Slow Print Reviews

l r Pr nt: L t r r R d l lt r b l z b th r l n nd L t V t r ll r (r v n Pr nt r V r Victorian Studies, Volume 57, Number 1, Autumn 2014, pp. 181-182 (Review) P bl h d b nd n n v r t Pr For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/vic/summary/v057/57.1.vargo.html Access provided by University of California, Davis (15 Jan 2016 19:08 GMT) 181 Slow Print: Literary Radicalism and Late Victorian Print Culture, by Elizabeth Carolyn Miller; pp. ix + 378. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013, $60.00. Recent scholarship has revealed the dynamic interaction between early and mid-nineteenth century literature and the rich periodical culture of British radicalism. Elizabeth Carolyn Miller’s Slow Print builds on the work of Ian Haywood, Anne Janowitz, and others in demonstrating the personal, institutional, and stylistic connections linking socialist and anarchist journals to the most advanced literary movements of the 1880s and 1890s. However, Miller’s project is potentially more surprising. Whereas Romantic poetry and mid-century iction directly engage questions of suffrage and factory reform, the proto-modernist writing of the in de siècle is often understood as eschewing politics by withdrawing into hermetic artworks, niche markets, literary cliques, and abstruse mystical systems. Yet, as Miller’s provocative study sets out to show, these inward turns had their source, at least in part, in the socialist and anarchist critique of the mass-market, capitalist press. Margaret Oliphant remarked in an 1858 review of working-class periodicals that their limsy pages seemed destined to serve as the next day’s kindling. Miller’s E. P. Thompsonian project of recovering this ephemeral canon both enriches our sense of the range of late Victorian writing and reorients how we think about more familiar igures. Naturally enough, William Morris and George Bernard Shaw feature prominently in a study of the overlapping commitments of the political left and experimental writers. More unexpected connections include Annie Besant’s early radicalism (who would have supposed that Fabian socialism, famous for its utilitarianism, partly grew out of spiritualist networks?) and the way the radical press lionized Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895) and Grant Allen’s The Woman Who Did (1895). Moving to the biopolitical realm, radicals defended sexual experimentation and critiques of marriage in terms of free expression, elaborating in a new context a language common to the left press from the early nineteenth century and the struggle to repeal the Stamp Acts. Beyond the careful reconstruction of overlapping milieus and a series of evocative thematic connections, Miller’s case for an alternate genealogy of modernism relies on close readings of plays, novels, poetry, and autobiography set against a wide view of radical print culture. Morris’s anti-novels and Shaw’s rejection of realism, for example, emerged from broad skepticism within the radical press toward the individualistic conventions of marriage plots and upward mobility stories. The late Victorian socialist critique of the realist novel adds an interesting context to the contemporary debate about the novel’s limited capacity to imagine systemic change given its commitment to the middle-class values of liberal individualism and the domestic sphere. Poetry in the radical press was more stylistically conservative than its iction, but Miller’s analysis of Tom Maguire and his lesser-known peers in socialist periodicals inds surprising afinities between radical poetry and more formally innovative verse. Maguire’s use of recognizable rhyme and rhythmic schemes as well as traditional forms, especially songs and ballads, sought to evoke a precapitalist culture while signaling the populist and communal nature of the genre. At the same time, the radical press consistently published parodies of both music hall ditties and more elite verse as a way to “simultaneously engage and critique established poetic tradition” (188). Furthermore, received poetic forms used unironically could act to naturalize radical content. Celebrations of the possibility of AUTUMN 2014 182 political revolution, though couched in accessible forms, looked ahead to the modernist trope of cultural rupture. One of the most exciting aspects of Slow Print is its detailed study of various radical journals, especially Morris’s Commonweal and the Manchester-based Clarion, the most popular socialist paper at the end of the nineteenth century. In The Dynamics of Genre (2009), Dallas Liddle remarks that “formal description of Victorian journalism—its genres, conventions, assumptions, inluences, and implicit values—has still hardly begun” ([University of Virginia Press], 2). Miller’s work demonstrates how looking closely at journalistic practices illuminates other kinds of writing, such as Shaw’s novels which play off the shallow personalization of what Matthew Arnold termed the “New Journalism” (qtd. in Miller 85). The Clarion and Commonweal represented opposite poles of the radical press’s attitude toward mainstream publication. The Clarion, which sold on average 40,000–50,000 copies per issue, borrowed signiicantly from the popular press, emulating the colloquial style of the New Journalism, featuring a sports column, and accepting advertisements. The Commonweal, like most radical journals of the period, eschewed such mass market tactics, relecting the disillusionment with an increasingly consolidated periodical market George Tressell parodied in the Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists (1914) when he showed workers reading The Daily Obscurer and The Weekly Chloroform. Giving up the hope that a large public could be reached outside the capitalist market and that therefore mass print ventures could bring positive social change, radicals at the in de siècle turned to a variety of new media strategies, including an aestheticism which Miller shows extended far beyond Morris’s Kelmscott Press into the Commonweal and other labor and socialist papers. These approaches, which cultivated smaller audiences and helped create “a political and aesthetic counterculture,” form a crucial link between the radical press and early modernism, reminding us “that the protomodernist backlash against mass print culture was also anticapitalist” (3, 7). In The Long Revolution (1961), Raymond Williams describes the ways in which the radical press became a victim of its own success. The weakening and abolition of the Stamp Acts, a central goal of British radicals for ifty years, opened the workingclass market to mainstream publishers who could now print cheap editions without risking imprisonment. Cobbett’s Political Register and the Poor Man’s Guardian were some of England’s irst mass periodicals, but from the 1840s radical papers struggled with stiff competition from well capitalized and respectable papers newly interested in the markets which the radical press itself had revealed and made accessible. Miller’s account ills in the end of Williams’s story. She demonstrates that not only was the radical press forced to change its print strategies in answer to a market dominated by commercial ventures but also that radical writers came to lose faith in a “narrative of print enlightenment” in which unfettered access to print would lead to a democratic and knowledgeable public (261). However, Miller tends to gloss over how the radical press had grappled from at least the 1850s with its diminished status and how it had always been aware of the threat posed by competition with improving and religious magazines or other political papers. The fascinating developments Miller describes in the 1880s and 1890s were less a rupture than the culmination of a long-term process. Gregory Vargo New York University VICTORIAN STUDIES / VOLUME 57, NO. 1 270 nin eteenth-century literatu re administration and the more metaphorical form of it that anchors most of his arguments. That said, Geopolitics and the Anglophone Novel is nonetheless an important study, not the least because it raises useful questions about the role of literature in helping us to understand the dramatic process of social transformation in which much of the world finds itself in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The works under examination here do suggest—quite rightly—that we cannot fully understand this process of social transformation without the aid of literature. The Leavisite argument is compelling, finally. Moreover, this book joins an important discussion we are currently having about the role and status of ‘‘world literature’’ in a postcolonial era. Daniel Bivona Arizona State University E li z a be t h C a ro l yn M i l le r , Slow Print: Literary Radicalism and Late Victorian Print Culture. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013. Pp. xii þ 378. $60. I s a b e l H o f m e y r , Gandhi’s Printing Press: Experiments in Slow Reading. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013. Pp. x þ 218. $24.95. It is rare enough that any single new book revises our understanding about how print culture shapes and is shaped by the intellectual and ideological currents of its day. Now along come two books that study different places (Britain and South Africa); disparate personalities (William Morris and Mohandas Gandhi); and divergent left-wing politics (internationalist socialism and Tolstoyan fledgling nationalism). Each proposes, however, what might be called a ‘‘slow text’’ theory. Before there was slow food, there was ‘‘slow print’’ (Elizabeth Carolyn Miller’s account of Morris at Commonweal and at Kelmscott Press) and ‘‘slow reading’’ (Isabel Hofmeyr on Gandhi’s printing ventures in South Africa between 1898 and 1914). As the circulation of words and even (as Lynda Nead has recently shown) images speeded up, significant and influential figures on the left proposed putting the brakes on. It is a wonderfully suggestive way of understanding many transformations of printmediated public realm between 1890 and World War I, and these two books, each remarkable achievements in their own right, form together a happy and inspiring syzygy. Miller and Hofmeyr offer reviews 271 slightly different accounts of these industrial slowdowns, but they agree on the main lineaments. Around 1900, left-wing thinkers sought and sometimes found ways to move within the speedy world of industrial production, but to develop ways of impeding its rapidity and promoting a distinct kind of reflection. In different ways (as described below), Miller and Hofmeyr each underscore the elective affinity that existed between political and aesthetic radicalism, and offer new ways of thinking about how formal innovation can bespeak or engender new ways of thinking about political possibilities. Miller’s Slow Print: Literary Radicalism and Late Victorian Print Culture explores various ways in which the late-Victorian radical left sought political and aesthetic alternatives to the free flow of (commercialized) information and entertainment that by the end of the century defined the print-mediated liberal public sphere. The radical left was being drowned out by the end of the century not by censorship, but by clamor. In a sense, then, radicalism’s worst enemy was the press’s untrammeled freedom to print whatever it thought the public would buy. This is a surprising observation and at first glance even an ironic one, given the strong association between British radicalism and the campaign for ‘‘print enlightenment’’ earlier in the nineteenth century. Miller’s key question, however, is what happens once the British left’s enemy is no longer the controlling state. Instead, just as John Stuart Mill had warned in On Liberty, by the 1870s the coercive force of ‘‘Society’’ as a preserver of the status quo had grown to surpass that of the state. Socialist, anarchists, communists, and other opponents of class-divided liberal polity faced a promiscuous, market-driven publication model that did not silence political dissent, but simply drowned it out in a raucous and commercially motivated chorus. Like Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge (in their monumental Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere [Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1993]), Miller in the first half of Slow Print is interested in exploring the alternative ‘‘anti-public’’ realms within which a more emancipatory sort of writing can circulate. Miller explores the bitter realization, among radical and socialists, that the ‘‘free press and free print’’ maxims of the earlier radical age had little relevance in a society where not the state but the commercial organs of publication exercised dominance over the circulation of ideas and of art. Even the Chartists came to realize that they lived in an age when ‘‘speed was all’’ (p. 53), and were unable to find a way to transmute their ‘‘free print’’ radicalism into winning moves in the literary marketplace: witness their long unhappy involvement with 272 nin eteenth-century literatu re the mid-century popular press and the turn that Chartist writing took toward apolitical melodrama in the 1850s. So, faced with that kind of exclusion by profusion, what were radicals to do? Morris’s poignant description of the ‘‘desolate freedom’’ that Commonweal had found outside the realm of widely circulating periodicals suggests the set of left-wing innovations that Miller sets out to explore: forms that avoided ‘‘selling out’’ partly by avoiding successful selling altogether. As previous scholars have noted, this critique of mass media readily lent itself to elitist snobbery: the Fabian disdain for working-class culture and its mandarin implications are clear. Without simply being a tub-thumper for every socialist thinker, however, Miller mounts an able defense of the very Ruskin-inflected line of thought that made thinkers like George Bernard Shaw, William Morris, and various socialist periodical publishers attempt to carve out a distinct realm where a progressive ethos might flourish, a little space apart. The title Slow Print brilliantly showcases Miller’s analysis of three modes that developed on the left to counter this: alternative periodical culture, artisanal book production, and theatrical/textual innovation (the former two exemplified by William Morris in various stages of his career, the last by Shaw). On the analogy with the ‘‘slow food movement,’’ ‘‘slow print’’ implies that print can somehow claim an alternative region from which it offers a new way of looking at the world (a rival realism, perhaps, a utopian vision or even a naturalist satire on bourgeois complacency about current economic modes). The book’s first half accordingly details a genealogy of the ways in which such conscious resistance evolve: not only the conscious archaism and slowed-down artisanal production of Kelmscott Press, but also, in the 1870s and 1880s, by the creation of a hived-off radical ‘‘anti public’’ that shared socialist magazines like Commonweal, or summoned into being by the early socialist novels of Shaw (first serialized in other socialist magazines). Miller charts ways in which socialists or other radicals forged print alternatives by conjuring up utopias (Morris’s John Ball and News from Nowhere); by newspapers that strove to present their print instantiations as mere traces of an originary orality that united the people in ways that London journals never could; by novels that reached for innovative political aims and hence renounced normative bourgeois modes of sympathy generation (hence chapter 2 interestingly attempts to rescue Shaw’s early socialist novels from obscurity). Among the new ways of bringing the left print culture of the day to light, Miller discerns evolving forms of political propaganda that can seem reviews 273 strangely contemporary; socialist magazines that make a point, for example, by ‘‘juxtapos[ing] a starving girl against the backdrop of government ministers toasting champagne’’ (p. 199). There is more than a hint of Sergei Eisenstein’s montage theory in the radical print strategies that Miller describes: Battleship Potemkin’s flickering pictures of rotting meat and rich officers are not all that far away. Miller’s book begins with Morris’s experiments, bringing his socialist newspaper Commonweal (often pegged as interested in politics to the exclusion of aesthetics, and hence indifferent to matters of form and publication) together with the Kelmscott Press books (so often dismissed as only aesthetically minded, hence implicitly politically quietist). Partially by tracing the impact that Kelmscott had on later writers—Shaw certainly, but also a range of socialist newspapers that altered their typography and layout in tribute to Kelmscott experiments—Miller tracks disparate efforts to generate a new kind of what might be called semi-closed readership. This semi-closed readership was open to those who were willing to commit time and energy—though not money; Commonweal sold for a penny—so as to enter into a living community that is understood as linked by the printed word, but not constituted by it. Hence traces of orality, Miller suggests, were crucial for Commonweal and Kelmscott alike. Finally, toward the very end of the century, stepping into the space that Henrik Ibsen had opened up, there is radical drama. Miller links together in compelling detail the revival of Percy Bysshe Shelley (a celebrated ‘‘private staging of the Cenci’’ in 1886 is a crucial moment for her) and the rise of Shavian political drama, which reflects on and draws attention to the fact that government regulations held that the living word of a play actually performed were considerably more dangerous than its mere circulation in print. In fact, Shaw himself aimed to do for theater what Morris had done for the printed book with the Kelmscott Press—a truly fascinating link that speaks volumes about how the radicals of the fin de siècle understood that narrowcast publication/promulgation of artworks might have the power to change minds that would be unaltered by simple exposure to words adrift within a chockablock print realm that offered not so much enlightenment as pure print tumult. If Kelmscott or Shaw’s blue book theater could offer only a weakly audible signal, that might nonetheless be preferable to entering into popular media that offered, in Kittler’s terms, noise without any discernible signal. The second half of Miller’s book tacks to explore three situations in which the left’s association with ‘‘print enlightenment’’ is tested in more disparate ways: schematically, by ‘‘free-love,’’ by the challenge of 274 nin eteenth-century literatu re developing a poetic common parlance of the left, and by the potentially liberatory role played by Theosophism and related mystical movements. These cases, it is worth noting, do not neatly fall into Miller’s rubric of ‘‘slow print.’’ The poetic forms discussed in a wellresearched chapter on radical and socialist magazines are traditional enough that they lend themselves to rapid assimilation by a dedicated working-class readership (Miller shows, for example, that Walt Whitman was frequently praised and described but almost never quoted or reprinted). By contrast, the sex-positive radical tradition that Miller describes (standing up for dissidents like Edward Carpenter) in fact aligns well with older ideals of ‘‘print enlightenment.’’ Finally, the mystical texts that Miller discusses are not readily parsable as part of ‘‘print enlightenment,’’ but that is principally because they are by nature profoundly anti-enlightenment generally. That does not mean, however, that they partake of the ‘‘slow print’’ dissidence that Miller maps in Commonweal, Kelmscott, and Shaw’s evolving radical relationship with the periodical press and the theater. If Miller has many fish to fry, then Isabel Hofmeyr’s Gandhi’s Printing Press: Experiments in Slow Reading has only one. Mohandas K. Gandhi, she sets out to show, was a true slow-print genius, quick to realize and explore the possibilities of delay and bafflement that might be woven into a print culture principally defined by speed and discontinuity. Hofmeyr marvelously parses Gandhi’s sly assertion (regarding redacted ‘‘clipping’’ pages of his newspaper Indian Opinion) that the concision and redaction demanded in telegraphic condensations of the news might be a ‘‘distilling’’ of the content of a longer work rather than a dilution: ‘‘Condensation,’’ writes Hofmeyr, ‘‘becomes an art form that produces a thoughtful or an ‘ideaful’ text that in turn requires a reader who is thoughtful in both senses of the word: exercising careful deliberation and extending sympathetic regard to the text’’ (p. 70). That is, Gandhi set out to make more from less, to mandate slow contemplation in a world that seemed to demand only rapid page-views. While Miller works her way methodically through several different instances of alternative configurations for producing radical print (or performance), Hofmeyr’s approach is more intensively microscopic: her story is only about Indian Opinion and the pamphlets that spun off from it, printed mainly by communal (or grudgingly paid) labor at its base at Phoenix, outside Durban. In its attention to the way in which the reader is constituted both as present and as absent, both as a ‘‘true patriot’’ and as diasporic and hence only vaguely known, Hofmeyr brilliantly uncovers the mixture of news and of redacted philosophizing that reviews 275 Indian Opinion (surely not uniquely?) published in an attempt to make a parochial provincial audience feel part of a complex global news network—but to feel part of it partially by training its readers to step back from the flurry and hurry of news and to digest it, to teach themselves a kind of contemplative voraciousness that allowed a reader both to swallow the news and to resist being swallowed by it, which is what the immediacy of simple daily mindless reading would produce. In one sense, Hofmeyr’s book is unabashedly a thick description of Gandhi’s printing press at Phoenix, where by way of clippings from other papers, poems, and carefully trimmed editorials (space in the paper was always at a great premium) Gandhi sought to generate a sense of a new print-bound community, a ‘‘colonial Indian’’ world in which his Tolstoyan ideals would come to serve as the basis for a reconfigured not-quite-nationalist solidarity. Yet in another sense Gandhi’s Printing Press is a launching-pad for Hofmeyr, with great elegance and economy, to explore many of the ideas that she has been developing since her revisionary account of how Christian evangelical ideals got globalized, in her The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of ‘‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’’ (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2004). As in her eye-opening article ‘‘Universalizing the Indian Ocean’’ (PMLA, 125 [2010], 721–29), Hofmeyr in Gandhi’s Printing Press seeks to remind readers (in ways that resist the too-quick paraphrase a review like this one has to attempt) that to think of oneself as embroiled in a global diaspora is not always to feel ‘‘peripheral’’; it is also to feel the emancipatory capacity that creative redescription can bring, and to be aware of the ironies involved in a genealogy of ‘‘Indian nationalism’’ that is bred in South Africa by way of a motley crew’s encounter with pacifist texts from Russia, Massachusetts, and who knows where else. Slowness is not the only crucial category for Hofmeyr, who strives to account for many competing currents within the print world where Gandhi’s political thinking came to maturity. In important groundclearing work early on, she documents the power of what she calls ‘‘print laborists’’ (‘‘men who attempted to define printing as part of white racial privilege’’ [p. 34]) and explores the complex mélange of racial stereotypes and assumptions that at times pitted Indian and African nationalists or radicals against one another as much as against their imperial rulers. She reconstructs portions of Gandhi’s employment practices—showing that Zulu women whom Gandhi never mentioned supplied paid physical labor to the printing press—and by exploring the sometimes cool relations between Gandhi and the African nationalist printing press run by John Dube next door to Phoenix 276 nin eteenth-century literatu re at Ohlange Institute (p. 39). Such complexity—of racial thought, and of Gandhi’s interest in comparing ‘‘civilization’’ in its Indian and European incarnations—shed a sidelight on Gandhi’s thought experiments and his commitment to instilling in his readers a new kind of ‘‘slow reading.’’ Such historical nuance, however, does not diminish Hofmeyr’s sense of Gandhi’s urgent, complex attempt to train (slowly to train) readers to notice within a text what key elements deserve to be brought out, underscored, amplified, and pondered. Taken together, then, Miller’s and Hofmeyr’s books have the potential to reshape our understanding of what kinds of alternative polities could be brought to life within a print-dominated public realm that had threatened (as John Stuart Mill saw it in 1859) to produce a stiflingly uniform sociability. They also suggest fruitful lines of research that might be undertaken on right-wing dissidents and their printing ventures, as well as on divergent religious and spiritual thinking of the sort Miller briefly explores at the end of Slow Print. In exploring various kinds of ‘‘slowness’’ associated with an ever-faster print realm, Miller and Hofmeyr uncover not head-in-the-sand ‘‘delaying tactics’’ but genuine formal experiments with various kinds of cognitive braking, so as to engage readers in a different kind of thought that would, they hoped, produce a new sort of political awareness. Miller chronicles what those techniques looked like from the outside, but Hofmeyr takes a remarkable further step, unpacking the internal hermeneutics of a ‘‘Gandhian theory of text’’ (p. 1). By her (brilliant) reading, Indian Opinion’s innovative response to ‘‘speed, summary, and discontinuity as ineluctable conditions of modern reading’’ (p. 158) is to acknowledge the speeded-up circulation of text, but to promote various baffles and impedances that make the reader ponder and contemplate both newsworthy events and the redacted, condensed philosophical insights that are also folded into the journal. Miller shows what a new print culture’s logistics and printed surfaces looked like; Hofmeyr offers some very persuasive readings of what kind of thinking such a culture aimed at producing, and she connects that thinking to Gandhi’s work turning Henry David Thoreau and Leo Tolstoy into inspirations for anticolonial satyagraha. The ‘‘slowness’’ that both Miller and Hofmeyr discover is no mere truism about left-wing self-insulation, a proleptic avatar of the hippie ‘‘drop out’’ culture of the 1960s. Rather it is a radical move within radicalism, because within both Gandhi’s and Morris’s milieu, radical politics seemed to go hand-in-hand with the glories and virtues of a free press culture defined first and foremost by rapid access to a mass readership. What this slowness suggests is that in various ways reviews 277 radicals on the left no longer saw their struggle, as nearly all had earlier in the nineteenth century, as a fierce struggle against the state for access to an untrammeled ‘‘marketplace of ideas.’’ Instead, in different ways Morris and Gandhi (and their respective co-workers in their various experimental small-press endeavors) sought to create, by way of very carefully planned-out new print products, protected spaces, almost (though not quite) anti-public realms in which radical ideas could germinate and selectively build a constituency. In almost every particular, the stories that Miller and Hofmeyr have to tell are distinct. In their general outline, though, Slow Print and Gandhi’s Printing Press tell a new story about the countercultural experiments that radicals undertook by exploiting wrinkles, peculiar and often transient vectors of flow within a variegated public realm. John Plotz Brandeis University l Pr nt: L t r r R d l lt r b l z b th r l n nH nd L t V t r ll r (r v n Pr nt d Victorian Periodicals Review, Volume 46, Number 3, Fall 2013, pp. 426-428 (Review) P bl h d b Th J hn H p n DOI: 10.1353/vpr.2013.0027 n v r t Pr For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/vpr/summary/v046/46.3.haywood.html Access provided by University of California, Davis (15 Jan 2016 18:45 GMT) 426 Victorian Periodicals Review 46:3 Fall 2013 visit with the editor of the Academy, Charles Appleton, in Oxford (75), and she examines George Augustus Simcox’s review of Robert Lytton’s work and Frederic Harrison’s obituary of Lewes, both of which appeared in the Academy (107–8, 127). She identifies Nannie Smith and Isabella Blythe as journalists who contributed to the English Woman’s Journal (93). In addition, McCormack makes interesting but rather random comments about several of Eliot’s periodical articles, such as “Woman in France: Madame de Sablé,” which was written for the Westminster Review in 1854 (16–17). McCormack also provides detailed commentary on Eliot’s poem “Agatha” (48–63) and shares various incidents concerning The Spanish Gypsy, such as the fact that Cross’s eldest sister sang a song from it during one of their visits to Weybridge (72, 138, 139) and that Lewes “shamelessly” publicized it (28, 61). However, in spite of the fact that Eliot and Lewes enjoyed the “remoteness” of the location at Bad Peterstal, which “distanced” them from the reviews of The Spanish Gypsy (54), “news of the reception of George Eliot’s major venture into poetry came as if swirling up the deep valley of the River Rench as Lewes and Blackwood corresponded about the questionable reviews” (55). In spite of McCormack’s extensive research and many insightful observations, her informalities—like “swirling up”—are rather jarring. A few of the numerous examples include the observation that women who appeared at the Priory were “a mixed bag” (7); Lewes “trotted out” some of his liveliest prose in his notes of invitation (8); Haight ignores “a slew” of the regular visitors (8), even though he “scatters a few lists of guests here and there” (9); Buchanan “lets loose” with criticism (9); and on one Sunday, Lewes “wailed in his diary” that “No one called!” (66). However, even if her narrative is rather uneven, her tone throughout is enthusiastic and energetic, and her observations are definitely thought-provoking. Constance M. Fulmer Pepperdine University Elizabeth Carolyn Miller, Slow Print: Literary Radicalism and Late Victorian Print Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), pp. ix + 378, $60/£54.95 cloth. The entry on “Socialist Newspapers” in Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor’s Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism (2007) tells us that approximately 250 socialist periodicals appeared in the years 1880 to 1900. Although many of these publications were “infrequent and irregular,” this impressive output is testimony to the socialist revival of the late Victorian period and its radical faith in the power of print culture. This wave of liter- book reviews 427 ary production represented the latest stage in a tradition of revolutionary print politics that originated in the pamphleteering of the English Civil War and that nourished the democratic struggles of the proceeding centuries. As seen in the unstamped press of the 1830s and the Chartist movement that succeeded it, the free press became both the vehicle and symbol of freedom. However, as Miller shows in her compendious new study of fin de siècle literary radicalism, this unshakeable faith in print enlightenment took a very serious knock at the end of the nineteenth century. Partly the victim of its own campaigns against legal and economic restrictions on freedom of expression (political and religious censorship, the stamp duty, and other “taxes on knowledge”), radical print culture found itself questioning and resisting the mass-circulation press and popular literary culture that had emerged in the last decades of the Victorian period. Far from producing the social, economic, and political emancipation of the British people, it seemed to many socialists and labour-movement leaders that the “free” press had simply become a powerful cultural tool of industrial-capitalist ideology and reprehensible modernity. The image of the world portrayed in the mass-produced press was nothing less than a fast-food diet of illusory consumerist freedoms, dubious sensationalism, and superficial knowledge. For those wanting a complete break with this dominant ideology (and whose critique of cultural debasement would be remarkably durable on the political left), the answer was no longer to try to outgun the mainstream press but instead to retreat to a position of “slow print,” Miller’s coinage for a new aesthetic of niche publication that literary history usually associates with elitist modernism. From this marginal yet righteous cultural base, socialist print culture could marshal its own troops and (in Engels’s words) attempt to “unsettle the optimism of the bourgeois world” by proposing an alternative vision of “reality” both within and beyond literature. For Miller, the paradox of an anti-print print culture was enabling rather than obstructive, as it inspired socialist editors and writers to find ways to transcend the limitations of commercialization, atomization, and alienation. One response to this dilemma—the utopianism and aestheticism associated with William Morris—is of course very well known, but the virtue of Miller’s book is its focus on the largely forgotten context of socialist print culture from which Morris and other familiar writers such as George Bernard Shaw emerged. It is no surprise to find that Morris is the subject of the first chapter, as this can most convincingly showcase Miller’s methodology. Shaw’s socialist fiction and drama occupy chapters 2 and 3; chapter 4 looks at some of the poetry that appeared in the periodicals; chapter 5 delves into the mystical world of theosophy; and the final chapter argues that “sex radicalism” became the new marker of liberty. Other themes and case studies could have been chosen from the mass of periodicals under review (whole 428 Victorian Periodicals Review 46:3 Fall 2013 chapters could have been devoted to Clarion and Justice), but this is work for future scholars. (Deborah Mutch’s English Socialist Periodicals, 1880– 1900: A Reference Source [2007] is the obvious starting point for all forays into this region.) The discussion of Morris provides some striking examples of new insights to be gleaned from Miller’s approach: few modern readers of News from Nowhere are likely to know that the original story appeared in Morris’s journal Commonweal interleaved with engravings by Walter Crane, the “artist of socialism.” As Miller points out, these images had two functions: they provided the visual evidence for the socialist vision described in the literary narrative, and they made the periodical itself into a “utopian print space, severed chronologically and spatially from the historical present” (46). The thirty-plus illustrations in Slow Print are extremely valuable for precisely this reason, and this reviewer would have welcomed a few more, as they often show the non-elitist radical investment in visual beauty. They also provide access to obscure sources that are badly in need of digitization—it is to be hoped that books like this one will spur the online recovery of socialist periodicals. Students of nineteenth-century periodicals will no doubt use this book selectively, while those with a particular interest in socialism will find much new information and many leads for further investigation. Some of the moments that stood out for this reviewer include: the Shelley Society’s performance of The Cenci in 1886, an attempt to liberate this “martyr for the cause of free print” from the confines of the page; the discussion of the poetry of the Leeds working-class socialist and union activist Tom Maguire (first celebrated by E. P. Thompson but here brought alive through generous excerpts and facsimiles); and the account of the intriguing “free love” journal the Adult (1897–99), deliciously subtitled “A Journal for the Free Discussion of Tabooed Topics.” The latter emerged from the “University Press” that also published Havelock Ellis’s Sexual Inversion and that predictably faced persecution. This in turn led to the setting up of the “Free Press Defence Committee,” whose members included Crane, Shaw, Grant Allen, Edward Carpenter, and the Social Democratic Federation leaders Henry Hyndman and Harry Quelch. Even though many socialist editors, including Morris and Hyndman, were reluctant to make sex (as opposed to women’s political and social rights) an issue in their periodicals, journals like the Atom show that socialist print culture was at the cutting edge of modernism’s “biopolitical” redefinition of subjectivity. But this also reminds us that the radical press had often been at the forefront of social controversy. After all, it was in the pages of Richard Carlile’s persecuted periodicals of the 1820s that birth control was first openly discussed. Ian Haywood University of Roehampton, London Novel Fin de Siècle Socialist Aesthetes in Utopia elizabeth carolyn miller, Slow Print: Literary Radicalism and Late Victorian Print Culture (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2013), pp. 392, cloth, $60.00. Elizabeth Carolyn Miller’s monograph treats late Victorian literary radicalism, a relatively neglected area, with an inventive paradigm of anticapitalist or ‘‘slow’’ print culture. Viewing literature as not autonomous but constrained by the power of print culture has been a critical procedure for some time now, at least since Marshall McLuhan, Raymond Williams, and Walter Ong. The History of the Book scholarship as well as Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983) have made ‘‘print culture’’ a rich area of study. Miller is working within this disciplinary field, and her own approach yields interesting results. Other welcome features of her study are the inclusion of the radical periodical, small press, and private theater as types of print culture worthy of close attention; also welcome is her rather catholic sense of what is meant by ‘‘radical,’’ which entails middle and working class as well as Fabians, Marxists, anarchists, and advocates of free love. After a substantial introduction, there are six full chapters and a brief conclusion. The more than thirty pages of notes provide material that probably could have gone into the main text, but few readers are going to complain about the effort to secure the finer points of historical information in a separate section. For monographs today, this is a little on the longish side and could have used some pruning, but its length is due in part to its historical intentions, to give readers a detailed description of what will be for many unfamiliar literary territory, such as periodicals like the Commonweal (William Morris) and the Clarion (Robert Blatchford), writers like Tom Maguire and Julia Dawson, and radical movements that include such ideological commitments as theosophy. While Morris and George Bernard Shaw, who receive considerable attention in the book, are hardly obscure figures, Slow Print brings to our attention a great deal of new material. The introduction situates the argument in terms of the Ruskinian antimodernist critique of Enlightenment liberalism, the repudiation of the realist novel as a vehicle for radical expression, and the embrace of the theater as a site for communal and socialist concerns. Miller points to the coterie and small press as cultural entities that are not tied inexorably to elitist early modernism; rather, they function too as anticapitalist reactions against mass culture and the ‘‘express’’ production of news with its dependence on speed. The socialist effort was to ‘‘opt out of the capitalist consumer culture by participating in alternative leisure and social networks as well as alternative print networks’’ (25). The first chapter, ‘‘No News Is Good News: William Morris’s Utopian Print,’’ describes a socialist aestheticism expressed in Commonweal and Kelmscott Press. Rather than dismiss or patronizingly marginalize Morris’s utopianism, Miller follows Fredric Jameson in reading the radical separation from ‘‘present-day reality’’ as revolutionary, a pointed and valuable move away from liberal and progressive politics (37). The inexpensive Commonweal took an ultra-leftist line for its rather small readership of 2,500 to 3,000: incremental reforms were not worth the effort, so voting and trade unionism were distractions from the apocalyptic transition to the socialist future. The same uncompromising approach was taken by the Kelmscott Press, which used preindustrial methods to produce very expensive and Published by Duke University Press Novel 156 NOVEL MAY 2015 exquisitely beautiful editions. In both ventures, Morris took on ‘‘realism’’—realistic politics, the aesthetic norms of realism—as obstacles to creative expression and revolutionary change. Miller follows critics like Jerome McGann, who admire Morris’s artfully constructed Kelmscott print texts that foreground textuality, and she notes but does not agree with critics like E. P. Thompson, who found the Kelmscott project to be unrelated to socialist politics (54). If the ‘‘process of production is as politically significant as the product’’ (57), Kelmscott then resists the modernizing practices of automation and engineered efficiency (57) and helps sustain an ‘‘anticapitalist counterculture’’ (58). Morris’s embrace of preindustrial oral culture stimulates a reminder of Jacques Derrida’s critique of such antiwriting gestures (59), but Morris’s utopian narratives clearly ‘‘debase’’ writing and imagine an oral culture rich enough to dispense with newspapers and most books (75). Few other socialists carry the war against bourgeois interiority as fulsomely as does Morris. The second chapter, ‘‘The Black and White Veil: Shaw, Mass Print Culture, and the Antinovel Turn,’’ shows how Shaw’s novels participate in the socialist rejection of the realist novel. Bourgeois, dependent on plots of inheritance and marriage, the realist novel was both nationalistic and individualistic. Typical of the late nineteenth-century bourgeois novel was the ‘‘slum novel,’’ in which the poor were objects of observation rather than agents of change (91). The utopian novel (Morris, Edward Bellamy) aimed to represent social totality and spurned realism’s rounded, psychologically deep characters. Shaw’s socialist novels thematized the novel’s own weaknesses as a literary form morbidly dependent on the ills of capitalism and advanced instead toward prototheatrical expression—flat characters, dialogue, polemic. The third chapter, ‘‘Living Language: Print Drama, Live Drama, and the Socialist Theatrical Turn,’’ explores the three key dramatists of the 1880s and 1890s: Shaw, Henrik Ibsen, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. The lattermost author of The Cenci is surprising to find here, but Miller fully justifies the play’s importance to the socialist movement. The play was not permitted a public performance in London until 1922, more than a century after Shelley wrote it. The private performance in 1886 organized by the Shelley Society was largely from the efforts of socialists like Shaw, who resisted the efforts to turn Shelley into something less radical and threatening to established opinion (Shaw wrote ‘‘Shelley’s Socialism’’ to bring the poet within the socialist canon). Shaw also sought the private theatrical performance of his own plays to circumvent censorship but also to avoid a mass public for which he had mostly contempt. For Shaw, the Ibsen-influenced theater was the appropriate remedy for the failures of the socialist novel. The ‘‘collective space of the theater’’ displaced ‘‘the liberal space of print’’ (130). Shaw’s plays were turned into print with the addition of long prefaces and appendixes, despite his conviction that print culture was not the appropriate vehicle for socialism (141). An especially effective part of this chapter is putting together The Cenci with Mrs. Warren’s Profession and Ibsen’s Ghosts, as the inexpressible sexual transgression allegorizes a social contradiction of great importance (158–66). Chapter 4, ‘‘Measured Revolution: Poetry and the Late Victorian Radical Press,’’ concentrates on the poetry of the socialist press. The poetry of the Commonweal was largely in ballad form and perpetuated uncritically the simulation of voice and oral tradition, something that has been deconstructed thoroughly by now. The formally innovative poetry of Edward Carpenter and Walt Whitman was not entirely neglected in the socialist periodicals, but the socialist approach to poetry preferred the traditional verse forms—four-beat and rhymed—and opted to promote democratic expression rather than literary quality (184). The Published by Duke University Press Novel SCRIVENER SOCIALIST AESTHETES IN UTOPIA 157 idea of the folk and the fantasy of communal expression were the socialist answers to the individualistic poetics of genius. ‘‘Many voices joining into one was obviously an impressive metaphor for collective action’’ (198). Tom Maguire, who died at twenty-nine years old, is Miller’s example of the socialist movement poet. Miller highlights the poetry’s focus on women workers to indicate Maguire’s advanced political views. The literary aspects of Maguire’s oeuvre are not extensively treated, however. Chapter 5, ‘‘Enlightenment beyond Reason: Theosophical Socialism and Radical Print Culture,’’ concentrates on Annie Besant and Alfred R. Orage. A ‘‘scientific socialist’’ might scorn the antirationalist mysticism of these particular radicals, but Miller approvingly cites Terry Eagleton, who views the ‘‘high-rationalist subject of Mill or Middlemarch’’ as imploding ‘‘into Madame Blavatsky and Dorian Gray’’ (225). Theosophy then carries out the radical, cosmopolitan opposition to jingoistic nationalism with a different kind of universalism, ‘‘recognizing the unity of all life’’ (226). Besant, as she transitioned from militant advocacy of birth control to theosophy, claimed ‘‘print as a mystical, atemporal, even reincarnational medium’’ (235), quite remote from the rationalistic, transparent medium of individualistic liberalism. This revolt against scientific rationality reminds one of the Romantic William Blake’s excoriations of Isaac Newton and John Locke. Homologous with the intellectual difficulty of high modernism, the esoteric theosophy of Besant was ‘‘another version of the antidemocratic response’’—also in Shaw and the Fabians—‘‘to mass print and mass culture’’ (242–43). Miller nicely illustrates the paradoxical and contradictory places in which the fin de siècle radicals often found themselves between their radicalism and their intellectual elitism. A good example was when Orage promoted a one-shilling edition of Marx’s Capital’s first nine chapters: these chapters would have been at least as esoteric and intellectually intricate as anything in the theosophical canon, or in Friedrich Nietzsche, or in Edward Carpenter’s socialist poetry (248). It was a text like Blatchford’s Merrie England that effectively popularized a version of socialism, but Blatchford’s radical critics found his version more popular and nationalistic than rigorously socialistic. The final chapter, ‘‘Free Love, Free Print: Sex Radicalism, Censorship, and the Biopolitical Turn,’’ notes that sex radicalism was the center of a ‘‘waning, yet enduring radical cause of free print’’ that had to cope with censorship (258). Two novels of 1895, Grant Allen’s The Woman Who Did and Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, inspired and set some of the terms for the sex radicalism of the time. Edith Ellis’s free love novel Seaweed: A Cornish Idyll (1898) ‘‘puts the language of enlightened sexual free thought in the mouths of her working characters, not in the mouths of the middle-class reformers’’ (275), as the strategy implicitly acknowledged the necessity and difficulty of challenging working-class sexual conservatism. A fascinating advocate for sex radicalism was Julia Dawson, who wrote for Blatchford’s Clarion. Dawson’s column appealed directly to working-class women and their cultural and sexual issues, even promoting a matchmaker ‘‘agency’’ so that socialist women could marry socialist men. The conclusion challenges the ‘‘dominant critical paradigm for early twentieth-century literary culture,’’ namely, modernist studies (299). One could also cite the example of a Marxist critic like Theodor Adorno, who wrote about the intellectually challenging poet Stefan George and the modernist novelist Marcel Proust because their formally innovative work revealed more about the social contradictions than did popular culture, for which he had much contempt. The texts that Miller deals with reveal all kinds of social contradictions, including the decentering and fracturing of the bourgeois subject. Miller admirably refrains Published by Duke University Press Novel 158 NOVEL MAY 2015 from taking cheap shots at some of her more vulnerable radicalisms—the Fabians and their class prejudice, Shaw’s post–World War I outrageous politics, the theosophists’ proto–New Age (I’m sorry) nuttiness—in order to keep her study properly historical. It is so difficult to resist the impulse to use the past to make us look so smart now. Miller’s archive of texts is fascinating and provocative as well as fresh, and hopefully she will not be the only scholar to mine its riches. michael scrivener, Wayne State University DOI 10.1215/00295132-2860533 * * * michael scrivener is professor of English at Wayne State University and has published a number of books, including Radical Shelley (1982), Seditious Allegories (2001), Poetry and Reform (1992), Cosmopolitan Ideal in the Age of Revolution and Reaction, 1776–1832 (2007), and most recently, Jewish Representation in British Literature, 1780–1840: After Shylock (2011). Published by Duke University Press Media History, 2014 Vol. 20, No. 1, 103–106 BOOK REVIEWS Downloaded by [University of California Davis] at 10:56 15 January 2016 SLOW PRINT: LITERARY RADICALISM AND LATE VICTORIAN PRINT CULTURE Elizabeth Carolyn Miller, 2013 Stanford, Stanford University Press 378 pp., ISBN 978-0804784085 (hbk £51.95) Writer and birth control campaigner Julia Dawson produced a women’s column for the Clarion, the best selling of late Victorian radical papers. In keeping with the tricks of their New Journalism style, she aimed at affecting a personal, individual tone to build her relationship with her readers. Yet Dawson chose to write under a pen name and thus in fact detached herself from her audience. At the same time the disruptive distance between the time of writing and the time of reading ‘was often a source of complaint’ (290). This contradiction of a writer employing a print persona whilst at the same time being frustrated by print’s distancing effect is one of many contradictions Elizabeth Carolyn Miller finds within the late Victorian radical press. Slow Print explores literary radicalism’s response to the speed and profusion of capital fuelled print production at the end of the nineteenth century and the ways in which some of its contradictions prepared the ground from which modernism began to emerge. Whilst Miller does not wish to reduce the radical press to ‘an unsung herald of modernism’ (299), she successfully reveals the part that its rejection of capitalist modes of print production played. Miller’s research extends into many corners of the copious fin de siècle radical press from the first major English socialist paper, Justice, to modernism-shaping New Age, taking in, for example, the 10 issue run of The Alarm and the free love journal The Adult on the way. She coordinates this wealth of periodical material beginning where one might expect with William Morris, Commonweal and the Kelmscott Press. Some of the most obvious contradictions Miller explores arise in her discussion of Morris; she raises the question of how a socialist could object to the overproduction of print, and later reflects on Morris’s placing of value on orality in his utopian novels, novels whose very existence points to orality’s insufficiency. Within this most extensive of Slow Print’s chapters, Miller tackles these problems through careful and clear drawing of Morris’s complicated socialist print politics. George Bernard Shaw and the socialist theatrical turn of the 1880s and 1890s present further paradoxes. When it came to drama, print reproduction was both problem and advantage; it represented capitalist mass production but equally afforded accessibility. Shaw wanted his plays printed ‘for the sake of the unhappy prisoners of the home’ (133). Miller finds Shaw merging print and theatre, which moved him to tackle their differences in audience, and ultimately led to questions of exclusivity. Whereas radical drama appears as a new space in Slow Print, Miller’s exploration of the poetry both featured and discussed in the radical press, focuses on ‘modest adaptations of genre and form’ (170). She turns to lesser known writers, for example, Morris’s comrade J. Bruce Glasier and the working-class amateur Tom Maguire. Again Downloaded by [University of California Davis] at 10:56 15 January 2016 104 BOOK REVIEWS she demonstrates radical print’s contradictions; here she finds the idea of poetry as collective rubbing up against the common notion of the necessity of individual genius to poetic creation, although Miller shows that the radical press tended towards imagining poetry as communal. Out of the discussion of poetry emerges a fascinating illustration of the ways in which familiar forms usefully presented new political ideas. The penultimate chapter explores socialist writers influenced by the mystical philosophy of theosophy with sections about Annie Besant and Alfred Orage. Theosophical socialism has often been viewed as antithetical to the advent of literary modernism; Miller argues, convincingly, otherwise. She firmly plants New Age’s roots in radical print, and then proceeds to detail its development into a journal which professed itself unable to ‘become for a long while, the paper of the “people”’ (251), somewhere where the modernist attack on realism grew out of earlier socialist writers’ antirealism. Finally Miller turns to free love journals such as The Adult, the emergence of sexuality as a radical discursive site and the biopolitical turn. She finds the discourse surrounding free print’s move from class issues to questions of sex to be a further shift favourable to modernism’s emergence. The path along which Miller takes us throughout Slow Print does not reconcile the tensions of the radical press, rather, its route reminds us ‘how easily resistance to capitalism can transmute—or be transmuted—into antipopulism and how capitalism’s strength is to render the anticommercial as antidemocratic’ (301) and we see that where modernist aesthetics appear, so too emerge critical notions regarding modernism. At the same time Slow Print successfully suggests, as Miller hopes it does, that this somewhat neglected print realm is of interest in its own right. Slow Print engages the reader not least due to Miller’s skilled illustration of her story with intriguing actors. The aforementioned Julia Dawson stands out revealed through Miller’s assiduous selection and analysis of Dawson’s writing, but we glimpse even the minor players’ personalities due to Miller’s deft command of her material. Given the extensive discussion of the realist novel and the various radical literary responses it provoked, it is perhaps surprising that Slow Print does not feature a closer exploration of the specificities of the short story form and its effects within radical press; Miller only touches upon the short story as part of other discussions. This certainly offers scope for further investigation of form and literary radicalism. At a time when projects such as Dickens Journals Online begin to provide access to nineteenth century periodicals for anyone connected to the Internet and, similarly, the Morris Online Edition makes freely available the Kelmscott Press Editions of Morris’s novels discussed in Slow Print, the tantalising journal extracts Miller utilises will doubtless intensify many readers’ desire for greater accessibility of digitisation of radical print. In the meantime Slow Print provides a valuable, thorough examination of the late Victorian radical press whilst at the same time suggesting further avenues of exploration in both modernist and periodical studies. Anne Chapman, King’s College London, UK © 2014 Anne Chapman http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13688804.2013.876263 Victorian Literature and Culture (2015), 43, 895–907. © Cambridge University Press 2015. 1060-1503/15 doi:10.1017/S1060150315000327 ON PRINT CULTURE: MEDIATION, PRACTICE, POLITICS, KNOWLEDGE By Barbara Leckie IN 2001 LAUREL BRAKE wrote an article entitled “On Print Culture: The State We’re In.” Now, almost fifteen years later, where does the term “print culture” stand in relation to Victorian studies?1 Brake was both brave and wise in her speculations. She knew very well that terminology – and fields and theories – have lives of their own and yet that sometimes someone has to step forward and try on certain names for size, make a pitch for style and fit and function. Brake took that risk in her endorsement of print culture. This essay considers the ways in which print culture has resonated in the intervening years by reviewing both books that have engaged productively with the term and books that have not used the term and yet are working under its umbrella. This essay is less a stock taking, however, than a review article that bears in mind – and keeps at the forefront – the critical purchase of the term “print culture.” At the same time, it is by no means a comprehensive review essay. I hope that the result is not an inadequate treatment of both areas of focus – the salience of print culture as a category and the books under review – and I hope that it can begin to give some parameters to a term that is often loosely defined. This essay, then, is not a survey of the field. Indeed, when I was asked to do a review essay with a focus on print culture, I hesitated because I found the term too capacious. What, after all, does it not include? I thought that I would likely narrow my discussion, say, to periodicals. But as I scrutinized recent books with an eye to their engagement with print culture, I began to realize that it might be useful to articulate some aspects of the term that are not always articulated and think about its value, not in my kneejerk response to its capaciousness, but rather in the many ways in which the term is, in fact, delimited and productive in relation to those limits. My first sense of the capaciousness of print culture relates to its affiliation with book history. Initially, I thought a review essay on book history would be more useful than an essay on print culture. Book history is a new field with relatively clear demarcations, whereas print culture includes book history and so much else. If book history leans toward (but is not defined by) material culture and print culture leans toward (but is not defined by) political culture, there is no question that print culture also embraces material culture. Indeed, there is no question that print culture gains its energy, in part, from the very “communications circuit” – Darnton’s oft-cited phrase – that book history embraces.2 Book history’s society SHARP, after all, captures the network of interrelated aspects of print in its acronym: the 895 896 VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE society for the history of authorship, reading, and publishing. These ideas are taken up in both book history and print culture in relation to the production, distribution, circulation, and reception of texts. The field extends to include book-sellers, railway stands, government officials, censors, printers, and any number of other social actors and institutions that have a bearing on book or print production. Is print culture, then, just book history, only bigger? Here it is helpful to turn to Roger Chartier’s dual definition of print culture: in a broad sense, he notes, print culture refers to the circulation of print after Gutenberg; in a narrow sense, it refers to the uses to which that print is put and the new practices that emerge in its wake (including the use of printed matter as an object).3 In terms of the former, Chartier writes, “[t]his new technique quite evidently encouraged the circulation of the written word on an unheard-of scale, not only because book making costs were lower . . . but also because production time . . . was shortened” (1). Elizabeth E. Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1979) is a foundational book in this context; it takes up the question of print in relation to the invention of the printing press and it (controversially) cements the powerful connection between print and political change.4 Work on print culture, with its emphasis on periodicals and newspapers, often engages with a politics of print perceived to be inseparable from the culture of print. Many of the essays in the collection edited by Sabrina Baron et al., Agent of Change: Print Culture Studies after Elizabeth L. Eisenstein (2007), for example, both take issue with the charge of technological determinism in Eisenstein’s work and testify to its continuing impact on “print culture studies.” Consider too that commodious second word culture: book culture, literary culture, press culture, print culture (all phrases which occur in the books under review). Print culture differs from book history not only in the weight it places on print but also in the weight it places on culture. In a footnote, Ann Ardis and Patrick Collier make a pitch for the term “print culture” over “print media” in relation to Raymond Williams’s tripartite definition of culture (10), and it is that expansive definition that resonates in references to print culture. If print culture embraces the book as well as other print forms, then, it also embraces history as well as culture. And yet. Book history is a clear area of study (indeed it is often capped as Book History) signaled not only in its name but also its institutional apparatus whereas print culture sits there more modestly with no society, no journal, and only the loosest claims to a field.5 Indeed, in the books under review here many critics use the term simply to refer to a body of material rather than a critical practice. Does it help, then, to turn to the specificity of the Victorian period itself to develop sharper distinctions? If the printing press occasions revolutionary changes in the circulation of print and, accordingly, the organization of knowledge, Chartier identifies the nineteenth century itself as “the age of the second revolution of the book” (2). Its moment, of course, is another new technology – the steam engine – which contributed to another, even more intense, acceleration of print production and dissemination in tandem with changes to industry, transportation, and literacy, making the nineteenth century, as many note, “the first massmedia era” (Hughes 1). It was in this period that the “proliferation of print” (an oft-repeated phrase) took hold in dramatic ways that are captured at once in the visual culture of the period and in the statistics critics routinely, and still with amazement, recount (see Liddle 147-48, Rubery 6, King and Plunkett 2). This accelerated print field generated readings of the relationship between print and democracy as well as challenges to a singular celebratory politics of print. On Print Culture: Mediation, Practice, Politics, Knowledge 897 The nineteenth century as the “second revolution” of the book owes a debt to the first revolution of the printing press. But we gain new modes of access to it through the third “revolution in the making” (Brake, “On Print Culture” 126) – our current period – occasioned by the invention of new digital technologies. The late eighteenth century, however, is the go-to period for the scholarship on print culture that also shapes Victorian studies. Not yet galvanized by the innovations following from steam, print was powerfully wedded to politics in the decades following the French Revolution (see Keen, Klancher, and Gilmartin). Scholars working in this area often invoke Enlightenment ideals – drawing on Habermas and Warner on the public sphere and counterpublic sphere respectively – that continue to inform scholarship in Victorian studies. The focus on print and politics returns again in the 1830s and 40s with the rise of Chartism, the penny press, and the unstamped press in combination with intensely depressed living conditions for the working classes and poor and fears of revolution at home and abroad. This period also brought calls for print censorship or regulation (of which the stamped press, of course, was a version), views that collided with Britain’s longstanding and deeply felt commitment to freedom of speech in all its forms. The idea of a free press was distinctly British despite its departures from anything like full freedom and despite the caveats that even those who supported freedom of the press interposed. How the country sustained and even celebrated this view while also curtailing press circulation is a fascinating chapter in the history of Victorian print culture. This period of unrest and fertile productivity opened out into what Richard Altick has famously called “the democracy of print” (1). The broad strokes I have sketched in here pertain more to periodical and newspaper culture than to book culture and contribute to two distinctive features of print culture as it relates to the press: its capacity to shape publics and counterpublics and, related to this point, its role in the organization of knowledge. In addition to communicating and producing knowledge, periodical and newspaper culture also defined new forms of knowledge – fragmented, patchwork, non-linear, immediate – that are discussed in many of the books under review here. I want to begin with a series of books that bring together newspaper and periodical studies and literature. Dallas Liddle’s The Dynamics of Genre: Journalism and the Practice of Literature in Mid-Victorian Britain and Matthew Rubery’s The Novelty of Newspapers: Victorian Fiction after the Invention of the News, both published in 2009, take up newspapers and journalism to say something about literature. Liddle’s work follows a lovely structure that draws out different dimensions of genre (poetry, autobiography, and sensation fiction) as well as different dimensions of the communications circuit (the fact that Liddle critiques the communications circuit notwithstanding [159]). Liddle is sensitive to the complexity of periodical genres, noting that individual journals and newspapers have their own language, genres, rules, and ways of operating (4). His desire to pay more attention to the form of journalism, in particular, is welcome. This is an area, he persuasively demonstrates, that has not yet received the attention it deserves. His own project is focused on genre: the specificity of journalistic genres, their interaction with literary genres, and the competition between the two in an increasingly complex print marketplace. Heavily indebted to Bakhtin (whose work provides an epigraph for every chapter except the introduction), Liddle discusses works by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Harriet Martineau, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, and countless unnamed others to offer a picture of the volatile print field at mid-century. I completely support Liddle’s effort to bind journalistic content to form/genre, but I felt uneasy with what felt like a wholesale dismissal 898 VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE of the insights growing out of theories indebted to Habermas, Benedict Anderson, and Pierre Bourdieu (to whom Liddle, rightly, attributes much of the recent work in what he variously calls “book history and the study of print culture” and “history of the book”) (141-59).6 In less than twenty pages one cannot give adequate coverage to the contributions these theorists have made let alone to critics who have relied on them (by my count, Liddle offers only five examples – two related to Habermas, one to Anderson, and two to Bourdieu – and offers only very spare comments for why he does not value these particular works). This is not the place to chart these issues in detail but I think several of the scholars who have taken up insights related to a Habermasian public sphere (or, more often, the critiques of the public sphere) would be surprised to find their work called unhistorical (see, for example, Gilmartin, Keen, and Kamra). More to the point of this essay is Liddle’s claim that book history and print culture studies would be “better” served by a Bakhtinian literary/historical approach (158). I enjoyed Liddle’s readings and often learned a great deal from them, but I didn’t think they were necessarily better than other approaches; they simply brought out different aspects of his focus on “the interactions between the press and literary forms” (174). Rubery’s The Novelty of Newspapers, not surprisingly, shares many assumptions with Liddle’s book even if it also departs from it in significant ways, one of which is indicated in the priority given to newspapers in the title. Rubery’s claim that “the transformation of news during the nineteenth century profoundly influenced literary narrative in ways that have yet to be realized” (4), for example, is similar to Liddle’s effort to trace the ways in which the “competition between artistic and journalistic genres did indeed affect midVictorian literature” (33). Liddle’s competing genres becomes Rubery’s “rival practice[s]” and “competing media” (4). Unlike Liddle (who attends to a range of periodical forms), Rubery seeks to revive a sense of the newness of the news, to capture again the sense of disorientation and potential it posed for a population not yet inured to its norms and conventions and moments of surprise. The structure of this book – moving from the front page with its focus on shipping news and personal advertisements in the first two chapters to the middle of the paper with its features of the leading article, personal interview, and foreign correspondence through the back page – captures Rubery’s appreciation of the newspaper form. His readings yield insights into Trollope, James, Conrad, and sensation fiction (a genre often addressed in print culture studies) among others. Unlike other books under review here, Rubery references print culture only in passing and in his focus on newspapers as a “source of thematic and formal innovation for Victorian novelists” (11), his readings do not always intersect with the political, material, and epistemological approaches developed by others. A trio of books that engage with newspapers or periodicals in other contexts point to directions that new scholarship is likely to take. James Mussell’s The Nineteenth-Century Press in the Digital Age (2012) is a first extended foray into the dialogue between new digital technologies and nineteenth-century print media (his term of choice) and will likely be followed by many others. Sukeshi Kamra’s The Indian Periodical Press and the Production of Nationalist Rhetoric (2011) is a welcome contribution to the nexus of Victorian studies, periodical studies, and postcolonial studies. And Ian Haywood’s The Revolution in Popular Literature: Print, Politics, People, 1790-1840 (2004) addresses the question of popular literature that runs, in one way or another, through many works in print culture studies. Both Kamra and Haywood also admirably address issues of print censorship and regulation in considerable detail. A fourth book, Alberto Gabriele’s Reading Popular Culture in Victorian Print (2009), takes up popular culture two decades after Haywood’s study leaves off. By On Print Culture: Mediation, Practice, Politics, Knowledge 899 this point the field looks very different. His focus is on a single journal, Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Belgravia, but his reach is much further, extending at once to a broader analysis of discursive formations and readership (sketched in as a “new intertextual methodology”) and the experience of urban modernity in general. Ann L. Ardis and Patrick C. Collier’s edited collection Transatlantic Print Culture 1880– 1940: Emerging Media, Emerging Modernisms (2008) and Elizabeth Miller’s Slow Print: Literary Radicalism and Late Victorian Print Culture (2013) both offer a complex sense of the print field in the latter decades of the nineteenth century – the former through its introduction of the transatlantic lens and the latter through its attendance to forms of print culture that have previously escaped sustained critical notice – and they both use periodical culture to rethink modernism. Transatlantic Print Culture collects together essays that sharpen the dialogue that emerges in the heady mixture of new forms of print journalism and new forms of popular literature. The focus is on the way these hybrid, often understudied, works link to articulations of modernism not as a monolithic movement but as a series of distinctive, and sometimes discrete, innovations in the print field. It is attuned, in particular, to works that have escaped critical scrutiny because they do not conform to modernism as it has been traditionally defined. The collection flags “print culture” in its title and the editors, not surprisingly, engage directly with the term in their introduction. Their endorsement of the term, however, is somewhat tepid; it is “admittedly vague,” they acknowledge, but will “suffice” (3).7 Following Brake, they read print culture as embracing “the entire ecology of print media in nineteenthcentury Britain: the organization of the newspaper industry, the hierarchy and circulation of weekly and monthly periodicals, the book publishing industry, and the evolving dynamics among literary agents, reviewers, authors, and their increasingly diverse audiences” (3). The essays in this volume often engage with the commercialization of the print field and the question, familiar from the late eighteenth century, of whether the increased volume of print material, in combination with increased literary rates and print accessibility, was a cause for critique, caution, or celebration. Miller’s Slow Print offers a different delineation of the field in a focus on radical print culture that comprises newspapers, periodicals, literature, and pamphlets among other print forms. In fact, more than in any other book under review here, Miller takes advantage of the capaciousness of print culture as a category. The lineage she traces goes back to Enlightenment ideals that linked the circulation of print with the promise of democracy, a view that, as noted above, was especially vibrant in the 1830s and 40s with the rise of a radical press and the many efforts to counter the taxes on knowledge. By contrast to the 1830s and 40s, however, Miller illustrates that by the 1880s and 90s writers were less sanguine about the benefits of mass circulation and mass culture. They worried, Miller elaborates, about the evacuation of politics that followed from a focus on consumption, a worry that echoes Habermas’s oft-noted characterization of the shift from a culture of conviction to a culture of consumption that occurs over the course of the nineteenth century.8 By the late nineteenth century the potential of print culture was felt to be either exhausted or wrongheaded: “radical thinkers,” Miller notes, “came to believe that print’s endless reproduction made it especially subject, as a technology, to the expansive market ideology of industrial capitalism” (6). Like others, Miller defines her period as a “watershed moment” in the “explosion of print production” (2).9 In contrast to this “explosion,” Miller gives us slow print, a contraction 900 VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE rather than an expansion of print culture. Miller defines “slow print” as “print that actively opposed literary and journalistic mass production”; “it was,” she continues, “often explicitly political in objective, as socialist, anarchist, and other radical groups came to believe that large-scale mass-oriented print was no way to bring about revolutionary social change” (2). Slow print is a brilliant phrase on Miller’s part, drawing together as it does not only a new sense of urgency in response to accelerated capitalist production at the end of the nineteenth century but also our own period’s response to the heightened acceleration wrought by new digital technologies and captured, for us, in antidotes like the “slow food” movement and “slow living” (which, tellingly, have very little to do with the political). In a single term Miller collapses two periods and helps us to understand both better. Each of the writers she addresses struggles, in different ways, to confront a perceived sense that print culture in its late-century forms was no longer realizing radical political goals; indeed, as Marx predicted with respect to capitalism in general, print culture was at once absorbing critiques and repackaging them in forms more conducive to the promotion of existing conditions than their demise. Miller does an excellent job of harnessing the journals’ stated intentions to their united opposition to a print marketplace marked by capitalism, of demonstrating the alternative audiences and spaces imagined and created by her conception of slow print, and of bringing all of this to bear on new understandings of modernism. With its emphasis on print culture in relation to politics, its range of reference, its focus on all stages of print production, and its challenge to received views of modernism, this book is a wonderful example of the readings that can result from the enlarged interpretive lens that print culture often provides. New areas of study are often legitimated through the publication of primary documents readers. Paul Keen’s Revolutions in Romantic Literature: An Anthology of Print Culture, 1780–1832 and Andrew King and Jon Plunkett’s Victorian Print Media: A Reader were published in 2004 and 2005 respectively. Both collections give shape to the category of print culture through section headings that include autobiographies, literature, the French Revolution, British India, and the Slave Trade among others (in the Revolutions anthology) and the influence of print, law, popular print forms, and graphic media (in the Victorian reader) as well as sections on periodicals, publishing, and the reading public that overlap in both collections. King and Plunkett discuss their decision to privilege “print media” over “print culture” in terms of their sense of its focus on mediation, remediation, and process (6). In the same vein, Colette Colligan and Margaret Linley’s edited collection, Media, Technology, and Literature in the Nineteenth Century: Image, Sound, Touch (2011) makes a case for the nineteenth century’s “invention of media” (1) and is alert to media history (and, importantly, its erasure). Colligan and Linley also note the nineteenth century’s elaboration of new media technologies, helpfully illustrated in Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey B. Pingree’s New Media 1740–1915 (2004) which uncovers, as Colligan and Linley put it, “the history of old new media” (10). If one wanted to be persuaded of the salience of “print media” as a term for the Victorian period, I would turn here instead of Plunkett and King’s brief rationale. Still, I prefer the term print culture to print media. I cannot shake the anachronism of “media” in reference to nineteenth century culture. John Guillory’s “On the Genesis of the Media Concept” makes this point. After Aristotle, the medium, as it related to communication was “set aside . . . for two millennia” (323). It reappears, with one exception, in the late nineteenth century with the introduction of new technologies like the telegraph and the phonograph that, through remediation, drew attention to the medium itself. The one On Print Culture: Mediation, Practice, Politics, Knowledge 901 exception is the invention of printing in the early modern period which, like new media technologies in the late nineteenth century, drew attention to print as a remediation of writing (324). Despite my hesitations about Victorian print media, however, as my subtitle indicates, I want to make a pitch for mediation as one lens through which to understand Victorian print culture.10 Mediation recurs as an idea, if not a word, in most of the works discussed here in at least three ways: first, it highlights print as a medium; second, it signals print as an always mediated form (mediated by printers, publishers, booksellers, editors, readers, censors, and so on); and third, it signals the ways in which meaning itself is always mediated and, accordingly, inextricable from the production of knowledge. I want to return now to Chartier’s second, narrower definition of print culture: “to reconstruct the multiple uses of the many forms of print” (8) by crossing “the study of representations of reading practices . . . with the study of printed pieces as material objects” (9). Within this definition we can identify two types of uses, one familiar and widely accepted, and the other new and not often the focus of scholarly inquiry. The former is reading (in all its manifold forms) and the latter is everything else (exquisitely catalogued in Price’s recent study in a series of lists: books as “[bought], sold, exchanged, transported, displayed, defaced, stored, ignored, collected, neglected, dispersed, discarded” [20], pages used as “[w]rapping, wadding, padding lining” [221]). The focus on reading, of course, has a long history in nineteenth-century scholarship. Richard Altick’s social history of the reader in The English Common Reader (1957) is the point of departure for much of that history. Many of these studies attest to the ways in which the new fields of book history and print culture are not far from the “old” fields of social history on which the new critics rely. If print culture increased at dramatic rates so too did the new reading publics. Beth Palmer and Arlene Buckland’s edited collection, A Return to the Common Reader: Print Culture and the Novel, 1850–1900 (2011), revisits Altick’s seminal study. Interestingly, it borrows a structure that is a contracted version of King and Plunkett’s Victorian Print Media: its first section focus on publishers, authors, critics, and readers, and its second section on scenes of reading (from jails to ships to the Royal Colonial Institute’s library to Australia). This book takes up Altick’s still compelling call to give close and textured attention to that elusive category, the common reader, from a wide range of perspectives. The distinction in Palmer and Buckland between print culture and the novel in the subtitle, however, gave me pause. The editors note the ubiquity of fiction in Victorian print culture – “the novel,” they argue, “traversed the book and the periodical in this period” (4) – and no doubt they want their title to capture this point but it also speaks to the incoherence that the term print culture sometimes produces. It was only a matter of time before a critic began to look past the equation between books and reading to consider the myriad other uses to which books could be put. In How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (2012), Leah Price takes up this latter challenge with great verve and insight. Still, I hesitated about including this book here. It is squarely situated in a book history context (her first chapter addresses many book history issues directly, she continues a dialogue with book history throughout her study, and she only rarely uses the term print culture).11 At the same time, an entire chapter is dedicated to Henry Mayhew and she often engages with newspapers and periodicals. Price asks “what meanings do books make even, or especially, when they go unread?” (2). Her focus is on the relationship of “thoughts to things,” of texts to books (2, 4). “The Victorians,” Price writes “cathected the text [‘a string of words’] in proportion as they disowned the book [‘a physical thing’]” (4). 902 VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE She wants, in other words, to find ways “to discuss the circulation and handling of books while bracketing their textual content” (14). Against the grain of much recent criticism, Price asks, “[w]hat exactly would it mean to study books without privileging reading?” (20). Price devises many clever locutions from rejection theory to reading blocks and absorbent books (one of my favorites is “Wrapping Up,” the title of the Mayhew chapter’s last section). Her target is “nonreading” – people doing things with books that have nothing to do with, or are only inversely related to, reading – and, as her title states, how people do things with books. The range – from reading to defacing to throwing to ignoring to wiping and so on – is often amusing. Price gives many examples of the wayward uses to which books are put through reference to novels by Dickens and Trollope, It-narratives,12 and journalism. This book also includes a provocative implicit dialogue with print censorship – it is not Price’s topic – that emerges from frequent examples that focus on references to, or practices of, censorship.13 Any treatment of print culture in recent works cannot avoid the question of digitization. Indeed, it arises, in passing or in detail, in every book discussed here. That said, this topic is much too large for a brief review and so I want to close by simply gesturing toward the ways in which this third “revolution” – following Gutenberg and then the steam engine – has been taken up. In both the first and second “revolutions,” the focus is put on print proliferation, speed, and acceleration, and in both cases copious numbers are recited to bolster the view that the circulation of printed matter has changed in manners too dramatic to fully take in. Digital technology, however, marks a difference. It is a shift not just in quantity but also in kind.14 What, if any, difference does this make? If there was an exponential increase in print culture in the nineteenth century, with digital technologies there has been an exponential increase in our access to it. In the 1990s I spent hours in the Colindale Newspaper library; now I spend hours at my desk looking at a screen, doing word searches (unimaginable then), and waiting only as long it takes my computer to load material. There is a loss: the feel of the pages, the tactile knowledge of their varying sizes, the smells, the heft of the printed matter or, conversely, its fragility. And, of course, there is a gain: speed, access, searchability. Digitization, then, heightens many of the points already discussed. Works are disseminated to a broad range of audiences that are diverse and untraceable and these audiences themselves have expanded exponentially in every thinkable category (by class, geography, gender, age, and so on). “One of the problems,” Brake notes in her 2001 essay, “of this field [print culture] appertains to its vastness, much of which is unmapped” (Brake 127). What emerges, in part, in the books under review are some new mappings of print culture in Victorian studies.15 Has the “new field” envisioned by Brake, then, come to pass? Before turning to some generalizations, I want to note one point that is clear: there is an energy and liveliness to the books under review here. These critics seem to know that they are charting new waters and they do so with great excitement, suspense, and conviction. It is as if the challenge to the humanities, wrought by that very neoliberal politics that locates its origins in the nineteenth century (and capitalism), has emboldened humanities critics to make claims for their areas in the most vivid, exuberant, and committed terms. Generalizations are always risky and prone to be challenged but here are a few that emerged from the books under review. Critics who adopt print culture perspectives are often inclined to situate their studies in the context of the Enlightenment, the public sphere, On Print Culture: Mediation, Practice, Politics, Knowledge 903 and politics; they are accordingly attuned to print as a practice, a politics, and a mode for the organization of knowledge. They always draw on periodicals or newspapers and they are likely also to extend the range of print forms consulted to include items like train timetables, advertising circulars, posters, book wrappers, pamphlets, and so on as well as a range of literary genres.16 They are likely to engage with at least two dimensions of the communications circuit; they do not, in other words, look at print in isolation from other social, political, economic, material, and use factors. In the context of both the extension of the range of print and the sense of print’s engagement with material practices, they are keenly aware of print in relation to mediation: print as a medium that draws our attention to mediation; and print as generative of culture practices that invoke mediation – with its affinity to interactivity, intertextuality, and what Linda Hughes calls “sideways” methodologies17 – in relation to the production of knowledge. In theory, this last line of inquiry extends to an analysis of print culture itself as a mediating category (as Brake suggests in her early essay and others develop although there is certainly more room for this sort of analysis in Victorian studies). I think (and hope) that many scholars working in the field will take issue with aspects of these generalizations and I certainly welcome a dialogue on what, if anything, constitutes this field. But it did become clear to me, after reading the above books through a print culture lens, that print culture did signify not only an expanded range of reading material but also a set of implicit scholarly conventions. I opened this review with a source from periodical culture – Brake’s essay – and I want to close this section with another essay that we could perhaps see as bookending Brake’s incursion into the “new field,” Linda Hughes’s 2014 essay, “SIDEWAYS! Navigating the Material(ity) of Print Culture.” Prompted by the rise of digitization, she begins with a question: “How are we to conceptualize this pervasive material presence and navigate what remains an incompletely charted archive in both its print and digital forms?” (1). The reference to navigation and charting recalls Brake’s sense of the unmapped field and, to be sure, there are many ways in which print culture studies continues to be inadequately conceptualized, the generalizations I note above notwithstanding. In the context of the dizzying increase in the availability of printed matter, Brake proposes “moving ‘sideways’ in these print and remediated forms” (1). Moving “sideways” involves the elements of surprise and insight – and sensitivity to mediation – that I have appreciated in all of the books under review. It illustrates the unexpected alliances that follow from juxtaposing forms of print that haven’t been set side-by-side before as well as returning forms of print that were once side-by-side to their original print contexts.18 Before practicing several “sideways” readings, however, Hughes begins with one of the questions that has preoccupied me here: how “to conceptualize the mass circulation of Victorian print” (2). In place of the metaphor of the body, she suggests two interconnected metaphors for print culture: the city and the network. She’s alive to the point made by Brake in Print in Transition (2001), and taken up often by others, that “books and serials were interactive rather than distinct media” (3); this interactivity produces a “pervasive dialogism” that supports the metaphor of the network and, of course, invokes digitization via the web. Still, Hughes notes, both of these metaphors on their own, and the conceptualizations they enable, have their limits. Taken together, however, Hughes suggests, they offer a sturdy enough framework to accommodate the challenge posed by a print culture “so massive that 904 VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE it exceeds scholarly ability to document it” (5). Her readings of Eliot, Dickens, and Thomas Hood’s “Song of a Shirt” illustrate just how rich such forms of reading can be. I have experienced the same problem with the material under review that many of the authors in this review relate to nineteenth-century print culture: a “proliferation” of material “so massive that it exceeds scholarly ability to document it.” It is at once inspiring and daunting. My solution has been to let go of the effort to document in any comprehensive way new work in Victorian print culture and rather to focus on a range of books that productively engage with “print culture.” Print culture itself encourages us always to cast a wider net. One of its strengths is to invest scholarship with a new energy that often draws together questions of mediation, practice, politics, and knowledge. Another of its strengths is to show that categories scholars once took for granted require this broader reach to be fully understood. And another is to demonstrate the defining force of categories in the first place. Carleton University NOTES 1. Brake promotes “print culture” as an “inclusive term that takes in periodicals, newspapers, and books, and will not preclude electronic publishing” (128). 2. Leah Price reprints a handy illustration of the communication circuit although she does so to illustrate its limits (152). Robert Darnton first described it in terms of the life cycle books that “runs from the author to the publisher (if the bookseller does not assume that role), the printer, the shipper, the bookseller, and the reader” (67). 3. Practice has always been a feature of print culture in relation to use. Luisa Calè and Patrizia Di Bello nicely capture a variation of this point through reference to Walter Benjamin: “Rather than positing either a medium-specific approach to art or a self-effacing notion of art based on medium transparency, Benjamin’s focus on touch, appropriation, and manipulation suggests a material form of engagement in which aesthetic experience is conceived as a production, a practice, rather than a contemplative and detached form of perception” (“Introduction”). 4. The chief critique against Eisenstein’s book was that it interpreted the invention of printing in the context of technological determinism (a critique that, Baron et al. point out, was not part of the early reception to the book). Adrian Johns’s The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (1998) is probably the best known challenge to Eisenstein’s work (although, as many have illustrated, it can also be read as complementary to it). By focusing on “print culture in the making” (3), Johns illustrates that nothing necessarily follows from print itself; rather, the impact of printing must be traced in relation to a complex dynamics of use or “making.” Eisenstein’s association of the press with “fixity,” for example, was a concept that emerged over time and did not follow automatically from the invention of printing. Johns, in turn, links “print in the making” to the “conditions of knowledge itself” (6) in a manner that resonates in some ways with the emphasis I am also putting on knowledge in this review. And his insistence on “the construction of different print cultures in particular historical circumstances” (20) is an apt reminder for those working within the Victorian period and its diverse locales. 5. In one year, 2006, PMLA dedicated a special issue to book history in January (entitled “Special Topic: The History of the Book and the Idea of Literature” edited by Leah Price and Seth Lerer) and a single essay to periodical studies in March (Sean Latham and Robert Scholes’s “The Rise of Periodical Studies”). Latham and Scholes’s essay begins: “Within or alongside the larger field of print On Print Culture: Mediation, Practice, Politics, Knowledge 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 905 culture, a new area for scholarship is emerging in the humanities and more humanistic social sciences: periodical studies” (517). They call for the treatment of periodicals not as containers for other works but as “cultural objects” in their own right (519), “requiring new methodologies and new types of collaborative investigation” (518). The “larger field of print culture,” however, still has not solicited the focused attention of book history. (Interestingly, Leslie Howsam’s Old Books and New Histories: An Orientation to Studies in Book and Print Culture [2006] is, in fact, about book culture.) Periodical studies, by contrast, with its association (the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals) and its journal (Victorian Periodicals Review), does have the institutional definition that print culture as a field lacks. Interestingly, in Paper Knowledge (2014), Lisa Gitelman notes that one of her book’s goals is “to argue against the use of print culture” as a term that defines a field in any significant way (9). In the books considered for this review, Habermas, Bakhtin, Benjamin, and Bourdieu were the theorists most frequently referenced. In a footnote to which I refer above they explain their preference for print culture through reference to Raymond Williams and by contrast to King and Plunkett. Their footnote does make a better case for their choice of terms. Mark Hampton’s essay in Ardis and Collier addresses this point among others. This print explosion followed from “such innovations as mechanized composition, cheaper paper, and photomechanical reproduction and such cultural shifts as universal education and widespread literacy” as well as economic factors that followed from the shift to a market economy (2-3). Clifford Siskin and Michael Warner’s edited volume, This Is Enlightenment, is the best place to go for an expansive and vibrant sense of mediation as a critical term (indeed their book grows out of a conference entitled “Mediating Enlightenment Past and Present”). The essays in this volume intersect with many of the points I am raising in this review and merit a lengthy review of their own. Mediation, like media, was not used in the nineteenth century in the way that I am using it here, but because it refers to ways of thinking rather than a body of work, I find the anachronism less jarring. She uses the term print culture herself twice, in fact, and cites it once. (I should point out that I know this because I can search the book using digital technologies.) Defined by Price as “fictional autobiography in which a thing travels among a series of richer and poorer owners” (105). Price’s book shares much in common with Theodore Stiphas’s immensely readable The Late Age of Print. For example, with respect to several of the books discussed here, I consulted online editions and did not once hold the book in my hand, turn its pages, feel its weight. In this review I have focused on books that engage centrally with periodical or newspaper culture as well as works that address the ways in which books are used (as read works or otherwise). Needless to say, there are many more approaches to the field that could have also been considered: author studies (Robert Patten’s new book on Dickens is an excellent example of the ways in which a print culture approach can enhance one’s comprehension of both a single author and the idea of authorship); print culture as it relates to under-studied areas (Oz Frankel’s study of government documents, for example); journals and oral culture (Patrick Leary’s The Punch Brotherhood, for example); and the many works in relation to print culture on gender, serials, circulating libraries, editorships, and so many other facets of the production, distribution, circulation, and reception of print. I hesitated over the “always” in this sentence but in the many books I consulted for this review periodical culture was always a component of the analysis. I was also struck by the diversity in literary genres; poetry, for example, is often discussed productively alongside other print forms. In the context of visual culture and collecting, Luisa Calè and Patrizia Di Bello argue that “interactivity . . . has been a feature of print culture since the nineteenth century if not earlier” (“Introduction”). For Hughes, considering print culture “sideways” includes “analyses across genres; texts opening out onto each other dialogically in and out of periodicals; sequential rather than ‘data mining’ approaches to reading periodicals; and spatio-temporal convergences in print culture” (1–2). 906 VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE WORKS CONSIDERED Altick, Richard D. The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public,1800–1900. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1957. Ardis, Ann L., and Patrick C. Collier, eds. Transatlantic Print Culture 1880–1940: Emerging Media, Emerging Modernisms. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Baron, Sabrina Alcorn, Eric N. Lindquist, and Eleanor F. Shevlin, eds. Agent of Change: Print Culture Studies after Elizabeth L. Eisenstein. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 2007. Brake, Laurel. “On Print Culture: The State We’re In.” Journal of Victorian Culture 6.1 (2001): 125–36. ———. Print in Transition: Studies in Media and Book History. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001. Calè, Luisa, and Patrizia Di Bello. “Introduction: Verbal and Visual Interactions in Nineteenth-Century Print Culture.” 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 5 (2007). Web. 1 March 2015. Chartier, Roger. “General Introduction: Print Culture.” The Culture of Print: Power, and the Uses of Print in Early Modern Europe. Ed. Andrew, F. G. Bourke, Roger Chartier, and Lydia G. Cochrane. Trans. Lydia G. Cochrane. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1989. Colligan, Colette, and Margaret Linley. Media, Technology, and Literature in the Nineteenth Century: Image, Sound, Touch. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011. Darnton, Robert. “What is the History of Books?” Daedalus 111.3 (1982): 65–83. Frankel, Oz. States of Inquiry: Social Investigations and Print Culture in Nineteenth- Century Britain. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2006. Gabriel, Alberto. Reading Popular Culture in Victorian Print. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Gilmartin, Kevin. Print Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition in Early Nineteenth-Century England. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. Gitelman, Lisa. Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents. Durham: Duke UP, 2014. Gitelman, Lisa, and Geoffrey B. Pingree, eds. New Media 1740–1915. Boston: MIT P, 2004. Guillory, John. “On Genesis of the Media Concept.” Critical Inquiry 36 (2010): 321–62. Haywood, Ian. The Revolution in Popular Literature: Print, Politics, People, 1790-1840.Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. Howsam, Leslie. Old Books and New Histories: An Orientation to Studies in Book and Print Culture. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2006. Hughes, Linda. “SIDEWAYS! Navigating the Material(ity) of Print Culture.” Victorian Periodicals Review 47.1 (2014): 1–30. Johns, Adrian. The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998. Kamra, Sukeshi. The Indian Periodical Press and the Production of Nationalist Rhetoric. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Keen, Paul. The Crisis of Literature in the 1790s: Print Culture and the Public Sphere. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. ———. Revolutions in Romantic Literature An Anthology of Print Culture, 1780–1832. Peterborough: Broadview, 2004. King, Andrew, and Jon Plunkett, eds. Victorian Print Media: A Reader. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005. Klancher, Jon. The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–1832. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1987. Latham, Sean, and Robert Scholes. “The Rise of Periodical Studies” PMLA 121.2 (2006): 517–31. Leary, Patrick. The Punch Brotherhood: Table Talk and Print Culture in Mid-Victorian London. London: The British Library, 2010. Liddle, Dallas. The Dynamics of Genre: Journalism and the Practice of Literature in Mid-Victorian Britain. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2009. Miller, Elizabeth. Slow Print: Literary Radicalism and Late Victorian Print Culture. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2013. On Print Culture: Mediation, Practice, Politics, Knowledge 907 Mussell, James. The Nineteenth-Century Press in the Digital Age. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Palmer, Beth, and Adelene Buckland, eds. A Return to the Common Reader: Print Culture and the Novel. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011. Patten, Robert L. Charles Dickens and ‘Boz’: The Birth of the Industrial-Age Author. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012. Price, Leah. How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain. Princeton: Princeton, UP, 2012. Rubery, Matthew. The Novelty of Newspapers: Victorian Fiction after the Invention of the News. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. Siskin, Clifford, and Michael Warner, eds. This is Enlightenment. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2010. Stiphas, Theodore G. The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control. New York: Columbia UP, 2009. The Unsocialist Socialists R. F. Dietrich SHAW: The Journal of Bernard Shaw Studies, Volume 35, Number 2, 2015, pp. 278-284 (Review) Published by Penn State University Press For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/shaw/summary/v035/35.2.dietrich.html Access provided by University of California, Davis (15 Jan 2016 19:25 GMT) 278 REVIEWS NOTES 1. See Michel W. Pharand, “Shaw Frenchified: Augustin and Henriette Hamon Rewrite Shaw” and, for the reception of Shaw’s plays in French translation, “Outrageous: Shaw and the French Press,” in Bernard Shaw and the French (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000), 101–46. Their first extant letter is a reply to Hamon from Shaw dated 31 July 1893. They first met in London in December 1894. 2. Only forty-two of Shaw’s letters to Hamon were selected by Dan H. Laurence for inclusion in his four-volume edition of Shaw’s Collected Letters (1965–88). Most of the Shaw quotations in this review are from letters published here for the first time. 3. According to Louis Guilloux, one-time tutor to Hamon’s daughters, Hamon had chosen the name because local residents used to say he was the devil, “à cause de ses idées. C’était une bonne manière de lutter contre la superstition” (because of his ideas. It was a good way of fighting against the superstition). Quoted in Augustin Hamon. Mémoires d’un en-dehors. Les années parisiennes (1890–1903), ed. Patrick Galliou (Brest: Centre de Recherche Bretonne et Celtique, Université de Bretagne Occidentale, 2013), 76. 4. As he was not part of the élite Paris theater boulevard scene, Hamon was often unfairly dismissed as a boorish country Breton whose French was less than refined. On the other hand, an unsavory aspect of his character was a virulent anti-Semitism (see Mémoires d’un en-dehors, 28–29, 29n108, and 30nn112–13). 5. Three months later, on 24 March 1924, upon receiving photographs of the 1923 Théâtre des Arts production of Pygmalion (starring Paulette Pax), with its romantic happy ending, Shaw wrote to Hamon, “They are so appalling that my first impulse is to forbid any attempt to reproduce my plays in a capital which is below the level of a Yukon mining camp in taste and intelligence.” 6. To learn how director Georges Pitoëff and his wife Ludmilla (as Jeanne) inadvertently created Shaw’s first major stage success in France, see Pharand, “The Trials of Jeanne d’Arc,” in Pharand, Bernard Shaw and the French, 149–71. 7. To be reviewed in SHAW 36, no. 2 (December 2016). The Unsocialist Socialists Elizabeth Carolyn Miller. SLOW PRINT: Literary Radicalism and Late Victorian Print Culture. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013. 378 pages. $35.00. Professor Elizabeth Miller’s SLOW PRINT is a brilliantly conceived book and the sort of deeply researched study in brick-and-mortar libraries that today’s digitizing of documents is replacing. Up to a point, and that’s the point. To her credit, Miller cites many documents that are likely candidates for not being digitized before they disintegrate, as some of that sort already have, documents that reveal a major historical reversal, the development in the nineteenth century of an at first approving, then ambivalent, and eventually hostile attitude by “literary radicals” toward the industrialization and REVIEWS 279 commercializing of printing. This development accompanied a change in the meaning of the word “radical,” which early in the century referred to political thinking that was anti- or limited-government, but that later evolved to viewing capitalism rather than government as the root cause of social injustice; and so whatever commonality the often disagreeing radical groups had by the end of the century was largely in this change of heart toward mass print as a capitalist tool (while yet being envious of its accomplishments). First, we’re reminded that the word “radical” covers a broad spectrum of reformist or revolutionary-minded people, the socialists among them, and the variety of disagreements among them on many fronts naturally included debate as well on the issue of how radicals involved in the use and dissemination of liberating and enlightening information should feel about the modernizing of print and presses. And that is why while Shaw figures prominently in two chapters (2 and 3), in the others he mainly just provides occasional context for and comparison to other kinds of radicals; for this book is not about Shaw, primarily, but about a fascinating cultural transformation the entire late Victorian world underwent. And in which, as usual, Shaw was anomalous in some ways, often in ways that were innovative and mediating as well. One of this book’s most valuable features is its providing an historical overview demonstrating the changes in attitudes toward print. Many radicals were, in the first half of the nineteenth century, accepting of and encouraged by the explosion of what might be called “fast printing” (think “fast food” and McDonald’s “Over a zillion sold!”), the sort of industrialized printing in which larger and larger and faster and faster presses turned out more and cheaper books, magazines, newspapers, pamphlets, and so on, which was generally thought admirable then because such publishing made such items more widely available for the education and enlightenment of the exploited masses. But the tide turned against this general approval when it began to strike many radicals in the latter decades of the century that such printing for the masses was actually serving capitalist ends a lot more than reformist or revolutionary causes. Because such print was characterized by counterreform advertising, excessive profit making to the benefit of the privileged few, standardization at the lowest level of quality, degradation of aesthetic values, commodification of life, and political manipulation of the masses, among other reasons. Many radicals became downright unfriendly toward the profit-oriented capitalist press, and thus my ironic title, “The Unsocialist Socialists,” refers to Miller’s principal point that many socialists, in turning away from the democratizing, mass-marketing capitalist press, became elitists, seemingly an “unsocialist” thing to do. Quite a joke, in fact, which was made richer because their elitism put them in bed with the elitist modernists 280 REVIEWS who wrote not for the masses but for each other, the knowing class! The modernists may have been as anticapitalist as the political radicals, but they were also largely antidemocratic, so discovering themselves in bed with the modernists brought consternation to some of the socialists. Miller makes the point that “the radical literary countermove to print mass production was as much about scale as it was about speed. The print community that emerged in British radical circles during these years directed itself . . . to a small-scale audience, a political and aesthetic counterculture, a public that defined itself against a mass-oriented, mainstream print culture” (3). Leaders of the developing anticapitalist “coterie” movement were, of course, John Ruskin and William Morris, with the latter’s Kelmscott Press providing a model of how to “slow print” beautiful (but expensive) books. The irony of course is that the very people who were most passionate about democratizing their society felt forced to reject one of the most democratizing forces of the time: the mass marketing print devices attendant upon the growth of capitalism. Miller finds testimony to the gradual development of this irony in a host of late Victorian radicals, with Anarchists, Theosophists, Aesthetes, Gay Rights–Birth Control–Free Love advocates (to name a few) mixed in with socialists. The questions facing them all were principally these: “Did print function as a synecdoche for capitalism, wordlessly conveying the values of mass production, homogeneity, and invisible labor? Could this capitalist technology—which in its very form implies standardization and the mechanization of manual labor (handwriting)—be used to produce anticapitalist political effects?” (6). The answers were various, but generally it was “yes” to the first question and “no” to the second, saving that there were always individuals who tried to have it both ways by inventing media strategies and literary modes that would accommodate both elitist radical and democratizing capitalist ideas, G. B. Shaw perhaps first among them. Shaw’s anomaly as an elitist is that he was always the teacher and ever explanatory, to whoever had ears to hear. Elitists of the modernist sort did not explain themselves or their works except to those fellow elitists who already understood. Shaw compensated for his elitism, as a Fabian, say, by being interminable in his speeches (given mostly by long-winded characters who have lessons to teach but also by himself on soapboxes in parks) and prefatory to his plays, explaining and explaining and explaining to anyone who would listen, whether they were situated in the “Stalls” of life or in the peanut gallery. One of his characters, a Member of the Idle Rich Class named Jack Tanner, directed most of his argument to his own class in an effort to reform from the top down, à la Fabian, but there is plenty REVIEWS 281 of Shavian argument elsewhere directed to every level of understanding, from the groundlings on up, for a lot of it is “fun” as well as instructive (and instructive because it’s fun). After a chapter that introduces the sort of coterie, aesthetically oriented, and utopian-minded publishing illustrated by William Morris (disdained by Marx and Engels as a sentimental dreamer), Miller’s second chapter spends most of its time with Shaw, partly on his own but also compared with other socialist writers of his time, particularly novelists because he began his publishing career under his own name with five novels, one a year from 1879 to 1883. Titled “The Black and White Veil: Shaw, Mass Print Culture, and the Antinovel Turn,” this chapter begins with Shaw’s striking reference to black print on white paper as “the black and white veil,” suggesting that “the print interface is a medium of obfuscation” because “the business and marketing of print generates (and obscures) its subjects of representation” (85). With such a view, it’s no surprise to see Shaw from the very beginning trying to rend the veil by calling attention to the way the conventions of the novel compelled him to use formulaic patterns and representations that contradicted (by obscuring) the reality he sees and his revolutionary intent towards it. As he proceeded through the writing of his novels, we find him often satirizing and parodying the very genre he was using and more and more unmasking the author as author and revealing the artifice of the authorial voice. His last novel, An Unsocial Socialist, concludes with a letter from the novel’s antihero Sidney Trefusis scolding the author for the falsifications of his life and urging him to take up a more worthwhile trade. Like playwriting? Miller’s third chapter, titled “Living Language: Print Drama, Live Drama, and the Socialist Theatrical Turn,” examines the idea that Shaw’s turn to playwriting was perhaps the thing needed to make the socialist case “more real.” Of course one can find plenty of instances in which Shaw ridiculed the Victorian stage as the last refuge of unreality, which is the most likely reason why he tried the novel first. But Miller’s argument is that the turn away from the novel and toward the drama was perhaps justified because staged drama replaces print with sights and sounds, the senses are more directly engaged and thus less is “veiled” in the act of communication, and the whole experience is in addition a communal act among the members of the theater audience that is “socialist” in spirit. As Miller writes, “To many socialists, liberalism, like the novel, was grounded in the idea of the independent rational subject, who would read and absorb print alone in a state of coherent subjectivity, whereas the theater appeared to offer an oral, live, mutual experience, less mass-oriented but more communal than print” (122). And if like Shaw and Ibsen the playwright practiced “a terrible 282 REVIEWS art of sharp-shooting at the audience” (as Shaw said in The Quintessence of Ibsenism), “the dramatist knows that as long as he is teaching and saving his audience, he is as sure of their strained attention as a dentist is, or the Angel of the Annunciation.”¹ All well and good in theory, but Miller points out that, as with the novel, the audiences for such plays tended to be dominated not by the working-class but by upper-middle-class Bohemians, those expected to lead the revolution from the top down, and Shaw himself asserted his desire for an audience of philosophers. Every move the radicals made toward a more authentic connection between themselves and the proletariat they wished to save seemed to have the same alienating effect of producing elitism among the leaders, but Shaw was undismayed because he never had any hope of a revolution originating from a proletarian uprising, for he knew that such crushed, demoralized, undereducated people had no interest in or capability for a revolution. And that is also why, partly, soon after becoming a playwright he hedged his bet on the theater by editing his plays for print, famously using narrative-like stage directions to give readers the sense that they were reading a novel, a scheme to make the plays a lot more likely to be read than most play scripts while also providing a cheaper way to go to the theater, so to speak. Shaw’s novelizing of his plays may not be the regression it may seem, in that the innovations of form in his particular novelizing of drama did as much to make his work accessible to as many as possible as such high octane drama could manage. As Miller sums up Shaw’s achievement and innovation, “Shaw’s turn from print to the theater was really not so much a turn as an amalgamation, a bringing together of the two media” (128), which combined their virtues to create a more effective voice for social change. And when you add Shaw’s own voice as a speaker (The Quintessence was originally a lecture delivered to the Fabians), you have a very powerful amalgamation of three different media: print, theater, and live voice. Of course how much more powerful would that have been with the addition of television, the Internet, and other post-Victorian inventions, and Miller notes that as well, with hints at the impact starting to be felt from arrivals of new media such as the telephone, phonograph, and moving pictures, which reinforced the turn to theater by suggesting that perhaps a return to an oral and visual rather than textual society would serve radical causes better. But Shaw still preferred an amalgamation rather than a choosing. Of course this historical battle among media preferences in the nineteenth century looks quaint to us now, but this debate presaged the current battle between a more egalitarian SLOW NET and an elitist FAST REVIEWS 283 NET for the financially privileged. (A DARK NET versus a LIGHTED NET is another subject of increasing debate, which is less about speed than about transparency versus hidden control). The current debate now ironically finds today’s egalitarians in the position of radicals in the first half of the nineteenth century who supported the democratizing effect of “FAST PRINT” (today’s “SLOW NET” having that sort of egalitarianism in common with yesterday’s “FAST PRINT”), and it will be interesting to see if there is the same movement toward disillusionment and a return to elitism in “progressive” ranks (we don’t call them “radicals” anymore because the only true radicals these days are “conservatives”) as the twenty-first century moves on. Miller’s book continues with three more chapters and a conclusion, from which Shaw is largely absent. The chapter titles themselves suggest why: Chapter 4, “Measured Revolution: Poetry and the Late Victorian Radical Press,” Chapter 5, “Enlightenment Beyond Reason: Theosophical Socialism and Radical Print Culture,” and Chapter 6, “Free Love, Free Print: Sex Radicalism, Censorship, and the Biopolitical Turn.” But the conclusion finds him making an auspicious return. The conclusion is less a summing up than a venture into rather new territory, as Miller shows how her arguments lead to the realization that these late Victorian literary radicals who have been considered not modernist or even antimodernist were in fact precursors to the modernists or even already modernist in certain respects, and here Shaw’s novel, An Unsocial Socialist, along with Morris’s News from Nowhere, are cited as modernist in the way they “ironize the ‘realism’ of Victorian novels as a decidedly unrealistic, bourgeois fantasy” (302). This conclusion is worth reading by itself as an excellent summary of the current debates over the need to expand the definition of modernism. I was rather taken aback by this book at first. Among my generation of Shaw scholars, much effort has gone into trying to rescue Shaw from some of the unfortunate implications of his being a socialist and self-proclaimed propagandist and didact, for the chief implication, that this meant he was “no artist,” as sometimes claimed or implied by Yeats and some modernists, was one of the principal reasons for his being undervalued as a writer of literature, and SLOW PRINT seems to plunge us back into an argument we thought had been won in Shaw Studies and was causing a rethinking of Shaw elsewhere. But the book’s subtitle, Literary Radicalism and Late Victorian Print Culture, alleviates this somewhat by confining this to the early Shaw, and it turns out that whether Shaw was an artist or not is not really under discussion here, although it may mislead on that subject by not discussing it. But this is just one defect amid a splendor of enlightening 284 REVIEWS argument, some of which suggests that modernism had deep roots in Shaw’s works. Elizabeth Miller is an Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Davis, and her book won the 2014 NAVSA Best Book of the Year Award, sponsored by the North American Victorian Studies Association, and received an Honorable Mention in the 2014 Modernist Studies Book Prize, sponsored by the Modernist Studies Association. As there is much more enlightenment to be found in this book, I highly recommend purchasing it at www.sup.org/books/title/?id=22344. R . F. D I E T R I C H NOTE 1. Bernard Shaw, Major Critical Essays (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), 171. L t V t r nR d l Pr nt lt r nn tt R. F d r English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, Volume 58, Number 1, 2015, pp. 121-123 (Review) P bl h d b LT Pr DOI: 10.1353/elt.2015.0017 For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/elt/summary/v058/58.1.federico.html Access provided by University of California, Davis (15 Jan 2016 19:04 GMT) BOOK REVIEWS Late-Victorian Radical Print Culture Elizabeth Carolyn Miller. Slow Print: Literary Radicalism and Late Victorian Print Culture. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013. vii + 378 pp. $60.00 ELIZABETH CAROLYN MILLER’S Slow Print begins with a de- scription from H. G. Wells’s In the Days of the Comet (1906) of a magazine or newspaper office in the inhuman, speed-driven days before the socialist revolution reformed the world of capitalist publishing: [Imagine] a hastily erected and still more hastily designed building in a dirty, paper-littered back street of old London, and a number of shabbily dressed men coming and going in this with projectile swiftness.… There is a throbbing of telephones and a clicking of telegraph needles, a rushing of messengers, a running to and fro of heated men, clutching proofs and copy. Then begins a clatter roar of machinery catching the infection, going faster and faster, and whizzing and banging—engineers … flying about with oilcans while paper runs off its rolls with a shudder of haste.… You imagine all the parts of this complex lunatic machine working hysterically towards a crescendo of haste and excitement as the night wears on. Stop the presses! The late-Victorian radical establishment’s refusal to join the rat race of modern print culture, Miller argues, involved not only the creation of dozens of countercultural periodicals, such as Workman’s Time, Freedom, the Anarchist, the Dawn, and Commonweal, but the recruitment of some of the most famous literary figures of the day to fill their pages. One of the best features of this thoughtful and carefully researched book is Miller’s own measured, informed, and scholarly pace: she balances the presentation of cultural and historical data with slowed-down readings of diverse literary works, including Annie Besant’s Autobiography, George Bernard Shaw’s plays and prefaces, William Morris’s News from Nowhere and The Pilgrims of Hope, and the working-class Leeds socialist Tom Maguire’s poetry, which appeared in an array of radical periodicals between 1885 and 1895. Resistance happened on many fronts within radical print culture, from the preference for skilled workers over industrial mechanization and the rejection of advertising to the introduction of new typographies and alternative print networks. Verse, drama, and fiction were seen as crucial agents for radical change, vital allies in the resistance to the hegemony of capitalist publishing practices. As Miller argues in her chapter on poetry and the radical press (among the best in the book), papers such as Commonweal encouraged a commitment to publishing poetry precisely because “part of a socialist project of transforming language, culture, and tradition” included presenting readers with “familiar forms 121 ELT 58 : 1 2015 through which people experience and understand their lives.” Literature and the fine arts had a vital role to play in the dawn of a future socialist society, not only as weapons of political propaganda, but as reminders of the roots of communal life. Miller keeps the literary in focus through six chapters that also deftly take into account the various problems of print production (the perceived “wastefulness” of Arts and Crafts printing and other matters of quality control) and the expected rifts among radicals with different ideas about both politics and publishing. Her range is impressive. In a chapter on the antirealist novel, for example, Miller explores the careers of C. Allen Clarke and Margaret Harkness (“John Law”), as well as Shaw’s Cashel Byron’s Profession and An Unsocial Socialist, to argue that socialist distrust of the realist novel as a mass-marketed, bourgeois art form led to the radical turn toward the public space of drama. She also looks in detail at some of the writings of Alfred Orage, finding a Nietzschean tinge in his “theosophical socialism” compared with Annie Besant’s more collectivist principles. Orage’s literary column, “Bookish Causerie,” published in Labour Leader, Miller suggests, anticipates literary modernism in its promotion of a more esoteric and intellectual literature, one distinctly separate from (and above) the popular marketplace. Miller also links the emergence of modernism with late-century sex radicalism: because the state retained control over the circulation of sexual material in print, campaigners such as Havelock Ellis and George Bedborough (editor of the free-love journal, the Adult) rallied on the side of the alternative press, with the support of many eager socialists who were already agitating for marriage reform, women’s rights, and birth control. Miller argues that modernist little magazines and private presses were on a continuum with anti-capitalist or “slow print” agendas—that, in fact, at the turn of the century such innovations and departures from mainstream publishing would have been automatically associated with radical dissent. The last two chapters and the conclusion on the creative crisscross of socialist publishing, theosophy, biopolitics, and censorship will interest scholars who continue to explore the genealogy of modernism, gender and modernism, and popular modernism. When I began to read Slow Print, I was drawn in by the clarity of Miller’s prose and her interesting ideas about the placement of literary works in radical journalism. Yet I wondered if her style and approach would dull after a while—if her project would devolve into the history of a largely forgotten subculture, the retrieval and rearrangement of 122 BOOK REVIEWS not very good literary works or obscure archival documents, a typically adept cultural studies project in which the stage is first set with a heavy backdrop of historical contexts and ideological arguments, and the works of literature—the authors and texts that ostensibly motivate the scholarship—shrink into the wings. I am happy to say that was not my experience. Slow Print elegantly blends a focused examination of a period in literary history and literary politics with actual readings of some of the literature, and occasionally some exciting and detailed attention to language, figure, and meaning. The illustrations included in this book also helped me to understand and to respect the ethical, political, economic, and aesthetic challenges of the radical press movement, and made the story rich, imaginable, and relevant for our own fast-print, hurried-media age. The best part of this book, to me, is its incidental presentation of the human situation in the almost impossible ambitions of anticapitalist publishing activism in the 1890s. How passionate and messed up and brave everyone seemed! Miller’s focus on the radical press at the moment of its radicalization, and her careful work of reading and trying to understand the commitments and limitations of these publishers and artists, will draw new scholars to the enterprise of reading fin-de-siècle culture’s literary innovations through the torn loyalties of radical publishers. Slow Print describes the late-Victorian radical dream of community, equality, and peace through the dream of literature’s refusal of ignorance and the status quo, art’s powerful and contradictory utterances. Perhaps we can’t have one dream without the other. ANNETTE R. FEDERICO James Madison University Buchan & Modernity Kate Macdonald and Nathan Waddell, eds. John Buchan and the Idea of Modernity. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2013. xi + 270 pp. $99.00 VIRGINIA WOOLF famously, and admittedly somewhat playfully, marked the precise beginning of the modernist era with the opening of the 1910 exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists organized by Roger Fry: “On or about December 1910, human character changed.” Woolf’s essay “Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Brown” explores the need for new experimental methods as an antidote to old habits of writing that ignored a modern understanding of perception, thought, memory, and desire. Woolf’s statement became a clarion call of change that would 123 TURN, TURN, TURN AGAIN: ELIZABETH CAROLYN MILLER’S ‘SLOW PRINT: LITERARY RADICALISM AND LATE VICTORIAN PRINT CULTURE’ .postitle 12 October 2013 .single-metainfo Elizabeth Carolyn Miller Slow Print: Literary Radicalism and Late Victorian Print Culture (Stanford University Press, 2013) by Owen Holland “Turn! Turn! Turn! (to Everything There is a Season)“ is a song adapted almost entirely from the Book of Ecclesiastes and set to music by Pete Seeger in 1959. Seeger waited until 1962 to record it, singing that there is “a time to cast away stones and a time to gather stones together.” Bob Dylan perhaps had Seeger’s recording in a nook of his mind when he penned “Percy’s Song” in 1963 – an outtake from the sessions for The Times They Are A-Changin’. The song has that insistent refrain – “Turn, turn, turn again” – which Joan Baez can be heard singing in D.A. Pennebaker’s 1967 documentary film Don’t Look Back. This micro-constellation of the 1960s American folk revival refused to leave my mind when I read Elizabeth Miller’s Slow Print. It lodged itself there for no other reason than that the book is structured around a series of “turns,” which Miller identifies and painstakingly pursues through the sub-cultural byways of late Victorian radical print culture. Miller defines the specificity of the period which she examines by delineating its inheritance of, but simultaneous scepticism towards, the Enlightenment ideal of “free print,” manifest in earlier struggles of the unstamped press in the early nineteenth century and the Chartist ferment of the late 30s and 40s. As such, Miller’s book provides a useful complement to studies of earlier radical print cultures, such as Ian Haywood’s The Revolution in Popular Literature: Print, Politics and the People, 1790-1860 (2004) and Joan Allen and Owen Aston’s edited collection Papers for the People: A Study of the Chartist Press (2005). By the late nineteenth century, the “dream of limitless print” (5) had been exposed as having fallen prey to what E.P. Thompson described as the “rationalist illusion.”[1] The proliferation of print in an era of (relative) liberal tolerance had not lead to mass radicalisation, a conundrum which caused fin-de-siècle radicals to reconsider their media strategies. It was not so much the censor, but, rather, the indifference of a mass public in an anonymous market place that was the main obstacle to the growth of radical and oppositional political sentiment. In a fin-de-siècle version of what Herbert Marcuse conceptualised as “repressive tolerance,” radical attempts to carve out alternative cultural spaces through the medium of print did not escape the contradictions of commercial capitalism. Nevertheless, many of the small-scale radical periodicals discussed by Miller were sufficiently dissimilar to the national, pro-capitalist dailies and weeklies to constitute a domain of “slow print” (2) – differentiated in being both explicitly political and agitational, as well as actively opposed to “literary and journalistic mass production” (ibid.). As the capitalist newspaper barons such as Lord Northcliffe, Arthur Pearson and George Newnes built their empires of inky paper, there was also a sharp rise in the number of printed periodicals and magazines; as Miller puts it, the turn-of-the-century “microsurge in the radical press paralleled the macrosurge of periodical publishing in general” (3). Much of Miller’s material is garnered from the pages of low-circulation radical and socialist newspapers and journals, prominent amongst which are the Socialist League’s Commonweal, the Socialist Democratic Federation’s Justice, Robert Blatchford’s Clarion, Tom Maguire’s Labour Champion, Annie Besant’s Our Corner and The Link, Alfred Orage’s New Age, the Labour Leader, To-Day and Seed Time, amongst numerous others. The ongoing digitalisation of nineteenth-century newspaper collections by multinational academic publishing companies such as Gale Cengage and ProQuest has thus far overlooked the late Victorian sub-cultural formation reconstructed by Miller.[2] It is a cunning ruse of capitalist “reason” that the late nineteenth-century “radical literary responses to the consolidation of the print industry and the emergence of a mass print market,” which shared in an “effort to generate an anticapitalist counterpublic through literature” (25), might well go ”missing” from today’s archive, thick as it is with the aroma of transmutation, as the contemporary print industry continues to migrate to the cloud. As for the turns I mentioned at the outset, George Bernard’s Shaw’s anti-realist turn away from novel-writing to the theatre, discussed in chapters two and three, is shown to have precedents and analogues in the anti-realism of William Morris’s socialist anti-novels, Alfred Orage’s New Age and Oscar Wilde’s aestheticism. Miller’s account of Shaw’s “socialist theatrical turn” (p. 123) is also embedded in a scrupulous reconstruction of the period’s wider theatrical milieu, in which private at-home readings of newly-translated versions of Ibsen’s plays ranked alongside the revivalism of the Shelley Society, whose private staging of The Cenci on 7th May 1886 was part of an “emerging theatrical counterpublic” (149). To-Day serialised the first English translation of Ibsen’s Ghosts in 1885, translated by Henrietta Lord, whilst Lord’s translation of A Doll’s House had been published under the title of Nora in 1882. As Miller comments, “Edmund Gosse may have been the first to translate Ibsen into English, but Lord translated him for radicals” (143). Lord’s translations were complemented by Havelock Ellis’s 1888 edition of The Pillars of Society and Other Plays, which included translations by Lord, William Archer and Eleanor Marx – who had learned Norwegian for the express purpose of translating Ibsen. The subversive edge of this sub-culture was linked, in large part, to the progressive sexual politics of many of the movement’s participants. Some late Victorian socialists, anarchists and radicals found common ground with (some) first-wave feminists on issues such as free love, marriage and the sexual division of labour. Miller’s final chapter, entitled “Free Love, Free Print,” contends that the movement took a biopolitical turn at the fin de siècle, in part because “[s]exuality had replaced labour politics as ground zero for […] censorship debates” (260) – as witnessed in the causes célèbres surrounding George Bedborough’s journal The Adult and Henry Vizetelly’s English translations of Zola. The prosecutions of Bedborough and Vizetelly for obscenity point to the intersection of the struggle for free print (“the residual effect of the radical Enlightenment” [263]) and the fin-de-siècle discourse of free love which challenged the dominant social morality as articulated in the mainstream press. The first chapter examines William Morris’s print ventures of the 1880s and 1890s, making a compelling case for a connection between his “two major experiments in […] slow print” (35): namely, the revolutionary socialist newspaper Commonweal and the Kelmscott Press. In case you were wondering, “Morris’s turn toward print production corresponded nearly exactly with his turn toward revolutionary socialism” (41). Miller stresses the “important continuities” (26) between these ostensibly antithetical projects of Morris’s later years, arguing that both “print enterprises construct themselves as utopian spaces outside the ‘march of progress’ narrative […] that had accrued to print and to capitalism” (ibid.). Miller’s interpretation of the Press usefully qualifies earlier interpretations of the Kelmscott Press as an apolitical feature of Morris’s final years – a late turn away from politics into the fantastic landscapes of romance – by emphasising the way in which the Press’s mission to produce beautiful books was continuous with the “struggle against utilitarianism” (55) which was a crucial element of Morris’s socialist politics. The utopian characterisation of the Commonweal occasionally strikes the wrong note; it is not quite accurate, for example, to say that “[i]t preached a revolutionary vision that called for disengagement with contemporary politics in service of total social transformation” (51). If the Commonweal called for disengagement, none of the Socialist League’s members would ever have bothered to attend a demonstration, or to turn up to a picket line. E.P. Thompson suggests that the Commonweal “never seemed to reconcile the twin tasks of a theoretical journal and a popular propaganda weekly,” but the latter of these two tasks did not involve calling for a complete disengagement with contemporary politics, even if palliative measures were frequently criticised as a road to nowhere (rather than Nowhere).[3] Such nit-picking aside, Miller’s elucidation of the connections between the Commonweal and the Kelmscott Press illuminates both ventures as part of the selfsame endeavour to “reform print at the level of production” (39). Mural on Leeds Road, Bradford. The Independent Labour Party was founded in Bradford by Keir Hardie in 1893. Photo by Tim Green (aka atoach, Flickr) Part of that attempt operated at the level of ideological production. The ideological function of the so-called “free press” in capitalist society is that it is instrumental in creating the impression of a pluralistic and multi-faceted public sphere, in which divergent views can be espoused within a framework of rational, agonistic discussion. Commonweal, and other papers like it, was established to probe the ideological limits of this public sphere, by exposing to scrutiny the unspoken consensus of values which delimits it. Morris was keenly aware of the function of newspapers as a site of ideological production, noting their influence on the “formation of public opinion,” suggesting that “the so-called educated classes stick with great fidelity to the opinions of their favourite newspapers, and by this time have learned to conduct an ‘argument’ on [any given subject] by those means.”[4] His attitude to journalism, however, spoke to a certain denigration of the form. In another article for the Commonweal, dated 30th June 1888, he wrote that “I believe, indeed, it is thought by some that this habit of the consumption of newspapers is the first step in education. Good! the second step, I take it, will be the cessation of that habit.”[5] Morris’s scepticism towards the value of print journalism is further testament to the ambivalence with which some late Victorian socialists regarded the legacy of the radical Enlightenment. In Morris’s case, in particular, John Ruskin’s criticisms of John Stuart Mill’s valorisation of liberty of thought as little more than liberty of “clamour” – to which Miller calls attention in her introduction – was one of the channels through which this ambivalence was mediated. Miller’s book is deeply immersed in what Morris referred to as an “enormous mass of printed paper which is not books or literature, but which the public pays for every day, since I suppose a faculty once acquired produces a habit and must be exercised, even when it is the mechanical one of reading print.”[6] The digital transmogrification of such habits in the contemporary world is both defamiliarising and disorientating, insofar as our changing reading practices are also changing the way we store, process and remember information. The democratic potentiality of the internet, which can shade off into a debilitating kind of idealistic cyber-utopianism, goes together with a manifold reduplication of the question posed by Miller: “Did [does] print function as a synecdoche for capitalism, wordlessly conveying the values of mass production, homogeneity, and invisible labour?” (6). The internet is a place where the possibility of limitless expansion goes hand-in-hand with the actuality of relentless contraction: is it a space for enlightenment or anomie? Each new blogoscule is a solar system unto itself, exerting a gravitational pull on those not-socelestial bodies that happen to fall into the orbit of the “central” sun. It was Hal Draper who once wrote that “[w]hat the future socialist movement needs is a network of informal socialist circles – or formal ones if you will – which have an integral relation to the real struggles people are carrying on.”[7] In part because Slow Print is a study of a radical print culture, Miller tends to shirk the subject of praxis, as such, a concept which is frequently sublimated into a discussion of aesthetic “value,” as instanced in the section of chapter four on the politics of formal innovation. The “real” struggles people were carrying on – or, at least, those that were not chiefly conducted through the medium of print – are mostly absent.[8] This is another minor quibble, though, which should not detract from the book’s achievement in restoring such a large treasury of material to critical attention. Miller’s careful recovery of an extinct media ecology also speaks implicitly to the predicaments of the present moment. Slow Print is ambitious in its scope, in part because the “diverse interconnected radicalisms” (151) of the period have left such a kaleidoscopic array of textual traces. Miller’s discussions of Tom Maguire’s poetry for the Commonweal and Labour Champion, Annie Besant’s autobiographical writings, Julia Dawson’s journalism for the Clarion and Henrietta Lord and Eleanor Marx’s translations of Ibsen illustrate the multifarious kinds of formal experimentation at play in late Victorian radical culture, at the same time as they speak to Miller’s virtuosity in handling such an extensive array of material. Much of the book’s material is drawn, as Miller acknowledges, from the radical press archive of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but the book’s critical payload is directed at modernism studies. Its force is felt in the concluding pages, which refracts the six preceding chapters through a different lens by offering an “alternative genealogy for an emerging modernist aesthetic” (301). A short section merits slightly lengthier quotation: I find in radical print culture a reminder that a rejection of capitalist modes of print production and circulation was just as constitutive of the modernist moment as was an appeal to niche markets and readerships. Forming a separate literary and print culture was not simply a savvy response to a fragmenting marketplace; it was a gesture with a radical political history, a recent radical political history. Little magazines and private presses have a political form that was, at the turn of the century, still associated with anticapitalist dissent. Our understanding of the cultural rupture effected by modernist print is poorer if we do not see this rupture as connected to a history of aggressive political protest against market capitalism such as we see in the late Victorian radical press (300). As this passage should suggest, Miller’s book is not only an important contribution to the study of late Victorian literary and political culture, it also supplies something of “missing link” between this period and the modernism(s) of the early twentieth century: Клином красным бей белых.[9] ___________________________________ Notes: 1 E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 4th edn (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), p. 806. 2 Commonweal and To-Day are two notable, and welcome, exceptions. 3 E.P. Thompson, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary, 2nd rev. edn (London: Merlin Press, 1976), p. 392. Elsewhere Thompson does find fault with Commonweal for being “out of touch with the working-class movement” and for being “difficult to sell” (463). Miller also quotes Thompson’s assessment that the League never learned to understand the “impossibility of preaching purism to workers engaged in bitter class struggles” (438). A “purist” ideological position, though, cannot strictly be identified with calls for disengagement from politics, if only because some measure of engagement, in one context or another, will be required in the attempt to persuade the intended audience of the truth of any given position. 4 William Morris, Journalism: Contributions to Commonweal, 18851890, ed. Nicholas Salmon (Bristol: Thommes, 1996), p. 66. 5 William Morris, Political Writings: Contributions to Justice and Commonweal 1883-1890, ed. Nicholas Salmon (Bristol: Thommes, 1994), p. 377. John Bruce Glasier confirms that “Morris undertook the editorship of the Commonweal with great reluctance, and only because there was no one else who had the time or capacity for the work who could be entrusted with it.” John Bruce Glasier, William Morris and the Early Days of the Socialist Movement (London: Longmans, 1921), p. 177. 6 Morris, Political Writings, p. 376. 7 Hal Draper, ‘Anatomy of the Micro-Sect’, unpublished document circulated privately in 1973, available here [last accessed 25/9/2013]. 8 I am mindful, here, that print is praxis, or one form of it, at least. The Egyptian socialist Hossam el-Hamalawy, for instance, has pointed to some of the ways in which the new technologies of virtual print can play a functional role in the work of political organisation. The Russian title of El Lissitzky’s Smash the Whites with the Red Wedge.