“Peculiarly marked with the character of our own time”: Photography and Family Values in Victorian Domestic Journalism

This article focuses on the treatment of photography in Household Words and All the Year Round between early 1850 and late 1870, addressing the increasingly complex interaction between Victorian domestic values and the conflicting impulses of the modern age. The ambiguous discursive response to the new medium of photography in Dickens’s periodicals testifies to the intricacy involved in combining a family-oriented socio-cultural agenda with the challenges presented by mass-produced photographic images.