The Crowd and the Building: Flux in the Early Illustrated London News

Abstract

When the illustrated newspaper was “invented” in 1842, festivals soon became prime content for the young Illustrated London News. Presenting festivals from home and abroad, illustrated papers were full of images and descriptions of spectacle in motion – including spectacular architecture and people. What was the relationship between the crowd and the building, in word and image, and how did it relate to the role architecture played in the public sphere? This article argues that the increasing plasticity of the text, alongside the rising dominance of the image, turned printing from a static into an interactive medium. The page transformed from a surface into a space that could capture figures and buildings in flux. As styles multiplied in the age of historicism, text and image in the Illustrated London News provided an immersive, yet highly controlled, experience of the metropolis and its events.

Keywords:

• architecture
• festival
• nineteenth century
• illustrated press
• crowd

Notes

Notes

1 See Patricia Anderson, The Printed Image and the Transformation of Popular Culture 1790–1860 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).

2 Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader. A Social History of the Mass Reading Public 1800–1900 (Columbus: Ohio State Press, 1998), 391–396.

3 Wood engraving differed from the much older process of making wood cuts in that it used the end-grain of boxwood, providing precise and durable print blocks that could easily be integrated with type and thus allowed very large print runs. It became the technique of choice for the penny press and other illustrated mass media, including the Illustrated London News. See “Xylography,” in Mari Hvattum and Anne Hultzsch, eds., The Printed and the Built: Architecture, Print Culture, and Public Debate in the Nineteenth Century (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 295–300.

4 See Peter Sinnema, Dynamics of the Pictured Page: Representing the Nation in the Illustrated London News (Adershot: Ashgate, 1998).

5 Anon., “Advertisement for The Illustrated London News,” The Man in the Moon 1, no. 2 (1847).

6 Anon., “Cambridge University. The Installation of the Chancellor.” Illustrated London News, July 9, 1842, 136.

7 See Anne Hultzsch, “‘To the Great Public:’ The Architectural Image in the Early Illustrated London News,” Architectural Histories, 5 (2017), available online: https://doi.org/10.5334/ah.268.

8 See Hvattum and Hultzsch, eds., The Printed and the Built.

9 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1984).

10 Andrea Korda, Printing and Painting the News in Victorian London: The Graphic and Social Realism, 1869–1891 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2014), 31.

11 Ibid., 36 and 32.

12 See Hannah Scally, “The Illustrated London News,” in Lord Mayor’s Show: 800 Years 1215–2015, ed. Dominic Reid (London: Third Millennium Publishing, 2015), 122–3.

13 Anon. “Lord Mayor’s Day,” Illustrated London News, November 12, 1842, 424.

14 Ibid., 417.

15 Mason Jackson, The Pictorial Press: Its Origins and Progress (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1885), 291.

16 Henry Vizetelly, Glances Back Through Seventy Years: Autobiographical and Other Reminiscences (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner and Co., 1893), vol. 1, 232.

17 Celina Fox, Graphic Journalism in England during the 1830s and 1840s (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1988), 279.

18 Jackson, Pictorial Press, chapter 9, 315-54 and Vizetelly, Glances Back, 232.

19 Anon., “Her Majesty’s Excursion to Belgium,” Illustrated London News, September 30, 1843, 216 (original emphasis).

20 Anon., “Shrewsbury Show,” Illustrated London News, June 7, 1845, 357.

21 Anon., “Procession of the Peasantry Before the Queen, at Gotha,” Illustrated London News, September 13, 1845, 169.

22 Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 81.

23 Charles Knight, Passages of a Working Life during Half a Century: With a Prelude of Early Reminiscences (London: Bradbury and Evans, 1864), vol. 3, 247.

24 Charles Mackay, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, 2nd ed. (London: Office of the National Illustrated Library, 1852), vol. 1, vii.

25 Anon., “The Fete of Fraternity,” Illustrated London News, May 6, 1848, 302.

26 Neil Levine, “The Book and the Building: Hugo’s Theory of Architecture and Labrouste’s Bibliothèque Ste-Geneviève,” in The Beaux-Arts and Nineteenth-Century French Architecture, ed. Robin Middleton (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982), 152. See also Maarten Delbeke, “Architecture’s Print Complex: Palloy’s Bastille and the Death of Architecture,” in Hvattum and Hultzsch, eds., The Printed and the Built, 73–96. The first edition of Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris was published in 1831.

27 Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame of Paris, trans. John Sturrock (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), 201.

28 See “crowd, n.3,” in OED Online (Oxford University Press, June 2017), available online: www.oed.com/view/Entry/45034 (accessed September 27, 2017).

29 See “concourse, n.,” OED Online (Oxford University Press, June 2017), available online: www.oed.com/view/Entry/38377 (accessed September 27, 2017).

30 Anon., “Annual Procession of the Cork Total Abstinence Society,” Illustrated London News, April 29, 1843, 295.

31 Ibid.

32 See “mass, n.2,” OED Online (Oxford University Press, March 2018), available online: www.oed.com/view/Entry/114666 (accessed May 1, 2018).

33 See also Tom Gretton, “The Pragmatics of Page Design in Nineteenth-Century General-Interest Weekly Illustrated News Magazines in London and Paris,” Art History 33, no. 4 (September 2010): 680–709, available online: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8365.2010.00766.x.

34 Anon., “Lord Mayor’s Day,” Illustrated London News, November 11, 1843, 313.

35 Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 74 (original emphasis).

36 Ibid.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anne Hultzsch

Anne Hultzsch is an architectural historian specializing in architectural print cultures. She is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Oslo School for Architecture, Norway, researching the nineteenth-century illustrated press and the origins of the architectural magazine. She trained as an architect at TU Munich and holds a Ph.D. from the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. Author of Architecture, Travellers and Writers: Constructing Histories of Perception 1640–1950 (Legenda, 2014), Anne has contributed to various journals and edited books. Most recently, she coedited “Building Word Image: Printing Architecture 1800–1950,” a special collection for Architectural Histories (vol. 4, no. 1, 2016, with Catalina Mejía Moreno) and The Printed and the Built: Architecture, Print Culture and Public Debate in the Nineteenth Century (with Mari Hvattum; Bloomsbury, 2018).