Drawing on the Victorians is an edited collection on a large scale. It totals almost four hundred pages, including an extensive introduction, ten substantial essays, an afterword from Kate Flint and, as one would expect, a generous number of illustrations. The collection as a whole uses the notion of the palimpsest as its key theoretical reference point. The volume's editors, Anna Marie Jones and Rebecca Mitchell introduce the concept by referencing Gerard Genette's Palimpsests (1982) and the many subsequent ways in which the idea of layering and overwriting have been taken up by postmodern and neo-Victorian scholars. In fact, they highlight the idea that the palimpsest is actually a Victorian term, first used as a metaphor by Thomas De Quincey in 1845, and is therefore particularly apposite when attempting to reflect on Victorian representational practices and their relation to an imagined or actual futurity. The concept applies especially well to the particular mode this volume focuses on, the graphic text, in which image and text jostle for space on the page. The Jones and Mitchel and the contributors conceive of this mode very broadly to include not just graphic novels but also illustrated books, poems and periodicals, comics, and cartoons. This breadth enables the volume to engage with material ranging from mass-market advertisements to “high-art” illustration and photography.
The hauntedness of the palimpsest is an implicit subtheme seen in essays by Christine Ferguson and Jessica Straley. Ferguson examines the relationship between nineteenth-century spiritualist iconography and its remaking through the work of the contemporary artist Olivia Plender. Ferguson emphasizes the ways in which spiritualists demonstrated their fascination with “the cultural, spiritual, and economic forces that shape our encounter with the image” (124) and shows Plender's work, too, to engage with the possibilities of observation in open-ended ways. The haunting figure of the dead innocent, so plentiful in Victorian visual and textual cultures, is reimagined as an “infinite regression of empty metaphors” (178) when viewed through the lens of Edward Gorey and Roman Dirge's recent illustrated texts and comic books in Straley's thought-provoking piece.
Several of the essays explore the ways in which the past is imagined or constructed in the interplay of visual and textual forms. Heidi Kaufman focusses on Will Eisner's graphic novel Fagin the Jew (2003) and its emphasis on Victorian anti-Semitism to think about history as standing between the Victorians and ourselves. Imagining the past as an “accumulation of histories rather than as a historical relationship linking contemporary readers and the Victorians” (153) focuses attention on how graphic artists can emphasize fractures, gaps, and absences in the historical narrative. Linda K. Hughes samples the vast collection of historical illustrations found in popular Victorian periodicals such as Good Words and Once a Week. She considers specifically the representation of female figures in neo-medieval images and emphasizes their sexuality and active agency in contrast to similar illustrations of contemporary domestic femininity. Jennifer Phegley likewise focuses more squarely on the Victorian than the neo-Victorian to argue that the act of interpreting images produced for the burgeoning Valentine's Day market provided nineteenth-century women with a training in navigating the complexities of their social lives.
Although most of the articles in the collection take an Anglo-centric approach, we do see attempts to widen out the scope. Anna Maria Jones focuses on Japanese manga, while Monika Pietrzak-Franger deals with the afterlives of Alice in Wonderland in Swiss and Polish graphic novels. Here, the collection reflects a broader developing interest in neo-Victorian studies in the transnational movements of texts, what Pietrzak-Franger calls the “global-local continuum” (69). Further essays like these, building on Elizabeth Ho's Neo-Victorianism and the Memory of Empire (2012) and the 2015 special issue of the Journal of Neo-Victorian Studies, will be welcomed in future collections.
One of the best aspects of this collection is that, although it coheres around the concept of the palimpsest, there is space for divergence and argumentation. Brian Maidment, in his essay on early nineteenth-century graphic texts, uses metaphors of “assault” and “smother[ing]” to describe the extent to which an emergent tradition of visual narrative was layered over “by an early Victorian devotion to words” (41). Flint, in her afterword, suggests that the image of the palimpsest itself is written (or drawn) over by a further form of palimpsest as neo-Victorian authors and artists work over “an intermedial dialogue that Victorian themselves put into place” (331). This book enters a gap in the critical landscape by focusing specifically on the relationships between image and word in Victorian and neo-Victorian graphic texts. In doing so, it does not set out a prescriptive agenda for writers that will follow. Rather it offers a useful and pliable paradigm in the shape of the palimpsest and allows its authors freedom to play with and modulate the concept in light of their particular and specific concerns.
