Imperial Differences and Culture Clashes in Victorian Periodicals' Visuals: The Case of Punch

One area under-utilized in research and in teaching on the periodical press is the press's visuality, a study of how visual content functions to generate meanings and reader identifications in periodicals. Despite art history departments now changing their titles to visual culture or visual media, art historians rarely include the press in courses, and curricular attention to popular culture in general is weak and often limited to film. In two courses, I use Victorian periodicals extensively: "Empire and Culture" and a course on Victorian art. In these courses I compare Punch cartoons, engravings in the Illustrated London News and the Graphic, and illustrations by Victorian artists for serialized literature. Periodical images were often para-texts, by which I mean they do not simply "illustrate" a text in a literal way (presuming this could even be done), but rather provide visual comment on the topic that may not simply repeat something from the text. Victorian illustrations and cartoons often complemented or supplemented written texts or captions, and sometimes even created contradictions or ambiguities not in the text they accompanied but generated in the space between image and text. Cartoons, engravings, photos, and lithographs were also read through their own conventions and through the social codes they bore as popular or high culture, "creative" or comic, imaginative or "realistic." These broader socio-cultural meanings placed most periodicals on a cultural spectrum, and most Victorian readers would recognize these codes as "naturalized" parts of their cultural experiences.

Recent studies of Victorian visuality inform the analyses in my class. Scholars who wish to incorporate discussions of periodical images in their courses can draw on illuminating studies of Victorian visual culture (e.g., Kate Flint, Julia Thomas, Carol Christ, and John Jordan), studies of the intersections of literature or narrative and the visual arts (Sophia Andres, Murray Roston, Michaela Giebelhausen, Gerard Curtis, Pamela Fletcher), scholarship on visual culture (most recently, Jessica Evans and Stuart Hall, Nicolas Mirzoeff, Amelia Jones, Margaret Dikovitskaya, W. J. T. Mitchell, among many others), and slightly older scholarship on cultural studies (Stuart Hall, Simon During, Lawrence Grossberg, John Storey, Graeme Turner, and periodicals devoted to this now-vast subject). The periodical press's own particular visual content is addressed in books by Peter Sinnema on the Illustrated London News and Paula Kreps on Victorian press representations of the Boer War. Exploring visuals in the press helps students in literature, art history, and history gain command of the rich ways images convey meanings in unstable relationships with other periodical content, including texts, advertisements, layout and broader cultural fields.

For art history courses, periodicals' images counterpoint the discipline's customary emphasis on "high" culture. Periodical images raise issues of representation in the frequent bond between an image and a text in periodicals. Images complemented, supplemented or even contradicted, sometimes unwittingly, texts with which they were paired. Images often added an emotional dimension and reinforced stereotypes. John Tenniel's cartoons on the 1851 Great Exhibition represented non-European foreigners then as bacchanalian primitives.¹ Well-known "high art" paintings used to satirize politicians or parliamentary bills created unstable and sometimes illegible meanings about what or who was the cartoon's target.² Cartoons are timely, so students also need help unraveling cartoons' references.

The first step is to survey differences in content, layout (another important visual feature), and page contextualization (images surrounded by texts) among sample periodicals. In my class, we focus on a few periodicals that use different media for different purposes. The Graphic employed artists' engravings to depict real life social issues. The Illustrated London News recorded events and imaged "important" figures whose importance was enhanced and even created by their appearance in the press. Many periodicals had "galleries" of ministers, politicians, intellectuals, and later artists and writers whose appearance signaled their rising importance. Foregrounding such people gave the press a role in shaping cultural identities of class, gender, locale, and nation.

In these ways, press images created a virtual gallery fitting Carlyle's notion that a portrait gallery would bring spectators into communion with national divinities.³ The vast majority...