective, and emotions. Brontë’s is a profoundly first-person account, a self-portrait in text so intensely told that many Victorian readers thought that it must be an autobiography disguised as fiction. George Henry Lewes said: “It reads like a page out of one’s own life.”4 Virginia Woolf said that to write down one’s impressions of rereading the novel year after year would be tantamount to recording one’s memoir: To write down one’s impressions of Hamlet as one reads it year after year, would be virtually to record one’s own autobiography, for as we know more of life, so Shakespeare comments upon what we know. In their degree, the novels of Charlotte Brontë must be placed within the same class of living and changing creations, which, so far as we can guess, will serve a generation yet unborn with a glass in which to measure its varying stature. In their turn they will say how she has changed to them, and what she has given them.5

Jane Eyre, like Hamlet, has a special quality of mirroring illumination. To read it, Woolf suggests, is to have our own lives reflected back at us. The same could be said of illustrating the novel. Of course, Jane Eyre did not need Eichenberg. It was originally published without illustrations and continues to be widely circulated without them. And yet, the nineteen images that he engraved for this edition indelibly transformed the novel. With geographic, historical, and experiential distance, Eichenberg carved frames that were at once vividly perspectival (and so Jane’s) and deeply personal (and so his). He made of this edition a self-portrait, narrativized not by his life’s events but by Brontë’s story. American in design, British in content, and German in style, Eichenberg’s Jane Eyre, which was packaged with an edition of Wuthering Heights that he also illustrated, made for a distinctively transnational book, one telling

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of this moment in publication history and of Eichenberg’s own biography. Born in Cologne, Eichenberg studied at art school there before moving on to a graphic arts academy in Leipzig and then to professional work in Berlin. He learned lithography at a local Cologne publishing house and bookmaking from a mentor in Leipzig.6 When asked about his idols Eichenberg referenced not Expressionist artists like Erich Heckel and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, whose powerful, angular prints he had much in common with, but beloved Renaissance and Romantic artists like Albrecht Dürer and Francisco Goya, whom his kindly neighbors had introduced him to. One near-contemporary that he mentions as a favorite, however, is telling: Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945), who was best known for her engraved depictions of downtrodden post–World War I subjects.7 Like Eichenberg, Kollwittz did not identify herself with Expressionism, but she did pick up on techniques developed by Die Brücke, the movement’s foundational group in Germany.8 Also like Eichenberg, she was sometimes exhibited with artists from that group and is not uncommonly found in Expressionist catalogues today.9 If Eichenberg does not explicitly link himself to Expressionism, the moody, rough-hewn engravings that fill his Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights carry the hallmarks of that movement, and especially of its admiration for the unpolished wood and raw feel of Gothic German art.10 When Eichenberg arrived in America in 1933, he and his art seemed too foreign (and, despite his lack of self-association with the movement, too Expressionist) and he had few prospects. Eichenberg was Jewish and had left Germany out of necessity. Beginning in 1927, he had been producing cartoon send-ups of Hitler and the Nazi Party, which put him and his family in a precarious position. “I was in great danger being a cartoonist and anti-Hitler. I had shown him as a monster in various disguises,” he recalled, describing the tension of tying up his life in Germany while making as little stir as possible.11 When he immigrated to America with his family they had very little. “We had nothing. We had no furniture. We just had what we brought over in our suitcases,” he said.12 Finding work was difficult. “Here I am, take note,” he remembered thinking in 1933.13 When he made the rounds of newspapers and publishers with what he deemed a “staggering” amount of prints, illustrations, and cartoons, he found that his work was too biting, political, and alien for American audiences.14 The harsh chiaroscuro of his wood engravings did not fit into the publishing landscape at the time. Over the course of the 1930s, however, he picked up more and more work, and in 1943 he was commissioned to illustrate Jane Eyre along with Wuthering Heights. “At the height of the Battle of Britain,” he later wrote, “I find myself engaged in illustrating Emily Brontë’s Wuthering

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Heights and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, perhaps two of the most popular English classics in America.”15 He sounded almost surprised. The editions were a triumph and Eichenberg ultimately had a long and successful career that included illustrating Russian authors like Leo Tolstoy, Ivan Turgenev, and Fyodor Dostoevsky; an appointment at the Pratt Institute; and the authoring of a definitive art-historical survey, The Art of the Print (1976).16 People did, in the end, take notice of him and of his work. Given how alien Eichenberg’s style might have initially seemed both to American readers and to these British classics, it is strange, touching, and somehow inevitable that he would seek to recreate and reimagine foreign cultural objects for the readers in his new home. His Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre set was bound in dark green with gold lettering and packaged in a single slipcase. The editions were designed by Richard Ellis at New York’s Random House and distributed by the Book-of-theMonth Club for the 1943 holiday season.17 These dark, gothic illustrations thus found their way to the most middlebrow of book club subscribers. 750,000 copies were printed, a huge order given wartime shortages.18 The books came at a perilous moment for the country but a period of brisk business for the Book-of-the-Month Club, which benefited from a wartime desire for home comforts and discounted entertainment.19 Moreover, top ten lists during World War II show increased demand for books dealing with individual human values – just what both Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre provided.20 Though the Book-of-the-Month Club was mostly in the business of promoting contemporary literature to a broad subscriber base it also, as discussed in Chapter 2, offered a selection of high-quality classic novels to its readers. Released like most such novels as dividend picks – a category created after the Book-of-the-Month Club edition of Rockwell Kent’s Moby Dick received great acclaim – Eichenberg’s Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights were collector’s editions offered at a free or discounted price (the unusual “dividend” nomenclature was due to the fact that the Federal Trade Commission argued that if people had to be subscribers in order to acquire books, they could not be called free)21. Quite a bit of space in the club’s magazine, Book-of-the-Month Club News, is devoted to explaining the slightly complicated process by which such dividends could be acquired. As was typical, Eichenberg’s editions were announced in a brief note: The Book-Dividend for November & December Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë and Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë Illustrated with thirty-seven wood-engravings by Fritz Eichenberg In Two Volumes, Boxed - Retail Price $5.00.

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On the same page, with wording that stayed almost identical from month to month, the marketing copy explained that the books would be distributed to members for free in November and available for purchase as a dividend in December. To access that latter option, readers had to buy one of a selection of twenty-five previous Book-of-the-Month Club picks. Such books ranged in cost from $1.50 to $3.50, though only one was so extravagantly priced, and most were between $2.00 and $2.75.22 All that is to say that in the Book-of-the-Month Club certain books led you to other books, and purchases of contemporary books of fiction and nonfiction could lead you to reprints of nineteenth-century novels. Book-of-the-Month Club founder Harry Scherman was enthusiastic to bring book collection to as wide a readership as possible. In 1916, ten years before launching the Book-of-the-Month Club, Scherman proposed what he called “The Library Package” to the Whitman Candy Company.23 In it, each purchase of a large box of specially marketed chocolate would be a­ ccompanied by a small and sturdy leather-bound edition of a William Shakespeare play. Customers were encouraged to eventually assemble a “Little Leather Library” of all fifteen plays on offer. In A Feeling for Books (1997), Janice Radway says of the scheme: “As easy to acquire as a box of candy, Scherman’s first volume of the Little Leather Library promised ­immediate gratification and pleasure on the act of consumption. Bound in leather, however, it surely would last, destined as it was to take its place beside the other volumes metonymically implied by Scherman’s invocation of the term ‘library.’”24 The books’ seeming ­sturdiness was belied by the fact that in order to keep prices down Scherman was eventually forced to switch from leather to an imitation material that he later described as somewhat smelly.25 And yet, with canny packaging, Scherman presented classic literature as accessible and ­aspirational, ­consumable and ­permanent.26 Take your culture sweetly, like candy. Moreover, the ­diminutive “little” adjective credited even a small ­collection with being a library. The collaboration, which ultimately reached over a million consumers, neatly benefited both the Whitman Candy Company, which sold more chocolate, and Scherman, who afterwards broadened the mandate of The Little Leather Library to include mail-order works by other great authors.27 When he later established the Book-of-the-Month Club, Scherman similarly invited readers to see even just a single set of books as the beginnings of a home library. Indeed, in an interview he said that the notion of a set of books – by authors like Oscar Wilde and Joseph Conrad and William Shakespeare – was crucial to his successfully distributing classic novels at wide scale.28 Like Scherman’s Shakespeare editions, Eichenberg’s Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights might be best understood as a “little library” all on their own. The Book-of-the-Month Club’s investment in

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such sets is apparent in two other pairs of classics: 1930’s The Complete Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and 1948’s The Jungle Books by Rudyard Kipling, with illustrations by Aldren Watson. Released eighteen years apart and before and after Eichenberg’s editions, these sets suggest classic British novels as approachable and collectible. Rushed into publication after Conan Doyle died in July of 1930, The Complete Sherlock Holmes was done “In Two Handsome Volumes” – note the seriousness of that word, “Handsome” – with matching covers featuring crosshatched drawings of the detective with his hat and pipe. The flap jacket copy proclaims the merits of completion and collection: “Every word Conan Doyle ever wrote about Sherlock Holmes is here, complete and unabridged – all four full-length novels and all fifty-six short stories – actually nine whole books.” On the back a snapshot of a lived-in-looking replica of Holmes’s Baker Street flat “shows the room as it might have looked if the famous detective had just left hurriedly in hot pursuit of some new villain.”29 This glimpse behind the scenes, as it were, made this possibly intimidating 1,300-page-plus set accessible to the everyday reader. In his introductory note to the editions, essayist Christopher Morley recounted how when he was growing up he would start new Sherlock Holmes stories on his way home from the library and finish reading them before he got home.30 The promise of these volumes was that you would never have to borrow an Arthur Conan Doyle book from the library again and that the rush of pleasure that Morley had once felt could be permanently yours. The Jungle Books set also encouraged its readers to participate in British culture through book ownership. About 350 pages total with twelve fullcolor full-page images and thirty black-and-white drawings, this set was short enough to be released as a single volume. Split into two, however, with matching watercolor covers done in big dashes of color, it constituted a shelf-ready Kipling library.31 In the editions’ foreword, Nelson Doubleday recounts how as a young boy he liked a particular Kipling story so much that he asked his father, who was just starting out in the book business, if it would be possible to request more such stories. His father helped Doubleday send a letter to Kipling, who was then still alive, with the stipulation that if the book was ever published, Doubleday would get a share of the profits, minus a five-cent advance for the stamp used to send the letter. The query was a success.32 Kipling was Doubleday’s first literary love, first commission, and first publishing payday. In The Jungle Books, Doubleday sought to invite his readers to, like him, find these stories exciting, foundational, and beautiful. The flyleaf of the first volume similarly frames the stories as canonical: “Out of the welter of charming or amusing or exciting books for children a few remain enduring enough in

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their impression to become part of the reader’s cultural equipment through life. Kipling’s THE JUNGLE BOOKS is one of these.” Loving these tales was a signal of a particular kind of attachment to the cultural consciousness. As the edition’s biographical note says, “Kipling’s name and books will always be a part of the heritage of the English-speaking races.”33 This racialization of childhood, literature, and culture is troubling, all the more so because Doubleday wrote his foreword from his family’s plantation in Yemassee, South Carolina.34 And yet, if Kipling’s stories had not been a beloved part of your childhood – if, in other words, they were not a part of your heritage – they could now be a part of your home library, for easy purchase through the Book-of-the-Month Club. These sets, like the candy-paired Little Leather Library, suggest the British canon as consumable good. And though that comparison might connote confection, the Book-of-the-Month Club was also explicitly interested in educating its consumers. Most Book-of-the-Month Club marketing materials, including the flap jackets, photographs, and introductions in The Complete Sherlock Holmes and The Jungle Books, positioned the club as a place for readers to better appreciate and understand art, literature, and culture. Furthermore, many issues of Book-of-the-Month Club News had a painting or photograph on the front cover and a corresponding explanatory essay inside the back cover. The November 1943 issue that advertised Eichenberg’s editions, for example, featured Pablo Picasso’s Two Harlequins (1905), the now-classic, once-daring portrait of two elegantly posed street performers. In a neatly printed essay that takes up the entirety of the inside back cover of the magazine, editor Edwin Seaver gave Book-of-the-Month readers a friendly and to-the-point summary of Picasso’s life and career.35 If reading the Book-of-the-Month Club News can provide such aspirational access to culture, the essay suggests, being a subscriber would be an even greater act of self-improvement.36 And though not all Book-of-the-Month Club books were as classic or as important as those by Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, Charlotte Brontë, and Emily Brontë – indeed the club was criticized for its overtly middlebrow picks, which, despite the Picasso essay, were seldom drawn from experimental, modernist, or emerging movements, and certainly not from a diverse set of authors – that was really the point of the dividend: to shore up the club as a distributer of valuable and instructive materials.37 Eichenberg’s editions were part of the same project of educating consumers about a canon of classic novels. They contain, however, almost none of the extratextual or extra-imagistic material present in other sets or in marketing materials. Instead, they utilize nostalgic design and striking illustration as more imaginative modes of instruction. “Collecting is a form of

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practical memory,” Walter Benjamin wrote in his Arcades Project ­(1927–40).38 Eichenberg’s books are practical memory. With their gilded lettering, softly textured spines, and large formats, they reconstruct a different world and place and time; with their intensely felt Expressionist-inspired engravings, they allegorize Victorian Britain for readers who might – or might not – share a clear vision of it. Eichenberg was far from native to England’s moors, and American readers purchasing these books were equally distant from its heaths. They might have no prior attachment to the Brontës (or to Conan Doyle or to Kipling). And yet, in his engravings Eichenberg imagined a memory of Victorian Britain, and in these editions he offered that memory to Book-of-the-Month Club readers as a tiny library of two. These Brontë editions are testaments to how portable culture is, to how it can be repackaged and reinvented and recollected in new bindings, for a new century. In his The Art of the Print, Eichenberg described the print as “the most democratic medium in the history of art”:39 It finds easy access into people’s minds and homes, into collections large or small, public or private. It crosses language barriers and political borders, can influence public opinion for better or for worse, and on a fragile piece of paper may carry messages of far-reaching importance and cultural impact. It is altogether a charismatic force – black magic performed either by anonymous hands or by famed artists.40

For someone who had crossed language barriers and geographic borders with difficulty, the appeal of the print as political and cultural vehicle was especially meaningful. For Eichenberg, it had to be the case that print could be print anywhere, and that book could be book anywhere too. Like a well-chosen Book-of-the-Month Club dividend, the print could influence opinion and make its way into libraries large and small, public and private. In The Art of the Print, Eichenberg also wrote in praise of the physical book: “Fine books are still bought and collected, admittedly by few, but what relief they give from the tawdriness of our plastic age. They have an air of permanence. They are recycled through the minds of people and become treasures passed on forever and ever. And the artist hangs on to the coattails of their immortality.”41 Thirty years after illustrating the Brontës, Eichenberg must have been seeing the production of fine books decrease, as it has continued to do. Still, he celebrated their permanence, their nonplastic object-hood. And he would have hoped that Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights – by virtue of the extraordinary magic of printmaking – would be recycled through the minds of readers and become home library treasures, to be passed on from parents to children.

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As products of British culture illustrated by a German-Jewish artist, these were markedly wartime books. British life, at that moment threatened, was an especially urgent topic of attention. In a November 29, 1943 issue whose cover featured an air force lieutenant general and whose articles concerned Allied bombings, marine landings, and the US army, LIFE published a photographic essay entitled “The Brontës: Three Strange Sisters Are Earning a New Popularity.”42 Taking the Eichenberg set as its primary piece of evidence for “a new popular climax” in the sisters’ reputation, the article posited Emily, Anne, and Charlotte Brontë as strange figures in need of contextualization.43 The first four pages feature photographs of the parsonage that the Brontë family grew up in and describe an unchanged interior and trees grown tall since Charlotte Brontë had planted them a century earlier. The lives of the sisters were here documented, tangible, important. “They wrote of familiar lives and landscapes,” scripted letters read over a spread of other places that inspired the Brontës’ books.44 Insisting that the novels were always about local people and places, the article glossed over Charlotte Brontë’s experience of Brussels and barely mentioned her excursions to London. Instead, photographs of various Yorkshire locales, such as a pub, street, hall, and manor, were featured as explicit inspiration for Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.45 These images seemed meant to bring the world of the Brontës to LIFE readers, making it halfway more familiar. The article evoked a prewar Britain populated by famous literary places and figures. Earlier that same year, in June, LIFE had produced a photographic essay on literary inspirations.46 This was then expanded and collected into the book Literary England (1944), which was designed by the same person as Eichenberg’s Jane Eyre and put out by the same publisher: Richard Ellis and Random House, respectively. It was also a dividend pick for the Book-of-the-Month Club in January and February of 1944, directly after the Brontës set was released. Book-of-the-Month Club News advertised it as “Literary England: Pictures of the Many Places Made Famous in English Literature with Well-Loved Passages Which Make Them Forever Memorable.”47 Sparely laid out with large black-and-white photographs and short paragraph-long descriptions, the book, like the LIFE article it was based on, went on a tour through the England of King Arthur, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, Thomas Hardy, and other literary giants. The Brontës appear in the guise of a farmhouse on a lonely looking moor, the inspiration, the text says, for Wuthering Heights.48 In the November LIFE article, a similar full-page image of farm and moors read: “Wuthering Heights is a farmhouse on the dreary Yorkshire moors.”49 It is a farmhouse; a fictional place was presented as real, photographable, and visitable.

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For most Americans reading LIFE, though, the Yorkshire moors that inspired the Brontës were out of reach. They could only read and dream of them. In his engravings Eichenberg, who was also unable to travel to England, offered readers imaginative access to a place just at that moment in need of defending. After the photographs that take up most of the November 1943 article, his illustrations follow. “The story of ‘Jane Eyre’” is told in two pages and six prints, and “The story of ‘Wuthering Heights’” is told in the same manner. One four-line caption per illustration quickly and efficiently lays out the plot of each novel. By virtue of their arrangement and captioning, Eichenberg’s images become cartoonlike CliffsNotes to the novels at hand. They seem almost misleadingly more thorough than they do next to the hundreds of pages of text that the editions themselves offer.50 Indeed, combined with the photographs of the “real” settings of the novels that preceded them, the images created a false equivalency between fiction and reality. In them, and despite the ongoing war, Britain past, Britain imagined, and Britain present seemed fused. Reminders of the war’s impact at home, however, surrounded the images on all sides. Allusions to it populate the ads for Maytag washing machines, Clicquot Club Ginger Ale, Robinson Reminders notebooks, and California Sunkist Lemons that run alongside “The story of ‘Jane Eyre’” and “The story of ‘Wuthering Heights.’” To the left of the first set of Jane Eyre images, for example, a harried-looking husband scrubs laundry in a big soapy bucket, his shirtsleeves rolled up, his hair flopped over his brow, his tie and good pants covered by a polka-dotted apron. His wife walks out of a door at the back of the room, grinning coyly. Her hair is neatly coiffed out of her face, she carries what appears to be a toolkit, and her button-up shirt and highwaisted pants seem – unlike the husband’s feminized apron – masculine, perhaps so she can participate in war-related factory work. “I wish Santa could bring me a Maytag!” the husband exclaims. “Wish I could!” Santa Claus replies at the bottom of the page. The scene emphasizes the complicated gender dynamics of the home front and the time-consuming domestic costs of war. Neatly making the Maytag washing machine – available in America since 1911 and ubiquitous by 1943 – seem a necessary household item, it also posits Maytag as a patriotic company.51 Santa cannot bring a new machine, the marketing copy informs us, because Maytag is busy manufacturing hydraulic and electrical mechanisms for bombers and other fighting equipment. For now, however, it could promise to give that busy husband a break by repairing whatever parts of his washer might needed fixing. In the meantime: drink some of the Clicquot Club Ginger Ale advertised on the next page (cleverly fizzed up to look like a much costlier

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bottle of champagne) and imagine the English moors as they were before the war and as they might exist after it.52 And yet, that sense of escapism lives in tension with the drama of Eichenberg’s prints, which seem to glance off the page, and do very different work from the text of their captions, the preceding article, and the marketing copy. Sharing space with the Maytag ad, for example, the first few images of Jane Eyre are dark, strange, and eerie. And sharing space with a cheery, cando ad for Robinson Reminders notebooks – “’I forgot’ Won’t Win the War! But Here’s a Memory System That Never Forgets” – the first few images of Wuthering Heights are scary, wild, and evocative. For a Wuthering Heights illustration in which Lockwood is pressed into a bench by seven snarling dogs piled up on top of each other in a rush to attack him, the caption reads: A visit to Wuthering Heights is paid by Mr. Lockwood, one of the narrators of Emily Brontë’s story. He has come to see Heathcliff from whom he has just rented Thrushcross Grange, a house in the valley a few miles away. Heathcliff, a rude and violent man, leaves Lockwood alone in a room to be menaced by a pack of snarling dogs.53

Eichenberg’s chaotic engraving is in marked contrast to the caption’s journalistic articulation of places, characters, and timelines. Moreover, while Heathcliff is surely “a rude and violent man,” that phrase does not do him justice. Equally out of place is the image directly below the one of Lockwood, in which Cathy clutches at her face with a desperation akin to Edward Munch’s The Scream of Nature (1893). Above her float the feathers of the pillow that she has just, first, torn apart with her teeth and then, second, in a strange moment of calm, identified as turkey, duck, and pigeon. Behind her, Eichenberg has organized the image around her psychic state, with Heathcliff’s face rising out of the grain of the wood. The print’s to-the-point caption says: Isabella, Heathcliff’s wife, is maltreated by her domineering husband who is in love with the memory of Cathy. Heathcliff was a gypsy boy taken into the home of Mr. Earnshaw, Cathy’s father. He was humiliated by Cathy’s brother and ran away to become rich. On his return he found Cathy married, though still loving him.54

Here and elsewhere, the article clarifies and contextualizes the strangeness of Eichenberg’s engravings, working somewhat along the lines of Bookof-the-Month Club News copy in its desire to inform the reader. In the process, however, it simplifies and even misidentifies the story. It would be easy, for example, to think from the description that the woman in the image was not Cathy but Isabella. Both the captions and the marketing

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copy of Robinson Reminders live in a journalistic, fact-based space, one in which things can be reduced and contained. Eichenberg’s images, however, refuse such easy categorization or such simple slogans. Tiny as Cathy’s torn feathers are, they drift alluringly above her, almost threatening to leap off the page, like the dogs that menace Lockwood. In its next issue, LIFE printed a letter from Book-of-the-Month Club editor Edwin Seaver, who speculated: “Your readers may be interested to know that Mr. Eichenberg was one of Germany’s best-known newspaper artists in the pre-Hitler days. Early in 1933 he left Germany from choice and has lived just outside New York ever since.”55 Seaver surmised, rightly, that Eichenberg’s connection to the ongoing war would be of interest to several interrelated readerships: of Brontë novels, of LIFE, and of the Book-ofthe-Month Club. Seaver’s focus on choice, however, is likely an elision of Eichenberg’s Jewishness, and another attempt to make familiar. One of the successes of these Random House and Book-of-the-Month Club editions is that they do not include a note from the editor or a photograph of the “real” setting for the novels. This allowed Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights to speak for themselves, and so offered readers and subscribers unmediated access to the complex relationship between Eichenberg’s images and Charlotte and Emily Brontë’s texts. “Artists are witnesses of their time,” Eichenberg wrote.56 Eichenberg was always both witness to his time and to Jane Eyre. While that is true of his Wuthering Heights, which Eichenberg gorgeously illustrated with craggy moors, expressive visages, and unexpected angles, it is in Jane Eyre that he most fascinatingly explores issues of sight and authorship. In that novel, in a strange, cross-temporal turns of events, Charlotte Brontë witnesses the events of Eichenberg’s life back to him. On the saturated green of the front cover of his Jane Eyre, two neat rows of girls walk down a cobbled path and away from a brick building (Figure 3.2). They all wear their dresses primly collared at their necks and have their hair tightly pulled back into buns. They are as evenly arranged as the stones beneath their feet, their hands are clasped tightly in front of them, and their eyes are downcast. This dark and unsentimental print might scan like a line of refugees or like prisoners in a concentration camp. What might not be noticeable at first glance is that one of the girls is not like the others: her eyes are wide open. That girl is Jane Eyre, and her place in this image is an indication of Eichenberg’s intention to consistently foreground her gaze in ways both obvious – her eyes and what she sees shape the scene – and abstract – her feelings affect her environment. Eichenberg’s dedication to Jane’s sight is

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Figure 3.2  Jane, Fritz Eichenberg, 1943. Reproduced by kind courtesy of the Artists Rights Society.

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not exclusively indebted to Expressionism, but the movement certainly influenced his approach. As Kasmir Edschmind put it: “The Expressionist does not look, he sees.”57 Emphasis on sight and a created world were essential to Eichenberg’s images, which tracked Jane’s perspective as it matured and developed over the course of the novel. If his Jane Eyre is an edition of doubled self-portraits, it is also one of doubled visions. Inside Eichenberg’s Jane Eyre, Brontë’s ekphrastic language beckons us into her story even as our eyes flicker back and forth between her text and Eichenberg’s images. Eichenberg started where Brontë did, with Jane curled up on a hefty wooden seat, set against a large window, and framed by a heavy set of curtains (Figure 3.3). Jane is diminutive against these furnishings. Her right hand holds her head up as she directs her gaze toward the book that she holds in her left hand, propped up against her knees. The image, which takes up barely a quarter of a page, illustrates this text: A small breakfast-room adjoined the drawing-room. I slipped in there. It contained a book-case: I soon possessed myself of a volume, taking care that it should be one stored with pictures. I mounted into the window-seat: gathering up my feet, I sat cross-legged, like a Turk; and, having drawn the red moreen curtain nearly close, I was shrined in double retirement. Folds of scarlet drapery shut in my view to the right hand; to the left were the clear panes of glass, protecting, but not separating me from the dreary November day.58

“I slipped in there” – Jane slips into a book. In a narrow strip of private space in the house, between curtain and window, she gathers herself into a temporary respite from an unfriendly household. Hidden from view, she can look out on the dreary November day without being in it. She is safe. Many scholars have noted the sequestration of this moment, which treats reading as refuge. Gayatri Spivak, for example, says: “Jane inserts herself – ‘I slipped in’ – into the margin.”59 Eichenberg intrudes on this peaceful scene. In the composition of his engraving, he uses thick roped curtains to frame rather than conceal the window seat. On the physical page itself, his image is printed directly onto the paper with which it shares text. In that, this image is unlike any other in the edition. In every other case, an illustration takes up a full page, with a blank page on the back, so that text and image are clearly denoted as separate. Moreover, Brontë does not describe Jane at her window until the bottom of the page, so that our introduction to Jane reading comes from Eichenberg not Brontë. Eichenberg thus robs Jane both of her private experience of reading and of her own unmediated introduction. Yet, in another sense, Eichenberg shelters Jane’s privacy. While we can see Jane as no one in that room on that day would have been able to, we

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Figure 3.3  Page 1 of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, 1943. Reproduced by kind courtesy of the Artists Rights Society and the Book of the Month.

cannot see what she is reading. Garrett Stewart has argued that images of reading like this one purposely withhold the texts of read objects. “What the scene of reading may be said to do is to shelter illegibility in the subjective,” he said in The Look of Reading (2006).60 While in this image Jane no

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longer has the luxury of heavy red curtains, her book remains opaque to the viewer. The illegibility of the text protects it from interpretation. It can still be private, even if she cannot. Elsewhere, Eichenberg said that he saw the novel as a theatrical space in which author, character, illustrator, and reader traded places: “To me books are like a stage and I watch with endless fascination the actors coming out of the wings and slipping into the pages of my books. My books, I say with a bow to the authors whose words I try to interpret visually and reverently.”61 In this scene, he reverently staged Jane as interpreter of her own words and images. He illustrated the experience of his reading of her reading, but left the text of the novel to Brontë. In a happy conjunction – though not a surprising one, since wood engravings are deeply entwined in the history of publishing – the text Jane is reading is illustrated with the same type of end-grain wood engravings that Eichenberg worked in. It is Thomas Bewick’s A History of British Birds. Published in two volumes in 1797 and 1804, Bewick’s prints were enormously influential in the nineteenth century and beyond. The Brontë family purchased the volumes when Charlotte was twelve, and they quickly became beloved and much-used family objects.62 Charlotte’s father Patrick kept running annotations on various local birds in the margins.63 Scholars (for example Jenny Uglow) have even traced the image that Jane was likely looking at, which is of a tiny ship wrecked along an Arctic coast.64 Each entry in the histories ended with such a tailpiece, which Bewick called “little whimsies.” Moody and fantastical, they rarely had any immediate relation to the text at hand. With these capsule narratives, Bewick played with the necessity of illustration to be illustrative, allowing readers to interpret as they wished.65 Jane sinks into them, dreaming up her own stories: “Each picture told a story,” she says. Her experience of these tailpieces is loose and imperfect: “Of these death-white realms I formed an idea of my own: shadowy, like all the half-comprehended notions that float dim through children’s brains, but strangely impressive.”66 Jane constructs her own highly personal sense of plot, story, and environment. Brontë’s description of Jane reading Bewick’s book of wood engravings offers a reader of Eichenberg’s book of wood engravings a vocabulary for what it means to flip between image and text and be smitten by both. Simon Cooke, a rare scholar to write at length about Eichenberg’s Jane Eyre, has posited that “it could be argued that it is only in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that illustrators could begin to visualize … the intense passion of Cathy and Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, the emotional suffering of Jane Eyre, or the anguish of Lucy Snowe in Villette. All this is beyond the scope of Brontës’contemporaries.”67 Instead of crediting

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post-Victorian artists with improved visualization skills, however, consider Brontë and Eichenberg here as engaged in a back and forth, with him creating images, and her theorizing word and image right back at him. In this scene in particular it is as if Brontë were, over a hundred years before the fact, calling upon readers of this edition to form their own absorbing and half-shadowy senses of an illustrated Jane Eyre. Jane cares more for the images than for the words: “The letter-press thereof I cared little for, generally speaking,” she says.68 Yet, she also values its language: “The words in these introductory pages connected themselves with the succeeding vignettes, and gave significance to the rock standing up alone in a sea of billow and spray; to the broken boat stranded on a desolate coast; to the cold and ghastly moon glancing through bars of cloud at a wreck just sinking.”69 When she looks at the rock standing in a sea of billow and spray, Jane envisions it with the aid of the introduction, so that for her reading requires combining and recombining text and image, yielding up a loosely connected sketch of an idea of the book. Here, Brontë does not so much compare or relate word and image as she makes them contiguous. The same could be said of Eichenberg’s edition. Eichenberg often equated the importance of reading and language on the one hand and drawing and art on the other. He said of his love of reading: “In the beginning is the word!” but elsewhere he said of print-making: “The theologian and the poet might agree that ‘In the beginning was the word,’ but the artist would state categorically: ‘In the beginning was the image’; and it would be difficult to refute him.”70 The word came first, and the image did too. Understanding these media as on equal planes is essential to this edition, in part because not every illustrator of Jane Eyre aspires to the same intimacy between word and image that Brontë and Eichenberg describe. For example, between 2001 and 2002 Paula Rego produced a series of lithographs inspired by Jane Eyre, among them one entitled “Loving Bewick.” In that image, an adult Jane is seated with a gigantic almost human-sized bird on her lap. Its beak rests precariously between her open lips. This evocative piece, which was part of an exhibited collection rather than any particular edition, seems designed not to draw a reader further into the experience of this scene, but to jolt them out of it.71 Unlike Rego, Eichenberg integrated his images into the edition at hand, encouraging his reader into the absorptive experience of reading text and image against each other. Eichenberg was particularly attuned to the rewards of absorbed reading. Hunger, trauma, and reading were often entangled in his childhood. Between chronic food shortages and his father’s Parkinson’s disease, life had been difficult during World War I. As a result, Eichenberg had spent a great deal of time at home, reading voraciously.72 He described

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his relationship to reading and illustrating in an essay entitled “Portrait of the Artist in Love with the Book” (1965). He remembered: “From the moment I could read I became totally committed and addicted to books. They were to me friends and teachers, a constant source of inspiration, joy, and solace, and incidentally of work and bread and sometimes butter.”73 Books were both solace and vocation. They seemed to offer him access to different times and spaces: “You read the book, once, twice, three times; you absorb it, it absorbs you. You slip into the time, the place, the characters.”74 Like Jane, he slipped into the pages of his books. If in an illustration like the one at the window seat he somewhat intruded upon Jane, he was surely also entirely captivated by her. Of the books he worked on he said: “Their characters surround me, hold me, seduce me. If that sounds like the beginning of a passionate affair, that’s what it is. This is how I met Cathy and Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, that is how I got involved with Jane Eyre, Eugene Onegin and Tatanya.”75 To depict a character was to meet them, to get involved with them and, ultimately, to be accompanied by them for decades. Eichenberg said: “For an illustrator to follow in the footsteps of an author, to interpret his thoughts and words in images, to slip into the skins of the writers’ characters and to visualize and dramatize their moods and actions – what delightful, exciting bondage!”76 There is that word “slip” again, but now it is tense, and he is nearly overcome. After the image of Jane reading, Eichenberg proceeds with a trio of illustrations that foreground Jane’s emotional experience of the world around her. He shows her in jagged spaces that highlight her small size and her lack of control over her surroundings. When Jane is exiled to the red room at Gateshead Hall, Eichenberg depicts her sitting anxiously on the edge of a small seat and towered over by a bed to her right, a chair in front of her, and heavy curtains to her left (Figure 3.4). A large mirror reflects these surroundings back to her, so that the oppressive space seems multiplied. Jane’s back is to us but her face is uncannily twisted toward us, so that we see her as well as what she sees. Next, Eichenberg returns to Lowood Institution, the setting of the front cover of his edition. Echoing the neatness of that image, his illustration shows two rows of girls at dinner, their backs hunched over their porridges.77 Exactly unlike the cover and the red room image, though, here there is no indication of which girl is Jane. She could have her back to the viewer, as the three girls on the left do, or she could be one in the longer row of mournful girls to the right. She is one of many, unable to get outside of the geometry of the scene, or the misery of the institution. For the last of this sequence of images of young Jane, Eichenberg depicts the scene in which Mr. Brocklehurst places her on a stool in front of the

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Figure 3.4  The red room, Fritz Eichenberg, 1943. Reproduced by kind courtesy of the Artists Rights Society.

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whole school. Her slight body droops pathetically next to Brocklehurst’s enormous, barrel-chested one, with his disproportionately long legs and his forehead that seems about to be wrenched in two by his severe grimace. In the text, Jane shrinks from the many gazes directed toward her – “for I felt their eyes directed like burning-glasses against my scorched skin” – and in this illustration she almost seems to shrink from the reader’s sight.78 And yet Eichenberg places her there, exposed, revealing the problem of dealing with her visually, as a viewer for another viewer. His images are in his voice, his perspective, so that they seem a third-person response to a profoundly first-person narrator. His solution is to depict Jane and her surroundings as much from her perspective as possible. Eichenberg said of her character: “It is a challenge for the illustrator not to succumb to the heroine’s sweetness but to show beneath that frail exterior the unconventional honesty and firmness that see her through her trials.”79 He depicts her as frail but firm, sweet but unconventional. Interspersed with Brontë’s language, his images draw us into a richly furnished world whose texture is dependent on Jane’s emotional state. Later in the novel, Jane’s gaze becomes more confident, and Eichenberg’s images change too. For example, in an image of Jane’s first kiss with Rochester, Eichenberg details Jane in miniature, dwarfed by Rochester and by the landscape around her (Figure 3.5). This is not, however, a subsumed, overwhelmed Jane. Rather, it is the scene as understood from Jane’s perspective. Instead of detailing her figure or face, Eichenberg twists trees in unseen wind, shaped in tribute to Jane’s mood. Often, her perspective necessitates some abstraction. In a moonlit image, Eichenberg contends with the several voices at work in Jane’s listening to Rochester’s narration of his time in Europe and the affairs he had there. “I transformed myself into a Will-o’-the-wisp,” Rochester tells Jane of this dark period in his life.80 In their exchange, Jane alternates between citing his language and putting it into her own words. Eichenberg renders the complicated time frames and perspectives of Jane’s processing of Rochester’s story by condensing all the lovers and Rochester’s disgusted response to them in a single image. Rochester’s mistresses Céline, Giacinta, and Clara are not just depicted; they are distorted around Rochester’s figure. Their faces are shown in a detail rarely ever given to the adult Jane.81 Looking at the engraving, we can imagine Eichenberg imagining Jane imagining their visages. As for Rochester, he surges through the frame, away from the women. The sweep of his cape is composed of almost unengraved wood, inches of the grain coming through in an otherwise much-detailed frame. Christian Weikop dubs this “arboreal expressionism,” an attention to the wood that allows the texture of the tree to emerge out of an otherwise crafted piece of art.82

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Figure 3.5  A kiss, Fritz Eichenberg, 1943. Reproduced by kind courtesy of the Artists Rights Society.

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Growing out of the wood, Rochester is imposing and solid, yet also full of movement and fury. In visualizing her imagining of Rochester’s story and figure, Eichenberg’s illustration speaks with both Jane’s voice and his own. Eichenberg’s Jane Eyre engravings draw from two particular periods of time, inked in text and carved in wood, as well as from two particular perspectives, expressed verbally and demonstrated visually. Ultimately, Eichenberg’s and Jane’s artistic and emotional evolutions seem overlaid onto each other. This is especially so because Jane is a narrator, a reader, and a maker of text and image. In one scene, asked by Rochester to share her work, Jane guides the reader through a set of three watercolors she has painted of low clouds, swollen seas, shining eyes, and piercing icebergs: The first represented clouds low and livid, rolling over a swollen sea: all the distance was in eclipse; so, too, was the foreground; or rather, the nearest billows, for there was no land. One gleam of light lifted into relief a halfsubmerged mast, on which sat a cormorant, dark and large, with wings flecked with foam; its beak held a gold bracelet set with gems, that I had touched with as brilliant tints as my palette could yield, and as glittering distinctness as my pencil could impart. Sinking below the bird and mast, a drowned corpse glanced through the green water; a fair arm was the only limb clearly visible, whence the bracelet had been washed or torn.83

Brontë’s language is so evocative as to seem to shimmer off the page, suggesting an other-worldly setting of beautiful shipwrecks and gemmed beaks. Described as Rochester sorts through them, Jane’s word-images approximate what she thinks Rochester is seeing, or what we would see if we were, like him, lucky enough to spread the watercolors out on a table and peruse them. Rochester’s actual experience of the watercolors is withheld – we have only Jane’s description of the images, given in the exact moment when we could have used insight into Rochester’s interiority – but his processed, vocalized response is all about Jane. How did she feel? What are her sources? Who taught her? “You have secured the shadow of your thought; but no more, probably. You had not enough of the artist’s skill and science to give it full being,” he tells her and yet, almost in the same breath, marvels at her ability to paint wind, of all things: “who taught you to paint wind?” he asks.84 Like the “shadowy … half-comprehended notions” that Jane gleaned from A History of British Birds at the start of the novel, these images are shadows of concepts never perfectly achieved. When queried, Jane says of them: “As I saw them with the spiritual eye, before I attempted to embody them, they were striking; but my hand would not second my fancy, and in each case it had wrought out but a pale portrait of the thing I had conceived.”85

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Intriguingly, Claire Harman describes how Brontë, who had ambitions of being an artist, was equally hard on her own work. Chancing upon an old drawing portfolio, Brontë felt as if “some fairy had changed what I once thought sterling coin into dry leaves.”86 Like Brontë’s only partially realized images, Jane’s “fancies” – which unintentionally echo Bewick’s “little whimsies” – could not be translated from spiritual eye to actual hand. Jane has an uneasy relationship to her art. Before she heard that Blanche Ingram would be coming to stay at Thornfield, Jane had been starting to feel that Mr. Rochester could love her. Angered by what she perceives to be a mistake on her part, she draws two portraits, one of herself and one of Blanche: Listen, then, Jane Eyre, to your sentence: to-morrow, place the glass before you, and draw in chalk your own picture, faithfully; without softening one defect: omit no harsh line, smooth away no displeasing irregularity; write under it, “Portrait of a Governess, disconnected, poor, and plain.” Afterwards, take a piece of smooth ivory – you have one prepared in your drawing-box: take your palette, mix your freshest, finest, clearest tints; choose your most delicate camel-hair pencils; delineate carefully the loveliest face you can imagine; paint it in your softest shades and sweetest hues, according to the description given by Mrs. Fairfax of Blanche Ingram: remember the raven ringlets, the oriental eye … call it “Blanche, an accomplished lady of rank.”87

Addressing herself, naming herself, Jane plans to chalk out her face, in all its irregularities. Every category here is in one way or another satirized: plainness, self-abnegation, loveliness, accomplishment. These drawings were self-mandated penances and opportunities for analysis, reflection, and observation. Their very mediums reflect their purposes: one in rough cheap chalk, the other on smooth expensive ivory. Jane’s portrait of Blanche is especially significant because Rochester later describes his wife Bertha to Jane as “a fine woman, in the style of Blanche Ingram,” so that in this scene Jane draws her double or doppelgänger in more ways than one.88 Jane’s portraits are modes of erasure – she effectively un-names herself in the portrait – and modes of self-making – she looks herself clear in the glass and portrays the reality of her gaze. Given that tension, it pains Jane to later be identified by her artwork. After her escape from Thornfield and her collapse in front of Moor House, she gives St. John and his acquaintances, among them a Miss Oliver, very little knowledge of her background. Since Jane is such an unknown quantity, the delicacy of her sketching surprises Miss Oliver, just as it did Rochester.89 Jane obliges her by painting her portrait. The result enraptures St. John: “He continued to gaze at the picture: the longer he looked, the firmer he held it,

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the more he seemed to covet it.”90 He is not so captivated, however, that he does not have the time to tear off a small scrap from Jane’s drawing paper. Later, he will return to Jane with that scrap, and she will think: “I recognised in its texture and its stains of ultra-marine, and lake, and vermillion, the ravished margin of the portrait-cover. He got up, held it close to my eyes: and I read, traced in Indian ink, in my own hand-writing, the words ‘JANE EYRE’ – the work doubtless of some moment of abstraction.”91 Much as Jane may try to divest herself of aspects of her self – labeling her self-portrait with the title of governess rather than with her name and later on refusing to reveal her name – she remains identifiable through her image-making. Drawing is here a literal and irresistible signature, the difference between scrawled out lettering and sketched out portraiture negligible. Notably, Brontë herself published first pseudonymously and then, as her fame grew, became increasingly uncomfortable with the assumptions made about the man or woman who was Currer Bell.92 Moreover, when asked by her publisher Brontë declined to illustrate Jane Eyre, despite her earlier interest in becoming an artist.93 How our names and signatures betray us – that is a central question of this novel, and of Brontë’s public life. Relatedly, one of the questions of this particular edition is how Eichenberg’s images identify him, and how that might intrude on the text at hand. Like the illustrations that Brontë never made, Jane’s watercolors and self-portraits were never fully realized. They were distinctly textual. Part of Eichenberg’s task, then, was to grapple with the very presentness of his images. They were in his style and they revealed his biography as well as his experience of this novel. Yet, that in itself was a kind of tribute, because there was no question that these images attempted to be originary. They were a later, absorbing accompaniment to the text. He staged his rendition of the novel alongside Jane’s. Given Eichenberg’s sensitivity to what was visual in Jane Eyre, it would have made sense for him to depict Jane painting or drawing. He said that his very first drawings of novels were always about finding and lifting out the already imagistic: “as I read I underline certain passages which conjure up some kind of pictorial image.”94 Certainly Jane’s watercolors were pictorial. Yet, he never showed her sketching, and he did not depict any of the several scenes in which her art is discussed. Like the text of A History of British Birds in Eichenberg’s image of Jane at the window seat, Jane’s drawings remained hidden from view. Eichenberg allowed her artistic gaze to escape depiction, to remain written, not seen. The final illustration of his Jane Eyre shows Rochester walking blindly through the frame, his now-mutilated arm in his coat and the other outstretched (Figure 3.6). This is him after Thornfield has burnt down.

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Figure 3.6  Rochester, Fritz Eichenberg, 1943. Reproduced by kind courtesy of the Artists Rights Society.

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As  Maria DiBattista and Deborah Epstein Nord have pointed out, his home’s destruction and his resulting blindness are uneasy resolutions of the novel’s preoccupation with feminist desire.95 Rochester cannot see, but Jane can, and this engraving is done, as always, from Jane’s perspective as understood by Eichenberg. Quietly, in the background, gnarls of trees emerge out of the block, as if Eichenberg has allowed Jane’s consciousness to lift out of the wood itself. If the interior illustration bookends of this edition are Jane reading and Rochester blind, then this seems a final realization of her matured gaze, and her personal independence. Much happens in between this last image and the last line of the novel, but Eichenberg chooses not to illustrate any more scenes, giving Jane and Brontë the last word, in text as well as in image. The wide-eyed print of Jane on the front cover of the book, which is replicated on its back cover, only serves to cement the primacy and lucidity of her gaze. Throughout, Jane retains the autonomy of her own portraiture, and so of her self-portrait of a novel as a whole. After the publication of this 1943 edition of the novel, Jane Eyre continued (and has continued) to be read, reread, reissued, and transformed – in new editions, film adaptations, and theatrical productions. And Eichenberg, who had a very long career, continued to grapple with the relationship between his self and his work. In 1947, just a few years after the Bookof-the-Month Club distributed the Brontës’ novels, Eichenberg depicted himself in a lithograph. He is seated at a desk, one hand holding his graver and the other his wooden block. His head is tipped back, his eyes are closed, and he is sound asleep.96 The image is coyly entitled “The Midnight Oil” despite the bright metallic lamp that obtrudes across the frame. The artist is asleep, but his hands are alive to his work. What that work is, though, is withheld (as Jane’s book in the window seat was); the woodblock is left blank. In further self-portraits engraved over several decades, Eichenberg staged his interactions with his craft and with the authors that he illustrated. At the same time, he remained taken with the Brontës, their lives, and their characters. In 1970 he said of them: “My interest [is] still, thirty five years later (this was 1943), very lively. I read as much as I can about the Bronte sisters – biographies about Bramwell [sic] and so on.”97 Eichenberg’s curiosity about the Brontës lasted for decades, so much so that in unexpected ways he would come to understand his work through theirs. In 1977, thirty years after making “The Midnight Oil,” Eichenberg engraved an extraordinary self-portrait as the frontispiece of The Wood and the Graver, a pictorial memoir of his life’s work (Figure 3.7). Again he is asleep at his desk. The tools of his trade are scattered before him:

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Figure 3.7  “A Dream of Reason,” Fritz Eichenberg, 1977. Reproduced by kind courtesy of the Artists Rights Society.

a leather sandbag, ink, pens, and papers. In the crook of his finger is his graver, and below the arm that props up his drowsing face is an open book. Surrounding him are haloed tiers of authors whose books he has illustrated. Just above his head is Fyodor Dostoevsky, whose furrowed brow,

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aquiline nose, beard, and large forehead echo the artist’s, as if his visage is created in Eichenberg’s image or, conversely, Eichenberg is shaped by the authors he has come into contact with. Dostoevsky’s right shoulder overlaps with his neighbor Erasmus’s, one’s cloth collar intermingling with the other’s fur coat. Above Erasmus, Emily Brontë cranes her neck to look down on the scene. The grain of the wood behind her seems inked so as to gift her wings, and she clutches a copy of Eichenberg’s edition of Wuthering Heights, open to some page at the center of the book. Edgar Allan Poe, Leo Tolstoy, and Lau Tzu round out this audience of ghostly presences. Eichenberg entitled the scene “The Dream of Reason,” but it is much more than that, a dream uncannily populated by his authors. What was he drowsing about exactly? Eichenberg made the print in tribute to Francisco Goya’s “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters” (1799), in which Goya portrayed himself asleep at his desk, winged monsters and owls hovering menacingly above him.98 To solidify the allusion, Eichenberg perches a single owl on the back of his chair, its talons tightly clenched, and its face leaning dangerously close to the sleeping artist. Goya initially inscribed his aquatint “The Author Dreaming. His only intention is to banish harmful superstition and to perpetuate with this work of fancy the solid testimony of Truth.”99 This title might seem to pit reason against the imagination, but Alexander Nehamas has argued that taken together with its imagery, the etching suggests that if the monsters never quit us, that is for the better.100 Put another way, “The Sleep of Reason” and “The Dream of Reason” beg of their artists to be reasonable, imaginative, and monstrous all at once. To further underline the productive monstrosity of illustration, look to a self-portrait Eichenberg had produced just two years before “The Dream of Reason,” “The Artist and the Seven Deadly Sins” (1975).101 In that engraving, Eichenberg is again at work on a woodblock at the bottom of the frame, this time surrounded by personifications of the seven deadly sins. Lust is a naked woman, pride a man with his arms sternly crossed, and so on. If Eichenberg’s authors were his muses, they were also his demons, tempting, torturing, and seducing him. Eichenberg’s self-portraits were often playful cousins of Goya’s image and of each other, using the same configurations or even the same materials. In 1985 he depicted himself older, with glasses and thinning hair, a lamb, lion, dove, and hawk behind him. His woodblock showed a halffinished depiction of that same scene with those same animals. His composition seems self-mirroring.102 A segment of “Seven Sins” comes up again in his personal papers, at the bottom of what appears to be a New Year’s card for 1986.103 Literally cut out from that previous print, Eichenberg’s figure is now shown with just one of the sins, a gremlin-like creature. Above it Eichenberg placed three figures playing music and dancing maniacally, all pulled from

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a print that he had done for an Edgar Allen Poe story. With ink and white paint, Eichenberg softened the borders between these two sources so that in the final print they looked of a piece. Even in a festive card, Eichenberg recycled and reworked his author-haunted self-image. One self-portrait stands apart from Eichenberg’s whimsical reinterpretations of Goya’s “Sleep of Reason.” Though it was printed in a magazine as a few inches tall, it is better seen in Eichenberg’s archives at Yale University, where its original is a larger 8½ × 11 inches.104 The original object consists of a layer of thick cardboard collaged over with torn scraps of Eichenberg’s Wuthering Heights prints and then covered with a heavy paper cut-out in the shape of Eichenberg’s profile. Pinch at the seam between the cardboard and the heavy paper and uneven scraps of prints from eight variously sized and overlapping pieces of paper become visible. Eichenberg must have first glued them into an ovalesque collage and then placed his profile over it, obscuring the messier pieces, making for a sharper self-portrait. As fashioned into Eichenberg’s face, the landscape of the heath is woodsier and more abstracted that it was in its original edition. The hills that are his cheek and neck seem magicked back into the wood their blocks were carved from. Snarling dogs, a scared shepherd boy, a hulking Heathcliff, and a desperate Cathy all contend for primacy here, and yet somehow their figures are lost in Eichenberg’s profile, his own story winning out for once. Eichenberg was fond of mentioning that his surname meant “oak mountain” in German.105 In wood-engraved self-portraits, he literalized that strikingly appropriate coincidence by carving his own face out of wood. This collage tells a different story. It is face as all paper and ink; Eichenberg as constituted by the product of his craft. By tearing the pages from the prints from the woodblocks, he produced a thrice-removed silhouette that was still absolutely a self-portrait, just as his engravings for Jane Eyre were a kind of reader’s autobiography. Long after the fact, Eichenberg remained materially his authors, his books, his prints. It seems appropriate, somehow, that his self-portrait would be cannibalized from his Wuthering Heights engravings, rather than from Jane Eyre. Dante Gabriel Rossetti said that Emily Brontë’s novel was “a fiend of a book – an incredible monster.”106 Eichenberg’s collage is a tribute to demons and fiends past and an act of control over them. Jane’s “JANE EYRE” scrap was a kind of metonymical fragment of the novel as a whole. So too with this self-portrait in illustration, and with Eichenberg’s engravings for Jane Eyre. In that book, Eichenberg’s engravings were already a self-portrait in image, a fragmented life story told through Jane’s eyes. And, as we see from his later haunted self-portraits, Eichenberg’s perspective, once elucidated in Jane’s, was never quite free of her.

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Figure 4.1  Endpapers for, in order from left to right and top to bottom, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Sense and Sensibility, Shorter Works, Persuasion, Northanger Abbey, and Emma, Joan Hassall, 1975. Reproduced by kind courtesy of the estate of Joan Hassall and The Folio Society.

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Done in pumpkin for Pride and Prejudice (1957), lilac for Sense and Sensibility (1958), olive for Northanger Abbey (1960), burgundy for Mansfield Park (1961), pink for Persuasion (1961), turquoise for Emma (1962), and charcoal for Shorter Works (1963), the endpapers that open and close Joan Hassall’s The Complete Novels of Jane Austen are hue-perfect introductions to the world of the author (Figure 4.1). Printed directly on each edition’s papers are two miniatures: first, a brick-by-brick rendition of Austen’s home at Chawton Cottage and, second, a portrait of Austen, made in imitation of a steel engraving of an 1869 watercolor by James Andrews, who painted his portrait in imitation of Cassandra Austen’s 1810 drawing of her sister.1 Engraved in homage to the eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury fad for miniature ivoried portraits (think of Jane Eyre’s portrait of Blanche Ingram), the medallions recall a scene in Pride and Prejudice in which Elizabeth is asked if she knows the subject of a miniature portrait of Mr. Darcy. “Elizabeth coloured, and said – ‘A little.’”2 Just a few minutes later, after being less interested by a gallery of larger portraits, she will be surprised by the arrival of Mr. Darcy in the flesh. But it is that first, tiny portrait that makes Elizabeth blush. And her “a little” is in lieu of many other answers: that she disliked him, that she refused his proposal, and that she was now, in his beautiful home at Pemberley, realizing that she might feel differently about him. In the process of moving from miniature to painting to person, Elizabeth appraises and reappraises not just Darcy’s appearance but his whole character. Stilled in miniature, he becomes newly legible to her. Framed in miniature, Hassall’s medallions – and all of her illustrations for The Complete Novels – work similarly. They invite you to, between opening the book to its first set of endpapers and closing it after its second, appraise and reappraise Austen’s works. During years in which book covers presented Austen’s novels as treacly romances and teenage love stories, and in which a flurry of television adaptations brought her books to the screen, Hassall was meticulously 125

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self-conscious about capturing the Regency era and her relationship to it. By depicting Austen in miniature, for example, Hassall invoked the turn of the nineteenth century, and by framing her and her home in laurels she gestured to the myths that had by 1957 accumulated around the author. Moreover, by engraving a print that was a watercolor that was a sketch that was a woman, Hassall indicated her desire to elaborate on rather than to elaborate over and to trace rather than to change. Austen once compared her writing to ivorywork: “the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush, as produces little effect after much labour.”3 Like Austen, Hassall enjoyed working small: “It is a problem about the number,” she said, “I like doing small headings and tails rather than full page for the reason that one can do more and anyway I don’t think my large blocks of pictorial subjects are quite so successful. I feel I can say all I want to say on a smaller scale.”4 Perhaps precisely because of their size, Hassall’s images have often been seen as polite, cute or sweet, or as exactly the things that Austen scholarship has moved away from, understanding the author as more robust, political, and assertive. But to overlook Hassall is to dismiss the power of two-inch bits of ivory and wood. With an eye for detail, a sense of how much can be expressed at tiny scale, and a mastery of her craft, Hassall recreated the vibrant, social, and complex world of Jane Austen’s novels. And because these editions came out decades after the print revival that Hassall was educated in and that gave us Leighton’s The Return of the Native; Kent’s Moby Dick; and, just a bit later, Fritz Eichenberg’s Jane Eyre, they are a fascinating site of anachronism and a last, enduring instance of an even-then-past moment in illustration history. Hassall’s aesthetic education began early. When she was born in 1906 her father John Hassall (1868–1948) was already established as a prolific and successful poster artist. In one of his more famous advertisements, “Skegness Is SO Bracing” (1908), he promoted rail lines to the seaside with a poster of a fisherman leaping over blue puddles and mustard sand in front of clean water and clear blue skies.5 Hassall would have seen his work around the house when she was growing up in Kensington, although she would go on to produce extremely traditional black-and-white wood engravings, in marked contrast with his bright, primary-colored images.6 Hassall’s formal training began in 1927, when she enrolled at the Royal Academy, where wood engraving was not taught because it was seen as merely reproductive. At around the same time, she stumbled across an underenrolled evening class at the School of Photo-Engraving, which did teach wood engraving, though also mostly as technical work.7 As Hassall put it: “We had first-rate technical instruction and nothing at all about

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the subject as ‘art.’”8 While her instructor Ralph John Beedham was a traditionalist, he was also an assistant to Eric Gill, one of the great British Modernist engravers. And Leighton (of whom Gill was an admirer) was exhibiting her work in London during the year after Hassall began at the Royal Academy.9 Hassall, then, arrived at wood engraving just as the medium was on the cusp of becoming a more than reproductive art form. And she adored it. “It was very much more like remembering than learning,” she later recalled.10 This was without doubt her vocation. Like many independent artists coming up at this time, Hassall drew inspiration from eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century engravings, which seemed more artistic and less reproductive than those of the Victorian and Edwardian eras. Hassall’s idol was Thomas Bewick, whose double-volume A History of British Birds (1797–1804) – which Jane read on her window seat in the opening scene of Jane Eyre – was extremely influential in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. “I thought it was the most marvellous thing I had ever seen,” Hassall recalled of the first time that she saw a print by Bewick on a slide.11 She became an admirer of and expert on his work, visiting his homes in Ovingham and Gateshead and collecting his books and woodblocks.12 In response to an enquiry, she mentioned that she had “only” two blocks by Thomas Bewick and one by his brother and collaborator John Bewick, as if those three felt like not nearly enough.13 Book designer Ruari McLean said Hassall made “the most delicate wood-engravings produced since the days of Thomas Bewick.”14 Those tiny bricks on Jane Austen’s Chawton Cottage, for example, were classically Bewick in style. In 1978, upon the 150th anniversary of his death, Hassall was invited to give a lecture on Bewick. In her preliminary notes, she situated him in a longer lineage by arguing that Victorian artists had forgotten Bewick’s lessons and “were not content to let wood speak for itself in its own way, but were preoccupied with engraving it finer and finer to emulate steel engraving, so that the special qualities of vigorous black grey and white were wasted.”15 Hassall’s commitment to engraving wood as wood, not in emulation of metal, was both old-fashioned and new-fashioned, drawing as it did from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and from twentieth-century artists’ turn from reproduction to craft.16 Hassall, however, was nearly unique in her devotion to emulating past engravings. George E. Mackley said of her in 1948 that she was “strongly traditional,” and more recently James Hamilton described her as formal and comfortable and Patricia Jaffe called her training “archaic.” When she received the Folio commission, Hassall was at the midway point of

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a career that would last from 1928 to 1988, long enough that in 1986 the Birmingham Public Library held an anniversary exhibit in tribute both to her eightieth birthday and to the fiftieth anniversary of her first published work.17 Through all those years, Hassall’s aesthetic remained so consistently old-fashioned that for a lecture she did in 1972 she remarked of a print in John Jackson’s 1839 A Treatise on Wood Engraving that it had not dated. Of course, it had, just not to her. “It is such a good picture of a woodengraver at work,” she said of the image of a man bent over his woodblock, his work illuminated by a water globe, a device that she commented she wished was still produced.18 She herself engraved by combination of a water globe, an electric light, and a sand bag.19 She also stayed fiercely loyal to T. N. Lawrence & Son, who by 1988 owned the last surviving traditional British block-making firm.20 Both a master in the Art Workers Guild  – the first woman to receive that honor, in 1972  – and a recipient of the Order of the British Empire, she continued to engrave the way that she had learned to do as a young woman.21 Lest all that make Hassall seem like a nineteenth-century engraver lost in the wrong century, Kristin Bluemel has noted that Hassall’s success would have been impossible in Bewick’s time. Hassall, after all, was in the first generation of British women to benefit from the educational and professional opportunities won by the suffrage movement.22 Especially as an independent self-supporting artist who never married, Hassall was very much a product of her time. And yet, aesthetically her work was grounded in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Hassall was a good match for The Folio Society, the subscription-based book club of illustrated literary reprints that commissioned her Austen editions. Where she did not stray from classic techniques, Folio did not stray from classic novels. It had been founded in 1947 by a trio of industry veterans who had all come up in the bustling London 1920s publishing scene: Christopher Sandford (1902–83), Alan Bott (1893–1952), and Charles Ede (1921–2002). Sandford had bought and run the Golden Cockerel Press, a small imprint that had revolutionized the relationship between publisher and engraver. Its commissions of original work from talented wood engravers had been successful enough to tip the practice into larger presses, which in turn influenced the publishers who commissioned Leighton, Kent, Eichenberg, and finally Hassall.23 Bott, the most famous of the partners, had been editor of The Graphic starting in 1926, then founder of the Book Society in 1929, the Reprint Society in 1939, and Pan Books in 1944. The Book Society distributed books quite broadly; the Reprint Society reprinted them (a precursor to Folio); and Pan Books,

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in partnership with the Book Society, circulated cheap paperbacks.24 The Book Society was the book club that F. R. Leavis had devoted a good part of Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture to lambasting and that had inspired the founders of the Book-of-the-Month Club to bring similar practices to America.25 While his tactics might have infuriated Leavis, Bott was less concerned with parsing taste categories than in trying, in many different ways over the decades, to distribute large numbers of books to large numbers of people. When he and his partners founded The Folio Society, they billed it as a home for “editions of the world’s greatest literature in a format worthy of the contents, at a price within the reach of the everyman.”26 Right when fatigue with wartime rationing met an ability to finally use sturdy materials again, they commissioned excellently illustrated classics for everyday readers.27 By the time that Folio commissioned Joan Hassall to illustrate Jane Austen, the editorial board had changed hands several times over. It continued, however, to operate as a subscription service out of London and to pride itself on the best printing methods. Of the many smaller postwar imprints, it was one of the few successful enough to survive through the 1940s and 1950s, and to this day.28 Why Folio commissioned these editions at this particular time is not clear, but there was never not a reason to publish a Jane Austen set  – Devoney Looser estimates that prior to 1975, about 1,500 illustrated editions of Jane Austen had been published.29 Hassall’s editions were initially released at a semiyearly trickle from 1957 to 1963. Apart from starting with Austen’s best-known work and ending with her least-known ones (from Pride and Prejudice to her Shorter Works), there was not any special logic to their initial order of release; they do not follow the original publication order of the novels. The text of each book was taken from the R. W. Chapman editions, first published in 1923 (except for Austen’s juvenilia, which he edited in 1954). To print them, Folio hired Butler & Tanner Ltd., who worked in close collaboration with Hassall. “Here is an artist prepared to co-operate with the printer on the same level,” art historian Basil Gray had said of her in 1949.30 Like Rockwell Kent  – but without receiving the same credit for it  – Hassall was a triple-threat illustrator, designer, and typographer. In anticipation of the 1975 rerelease of the books, Folio editor Tom Wilkinson, who had been Hassall’s point person for almost the entirety of her work on the Austen engravings, wrote to tell her: “I am very excited about this prospect, because I feel that this particular set of books was one of the best we ever did. Perhaps it is unfair of me to even think that we could improve upon the original editions, but I feel sure that we could, and that it is

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worth having a try.”31 The 1975 editions had the same bindings and texts as the originals but contained several new engravings per book. More importantly, they presented the books as a collection, to be purchased together, thus drumming up new interest in an old set (of old novels). Here, because Hassall was so consistent in her approach to the novels and so committed to seamlessly incorporating her new illustrations into the second printing of the books, I will be referencing the 1975 editions. Each edition featured a short introduction by Richard Church, a poet, novelist, and critic. His essays are dismissive paratexts to these commercial editions. In the introduction to Northanger Abbey, for example, Church wrote: “Of all Jane Austen’s novels, Northanger Abbey is the most difficult to assess. I say this, presuming that, here and there, readers may be found who want to assess these half-dozen masterpieces, rather than enjoy them, to revel in them, and finally to wonder at them.”32 Church rather snottily speculated that there might be readers who would only wish to enjoy, revel, and wonder at the novels. He, unlike these neophytes, addressed himself to the necessities and difficulties of assessment. This novel, he said, is a “literary puzzle” to the critic.33 He treated the other novels in the same manner, positing his two- to six-page entries as solutions to puzzles. In introducing Mansfield Park, he said: “The deathless army of Jane Austen lovers has always been divided into two camps, those who put Pride and Prejudice first, and those who prefer Emma. Sotto voce enquiry amongst the latter has led me to the belief that none of them can make up his or her mind whether or not Emma must give pride of place to Mansfield Park.”34 With some Italian thrown in for good measure, Church implied that he had quietly – shamefully perhaps – inquired into Austen’s zombied army of acolytes and been disappointed. These introductions would no doubt be alienating to a passionate aficionado who lacked Church’s ability to proclaim, with absolute certainty, that since Austen’s morality tale may not have aged well, they should instead think of Mansfield Park as a full-on satire.35 Church evinced the same attitude in his notes on Sense and Sensibility: “This novel is not largely discussed by Jane fanatics, and it may be assumed, therefore, not to be a favourite. I cannot understand why.”36 By destabilizing what he saw as the misconceptions of casual readers, Church placed himself in the position to stage a series of interventions on Jane Austen’s novels. Outside and inside the editions, however, Hassall’s intervention is the more dynamic, inviting, and satisfying one. She wanted these editions to sing of the years leading up to their being written, of the engravings that Austen might have known, and of the fabrics that she might have touched.

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All of the illustrators in this book set themselves a somewhat impossible project: Leighton to capture a lost geography; Kent to wrangle all those whales and waves; Eichenberg to inhabit Jane’s perspective while expressing his own. In giving herself the task of recreating an era a century and a half after the fact, Hassall confronted history itself. Hassall recognized that her attempts at accuracy would not be foolproof. “I am sure that my own work will display the same trends to future generations,” she said of past illustrators of Jane Austen, “but I am too close to my own era to see it.”37 There is such pathos to this admission of how time would betray her place in it. Hassall’s editions are of course objects of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. They were illustrated by a twentieth-century artist and distributed by a twentieth-century book club. And, as Bluemel has noted of Hassall’s illustrations for children’s books, “the existence of these engravings as book illustrations depends on modern industrial processes of mechanical reproduction, mass distribution, and international marketing.”38 Looking at Hassall’s editions, though, what most stands out is how undated they are  – or, despite their smoothly printed engravings and tightly woven bindings – how of the Regency era they seem. Hassall designed her editions in marked contrast to many other illustrated Jane Austen sets. Kathryn Sutherland has explored how Jane Austen was “transmitted and transformed” through early volumes, modern editions, biographies, continuations, and film versions. She and Devoney Looser have especially noted that illustrators of Jane Austen were influenced by a mid-nineteenth-century “Cranford School” of illustration, characterized by line drawings that idealized the Regency period with cherubic flourishes.39 Sutherland, however, omits Hassall from her narrative and Looser only mentions her alongside such Victorianized illustrators. Remarkably, though, not only was Hassall not of this Cranfordizing school, but she had actually illustrated Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford in 1940.40 When she began work on the novel, she considered how it treated clothes: the narrator wrote in 1849, Miss Jenkyns wore the fashion of 1828, and the other ladies would range in between. For Hassall, depicting a historical moment meant showing how time had accumulated toward it. An 1849 novel did not need to be strictly mid-nineteenth century in its aesthetic. In ­anticipation of work on the project, she had decamped from 1938 to 1939 to the small village of Highgate, which she had chosen because she thought it similar to Cranford. While living there she met a Dr. Connington who, upon seeing her buying relevant fashion plates at the local bookstore, invited her to reference in his collection of nineteenth-century clothing, which was so good that it was later placed in a museum. She took him

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up on the offer and sketched the clothes, drafting, for example, a cloak several times over.41 “The subject of fashion is delightful and of paramount importance,” she observed.42 When she illustrated her Austen editions, she similarly researched fashion plates, portraits, conversation pieces, and children’s books from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. On one trip to the British Library, Hassall critiqued old editions of Emma and Mansfield Park from 1892 along some of the same lines that Sutherland and Looser would later use. She was bemused by how one artist had given Henry Crawford too bushy a beard and Harriet Smith too tall a figure and all of the women’s dresses overly Victorian flounces.43 Her goal for the Folio set was to much more firmly and precisely situate Austen in her own time period. Hassall’s archives contain whole pages covered with tiny eighteenth- and nineteenth-century-style flowered frames, fleurs-de-lis, curlicues, and flourishes, done in pencil, ink, and watercolor.44 On one large sheet folded in half she inked out five variously shaped and sized bouquets of flowers and noted down: “Painted & Printed Fabrics, Clouzot & Morris, Metropolitan Museum of Art.”45 “Clouzot” is Henri Clouzot (1865–1941), who wrote Painted and Printed Fabrics (1927), a history of eighteenth-century French textiles. “Morris” is Frances Morris (1866–1955), who was the first textiles curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The exhibit in question, named after Clouzot’s book, went up in 1927, was curated by Morris, and included many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and French printed cottons.46 Though Hassall saw the exhibit decades before illustrating Austen’s novels, she kept these sheets for later use and sustained her interest in shape, texture, and arrangement throughout her career. Hassall drew from her technical understanding of textiles when she papered the front and back covers of Austen’s Complete Novels with complementary or contrasting stripes of neat feathers. She did Shorter Works in maroon on rust red, Mansfield Park and Emma in dark brown on mustard orange, Pride and Prejudice and Northanger Abbey in plum on buttercup yellow, and Persuasion and Sense and Sensibility in dark lavender on robin’s egg blue. She shaded these cover choices in contrast to their endpapers, so that the editions, though illustrated in black and white, open colorfully. She also borrowed motifs from her collection for the roses, harps, fans, flowers, garlands, hourglasses, and anchors that dot the editions’s spines, as well as for their decorative chapter headings.47 She was inspired by a fortuitous discovery she had made while teaching in Edinburgh during World War II, a position she had taken to replace a teacher who had qualified for the Merchant Service, and which served as a

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means for her to escape the chaos of wartime London.48 While at a benefit sale, she spotted a beautiful tea cozy: I saw a tea cozy made from patches of stuff that I recognized as being late eighteenth-century and regency prints. The lady who had brought it to the sale said her mother had made it from the patchwork bag of her greatgrandmother, her own mother being then ninety years of age. She asked me to her house to meet the old lady, who was so good as to allow me to rummage in the precious bag and to keep any that I liked, as they were all destined to be made into bags and knickknacks.49

Hassall immediately recognized the value of the fabrics and, in a lovely moment of womanly inheritance, took home and preserved this greatgrandmother’s hodge-podge of ribbons and scraps. It was the beginning of a collection that would span from about 1750 to 1840.50 Many years later, in 1957, Hassall retrieved the textiles, copied their designs, engraved them onto wood, printed them, and then pasted them together for use in her Folio Society set. Her editions, then, are late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century texts illustrated in the mid-twentieth century by an artist inspired by the aesthetics of late eighteenth-century fabrics, midnineteenth-century drawing, and early twentieth-century engraving. They are materially aware, historically precise, and imaginatively collated emblems for the Regency era. In illustrations full of motion and sociability, Hassall staged Austen’s novels with carefully elucidated design details, highly gestural characters, immaculately furnished rooms, and tiny panoramic backgrounds. Whole worlds on two-inch bits of wood. She envisioned each of her illustrations in relationship to text, sizing them to be a third or a half page but no more, so that they would be surrounded by words. To produce such small images  – which really are often sometimes about two inches wide  – she shrank almost everything – houses, trees, figures, and furnishings – often to much less than the size of a pinky finger. To avoid the temptation of choosing only her favorite moments to illustrate, and so ending up with an illmixed cake of a book, with all the fruit in one spot (the metaphor is hers), Hassall would make thirteen paper markers in the book at regular intervals and then look for inspiration at or near those markers.51 Done in pencil and then sometimes inked over, the initial sketches that resulted from this process were also true to scale. They vary in detail but tend to begin roughly, with just figures and perhaps a single background element, like the angle of a curtain or the rough lines of a fireplace. Hassall always advised beginning with such sketches: “I find that if you do a very careful drawing on wood

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your engraving follows those lines and is not free; you should develop and amplify the drawing as you go along, not copy something you have already drawn.”52 She preferred to add detail later, on the wood itself. “I find myself developing, elaborating, and inventing with a graver which simply does not happen when I am using a pen,” Hassall explained of the movement from sketch to illustration.53 Like Thomas Bewick, she saw wood as her primary medium and preferred to work and rework images inside the grain of a block, rather than on paper. To Hassall a book was a coherent thing, elaborated on wood and paper, and shaped around story and text. When the book was closer to publication, Hassall would often return to a sketch to scrawl its final page number in red ink on its front.54 She was always planning with the edition in mind, considering pagination, distribution, and narrative. Indeed, one of the accidents of her sketches is that, absenting their relevant text, they can easily be misidentified or misarranged, whether within a novel or between them. In her archives at The Fitzwilliam Museum at the University of Cambridge, Hassall’s sketches are often incorrectly labeled, having been shuffled into the envelopes for the wrong novels. Distinguishing elements in the images exist of course – Marianne being carried in from the storm by a heroic Willoughby, for example – but to see if a dock scene is from Portsmouth in Mansfield Park or from Lyme in Persuasion is more difficult. Emma in particular is a novel of so many drawing rooms that its sketches and engravings could easily be reordered. Early on in working with Hassall on the 1975 revisions, Wilkinson wrote her to say: “I am sure we are going to create an edition which will be spoken of in the future as a landmark in the marriage of text and illustration.”55 His compliment – that text and image seemed married – suggests that the goal of this project was to integrate image and text. In the same letter, he wrote: “It is a continual mystery to me how you manage to get such a feeling of sparkle and luminosity in your work, so that it almost comes off the page. Handling these illustrations, and fitting them into their places in the text, has inspired me to go back and reread the whole of Jane Austen.”56 That placing Hassall’s illustrations in the books was the thing that made him reread the novels – rather than commissioning Hassall, for example  – speaks to how absolutely these images came alive next to text. Even Hassall’s seven frontispieces, which are printed before the text of Austen’s novels, are best understood in relationship to language. In every edition, Hassall introduced readers to her world and Austen’s through a full-page image and a facing page denoting the book’s title, author, introduction, engraver, society, place of publication, and date. She surrounded

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each page with a rectangle of tiny interlinked flowers and vines copied from her textile collection. Her Sense and Sensibility frontispiece, for example, features Elinor and Marianne, just after Marianne has received a letter from Willoughby.57 Marianne’s right hand is at her face while her left crumples a page from the letter, the rest of which is in three sheets on the floor, at Elinor’s feet. Hassall recalled engraving this piece several times over even though she was past Folio’s deadline. She modeled Marianne on portraits of Lady Hamilton, but had more trouble with Elinor, whose figure Austen vaguely called “correct.”58 Note Hassall’s interest in precise language – what does correct mean to an artist? Perhaps that is why more than the generically pretty figures, a gesture is at the heart of this image: that of Elinor supporting Marianne, who almost faints into the floor along with those dropped pages. In her frontispiece for Pride and Prejudice, Hassall also focused on a letter received. She depicted Darcy and Elizabeth outside with Lady Catherine’s estate in the background.59 In one hand he holds his hat and in the other a letter for her. Their gazes are diverted, he looking out, she down at the letter. Hassall thus began both Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice by foregrounding the act of reading itself. Hassall’s illustrations are, perversely, invitations into text. They point not to themselves but to Austen’s language. In her frontispiece for Northanger Abbey, for example, Hassall placed Catherine in a crowded ballroom with Mrs. Allen and Mr. Tilney (Figure 4.2). Taking inspiration from the previous chapter, in which Austen said of a gathering that the “season was full, the room crowded, and the two ladies squeezed in as well as they could,” Hassall stuffed the room with people.60 In the background, a man and a woman step further into the room. Behind them are more figures, crowded together. Above them, Hassall detailed three chandeliers with at least two dozen candles each and engraved each of those candles with at least two dozen tiny white dashes of bright illumination. On the walls, she engraved slender lines to create rich texture and also added several doors, leading to other spaces, other groups, other crowds. As an introduction to the novel, this frontispiece suggests a world that the reader might almost be able to participate in and a space that they could wander through. But this lovely scene also invites rereading. It is arguably best understood after having read the early chapters in the novel, which both allows the identification of each character involved and lends specific context to the scene. Hassall caught not just the scene of the ball and Catherine’s first encounter with Mr. Tilney, but the moment at which Mrs. Allen interrupts their conversation: “‘My dear Catherine,’ said she, ‘do take this pin out of my sleeve; I am afraid it has torn a hole already;

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Figure 4.2  Frontispiece for Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, Joan Hassall, 1975. Reproduced by kind courtesy of the estate of Joan Hassall.

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I shall be quite sorry if it has, for this is a favourite gown, though it cost but nine shillings a yard.’”61 The main gesture of the image is Catherine’s, as she lifts the back of Mrs. Allen’s dress to remove the pin. Three people – including, presumably, Mr. Tilney – watch the pair, looking variously at Catherine, her twitching hand, and Mrs. Allen’s dress. This frontispiece, then, provides both an introduction to this novel and an invitation to revisit it, rereading Hassall’s image through Austen’s text. Indeed, rereading is an essential tool of approach to these editions. As Sarah Horowitz has argued, drawing from Peter Brooks and Julia Thomas, when you see text on the one hand and image on the other, you are encouraged to read and reread them through each other.62 Take, for example, the iconic moment in Pride and Prejudice when Elizabeth is walking from home to Netherfield to keep an ailing Jane company. In the novel, Mrs. Bennett exclaims that Elizabeth should not even think of going out. “You will not be fit to be seen when you get there,” she insists. Mr. Bennett offers to send for the horses, but Elizabeth wishes to go out. Her sisters come with her for part of the way, but then: “Elizabeth continued her walk alone, crossing field after field at a quick pace, jumping over stiles and springing over puddles with impatient activity, and finding herself at last within view of the house, with weary ancles, dirty stockings, and a face glowing with the warmth of exercise.”63 In Hassall’s initial sketch, she depicted the outlines of a puddle on the ground, the suggestion of a gate in the background, and rendered Elizabeth without facial details, just a body, holdings at the lines of what would become her dress and cloak. On her sketch, Hassall wrote: “P&P p 23 Springing.”64 That single, ringing word sums up the moment. Elizabeth, as Claudia Johnson has noted, is here sprightly and ruddy and embodied, springing over puddles.65 In her final illustration, Hassall further elaborated the background of the image with a simple fence, a trail of mud, a tiny house, a half thumbprint of a windmill, and a clear sky. She caught Elizabeth mid-motion, one foot just brushing onto the ground, the other lifted in the air (Figure 4.3). In the dense texture of her woodblock, Hassall developed Elizabeth’s body as lightly springing, and her character as joyfully energetic. As in the scene of Elizabeth’s walk to Netherfield, Hassall wrangled green pastured England into her editions. Though Austen was generally quite spare with her geographical details, when a party visited Knightley’s estate in Emma, she wrote: “It was a sweet view – sweet to the eye and the mind. English verdure, English culture, English comfort, seen under a sun bright, without being oppressive.”66 This is one of those perfect Austen sequences: a clause, a dash, a clause, a period, a syntactically parallel list in three commas, two more clauses, and a surprise. All seems sweetness

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Figure 4.3  Elizabeth, Joan Hassall, 1975. Reproduced by kind courtesy of the estate of Joan Hassall.

and light and then her “without being oppressive” begs the question: why would verdure, culture, and comfort be oppressive? Hassall did not capture the barbed nature of this line. Instead, she depicted Knightley’s house, people gathered around it, and rolling hills in the background. When the party proceeded to Box Hill, she engraved a landscape dotted with trees and the whole party wandering lazily up the slope for their expedition.67 Hassall’s illustrations are not expressive capstones to Austen’s wit but rather entangled illustrations of her language. Next to that line in Emma, Hassall’s idealized image might be read as a kind of question mark in itself. Because again, her images necessitate text  – Hassall wants to encourage interaction with Austen’s language. Take for another example the moment in Persuasion when a group walks to the Winthrop estate (Figure 4.4). “Winthrop … was stretched before them,” Hassall scribbled in the margins of her sketch for the image.68 She was borrowing from Austen’s text:

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Figure 4.4  Winthrop, Joan Hassall, 1975. Reproduced by kind courtesy of the estate of Joan Hassall.

“Winthrop, without beauty and without dignity, was stretched before them.”69 It is a funny bit of excising, taking away as it does the “without beauty and without dignity.” Hassall here was less interested in Winthrop’s issues – which Austen might be especially filtering through Henrietta, who is at this moment less than excited about the prospect of someday living there – than in the beauty of the day, which Wentworth and Louisa had just been discussing. In her image, Hassall layered hills on top of each other in crests, one after the other. This black-and-white landscape, despite its palette, feels verdant. Next to it, a reader might both admire the beauty of the day and doubt the loveliness of the house. Whether outside or in a drawing room or a ballroom, Hassall’s characters are nearly always in some kind of motion or interaction. Hassall’s first Northanger Abbey image after the frontispiece, for example, is of Catherine’s introduction to Henry Tilney, just before Mrs. Allen interrupts them. In the novel, Tilney asked Catherine how long she had been in Bath: “About a week, sir,” replied Catherine, trying not to laugh. “Really!” with affected astonishment. “Why should you be surprized, sir?”70

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In a mid-page image printed just below the text of this meet-cute, Hassall depicts Catherine’s curiosity and Henry’s off-kilter humor. The pair is seated as befits a man and a woman in a public space who do not know each other: she is half turning toward him, and he half turning toward her. A moment before, it seems, they were unacquainted. Now, Hassall shows their interest by the way that Catherine brings the tip of her fan to her lips in seeming surprise, and by the way that Henry’s looks directly and genially at her face. They are in perfect, fascinating, fascinated tension, Catherine seeking to understand his affected astonishment, he flirtatiously bating her. They are specifically not interested in all that Hassall depicts around them: a waiter walking past in the far background with a ribbon in his wig and a bowl of punch in his arms; a gentleman to his right approaching that attractive bowl of punch; a couple to the left in conversation, the woman with huge feathers sticking out of her hair, the man listening to her.71 Those details, though, make this brush between characters feel especially true and real, and offer Austen’s wit a new tableau on which to play out. Hassall adeptly interpreted the complications of Austen’s social descriptions. Her characters touch, they hover, they look, they look away, they laugh, they dance, they worry, and they mourn. All in direct response to Austen’s language and in intimate interaction with her text on the page. When in Mansfield Park, for example, Maria finds herself at an altar with Rushworth, Julia, looking to wound her sister, tells Mary Crawford that they might as well get married then and there. But Mr. Crawford disagrees: “Mr Crawford smiled his acquiescence, and stepping forward to Maria, said, in a voice which she only could hear, ‘I do not like to see Miss Bertram so near the altar.’” Hassall illustrates this sudden moment of intimacy, with Crawford leaning in to whisper, his demeanor sly and secretive.72 Maria’s hand rests delicately on the altar, but her body is turned away from it, and toward her romancer. Fanny hovers in the background where she can observe not just Crawford and Maria but also Rushworth, who stands obliviously at the altar. Hassall zeroed in on the slightest of interactions and elucidated Austen’s characters in the quickest of glances. Here and elsewhere, Hassall also furnished her spaces at tiny scale. For example, she depicted a moment in Sense and Sensibility in which Elinor is jolted out of a romantic reverie  – “She happened to be quite alone,” Austen writes – by a visit from Sir John. In Hassall’s image, he waves his arms outside and Elinor grabs at the window and rises to speak to him. At her desk are objects not mentioned in the text: a plant, pens, paper, books. As Austen created her world without too many such things, these

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could be unneeded additions.73 But they ground and realize the text, giving it a physical space to exist in. In Mansfield Park Hassall takes Austen’s language as a starting point for furnishing her spaces. For one engraving, she depicts Edmund as he is coming in to ask Fanny for advice about the play the family has been rehearsing. He has just opened the door and is stepping in, she is turned around to greet him. This is Fanny’s little white attic, barely ever with a fire, but now brightly lit by sunshine. It is her safe haven, her “nest of comforts,” filled with her plants and books, her workboxes, and her writing desk.74 Hassall included these details and also added a portrait, a fireplace, a curtain, and a view of the stairs descending behind Edmund. Later in the edition, when Sir Thomas comes to inspect the attic, Hassall recreates the room, again showing it with the fireplace, a picture of a ship on its mantle. By engraving the room and its objects twice, Hassall lent it solidity. That repetition, in turn, made the space of the novel feel lived-in and real. Hassall also gave her images intricate social backgrounds. In Northanger Abbey, when James Morland and John Thorpe stop their carriage in the middle of Bath to greet their sisters, Hassall unfolds a whole other set of interactions behind them. In front of a house, two men are engaged in some business, experiencing their own narratives, irrelevant to Austen’s story but essential to Hassall’s depiction of it.75 In Emma, Hassall depicts Frank, Harriet, and Emma in front of the Crown, across from where the Bateses live, on their Highbury expedition. A woman peers into a shop window, another enters from the right side of the frame, clutching a package, a man walks in the opposite direction. Another man sweeps at the sidewalk in front of the Crown and another girl walks out of the frame in the background.76 The activities here engaged in are not important: packages picked up and delivered, debris swept away. And yet, they make the novel come alive. In Persuasion, when Captain Wentworth races across the main street of Lyme to find a doctor for the just-fallen Louisa, he is watched by: a woman peering out of her doorway, a man leaning out of his window, a little boy holding a toy hoop, and the little boy’s dog (who barks at Wentworth). The captain is all motion and these figures seemingly stricken still by watching him. At the same time, a child and mother walk away in the background, apparently unperturbed by Wentworth’s flight down the street. Equally uninterested is a tiny cat sitting in the foreground.77 Of such minute elaborations, usually made not in her sketches but while engraving, Hassall said: “I am aware that these refinements will go unnoticed, but the characters in Jane Austen’s books are so real to me that I find myself pondering over different aspects of their lives.”78

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Like  Bewick’s “little whimsies,” Hassall’s additions are playful ­micro-­narratives that elaborate on Austen’s text without displacing it. If anything other than mechanical reproduction dates these engravings as of the twentieth century, it might be this further elaborated world, which suggests Austen not just on a stage but, perhaps, in cinematic space. That would account for all those panoramas, those bits of set-making, and those unnamed people. But Hassall’s illustrations are meant to exist in relationship to text and to story. Take, for example, an illustration of a moment toward the end of Persuasion when Austen writes: Soon words enough had passed between them to decide their direction towards the comparatively quiet and retired gravel-walk, where the power of conversation would make the present hour a blessing indeed; and prepare it for all the immortality which the happiest recollections of their own future lives could bestow. There they exchanged again those feelings and those promises which had once before seemed to secure every thing, but which had been followed by so many, many years of division and estrangement … And there, as they slowly paced the gradual ascent, heedless of every group around them, seeing neither sauntering politicians, bustling house-keepers, flirting girls, nor nursery-maids and children, they could indulge in those retrospections and acknowledgements, and especially in those explanations of what had directly preceded the present moment, which were so poignant and so ceaseless in interest. All the little variations of the last week were gone through; and of yesterday and today there could scarcely be an end.79

This is so linguistically deft a summary of reunion that it can be easy to gloss over the setting and characters that swirl around Anne and Wentworth. They, after all, are “heedless” of their surroundings and so, in a way, might we be. But Hassall, who so often liked to bring in what are essentially bit actors or extras into her scenes, built out a lively world in the background of her illustration (Figure 4.5). Wentworth is at the center of the frame, with Anne’s hand clasped in his. They are such a unit that Hassall carved Anne’s profile into the side of Wentworth’s body. Setting aside the sauntering politicians or flirting girls, Hassall focused on the nursery maid, who holds a baby and child to the left of the pair, and added an elderly man, who reclines in a wheelchair of sorts to their right. In the manner that Hassall interpreted it, the path arches from the elderly man to Anne to Wentworth to the baby, nursery maid, and child. This is a storied reversal of the usual movement from childhood to marriage to agedness. Indeed, there is a sense in which Hassall’s image, like Austen’s plot, returns to Anne and Wentworth a life that they thought they would never have together. The entire composition plays cannily with time in a scene that is also preoccupied with the past and

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Figure 4.5  Anne and Wentworth, Joan Hassall, 1975. Reproduced by kind courtesy of the estate of Joan Hassall.

present: “All the little variations of the last week were gone through; and of yesterday and today there could scarcely be an end.” This is a moment of days pored over and moments examined. And, because this is Austen, it is also a bit strange: “of yesterday” there has of course already been an end; and today will also soon be over. Austen suspends time and Hassall tells the story of that suspension. Her narratively inclined image lives in its “little variations,” and also in its liberally wooded background: trees, bushes, trunks, branches, and leaves arch behind Anne and Wentworth, a reminder of Hassall’s woodblock, and of the minute flicks of the graver that produced this engraving. This extremely bookish image exists in conversation with time, text, and wood. This is in other words far from a filmic set of books. Its images live in wood and paper. We might still ask if Joan Hassall is in these editions. Her illustrations are not diaries-in-images, as Leighton’s, Kent’s, and Eichenberg’s were. But it is still an important question because it mirrors one often asked about Austen. If Austen is called distant, most famously by D. A. Miller, who said that her omniscient voice seemed to emanate from “No One,” the same could be said of Joan Hassall.80 Where Austen is not immediately available to us because of a somewhat opaque personal life and a carefully

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distant narrative voice, Hassall is not immediately present because of her apparently descriptive and decorative mode. Yet, just as Austen’s embodiment has now been more thoroughly written about – that fresh, springing description of Elizabeth, for example, is not the work of a narrator uninterested in bodies – Hassall’s might be. Because the thing about engraving is that it is always embodied. Carving is taxing to the back, wrists, and arms and requires moving not just the graver but the block itself. You can request the brown leather sandbag on which Hassall enacted this rigorous choreography at The Fitzwilliam Museum, along with her kit of still-sharp gravers, wrapped in green felt and tied with thick string.81 The top of the sandbag must have once been the same dark brown as the sides, but from use it has been worn down to a pale, crackled beige. It is tiny, no more than five inches across. Hold it in your hand, though, and you will find it a surprisingly heavy, sturdy object. On it are embossed Hassall’s looping initials: a J nested inside of an H. Their indentation was deep enough so that though each engraving progressively wore the dark leather to light they are still clearly legible. Her initials withstood the regular, careful twisting of the wood, the force exerted from one small object on another. If Hassall’s signature is not always present in these editions  – and if she engraved in a sort of third-person omniscient and was thus an elegant match for Jane Austen’s free indirect discourse – her person might best be found in the same place that many Austen scholars have gone with questions of personhood: the juvenilia. Collected for The Folio Society as Shorter Works, Austen’s least known works were published last of all the staggered editions, in 1963. Its juvenilia runs from 1787 to 1793, or from when Austen was between the ages of twelve and eighteen. Folio took the text of its edition from R. W. Chapman’s Minor Works (1954), which was seen as sequel and part of his Novels of Jane Austen (1923).82 The “minor” was distinctly infantilizing and, as Sutherland has argued, revealed how inferior Chapman thought these works.83 Folio’s choice to call these the Shorter Works reads as lightly less judgmental. Indeed, it is interesting that they would choose to add them here as a part of The Complete Novels of Jane Austen at all. To have a thorough understanding of Austen, this suggests, you need to read these stories. Chapman organized his manuscripts chronologically, as a scholar would, from the juvenilia through Lady Susan to drafts of novels, verses, and prayers.84 Folio was more selective and gave its readers more guidance, with four sections: complete novels, major fragments, “The History of England,” and minor novels. The inclusion of “The History of England” is a sweet bit of organization, as if an editor could not resist its charms but also knew it needed its own category.85

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Hassall began her Shorter Works with a frontispiece that, unlike every other in this set, was not pulled from Austen’s literary imagination. Instead, Hassall continued the work of her endpapers and depicted the author herself. The scene is a pretty garden and the characters two of the Austen siblings, Jane and Cassandra (Figure 4.6). Hassall engraved the place name of Steventon in capital letters at the bottom of the frame, but it could be guessed from the sisters’ youthful appearance. This is where Austen lived until she was twenty-five, from 1775 to 1800. The house itself was torn down shortly after she and her family left it. Later, Austen’s nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh would call it “the cradle of her genius.”86 As Hassall imagined it, the house is not too large and not too small, with three chimneys and two gables. It is on a slight slope, the hill rising up from the left to the right of the scene. In the foreground, Jane is seated on a blanket spread out over the grass. She seems to have just been writing – she holds a quill in one hand and paper in the other – and to be reading her work to Cassandra, who is perched on a bench above her. At the bottom of the frame, Hassall has engraved her initials, just as she did on the sandbag: tiny, looping, and pale against a dark background. This is the only one of the editions that she signed. It is as if Hassall was signaling her presence in this edition, in which Austen seemed somehow also more present. By looking to Steventon and where everything began for Austen – and by including Chawton Cottage on the endpapers of every edition in this set – Hassall was participating in a much larger cultural pursuit of the “real” Jane Austen. As Claudia Johnson has articulated, there are many legends of Jane Austen, accumulated since she first published a novel to the present day.87 And, as Devoney Looser has said of the author: “She was not born, but rather became, Jane Austen.”88 Over the course of the nineteenth century, family members like Austen’s brother Henry Thomas Austen, her niece Caroline Austen, and her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh described a witty, kind, quiet authoress.89 Later writers like Constance Hill in 1902, Elizabeth Jenkins in 1938, Jane Aiken Hodge in 1972, and Claire Tomalin in 1999, to name just a few, found an increasingly more fully formed, more public, more plugged-in Austen.90 Yet, they were all forced to work with the sometimes-spare details of Austen’s life, and so we get books like Emily Auerbach’s Searching for Jane Austen (2004), which tackles this very dearth of evidence, and Paula Byrne’s The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things (2013), which, having found the family accounts limiting and the biographies structurally mundane, locates Jane Austen’s life in a collection of relevant objects.91 Austen’s legacy has been such that it has been built over time. Moreover, it is still in development. In 2021,

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Figure 4.6  Frontispiece for Jane Austen’s Shorter Works, Joan Hassall, 1975. Reproduced by kind courtesy of the estate of Joan Hassall.

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Jane  Austen’s House, a museum dedicated to the author in Chawton, added much-needed context to the Austen family’s relationships to slavery and colonialism.92 Since it opened in 1949, Hassall would likely have been able to visit that museum – though it would have been without that historical context  – when she made a washed-ink drawing on medium weight paper of a single, spindly tree rising out of a scramble of flowers and grasses. She signed the bottom in tiny script: “Joan Hassall, Alton.”93 Just a town and a twenty-minute walk away from Chawton, this Alton tree, along with the trips that Hassall made to Bath and Lyme when planning her Folio Society illustrations, suggests that Hassall sought to follow, as many others have, in Austen’s footsteps.94 For Hassall, as for many scholars, Austen’s juvenilia and unfinished works seemed, more than her novels, to suggest the closest approximation of her person in text. They indicated the author at work. In his introduction to the Shorter Works edition Richard Church wrote: Once a reader becomes addicted to a certain author, the desire is born to find the cause of this infatuation. But the grand, the famous, the finished works are secretive about it. They are homogenous, with every element concealed in their magical alloy … The reader is left baffled, and all the more embroiled. Critics are caught like flies in the cunning web.95

Church’s is a common complaint about Austen: that she is too perfect, that she addicts and traps readers and critics alike. Stuck with just the six novels, Church said, the tendency is “to try to pillage the workshop, looking for odds and ends of discarded material, examining the few tools that may have been left about.”96 His is a deeply (and negatively) feminizing response. He continues the metaphor: To approach Jane Austen in this way is to discover not a workshop but a work-basket, a feminine secretoire, tumbled with bits and pieces. A vague legend has grown around this effort, and nothing very definite has been done to separate out of the skeins of silk, the odd threads, the fragments of patterns, and to compare them with incidents, persons and places in the novels, in the hope of illuminating the creative mystery, the devices of genius.97

Church suggests that to seek Austen in small stories and small things is a fool’s errand. If our goal is, as his was, to assess, then nothing valuable will be achieved by such an attempt. We will find ourselves in a space of bits and pieces, silks, patterns, fragments. Interestingly, in the introduction to Pride and Prejudice Church had described that novel as having “cast its music; a music as determined and absolute, yet as mysterious in its origins, as that of the marvellous creature whom Keats called ‘divine Mozart.’”98

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To Church the almost extra-textual genius of Austen was better thought of as mysterious in origin. He would rather not consider the girl or trace her roots; that was for the obsessive to do, not the critic. We can rehabilitate Church’s language (though not his argument) with the help of Virginia Woolf. Her 1922 review, “Jane Austen Practising,” explores Austen’s early work by way of an opening anecdote. The summer of that year had been so cold that people had fallen asleep under layers of blankets and quilts with hot water bottles tucked into their beds. In the middle of the night, stifled under all that weight, they had woken up and stripped off their clothes and bed sheets. According to Woolf, literary legacy operates similarly: All over England for the past ten or twenty years the reputation of Jane Austen has been accumulating on top of us like these same quilts and blankets. The voices of the elderly and distinguished, of the clergy and the squirearchy, have droned in unison praising and petting, capping quotations, telling little anecdotes, raking up little facts. She is the most perfect artist in English literature … So they pile up the quilts and counterpanes until the comfort becomes oppressive. Something must be done about it. But what a frightful effort it needs at this time of day to shake off all these clothes!99

This stripping away, this shaking, is a quite violent metaphorization of the critical process. It gets at the manner in which discourses can be oppressive and suffocating. This new edition of Austen’s stories introduced Woolf to an Austen before Pride and Prejudice and maybe more especially before anyone had ever thought to write about her. Though Woolf finds much in Austen’s stories, she also warns that there is a danger of ­overinterpreting them: “It may be that we are reading too much into these scraps and scribbles. We are still under the influence of the quilts and counterpanes. But just as we determine to shake ourselves free – and after all, she was a limited, tart, rather conventional woman for all her genius – we hear a snatch of music.”100 Like Church’s Mozart allusion, this musical analogy is an attempt to describe Austen’s genius, which seems to emerge from some other-worldly sonic space. Unlike Church, however, Woolf found snatches of Austen’s genius in the stories, and so valued them, though with reservations. When Woolf later revised this essay for The Common Reader, as a part of “Jane Austen,” a broader assessment of the author and her works, she edited out her skepticism as to whether too much was being read into the scraps and scribbles of Austen’s stories. Instead, she left in an only slightly amended version of the following text from the original essay: “For this girl of seventeen is not writing to amuse the schoolroom. She is not writing

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to draw a laugh from sister and brothers. She is writing for everybody, for nobody, for our age, for her own; she, in short, is writing.”101 By declaring these stories authored, Woolf denied the importance of several entangled narratives about Austen, perhaps most especially the one in which she was girl and then woman who wrote for the drawing room and not for the world. In her preface to The Common Reader, Woolf had elevated and praised the general reader’s rickety and ramshackle mode of reading. In her essay on Austen, she did the same with what one might dismiss as the silly writings of a young girl. As she signaled in her frontispiece, Hassall very much approached the Shorter Works as a work basket of ideas. This was appropriate for an artist who copied her decorative designs for the editions from a great-­ grandmother’s patchwork bag.102 In a dozen small engravings Hassall, like Austen, found space to practice, and to be herself, and to show herself. Especially for an artist so consistent in her style, these images were aberrations. What Wilkinson described as the marriage of text and illustration was barely apparent here. All but one story lacks interior images, so that word and image are never enmeshed. Instead, Hassall gave each fragment an embellished headpiece and a large tailpiece. For Lady Susan, for example, Hassall depicted two couples: Lady Susan and Sir James Martin, and Frederica and Reginald.103 Hers is actually a staid rendition of a satirical romp, just these pairs, likely at a dance, some ribbons strewn in the background. Where in any scene from the novels Hassall would have added moldings, tables, and maybe waiters, here she includes just the characters – or just the building blocks of a story. For “The History of England” she elucidated a jaunty little man holding up two tiny medallioned portraits of Elizabeth I and Mary Stuart, in a callback to the Folio editions’ endpapers.104 In such images, Hassall took up broad symbols, singular moments, and particular characters without elaborating worlds around them, as if to suggest that the embellishments that would make Austen’s style later on were not yet present. Hassall’s illustration for the strange, meandering, and wonderful “Love and Freindship” was particularly unusual (the misspelling is Austen’s and in The Folio Society edition as in most versions the convention is to preserve it). This epistolary novella – which featured in the edition that Woolf reviewed in 1922 – is Austen’s longest piece of juvenilia, written when she was just fifteen. She opens it with an entreaty from a young Isabel to her mother’s closest friend Laura, asking to be told the story of her life. “Surely that time is now at hand. You are this day 55,” Isabel says.105 Coincidentally, Hassall was fifty-seven at the time of this edition’s initial publication, an age

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that the very young Austen deemed to be an appropriate one for telling tales. What unfolds is a story of woe and affliction, dripping with satire. Laura is a narrator overly gifted with sensibility. The next thing that happens to her is always worse than the last. “The death of my father, my mother, and my husband, though almost more than my gentle nature could support, were trifles in comparison to the misfortune I am now proceeding to relate,” she says.106 It is then that her friend Sophie develops a horrific consumption and, with her dying breath, advises Laura: “Run mad as often as you chuse; but do not faint.”107 This scene is the subject of Hassall’s illustration. The two girls are on a divan, Sophie crumpled in a spine-defying faint and Laura next to her in a painful twist, tearing at her wild, unplaited hair.108 If in her story Austen mimicked the vagaries of sentimental literature, in her image Hassall imitated the emotive engravings of Expressionism. She could only communicate emotions run mad by deviating from the miniaturized politeness of her illustrations for Austen’s full-length works. Sanditon, Austen’s final and unfinished novel and the last piece included in Shorter Works, is also thought of as a part of Austen’s workbasket. It is a draft and a change in style, less interested in a single heroine, more concerned with a town, focused on illness and the body in a new way. Hassall’s image for it is perhaps the grandest of her Austen panoramas, though it is still scaled at about two inches wide (Figure 4.7). A huge cliff hovers over the scene, tumbling down into a peaceful harbor. On it are dotted numerous houses whose windows are so small that they could not have taken more than a dab of a carving tool against wood to make. A few boats sail into and away from the shore.109 Unusually, Hassall left some of the surface of her block unengraved, creating a misty and gusty atmosphere which is quite difficult to achieve on wood. This is the town of Sanditon, which Mr. Parker, a character in the novel, believes can cure just about any ailment: “He held it indeed as certain, that no person could be really well, no person (however upheld for the present by fortuitous aids of exercise and spirits in a semblance of health) could be really in a state of secure and permanent health without spending at least 6 weeks by the sea every year.”110 Place seems here the solution to bodily pain. And yet, in conjunction with that interest in a cure, disaster in the form of illness looms over the novel. If we are always struggling to keep ourselves healthy then we must always be about to be ill. Or, as many have suggested: all is built on sand, and the foundation is not strong. Sanditon is a register of Austen’s body. It is a story of illness, told by an author so ill that she would not live to finish it. It suggests Austen as “Some One” or “Some Body” rather than, as Miller argued, “No One.”

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Figure 4.7  Sanditon, Joan Hassall, 1975. Reproduced by kind courtesy of the estate of Joan Hassall.

Hassall’s illustrations for this edition and for her other Austen reprints also resonate with her body. Because she suffered from debilitating diabetes and arthritis, the strength required to engrave on wood often eluded Hassall. During the first stage of illustrating The Folio Society collection she was in recovery from an arthritic attack so severe that for almost the entirety of the 1950s she had stopped working in wood.111 When she began illustrating additional images for The Folio Society, her arthritis had flared up again, and she engraved on scraperboard, a cheaper, less taxing medium. Decades earlier, Hassall had highlighted the difference between the mediums: “the discipline of the resistance of wood to the tool gives every line of an engraving a special deliberation. An engraver cannot scribble for his effects, but every line must vigorously create the form it seeks to express.”112 A deliberate, vigorous line – the kind of work that, for example, Leighton did in her searching, winding roads for The Return of the Native – was best achieved through wood. Such work no longer felt available for large portions of the last decades of Hassall’s life. In 1971, a few years before The Folio Society invited her to add illustrations to the novels, she came before the Artists’ General Benevolent Institution, which agreed to help her repay a debt of £1,000, accumulated in part because of her ill health.113 In 1978 she complained of pain and swelling, saying: “my

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hand is much better and I have started work again in good heart, but the finger beyond the abscess is by no means back to normal” and, a few days later, “my hand is better but not well enough yet though can work with it and The Muse is not in bad shape.”114 Hassall could engrave, and her inspiration was intact, but her work was a struggle. Sometimes, rather than carve the grain of a woodblock, she had begun playing the harp, finding its strings easier to manipulate than a graver.115 Behind what might be called the cute picturesqueness of Hassall’s engravings, then, was a woman ailing. Though they look tiny, perfect, and pretty, those little boats and houses in the Sanditon print in fact required strength and precision. There was a muscularity to this miniature world. And yet, Hassall loved that world and this commission and her work. A photograph of her the year that she died, in 1988, shows her at work at her desk, her woodblock firmly placed on her sandbag, her gravers scattered out before her.116 Though her hands must have ached, she was continually pulled back to this archaic, anachronistic, and difficult labor. At the end of such a day, she might have found the time to revisit one of Austen’s novels. Hassall told book designer Ruari Mclean that she read her favorite books over and over, finding it more relaxing than reading new things: I find the most perfect and enjoyable relaxation is to read again and again the same loved books. This sounds rather unenterprising but I really know nothing so relaxing … Of course I do read fresh books, but not nearly so often as the old friends which are  – Shakespeare, Dickens, the Brontës, Jane Austen, Maria Edgeworth, Flora Thompson, Fanny Burney, and some isolated books such as Gosse’s Father and Son.117

Since Hassall offered this casual out of order list in 1960, when she would have been halfway through illustrating The Folio Society set for the first time around, it suggests Austen as an especially fruitful site of rereading and revisiting. British philosopher Gilbert Ryle is reputed to have replied, on being asked if he read novels, “Of course, I read all six every year.”118 It is a near-perfect answer, precise in its assumption that the asker will know that those six can only be Austen’s novels, and ambiguous in how he spreads his readings out over the year, in which order, and why. More recently, in Austen Years (2020), Rachel Cohen – who quotes Ryle – read and reread Austen’s novels almost exclusively for several years, finding in them retreat, seclusion, comfort, and meaning.119 If illustrated reprints are always objects of rereading  – the illustrator rereads the work, and then we reread the texts against their images – this set is especially interesting because those rereadings might have been, for

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Hassall at least, medicinal. She initially developed her habit of reading the same authors over and over again as a direct result of illness: I sometimes wonder whether this peculiar fondness for rereading a few tried friends is in any way connected with an illness in early childhood when a rather silly Doctor we had pronounced that I was not to be allowed to use my brain at all, and the only way to prevent it was to read aloud to me something I already knew and to start again at the beginning the moment it was ended!!! All I can say is that to reread these books has the same effect as cigarettes or sedatives on other people.120

Favorite novels seemed drug-like in their capacity to both excite and lull Hassall. Reading and rereading Austen so intensely and then engraving and reengraving her could also have been therapeutic: an old remedy for new pain. In the image of Elizabeth springing, sturdy and embodied, for example, Hassall could have felt some of her own energy again. And in the experimentation of illustrating Austen’s Shorter Works she, like Woolf, might have found a way to see one of her most beloved authors anew, and her own art anew. And her illustrations might, by virtue of their luminosity, offer us readers a new way to revisit Austen, too.

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The Home Library

Here, on the smooth honeyed surface of this woodblock, Joan Hassall engraved the reverse image of a man, two books, and a small child, under an arching tree (Figure C.1). From early on in her career, Hassall maintained a brisk side business in creating such bookplates – those slips of paper pasted on the inside covers of books to denote their owners. She designed this block in particular for her friend and bookplate expert Brian North Lee, filling it with an eclectic

Figure C.1  Woodblock for Brian North Lee, Joan Hassall, 1969. Reproduced by kind courtesy of the estate of Joan Hassall and The Fitzwilliam Museum.

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array of things he loved, like nature, music, architecture, and hibiscus flowers.1 Because Hassall interviewed her clients extensively each had, as she put it, “a real hand in the creation” of each plate.2 For Valeria Finnis, for example, she scripted a V and an F together at the heart of several layers of flowers and for A. P. Pollack, she clustered a floating musical note, a globe, a quill, and an oil lamp on a desk.3 Though Hassall once made plans for what she called a “universal bookplate,” which she sketched in various combinations of fields, fences, trees, paths, and mountains, she never went through with it.4 Perhaps it would have been impossible to capture the collaborative self-portraiture of her customized bookplates for an anonymous audience. Instead, she  – like Clare Leighton, Rockwell Kent, and Fritz Eichenberg – created in her illustrated reprints objects that felt as if they were hand-crafted for just one reader and one home library but were in fact meant for a mass readership. Part of a decades-long twentieth-century fad, wood-engraved reprints speak of another era: of critics concerned with the canon; publishers looking for a new way to dress up the classic novel; artists navigating texts in exciting and interesting ways; and readers able to purchase, read, and keep the fruits of all of that commercial and aesthetic labor. Though the wood engraving is of course still valued, the wood-engraved classic is no longer publishers’ preferred holiday season drop. But if the circumstances of the print revival and the popularity of the illustrated reprint have largely faded away, the desire for mass objects that might feel unique in a home library has not. With or without bookplates, we imprint ourselves on our books by buying, borrowing, receiving, reading, rereading, shelving, unshelving, moving, losing, and finding them. In “all those rooms, too humble to be called libraries, yet full of books, where the pursuit of reading is carried on by private people,” as Woolf described what we might now call the home library, everyday readers continue to remake books every day.5 The home library contains a wide range of aspirations. In George Bernard Shaw’s Arms and the Man (1894), the heroine boasts of her father’s library to the Swiss soldier who has just unexpectedly clambered into her room: RAINA: Do you know what a library is? THE MAN: A library? A roomful of books? RAINA: Yes. We have one, the only one in Bulgaria. THE MAN: Actually a real library! I should like to see that.6

Her father also proudly mentions the library throughout the play, dropping it into conversations where it does not belong. This goes on until the beginning of Act III, when Shaw sets the scene as: “In the library

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after lunch. It is not much of a library. Its literary equipment consists of a single fixed shelf stocked with old paper covered novels, broken backed, coffee stained, torn and thumbed; and a couple of little hanging shelves with a few gift books on them: the rest of the wall space being occupied by trophies of war and the chase.”7 It is a neat gag that plays as well on the stage – perhaps set with a single shelf on a wall – as on the page. The father is a snobbish bourgeois with aspirations grander than his possessions. But if we gave him a little more credit, we might find his conviction that these few old, cheap, stained, broken, and torn books are a library touching. A library is what we make of it. Although his play was set in 1885, Shaw wrote it only a couple of decades after Wilkie Collins mused about an unknown public of readers and just at the start of a revolution in the number of books available to the everyday reader. In the fifty or so years between the first staging of Arms and the Man and the publishing of the books described here, more and more people were able to afford books, and to, like Raina’s father, call their home collections “libraries.” The books in this book might seem too few to constitute a library. Yet, each of these wood-engraved reprints was an incremental addition to the common reader’s library, and each of these artists was interested in supplying everyday readers with beautiful books. Leighton championed illustrated books as a cheap means to get great art into private hands; Kent aspired to make an edition so special that each copy might feel like the only one in the world; Eichenberg praised the quality of the well-made book in what he described as a plastic age; and Hassall interpolated a precise sense of history into matching patterned-paper covered novels. Like the Little Leather Library, the Everyman’s Library, the Modern Library, the Library of American Books, and Harper’s Family Library, all of which were popular during this period in the twentieth century, the books I have written about here implied that a single book, set, shelf, or collection might count as a library, just as much as, say, a whole manor-house-style room equipped with a sliding ladder.8 I myself came to these illustrated reprints through Fritz Eichenberg’s Jane Eyre, which was gifted to me by mother, Jane, who in turn had been gifted it by her grandmother, Alice. Growing up, my mother was a navy brat whose small family moved almost yearly. They were not wealthy and, excepting several copies of the King James Bible, they did not have many books. But when my mother’s grandmother began to work as a lady’s companion, she devoted part of her modest disposable income to gifting beautifully illustrated books, among them Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, to her granddaughter. My mother Jane’s affinity with

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Brontë’s  Jane  was  especially immediate and passionate. She remembers thinking that Eichenberg and Charlotte Brontë must have been married, so completely did his illustrations fuse with the language of the novel. Later, she brought the two books with her when she went to college. Their dark green covers and gilded bindings felt fancy and exciting, like the new environment she found herself in. She kept packing the books up and carrying them with her over the years, from house to house, through three marriages and four children, until she passed them on to me.9 We keep books because our grandparents and parents loved them, because we love them, because their covers are attractive, because they look good on a shelf, because they entrance us, because they are classic. We keep them because they are pretty, meaningful, and aspirational. And out of what we keep, we construct our home libraries. To my surprise, a couple of years into researching this project, I discovered that my mother’s first husband Chris had grown up with these books as well. His parents had been Book-of-the-Month Club subscribers and had likely received or purchased the books right when they were released in 1943. “I can just picture them on the shelf,” Chris told me, remembering how the two volumes sat amongst the family’s collection of some 400 books. His parents were aspirational readers who subscribed to several book clubs and who purchased not one or two or three but four sets of encyclopedias. They kept the Eichenberg books with them when, after their children had moved away, they pared down their book collection to move into a smaller house. After Chris’s mother passed away and then, later, his father was taken to live in assisted care, something had to be done about their still-large library. A librarian already in possession of a sizable collection of books, Chris was more inclined to get rid of things than to accumulate them. He took very little from his parents’ collection, but he kept these books.10 When he told me all this and brought out his set one Thanksgiving – on a cold November day much like the one that opened Jane Eyre – it was a shock to see these heavy, beautiful, gilded books on someone else’s bookshelf. Here they were, forest green, less sun-bleached than my mother’s copies, but also more thumbed-through. This was before I had researched the set and realized that hundreds of thousands of copies had been printed for the Book-of-the-Month Club, each as unique-looking as the last. And it was also before I purchased another set of the books cheaply on Amazon, so that I could lay them out and photograph them and bring them to conferences without feeling as if I was wearing away at family heirlooms. So now, because Chris kindly gifted me his books, I have three sets of the novels. They are identical, but not. They are big, gilded, and green, but

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their relationship to sunlight, air, and touch has differed enormously. These reprints – and also Leighton’s, Kent’s, and Hassall’s – carry the markings of nearly a century in the world. All in a row, they are a lesson both in the fruits of mechanical reproduction and in the ways in which consumers change that which is marketed to them. These books have been scuffed up and worn away and dog-eared and written in and fitted with the bookplates of private readers and rubber-stamped with the emblems of public libraries. By dwelling on my family here I do not mean to suggest inheritance or ownership as a primary means of interacting with books. Much like Fritz Eichenberg, my father immigrated to America as a Jewish refugee with just a suitcase to his name. Had he had a stack of ornate reprints to call his own (which he did not), he could not have brought them with him. What interests me is that these books seem so special that if you could save them, you would. Before I was aware that they had a family history behind them or that I would shape my own book around them, I was wrapping my editions of Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre in several layers of t-shirts before every new move of my twenties. Perusing my bookshelves, a recent dinner guest (unprompted) gravitated to Kent’s Moby Dick and Eichenberg’s editions. Conceived as gorgeous, nostalgic objects, these editions have a certain bookish charisma to them, and seem especially able to contain and retain the extra meaning that readers imbue them with by living with them. The books in this book feel unique because they were first illustrated for everyday readers, in wood, as craft-prestige-mass objects, and also because we imagine our lives into them, and they mirror our lives back to us. In the romantic comedy Definitely, Maybe (2008) the main character, played by Ryan Reynolds, falls in love with a woman, played by Isla Fisher, who has spent her whole adult life trying to find the edition of Jane Eyre that her father had inscribed to her as a teenager, three weeks before he died. In search of it, she opens up copy after copy of the novel in used bookstores, and buys the editions in which she finds inscriptions, from other family members and friends and lovers to other readers. Every year, she also rereads the novel. “Every time it’s different. It tells me different things,” she says.11 Like George Henry Lewes, who said that Jane Eyre read “like a page out of one’s own life,” she seems to find herself in the novel.12 In a pivotal scene, Reynolds’s character hands her a gift that he had found after adopting her habit of frequenting used bookstores: the novel, with her father’s inscription. We discover when she unwraps it something that she had never mentioned – that the edition that her father had given her had been the one illustrated by Eichenberg. It is the kind of book that you might spend a lifetime searching for.

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Because we sometimes attach books to specific memories, they have strange sorts of afterlives. Revisiting them can be fraught. In her essay “Motherless,” which was coincidentally published the same year as Definitely, Maybe was released, Betty Ruddy fondly remembers growing up with Eichenberg’s edition of Jane Eyre. It was a part of her mother’s small book collection and seemed to Ruddy as a child to be “the most significant book in the world.”13 Like me, Ruddy first came to know Jane Eyre both through the text of Brontë’s novel and through Eichenberg’s engravings. When Ruddy revisits the edition as an adult, however, she is somewhat disappointed by his illustrations, and also by her own memories of them, which feel incomplete. As she considers how time and her relationship with her mother impact her experience of the book, she writes: “What I am unearthing as I revisit the old book is a new truth: the words on the page have shaped my ideas about my mother, and my experience with my mother has colored my reading of a fictional narrative. The book and my mother are now so intertwined in my mind that the two stories are one.”14 Ruddy’s memories of Jane Eyre of her mother are inextricably entangled. Readers, experiences, and memories color each other, unexpectedly, over many years, and in many contexts and many spaces. These days, however, book ownership is by many accounts on the decline. The End of the Book has been much prophesized. In Books as History (2008), David Pearson wrote that “The death of the book has been in the air for some time, as a consequence of the communications revolution brought about by new technology.”15 In The Case for Books (2010), Robert Darnton pointed to the pace of technical innovation: “from writing to the codex, 4,300 years; from the codex to movable type, 1,150 years; from movable type to the Internet, 524 years; from the Internet to search engines, 17 years; from search engines to Google’s algorithmic relevance ranking, 7 years; and who knows what is just around the corner or coming down the pipeline?”16 When I worked as an editorial assistant at Penguin in 2011, we all thought the book was headed the way of the typewriter: a beautiful object for collectors. Just at the slow pace of the publishing world, in the last ten years Penguin merged with Random House to become Penguin Random House, and in 2021 it announced plans to purchase Simon and Schuster, making what was already the largest book publisher in the world even bigger. This both contracts and concentrates power and decision making in an already strained industry.17 At the same time, however, independent houses have been sprouting up, printing short runs of beautifully pressed books of poetry and literature.18

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For example, the great-grandson of T. N. Lawrence, whose firm made the woodblocks that Hassall so prized – and who likely produced the one for Brian North Lee’s bookplate – now runs a one-man private printing press specializing in wood-engraved illustrations.19 A difficult moment for the industry is actually a great time for book design. As the editors of The Art of the Book (2015) put it: “At a juncture when the acts of reading and watching are in a state of unrest, we are operating in an extremely exciting period for the printed book.”20 Some designers are putting especial work into bridging the divide between book object and digital experience. A copy of N. K. Jemisen’s The City We Became (2020), for example, invited readers to view the cover’s shiny alien tentacles as twisting and dancing and contorting on a Google app on their phones.21 Though the industry has changed and will continue to change, it has not disappeared, and neither has the desire for well-designed books and home libraries. We have perhaps never been invited into people’s home libraries in as frequent or as strange a fashion as we were during the Covid-19 pandemic. In 2020, a Twitter account named “Bookcase Credibility” began screenshotting and tracking the bookshelves of celebrities, entertainers, broadcasters, and professors, all of whom had chosen to position their computers with carefully curated bibliophile backdrops.22 In The New York Times, in an article that cited that account, Amanda Hess investigated our shared fascination with people’s bookshelves.23 PopSugar compiled a slideshow with peeks at celebrity libraries – the actress and producer Reese Witherspoon is pictured gleefully surrounded by books  – and Town & Country invited a book curator to assess famous home libraries.24 All this voyeurism yielded a new interest in celebrity reading habits. Starting in August of 2020, Marie Claire began posting a video series entitled “Shelf Portrait” on YouTube, inviting Alanis Morrissette, Priyanka Chopra, and Dolly Parton, among others, to pose in front of a bookcase and share their favorite books.25 In her video, to explain why her Millennial-pink, arched bookshelf was uncrowded, actress and model Laura Harrier shared that she usually gives books away to friends and family.26 On Cup of Jo, the lifestyle blog, cartoonist Grace Farris suggested that there are four kinds of bookcases: “the Reading Rainbow,” in order by color; “Bookworm, but make it stylish,” with a tendril of green tucked into a vase next to a small selection of books; “It was Mr. Plum in the library with the candlestick,” handsome and traditional; and “the Tight Squeeze,” with books crammed vertically and horizontally into a too-small shelf.27 Hers is a sweetly sarcastic cartoon, aimed at the overly aesthetic bookshelf. Reading and watching from home, though, I was delighted at this sudden entry into people’s

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reading lives. Sure, some of this might be corny, and not all home libraries are obsessively organized representations of their curators. But for a short period of time, this was how we saw many people: through how they arranged their books, and themselves in relation to them. Even, and maybe especially, in an increasingly digital era, the aesthetics of books and bookshelves still matter. Since so much is now available online  – every nineteenth-century novel that I have described here, for example, is now freely distributed on Project Gutenberg’s web platform – the books that everyday readers actually choose to buy, keep, and cherish in their home libraries are especially resonant. In the “Library Services” episode of Martin Scorsese’s Pretend It’s a City (2021), Fran Lebovitz, a noted book-lover, complained that she could barely give her books away: “It used to be like I would go through my books every year, the ones I didn’t want. Anyone would take them. Any school, any, like, library in a school. Now no one will take them. Because they take up room.”28 Young people these days, she mused, seem to have no books (not to mention no records, cassettes, CDs, or DVDs) and so no stuff. But there are all sorts of reasons not to accumulate books, including limited funds, minimalism, a preference for borrowing from libraries, constrained spaces, lack of interest in reading or in books, a dislike of dust, and the wide digital availability of books. It makes sense, then, that especially in New York City, both institutions and readers might be wary of taking any and all books. The elegantly designed reprint is somewhat exceptional because it always had to make a strong case for why a reader should bother to buy and keep it. If you were a minimalist disliker of stuff and dust, you could do worse than to have one or a few particularly special books, and nothing else, just as the everyday reader in the early twentieth century was unlikely to have many books, but likely to have a few classic novels, perhaps illustrated with wood engravings. If you wanted to build or expand your home library through the specific reprints described here, you would find a thriving online market in secondhand books. Etsy, for example, the home of chunky knit seat cushions, initial-­embossed cutting boards, and bespoke dog handkerchiefs, is a bustling purveyor of reprinted fiction. Nearly every volume of Penguin Illustrated Classics, the collection edited by Robert Gibbings that I described in my introduction, is easily obtainable on their platform.29 Clare Leighton’s The Return of the Native is not available, which makes sense – only 1,500 copies of that book were printed, and she is not necessarily a household name, though I think she should be. Prints of her work are, however, available for purchase on Etsy, and that edition in particular can be found for

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$55.00 on AbeBooks, a primary source of seconhand books.30 Back on Etsy, the trade edition of Rockwell Kent’s Moby Dick is available for as low as $500.00 and for as much as $1,500.00, along with various other iterations of that edition – posters of his whales for $65.38 each, a vintage serving bowl embellished with images from the edition for $450.00.31 With years of celebration, that edition has become very expensive, as have its prints. Also on Etsy, Fritz Eichenberg’s Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights can be obtained as a set for $34.95 or $76.00, with the slipcase still intact, or for $145.99 for a barely touched pair of the books, also in the slipcase. One $89.00 edition of his is advertised with the search terms “Goth Wedding and Goth Décor” and comes tied up in a black cloth ribbon.32 These books were free or inexpensive when they were distributed and sold to Book-of-the-Month Club subscribers, and though they are much loved, they remain fairly affordable. While Etsy charges slightly absurd prices, Eichenberg’s Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights can still usually be obtained for under $20.00 on Amazon, and I have seen some especially used copies go for under $10.00. Joan Hassall is rarely available on Etsy and interestingly barely represented in that site’s canon of Austen paraphernalia, which includes a bounty of prints, puzzles, quilts, coasters, playing cards, t-shirts, sweatshirts, books, shower curtains, and iced tea keeper cups.33 Austen has had many illustrators, and so perhaps Hassall stands out less in that crowd than Leighton, Kent, and Eichenberg do, though I hope that this book has gone some way toward giving her more credit for her contribution to the Austen canon. Her books can, however, be easily found on AbeBooks, where they sell for around $25.00 each, though a full set is harder to find.34 Many of these books are available at research libraries, which will tend to have a copy of at least the Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights and perhaps the Moby Dick.35 But it is telling that these originally mid-priced and widely distributed books are still participating in the literary reprint marketplace. Moreover, reprints  – and even more so new reprints of nineteenthcentury novels – still hold a special place on the modern home’s bookshelf. We make our home libraries, as Woolf said, out of many odds and ends.36 But there is an enduring quality to the classic reprint. Most publishers now focus much less on illustration than on excellent cover design; eye-catching packaging; and, sometimes, interesting introductory notes. If you wanted a newly published reprint of a nineteenth-century novel, you would have an abundance of options. Dover Thrift Editions, Oxford World Classics, and Norton Critical Editions all print and revise classic novels. For fancier packaging, you might look to Barnes & Noble Leatherbound Classics, Juniper Books, Royal Classics, or Chiltern Publishing. We continue to, like

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Leighton, Kent, Eichenberg, and Hassall, and like Macmillan, Harper and Brothers, Lakeside Press, Random House, the Book-of-the-Month Club and The Folio Society, reinvent and remake these books for our own era. One company that is still commissioning new illustrations for reprints of nineteenth-century novels is The Folio Society. The Book-of-the-Month Club, which has rebranded itself as the Book of the Month, dropping the fussy dashes and the clubby “Club,” seems to be no longer interested in reprints.37 But Folio is still around and has stuck, as always, to special illustrated editions, now not only of classic novels, but of contemporary literature, science fiction, and fantasy. “Beautifully illustrated hardcover books,” its main webpage reads.38 The desire to live both in the world of craft and in the world of mass consumption remains, but is differently executed. A Folio Society edition of George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871), for example, is as tall and wide as a standard piece of printing paper, with a satiny cover and slipcase.39 It is hard to overstate how massive this book feels in comparison to everything else on my bookshelf. It is literally bigger than any other novel I own. It fits in much better with my cookbooks, where it is about as big as Sanjeev Kapoor’s How to Cook Indian (2011), which contains over 500 recipes.40 With the increasing digitization of books, Middlemarch must somehow announce itself as book loudly and largely enough to stand in for an entire library of classics. Equally enormous are The Folio Society’s editions of Jane Austen’s novels, done in yellow-gold with black-and-white silhouettes on the front covers; of Jane Eyre, done in grey with twisting black branches overlaid onto the figure of a woman; and of Wuthering Heights, done in matching grey, with golden swoops of grass and air floating over a dark heath.41 The Return of the Native is not here – and seems less often reprinted than those novels – but several other editions of Thomas Hardy novels are, and Folio just published a new edition of his poems in 2021.42 To bring things full circle, Folio has recently rereleased an edition of Moby Dick, with the original 1930 illustrations by Rockwell Kent. Adorning its front cover is the full-page image I described in Chapter 2, of a whale diving down on a starry night, a boat clutched in its jaw. In Kent’s illustration, it was a very pigmented black, but here it has been recolored so that the background is a grey-brown and the whale a clean, nearly unmottled white.43 Kent’s whales were sometimes Moby Dick, but more often investigations of the idea of the whale itself. This particular whale was anonymous. This front cover, then, is yet one more reinvention of the reprint through the idea of the wood engraving, and its sold-out edition is one more sign of the endurance of these stories with these illustrations.

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We still look to nineteenth-century novels as anchors in our home libraries, and we want them nicely bound, special-feeling, and distinguished-looking, just as readers did in the early to mid-twentieth century. Penguin Illustrated Classics was never revived, but Penguin does have several imprints under its Penguin Classics division, like Deluxe Classics, Drop Caps, and Civic Classics. One popular choice, the Clothbound Classics series, is designed by Coralie Bickford-Smith, and advertised online as follows: Penguin Classics presents beautiful hardcover editions of beloved classic literature. Featuring custom patterns inspired by each work stamped on linen cases, colored endpapers, and ribbon markers, these gift-worthy editions of more than sixty titles including Great Expectations, Far from the Madding Crowd, and Wuthering Heights are one of the most coveted series of classic literature every produced.44

With their soft covers, these twenty-first-century reprints really are very giftable and pretty (or, to use a term F. R. Leavis would hate, “worthwhile”). In a seminar I once taught on Jane Austen – in which I required all her texts but did not mandate any given edition – one of my students came to each class with the relevant Austen Clothbound Classic, neatly protected in a large Ziploc bag. These mass-produced objects feel unique. However, while the rest of Penguin Classics’s imprints have been increasingly diversifying, this series is surprisingly heavy on the British and American nineteenth century.45 The only books called out in the above description are by Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, and Emily Brontë, and the only books currently for sale as sets are works by Dickens, the Brontës, and Austen. This list would feel oddly familiar to a Book-of-theMonth Club subscriber in the mid-1940s, when Penguin Classics was founded, right after the war, as a new library of translations. Ten years later, one author suggested that its by-then fifty-nine books would soon exhaust the world of available classic literature.46 There are by now of course many more Penguin Classics, but Clothbound Classics shrink that canon back to about sixty. Nostalgic objects, they look backwards, to a different version of the canon. These novels, though, are resilient to and receptive of adaptation and change. They do not need to be nostalgic. Just in the last couple of years, artists, directors, and publishers have remade the canon in diverse fashions. Amy Sherald, Michelle Obama’s official portraitist, painted A single man in possession of a good fortune (2019), a stunning canvas of a Black man looking straight at the viewer, dressed in a sweater tiled over with a complicated architectural geography.47 Her reinvention of the famous first line of

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Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is a statement and a query, of the place of Blackness in the classic canon. Armando Iannuci directed Dev Patel as the lead of his adaptation of The Personal History of David Copperfield (2020), centering a Brown person in a film space known for being overly nostalgic about a very white version of the Victorian era.48 The same year that his movie came out, Barnes & Noble’s “Diverse Editions” series featured diverse faces on twelve covers of classic young adult novels – Ahab as Brown, Frankenstein’s monster as Black, Dorothy as of East Asian descent. Widely panned as diversity-washing, it was quickly pulled.49 Much more compellingly, a sixteen-book capsule collection of new reprints is forthcoming from an imprint associated with Freedom Reads, which brings books to incarcerated persons.50 Among the first set of books are familiar names: Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, and Moby Dick, each of which will be accompanied by a letter-style foreword chosen from a roster that includes authors like Marlon James, George Saunders, and Jamaica Kincaid.51 The books we choose to collect into sets and libraries still reflect choices made in the early twentieth century around what an everyday reader should and would like to read. And the reprint can still create cross-temporal conversations between authors, readers, and spaces. Because the gilded objects that resulted from Leighton, Kent, Eichenberg, and Hassall’s illustration projects are now doubly n ­ ostalgic residents of our home libraries  – they were always metonyms for the nineteenth  ­ ­ century and now they are also stand-ins for a particular moment in the ­twentieth ­century – they might easily face us backwards, to old ­stories, beloved ­characters, and remembered circumstances. And yet, stripping away all the complex dynamics of authors, publishers, artists, and ­readers that I have here endeavored to elucidate into linear timelines, there is a ­powerful ­presentness to these books. In his Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin ­theorized the image as follows: “It is not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation.”52 To unshelve one of these books and read its images against its text is to navigate a spontaneous constellation of word, image, story, character, and experience. It is even, perhaps, to be ­suddenly stilled, and to find that a novel from the nineteenth century inside a book from the twentieth century can be a doubled mirror – you in it, it in you. The possibility of such moments – which these artists’ books are both emblematic of and conduits for – is why this book, which was once meant to be mostly about objects, became mostly about people. The stories of our books are also the stories of our lives.

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Notes

Introduction 1 Emily Dickinson, “1263,” in The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (New York: Little Brown and Company, 1976), 553. 2 Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native, illust. with woodcuts by Clare Leighton (1878; New York: Harper & Brothers, 1929). 3 Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, illust. with wood engravings by Fritz Eichenberg (1847; New York: Random House, 1943); Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, illust. with wood engravings by Fritz Eichenberg (1847; New York: Random House, 1943). 4 Jane Austen, Emma, illust. with wood engravings by Joan Hassall (1815; 1962; London: Folio Society, 1975); Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, illust. with wood engravings by Joan Hassall (1814; 1961; London: Folio Society, 1975); Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, illust. with wood engravings by Joan Hassall (1817; 1960; London: Folio Society, 1975); Jane Austen, Persuasion, illust. with wood engravings by Joan Hassall (1817; 1961; London: The Folio Society, 1975); Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, illust. with wood engravings by Joan Hassall (1813; 1957; London: Folio Society, 1975); Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility, illust. with wood engravings by Joan Hassall (1811; 1958; London: Folio Society, 1975); Jane Austen, Shorter Works, illust. with wood engravings by Joan Hassall (1963; London: Folio Society, 1975). 5 Herman Melville, Moby Dick: Or, The Whale, illust. by Rockwell Kent (1851; Chicago: Lakeside Press, 1930); Herman Melville, Moby Dick: Or, the Whale, illust. by Rockwell Kent (1851; New York: Random House, 1930). 6 Virginia Woolf, The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 3: 1919–1924, ed. Andrew McNeillie (San Diego: Harvest Books, 1991), 284. 7 J. E. Morpurgo, Allen Lane, King Penguin: A Biography (London: Hutchinson, 1979), 83; W. E. Williams, The Penguin Story (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1956), 9. 8 Kathryn Sutherland, “Jane Austen: Juvenilia. Review,” The Review of English Studies 63, no. 259 (April 1, 2012): 333–37, 333; Herman Melville, Moby Dick, ed. Hershel Parker and Harrison Hayford (1851; New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), 635. 166

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9 Richard Clement, Book in America (Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing, 1996), 112–13. 10 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (1955; New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 218. 11 Albert Garrett, A History of British Wood Engraving (Tunbridge Wells, UK: Midas Books, 1978), 101. 12 Patricia Jaffe, Women Engravers (London: Sphere, 1988), 20. 13 F. J. Harvey Darton, Modern Book-Illustration in Great Britain and America (London; New York: Studio Publications, 1931), 18. 14 James Hamilton, Wood Engraving & the Woodcut in Britain, c. 1890–1990 (London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1994), 68. 15 Dorothea Braby, The Way of Wood Engraving (London: Studio Publications, 1953), 91. 16 Clare Leighton, Wood Engraving of the 1930’s (London: Studio Publications, 1936), 175. 17 George Bernard Shaw, The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God, illust. John Farleigh (London: Constable & Co., 1932); Joan Hassall, Wood Engraving: A Reader’s Guide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the National Book League, 1949), 8. 18 Hamilton, 109, 137. 19 Garrett, 165; Hamilton, 140. 20 Morpurgo, 80. 21 Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, illust. with wood engravings by Helen Binyon (1813; London: Penguin Illustrated Classics, 1938). 22 Herman Melville, Typee, illust. with wood engravings by Robert Gibbings (1846; London: Penguin Illustrated Classics, 1938). 23 Austen, Pride and Prejudice (Penguin Illustrated Classics). 24 Ibid., 79, 203, 240, 279–80. 25 Hamilton, 140. 26 Gyorgy Kepes, Graphic Forms: The Arts as Related to the Book (London: Forgotten Books, 2018), 109. 27 See, for example, Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture (1929; San Diego: Harcourt Brace Javanovich, 1959), 230. 28 Wilkie Collins, “The Unknown Public,” Household Words 18, no. 439 (August 21, 1858): 217–22. 29 See Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957); Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life (1957; London: Penguin Books in association with Chatto & Windus, 2009). 30 Matthew Arnold, Culture & Anarchy (1869; New York: Macmillan, 1924), xi. 31 Virginia Woolf, The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 3: 1919–1924, ed. Andrew McNeillie (San Diego: Harvest Books, 1991), 337. 32 Ibid.

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Notes to pages 9–16

33 Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader, ed. Andrew McNeillie (1925; San Diego: Mariner Books, 2002), 1. 34 Francis Mulhern, The Moment of “Scrutiny,” New Edition (1979; London: Verso, 1981), 25. Note: Mulhern is here summarizing Chapter 1 of I. A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner, & Co., 1924). For more, see Katerina Koutsantoni, Virginia Woolf’s Common Reader (Farnham, UK: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2009). 35 F. R. Leavis, Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture (Cambridge: The Minority Press, 1930), 4. 36 Rachel Bowlby, Shopping with Freud (London; New York: Routledge, 1993), 3. 37 Q. D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public (1932; London: Chatto and Windus, 1939), 169. 38 Hoggart, xx; Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot (1984; New York: Vintage, 1990), 76. 39 Terry Seymour, A Printing History of Everyman’s Library, 1906–1982 (Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2011), 12. 40 Dorothy Canfield, “Taps for Private Tussie by Jesse Stuart” Book-of-the-Month Club News, ed. Harry Scherman, vol. November 1943 (New York: Book-ofthe-Month Club, 1943), 2. 41 See Joan Shelley Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992); Janice A. Radway, A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). 42 “The Folio Society,” The Book Collector 57, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 11–20, 11–12. 43 Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), 36–37. 44 Joan Hassall, “My Engraved Work,” The Private Library Second Series 7, no. 4 (Winter 1974): 139–65, 139. 45 Joan Hassall Papers, The Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge, 75–1989. 46 Hassall, “My Engraved Work,” 139. 47 Ruari McLean, The Wood Engravings of Joan Hassall (London: Oxford University Press, 1960), 24. 48 Clare Leighton, Clare Leighton: The Growth and Shaping of an Artist-Writer (Pewsey, Wiltshire, UK: Estate of Clare Leighton, 2009), 8. 49 Fritz Eichenberg, Oral history interview with Fritz Eichenberg, inter view by Robert Brown, 1979, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, accessed April 23, 2013, www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/ oral-history-interview-fritz-eichenberg-12736. 50 Fritz Eichenberg, Oral history interview with Fritz Eichenberg, inter view by Paul Cummings, 1970, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, accessed June 7, 2016, www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/ oral-history-interview-fritz-eichenberg-12524. 51 Brontë, Wuthering Heights (Random House), 106.

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52 Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation (1966; New York: Picador, 2001), 7. See also Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, “Surface Reading: An Introduction,” Representations 108, no. 1 (November 1, 2009): 1–21. 53 Sontag, 14. 54 Brontë, Wuthering Heights (Random House), 106. 55 J. Hillis Miller, Victorian Subjects (Durham: Duke University Press: 1991), 153. 56 Lewis Mumford, Herman Melville (New York: Literary Guild of America, 1929), 194. 57 Simon Dentith, Nineteenth-Century British Literature Then and Now: Reading with Hindsight (Farnham, Surrey; Burlington, VT: Routledge, 2016), 1. 58 Letter from William Kittredge to Rockwell Kent, July 27, 1928, Rockwell Kent Papers, Reel 5174, Frame 1132–33. Archives of American Art. Smithsonian Institute. Washington, D.C.; Joan Hassall Papers, MS 188 1989. 59 Leah Price, How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 124. 60 Leighton, Clare Leighton, 17.

1  Clare Leighton & Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native 1 Virginia Woolf, The Second Common Reader (1932; San Diego: Mariner Books, 2003), 248–49. 2 E. M. Forster, The BBC Talks of E. M. Forster, 1929–1960: A Selected Edition, ed. Mary Lago, Linda K. Hughes, and Elizabeth MacLeod Walls (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008), 164. 3 Clare Leighton, Clare Leighton: The Growth and Shaping of an Artist-Writer (Pewsey, Wiltshire, UK: Estate of Clare Leighton, 2009), 17. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid. 6 Clare Leighton, Tempestuous Petticoat: The Story of an Invincible Edwardian (New York, Toronto: Rinehart & Company, 1947), 4. 7 Ibid., 6. 8 Ibid., 240–41. 9 Ibid., 11. 10 Ibid., 22. 11 Ibid., 20. 12 Ibid., 33. 13 Albert Garrett, A History of British Wood Engraving (Tunbridge Wells, UK: Midas Books, 1978), 386. 14 Patricia Jaffe, Women Engravers (London: Sphere, 1988), 18. 15 Ibid., 44; Clare Leighton, Woodcuts: Examples of the Work of Clare Leighton (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1930). 16 Clare Leighton, Wood Engraving of the 1930’s (London, New York: The Studio, Ltd., 1936), 10.

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Notes to pages 26–29

17 Richard Clement, Book in America: With Images from the Library of Congress (Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing, 1996), 65–66. 18 “Display Ad 16,” The Observer, September 22, 1929. http://search.proquest​ .com; Arthur St John Adcock, ed., “Advertisement,” The Bookman 77, no. 457 (October 1929), 55. 19 Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native, illust. with woodcuts by Clare Leighton (1878; New York: Harper & Brothers, 1929), jacket copy. 20 F. R. Leavis, Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture (Cambridge: The Minority Press, 1930), 23. 21 Ibid., 25. 22 Pamela Dalziel, “Anxieties of Representation: The Serial Illustrations to Hardy’s The Return of the Native,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 51, no. 1 (1996): 84–110, 88. 23 Carl J. Weber, “Hardy’s Grim Note in ‘The Return of the Native,’” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 36, no. 1 (1942): 37–45, 39. 24 Arlene M. Jackson, Illustration and the Novels of Thomas Hardy (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1981), xi. 25 Dalziel, 110. 26 For more, see Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, illust. Vivien Gribble (1891; London: Macmillan & Co., 1926); Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native, illust. Agnes Miller Parker (1878; New York: Limited Editions Club, 1942); Ian Rogerson, Wood Engravings of Agnes Miller Parker (London: Mark Batty Publisher, 2006); Jaffe 60–71. 27 See Caroline Mesrobian Hickman, Clare Leighton’s Wood Engravings of English Country Life between the Wars (PhD, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2011), http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.princeton.edu/, 77; James Hamilton, Wood Engraving & the Woodcut in Britain c. 1890–1990 (London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1994), 137. 28 Isabel C. Herdle. “Memorial Gallery Offers Final Chance to View Watercolors Show, Leighton Woodcuts,” Democrat-Chronicle, December 3, 1939; Clare Leighton Papers, 1931–1967, Smithsonian Archives of American Art, reel 69–70. 29 Thomas Hardy, Under the Greenwood Tree, illust. with wood engravings by Clare Leighton (1872; New York: Macmillan & Co., 1940). 30 Clare Leighton Papers, reel 69–70. 31 F. R. Leavis and Denys Thompson, Culture and Environment: The Training of Critical Awareness (London: Chatto & Windus, 1933), 1. 32 David Matless, Landscape and Englishness (London: Reaktion Books, 2005), 173. 33 Ian Jeffrey, British Landscape, 1920–1950: With 150 Illustrations, 50 in Color (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1985), 7–8. 34 Leighton, Tempestuous Petticoat, 223. 35 Marie Connor Leighton, Boy of My Heart: A True Book (New York: George H. Doran Company, 1916); Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900–1925 (London: Penguin, 1933).

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Notes to pages 29–40

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3 6 Marie Connor Leighton, Boy of My Heart. 37 Leighton, Tempestuous Petticoat, 250. 38 Ibid., 225. 39 David Leighton, “Eulogy at Memorial Service for Clare” (St. Paul’s, Woodbury, Connecticut, May 12, 1990). 40 Clare Leighton, Country Matters (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1937), xiii. 41 Ibid., xiv. 42 Ibid. 43 Hardy, The Return of the Native (New York: Harper & Brothers), 3. 44 Virginia Woolf, The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 4: 1925–1928, ed. Andrew McNeillie (San Diego: Harvest Books, 1991), 507–19. 45 Woolf, The Second Common Reader, 248–49. 46 Ibid., 253. 47 Forster, The BBC Talks of E. M. Forster, 164. 48 Ibid., 168. 49 Ibid., 169. 50 Ibid., 167. 51 Ibid., 168. 52 Thomas G. Pavel, The Lives of the Novel: A History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 257. 53 Hardy, The Return of the Native (New York: Harper & Brothers), 135–36. 54 Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891; London: Penguin Books, 2003), 85. 55 Arthur Hopkins, “She lifted her hand,” Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native in Belgravia, A Magazine of Fashion and Amusement, February 1878; Hardy, The Return of the Native (Harper & Brothers), 62. 56 Hardy, The Return of the Native (New York: Harper & Brothers), 62. 57 Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, illust. with Twelve Wood Engravings by Clare Leighton (1847; New York: Random House, 1931). 58 Clare Leighton, “Untitled Sketch,” Clare Leighton Papers, reel 69–91. 59 Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Vintage, 1992), 92. 60 Hardy, The Return of the Native (New York: Harper & Brothers), 98. 61 Ibid., 75–76. 62 Jackson, 41. 63 Hardy, The Return of the Native (New York: Harper & Brothers), 74–75. 64 Ibid., 236. 65 Ibid., 237. 66 Ibid., 299–300. 67 Arthur Hopkins, “Unconscious of her presence, he still went on singing,” Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native in Belgravia, August 1878. 68 Hardy, The Return of the Native (New York: Harper & Brothers), 302. 69 Ibid., 421. 70 Ibid., 425. 71 Ibid., 423–4.

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172

Notes to pages 40–50

72 Ibid., 426. 73 Ibid. 74 Ibid., 484. 75 Ibid. 76 Jackson, 88. 77 Dalziel, 84–86. 78 Hardy, The Return of the Native (New York: Harper & Brothers), 473. 79 Ibid., 82. 80 Ibid., 237. 81 Ibid., vii–viii. 82 Clare Leighton, Four Hedges: A Gardener’s Chronicle (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1935), 11. 83 Ibid., 53–54. 84 Hardy, The Return of the Native (New York: Harper & Brothers). 85 Ibid., 8. 86 Ibid., 7 (and 416), 8 (and 271), 15 (and 203), 89 (and 173), 129 (and 326), 135 (and 394), 159 (and 374), 182 (and 317), 238, 245 (and 399). 87 Garrett, 312. 88 Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works (New York: Everyman’s Library, 2003), 361. 89 Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (1970; Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1991), 14. 90 Leighton, Clare Leighton, 21. 91 See, for example, Ibid., 42–43. 92 Garrett, 386. 93 Leighton, Clare Leighton, 29. 94 Clare Leighton, “Growing New Roots,” Common Ground IV, no. 4 (Summer 1944): 20–23; Clare Leighton, Growing New Roots: An Essay with Fourteen Wood Engravings (San Francisco: The Book Club of California, 1976). 95 Leighton, “Growing New Roots,” 20. 96 Ibid., 22. 97 Ibid. 98 Daniel Pool, Dickens’ Fur Coat and Charlotte’s Unanswered Letters: The Rows and Romances of England’s Great Victorian Novelists (New York: Perennial, 1998), 208. 99 Ibid. 100 See George Eliot, Adam Bede (1859; New York: Penguin, 2008), 193. 101 Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Dutch Painting and the Realist Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 91, 147. 102 Hardy, Under the Greenwood Tree, 231. 103 Ibid. 104 James Canton, The Oak Papers (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2021), 78. 105 Clare Leighton, The Farmer’s Year: A Calendar of English Husbandry (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1933), 9.

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Notes to pages 50–59

173

106 Clare Leighton, “Study for Lopping,” 1933, Black crayon and grey wash heightened with white gouache over graphite, 8 c 9 15/16 in, Mather Collection, Princeton University Museum. 107 Hardy, Under the Greenwood Tree, 7. 108 Ibid, 37. 109 Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (1973; New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), 13. 110 Letter from William Maxwell to Claire Leighton, May 15 1940, Clare Leighton Papers, reel 69–70. 111 Ibid. 112 Ibid. 113 Leighton, The Farmer’s Year, publicity insert. 114 Eric Gill, Eric Gill: Autobiography (1940; London: Lund Humphries, 1992), 239. 115 William Shakespeare, As You Like It, in The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (1599; 1623; Philadelphia: The Blakiston Company, 1944), 675.

2  Rockwell Kent & Herman Melville’s Moby Dick 1 Herman Melville, Moby Dick: Or, the Whale, illust. by Rockwell Kent (New York: Random House, 1930), 1. 2 Rockwell Kent, Voyaging: Southward from the Strait of Magellan (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1924), 2. 3 Ibid. 4 Letter from William Kittredge to Rockwell Kent, July 27, 1928, Rockwell Kent Papers, 1935–61, Archives of American Art. Smithsonian Institute. Washington, D.C., Reel 5174, Frame 1115. 5 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven F. Rendall (1980; Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 170. 6 Lewis Mumford, Herman Melville (New York: Literary Guild of America, 1929), 3; O. W. Riegel, “The Anatomy of Melville’s Fame,” American Literature 3, no. 2 (1931): 195–203. 7 Herman Melville, Moby Dick, ed. Hershel Parker and Harrison Hayford (1851; New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), 635; Paul Lauter, “Melville Climbs the Canon,” American Literature 66, no. 1 (1994): 1–24, 6; Raymond Melbourne Weaver, Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic (New York: George H. Doran Company, 1921), 22. 8 D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (New York: T. Seltzer, 1923), 237. 9 Mumford, 4. 10 V. L. O. Chittick, “The Way Back to Melville: Sea-Chart of a Literary Revival,” Southwest Review 40, no. 3 (1955): 238–48. 11 See Constance Martin and Richard V. West, Distant Shores: The Odyssey of Rockwell Kent (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 35; Don Roberts, Rockwell Kent: The Art of the Bookplate (San Francisco: Fair Oaks Press, 2003), 72.

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174

Notes to pages 59–61

12 “Recent Books,” The New Yorker, December 13, 1930, 122, accessed June 16, 2021, www.newyorker.com/archive. 13 “Talk of the Town,” The New Yorker, January 3, 1931, 9, accessed February 24, 2021, www.newyorker.com/archive. 14 “33-Foot Boat Sails Today for Greenland On 3-Month Trip; Rockwell Kent in Crew,” The New York Times, May 18, 1929, sec. Archives, accessed February 15, 2020, www.nytimes.com/1929/05/18/archives/33foot-boat-sails-today-forgreenland-on-3month-trip-rockwell-kent.html; “Rockwell Kent to Set Sail: Artist Leaves Thursday on Way to Greenland for Long Stay,” The New York Times, April 28, 1931, sec. Archives, accessed February 15, 2020, www.nytimes​ .com/1931/04/28/archives/rockwell-kent-to-sail-artist-leaves-thursday-on-wayto-greenland.html, 7; “Rockwell Kent Off on Trip to Greenland; Artist, Irked by City Life, to Live 2 Years with Eskimos – Son, 13, Accompanies Him,” The New York Times, July 12, 1934, sec. Archives, accessed February 15, 2020, www .nytimes.com/1934/07/12/archives/rockwell-kent-off-on-trip-to-greenland-­ artist-irked-by-city-life-to.html,19. 15 “Profiles: Education of a Prince ~ V,” The New Yorker, November 26, 1932, 24, accessed July 18, 2020, www.newyorker.com/archive. 16 “Journalistic Observation,” The New Yorker, March 24, 1945, 103, accessed July 18, 2020, www.newyorker.com/archive. 17 Richard Clement, Book in America (Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing, 1996), 112–13; Claire Badaracco, American Culture and the Marketplace: R. R. Donnelley’s Four American Books Campaign, 1926–1930 (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1992), 13, 26. 18 Letter from William Kittredge to Rockwell Kent, September 16, 1926, Rockwell Kent Papers, Reel 5174, Frame 1073. 19 Ibid. 20 Letter from William Kittredge to Rockwell Kent, January 10, 1930, Rockwell Kent Papers, Reel 5174, Frame 1196. 21 Letter from William Kittredge to Rockwell Kent, September 16, 1926, Rockwell Kent Papers, Reel 5174, Frame 1073. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid. 24 Letter from William Kittredge to Rockwell Kent, January 24, 1929, Rockwell Kent Papers, Reel 5174, Frame 1151. 25 Letter from William Kittredge to Rockwell Kent, April 12, 1927, Rockwell Kent Papers, Reel 5174, Frame 1081. 26 Letter from Rockwell Kent to William Kittredge, June 22, 1927, Rockwell Kent Papers, Reel 5174, Frame 1097; Letter from William Kittredge to Rockwell Kent, December 13, 1927, Rockwell Kent Papers, Reel 5174, Frame 1109; Badaracco, 49. 27 Badaracco, 13. 28 See, for example, Rockwell Kent, It’s Me O Lord: The Autobiography of Rockwell Kent (1955; Whitefish, MT: Literary Licensing, LLC., 2011), 92; Rockwell Kent, Wilderness: A Journal of Quiet Adventure in Alaska (1918; Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2011), 112.

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Notes to pages 61–66

175

29 Letter from Rockwell Kent to William Kittredge, November 4, 1929, Rockwell Kent Papers, Reel 5212, Frame 544. 30 Kent, It’s Me O Lord, 438. 31 Letters from William Kittredge to Rockwell Kent, June 1, 1927, January 26, 1929, February 28, 1929, Rockwell Kent Papers, Reel 5212, Frames, 1094, 1153, 1162. 32 Letter from William Kittredge to Rockwell Kent, January 10, 1930, Rockwell Kent Papers, Reel 5212, Frame 1196. 33 Letter from William Kittredge to Rockwell Kent, December 30, 1926, Rockwell Kent Papers, Reel 5212, Frame 1076. 34 Ibid. 35 “Engross,” in Merriam-Webster, accessed August 18, 2020, www.merriamwebster.com/dictionary/engross. 36 Letter from William Kittredge to Rockwell Kent, December 29, 1927, Rockwell Kent Papers, Reel 5212, Frame 1111. 37 Letter from William Kittredge to Rockwell Kent, December 30, 1926, Rockwell Kent Papers, Reel 5212, Frame 1076. 38 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (1955; New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 220. 39 Richard J. King, Ahab’s Rolling Sea: A Natural History of “Moby-Dick” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 350. 40 Rebecca Giggs, Fathoms: The World in the Whale (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020), 39. 41 Martin and West, 114. 42 Jamie L. Jones, “Print Nostalgia: Skeuomorphism and Rockwell Kent’s Woodblock Style,” American Art 31, no. 3 (September 1, 2017): 2–25, 4. 43 Herman Melville, Moby Dick: Or, The Whale, illust. by Rockwell Kent (1851; Chicago: Lakeside Press, 1930). 44 Kent, Wilderness, 107. 45 Kent, It’s Me O Lord, 353–54. 46 Kent, Wilderness, 147. 47 Rockwell Kent, Rockwellkentiana: Few Words and Many Pictures, ed. Carl Zigrosser (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1933), 43. 48 Clare Leighton, Wood Engraving of the 1930’s (London: The Studio, Ltd; New York, 1936), 17. 49 Jake Milgram Wien. “Rockwell Kent’s First Print,” Print Quarterly, vol. 18, no. 3, Print Quarterly Publications, 2001, pp. 289–301, 294. 50 Kent, It’s Me O Lord, 129. 51 Ibid., 150. 52 Andrew Delbanco, Melville: His World and Work (New York: Vintage, 2013), 183. 53 Kent, It’s Me O Lord, 92; Wilderness, 49. 54 Rockwell Kent, This Is My Own (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1940), 80. 55 Letter from Rockwell Kent to Charles Littell, November 10, 1930, Rockwell Kent Papers, Reel 5212, Frame 1393. 56 Badaracco, 54. 57 Melville, Moby Dick (Lakeside Press, 1930). 58 Melville, Moby Dick (Random House).

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176

Notes to pages 66–69

59 Letter from Rockwell Kent to William Kittredge, July 7, 1927, Rockwell Kent Papers, Reel 5212, Frame 1104. 60 “Profiles: Publisher II ~ Big Day for Random,” The New Yorker, May 16, 1959, 50, accessed July 18, 2020, www.newyorker.com/archive. 61 “About Modern Library,” Modern Library, accessed August 19, 2020, www​ .modernlibrary.com/about/. 62 “Profiles: Publisher II ~ Big Day for Random,” 50. 63 Roberts, 46. 64 Letter from William Kittredge to Rockwell Kent, June 6, 1930, Rockwell Kent Papers, Reel 5212, Frame 1295. 65 “An Illustration from the Rockwell Kent’s Moby Dick,” The New Yorker, December 6, 1930, 133, accessed July 18, 2020, www.newyorker.com/archive. 66 Roberts, 72. 67 Charles Lee, The Hidden Public: The Story of the Book-of-the-Month Club. (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1958), 164. 68 Ibid., 135. 69 Joan Shelley Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), xi, 94. 70 See, for example, Lee, 164. 71 Ibid., 24. 72 Harry Scherman, Reminiscences of Harry Scherman: Oral History, Transcript, 1955, Book-of-the-Month Club Project, Columbia Center for Oral History, 136–37. 73 Ibid., 130. 74 Lee, appendix. 75 Andre Schiffrin, The Business of Books: How the International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read (London: Verso, 2001),  8; Gordon Barrick Neavill, “Publishing in Wartime: The Modern Library Series during the Second World War,” Library Trends 55, no. 3 (2007): 583–96, 586. 76 Janice A. Radway, A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 283. 77 Rockwell Kent and Paul Cummings, “An Interview with Rockwell Kent Conducted by Paul Cummings at Ausable Forks, New York, February 26–27, 1969,” Archives of American Art Journal 12, no. 1 (1972): 10–18, 18. 78 Kent, It’s Me O Lord, 323. 79 Ibid., 50, 72–74. 80 Ibid., 76; Roberts, 7. 81 David Traxel, An American Saga: The Life and Times of Rockwell Kent (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), 18. 82 Roberts, 53. 83 Kent, It’s Me O Lord, 116. 84 Kent and Cummings, “An Interview with Rockwell Kent,” 13. 85 Ibid.

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Notes to pages 69–74

177

86 Frederick Lewis, dir. Rockwell Kent: A Documentary by Frederick Lewis (Dundee Road Productions, 2005, 2 hr, 50 min). 87 Kent, It’s Me O Lord, 147–48. 88 Traxel, 154. 89 Kent, It’s Me O Lord, 448. 90 Rockwell Kent, N by E (New York: Random House, 1930); Kent, Rockwellkentiana; Rockwell Kent, Salamina (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1935). 91 Kent, This Is My Own and It’s Me O Lord. 92 Kent, It’s Me O Lord, 239. 93 Ibid., introduction to Part 3. 94 Ibid., 204. 95 Martin and West, 17. 96 Kent, Voyaging, 24. 97 Letters from William Kittredge to Rockwell Kent, March 22, 1927; May 18, 1928; June 5, 1928, Rockwell Kent Papers, Reel 5212, Frames 1080, 1125, 1127. 98 Letter from William Kittredge to Rockwell Kent, June 5, 1928, Rockwell Kent Papers, Reel 5212, Frame 1127. 99 Letter from William Kittredge to Rockwell Kent, October 21, 1930, Rockwell Kent Papers, Reel 5212, Frame 1388. 100 Letter from Rockwell Kent to William Kittredge, November 2, 1929, Rockwell Kent Papers, Reel 5212, Frame 1188. 101 Kent, It’s Me O Lord, 439. 102 Lewis. See also Motion Picture Film of [Kent in Greenland], transferred to videotape, Rockwell Kent Papers. 103 Lewis. 104 Rockwell Kent, Greenland Journal (New York: Ivan Obelensky, 1962), vii. 105 “Rockwell Kent to Set Sail: Artist Leaves Thursday on Way to Greenland for Long Stay,” The New York Times, April 28, 1931, sec. Archives, accessed February 15, 2020, www.nytimes.com/1931/04/28/archives/rockwell-kent-tosail-artist-leaves-thursday-on-way-to-greenland.html, 7; “Rockwell Kent Off on Trip to Greenland,” 19. 106 Kent, It’s Me O Lord, 442. 107 Lewis. 108 Kent, This Is My Own, 130. 109 A. C. Christodoulou, “Melville’s Painting,” Leviathan 5, no. 1 (2003). 110 Melville, Moby Dick (Random House), 16. 111 Delbanco, 191. 112 Kent, It’s Me O Lord, 436. 113 Melville, Moby Dick (Random House), 383–84. 114 King, 23. 115 Melville, Moby Dick (Random House), 385. 116 Ibid., 379. 117 Elizabeth A. Schultz, Unpainted to the Last: Moby-Dick and TwentiethCentury American Art (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995).

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178

Notes to pages 75–86

118 Roberts, 108–9. 119 Mumford, 193. 120 Kent, It’s Me O Lord, 437–38. 121 Mumford, 55. 122 Kent, It’s Me O Lord, 438. 123 Martin and West, 32. 124 Lewis. 125 Miscellaneous photographs, Rockwell Kent Papers, Reel 5255, Frames 618–69. 126 Kent, It’s Me O Lord, 438. 127 Melville, Moby Dick (Random House), 190. 128 Ibid., 194. 129 Ibid., 207. 130 Ibid., 655. 131 Giggs, 2. 132 Melville, Moby Dick (Random House), 293, 386, 490, 491, 500, 573, 313, 566, 577, 650, 654, 659, 710, 786, 794. 133 Ibid., 487. 134 Ibid., 450. 135 Ibid., 489. 136 Ibid., 490. 137 Giggs, 13. 138 Kent, Wilderness, 13. 139 Ibid. 140 Kent, Rockwellkentiana. 141 Kent, It’s Me O Lord, 427. 142 Ibid., 100. 143 Scott R. Ferris and Ellen Pearce, Rockwell Kent’s Forgotten Landscapes (Camden, ME: Down East Books, 1998), 18–19. 144 Ibid., 31. 145 See, for example, Ibid., 52. 146 Ibid., 19. 147 Kent, Voyaging, 24–25. 148 Ibid., 51. 149 Ibid., 24. 150 Ibid., 52–53. 151 Ibid., 90, 100, 107. 152 Kent, N by E, 15–16. 153 Melville, Moby Dick (Random House), 655. 154 Ibid., 292. 155 Kent, N by E, 88. 156 Ibid., 117. 157 Ibid., 24, 26, 54, 129, 132, 125. 158 Melville, Moby Dick (Random House), 159; Kent, It’s Me O Lord, 359. 159 Melville, Moby Dick (Random House), vii.

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Notes to pages 86–91 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173

179

Ibid., 137–38. Ibid., 211, 351, 440, 445, 493, 653. Ibid., 53, 93, 167. Ibid., 243. See, for example, Jones, 2. Melville, Moby Dick (Random House), 550. Melville, Moby Dick, ed. Hershel Parker and Harrison Hayford, 632. Traxel, 5. Ferris, 12; Traxel, 29. Kent, It’s Me O Lord, 302. Ibid., 300. Ibid., 303. Dan Burne Jones, Rockwell Kent Centennial (Oak Park, IL: D. Burne Jones, 1983). “Painters Debate Art Policies Here,” The New York Times, March 15, 1926, sec. Archives, accessed February 15, 2020, www.nytimes.com/1926/03/15/archives/ painters-debate-art-policies-here-rockwell-kent-attacks-stand-of.html, 7. 174 “Artist and Crusader,” The New York Times, October 27, 1930, sec. Archives, accessed February 15, 2020, www.nytimes.com/1930/10/27/archives/artistand-crusader.html, 14. 175 “Revolt Plea Seen in Kent’s Murals,” The New York Times, September 11, 1937, sec. Archives, accessed February 15, 2020, www.nytimes.com/1937/09/11/ archives/revolt-plea-seen-in-kents-murals-paintings-near-farleys-officeshow.html, 19. 176 Justin Hamel, “Searching for America’s 1930s Post Office Murals – a Photo Essay,” The Guardian, August 21, 2020, sec. Art and Design, accessed February 17, 2020, www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/aug/21/pictureessay-america-1930s-post-office-murals; Karal Ann Marling, Wall-to-Wall America: Post Office Murals in the Great Depression (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 4. 177 Kent, It’s Me O Lord, 501. 178 Ibid. 179 Kent, Mail Service in the Arctic and Mail Service in the Tropics at the Ariel Rios Federal Building in Washington, D.C., 1937. 180 Kent, It’s Me O Lord, 502; April G. L. and Annette Evans-Smith, “2020 Biennial Report to the Governor and Legislature” (The Alaska Native Language Preservation and Advisory Council, January 1, 2020). 181 Kent, It’s Me O Lord, 502. 182 Ibid. For more, see Patricia Gherovici, The Puerto Rican Syndrome (New York: Other Press, 2003), 266. 183 Ibid.; Marling, 142. 184 Kent, It’s Me O Lord, 501. 185 Ibid., 503. 186 Edwin Meléndez and Edgardo Meléndez, Colonial Dilemma: Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Puerto Rico (Boston: South End Press, 1993), 192–93.

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180

Notes to pages 91–97

187 “Revolt Plea Seen in Kent’s Murals,” 19. 188 Rockwell Kent, Of Men and Mountains (Ausable Forks, NY: Asgaard Press, 1959), 7. 189 See Traxel, 204–5; Roberts, 172. 190 Kent, It’s Me O Lord, 287, 573. 191 Ibid, acknowledgments. 192 Ibid., 494, 563. 193 Traxel, 205. 194 “Rockwell KENT and Walter Briehl, Petitioners, v. John Foster DULLES, Secretary of State,” LII/Legal Information Institute, accessed August 18, 2020, www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/357/116. 195 Kent, Of Men and Mountains, title page. 196 Ibid., frontispiece. 197 William Blake. The Selected Poems of William Blake (Hertfordshire, UK: Wordsworth Editions, 2000), 151. 198 Kent, Of Men and Mountains, 23.

3  Fritz Eichenberg & Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre 1 Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, illust. with wood engravings by Fritz Eichenberg (1847; New York: Random House, 1943), 253. 2 Fritz Eichenberg, Oral history interview with Fritz Eichenberg, interview by Paul Cummings, 1970, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, accessed June 7, 2016, www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/ oral-history-interview-fritz-eichenberg-12524. 3 Ibid. 4 George Henry Lewes, “Recent Novels: French and English,” Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country, December 1847, 686–95, 692, accessed June 16, 2021, www.bl.uk/collection-items/review-of-jane-eyre-by-george-henry-lewes. 5 Virginia Woolf, The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 2: 1912–1918, ed. Andrew McNeillie (San Diego: Harvest Books, 1990), 27. 6 Eichenberg, Oral history interview, 1970. 7 Fritz Eichenberg, Oral history interview with Fritz Eichenberg, interview by Harlan Phillips, 1964, Archives of American Art’s New Deal and the Arts Project. Smithsonian Institution, accessed January 21, 2021, www.aaa.si.edu/ collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-fritz-eichenberg-12524. 8 Bernard S Myers, The German Expressionists: A Generation in Revolt (New York: Praeger, 1957), 24. 9 Leann Davis Alspaugh, “‘Shell-Shocked: Expressionism after the Great War.’ Los Angeles County Museum of Art,” Exhibit 27, no. 8 (April 2009): 47–49, 49. 10 Robin Reisenfeld, “Cultural Nationalism, Brücke and the German Woodcut: The Formation of a Collective Identity,” Art History 20, no. 2 (June 1, 1997): 289–312, 307.

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Notes to pages 97–101 11 12 13 14 15

181

Eichenberg, Oral history interview, 1964. Eichenberg, Oral history interview, 1970. Eichenberg, Oral history interview, 1964. Ibid. Fritz Eichenberg, The Wood and the Graver: The Work of Fritz Eichenberg (New York: Crown Publishers, 1977), 46. 16 Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, illust. Fritz Eichenberg, trans. Louise Maude and Alymer Maude (1867; New York: Heritage Press, 1938); Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev, Fathers and Sons, illust. Fritz Eichenberg, trans. Constance Garnett (1862; New York: The Heritage Press, 1941); Fyodor Dostoyevsky. A Raw Youth, illust. Fritz Eichenberg, trans. Constance Garnett (1875; Avon, CT: Limited Editions Club, 1974); Eichenberg, Oral history interview, 1964; Fritz Eichenberg, The Art of the Print: Masterpieces, History, Techniques (New York: H. N. Abrams, 1976). 17 Brontë, Jane Eyre (Random House), front matter. 18 Fritz Eichenberg, Oral history interview with Fritz Eichenberg. Interview by Robert Brown, 1979. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, accessed April 23, 2013, www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/ oral-history-interview-fritz-eichenberg-12736. 19 Charles Lee, The Hidden Public: The Story of the Book-of-the-Month Club (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1958), 30–31. 20 Gordon Barrick Neavill, “Publishing in Wartime: The Modern Library Series during the Second World War,” Library Trends 55, no. 3 (2007): 583–96, 586. 21 Emma Ruth Kent, The Dividend Books of the Book-of-the-Month Club: An Appraisal and an Evaluation (Tallahassee: Florida State University, 1952), 3. 22 Harry Scherman, ed., Book-of-the-Month Club News, November (New York: Book-of-the-Month Club, 1943), 4, 31–32. 23 Harry Scherman, Reminiscences of Harry Scherman: Oral History, Transcript, 1955, Book-of-the-Month Club Project, Columbia Center for Oral History, 20–35. 24 Janice A. Radway, A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 152. 25 Harry Scherman, Reminiscences, 26. 26 Radway, 152. 27 Rebecca Rego Barry, “The Neo-Classics: (Re)Publishing the ‘Great Books’ in the United States in the 1990s,” Book History 6 (2003): 251–75, 256. 28 Radway, 160. See also Harry Scherman, Reminiscences. 29 Arthur Conan Doyle, The Complete Sherlock Holmes, 2 vols. (New York: Doubleday, 1930), jacket copy. 30 Ibid., 8. 31 Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Books, with Illustrations by Aldren Watson, 2 vols. (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1948). 32 Ibid., v. 33 Ibid, jacket copy.

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182

Notes to pages 101–10

34 Ibid., vii. 35 Edwin Seaver, “Two Harlequins,” in Book-of-the-Month Club News, ed. Harry Scherman, November (New York: Book-of-the-Month Club, 1943). 36 Alice Kaplan and Philippe Roussin, “A Changing Idea of Literature: The Bibliothèque de La Pléiade,” Yale French Studies, no. 89 (1996): 237–62, 242. 37 Radway, 293. 38 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2002), 205. 39 Eichenberg, The Art of the Print, 7. 40 Ibid. 41 Eichenberg, The Wood and the Graver, 177. 42 “The Brontës: Three Strange Sisters Are Earning a New Popularity,” LIFE 15, no. 22 (November 29, 1943), 95–103. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid., 96–99. 45 Ibid. 46 Richard Wilcox and David E. Scherman, “Literary England,” LIFE 14, no. 24 (June 14, 1943), 76–83. 47 Harry Scherman, ed., Book-of-the-Month Club News, December (New York: Book-of-the-Month Club, 1943). 48 Richard Wilcox and David E. Scherman, Literary England: Photographs of Places Made Memorable in English Literature, no. 32 (New York: Random House, 1944). 49 “The Brontës,” 99. 50 Ibid., 100–3. 51 Lee M. Maxwell, Save Womens Lives: History of Washing Machines (Eaton, CO: Oldewash, 2003), 18–19. 52 “The Brontës,” 101. 53 Ibid., 102. 54 Ibid. 55 Edwin Seaver, “Letter to the Editor,” LIFE 15, no. 25 (December 20, 1943), 4. 56 Fritz Eichenberg, Artist on the Witness Stand (Wallingford, PA: Pendle Hill Publications, 1984), 6. 57 Norbert Wolf and Uta Grosenick, Expressionism (Köln; Los Angeles: Taschen, 2004), 7. 58 Brontë, Jane Eyre (Random House), 1–2. 59 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,” Critical Inquiry 12, no. 1 (1985): 243–61, 246. See also Antonia Losano, “Reading Women/Reading Pictures,” in Reading Women: Literary Figures and Cultural Icons from the Victorian Age to the Present, ed. Jennifer Phegley and Janet Badia (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005). 60 Garrett Stewart, The Look of Reading: Book, Painting, Text (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 56. 61 Fritz Eichenberg, “Portrait of the Artist in Love with the Book,” The Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress 22, no. 2 (April 1, 1965): 88–96, 90.

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Notes to pages 110–20

183

62 Jenny Uglow, Nature’s Engraver: A Life of Thomas Bewick (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 317. 63 Jennifer Schuessler, “A Lost Brontë Library Surfaces,” The New York Times, May 25, 2021, accessed May 25, 2021, sec. Arts, www.nytimes.com/2021/05/25/ arts/bronte-library-sothebys-auction.html. 64 Uglow, 319. 65 Diana Donald, The Art of Thomas Bewick (London: Reaktion Books, 2013), 93. 66 Brontë, Jane Eyre (Random House), 2. 67 Simon Cooke, “‘The Ever-Shifting Kaleidoscope of the Imagination’: Modern Illustrations to the Brontës,” Brontë Studies 31, no. 1 (March 1, 2006): 7–22, 8–9. 68 Brontë, Jane Eyre (Random House), 2. 69 Ibid. 70 Eichenberg, “Portrait of the Artist in Love with the Book,” 91; Eichenberg, The Art of the Print, 18. 71 Paula Rego, Loving Bewick, 2001, Lithograph, 67 × 43 cm, 2001. 72 Eichenberg, Oral history interview, 1970. 73 Eichenberg, “Portrait of the Artist in Love with the Book,” 89. 74 Ibid., 91. 75 Ibid. 76 Eichenberg, The Wood and the Graver, 177. 77 Brontë, Jane Eyre (Random House), 32. 78 Ibid, 46. 79 Eichenberg, The Wood and the Graver, 53. 80 Brontë, Jane Eyre (Random House), 233. 81 Ibid., 234. 82 Christian Weikop, “The Arts and Crafts Education of the Brücke: Expressions of Craft and Creativity,” The Journal of Modern Craft 1, no. 1 (March 1, 2008): 77–99, 86. 83 Brontë, Jane Eyre (Random House), 92. 84 Ibid., 93. 85 Ibid., 92. 86 Claire Harman, Charlotte Brontë: A Fiery Heart (New York: Knopf, 2016), 89. 87 Brontë, Jane Eyre (Random House), 119. 88 Ibid., 229. 89 Ibid., 279. 90 Ibid., 281. 91 Ibid., 288. 92 Harman, 286. 93 Ibid., 93. 94 Eichenberg, Oral history interview, 1970. 95 Maria DiBattista and Deborah Epstein Nord, At Home in the World: Women Writers and Public Life, from Austen to the Present (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 31. 96 Fritz Eichenberg, The Midnight Oil, 1947, Lithograph on wove paper, 15 15/16 × 11 13/16 in., Brooklyn Museum.

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Notes to pages 120–27

97 Eichenberg, Oral history interview, 1979. 98 Francisco Goya, El Sueño de La Razon Produce Monstruos, 1799, Etching, aquatint, drypoint, and burin, 8 3/8 × 5 15/16 in., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of M. Knoedler & Co., 1918. 99 Alexander Nehamas, “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters,” Representations 74, no. 1 (2001): 37–54, 37–38. 100 Ibid. 101 Fritz Eichenberg, The Artist and the Seven Deadly Sins, 1975, wood engraving, 10 5/8 × 7 inches. 102 Fritz Eichenberg, “Self Portrait,” in Face to Face: Twelve Contemporary American Artists Interpret Themselves in a Limited Edition of Original Wood Engravings (Great Barrington, MA: Penmaen-Busyhaus Publications, 1985). 103 Fritz Eichenberg, Untitled (Self-Portrait with Edgar Allan Poe Image), 1986, Print, Fritz Eichenberg Papers, Robert B. Haas Family Arts Library, Yale University Library, BOX 65 CALL #AOB 89. 104 Untitled Collage, Undated, Fritz Eichenberg, Paper and cardboard, Fritz Eichenberg Papers. 105 Eichenberg, The Wood and the Graver, 12. 106 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti to William Allingham, 1854–1870, ed. George Birbeck Hill (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1898), 58.

4  Joan Hassall & The Complete Novels of Jane Austen 1 Claudia L. Johnson, Jane Austen’s Cults and Cultures (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 34. 2 Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, illust. with wood engravings by Joan Hassall (1813; 1957; London: The Folio Society, 1975), 198. 3 James Edward Austen-Leigh, A Memoir of Jane Austen: And Other Family Recollections (1872; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 150. 4 Ruari McLean, The Wood Engravings of Joan Hassall (London: Oxford University Press, 1960), 28–29. 5 Ibid., 9. 6 Winston Fletcher, Powers of Persuasion: The Inside Story of British Advertising 1951–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 19. 7 McLean, 11. 8 Patricia Jaffe, Women Engravers (London: Sphere, 1988), 79. 9 Albert Garrett, A History of British Wood Engraving (Tunbridge Wells, UK: Midas Books, 1978), 191. 10 Hassall, “My Engraved Work,” 142. 11 Ibid., 145. 12 Joan Hassall Papers, The Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge, MS 183 1989. 13 Ibid., 71 1989.

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Notes to pages 127–32

185

14 McLean, 9. 15 Joan Hassall Papers, MS 39 1989, MS 105 1989, MS 183 1989. 16 McLean, 26; James Hamilton, Wood Engraving & the Woodcut in Britain c. 1890–1990 (London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1994), 138; Jaffe, 79. 17 Joan Hassall Papers, 1 E 43. 18 Hassall, “My Engraved Work,” 140. 19 McLean, 8. 20 Jaffe, 79. 21 Joan Hassall Papers, MS 201 1989; “Supplement to the London Gazette,” The London Gazette. December 30, 1986. 22 Kristin Bluemel, “‘A Happy Heritage’: Children’s Poetry Books and the Twentieth-Century Wood Engraving Revival,” The Lion and the Unicorn 37, no. 3 (September 2013): 207–37, 209. 23 Hamilton, 16. 24 “The Folio Society,” The Book Collector 57, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 11–20, 11–12. 25 F. R. Leavis, Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture (Cambridge: The Minority Press, 1930), 21. 26 “The Folio Society,” 12. 27 Alan Bennett, “Pictures at an Exhibition,” The Book Collector 57, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 37–57, 37. 28 Geoffrey Beare, “The Folio Society and Illustration,” Studies in Illustration 54 (2013): 6–25, 7. 29 Devoney Looser. The Making of Jane Austen (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017), 16. 30 Basil Gray, “Joan Hassall,” Signature 1: New Series. A Quadrimestrial of Typography and Graphic Arts. 1 (1949), 37. 31 Joan Hassall Papers, MS 191 1989. 32 Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, illust. with wood engravings by Joan Hassall (1817; 1960; London: The Folio Society, 1975), 5. 33 Ibid. 34 Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, illust. with wood engravings by Joan Hassall (1814; 1961; London: The Folio Society, 1975), 5. 35 Ibid., 6. 36 Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility, illust. with wood engravings by Joan Hassall (1811; 1958; London: The Folio Society, 1975), 5. 37 Joan Hassall, “Illustrating Jane Austen,” in The Jane Austen Companion, ed. J. David Grey (New York: Macmillan, 1986), 217–18. 38 Bluemel, 214. 39 Sutherland, Jane Austen’s Textual Lives, 6. 40 Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford, illust. Joan Hassall. (1853; London: George G. Harrap & Co., 1948). 41 Joan Hassall Papers, PD 12 1989, PD 13 1989. 42 Hassall, “Illustrating Jane Austen,” 215. 43 Ibid., 217. 44 See, for example, Joan Hassall Papers, PD 46 1989.

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Notes to pages 132–44

4 5 Ibid., PD 86 1989. 46 Amelia Peck et al., Interwoven Globe: The Worldwide Textile Trade, 1500–1800 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2013), 5–7. 47 Ibid. 48 Letter from H. L. Wellington to Joan Hassall, October 10, 1940, Joan Hassall Papers, MS 317 1989. 49 Hassall, “Illustrating Jane Austen,” 217–18. 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid., 215. 52 Hassall, “My Engraved Work,” 139. 53 McLean, 29. 54 Hassall, “Illustrating Jane Austen,” 215. 55 Joan Hassall Papers, MS 188 1989. 56 Ibid. 57 Austen, Sense and Sensibility, Frontispiece. 58 Hassall, “Illustrating Jane Austen,” 217. 59 Austen, Pride and Prejudice (The Folio Society, 1975), Frontispiece. 60 Austen, Northanger Abbey, 17. 61 Ibid, 24. 62 Sarah M. Horowitz, “Picturing Pride and Prejudice: Reading Two Illustrated Editions of the 1890s,” Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal Online 34, no. 1 (Winter 2013), 19. 63 Austen, Pride and Prejudice (The Folio Society, 1975), 36. 64 Joan Hassall Papers, PD 137 1989. 65 Claudia L. Johnson, Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 76–77. 66 Jane Austen, Emma, illust. with wood engravings by Joan Hassall (1815; 1962; London: The Folio Society, 1975), 285. 67 Ibid. 68 Joan Hassall Papers, PD 60 1989. 69 Jane Austen, Persuasion, illust. with wood engravings by Joan Hassall (1817; 1961; London: The Folio Society, 1975), 84. 70 Austen, Northanger Abbey, 22. 71 Ibid. 72 Austen, Mansfield Park, 77. 73 Austen, Sense and Sensibility, 89. 74 Austen, Mansfield Park, 127–28. 75 Austen, Northanger Abbey, 39. 76 Austen, Emma, 159. 77 Austen, Persuasion (The Folio Society), 109. 78 Hassall, “Illustrating Jane Austen,” 216. 79 Austen, Persuasion (The Folio Society), 224. 80 D. A. Miller, Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 2. 81 Joan Hassall Papers, P 5–1989.

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Notes to pages 144–50

187

82 Jane Austen, The Works of Jane Austen: Minor Works, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford University Press, 1954). 83 Kathryn Sutherland, “Jane Austen: Juvenilia. Review,” The Review of English Studies 63, no. 259 (April 1, 2012): 333–37. 84 Austen, The Works of Jane Austen: Minor Works, table of contents. 85 Jane Austen, Shorter Works, illust. with wood engravings by Joan Hassall (1963; London: The Folio Society, 1975). 86 Austen-Leigh, 24. 87 Johnson, Cults and Cultures, 2. 88 Looser, 1. 89 Henry Thomas Austen, “Biographical Notice of the Author,” in Jane Austen, Persuasion, ed. Patricia Meyer Spacks (1818; New York: W. W. Norton, 1994); Caroline Austen and Jane Austen Society, My Aunt Jane Austen: A Memoir (Overton, Hants.: Jane Austen Society, 1991); Austen-Leigh. 90 Constance Hill, Jane Austen; Her Homes & Her Friends (New York: John Lane, 1904); Elizabeth Jenkins, Jane Austen: A Biography (London: Gollancz, 1986); Jane Aiken Hodge, Only a Novel: The Double Life of Jane Austen (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1972); Claire Tomalin, Jane Austen: A Life (New York: Viking, 1997). 91 Emily Auerbach, Searching for Jane Austen (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004); Paula Byrne, The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things (New York: Harper, 2013). 92 Jenny Gross, “A Jane Austen Museum Wants to Discuss Slavery. Will Her Fans Listen?” The New York Times, April 27, 2021, accessed April 27, 2021,  sec. World, www.nytimes.com/2021/04/27/world/europe/jane-austenslavery-museum.html. 93 Joan Hassall Papers, PD 27 1989. 94 Hassall, “Illustrating Jane Austen,” 215. 95 Austen, Shorter Works, 7. 96 Ibid. 97 Ibid. 98 Austen, Pride and Prejudice (The Folio Society, 1975), 9. 99 Virginia Woolf, The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 3: 1919–1924, ed. Andrew McNeillie (San Diego: Harvest Books, 1991), 331–32. 100 Ibid., 334. 101 Ibid., 332; Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader, ed. Andrew McNeillie (1925; San Diego: Mariner Books, 2002), 136. 102 Hassall, “Illustrating Jane Austen,” 217. 103 Austen, Shorter Works, 69. 104 Ibid., 237. 105 Ibid., 70. 106 Ibid., 89. 107 Ibid., 90. 108 Ibid., 96. 109 Ibid., 187.

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188

Notes to pages 150–58

110 Ibid., 144. 111 McLean, 20. 112 Hassall, Wood Engraving, A Reader’s Guide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the National Book League, 1949), 8. 113 Letter from Dorothy P. Laidman to Joan Hassall, May 28, 1971, Joan Hassall Papers, MS 310 1989. 114 Ibid., 107 1989, 106 1989. 115 Ibid., 107 1989. 116 Joan Hassall, “Photo Album” (n.d.), Joan Hassall Manuscripts, Department of Manuscripts and Printed Books, The Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge. 117 McLean, 28. 118 Rachel Cohen, Austen Years: A Memoir in Five Novels (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020), 19. 119 Ibid., 3. 120 McLean, 28.

Coda: The Home Library 1 Joan Hassall Papers, The Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge, Postcard Album; “Brian North Lee,” The Scotsman, March 8, 2007, accessed January 31, 2022, sec. Obituaries, www.scotsman.com/news/obituaries/ brian-north-lee-2469136. 2 Joan Hassall, “My Engraved Work,” The Private Library Second Series 7, no. 4, Winter 1974: 139–65, 150. 3 Joan Hassall Papers, MS 323 1989. 4 Joan Hassall Papers, 107 1989, PD 204 1989. 5 Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader, ed. Andrew McNeillie (1925; San Diego: Mariner Books, 2002), 1. 6 George Bernard Shaw, Arms and the Man: A Pleasant Play (1894; New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 22. 7 Ibid., 49. 8 Janice A. Radway, A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 152; Terry Seymour, A Printing History of Everyman’s Library, 1906–1982 (Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2011), 12; “About Modern Library,” Modern Library, accessed August 19, 2020, www.modernlibrary​ .com/about/; George T. Goodspeed, “The Home Library,” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 42, no. 2 (1948): 110–18, 110. For more, see Marjorie Hill Allee, “Books at Home,” ALA Bulletin 34, no. 10 (1940): 623–30, 627. 9 Jane Merrill in discussion with the author, December 2017. 10 Chris Filstrup in discussion with the author, December 2017. 11 Adam Brooks, dir. Definitely, Maybe (Universal Pictures, 2008, 1 hr, 51 min).

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Notes to pages 158–61

189

12 George Henry Lewes, “Recent Novels: French and English,” Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country, December 1847, 686–95, 692, accessed June 16, 2021, www.bl.uk/collection-items/review-of-jane-eyre-by-george-henry-lewes. 13 Betty Ruddy, “Motherless,” Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction 10, no. 2 (2008): 39–47, 39. 14 Ibid., 43. 15 David Pearson, Books As History: The Importance of Books Beyond Their Texts (London: British Library Board, 2008), 12. 16 Robert Darnton, The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future (New York: PublicAffairs, 2010), 23. 17 Elizabeth A. Harris, “What Happens When a Publisher Becomes a Megapublisher?” The New York Times, February 25, 2021, sec. Books, accessed April 27, 2021, www.nytimes.com/2021/02/25/books/penguin-random-housesimon-schuster-publishing.html. 18 See, for example, Nicole Disser, “Four Small Presses Rage On in Brooklyn,” Brooklyn Magazine, November 14, 2014, accessed June 9, 2021, www.bkmag​ .com/2014/11/14/four-small-presses-rage-on-in-brooklyn. 19 Simon Lawrence, “The Fleece Press,” accessed January 28, 2022, https:// fleecepress.com. 20 Send Points Publishing Co., Ltd., Art of the Book: Structure, Material and Technique (Berkeley, CA: Gingko Press, 2015), foreword. 21 N. K. Jemisin, The City We Became (New York: Orbit, 2020). 22 “Bookcase Credibility (@BCredibility),” Twitter, accessed May 6, 2021, https://twitter.com/BCredibility. 23 Amanda Hess, “The ‘Credibility Bookcase’ Is the Quarantine’s Hottest Accessory,” The New York Times, May 1, 2020, sec. Arts, accessed May 6, 2021, www.nytimes.com/2020/05/01/arts/quarantine-bookcase-coronavirus.html. 24 India Yaffe, “There’s So Much to Unpack in These Celebrity Bookshelves,” PopSugar, November 23, 2020, accessed May 6, 2021, www.popsugar.com/ node/47982702; Olivia Hosken, “What Celebrity Book Curator Thatcher Wine Really Thinks of A-Listers’ Bookshelves,” Town & Country, May 19, 2020, accessed May 6, 2021, www.townandcountrymag.com/style/home-decor/ g32449315/zoom-bookshelves-ranked-books-style/. 25 Marie Claire, Alanis Morissette Takes Us inside Her Massive Home Library, Priyanka Chopra Jonas’ Bookshelf Tour: See Her Favorite Reads!, Dolly Parton’s Bookshelf Tour: See the Music Legend’s Favorite Reads | Shelf Portrait | Marie Claire, accessed June 23, 2021, www.youtube.com. 26 Marie Claire, Laura Harrier’s Bookshelf Tour: James Baldwin, Zadie Smith & More | Shelf Portrait | Marie Claire, accessed June 23, 2021, www.youtube.com. 27 Grace Farris, “Bookcase Styles,” A Cup of Jo (blog), January 22, 2021, https:// cupofjo.com/2021/01/bookcase-styles. 28 Martin Scorsese, dir. Pretend It’s a City, “Library Services” (Netflix, 2021, 30 minutes). 29 See, for example, “Jonathan Swift – Gulliver’s Travels – 1938 First Penguin Illustrated Classics Edition,” Etsy, accessed June 9, 2021, www.etsy.com/listing.

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Notes to pages 162–65

30 “The Return of the Native by Hardy, Thomas: Good Hard Cover (1929) First Edition Thus., Signed by Author(s) | Arundel Books,” AbeBooks, accessed May 19, 2021, www.abebooks.com/signed-first-edition/Return-Native-HardyThomas-Harper-Brothers/22403825955/bd. 31 “Moby Dick Rockwell Kent,” Etsy, accessed May 7, 2021, www.etsy.com/ market/moby_dick_rockwell_kent. 32 “Fritz Eichenberg Jane Eyre,” Etsy, accessed May 7, 2021, www.etsy.com/ market/fritz_eichenberg_jane_eyre. 33 “Jane Austen,” Etsy, accessed May 7, 2021, www.etsy.com/market/jane_austen. 34 “Jane Austen Joan Hassall, First Edition – AbeBooks,” AbeBooks, accessed May 7, 2021, www.abebooks.com/book-search/kw/jane-austen-joan-hassall/ first-edition. 35 See, for example, the research libraries of Columbia University and Princeton University: “CLIO,” accessed June 23, 2021, https://clio.columbia.edu/; “Princeton University Library Catalog,” accessed June 23, 2021, https://catalog​ .princeton.edu/. 36 Woolf, The Common Reader, 1. 37 “Book of the Month | Read More, Research Less, Save Money,” accessed April 27, 2021, www.bookofthemonth.com. 38 “Beautifully Illustrated Hardcover Books | Folio Society,” accessed April 27, 2021, www.foliosociety.com/usa. 39 George Eliot, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life, illust. Pierre Mornet (London: The Folio Society, 1999). 40 Sanjeev Kapoor, How to Cook Indian: More than 500 Classic Recipes for the Modern Kitchen (New York: Stewart, Tabori and Chang, 2011). 41 See, for example, Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, illust. Anna and Elena Balbusso (1813; London: The Folio Society, 2013); Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, illust. Santiago Caruso (1847; London: The Folio Society, 2014); Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, illust. Rovina Cai (1847; London: The Folio Society, 2014). 42 Thomas Hardy, Selected Poems, illust. Stanley Donwood (London: The Folio Society, 2021). 43 Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, or, The Whale (1851; London: The Folio Society, 2009). 44 “Penguin Clothbound Classics,” PenguinRandomhouse.com, accessed May 12, 2021, www.penguinrandomhouse.com/series/B45/penguin-clothbound-classics. 45 See, for example, “Penguin Classics | The Best Classic Books, Poetry & Cult Novels,” accessed June 14, 2021, www.penguin.co.uk/brands/penguin-classics​ .html. 46 W. E. Williams, The Penguin Story (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1956), 59. 47 Peter Schjeldahl, “The Amy Sherald Effect,” The New Yorker, September 16, 2019, accessed June 16, 2021, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/09/23/ the-amy-sherald-effect. 48 Armando Iannucci, dir., The Personal History of David Copperfield (Lionsgate, Searchlight Pictures, 2019, 1 hr, 59 min).

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Notes to page 165

191

49 André Wheeler, “‘Fake Diversity’: Barnes & Noble Cancels Race-Swapped Classic Covers,” The Guardian, February 6, 2020, accessed May 12, 2021, www​ .theguardian​.com/books/2020/feb/05/barnes-and-noble-diverse-classics-backlash. 50 “Our Story,” Freedom Reads, accessed February 19, 2022, https://freedomreads​ .org/. 51 Reginald Dwayne Betts and John J. Lennon, “A Canon for the American Prisoner,” The New York Review of Books (blog), accessed December 5, 2021, www.nybooks.com/daily/2021/10/05/a-canon-for-the-american-prisoner/. 52 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2002), 462–63.

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Index

Adler, Elmer, 75 Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God, The, 5 Alighieri, Dante, 65 Andersen, Hans Christian, 65 Arnold, Matthew, 8 Art Workers Guild, 128 Arts and Crafts, 25 Austen, Caroline, 145 Austen, Cassandra, 125, 145 Austen, Henry Thomas, 145 Austen, Jane, 2, 3, 6–8, 10, 17–18, 20–21, 125–53, 162–65 Austen-Leigh, James Edward, 145 Barnes & Noble, 162, 165 Barthes, Roland, 12, 47, 51 Belgravia, 27, 41 Benjamin, Walter, 4, 63, 102, 165 Bennett, Arnold, 26 Bewick, Thomas, 110–11, 117, 127, 134, 142 Binyon, Helen, 6–7 Blake, William, 64, 65, 93 Bliss, Douglas Percy, 6 Book Society, The, 128 Book-of-the-Month Club, 5, 11, 20, 26, 59, 67–68, 98–103, 106, 120, 129, 157, 162–64 Book-of-the-Month Club News, 98, 101, 103, 105 bookplates, 64, 75, 155 Bott, Alan, 128–29 Braby, Dorothy, 4 Brittain, Vera, 19, 28 Brontë, Charlotte, 2–3, 8, 10, 11, 18, 20, 68, 95–96, 98, 101–104, 106–19, 152, 157, 164 Brontë, Emily, 2–3, 8, 10, 11, 13–18, 21, 96–98, 101–106, 110, 120, 122, 123, 152, 164 Brontë, Patrick, 110 Brothers Grimm, 67 Browne, Thomas, 65 Burney, Frances, 152

Carlyle, Thomas, 65 Carroll, Lewis, 67 Cerf, Bennett A., 66, 67 Certeau, Michel de, 12, 58 Cervantes, Miguel de, 67, 68 Chapman, R.W., 129, 144 Chase, William M., 69, 83 Chatto & Windus, 3 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 10 Chiltern Publishing, 162 Church, Richard, 130, 147–48 Clouzot, Henri, 132 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 65 Collins, Wilkie, 8, 156 Collins’s Pocket Classics, 3 common reader, 8–12, 156 Common Reader, The, 9–10, 16, 148, 149 Complete Novels of Jane Austen, The, 7, 11, 12, 125, 144 Complete Sherlock Holmes, The, 100–101 Conrad, Joseph, 10, 99 Country Matters, 19, 29–30, 44, 48, 50 Covid-19, 160 Cranford, 132 Cruikshank, George, 17 Darwin, Charles, 65 Daumier, Honoré, 96 Definitely, Maybe, 158–59 Defoe, Daniel, 6, 65 Dickens, Charles, 3, 9, 10, 17, 67, 152, 164 Dickinson, Emily, 1 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 98, 121, 122 Doubleday, Nelson, 100–101 Dover Thrift Editions, 162 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 67, 100–102 Dürer, Albrecht, 25, 97 Ede, Charles, 128–29 Edgeworth, Maria, 152

206

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Index Eichenberg, Fritz, 2, 5, 7, 12–18, 20–21, 26, 63, 116, 118–23, 126, 128, 131, 143, 155, 156–59, 162, 163, 165 Eliot, George, 49, 163 Ellis, Richard, 98, 103 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 69 Emma, 125, 130, 132, 134, 137, 138, 141 Erasmus, 122 Etsy, 161–62 everyday reader, 5, 8–12, 26, 100, 156, 161, 165 Everyman’s Library, 3, 11, 58, 156 Expressionism, 18, 96–97, 102, 108, 114, 150 Farleigh, John, 5, 25 Farmer’s Year, The, 50 Fiction and the Reading Public, 10 Fitzwilliam Museum, The, 134, 144 Folio Society, The, 2, 11, 20, 128–30, 133, 144, 147, 149, 151, 152, 163–64 Forster, E. M., 23, 30–31, 33, 37, 45 Four Hedges, 19, 44, 45, 48, 50 Freedom Reads, 165 Gaskell, Elizabeth, 132 Gibbings, Robert, 5–7, 25, 161 Giggs, Rebecca, 77 Gill, Eric, 48, 53, 127 Goethe, Johann, 65 Golden Cockerel Press, 6, 128 Gosse, Edmund, 152 Goya, Francisco, 96, 97, 122, 123 Grant Richards’ World’s Classics, 3 Gribble, Vivien, 5, 25, 27 Haigh, Dorothy, 25 Hamlet, 9, 96 Hardy, Thomas, 2–3, 10, 12, 18–19, 25–55, 60, 63, 103, 163, 164 Harper and Brothers, 24, 163 Harper’s Family Library, 156 Hassall, Joan, 2–3, 5, 7, 11–13, 17–18, 62, 63, 124–47, 149–55, 156, 158, 160, 162, 163, 165 Hassall, John, 126 Henri, Robert, 68–69 Hermes, Gertrude, 6 History of British Birds, A, 110, 116, 118, 127 Hogarth, William, 70, 96 home library, 21, 68, 102, 154–56, 161 Hopkins, Arthur, 26–27, 33, 36, 37 Hopkins, Gerald Manley, 27 illustration, 3–6, 17–21, 27, 38, 43, 48, 51, 57, 58, 62–64, 69–71, 78, 84, 85, 92, 96–98, 100, 104,

207

112, 118, 125, 130, 131, 133–135, 138, 142, 143, 147, 150, 151, 153, 157, 159, 160, 163 It’s Me O Lord, 62, 64, 70, 83, 89–92 James, Marlon, 165 Jane Austen’s House, 147 Jane Eyre, 2, 3, 7, 11, 12, 18, 20, 26, 68, 95–99, 102–19, 123, 126, 127, 162, 163, 165 Jemisen, N. K., 160 Johnson, Samuel, 8–10 Jungle Books, The, 99–101 Juniper Books, 162 Keats, John, 65 Kent v. Dulles, 21, 91–93 Kent, Rockwell, 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 12, 17–21, 56–93, 98, 126, 128, 129, 131, 143, 155, 156, 158, 162–65 Kincaid, Jamaica, 165 Kipling, Rudyard, 99–102 Kittredge, William, 59–64, 66, 70–72 Klopfer, Donald S., 67 Kollwitz, Käthe, 97 Lakeside Press, 60, 65–67, 163 Lawrence, D. H., 58 Lawrence, T. N., 128, 160 Leavis, F. R., 8, 10, 17, 26, 28, 128–29, 164 Leavis, Q. D., 8, 10, 11, 17 Lebovitz, Fran, 161 Leighton, Clare, 2, 4–7, 12–55, 60, 62–63, 65, 78, 82, 126–28, 131, 143, 151, 155, 156, 158, 161–63, 165 Leighton, David Roland, 29 Leighton, Marie Connor, 24–25, 28, 29 Leighton, Robert, 24–25 Leighton, Roland, 19, 28, 29 Lewes, George Henry, 96, 158 Library of American Books, 156 LIFE, 103–106 Literary Guild, 66 Little Leather Library, 99, 101, 156 Lord Byron, 65 Macmillan, 24, 26, 27, 163 Mansfield Park, 125, 130, 132, 134, 140, 141 Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture, 10, 26 McLean, Ruari, 127, 152 Melville, Herman, 2, 3, 6, 18–20, 57–63, 65–68, 72–88, 92 Meredith, George, 8, 49 Metropolitan Museum of Art, The, 69, 132 middlebrow, 20, 26, 67, 68, 98, 101 Middlemarch, 163 Milton, John, 65

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208

Index

Moby Dick, 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 12, 18–21, 57–89, 98, 126, 158, 162–65 Modern Library, 3, 156 Monhegan Island, 69, 83, 84 Montaigne, Michel de, 47, 65 Morley, Christopher, 100 Morris, Frances, 132 Morris, William, 11 Mumford, Lewis, 18, 59, 75 Munch, Edvard, 105 N by E, 19, 70, 71, 85–87, 93 Nash, Theodore, 6 Nelson’s Classics, 3 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 65 Northanger Abbey, 125, 130, 132, 135, 139, 141 Norton Critical Editions, 162 Oxford World Classics, 58, 162 Pan Books, 128 Parker, Agnes Miller, 27 Penguin, 6, 7, 159, 164 Penguin Illustrated Classics, 5–7, 161, 164 Personal History of David Copperfield, The, 165 Persuasion, 125, 132, 134, 138, 141, 142 Picasso, Pablo, 101 Poe, Edgar Allan, 6, 122, 123 Pride and Prejudice, 6–7, 125, 129, 130, 132, 135, 137, 147, 148, 165 print revival, 4–5, 25, 126–27 Proust, Marcel, 67 R.R. Donnelley & Sons, 59 Railway Library, 3 Random House, 59, 62, 66, 67, 71, 98, 103, 106, 159, 163 Raverat, Gwen, 5, 7 Reprint Society, 128 Return of the Native, The, 2, 3, 5, 7, 12, 18–19, 23–24, 26–48, 50, 55, 60, 63, 78, 82, 126, 151, 161, 163 Richards, I. A., 10, 17 Rockwellkentiana, 70, 83 Rooke, Noel, 4, 6 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 123 Rowlandson, Mary, 96 Royal Classics, 162 Ruddy, Betty, 159 Run and Read Library, 3 Ryle, Gilbert, 152 Salamina, 70 Sandford, Christopher, 128–29 Saunders, George, 165 Scherman, Harry, 67, 99

Scorsese, Martin, 161 Seaver, Edwin, 101, 106 Second Common Reader, The, 10, 30 Sense and Sensibility, 125, 130, 132, 134–35, 140 Sentimental Journey, A, 7 Shakespeare, William, 9, 10, 26, 55, 65, 96, 99, 103, 152 Shaw, George Bernard, 5, 155 Shelley, Mary, 65 Shelley, Percy, 65 Sherald, Amy, 164 Shilling Library, 3 Shorter Works, 3, 125, 129, 132, 144, 145, 147, 149, 153 Simon and Schuster, 159 Sontag, Susan, 16 Spenser, Edmund, 103 Stephen, Leslie, 49 Sterne, Laurence, 7 Stevens, Wallace, 34 Swift, Jonathan, 6 Tempestuous Petticoat, 24–25, 28–29 Tess of the D’Urbervilles, 27, 32 Testament of Youth, 19, 29 Thayer, Abbot H., 83 This Is My Own, 70, 93 Thompson, Denys, 28 Thompson, Flora, 152 Tolstoy, Leo, 65, 67, 98, 122 Travellers’ Library, 3 Turgenev, Ivan, 98 Twain, Mark, 67 Typee, 6, 60 Tzu, Lau, 122 Under the Greenwood Tree, 21, 27, 47–55 Vanity Fair, 9 Villette, 110 Virgil, 65 Voltaire, 66 Voyaging, 70, 84–86 Walpole, Hugh, 26 Watson, Aldren, 100 Wessex, 23, 29, 30, 46, 48, 55 Whitman Candy Company, 99 Whitman, Walt, 69 Wilde, Oscar, 99 Wilderness, 64–65, 70, 83 Wilkinson, Tom, 130, 134, 149 Wood and the Graver, The, 120 wood engraving, 1–2, 4, 5, 12, 26, 46, 58, 63–65, 87, 97, 110, 126, 155, 161, 163

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Index woodblock, 4, 12, 13, 47, 64, 96, 120, 122, 128, 143, 152, 154 Woolf, Virginia, 3, 8–11, 16, 17, 20, 23, 30–31, 33, 37, 45, 96, 148–49, 153, 155, 162 Wordsworth, William, 65

209

World War I, 19, 24, 28, 29, 67, 89, 95, 97, 111 World War II, 7, 20, 48, 55, 98, 103, 104, 106, 132 Wuthering Heights, 2–3, 11, 13–18, 21, 33, 96–99, 102, 103, 106, 110, 112, 122–23, 156, 158, 162–64

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cambridge studies in nineteenth-century literature and culture GENERAL EDITORS Kate Flint, University of Southern California Clare Pettitt, King’s College London Titles published 1 The Sickroom in Victorian Fiction: The Art of Being Ill Mir i a m Ba il in, Washington University 2 Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age edited by Dona l d E. H a l l, California State University, Northridge 3 Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in Early Victorian Literature and Art Her bert Sussm a n, Northeastern University, Boston 4 Byron and the Victorians A ndr ew El fenbein, University of Minnesota 5 Literature in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century British Publishing and the Circulation of Books edited by John O. Jor da n, University of California, Santa Cruz and Robert L. Patten, Rice University, Houston 6 Victorian Photography, Painting and Poetry L inds ay Smit h, University of Sussex 7 Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology S a l ly Shu t t l ewort h, University of Sheffield 8 The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle K el ly Hur l ey, University of Colorado at Boulder 9 Rereading Walter Pater W il l i a m F. Shu ter, Eastern Michigan University 10 Remaking Queen Victoria edited by M a rg a r et Hom a ns, Yale University and A dr ien ne Mu nich, State University of New York, Stony Brook 11 Disease, Desire, and the Body in Victorian Women’s Popular Novels Pa mel a K . Gil bert, University of Florida 12 Realism, Representation, and the Arts in Nineteenth-Century Literature A l ison By er ly, Middlebury College, Vermont 13 Literary Culture and the Pacific Va ne ss a Smit h, University of Sydney 14 Professional Domesticity in the Victorian Novel: Women, Work and Home Monic a F. Cohen 15 Victorian Renovations of the Novel: Narrative Annexes and the Boundaries of Representation Suz a n ne K een, Washington and Lee University, Virginia

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16 Actresses on the Victorian Stage: Feminine Performance and the Galatea Myth G a il M a r sh a l l, University of Leeds 17 Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud: Victorian Fiction and the Anxiety of Origin C a roly n De v er, Vanderbilt University, Tennessee 18 Ancestry and Narrative in Nineteenth-Century British Literature: Blood Relations from Edgeworth to Hardy Sophie Gil m a rt in, Royal Holloway, University of London 19 Dickens, Novel Reading, and the Victorian Popular Theatre Debor a h V lock 20 After Dickens: Reading, Adaptation and Performance John Gl av in, Georgetown University, Washington D C 21 Victorian Women Writers and the Woman Question edited by Nicol a Di a ne T hompson, Kingston University, London 22 Rhythm and Will in Victorian Poetry M at t hew C a mpbel l, University of Sheffield 23 Gender, Race, and the Writing of Empire: Public Discourse and the Boer War Pau l a M. K r ebs, Wheaton College, Massachusetts 24 Ruskin’s God Mich a el W heel er, University of Southampton 25 Dickens and the Daughter of the House Hil a ry M. Schor, University of Southern California 26 Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science Rona l d R . T hom a s, Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut 27 Testimony and Advocacy in Victorian Law, Literature, and Theology Ja n-Mel iss a Schr a mm, Trinity Hall, Cambridge 28 Victorian Writing about Risk: Imagining a Safe England in a Dangerous World El a ine Fr eedgood, University of Pennsylvania 29 Physiognomy and the Meaning of Expression in Nineteenth-Century Culture Luc y H a rt l ey, University of Southampton 30 The Victorian Parlour: A Cultural Study T h a d Log a n, Rice University, Houston 31 Aestheticism and Sexual Parody 1840–1940 Den nis Denisoff, Ryerson University, Toronto 32 Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880–1920 Pa mel a T hur sch w el l, University College London 33 Fairies in Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature Nicol a Bow n, Birkbeck, University of London 34 George Eliot and the British Empire Na nc y Henry, The State University of New York, Binghamton 35 Women’s Poetry and Religion in Victorian England: Jewish Identity and Christian Culture C y n t hi a Scheinberg, Mills College, California

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36 Victorian Literature and the Anorexic Body A n na K rugovoy Silv er, Mercer University, Georgia 37 Eavesdropping in the Novel from Austen to Proust A n n G ay l in, Yale University 38 Missionary Writing and Empire, 1800–1860 A n na Johnston, University of Tasmania 39 London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 1885–1914 M at t Cook, Keele University 40 Fiction, Famine, and the Rise of Economics in Victorian Britain and Ireland Gor don Bigelow, Rhodes College, Tennessee 41 Gender and the Victorian Periodical Hil a ry Fr a ser, Birkbeck, University of London judith johnston and stephanie green, University of Western Australia 42 The Victorian Supernatural edited by Nicol a Bow n, Birkbeck College, London carolyn burdett, London Metropolitan University and Pa mel a T hur sch w el l, University College London 43 The Indian Mutiny and the British Imagination G au ta m Ch a k r ava rt y, University of Delhi 44 The Revolution in Popular Literature: Print, Politics and the People I a n H ay wood, Roehampton University of Surrey 45 Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical: Reading the Magazine of Nature Geoffr ey C a n tor, University of Leeds gowan dawson, University of Leicester graeme gooday, University of Leeds richard noakes, University of Cambridge sally shuttleworth, University of Sheffield and jonathan r. topham, University of Leeds 46 Literature and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Britain from Mary Shelley to George Eliot Ja nis McL a r r en C a l dw el l, Wake Forest University 47 The Child Writer from Austen to Woolf edited by Chr ist ine A l e x a nder, University of New South Wales and Ju l iet McM a ster, University of Alberta 48 From Dickens to Dracula: Gothic, Economics, and Victorian Fiction G a il T ur l ey Houston, University of New Mexico 49 Voice and the Victorian Storyteller I va n K r eilk a mp, University of Indiana 50 Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture Jonat h a n Smit h, University of Michigan-Dearborn 51 Catholicism, Sexual Deviance, and Victorian Gothic Culture Patr ick R . O’M a l l ey, Georgetown University 52 Epic and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Britain Simon Den t it h, University of Gloucestershire 53 Victorian Honeymoons: Journeys to the Conjugal Hel ena Michie, Rice University

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54 The Jewess in Nineteenth-Century British Literary Culture Na di a Va l m a n, University of Southampton 55 Ireland, India and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Literature Ju l i a W r ight, Dalhousie University 56 Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination S a l ly L edger, Birkbeck, University of London 57 Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability Gowa n Dawson, University of Leicester 58 ‘Michael Field’: Poetry, Aestheticism and the Fin de Siècle M a r ion T h a in, University of Birmingham 59 Colonies, Cults and Evolution: Literature, Science and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Writing Dav id A migoni, Keele University 60 Realism, Photography and Nineteenth-Century Fiction Da niel A. Nova k, Lousiana State University 61 Caribbean Culture and British Fiction in the Atlantic World, 1780–1870 T im Watson, University of Miami 62 The Poetry of Chartism: Aesthetics, Politics, History Mich a el S a nder s, University of Manchester 63 Literature and Dance in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Jane Austen to the New Woman Chery l W il son, Indiana University 64 Shakespeare and Victorian Women G a il M a r sh a l l, Oxford Brookes University 65 The Tragi-Comedy of Victorian Fatherhood Va l er ie S a nder s, University of Hull 66 Darwin and the Memory of the Human: Evolution, Savages, and South America C a n non Sch mit t, University of Toronto 67 From Sketch to Novel: The Development of Victorian Fiction A m a npa l G a rch a, Ohio State University 68 The Crimean War and the British Imagination St efa nie M a r kov its, Yale University 69 Shock, Memory and the Unconscious in Victorian Fiction Jil l L. M at us, University of Toronto 70 Sensation and Modernity in the 1860s Nichol a s Da ly, University College Dublin 71 Ghost-Seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists: Theories of Vision in Victorian Literature and Science Sr dja n Sm ajić, Furman University 72 Satire in an Age of Realism A a ron M atz, Scripps College, California 73 Thinking about Other People in Nineteenth-Century British Writing A del a Pinch, University of Michigan 74 Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagination K at her ine By r ne, University of Ulster, Coleraine

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75 Urban Realism and the Cosmopolitan Imagination in the Nineteenth Century: Visible City, Invisible World Ta n ya Ag at hocl eous, Hunter College, City University of New York 76 Women, Literature, and the Domesticated Landscape: England’s Disciples of Flora, 1780–1870 Judit h W. Page, University of Florida elise l. smith, Millsaps College, Mississippi 77 Time and the Moment in Victorian Literature and Society Sue Z emk a, University of Colorado 78 Popular Fiction and Brain Science in the Late Nineteenth Century A n ne St il e s, Washington State University 79 Picturing Reform in Victorian Britain Ja nice C a r l isl e, Yale University 80 Atonement and Self-Sacrifice in Nineteenth-Century Narrative Ja n-Mel iss a Schr a mm, University of Cambridge 81 The Silver Fork Novel: Fashionable Fiction in the Age of Reform Edwa r d Copel a nd, Pomona College, California 82 Oscar Wilde and Ancient Greece I a in Ross, Colchester Royal Grammar School 83 The Poetry of Victorian Scientists: Style, Science and Nonsense Da niel Brow n, University of Southampton 84 Moral Authority, Men of Science, and the Victorian Novel A n ne DeW it t, Princeton Writing Program 85 China and the Victorian Imagination: Empires Entwined Ross G. For m a n, University of Warwick 86 Dickens’s Style edited by Da niel T y l er, University of Oxford 87 The Formation of the Victorian Literary Profession R ich a r d S a l mon, University of Leeds 88 Before George Eliot: Marian Evans and the Periodical Press Fion nua l a Dil l a ne, University College Dublin 89 The Victorian Novel and the Space of Art: Fictional Form on Display Dehn Gil mor e, California Institute of Technology 90 George Eliot and Money: Economics, Ethics and Literature Der mot Col em a n, Independent Scholar 91 Masculinity and the New Imperialism: Rewriting Manhood in British Popular Literature, 1870–1914 Br a dl ey De a ne, University of Minnesota 92 Evolution and Victorian Culture edited by Ber na r d L ight m a n, York University, Toronto and Ben net t Zon, University of Durham 93 Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination A l l en M acDuffie, University of Texas, Austin 94 Popular Literature, Authorship and the Occult in Late Victorian Britain A ndr ew McC a n n, Dartmouth College, New Hampshire

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95 Women Writing Art History in the Nineteenth Century: Looking Like a Woman Hil a ry Fr a ser Bir k beck, University of London 96 Relics of Death in Victorian Literature and Culture Debor a h Lu tz, Long Island University, C. W. Post Campus 97 The Demographic Imagination and the Nineteenth-Century City: Paris, London, New York Nichol a s Da ly, University College Dublin 98 Dickens and the Business of Death Cl a ir e Wood, University of York 99 Translation as Transformation in Victorian Poetry A n n m a r ie Drury, Queens College, City University of New York 100 The Bigamy Plot: Sensation and Convention in the Victorian Novel M a i a Mc A l e av ey, Boston College, Massachusetts 101 English Fiction and the Evolution of Language, 1850–1914 W il l A bber l ey, University of Oxford 102 The Racial Hand in the Victorian Imagination Av i va Br iefel, Bowdoin College, Maine 103 Evolution and Imagination in Victorian Children’s Literature Je ssic a Str a l ey, University of Utah 104 Writing Arctic Disaster: Authorship and Exploration A dr i a na Cr aciu n, University of California, Riverside 105 Science, Fiction, and the Fin-de-Siècle Periodical Press W il l Tat ter sdil l, University of Birmingham 106 Democratising Beauty in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Art and the Politics of Public Life Luc y H a rt l ey, University of Michigan 107 Everyday Words and the Character of Prose in Nineteenth-Century Britain Jonat h a n Fa r ina, Seton Hall University, New Jersey 108 Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Poetry of Religious Experience M a rt in Du bois, Newcastle University 109 Blindness and Writing: From Wordsworth to Gissing He at her T il l ey, Birkbeck College, University of London 110 An Underground History of Early Victorian Fiction: Chartism, Radical Print Culture, and the Social Problem Novel Gr egory Va rgo, New York University 111 Automatism and Creative Acts in the Age of New Psychology L inda M. Aust in, Oklahoma State University 112 Idleness and Aesthetic Consciousness, 1815–1900 R ich a r d A del m a n, University of Sussex 113 Poetry, Media, and the Material Body: Autopoetics in Nineteenth-Century Britain A shl ey Mil l er, Albion College, Michigan 114 Malaria and Victorian Fictions of Empire Je ssic a How el l, Texas A&M University

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115 The Brontës and the Idea of the Human: Science, Ethics, and the Victorian Imagination edited by A l e x a ndr a L ew is, University of Aberdeen 116 The Political Lives of Victorian Animals: Liberal Creatures in Literature and Culture A n na Feuer stein, University of Hawai’i-Manoa 117 The Divine in the Commonplace: Recent Natural Histories and the Novel in Britain A m y K ing, St John’s University, New York 118 Plagiarizing the Victorian Novel: Imitation, Parody, Aftertext A da m A br a h a m, Virginia Commonwealth University 119 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900: Many Inventions R ich a r d Menk e, University of Georgia 120 Aging, Duration, and the English Novel: Growing Old from Dickens to Woolf Jacob Jew usi a k, Newcastle University 121 Autobiography, Sensation, and the Commodification of Identity in Victorian Narrative: Life upon the Exchange Se a n Gr a ss, Rochester Institute of Technology 122 Settler Colonialism in Victorian Literature: Economics and Political Identity in the Networks of Empire Phil l ip Steer, Massey University, Auckland 123 Mimicry and Display in Victorian Literary Culture: Nature, Science and the Nineteenth-Century Imagination W il l A bber l ey, University of Sussex 124 Victorian Women and Wayward Reading: Crises of Identification M a r is a Pa l acios K nox, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley 125 The Victorian Cult of Shakespeare: Bardology in the Nineteenth Century Ch a r l e s L a Porte, University of Washington 126 Children’s Literature and the Rise of ‘Mind Cure’: Positive Thinking and Pseudo-Science at the Fin de Siècle A n ne St il e s, Saint Louis University, Missouri 127 Virtual Play and the Victorian Novel: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Fictional Experience T imot h y G ao, Nanyang Technological University 128 Colonial Law in India and the Victorian Imagination L eil a Net i, Occidental College, Los Angeles 129 Convalescence in the Nineteenth-Century Novel: The Afterlife of Victorian Illness Hos a n na K r ienk e, University of Wyoming 130 Stylistic Virtue and Victorian Fiction: Form, Ethics and the Novel M at t h ew Sussm a n, The University of Sydney 131 Scottish Women’s Writing in the Long Nineteenth Century: The Romance of Everyday Life Ju l iet Shiel ds, University of Washington

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132 Reimagining Dinosaurs in Late Victorian and Edwardian Literature: How the ‘Terrible Lizard’ Became a Transatlantic Cultural Icon R ich a r d Fa l lon, The University of Birmingham 133 Decadent Ecology in British Literature and Art, 1860–1910: Decay, Desire, and the Pagan Revival Den nis Denisoff, University of Tulsa 134 Vagrancy in the Victorian Age: Representing the Wandering Poor in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture A l ista ir Robinson, New College of the Humanities 135 Collaborative Writing in the Long Nineteenth Century: Sympathetic Partnerships and Artistic Creation He at her Boz a n t W itcher, Auburn University, Montgomery 136 Visual Culture and Arctic Voyages: Personal and Public Art and Literature of the Franklin Search Expeditions E ava n O’Doch a rta igh, Umeå Universitet, Sweden 137 Music and the Queer Body in English Literature at the Fin de Siècle Fr a ser R iddel l, University of Durham 138 Victorian Women Writers and the Other Germany: Cross-Cultural Freedoms and Female Opportunity L inda K . Hughe s, Texas Christian University 139 Conversing in Verse: Conversation in Nineteenth-Century English Poetry El iz a bet h Hel singer, University of Chicago 140 Birdsong, Speech and Poetry: The Art of Composition in the Long Nineteenth Century Fr a nce sc a M ack en ney, University of Leeds 141 The Art of the Reprint: Nineteenth-Century Novels in Twentieth-Century Editions Ros a l ind Pa r ry, Independent scholar

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