The illustration revolution

Abstract

The nineteenth century brought illustrated books and periodicals to large sectors of the British population for the first time. The first serious efforts to bring large numbers of illustrated publications within the pockets of ordinary readers were made in Britain in the 1830s with the rise of pictorial journals, particularly the Penny Magazine. The measure of the progress of illustration in nineteenth-century Britain is provided by pictures in popular periodicals. The astonishing growth of illustration in nineteenth-century periodicals was echoed in some categories of book publishing, though less dramatically. In the late eighteenth century two developments paved the way for the rapid increase in illustrative material. They are Thomas Bewick's refinements to the process of producing relief prints from wood, and Alois Senefelder's invention of the planographic process of lithography in Germany in 1798/9. Several approaches were adopted for the production of photographic illustrations in books before the development of photomechanical relief blocks in the closing decades of the century.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 17 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.