Queen Victoria: First Media Monarch (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Queen Victoria: First Media Monarch Margaret Homans (bio) Queen Victoria: First Media Monarch, by John Plunkett; pp. x + 256. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003, £19.99, $29.95. John Plunkett's book provides a fascinating, detailed look at the transformation the Victorian news media underwent between Victoria's coronation and her death, as woodcuts and steel engravings gave way to lithography and photography and as the diverse and often anti-monarchist print media yielded to a professionalized journalism increasingly invested in promotion of the status quo. Tracing this history through the lens of the media's relation to Victoria's monarchy, the book argues that developments in the two were interdependent: that the media required an alluring and never-ending source of material through which to promote its own indispensability, and that the monarchy depended entirely on the media to become both populist and constitutional. Thus the book claims to be at once about "Victoria's media making" and about "the media's making of its own mythology" (7). While the book succeeds as a richly researched history of the Victorian media and the individuals who directed its growth, it is less persuasive in its claims about Victoria's "media making" and about the mutual dependency of the two institutions. The same media history could presumably have been traced by charting changing representations of other subjects as well; moreover, the media underwent similar developments in other nations without the benefit of Victoria's monarchy. "Victoria's endless materialization" (7) in word and image may have constituted her monarchy for her subjects, her image "made" in her subjects' minds by their daily "practice" of reading about her in the papers (8), but the book cannot make good on its needlessly overstated claim that Victoria was "made" without her agency: "The number of contradictory portrayals demonstrates that the royal family was far from having any self-fashioned representation" (2). The book claims a one-directional causal relation between an active press and a passive royalty: "Rather than events producing a spate of prints, the illustrated press had itself to produce a constant series of events" (98). The book makes this claim sound plausible only by ignoring the kinds of evidence that have led others to take seriously Victoria's agency. Discussing her unglamorous coronation, for example, the book focuses on media representations and on Tory and Whig responses but takes no notice of who devised the ceremonies in the first place. [End Page 520] There is little consideration of the public images that Victoria commissioned or selected, such as the memorial images of Albert in which she took such an obsessive interest after 1861. Plunkett offers astute deconstructive readings of early engravings of Victoria, but when it comes to the photographs of the queen, although he tells us a great deal about the photographers and the public reception of their work, his gift for close reading goes curiously unused. I agree that "it was not that Victoria's image was disseminated through photographs. The royal image itself became photographic" (7). But why insist that the royal image became photographic without Victoria's agency? The subject of a photograph must pose; is this why Plunkett has so little to say about the images themselves, with their suggestively varied adjustment of the queen's pose in relation to her family? In arguing for the media as the unique cause of developments in the monarchy, the book also underrates the power of readers. The media may have driven the craze for Victoria's images, but it cannot have determined which images would sell like hotcakes and which would not. In my view, which this book did not persuade me to abandon, Victoria's "contradictory" representations and her unprecedentedly public monarchy resulted from an active collaboration between her and her subjects, including those who depicted her in words and images. Indeed, the book's evidence shows that Victoria actively took part in constructing and disseminating her media image. A court case, interestingly, indicates that "the publication of [J. J. E. Mayall's] Royal Album can be seen as a response to external pressures rather than simply a proactive decision on the...