On January 23, 1855, Dante Gabriel Rossetti wrote to his friend William Allingham with regard to illustrations for a new volume of Alfred Tennyson’s poems, explaining he would pick those verses “where one can allegorize on one’s own hook on the subject of the poem, without killing for oneself and every one a distinct idea of the poet’s” (George Birkbeck Hill, ed., Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti to William Allingham, 1854–1870, London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1897, 97). The desire on the part of the young Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood members to stake out new territory for the illustrator—providing commentary rather than echoing the text—and the ensuing visual revolution this sparked is the subject of Paul Goldman’s Victorian Illustration. In The Pre-Raphaelite Art of the Victorian Novel, Sophia Andres investigates Victorian authors’ appropriation of such Pre-Raphaelite boundary-breaking imagery to enhance their own fictional forays into the reform of women’s rights and other pressing social issues of the day.

Goldman’s Victorian Illustration is a straightforward account of the period of textual representation in England, referred to as “The Sixties,” but spanning roughly 1855–80. The book covers the work of approximately thirty artists whose imagery most prominently adorned the pages of the leading novels and periodicals of the time. This is the second (paperback) edition of a book that was first published in hardcover in 1996. It includes a four-page appendix with additions and omissions, but otherwise remains identical to the earlier publication.

The volume is arranged in five chapters followed by several useful appendices. The latter include an annotated list of illustrated periodicals (glossed with Goldman’s critical commentary), an alphabetically arranged compilation of artists and the illustrations they created (admittedly incomplete due to the sheer number produced during this period), and a bibliography of illustrated books, arranged alphabetically by author. Numerous reproductions greatly enhance the value of this book, as many of the periodicals in which they originally appeared are not easily accessible.

Each chapter begins with a brief introduction outlining the shared characteristics of the works under discussion, followed by individual entries for each artist. As in the earlier printing, the artists under discussion are grouped stylistically, based on Goldman’s occasionally quirky aesthetic notions. The choice to approach the subject from a formalist perspective rather than chronologically is often disconcerting, and it makes for some unusual visual juxtapositions.

Chapter 1 introduces the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood members, who were largely responsible for the virtual transformation of book and magazine illustration of the 1850s and 1860s in England. The passion for literature shared by these seven young men was expressed in their joint publication The Germ: Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art (1850) and, even earlier albeit with more tongue in cheek, in their “List of Immortals” (1848) (reprinted in William E. Fredeman, The P.R.B. Journal, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975, 107). The illustrations of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood reflect these artists’ notion that illustration was deserving of the same status as a finished oil painting, and that within the text it should receive equal treatment with the accompanying words.

It is confusing to find the work of Edward Burne-Jones, a generation younger than the original Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood members, included in this opening chapter. The bulk of Burne-Jones’s illustrative work—the visual accompaniments to William Morris’s Kelmscott Press publications—are excluded, deemed by Goldman “to belong in character to the more self-conscious era of ‘the book beautiful’” (11). Although this point bears some validity, by including only these early works, many of which were completed in the formative stages of his artistic development, one could come away misinformed as to this artist’s accomplishments in the illustrative genre. For example, Goldman includes Burne-Jones’s illustrations for Archibald Maclaren’s The Fairy Family, begun in 1854. Gleeson White, a pioneer in the field of British illustration, wrote damningly of these, “. . . it is safe to say that no human being, who did not know by whom they were produced, would recognize them” (English Illustration of the Sixties, London: Constable and Co., 1897, 75–76).

Burne-Jones’s inclusion in this first chapter is all the more idiosyncratic given the parameters of chapter 2. Here Goldman expands the boundaries of the original Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood members to introduce (with a single paragraph) those artists who “share . . . certain characteristics either in subject-matter or style . . . but who were themselves never formally part of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood” (51). Burne-Jones was, of course, not a member of the original group. In addition, it is in this chapter that Goldman suggests Frederick Sandys was “one of the least productive” (51) of the artists working during this period. This is also misleading, as the acknowledged total of thirty illustrations makes Sandys the most prolific of those discussed thus far, excluding John Everett Millais. Several of the artists mentioned in this chapter are not well known today. Goldman is to be commended for resurrecting the work of illustrators such as Henry Hugh Armstead and Matthew James Lawless, both of whom were prominent during this period.

Chapter 3, focusing on “The Idyllic School,” brings together a number of artists who share very little in common. The term “idyllic” was first used by Forrest Reid in his groundbreaking Illustrators of the Eighteen Sixties (London: Faber and Gwyer, 1928), and one can only surmise Goldman is respecting this noted scholar’s earlier work. Reid linked these artists together for their often romanticized, rural imagery. Following Reid’s lead, Goldman includes the work of George du Maurier, Frederick Walker, and John William North under this heading. Goldman incorporates as well social commentators of the day such as Arthur Boyd Houghton, whose work appeared in the illustrated periodical The Graphic.

“High Victorians,” the subject of chapter 4, is a more natural assemblage, encompassing the work of those artists who “were first and foremost painters, not illustrators” (209). Frederic Leighton, Edward Poynter, and George Frederick Watts are included as well as Frederick Richard Pickersgill. The latter is another instance of Goldman’s attempt to include all the major contributors of the day, despite some having largely disappeared from the current critical canon.

The final chapter is given the all-encompassing title “Other Artists.” Amid this stylistic hodgepodge, the work of Charles Keene stands out as strikingly noteworthy. Another revelation is the degree to which James McNeill Whistler’s six wood engravings appear in harmony with this moment in English illustration. Their relative tameness is a shock when compared to the more “modern” treatment of his later etchings.

Paul Goldman is a renowned scholar of British prints of the period. He served in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum and is the author of several texts on the subject. (See Looking at Prints, Drawings and Watercolours: A Guide to Technical Terms, London: British Museum Publications, 1988, and Victorian Illustrated Books, 1850–1870: The Robin de Beaumont Collection, Boston: David R. Godine, 1994). As such he is more than qualified to follow in the footsteps of earlier pioneering art historians in the field of British book illustration—in particular, Reid and Gleeson White. Despite the merits of this volume, a revisiting of the text, now eight years old, might have been in order. The book’s shortcomings are particularly unfortunate given that it is one of only a handful of books on this topic. Gregory Suriano’s recently revised The British Pre-Raphaelite Illustrators (New Castle, Del.: Oak Knoll Press, 2005) is one of the few useful but flawed alternatives.

Sophia Andres’s The Pre-Raphaelite Art of the Victorian Novel continues the investigation of England in the 1850s through 1870s, exploring “the coalescence of the visual and the verbal” from the literary perspective and, more specifically, “the reconfigurations of notable Pre-Raphaelite paintings within the Victorian novel, with a focus on the significant gender issues this convergence involves” (xii). For the four novelists under discussion—Elizabeth Gaskell, Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy—the paintings become novel subjects; their books are “textual redrawings” (xxi) of Pre-Raphaelite imagery, presenting fictional challenges to traditional gender constructs. Many of the novelists discussed were acquainted with one or more of the artists with whom they are linked, although actual documentation of the authors’ viewing of artists’ works is admittedly not always available. Despite the shared concerns of artists and novelists with social issues of the day, this innocuous merging of “the fictional and the actual” (xvii) can at times be a challenging premise to accept. Much of the power of the argument lies in the overall cultural atmosphere of the period best described as follows: “We have now in London pre-Raphaelite painters, pre-Raphaelite poets, pre-Raphaelite novelists, pre-Raphaelite young ladies; pre-Raphaelite hair, eyes, complexion, dress, decorations, window curtains, chairs, tables, knives, forks, and coal-scuttles” (137, citation of Justin McCarthy, “The Pre-Raphaelites in England,” Galaxy 21, June 1876: 725). The sixteen color plates reinforce and support the arguments presented.

Andres begins with an introduction to both Pre-Raphaelite imagery and the characteristics shared with Victorian prose—specifically, their egalitarian treatment of all aspects of the subject being depicted. The painters’ democratic refusal to adhere to traditional hierarchical representations of gender and class was an ideology held in common with the writers of the period. All of the novelists under discussion were familiar with John Ruskin’s Modern Painters and, like the Pre-Raphaelites, held the author’s philosophy of truth to nature in high esteem.

Other areas in which Pre-Raphaelite imagery provided fodder for Victorian novelists include their depiction of individuals rather than stereotypes and their focus on psychological realism and emotion. Like Rossetti, these writers chose to “allegorize on their own hook” when translating the visual into fiction, a method that makes Andres’s premise all the more challenging to argue convincingly.

In this first chapter, Andres carefully documents adverse critical reception to the early work of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood members, particularly in reference to their concept of female beauty. The correlation of this aspect of their imagery is somewhat unconvincingly related to the literary advocacy for more liberal gender roles. Her argument is stronger when she turns to painted subject matter that specifically addresses such women’s issues, as in the case of John Everett Millais’s Proscribed Royalist and The Order of Release (both Tate Gallery, London).

Chapter 2, entitled “Gendered Silence,” investigates the literary constructs in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth (begun in 1851) and their relationship to the work of the Pre-Raphaelites. Andres admits to the scant documentation regarding Gaskell’s acquaintance with any of these artists or their paintings prior to writing Ruth. She suggests, however, that given the notoriety the young Brotherhood achieved, Gaskell would almost surely have read about them and could, with very little difficulty, have seen their work.

According to Andres, Gaskell’s appropriation of the Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic lay in the domain of technique. Andres seems to imply that Gaskell applied Ruskin’s dictum to “go directly to nature” to convey favored moral and religious tenets within her narratives. Thus, one might debate just as emphatically that it was the writings of Ruskin and not Pre-Raphaelite imagery that influenced Gaskell’s approach. Andres’s most convincing argument—regarding the shared characteristics of Gaskell’s North and South (1854) and Millais’s Order of Release (which Gaskell is known to have seen)—is, unfortunately, addressed only briefly at the end of the chapter.

The third chapter, “Gendered Shadows,” examines the work of Wilkie Collins, specifically The Woman in White. Collins was the brother of Charles Allston Collins, an artist and early friend of the members of the Brotherhood. Thus, unlike Elizabeth Gaskell, Wilkie Collins was intimately associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood from its very beginnings. Andres makes the obvious connections between Collins’s novel and depictions of white-clothed females. More stimulating is the suggested relationship of this text to images of doppelgangers, such as Rossetti’s How They Met Themselves (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge).

In addition to borrowing narrative elements, Andres posits that Collins applied artistic techniques for depicting light and shade. She notes the author’s fondness for placing significant events in partially lit settings. Just as the Pre-Raphaelites “used light and shade to create new perspectives and to oblige their viewers to see things differently, Collins situates his characters in scenes that distort ordinary contents of perception and engender new ways of perceiving the external world” (78). The problem with this suggestion is that Andres seems to confuse an artist’s use of light and shadow to convey depth with perspectival renderings—two different artistic techniques. Nevertheless, in each instance of proposed literary borrowing, Andres stakes a claim for the novelist’s success in appropriating the visual for social improvement. Using “the new ways of seeing initiated by the Pre-Raphaelites . . . Collins successfully undermines Victorian society, which displaces women by either apotheosizing them as angels or condemning them as outcasts—in either case confining them within conventional gender boundaries” (95).

The examination of the relationship between the work of George Eliot and Pre-Raphaelite art in chapter 4, “Gendered Imperialism,” is perhaps the most compelling. Although, as Andres freely admits, Eliot’s use of Pre-Raphaelite imagery is not a new premise, its application in Daniel Deronda (1876), in a manner that differs from her earlier fiction, is a fresh idea. Specifically, Andres suggests Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, like Edward Burne-Jones’s Wheel of Fortune (Archives and Local History Centre, Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham, London), is an example of great art helping individuals to look beyond themselves via history. Other examples are cited in this argument, including Rossetti’s Proserpine (Tate, London) and La Pia dé Tolemei (Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas), both of which Eliot is known to have viewed in the artist’s studio. Andres explains that Eliot used these “subjects” as a point of departure in her critique of the British Empire.

Chapter 5 explores the second wave of Pre-Raphaelitism, in particular as reflected in the work of Edward Burne-Jones, and speaks to the influence of his imagery on the late work of Thomas Hardy. Hardy’s interest in and knowledge of art is well documented. Andres observes that as Hardy’s work matured, his use of the visual arts became “progressively more sophisticated” (145). Focusing on Jude the Obscure, Andres notes Hardy’s two-fold appropriation of the visual—in textual “allusions to contemporary paintings [to] evoke conventional and unconventional gender boundaries” (145) and through the transformation of artistic techniques for the purpose of evoking intense emotion.

Andres’s book follows a line of thinking in Victorian studies in which literature and the fine arts are compared and contrasted. Two important predecessors in this genre—both out of Yale University, long a major U.S. center for British art studies—are Maryan Ainsworth’s groundbreaking Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Double Work of Art (New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 1976) and Susan Casteras’s excellent Pocket Cathedrals (New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, 1991). This area of study has grown overwhelmingly in the past decade, as affirmed by the thorough bibliography included with Andres’s text.

For the art historian, Andres’s book puts forth an intriguing new way of thinking about the art of this era. However, while many of her comparisons and suggestions are thought provoking, she falls short of carefully considering the images’ accessibility for the novelists under discussion. In addition, Andres often fails to make the crucial distinction between nineteenth-century interpretations of gender issues as represented in Pre-Raphaelite paintings and those expressed by current art historians. She writes: “Pre-Raphaelite paintings such as Mariana and Ophelia . . . were most likely seen by women writers like Elizabeth Gaskell as attempts to sabotage and silence emergent feminist voices and to confirm existing stereotypes of feminine passivity and vulnerability, endorsed by canonical writers such as Shakespeare and Tennyson. Yet they could also have been interpreted as visual representations of the patriarchal victimization of women and by extension as appeals for legislative measures that could avert further victimization and protect women from culturally endorsed inequities.” Which is it? And were phrases such as “feminine passivity and vulnerability,” “visual representations of the patriarchal victimization of women,” and “culturally endorsed inequities” standard in the nineteenth century? If they were, it certainly was not with the kind of power associated with them today.

Both books provide a great deal of information for the Victorian scholar. Paul Goldman’s Victorian Illustration is a useful reference tool for historians of British art, and Sophia Andres’s The Pre-Raphaelite Art of the Victorian Novel provides a theoretical evaluation of the cultural nexus that is particularly relevant for those in the field of British literature. Although they approach from different camps, both these studies demonstrate the rich possibilities for further study of literary and visual exchanges during the Victorian era.