1 Introduction: Mass Reproduction and the Mass Audience

Notes 1 Introduction: Mass reproduction and the mass audience 1. The Illustrated London News, January 6, 1843, iii. 2. In terms of the social I draw in particular on Patrick Joyce, The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City (London: Verso, 2003), and also Patrick Joyce, Democratic Subjects: The Self and the Social in Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 3. Richard Salmon suggests that the emphasis on the personal was intrinsically linked to the new structures of the press. “It is surely not coincidental that at the very moment when the material basis of the press made it harder to locate an individual source of authorial value, the discourse of journalism should so insistently declare its personalized character.” He notes “As a prototypical form of modern mass culture, the New Journalism extols the virtue of ‘personality’ whilst simultaneously extending the division of labour against which it protests. For this reason, the antagonism between intimacy and abstraction remains unreconciled.” Richard Salmon, “ ‘A Simulacrum of Power’: Intimacy and Abstraction in the Rhetoric of the New Journalism,” Nineteenth-Century Media and the Construction of Identities, ed. Laurel Brake (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), 29, 37. 4. Jennifer Green-Lewis, Framing the Victorians (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 113. 5. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), 39–40. 6. Valerian Gribayédoff, “Pictorial Journalism,” The Cosmopolitan, 11.4 (August 1891), 471–481. 7. Joshua Brown notes that the leading American middle-class magazine, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper segregated the crowds in its engravings of New York, rarely showing the classes mixing within the same image. Joshua Brown, Beyond the Lines: Pictorial Reporting, Everyday Life, and the Crisis of Gilded Age America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 80–81. 8. Charles Knight, Passages of a Working Life During Half a Century, vol. 3 (London: Bradbury & Evans, 1865), 246. 9. Plunkett argues that the images are not, in the final analysis, about Victoria, who is “effaced.” “This engraving dramatizes the dialectic between the power and powerlessness of Victoria, a tension which is at the heart of the monarchy’s media- making.” John Plunkett, “Queen Victoria’s Royal Role,” Encounters in the Victorian Press: Editors, Authors, Readers, eds Laurel Brake and Julie F. Codell (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005), 24. 10. John Ruskin, “Ariadne Florentina: Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving Given before the University of Oxford at Michaelmas Term 1872,” Proserpina (Boston: Dana Estes and Co., 1872), 324. 11. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations (London: Fontana, 1973), 211–44, 225, 235. 12. On the everyday in the press see Margaret Cohen, “Panoramic Literature and the Invention of Everyday Genres,” Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, eds Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 210 Notes 211 13. Vanessa R. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin De Siècle Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 44. 14. See Salmon, “ ‘A Simulacrum of Power’: Intimacy and Abstraction in the Rhetoric of the New Journalism.” 15. Clement King Shorter, C.K.S. An Autobiography: A Fragment by Himself, ed. J. M. Bullock (London: Privately Printed, 1927), xviii. 16. Recalling his career in the press in 1897, Sir Wemyss Reid stated that new journalism had brought a number of changes, mostly concerned with an increasing emphasis on personality, not only in the content of the papers but also in their style. Leading articles have become less like discursive essays and more like emphatic speeches by the leader-writer. Newspapers no longer employ the unob- trusive descriptive journalist to cover events. Instead, “The new journalist when writing the account of a ceremony talks as much about himself as the event he is describing.” In general, he concludes that the personalities of the journalist, of the paper and of the press itself are much more prominent. He christened this type of journalism “wegotism” as the identity and opinions of the papers, “We think” had become so pervasive. Wemyss Reid, Sir, “Some Reminiscences of English Journalism,” Nineteenth Century, XLII.CCXLV (1897), T. P. O’Connor’s leader in the Star, an influential evening paper that I discuss in Chapter 5, was entitled “What we Think.” 17. Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (London: Chatto and Windus, 1961), 176. 18. On the complexities of middle-class groupings in Manchester see Joyce, Demo- cratic Subjects: The Self and the Social in Nineteenth-Century England, 164–66. 19. As Richard Terdiman suggests these items were much like an array of consumer goods displayed on shelves in a store. This sense of abundance was heightened in the new illustrated magazines with the variety and quantity of their illustrations. Richard Terdiman, Discourse/Counter Discourse: The Theory and Practice of Symbolic Resistance in Nineteenth Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 187. 20. Margaret Beetham offers a compelling analysis of the relationship between the woman reader and the magazine in A Magazine of Her Own? (London: Routledge, 1996). She shows how the miscellaneous format of the magazine and its temporal structure gave the reader a degree of freedom. Yet she also observes that readers often wished to remain safely within the prevailing point of view expounded by the magazine. “For many – perhaps most – readers the desire to be confirmed in the generally accepted or dominant discourse may be a more powerful need than the dream of a different future or the desire to construct alternatives. The periodical both offers and withholds the possibility of what we may call ‘poly- morphously diverse’ readings.” Beetham, A Magazine of Her Own?, 30. Not only were there a variety of voices within each magazine, the range of magazines differed in their overall tone. In his analysis of American illustrated magazines of the late nineteenth century Schneirov notes that periodicals contained a wide variety of ideas; McLure’s Cosmopolitan, Munsey’s the Century all had large circula- tions and all had divergent views. Matthew Schneirov, The Dream of a New Social Order: Popular Magazines in America, 1893–1914 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). 21. Most of the large London publishers used American Hoe presses, and many of the key developments in imaging technologies were first developed in the US. Illustrated magazines were also influenced by publications from other countries. This was especially true of English and American magazines, which, in some 212 Notes cases, published overseas editions. Publishers in both countries were inspired by formats developed by their transatlantic peers. 22. John Southward, Progress in Printing and the Graphic Arts During the Victorian Era (London: Simpkins, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent and Co., 1897), 21. The various photographic relief techniques were known collectively as “process.” 23. Carl Hentschel, “Process Engraving,” Journal of the Society of Arts, 49.2474 (1900), 463–474. 24. Lena Johannesson argues that the idea that the picture printing industry was dominated by the photograph and photo processes is untrue. She admits that the photo had an influence on the visual idiom and finds before 1900 fluid “graphic intersections” between photo and other prints. Lena Johannesson, “Pictures as News, News as Pictures: A Survey of Mass-Reproduced Images in 19th Century Sweden,” Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 1984. Also see Helena E. Wright, “The Osbourne Collection of Photomechanical Incunabula,” History of Photo- graphy, 24.1 (2000). 25. Brian Maidment, Reading Popular Prints, 1790–1870 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), in particular, “The Victorian Wood Engraving and Its Uses,” 145–48. 26. For Harris the construction of categories of “appropriateness” in the types of technology used to reproduce particular images marked a new cultural moment. Neil Harris, “Iconography and Intellectual History: The Halftone Effect,” Cultural Excursions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). 27. This study deals with magazine illustration and apart from Peter Sinnema, Dynamics of the Pictured Page: Representing the Nation in the Illustrated London News (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), there has been little attention paid to imagery in popular magazines in the nineteenth century. However, illustration, particularly the relationships between text and image, has received increasing amounts of critical attention. Recent scholarship on specific aspects of illustration includes Rosemary Mitchell, Picturing the Past: English History in Text and Image, 1830–1870 (Oxford: Clar- endon Press, 2000); Julia Thomas, Pictorial Victorians: The Inscription of Values in Word and Image (Athens Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2004); and Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, Christina Rossetti and Illustration (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2002); and For the use of photographic illustration in other media see Anthony J. Hamber, A Higher Branch of the Art: Photographing the Fine Arts in England 1839–1880 (Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach, 1996), and Helene E. Roberts, Art History through the Camera’s Lens (Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach, 1995). On the use of photography in science see Jennifer Tucker, Nature Exposed: Photography as Eyewitness in Victorian Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins

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