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Julia Thomas, The Reader’s Image, Journal of Victorian Culture, 2025;, vcaf005, https://doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcaf005
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Extract
Most readers of this edited collection will be able to ‘picture’ a nineteenth-century reader. The iconographic trope was so ubiquitous in the period that its traces have endured today. A composite image of a typical nineteenth-century reader—in the style of one of Francis Galton’s composite photographs—would probably consist of a middle-class Victorian female in a suitably languid pose and oblivious to everything around her, completely lost in the book. This image, along with some interesting deviations from the stereotype, appears throughout the pages of this collection. It is laudable that the publisher Peter Lang has reproduced over 30 images, some of which are in colour. This is not routinely the case these days, even in books like this one that specifically engage with aspects of visual culture.
Picturing the Reader taps into a fascination with representing readers and reading that pervaded literature and the visual arts in the nineteenth century and has been recovered in recent criticism. Where this collection makes its mark is in its focus on analysing these representations through the lens of a dialogue between word and image that crossed textual and visual arenas. Media such as interior decoration, paintings, and illustrations are examined in relation to novels, diaries, essays, and poetry. All the essays here bear witness to the porous boundaries between pictures and words in a period that saw a burgeoning of bi-medial material, especially in the context of the production and proliferation of illustration. The editors, Bath Palmer and Amelia Yeates, have done an impressive job of bringing these essays together in a lucid and intuitive way and they helpfully draw out the themes and the interdisciplinary nature of the collection in their introduction.
