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Abstract
Pictorial journalism in the latter nineteenth century faced a temporal conundrum: whereas words could travel by telegraph and hence at the speed of electricity, the accompanying illustrations had to travel as material objects and were chronically belated. This article analyzes the strategies with which two prominent Victorian weekly papers—Illustrated London News and Punch—sought to deal with the slowness of illustration and reconcile the speed differentials between textual and visual news with their printing deadlines and production cycles. The most striking of these strategies was to deploy an ‘oracular pencil’ to work up an illustration before an event had taken place. These pre-produced illustrations relied on specific visual codes that shaped the illustrations’ ‘truth.’ The article shows that, contrary to the self-positioning of pictorial journalists as reporting truthfully and speedily on the world ‘out there,’ the pictorial press had its own temporal and epistemological laws.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Stead, ‘How to Become a Journalist,’ 149.—The author wishes to thank Monica Bravo and the other participants of the workshop ‘How to Do Things with Media’ as well as two anonymous reviewers at Media History whose insightful comments greatly improved the argument.
2 Schudson, ‘Deadlines, Datelines, and History,’ 79.’
3 Zelizer, ‘Epilogue: Timing the Study of News Temporality,’ 112–3.
4 On the cyclical structure of the news day versus the linear flow of time, see Schlesinger, ‘Newsmen and Their Time-Machine,’ 339. Schlesinger conducted his study of news temporality in the News Division of the BBC between 1952 and 1975, but what he has to say about the temporal logic of journalistic work applies to any historical media setting characterized by periodicity.
5 For an excellent historical overview, see Kooistra, ‘Illustration.’
6 Maidment, Reading Popular Prints, 302. It should be noted that already in the eighteenth century, etching was used for the quick illustration of news events, but this did not happen on the same scale and was a much costlier process. See the chapter ‘Cheap prints and the itinerant trade’ in Griffiths, The Print Before Photography, 375–391.
7 See Tucker, ‘“Famished for News Pictures,”’ 216.
8 See Smits, The European Illustrated Press, 1–20.
9 ‘Our Address [1842],’ 1.
10 Andrea Kaston Tange provides a compelling analysis of the ILN’s discursive self-positioning and the role of eyewitnessing in ‘Picturing the Villain,’ 193–197. My own inquiry builds on her analysis.
11 ‘New Year Address [1845],’ 1.
12 Jackson, The Pictorial Press, 346.
13 Kooistra describes this process in detail in ‘Illustration,’ 111–122.
14 Martin, ‘Nineteenth-Century Wood Engravers at Work.’
15 Jackson, The Pictorial Press, 321.
16 For another study that investigates the relationship of temporality and truth-telling in news images of the 1840 but comes to different conclusions, see Kihlberg, ‘Synoptic Images.’ Kihlberg’s insightful analysis focuses on images of political gatherings and public ceremonies, arguing that the visual rhetoric of illustrated weeklies included strategies for condensing events, charging them with historical significance, and ‘slowing down’ time. This is an important perspective, but my own analysis has a different focus and is concerned with images of dramatic events, in the context of which illustrated weeklies played up eyewitnessing and on-the-spot sketching as means of authenticating their images and felt the problem of belatedness particularly acutely.
17 Gretton, ‘From La Méduse to the Titanic,’ 5.
18 Jackson, The Pictorial Press, 286.
19 Smith, ‘The Early Days of ‘The Illustrated London News,’ 9. The anecdote is also included in Bishop, ‘The Story of the ILN,’ and discussed in Sinnema, Dynamics, 70.
20 Vizetelly, Glances Back I, 232–34. Sinnema discusses this system, concluding that ‘[i]n the end, […] it is the mass production of images alignable with type, rather than an actual commitment to truth or facticity in all their dimensions, that structures the ILN.’ Dynamics, 70.
21 Vizetelly, Glances Back I, 232.
22 Barnhurst and Nerone characterize the perspective adopted in early news images as the ‘civic gaze,’ with images representing ‘incidents as viewed by a citizen not directly involved but paying close attention’ at a distance. See Barnhurst and Nerone, The Form of News, 125.
23 Sinnema, Dynamics of the Pictured Page, 48.
24 ‘Her Majesty’s Belgium Excursion,’ 212. As Kihlberg has pointed out, in practice illustrated newspapers worked with a notion of truth and faithfulness that ‘made any clear-cut distinction between on-site documentation and later reconstruction too simplistic’ (‘Synoptic Images,’ 204). It is precisely the (considerable) disconnect between discursive self-positioning and actual practice, however, that is significant in the context of my analysis.
25 An early example is the re-use of woodcuts in Abraham Verhoeven’s Nieuwe Tijdingen, as discussed in Pettegree, The Invention of News, 190–193.
26 On the question of scale, see Barnhurst and Nerone, The Form of News,112–113; on the epistemological influence of new optical technologies, see the monumental new source book and essay collection Picture Industry.
27 ‘How Illustrated Newspapers Are Made,’ 125. It may seem strange that the editorial would brag about image re-use, considering how much weight the discourse of on-the-spot sketching carried in the self-presentation of papers of the ILN genre. Re-use is limited to backgrounds (‘magnificent views’), however, and described as only ‘half the labor’ of producing a news picture. It is implied that the other half—everything that is in the foreground—is supplied by ‘artist correspondents,’ of which Frank Leslie had an ‘unrivaled corps’ according to the same editorial. Even image re-use, then, is fully in line with the journalistic values of eyewitnessing and rapid sketching.
28 Kihlberg introduces this helpful concept to describe how news images processed information from other media. See ‘Synoptic images,’ 201.
29 Kooistra, ‘Illustration,’ 119.
30 Schwarzkopf, Ueber Zeitungen, 97.
31 ‘Looking into the Middle of Next Week,’ 35.
32 It exceeds the scope of this analysis to substantiate the connection between predictive drawing, its visual codes, and the visual codes of early press photographs. An excellent starting point for such an analysis is Zierenberg, ‘Fabricating Authentic Pictures.’
33 On the emergence of recognizable ‘image patterns’ and visual codes through periodicity and serial repetition, see Kihlberg, ‘Synoptic Images,’ 215.
34 Looking into the Middle of Next Week,’ 35.
35 See Kooistra, ‘Illustration,’ 119.
36 Leary gives a minute account of the making of the Large Cut in Punch Brotherhood, 35–56.
37 ‘Our Address [1842],’ 1.
38 ‘India and China,’ 8.
39 ‘The Indian Mutinies,’ 10.
40 On the emotionalized content of the image and its imperialistic visual rhetoric, see Kooistra, ‘Illustration,’ 120. It is worth emphasizing that allegory was a standard feature of pictorial journalism and likely not perceived by readers as ‘less true’ than other visual codes. See Kihlberg, ‘Synoptic Images,’ 217–19.
41 That an image was supposed to provide visual ‘clarity’ in a situation in which textual coverage was contradictory was not unique to The British Lion’s Vengeance,’ but held true for the reporting on the uprising as a whole. See Kaston Tange, 198.
42 Morris, Artist of Wonderland, 63.
43 I owe knowledge of this case to Leary, 49.
44 Schudson, ‘Deadlines, Datelines, and History,’ 81.
45 Ibid., 84.
46 On journalists serving as agents of ‘collective prospective memory,’ see Tenneboim-Weinblatt, ‘Bridging Collective Memories and Public Agendas,’ 107.
47 Kihlberg, ‘Synoptic Images,’ 216.
48 Luhmann, The Reality of the Mass Media, 1–9; 25–41.