Dynamics of the Pictured Page

Representing the Nation in the "Illustrated London News"

Peter W. Sinnema

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429640377
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Originally published in 1998, Dynamics of the Pictured Page provides a critical study of the world's first regularly illustrated newspaper, the Illustrated London News, founded by Herbert Ingram in 1842. Focusing on the first decade of this enormously influential weekly, this book situates the ILN within the publishing history of periodicals, arguing not only for a better understanding of those new modes of production engendered by an illustrated newspaper, but also for the need to theorize the relations between engraved images and printed text that constituted the ILN, which advertised itself as an unprecedented 'marriage' between art and literature.

Through a series of interpretive interventions that focus on categories that would have had especially powerful reverberations for Victorian readers (for example, the home, the railway, the public funeral, and serialized literature), this book traces the newspaper's complex strategies of appeal to a middle-class English readership.

This book will appeal to students of nineteenth-century literature and history (especially those with an interest in publishing history and the history of the press), as well as to Victorian studies scholars.

CHAPTER ONE

Political Vision and the Illustrated Text

Founded in an age of escalating technological advancement and fixation, the Illustrated London News – site of new mediations between such categories as the art of wood engraving and the dissemination of news – embodies what would appear to be competing aspirations. On the one hand, the paper heralds itself as a sort of bracketing agent in its presentation of ‘a new, beautiful, and hitherto untilled field’ of printing technology, ‘clasping Literature and Art together in the firm embrace of Mind’ (ILN 1: 1–2). In this instance, the ILN attempts to accomplish its own absolute commodification in a new form. With the well-packaged commodity, a potent physical presence conceals every trace of the labour that produced it. What tends to be lost in the ILN’s celebrated encounter of pictures with words is the fact that a complex conjuncture of advances in news gathering, illustration, engraving, typesetting, mass publication, and efficient distribution formed the infrastructure for the success of the final product. On the other hand, the ILN repeatedly advertises its own processes of production, as was demonstrated in the Introduction with the early announcement of circulation figures and with the promotion of the ‘colosseum’ print. By disclosing its own ‘technique’, the newspaper seeks to impress readers with its energetic industry, its capacity to triumph over nature in order to bring to the world all the news fit to print and illustrate.

As this study progresses, I shall return frequently to the fundamental issue of the image-text collaboration and its protective agency, its capacity to construct versions of the world gratifying to a particular audience. Like the technological extravaganzas publicly consumed in the increasingly lavish ‘world’ fairs of the second half of the nineteenth century,¹ the ILN seems to transform the appearance of reality into an objective fact. Image and text in combination claim to be a rigorous, unmediated presentation of the world as it empirically exists: mimesis in its purest form. The writer of the preface to the third volume asks with considerable flourish, ‘Is not the register true in detail and illuminated by art?’ (3: n.p.). As might be expected, a positive answer is provided: ‘in a word, all the landmarks of Time’s Progress Truth and Art set up within this tome’ (3: n.p.).

It may, however, be more useful to speak of ekphrasis, the translation of the visual in and through the verbal,² than of the ILN’s adherence to the conventions of mimesis. But traditional ekphratic activity is itself not sufficient. What is called for is a politically discriminating ekphrasis, an interpretation of the complexities of image and text in their material production and social effects. James Heffernan’s attempt in Museum of Words (1993) to expand the notion of ekphrasis to accompany both the word’s classical meaning and the emphases of contemporary cultural studies provides a useful and comprehensive definition: simply put, ‘Ekphrasis is the verbal representation of visual representation’ (3). No longer limiting the ancient concept to the specifically literary interpretation of visual art – poetic ruminations on painting, in particular – Heffernan enables us to speak of the full array of language’s interpretation of (and our ways of speaking about) all types of visual art, including wood engraving in the illustrated press.

If, then, ‘cultural artifacts make the world, as well as being made by it’ (Rees and Borzello 70), a critical, late twentieth-century reading of the Victorian ILN will evaluate the interrelation between pictures and words as a means of wresting away such an ‘artifact’ from the myths which constitute its ideological ‘unconscious’. The ILN makes the world, fabricating an English identity for its nineteenth-century readers, by contributing to such solidifying ideologies as those of national superiority, limitless technological progress, and bourgeois solidarity. Although the ILN 9s editor presents the bound issues of 1842 as a potential ‘museum-preserved volume’ that should be ‘enshrined’ (1: l),³ it is precisely this urge to make the text a static, irrefutable archive that ought to be countered in favour of a truly interventionist reading.⁴ Lyn Pykett encapsulates this point in her essay on Victorian journalism:

Periodicals can no longer be regarded in any simply reflective way as ‘evidence’ (either primary or secondary), as transparent records which give access to, and provide the means of recovering, the culture which they ‘mirror.’ Far from being a mirror of Victorian culture, the periodicals have come to be seen as a central component of that culture – an ‘active and integral part’, and they can only be read and understood as part of that culture and society, and in the context of other knowledges about them. (7)

One way of contextualizing the ILN, as I suggested in the Introduction, is to give careful consideration to the mechanics of its production. The temporal origins of the ILN and the specific details of its publication during the 1840s and early 1850s give rise to an indispensable historical knowledge. Chapter Two, in particular, is concerned with the paper’s ‘coming into being’ through wage labour and its subsequent dissemination as a new contract between art and letterpress. But the encounter between image and text in the ILN will also be understood, in terms more formalist than materialist, as an innovative confrontation which must be submitted to critique. (Figuratively, the form / content opposition implied by these comments is enacted in those engravings in the ILN which disclose on the surface the activity of their production. Those white lines running through so many of the newspaper’s pictures show where the wood blocks are joined together to create one image. These lines are inadvertent, ‘mistakes’, insofar as they are precisely what should be hidden from the viewer. The totality and harmony of the published images are at times betrayed by these indications of the labour of separate engravers who were unable to integrate seamlessly the wood blocks. Lines thus point to ‘form’, to the materiality of the wood block itself.)

The notion of a necessary connection between the literary or artistic product and the materiality of its production is, of course, nothing new. Within the broad context of visual representation alone, the ‘new’ art history can be viewed as a concerted if not yet fully developed effort to propagate an awareness of the artwork’s production and the consequent political implications for the perceiver. Much contemporary art history attempts to break free of art consumerism and apolitical connoisseurship by returning artworks to (and thereby grounding them in) the history of their own creation. As Rees and Borzello write, ‘the “new art history” is in opposition to the widespread tendency of art historians, and art critics, to isolate works of art from the broader social circumstances of their production and reception’ (41). The new art historian confronts the perceiver with the political significance of the temporal and material contiguity between the seemingly autonomous, displayed work, and its production in the specificity of a cultural context.

If the new art history works to repoliticize those works already regarded as art, the question might be posed: how can the ILN be read as a site of this complex cultural-material interplay? Further, how does that other central interplay between text and image contribute to and further complicate this primary intersection? A particularly poignant example from the ILN provides some hints as to how this doubled interrelation functions and how it can be articulated.

The illustration and poem which occupy the top left-hand corner of the last page from a winter number for 1849 present the reader with a number of powerful tensions under the title, ‘The Inscription on the Pavement’ (Figure 2). The wretched beggar’s obvious destitution is unparalleled in engravings elsewhere in the ILN. Baldly unromanticized, the pictorial representation of the pauper might excite either reactionary horror or curious sympathy. The poem on the right, however, as the verbal accompaniment to the engraving, exhibits a seemingly impervious, if slightly uncertain, self-righteousness: ‘clamorous beggary disgusts’ the speaker, who, however sadly, feels obliged to ‘steel the heart, avert the eye’, excoriating this beggar who audaciously ‘vend[s his] squalor at our feet’. To ‘part ... shillings’ with the destitute under such circumstances would be an implicit affront to the workhouse system, maintained by taxes and representative of British justice, which has the convenient advantage of concealing from public view grieving widows and ‘orphan babes’. According to the speaker, the workhouse is designed expressly ‘to keep the beggar from the street’.

2 ‘The Inscription on the Pavement’, 14.355 (17 January 1849): 64

‘The Inscription’, however, does not exist in a political or material vacuum. Coexisting under the aegis of the illustrated periodical, forms such as the poem or the engraved picture are invariably redefined according to the way they are embedded in, or received as constituent parts of, the newspaper. In other words, their relative position to each other on the newspaper page specifies in part their artifactual use. A poem like Mackay’s ‘Inscription’ is accorded new layers of meaning once it is illustrated, once it becomes part of a fully interdependent relationship – verse and illustration elaborating each other reciprocally.

Stepping back momentarily from the specific interrelation between Mackay’s poem and Meadows’s illustration by examining them as parts of the page upon which the reader of 1849 would have found them, one would be better able to appreciate how they might have appealed, with minimal agitation, to a reading and viewing audience. ‘The Inscription on the Pavement’ occupies about one-third of the entire page’s space. Although it is situated at the page’s top, deriving a certain advantage of position, it is nevertheless an integral part of an otherwise innocuous pictorial and textual environment: the bleakness of the beggar scene contrasts sharply with two engravings of pleasant buildings, an ‘ancient edifice’ in Somersetshire currently serving as an inn, and a handsome new school in Bermondsey, south London. The spatial contiguity between ragged mendicant and a feature on ‘Nooks and Corners of Old England’ appears perverse, even farcical, from this perspective. But, as any reader of the press knows, frequently bizarre disparities between one column and its neighbour, between one picture and another on the same page, are inherent to the form.

Rather than stress the inevitability of friction in content, however, I would like to note that such contradictions are capable of acting forcefully upon any particular verbal-visual representation. The layout of the page on which Figure 2 is found therefore has the effect of diluting much of the discomfort that might arise from even an attentive encounter with the poem and engraving. Integrated with news of the universities and with the banter of architectural appreciation, ‘The Inscription on the Pavement’ is also infected with the apolitical nugacity characteristic of the pages of general information and entertainment that close most numbers of the ILN.

I shall return to the formal structure of the page and to the generic fusing constitutive of the ILN in the third example. At this point we can observe how Mackay’s poem exhibits discomfort with its own position. The speaker admits to a ‘harsh’ reaction to the beggar; he intimates that he is troubled by ‘unpleasant thoughts’. Yet he is able to repudiate these ‘rising qualms’, to reassert ‘judgment’ in an emotional purge, by attributing blame to the wretch’s ‘importunity’ and by calling to his assistance the New Poor Law of 1834. The poem is barely able to contain, under the language of urbane piety, the undeniable social inequities and moral quandaries the beggar embodies. Add to this the fact that Charles Mackay was the literary and political editor of the ILN from 1848 to 1852 (and thereafter editor-in-chief until 1859 [see Jackson 305]), and account must be taken of the exemplary authority his own words bear for the ILN. In his role as editor-poet, Mackay represents, in the fullest sense, the Law, the ideological underpinnings of the ILN.

Picture and word, then, operate as ‘inscriptions’ on a number of levels to produce complexity and ambiguity. The ‘poor scribbler of the flags’ inscribes his poverty onto paper in order to publicize his plight. He has no voice in the poem, existing simply as the mute addressee of the poet’s oddly defensive verse. How, then, is his evidently silent beggary ‘clamorous’ or ‘theatric’? Still, the inscription ‘I am Destitute’ forcefully demonstrates the process of subjectivization. Not only do the words provide spectators with an internal caption to help us make sense of the supplicating pauper and his presence on a London street, they also represent the beggar as a subject who accepts what socio-economic discourse says he is: ‘I am – that is, I represent a certain social position, what society labels – Destitute.’

The scribbler’s written words find a curious counterpart in the illustrator’s self-inscription at the bottom left corner. Kenny Meadows’s initials are etched into the sidewalk and become part of the picture, aligning themselves with its perspective by sloping to the left and paralleling the cracks of the stone pavement. But, despite their apparent absorption, these letters declare Meadows’s ownership of the picture: by having his signature cut into it, Meadows asserts possession, even while his initials occupy the same representational plane as the beggar’s note, taking on a naturalized appearance as a ‘real’ component of the scene. Like Mackay, Meadows signs his work, naming himself as its originator – and in so doing, betrays the ‘objectivity’ of the representation, its ostensible status as a window on the world. In this sense his initials are more potent than the pathetic words of the nameless scribbler, since they refer the viewer to a creator, to the authentic source of the picture. And if we take the title of the engraving literally, Meadows seems to be the referent; his ‘KM’ is carved directly into the pavement, whereas the beggar’s plea is written in ink on a slip of paper held down by small rocks. Which, or whose, is ‘The Inscription on the Pavement’?

The various pressures only just contained in this instance of visual and verbal ‘collaboration’ can be paraphrased as follows: the economic ‘content’ discernible as the sub-text in the combined visual-verbal moment functions as a kind of base-frame within which image and text confront each other. The resolution offered in the poem – the turning away of the speaker as a morally justified movement – is not simply the predictable displacement of bad conscience. Nor is it indicative of the now-familiar Victorian encouragement of self-help popularized by writers such as Samuel Smiles and Harriet Martineau. Any such attempted rapprochement of a contradiction is also symptomatic, is in fact the primary symptom, of ideology at work. The Inscription on the Pavement5 comes into being at the confluence of an economic contradiction combatted and successfully resolved by the speaker’s ambiguous position as a defender of an early, crude version of the welfare state; the pauper is situated as a threat to the very workhouses upon which destitutes such as himself must, and ought to, rely.

In the case of Mackay’s speaker, then, ideological resolution operates as the common-sensical overcoming of fundamentally irresolvable crises. The speaker’s reaction to the beggar is shameless through an appeal to what is for him an inherent moral law prohibiting street charity. Though harsh it seem ... our English law is wise and good’, because it helps those who help themselves (‘And surely, if thine art can spell / Thy sufferings to the public view, / Thy hand can pull the workhouse bell / To ask the parish for they due?’). And in this quite extraordinary instance, the law is economic in origin: the speaker’s ‘ideological consciousness’, witnessed in the elaborate resolution of a material contradiction, reveals its rootedness in the concerns of capital.

This same interplay between resolution and an economic substructure is repeated in an image-text collaboration of 1850 which dominates a page in a special Christmas number. Like the unfortunate scribbler of the flags, The Crow-Boy’ (Figure 3) is a societal outcast; in this case, he is the subject of a seasonal homily rather than of a versifier’s uneasy...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• The Nineteenth Century General Editors’ Preface
• List of Figures
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Political Vision and the Illustrated Text
• 2 Reproducing ‘Art’ and the Division of Labour
• 3 Interiority and Readership
• 4 Representing the Railway
• 5 Domestic Fiction: Maintaining Social Equilibrium
• 6 Death and National Glory
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index