William Cubitt Cooke (1866–1951) was the illustrator of a groundbreaking 10-volume Austen edition by J. M. Dent, published in 1892. The Dent edition features thirty illustrations, the largest number produced by one Austen artist to that date. Cooke designed three plates per volume, because the four longer Austen novels were split into two volumes each.
After Cooke, no single illustrator could count on his (and most were male) potential power to shape readers’ experiences of reading Austen’s fiction through his designs. Cooke’s images were safe ones, extending, rather than deviating from, previous trends in Austen illustration. He sometimes chose precisely the same scenes for illustration as his predecessor Ferdinand Pickering. Cooke's images may be found in the gallery below.
