A History of Press Graphics, 1819–1921: The Golden Age of Graphic Journalism by Alexander Roob (review)

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Reviewed by:

• A History of Press Graphics, 1819–1921: The Golden Age of Graphic Journalism by Alexander Roob
• Brian Maidment (bio)

Alexander Roob, A History of Press Graphics, 1819–1921: The Golden Age of Graphic Journalism ( Cologne: Taschen, 2023), pp. 605, $80/ £60 cloth.

In his shrewd introduction to the bravely titled History of Press Graphics, 1819–1921, Alexander Roob notes the topicality and diversity of the visual content of magazines but also gives a daunting list of the reasons why nineteenth-century periodical illustration has so far resisted anything approaching a broad multinational survey. Roob argues that the essentially ephemeral graphic content of magazines has endured the contempt of traditional art-historical interest and been marginalised by comics studies scholars and photographic historians. Anxiety over the extent to which magazine illustration has been implicated in structuring and sustaining various imperial and nationalistic projects has further hampered scholarly attention. However, studying nineteenth-century magazine illustration illuminates contemporary concerns such as the nature of press censorship and the ways in which racial and national stereotypes are developed through everyday images. [End Page 678]

Despite its title, this book might at first seem less an ambitious history of press graphics than a commercially oriented anthology that, by using the spectacular reprographic resources for which Taschen is well known, brings together and exploits visually attractive source material. Like many Taschen volumes, this one is preposterously large and glamorous. It gives off a wondrous sheen that will be entirely unfamiliar to those scholars who sit day by day in library reading rooms studying volumes of faded and often browning periodicals. Never intended to be a simulacrum of the huge range of European and American magazines that it displays, the book reengineers a mass of nineteenth-century periodicals into a postmodern artifact of often startling, even visceral, visual appeal. It reproduces a wondrous mass of rare material for a wide and multinational readership of book lovers and the intellectually curious, and it gives shape to that mass through an interesting and well-considered sequence of chapters that map simultaneous developments across Europe and the United States. Roob's book joins the even more wide-ranging Bloomsbury History of Illustration (2019) in providing a visually arresting overview of the images that formed a staple element in mass-circulation cheap print during the nineteenth century, images that speak of and to their own cultural moment as well as our own.

The multilanguage text—English, German, and French—unsurprisingly concentrates on British, French, German, and American magazines. A succinct introduction is followed by a quite extensive chapter on early illustrated news that rapidly runs from sixteenth-century Germany to nineteenth-century Japan. The overarching but unexplained historical framework of 1819 to 1868 is then used to preface three chapters—a short section titled "The Industrial Turn" that discusses the emergent reprographic media of lithography and wood engraving, followed by two substantial chapters, "Realism and Caricature 1819–1842" and "The Rise of Illustrated Journalism 1842–1868." Although it would have been valuable to have a clearer sense of why these dates were chosen to demarcate significant phases in the history of magazine illustration, the implicit argument here is an interesting one. Roob follows a recent trend in regarding the observational precision and satirical energy of caricature as the foundation out of which the dominant tradition of Victorian graphic realism developed. Despite the obvious contrasts between British magazines' concentration on wood engraving and the French preference for lithography, Roob's chosen images underline the interplay between naturalism and satire in late Regency and early Victorian periodical illustration. It is a sign of how widely Roob has surveyed his sources that this section of his book concludes not with the moment of Punch's appearance in 1841 but with two pages from W. J. Linton's sub-Blakean Poorhouse Fugitives, published in [End Page 679] the ambitious monthly Illuminated Magazine rather than a comic journal. The following chapter, "The Rise of Illustrated Journalism 1842–1868," while more precisely focussed on such magazines as the Illustrated London News and L'Illustration, nevertheless retains a strong sense of the dialogue between naturalism and caricature that characterises periodical illustration in this period.

The later...