This type of critique is often implicit and possibly motivates most of the critiques in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We find the first explicit occurrence of this argument in the so-called Golden Age of Illustration in France (1760-1800, approximately).
The idea that illustrations are included for commercial gain and not aesthetic reasons can be located in the criticism of Claude Joseph Dorat’s illustrated editions of his poetry. These editions sold very well, but between 1764 and 1765, other authors heavily criticized these editions for their use of illustrations as a commercially motivated element. The abbé Galliani, as Griffiths comments, said, with reference to the poor quality of the poems, that “ce poète se sauve de naufrage de planche en planche” (Grimm 18). Griffiths writes that the assumption that only the illustrations could make Dorat’s poems sell “became widespread in the period” (33). Griffiths mentions a peculiar case that exemplifies the commercial advantage of illustrations over the literary text:
One commentator recorded the case of a customer who had cut out the plates and left the rest of the book behind in the shop
(Griffiths 33; based on the anecdote in Bachaumont, Mémoires secrets, London 1780, entry for 4 April 1779, XIV, pp. 12–3)
We find another occurrence of this idea in an anonymous article from 1844 published in The Quarterly Review. In this article, the author surveys the expansion of illustration in the period, describing the technical developments that allowed such an expansion. The author also briefly describes the public’s eager reception of all illustrated texts. The reviewer defines the period as one characterized by the public’s “rage for ornamented, or as they are now termed, ‘Illustrated’ or ‘Pictorial’ editions of books.” (168)
A more emphatic assessment can be found in Sidney Fairfield’s “The Tyranny of the Pictorial,” from 1886. The author considers that there is a craze for pictures in the public—“the reading public has suddenly become picture-mad”—(863) and that the “purely pictorial element is the controlling end and be-all” of contemporary publishing practices (861). Crucially, Fairfield speculates that the visual elements (encompassing [ornamental] illuminations, [representational] drawings, and photographs) produce certain effects on the readership that are beneficial economically for the publishers. Fairfield argues that readers tend to believe that publications with visual covers and plentiful half-tones are “high-class reading-matter” (861), making the connection between illustrations and commercial gain explicit.
Works Cited
Fairfield, Sidney. “The Tyranny of the Pictorial.” Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, Vol. 55 (January to June, 1895). Philadelphia, Pa.: J.B. Lippincott Co., 1886, pp. 861-864. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/uiug.30112045355614
Griffiths, Antony., and British Library. “Publishers and Authors.” Prints for Books: Book Illustration in France, 1760-1800. British Library, 2004, pp. 1-56.
Grimm, Friedrich Melchior. Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique de Grimm et de Diderot, depuis 1753 jusqu’ en 1790. Vol. 5, Oxford University, 1829.
[Holmes, John] Quarterly Review, “Illustrated Books” (1844). Publisher J. Murray. 167-199. https://archive.org/details/quarterlyreview08unkngoog/page/n180/mode/2up
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