DHSI 2014: Understanding the Pre-Digital Book

1. DHSI 2014: Understanding the Pre-Digital Book Reading Tess in The Graphic

2. Our group chose to examine the first edition of Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D’urbervilles, which was published in The Graphic July 4, 1891 through December 26, 1891. The Graphic, founded by William Luson Thomas, was a weekly paper noteworthy for its elaborate illustrations. The Graphic was published every Saturday for the price of six pence—one pence more than the cost of its competitor paper, The Illustrated London News. The Graphic was printed on high quality paper, a large format (38cm by 29 cm), of twenty-four page installments. The paper sold throughout the British Empire as well as the United States, and covered a range of topics including literature, sports, music, arts, and sciences.

3. The first issue of The Graphic appeared on December 4, 1869, and continued through 1832, at which point the paper changed its name to The National Graphic. Illustrations for Tess were created by a team working under the supervision of Professor Hubert Herkomer, RA. The number and quality of illustrations in each issue are inconsistent: some are steel plates, whereas others appear to be wood engravings; some illustrations take up an entire page, whereas others appear on the page with letterpress.

4. First and Twenty-third issues have double-page illustrations. The final issue includes a full-page image of larger than life Stonehenge. All illustrations are in black and white. The novel’s title does not include the sub-title that appeared on later editions of this novel.

5. In examining this edition of Tess, our group looked to create a list of the edition’s material features that we thought would be important to convey in a digital format, and that were conspicuously absent from existing digitizations of The Graphic. The most striking of these features is the impressive size of the paper: the large folio pages of The Graphic were intended to showcase images, and thus provided the illustrators of Tess withthe freedom and space to create vivid, detailed representations of scenes in the novel, which are not always included in modern editions. With this in mind, we wondered how these illustrations might have influenced the experience of Victorian readers of Tess. In our own interaction with the library’s copy of The Graphic, we were struck both by the richness of the illustrations, but also by the practical challenges of reading a serialized work of fiction in this large format.

6. Though digital images of The Graphic exist in numerous locations online, they fail to convey some aspects of the materiality of this process. What, for example, was it like to read Thomas Hardy in the image-to-text ratio that we get in the Graphic, where one page of text is accompanied by a full-page illustration? What can this form of publication tell us about the experience of reading the first edition of Tess?

7. image and text sharing the space of a single folio of The GraPhic.

8. PERIODICAL VS. TRIPLE DECKER The above image shows the relative size of The Graphic (below) and Tess in a later book edition of three volumes.

9. Reading by candlelight This image conveys the difficulty of reading a large page by candlelight: the candle is only able to illuminate a small part of the page. Interacting with Tess in The Graphic spurred us to ask questions about the necessary material conditions for reading this kind of magazine.