The European Illustrated Press and the Emergence of a Transnational Visual Culture of the News, 1842-1870

Thomas Smits

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780367247867
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000767223
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

This book looks at the roots of a global visual news culture: the trade in illustrations of the news between European illustrated newspapers in the mid-nineteenth century. In the age of nationalism, we might suspect these publications to be filled with nationally produced content, supporting a national imagined community. However, the large-scale transnational trade in illustrations, which this book uncovers, points out that nineteenth-century news consumers already looked at the same world. By exchanging images, European illustrated newspapers provided them with a shared, transnational, experience.

1
Readers all over the world

The audiences of the Illustrated London News, l’Illustration, and the Illustrirte Zeitung, 1842–1870

Introduction

In “Around the World without a Gaze,” Peter Sinnema has pointed to the prominent role that newspapers play in the work of Jules Verne (1828–1905). The gentleman traveller Phileas Fogg reads the Illustrated London News everywhere he goes during his trip in the novel Around the World in Eighty Days (1873).¹ Instead of enjoying some sightseeing in Hong Kong, Fogg ‘engrossed himself all evening in The Times and Illustrated London News.’² The irony of Fogg’s position cannot escape the reader: ‘His journey seems to offer him direct purchase on an Other world, but he prefers to access that world indirectly, through printed and pictorial journalism.’³ Sinnema argued that the images of the Illustrated London News are a form of representational control for Fogg: instead of confronting the inhabitants of the countries he visits directly, he gazes at them through the controlled lens of the illustrated newspaper.

While the Illustrated London News certainly fulfils this function in Verne’s novel, in reality, others also used the periodical to look back. Underlining the universal comprehensibility of images of the news, the paper contained the following passage in 1859:

The Chinaman and the Japanese, though unable to read what we write, learn something of the ‘barbarians’,… by contemplation of the pictures that all the world can understand, and which they cut out to adorn the cabins of their junks or the walls of their dwellings on shore.⁴

A year later, a correspondent of the Jersey Independent and Daily Telegraph exploring China remarked that ‘illustrations from the Illustrated London News’ adorned the walls of barbershops in Tinghae, the capital of the present-day Chinese island of Zhoushan.⁵

This chapter argues that the audiences of illustrated newspapers were far less national than has been previously assumed. It shows that the three most famous mid-nineteenth-century titles – the British Illustrated London News, the French l’Illustration, and the German Illustrirte Zeitung – served diverse audiences, ranging from urban readers to readers in colonies and other nations. These diverse groups of readers are brought into focus by looking at how the illustrated newspapers described their ideal audiences in different kinds of paratexts, for instance, in the introductions to bounded volumes, new years’ greetings, and all sorts of notices informing readers on practical matters, such as the mailing of the publications. In addition, digital archives can be used to research their distribution and reception in specific areas. Two cases – the reception of the three illustrated newspapers in the Australian colonies and the Netherlands – highlight this new methodology.

Historiography and methodology: readership and digital newspaper archives

In the last two decades of the twentieth century, it was widely held that the historical readership of a publication was almost impossible to trace.⁶ As a reaction to the empirical research of the 1950s to the 1970s, exemplified by Richard Altick’s seminal study The English Common Reader (1957), historians focused on ‘textual’ readers, by critically studying the ways in which text conscripted readers and produced audiences.⁷

Since the late 1990s, several historians and theorists have criticized the focus on the textual reader. In The Reading Lesson (1998), Patrick Brantlinger has argued that the gap between the sociology of Altick’s common reader and the produced and conscripted textual reader should be bridged to acquire the most realistic picture of actual readers and readings practices.⁸ By focusing on ‘resisting readers,’ several gender historians make the same point. As Hilary Fraser, Stephanie Green, and Judith Johnston would have it in their insightful Gender and the Victorian Periodical (2003): ‘To neglect the “real” reader is to privilege the ideological positioning of the reader by and in the text, and diminishes our sense of readerly agency, of how the person turning the pages might have resisted, or at least participated in, that positioning.’⁹

This chapter aspires to bridge the gap between the common and textual reader, by focusing on the middle ground where they meet. It arrives at this middle ground in two ways. First, different paratexts, such as introductions of bounded volumes and advertisements, describe the ideal audience of the illustrated newspapers. Also included in this category are all sorts of practical notices concerning, for example, an increase in the price of mailing a periodical. These notices reveal something about ‘real’ audiences: successful illustrated newspapers operated in a competitive market, and, as a result, their ideal audience – the readers they targeted – must have been attainable. Second, the practical notices concerning the mailing of the periodicals demonstrate that a substantial part of the readership for the three illustrated newspapers lived either abroad or in the colonies.

Digital archives enable research into the distribution and reception of publications in specific geographical contexts. Historians from different fields agree that digital archives offer reliable data for research on the reception of novels. Bob Nicholson, for instance, has pointed out how literary scholars can use digital archives to ‘examine how a novel sat within wider cultural discourse.’¹⁰ James Mussell has also argued that we can use digital archives to ‘study the construction of authorship, from the different ways that it is signalled across print contexts to the coverage of the emergent author in news, reviews and gossip.’¹¹ However, these methods have not been applied to more ephemeral publications such as newspapers and magazines. The research of this chapter is consequently based on the premise that media write about other media, especially if they were as successful as the Illustrated London News, l’Illustration, and the Illustrirte Zeitung were in the mid-nineteenth century.

Using keyword searches in digital archives, I studied the distribution of the three illustrated newspapers to map where their different audiences could be found. To begin, I used the British Newspaper Archive to study the distribution of the Illustrated London News outside London. Similarly, I looked for references to the British illustrated newspaper in the digital newspaper archives of Australia, Singapore, and Bermuda, the only former British colonies to offer open access to the digitized material of their national libraries. Finally, I studied the availability and reception of all three illustrated newspapers in the Netherlands by looking for references in Delpher: the Dutch digital newspaper archive.

While some countries, like Britain and the Netherlands, boast extensive digital newspaper archives, the digitization of sources is still in its infancy in others. In studying transnational phenomena in digital newspaper archives, we must therefore be aware that they provide unequal access to the past.¹² For example, while the digital newspaper archive Trove can be used to study the reception of the Illustrated London News in the Australian colonies, the lack of a similar archive in India obscures a large part of its colonial distribution. Similarly, while the British Newspaper Archive enables a study of the national readership of the British illustrated newspaper, the lack of similar national initiatives when I started my research in 2013 in France and Germany made it much more difficult to chart the national distribution of l’Illustration and the Illustrirte Zeitung.

Different audiences

This section discusses the different audiences of the three illustrated newspapers. Where – in what geographical areas – can they be located? In this regard, the argument put forward here is that the illustrated newspapers had readers on three geographical levels: the city, the nation, and abroad. In addition, the three illustrated newspapers targeted and found specific audiences, like the many readers of the Illustrated London News in the British colonies.

Urban readers

Two of the illustrated newspapers have the name of a city in their title: the Illustrated London News and the Leipziger Illustrirte Zeitung. When the former completed its second volume in 1843, it prided itself on the fact that it had brought th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Readers all over the world: the audiences of the Illustrated London News, l’Illustration, and the Illustrirte Zeitung, 1842–1870
• 2 The transnational trade in illustrations of the news, 1842–1870
• 3 Foreign images of war: L’Illustration’s images of the Crimean War in Cassell’s Illustrated Family Paper
• 4 Images of the world: the transnational trade in illustrations and the visual representation of the Universal Exposition of 1867
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index