Seeing Protestant Icons: The Popular Reception of Visual Media in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century America

Abstract

Although it is commonly asserted that Protestantism bears an intrinsic antagonism toward images, this claim is manifestly, contradicted by a long history of the production and use of images among Protestants the world over. At the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, British organizations such as Hannah More’s Cheap Repository and the Religious Tract Society, and a host of tract and Sunday school societies formed in the United States, all made zealous use of illustrated tracts, handbills, broadsides, newspapers, magazines and books in order to address the disparity between the small number of evangelists and the vast number of those requiring evangelization. Founded in 1825, the American Tract Society invested unprecedented sums in materials and technology to illustrate its tracts and children’s literature and attracted the best wood engraver in the United States to do so. British and American tract producers explicitly felt that illustrations were a strong form of appeal to children and the semi-literate, such as immigrants and the poor. And they happily relied on images in urban settings to compete with secular advertisements and the rival trade of books and pamphlet sellers.