Roundtable: The European Illustrated Press and the Emergence of a Transnational Visual News Culture, 1842–1870

Abstract

representations of ‘the same world’ to readers inhabiting very different parts of the globe. Did a picture of the 1851 Great Exhibition in the Illustrated London News mean the same thing to an ILN reader in Australia or New Zealand—crown colonies that ‘ascribed enormous cultural and political influence’ to the paper (p. 43)—as it did to a subscriber residing in the metropolis itself who had the opportunity to stroll through the Crystal Palace? A similar question could be asked of whether an image of Parisian revolutionaries at the barricades in an 1848 issue of l’Illustration might have been apprehended differently by a French reader than by a resident of one of the many countries or distant territories where that newspaper was aggressively retailed—the United States, Sweden, Russia, the Netherlands, Spain, or South America. Ultimately, the question Smits’ book leaves me asking is how seeing a pictorial representation of the world might generate in viewers a sensible conviction of that world’s monolithic ‘sameness’ across space and time.