4 “Wider Still and Wider, Shall Thy Bounds Be Set”: Empire and Anxiety at the Fin de Siècle

In this chapter I will set out the origins of the fourth, commercial phase in the history of news infographics. This period, spanning roughly the last two decades of the nineteenth century and the first three decades of the twentieth, occurred within the independent stage of UK journalism history. It was made possible by those illustrated newspapers of the 1840s that had both been incrementally increasing public exposure to, and reacting to public expectations about, visual culture. During this period the infographic is first published in truly “mass” media formats; albeit not in any consistent way. Occasional infographics, informed by different traditions and epistemologies, assume a varied (and visually inconsistent) discursive form by the end of this period, with the rise of modern news design. This era also saw the rise of an important component of news infographics—the pictogram. This new form made abstract notions and ideas concrete and recognizable (and memorable), serving as a crucial bridge between cultures of popular media and mass media. They appear at a moment of democratization in print culture that in turn speaks to a wider democratization in society. This generation of infographics embodies the increasing discursive weight of the commodity in popular culture.