ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that illustration was a key feature of both Charles Dickens and Edward Lloyd impact on the new ‘commodity text’ market, downmarket version of Dickens in which the aesthetic form of the original is reconfigured and redirected rather than being merely hijacked, debased, demeaned or lampooned. It discusses the dickens’s court case against Lloyd in order to show how the decision to acquit Lloyd of the charge of plagiarism was based primarily on visual evidence. The publisher’s case was that Lloyd had produced a ‘colourable imitation’ designed to deceive the ‘ignorant and unwary’ who ‘comprised a very large portion of the customers of every article exposed to public sale’. The possibility that Lloyd’s readers acted in full knowledge that they were purchasing a ‘publication of that sort’ was simply too painful to consider, as it would concede that Dickens had been successfully modified for a lower-class market.
