A Taste for Refined Culture: Imag(in)ing the Middle Class in the Philly Pictorials of the 1840s and 50s

In America's “Golden Age of Periodicals,” between 1825 and 1850, monthly magazines served up to middle-class audiences a steady diet of fiction, poetry, travel literature, essays, and engraved illustrations. The full-page illustrations, printed separately on specially designed paper and inserted into the magazines, encouraged pull-out and framing. The 1840s witnessed advancements in printing technologies that encouraged a proliferation of visual images in a medium that previously relied primarily on printed text. Although some of the illustrated periodicals—Godey's Lady's Book for instance—were known principally for the hand-colored “fashion plates,” Peterson's, Graham's and the Union, in keeping with their wide range of topics and intended audience, also displayed engraved portraits, historical scenes, landscapes, religious imagery, flora and fauna, and genre scenes featuring Americans of every ilk. Published in Philadelphia—considered in the 1840s the leader in the art of engraving—Graham's, Godey's, Peterson's and the Union became known collectively as the “Philly pictorials.”

These magazines were extremely popular and widely circulated in their era, in large part thanks to the engravings. Early in the 1840s, the periodicals highlighted a series of “innovations” to magazine embellishments designed to increase reader subscriptions—the sole source of income for magazines in an age before advertising. In some instances, editors commissioned textual material to “illustrate” the engraving, rather than the other way around. Unlike other contemporary magazines relying on reprints—engravings lifted from other, usually European, sources—these magazines showcased original work by American artists and engravers, thereby contributing to the rapidly increasing democratization of American art. The Philly pictorials also touted “entirely original” contents contributed by American authors. These magazines enabled many of the authors, editors, publishers, artists and engravers contributing to them to earn a respectable living, a first in the nation's history. Thus contributors might aspire to the ranks of an emerging middle class whose social and cultural boundaries they themselves sought to define, even as they simultaneously excluded a host of “others” based on gender, class and race. Because these magazines addressed both (white) men and women, they provided middle-class models of masculinity, femininity, marriage, and genteel consumption.