'In the Mind's Eye': Picturing Reading in Victorian Narrative

For much of the nineteenth century, British readers maintained a profound interest in the integration of image and text. This project examines how the explosion of graphic media during the mid and late nineteenth century caused British readers, writers, and publishers to question conventional definitions of reading. It does so by exploring core questions about narrative visuality in the nineteenth century: what did Victorians think went on in the brain while a person read? How did printed text become mental picture, according to contemporary physiological theories? And how did authors and publishers define, manipulate, or otherwise shape a reader's tendency to picture mentally a text? The dissertation responds to these questions by first considering the often anxious rhetoric about visualized reading that emerged over the course of the century. Even as graphic materials flooded the literary marketplace, visualized reading came under attack as being overly spontaneous, immediate, and habitual. The project then addresses specific narrative responses to the mind's perceived tendency to produce mental pictures involuntarily, to drift unconsciously into imagistic reverie, and to assimilate graphic imagery instantaneously. Charles Dickens negotiated a tenuous balance between appealing to market demand for images while simultaneously attempting to direct and control the reader's desire to picture the narrative. Other authors grappled with growing concerns about reverie, which Victorians understood to be a specifically visual mode of thought. Charlotte Bronte's Villette and George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss directly contrast the mental imaging of reverie with more conventional forms of picturing, such as illustrations, paintings, and sculpture. Later in the century, H. Rider Haggard and Arthur Conan Doyle incorporated into their narratives unconventional graphic materials such as clues, maps, and "facsimile" reproductions of documents. These images enabled consumers of escapist, entertainment literature to simulate the kinds of valorized, studied reading methods typically associated with more respectable forms of reading. All these authors encouraged, limited, and defined a Victorian reader's visual interaction with the written word and Victorian readers, in kind, developed new reading strategies that assumed and anticipated a high level of integration between the printed page and visualized images.