The Imprint of the Picturesque on Nineteenth-Century British Fiction

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

Alexander M. Ross’s book is a monograph in the best sense of the word: a short book on a single theme by a devoted expert. In recent years, with the increasing number of interdisciplinary ventures designed to break down the self-imposed barriers between specialist disciplines, there have been several studies of the relation of individual novelists — Eliot, Hardy, James — to the visual arts. But there have been few more general inquiries into the interconnections between fiction and painting. Ross has made good this deficiency in one important area. He has taken the cult of the picturesque, which began in the eighteenth century and flourished in the age of Romanticism, and traced its effects on Sir Walter Scott, Charlotte Brontè, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy.

Ross begins with a clear-headed summary of the development of the term picturesque through the arguments and advocacy of William Gilpin, Sir Uvedale Price, and Richard Payne Knight. This introduction is illustrated by 23 well-chosen plates, two of them in colour. Subsequent chapters show how their ideas, disseminated through Scott’s popular Waverley novels, affected the practice of later Victorian fiction not only in passages of landscape description but in “painterly” presentations of human figures. Ross establishes the extent to which these novelists were familiar with picturesque principles and with artists who can be designated picturesque. He also shows how these writers, especially Dickens, were able to take advantage of the picturesque without succumbing to the socially heartless practice of patronizing the poor and praising the beauties of dwellings which, however pleasing to the eye, were dilapidated, inconvenient, and unsanitary.

When I first read Christopher Hussey’s statement in his classic study of the subject that “only second-rate writers continued, after Waverley, to be conscious of the picturesque,” I did not feel the need to protest. But Ross demonstrates convincingly that, in this one respect, Hussey was wrong. Ross works his way single-mindedly and thoroughly through his material, showing clearly and cleanly how each novelist reacted to this particular subject.

It was a topic that needed to be explored and I do not know how it could have been done better.