ABSTRACT
Understanding problem pictures as a social practice requires connecting them to other practices – such as reading fiction, attending theater and going to work – as part of the web of social conventions that represented and reproduced Edwardian culture and society. By provoking discussion of moral and artistic ‘problems’, problem pictures initiated wide-ranging cultural conversations about the contested social and aesthetic values that marked the very self-conscious transition from the Victorian to the modern. This chapter sets out the groundwork for such an analysis with three histories: a chronological narrative of the pictures and their producers, a discussion of the contemporary audiences for the pictures, and an analysis of the role of the press in the phenomenon. Publications aimed at different readerships not only evaluated the problem picture differently as a genre, but they also proffered vastly divergent readings of the narrative and moral problems individual pictures posed.
