Pick-A-Periodical with Dr. Bethan Stevens
Join Us Friday, March 21
The RSVP Digital Events committee is delighted to welcome Dr. Bethan Stevens (University of Sussex) for our March “pick a periodical” event. Dr. Stevens will speak on “The Pictorial World in 1883: From Illustrated Magazine to Exhibition Space.”
This talk expands upon The Pictorial World’s promise to provide “the best Fine-art Works ever engraved in any newspaper” (1874, 2). Interactively engaging with readers through an interest in amateur photography and drawing, it devoted space to reviewing international art exhibitions, and published large chromolithographic prints in collaboration with Le Figaro. After giving a brief history of the periodical and its ownership, this talk focuses on the volume for 1883, when The Pictorial World was at its most ambitious, during its brief ownership by the Dalziel Brothers. Dr. Stevens considers astonishing large-scale wood engravings after Frederick Barnard, Lucien Davis and Walter and Sidney Paget. Also – importantly –the magazine set up its new London offices as a kind of exhibition space, exploiting the complex geography of The Pictorial World within London at 149 the Strand (a neighbour to the administrative centre of empire, at Somerset House).
About The Pictorial World
The Pictorial World ran from 1874 to 1892, pitching itself as a “pleasant family newspaper” for “the great middle-class of England and of all English-speaking countries” (1874, 2). As a cheap visual arts newspaper, its ambition was to compete with The Graphic and The Illustrated London News (Houfe 1981, 73). Larger than both competitors, it was more suitable for exhibition and display. Its spectacular wood engravings capitalized on patriotic and imperialist dramas. For example, Mason Jackson in The Pictorial Press observes how the magazine expanded during the Anglo-Egyptian war of 1882 (Jackson 1885, 314). It published fiction by Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and in 1883 serialized George Sims’s landmark work of social journalism, How the Poor Live (Jakobs 2021, 121-41).
The Pictorial World is not digitized but 366 pages of wood-engraved proofs of the magazine (1879-1883) can be browsed via the British Museum’s Dalziel Archive. More information about the wider Dalziel Archive catalogue can be found here.
About Our Speaker
Dr. Bethan Stevens is Reader in English and Art Writing at the University of Sussex. She works on word-image culture in the long nineteenth century, creative criticism, and print history. Her current book-in-progress is Uncaring, which explores the history of care work through Victorian novels, print history and life writing. Recent essays include ‘Cutting So “Sweetly”’: Idyllist Wood Engravings and the Lost Boxwood Forests’, a study of the environmental impact of wood-engraved illustrations. Stevens’s recent monograph, The Wood Engravers’ Self-Portrait (2022), is a study of the Dalziel Brothers.
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