Nowadays, at a time of virtual crisis for printed books – the crux and the essence of the decisive Victorian culture, whether individual or social – it is exceedingly useful and highly relevant to have at hand a comprehensive study, such as this, of the significant relationship between the visual and the intellectual, the artistic and the literary, among the enormous – not to say, the inordinate – legacy of Victorian books, still thankfully in our midst. The contemporary danger, I am sure, is that in our laudable and necessary intentions, especially in the more “popular” of our public libraries, to promote and to encourage the “people’s media”, of the Internet and computers – “electronic means”, in the jargon of today – we will in the end, perhaps irretrievably, “throw out the baby with the bathwater”, and relinquish for ever the priceless legacy of books and other countless printed materials, in favour of what must inevitably be “political correctness” and the fashion of our times.
In this fitting dialogue, between our national heritage of printed books – beginning, after all, with the western adoption of printing in renaissance Europe – and the visual immediacy of “electronic technology” and the like, we must mirror a more historical dichotomy, between art and literature, external vision and the “eye” of mind and imagination, which indeed should never be lost, nor deemed excluded from the creative processes of literature in these present times of information technology and the like.
Thus, I detect nowadays a somewhat pressing debate, between elitist and popular culture, in relation to the diversity of our national libraries, public or academic, which – like most disagreements in contemporary society – suggests a gulf which in the end must be more superficial than it is actual. At any rate, the underlying objectives are much the same as they have always been: access for a maximum number, young and old, to sound knowledge and accurate information. Moreover – as the work under review so ably illustrates – the debate itself is far less new, far less combative, than often now it may seem to be: the book under review expresses clearly and reliably that, even in Victorian England, the dilemma already existed of how to combine the visual with the intellectual, the art with science, and mere information with the creativity of the imagination.
Victorian England, indeed, represents still another point of crisis in the evolution of “information technology”, in as much as authors and publishers then had to accept the challenges of changing times: the chronological transition, from “elitism” in 1837 by progressive states, into the initiation of “popular” culture and “popular” democracy, by the year 1901. The book industry itself, therefore, during the long course of the nineteenth century, was manifestly obliged to modify, even quite radically, the format of its books, in line with public taste, expectation, and education. The rather complex relationship, between images and words, was exploited to the full by the generality of the Victorian book industry: with a harvest of results which may still be seen and admired, as at St Deiniol’s library at Hawarden, North Wales.
In Victorian England, perhaps, that very division, between the beautiful and the useful, the ornamental and the factual, may aptly be personified in the rival literary tastes of Gladstone – who in theory at least valued chiefly “useful literature” – and Disraeli – who in his own library at Hughenden Manor, Buckinghamshire, collected a lot of “picture books”, a positive pleasure to handle as well as to read. The contrast was not absolute, of course: Gladstone himself at Hawarden did possess some aesthetic texts, often given to him by admirers. Nevertheless, the rivalry, between text and illustration, effectively dominated that lost Victorian world: devoid as it was of the distractions of TV but also emerging into the notions of political democracy which we have today.
Gerard Curtis is associate professor of art history at the Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada, and he has produced for us what must be a completely reliable and profoundly studied book on his important subject: changing, as usual, our customary perceptions of the relations between art and books, even also our necessary understanding of the impact of books upon society, the popular imagination, and culture in general. With an abundance of applicable illustrations, this detailed and wholly admirable book studies as specific examples the apparently contrasting works of the artist, Ford Madox Brown, and the novelist, Charles Dickens. The term “visual” must be extensively interpreted: in the Victorian novel, as well as the Victorian painting. Dickens, at any rate, embodied eventually a highly visual sort of literary expression, that so admirably suited his increasingly “popular” audience and clientele. Literature, therefore, then responded thoroughly to social change and the Gladstonian type of political democracy: leading on to both the “welfare state” and the egalitarian culture of our own times.
In the climate of our own transitional notions of both literacy and art, it is both instructive and inspirational to study in this book the unexpectedly long historical evolution of the rivalry between text and illustration, image and rationality. It must bridge the gulf, which we have today, between the Victorian cult of printed books and even the use of electronic technology, for the same underlying purposes, of information and cultural enlightenment. Dickens, of course, depicted and felt for the lives of the poor, particularly in London: this was graphic, if not chiefly visual, even if expressed in printed words. In most of his immensely “popular” novels, therefore, he foresaw the coming of the mass education, and the universal democracy, of our own times. What is the essential message of this invaluable book, therefore, is that our own contemporary dilemma, of the love of books and the love of technology – in other words, between the elderly and the young in terms of educational objectives – has existed inherently ever since the Victorian era; and that is reassuring for most of us.
“The battle between the image and the word has its roots in the democracy of print of the Victorian period”. The lavish Victorian enthusiasm for whole libraries of printed books – reflected not only in the private libraries of those times but also in the civic libraries in such places as Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds and Birmingham – curiously changed with the social implications of the evolving political democracy, before and after the terminal year of 1901. We still need nowadays to achieve a valid compromise, between the Victorian culture of print, and the pressing realities of the political democracy which the latter so hugely created. Such is the salient purpose, the lasting claim to inclusion and appreciation, of this very timely and scholarly volume, which ought to be on the shelves of all the leading libraries, academic or municipal, within the UK.
