Making Pictorial Print

A stimulating and innovative analysis of the illustrated journalism of the late Victorian era and its legacy for present day print media literacy. In a series of illuminating case studies from the Illustrated London News, the Graphic, Pearson's Magazine, and the Strand, Alison Hedley demonstrates how the mass readership of popular illustrated newspapers and magazines anticipated the engagement and agency of today's consumers of both print and social media.

Alison Hedley offers detailed, wide-ranging, and subtle case studies of the materiality and intermediality of popular illustrated magazines in fin-de-siecle London. Refreshingly she places media-literate readers and their reshaping of print via scrapbooks and snapshots at the centre of her account. Situated at a moment when print was entangled in new technologies including cinema, photography, and the gramophone, the book outlines a landscape that shaped subsequent mass media.

In Making Pictorial Print, Alison Hedley argues that late nineteenth-century popular periodicals not only embraced the possibilities afforded by new imaging technologies but also drew attention to their use. Through illuminating readings of text and image, she provides a compelling account of how these publications cultivated the print media literacy of their readers. The book is essential reading for anyone interested in how readers navigated the changing media landscape of the late nineteenth century.

This vivid account of the many different ways readers engaged with Victorian media culture in popular illustrated periodicals at the end of the nineteenth century ranges over many important topics, including advertising, statistical visualization, scrapbooks, and reader contributions. Alison Hedley's theorization of the print technological imagination addresses the complex new visual literacies and interpretive horizons developing within and alongside print culture as nineteenth-century readers negotiated a culture of rapid technological and social change.