Peter W. Sinnema - Dynamics of the Pictured Page

First published 1998 by Ashgate Publishing

Reissued 2018 by Routledge

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Copyright Peter W. Sinnema, 1998

The author has asserted his moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. The author has asserted his moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

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The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent.

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ISBN 13: 978-0-367-13426-6 (hbk)

ISBN 13: 978-0-367-13427-3 (pbk)

ISBN 13: 978-0-429-02642-3 (ebk)

The aim of this series is to reflect, develop and extend the great burgeoning of interest in the nineteenth century that has been an inevitable feature of recent decades, as that former epoch has come more sharply into focus as a locus for our understanding not only of the past but of the contours of our modernity. Though it is dedicated principally to the publication of original monographs and symposia in literature, history, cultural analysis, and associated fields, there will be a salient role for reprints of significant texts from, or about, the period. Our overarching policy is to address the spectrum of nineteenth-century studies without exception, achieving the widest scope in chronology, approach and range of concern. This, we believe, distinguishes our project from comparable ones, and means, for example, that in the relevant areas of scholarship we both recognize and cut innovatively across such parameters as those suggested by the designations Romantic and Victorian. We welcome new ideas, while valuing tradition. It is hoped that the world which predates yet so forcibly predicts and engages our own will emerge in parts, as a whole, and in the lively currents of debate and change that are so manifest an aspect of its intellectual, artistic and social landscape.

Surprisingly, even a book of such modest pretensions as this one requires the thanks (most happily given) of many. There are those who read earlier versions, in whole or in part, and turned the unseasoned into the readable: Lesley Higgins, Marie-Christine Leps, William Whitla, Jim Ellis, Jennifer Henderson, Katherine Binhammer, Daniel OQuinn, George Szanto and Jamie Scott. Those on the publishing and reproductive end of things: Alec McAulay, and Caroline Cornish of Ashgate Publishing, and Joanne Shattock of the University of Leicester; John Workman and other staff at the University of Torontos Robarts Library and Zoology department, for help with the illustrations. Those who provided support of a more oblique, but no less significant nature: Keith Denny, Glenn Mielke, Jim Leach, Craig Gordon, Lauren Gillingham, Janice Leach, and my mother, Edith Sinnema. She who has long been a professional and emotional mainstay: Janet Wesselius. And the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, which provided financial support for the studys research and writing.

A brief note on the text: the transcriptions provided for several of the illustrations retain the punctuation of the original pages of the Illustrated London News. Their style has been edited somewhat differently in the main body of the text.

Commenting on the extraordinary breadth of Victorian periodicals and a burgeoning historical interest in their influence on nineteenth-century readers, B. E. Maidment notes that there exists a startling absence of any well-developed corpus of work studying the generic issues specific to periodicals the complex mediations ... of editorial policy, wood engraving technique, readership definition, sales figures, distribution patterns and finance which would help us to better understand some of the ideological and political investments of proprietors and consumers (144). Although scholarly work has a long history of extracting evidence from Victorian periodicals to support and illustrate arguments, it has rarely accounted for these periodicals in themselves. As a result of this dearth of critical analysis, Maidment makes a plea for a general recognition of periodicals as discourse rather than evidence, challenging historians and literary scholars to identify more rigorously the specific place occupied by the discourses of periodicals within that hierarchy of discourses by which social meaning is constructed (151, 147).

Maidments challenge is eight years old, yet much remains to be done in terms of expanding periodicals research beyond its traditional activities of empirical description and classification. With specific regard to illustrated periodicals, a lack of critical work continues to hamper present-day researchers interested in the nineteenth-century popular press. The 1994 publication of a collection of essays promisingly entitled Victorian Periodicals and Victorian Society; however, seemed to offer redress for this paucity of theoretical discourse. Patricia Anderson argues precisely this point in her chapter on Illustration in the text just mentioned, referring to illustrated Victorian newspapers: There are still not many scholarly studies which combine sophisticated analysis of the content of periodical illustration with a rigorous attention to the purposes that the imagery served and to the particular social, cultural, and political context in which it was created (133). Yet, despite this reference to an absence of such scholarship,