The Illustrated Police News, alongside sensation fiction, are demonstrative of 1860's Victorian era pop culture. Such novels and newspapers were a product of the “cultural emergence of a ‘modern’ print culture in the mid-Victorian period, which saw a proliferation of printed material due to developments in technology and the abolition of taxes on knowledge. These changes meant that literature could be produced and consumed more easily and cheaply” (Palmer 86). The technological advancements that decreased the price of printing not only affected “print culture” but popular culture as well. Wilkie Collins, a popular sensationalist writer took up this issue in his 1858 article “The Unknown Public”. In the article he wrote, “Meanwhile, it is perhaps hardly too much to say that the future of English fiction may rest with this Unknown Public, which is now waiting to be taught the difference between a good book and a bad. It is probably a question of time only. The largest audience for periodical literature, in this age of periodicals, must obey the universal law of progress, and must, sooner or later, learn to discriminate” (222). In this passage, Collins points to an audience who “reads for amusement more than for its information” (218) and therefore argues that a shift in printing must also (eventually) coincide with a shift in popular culture. He particularly articulates that there must develop a discrimination between “good” and “bad” literature. In other words, with a newfound accessibility of text how do you now determine what is good and what is bad. The sensationalists, both in novel and periodicals, took advantage of this transitory period. The periodicals, such as the Illustrated Police News used it to dramatize “true” stories and thereby turn a profit. The novelists did it by developing characters and subject matters that could fluctuate classes, such as Lady Audley and Robert Audley’s quest for justice. Thereby, these texts brought good literature into question by popularizing bad subjects—which could only have been possible with an increase in printed materials and a decrease in cost. They helped develop a question that is still grappled with today, is the popularity of something any evidence of its quality?

Sources: 

Collins, Wilkie. “The Unknown Public.” Household Words, no. 18, 1858, pp. 217-222.

Palmer, Beth. “Are the Victorians Still with Us?: Victorian Sensation Fiction and Its Legacies in the Twenty-First Century.” Victorian Studies, no. 1, 2009, p. 86. EBSCOhost, ezproxy.uvu.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edsglr&AN=edsgcl.2....