1. The change in style that signaled the subordination of image to text was in part caused by, and was indicative of, the increasing industrialization of book production itself. With the move from monthly publication to weekly serialization in magazines such as the Graphic, fiction became part of a proto-assembly line. Not only did authors find their labor increasingly controlled by the magazine, and its intended readers, but illustrations were often produced piecemeal. The sketching and engraving of an illustration could proceed simultaneously, with each section passed along after drafting to the engraver, so that neither artist perceived or controlled the whole; thus the ''artist'' disappears into the technician. See N. N. Feltes, Modes of Production of Victorian Novels (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 65. [BACK]

2. Beardsley and Morris are exceptions to this tendency: Beardsley's "decorations" are distinctly shocking while Morris's illustrated works, such as the Kelmscott Chaucer, harken back to Blake and illuminated manuscripts, not George Cruikshank. But neither artist really involves his images with the narrative process, as Thackeray or Cruikshank did. Thus their excessive decorativeness excludes them from my consideration here. [BACK]

3. Actually Cruikshank advanced this claim in the 1870s. Shelton Mackenzie first reported it in the American Roundtable, and then Cruikshank seconded it in The Artist and the Author in 1872 (Hilary Evans and Mary Evans, The Life and Art of George Cruikshank, 1792-1878 [New York: Phillips, 1978], 92-96). [BACK]

4. J. H. Stonehouse, Catalogue of the Libraries of Charles Dickens and W. M. Thackeray (London, 1935). See especially the section "Relics from the Library of W. M. Thackeray," 163-82. For a list of Thackeray's prepublication drawings, done while he was a child and at Cambridge, see Lewis Melville, "Thackeray as Artist," Connoisseur 8 (1904): 25-31, 152-55. [BACK]

5. J. R. Harvey, Victorian Novelists and Their Illustrators (New York: New York University Press, 1971); Joan Stevens, "Thackeray's Pictorial Capitals," Costerus: Essays in English and American Language and Literature, n.s. 2 (1974): 113-40, and "Thackeray's Vanity Fair, " Review of English Literature 6 (1965): 19-38; Patricia Sweeney, "Thackeray's Best Illustrator," Costerus: Essays in English and American Language and Literature, n.s. 2 (1974): 83-112. Subsequent citations of Harvey's and Stevens's works are given parenthetically in the text. [BACK]

6. Thackeray drew three kinds of illustrations: pictorial capitals at the beginning of a chapter, usually metaphoric; intratextual illustrations deliberately placed to affect the reading of the text; and full-page illustrations, with titles that seem to be simple realizations of the text. Meisel notes that Thackeray's full-page illustrations are most closely bound by the conventions of straightforward "realization," but there are quite a few exceptions to this rule besides the familiar "Second Appearance of Clytemnestra," especially if one takes Meisel's own advice to look for Thackeray's illustrations as embodiments of states of mind or feeling (Martin Meisel, Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983], 335; subsequent citations are given parenthetically in the text). [BACK]

7. Henry Kingsley, "Thackeray," Macmillans 9 (1864): 360. Kingsley, in nineteenth-century terms, also confronts the paradoxical experiential realism created by Thackeray's self-conscious mode. Vanity Fair merged its fiction with its readers' lives so well that Kingsley felt it "had taken entire possession of us and of the world. Through the exquisite perfection of the art, the art itself was not only ignored, but indignantly denied" (357). [BACK]

8. The editions of Vanity Fair and Pendennis cited in this essay are those issued by Garland Publishing, complete with all illustrations. All citations are given parenthetically in the text ( Vanity Fair, ed. Peter L. Shillingsburg [New York, 1989]; The History of Pendennis, ed. Peter L. Shillingsburg [New York, 1991]). [BACK]

9. This is a fairly traditional function for book illustration. Cruikshank, for example, often composed his illustrations from the point of view of one or more characters. A familiar instance of this technique is the illustration "Fagin in the Condemned Cell" for Oliver Twist, where we see the cowering Fagin from Oliver's and Mr. Brownlow's sympathetic point of view. [BACK]

10. W. M. Thackeray, "Caricatures and Lithography In Paris," Fraser's Magazine 32 (1839): 295-300. [BACK]

11. The ensuing conversation about the "moral sheepdog" and "shearing" Lord Southdown affirms the moral judgment of readers. [BACK]

12. As Nina Auerbach notes, the publicness of nineteenth-century life demanded acting that did not seem to be acting: "To be was to be seen" (Nina Auerbach, Private Theatricals [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990], 32). Meisel discusses the handbooks for theater style in Realizations, part 1. Henry Siddons's Practical Illustrations of Rhetorical Gesture and Action is actually an adaptation of M. Engels's German handbook. Siddons was the son of Sarah Siddons. The numbering of the illustrations is from an 1822 edition of Siddons's handbook. [BACK]

13. Robert Colby, Thackeray's Canvass of Humanity: An Author and His Public (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1979), 235. [BACK]

14. Catherine Peters, Thackeray's Universe: Shifting Worlds of Imagination and Reality (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1987), 169. Peters identifies the church in the frontispiece as the one in Ottery St. Mary, an identification made earlier by S. M. Ellis, who explained it as "an allegorical fancy that amid all the vanities and sins and turmoil of life there remain in the background of memory scenes from far-off happy days of youth and innocence and peace" ("Thackeray's Illustrations: Their Personal and Topographical Interest," Athenaeum [September 1916]: 404). [BACK]

15. John Loofbourow, Thackeray and the Form of Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964). [BACK]

16. The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, ed. Gordon Ray, 4 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1946-54), 2:423. [BACK]

17. For an excellent discussion of the necessity for role-playing that does not, however, consider the visual role-playing of illustrations, see Edgar F. Harden, "Theatricality in Pendennis, " Ariel 4 (1973): 74-94. [BACK]

18. English pantomime developed from commedia dell' arte and was a favorite Christmas entertainment. Usually, the play began as a mimetic comedy or burlesque with old Pantaloon, aided by Clown, tying to thwart the love of Harlequin and Columbine. At a crucial moment in the action, the Good Fairy would descend with the magic bat and she or Harlequin (after she gave him the bat) would transform the scene into a harlequinade, an acrobatic chase culminating in the shift of the entire set into a fantasy world. Thackeray suggests some of the extravagance of this transformation scene in the title and beginning of the last chapter of The Adventures of Philip, "The Realms of Bliss." [BACK]

19. W. M. Thackeray, "Swift," in The Four Georges and the English Humourists, Everyman's Library (New York: Dutton, 1968), 3-4. [BACK]

20. Donald Hannah, "The Author's Own Candles': The Significance of the Illustrations to Vanity Fair, " Renaissance and Modern Essays Presented to Vivian de Sola Pinto (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), 127. [BACK]

21. Amy Wilkinson calls such haphazard collection of information a "Tomeavesian" way of knowing the world, after Tom Eaves, a convenient gossip in Vanity Fair who provides the "narrator" with much of his information about high society (Amy Wilkinson, "The Tomeavesian Way of Knowing the World: Technique and Meaning in Vanity Fair, " English Literary History 32 (1965): 370-87. Wilkinson's emphasis is less on these multiple conflicting voices than on the way that gossip, as an epistemology, constructs its own truth, obviating any truth of event. [BACK]

22. Jerry Williamson, "Thackeray's Mirror," Tennessee Studies in Literature 22 (1977): 134. [BACK]