‘The Epitheatrical Cartoonist’: Matthew Somerville Morgan and the World of Theatre,Art and Journalism in Victorian London

This article examines the vibrant cultural milieu inhabited by one of Victorian Britain's most famous cartoonists, Matthew Somerville Morgan. Morgan is well-known as the cartoonist who attacked Queen Victoria's withdrawal from public life (and her associations with John Brown), and the lifestyle of Albert, Prince of Wales, in the short-lived rival to Punch: the Tomahawk. Likewise, his post-1870 career in New York as cartoonist of the ‘Caricature War’ over the 1872 Presidential elections, and involvement with ‘Buffalo’ Bill Cody have been well-studied. However, his involvement with the world of the 1860s Victorian stage – and the social circles in which he moved – have not been given close attention. This broader social, cultural, and economic context is essential to understanding Morgan's role as a cartoonist-critic of politics, class, gender and art in Victorian Britain. Special attention is given to the ways in which Morgan's work as a theatrical scene-painter informed his other pursuits, including his political cartoons for Fun, the Comic News and the Tomahawk. So central was the theatre to Morgan's life story that he may be appropriately described as an ‘epitheatrical’ figure. Indeed he is one of the most spectacular exemplars of the interconnected worlds of journalism, high art and theatre in Victorian London. The theatre provided him with the artistic and journalistic connections needed to raise himself above his lower-class origins; to move in ‘clubland’ and fashionable bohemian society; and to win an influential place in the key political and cultural debates of his age.     

The Reporting of International News in Canada: Continuity and Change, 1988–2006

This article examines Canadian daily newspaper editors' views regarding the status of international news reporting in Canada. It is based on a series of surveys administered in 1988, 1995, 2000, and 2006 that measured editors' assessments of issues such as the quantity and quality of international news in their papers, the importance they attach to international news coverage, the areas of the world they consider important to cover, and the sources they use for international news. The article uses the data from the surveys to determine whether 11 September 2001 affected editors' perceptions of international news reporting. This question has been widely studied in the United States, but less so in Canada. The central conclusion here is that 9/11 has had only a limited impact on editors' perceptions. The data across all four surveys demonstrate a remarkable degree of consistency in editors' assessments of international news reporting in Canada.     

The invention of the basset hound: breed,blood and the late Victorian dog fancy, 1865–1900

In this article the authors explore the practices and conceptualisations of British dog breeding and the showing of pedigree dogs by the ‘the dog fancy’, focusing specifically on the story of a single breed: the basset hound. This was not simply a story of British dog fanciers appropriating a French dog breed; indeed, this was impossible because the very notion of a dog ‘breed’, defined by conformation and legitimated by pedigree, was in the process of invention. They show how the British dog-show fancy chose one, from many and varied types of French hound, to be the basset hound, and how this choice was legitimated by reference to an imagined history, where the British dog fancy rescued a noble animal from French indifference to breed and blood. The chosen physical form was standardised to arbitrary ideal, but was by means no static. In the spirit of the times, it was ‘improved’, first by the empirical methods of animal breeders, using pedigrees to secure good and pure ‘blood’, and then by the application of science, particularly artificial insemination and hereditarian theories.     

The Conventillo,the Department Store,and the Cabaret: Navigating Urban Space and Social Class in Argentine Silent Cinema, 1916–1929

This article examines an understudied film genre that some Argentine early film periodicals labeled cinedrama porteño. Porteño cinedramas portrayed a bleak Buenos Aires, a dark metropolis of massive immigration and accelerated urbanization in which opulence was reserved for the few and misery was all around, particularly in immigrant neighborhoods. Centering on ‘fallen women’ and well-dressed wastrels, the genre foregrounded social instability by confronting emerging and established social actors in several locations, including tenement housing, department stores, and cabarets and garçonnières. Based on surviving film fragments, this article argues that porteño cinedramas rendered visible varying degrees of sociocultural proximity and separation in urban space. In doing so, the genre traced sociocultural cartographies and identitary strategies to confer narrative and visual saliency to mobile subjects, most noticeably urban outcasts. Porteño cinedramas warned against the dangers of upward mobility while at the same time denouncing gender and class inequality in Buenos Aires. Films discussed include Hasta después de muerta (Eduardo Martínez de la Pera and Ernesto Gunche, 1916), La chica de la Calle Florida (José A. Ferreyra, 1922), and La borrachera del tango (Edmo Cominetti, 1928).     

Science and Politics in the Hawaiian Kingdom: The Progress of the Honolulu Social Science Association, 1882–87

The growth in studies of Indigenous responses to the gradual foreign control and American annexation of the Hawaiian Islands has provided an important corrective to dominant trends in earlier Hawaiian historiography, but there has been comparatively little recent work on the attitudes and values of those identified as colonizers. In particular, how Western ideas were understood and appropriated within the context of Hawaiian politics is not well known. This article extends scholarship demonstrating how in colonizing contexts, ideas about science could be mobilized as a moral resource and scientific societies could become distinct social formations. Specifically, the article shows how, during the pre-annexation period, the predominantly White and Hawaiian-born members of the Honolulu Social Science Association gathered in the performance of scientific modernity, with an implicit yet overarching political aim.     

Printing and Publishing in Greece: ‘flexibility’ and the process of innovation, 1979–1991

Abstract

Since the mid-1960s a large number of innovations has affected printing and publishing throughout the world. At the heart of what is now widely acknowledged as a technological revolution was the switch to photo-composition and offset lithography from ‘hot-metal’ techniques. Two principal developments may be identified-the shift from molten metal to photography pioneered in the USA, and the introduction of electronic-based processes of production and transmission (Moran, 1974: 147–261,309–19; Clair, 1976; Marshall, 1983; Guy and Haywood, 1985). The early photo-setters were costly and were restricted to a relatively small number of sizes and typefaces. Origination remained fragmented and still had to be divided-up into a series of distinct tasks notably keyboarding, photo-typesetting, page paste-up, photographic work and fmal plate-making. Because of this constraint the take-up of electronic typesetting, particularly in small and medium-size printing firms, was slow. However, the arrival of micro-electronic chips paved the way for cheaper and more dependable photo-typesetting systems. Digitalisation of information enables a unification of the origination process and allows an author to prepare high quality graphics and sophisticated art work.