Imaging the City: London and the Media in the 1890s

Abstract

In 1893, Joseph Gleeson White, the editor of The Studio and the leading critic of contemporary illustration, commented on a familiar London phenomenon: the crowds that assembled outside of publishers’ offices in the Strand and on Fleet Street. The great illustrated weekly magazines, including Punch, the Illustrated London News, and the Graphic, all displayed their latest issues in their windows, attracting spectators who lingered over the pictures they contained, engaging in a particularly public form of social reading. Gleeson White suggested that these groups found the printed depiction of events more compelling than the capital’s ancient monuments and the grand official buildings that surrounded them. This chapter discusses the structure of the late-Victorian media and the differing ways in which daily, weekly, and monthly publications incorporated illustration. It also looks at the audience for the new pictorial press.

For one person gazing at the “Griffen” with sorrow or reverence, you shall see a dozen looking in at the office of a popular weekly paper; for one rapt in contemplation before the Law Courts, perhaps a hundred with their backs to it, studying the actuality of the sketches on the spot which are exhibited in the window of the Daily Graphic.

– “The Lay Figure Speaks,” The Studio, October 1893¹