Windows on the World: Xylographic Visuality in the Popular Press

Like many a popular book or periodical, the Familienblätter, or "family papers," emerged from a broadening nineteenth-century print market. As general-interest magazines produced for domestic consumption, they emphasized variety and accessibility enhanced by wood-engraved pictures, a successful formula in the competitive publishing environment of the 1850s and 1860s. What most distinguished the family papers from their analogs in Great Britain, France, or the United States, however, were the aims of their creators, namely post-1848 liberals who shared the assumption that reading could pick up where legislating had left off. By bringing a subtle mixture of education and entertainment into the home, the family papers were initially intended not only to turn a profit, but also to galvanize civil society at its putative core and so complete the work of an abortive revolution, even in the midst of a harsh reaction. Harnessing the popular press to a wary crypto-liberalism, their pioneers sought to mold the politics of German readers without getting into trouble. Perhaps the most striking feature of the family papers was their rich and evocative illustration. Technologically impossible anywhere before the 1820s and realizable in Germany only from the mid-1840s, wood-engraved imagery adorned the pages of successful family papers on a scale and with a degree of textual integration that neither lithography nor metal engraving could match. This essay discusses how the family papers achieved their cohesion as pictorial artifacts and worked to mediate impressions of the world through accessible and lively images, which both dazzled the eye and suggested a political future which need only be comfortably possessed, indeed whose conquest lay in plain sight.