Graphic Design, Print Culture, and the Eighteenth-Century Novel

Janine Barchas’s Graphic Design, Print Culture, and the Eighteenth-Century Novel is one of the most interesting books to be published in eighteenth-century studies in the last decade. In contrast to most other abstract, theoretical recent developments in the history of the novel, Barchas is concerned with the concrete, material presentation of books in the eighteenth century. Her deceptively simple thesis is that the material form of the novel contributed to the establishment and authority of the genre just like its content.

Barchas situates her approach in the intersection of cultural studies, literary criticism, and textual studies. She explicitly acknowledges three recent theoretical developments that inform her work: an inclusion of paratextual material in literary studies, a change in editorial theory that led to questions about authorial intent, and a new perception of print culture as an unstable entity. While Barchas does not give her approach a specific name, her book offers a paradigmatic incarnation of the method known as ‘history of the book’ or ‘book history.’ What makes Graphic Design so good is that the various aspects of the theory, particular the bibliographic details and the textual interpretations, inform each other so well. While many book history studies suffer from a deluge of historical information unrelated to analysis of the novel in question, Barchas makes a point of connecting the two.

For instance, the chapter on the fold-out of a musical score in Clarissa is exemplary. This material detail may seem unimportant, but Barchas’s sophisticated interpretation shows how three kinds of text overlap: “the visual text, or graphic design, of the oversized engraving; the verbal text of the fiction and the accompanying poem; and the auditory text of the musical score” (94). By taking the format of contemporary music lesson books, Richardson indicates to his readers that the song has a moral lesson. Since it is set for a soprano voice, the song appeals particularly to female readers. Through the physical presentation in the oversize fold-out format, the song interrupts the reading and emphasizes the performative aspect of the entire novel. In its text, the song similarly teaches a moral lesson, encouraging women to form or join independent female communities. Thus, “Richardson uses the print conventions of musical notation to mark the boundaries of the community shaped by music in the novel” (111). In other words, the material format of the song resonates with the moral interpretation of the text while the text confirms the feminocentricity of the song.

This kind of intelligent and insightful analysis is found in every part of Graphic Design. In the chapter on frontispieces, Barchas shows how the various images of Lemuel Gulliver differ from each other and do not add up with the text. This allows Swift simultaneously “to signal the generic authority of the text, while his particular execution of the frontispieces enables him to interrogate that authority” (33). Similarly, as the exploration of titles, authorship declarations, publishers’ imprints, and epigraphs in Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, and lesser-known novels demonstrates, title pages “helped the genre to negotiate questions of authority, canonicity, and identity—in addition to (mis)guiding the reader’s expectations” (76). In separate chapters on Samuel Richardson and Sarah Fielding, Barchas investigates the uses of typography. In Clarissa, Richardson employed typography to indicate temporal breaks and to heighten the readers’ emotional responses, but also to suggest pauses for refection and to enforce interpretive cohesion, one of his major concerns throughout his career. In David Simple, the dashes in the first edition take on two meanings: “As visual markers of spoken speech, the dashes promote the sense of conversational immediacy and psychological affect. And, as graphic markers of silence, the dashes allow Sarah Fielding to emphasize the important role non-verbal communication plays in the novel” (160). Perhaps because this last use allowed for an independent female sentimental community, Henry Fielding eliminated most of his sister’s dashes in the second edition of the novel. Finally, Barchas devotes a chapter to lists and indexes, especially those in Sir Charles Grandison. While the list of characters serves “to assert the supremacy of moral virtue over social rank, proclaim the sovereignty of the author, establish the plot’s inevitability, and highlight the novel’s theatricality and expanded mandate” (193f.), the index once again tries to clarify ambiguities in the novel.

From this summary, it is obvious that a large part of Graphic Design is concerned with the work of Samuel Richardson, who turns out to be much more innovative than generally acknowledged. By focusing on a canonical author, Barchas is helping to establish book history as a valid approach, and she could have gone even further along this route—I’m sure her interpretation of Tristram Shandy, more generally recognized as graphically innovative, would have been quite spectacular. At the same time, Graphic Design returns several times to a series of other, lesser known novels: John Kidgell’s The Card (1755), the anonymous The Life and Memoirs of Ephraim Tristram Bates (1765), and Richard Griffith’s Something New (1772). Kidgell’s Card has a separate chapter in Barchas’s dissertation, and I would have welcomed more intense focus on these three novels here as well.

Nevertheless, these are minor quibbles with a ground-breaking and stimulating—and lusciously illustrated—book. Since the history of the book approach requires an extensive knowledge of historical backgrounds (in addition to excellent interpretive skills), I’m not sure if book history will ever make it into the college classroom, but for scholars this is an avenue that can and should be explored much more deeply in the field of eighteenth-century studies. With Graphic Design, Janine Barchas has contributed a first landmark to that exploration.