Illustrated fiction

In the novel The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, the author Henry Fielding refers to paintings by William Hogarth in order to explain what some of his characters look like.

Henry Fuseli created a single frontispiece for the fourth edition of Tobias Smollett's The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle.

Thomas Stothard provided several illustrations for an edition of The Vicar of Wakefield published 30 years after its first publication in 1766.

[6] 19th century author artists included William Makepeace Thackeray and George du Maurier.

[3] Technological improvements in printing flooded the market with affordable novels with illustrations of high quality.

Prestigious artists including John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, and Frederick Leighton started to illustrate books.

[10] A review of the 1915 film adaptation of Vanity Fair said that "the reels make a set of illustrations superior to the conventional pen-pictures of a deluxe edition.

"[11] Modern literary fiction was often not well-suited to illustration, for example the introspective novels of E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf.

Alvin Langdon Coburn's photographs were used in the New York edition of his works only as frontispieces, and only after James reassured himself that they did not compete or make a reference to his prose.

Similar to James, Thomas Hardy increasingly excluded illustrations from the collected editions of his novels, with the exception of maps that he had drawn and photographic frontispieces.

However, as editor and later president of the John Day Company, he did not include illustrations in the subsequent hardcover editions of these novels.

When Ernest Hemingway's novella The Old Man and the Sea was first published in Life magazine in 1952, it was illustrated with blue-tinted drawings by Noel Sickles.

[3] In the middle of the 20th century, the comic strip used visual images to convey action and had a great influence on children and young people.