Queen Victoria - First Media Monarch [Hardcover]

John Plunkett presents the first history of the interaction between the monarchy and the media to focus on the reign of Queen Victoria. 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, and includes a detailed account of the emergence of royal journalism and the impact of new media such as photography.

List of Abbreviations
List of Illustrations
Introduction
1. Civic Publicness: Popular Politics and Victoria's Royal Role
2. Royal Portraiture and Graphic Media 1837-1860
3. Of Hype and Type
4. Exposing the Monarchy: Photography and the Royal Family
5. Reporting Royalty: from Penny-a-liners to Special Correspondents
Conclusion
Appendix One
Further Reading
Index

The book's range, thoroughness and grasp of exemplary detail which are its real strengths. It is superbly illustrated, and Plunkett's scholarship is, as its best, an illustrative rather than an analytic tool. The documentary side of the book is immensely impressive: Plunkett has done work for which other Victorian scholars will be permanently grateful. We are made vividly aware of the complex, dynamic relation between social and technological change, and Plunkett's concentration on the monarchy gives the account a clarity and focus which more broadly based studies of Victorian progress often lack. --Daniel Karlin,Times Literary Supplement

The material in this book, much of it analysed for the first time, is clearly fascinating....Queen Victoria: First Media Monarchis enlightening both in its analysis of the nineteenth-century press and its anticipation of the media-saturated world we live in today. --English Literature inTransition 1880-1920

Adds considerably to our understanding of thel“m