Shannon 2015

Shannon, Mary L. Dickens, Reynolds, and Mayhew on Wellington Street: The Print Culture of a Victorian Street. London: Ashgate, 2015.

• thesis:
• methodology: using archival research to inform new readings of well-known and lesser known periodicals, newspapers, sketches, plays, and serial fiction (4)
  • a form of the literal turn, taking it into the spatial: taking the critical commonplace that Dickens, Mayhew, and Reynolds resemble each other and tracing it in their geo proximity
  • archive:
  • specific period covered: 1843-1853
• evidence/argument:
  • a networked way of working and socializing fed into the ways writeres...represented their readers (6)
• relevance/stakes:

Intro

• focus on Wellington St, just off the Strand
• 2: [Insignificant street but...] On Wellington St, however, you could find the offices of some of the most well-known and influential newspapers, miscellanies, and serials of the mid-Victorian period. In 1850, Charles Dickens set up the office of his new periodical Household Words at 16 Wellington St North. It is not surprising that D chose this location the three sections of Wellington St...were positioned at the heart of London's print networks, located as they were just off the Strand between Fleet St and Covent Garden.
• 3: From the bow window of the HW office in 1851, D could see the Lyceum as well as the office of the radical publisher GWM Reynolds (and Reynolds's business partner, John Dicks), from which was published Reynolds's Miscellany and Reynolds's Weekly Newspaper. A few doors up, Henry Mayhew had just opened the office of his new part-work, London Labour and the London Poor. Mayhew's new office was next door to the building from which his father-in-law, Douglas Jerrold, had run Douglas Jerrold's Weekly Newspaper, two years previously, and in which the young GA Sala had rented a room the year before.
• [Claim] This was a street in which the print trade, entertainment culture, and reformist politics co-existed in a strange kind of melting pot. These interests and activities generated ideas and modes of thought and operation which spread out from Well St itself; colonial emigration enabled the networks of Well St to give life to the print networks on the other side of the globe. Writers, periodicals, and newspapers from Wellington St. found their way to colonial Melbourne, and print culture networks based on Wellington St. were reproduced by Melbourne immigrants like R.H. Horne and Marcus Clarke.... I examine the print networks of Well St between roughly 1843 and 1853 to show how print culture operated on the groun din the early to mid-nineteenth century and how London's print culture intersected with the Empire.
• 4: Physical proximity in the city reinforced print networks, and this way of working and socializing created a virtual space which stretched across cities and connected writers, editors, and readers in a vast imagined network.
  • "imagined network" suggests a combo of, what, Benedict Anderson and network analysis (not sure who the main theorist there is -- Latour? Durkheim?) (cf. Houston 2014)
    • interpolating the actor-network thing might be an interesting way of getting at non-human agents, i.e., books, and what a book like Jane Eyre can do (cf. the chapter in 10 Books that shaped...)
• cites Anderson
• ...Benedict Anderson argues that print culture helped to develop the modern conception of the nation state, because it created the condition whereby readers become accustomed to the idea of the 'imagined community'....[5] However, streets like the three sections of Well St show that those involved in the actual production of this very print culture in mid-Victorian London themselves operated within very sociable face-to-face interactions, made up of interconnected (and also rival) networks.
• 5: B Anderson draws a distinction between 'primordial villages' and the imagined communities of print capitalism, but Phiz's son finds a certain wry humour in the fact that this is a distinction which he cannot draw [qtd. as remembering "News spread[ing] mysteriously, as it is said to do amongst the Indians"]
• Raymond Williams too
• 6: This book argues that a networked way of working and socializing fed into the ways in which writers such as Dickens, Reynolds, and Mayhew represented their readers [as anonymous friends].... Social networks enable the passing of information and social capital around the system; they involve active sharing and exchange. Dickens, I argue, makes a claim that Household Words will unite his readers in a better understanding; Reynolds hopes his readers will become radical protestors and vice versa; Mayhew's readers write in to the office of London Labour' with new information to contribute to the project, and debate with each other via the 'Answers to Correspondents' section. These writers and editors represented their readers as active participants in a network, who would react, respond, and feed information back to the 'hub' of the editor's office.
• 7: As is increasingly recognized, digitization has opened up a panoply of resources that must be assimilated and assessed in new ways, and the vast quantity and variety of works that comprised C19 print culture is becoming more and more evident. However, this book shows that, despite advances in literacy, print technology, and communications, London in the 1840s and 50s was not a place where face-to-face interactions within a knowable community (more commonly associated with the print trade in smaller early modern cities) disappeared.
• This book unites the concepts of the 'face-to-face community' and the 'imagined community': an experience of the former by the editors and writers of Well st was a part of what led to an expectation of, and desire for, the latter - that is, a relationship between writers and imagined readers, conducted through print.
• This book is not interested in the geographies of reading or reception; rather, it is interested in how the writers of Well st themselves conceived of their community of readers, and the ways in which the cultural geography of Well St informed their representation of their imagined readers as part of the network. Readers, in this model, are not just an 'imagined community' of communicants who read in 'silent privacy' but active members of an imagined [8] network, in ways which attempt to puncture the anonymity of the teeming city, and even the Empire.
• 8: Situated within a square mile wherein much of the printed material of London, and indeed of the Empire, was produced, Wellington St offers a particularly rich entry point into print culture networks in the mid C19.
• ...Dickens and Reynolds may not have met each other on the street each day...what this book argues, however, is that they were nonetheless aware of each other, because they [9] had offices on the same relatively short stretch of the city. This means that they had shared experiences of the print economy and its networks which operated on Well St, filled as it was with booksellers, publishers, and editors.
• 9: Scholars of print networks are increasingly looking for ways to develop the study of networks beyond a focus on individual writers, titles, and groups, and towards an understanding of everyday practice and how networks function on the ground.
• ...intersections between networks of writers, editors, journalists, printers, illustrators, and publishers. This book provides one answer to this problem: the study of a street rather than a house, or a group, allows us to imagine all of these together.
  • L Brake, "Time's Turbulence"
• 10 how the material fact of buildings and streets affects the complexity, the contingency, and the dynamic flow of interactions
• The everyday is not easy to define; 'it is almost undefinable, being the realm of routing and humdrum which we take for granted.' Following Lefebvre, however, the everyday might [11] simply involve work, leisure, and 'private life' and the places where these everyday activities occur.
• 11:...[this method] reveals the geographical connections lurking behind the texts, which have escaped notice until now, and the ways in which print networks were reinforced by physical proximity within a city in the mid-C19.
• 12: This book combines archive work (both physical and digital) with literary criticism to show that the context of where texts were produced can make us look again at the language of the texts themselves.
• How do we map print culture without flattening the landscape of interactions, as Bruno Latour warns us against in Reassembling the Social? Networks are often viewed or displayed panoptically...following Latour's directive, this book searches for how networks operate on the ground.
• 13: Melbourne print culture pops up as a sudden new node on the interlinked networks, and turns phsyical proximity to London print networks into a metaphorical idea played out through the language and imagery of bodies and child-parent relations.
  • e.g., a tree
• The study of print networks on Well St also sheds further light on the connections between literature, journalism, and drama in the mid-C19
• 14: limit -- gender in this case study -- Martineau and Gaskell contrib to Household Words but were not based in London
• 15 Shattock points out that 'women writers began to have a public visibility in the 1840s' and analyzes the different ways in which women maintained literary networks, but she emphasizes that women writers were constrained by their lack of access to university education and to the 'clubs and dinners enjoyed by their male colleagues.'
• 16: Latour argues that no place can be described as truly local or truly global, as the two categories are porous. For Latour, any social interactions involve a 'bewildering array of participants'...therefore 'no place dominates enough to be global and no place is self-contained enough to be local.' This is certainly true for Well St. However, Wellington St was an important local 'neighbourhood', in Arjun Appadurai's terms, where a 'locality' is not a place in space but a structure of feeling, and the 'neighbourhood' is the form in which this structure of feeling is realized. Therefore, a neighbourhood can be virtual as well as real...and so can be transnational as well as local.
• 17: The face-to-face networks of the writers and editors of Well St were not a closed system, but connected with readers, audiences, and colonial counterparts in a vast imagined network of sometimes tense and uncomfortable 'belonging'.
• ...the following chapters are arranged thematically and according to times of the day. This book, then, revisits mornings on Well St as editors and print workers arrive for [18] work, afternoon on a specific day during a radical protest, evenings at the Lyceum Theatre, and nights on the streets. Chapters 1 to 3 establish the different kinds of print networks which operated in and around the three sections of Wellington St. Ch 4 then reveals connections and similairities between these networks and those based around Collins St, Melbourne.
• Ch 1 argues that editors on Well St [specifically Dickens] shared the same experiences of the print economy on the same short street, and links this to Dickens's address to his imagined network of readers, 'The Preliminary Word', in the first number of Household Words.
• Ch 2 argu[es] that Reynolds went one step further than Dickens's 'Preliminary Word' and sought to address real and potential readers directly when he spoke before and after the Trafalgar Sq riots in 1848....arguing that the accounts of his speeches that Reynolds inserted into Mysteries blurred the line between speechmaking and radical fiction and attempted to expand and personalize his relationship with his network of readers, and to agitate them to revolution [though this would have imperiled his own position as a writer]
• Ch 3...argues that interactions between the theatrical and print communities on Wellington St reveal the links between print culture and the culture of entertainment and spectacle.... This awareness of the potential connections between audiences and readers allowed members of the print networks to have a sense of a 'real' public: their tastes, their instant feedback on a writer's work or the work of colleagues, and even their faces looking back at the playwright from the pit and the gallery.
• 19: Ch 4...argues that replication of London's print networks enabled Melbourne's print culture to emerge fully functioning by the time of [Marcus] Clarke's arrival, less than three decades after the city was founded. The chapter ends with a comparison of Mayhew's London Labour, Sala's "The Key of the Street", and Marcus Clarke's "A Night at the Immigrants' Home" to argue that night-time in Melbourne comes to sound a lot like night-time on Well St.... the product of an enabling cultural tension between the 'Old World' and the 'New'.
• The book concludes with a reading of Bleak House as a novel which emerged out of Dickens's experiences of a world of coincidences, connections, and networks.... I seek to show what the study of networks within print culture can do, not just for our understanding of the working conditions of mid-century urban writers, but for the close reading of their words on the page.