A stickier problem lies beneath the writerly distrust of publishing fiction with illustrations. The real backlash to the universal custom began around the turn of the century. In his 1909 foreword to a reissue of “The Golden Bowl,” Henry James sought to explain it (brace yourself, as this is the most Jamesian of Jamesian sentences). The danger of pictures of people and scenes, he wrote, is that “anything that relieves responsible prose of the duty of being, while placed before us, good enough, interesting enough and, if the question be of picture, pictorial enough, above all in itself, does the worst of services, and may well inspire in the lover of literature certain lively questions as to the future of that institution.”

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So writers somewhat defensively cleaved to this division: pictures were about superficial titillation; prose was about essences. And over time the opinion hardened that the old custom of accompanying illustration was a form of aesthetic corruption.