Dickens extra-illustrated: heads and scenes in monthly parts (The Case of Nicholas Nickleby)

As a practice that interleaves extraneous materials within the pages of a book, extra-illustration unbinds the volume form and undermines the autonomy of the literary and of the act of reading. I concentrate on Charles Dickens's The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (1838-39) and sets of extra-illustrations by Peter Palette (pseud, for Thomas Onwhyn) and Miss La Creevy (pseud, for Kenny Meadows). Taking advantage of the material and temporal aspects of serialization, these extra-illustrations rearticulate the act of reading in a way that emphasizes the place of Victorian literature in a culture of viewing and collecting

Historic doubts, conjectures, and the wanderings of a principal curiosity: Henry VII in the fabric of Strawberry Hill

This article explores the inscriptions and material metamorphoses of Henry VII in Horace Walpole’s ‘paper fabric’, a reversible world of writing, collecting, and book making. In Anecdotes of Painting in England (1762), Walpole celebrates the funerary monument of Henry VII by Pietro Torrigiano at Westminster Abbey. In Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third (1768) conjecture and speculation become methodological prompts to unveil the textual and architectural discontinuities of history. Walpole’s next historical experiment consists in placing a bust of Henry VII in the agonies of death in the Star Chamber at Strawberry Hill. The bust’s importance is captured by its reappearance propped on top of a frontispiece and its dissemination in other reproductions in extra-illustrated copies of Description of the Villa of Mr Horace Walpole, youngest son of Sir Robert Walpole Earl of Orford at Strawberry Hill (1784). A dramatic representation of the bust in John Carter’s extra-illustrated copy of Description, later engraved in his Specimens of the Ancient Sculpture and Painting now remaining in this Kingdom (1780-94), shows the alternative trajectories of Henry VII from Westminster Abbey to Strawberry Hill, from Walpole’s cosmopolitan collection of curiosities to Carter’s paper collection of national gothic specimens

‘A Gallery in the Mind’? Hazlitt, Spenser, and the Old Masters

‘An old lady, to whom Pope one day read some passages out of Spenser’s “Faerie Queene,” said that he had been entertaining her with a gallery of pictures’. Published in Joseph Spence’s Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters of Books and Men (1820), this scene of reading reached a new public brought together by a new culture of Old Master paintings shaped by the establishment of temporary exhibitions at the British Institution. Drawing on Francis Haskell’s notion of the ephemeral museum, this paper explores William Hazlitt’s association of Spenser with the Old Masters in his Lecture on Chaucer and Spenser (1818) and his essay on ‘Pictures at Oxford and Blenheim’, which was the last instalment of his British Galleries of Art published in the London Magazine in 1823. Building on the work of Jonathan Richardson, who had placed an intermedial art of memory at the centre of his ‘science of a connoisseur’, Hazlitt advocated a practice of ‘reading with the eyes of a connoisseur’. Through the pages of the Faerie Queene Hazlitt imagined a new gallery of painting, a ‘gallery of the mind’ that could be abstracted from the aristocratic world of old master collections and the Spenserian productions of modern painters

In the cloud: Nineteenth-Century visions and experiments for the digital age

What shapes does the nineteenth-century paper archive take in the twenty-first century digital cloud? Luisa Calè and Ana Parejo Vadillo situate the crafts, experiments, and visions discussed in this anniversary issue in the wider context of questions raised by the emergence and possibilities of nineteenth-century archives for the digital era. What happens when objects float free of their bibliographic and museum anchorings? What is gained and lost in the digital transformations? What new imaginary spaces open up in the transition from the book to the virtual codex and from the terrestrial library to cloud-sourced collections? What formations does the nineteenth century take in digital discourse networks? How are nineteenth-century objects made digital, and through what crafts, skills, and disciplines? How are they shaped by circulation through digital platforms, social media, and remix on the semantic web? What kinds of authoring, what structures of labour, what kinds of making and knowing shape agency in the nineteenth-century digital archive

Modern Sibyls and sibylline media

The dynamic image of the Sibyl’s flying leaves is at odds with the still life of painting, but her recalcitrant ministry offers a powerful allegory for the survival of writing as a ‘riddle at the painting’s centre’ (Garrett Stewart), a medium whose mode of operation has been subtracted by its transposition in paint. This essay traces visual lines of transmission starting with Old Master paintings, and then turning to portraits, adaptations, and impersonations of modern sibyls in the Romantic period, focusing on Benjamin West, Angelica Kauffmann, Emma Hamilton’s attitudes and Friedrich Rehberg’s outlines, and Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun

Blake, Young, and the poetics of the composite page

This essay analyses William Blake’s ‘composite art’ through a practice of illustration that staged the separation of text and illustration, tracing his successive experiments with Edward Young’s Night Thoughts, from the extra-illustrated volumes of 537 watercolours to the illustrated edition published by Richard Edwards in 1797 and the recycling of proofs in Vala or The Four Zoas. The shifting relationship between letterpress and illustration in the extra-illustrated volume and the 1797 edition, and the function of proofs as units of composition, shed light on the archaeology of bookmaking and its impact on the composition of the manuscript

‘Knowledge is Power’: literature, invention, radical thinking at the London Mechanics’ Institution

On the occasion of the bicentenary of the London Mechanics’ Institution, this introduction goes back to the Baconian motto ‘Knowledge is Power’ adopted by the early proponents of mechanics’ education to reconstruct the place and function of literature in mechanic invention, practical education, and useful knowledge, against the backdrop of its emergence as an autonomous discipline of the creative imagination. Analysis of different published versions of George Birkbeck’s speech on the laying of the first stone of the lecture room in December 1824 reveals the precarious status of literature in the mechanics’ ‘Temple of Reason’ under construction: foregrounded in one version, excluded from another. Why? This intervention explores what is at stake in its inclusion or exclusion then and now, in the current predicament of the arts and humanities locally, nationally, and internationally

The reception of Blake in Italy

Apart from scant encyclopaedia entries, the first traces of Blake in Italy come through German Dante scholarship at the turn of the twentieth century. After a private press publication of ‘Tigre’ in 1906, the key translations of Blake’s works are Edmondo Dodsworth’s Il matrimonio del cielo e dello inferno (1923), followed from the 1930s by the most influential translations by the poet Giuseppe Ungaretti, published in newspapers in 1930 and 1933, collected in Traduzioni in 1936 (with translations from St. J. Perse, Gongora, Essenin, Jean Paulhan), and continuing over a period of thirty years, culminating in Visioni, published in 1965 and regularly reprinted. While Ungaretti singled out the shorter poems to produce a hermetic Blake, translation of the later prophetic works was inaugurated by an anonymous translation of Jerusalem published in 1943 in a series entitled ‘Breviari Mistici’. Libri profetici, translated by Roberto Sanesi, appeared in 1980. Another edition of Jerusalem, with a facsimile of copy E, was published with a translation by Marcello Pagnini in 1994. I quattro zoa: i tormenti dell’amore e della gelosia nella morte e nel giudizio finale di Albione, l’antico uomo, translated by drama therapist Salvo Pitruzzella was published in the series ‘I quaderni dell’Almagesto’ in 2007. Blake’s work has been studied by philosophers and psychologists, as well as scholars of literature and art history. Rewritings include a visionary biographical prose poem by Caterina Lelij (1938), radical left wing lawyer Corrado Costa’s cartoon essay Blake in Beulah, saggio visionario su un poeta a fumetti (1983), and Paolo Renosto’s musical compositions Love’s Body (1974, winner of the ‘premio d’Italia’) and Omaggio a Blake (1983), hosted in the new phonology studio of the Italian Broadcasting Corporation (RAI) run by Luciano Berio in the 1970s and 1980s

Maria Cosway’s Hours: Cosmopolitan and Classical Visual Culture in Thomas Macklin’s Poets Gallery

Thomas Macklin’s Gallery of Poets opened at the Mitre Tavern in Fleet Street in 1788 with the aim to ‘display British Genius’ through ‘Prints Illustrative of the Most Celebrated British Poets’. Early newspaper coverage promised ‘a monument of the powers of the pencil in England, as the Vatican is at Rome’. The incongruous juxtaposition between Fleet Street and the Vatican spells out the cosmopolitan ambition of the literary gallery phenomenon through its real and imagined geographies of display. Through the format of the paper gallery of prints, Macklin’s Poets offered the inventions of British Poets as a repository of painting. This chapter examines how the cosmopolitan idiom of the paper gallery is negotiated in the first number of Macklin’s Poets. This essay examines the extent to which this ambition was achieved in the first Number of Macklin’s Poets which carried an engraving of Maria Cosway’s The Hours, originally a painting with an impressively European iconographic heritage. The painting was first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1783, and was retroactively associated by Macklin with Thomas Gray’s ‘Ode on the Spring’. The trope of the Hours brought with it a weighty provenance derived from classical marble bas-relief, through the antiquarian pages of Pietro Santi Bartoli and Bernard de Montfaucon to Flaxman’s designs for Wedgwood plaques and vases. Cosway’s name also imported into Gray’s poem her reputation as a cosmopolitan, cultured woman who had completed the Grand Tour and who moved in elite circles including those of the Prince of Wales in London and the Duke of Orleans, Pierre d’Hancarville and Thomas Jefferson in Paris. The iconographies of the painting, the print, and the poem articulate a European cosmopolitan tradition for British Art