Short description:

Outlining how supernatural themes were represented through book and magazine illustrations in Victorian culture, this book sheds new light on paranormal, strange, and mysterious subjects. Additionally, it examines the connections between supernatural illustration, women’s ghost story writing, race, social class, and colonialism.

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Long description:

A detailed study of Victorian supernaturalism in book and magazine illustrations and cartoons

Illustrating the Victorian Supernatural explores written and visual texts through which the original Victorian readership encountered and navigated their experience of supernaturalism. Looking across the nineteenth century, Simon Cooke investigates illustrative responses to well-known texts by writers such as Charles Dickens and Henry James while also examining responses to less familiar ghost stories by female authors such as M. E. Braddon and Amelia Edwards. The mix of familiar and unfamiliar carries forward into the selection of artists, both those in the mainstream—John Leech, George Cruikshank, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais—and others whose names are lost to modern readers and whose work deserves to be better known.

The study addresses two main questions: how illustration responded to key literary texts and how graphic designs related to contemporary contexts of race, gender, and class and to the workings of the supernatural itself. The first chapter focuses on satirical writings about ghosts and ghostliness and the various ways illustrators depicted that mockery. Chapter 2 traces artistic responses to Dickens’s writing of the supernatural as a mode of psychological investigation. Chapter 3 looks at class and gender and the problematic practice of male artists illustrating female-authored ghost stories. The fourth chapter examines satirical cartoons’ deployment of supernatural imagery to anatomize issues of imperialism and race. Finally, chapter 5 examines how neo-Victorian artists have revisited the classic texts and taken up the themes established by their forebears.

This meticulously researched, generously illustrated study of a genre not systematically explored until now illuminates how Victorian illustration of the supernatural reflects, enhances, and at times counters topics including skepticism of the paranormal, the psychological dimensions of ghostliness, and the political ghoul as an incarnation of Empires repugnant past. Through Cooke's superb reading of supernatural illustrations by well-known and lesser-known artists for texts including those not typically considered ghost stories, this book will linger in our minds and imaginations long after we close its pages.

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