Book illustration proliferated in the last decades of the Victorian Era. Advances in photography allowed illustrations to be reproduced cheaply, and publishers produced a higher output of illustrated titles than at any time since.
While many illustrators worked in traditional styles, a revolution was taking place in the art world. A new movement called Aestheticism affirmed the notion of "art for art’s sake"–art needed no other purpose than beauty and
pleasure. Aestheticism influenced literature and the fine and decorative arts as well as book design and illustration. It inspired some of the most recognizable illustrations of the period.
Authors & Artifacts
Richard Caton Woodville Jr. 1856-1927
Richard Caton Woodville’s parents were both painters. As a young man, he studied painting in Germany. Woodville moved back to London in 1877, and submitted a drawing to the Illustrated London News. He was offered permanent employment
and spent his entire career there, though he contributed to other periodicals. Woodville’s specialty was in military and war scenes (which he created from drawings provided by sketch artists sent out as war correspondents as well
as his own imagination), but he occasionally illustrated fiction for the magazine. Woodville was also a successful painter who received numerous important commissions to portray incidents in British military history.
Richard Caton Woodville. Original drawing for H. Rider Haggard’s Nada the Lily.
This illustration is one of eleven Woodville original drawings for Nada the Lily held by BYU. When Nada the Lily appeared in book form in 1892, Haggard’s publisher Longmans, Green & Co. chose artist Charles H. M.
Kerr to illustrate the novel rather than reissuing Woodville’s drawings from the serialized version in The Illustrated London News.
H. Rider Haggard. Nada the Lily. In The Illustrated London News, Vol. 100 (1892).
Nada the Lily is a historical romance set among the Zulu people of South Africa during the early 19th century. As a young man, Haggard worked in the civil service and was posted to Britain’s South African colonies.
Many of his novels were influenced by his years in Africa.
George Du Maurier 1834-1896
Illustrator and novelist George Du Maurier was born to a French father and English mother. He initially followed his father into the sciences, but after his father’s death in 1856, George moved to Paris to hone his artistic talents.
He studied painting in Paris and Antwerp, but experienced a sudden loss of sight in one eye which forced him to give up painting. Du Maurier returned to London in 1860 in order to pursue a career as an illustrator, finding work
at various magazines. On the advice of illustrator Frederick Sandys, Du Maurier focused on drawing from life, which led to commissions for illustrating serialized novels in the magazine Once a Week. In 1864, Du Maurier became
a member of the staff of Punch, producing social cartoons. He also worked as a book illustrator, winning acclaim for his work on a collected edition of Elizabeth Gaskell. By the 1880s, Du Maurier began having difficulties
with the vision in his good eye, and he decided to find alternate means of earning money. He won great success as an author of fiction, including the novels Peter Ibbetson (1891) and the bestseller Trilby (1894).
Du Maurier illustrated both novels himself.
George Du Maurier. Original pencil drawing for Trilby.
These illustrations were done as preliminary sketches of some of the characters in the novel. This illustration depicts Svengali, the evil hypnotist who controls Trilby throughout the novel.
George Du Maurier. Original pencil drawing for Trilby.
The heroine Trilby is shown in this sketch wearing shoes, but Du Maurier’s published version depicts her with bare feet.
George Du Maurier. Trilby. New York: Harper and Bros., 1893-94.
Trilby was first published serially in the January-August 1894 numbers of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, accompanied by Du Maurier’s illustrations. It became one of the most popular novels of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, inspiring a successful stage play and several parodies. When the novel was first issued in book form, by London publishers Osgood, McIlvaine & Co., it appeared without illustrations.
Charles Henry Malcolm Kerr 1858-1907
Charles H. M. Kerr was primarily a painter of portraits and landscapes. He was educated at Corpus Christi College in Oxford, as well as at the Royal Academy Schools and in Parisian art schools. Kerr was a regular in the English art
scene of the late 1800s. He exhibited numerous paintings at the Royal Academy and the Royal Society of British Artists. Today, however, Kerr’s contributions to the art world and to the field of book illustration have largely been
forgotten.
C. H. M. Kerr. Original drawing for H. Rider Haggard’s She.
She was first published in The Graphic, a large-format magazine, between Oct. 1886 and Jan. 1887, illustrated by E. K. Johnson. The first American edition (New York, Harper & Bros., 1886) included Johnson’s work,
but the first English edition, significantly revised by Haggard, had no images. Kerr’s illustrations were used in the second English edition, published in 1888 (shown here). This illustration, on a thin blue paper, was once matted,
but at some point the mat has been removed, damaging the margins.
H. Rider Haggard. She. London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1888.
A tale of two British explorers who come across a lost African kingdom ruled by a white queen, She remains one of Haggard’s most popular novels. Haggard wrote the book in a burst of creative energy over a period of six weeks,
finishing it while waiting for an appointment with his literary agent.
Aubrey Beardsley 1872-1898
Aubrey Beardsley was an artistic prodigy of the late Victorian period. By age 20, Beardsley was recognized for his linear, black-and-white drawings. In February 1893 Oscar Wilde's play Salome was published in London, and Beardsley’s drawing inspired by the play was printed in an art magazine. Wilde admired the drawing, and his publisher commissioned Beardsley to illustrate a new edition of the play, which brought the young man great notoriety both for the skill of his drawings and for their grotesque eroticism. Beardsley co-founded the most famous literary and art journal of the Aesthetic period, The Yellow Book, first issued in April 1894. But Beardsley’s connection to Wilde proved so controversial that he was dismissed from the magazine in 1895. Soon after, Beardsley was approached by publisher Leonard Smithers about establishing a rival magazine, The Savoy. Beardsley contributed written pieces and drawings to the journal and illustrated several books for Smithers. Beardsley had suffered from tuberculosis since boyhood. By late 1897, his condition had deteriorated enough that his doctor advised a change of climate and he moved to France, where he died at the age of 25.
Aubrey Beardsley. Original drawing for Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d'Arthur.
Beardsley’s first serious commission was from publisher J.M. Dent in 1892 to execute the designs and illustrations for this edition of Malory’s Arthurian legends. Beardsley grew bored with the job—he found Malory’s text “long-winded”—and didn’t finish many of the drawings as he had planned. Though many critics find Le Morte d’Arthur to be one of the least compelling examples of Beardsley’s output, it was his first major work as a book illustrator and helped to launch his career.
Sir Thomas Malory. Le Morte d'Arthur. London: Dent, 1893.
J. M. Dent & Co. issued Le Morte d’Arthur in seven parts between June 1893 and November 1894. A deluxe edition of the parts was later grouped into a two-volume book. This work tapped into the late Victorian vogue for medievalism and was so popular that it was reprinted many times over the next two decades.
Edmund Joseph Sullivan 1869-1933
E. J. Sullivan’s career as an illustrator and graphic designer bridged two centuries. As a young man, he worked at a number of Victorian illustrated periodicals, including The Daily Graphic, where he illustrated news articles
as well as fiction. By the mid-1890s, Sullivan was illustrating books, including editions of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The School for Scandal and The Rivals (1896) and Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1898),
which is often considered his masterpiece. Sullivan was also an educator who published several books on illustration. His style is often compared to that of Aubrey Beardsley because it incorporates elements of the grotesque.
E. J. Sullivan. Proof illustration for Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler.
This illustration is one of a full set of printing proofs for The Compleat Angler, which would have been created as drafts for the artist to check before final production of the book. Sullivan’s illustrations for this book include
full-page plates, tail and headpiece vignettes, and portraits of Walton and other anglers mentioned throughout the text.
Izaak Walton. The Compleat Angler, or, The Contemplative Man’s Recreation. Edited by Andrew Lang. London: J.M. Dent and Company, 1896.
Walton (1593-1683) first published this famous treatise on fishing in 1653. He continued to add to the text over the next two decades. The text has been popular with anglers—and book illustrators—ever since. Hundreds of editions appeared
in Great Britain and America throughout the 19th century.
AN ILLUSTRATOR IN PROCESS: Six stages of a drawing by E. J. Sullivan.
Captions by Percy V. Bradshaw, in The Art of the Illustrator: E. J. Sullivan and his Work. London: The Press Art School, 1922.
The drawing [Sullivan] has done for me shows admirably his mental and artistic processes. In thinking out his subject, he has not given us a realistic character-drawing of the Cartoonist, but a decorative study of the man, his medium,
his material, and his mental “stock-in-trade.” He has not used a model, though he usually does so. The big easel is drawn from the one he works at in his own studio, and the Cartoonist is a fairly good portrait of himself.
The work is so self-explanatory that lengthy comment on the various stages will be unnecessary.
