Hiromi KONO    Department   Kyoto Junior College of Foreign Languages  , Department of English Studies for Careers    Position   Associate Professor
Date	2017/03/23
Presentation Theme	Florence Nightingale as a National Heroine to Be Consumed
Conference	消費文化史研究会 2017年国際大会
Promoters	消費者文化研究会
Conference Type	International
Presentation Type	Speech (General)
Contribution Type	Collaborative
Venue	学習院大学
Publisher and common publisher	◎Hiromi Kono, Sunil Manghani
Details	In the 19th century Britain, the print culture showed the major developments in the society. The mass circulation created by an abolition of taxes, cheaper paper, and advanced print technologies drove more people to buy and read print materials. The more titles of magazine appeared during the Victorian era, the more business rivalries in economy and market the society had. During this period, the Victorian journalists turned their eyes on the mass citizens, the working class readers, and linked them together with print in contents. “The Illustrated London News” and “The Punch” are among those new Victorian periodicals concerned with the London poor and visual effects: illustrations, and photos. Florence Nightingale is the famous Victorian figure who became the national celebrity through the periodicals in the nineteenth century. Timely reports from the Crimean War kept coming in and her service at the battlefields was widely known to the people in her native land. The “Lady with the Lamp” appeared in “the Illustrated London News” in 1855 as the first image of Nightingale. Since then, her story became things people most talked about. Her manners to tread wounded soldiers equally grabbed the working class people’s minds. Nightingale related songs, theater plays, short stories, poems, articles, and even potteries started being produced and consumed by the national public. In this presentation, how the image of Florence Nightingale was received by the British public, and how the Victorian print industry took a leading role to create Florence Nightingale as the national heroin for a commercial purpose. By the end, I hope to show how the national celebrity was born in the Victorian period in relation to the power of print culture over the public.