Making Pictorial Print: Media Literacy and Mass Culture in British Magazines, 1885–1918 by Alison Hedley (review)

Reviewed by: Making Pictorial Print: Media Literacy and Mass Culture in British Magazines, 1885–1918 by Alison Hedley Erica Haugtvedt (bio) Making Pictorial Print: Media Literacy and Mass Culture in British Magazines, 1885–1918, by Alison Hedley; pp. xi + 229. Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 2021, $89.00, $89.00 ebook. Print is a media technology—a fact that can be difficult to remember in all the excitement over digital media as the only new media that counts. In her book, Making Pictorial Print: Media Literacy and Mass Culture in British Magazines, 1885–1918, Alison Hedley considers the emergence of densely illustrated periodicals during the fin de siècle in terms of media history, arguing that these illustrated periodicals remained central to popular culture, even when new mechanical communication technologies were beginning to displace print as the main medium of entertainment. Specifically, Hedley contends that the design aesthetics of several photo-mechanical illustration methods used during the period affected how audiences engaged with the magazines, "creating opportunities for them to participate in and even contribute to popular culture actively, creatively, and critically" (3). Hedley combines media studies methods with attention to media literacy to argue that late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century periodicals afforded types of engagement that allowed audiences not only to help forge the conventions of use and reception for emerging media technologies, but also to subvert and appropriate media for their own devices. In asserting the influence of periodicals, Hedley follows in a prestigious and established tradition within Victorian periodical studies going back at least to Benedict Anderson's theory of imagined communities. Similarly, Hedley argues that illustrated periodicals facilitated what she terms the "print technological imagination," an interpretive practice through which Victorian audiences used their recognition of the "material traces of production" to situate the periodical "in its real and imagined socio-technological contexts" (7). Hedley traces the development and spread of illustrations [End Page 684] in periodicals since the late 1830s but points out that illustrations truly started to dominate the periodical market with the advent of photo-mechanical methods, such as halftone and line-block engraving, in the late part of the century. She further contends that audiences would have understood the print processes behind these illustrations when they saw them used, as articles explaining the production process were fairly common in periodicals of the period. Hedley thus sees consciousness of media technology operating in both the content and reception of illustrated periodicals. Like many historical theories of reception, Hedley's claims about literacy necessarily rely on speculation about what audiences would have known and what they would have inferred from aesthetic choices in the primary sources she analyzes. The book contains five chapters with an introduction and a conclusion, covering magazine titles including The Illustrated London News (1842–2003), The Graphic (1869–1932), Pearson's Magazine (1896–1939), and The Strand Magazine (1891–1950). Chapter 1 ("The Illustrated London News, Popular Illustrated Journalism, and the New Media Landscape, 1885–1907") establishes illustrated magazines as a new medium at the turn of the century, arguing that, while illustrations had appeared before in periodicals, the end of the century saw magazines, such as The Illustrated London News and The Graphic, shift from a preponderance of letterpress to a preponderance of page spreads containing illustrations. With the increasing presence of photo-mechanical illustrations making engagement with the periodical a more multimodal experience, Hedley contends that audience attention would have been drawn to the ways that the periodical mediated its content and that this reflection would have had ramifications for the conceptualization of popular culture as a whole. One of the greatest strengths of the book is Hedley's careful attention to the process of media evolution, by which I mean the processes by which a new medium enters the market and becomes recognizable through gradually coalescing conventions regarding its uses and meanings. In other hands, discussion of this process of the establishment of a new medium may risk universalizing claims, but Hedley admirably maintains a healthy sense of the chaos of this process. Namely, in chapters 2, 4, and 5, Hedley considers the ways in which audiences could resist the emergent codes...

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.