Images at War: Illustrated Periodicals and Constructed Nations (review)

Since its formal inception as an important sub-discipline in the late 1960s, Victorian periodicals research has tended to follow two distinct, occasionally confrontational paths. On the one hand, the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals, along with its official quarterly, the Victorian Periodicals Newsletter (later the Victorian Periodicals Review) was established to address a perceived dearth of reliable information in Victorian studies on newspapers, magazines, and other serials. The society saw itself as a kind of mustering-ground for the production of data, primarily in the form of bibliographical catalogues that traced authorial and editorial sources, about the immense body of material constituting nineteenth-century periodicals—a corpus whose "overwhelming empirical presence," as Brian Maidment has noted, seemed to offer researchers a "welcome haven of certitude in a shifting methodological and theoretical world" ("Victorian Periodicals and Academic Discourse," Investigating Victorian Journalism [1990] 144). On the other hand, the indexical impulse that continues to distinguish much of the scholarship on Victorian periodicals has been arraigned for being narrow in focus and circumscribed, if not utterly deficient, in methodology. Over the past two decades, in particular, feminists, Marxists, and new historians have called for a broader recognition of the highly mediated nature of Victorian periodicals, advocating a genuinely interdisciplinary conception of the periodical press that, in the words of Lynn Pykett, "not only challenges the boundaries between hitherto separately constituted fields of knowledge, but also challenges the internal hierarchies and sub-divisions within discrete academic disciplines" ("Reading the Periodical Press: Text and Context," Investigating Victorian Journalism 4). If the theory wars came somewhat late to Victorian periodicals research, they did not fail to make a significant impact on the field, a fact demonstrated by the recent work of scholars such as Aled Jones, Margaret Beetham, David Finkelstein, and Mark Turner.

Michéle Martin's Images at War is a self-conscious but ultimately reductive encounter with this methodological divide, opening with (and frequently returning to) the rather obvious but nonetheless germane observation that "reading historical material always involves an interpretation, a mediation" (48). Uncommitted to either the empirical or theoretical camps, Images at War serves instead as a bridging attempt that remains unsatisfying because of the extemporaneous nature of its analysis and the absence of a unifying argument. The book examines coverage of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 in the illustrated presses of England, France, Germany, and Canada. The latter two countries, represented by the Illustrirte Zeitung and the Canadian Illustrated News, get very short shrift, a few pages' consideration being granted to each in the book's final sections. England and France fare better, each represented by four illustrated newspapers: the Illustrated London News, The Graphic, the Penny Illustrated Paper, and the Illustrated Times; and Illustration, Monde illustré, Univers illustré, and the Journal illustré, respectively.

In six chapters, Martin proposes to investigate the role illustrations play in late-nineteenth-century nationalist discourse, claiming that the uniqueness of her study lies in its comparative, "international and interdisciplinary approach" (7). Her central contention is that the illustrated periodicals that covered the war were "at the crossroads of [an] information-education dynamic" (19), clinging to an anachronistic, didactic function even while their owners and editors were increasingly beholden to a purely profit-making enterprise. Martin's elaboration of this point does not include any thoughtful scrutiny of specific illustrations; her purported interest in the image/text interrelation is either forgotten or disregarded after some early assertions about its priority in her work. Still, Martin asks a number of useful questions that can guide readers to some of the current preoccupations of Victorian periodicals research.

How, for example, did engraved images become legitimate newspaper content? How did editors and artists decide, among the many unexpected events of the war, what was to be published for readers to remember? How did editorial attitudes and positions change in response to some of these vicissitudes? And perhaps most...