PICTORIAL WEEKLIES

In the United States, the "weekly" was a paper that even in its earliest forms mixed dry news stories with more sensational ones. In American Journalism, Frank Luther Mott describes how the Boston News-Letter, established in 1704 by John Campbell, combined news from London with reports of sermons, deaths, abductions, and pirates (pp. 11–12). During the nineteenth century, especially between the 1830s and 1870s, the weekly news format was used in smaller towns and by religious and political organizations. The weekly format was also used throughout the nineteenth century for illustrated story papers, or pictorial weeklies. Some later nineteenth-century weeklies, such as the New National Era, an African American weekly edited by Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) that ran from 1869 to 1875 and was published in Washington, D.C., focused on the political aims of a specific group. The New National Era drew from national, religious, and educational news to promote the paper's aim of full civil rights and recognition for African American citizens. Others, like the penny dailies that became popular in the 1830s, mixed news with fiction, gossip, and advertising. They provided cheap reading material for readers across a wide spectrum of age groups and classes.

These illustrated papers specialized in fiction that focused on the grisly and sensational, and serialized stories of suspense and adventure encouraged readers to buy and share the papers each week. New York was the publishing center for many such papers, although Boston and Philadelphia also had their share. The weeklies reported and illustrated sensational news stories, focusing especially on murder and scandal. In the twenty-first century tabloids such as the National Enquirer serve similar functions, providing entertainment and occasionally breaking a news story that must then be followed by a more traditional news source. Along with the sensational quality of the material included in the fiction and news of these stories, the illustrations added a significant level of interest. Large engravings attracted readers; they depicted train robberies, racist scenes of Native Americans, and "bodice ripping" images. The sensational images provided the necessary newsstand titillation to coax readers to purchase the entire paper.

Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America (1840) that "newspapers make associations, and associations make newspapers" (2:120). Pictorial weeklies associated fiction with news, used news of the Mexican-American war and the California gold rush to craft sensational stories, and drew together readers from working, middle, and upper classes. The papers created reading communities interested in the next episode of a suspenseful serial and used advertising to construct consumers who associated the products with the reading material. Advertisers learned from the powerful illustrations and incorporated illustrations and elements of the daily-life features that were part of the weeklies' stories into the advertising copy. The weeklies' format placed stories and illustrations between advertisements and news, so that readers could immerse themselves in sensational episodes but were also forced to notice the news, human-interest features, and ads surrounding the story on the page. The content of the weeklies informed regionalist writing, dime novels, and the development of realism. An examination of the history and culture surrounding the weeklies provides insights into this popular form's influence on many other aspects of nineteenth-century culture, particularly women's roles in the publishing communities.

WOMEN WRITERS

Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888), best known for her domestic fiction, such as Little Women (1868–1869), An Old Fashioned Girl (1870), and Eight Cousins (1875), was a frequent contributor to pictorial weeklies during the 1860s and 1870s. Her gothic thriller "Behind a Mask" tells the story of Jean Muir, a woman bent on profiting from revenge and deceit. Appearing as a serialized piece for the Flag of Our Union in October and November of 1866, it was published under Alcott's pen name A. M. Barnard. Alcott commented on her enjoyment of the sensation story:

I think my natural ambition is for the lurid style. I indulge in gorgeous fancies and wish that I dared inscribe them upon my pages and set them before the public. . . . How should I dare to interfere with the proper grayness of old Concord? The dear old town has never known a startling hue since the redcoats were there. (Stern, p. xxvi).

In Little Women, Jo March contributes to fictitious pictorial weeklies with names like the Blarneystone Banner and the Weekly Volcano, which are modeled on the kinds of pictorial weeklies Alcott knew from experience. Elliott, Thomes, and Talbot was a publishing firm associated with the Flag of Our Union, which possibly served as the model for the Blarneystone Banner. William Henry Thomes partnered with James R. Elliott, who had also published the True Flag. Newton Talbot, their third partner, helped Thomes and Elliott set up a firm in Boston that produced sensational illustrated materials. The Flag of Our Union also published Alcott's "The Abbot's Ghost," a tale about devastating gambling, tragic injury, and mercenary marriages that reveals her wide reading in the English gothic tradition and the ways gothic devices lent themselves to the suspense and horror that sold the weeklies. Some of Alcott's sensational stories, like "V. V.; or, Plots and Counterplots," which appeared in the Flag of Our Union in 1865, contain significant political and cultural commentary embedded in the suspenseful serial form. "V. V." explores issues of identity—in this case, the branding of initials—to comment on the lasting horrors and inescapable legacies of slavery. Alcott's active participation in the culture of the weeklies offers just one example of a mainstream author who participated privately and profitably in a venue not publicly regarded as appropriate for women.

This lead story from an 1854 edition of the Flag of Our Union, titled "The Royal Yacht; or, Logan the Warlock" (subtitled "A Revolutionary Romance of Sea and Land Adventure") combines history with fiction; it has dialog and graphic descriptions of violence, all characteristics of fiction published in pictorial weeklies.

Long since, the summer of 1778 had opened in sunshine and warmth on the American colonies. The British had been moving from post to post, and the Americans had been hanging upon their course and worrying them exceedingly. Yet the cause of freedom in America looked dark and dubious. The onset of the patriots upon their enemy in Rhode Island utterly failed, and their French ally, the Count d'Estaing, was driven with his fleet to seek shelter in the harbor of Boston. On the western frontier a frightful war was carried on by the Indians and British against the peaceful inhabitants, and in this the tories had the leading hand. The terrible massacre of Wyoming shed a dark cloud over the people of the border, and it was the more dreadful from the fact that the bloody butchery was the result of the treachery of tories. One other thing tended to darken the dawn of independence, and that was the frequent dissatisfaction that was manifested among the American soldiers. They had suffered all kinds of privations and hardships, and some of them began to be disheartened. But the cause of freedom was yet might, and the hearth-stones of Columbia had stout defenders. . . .

"She's a beauty, and no mistake," said Andrew Elliott, addressing young Edgerly. Elliott was the oldest man of the party, having seen some forty years of life, and he was a fair specimen of a Yankee sailor—rather short of stature, but with breadth and thickness of shoulder enough to make it up.

"Ay, Elliott," returned the young man, while his eye sparkled. "She is a beauty. It cost money to put such a craft as that upon the water."

"I guess it did," said another of the party, a man whose name was Caleb Wales, who possessed a frame of extraordinary muscular power, and a face of extraordinary shrewdness. He was a native of Connecticut, and an original genius in his way. "I guess it did," he repeated, with more emphasis. "By the great end of all creation, Ned Edgerly, she's in a very dangerous place."

This last sentence was spoken very slowly, and with a strange tone and manner.

Cobb, The Royal Yacht, pp. 9, 10.

Many women besides Alcott wrote for the pictorial weeklies. E. D. E. N. Southworth (1819–1899) wrote for the New York Ledger, edited by Robert Bonner (1824–1899). The Ledger succeeded in part through innovative use of advertising. Bonner sometimes would take out entire columns in daily papers like the New York Herald and encourage readers to buy the Ledger in order to read the sensation story. Southworth's novel The Hidden Hand was serialized in the Ledger in 1859. The Hidden Hand features Capitola, a young woman who dresses as a boy, fights duels, and survives dangerous adventures. Bonner's weekly also published the work of Fanny Fern (Sara Payson Willis Parton, 1811–1872). Women who wrote for the weeklies did not focus on domestic angels but wrote about passionate humans who struggled with greed, sought revenge, and pursued sexual gratification. The weeklies and women's magazines—such as the Ladies' Companion and Peterson's Magazine—that supported many women writers combined local and national news, patterns for fashions, and hair-raising adventures. The weeklies read by women, like Peterson's, also provided material for dime novels. Ann Sophia Stephens's Malaeska: The Indian Wife of the White Hunter, which was initially serialized in the Ladies' Companion in 1839, was published by Erastus Beadle as the first the dime novel in 1860.

Pictorial weeklies as well as other kinds of periodicals developed forms of popular literature that in turn supported the growing number of women who wrote professionally. Women contributed regularly to the weeklies, and some women worked on the editing end. Mrs. Frank Leslie (formerly Miriam Florence Squier, 1846–1914), who was an actress and worked as an editor for Frank Leslie before and after she married him, took over his empire after his death. Her life offers one example of how the periodical weeklies, as well as other periodical forms, provided women with opportunities to participate in literary and journalistic publishing cultures.

"The Dead Alive," which appeared in Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper in January 1866, is representative of the sensational, dramatic stories that appeared alongside news and illustrations in this pictorial weekly. It suggests the mutability and tenuousness of identity and the drama of sudden changes in fortune. It is unsigned, but the afterword reads, "Reader, this story is true. But its names and dates and places are all false."

When Maria Graham married Walter Forsythe, everybody said there was little love, save love of lucre, in the match.

Miss Graham was poor and ambitious. Her father had brought her up expensively, and died a bankrupt. She had need of luxury, but was forced to live as a dependent in the house of a distant relative. Walter Forsythe was rich and solitary. Not one of his blood lived to claim tithe of his heart or purse. He had recieved a military education; but inheriting a large fortune from the last of his house, and longing to travel through other lands, he left the army—the less reluctantly that the days were days of peace and idlesse for them of the sword—and went abroad for seven years.

When he returned he met Miss Graham, and, after a brief courtship, wedded her. Then once more he sailed for foreign shores, this time with his proud and beautiful bride.

What manner of life those two led in the brilliant route of the Old World its skills not knowing. But Forsythe, in the second year of his absence, expresses his intention of becoming a subject of France, and, withdrawing his fortune from his native land, invested it in that of his adoption. Another year, and Walter Forsythe was Monsieur Forsythe de Claireau, Claireau being the title of an estate he had purchased in the South of France. Three more years and the "dogs of war" were again let loose on olden battle-fields, and Christian and Turk fought side by side, for the first time, on Crimean plains. Forsythe remembered his vocation, and became le Capitain de Claireau, aide-de-camp, voluntaire.

Three "stricken fields" he saw, and on each he left a trail of blood.

Then came Inkerman, and Madame de Claireau was a widow. A widow, without even the sorrowful comfort of seeing her hero husband in death, or weeping over his laurelled grave. Captain Forsythe was torn to pieces by a shell—so said the bulletin—with many others, and their indistinguishable remains committed to the common fosse, with hasty ceremonial. So, Maria Forsythe was a widow, still young, beautiful, childless and sole mistress of a noble fortune.

Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, 20 January 1866, p. 278.

POLITICAL AND SOCIAL INFLUENCE

In addition to offering publishing venues to women writers and editors, the mixture of articles, fiction, engravings, and advertisements in the pictorial weekly also reflected the complex mixture of fiction and fact that shaped cultural attitudes toward nineteenth-century political issues—abolition, immigration, expansion, citizenship laws, and suffrage. George Lippard (1822–1854), who worked out of Philadelphia, produced the Quaker City Weekly, a pictorial paper that placed short stories and serialized novels alongside national and international news. Shelley Streeby has written about how this form "allowed Lippard, for one, to forge a closer connection between his writing and his numerous political and social projects, between his novels and the communities he helped to construct" (p. 187). The weekly form, especially weeklies that combine news, fiction, and advertising, provide fruitful fields of inquiry for understanding how this regularly produced form challenged and reinforced boundaries of class, race, and gender.

ILLUSTRATIONS

Between the 1830s and 1870s a number of technological advances dramatically changed the illustrations included in the weeklies. In the papers of the 1830s steel plates and woodcuts were used to produce illustrations that began as rough sketches approved by the editor. When final sketches were ready, skilled engravers worked painstakingly to reproduce the lines and dramatic energy of the artwork. Developments in photography made it possible to place photographs onto woodblocks directly and to reproduce lines and textures more exactly. While this made it possible to include more detailed illustrations in the weeklies, some critics, including the wood engraver William Linton (1812–1897), argued that the more precise engravings were static and lifeless and that the art of engraving had become merely a technical skill. Some smaller publishers clung to the older techniques, while others embraced the new developments since they allowed more illustrations to be produced with ease and speed. Gerry Beegan explains that Linton encouraged apprentices to remain familiar with the older forms of engraving and spent time in America teaching women wood-engraving techniques (p. 273). More scholarship about women's roles as engravers is certainly warranted, and further study about the connections between women's art and writing should produce interesting lines of inquiry about the pictorial weekly as a form shaped by women.

One of the most powerful influences on the pictorial weekly form in the United States was Frank Leslie (1821–1880). He worked on weeklies such as Gleason's Pictorial and Drawing-Room Companion and was the producer of many pictorial papers, including Frank Leslie's Illustrated Weekly, Frank Leslie's Lady's Magazine, and Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper. He solicited contributions from writers like Alcott who devoted most of their time to more "respectable" venues, and he helped them to make money by publishing anonymously or pseudonymously in the weeklies. A gifted engraver who used his understanding of engraving technologies to improve the speed of his production process, Leslie's illustrations gave the pictorials he worked on immediate appeal. He carefully selected staff members who understood the significance of the illustrations and could produce images that would provide the necessary dramatic interest to sell papers. In some cases, double-page illustrations dominated the text of the paper, drawing attention to murders, scalpings, and seductions that made up only a small part of the episodes.

PICTORIAL PAPERS FOR CHILDREN

Leslie's empire also produced a number of pictorial papers for children, including Frank Leslie's Boy's and Girl's Weekly beginning in 1867. Although not all pictorial weeklies were designed for children, many children read these pictorials avidly, enjoying the stories of sudden fame and fortune, suspense, murder, and intrigue that filled their pages. Edward J. Jennerich writes that in Frank Leslie's Boy's and Girl's Weekly the sensationalism was tempered: "maidens were pursued, but they were not caught and defiled by dastardly villains; chivalry and manly behavior were not dead in its pages" (p. 164). This softening of the violence suggests how Leslie's understanding of the readership and the market helped him to build a successful empire.

The readers of these papers were literate members of the working class, but others read them as well, including members of the middle and upper classes and writers fascinated by the gothic, sensational aspects of these papers. Articles in children's magazines criticized the pictorial weeklies for their addictive qualities, for their tendency to develop a taste for the sensational. On the other hand, magazines such as the very didactic weekly Youth's Companion drew from what was popular in the pictorial weeklies and included dramatic engravings of fights with animals and travel adventures. Mary Mapes Dodge's (1830–1905) monthly magazine for children, St. Nicholas, included many illustrations but carefully avoided anything that hinted of the sensational weekly. Michael S. Joseph notes that in her editorial criticisms of illustrations for Mark Twain's serialization of Tom Sawyer Abroad (which began in November 1893), Dodge insisted that the bare feet be covered, since it was possible that they were too "vulgar." Both children and adults enjoyed the illustrations in weeklies designed for children, and children also enjoyed the illustrations in comic weeklies such as Puck and Judge that began in the 1870s and 1880s and ran into the twentieth century. Illustrations in the comic weeklies took up double-page spreads and made use of color, drawing in readers with both size and subject matter.

Clearly the illustrated format of these papers had an important effect on magazines published for both adults and children. There are direct relationships between the tabloid press of the twenty-first century and the exciting stories of danger illustrated in the nineteenth-century weeklies. To argue, as some do, that present-day "news" has suddenly descended into the realm of the sensational is to neglect important aspects of journalistic history. Sensational tales and images have played significant roles in defining citizenship and in creating reading communities that relied on the regularity of the weeklies to reinforce political and cultural belief systems. The pictorial weeklies reveal that U.S. readers have long been fascinated by the murderous, the erotic, and the sensational. The fictional and pictorial elements are interwoven with political and cultural issues, showing how periodical forms intervened in constructions of attitudes about Americanness, class, gender, and race in the nineteenth century.

See alsoArt; Book and Periodical Illustration; Dime Novels; Female Authorship; Gothic Fiction; Literary Marketplace; Periodicals; Sensational Fiction

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Cobb, Sylvanus. The Royal Yacht; or, Logan the Warlock. New York: S. French, 185?.

Linton, William. Wood-Engraving: A Manual of Instruction. G. Bell and Sons, 1884.

Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. Vol. 2. 1840. New York: Vintage, 1945.

Secondary Works

Beegan, Gerry. "The Mechanization of the Image: Facsimile, Photography, and Fragmentation in Nineteenth-Century Wood Engraving." Journal of Design History 8, no. 4 (1995): 257–274.

Jennerich, Edward J. "Frank Leslie's Boy's and Girl's Weekly." In Children's Periodicals of the United States, edited by R. Gordon Kelly, pp. 161–165. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1984.

Joseph, Michael S. "Illustrating St. Nicholas and the Influence of Mary Mapes Dodge." In St. Nicholas and Mary Mapes Dodge: The Legacy of a Children's Magazine Editor, 1873–1905, edited by Susan R. Gannon, Suzanne Rahn, and Ruth Anne Thompson. Jefferson, N.C.: MacFarland, 2004.

Mott, Frank Luther. American Journalism. Rev. ed. New York: Macmillan, 1950.

Mott, Frank Luther. A History of American Magazines. Vol. 2, 1850–1865. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957.

Stern, Madeleine. "Introduction." In Behind a Mask: TheUnknown Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott, edited by Madeleine Stern. New York: William Morrow, 1975.

Streeby, Shelley. "Opening Up the Story Paper: George Lippard and the Construction of Class." boundary 2 24 (spring 1997): 177–203.

Lorinda B. Cohoon