Victorian Media Research Articles

9. The Gendered Press: On Victorian Media as an Invitation to Politics

In the course of a long and richly varied career, painstakingly retrieving, mapping, and interpreting the nineteenth-century press and encouraging other scholars to mine its riches, Laurel Brake has sometimes allowed herself an expression of justified indignation. The indignation has two objects – connected, she has argued persuasively, by way of history and through ongoing ‘characteristic forms’ of political exclusion. The first is the undervaluation of work in the history of journalism, marginalized until recently (I suspect she would say, ‘even now’) by the very practitioners and disciplines with most reason to engage and learn from it – journalists, and those who train journalists; but also scholars of History, English, Bibliography, ‘on whose borders journalism loiters’. All three fields have been formed, she points out, and English ‘high’ Literature substantially defined, by their ambivalent relationship with the collaborative, public-facing, interdependent modes of writing for the culture’s dailies, weeklies, monthlies, quarterlies...

Searching for online news content: the challenges and decisions

ABSTRACTThis paper raises questions about the reliability of findings arising from an online publishing environment. Focusing on a case study of the Victorian media’s reporting of violence against women, it argues that many studies that are presented as accurate and empirical representations of online media coverage may be questionable. This is because of the increasingly inconsistent and ad hoc nature of the online databases used to collect the content. This raises deep problems surrounding the findings and claims that can be made by media research and the future of empirical media analysis. There are warnings of the inadequacy of standard methods used to collect content and suggestions are made such as, triangulation of different databases and the combination of computational and human methods. However, there is no definitive solution to this problem nor are there set protocols on how to proceed in this area of study. This paper aims to provide the research community with a transparent account of the challenges and decisions made when grappling with the issue of collecting online news content. It is suggested that a more proactive collaboration between newsroom archivists, database services and researchers is needed going forward.

Adulation or Adulteration? Representing Chemical Dyes in the Victorian Media

This essay describes how the Victorian media reported on the transformation of coal tar into a synthetic palette of colours in the form of aniline and azo dyes. These dyes were the first of many new chemical substances including drugs, perfumes, and flavourings, which chemists began to synthesise and produce on an industrial scale from a waste product of the coal gas industry. Although intended for use in the textile industry, the new dyes soon began to be added to food, becoming one of the first examples of laboratory–created, industrially manufactured chemicals to permeate our daily life in unexpected ways. The essay describes how the initial media portrayal of the dyes as wonders of science became more nuanced as the risks as well as the benefits of the new dyes being used in textiles, and then subsequently in food, became better understood. By examining the media representation of new chemical substances, from their creation in the laboratory to their widespread use in consumer products, sometimes in ways not intended by their creators, my research provides an intriguing case study to add to the growing historiography of how science is represented in the press.

Victorian media studies, history, and theory

AbstractThis article gives an account of Victorian media studies as a sub‐field that emerged primarily from investigations of nineteenth‐century communication technologies and the century's accompanying preoccupations with transmission and the idea of in‐betweenness. Owing to unprecedented developments such as the rise of the universal postal system, telegraphy, phonography, photography, and mass print media, historicist inquiries have proven fruitful for the sub‐field. At the same time, continuities between how Victorians (such as the journalist and editor W. T. Stead) imagined communication's unifying reach across Britain and the globe and twentieth‐century media theory's critique of this same reach have ensured the sub‐field's grounding in theoretical engagements. The second part of the article considers how alternative frameworks for understanding media beyond communication (such as immersion, virtuality, and media archaeology) are currently redefining Victorian media studies in the twenty‐first century, continuing the sub‐field's robust dialectical engagements of history and theory.

Victorians Living in Public: Cartes de Visite as 19th-Century Social Media

This essay examines how the carte de visite functioned as a form of “social media” avant la lettre. The carte de visite, which reached its peak of popularity in the 1860s, was a mobile, public, and performative media form which gained meaning through its circulation. In examining these attributes of the carte’s social significance, this essay contends that the carte possessed many of the attributes that are popularly associated with digital photography in the early twenty-first century, and that, in this Victorian media form, we can see a precursor to the image sharing that prevails in the age of social networking.

‘Ice epidemic’? Trends in methamphetamine use from three Victorian surveillance systems

Introduction and Aims: Victorian media have been reporting a widespread ‘ice crisis’. This concern arises predominantly from anecdotal information and data showing increasing rates of methamphetamine-related harms.We triangulate three data sources to investigate whether a possible increase in methamphetaminerelated harms has been driven by an actual increase in methamphetamine (speed powder/ice/crystal) use. Design and Methods: We analysed three, annual, cross-sectional Melbourne-based drug monitoring systems.The Big Day Out (BDO) surveys young people at a music festival. The Ecstasy and Related Drugs Reporting System (EDRS) targets regular psychostimulant users. The Illicit Drug Reporting System (IDRS) interviews people who inject drugs.Trends in prevalence were assessed using Chi test for trend. Trends in frequency of use were assessed using Poisson regression. Results: The percentages reporting recent methamphetamine use were 8% among BDO attendees (n/N = 825/9582), 75% among EDRS participants (n/N = 452/601) and 65% among IDRS participants (n/N = 587/898). The BDO found a non-linear decrease over time in the percentage recently using methamphetamine. EDRS and IDRS data showed no significant change in prevalence of use, but the EDRS showed an increase in frequency of use between 2008 and 2014 (P < 0.01). Discussion and Conclusions: These samples are not representative of the general population and are not reflective of rural populations. Methamphetamine use prevalence among the three serial cross-sectional samples remained stable from 2008–2013/14. Evidence of increasing use frequency may explain some trends in rising harms. Research that accurately characterises methamphetamine use will allow attention to focus on effectively preventing methamphetamine-related harms. Implications for Practice or Policy: While not wanting to underplay the potential adverse effects of methamphetamine use, it is important that government takes an evidence-based response to this issue. The media, policy makers, and practitioners should be aware that increased harm is not necessarily indicative of increased population-level methamphetamine use.

Melodrama and the Penitent Woman Tableau in Victorian Culture: From Tennyson to Conrad

This essay investigates an important stock scene of female peril and suffering from Victorian melodrama that I am calling the penitent woman tableau. I argue that this highly iconographic staged moment, where a sexually fallen daughter, fiancée, or wife sinks to her knees in remorse at the sight of the father, lover, or husband she has betrayed, derives its emotional energy and cultural force less from its representation of feminine terror and more from its equivocal portrayal of masculine authority. The penitent woman tableau spotlights a tense moment where violence against a woman could occur but doesn’t; it is a performance of masculine power where the man’s physical force is implicitly available but never literalized. Both visual artists and writers of the Victorian period were drawn to this scene, which I believe fascinated audiences because it spotlights the difficulty of representing masculine mastery in a society increasingly skeptical of physical force as a desirable means of domestic discipline. By examining the penitent woman tableau across several Victorian media and literary genres, including painting, poetry by Alfred Tennyson, and fiction by Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Joseph Conrad, I not only attempt to enrich our understanding of the unstable nature of masculine authority within the middle-class mid-Victorian family but also to illuminate the ways in which melodramatic conventions were crucial to the exploration of this urgent social question. Melodrama, often thought of as both feminine and conservative, offers a surprisingly complex depiction of masculinity within the penitent woman tableau.

Letters from the Highlands: Scribal Publication and Media Shift in Victorian Scotland

This essay argues that a little-studied text, Elizabeth Grant’s Memoirs of a Highland Lady , offers insights into conditions of authorship and publication for middle-class provincial female authors from the early nineteenth century to the turn of the twentieth. While critics have often seen manuscript declining as a form of literary publication by the end of the Romantic period, I argue that Grant—who completed her memoir in 1854—chose to “publish” in manuscript even as she presented herself as historian and historiographer of the Highlands. Grant shows her awareness of a shifting Victorian media environment by analyzing changes in systems of communication and circulation. Her manuscript memoirs demonstrate that Victorians, like ourselves, often viewed history through the lens of media shift.

Moving Through Time and Space: Negotiating Victorian Media Studies

Both Alison Byerly's monograph and the collection edited by Trish Ferguson form key additions to the growing field of what Byerly terms ‘Victorian media studies’ (4). They are concerned primarily w...

Translocal Artistry: James McNeill Whistler’s Wapping

Translocal Artistry: James McNeill Whistler’s Wapping Melissa Berry (bio) After Paris’s international exposition of 1855, continental Europe’s attitude toward Victorian British art changed dramatically. The exposition featured the world’s first international art exhibition, and English works on display showed an originality and quality that led many reviewers to compliment the nation’s art, which had previously been deemed dull or derivative. From this point on, in the eyes of Europe, Victorians could hold their heads high regarding their artistic production; indeed, many claimed it possessed unique qualities because it remained uninfluenced by major continental traditions, specifically those of the French. Quintessentially Victorian styles of painting, such as Pre-Raphaelitism and Aestheticism, emerged from this pseudo-isolation; however, to view Victorian painting, or any form [End Page 31] of Victorian media, as occurring in a vacuum robs the period of its cosmopolitan characteristics. James McNeill Whistler’s painting Wapping (1860–64) encapsulates the diversity and exchange of ideas that the translocal artistic community contributed to the age Click for larger view View full resolution James McNeill Whistler. Wapping. 1860–1864. Oil on canvas. 72cm × 101.8cm. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, d.c. At first glance, the subject and style of Wapping may appear insignificant. Whistler presents two men and a woman seated on a balcony overlooking the bustling Thames across from Wapping, in East London. In spite of his inscription of “’61” in the corner, he revised Wapping from 1860, when he began sketches on the balcony at Angel Inn, until its official exhibition in 1864 at the Royal Academy. Whistler composed the scene with harmonious tones that leave the foreground figures’ muddy russets, browns, and ochres to be echoed by the crisper, brighter activity of the industrious river. This congruent colouring foreshadows the full-blown Aestheticism to which Whistler, and many Victorian artists, would turn in the 1870s. The men of the painting are portrayed as sailors or dock workers and the woman as a prostitute. Whistler intentionally positioned himself, and consequently the viewer, as a part of the company of these lower-class individuals in an everyday moment, as opposed to a scene of high drama or moral anecdote. Whistler’s translocality affected both his artistic production and his reception. His chosen subject and manner of execution are typical both of Realism, a style that gained ground in mid-century with Gustave Courbet in France, and of the English Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Essentially, Realism sought to portray life as it was: replete with grit, details, and monotony. While living [End Page 32] in Paris in the 1850s, Whistler drew influence from Courbet and his often controversial works, which focused primarily on the French peasantry. In London, he befriended many associates of the Pre-Raphaelites, whose brand of Realism concentrated on meticulous detail; undoubtedly, this affected Whistler’s decision to create Wapping’s exhaustively detailed setting. In this painting, Whistler’s dark palette and technique resemble Courbet’s more than his English colleagues’, and perhaps this obvious foreign influence, coupled with the fact that Whistler was American-born, explains why most reviewers had reservations about his final product. Some critics of the Royal Academy’s ninety-sixth exhibition praised Wapping’s technical skill, but they often focused on the background instead of the disreputable characters. Others, such as a writer for the Times, considered it somewhat vulgar and not up to the standard of which Whistler was capable (Stephenson 140): There are no pictures in the Exhibition showing more unquestionable power, accompanied by an almost defiant eccentricity, than the two by Mr. Whistler .… The painting of the Thames and its various river craft … could hardly be surpassed for force and truth…. But even such power as Mr. Whistler’s does not excuse his defiance of taste and propriety. He should learn that eccentricity is not originality .… Mr. Whistler has so much power, that it is a thousand pities to see it marred by fantastic tricks, such as have led him to … unite an ostentatious slovenliness of execution with the most carefully calculated choice and arrangement of hues; or when he can draw so well when he chooses, to give us … figures as...

The January 1861 Quarterly Review as Genre, Media Event, and Research Heuristic

The January 1861 Quarterly Review as Genre, Media Event, and Research Heuristic Linda K. Hughes (bio) Nothing could be duller, alas, than the image of the periodical I have chosen for this forum’s exploration of Victorian media: the January 1861 Quarterly Review. The Illustrated London News, so often identified with modernity itself, had permanently altered newspapers with its first issue in 1842, naturalizing the linking of current news, words, and vibrant images in ways that would forever change readers’ media tableau (Brake and Demoor 2–3; see also Sinnema). Of all this, the Quarterly is innocent. (See fig. 1; ironically, to gauge the Quarterly’s lack of pictures or visual interest, I have provided an image of it here.) The Quarterly adds no headlines or title gracefully set off by white space, as in the contemporaneous Cornhill Magazine, the monthly magazine edited by William Makepeace Thackeray, which had begun a year earlier. Indeed, aside from the omnibus listing of titles at the top, the page shown here could as easily come from a book as from an ephemeral periodical. This was no coincidence. As Joanne Shattock points out, each issue of a quarterly was around 250 pages, with eight to ten articles; a single issue was so expensive (at four to six shillings) that only the affluent could afford it, and once a year’s issues were bound together, the volume more closely resembled a book than ephemera (523). Everything on this Quarterly page, then, glances backward, toward the beginning of the nineteenth century, when the great quarterlies were founded (the Edinburgh Review in 1802, the Quarterly in 1809), and signals a determined avoidance of popular appeal or up-to-date innovations. On one hand, then, the January 1861 Quarterly indicates in its old-fashioned format the unevenness of media history, the persistence of [End Page 23] older media forms amid radical change—just as today, paper newspapers survive, however tenuously, in the era of the Internet and phone apps. On the other hand, popular appeal is precisely what this specific issue had. So voracious was the demand for it that it had to be reprinted five times. According to John North’s Waterloo Directory of English Newspapers and Periodicals: 1800–1900, the circulation of the Quarterly was eight thousand in 1860; if each edition repeated this number, forty thousand copies of this single issue were printed in all. A thousand of these were sent to Mudie’s Circulating Library so that they could be borrowed rather than bought (W. 705). The issue was even reviewed among other current publications, as in the February 1861 Dublin Review (“Essays” 458, 475). Despite its unprepossessing format, then, this issue of the Quarterly was clearly a media event. Why? And what questions does this media event pose for our understanding of Victorian periodicals, described by scholars as the era’s most pervasive medium and characteristic genre (Altick 318; Saintsbury 166)? Click for larger view View full resolution [Wilberforce, Samuel]. “Essays and Reviews.” Quarterly Review 109 (Jan.1861): 248–49. The reason for the issue’s popularity is straightforward—and a salutary reminder of how much questions of religion mattered to middle-class and more affluent Victorian readers. In 1860, seven Anglican clergymen, including Benjamin Jowett of Balliol College, Oxford, drew upon the approaches and methods of higher criticism in Essays and Reviews (1860). Higher criticism, [End Page 24] largely developed in Germany, applied the historical methods developed for classical texts to the Bible and, in doing so, brought attention to many textual inconsistencies (for example, Moses, generally understood to be the author of the Pentateuch, narrates his own death). Though George Eliot had translated David Friedrich Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu in 1846, higher criticism did not affect a wide sector of Victorian Christians until the publication of Essays and Reviews. The effect was electric. As Mark Knight and Emma Mason observe, “The publication of Essays and Reviews had a significant effect on Evangelicals’ consciousness and elicited a far stronger reaction from them than the publication of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species in 1859.” In illustration of the point, they cite the Evangelical Christian Observer: “If the Bible is plainly...

Introduction to the Special Issue: Victorian Networks and the Periodical Press

Introduction to the Special Issue: Victorian Networks and the Periodical Press Alexis Easley (bio) When selecting the theme for the 2009 RSVP Conference at the University of St. Thomas, we were immediately struck by the self-reflexive meanings of “Victorian networks and the periodical press.” After all, it was during 2009 that one of the most significant collaborative ventures in the field of Victorian media studies—the Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism—was first published in print and digital forms. This project, edited by Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor, not only networked researchers in the field of media history but uncovered unexpected links between periodicals, writers, publishers, illustrators, and editors. Another important networking initiative that year was the digitization of back issues of VPR, 1979–2003, which were made available for the first time on the JSTOR database. It was also in 2009 that RSVP created a Facebook page, thus staking claim to virtual terrain in the world of social networking. Meanwhile, major digitization efforts, such as those led by Gale, Pro-Quest, and Google Books, were well underway and were the subject of a special panel at the 2009 conference organized by Patrick Leary, “Fishing the Golden Stream: Adventures in Online Research on the Victorian Press.” At the conference, RSVP also awarded the first Gale Dissertation Research Prize, which recognizes excellence in the use of digital resources for scholarship in Victorian studies. More efforts to embrace digital technologies and networking were soon in progress. In 2010, members of RSVP contributed essays to the Illustrated London News Historical Archive, and this year, members are working collaboratively with John Drew’s Dickens Journals Online project in preparation for the Dickens bicentenary in 2012. If, as Jerome McGann suggested in 2005, the Victorian studies community must embrace networked digital technologies in order to assume [End Page 111] a position of relevance in the postmodern academy,1 then certainly the members of RSVP have risen to this challenge. Of course, RSVP has always demonstrated a commitment to social and scholarly networking. The organization owes its very existence to the network of relationships that arose from the first and greatest of all Victorian studies collaborative projects, the Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals. In the years that followed, RSVP became well known for its collegial company of scholars as well as its numerous scholarly publications, including edited anthologies and the quarterly publication of Victorian Periodicals Review. Such collaborative projects create and enhance a network of relationships, thereby promoting what network theorists call a location of “high connectivity” between individuals.2 The 2009 conference was no exception to this tradition of collegial exchange. The quality of panel presentations and conversations was superb, thanks in part to the work of an outstanding program committee: Sally Mitchell, Molly Youngkin, and Deborah Mutch. Those who attended the 2009 conference were struck by the rich and suggestive ways that the concept of “Victorian networks” was interpreted within the context of the newspaper and periodical press. Given the high quality of scholarship presented at the conference, it seemed fitting to publish a special issue of VPR focused on the conference theme. As editor of the special issue, I was impressed with the number of superb submissions I received. The five essays selected for the special issue demonstrate how the concept of “networking” can illuminate our understanding of Victorian print culture. As Laurel Brake points out in the opening essay, “‘Time’s Turbulence’: Mapping Journalism Networks,” such investigations have been enabled by the development of digital resources, which provide us with opportunities to uncover networks of affiliation among the wide variety of contributors to the Victorian print industry. Brake’s essay highlights important developments in network theory, particularly the work of Friedrich Kittler, and suggests how this scholarship may inform future research in our field. The geographical reference in Brake’s title reminds us that Victorian networks were informed by spatial considerations—the physical locations of individuals, clubs, editorial offices, and other sites of literary exchange. Of course, access to such networking locations was often constrained by gender and economic status. Joanne Shattock, in her essay, “Professional Networking, Masculine and Feminine,” not only provides insight into the crucial role of clubs and...

Images of the Toronto Provincial Asylum, 1846-1890

Built in 1850, the Toronto Provincial Asylum was once the largest mental hospitals in Canada. The main building was demolished in 1975, and the property is now home to the Queen Street branch of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. Although there are remnants of the nineteenth-century institution, including most of the perimeter wall, the only lasting visual reminder of the property as a whole is a small group of images. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, perhaps in order to ease public concern over the increasingly custodial function of the institution, Victorian media sources repeatedly presented an unchanging or immutable depiction of the Toronto Asylum. Drawing upon the architectural concept drawings of the 1840s, which contained an ideal vision for the building, pictures from the 1870s, 80s and 90s depict the asylum as the new, clean, and proud-looking structure it was when it opened. Arguably, these images are what the Victorian public wanted to see: they preserved the early-century optimism that such institutions would yield high cure rates and they supported the view that the care of the mentally ill belonged in the hands of the medical profession.

A Question of (dis)engagement? Historical Lessons in Promoting an Effective Public Interface to Address Current Crime Concerns

What is lacking in the current crime control strategies is any genuine and effective debate between government, the legal world and the wider public about crime related issues. Historically, the Victorian media provided the conduit for an effective interface to address both public and official concern, but today this is absent from the media discourse. This article utilizes two case studies, focusing on the crimes of rape and burglary to demonstrate the problems that this present level of disengagement between the public and the criminal justice system can generate. It suggests ways in which the historical experience can facilitate and promote a more constructive and successful interface between the official and the popular communities. The argument is made that a more effective and influential public forum is a prerequisite to engender public confidence in the criminal justice system's ability to ensure community safety, and that a responsible media is best placed to facilitate this.

BOOK REVIEW: Edited By Judith Rowbotham and Kim Stevenson.BEHAVING BADLY: SOCIAL PANIC AND MORAL OUTRAGE?VICTORIAN AND MODERN PARALLELS. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2003.

Reviewed by: Behaving Badly: Social Panic and Moral Outrage—Victorian and Modern Parallels Lesley Hall (bio) Behaving Badly: Social Panic and Moral Outrage—Victorian and Modern Parallels, edited by Judith Rowbotham and Kim Stevenson; pp. xxii + 247. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2003, £47.50, $94.95. The fourteen chapters of this book address a range of issues of concern to the Victorians and still, or again, causes of concern today. These involve "the essentially fluid boundary between the criminal and the anti-social" (1). This volume foregrounds the complex interactions between popular and media understandings of the point at which offensive behaviour becomes (or ought to be designated) crime, and the official response through legislation or policing practice. The approach is strongly interdisciplinary: contributors include academics from a range of areas, and several are also lawyers or solicitors, or have been involved in other aspects of law and policing. Initial chapters look at general issues of legal systems, perceptions of the law, and the role of policing. David Bentley, a former Queen's Counsel, judge, and legal historian, contrasts Victorian and modern trial systems. He argues that in spite of the lack of representation for poor prisoners, and of an effective appeal structure, confidence in the Victorian legal system was high, with a tacit assumption that there were never miscarriages of justice. Judith Rowbotham and Kim Stevenson's chapter on "Media and Legal Representations of Bad Behaviour" argues that Victorian media fostered trust in their political and legal institutions, whereas in the present day the media uses "personal 'exposures'. . . to undermine the individual professional" (33). They also find, however, significant similarities in "attention-grabbing sensationalism" and the media's ability to "make choate the incoherent fears existing more widely in society" (41). Kiron Reid, a lecturer in law, examines the enormous recent increase of criminal legislation and state intervention in the UK, independent of changes in the ruling party. The Victorians passed relatively few acts relating to criminal justice, but, he argues, this was less about liberalism than the presence of extensive powers enabling the police to deal with a range of bad behaviour. There is also continuing disjunction between the attitudes expressed through legislation by successive parliaments and the justice system's actual performance in the courts. The rise of a professional police force was a major nineteenth-century innovation. In "Policing a Myth, Managing an Illusion," Tom Williamson, a former Deputy Chief Constable and forensic psychiatrist, considers crime recording and the production of statistics, particularly in the light of the vast explosion in the numbers of criminal offences defined by the law since 1901. Roger Hopkins Burke examines get-tough policing strategies, then and now, to remove undesirables—drunks, vagrants, beggars—from the public streets, a class particularly likely to grow in periods of economic upheaval and trade recession. He argues that proactive dealing with these "rougher elements" both in the Victorian era and today has commanded a good deal of support from the "respectable working class," who were the most likely to be affected by the gross behaviour, violence, and extortions of this excluded group. Several chapters address particular forms of bad behaviour. Sara Wilson, a lecturer in company law and financial crime, considers white-collar crime. She suggests that financial crime in the modern sense was born in the nineteenth century, and only then did fraud come to be perceived as undermining social and economic stability. Blasphemy, the subject of historian David Nash's chapter, may conversely seem like an ancient form of bad behaviour. Nash argues that English jurisprudence in this area has, [End Page 605] historically, generated significant paradoxes through its "strange mixture of authoritarian defence of morals and protection of individual opinion" (114). A similar point is made by Tom Lewis, a solicitor, who suggests that the "lack of certainty and clarity" (151) about the line between art and obscenity in Victorian England was rooted in a central paradox: preserving the right to privacy and maintaining the right of protection from pollution. Lewis also makes the point that increased anxieties over obscene representations were fuelled by the wider and cheaper dissemination of such materials enabled by technological developments, a theme picked up in...

Queen Victoria: First Media Monarch (review)

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...