Crime and Class in Print: Visual Culture in Nineteenth-Century New York (New York State Series)

As newspapers and periodicals proliferated in the United States in the nineteenth century, editors seeking to carve out a large and loyal audience hired artists to pair vivid imagery with sensational fiction ripped from the headlines.In Crime and Class in Print, Wendy Jean Katz examines the emergence of a modern visual culture in pre-Civil War New York City around these illustrated stories of crime, swashbuckling, and ordinary and extraordinary characters both rich and poor.Katz documents the life and career of Tompkins H. Matteson (1813-1884), whose drawings were printed alongside these tales, to understand the mass production, reception, and circulation of serialized illustrations.By closely analyzing the images within both their historical and fictional contexts, she interrogates how these cheap, ephemeral periodicals dramatized urban crime but also framed it within class-based concerns. The serial nature of Matteson’s illustrations, which made the coupled stories accessible to a la