ABSTRACT
This chapter is largely concerned with the issue of the ‘nationalized’ reading audience. It can be determined that, as they are pictured and narrated in the Illustrated London News’s (ILN), interior spaces presuppose the existence of a readership with certain attributes: English, middle class and quite highly literate. The political, as these introductory comments suggest, are narrated in the image-text format of the ILN, although it is frequently implicit and requires a certain amount of unearthing. In other words, the question of audience-construction is in large part a matter of subtle politicking on the part of the newspaper. Each prisoner occupies the ‘same space’; each is accorded a certain cubic footage equivalent to that of fellow inmates and calculated, according to a strict utilitarianism, to the quarantine most economically an occupant with his water-closet pan, basin, stool, table and hammock.
