The Pragmatics of Page Design in Nineteenth-Century General-Interest Weekly Illustrated News Magazines in London and Paris

This article discusses the way that pictures and texts were configured in general-interest weekly news magazines from the 1840s until 1900. It explores how the illustrational (thus subordinate and instrumental) status of the pictures was undermined by other, insubordinate, visual imperatives. It considers layouts that combined texts and images, and other indices of the symbiosis of the two. In the early years of the genre, pictures had primarily an 'illustrational' status. By the 1860s pictures were coming to be granted very considerable independent status and authority. In both countries photomechanical technologies changed both the pragmatics of page design and the text-image hierarchy, bringing the displayed image back under the authority of the text. (Author abstract)