Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book addresses the interplay between reader and text. It considers in more detail the Illustrated London News (ILN) as part of the ideological apparatus of the popular press. The book highlights an extreme divergence in content while revealing that discourses about what it means to ‘be, in essence, English’ permeate all strata of representation. It focuses on the railway and serialized fiction. The book shows that readers with an opportunity to investigate the tension between a revolutionary technology and the firmly established conventions of periodical literature. It examines the fetishized Victorian hero, embodied in the dead Duke of Wellington, in order to amplify Richard Altick’s thesis that ‘the lugubrious trappings of woe with which the Victorians surrounded the death of a dear one’ were among the most ‘peculiar wonders’ of nineteenth-century popular culture.