Richard Pearson

Fiction and the Visual Arts

Reading novels in the nineteenth century involved a process of engagement that is largely impossible to replicate today. The works of writers such as Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray appeared in forms that no longer exist as a commercial publishing mode. They were released in serial numbers, published month by month in their own part-issue wrappers containing illustrations and trade advertisements. Or they appeared as monthly or weekly serializations in magazines of the period, sometimes illustrated, and always surrounded by the articles and news items of other writers. After the serial run, their numbers were then usually gathered together and published as volumes. These were generally in three-volume format, designed specifically for the circulating libraries to be borrowed a volume at a time.

Etexts and Archives

A consideration of the development of digital resources in Victorian Studies, and how these might influence the research of the future, raises more questions and points for clarification than it provides answers. We might therefore begin with a list of more generic observations that might be divided into two: those related to ICT and those related to academic studies (and in Victorian Studies, we immediately come up with the series of discipline differences: the way art history, literary criticism, or historiography might make use of ICT will vary enormously – my background is in literary criticism and most that I have to say will relate to that subject). Digitisation is a specialist field in its own right; non-specialists will most likely interact with it in two ways, as users of resources or as part of teams engaging in multior inter-disciplinary research. ICT in Humanities research might also loosely be split into two: the use of internet-based platforms to host resources of different kinds – e-texts, hypertexts, visual resources, searchable databases – and the use of computers to analyse and interrogate materials – usually in the form of a database of some kind. Hence, we start with a question of what we mean by ‘digitisation’ and how this actually relates to our research: at the moment, most ‘digital’ activity is focused on the creation of resources and any overt research element usually considers how a resource might advance upon the simple practice of making available a text as a document to be read (an e-text). I say ‘simple practice’, but of course, this in itself is not without complexities: an e-text could be a Word document, a .txt document, a pdf, or web-mounted file with HTML or XML mark-up. You might have to download the whole text and read it as a linear document scrolling down through the pages; or it might be web-readable and require you to click to turn pages or move from chapter to chapter or poem to poem. It might be searchable, and if it is, it might be searchable for keywords only, or for specific sets of pre-marked generic categories or terms, or both. In editorial terms, as a literary product, it might bear no trace of its origins as a published text and not inform you of when it was published or what edition it is drawn from. Or it