This argument is a common critique in the last decades of the ninetieth century. John Harthan suggests that it can already be found in the first half of the nineteenth century (Harthan 180). However, we find the first explicit occurrence of this idea in William Dean Howells’ novel A Hazard of New Fortunes from 1889. This novel represents the production of a periodical publication. In the sixth chapter, the main characters discuss the use of visual elements in this magazine, concretely illustrations. The characters discuss the obligatory nature of illustrations due to their economic advantages and attractiveness, particularly related to female visual representations. Basil March, the protagonist, is presented at this moment as someone who would prefer to publish without illustrations. He provides his rationale in the following manner:
“Not because I don’t like them, Mr. Beacon, […] but because I like them too much. I find that I look at the pictures in an illustrated article, but I don’t read the article very much, and I fancy that’s the case with most other people. You’ve got to doing them so prettily that you take our eyes off the literature, if you don’t take our minds off.”
This thought has a distant echo in research about teaching reading from the 1960s. In his 1967 article “Attentional Process in Reading,” S. Jay Samuels, for instance, draws on the result of a recent study to warn that images distract some students from the text and thus negatively impact their learning:
The Ss in this experiment had 7 months of formal reading instruction. No significant difference was found in reading acquisition between the picture and no-picture condition among the better readers. Among the poorer readers, Ss in the no-picture condition learned to read significantly more words than did Ss in the picture condition. […] Considering the effect which pictures had on reading acquisition of naive and less capable students, one may wonder if it is good practice to put pictures in reading primers.
(Samuels 341)
Works Cited
Harthan, John. The History of the Illustrated Book: The Western Tradition. Thames and Hudson, 1981.
Howells, William Dean. A Hazard of New Fortunes. Project Gutenberg, 2004.
Samuels, S. Jay. “Attentional Processes in Reading: The Effect of Pictures on the Acquisition of Reading Responses.” Journal of Educational Psychology, vol. 58, no. 6, 1967, pp. 337–42.
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