Queen Victoria

The nineteenth century saw the arrival of the mass media: high-volume illustrated newspapers and magazines, photography, and the telegraph which connected every part of the Empire. From the beginning, royalty was an essential subject for the media; Victoria’s reign was documented in a detail never known before: her accession and coronation, her very public marriage, her travels at home and abroad, her Jubilees, and ultimately her death and funeral. John Plunkett’s book is the first to study the role of the media in Queen Victoria’s reign. He argues that the development of popular print and visual media in the nineteenth century helped to reinvent the position of the monarchy in national life. He reveals how the royal family was one of the principal beneficiaries of the growth of cheap newspapers and illustrated periodicals and the advent of new media. He brings to light a wealth of previously unexamined material, including a detailed account of the emergence of royal journalism and the role of functionaries like the Court Newsman, and shows how photographs of Victoria were routinely retouched and manipulated in the latter decades of the century.

Author Biography

John Plunkett is currently a Junior Research Fellow at the Bill Douglas Centre for the History of Cinema and Popular Culture, Exeter University. His main research interests are in nineteenth-century print and visual media, especially photography, popular fiction and the periodical press. He is currently working on a book, Optical Recreations, which examines the different types of nineteenth-century domestic and public screen entertainment. In 2002, he held
a visiting fellowship at Yale Centre for British Art for work on this project.