The television adaptation of Nick Hornby’s decade-old novel Funny Girl prompted me to pick up a paperback copy I had lying around. I remembered it as a light, bath-time read, uncharacteristically sunny for Hornby. Climbing into my bath that night to look it over again, I realised I’d forgotten one unexpected aspect of the book: it has pictures.

I couldn’t immediately think of any English novel of the last hundred years or so written for an adult readership with illustrations. It struck me as an almost unbreakable convention to omit them. So when did it become standard practice for prose fiction to be published without pictures?

The novel emerged in a period when almost all prose works were published without illustrations, principally because of the difficulty and expense of adding engravings to letterpress text. Two of the most famous early novels in English have illustrations, but only because they imitated in appearance a genre more likely to have them. The first editions of both Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels are furnished with portraits of the supposed authors and maps of their journeys – in furtherance of their pretence to be travel books. 

Another outlier is Tristram Shandy, which is tricked out with various visual japes, such as an engraved frontispiece. This appears not, as you might expect, in the first volume but the third – because it has taken the overscrupulous narrator so long to reach the circumstances of his own birth. Sterne’s joke whooshed over the heads of many bookbinders, who shifted the plate to its customary position at the front of the first volume. Another of Sterne’s gags, a page left blank for readers to draw their own portraits of one of his characters, calls attention to an enduring idea: that good prose creates pictures in the mind that no illustrator can match.

The absence of pictures in novels held good for a hundred years. The first editions of the Gothic novels of Matthew Gregory Lewis, Ann Radcliffe and their competitors, as well as the books of more sophisticated authors like Fanny Burney, Jane Austen and Mary Shelley, worked their magic in print alone. Settling in the Regency era into an unchanging three-volume format targeted at well-to-do buyers and circulating libraries, novels were already expensive enough without engravings adding to the cost.

Then, as Adam Curtis might intone, something happened. In February 1836, a series of comic plates by the artist Robert Seymour went on sale with accompanying text by a young sketch writer using the sobriquet ‘Boz’ – Charles Dickens. A new set of plates appeared each month, aimed at a readership of clerks and factory workers short of time and hungry for amusement. By the end of its run, the series, now known as The Pickwick Papers, had a monthly circulation of nearly forty thousand, a figure well in excess of the combined sales achieved by Fanny Burney, Jane Austen and Mary Shelley during their lifetimes. The images accompanying Dickens’s text were engraved on steel plates, a new medium sharper and sturdier than the copper plates used previously.

Most of Dickens’s novels were, like The Pickwick Papers, published in monthly parts. These were afterwards bound up into single octavo volumes containing as many as forty engraved plates. Dickens tried several illustrators but developed his most enduring partnership with Hablot Knight Browne (‘Phiz’). Similar pairings of author and artist formed during the 19th century. Anthony Trollope employed the fashionable Pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais, even though one of his efforts caused the novelist to splutter that it looked like a Punch cartoon. 

Friction between author and artist was inevitable. There were limits to the kinds of scenes artists could plausibly depict. Which book illustrator dared compete with the bravura word picture of a monstrous dinosaur waddling through London’s primordial mud and fog that opens Bleak House? At his best, Dickens painted pictures in prose that could effortlessly outdo anything a hired hand might produce. When he presented a copy of the first edition of A Tale of Two Cities to the up-and-coming George Eliot, he had all the plates except the frontispiece removed, as if putting away childish things. His last masterpiece, Great Expectations, was not illustrated. 

As the end of the 19th century neared, with the new medium of photography encroaching, even the subtlest engravings seemed outmoded. The three-decker was abandoned, along with monthly parts and engraved plates. The first huge bestseller in the unillustrated single-volume format was Hall Caine’s The Manxman, published in 1894. Thereafter, the English novel for adult readers had pictures only on the covers or dust jacket, and sometimes not even that. 

So why did Hornby revive illustrations for Funny Girl? The novel inserts Barbara Parker, his fictional female sitcom star, into 1960s London, where she meets her heroine, Lucille Ball, and competes for ratings with Till Death Us Do Part. Photographs of real people, buildings and ephemera lend verisimilitude to the narrative. When Parker visits the Positano Room, the next page shows us a young Mick Jagger dining there. We instantly clock the groovy art on the wall, Jagger’s kipper tie, breadstick packets on the table and the bistro-style wine glasses. The suspicion that Hornby has saved himself the effort of describing the restaurant is offset by the realisation that his lead character, whose point of view the book largely presents, is too naive and unworldly to register such details.

One running gag has Parker repeatedly mistaken for another television personality, Sabrina, the glamour girl on the The Arthur Askey Show. Only a small section of the population will be able to recall that programme, so Hornby supplies a picture of Sabrina. She wears a tight sweater over an absurdly cantilevered bra. She is advertising slide projectors. The accompanying copy makes a Carry On-style innuendo about her magnificent projection, which tells us plenty about the treatment of women in that period. 

Using black-and-white photographs printed directly onto the page, Hornby found a playful, metatextual way to illustrate his comic novel. By using modern digital printing, he did so without adding to the production costs or getting into a pissing match with a temperamental artist. Of that, at least, Dickens would have been jealous.