Queen Victoria: First Media Monarch »

John Plunkett is currently a Junior Research Fellow at the Bill Douglas Centre for the History of Cinema and Popular Culture, Exeter University. His main research interests are in nineteenth-century print and visual media, especially photography, popular fiction and the periodical press. He is currently working on a book, Optical Recreations, which examines the different types of nineteenth-century domestic and public screen entertainment. In 2002, he held a visiting fellowship at Yale Centre for British Art for work on this project.

John Plunkett presents the first history of the interaction between the monarchy and the media to focus on the reign of Queen Victoria. He argues that the development of popular print and visual media in the nineteenth century helped to reinvent the position of the monarchy in national life, and includes a detailed account of the emergence of royal journalism and the impact of new media such as photography.

List of Abbreviations
List of Illustrations
Introduction
1. Civic Publicness: Popular Politics and Victoria's Royal Role
2. Royal Portraiture and Graphic Media 1837-1860
3. Of Hype and Type
4. Exposing the Monarchy: Photography and the Royal Family
5. Reporting Royalty: from Penny-a-liners to Special Correspondents
Conclusion
Appendix One
Further Reading
Index