‘To the great public’: The architectural image in the early Illustrated London News

The Illustrated London News, launched in May 1842 as the first illustrated newspaper and quickly copied across Europe, North America and beyond, was full of architectural images. New buildings, ancient ruins, construction sites, royal visits, wars, theatre performances, exotic expeditions, historical essays and innumerable other subjects gave occasion to feature the built, whether for its own sake or as background setting. Images and texts were produced and consumed with an urge and at a speed never seen before. The building, through the illustrated press, left the static confines of the book and the framed print and became peopled by the purposeful bourgeoisie. Through a close analysis of a range of articles on the new Royal Exchange, the refurbished London Colosseum as well as the Queen’s Scotland tour, this essay explores the role of the architectural image in the illustrated press by focusing on its relationship to the accompanying text. Untangling the mechanics of representation and perception, it identifies modes of intellectual, affective, and kinetic vision through which architecture was represented to the remote reading public. By externalising and stabilising vision, the Illustrated London News thus created a virtual public sphere in which the dramatic technological and material changes occurring in the period could be absorbed and normalized

Fraser’s Magazine and the Instability of Literary Fashion

This chapter examines the relationship between literature and fashion in one of the most influential nineteenth-century literary periodicals, Fraser’s Magazine. Established in 1830 under the editorship of William Maginn, Fraser’s became known for its scathing satirical treatment of ‘fashionable novels’ and the cult of dandyism, most notably embodied by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Yet texts such as Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1833–4) and William Thackeray’s Yellowplush Papers (1837), both serialized in Fraser’s during the 1830s, express a more ambivalent fascination with the analogy between literature and fashion than their satirical mode might suggest. Fashion in clothing becomes a productive metaphor for considering the nature of literary production within an expanding market economy, characterized by the proliferation of periodicals and other forms of print ephemera