Jenny Uglow's new book looks like a charming stocking filler, but it raises a
big cultural question that it never quite brings itself to confront. It is
planned as a short history of book illustration, starting with illustrated
editions of Milton and Bunyan in the 17th century, and progressing by way of
Fielding and Hogarth in the 18th, to Wordsworth and the wood engraver Thomas
Bewick in the Romantic period. There is a coda on Lewis Carroll, Charles
Dickens and their illustrators. Like everything Uglow writes it is extremely
well informed, though the title's claim that book illustration is a
peculiarly British tradition is not substantiated, and seems wrong. The
first picture book for children was devised in the 17th century by a Czech,
the revolutionary educationalist Jan Amos Komensky, and the tradition he
began is European not British.
That is a trivial matter, though, compared to Uglow's uncritical acclaim for
book illustrators as a species, and for those who applied their dubious
talents to illustrating Milton in particular. He had been dead for 14 years
when the first illustrated edition of Paradise Lost came out in 1688, and
even if he had still been alive his blindness would have prevented him
perusing it, which is just as well. The engraving Uglow reproduces from Book
I, which depicts Satan rousing his legions from the burning lake, shows the
archfiend as a sort of gnome in a miniskirt, with pixie ears and a small
curly horn poking out of his forehead. Milton did not suffer foolish artists
gladly. He had disapproved of the portrait frontispiece prepared for the
1645 edition of his poems, and requested the artist to engrave a Greek
epigram under it. The wretched limner complied, unaware, since he knew no
Greek, that the epigram denounced him as a rotten artist.
Bad as the 1688 illustrations are, later illustrators of Paradise Lost worked
hard to lower the standard. Worst was William Blake, who responded to
Milton's epic with a series of his usual dead-looking muscular nudes. His
illustration for the temptation of Eve shows her with a snake wound round
her naked body, holding what looks like a yellow plum in its mouth and
thrusting it into hers. This is a vulgar travesty of Milton's poem, where
Eve's temptation is quite specifically intellectual, not sensuous - the
result of a debate between her and Satan. Illustrating Paradise Lost at all
is misguided, for reasons that Milton spelt out when he warned readers that
he was writing about things above “the reach of human sense”. To convey his
unimaginable subject matter he created an intricate and elusive poetic
medium, unmatched in English before or since. Cumbering it with
illustrations is the equivalent of drilling a hole in a Ming vase and
sticking a lampshade on top.
Admittedly Milton is a special case, but the antagonism between pictures and
language that he brings into focus spreads right through our culture, and
for reasons that relate to human evolution. Neuroscientists tell us that the
visual part of our brain is millions of years older than the linguistic
part, and this accounts for its superior power. Language, being a quite
recent invention, is relatively undeveloped and inefficient. However hard
you try to describe a face in words, for example, you will never do as well
as a photograph. It follows that any work of literature will always be more
indefinite than a picture, but its lack of definition stimulates our
imaginations in a way that a picture cannot. When reading we have to create
images in our minds as we go along, and this is one reason why we feel
possessive about books we have read. We sense, rightly, that we have partly
written them, and we feel something like an author's indignation when we
think that film or television adaptations have got them wrong. A book
illustration interrupts this living engagement, replacing it with something
inflexible and extraneous. Children need illustrations, of course, not
having been alive long enough to build up the vast gallery of private images
all adults have. But for readers beyond the Peter Rabbit stage they are a
hindrance.
It is ironic that The Pilgrim's Progress should be the other 17th-century work
that Uglow praises for the illustrations that have accumulated around it,
because it is strikingly non-pictorial. If you go back to John Bunyan's
original, unillustrated text, and look up the great set pieces such as the
Slough of Despond or Doubting Castle, you find that they are not set pieces
at all. On the page, each consists of scarcely more than a bare phrase. They
have gained their power by stimulating readers' imaginations, which was
Bunyan's aim, and anything as nailed-down and definite as an illustration
defeats it. The only Pilgrim's Progress illustration in Uglow's book that
matches the text in simplicity and lack of detail is a small line drawing by
John Flaxman that shows Giant Despair clambering up the steps from his
cellar, with nothing but his huge behind and stocky legs clearly visible.
The only Paradise Lost illustration that comes near to Milton's otherworldly
dimension is an etching by Gustave Doré of a group of angels confronting
Satan, which makes them look like huge, spectral insects.
If reading stimulates the imagination, it seems reasonable to suggest that the
eclipse of reading caused by the growth of modern visual media will affect,
or maybe already has affected, our ability to imagine. True, it is difficult
to assess how people imagined in the past, but it seems clear that they were
different from us. Hogarth's engraving The Enraged Musician, which is one of
Uglow's examples, depicts a turbulent London street scene with a child
beating a drum, a busker blowing a pipe, hucksters shouting their wares, and
other sources of cacophony. Fielding said of this picture that it was
“enough to make a man deaf to look at it”. Nobody would say that now,
because most of the pictures we look at - on film, on television - make a
noise, so a picture that does not make a noise seems to us unusually still
and quiet. But Fielding's comment shows that it was not like that in the
18th century, and proves that technological change can change how we
imagine.
With the arrival of Romanticism and the 19th-century novel, which switch
attention to inner experience and the workings of the mind, illustration
becomes still more pointless. When Wordsworth writes about intimations “felt
in the blood and felt along the heart”, or about “a sense sublime/Of
something far more deeply interfused”, even the dullest artist must realise
that illustration would be ridiculous. Wordsworth's descriptions of the
external world often depend on indefiniteness, too. In The Old Cumberland
Beggar he notices the “small mountain birds” waiting to peck up the crumbs
that drop from the scraps of bread the beggar is eating. Uglow comments that
Bewick, being a trained illustrator, would not have been so imprecise, but
would have identified the birds as finches, buntings or sparrows. That is
true, and it would have completely ruined Wordsworth's effect. The vagueness
of his birds, and the suggestion of wildness and remoteness in the word
“mountain”, render them alien, even slightly eerie, and not in the least
like Bewick's neat ornithological specimens.
The first author in Uglow's historical survey who insisted on his illustrator
getting things right was Lewis Carroll. He made sketches showing precisely
how he wanted the characters in Alice in Wonderland to appear, and insisted
on his illustrator John Tenniel remaining faithful to them. So carefully did
he check Tenniel's drawings that the affronted artist berated him as a
“conceited old Don”. Uglow takes his side, observing that “despite the
author's bullying, Tenniel's brilliance shows through”. But surely that is
to get things the wrong way round. It was Carroll who was brilliant. Nobody
would have heard of Tenniel if it were not for Carroll.
Dickens, too, was adamant that his illustrators must obey him, and made this
emphatically clear from the start. His first illustrator, Robert Seymour,
blew his brains out after a dispute with the author about one of the
illustrations for The Pickwick Papers. Neither Carroll nor Dickens need
illustrations, and you lose nothing if you read them in an unillustrated
modern edition. If the illustrations are there, a common experience is that
you have to switch out of the imaginative mode, examine the old artwork
half-interestedly, and then slip back into the make-believe of the novel.
Less theatrical novelists than Dickens were uncomfortable about being
illustrated. George Eliot decided against an illustrated edition of Romola
because of the “impossibility of producing perfect correspondence between my
intention and the illustrations”. Henry James said that he would regard the
attempt to impose “a picture by another hand on my own picture” as a
“lawless incident”. Quite right, too. It is the opposite point of view that
has produced our current situation, where watching television costume drama
has replaced reading.
Words and Pictures by Jenny Uglow
Faber £12.99 pp176
