The Victorian mind's eye: Reading literature in an age of illustration

Thomas, Julia ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1995-5558 2025. The Victorian mind's eye: Reading literature in an age of illustration. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 10.1093/oso/9780198914600.001.0001

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Abstract

This book conceptualizes the material and mental mechanics of reading that emerged with the Victorian age of illustration. This period witnessed the growth of illustrated material on an unprecedented scale, with words and pictures printed alongside each other in works of fiction and non-fiction. Victorian illustrated literature was extraordinarily diverse in terms of its style, subject matter, and audience, but its common feature was its bi-mediality, a conjunction of text and image that instigated and demanded new processes and experiences of reading. This book identifies and analyses these modes of reading as they are articulated across an array of Victorian sources, from the first-hand accounts of Victorian readers, reviewers, authors, and artists to the corpus of work by Victorian psychologists that explores multiple aspects of reading, including mental visualization or the ‘mind’s eye’. The book also turns to the content and form of illustrated texts, which indicate how readers handled and interacted with them and how the activity of reading was facilitated or frustrated by their materiality. By uncovering the cognitive and cultural mechanisms of the Victorian engagement with illustrated literature, the book reveals a mode of reading in which illustrations were conceived as both material and mental entities, where they were experienced as part of iconographic networks and clusters, where they elicited their own specific pleasures and displeasures, and where they were seen before the words and remembered long after the words were forgotten. These ways of reading redefine the relation between texts, images, and historical meanings, situating illustration as central to how the Victorians read, and to how we read the Victorians.

Item Type:	Book
Book Type:	Authored Book
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Schools > English, Communication and Philosophy
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
ISBN:	9780198914600
Last Modified:	06 Mar 2025 10:50
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/175914

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