Reading Popular Prints 1790-1870

The book offers undergraduates, research students and interested readers access to the critical issues and methodolgical complexities raised by the interpretation of popular graphic images from the 18th and 19th centuries. Brian Maidment reads popular prints as complex commodities, through which one can understand historical events and social change. The events covered in the book include a fire in a corn mill in 1791, the rise of the "educated dustman" as a symbol of proletarian cultural development in the 1820s and 30s, and working men returning home to their families in the 1850s. In each chapter a wide range of images is assembled - metal and wood engravings, lithographs, woodcuts, etchings, water-colours and drawings - to show the different ways that historical events can be represented.