introduction: verbal and visual interactions in nineteenth-century print culture

Volumes of George Cruikshank's 'Scraps and Sketches', a publication of miscellaneous images vaguely intended to be cut and pasted in home-made albums and scrapbooks; a catalogue of the 1857 Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition customised by the doodles and marginalia of its owner and her friends; a job-lot of nineteenth-century illustrated children's publications, in which the magic lantern show is miniaturized into the format of the book – the objects featured in the lead articles of this issue of 19 evoke the contents of a house sale more than a scholarly journal. Akin to the type of material described by Walter Benjamin as ‘booklike creations from fringe areas', they don't add up to any of the cohesive themes featured in previous issues, such as history, literature, or sentimentality. They have been, however, ‘salvaged' by collectors and thus given a chance to ‘renew the old world'. The essays and reviews in this issue have been selected or developed from papers and workshops given at the conference The Verbal and the Visual in Nineteenth-Century Culture (23-24 June 2006) organised by the Birkbeck Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies. Given the wealth of papers on far more canonical literary and visual practices featured at that conference, our selection might seem perverse in its insistence on odds and ends...