by Lucy Riall
Modern mass-media print developed as the result of a transformation in both supply and demand. Since the eighteenth century, the industrialisation of the printing process had, by the 1840s, made ‘the printed word both cheaper and more readily accessibile than it had ever been before’.2 Supply was also helped by a general increase in mass communications, and specifically by a wideranging improvement in transport and distribution networks. Equally, the expansion of the market was the result of a rapid extension of the reading public. During the 1840s and 1850s, first in Britain and the USA, then in France, Germany, and – to a much lesser but still significant extent – Italy, the market for the printed word grew very quickly. This growth was due to a series of factors such as popular education, which led to rising literary rates (for instance, in Britain around 60 per cent of people could read in 1850, and more than 90 per cent in 1900) among populations which were also increasing; the concentration of the same populations in urban areas; the gradual prominence of an educated middle class and, in many places, the reduction of censorship and/or of government duties, which helped to reduce prices further on printed works and boost circulation. The growth in a taste for, and pleasure in, reading is also suggested by the increasing number of books available; for example, in France there were 6,739 titles published in 1830; this had risen to 11,905 in 1860 and 14,195 in 1875.3 The number of libraries grew in this period, especially in the USA and Britain (where some free libraries were established after 1850), and so did bookshops, which spread throughout provincial towns and became a feature of railway stations.4 Periodicals could be sold on the street or by colportage, that is, by travelling salesmen going from house to house selling subscriptions and making deliveries; by the same means periodicals, almanacs, pamphlets and flyers (often satirical or sensational canards) were also sold in rural areas at fairs or in public spaces in country villages.5
For the first time in the 1850s, all kinds of newspapers and magazines achieved a true mass circulation. For example, in Britain, the radical Reynolds's Weekly Newspaper achieved a circulation of around 50,000 in 1855 (and reached 150,000 by 1865); the satirical magazine Punch had a circulation of 40,000 in the same period. Among daily newspapers, The Times' circulation figures were consistently between 50,000 and 60,000, but reached between 90,000 and 108,000 on several occasions, while the mainstream weekly The Illustrated London News had a circulation of 123,000 in the mid 1850s (up from 67,000 in 1850).6 In Germany, Ernst Keil's illustrated family magazine, Die Gartenlaube, reached a circulation of 60,000 within four years of its foundation in 1853, and 180,000 by 1863; while in France, the anti-clerical, leftwing paper, Le Siècle, achieved a print run of over 52,000, despite the difficult conditions and censorship prevailing under the Second Empire.7 All these papers went on to publicise the ‘Italian Question’ during the 1850s and to give a high profile to Garibaldi in the years of unification. Circulation figures in Italy itself were, as we shall see below, much lower but it is worth remembering that throughout Europe the increase in the reading public was far greater than these figures suggest. Magazines and newspapers appeared, along with books, in lending libraries and reading rooms, and they were also to be found in cafés and other public meeting places and, especially in rural areas, they were often read aloud. So it is very likely that several people may have read or otherwise been exposed to a single copy of a magazine or paper.
An equally significant trend was the diversification in print production. Of particular importance to understanding the broad appeal of Italian nationalism for public opinion was the emergence of illustrated news, popular periodicals, family and/or women's magazines alongside the expansion of more traditional printed materials like books, newspapers, pamphlets and learned periodicals. These new magazines offered news items alongside articles of historical interest, essays on self-improvement, general interest stories, serialised novels and advice on fashion, taste, cooking and gardening. A real innovation came from the rapid engraving techniques pioneered by The Illustrated London News, established in 1842, which meant that henceforth not only were historical anecdotes or general features accompanied by images but the latest news items could quickly be illustrated as well. It was for this reason, as we saw in Chapter 3, that The Illustrated London News sent an artist to Rome in 1849, and that his pictures of the fighting and of the garibaldini were rapidly available and used to supplement contemporary accounts of the siege. Since this format was accessible to a very wide public, it quickly became popular and spread rapidly. To give just a few examples: after The Illustrated London News in 1842, L'Illustration of Paris and Die illustrierte Zeitung of Leipzig commenced publication in 1843, followed by A Illustraçao in Lisbon in 1845, Il Mondo Illustrato in Turin and The Lady's Newspaper and Pictorial Times in London in 1847, Die Gartenlaube in Leipzig in 1853, and Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper and Harper's Weekly in New York in 1855 and 1857 respectively.8
At the same time, and for similar technological and cultural reasons, there was a general expansion in the market for graphic culture. Books were suddenly full of illustrations, and these could serve a serious scientific or technical purpose; they could also, along with magazines, inform and entertain those with enough time and money to read but not quite enough education to do so easily. Illustrations also led to the diversification of books, from large-format albums to de-luxe editions and travel guides; small illustrated books – ‘keepsakes’ in Britain; Taschenbücher in Germany; physiologies in France – were very collectable and made popular gifts, especially for women. The vogue for satirical papers, pamphlets and flyers, such a feature of mid-century political life in Europe, was due in no small measure to the ease with which drawings and caricatures could be reproduced. By the 1840s, short story boards or cartoon strips were also being prepared and printed for mass consumption.9
Another manifestation of this same technological trend, of great relevance in understanding the fame of Garibaldi, was the mass production of cheap engravings of saints, historical figures and contemporary personalities. Portraits of famous people became a common feature of illustrated magazines and books, and printed portraits were also popular and indeed became fashionable as individual items: produced and sold in large numbers, and then altered and re-copied several times over to an apparently insatiable public. The fashion for portraits of the famous was intensified by, first, the invention of the daguerreotype (used as the basis of numerous engravings) and then the commercialisation of photographic portraits as cartes de visite in the late 1850s. The latter became ‘collectable’, and were used especially by women in the exchange of gifts and as the basis of sometimes elaborate, hand-painted albums.10 Some historians talk of the creation by photography of a ‘cult of celebrity’ from mid-century onwards. Actors, artists and political leaders came to use photographic portraits of themselves as a means of self-promotion through the mass circulation of their image: photography was able to create a sense of immediacy, realism and familiarity.11 Paradoxically, this kind of fame reflected not just the ubiquity of the printed image but also the emergence of the actor, artist and political leader as exceptional or charismatic figures in their own right.
The ‘revolution’ in print culture meant that mass communication was now possible in practical terms, via a range of print media which offered different kinds of information in a variety of forms to cater to the diverse tastes of the reading (and, in the case of visual prints, non-reading) public. The writing of fiction was especially affected by this change. Although the price of books seems to have lagged behind the transformation of production, during the 1850s cheap editions and reprints of popular novels began to be produced. Moreover, in a format which proved commercially successful everywhere from the 1830s, much popular fiction was also issued in ‘parts’ – as ‘story papers’ in the USA, feuilletons in France or romanzi d'appendice in Italy – appearing in regular weekly or monthly instalments to be purchased over the course of a year or two. This fiction was sometimes abridged and/or serialised in the new ma
gazines or popular newspapers, and a great deal of the more successful fiction was translated into foreign languages. Not only did part-issues and serialisation greatly increase the availability and circulation of fiction, they also helped to change the genre itself. Since the market was constructed around maintaining a regular supply and demand for fiction, such fiction was based on conventional narrative formulas which guaranteed sales: thus adventure stories, historical novels, adventure romances, crime and sensation novels became extremely successful serial forms in both Britain and France and, from the 1850s, in Italy as well. Stories which proved commercially successful were then republished in cheap editions, perhaps most famously in the ‘dime novels’ which became so popular in the United States from the 1840s onwards.12
Hugely popular too were books on any number of historical subjects. The memoirs and letters, biographies and autobiographies of famous men like Nelson, Napoleon and, as we shall see, Garibaldi, proved strong sellers. Perhaps most noteworthy was Napoleon, who took on a new – more liberal and more romantic – image after his death, thanks to a series of published memoirs. These contributed significantly not only to the creation of a Napoleon myth but also to its constant refashioning during the course of the nineteeenth century.13 More generally, biographical works of various kinds took their place alongside, and overlapped with, an equally popular and widespread religious and morality literature, as well as self-help manuals and books on cooking, medicine, gardening and so on.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, in other words, publishing in Britain had become what has been described as ‘a major, multi-million pound industry that both benefited from and contributed to the more general economic and technological developments of the Victorian period’.14 In France, this was ‘the age of the publisher’, when book and newspaper publishers built empires and came to be among the most powerful and wealthy figures of middleclass society.15 Best-selling authors of serialised novels – perhaps most obviously Scott, Dickens, Thackeray and Trollope in Britain; Hugo, Dumas, Sue and Sand in France; D'Azeglio in Italy – could also make money and they certainly became well known, often in more than one language and country. For example, Sue's Les mystères de Paris and Le juif errant each sold between 50,000 and 70,000 copies between 1841 and 1850, and sales of both were helped by translations into English, German and Italian. In the four years between 1846 and 1850, global sales of Dumas’ Le comte de Monte Cristo, Les trois mousquetaires and La reine Margot together may have reached 90,000 copies.16
Although the audience for much of this literature was predominantly middle class, a crucial sign of the industry's modernity was its increasing differentiation according to the reading market, and the emergence of a number of important new groups with their own dedicated publications and/or publishers. Especially worthy of note in this period are the growing number of women readers and the diversification of styles and genres within the production of specifically women's fiction and women's magazines. Equally significant in the long term was the gradual development of fiction and non-fiction books, and school textbooks, for children and young people.17 Already in 1840s Britain, the working-class reading public had its own fiction ‘comprising “penny bloods”, plagiarisms of mainstream fiction … and translations of racy continental fiction’, along with a number of sensational Sunday newspapers, so much so that by the 1850s there was both intense competition within the popular press, and official concern being expressed about its corrupting influence on the reader.18 As noted, printed matter could and did reach the countryside via travelling salesmen who relied on the sale of ephemeral material and visual images. The latter in particular can be seen as, in Eugen Weber's words, ‘the great bibles of the little people’, with a huge impact in isolated rural areas where people had little other visual material to distract and entertain them.19
All these trends in publishing and reading should not be overestimated, especially in the case of Italy. The equally revolutionary effect of the printed word and image on eighteenth-century popular culture and politics is widely recognised. It is also worth noting that many of the features described here took full shape only after the 1870s, and that the spread of the reading public was by no means uniform across any national territory. There was also a huge practical gap between the ability to sign one's name (the accepted test for literacy) and reading for pleasure. Nevertheless, the emergence of a more popular literature is of real significance in understanding the political changes of the mid-nineteenth century; specifically, it can help to explain various reactions to the events which occurred in Italy in 1859–60 and the public resonance of Garibaldi's actions. First, it was in this kind of literature that the symbols and tropes of romanticism became part of popular culture. Popular romanticism produced ‘patriotic songs, stormy melodramas, gothic romances, and national histories’, and it was through this literary and dramatic medium that Garibaldi reached a broader public.20 Second, as Benedict Anderson points out and as Mazzini had already understood in the early 1830s, the rapid expansion of ‘print-capitalism’ played a central role in the fashioning of national identity, in that reading books, periodicals and printed images could create a sense of community (however imaginary) by allowing people who had no knowledge of each other, and who lived in different places, to share the same experiences and have the same responses to stories and events in which they had no part.21 As Mazzini also realised after arrival in England in 1837, the technologies of mass communication could be used to encourage and spread such feelings of empathy far beyond any ‘natural’ boundaries of national community. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the effects of this nationalising and internationalising print-capitalism had become more widespread. It also became evident that the polite and/or liberal public sphere could no longer be sure of its monopoly of public debate now that it faced increasing competition from, and overlap with, radical and popular culture.22
The press – especially newspapers and pamphlets – had always played a direct role in helping to create public opinion and in mobilising it behind political issues but, with the change in scale and scope of press activity in the mid-nineteenth century, relations between press and politics became closer and more immediate. In many mid-nineteenth-century papers and magazines, articles with a political content were interspersed with popular stories or advice on household matters, and in this way politics became more ubiquitous and part of daily life. At the same time, the language of popular fiction overlapped with the language of politics. Perhaps most notably, the narrative structures of fiction lent themselves to – and were used explicitly in – the construction and sale of a political message. Marilyn Butler has observed that the French Revolution was ‘told like a story’: it was represented by its protagonists and adversaries, and received and understood by the public, as a series of narrative plots through the medium of reading. In this way, narrative made certain political futures ‘thinkable’, and excluded or devalued others.23 As a result, the language and representation of politics changed definitively.
The effect on politics was intensified by a parallel expansion in popular entertainment. Especially in the major centres like London and Paris, the number of new theatres and plays grew rapidly (an estimated 260 new plays were put on every year in Paris during this period), and new popular genres developed, such as melodrama, vaudeville and historical drama, in which songs and dance were a prominent feature.24 Popular theatre altered the nature of the ‘public’ and the performance of politics by making them both more spectacular and more accessible. It created a new awareness of the national past by reproducing it as a spectacle for popular consumption and entertainment: theatre, in other words, acted as a site for the staging of national (as opposed to classical) history and political ideology. In so doing, however, it could also become a means of challenging political orthodoxies and celebrating alternative values.25 The subversive potential of popular theatre as political expression was demonstrated clearly by the explosion of protest around the play Roma in 1849,
as we saw in Chapter 3 (see pages 80–1), and by the growing popularity of ‘Napoleon plays’ in Paris during the 1820s and '30s.26 Equally interesting was the development of new methods of staging and acting, and especially important for our purposes was the emergence of the author and, in particular, the actor (‘celebrities’ like Frédérick Lemaître and Jenny Lind) as artistic personalities with a recognised public role and admired for their emotive and realistic performances. The use of new optical technologies (the wax display, the Panorama, the phantas-magoria), both inside theatres and as separate shows, attracted large audiences and ‘spectacularised’ public entertainement.27 All these new techniques altered the relationship between performance and audience and came, in turn, to affect the structure and presentation of relations in the public sphere more broadly.
In the course of the nineteenth century, the alliance between politics and entertainment was democratised. Political radicals in Britain were at the forefront of commercial publishing, and made the popular press, and periodicals in particular, a portal through which ‘non-respectable’ Victorians could enter the public sphere. Radicals like Ernest Jones turned to publishing, while writers like George Reynolds embraced mass culture and linked serial fiction to radical politics; ‘[i]n the process … [they] showed the tremendous potential of popular fiction for shaping and transmitting a popular political consciousness’.28 New political leaders tried to seize control of this process, actively offering themselves as the physical embodiment of a collective identity, and they constructed and publicised their own life stories as the narrativisation of popular demands.29 They ‘began to be judged as believable by whether or not they aroused the same belief in their personalities which actors did when on stage’.30 Political meetings and demonstrations came to resemble popular theatre, with songs, banners, portraits and the use of elaborate illuminations and other forms of visual entertainment.31