Abstract
Scholars of the 19th century Atlantic world will readily attest to the importance of newspapers. As many monographs have demonstrated, newspapers played a vital role in creating nationalism, facilitating the rapid dissemination of information and the consolidation of nation-states, and forging partisan identities and political parties. However, despite the impressive amount of attention devoted to newspapers, scholars often ignore other forms of print culture. Heather A. Haveman’s Magazines and the Making of America and Patricia Mainardi’s Another World demonstrate the importance of analyzing magazines, lithographic imagery, the illustrated press, comics, illustrated books, and popular prints. Both studies urge scholars to enlarge discussions of print culture and modernity to include the media they discuss.
Haveman, professor of sociology and business at the University of California, Berkeley, begins by asserting that scholars ignore magazines because of a consensus that early magazines were “a kind of literary hinterland” and a “vast record of not-so-exciting attempts to institutionalize literacy in the colonies and the early republic, vis-à-vis correspondence and news from Europe; amateurish, heavily didactic essays and poems; reprinted speeches and dry historical biographies; and numerous extracts and miscellaneous trifles.” However, she argues that this dismissive attitude is wrongheaded and overlooks the importance of magazines during a critical period in U.S. history. Magazines served as a sort of social glue. They brought together people who would not otherwise have met and thus helped forge communities. In addition, they also allowed readers to receive the same cultural messages.
Haveman analyzes magazines from 1741 to 1860. Although the industry grew very slowly, it began to flourish by the 1820s. Much of this had to do with demographics. In 1740, the population of the British North American colonies stood at roughly 1 million people. The colonies had few urban areas and most people lived in small agricultural communities. Consequently, the potential audience for magazines was small. Only a few magazines existed during this period. However, the population of the United States began to increase rapidly in later decades. By 1860, it reached 30 million people. Magazines thus had a very large potential audience. Granted, millions of people could not subscribe to magazines—slaves, for instance—but in the period Haveman studies, the potential audience grew tremendously. In addition, as the population increased, existing urban areas grew larger and new urban areas appeared. Cities such as New York, Philadelphia, and Boston contained plenty of magazines. As the U.S. population continued to grow, people began to leave the eastern seaboard and spread across the continent. As people dispersed, so did magazines. Moreover, developments in production and distribution technologies facilitated the growth of magazines and the ease of starting and distributing them. Although some magazines had very short life spans, others found audiences of varying sizes and had stable existences for multiple decades.
Magazines had a tremendous impact on three important areas of social life: religion, social reform, and the economy. Haveman contends that magazines could and did create communities out of people dispersed over large distances. Religious communities depended on magazines. Protestants of various denominations, Catholics, Jews, and spiritualists all utilized magazines to disseminate their beliefs and compete in the religious marketplace. In addition, religious magazines changed the nature of the industry. For one, they demonstrated that magazines could be powerful tools. Furthermore, because they were the first specialized genre to proliferate, religious magazines were largely responsible for the growth of magazines dedicated to social reform. Indeed, “reformers of all stripes followed churches in using magazines to spread the gospel of reform and sustain the faithful in the cause.” Magazines helped drive social reform efforts, although even magazines could not make relatively unpopular causes like spelling reform and vegetarianism popular. Finally, magazines played a role in economic modernization. Banknote reporters and counterfeit detectors facilitated commerce by reassuring people about the value of paper currency. Technical and scientific magazines helped diffuse knowledge. Finally, agricultural magazines created communities of practice at the international, national, regional, and local levels. Magazines, in other words, were firmly linked to modernity.
As with Haveman, Mainardi analyzes sources that many scholars have dismissed. Another World initially began as a study of comics, which have received some attention from scholars. However, she quickly realized that comics could not be considered in isolation because they “were part of a complex of interrelationships among artists who worked in several media at the same time.” Thus, she expanded the study to examine other areas of illustrated print culture, including lithographic imagery (particularly caricature); the illustrated press; comics; illustrated books; and popular prints. Mainardi is professor emerita of art history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
Over the course of five chapters, in a lavishly illustrated volume, Mainardi discusses developments in print culture. She begins with lithography, which was quickly
identified as the medium par excellence for images of modern life because of the ease with which it could be executed, its responsiveness to individual stylistic temperaments, and its ability of depict the ephemeral and shifting scenes of a rapidly changing society.
Lithographs sparked a seismic shift in French cultural life and set the stage for the development of the illustrated press. People quickly understood that images had as much, if not more, power than words, and the general survey magazine soon exploded into being. Periodicals such as the Illustrated London News and L’Illustration quickly “established the format that took root in modern culture and that still governs everything from our daily newspapers to the television news.” Furthermore, while illustrated periodicals began as attempts to improve the working class, they quickly evolved into “agents of every political, cultural, and social opinion.”
Although comics are now the most familiar form of caricature, that was not always the case. French artists did not invent comics, but they played an important role in their development. Early comics had limited success, but artists established comics “as a subversive medium that obeys no rules, a definition still applicable in the twenty-first century.” Mainardi cautions readers that comics are only one form of visual narration. Other forms did not prove as enduring. Although illustrated books largely disappeared by 1900, they nevertheless boomed in the 19th century. Finally, popular prints mutated throughout the century and responded to seemingly never-ending shifts in taste, style, and markets. As with Haveman, Mainardi finds print culture intimately linked to modernity.
Both Haveman and Mainardi illustrate the benefits of spending more time thinking about aspects of print culture that have long been considered irrelevant. Furthermore, the two books complement each other nicely. Haveman analyzes magazines and focuses mainly on words. Mainardi, on the contrary, considers multiple media and pays much more attention to the fusion of words and images. Furthermore, whereas Haveman focuses principally on the United States, Mainardi discusses Europe. Taken together, they illuminate the remarkable world of 19th century print culture. Scholars from many different disciplines will find much to enjoy about these volumes.