Book Reviews : Reading popular prints, 1790-1870. By B. E. Maidment. Manchester, Manchester University Press. 1996. 208 pp. £35.00, cloth. ISBN 0 7190 3370 5

Abstract

Maidment’s book explores popular visual culture in England during the graphic media’s heyday, an era of great technical innovation in which illustrated journals flourished and popular imagery commanded the sort of broad-based audience the electronic media do now. An aficionado and collector of ’prints’ the term he uses to describe a full range of mechanically reproduced renderings, from full-sheet political commentaries to illustrative vignettes for sheet music and novels Maidment seeks to redress their marginalization by art historians. He suggests that art historians are discomfited by modes of rendering that shatter the ’idea of art as the unmediated expression of the artist’s inner life and