The Victorian Illustrated Book

Throughout the nineteenth 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 The Victorian Illustrated Book address a wide chronological and stylistic range of work. They offer fresh insights into such diverse topics as the century's best-known illustrators, including George Cruikshank, 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.