Between 1790 and 1860 the widening dissemination of print led to the transformation and unprecedented expansion of popular cultural experience; Patricia Anderson advances the challenging central argument that an essentially modern mass culture had begun to develop as early as 1840. This study questions the adequacy of simplistic concepts of class and culture. It combines modern cultural theory and historical evidence to demonstrate how people of all kinds, especially workers and women, interacted with the printed image and helped to shape an increasingly visual mass culture. In doing so, it offers a new way to look at and extract meaning from nineteenth-century popular illustration.

Patricia Anderson's profile page

Patricia Anderson, Postdoctoral Fellow affiliated to Department of History, Simon Fraser University.

'Extensively researched and ambitious study ... well written ... her enthusiasm for this fascinating period of English publishing history shines through. The choice of sample illustrations from the period is excellent.'Epilogue

'The book has a number of strengths. It is thoroughly researched and in fact the footnotes and bibliography are an excellent guide to students in the field of early Victorian periodicals. The book is also to be commended for the effort to theorize the material ... the book is written withgreat clarity, a fact even more impressive in the light of the large number of secondary materials the analysis rests on. Thompson wears her research lightly. Finally, Oxford University Press has done well in the production of the book; it has a good number of illustrations, all of them importantexamples of the material under discussion ... a useful contribution to the analysis of the nineteenth-century periodical press and the ongoing analysis of the development of mass culture.'Anne Humpherys, City University of New York, Nineteenth-Century Literature 47:4 (March 1993)

'an important avenue to understanding the role of print culture generally, and periodical literature more specifically, in people's lives ... most useful for students of popular print as a catalog of the images and of the general content of these four widely circulating weeklies'Lee E. Heller, Hampshire College, Nineteenth-Century Prose, Volume 20, Number 2: Fall 1993

'...closely argued and brilliantly researched....Such is the quality of the work,...that one never feels "reference overkill," or any sense of pedantry....This excellent and original book should be required reading for anyone interested either in Victorian cultural history or in theinfluential role played by periodicals in the nineteenth century.'Rosemary T.Van Arsdel, Victorian Review

'persuasive and informative ... written with admirable concision and empathy for the material ... excellent footnotes ... The Clarendon Press is to be congratulated for the encouragement to historical and literary scholarship which immaculate productions such as this provide.'John Springhall, University of Ulster at Coleraine, Social History Society's Newsletter, Spring 1992

'Detailed and engaging study ... lively descriptions ... entertaining as well as informative.'Victorian Studies

'well-illustrated study'International Review of Social History, No. 3, 1992

'Anderson's conscientious scholarship is evident in her copious and well researched footnotes and bibliography ... a highly readable, highly informative, and delightfully visual exploration of the predecessors of the mass media.'Betsy Cogger Rezelman, St. Lawrence University, Victorian Studies Association of Ontario Newsletter, No. 51, Spring '93

'Anderson's speculative interpretations on the altered meaning that the various images acquired in the context of the periodical provide perceptive readings of social forces arrayed in the periodicals ... this is an important and illuminating study ... Anderson explores a topic too littleconsidered, and her study has wide implications.'Michael Kaufmann, Indiana University-Purdue University

'Patricia Anderson's effort to identify a transformation of popular culture in mid-nineteenth-century Britain is ... welcome ...she makes some shrewd points about the shifting, if not "transformed," visual literacy of the vastly more numerous mid-century consumers.'Robert L. Patten, Rice University, American Historical Review, April 1993