Transformations: REBEKKA ROHLEDER - Anglistik
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159
REBEKKA ROHLEDER
Transformations:
Image and Narration in Mary Shelley's Keepsake Stories
1. Introduction
In the frame narrative of Mary Shelley's story "The Invisible Girl" (1832) a remarkable
thing happens. The narrator describes a picture – one which the story's readers can
immediately compare with its own description, since this picture is (almost) identical
with the engraving which accompanies the story and which was, at its first publication
in an annual, The Keepsake, placed on the opposite page. What is remarkable in the
narrator's account of the picture is his sudden self-consciousness:
This drawing represented a lovely girl in the very pride and bloom of youth; her dress
was simple, in the fashion of the day – (remember, reader, I write at the beginning of the
eighteenth century), her countenance was embellished by a look of mingled innocence
and intelligence, to which was added the imprint of serenity of soul and natural
cheerfulness. (Shelley 1990, 190)
"[R]emember, reader, I write at the beginning of the eighteenth century:" As soon
as the narrator begins to describe an image, he breaks character. Until then, that is, there
has been no indication that he might be addressing readers outside his own century. In
addition to that, if the early 18th-century setting were at all relevant for the story which
follows, this is not exactly the most elegant way of conveying this information, all of
which leaves the reader with the question of what, if not unaccountable narrative
awkwardness, is the point of this disruptive moment.
To begin with, narrative disruptions regularly feature in the descriptions of images
in Mary Shelley's stories. Thus, in another tale, "Ferdinando Eboli" (1828), which I will
discuss below, the accompanying engraving, which is described towards the end of the
story, abruptly introduces an intradiegetic narrator, whom the reader knows, until then,
as a character only, and who functions as a narrator for exactly two sentences before
the extradiegetic narrator who has been telling the story so far takes over again (Shelley
1990, 78). The relationship of narration and images is clearly marked as a topic of
interest in these stories.
It should be noted that Shelley's tales for the annuals are not simply stories with
illustrations. In annuals – publications which became extremely popular from the late
1820s on – it was not the engravings which illustrated the literary text. Rather, it was
the other way around: many of the stories and poems which were published in them
were commissioned to accompany a pre-existing engraving, except with very famous
authors whose contributions the editors wanted to secure. For most authors, even when
there was already a finished text, this text might have to be adapted in order to
accommodate the image – something which Shelley sometimes had to do when writing
for annuals, adding a description or changing characters' names (Robinson 1990, xvi).
Nonetheless, the relationship of those passages which refer to the accompanying
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engravings with the rest of the story remains fraught. Narrators take a noticeable break
from storytelling in order to describe either the image as an image, or the scene it shows,
in much more detail than the economy of such a brief story justifies; in addition to that,
as we have already seen, some narrators suddenly act out of character in these passages.
The annuals' emphasis on pictures was also one of the reasons for the fact that their
cultural prestige was relatively low. They were, moreover, associated with domestic
femininity; with political and artistic conservatism; they were decidedly sentimental;
they were a commercial product aimed at a middle-class, middlebrow audience. Some
for personal use only / no unauthorized distribution
aspects of this mixture rendered them ideologically and aesthetically suspect for many
authors at the time; others still render them suspect for critics today. The annuals just
did and do not appear as a convincing platform for serious literary works (Harris 2015,
20). Accordingly, critics tend to explicitly or implicitly look for mitigating
circumstances for the fact that in the 1820s and 1830s "the Author of Frankenstein"
published several stories in The Keepsake (as well as one in another annual, Heath's
Winter Journals
Book of Beauty, and possibly also in a third, Forget Me Not1).
Critics commonly employ two strategies in order to square Shelley as a serious
author with Shelley the author of stories for the annuals. The first is a biographical
argument, founded on the fact that she needed the money – The Keepsake paid well –
which is coupled, however, with the assertion that she found the "constraints placed
upon [her] art" (Robinson 1990, xvi) in the annuals extremely problematic. These
constraints included the limited length of the stories as well as the necessity of
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integrating a reference to an illustration (Robinson 1990; Hofkosh 1993, 208-217). A
second and more complex reading understands these tales, or even The Keepsake in
total, as subtly subversive with regard to cultural and gender politics (Markley 2000;
Sussman 2003; Marino 2015, 29; Vargo 2017, 50-51). Here, the illustrations are not
denigrated as a constraint, but such interpretations, illuminating as they are with regard
to the stories, are not very interested in the images as images. They either ignore them
altogether, or they treat text and image as an unproblematic continuum, as if the
engravings in the annuals were nothing more than illustrations designed to serve the
accompanying texts. Both versions are clearly intended to redeem Shelley as an author
from any suspicion of superficiality, including, implicitly at least, the possibility that
she chose to adapt her stories in order to accommodate a mere image.2
In the following, I would like to propose a different reading, one which takes the
texts' fraught relationship with the accompanying engravings more seriously. I will
argue that Shelley does not treat these illustrations as an unproblematic continuum with
the text. She also does not treat them as an unwelcome and superfluous addition to a
1 For an illuminating discussion of authorship attribution in the Forget Me Not case, see Crook
(2019). For four examples of Shelley's Keepsake stories and accompanying images, see the
"Other Works by Mary Shelley" section of Steven Jones's Romantic Circles edition of The
Last Man, specifically this page: https://romantic-circles.org/editions/mws/lastman/
mwsfict.htm.
2 Gregory O'Dea's reading is an exception: he analyses Shelley's "striking experiments with
the relationships between image and narrative" as criticism of the Romantic aesthetics of the
fragment (O'Dea 1997, 65).
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text that was already complete in itself. Instead, she reacts to the direct confrontation
of her texts with another medium. In those passages of her stories which describe the
accompanying engravings, she explores the limits of image and text respectively,
introducing a sometimes bewildering number of references from text to image and back.
Thus, these passages should be read as an aesthetic reflection, in particular when they
draw attention to unresolved narrative difficulties. In particular, they can be read as a
reflection on the transmedial relationship of picture and narrative. Here, my reading of
the interaction of text and image goes back to Sabine Coelsch-Foisner's reflections on
transmedialisation processes, in which she focuses on the mutual transformation of
different media (Coelsch-Foisner 2019, 16-18; 23). This concept is a useful alternative
to the media hierarchies which critics tend to apply to Shelley's stories in the annuals,
and which, as we will see, many writers in Shelley's own time believed in, but which
Shelley’s stories do not support. In the following, I will first look at the cultural position
occupied by the annuals and their engravings, before going on to discuss three of
Shelley’s stories for The Keepsake: "The Sisters of Albano" and "Ferdinando Eboli"
(both 1828), and "The Invisible Girl." In all three stories, the text uses the description
of the engraving as an occasion for an implicit aesthetic reflection, which is related to
issues that are prominent in contemporary discussions of the relationship of literature
and pictures, namely temporality and a hierarchisation of the senses and art forms. At
the same time, however, these issues are also prominent themes of the stories
themselves, transforming the pre-existing image into a necessary part of the story.
2. Women, Landscapes and "crimson silk"
The annuals themselves have been read as going back to long-standing traditions of
combining image and text: Katherine D. Harris proposes that the emergence of the
annual in the 1820s should be read as "continu[ing] the tradition of a mixed-media form
that is reminiscent of fifteenth-century emblems" (2015, 2). Annuals at the time
certainly made no secret of the fact that it was the illustrations, not the texts, which
were at the centre of the whole enterprise and its commercial success. These
illustrations were often steel engravings of pre-existing paintings. The yearly editions
of The Keepsake were mainly advertised as books with spectacularly good engravings.
In addition to that, they were explicitly advertised as valuable objects, both because
they had contributions from famous artists and authors and because they were well-
made expensive books, which were (as was pointed out in advertisements) sold bound
"in crimson silk" ("Advertisement for The Keepsake for 1829" 1829, 32). In the preface
to the second Keepsake, the editor even used the high cost of producing the volume as
an argument in its favour – a statement which horrified at least one reviewer, who
strongly objected to its vulgarity ("The Annuals for 1829," Monthly Review 1829, 93).3
Clearly, then, its readers, including reviewers, expected an annual to be an elegant and
expensive product, even when not all readers agreed on how this information was to be
conveyed. After all, the annuals were published towards the end of the year, so they
3 As Kathryn Ledbetter points out, the silk bindings may not have been quite as luxurious as
marketing would have it, since there was an overabundance of silk at the time (Ledbetter
2009, 211).
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could be given as presents in the holiday season.4 Many of the annual titles indicated
their status as possible gifts: these publications were entitled Keepsake, Friendship's
Offering or Forget Me Not (Pascoe 2000, 175-177). And they were gifts designed for
middle-class women, which meant that, apart from being elegant, the annuals also had
to be absolutely respectable. Therefore, their contents were closely monitored by the
literary public. Thus, a reviewer commented on Samuel Taylor Coleridge's contribution
to The Keepsake for 1829, the poem "The Garden of Boccaccio:"
Mr. Coleridge's poetical description of the garden of Bocaccio [sic] is also a charming
performance; we should have given it unqualified praise, if it had not mentioned, in terms
not sufficiently guarded, one of the most impure and mischievous books that could find
its way into the hands of an innocent female. ("The Annuals for 1829," Monthly Review
1829, 100)
The reviewer omits to mention the book he means, maybe in order to avoid
corrupting any curious "innocent females." It is therefore not entirely clear whether he
refers to the Decameron, which the whole poem obviously (but implicitly) refers to, or
rather "Ovid's Holy Book of Love's sweet smart" (Coleridge 1996, 219), the Ars
Amatoria, which is also mentioned. The latter seems more likely, though, if the whole
poem can still count as a "charming performance." In any case, this reviewer applies
stricter standards of morality than the poet, or even The Keepsake's editors. The exact
limits of what could and could not be said in such a publication were subject to constant
renegotiation.
From the first volume on, The Keepsake explicitly addresses its intended audience
as female, and suggestively combines compliments for the readership’s assumed beauty
with a celebration of the beauty of the engravings and the women depicted in them. In
an introductory poem, the editors of the first Keepsake, the one for 1828, addressed
their readers as follows:
Unto the beautiful is beauty due;
For thee the graver's art has multiplied
The forms the painter's touch reveals to view;
Array'd in warm imagination's pride
Of loveliness (in this to thee allied).
And well with these accord poetic lays
(Two several streams from the same urn supplied);
Each to the other lends a winning grace,
As features speak the soul – the soul informs the face.
(The Keepsake for 1828, qtd. in Hofkosh 1993, 207)
Three aspects of this programmatic verse preface are particularly worth noting: its
emphasis on the materiality of the images as engravings, its description of the interplay
between text and image, and of that between the images and feminine beauty. The last
is expressed in a suggestive analogy: "Unto the beautiful is beauty due," which equates
4 This also accounts for the fact that their titles always point towards the future: each volume
was published "for" the next year, but appeared at the end of the year before.
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beautiful women with beautiful images and books. The same connection was made in
some of the annuals' titles, as an alternative to emphasising their status as a potential
gift. Thus, one annual called itself Heath's Book of Beauty, capitalising at once on the
beauty of the book and of its illustrations and on the good name of Charles Heath, who
was the proprietor of this annual as well as of The Keepsake, and personally responsible
for many of the engravings. Heath had been instrumental in introducing steel engraving
to England in the 1820s (Wilkes 2010, 345-346), and this technique, which made it
possible to produce many good copies of the same picture, was largely responsible for
the commercial success of the annuals. After all, as the poem states, "[f]or thee the
graver's art has multiplied / The forms the painter's touch reveals to view." The main
raison d'être of the annuals was the quality of their engravings of pre-existing paintings.
Accordingly, advertisements for and reviews of the annuals focused on these
engravings at least as much as on the texts. Thus, one reviewer states that
[i]t is to the admirable artist, Charles Heath, that [The Keepsake] is chiefly indebted for
its exquisite embellishments. Line engraving was undoubtedly never before brought to
the perfection it has attained in this country within the last few years. […] The largest
picture is reduced to the size of a duodecimo page, with a degree of accuracy so complete,
that the smallest leaf does not disappear from a landscape, – nor is the slightest shade of
difference in the expression of the individual features of a magnificent portrait ever
perceived. There is here a very great triumph of human ingenuity. ("The Annuals for
1829," Edinburgh Literary Journal 1828, 3)
Clearly, the most sensational aspect of these engravings was the fact that paintings
of which only one original existed could now be copied accurately and reduced in size
and therefore transferred to private and semi-private spaces. The Keepsake engravings
could even be bought separately, and for a larger sum than The Keepsake as a whole
(Hoagwood et al. 1998). Nonetheless, when the poem quoted above states that texts
and images are equally important to this annual, "[t]wo several streams from the same
urn supplied," this is completely in accordance with the way in which the first few
numbers at least were advertised. Initially, Charles Heath and the editor, Frederick
Mansell Reynolds, took care to enlist well-known authors, too (Pascoe 2000, 173) –
and to advertise this fact. Thus, The Keepsake for 1830 included a complete "List of
Contributors" after the table of contents, which gave all the authors' names (and
pseudonyms) again, in capital letters, including Sir Walter Scott, Lord Byron, S.T.
Coleridge, and "the authors of" several works, including Frankenstein.5 Since this list
5 Shelley famously published all her later novels with "the Author of Frankenstein" in place of
an author's name. The pseudonym did not serve to make her anonymous; after all, the second
edition of Frankenstein had, in 1823, been published under her name. Thus, "the Author of
Frankenstein" was in part a way of capitalising on the fame of her first and most famous
novel, which had already been adapted for the stage, and was therefore already familiar to a
public that was decidedly larger than its actual readership (St Clair 2000). It was also a way
of publishing without explicitly bringing her late husband's name before the public, which
Percy Bysshe Shelley's father, Sir Timothy Shelley, on whom she and her son depended for
financial support, had, in 1824, explicitly forbidden her from doing (Shelley 1980, 513, note
2; Eberle-Sinatra 2000, 98). It should be noted, though, that Mary Shelley used The Keepsake
as a forum in which to avoid or possibly test this injunction, in a publication with a much
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was placed directly under the table of contents, which also named the authors of
individual contributions, the information conveyed in the "List of Contributors" is not
so much who the authors are but rather what they are. It underlines their importance,
not just by the consistent use of capital letters, but also by the way in which the names
are arranged. Thus, authors with a title of nobility (except Lady Caroline Lamb) were
all at the beginning of the list. "[P]eople read the names of dukes and marquises, till
they fancy coronets on their own heads," as Leigh Hunt commented on the annuals'
marketing practice (qtd. in Hofkosh 1993, 206). The other prominent place, the end of
the list, is occupied by the "authors of:" here, literary fame is the main sales argument.
This "List of Contributors" was printed in the book itself, but it was also used for
advertising purposes. Thus, The Keepsake for 1829 was advertised in the magazine The
Athenaeum with its whole "List of Contributors," simply introduced by "This day is
published, in crimson silk, price 21 s., The Keepsake for 1829. Edited by F. Mansel
Reynolds." The list was apparently intended to speak for itself, and it contains even
more canonical authors' names than it would in the next year: Sir Walter Scott, William
Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, Felicia Hemans, Letitia
Elizabeth Landon, Percy Bysshe Shelley (posthumously) and Mary Shelley (here, too,
as "Author of Frankenstein"). Even more prestigious copies of The Keepsake are
advertised under this list: "A few copies are printed in royal 8vo., with India Proofs of
the plate […] and for these early application is necessary." The text ends by stating that
there are only very few copies of the previous year's Keepsake still available
("Advertisement for The Keepsake for 1829" 1829, 32). Thus, the product is made to
appear valuable, both for its intrinsic qualities, material and literary, and by means of
artificial scarcity, suggesting that buyers should feel lucky if they manage to obtain a
copy at all (Hofkosh 1993, 206).
It is, however, symptomatic of the direction which the annuals subsequently took
that four years later The Keepsake for 1833 was, this time in the Literary Gazette,
primarily advertised with its list of illustrations. The volume was, as ever, published
"in crimson silk," and it was "[e]mbellished with 17 highly finished Line Engravings,"
which are then listed. The authors are named only in second place, and there are
decidedly fewer names of high literary fame. Mary Shelley is still a contributor, but
Wordsworth, Scott, Southey, and Coleridge were, by then, no longer writing for The
Keepsake ("Splendid Annuals" 1832, 768).6
higher circulation than most novels at the time ever enjoyed (for a comparison between the
circulation of annuals and other publications, see Paley [1994, 2]). She had an essay and three
poems by Percy Bysshe Shelley published in The Keepsake for 1829 (Manning 1995, 55),
and she herself was listed as "Mrs. Shelley" in the "List of Contributors" of The Keepsake
for 1832 (but as "The Author of Frankenstein" in the table of contents). This is despite the
fact that in 1826, Sir Timothy had even objected to "Mrs. Shelley" being mentioned by name
in the reviews of The Last Man (Peacock 1934).
6 In fact, in this advertisement The Keepsake is the only one of the "splendid annuals" which
is still advertised with a list of contributors at all. Heath's Book of Beauty and Heath's
Picturesque Annual are represented by their list of plates only.
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In fact, the famous male authors' relationship to the annuals had always been
strained. In 1828, Wordsworth, Scott, Southey and Coleridge all felt the need to
privately stress that they contributed to The Keepsake despite the fact that they
considered the annual and its editors slightly vulgar, and that it was only the money
which motivated them. "Money, – money you know makes the mare go, – and what is
Pegasus, but a piece of horse-flesh," as Southey expressed it, managing to both criticise
The Keepsake's focus on financial gain, and to use it as a justification for his own
involvement at the same time (qtd. in Manning 1995, 49). Elsewhere, he summarily
denounced the annuals as "picture books for grown children" (qtd. in Pascoe 2000, 177).
The (primarily female) readers' interest in the illustrations is framed as regressive.
Clearly, the annuals' cultural prestige was not very high, and their combination of texts
and images had a part to play in this.
3. Literature and Image in the Early 19th Century
In fact, some tension is already built into the Keepsake editors' enthusiastic claims about
images and literature being "(Two several streams from the same urn supplied); / Each
to the other lends a winning grace, / As features speak the soul – the soul informs the
face" (qtd. in Hofkosh 1993, 207). The imagery employed in these lines consistently
fails to satisfactorily describe the relationship between text and image. The first
metaphor, the two streams from the same urn, harmonises the two art forms into one
substance, leaving them free to take separate ways only after that, as "separate streams."
This is despite the fact that what The Keepsake actually did was combining the two, not
allowing them to go separate ways. The other metaphor, which describes the
relationship between text and image as that between soul and face, appears even more
problematic. It is not at all clear which art form is supposed to be the soul and which
one is the face. In addition to that, their alleged reciprocity is undermined by the very
next verse, which repeats the same claim twice: "As features speak the soul – the soul
informs the face." Influence goes in only one direction here, from soul to face. The
alleged aesthetic innovation of the annuals remains highly doubtful even within The
Keepsake itself.
Indeed, high culture in the early 19th century generally reacted with suspicion to any
suggestion that text and image could be of equal value. Wordsworth's 1846 sonnet on
"Illustrated Books and Newspapers" may serve as an example of the cultural pessimism
triggered by new media at the time. Here, he calls "Discourse" "Man's noblest
attribute," enhanced by the inventions of writing and printing. These inventions form a
high point in a rise and fall narrative: after printing has been used "For spreading truth,
and making love expand," he complains that now "prose and verse […] / Must lacquey
a dumb Art," and that this constitutes a "backward movement," namely "From manhood,
– back to childhood," in which eyes must "be all in all, the tongue and ear / Nothing"
(Wordsworth 1886, 172). This is Southey's "grown children" all over again, only as an
overall cultural diagnosis this time, not just as disdain for particularly immature readers.
Wordsworth imagines the whole culture going back from enlightened discourse to cave
paintings. Only language is here allowed a positive development, from speech to
writing and print. Images, in whatever form, are still cave paintings: they cannot
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develop, Wordsworth implies. The more abstract art form is described as superior
because culturally more valuable; the image is allegedly more immediately accessible
and therefore subordinate to the arbitrary signs of speech and writing. Nonetheless, it
is also imagined as a danger to them: the text becomes subordinate to the culturally
inferior, dumb image. Any other interaction between the two art forms beyond such
power relationships is apparently unimaginable to the poet. The two cannot interact on
the same plane; after all, they are not even perceived with the same senses, he alleges,
more or less elegantly omitting to comment on the fact that written and printed texts
(which he approves of) are also perceived through the eyes (which he does not approve
of), not through the ears.
Clearly, then, literature and the visual arts are anything but "[t]wo several streams
from the same urn supplied" in Romantic aesthetics. Instead, writers in particular liked
to construct a hierarchy of sign systems in which language is accorded a special and
superior place. In its most influential form, such an aesthetics was formulated in
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's Laokoon (1766): here, poetry and painting were
conceptualised as two art forms with completely different properties and possibilities,
which means that they cannot even properly represent the same things. Lessing claims
that signifiers should stand in a self-evident relationship to the signified, so that signifiers
which stand side by side like those employed by the visual arts should represent "subjects
which, or the various parts of which, exist […] side by side;" by contrast, "signs which
succeed each other," like those of language – should be used for "subjects which, or the
various parts of which, succeed each other" (Lessing 1985, 99).7
It has been argued that Lessing's concept of the relationship of signifier and
signified is semiotically highly problematic (Hewlett Koelb 2006, 49-51). And indeed,
he runs into difficulties with literature which does not confine itself to the expression
of actions in time. Language, Lessing says, is of course able to describe bodies in space,
since the linguistic sign is arbitrary as well as sequential: it does not really need to stand
in a self-evident relationship to the signified (Lessing 1988, 112). Such a description,
he claims, is not as good as representing the same body in space in the visual arts,
though: in contrast to an image, a description of a thing is not "täuschend," it does not
have the same effect as the thing itself, but good description should do exactly that,
since it is the aim of literature to convey by a description the effect which the events
which are described would have on a spectator, Lessing argues: "The poet […] desires
[…] to make the ideas awakened by him within us living things, so that for the moment
we realise the true sensuous impressions of the objects he describes" (Lessing 1985,
7 [W]enn unstreitig die Zeichen ein bequemes Verhältnis zu dem Bezeichneten haben müssen:
So können nebeneinander geordnete Zeichen auch nur Gegenstände, die nebeneinander oder
deren Teile nebeneinander existieren, aufeinander folgende Zeichen aber auch nur
Gegenstände ausdrücken, die aufeinander, oder deren Teile aufeinander folgen" (Lessing
1988, 104).
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103).8 Representing objects in space is therefore against what Lessing considers the
nature of literature to be.
In this discussion, Lessing addresses the problem of ekphrasis. The literary
description of an image makes the relationship of the arts even more difficult. Lessing
takes care to stress that ekphrasis is simply a literary description which happens to be
that of another work of art. Still, he claims that the literary description of a thing and
its depiction in an image need to adhere to the respective rules of literature and of the
visual arts; if they treat their object according to the rules of the other art form, they are
not original. On the other hand, if a literary text is ekphrastic without imitating the
conventions of the visual arts, then the text is, in Lessing's logic, to be considered
superior to the image (Lessing 1988, 59-60). Here, ekphrasis is made to "defeat the
dominion of the image by writing it into language," as Grant F. Scott observes (1994,
xii).
An abridged version of the Laokoon had been translated into English by Thomas de
Quincey and published in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine in 1826 and 1827, that is,
shortly before the Keepsake was founded (De Quincey 1890).9 De Quincey leaves out
everything Lessing has to say about ekphrasis, but he adds some reflections of his own
on the respective properties of literature and the visual arts, in a long note, and he uses
an ekphrastic sonnet by Wordsworth as an example. He observes that the visual arts
depict "transitory reality" in a "non-transitory image." The sonnet serves as an example,
or rather, in de Quincey's phrasing, an illustration of this principle:
This truth has been admirably drawn into light, and finely illustrated, by Mr. Wordsworth
in a sonnet on the Art of Landscape-Painting; in which he insists upon it as the great
secret of its power that it bestows upon 'One brief moment caught from fleeting time /
The appropriate calm of blest Eternity.' (De Quincey 1890, 178)
De Quincey in turn makes Wordsworth's ekphrastic poem "Upon the Sight of a
Beautiful Picture" into an implicit theory of painting. The poem itself treats the painting
it describes in a manner that is reminiscent of Keats's "Grecian Urn:" Wordsworth's
speaker enumerates a series of moments which will remain forever unchanged in both
painting and poem: a painted cloud which will never alter its form; wanderers who will
stand at the edge of the forest forever, a fisherman's boat which will remain anchored
to its place. De Quincey comments that there are two different kinds of events: cyclical
ones as opposed to those in which "each step effaces the preceding (as in the case of a
gun exploding, where the flash is swallowed up by the smoke, the smoke effaced by its
own dispersion, &c.)" (De Quincey 1890, 178). Only cyclical events can be shown in
a painting, he claims, and those described in Wordsworth's poem are all of that kind.
Thus, the ekphrastic text contains its own theory of the image, and judges the image
implicitly. It is in keeping with the ultimate superiority of the text which this statement
8 "Der Poet will […] die Ideen, die er in uns erwecket, so lebhaft machen, daß wir in der
Geschwindigkeit die wahren sinnlichen Eindrücke ihrer Gegenstände zu empfinden glauben"
(Lessing 1988, 113).
9 The translator of a complete English version, published in 1836, knows of no other
predecessors (Lessing 1836, v). Before, Lessing had primarily been known as a dramatist in
Britain (Zelle 2000).
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implies that De Quincey suggests, in passing, that the poem can do at least some of the
same things which the painting can also do, namely "draw" something "into light" and
"finely illustrat[e]" it.
Theories of the relationship between text and image around 1800 emphasised
conflict, not harmony between the arts, then (Boehm 1995, 23-24). The Keepsake
editors' assertion that literature and the visual arts can easily coexist could hardly be
further removed from the state of aesthetic theory at the time. In fact, even within The
Keepsake itself, authors voiced their doubts. Thus, Sir Walter Scott introduced a story
he contributed to The Keepsake for 1829 with a remark addressed to the editor, in which
he explains that literature and images do not, in general, agree very well, but that the
traditional story he has chosen may work in a picture because "the interest is so much
concentrated in one strong moment of agonizing passion, that it can be understood, and
sympathised with, at a single glance" (Scott 1828, 187). After all,
although sicut picture poesis is an old and undisputed axiom – although poetry and
painting both address themselves to the same object of exciting the human imagination,
by presenting to it pleasing or sublime images of ideal scenes; yet the one conveying
itself through the ears to the understanding, and the other applying itself only to the eyes,
the subjects which are best suited to the bard or tale-teller are often totally unfit for
painting, where the artist must present in a single glance all that his art has power to tell
us. The artist can neither recapitulate the past nor intimate the future. The single now is
all which he can present […]. (Scott 1828, 186; original emphases)
Here we have, within the pages of The Keepsake, the same hierarchy of the senses
with which Wordsworth justified his contempt for "illustrated books and newspapers:"
the ear leads directly to the understanding; an image is "only" for the eye and is
apparently supposed to go no further than that. The author goes on to assert the
superiority of his own text (which is at best a sketch of a story) to the image, and he
insists on the fact that he did not have to alter his own contribution in order to
accommodate a specific engraving, but that he was, on the contrary, the one to propose
the subject for the illustration. His description, at the end of the text, of a possible
illustration for the story is an exact description of the actual engraving which
accompanies it.
The second distinction which Scott makes between pictures and stories is, just as
with Lessing and De Quincey, based on their relationship to time: pictures show a
moment, stories describe a development. As we will see in the following, some of the
narrative irritations associated with the accompanying images in Mary Shelley's stories
are based on a similar distinction, but Shelley makes the required reference to a pre-
existing engraving into an opportunity for experimenting with the relationship of image
and text instead of providing an argument against any combination of the two media.
In her stories, this combination is instead used in order to explore temporality and the
relationship of the visible and the audible with regard to the world of the story.
In these stories, the scene depicted in the image can be a real event in the fictional
world, or it can itself be described as a picture of such an event (in "The Invisible Girl"
and "The Elder Son," the latter from Heath's Book of Beauty, 1835), or categorised as
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a potential painting by a painter (in "The Swiss Peasant," 1830). The moment seen in
the image is frequently used as a pivotal scene in the action, or as the moment when the
frame narrative gives way to the main story. In one instance, in "Euphrasia" (1838), the
engraving is described twice, illustrating the traumatic quality the scene has for the
protagonist. In another instance, in "The Evil Eye" (1829), the narrator points out in
passing that the vaguely oriental woman in the engraving is actually inappropriately
costumed. This comment serves to implicitly criticise a sexualisation of the exotic
Other that was, as Kathryn Ledbetter points out, commonplace in such publications at
the time (2009, 98-100).
Thus, the images and their descriptions arguably become quite central to the stories.
The stories in their turn transform the engravings in various ways and draw attention to
their own productive exchange with them. A transmedial focus, which is, according to
Coelsch-Foisner, interested in the productive transformation of different media through
mutual interaction (2019, 23) is therefore helpful in order to see these descriptions in a
new light. Shelley's stories do not treat the engravings as a nuisance – a less noble
medium towards which the text has to assert its own superiority, as Scott does in his
contribution to The Keepsake for 1829. Shelley's stories also interact with the images
in a more interesting way than Coleridge in "The Garden of Boccaccio," where the
speaker simply describes his own reaction to seeing the picture that is in front of the
reader at the time of reading. Instead, Shelley's stories take the pictures seriously, and
they do indeed transform them in the process, as I intend to show with the three
examples which I will discuss in more detail in the following.
4. Copies of Copies: "The Sisters of Albano"
In The Keepsake for 1829, "the Author of Frankenstein" published two stories, "The
Sisters of Albano" and "Ferdinando Eboli." Both are stories about masquerade,10 and
both are therefore concerned with the boundary between appearance and reality, and in
ways which mirror their respective engagement with the image as a scene in the
fictional world and as an engraving on the printed page. Indeed, this is a concern that
recurs in other stories, for instance in "The Smuggler and his Family" (1833), a story
which Shelley published in a non-serial illustrated collection of literary texts, and in
which the picture (and, for a moment, the narrator) suggests that a character has
drowned, but this suggestion turns out to be deceptive. Within the fictional world of
these stories the distinction between appearance and reality can be a matter of life and
death.
In "The Sisters of Albano" in particular, it is exactly that. It is the story of two sisters,
the younger of whom is condemned to death for bringing food to a local bandit (with
whom she is in love, of course). Her older sister changes clothes with her in order to
smuggle her out of prison, which saves the life of the younger sister, who escapes in
the older sister's nun's habit. The older sister is executed instead of her, though; to the
French soldiers whose task it is to fight the bandits "one peasant girl […] was the same
10 See Markely (2000, 116-119) for an insightful analysis of the implications of masquerade for
these stories.
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as another" (63), and they do not care much which one they shoot if only they succeed
in frightening the local peasantry into submission. The younger sister then goes on to
live in a convent; the temporal change of roles has become complete and permanent.
The engraving which goes along with this story does not show any of these
characters, though. It belongs to the frame narrative, and it shows the exact moment
which prompts one of its characters to tell the story of the two sisters. First, however,
the landscape which can be seen in the image is described in great detail by the narrator
of the frame narrative, who implicitly also describes the engraving at the same time.
At our feet there was a knoll of ground that formed the foreground of our picture; two
trees lay basking against the sky, glittering with the golden light, which like dew seemed
to hand amid their branches – a rock closed the prospect on the one side, twined round
by creepers, and redolent with blooming myrtle – a brook crossed by huge stones gushed
through the turf, and on the fragments of rock that lay about, sat two or three persons,
peasants, who attracted our attention. One was a hunter, as his gun, lying on a bank not
far off, demonstrated, yet he was a tiller of the soil; his rough straw hat, and his
picturesque but coarse dress, belonged to that class. The other was some contadina, in
the costume of her country, returning, her basket on her arm, from the village to her
cottage home. They were regarding the stores of a pedlar, who with doffed hat stood near;
some of these consisted of pictures and prints – views of the country and portraits of the
Madonna. Our peasants regarded these with pleased attention. (Shelley 1990, 53)
Within the text, this is not a description of an image; it is a description of a landscape
and the people who can be seen in it at a certain moment and from a certain perspective.
Nonetheless, the landscape is described as if it were an image. The text accepts the
margins of the picture as the limits of what it can describe; there is nothing in the
description which could be seen to the left of the two trees or to the right of the rock
which "close[s] the prospect." Even some of the terminology is borrowed from painting:
there is "the foreground of our picture." Finally, there are actual "prints and pictures"
within this landscape. With the "prints and pictures" the description goes beyond what
can be seen in the engraving: the narrator knows something which viewers of the
engraving have no way of knowing, namely what is depicted on the pedlar's "prints and
pictures." Some of them show "views of the country" – in other words, pictures just
like the one the reader is looking at in the engraving.
At this point, description gives way to storytelling. "One might easily make out a
story for that pair," the narrator muses: "his gun is a help to the imagination, and we
may fancy him a bandit with his contadina love" (Shelley 1990, 53). The picture itself
suggests a story, then, but the reader never gets to read that story. Instead, another
character jumps in with the story of the two sisters. The story of the peasants in the
landscape, which is not told, is replaced by another one that is told instead. This is one
of many acts of replacing elements of the story and the image with each other. The
image on the page is also replaced by the other images within the image, the description
by the image, and the image by its description.
In no case can the substitution be complete, though. The description of the fictional
landscape points back to the real image, but the description has colours ("golden light")
which the engraving cannot represent (but which can in fact be seen on the painting by
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William Turner after which the engraving was made), and the narrator knows things
which viewers of the engraving cannot see. The narrator indulges in an enthusiastic
description of the sunset over Lake Albano (which is the subject of the image), and this
description includes yet another doubling, namely that of the landscape itself as its own
mirror image in the water, which "reflect[s] the brilliancy of the sky and the fire-tinted
banks, [and] beamed a second heaven, a second irradiated earth, at our feet" (Shelley
1990, 53). In the engraving, this mirror image in the water is only hinted at, but not
fully visible. Thus, the description reflects a landscape which is reflected in the
engraving, which in turn also reflects the Turner painting; and in addition to that, the
literary description adds more doublings in the form of the mirror image in the lake,
and the "pictures and prints" of other landscapes. Like the characters and their stories,
landscapes, descriptions, images and mirror images are constantly made to reflect each
other; the text refers the reader back to the engraving, and the engraving refers the
viewer back to the text. There is no original in this series of copies. This dynamic
interaction of image and text can be read as a playful commentary on their mutual status
in The Keepsake; on a more serious note, though, these various substitutions and
doublings recall the deadly seriousness of the substitution of one sister for another in
the story.
5. Exhibiting the Artificial: "Ferdinando Eboli"
A last mirror image is to be found outside the story and outside the engraving: with its
exchange of one sister for another, "The Sisters of Albano" also reflects Shelley's
second tale in The Keepsake for 1829. In "Ferdinando Eboli," too, masquerade and
changes of role are crucial, only in this case it is two brothers who change places, and
only one of them participates voluntarily in this exchange. The other one, the story's
title character, finds out that he has a double, his half-brother Ludovico, who looks
exactly like him and who manages to take Ferdinando's place in the army, in his own
house, and, for a time, in the affections of his unsuspecting fiancée Adalinda. The latter
is also the subject of the engraving which accompanied this story. The picture shows
her in the clothes of a young man, a masquerade which she takes on when she finds out
that the man who pretends to be her fiancé is in reality Ludovico, whom she does not
want to marry, and from whom she escapes in the costume of a page. She hides in a
cave in the mountains, and this is where the engraving depicts her. The narrator
describes the scene, once again at some length, concluding with the remark that "[h]er
fanciful but elegant dress, her feminine form, her beauty and her grace, as she sat
pensive and alone in the rough unhewn cavern, formed a picture a poet would describe
with delight, an artist love to paint" (Shelley 1990, 78). In other words, it is the
description of the scene which is depicted in the engraving11 which gives the narrator a
reason to remind the reader that this is fiction: after all, the literary description has just
taken place in the text, and a painter has already painted the scene. The image is used
as the occasion for a metaleptic narrative comment.
11 Reproduced on the Romantic Circles page: [accessed 1 October 2020].
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In addition to that, the image is also used as an occasion for another leap between
narrative levels, namely the introduction of a second narrator. Directly after the scene
above is described, it turns out that there is still another observer apart from the reader,
that is, and one who sees the scene from a different perspective than the one from which
the reader sees it, namely from above12:
"She seemed a being of another world; a seraph, all light and beauty; a Ganymede,
escaped from his thrall above to his natal Ida. It was long before I recognised, looking
down on her from the opening hill, my lost Adalinda." Thus spoke the young Count
[Ferdinando] Eboli, when he related this story; for its end was as romantic as its
commencement. (Shelley 1990, 78)
At this point, Ferdinando has been absent from the story for a while, so his
reappearance is somewhat surprising. Also, he never, except in these two sentences,
appears as the narrator of his own story. Thus, the image produces not one but two
narrative irritations in the text. It suggests a possible frame narrative in which
Ferdinando himself tells his story – but that does not happen in the text – and it forms
the occasion for an untypically self-reflexive comment on the part of the narrator, when
the description of the scene depicted in the image ends with the announcement that
writers and painters would love to do what they have actually already done, namely
represent this scene. The boundaries between different narrative levels are briefly
transgressed, and therefore made visible, all on occasion of the image.
It is significant that this happens on account of a picture of a woman in the costume
of a young man – and an image in which the costume is so obviously depicted as a
costume that there is never any doubt about the gender of the person we see. There is
even a caption which identifies her as "Adalinda," but it is also her face and hair which
are clearly conventionally feminine. Indeed, so much does the picture emphasise the
status of her costume as costume that readers who look at the engraving do not at all
participate in Ferdinando's moment of doubt ("[i]t was long before I recognised […]
my lost Adalinda"). It is impossible to suspend one's disbelief: there is no page on this
page. The obvious artificiality of the costume, though, is reflected in the text by the
narrative irritations associated with the description of the engraving. The text mirrors
the image's emphasis on a visual deception that can easily be seen through, very exactly
but by specifically literary means, namely by making a show of its own narrative
construction.
In this manner, the story implicitly addresses the same hierarchy of the senses, and
therefore of the arts, that Walter Scott insists on in his contribution to the same
Keepsake volume. Scott wrote that language addresses "the understanding" "through
the ears," whereas an image "appl[ies] itself only to the eyes" (1828, 186). In Shelley’s
story, language and image work together on a more equal basis: together, both address
a deception that works within the story, but not between image and viewer, or between
12 Shelley also plays with perspective elsewhere. Thus, in "The Parvenue," published in The
Keepsake for 1837, the image shows Margate in the background, and a ship in the foreground,
whereas in the story, the narrator observes the same scene from the coast, and the ship is not
even relevant to her.
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story and reader. The story's thematic concern with appearance and reality is thus
playfully undercut by an image that does not deceive, and an unlikely narrating
character who surprises the reader both by his sudden reappearance and by his moment
of doubt about Adalinda's costume.
6. Depicting an "Invisible Girl"
In the last story which I will discuss in detail, the description of the image does not, in
contrast to the other two, pretend to be a description of a scene from real life; it is a
description of an actual picture, which is almost (but not quite) identical with the
accompanying engraving. It should be noted, though, that the engraving is entitled
"Rosina," which is also the name of the story's protagonist; the picture which the
narrator discovers in a ruined tower is called, like the story itself, "The Invisible Girl."
The description of this picture is an exact description of the engraving, with the notable
exception that the picture is "simply painted in water-colours" (Shelley 1990, 190) –
and is therefore not the engraving itself; rather, it may be imagined as the picture after
which the engraving was made. Nonetheless, the picture in the story is clearly marked
as fictional. "The Invisible Girl" and "Rosina" are two different but related images. The
engraving which accompanies the story is (according to its caption) made after a
painting by William Boxall; within the fictional world of the story, however, the
original is a watercolour portrait of the protagonist, which the narrator stumbles upon
in a building which pretends to be a ruined tower, but which is from the inside "fitted
up somewhat in the guise of a summer-house," complete with "elegant furniture"
(Shelley 1990, 190). Appearance and reality are once again decidedly not in accordance.
There will also once again be exchanges of copies and originals. This time, though, it
is not persons who are exchanged for one another, but the protagonist, stories about her
and, at the end of the story, her portrait.
The picture's title, "The Invisible Girl," functions as an irritation, not just because
this is not actually the title of the image on the next page, but also because The Keepsake
was all about visibility, in particular that of women. Rosina is anything but invisible in
the picture, and the narrator is consequently intrigued both by the watercolour and by
"its singular inscription, naming her invisible, whom the painter had coloured forth into
very agreeable visibility" (Shelley 1990, 192). Since there is no (unexplained)
supernatural element in this story, the protagonist is indeed visible throughout; she
simply hides for a while in the ruined tower, and the peasantry call the unknown young
woman "invisible girl," a name for which the narrative offers several explanations, none
of which are very conclusive. The name itself alludes to a magic trick in which the
voice of a woman can be heard in the same room, but the speaking woman was not to
be seen.13 Nonetheless, Rosina cannot be heard any more than seen while she lives in
13 Also mentioned in Book VII of Wordsworth's Prelude as one of the "moveables of wonders
from all parts" which were to be seen in Bartholomew Fair at the time: "Albinos, painted
Indians, Dwarfs, / The Horse of Knowledge and the learned Pig, / The Stone-eater, the Man
that swallows fire, / Giants, Ventriloquists, the Invisible Girl, / The Bust that speaks, and
moves its goggling eyes" (Wordsworth 2000, 485). This is the company a real Invisible Girl
would have kept.
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the ruined tower. The only indication of her presence is a light that can sometimes be
seen in the tower at night; the locals have no definite indication even of the gender of
the person who lives there. At the end of the story, her fiancé, who is in search of her,
actually hears her before he sees her, but that is only because it is night and therefore
dark.
In an additional complication, when he finds her, Rosina no longer looks like her
own portrait, which was painted before the whole episode, and "many months went by
before the bloom revisiting her cheeks, and her limbs regaining their roundness, she
resembled once more the picture drawn of her in her days of bliss, before any visitation
of sorrow" (Shelley 1990, 201). The woman who is depicted in the watercolour is
therefore, for a time at least, really no longer visible, outside the picture at least. In
addition to that, this remark emphasises (like Lessing, De Quincey and Scott) the fact
that an image depicts a moment, whereas a text can describe a development in time.
Indeed, the narrator's jumping out of character when faced with this picture also
underscores the fact that an image shows one particular moment in time, when he
stresses that "her dress was simple, in the fashion of the day – (remember, reader, I
write at the beginning of the eighteenth century)" (Shelley 1990, 190). The narrator
explicitly addresses readers in the future whose possible existence was not an issue
before, and who are not directly addressed ever again in this story. Besides possible
reader irritation, the effect is that the image, too, is located in a specific historical
moment: it allegedly depicts a woman dressed according to the fashion a hundred years
before the story was first published in 1833. The narrator foresees that fashion will
change and that readers may wear different dresses; the image has no way of addressing
such a possible change. The image can easily afford to ignore that time will pass; within
the story, by contrast, time passes, fashion changes, and the woman will not remain "a
lovely girl in the very pride and bloom of youth" forever. Her picture stays in the ruined
tower instead of her when she goes away in order to get married. Once it is there, though,
the picture requires Rosina's story as an explanation for its presence, just as the story
requires the engraving in order for it to be present in its own location, that is, on the
pages of The Keepsake.
7. Conclusion
Both "Ferdinando Eboli" and "The Invisible Girl" use their descriptions of the
engravings in order to address the same aesthetic concerns that were also discussed in
contemporary theories of the relationship of images and literary texts. The focus on
temporality in "The Invisible Girl" serves to dramatise the tension created by the fact
that the accompanying image depicts only one moment of a longer story – that the
engraving emphasises one particular event in the story, and that the engraving is re-
contextualised and given a new meaning by a text which did not yet exist when the
painting was painted, or when the engraving was made. Temporality is also thematic in
this story. It is even more prominent in another story, "The Mortal Immortal" (1833) in
which the illustration shows three people: an older woman, a young woman and a young
man. The two women will age and die during the course of the story. But because this
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