Visual Art, Intertextuality, and Authorship in the Golden Age of Illustration

This chapter sketches the scope of the golden age of illustration, surveys major publishing houses’ attitudes toward visuality, the yearly incomes of prominent artists and realist authors, and the spatial proportions that leading magazines devoted to visual, as opposed to verbal, fare. It documents many readers’ experiences with illustrations that spoiled installments’ surprises, compromised a work’s narrative authority, or comically caricatured a work’s serious characterizations. Examples from A. B. Wenzell’s frontispieces for the Scribner’s serialized House of Mirth, Joseph Hatfield’s images for “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Albert Herter’s Bras Coupé in an 1899 edition of The Grandissimes, and a Puck cartoon of African Americans interacting with an advertisement for an Uncle Tom’s Cabin stage adaptation suggest that research into realism’s graphic dimensions combines innovative scholarship and rewarding archival recuperation.