Hughes 2014

Hughes, Linda K. “SIDEWAYS!: Navigating the Material(ity) of Print Culture.” Victorian Periodicals Review 47, no. 1 (2014): 1–30. doi:10.1353/vpr.2014.0011.

Overview

• thesis: understanding Vic print culture as a city (navigable) and web to be moved through laterally allows us to come to terms with the overwhelming material presence of Victorian print brought about by digitization
• methodology:
  • archive: Our Mutual Friend in serial, for one; convergence between Song of the Shirt and A Xmas Carol in print
  • specific period covered:
• evidence/argument:
• relevance/stakes:

Notes

• 1: The task of conceptualizing Victorian print culture and devising methods to navigate its massive materiality has become more pressing because of the digitization of Victorian periodicals.
• As one overture in an ongoing scholarly conversation about material textuality, media history, and cultural studies, I want to suggest the virtues of moving "sideways" in these print and remediated forms. "Sideways," as I use the term includes analysis across genres; texts [2] opening out into each other dialogically in and out of periodicals; sequential rather than "data mining" approaches to reading periodicals; and spatio-temporal convergences in print culture. However, before exploring specific examples of lateral moves, I first consider how we might begin to conceptualize the mass circulation of Victorian print.
• 2 inadequacy of body metaphor
• I find it much more useful to think of print culture in terms of the material form made possible by the industrial revolution, the intensified capital investment following the Peninsular Wars, and the transport system enhanced by new technologies: the Victorian city.
  • In part a metonymic representation: Fleet Street, Cornhill Magazine...
• 3: A city is an incomplete and imperfect model, of course, in part because it is too easily mapped onto London.... Insofar as printed texts initiated and sustained a pervasive dialogism - ideological, political, visual, aesthetic, and commercial, they more closely resembled an interconnected web of discourse than a city.
  • print culture as city and web
• 4: Conceptualizing print as an interactive web is also familiar from Roger Darnton's graphic visualization of a communications circuit (readily accessible on the internet) and from the work of many other Victorianists.
• 5: The promiscuity of print, that is, its accessibility, variety, and multiple partnerings with readers, also drives its capacity to set dialogues in motion and to exceed ideological containment, scholarly modeling, and the control of authorities. The conceptual model of a discursive web is hence also useful for emphasizing what is produced by materiality but often cannot be seen on a given page.
• 7: In approaching Victorian literature in the context of print culture, then, we do well to conceive of poetry and fiction less in terms of high versus popular culture than in terms of the interactivity of genres or media. These texts influenced and shaped each other and in so doing left traces of the pressures exerted by readerships, commercial publishing, and the valences of symbolic capital, gender and sexuality.
• Each shilling installment of the novel moved horizontally from advertisement to literature to advertisement, from printed text claiming readers' sustained attention on the merits of its expressive and aesthetic functions to dust mounts of reified print that treated human creations as objects sold to accumulate wealth.
• 13: I want to conclude by looking at another poem and novel in terms of what they suggest about spatio-temporal convergences in Victorian print culture and the process of investigating material and digital forms of periodicals in our own time. "The Song of the Shirt," by Thomas Hood, and Dickens's A Christmas Carol are rarely discussed in tandem, though they appeared only three days apart and were written in response to the Second Report of the Children's Employment Commission and the news stories it generated. Of course so was EB Browning's "The Cry of the Children," which first appeared in the August 1843 issue of Blackwood's.
• 20: The interactive convergence of "Song of the Shirt" and A Christmas Carol was produced by print but took place off the page. It is possible today to pick up an 1843 volume of Punch or a first edition of A Christmas Carol without thinking of the other work and to miss the kairos of their material production and reciprocal effects. Only by picking up a volume of Punch or examining a digitized version page by page is the Christmas context of both works made clear. It is unfortunately difficult to search for similar affordances in electronic databases.... Only when I ceased relying on a list of hits and examined the Critic page by page did I realize that the poem and a review of A Christmas Carol were published nine pages apart.
• Moving sideways is certainly possible online as well as in printed materials; indeed it usually provides a faster retrieval of findings, not to mention cleaner results, given the disintegration of periodical pages and the heft of many bound volumes. Nor could I have found the flouting of Matthew Arnold's authority on culture in an 1867 sporting magazine without a search engine's help. If such searches reveal the discursive web that characterizes mass print culture, we require alternative methods to understand how print organizes itself locally, materially, and temporally.
• 21: Right now and in the foreseeable future, books do a number of things much better than computers. While digital searches of databases are superior instruments for discovering hitherto unsuspected dialogues among texts emanating from very different formations of class, gender, politics, and symbolic capital, printed periodicals and books are more fruitful vehicles for discovering local organizing principles and spatio-temporal convergences. Both media can of course illuminate such underpinnings of print culture. A disjunctive double metaphor of city and web can serve to remind us that two modalities are possible and desirable in navigating the print archive and that it remains important to preserve print's materiality [echoed in Mussell, perhaps more effectively] even while expanding digital access to the contents of the mass medium that did so much to define and construct Victorian textuality and culture.
• Thomas Carlyle, whose acute grasp of the implications of print and movable type is evident in "Signs of the Times," memorably remarks in "Thoughts on History" that "observations...must be successive, while the things done were often simultaneous...Narrative is linear, Action is solid."
• The vertical hit lists of databases construct radiant images from traces of the solid, thick, and simultaneously layered materials of history, out of which scholars must construct a new narrative line. To explore, identify, and assess the convergences in printed texts, whether in their original or remediated format, I recommend thinking and moving sideways.