Illustrating Culture: Consensus and Conflict in the Nineteenth-Century American Picture Press

Joshua Brown. Beyond the Lines: Pictorial Reporting, Everyday Life, and the Crisis of Gilded Age America. Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2002. 384 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $49.95.

On April 27, 1861, while Fort Sumter lay under siege, Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper ran a call for artists among the soldiery on both sides of the conflict:

Important Notice!

To Officers and others Attached to the Armies of the Federal and the Confederate States

I shall be happy to receive from Officers and others attached to either Army, sketches of important events and striking incidents which may occur during the impending struggle which seems to threaten the country. For such sketches, forwarded promptly, I will pay liberally . . .

The most convincing proof of the reliability and accuracy of our illustrations is, that ours is the only Illustrated Paper which is allowed to circulate freely in the South, and an additional proof is, that it stands a critical examination in those places where the scenes we illustrate occurred .

(p. 47)

The notice contains in condensed form much of the flavor of Leslie's and, beyond it, the illustrated popular journalism of nineteenth-century America. The call for "sketches"—not written, but drawn—reflected a shift in emphasis within the magazine press, from a cultivated, even elevated form of writing toward a visual journalism, democratically based and directed toward a newly empowered and rapidly expanding democratic polity. Leslie's wanted artifacts of direct experience, marked with the imprimatur of authenticity; it sought to present itself as less a maker of taste and ideology than a conduit linking everyday citizens experiencing the momentous events of democracy and modernization. This Leslie's notice was the clarion call of a new force in American cultural politics: a popular press situated between the scurrilous rags of vested political interest and inflammatory rhetoric and the sober high-style Boston and New York literary magazines. Even as the Union was sundering, Leslie's was announcing a new American mass culture, based in the promise of authenticity, applying the democracy of sight and the visual to overcome divisions of literacy and language and, beyond that, class, region, and political divisions.

This is the first argument Joshua Brown presents in his engrossing study of the illustrated press in nineteenth-century America: that we can trace in this often-cited but rarely studied genre the rise of a uniquely American popular culture. But there is much more to this wonderful study: Brown's narrative is a story, with twists and turns of plot, Dickensian characters and settings, and an equivalently complex set of interwoven themes. Beginning with Leslie's, Brown expands his focus to include the magazine press more generally; watching this segment of popular culture, Brown reveals its hubris—its promise to unite a disparate nation, a promise impossible to keep and often disastrous in outcome. As Brown argues, forcibly and with expertise, "Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper prospered because of its ability to both address and encompass difference. . . . [H]owever . . . this inclusiveness could never successfully bridge oppositions" (p. 46). To survive the very turbulence it reported and exploited, Leslie's turned to the visual, to "pictorial coverage" as a means to disguise, to emphasize, to undercut, to distill, and to disguise its contradictory messages.

Let us return for a moment to that call for artists—a densely packed artifact, rich in significance for those seeking to understand Leslie's in particular and nineteenth-century American culture in general. Brown examines the packed canvas of American life during the period, and he has found it necessary to read not just other journals, but the documents and histories of a far wider array of cultural trends and events—not least because Leslie's and other such periodicals promised readers they'd find everything they needed to know, to think, and to believe in their...