Making Pictorial Print: Media Literacy and Mass Culture in British Magazines, 1885–1918 by Alison Hedley

Abstract

Reviewed by: Making Pictorial Print: Media Literacy and Mass Culture in British Magazines, 1885–1918 by Alison Hedley Emma Liggins (bio) Alison Hedley, Making Pictorial Print: Media Literacy and Mass Culture in British Magazines, 1885–1918 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021), pp. 187, $85/ £70.99 hardcover. Drawing on media studies approaches and new understandings of technology, Making Pictorial Print gives a lively, broad-ranging account of the significance of images in the periodical at the fin de siècle. Whilst recent studies have paid welcome attention to illustration and image reproduction in nineteenth-century journalism, Alison Hedley's timely intervention broadens conceptualisations of text-image relations across a number of representative magazines and encourages us to rethink their complex visuality and rapidly increasing audiences. She demonstrates that what she terms "the technological imagination," encompassing the modernity of new communication technologies from the gramophone to the camera, is hugely significant for appreciating "readers' enhanced awareness of media materiality" (16). As she argues, "Popular illustrated magazines prepared mass readerships for modern media systems," helping to usher in a new media age (17). Analysing advertisements, photographs, magazine headers, wood engravings, and scrapbooks, Hedley shows how pictorial magazines, and indeed popular culture in general, became increasingly visual and multimodal as the twentieth century approached. This new media landscape "created new possibilities for readers to exert agency" and make meaning at a time of periodical diversification (62). She takes as her case studies the Illustrated London News, the Graphic, Pearson's Magazine, and the Strand Magazine, all popular Victorian publications with long print runs surviving into the 1930s and beyond. Although oriented around general [End Page 459] interest periodicals and omitting the widely read women's magazines of this era, this selection allows Hedley to examine reader engagement and different aesthetic representations in detail. A good range of periodical pages are included to demonstrate the variety and variability of images in circulation. Beginning with the new visuality of the Illustrated London News (ILN) at the turn of the century, Hedley argues that print's "established text-image hierarchy" was subverted at the fin de siècle (29). She draws on André Gaudreault and Phillipe Marion's three-phase model for constituting media—appearance, emergence, and advent—to demonstrate that advances in print technology and changing attitudes to visual communication transformed the balance between letterpress and pictures in the ILN. Her quantitative analysis of random sample numbers shows that image-dominated pages increased from 42 percent of the issue in 1880 to 85 percent by 1907, correlating with the rise in halftones from photographs. Hedley reads a representative item from 1907, "Fairy Stories by Photography: Grimm Illustrated," in terms of a hybrid intermediality that "[juxtaposes] old and new aesthetic techniques" through a combination of photography and hand-drawn or painted images (55). The second chapter focuses on advertisements and consumer culture in a comparison between the ILN and the Graphic, examining the metamorphosis of the advertising pages into a "visual bazaar of images of slogans" built on greater "extravagant aesthetics" (63). This adds to critical discussions of advertising though a greater emphasis on readers' engagement with mass culture and "counter-interpretative hyper-reading" (87). Hedley's new readings of advertisements for cocoa and Pears soap emphasise the techniques of mélange and hybridity while also thinking about ways in which readers could resist advertisers' strategies. This resistance could take the form of curatorial remediations, as shown in her analysis of a scrapbook from the Harry Page collection of ephemera at Manchester Metropolitan University, which contains elaborate pictorial scenes accompanied by handwritten comments. I was fascinated to read about this subversive commentary on consumerism evident in the fetishized displays of commercial brands on scraps cut from periodical advertisements, a lesser-known tactic of alternative interpretation. Possibilities for subversive engagement are also highlighted in the third chapter, which explores data visualizations in Pearson's Magazine (1896–1902) in relation to reader engagement with population journalism. Photorealistic representations of statistical data on such subjects as marriage or suicide rates function as further examples of the aesthetic evolution through which illustrated periodicals of this time "responded to innovations in mass image reproduction" (112). Readers have the chance to...