Driving Wild Cattle in Illustrated Magazines from Britain to France, and from France to Germany

Migrating Illustrations as a Means of National Self-Assurance

Abstract

This case study on English, French, and German penny magazines from the 1830s aims to make visible a mostly overlooked way of producing and diffusing knowledge—not least ethnographic knowledge—in early illustrated magazines. By investigating an example of trading stereotyped wood engravings between England, France, and Germany, the present paper retraces the development of a periodical-specific international verbal-visual syntax which was triggered by the emergence of illustration. It retraces how magazine makers learned within a few months to give meaning to illustrated periodicals’ layout, to the arrangement of thematically heterogeneous articles’ letterpress and images on a double-page spread—and how they used the semanticized mise-en-page of their magazines’ openings to express international connections and tensions. Thus, the page design of illustrated periodicals turns out to be a means of an implicit ethnography, an instrument to render the profile of the own nation, ἔθνος, readable and visible by γραφή, by printed writing and wood-engraved drawings.