I asked this question yesterday about storing a plot within an object. I tried implementing the first approach (aware that I did not specify that I was using qplot()>
qplot()>
There is a bug in your code concerning list subscripting. It should be
pltList[[pltName]]
not
pltList[pltName]
Note:
class(pltList[1]) [1] "list"
pltList[1] is a list containing the first element of pltList.
class(pltList[[1]]) [1] "ggplot"
pltList[[1]] is the first element of pltList.