“A Greek land of promise” as a bone of contention: modern Greece in the early years of The Illustrated London News, 1843–1850

Abstract

The Illustrated London News (ILN) was the first newspaper to integrate image and text in reporting the news. Illustrated journalism occupied significant space in the newspaper, promoting the brave new world of the image and urging readers to visualize the story being told. As Anne Hultzsch (2017, 9) notes in her discussion of the architectural image in the early ILN, “by relieving readers of the task of visualising text in their minds, the illustrated press externalised and stabilised vision, while at the same time introducing a new mode of kinetic experience through the combination of word and image.” A significant innovation at an opportune moment, only a year after the appearance and success of Punch, the popular illustrated comic weekly, the ILN offered sixteen pages featuring thirty-two woodcuts, large and small, accompanying forty-eight columns of news (see Leary 2011). For sixpence, every Saturday it presented, in a regular format, the events of the preceding week. Considering that the ILN sold over 100,000 weekly copies by the 1850s, attracting a mainly middleto upper-class readership, these narratives reached a wide audience who were slowly becoming educated in what we might think of as the lures of the visual (Ellegård 1971, 22; see also Baillet 2017 on the visual representations of the labouring and lower classes in the mid-Victorian illustrated press). As Gerry Beegan (2008, 55) has suggested, wood engraving, the ILN’s reproductive method, asserted the newspaper’s middle-class character and “became the means through which middle-class magazine readers expected to see their world depicted”: “The drawn image was not simply a depiction but an explanation, its purpose to clarify and make sense of the incident it portrayed.” An exploration of these images and their accompanying texts more than a century-and-a-half later, when visual journalism has become a vital part of mass media and the arts, is an exploration of the history of the visual in the media, and how it came to call attention to specific aspects of reality. On 19 June 1847, the ILN published a letter sent to the editor by an indignant “traveller in the Levant, and a friend of Greece” on the “atrocities” perpetrated around what came to be known as the Don Pacifico Affair, which led to the blockade of the main Athenian port of Piraeus by British forces in the early 1850s. The letter was published under the title “Brigandage in Athens” and was paired with a small illustration depicting the house of Don Pacifico “after the sacking” (Figure 1). The small drawing, showing an external view of a three-storey house with the