Communications in the Strand Magazine, September 1896

The September 1896 number of the Strand Magazine begins with a startling image: a daring escape from certain death made by telegraph wires (figure 1). In this wood engraving, a gargoyle sneers on as a wild-haired professor and an angelic-looking young woman leap away from a rooftop engulfed in flames. Suspended in mid-air, they stretch their arms toward a swath of telegraph lines below, anticipating the landing that will reveal whether the cables will give way or sustain their weight and save their lives. A crowd looks on from the street far below, shouting words of encouragement or warning to the two figures. The caption reads, "They sprang from the gable and struck blindly against the wires."

This opening illustration foregrounds a theme that appears throughout the September 1896 number of the Strand: communication. The image illustrates a pivotal moment from the first piece in the magazine, a short story by W. Buckley titled "After Many Days." Opening an issue with an illustration was a familiar convention of Victorian illustrated monthlies, and accompanying that graphic with a short story or serial instalment was standard practice for the Strand. But this full-page illustration is notable for its unusual use of telegraph technology, one that signals a preoccupation with communication evident particularly in this number but persistent throughout the Strand's publication history. The telegraph wires in "After Many Days" simultaneously embody the traditional and emerging conceptions of communication that interacted in journalism and other avenues of cultural discourse in 1890s Britain. In accordance with the older sense of the term, the telegraph lines support the distribution of physical phenomena—in this case, not sound, heat, or air, but human bodies. At the same time, the swath of three dozen or more wires stretched high above the street invokes the emerging concept of "communications" in the plural form: a system for imparting information.

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The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) lists a quotation from 1907 as the first usage of the term "communications" to signify "the science, practice, or system of transmitting or imparting information, esp. of doing so over a distance."¹ Taken in this sense, communications, as Bruce Clarke points out, encompass both the social and material, using physical structures and phenomena to circulate individual expressions within a networked system.² The OED's definition identifies electronic and digital media as specific objects of the science of communications, suggesting a twentieth-century orientation. Similarly, John Durham Peters argues that during the Victorian period, the term "communication" signified "a state of shared understanding" between people; it was not until after World War I that the notion of communication as information exchange gained traction.³ However, the 1907 usage documented in the OED suggests slippage between notions of "communication" and "communications" in the social imagination at the turn of the century. Indeed, many modern communication systems originate in the nineteenth century.⁴ Richard Menke contends that "over the course of the Victorian era, the sense of communication shifted" in response to new networks, such as the Penny Post and telegraphy, that "dramatically increased" communication's "speed and reach."⁵

I argue that the systematic, medium-focused approach to knowledge circulation encapsulated by the plural term "communications," though naturalized in the twentieth century, was shaped by nineteenth-century media and culture. Changing conceptions of communication reflected the late-Victorian shift toward forms of knowledge transmission that were increasingly technologized, systematized, mass in scale, and consumerist in orientation. It is no coincidence that the modern usage of "communications" emerged around the same time that other words associated with knowledge production and circulation—such as medium, media, and information—gained their current meanings. Menke has chronicled how the nineteenth-century concept of information came to refer to an "industrialized" stream of data, decontextualized and parsed into fragments for circulation in technologized systems such as the electric telegraph network.⁶ However, while the Victorians increasingly understood information as subject to disembodiment by modern technology, Menke states that it was not uniformly viewed in this light.⁷ The dual connotations of communication at the fin de siècle—as the circulation of a physical phenomenon and as the systematic, technologized exchange of information—attest to the multifaceted cultural perceptions of communication technologies, systems, their objects, and their subjects.

This shifting conception of communication was both cause and effect of print's gradual displacement from the epicentre of popular culture, which increasingly favoured mechanical media that could rapidly process and circulate sounds and images such as the gramophone, telephone, hand camera, and film.⁸ However, these modern knowledge transmissions inherited practices from print. In turn, some types of print media, such as illustrated magazines, incorporated the aesthetic sensibilities and technological advances ushered in by new media. As nonverbal mass media transformed how people defined communication, illustrated magazines positioned themselves at the intersection of old and new forms of knowledge circulation.

The Strand particularly embraced the position of the magazines within popular culture, as exemplified by the number published in September 1896. Beginning with the full-page illustration for "After Many Days" and concluding with a short piece about Pekinese pigeon whistles in the novelty journalism feature "Curiosities," the editorial contents of this number are filled with accounts of what Leah Price describes as "communication infrastructures," the technologies and systems that allow cultural expression to circulate.⁹ The most aesthetically distinctive of these is "The Modern Mercury," an article on the British Post Office written and illustrated by John Holt Schooling. "The Modern Mercury" invokes special cultural authority through its reliance on statistics and data visualization. Schooling's outlook on communication provides a framework for assessing other representations of communication in this number. To avoid anachronism, I use the plural term "communications" sparingly in analyzing the Strand, but I study the motifs that invoke communication technologies and systems in a sense consistent with the twentieth- and twenty-first-century use of the plural term. Each form of knowledge transmission in the September 1896 number of the Strand, from telegraphy and underwater photography to pigeon whistles and historical woodcuts, fosters social and commercial activity, the twin aims of communication according to Schooling. Throughout the magazine, the production and circulation of cultural knowledge are made possible by industrial, technologized systems of communication that enhance traditional practices. Tellingly, the Strand depicts illustrated journalism as part of these systems and foregrounds its own material status as a media object at the centre of its reader network.

In what follows, I investigate how the September 1896 number of the Strand associates modern communication technology and systems with illustrated journalism in general and with its own brand in particular. In Telegraphic Realism, Menke lays important groundwork for studying communications as both a social and material phenomenon in Victorian culture by analyzing how the literary genre of realism expressed the "media shifts" of its age, imagining itself as both medium and information system.¹⁰ Taking a similar approach to analyzing the medium of the illustrated popular periodical, I investigate how the Strand reflexively used its material form and contents to position itself within a changing media landscape that included both traditional print and new, non-print forms. I argue that at the fin de siècle, the Strand encouraged its readers to embrace a systematic, medium-based understanding of communication by making it personal and tangible. The Strand's semantic and aesthetic strategies, apparent in its September 1896 number, contextualized modern mass media within a longer, print-oriented history of communication. Making its multimedia network relatable and concrete, the magazine represented communications as the lifeblood of the Strand community. The Strand leveraged this strategy to impress on readers the continued importance of illustrated print to modern communications and fin de siècle popular culture.

A Paragon of Pictorial Journalism and Middle-Class Modernity

As one of the highest circulating monthlies of the 1890s, the Strand exemplifies middle-class mass culture and therefore offers a representative case study of how popular illustrated magazines interacted with changing communication technology and systems. Analyzing this phenomenon requires attention to all aspects of the magazine's form and content, many of which have received little scholarly consideration. The Strand's "snippets"—what Reginald Pound describes as "scraps of useless information"—as well as most of its non-fiction contents and fiction by lesser-known authors have largely gone unexamined even in detailed studies of the magazine, which tend to focus on its canonical fiction.¹¹ However, as Jonathan Cranfield points out, the magazine must be approached holistically: the meaning of each article or story "was always contingent upon [a] massive drift of other writing" in the Strand, to say nothing of nonverbal characteristics such as the images, ornamentation, and page layouts.¹²

Illustrations were essential to how the Strand engaged readers and thus warrant particular scrutiny in any holistic study of the magazine. The Strand distinguished itself from other general-interest pictorial monthlies through a high volume of images, striving to print "a picture on every page."¹³ As James Mussell has observed, the Strand deployed the latest in image-reproduction methods to provide readers with "access to an unprecedented array of subjects, presented in a range of formats, gathered together to be consumed simultaneously."¹⁴ The Strand foregrounded the sophistication of its format by offering state-of-the-art reproduction and drawing attention to this and virtually every other aspect of the magazine's production. Examples of this reflexivity include articles such as "A Description of the Offices of the Strand Magazine" (1892) and "The Romance of Our News Supply" (1895), numerous interviews with Strand authors, and a portrait of the magazine's founder, George Newnes (1892).¹⁵

The Strand was a paragon of modern middle-class consumerism and popular culture as well as modern pictorial journalism. The magazine's reflexivity and innovative aesthetics were part of Newnes's efforts to foster an active, loyal community of readers who would invest emotionally and financially in the Strand as their own "social space."¹⁶ The quires of advertising pages published in the original monthly issues affirm that the magazine's raison d'être was at least as commercial as it was social.¹⁷ The consumer community that Newnes targeted with the Strand was largely middle class, and the magazine positioned itself as a beacon of cultural authority shaped by middle-class values and interests; it not only presented the modern world as "an object of desire" but also educated readers in how to perceive this world and interpret its possibilities.¹⁸

Visualizing Industrial Communication in "The Modern Mercury"

The September 1896 number's offerings exemplify the Strand's typical range of contents, aesthetics, and design in the late 1890s. The issue contains six works of fiction, including one serial instalment of a novel by Arthur Conan Doyle, two episodes in a series of linked short stories, and three stand-alone works of short fiction. Among the non-fictional contents are an illustrated celebrity interview; a feature on taxidermized animal furniture; an article on the production of large ocean vessels and one on undersea pearl diving; a statistical essay accompanied by data visualizations; and the latest instalment of "Curiosities," a regular feature exhibiting an assortment of visual oddities. Every piece combines letterpress with multiple images, including illustrations by some of the most famous and innovative artists of the era as well as half-tone images reproduced from photographs using cutting-edge photomechanical technology.

Throughout the number, the Strand positions itself at the centre of a multimedia network that folds old communication methods into a modern system to circulate knowledge. For example, celebrating the Post Office as one of the pillars of modern communication in Britain, "The Modern Mercury: A Quantitative Account of Post Office Work" posits systematized communication as a precondition of modern cultural knowledge production and transmission. "The Modern Mercury" participates in population journalism, a late-century magazine genre that combined entertaining data visualizations with narrative analysis of statistics about human populations.¹⁹ As the article demonstrates, this genre enhanced its cultural weight by invoking the objective authority that Victorians attributed to empirical, quantitative evidence.²⁰ This authority is buttressed by data visualization, a relatively new form of information expression for most middle-class readers at this time.

John Holt Schooling, the actuary and journalist who wrote and illustrated "The Modern Mercury," posits letter writing as both a cause and an effect of British economic and political advancements in the nineteenth century.²¹ This claim is not as exaggerated as it may seem: as Price notes, nineteenth-century efforts to make the postal service more affordable, accessible, and systematic helped build the communication infrastructure that underwrote British industrialization and imperialism.²² "The Modern Mercury" does not explain the reasons for the Post Office's growth, but readers would presumably know that it was the result of tax reform, efforts to increase procedural regularity, and integration with technologies such as the railway.²³ Improving centuries-old postal practices with new, technologized infrastructure, the British Post Office made the exchange of letters and goods possible on a larger and more rapid scale than ever before.

The article opens with an anecdote illustrating the tendency among citizens to "grow[l] at the management" of the Post Office when "any trivial irregularity occurs" in the workings of its "vast business."²⁴ Taking the side of management—the Postmaster General—Schooling surmises, "If we take a bird's eye view of the quantity of work done, we may come to the conclusion that the quality of the work is no less remarkable than its bulk."²⁵ The Post Office deserves the appreciation of the Strand's readers not only because of the remarkable quality and quantity of its work, but also because its outputs benefit the public. Schooling describes the communication system of the postal service as a "gigantic social and commercial machine" that grinds away daily on behalf of British citizens.²⁶ As the article's data visualizations illustrate, this machine fosters a wide array of social and commercial activity through a comprehensive range of media, including letters, telegrams, book packets, samples, circulars, postcards, and newspapers, as well as parcels.

Ultimately, the article affirms the progress of the British nation and the reach of the British Empire. The cited statistics indicate that, among ten Western nations, the number of letters delivered per head in Britain is second only to the United States. Schooling suggests that this distinction attests to British civility: given that the Post Office is "a vital factor of our social life and of our national activity and development," the mail delivery statistics offer an "index" of "activity" and "enterprise."²⁷ The author interprets Britain's high ranking in this statistical comparison as evidence of its superiority to the rest of Europe. A visualization of correspondence between Britain and the other six "great powers" of the world (the United States, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, and Austria-Hungary) highlights the socio-economic network that such correspondence facilitates by expressing each quantity as a bar, creating a visual bond between each pair of nations (figure 2). Schooling reminds readers that this extensive correspondence

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enables "intercourse with the continents of the world," ensuring communication with locations as far away as Aden and Zanzibar—two destinations that happened to be sites of British imperial involvement.²⁸

"The Modern Mercury" depicts modern communications as an industrial machine that parses instances of communication into normalized units. Indeed, the article illustrates Menke's observation that the reformed postal service was remarkable not just because of its use of technology, but also because it successfully embodied the "reconsideration of postal service in informatic terms."²⁹ The normalizing effect of systematized postal practices is modelled through the article's graphics, which abstract individual instances of communication as quantities that Schooling has aggregated and expressed as geometric shapes. The statistics average out communication instances into equal units of the postal system's total output. For example, the article's fifth figure displays the average postal correspondence circulated per minute during an entire year. In practice, fewer items would be submitted to the post and delivered to their destinations in the middle of the night, but quantification has flattened such fluctuations to suggest a constant, regularized flow of postal activity. The visualization method underscores this sense of unending, normalized units of communication.³⁰ A series of identical circles represents each stream of correspondence flowing from one nation to another, suggesting that the edges in the network of communication that connect each one—the roads, railways, and waterways on which the post travels, as well as the organization of the postal service itself at each stop—are identical even though geographic, technological, and socio-economic differences from one nation to the next make this unlikely.

The material aesthetics of the data visualizations further reinforce the semantic themes this article associates with communication. As I have argued elsewhere, abstract statistical graphics such as those created by Schooling for "The Modern Mercury" have a look that readers would have recognized as specific to images reproduced by photomechanical line-block engraving, a relatively recent technology. It was not unusual for Victorian readers to consider material factors such as image reproduction method as part of their interpretive process; articles on illustrated magazine production were printed in periodicals throughout the Victorian era and fostered readers' print media literacy.³¹ The line-block engraving process used for "The Modern Mercury" involved photographing an artist's drawing, exposing the negative on a plate, and etching the plate to reveal the line drawing in relief.³² Because line engravings maintained the hand-drawn details of an artist's original image, Schooling's data visualizations contribute to the abstraction of real communication by replicating Schooling's own efforts to quantify those instances by hand while, at the same time, inking them as part of a systematized, mechanical process. In a material sense, then, unique instances of communication became abstract, normalized units of mass print.

Crucially, as depicted by "The Modern Mercury," the industrial scale and pace of the modern Post Office do not depersonalize communication. Rather than displacing traditional, individual, and otherwise idiosyncratic modes of communication, the postal machine's interlocking components and processes incorporate these elements into a systematic framework for efficiency's sake. Schooling strategically links the vast network of the post to individual persons and communication instances, tacitly inviting readers to locate themselves within this network. For example, the article's first data visualization balances the large scale of the postal machine with the small scale of the individual, mapping out the number of postal items circulated per head using a drawing of an everyman's head—balding, unremarkable, and viewed from behind so the (presumed male) reader might place himself in the position of this average subject (figure 3).

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The article further personalizes its subject matter through the narrative "I" of its author and the graphical traces of his hand in the visualizations. The article's conversational tone is typical of the Strand but has specific implications in "The Modern Mercury" because Schooling, as both author and illustrator, draws readers into studying certain aspects of his images through personal address. For example, on the third page of the article he reflects, "It occurs to me that when, just now, I showed you the big figures on the face of No. 3 [a visualization of total annual correspondence between Britain and other continents], they were too large to convey to your mind a clear idea of what they really mean. So, in No. 5, I show our postal correspondence with the five continents, translated into … much smaller figures."³³ Here Schooling uses letterpress to walk readers through the process of interpreting the visualizations, presenting their abstract data within a more personal frame. In the illustrations, Schooling further imbues the article with a sense of his personality by including handwritten labels and free-hand shapes among the ruled ones. While the visualizations deploy abstract shapes and clean lines that evoke rational, industrial sensibilities, the traces of the artist's hand evident in the more mimetic shapes (such as the everyman's head) and the verbal labels (created free-hand instead of with letterpress) balance rationality with individual subjectivity.

By linking the growth of Britain to the growth of its postal service, "The Modern Mercury" suggests that systematized, large-scale communication is a precondition of modern cultural knowledge production and transmission. In this case, such production and circulation are made possible by industrial, systematic practices of communication that enhance the traditional practice of sending letters and parcels by post. Ultimately, like any successful system of communication, the Post Office is powerful because it draws "disparate persons and places into relation."³⁴ "The Modern Mercury" suggests that while the postal service promotes a variety of social and commercial activities, its main purpose is to connect people through materialized expressions—in other words, through media, particularly forms oriented to the inscribed word. Schooling reflects that the expansion of the postal service seems especially significant "when we think of all that letters mean to us, their conveyance to and from us of the successes and failures, the tragedies and comedies of life, the thousand chances and accidents brought by the receipt of a letter."³⁵

The interconnection of people and places through inscribed paper media is the primary function not only of the Post Office but also, at least in part, of the Strand itself. As a prominent example of late-Victorian New Journalism, the Strand was characterized by a personal tone and the careful cultivation of a consistent brand through its choice of contributors and subject matter.³⁶ The magazine also encouraged reader participation through correspondence columns, submission competitions, and promotional schemes such as a months-long treasure hunt.³⁷ Such efforts, Jackson argues, "represented the attempt to maintain an interactive relationship with readers and to manufacture a community of interest" in which "anonymous citizens" became real individuals.³⁸ Similarly, the Strand's efforts to personalize both the modern postal system and print journalism were a calculated response to the increasingly mass character of communication, a shift viewed by the British public with ambivalence.³⁹

Communicating the Far as Near, Exotic as Familiar, and Old as New

"The Modern Mercury" suggests that the transition to a larger scale and more systematic operation of communications, while mechanized and normalizing, had only positive repercussions for individuals. It enabled social connectivity, the circulation of knowledge, and the expansion of the economy and empire. Other contents of the Strand's September 1896 number similarly deployed a variety of strategies to personalize and materialize aspects of modern communication systems and technologies. Items of popular science, adventure, novelty, and history used modern communication systems and modes to make unusual activities and locales accessible, legible, and even personal.

In the Strand's popular science and adventure journalism, modern communication gave readers access to exciting new horizons of knowledge and experience. Mussell has observed that Newnes used state-of-the-art image reproduction processes to "expose" readers to "unsettling and strange images."⁴⁰ For example, the September 1896 article "Modern Pearl Fishing," by H. Phelps Whitmarsh, brings together the technologies of modern undersea diving and underwater photography to give readers the opportunity to explore the bottom of the ocean and witness the excitement and isolation of pearl diving. Readers can experience undersea diving by proxy through Whitmarsh's ethnographic account of his own experience among pearl divers in Malaysia and Australia. This account includes a series of images documenting the diving process from preparations in the boat to undersea exploration. The title's use of the term "modern" can be interpreted as describing both the technology used by pearl divers to transform their traditional vocation and the technology used to record them. Although Whitmarsh devotes little attention to describing the process of underwater photography itself, his account emphasizes the novelty of traversing the ocean floor, a highly solitary experience made available to the masses vicariously through photographic technology. Whitmarsh reflects, "There is an uncanny feeling about the bottom of the sea. … Far removed from actual communication with other human beings, in a vast, strange world … the sense of loneliness … is at times awful."⁴¹ Despite a diver's remove from human communication, Whitmarsh uses photography and narration to establish a channel of communication that overcomes a diver's separation from the human world, albeit a one-way channel from the diver to the Strand's readers far above the ocean floor. Through tonal detail, the half-tone images reproduce the physical data from the ocean floor that Whitmarsh captured through photography, bringing traces of that "fairyland" to the periodical page (figure 4). By incorporating Whit-marsh's images and letterpress within its circulation network, the Strand enables readers to experience sensory characteristics of the "vast, strange" landscapes underwater without having to confront the isolation and danger involved in the real thing.

The Strand's science and adventure journalism emphasized the excitement of access to new knowledge in its thematic depiction of communication modes and systems. Other articles in this magazine focused on the imperialist dimensions of communication. In "Pigeon Whistles from China," a subsection of the September 1896 instalment of "Curiosities,"

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the pigeon whistle is assimilated into the modern British communication system so that this foreign practice becomes common knowledge among the Strand's readers. The item includes a reproduced photograph of three whistles and a brief text by J. Edge Partington, who brought the whistles to England from Pekin (a variant of Peking, the imperialist name for the city now known as Beijing). Partington reports that while "no sound" came from the town of Pekin itself, "the most plaintive and lovely music" emanated from the flocks of pigeons that flew about with whistles tied to their tails.⁴² Like the pictures of the undersea "fairyland" of Whitmarsh's article, Partington's illustrated report on pigeon whistles is a source of entertainment, but it also contributes to an imperial store of popular knowledge about nations subject to British rule. Removing the practice from its local context and reducing it to an anecdote effectively contains the "pleasure-loving Chinese" as a cultural commodity for readers to consume.⁴³ Through the modern networks of communication in which the Strand participates, the spaces of the seabed of Northern Australia and the rooftops of Pekin are made subject to the Strand's middle-class reading community.⁴⁴

The technologized systems of communication that bring the whole world to the reader in the pages of the Strand are made to feel more tangible and personal when depicted from the perspectives of real individuals such as Whitmarsh and Partington. The magazine's short stories also brought unusual and exotic experiences into the purview of readers through the often-sensational images produced by Strand artists. The Strand's illustrated fiction frequently evoked modern communication sensibilities in both its format and content. The illustrated short story format that dominated the Strand's fiction was itself a modern genre evolved from the older and widely popular form of serial fiction (indeed, both appear in the September 1896 issue).⁴⁵ Like much late-Victorian fiction, particularly stories of sensation and detection, the Strand's stories frequently relied on modern technologies such as the railway and wireless telegraphy to provide new possibilities for plot development, both in terms of the rapid relay of information and the distortion or failure of such efforts.⁴⁶ "After Many Days" exemplifies this use of communication through its depiction of telegraph cables as a crucial device in both the full-page illustration discussed at the beginning of this article and in the story's climax (figure 1).

Tellingly, "After Many Days" highlights the beneficence of communications: in connecting people and places, it can save lives. The story opens with Philip Weston, a failed professor, contemplating suicide. The British classicist learns that Thérsè, the fifteen-year-old girl who sings in the café below his Parisian garret, is his long-lost daughter. Immediately after this revelation, a fire breaks out in the café, forcing father and daughter onto the roof. As the blaze spreads, they have almost lost hope when they see "a maze of telegraph wires threading their way through the rolling vapour"; Thérèse deems the cables "strong and quite capable of bearing a good, heavy weight," and they prove to sustain both father and daughter long enough to reach safety.⁴⁷ By the story's conclusion, Weston has abandoned thoughts of suicide and prays instead for "strength to use worthily that new life that had been given him in the new hope dawning upon his soul."⁴⁸ This outcome suggests that the telegraph wires are not just useful but redemptive. While nineteenth-century communication infrastructure was rarely leaned on so literally, the story's imbrication of old and new conceptions of communication (physical exchange and systematized circulation, respectively) serves to underscore that communications systems ultimately save lives. Improbable though the story's use of telegraph cables may be, it presents a literalized expression of modern communication technology as altruistic in its capacity for interconnection.

The Print History of Mass Communication Systems in "Some Old Newspapers"

Each of the previously discussed items implicitly situates the Strand as part of the modern communication systems depicted. F. G. Kitton's "Some Old Newspapers: From Charles I to Queen Victoria" explicitly situates illustrated journalism as part of this system. The article simultaneously surveys the history of print journalism and the British nation by examining newspaper accounts of major social and political events of the past 200 years. It posits that increased speed and efficacy of communication have led to a more informed populace and improved quality of life. "Some Old Newspapers" also foregrounds modern illustrated journalism's socio-cultural heritage, situating it at the centre of Britain's past and present communication networks.

Buttering up anyone who might cast a glance at this article, Kitton begins by noting the "peculiar fascination" that an "ancient, time-stained news-sheet" holds for a "thoughtful, intelligent reader."⁴⁹ Kitton first proposes that reading about events as reported at the time is more compelling than reading "less vivid descriptions" by modern historians.⁵⁰ He then asserts the special status of old materials, akin to what Walter Benjamin describes as an original artwork's "aura" of authenticity, remarking that "the identical print we so reverently handle was the means of spreading information respecting current events among our ancestors centuries ago."⁵¹ Both of Kitton's observations suggest that journalism's value is based upon its proximity to the events and people on which it reports. Temporal proximity ensures that journalism reflects how events were perceived by "the public mind" as they unfolded; material proximity means that the enduring artifacts of print journalism testify to the communication networks of days past.⁵²

Kitton follows these reflections with a brief history of the early newspaper, beginning with the seventeenth-century reign of James I. The account situates journalism as essential to the public's experience of significant political and military events that have contributed to Britain's national identity. He names a succession of weeklies printed between 1622 and the Civil War, noting that even during "the heat" of this war's "hostilities, each army made a point of "carr[ying] its printing press" because journalism had become such an important political weapon.⁵³ The first daily newspaper, Kitton states, was printed during the reign of Queen Anne. Having traced the development of journalism as concomitant with British rule, Kitton turns to a study of some individual newspaper artifacts "with a view to discovering the earliest publication records of certain remarkable occurrences which have made their mark in English history."⁵⁴ The ensuing pages combine Kitton's narrative overview of major historical events and their reportage in the news with illustrations that reproduce letterpress and images from contemporaneous newspapers and prints (figure 5). These events include the second Civil War (1648), an outbreak of the Black Plague (1665), the Battle of Trafalgar (1805), and Queen Victoria's birth (1819). Kitton frequently mentions the relay and timeline of communication as part of his context for each journalistic account. For example, he notes a two-week gap between the Trafalgar victory and its official confirmation by authoritative news outlets in Britain, observing that such a delay "seems strange, in these days of rapid transmission of news."⁵⁵ Kitton also emphasizes how the circulation of news affected the reading public. For example, news of the Duke of Wellington's victory at Waterloo "instant[ly]" lifted a "dark cloud of dread which the Bugbear of Europe [Napoleon] had drawn over the country."⁵⁶ The article concludes with accounts of events that "some … readers will, doubtless, readily recall to mind": Queen Victoria's birth in 1819 and coronation in 1838.⁵⁷ Kitton thus invites the Strand's readers to join the parade of historical events he has put on display. Concluding the article with reverent commentary on the "impressive ceremony crowning 'Victoria Alexandrina,' Queen of these realms," Kitton portrays the Victorian era as the culmination of modern British history.⁵⁸

"Some Old Newspapers" associates communication speed and efficacy with the well-being of the nation in terms of its physical, social, and political health. Excerpts from newspaper reports on the bubonic plague demonstrate journalism's role in fostering physical health, documenting rates of infection and death, and notifying citizens of London about efforts to limit the circulation of disease (a form of communication in the traditional sense).⁵⁹ Snippets from newspaper reports on Admiral Lord Nelson's funeral procession, interwoven with reproduced prints and paintings of his death, the Battle of Trafalgar, and his funeral, involve journalism in the people's collective mourning and catharsis at the passing of a prominent

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figure. They also demonstrate how newspapers can provide a framework within which to process a major event—in this case, a nationalistic occasion that buttresses the social and political outlook of British subjects. "Some Old Newspapers" suggests that the need to know is a right of British subjecthood and that newspapers have been the primary platform for exercising that right throughout modern British history. Periodicals offer individuals the information they need to participate fully in public life: to observe practices that support collective health and safety, celebrate military victories and coronations, and share a common nationalistic narrative that unfolds one day at a time in the newspapers.

Positing knowledge of both current and historical events as essential to British subjecthood, "Some Old Newspapers" suggests that illustrated journalism offers the most effective means of understanding the past. The article makes robust use of the aesthetic capacities of the illustrated magazine medium, assembling a variety of graphical media to approximate history. It reproduces snippets of historical letterpress and images from broadsides, prints, and paintings—some created contemporaneously with the events they depict, and some created afterward—to present a multimodal narrative of journalism and history. Interestingly, none of the newspapers that Kitton cites were originally illustrated; eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century print technology could not produce illustrations of current events on a mass scale for circulation in daily or weekly newspapers. However, the article reimagines a history of illustrated journalism by adding photomechanical reproductions of woodcuts, steel engravings, and oil paintings.

Ultimately, "Some Old Newspapers" values archival print matter because it gives readers the interpretation of events circulated at the time and offers a physical remnant of that moment. Thus, Kitton suggests that illustrated journalism marshals the technology best suited to remediating the past for a mass readership. Following this logic, the Strand used modern techniques to print new types of images such as the line engravings of "The Modern Mercury" and the half-tone photographs in "Modern Pearl Diving" as well as traditional types of graphics such as woodcuts. These different image types achieved different semantic registers, as Mussell has shown, and the assortment of images in "Some Old Newspapers" leverages an especially complex semantic range.⁶⁰ The article enhances archival print's aura of authenticity by including pictures that provide additional, graphical information about the events documented by letterpress. Indeed, the reproduced archival letterpress itself offers a graphical testament to both the events described and the advancements in print technology over two centuries. Presented chronologically, the snippets of archival print illustrate how newspaper letterpress became more uniformly distributed over time and its legibility improved with the shift to less ornamental fonts with minimal serifs. Through its graphics as well as Kitton's textual narrative, then, the article showcases how modern illustrated print can bring readers closer to the history of Britain and the print journalism through which that history was communicated to the people.

Contextualizing modern mass media within a longer, print-oriented history of communication, "Some Old Newspapers" celebrates journalism's past, present, and future. It reminds readers that the modern illustrated magazine uses a network of unprecedented speed and reach to circulate the latest information. It also models how cutting-edge reproduction technology enables pictorial journalism to represent history and culture accurately. "Some Old Newspapers" thus champions the capacity of periodicals to ensure cultural continuity even as modern technology transformed their role in promoting an informed and engaged citizenry. Not only does the article illuminate the interconnectivity of the journalistic tradition, modern communication, and vitality of the British nation, but it also situates the physical artifact of the Strand Magazine as a central agent of the modern media system. Through its capacity to imbricate old and new print media on the page, the Strand presents itself as essential to fostering modern British culture while maintaining its heritage. After all, the power of communication systems lies in their ability to connect people and places separated by time as well as space. The Strand brought its community of readers into proximity with historical readers and cultural moments.

Illustrated Magazines and the Media Landscape of the Fin de Siècle

My analysis of the September 1896 issue of the Strand has two sets of implications. First, in depicting communication as personal and embodied, the magazine encouraged readers to understand every act of communication as a physical phenomenon. Communication involves the inscription, storage, and transmission of information, a process made possible through the physical infrastructure of media technologies. Use of technologies such as the electric telegraph and telephone yielded a common supposition that the proximity to people, places, and historical periods achieved through communication was ethereal, even supernatural, in its immediacy.⁶¹ Menke has observed that the resulting notion of disembodied information was viewed by the Victorians with ambivalence. On one hand, externalizing data created new possibilities for its circulation that would foster material and even moral progress by increasing access to knowledge. On the other hand, it raised questions about the nature (and efficacy) of communication and created new possibilities for its distortion.⁶²

In the face of this cultural ambivalence about communication systems, "Some Old Newspapers" underscored the Strand's ethos: the circulation of information remained reassuringly tangible because it was inextricably associated with print media and other familiar forms, such as painting. Other contents of this issue of the Strand also drew attention to materiality and mediality in different ways, ranging from the spectacular line-block engraved visualizations of "The Modern Mercury" to the telegraph cables that Weston and Thérèse use to crawl to safety in "After Many Days." In effect, the Strand encouraged readers to think about communication as embodied in multiple ways, including the physical phenomena involved in an expression, the infrastructure of a communication system, and the materiality of the media within that system.

The Strand also encouraged readers to attend to how different embodiments and modes of communication allowed for different kinds of engagement with cultural expression. "After Many Days," "The Modern Mercury," "Modern Pearl Diving," and "Some Old Newspapers" assemble a variety of subject matter by combining letterpress with artist-drawn illustrations, line-engraved data visualizations, underwater photography, and half-tone reproductions of art. Through their distinctive affordances, each article presents readers with a different interpretive horizon. Drawing readers' attention to the materiality of communication, illustrated magazines such as the Strand reflected an evolving awareness of mediation and technologized expression in the industrial age, subjects that became central preoccupations of modernist art and social criticism in the twentieth century (for example, Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction").

After the century's turn, the Strand continued to depict and discuss new communication technologies, such as radio and television, striving to maintain its position within a mass culture increasingly centred on mechanized, non-print media. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the magazine's self-awareness about the materiality of communication in the industrial age did not lead to dabbling in Marxist criticism or modernist experimentation. Rather, the Strand continued to be shaped by the "solid middle-class ideology" that had always informed the magazine.⁶³ It encouraged readers to assess communication technologies using a middle-class rubric that emphasized the social and commercial activity discussed in "The Modern Mercury," particularly as these underwrote nationalism and consumer capitalism.

The second set of implications for my analysis relates to the changing role of illustrated print at the turn of the century. Embracing technologized, industrial communication networks as a precondition of modern cultural life, the September 1896 number of the Strand testifies to a broader effort by popular illustrated periodicals to adapt to a milieu in which non-print communication technologies were gaining prominence. Beginning at the turn of the century, print media were gradually displaced from their position at the centre of communications. As Price comments, "The same generation that achieved universal literacy was also the last to see print as an unchallenged medium of communications."⁶⁴ While this meant a more complex and diverse media landscape, it did not precipitate the obsolescence of print. By 1896, as the Strand illustrates, the role of print media had already begun to change. By embracing the infrastructure and sensibilities of new media, however, illustrated magazines sought to maintain a prominent position in the mass, technologized, and systematized networks through which popular culture was produced and circulated. Popular illustrated weeklies and monthlies capitalized on new industrial, mass-production technologies to become more multimodal and intermedial. Crucially, as "Some Old Newspapers" demonstrates, they also used their new technological affordances to carry on the tradition of print journalism.

The September 1896 number showcases the Strand's thematic and aesthetic strategies for contextualizing new media within a longer, print-oriented history of communication. By depicting communication technology and systems that enhanced the old with the new, the Strand linked print and new media within one network that produced and circulated cultural knowledge. The magazine positioned itself as an authoritative agent to usher readers into the new century, embodying and personalizing this multimedia network for the Strand community. By successfully leveraging such strategies, the Strand asserted the importance of illustrated print to the communication systems and media cultures of the future.

NOTES

1. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. "communication (n.)," http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/37309.

2. Clarke, "Communication," 132. The physical dimensions of communications imply their inherent relationship with media and mediation, although these concepts will remain primarily in the background throughout this article.

3. Peters, Speaking into the Air, 108.

4. Clarke, "Communication," 132.

5. Menke, "The Victorian Novel and Communication Networks," 278.

6. Menke, Telegraphic Realism, 9, 13.

7. Ibid., 23.

8. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 143.

9. Price, "Victorian Reading," 46.

10. Menke, Telegraphic Realism, 3.

11. Pound, Mirror of the Century, 54. Scholarship focusing on the Strand's high-profile fiction includes Cranfield's Twentieth-Century Victorian and Ashley's section on this magazine in The Age of the Storytellers.

12. Cranfield, Twentieth-Century Victorian, 2.

13. Pound, Mirror of the Century, 30.

14. Mussell, Science, Time and Space, 61.

15. "A Description of the Offices of the Strand Magazine," 594–606; "Portraits of Celebrities: Mr. George Newnes," 593.

16. Jackson, George Newnes, 102.

17. Ibid.

18. Mussell, Science, Time and Space, 82.

19. See Hedley, "Data Visualization and Population Politics."

20. On changing views of empirical evidence in the nineteenth century, see Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact, xii–xv.

21. Schooling, "The Modern Mercury," 335.

22. Price, "Victorian Reading," 46–48.

23. Menke, Telegraphic Realism, 41.

24. Schooling, "The Modern Mercury," 334.

25. Ibid.

26. Ibid.

27. Ibid., 339.

28. Ibid., 336. The Turkish sultan ceded Aden, a port city, to the British in 1839; they maintained a presence there until the mid-twentieth century (Cannon and Crowcroft, "Aden"). Similarly, the island of Zanzibar, notable in the nineteenth century as a depot for slave export, was a British protectorate until the 1960s (Cannon and Crowcroft, "Zanzibar").

29. Menke, Telegraphic Realism, 27.

30. Schooling, "The Modern Mercury," 337.

31. For a more detailed explanation, see Hedley, "Reflexive Pictorial Journalism," in which I argue that articles documenting aspects of illustrated journalism's production fostered readers' print media literacy throughout the nineteenth century.

32. For more on line-block engraving, see St. John and Zimmerman, "Print Processes."

33. Schooling, "The Modern Mercury," 336.

34. Halliday, "Electricity, Telephony, and Communications," 598.

35. Schooling, "The Modern Mercury," 335.

36. Jackson, George Newnes, 272.

37. Jackson, "The Tit-Bits Phenomenon," 211–14.

38. Jackson, George Newnes, 272.

39. Keep, "Technology and Information," 138.

40. Mussell, Science, Time and Space, 78.

41. Whitmarsh, "Modern Pearl Fishing," 351.

42. "Pigeon Whistles," 360.

43. Ibid.

44. Mussell, Science, Time and Space, 62.

45. Chan, "The Yellow Book Circle," 120.

46. Rubery, The Novelty of Newspapers, 16; Halliday, "Electricity," 604.

47. Buckley, "After Many Days," 248, 249.

48. Ibid., 250.

49. Kitton, "Some Old Newspapers," 291.

50. Ibid.

51. Benjamin, "The Work of Art," 21; Kitton, "Some Old Newspapers," 291.

52. Kitton, "Some Old Newspapers," 291.

53. Ibid.

54. Ibid., 291–92.

55. Ibid., 296.

56. Ibid., 298.

57. Ibid., 299.

58. Ibid., 300.

59. Ibid., 294.

60. Mussell, The Nineteenth-Century Press, 83.

61. Peters, Speaking into the Air, 64.

62. Menke, Telegraphic Realism, 16–20.

63. Mussell, Science, Time and Space, 78.

64. Price, "Victorian Reading," 40–41.

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