The printed image and the transformation of popular culture, 1790-1860

Abstract

Patricia Anderson advances the challenging central argument that an essentially modern mass culture had begun to develop as early as 1840. Between 1790 and 1860 the widening dissemination of print led to the transformation and unprecedented expansion of popular cultural experience; and from the centre of this transformed culture there emerged a mass culture. The new culture's hallmark was its pictorial character. Patricia Anderson interprets a range of under-used or neglected sources, focusing on four illustrated magazines, but also examining penny fiction, broadsides, and other artefacts which played a significant part in the mass dissemination of imagery. A recurring theme is the declining role of art reproduction in people's otherwise expanded pictorial experience. The study questions the adequacy of simplistic concepts of class and culture. It combines modern cultural theory and historical evidence to demonstrate how people of all kinds, especially workers and women, interacted with the printed image and helped to shape an increasingly visual mass culture. In doing so, it offers a new way to look at and extract meaning from 19th-century popular illustration.