Make Real Through Fictional Presentation

Looking at an example of an illustration which accompanied a Victorian newspaper article about homelessness it is interesting to note that at the time photography was a used and functional medium and yet an illustrated presentation was preferred to sit alongside the text.
 "Yet this should not surprise us in an age when many find the dramatisation of recent events in  fictionalised on television or film accounts -of the holocaust say, or of the hostage crisis in the Middle East- more acceptably 'real' than factual and scholarly accounts." - Stuart Sillers, Visualisation in popular fiction.

In these cases what is happening is the use of a single dialogue of the text and illustration to 'make real through fictional presentation' a truth of contemporary reality that is otherwise difficult to grasp in human terms.

In the text accompanying this illustration, the author uses characters to describe the facts and situations of those people living on the streets. However it would seem that these characters are invented, the author is giving life and story to those he sees that the illustrator has presented. 'The fact that the characters are invented and given fictional life stories makes the scene more real to the reader.' We can sympathise with them, if not identify. That we now know of them 'personally' and not as just someone in the street we know nothing of, makes us care more about them, even though these particular people are not strictly speaking, real.

"We are taken along to the asylum with the central character, and approach it through her eyes as much as through those of the omniscient narrator. There is effectively a dual viewpoint, allowing us to both experience the asylum as does the central character, and also to recoil from it in horror."

Dickens

The most striking point in this quote in which Dickens discusses the actuality of life in the London slums from the preface of Oliver Twist is that "Dickens assumes without question that the 'reality' of urban vice and squalor is that which is presented by Hogarth - a statement of 'truth' of the image which reveals much about the impact of the earlier artist's work upon the writer and also of the larger power of the transmitted vision of the truth rather than the external truth itself at a time when engravings were the major source of reproduced visual data."

People are more willing to take presented visuals as truth when accompanied by the text than they are the reality which they may not be aware of or just unwilling to accept.
 The difference is that there is an involvement occurring between the reader and a text or image, they are being presented something which they can then use to recognise the world with and because they have read the text/image have (secondary) experience with and so take that as truth. Its almost like having a preconceived opinion about someone before meeting and getting to know them.