The Victorian Illustrated Book (Victorian Literature & Culture)

Throughout the 19th century, but most intensely in the reign of Queen Victoria, England and Scotland produced an unprecedented range of extraordinary illustrated books. Images in books became a central feature of Victorian culture. They were at once prestigious and popular - a kind of entertainment - but equally a place for pondering fundamental questions about history, geography, language, time, commerce, design and vision itself. Concentrating on the use of illustration in literature - especially novels, poems and children's books - the essays collected in this text address a wide chronological and stylistic range of work. They offer insights into such diverse topics as: the century's best-known illustrators, including George Cruickshank, William Morris and Aubrey Beardsley; the use of words as images; the intersection of children's books and shopping; the use of maps in fiction; the decline of illustrated volumes after Queen Victoria's death; and the proposal that Victorian illustration was a major inspiration for modernist and postmodernist experiments with the form of the book.