The pictorial image

During the second half of the 19th century, there began a new stage in the evolution of the storage and communication of information. It can be seen as an attempt to overcome some of the inflexibility of print, tied as it was to the alphabetic representation of language and a few other sets of symbols such as those used by musicians or mathematicians. The earliest experiments were with processes that facilitated the reproduction of visual images in print. Such processes had existed since the 15th century, and indeed the simplest of them – the carved wooden block – had probably been invented in Europe before typographic printing and had certainly been in use in east Asia for centuries before the first book was printed in the West. Woodcuts were crude but could be effective; indeed the woodcuts that allegedly illustrated the martyrdom of English Protestants in the reign of Mary I (1553–1558) became one of the most common visual images of the past for millions of people in the following 200 years.

At a more sophisticated and technically satisfying level, a printing process that made it possible to reproduce engravings made on metal (usually copper) plates was developed in the 16th century. This process was in use, with some modifications and refinements, for 200 years; engravers reached a high level of technical and artistic achievement. At the very end of the 18th century, another new printing process, lithography, made it possible for the artist to draw an image on a prepared block of stone (or later of metal) which could then be reproduced without any further intervention from an engraver or woodcutter. However, all of these processes, even woodcut, were expensive, and, except in the very best of hands, reproductions were little more than approximations to the subjects they allegedly portrayed.

From the 1840s onwards, the invention of photography changed this forever. Although the early processes were expensive, cumbersome and unreliable, within 30 years a means had been found of reproducing photographs in print. By the end of the 19th century they were beginning to appear in some of the more popular newspapers.