About Gleason's Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion

Gleason's Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion

Gleason's Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion was a nineteenth-century illustrated weekly periodical published in Boston, Massachusetts, from 1851 to 1859. It was founded by the publisher Frederick Gleason, with Maturin Murray Ballou as its managing editor, and it was modelled on the Illustrated London News — an attempt to give American readers a paper in which high-quality engravings carried the news and literature of the week rather than merely decorating it. In November 1854 Ballou bought Gleason's interest, and from the issue of 6 January 1855 the paper continued as Ballou's Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion until it ceased publication in 1859.

In its eight years the Pictorial helped to invent illustrated journalism in the United States. Gleason has been called the father of illustrated journalism, and the paper gave early work to artists including Winslow Homer, whose drawings of Boston life for the magazine in 1859 are now among its most studied pages. Before photography could be printed, the Pictorial's wood engravings were how many Americans first saw the places and events their newspapers described.

Frederick Gleason's Boston Enterprise

Frederick Gleason was born in Germany in about 1817, moved to the United States in his youth and began his career as a bookbinder, working from a second-floor office on Tremont Street in Boston. In the late 1840s he published a string of short novels by a stable of writers that included Benjamin Barker and Maturin Murray Ballou, often issued under pseudonyms — hundred-page tales of dialogue and fast action that belonged to the emerging dime-novel tradition. In 1846 he began the weekly story paper The Flag of Our Union, which by about 1852 circulated some 75,000 copies, soon rising toward 100,000, and earned him a substantial income. His publishing hall stood for a time on Tremont Street in the former Boston Museum building. The Pictorial, founded in 1851 with Ballou, applied the same popular instincts to pictures.

The Illustrated London News Model

Gleason and Ballou established the weekly in 1851 explicitly on the model of the Illustrated London News, the British paper that had shown since 1842 how engraved images could anchor a general newspaper. The first issue appeared on 3 May 1851. Its stated object, in the paper's own prospectus language, was to present a weekly literary mixture of the notable events of the day — original tales, sketches and poems by American authors, the best of domestic and foreign news, seasoned with wit and humour. The Brookline Public Library's account of its holdings makes the same point from the reader's side: Gleason's sought to combine local and national journalism with high-quality illustration rather than letting the text stand alone, and in a world before printed photographs it now serves as a visual time capsule of mid-nineteenth-century America.

Contents: News, Tales and Pictures

A typical issue of the Pictorial mixed illustrated reports of public events — an anti-slavery meeting on Boston Common in May 1851, a grand display of firemen on the Common the same year, Fourth of July festivities at Faneuil Hall in 1853 — with serial fiction, poetry, travel views and portraits. Its image-led reporting ranged from Gleason's own publishing hall on Tremont Street, pictured in the issue of 18 October 1851, to colleges and landscapes far from Boston, such as Franklin College in Athens, Georgia. In 1853 the magazine absorbed the Illustrated News of New York, eliminating a rival and widening its reach, a consolidation typical of Gleason's aggressive expansion during the paper's first, successful years. Ballou later summarised the formula as a melange: events, original literature and news, held together by illustration.

Contributors

The Pictorial's author list documented the popular literature of its decade. Contributors included Giddings H. Ballou, Susan H. Blaisdell, Alice Carey, Sylvanus Cobb Jr., Sophronia Currier, Francis A. Durivage, Joseph Holt Ingraham, Grace Lee, Mary A. Lowell, Ellen Alice Moriarty and many others whose names filled the story papers of the period. Several of them — Cobb and Ingraham above all — were among the most prolific American fiction writers of the century, producing for Gleason's and Ballou's other papers the tales on which the Boston story-paper industry ran. Their work appeared beside engraved views and news images, so that a reader encountered the same stable of writers whether opening the Pictorial, The Flag of Our Union or one of Gleason's hundred-page novels.

The Artists and Winslow Homer

Illustration was the paper's reason for existing, and its artist list mixed journeymen with a future master. Illustrators who worked for Ballou's enterprise included John Andrew, Charles A. Barry, W. L. Champney, John Chapin, William Croome, Charles Damoreau, George Devereux, Frank Leslie — himself later Gleason's greatest rival in illustrated publishing — John Manning, Emile Masson, Samuel Worcester Rowse, William Wade and Alfred and William Waud. Above all there was Winslow Homer, who contributed drawings in the magazine's final phase, including Boston Street Characters, published in Ballou's Pictorial on 9 July 1859, and a wood engraving of the chess champion Paul Morphy, after Homer, in the issue of 2 July 1859. Homer indexes devoted to his early work treat the Ballou's illustrations as a foundation of his career, the training ground in which America's most celebrated nineteenth-century artist learned to observe and report in pictures.

Ballou Buys Out Gleason

In November 1854 Gleason sold his share of the Pictorial to Ballou, declaring that he had realised an ample competency and wished to retire from business altogether. The first issue under the new name, Ballou's Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion, appeared on 6 January 1855. The change was more than nominal: Ballou, who had been managing editor from the start, now owned the paper he edited, and he built around it one of Boston's most substantial publishing operations. The success of Gleason's Pictorial also inspired imitators who quickly became rivals; a New York Daily Times item of 1852, marvelling at Gleason's patronage of artists, already treated the competition among pictorial publishers as a coming literary war in which the engravers, at least, would grow jollier.

The Winter Street Pressroom

By about 1857 Ballou's enterprise operated from 22 Winter Street in Boston, in a building constructed in 1856 and described in accounts of the firm as a vertical factory of illustrated journalism. The first two floors held the editorial and business offices; the basement held twelve steam-powered presses that each week produced, among other publications, more than 100,000 copies of a sixteen-page, profusely illustrated journal; engravers occupied the third floor, working at desks by the windows; and an attic lit by a large lantern housed the graphic artists who drew for the Companion. The building explains the paper's economics: text, image, engraving and printing under one roof, at industrial scale, in the centre of Boston.

The End in 1859 — and the Monthly Afterlife

The Pictorial in its original weekly format ceased publication in 1859. Ballou's publishing continued, and in later decades the name survived in Ballou's Monthly Magazine, also known as Ballou's Dollar Monthly Magazine, which continued until June 1893 — a long afterlife that can confuse cataloguers, since the weekly Companion of 1851–59 and the later monthly were related products of the same house rather than the same periodical. Ballou himself went on to further prominence, including as the first editor of the Boston Daily Globe, founded in 1872, carrying the Boston illustrated-journalism tradition into the daily newspaper era.

Survival and Study

Bound and single issues of the Pictorial survive in libraries and in the trade, and institutions such as the Public Library of Brookline exhibit pages from it as a record of what mid-nineteenth-century America looked like before the camera. Art historians use its Homer engravings to trace the artist's beginnings; press historians use its prospectus, its absorption of the New York Illustrated News and its Winter Street production line to explain how illustrated news became an industry. The paper's images of Boston Common crowds, firemen, festivals and street characters remain primary visual evidence for the city in the 1850s.

Legacy

Gleason's Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion lasted only eight years, and under its founder's name only four, but it established the template that Harper's Weekly and Frank Leslie's papers would carry to national dominance: a weekly miscellany in which engraved pictures were not ornaments but reporting. It made its founder's reputation, launched its editor into ownership of a Boston publishing house, and employed, briefly, both Frank Leslie and Winslow Homer — the publisher and the artist who would define American illustration for the rest of the century. Few short-lived Boston weeklies can claim so much of the future in their contributor lists.