Book Illustration and The Deserted Village

Abstract

Book illustration is enjoying new interest. The Deserted Village attracted illustrators from the beginning. By the mid-nineteenth century, images of its rustic characters appeared regularly alongside the verse. During the final decades of the eighteenth century, three graphic artists reimagined Goldsmith's narrative as tragedy. Their transformations show the need for a term to describe the full interplay of verbal narrative and visual interpretation: the imagetext. James Gillray, John Keyse Sherwin, and Francis Wheatley each represent two characters from the poem, the bashful virgin and the dutiful daughter, as a single tragic heroine. In two pairs of freestanding prints, Gillray and Sherwin recast the then-and-now structure of the poem as a drama of displacement. These prints are imagetexts in a dual sense. They reflect a printing practice dating back to the sixteenth century of showing a text and an image in tandem, and they place the image in an independent collaborative relation. In a third print and then in related book illustrations, Francis Wheatley depicts the daughter as the prime victim of the trade in luxury. Like Sherwin, he represents an abandoned maiden as an allegorical figure of the land, following Charles Le Brun's decrees regarding how the passions should be depicted. These visual narratives reflect the academic theory of the sister arts as filtered through the lens of sensibility and indicate social commitments largely lost in the nineteenth-century illustration of the poem.