Dickens extra-illustrated: heads and scenes in monthly parts (The Case of Nicholas Nickleby)

As a practice that interleaves extraneous materials within the pages of a book, extra-illustration unbinds the volume form and undermines the autonomy of the literary and of the act of reading. I concentrate on Charles Dickens's The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (1838-39) and sets of extra-illustrations by Peter Palette (pseud, for Thomas Onwhyn) and Miss La Creevy (pseud, for Kenny Meadows). Taking advantage of the material and temporal aspects of serialization, these extra-illustrations rearticulate the act of reading in a way that emphasizes the place of Victorian literature in a culture of viewing and collecting

‘A Gallery in the Mind’? Hazlitt, Spenser, and the Old Masters

‘An old lady, to whom Pope one day read some passages out of Spenser’s “Faerie Queene,” said that he had been entertaining her with a gallery of pictures’. Published in Joseph Spence’s Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters of Books and Men (1820), this scene of reading reached a new public brought together by a new culture of Old Master paintings shaped by the establishment of temporary exhibitions at the British Institution. Drawing on Francis Haskell’s notion of the ephemeral museum, this paper explores William Hazlitt’s association of Spenser with the Old Masters in his Lecture on Chaucer and Spenser (1818) and his essay on ‘Pictures at Oxford and Blenheim’, which was the last instalment of his British Galleries of Art published in the London Magazine in 1823. Building on the work of Jonathan Richardson, who had placed an intermedial art of memory at the centre of his ‘science of a connoisseur’, Hazlitt advocated a practice of ‘reading with the eyes of a connoisseur’. Through the pages of the Faerie Queene Hazlitt imagined a new gallery of painting, a ‘gallery of the mind’ that could be abstracted from the aristocratic world of old master collections and the Spenserian productions of modern painters

Historic doubts, conjectures, and the wanderings of a principal curiosity: Henry VII in the fabric of Strawberry Hill

This article explores the inscriptions and material metamorphoses of Henry VII in Horace Walpole’s ‘paper fabric’, a reversible world of writing, collecting, and book making. In Anecdotes of Painting in England (1762), Walpole celebrates the funerary monument of Henry VII by Pietro Torrigiano at Westminster Abbey. In Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third (1768) conjecture and speculation become methodological prompts to unveil the textual and architectural discontinuities of history. Walpole’s next historical experiment consists in placing a bust of Henry VII in the agonies of death in the Star Chamber at Strawberry Hill. The bust’s importance is captured by its reappearance propped on top of a frontispiece and its dissemination in other reproductions in extra-illustrated copies of Description of the Villa of Mr Horace Walpole, youngest son of Sir Robert Walpole Earl of Orford at Strawberry Hill (1784). A dramatic representation of the bust in John Carter’s extra-illustrated copy of Description, later engraved in his Specimens of the Ancient Sculpture and Painting now remaining in this Kingdom (1780-94), shows the alternative trajectories of Henry VII from Westminster Abbey to Strawberry Hill, from Walpole’s cosmopolitan collection of curiosities to Carter’s paper collection of national gothic specimens

Modern Sibyls and sibylline media

The dynamic image of the Sibyl’s flying leaves is at odds with the still life of painting, but her recalcitrant ministry offers a powerful allegory for the survival of writing as a ‘riddle at the painting’s centre’ (Garrett Stewart), a medium whose mode of operation has been subtracted by its transposition in paint. This essay traces visual lines of transmission starting with Old Master paintings, and then turning to portraits, adaptations, and impersonations of modern sibyls in the Romantic period, focusing on Benjamin West, Angelica Kauffmann, Emma Hamilton’s attitudes and Friedrich Rehberg’s outlines, and Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun

In the cloud: Nineteenth-Century visions and experiments for the digital age

What shapes does the nineteenth-century paper archive take in the twenty-first century digital cloud? Luisa Calè and Ana Parejo Vadillo situate the crafts, experiments, and visions discussed in this anniversary issue in the wider context of questions raised by the emergence and possibilities of nineteenth-century archives for the digital era. What happens when objects float free of their bibliographic and museum anchorings? What is gained and lost in the digital transformations? What new imaginary spaces open up in the transition from the book to the virtual codex and from the terrestrial library to cloud-sourced collections? What formations does the nineteenth century take in digital discourse networks? How are nineteenth-century objects made digital, and through what crafts, skills, and disciplines? How are they shaped by circulation through digital platforms, social media, and remix on the semantic web? What kinds of authoring, what structures of labour, what kinds of making and knowing shape agency in the nineteenth-century digital archive

Blake, Young, and the poetics of the composite page

This essay analyses William Blake’s ‘composite art’ through a practice of illustration that staged the separation of text and illustration, tracing his successive experiments with Edward Young’s Night Thoughts, from the extra-illustrated volumes of 537 watercolours to the illustrated edition published by Richard Edwards in 1797 and the recycling of proofs in Vala or The Four Zoas. The shifting relationship between letterpress and illustration in the extra-illustrated volume and the 1797 edition, and the function of proofs as units of composition, shed light on the archaeology of bookmaking and its impact on the composition of the manuscript

The reception of Blake in Italy

Apart from scant encyclopaedia entries, the first traces of Blake in Italy come through German Dante scholarship at the turn of the twentieth century. After a private press publication of ‘Tigre’ in 1906, the key translations of Blake’s works are Edmondo Dodsworth’s Il matrimonio del cielo e dello inferno (1923), followed from the 1930s by the most influential translations by the poet Giuseppe Ungaretti, published in newspapers in 1930 and 1933, collected in Traduzioni in 1936 (with translations from St. J. Perse, Gongora, Essenin, Jean Paulhan), and continuing over a period of thirty years, culminating in Visioni, published in 1965 and regularly reprinted. While Ungaretti singled out the shorter poems to produce a hermetic Blake, translation of the later prophetic works was inaugurated by an anonymous translation of Jerusalem published in 1943 in a series entitled ‘Breviari Mistici’. Libri profetici, translated by Roberto Sanesi, appeared in 1980. Another edition of Jerusalem, with a facsimile of copy E, was published with a translation by Marcello Pagnini in 1994. I quattro zoa: i tormenti dell’amore e della gelosia nella morte e nel giudizio finale di Albione, l’antico uomo, translated by drama therapist Salvo Pitruzzella was published in the series ‘I quaderni dell’Almagesto’ in 2007. Blake’s work has been studied by philosophers and psychologists, as well as scholars of literature and art history. Rewritings include a visionary biographical prose poem by Caterina Lelij (1938), radical left wing lawyer Corrado Costa’s cartoon essay Blake in Beulah, saggio visionario su un poeta a fumetti (1983), and Paolo Renosto’s musical compositions Love’s Body (1974, winner of the ‘premio d’Italia’) and Omaggio a Blake (1983), hosted in the new phonology studio of the Italian Broadcasting Corporation (RAI) run by Luciano Berio in the 1970s and 1980s

”A Bright Erroneous Dream": The Shelley Memorial and the body of the Poet

This article argues that Edward Onslow Ford’s Shelley Memorial at University College Oxford (inaugurated in 1893) played an important role in refashioning Shelley’s corpus at the turn of the century, particularly by enabling political and homoerotic readings of his works, and contributed to a distinctive fin-de-siècle reception of the Romantic poet. The display and architectural setting of the Shelley Memorial activate Shelley’s poetic Platonism by playing with the metamorphic possibilities of light and shadow. The sculptural medium thus generated new ways of reading Shelley just as it illuminates the aesthetics and politics of Victorian classicism and nineteenth-century attitudes to the cultural significance of the male poetic body

Poetics of the Bedroom Scene in Fuseli, Frankenstein, Film

This essay explores Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare (1781), its intermedial modes of transmission, and the intermedial poetics and reading practices it generates. The sensational power of The Nightmare generates further commissions in the areas of dreams, the gothic and the supernatural. The striking composition and open-ended potential of Fuseli’s nocturnal interior make it a schema that helps define and disseminate works. Its intermedial circulation also defines the narrative possibilities and the visual construction of the death-bed scene in Shelley’s Frankenstein, a scene often related to Fuseli’s picture mostly for its biographical import or its afterlife in filmic adaptations.Cet article s’intéresse aux modes de transmission, à la poétique de l’intermédialité et aux pratiques de lectures que Le Cauchemar de Henry Fuseli (1781) a générés. Les potentialités de lecture relativement ouvertes qui caractérisent cette scène d’intérieur nocturne en font une représentation qui a contribué à définir d’autres œuvres. Cette circulation intermédiale engendrée par le tableau infléchit la construction visuelle de la scène de la mort d’Elizabeth sur son lit, décrite par Shelley dans Frankenstein. L’œuvre de Fuseli apparaît comme une scène-clé non seulement dans le roman mais aussi dans ses transpositions filmiques.Calè Luisa. Poetics of the Bedroom Scene in Fuseli, Frankenstein, Film. In: Cahiers Charles V, n°48,2010. Circulation and Transfer of Key Scenes in Nineteenth-Century Literature. pp. 85-105

Spiritual form: Walter Pater's encounters with William Blake

The relationship between the arts was central to Pater’s literary criticism. His interest in the poet-painters Blake and Rossetti offers an ideal corpus for thinking about form within and across the arts. Although Pater never devoted a whole essay to Blake, his name surfaces in discussions about form and style, image and meaning, soul and mind, in which literature is defined within a classical and European aesthetic tradition. Artistic examples and analogies shape a comparative and complementary understanding of literature and art through exercises in appreciation and interartistic lines of cultural influence that present Blake and Hugo as the ‘true sons’ of Michelangelo. This chapter traces Pater’s engagement with Blake through Swedenborg and Swinburne, and then focuses on Blake’s function in Pater’s poetics. Pater’s explicit references to Blake bring to view his illustrations to Job and Robert Blair’s The Grave, revealing the role played by visual invention in his attempts to define the organic interfusion of form and matter in literary writing. In his essays on Demeter and Dionysus, he mentions Blake as a ‘ “survival” from a different age’, who can articulate an aesthetic politics for the present through the experience of ‘spiritual form’, a concept he attributes to Blake. Blake had used this formula satirically in the titles of his dystopian allegorical portraits of Pitt, Nelson, and Napoleon to denounce their political imposition as a satirical yoking of opposites. These paintings were exhibited at the Burlington Fine Arts Club’s Blake retrospective when Pater developed his own idea of ‘spiritual form’ in 1876. In a strong act of misreading and revaluation, Pater repurposes the term to signal the utopian potential of an ancient embodied aesthetic to heal the separation between form and content and to restore the prelapsarian eternal body celebrated in Blake’s prophetic writings. Comparison with Blake’s discussion of Chaucer shows how both writers look to sculpture to develop an embodied ideal of the human form divine and to define how it might be achieved, restored, reformed through an embodied aesthetic. Engagement with Blake illuminates the inter-art dynamics of Pater’s critical practice, providing insight into the role of art criticism in developing his writing about literature. Pater’s Blake brings out a discipline of literary form that is shaped by a multisensorial aesthetic