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Brown, Joshua. Beyond Lines: Pictorial Reporting, Everyday Life, and Crisis of Gilded Age America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.361 pp. $49.95. Henry Carter changed American journalism. This immigrant wood engraver, born in 1821 in Suffolk, learned his trade at Illustrated London News, where he distinguished himself by displaying, in author Joshua Brown's words, the kind of speed, dexterity, inventiveness, and self-exploitation that indispensable in running an illustrated newspaper. By 1855, these qualities evident in New York, where Carter, now reinvented as Frank Leslie, founded America's first pictorial weekly, a sometimes sensational publication that inspired Fletcher Harper start a more genteel rival weekly and, more importantly, that changed way Americans understood world. As Frederic Hudson observed in 1873, illustrated papers object-teaching multitudes, making battlefields, coronations, corruptions of politicians, balls, race-course, yacht race, military, and naval heroes familiar every one. Brown has written an illuminating-and long overdue-social history of Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, focusing on shifting economic, racial, and class relations that helped shape new practice of pictorial reporting. illustrated weeklies, Brown writes, were an arena for contending representations of Gilded Age life, their wood-engraved pictures constituted by a complicated social negotiation among artists, editors, engravers, and Explaining such matters is tricky business, yet Brown offers detailed explorations of ways that Leslie's illustrators attempted construct representations of an increasingly fractured urban landscape and balance unbalanceable-that is, produce images that told a compelling story, projected Leslie 's own interests, and yet remained responsive desires and prejudices of its readers. The paper's coverage of Pennsylvania coal strikes in 1870s demonstrates Brown's method. Many early images depicted militant Irish strikers as ignorant and lazy. Later, however, paper recognized some of its readers among striking classes and began restrain its anti-union line. Thus, Leslie's was compelled, as Brown puts it, to follow a treacherous course, attempting bridge increasing political, social, and cultural differences among its varied reading public. …
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