Constructing a Readership: Surveillance and Interiority In the Illustrated London News

Abstract

W^hen first thirty-four numbers of Illustrated London News (May-December 1842) were bound together into an imposing hard cover volume, they were prefaced with a bold claim: ILN's proprietors had, according to anonymous writer, discovered and opened up world of Illustration as connected with News. In pages of world's only regularly illustrated weekly, sound judging British public was presented with a new, scripto-visual form, clasping and together in firm embrace of Mind (Vol. l:iii). Present-day readers of ILN, although aware of paper's phenomenal success ? it was selling 130,000 copies a week in 1855, 300,000 by 1863 ? would likely approach this self congratulatory preface with some guardedness. Certainly, ILN contributed significantly to rapid expansion of press in mid nineteenth-century England; in terms of mass dissemination of popular imagery, ILN was broadly representative of what Richard Altick calls the most influential novelty during [the] period, print media's growing emphasis upon illustrations (343).1 But I would suggest that smooth exchange between Art and Literature celebrated in florid prose of ILN's preface is a relationship which demands sustained investigation. This essay, by interrogating word-image collaboration in ILN as an ideologically naturalized relationship between different modes of representation, also theorizes some of ways in which a readership may be constructed and gradually solidified into a loyal audience. J. Hillis Miller has recently argued that it is more discriminating to speak of interference of picture and text with one another, their dialogical relation (95), than to maintain notion of an untroubled co