This essay examines the interaction between picture and text in the construction of the narrative spaces in George W. M. Reynolds\u27s Mysteries of London (1844–45) and William Harrison Ainsworth\u27s Jack Sheppard (1839) . Building on previous discussions from Gabriel Zoran (1984) and David Herman ( Story Logic, 2002) concerning the process by which space is constructed in verbal/written texts, this essay examines how such theories function in conjunction with the illustrations that often accompanied Victorian serialized narratives in their original publication. Specifically, I consider the interaction between the verbal and visual channels in the construction of interior rooms presented in these two novels and how this interaction is affected by the variance in the physical placement of the illustrations on the material page in relation to the verbal discourse. Thus, I ask to what extent the physical placement of the illustration on the page relative to the placement of verbal discourse that describes the scene interacts with the dialogic created by the two modes of perception in the visual and the verbal channels. Moreover, I show how this interaction prompts readers to recursively reconfigure the construction of the interior spaces as they engage with both narrative modes
