SOURCE: Johnson, Wendell Stacy. “Illustrious Victorians.” Journal of Popular Culture 15, no. 4 (1982): 1-15.

In the following essay, Johnson discusses the trends that influenced the development of illustration. Johnson focuses on a Victorian aesthetic theory which held that all arts were in essence a form of poetry, and that, by extension, all visual arts were a form of storytelling.

Although modern criticism has come to recognize what the ancients knew, how arbitrary a distinction between music and poetry can be, we sometimes still insist upon an artificial purity of genres. This is especially true when the genres are visual and verbal. We hold as suspect pictures that seem literary—as we tend to patronize “program music.” The appeal of mere illustration seems too lower middle-brow, too old-fashioned, too “Victorian.” Yet the extent to which eye and ear are forced into an abstract, distant relationship one with the other, and are...