The first issue of
Skilling-Magazin was published on 9 May 1835, its front page showing an engraving of Benjamin Franklin (Plate 12.1). The magazine was published almost every Saturday until 1891, and in it the interested reader could find illustrated educational articles on a large variety of topics from animals, biographical and topographical descriptions to prison systems and steam engines. When the first issue was published, the magazine had already acquired more than two thousand subscribers. This was considered an extraordinary success, and it was stated that so many subscribers ‘perhaps never in such a short time had been reached by any other publication in this country’.
1 ‘Til Læseren’, Skilling-Magazin no. 1, 9 May 1835, p. 1. However, publishing the magazine in a small peripheral country had not been easy. As editor Carl August Guldberg explained in an address to the reader in the first issue, the lack of ‘artistic establishments’ in Christiania meant they had difficulties publishing the magazine with wood-engraved images – in what Guldberg called a ‘form suitable to the times’.
2 Ibid. To achieve this more suitable form, Guldberg drew on the transnational network of educational illustrated magazines and contacted Charles Knight in London to source some stereotyped wood engravings for the magazine.
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Plate 12.1. Front page of the first issue of Skilling-Magazin, published 9 May 1835. With an address to the reader and an engraving of Benjamin Franklin.
Skilling-Magazin was not only inspired by the
Penny Magazine (Plate 12.2) and similar magazines across Europe, but it would also rely heavily on both images and texts from English, German and French magazines. While there were local and national variations, the beginnings of what we could call the illustrated educational magazine can be traced to Charles Knight and the
Penny Magazine. Charles Knight was a prominent member of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge and the editor of the
Penny Magazine throughout its existence from 1832 to 1845.
3 In 1846 a periodical called Knight’s Penny Magazine appeared, but it only lasted about 6 months. The periodical combined new wood engraving techniques with cylinder presses and stereotype techniques. Moreover, Charles Knight built up a large network of distributers all over the British Isles. The magazine reached a circulation of 200,000 within its first year of publication, and the magazine was one of the first examples of what one might call a mass market publication.
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Plate 12.2. Front page of Penny Magazine 26 January 1833 with an engraving of the Church of St Martin, Cologne.
The
Penny Magazine and the other publications of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge was part of a movement that has been characterised as ‘the march of intellect’, or the ‘march of mind’, which became a rallying cry for the technologically and scientifically optimistic reform movement in early nineteenth-century Britain. In the words of Alice Jenkins, this represented the ‘extraordinary conjunction of enormous elite scientific progress and convulsive movements towards mass education’.
4 A. Jenkins, Space and the ‘March of Mind’: Literature and the Physical Sciences in Britain 1815–1850 (Oxford, 2007), p. 9. See also A. Rauch, Useful Knowledge: The Victorians, Morality, and the March of Intellect (Durham, 2001). This was part of a scientific and utilitarian spirit which made its mark on British intellectual life in the early nineteenth century. However, as Elisabeth L. Eisenstein argues, the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge has ‘become celebrated less for its virtuous intentions than for the satire it inspired’.
5 Eisenstein, Divine Art, Infernal Machine, p. 188.The founder of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, Henry Brougham, and his followers possessed an almost religious faith in the economic and social laws formulated by utilitarian thinkers such as Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. ‘Useful knowledge’ was the good, solid, employable facts of mechanics and chemistry, metallurgy and hydraulics, facts that could be applied in the workshop and on the railway line, to produce goods cheaply and efficiently, to communicate and transport more swiftly.
6 R. D. Altick, English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900, 2nd edn (Columbus, 1998), pp. 130–1.As the title of the society that published it implies, the content of the
Penny Magazine was largely educational. Its content was described as being ‘all ramble-scramble’, but as Knight explained, ‘it was meant to be so – to touch rapidly and lightly upon many subjects’.
7 C. Knight, Passages of a Working Life during Half a Century: With a Prelude of Early Reminiscences (3 vols, London, 1864), vol. 2, p. 182. It contained articles and illustrations on a whole range of subjects: architecture, modern and ancient history, biographies, travel, topography of cities and rural landscapes, technology, science and the arts, with no special emphasis on any of those topics.
8 See S. Bennett, ‘The Editorial Character and Readership of “The Penny Magazine”: An Analysis’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 17:4 (1984), 127–41. Much like the British Spectator journals of the eighteenth century, the success of the
Penny Magazine encouraged imitators all over Europe. These include periodicals such as its Anglican rival
The Saturday Magazine (1832–44), the French
Magazin Pittoresque (1833–1938), the German
Pfenning Magazin (1833–55) and
Heller Magazin (1834–45), the Swedish
Lördags-Magasin (1836–8)
and the Danish
Dansk Penning Magazin (first published in 1834) to name just a few.
Illustrated periodicals that used wood-engraved images were a vital part of what the historian of printing Michael Twyman has called the illustration revolution of the nineteenth century.
9 M. Twyman, ‘The Illustration Revolution’, in D. McKitterick (ed.), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 6, 1830–1914 (Cambridge, 2009), pp. 117–43. One of the earliest illustrated magazines, the
Mirror of Literature founded in 1822, was published for many years with only one wood engraving on the front page of its sixteen octavo pages. Ten years later the
Penny Magazine and similar magazines had wood engravings scattered throughout its eight pages, its quarto format being twice as large as the
Mirror of Literature. Ten years later again, the
Illustrated London News and similar magazines had wood engravings of different shapes and sizes throughout their sixteen folio pages and a format that was double that of the
Penny Magazine.
10 Ibid. p. 118. For a discussion of the early illustrated magazines, see also: B. Maidment, ‘Dinners or Desserts?’: Miscellaneity, Illustration, and the Periodical Press 1820–1840’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 43:4 (2011).Important to this illustration revolution was the development of wood engraving. The most important figure in the development of wood engraving was the Newcastle engraver Thomas Bewick (1753–1828). Traditionally, woodcuts were cut by knife on the side of a softwood board. Bewick’s innovation was to apply sharp tools, like those used in metal engraving, on the end grain of hardwood blocks, preferably boxwood.
11 According to Mason Jackson, what was called ‘Turkey-boxwood’ growing in the forests of the Caucasus was the preferred kind, see M. Jackson, The Pictorial Press: Its Origin and Progress (London, 1885), p. 315. On Bewick, see e.g. J. Uglow, Nature’s Engraver: A Life of Thomas Bewick (Chicago, 2009). The compact end grain allowed the engraver to cut very fine lines, producing work with far greater detail than traditional woodcuts.
12 A. Griffiths, Prints and Printmaking: An Introduction to the History and Techniques (Berkeley, 1996), pp. 22ff. The techniques of wood engraving are also explained in a number of treatises published during the nineteenth century, the most extensive of which is J. Jackson, A Treatise on Wood Engraving: Historical and Practical (London, 1839). Compared to lithography, relatively few treatises on wood engraving were published, this indicates that the trade of wood engraving was generally learnt by apprenticeship. Wood engravings were cheaper, easier and faster to produce than copper or steel engravings and could provide more elaborate images than traditional woodcuts. Like woodcuts, they could also be printed along with the text.
The success of wood engraving relied, to a large extent, on technologies for casting copies of printing plates – stereotyping. It was the
Penny Magazine that tied stereotyping to wood engraving. Stereotyping allowed the
Penny Magazine to use several presses simultaneously and protected the woodblocks from wear. A bonus of stereotyping was that it allowed the magazine to sell engravings across Europe and the USA, prompting a vigorous international circulation of images. ‘The art of wood engraving is imperfectly understood in France and Germany,’ proclaimed Charles Knight. Selling wood engraving casts ‘at a tenth of the price of having them re-engraved’ could therefore assist ‘foreign nations in the production of “Penny Magazines”’.
13 ‘The Commercial History of a Penny Magazine’, Penny Magazine, 30 September 1833. The trade in wood engravings was important not least to the establishment of illustrated magazines in places – like Norway – that could not support a large wood engraving trade.
With mechanical presses, large circulations and extensive use of illustrations, the
Penny Magazine and its imitators have largely been seen in the context of an emerging modern mass culture in the nineteenth century. As Patricia Anderson has argued, the
Penny Magazine and its imitators depended upon and fostered new technology, commercialised their operation, continually augmented the amount and range of their written and pictorial content, and persistently reached and communicated with an ever-widening socially and geographically diverse body of readers and viewers. In this way, Anderson argues, these periodicals ‘accommodated all the necessary preconditions for the development of the twentieth-century mass media’.
14 P. Anderson, The Printed Image, p. 198. But investigating the
Skilling-Magazin, a small and peripheral magazine, can provide us with a different picture.
Skilling-Magazin shows us that this genre of periodicals must not only be understood as an early predecessor of mass media but can also be placed in a continuum with earlier forms of publishing.