Abstract
In 1893, Joseph Gleeson White, the editor of The Studio and the leading critic of contemporary illustration, commented on a familiar London phenomenon: the crowds that assembled outside of publishers’ offices in the Strand and on Fleet Street. The great illustrated weekly magazines, including Punch, the Illustrated London News, and the Graphic, all displayed their latest issues in their windows, attracting spectators who lingered over the pictures they contained, engaging in a particularly public form of social reading. Gleeson White suggested that these groups found the printed depiction of events more compelling than the capital’s ancient monuments and the grand official buildings that surrounded them. This chapter discusses the structure of the late-Victorian media and the differing ways in which daily, weekly, and monthly publications incorporated illustration. It also looks at the audience for the new pictorial press.
For one person gazing at the “Griffen” with sorrow or reverence, you shall see a dozen looking in at the office of a popular weekly paper; for one rapt in contemplation before the Law Courts, perhaps a hundred with their backs to it, studying the actuality of the sketches on the spot which are exhibited in the window of the Daily Graphic.
– “The Lay Figure Speaks,” The Studio, October 18931
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Notes
Joseph Gleeson White, “The Lay Figure Speaks,” Studio (October 1893). The “Griffen” is the heraldic griffin statue that marks the boundaries of the City of London.
See Gareth Steadman Jones, Outcast London (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), Chapter 8, “The Transformation of Central London,” 159–78.
On imperialism and commerce, see Bernard Porter, “The Edwardians and Their Empire,” Edwardian England, ed. Donald Read (London: Croom Helm, 1982). Also see Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire: The Making of Modern English Society from 1750 to the Present Day, 107–08, 110–27, 201–02.
Susan D. Pennybacker, A Vision for London, 1889–1914: Labour, Everyday Life and the LCC Experiment (London: Routledge, 1995), 24.
T. H. S. Escott, “The Past, Present and Future of the Middle Classes,” Fortnightly Review, NS 88 (1907), 117–18. Escott was the editor of the Daily Telegraph.
Mason Jackson, The Pictorial Press: Its Origins and Progress (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1885), 2.
Mark Hampton, Visions of the Press in Britain, 1850–1950 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 83.
James Moran, Printing in the Twentieth Century (London: The Times Printing Company Limited, 1930), 24.
Ellic Howe, Newspaper Printing in the Nineteenth Century (London: Printed Privately, 1943), 25.
Horace Townsend, “Modern Developments in Illustrated Journalism,” Journal of the Society of Arts, 42. 2152 (1894).
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© 2008 Gerry Beegan
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Beegan, G. (2008). Imaging the City: London and the Media in the 1890s. In: The Mass Image. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230589926_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230589926_2
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