ABSTRACT
By the mid-nineteenth century, as advances in technology allowed cheap, high-quality engravings to be both easily created and distributed, the illustrated London press had become a main medium of modernity, one which attracted a mass following. In the past 20 years there has been increasing exploitation of this visual evidence of the Victorian and Edwardian periods to shed new light on conventional topics, and this important ‘visual turn’ has allowed images to take their place alongside literary and oral texts as key sources for cultural historians.1 More recently Lynda Nead and Peter Burke have both shown the central role that visual images and the consumption of visual culture played in cultural life.2
