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‘To the great public’: The architectural image in the early Illustrated London News

‘To the great public’: The architectural image in the early Illustrated London News

Hultzsch, Anne ORCID: 0000-0003-4433-5083 (2017) ‘To the great public’: The architectural image in the early Illustrated London News. Architectural Histories, 5 (1):9. pp. 1-17. ISSN 2050-5833 (Online) (doi:https://doi.org/10.5334/ah.268)

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Abstract

The Illustrated London News, launched in May 1842 as the first illustrated newspaper and quickly copied across Europe, North America and beyond, was full of architectural images. New buildings, ancient ruins, construction sites, royal visits, wars, theatre performances, exotic expeditions, historical essays and innumerable other subjects gave occasion to feature the built, whether for its own sake or as background setting. Images and texts were produced and consumed with an urge and at a speed never seen before. The building, through the illustrated press, left the static confines of the book and the framed print and became peopled by the purposeful bourgeoisie. Through a close analysis of a range of articles on the new Royal Exchange, the refurbished London Colosseum as well as the Queen’s Scotland tour, this essay explores the role of the architectural image in the illustrated press by focusing on its relationship to the accompanying text. Untangling the mechanics of representation and perception, it identifies modes of intellectual, affective, and kinetic vision through which architecture was represented to the remote reading public. By externalising and stabilising vision, the Illustrated London News thus created a virtual public sphere in which the dramatic technological and material changes occurring in the period could be absorbed and normalized.

Item Type: Article
Additional Information: © 2017 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Uncontrolled Keywords: Illustrated London News, image, language, perception, Victorian architecture, printing
Subjects: N Fine Arts > NA Architecture
Faculty / School / Research Centre / Research Group: Faculty of Liberal Arts & Sciences
Faculty of Liberal Arts & Sciences > School of Design (DES)
Last Modified: 18 Mar 2021 22:54
URI: http://gala.gre.ac.uk/id/eprint/28750

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