The illustrated book was a classic, distinctive, and multiform kind of Victorian new media. Books had been illustrated before the nineteenth century, but these were usually expensive, luxury items for the ruling classes. Only in the mid-nineteenth century did new technology enable the mass printing of illustrated books—as well as newspapers and magazines—at prices that many more people could afford. “Illustration” is an aesthetic keyword strongly associated with the nineteenth century. In later years, twentieth-century critics would look askance at illustration’s promiscuous mixing of word and image; this fusion contravened the modernist dogma of pure medium. Literary books for adults today largely appear without illustrations; picture-books for adults seem like an outmoded print phenomenon of the past. Yet Victorian illustration was a complicated and long-reaching media effect that entailed more than merely interleaving books with pictures. In this chapter, I argue that illustrations engaged in imaginative acts of world-building and world-making: they concretized visions of space, place, and self whose after-effects are still with us, albeit in slightly different forms.

My account of illustration pushes against usual understandings of the term. For literature scholars, an illustration usually suggests an image with a lesser relationship to a text. Words occupy a position of primacy, especially in works of literature, while images function as an afterthought, a belated attempt at concretization subordinated to the textual original.¹ This approach offers many revelations within the literary sphere, but it also constrains our notion of Victorian illustration, which extended far beyond literature: many kinds of books and magazines contained images, of which literature was merely a subset.

Art historians, meanwhile, have approached the subject with a fine-art sensibility, focusing on avant-garde illustrators like Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Everett Millais.² These Pre-Raphaelite painters are famous for elevating illustrations to the level of autonomous artworks, creating images that are distinct from the text and equally artistic, with all the hermetic formal perfection ascribable to high art. Fine-art criticism has studied a small canon of illustrators who crafted images for Fine Art Books, Victorian precursors to modern-day, opulent coffee-table art books. Scholars who study illustration as a fine art implicitly distinguish their subjects from more patently commercial printing productions, which used illustrations as a marketing tool to sell books.³ Accordingly, these accounts rarely consider more prolific, mass-cultural objects or illustrators. Artists such as Gustave Doré, the most popular and influential illustrator of the later nineteenth century, are strikingly under-studied.

Rather than seeing illustration as elucidating a text, or glimmering in its own autonomous artistic sphere, I analyze it as a major interactive, world-building activity of the nineteenth century, permeating many different kinds of books, not just literary or Fine Art productions. A different understanding of illustration comes to the fore in my choice of object, the Victorian Bible. Any respectable middle-class Victorian home would have contained an illustrated Bible, often a deluxe “family” edition filled with illustrations, notes, and all manner of extra materials. The illustrated Bible was likely the single most popular illustrated book of the nineteenth century. It was a central object in the Victorian parlor, with elaborate rituals for its reading and study; as such, it is an exemplary piece of visual culture, defining the way that many middle-class Victorians consumed illustrations. Pictures in a Bible signify differently from pictures in a novel: instead of interpreting a suspense-driven product, an illustrated Bible—where readers already know the story and the outcome—finds suspense and desire in the images themselves, in the choices for world-formation and imaginative projection. The appeal of the book lies in the way that it visually constructs and animates the world of ancient Jews and Christians. Bible illustration thus models the way that pictures, accompanying words, opened out into unknown places and times, crafting solidities and defining worlds out of increasingly fraught religious materials.

The illustrated Bible shaped worlds with a porous sensitivity to other modes of Victorian knowing and seeing. It was a heterogeneous object, a series of layers or palimpsests, intertextual and intervisual with other mass-cultural forms. Illustrated Bibles generated commentaries on Victorian notions of science, history, geography, empiricism, and materiality: they fashioned a Victorian “world picture,” in Martin Heidegger’s resonant phrase. “World picture” translates the term Weltbild, a philosophical concept that Heidegger used to describe the pre-structured human comprehension of the world-as-picture, as something to be framed, surveyed, used, and acted upon. For Heidegger, “the fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as picture.”⁴ Heidegger’s “world” is a defamiliarized place, understood not as the natural unfolding of space and time but as an artificial schema, connoting art-making, constructedness, and the action of human perception on the scene. There is no innocent world apart from the frames and preconceived notions that we impose upon it. Though Heidegger’s essay largely theorizes the rise of modern science, its terminology of “conquest” and “mastery” also evokes a political dynamic inflecting Western eyes.⁵ Envisioning the world-as-picture also implicitly accommodates modern imperialism, encouraging humans to strive to conquer and control the world’s various territories. As the chapter pursues, the Bible is a crucial site for analyzing political constructions of the Victorian world picture, standing as it does at the locus of past and present, East and West, British and foreign, Protestant and Jewish.

Bible illustrations offer a revealing entrée into an ever-shifting Victorian world picture. They played a key part in making the Bible “English,” even while raising larger questions about Christianity’s foreign roots. Many of the Bible’s exotically decorated scenes appear to operate in a classic orientalist mode as described by Edward Said, in which the West projects a fantastical otherness onto a luxurious, sensuous East. Yet the illustrated Bible challenges this conception of the Victorian world picture, since the Christian imagery demanded a problematic alignment of self with other. The resulting illustrations create what I call “orients of the self”: they depict destabilizing scenes hovering somewhere between East and West, ancient and modern, Jewish and gentile, patriarchal and democratic, and magical and rational.

Though religious illustration was central to the Victorian household, this imagery has received only limited scholarly attention. Colleen McDannell explores some of the reasons for the critical neglect of Christianity’s material aspects, suggesting that scholars typically adhere to a commonplace distinction between “the sacred and the profane, spirit and matter, piety and commerce.”⁶ From this perspective, a marketed commodity—like a profusely illustrated Bible—would seem out of place in the disembodied realm of true religion. Twentieth-century theorists of religion like Emile Durkheim, writing in Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912), produced an influential narrative of the West’s increasing modernization and secularization, in which the realm of the sacred—transcendental, awe-inspiring, and guarded by elder initiates—was walled off from the world of the profane and the workaday, populated by women, children, and working-class people.⁷ These values are still evident in scholarship on Victorian religious discourse, which has tended to focus on the controversies that roiled elite intellectual circles—Darwinism, the “Higher Criticism” investigating the Bible as a historical document, and the Tractarian and neo-Catholic movements—while omitting other forms and practices of religion.⁸ Yet Victorian religion consisted of more than heated doctrinal battles waged in pamphlets and treatises. It was also the lived faith of everyday people, as seen in its material traces.

Acknowledging that the illustrated Bible is a commodity might seem to deflate its sacred value. But if we presume that a commercial purpose taints any religious object, then, as Colleen McDannell argues, “we will miss the subtle ways that people create and maintain spiritual ideals through the exchange of goods and the construction of spaces.”⁹ McDannell’s point seems especially pertinent to the study of illustrated Bibles, which might be cynically perceived to empty out religious feeling in favor of crass commercialism, with sensuous renderings of melodrama, violence, slavery, and other sensational biblical subjects. Yet these aspects of the illustrated Bible performed important political and religious functions, as the chapter argues, scripting a modern liberal epic by which British Protestant readers could identify with the tribulations of ancient Jews. In other words, the illustrated Bible’s commercial and religious contents were deeply entwined. Embodied violence was a fundamental part of Victorian Christianity; it also sold well. The chapter’s conclusion looks at ways that this sometimes disturbing embodiment continues today, in ongoing spectacles of modern Christianity. I track how the spiritual and the sacred express themselves in visual and embodied forms, especially those courting magic, theatricality, and spectacle. It is no coincidence that Gustave Doré, the most popular Victorian Bible illustrator, had an outsized influence on modern cinema.

Contemporary scholarship on the Victorian Bible emphasizes its fragility: in the wake of historical and scientific research, especially that of the German Higher Criticism, Victorian intellectuals were forced to confront the Bible’s instability as a religious document. The foundational scriptures were revealed to be not set in stone, but a murky, ambiguous set of signs, open to interpretation and reinterpretation.¹⁰ In some ways this multiform sensibility underlies the project of Bible illustration, in which each new book offered a different version of biblical truth. Having said this, illustrated Bibles proved surprisingly impervious to the challenges posed by new Bible scholarship. In fact, Bibles often marketed themselves by promising more accurate, more detailed illustrations of the history and customs of the Holy Land—a scientific and empiricist worldview that was seen as the perfect counterpart to the spiritual truth of Christianity. The modern-day sense of science opposing religion did not apply in the case of most Victorian Bibles, which presented the two modes as complementary rather than competing.

New historical approaches strengthened the Bible’s “reality effect,” making its places and times feel more real for its readers. George Eliot’s famous realist manifesto, in chapter 17 of Adam Bede (1859), makes its claim by attacking the false, beautiful types of religious illustration, the Madonnas and angels that seem inauthentic and unreal when compared with more homely peasant figures. As Eliot’s manifesto suggests, religious illustration itself was a proving ground of the real. (I discuss this manifesto at length in Chapter 2.) “Realism” is an auxiliary keyword in the chapter, befitting a concept of illustration that emphasizes its moves toward visualization, realization, materialization, and embodiment.

The chapter begins by delving into the meanings of “illustration,” especially as they pertained to the Victorian illustrated book. I then move to the specific history of the illustrated Bible, focusing in particular on Cassell’s Family Bible (1859–63), the best-selling Bible of mid-century.¹¹ The copious illustrations of Cassell’s Bible marshaled all the latest scientific and geographic research into the Holy Land to produce a phantasmagoric, fantastical spiritual realm, blending together clashing systems of knowledge in the manner of a Foucaultian heterotopia. The visual culture of the Holy Land showed the influence of spectacular archaeological discoveries in the Middle East, leading to anachronistic yet compelling origin stories that superimposed religious history onto the history of Western nation-states. The Bible’s numerous political stories of nation-building among ancient Jews became available for identification and appropriation by British Protestant readers, especially in the illustrated Bible of Gustave Doré: these images depicted righteous, violent heroes emerging triumphant against larger armies in visual narratives I identify as a liberal epic. From rousing battle scenes I turn to the intimate, domestic realism of John Everett Millais’s illustrations to The Parables of Our Lord (1863), which controversially updated the parables to modern Scotland, with strange and disconcerting results. A late section considers the visual culture surrounding ancient and modern Jewishness, which epitomized the problems of self and other haunting the Victorian Bible. The conclusion ponders “the persistence of illustration” in the long influence of Victorian Bibles upon our modern mediascape, from televangelical empires to American theme parks recreating “The Holy Land Experience.”

This chapter brings together two terms usually associated with Walter Benjamin: mechanically reproduced artworks and “aura,” the burnished, spiritual quality he attached to the singular, original work of art. Benjamin predicted that the phenomenon of aura would diminish with the rise of mechanical reproduction, as the singular artwork would be replaced by a flood of cheaper, more accessible copies.¹² This chapter moves in a different direction: I propose that mass culture, kitsch, and other disreputable media forms are not incompatible with values of authenticity, belief, or aura. Even while illustrated Bibles fabricated new worlds that were intellectually impossible, those worlds were compelling creations, deeply realized and powerfully animated, inviting authentic experience from their readers, and demanding our scholarly attention.

Theorizing Illustration: Enlightening, Expanding, Remaking

The earliest meanings of “illustration” were, fittingly, spiritual. Rooted in an idea of luster, or light, the word connoted religious illumination or enlightenment, “filled with light,” in usages dating back to the fourteenth century (OED). “The person that receyueth suche illustracyon or lyght, is all quiete and restfull: bothe in soule & body” (OED, 1526). The word also described an emanating light, as in a 1631 sermon of John Donne’s in which a devout priest’s fingertips exude “such an illustration, such an irradiation, such a coruscation” that the priest’s fingers can serve as candles in the night.¹³ Illustration also connoted elevation to fame, or, especially in the eighteenth century, the act of making something clear or evident to the mind. To illustrate something was to shed metaphorical light on it. This usage featured notably in eighteenth-century Bible titles, as in the 1771 Complete Family Bible, whose subtitle boasted: With a Complete Illustration of All the Difficult Passages; Wherein All the Objections of the Infidels are Obviated, the Obscure Passages Elucidated, and Every Seeming Difficulty Explained; Together with Notes Historical and Critical.¹⁴ The metaphoric usage of illustration, comparing thinking to seeing, reflected eighteenth-century philosophies that modeled the mind as a gallery of pictures. In Enlightenment thought, illustration stood for a figurative kind of vision characterized by properties of reason and clarity.

Only in the early nineteenth century did illustration take on a distinctive pictorial sense, referring to the visual embellishment of a text. An early pictorial usage appears in the title of Westall’s Illustrations to the Works of Walter Scott (1817) (OED)—an unsurprising example, given Scott’s role in establishing many of the commercial practices associated with modern authorship.¹⁵ As an adjective, the word “illustrated” first described text accompanied by pictures in 1831, with reference to a magazine article (OED). The Illustrated London News—the first pictorial newspaper in the world, as I discuss in Chapter 2—was founded in 1842, at which early date its title would have presented readers with a striking neologism. That “illustrated” books and newspapers only entered the English lexicon in the 1830s highlights the profoundly Victorian provenance of illustration, a newly popular way of seeing, reading, and consuming culture made possible by advances in reproductive print technologies.

While books in the 1830s were still luxury commodities for most people, by the end of the century lower costs and the broader industrialization of culture had given rise to a mass reading public. Richard Altick, in The Common Reader, outlines some of the familiar generative circumstances, such as an expanded railway, growing urban populations with concentrated book markets, and a better-educated populace with more disposable income and leisure time.¹⁶ Illustrations added an alluring element to book printing, and became newly affordable as sequential technologies allowed for ever-larger print runs at greater speed and lower cost across the nineteenth century.¹⁷ Plate technology was key, because it determined how many copies could be struck before the plate’s image was deformed by the constant pressure of the printing machine. Copper, steel, and then boxwood offered increasingly durable plate technologies as the century progressed. Relatively soft copper plates, in use since the eighteenth century, could produce 120 copies from a single plate, while a steel plate could generate 1,200 copies.¹⁸ Steel engravings adorned new Victorian media such as the illustrated annuals of the 1830s and 1840s, elegant productions made by and for women that included Heath’s Book of Beauty or The Keepsake. These costly items, bound in silk or leather, featured delicate, steel-engraved reproductions of paintings accompanied by woman-authored poetry.¹⁹ They quickly became outmoded with the rise of wood engraving, whose productions were made more swiftly and cheaply.²⁰ The “golden age” of Victorian illustration—known as “the sixties,” but stretching from approximately 1855 to 1875—emerged out of the unique attributes of wood engraving, whose robust technology enabled greater circulation numbers even while an element of hand workmanship bestowed the stamp of fine art.²¹ Unlike its predecessors, wood engraving allowed for pictures and text to be mingled on the same page, creating close entwinings of word and image. In the 1880s, wood engraving was again superseded by photographic technology in “process blocks,” and the hand of the engraver became unnecessary as the image could be reproduced directly onto the metal printing plate. Once photographic technologies came widely into book production, to put it slightly reductively, illustrated book-making at the fin-de-siècle divided into cheap, mass-circulated items versus the hand-made, expensive, and collectible volumes produced by Morris’s Kelmscott Press and other “revivalist” operations.

The books and magazines of illustration’s golden age flourished under the emergence of a new kind of entrepreneurial editor, a businessman who oversaw collaborations between myriad artists and engravers to create a single book or magazine issue. Charles Knight, John Cassell, and the Dalziel Brothers combined business savvy with artistic leanings to produce a range of illustrated publications. Not coincidentally, despite the secular nature of most of their works, all three coordinated the production of large-scale illustrated Bibles. The Dalziel Brothers not only commissioned and organized books but also engraved their own images, adding their name to numerous titles, such as The Dalziels’ Bible Gallery. The artistic effect of this business arrangement, as Lorraine Janzen Kooistra points out, was to create books with very heterogeneous styles, a hodgepodge or hybrid of old and new, conventional and experimental.²²

The rise of illustrated books and periodicals was a financial boon for many Victorian artists. In the realms of both fine art and religion, pure forms of art or devotion might seem sullied by acknowledging the pecuniary motives of practitioners or makers. Yet many canonical Victorian artists, some of them known as avant-garde innovators, supported themselves financially by illustrating commodified, mass-marketed books and magazines. Illustration’s reputation as a degrading kind of hackwork, especially for mass-circulated pictorial magazines, persisted late into the twentieth century. Fine-art collectors regularly defaced periodicals with Pre-Raphaelite illustrations, cutting out the pictures to mount and frame them separately.²³ These collectors were expressing a sentiment with Victorian roots: nineteenth-century critics with allegiances to an elite high culture often disparaged illustration as low or vulgar. A sonnet by Wordsworth in 1846 titled “Illustrated Books and Newspapers” expresses a typical attitude of aesthetic disdain:

Now prose and verse sunk into disrepute
Must lacquey a dumb Art that best can suit
The taste of this once-intellectual Land.
A backward movement surely have we here,
From manhood,—back to childhood; for the age—
Back towards caverned life’s first rude career.
Avaunt this vile abuse of pictured page!
Must eyes be all in all, the tongue and ear
Nothing? Heaven keep us from a lower stage!24

Wordsworth, who had once been the eloquent spokesman for the common language of the rural poor, here takes on the role of crotchety cultural conservative, deploring the recent popularity of mass illustrated publications. “Tongue and ear” stand for a lofty literature and high culture, sunk now by attachment to a crude, primitive, and sensual visuality. Wordsworth’s implicit gendering of a masculine word versus a feminized image can be traced all the way back to Lessing’s Laocoön (1766): the portrayal of images as suspiciously sensuous, in contrast to poetry’s more respectable transcendence, has its roots in Enlightenment discourses elevating the mind over the body.²⁵ The inaugural 1842 issue of the Illustrated London News echoes Wordsworth’s gendered imagery when it declares: “Art … has, in fact, become the bride of literature.”²⁶ Of course, for the ILN, the wedding of the two media is a positive development rather than a regression back to the era of cavemen.

Despite the disapproval of some cultural critics, illustrated books and magazines became dominant media in the nineteenth century. Illustration might serve the purposes of visual pleasure, beauty, or entertainment; readers enjoyed the illustrated book’s visual acts of concretization, revivification, and animation. Book historian Richard Maxwell reformulates Walter Pater’s famous dictum to suggest that all the arts in Victorian Britain at some point “yearned to achieve the condition of illustration,” whether paintings, music, prints, or realist novels.²⁷ An eros of illustration inspired bookmakers to reprint and remake the same texts repeatedly, with different pictures, bindings, fonts, and formats. In the case of the Bible, the same stories, verses, and parables were retold and reimagined over and over again, in myriad different visual versions. These illustrations invite a scholarly approach that expands beyond the typical questions of fidelity to a controlling text, as each illustrated version offered a new remaking of an envisioned world.

Even while new technology enabled illustration’s increasing popularity, that popularity was also linked, paradoxically, to the allure of medievalism and other pre-industrial forms of culture. Victorian book artists deliberately copied the styles of medieval illuminated manuscripts, emulating the hand-made codex format. Examples ranged from the elaborate pictorial capital letters opening Thackeray’s chapters of Vanity Fair (1847–8) to the faux architectural elements of Phiz’s covers for Dickens serials.²⁸ The transition from illuminated manuscripts to mass-produced books was mediated by illustrated books that imitated medieval styles. It is easy to condemn these machine-made books for their blatant inauthenticity. Walter Benjamin uses a scathing irony to describe similar incongruous juxtapositions in The Arcades Project, pointing out the absurdity of Victorian iron-ribbed buildings adorned with Gothic ornaments, or modern, glass-plated exhibition halls housing hand-crafted neo-antiquities. Yet the nineteenth century’s unlikely amalgamations can also be read as expressions of profound desires, combining a genuine yearning for a lost history with a playful celebration of the triumph of mass dissemination. The industrialization of culture is often scripted as an artistic disaster, signaling the end of authentic, hand-made materiality in exchange for a flood of cheap, poorly made wares; but this reductive account (for all of its kernel of truth) misses the vibrancy and vitality of some forms of mass culture, which offered broad audiences a host of eccentric or unlikely pleasures.

Despite the fakery entailed by the illustrated book’s implicit medievalism, that backwards look also had a serious and suggestive religious aspect, harkening back to a pre-Reformation Catholicism, with its overawing, mystical visual element. Catholicism’s iconophilic visuality traditionally expressed itself in the imposing architecture of cathedrals, in niche sculptures and in carved ornaments, all consumed as part of the mass experience of cathedral worship. Moving from an actual cathedral to the illustrated book’s “pocket cathedral,” in William Morris’s suggestive phrase, highlights the way that mass visual culture adopted elements from Catholic traditions—using images as a central part of cultural literacy—while producing a devotional experience that was miniaturized, individualized, made portable, and brought into the home. In effect, the illustrated book can be seen as a Protestant version of Catholic styles. On the one hand, the Victorian suspicion of illustrations in some quarters can be traced to a lingering Protestant iconophobia, or to an even older Old Testament prohibition against the worship of idols. At the same time, however, the massive popularity of religious illustration shows how the wild Victorian enthusiasm for visual culture trumped most scruples regarding the use of pictures for sacred purposes.

While religious illustration might seem a distinct wing of Victorian publication, in fact this media emerged as part of a larger process of nineteenth-century literary canon formation. Dalziels’ Bible Gallery (1881) or the Doré Bible Gallery (1879) were grand illustrated books whose antecedents can be traced all the way back to John Boydell’s “Shakespeare Gallery” of the 1790s. Boydell was the engraver-entrepreneur who launched the first multimedia illustration project: he decided that a profit could be made by staging a work of illustration over multiple media platforms.²⁹ His versions of Shakespeare’s plays included a folio of engravings, a set of elaborate illustrated books, and a public gallery displaying the original paintings in a fashionable London neighborhood. Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery quickly gained imitators in the 1790s in Macklin’s Gallery of the Poets and Fuseli’s Milton Gallery. Milton’s Paradise Lost, which made the book of Genesis into an epic poem, blurred the line between the Bible and great literature, making Milton’s work ripe for profitable illustration. The printseller Thomas Macklin commissioned a lavish illustrated Bible (1800) using many of the same artists who illustrated his Gallery of the Poets, again showing the entwining of the religious with the secular. The process of British literary canon-building inevitably came to include a “Gallery,” linking visual and verbal collections and transforming the illustrated book into a metaphoric, quasi-architectural space for public display.

The commodification of religious illustration in the 1790s worked to align the Bible with writers such as Shakespeare and Milton. Just as Shakespeare was transformed from a popular playwright into a great British author, so too the Bible was adopted for British nationalism and construed as a great national work of literature, worthy of illustrated editions. (Of course, transforming the Bible into a foundational work of English literature would also prove problematic, given its Semitic origins—an issue that comes to the fore within the illustrations, as I discuss below.) The idea of a canon itself entails an overlap of the secular and the sacred, originating out of the Catholic tradition to describe a set of holy books. Literary canon-building continued to occur during the nineteenth century via the process of illustration, as Victorian publishers looked to capitalize on the rising popularity of touchstone texts. At mid-century, wood-engraved gift books interlaced the religious with the secular in anthologies such as Lays of the Holy Land (1858) and English Sacred Poetry of the Olden Time (1864), which included poetry by Milton, Byron, Scott, and other luminaries. Even while the illustrated religious book was a special kind of commodity, then, uniting the sacred with the sensuous, it also partook of the sacralization of other kinds of non-religious British writings deemed worthy of picturing.

Victorian Bibles: Commodity, History, Palimpsest, Collage

Victorian Bibles were manufactured as part of a booming commercial practice. By 1861, nearly 4 million Bibles were being published per year in Great Britain.³⁰ London’s massive book emporia stocked tens of thousands of Bibles, prayer books, and other religious print items. The Illustrated London News advertised bookstores such as John Field’s “Great Bible Warehouse,” near Piccadilly Circus, boasting an inventory of 50,000 religious publications.³¹ The mass production of Bibles accompanied a missionary zeal to spread the word, among both Britain’s working classes and peoples of the colonies. The British and Foreign Bible Society, founded in 1804, used modern media advancements to produce increasingly cheap Bibles, aligning Bible distribution with new transportation networks, especially the railway.³² Perhaps ironically, the Victorian Bible existed on the cutting edge of modernity, and was even deemed worthy of a display at the Great Exhibition—among reaping machines and other technological wonders—as proof of the “Industry of all Nations.” A bookcase hosted by the British and Foreign Bible Society displayed copies of the Bible translated into 165 languages, concretizing some of the Exhibition’s imperial designs by showing how this English product was ready to infiltrate foreign markets and convert foreign minds.³³

The cheapest Bibles, produced by charitable societies and intended for impoverished readers at home and abroad, usually eschewed illustrations in order to keep prices down.³⁴ These differed from the more deluxe illustrated “Family Bibles” that occupied a central place in the middle-class Victorian home.³⁵ Family Bibles originated in the eighteenth century, when only printers licensed by the Crown were allowed to publish the authorized (King James) versions of the Bible; to evade these legal restrictions, unlicensed printers created Bibles with notes, illustrations, and all manner of extra materials—additions that, in the nineteenth century, became almost encyclopedic, resulting in Bibles that “functioned more like religious furniture than biblical texts,” in the words of Colleen McDannell.³⁶ Victorian illustrated family Bibles were often sold in serial parts, available on different kinds of paper and at different price points, resulting in a mass accessibility across many financial strata. Publisher John Cassell issued his Bible, as he did many of his publications, in five forms: weekly numbers, monthly parts, quarterly sections, half-yearly divisions, and annual volumes. Cheap weekly numbers or monthly parts were sold “up and down the country, from house to house, by colporteurs,” for much of the nineteenth century.³⁷ Families could customize their Bibles in different bindings and covers; they could also use the blank family register page to record occasions such as births, marriages, and deaths (Fig. 3.1). The illustrated Bible was a religious text interwoven into the secular world, caught up with the incidents of family life, with the décor of a parlor room, with privatized acts of reading, both silent and aloud. That the Bible was sold in serial parts aligned it with novels, popular magazines and other new forms of accessible reading materials. Parts wrappers for Cassell’s Illustrated Family Bible—still intact in a copy held in the British Library—are covered with advertisements, revealing how the Bible functioned within a secular commodity culture. Advertised products range from hand-books to writing paper to “Delicious, Health-Restoring Revalenta Arabica Food” (Fig. 3.2).

Fig. 3.1 “Family Register.” The Imperial Illustrated Bible, c. 1858. The British Library, London. © The British Library Board. L.15.c.7.

Fig. 3.2 Parts wrappers. Cassell’s Illustrated Family Bible, c. 1859–63. The British Library, London. © The British Library Board. L.15.a.2.

Innovations in Bible illustration began in the 1830s with Charles Knight’s Pictorial Bible (1836–8). Knight wanted to create a popular edition that would appeal to the same working-class audience he catered to with the illustrated Penny Magazine and the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. The Bible contained around thirty illustrations, following a pattern established in the 1790s, with prints engraved after paintings by Old Master artists like Raphael and Rubens. Knight’s innovation was to add modern illustrations, simple wood engravings, depicting the lands, customs, costumes, and plant life of the Bible.³⁸ These additions were taken to an extreme with John Cassell’s vast mid-century illustrated Bible, discussed below, which greatly expanded the numbers and types of engravings. Unlike Knight’s Bible, Cassell’s eschewed derivative Old Master scenes in favor of original compositions created by a range of different artists, adding to a sense of his Bible’s heterogeneous contents. A final contrast is offered by the “Doré Bible,” also published by Cassell (1866) and discussed below; all of the pictured scenes are illustrated by a single artist, Gustave Doré, lending a sense of cohesion to what was to become the best-selling Bible of the later nineteenth century. It bears repeating that these “big” Bibles reflect the entrepreneurial spirit of the age, as they were all produced by businessmen rather than religious figures.

Reviewers of illustrated Bibles often took a condescending tone toward the pictorial content. A critic of Cassell’s Bible in 1861 disdains the “half-taught adult” who needs pictures to stimulate his fancy, as opposed to “the highly cultivated reader,” for whom illustrations are more a hindrance than a help.³⁹ John Ruskin goes so far as to declare, “I do not know anything more humiliating to a man of common sense, than to open what is called an ‘Illustrated Bible’ of modern days.”⁴⁰ (Always reacting to media modernity, Ruskin makes cantankerous comments about most of the artifacts studied in this book, from photographs to advertising posters; illustrated Bibles are not an exception.) Here Ruskin writes to attack the mediocre quality of the Bible’s engravings, many of which seemed crude and poorly finished. Yet despite elite commentators’ hostile notion of illustrated Bibles as bastions for the uneducated, the vehemence of their comments gives a sense of the illustrated Bible’s popularity and allure, even for educated people. The tremendous sales numbers for the Knight, Cassell, and Doré Bibles testify to just this fact.

Cassell’s Illustrated Family Bible (1859– 63) was the best-selling illustrated Bible of the mid-nineteenth century.⁴¹ The presiding genius behind its production, John Cassell, had a career whose events represent in miniature some of the great media developments of his age.⁴² Cassell began humbly in Manchester as an itinerant Methodist preacher who marketed tea and coffee to working-class people as alternatives to alcohol. The roots of his publishing empire began when he printed his own bottle labels, soon followed by printed advertisements and a temperance journal. Expanding into newspaper publishing allowed Cassell to promote religious freedoms, working-class politics, and, not least of all, his own commodities. Targeting newly literate working-class readers, he produced popular educational hand-books on subjects such as railway etiquette and letter-writing. He agitated against the stamp, paper, and advertising taxes in the 1850s, even providing testimony on the issue to the Select Committee of the House of Commons. A turning point came with the Great Exhibition of 1851, when he created an inexpensive yet vast illustrated record of the event. The Illustrated Exhibitor, a Tribute to the World’s Industrial Jubilee, was jam-packed with woodcut engravings and heavily advertised; it came out in weekly numbers at 2d, in monthly parts at 8d, and eventually filled four volumes. The first number sold out in a day, and Cassell claimed to sell 100,000 copies by the end of the first month.⁴³ This venture enlightened Cassell as to the commercial value of illustration, and from 1851 onward pictures played a key part in his book and newspaper publications.⁴⁴ Among the highlights, he published what was likely the first illustrated edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Britain (1852), with illustrations by George Cruikshank. Cassell’s indefatigable advertising campaigns made his name into an integral part of the mid-century visual mediascape: “On hoardings, in magazine advertisements, in posters at railway bookstalls, the magic word CASSELL’S was kept ceaselessly before the reading public,” as Richard Altick reports in The Common Reader.⁴⁵

Cassell published his Illustrated Family Bible from 1859 to 1863, with more than a thousand engravings. The publication cost about £100,000 to produce and sold 300,000 copies a week in penny numbers. Despite the Bible’s basis in an ancient, non-Western history, it was advertised—using language familiar from the Great Exhibition—as a technological wonder and epitome of modern progress. Cassell billed his Bible as “The Greatest Enterprise of the Age!,” an appropriate slogan for a showman with a circus-like sense of publicity.⁴⁶ (Cassell’s biographer notes that he was always one to yoke “religious motive to the chariot of commerce.”)⁴⁷ Advertisements touted reviews calling Cassell’s Bible a “truly national work” whose “mechanical execution” makes it “one of the marvels of this marvellous age.” The Bible’s vast number of illustrations, sold affordably, made the book into a modern feat of engineering—thereby denoting it as English, and Victorian, rather than “oriental” or ancient. The illustrations were described as key to the Bible’s proselytizing efficacy: Cassell reported success among Native Americans when he received a subscription from ten members of the Creek tribe. “[T]he missionary stated that the Indians, both heathen and Christian, were delighted with the pictures.”⁴⁸ Advertisements proclaimed the Bible’s missionary qualities, noting its immense sales “in America, and throughout our Colonies … whilst Missionaries availed themselves of its graphic Illustrations to enforce the truth upon their native hearers.”⁴⁹ The potency of illustrations merged together with the power of the Bible, working to conquer and Christianize the world. Advertising rhetoric ultimately presented Cassell’s Bible as a powerful, unified object, especially in its illustrations: whole, modern, and nationalist.

Yet the Bible’s reality, when one actually peruses it, is something quite different. The volume in fact demonstrates a wild heterogeneity, a disorienting mishmash of notes, commentaries, and disparate illustrations—contents advertised by Cassell as depicting

the Mountains, Valleys, and Plains, the Lakes and Rivers, the Cities, Towns, and Villages in “the lands of the Bible;” their Plants, Animals, and Minerals; the Manners, Customs, and Arts of their People; their Ruins, Monuments, Coins, Medals, Inscriptions, and other remains of Antiquity;—all accurately drawn, and faithfully engraved, expressly to elucidate the Sacred Writings.⁵⁰

Imitating eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travelogues, the Bible sounds like a Victorian tourist destination, one with a distinctive set of places, peoples, customs, flora and fauna. New railways had opened up tourism to the Middle East just a few years previously, creating a new desire in readers for a more accurate representation of the Holy Lands, a kind of science of biblical illustration.

The Family Bible creates a journey to a place that is also a journey to a time. The Bible is inherently a palimpsest of history, a layering of times: even the move from the Old Testament to the New enacts this overlay, as the Old prophesies the New and the New fulfills the Old—uniting “the different portions of the Sacred History in their connection and harmony,” as the Bible’s preface declares.⁵¹ Spaces and times are a visual jumble in the Bible’s collage-like page layout, which combines text, illustrations, and commentary in different mingled spaces. Palimpsest and collage make up the Bible’s striking frontispiece (Fig. 3.3), whose doubled iconography has the Old Testament mirrored by the New: Moses on the left, Jesus on the right; ten commandments echoed by scriptures, night by day, oil lamp by bread and blood. The Bible’s dual temporalities are superimposed by that of the Victorian present day, as framing rays of light mimic the beams of a showman’s lamp or circus tent. This visual fanfare perfectly befits the opening of a crowd-pleasing nineteenth-century spectacle. Faux architectural elements in this frontispiece introduce the idea of the book-as-world, paper imitating an entryway both spiritual and sensuous.

Fig. 3.3 Frontispiece, Cassell’s Illustrated Family Bible, c. 1859–63. The British Library, London. © The British Library Board. L.15.a.2.

Cassell’s Bible conjoins disparate kinds of knowledge in the manner of Michel Foucault’s heterotopia, an “effect of the proximity of extremes, or … the sudden vicinity of things that have no relation to each other; the mere act of enumeration that heaps them all together has a power of enchantment all its own.”⁵² Foucault designates the museum and the library as quintessential nineteenth-century heterotopias of time, existing as places both within and beyond history, collecting unto themselves diverse histories, objects from many cultures and styles (182). Heterotopias are distinguished by their boundedness, their portals of opening and closure, their mixture of not merely diverse elements but diverse ways of knowing, juxtaposing incompatible parts and discontinuous temporalities. A ship, a cemetery, a Victorian boy’s school, a garden: these self-contained communities or institutions are profoundly symbolic, standing for “the world” at large. “The garden is the smallest parcel of the world and the whole world at the same time” (182). Even while heterotopias contribute to culture in normative ways and uphold modern societies, they also offer utopian alternative realities, creating “a different real space as perfect, as meticulous, as well-arranged as ours is disorganized, badly arranged, and muddled” (184). Foucault’s heterotopia is a gorgeous discombobulation that perfectly describes some of the nineteenth century’s ambitious projects of visual eclecticism.⁵³ The Great Exhibition itself is a supreme example of a Victorian heterotopia, a hodgepodge presented under the guise of a beautiful order. If the nineteenth century is famous for its projects of classification and discipline—as Foucault himself has shown—the era also produced visual projects that were wildly incongruous and multifaceted, pushing at the boundaries of order itself.

Cassell’s Bible is a visual, spatial heterotopia, as well as a temporal one. A page spread devoted to the Israelites wandering in the desert (Fig. 3.4) offers a fantasia on the theme of wandering, described across diverse modes of knowledge. A map shows “the Journeyings of the Israelites during the Forty-Years’ Sojourn in the Wilderness”; it is styled with the familiar objectivity and precision of Victorian topography. Small print beneath the map describes the region as a travel destination, “the paradise of the Bedouin, … a wild, picturesque glen” (1:128), using canned phrases from travelogue prose. Another box offers an illustration of “The Coriander Plant,” whose seed Cassell’s text compares to Manna; the plant is shown in standard natural-history format, clearly delineating flowers and leaves. An opposing illustration depicts the dramatic narrative of “Moses Striking the Rock,” in which the patriarch bestows water upon a thirsty and beseeching people in the midst of a rocky desert. The jumble of bodies, naked arms thrown up in attitudes of supplication and relief, conveys a drama of hunger and physical satiation that strikingly contrasts the measured, scientific illustrations on the opposing page. Tiny script at the page’s bottom offers the symbolic interpretation of the scene, by which “the wilderness of Sin,” a veritable “SEA OF DESOLATION,” is superimposed upon the actual Holy Land geography of mountainous “Horeb,” “a wild and desolate spot” (1:129). The visual collage of the page stitches together topography, travelogue, biblical text, natural history, dramatic pictorial narrative, and explicative commentary, all united under the allegorical poetics of a desperate journey. The spatial collage is matched by a suturing of temporal disjunctions, by which forty years of wandering becomes a single, coherent, seamless passage of time, coterminous with the contemporary moment of Victorian map-making and natural history.

Fig. 3.4 Exodus XVII (“Moses Striking the Rock.”) Cassell’s Illustrated Family Bible, c. 1859–63. The British Library, London. © The British Library Board. L.15.a.2.

Cassell’s Bible contains a heterotopian array of knowledges, many of them extending beyond the Christian tradition. Accompanying the Genesis story, illustrations depict Egyptian symbols of heaven and earth and a Hindu picture of the universe, featuring a giant turtle (1:2) (Fig. 3.5). The commentaries offer a similar expansive miscellany, invoking modern science: on the rainbow appearing after the Flood, a note informs that “the rainbow is produced by the refraction of the sun’s rays falling on drops of rain.” The same note also observes that Homer and Virgil saw the rainbow as a “divine token or portent” (1:16). The practice of comparative mythology—Egyptian, Hindu, pagan, and Christian—would seem to deconstruct the foundations of Christian faith, implying the nullification of all faiths. The use of modern science to explain biblical phenomena seems similarly problematic. Instead, though, Cassell’s Bible offers a utopian belief in the mixture itself, a confident sense that attacking the project of faith on many fronts amplifies, rather than dismantles, the different ways of knowing, seeing, and believing.

Fig. 3.5 Genesis, with illustrations of “Egyptian Symbols of the Heavens and the Earth,” and “Hindoo Representation of the Universe.” Cassell’s Illustrated Family Bible, 1859–63. The British Library, London. © The British Library Board. L.15.a.2.

A Bible inherently encodes a utopian sense of history, with its scenes of paradise and promised lands, its offer of salvation, its visions of resurrection and redemption. (These promises have their negative echo in the temptations, sins, falls, plagues, judgments, and other, darker temporal shifts.) The heterotopia of Cassell’s Bible provides an ebullient vision by which Christian faith, ethnographic knowledge of other faiths, and scientific progress can coexist on the same pages and in the same visual realms. The politics of this Bible accord with those of the heterotopias outlined by Foucault, as it invokes a range of contradictory authorities, from patriarchs to prophets, from poets to modern scientists and geographers, each potentially undermining the other, yet together emerging as strongly authoritative. Cassell’s Bible is ultimately a deeply normative object, strengthening the Victorian Protestant project even while it juxtaposes modes of knowing that threaten to annihilate one another.

This analysis presents a surprising take on the nineteenth century’s famous historicism, whose rational and empiricist drives would seem to oppose qualities of the spiritual, metaphysical, and mythical. Victorian religious historicism has typically been understood through the Higher Criticism, which read the Bible as a historical document and looked to Jesus as a political leader rather than a holy figure. In Cassell’s Bible, however, history works not so much to deconstruct as to create, building the reality of the biblical world for modern readers. Illustrations serve as scientific proof, and also work toward reanimation, revivification, bringing the past alive into the present. These performances help the reader, as one American Bible advertiser puts it, to “separate himself from his ordinary associations” and return to the ancient world of the Bible “by a kind of mental transmigration.” Indeed, the Bible reader’s task is to

set himself down in the midst of oriental scenery.… In a word, he must surround himself with, and transfuse himself into, all the forms, habitudes, and usages of oriental life. In this way only can he catch the sources of their imagery, or enter into full communion with the genius of the sacred penmen.⁵⁴

Even while Bible illustrations performed immersive acts of solidification and concretization, these historical renderings all went toward fabricating an illusion. Illustration thus emerged in a contradictory sense as an anti-real real, a reasoning into emotion, an authentic simulacrum. The Bible advertisement implies that illustrations create the possibility of time travel and even racial transformation, as the reader becomes “oriental” in his communion with the Bible’s authors. I want to delve now into some of the unexpected possibilities offered to the Western Bible reader by these strange transmigrations.

Heterotopias of Time: Archaeology, the Fragment, the Nation-State

“A truly national work”: so one reviewer hailed Cassell’s Bible, praising the way that its low cost enabled a broad, nation-wide distribution.⁵⁵ Yet the resonant phrase also evoked the Bible’s function as a shining object of British patrimony, proof of national cohesion and British cultural superiority. Illustrations played a key part in making the Bible British, telescoping the modern West onto the ancient East. A British ethnographic eye reimagined the customs of ancient peoples using modern exemplary subjects such as Egyptians and Jews. The illustrated Bible created a real world that was also illusory, melding together times and spaces into a single, unified—and fantastical, or miraculous—world. A whole ethnography of the Bible moved seamlessly from present to past and back again via the illusion of illustration.

The world picture created by nineteenth-century Bible illustrations reflected dramatic developments in British archaeology. Scholars have focused on the impact of Austen Henry Layard’s stunning Assyrian discoveries in the 1850s. Layard’s excavation of the ruins at Nineveh, in modern-day Iraq, gained a huge following back in Britain, especially after he audaciously secured the Assyrian pieces for the British Museum. Layard narrated his exploits in travelogues described by one scholar as “the archaeological best-sellers of the Victorian age,” and the arrival of the Assyrian sculptures at the British Museum was widely covered in the popular press (Fig. 3.6).⁵⁶ Despite the fact that biblical events took place in ancient Egypt and Persia, Bible illustrators enthusiastically adopted Assyrian patterns as the ahistorical and inaccurate backgrounds for various dramatic scenes.⁵⁷ Cassell’s Illustrated Family Bible portrays numerous Old Testament scenes with the distinctive Assyrian human-headed bull holding up a wall or ornament. In “Ehud and Eglon,” the tyrannical Moabite king Eglon is portrayed with a beard mimicking that of an Assyrian sculpture; his throne is decorated with a winged bull (Fig. 3.7). Steven Holloway argues that Bible illustrators turned to the Assyrian objects because Layard’s acquisitions inspired a “popular nationalistic identification with ‘ancient Assyria’”—a claim worth pausing over for its sheer incongruity.⁵⁸ The Bible itself was one crucial adhesive force joining together these two very different times and places.

Fig. 3.6 “Nimroud Sculptures Just Received at the British Museum.” Illustrated London News, October 26, 1850.

Fig. 3.7 “Ehud and Eglon.” Cassell’s Illustrated Family Bible, c. 1859–63. The British Library, London. © The British Library Board. L.15.a.2.

Many Victorian writers, Layard included, celebrated his discoveries for offering proof of the Bible’s veracity. The Mayor of London, awarding the archaeologist the “Freedom of the City of London” in 1854, praised him for securing “the long lost Remains of Eastern Antiquity … in so perfect a state as to demonstrate the Accuracy of Sacred History.”⁵⁹ Layard similarly marveled in his acceptance speech that his finds could serve as “records” that “confirm, almost word for word, the very text of Scripture.”⁶⁰ Layard’s words are not quite true, as the Assyrian discoveries provided ammunition to both conservatives and rationalists in their fight over the literal truth of the Bible.⁶¹ Yet for Layard, as for many Victorian commentators, “Sacred History” became the glue linking “Eastern Antiquity” to modern Protestant Britain. Décor and architecture played a decisive role in Bible illustrations because the oriental designs, mimicking artifacts displayed in the British Museum, affirmed a smooth timeline of development from past to present, creating a narrative of a single Christianity, ancient to modern. Layard himself was a key mediating figure in this process: the intrepid archaeologist beat out imperial rivals like France and Turkey to bring home foreign treasures for triumphant display (Fig. 3.8). These objects lost their foreignness once safely installed in the British Museum, entering into a new constellation—a heterotopia of time that was outside of times yet also deeply embedded in time. Biblical history, moving from wandering to salvation, was superimposed upon British national history, as epitomized by the British conquest of the material world evident in the British Museum. These two superimposed histories, meanwhile, ignored the reality of Assyrian history as a unique and separate entity. In the scriptural reception of Assyrian relics, ancient “Christian” history was fused with modern British museum-making, creating an imaginary timeline of origins of the type that Benedict Anderson aligns with the rise of modern nation-building.

Fig. 3.8 Austen Henry Layard, Frontispiece. Nineveh and Its Remains. Vol. 1, 1849. Courtesy Vanderbilt University Special Collections and University Archives.

The Assyrian imagery in Cassell’s Bible itself, meanwhile, courts ambiguity in its very ubiquity. On the one hand, it often adorns settings for the tyrannical enemies of the Jews—as when the Moabite King Eglon sits upon a winged-bull throne, his patriarchal beard marbled in the distinctive Assyrian style (Fig. 3.7). King Eglon’s hard, sculptural qualities serve as a symbolic shorthand for the cruel tendencies ascribed to oppressive, non-Jewish leaders in the Old Testament. The decadent, ornamented Assyrian patterns spoke perfectly to Victorian assumptions about the enemies of Judeo-Christianity, both past and present. Yet Assyrian patterns also appeared in scenes featuring Jewish protagonists, as when Mordecai, the hero of the Book of Esther, is portrayed wearing the Assyrian royal regalia, riding a horse similarly adorned (Fig. 3.9).⁶² The orientalized, exotic excess of Assyrian ornament connoted Jewishness as part of a broader, and vaguer, ancient “East.” Given that these scenes feature the heroes of the Old Testament, the link between Assyria and the foreign is necessarily complicated—an idea captured by Holloway when he observes that Victorian Britain appropriated ancient Assyria for nationalistic purposes. I will return below to the vexed question of Jews and biblical otherness, but for now it is enough to point out that Assyrian patterns did not safely demarcate a divide between the believers and infidels of biblical history.

Fig. 3.9 Mordecai in Assyrian-Styled Robes. “The Book of Esther.” Cassell’s Illustrated Family Bible, c. 1859–63. The British Library, London. © The British Library Board. L.15.a.2.

Ancient sculptural pieces influenced mid-Victorian Bible illustrations, connoting an aesthetic of the fragment. The visual fragment is a fitting echo to the biblical text, which is itself also an assemblage of alien, disjointed parts sutured into a post-historical whole. Yet scattered ancient fragments, verbal and visual, did not inspire Bible illustrators to ponder the ends of empires, like melancholy Romantic poets. Instead, Victorian scholars and illustrators reassembled the ancient fragments into new imaginative wholes, creating chimeras of fake coherence by fusing together disparate parts. Illustrators used sculptural pieces to reimagine entire rooms, halls, and palaces; their aesthetic owes much to the popular large-scale reconstructions of ancient cultures on view in the British Museum and in the Crystal Palace at Sydenham, opened in 1854. Frederick N. Bohrer writes of how Assyrian mania in mid-century Britain inspired not only winged-bull jewelry for men and women but also a “Nineveh Court” at Sydenham’s Crystal Palace (Fig. 3.10).⁶³ The post-Exhibition Palace, sometimes seen as a precursor to the modern amusement park, offered a pastiche of history in a series of three-dimensional, walk-through galleries, reconstructing—from appropriated fragments and replicas—the architecture and ornament of ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, Byzantium, and Assyria, among others. The two-dimensional spaces of the illustrated Bible are contiguous with the ancient rooms assembled at Sydenham’s pleasure-grounds. These simulations of history might connote postmodern pastiche, but they are offered without irony as both pleasurable and educational, the classic mixture defining Victorian infotainment. The pleasures of “history,” conceived of as a grouping of commodities and costumes set amid exotic, imaginative spaces, aligns the world-building projects of the illustrated Bible with more modern phantasmagorias: like modern-day Las Vegas, offering miniaturized replicas of Paris and Venice, the Bible and the amusement park limn the world as a picture, a series of historical styles ripe for appropriation in commodified space and time.

Fig. 3.10 “Exterior of the Assyrian Palace.” Lithograph. Matthew Digby Wyatt, Views of the Crystal Palace and Park, Sydenham, 1854. Courtesy University of Kentucky Special Collections Research Center.

Assyrian patterns were only the most popular of a number of exotic, “oriental” visual styles in Bible illustrations—a mishmash of décor that also included Turkish, Ottoman, and Egyptian designs. These visual appropriations would seem to operate in the classic orientalist mode described by Edward Said, creating a “closed field, a theatrical stage affixed to Europe,” populated by “monsters, devils, heroes; terrors, pleasures, desires.”⁶⁴ Though the orientalist biblical visual style might seem overwrought, fanciful, and slightly ridiculous to our eyes, this style was in fact received by Victorian critics as realistic. They perceived the archaeological as real because it was researched, historical, and scientific.⁶⁵ (By contrast, as I discuss below, critics assailed John Everett Millais for setting his Bible parables in modern-day Scotland, even though to our eyes these images seem more “real” and everyday.) While Said posited orientalism as a series of fantasies whose ultimate purpose was to divide Western and Eastern peoples—while enabling Western empires to conquer Eastern territories—that political account does not quite capture the complexity of Bible illustrations, which appropriated “oriental” imagery for British nationalism and Protestant Christianity. The art critic W. M. Rossetti captures the knottiness of the issue when he asks, “Is our Madonna to be a Jewess, our biblical costume oriental, our scenery that of the Holy Land?”⁶⁶ Rossetti’s emphasis on the word “our” aptly captures the dilemma of Bible illustrators, who had to domesticate an alien imagery for an audience demanding an authenticity of both history and faith.

In The Holy Land in English Culture, Eitan Bar-Yosef argues that Edward Said’s account of orientalism is inadequate to describe the complex attitudes of Victorian British people toward Palestine. In fact, says Bar-Yosef, “due to its geographical location, historical heritage, and, most significantly, its scriptural aura, Palestine—the Holy Land, the land of the Bible—offers an exceptionally forceful challenge to the binary logic which Said traces in Orientalism.”⁶⁷ For Said, Western imperial projects in the East were always accompanied by an omnivorous scholarly and literary culture scripting Eastern otherness.⁶⁸ Yet Bar-Yosef points out some of the ways that Orientalism fails to encompass Victorian encounters with Palestine. Said’s insistently secularist bent ignores the ways that devout Christian authors identified with Jerusalem rather than making it other; and Said’s resolute focus on high culture and top-down modes of authority does not acknowledge more mass-cultural forms and more diffuse models of power. While Bar-Yosef’s study does not specifically examine Victorian illustrated Bibles, his notion of a “vernacular Orientalism” seems useful for describing the ambivalences surrounding mass-cultural Christian encounters with an Eastern, yet spiritualized, Palestine.⁶⁹

Bar-Yosef ultimately aligns his study with those who “point to the vulnerability, rather than the authority, of the imperial ethos.” He cites scholars like Jonathan Rose and Bernard Porter, who argue that working-class and middle-class British people were surprisingly ignorant of Britain’s actual imperial projects and possessions.⁷⁰ And he argues convincingly that the nineteenth-century scholars and writers exploring Palestine largely did so not to aid in capturing the territory, but rather to strengthen their own internal Protestant commitments—to define their own Englishness, in other words, rather than to dominate a foreign other.⁷¹ While I agree with Bar-Yosef that the metaphorical Holy Land in English culture was more predominant than the actual, geographical place—and while I also adopt his critique of Said’s Orientalism for its rigid oppositions—I think he misses how the “Orientalization of self,” with all its confusions of binaries and unexpected alignments of self with other, might also have accommodated a strong imperial mandate, one turning Christianity outwards toward a generalized global mission.⁷² Just as Cassell’s Bible united seemingly contradictory bodies of knowledge to emerge with a triumphant and confident Christian vision, so too—as I now want to explore—the equivocal orients of Britishness could serve to legitimate an idea of the heroic Christian soldier abroad.

Sublime Sword: The Bible as Liberal Epic

The most popular illustrated Bible of the later nineteenth century was that of Gustave Doré, the prolific and tremendously influential French illustrator.⁷³ Doré’s lavish Bible, originally published in Paris in 1865, was brought out by John Cassell in a costly 1866 English edition featuring 228 plates. It was sold in parts for 4 shillings each and in a complete volume from £8 to £15, depending on the paper quality and binding type.⁷⁴ Doré’s Bible is not a heterotopia in quite the way that Cassell’s Illustrated Family Bible was—it contains none of the eclectic mishmash of scientific notes and commentary. Instead, Doré’s images were marketed as a fine art “gallery,” unified by their production by a single artist. Doré augmented his fine-art status in England by displaying paintings on religious themes at Cassell’s London premises, which led to the 1868 creation of the Doré Gallery in Bond Street. Yet Doré’s images were also popularized by widespread print circulation and book publication in cheaper, “gallery” editions.⁷⁵ The Doré Gallery became a popular London tourist destination and only closed in 1914.⁷⁶ That Doré’s publisher in England was John Cassell is entirely appropriate, given Cassell’s reputation as the consummate showman and master of religious art-as-entertainment. In fact, Cassell published many of Doré’s illustrated literary works, including those by Dante, Milton, and Tennyson. (We might note, too, how Dante and Milton were important intermediaries in the Victorian commodification of religious imagery, since their works transformed Christian material into quasi-secularized artistic narratives, paving the way for adaptation into forms of popular entertainment, especially in illustrations.) While Doré’s fine-art Bible seems a far cry from Cassell’s mid-century scientific and heterotopic miscellany, I want to explore now how it performs similar cultural work, telescoping and assimilating a fragmented, foreign Judeo-Christian history into a visually coherent, though slightly different, Victorian world picture.⁷⁷

Doré’s illustrations appear to adhere to a familiar orientalist conception, as his Bible dwells upon Christianity’s most sensuous and violent episodes. Critics noted his fondness for decapitated heads; also featured were scenes of enslavement, murder, and naked drownings (Figs. 3.11 and 3.12). Doré devoted a large number of scenes to the Passion of Christ, lingering on the drama of a nude male body mangled and put on display in a gruesome chiaroscuro spectacle. The Bible’s alien otherness, its “oriental” settings and exotic peoples, offered an excuse to depict all the physical, corporeal taboos forbidden to contemporary Victorian viewers. No doubt Doré’s French Catholicism shaped his enthusiasm for the body, blood, and flesh of biblical characters. Interestingly, his illustrations found a much more eager audience in Protestant Britain and America than in France—perhaps due to the way that his images packaged adventurous content in respectable, Christian form.⁷⁸ Catholic-inflected, corporealized illustrations gained a Protestant aspect when they appeared in the form of a Bible, a book mediating the individual’s (or family’s) direct relation to God. Moreover, Doré decorated these scenes with architectural elements borrowed from across the “oriental” spectrum, using books he found in the Louvre, and enhancing his Bible’s foreign, exotic atmosphere. Doré’s Bible united the otherness of the Catholic with that of the Orient, offering middle-class British readers scenes that courted both desire and transgression.

Fig. 3.11 Gustave Doré, “David Slays Goliath.” The Holy Bible, 1866.

Fig. 3.12 Gustave Doré, “The Deluge.” The Holy Bible, 1866.

Yet the Bible’s markers of difference, both Catholic and Eastern, appeared alongside more confusing interminglings of self and other. Many of the figures are neoclassical or Westernized, rather than Semitic or racialized—invoking a long tradition in Western art history, from the Renaissance onward, of portraying Bible figures as muscular Caucasians. Doré’s illustrations also contributed to a surprisingly British visual tradition in their inheritance from John Martin, the Romantic painter of sublime and apocalyptic scenes. Martin’s paintings circulated widely in print form across Europe, and British critics regularly described Doré as Martin’s inheritor, despite Doré’s French birth.⁷⁹ In paintings such as The Deluge (1834) and The Great Day of His Wrath (1853) (Fig. 3.13), Martin had created massive canvases where the acts of God and Nature rained down rocks, lava, storm, and destruction, dwarfing any human features and figures. Similarly, as The Eclectic Review noted in 1867, Doré’s interest lay in “the huge magnificences of nature—whether size, and dimension, or mystery—or the overwhelming conflict of the elements.”⁸⁰ Both Martin and Doré portrayed small human actors overwhelmed by the forces of God, nature, or enemy armies. Some art historians have seen Martin’s Bible paintings as implicit responses to Britain’s emergent industrialism, in terms suggestive for our understanding of Doré: Martin’s paintings portray large-scale social transformations inflicting massive change upon a landscape and a people.⁸¹ Modernity itself might be imagined as the rush of oncoming forces, encompassing social upheavals, industrial and scientific innovations, mobs, overthrows.⁸² Both Martin and Doré depict a recognizably British aesthetic of the apocalyptic, biblical sublime, as they look back to ancient biblical history while also channeling very modern transformations.

Fig. 3.13 John Martin (1789–1854), The Great Day of His Wrath. Oil on canvas, 1851–3. © Tate, London 2019.

Doré’s Bible illustrations combined ancient and modern elements with the wild incongruity typical of Victorian historicism. On the one hand, critics called his style medieval and grotesque, comparable to the monstrous carvings of medieval cathedrals.⁸³ Yet Doré also embraced modern techniques of mechanical reproduction: Lorraine Janzen Kooistra notes that he employed a veritable “army of engravers” who used “mechanized grids” to mass-produce illustrated books at a rate worthy of a Victorian factory.⁸⁴ These production methods mirrored Doré’s innovative visual style of “tonal facsimile,” which emphasized tones over lines to create graduated shades of black and white.⁸⁵ Scholars have taken this new style to intimate the shift away from hand-drawn, linear engravings—like those of Cassell’s earlier Bible—toward late-century, mechanized methods that were more “tonal, photographic, and mimetic.”⁸⁶ Doré’s combination of the biblical and the Victorian, the medieval and the modern, the illusionistic and the sublime, perfectly captures the paradoxical nature of Victorian new media, building on earlier or more archaic forms to make its advances.

Doré’s grotesque style and brutal subject-matter sits somewhat uneasily with the Bible’s central place in the Victorian veneration of the family. Religious historian Frances Knight observes that, for all of the Bible’s family-friendly connotations, in fact the most popular stories for illustrations across the nineteenth century were also the most violent—“Cain and Abel, the Flood, Abraham and Isaac; the Massacre of the Innocents, the Woman taken in Adultery, the Crucifixion.”⁸⁷ These scenes starkly contrast the family register page at the Bible’s front, usually depicting vignettes of family life—marriage, death, and a happy couple ascending to heaven. While the family aspects of Victorian Bibles seemed to cater to their often female purchasers, in fact the dominant keynote of Bible illustrations moved in the opposite direction, toward epic themes of male-oriented nation-building and bloodshed, featuring prophets, heroes, kings, soldiers, and martyrs.⁸⁸ Doré’s illustrations, in particular, accentuate the Bible’s masculinist, epic themes. From the Old Testament, he features a patriarchal god presiding over male contests for power or revenge; from the New Testament, he emphasizes forms of suffering, often gory ones, dramatizing embodiment and apocalypse via extremes of dark and light.

The biblical epic visual tradition, traced from John Martin’s paintings to Doré’s book illustrations, recasts the Bible in the form of what Edward Adams has called a liberal epic.⁸⁹ Adams defines his term via secular sources—mostly late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century war historians like Gibbon and Macaulay—but his notion of liberal epic seems particularly apt to describe Doré’s wartorn Bible illustrations. “Liberal epic” limns a post-Enlightenment intellectual tradition that excoriates violence even while celebrating the individualistic male heroes who conquer in the name of liberty. In the Bible’s Old Testament, these scenes depict Jewish tribes escaping Egyptian slavery and seeking a homeland, often while fighting the large forces of enemy kings. In the New Testament, scenes celebrate the defiance of Christian heroes overthrowing the tyranny of a pagan Roman empire. The visual trope of these epic battles spotlights a lone figure on a hilltop or mountainside, calling down God’s wrath upon a vast multitude of faceless enemies. Doré’s illustration of “The Egyptians Drowned in the Red Sea” centers on the distant figure of Moses, elevated above the fray with arms upstretched and haloed in light, while in the foreground crashing waves envelop the masses of Pharaoh’s army. In “Joshua Commanding the Sun to Stand Still” (Fig. 3.14), Joshua reigns as the image’s highest figure, one arm raised, bathed in streaks of holy light, while the chaos of battle rages among myriad figures below him. The composition of biblical epic foregrounds a heroic figure set against an invading mob, merging the natural sublime into a kind of political sublime, as rushing waters are replaced by rushing bodies. The visual layout of these scenes uses the Bible to reflect a deep Victorian political ideology, showing how, despite liberalism’s moves towards pacifism, humanism, and civilizing diplomacy, the era also celebrated the heroic, self-determining individual through scenes of thrilling violent triumph, legitimated through a larger ethical system predicated on the disavowal of war and violence. (It’s worth noting that these values differ from those of the Bible itself, especially the Old Testament, where warfare appears as a fitting method for asserting religious righteousness.)

Fig. 3.14 Gustave Doré, “Joshua Commanding the Sun to Stand Still.” The Holy Bible, 1866.

Doré’s Bible is an especially potent vehicle for liberal epic because of its book-sized scale, bringing vast martial scenes into the intimate sphere of the Victorian drawing room. His illustrations shift between bodily close-ups and distant panning landscape shots, telescoping between near and far, in the same way that the illustrated book itself oscillates between miniaturization and vast expansion. These shifts in scale can be seen to allegorize a political relationship between the one and the many: Adams cites Lyotard in describing liberalism’s alignment between individuals and nations, by which “humanity [is] the hero of liberty” and “the State receives its legitimacy not from itself but from the people.”⁹⁰ Doré’s hero, perched aloft on the mountaintop, represents self-determination at both the individual and national levels. Even Doré’s familiar signature chiaroscuro might be read politically, as the extremes of light and shadow render the drama of the one versus the many, with darkness and shadows implying untold numbers of enemies, signifying the obscure multitudes of a political sublime.

Scenes of biblical epic describe acts of violent nation-building that are also critiques of imperial tyranny, as they celebrate pious rebels who throw off the yokes of larger, oppressive imperial forces. That these scenes were rousing for a British audience might seem a strange reversal, given that Britain itself was a major imperial superpower in the nineteenth century. Yet the odd identification can be explained via the tortuous logics of empire: Britons did not envision their own imperial project as one of forceful domination so much as the result of a few men’s heroic efforts, where hordes of unbelievers were brought to heel by a small number of British men with “character.” Appropriately enough, Doré’s Bible itself became a visual template in the later nineteenth century for framing stories of British imperial heroes and martyrs. As Sue Zemka has written, after General Gordon died in his 1885 attempt to retake the Sudanese city of Khartoum from Islamic rebels, he achieved Christian deification in the English press; his arrival at Khartoum appeared in the Pictorial Records of the English in Egypt (1885) in the iconographic format of Doré’s “Entry of Jesus into Jerusalem,” with the noble Gordon riding his horse toward certain doom while surrounded by restive Khartoum natives.⁹¹

The telos of liberal epic, for Edward Adams, is the modern first-person shooter video game, in which “[t]he player becomes the hero-killer, generally in a war to save humanity from some grandiose threat of conquest.”⁹² When Adams jumps from nineteenth-century verbal sources to the twenty-first-century video game, he elides the Victorian visual modes that also contributed to the trajectory he outlines. Ever-greater illusionistic depictions of graphic violence escalated into the twentieth century, until war itself became an “unreal simulacrum.”⁹³ Doré’s Bible illustrations stage a crucial moment in this trajectory, combining visual mimeticism with a spiritual subject-matter that remains resolutely anti-realist—embracing the sublime, the supernatural, the apocalyptic, and the grotesque.

These elements help to explain Doré’s influence on early cinema, and even on modern Hollywood. Scholars have traced a direct line from Doré’s Bible to the epic biblical films of D. W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille, especially DeMille’s Ten Commandments (1923 and 1956 versions).⁹⁴ Griffith’s Intolerance (1916) famously envisions Babylon as an opulent, ornamented, and orientalized setting inspired by Doré’s elaborate pages (Fig. 3.15). The movie poster advertising Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1956) models itself directly on Doré’s image of “Moses Breaking the Tablets of the Law”—once again portraying the righteous patriarch atop a mountain, raining down retribution on an undeserving people (Figs. 3.16 and 3.17). Doré’s searing chiaroscuro translates well into the film poster, as a bolt of lightning visually anoints Moses as the direct representative of God.

Fig. 3.15 Film still of Babylon from Intolerance (1916) dir. D. W. Griffith. History and Art Collection/Alamy Stock Photo.

Fig. 3.16 Gustave Dore, “Moses Breaking the Tablets of the Law.” The Holy Bible, 1866.

Fig. 3.17 Movie poster, The Ten Commandments (1956), dir. Cecil B. DeMille. Everett Collection, Inc./Alamy Stock Photo.

In fact, already by the 1880s, Doré’s Bible images were being appropriated by pre-cinematic technologies such as the magic lantern show.⁹⁵ One religion scholar reports finding lantern slides of Doré’s Bible in an African missionary outpost in northern Malawi. These kinds of images were also shown to working-class British people at home, signaling the extent to which Doré’s images had penetrated British mass culture.⁹⁶ Although his original Bible was a costly production, its illustrations quickly entered the realm of the popular due to their winning combination of mimeticism and the sublime—a formula we can recognize today in Hollywood, as popular action movies use ever-more illusionistic effects to dramatize melodramatic, impossible plotlines, rife with epic destruction and devastation. While the epic genre has its origins in the long-form, nationalist poem, “epic” in the nineteenth century also became a visual culture, popularized by John Martin and Gustave Doré, describing the rise and fall of religious nations. The formula is now secularized in the modern action movie, still largely a masculinist affair. The Bible’s underdogs, its prophets and martyrs challenging infidel kings, have been replaced in modern movies by everyman heroes taking on cruel governments or despots.

Edward Adams notes that Victorian novelists—unlike the history writers of his study—show a remarkable lack of interest in epic modes, choosing drawing rooms over battlefields. Yet the stark divide between history chronicles and realist novels might be seen to be bridged, surprisingly, by the Victorian illustrated Bible. Even while it occupied the parlor room and was often issued in parts, like a novel, the Bible brought the material of epic into the British domestic sphere. The illustrations’ political work as liberal epic might help to explain why images that seem transgressive—scenes of violence, sexuality, and slavery—were received enthusiastically within mainstream Christianity. That enthusiasm, by contrast, did not greet the religious illustrations of John Everett Millais, which I turn to now. Even while his small-scale, domestic scenes moved the Bible closer to the domain of the realist novel, his innovations contravened some of the expectations readers had learned to bring to Holy Land subject-matter.

Realism and the Biblical Body

From the epic, sweeping scenes of Gustave Doré, I turn now to the intimate, homespun scenes of John Everett Millais’s Parables of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ (1863). Millais’s Bible illustrations have typically been studied under a fine-art rubric appropriate to his status as a Pre-Raphaelite painter.⁹⁷ Disdain for his illustration work already circulated in the nineteenth century; as one reviewer of his Parables wrote scornfully, “We have our serious doubts whether this distinguished artist is justified in frittering away his powers in book illustration.”⁹⁸ Yet Millais’s paid illustration work was an important part of his oeuvre, reaching a wide audience: his images appeared in mass-circulated periodicals such as Good Words, Once a Week, Cornhill Magazine, and the Illustrated London News.⁹⁹ In fact, Millais brought a domestic realism to all of these projects, including his Bible illustrations, inviting controversy and producing a defamiliarizing commentary on both spirituality and the act of illustration itself.

Millais’s Parables illustrations appeared in multiple formats, from singular original drawings on wood blocks, to engravings by the Dalziel brothers in an expensive Christmas gift book, to electrotype illustrations in the mass-circulated Christian periodical, Good Words. This multiplicity allows us to recast the “Fine-Art Book”—that vaunted object of the “golden age” of 1860s publishing—not as a hermetic, beautiful object but as a permeable, intertextual, and intervisual production, a node in a network linking other related objects, editions, and versions. When Millais chooses the parables as his subject-matter, he takes on an already crowded visual field. But his approach is deeply unusual, bringing biblical figures into a recognizable, “real” world—and raising questions about how the modern artist should go about illustrating the intangible and transcendental state of faith.

The biblical body offered a signal challenge to nineteenth-century illustrators. In an age driving toward scientific discovery, Darwinism, ethnographies, physiologies, and a new investment in visual realism, the bodies of sacred Bible characters threatened to become all too material. John Ruskin looked back angrily to the sixteenth century to locate the pernicious roots of the problem, as religious painting was overtaken by a new, commercialized realism. A painting of the Madonna cradling the dead Christ thus became an excuse for the artist to show off his “serene science,” rendering “her last maternal agony” in anatomically correct “muscles of misery and … fibres of sorrow.”¹⁰⁰ For Ruskin, writing of “The False Ideal” in 1856, the scientific eye inevitably secularized the sacred body—an attitude that differs from his earlier thoughts on landscape in Modern Painters, when a quasi-scientific gaze into nature merged with that of a spiritual gaze discerning sacred truth.¹⁰¹ The body of the Madonna cannot withstand the touch of scientific realism that Ruskin holds as necessary to viewing the natural world.

Ruskin’s sentiments echo a larger sensitivity surrounding the biblical body, one most striking in the censorship of biblical subjects on the Victorian stage. This prohibition had its roots in the Protestant Reformation, when the Tudor government had banned biblical drama in an attempt to impose Protestant sentiment upon a people who still clung to old, Catholic ways.¹⁰² Theater historian John Russell Stephens notes that the injunction against religious drama escalated in the nineteenth century, driven by a Puritan sensibility that wanted to protect religion’s sacrosanct realm from sullying contact with the too-worldly stage.¹⁰³ The theater’s reputation for trivial, “low,” or comic entertainment made it incompatible with serious holy subjects; and, as I discuss in Chapter 4, the theater’s ties to prostitution and female display aligned it with destabilizing forms of transgressive embodiment. British public opinion drove Victorian censors to forbid not only plays with biblical themes, but also any onstage mention of God, the Lord, or allusions to Scripture. The Bible was outlawed as a stage prop. As Stephens relates, in an 1854 melodramatic adaptation of Dickens’s Bleak House, crossing-sweep Jo was “prevented from being taught the words of the ‘Lord’s Prayer’ on his death-bed.”¹⁰⁴ Even as the Victorian Bible was under assault by various scientific and secularizing forces, only in the very final years of the century did the religious theater ban begin to relax.¹⁰⁵ Censorship of religious theater heightened the sense that the embodiment and concretization of Christian figures might violate spiritual belief.

Despite the ban on religious drama, however, secular ways of knowing and seeing inflected biblical depictions, as we saw in Cassell’s Illustrated Family Bible. Certain realisms might accommodate and even enhance religious projects. Victorian art critics debated the visual proprieties of the biblical body in discussing key, controversial religious paintings of the mid-nineteenth century. On the one hand, William Holman Hunt drew praise for his “scientific” approach, traveling to the Holy Land to research sacred landscape, costume, and architecture. For his painting The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple (1860), he sought physiognomic models among modern Jews in London’s East End.¹⁰⁶ Hunt’s acceptable realism contrasted with the unacceptable verisimilitude presented by Millais in his notorious painting Christ in the House of His Parents (1851) (Fig. 3.18), which portrayed the Holy Family in strange, angular poses in a humble carpenter’s shop. Despite the painting’s heavy symbolism—doves, stigmata, a flock of sheep—critics responded as though Millais had updated the religious figures to a modern London slum.¹⁰⁷ Charles Dickens, in a famous attack, described the bodies of Millais’s holy figures as grotesque and even repulsive. The Virgin Mary appeared to be “a kneeling woman, so horrible in her ugliness, that … she would stand out from the rest of the company as a Monster, in the vilest cabaret in France, or the lowest gin-shop in England.”¹⁰⁸ In this early phase of Millais’s Pre-Raphaelitism, critics imposed neo-Catholic stereotypes onto the painted bodies, implying that their twisted grotesquerie resulted from ascetic and unnatural Catholic practices. Predictably enough, those transgressive bodies also coded as working-class and basely sexualized.¹⁰⁹

Fig. 3.18 John Everett Millais (1829–1896), Christ in the House of His Parents (‘The Carpenter’s Shop’), oil on canvas, 1849–50. © Tate, London 2019.

Millais’s parable illustrations in some ways follow in the style of Christ in the House of His Parents, presenting a surprisingly realist gloss on the mysterious ancient subject-matter. Unlike that early painting, however, the Parables were not assailed for “ugliness,” in part due to their highly wrought and volumetric style. Yet the style itself accompanied a deliberately anti-epic treatment, as characters in small groups appeared at strange angles, faces obscured, backs turned, arranged in odd poses. Millais’s domestic realism offered not the spotlit, epic melodrama of Doré’s Bible but a prosaic, small-scale retelling of mystical stories, a realism of subject-matter presented in a heightened, polished form.

Millais’s Parables illustrations also had a strikingly different media circulation than did his paintings. Twelve of the Parables first appeared in 1863 in Good Words, an illustrated, mass-circulated Christian periodical. Founded in direct competition to the Cornhill Magazine, the journal, along with Once a Week, is considered one of the “big three” major illustrated periodicals of the 1860s.¹¹⁰ Articles in Good Words offered a Christian spin on the typical genres of Victorian magazine-writing, such as the biographical sketch, the travel essay, or the natural history review. The Christian journal covered a surprisingly broad range of scientific discoveries and innovations, with frequent mention of up-to-date visual technologies. Stereoscopy, photography, even the latest telescope were mentioned or reviewed in its pages.¹¹¹ Good Words embraced visual media modernity, merging old-world spirituality with newfangled media objects and interests—a fitting combination for a cutting-edge, illustrated journal devoted to Christian themes. The magazine promised content suitable for Sunday reading, but it also promoted itself by giving top billing to prominent secular artists and authors, such as Millais and Anthony Trollope; the latter’s fiction appeared in Good Words in both story and serialized form.

Millais’s images served to accompany Thomas Guthrie’s 1863 Good Words series, “The Parables Read in the Light of the Present Day.”¹¹² Guthrie makes no mention of the illustrations; instead, each parable receives extended commentary while silently supplemented by the picture. Guthrie modernizes and concretizes the parables by creating analogies to a reader’s everyday experience. (On “The Good Samaritan,” he describes a tossed stone forming ripples on a lake; the ever-widening circle is an apt “symbol of our love, such it should be.”)¹¹³ The parables invite exegesis due to their metaphoric form: in each case, they tell a concrete story whose solidity is then vaporized with a spiritual, abstracted lesson at the end. Perhaps due to their mysteriousness and allusive difficulty, they appeared in numerous illustrated editions across the nineteenth century, accompanying the rise of mass print. These compact Bible stories thus gained their own visual lexicon and familiar iconography—all of which were defamiliarized by Millais. As Guthrie updated the parables for his Victorian audience, so too Millais transported a potentially orientalized subject-matter to the recognizable landscape of modern Scotland, where he was living when he made the drawings.

Millais’s visual choices are striking when compared with those of more conventional parable illustrations. In John Franklin’s 1851 version of “The Lost Sheep,” for example, Christ dominates the center frame in the guise of a shepherd, clothed in the familiar robe and beard, cradling a lost sheep and surrounded by a subservient flock (Fig. 3.19). According to the parable, just as the good shepherd deserts his flock to rescue a single lost sheep, so too heaven celebrates one repentant sinner more than ninety-nine just men. In Millais’s treatment (Fig. 3.20), the scene is rendered with remarkable specificity on a rough cliffside, gnarled with weeds and scrubby trees. The shepherd looks more like a Scottish boy than a recognizable Christ, and, with the rescued sheep draped around his shoulders, his face and human expressiveness are mostly obscured. The image amplifies the drama of risk to the vulnerable sheep by foregrounding the predatory bird and the sheer drop-off of the rocky cliffs. The scruffy Scottish highlands, rendered with loving fidelity, capture an intense reality of place even while symbolizing the hardships attendant upon true faith.

Fig. 3.19 “The Lost Sheep.” The Parables of Our Lord. Illustrated by John Franklin. London, 1851. Courtesy the Ruari McLean Collection in the Robertson Davies Library, Massey College, the University of Toronto.

Fig. 3.20 John Everett Millais, “The Lost Sheep.” The Parables of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, 1863. Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, Open Access Collection.

Critics of Millais’s Parables disapproved of his mixture of British scenery with vaguely “Oriental” costumes and props. The New Path strongly preferred the “vivid reality” of Holman Hunt’s Holy Land, with its accurate “Oriental features.” Instead, the reviewer declares, Millais “has given us an Englishwoman kneading bread, and English virgins with Eastern lamps going on an errand never heard of in England.” The result is a kind of “mongrel” imagery, part English, part Oriental, and largely unbelievable.¹¹⁴ The Athenaeum similarly accused Millais of “mix[ing] up the ancient with the recent,” warning that the costuming of religious figures in modern dress might open up a painter to “ridicule.”¹¹⁵ The Art Journal, commenting on the oil painting version of “The Lost Piece of Silver,” attacked the English realist treatment of the parable as “simply absurd, the figure being a modern maid-servant, with a broom in one hand, and a brass candle-stick in the other, looking for something on the ground” (Fig. 3.21).¹¹⁶ The Saturday Review concluded that the Parables courted “inanity” and “the commonplace” typical of Millais’s work in the Cornhill Magazine, where Millais had illustrated Trollope’s novels—even though these illustrations look very different.¹¹⁷ Millais’s realist propensities were seen to impair the Parables project, as the spiritual realms of the Bible jarred with the modern, prosaic English world of maids, brooms, and brass.

Fig. 3.21 John Everett Millais, “The Lost Piece of Silver.” The Parables of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, 1863. Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, Open Access Collection.

Despite the claims of some critics, Millais actually differentiated the style of his Parables from his more secular images. Whereas the Trollope illustrations are sketch-like and minimally rendered, the Christian scenes are densely worked, with fine cross-hatchings creating sculptural effects of depth and modelling.¹¹⁸ The figures burst forth in a monumentality of substance and shadow appropriate to their spiritual natures.¹¹⁹ Yet the polished, worked style clashes with the odd postures and everyday settings of the scenes, producing images that are largely illegible. (As The New Path complained, anyone unfamiliar with the parables would not be edified by Millais’s versions.)¹²⁰ Each parable involves a comparison (“just as …, so too …”) that undercuts the concrete world of its narrative, leaping into the metaphysical realm. Parable illustrations usually depended on a formulaic iconography, as in the parable of the “Hidden Treasure,” which likens the Kingdom of Heaven to a treasure buried in a field, joyfully unearthed by a farmer. In Rembrandt’s version of 1630 (Fig. 3.22), the farmer kneels beside the gleaming treasure, spade in hand; yet he looks off into the distance, sighting a sacred reward beyond the material. By contrast, Millais’s version downplays the treasure, placing it in a darkened corner (Fig. 3.23). The farmer awkwardly kneels away from the viewer, light falling on his back. This vision of a moment of faith presents the backsides of oxen, and sun dappling a stubbly field. The man’s face, also cast in shadow, churns with emotion, reflected in the dynamism of his crouched posture. Millais’s version omits the familiar iconography: anyone unfamiliar with the parable will not learn its narrative here. Yet the illustration offers a poignant portrayal of the lightning-strike of epiphany, focusing on an intimate moment of intense personal emotion. Millais responds to the problem of how to depict something as intangible as faith—how to illustrate a spiritual state of being—by introducing realistic elements of psychology and embodiment, showing us what such a moment might actually look like, rife with awkwardness and passion.

Fig. 3.22 Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (1606–69), The Parable of the Hidden Treasure, c. 1630. Photo: Jozsa Denes. Museum of Fine Arts (Szépmúvészeti Múzeum). © The Museum of Fine Arts Budapest/Scala/Art Resource, NY.

Fig. 3.23 John Everett Millais, “The Hidden Treasure.” The Parables of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, 1863. Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, Open Access Collection.

That drama of psychology, however, did not register as valid for most Victorian critics, for whom sacredness depended on customary iconography and ritualized body styles. Even the introduction of realist elements like researched Middle-Eastern costumes and landscapes might still accompany traditional modes of iconography and symbolism, as we saw in Cassell’s Bible illustrations. Millais chooses a different approach, one that remains mysterious and incongruous for his critics, planting his monumentalized figures in a real world, and lending them a psychological and physical dynamism that seems at odds with their metaphysical roles. Millais’s Parables join the Bible illustrations of Cassell and Doré as all of these exemplify new nineteenth-century modes of seeing the sacred. The Bible gains a surprising new functionality: it serves not merely as a repository for doctrine or an assemblage of idealized stories and figures, but also as a concretized and fantastical visual storehouse, interwoven with commodity culture and inseparable from secularized ways of seeing and knowing.

Race, Jewishness, Orientalism, Aura

If each illustrated Bible projected its own imagined world, one that seamlessly united disparate geographies and cultures, then many of the ambiguities surrounding this act of visual configuration were encapsulated by the problem of Jews. “Is our Madonna to be a Jewess?” asks W. M. Rossetti. The Bible itself is a strange amalgamation of Jewish and Christian, shifting from Old Testament to New. This shift is normalized in the notion of typology, which sees the Jewish Old Testament as symbolically foreshadowing a subsequent Christian truth.¹²¹ Yet if the Bible was becoming, in the nineteenth century, a “real” place populated by historical figures with traceable, ethnographic features, Victorian producers were forced to acknowledge that ancient Jewishness, a crucial part of the Bible, existed as its own distinct entity—foreign, alien, and non-Christian. Moreover, Jews themselves inhabited modern Europe and many of them still practiced the rites and rituals outlined in the Bible. If the visual culture of the Bible dramatized fantastical leaps of imaginative world-building—leaps that sutured together old and new, foreign and native, and West with East—then that drama entailed a confrontation with both self and other epitomized in depictions of Jews.

The question of visualizing biblical Jewishness inevitably blurred into the question of visualizing modern-day British Jews. In this section, I turn to an important subset of mass-circulated religious illustration in the images of Jews produced by the Pre-Raphaelite artist Simeon Solomon. Scholars have largely studied Solomon as a member of D. G. Rossetti’s circle, known for his paintings of dreamy, androgynous young men. His reputation as a sex radical was cemented by his career-ending arrest, in 1873, for soliciting sex with another man in a public restroom.¹²² Yet critical focus on Solomon’s homoerotic imagery has obscured the key source of fame during his lifetime, namely, his work as a pioneering illustrator of Jewish customs for a mass gentile British audience. Appearing in the journals Once a Week and The Leisure Hour in the 1860s, Solomon’s illustrations created a visual vocabulary for the vexed subject of modern Jewishness, the first to do so in the mass press. Many of the same puzzling questions that hovered over Bible illustration—to what extent is the Bible “ours,” and to what extent are these figures “us”?—also accrued to modern Jews living in Britain: in fact, Jewish people exemplified these issues, as they were seen to uniquely occupy a liminal region between European modernity and a spiritual antiquity.

Victorian illustrations of Jews emerged against the background of a long caricature tradition, epitomized by Cruikshank’s notorious Fagin in Dickens’s Oliver Twist. Fagin appears as devilish, animalistic, even rat-like. (I discuss the caricature tradition further in Chapter 1.) The popular visual rendering of Jews had a long, pernicious history, a typical treatment for Britain’s religious and ethnic minorities. More high-culture productions also trafficked in stereotypes. In the Lays of the Holy Land from Ancient and Modern Poets (1858), some poems attack modern Jews for their wrong-headed beliefs. A poem titled “The Jews” declares, “ZION! thy symbols fade;/Cast thy dim types away,/Come forth from ancient error’s shade,/And hail Messiah’s day.”¹²³ The book contains a striking illustration depicting “The Wailing Place of the Jews,” a holy site in Jerusalem (Fig. 3.24). Jewish men pray in a row, facing the crumbling wall; their turned backs suggest their avoidance of Christian truth. The men’s faces are darkened, heightening their racial otherness. The imagery is typical of the volume’s accusatory, negative tone toward modern Jews.

Fig. 3.24 “The Wailing Place of the Jews.” Lays of the Holy Land from Ancient and Modern Poets, 1858. Courtesy the Ruari McLean Collection in the Robertson Davies Library, Massey College, the University of Toronto.

Yet outright anti-Semitism was not the dominant note of illustrated Bibles themselves, given the importance of tying together the Old and New Testaments. Cassell’s Illustrated Family Bible notes the continuity between Jews of past and present when it illustrates the “Celebration of the Feast of Tabernacles by the German Jews” (1: 202). German Jews are pictured in a modern interior, gathered round a dinner table and dressed in quaint German peasant garb. It is an interesting question as to why Cassell’s Bible chooses German, rather than British, Jews for its illustrative footnote depicting a modern ritual whose roots go all the way back to the Bible. Apparently the link between past and present still needs to maintain some barrier of foreignness for the comfort of British readers.

This illustration reflects the ambiguities surrounding depictions of Victorian Jews—were they modern or ancient, European or Eastern? In fact, British Jews were insistently characterized by a discourse of “both” and “neither.” They were seen to occupy many dualistic categories while never being fully one thing or the other. This doubleness emerged against a background of gradual Jewish emancipation in Victorian Britain, which came in fits and starts between 1828 and 1858. These rights included access to the professions, retail sales, property ownership, voting for men, college degrees, and holding political office. In 1858, Lionel Rothschild became the first Jewish person to take a seat as a Member of Parliament.¹²⁴ As Victorian Jews became more prosperous and more assimilated into British middle-class and upper-class life, the question of their Englishness became more pressing. Indeed, Jewish assimilation raised uncomfortable questions about the limits of the tolerant liberal British state. As Richard Dellamora notes, “Jewish belief and practices, dietary and otherwise, were understood to be expressions of a commitment to social and cultural exclusivity”; these commitments inevitably created a problem for the notion of “universal brotherhood” underlying the modern democratic state.¹²⁵ Dellamora uses Jonathan Boyarin’s phrase “internal Others” to name liminal figures like Jews—along with Irish people and gay people—who occupied the imperial state and yet maintained a quasi-otherness that threatened to destroy the purity of the nation.¹²⁶ Bryan Cheyette observes a similar duality in representations of Victorian Jews, what he calls a “stark doubleness” at the heart of the liberal tradition embodied by writers like Matthew Arnold and George Eliot. For Cheyette, Jewish assimilation offered the promise of a unified nation-state—but that promise was always undercut by the fact of an immutable racial difference. Jews thus stood for both “the possibility of a new redemptive order as well as the degeneration of an untransfigured past.”¹²⁷ That duality, I would add, is amplified in Bible illustrations, when a “redemptive order” is literalized in the religious narrative describing the foundation of Christianity, yet also juxtaposed with the orientalized, violent otherness of a racialized Old Testament history.

While Dellamora and Cheyette focus on British writers, their theories also enlighten in the visual realm. The “stark doubleness” of Victorian Semitic discourse emerged powerfully in the reception of Simeon Solomon’s artworks. Reviewers offered ambivalent mixtures of praise and condemnation, locating “Hebrew” qualities even in paintings without apparent Jewish content.¹²⁸ A fellow artist, William Blake Richmond, uses typical language when he writes of Solomon as “a fair little Hebrew, a Jew of the Jews, … an Eastern of the Easterns, facile and spasmodically intense.”¹²⁹ Describing Solomon’s early Bible illustrations, Richmond calls them

indescribably ancient-looking and strangely imbued with the semi-barbaric life it tells of in the Book of Kings and in the Psalter of David.… [T]hey seemed to be written in Hebrew characters; no one but a Jew could have conceived or expressed the depth of national feeling which lay under the strange, remote forms of the archaic people whom he depicted and whose passions he told with a genius entirely unique.¹³⁰

Richmond’s comments likely refer to Solomon’s designs for the Dalziels’ Bible Gallery. They reflect a familiar dualism, praising the artist for “passion” and “genius” while finding him mired in the hidebound antiquity of an “archaic people” and committed to a “national feeling” that is clearly not British.

Richmond’s idea of the Bible’s “semi-barbaric life” is a powerful descriptor for a visual Jewishness spanning ancient and modern worlds. Algernon Swinburne echoes that note of half-conjured brutality, writing in 1871 that his friend’s art “combine[s] the fervent violence of feeling or faith which is peculiar to the Hebrews with … the sublime reserve and balance of passion, which is peculiar to the Greeks.”¹³¹ Swinburne too characterizes Solomon’s work by its convergence of two opposing influences. These comments insist on the half-ness of Jewishness, its divided state of semi-barbarism and semi-civilization. The characterization strongly echoes Matthew Arnold’s 1867 comments on the Celts, whom Arnold portrays as “sentimental,” “passionate, penetrating, melancholy,” “sensuous,” “lov[ing] bright colours,” “half-barbarous,” and manifesting a “feminine” “sensibility.”¹³² Like the Irish, Jews too are defined by contrasting traits that reflect a familiar late-nineteenth-century trope, what Nietzsche named in The Birth of Tragedy as the opposition between Apollonian and Dionysian forces—drives toward order and law contrasted by more subversive forces of disruption and anarchy. Yet a presumed racial difference always haunts these rhetorics, suggesting that the Dionysian, “semi-barbarous” qualities innate to both the Irish and the Jews will somehow always be definitive of their character.¹³³ Solomon’s critics trace an organic connection between his Jewish self and his artworks, in which a placid surface harbors mysterious, potentially violent depths, a secret, embodied sacredness hiding just beyond the veil of the ordinary.¹³⁴

These terms defined the reception of a Jewish artist when Solomon published his illustrations of contemporary Jewish life. The article “Jews in England,” appearing in Once a Week in 1862, explores the unknown lives of “the Jews resident among us” by explaining their modern performance of ancient rituals—since, “like most oriental nations, the Jews adhere to their religious doctrines and customs with great tenacity.”¹³⁵ The later series “Illustrations of Jewish Customs,” published in ten installments in The Leisure Hour in 1866, offers an insider’s view, with in-depth essays penned by an anonymous “distinguished member of the Hebrew community” who hopes that “these explanations may have been instrumental in removing prejudices … against this ancient people.”¹³⁶ Solomon’s illustrations for both journals work toward the same goal, which is to present modern Jewish customs to a predominantly Christian audience. Both of these illustrated periodicals served as what Jeffrey Collins calls “‘windows on the world’ for the literate middle classes,” offering armchair access to foreign cultures seen as “unusual” and “exotic.”¹³⁷ The Leisure Hour billed itself on the masthead as “A Family Journal of Instruction and Recreation”; published by the Religious Tract Society at a cost of 1 shilling, it aimed, like Good Words, to offer wholesome entertainment suitable for Sunday reading.

Given the expectations of British audiences—that Jews be portrayed as “oriental” and “archaic”—Solomon makes a radical choice by setting many of his scenes within an explicit Victorian modernity. In scenes of “The Passover” or “Lighting the Sabbath Candles,” men and women gather around a table wearing modern clothes within recognizably English bourgeois interiors. In “The Wedding” (Fig. 3.25), two up-to-date British dandies in waistcoats and top hats hold up the poles of the chuppa, the traditional wedding canopy, while beneath it the bride and groom—in fashionable dress—stand before patriarchs attired in customary robe and fringe. The image presents an ambiguous vision of modern Jewishness, proposing that British modernity and ancient ritual can coexist without contradiction.

Fig. 3.25 Simeon Solomon, “The Wedding Ceremony.” From “Illustrations of Jewish Customs.” The Leisure Hour, Vol. 15, 1866. Courtesy of University of Aberystwyth.

The dominant note of Solomon’s images, however, especially in the “Illustrations of Jewish Customs,” was not one of modernity but that of a timeless ritualism, a nostalgic world of old men observing sacred and mysterious ceremonies. (The backdrop for these scenes, as Richard I. Cohen notes, was the rapid Jewish assimilation in Europe in the later nineteenth century, which was transforming—and obliterating—Jewish customs in as quickly as a single generation, especially among elite families.)¹³⁸ In “The Day of Atonement” (Fig. 3.26), white-clad male penitents kneel in the synagogue, while in the iconic “Feast of the Dedication,” a solemn, bearded rabbi lights the candles of a giant Jewish menorah (nine-branched candelabra) in front of an audience of robed, younger men (Fig. 3.27). Darkness envelops the candlelit figures, creating a haunting, dramatic scene. The old-world subject-matter harmonizes well with the series’ striking style: unlike Solomon’s Pre-Raphaelite designs, which were hard-edged and starkly rendered, the Jewish illustrations produce a notable impressionism, evoking qualities of mystery, atmosphere, and shadow. The hazy style seems like an implicit rebuke to the linear caricature tradition that had formed rat-like Fagins and other negative visual stereotypes. Victorian reviewers admired the spiritual profundity of these images. Swinburne saw them as distinguished by “the Hebrew love of dim vast atmosphere and infinite spiritual range without foothold on earth or resting-place in nature.”¹³⁹ The Athenaeum called them “rough but effective pen and ink drawings,” “beautiful in tone,” “charmingly composed.”¹⁴⁰

Fig. 3.26 Simeon Solomon, “The Day of Atonement.” From “Illustrations of Jewish Customs.” The Leisure Hour, Vol. 15, 1866. Courtesy of University of Aberystwyth.

Fig. 3.27 Simeon Solomon, “The Feast of Dedication.” From “Illustrations of Jewish Customs.” The Leisure Hour, Vol. 15, 1866. Courtesy of University of Aberystwyth.

That the Athenaeum accepts these scenes as “charming” might seem surprising, given the fraught, “semi-barbaric” reception of Jewishness elsewhere. Yet Solomon’s later avant-garde reputation should not obscure the fact that, indeed, these illustrations offered an unexpectedly normative vision of religious tradition. With their combination of modern male figures and ancient-looking rabbis in traditional dress, they described the assimilation of old Jewish traditions into modern British ones, with a shared embrace of male patrimony and power. The bearded, cloaked patriarchs embody a very different kind of masculinity from Solomon’s later, androgynous, pagan male figures, and seem more akin to the prophets and kings of Doré’s Old Testament liberal epic.¹⁴¹ In fact, the iconic image of the “Feast of the Dedication,” in which a rabbi lights candles amid male congregants, celebrates the traditional story of Hanukkah, when a small band of plucky Jewish fighters managed to defeat a much larger army of the infidel Syrian king. The accompanying essay retells the story (featuring “the hammer” Judah Maccabee) and concludes that the lit candles aptly symbolize the dispersal of “the darkness of an overwhelming tyranny.”¹⁴² Once again, liberal epic surfaces in the story of underdog true believers defeating the horde of infidels—reflecting, as in Doré’s Bible, a crucial narrative by which modern Britons might identify with ancient Jews. The familiar narrative of “the Chosen People” might be wielded by the British to defend national and imperial ambitions.¹⁴³ (Fittingly enough, Doré’s Bible illustrations were themselves adapted for Jewish readers in a bilingual Hebrew-English edition, The Jewish Family Bible.)¹⁴⁴ In Solomon’s “Feast of the Dedication,” the candles burning in darkness capture a male spiritual power, hinting at a mystic transformation by which religious tradition might be channeled from one generation to the next.

This discussion inevitably brings to mind George Eliot’s novel Daniel Deronda (1876), in which a wealthy, cosmopolitan Englishman discovers his hidden Jewish ancestry and becomes inspired to found a Jewish homeland in Palestine. If Solomon’s illustrations were among the first to limn modern Jewishness for a Protestant mass visual culture, Eliot’s novel likewise was one of the first to do so in the literary realm. Daniel Deronda suggests that British Jews, who have preserved their cultural heritage and spiritual authenticity, should serve as a model for a moribund, spiritually bankrupt English nation. The book thus reproduces the alignment of nationalisms, British and Jewish, implied by the biblical epic. The spiritual center of the novel is Mordecai, an impoverished, Jewish prophet-figure who channels the mystical Cabbala and embodies qualities of history, spirit, organicism, dreams, anti-rationalism, and anti-cosmopolitanism. His aura of authenticity makes for a strong contrast with the artifice of the British aristocracy. Mordecai also preaches a strong Jewish separatism, celebrating the crucial role of the “great Transmitters” in preserving “the [Jewish] heritage of memory, and sav[ing] the soul of Israel alive as a seed among the tombs.”¹⁴⁵ Mordecai himself is one of these transmitters, working to educate Daniel Deronda in the fundamentals of his new faith, including the Hebrew language.

Solomon’s illustrations serve as fitting accompaniments to Eliot’s novel, with their similar celebration of the patriarchal transmission of Jewish history and culture. Solomon’s rabbis and male elders—bearded, orientalized, distinctively anti-modern—serve as guardians of culture, “great transmitters” themselves. As prophet figures they are non-violent yet spiritually puissant, the Mordecais of visual culture. Daniel Deronda critiques cosmopolitanism—a deracinated, detached state of modernity—to which Jews, lacking a homeland, are especially prone.¹⁴⁶ Solomon’s depictions of modern Jews are resolutely anti-cosmopolitan, as modern Jews are portrayed enacting non-Christian, ancient rituals with antecedents in the Bible—some of them performed in British bourgeois settings and costumes. Jewish separatism, in both Solomon and Eliot, appears beautiful, admirable, spiritual, “Chosen,” and potentially superior to a deracinated British Christianity, even while offering a model for a broader British regeneration. The spiritual—and political—alignment between the Jewish and the British in 1866 seems especially pointed, given that Benjamin Disraeli, of known Jewish ancestry, would become Prime Minister in 1868.

Yet the alignment also proves problematic in Eliot’s case, since not all British Jews live up to Mordecai’s standards, and many of them—especially those who are poorer or more working-class—appear in the novel as repellent Jewish stereotypes, conniving and materialistic. Even while Jewish nationalism becomes a model for British national redemption, Jews themselves remain ambiguous in Eliot’s novel; as Bryan Cheyette points out, they “signify both a quasi-biblical, spiritual community rooted in the past” and also “a degenerate contemporary ‘race’ that is in need of immediate ‘improvement.’”¹⁴⁷ Eliot’s vision for Jewish rebirth organizes itself around a very specific subset of Jews, those who are, like Deronda, educated, upper-class, and enlightened by European culture. “[P]oised between East and West,” as Mordecai describes him, special Jews like Deronda can bring together Western rational learning with Eastern spiritual fervor and authentic feeling—once again rehearsing the dualistic thinking that defined many accounts of British Jewishness.

Unlike Daniel Deronda, Solomon’s illustrations of modern Jews do not reproduce overtly negative Jewish stereotypes. There are no pictures here of Jews in urban, mercantile settings, working in shops or banks, or functioning within a secular, public world. The scenes are either domestic or religious, in the home, or in the synagogue; they are normative without alluding to the stereotypical roles Jews played in the British public sphere—selling in trade, for men, or, for women, performing on the stage. (Both of these kinds of Jewish public identities appear in Daniel Deronda.) Solomon’s domestic scenes accord with British bourgeois domestic ideology; in the “Eve of the Sabbath,” the image portrays the wife lighting the candles under the approving eye of “the master” (as the text names him), with the children gathered round obediently.¹⁴⁸ A similar heartwarming scene illustrates “The Passover,” as the master of the house holds up a piece of matzoh, or unleavened bread, to educate the assembled women and children about the ritual.

Solomon’s images present a striking contrast to those of Millais in their vision of religious temporality. When Millais updates the parables to modern Scotland, he courts anachronism, dramatizing ancient, foreign customs that seem obscure or even nonsensical in modern guise. The update only serves to highlight the difference between the Bible’s ancient Eastern cultures and those of modern Britain. The time-sense of Jewishness in Solomon’s illustrations, by contrast, proposes a robust continuity between past and present. The imagery implies that Jews possess the Bible more firmly than Christians do: Jewish otherness itself is aligned with the Bible, connoting mystical forms of ineffable spirituality that are majestic, masculine, and ritualistic. Across many Victorian discourses, oddly enough, the Bible itself becomes a quasi-racial marker for modern Jews, standing for an orientalized antiquity with which they are inescapably imbued. Their biblical qualities are innate, inherited, and organic. Even the Jewish narrator of “Illustrations of Jewish Customs” describes his fellow Jews as “this ancient people,” rehearsing the persistent label.¹⁴⁹ (Meanwhile—perhaps it goes without saying—Jewish cultural continuity was not some mysterious racial inheritance, but a result of persistent European practices of ghettoization and exclusion.) Solomon’s illustrations, with their patriarchal spirituality intermixed with modern, bourgeois Britishness, continue to propagate the historicist, organic understanding of Jewishness.

The ideological work of these illustrations is both to normalize, assimilate and also to exoticize, mystify. Both of these moves are acceptable to the mainstream British establishment, as seen in the glowing Athenaeum review and in the fact that The Leisure Hour, a Christian periodical, saw fit to publish them. The complications abound here: even while normalizing, Solomon’s visual culture is also radical for bringing modern Jews into positive, unprecedented, mass-circulated visibility for a gentile audience. These images certainly offer a counterpoint to Cruikshank’s rat-like Fagins. Likewise, there is also a radical edge to Solomon’s “normative” Jewish patriarchs: even while they prefigure the patriarchs and holy men of late-century, best-selling Bibles, they also serve as implicit rejoinders to stereotypes of Jewish men as effeminate, or queer.¹⁵⁰ Very complicated indeed, given that Solomon would soon become most known for his paintings and drawings of androgynous male figures—a queer iconography with which he was already engaged in 1862, when he made the Jewish illustrations. Solomon would convert to Roman Catholicism in 1864, and by 1866 he had moved toward the pan-spiritual ritualism typical of Walter Pater’s circle. Yet, as I’ve argued here, these early images accorded with other mainstream accounts of Victorian Jewishness, invoking a masculinist spiritual power whose source seemed to emanate from the Old Testament itself. In this way, Solomon’s Jewish imagery allowed for identification between Jews and Christians as “chosen people,” proposing modern Britain as the secular–sacred endpoint for a long religious history.

The Persistence of Illustration: Holy Land Experience

Religious print illustration produced diverse, animating versions of a Victorian world picture. These images also had an expanded life outside of books in intervisual and intermedial crossovers with other Victorian-era spectacles: stereoviews of the Holy Land, magic lantern shows of Bible illustrations, scale models of Jerusalem, museum displays, world’s fair expositions. Francis Frith, the intrepid photographer of Egypt and the Middle East discussed in Chapter 5, was also the maker of an illustrated Bible (1862–3). His version of the book featured his own photographs of Holy Land sites, tipped-in to blank pages to replace the more usual engraved illustrations. Titles of the original photographs were altered to suit the verses of the King James text. Because Frith’s sumptuous Bible was dedicated to Queen Victoria, herself a photography enthusiast, it is now known as “the Queen’s Bible.”¹⁵¹ The photographically illustrated Bible was perhaps an extreme manifestation of the drive to bring media modernity to religious illustration, concretizing place and time while also performing feats of dizzying travel across space and millennia.

While most Victorian people did not own a Bible illustrated by photographs, the ubiquity of illustrated Bible ownership suggests a dominant, widespread cultural phenomenon. The illustrated Bible signaled the privatization of religious experience, even in formalized Bible readings among families, where the patriarch read aloud to the assembled household. Pictures in Bibles invited a personal relationship to the sacred. No wonder that the illustrated Bible featured in many Victorian and twentieth-century memoirs of childhood as an item both formative and fantastical, a key to the making of the imaginative self. Thomas De Quincey recalled in his 1853 autobiography that in his childhood nursery, “no book was so much in request among us. It ruled us and swayed us as mysteriously as music.”¹⁵² A century later, a ten-year-old Cecil B. DeMille pored over his childhood home’s “most fingered book”—the Doré Bible Gallery in an 1891 edition, according to a biographer. From these images “the whole visual inspiration of his great religious films sprang,” DeMille’s biographer concludes.¹⁵³

In Elizabeth Bishop’s 1955 poem “Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance,” the speaker juxtaposes the grim reality of Holy Land travels with the beauty of an illustrated Bible, where she “looked and looked our infant sight away.” Even in our ostensibly secular, post-print contemporary era, many still retain emotional ties to illustrated Bibles cherished in childhood. Religious illustrated books consumed in infancy are a powerful inheritance of the nineteenth century, even while most story-driven books for adults today are published without pictures. Illustration itself has become a powerful signifier of childhood.

Richard Maxwell argues that even as the Victorian illustrated book became outmoded after 1900, it also “became a crucial starting point for symbolist, surrealist, postsurrealist, and eventually postmodern practices” among a select group of avant-garde artists and writers.¹⁵⁴ Another crucial legacy, however, can be traced in the public spectacles and heterotopias coterminous with the illustrated book, the Victorian world-building projects of Sydenham’s Crystal Palace pursued at subsequent World’s Fairs, immersing visitors in pleasurable imitations that were both life-sized and miniaturized. Both the illustrated book and the walk-through gallery envision the world-as-picture, crafting rooms of costumery and play, Disneyfications of space and time, or the kitsch simulacra decried by Jean Baudrillard. Baudrillard sees the rise of nineteenth-century mass culture as a crucial first step toward the disintegration of “the real,” as simulations and simulacra came to replace or even manufacture our experience of reality. Interestingly, Baudrillard looks to religious imagery as a key premodern antecedent to the postmodern condition, as iconoclasts and iconophiles debated whether images can represent a “real” divine presence.¹⁵⁵ From there it is only a few steps, in Baudrillard’s account, to Disneyland, “a perfect model of all the entangled orders of simulacra,” and a profound incarnation of all the surreal, imitative excesses of late capitalism.¹⁵⁶ Though Victorian religious imagery might seem worlds away from the flashy, secular entertainments of the twentieth century, both forms—as I’ve argued—emerged out of the same spectacularizing drives in Victorian culture, stimulating heightened emotions via visual sensations that produced compelling, fabricated realities.

The Victorian illustrated Bible continues to have influence in world-building projects that are its inheritors, such as Bible-themed amusement parks and televangelist empires. New media networks create both virtual and real religious communities, organizing “nations” of new viewers and congregants. At “The Holy Land Experience,” in Orlando, Florida, visitors can experience detailed recreations of biblical sites like the Tabernacle of the Old Testament and the empty tomb of Christ’s resurrection. A daily performance re-enacts Christ’s bloody crucifixion in song, with Broadway-style music and high-tech visual effects. Live actors wander the park, dressed in period costume as disciples, lepers, or Roman centurions. A bustling marketplace, modeled on that of Jerusalem circa the first century ad, sells biblical items, Jewish items, and concessions. According to its publicity materials, the park promises “a total sensory experience that is educational, historical, theatrical, inspirational and evangelistic, blending sights, sounds and tastes that transport guests 7,000 miles away and more than 3,000 years back in time.”¹⁵⁷ This advertising copy sounds like it might have been lifted from advertisements for Victorian illustrated Bibles, promising virtual travel to a pleasurable and educational immersion.

The Holy Land Experience also offers a heterotopian array of divergent elements united in a single space. Religion scholar Timothy Beal notes that the park ignores biblical geography and timelines, such that “the Wilderness Tabernacle and the Herodian Temple, separated by centuries in Israelite and Judean history, are right next to each other.”¹⁵⁸ Though evangelical Christianity is sometimes thought to oppose science and technology, the Holy Land Experience makes the two complementary—using historical study to recreate “authentic” sites in Palestine, presenting researched biblical documents and scrolls in an authoritative museum format, using up-to-date technology to stage biblical spectacles, and marshaling all the tools of contemporary media advertising, with a multi-format website that includes reviews by tourists on TripAdvisor. The theme park brings together Bible history, scripture, ancient geography, sacred architecture, commodity culture, theater experience, high-tech simulations, and spectacular entertainment to present a heterotopian version of modern American evangelicalism.

Some scholars have expressed hostility to the park’s slick presentation and commodified religious experience. Timothy Beal attacks it as “a fundamentalist Magic Kingdom, a Disneyesque alternative to Disney World.”¹⁵⁹ Graham Ward similarly uses Baudrillardian terms to savage what he sees as the park’s “collapse of the sublime” into “kitsch”—a Holy Land Experience defined by unapologetic “superficiality” and “unashamed commodification, reification, idolatry,” in which “transcendence is engineered.”¹⁶⁰ Ward polemically titles his book True Religion. These critiques echo familiar attacks on mass culture in which mechanized or commercialized products debase authentic experience—Clement Greenberg denigrating kitsch art, or Theodor Adorno aligning the culture industry with “mass deception.” Yet the patent glitzy artifice of the Holy Land Experience does not prevent many of its visitors from experiencing deep religious emotions there, as affirmed by numerous testimonials on the TripAdvisor website. This fact might invite us to question scholars’ desire to elevate one religious experience over another, raising tricky philosophical questions about the extent to which we can truly know or assess another person’s authentic feelings. Victorian illustrated Bibles are open to critique along similar lines: they were profitable commodities, manufactured by entrepreneurial businessmen, immersed in secularized and quasi-scientific ways of seeing that often clashed with the religious content—yet they also created a sacred, venerated space of religious contemplation for many Victorian readers. For Baudrillard, the substitution of reality for protean signs and simulacra is a cause for despair, papered over with a withering irony: the loss of “the real” coincides with the triumph of nihilistic, avaricious forces like capitalism and fascism. “Authenticity” is no longer possible, or even thinkable, in this postmodern environment. Yet the cynical, secular mindset of the cosmopolitan academic seems disjointed from the lived reality of many modern subjects, whether in contemporary America or Victorian Britain, who seem unaware that their spiritual emotions and beliefs are the unreal products of an illusory world. Modern scholarship has not yet fully addressed the way that authentic feelings might be produced by some very inauthentic objects and environments.

The geographic shift in my analysis from British Bibles to American theme-parks is not random. While Doré’s Bible found a vast audience in Victorian Britain, its influence in late-nineteenth-century America was perhaps even greater. When the Doré Gallery traveled to Chicago for a nine-month exhibition in 1896, it attracted an astonishing 1.5 million visitors.¹⁶¹ The Doré Bible created a visual narrative of liberal epic, a thrilling account of a “chosen people” that was free-floating, adaptable, and highly compatible with visions of American exceptionalism. Burke O. Long documents the American obsession with Holy Land recreations, which ranged from Palestine Park, in Chautauqua, New York—founded in 1874, and the first of America’s life-sized, miniaturized Bible recreation parks—to the Jerusalem exhibit at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, which featured a golden Tabernacle, the Dome of the Rock, and live performances. These biblical recreations invoked a politics of what I have been calling liberal epic, such that visitors could “move, if only temporarily, from their American status as a metaphorical chosen race in the New World, to the actual favored nation of the Old.”¹⁶² Long doesn’t mention the twentieth-century Hollywood Bible films that conveyed a similar message, with suitably epic spectacles depicting infidel hordes, crashing Red Sea waters, and Westernized saviors. He does, however, point out some of the ugly ideologies underlying American biblical appropriation, which became more pronounced in the early twentieth century—racism, imperialism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, and anti-communism.¹⁶³ These American examples show us again the paradoxes of Bible illustration, whose investments in the lived reality of ancient, “oriental” peoples, endeavoring to provide a “mental transmigration” into the world and mind of the other, also coexisted with nationalist and imperialist worldviews that hardened the definition of borders and selves.

“Epic” still connotes the Bible today as a form of visual culture, especially in conveying a sense of scale: the Flood remains the paradigmatic example of a massive event destroying an entire population—hence the epic modifier, “of biblical proportions.” The illustrated Bible offered a twist on this epic scale, miniaturizing and domesticating epic scenes for the Victorian parlor. Today we can consume scenes of epic destruction on our home televisions or smartphone screens; as technology changes, epic continues to become more accessible, smaller, a portable spectacle. Disasters of biblical proportions have also become newly relevant due to climate change, whose extreme weather events and global scope invite comparison to biblical reckoning. John Martin’s fiery apocalyptic visions, like those of The Great Day of His Wrath, now seem less fantastical and more prescient than they did in the 1850s. Liberal epic reappears in a new guise in several contemporary television shows set in post-apocalyptic worlds: dramatizing the struggles of a valiant crew of survivors, these shows celebrate individual humanity even while glorying in the violent realities of mass disaster. Darren Aronofsky’s movie Noah (2014) retells the Bible story as an action movie, in which one zealous man protects his family from faceless hordes of bandits in a post-apocalyptic pre-apocalypse. Though the film gestures at the tragedy of watery doom for a generalized humanity, the figure of Noah still emerges as the movie’s strongman hero whose violent acts are condoned by a righteous, Judeo-Christian deity. Noah is an unsubtle commentary on modern climate change, with the massive, terrifying storm at its heart, brought about by human folly; the film’s environmentalist message supports an ideology of liberal epic, since the human exploitation of the planet justifies a moral calculus by which humanity (or most of it) deserves to die. Unsurprisingly, the movie quotes Doré’s Bible illustrations of the flood, as a group of nameless victims cling to a rocky perch atop swirling waters while the ark floats in the background.

Selling the Bible’s violent spectacle is a tradition that continues unabated. Doré’s illustrations, which channeled the Bible’s most violent and gory aspects, find a contemporary successor in the bloody re-enactments of Christ’s crucifixion at the Holy Land Experience. The scene’s gruesomeness invites uneasiness, especially given the high dollar price of the entrance ticket: the theme park is making money off of the spectacle of half-naked, brutal suffering. Doré’s Bible, too, was a huge commercial success, popular for its violent scenes of enslavement, warfare, and decapitation, and mass-produced under factory-like conditions. Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ (2004) similarly foregrounds naked male torture, with one critic calling it a “two-hour-and-six-minute snuff movie.”¹⁶⁴ The Passion of the Christ is the highest-grossing R-rated movie in the US as of this writing, its success driven in part by evangelical church networks and the Christian media stars who promoted it. While these violent biblical spectacles might seem sensationalistic and excessive, they again raise larger philosophical questions about when the spark of authentic religious emotion edges into something more exploitative and perverse. Most religious traditions across the ages have embraced violent spectacle, suggesting that the visual culture of martyrdom and suffering participates in a long, complicated history whose moral dimensions are difficult to parse.

I have been tracing how the Victorian illustrated Bible offered an ambiguous entryway into otherness for its readers. These illustrations merged religious piety with a larger curiosity about the Middle East in the midst of imperial conquests and archaeological discoveries. The illustrated Bible not only exoticized ancient “oriental” places and peoples; it also captured a fantasy of personal transformation, of channeling and perhaps even becoming the other. These dynamics express themselves today in Holy Land Experiences promising authentic recreations of Middle Eastern sites and cultures; in ongoing American and European imperial intrigues in the Middle East, drawing Western attention to non-Western peoples and customs; and even in Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ, which, while cast entirely with Caucasian actors, rendered its lines in Latin and Aramaic, attempting to give audiences a more powerful sense of “being there” in a foreign biblical history. The success of this film—in the medium of film itself, which exists as a strong telos for the illustrated book—points to a continuing investment in fantastical yet researched recreations that present themselves as lived, authentic truths.

Picture World: Image, Aesthetics, and Victorian New Media. Rachel Teukolsky, Oxford University Press (2020). © Rachel Teukolsky.

DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198859734.001.0001

¹ Scholars of the illustrated book have focused largely on its production history, especially its relationship between author and illustrating artist. Classic examples include Jane R. Cohen and Jane Marjorie Rabb, Charles Dickens and His Original Illustrators (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1980), N. John Hall, Trollope and His Illustrators (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1980), and John Harvey, Victorian Novelists and Their Illustrators (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1970). These studies’ hierarchy of word and image is evident in their titles. By contrast, Julia Thomas’s more recent book, Pictorial Victorians: The Inscription of Values in Word and Image (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004), sees the visual and the verbal signifying in equally complex and unstable ways.

² Important art-historical studies of Victorian illustration include: Paul Goldman, Victorian Illustration: The Pre-Raphaelites, the Idyllic School and the High Victorians (Aldershot, UK: Scolar Press, 1996); Gordon N. Ray, The Illustrator and the Book in England from 1790 to 1914 (Mineola, NY: Dover Press, [1979], 1991); and Forrest Reid, Illustrators of the Eighteen Sixties: An Illustrated Survey of the Work of 58 British Artists (New York: Dover Publications, [1928], 1976). More modern approaches are found in the collection edited by Paul Goldman and Simon Cooke, Reading Victorian Illustration, 1855–1875: Spoils of the Lumber Room (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2012).

³ For many book historians, the pinnacle of Victorian fine-art bookmaking is William Morris’s Kelmscott Press, whose hand-crafted, lavish productions epitomized the values of the late-nineteenth-century “Book Beautiful” movement. See William Morris, The Ideal Book: Essays and Lectures on the Arts of the Book by William Morris, ed. William S. Peterson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).

⁴ Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in The Question Concerning Technology: And Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Garland, 1977), 115–54: 134.

⁵ Heidegger uses the words “master” and “mastery” in a more Nietzschean sense, especially in describing “man’s” attempted domination over the external world using technology and scientific research. His terms of mastery do not have the same negative political connotations that they do for us today. See, for example, in “The Age of the World Picture”: “that chaos, not yet ordered and still to be mastered through objectification, which demands mastery in a particular age” (148).

⁶ Colleen McDannell, Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 4.

⁷ Ibid., 5.

⁸ Mary Wilson Carpenter points out that Victorian literary studies of the Bible, such as those that focus on typology, usually ignore the Bible’s material forms: “[M]ost Victorianists tend to treat the Victorian reader’s relationship to the Bible as unmediated.” Mary Wilson Carpenter, Imperial Bibles, Domestic Bodies: Women, Sexuality, and the Victorian Market (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003), xviii. The critical trend to read “the Bible as literature” will, by definition, omit discussion of pictorial illustrations.

⁹ McDannell, Material Christianity, 6.

¹⁰ For a summary of these developments see Jude V. Nixon, “Framing Victorian Religious Discourse: An Introduction,” in Victorian Religious Discourse: New Directions in Criticism, ed. Jude V. Nixon (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 1–26. Also helpful is Sue Zemka, Victorian Testaments: The Bible, Christology, and Literary Authority in Early-Nineteenth-Century British Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997). Zemka analyzes the entwining of cultural authority with religious authority in figures like Dickens, Thomas Arnold, and Florence Nightingale.

¹¹ Scholars of book history might be struck by the absence of the Dalziels’ Bible Gallery (1881) from the chapter. This famous publication contained religious illustrations by some of the most eminent Victorian artists, including Frederick Leighton, Edward Burne-Jones, and William Holman Hunt. Despite the book’s (relative) fame today, however, it cannot be taken as representative of mass religious illustration in the nineteenth century. Its lavish size and expense excluded it from mass consumption. By contrast, the Bibles and religious illustrations I study in the chapter were accessible to a range of readers in different formats and at a variety of price points.

¹² Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version,” trans. Edmund Jephcott and Harry Zohn, in The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 19–55.

¹³ The Works of John Donne, D.D., 6 vols. (London: John W. Parker, 1839), 1:159. This example is cited in the OED.

¹⁴ This Bible is held in the collection of the British Library.

¹⁵ The OED cites one earlier example, from 1816: A Cabinet Illustration of Great Britain; in a Series of Near 300 Elegant Views. On Walter Scott, see Richard Maxwell, “Walter Scott, Historical Fiction, and the Genesis of the Victorian Illustrated Book,” in The Victorian Illustrated Book, ed. Richard Maxwell (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002), 1–51.

¹⁶ Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900, 2nd edn. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998), 306.

¹⁷ Helpful sources include: Geoffrey Wakeman, Victorian Book Illustration: The Technical Revolution (Detroit, MI: Gale Research, 1973); Ruari McLean, Victorian Book Design and Colour Printing (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963); Philip James, English Book Illustration: 1800–1900 (London: King Penguin, 1947); and Paul Goldman, Victorian Illustrated Books, 1850–1870: The Heyday of Wood-Engraving (London: British Museum Press, 1994).

¹⁸ Robert L. Patten, “Book Illustration,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature, 5 vols., ed. David Scott Kastan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), I: 235–43: 238.

¹⁹ See Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, “Poetry and Illustration,” in A Companion to Victorian Poetry, ed. Richard Cronin, Alison Chapman, and Antony H. Harrison (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 392–418: 396.

²⁰ While boxwood engraving technology enabled the “golden age” of 1860s illustration, it was already in use in the late-eighteenth century, perhaps most famously in Thomas Bewick’s History of British Birds (1797–1821).

²¹ See Lorraine Janzen Kooistra’s important study, Poetry, Pictures, and Popular Publishing: The Illustrated Gift Book and Victorian Visual Culture, 1855–1875 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011).

²² Kooistra, “Poetry and Illustration,” 399.

²³ Paul Goldman, Beyond Decoration: The Illustrations of John Everett Millais (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2005), 27–8.

²⁴ William Wordsworth, “Illustrated Books and Newspapers,” in The Complete Poetical Works of William Wordsworth (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1904), 787.

²⁵ See W. J. T. Mitchell, “Space and Time: Lessing’s Laocoön and the Politics of Genre,” in Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 95–115.

²⁶ “Our Address,” The Illustrated London News 1:1 (May 14, 1842), 1.

²⁷ Richard Maxwell, “Introduction,” The Victorian Illustrated Book, ed. Richard Maxwell (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002), xxi–xxx: xxii.

²⁸ Richard Maxwell, “Afterword,” The Victorian Illustrated Book, 385–422: 392. Maxwell does not delve into the Catholic or religious connotations of the illustrated book’s medieval influence.

²⁹ Though Boydell’s instinct was strong, his execution was poor; delays in production of the illustrated works ultimately led to his insolvency, despite the popularity of the project. See Walter Pape and Frederick Burwick, eds., The Boydell Shakespeare Gallery (Bottrop, Germany: Verlag Peter Pomp, 1996).

³⁰ “Bibles,” Illustrated London News (October 5, 1861), 344.

³¹ See Donato Esposito, “Dalziels’ Bible Gallery (1881): Assyria and the Biblical Illustration in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” in Orientalism, Assyriology and the Bible, ed. Steven W. Holloway, Hebrew Bible Monographs, vol. 10 (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2006), 267–96: 270.

³² See Leslie Howsam, Cheap Bibles: Nineteenth-Century Publishing and the British and Foreign Bible Society (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

³³ The Religious Tract Society also displayed religious works translated into fifty-four languages and dialects. See Geoffrey Cantor, Religion and the Great Exhibition of 1851 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Cantor argues that the Exhibition was far more religious in tenor than scholars have previously allowed. By contrast, John P. Burris describes how the Bibles were almost excluded from the exhibition because they didn’t easily fit into any of the thirty categories. Eventually they were accepted for display “in the machinery department near the printing machines,” and even then stuck under an unsatisfactory staircase. See Burris, Exhibiting Religion: Colonialism and Spectacle at International Expositions, 1851–1893 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001), 53.

³⁴ See Leslie Howsam, Cheap Bibles, 99.

³⁵ On the ubiquity of Bibles in Victorian households, regardless of social class or Protestant denomination, see Frances Knight, The Nineteenth-Century Church and English Society (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 36–46.

³⁶ McDannell, Material Christianity, 15. The emergence in Britain of “family Bibles” from unlicensed printers is described in Mary Wilson Carpenter, Imperial Bibles, Domestic Bodies, xvi.

³⁷ Simon Nowell-Smith, The House of Cassell, 1848–1958 (London: Cassell, 1958), 36.

³⁸ These facts are discussed by Michaela Giebelhausen in Painting the Bible: Representation and Belief in Mid-Victorian Britain (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006). Giebelhausen analyzes illustrated Bibles as “a context for [painter William Holman] Hunt’s pictorial concerns” (134), noting that Hunt owned a copy of Knight’s Pictorial Bible.

³⁹ “Cassell’s Illustrated Family Bible,” The Examiner 2799 (September 21, 1861), 601.

⁴⁰ John Ruskin, Modern Painters III (1856), in The Complete Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (London: George Allen, 1904), 5:88.

⁴¹ Cassell’s Illustrated Family Bible sold 350,000 copies in six years, according to Richard Altick (The English Common Reader, 303).

⁴² I summarize from the biographical account presented in Nowell-Smith, The House of Cassell.

⁴³ Ibid., 31–2.

⁴⁴ Cassell’s poor bookkeeping skills led him to declare bankruptcy in 1854, when his business and publishing name were purchased by the printers Thomas Dixon Galpin and George William Petter. Cassell became their partner in 1858, and the company went on to profit greatly from publications illustrated by the French artist, Gustave Doré. Cassell’s publication firm persisted into the twentieth and even twenty-first centuries. See Nowell-Smith, House of Cassell.

⁴⁵ Altick, Common Reader, 304. Altick provides a brief biography of Cassell, 302–4.

⁴⁶ This information about Cassell’s Illustrated Family Bible is provided in Nowell-Smith, House of Cassell, 57.

⁴⁷ Ibid., 62.

⁴⁸ Ibid., 58.

⁴⁹ Millicent Rose, “Introduction to the Dover Edition,” The Doré Bible Illustrations (New York: Dover, 1974), v–ix: vi. Rose is quoting from an early 1870s advertisement that appeared on a parts wrapper to the Doré Bible, which was also published by Cassell.

⁵⁰ This advertisement appeared ubiquitously in Cassell publications, including on parts wrappers to the Bible itself. See, for example, Cassell’s Handbook of Natural and Experimental Philosophy (London: Cassell, Petter, and Galpin, 1861), 96.

⁵¹ Cassell’s Illustrated Family Bible, 2 vols. (London: Cassell, 1859–63), 1.iv. Further citations will refer parenthetically to this edition.

⁵² Michel Foucault, “Preface,” The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, [1970], 1994), xvi. Foucault theorizes the concept of heterotopia in the preface to The Order of Things and also in the essay “Different Spaces,” in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault, vol. 2, ed. J. D. Faubion (London: Penguin, [1967], 1998), 175–85. All of the citations after the first in this paragraph refer parenthetically to this latter essay and edition.

⁵³ Contemporary scholarship has embraced the idea of the heterotopia for its disruptive and liberatory politics, but Foucault’s original account chooses examples that are decidedly normative. A ship is a heterotopia “par excellence”: it is both a powerful instrument of “economic development” and also a “reservoir of imagination” (“Different Spaces,” 185). Foucault celebrates the ship even while acknowledging its participation in imperial projects and institutions.

⁵⁴ American nineteenth-century advertisement for the Brattleboro Typographic Company; quoted in Paul G. Gutjahr, An American Bible: A History of the Good Book in the United States, 1777–1880 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 64.

⁵⁵ The claim appears in the advertisement for Cassell’s Bible cited in note 50 above.

⁵⁶ Steven W. Holloway, “Assur is King of Persia: Illustrations of the Book of Esther in Some Nineteenth-Century Sources,” Journal of Religion and Society 11 (2009), 1–15: 11.

⁵⁷ Steven Holloway, analyzing Bible illustrators of Esther, notes that artists “tended to default to … Neo-Assyrian visual motifs …, despite the ready availability of drawings of authentic Achaemenid imperial sculpture” (“Assur is King of Persia,” 11).

⁵⁸ Ibid., 11.

⁵⁹ Quoted in ibid., 9.

⁶⁰ Ibid., 9.

⁶¹ See Steven W. Holloway, “Mad to See the Monuments,” Bible Review 17:6 (December 2001), 38–47, 55–7: 45–6.

⁶² This example is listed, among others, in Holloway, “Assur is the King of Persia,” 6. Holloway cites numerous examples of Assyrian imagery appearing in Cassell’s Bible, but does not observe the fact that both Jewish and non-Jewish figures appear in Assyrian costumes and styles.

⁶³ Frederick N. Bohrer, Orientalism and Visual Culture: Imagining Mesopotamia in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 175, 212–18.

⁶⁴ Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, [1978], 1994), 63.

⁶⁵ Thus a reviewer of Gustave Doré’s Bible, discussed below, praises his illustrations for “a realism unapproached in the works of any other artist. His Eastern pictures are a-glow with oriental splendour. His priests and soldiers are robed … in the costume of their age; the buildings are such as those common to the East in ancient times: and the trees and … all the lower animals, are such as we may find in Syria at this day.” The Quiver (April 7, 1866). Review reprinted in Blanche Roosevelt, Life and Reminiscences of Gustave Doré (New York: Cassell, 1885), 256–8: 258.

⁶⁶ W. M. Rossetti, “The Externals of Sacred Art,” The Crayon 5:12 (December 1858), 333–6: 334.

⁶⁷ Eitan Bar-Yosef, The Holy Land in English Culture 1799–1917: Palestine and the Question of Orientalism (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2005), 8.

⁶⁸ The classic, devastating essay applying Said’s concept of orientalism to the sphere of the visual arts is Linda Nochlin, “The Imaginary Orient,” in The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth-Century Art and Society (New York: Harper and Row, 1989), 33–59.

⁶⁹ Bar-Yosef, The Holy Land in English Culture, 9–12. Bar-Yosef’s analysis diverges from that of Mary Wilson Carpenter in Imperial Bibles. Carpenter studies a small number of early nineteenth-century Bibles that demarcated taboo material, such as male homosexuality, as too Jewish or too “Oriental”; these scandalous sections were marked off for private reading by “the Master” in his “CLOSET” (38, 34). Carpenter concludes that Victorian Bibles anglicized and whitewashed biblical content: “Whatever was exotic, sensational, and alien in the Bible could be assigned to ‘the Jews’ or ‘Eastern Customs’; whatever was domestic, safe, and familiar, to that ‘English Bible’ on which … the sun never set” (47). By contrast, the best-selling Bibles that I consider did not work to separate the reader from the ancient content, and, as I argue, many of the illustrations encouraged readers to identify with ancient Jews, suggesting complicated fantasies of self mingling with other.

⁷⁰ Bar-Yosef, The Holy Land in English Culture, 15.

⁷¹ Ibid., 16. As Bar-Yosef notes, while nineteenth-century Britain had always maintained a strategic interest in Palestine, especially in protecting its trade route to India, the British Empire was only one of many European powers competing for influence in the region. Twentieth-century events transpired to bring Britain into Palestine, but “up until 1917, exclusive control of the Holy Land by a single European power seemed unthinkable” (3).

⁷² Bar-Yosef takes the phrase “Orientalization of the self” from John Barrell’s study, The Infection of Thomas de Quincey: A Psychopathology of Imperialism (1991). I in turn adopt the phrase for my chapter title, “Orients of the Self”; but in my slight modification, I emphasize the “orient” as both a place and a verb, to orient, to align, to gain one’s bearings.

⁷³ Art critic Philip G. Hamerton calls Doré “the most popular and famous living illustrator in the world” in his 1866 review, “Gustave Doré’s Bible,” The Fortnightly Review 4:24 (May 1, 1866), 669–81: 669. Colleen McDannell, in her brief consideration of Doré, notes that his name became inseparable from the idea of Bible illustration in later nineteenth-century America (Material Christianity 93). Helpful sources on Doré include two exhibition catalogues: Philippe Kaenel, ed., Doré: Master of Imagination (Paris: Musée D’Orsay, 2014); and Eric Zafran, ed., Fantasy and Faith: The Art of Gustave Doré (New York: Dahesh Museum of Art and New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007).

⁷⁴ Rose, “Introduction to the Dover Edition,” The Doré Bible Illustrations, vi. Doré’s Bible was originally published in French as La Sainte Bible: Selon la Vulgate (Tours, France: Alfred Mame et Fils, 1866). Though the first edition is dated 1866, it actually appeared in late 1865.

⁷⁵ Dan Malan details the publication history of Doré’s Bible illustrations in Gustave Doré: Adrift on Dreams of Splendor (St. Louis, MO: Malan Classical Enterprises, 1995), 81–5. Malan shows how Cassell followed up initial, expensive editions of Doré’s Bible with increasingly affordable versions, beginning with parts editions from 1866 to 1870 and 1872 to 1876. In 1872 each part sold for 7d; by 1892, a cheap edition of the Bible offered 194 engravings for 15s.

⁷⁶ Rose, “Introduction to the Dover Edition,” The Doré Bible Illustrations, viii.

⁷⁷ Doré did contribute three illustrations to Cassell’s earlier Bible edition, including, not surprisingly, “The Deluge.” Yet these contributions were minor in a collection of more than 900 images.

⁷⁸ British audiences accepted Doré’s French biblical subject-matter—with the exception of the concrete rendering of the Creator in the opening pages. Cassell excised these parts from his English versions of Doré’s Bible.

⁷⁹ As the Eclectic Review writes in 1867, “Martin was a wild, undisciplined genius, but there were many points of resemblance between his pencil and that of Doré” (143). “VII. The Illustrations of Gustave Doré,” The Eclectic Review 12 (February 1867), 141–7. John Martin’s reception in France is described in Jean Seznec, John Martin en France (London: Faber & Faber, 1964). Martin also published his own Illustrations of the Bible (1831–5), a series of twenty mezzotints.

⁸⁰ “Illustrations of Gustave Doré,” Eclectic Review, 143. Sarah C. Schaefer argues for a contrast between Martin and Doré because Doré magnified his figures against their architectural backgrounds, while Martin tended to shrink figures in the midst of vast structures. Yet despite this contrast, I would argue that the lineage still holds, especially given their shared interests in sublime, apocalyptic subject-matter. Victorian commentators insistently linked the two artists. See Sarah C. Schaefer, “‘From the Smallest Fragment’: The Archaeology of the Doré Bible,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 13:1 (Spring 2014), <http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/spring14/schaefer-on-the-archaeology-of-the-dore-bible>.

⁸¹ Albert Boime, Art in an Age of Counterrevolution, 1815–1848 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 557–9.

⁸² Doré’s Bible illustrations also connote modernity in their similarities to his later book, London: A Pilgrimage (1872), in which the illustrator portrays the hellish, vibrant world of the modern metropolis. The “pilgrimage” of the book’s title invokes a religious journey. The famous final image depicts a New Zealander contemplating London’s future ruin, recapitulating the “Last Judgment” eschatology of the Bible and predicting an ominous, Babylonian future for modern Britain.

⁸³ The Eclectic Review notes Doré’s penchant for “strange monstrosity,” observing that “he does the weird wonderfully” (“Illustrations of Gustave Doré,” 144, 146). Philip G. Hamerton writes, “Fancy one of the very cleverest of those [old French Gothic carvers] … set down in modern Paris, with wooden blocks to draw upon, influenced by modern surroundings … and you would have something like Doré.” Hamerton, “Gustave Doré’s Bible,” 672.

⁸⁴ Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, Poetry, Pictures, and Popular Publishing, 240. Kooistra in turn takes information about Doré’s illustration practices from Philip James, English Book Illustration, 1800–1900 (London: King Penguin, 1947), 49.

⁸⁵ Kooistra, Poetry, Pictures, and Popular Publishing, 240.

⁸⁶ Gerry Beegan, The Mass Image: A Social History of Photomechanical Reproduction in Victorian London (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 68. Quoted in Kooistra, Poetry, Pictures, and Popular Publishing, 240. Beegan does not mention Doré in his study; Kooistra examines Doré’s illustrations of Tennyson’s poetry.

⁸⁷ Frances Knight, Nineteenth-Century Church and English Society, 39.

⁸⁸ Here I diverge from Mary Wilson Carpenter’s study Imperial Bibles, Domestic Bodies, which argues that Victorian Bibles catered to newly empowered, middle-class female consumers. For Carpenter, the female purchaser was also, “in her symbolic function as “angel in the house,’ the consuming subject of the British Family Bible in the nineteenth century” (50). By contrast, I observe that the best-selling Bibles featured illustrations that were overtly violent and patriarchal. It is interesting to contemplate the fact that women were often purchasing these masculinist representations.

⁸⁹ Edward Adams, Liberal Epic: The Victorian Practice of History from Gibbon to Churchill (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011). Adams does not discuss gender in his study, but it seems important that the heroes he analyzes are all male, figuring in a profoundly masculinist political tradition.

⁹⁰ Ibid., 8. Adams is citing Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 31.

⁹¹ Sue Zemka, “The Death of Gordon and the Birth of Modern Martyrdom,” conference paper delivered at the North American Victorian Studies Association Annual Conference, 2015, unpublished MS, p. 9. I am grateful to the author for allowing me to cite this work.

⁹² Adams, Liberal Epic, 5.

⁹³ Ibid., 5.

⁹⁴ Dan Malan, quoting from a 1973 biography of Cecil B. DeMille (by Charles Higham), notes that DeMille’s favorite book as a child was the Doré Bible Gallery (Gustave Doré, 89). In 1947, DeMille purchased religious paintings by Doré that had been on display at the Doré Gallery (Gustave Doré, 89). See also Caroline Vander Stichele, “Silent Saviours: Representations of Jesus’ Passion in Early Cinema,” in The Ancient World in Silent Cinema, ed. Pantelis Michelakis and Maria Wyke (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 169–88, especially p. 177; and Aaron Rich, “The Accent of Truth: The Hollywood Research Bible and the Republic of Images,” Representations 145 (Winter 2019), 152–73.

⁹⁵ The New York Times in 1888 gives notice of a popular “Biblical Scenorama” composed of Doré images. See “Biblical Scenorama,” New York Times, June 4, 1888, p. 8. See also Dan Malan, “Gustave Doré: Magic Lantern Slides,” The Magic Lantern Gazette 14:2 (June 2002), 1–7.

⁹⁶ T. Jack Thompson, “Missionaries and the Magic Lantern,” in Light on Darkness?: Missionary Photography of Africa in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2012), 207–38, especially p. 220.

⁹⁷ See Paul Goldman, Beyond Decoration: The Illustrations of John Everett Millais (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2005).

⁹⁸ “Christmas Books, No. 1,” Saturday Review 16:423 (December 5, 1863), 738–9: 738.

⁹⁹ Mary Lutyens, “Introduction to the Dover Edition,” The Parables of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, pictures by John Everett Millais, engraved by the Brothers Dalziel (New York: Dover Publications, [1864], 1975), xviii.

¹⁰⁰ John Ruskin, Modern Painters III, in The Complete Works of John Ruskin, 5: 78.

¹⁰¹ See Rachel Teukolsky, The Literate Eye: Victorian Art Writing and Modernist Aesthetics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 25–63.

¹⁰² See Harold C. Gardiner, Mysteries’ End: An Investigation into the Last Days of the Medieval Religious Stage (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1946), 47–8.

¹⁰³ John Russell Stephens, “Religion and the Stage,” in The Censorship of English Drama 1824–1901 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 92–114: 93.

¹⁰⁴ Ibid., 100.

¹⁰⁵ Ibid., 113.

¹⁰⁶ E. M. Kauffmann, ed., The Bible in British Art, exhibition catalogue (London: Victoria & Albert Museum, 1977), 23. Michaela Giebelhausen, in Painting the Bible, argues that Hunt was influenced by the new illustrated Bibles, including Knight’s Pictorial Bible and Cassell’s Illustrated Family Bible, which both served to popularize a “scientific” vision of Christian themes (134–41).

¹⁰⁷ George P. Landow explores the typological symbolism of Millais’s Christ in the House of His Parents in Victorian Types, Victorian Shadows: Biblical Typology in Victorian Literature, Art and Thought (Boston, MA: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), 123–5.

¹⁰⁸ Charles Dickens, “Old Lamps for New Ones,” Household Words (June 15, 1850), 265–7: 266.

¹⁰⁹ Michaela Giebelhausen discusses the controversy surrounding Millais’s painting in Painting the Bible, 100–26. See also J. B. Bullen, “The Ugliness of Early Pre-Raphaelitism,” in The Pre-Raphaelite Body: Fear and Desire in Painting, Poetry, and Criticism (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1998), 6–48.

¹¹⁰ See Simon Cooke, Illustrated Periodicals of the 1860s: Contexts and Collaborations (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2010). Paul Goldman discusses the history of Good Words in Victorian Illustrated Books, 1850–1870, 48–52.

¹¹¹ An article on “The Moon—is It Inhabited?” recommends consulting recent “stereoscopic pictures” of the moon for greatest visual accuracy (Good Words 1:1 (December 1860), 24). A piece of scripture analysis is titled “Woman’s Noblest Attitude: A Photograph from the Gospel History” (Good Words 1:1 (December 1860), 33). The journal reviews a new telescope in “Experiments with the Trophy Telescope of the First Exhibition,” Good Words 4 (January 1863), 125–32. It also runs a series of essays by scientist David Brewster on “The Human Eye: Its Phenomena and Illusions” (see Good Words 3 (December 1862), 498–503).

¹¹² Thomas Guthrie, “The Parables Read in the Light of the Present Day.” The series is introduced in Good Words 4 (January 1863), 1–7.

¹¹³ Thomas Guthrie, “The Parables Read in the Light of the Present Day. IV—The Parable of the Good Samaritan,” Good Words 4 (January 1863), 241–7: 241.

¹¹⁴ “Millais’ ‘Parables,’” The New Path 1:11 (March 1864), 145–52: 148.

¹¹⁵ “The Parables of Our Lord,” Athenaeum 1887 (December 26, 1863), 881–2: 882, 881.

¹¹⁶ “The Royal Academy. Exhibition, 1862,” Art Journal 6 (June 1862), 129–38: 130. The oil painting version of “The Lost Piece of Silver” was later destroyed, but preserved as a mezzotint, showing that the painting had almost the same composition as the original engraving (Mary Lutyens, “Introduction to the Dover Edition,” The Parables of Our Lord, xxvii).

¹¹⁷ “Christmas Books, No. 1,” Saturday Review 16:423 (December 5, 1863), 738–9: 738.

¹¹⁸ See Michael Mason, “The Way We Look Now: Millais’ Illustrations to Trollope,” Art History 1:3 (September 1978), 309–40; Hilary Gresty, “Millais and Trollope: Author and Illustrator,” The Book Collector 30 (1981), 43–61; and N. John Hall, Trollope and His Illustrators.

¹¹⁹ Millais complained of the effort he was lavishing on the parable illustrations in an 1859 letter to the Dalziel brothers: “I can do ordinary illustrations as quickly as most men, but these designs can scarcely be regarded in this same light—each Parable I illustrate perhaps a dozen times before I fix, and the hidden Treasure I have altered upon the wood at least six times” (quoted in Lutyens, “Introduction,” Parables, xxi).

¹²⁰ “Millais’ ‘Parables,’” The New Path, 147.

¹²¹ For more on biblical typology, see Landow, Victorian Types, Victorian Shadows.

¹²² See the essays collected in Colin Cruise and Victoria Osborne, ed., Love Revealed: Simeon Solomon and the Pre-Raphaelites (London: Merrell, 2005). Also important is Thais E. Morgan, “Perverse Male Bodies: Simeon Solomon and Algernon Charles Swinburne,” in Outlooks: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities and Visual Cultures, ed. Peter Horne and Reina Lewis (London: Routledge, 1996), 61–85.

¹²³ Lays of the Holy Land from Ancient and Modern Poets, with Illustrations from Original Photographs and Drawings (London: James Nisbet, 1858), 294. The poem is authored by “Sigourney,” aka Lydia Huntley Sigourney (1791–1865).

¹²⁴ See Geoffrey Alderman, “English Jews or Jews of the English Persuasion? Reflections on the Emancipation of Anglo-Jewry,” in Paths of Emancipation: Jews, States, and Citizenship, ed. Pierre Birnbaum and Ira Katznelson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 128–56: 128–30.

¹²⁵ Richard Dellamora, Friendship’s Bonds: Democracy and the Novel in Victorian England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 12.

¹²⁶ Ibid., 2. Dellamora takes the phrase “internal Others” from Jonathan Boyarin, Storm from Paradise: The Politics of Jewish Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 98. Dellamora studies the discourse of male friendship necessary to modern citizenship, and the attendant anxieties about sexuality, sodomy, and “corrupting” influences between men (3).

¹²⁷ Bryan Cheyette, Constructions of ‘the Jew’ in English Literature and Society: Racial Representations, 1875–1945 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 6.

¹²⁸ As one critic complained in 1866, “Solomon’s Jewish proclivities still cling to him; and though his efforts, to us, are exceedingly unpleasing, they find admiring purchasers.” ‘Your Bohemian,’ “Mems of the Month,” Sharpe’s London Magazine of Entertainment and Instruction for General Reading (May 1866), 272–4: 274.

¹²⁹ A. M. W. Stirling, The Richmond Papers, from the Correspondence and Manuscripts of George Richmond, R.A., and His Son, Sir William Richmond, R.A., K.C.B. (London: William Heinemann, 1926), 160. Stirling notes that Richmond’s comments on Solomon were penned before the artist’s arrest in 1873 (161).

¹³⁰ Ibid., 161.

¹³¹ A. C. Swinburne, “Simeon Solomon: Notes on His ‘Vision of Love’ and Other Studies,” The Dark Blue 1:5 (July 1871), 568–77: 572.

¹³² These descriptors appear in Matthew Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature and On Translating Homer (London: Macmillan, [1867], 1903), 82–90.

¹³³ Given the Dionysian associations of Victorian Jewishness, it makes sense that Walter Pater later invokes Solomon in his 1876 essay “A Study of Dionysus.” Pater refers to Solomon as “a young Hebrew painter” whose 1868 painting of Bacchus typifies a “melancholy and sorrowing Dionysus, … the god of the bitterness of wine” (Greek Studies, Project Gutenberg, <http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4035>). Pater’s allusion to Solomon in 1876 was daring, coming three years after the painter’s arrest for public homosexuality.

¹³⁴ Solomon brandished his Jewishness defiantly in his personal life. He was known to dress up in “oriental” costume and to declaim passages from the Hebrew Torah while staying in the mansions of his aristocratic friends. Meanwhile, his friend and fellow artist Edward Burne-Jones referred to him in a letter to Swinburne as “the ‘Jewjube.’” Simon Reynolds, The Vision of Simeon Solomon (Stroud, UK: Catalpa Press, 1984), 13.

¹³⁵ G. L., “Jews in England,” Once a Week 7:163 (August 9, 1862), 190–6: 190, 191.

¹³⁶ “Illustrations of Jewish Customs. X—The Week of Mourning,” Leisure Hour 15 (December 29, 1866), 823–5: 823n, 825.

¹³⁷ Jeffrey Laird Collins, “Prototype, Posing, and Preference in the Illustrations of Frederick Sandys and Simeon Solomon,” in Pocket Cathedrals: Pre-Raphaelite Book Illustration, ed. Susan Casteras (New Haven, CT: Yale Center for British Art, 1991), 79–91, 110: 85.

¹³⁸ Richard I. Cohen, Jewish Icons: Art and Society in Modern Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 156.

¹³⁹ A. C. Swinburne, “Simeon Solomon: Notes on His ‘Vision of Love,’” 572.

¹⁴⁰ The Athenaeum reviewed the images in 1862, when they were first published as a book of photographs, before being later reprinted in serial form in The Leisure Hour in 1866. “Fine-Art Gossip,” The Athenaeum 1809 (June 28, 1862), 860.

¹⁴¹ Already by 1859, Solomon was making biblical drawings with homoerotic, androgynous figures, as in his David Playing before Saul. In 1858 he had started apprenticing in Rossetti’s studio, where he would have been exposed to non-normative ideas about gender and visuality. His decision in 1862, then, to depict Jewish ceremonies featuring old, bearded men was a choice rather than merely an early phase.

¹⁴² “The Feast of Dedication,” The Leisure Hour 15:736 (February 3, 1866), 72–4: 74.

¹⁴³ The Jewish Chronicle, reviewing Solomon’s illustrations in their 1862 book form, criticized them for focusing too much on individual figures, thus “sacrificing the mass to the individual.” The images “exclude the grand view of the synagogue, crowded with devout worshippers,” and thus “fail to call forth those holy feelings of awe.” Solomon’s emphasis on individuals resonates with my argument linking Bible illustration to certain strands of liberal philosophy. See “Jewish Ceremonies, by Mr. S. Solomon,” The Jewish Chronicle and Hebrew Observer 1 (August 1862), 8.

¹⁴⁴ The Jewish Family Bible, trans. M. Friedlander, 2nd edn. (London: W. Rider & Son, 1884).

¹⁴⁵ Quotations from Eliot’s Daniel Deronda are taken from the Project Gutenberg online edition of the novel, <http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7469>.

¹⁴⁶ Catherine Gallagher studies Daniel Deronda’s critique of Jewish cosmopolitanism in “George Eliot and Daniel Deronda: The Prostitute and the Jewish Question,” in Sex, Politics, and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Novel, ed. Ruth Bernard Yeazell (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 39–62: 56.

¹⁴⁷ Cheyette, Constructions of ‘the Jew’ in English Literature and Society, 48.

¹⁴⁸ “Illustrations of Modern Jewish Life. V.—The Eve of the Jewish Sabbath,” The Leisure Hour 15:755 (June 16, 1866), 376–7: 377.

¹⁴⁹ “The Feast of Dedication,” Leisure Hour, 72.

¹⁵⁰ See Daniel Boyarin, Daniel Itzkovitz, and Ann Pellegrini, eds., Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003).

¹⁵¹ The Holy Bible … Illustrated with Photographs by [Francis] Frith (Glasgow: William Mackenzie, 1862–3).

¹⁵² Thomas De Quincey, Autobiographic Sketches (1853), Project Gutenberg, <http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7306>.

¹⁵³ Charles Higham, Cecil B. DeMille: A Biography of the Most Successful Film Maker of Them All (New York: Scribner, 1973), 7. Quoted in Malan, Gustave Doré, 89.

¹⁵⁴ Maxwell, “Afterword,” The Victorian Illustrated Book, 419.

¹⁵⁵ Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 4–5.

¹⁵⁶ Ibid., 12.

¹⁵⁷ Quoted in Timothy K. Beal, Roadside Religion: In Search of the Sacred, the Strange, and the Substance of Faith (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2005), 51.

¹⁵⁸ Ibid., 60.

¹⁵⁹ Ibid., 53.

¹⁶⁰ Graham Ward, True Religion (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003), 123.

¹⁶¹ Eric Zafran, “Doré in America,” in Doré: Master of Imagination, ed. Philippe Kaenel, 259–63: 263.

¹⁶² John Davis, The Landscape of Belief: Encountering the Holy Land in Nineteenth-Century American Art and Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 94. Quoted in Burke O. Long, Imagining the Holy Land: Maps, Models, and Fantasy Travels (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 27.

¹⁶³ Burke O. Long notes how Victorian-era Bible parks and re-creations led directly into nationalist, anti-Semitic American tourist biblical sites of the twentieth century, what he calls “Starred and Striped Holy Lands” (Imagining the Holy Land, 43–87).

¹⁶⁴ David Edelstein, review of The Passion of the Christ in Slate, February 24, 2004.

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Illustration

Orients of the Self: Bible Illustration and the Victorian World Picture