Difference between revisions of "Turner 2010"

Latest revision as of 19:31, 27 January 2018

Mark W. Turner. "Companions, Supplements, and the Proliferation of Print in the 1830s." Victorian Periodicals Review 43.2 (Summer 2010) pp. 119-132. Web.

• 119 Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge founded 1826 - significant for the publication of cheap print in C19
  • a self-described "Library of Entertaining and Useful KNowledge"
• like Chambers and the Mechanics Institutes -- cf. Fyfe 2012 for the former; Altick 1957 also handles this in ch. 12 or so
• 120 Charles Knight affiliated and published The Penny Magazine -- cf. Valerie Gray, CK: Educator, Publisher Writer (Ashgate 2006)
  • Knight's prolific cheap publishing - inc pictorial Bibles and pictorial Shakespeare -- "extend[ing] the boundaries of reading in a developing and overlapping network of inexpensive print"
    • within the lower tranche of the market, as St Clair 2004 might say (Knight is adjacent to the post-romantic radical printers he discusses, too, though not politically radical himself)
• Knight's publication of companions and supplements, emergent print forms: "when we look closely at [them] we begin to see not only the complex, knotty relationship of overlapping print forms vying for new readers in a network of print, but also the emergence of new genres and their struggle for survival in the serials market."
• Companion to the Newspaper (1833-7), monthly, 2d, large circulation necessary (what was it?)
• 121 This fluid network of print, in which titles merge, discontinue and spawn ever more titles, challenges us to think more critically about the coherence of any single serial title amid the stuttering rhythms of the marketplace.
• published at a 28 day interval to avoid the "stamp," the taxes on knowledge, on periodical publication and as "an important instrument in the diffusion of sound Political Knowledge"
  • an importantly different rhythm vs newspapers for working people to think about pressing issues
    • I think Altick 1957 has circulation figures for newspapers
• 123 "the idea of supplementarity"
• the Penny Cyclopedia required purchasing supplements -- "The Cyclopedia was organized alphabetically and the [124] supplements continued the sequence of the alphabetical material; so to be without a supplement would be to disrupt the continuity of the sequence."
• 125 The "Supplement," then, isn't exactly supplemental material or a distinct publication so much as it is a regular and numbered part of the sequence of the general title, though with different sort of material contained within its pages. The "Supplement" is both supplemental to the general content of the monthly Companion, and a part of the braoder remit of what the Companion "is," an umbrella title suggesting multiple other forms.
  • There are layers of print here working at different rhythms...but all are presented in sequence as part of a whole numbered title, the Companion to the Newspaper. Understanding the Companion requires understanding the relationship of parts to the whole, but that relationship itself is not fixed; furthermore, and like virtually all serials, the parts could be purchased separately, piecemeal, rendering the idea of a "whole" only ever tentative.
    • Rhythm of publication (and reading) ties to Hughes and Lund 1991
• 127-9 The Printing Machine -- interesting case study (eventually merged with Leigh Hunt's London Journal in 1835)
• 130 Each of these forms, for example, raises significant questions about how we study temporal change, supplementing the monthly cycle with a quarterly publication, say, or interrupting it with a fortnightly, only swiftly to change the pattern, suggests not a serial culture of continuous rhythms, but one of starting and stopping, of stuttering.
  • a serial, material tie to Bowen 2009
• 131 By focusing on a single title like the Companion, perhaps one thing we see is that we need to stop focusing so much on single titles. Or, we need to privilege the single title less, and shift our attention to consider the messy networks of print culture more.