Crime and Class in Print : Visual Culture in Nineteenth-Century New York

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 larger swath of readers, represented an investment in industrial progress necessary to reach "mass" audiences. As Katz explores, while the images of city life conveyed nuance regarding ethnicity, temperance, police powers, privacy, sex, labor, aesthetics, reading practices, and masculinity, their paired narrative texts frequently mutated within and across different periodicals and languages to suit their audiences. In the English-language press, Matteson’s illustrations highlighted class struggle yet entwined them within the jingoist politics that advocated against immigration and upheld the white working class in opposition to ethnic diversity. As meaning shifted from one story, newspaper, or language to the next, what was a visual demonstration of progressive values championing proletariat interests became a platform to enforce a petit bourgeois and nativist perspective.