Dynamics of the Printed Page: Representing the Nation in the Illustrated London News by Peter W. Sinnema

Abstract

ESC 26, 2000 demonstrate abundantly that astronomy is an important “imag­ inative constituent” of Melville’s writings. V. K. CHARI / Carleton University Peter W. Sinnema. Dynamics of the Printed Page: Representing the Nation in the Illustrated London News. Aldershot/Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1998. [xii], 219. £45/$76.95 (U.S.). More than a decade ago, in a chapter devoted to outlining a fu­ ture agenda for scholarship in the burgeoning field of Victorian periodicals research, this reviewer noted that “more remains to be done on illustrated journals in general and on such middleclass parlor mainstays as the Illustrated London News and the Graphic in particular.” Peter Sinnema has heeded this call, as well as a “plea for a general recognition of periodicals as dis­ course rather than evidence” by — in his words — “apprehend­ ing Victorian periodicals as discursive and ideological entities” (2). Thus, he adopts an “interventionist” reading to “contextu­ alize” the ILN and its contents. Limiting his scope to the Illustrated London News’ first decade of publication, during which time its circulation in­ creased more than five-fold, Sinnema treats the periodical as “a textual centre around which other discourses circulate” (9). Moreover, space dictated that he seek “an adequately cogent delimitation of the field of analysis” in his “examination of an unexpurgated strata of social discourse.” The discourse that most concerns him is that between text and illustration, and here he seeks no less than “a politically discriminating ekphrasis , an interpretation of the complexities of image and text in their material production and social effects” (31). Combining the tools of literary and artistic criticism, Sinnema aims “to investigate the material conditions of possibility for the IL N ’s emergence in 1842” (206). In this, perhaps the book’s most interesting chapter, the author discusses advances in the repro­ duction and mass production of illustrated texts, the interplay between the roles of illustrators and wood block engravers, and the general lack of status and “alienation” of the latter vis-à-vis the former (53ff.). The constraints imposed by the need to pro­ duce illustrations for an increasingly industrialized publishing 508 REVIEWS industry, the author argues convincingly, led to a more prole­ tarian status for illustrators, draughtsmen, and engravers. Less illuminating or persuasive, however, is the author’s lengthy, the­ oretical digression into the distinctions between “art” and “art reproduced.” Sinnema’s commitment to a theoretical pursuit of “ideolo­ gies,” in which he “attempts to break with the bibliographical tradition” (2) in the study of periodicals, appears at first to be promising. However, the author’s lack of attention to much of the historical (“bibliographical”) context, as well as his rigid adherence to passé critical theories and their attendant jargon, seriously handicap his efforts to offer worthwhile new insights and conclusions. In four “thematized” chapters that follow, the author considers the IL N 's treatment of interiors, railways, fic­ tion, and death. In the first of these, by “Taking the binary ‘interior /exterior’ as my problematic, I shall consider visual and verbal representations of indoor and outdoor spaces as some of the IL N 's most potent in terp ellate mechanisms. Linguistically and pictorially, the ILN frames a rigid distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’, or reading self and represented Other, in its con­ comitant elaboration of the interior/exterior opposition” (86). Thus, for example, the author interprets a major, illustrated article on the Pentonville prison in terms of Michel Foucault’s “panoptic modality of power” (93): “The ubiquitous artist was a synecdoche for a relatively new and pervasive culture of inde­ fatigable observation” (95). Thus, “Put simply, reading about and viewing the penal interior grants readers power” (88). A lengthy chapter is then devoted to plot summaries and analy­ ses of the ideology implicit in several works of fiction serialized during the IL N 's first decade. Nor does the author neglect to consider poetry, despite its infrequent inclusion, and we are as­ sured that “these poems calibrate seamlessly with the general strategy of ‘Othering’ already uncovered” in the prose works (145). The final chapter is devoted to the IL N 's “hypercathectic scrutiny” (6) and eulogizing of the Duke of Wellington follow­ ing his death in 1852. This “commodification” of...