Clare Pettitt - Serial Forms - The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815-1848-Oxford University Press (2020)

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Serial Forms
Serial Forms
The Unfinished Project of Modernity,
1815–1848
CLARE PET TIT T
1
1
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For Cristiano
Tanti piccoli gesti

Acknowledgements
Serial Forms starts in the middle of a ‘crowd moving in different directions some-
where between the Strand and Leicester Square’ and a lot of my preliminary
thinking for this book was done walking backwards and forwards to Covent
Garden tube station on my way to and from my work at King’s College London.
On the Strand (and latterly, on Kingsway), I have been intellectually sustained
and challenged by extraordinary colleagues in the English Department and
beyond. My dear friends, John Stokes and Mark Turner deserve my particular
thanks for reading and commenting on so much of my work, often at moments
which were highly inconvenient for them. Mark’s theories about the history of
periodicals, and John’s work on nineteenth-century theatre and performance,
have thoroughly informed my own thinking and their brilliance has improved
this book immeasurably. Roger Parker in the Music Department was another
invaluable reader who always treated this as a real project, even when I was not so
sure that it was. I still stubbornly think of Josephine McDonagh as a KCL col-
league although she now offers thoughts and support from Chicago. Other
London colleagues have added grist and substance to my ideas, in particular
Adelene Buckland, Rowan Boyson, David Edgerton, Janet Floyd, Seb Franklin,
Paul Gilroy, Russell Goulbourne, James Grande, Richard Kirkland, Johanna Malt,
Alan Marshall, Brian Murray, Paul Readman, Flora Willson, and Patrick Wright.
The ‘Shows of London’ seminar group at KCL, so called because the first text we
read together in 2005 was Richard Altick’s Shows of London, has offered inspir-
ation and an invaluable space for interdisciplinary thinking. King’s is a very con-
genial place to work, and I am grateful for the support, not only of colleagues, but
also of the institution, in the shape of departmental sabbatical leaves and a gener-
ous subvention from the Faculty of Arts and Humanities towards image repro-
duction costs for this book.
The impressive Jacqueline Norton at Oxford University Press has been enor-
mously supportive. She encouraged me to develop what was beginning to feel like
a hopelessly unwieldly project, and my production editor, Aimee Wright, has been
a model of efficiency and good humour in helping me to navigate this book
through the press. Bhavani Govindasamy was gracious and responsive in oversee-
ing its production, and Howard Emmens, my copy editor and indexer, managed
to be both precise and forgiving in equal measure and was a pleasure to work
with. The two anonymous readers who read my first proposal were immensely
generous, helpful, and clear-sighted in their comments. Without their interven-
tion, the ‘book’ would not have become three books and would probably never
viii Acknowledgements
have seen the light of day at all. They remain anonymous, but I thank them
wholeheartedly for everything they have done to bring this project into the world.
I would also like to thank the admirable Leverhulme Trust. The Leverhulme
understands the value of ‘slow thinking’ and without its commitment to the
humanities, and its grown-up resistance to science-analogue models of research,
intellectual life in the UK would be considerably the poorer. The three-book
series of which Serial Forms is the first part has been an unconscionably long time
in gestation. It began when the Leverhulme decided to fund a big interdisciplin-
ary project at Cambridge University, where I was then Director of Studies in
English Literature at Newnham College. ‘Past versus Present: Abandoning the
Past in an Age of Progress’ ran from 2006 to 2011 and brought together five
Research Directors: myself (English); Professor Mary Beard (Classics); Professor
Simon Goldhill (Classics); Professor Peter Mandler (History); and Professor Jim
Secord (History and Philosophy of Science). Five years of concentrated interdis-
ciplinary work completely transformed my view of the nineteenth century, and
I hope that some of the freshness and excitement of that project has migrated
into the pages of this book. My interest in the history of news grew through the
writing of my second monograph, ‘Dr. Livingstone, I Presume?’: Missionaries,
Journalists, Explorers, and Empire (2007), and through a second interdisciplinary
research project, this time funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council
and based in London. ‘Scrambled Messages: The Telegraphic Imaginary 1857–1900’
was a project with Caroline Arscott (History of Art, Courtauld Institute of Art)
and Mark Miodownik (Materials Science, UCL) and our conversations and dis-
coveries over four years (2013–17) will underpin the third book in this series,
Serial Transmission: Literature and Other Technologies, 1848–1918. When my
directorship of the London Arts and Humanities Partnership had taken me away
from research for two years, the Leverhulme Trust came to my rescue in 2018, by
awarding me a year’s Research Fellowship. The space to read, think and write,
after a decade of busy collaborative activity, has been precious beyond reckoning.
Looking back fifteen years to my first book, Patent Inventions: Intellectual
Property and the Victorian Novel published in 2004, also by Oxford University
Press, I realise with pleasure that many of the people that I thanked then are still
very much in my life. Kate Flint, once my PhD supervisor, now my colleague and
friend, has been unwavering in her belief in my work, even—and perhaps espe-
cially—when I have been wavering badly. Barry Windeatt, once my Undergraduate
Director of Studies, is now my wise, wry, and scholarly friend; Jacqueline
Tasioulas, who once ran English with me at Newnham College Cambridge, is now
the steadiest of fellow-travellers through the parallel vicissitudes of motherhood
and academic life. Discussing all things nineteenth-century with Caroline Arscott
is always surprising and exciting. One friend and mentor in my 2004 acknow-
ledgements is sadly missing here: Susan Manning died in 2013. I remember her
often. Other friends and colleagues (the categories are pleasingly leaky) have
Acknowledgements ix
offered invaluable support in different ways, notably Isobel Armstrong, Mary

Beard, Matthew Beaumont, Fenella Cannell, Laurel Brake, Christopher Clark,
Claire Connolly, Emma Dillon, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Eileen Gillooly,
Heather Glen, Lauren Kassell, Helen Kingstone, Julia Kuehn, Mary Laven, Sharon
Marcus, Mark Miodownik, Lynda Nead, Francis O’Gorman, David Russell, Toru
Sasaki, Jan-Melissa Schramm, Helga and Charlotte Schwalm, Jason Scott-Warren,
Sally Shuttleworth, Helen Small, Fumie Tamai, Sara Thornton, Adam Tooze,
David Trotter, Neil Vickers, Alex Werner, and Keith White.
My father died in 2009 and I now see he had a far more profound influence on
my intellectual life than I ever realised when I was younger. I share the sadness of
his loss with my stepmother, Elizabeth, my stepsisters Hilly and Clare, and their
children. And in 2015, my father-in-law, Sergio Ristuccia, also died. Sergio
remained an involved and active father to his three sons to the very end of his life,
and he was also the kindest of fathers-in-law. My sister, Helen Pettitt, and her
husband James Brown are not only the most supportive of family, but also the
most excellent of friends and holiday-companions. Sustaining friendships which
have now endured for more than thirty years with Kirsten Denker, Kathy James,
and Sophie Maccallum continue to define me, and I am grateful too for a twenty-
year friendship with Rebecca Patterson. My Italian and Italian-Brazilian family,
Renzo and Marco Ristuccia, Flavia De Rubeis, and their children, Livia, Fulvia,
Felipe, and Henrique, along with my mother-in-law, Maria-Teresa Salvemini,
remain formidable interlocutors and supporters.
My students have helped me more than they can possibly know. I have taught
undergraduate and MA classes at KCL on ‘Victorian Pasts’, ‘Memory and Time in
the Nineteenth Century’, ‘Victorians Abroad’, and ‘On Speed’ (the last with Mark
Turner) and students on those courses moved my thinking along in ways which
I did not always see coming. Smart and intellectually generous PhD students and
postdoctoral researchers at KCL and on my research projects have all inspired
me with their willingness to keep thinking hard and further: Jocelyn Betts, Helen
Brookman, Rachel Bryant Davies, Christopher Butcher, Anne Chapman, Malcolm
Cocks, Maria Damkjaer, Melissa Dickson, Amanda Ford, Delphine Gatehouse,
David Gange, Samuel Golding, Natalie Hume, Joanna Hofer-Robinson, Nicola
Kirkby, Michael Ledger-Lomas, David McAllister, Cassie Newland, Sadiah Qureshi,
Aaron Rosenberg, Mary Shannon, Helen Stevens, Astrid Swenson, Harriet
Thompson, Briony Wickes, Daniel Wilson, and Mariam Zarif.
I have presented work from this part of the project most recently at the invita-
tion of the department of English at Uppsala University, Sweden, and for the Art
History and English departments and the Visual Studies Research Institute of the
University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles; at the Dickens
Fellowship Annual Conference in Nagano, Japan; and at the Centre for the
History of the Book, Edinburgh University. It was a pleasure to be asked to give a
plenary lecture by my former PhD student, Joanna Hofer-Robinson at University
x Acknowledgements
College Cork. I have also presented early nineteenth-century material at the KCL
Shows of London seminar, at the British Association of Victorian Studies (BAVS)
conference at the University of Cambridge and at BAVS at the University of
Cardiff; at the Yale Center for British Art; the North American Victorian Studies
Association in Victoria, Canada; at the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill; and at Leicester University’s Nineteenth-Century Seminar. I am grateful to
the audiences at all of these sessions, who always said something that made me
think again and better. Any errors in the book are, of course, entirely my own.
I am very grateful to Scott Higgins and to Anna Tsing for kindly allowing me
to use excerpts from their work as epigraphs to Chapters 2 and 5, respectively.
I would also like to thank the journal Radical Philosophy for allowing me to use a
quotation from Jacques Derrida as an epigraph to Chapter 3; Routledge for Homi
Bhabha for Chapter 1; Suhrkamp Verlag AG for Ernst Bloch’s words that start
Chapter 4; and Penguin Random House for the Gaston Bachelard quotation at
the start of Chapter 6. I am grateful too to the University of Chicago Press, who
allowed me to reprint about 600 words on Byron previously published in my
chapter ‘At Sea’ in Adelene Buckland and Sadiah Qureshi (eds), Time Travellers:
Victorian Perspectives on the Past (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020),
pp. 196–219. I would like to record my sincere thanks, too, to the librarians, arch-
ivists, and picture researchers who have gone well beyond the call of duty to help
me locate materials for this book. In the Cambridge University Library, I was very
well supported by the delightful staff in the Rare Books Room, especially Claire
Welford-Elkin and Nicola Hudson. In the Picture Library there, Johanna Ward
and Domniki Papadimitriou were endlessly patient and helpful with my deluge of
image orders. Also indispensable were Nikki Braunton at The Museum of
London, Jeremy Parrett at the Manchester Metropolitan University Special
Collections, Mukund Miyangar at the British Library, Lucia Rinolfi at the British
Museum, Rachel Kett at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Jonathan Coulborn at
Thomas Coulborn & Sons Ltd, Kelly Marshall at the Senate House Library, and
Graham Hogg at the National Library of Scotland. Hanna-Kristin Arro at KCL
cheerfully managed the complexities of image-purchase with me and I thank her
for all her hard work on my behalf. Parts of this book were written at Gladstone’s
Library in Hawarden and I would like to thank all the staff there for their wel-
come and hospitality.
Finally, and most vitally, I would like to thank my husband, Cristiano Ristuccia,
and our two daughters, Kitty and Marina. Cristiano is both the best of husbands
and the most challenging of intellectual companions. Ever since we met, we have
been engaged in a long conversation about the world and his impressive political,
historical, and economic knowledge sustains and grows my own thinking. He has
uncomplainingly read and commented on more drafts of this book than anybody
Acknowledgements xi
else and I thank him for that. I thank him too for all the countless quiet everyday
things he does to support our family. Kitty and Marina were at nursery when my
first book came out, and are now nearly grown-up, and on the brink of their own
lives. They are brilliant and fearsome and funny, and I can’t wait to see what they
do next.
Contents
List of Illustrations xv
Introduction: Serial Forms 1
1. Yesterday’s News 29
2. Scott Unbound 69
3. Live Byron 107
4. Vesuvius on the Strand 148
5. Scalar: Pugin, Carlyle, Dickens 177
6. History in Miniature 213
7. Biopolitics of Seriality 251
Conclusion: 1848 and Serial Revolutions 287
Bibliography 295
Index 335
List of Illustrations
1.1. George Cruikshank, ‘Thoughts about People’, from Charles Dickens, Sketches
by Boz (London: Macrone, 1837) [reproduced by kind permission of the
Syndics of Cambridge University Library, Lib.7.83.4] 40
1.2. Richard Doyle, ‘A Fashionable Club—Four o’Clock p.m.’, in Charles L. Graves,
Mr. Punch’s History of Modern England, vol. 1: 1841–1857 (London: Cassell,
1921), p. 217; originally published in Richard Doyle, Manners and Cvstoms of
Ye Englyshe: Drawn from Ye Quick (London: Bradbury & Evans, 1849–50)
[reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University
Library Lib.5.92.100] 41
1.3. Ackermann’s Print of Benjamin Haydon, ‘Waiting for The Times (after an
adjourned debate)’ (1831) [© The Trustees of the British Museum] 42
1.4. John Thomas Smith, ‘New Elegy’ [itinerant third generation vendor of
elegies, Christmas carols and love songs], in The Cries of London: Exhibiting
Several of the Itinerant Traders of Antient and Modern Times, Copied from
Rare Engravings or Drawn from the Life (London: John Bowyer Nichols and
Son, 1839) [reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge
University Library Syn.4.83.19] 49
1.5. ‘The Long-Song Seller: “Two under fifty for a fardy!” [from a daguerreotype
by Beard]’, Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (1851)
Library XIX.49.16] 55
1.6. Cover of the Vox Stellarum Almanac for 1828 [reproduced by kind
permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library L506.5.d.33.26
(1828)] 60
1.7. ‘Diary and Chronology’, Olio (12 January 1828), p. 16 [reproduced by kind
permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library T900.c.221.1–4
(vol. 1)] 62
2.1. ‘Frontispiece: Woodcut by Thompson’, [George Mogridge], Sergeant Bell, and
his Raree-show (London: Thomas Tegg, 1839) [reproduced by kind
permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library Syn.8.83.21] 73
2.2. T. H. Shepherd, ‘Cranbourne Street, Entrance to Burford’s Panorama’ (1858)
[© Victoria and Albert Museum, London] 80
2.3. ‘Title page’, E. Madder, ‘Olio, or, Scrap Book’ (Cork, 1822) [reproduced by
kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library
Hib.1.822.1–2 (Volume 1)] 85
xvi List of Illustrations
2.4. ‘Black Eye’d Susan’, E. Madder, ‘Olio, or, Scrap Book’ (Cork, 1822)
Library Hib.1.822.1–2 (Volume 1)] 86
2.5. ‘Raree Show’, E. Madder, ‘Olio, or, Scrap Book’ (Cork, 1822) [reproduced by
kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library
Hib.1.822.1–2 (Volume 1)] 87
2.6. ‘The Lucky Horseshoe’, E. Madder, ‘Olio, or, Scrap Book’ (Cork, 1822)
Library Hib.1.822.1–2 (Volume 1)] 88
2.7. ‘North Distant View of Abbotsford’, in ‘A Journey from Stuttgart to Milan and
Florence’, Sir Harry Page Collection of Scrapbooks and Commonplace Books,
Manchester Metropolitan University Special Collections, HPC No. 252 90
2.8. ‘Camposanto di Pisa’: loose insert; hand-coloured print in album, E. Madder,
‘Olio, or, Scrap Book’ (Cork, 1822) [reproduced by kind permission of the
Syndics of Cambridge University Library Hib.1.822.1–2 (Volume 1)] 91
3.1. Théodore Géricault, Scène de Naufrage (1819) [Credit: Louvre, Paris,
France/Bridgeman Images] 111
3.2. Bullock’s Museum (Egyptian Hall or London Museum), Piccadilly. Coloured
aquatint, attributed to T. H. Shepherd (London: Ackermann, 1815)
[Credit: Wellcome Collection. CC BY] 117
3.3. A View of Philip James de Loutherbourg’s Eidophusikon during a
performance, at left a man bowing to a woman, to right figures seated on a
bench in the foreground, watching a scene titled ‘Satan Arraying his Troops
on the Banks of a Fiery Lake, with the Raising of the Palace of
Pandemonium’ from Milton’s Paradise Lost (c.1782) [© The Trustees of the
British Museum] 127
4.1. Alessandro Sanquirico, set design for Giovanni Pacini’s opera, L’ultimo giorno
di Pompei which premiered at the Teatro San Carlo, Naples in 1825. This set
design is from the 1827 La Scala Production [Pictures Now/Alamy Stock
Photo] 150
4.2. ‘Eruption of Mount Vesuvius’, Mirror of Literature, Amusement and
Instruction (30 November 1822), front page [reproduced by kind permission
of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library, Library Storage Facility v.1
(1823)] 154
4.3. ‘Destruction of Torre del Greco’, Mirror of Literature, Amusement and
Instruction (7 June 1823), front page [© The British Library Board:
General Reference Collection P.P.5681] 155
4.4. ‘Representation of Mount Vesuvius at “The Surrey Zoological Gardens” ’,
Mirror of Literature, Amusement and Instruction (13 August 1837), front page
[© The British Library Board: General Reference Collection P.P.5681] 159
5.1. A. W. Pugin, ‘Contrasted Public Conduits’, Contrasts; or, a Parallel between
the Noble Edifices of the Middle Ages, and Corresponding Buildings of the
List of Illustrations xvii
Present Day (London: Charles Dolman, 1841) [reproduced by kind

permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library Ii.4.8] 190
5.2. A. W. Pugin, ‘Contrasted College Gateways’, Contrasts; or, a Parallel between
the Noble Edifices of the Middle Ages, and Corresponding Buildings of the
Present Day (London: Charles Dolman, 1841) [reproduced by kind
permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library Ii.4.8] 193
5.3. ‘Perring’s Light Hats mobile advertisement’, London, ed. Charles Knight,
vol. 5 (1843) [reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge
University Library K.19.16-18] 196
5.4. George Cruikshank, ‘Greenwich Fair’ from Charles Dickens, Sketches by Boz
(London: Macrone, 1837) 2 vols, vol. 1 [reproduced by kind permission of
the Syndics of Cambridge University Library Lib.7.83.4] 209
6.1. Hablot Knight Browne [Phiz], ‘I am hospitably received by Mr. Peggotty’, in
Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1849–50) (London: Ward, Lock,
Bowden & Co., 1892) [reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of
Cambridge University Library, 1893.7.711] 214
6.2. ‘The Colosseum, in the Regent’s Park’, Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and
Instruction (31 January 1829), front page [reproduced by kind permission of
the Syndics of Cambridge University Library, Library Storage Facility v.13
(1829)] 214
6.3. ‘The Coliseum at Rome’, Mirror of Literature, Amusement and Instruction
(13 September 1823) [reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of
Cambridge University Library, Library Storage Facility v.2 (1823)] 217
6.4. Caleb Robert Stanley, The Strand, Looking Eastwards from Exeter Change,
c.1824. The office of the Literary Gazette is visible in the left-hand foreground
[©Museum of London] 221
6.5. John Orlando Parry, A London Street Scene (1835). [Pictures Now/Alamy
Stock Photo] 222
6.6. Robert Cross Smith (aka ‘Raphael’), ‘Illustration Number IX: Astrological
Interpretation of the Signs’, in The Astrologer of the Nineteenth Century
(London: Knight & Lacey, 1825) (18), p. 139. [reproduced by kind
permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library, RBR Y.17.21] 224
6.7. Olio (15 March 1828), p. 145 [reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics
of Cambridge University Library, T900.221.1] 228
6.8. ‘Cork Model of the Temple of Poseidon (now thought to be of Zeus) at
Paestum’. Attributed to Domenico Padiglione’s workshop, Naples, Italy,
c.1820 [image courtesy of Thomas Coulborn & Sons Ltd] 231
6.9. An image mistitled as ‘The Remains of the Parthenon’ in ‘The British
Museum—No.5. The Elgin Marbles’, Penny Magazine (8 September 1832):
228–9, p. 228 [reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge
University Library, L900.b.69] 233
xviii List of Illustrations
6.10. ‘The Parthenon’, Penny Magazine (20 October 1832) [reproduced by kind
permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library, L900.b.69] 234
6.11. ‘The Acropolis at Athens’, Mirror of Literature, Amusement and Instruction
(2 December 1826) [reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of
Cambridge University Library, Library Storage Facility v.8 (1826)] 236
6.12. ‘Stonehenge’, Penny Magazine (22 February 1834) [reproduced by kind
permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library, L900.b.69] 238
6.13. John Leech, ‘Further Preparation of the Miller and his Men’, Young
Troublesome; or, Master Jacky’s Holidays [1850] [© The British Library Board:
General Reference Collection 1899.cc.42] 246
7.1. ‘The British Museum on a British Holiday’, Howitt’s Journal (16 January
1847), p. 29 [reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge
University Library, L900.c.254.1] 263
7.2. Wilhelm von Kaulbach, illustration for William Howitt, ‘The Month in
Prospect: January’, Howitt’s Journal (2 January 1847) [reproduced by kind
permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library, L900.c.254.1] 266
7.3. George du Maurier, ‘The Cut Finger’, illustration for Elizabeth Gaskell, ‘Hand
and Heart’, in Mrs Gaskell, The Grey Woman and Other Tales (London:
Smith, Elder & Co., 1865) [reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of
Cambridge University Library LE.9.81] 273
7.4. Alfred Fripp, ‘The Munster Girl’, Howitt’s Journal (1 January 1848) [courtesy
of Senate House Library, University of London [G.L.] B.847 [Howitt] fol.] 276
Introduction
Serial Forms
‘Never was there a period more fertile than the present in the
production of serial publications’1
The 5th of June 1846 was such a hot day that Elizabeth Barrett, soon to become
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ‘could do nothing but lie on the sofa and drink lem-
onade and read Monte Cristo’.2 She wrote to Robert Browning that she had started
‘ “Le Comte de Monte Cristo,” the new book by Dumas, (observe how I waste my
time . . .) & really he amuses me . . . six volumes I am glad to see.’3 She was not
alone: Dumas’s newspaper novel, The Count of Monte Cristo, was everywhere
that year.4 The London Journal, a penny weekly, was publishing a serialized trans-
lation of the novel for its ever-widening readership,5 and an abridged translation
was running in Ainsworth’s Magazine from 1845 to 1846. In 1847, the American
Ralph Waldo Emerson set out from Boston on the long journey to Europe and
wrote that on the voyage, ‘we retreated upon [the] novels [of] Dumas, [and]
Dickens’.6 Dickens’s new novel Dombey and Son was coming out in its green-covered
monthly numbers between October 1846 and April 1848. An illiterate ‘elderly
1 ‘Advertisement,’ The Court Journal: Court Circular & Fashionable Gazette 7 (14 November 1835),
p. 784, col. 2.
2 Alethea Hayter, A Sultry Month: Scenes of London Literary Life in 1846 (London: Faber & Faber,
1965), p. 47. Le Comte de Monte Cristo was originally published in the Journal des Débats in eighteen
parts from 28 August 1844 to 15 January 1846. The first edition in book form was published in Paris by
Pétion in eighteen volumes with the first two issued in 1844 and the remaining sixteen in 1845. The first
appearance of The Count of Monte Cristo in English was the first part of a serialization by W. Francis
Ainsworth in volume vii of Ainsworth’s Magazine published in 1845, although this was a summary of
the first part of the novel only and was entitled The Prisoner of If. Ainsworth translated the remaining
chapters of the novel, again in abridged form, and issued these in volumes VIII and IX of his magazine
in 1845 and 1846 respectively. Chapman and Hall published a translation in ten weekly instalments
from March 1846 (each comprised six pages of letterpress and two illustrations by M Valentin). This
translation was released in book form with all twenty illustrations in two volumes in May 1846.
3 Elizabeth Barrett to Robert Browning [London] Sunday. [7 June 1846] Letter 2402. The Brownings’
Correspondence, vol. 13, pp. 27–9, https://www.browningscorrespondence.com/correspondence/2649
/?rsId=154587.
4 For a full discussion of the pervasiveness of Alexandre Dumas’s fiction in England in the mid-
1840s, see Juliette Atkinson, French Novels and the Victorians (Oxford: British Academy and Oxford
University Press, 2017), pp. 289–340.
5 G.W.M. Reynolds took on the editorship of the cheap penny weekly, the London Journal in
1845.
6 The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson in Six Volumes, ed. Ralph L. Rusk, vol. 3: 1842–7 (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1939), p. 421.
Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815–1848. Clare Pettitt, Oxford University Press (2020).
© Clare Pettitt.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198830429.001.0001
2 Serial Forms
charwoman’ who ‘lodged at a snuff-shop’ explained to Dickens’s mother-in-law

‘that on the first Monday of every month there was a Tea [at the snuff-shop], and
the landlord read the month’s number of Dombey’.7 In the 1840s, then, the print
serial had begun to cross languages, countries, classes, and genders. The form was
creating new international readerships and a new rhythm of reading.
When they think about seriality, most literary scholars think about serialized
fiction.8 But Serial Forms sets out to enlarge our thinking about seriality by start-
ing to think about it as not just a literary, but also a political, historical and social
category. Ultimately, Serial Forms will suggest that seriality is the defining form of
modernity. Literary and media historian Mark W. Turner has suggested that
‘[t]he periodical-ness of periodicals requires us to think not only about the material
object more closely but also about the conceptual challenges offered by those
objects’, and it is precisely the move from the material of the serial to the concept
of seriality that Serial Forms attempts to locate.9 Beyond literary work on serial-
ized fiction, theories of seriality have been developed in disciplines as diverse as
philosophy, anthropology, media studies, sociology, art history, literary studies,
book history, cultural studies, history of science, women’s studies, queer studies,
and post-colonial studies. The majority of this work has engaged with seriality in
the twentieth century, in a context of advanced political and industrial standard-
ization, a mass society, and state-sanctioned violence on an unprecedented scale.
‘My number is 174517’, says Primo Levi. In Auschwitz, ‘they placed us all in a row,
and one by one, according to the alphabetical order of our names, we filed past a
skilful official, armed with a sort of pointed tool with a very short needle’.10 The
Second World War produced a dark and terrible version of seriality in Europe
7 John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, 3 vols, vol. 2: 1842–1852 (London: Chapman & Hall,
1873), p. 308.
8 The classic work on literary serialization in the nineteenth century is Linda K. Hughes and
Michael Lund, The Victorian Serial (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1991). There is a
large body of work on the serial fiction of the mid to late nineteenth century. See, for example,
Catherine Delafield, Serialization and the Novel in Mid-Victorian Magazines (Abingdon: Routledge,
2016); Graham Law, Serializing Fiction in the Victorian Press (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000);
Robert L. Patten, Charles Dickens and his Publishers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978); Deborah
Wynne, The Sensation Novel and the Victorian Family Magazine (Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2001);
Mark W. Turner, Trollope and the Magazines: Gendered Issues in Mid-Victorian Britain (Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 2000); Andrew King, ‘The London Journal’ 1845–83: Periodicals, Production and Gender
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004); Carol Martin, George Eliot’s Serial Fiction (Columbus: Ohio State
University Press, 1994); Robin Myers and Michael Harris (eds), Serials and their Readers 1620–1914,
papers presented at the 14th Annual Conference on Book Trade History, Birkbeck College, London,
November 1992 (Winchester: St. Paul’s Bibliographies, 1993).
9 Mark W. Turner, ‘Time, Periodicals, and Literary Study’, Victorian Periodicals Review 39:4
(2006): 309–16, p. 311.
10 Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity, trans. Stuart Wolf (New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1996), p. 27. Originally published in Italy as Se questo è un uomo (Giulio Einaudi,
1958). Published in England as If this is a Man. Upon arrival, prisoners in Auschwitz were all tattooed
with a serial number. For information on the number series used in Auschwitz to distinguish Jewish,
male, female, Roma, and police prisoners in the camps, see: http://auschwitz.org/en/museum/aus-
chwitz-prisoners/prisoner-numbers.
Introduction 3
and the theories of seriality that emerged from the Frankfurt School after the war
are understandably culturally pessimistic about what Adorno called ‘the culture
industry’, which figures a manipulative mass media using repetition and repro-
duction to maximize the authority of governments and markets and to under-
mine attempts at social resistance, collectivity, or finally even subjectivity.11 Much
of the twentieth-century work on seriality is broadly Marxist in its identification
of seriality with capitalism, through Fordism, for example, or through consump-
tion patterns and the accelerated rhythms of fashion.12
In the 1960s, a new generation of structuralist and post-structuralist thinkers,
such as Umberto Eco and Gilles Deleuze, moved the discussion of seriality
towards aesthetic process and the cultural production of form, imbuing the idea
of the serial with renewed energy. Eco was later to write that ‘[t]he products of
mass media were equated with the products of industry insofar as they were pro-
duced in series, and the “serial” production was considered as alien to the artistic
invention’.13 But the serial as ‘machinic’, to use Deleuze’s word, could also be an
engine of proliferation and potentially radical transformation.14 Jean-Paul Sartre
produced his important and influential social theory of seriality in 1960, which
describes the seriality of ‘ordinary . . . everyday life’ in a city, where people find
themselves placed in a ‘relation of isolation, of reciprocity and of unification (and
massification) from outside’.15 ‘There are serial behaviour, serial feelings, and
serial thoughts’, Sartre claims; ‘[a] series is a mode of being for individuals both in
relation to one another and in relation to their common being, and this mode of
11 Such a view of the victimization of the human ‘subject’ by the technological ‘object’, clear also in
the work of Martin Heidegger and, more recently, Paul Virilio, is coming under increasing pressure.
Bernhard Siegert has declared ‘the end of the intellectual postwar in German media theory’, and he
has welcomed a new attention to ‘cultural techniques’ conceived of as processual chains of action
across human and non-human agents. Bernhard Siegert, ‘Introduction: Cultural Techniques, or, The
End of the Intellectual Postwar in German Media Theory’, in Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors,
and Other Articulations of the Real, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young (New York: Fordham University
Press, 2015), pp. 1–18. Siegert’s own work puts his theory into practice: see also Bernhard Siegert,
Relays: Literature as an Epoch of the Postal System (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999) First
published in German as Relais: Geschicke der Literatur als Epoche der Post, 1751–1913 (Berlin: Verlag
Brinkmann & Bose, 1993).
12 See, for example, N. N. Feltes, Modes of Production of Victorian Novels (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1986); Peter L. Shillingsburg, Pegasus in Harness: Victorian Publishing and
W.M. Thackeray (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1992); Law, Serializing Fiction.
The term ‘Fordism’ gained prominence when it was used by Antonio Gramsci in 1934 in his essay
‘Americanism and Fordism’ in Prison Notebooks: Antonio Gramsci, The Gramsci Reader: Selected
Writings, 1916–1935, ed. David Forgacs (New York: New York University Press, 2000), pp. 275–99.
13 Umberto Eco, ‘Innovation and Repetition: Between Modern and Post-Modern Aesthetics’,
Daedalus 114:4 (1985): 161–84, p. 162.
14 Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi
(London: Continuum, 1987), p. 23. Originally published as Mille Plateaux, vol. 2: Capitalisme et
Schizophrénie (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1980). Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari first introduced
the idea of the ‘machinic’ in their 1983 Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
15 Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. 1, trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith (London:
New Left Books, 1976), p. 256. Originally published as Critique de la raison dialectique, précedé de
Questions de méthode (Paris: Gallimard, 1960).
4 Serial Forms
being transforms all their structures’.16 Sartre’s mode of seriality has some
generative potential. It can produce a ‘group-in-fusion’ with the capacity for polit-
ical resistance.17 The événements in Paris in 1968 produced a burst of energetic
engagement with ideas about the relationship of the ‘serial’ to the ‘event’.18 In
1970, Michel Foucault ‘transferred the word-pair “event and series” from his
beloved serial music to the contentious debate on how history and time could be
conceptualized in a different way’.19 Through the 1970s, Foucault used the idea of
the serial to develop his ‘genealogical’ approach to history, and the series and seri-
ality were also crucial to his later theory of governmentality. Media Studies, as it
gained disciplinary ground, particularly in Germany in the latter half of the twen-
tieth century, began to explore serial form with an emphasis on reception and
viewer participation.20 Sartre’s understanding of the social function of seriality
was revisited in the 1980s by an anthropologist of South-East Asia, Benedict
Anderson.21 Anderson used the examples of the government census and parlia-
mentary elections to model what he called ‘bound seriality’ and he opposed this
kind of seriality to the ‘open to the world plurals’ of categories such as ‘worker’ or
‘anarchist’ which worked across national boundaries and represented what he
called ‘unbound seriality’.22 Anderson linked seriality to nation-building, nation-
alism, and imperialism, particularly through the print media.23 In the 1980s and
16 Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. 1, p. 266.

17 Frederic Jameson, in his preface to Sartre’s Critique, explains that ‘the group-in-fusion is hardly a
social form at all, but rather an emergence and an event, the formation of a guerilla unit, the sudden
crystallization of an “in-group” of any kind’: Frederic Jameson, ‘Foreword’, in Jean-Paul Sartre,
Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. 1, trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith, new edn (London: Verso, 2004),
pp. i–xxxiii, pp. xxvi–xxvii.
18 For example, see the discussion of Alain Badiou’s theory of ‘the event’ in Chapter 4 of this book.
19 Friedrich Kittler, ‘Lightning and Series—Event and Thunder’, Theory, Culture and Society 23:7–8
(2006): 63–74, p. 64.
20 See, for example, Frank Kelleter (ed.), Populäre Serialität: Narration—Evolution—Distinktion. Zum
seriellen Erzählen seit dem 19. Jahrhundert (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2012); Frank Kelleter, Serial
Agencies: The Wire and Its Readers (Alresford: Zero Books, 2014); Felix Brinker, ‘On the Formal Politics
of Narratively Complex Television Series: Operational Self-Reflexivity and Audience Management in
Fringe and Homeland’, in Sebastian M. Herrmann et al (eds), Poetics of Politics: Textuality and Social
Relevance in Contemporary American Literature and Culture (Heidelberg: Universtätsverlag Winter,
2015); and Jason Mittell, ‘Narrative Complexity in Contemporary American Television’, The Velvet Light
Trap 58 (Fall 2006): 29–40. See also the publications produced by the ‘Popular Seriality Research Unit’
(2010–16), based at Free University Berlin (:http://www.popularseriality.de/en/index.html) and by
‘Popular Seriality—Aesthetics and Practice’, :http://popularseriality.uni-goettingen.de. Caroline Levine in
Forms devotes her last chapter to The Wire, claiming that this television series models ‘what happens
when a great many social, political, natural, and aesthetic forms encounter one another’: Caroline Levine,
Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), p. 132.
21 Ed White has pointed to ‘strong, unacknowledged echoes . . . in Anderson’s work’ of Sartre’s work:
Ed White, ‘Early American Nations as Imagined Communities’, American Quarterly 56:1 (2004):
49–81, p. 62.
22 Benedict Anderson, ‘Nationalism, Identity, and the World-in-Motion: On the Logics of Seriality’,
in Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (eds), Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation,
Cultural Politics 14 (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), pp. 117–33, p. 117.
23 See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism, rev. edn (London: Verso, 1991) and Benedict Anderson, The Spectre of Comparisons:
Nationalism, Southeast Asia and the World (London: Verso, 1998).
Introduction 5
1990s, Marxist book and publishing historians began to think about the Victorian
periodical and serialized fiction as a commodity form, and feminist critics used
seriality to think about the construction of gender and about the narratological
characteristics of women’s writing.24 Queer and post-colonial critics have turned
to Freudian theories of repetition and return to describe a traumatic seriality
which functions on both macro and micro scales, making connections for
example between slavery and ‘everyday’ racist microaggression.25
The branding and tattooing of slaves in the eighteenth and nineteenth centur-
ies predates Auschwitz by more than a century, and had already revealed the ter-
rifying anti-human work that serialization could be made to do.26 It was clear,
even at this early stage, that seriality might not be a racially neutral category. In
cultural criticism today, seriality is most often described as the cultural logic
which drives neoliberalism in its tireless accrual of information and its relentless
agglomeration of power. Serial systems have adapted well to neoliberalism’s
requirements for built-in flexibility, risk-taking, and mobility. The digital series of
computer programming has replaced the factory assembly line as the material
actualization of serial logic, and the ubiquity of computer code means that we
find ourselves more serialized today than ever before. Serial Forms focuses on the
period before a mass society and mass communication existed. It asks what the
24 See, for example, Iris Marion Young, ‘Gender as Seriality: Thinking about Women as a Social
Collective’, Signs 19:3 (Spring 1994): 713–38, pp. 727, 728. Young sticks close to Sartre’s idea that
‘[s]ocial life consists of constant ebbs and flows of groupings out of series; some groups remain and
grow into institutions that produce new serialities, others disperse soon after they are born’, p. 735,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/3174775. Also see Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death
Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), p. 35. A summary of critiques of Edelman’s posi-
tion can be found in Mari Ruti, The Ethics of Opting Out: Queer Theory’s Defiant Subjects (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2017). See also work on queer negativity by Jack Halberstam and Lynne
Huffer, and on ‘bad feelings’ by Sara Ahmed, David Eng, Heather Love, and José Muñoz.
Robyn R. Warhol, ‘Making “Gay” and “Lesbian” into Household Words: How Serial Form Works in
Armistead Maupin’s “Tales of the City” ’, Contemporary Literature 40:3 (Autumn 1999): 378–402,
pp. 382–3. Warhol also argues that ‘Serial form infiltrates domestic space, blurring the boundaries
between “public” and “private” discourse’ and that ‘Serial form interacts with events in “real time” ’:
pp. 382–3 (emphasis original).
25 See Saidiya V. Hartman and Frank B. Wilderson III, ‘The Position of the Unthought: An
Interview with Saidiya V. Hartman conducted by Frank B. Wilderson, III’, Qui Parle 13:2 (2003):
183–201, p. 196. See also Saidiya Hartman, ‘The Time of Slavery’, South Atlantic Quarterly 101:4
(2002): 757–77 and Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2016).
26 Slaves were often branded with a symbol of ownership, rather than a serial number, although
there is evidence that serial numbering was also used. For example, Martha B. Katz-Hyman says, ‘[i]t
is unclear how common branding was among American slaveholders. In an early example of brand-
ing, in 1766, “twenty-four prime Slaves, six prime women Slaves, being mark’d and number’d as in the
margin [of the captain’s instructions]” were sent to “Georgey, in South Carolina” aboard the Mary
Brow’: Martha B. Katz-Hyman, ‘Branding’, in Martha B. Katz-Hyman and Kym S. Rice (eds), World of
a Slave: Encyclopedia of the Material Life of Slaves in the United States, vol. 1 (Santa Barbara, CA:
Greenwood, 2011), pp. 77–9, p. 78. Mark T. Gustafson notes that ‘[b]randing has been shown recently
to refer to the much more prevalent practice of tattooing’: Mark T. Gustafson, ‘Branding of Slaves’, in
Junius P. Rodrigue (ed.), The Historical Encyclopaedia of World Slavery, vol. 1 (Santa Barbara, CA:
ABC-Clio, 1997), pp. 98–9, p. 98.
6 Serial Forms
history of modern ‘seriality’ might be, and how emergent theories of history and
time entered into the practice of everyday life in the nineteenth century in ways
which would later support the development of a culture of ‘seriality’. Although the
book has been informed by theories of seriality, it largely relies on historical and
literary evidence to construct its argument.27 Serial Forms sets out to show that in
the early nineteenth century, seriality becomes a kind of knowledge, a knowledge
that is political, bodily and historical: a knowledge about being in time.
A new regime of time is necessary to the embedding of seriality, and Serial
Forms suggests that what we can see in this period is the gradual uptake of prac-
tices and understandings of sequential time that will enable the establishment of
that serial logic after mid-century. In a shift from previous models of time, people
were learning how to figure their existence in a periodized continuum.28 I am
interested in ‘practices and systems of practices’, and I argue that this new time-
knowledge came to people through practice: the practices of systematization and
standardization, rationalization, and mediation.29 These practices were new and it
would not be until later in the century that they would develop more fully into
the serialization of social relations through the liberal dispensation and what
John Stuart Mill would describe as the ‘perfect impartiality between persons’.30
Seriality is an exceptionally, perhaps a dangerously, flexible form. It can be
emancipatory, but it can also be regulatory and repressive. It can model a con-
nective universalism, but it can also be enlisted to work to biopolitical and racist
ends. And the serial can plot multiple and conflicting temporalities. Helen
Vendler has shown how the nineteenth-century American poet Emily Dickinson
rearranged the series in her poems ‘to show seriality mutating into iterative sta-
sis . . . or to suggest serial hope deliquescing into uncertain termini or no termini
at all’.31 In its movement across space and time, seriality maintains some kind of
structural relation between its moving parts, although this relationality can be
quite complicated, as Vendler points out. It is complicated partly because serial-
ization is at the same time about both the relation of parts and their separation.
The serial offers a means of distributing information or data across time and also
across space, and this distributive function is crucial to the ways in which seriality
27 For a survey and discussion of theories of seriality, see my article, ‘Beginning Again to Begin:
Thinking About Seriality’ (forthcoming).
28 See Helen Kingstone, ‘History as a Temporal Continuum: From Walter Scott to William Stubbs’,
in Victorian Narratives of the Recent Past: Memory, History, Fiction (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017),
pp. 29–53.
29 Michel Foucault, ‘Questions of Method’, in J. D. Faubion (ed.), Michel Foucault: Power (New York:
The New Press, 1994), pp. 223–38, p. 230.
30 John Stuart Mill, ‘Utilitarianism’, Fraser’s Magazine 64:383 (November 1861): 391–534 and
‘Utilitarianism’, Fraser’s Magazine 64:384 (December 1861): 659–73, p. 672. In Chapter 5, ‘one person’s
happiness, supposed equal in the degree (with the proper allowance made for kind), is counted for
exactly as much as another’s’.
31 Helen Vendler, ‘Emily Dickinson Thinking: Rearranging Seriality’, in Poets Thinking: Pope,
Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), pp. 64–91, p. 91.
Introduction 7
becomes imbricated in political systems and processes in the nineteenth century.

A serial can fail and collapse or it can amalgamate with other serials, and join
another series, creating complicated and uneven networks and patterns. Our ten-
dency is to think of a series as one thing after another, but the serial is not neces-
sarily tidy or linear. On the contrary, as Turner has argued about print, serials are
messy, ‘unruly’, and, ‘stuttering, uncertain, nonlinear and often unpredictable’.32
Different formats, paper quality, and typefaces all shape the way that texts are
read and circulated, so that if we follow these serial material objects and think
about their reception, we rapidly discover that a definition of seriality as stable
linear sequence is balefully inadequate.33
Like Foucault’s concept of ‘governmentality’, seriality can absorb resistance and
is created partly by the resistant elements which it is able to fold into itself. In fact,
it is seriality’s ability to include gaps and pauses inside its strong onward flow that
makes it such a useful format for ‘progressive’ thinking, including, but not exclu-
sive to, capitalist thinking. The serial-progressive model proved malleable to all
sorts of appropriations. It could be used to frame visions of unbridled capitalism,
democratic reform action, and practices of state formation and power. From the
1830s onwards, an increasingly pervasive concept of time as uneven succession
was co-opted by the market economy and by the state alike. This does not func-
tion as proof of a category identity between them, but it does suggest that the
market economy and the state shared a morphology from the start which would
inevitably lead to their subsequent confusion. Serial Forms shows how this mud-
dling of democracy and capitalism is already happening by the late 1840s. In this
context, it is not surprising that, as the delivery mechanism of progress, seriality
was sometimes identified with democracy and sometimes with capitalism, and
sometimes with both. This confusion meant that each was sometimes understood
to be the vehicle of the other: was the market delivering democracy, or was
democracy underpinning the market? Making this complex history visible again
can reveal how uncompromisingly hard neoliberalism has to work today to main-
tain its false causal association between capitalism and democracy. Indeed, this
model seems to be unwinding in the twenty-first century as late capitalism
appears to be starting to ‘undeliver’ democracy, and we are now being forced to
question the relationship between the two with ever more consternation. In my
32 Mark W. Turner, ‘The Unruliness of Serials in the Nineteenth Century (and in the Digital Age)’,
in Rob Allen and Thijs van den Berg (eds), Serialization in Popular Culture (New York: Routledge,
2014), pp. 11–32, p. 20.
33 Sarah Schaschek reminds us that the origin of the word ‘series’ does suggest linearity as it derives
from the Latin noun meaning row or chain, which in turn stems from the verb serere: to join or con-
nect. Sarah Schaschek, Pornography and Seriality: The Culture of Producing Pleasure (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 8. The Oxford English Dictionary gives the etymology as ‘classical Latin
seriēs row, continuous line, succession, sequence, line of ancestors or descendants. Serere to link, to
join, to string together (the same Indo-European base as ancient Greek εἴρειν to string together)’:
http://www.oed.com.ezp.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/Entry/176458#eid23335888.
8 Serial Forms
argument, it was the cultural logic of seriality establishing itself in the 1830s that
caused the identification of the freedom of the market with the freedom of the
people.
Serial Forms reveals how serial technologies could tip uneasily between free-
dom and control in the early nineteenth century. Seriality was a transformative
form, and the book suggests that it was welcomed by many people, before its dis-
ciplinary capacities became wholly clear. These technologies opened up new pos-
sibilities for social visibility for more and more people, but at the same time, that
very visibility admitted new techniques of counting and ordering populations
which contributed to the centralization of power and to an accelerating
nationalism. By mid-century, it was clear that seriality was entwined with the
biopolitics of an enlarging state which was beginning to enumerate and serialize its
people into a national ‘population’. Seriality had already become a nodal concept
with a wide operative range across literary, scientific, and political fields, and was
fast becoming a technology of government. Oruc Firat has suggested that seriality
is important because ‘it invokes the consciousness of the serial mode of existence
that links individuals along an apparitional linearity’.34 It is to this consciousness,
to the experiential and ‘apparitional’ nature of seriality as it emerged in the first
part of the nineteenth century, that I direct my enquiry, asking how it might have
felt to live in a culture that was beginning to serialize. Seriality has always allowed
attention to the ‘microdynamics of the everyday and the ordinary’.35 Serial Forms
argues that the rhythms of seriality in the early nineteenth century do not create
political subjects out of people overnight, but that they do crucially start to create
the feeling of being part of a daily politics for more and more people.
Why 1815–1848?
Serial Forms rethinks the history of the nineteenth century in Britain. The seven-
teen years of the Georgian period from the end of the Regency to the beginning
of Victoria’s reign in Britain has long been a neglected and arid field in British lit-
erary studies.36 The British literary canon seems to suffer something of a collapse
34 Oruc Firat Oruc, ‘Plebeianization, Un/Bound Seriality, and Global Modernism’, Criticism 55:2
(Spring 2013): 279–97, p. 287, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.13110/criticism.55.2.0279.
35 Janet Staiger, Ann Cvetkovich, and Ann Reynolds, ‘Introduction’, in Janet Staiger, Ann
Cvetkovich and Ann Reynolds (eds), Political Emotions: New Agendas in Communication (New York:
Routledge, 2010), pp. 1–17, p. 6.
36 Since I started this project, the 1820s and 1830s have come into sharper scholarly focus. James
Chandler’s important England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Literary
Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998) was joined by an excellent collection, James
Chandler and Kevin Gilmartin (eds), Romantic Metropolis: The Urban Scene of British Culture,
1780–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), and by Kevin Gilmartin (ed.), Sociable
Places: Locating Culture in Romantic-Period Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
Also notable is Jon Mee’s Conversable Worlds: Literature, Contention, and Community 1762 to 1830
Introduction 9
in this period. After the pyrotechnics of the ‘Romantic period’ a gloomy wasteland
devoid of markers stretches between Keats’s Poems of 1820 and Charles Dickens’s
Pickwick Papers of 1836. A few desultory silver-fork novels are scattered about,
and of course there is Scott as well as the ongoing phenomenon of Byron,
although few of our undergraduate university courses in the UK teach very much
Byron or Scott.37 But apply to an intellectual historian or a historian of science
and technology and a very different landscape appears. For science and intellec-
tual history, the late 1820s to the middle of the 1830s represents a period of
remarkable generic fluidity, porosity to European ideas, and international intel-
lectual debate.38 Historians would cite the significant pan-European social unrest
between the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 up to the French revolution of
1830. Print historians and art historians meanwhile know this as the period that
sees the bursting forth of a variety of new media and new and cheapening forms
of print. The history of what we now call ‘history’, the history of what we now call
‘the media’, and the history of ‘literature’ continue to be held apart today by a
remarkably persistent nineteenth-century machinery of historicization, Romantic
nationalism, and disciplinization. But this was not always the case. Building on
scholarship in a variety of disciplines, Serial Forms sets out both to re-examine
the nineteenth century and to develop a methodology to dismantle this familiar
machinery and to transcend these disciplinary categories.39 In this sense, this is
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Work by Mary Favret and by Kevis Goodman has been par-
ticularly inspiring: Mary Favret, War at a Distance; Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009); Kevis Goodman, Georgic Modernity and British
Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Angela Esterhammer’s Print and
Performance in the 1820s: Improvisation, Speculation, Identity is forthcoming with Cambridge
University Press, and a collection is forthcoming from the research project ‘Institutions of Literature,
1700–1900’ run by Jon Mee and Matthew Sangster. Matthew Sangster has written on London in this
period: see Matthew Sangster, ‘Transformation and Specialization in London and its Topography’,
Journal of Victorian Culture 22:3 (2017): 317–28. Questions of novelty, contemporaneity, and fashion-
ability have been addressed by Timothy Campbell in his Historical Style: Fashion and the New Mode of
History, 1740–1830 (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) and by Lauren
Gillingham in her article, ‘The Novel of Fashion Redressed: Bulwer-Lytton’s Pelham in a Nineteenth-
Century Context’, Victorian Review 32:1 (2006): 63–85. Beyond the literary, new directions for the
period have been suggested by James A. Secord, Visions of Science: Books and Readers at the Dawn of
the Victorian Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014) and Roger Parker and Susan Rutherford
(eds), London Voices, 1820–1840: Vocal Performances, Practices, and Histories (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2019).
37 Scott is more widely taught in the US than in the UK.

38 James Secord makes the point that the period from the late 1820s to the mid-1830s witnessed an
extraordinary fluidity and intermixing of generic boundaries. Fiction and verse ‘were seen by contem-
poraries as in decline, with publishers and readers looking to the dialogue, the essay, and the treatise
as indicators of what William Hazlitt termed the “spirit of the age” ’: Secord, Visions of Science, p. xxxiv.
39 Martin Meisel suggested such an approach many years ago in Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial,
and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983).
George Levine predicted in his review of Meisel’s book that it would ‘probably will take a long time—
already has taken too long—for [this book] to make its impact on nineteenth-century scholarship and
criticism, and beyond that on narrative theory’. He was right. Modern Philology 84:2 (November
1986): 233–5, p. 233.
10 Serial Forms
both a book about the nineteenth century and a book about thinking about the
nineteenth century.
By the 1840s, all kinds of things were being serialized—not just Dickens’s and
Dumas’s novels, but recipes, science, Bibles, encyclopaedias, directories and man-
uals of all kinds. Political events, military engagements, and natural disasters were
represented in serial form in panoramas and on stage. The sociability and perme-
ability of serial form was creating a new version of the public sphere and a more
inclusive model of citizenship and it was permanently changing the relationship
of the individual to the state. Serial Forms looks back to the grim two decades
after the Napoleonic wars, a time of repression, press censorship, and painful eco-
nomic transformation, and asks how this emergent rhythm of seriality won
through. The book ends on the eve of the European revolutions of 1848, events
that were themselves often imagined as a ‘series’, and which mark a far more
important turning point in the history of modernity than is usually acknow-
ledged, especially by scholars in Britain and America.40 The revolutionaries of
1848 deliberately deployed the ideas of serial citizenship that had emerged in the
first half of the century. And the revolutions resulted in the serial spread of con-
nected and politically liberal regimes across most of Europe. These liberal regimes
would endure throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, and would,
with great efficiency and consummate historical irony, put in place the serial
machinery of empire which would drastically limit the freedom of so many
people across the globe.
Why London?
Serial Forms takes the print centre of Regency and Georgian London as its focus
and asks how London responded in print and spectacle to the reopening of
Europe after sixteen years of Napoleonic Wars. These wars themselves had already
had an important effect on popular perceptions of space and time: as Georg
Lukács points out, ‘the enormous quantitative expansion of war plays a qualita-
tively new role, bringing with it an extraordinary broadening of horizons’.41 The
Napoleonic Wars had forced the migration of thousands of people, with the largely
unintended but significant result that Europe had become unprecedentedly
40 The significance of 1848 is generally better understood by historians in Continental Europe.

Important exceptions are Christopher Clark, ‘After 1848: The European Revolution in Government’,
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 22 (December 2012): 171–97; and Gareth Stedman Jones
and Douglas Moggach, eds. The 1848 Revolutions and European Political Thought (Cambridge and
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018). My forthcoming book, Serial Revolutions: 1848 will
continue the story of the European revolutions, and their impact in Britain and America.
41 Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (London: Merlin Press,
1962), p. 24; first published in Moscow, 1937.
Introduction 11
internationally interconnected by 1815.42 In these years London is both ahead

and behind, and is busy catching up with itself as a ‘bawling, splashing, link-
lighted, umbrella-struggling, hackney-coach-jostling, patten-clinking, [and]
muddy’ city.43 In playing catch-up with a rapidly accelerating culture, the major-
ity of Londoners needed first of all to catch up with the past. Only when they
could enter into a shared form of popular historical consciousness would they be
equipped to participate in the newly defined present.44 This is a period of popular
globalization, when images of world history are available in the cheapest papers,
in street shows, and in the set designs in the unlicensed theatres.45 The emphasis
placed on the importance of nationhood and national identity by twentieth-century
historiography has perhaps obscured the degree to which educated and, as Serial
Forms shows, also half-educated and uneducated people in the early nineteenth
century lived in a world of images and ideas that was much larger than the
national, and by no means dominantly imperial. London’s centrality as a capital
city and its permeability to other cultures make it unrepresentative of anything
but itself, but if most Londoners were playing catch-up with what they would
only later come to consider their own national past, then this time lag can be
assumed to have been even longer in provincial or remote locations.46
Serial Forms plunges into the centre of Georgian London at some time in 1820,
in a crowd moving in different directions somewhere between Leicester Square
42 Brendan Simms argues that Napoleon’s hegemonic project was unparalleled since the Roman
Empire: ‘[t]he period after 1792 saw an unprecedented revolution in European international rela-
tions’: Brendan Simms, ‘Napoleon and Germany: A Legacy in Foreign Policy’, in David Laven and
Lucy Riall (eds), Napoleon’s Legacy: Problems of Government in Restoration Europe (Oxford: Berg,
2000), pp. 97–112, p. 99. See also T. C. W. Blanning, ‘The French Revolution in Europe’, in Colin Lucas
(ed.), Rewriting the French Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 183–206.
43 Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, ed. Nina Burgis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997),
p. 279.
44 Patrick Joyce has suggested that after 1848 ‘[t]he making of identity was intimately tied up with
the operations of memory and the construction of the historical sense’: Patrick Joyce, Visions of the
People: Industrial England and the Question of Class, c.1848–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1991), pp. 338–9.
45 Edward Ziter has made this point in relation to the popular drama of the nineteenth century:
‘[i]n [Stephen] Bann’s analysis, nineteenth-century venues of popular culture emerge as arenas in
which modern European identities were generated out of examinations of the historically distant, and
I would extend the analysis to include the geographically distant as well’: Edward Ziter, The Orient on
the Victorian Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 14. See Stephen Bann, The
Clothing of Clio: A Study of the Representation of History in Nineteenth-Century Britain and France
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
46 Andrew Charlesworth has pointed out that, in England, ‘[i]t is even possible that the village
world of the 1840s and 1850s had a more restricted horizon than had the village in 1830’, due to ‘the
disintegration of the network of long-distance carriers and coaches after the coming of the railway.
The railway may have united an urban proletariat but in rural areas it could not perform the role that
the link men of the road had. Its network was much less integrated, sparse, and its stopping places
much rarer. Indeed, initially, it isolated the rural labourer and artisans from regular and direct contact
with the urban centres of political radicalism and with labourers in other areas. No wonder Chartism
barely touched the countryside’: Andrew Charlesworth, Social Protest in a Rural Society: The Spatial
Diffusion of the Captain Swing Disturbances of 1830–1831 (Norwich: Geo Abstracts [for] the Historical
Geography Research Group, 1979), p. 46.
12 Serial Forms
and ‘the ever-crowded, noisy, tumultuous thoroughfare called the Strand’, which
was ‘the very focus—the hot-bed, the forcing house—of the “Newspaper-Press” ’.47
Henri Lefebvre has observed that ‘[w]hen lives are lived and hence mixed
together, they distinguish themselves badly from one another. Noise, chaotic has
no rhythm.’48 By looking over the shoulders of some of those people in the crowd,
Serial Forms tries to distinguish different lives and the timeframes and measures
of their variously lived rhythms, speculating about the level of social syncopation
that it was possible for the members of this moving crowd to imagine in 1820. It
questions whether concepts such as ‘contemporanenity’ or ‘dailiness’ can be used
meaningfully in this period.49 By the 1830s, a decade later, ways of imagining
contemporaneity were fast becoming increasingly available to almost everyone
through a growing consensus around news time and historical time. This consen-
sus was produced largely through low-end print and show culture. Serial Forms is
not about ‘high’ intellectual history, nor is it about literary Romanticism. It tries
to keep its focus on the Londoners in the crowd, and on what their everyday
experiences might have told them about the shifting values of time. The relation-
ship between the present and the past was intensely mobile and unstable for many
people. Because of the particular and exceptional conditions of the 1820s and
1830s in Britain—urbanization, increasing industrialization, and democratiza-
tion, even in spite of censorship and an authoritarian state—‘new kinds of tem-
poral attunement’ did develop.50
In 1815, London was the fastest-growing city in the world, and that is why my
enquiry starts here. Seriality is primarily an urban phenomenon in this period
and the city is an important actor in the naturalizing of serial rhythms. The
‘double condition’ of London was recognized long ago by Raymond Williams,
who identified both ‘its miscellaneity, its crowded variety, its randomness of
movement’ and also ‘beyond them, often hidden, the common condition and des-
tiny’ which make London something of ‘a contradiction, a paradox’. He suggests
that ‘the random and the systematic, the visible and the obscured’ is really ‘the
47 Thomas Rees, Reminiscences of Literary London from 1779 to 1853, With Interesting Anecdotes of
Publishers, Authors and Book Auctioneers of That Period &c. &c. With Extensive Additions by John
Britton (London: Suckling & Galloway, 1896), p. 133.
48 Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life, trans. Stuart Elden and Gerald
Moore (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 27.
49 In his work on time and anthropology, Johannes Fabian has famously exposed ‘the denial of
coevalness’ and what he called the ‘allochronism of anthropology’ with regard to non-Western cul-
tures: Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1983; repr. 2002;), pp. 31, 32. See also Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincialising Europe:
Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). In
the field of art history, Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood have argued for the ‘plural temporalities’
of an artwork which are not ‘anachronistic’ but ‘anachronic’, showing ‘the power of the image, or the
work of art, to fold time’: Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood, Anachronic Renaissance (New
York: Zone Books, 2010), p. 13.
50 Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift, Shaping the Day: A History of Time-Keeping in England and Wales
1300–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 94 (italics original).
Introduction 13
true significance of the city, and especially at this period, of the capital city, as a
dominant social form’.51 Serial Forms suggests that the ‘double condition’ of the
random and systematic is also the ‘double form’ of seriality which can plot long
linked narratives and deep shared morphologies whilst remaining busy, various,
and miscellaneous on the surface.52
Serial Forms is concerned with that elusive group, ‘the people’.53 But while my
enquiry stands on the shoulders of Marxist histories of class, it is more interested
in the practices and experiences of social consensus rather than resistance to
them. For example, much work has been accomplished in thinking about the
political reach and impact of the radical unstamped press in the first half of the
nineteenth century, but my discussion more often turns to the legitimate penny
and twopenny press in the 1820s and 1830s to show how intimately newsprint
was connected to the shows and pictures and spectacles available to semi-literate
and literate working Londoners at the time.54 This popular entertainment culture
intersected and shared elements with a more radical culture, but it was not itself
explicitly politically radical. Rather, it developed from a tradition of popular print
and show culture which goes back at least to the early modern period. Robert
Darnton sounded a gloomy warning note when he said that historians ‘want to
penetrate the mental world of ordinary persons as well as philosophers, but they
keep running into the vast silence that has swallowed up most of mankind’s
thinking’.55 ‘Ordinary persons’ are the focus of this study, and I am fully aware of
the inadequacy of that descriptor, and of the paucity of direct ‘evidence’ about the
thoughts, feelings, and life-worlds of ‘people’, the majority whom have lived and
51 Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Chatto & Windus, 1973), p. 154.
52 Although Williams connects this version of the city to Dickens’s novels, ‘the experience of the
city is the fictional method, or the fictional method is the experience of the city’, he does not mention
Dickens’s re-invention of serialization: Williams, The Country and the City, p. 154.
53 Patrick Joyce cautions that after 1848 ‘the marked heterogeneity of the social and economic con-
dition of English workers in this period’ makes it difficult to generalize about ‘the people’: Joyce,
Visions of the People, p. 333. Joyce’s caveat is borrowed for this work too. Morag Shiach has shown that
scholarly discussions of ‘popular’ or ‘folk’ or ‘mass’ culture always founder on slippery definitions:
Morag Shiach, Discourse on Popular Culture: Class, Gender and History in Cultural Analysis (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 1989). Underpinning my work is Edward Thompson’s The Making of
the English Working Class (London: Victor Gollancz, 1963). See also Geoff Eley, ‘Edward Thompson,
Social History, and Political Culture: The Making of a Working-Class Public, 1780–1850,’ in
Harvey J. Kaye and Keith McClelland (eds), E. P. Thompson: Critical Debates (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1990), pp. 12–49; and Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘The Lost Causes of E. P. Thompson’,
Labour / Le Travail 72 (Fall 2013 Automne), pp. 207–12.
54 Vanessa Schwartz has made an argument for the interconnectedness of news and visual culture
in fin-de-siècle Paris in Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 1998). Her argument differs from mine not only in its chronology but
also because I am interested in the development of a specifically historical consciousness, and not only
a news culture, through these media.
55 Robert Darnton, The Kiss of Lamourette (New York: W.W. Norton, 1990), p. 212. He continues,
‘[t]he experience of the great mass of readers, lies beyond the range of historical research’.
14 Serial Forms
died on this planet without leaving any written trace.56 But I have scraped together
what I can, and I have listened hard to the surviving texts for echoes and clues as
to the ways that they were enjoyed, used, and understood.
News, History, Shows
In Charles Dickens’s 1848 Christmas story The Haunted Man, Mr Tetterby runs a
tatty corner shop in Jerusalem Buildings in London: ‘[t]here was a good show of
literature in the window, chiefly consisting of picture-newspapers out of date, and
serial pirates, and footpads’.57 When ‘walking about London, more especially in
the second and third-rate neighbourhoods’, Wilkie Collins discovers many such
shops offering ‘limp unbound picture-quarto[s]’.58 The London poor were habit-
ually ‘out-of-date’, as by necessity they bought their furniture, their clothes, and
their reading matter second-hand. After the Peterloo Massacre of 1819, and the
tightening of an already repressive counter-revolutionary regime by the introduc-
tion of the Six Acts, it became almost impossible for poorer people, even in
London, to get hold of fresh news.59 Newspaper duty was payable on all news that
appeared more frequently than every twenty-six days. Not only newspapers but
also paper and postage were prohibitively expensive, so that many people had to
make do with fabricated or delayed news. A popular culture of shows, stories, and
images emerged in its stead, standing in the place of news, and out-of-date mater-
ial was often drafted in as a place-holder for current affairs. What developed
through this improvised bricolage of different media was nothing short of ‘an
56 Jonathan Rose has refused to be disheartened, and his wonderful The Intellectual Life of the
British Working Classes (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001) proves that more ‘evidence’ has
survived than we think. Rose credits, among others, David Vincent’s important collection of 142
working-class memoirs, and Vincent’s book, Bread, Knowledge and Freedom: A Study of Nineteenth-
Century Working Class Autobiography (London: Europa Publications, 1981). Rose gives a thoughtful
account of his project in Jonathan Rose, ‘Re-reading the English Common Reader: A Preface to a
History of Audiences’, Journal of the History of Ideas 53 (1992): 47–70.
57 Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Books, ed. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 349.
58 Wilkie Collins, ‘The Unknown Public’ [1858], in My Miscellanies (London: Chatto and Windus,
1875), pp. 249–64, pp. 249, 250. Collins is referring to the weekly penny journals (he stresses that they
are not newspapers) which carried serial fiction and woodcut illustrations.
59 The Six Acts were: (1) An Act to prevent the training of persons to the use of arms and to the
practice of military evolutions and exercise (60 Geo III & I Geo IV c.I); (2) An Act to authorize jus-
tices of the peace to seize arms, etc., to continue in force until 1822 (c.2); (3) An Act to prevent delay
in the administration of justice in cases of misdemeanour (c.4); (4) An act for more effectually pre-
venting seditious meetings, etc., [out of doors] (c.6); (5) An Act for the effectual prevention and pun-
ishment of blasphemous and seditious libels (c.8); (6) An Act to subject certain publications to duties
of stamps upon newspapers, and to restrain abuses arising from the publication of blasphemous and
seditious libels. (c.9). Information from Albert Venn Dicey, Lectures on the Relation Between Law and
Public Opinion in England: During the Nineteenth Century (London: Macmillan and Co., 1905; repr.
New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1981), p. 102 n. 3.
Introduction 15
alternative knowledge-system’.60 Serial Forms suggests that the writing of history

and the reporting of news developed together in Britain, often in the same texts
and the same spaces, and that this collocation has far-reaching consequences that
are still with us today. James Chandler has suggested a link between periodicals
and periodization: ‘[i]n eighteenth-century Britain, the history of the periodical
forms an important part in any account of the periodization of history’.61 But
even in the first half of the nineteenth century, not everyone was living in the
same ‘present’. If periodization was achieved through periodicalization, it was
very unevenly achieved at first. The idea of ‘news’ and the significant ‘event’
depends upon an evenly paced diachronic linear model of time that moves ever
onwards, discarding each day as it passes, ‘scorn[ing] yesterday’s news and bril-
liant [newspaper] leaders’, but for the first half of the nineteenth century the
majority of English people were deliberately kept out of step with this new rhythm
of dailiness.62
Slowly, an emerging news media set an insistent serial rhythm of open-ended
historical time punctuated by extraordinary events. Seriality developed into the
dominant cultural form of the nineteenth century: an ever more insistent and
dynamic syncopated rhythm of repetition and development which begins to for-
mat print, literature, history, politics, and concepts of citizenship. While the serial
was not a nineteenth-century invention, the proliferation of print in this period
meant that serials of all kinds entered the culture at all social levels, and the devel-
opment of science, technology, global markets, demography, and political liberal-
ism all increasingly relied on serial models.63 Historian of science Nick Hopwood
confirms that:
contrary to popular belief, eighteenth-century natural historians mostly did not

arrange collections according to the great chain of being, an ascending sequence
from the rocks below ground through plants and animals to humans and even
angels above. Trees and other shapes figure too, while botanical gardens were laid
out like maps. Yet around 1800 scales did turn into ladders, and inventories into
the results of development. Series came to express neither mere chronology nor
60 The phrase is Aritra Chakraborti’s and I thank him for it. See Aritra Chakraborti, ‘A Series of
Unfortunate Events: Natural Calamities in 19th-Century Bengali Chapbooks’, in Bodhisattva
Chattopadhyay, Aakriti Mandhwani, and Anwesha Maity (eds), Indian Genre Fiction: Pasts and Future
Histories (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018), pp. 57–72.
61 Chandler, England in 1819, p. 123. Chandler is discussing the Annual Register and the idea of the
single year as an accepted ‘period’.
62 Godfrey Turner, ‘Newgate Fair’, republished in The Train from the Morning Chronicle. The Train:
A First-Class Magazine (January–June 1857), vol. 3, p. 98.
63 An early experience of serial reading is recalled by William Hazlitt, ‘Cooke’s edition of the British
Novelists [1792] was to me a dance through life, a perpetual gala-day. The six-penny numbers of this
little work regularly contrived to leave off just in the middle of a sentence, and in the nick of a story—
where Tom Jones discovers Square behind the blanket’: T. [William Hazlitt], ‘On Reading Old Books’,
Table-Talk No. VII, London Magazine 3:14 (February 1821): 128–34, p. 130.
16 Serial Forms
endless cycles, but history and progress, the biggest story of nineteenth-century
science.64
History and progress were not just the biggest story of nineteenth century sci-
ence, but the biggest story of the nineteenth century tout court. Re-formatting
into series was happening right across Europe, and beyond.
Mediality and Materiality
It is more than thirty years since Friedrich Kittler first published Discourse
Networks 1800/1900 in Germany, a work that suggested that ‘mediality’ is the
general condition within which categories called poetry or literature develop.65
Kittler’s argument is that ‘literary history (or criticism), therefore, becomes a sub-
branch of media studies’.66 While I have willingly taken on Kittler’s ideas of medi-
ality and German media theory’s ‘attempt to overcome French theory’s fixation
on discourse, by turning discourse from its philosophical or archaeological head
onto its historical and technological feet’, I have not fully adopted the hierarchy of
Kittler’s system.67 Serial Forms argues that literary form has often been the switch
point in constituting new modes of communication, and not merely one of its
accidental results. Jacques Rancière has pointed out that ‘[t]he idea of modernity
would like there to be only one meaning and direction in history, whereas the
temporality specific to the aesthetic regime of the arts is a co-presence of hetero-
geneous temporalities’, and Kittler perhaps underestimated the heterogeneous
temporalities which can be folded into the aesthetic, stored there, and subse-
quently released to create something new.68 N. Katherine Hayles has suggested
another way of thinking about a feedback loop between communications tech-
nologies and culture: ‘[c]ulture rushes forward, creating an imaginative space that
technology scrambles to occupy; technology speeds along; creating phenomena
64 Nick Hopwood, Haeckel’s Embryos: Images, Evolution, and Fraud (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2015), p. 10.
65 Originally published in German as Aufschriebesysteme 1800/1900 (1985). See also Friedrich
Kittler, Grammophon, Film, Typewriter (Berlin: Brinkmann & Bose, 1986), translated as Gramophone,
Film, Typewriter (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999). Of course, work on media generally
owes much to Marshall McLuhan’s field-making Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964).
66 David E. Wellbery, ‘Foreword’, in Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks, 1800/1900, trans.
Michael Metteer with Chris Cullens (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), pp. vii–xxxiii,
p. xiii.
67 Siegert, ‘Introduction’, p. 3. Siegert outlines very clearly the move from the anti-hermeneutic
thinking of the early 1980s to late 1990s to the current state of post-hermeneutic thinking in German
media theory.
68 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, ed. and trans. Gabriel
Rockhill (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), p. 21.
Introduction 17
that culture contextualizes and interprets in new representations’.69 The imagination

can always reach further than any available technological media. Michel Foucault
probably did not expect a definitive answer to his question ‘[w]here does the
boundary lie between the history of knowledge and the history of imagination?’
but nonetheless, the question needs to be asked, and re-asked, if only to remind
us of the fragility of our historiography.70 Serial Forms is an investigation into the
history of the imagination. It argues that seriality is both a category of historical
knowledge and a materialization of novel possibilities of mediation. Viewed as a
work of ‘literary criticism’, Serial Forms will probably seem most radical in its
omissions. It does not focus, as many literary studies of the nineteenth century
do, on canonical literary texts in a canonical literary period, or at least, it does not
allow these texts to have the last say, or to close the argument. Instead, it insists on
the importance of unregarded and cheap ephemera in the early decades of the
nineteenth century, particularly of illustrated materials, and argues for what art
historian Richard Taws has described as ‘visuality itself as a form of political
praxis’.71 Through a series of close studies, Serial Forms aims gradually to con-
struct a theoretical understanding of seriality in the period by careful and
grounded analysis of specific and particular places, images, performances, and
texts. Despite its topographical specificity, I hope that Serial Forms will offer new
strategies of reading across the period and across space which are designed to set
free the possibilities of the material intersections of scientific, literary, political,
and artistic creativity and innovation. I am mindful of the warning from Jonathan
Kramnick and Anahid Nersessian that ‘there is no reason to maintain or to desire
a consistent use of the term form across the disciplines or even, perhaps, within a
single discipline . . . the effort to define form as something over and above the
explanation through which it comes into view and whose ends it serves has led to
some confusion’.72 I agree. This is why I use the plural ‘forms’ and not the singular
‘form’, and I try to locate my formal discussions in the book in embedded and
specific historical instances. I agree that ‘form’ is ‘a notion bound pragmatically to
69 N. Katherine Hayles, ‘Artificial Life and Literary Culture’, in Marie-Laure Ryan (ed.), Cyberspace
Textuality: Computer Technology and Literary Theory (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press,
1999), pp. 205–23, pp. 219–20.
70 Michel Foucault, ‘Politics and the Study of Discourse’, in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and
Peter Miller (eds), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality with Two Lectures by and an
Interview with Michel Foucault (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), p. 64.
71 Richard Taws, The Politics of the Provisional: Art and Ephemera in Revolutionary France
(University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013), p. 8. Paula McDowell has helpfully
reminded us that ‘“[e]phemera” is not a thing but a classification. The category “ephemera,” like the
category “Literature,” is not transparent, timeless, or universal, but a classification, existing in history,
that has done and continues to do powerful rhetorical, practical, ideological, and disciplinary work’:
Paula McDowell, ‘Of Grubs and Other Insects: Constructing the Categories of “Ephemera” and
“Literature” in Eighteenth-Century British Writing’, Book History 15 (2012): 48–70, pp. 48–9,
https://www.jstor.org/stable/23315043.
72 Jonathan Kramnick and Anahid Nersessian, ‘Form and Explanation’, Critical Inquiry 43:3
(Spring 2017): 650–99, p. 651.
18 Serial Forms
its instances’, and I share E. P. Thompson’s belief in ‘the ruthless discipline of

context’.73 This is a mode of reading, therefore, that deliberately avoids hierarchiz-
ing the topoi of knowledge or creating false boundaries between, for example, sci-
ence and literature, or technology and history, or reader and text. Instead it thinks
about the mediality and the materiality of all these practices to develop a way of
reading a culture that can restore our distance from it, while still engaging intim-
ately with its development. In investigating genre in terms of its mediality, this
book understands literary form, the emergent discipline of ‘history’, and a nascent
news culture to be mutually constitutive.74
Moving beyond Kittler’s predominantly German and ‘cybernetic’ history of
Romanticism and state formation, I set out instead to think about the different
trajectory of the British case. I argue that German Romantic theories of period-
ization and a Hegelian model of teleological history arrived in Britain less through
high intellectual channels than through the adoption of repeated material prac-
tices, which penetrated all levels of society. I also suggest that the deterritorializa-
tion that Kittler tracks after 1900 through German modernism is in play in
Britain much earlier in the nineteenth century, as the link between location and
cultural production is already becoming attenuated through the acceleration and
mobility of print forms which are combining to create novel social entities. One
of the effects that Serial Forms traces is the way that texts, images, and gestures
‘recombine and enter into new relations in the constitution of a new assemblage
or the modification of the old’.75 Rosemary Ashton, introducing her study of the
reception of German historicist thought in Britain, says ‘[t]his book does not
attempt to deal with the whole range of German thought as it . . . “leaked” into
England’.76 But Serial Forms is interested in precisely that process of leaking.
73 Kramnick and Nersessian, ‘Form and Explanation’, p. 661 and Thompson quoted in Arjun
Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minneapolis Press, 1996), p. 17.
74 Although she is also interested in the relationship of the social to the formal, Caroline Levine’s
approach to form is more morphological than mine. She attends to how power is exercised through
the intersection of different ‘forms’: ‘[p]aying attention to numerous overlapping social forms may
seem daunting, if not impossible, but it is in fact true that forms very often find their organizing power
compromised, rerouted, or deflected by their encounters with other forms’: Levine, Forms, p. 132. See
also Marjorie Levinson, ‘What is New Formalism?’, PMLA 122:2 (March 2007): 558–69; Colleen Lye,
‘Racial Form’, Representations 104:1 (Fall 2008): 92–101; Angela Leighton, On Form: Poetry,
Aestheticism, and the Legacy of a Word (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
75 ‘In the concluding statement of rules governing certain key concepts in A Thousand Plateaus,
deterritorialization is defined as the complex movement or process by which something escapes or
departs from a given territory, where a territory can be a system of any kind, conceptual, linguistic, social,
or affective. On their account, such systems are always inhabited by “vectors of deterritorialization”, and
deterritorialization is always inseparable from correlative reterritorrializations . . . Reterritorialization
does not mean returning to the original territory but rather refers to the ways in which deterritorialized
elements recombine and enter into new relations in the constitution of a new assemblage or the modifica-
tion of the old’: Paul Patton, Deleuzian Concepts: Philosophy, Colonization, Politics (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2010), p. 52.
76 In 1842, the Scottish author John Sterling wrote from London to Ralph Waldo Emerson in
America: ‘Thought is leaking into this country’, he reported; ‘even Strauss sells. I hear his copyright is
Introduction 19
When Emerson visited Europe in 1847 and 1848 he was very struck that in
England ‘the language of the noble, is the language of the poor’, unlike in
Germany, where ‘there is one speech for the learned and another for the masses,
to that extent that it is said that no sentiment or phrase from the works of any
great German writer is ever heard among the lower classes’.77 It was through
material practice and popular performance rather than by abstruse reading that
the principles of historicism were absorbed by the people of London. These
material practices of seriality were open-ended and offered new and suggestive ways
of inserting oneself into historical time. Rita Felski resists the cultural pessimism
of the Frankfurt School when she argues that ‘the fact of mediation is not a regret-
table lapse into complicity or collusion but a fundamental precondition of being
known’.78 Serial Forms takes a similar position in setting aside the political scepti-
cism of hindsight to explore what might change if we celebrate the new forms of
mediation available to ordinary Londoners in the 1820s and 1830s, just as they
did themselves. Those Londoners surely appreciated that much of the pleasure of
participating in this exciting newly mediated virtual culture was the feeling that
they were themselves playing a part in its creation.
One of the most significant of these practices was serial reading. And by serial
reading I do not mean ‘reading serials’ (although that is a part of what I mean).
The media marks its own time, and the print serial is one material manifestation
of what I will call ‘seriality’, but seriality is a stronger term than merely serializa-
tion in print. Seriality is about the reformatting of social and political experience.
Seriality is a way of understanding the world, and it is fundamental to the emer-
ging biopolitical regime of philanthropic and governmental reform in the 1840s.
Seriality is related to, but not identical to, the weaker forms of ‘serialization,’ and it
is about much more than text and print, although text and print are very import-
ant to its growing hegemony as a form. A dynamic form which collects individual
parts towards the completion of an imagined whole, it creates a holding pattern
which can maintain fragile individual identities, even while it subsumes them
worth more in Germany than that of any living writer, his books selling like Bulwer’s novels among
us’: John Sterling to Ralph Waldo Emerson (28 June 1842), A Correspondence Between John Sterling
and Ralph Waldo Emerson with a Sketch of Sterling’s Life by Ralph Waldo Emerson (Port Washington,
NY: Kennikat Press, 1971; first published 1897), pp. 59–60. David Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu, kritisch
bearbeitet [The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined] (Tübingen: 1835–6) caused a sensation across
Europe. It was translated into English in 1846 from the fourth German edition by Marian Evans (later
to be known as George Eliot). Strauss was influenced by Hegelian ideas of history, although the
Hegelians themselves were not receptive to his work. Das Leben Jesu is a historical biography of Jesus
in which Strauss claims that the miracles are myths. Rosemary Ashton, The German Idea: Four English
Writers and the Reception of German Thought 1800–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1980), p. 2. Ashton is right that ‘Coleridge and Carlyle are the two most important figures’ in her story,
and that ‘they helped to produce a considerable shift in Britain’s view of the Germans’, p. 4, but
‘Britain’s view’ does elicit the question, which Britons?
77 Ralph Waldo Emerson, English Traits (London: G. Routledge & Co., 1857), p. 57 and pp. 56–7.
78 Rita Felski, ‘Context Stinks!’, New Literary History 42 (2011): 573–91, p. 589.
20 Serial Forms
into a massive ongoing total of unknown dimensions. Therefore, seriality can

account for—I would argue that it helps to create—both the individual and the
mass. It is also a uniquely scalar (and scalable) form. In my definition, seriality is
perhaps less a ‘form’ than a ‘format’ in that it offers a way of organizing, standard-
izing, and distributing information and knowledge.79 I argue that seriality is
already ‘coding’ information long before computerization and that the digital age
started much earlier than we tend to think. Even in the 1820s, preparatory work is
already under way for the digital revolution that will accompany and underpin
the emergence of the liberalism of the 1860s. For it is through the media, new
measures of industrial time, and the rhetoric of reform in the 1820s and 1830s
that we see the beginning of a popular imagination of a serial circuitry of ‘the
people’, stretching across Europe and beyond, in which each element was of an
equivalent scale and value and could therefore be (or, crucially, could be imagined
to be) connected and made to communicate.
Seriality: Reformatting the Future
Seriality offered a century that was already on the move a way of modelling move-
ment. The form of the serial moves onwards through calendar time: by its
dynamic forward trajectory, it seems to unspool into the empty future. Indeed,
I argue that it is actually constructing that very model of a future—in a way that
echoes Walter Benjamin’s famous description of the ‘empty, homogeneous time’
of modernity.80 Or, given that Benjamin is echoing Marx, seriality is both the
vehicle and the consequence of Marx’s famous
Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social

conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation [which] distinguish[es] the
bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their
train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all
79 Jonathan Sterne has helpfully developed a definition of ‘format theory’: ‘format theory refuses an
a priori hierarchy of formations of any given medium. Instead, it invites us to ask after the changing
formations of media, the contexts of their reception, the conjunctures that shaped their sensual char-
acteristics, and the institutional politics in which they were enmeshed.’ Jonathan Sterne, MP3: The
Meaning of a Format (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), p. 11.
80 Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, especially Thesis 13. Pheng Cheah has
written about Benedict Anderson’s debt to Benjamin that ‘[Anderson’s] main concern is the synchronic
mode of temporality, or the simultaneity that allows one to imagine a limited sovereign community
beyond face-to-face relations and to envision other limited sovereignties besides one’s own as equiva-
lent. He suggests that this synchronicity, which he calls “homogeneous empty time” following
Benjamin, is a fundamental characteristic of both the nation and the narrative form of the old-fash-
ioned novel.’ Pheng Cheah, ‘Grounds of Comparison’, in Pheng Cheah and Jonathan Culler (eds),
Grounds of Comparison: Around the Work of Benedict Anderson (New York: Routledge, 2003), pp.
1–20, pp. 6–7 (emphasis original). I argue that it is not the novel, but seriality which creates this ‘syn-
chronic mode of temporality’.
Introduction 21
new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid
melts into air[.]81
The serial rushes forward, always incomplete, abandoning the past in its wake, in
a state of constant self-interruption, beginning again with every new iteration or
fresh item or number.82 Its rhythm underpins new production methods and
repetitive factory work.83 ‘[C]onsumption leans toward habituation through rep-
etition’, and seriality structures patterns of consumption and it is also powerfully
implicated in the commodification of leisure.84 Serials are risky ventures, too. The
print serials that collapsed in the nineteenth century far outnumbered those that
survived.85 In 1837, the novelist Bulwer reflected that ‘[t]he rage for cheap publi-
cations is not limited to Penny Periodicals; family libraries of all sorts have been
instituted, with the captivating profession of teaching all things useful’. But he
goes on to record the numerous failures, ‘[e]xcellent inventions, which after
showing us the illimitable ingenuity of compilation, have at length fallen the prey
of their own numbers, and buried themselves amongst the corpses of the native
quartos which they so successfully invaded’.86 Despite the vulnerability of these
cheap publications, Bulwer is cheerful about their popularity and the sudden
‘profusion of amusing, familiar and superficial writings’, saying ‘[p]eople com-
plain of it, as if it were a proof of degeneracy in the knowledge of authors’, but he
argues instead that ‘it is a proof of the increased number of readers’.87
In the early period that I am examining in Serial Forms, the seriality achieved
through proliferating print media creates links and collectivities, associations and
interchangeabilities which were potentially politically emancipatory. Concurrently
and connectedly, the emerging regulatory state was not wholly sinister or disin-
genuous in its reforming aims. These early possibilities coalesce into forms of col-
lectivity that offer themselves freely up to the state bureaucracy of political
81 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, ed. David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford
82 Sean O’Sullivan has proposed a set of terms—iteration, multiplicity, momentum, and world-
building—for exploring seriality: Sean O’Sullivan, ‘Ingmar Bergman: Showrunner’, in Rob Allen and
Thijs van den Berg (eds), Serialization in Popular Culture, pp. 106–24.
83 Nicholas Dames has argued that the Victorian novel is ‘the training ground for industrialized
consciousness, not a refuge from it’: Nicholas Dames, The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural
Science and the Form of Victorian Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 7. Tom Gunning
gives a non-linear genealogy of seriality and repetition for film comedy from the Lumière brothers’
early prankster shorts to Charlie Chaplin’s serial factory assembly line in his 1936 Modern Times: see
Tom Gunning, ‘Crazy Machines in the Garden of Forking Paths: Mischief Gags and the Origins of
American Film Comedy’, in Kristine Brunovska Karnick and Henry Jenkins (eds), Classical Hollywood
Comedy (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 87–105.
84 Appadurai, Modernity at Large, p. 67 and Rob Allen and Thijs van den Berg, ‘Introduction’, in
Rob Allen and Thijs van den Berg (eds), Serialization in Popular Culture, p. 2.
85 Mark W. Turner gives nineteenth-century examples in his article ‘The Unruliness of Serials’.
86 Edward Lytton Bulwer, England and the English (Paris: Gaglignani and Co., 1837), p. 215. Bulwer
is characterizing the new cheap publications as pygmies.
87 Bulwer, England and the English, p. 217.
22 Serial Forms
liberalism and nationalism, which is one of the reasons that the liberal-nationalist
moment of 1848 is so important to my argument. After mid-century, the onrush
of capitalism in a period of rapid growth, economic liberalism, and technological-
imperial expansion leads inevitably, inexorably, to deterritorialization and a form
of social serialization adapted for surveillance, although I would still contend that
resistance and collective action remain possible. The serial can never be totalizing
as it is never finished. But this means that the serial form can lend itself just as
willingly to the liberal ideology of the proliferating techno-state, and to a capital-
ist military-industrial agenda. In 1848, where Serial Forms leaves off, revolution-
ary seriality looked unbounded and emancipatory, but the speed with which
constitutional liberalism and nationalism poured into the vacuum left after the
revolutions of 1848 suggests that Benedict Anderson’s ‘bounded’ and ‘unbounded’
serialities have never really been distinct forms.88
After 1848
This book is deliberately Eurocentric and metropolitan in its focus on London.

But Serial Forms is itself part of a larger series of three volumes, and the project
will expand outwards in future, to Continental Europe and then to the techno-
logically networked empire towards the end of the century. A second volume,
Serial Revolutions:1848 will continue my enquiry into seriality, building on the
idea of a new social time established by this volume. Its focus is the sequence of
revolutions across Europe and beyond between 1847 and 1849. Like Serial Forms,
this second book investigates the role of serialized print and visual media in relay-
ing the revolution from place to place, as well as offering—even at the time—a
new way of understanding this extraordinary pan-European phenomenon. As
well as tracking the cross-continental journeys of newspapers, pictures, and
European novels, Serial Revolutions follows a series of linked writers on their
travels between England, Ireland, France, Italy, Germany, and the United States
during this turbulent period. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning,
Robert Browning, Arthur Hugh Clough, Margaret Fuller, Fanny Lewald,
Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Charles Dickens all responded directly
and powerfully to the revolutions, and Serial Revolutions examines the ways in
which their experiences of revolution changed both their politics and their
88 And, in a sense, Anderson reaches the same conclusion in the pessimistic ending of The Spectre
of Comparisons, as described by Pheng Cheah: ‘[i]n a world of mass migrations where collective sub-
jectivities are no longer territorialized or bound by the borders of nation-states, the logic of bounded
seriality also governs diasporic or long-distance nationalism, which Anderson describes as ‘a probably
menacing portent for the future’ partly because ‘it creates a serious politics that is at the same time
radically unaccountable’ [Spectre of Comparisons, p. 74]. Pheng Cheah, ‘Grounds of Comparison’, p. 17.
Introduction 23
writing. The emergence of a national literary canon in most European states in

this period was also a consequence of 1848, and the book makes connections
between canon-formation, nationalism, and liberalism.
At a theoretical level, Serial Revolutions argues that 1848 was crucial to estab-
lishing the modern version of seriality that we still live with today. In 1848, for the
first time, the social became political and the ensuing crisis of governance pro-
duced a series of newly formed constitutions across the European states. The con-
stitutional and economic liberalism that emerged after 1848 was structured by a
deep form of seriality. Serial Revolutions shows how important the imagination of
international connectivity was to making the 1848 revolution, even before the
new communications technologies were properly joined up. One lasting conse-
quence of 1848 was that the metaphors of communication and connectivity that
drove that revolution became the driving metaphors of government after mid-
century. In the second half of the nineteenth century, seriality underpins both the
technological operating systems and the political structure of states. The third,
and final book in the series, Serial Transmission: Literature and Other Technologies
1848–1918 scales up the argument beyond Europe to the global and considers
seriality as a technology of empire. After mid-century, the new communications
and digital technologies, such as the steam train, the steamboat, the cheap daily
newspaper, and the electric telegraph, which had first appeared in the 1830s and
1840s, were merging their functions and spreading into a global infrastructure.
Digital coding fundamentally and irrevocably changed the imagination of the
social over the second half of the nineteenth century. As writers and artists began
to expose and investigate the darker sides of seriality and connectivity, the links
between coding, communications, surveillance, and violence became increas-
ingly visible, and the book ends with the cataclysmic disaster of World War One,
a war which undid and sundered much that the revolutionary seriality of 1848
had joined together.
The Argument of Serial Forms
Serial Forms argues that the profoundly experiential dimension of repetition and
seriality is critical to understanding the development of British culture in the
early nineteenth century and it attempts to open up the boundaries again between
literature, performance, politics, and everyday life. The first chapter, ‘Yesterday’s
News’, investigates the overlapping of different kinds of media time in the 1820s
and 1830s. It tracks the persistence into modernity of older cultures of print and
reading: almanacs, ballads, broadsheets, and miscellanies were all circulating
alongside the popular illustrated twopenny papers of the 1820s. Historical
descriptions (of the classical past; medieval dress; customs of the Tudors, and
24 Serial Forms
such like) became placeholders for ‘news’ in these popular papers. Using John
Clare’s The Shepherd’s Calendar (1827) as an important commentary on the inter-
sections of print and different forms of time in the 1820s, this chapter measures
the time lag of the news for most Londoners who were unable to afford expensive
newspapers and instead relied on out-of-date information, or topical popular
publications, and so were struggling to catch up and, in the meanwhile, were
encountering history as news. They experienced print not as informational, two-
dimensional, and ephemeral like the newspaper, but rather as one medium in a
multimedia virtual London that was growing in scale and complexity alongside
the built city. Chapter 2, ‘Scott Unbound’, shows how thinking about print in the
1820s and 1830s in this disaggregated, messy, and material way, and seeing it as
part of a new media world of performance, text, and image, can help us to think
differently about the immense cross-class popularity of Walter Scott’s work in this
same period. Right from the start, Scott’s powerful Romantic presence as the liter-
ary author of books rested on ‘Scott’ as a multimedia phenomenon. Taking the
nineteenth-century print serial seriously challenges assumptions about what a
‘book’ might be.89 By unbinding Scott’s work, this chapter disperses his texts and
restores them to their original promiscuous sociability.90 The way that Walter
Scott’s fiction offered itself up to its readers for their multimedia participation and
engagement leads me to suggest that readerly participation in serial forms proves
that what media theorists now call ‘procedural literacy’ and the ‘operational aes-
thetic’ are far from recent ideas.91 The Romantic idea of the author is complicated
89 Jeffrey Masten, Peter Stallybrass, and Nancy Vickers have argued that ‘the myth of teleological
narrative’ is ‘one of the persistent myths of modern reading . . . [t]his is of course a possible way of read-
ing a book, and one that was encouraged by the development of narrative fiction in the eighteenth
century’, but it is not a necessary or inevitable way of reading: ‘Introduction: Language Machines’ in
Jeffrey Masten, Peter Stallybrass, and Nancy Vickers (eds), Language Machines: Technologies of Literary
and Cultural Production (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 1–16, all quotations, p. 2. I agree and add
that we should remember that in the nineteenth century missing parts, or incomplete sets, as well as
readerly inattention, often worked against the experience of a book as a ‘whole’. Emma Smith makes a
similar argument about the ‘gappiness’ of Shakespeare in Emma Smith, This Is Shakespeare (London:
Pelican, 2019). Umberto Eco speculates about what could be extrapolated by future critics if only one
episode of the TV copshow Colombo survived: Umberto Eco, The Limits of Interpretation
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), p. 100.
90 Here, again, I agree with Rita Felski, that ‘[t]heory’s affinity for a modernist rhetoric of marginal-
ity and negativity prevents us from seeing that a text’s sociability—that is, its embedding in numerous
networks and its reliance on multiple mediators—is not an attrition, diminution, or co-option of its
agency, but the very precondition of it’: Felski, ‘Context Stinks!’, p. 589.
91 Both Frank Kelleter and Jason Mittell emphasize ‘a need for procedural literacy’, meaning that
TV-serial viewers, or the players of serial digital games, need to know the protocols of the medium to
be able to play the game. Mittell adds, ‘[t]his manifests itself explicitly in videogames, where proce-
dural mastery is a requirement for success, and web use, as we have come in a very short period of
time to accept linking, searching, and bookmarking as naturalized behaviors’: Mittell, ‘Narrative
Complexity’, p. 39. See also Lisa Gotto, ‘Types and Bytes: Ludic Seriality and Digital Typography’,
Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture 8:1 (2014):115–28, http://www.eludamos.org/index.
php/eludamos/article/view/vol8no1-8/8-1-8-pdf and Shane Denson and Andreas Jahn-Sudmann,
‘Digital Seriality: On the Serial Aesthetics and Practice of Digital Games’, Eludamos: Journal for
Computer Game Culture 7:1 (2013): 1–32, http://www.eludamos.org/index.php/eludamos/article/
Introduction 25
through the remediations of the multi-genre productions of ‘The Magician of the

North’ (aka Walter Scott), and I suggest that the extraordinary cross-class popu-
larity of ‘Scott’ in the early nineteenth century is produced by what Umberto Eco
has called the ‘generative mechanism’ of the serial much more than has been pre-
viously recognized.92
Chapter 3 turns to the other great literary celebrity of this period, Byron, and
reconsiders the idea of live performance and virtuality. This chapter suggests that
liveness and death are fundamental to two ‘live’ and singular performances of
‘shipwrecks’, both in 1819, by Byron and the painter Géricault. Reactions to
Byron’s treatment of a fatal shipwreck in the first instalment of his serial poem
Don Juan are assessed alongside reactions to Géricault’s oil painting The Raft of
the Medusa, which was simultaneously on show at the Egyptian Hall in London.
The chapter considers the history of the shipwreck as (impossibly) ‘live’ perform-
ance, and analyses the strong sentiments of disgust elicited by both Byron’s poem
and Géricault’s picture, concluding that it is both their reference to a ‘real’ news
item, and their creation of virtual bodies to represent catastrophic death, that
triggered such strong critical reactions. Through the experiences of their viewers,
panoramas, and shows in this early period are reconceptualized as ‘live’ perform-
ances which demanded an interactive and participative engagement and which con-
tributed to the formation of a popular consciousness of existing in a simultaneous
historic present. Chapter 4, ‘Vesuvius on the Strand’, continues to explore the idea
of seriality and catastrophe through the ‘cross-class obsession’ with Mount
Vesuvius.93 ‘In Surrey Gardens a volcano espy, | That from its crater emits to the
sky | Combustion matter amazing to behold, | Mount Vesuvius’: there were
view/vol7no1-1/7-1-1-pdf. Andrew Darley suggests that procedural literacy has now become second
nature to a new generation, so that ‘seriality . . . is coming to replace or subsume genre in more recent
manifestations of mass visual culture’: Andrew Darley, Visual Digital Culture: Surface Play and
Spectacle in New Media Genres (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 126. Neil Harris identified something
similar at work in the nineteenth century when he described the ‘operational aesthetic’ of P.T. Barnum’s
American Museum, ‘the objects inside the museum, and Barnum’s activities outside, focused attention
on their own structures and operations, were empirically testable, and enabled—or at least invited—
audiences and participants to learn how they worked. They appealed because they exposed their pro-
cesses of action.’ Neil Harris, Humbug! The Art of P.T. Barnum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1973), p. 57.
92 Umberto Eco, ‘Series and Structure’, in The Open Work, trans. Anna Cancogni (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 217–35, p. 228. Umberto Eco, Opera Aperta [The Open Work]
was originally published in 1962 and Gilles Deleuze, Différence et Répétition [Difference and
Repetition], in 1968. Ruth Mayer similarly argues that ‘seriality is a principle rather than a technique
and . . . this principle cannot be traced back to one author, author collective, or instigator. It gains a
“machinic” momentum of its own in the course of its unfolding’: Ruth Mayer, Serial Fu Manchu: The
Chinese Supervillain and the Spread of Yellow Peril Ideology (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University
Press, 2014), p. 6. See also Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, ‘Introduction’ and ‘Theory:
Immediacy, Hypermediacy, and Remediation’, in Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2000), pp. 2–19 and 20–51.
93 Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination, 1830–1880 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 314.
26 Serial Forms
numerous displays and shows of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in Naples all
over London in this period, and this chapter considers the versions of the ‘real’
past—deep or recent—that they produced and how these might have contributed
to a construction of a sense of the present.94 Bulwer’s phenomenally popular hit
of 1834, The Last Days of Pompeii, which was received more as a multimedia show
than as a novel, is used here as a test-case for rethinking conventional literary
generic hierarchies through a more nuanced appreciation of the possible uses and
pleasures of texts in this period of widening readership and cultural participation.
Bulwer’s text is also examined as contributing to the reconfiguration of the ‘day’
and the politicization of the idea of dailiness and the everyday, with a discussion
that concludes that the confusion of individual tragedy with mass disaster in this
text is an important generic correction in the face of enormous changes in the
scale of the audience for fiction and for classical history in the 1830s.
Chapter 5 is about scale. It looks in detail at three writers in London who pro-
duced very different versions of the ‘modern’ in the late 1830s and early 1840s,
but all of whom realized that something very big indeed was happening around
them. Across different genres, Augustus Welby Pugin, Thomas Carlyle, and
Charles Dickens all chose to represent democracy and reform specifically as a
problem of scale. This chapter investigates their understandings of the seriality
and scalability of market capitalism and the anxieties and opportunities that these
revealed to them. Each took a different view, from Carlyle’s apocalyptic denunci-
ation of a massification which soars vertiginously between the gigantic and the
tiny, to Pugin’s insistence on a built and material ethics of the human scale, and
Dickens’s cautious optimism about this moment of scalar derangement and the
redistribution of the sensible.
Chapter 6, ‘History in Miniature’, continues the discussion of scale, considering
the scalar strategies by which popular print and material culture put the past
‘within reach’ and suggesting that different forms of miniaturization helped
people to negotiate the dizzying possibilities of a global scale. It investigates the
weekly illustrated miscellanies of the 1820s and 1830s to see how they presented
the past and created a sense of virtual historicity for a new readership. Images of
the geographically and historically remote were presented as novelties and ‘news’
and this chapter asks what kind of historical sense was produced by the serialized
miscellany functioning together with the wider popular culture of this period
(the chapter looks at toys and other miniature representations of historical events
too). Did people understand history as a series of singular and spectacular ‘fixed’
events? Or did the gradually embedding seriality of their daily practices create
instead a more pliant, plastic, and permeable idea of history as a forming and
formative process in which they could participate? Did the virtual world of serial
94 Anthony Mahon, ‘London Entertainments’, in London as It Was and Is, A Poem; With
Miscellaneous Pieces, in Verse (London: H. Johnson, 1841), pp. 118–20, p. 119–20.
Introduction 27
print and performance fashion a new ‘structure of feeling’, in Raymond Williams’s

famous phrase, ‘a kind of feeling and thinking which is indeed social and material
but . . . in an embryonic phase before it can become fully articulate’?95
Chapter 7, ‘Biopolitics of Seriality’, considers the political possibilities that were
released or inaugurated in the 1840s by this structure of seriality. It takes the
whole run of Howitt’s Journal as its ‘serial’ case study and uses this radical liberal
journal to think about how seriality was becoming increasingly important to the
creation and maintenance of what we might now call biopolitics. Through its
serial repetition of exemplary narratives of injustice around gender, race, class,
and age, Howitt’s Journal unconsciously reveals the profound connection between
these constructs. It shows how bio-philanthropy and the state are intertwined in
the period leading up to the European revolutions of 1848. Tracking the represen-
tation of children, slaves, and the Irish across the run of the journal, and suggest-
ing that Howitt’s was the model for Frederick Douglass’s newspaper, the North
Star, launched in 1847 in America, this chapter argues that we need to develop a
more complex way of thinking about the developing relationship between kin-
ship, citizenship, and biopolitics at this critical historical moment. The conclusion
to Serial Forms looks ahead to the serial European revolutions of 1848. Benedict
Anderson argues that ‘nationalism lives by making comparisons’, and 1848 was
the definitive moment for the international comparison of nationalisms.96 As
Karl Marx noticed at the time, these were revolutions that understood themselves
in terms of international communications and evinced a seriality of form that
suggested an equivalence of scale and a category identity across Europe and
beyond. But without the new international consciousness of interconnectedness
already brought about by a serial permeability of texts, ideas, and politics, the
multiple revolutions of 1848 would never have happened. Writing about the Paris
Commune of 1870, Kristin Ross has suggested that the experience of that later
revolutionary moment made it clear that, ‘political struggle itself produces new
conditions, modifies social relations, changes the participants in the event, and
the way they think and speak—the struggle itself creates new political forms,
ways of being, and new theoretical understanding of those ways and forms’.97
Serial Forms tracks the emergence of one such new form: the serial. Seriality
would enable the political struggle of the 1840s and would ultimately create a new
theoretical understanding of that struggle too. The irony is that after 1848, this
same international revolutionary energy would be recycled into national liberal
95 Raymond Williams, ‘Structures of Feeling’, in Literature and Marxism (Oxford: Oxford

University Press,1977), pp. 128–35.
96 Anderson, Spectre of Comparisons, p. 229.
97 Kristin Ross, Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune (London: Verso,
2015), p. 93.
28 Serial Forms
state apparatuses and major technological state infrastructures.98 Seriality would

be enlisted by disciplinary state and government agencies.
In his 1980 lecture ‘Modernity: An Unfinished Project’, Jürgen Habermas
declared that, ‘[w]e are, in a way, still the contemporaries of that kind of aesthetic
modernity which first appeared in the midst of the 19th century’.99 Considering
the—then current—announcements of the ‘end of history’, Habermas reflected in
his lecture on the failed promises of modernism and democracy and the entangle-
ment of ideas of market freedom with those of artistic and political freedom.
Despite my scepticism about the usefulness of the term ‘modernity’, my book has
borrowed Habermas’s title because, in his lecture, he reminds us of the emancipa-
tory potential of culture if it can only be appropriated by ordinary people. Serial
Forms remembers that, in the early Victorian period in Britain, ordinary people
did participate in and help to create an emergent culture, often through serial
forms and practices, and that this was crucial to creating a new social visibility for
them. After mid-century, things would change. But because the serial is a neces-
sarily endless form (for if it appears to reach completion, it merely starts up some-
where else), perhaps we can still afford to hope that the collective and
emancipatory part of the project, ‘the energy and the fantasy of ongoingness’,
remains unfinished and is still ‘to be continued . . .’100
98 I discuss the idea of the revolutionary event and its relationship to serial time in much greater
detail and depth in my forthcoming book Serial Revolutions: 1848.
99 Jürgen Habermas, [‘The Unfinished Project of Modernity’]. This lecture was originally delivered
by Habermas in Frankfurt in September 1980 as an acceptance speech on receiving the
Theodor W. Adorno Prize. It was published under the title, ‘Die Moderne—ein unvollendetes Projekt’
in Jürgen Habermas, Kleine Politische Schriften I–IV (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1981), pp. 444–64.
Translated by Seyla Ben-Habib, it was published in English as ‘Modernity versus Postmodernity’ in
New German Critique 22 (1981): 3–14. Malcolm Waters included this translation in his edited collec-
tion, Modernity: Critical Concepts, vol. 4: After Modernity (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 5–16, from
which this quotation is taken, p. 6. A different translation by Nicholas Walker appeared in Maurizio
Passerin d’Entrèves and Seyla Benhabib (eds), Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity:
Critical Essays on the Philosophical Discourse on Modernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997),
pp. 38–55.
100 Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), p. 48. Berlant is
less sanguine, perhaps, pointing out that ‘so many of the normative and singular objects made availa-
ble for investing in the world are themselves threats to both the energy and the fantasy of ongoingness,
namely, that people/collectivities face daily the cruelty not just of potentially relinquishing their
objects or changing their lives, but of losing the binding that fantasy itself has allowed to what’s poten-
tially there in the risky domains of the yet untested and unlived life.’ p.48. Nevertheless, even for
Berlant, the buried potential of the ‘yet untested and unlived life’ survives.
1
Yesterday’s News
‘Time lag keeps alive the making of the past.’1
In Walter Scott’s celebrated debut novel of 1814, Waverley, Sir Everard learns
‘from the public News-Letter’ first that Richard Waverley, esquire, had won a
parliamentary seat; second, that Richard Waverley, esquire, had spoken in a par-
liamentary debate; and, third, that Richard Waverley, esquire, had been elected to
a parliamentary board. Scott then draws our attention to the considerable news
time-lag in 1745, the year in which Waverley is set:
Although these events followed each other so closely that the sagacity of the
editor of a modern newspaper would have presaged the last two even while he
announced the first, yet they came upon Sir Everard gradually, and drop by
drop, as it were, distilled through the cool and procrastinating alembic of Dyer’s
Weekly Letter. For it may be observed in passing, that instead of those mail
coaches, by means of which every mechanic at his sixpenny club may nightly
learn from twenty contradictory channels the yesterday’s news of the capital, a
weekly post brought, in those days, to Waverley-Honour, a Weekly Intelligencer,
which, after it had gratified Sir Everard’s curiosity, his sister’s, and that of his
aged butler, was regularly transferred from the Hall to the Rectory, from the
Rectory to Squire Stubbs’s at the Grange, from the Squire to the Baronet’s steward
at his neat white house on the heath, from the steward to the bailiff, and from
him through a huge circle of honest dames and gaffers, by whose hard and horny
hands it was generally worn to pieces in about a month after its arrival.2
1 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 364 (italics original).
Bhabha argues that the post-colonial is not located ‘outside’ of modernity but is intrinsic to modernity
itself: ‘Without the post-colonial time-lag, the discourse of modernity cannot, I believe, be written’, he
says: p. 361.
2 Walter Scott, Waverley [1814], ed. Claire Lamont (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015),
pp. 7–8. The novel is set in 1745. In 1787, we get a glimpse of the time lag involved in publishing
London news in the provinces. The Sheffield Advertiser rebutted the claims of a rival paper to publish
fresher news: ‘[t]his paper is published about 8 o’clock in the morning of every Friday, and contains
the most important intelligence from all the London and other papers, and the last post from the
Wednesday evening London papers (Lloyd’s and London Packet) which arrive at Sheffield late on
Thursday night; and it is impossible to publish a paper in this town, on any part of the day on Friday,
to have the last day’s news or postscript of the St. James’s, the General, the Whitehall, the Chronicles,
or any other of the Thursday evening’s London papers, as they are not published till Thursday evening
in London, nor do they arrive here earlier than by the mail coach on Friday night. This is what is
© Clare Pettitt.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198830429.001.0001
30 Serial Forms
But in 1814, and for long afterwards, there were still plenty of ‘honest dames and
gaffers’ who, despite those mail coaches, had to struggle to get their ‘hard and
horny hands’ on last week’s news, let alone yesterday’s. This chapter investigates
the delay to the distribution of the news and uses this material fact, the result of a
repressive tax regime, to explore the implications for constructions of participa-
tive citizenship in the period running up to and beyond the First Reform Act of
1832.3 The reasons for the delivery of news to the poorer people in society ‘grad-
ually, and drop by drop’ in the first half of the nineteenth century are well known.
After the brutal attack on demonstrators at Peterloo, Manchester, in August 1819,
the Six Acts were passed rapidly through Parliament in December. The sixth of
these, known as the Newspaper Stamp Duties Act, put a 4d duty on all periodicals
that appeared more frequently than every twenty-six days and that sold for less
than 6d, and that contained ‘any Public News, Intelligence or Occurrences, or any
Remarks or Observations thereon, or upon any Matter in Church or State’. This
tax was reduced to 1d in 1836, but a so-called Gagging Bill was brought in which
continued some of the work of political censorship until the eventual repeal of the
tax altogether in 1855.4 In addition, there was a levy on advertisements (repealed
1853), an excise duty on paper (repealed 1861), and smaller assessments on
almanacs and pamphlets (repealed 1833 and 1834).5 Import duties on paper and
on foreign books were not repealed until 1861. A similar censorship on theatrical
productions, the Patent Theatres’ Monopoly, was repealed in 1843.
As a result of this regime, the monthly, weekly, and daily news rhythms which
were to become unignorably insistent after mid-century were still uneven, falter-
ing, and unpredictable in this earlier period. Ivon Asquith has helpfully provided
a typology of London papers for the early nineteenth century:
usually understood to be Saturday’s Post.’ Sheffield Advertiser (7 September 1787), quoted in Jeremy
Black, The English Press in the Eighteenth Century (London: Croom Helm, 1987), pp. 284–5.
3 Lord Ellenborough, explaining the Newspaper Stamp Duties Act of 1819, said that ‘it was not
against the respectable Press that this Bill was directed, but against the pauper press’. Raymond
Williams, ‘The Press and Popular Culture: An Historical Perspective’, in George Boyce, James Curran,
and Pauline Wingate (eds), Newspaper History from the Seventeenth Century to the Present Day
(London: Constable, 1978), pp. 41–50, p. 46.
4 Nevertheless, the 1836 repeal made a difference. Ruth Livesey transcribes some ‘[f]raught corre-
spondence in the Royal Mail archives from 1836 . . . when the reduction in duty came into effect’. Post
Office official George Louis reported that ‘the Edinburgh Mail was loaded to a, I may say, fearful
height and I am convinced if the Papers gradually increase in size and number some mode must be
adopted to relieve the top of some of the coaches either by adopting a portion of them now dedicated
to the conveyance of passengers or by extra mails’. By April 1837, Livesey reports that the Post Office
was dealing with claims from mail coach contractors for loss of passenger revenue resulting from
outside seats being occupied by bundles of newsprint. Ruth Livesey, Writing the Stage Coach Nation:
Locality on the Move in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016),
pp. 107, 107–8.
5 For the expense of paper made from rags and not wood pulp in this period, see Richard L. Hills,
Papermaking in Britain 1488–1988: A Short History (London: Athlone Press, 1988).
Yesterday ’ s News 31
In 1780 there were only three important kinds of newspaper: the London
morning dailies, the evening papers published two or three times a week, and
the provincial weeklies. The last two decades of the eighteenth century saw the
rapid growth of two new types: Sunday and daily evening papers. From 1816 to
1819 there was a brief development of a working-class weekly press, which
revived from 1830–1836 with the proliferation of the unstamped, and from the
late 1830s with the growth of Chartist newspapers.6
The problem with this analysis is that, first, it is only concerned with ‘newspapers’
and, second, it is only concerned with ‘important kinds of newspaper’ and with
the radical unstamped working-class press. But anyone walking around the
London streets during this period would have been immediately struck by the
bewildering variety of print formats available, many of which made claims to
carry ‘news’ without being ‘newspapers’ as such. These proliferating print formats
materially manifested a clash of conflicting and divergent temporalities made
only more confusing with the intensification of urbanization and social mobility
in the 1820s and 1830s. One result of these incommensurable media timescales
was to create delays and gaps which forced a new awareness of lived and historical
time. Print historians have argued that the press was very static and conservative
in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but my account reinserts print
into a multimedia environment to reach a different conclusion.7 In this period, as
well as proliferating print, there flourished the many ‘shows of London’ so
exhaustively catalogued by Richard Altick in his seminal 1978 study.8 A study of
media in this period must include this growing show culture of London and visual
culture alongside print culture, as it was through these multiple media that his-
torical time and news time developed together in the public consciousness. The
interactivity of shows, prints, and pictures is what began to make a real change as
print and material culture worked together to create a new virtual environment
for Londoners. And print on the page was adapting visually to meet demand from a
large constituency of semi-literate new readers, with more and better illustrations
and bigger and more arresting and easily readable font sizes.
Charles Dickens had ‘a way of seeing men and women that belongs to the
street’, Raymond Williams once said.9 Dickens’s ‘Street Sketches’ of the 1830s were
published in London newspapers, and only later in the collected Sketches by Boz,
a volume which came out just as Dickens hit the jackpot with the fifth number of
his serial, Pickwick Papers. But Dickens wrote his ‘Street Sketches’ before he was a
6 Ivon Asquith, ‘The Structure, Ownership and Control of the Press, 1780–1855’, in George Boyce,
James Curran, and Pauline Wingate (eds), Newspaper History from the Seventeenth Century to the
Present Day, pp. 98–116, p. 99.
7 See, for example, Black, The English Press in the Eighteenth Century.
8 Richard Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1978).
9 Williams, The Country and the City, p. 155.
32 Serial Forms
successful novelist, and they are remarkable for their representation of a culture
just emerging into visibility on the streets of London. He was still a parliamentary
reporter on the newspapers and an ambitious young bachelor of the clerk class,
badly paid, living in small lodgings, walking London’s streets on business, travelling
on the omnibuses up and down the Strand, eating in the chop houses, drinking in
the tap houses, occasionally taking a coach out of London on newspaper busi-
ness, and enjoying himself in the evenings at Astley’s circus and the unlicensed
theatres on the south side of the River Thames. At this stage in his life, Dickens
was of a class that enjoyed its social life in public, out on the streets and in the
public theatres and pleasure gardens. It was only after he married Catherine
Hogarth in April 1836 that he started on his rapid social ascent and began to
entertain regularly at home. The sketches are both of print and about print and
they are also thoroughly immersed in theatrical and visual culture. I will discuss
Dickens’s Sketches by Boz in more detail in Chapter 5. They offer a vivid contem-
porary account of the vertiginous movement of print and the increasing immer-
sion of ordinary Londoners in a print and show culture that invites them to
consider themselves as citizens and as actors in history, and can reveal what one
critic has called ‘the workings of time in the culture’.10 As more Londoners are
brought ‘up to date’ and find themselves coming into visibility in print, they are
‘subjectivized’, or given the virtual apparatus for the performance of social and
political dissent: they have a part.
Having a part was connected to other forms of ‘part-issue’ too. While access to
up-to-date daily news was difficult, a newly invigorated form was making its way
into people’s notice: the form of the serial. Publication in parts allowed for more
frequent entry points into a ‘live’ ongoing print event, and so to a sensation closer
to (although also far from identical to) Benedict Anderson’s model of shared
simultaneous participation in a culture. The serial is a powerful machine for con-
necting a horizontal community of readers, and even if their access to serial parts
was irregular and haphazard, and infrequent to begin with, the growing popular-
ity of serial formats prepared people to read differently. And as the idea of daily
news became more familiar to more people from the 1840s onwards, those people
became more accustomed to an idea of dailiness and to the self-conscious in-
habitation of a temporality identified as ‘the present’. From this relatively new
vantage point, ‘yesterday’ seemed more distant and the mixed and muddled tem-
porality of the miscellany began to modulate into a serial and orderly model of
time in which yesterday always came before today. Of course, this process was far
from straightforward and overlapping timeframes persisted, but the increasing
cultural orthodoxy of the ‘daily’ began to make the distance from the present
10 Stuart Sherman, Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries and English Diurnal Form, 1669–1785 (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. x. Sherman describes how ‘calendrically successive texts grad-
ually came to govern time consciousness and social practice’: p. xi.
appear longer and less easily traversed than before. As the gaps in news time began
to close up, they contributed to constructing a historical consciousness that was
based on chronology and information rather than on symbol, myth, or religion.
But, as we shall see, the switch from one regime to the other was neither immedi-
ate nor definitive.
The government tax on news was not fully repealed until 1855 and daily news-
papers remained expensive and beyond the reach of poor working people for the
entire first half of the nineteenth century. It is a sure sign of her social fall that, in
Dickens’s 1838–9 novel Nicholas Nickleby, the widowed Mrs Nickleby is reduced
to reading ‘a yesterday’s newspaper of the very first respectability from the public-
house’.11 The news taxes were very contentious, even for those who generally
believed in governmental intervention. An anxious commentator writing in the
midst of the turbulence occasioned by the reform debate of 1832 pointed out that
‘[t]he violent wrench by which private and public life have of late years been sep-
arated in this country is most dangerous’.12 At the end of the century, Frederic
May Holland looked back to the causes of this restriction on printed matter:
Newspapers had already become the chief teachers of politics; and therefore
they were under a triple tax. A duty on paper added one-fourth to the cost of
publication. There was also a tax of three-and-sixpence on each advertise-
ment . . . A third exaction was that of fourpence for a stamp on every copy; and
prices were thus prevented from falling below seven-pence, except in case of
violation of the laws. These threatened fine or imprisonment to whoever should
publish or sell any periodical costing less than sixpence, and containing ‘news,
intelligence, occurrences, and remarks and observations thereon, tending to
excite hatred and contempt of the government and constitution of this country
as by law established, and also to vilify religion.’ This purpose was avowed
explicitly, in so many words, by The Poor Man’s Guardian, which announced that
it was published ‘contrary to law’ and would be sold for one penny. The circula-
tion was twice that of The Times, and the language often violent.13
Radical publications such as Henry Hetherington’s Poor Man’s Guardian flouted

the law to target a particular constituency of readers, most of them already polit-
ically aware, urban, and male.14 What was published in the legal penny press was
11 Charles Dickens, The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby [1838–9] (Oxford: Oxford
12 ‘Chambers’ Edinburgh Magazine I to XXVIII; The Penny Magazine I to XXI; Saturday Magazine
I to VII; The Schoolmaster, I to III’, Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine 1:6 (September 1832): 721–4, p. 723.
13 Frederic May Holland, Liberty in the Nineteenth Century (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1899),
pp. 41–2.
14 The Poor Man’s Guardian was a penny weekly newspaper published in London by Henry
Hetherington in contravention of the stamp duty from July 1831 to December 1835. For more on the
radical press, see this chapter, n. 50.
34 Serial Forms
‘general knowledge’ rather than news, geographical and historical information

about, for example, ‘The Acropolis at Athens’, or the ‘Knights of the Holy
Sepulchre’, or ‘Illustrations of History: On Dress’, much of which may have come
as news to many of its first readers, but was not the news as such.15 Until the
newspaper taxes were repealed, the street vendors of broadsides filled the gap by
offering cheap news to the people who could afford no other kind. Speaking after
the repeal of the taxes, a broadside seller wistfully remembered how good busi-
ness had been for the street sellers under the news tax because, while newspapers
were so expensive, their street literature had offered an attractively cheap alterna-
tive. For example, when the Houses of Parliament had burnt down in 1834, he
had hawked broadsides carrying the news and ‘it wasn’t only the working people
that bought of me, but merchants and their clerks. I s’pose they took the papers
home for their wives and families, which is a cheap way of doing, as a newspaper
costs 3d. at last. But stop sir—no—there wasn’t no threepennies then—nothing
under 6d., if they wasn’t more; I can’t just say, but it was better for us when news-
papers was high.’16 The transport and communications technologies that would
ultimately make possible a fast, cheap supply of news across the country were
being put in place in Britain in the 1830s, but the majority of the people, even
in urban centres, were still disbarred from taking an active part in the news
revolution.17 Engagement with politics, current affairs, and with contemporary
literary culture was becoming increasingly difficult in the 1820s, a decade in
which new books were more expensive than they had ever been before or ever
would be again.18 In 1799 Richard Brinsley Sheridan had told Parliament that
15 ‘The Acropolis at Athens’, Mirror 8:225 (2 December 1826), p. 337; ‘Knights of the Holy Sepulchre’,
Olio (23 February 1828), p. 108; ‘Illustrations of History: On Dress’, Olio (24 May 1828), p. 317. For
more detailed discussion of the content of these journals, and its significance, see Chapter 6.
16 Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor: The Conditions and Earnings of those that
Will Work, Cannot Work, and Will Not Work, 2nd edn (London: Griffin, Bohn and Company, 1861),
vol. 1, p. 230. Mayhew’s interviews were first published in a series of eighty-two articles in the Morning
Chronicle from October 1849 to December 1850. It has been suggested by historians that Mayhew
exaggerated his portraits of the street sellers and added dramatic touches from the comic stage.
Carolyn Steedman records her surprise when she discovered that ‘many of the voices that seem to
speak directly out of London Labour are, in fact, composite voices, spoken by made-up or amalgam-
ated figures, put together out of several interviews, or several pages of shorthand notes’: Carolyn
Steedman, ‘Mayhew: On Reading, About Writing’, Journal of Victorian Culture 19:4 (December 2014):
550–61, p. 550. But Steedman does not dismiss Mayhew’s testimony and Gareth Stedman Jones has
defended Mayhew’s usefulness as a commentator, saying that Mayhew provided ‘in embryo at
least . . . a theory of the specificity of the London economy which in turn made intelligible the eco-
nomic behaviour of the London poor’: Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London: A Study in the
Relationship between Classes in Victorian Society [1971] (London: Verso, 2013), p. 263.
17 Hansard Parliamentary Debates, First Series 41 (1820), col. 1678 [60 Geo III, c.9].
18 On the high price of books and reading matter in the 1810s and 1820s, see James Raven, The
Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade, 1450–1850 (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2007); William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2004); Lee Erickson, The Economy of Literary Form: English Literature and the
Industrialization of Publishing, 1800–1850 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996),
and The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 5: 1695–1830, ed. Michael F. Suarez and
Michael L. Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) and vol. 6: 1830–1914, ed. David
‘people . . . think stale news as bad as stale mackerel!’ but it took until the late
nineteenth century for daily news to become available and readily accessible to
everyone in urban England.19 Even as late as 1848, Howitt’s Journal was suggest-
ing a redistributive scheme for yesterday’s news which took advantage of free
postage for printed matter:
We take our daily or weekly paper, read it, and fling it aside. Many of us have
whole piles of newspapers sent from one quarter or another, which are a nuis-
ance rather than anything else to us when read, if read they are. But if we exist in
such newspaper plenty, there are thousands and millions who exist in an equal
dearth . . . our surfeit leaves them equally in starvation . . . What a mass of the
seeds of information we destroy, when we might fling them to the wind, and
make them generate all over the country.20
Readers wrote in responding enthusiastically to the idea, and old newspapers

were soon being sent to Mechanics’ Institutes in Liverpool and Leeds.21
Elsewhere, things were different. In the north-eastern seaboard cities of
America, where literacy rates were considerably higher than in Britain, ‘the penny
press invented the modern concept of “news” ’, and the innovation of ‘inexpensive,
mass circulation daily newspapers in the early 1830s’, such as the Sun (1833),
Transcript (1834) and Herald (1835) were hawked up and down the streets at one
or two cents a copy, so that by 1836, ‘[a]lmost every porter and drayman, while
not engaged in his occupation, may be seen with a paper in his hands’.22 And in
McKitterick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Abigail Williams also notes that, in the
eighteenth century, ‘[b]ook inventories from homes all over the country show older publications
significantly outnumbering recent ones. Examining middling-sort London inventories, we see that
where texts are itemized, by far the majority are at least three decades old’: Abigail Williams, The
Social Life of Books: Reading Together in the Eighteenth-Century Home (New Haven, CT: Yale
19 Debate in the House of Commons, on the Sunday Newspapers Suspension Bill (30 May 1799),
The Parliamentary History of England, from the Earliest Period to the Year 1803 (continued after 1803
as Hansard) vol. 34, 3 December 1798–21 March 1800 (London: T.C. Hansard, 1819), cols 1005–14,
col. 1008. Sheridan said that ‘[t]here was an exception [to the law] in favour of selling mackerel on the
Lord’s day, but might not the people think stale news as bad as stale mackerel?’ and added that ‘he
could not agree to a bill that would deprive them of all means of information’: col.1008.
20 ‘Excellent Use for Newspapers When Read’, Weekly Record, Howitt’s Journal 3:68 (15 April 1848),
p. 256. The article continued, ‘[t]hat which applies to newspapers applies to literary papers also, to any
species of printed sheet, in fact, which can be transmitted, cost free, by post’: p. 256.
21 ‘Letters from Readers’, Weekly Record, Howitt’s Journal 3:70 (29 April 1848), p. 288.
22 Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers (New York:
Basic Books, 1978), p. 22; Mark S. Monmonier, Maps With the News: The Development of American
Journalistic Cartography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 71; Philadelphia Public
Ledger, (March 25 1836), quoted in David Henkin, City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in
Antebellum New York (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 110. See Terdiman for a discus-
sion of the development of the newspaper in France: Richard Terdiman, ‘Newspaper Culture:
Institutions of Discourse; Discourse of Institutions’, in Discourse/Counter-Discourse: The Theory and
36 Serial Forms
Paris, Richard Terdiman has demonstrated ‘the early penetration’ of the newspaper
into structures of cultural and individual consciousness. In 1836, the editor Emile
de Girardin undercut the expensive subscription newspapers and brought out a
new quotidien, a cheap daily paper called La Presse, and from then on, ‘the daily
paper itself takes a privileged place as figure for the constant, recurring practices
by which daily life is organized in response to the needs of a transforming
socioeconomy’.23 In Britain, though, such popular daily newspapers would be
slow to appear, as John Gibson Lockhart wrote. Looking back to 1826, he recalls
that ‘[s]uch newspapers as were in a few years to become powerful in the world
of cultivated (and respectable) readers were as yet, relatively speaking, in an
undeveloped state’.24 Benedict Anderson has famously claimed great agency for
the daily newspaper in the formation of national identity, claiming that the ‘calen-
drical coincidence’ of ‘[t]he date at the top of the newspaper, the single most
important emblem on it, provides the essential connection—the steady onward
clocking of homogeneous, empty time’.25 Furthermore, he has argued, the news-
paper reader knows that his [sic] reading of his daily newspaper is ‘being repli-
cated simultaneously by thousand (or millions) of others’, and he observes ‘exact
replicas of his own paper being consumed by his subway, barbershop or residen-
tial neighbours, [and so] is continually reassured that the imagined world is vis-
ibly rooted in everyday life’.26 But newspapers were neither national (the London
papers were London papers, for example, not national papers) nor by any means
daily for most people in Britain for most of the nineteenth century. Anderson also
figures newspaper-reading as a solitary activity that is ‘performed in silent privacy,
in the lair of the skull’, while it is clear that the scarcity and expense of newspapers
and low literacy levels in the first half of the nineteenth century in Britain meant
that they were often passed around, shared and read out loud in groups.27
Practice of Symbolic Resistance in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1985), pp. 117–46.
23 Terdiman, ‘Newspaper Culture’, p. 120 n. 4. Terdiman is particularly interested in tracking the

development of a consumer society through advertising in the newspaper. Terdiman says that news-
papers in France were not available for direct sale until the 1830s. They were either ordered on a pre-
paid subscription or rented by the hour at a cabinet de lecture. Emile de Girardin and Moise (known as
Polydore) Millaud revolutionized the French daily newspaper press. In July 1836 Girardin bought out a
new paper, La Presse, and undercut the subscription rates of the other Paris dailies by 50 per cent.
Millaud brought out Le Petit Journal in 1863. In 1843, the inauguration of the roman-feuilleton in the
newspaper with publication of Eugène Sue’s Le juif errant in Le Constitutionnel quadrupled the paper’s
circulation to 80,000: Terdiman, ‘Newspaper Culture’, p. 134. See also Richard Terdiman, ‘Afterword’, in
Dean De la Motte and Jeannene M. Przyblyski (eds), Making the News: Modernity and the Mass Press in
Nineteenth-Century France (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), pp. 351–76.
24 ‘Biographical Sketch of John Gibson Lockhart’, in John Gibson Lockhart, Memoirs of the Life of
Sir Walter Scott, 5 vols (Boston, MA: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1902), vol. 1, pp. xiii–xxvi, p. xxii.
25 Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 33. 26 Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 36.
27 Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 35. Literacy rates were still an issue at the close of the nine-
teenth century, particularly for the elderly.
Although the format of the daily newspaper was long established by the 1820s
and 1830s in Britain, Aspinall tells us that ‘the consumption of newspapers per
head of the population was actually stationary between 1815 and 1835’.28 This was
just what the government intended. As late as 1855, the Morning Chronicle was
still able to lament the enforced obsolescence of the cheap press, ‘[t]he cheap
journals, which can only exist by obtaining a large circulation, are and must be
printed early in the week, though published towards the end of it. By the time
they appear, therefore, the whole aspect of the world has changed.’29 Clearly, even
at mid-century and after repeal of the news taxes, the cheap Sunday newspapers
which became the most common and affordable sources of news summaries for
the working people were still lagging considerably behind the daily news.30 And
in the earlier Regency and Georgian period in Britain, ‘daily’ news could be eked
out for weeks.
Away from the metropolitan centres there were often no newspapers available
at all. Robert Roberts remembers that in Wales in the 1830s ‘[t]here were no
newspapers, for there was none published in that part of Wales at that time’, but
he does remember a Welsh monthly ‘secular paper something like the old Penny
Magazine’.31 Nevertheless, in ways which were rather different to those described
by Anderson, the 1820s and 1830s did witness a significant shift in the structures
of cultural and individual consciousness in Britain. To examine how this shift
happened, it is necessary to move away from the tidy model of a ‘newspaper’ and
to disaggregate and mess up the concept of ‘print’ again, in order to reimagine its
unruly and contradictory rhythms, and its clashing temporalities. For even in the
large urban centres in Britain, people continued to engage with forms of print
culture much older than the newspaper: forms such as the broadside, the ballad,
and the almanac. Raymond Williams’s cultural categories of ‘dominant’, ‘residual’,
and ‘emergent’ are useful here: ‘the residual, by definition, has been effectively
formed in the past, but is still active in the cultural process, not only and often not
at all as an element of the past, but as an effective element of the present’.32 In
terms of the popular print culture of the early nineteenth century in Britain, it
was these ‘residual’ forms, which had proved so robust from the early modern
period onwards, that bypassed the ‘dominant’ culture to achieve a new visibility
28 Arthur Aspinall, ‘Statistical Accounts of the London Newspapers 1800–1836’, in English

Historical Review 65 (1950): 222–34, pp. 222–3.
29 ‘The Magic Penny’ [From the Sunday Times], Morning Chronicle (2 April 1855), p. 4.
30 See Virginia Berridge, ‘Popular Sunday Papers and mid-Victorian Society’, in George Boyce,
James Curran, and Pauline Wingate (eds), Newspaper History: From the Seventeenth Century to the
Present Day (London: Constable, 1978): 247–64.
31 John Burnett, Destiny Obscure: Autobiographies of Childhood, Education and the Family from the
1820s to the 1920s [1982] (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 184.
32 Raymond Williams, ‘Dominant, Residual, and Emergent’, in Marxism and Literature, pp. 121–7,
p. 122.
38 Serial Forms
and cultural value in the 1820s and 1830s as ‘emergent.’33 It is here we can locate a
time-lag effect, where the recontextualization of older print forms within a shift-
ing social order created entirely new meanings for them. But understanding a
shift in public historical consciousness in this period involves opening up the
concept of ‘print culture’ to a much wider array of material than just the news-
paper and the book. From the early modern period, when the pedlar Autolycus
assures Mopsa in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale that the ballads that he is selling
are ‘[v]ery true, and but a month old’, all the way through to the early nineteenth
century, there is a striking continuity in poorer people’s desire for accurate and
fresh news, and in their difficulties in obtaining it.34
Borrowing the News
Sometime in the winter of 1810, a working man, a journeyman tailor, Thomas

Carter explained his arrangements for borrowing the daily news:
For breakfast I had a penny roll and half a pint of porter. This I took at a
publichouse—for two reasons: first, that I might have an opportunity of looking at
the morning newspaper; and further, that I might have the comfort of sitting by a
good fire . . . I felt a considerable degree of interest in regard to the course of public
affairs, and therefore was the more anxious to see a newspaper every day.35
Although Carter could not afford to own the news for himself, this does not pre-
vent his sense of daily participation in the political life of the nation. His is no
leisured browsing of the more sensational titbits or the advertisements in the
paper, but a serious and serial engagement with ‘the course of public affairs’.36 He
goes on to explain how he ‘every morning gave [his work colleagues] an account
of what I had just been reading in the yesterday’s newspaper. I read this at a coffee
33 William St Clair dates some forms of popular print culture even further back, citing ‘[t]hree sto-
ries admired by Wordsworth, Robin Hood, Jack and the Giants, St George and the Dragon, and others
[that] had a continuous history back to the oral and manuscript tradition of medieval romance’:
St Clair, The Reading Nation, p. 79. St Clair cites Victor E. Neuburg, Popular Education in Eighteenth-
Century England (London: Woburn Press, 1971), p. 116. St Clair argues that there is a ‘centralised,
cartelised, national book industry’ that is deliberately ‘prolonging the obsolete’: p. 81. He argues that
the state used this to control mentalities and horizons of its people: p. 438. I think the causes and
effects of taxation, copyright regimes, and book pricing are more complex, and that the mentalities
and horizons of the people were much harder to control than he suggests.
34 William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale IV: iv, 254–79.
35 Thomas Carter, Memoirs of a Working Man (London: Charles Knight & Co., 1845), pp. 144–5,
http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/reading/UK/record_details.php?id=7587. This incident is reported as
happening between 1 December 1810 and 28 February 1811.
36 Michael Warner characterizes this version of newspaper-reading in eighteenth-century America
as a ‘republican reading of general public discourse, rather than a leisurely consumption of luxury
goods’: The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 125.
shop . . . near the bottom of Oxford Street . . . The papers I generally preferred to
read were the “British Press”, the “Morning Chronicle”, and the “Statesman”. I usu-
ally contrived to run over the Parliamentary debates and the foreign news’, and he
adds that his workmates were also ‘warm admirers’ of Mr Cobbett’s ‘Political
Register’. Cobbett’s twopenny Register which reported and commentated on the
doings of Parliament sold forty to sixty thousand copies a week in 1816–17.37
Forty years later another working man claimed that ‘[m]y only reason for going
to the public house; [is that] I hear people read the paper, and say what is going
on in London, and it is the only place where I get the news’.38 Throughout the first
half of the nineteenth century, then, fresh news had to be overheard, rented, or
borrowed by poorer people.
In the mid-1830s Dickens notices, in his Sketches by Boz, several instances of
sharing the news. A lonely clerk who repairs to an eating house ‘bespeaks the
paper after the next gentleman. If he can get it while he is at dinner, he appears
to eat with much greater zest; balancing it against the water-bottle, and eating
a bit of beef, and reading a line or two, alternately.’ [See Fig. 1.1].39 In ‘The
Streets—Night’, a street-seller, ‘the nine o’clock “beer,” comes round with a lan-
tern in front of his tray’, selling pots of beer house to house. He also ‘lends Mrs.
Walker “Yesterday’s ‘Tiser [Advertiser]” ’; and a young city clerk, Mr Thomas
Potter, who, after several glasses of grog in ‘Making a Night of It’, ‘feebly bespoke
the evening paper after the next gentleman’, but found it ‘a matter of some diffi-
culty to discover any news in its columns, or to ascertain distinctly whether it
had any columns at all’ so ends up walking ‘slowly out to look for the moon’
instead.40 And in ‘The Broker’s Man’, Mr Fixem the Broker, or bailiff, serves
37 Schudson, Discovering the News, p. 38. Schudson adds that ‘[t]he Northern Star sold ten thou-
sand papers a week within its first five months during the Chartist movement. At its height in 1839, it
sold forty to sixty thousand copies a week’: p. 38. Jonathan Topham agrees that when Cobbett abridged
Cobbett’s Register, ‘[i]ts circulation rose abruptly from 1,000 or 2,000 to 40,000 or 50,000 (or perhaps
even 70,000), and Cobbett claimed to be making a profit of between £100 and £200 per week’:
Jonathan R. Topham, ‘John Limbird, Thomas Byerley, and the Production of Cheap Periodicals in the
1820s’, Book History 8 (2005): 75–106. See also George Spater, William Cobbett: The Poor Man’s Friend,
2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), vol. 2, p. 358, vol. 2, p. 569, n. 15. Publisher
Charles Knight followed Cobbett’s career closely: ‘There is a new power trusted to the great mass of the
working people . . . [Cobbett’s] “two-penny trash”, as it is called, has seen farther, with the quick percep-
tion of avarice or ambition, into the intellectual wants of the working classes.’ Charles Knight, Passages
of a Working Life During Half a Century, With a Prelude of Early Reminiscences, vol. 1 [1873]
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 235–6.
38 ‘Select Committee on Newspaper Stamps 1851’, quoted in Joel H. Weiner, The War of the
Unstamped: The Movement to Repeal the British Newspaper Tax 1830–1836 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
39 Charles Dickens, ‘Thoughts about People’, in Sketches by Boz, ed. Dennis Walder (London:
Penguin Books, 1995), pp. 252–3.
40 Charles Dickens, ‘The Streets—Night’, in Sketches by Boz, p. 75 and ‘Making a Night of It’, in
Sketches by Boz, p. 311. Dickens is accurate as neither the Advertisers nor the evening papers were as
expensive as the daily (morning) papers, and therefore would have been more likely to reach the
clerks’ class that he is writing about here.
40 Serial Forms
Fig. 1.1. George Cruikshank, ‘Thoughts about People’, from Charles Dickens,
Sketches by Boz (London: Macrone, 1837) [reproduced by kind permission of the
Syndics of Cambridge University Library, Lib.7.83.4]
a ‘warrant of distress’ to a lady, ‘handing it over as polite as if it was a newspaper

which had been bespoke arter [sic] the next gentleman’.41 Omnibus stations in the
1840s were crowded with sellers who ‘vend oranges, pen-knives, and last week’s
morning papers’.42 By contrast, better-off Londoners had no difficulty procuring
up-to-date news, and Dickens is equally precise in Sketches by Boz about those
who can afford daily intelligence. For example, we are told that a senior clerk at
Somerset House, Mr Minns, has ‘a good and increasing salary, in addition to
some 10,000l. of his own (invested in the funds)’,43 and is discovered ‘sitting at his
breakfast-table, alternately biting his dry toast and casting a look upon the col-
umns of his morning paper, which he always read from the title to the printer’s
name’.44 In ‘The Tuggs’s at Ramsgate’, the ‘ladies and gentlemen’ disposing
themselves on the sands at Ramsgate are of a class that can afford the luxury of
41 ‘Mr. Bung’s Narrative’ in ‘The Broker’s Man’, in Sketches by Boz, p. 50.

42 ‘A Plea for Advertising Vans’, Our Own Times Illustrated by George Cruikshank (London:
Bradbury & Evans, July 1846), p. 123. The series ran from April to July 1846.
43 Charles Dickens, ‘Mr. Minns and His Cousin’, Sketches by Boz, p. 361.
44 Dickens, ‘Mr. Minns and His Cousin’, p. 363.
Fig. 1.2. Richard Doyle, ‘A Fashionable Club—Four o’Clock p.m.’, in

Charles L. Graves, Mr. Punch’s History of Modern England, vol. 1: 1841–1857
(London: Cassell, 1921), p. 217; originally published in Richard Doyle, Manners and
Cvstoms of Ye Englyshe: Drawn from Ye Quick (London: Bradbury & Evans, 1849–50)
[reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library
Lib.5.92.100]
leisure and newspaper reading, the class that the Tuggs family are hoping to join:
“[t]he ladies were employed in needlework, or watch-guard making, or knitting,
or reading novels; the gentlemen were reading newspapers and magazines”.45
Even higher up the social scale, private ownership and silent reading of news-
papers was not necessarily the norm in this period. In what Thackeray refers to as
the ‘Pall Mall agorae’, the reading rooms of the Pall Mall gentlemen’s clubs, ‘the
principal men of all London come to hear or impart the news’ [see Fig. 1.2].46
Gentlemen shared and discussed the news, but they were also the people who
made the news. The ‘Wet Paper Club’, which met at the Chapter Coffee-house in
Paternoster Row, was so called because its members read the newspapers as soon
as they were delivered from the press, with the ink still wet, and ‘a dry paper was
45 Charles Dickens, ‘The Tuggs’s at Ramsgate’, Sketches by Boz, both quotes p. 397.
46 [W. M. Thackeray], ‘Strange to Say, On Club Paper’, Cornhill Magazine 8 (November 1863):
636–40, both quotes p. 637.
42 Serial Forms
Fig. 1.3. Ackermann’s Print of Benjamin Haydon, ‘Waiting for The Times (after an
adjourned debate)’ (1831) [© The Trustees of the British Museum]
regarded as a stale commodity’.47 But such freshness was available only to those
who could afford it.
Benjamin Haydon’s 1831 oil painting ‘Waiting for The Times (after an adjourned
debate)’, sometimes subtitled ‘the Morning After the Debate on Reform, 8
October 1831’ [Fig. 1.3] is set in a London coffee-room. The painting shows one
man almost entirely obscured by the huge broadsheet Times that he is reading
while another waits for him to finish and hand it over.48 Haydon’s biographer
47 Ralph Nevill, London Clubs (London: Chatto & Windus, 1911), p. 11. Barbara Black points out
that this ‘literalizes the alliance between the press and club culture’, and that the gentlemen’s clubs
‘formed a microculture where newspapers were read, where news was discussed as well as made,
where writers searched for the latest scoop and editors kept on the lookout for rising talent’: Barbara
Black, A Room of His Own: A Literary-Cultural Study of Victorian Clubland (Athens, OH: Ohio
University Press, 2012), p. 256 n. 2 and p. 128.
48 Haydon’s painting circulated widely when it was published as a print in 1832 by Ackermann on
the Strand after a mezzotint by Thomas Lupton. Haydon’s biographer says the picture was ‘well known
from the engraving’, and the Crayon says that ‘from engravings [it] is the best known of all his works’:
Tom Taylor (ed.), Life of Benjamin Robert Haydon, Historical Painter, from his Autobiography and
Journals, 2 vols (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1859), vol. 2, p. 113; Frederick Stephens, ‘Some
notes that ‘[i]t was while under the influence of this political fever [leading up to
the 1832 Reform Bill] that Haydon painted his picture of Waiting for the
Times . . . with its bearing on the feeling of the times’; and impatience is the real
subject of the picture, which Richard Altick suggests ‘reflects the unprecedented
importance the daily press acquired in those turbulent years’.49 By the time the
Reform movement had swept away the ‘taxes on knowledge’, though, the extended
period of press censorship in the 1820s and 1830s had created new formats by
necessity. The popular newspaper which emerged in the mid-nineteenth century
would continue even into the twenty-first century to bear the traces of the for-
matting and the internal logic of the early cheap weeklies and surviving genres of
street literature. And some of those formats reach back to the kinds of printed
material that were circulating long before the eighteenth century. Today’s surviv-
ing red-top tabloids are the direct descendants of the print forms that emerged
under the taxation regime of the 1820s and 1830s. As I will argue, the govern-
ment’s determination to keep the people ignorant and distracted by topicalities
rather than representing them as political participants was ultimately successful
in producing a particular kind of populism among those in Britain who were ‘left
behind’ and left out of the daily political conversation.
Weekly Rhythms: Sunday Papers and Twopenny Papers
The historiography of the 1970s and 1980s made much of the radical unstamped
press (the Poor Man’s Guardian, for example, ‘published contrary to law’), its cam-
paign against the ‘taxes on knowledge’, and its crucial role in the development of
class consciousness in nineteenth-century Britain.50 But much less work has been
Remarks upon the Life of B. R. Haydon’, The Crayon: A Journal Devoted to the Graphic Arts (June
1856): 165–9, p. 168. The print was also stuck into an album compiled by Queen Victoria (see the
Royal Collections website).
49 Taylor (ed.), Life of Benjamin Robert Haydon, vol. 2, p. 112; Richard D. Altick, The Presence of
the Present: Topics of the Day in the Victorian Novel (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press,
1991), p. 14.
50 Classics of this genre include Stanley Harrison, Poor Men’s Guardians: A Record of the Struggles
for a Democratic Newspaper Press 1763–1973 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1974); Patricia Hollis,
The Pauper Press: A Study in Working-Class Radicalism of the 1830s (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1970); Ian Inkster (ed.), The Steam Intellect Societies: Essays on Culture, Education and Industry circa
1820–1914 (Nottingham: University of Nottingham, 1985); J. F. C. Harrison, Learning and Living,
1790–1960: A Study in the History of the English Adult Education Movement (London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1961); I. J. Prothero, Artisans and Politics in Early Nineteenth-Century London: John Gast
and His Times (Folkstone: Dawson & Son, 1979); James Epstein and Dorothy Thompson (eds), The
Chartist Experience; Studies in Working-Class Radicalism and Culture 1830–1860 (London: Macmillan,
1982); Thompson, Making of the English Working Class; Joyce, Visions of the People; Weiner, The War of
the Unstamped; Ian Haywood, The Revolution in Popular Literature: Print, Politics, and the People,
1790–1860 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Brian Simon (ed.), The Radical Tradition in
Education in Britain (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1972); Ian Haywood, Romanticism and Caricature
44 Serial Forms
done on the impact of the un-radical unstamped press of the 1820s and 1830s: the
‘Twopenny Trash’, or experiments in popular weekly periodicals that were toler-
ated, or even actively encouraged, because they carefully choreographed their
contents to reflect, rather than to report, the news. Leigh Hunt described his
weekly essay periodical, the Indicator (1819–21), as ‘an accomplished speci-
men . . . of the Twopenny Trash’ which was aimed at a wide audience.51 These were
the magazines such as The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction
(weekly and monthly 1822–49)52, The Olio; or, Museum of Entertainment (weekly
1828–33), the Parterre (weekly 1834–6), the Saturday Magazine (weekly 1832–44),
Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal (weekly 1832–97), and The Society for the Diffusion
of Useful Knowledge’s Penny Magazine (weekly 1832–45).53 In the first issue of
the Penny Magazine, Charles Knight made it clear that his new publication was
not a newspaper, but rather a ‘little Miscellany’: ‘we have . . . no expectation of
superseding the newspaper, and no desire to supersede it. We hope only to share
some portion of the attention which is now almost exclusively bestowed on “the
folio of four pages,” by those who read little and seldom.’54 Knight recognized that
most working people had little time available for reading, and that reading could
be unrewarding for those whose literacy skills were basic. Following the news
required not only good reading skills but also a degree of political literacy not
easily attained by those for whom daily information was not available. There is
evidence that these weekly publications were much more widely read than the
radical unstamped press.55 The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); and Iain McCalman, Radical Underworld: Prophets,
Revolutionaries and Pornographers in London, 1795–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1988); and Gregory Vargo, An Underground History of Early Victorian Fiction: Chartism, Radical Print
Culture, and the Social Problem Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
51 Thornton Leigh Hunt, The Correspondence of Leigh Hunt, 2 vols (London: Smith, Elder & Co.,
1862), vol. 1, p. 149.
52 The Mirror of Literature, Amusement and Instruction (1829–49) offered 16 pages for 2d. The later
Penny Magazine cost—of course—1d. Chambers and the Saturday Magazine both cost 1½d.
53 Only the Monthly, the Mirror, the Olio, and the Penny Magazine were illustrated. The Olio was
published by Joseph Shackell.
54 [Charles Knight], ‘Reading for All’, Penny Magazine 1 (1832), p. 1. Knight also describes his
magazine as ‘the finder glass’ that will help orientate its readers towards greater knowledge. The ‘folio
of four pages’ is William Cowper’s description of a newspaper in his 1785 poem The Task. A Poem, in
Six Books. For an excellent discussion of Cowper and newspaper form, see Kevis Goodman, ‘The
Loophole in the Retreat: The Culture of News and the Early Life of Romantic Self-Consciousness’,
South Atlantic Quarterly 102:1 (Winter 2003): 25–52.
55 William Howitt claimed, with some national pride, that ‘our Penny Magazine, Saturday
Magazine and Chamber’s Journal’ ‘go amongst the multitude’: William Howitt, The Rural and Domestic
Life of Germany: With Characteristic Sketches of Its Cities and Scenery. Collected in a General Tour, and
During a Residence in the Country in the Years 1840, 41 and 42 (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and
Longmans, 1842), p. 491. Jon Klancher says that ‘[b]y the early 1820s cheap periodicals like the Mirror
of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction or the Hive were to flood British bookstalls and coffeehouses
with circulations of fifty thousand or more, dwarfing those of the quarterly reviews and monthly
magazines’: Jon P. Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–1832 (Madison, WI:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), p. 49.
is described by Richard Altick as ‘the first long-lived cheap periodical’, and ‘was
by far the most successful among the spate of twopenny weekly miscellanies that
appeared during the 1820s’.56 The Mirror matched the circulation of the six-
shilling Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews (around 12,000 copies), and outstripped
those of the half-crown (2s. 6d.) Blackwood’s and two-shilling Monthly Magazine
(around 3,000 to 4,000 copies), the eightpenny Literary Gazette (around
3,000 copies), and the sevenpenny Times (around 6,000 copies).57 James Grant
remembered that the Mirror ‘certainly was to be seen everywhere. It was amaz-
ingly popular, but not more so than it deserved.’58 A survey of magazines available
for perusal at taverns and coffee houses in London, published in 1839 by the
Royal Statistical Society, shows that it was the weeklies—the Mirror, Chambers,
and the Saturday Magazine—that were the most likely to be found lying around
on the tables and counters of such places.59
The ‘circulation of the Penny Magazine’, Charles Knight observed in a hand-
written proposal for the Penny Cyclopædia in 1832, had already revealed the
56 Richard Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public,
1800–1900, 2nd edn (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1998), p. 266; Jonathan Topham,
‘John Limbird, Thomas Byerley’, p. 75. Topham suggests that, ‘[w]ithin a couple of years of the Mirror’s
inception more than 80,000 copies of some parts had been printed, and total sales of the first number
ultimately exceeded 150,000’: pp. 75–6. Information from Henry Peter Brougham, Practical
Observations upon the Education of the People, Addressed to the Working Classes and their Employers,
15th edn (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1825), p. 3; [Anon.], ‘The
Pioneer of Cheap Literature,’ Bookseller (30 November 1859): 1326–7, reference on p. 1326. Topham
suggests that the probable average weekly circulation of the Mirror was closer to between 10,000 and
15,000.
57 Jonathan Topham adds, ‘Indeed, in numerical terms it was second only to such sixpenny reli-
gious monthlies as the Evangelical Magazine and the Wesleyan-Methodist Magazine (around 18,000 to
25,000 copies)’, p. 76. All data from Jonathan Topham, ‘John Limbird, Thomas Byerley’, footnotes 5
and 6, p. 98. Francis Place reported that in 1823 the Mirror had an average sale of 10,000 copies (Place
Papers, Add. MS 27823, fol. 240, British Library), and in 1837, James Grant quoted a figure of 15,000
copies: James Grant, The Great Metropolis, 2 vols (London: Saunders & Otley, 1837), vol. 2, p. 349. A
figure of this order of magnitude is also implied by both Thomas Frognall Dibdin, The Library
Companion; or, The Young Man’s Guide, and the Old Man’s Comfort, in the Choice of a Library, 2 vols
(London: Harding, Triphook and Lepard, and J. Major, 1824), vol. 1, p. xv and Charles Cuthbert
Southey, The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey, 6 vols (London: Longman, Brown, Green,
and Longmans, 1849–50), vol. 5, p. 117. Richard Altick, English Common Reader, pp. 318–19, 392;
John O. Hayden, The Romantic Reviewers, 1802–1824 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969),
p. 71; and [Anon.], ‘Contemporary Journals’, Monthly Repository 15 (1820): 540–3, 601–2, 672–4.
Topham gives comparative data for the leading periodicals at this period in tabular form in his article
‘The Wesleyan-Methodist Magazine and Religious Monthlies in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain’, in
Geoffrey Cantor et al. (eds), Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical: Reading the Magazine of
Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 67–90, on p. 69.
58 Grant, The Great Metropolis, vol. 2, p. 317.
59 Edgell Wyatt Edgell, ‘Moral Statistics of Parishes of St. James, St. George, and St. Anne Soho, in
the City of Westminster. Supplementary to the Third Report of the Education Committee of the
Statistical Society of London, Journal of the Statistical Society of London 1:8 (1838): 478–92, pp. 484–6.
Andrew Piper has also claimed that the miscellanies also ‘played an important role in marking the
transition from the cyclicality to the seriality of cultural production that would become a hallmark of
both nineteenth-century literature and twentieth-century mass media more generally’: Andrew Piper,
Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2009), p. 123.
46 Serial Forms
enormous ‘number of persons . . . who are desirous to acquire information, when

presented to them at a very low price, and at short intervals’, and this body of
readers from ‘all classes’ who preferred receiving knowledge in regular weekly,
manageable portions could be serviced by an efficient distribution network that
extended ‘to the most opulent bookseller and to the keeper of a stall—to the pub-
lisher of the county newspaper and the hawker of worn-out reprints’.60 Knight
recognized the commercial possibilities inherent in joining up separate distribu-
tion networks by offering a product respectable enough for the polite booksellers
while also cheap enough for the pedlar or hawker. The weekly papers had already
established their rhythm in poorer households, where information that was not
time-sensitive ‘news’ could be browsed over and returned to over the space of a
week. In Elizabeth Gaskell’s historical novel Sylvia’s Lovers, set in the late eighteenth
century, it is ‘the weekly York paper’ that Philip reads out loud in the evenings to
the semi-literate Robson family, and in her novella Cousin Phillis, ‘Cousin
Holman gave me the weekly county newspaper to read aloud to her, while she
mended stockings out of a high piled-up basket.’61 In 1832 the novelist Bulwer
quoted to Parliament ‘an intelligent mechanic’ who said that ‘[w]e go to the
public-house to read the sevenpenny papers, but only for the news. It is the cheap
penny paper that the working man has by him to take up and read over and over
again whenever he has the leisure, that forms his opinions.’62
The seriality of these cheap weekly publications seems to have been relatively
unimportant to their readers, whose reading might be both irregular and repeti-
tive—the same issue being read ‘over and over again’ either by a succession of
visitors to a tavern or coffee house, or by a group of friends and neighbours, or
just read repeatedly by one careful owner. One working-class boy read and reread
his father’s copies of the Penny Magazine so often that he ‘got by heart’ all the
articles.63 He also remembered that his father’s series was incomplete, ‘for want of
a penny’ some weeks.64 A ploughboy called James Croll remembered that ‘[o]ne
60 Charles Knight, The Penny Cyclopædia (21 June 1832), Society for the Diffusion of Useful
Knowledge Papers, Special Topics 53, University College London Archives; quoted in Gowan Dawson,
‘Palaeontology in Parts: Richard Owen, William John Broderip and the Serialization of Science in
Early Victorian Britain’, Isis 103:4 (December 2012): 637–67, p. 648.
61 Elizabeth Gaskell, Sylvia’s Lovers, ed. Andrew Sanders, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1999), p. 95. Elizabeth Gaskell, Cousin Phillis, in Cousin Phillis and Other Stories, ed.
Heather Glen, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 176.
62 Edward Bulwer Lytton, Debate in the House of Commons on Taxes on Knowledge, 14 June 1832
Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates Third Series 23 May – 3 July 1832 (London: T.C. Hansard, 1833), cols
619–48, col. 624. Bulwer Lytton is arguing that the high cost of daily papers forces the working man to
resort to the ‘wild’ and illegitimate penny press in search of political news, although he also reports
that the Penny Magazine and other non-news-carrying papers are popular in the absence of proper
newspapers for the poor.
63 ‘An Irreconcileable, The Penny Magazine’, Saint Paul’s Magazine 12 (May 1873): 542–49, p. 545.
64 Abigail Williams has argued that library borrowing records from the eighteenth century also
‘show that books were not always read in sequential and complete order’: Williams, The Social Life of
Books, p. 75.
day during the summer of 1832, when at Perth, I observed in a bookseller’s window
the first number of the Penny Magazine, which had just appeared. Attracted by
the illustrations, I went in and purchased it. This incident led to a new epoch in
my life. Having read the first number with interest, I then purchased the second,
third, and succeeding numbers as they appeared, all of which I read with zest.’65
Croll claimed that the Penny Magazine launched him on a lifetime of learning.66
The weeklies, with their miscellaneous contents and occasional illustrations, their
jumble of ‘[p]ast and present, the remote and the nearby . . . set side by side’ repre-
sentationted a continuity with ‘yesterday’ rather than a news-focused march
towards ‘tomorrow’.67 While there is evidence that E. P. Thompson was largely
right about the extension and regularization of the working week in his celebrated
1967 article ‘Time, Work-discipline, and Industrial Capital’, there is still more to
be said about the ways in which people may have organized their own relation-
ships to time in multiple and contradictory ways according to their various lived
experiences and everyday practices.68 They may have exercised a tactical flexibil-
ity in their reading which reached both forwards into a thoroughly modern ‘news’
culture and backwards to older models of time and event: ecclesiastical, agricul-
tural, and astrological.69
Recognizing this flexibility and multiplicity of experiential time in the early
nineteenth century is important, as it might allow us to leave behind the unhelp-
ful periodizing of that elusive category known as ‘modernity’, and equally to put
aside our obsession with ‘rupture’, in order to think more clearly about continuity
and lag, and the ways in which the ‘always there’ is always emerging into visibility
as new. Jon Klancher, writing about the cheap press of the early nineteenth century,
suggests that ‘[f]or a public inescapably facing bewildering historical transforma-
tions in the rush of the nineteenth century, what the mass journal must do is
register and recuperate what was always there’.70 But the remediation of what has
been ‘always there’ to a new reading public makes it not quite the same as it was
before, and therefore this is less a process of ‘recuperation’ than of re-presentation
and re-formation. It is undoubtedly true that the twopenny weekly journals of the
1820s are important in this regard, but less as agents of rupture than as extensions
of the ‘distribution of the sensible’, in Rancière’s term, in that they made formerly
65 James Campbell Irons, Autobiographical Sketch of James Croll, with Memoir of his Life and Work
(London: Edward Stanford, 1896), pp. 12–13.
66 Irons, James Croll, pp. 12–13.
67 Jon P. Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences, p. 81.
68 E. P. Thompson, ‘Time, Work-discipline, and Industrial Capital’, Past and Present 38 (1967):
56–97. For evidence taken from court reports supporting Thompson’s conclusions, see Hans-Joachim
Voth, Time and Work in England 1750–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
69 In this I agree with Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift who, while questioning the separation between
clock time and natural time asserted by E. P. Thompson and Raymond Williams, ‘disavow the idea
that an alternative grand theory of clock time and western modernization is even appropriate’:
Glennie and Thrift, Shaping the Day, p. 16.
70 Jon Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences, p. 88.
48 Serial Forms
elite knowledge available to new constituencies and began to improve the possibility
of social and political participation. In Chapter 6, I will examine in detail the ways
in which these weekly illustrated miscellanies presented the past and created a
sense of virtual historicity for a new readership.
The Newspaper Press Directory described the Sunday weekly papers as
‘compress[ing] into a capacious double sheet the news of the week’, for ‘a class of
readers who, though respectable, may be supposed—through incessant occupa-
tion in the week—not to have had much opportunity before the Saturday evening
for newspaper reading’.71 In Dickens’s Sketches by Boz, a shop tumbles down the
social scale from the relative gentility of a haberdasher’s until it is finally split into
two, ‘separated by a thin partition, covered with tawdry striped paper’ (83). One
side is ‘opened by a tobacconist, who also dealt in walking-sticks and Sunday
newspapers’ (83). A shop, ‘on the Surrey side of the water’ (81)—that is, south of
the river—selling Sunday newspapers suggests that from the beginning of the
century, the weeklies had circulations well ahead of the ‘respectable’ daily papers
and their readership was wider socially, too, and increased after the newspaper
tax was removed in 1836. Indeed, Raymond Williams went so far as to argue that
it was the cheap Sunday weeklies, and not the dailies, that laid the foundations for
the commercial mass press.72
‘Straggling Papers’: Broadsides, Ballads and Chapbooks
News could mean very different things to different people, depending on their
location, their gender and their occupation. Working men hungry for news of
London politics who had access to public houses in or close to the city could bor-
row a newspaper or hear it read out by another customer, but ‘news’ often came to
others not in the shape of newspapers at all, but in the guise of execution broad-
sides, chapbooks, and ballads, and this was as true in the expanding cities as in
rural parts of the country. Wordsworth was well aware of the lingering influence
71 ‘The News of the World’, Newspaper Press Directory (London: C. Mitchell, 1846), p. 79; Laurel
Brake, Chandrika Kaul, and Mark Turner (eds), The News of the World and the British Press, 1843–2011:
‘Journalism for the Rich, Journalism for the Poor’, Palgrave Studies in the History of the Media
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 11–26, p. 22. Edward Lloyd’s Lloyd’s Illustrated
Newspaper (later Lloyd’s Weekly London Newspaper, then Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper 1842–1931) was a
leader in a new market for cheap illustrated Sunday papers.
72 Williams, ‘The Press and Popular Culture’, pp. 41–50. McCalman, in Radical Underworld, has
claimed it was the criminal papers and scandal sheets of the late 1820s that introduced in periodical
form the sensationalist ingredients of the mid-century Sunday papers. Laurel Brake and Mark Turner
note that ‘Yesterday’s News’ becomes a section head in the News of the World. They discuss, ‘the rou-
tine coverage of “Yesterday” in the Sunday editions—“Yesterday” not only as a designation of “recent”
news, but “Yesterday” hinting at copy in earlier editions’, but they note that the archive only contains
the latest London edition, so this is difficult to establish: Laurel Brake and Mark Turner, ‘Rebranding
the News of the World, 1856–90’, in Brake, Kaul, and Turner (eds), The News of the World and the
British Press, pp. 27–42, p. 33.
Fig. 1.4. John Thomas Smith, ‘New Elegy’ [itinerant third generation vendor of
elegies, Christmas carols and love songs], in The Cries of London: Exhibiting Several of
the Itinerant Traders of Antient and Modern Times, Copied from Rare Engravings or
Drawn from the Life (London: John Bowyer Nichols and Son, 1839) [reproduced by
kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library Syn.4.83.19]
of earlier forms of print among the poor, noting in 1808 that ‘I find, among the
people . . . half-penny Ballads, and penny and two-penny histories, in great abun-
dance . . . I have so much felt the influence of these straggling papers’.73
Wordsworth’s word, ‘straggling’, which he uses again in The Excursion, suggests
that not only are these forms of print vagabond and vagrant but also, perhaps,
lagging behind. Fig 1.4 shows a street vendor of ‘elegies, Christmas carols and
love songs’ who is the third generation of his family in a trade which has been
continuous up to the 1830s. Even at the very end of the 1840s, the Morning
Chronicle journalist and social investigator Henry Mayhew found that these
‘straggling papers’ continued to endure in the cities as well as the countryside: ‘the
street-ballad and the street-narrative, like all popular things, have their influence
73 William Wordsworth to Archdeacon Wrangham, Grasmere (5 June 1808), in The Letters of

William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Middle Years, 1806–1820, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, rev. Mary
Moorman and Alan G. Hill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969–70), vol. 2, p. 248.
50 Serial Forms
on masses of the people’.74 Ballads framed as the last confessions or lamentations

of hanged criminals were published well in advance, ready for the day of the
hanging; ‘[s]o you see’, as one running patterer, or street seller, explained, ‘for the
herly and correct hinformation, we can beat the Sun—aye, or the moon either, for
the matter of that’.75
In this earlier model of ‘news’ the report was provided concurrently with the
event and was understood as part of the crowd’s experience of the event, rather
than offering an accurate account of it after it had happened.76 By the early 1850s,
though, the broadside and ballad sellers were aware of competition from a newly
cheap newspaper press; ‘we must be in advance of the papers’, as one explained to
Henry Mayhew, who was writing for the Morning Chronicle at the time: ‘But Lord
love you, there’s plenty of ’em gets more and more into our line. They treads in our
footsteps, sir; they follows our bright example. O! isn’t there a nice rubbing and
polishing up. This here copy won’t do. This must be left out, and that put in; cause
it suits the walk of the paper. Why, you must know, sir. I know. Don’t tell me. You
can’t have been on the Morning Chronicle for nothing.’ Henry Mayhew adds that
‘the patterers laugh at telegraphs and express trains for rapidity of communica-
tion, boasting that the press strives in vain to rival them’,77 for nothing can be as
fast as writing it all up before it happens. In 1819, Mrs Catnach was tried for
‘Circulating False News’ after two street-sellers were apprehended for blowing
trumpets and hollering a halfpenny paper titled ‘A HORRID MURDER’: the
‘news’ of the murder of a Mr Ellis the night before. No such event had actually
taken place, and ‘the contents of the paper had no reference whatever to Mr.
Ellis’.78 But buying an expensive taxed newspaper did not always guarantee accur-
acy either. During the Napoleonic wars, Mayhew recalls, ‘how frequent, and how
false, were the announcements, or the rumours of the death of Bonaparte, his
brothers, or his marshals, in battle or by assassination’.79 Throughout the 1820s,
news values were slowly improving and more factual accuracy was required by
74 Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, vol. 1, p. 220.

75 Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, vol. 1, p. 224. See also Gertrude Himmelfarb,
‘Mayhew’s Poor: A Problem of Identity’, Victorian Studies 14:3 (March 1971): 307–20; Richard
Maxwell, ‘Henry Mayhew and the Life of the Streets’, Journal of British Studies 17:2 (Spring 1978):
87–105; Stephen Jankiewicz, ‘A Dangerous Class: The Street Sellers of Nineteenth-Century London’,
Journal of Social History 46:2 (Winter 2012): 391–415; Natalie Prizel, ‘The Non-Taxonomical Mayhew’
Victorian Studies 57:3 (Spring 2015): 433–44; and Neil Pemberton, ‘The Rat-Catcher’s Prank:
Interspecies Cunningness and Scavenging in Henry Mayhew’s London’, Journal of Victorian Culture
19:4 (October 2014): 520–35.
76 The execution broadsides were touted to the crowd during the executions, but they could also be
bought afterwards.
77 The hawker boasts that ‘[w]e had accounts of Mistress Sloane’s apprehension before the papers’.
The Sloanes had severely abused and beaten their servant, Jane Wilbred in 1850, and were tried in
1850–1. Henry Mayhew, London Labour, vol. 1, pp. 225, 226, 229.
78 Charles Hindley, History of the Catnach Press: At Berwick-upon-Tweed, Alnwick and Newcastle-
Upon-Tyne, in Northumberland, and Seven-Dials, London (London: Charles Hindley, 1886), p. 44.
79 Mayhew, London Labour, vol. 1, p. 231.
readers who paid taxes on their news. The status of the ‘fact’ itself was growing
too, and, as international communications improved, newspaper stories were
becoming more easily verifiable.80 Early-modern broadsides had reported both
marvellous events and political news; novelty and rarity, the bizarre and the
strange, so, for example, a sighting of a mermaid might be reported alongside a
parliamentary report. As Barbara Shapiro points out, ‘[t]he history of “news” and
“facts” cannot be separated from the “wonders” and “marvels” of the age’.81 She
argues that by the late sixteenth century, emerging conventions of ‘fact’ were
beginning to be applied and a new emphasis appears on reporting the exact time
and place of an event and proof from credible witnesses. Shapiro says that, ‘[n]ews
involved an ‘event’ or series of events, that is particular occurrences rather than
general experience. . . . Typically, “news” involved not only the recounting of a par-
ticular act or event but an unusual, strange, marvellous, important, or particularly
interesting event.’82 Nevertheless, ‘[u]nusual cloud formations, comets or blazing
stars, storms, frosts, and other natural events continued to be newsworthy’.83
Although they continued to be newsworthy well into the nineteenth century,
natural events were shifting their status from singular cosmological appearances,
identified as prophetic or prognostic of the future, to serialized daily weather
reports and forecasts.84 One of the most significant strategies of the broadsides
was their combination of the old and the new. This was often purely an expediency
in a competitive marketplace where there was an advantage in the swift creation
of ‘new’ products from readily available and existing materials. For example, John
Camden Hotten states that from the mid-eighteenth century in London, ‘the
more enterprising [chapbook] dealers, anxious for novelties, seized upon the
80 Mary Poovey dates the stabilizing of the concept of the modern fact to the science of political
economy and statistics in Britain in the 1830s. See Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact:
Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press,1998). Her argument has been challenged as relying too innocently on the self-definitions of
statisticians and political economists in the early nineteenth century. See, for example, Theodore
Porter who argues that ‘[t]he factual sensibility of early nineteenth-century England was, among other
things, a politically resonant denial of politics, in an era when rationalism appeared dangerously
French’: Theodore M. Porter, ‘Modern Facts and Postmodern Interpretations’, Annals of Science 58:4
(2001): 417–22, pp. 418–19, doi: 10.1080/00033790152739551. On trust and facts, see Steven Shapin,
A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago: University of
81 Barbara Shapiro, A Culture of Fact: England 1550–1720 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
2000), p. 87.
82 Barbara Shapiro says that ‘[w]e also see the blurring of disciplinary boundaries and the overlap
among the discourses of fact when we put the news media’s attention to unusual natural phenomena
alongside the natural histories of the virtuosi and some of the writings of theologians. Contemporary
wonders and marvels were news to the periodical publisher, providential events with moral implica-
tions to the preacher and theologian, and, to the virtuoso, the subject of reports offered to the Royal
Society and in the Philosophical Transactions.’ Shapiro, A Culture of Fact, p. 99.
83 Shapiro, A Culture of Fact, p. 99.
84 See Katharine Anderson, ‘Weather Prophets and the Victorian Almanac’, in Predicting the
Weather: Victorians and the Science of Meteorology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005),
pp. 41–82.
52 Serial Forms
ancient oral tales, and printed them for the first time’.85 That ‘ancient’ tales from
an oral tradition were seized upon and issued as print ‘novelties’ is important. The
old was remediated into print and thus transformed into ‘news’. Chapbooks were
small pamphlets which cost between one penny and sixpence and could be from
eight to thirty-two pages long. They were usually crudely printed on cheap paper
and embellished with seemingly random woodblock images which did not neces-
sarily bear any relation to the text.86 The use and reuse of old woodblocks was
another time and money-saving economy for the producers, but it had accidental
effects. Old blockprints could create oddly ill-matched timescales: for example,
the biblical scenes on Catnach’s Christmas sheets mixed the ancient and the
modern in bizarre ways, featuring ‘modern Gothic churches, and men in strange
costumes’, which perhaps encouraged a version of religious time as eternal.87
Henry Mayhew judged that these old print formats still made up an ‘exten-
sive . . . portion of the reading of the poor’ in the late 1840s.88 The reach of these
‘straggling papers’ was wide: one broadside of ‘The Last Dying Speech and
Confession’ of the murderer of Maria Marten in the 1827 ‘Red Barn Murder’ sold
more than 1,100,000 copies and the subject was multiply remediated in print,
sung ballads, penny dreadfuls, peep shows, waxworks, and on stage in theatres
and at fairs.89 The broadsides reached remote rural areas too. Henry Mayhew
recalls one broadside seller who claimed that, through the uncurtained window
of a cottage in Norfolk one evening in the late 1840s, he had seen ‘eleven persons,
young and old, gathered round a scanty fire’ where ‘[a]n old man was reading, to
an attentive audience, a broadside of Rush’s execution’. There were no candles lit,
as this was a very poor household, and the man read by the light of the fire
85 John Camden Hotten, ‘Jack the Giant Killer’, Notes and Queries (7 November 1863): 377–8,
pp. 377–8. Hotten’s geography of the print trade in the mid-eighteenth century ‘when chap-bookselling
was at its zenith’ is precise, as being focused upon ‘London Bridge, Little Britain, Aldermary, and Bow
Churchyards, Gracious or Gracechurch Street and the lanes running out of Smithfield’: p. 377.
86 Information from Gary Kelly, ‘Fiction and the Working Classes’, in Richard Maxwell and Katie
Trumpener (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Fiction in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2008): pp. 207–34, p. 209. Kelly notices that around 1800, ‘chapbooks of a new kind
began to appear, mainly much shorter versions of books read by the middle classes, and bought from
publishers and small shops, or possibly borrowed from small circulating libraries and pubs’: p. 209. He
gives a useful survey of the most popular chapbooks in circulation around 1780 and he also discusses
the new generation of longer 3d chapbooks which began to appear in the early 1800s.
87 [Anon.], ‘Street Ballads’, National Review 26 (October 1861): 397–419, p. 417. Sheila O’Connell’s
reproduction of a Christmas sheet shows how accurate the above description is: Sheila O’Connell, The
Popular Print in England 1550–1850 (London: Trustees of the British Museum, 1999), Figure 6.4,
p. 155. Another reproduction of a Christmas sheet can be found in Leslie Shepard, The History of
Street Literature: The Story of Broadside Ballads, Chapbooks, Proclamations, News-Sheets, Election Bills,
Tracts, Pamphlets, Cocks, Catchpennies, and other Ephemera (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1973),
p. 185.
88 Henry Mayhew, London Labour, vol. 1, p. 280.
89 Raymond Williams, ‘The Press and Popular Culture’, pp. 41–50, p. 43. This particular broadside
was published by James Catnach. For details of the representations of the Red Barn Murder in differ-
ent media, see Rosalind Crone, Violent Victorians: Popular Entertainment in Nineteenth-Century
London (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012), pp. 141ff.
alone.90 The London-based hawker had travelled to Norfolk to sell the broadside
because the hanged man was local, from Norwich.91 Women also bought broad-
sides. A ‘running patterer’ describes his most recent ‘paying caper’ as ‘the Sloanes’,
a couple who were arrested and sentenced in 1851 for severely beating and abus-
ing their female servant, Jane Wilbred: ‘I’ve been in little streets where some of
the windows was without sashes, and some that had sashes has stockings thrust
between the frames, and I’ve taken half a bob in ha’pennies. Oh! you should have
heard what the poor women said about him, for it was the women that bought
him most.’92 Clerks and the lower middle classes, as well as some of the ‘gentry’,
bought from the street sellers too, so that the street broadsides and ballads
reached a very broad cross-section of Londoners. Chapbooks, broadsides, and
ballads continued to be produced well into the nineteenth century in London,
chiefly in Seven Dials, Covent Garden.93 The best-remembered of the Seven Dials
firms is Catnach’s, but Mayhew recalled that ‘next to Catnach stood the late
“Tommy Pitt” of the noted toy and marble-warehouse. These two parties were the
Colburn and Bentley of the “paper” trade.’94 Dickens name-checks both firms in
his 1835 essay ‘Seven Dials’: ‘Seven Dials! the region of song and poetry—first
effusions, and last dying speeches: hallowed by the names of Catnach and of
Pitts.’95 The two companies competed energetically, turning out ‘catchpennies’ to
90 Henry Mayhew quoted in V. A. C. Gatrell, The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People
1770–1868 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 173–4.
91 James Rush was a tenant farmer in Norwich, who owed his landlord, Isaac Jermy, the huge sum
of £5,000. As the deadline for payment approached in November 1848, Rush shot Jermy and his son
Isaac Jr dead on the porch of their Stanfield Hall home. He also shot Jermy Jr’s pregnant wife and Eliza
Chestney, her serving maid, but both of them survived.
92 Mayhew, London Labour, vol. 1, pp. 225–6.
93 Susan Pedersen records that ‘Victor Neuburg has listed over 250 printers of chapbooks in
London alone during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and a further 140 in the provinces.
Dominating this London market was the firm of William Dicey and, later, his son Cluer. For half a
century, the Diceys produced a variety of imprints, including over 150 chapbook titles. In the early
nineteenth century James Catnach replaced the Diceys as king of the chapbook printers and allegedly
made 10,000 pounds on his business.’ Susan Pedersen, ‘Hannah More meets Simple Simon: Tracts,
Chapbooks, and Popular Culture in Late 18th-century England’, Journal of British Studies 25 (1986):
84–113, p. 98. Victor E. Neuburg, Chapbooks: A Bibliography (London: Vine Press, 1964), pp. 15–30.
Harry B. Weiss found that one collection of chapbooks from 1785 to 1830 was drawn from over eighty
London firms: Harry B. Weiss, A Book about Chapbooks (Trenton, NJ: Edward Bros, 1942), pp. 6–7.
See also Neuburg, Chapbooks, pp. 9–10, and Victor Neuburg, The Penny Histories: A Study of
Chapbooks for Young Readers Over Two Centuries (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969),
pp. 26–9.
94 Mayhew, London Labour, vol. 1, p. 220. Mayhew also lists the current street publishers, including
Mrs Ryle, Catnach’s niece. David Atkinson and Steven Roud have warned that the work of memoriali-
zation of Catnach performed by Charles Hindley and his son has resulted in a false emphasis on
Catnach’s importance in what was in truth a very crowded field: David Atkinson and Steven Roud,
‘Chapter One: Introduction’, in David Atkinson and Steven Roud (eds), Street Literature of the Long
Nineteenth Century: Producers, Sellers, Consumers (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing,
2017), pp. 1–59, p. 24.
95 Charles Dickens, ‘Seven Dials’, Sketches by Boz, p. 90. Although Walder uses the revised 1839
edition of the text, this sketch was first published in Bell’s Life in London on 27 September 1835.
Dickens correctly refers to John Pitts (1768–1844) as ‘Pitts’, but he is often referred to elsewhere
as ‘Pitt’.
54 Serial Forms
harness any novelty that might attract attention on the streets. Both, for example,
immediately pirated John Clare’s 1820 poem ‘The Meeting’ and sold it in bastard-
ized versions: in the Pitts version, a four-line chorus was arbitrarily added to
make it conform to ballad form.96
In Sketches by Boz, Dickens declares that Catnach and Pitts are ‘names that will
entwine themselves with costermongers, and barrel organs, when penny maga-
zines shall have superseded penny yards of song, and capital punishment be
unknown!’ The prolepsis is significant, throwing Catnach and Pitts into ‘yester-
day’ from the vantage point of an imagined ‘today’ in the future. Chapter 5 dis-
cusses in more detail how in Sketches by Boz Dickens creates complex scales of
time, sensitive to the unevenness of a changing city chronoscape in which the
Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge’s Penny Magazine was attempting
to offer a rational alternative to the unwholesome ‘gallows literature’ of Catnach
and Pitts. Dickens connects the Seven Dials printers explicitly with capital pun-
ishment, against which he himself was campaigning energetically throughout the
1830s and 1840s.97 His bundling together of Catnach’s and Pitts’s wares with
costermongers, barrel organs, and penny yards of song is also significant as a
reminder of the place of print in the miscellaneous material culture of the London
streets.98 Alongside broadsides and ballads, Pitts sold ‘children’s toys, in the shape
of little carts, tin-trumpets, drums, dolls, picture-books, lollipops, pin-cushions,
[and] laces’, and both Pitts and Catnach sold ‘toy-books’, such as Pitts’s The Easter
Gift: Being a Useful Toy for Little Miss and Master to Learn their ABC.99 Catnach
advertised his toy-books as ‘adorned with cuts’.100 The word ‘cuts’ itself recalls the
material process of making a woodcut, and reinserts the materiality of incisions
into a thick material, and the ‘penny yards of song’ refer to the ‘long-songs’, which
Mayhew tells us were mostly bought by ‘boys and girls, but mostly boys, who
expended 1d. or ½ d. for the curiosity and novelty of the thing, as the songs were
not in the most readable form’ [Fig. 1.5].101
96 John Clare’s poem ‘The Meeting’ was printed in the introduction to his Poems Descriptive of
Rural Life and Scenery (London: Taylor and Hessey and Stamford: E. Drury, 1820), pp. xxiii–xxiv. See
Michael N. Joy ‘The Everyday Uses of Nineteenth Century Broadside Ballads and the Writings of John
Clare’, https://www.jrc.sophia.ac.jp/pdf/research/bulletin/ki22/mjoy.pdf. John Clare himself worked
in an oral ‘commons’ and he recalled that ‘I made many things before I ventured to commit them to
writing . . . imitations of some popular songs floating among the vulgar at the markets and fairs till they
were common to all’: Shepard, History of Street Literature, p. 112.
97 Dickens’s ‘Letters on Social Questions: Capital Punishment’ appeared in the Daily News on
23 and 28 February and 9, 13, and 16 March 1846.
98 Costermongers sold fruit and vegetables from hand-wheeled barrows.
99 ‘Horae Catnachianae’, Fraser’s Magazine 19 (April 1839): 407–24, p. 409. The Easter Gift was a
sixteen-page children’s chapbook sold by Pitts in the early 1800s: Jonathan Cooper, ‘The Development
of the Children’s Chapbook in London’, in David Atkinson and Steven Roud (eds), Street Literature of
the Long Nineteenth Century: Producers, Sellers, Consumers (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars
Publishing, 2017), pp. 217–40, p. 234 n. 55.
100 Hindley, History of the Catnach Press, p. 8.
101 Mayhew adds that ‘[a] few working people bought them for their children, and some women of
the town, who often buy anything fantastic, were also customers’. One patterer recited for Mayhew a
Fig. 1.5. ‘The Long-Song Seller: “Two under fifty for a fardy!” [from a daguerreotype
by Beard]’, Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (1851) [reproduced
by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library XIX.49.16]
The idea of buying text as if it were textile, by the yard, again reinstates the
materiality of the paper itself. Street print in this period could not be further from
the model of the ‘newspaper’. It was not conceived of as ephemeral, or as two-
dimensional, or purely as the vehicle of information. It was not yet ‘industrial’.
Instead, these texts were thought of as crafted three-dimensional objects or
things: not just things ‘to think with’ in Robert Darnton’s famous phrase, but
things to play with and make with, too.102 Huge, double-sized Christmas broad-
sides were ‘an important item’ for Catnach and Pitts, and these functioned not
list of the song titles he would cry, including ‘The Pope he leads a happy life, he knows no care’, ‘Buffalo
gals, come out to-night’, ‘Death of Nelson’, ‘The gay cavalier’, ‘Jim along Josey’, ‘There’s a good time
coming’, ‘Drink to me only’, ‘Kate Kearney’, ‘Chuckaroo-choo, choo choo choot-lah’, ‘Chockala-roony-
ninkaping-nang’, ‘Pagadaway-dusty-kanty-key’, ‘Hottypie-gunnypo-china-coo’, ‘I dreamt that I dwelt in
marble halls’, ‘The standard bearer’, ‘Just like love’, ‘Whistle o’er the lave o’it’, ‘Widow Mackree’, ‘I’ve been
roaming’, ‘Oh! that kiss!’, and ‘The old English gentleman’: Mayhew, London Labour, vol. 1, p. 221.
102 Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and other Episodes in French Cultural History
(New York: Vintage, 1984), p. 4.
56 Serial Forms
only as texts for reading, but as Christmas decorations, conversation pieces,

song-sheets, and objects of religious contemplation:
Each Christmas broad-sheet is headed by a large wood-cut roughly coloured,

and is double the size of the ordinary broad-sheet, and sells for a penny plain
and two-pence coloured. It contains four or five carols, and one or two very long
narrative ballads of some twenty verses, and three or four short pieces. The illus-
trations are of the Crucifixion, the Raising of Lazarus, the Birth of Christ, the
Ark, the Last Supper, the Resurrection, and other kindred subjects.103
John Clare remembered seeing these Christmas sheets in his village as a child. At
Christmas time, the local church was ‘stuck with evergreens (emblems of Eternity)
& the cottage windows & the picture ballads on the wall all stuck with ivy holly
Box & yew’.104 Robert Roberts grew up in the 1830s and 1840s in a farmhouse in
Wales with broadsides pasted on the whitewashed walls as decorations. One of
these featured ‘a doleful ditty about the great storm of 1839, detailing in unmelo-
dious numbers the damage done to ships and buildings by that calamity; over the
letterpress is a woodcut of Menai Bridge, coloured green, surprinted by a bright
yellow ship in full sail’.105 The Menai Bridge had been badly damaged in the 1839
storm, so this broadside had once briefly been ‘news’ and its ‘ditty’ makes claims
103 There seems to be little differentiation between broadsheets and broadsides in the literature,
although some critics think that broadsides are distinguished by being printed only on one side,
whereas broadsheets can be double-sided. This is not a generally accepted definition, however. I have
tended to use the word ‘broadside’ in my discussion, to avoid confusion with the modern ‘broadsheet
newspaper’.
104 The Prose of John Clare, ed. J. W. and Anne Tibble (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951),
p. 128. Clare also writes about broadsides as cottage decorations in ‘Dobson and Judie, or, The Cottage’:
Save Ballads, songs and Cutts, that hide
Both window-shutters, wall, and door,
Which tell of many-a-murder’d bride
And desperate Battles daubed oer
‘Keep within compass’ courts the eye
To read and learn a morral truth
With ‘Golden Maxims’ paste’d nigh
And ‘Pious counsils’ plan’d for youth
There too on poltry paper wrought
Disgrac’d with songs upon the screen
(Of some poor penny hawker bought)
King Charles’s ‘Golden Rules’ are seen
John Clare, ‘Dobson and Judie, or, The Cottage’, in The Early Poems of John Clare, 1804–1822, ed. Eric
Robinson and David Powell, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), vol. 1, pp. 172–80, p. 175
ll. 81–92.
105 John Burnett, Destiny Obscure, p. 183. Robert Roberts was born in 1834. The quality of these
illustrations was undoubtedly crude. In the nineteenth century, John Camden Hotten ‘purchased
Catnach and Tommy Pitts’s collections of wood blocks, and amongst them are many as rude, and not
nearly so well-drawn, as those to be met with in the block-books of the fifteenth century’: Hotten,
‘Jack the Giant Killer’, p. 378.
to statistical accuracy, but its retention on the wall after 1839 was surely much
more to do with that green bridge and yellow ship, which Roberts remembers
thinking ‘creditable specimens of the pictorial art’.106 The broadsides were novel-
ties, rather than news: they offered narrative with a frisson of the real, but their
value to their purchasers was chiefly as domestic objects, repositories of stories
and songs, and displays of pictures. In this sense, they were closer to cabinets of
curiosities than newspapers. Indeed, they were used and experienced not as flat
sheets of print, but as multimedia objects.
The visuality of the broadsides is particularly important to the development of
seriality out of the miscellaneity of print in this period.107 A standing patterer
interviewed by Mayhew described the illustrated broadsides he was selling as
‘[r]ecent popular paintings’ which included ‘the Mannings, and afterwards the
Sloanes. The two last-mentioned were among the most elaborate, each having a
series of “compartments” representing the different stages of the events in which
these heroes and heroines flourished.’108 The sequencing of pictorial narrative
into ‘compartments’ in this way was far from new, of course, but, as Martin Meisel
has so convincingly shown, it was gaining ground as the dominant narrative tech-
nique in the early nineteenth century, through cheap serialized prints, such as the
‘small series of caricatures’ that Boz is offered by street pedlars as he mounts a
stage coach in the 1830s, and also through the tableaux used to emphasize the
most dramatic moments in stage melodramas.109 The first monthly number of a
series of fifty-six hand-coloured etchings by the two Cruikshank brothers with
accompanying text by Pierce Egan appeared in July 1821, and Life in London; or
the Day and Night Scenes of Jerry Hawthorne Esq., and his elegant friend Corinthian
Tom, accompanied by Bob Logic the Oxonian, in their Rambles and Sprees through
the Metropolis, a title that was swiftly compressed to Tom and Jerry, was to become
enduringly popular. Thackeray remembered reading it as a schoolboy, ‘behind the
great books, which he pretends to read, is a little one, with pictures, which he is
really reading’, and the experience seems predominantly visual: ‘oh! Such funny
pictures!’110 It was as extended captions to a series of comic ‘cockney sporting
106 John Burnett, Destiny Obscure, p. 183.

107 Brian Maidment has also pointed to the importance of the visual to the serial: ‘[t]he importance
of visual culture in the development of the early forms of seriality, especially exemplified in the litho-
graphed caricature magazines of the 1820s and 1830s, the annuals and comic pamphlets of the early
1830s—all of which formed the staple material for many scrapbooks—challenges the heavy emphasis
on the verbal aspects of print culture that has dominated historical accounts of seriality’.
Brian E. Maidment, ‘Scraps and Sketches: Miscellaneity, Commodity Culture and Comic Prints,
1820–40’, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 5 (2007), p. 20.
108 Mayhew on standing patterers, London Labour, vol. 1, p. 232.
109 Charles Dickens, ‘The Streets—Morning’, Sketches by Boz, p. 72. Along with the caricatures, the
pedlars are selling ‘a last year’s annual’, so that again we see out-of-date printed matter offered for sale.
110 W. M. Thackeray, ‘De Juventute’, in Roundabout Papers Reprinted from ‘The Cornhill Magazine’
(London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1863), pp. 103–30, p. 107.
58 Serial Forms
plates’, drawn by Robert Seymour, that Dickens was to start writing Pickwick
Papers in 1836. Meisel makes the connection explicit:
In serialized fiction, [the material collaboration of pictures and words] . . . includes

a predisposition to an expansive elaboration of a pictorially conceived drama-
turgy which substituted situation for action as the constituting unit of the play.
The whole, presenting bursts of lateral development in a progressive movement,
a continuity of discontinuities in packets, requires a description as rarified as
that of light: neither wave nor corpuscle, but something of both.111
As Meisel implies, the ways in which pictorial information was circulated in print,
and in melodramatic tableaux on stage, had an impact not only on the development
of the nineteenth-century novel but also on the development of a nineteenth-
century understanding of history and of politics. Neither has yet been fully
acknowledged or described by literary critics or historians. The serial emerged in
counterpoint to another early and hugely influential print form and chronotype:
the almanac. Almanacs offered an astrological calendar of the coming year which
functioned on the prophetic assumption that the future was already there, replete
with divinable and transmissible information, and not a mere blank, emptily
awaiting shape and agency.112
Yearly Rhythms: Almanacs
Almanacs remained fairly standard in their format into the nineteenth century
until the repeal of the almanac duty in 1834; indeed, they would sometimes
reprint the same daily weather predictions for several succeeding years. As they
had done since the 1550s when they were first printed in England, they usually
consisted of a front page of chronological cycles and eclipses, and the major items
of reference affecting the whole year ahead. Then there were twelve pages of cal-
endar, month by month with a section at the top of each page devoted to phases
of the moon and other planetary aspects. Below this, each page would list the
days of the week, beside which were noted the times the sun would rise and set or
111 Meisel, Realizations, p. 56. For a fascinating account of the history of the tableau vivant, see
Kirsten Gram Holmström, Monodrama, Attitudes, Tableaux Vivants: Studies on Some Trends of
Theatrical Fashion 1770–1815 (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1967).
112 Giacomo Leopardi, Dialogue between an Almanac Maker and a Passer-By [1824], trans. Charles
Edwardes (San Francisco: Edward and Robert Grabhom, 1921). What made time modern, says
Leopardi, was the fact that the future always trumped the past. In a new version of time without repe-
tition, the almanac was no longer able to look forward to the new year by describing the year that has
passed. See the discussion in Sanja Perovic, The Calendar in Revolutionary France: Perceptions of Time
in Literature, Culture and Politics (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 241.
the age of the moon. Red ink would often be used to mark saints’ days and church
festivals or the anniversaries of ‘red-lettered worthies’, from which we take our
‘red-letter days’.113
The construction of events by an almanac is markedly different to that by a
daily newspaper. The events are annual and perpetual rather than daily and
ephemeral. After the calendar the almanac might offer hints on health, an image
of the ‘zodiac man’ which was designed to show which parts of the human body
were most vulnerable to different planetary influences, interpretations of ingress
charts, stories of wonders, little poems and short tales, proverbs, and blank pages
for notation.114 Almanacs were usually small booklets, such as Old Moore’s
Almanac, also known as the Vox Stellarum or ‘voice of the stars’, a predictive
almanac issued annually that was by far the most popular of the almanacs in the
nineteenth century. [Fig. 1.6].115 Goldsmith’s Almanac, another popular booklet
almanac, was advertised as ‘[e]legant, useful, and portable’ and ‘essentially
adapted for the pocket’, but almanacs could also take the form of broadsides to be
displayed on a wall.116 In Wuthering Heights (1847), Heathcliff jealously marks
with crosses the days that Catherine is spending with the Lintons on a ‘framed
sheet’ almanac on the wall.117 They were sometimes sold as novelties, such as the
folding ‘hat almanacs’ remembered by a street seller who in one evening ‘sold, just
by Blackfriars-bridge, fourteen dozen of diamond almanacks to fit into hat
crowns’.118 Almanacs were ubiquitous on the streets before the mid-1830s, when
the sellers of illegal pornography also sometimes claimed to be selling almanacs
and pocket memorandum books as a cover.119 Almanacs could also be ‘spin-offs’
from other forms of print. Robert Seymour’s wood-engraved vignette caricatures
were recycled from the periodical Figaro in London into a sheet almanac, the
113 For example, William Cowper, hearing of the death of Handel (21 June 1784), wrote in his diary
‘[i]t is reasonable to suppose, that in the next year’s almanack we shall find the name of Handel among
the red-lettered worthies’: Oxford English Dictionary online edition.
114 The Natural History Prose Writings of John Clare, ed. Margaret Grainger (Oxford: Oxford
115 Old Moore’s Almanack was first published in 1697 and has survived in various forms to the pre-
sent day. Foulsham’s Original Old Moore’s Almanack claims an unbroken genealogy back to the seven-
teenth century.
116 Advertisement, Saturday Review (29 November 1873), p. 718. Maureen Perkins records that in
1801 Goldsmith’s Almanac was selling 30,000 copies annually and continued to be popular throughout
the century: Maureen Perkins, Visions of the Future: Almanacs, Time, and Cultural Change 1775–1870
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 34. Brian Maidment points to ‘[a] formal division, between
almanacs produced as single broadside sheets aimed at public or domestic display and those produced
in pamphlet or booklet form for domestic reading, is immediately evident’: Brian Maidment, ‘ “Larks
in Season”; The Comic Almanack (1835–54)’, Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens 84 (Automne 2016),
http://journals.openedition.org/cve/2881.
117 Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, ed. Ian Jack, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford
119 ‘Strawing’ was the practice of hawking a straw and giving ‘for free’ a paper which is too indecent
or incendiary to be sold openly: see Mayhew, London Labour, pp. 239–41.
60 Serial Forms
Fig. 1.6. Cover of the Vox Stellarum Almanac for 1828 [reproduced by kind
permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library L506.5.d.33.26 (1828)]
Figaro in London Almanac.120 But by the late 1840s, when Mayhew interviewed
the street traders, ‘[t]he almanack street trade, I heard on all hands, had become a
mere nothing . . . It was a capital trade once, before the duty was taken off—capital!
The duty wasn’t in our way, so much as in the shopkeepers’, though they did a good
deal of on the sly in unstamped almanacks.’121 Nowadays they tell Mayhew that
they only sell cheap almanacs, ‘but they are almost always announced as Moores’.122
The fall-off in the almanac trade by mid-century was partly due to the reduction of
taxation on newsprint, so that more cheap publications became available, but also
due to the appearance of new forms of print which had subsumed and replaced the
functions of the almanac. The twopenny paper the Olio, for example, launched in
1828, promising its readers ‘[i]llustrations, by an artist of no common talents’, and
a weekly ‘Diary and Chronology’ on its back page which listed holidays and note-
worthy upcoming events alongside a ‘Corresponding Chronology’ of historical
occurrences against each day. [Fig. 1.7].123
Until these new cheap printed papers became available, though, the almanac
remained one of the few kinds of texts that poorer people could afford to buy and
own. One Victorian writer on almanacs attested that ‘to a large class of the English
people, they were almost the sole representatives of literature’.124 Bernard Capp
suggests that ‘the almanac was the greatest triumph of journalism until modern
times’, and in 1828 the Athenaeum said that almanacs could be found ‘in the
hands of persons of every degree’ and speculated that ‘being the subjects of daily
consultation, [they] must have some decided influence upon their habits of
thought’.125 Maureen Perkins, the chief historian of the genre, agrees: ‘[e]ven in
120 The Figaro in London Almanac was published by William Strange in London in 1836. Brian
Maidment describes it as ‘a broadside single sheet that surrounded a conventional calendar with
Seymour’s images, thus finding an ingenious way of reusing the original blocks for commercial pur-
poses’: Brian Maidment, ‘Beyond Usefulness and Ephemerality: The Discursive Almanac 1820–1860’,
in Sandro Jung (ed.), British Literature and Print Culture (London: D.S. Brewer, 2013), pp. 158–94,
pp. 173–9.
122 Mayhew, London Labour, vol. 1, p. 271. The repeal of the almanac duty in 1834 led to an
‘ephemeral swarm’ of cheap almanacks for sale, made up of ‘some half-a-dozen of old almanacs, a pair
of scissors, and a bowl of paste’: [Anon.], ‘The Almanacs for 1835’, Mechanics’ Magazine (29 November
1834): 152–9, both quotations p. 152. After mid-century, almanacs were increasingly produced as
advertising material, as All the Year Round laments: ‘Almanacs? The world is afflicted with
almanacs . . . My stationer round the corner is sure to send me his unreadable little almanac with the
first shilling packet of flimsy cream-laid that I may have been rash enough to order; my patent medi-
cine vendor wraps up my little box of pills in his special version of the yearly seasons; my perfumer
generously gives me his, scented, with my bottle of British eau de Cologne; my illustrated newspaper
has its illustrated almanac, which I am bound to buy; my comic periodical, its comic almanac, which I
am also bound to buy; my insurance office has a broadsheet, which I am forced to put up in my study;
four rival prophets preach woe and desolation in my ears, and I am tempted by patriotic zeal to learn
what will be the fate of my beloved country, at a cost varying from a penny to half a crown’: ‘Almanacs’,
All the Year Round 6:140 (28 December 1861): 318–21, p. 318.
123 ‘Diary and Chronology’, Olio (Saturday 12 January 1828), p. 16 (back page).
124 Mortimer Collins, ‘Almanacs’, New Quarterly Magazine (January 1876): 409–30, p. 410.
125 ‘The British Almanack for 1828: Published under the Superintendence of ‘The Society for the
Diffusion of Useful Knowledge’, Athenaeum 1 (2 January 1828): 4–6, p. 4.
62 Serial Forms
Fig. 1.7. ‘Diary and Chronology’, Olio (12 January 1828), p. 16 [reproduced by kind
permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library T900.c.221.1–4 (vol. 1)]
the early nineteenth century, people did not simply consult their almanac, but
read it’, she says.126 Nor did people just read them, they wrote in them too. One
female housekeeper ‘inserted the dates of the marriages, deaths and interments
that took place among her acquaintance; [and] . . . carefully noted, every year, on
what days the bees swarmed’.127 In another is written in pen against a date in July
1829 ‘an odd dream about being naked’.128 Almanacs were ‘things to think with’,
and Lauren Kassell adds that they were particularly ‘useful for thinking about one’s
bodily, domestic, social and occupational economy’.129 Through the almanac,
people inserted their own experience of lived time into cosmological time.130
The 1820s was also the decade in which ‘a new branch of polite literature’ began
to appear: the literary and musical gift annuals, marking annual time in a more
commodified way than the cheap almanacs, and targeted at a wealthy, genteel,
and largely feminine market.131 The annuals were domestic objects sumptuously
designed for the middle-class parlour or drawing room, so they were not much
seen on the streets, except perhaps in colourful displays through bookshop
windows at Christmas time. They were an innovative and important print phe-
nomenon in this period and the Mirror mediated them for those of its readers
who would be unlikely to be able to afford them. In December 1824, the Mirror
told its readers that ‘[w]e have given the precedence to almanacks as the oldest of
our annual periodicals,’ but that it would now also recognize other ‘yearly publi-
cations’.132 It proceeded to reprint stories and poems from a variety of the new
annuals, allowing its readers a glimpse of the luxury of literary novelty. Three
reprinted extracts from Forget me Not are followed by an extract from a story by
Maria Edgeworth taken from Friendship’s Offering.133 The Mirror comments
on how ‘beautifully got up’ the annuals are, and they were largely beyond the
126 Bernard Capp, English Almanacs 1500–1800: Astrology and the Popular Press (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1979), p. 292; Maureen Perkins, Visions of the Future, pp. 15–16.
127 ‘Francis Moore: Physician’, Household Words 6:138 (13 November 1852): 197–201, p. 198.
128 Handwritten marginalia, Vox Stellarum; or, A Loyal Almanack For the Year of Human
Redemption 1829 (London: Luke Hansard & Sons, 1829), p. 14 (author’s collection). Or, for example,
‘ “Richard Lewis was born at half-past 3 o’clock on Saturday evening the 17 day of October 1818” ’:
Collins, ‘Almanacs’, p. 414.
129 Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre, p. 4. Darnton borrows the idea of ‘things to think with’ from
Claude Lévi-Strauss, who used it to describe tools as ‘objects to think with’ in The Savage Mind
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966) [originally published in 1962 as La pensée sauvage].
Lauren Kassell, ‘Almanacs and Prognostications’, in Joad Raymond (ed.), The Oxford History of Popular
Print Culture, vol. 1: Cheap Print in Britain and Ireland to 1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2011), 431–42, p .435.
130 The ‘reinscription of lived time upon cosmic time’: Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3,
trans. Katherine Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 128. See
also Julia Grandison, ‘Jane Austen and the Almanac’, Review of English Studies (31 January 2019):
911–29, https://doi-org.ezp.lib.cam.ac.uk/10.1093/res/hgy133.
131 [Anon.], ‘Christmas and New Years’ Presents’, Mirror 4:116 (4 December 1824): 408–12, p. 408.
The idea of the decorative annual came from Germany and Ralph Ackermann was largely responsible
for introducing it in Britain.
132 Ibid., p. 408. 133 Ibid., pp. 409–11.
64 Serial Forms
pecuniary reach of the kind of people who bought almanacs on the street.134 They
were perhaps beyond their reach in another way too: the annuals projected an
abstracted version of ‘polite time’ and had little to do with the seasonal practices
of everyday life that formed the subject of the almanacs.135 Their lavishly pro-
duced engravings demanded a relationship to the visual which was to do with
taste, display, and consumption rather than consultation and speculation.
‘[A]ll I have read today is Moores [sic] Almanack’, wrote John Clare on
6 September 1824, ‘for the account of the weather which speaks of rain tho it is
very hot’. His long poem The Shepherd’s Calendar, published in 1827, borrows
from the calendrical format of the almanac and starts, conventionally enough,
with ‘January’:
Now, musing o’er the changing scene,

Farmers behind the tavern-screen
Collect;—with elbow idly press’d
On hob, reclines the corner’s guest, 10
Reading the news, to mark again
The bankrupt lists, or price of grain;
Or old Moore’s annual prophecies
Of flooded fields and clouded skies;
Whose Almanac’s thumb’d pages swarm
With frost and snow, and many a storm,
And wisdom, gossip’d from the stars,
Of politics and bloody wars.
He shakes his head, and still proceeds,
Nor doubts the truth of what he reads: 20
All wonders are with faith supplied,—
Bible, at once, or weather-guide.
Puffing the while his red-tipt pipe,
He dreams o’er troubles nearly ripe;
Yet, not quite lost in profit’s way,
134 Ibid., p. 411.

135 The Olio reviewed a clutch of Christmas literary annuals in 1829: Forget Me Not; The Winter’s
Wreath; Literary Souvenir; Friendship’s Offering; and The Anniversary. ‘Cream of the Annuals for 1829’,
Olio (25 November 1829), pp. 221–36. In 1829, the first musical annuals also appeared. See James
Davies, ‘Julia’s Gift: The Social Life of Scores, c.1830’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association 131:2
(2006): 287–309; also see Jill Rappoport, ‘Buyer Beware: The Gift Poetics of Letitia Elizabeth Landon’,
Nineteenth-Century Literature 58 (2004): 441–73; Katherine D. Harris, Forget Me Not: The Rise of the
British Literary Annual, 1823–1835 (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2015); Lorraine Janzen
Kooistra, Poetry, Pictures, and Popular Publishing: The Illustrated Gift Book and Victorian Visual
Culture (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2011); and Josephine McDonagh’s section on the annuals
in ‘Women Writers and the Provincial Novel’, in The History of British Women’s Writing, vol. 6: 1830–
1880, ed. Lucy Hartley (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), pp. 125–42. The annuals are usefully
discussed on pp. 128–36.
He’ll turn to next year’s harvest-day,

And, Winter’s leisure to regale,
Hope better times, and—sip his ale.
Clare’s farmer ‘dreams’, ‘hopes’, and ‘shakes his head’ as he flicks through the
‘thumbed pages’ of the year to come. As well as almanacs, Clare read the local
newspaper and transcribed wonders (and ‘lyes’) into his journal alongside his
own observations of the weather in the years that he was writing The Shepherd’s
Calendar. On 9 January 1825 he resolved for the new year that ‘Newspaper
Miracles Wonders Curiositys etc under these heads I shall insert anything I can
find worth reading and laughing at’. Sure enough on Saturday 22 January 1825 he
notes that ‘[a]n elm suppos’d to be a thousand years old was blown down near
ludlow castle [sic]’—‘a black bird’s nest with four young ones was found a few
days ago in Yorkshire’. Both curiosities were culled from the Stamford Mercury,
although neither seems particularly amusing.136 The newspaper of Clare’s poem
appears to have been lying around for some time. But this does not matter to the
farmer who is re-reading it, alongside a different kind of ‘chrono-text’, that of Old
Moore’s Almanack. This reader seems to give equal weight to newspaper and
almanac, to the price of corn, prophecies of “politics and bloody war”, and prov-
erbial “wisdom”, so that in this scene—and indeed, in Clare’s poem as a whole—
'multiple times interdigitate, echoing backward and forward against each other’ as
Nigel Thrift and Paul Glennie have nicely expressed it.137
When Clare’s farmer flicks through the year to come in his almanac, the pages
are already ‘thumbed’: the version of time performed by the almanac is repetitive
and consolatory. And his newspaper is out of date. Through this ‘straggling’ print
culture of the poor, time and history were modelled in various and often conflicting
ways, and the onward march of ‘news time’ into an ‘empty homogeneous future’
created by the daily newspaper was far from dominant until well after mid-century.
As Robert Poole points out, ‘[t]ime for most people through most of history, was
an attribute of physical events, not an impersonal Newtonian flow’.138 The sur-
vival of the almanacs and the ballads alongside the weekly papers and the daily
136 Margaret Grainger (ed.), The Natural History Prose Writings of John Clare (Oxford; Clarendon
Press, 1983), p. 218. Clare’s Shepherd’s Calendar came out in May 1827 and was written between 1825
and 1826.
137 Glennie and Thrift, Shaping the Day, p. 155.
138 Robert Poole, Time’s Alteration: Calendar Reform in Early Modern England (London: UCL Press
1998), p. 21. Poole tracks the rationalization of the calendar through to the early eighteenth century,
when, ‘[c]ivilization was perceived as something alive and contemporary, flourishing only when freed
from the dead burden of custom. Similarly John Pocock has mapped out how, in the earlier eighteenth
century, the various legal, political and religious languages of time drew together into an ordered
awareness of a common historical “public time” ’: p. 175. See John Pocock, ‘Modes of political and
historical time in early eighteenth-century England’, in Virtue, Commerce and History: Essays on
Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1985).
66 Serial Forms
newspapers is an important reminder of the ways in which the forward-rushing

serial rhythms that the steam presses were able to produce were still in competi-
tion with older versions of seasonal, cyclical, devotional, and cosmological
time.139 Since serial parts were often bought, found, or borrowed second-hand in
random order, the reader had to construct his or her own frame for the disarticu-
lated pieces of story or information. It is clear, therefore, that actual reading strat-
egies were not necessarily always in step with the general perception of the
acceleration of the culture. Maureen Perkins ends her account of the long almanac
tradition with ‘the development of a mass newspaper market which met the needs
previously met by broadsheet and almanac’, and there has been a critical consen-
sus that the superstition, astrology, and prognostication in the old almanacs was
swept away with the growth of ‘reform’ thinking in the late 1820s and 1830s.140
But this is too simple a view.141 The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge
certainly intended to modernize the form and in the very first edition of its British
Almanac, launched on 1 January 1828, Charles Knight wrote sternly about
‘Celestial Phenomena’ that ‘[t]he proper key to the future is induction from the
past’, and—the implication is clear—not through astrological prognostication.142
Knight significantly reimagined his British Almanac as a serial: ‘[t]he conductors,
therefore, beg to impress upon the purchasers of the almanac, that it is not a
merely temporary work; and they entreat them to preserve it as the first of a
Series, to be annually published, with such improvements as will naturally arise
out of a diligent and systematic collection of the various facts that appear of the
most consequence to be generally diffused’.143 The annual, repeatable, recursive
timeless time of the almanac is transposed into the forward movement of the
serial with its elastic capacity for ‘improvement’, augmentation, correction, and
updating. Clare’s farmer who reads his almanac in an active and participatory
way—flicking backwards and forwards through ‘thumbed pages’—is replaced by
139 James Moran says, ‘In 1820 there were only eight steam-presses in the whole of London, nearly
all being used by newspapers, except for those of Strahan, the King’s printer. As late as 1851, the
Printing Machine Managers [sic] Trade Society had a membership of only 130, indicating that in
London, the main centre of printing, there could not have been many machines at work’: James
Moran, Printing Presses. History and Development From the Fifteenth Century to Modern Times
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1973), p. 123.
140 Maureen Perkins, Visions of the Future, p. 232. Perkins claims that by the 1860s, the newspaper
had completely overtaken the almanac.
141 Brian Maidment says, ‘[t]he almanac’s traditional concern with the agricultural and devotional
year began to give way in the 1830s to experimental versions of an urban and secular year predicated
on the assumed political, social and cultural interests of working people’: Maidment, ‘Beyond
Usefulness’, p. 194. Bernard Capp argues: ‘The more complex and individual characteristics of the
English almanac grew out of its fusion with the prognostication, a development which failed to take
root in France.’ Capp, English Almanacs, p. 273.
142 [Charles Knight], ‘Celestial Phenomena’, British Almanac (1828), p. 23. Maidment points out
that ‘[t]he polemical underpinning of the British Almanac, despite its seemingly neutral and inoffen-
sive presentation of “useful” information, was immediately apparent to the many critics of the SDUK’s
cultural program’: Maidment, ‘ “Larks in Season” ’, n.p.
143 Charles Knight, Companion to the British Almanac (London: Charles Knight, 1828), p. iv.
a more passive reader who reads only forwards and awaits instructions to guide
him (and it is a male reader figured here) in navigating an open future. The
SDUK’s Penny Magazine suggested that, ‘those who consult the “British
Almanac” . . . and those who use “Moore’s Almanac”, are reckoning in two different
sorts of time, the first giving clock-time, the second dial-time’ (the dial being a
sundial), so that the pages of the British Almanac beat to a regular industrial
rhythm, while Moore’s still waxes and wanes with solar and lunar time.144
But clock and dial time were not so easy disentangled. Historian of science
James Secord has argued that ‘[t]he decade around 1830 was a period of projec-
tions, projects, and prophecies, of attempts to imagine the future’, and the transi-
tion from astrology to modern ‘science’ is not quite so simple as the SDUK might
have imagined it to be.145 Print historian Brian Maidment is surely right in think-
ing about the second generation of nineteenth-century political and comic illus-
trated almanacs after around 1830 as ‘hybrids’, which brought the traditions of
eighteenth-century visual satire together with the ‘the new information culture of
the 1830s to form something at once traditional and radically new’.146 I argue that
the almanacs and broadsides of the early nineteenth century were not overtaken
or superseded by the popular press of the 1830s and 1840s. Not only did they
survive and thrive, albeit in new and hybrid forms, but also, and crucially, the
popular newspaper was a hybridized form itself recycled out of these older forms
of print. The effects resonate into what remains of the newspaper press today.
By mid-century, with the removal of most of the newspaper taxes, media
rhythms were starting to synchronize and naturalize themselves. In 1846, Douglas
Jerrold’s Shilling Magazine suggested that clock time and sundial time were now
running in perfect synch: ‘[f]or the mail to arrive without the journals, would be
like the approach of day followed by no rising sun’.147 Over the second half of the
nineteenth century, more and more people would be able to afford fresh news,
and the news would become increasingly regular and reliable, striking a more
even serial beat. When Dickens’s fruit-pie maker in ‘Scotland-yard’ moves up the
social scale as the area ‘improves’, he ‘still continued to visit the old room [the
pub], but he took to smoking cigars, and began to call himself a pastrycook, and
to read the papers’ (88–9). In Sketches, Dickens sees the utility of yesterday’s news
144 [Anon.], ‘Time’, Penny Magazine of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge 4:191
(28 March 1835): 118–20, p. 120.
145 James A. Secord, Visions of Science, p. 237. See also Boyd Hilton, Age of Atonement: The Influence
of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1785–1865 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). Louis
James suggests that ‘[i]t is . . . too simple to see almanacs as only “prophetic”’, but he thinks they did
create a sense of the end of end-time and apocalypse which became part of the public imagination:
Louis James (ed.), Print and the People 1819–1851 (London: Allen Lane, 1976), p. 54.
146 Brian Maidment is here discussing the Political Almanac: Maidment, ‘Beyond Usefulness’,
p. 178.
147 ‘The Mission of the Press’, Douglas Jerrold’s Shilling Magazine 14 (February 1846): 156–64,
p. 164.
68 Serial Forms
and he understands that recycling and mobilizing the second-hand and out-of-date
might lead to the improvisation of something politically entirely new. During the
period of censorship, the excluded majority had developed, by necessity, new
formats and new hybrids, and had continued to use and recycle print in ways that
looked back to older practices. They experienced print not as informational, two-
dimensional, and ephemeral like the newspaper, but rather as one medium in a
multi-media virtual London that was growing in scale and complexity alongside
the built city.
Thinking about print in the 1820s and 1830s in this disaggregated, messy, and
material way, and seeing it as part of a new media world of performance, text, and
image, can help us to think differently about the immense cross-class popularity
of Walter Scott’s work in this same period, and to recognize that, right from the
start, ‘Scott’ was less a Romantic literary author of books than a multimedia phe-
nomenon. And it is to Scott’s self-conscious self-mediation that we now turn.
2
Scott Unbound
‘Seriality makes stories playable’1
In 1810, Scott wrote about his—by then quite extensive—collection of ballads and
broadsides that ‘[u]ntil [the collection was] put into its present decent binding it
had such charms for the servants that it was repeatedly, and with difficulty,
recovered from their clutches’.2 The ‘decent binding’ seems to have elevated the
haphazard sheaf of scrappy papers from the kitchen table to the drawing room
bookshelf. But it was the unbound sheets, the broadside ‘in its primary tattered
guise, as it was hawked through the streets’, that inspired Scott, and if—as he him-
self seems to suggest—binding a story is an artificial process of combination, his
own writing remains at some level crucially unbound.3 Scott had started collect-
ing ‘[s]tall tracts and ballads’ when he was still a boy, ‘from the baskets of the
travelling pedlars’.4 He persuaded his grandparents and the relatives of his friends
to recite the old ballads they knew so that he could write them down, and ‘before
he was ten years old’ he already had ‘several volumes’ of these, along with ‘another
collection of little humorous stories in prose, the Penny Chap-books’.5 And it was
not only ballads and chapbooks that the young Scott accumulated. His biographer,
John Gibson Lockhart, describes how
Walter had soon begun to collect out-of-the-way things of all sorts. He had more
books than shelves; a small painted cabinet, with Scotch and Roman coins in it,
and so forth. A claymore and Lochaber axe, given him by old Invernahyle,
1 Scott Higgins, Matinee Melodrama: Playing with Formula in the Sound Serial (New Brunswick,
NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2016), p. 183.
2 Quoted by Andrew Lang in ‘Editor’s Introduction to The Antiquary’, Walter Scott, The Antiquary
(London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd, 1901), pp. xx–xxi. Scott adds, ‘[i]t contains most of the pieces that
were popular about thirty years since, and, I dare say, many that could not now be procured for any
price (MS note written by Scott,1810)’. It is, therefore, the ballads and broadsides of the 1780s and
1790s that underpin The Antiquary.
3 Sir Walter Scott, The Antiquary, ed. Nicola J. Watson, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2002), p. 37. All subsequent references are to this edition and appear in parentheses
in the text.
4 Quoted by Lang in ‘Editor’s Introduction to The Antiquary’, p. xx.
5 Letter from Mr. Irving in J. G. Lockhart, Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart, 7 vols
(Edinburgh: Robert Cadell, 1837–8; repr. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2012), vol. 1, p. 122.
John Irving was Scott’s childhood friend. He describes ‘the collection of ballads in six little volumes,
which, from the handwriting, had been begun at this early period, and which is still preserved at
Abbotsford’, and he says that the Chapbooks collection was started at ‘at least as early a date’..
© Clare Pettitt.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198830429.001.0001
70 Serial Forms
mounted guard on a little print of Prince Charlie; and Broughton’s Saucer was
hooked up against the wall below it.6
From his childhood, Scott physically immersed himself in popular oral, material,
and print culture: his first major publication in 1802 was the two-volume anti-
quarian collection of the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border.7 The historicism of
Scott’s fiction has generally been read as deriving from the uneven development
theory of the Scottish Enlightenment.8 But I suggest that there is a different way
of reading anachronism in Scott’s work.9 Much of the canonizing literary criti-
cism of the later nineteenth century and beyond has occluded the fact that at the
start of his writing career Scott was working self-consciously in a genre of ‘print
culture’ rather than in a novelistic one. In trying to claim Scott as the progenitor
of a new ‘manly’ novel, the ‘rise-of-the-novel’ story has obscured the ways in
which Scott derived his narrative models from the miscellany, the broadside, and
the almanac.10 I suggest instead that we should take him at his word when he
6 Lockhart, Life of Scott, vol. 1, p. 178 (emphasis original). The description was given to Lockhart
by ‘a lady of Scott’s family’.
7 Scott’s very first publications were translations of Goethe. In October 1797 Scott had sent a copy
of ‘The Erl-King’, his translation of Goethe’s Der Erlkönig, to his aunt Christian Rutherford (Letters,
1.76–7), and on 1 March 1798 it was published in a revised form in the Kelso Mail. Scott then pub-
lished the first English translation of Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen on 14 March 1799 (the translator
was given as ‘William Scott’ on the title page). Three poems (‘The Fire-King’, ‘Glenfinlas’, and
‘Frederick and Alice’) were published by Matthew ‘Monk’ Lewis in the two-volume Tales of Wonder in
November 1800. John Tosh says Scott was ‘the most influential Romantic literary figure’ and argues
that his work launched historicism more fully than that of von Ranke or Winckelman: John Tosh, The
Pursuit of History: Aims, Methods, and New Directions in the Study of History (New York: Routledge,
2015), pp. 6–7, p. 6.
8 James Chandler says that in Scott’s Waverley novels ‘one can see how the dialectics of uneven
development and the dated grid of homogeneous empty time may be said to go hand in hand’ and that
‘the logic of uneven development had indeed structured Scott’s fiction from his first great experiment’:
Chandler, England in 1819, pp. 131, 131–2. Ian Duncan agrees that ‘[t]his “ultimate condition” of dis-
tinct, antagonistic, overlapping cultural stages (Jameson’s “sedimentation”) is the central topic of
Scott’s historical romance. It is at once the version of history Scott (like Marx) developed from the
philosophical historians of the Scottish Enlightenment, and the condition of Romance as modernity’s
vision of the worlds it has superseded, charged with a magic of estrangement, peril and loss: a cultural
uncanny.’ Ian Duncan, Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel: The Gothic, Scott, Dickens
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 9. See also Paul Hamilton, Metaromanticism:
Aesthetics, Literature, Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
9 See Susan Manning, ‘Antiquarianism, the Scottish Science of Man, and the Emergence of
Modern Disciplinarity’, in Leith Davis, Ian Duncan, and Janet Sorensen (eds), Scotland and the Borders
of Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 57–76. See also Rosemary Sweet,
Antiquaries: The Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London: Hambledon & London,
2004).
10 Ina Ferris has made a similar argument about ‘Scott’s antiquarian-commercial model of author-
ship’, although she is less interested in the more ephemeral forms of print culture, saying that ‘[t]he
role of the “Author of Waverley” thrust Scott on to the international stage, but that role was forged out
of a rich complex of literary-historical practices as editor, collector, imitator, and periodical essayist in
a range of intermediary genres’: Ina Ferris, ‘Scott’s Authorship and Book Culture’, in Fiona Robertson
(ed.), The Edinburgh Companion to Walter Scott (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012),
pp. 9–21, p. 10. For the classic critical literature on Scott as the father of the realist novel, see David
Daiches, Literary Essays (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1956) and David Daiches, ‘Sir Walter Scott and
History’, Etudes Anglaises 24 (1971): 458–77; Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and
Scott Unbound 71
says, in the ‘Advertisement’ which prefaces The Antiquary (1816), that he has
‘been more solicitous to describe manners minutely than to arrange in any case
an artificial and combined narrative, and have but to regret that I felt myself
unable to unite these two requisites of a good Novel’.11 He is not saying here that
he regrets that his novel is not a good one; he is rather saying that it is not a novel.
This chapter unbinds the Waverley ‘series’ to show that Scott’s own interest in
mediating the past through material and popular culture meant that his work was
permeable to that culture in ways which challenge the traditional literary ‘rise of
the novel’ narrative. Thinking about an unbound Scott will also help us to under-
stand some of the reasons why his work is both considered so important and why
it is now so little read.
By unbinding Scott’s work, we can better understand the mechanisms of its
popularity in the early nineteenth century and we can challenge orthodox read-
ings of Scott as a realist novelist or of Scott as a historical novelist. I am suggesting
that it is more useful to abandon the idea of the novel in reassessing the influence
of Scott’s narratives and to look at them carefully instead as print objects. This,
I think, will help us to understand better the ways in which they construct their
own reception, as it is surely Scott’s reception which is critical to understanding
Scott. I propose a model of participative reading which created and maintained
the Scott-world right through the nineteenth century.12 Such a model of reading
was made possible by an emerging news and periodical culture which was creat-
ing new meanings for seriality in this period. Scott is exceptional because both
the subject and the improvisatory method of his work syncopates so well with the
rhythm of seriality and with the emergent historicism of a news culture. For these
reasons, the phenomenon of ‘Scott’ can help to clarify the model of the serial
emerging in the early nineteenth century, rather than the other way around.
Using Umberto Eco’s structuralist theory of the ‘open serial’ and its subsequent
development by the post-structuralist Gilles Deleuze into the ‘infinite and inor-
ganic serial’, I conclude the chapter by suggesting that the enormous popularity of
Scott’s work becomes far more understandable if we understand his use of serial
narrative as a ‘generative mechanism’.13
Stanley Mitchell (London: Merlin Press, 1962); and F. R. Hart, Scott’s Novels: The Plotting of Historic
Survival (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1966).
11 ‘Advertisement’, Sir Walter Scott, The Antiquary, p. 3.

12 Something of this model of serial-reading was proposed long ago by Kathleen Tillotson, who
noticed that ‘[s]erial publication gave back to story-telling its original context of performance, the
context that Chaucer, for example, knew and exploited . . . The creative artist, as R.G. Collingwood has
said, requires an audience whose function is not merely receptive, but collaborative, even “concrea-
tive”. “It is a weakness of printed literature that this reciprocity between writer and reader is difficult to
maintain.” ’: Kathleen Tillotson, Novels of the Eighteen-Forties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954),
p. 36. Tillotson is here quoting R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1938), pp. 323–4.
13 Eco, ‘Series and Structure’, in The Open Work, pp. 217–35, p. 228.
72 Serial Forms
Ballads, Broadsides, and Miscellanies
In a characteristically disguised piece of self-criticism in which he reports an

interview with himself, Scott explicitly likens himself to a raree showman pulling
a string to exhibit a series of pictures in a street peepshow, rather than as the
respectable author of strictly bound and disciplined volumes:
Our author has told us it was his object to present a succession of scenes and
characters connected with Scotland in its past and present state, and we must
own that his stories are so lightly constructed as to remind us of the showman’s
thread, with which he draws up his pictures and presents them successively to
the eye of the spectator.14
The reference is to the device which in England was called a peep show, some-
times called a raree show, or mondo nuovo, as many of the itinerant showmen
who displayed it at fairs and on the streets were Italians.15 After 1815, unemployed
soldiers returning from the Napoleonic wars also took up this street trade. [See
Fig. 2.1.] Punters paid to peep through a hole in a wooden box to see ‘glimpses of
distant, long-vanished or legendary landscapes’ as a miniature perspective view
inside.16 Unbinding Scott helps us to understand him as a literary author, col-
lector, an antiquarian, and a modernist and innovator. It also reveals the unbound
seriality of his work, with its ‘succession of scenes’ and ‘pictures’ and its extraor-
dinary, even obsessive, emphasis on mediation. Print is always on the move in
Scott’s narratives, which makes them feel modern, dynamic and fresh, but the
stories themselves are collated from old print and old ‘types’. Thinking about an
unbound Scott can force us to re-evaluate the much-noted fact that the novels
were so swiftly ‘remediated’ and returned to the popular culture from whence
they came, in the multiple forms of printed handkerchiefs, shows, plays, songs,
prints, cheap periodical adaptations, and chapbooks that were available to the
poor, and the tableaux vivants, fashionable dresses in the écossaise style,
14 [Walter Scott], ‘Tales of my Landlord’, Quarterly Review 16 (January 1817): 430–80, p. 431. The
raree show was a street peep show, and the showman changed the scenes by pulling a string: ‘[t]he old
showman leads you a long dance about the world. At one time you are in England. He pulls a string,
and at once you find yourself . . . quite on the other side of the globe’: [George Mogridge], Sergeant Bell,
and his Raree-Show (London: Thomas Tegg, 1839), p. 419. They ‘were known as Raree Shows because
they showed rare objects or scenes’, and ‘[t]he showman changed scenes by pulling on strings protrud-
ing from the side of the box or by turning a crank’: Ian P. Howard and Brian J. Rogers, Perceiving in
Depth, vol. 1: Basic Mechanisms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 76.
15 Dickens’s Mrs Nickleby remembers encountering ‘an Italian image boy’ in the street: Dickens,
Nicholas Nickleby, p. 353. See Frances Terpak, ‘Perspective Theatres’, in Barbara Maria Stafford,
Frances Terpak, and Isotta Poggi (eds), Devices of Wonder: From the World in the Box to Images on a
Screen (Los Angeles, CA: J. Paul Getty Trust, 2001), pp. 336–43, p. 336. See also Veronica della Dora,
‘Putting the World into a Box: A Geography of Nineteenth-Century “Travelling Landscapes” ’,
Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 89:4 (2007), pp. 287–306.
16 Richard Balzer, Peepshows: A Visual History (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998), p. 290.
Scott Unbound 73
Fig. 2.1. ‘Frontispiece: Woodcut by Thompson’, [George Mogridge], Sergeant Bell,

and his Raree-show (London: Thomas Tegg, 1839) [reproduced by kind permission of
the Syndics of Cambridge University Library Syn.8.83.21]
dioramas, magic-lantern shows, paintings, engravings, periodical articles, and

house decorations, curtains, and parlour-board games that were all on offer to
the middling classes.17 Even before Victoria acceded to the throne, in its 1832
obituary of Scott, Fraser’s Magazine wrote that ‘[t]he painter, the sculptor, the
17 Ann Rigney says, ‘almost all the Waverley novels were put on stage within months of being
published . . . the sheer number of theatrical productions inspired by Scott has been surpassed only by
productions of Shakespeare’. Ann Rigney, The Afterlives of Walter Scott: Memory on the Move (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 60. See also H. Philip Bolton, Scott Dramatized (London: Mansell
Publishing, 1992).
74 Serial Forms
engraver, the musician, have sought inspiration from his pages. The names of his
works, or the personages introduced into them, are impressed on the man-of-war
or the quadrille, the race-horse or the steam-boat.’18 Scott’s numberless ordinary
readers cut poems and illustrations of his stories from the journals and pasted
them into their scrapbooks and albums, and by the 1830s tourism to Scott’s house
at Abbotsford was becoming increasingly common. Ian Duncan has noted that
‘retellings and adaptations proliferated across the genres of print into the theatri-
cal, pictorial, musical, touristic, monumental, ceremonial, and other media and
symbolic practices of nineteenth-century public life’.19 And Ann Rigney has
written a whole book about ‘[t]he history of [Scott’s] afterlife in other media’,
which she says resulted in what she usefully calls his ‘banal canonicity’.20 But
Rigney sees Scott as a ‘bound’ author, arguing that ‘he worked within the confines
of the printed book’.21 Duncan, too, models Scott’s books as self-contained
and closed: ‘all voices—the tumult of dialects and jargons—are contained and
absorbed into the past, as literature, words printed and bound’.22 This chapter asks
instead what Scott understood those ‘confines’ and ‘bounds’ to be and suggests
the danger of retrospectively attributing characteristics to the form of the book
in the early nineteenth century at a moment when readerships were expanding
and the technology of reading and reception were undergoing very significant
changes. Tom Mole suggests that Romantic work in the Victorian period was
‘recirculated . . . often in fragmented and modified forms’, but I argue that Scott’s
work was fragmented from the start.23 Quarantining the ‘book’, and perhaps par-
ticularly the literary ‘novel’, from all the other forms of popular entertainment
that were widening their consumer base dramatically in the thirty years between
1810 and 1840 is the work of hindsight and disciplinary protectionism which
might now need to be undone. While Rigney notes the importance of Scott ‘pre-
senting the Waverley novels as part of a series (itself revolutionary and a foretaste
of much culture to come)’, she does not pursue this thought.24 But, as we shall see,
Scott’s seriality is one of the chief instruments of his unbinding of the book.
Both the seriality of Scott’s fiction and his self-conscious attention to medi-
ation were to have a profound effect on the development of the novel in the later
nineteenth century, but in the 1820s and 1830s his novels are best retroactively
18 [William Maginn], ‘The Death of Walter Scott’, Fraser’s Magazine 6 (1832), p. 380.
19 Ian Duncan, ‘Walter Scott and the Historical Novel’, in Peter Garside and Karen O’Brien (eds),
The Oxford History of the Novel in English, vol. 2: English and British Fiction 1750–1820 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 312–32, p. 313.
20 Rigney, Afterlives, pp. 58, 44. Rigney does usefully complicate the idea of remediation in Scott,
but she remains tied to the idea of a bound Scott.
21 Rigney, Afterlives, p. 55. 22 Duncan, Modern Romance, pp. 94–5.
23 Tom Mole, What the Victorians Made of Romanticism: Material Artifacts, Cultural Practices and
Reception History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), p. 2.
24 Rigney, Afterlives, p. 51. See also Mole, What the Victorians Made of Romanticism. Mole gives no
attention to serialization.
Scott Unbound 75
understood not as novels, but as collections of stuff: analogous to the album, the
miscellany, the show, and to the concrete miscellany he built in material form as
his house at Abbotsford.25 Scott deliberately unbound his relationship with his
novels first by his anonymity (up to 1827) and then by his projection of a prolif-
eration of editors, antiquaries, and frame stories, all of which strategies worked
further to undo narrative cohesion by multiplying sources and complicating
origins.26 In 1823, the twopenny Mirror speculated that ‘[t]he Scottish novels’ are
‘generally attributed to Sir Walter Scott; there are, however, strong reasons for
believing, that though the whole series may have gone through his hands, that he
is not the sole author’.27 In one sense the Mirror was right: Scott was never the sole
author, as he himself always made abundantly clear by his multiple attributions to
sources outside the boundaries of his narrative. In the final chapter of The Fair Maid
of Perth, for example, he notes that ‘[a] varying tradition has assigned more than
one supplement to the history’, and his fiction remains deliberately open and per-
meable to other stories and other endings.28
Scott’s interest in ballad collecting and editing has often been noticed, of
course, but it has been explained as an enthusiasm for ‘an earlier, and outdated,
mode of cultural expression’ which Scott then ‘enfold[s] within a more modern
one, the historical novel, which can describe and historicise the cultural forms
that preceded it’.29 But the ballad form, as we have already seen, was far from
‘outdated’ in the 1820s, and the ‘historical novel’ does not arrive fully formed
ready to absorb it into a tidy progressive history. More subtly, Ina Ferris has iden-
tified the Waverley novels as ‘forms of commentary and compilation’ which ‘grow
out of and, in the late prefaces, often dissolve back into the kinds of documents
published by the printing societies [Scott] helped to pioneer’.30 I would go further
25 Robert Crawford has also argued that Scott is ‘an author who delights in the synthetic nature of
his text’ and who ‘wishes its eclecticism to be part of the reading experience’: Robert Crawford,
Devolving English Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992), p. 125. I agree with
Crawford—although I suggest that he grants Scott too much agency in the process, while I prefer to
see Scott’s work as a symptomatic of a complex cultural and political shift. See also Kyoko Takanashi,
‘Circulation, Monuments, and the Politics of Transmission in Sir Walter Scott’s “Tales of My
Landlord” ’, ELH 79:2 (Summer 2012): 289–314.
26 For example, The Author of ‘Waverley’, ‘Jedediah Cleishbotham and Peter Pattieson’, ‘Laurence
Templeton’, ‘Jonas Dryasdust’, ‘Captain Clutterbuck’, and others. In 1827, Scott stood up at the Annual
Theatrical Edinburgh Fund Dinner and announced that ‘he was the total and undivided author’ of ‘the
whole of the series of the Waverley Novels’: ‘Sir Walter Scott, The Avowed Author of the Waverley
Novels’, Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction 9:242 (3 March 1827): 154–5, p. 155.
27 [Anon.], ‘The Novelist: No. XII. Peveril of the Peak’, Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and
Instruction 1:14 (1 February 1823): 216–19, p. 216.
28 Quoted in Ina Ferris, ‘The Historical Novel and the Problem of Beginning: The Model of Scott’,
Journal of Narrative Technique 18:1 (1 January 1988): 73–82, p. 78.
29 Kenneth McNeil, ‘Ballads and Borders’, in Fiona Robertson (ed.), Edinburgh Companion to
Sir Walter Scott (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), pp. 22–34, p. 23.
30 Ina Ferris, ‘Printing the Past: Walter Scott’s Bannatyne Club and the Antiquarian Document’,
Romanticism 11:2 (2005): 143–60, p. 157. Joep Leerssen stresses Scott’s key role as mediator between
history and literature in Joep Leerssen, ‘Literary Historicism: Romanticism, Philologists, and the
Presence of the Past’, MLQ 62 (2004): 221–43.
76 Serial Forms
and argue that all of Scott’s fiction is fundamentally porous and ephemeral,
patched together not out of, but into, what Walter Bagehot recognized as a
‘motley assemblage’ of ‘old family histories, odd memoirs, old law-trials’.31 Scott’s
fiction cannot ‘dissolve back’ into documents because it has never fully transmog-
rified into anything else, and this generic indigestion is what provoked Hazlitt to
complain that ‘[Scott] encouraged the lowest panders of a venal press; deluging,
nauseating the public mind with the offal and garbage of Billingsgate abuse and
vulgar slang’.32 For Hazlitt, Scott’s attachment to the straggling papers of ephem-
eral popular culture, both past and present, renders his genius ‘degraded’.33 He
read Scott’s fiction as a lumber room of trophies: ‘[h]e has ransacked old chronicles,
and poured the contents upon his page; he has squeezed out musty records; he
has consulted wayfaring pilgrims, bed-rid sibyls; he has invoked the spirits of the
air; he has conversed with the living and the dead, and let them tell their story
their own way’. Ransacked, poured, squeezed, and extorted from the sick and
dying: Scott’s literary labours are cast as peculiarly physical, violent, and material.
Hazlitt continues, ‘[h]e has taken his materials from the original, authentic
sources, in large concrete masses’.34 Hazlitt’s view of the edgelessness of Scott’s
writing, into which ‘large concrete masses’ are imported wholesale and dumped
into his tales, was echoed by the author himself: ‘[i]t is from the great book of
Nature, the same through a thousand editions, whether of black letter or wire-
wove and hot-pressed, that I have venturously essayed to read a chapter to the
public’, he claimed.35 By claiming his source to be ‘the great book of Nature’, a
book that remains ‘the same through a thousand editions’, Scott lends a universal-
ity to his works which neatly sidesteps their historicism.
Ransacking is unfair as an account of Scott’s method, but only just. He cer-
tainly took his stuff, including songs and ballads, from wherever he could find it.
Transcribing and translating some old French songs, he writes that ‘[t]here is
another verse of this last song, but so much defaced by stains, and disfigured by
indifferent orthography, as to be unintelligible’. The manuscript ‘bear[s] stains of
clay and blood’ because it was found on the battlefield of Waterloo and was given
to Scott as a ‘relique’ of that battle. In August 1815, only two months after this
final decisive battle of the Napoleonic Wars, Scott travelled to Belgium to visit the
31 Ferris, ‘The Historical Novel’, p. 78. Ferris argues that ‘[t]he historical novel supplements official
history and in so doing generates a surplus, and this sense of surplus and supplement is crucial to
Scott’s achievement in reinvesting the past with something of the untidy, excessive and motley details
which history has to suppress or absorb in its ordering of events into meaningful pattern’.
32 William Hazlitt, The Spirit of the Age; or, Contemporary Portraits (London: Henry Colburn,
1825), p. 144 (emphasis original).
33 Hazlitt, Spirit of the Age, p. 145. 34 Hazlitt, Spirit of the Age, p. 133.
35 Walter Scott, Waverley, p. 5. ‘Wire-wove’ is high-grade glazed paper produced in a wire
gauze frame; and ‘hot-pressed’ refers to the production of another fine paper, often used by
water-colourists.
Scott Unbound 77
battlefield.36 What he found there was a tip, a field full of rubbish with litter blow-
ing around: ‘[b]ones of horses, quantities of old hats, rags of clothes, scraps of
leather, and fragments of books and papers strewed the ground in great
profusion’.37 Much of the detritus was paper, including ‘military livrets, or
memorandum-books of the French soldiers’ and ‘fragments of German prayer-
books’ used as ‘cartridge paper’, and ‘[l]etters, and other papers, memorandums of
business, or pledges of friendship and affection, lay scattered about on the field—
few of them were now legible. Quack advertisements were also to be found where
English soldiers had fallen.’38 A friend found a battered copy of the Scottish play
The Gentle Shepherd by Allan Ramsay. Scott’s instinct was to gather as much as he
could, and ‘the zeal with which we picked up every trifle we could find upon the
field’ caused some offence to their guide, who had fought in the battle. Scott
brushed this off, and continued to accumulate his ‘humble harvest of peach-
stones, filberds, and trinkets’.39 He also bargained with local people to buy relics
of the battle: ‘[c]rosses of the Legion of Honour were in great request’, he reports.
‘I bought one of the ordinary sort for forty francs’, and he also ‘bought the cuirass
of a common soldier for about six francs’. But in Brussels, he paid ‘four times the
sum’ for ‘a very handsome inlaid one, once the property of a French officer of
distinction’.40 His trip to Waterloo seems to have been uncomfortably balanced
between relic-collecting and tomb-raiding. And he sought out even more costly
trophies too: ‘the pen-case and portfolio of Napoleon and the pistol taken from
the Emperor’s carriage at Waterloo’, for example, which ‘came to be ranked among
his most prized possessions’.41 The carriage itself was to become one of the most
successful exhibits in the eclectic exhibitionary space of the Egyptian Hall in
London, before Mme Tussaud bought it for her wax museum.42
36 When he returned to England, Scott met Byron for the last time in London on 14 September
1815. Byron was yet to visit the battlefield and to write about it in the third canto of Childe Harold’s
Pilgrimage.
37 [Walter Scott], Paul’s Letters to his Kinsfolk (Edinburgh: James Ballantyne & Co., 1816),
pp. 198–9.
38 [Scott], Paul’s Letters, pp. 199, 200.
39 Scott justified his memento-hunting in Paul’s Letters: “I was obliged to remind him that as he
had himself gathered laurels on the same spot, he should have sympathy, or patience at least, with our
more humble harvest of peach-stones, filberds, and trinkets.” ’: p. 209. Stuart Semmel calls this ‘an
unconvincing metaphorical parallel’: Stuart Semmel, ‘Reading the Tangible Past: British Tourism,
Collecting, and Memory after Waterloo’, Representations 69 (Winter 2000), 9–37, p. 21; quoted in
Graham Tulloch, ‘Walter Scott and Waterloo’, Romanticism 24:3 (2018): 266–77, p. 274. Luckily for
Scott and his friends, their behaviour was eclipsed by ‘a more wholesale amateur’ who ‘purchased the
door [of the house at La Belle Alliance] for two gold Napoleons’. Scott speculates about ‘cutting it up
into trinkets, like Shakspeare’s mulberry-tree’: Paul’s Letters, p. 209.
40 [Scott], Paul’s Letters, p. 208.
41 ‘The Relics of Walter Scott’, The Observer (17 December 1893), p. 6.
42 Jonathan Crary points out that wax museums often used the ‘real’ alongside their wax figures.
Jonathan Crary, ‘Géricault, the Panorama, and Sites of Reality in the Early Nineteenth Century’, Grey
Room 9 (Autumn 2002): 5–25, p. 12.
78 Serial Forms
Scott’s enthusiasm for set design and scene-making started early. He remembered
being very bored when convalescing from an illness as a child:
I fell upon the resource of illustrating the battles I read of by the childish expedi-
ent of arranging shells, and seeds, and pebbles, so as to represent encountering
armies. Diminutive cross-bows were contrived to mimic artillery, and with the
assistance of a friendly carpenter, I contrived to model a fortress, which, like that
of Uncle Toby, represented whatever place happened to be uppermost in my
imagination.43
Scott’s easy projection of ‘whatever place happened to be uppermost in my imagi-

nation’ onto his general scenographic background illuminates his own avowed
‘desire of producing effect’, in his fiction, ‘by keeping both the actors and action
continually before the reader, and placing him, in some measure, in the situation
of the audience at a theatre’.44 Reading Scott can be understood as being invited
to join a game or to watch a show. Having modelled a miniature wooden fortress,
he graduated to modelling a full-sized castle at Abbotsford. Within Abbotsford,
he created a series of scenes, including miniature copies of other buildings: the
Armoury, for example, was ‘the miniature of the corresponding apartment in the
Tower of London’.45 Many critics have noted the analogy between the construc-
tion of Abbotsford and of the novels. In Ivanhoe’s ‘Dedicatory Epistle’, Scott
described how he ‘forms for himself a minstrel coronet, partly out of the pearls of
pure antiquity, and partly from the Bristol stone and paste, with which I have
endeavoured to imitate them’.46 The novels are patched together from authentic
historical sources and imitations and fillers, the literary equivalent of the ‘moss
put between the junctions of the stones and the lime’ at Abbotsford, which was
‘carefully blackened [so that] it will not have a modern appearance in the least’.47
The Mirror reported that ‘[t]he walls are interspersed with statues and stones
from numerous ancient castles, abbeys, and mansions, containing odd inscrip-
tions, armorial bearings, and figures’ which are ‘placed here and there without
43 ‘Memoir of the Early Life of Sir Walter Scott, Written by Himself. ASHESTIEL, April 26, 1808’, in
Lockhart, Life of Scott, vol. 1, pp. 47–8. Uncle Toby is of course Sterne’s creation in Tristram Shandy.
Scott loved Sterne for his digressiveness.
44 [Walter Scott], ‘Tales of my Landlord’, p. 431.
45 ‘Recent Visit to Abbotsford’, Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction 37:1046
(13 February 1841): 105–7, p. 106.
46 Walter Scott, Ivanhoe, ed. Graham Tulloch (New York: Penguin, 2000), p. 12.
47 Walter Scott, The Letters of Sir Walter Scott, ed. H. J. C. Grierson (London, 1932–7), vol. 3, p. 174.
Quoted in Shawn Malley, ‘Walter Scott’s Romantic Archaeology: New/Old Abbotsford and The
Antiquary’, Studies in Romanticism 40:2 (Summer 2001): 233–51, p. 241. Scott also describes his ‘new
old’ gothic well, which was constructed using stones from the ruins of Melrose Abbey: Scott, Letters,
vol. 4, p. 223.
Scott Unbound 79
regard to order or any conceivable design’.48 Towards the end of the nineteenth
century, the Observer described Abbotsford thus:
It was his own personal and peculiar creation. He built the mansion, he invented
the name, he planted the demesne. It was his own as much as Ivanhoe and
Marmion, and though a thing of shreds and patches, it is a remarkable monu-
ment of his romantic tastes and fancies, and of his enthusiastic, if inexact,
antiquarianism.49
Moving into Abbotsford in 1812, Scott remembered that ‘we had twenty-four
cart-loads of the veriest trash in nature’.50 This miscellaneous trash included ‘the
fragment of Queen Mary’s bed at Jedburgh, the piece of oatcake found in the
pocket of a dead Highlander at Culloden, the Quaigh of Bonnie Prince Charlie,
Flora MacDonald’s pocket-book, [and] the sporran of Rob Roy’.51 The Mirror’s
visitor to Abbotsford ends up standing in the grounds of the house in the gloam-
ing, ‘tracing with my mind’s eye the long cavalcade of romance, poetry and chiv-
alry, which had proceeded from this spot on its march over the world’, and the
article is appropriately immediately followed by a piece on Burford’s Panorama
[Fig. 2.2].52
Serializing the Miscellany
The panorama was not the visual technology that Abbotsford most resembled
according to the correspondent in the Mirror, however. For him, the house
recalled an older visual technology, that of the ‘cabinet of historical curiosities’.53
Since the seventeenth century, antiquaries, with their fixation on messy and dis-
orderly objects, had been much satirized for resisting Enlightenment grand his-
torical narratives. The antiquarians were mocked as ‘naive nominalists’ who were
distracted by the quiddity and the multiplicity of the things they collected and
were unable to arrange them into a properly disciplined chrono-scalar order.54
48 ‘Recent Visit to Abbotsford’, pp. 105–6. An accompanying note reads: ‘We quote this highly
graphic “Visit” from a recent number of the Salopian Journal . . .With the majority of the descriptive
details the reader may already be familiar; but it will, doubtless, be interesting to know the present
actual condition of this baronial home of greatness’: p. 105.
49 ‘The Relics of Walter Scott’, p. 6. 50 Letters of Sir Walter Scott, vol. 3, p. 128.
51 ‘The Relics of Walter Scott’, p. 6. A quaigh is a traditional, shallow, two-handled Scottish cup
symbolizing friendship. See also Ann Rigney, ‘Abbotsford: Dislocation and Cultural Remembrances’,
in Harald Hendrix (ed.), Writers’ Homes and the Making of Memory (New York: Routledge, 2007),
pp. 75–91.
52 ‘Recent Visit to Abbotsford’, p. 107.
53 ‘Recent Visit to Abbotsford’, p. 106, referring specifically to the Great Hall.
54 Susan Manning has described ‘the refractory relationship between antiquarian evidence and
“philosophical” narrative in Scottish Enlightenment Historiography’: Manning, ‘Antiquarianism’, p. 58.
80 Serial Forms
Fig. 2.2. T. H. Shepherd, ‘Cranbourne Street, Entrance to Burford’s Panorama’ (1858)

[© Victoria and Albert Museum, London]
The cabinet of curiosity was the analogue of the miscellany or the album, dis-
playing fragments rescued from the ruined past, refusing a progressive or stadial
model of development. The cabinet of curiosities privileged complex taxonomies
over joined-up narrative. Worse, it encouraged a fetishization of objects, an
unhealthy perversion of ‘sympathy’ which led to sentimental, unscientific, and
excessively emotional responses to relics and landmarks, or half-eaten
Scott Unbound 81
oatcakes.55 In the third and final part of the first Waverley series, The Antiquary
(1816), which was his favourite of all his books, Scott negotiates this divide
between antiquarian classification and historicism with ready humour.56 But
more seriously for the history of the novel, albeit possibly accidentally, his writing
hit the rhythm of an accelerating media culture that was in the process of shifting
its focus from topicality to news and was speeding up its serial rhythms. By his
improvisatory serial method, Scott found that he was able to square the circle and
serialize the miscellany. He put the cabinet of curiosities into motion, allowing
the fixed pleasures of the topical and taxonomic to punctuate the ongoing flow of
narrative in ways which were peculiarly well adapted to stop-start periodical
rhythms.57 Hazlitt spotted this very early on, remarking that ‘[t]he execution [of
Scott’s fiction] . . . is much upon a par with the more ephemeral effusions of the
press’.58 The story stops and starts, and the reader is both in and out: immersed in
the forward push of plot, pulled back by description, footnote, and fussy textual
apparatus. It was the complex affordances of the serial form, which is both
ephemeral and cumulative, and which can look backwards and move forwards
at the same time, that made Scott into the unbounded phenomenon known
as ‘Scott’.
Scott’s impressive improvisatory skills served him well in what he called his
‘hab nab at a venture style of composition’.59 His childhood friend John Irving
remembered that when they were young boys, Scott had suggested that they
‘recite to each other alternately such adventures of knight-errants as we could
ourselves contrive . . .The stories we told were . . . interminable—for we were
unwilling to have any of our favourite knights killed’.60 The first rule was to keep
the game going, and Scott won every time because ‘[h]e found no difficulty in it,
and used to recite for half an hour or more at a time’.61 Scott’s antiquarian interest
in ‘fugitive literature’ which was, as he recognized, ‘seldom regarded as the titles
of a permanent reputation’, left him oddly untroubled by the formal exigencies of
the bound volume.62 ‘I have generally written to the middle of one of these novels
55 Manning, ‘Antiquarianism’, pp. 63–4.

56 Lockhart reports that The Antiquary was Scott’s ‘chief favourite among all his novels’: Lockhart,
Life of Scott, vol. 4, p. 12.
57 Susan Manning points out that Scott did also write stadial history. Thomas Percy constructed a
stadial history in the Reliques of Ancient Poetry, and Scott did the same in the two new essays he
appended to the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border in the collected Poetical Works of 1830. James Chandler
suggests the first use of ‘series’ format for fiction is Scott’s three series of ‘Tales of My Landlord’, and in
the Waverley Series as a whole: Chandler, England in 1819, p. 225. Maria Edgeworth was an important
innovator in serial form too, producing the first series of modern novels in her Tales of Fashionable Life,
which were published in two separate series (in 1809 and 1812). Scott admired her work.
58 Hazlitt, Spirit of the Age, pp. 127–8.
59 Walter Scott’s Journal, 24 February 1828, quoted by Andrew Lang in ‘Editor’s Introduction to
The Antiquary’, p. xix (italics original).
60 Letter from Mr Irving, quoted in Lockhart, Life of Scott, vol. 1, p. 121. 61 Ibid., p. 121.
62 [Walter Scott and Francis Jeffrey], ‘Tales of my Landlord’, Edinburgh Review 28 (March 1817):
193–259, p. 193. The review concludes that ‘the great objection to [these tales], indeed, is that they are
too entertaining’: p. 193.
82 Serial Forms
without having the least idea how it was to end’, he confessed, and the stories did
not really end but were merely absorbed into the larger series.63 His account of
the slapdash genesis of Waverley supports this: ‘about the year 1805, I threw
together about one-third part of the first volume’, he recalled, before chucking it
into a trunk and forgetting all about it for a few years. About the composition of
Rob Roy (1817) he wrote, ‘I had too much flax on my distaff; and as it did not
consist with my patience or my plan to make a fourth volume, I was obliged at last
to draw a rough, coarse, and hasty thread. But the book is well liked here, and has
reeled off in great style.’64 He wrote freely and at speed, ‘reeling off ’, as he puts it.
At the end of December 1815, he told Ballantyne that he was writing The
Antiquary ‘as fast as I can scrawl’, and Thomas Talfourd felt that the rapidity with
which Scott wrote in the 1820s provoked ‘mingled admiration and regret in all
who take a deep interest in his lasting fame’.65 Hazlitt, too, was astonished by
Scott’s speed: ‘[h]e writes as fast as they can read’, he said, and it was true. When
the first Waverley series was coming out, ‘circulating libraries [were] splitting vol-
umes in half, to make six volumes per title instead of three’, to try and meet their
borrowers’ demand.66 The Quarterly Review surrendered all criticism before
‘works, which are bought, and borrowed, and stolen, and begged for, a hundred
times more than our dry and perishable pages’.67 The Scottish novels were news,
and like newspapers, people were keen to get hold of them as fast and as fresh as
possible.
Scrapbooks and Albums
The early nineteenth century antiquarian scholar, book collector, and British
Museum curator Francis Douce thought nothing of disassembling rare old books,
63 Walter Scott’s Journal, 24 February 1828, quoted by Lang in ‘Editor’s Introduction to The
Antiquary’, p. xix.
64 Walter Scott to J. B. S. Morritt (14 January 1818), quoted in Lockhart, Life of Scott, vol. 4, p. 114.
Scott recalls how this bit of his manuscript was put away in a trunk in a lumber room when he moved
to Abbotsford, until ‘I happened to want some fishing-tackle’ and ‘in looking for lines and flies, the
long-lost manuscript presented itself ’. The manuscript seems to have emerged back into text from
object status. Walter Scott, ‘General Preface, 1829’, Waverley, pp. 349–61, p. 354.
65 Walter Scott to James Ballantyne (29 December 1815), quoted in Lockhart, Life of Scott, vol. 3,
p. 404; [Thomas Talfourd], ‘The Fortunes of Nigel’, New Monthly Magazine (January 1822): 77–81,
p. 77. Talfourd worried that ‘the popularity of the “Author of Waverley” is a sign of the times; and that
the interest which the present generation takes in works of pure description, in pages disclosing a
series of pictures divested of moral interest,—and delineating characters politically profligate, or pri-
vately depraved, is an unequivocal mark of a culpable indifference to right and wrong’: [Thomas
Talfourd], ‘Redgauntlet’, New Monthly Magazine (January 1824): 93–6, p. 93.
66 [James Thin], Reminiscences of Booksellers and bookselling in Edinburgh in the Time of William
IV, An Address to a Meeting of Booksellers’ Assistants (privately printed, Edinburgh, 1905), quoted in
St Clair, Reading Nation, p. 245.
67 ‘Nassau Senior Surveys the Novels, Quarterly Review 1821’, reprinted in Walter Scott: The Critical
Heritage, ed. John O. Hayden (London: Routledge, 1970), pp. 215–55, p. 215.
Scott Unbound 83
cutting out individual illuminations from medieval manuscripts, or rare prints

from printed books, and pasting them into albums, and Ferris has pointed to the
‘disaggregation of the past’ practised by antiquarians in the name of preservation.68
Scott’s antiquarian practice seems to have been considered particularly vague and
unreliable by his associates. George Chalmers remarked spitefully, for example,
that ‘[h]is notes are loose and unlearned, as they generally are’.69 But Scott’s loose-
ness was an asset when it came to combining found pieces and scraps into fic-
tion.70 Unabashedly glued together with ‘Bristol . . . paste’, the threshold between
the authentic and the imitation, the original and the copy, was entirely and self-
consciously porous in Scott’s work. Ian Duncan suggests that Scott’s ‘troubling’
achievement is to show that ‘the powerful pleasures and important truths offered
by fiction are precisely those of its inauthenticity’.71 This may be true, but it is cru-
cially far from unique to Scott’s fiction, and it was as much enabled by a proliferat-
ing popular visual and entertainment culture as by the ‘achievement’ of Scott as a
writer. Scott’s real achievement was in riding the wave of a newly self-conscious
popular appreciation and enjoyment of technologies of mediation (the show, the
miscellany, the scrapbook, and so on) and an expanding news culture which, as
we saw in Chapter 1, was encouraging readers to expect regular instalments of
updated information. Umberto Eco theorized art as ‘opera aperta’ or ‘open work’:
‘an open product on account of its susceptibility to countless different interpretations
which do not impinge on its unadulterable specificity’.72 Scott’s fictional world was
open and sociable in this way. It was as much the creation of the readers who
inhabited it as of the words on the page. It depended on the modes and media of
its reception (or we might even say of its consumption), which was critical to its
continued traction as it travelled in multiple forms across classes and nations.
I have argued elsewhere for the importance of the scrapbook and the album in
understanding nineteenth-century print culture.73 Albums made in the early dec-
68 ‘The importance of [Joseph] Strutt’s publications from a more literary-theoretical point of view
is that they throw into relief the degree to which this mode of the antiquarian transmission of the
past depended less on preserving its remains than on turning the past itself into pieces: a deliberate,
even aggressive, disaggregation of the past.’ Ina Ferris, ‘Unhinging the Past: Joseph Strutt and the
Antiquarian Poetics of the Piece’, in Noah Heringman and Crystal B. Lake (eds), Romantic
Antiquarianism, special issue of Romantic Circles Praxis (June 2014), https://romantic-circles.org/
praxis/antiquarianism/praxis.antiquarianism.2014.ferris.html.
69 George Chalmers, in Constable’s ‘Life and Correspondence’ (i. 431), quoted in Andrew Lang,
‘Editor’s Introduction to The Antiquary’, p. xxi.
70 See Fiona Robertson, ‘Fictions of Authenticity: The Frame Narratives and Notes of the Waverley
Novels’, in Legitimate Histories: Scott, Gothic, and the Authorities of Fiction (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1994), pp. 117–60. Robertson argues that Scott’s editorial apparatus is deployed to destabilize the sta-
dial historicism it ostensibly serves. And she also suggests ‘the expansionist potential of namelessness’:
p. 124.
71 Duncan, Modern Romance, p. 62.
72 Eco, ‘The Poetics of the Open Work’, in The Open Work, pp. 1–23, p. 4.
73 Clare Pettitt, ‘Topos, Taxonomy and Travel in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Scrapbooks’, in
Brian H. Murray and Mary Henes (eds), Travel Writing, Visual Culture, and Form, 1760–1900
(London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 21–41.
84 Serial Forms
ades of the nineteenth century are particularly fascinated by the new affordances
and possibilities of print media and they participate actively in those media. ‘The
Magician of the North’; ‘The Author of Waverley’; or ‘Scott’ was a media phenom-
enon whose outputs were tirelessly cut up and pasted into albums.74 A couple of
examples must stand for this largely uncatalogued and lost deluge of the cut and
the pasted. Into a scrap album made in Cork, Ireland in 1822 [Fig. 2.3] is pasted a
synopsis and extracts of The Battle of Waterloo by Walter Scott, ‘published for the
benefit of the Waterloo Fund’.75
In the same album, a broadside of the ‘Raree Show’ has a crude woodcut of the
showman with his wooden box with its glass peephole, and a rhyme describing
him as an impoverished ex-soldier wounded at Waterloo. Scott’s poem also com-
petes for attention with the ballad ‘Black-Ey’d Susan’; a hand-coloured print of ‘An
Anglo-Saxon Lady of Quality, in the Costume of the Eighth Century’; a black-
and-white fashion print of ‘Ladies in the Dress of 1795’; and a long discussion of
Canto III of Byron’s Childe Harold (which includes his famous description of the
battlefield of Waterloo), reprinted from the Quarterly Review [Figs. 2.4, 2.5].76
E. Madder’s album catches in its net many of the subgenres of the noisy popu-
lar print culture available in the first two decades of the nineteenth century.
Illustrated material is rare in the album, most of which consists of columns of
closely printed text cut out from periodicals, but advertisements, flyers, tickets,
and sales cards are all conserved for their graphic qualities. Under a glued-in pic-
torial advertisement for Royal Exchange Assurance is an advertising bill for two
forges in Dublin headed ‘The Lucky’ [Fig. 2.6] with a large print of a horseshoe
beneath:
’Twas the custom to nail an HORSE SHOE to the door . . .

But now ’tis impressed on Browne’s Ticket or Share,
And safe in your pocket the Horse Shoe you’ll bear;
’Tis not made of cold Iron, good Paper will do . . .
The printed horseshoe is described as a three-dimensional object, a paper thing to

be carried in the pocket to bring just as much good luck as the ‘cold iron’ version,
and the album compiler has preserved this print-object in the album. In our visu-
ally saturated modern world, we are in danger of dismissing such early illustrated
74 Scott published his poetry under his own name, but his novels were published anonymously
until 1827.
75 ‘Olio, or Scrap Book, A Miscellaneous Collection of Biography Literature Anecdotes Poetry Etc.
Embellished with a Great Variety of Engravings Selected and Arranged from Various Publications by
E. Madder’, vol. 1, Cork [1822], p. 14. Cambridge University Library. The poem was written on Scott’s
trip to Belgium in 1815.
76 ‘Black-Ey’d Susan’ was written by John Gay and published in 1719. See Andrew Gustar, ‘The Life
and Times of Black-Ey’d Susan: The Story of an English Ballad’, Folk Music Journal 10:4 (2014):
432–48.
Scott Unbound 85
Fig. 2.3. ‘Title page’, E. Madder, ‘Olio, or, Scrap Book’ (Cork, 1822) [reproduced by kind
permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library Hib.1.822.1–2 (Volume 1)]
86 Serial Forms
Fig. 2.4. ‘Black Eye’d Susan’, E. Madder, ‘Olio, or, Scrap Book’ (Cork, 1822)
Hib.1.822.1–2 (Volume 1)]
Scott Unbound 87
Fig. 2.5. ‘Raree Show’, E. Madder, ‘Olio, or, Scrap Book’ (Cork, 1822) [reproduced by
kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library Hib.1.822.1–2
(Volume 1)]
88 Serial Forms
Fig. 2.6. ‘The Lucky Horseshoe’, E. Madder, ‘Olio, or, Scrap Book’ (Cork, 1822)
Hib.1.822.1–2 (Volume 1)]
Scott Unbound 89
ephemera as insignificant. But ephemera were far from ephemeral in a culture of

paper scarcity and we need to look as closely at such material as its first con-
sumers did. Looking carefully at what surrounds Scott’s poem in this album can
help to recreate the visual and spectacular show culture that spawned his fictional
world. Ballads are still there, but the neighbourhood of the ‘Anglo-Saxon Lady of
Quality, in the Costume of the Eighth Century’ to the ‘Ladies in the Dress of 1795’
points to a newly historicized and date-stamped interest in fashion and dress,
which Timothy Campbell has described as a ‘new visual order instantiated by
print-cultural fashion [which stood] alongside the new problems of historical
representation that it generated’.77 Certainly, the albums register Scott’s fashion-
ability alongside the antiquarian as a new site of consumption, and the two are
clearly linked. The accelerating fashion industry, dependent on an emergent fash-
ion press, is itself a serializing commercial technology, driven by novelty and
ephemerality, much like Scott’s novel technology.78
A second anonymous album was created a decade later, in the mid-1830s, as
the record of a journey through Germany, France and England. Slipped between
its pages are some loose insertions: a pressed fern, and a series of printed views of
Melrose Abbey and Abbotsford [Fig. 2.7].79
The young lady who compiled the album visited Abbotsford in May 1836, four
years after Scott’s death, with her father and she records the ‘great pleasure we
experienced in visiting the highly interesting spot [which] can hardly be
expressed’. She recalls that ‘we . . . felt as if each shrub had some particular story
which had it the gift of speech, it would narrate to the edification of the visitors
and sing the virtues of its late master’. She is particularly delighted to find hanging
‘in a closet . . . the clothes which Sir Walter last wore, a white hat, a green coat, a
pair of checked black and white trousers, a pair of boots, shoes and gaiters’.80
Susan Stewart has classified scrapbooks as ‘souvenirs’ whereas Jessica Dallow has
argued that they must be understood as ‘collections’.81 These albums seem to
77 Campbell, Historical Style, p. 27.

78 William St Clair points out that ‘[f]or a time, Scott and his partners achieved an ownership of
the whole literary production and distribution process from author to reader, controlling or influenc-
ing the initial choice of subjects, the writing of the texts, the editing, the publishing and the printing of
the books, the reviewing in the local literary press, the adaptations for the theatre, and the putting on
of theatrical adaptations at the theatre in Edinburgh which Scott also owned’: St Clair, Reading Nation,
p. 170.
79 ‘A Journey from Stuttgart to Milan and Florence’, an album in the Sir Harry Page Collection of
Scrapbooks and Commonplace Books in the Manchester Metropolitan University Special Collections.
HPC Number 252, Anon., 1833–7. The travellers left London on 29 May 1833 and returned to Britain
from Boulogne to Ramsgate leaving France on Sunday 21 October 1835.
80 These ‘personal relics of the collector’, ‘the old bottle-green coat, and the old fawn-coloured beaver’,
were to become canonical by the end of the century. [Anon.], ‘The Relics of Walter Scott’, p. 6.
81 Susan Stewart aligns scrapbooks with ‘memory quilts, photo albums and baby books’; see Susan
Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Baltimore,
MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), p. 139; and Jessica K. Dallow, ‘Treasures of the Mind:
Individuality and Authenticity in Late Nineteenth-century Scrapbooks’, MA thesis, University of
North Carolina, 1995, quoted in Jennifer A. Jolly, ‘History in the Making: A Columbian Exposition
90 Serial Forms
Fig. 2.7. ‘North Distant View of Abbotsford’, in ‘A Journey from Stuttgart to Milan
and Florence’, Sir Harry Page Collection of Scrapbooks and Commonplace Books,
Manchester Metropolitan University Special Collections, HPC No. 252
share aspects of the souvenir and the collection. Stewart defines collecting as ‘the
reframing of objects within a world of attention and manipulation of context’, and
both the albums and Scott’s novels could be defined as technologies which
Scrapbook’, in Susan Tucker, Katherine Ott, and Patricia P. Buckler (eds), The Scrapbook in American
Life (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2006), pp. 79–96, p. 89.
Scott Unbound 91
Fig. 2.8. ‘Camposanto di Pisa’: loose insert; hand-coloured print in album, E. Madder,
‘Olio, or, Scrap Book’ (Cork, 1822) [reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of
Cambridge University Library Hib.1.822.1–2 (Volume 1)]
engineer a particular quality of attention for their miscellaneous contents, and

this quality of attention becomes a large part of the pleasure of reading them.82
Both the albums spend time with ancient buildings and include illustrations of
them. Slipped into the pages of the Madder album, for example, is a hand-coloured
print of the Camposanta in Pisa [Fig. 2.8]. In the preservation and display of
popular ephemera and images of places and scenes of historic interest, the
album craze of the early nineteenth century democratized an antiquarian enthu-
siasm for amassing pieces of the past, and opened it up to a more general public
participation. The illustrated twopenny journals included popularized antiquar-
ian articles and images for their non-elite readers, such as the article on ‘Relics
of London’ in the Mirror which investigated early-modern inscriptions still
visible on the streets of London, in an issue which also included a picture of
St Peter’s Basilica in Rome.83 Richard Maxwell has shown how important images
were to antiquarian publications in the late eighteenth century, and suggests that
‘[t]hrough the mediation of antiquarianism, with its destabilizing, sometimes
anarchic craving for supplements of all kinds, the idea and practice of pictures in
82 Stewart, On Longing, p. 152.

83 Alexander Andrews, ‘Relics of London’, Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction 2:5
(29 July 1843): 72–3.
92 Serial Forms
books achieved a new kind of power’.84 He points out that Scott’s role in his
Provincial Antiquities of Scotland (1819–26) was to write captions to the plates,
much like Dickens’s initial role in writing to Seymour’s plates in Pickwick Papers,
itself an antiquarian-inspired fiction.85 Maxwell is keen to make Scott the pro-
genitor of a new regime of book illustration in the mid-nineteenth century, but
the early illustrated twopenny magazines that emerged in the 1820s, such as the
Portfolio, the Parterre, the Mirror, and the Olio are also important precursors, and
it is in part their innovations that enable the emerging pictorial-historical worlds
of Scott, Harrison Ainsworth, and the Illustrated London News to make sense.86
Of course, Scott’s writing was ‘illustrated’ first with verbal description and only
subsequently with pictures.87 His descriptive writing was always ‘on the verge’ of
the visual and it offered spectacular tableaux scenes ‘ready-made’ and easily
detachable from the narrative.88 And detached, of course, they often were.89 The
Saturday Magazine, for example, was typical in extracting Scott’s description of
Oldbuck’s study in The Antiquary and publishing it as a stand-alone word-picture,
entitled ‘Visit to the Antiquary’s Study’.90 The dazzling visuality and tactility of
Scott’s description was often criticized; ‘there is too much of excessive minute-
ness, too much of enumeration, of uninteresting and insignificant particulars in
almost all his descriptions of land, water, ships, men, women, dress &c., in short,
84 Richard Maxwell, ‘Walter Scott, Historical Fiction, and the Genesis of the Victorian Illustrated
Book’, in Richard Maxwell (ed.), The Victorian Illustrated Book (Charlottesville, VA: University Press
of Virginia, 2002), pp. 1–51, p. 2.
85 Maxwell points out that in the 1840s Scott and Hugo’s influence is clear in Ainsworth’s Tower of
London illustrated by Cruikshank (1840) and Dickens’s Master Humphrey’s Clock (1840–1), which he
describes as an ‘amalgam of urban fantasia and homages to Scott’, placing George Cattermole’s archi-
tectural fantasies next to Phiz’s illustrations: Maxwell, ‘Walter Scott, Historical Fiction’, p. 43. He
relates this aesthetic to Abbotsford, pp. 44–5.
86 Maxwell argues that the growing power of the ‘illustration’, ‘rather than, say, a ‘cut, a “plate”, an
“embellishment”, or a “decoration” ’, was ‘to endow it with considerable responsibilities—epistemological
as well as aesthetic’: Maxwell, ‘Walter Scott, Historical Fiction’, p. 42.
87 See Catherine Gordon, ‘The Illustration of Sir Walter Scott: Nineteenth-Century Enthusiasm
and Adaptation’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 34 (1971): 297–317, https://www.
jstor.org/stable/751025. Gordon discusses mostly paintings, some of which were then engraved and
widely circulated. The ‘magnum opus’ 48-volume edition after Scott’s bankruptcy (Edinburgh: Robert
Cadell, 1829–33) promised extensive illustration and extras from Scott with two plates in every volume.
Cadell also issued a series of engravings of Abbotsford. The lavish steel-engravings in the Abbotsford
Edition (1842–7) set a new standard for illustrated books. Tom Mole has described the ‘retrofitting’ of
illustrations to Scott’s work: Mole, What the Victorians Made of Romanticism, p. 45.
88 Rigney, Afterlives, p. 55. ‘There is one obvious tableau in Waverley, Waverley’s discovery of Flora
posed in the moonlit glen beside the waterfall’: Meisel, Realizations, p. 57. Maria Edgeworth criticized
the scene as Flora should be ‘far above all stage effect, or novelist’s trick’: Maria Edgeworth to the
Author of ‘Waverley’ (23 October 1814), in The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, ed.
Augustus J. C. Hare, 2 vols (London: Edward Arnold, 1894), vol. 1, pp. 226–31, p. 230.
89 Stephen Arata has argued for the importance of spectacle in Scott’s Kenilworth (1821), particu-
larly in ‘Scott’s rendering of the two elaborate spectacles arranged by Leicester to entertain Elizabeth’.
He suggests that Scott ‘strives to induce the form of historical consciousness associated with pag-
eantry’: Stephen Arata, ‘Scott’s Pageants: The Example of Kenilworth’, Studies in Romanticism 40:1
(Spring 2001): 99–107, pp. 101, 102.
90 Walter Scott, ‘A Visit to the Antiquary’s Study’, Saturday Magazine (29 October 1842):162–3.
Scott Unbound 93
of every material object’.91 But it was precisely this level of almost shopkeeperly
detail which allowed his readers to participate in the assemblage of the scene. In
the Preface to Waverley, Scott claimed to be addressing
those passions common to men in all stages of society, and which have alike
agitated the human heart, whether it throbbed under the steel corslet of the
fifteenth century, the brocaded coat of the eighteenth, or the blue frock and
white dimity waistcoat of the present day. [Footnote: Alas, that attire, respectable
and gentlemanlike in 1805, or thereabouts, is now as antiquated as the Author of
Waverley has himself become since that period! The reader of fashion will please
to fill up the costume with an embroidered waistcoat of purple velvet or silk, and
a coat of whatever colour he pleases.]92
Scott’s fiction knows that it belongs to a print, periodical, and album culture that
is already reimagining antiquarian objects as commodities. He opens up Waverley
like an album for readers to stick in and hand-colour whichever fashion plates
they prefer. The comedy and interactive playfulness of Scott’s writing is often
neglected by critics who ponder long and hard over, for example, ‘the epistemic
relationship of materials to historical story-telling’.93 But Scott himself did not
dally long on such theoretical reflection, and the models of his authorship seem
more vulgar (a word he uses often and with reverence), and more open to the
world, than this.
Mediation and News: The Antiquary
Scott was very clear about the riskiness of transmission in his ‘Introductory
Remarks’ to his Minstrelsy: ‘[a] poem transmitted through a number of reciters,
like a book reprinted in a multitude of editions, incurs the risk of impertinent
interpolations from the conceit of one rehearser, unintelligible blunders from the
stupidity of another, and omissions equally to be regretted, from the want of
memory in a third’.94 In the third part of Waverley’s first series, The Antiquary
91 Review of Walter Scott’s The Pirate in The New York Mirror 8 (12 February 1831), p. 253.
92 Walter Scott, Waverley, or ’Tis Sixty Years Since, ed. Claire Lamont (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1986), p. 390. Ian Duncan claims that Scott describes ‘a past that flows into the present’ which
makes ‘profound, organic inertia of common life that resists the totalizing force of historical change’:
Ian Duncan, Scott’s Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2007), p. 140. I read Scott as less systematic and more miscellaneous and inconsistent in his
treatment of chronology than this suggests.
93 Shawn Malley, ‘Walter Scott’s Romantic Archaeology: New/Old Abbotsford and The Antiquary’,
Studies in Romanticism 40:2 (Summer 2001), pp. 233–51, p. 238.
94 ‘Introductory Remarks on Popular Poetry’, in Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, ed. J. G. Lockhart
(London, 1833), p. 7.
94 Serial Forms
(1816), transmission certainly leads to interpolations, blunders, and omissions.95

The Antiquary was the first novel Scott wrote after Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo,
and the events of the novel are imagined as taking place in the mid-1790s, at the
beginning of the wars against revolutionary France. Scott advertised The
Antiquary as the third of a series, a trilogy of ‘fictitious narratives’ (not ‘novels’,
note) ‘intended to illustrate the manners of Scotland at three different periods’.96
Ian Duncan has noted how this statement ‘encourages readers to align the novels
along the developmental or progressive plot of modern national history, from the
final conflict between old and new regimes in 1745 to the global crisis (the war
with revolutionary France) that gave birth to the present’.97 This is surely true to a
point; but it underplays Scott’s post-justifying retrospective serialization of a
loosely connected output, and it also fails to account for the ways in which Scott
punches holes and sinks depth charges down through the surface of these narra-
tives. At issue here is the status of the contemporaneous ‘present’. Timothy
Campbell is suggestive in thinking about Scott’s work in relation to a wider media
culture, although he oversimplifies ‘news’ in this period as ‘a straightforward
serial form’.98 In Chapter 1, I argued that in these years of heavy news and paper
taxes, during an extended series of foreign wars, the delivery and reception of
news was itself uneven and ‘interruptive of straightforward, temporal
procession’.99 Scott was well aware of this fact, knowing the range of his reader-
ship, or perhaps more properly, his audience (which also included all those who
encountered his work through media other than text), and he was well aware, too,
of the conflicting temporalities caused by the imperfect and delayed mediation of
information. So aware was he of this, in fact, that he made imperfect mediation
the chief subject of his ‘fictitious narratives’, and this works particularly power-
fully as the motor of The Antiquary. Mary Favret has described the invisibility and
distance of the Napoleonic wars from the British Isles as creating ‘a sense of
95 Adelene Buckland argues that antiquarianism allows Scott to tell broken stories: ‘the form of his
novels would always break down, draw attention to itself, getting stuck in the quagmires of intellectual
disquisition in its most extreme form and the clutter of proliferating description’: Adelene Buckland,
Novel Science: Fiction and the Invention of Nineteenth-Century Geology (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2013), p. 53.
96 ‘WAVERLEY embraced the age of our fathers, GUY MANNERING that of our own youth, and
the ANTIQUARY refers to the last ten years of the eighteenth century’: ‘Advertisement’, The Antiquary,
p. 3. Waverley (1814) is set in 1745–6, Guy Mannering (1815) in the 1780s, and The Antiquary (1816)
in 1794.
97 Duncan, ‘Walter Scott and the Historical Novel’, p. 317.
98 Campbell, Historical Style, p. 15. Campbell is citing J. Paul Hunter on the news, which he says
‘ultimately conformed events to the homogeneous empty time that was the stuff of one kind of histor-
ical modernity’: p. 15. Campbell also sets up a questionable contrast between news and print-fashion
culture.
99 Campbell, Historical Style, p. 15. See also Timothy Campbell, ‘Pennant’s Guillotine and Scott’s
Antiquary: The Romantic End of the Present’, in Noah Heringman and Crystal B. Lake (eds), Romantic
Antiquarianism, special issue of Romantic Circles Praxis (June 2014), https://romantic-circles.org/
praxis/antiquarianism/praxis.antiquarianism.2014.campbell.html.
Scott Unbound 95
historical eventfulness that falls away into eventlessness’.100 This could work well
as a description of the The Antiquary, a curiously busy book about non-events,
which perhaps draws its anxious energy from those distant wars, and its comedy
from the relief consequent upon those wars having just ended.
Oldbuck, the antiquarian of Scott’s title, is descended, or so he believes, from
the ‘industrious typographer, Wolfbrand Oldenbuck (66) of the fifteenth century,
so that his ‘veins are filled with printer’s ink’ (185). The ‘medley’ (33) of Oldbuck’s
study, which is ‘littered’ (32) with books and ‘a chaos of maps, engravings, scraps
of parchment, bundles of paper, [and] pieces of old armour’ (32), echoes the med-
ley of Scott’s narrative, which is itself created from scraps and pieces of print and
visual culture (the ballad, the broadside, the romance, the tableau etc.). Oldbuck
proudly displays to the stranger, Lovel, his prized ‘bundle of ballads’ (35) and his
collection of ‘original broadside[s],—the Dying Speech, Bloody Murder, or
Wonderful Wonder of Wonders’ (37). The antiquarian has ‘wheedled’ the ballads
out of ‘an old woman’ (35) by plying her with snuff and a songbook. A ‘mutilated
copy’ of a sixteenth-century book was procured only after Oldbuck stood ‘the
drinking of two dozen bottles of strong ale’ with its previous owner (36).101 And ‘a
little black smoked book about the size of a primer’ (36) is declared a dazzling
‘treasure’ (36), somewhat to Lovel’s surprise. Listening to the aged Elspeth
Mucklebait’s deranged singing, Oldbuck recognizes, he thinks, ‘a historical bal-
lad . . . a genuine and undoubted fragment of minstrelsy! Percy would admire its
simplicity—Ritson could not impugn its authenticity . . . and down it went in his
red book’ (375–6).102 The joke is that the ‘historical’ ballad interpolated into the
text is written by Scott himself. Oldbuck’s impressive broadside collection
includes a sheet of ‘Strange and Wonderful News from Chipping Norton, in the
County of Oxon, of certain dreadful Apparitions that were seen in the Air on 26th
July, 1610’ (37). Scott adds an editorial note: ‘[o]f this thrice and four times rare
broadside, the author possesses an exemplar’ (431). Acts of fabrication are insisted
upon—Scott fabricates ballads, and broadsides fabricate news, but Scott also
insists on the authenticity of these fabrications: he really does own that broadside.
The elaborate titles of the broadsides ‘bore the same proportion to the contents
that the painted signs without a showman’s booth do to the animals within’ (37),
and The Antiquary repeatedly directs its readers back to ephemeral print, popular
spectacle, and fakery.
In the character of Edie Ochiltree, The Antiquary offers us ‘one of the last speci-
mens of the old fashioned Scottish mendicant [who] was the news-carrier, the
100 Favret, War at a Distance, p. 19. Favret is discussing Hazlitt’s last essay, ‘The Letter Bell’.
101 The songbook in question was The Complete Syren: The Syren Containing a Collection of Four
Hundred and Thirty-Two of the Most Celebrated English Songs (1739).
102 Thomas Percy (1729–1811) and Joseph Ritson (1752–1803) were famous antiquaries and col-
lectors of old ballads. Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) was the first of the serious
ballad collections.
96 Serial Forms
minstrel, and sometimes the historian of the district’ (47). A King’s Bedesman
and Blue-Gown ‘that brings news and country cracks frae ae farm-steading to
anither . . . and kens mair auld sangs and tales than a’ the barony besides’ (117),
and whose dress has ‘more of the pilgrim than the ordinary beggar’ (197) about it,
Edie Ochiltree becomes a powerful figure of mediation in the narrative. Ochiltree’s
life is crucially ‘unbounded’: when offered a permanent lodging, he refuses, say-
ing, ‘I downa be bound down to hours o’ eating and sleeping’ (116). When he is
wrongly arrested for ‘spreading disaffection against church and state through the
whole parish’ (61) and threatened with prison, it is agreed that ‘confinement
would break his heart’ (350). He is the people’s ‘newsman’ (350), he delivers writ-
ten letters and oral communications: ‘here comes Edie with a whole budget of
good news!’ (405). Edie’s ‘world’ is ‘the little circle which was all in all to the indi-
vidual by which it was trodden’ (282); and he is powerfully identified with the
landscape he moves through, or, in his own words, ‘the bonnie burnsides and
green shaws [he is] dandering beside’ (352).103 Edie has been a professional
‘ballad-singer’ (46), and the minstrel’s ballad that traditionally combined history,
news, and entertainment comes to stand as the micro-model for Scott’s multi-
genre fiction that plays across the boundaries between history, news, and fiction-
ality. Ballads in this period occupied a particular and liminal space between the
oral and the written, as must have been particularly clear to Scott, who collected
and transcribed them. The ballad-singer Margaret Hogg, who was an important
oral source for Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, is reported to have com-
plained to him, ‘there war never ane o my songs prentit till ye prentit them your-
sel’ an’ ye hae spoilt them awthegither. They were made for singing an’ no for
reading; but ye hae broken the charm now, an’ they’ll never be sung mair’.104 The
risk of binding unprinted forms into print suggested another reason, perhaps, for
Scott to arrange his fictions in such a way as to lay them as open as possible to
disaggregation and re-performance.
‘And what are the news at Fairport?’ (344); ‘And what news do you bring us
from Edinburgh?’ (61): there is a universal hunger and demand for news clam-
ouring throughout the novel, sharpened by the war, and the feeling that ‘we are
threatened with invasion from abroad, and insurrection at home’ (61). A ‘whis-
per’ is ‘sent abroad’ that Lovel ‘must certainly be a French spy (49); ‘the subject of
foreign news’ is much discussed (186); Oldbuck is discovered ‘busily employed in
perusing the [weekly] London Chronicle’ (30), and is himself pumped for news
finding that ‘he had no sooner entered the streets of Fairport, than it was “Good-
morrow, Mr. Oldbuck . . . what d’ye think of the news in the Sun the day?” ’(149).
103 For an account of Edie as ‘elemental’, see Tom Braggs, ‘Scott’s Elementals: Vanishing Points
Between Space and Narrative in the Waverley Novels’, Studies in the Novel 42:3 (Fall 2010): 205–26.
104 Cited in James Hogg, Memoirs of the Author’s Life and Familiar Anecdotes of Sir Walter Scott, ed.
Douglas S. Mack (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1972), p. 137.
Scott Unbound 97
The first of the many scraps and sheets of paper which we encounter in The
Antiquary appears in Chapter 1. It is a ‘written hand-bill, which, pasted on a pro-
jecting board, announced that the Queensferry Diligence, or Hawes Fly, departed
precisely at twelve o’clock on Tuesday, the fifteenth July 17—” (13). But this hand-
bill, ‘lied on the present occasion like a bulletin’ (13). Military bulletins during the
Napoleonic wars were deliberately economical with the truth, the war created a
climate of fake news, and false and delayed reports will abound in the narrative
that follows.
Edie Ochiltree may be the repository of the communal memory, knowing, for
example, the genealogies of all the local Fairport families, and the true (and
recent) origins of the structure that Oldbuck misidentifies as Roman remains, but
it is nevertheless made explicit that he has travelled further from Fairport than
most. He is an ‘old soldier’ who has crossed the Atlantic Ocean: ‘ “Ay, I was in
America then.” ’ (281) Other soldiers in the story are Reginald Wardour, the son
of Arthur Wardour, ‘absent upon foreign and military service’ (54) throughout
the narrative, and only appearing in epistolary form at the end, and the reckless
young ‘jackanapes’ (128) Hector M’Intyre, under whose father Edie served in the
‘42nd’ (197), the Blackwatch Highland regiment, in the American Revolutionary
wars. The Antiquary is a war story, but it is a war story at a distance, mediated in
an unsettling way so that war is both present and absent from the narrative.105
The gaps in the transmission of information create particular kinds of affect
which gather thickly around processes and forms of mediation. This thickening
of affect (the affect produced by mediation itself) undermines any straightfor-
ward historicism, and the affective-events which occur when information is
delayed, mis-transmitted or, for that matter, suddenly delivered, dictate the stop-
start time of the story, a time that is far from a regular chronology. For example,
the very old news that Elspeth Muckelbackit finally delivers to Lord Glenallan of
his son’s survival is conveyed with startling immediacy, as she describes how his
mother ‘wrung the draps from her hair and cloak,—for the night was drizzling’
(314). The accident that drowns the fisherman Steenie Mucklebackit is ‘said to
have happened’ (364), although it is first disputed as ‘a damned lie’ and a ‘general
rumour’ (364). Hector M’Intyre rushes to gather news of the event ‘as if he had
been flying to get the Gazette of a victory’ (364), and ‘[a]t length the rumour
reached, in a distinct shape, the ears of Edie Ochiltree’ (284). But even then,
‘[r]umour had in this, however, as in other cases, gone beyond the truth’ (284), and
it eventually transpires that not four men, but one only, had drowned. The written
105 Mary Favret has argued brilliantly that ‘a mediated war sets in motion various and conflicting
senses of time, and unsettled times unleash unsettled feelings’: Favret, War at a Distance, pp. 11–12.
Favret maintains that Scott’s historicism is ‘confident’, however, p. 75, and that the transition from
wartime to peacetime and the pleasure of the peace is a transition ‘repeatedly inscribed in Scott’s
Waverley novels’, p. 151. I think that the fear and anxiety of war is more present in the Waverley series
than this reading suggests.
98 Serial Forms
and the oral are often confused, so that news and gossip countermand each other
throughout the narrative. All ‘yepistolary correspondensh’ (405), as Edie puts it,
passes through Mrs Mailsetter’s hands ‘in the back-parlour of the post-master’s
house’ (138) where she and her friends sort and scrutinize ‘the letters which had
come by the Edinburgh post’ (138) and speculate wildly about each one, even
when the ‘strong thick paper’ makes it impossible for them to descry the contents
(141). Between them, they transform the written letters into gossip, and
‘arrange . . . and combine . . . the information of the evening, which flew next morn-
ing through a hundred channels, and in a hundred varieties, through the world of
Fairport’ (143). An express packet that arrives from the Secretary of State for
Lovel stimulates multiple interpretations (he must be an ‘emigrant noble’; a ‘spy’;
and a ‘prince’ (144)), and is almost delayed by a day, as Mrs Mailsetter is reluctant
to give the job of delivery to anyone but her husband, declaring that ‘it’s the same
thing whether the gentleman gets the express this night or early next morning’
(143). Eventually her small son is mounted on a disobedient pony and he and the
letter undergo a ‘perilous and interrupted’(144) journey to its addressee. Edie’s
role as mediator in The Antiquary extends beyond carrying news and letters, to
mediating between the illiterate and literate, between the ballad and the news-
paper, and between the past and the present. Edie is clearly literate himself
because Lovel writes to him: ‘ “I just gat ae bit scrape o’ a pen frae him” ’ (417), but
he is nevertheless deeply suspicious of the written word, and asks Oldbuck to put
away his ‘writing materials’ before he will tell the story of his arrest, because
‘they’re a scaur to unlearned folk like me—Od, ane o’ the clerks in the neist room
will clink down, in black and white, as muckle as wad hang a man, before ane
kens what he’s saying’ (361).
At the denouement of the story, Reform has come to Fairport, it seems, and
Mrs Mailsetter is to stand accountable. Edie Ochiltree is asked to circumvent the
Fairport Post Office to ensure the safe and swift delivery of important letters and
documents preventing Arthur Wardour’s arrest for debt, and he reports that
‘ “Mrs. Mailsetter is to lose her office for looking after other folk’s business and
neglecting her ain.” ’ (417). Kathryn Sutherland has noticed that ‘[t]he turbulent
years between the defeat of Napoleon and the European peace settlement (1814–15)
and the first positive steps towards internal reform in Britain (1832) mark the
precise span of Scott’s novel-writing career’, and The Antiquary reflects this turbu-
lence in its clash of incommensurate systems of knowledge and conflicting
models of the state.106 Whereas Oldbuck lives by the clock time of his ‘huge gold
repeater’ and consults the Fairport Almanac for the times of the tide, Edie
106 Kathryn Sutherland, ‘Fictional Economies: Adam Smith, Walter Scott and the Nineteenth-
Century Novel’, ELH 54:1 (Spring 1987): 97–127, p. 99. See also Natasha Tessone, ‘Entailing the
Nation: Inheritance and History in Walter Scott’s The Antiquary’, Studies in Romanticism 51:2
(Summer 2012): 149–77.
Scott Unbound 99
calculates time ‘by some train or process of his own in observing the heavenly
bodies, [which] stood independent of the assistance of a watch or time-keeper’
(214). But Oldbuck’s large watch is itself old-fashioned, along with his wig, his
mealtime reading of the Rambler, and his publications in the Antiquarian
Repository and the Gentleman’s Magazine, the periodical in which, according to
Hazlitt in 1823, ‘we are sure of finding the last lingering remains of a former
age’.107 Oldbuck’s plan for the Caledoniad that Lovel is to write is for a multi-volume
epic poem which ‘will revive the good old forms so disgracefully neglected in
modern times’ and will resemble ‘none of your romances or anomalous novel-
ties’. Anachrony supplies the fundamental structure of Scott’s narrative, and
through its manipulation of anachronous materials it displays its own anomalous
novelty.
The final crisis of The Antiquary is produced by a mistaken transmission
which muddles the local and international; so that the kind of news transmitted
from a distance by the optical telegraph and published in the Bulletins and
the Gazettes intermingles with the ‘petty news and small talk’ of Fairport
(415).108 Misinterpreting the flames of the bonfire the antiquary has made of
Dousterswivel’s useless mining equipment, ‘old Caxon’ at the ‘signal-post’ sees a
light increasing ‘like a comet’ (421) and so ignites the beacon that is the signal of
an impending invasion. The signal is ‘caught, and repeated’ down the coast,
throwing people into a panic, ‘ “The beacon, uncle!” said Miss M’Intyre. “The
French coming to murder us!” screamed Miss Griselda. “The beacon! the beacon!—
the French! the French!—murder! murder! and waur than murder!”—cried the
two handmaidens, like the chorus of an opera’ (422). When the truth of the case
comes to light, Oldbuck curses the German imposter Dousterswivel, ‘as if he had
lighted some train of fireworks at his departure. I wonder what cracker will go off
next among our shins.’ (425) Throughout this concluding scene, similes build up
that all refer to popular print and show culture: the comets which prognosticate
‘Strange and Wonderful News’ in the almanacs and broadsides, the opera chorus,
and the spectacle of a train of fireworks: these reveal Scott’s true distance from the
event. This finale is the last in the series of detachable and self-contained ‘scenes’
that The Antiquary has offered to its audience. Among them are ‘a singular spectacle
in the interior of the sacristy’, during the midnight funeral of Countess Glenallan;
the ‘scene equally unexpected and interesting’ which is espied ‘through a breach
in a low, ancient, and ruinous wall’ of St Ruth’s Priory; the tableau of ‘the inside of
the [Muckelbackits’] cottage’ is ‘a scene which our Wilkie alone could have
painted’; the tableau in which Lord Glenallan hears the truth about his first wife is
107 William Hazlitt, ‘The Periodical Press’, Edinburgh Review 38 (February–May 1823): 349–78,
p. 369.
108 Andrew Lang tells us that Scott places the date of ‘The False Alarm’ on 2 February 1804, when
he himself rode a hundred miles to join his regiment: Lang, ‘Editor’s Introduction to The Antiquary’,
p. xxxii.
100 Serial Forms
carefully stage-lit, so that ‘the rays illuminated, in the way that Rembrandt would
have chosen, the features of the unfortunate nobleman’ (309). In addition to these
carefully produced tableaux, the tale spawns tales within itself, such as ‘The
Fortunes of Martin Waldeck’ penned by Miss Wardour, and the strange scene of
the vision of the tapestry which re-runs the old story of ‘Aldobrand . . . a journey-
man printer’ through Lovel’s dream. Martin Meisel wrote perceptively that the
serial form manages ‘bursts of lateral development in a progressive movement, a
continuity of discontinuities in packets’.109 Scott’s serial narratives play different
chronologies against each other and create spaces of digressive survival and
improvisation. Oldbuck remarks that ‘[t]he eras by which the vulgar compute
time, have always reference to some period of fear and tribulation, and they date
by a tempest, an earthquake, or burst of civil commotion’ (164), and the finale of
The Antiquary is itself vulgarly dated by a burst of civil commotion. The narra-
tives that Scott produces in the second decade of the nineteenth century are just
as porous to the popular world of shows, broadsides, folklore, and common his-
tory as were the new twopenny newspapers of the 1820s.
Citizenship and Shared Reading
The Antiquary understands and exploits the roundabout routes of the serial, and
Oldbuck’s circumlocution is matched by the general circumnavigation of all the
characters, none of whom ever seem to take the most obvious route: ‘they didna
gang the road by the turnpike . . . they gaed by the sands’ (69); or they swerve from
the road onto ‘[a] footpath leading over a heathy hill’ (29). Exploiting the porous-
ness of the serial form, Scott offered different points of entry and different routes
for different kinds of readers. But who were Scott’s readers? ‘During the Romantic
period’, estimates William St Clair, ‘the “Author of Waverley” sold more novels
than all the other novelists of the time put together.’110 St Clair analogizes the
Waverley novels to other commodities that were serially consumed, because the
109 Meisel, Realizations, p. 56.

110 St Clair, Reading Nation, p. 224. At a drunken conversation at Scott’s mansion, Archibald
Constable speculated that ‘a three-shilling or half-crown volume every month which must and shall
sell, not by thousands or by tens of thousands, but by hundreds of thousands—ay, by millions’. Scott
predicted that Constable would become ‘the grand Napoleon of the realms of print’; in fact, Constable
went bankrupt in the crash of the mid-1820s, but others saw the opportunity. The five-shilling small
octavo format used for Scott’s hugely popular collected works became a standard for history, biogra-
phy, and science as well as literature: see Secord, Visions of Science, p. 19. John Murray brought out a
‘Family Library’ in 47 volumes, and Longman issued a 133-volume Cyclopaedia. These were still a little
expensive but became the staples of circulating libraries. In the end it was William and Robert
Chambers of Edinburgh who really broke through into an entirely new market. By 1839, The Lay of
the Last Minstrel, Marmion, and The Lady of the Lake were available for less than one shilling each. The
novels benefited by the 1842 Copyright Act and stayed copyrighted for longer: see St Clair, Reading
Nation, p. 209.
Scott Unbound 101
volumes were ‘reasonably predictable in textual content, uniform in material

appearance, and sufficiently mutually substitutable to be “consumed” week after
week like bottles of wine’.111 But, because he focuses entirely on bound books,
St Clair claims that Scott was an exception in managing this commodification
effect. David Finkelstein reminds us that ‘[i]n 1821, it cost thirty-one shillings
and sixpence to buy a best-selling three-volume novel by Walter Scott; more than
the average weekly wage of most’.112 According to Jonathan Rose, Dunfermline
weavers ‘were clubbing together to buy the Waverley novels’ as they came out.113
But this was unusual as books were very expensive in this period and still remark-
ably little is known about the reception of Scott’s work beyond the reviews (often
written by Scott himself) in the polite quarterlies. It is clear that, however enthu-
siastically middling to upper-class people were snapping up the latest of Scott’s
productions from booksellers and circulating libraries, the working poor could
only hope to experience Scott’s latest novel at second or third hand and would
have been most likely to encounter the ‘Scott-world’ in shows, prints, songs, and
retold stories on stage.114 Scott discussed launching a cheap book series with
Archibald Constable, but the plan collapsed with the bankruptcy of John
Ballantyne & Co., so the best hope for those that could not afford the bound
novels were the dramatizations, of which there were extraordinary numbers.
Louis James and others have pointed out that ‘the main impact of Scott on the
lower classes came through the numerous and popular dramatizations of his
works’.115 Guy Mannering (1815) generated at least 860 distinct theatrical produc-
tions, and Rob Roy (1817) at least 970.116 These theatrical adaptations in turn
generated cheap chapbooks which sold at sixpence, and numerous printed songs,
111 St Clair, Reading Nation , p. 31.

112 David Finkelstein, ‘Publishing and the Materiality of the Book’, in Kate Flint (ed.), The
Cambridge History of Victorian Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 15–33,
p. 16. Finkelstein adds that ‘Archibald Constable was . . . charging ten shillings and sixpence per vol-
ume for his three-volume editions of Walter Scott’s historical romances in the 1820s’: p. 21. Ian
Duncan says that ‘Scott’s high sales guaranteed standard formats for the novel for the remainder of the
century, from the guinea-and-a-half, three-volume octavo sets of first editions (fixed with Kenilworth,
1821) to the author’s uniform stereotyped edition in five-shilling monthly-issue “small octavo” vol-
umes (1829–33), for which Scott revised his texts and added historical notes and introductions. This,
the so-called “Magnum Opus” edition, set the pattern for reprint editions in the Victorian period
(such as Bentley’s Standard Novels) and established the revised, collected edition as the major biblio-
graphic platform for novelists who aspired to serious literary stature.’ Duncan, ‘Walter Scott and the
Historical Novel’, p. 313.
113 Rose, Intellectual Life, p. 116. Rose adds that in the Dunfermline Tradesmen’s Library (founded
1808), ‘by 1823, eighty-five out of 290 volumes in its collection were fiction’: p. 116.
114 See Henry A. White, Sir Walter Scott’s Novels on the Stage (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1927).
115 Louis James, Fiction for the Working Man 1830–1850: A Study of the Literature Produced for The
Working Classes in Early Victorian Urban England (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), p. 103.
116 Information from Bolton, Scott Dramatized, p. 56. Bolton estimates that Guy Mannering and
Rob Roy together accounted for 37 per cent of all derivative dramas from Scott during the nineteenth
century; Rigney, Afterlives, p. 59.
102 Serial Forms
which were even cheaper.117 Some of the cheap weeklies did disseminate the new
works. The twopenny Mirror, for example, ran long extracts and plot synopses of
Peveril of the Peak in 1823; Redgauntlet: A Tale of the Eighteenth Century in 1824;
Tales of the Crusaders in 1825; Woodstock; or, The Cavalier: A Tale of 1651 in 1826;
and Chronicles of the Canongate in 1827. The Olio serialized St. Valentine’s Day, or,
The Fair Maid of Perth and Exploits of Evan Dhu with illustrations in 1828.118
When Scott’s Kenilworth was republished in a penny journal it became available
to ‘a monster audience of at least three millions!’ but that audience had already
been prepared for Scott’s historicism by the cheap journals themselves.119 The
journal versions of Scott’s narratives were abridged and adapted versions of the
originals. The Mirror offered what it called ‘a connected account’ of the newly
published Peveril of the Peak, ‘which occupies four volumes and costs two guin-
eas’, using ‘the analysis of the novel which has already appeared in the Literary
Chronicle’.120 These synopses included long passages of quotation from the new
novel, and they were run as series ‘(To be concluded in our next)’.121 The Mirror
introduces its coverage of Tales of the Crusaders, ‘the essence of both of which we
shall give in this and the next number, presenting a faithful narrative of the inci-
dents of the story, with some of the best scenes, and all of the original poetry’.122
Introducing Woodstock to its readers, the Mirror explains that ‘[b]efore the new
romance, by the author of Waverley appears, this number of the MIRROR will be
on its way to some of the more remote parts of the kingdom; but although we
cannot give such an analysis of the tale as we could wish, we can in some degree
gratify our readers by quoting from it an episode of the noblest character, which
is complete in itself ’.123 An episode ‘complete in itself ’, unbound from the novel in
which it appears, will ‘gratify’ readers, and stand for ‘Scott’. Like many other peri-
odicals, the Mirror trod a narrow path between quotation and unlicensed
117 Barbara Bell notes that ‘[t]he original Scott novels may have been out of the reach of the poorest
players, but the short chapbook versions of them were not and many of the widely available chap-
books of the Waverley Novels were in fact drawn from the National drama, following the changes in
plot and dialogue made for the stage’: Barbara Bell, ‘The Nineteenth Century’, in Bill Findlay (ed.), A
History of Scottish Theatre (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1998), pp. 137–206, p. 157. During the Peninsular
Campaign, Captain Adam Ferguson read Scott’s poem The Lady of the Lake aloud to the soldiers
under fire: a successful experiment which led to him writing to London to ask for popular illustrations
and music written for stage adaptations: Simon Bainbridge, British Poetry and the Revolutionary and
Napoleonic Wars: Visions of Conflict (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 1–2, quoted in
Favret, War at a Distance, p. 77.
118 [Walter Scott], ‘From the Chronicles of the Canongate: Second Series. St. Valentine’s Day, or, The
Fair Maid of Perth’, Olio (24 May 1828): 305–11. The serialization ran until 21 June 1828.
119 Collins, ‘Unknown Public’, p. 262.
120 [Anon.], ‘The Novelist: No. XII. Peveril of the Peak’, p. 216.
121 [Anon.], ‘The Novelist No. LVI. Redgauntlet; A Tale of the Eighteenth Century by Sir Walter
Scott’, Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction 4:91 (27 June 1824): 11–13, p. 13.
122 [Anon.], ‘The Novelist. No LXXIII. Tales of the Crusaders’, Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and
Instruction 6:148 (2 July 1825): 4–14, p. 4.
123 [Anon.], ‘The Selector; or, Choice Extracts from New Works: Woodstock; or, The Cavalier. A
Tale of 1651. By Sir Walter Scott’, Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction 7:193 (29 April
1826): 261–9, p. 261.
Scott Unbound 103
reproduction, and it ran into trouble when, in 1827, it serialized its adaptation of
Scott’s Chronicles of the Canongate. An editorial note explains:
Our readers must have missed, and probably with some regret, the conclusion of
the above story, as promised for insertion in our last Number, and unaccus-
tomed as we are to such an intentional discrepancy of this sort (for such was the
above,) we shall consider ourselves justified in briefly stating some of the cir-
cumstances which led to the irregularity . . . we were induced to copy the first
portion of the tale of The Two Drovers upon the editor’s assurance of his own
honesty in obtaining the precedence . . . On the day of our publishing the first
portion, we received a notice to desist from its continuance,—full of the causti-
city of our friends on the other side of the Tweed.
They therefore suspended the next portion and now ‘we have abridged the whole
story, and accordingly now present the conclusion to our readers, though cer-
tainly not in the promised state’.124 The note ends with a spirited defence of the
periodicals as popularizers of Scott’s work:
We need not enlarge upon the advantages which publishers (and, to some
extent, authors) derive from portions of their works appearing in periodical
journals. The benefit is not reciprocal, but largely on their side, if they consider
how many columns of advertisement duty they thereby avoid. It is well-known
that the first edition of any work by such a master-spirit as Sir Walter Scott is
consumed in a few days by the circulating libraries and reading societies of the
kingdom; but how many thousands would neither have seen nor heard of his
most successful works, had not the gusto been previously created by the caducei
of these literary Mercuries . . . But we are not inclined to quarrel with the scheme,
for with Johnson we say, ‘Quotation, sir (Walter), is a good thing.’125
That the periodicals created the gusto for Scott’s fiction and extended its audience
is surely true, but they also facilitated Scott’s fiction in much more fundamental
ways. The accelerating media rhythms of the first three decades of the nineteenth
century created a new form of periodicity and a regulated, serial means of cul-
tural understanding that was open to (nearly) all. In ransacking his antiquarian
collection and his library for his materials, Scott may have thought he was rescu-
ing the novel from its silly feminine reputation and giving it a gentlemanly form,
but what he actually did was to put the antiquarian into wide circulation, and to
124 [Anon.], ‘The Selector; and Literary Notices of New Works. Chronicles of the Canongate. The
Two Drovers. (Concluded from page 289)’, Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction 10:282
(10 November 1827), pp. 324–6, p. 324.
125 Ibid., p. 324. The ‘Caduceus’ is the herald’s staff carried by Mercury/Hermes.
104 Serial Forms
repurpose the ‘vulgar’ for a new generation.126 His open series of improvised
scenes facilitated a new sense of readerly participation in history. The sharing of
this popular antiquarianism across classes was part of the distribution of histor-
ical equipment effected by the popular press as an important transitional step
towards citizenship and a shared political culture.
This was probably the reason that the Chartist Circular chose Scott as the sub-
ject of the first of its series of ‘Literary Sketches’ in 1841, although readers were
warned about his dangerous Tory politics: ‘[t]he subtle effect of his great histor-
ical panoramas is, to exalt the aristocracy, and debase the people’.127 But the per-
sistent view that Scott’s ‘counterrevolutionary politics must have determined a
general dynamic of closure’ has been challenged by Duncan, who believes that it
prevents the critic ‘attend[ing] to all [his novels] opened up’.128 I agree that Scott’s
fiction closes down very little, but is perforated with apertures, and radically
unbound to a degree that makes it quite impossible to co-opt it into the tradition
of realist historical fiction as Lukács and many others have attempted to do.129
Harry Shaw suggested that it was Scott who ‘made possible the fictional depiction
of what Hegel calls “the present as history” ’, and Elizabeth Deeds Ermath con-
siders that the ‘historical habit can be traced most importantly to Walter Scott’
because ‘[t]he historical novelist cares about the emergence of identity and the
conditions of that emergence, not the antiquarian details of a past era for their
own sake’.130 In my argument, it is not Scott’s fiction that somehow ‘produces’
historicism out of itself, but rather the material conditions of his publication
and reception in a newly emergent media environment that is itself starting
to enact the cultural logic of historicism. Because of its miscellaneity, Scott’s
126 Adelene Buckland argues that ‘Scott had bartered a new prestige for the novel’, because he
‘pulled back from romance into plot-less antiquarian digression and lengthy descriptive prose as a
means of giving novel [sic] a gentlemanly and respectable flavor’: Buckland, Novel Science, pp. 55, 93.
127 ‘Literary Sketches: Walter Scott’, Chartist Circular (1841), pp. 305–6, p. 305.
128 Duncan, Scott’s Shadow, p. 98.
129 Georg Lukács read in Scott’s novels ‘a direct continuation of the great realistic social novel of the
eighteenth century’: Lukács, The Historical Novel, p. 31. Franco Moretti notices Scott’s stop-start
rhythms, but writes this into the smooth history of the novel as it develops from melodrama to bour-
geois realism: ‘Scott, in Waverley (1814), turns to the daily rituals of the past: singing, hunting, eating,
toasting, dancing . . . Static scenes, even a little boring; but Waverley is English, he does not know what
Scottish habits prescribe, asks the wrong questions, misunderstands, insults people—and the routine
of the everyday is lit up by small narrative ripples. Not that Waverley is as dominated by fillers as
Meister, the atmosphere is still half Gothic, world history is nigh, stories of love and death create all
sorts of melodramatic echoes. But within the melodrama, Scott manages to slow down the narrative,
multiplying its moments of pause; and within these, he them finds the “time” to develop that analyti-
cal style which in its turn generates a new type of description, where the world is observed as if by an
“impartial judge.” ’ Franco Moretti, The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature (London: Verso,
2013), pp. 75–6.
130 Harry E. Shaw, Narrating Reality: Austen, Scott, Eliot (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1999), p. 168; Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth, The English Novel in History, 1840–1895 (London: Routledge,
1997), p. 83. Ermarth’s is an excellent book, and she also notices the importance of serial form: ‘[s]erial
publication expresses the vast public interest in serial form. This publishing format declares by its very
nature the evolutionary possibilities of sequence’: p. 103.
Scott Unbound 105
fundamentally antiquarian work launched and floated particularly well on this

new serial tide, which caused new meanings to adhere to old stories.131 As
Umberto Eco suggests, the series does not seek to discover history, but rather, it is
a form peculiarly adapted to ‘the production of a new ancient history’.132
From the very first, Scott does seem to have been read at speed under the sign
of seriality. Ann Rigney tells us that ‘[t]he scarce research on Scott’s reader-
ship . . . suggest[s] a serial pattern; thus library records for Richmond, Virginia, in
the 1840s show borrowers devouring the novels in intense and rapid succession’.133
As the series extended it became, according to Fiona Robertson, an ‘internally
consistent system’, and Ina Ferris also describes ‘the dense network of the
Waverley Novels’.134 Scott wrote his own intertextuality into the texts. So, the
amateur antiquarian Laurence Templeton, dedicating the narrative of Ivanhoe to
‘The Rev. Dr Dryasdust, F. A. S.’ , refers to a character in The Antiquary as ‘unjusti-
fiably expos[ing] to the public [the details of] the private and family affairs of
your learned northern friend Mr Oldbuck of Monkbarns’. Another source given is
the ‘singular Anglo-Norman MS’ of Sir Arthur Wardour (in The Antiquary).
Dr Dryasdust’s watch turns out to be the work of ‘Vincent and Tunstall’, the two
apprentices from The Fortunes of Nigel. Nassau Senior complained that The Heart
of Midlothian begins twelve times, and the extravagant introduction to Tales of the
Crusaders (1825) reports the ‘Minutes’ of a ‘General Meeting of Shareholders
Designing to Form a Joint-Stock Company United for the Purpose of Writing
and Publishing the Class of Works Called the Waverley Novels’. The meeting
is attended by miscellaneous characters from the series, including Captain
Clutterbuck and Jonathan Oldbuck: even Mr Dousterswivel, the villain of The
Antiquary, has sent in some drawings.135
131 Perhaps this is what was picked up by Fraser’s Magazine in an 1847 article entitled ‘Walter
Scott—Has History Gained by His Writings?’ One of the problems of the method encouraged by
Scott, Fraser’s argues, is that it lingers on ‘small particulars’ and lacks the theoretical bent essential to
‘the historical sense’: [Anon.], ‘Walter Scott—Has History Gained by His Writings?’, Fraser’s Magazine
36: 213 (September 1847): 345–51, both quotations p. 350. It was surely not Scott who was responsible
for separating the novel and history, it was his later critics, because, as Clifford Siskin argues, ‘dwelling
on some novels as “historical” allowed for a category of those that were not’. And all novels are, of
course, historical. Clifford Siskin, System: The Shaping of Modern Knowledge (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2016), p. 61.
132 Eco, ‘The Death of the Gruppo 63’, in The Open Work, pp. 217–35, p. 221.
133 Rigney, Afterlives, p. 244 n. 5. Cited from Emily B. Todd, ‘Walter Scott and the Nineteenth-
Century American Literary Marketplace: Antebellum Richmond Readers and the Collected Editions
of the Waverley Novels’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 93:4 (December 1999):
495–517. Todd says the library records show that Richmond readers ‘went on “binges” and consumed
Scott’s novels rapidly’: p. 497.
134 Robertson, Legitimate Histories: Scott, Gothic, and the Authorities of Fiction, p. 132; Ferris, ‘The
Historical Novel and the Problem of Beginning’, p. 79. The Cadell edition of 1829 emphasized the
seriality of Scott’s oeuvre: ‘[a]t the top of each title-page, in big letters, is the title WAVERLEY
NOVELS, and then underneath are listed the volume number and the title of the novel: the Cadell
editions give top billing to the series’: Todd, ‘Walter Scott’, p. 498.
135 Ina Ferris says ‘since any sequence is so entangled and embedded in various other sequences’:
Ina Ferris, ‘ “On the Borders of Oblivion”: Scott’s Historical Novel and the Modern Time of the
Remnant’, Modern Language Quarterly 70:4 (2009): 473–94, p. 475.
106 Serial Forms
Scott’s fantasy General Meeting challenges the idea of single authorship, asking
how his ‘scores of volumes . . . could be the work of one hand’ and invoking Adam
Smith’s theory of ‘the division of labour’. The motion before the meeting is that
the ‘labour of composing these novels might be saved by the use of steam’. In fan-
tasizing its automation, Scott suggests how open to disaggregation his fiction
really is, so that once each narrative element is disbound from the whole, the
‘love-speeches of the hero, the description of the heroine’s person, the moral
observations of all sorts’ and so on could be fed through ‘a mechanical process as
that by which weavers of damask alter their patterns, [so that] many new and
happy combinations cannot fail to occur’.136 Invented by Joseph Marie Jacquard
in 1804, the Jacquard machine was a device fitted to a power loom that simplified
the process of manufacturing textiles with complex patterns such as brocade and
damask. The machine was programmed with punch cards. One of the first auto-
mated digital technologies, the Jacquard loom was important to the development
of Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine, and to the subsequent emergence of digi-
tal computing.137 The image is striking as it suggests a Deleuzian, ‘machinic’ pro-
liferation of the serial, almost as if Scott’s works are being described as ‘rhizomic’
by Scott himself. Thinking of Scott’s series as crucially ‘unbound’ offers us a way
of experiencing his fiction much closer to the ways in which it was enjoyed by its
first readers, viewers, and participants. And by the 1820s, Scott himself was
imagining ‘Scott’ not as the author of a collection of leather-bound editions, but
as a digital programming code capable of generating patterns that tessellated,
combined, and continued without end.138 The next chapter turns from one media
sensation of the period to another: from Scott to Byron, to the mediation of news
in poetry and pictures, and to the importance of embodied knowledge in Byron’s
celebrated (and excoriated) serial poems.
136 Scott explains that ‘this mechanical operation can only apply to those parts of the narrative
which are at present composed out of commonplaces, such as the love-speeches of the hero, the
description of the heroine’s person, the moral observations of all sorts, and the distribution of happi-
ness at the conclusion of the piece’. Scott makes his satire clear by adding that the mechanism would
work ‘by placing the words and phrases technically employed on these subjects, in a sort of frame-
work, like that of the Sage of Laputa’. Laputa is the flying island in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels
(1726), whose population of astronomers and inventors of preposterous gadgets is intended as a satire
upon the Royal Society.
137 See James Essinger, Jacquard’s Web: How a Hand-Loom Led to the Birth of the Information Age
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Bolton also reaches for a mechanical image for the remedi-
ation of Scott: ‘[t]he plays that were pilfered from the imagination of Sir Walter Scott began in
1810 . . . [and] even long after 1832, the machinery of the Victorian theatrical industry continued to
churn out performances.’ Bolton, ‘Preface’, in Scott Dramatized, p. vii.
138 Jerome Christensen is describing a similar effect, perhaps, when he says that ‘Waverley is the
first bureaucratic novel’, which is designed, he suggests, to accommodate its readers to what Hannah
Arendt calls, in The Human Condition (1958), ‘[t]he rule of nobody’: Jerome Christensen, Romanticism
at the End of History (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), p. 175.
3
Live Byron
‘Hegel was right to remind the philosophers of his time to read the
newspapers every day’1
The appalling attack by cavalry troops on a crowd of peaceful working-class

protestors at St Peter’s Field in Manchester on 16 August 1819 created a scandal to
which Byron very briefly referred in Canto XI of his serialized poem Don Juan:
I’ve seen the people ridden o’er like sand | By slaves on horseback–2 Ten days after
Peterloo, The Times reported from Manchester: ‘[y]esterday Wroe’s shop was
again beset with numerous anxious expectations of a new publication, entitled
The Peterloo Massacre. It was announced for every hour of the day by regular bul-
letins of its progress. Don Juan was not advertised more mysteriously, or expected
more eagerly.’3 James Wroe was the publisher of the radical Manchester Observer
and his shop was ‘in that part of Market-Street which has been called “Sedition
Corner” ’ where ‘poor misled creatures’ looked for ‘every species of stimulating
novelty’.4 The Peterloo Massacre came out in weekly parts, as a serialization like
Don Juan, and it landed Wroe in prison for twelve months and closed the
Manchester Observer for good.5 The previous month, in the first two weeks of July
1819, Byron’s new poem had been announced in a series of trailers in The Times and
the Morning Chronicle placed there by his publisher, John Murray: ‘In a few days,
1 Jacques Derrida, ‘The Deconstruction of Actuality: An Interview with Jacques Derrida’, trans.
Jonathan Ree, Radical Philosophy 68 (Autumn 1994): 28–41, p. 28.
2 Lord Byron, Don Juan, xi: 85 in Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome McGann,
vol. 5 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986). All references are to this edition and are given hereafter in
parentheses in the text. For criticism of Byron’s understanding of Peterloo and a debunking of his
radical politics through an exposure of his ‘breath-taking’ ‘class arrogance’, see Peter Cochran, ‘The
Politics of Don Juan’ in Roderick Beaton and Christine Kenyon Jones (eds), The Poetry of Politics and
the Politics of Poetry (London: Routledge, 2017), pp. 131–42, p. 135.
3 [Anon.], ‘Manchester August 26 1819’, The Times (28 August 1819), p. 2.
4 The Times (11 August 1819), p. 2.
5 In addition to imprisonment Wroe was fined £100, which broke his business. An apprentice who
had sold one copy of the Peterloo serial was imprisoned for four months, the wife of one of his jour-
neymen was jailed for six months for selling copies, and Wroe’s ten-year-old son was fined sixpence:
Geoffrey Cranfield (ed.), The Press and Society, from Caxton to Northcliff (London: Routledge, 1978),
p. 189. It would be ten years before another working-class newspaper could establish itself in
Manchester, the Manchester and Salford Advertiser (1829): see Cranfield, p. 89.
© Clare Pettitt.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198830429.001.0001
108 Serial Forms
DON JUAN’.6 These mysterious advertisements ran alongside ‘Authentic

Observations of the Comet’, referring to the ‘Great Comet’ of 1819 visible that
year, as if they were prognostications of a similarly wonderful natural event.7 The
advertisements were ‘more novel in their form than the first appearance of the
new comet; and in their import, certainly not less mysterious’.8 Don Juan was
announced as news and, after its publication on 15 July 1819, pirated copies of
Byron’s poem were soon rubbing up against radical pamphlets, those ‘pestilent
publications’ which were ‘heaped on the table, or in the windows, with hideous
profusion’ in Wroe’s shop.9 Popular and radical print serials criss-crossed, and
used similar formats and effects to catch people’s attention.10 In a brutal counter-
revolutionary regime of censorship, and deepening economic depression caused
by the vast expense of the war, the people were hungry for bread, but also for
novelty. Novelty brought with it new forms of knowledge and at least some pieces
of the apparatus of citizenship.
6 [John Cam Hobhouse], Byron’s Bulldog: The Letters of John Cam Hobhouse to Lord Byron, ed.
Peter W. Graham (Columbus, OH: Ohio University Press, 1984), p. 277 n. 4.
7 The Great Comet of 1819 was the object of much fascinated discussion, and was, apparently, ‘dis-
tinctly visible to the naked eye, with a bright tail and nucleus’: John Russell Hind, The Comets: A
Descriptive Treatise upon those Bodies. With a Condensed Account of the Numerous Modern Discoveries
Respecting Them; and a Table of All the Calculated Comets, from the Earliest Ages to the Present Time
(London: John W. Parker & Son, West Strand, 1852), p. 157.
8 [Anon.], ‘Don John’ or Don Juan Unmasked; Being a Key to the Mystery, Attending that
Remarkable Publication; with A Descriptive Review of the Poem and Extracts, 2nd edn (London:
William Hone, 1819), p. 5. This cheap pamphlet cost two shillings and reprinted parts of the poem for
readers unable to afford the expensive quarto and ‘very superb’ Murray edition of parts one and two of
the poem: [John Cam Hobhouse], Byron’s Bulldog, p. 275. The pamphlet exposed Murray’s cowardice
in refusing to put his name to Don Juan and it was on sale very swiftly as it was advertised in The
Times within a week of the publication of Murray’s Don Juan: ‘Advertisement’, The Times (21 July
1819), p. 2. The price of Murray’s volume (31 shillings) shows it was aimed at the wealthy. A pirate
edition was quickly produced by J. Onwhyn, at a much lower price, leading to financial loss for
Murray; 150 copies of his first edition were unsold, and were traded as waste-paper. Murray was
forced to issue a cheaper edition. In 1821 he issued cantos 3–5, again without his name as publisher.
Some of Byron’s friends felt that Murray’s delays and pricing policy had encouraged publishers to issue
pirate editions. Despite his reservations, Murray wanted to go on publishing Byron. He complained to
Byron of the possible loss of reputation both to Byron and himself that could be caused by the poet
turning to publishers of radical pamphlets, stating emphatically that Don Juan Cantos 6–8 were too
dangerous: ‘Mr Kinnaird sent me the 3 Cantos of Don Juan . . . I declare to you they were so outra-
geously shocking that I would not publish them if you were to give me your Estate—Title and Genius—
for Heaven’s sake revise them’. Byron responded ‘I shall withdraw from you as publisher . . . and I wish
you good luck elsewhere’; from then on the radical John Hunt was Byron’s authorized publisher, and
later cantos of Don Juan received no copyright protection. Priced at 1 shilling to forestall piracy, it
became available to almost anyone who wanted it. Murray eventually bought the rights to Cantos
6–16 in 1829. Information on the publishing history of Don Juan from the British Library website:
https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/don-juan-cantos-1–2.
9 The Times (11 August 1819), p. 2. The radical William Hone published a spurious third canto to
Don Juan in 1819.
10 Ian Haywood has written on ‘the interface between popular and radical literature’, noting that
‘[c]onservative and liberal anti-jacobinism has been underplayed or even ignored by some of the
scholars working in the area of “plebian studies” ’: Haywood, Revolution in Popular Literature, p. 3.
Live Byron 109
This chapter continues my enquiry into the effects of an accelerating and

serialized news culture. I take the publication of Byron’s Don Juan in 1819 to think
about forms of performance that made innovative claims to ‘liveness’. I track the
delivery of ‘news events’ specifically through visual and spatial forms that were
designed to distort scale and distance to create innovative perceptual and bodily
effects. These novel forms created a particular affect around news that eventually
led to the widespread public imagination of the virtuality of contemporary life.
The topicality of these new spectacular forms was consequential, therefore, in the
wider social life of the city and the nation in ways which, I will argue, went far
beyond the building of national consensus through patriotic affect.11 It was only
in developing forms of immersive virtual reality that a consensus on what consti-
tuted ‘actuality’ was achieved. Martin Myrone has argued that a stale and ‘half-
baked’ concept of the philosophical sublime of the eighteenth century is co-opted
by ‘commercial spectacle and sensation’, so that, by the early nineteenth century,
the sublime can ‘probably best be described as a certain kind of effect which had
more to do with manipulating public and critical response than with attending to
some pre-ordained theoretical prescription’.12 But I ask what we risk in dismissing
the ‘commercial spectacle and sensation’ of the early decades of the nineteenth
century. I take the argument further in suggesting that what have often been
described as passive and commodified forms of entertainment were more open to
interactive participation than is usually allowed, and were often in dialogue with
radical ideas of democratization.13 As such spectacles became more widely
accessible through the 1830s and 1840s, large numbers of, for example, artisans,
shop workers, and clerks who had not had access to much (if any) formal educa-
tion were offered new forms of experience which combined history with topical-
ity. These spectacles offered opportunities for imagining the world on a different
scale and made possible novel calibrations of individual bodily experience in
space and time. In this sense, they had a ‘civic’ component.
The serial object that structures this chapter is the shipwreck. ‘Considered
quantitively, the nineteenth century was surely the epoch of shipwrecks’, Hans
Blumenberg declares, and he argues that the shipwreck becomes the core meta-
phor for modern subjectivity in ‘the newly emerging [in the nineteenth century]
historical consciousness and its insoluble dilemma of theoretical distance versus
11 For example, John Plunkett argues that ‘[t]he success of touring panoramas and dioramas was
their ability to give audiences up and down the country a sense of belonging to their own nation’: John
Plunkett, ‘Moving Panoramas c. 1800 to 1840: The Spaces of Nineteenth-Century Picture-Going’, 19:
Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 17 (2013), p. 25, http://19.bbk.ac.uk.
12 Martin Myrone, ‘The Sublime as Spectacle’, in David Solkin (ed.), Art on the Line: The Royal
Academy Exhibitions at Somerset House, 1780–1836 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 80.
13 Jonathan Crary claims that through the panorama, ‘the multifaceted festival participant [of the
olden days] is turned into an individualized and self-regulated spectator’: Crary, ‘Géricault’, p. 11. As
my chapter will make clear, I disagree with Crary’s argument about the privatization of vision through
these technologies.
110 Serial Forms
living engagement’.14 Distance and engagement are important terms for my

examination of a historicized news culture in this chapter. I am interested in the
serial possibilities of the shipwreck and I use representations of wrecks to explore
the Deleuzian version of open seriality in which ‘[s]eriality is not based on the
logic of permutation of a closed set of elements; it is the way the work of art exists,
namely that it is not a copy, but an equal part, a repetition of reality’.15 Thinking
about aesthetic objects as high-level repetitions of the real, rather than inferior
imitations of some pre-existent Platonic state, helps to reconstruct the immediacy
of the effects of media events, and accounts for the powerful bodily reactions, and
sensations of live-ness that they elicited.16
The chapter starts ‘[u]pon the wide, wide sea’ with Byron’s serial poem Childe
Harold’s Pilgrimage: a voyage without a shipwreck, although the political ship-
wreck of Europe, and ‘[t]he wreck of old opinions’, is its metaphorical theme.17
Byron uses the Childe’s voyage to problematize the straightforward chronology
of the past, leaving open fissures and spaces of revolutionary possibility. Childe
Harold is a serial poem which questions the logic of seriality, but Byron’s subse-
quent and unfinished long poem, Don Juan, goes much further. Don Juan
pushes the serial form to extremes. I look at the long chain of mediations,
through newspapers, periodicals, pamphlets, and pictures, that brought Byron,
by then self-exiled in Venice, to write in Canto II of Don Juan about a scene of
shipwreck and survival which would echo uncannily with the scene that
Théodore Géricault was painting at exactly the same time in Paris [Fig. 3.1]18
14 Hans Blumenberg, Shipwreck with Spectator: Paradigm for a Metaphor for Existence, trans. Steven
Rendall (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), p. 67. Blumenberg reports that 5,000 men a year were lost
through shipwrecks in nineteenth century. He goes on to argue that the shipwreck is a metaphor for
both the riskiness of our ‘lifeworld’ and ‘the spectator position as regards to history’. Of course, there is
a long history of maritime disaster and its representations, dating back to well before Shakespeare’s The
Tempest. In Britain, shipwrecks close to shore were often visible to coastal communities, but the Méduse
was wrecked far away off West Africa, so that the importance of Géricault’s canvas is about bringing
into visibility something which was doubly invisible, as both geographically distant and as politically
censored. Slajov Žižek has written about the wreck of the Titanic in 1912 as symbolically overdeter-
mined as the trauma of ‘the approaching catastrophe of European civilization itself ’ and so endlessly
repeated in the culture as the ‘recurrent incursion of the Real, that which resists symbolization’ or ideo-
logical appropriation, yet which at the same time requires constant ideological negotiation to defuse its
troubling implications: Slajov Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), pp. 70, 69.
15 András Bálint Kovács, ‘Notes to a Footnote: The Open Work According to Eco and Deleuze’, in
David Norman Rodowick (ed.), Afterimages of Gilles Deleuze’s Film Philosophy (Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press, 2010), pp. 31–46, p. 37.
16 ‘Deleuze opposes seriality to regularity. Regularity means a series composed according to a rule
that is one and the same all over in the series. Seriality means a series composed according to an infi-
nite series of rules, where every element of the series obeys a different rule and yet belongs to the same
system. With respect to art, the principle of open seriality means that a work of art is a series of several
not necessarily connected forming principles, whose serial nature does not, therefore, constitute an
organic whole or totality.’ Kovács, ‘Notes to a Footnote’, p. 37.
17 Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, i: 9 and iii: 82, in Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical
Works, ed. Jerome McGann, vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980). All references are to this edition
and are given hereafter in parentheses in the text.
18 Lorenz Eitner allows himself to speculate in this connection, ‘Byron wrote Canto II of Don Juan
between September 1818 and January 1819, at about the time when Géricault was finishing [The Raft
Live Byron 111
Fig. 3.1. Théodore Géricault, Scène de Naufrage (1819) [Credit: Louvre, Paris, France/
Bridgeman Images]
Both Byron’s and Géricault’s shipwreck scenes were greeted with some disgust,
and they were immediately discussed together. When it was first displayed in the
Paris salon, Géricault’s picture was reviewed in the Monthly Magazine:
The dreadful account of the ‘Shipwreck of the Medusa’ affords a distressing pic-
ture of calamitous and hideous circumstances to the imagination; but a painter
hazards much in attempting to convey the particulars of that event to the canvas.
Lord Byron has tried his able and eccentric pen on the subject,—he has succeeded
in exciting disgust, more than commiseration, for the fate of the sufferers, or
admiration for his own talents.19
By exploiting the dimensionality of their respective aesthetic forms, both Don

Juan and Scène de Naufrage use the affect of disgust to engage their audiences and
both works carry a powerful political charge. Large-scale mediation in the early
1800s, rather than initiating a kind of proto-Debordian society of spectacle,
of the Medusa] It raises the question of the possibility of a link between them.’ Lorenz Eitner, Géricault’s
The Raft of the Medusa (London: Phaidon, 1972), p. 45.
19 David Carey, ‘State of the Fine Arts in France’, The Monthly Magazine 49:340 (1 June 1820),
p. 417, quoted in Christine Riding, ‘Staging The Raft of the Medusa’, Visual Culture in Britain 5:2
(Winter 2004): 1–26, p. 16.
112 Serial Forms
rather closes the gap between the public and the news event to create a sense of
queasy and distorted intimacy. The result is a kind of scandal, the scandal of the
topical, which is as much related to the speed, scale, and quality of the transmis-
sion as it is to the ‘content’, be that Queen Caroline, Cato Street, or Peterloo.20
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and the Moving Panorama of the Past
The colouring of the scenes which fleet along,

Which I would seize, in passing, to beguile
My breast (iii: 112)
For much of this extended sequence of poems, published across six years in three
parts between 1812 and 1818, the Childe floats somewhat aimlessly on the
Mediterranean past the remains of history on ‘his weary pilgrimage’ (i: 10). From
his moving vantage point reclining on the prow of his boat he surveys the ruins of
past civilizations and ancient empires as his ‘stately vessel glided slow | Beneath
the shadow of that ancient mount’ (ii: 41) through the borderlands between the
Christian world and the East.21 The sites of ancient events and myths appear
phantasmagorical before him. Lisbon, for example, appears like a mirage: ‘Her
image floating on that noble tide’ (i: 16) and
Childe Harold sailed, and passed the barren spot

Where sad Penelope o’erlooked the wave;
And onward viewed the mount, not yet forgot,
The lover’s refuge, and the Lesbian’s grave.
Dark Sappho! (ii: 39)
History for Byron seems to operate along the distant shoreline as the recumbent
Childe descries ‘[t]he colouring of the scenes’ (iii: 112) from the deck. The
sequence is repeatedly lost as these scenes ‘fleet along’ and can only be seized
indistinctly ‘in passing’ as the Childe sails by.
When the Childe does disembark in the poem it is to tour the battlefields of
Europe, both ancient and modern.22 Byron hired a guide at Waterloo in Belgium
20 Some parts of the following discussion of Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage appear in my chap-
ter ‘At Sea’ in Adelene Buckland and Sadiah Qureshi (eds), Time Travelers: Victorian Encounters with
Time and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), pp. 196–219.
21 The ‘ancient mount’ is the Cape of Leucadia, the Greek island now known as Lefkada in the
Ionian Sea on the west coast of Greece. It has been suggested that Lefkada might have been Homer’s
Ithaca. The island’s cliffs are also supposed to be those from which the suicidal Sappho threw herself.
22 J. M. W. Turner chose to print lines from Canto III of Childe Harold in the catalogue for the
exhibition of his painting The Field of Waterloo in 1818. Turner had travelled to the field of Waterloo
with a copy of Byron’s poem. The lines he chose were: ‘The earth is cover’d thick with other clay, |
Live Byron 113
in the spring of 1816, as Walter Scott had done the year before, and recorded that
‘I went on horseback twice over the field, comparing it with my recollection of
similar scenes. As a plain, Waterloo seems marked out for the scene of some great
action, though this may be mere imagination: I have viewed with attention those
of Platea, Troy, Mantinea, Leuctra, Chaeronea, and Marathon.’23 The Battle of
Waterloo was still news—it had happened only the summer before—whereas the
battle of Marathon, for example, had taken place in 490 bce, and the Trojan wars,
if they ever happened at all, happened in the twelfth or eleventh century bce.
Byron is experiencing these events out of any historical sequence; significantly his
list of the names of battles, ‘Platea, Troy, Mantinea, Leuctra, Chaeronea, and
Marathon’, is not chronologically ordered, but nevertheless he is able to contem-
plate them with equal ‘attention’ as ‘similar scenes’.
In Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, literary form becomes a category of historical
knowledge. Hume and Gibbon had inaugurated a newly ironic version of history,
but it was Byron who set their ideas to the rhythms of modern life and who
launched his newly made measures to the public as a ‘structure of feeling’.24 The
poem dramatizes the problematics of historical sequence, and collapses times
together so that Marathon and Waterloo are superimposed one upon the other.
Byron’s Spenserian stanza allows for a ‘broken and more impassioned movement’,
as William Wordsworth noticed with disapproval.25 Byron himself excused his
choice of Spenserian stanzas in his preface to the poem by claiming that this form
‘admits of every variety’.26 Colin Burrow’s analysis of the structure of Spenser’s
stanza form perhaps reveals some of its attraction for Byron. Burrow says that the
form ‘invites repose: the lines interlock and lace back into each other, and the
final line draws its slow length along, inviting readerly delay. The form of the
poem fights a continual benevolent war with its content. The knights who
Which her own clay shall cover, heap’d and pent, | Rider and horse—friend, foe—in one red burial
blent.’ Leo Costello suggests that Turner’s use of ‘rising’ and ‘falling’ in the composition of his pictures
echoes Byron’s in his poetry: see Leo Costello, J.M.W. Turner and the Subject of History (Farnham:
Ashgate, 2012), pp. 87–90.
23 Byron, note to Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto the Third. CPW, vol. 2, p. 303.
24 The phrase is from Raymond Williams, who introduces it in Raymond Williams, The Long
Revolution [1961] (New York: Broadview Press, 2001), p. 64.
25 Letter from Wordsworth to Catherine Grace Godwin [Spring 1829], Letter no. 423. The
Spenserian stanza consists of an intertwining of three rhymes over nine lines, in the pattern ababbcbcc;
the lines are in iambic pentameter (ten syllables), except for the final one, which is an iambic hexam-
eter, or ‘alexandrine’ (twelve syllables). It is derived from French, specifically Provençale, balladic
forms and the octava rima of Italy and it is generically associated with Romance narrative. Wordsworth
continues his letter by remarking that ‘the stanza is spoiled in Lord Byron’s hands; his own strong and
ungovernable passions blinded him as to its character’: The Letters of William and Dorothy
Wordsworth, vol. 5: The Later Years, Part II: 1829–1834, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, 2nd edn rev. and ed.
Alan G. Hill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), pp. 57–9, both quotations p. 58.
26 Byron, ‘Preface to Cantos I–II’, CPW, vol. 2, p. 4. See Jerome Christensen, Lord Byron’s Strength:
Romantic Writing and Commercial Society (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993),
pp. 75–6, 181, 188.
114 Serial Forms
dominate the action . . . struggle against the reflective flow of Spenser’s verse,
which ebbs backwards endlessly.’27 Byron responded to a verse form which could
subtly undermine its own narrative and that did not admit of couplets or other
dangerously monumental possibilities.
In its stanzaic form, then, and by its constant return from the land to the sea
(‘Once more upon the waters! yet once more!’ (ii: 2)) Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
rejects settling in favour of moving, and repeatedly reprises a maritime perspec-
tive from which nationhood swiftly comes to look like landlocked introspection.
As old regimes such as the Ottoman Empire started to fragment, the Childe
apprehends the emergent global order as ‘the shattered links of the world’s broken
chain’ (iii: 18) and Byron seems to celebrate these ‘shattered links’ and to revel in
the uncertainty of being cast adrift from teleology. The memory of the French
Revolution, an event which had ‘seemed to outstrip all previous experience’, and
had shattered links with the past, was still ricocheting around Europe in the con-
fusion of the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars.28 The poem does not merely bear
witness to the beginning of a break from the teleological and serial history pro-
duced by the Enlightenment, but partly creates this break, plunging its readers
into a disorientating seascape in which it is difficult to make out landmarks: even
as the Childe leaves Dover, ‘the white rocks faded from his view, | And soon were
lost in circumambient foam’ (i: 7). Flung out into the middle of the ocean, the
land-bound topographical mode of eighteenth-century poetry is undone and
gives way instead to a Romantic mobilité, or, as Francis Jeffrey put it more sourly
in Blackwood’s, the poem ‘floats and fluctuates in cheerless uncertainty’.29 While
the Childe’s experience of being at sea reinforces the sense of distance between
one place and another, the poem dramatizes his restless search for an alternative
connective order. The constantly collapsing seriality of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
mimics the struggle for a ‘joined-up’ political revolution across Europe. Byron is
already dramatizing the difficulty of aligning diverse national histories with a
‘European’ revolutionary identity.30
as my bark did skim

The bright blue waters with a fanning wind,
Came Megara before me, and behind
Aegina lay, Piraeus on the right,
27 Colin Burrow, Edmund Spenser (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1996), p. 27.

28 Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), p. 33; first published in German, 1979.
29 [Francis Jeffrey], Presbyter Anglicanus, ‘Letter to the Author of Beppo’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh
Magazine 3 (1818): 323–29, p. 326.
30 Jerome McGann suggests that Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage ‘is a highly moralized travelogue very
much in the tradition of eighteenth-century topographical poetry’: CPW, vol. 2, p. 270. Anne K. Mellor
describes Byron’s ‘exuberant mobilité’ in Anne K. Mellor, English Romantic Irony (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1980), p.186.
Live Byron 115
And Corinth on the left; I lay reclined

Along the prow, and saw all these unite
In ruin (iii: 44)
While the orientation of these four locations in the Saronic Gulf is correct accord-
ing to a map, there is no possible way that Byron could really have ‘seen’ them all
from his boat. Aegina and Piraeus are visible from the sea, but Ancient Corinth is
hidden from the coast by mountainous terrain. This reading may seem literal and
unpoetic, but it is useful in alerting us to the ways in which Byron manipulates
the Greek landmass, superimposing place on place, or making distant locations
appear simultaneously in his poem. His imaginary geography is important. The
geography of Greece here assumes the transcendent canonicity of the ancient
literary works which Byron had studied at his English public school, Harrow,
and at Trinity College, Cambridge. The canon holds texts in a virtual presence,
unbounded by their original time or place, while simultaneously renationalizing
and repurposing them. Byron arranges Greece in his poem just as Greek texts
are arranged by learned English gentlemen, but he does so knowingly, and he
remains alert to the contingencies of history too, and the repeated rupture of
national categories. Byron’s is a canon that is constantly trembling on the brink
of dissolution.
‘I . . . saw all these unite | In ruin’: the movement from the line ending ‘unite’
collapsing into the opening words of the following line ‘In ruin’ performs the
moment at which Byron fails to sustain his imagination of a coherent and ideal-
ized ancient civilization. Instead it collapses back into the derelict present, leaving
a broken link between past and present. This movement also expresses the central
paradox of a poem that constantly attempts to create coherence and historical
sequence across time and space only to enact its own failure. William Hazlitt rec-
ognized this pattern of abandoned sequence in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and did
not like it: ‘[t]here is here and in every line an effort at brilliancy, and a successful
effort; and yet, in the next, as if nothing had been done, the same thing is
attempted to be expressed again with the same effort of labour as before, the same
success, and with as little appearance of repose or satisfaction of mind’.31 Not just
in its famous concluding encomium to the ocean, but throughout all its four
Cantos, this is a work which crashes as rhythmically and relentlessly as the waves,
using its patterns of swell and collapse to break up a teleological or serial view of
history. For in this poem, ‘Art, Glory, [and] Freedom fail’ (ii: 37) again and again
to achieve transcendence over history.
31 [William Hazlitt], ‘Literature: Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Canto the Fourth. By Lord Byron.
Murray’, Yellow Dwarf (2 May 1818): 142–4, p. 144; reprinted in Donald H. Reiman (ed.), The
Romantics Reviewed, 9 vols (New York: Garland, 1972), pp. 2336–8, p. 2338.
116 Serial Forms
Yet they do not wholly fail. The poem’s ekphrastic paradox turns upon the
ambiguity of the ruin: are Byron’s images of ruins a sign of disappearance or of
survival? ‘Fair Greece! sad relic of departed worth! | Immortal, though no more;
though fallen, great!’ (ii: 73). In this poem it seems they can be both at once.
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage dramatizes the puzzling encounter of ephemerality
and material presence, and it does so self-consciously through the medium of
print. Part ‘Romaunt’ and part up-to-date and topical travel narrative, Byron’s
Childe Harold generically bestrides the ancient and the modern to create from the
scattered stones remaining of the ancient world a bestseller which proliferated in
ephemeral paper copies.32 Not only was Byron making news out of history, he
was also giving history a historical feeling, and inviting his readers to share in that
affect.
News and the Scandal of the Topical
It was quite incredible, marvelled The Times in September 1819, that ‘in the same
year there proceeded from the same pen two productions, in all things so differ-
ent, as the fourth canto of “Childe Harold” and this loathsome “Don Juan” ’. Its
objection to the first two cantos of Don Juan centred on the idea of the ‘real’.33 The
article continues,
‘[b]ut the best and the worst part of the whole is, without doubt, the description
of the shipwreck. As a piece of terrible painting, it is as much superior as can be
to every description of the kind, not even excepting that in the Aeniad, that ever
was created. In comparison with the fearful and intense reality of its horrors,
everything that any former poet had thrown together to depict the agonies of
that awful scene, appears chill and tame.’34
The account of Don Juan’s ship going down in Canto II of Don Juan, and of his
survival on board a raft, amid the random violence and cannibalism of his fellow
passengers, impresses this reviewer with its ‘intense reality’. The Times reaches for
the Aeniad for a comparison, but it should have looked no further than its own
pages: much of Byron’s ‘reality effect’ in this scene was directly and deliberately
imported from newspapers and documentary sources. And not only in this scene:
32 On Childe Harold’s publication history, see Peter J. Manning, ‘Childe Harold in the Marketplace:
From Romaunt to Handbook’, Medieval and Modern Language Quarterly 52:2 (June 1991): 170–90.
On reprinting more generally see St Clair, The Reading Nation and Meredith L. McGill, American
Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834–1853 (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2003).
33 Famously, Murray did not even add his own name as publisher to the first edition of Don Juan.
34 ‘Remarks on Don Juan’, The Times (4 September 1819), p. 4.
Live Byron 117
Fig. 3.2. Bullock’s Museum (Egyptian Hall or London Museum), Piccadilly. Coloured
aquatint, attributed to T. H. Shepherd (London: Ackermann, 1815) [Credit: Wellcome
Collection. CC BY]
throughout the whole serial of Don Juan, which appeared in four instalments
between 1819 and 1824, Byron was to use topicalities and scraps of ‘real’ news to
disturb the generic identity of what he called his ‘Epic Satire’. He declares that his
poem is ‘very accurate’, ‘[a]nd epic, if plain truth should prove no bar’ (viii: 138).35
What did it mean for Byron to use ‘the news’ in his poem? And what effect did it
have on the poem’s internal temporalities and its connection with its distant
British audience? What business does the aesthetic have with the ephemerality of
the present?
In the autumn and winter of 1818, while Byron was composing the shipwreck
in Canto II of Don Juan in Venice, Théodore Géricault was painting a shipwreck
in Paris. Géricault’s painting was first shown at the 1819 Paris Salon, under the
generic-serial title Scène de Naufrage, but when the canvas was shipped to London
to be exhibited from June to December 1820 at Bullock’s Egyptian Hall at
Piccadilly [Fig. 3.2], it was advertised as ‘Monsieur Gericault’s great picture
(24 feet long by 18 feet high) representing the surviving CREW of the MEDUSA
35 Jane Stabler has noticed that ‘[t]he incorporation of newspaper reports along with literary allu-
sion is one of the poem’s most brilliant and challenging innovations’: Jane Stabler, Byron, Poetics and
History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 137. Stabler gives an excellent account of
the influence of Byron’s newspaper reading on Don Juan, helpfully listing the topicalities that Byron
includes about British politics in Canto VII (composed in 1822), and showing how Galignani’s
Messenger is semi-quoted by him in the poem: see Stabler, Byron, pp. 141, 168.
118 Serial Forms
FRENCH FRIGATE’.36 The change of name, from the generic Scene of a Shipwreck
to The Raft of the Medusa signalled the show at the Egyptian Hall as a topical
spectacle and altered the meaning and reception of the painting. The Méduse was
a French frigate carrying troops and colonists to recolonize Senegal. In July 1816,
she was wrecked off the west coast of Africa. There were not enough lifeboats to
accommodate all on board, and those lower down the social hierarchy were put
on a large hastily constructed raft which was to be towed by one of the bigger
lifeboats. But, realising the disadvantage of the extra weight, this lifeboat soon cut
the tow rope and abandoned the raft. During the desperate days at sea, provisions
on the raft ran out, there were murderous brawls, and survivors resorted to can-
nibalism. Of 150, only fifteen were rescued alive by a passing ship, the Argus, thir-
teen days later, and of those four more died soon after. In a regular column of The
Times headed ‘French Papers’, a translated account of the ‘Shipwreck of The
Méduse French Frigate’ appeared in September 1816.37 This eyewitness account
of the wreck written by one of its survivors, a surgeon called Savigny, had origin-
ally appeared in Le journal des débats and The Times was bribed by French anti-
Royalists to publish the translation. The wreck had been entirely due to the
incompetence of the naval captain, a pro-Bourbon aristocrat, Hugues Duroys de
Chaumareys, appointed to his post by the Ultra-Royalist Minister of the Marine,
Vicomte de Bouchage. Seeing its political danger, the government of Louis XVIII
had tried to suppress the story altogether, but liberal factions were determined to
use it against the Royalists to expose corruption in the Restoration government in
France. In November 1817, a book-length account of the shipwreck by two of the
raft survivors, the surgeon Henri Savigny and Alexandre Corréard, a geographer-
engineer, was published, the text of which was Géricault’s main source.38 This too
was swiftly translated into English, and the ‘real’ and the ‘theatrical’ seemed to
collide in a shipwreck narrative that was, according to the Morning Post, ‘more
deeply and dreadfully tragical than any tragedy could ever be conceived . . . here
the unfortunate actors were real sufferers, human-life the Scene, the pitiless ocean
the Theatre’.39 It is likely that Byron also consulted this account: certainly his
reviewers assumed that he had, describing Byron’s representation of the ship-
wreck in Don Juan as ‘neither more nor less than the dreadful tale of the French
36 Advertisement, Morning Chronicle (Monday 12 June 1820), n.p. The advertisement was repeated,
17/27/29th June 1820. The advertisement continued: ‘[t]his magnificent Picture excited universal
interest in the last Exhibition of the Louvre, and is now open for public inspection in the Roman
Gallery, at the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly . . . Admission 1s, Description 6d.’ The Egyptian Hall was open
from 1812 until 1904 when the building, then a hall for early cinematic exhibitions, was demolished.
Originally called the London Museum by its founder William Bullock, it quickly came to be called the
Egyptian Hall because of its exterior of simulated Egyptian relief sculpture and hieroglyphs. See
Jonathan Crary, ‘Géricault’, pp. 5–25, 9–10.
37 [Anon.], ‘The Meduse French Frigate’, The Times (17 September 1816), p. 2.
38 Naturally, the account given of the incident by Henri Savigny and Alexandre Corréard was self-
exculpatory, and probably not entirely reliable.
39 [Anon.], ‘Literature’, Morning Post (17 August 1818), n.p.
Live Byron 119
frigate, La Meduse, [sic] with the horrors of the Raft related verbatim’.40 John
Keats was confident that ‘the description of the Storm . . . is evidently taken from
the Medusa frigate’.41 The news of the wreck circulated in popular culture, inspir-
ing William Thomas Moncrieff ’s nautical melodrama, Shipwreck of the Medusa;
or, The Fatal Raft! (1820), the first of ‘a new species of drama’ that would become a
craze in the transpontine theatres in the 1820s and 1830s.42 The story was recircu-
lated in the cheap press too: when it launched in 1823, for example, the twopenny
Portfolio ran a woodcut of ‘The Shipwreck of the Medusa’ and a story taken from
the ‘Narrative of M. Sevigne [sic]’, and a little twopenny chapbook with a crude
woodcut appeared, promising to ‘[d]etail . . . a mass of human suffering almost
without parallel . . . Eleven Only Survived After feeding on the Dead Bodies’.43 In
August 1821, Byron wrote to John Murray from Ravenna, ‘Dear Sir,—enclosed
are the two acts corrected. With regard to the charges about the Shipwreck,—
40 [Anon.], ‘Don Juan’, New Bon Ton Magazine, or Telescope of the Times 3 (August 1819), p. 236. By
1819 two other books on the Medusa wreck had appeared, and a number of prints.
41 John Keats, reported by his friend Joseph Severn: see The Keats Circle: Letters and Papers 1814–
1879, ed. H. E. Rollins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), vol. 2, p. 134; quoted in
Lord Byron: The Critical Heritage, ed. Andrew Rutherford [1970] (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 163.
42 George Daniel, ‘Remarks’ to Shipwreck of the Medusa; or, The Fatal Raft! by William Thomas
Moncrieff (London; Thomas Richardson, 1830), viii. Moncrieff was the manager of the Coburg
Theatre from 1819. Moncrieff ’s Shipwreck of the Medusa was not immediately successful, but its run
was extended when Géricault’s picture arrived in London: ‘the great anxiety expressed by many of the
Patrons of this Theatre, to witness the Representation of “the shipwreck of the medusa; or, the fatal
raft,”—in which the deplorable state of the surviving Crew of that Vessel on the Raft a short time pre-
vious to their Discovery & Preservation, as depicted in the Great Picture now Exhibiting in Pall Mall,
15 only remaining, after thirteen days abandonment, out of one hundred and fifty that had originally
embarked, is so pathetically and correctly delineated, has determined the Proprietors to continue it, as
an Afterpiece, for a few Nights longer’: quoted in Meisel, Realizations, p. 190. An original edition of
the Royal Coburg Theatre playbill is held in the Theatre Museum (Victoria and Albert Museum)
archive, London. See Riding, ‘Staging The Raft’. Frederick Burwick points out that international news
was seized upon for dramatization as it was less likely to be censored in the theatres. An enthusiast of
colonial expansion, Moncrieff rewrote the Medusa story so that its hero becomes a stalwart British
sailor, Jack Gallant, who intervenes to prevent cannibalism on the raft. Although Moncrieff claimed
that his play ‘led the way’ for nautical melodrama, shipwrecks and battles at sea had been popular at
Sadler’s Wells since 1804, when the theatre was fitted with a large shallow water tank and The Siege of
Gibaltrar was staged with aquatic effects. Burwick says Moncrieff ’s innovation was ‘the effective con-
juration of “reality” through . . . documentary pretense’: see Frederick Burwick, Romantic Drama:
Acting and Reacting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 73–9. Matthew Kaiser, in an
absorbing chapter on nautical melodrama, suggests that the form ‘allegorizes Britain’s historical and
economic shift from a relatively stable agrarian world at play to a capitalist world in play’: Matthew
Kaiser, The World in Play: Portraits of a Victorian Concept (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
2012), p. 58. Sarah Hibberd notes that in France, ‘Auguste Pilati and Friedrich von Flotow’s opera
Le Naufrage de la Méduse (Théâtre de la Renaissance, 1839) . . . incorporated an ambitious ani-
mated representation of Théodore Géricault’s celebrated painting on the subject’. Critics were not
convinced that the melodic singing on board the raft was entirely credible, however: Sarah
Hibberd, ‘Le Naufrage de la Méduse and Operatic Spectacle in 1830s Paris’, 19th-Century Music
36:3 (Spring 2013): 248–63, p. 251.
43 [Anon.],‘The Shipwreck of the Medusa’, Portfolio of Entertaining and Instructive Varieties in
History, Science, Literature, the Fine Arts, &c. 1:24 (issues undated), (London: Duncombe, 1823):
369–73, p. 369. The Portfolio’s account is taken from the narrative of ‘M. Sevigne’. The chapbook
[Anon.], Narrative of the Dreadful Shipwreck of the Medusa Frigate (London: James Meldon, n.d., early
1820s) is a booklet of fourteen pages with a broadside-like title page, and a woodcut.
120 Serial Forms
I think that I told both you and Mr Hobhouse, years ago, that [there] was not a
single circumstance of it not taken from fact; not, indeed, from any single ship-
wreck, but all from actual facts of different wrecks. Almost all Don Juan is real
life, either my own, or from people I knew.’44 Byron did use the Medusa accounts
but he also used the three volumes of J. G. Dalyell’s Shipwrecks and Disasters at
Sea (1812).45 In an article entitled ‘Lord Byron’s Plagiarisms’, The Times printed a
long list of extracts from Dalyell, each followed by quotations from Byron’s Don
Juan which versify the prose almost verbatim. The Times excuses this as analogous
to Shakespeare’s use of Plutarch to impress his plays ‘with the stamp of antique
reality’.46 Shipwrecks also ran in Byron’s family: his own grandfather, Captain
John ‘Foul-Weather Jack’ Byron, had written an account of the shipwreck of the
Wager in 1741, which Byron used to authenticate his own account in Don Juan:
‘his [Juan’s] hardships were comparative | To those related in my grand-dad’s
“Narrative” ’ (ii: 137).47
Scène de Naufrage and Don Juan both imagine distant scenes of bodily suffer-
ing at sea, and Byron’s poem, written in Venice, and Géricault’s rolled canvas,
painted in Paris, made voyages of their own to London. They were works designed
to be mobile: their meanings tightly packed into corporeal forms which were the
vehicles of sensory and affective information. When Géricault’s 1819 shipwreck
painting, now retitled The Raft of the Medusa, arrived in London, it was linked
immediately to Don Juan.48 A reviewer of the London exhibition noted how the
figure of a father cradling his dead son in ‘Mr. Jerricault’s’[sic] picture ‘mocks all
description, if we except that of the author of Don Juan, who (if fame speak true,
and if criticism may confirm the belief) has so exquisitely depicted this groupe
44 Byron to John Murray, (23 August 1821), in Lord Byron, Selected Prose, ed. Peter Gunn
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), p. 456.
45 Jane Stabler records that Byron subscribed to Gaglignani’s Messenger published daily Monday to
Saturday in Paris. It drew news from a variety of British national and regional sources and it had its
own Westminster correspondent. It also had a ‘News from France’ section. He also read the Edinburgh
Review while abroad, as Murray sent it to him [see Elizabeth French Boyd, Byron’s Don Juan: A Critical
Study (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1945), p. 95], so perhaps he read Francis
Jeffrey,‘Voyage of H. M. Ship Alceste along the Coast of Corea to the Island of Lewchew, with an Account
of her subsequent Shipwreck’, Edinburgh Review 30:60 (September 1818): 388–406, in which Jeffrey
compared the Alceste and Medusa disasters and concluded that ‘[n]ever was there a contrast so strik-
ing, as in the conduct of the English and French sailors’, extolling the decency of the English over the
anarchy of the French: p. 399.
46 [Anon.], ‘Lord Byron’s Plagiarisms,’ The Times (6 August 1821), p. 3. The Times claims to be
defending Byron against charges of plagiarism in the Monthly Magazine.
47 See Thomas Moore, The Works of Lord Byron, with His Letters and Journals and His Life, 14 vols
(London: John Murray, 1839), vol. 3, p. 291.
48 Christine Riding has considered Don Juan and the Géricault together in a discussion of the
sublime. Christine Riding, ‘Shipwreck, Self-Preservation and the Sublime’, https://www.tate.org.
uk/art/research-publications/the-sublime/christine-riding-shipwreck-self-preservation-and-the-
sublime-r1133015. Riding also cites the first published comparison of the two works: David Carey,
‘State of the Fine Arts in France’, The Monthly Magazine 49:340 (1 June 1820), p. 417. Riding, ‘Staging
The Raft’, p. 16.
Live Byron 121
[sic] in a passage of that powerful but noxious publication’.49 Both Byron’s ‘noxious’
Don Juan and Géricault’s ‘shocking’ painting, of which one English reviewer com-
plained that ‘these subjects of physical horror are ill-chosen, because they excite
disgust’, were felt to be disgusting for complicated but remarkably similar reasons
to do with their scale, their use of bodiliness, and their newsworthiness.50 In both
cases, these reasons were less ‘reasons’ than affects. The strong affects produced
by both these works return us to the question of the relationship between spec-
tacle and embodied knowledge in this politically turbulent period in both France
and England.
The choice made by Byron and by Géricault in 1819 to represent a ‘real’ news
event in epic poetry and in grand Salon painting puzzled many of their critics at
the time and later. Géricault himself was clear that ‘[l]’artiste . . . doit s’exercer à
une indifference complete pour tout ce qui émane des journaux et des journal-
istes . . . et rester sourd au bruit que font tous les vendeurs de vaine fumée’ [‘The
artist . . . must practise complete indifference to all that emanates from newspapers
and journalists . . . and remain deaf to the noise made by all those who sell empty
smoke’], pursuing instead ‘le beau et le sublime’.51 Nevertheless, Géricault’s ‘stern
fidelity’ to his subject matter and his attention to ‘the details of the horrid facts’
were noticed immediately, and Byron in Don Juan was read as ‘representing
[things] as they are’ in ‘the England of the day that now is’.52 Critics ever since
have puzzled over Géricault’s ‘remarkable . . . literalness’: one essay ends apologet-
ically for having treated the artist ‘as though he were a foreign correspondent on a
newspaper, complimenting him on the accuracy of the reports he sends home’.53
Jordan Bear has argued that The Raft is ‘a news picture’, avant la lettre.54 Jonathan
49 William Henry Parry, ‘M. Jerricault’s Picture of the Raft of the Medusa’, Literary Chronicle and
Weekly Review (16 December 1820), p. 814. Barbey d’Aurevilly identified Géricault as ‘le Byron de la
Peinture’ (the Byron of Painting) and Jules Michelet described Géricault and Byron as ‘Ces deux
grands poètes de la mort’ (these two great poets of death): Barbey d’Aurevilly quoted in Albert Aladeff,
The Raft of the Medusa: Géricault, Art and Race (Munich: Prestel, 2002), p. 31; Jules Michelet, Géricault
(1848; rev. edn, Caen 1991), p. 51.
50 [Anon.],‘Fine Arts’, New Monthly Magazine (September 1820): 316–18, p. 317.
51 Théodore Géricault, quoted in Brian Grosskurth, ‘The Representation of Death in the Painting
of Géricault and Delacroix during the First and Second Bourbon Restorations, 1814–1830’, unpub-
lished DPhil thesis, Oxford University, 2 vols, 1989, vol. 1, p. 145. Quoted in Christine Riding,
‘Shipwreck, Self-Preservation and the Sublime’, note 60, n.p. (translation my own).
52 [Anon.], ‘Fine Arts’, New Monthly Magazine, p. 317. [Anon.], ‘Raft of the Medusa: [Mr. Jerricault’s
Picture, at the Egyptian Hall]’, The London Literary Gazette, and Journal of Belles Lettres, Arts, Sciences
etc. (1 July 1820), p. 427. John Gibson Lockhart’s anonymous Letter to the Right Hon. Lord Byron. By
John Bull (April/May 1821), reprinted in Lord Byron: The Critical Heritage, ed. Andrew Rutherford,
pp. 182–91, pp. 190, 189.
53 Twentieth-century art historian Benedict Nicolson starts his essay on the Raft confidently
claiming that Géricault’s ‘subject-matter is more or less incidental’, because it is only ‘a pretext for
depicting the struggle of humanity for freedom’: Benedict Nicolson, ‘The “Raft” from the Point of
View of Subject-Matter’, Burlington Magazine 96:617, Théodore Géricault (August 1954): 240–9,
pp. 240, 248.
54 Jordan Bear argues it is a news picture ‘because it takes as its subject the challenges and short-
comings of the transmission of visual information’: Jordan Bear, ‘Adrift: The Time and Space of the
122 Serial Forms
Crary in an important article on Géricault’s painting and the panorama, is more

subtle in seeing Géricault’s painting as occupying an ‘unstable position between
two distinct historical worlds’: that of art derived from antiquity and the
Renaissance, and ‘an unbounded heterogeneous informational field of journalis-
tic, medical, legal, and political sources of evidence, testimony, fact, and other
guarantees of the real’.55 Byron’s Don Juan occupies a similarly unstable position
between two historical worlds. In addition to the carefully documented ship-
wreck, Byron cheerfully, even garrulously, distributes topicalities and facts across
the full extended range of his serial poem.56 In both the case of the poem and the
case of the picture, the insistence on topicality and fact scandalized contemporary
critics. Géricault’s elaborate preparations for making his painting ‘real’ have been
well documented, including tracking down and interviewing Corréad and
Savigny and getting them to build a replica of the raft in his studio so that he
could pose wax figures on it. He sourced human body parts from morgues and
hospitals to study and paint anatomy but, more precisely, to capture the look and
progress of death on human flesh. This transgressive attention to bodiliness was
immediately picked up in the London reviews of the final painting: the New
Monthly Magazine complained about ‘an ostentatious and far too minute display
of anatomical drawing in this picture’.57 The repulsiveness of Don Juan was identi-
fied as residing in its bodily detail, too. William Hazlitt wrote of Canto II that
‘[a]fter the lightening and the hurricane, we are introduced to the interior of the
cabin and the contents of wash-hand basins’.58 This is a reference to Juan’s seasick-
ness on board the Trinidada, and it is the insistent return to the lexicon of the
flesh—hungry, sexual, leaky, physical bodies, and the intimate material detail of
the body-world—that offends.59 The Times quoted two stanzas from Canto II
News in Géricault’s Le Radeau de la Méduse’, in Jason Hill and Vanessa R. Schwartz (eds), Getting the
Picture: The Visual Culture of the News (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), pp. 182–8, p. 182. However,
Bear’s argument is proleptic and makes too much of (not yet invented) electric telegraphy.
55 Crary, ‘Géricault’, p. 13. On his visit to England (1820–2) Géricault admired the new pictures of
Wilkie. It seems highly probable, therefore, that he admired Newsmongers (which Wilkie exhibited in
1821, while Géricault was in England) and Guess my Name, both of which are small genre scenes of an
anecdotal nature. The Chelsea Pensioners reading the ‘Gazette’ of the Battle of Waterloo (Apsley House)
was exhibited in 1822.
56 Elizabeth French Boyd suggests that ‘the points of departure for many of Byron’s ramblings on
contemporary subjects’ are to be found in the Edinburgh Review, copies of which Murray was period-
ically sending to Venice. She finds references in Don Juan to ‘medicine, political economy, subjects
under debate in Parliament and in religious synods, Ireland, slavery, post roads, travels to the North
Pole in search of a north-west passage, descriptions of country seats, indicating the revival of interest
in gothic architecture and gay reviews of recent books on French cookery and the science of the gour-
met’: Boyd, Byron’s Don Juan, p. 152.
57 [Anon.], ‘Fine Arts’, New Monthly Magazine, p. 317.
58 Hazlitt, ‘The Spirit of the Age’, pp. 161–2.
59 Similarly, there was a scalar problem with Géricault’s ‘treatment of a genre subject on a monu-
mental scale’ because, ‘to quote the Annales du Musée, large-scale paintings were then “reserved for
the representation of events of general interest, such as a national celebration, a great victory, or one of
Live Byron 123
about those on the raft watching the Trinidada sink: ‘They grieved for those who
perish’d with the cutter, | And also for the biscuit-casks and butter’ (ii: 61). It was
appalled by the ‘disgusting merriment’ of the tone.60 Blackwood’s Magazine found
the poem ‘filthy and impious’.61 In both the picture and the poem, the scandal
seems to be generated by the ‘realness’ of the accounts, mediated through bodily
experience. Yet French critics had also complained that Géricault’s picture was
not topical enough, as the tangled naked bodies on the raft were not identifiably
French, so the picture could not be easily decoded as a national-historical Salon
painting.62 It is easy to imagine that Byron could have written a topical poem, on,
for example, the Battle of Waterloo, without exciting horror: his section on
Waterloo in Childe Harold was widely admired and quoted. The scandal is not
really about topicality per se, then, it is rather about the wrong kind of topicality.63
Both Byron and Géricault borrow the affective charge of the topical to intensify
the experience of their readers and viewers. They were both interested in exciting
a powerful somatic response from their audiences through the incorporation of
sensory information into their work. And they were both deliberately taking part
in the immersive media revolution that was taking place around them.
‘A Storm and Shipwreck’: The Shows of London
‘Was Byron only a pretext for a panorama?’ asked G. H. Lewes in a review of

Kean’s production of Sardanapalus, and it is easy to see why Byron’s work became
so instantly popular with scene painters, anthologists, travel writers, and panorama
painters.64 Single episodes of topological description could be easily detached and
adapted into visual scenes and spectacles, or quoted as pop-up captions for travel
books.65 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage becomes one of the foundational texts for a
those instances of sublime self-sacrifice that are the glory of religion and of patriotism” ’: quoted in
Eitner, Géricault’s Raft, pp. 51–2.
60 [Anon.], ‘Remarks on Don Juan’, The Times (4 September 1819), p. 4.

61 [Anon.], ‘Remarks on Don Juan’, Blackwood’s Magazine 5 (August 1819): 512–18, p. 514.
62 Salon critics complained that there was nothing to show the exact place or the nationality of the
sailors. Contemporary French criticism of the painting is cited in Germain Bazin, Theodore Géricault:
étude critique, documents et catalogue raisonné, vol. 6 (Paris: Bibliothèque des arts, 1997) and see also
Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, Extremities: Painting Empire in Post-Revolutionary France (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 2002), p. 220.
63 ‘Byron’s use of very topical pieces of news out of context was received by his contemporaries as
writing from a dislocated social position rather than as a reflection of the fragmented culture the
author and his readers shared.’ Stabler, Byron, p. 139.
64 [G. H. Lewes], Leader (25 June 1853), p. 50. Lewes is reviewing Charles Kean’s production of
Byron’s Sardanapalus: quoted in Altick, Shows of London, p. 186. Helen Groth discusses the produc-
tion in detail in Helen Groth, ‘Byronic Networks: Circulating Images in Minds and Media’, in Moving
Images: Nineteenth-Century Reading and Screen Practices (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2013), pp. 54–77.
65 Ralph O’Connor notices how excerpts from Byron ‘became more frequent in the 1820s, espe-
cially in the guidebooks to commercial displays’: Ralph O’Connor, The Earth on Show: Fossils and the
124 Serial Forms
new regime of popular reprinting and proliferation. It was reproduced tirelessly,

spawning pirated copies, subsidiaries, and supplements, both unauthorized and
official.66 Offshore reprints, not covered by English copyrights, abounded. Alfred
Tennyson, John Clare, William Wordsworth, and William Gladstone all owned
cheap Galignani editions of Byron printed in Paris, and William Godwin owned
an even cheaper offshore German reprint.67 It is curiously appropriate that this
text should have been so relentlessly quarried, excerpted and anthologized, re-
mixed and quoted out of context in a dizzying variety of material and print forms
for an audience wider than it had ever before been possible to imagine. Childe
Harold enacts the uncoupling of its own sequence and obligingly fragments itself
into new forms. After Childe Harold, tourists could stand on the Bridge of Sighs
in Venice, or any other of the places mentioned in the poem, and consult their
pocket editions of Byron to create a sharper sense of their own actual presence on
the very spot. Inveterate traveller John Ruskin appreciated the revivification of
the past and the sense of his own live presence channelled by Byron: ‘Byron told
me of, and reanimated for me, the real people whose feet had worn the marble I
trod on’.68 Extracts from Byron were used, too, in the guidebooks for Henry Aston
Barker and John Burford’s panoramas.69 Either standing on the Bridge of Sighs,
or at Burford and Barker’s celebrated 1819 topographical View of Venice at the
Panorama in the Strand, Byron’s poetry mediated ‘live-ness’.
The restless onwards movement of Childe Harold suggests the seriality and
movement of a sequence of images represented by the moving panoramas and
moving dioramas of the early 1800s, which was different from the viewing
Poetics of Popular Science, 1802–1856 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 289.
Peter J. Manning records that Murray’s Hand-Book for Travellers in Central Italy; Including the Papal
States, Rome, and the Cities of Etruria (1843) quotes Byron eighteen times, on the Pantheon, the
Laocoon, St. Peter’s etc.: Manning, ‘Childe Harold in the Marketplace’. James Buzard discusses the
ubiquity of Byron in nineteenth-century tourist handbooks in James Buzard, The Beaten Track:
European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to ‘Culture’, 1800–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1993) and Tom Mole discusses remediations of Byron in What the Victorians Made of Romanticism.
The cheap twopenny Mirror reprinted Byron in its pages for a new audience. See Klancher, The Making
of English Reading Audiences, p. 79. See also Andrew Elfenbein, Byron and the Victorians (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995).
66 For example, Murray’s Historical Illustrations, which was a supplementary collection of John Cab
Hobhouse’s art-historical notes to Canto IV of Childe Harold, was published as a separate volume.
67 Information from St Clair, The Reading Nation, pp. 302–3. St Clair notes that only four living
British poets were in enough demand to be pirated by more than one European publisher in the
Romantic period: Moore, Scott, Byron, and Campbell. Giovanni Antonio Galignani operated from
Paris and was able to offer these volumes at a few francs each: p. 294. For information on dramatiza-
tions of Byron, see Margaret J. Howell, Byron Tonight: A Poet’s Plays on the Nineteenth-Century Stage
(Windlesham: Springwood Books, 1982).
68 John Ruskin, Praeterita: The Autobiography of John Ruskin [1889] (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1983), p. 140. As James Buzard says, ‘the “Byronic” held out the promise of making Continental
experience “live”, of saturating it anew with poetical evocations’: Buzard, The Beaten Track, p. 117.
69 Using quotations from Byron’s Childe Harold to market his Mont Blanc panorama in 1835 (‘The
Alps, The Palaces of nature . . . yet leave vain man below!’), Robert Burford participated in what Jerome
Christensen has described as the ‘literary system of Byronism’: Christensen, Lord Byron’s Strength, p. xvi.
Live Byron 125
experience of static 360-degree panoramas.70 It is not always clear what was the
kinetic element of spectacles advertised as moving panoramas in the late eight-
eenth and very early nineteenth centuries, but by 1820, what is generally described
as a moving panorama was created by unwinding a painted scene between two
rollers to show a sequential moving image.71 These moving panoramas were
mobile in other ways: they required far less exhibition space than the 360-degree
fixed panoramas, so they could easily be transported on tour, and they were
more responsive to topical events because it was easier and cheaper to change
the scenes.72 The moving panoramas and dioramas often offered other kinetic
effects too: the diorama used coloured backlighting to moderate the temporality
of its scenes, moving from dawn to day, or twilight to night, for example, and
magic lantern projections, mechanical effects, and sound and other sensuous
effects all contributed to compensate for the full immersion of the 360-degree
version of the panorama.73 The moving panorama gave the impression that the
(static) viewer was moving through space and time, much like the Childe reclin-
ing on the deck of his boat.
The spectators of panoramas, dioramas, and cosmoramas were beguiled by
special technological effects, but they were also watching the process by which a
news event became a media actuality and claimed a place in the historical series.
With Derrida, I argue that ‘live “communication” and “real time” are never pure:
they do not furnish us with intuitions and transparencies, or with perceptions
unmarked by technical interpretation or intervention’.74 The media make what
Derrida calls ‘artifactuality’ out of news events, and ‘the “reality” (to which
“actuality” refers)—however singular, irreducible, stubborn, painful, or tragic it
may be—reaches us through fictional constructions’.75 Derrida explains, ‘[o]ne
must, at the same time, defer, keep a distance, linger and rush. This must be done
70 For explanations of different panorama and diorama forms, see Altick, Shows of London; Stephan
Oettermann, The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium (London: Zone Books, 1997); Ralph Hyde,
Panoramania!: The Art and Entertainment of the ‘All-Embracing’ View (London: Trefoil in association
with Barbican Art Gallery, 1988); Bernard Comment, The Panorama (London: Reaktion Books, 1999);
Erkki Huhtamo, Illusions in Motion: Media Archaeology of the Moving Panorama and Related
Spectacles (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013). For an exhaustive description of the panoramas of the
nineteenth century, see Lawrie Garrison et al, Panoramas, 1787–1900, 5 vols (London: Pickering &
Chatto, 2012).
71 See Altick, ‘Panoramas in Motion’, in Shows of London, pp. 198–210, p. 199. Altick reminds us
that de Loutherbourg’s ‘clouds-over-Greenwich device’ in his Eidophusikon was achieved by rolling
cloth across the upper section of the scene and applying different lighting effects to it: p. 199.
72 Information from Plunkett, ‘Moving Panoramas’. Plunkett is interested in the exhibition of these
panoramas in the provinces, and particularly in the South West of England.
73 Robert Barker’s panorama of London, first exhibited in June 1791, covered 1,479 square feet of
canvas. A second, larger version of this panorama, which opened in the upper circle of the Leicester
Square rotunda in 1795, covered 2,700 square feet.
74 Jacques Derrida, ‘The Deconstruction of Actuality’, in Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews,
1971–2001, ed. and trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002):
85–116, p. 88.
75 Ibid., p. 86.
126 Serial Forms
properly . . . to get as close as possible to what is happening by way of actuality.’76

The combination of the anachronous (the distancing) and the hyperactual (the
rush) is a vital form of response, resulting in a mediation that takes responsibility
for its subject matter and re-presents it as part of a historical series, but equally as
a singularity which demands close attention and commands a particular affective
response from its audience.77
Storms and shipwrecks were foundational in the show culture of London from
the late eighteenth century onwards, just as meteorological and shipping news
were foundational to the development of newspapers.78 In his celebrated inven-
tion of the Eidophusikon, the landscape and theatrical scenic artist Philip James
de Loutherbourg
resolved to add motion to resemblance. He knew that the most exquisite painting
represented only one moment of the time of action, and though we might justly
admire the representation of the foaming surge, the rolling ship, the gliding
water . . . yet however well the action was depicted, the heightened look soon per-
ceived the object to be at rest, and the deception lasted no longer than the first
glance. He therefore planned a series of moving pictures, which should unite the
painter and the mechanic; by giving natural motion to accurate resemblance.79
Loutherbourg’s Eidophusikon deployed a battery of special effects, visual,

mechanical and sonic, to animate a series of scenes on a fairly small scale.80
Audiences sat on benches in front of what looked like a miniature proscenium
theatre [see Fig. 3.3]. The show worked sequentially through scenes of Dawn,
Noon, Sunset and Midnight so that the serial nature of time seems to have been
one of its implicit subjects. The novel combination of fine art exhibition, theatrical
effects, and mechanical machinery worked against fixed generic categories, so
that it was difficult to know quite what this show was. The Eidophusikon was
advertised as delivering ‘Various Imitations of Natural Phenomena, Represented
76 Ibid., p. 92.
77 Derrida says, ‘It is the law of response or responsibility, the law of the other.’ Ibid., p. 92.
78 Stuart Sherman points out that for early newspapers, the shipping news provided ‘a stable source
of copy’: Sherman, Telling Time, p. 119. See also James Sutherland, The Restoration Newspaper and Its
Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 123–31. Shipwrecks were also a
stock-in-trade for the street balladeers, although ‘the majority of shipwreck ballads paid little or no
attention to themes like cannibalism, survival on desert islands, or encounters with “savage” peoples’.
They focused instead on patriotic stories of sexual fidelity and martyrdom: see Kirsty Reid, ‘Shipwrecks
on the Streets: Maritime Disaster and the Broadside Ballad Tradition in Nineteenth-Century Britain
and Ireland’, in Carl Thompson (ed.), Shipwreck in Art and Literature: Images and Interpretations from
Antiquity to the Present Day (New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 133–49, p. 133.
79 European Magazine 1 (1782): 182, quoted in Huhtamo, Illusions in Motion, p. 101 (my
emphasis).
80 The Eidophusikon’s stage was two metres wide, one and a quarter metres high, and two and a
half metres deep: see Ann Bermingham, ‘Technologies of Illusion: De Loutherbourg’s Eidophusikon in
Eighteenth-Century London’, Art History 39:2 (April 2016): 376–99, p. 377.
Live Byron 127
Fig. 3.3. A View of Philip James de Loutherbourg’s Eidophusikon during a

performance, at left a man bowing to a woman, to right figures seated on a bench in
the foreground, watching a scene titled ‘Satan Arraying his Troops on the Banks of a
Fiery Lake, with the Raising of the Palace of Pandemonium’ from Milton’s Paradise
Lost (c.1782) [© The Trustees of the British Museum]
by Moving Pictures’, and the meteorological spectacle of a storm at sea was the
grand finale of Loutherbourg’s first Eidophusikon show in 1781, ‘A Storm and
Shipwreck’.81 The Morning Herald praised it as ‘a spectacle so well contrived to
gratify the sight’, but regretted the over-enthusiasm of audience members who
kept standing up and blocking the view of those sitting behind them.82 The
painter Thomas Gainsborough was fascinated by Loutherbourg’s thunder and
storm effects, and returned again and again to see them.83 Five years after its
debut, in January 1786, the shipwreck scene was revived and represented as a
re-enactment of a ‘real’ shipwreck that had happened three weeks before, the loss
of the Halsewell Indiaman in the English Channel on 6 January 1786 as she set out
81 Richard Altick, ‘The Eidophusikon’, in Shows of London, pp. 117–27, p. 121. Ann Bermingham
sees the Eidophusikon as a philosophical machine, suggesting that ‘it was the paradoxical mix of the
mechanical and empirical with the aesthetic and spiritual that defined the approach to the natural
world in this moment’: Bermingham, ‘Technologies of Illusion’, p. 379.
82 [Anon.], Morning Herald (1 March 1781), quoted in Altick, ‘The Eidophusikon’, p. 121.
83 See William Whitley, Thomas Gainsborough (London: John Murray, 1915), p. 354. Ann
Bermingham speculates that, ‘[p]erhaps it was this ability to capture—or, more precisely, mimic—the
evanescent that entranced Reynolds and Gainsborough’: Bermingham, ‘Technologies of Illusion’, p. 394.
128 Serial Forms
for Madras, so that now the emphasis fell squarely upon the shipwreck rather
than the storm.84 This time this episode was billed as an ‘exact, awful and tremen-
dous Representation of that lamentable event’, and was greatly admired as ‘awful
and astonishing . . . mariners have declared, whilst viewing the scene, that it
amounted to reality’:85
The vessels, which were beautiful models, went over the waves with a natural
undulation, those nearest making their courses with a proportionate rate to
their bulk, and those farther off moving with a slower pace. They were all cor-
rectly rigged, and carried only such sails as their situation would demand. Those
in the distance were coloured in every part to preserve the aerial perspective of
the scene. The illusion was so perfect, that the audience were frequently heard to
exclaim, ‘Hark! the signal of distress came from that vessel labouring out there—
and now from that.’86
The ‘exact reproduction’ of the wreck of the Halsewell Indiaman shifted the status
of the show from a quasi-scientific examination of a natural-historical phenom-
enon to a topical and affective representation of an actual and singular event. Ann
Bermingham describes this as part of the ‘downward spiral from elite entertain-
ment to commonplace variety show [which] was typical for eighteenth-century
attractions of this sort’.87 But I think this ‘downward spiral’, which moved the
meaning of the show away from polite knowledge and towards topical informa-
tion, is more important than has been realized in signalling the beginning of a
repositioning of the ‘real’ in popular culture, inaugurating a version of ‘actuality’
through virtuality which would gain even more momentum in the early nine-
teenth century. It is less of a downward spiral than an example of the traction of
an accelerating news culture in a rapidly expanding popular culture. A kind of
sticky topicality began to adhere to formerly polite abstractions. One eyewitness
84 Of more than 240 crew and passengers, only 74 survived. Charles Dickens later wrote a short
story, ‘The Long Voyage’, Household Words (31 December 1853), which remembered the wreck. By
1786, Loutherbourg had sold his Eidophusikon to his assistant Chapman who was now running it in
less salubrious spaces and with a much lower entrance fee. On the night of 21 March 1800, a fire
started in a nearby brothel and Chapman was burned out. The Eidophusikon had been on show for
nineteen years.
85 Altick, ‘The Eidophusikon’, p. 125; Ephraim Hardcastle [William Henry Pyne], Wine and
Walnuts; or, After Dinner Chit-Chat, 2 vols (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1823),
vol. 1, p. 292.
86 Hardcastle, Wine and Walnuts, vol. 1, p. 299; quoted in Christopher Baugh, ‘Philippe de
Loutherbourg: Technology-Driven Entertainment and Spectacle in the Late Eighteenth Century’,
Huntington Library Quarterly 70:2 (2007): 251–68, p. 261. See also Christopher Baugh, Garrick and
Loutherbourg, (Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey, 1990).
87 Bermingham, ‘Technologies of Illusion’, p. 385. Bermingham suggests that this is why so few of
these shows have survived. See also Altick, ‘The Eidophusikon’, p. 122. Iain McCalman makes a similar
point about the competitive commercial world of shows which forced an inevitable sensationalization:
see Iain McCalman, ‘Specters of Quackery: The Fragile Career of Philippe de Loutherbourg’, Cultural
and Social History 3 (2006): 241–54.
Live Byron 129
report of the Eidophusikon reflected that ‘man was an extraordinary creature,

who could create a copy of Nature, to be taken for Nature’s self ’.88 But the
Eidophusikon had moved imitation into a new reality, and, through its immersive
technologies, it had begun to create affective responses to actual events, and to
enable the kind of feeling at a distance necessary to an extending civic culture. Its
audience was not silent and passive but was ‘frequently heard to exclaim’.
Spectators did not consume so much as participate in an event which they experi-
enced as ‘live’, and stories of somatic responses to panoramas and immersive
shows of all kinds survive. Visitors reported feeling vertiginous at mountain
panoramas and seasick at nautical ones, and sometimes audience members would
leap into the water tank during a nautical melodrama, or would scramble onto
the stage during a performance, join in the battle scenes, or shout advice at the
characters on stage.89 The experience of live-ness is not generated by a perform-
ance but by an interactivity between the audience and the performance (which
does not have to involve living bodies to be live). Once we accept that our under-
standing of live performance shifts with changing forms of technological medi-
ation, ‘live’ becomes a more complicated and useful concept. As The Times put it
in 1785, Loutherbourg’s work functioned ‘[t]o bring into living action . . . [t]o see
exact representations’, and it altered the notion of the ‘live’ in the 1780s.90 The
value of the ‘living action’ of these moving shows has often been diminished by
critics as ‘sensational’ and ‘directed less at [spectators’] intellect than their feel-
ings’, but this seems to be reinscribing an Enlightenment split between body and
mind, a split which these mechanical-philosophical shows took an important
part in challenging.91 If we think of these shows as ‘live’ performances then we
can better understand the importance of the intensification of somatic experience
in forming responses to certain kinds of knowledge. This affective knowledge can
then be returned to the rest of the social world in ways which are politically
important. The embodiment of knowledge is one of the subjects of Byron’s Don
Juan and of Géricault’s painting, both of which aspire to live performance. While
88 Hardcastle, Wine and Walnuts, vol. 1, p. 298.

89 Markman Ellis records some of these bodily reactions to the new shows, the most famous being
that ‘Henry Aston Barker [of the Leicester Square Panorama] later claimed that, on the occasion of the
royal visit in 1793 to the Spithead panorama, “Queen Charlotte is reported to have said that the sight
of this picture made her feel sea-sick” ’: Markman Ellis, ‘ “Spectacles within doors”: Panoramas of
London in the 1790s’, Romanticism 14:2 (2008): 133–48, p. 142; quoted from G. R. Corner, The
Panorama with memoirs of its inventor, Robert Barker, and his son, the late Henry Aston Barker
(London, 1857); reprinted from The Art Journal (February 1857), p. 7. Matthew Kaiser discusses ‘the
highly interactive manner in which working-class audiences experienced melodrama in the 1820s and
1830s’, noting that ‘[e]very now and then, a curious audience member would leap into the tank during
a performance’: Kaiser, World in Play, pp. 59, 54–5.
90 [Anon.], ‘Omai; or, a Trip Round the World’, The Times (26 December 1785). Omai was a panto-
mime written by John O’Keeffe in collaboration with Loutherbourg which opened at Covent Garden
Theatre on 20 December 1785.
91 John Brewer, ‘Sensibility and the Urban Panorama’, Huntington Library Quarterly 70:2 (June
2007): 229–49, p. 233.
130 Serial Forms
it was in the British Isles, Géricault’s painting was to undergo a similar transpos-
ition to that of de Loutherbourg’s Eidophusikon, moving from an exemplary scene
to an insistently particular one, and, as a result, revealing structural strains
between history painting and reportage, and between the scale and perspective of
academy painting and the intimate details of a closely documented struggle for
human survival.
Byron introduces Don Juan as if he were casting and advertising a show. For a
hero, ‘I’ll therefore take our ancient friend Don Juan— | We all have seen him, in
the pantomime’ (i: 1).92 In the first canto, he promises ‘Love, and War, a heavy
gale at sea,’ (i: 200) and a ‘new mythological machinery, | And very handsome
supernatural scenery’ (i: 201), and even a grand finale of ‘A panorama view of
Hell’ (i: 200) which might have echoed de Loutherbourg’s Eidophusikon show of
‘Satan Arraying his Troops on the Banks of a Fiery Lake, with the Raising of the
Palace of Pandemonium from Milton’, if Byron had only lived to write it. Herbert
Tucker feels that Byron ‘reneges on his promise’ because he insists on realism, and
that ‘this story’s actually true’ (i: 202).93 But I disagree. The spectacularization of
the ‘real’ is Byron’s new mythological machinery. Writing to Murray in 1821, he
confessed that ‘I had not quite fixed whether to make him [Don Juan] end in Hell,
or in an unhappy marriage, not knowing which would be the severest. The
Spanish tradition says Hell; but it is only probably an allegory of the other state.’94
This gives a clue as to Byron’s anarchic reversal of generic hierarchy: when Hell
becomes the allegory of a bad marriage, the real has indeed overtaken the ‘super-
natural’. The domestication of the cosmic scale of epic (Hell) into the space of the
real (an unhappy marriage) has an odd effect, so that the real grows and swells
into the ‘hyperreal’, absorbing the supernatural into its ‘realist’ dimensions and
scaling itself up to fill the giant space of the inescapable and terrible. These are
effects which were increasingly available in the larger culture at the time. A sur-
vey of the shows on offer by 1827 lists ‘the Diorama (where they turn you about
till you feel quite qualmish), the Cosmorama, the Peristrephic Panorama, and the
Apollonicon, and the Euphonon, and I know not what besides’.95 The shows had
92 Frederick Beaty suggested that Byron might have been inspired by the pantomime tradition, and
could have read Hazlitt’s review in The Examiner on 25 May 1817 of a new after-piece, based on The
Libertine, in which Don Juan was for the first time portrayed as the victim of circumstance ‘forced into
acts of villainy against his will’: Frederick L. Beaty, ‘Harlequin Don Juan’, Journal of English and
Germanic Philology 67 (1968): 395–405, p. 401.
93 Herbert Tucker, Epic: Britain’s Heroic Muse, 1790–1910 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008),
p. 225. Byron appeals ironically to ‘newspapers, whose truth all know and feel’ (i: 203) to substantiate
his claim of actual truth for his poem.
94 Byron to John Murray (16 February 1821), quoted in Boyd, Byron’s Don Juan, pp. 31–2.
95 [Anon.], ‘The Praise of the Past’, The Inspector, Literary Magazine and Review 2 (London:
Effingham Wilson, 1827): 33–5, pp. 34–5. Many of these new effects were incorporated into theatrical
productions, typically into the melodramas at the transpontine theatres. But the explicitly topical con-
tent of the shows and their claim to matrix the world as ‘real’ means that I have focused on the shows
outside of the theatre. In many cases, though, the audiences would be the same, particularly into the
1810s and 1820s as the shows cheapened and courted new audiences.
Live Byron 131
made it into the theatres too. Coleridge was famously shocked by Maturin’s
Bertram at Drury Lane in 1816, which featured a sensational shipwreck scene of
‘roaring billows’ and ‘storm of wind and rain’, which he considered entirely gra-
tuitous, and merely a ‘sonorous picture; a scene for the sake of a scene, without a
word spoken’.96 The real target of Coleridge’s denunciation of ‘sentimental theatre’
in his Biographia Literaria is the shared public space of the theatre and the
uproarious and thundering audience which ‘share[s] the garbage with the whole
stye [sic], and gobble[s] it out of a common trough’.97 In a letter to the Courier
newspaper, he warned darkly against letting the ‘right of cultural suf-
frage . . . [become] too widely diffused’.98 Byron’s Don Juan joined a culture war
that was already well under way, and it borrowed some of its effects from the
street shows and theatrical extravaganzas.
In between its insistently material details of bodily life, Don Juan delivered
Eidophusikonic scenographic effects: ‘Now overhead a rainbow, bursting through
| The scattering clouds, shone, spanning the dark sea, | Resting its bright base on
the quivering blue’ (ii: 91), and Byron lights his rainbow like a diorama: ‘It
changed, of course; a heavenly chameleon, | The airy child of vapour and the sun,
| Brought forth in purple, cradled in vermilion, | Baptized in molten gold, and
swathed in dun, | Glittering like crescents o’er a Turk’s pavilion, | And blending
every colour into one’ (ii: 92). But the clinching simile in the couplet is typical of
Byron’s bathetic method: ‘Just like a black eye in a recent scuffle | (For sometimes
we must box without the muffle)’ (ii: 92). Byron’s poem repeatedly merges body
and landscape in a poem which is tenacious in bothering at the boundary between
the human and the material world. Juan recovering from inanition and near
drowning, for example, is described: ‘on his thin worn cheek | A purple hectic
play’d like dying day | On the snow-tops of distant hills; the streak | Of sufferance
yet upon his forehead lay, | Where the blue veins look’d shadowy, shrunk, and
weak’(ii: 147). Byron’s poem breaches the boundaries of the human body, and so
does Géricault’s picture. They force the viewer to ask, with the phenomenologist
Merleau-Ponty, ‘[w]here are we to put the limit between the body and the world,
as the world is flesh?’99 The scalar effects of Don Juan ensure that its readers suffer
immersion and distance in similarly affective ways to the viewers of Géricault’s
96 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Major Works, including Biographia Literaria, ed. H. J. Jackson
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 463, 462. Coleridge affected to be particularly horrified
by the immorality of the adulterous plot and the ‘thunder of applause’ which greeted actor Edmund
Kean, playing Bertram, at the opening of Act IV. Bertram’s success at Drury Lane offers ‘a melancholy
proof of the depravation of the public mind’: p. 469.
97 Ibid., p. 437.
98 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, letter to the editor of the Courier (29 August 1816), in Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, Essays on his Times: In the Morning Post and the Courier, ed. David V. Erdman, 3 vols
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), vol. 2, pp. 435–40, p. 436. This letter was not included in
Biographia Literaria.
99 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible: Followed by Working Notes [1964], ed.
Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), p. 138.
132 Serial Forms
painting, which was visited not as ‘art’ but as a ‘show’. It had a dramatic effect on
its viewers. One of its first London visitors said, ‘[a]t the first view of this picture
we were electrified with astonishment; and we continued gazing on the tremen-
dous scene in admiration for a considerable time after our entrance into the
room’.100 The reviewer for the Examiner felt similarly that he had been ‘penetrated
at heart’ by the picture and ‘[w]e never left…[a painting] more reluctantly, or
thought of it more after we had left it, with a charmed melancholy. The impres-
sion can never forsake us.’101 Electrifying and penetrating, The Raft of the Medusa
had a strong bodily effect on its viewers. Both Don Juan and the Raft seem to have
functioned like nonconceptual art-objects which can only be ‘understood’ at a
somatic level, and this is precisely what people found disturbing, difficult, and
fascinating about them both.102
Scalar Effects
Géricault was famously indecisive about the hanging of his picture in the Louvre,
deciding it was initially too high and having it lowered. His friend Eugène
Delacroix noted that, in the new lower position, the viewer’s foot was already in
the water, concluding ‘Il faut l’avoir vu d’assez près, pour en sentir tout le mérite’
(‘it is necessary to have seen it quite close, to feel all its merits’).103 Géricault’s
indecision is indicative of the generic interference that distorts the meanings of a
picture which is itself about uncertain transmission. The painting is on a big scale
but its curiously queasy composition is designed to be experienced at close range.
In London in the large Roman Gallery of the Egyptian Hall, the Raft was hung
very low, close to the ground. Thomas Crowe has argued that the ‘paradox of the
Raft is that its colossal size both creates and demands a closeness of approach that
is normally the province of an easel painting’.104 This resembles the odd scalar
regime of the panorama, which combines the colossal with minute detailing.
Jonathan Crary has read the raft in Géricault’s picture as a proxy for the viewing
platform of a 360-degree panorama, likening the painting’s perspectival oddness
to that created by the panorama, because both blur and displace the boundary
between the spectator/artist and the material world.105 Certainly, like the
100 Parry, ‘M. Jerricault’s Picture’, p. 814.

101 [Anon.], ‘Fine Arts: M. Jerricault’s Great Picture’, Examiner (16 July 1820): 461–2, p. 461.
102 Theodor Adorno said of ‘autonomous works of art’ that ‘[t]hey are knowledge as nonconceptual
objects’: Theodor Adorno, ‘Commitment’, trans. Francis McDonagh, in Ernst Bloch, George Lukacs,
Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Aesthetics and Politics: The Key Texts of the Classic
Debate Within German Marxism (London: Verso, 1980), pp. 177–95, p. 193.
103 Quoted in Eitner, Géricault’s Raft, p. 40.
104 Thomas Crowe, Emulation: Making Artists for Revolutionary France (New Haven, CT: Yale
105 Crary, ‘Géricault’, p. 23. Kant insisted on the need for a secure and stable viewing point from
which to experience the sublime. Crary says, ‘Géricault’s work discloses a very different sense of the
Live Byron 133
panorama, which both immerses and distances its viewer, this is peinture d’histoire
that does not obey the conventional and hierarchical rules of perspective.
T. J. Clark has insisted on ‘the felt quality of the format’ of a painting, observing
that ‘certain paintings do create specific “places” from which they are to be
viewed—places meaning imaginative distances, particular forms of closeness or
stand-offishness or intimacy or remoteness’, but that these often do not conform
to conventional perspectival rules, which are ‘hopelessly wrong’.106 He concludes
that ‘[d]istance and proximity are ethically charged’.107
Addison in 1712 had suggested that vast scale was key to the experience of the
sublime: ‘[o]ur imagination loves to be filled with an object, or to grasp at any-
thing that is too big for its capacity. We are flung into a pleasing astonishment at
such unbounded views, and feel a delightful stillness and amazement in the soul
at the apprehension of them.’108 For Burke in 1757, the ocean offered a scale that
was necessarily sublime: ‘the ocean is an object of no small terror. Indeed terror is
in all cases whatsoever, either openly or latently the ruling principle of the
sublime.’109 But in 1790, Kant had introduced an important caveat, that the sub-
lime depends upon the interaction of external conditions and internal subjectiv-
ity: ‘[t]hus the broad ocean agitated by storms cannot be called sublime . . . All we
can say is that the object lends itself to presentation of a sublimity discoverable in
the mind. For the sublime, in the strict sense of the word, cannot be contained in
any sensuous form.’110 Kant’s idea of interactive subjectivity mediated through the
senses moves the sublime towards embodied sensory experience. Both Byron’s
earlier poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and Don Juan are about movement, but
bodily movement in Don Juan is far more extreme, violent, and disorientating for
the reader, built as it is on an epic scale. Both Byron and Géricault create virtual
conditions of panoramic experience—it is to be uprooted from any point of anchorage and to be drifting
on an amorphous surface like the sea, without markers, without a center, and on which homogeneity
and repetition overwhelm singularity. At stake in this work is an apprehension of the numbing dispro-
portion between the limits of human perception and the implacable otherness of the exterior world’:
p. 23. When the Raft of the Medusa was exhibited at the Egyptian Hall, the printed description was
prefaced by an excerpt from ‘The Voyage’, from Robert Southey’s poem Madoc (1805): ‘Tis pleasant,
by the cheerful hearth, to hear | Of tempests and the dangers of the deep, | And pause at times, and feel
that we are safe’. See also the account of the exhibition at the Egyptian Hall of Benjamin Robert
Haydon’s enormous Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem, which coincided with the display of Géricault’s
painting in 1820, in David Blayney Brown, Robert Woof, and Stephen Hebron, Benjamin Robert
Haydon 1786–1846 (Kendal: Wordsworth Trust, 1996), pp. 12–13.
106 T. J. Clark, The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2006), pp. 97, 143, 141.
107 Clark, The Sight of Death, p. 136.
108 Joseph Addison, ‘On the Pleasures of the Imagination’, Spectator 412 (23 June 1712), p. 134.
109 Edmund Burke, Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful and Other Pre-
Revolutionary Writings, ed. David Womersley (London: Penguin, 1998), p. 102.
110 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement (1790), quoted in Jonathan Lamb, The Rhetoric of
Suffering: Reading the Book of Job in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995),
pp. 10–11.
134 Serial Forms
bodies through which to explore the sensation of embodiment. In the Raft,

Géricault transforms the human body to double life-size, not to decrease its real-
ness, or distort its relationship to the social, but to better expose the reality of
social relationships.111
Byron projected Don Juan on a vast scale too: ‘My poem’s epic, and is meant to
be | Divided in twelve books . . . After the style of Virgil and of Homer, | So that my
name of Epic’s no misnomer’ (i: 200). But his ‘radical transvaluation’ of epic owed
much to Italian burlesque and the flexible ottava rima: a loose, looping, conversa-
tional form, generous and capacious enough to admit variety and frequent modu-
lations of tone.112 Herbert Tucker puts it succinctly: ‘Don Juan is the epic for an
age of bullshit.’113 And Byron frequently undercuts the form, opening Canto III,
for example, with ‘Hail, Muse! et cetera.—We left Juan sleeping, | Pillow’d upon a
fair and happy breast’ (iii. 1). Nevertheless, the poem retains the sweeping scale of
epic in its rapid (often geographically impossible) traversals of oceans, its vast
architectural structure, its episodic picaresque, and its special scenographic
effects.114 The Edinburgh Review was quite overwhelmed by its scale, describing it
as a ‘magnificent structure of impurity’ and ‘a grand panorama of licentious-
ness’.115 As this uneasy reviewer intuits, this was epic remade for mass spectator-
ship and a new kind of audience. Scale is always political, as Susan Stewart points
out: ‘[a]esthetic size cannot be divorced from social function and social values’.116
Argument can be produced through scale. In Don Juan, as in Géricault’s Raft,
generic mixing allows for a rescaling of the human and a recalibration of the pos-
sibilities for political participation. Much of the political potential encoded in
these two radical aesthetic objects is invested in the production of liveness. When
Byron declares ‘I feel this tediousness will never do— | ’Tis being too epic, and
111 Julian Barnes has said that ‘[i]t is because the figures are sturdy enough to transmit such power
that the canvas unlooses in us deeper, submarinous emotions, can shift us through currents of hope
and despair, elation, panic and resignation’: Julian Barnes, ‘Géricault: Catastrophe into Art’, in Keeping
an Eye Open: Essays on Art (London: Jonathan Cape, 2015), pp. 10–39, p. 37. Kristen Whissel argues
that CGI effects in film ‘seemingly dislocate the human body from the laws of physics’, suggesting
‘radical forms of mobility that might signify both the exhilaration and the anxiety of rapid social
change’: Kristen Whissel, Spectacular Digital Effects: CGI and Contemporary Theatre (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2014), pp. 29–30.
112 Tucker, Epic, online abstract to Chapter 5: ‘In Style: Epic Plush 1815–1820’, doi: 10.1093/acprof:
oso/9780199232987.003.0005. Anne Barton describes ottava rima as ‘eight decasyllabic lines rhyming
abababcc . . . [t]he couplet concluding each verse unit, lacking Spenserian finality, could extend itself
naturally into the next stanza, or not, according to the whim of the writer’: Anne Barton, Byron: Don
Juan, Landmarks of World Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 16.
113 Tucker, Epic, p. 231.
114 ‘[C]hange your lakes for ocean’, Byron famously exhorts the lake poets in the ‘Dedication’ to
Don Juan (stanza 5). Drummond Bone argues that ‘there are large architectural patterns which under-
pin the narrative’, which he parses in the poem: Drummond Bone, ‘Childe Harold iv, Don Juan and
Beppo’, in Drummond Bone (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Byron (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2006), pp. 151–70, p. 159. Critics have pointed out that Don Juan could not really
have been washed up in the Cyclades, having been wrecked in the gulf of Lyons.
115 [Anon.], ‘Don Juan’, Edinburgh Monthly Review 2:10 (October 1819): 468–86, p. 482.
Live Byron 135
I must cut down | (In copying) this long canto into two’ (iii: 111), he is dramatizing
his own production and re-scaling of the text (in copying) as a live operation hap-
pening in front of our eyes, as he decides to redistribute his material into two
cantos instead of one.
Seriality and Survival
After its London exhibition, Géricault’s picture travelled to Dublin in 1821 to be

displayed by the Royal Dublin Society. Here, it found itself competing with a
panorama on the same subject. Marshall’s ‘Grand Marine Peristrephic Panorama
of the Shipwreck of the Medusa, French Frigate with the Fatal Raft’ was already
on show.117 Marshall’s panoramas were considered downmarket, provincial, and
vulgar by some, merely ‘adapted to amuse and satisfy that class of persons alone
who frequent . . . halfpenny exhibitions’.118 The ‘Peristrephic Panorama’ was a long
painted canvas that was unrolled slowly before the seated audience, showing a
series of six scenes, accompanied by music and diorama lighting effects.119 An
eyewitness to another naval-themed Marshall show recorded that the panorama
‘moved off slowly upon rollers, so that the pictures are changed almost imper-
ceptibly, and without any break between scene and scene. A man describes aloud
the objects represented; and the distant thunder of cannon, military music, and
the noise of the battle, increase the illusion. By means of panoramic painting, and
117 Jonathan Crary argues that the Dublin show of the painting was not so successful as in London,
because ‘for roughly the same price, a consumer had the choice of seeing over 10,000 square feet of
moving painted surface or about 450 square feet of motionless canvas’: Crary, ‘Géricault’, p. 17. I think
that the case might be a little more complicated. The Royal Dublin Society was a polite and expensive
subscription club, and, although panoramas had been exhibited there, its Rotunda was not the
Egyptian Hall. The painting would, therefore, have been displayed in the character of a fine art exhibit,
and an example of modern French painting, and not as a ‘show’. I suspect the audiences at the Rotunda
and the audiences for the moving panorama (Marshall’s were at the lower end of the panorama market)
would have been distinct in Dublin in a way that they had not been in London. My hunch is sup-
ported by Philip McEvansoneya, who quotes the Carrick’s Morning Post account of the ‘300 Persons of
rank and fashion’ who attended the opening night of the Dublin exhibition, and also says art exhibi-
tionary culture was ‘underdeveloped’ at this time in Dublin, while panoramas were common: Philip
McEvansoneya, ‘The Exhibition in Dublin of Géricault’s “Raft of the Medusa” ’, Burlington Magazine
150:1262, French Art and Artists (May 2008): 325–6, p. 325.
118 [Anon.], ‘New French Peristrephic Panorama’, New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal
12 (January 1824), p. 11.
119 Moving panoramas were being used in the theatre as part of the stage scenery by the turn of the
century, but it seems that Peter Marshall ‘pioneered this form as a nontheatrical attraction. As early as
1809, he exhibited a canvas representing 100 miles of the banks of the river Clyde; it was claimed to be
“300 feet by a proportionate breadth.” According to a commentator, the spectators viewed the Clyde
“as if travelling along its banks”. The painting was displayed at least in Edinburgh, Glasgow, London
and Dublin. A moving panorama of the Thames followed. In 1815 it was on display in Dublin. A
local newspaper published an “impromptu” that does not leave doubt about its character: About
travelling Balloons people make a great rout, | The greatest of journies in them appear small; | But at
the Rotunda you’ll quickly find out, | How to go 30 miles without moving at all!’: Huhtamo, Illusions
in Motion, p. 66.
136 Serial Forms
a slight undulation of that part which represents the waves and the ships, the
imitation almost reaches reality.’120 The Medusa panorama narrated the voyage
and loss of the ship, and the rescue of the survivors on the raft in sequence. Unlike
Géricault’s single summative image, then, the moving panorama serialized the
catastrophe. But in her discussion of the many preparatory sketches, studies, and
compositional experiments that preceded Géricault’s final canvas, art historian
Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby has shown how the ‘final painting is . . . haunted by the
layered history not only of the event but of its making’.121 She demonstrates how
the painting is created out of many sequenced images which were subsequently
abandoned by the artist, and she shows how the dismembered or rearranged parts
of some of his earlier ‘survivor’ figures on the raft have also survived from sketch
to painting so that it remains haunted. It is haunted in particular by a discarded
sketch of the cannibalism on the raft.122 One of the painting’s subjects, then, is the
multiple mediation that has culminated in this image which, although it takes as
its proximate moment the first hopeful-hopeless sighting of the Argus, is also able
to access, through its layerings, multiple temporalities that are both documentary
and aesthetic, as if Caravaggio is in uncanny collision with the Journal des
débats.123 Géricault folds a sequence of contingencies into a tableau. A productive
paradox of all history painting, then, may be its phantom seriality.
And there is another fragile form of seriality that structures both Géricault’s
painting and Byron’s poem. Both works self-consciously test the notion of mediation-
as-survival. They are fundamentally, about going on, continuing, enduring, and
dodging death and so they are extreme in their awareness of the precarity of the
serial. When the naked and exhausted Don Juan passes out having reached a
Cycladean beach as the only survivor of the shipwreck, he may, or may not, be
120 This panorama is Messrs Marshall’s ‘Battle of Navarino’ and the account is by Hermann Pückler-
Muskau, a German prince who toured Europe in 1828 and kept a detailed diary. In Dublin the pano-
rama was probably showing at Messrs Marshall’s Lower Abbey Street Pavilion, 12 August 1828.
Quoted by Erkki Huhtamo, ‘Penetrating the Peristrephic: An Unwritten Chapter in the History of the
Panorama’, Early Popular Visual Culture 6:3 (2008): 219–38, p. 234, doi: 10.1080/17460650802443019.
121 Grigsby, Extremities, p. 207.
122 Julian Barnes comments on the cannibalism sketch: ‘The spotlit moment of anthropophagy
shows a well-muscled survivor gnawing the elbow of a well-muscled cadaver. It is almost comic.’
Barnes, Keeping an Eye Open, p. 26. The figure of a woman also appeared in early sketches for the Raft. The
women were early victims on the raft and no woman survived. Grigsby makes a compelling case that on
the raft 135 subordinates were massacred by an armed elite of officers and professionals who then
defended themselves by speaking of hunger and fever. See also Lucy Delap, ‘ “Thus Does Man Prove His
Fitness to Be the Master of Things”: Shipwrecks, Chivalry and Masculinities in Nineteenth- and
Twentieth-Century Britain’, Cultural and Social History 3:1 (2006): 45–74, doi: 10.1191/1478003805cs044oa.
123 The programme for the show of the painting stated wrongly that this was the moment of rescue,
but Géricault was clear that he had chosen the moment when the Argus was first sighted distantly on the
horizon before disappearing again, throwing the men back into despair. In 1816–17, Géricault had been
in Rome and had been very impressed by the works of Michelangelo and Caravaggio. Gustave Planche
noted that ‘C’est a Michel-Ange de Caravage que Géricault a demandé conseil, et c’est avec le souvenir de
ses oeuvres qu’il a composé le Radeau de la Méduse’: Gustave Planche, ‘Géricault’, Revue des Deux
Mondes nouvelle période 10:3 (1 May 1851): 502–31, p. 502. See Donald A. Rosenthal, ‘Géricault’s “Raft
of the Medusa” and Caravaggio’, Burlington Magazine 120:909 (December 1978): 836–41.
Live Byron 137
dead: ‘His slender frame and pallid aspect lay, | As fair a thing as e’er was form’d of
clay’ (ii: 110). Byron embodies the idea of death and survival that is integral to
serial publishing, not just through the vicissitudes that he visits upon the vulner-
able body of his hero, ‘a very pretty fellow, | Although his woes had turned him
rather yellow’ (ii: 148), but also through the extreme vulnerability of his own text.
Critics have often remarked upon the digressiveness and repeated re-beginnings
of Don Juan but these issue from its repeated near-deaths, and the poem is
haunted by the possibility of its own discontinuance.124 The First Canto ends:
But for the present, gentle reader! and

Still gentler purchaser! the bard—that’s I—
Must, with permission, shake you by the hand,
And so ‘Your humble servant, and good-b’ye!’
We meet again, if we should understand
Each other; and if not, I shall not try
Your patience further than by this short sample—
‘Twere well if others follow’d my example. (i: 221)
Throughout all its parts, Don Juan is very much preoccupied with its own survival
into another canto and with its readers’ perseverance. To ‘keep [. . .] the atrocious
reader in suspense’ (xiv: 97 (italics original)) Byron improvises energetically,
claiming, as he set out to write the poem, that ‘I have no plan—I had no plan—
but have or had materials’.125 While Childe Harold had won plaudits as its serial
parts appeared, Don Juan met resistance and disgust, causing Byron to appeal
directly to its ‘reader’ thirty-five times, whereas the reader is only referred to thir-
teen times in Childe Harold.126 And there are many other anxious moments, such
as when Byron imagines a new portmanteau—‘Perhaps it may be lined with this
my canto’ (ii: 16)—and later the same irresistible rhyme returns: ‘And though
these lines should only line portmanteaus, | Trade will be all the better for these
Cantos’127 (xiv: 14). ‘Go, little book, from this my solitude! | I cast thee on the
waters—go thy ways!’ cries Byron in a traditional envoi at the end of the First
Canto (i: 222), only to show in the Second Canto how very dangerous those
124 Byron himself said, ‘I mean it for a poetical T[ristram] Shandy’: Letter [to Douglas Kinnaird]
(14 April 1823), in Byron’s Letters and Journals,1822–1823, vol. 10: ‘A Heart for Every Fate’: 1822–1823,
ed. Leslie A. Marchand (London: John Murray, 1980), p. 150. Elizabeth French Boyd discusses Byron’s
digressive ‘Don Juanism’: Boyd, Byron’s Don Juan, pp. 55–6. More recently, Tom Mole has argued that
‘Don Juan is, in a sense, all beginning’: Tom Mole, ‘Byron and the Difficulty of Beginning’, Review of
English Studies 69:290 (2018): 532–45, pp. 542–3. See also Nicholas Halmi, ‘The Very Model of a
Modern Epic Poem’, European Romantic Review 21 (2010): 589–600.
125 Byron’s comment is quoted by McGann in Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works, vol. 5, p. 668.
126 Barton, Byron: Don Juan, p. 79. Barton suggests that this ‘reader’ reappears so frequently as to
assume ‘the importance of a character in the poem’.
127 Old paper was used to line trunks and portmanteaus in the nineteenth century.
138 Serial Forms
waters can be. Byron remains alert throughout this most awake of poems to the
gamble and the risk of writing at length: ‘In play, there are two pleasures for your
choosing— | The one is winning, and the other losing’(xiv: 12). And the Italian
ottava rima is a risky form for an English poet as it requires an exorbitant prolif-
eration of rhymes, difficult to find in English.128 Herbert Tucker has discussed
‘the subversively exposed contingency of rhyme’ in Don Juan, and both Géricault
and Byron produce works that are about the struggle for survival, about staying
alive against the odds. Writing about the medium of television, film studies
scholar Mary Ann Doane has said that ‘[c]atastrophe at some level is always about
the body, about the encounter with death. For all its ideology of “liveness,” it may
be death which forms the point of televisual intrigue.’129 Likewise, death under-
writes the liveness of Don Juan and The Wreck of the Medusa.
The possibility that something might go wrong is an essential element of live
performance. As we have seen, Byron’s celebrity after Childe Harold, and the ubi-
quity of quotations and allusions to that text, already made him appear vitally
present in early nineteenth-century culture. In the interactive present tense of
Don Juan he worries that he is ‘Tiring old readers, nor discovering new’ (xiv: 10),
but he was wrong. From 1820, Byron garnered a massive second readership
among the working classes and the international avant-garde, and the poem was
to become an indispensable text for the Chartists in the 1840s.130 Wordsworth
worried that the poem would do ‘harm to the English character . . . not so much as
a Book’ but as ‘choice bits . . . in the shape of Extracts’, and Don Juan was very
swiftly pirated, extended, rewritten, and published in cheap versions, some with
obscene illustrations.131 The Quarterly Review agreed with Wordsworth that
‘ “Don Juan” in quarto and on hot-pressed paper would have been almost inno-
cent—in a whity-brown duodecimo it was one of the worst of the mischievous
publications’.132 Géricault’s painting also persisted in British culture and swiftly
128 Tucker, Epic, p. 229. Jerome Christensen reads Don Juan as a poem that cultivates openness to
contingency, making it ‘fully circumstantial, subject to no master plan’: Christensen, Lord Byron’s
Strength, p. 215.
129 Mary Ann Doane, ‘Information, Crisis, Catastrophe’, in Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Thomas
Keenan (eds), New Media / Old Media: A History and Theory Reader (New York: Routledge, 2006),
pp. 251–64, p. 258.
130 Tucker, Epic, p. 234. See the figures, tables, and discussion in William St Clair, ‘The Impact of
Byron’s Writings: An Evaluative Approach,’ in Andrew Rutherford (ed.), Byron: Augustan and
Romantic (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), pp. 1–25. See also David Stewart, ‘The End of
Conversation: Byron’s Don Juan at the Newcastle Lit and Phil’, Review of English Studies 66:274 n.s.
(April 2015): 322–41. Stewart describes the fallout when a copy of Don Juan was ordered for the
Newcastle Lit and Phil reading room.
131 William Wordsworth to (?)Henry Crabb Robinson (January 1820?), Appendix One: A Letter of
Wordsworth Kindly Supplied and Annotated by Sir Charles Firth, in The Correspondence of Henry
Crabb Robinson with the Wordsworth Circle, ed. Edith J. Morley, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1927), vol. 2: 1844–1866, pp. 850–1, p. 850. The pirating of Don Juan was partly due to John Murray’s
decision not to ‘own’ the copyright.
132 [Robert Southey?], ‘Art. VI.—Cases of Walcot v. Walker; Southey v. Sherwood; Murray v.
Benbow; and Lawrence v. Smith’, Quarterly Review 27 (1822): 123–38, p. 128, quoted in Colette
Live Byron 139
entered the visual lexicon of maritime disaster reporting in newspapers.133 The

shipwreck was always on standby as a ‘ready-made’ element of the news, but
Géricault’s mediation through sensory embodiment had made it newly visible as
a live event.
Live Performance and Bodily Authenticity
The boundary between mediatized and ‘real’ presence was already shifting in the
1810s and 1820s.134 Philip Auslander has questioned ‘whether there really are
clear-cut ontological distinctions between live forms and mediatized ones’.135
I agree that this is a question about the shifting relationship between perception
and technology. How ‘liveness’ is experienced depends less on the technical con-
ditions of performance than on the audience and its expectations. Of course,
immersive or virtual experiences around 1810 were not the digital ones that
Auslander discusses, but this would have made them no less powerful for the
thousands of people being introduced to these effects for the first time.136 But the
Colligan, ‘The Unruly Copies of Byron’s Don Juan: Harems, Underground Print Culture, and the
Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, Nineteenth-Century Literature 59:4 (March 2005): 433–62, p. 439.
Colligan argues that the controversy that erupted over Don Juan was connected to the emergence
of obscenity and pornography as a commercialized print trade. See also McCalman, Radical
Underworld. That Don Juan circulated in respectable working-class homes is evidenced by Dickens’s
clerk, Mr Hicks, ‘the Byron-quoter’ in Sketches by Boz. Mr Hicks ‘felt in the seventh heaven of
poetry or the seventh canto of Don Juan—it was the same thing to him’: Dickens, Sketches by Boz,
pp. 336, 331.
133 Tom Gretton, ‘Géricault’s Raft in Journalistic Illustration up to 1912’, 19: Interdisciplinary
Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 16 (2013): n.p., http://19.bbk.ac.uk. In 1832, a two-colour
mezzotint copy by J. Egan was published in London, and another engraving by is mentioned in Fraser’s
in 1839: ‘If you have not seen the picture, you are familiar, probably, with Reynolds’s admirable
engraving of it.’ [M.A.T.], ‘On the French School of Painting’, Fraser’s Magazine 20:120 (December
1839): 679–88, p. 687.
134 Tom Mole has described a new ‘hermeneutic of intimacy’ which ‘figured celebrity texts as con-
duits’ or mediums that cultivated intimate identifications with remarkable or famous people: Tom
Mole, Byron’s Romantic Celebrity: Industrial Culture and the Hermeneutic of Intimacy (Basingstoke:
Palgrave, 2007), p. 156. Peter Otto has argued that modern forms of virtual reality first appear during
the Romantic Period: Peter Otto, Multiplying Worlds: Romanticism, Modernity, and the Emergence of
Virtual Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
135 Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (London: Routledge, 1999),
p. 7. In this, he argues against Peggy Phelan’s idea that live performance that ‘becomes itself through
disappearance’ can resist the commodification of the market. Auslander argues that liveness is not
necessarily a site of ideological resistance. See Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance
(London: Routledge, 1993), p. 146. I would, however, want to hang on to Phelan’s idea of co-presence
as the ‘interactive exchange between art object and the viewer’.
136 Matthew Reason and Anja Mølle Lindelof have argued that ‘[i]f we recognise that our very
understanding of live performance is produced by mediatisation, and is constantly changing in
response to changing technological innovations, then any automatic value judgements based on an
ontology of liveness become indefensible’: Matthew Reason and Anja Mølle Lindelof, ‘Introduction’, in
Matthew Reason and Anja Mølle Lindelof (eds), Experiencing Liveness in Contemporary Performance:
Interdisciplinary Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2016): 1–16, p. 4.
140 Serial Forms
history of ‘the relationship between the live and the mediated’ is not an easy one
to recover.137 By the 1810s and 1820s, artificial environments were becoming
increasingly sophisticated representations of everyday realities, and they were
experienced as live precisely because they both closely imitated the real and drew
attention to the process of imitation. In this way they could both remain ‘matrixed’
to a ‘real-life’ context and create a ‘non-matrixed’ live unexpectedness.138 Thomas
Hornor’s 360-degree panorama of London on display at the Coliseum from 1829,
for example, which famously simulated the aerial view of London as if from the
top of St Paul’s Cathedral, ‘surprises from its exact imitation of nature . . . the real
and the artificial are so very much alike, you cannot tell the one from the other—
especially the artificial’.139 Charles Robert Leslie, a painter, visited a panorama in
1812 and declared that the panoramas ‘are perfect in their way. The objects appear
so real, that it is impossible to imagine at what distance the canvas is from the
eye.’140 Newspapers referred again and again to the ‘singularly striking’ effect pro-
duced by the panorama: its uncanny ability to create the feeling that one was
really there, as well as here.141 As the Morning Journal reported, ‘[o]bjects in the
distance which, to the unassisted sight would necessarily seem but as a green spot
or small undefinable appearance, the application of the glass realises into a well
laid-out garden with figures, or a defined and recognisable building’.142 The
Mirror of Literature described how spectators ‘become rivetted [sic] by some par-
ticular objects’.143 Spectators used ‘glasses’ to mediate the mediation and to fur-
ther defy the laws of perspective. The impossible scalar coordinates of the
panoramas contributed to their hyperreality: they were enormous in their scope
(Hornor’s London panorama was painted on more than an acre of canvas), but
also microscopic in their detail.
Critics have repeatedly described the shows of Regency London as ‘proto-
cinematic’, suggesting that topical panoramas became ‘the newsreels of the
Napoleonic era’.144 The television of today has been described as ‘a direct descendent
137 Ibid., p. 1.
138 Paddy Scannell in Television and the Meaning of Live: An Enquiry into the Human Situation
(Wiley-Blackwell, 2013) argues that liveness is linked to everyday experience and engaging with TV is
a way of engaging with life. ‘Non-matrixed’ is Michael Kirby’s term for live happenings—unlike trad-
itional theatre they were ‘non-matrixed’ and non-verbal. See Michael Kirby, A Formalist Theatre
(Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987).
139 [Anon.], ‘The Coliseum’, People’s Journal (12 December 1846): 333–6, p. 334 (italics original).
140 Charles Leslie (1794–1859) went to see a panorama in 1812 as an eighteen-year-old art student.
Quoted in Ellis, ‘ “Spectacles within doors” ’, p. 144.
141 ‘La Nature a Coup d’Oeil: The Celebrated VIEW OF EDINBURGH’ [Advertisement], The Times
(9 May 1789), p. 1. This was Barker’s first panorama, a view of Edinburgh.
142 Morning Journal (15 February 1830), quoted in Ralph Hyde, The Regent’s Park Colosseum
(London: Ackerman, 1982), p. 39.
143 [Anon.], ‘Some Account of the Colosseum, in the Regent’s Park’, Mirror of Literature,
Amusement, and Instruction 13:352 (17 January 1829): 34–7, p. 35. Thomas Hornor, ‘View of London
from the Cross of St. Paul’s’, Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction 1:29 (17 May 1823), p. 449.
144 Gillen D’Arcy Wood describes ‘a proto-cinematic urban culture of panoramas, print shops, gal-
leries, and spectacular theatricals’, a description which fails to engage with the specific sensory effects
Live Byron 141
of the panorama’.145 But I argue that such deterministic technological teleologies

will not help us to understand the complexity of the relationship between news,
topicality, and the feeling of the real in the 1810s and 1820s. Paradoxically, these
technologies of simulation created a new sense of ‘actuality’. To understand this
concept of actuality, which is not the same as reality, Derrida says, we must ‘avoid
the constant confusion of the present with what is called actuality’.146 According
to Derrida, the apparently straightforward ‘here and now’ is always infected by
the ‘there and then’, so that we can only process the present once it is already
mediated. This means our sense of the ‘now’ or the ‘actual’ is always time-lagged
and anachronistic.147 Certainly a ‘feeling of liveness’ was registered by the visitors
of the immersive shows in Georgian London, through their sense of their own
embodied presence in the presence of the spectacle.148 Our most basic contem-
porary definition of ‘live’ tends to oppose ‘live’ to ‘recorded’, the immediate to the
mediated. While modern technologies of recording (audio or video) were obvi-
ously not available in the earlier period, these shows confounded the opposition
between live and recorded by producing mediated immediacy—an artificial ‘now’
that was also clearly not the ‘now’ of the viewer. The 360-degree panoramas which
were static had to condense a dramatic event or scene into a single instant, and so
obsolescence was built-in to their representations. Henry Aston Barker’s pano-
rama of London viewed from the roof of the Albion Mills began to date as soon as
of each of these new technologies: Gillen D’Arcy Wood, The Shock of the Real: Romanticism and Visual
Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), p. 14; Altick, Shows of London, p. 136. Vanessa Schwartz does
suggest that ‘we need to look at panoramas and dioramas as more than steps in the technological telos
that culminated in film’, but nevertheless her book culminates in early cinema: Vanessa Schwartz,
Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (Berkeley, CA: University of California
145 Oettermann, The Panorama, p. 44. Ralph O’Connor also suggests of panoramas that ‘[d]uring
wartime they functioned somewhat like the newsreels of the 1940s’: O’Connor, The Earth on Show, p. 269.
But the analogy obscures the historical specificity of the role of the panoramas in the developing public
sphere of the early nineteenth century. Similarly, Ralph Hyde has claimed that ‘[t]he panorama supplied a
substitute for travel and a supplement to the newspaper’: Hyde, Panoramania!, p. 37. But newspaper
reading in London in 1820 was far from the widely diffused daily practice it was later to become. Hyde’s
idea of ‘supplementarity’ therefore suggests a hierarchy of forms which did not exist in this period.
146 Derrida explains that the reality of the contemporary world is itself an indeterminate combin-
ation of the actual and virtual, a world of ‘actuvirtuality’ and ‘virtuactuality’: Derrida, ‘The
Deconstruction of Actuality’, trans. Rottenberg, pp. 85–116, p. 92.
147 Jonathan Steuer has deployed the term ‘telepresence’ to refer to ‘the extent to which one feels
present’ in any mediated or simulated environment, and he explains that ‘[i]n unmediated perception,
presence is taken for granted. However, when perception is mediated by a communication technology
[one perceives both] environments simultaneously: the physical environment in which one is actually
present and the environment presented via the medium.’ Jonathan Steuer, ‘Defining Virtual Reality:
Dimensions Determining Telepresence’, Journal of Communication 42 (1992): 73–93, p. 76.
148 Philip Auslander says, of our contemporary moment, ‘[t]o the extent that websites and other
virtual entities respond to us in real time, they feel live to us, and this may be the kind of liveness we
now value.’ He argues that a machine that thus ‘interacts’ with the user even at this minimal level can
produce a feeling of ‘liveness’: Philip Auslander, ‘Live and technologically mediated performance’, in
Tracy C. Davis (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Performance Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2008), pp. 107–19, p. 112, doi: 10.1017/CCOL9780521874014.008
142 Serial Forms
it was put on show in Leicester Square in 1793, and Robert Burford’s panorama of
the Battle of Waterloo, first shown in 1819, was updated and completely repainted
in 1842.149 But this does not seem to have altered the feeling of embodied experi-
ence of the material world that the panorama was able to deliver, so that the top-
icality of these shows was not so much invested in their up-to-date information as
in the affect that they created. The bodiliness of the experience of the shows was
important.
In 1818, both Byron and Géricault were working on the cusp of the new possi-
bilities of mediated liveness produced by shows and spectacular culture. They
both created performances which, rather than transforming the real or the news
event, brought them to a higher pitch by incorporating the sensory. The human
body is front and centre in both Géricault’s painting and in Byron’s poem and
connects the spectator’s or the reader’s sensing body as the interactive sensorium
through which knowledge is received and processed. Anne Barton claimed that
‘Byron was to be much concerned throughout Don Juan with the body’s tyranny
over the mind’, and she cites the moment where Juan’s impassioned devotion to
the lover he is forced to abandon collapses into seasickness: ‘Beloved Julia, hear
me still beseeching!’ | (Here he grew inarticulate with retching.)”(ii: 20)150 But
I argue that Byron did not consider the body as tyrannous over the mind, but
rather he saw the mind as a part of the body, and creates, in Don Juan, a model of
embodied consciousness. The interactions between physical bodily experiences
and the processes of consciousness are insisted upon throughout the poem. As
the Trinidada sinks, Byron comments (absurdly) that men tend to remember an
event that ‘breaks their hopes, or hearts, or heads, or necks’ (ii: 31), and later, in a
small boat, the survivors are doused by high waves, ‘So that themselves, as well as
hopes were damp’d’ (ii: 60). His use of syllepsis here yokes together mental, emo-
tional, and physical experience. Vivian Sobchack says our experience of the world
as humans ‘necessarily entails both the body and consciousness, objectivity and
subjectivity in an irreducible ensemble. Thus we both matter and mean as much
through processes and logics of sense-making that owe as much to our carnal
existence as they do to our conscious thought.’151 Byron’s insistent mixing of the
metaphysical and the material in Don Juan is what caused the poem to be excori-
ated as ‘very disgusting’, ‘vulgar’, and ‘perverted [and] degraded’.152 He hauled in
149 And at a much later date, Barker’s son claimed that the ‘scene on the Thames was the Lord
Mayor’s procession by water to Westminster on the 9th of November.’ See Ellis, ‘ “Spectacles within
doors” ’, p. 138. For Burford’s updated Waterloo panorama, see Helen Groth, ‘Panoramic Byron:
Reading, History and Pre-Cinematic Spectacle’ in Kate Mitchell and Nicola Parsons (eds), Reading
Historical Fiction: The Revenant and Remembered Past (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013),
pp. 85–100, pp. 87–8.
150 Barton, Byron : Don Juan, p. 31.
151 Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Bodiliness and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 2004), p. 4.
152 John Wilson Croker, The Croker Papers: The Correspondence and Diaries of John Wilson Croker,
ed. L. L. Jennings, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1884), vol. 1, p. 146; Harriette Wilson, ‘Letter to Lord
Live Byron 143
real everyday stuff and dumped it in the oddest places in his poem, such as, for
example, ‘the turnpike gates to heaven’ (ii:131). As Leigh Hunt noticed, in Don
Juan lots of different ‘modes’ are ‘mingled together and push one another about in
a strange way’.153 Although the women in the poem are ‘ripe and real’ (ii: 118), the
poem was disliked as much for its emphasis on the alimentary as for its suggestive
sexuality. As Byron says, ‘love must be sustain’d like flesh and blood’ (ii: 170), and
he recommends a menu of vermicelli, jelly, eggs and oysters. ‘[T]he steam | Of
Zoe’s cookery’ (ii: 153) wafts welcome over the starving Juan and her ‘most super-
ior mess of broth, | A thing which poesy but seldom mentions’ (ii: 123) is deliber-
ately mentioned by Byron’s poesy, which also allows for a long digression on beef.
After all, as Byron points out, if Noah’s dove had alighted on the boat, ‘They would
have eat her, olive-branch and all’ (ii: 95). The desperate hunger of the wreck’s
survivors exposes each of them as radically naked and unaccommodated. Human
bodies, alive and dead, are tangled in the vessel: a dead boy with ‘pale lips’ (ii: 89)
lies ‘stiff ’ (ii: 90) in his father’s arms and three other bodies thought to be sleeping
at the bottom of the boat turn out to be dead (ii: 98). The boundary between liv-
ing flesh and meat is blurry, and a hungry shark carries off Juan’s fellow swimmer
‘by the thigh’ (ii: 106). The killing and eating of Juan’s tutor, Pedrillo, is excused by
reference to Dante: ‘Remember Ugolino . . . | ’Tis surely fair to dine upon our
friends, | When shipwreck’s short allowance grows too scanty, | Without being
much more horrible than Dante’ (ii: 83).154
Géricault’s preliminary anatomical studies of heaps of dismembered limbs
have been described as ‘radically transgressive’ because of their unreadability as
complete bodies.155 In her brilliant reading of the development of the final paint-
ing, Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby describes the uncanniness of looking at studies of
intertwined (severed) hands which seem to touch until we realise that ‘the sense
of touch is ours not theirs’.156 The bodies do not seem to have been fully reassem-
bled for the final picture, either. The ‘pyramidal mounding of inextricably entan-
gled figures’ displays a ‘relative indifference to traditional hierarchies’, mingling
Byron’, 1820; ‘Remarks on Don Juan’, Blackwood’s Magazine 5 (August 1819): 512–18: all quoted in
Rutherford (ed.), Lord Byron: The Critical Heritage, pp. 161, 163, 170.
153 [Leigh Hunt], ‘Don Juan. Cantos 1st and 2d’, Examiner 618 (31 October 1819): 700–2, p. 700.
154 Ugolino della Gherardesca (c.1220–March 1289), Count of Donoratico, was an Italian noble-
man, politician and naval commander. In Dante’s Divine Comedy he and his children are locked in a
tower and left to starve, and his dying children beg him to eat them after they are dead. ‘Quivi morì; e
come tu mi vedi, | vid’ io cascar li tre ad uno ad uno | tra ‘l quinto dì e ‘l sesto; ond’ io mi diedi, | già
cieco, a brancolar sovra ciascuno, | e due dì li chiamai, poi che fur morti. | Poscia, più che ‘l dolor, poté
‘l digiuno.’ (‘And I, | Already going blind, groped over my brood | Calling to them, though I had
watched them die, | For two long days. And then the hunger had more | Power than even sorrow over
me’) (Dante, Inferno, Canto XXXIII, ll. 70–3). Film critic André Bazin said that ‘obscenity is the repe-
tition of the absolutely unique, the fact that death could be made to happen over and over again’:
André Bazin, ‘Death Every Afternoon’, trans. Mark A. Cohen, in Ivone Margulies (ed.), Rites of
Realism: Essays on Corporeal Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 263.
155 Grigsby, Extremities, p. 205. 156 Grigsby, Extremities, p. 206.
144 Serial Forms
the living and the dead, and the black and the white.157 It is difficult to make out
which parts of whose body we are looking at, and Géricault seems to be challen-
ging us in viewing the painting to think about how we recognize another as a fel-
low human creature. Such a disaggregation of bodily information calls the logic of
seriality into profound question, as seriality depends upon separation of parts as
well as their sequencing. A serial democratic logic means that individuals can be
recognized as both distinct from and part of the whole polis.158 Here we see only a
confusion, although one black figure at the top of the pyramidal heap of flesh is
more legible than the others as he strains away from us and towards the distant
sail of the Argus. Critics in Géricault’s time looked anxiously for signs of canni-
balism in the picture, but they found only a frightening chiaroscuro: ‘the light is
injudiciously forced to assist [the anatomical modelling]’.159 William Parry
admired the picture with one reservation: ‘[t]he only fault we observed in this
performance is a rather too great monotony of colour’, and Fine Arts magazine
agreed, ‘[t]he colouring is extremely poor’.160 Géricault seems to have deliber-
ately occluded skin colour, to make his picture racially difficult to read. The
blending of the bodies into one another, and the tangled confusion of identity are
perhaps suggestive of cannibal ingestion, and also of miscegenation, but, most
radically of all, they could also suggest a kind of utopian union.161 Géricault’s pas-
sionate abolitionism became manifest in his La Traite des Nègres project (1822–3)
and he was well aware of the iconographic meaning of the naked black body as an
image of slavery.162 Richard Taws has suggested that ‘the frantic semaphore of
Géricault’s multi-ethnic crew—these people of no state—exposes the horror of
the colonial encounter,’ but the brilliance of Géricault’s painting is that, despite its
157 Grigsby, Extremities, p. 181.

158 The study of populations which was emerging at this time, too, demanded a binding together of
bodies into a general mass. Kyla Schuller asks, ‘[h]ow did bodies come to be understood as capable of
binding together into the biopolitical phenomenon of population, an entity conceived at the biological
level of species-being, in which the actions of one person, animal, or object affect the potential of the
rest, even at a spatial and temporal distance?’ Kyla Schuller, The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and
Science in the Nineteenth Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), p. 4.
159 [Anon.],‘Fine Arts’, New Monthly Magazine, p. 317. Géricault used an experimental mix of bitu-
men in his paint which has since degraded badly, so the painting has lost much of its original
subtlety.
160 Parry, ‘M. Jerricault’s Picture’, p. 814; [Anon.], ‘Fine Arts’, New Monthly Magazine, p. 317.
161 Grigsby pushes this argument further, suggesting that Géricault is turning disgust to political
ends, ‘[f]or Liberals and abolitionists, cannibalism enacted in its very enunciation that desired incorp-
oration of black men into the (white) body politic’: Grigsby, Extremities, p. 229.
162 Grigsby points out that while a naked white body reads as the classical Academy nude, in this
period the naked black body means slavery. She examines early sketches of a black man in the suppli-
cant pose of the anti-slavery medallions, ‘Am I not a man and a brother?’ Grigsby, Extremities, pp. 231,
192–3. There was only one black soldier, Jean-Charles, among the fifteen rescued. Géricault paints
three black people on the raft: Alhadeff, The Raft of the Medusa and see also Albert Alhadeff, ‘Julian
Barnes and the Raft of the Medusa’, The French Review 82:2 (December 2008): 276–91. The Narrative of
the Dreadful Shipwreck of the Medusa Frigate (London: James Meldon, n.d.) announces ‘The Attack Of
the Soldiers and Sailors on the Officers, and their Attempt to Murder them and Destroy the Raft’, but
Grigsby is convincing in suggesting that in reality the officers seem to have attacked the men (and women).
Live Byron 145
uncompromising engagement with horror, violence, and slavery, through its

tangle of bodies it simultaneously expresses the distant future hope of collective
incorporation and cooperation.163 The Raft directly engages the ‘physiological
dimension of sympathy’ by both eliciting and displaying what Kyla Schuller has
called ‘the impressible body’.164 Schuller says, ‘[t]he impressible body—and the
sentimental body—is a biopolitical effect, constituted by its affective linkages to
the other bodies within its milieu’.165 The bodies in the picture are intimately
affectively linked, inviting not only the viewer’s sympathy, but also his or her par-
ticipation. The London critic who was ‘penetrated at heart’ by the picture added
that ‘[t]he impression can never forsake us’.166 Géricault intended his viewers to
be physically pressed by his picture into a complicated engagement with the pos-
sibility of a racially undifferentiated future.
Conclusion
The panoramas that had previously been the preserve of the elite were becoming
cheaper and more accessible to ordinary working people in the 1810s and 1820s.
In the absence of regular or reliable news, they provided topicality and the possi-
bility of some form of participation. People experienced these spectacles as inaug-
urating a novel kind of liveness, and those who experienced them felt themselves
to be alive and present, too. I mention this, as it seems oddly forgotten or occluded
in many of the standard accounts of ‘modernity’ or the development of a spec-
tacular culture. When Gillen d’Arcy Wood suggests that the panoramas repre-
sented a ‘single frozen moment in time’, he does not adequately convey the texture
of this curious experience, as these vast 360-degree canvases demanded attention,
time, and activity from the viewer, who had to move around to make sense of the
scene.167 These shows are not ‘frozen’ but rather suspended between practice and
representation, and demanded a serial work of looking.168 Viewers were aware of
one another too and of the reactions of others in the crowd. By the 1840s, the
people had claimed these spectacles as their own, and far from shuffling through
163 Richard Taws, ‘Telegraphic Images in Post-Revolutionary France’, Art History 39:2 (April 2016):
400–21, p. 420. Michael Fried has written that ‘the strivings of the men on the raft to be beheld by the
tiny ship on the horizon . . . may be viewed as motivated not simply by a desire for rescue from the
appalling circumstances depicted in the painting but also by the need to escape our gaze, to put an end
to being beheld by us, to be rescued from the electable fact of a presence that threatens to theatricalize
even their sufferings’: Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and the Beholder in the Age
of Diderot (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,1980), pp. 154–5.
164 Schuller, Biopolitics of Feeling, p. 10. 165 Schuller, Biopolitics of Feeling, p. 9.
166 [Anon.], ‘Fine Arts: M. Jerricault’s Great Picture’, p. 461.
167 D’Arcy Wood, The Shock of the Real, p. 111.
168 See Jonathan Potter, ‘The Panorama and Simultaneity: The Panoramic Desire to See Everything
at Once’, in Discourses of Vision in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Seeing, Thinking, Writing (Cham:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), pp. 21–46.
146 Serial Forms
these spaces in disciplined silence and awe, they seem to have been noisily enjoy-
ing themselves, certainly according to this review of a new 360-degree panorama,
‘London by Moonlight’:
The pleasure of the spectacle would doubtless be much enhanced if the people
who go to look at it would hold their peace, or speak only in a whisper; instead
of which, you hear a dozen voices roaring out, ‘Yes, there is my shop, and the
very lamp in the window!’ or ‘I cannot make out where I am.’ ‘Don’t you see that
is Christ’s Hospital and that the Thames over there?’ ‘Oh la! How beautiful—
how very like!’ ‘Well I never!’ and so on. A hint from the manager to keep silence
would be well directed; but as it might be considered unconstitutional, John and
Mrs Bull would probably lodge a protest and speak louder than ever ‘if only
to vex ’em.169
John and Mrs Bull at the panorama, with their ‘constitutional’ right to chat loudly
with their friends and spot one another’s houses, confidently undermine Jonathan
Crary’s argument that they have been ‘turned into . . . individualized and self-
regulated spectator[s]’.170 Crary thinks ‘the panorama coincided with new forms of
subjective isolation, of a sensory impoverishment and emotional privatization’.171
But if we think about the panorama not as a silent space of lack and loss but as a
noisy collective space of social display and interaction, and not as a scenographic
object, but as a live performance of the hyperreal, it might instead ‘produce . . . a
public among whom a sense of human potential beyond the constraints of the
present is fleetingly captured’.172 The panorama placed people in relation to an
imagined world beyond their everyday experience. And the panorama did not
stand alone, it took its place in a crowded London show-scene, sharing audiences
and effects with the theatres where, reading against Coleridge’s comic grain, we
find audiences noisy and empowered by the experience of virtual reality, ‘[s]uch a
deafening explosion, that I could not hear a word of the play for half an act after it:
and a little real gunpowder being set fire to at the same time, and smelt by all the
spectators, the naturalness of the scene was quite astonishing!’173 Rather than iso-
lating them from ‘a lived embeddedness’, the popular show culture of the Regency
gave presence and liveness back to the people, and helped them to find a place in
169 [Anon.], ‘Gossip from London’, Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal 129 (June 1846): 395–8, p. 396.
170 Crary, ‘Géricault’, p. 11. Matthew Kaiser makes a similar argument about ‘[r]aucous early
nineteenth-century audiences’ for melodrama in the theatre, although I disagree with his conclusion
that such audiences represented ‘the last hurrahs of Merry England’, or that they were replaced by the
end of the century by ‘silent, middle-class spectators’. Kaiser, World in Play, p. 84.
171 Crary, ‘Géricault’, p. 23.
172 Nicholas Ridout, Passionate Amateurs: Theatre, Communism, and Love (Ann Arbor, MI:
University of Michigan Press, 2013), p. 5. Ridout is speaking of Jill Dolan, Utopia in Performance:
Finding Hope at the Theater (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2005).
173 Coleridge, Major Works, p. 439.
Live Byron 147
a newly serializing media world.174 By producing in spectators, readers, and

passers-by a particular kind of participative historical consciousness, these tech-
nologies were also engaged in forging a new consciousness of the present and of
the experience of ‘present time’. ‘Now’ became both the vantage point and the
destination of history. The next chapter will continue an investigation into the
interconnection of London shows, print, and news and their increasing seriality
by focusing on one spectacular obsession of the period: the eruption of Mount
Vesuvius.
174 Crary, ‘Géricault’, p. 15.

4
Vesuvius on the Strand
‘Zeit ist nur dadurch, daẞ etwas geschieht, und nur dort, wo etwas
geschieht.’
‘Time is only because something happens, and it is only where some-
thing happens.’1
It must have been difficult to ignore the insistent presence of Mount Vesuvius in
London from the 1820s onwards. The volcano would pop up all over the place
and erupt, often several times a day, in multimedia shows, spectacles, and plays
across the city.2 Walking down the Strand in the centre of London in 1823, ‘the
ancient city . . . is transported on the wings of the wind. And [its] location here is
curious. We have seen Vesuvius in full roar and torrent, within a hundred yards of
a hackney-coach stand, with all its cattle, human and bestial, unmoved by the
phenomenon . . . and now Pompeii, reposing in its slumber of two thousand years,
in the very buzz of the Strand’.3 Vesuvius and the Bay of Naples had been a
favourite subject with picturesque landscape painters throughout the eighteenth
century, and had offered a subject in 1781 for Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg’s
Eidophusikon, but the scene reached a new and altogether different level of
cultural visibility in the 1820s and 1830s, when it became less a ‘subject’ than a
pervasive and insistent cultural theme.4
From the celebrated ‘representation of Vesuvius, fizzing, and roaring’ in
Vauxhall Gardens which premiered in June 1821, to John Martin’s painting of The
Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum which was exhibited at the Egyptian
Hall in 1822, and which, one critic said, ‘cannot be seen without deep emotion’,
1 Ernst Bloch, Tübinger Einleitung in die Philosophie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), S.129.
Translation my own. John Cumming translates this as ‘Time is only because something happens, and
where something happens, there time is’: Ernst Bloch, A Philosophy of the Future, trans. John Cumming
(New York: Herder & Herder, 1970), p. 124.
2 Nicholas Daly has noticed that ‘[a]s a narrative device, theatrical special effect, and sublime fine-
art spectacle, inter alia, . . . [the volcanic disaster narrative] crosses not just genres and modes, but
media’: Nicholas Daly, ‘The Volcanic Disaster Narrative: From Pleasure Garden to Canvas, Page, and
Stage’, Victorian Studies 53:2 (Winter 2011): 255–85, p. 256.
3 [Anon.], ‘Pompeii’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (April 1824): 472–5, pp. 472–3. See also
Altick, Shows of London, p. 181. This refers to Robert Burford’s panorama ‘The Ruins of Pompeii and
the Surrounding Country’ which opened in November 1823 on the Strand. A view of ‘The City of
Naples’ including Mount Vesuvius had been exhibited in 1821 [The Morning Chronicle (Saturday
10 February 1821), advertisement, front page].
4 For de Loutherbourg, see Altick, Shows of London, pp. 96, 117–27.
© Clare Pettitt.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198830429.001.0001
Vesuvius on the Strand 149
the spectacle of the eruption of Vesuvius was becoming available to a remarkably

wide cross-section of the London public.5 Martin’s picture could be seen for a
shilling and apparently excited ‘extraordinary interest . . . among the graphically
untutored’.6 No wonder that Byron wrote in 1822 that ‘Vesuvius shows his blaze,
an usual sight | For gaping tourists, from his hackneyed height’.7 The tourists
could just as well be in London as in Naples. The ‘Eruption of Mount Vesuvius’
was one of the most common scenes in the raree shows, and Dickens records
‘Mount Vesuvius, going it (in a circle)’ as a favourite subject of pavement artists in
London.8 The erupting volcano was also a subject for Mrs Linwood’s needle: her
embroidered version of Vesuvius would have been admired by Peggotty and
David on their big day out in London in David Copperfield, when they visit Mrs
Linwood’s well-known gallery of needlework in Leicester Square. Pacini’s 1825
opera L’ultimo giorno di Pompei reached the King’s Theatre in the Haymarket
from Naples, via Paris, in 1831 with a spectacular final eruption scene of ‘falling
temples, and showers of ashes and fire’. [Fig. 4.1]9 By 1834, when Edward Lytton
Bulwer brought out his novel The Last Days of Pompeii, the subject had already
become what Isobel Armstrong has described as a ‘cross-class obsession’, and was
to remain so into the 1840s.10 On a trip to London in 1837 a visiting American,
Lowell Mason, ticked off the fashionable sights one by one and on Thursday 7
September he duly went to ‘see the eruption of Vesuvius at Surry [sic] Gardens’.11
The ‘freestanding architectural and topographical models’ of Pompeii that he found
in these pleasure gardens were fashioned out of wood and canvas around an
ornamental lake that stood in for the Bay of Naples. Elaborate son et lumière
evening performances on these sets delivered Vesuvius’s eruption as their
5 Thomas McDonald Rendle, Swings and Roundabouts: A Yokel in London (Chapman & Hall
1919), p. 140. Martin’s canvas was itself based on Edwin Atherstone’s long poem The Last Days of
Herculaneum (1821). A review of the Egyptian Hall Martin show appeared in ‘Fine Arts’, Literary
Gazette 270 (23 March 1822), p. 185.
6 R.H., ‘Picture of the Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum’, Examiner (7 April 1822), p. 219.
The canvas was displayed alongside a display of live reindeer and Laplanders posing in front of a dio-
rama. See Martin Myrone (ed.), John Martin: Apocalypse (London: Tate Publishing, 2011), pp. 109–10.
In May 1828, crowds flocked to the Western Exchange, Old Bond Street, to see John Martin’s The
Deluge (1826) and The Destruction of Nineveh (1828).
7 Lord Byron, The Age of Bronze, or Carmen Seculare et Annus Haud Mirabilis (London: John Hunt,
1823), p. 12 ll. 181–2. Byron himself had refused to travel to Naples to view Vesuvius. ‘Certainly he did
not travel for fashion’s sake, nor would he follow in the wake of the herd of voyagers. As much as he had
heard about the Mediterranean, he had never visited Vesuvius or Aetna, because all the world had’:
R. N., ‘Personal Character of Lord Byron’, London Magazine 10 (October 1824): 337–47, p. 346.
According to some, Byron’s dismissal of Vesuvius was in a ‘tone of dandyism he was wont to adopt’:
H. W. B., ‘Letters from the Journal of a Traveller’, Metropolitan Magazine 78 (October 1837), p. 221.
8 [George Mogridge], ‘Eruption of Mount Vesuvius’, in Sergeant Bell, and his Raree-Show, pp.
76–82. Thanks are due to Kate Flint for drawing my attention to this. Charles Dickens, ‘His Brown-
Paper Parcel’, in Charles Dickens, Somebody’s Luggage, ed. Melissa Valiska Gregory and Melisa
Klimaszewski (London: Hesperus Press, 2006), pp. 81–91, p. 87.
9 [Anon.], ‘Theatrical Examiner: King’s Theatre’, Examiner 1207 (20 March 1831), p. 180.
10 Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds, p. 314.
11 Lowell Mason, A Yankee Musician in Europe: The 1837 Journals of Lowell Mason, ed. Michael
Broyles (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1990) p. 123.
150 Serial Forms
Fig. 4.1. Alessandro Sanquirico, set design for Giovanni Pacini’s opera, L’ultimo
giorno di Pompei which premiered at the Teatro San Carlo, Naples in 1825. This
set design is from the 1827 La Scala Production [Pictures Now/Alamy Stock Photo]
pyrotechnic finale.12 ‘The burning lava, streams of liquid fire, and the reflection of
the whole on the lake beneath, are given with an effect so striking as to produce a
complete illusion’, wrote another satisfied customer.13 In 1845, Robert Burford
opened an immersive panorama of the eruption in Leicester Square: ‘[t]he sky is
dark, the stars shine brightly’, and Vesuvius, with its vast ‘column of fire . . . illu-
mines . . . the heavens with coruscations of flame and jets of red-hot stones’.14 And
spectacle generated print. When lit from behind, William Morgan’s ‘Protean’ sou-
venir print of the show at the Surrey Gardens morphed from a daytime image of
Vesuvius into a scene depicting a night-time eruption complete with flames and
12 Quoted from Altick, Shows of London, p. 325. See also John L. Seydl, ‘The Last Days of Pompeii:
Decadence, Apocalypse, Resurrection’, in Victoria C. Gardner Coates, Kenneth Lapatin, and
Jon L. Seydl, The Last Days of Pompeii: Decadence, Apocalypse, Resurrection (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty
Museum, 2012), pp. 14–31.
13 [Anon.], ‘Vauxhall Gardens’, The Idler and Breakfast Table Companion 1 (1837), p. 124.
14 Robert Burford, Description of a View of the City and Bay of Naples, by Moonlight, with an
Eruption of Mount Vesuvius (London: Brettell, 1845); [Anon.], ‘From the Spectator: Christmas
Entertainments’, Littell’s Living Age 4 (1845): 402.
lava.15 Prints and shows intersected and reproduced one another in a chain of
mediations: Morgan’s print is not of Vesuvius per se, but of Vesuvius ‘as repre-
sented at the Surrey Zoological Gardens’.16
Even without joining the crowds at Vauxhall or the Surrey Gardens, it was dif-
ficult to avoid Mount Vesuvius. Large bills announcing the imminent eruption of
the volcano were plastered all over the walls of London’s central thoroughfares.
John Parry’s 1835 watercolour ‘A London Street Scene’ (See Fig 6.4) shows a
wall covered with competing bills, displaying at least two examples, ‘THE
DESTRUCTION OF POMPEII EVERY EVENING’ and ‘ADELPHI THEATRE |
EXTRAORDINARY HIT | THE LAST DAYS OF | POMPEII!’17 Competition for
the attention of the passer-by was ferocious, and the bill-stickers were constantly at
work: ‘a tremendous explosion of Vesuvius in the Surrey Gardens, has put out the
intended blaze of the Lady’s Newspaper, or perhaps of Howitt’s Journal!’ wrote a
columnist wryly in Howitt’s Journal, adding that ‘fresh broadsides are firing every
hour from the steam guns of the press’.18 And even if the noisy bills and posters
escaped the passer-by’s notice, the newspapers were full of it too: ‘in looking over
the Times newspaper at breakfast yesterday morning, I found amongst the advert-
isements, . . . long bills, asking [readers] into Vauxhall Gardens’ to enjoy the ‘grand
imposing Scene of the Eruption of Mount Vesuvius, and the Bay of Naples’.19
Vesuvius as a Serial Event
But the newspapers did not only contain advertisements for the Vesuvius shows
and the sensational spectacles of the destruction of the Ancient Roman city of
Pompeii in 79 ce. They also contained news about current eruptions in real time
as Vesuvius erupted with ‘obliging frequency’ throughout the early part of the
15 William Morgan, ‘Improved Protean Scenery: Mount Vesuvius as Represented at the Surrey
Zoological Gardens’, n.d. [?1840] (7 in. × 10 in.). A copy is held by University of Southern California
Libraries.
16 Prints of Vesuvius in eruption were popular in scrapbooks, too. Henry Armfield remembered
that ‘[t]he old pictures in the scrapbooks that show Vesuvius represented by a triangle of black with an
equal triangle of red nearly balanced on top of it, apex to apex, are . . . creations of the purest fiction’:
Henry Armfield, At the Crater of Vesuvius in Eruption: A Word-Picture (Salisbury: Brown & Co.,
1872), p. 5.
17 Parry’s 1835 watercolour references real performances. The Last Days of Pompeii was a play
adapted by John Baldwin Buckstone from Bulwer’s novel of the same name, and performed for 64
nights in 1834–5 at the Adelphi Theatre. See The Adelphi Theatre Daily Calendar online, https://www.
umass.edu/AdelphiTheatreCalendar/m34d.htm. For Parry’s watercolour, see Fig. 6.4.
18 [Anon.], ‘The Battle of the Posters by a Literary Policeman’, Howitt’s Journal 1:4 (23 January
1847): 54–5, p. 55.
19 [Anon.], ‘Memory—Suggestions Against the Encouragement of It’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh
Magazine 16 (1824): 136–9, p. 137; [Anon.], ‘The Mirror of Fashion’, Morning Chronicle (Wednesday
6 June 1821), unpaginated.
152 Serial Forms
century.20 On 15 June 1794 Vesuvius had erupted and destroyed the nearby town
of Torre del Greco; and the volcano remained active, making fairly frequent
eruptions, the more significant of which were in November 1819, October 1822,
and August 1834. ‘A new eruption of Mount Vesuvius has just occurred, which is
said to be superior in grandeur to that of 1794’, announced the papers in 1822.
The recorded time was precise: ‘[a]t three o’clock in the morning of the 22nd
[of October]’.21
Eruptions of Vesuvius were treated as ‘topical’ in the first half of the nineteenth
century, but their topicality was invariably backdated to the famous ancient erup-
tion. The Mirror reprinted an article on Pompeii in 1824 from the upmarket
Blackwood’s Magazine, an article which announced that ‘[a]ll the world knows the
story of Pompeii’.22 Yet the world of Blackwood’s readers was a different one to that
of the readers of the twopenny Mirror, and the Mirror devolved the story to a much
wider and less ‘polite’ public. Similarly, the Literary Chronicle in 1820 did not bother
to repeat ‘former accounts’ of the destruction of Pompeii because they were already
‘too well known to the least conversant in history’.23 The cheap periodicals of the
1820s were formative in the creation of a ‘historical’ nation, of an imagined reader-
ship of people historically informed and aware. As Michael Warner has argued for
an earlier period in America, this is how print culture both performs and creates a
public sphere: ‘the reader . . . now . . . incorporates into the meaning of the printed
object an awareness of the potentially limitless others who may also be reading. For
that reason, it becomes possible to imagine oneself, in the act of reading, becoming
part of an arena of the national people that cannot be realized except through such
mediating imaginings’.24 Here the ‘arena of national people’ is imagined as ‘conver-
sant in history’, and a newly topographical and historical sensibility is nurtured by a
media which creates novelties from the events of the past.
The Literary Chronicle of 23 November 1822 reported the most recent eruption
of the volcano on the same page as an advertisement for John Martin’s apocalyp-
tic picture of the destruction of Pompeii.25 The topicality of Vesuvius in this
20 Roy Porter, The Making of Geology: Earth Science in Britain 1660–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997), p. 123. For the history of Vesuvius, see Alwyn Scarth, Vesuvius: A Biography
(Harpenden: Terra, 2009); Gillian Darley, Vesuvius: The Most Famous Volcano in the World (London:
Profile, 2011); Sean Cocco, Watching Vesuvius (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).
21 [Anon.], ‘Eruption of Mount Vesuvius’, Literary Chronicle and Weekly Review 184 (23 November
1822): 745–6, p. 745. Often news of recent eruptions was printed in newspapers in the form of ‘private
letters’ from Naples.
22 Brian Maidment claims that the Mirror is ‘a key periodical for understanding the transitions
from polite to mass culture during these decades’: Brian E. Maidment, Into the 1830s; Some Origins of
Victorian Illustrated Journalism Cheap Octavo Magazines of the 1820s and their Influence (Manchester:
Manchester Polytechnic Library, 1992), p. 5. [Anon.], ‘Pompeii’, Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and
Instruction 3:86 (29 May 1824), p. 362.
23 [Anon.], ‘Eruption of Mount Vesuvius’, Literary Chronicle and Weekly Review 2:44 (18 March
1820), p. 188.
24 Michael Warner, ‘Preface’, in The Letters of the Republic, p. xiii (emphasis original).
25 [Anon.], ‘Eruption of Mount Vesuvius’ and ‘Fine Arts’, Literary Chronicle and Weekly Review 184
(23 November 1822): 745–6, p. 745.
period was maintained by the many volcano shows and spectacles, so that when
the Mirror offered its readers a picture of the currently erupting Vesuvius on its
front page a week later, [Fig. 4.2] the woodcut was indistinguishable from images
of the Vauxhall simulacrum.26 On Saturday 7 June 1823, the Mirror’s front page
was again half taken up with an image of the volcano entitled ‘The Destruction of
Torre del Greco’ which appeared to be a current news story [Fig. 4.3]. But the art-
icle beneath it revealed that the story was thirty years old: ‘[o]ur Engraving this
week presents a faithful representation of the city of Torre del Greco, after its
almost total destruction by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 1794’. Nevertheless,
the paper made a strange retrospective claim for up-to-the-minute reporting:
‘[t]he drawing from which our Engraving is copied, was taken on the spot, eight days
after this dreadful event, which destroyed a fine city, and rendered fifteen thousand
persons houseless’.27 There is an odd layering of time evident here: this was news
eight days after an event thirty years ago, which was significant as a repetition of an
event two thousand years before that. The ontology of this particular event seems to
depend on the teleology of the ‘event-series’ to which it belongs.28
The newspapers combined the reporting of current or recent volcanic eruptions
with historical reflection and scientific and topographical information, and this
‘news’ was then recycled back into the show culture. In 1822 the Surrey Theatre
opened a spectacular equestrian production of Masaniello to compete with its
rival the Coburg Theatre’s lavish historical productions. Masaniello, the story of
the revolt of a Neopolitan fisherman against the rule of Hapsburg Spain in Naples
in 1647, ended with the eruption of Vesuvius by moonlight displaying ‘the Effect
of the Liquid Fire pouring in copious Torrents down the Mountain Sides’.29 In
1829, the Cosmorama on Regent Street was showing
the Eruption of Mount Vesuvius, as it appeared in Oct. 1822 . . . The burning vol-
cano presents a scene of the most awful grandeur. We shrink, as it were, ‘with
inward horror’ from the devastating scene before us. The mind can scarcely
divest itself of the terrible reality, so perfect is the illusion. The powers of
26 [Anon.], ‘Eruption of Mount Vesuvius’, Mirror of Literature, Amusement and Instruction 1:5
(30 November 1822), p. 65.
27 [Anon.], ‘Destruction of Torre del Greco’, Mirror of Literature, Amusement and Instruction 2:33
(7 June 1823), p. 33.
28 Srinivas Aravamudan claims that ‘[t]he event has twin temporal aspects of eventuality and event-
fulness, teleology and ontology’: Srinivas Aravamudan, ‘The Return of Anachronism’, Modern
Language Quarterly 62:4 (2001): 331–53, p. 332. The identity of an ‘event’ and its relationship to a
series is central to Michel Foucault’s redefinition of ‘genealogy’ with reference to Friedrich Nietzsche’s
work. For Gilles Deleuze, event replaces essence. See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth
of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995) and Gilles Deleuze, Logique du
sens (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1969); trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale as The Logic of Sense
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1990).
29 Playbill, 26 December 1822, quoted in Jane Moody, Illegitimate Theatre in London 1770–1840
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 116. The play was by Henry Milner, and was to
become a famous London production, much revived over the next fifteen years or so.
154 Serial Forms
Fig. 4.2. ‘Eruption of Mount Vesuvius’, Mirror of Literature, Amusement and

Instruction (30 November 1822), front page [reproduced by kind permission of the
Syndics of Cambridge University Library, Library Storage Facility v.1 (1823)]
Fig. 4.3. ‘Destruction of Torre del Greco’, Mirror of Literature, Amusement and
Instruction (7 June 1823), front page [© The British Library Board: General Reference
Collection P.P.5681]
156 Serial Forms
mechanism have been called to the aid of the painter’s art; and instead of behold-
ing the still life which a mere picture presents, we perceive incessant belchings
and undulating masses of smoke and flame.30
Magic lantern shows incorporated ‘dissolving views’ of ‘Mount Vesuvius . . . day and
Night, and an Eruption’.31 Vesuvius had become a ‘compulsive image’ circulating
around London in print and show culture from the opera houses and theatres of
the West End and polite Regent Street to Vauxhall and the Surrey Gardens in
Kennington south of the river, and the unlicensed transpontine theatres.32
The volcano was of course already established as an image of revolution and
the eruption of repressed political energy. Nicholas Daly has suggested that the
spectacle of the erupting volcano could operate as a ‘screen-threat for other
forces—such as the crowd’.33 It had been particularly associated with representa-
tions of the French Revolution, as William Cobbett remarked in his Weekly
Political Register in 1804, ‘[w]e have been so often told about the earthquake, the
volcano, the burning lava of the French Revolution’, complaining about what he
saw as a dangerous British fatalism in the face of French power as if ‘our power
has been crippled by some convulsion of nature’.34 The revolutionary charge of
the image of Vesuvius continued into the 1820s. In 1821 the Monthly Magazine
warned its readers that ‘Paris is a greater volcano than Vesuvius’, before going on
to ask, ‘is London, at this present writing, so perfectly free of volcanic phenom-
ena? Are her artisans all quiet and industrious?’35 The unstamped radical press,
always quick to lay hold of useful rhetorical materials as they became available,
appropriated the volcano trope as a figure of the threat of unstoppable violence,
warning that the ‘oppressed [could] burst forth like the volcano’.36 The Poor Man’s
Guardian invoked the ‘great reform volcano’ in Britain in an article in August
1832 called, threateningly, ‘Second Anniversary of the French Revolution’.37
Carlyle reignited the image for a British readership in his French Revolution
30 [Anon.], ‘Cosmorama, Regent Street’, Gentleman’s Magazine (August 1829) p. 156; [Anon.],‘Eruption
of Vesuvius’, Literary Gazette 270 (23 March 1822), pp. 184–5. Earthquakes were felt on 13 March and on
24 March the volcano erupted.
31 Quoted from the Negretti and Zambra catalogue of magic lantern slides, undated, p. 360, in
Armstrong, Glassworlds, p. 312.
32 Armstrong, Glassworlds, p. 262. 33 Daly, ‘Volcanic Disaster’, p. 280.
34 William Cobbett, ‘Letter IV. To the Right Hon. William Pitt’, Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register,
(17 November 1804), cols 741–2. In November 1816, William Cobbett issued an abridged twopenny
edition of his 1s. ½d. Weekly Political Register, evading the newspaper stamp by publishing it initially
as a single open sheet, and from the following week as a sixteen-page octavo ‘pamphlet’. See also Mary
Ashburn Miller, ‘Mountain, Become a Volcano: The Image of the Volcano in the Rhetoric of the
French Revolution’, French Historical Studies 32:4, ’89: Then and Now (Fall 2009): 555–85.
35 [Anon.], ‘Grimm’s Ghost’, New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal 1:1 (January 1821):
345–9, pp. 345–6.
36 [Anon.], ‘National Union of the Working Classes’, Poor Man’s Guardian (Sunday 25 December
1831): 219–20, p. 219.
37 [Anon.], ‘Second Anniversary of the French Revolution’, Poor Man’s Guardian (Saturday
4 August 1832): 482–3, p. 482. This refers to the French Revolution of 1830.
(1837) in suggesting that it was impossible to predict the direction of ‘the volcanic
lava-flood’ of a revolution.38 Vesuvius became ‘a type of the absolute contingency
of violent catastrophe’.39 The erupting volcano as a figure of revolution, and par-
ticularly of the French Revolution, was well understood throughout the Regency
period and was surely one of the aspects of the Vesuvius phenomenon that
attracted people who were both fearful of and hoping for change, yet unsure of
what agency might bring such change about.40 The eruption of Vesuvius could
stand for, and did stand for, any enormous event. Something happens. At first it
looks as if it will not happen (the volcano slumbers) and then it happens. How
can such events be predicted or known? What sensations of relief or catharsis are
there in the spectacle of eventfulness? Henri Lefebvre might answer that ‘a revolu-
tion, whether violent or non-violent . . . acquires the new significance of a liber-
ation from the quotidian’.41 Topical news and shows did not just punctuate and
alleviate the eventlessness and banality of everyday life, they were instrumental in
constructing and maintaining just that very sense of ‘everydayness’.
Nicholas Daly warns against over-historicizing the ‘disaster narrative’ of
Pompeii, suggesting the payoff and pleasure of ‘the sublime moment of devasta-
tion, with its toppling buildings, fiery showers of pyroclastics, yawning trenches,
and human immolation’ has not changed much in its appeal between the early
nineteenth century and now.42 But the ‘Vesuvius’ phenomenon demands careful
historicization precisely because part of its immense power was in its historiciz-
ing of itself, as a moment when popular ideas about the relation of the present to
historical time were themselves undergoing seismic changes. The shows and
reports and images coalesced around the eruption of Vesuvius as symbolic of not
only one event but of many events overlaid one upon the other, so that the ori-
ginal and well-known ancient eruption of 79 ce both invoked and was invoked by
the more recent eruptions in the nineteenth century. For example, the twopenny
Idler, and Breakfast-Table Companion accompanied a report of the ‘Evening
exhibition [at the Surrey Zoological Gardens], when an eruption takes place, (on
which occasions there are seldom fewer people present than 10,000)’ with ‘a few
interesting particulars connected with the history of the mountain’.43 The
38 Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution [1837], ed. K. J. Fielding and David Sorensen (Oxford:
39 Armstrong, Glassworlds, p. 314. Michael Booth makes some comments on ‘catastrophe’ spectacle
and the connections between panoramas, paintings, and theatre, and suggests that the painter John
Martin is a significant originator of this multimedia phenomenon. A spectacular collapsing set was
built for Charles Kean’s production of Sardanapalus in 1853. Michael R. Booth, Victorian Spectacular
Theatre (London: Routledge, 1981), pp. 12, 20.
40 See, for example, G. M. Matthews, ‘A Volcano’s Voice in Shelley’, ELH 24:3 (September 1957):
191–228.
41 Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World, trans. Sacha Rabinovitch (London: Athlone
Press, 2000), p. 36.
42 Daly, ‘Volcanic Disaster’, p. 280.
43 [Anon.], ‘Mount Vesuvius’, Idler, and Breakfast-Table Companion (9 September 1837): 129–30,
p. 129.
158 Serial Forms
topicality of the modern eruptions seems to be created partly by a backwards

association with the ancient eruption story. Early nineteenth-century reports of
recent eruptions of Vesuvius were less news bulletins than miscellaneous articles
combining an account of the ancient Roman world with remarks upon geology
and the relationship of volcanic activity to the formation of the earth.44 In report-
ing the sudden and unforeseen event of a present eruption, they also invoked
ancient historical time and deep geological time. Geological time was itself also
‘news’ in this period, made topical through the arguments of Nichol, Whewell,
and Lyell over catastrophist and gradualist theories of the origins of the earth.45
In this way, the ephemeral news event became the last episode of a long ongoing
series of ‘events’, both cosmological and historical.46 ‘When we think of novelty’,
says sociologist Niklas Luhmann, ‘we think first of one-off events. But in order to
recognize novelty we need familiar contexts. These may be types (earthquakes,
accidents, summit meetings, company collapses)’.47 Vesuvius shows could offer a
one-off event that was always also part of a series.
Fizzing and Roaring: Revolutionary Noise
So far we have been staring at a largely silent volcanic spectacle. But Thomas
McDonald Rendle usefully reminds us that noise was always part of the Vesuvius
event. Looking back to the Surrey Gardens display [Fig. 4.4], he remembers:
Noise and excitement being grateful to evening sojourners in outdoor resorts, it

was necessary to make the panorama a ‘speaking’ spectacle. What better than a
representation of Vesuvius, fizzing, and roaring, and upsetting the child slumber
of the neighbourhood? Sieges, bombardments and foes ruled the roost.48
The Idler also reported that the Surrey show climaxed with ‘clouds of black smoke,
and terrific reports’.49 Noise machines, firework bangs, shaken metal sheets, and
kettledrums were used to add to the rumpus at Vesuvius shows. The auditory
effects were an important contribution to the verisimilitude of the event and
helped to increase the feeling of immersion in the experience for the audience.
These spectacular and noisy experiments that started in the street shows and
pleasure gardens in the city were to prove remarkably upwardly mobile. Soon
44 See Simon Schaffer, ‘The Nebular Hypothesis and the Science of Progress’, in James R. Moore
(ed.), History, Humanity, and Evolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 131–64.
45 See Buckland, Novel Science. 46 See O’Connor, The Earth on Show.
47 Niklas Luhmann, The Reality of the Mass Media, trans. Kathleen Cross (Cambridge: Polity Press,
2000), p. 28; first published as Die Realität der Massenmedien (1996).
48 Rendle, Swings and Roundabouts, p. 140.
49 [Anon.], ‘Mount Vesuvius’, Idler, p. 130 (emphasis original).
Fig. 4.4. ‘Representation of Mount Vesuvius at “The Surrey Zoological Gardens” ’,

Mirror of Literature, Amusement and Instruction (13 August 1837), front page [© The
British Library Board: General Reference Collection P.P.5681]
they were being incorporated into productions in the grandest opera houses of
London and Paris. With the advent of the French grand opéra in the 1820s and
1830s, music got noisier too. Heinrich Heine commented wryly that ‘nothing
exceeds the luxury of the grand opera, which is now become a paradise for the
hard of hearing’.50
This new noisiness could also represent a displaced version of the revolution-
ary derangements and upheavals that had been happening periodically in Europe
since the end of the previous century. In Paris on 29 February 1828, Daniel
Auber’s premiere of La Muette de Portici is conventionally discussed as one pos-
sible point of origin for what was eventually to become known as grand opéra.51
Eugène Scribe’s libretto is based on the 1647 uprising of Neopolitan peasants and
fishermen against their Spanish rulers, led by the hero Masaniello, but, as Sarah
Hibberd has argued, this historic uprising also serves as a metaphor for the
revolutions that underlay more recent French and European experience. Hibberd
50 Heinrich Heine, ‘Über die französische Bühne’; quoted in Jürgen Maehder, ‘Historienmalerei
und Grand Opéra: zur Raumvorstellung in den Bildern Géricaults und Delacroix und auf der Bühne
der Académie Royale de Musique’, in Sieghardt Döhring and Arnold Jacobshagen (eds), Meyerbeer
und das europäische Musiktheater (Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 1999), pp. 58–87; quoted here in Carolyn
Abbate and Roger Parker, A History of Opera: The Last Four Hundred Years (London: Allen Lane,
2012), p. 266.
51 The Times suggested that ‘La Muette de Portici is unquestionably the most perfect existing model
of the historical opera’: [Anon.],‘Royal Italian Opera’, The Times (16 March 1849), p. 8.
160 Serial Forms
argues that ‘the pace and dynamic style—musical, visual, textual—and the height-
ened emotion of the work drew the audience into the accelerated action and
brought the revolutionary past alive in a manner that was wholly unprecedented
at the Opéra in 1828.’52 The mute heroine of the title, Fenella, has migrated alone
into the opera from Walter Scott’s 1822 novel Peveril of the Peak, which features a
deaf-mute character also called Fenella.53 The climactic scene of the opera sees
Fenella throwing herself into the crater of an erupting Vesuvius. Originally,
Fenella had been meant to leap into the sea: Hibberd notes that Vesuvius was only
introduced in the third draft of the libretto in 1827, and she speculates that this
change may have been prompted by recent Vesuvius depictions on popular
stages.54 As we have seen, a show called Masaniello had played at the Surrey
Theatre in 1822.55 The opera’s repurposing of low-end shows and of Scott’s popu-
lar novel suggests that, rather than trickling down, the ‘historical’ imagination
flowed upwards from the popular to the bourgeois culture of the opera. Masaniello
was not a new subject. Carafa’s Masaniello had premiered at the Opéra Comique
in Paris two months before. Nor was an erupting Vesuvius entirely new to the
operatic stage. Pacini’s L’Ultimo Giorno di Pompei, which naturally concluded
with the volcano spectacularly destroying the city, had premiered in Naples on
19 November 1825 and had been touring the opera houses of Europe ever since.
In London, the Masaniello story definitely seems to have moved from the bot-
tom up: it starts as a melodrama ‘at the inferior theatres’, such as the Surrey, then
in February 1825 it appears as a historical play at the Drury Lane Theatre, with
Edmund Kean in the role of Masaniello, reappearing in March 1829 as ‘the long-
expected Ballet of Masaniello, ou le Pecheur de Portici’ at the King’s Theatre.56
52 Sarah Hibberd, French Grand Opera and the Historical Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge
53 Sonia Slatin argues that ‘[t]he fluent integration and bold transference of elements drawn from
other existing dramatic forms into that of traditional nineteenth century serious opera resulted, in this
Scribe-Auber work, in an illusion of novelty and innovative audacity—both highly rewarding in terms
of audience gratification’: Sonia Slatin, ‘Opera and Revolution: La Muette de Portici and the Belgian
Revolution of 1830 Revisited’, Journal of Musicological Research 3:1–2 (1979): 45–62, pp. 56–7.
54 Sarah Hibberd says that ‘[i]n 1828 an erupting Vesuvius could be seen at the Diorama, in Carafa’s
Massaniello at the Opéra-Comique; and in three melodramas: Antier’s Gustave; ou, le Napolitan and
Pixérécourt’s La Tête de mort; ou, les ruines de Pompéïa both at the Théâtre de la Gaiété , and Saint-
Hilaire’s Irène; ou, la prise de Napoli at the Cirque Olympique. And Pacini’s L’Ultimo Giorno di
Pompei—on whose final scene Ciceri’s mise-en-scène had been based—was revived at the Théâtre-
Italien on 2 October 1830.’ Sarah Hibberd, French Grand Opera, p. 48.
55 Masaniello also became a popular play. By 1846, Charles Dickens had seen at least one produc-
tion. ‘Do you recollect Yarnold in Massaniello [sic]?’, he asked his friend Clarkson Stanfield in 1844:
‘I find that I unintentionally “dress at him” before plunging into the sea.’ Macready’s company had
staged Masaniello at Covent Garden in 1838, and there was another production at the Lyceum in 1845.
Yarnold had played Masaniello’s friend Moreno in the first production in 1829. Charles Dickens to
Clarkson Stanfield (24 August 1844), The Letters of Charles Dickens 1844–1846, vol. 4, ed. Kathleen
Tillotson and Nina Burgis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), pp. 182–6, p. 185.
56 [Anon.], ‘Theatre’, Morning Post (18 February 1825), n.p.; [Anon.], ‘Theatre’, Morning Post
(25 March 1829), n.p. In 1825, the Morning Post reported, ‘Drury Lane Theatre. A new historical Play,
called Masaniello, the Fisherman of Naples, was produced last night at this theatre. When we say new
Here, ‘[t]he volcanic eruption was very cleverly managed; flames and ashes are
emitted from the summit and lava flows down the sides and flows around the
base in a manner most appropriately horrific’.57 Finally, in May 1829, a ‘new grand
opera’, La Muette di Portici, arrived at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, although it
was later described as ‘mutilated’ and cut down to three acts because London, as
always, lacked the lavish state subsidies that furnished the French opera with a
large part of its grandeur.58 The first night was disappointing as ‘[s]ome of the
machinery connected with the eruption in the last scene was out of order, and
diminished the effect intended to be produced by it’.59 Reviewers agreed though
that ‘[a]ll that the Manager could do in the way of scenic display is done, and
done unsparingly’.60 Two years later, in 1831, Pacini’s ‘long-promised opera’
L’ultimo giorno di Pompei reached the King’s Theatre in the Haymarket from
Naples, via Paris, with its spectacular final eruption scene of ‘falling temples, and
showers of ashes and fire’.61
Scenic display is key here. Critics felt that Pacini’s opera hardly needed a narra-
tive, as scenery and a spectacular eruption provided enough interest: ‘[t]he sud-
den destruction of an ancient city (which its disinterred remains enable the
painter to revive in pictured reality) . . . by a volcanic eruption, is in itself an inci-
dent sufficiently striking as to uphold a series of good music, almost without a
story’.62 The ongoing excavations at Pompeii were reported regularly in the illus-
trated press in Paris and London so that scenic authenticity, already important for
the panoramas, rapidly became a novel attraction at the opera too. Le Corsaire
reported that the sets of La Muette at its Paris premiere ‘toutes sans exception, ont
we copy the language of the bills, for though it might be the first time that it has appeared on one of
our national stages, the subject has been dramatized before at the inferior theatres, and has for some
weeks attracted the attention of the public as a melodrama.’ Bell’s Life explained that the production at
the King’s Theatre was ‘a pantomimic and choreographic representation of “La Muette de Portici”, an
opera performed with very great success at the “Académie Royale” at Paris . . . Dancing has been substi-
tuted for singing.’ [Anon.], ‘The Drama’, Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle (29 March 1829),
n.p. Fenella was danced by Pauline Leroux.
57 [Anon.], ‘Theatre’ Morning Post (25 March 1829), n.p.

58 Announced nevertheless as ‘a new Grand Opera: for the first time, Masaniello, or, the Dumb Girl
of Portici Fenella: Madame Alexendrine from the Opera House Paris for the first time’: [Anon.],
‘Theatre Royal, Drury-Lane’, Morning Post (4 May 1829), n.p.
59 [Anon.],‘Drury-Lane Theatre’, The Times (5 May 1829), p. 3. Although there was some compen-
sation in the fact that ‘[t]he costumes have been very carefully selected, and are extremely accurate, as
well as striking and bold’. The opera played alongside the ballet at the King’s Theatre.
60 [Anon.], ‘Drury-Lane Theatre’, Morning Post (6 May 1829), n.p. The Morning Post added that ‘the
scenery, dresses and decorations are altogether splendid. Some of the new scenery may be classed among
the best efforts of STANFIELD, ADAMS, MARINARI and ANDREWS.’ The opera returned to the
Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in 1830 and 1833; [Anon.],‘Multiple Arts and Popular Culture Items’, Morning
Post (26 November 1830); ‘Theatre Royal, Drury-Lane’, Morning Post (1 February 1833). The overture
was played in concert in 1840 and 1841, and the opera was produced again in 1845 at Covent Garden.
61 [Anon.], ‘Theatrical Examiner: King’s Theatre’, Examiner 1207 (20 March 1831): 180. Another
review remarked, ‘[t]he eruption of Vesuvius and the destruction of Pompeii were admirably well
represented.’ [Anon.], ‘Multiple Arts and Popular Culture Items’, Standard (18 March 1831): n.p.
62 [Anon.], ‘Theatrical Examiner: King’s Theatre’, Examiner 1207 (20 March 1831): 180.
162 Serial Forms
étés copiées sur les lieux, et . . . ont Presque la vérité des toiles du Diorama’ [‘[They]
were all, without exception, painted from the actual places and are almost as real
as diorama canvases.’].63 In Paris, advance publicity in the theatrical papers for La
Muette made much of the fact that the Opéra’s set designer, Charles Cicéri, had
travelled to Italy to copy the scenes ‘sur les lieux’—although ‘les lieux’ turn out not
to be the Bay of Naples and Vesuvius but Milan, where Cicéri had copied Alessandro
Sanquirico’s sets for Pacini’s L’ultimo Giorno di Pompei, which had been staged at
the Teatro alla Scala the previous year.64 A critic wrote admiringly of Grieve’s scen-
ery for the English version of L’ultimo Giorno that ‘[t]he house of Sallustio, and the
street of the tombs, are effective and correct compositions from the existing remains
of the city’.65 Grieve also produced scenery for the 1849 production of La Muette in
London: ‘It should have been mentioned that the scenery by Mr. Grieve is exceed-
ingly beautiful, and that almost every tableau received a distinct round of
applause. . . . The house was crammed to suffocation.’66 An American in 1838 wrote
that the grand opera in Paris surpassed all others as it ‘has a greater quantity of
thunder and lightning, of pasteboard seas, of paper snow storms, and dragons that
spit fire’.67 The singers were now competing with the scenery as much as with the
increased volume of the orchestra and the sound effects.68
There is a double massification at work in the staging of grand opera. One
critic wrote of the London version of La Muette that ‘no opera depends so much
on the effect of masses as Masaniello’.69 This referred to the large choruses and
others on stage; as another critic remarked, ‘the supernumeraries, nobles, guards,
magistrates, lazaroni, &c. are very abundant: on some occasions there must have
been considerably upwards of 150 persons on the stage’.70 The dramatization of
the crowd and the increased musical importance of the chorus make these operas
more concerned with the representation of ‘the people’ than with a sole focus on
individuals.71 But there is also a corresponding massification of the music in these
operas, as was noticed in a review of an 1845 London production of La Muette:
63 Le Corsaire (2 March 1828), quoted in Mary Ann Smart, Mimomania: Music and Gesture in
Nineteenth-Century Opera (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004), p. 65.
64 See Smart, Mimomania, p. 65.
65 [Anon.],‘Theatrical Examiner: King’s Theatre’, Examiner 1207 (20 March 1831), p. 180.
66 [Anon.], ‘Royal Italian Opera’, The Times (16 March 1849), p. 8.
67 John Sanderson, Sketches of Paris: In Familiar Letters to his Friends (Philadelphia, PA: E.L. Carey
& A. Hart, 1838), p. 30.
68 Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker agree that in the grand opera in the 1820s, ‘[t]he obsession
with creating a picture, the idea of meticulously managed scenic tableaux, was new and significant’:
Abbate and Parker, A History of Opera, p. 264.
69 [Anon.], ‘Royal Italian Opera’, The Times (16 March 1849), p. 8.
70 [Anon.], ‘Drury-Lane Theatre’, Morning Post (6 May 1829), n.p.
71 For the history of crowds and crowd scenes, see Mary Fairclough, The Romantic Crowd:
Sympathy, Controversy and Print Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); John Plotz,
The Crowd: British Literature and Public Politics (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000);
Phyllis Weliver, The Musical Crowd in English Fiction, 1840–1910: Class, Culture and Nation
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Michael Tratner, Crowd Scenes: Movies and Mass Politics
(New York: Fordham University Press, 2008).
‘[i]n all that relates to combined effort and masses of sound the results were fine
in the extreme’.72 The ‘masses of sound’, particularly when considered in the cli-
mactic volcanic eruption scenes, do seem to pit music against noise in ways which
reflect a shifting narrative and historical focus from tragedy and towards disaster.
In a close reading of the musical score during the final eruption scene in La
Muette, Roger Parker and Carolyn Abbate agree that ‘the simplicity of the music
at this climactic moment (nothing more than a sequence of mechanically
repeated scales) . . . [a]n absence of musical interest underlines the fact that the
visual element is meant to carry all before it’.73 And Richard Wagner initially
wrote off the opera complaining that [Fenella] ‘made away at last with herself
and her hopeless sorrow in the artificial fury of a stage volcano!’74 But the ‘visual
element’ is not silent. The stage directions for the last scene of La Muette are
worth quoting in full:
During this final scene, the curtain of clouds has disappeared and revealed an
angry Vesuvius; it throws out swirls of flame and smoke; the lava comes as far as
the foot of the stairway. The music must be managed so that the chorus begins as
soon as Fenella has disappeared into the lava.
After the final chorus, everyone moves about with the greatest terror. A man
arrives at the top of the stairway; the top of the terrace, at the sound of an explo-
sion, collapses and swallows him and three children, two held by the hand, one
on his back. All see this tableau of horror and group themselves as follows.
Alphonse in the centre of the stage; Elvire, head buried in his chest; pages and
women surround her in diverse groups.
The people fill the stage; mothers carry their children; men support their wives;
some fall to the ground, others support themselves against the colonnades.
Those who come via the terrace expire on the steps; one cannot go too far in
painting the terror in every movement of these characters.
Underground noises continue; tam-tam strokes, thunder, tremors, roaring,
everything happens at once. Just as the curtain is lowered, the arch should fall,
from Vesuvius to the steps, stones of all sizes that could come from the crater;
there must be many.75
72 [Anon.], ‘Multiple News Items’, Satirist; or, the Censor of the Times (29 June 1845): n.p. The
review is of a production of La Muette by a Brussels company at Covent-Garden.
73 Abbate and Parker, A History of Opera, p. 269.
74 Richard Wagner, Opera and Drama [1851], trans. William Ashton Ellis (Lincoln, NE: University
of Nebraska Press, 1995), p. 57. Wagner subsequently changed his mind about the opera and wrote
admiringly about it in an obituary piece on Daniel Auber.
75 Louis Jacques Solomé, Indications Générales et observations pour la mise-en-scène de La Muette
de Portici, repr. in Robert H. Cohen, The Original Staging Manuals for Twelve Parisian Operatic
Premiers, 1824–1843 (Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon Press, 1991), pp. 13–72. p. 47; quoted in Hibberd,
French Grand Opera, pp. 40–1. The translation is Hibberd’s own.
164 Serial Forms
Those ‘[u]nderground noises . . . tam-tam strokes, thunder, tremors, roaring’ are

presumably competing with the orchestral music, which at this point is itself
thumping and loud. Fenella’s ‘theme’ for as long as she teeters on the brink of the
volcanic crater is not lyrical but repetitive and mechanical, as if she is pathologic-
ally stuck. Mary Ann Smart has suggested that Fenella becomes pure movement
and pure pain in the opera’s last act: ‘[t]he music for this last sequence of
actions . . . fills a multitude of illustrative functions, suggesting at once the rioting
crowd, the volcano, and Fenella’s own frenetic movements’.76 The French censors
of the original opera demanded that some notice be taken in the libretto of
Fenella’s demise.77 But even in the final version her death is attended by repetitive
noise rather than narrative music, and the affective focus of the scene is by no
means clearly on her. Fenella’s suicide constitutes collateral damage rather than
the main event. Ending with the shock of disaster as stones of all sizes tumble
noisily down onto the stage, La Muette cannot achieve the closure of tragedy.
Revolutionary Seriality
The stage eruption of Vesuvius in La Muette was to become part of the story of a
real revolution. The Paris uprising of July 1830 was followed by unsuccessful
revolts in Rome and Warsaw, and successful ones in Brussels and Dresden.
In Brussels the revolt began on 25 August 1830, apparently during a performance
of Auber’s opera at the Théâtre de la Monnaie, and then spilled out onto the
streets. Inspired by the volcanic force on stage, the Belgians drove out the Dutch,
and Belgium was subsequently declared a separate constitutional monarchy.
Richard Wagner wrote of Masaniello that its ‘very representation had brought
[revolutions] about . . . seldom has an artistic product stood in closer connection
with a world event’.78 The blurring of representation and event so forcefully enacted
between stage and street in Brussels was already underpinning a European
show culture that relied on creating performances of intense authenticity, and a
European revolutionary culture which relied on self-conscious performance and
on the deliberate mobilization of symbols.79
Sonia Slatin has disagreed that the opera spontaneously ignited a revolution
that night, but has argued instead that it was used to organize a revolution ‘as a
point of departure according to a previously conceived and carefully but
76 Smart, Mimomania, p. 64. 77 Smart, Mimomania, p. 65.

78 Richard Wagner, Prose Works, trans. W. Ashton Ellis, vol. 5 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench,
Trübner, 1895), p. 53. The ‘Reminiscences of Auber’ were written in 1871.
79 Roland Barthes comments on the barricade as a ‘symbol of revolutionary France’, along with the
monument, the demonstration, the occupation, particular garments, and of course language in its
most coded (symbolic or ritual) aspects: Roland Barthes, ‘Writing the Event’ in Roland Barthes, The
Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989),
pp. 149–54, p. 152.
apparently flexibly prepared plan’.80 But she concedes that ‘there is no doubt that
its daring subject-matter (rooted in actual history) and its musical—and particu-
larly, its dramatic and scenic—treatment contributed considerably to the success
of the plan’.81 Its open-endedness, its loudness, its close relationship to the popu-
lar world of shows and novelties certainly lent it a revolutionary possibility. But it
is doubtful whether the fact that it was ‘rooted in actual history’ was as important
as Slatin suggests. It was much more important that it created a sense of the repe-
tition of history, of the seriality of revolutions, through its silent echoing (and the
silence of the mute Fenella is of course one of the major tropes on stage) of the
much more recent revolutionary past. Its anachronism was more important than
its historical authenticity because it brought the action of the past into the present
and suggested that it could be replayed in any historical moment.
The form of the opera itself suggests the possibility of seriality. Emilio Sala says
the music of the mélodrame is governed by the ‘rhetoric of repetition’ and an
‘open sequential structure’.82 La Muette crucially conforms to the key form of the
first half of the nineteenth century in both France and England: the serial. The
explosion of Vesuvius at the end of the opera was not just ‘a highly charged sym-
bolic moment’; it was also understood from the contemporary vantage point as a
serial event which suggests a historical present as much as it recreates a historical
past.83 It was the opera’s seriality, and its transfer of affect from individual to col-
lective suffering, implicating its audience, that made it so very useful as a revolu-
tionary object. Walter Ong has said that ‘sound situates man in the middle of
actuality and in simultaneity, whereas vision situates man in front of things and in
sequentiality’.84 But in the complex interplay of immersive sound and vision in
the Vesuvius shows, an actuality is made of sequentiality, or, in other words, seri-
ality becomes an event. Vesuvius shows in the early nineteenth century, be they
on the Strand in London, in the dioramas, panoramas, or at the Opéra in Paris,
or the theatre, all demonstrate how a particular kind of historical consciousness
developed alongside and because of emerging serial news media in this period.
Vesuvius becomes a trope not just of revolution, but of revolutionary seriality,
allowing people across all classes to insert themselves into history and to imagine
themselves as actors in the ongoing history of the present.
The Vesuvius phenomenon in the 1820s was issuing out of a new perception
and culture of ‘eventfulness’ created by the coincidence of several factors. An
acceleration of print culture, an opening up of Continental Europe, a newly ‘his-
toricizing’ culture, a democratization and commercialization of leisure, a hunger
80 Slatin, ‘Opera and Revolution’, p. 56. 81 Slatin, ‘Opera and Revolution’, p. 56.
82 Emilio Sala, L’Opera senza canto, il mélo romantico e l’invenzione della colonna sonora (Venice:
Marsilio, 1995): p. 147; quoted in Smart, Mimomania, p. 60.
83 Hibberd, French Grand Opera, p. 46.
84 Walter J. Ong, The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1967), p. 128.
166 Serial Forms
for ‘news’ that was not yet fully met, a newly spectacular culture: all of these were
determinants for a shift in the 1820s towards a reformulation of the new or the
‘contemporary’. The steadily increasing flow of written commentary and reflec-
tion on events which was now beginning to reach more and more people was
establishing itself as the ecosystem of the everyday. Critique and commentary
about far-away happenings were creating eventfulness in the ordinary lives of a
new constituency of readers. The report of an event was in fact the event itself.85 It
was the precipitation of distant world events into the actual everyday lives of
ordinary people and the consequent recalibration of scales of experience and feel-
ing that brought the concept of the ‘everyday’ into being. Lefebvre is adamant that
‘until the nineteenth century, until the advent of competitive capitalism and the
expansion of the world of trade the quotidian as such did not exist’.86 This is an
overstatement, as surely day-to-day unexceptional experience had always existed,
but it had previously existed in a different proportional relation to global events,
and had occupied a different historical scale. The proliferation of information and
spectacle in the 1820s even led to the press itself being figured as a kind of
Vesuvius, where Vesuvius stood for an out-of-control excess, so that in London in
1820, ‘[e]very hour we find something new issuing from the press: together with
an inundation of romances and novels . . . Some are essays on Chemistry, botany
and astronomy; really the daily teeming of the British press is like the explosion of
Mount Vesuvius’.87 The intersections of print and show culture in 1820s London
reveal that the modern concept of daily ‘news’ was growing in importance along-
side a new kind of popular engagement with history.
Bulwer’s Vesuvius Show: The Last Days of Pompeii
On 27 August 1834, Vesuvius erupted again. Newspaper reports of the eruption

ran alongside notices of Bulwer’s new novel The Last Days of Pompeii, which was
published a few weeks later in September. The Morning Post reported that in
Naples ‘thousands of families were seen fleeing from their native land, old and
young dragging through heavy masses of heated cinders’.88 The news only added
to the curious telescoping of chronologies, ancient and modern, in Bulwer’s novel.
The Athenaeum exclaimed, ‘[a]t what a moment too it has appeared! Accounts
have been received within these last few days of another eruption of Mount
85 Homi Bhabha makes a similar point in The Location of Culture when he sees this process hap-
pening ‘through the splitting of modernity as event and enunciation, the epochal and the everyday’:
Bhabha, The Location of Culture, pp. 347–8.
86 Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World, p. 38.
87 [Anon.], ‘Rosina, Letter from a Country Lady to her Sister, After her Arrival in London’, Belle
Assemblée; or Court and Fashionable Magazine (October 1820): 154–6, p. 154.
88 [Anon.], ‘Eruption of Mount Vesuvius’, Morning Post (22 September 1834), p. 3.
Vesuvius which has spread misery far and wide.’89 The success of Bulwer’s book
probably owed as much to the already established topicality of the subject as it did
to the news reports that autumn. Indeed, Bulwer seems to have picked up elem-
ents of his story from a variety of sources: Byron’s Sardanapalus, published in
1821, had included a character, Arbaces, similar to Bulwer’s, and Pacini’s opera
L’ultimo giorno di Pompei had introduced a pair of lovers as a focus.90 In 1831,
Charles Knight produced a volume in his Library of Entertaining Knowledge
series called Pompeii, suggesting that Pompeii was already potentially entertain-
ing when presented as ‘knowledge’ to a wide audience. Robert Burford’s detailed
panorama of ‘The Ruins of Pompeii and the Surrounding Country’ had opened
on the Strand in London a full ten years before the publication of Bulwer’s novel,
stirring Blackwood’s into the vivid imagination of Pompeii before the catastrophe:
‘the Forum, the narrow streets, the little Greek houses, with their remnants of orna-
mental painting, their corridors and their tessellated floors, are seen [in the
Panorama], as they might have been seen the day before the eruption’.91 The recon-
struction of ‘the day before’, the heedless present that Bulwer was more fully to
imagine in his novel, was already an acknowledged element of the Vesuvius ‘theme’.
‘When Vesuvius met Bulwer-Lytton, clap met trap’, wrote John Leonard in
1984.92 He backs this up with a quotation from Q. D. Leavis who wrote with char-
acteristic briskness that Bulwer’s ‘pseudo-philosophic nonsense and preposterous
rhetoric carry with them inevitably a debasing of the novelist’s currency’. But even
she has to add that ‘they were taken seriously by the general public’.93 And indeed
they were: the book remained a best-seller throughout the century. It is probably
more accurate to think of Bulwer’s production less as a stand-alone literary novel
and more as an intervention in a wider shows culture that included print and
spectacle of all kinds. Certainly, his text was swiftly recognized and co-opted by
London show culture, so that, for example, the Mirror, ‘in illustration of the
mimic Volcano at “the Surrey Zoological Gardens”’, in 1837 was using an extract
89 [Anon.], ‘The Last Days of Pompeii’, Athenaeum (27 September 1834): 705–8, p. 708.
90 See William St Clair and Annika Bautz, ‘The Making of the Myths: Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The
Last Days of Pompeii (1834)’, in Victoria C. Gardner Coates, Kenneth Lapatin, and Jon L. Seydl (eds),
The Last Days of Pompeii: Decadence, Apocalypse, Resurrection (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum,
2012), pp. 52–9. See also Mary Beard, Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town (London: Profile, 2008) for a
comprehensive consideration of the city at the time of the original eruption and its afterlife as an
archaeological site and tourist attraction. Richard Maxwell suggests that Bulwer also drew on Victor
Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) and Andrea de Jorio, Gesture in Naples and Gesture in Classical
Antiquity [1832], trans. Adam Kendon (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2000): see Richard
Maxwell, ‘The Historical Novel’, in Richard Maxwell and Katie Trumpener (eds), The Cambridge
Companion to Fiction in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009),
pp. 65–88, pp. 84–6.
91 [Anon.], ‘Pompeii’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, p. 475. Burford’s panorama opened in
November 1823. John L. Seydl gives a convincing list of representations of Pompeii and Vesuvius that
are likely to have influenced Bulwer’s novel in his chapter ‘Decadence, Apocalypse, Resurrection’, in
Gardner Coates, Lapatin, and Seydl, The Last Days of Pompeii, pp. 14–31.
92 John Leonard, ‘Throw Another Christian on the Fire’, New York Magazine (7 May 1984), p. 90.
93 Q. D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public (London: Chatto & Windus, 1932), p. 164.
168 Serial Forms
‘from Mr. Bulwer’s Last Days of Pompeii’.94 Anthony Trollope was later to com-
plain that Bulwer-Lytton failed to ‘live with’ his characters, and subordinated his
novels to ‘the effects which he wished to produce’.95 He was right: Bulwer was
more interested in spectacular effects than realistic narrative, but in this he had
learnt from Scott. ‘What did nineteenth-century readers respond to . . . that later
readers have trouble discerning?’ asks Stephen Arata, about the immense popu-
larity in the nineteenth century of Scott’s 1821 novel Kenilworth: ‘[t]he short
answer, I believe, is spectacle’.96 Like Scott’s ‘Elizabethan’ novel, Bulwer’s Last Days
is designed to be read through the aesthetics of show and spectacle, offering a
simulacrum that creates a parody of presence.97 Scott’s enormous success had
elevated the novel form ‘with the vulgar’, and ‘novels of all sorts’, rather than ‘as in
former times, the great novel alone’, were being read by ‘the people’.98 Bulwer sees
a move from organic form to multiple self-replicating formats. In Book One of
The Last Days, he himself offers Pompeii as a model, or a kind of peepshow box:
‘Pompeii was the miniature of the civilization of that age . . . In its minute but glit-
tering shops, its tiny palaces, its baths, its forum, its theatre, its circus . . . you
beheld a model of the whole empire. It was a toy, a plaything, a showbox.’99 The
mondo nuovo or raree show showed ‘glimpses of distant, long-vanished or legend-
ary landscapes’, and its ‘new world’ was often a very old world, distant in time.100
Like Kenilworth’s culmination in scenes of Elizabethan pageant, Bulwer’s Last
Days stages a grand spectacle in the amphitheatre as its climactic scene, playing
up in particular the salacious interest of the spectators: ‘the intense curiosity
which the trial and sentence of two criminals so remarkable had occasioned,
increased the crowd on this day to an extent wholly unprecedented’(355). Indeed,
the coincidence of modern-day show culture and the Ancient Roman amphi-
theatre generates a tremor of anxiety when the reader is reminded that this
(ancient) audience is ‘intent upon no fictitious representation—no tragedy of the
stage’ but rather on ‘the exultant life or the bloody death’ of the gladiators (367).
Bulwer seems to have to remind himself, as well as his readers, that he is not writ-
ing a description of Astley’s Circus here, but a representation of ‘real’ history. In
so reminding them, he of course draws attention to the gap between the ‘real’ and
the represented, insisting, in a move that is characteristic of the novel as a whole,
on the mediation of his text. What he and his contemporary readers are here
likely to be visualizing during the amphitheatre scene are the ‘hippodramas’ at
94 [Anon.], ‘Notes of a Reader’, Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction 30:850 (26 August
1837): 132–4, p. 132.
95 Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography, ed. David Skilton (London: Penguin, 1996), p. 161.
96 Arata, ‘Scott’s Pageants’, p. 99.
97 ‘Parodies of presence’ is Lefebvre’s phrase: Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, p. 23.
99 [Bulwer, Edward Lytton], The Last Days of Pompeii by the Author of Pelham (London: Richard
Bentley, 1839), p. 9. All subsequent references are to this edition and appear in parentheses in the text.
100 Balzer, Peepshows, p. 290.
Astley’s Amphitheatre, which regularly included Andrew Ducrow’s celebrated per-

formance of the labours of Hercules and his ‘classical exercises of the Roman
Gladiator on his rapid courser’.101 Bulwer’s novel both borrowed from and fed back
into this tradition of spectacle, so that in August 1838 the American lion-tamer,
Isaac A. Van Amburgh, clad in Roman toga and sandals, made his debut in ‘an
historical and equestrian drama The Brute Tamer of Pompeii’ which ‘attract[ed] over-
flowing audiences’, capitalizing on the recent and ongoing success of the novel.102
Dailiness and the Event
If Bulwer’s novel was in fact a show, what this show did more emphatically than
any of the other Vesuvius shows was establish the days of its title. Bulwer’s insist-
ence on the category of the day and on the dailiness of life in Pompeii preceding
the great catastrophe of the eruption is critical to the modernity of this work.
During the nineteenth century, the category of the day was to become increas-
ingly politically resonant. The year before Bulwer’s book was published, the
Factory Act of 1833 had declared the ordinary factory working-day to be from
half-past five in the morning to half-past eight in the evening. Pressure from
reformers and organized lobbying from the Ten Hours Movement produced a
succession of Factory Acts over the next decade but would only finally succeed in
limiting the working day to ten hours in 1847, and then the limitation only
applied to women and children. Karl Marx saw very clearly how a newly industri-
alizing economy had the power to recalibrate workers’ time, and he devoted an
entire chapter to ‘The Working-Day’ in Volume One of Das Kapital: ‘[w]ithin the
24 hours of the natural day a man can expend only a definite quantity of his vital
force. A horse, in like manner, can only work from day to day, 8 hours. During
part of the day this force must rest, sleep; during another part the man has to sat-
isfy other physical needs, to feed, wash, and clothe himself . . . But,’ he asked, ‘what
is a working-day? At all events, less than a natural day. By how much?’103 The
101 Paul Schlicke, Dickens and Popular Entertainment (London: Allen & Unwin, 1985), p. 161.
Astley’s ampitheatre was set up by Philip Astley in 1773, and the Astley family continued to run it
through three generations until it closed down in 1893. The ampitheatre buildings burnt down four
times though: Helen Stoddart, ‘Origins’, in Rings of Desire: Circus History and Representation
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 13–33. See also Edith Hall, ‘Putting the Class
into Classical Reception’, in Lorna Harwick and Christopher Stray (eds), A Companion to Classical
Receptions (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), pp. 386–98, p. 393.
102 J. Pattie, Actors by Daylight; or, Pencillings in the Pit (London: J. Pattie, 1838), vol. 1, p. 174.
Queen Victoria was so enthusiastic about van Amburgh’s show that she commissioned Edwin
Landseer to paint the spectacle in Isaac van Amburgh and his Animals (1839).
103 Karl Marx, ‘The Working-Day’, in Capital, Volume 1, in Karl Marx Frederick Engels, Collected
Works, 50 vols, vol. 35 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1996), pp. 239–307, pp. 240–1. Kristin Ross
references Raya Dunayevskaya’s discussion of Marx’s break with theory, which began when ‘very late
in the various drafts and revisions that went into the writing of Capital, [Marx] made the decision to
include in Volume One the chapter on the working day’. As Ross glosses it, ‘“[w]hen does my day
170 Serial Forms
debate over the differential between the ‘working day’ and the ‘natural day’ was to
continue into the late nineteenth century. But in the early 1830s the day had
already become a politicized category of time.
While the spectacle of The Last Days is more interested in leisure than work,
the text is structured, as its title suggests, by the category of the day per se. The
text uses the reader’s foreknowledge of the coming catastrophe to create a height-
ened sense of the ordinariness and dailiness of these ‘Last Days’, alongside a very
modern experience of acceleration and eventfulness. These are far from the
extraordinary ‘Last Days’ before the Apocalypse. Book One, Chapter Six of
Bulwer’s novel opens with an acknowledgement: ‘[i]n the history I relate, the
events are crowded and rapid as those of the drama. I write of an epoch in which
days sufficed to ripen the ordinary fruits of years’ (47). The ‘epoch’ resonates more
with the 1830s than with 79 bce. The rapid increase in communications throughout
the nineteenth century, and particularly in the 1820s and 1830s, was creating a
paradoxical but powerful expectation of the unexpected. A sense of the contin-
gency and unpredictability of events, be they political or geological, economic or
meteorological, encouraged an anxious focus on futurity. At the same time, events
seemed to proliferate and to occur in very rapid succession. At the dawning of the
nineteenth century, William Wordsworth had already noted the growing interest
in ‘the great national events which are daily taking place’. He had pointed presci-
ently to urbanization and the standardization of labour as creating ‘a craving for
extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly
gratifies’.104 By the mid-1830s, the acceleration of communications had multiplied
daily eventfulness many times over.105 The interference with circadian rhythms
by a polyrhythmic media time, alongside the increasing standardization of the
working day for more and more people, was producing a newly paradoxical sens-
ibility of mundanity and repetition punctuated by, or spliced together with,
national or global events beyond the control of the individual.106 Against this
begin and when does it end?”—with this question the subject is about neither economics nor philoso-
phy, precisely, but about human beings and their daily life. What is at stake is “history and its process.”’
See Raya Dunayevskaya, Philosophy and Revolution: From Hegel to Sartre, and from Marx to Mao
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1973) and Ross, Communal Luxury, p. 80.
104 William Wordsworth, ‘Preface 1800/1802/1805 to Lyrical Ballads’, in William Wordsworth and
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads 1798 and 1800, ed. R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones (London:
Routledge, 1991): 241–72, p. 249.
105 Historians have argued that it was the news of shipping, logging the arrivals and departures of
ships, that began to introduce the idea of the importance of accurate dates and punctuality to the
newspaper. See, for example, Michael Harris, London Newspapers in the Age of Walpole: A Study in the
Origins of the Modern English Press (London: Associated University Presses, 1987), p. 175 and
John J. McCusker, ‘New York City and the Bristol Packet: A Chapter in Eighteenth-Century Postal
History’, in Essays on the Economic History of the Atlantic World (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 122–30.
106 That this period sees time to be newly socially understood as serial and open-ended rather than
cyclical and repetitive is now almost a truism. E. P. Thompson was among the first to theorize this
change: Thompson, ‘Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism’.
sometimes alarming backdrop, a newly developing leisure industry capitalized on

topicalities and news events which more people than ever before were able to rec-
ognize. But, as we have seen, the panoramas, dioramas, cosmoramas, and such
like did not function like the newsreels of the mid-twentieth century and they
were rarely put together fast enough to represent breaking ‘news’ as such.107
Instead they functioned to mediate these news events into the collective public
life, often with a time lag that meant that the events depicted were already teeter-
ing on the brink between memory and ‘history’.
Global events were translated into events in the social lives of the show-going
public, but the panoramas were also important in forming a sense of the portent-
ousness of events within recent memory, and therefore a sense of the present as
potentially historical. Media historian Paddy Scannell has described people in the
twentieth century as feeling themselves living in ‘a serial world punctuated by sin-
gular events.’108 He suggests that news events became ‘singularities that are part of
a common, collective, available, shareable public life. They are marked up not
only on the calendar of “public history” but also on the private calendars of peo-
ple’s lives.’109 This process is being prepared much earlier in the nineteenth cen-
tury, and in more directly ‘sociable’ situations, such as at shows and in the theatre,
long before the more private technologies of radio and television arrive. The
understanding of daily life as a predictable repeated format which is, nevertheless,
unpredictably open to interruption at any time is created by the strengthening
rhythms of the media coming into being: as Henri Lefebvre puts it, ‘[t]he media
occupies days: it makes them; it speaks of them’.110 In London in the 1830s, the
media is just beginning to make and speak of days as serial in this way.
Lefebvre thinks of the relation of repetition and event as causal: ‘[n]ot only
does repetition not exclude differences, it also gives birth to them; it produces
them. Sooner or later it encounters the event that arrives or rather arises in rela-
tion to the sequence or series produced repetitively. In other words: difference.’111
For Lefebvre, then, the repetitive rhythm of seriality prepares the way for the
event which is (paradoxically) understood as singular only because it is produced
out of such repetition. Alain Badiou’s theory of ‘the event’ emerged from ‘les évé-
nements’ of May 1968 in Paris, and was published in French as L’Être et
l’Événement in 1988. Badiou’s question is how anything entirely new can come
into the world. Reflecting on 1968, he writes that
the crystallisation of all these moments, their generalisation, and then the way in
which everyone was caught up in it, well beyond what any one person might
have thought possible—that’s what I call an evental dimension. None of the little
107 See Chapter 3 of this volume, pp. 140–1, n. 144.

108 Scannell, Radio, Television, p. 156. 109 Scannell, Radio, Television, p. 91.
110 Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, p. 46. 111 Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, p. 7 (bold in original).
172 Serial Forms
processes that led to the event was equal to what actually took place . . . there was
an extraordinary change of scale, as there always is in every significant
event . . . we are actors, but in such a way that we are targeted by, carried away by,
and struck by [atteint par] the event. In this sense there can undoubtedly be col-
lective events.112
For Badiou, an event is always ‘supernumerary’, because it represents a difference,

or a supplement to the elements that give rise to it.113 It is a break, a new begin-
ning, and as such it is thrown up by the serial to which it belongs, but from which
it also breaks away. ‘Retroactively’, Badiou explains, ‘we will have to declare that
this something which appears, eventally, as needing to be counted, did indeed
belong to the situation.’114 What has been politically repressed will break through
the symbolic order to become an ‘event’. The event for the Marxist Badiou is
always revolutionary, but while the news culture of the early nineteenth century
was preparing the public to understand eventfulness as potentially revolutionary,
it was simultaneously revealing the event as potentially disastrous.
The category of the day becomes hugely overdetermined in Last Days in ways
that are useful to Bulwer’s desire to establish not only the reconstructed present of
that ancient moment but also the historicity of his readers’ present. As we shall
see in Chapter 6, reading the emergent popular daily newspaper was to historicize
both the present and the past. The feeling of virtual and distanced participation in
events through reading news creates a double sense of identification: both the
recognition of involvement and the simultaneous recognition of distance and
difference.115 Bulwer’s novel creates the desire to identify with its historical char-
acters, but equally pivots on their immolation. The pleasure of seeing oneself as
historical is in recognizing one’s historical difference from the protagonists of the
spectacle of ancient Rome, for example, but the concomitant anxiety is in recog-
nizing oneself as part of a long series of ephemeralia: always already obsolescent.
Throughout the novel, Bulwer makes us intensely aware of the rhythms of daily
life in the ancient city. From the opening page when Glaucus returns to Pompeii
to find ‘all that gay and animated exuberance of life and motion which we find at
this day in the streets of Naples’ (2), the text is scrupulous about marking the time
of day—‘[i]t was early noon, and the forum was crowded alike with the busy and
112 Peter Hallward, ‘Subject and Event’, in Badiou: A Subject to Truth (Minneapolis, MN: University
of Minnesota Press, 2003), pp. 107–51, p. 123. L’Être et l’Événement was translated into English in 2005
as Being and Event.
113 Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2006), p. 207.
114 Alain Badiou, ‘Politics and Philosophy’ [interview with Peter Hallward], Angelaki 3:3 (1998):
113–33, p. 129.
115 Literary historian Kevis Goodman has written about ‘the sense of the historical present that is
fostered by a nascent news culture’. She argues that the sense of presentness created by the news is less
cognitive than affective and sensory, and she calls this consciousness a ‘virtual historicity’ which
‘includes the desire for—but also desire’s counterpart, an anxiety about—historical participation’:
Goodman, ‘The Loophole in the Retreat’, pp. 44, 31.
the idle’ (149)—and it is careful too about analogizing the daily rhythms of
Pompeii to the rhythms of modern cities. This passage continues, ‘[a]s at Paris at
this day, so at that time in the cities of Italy, men lived almost wholly out of doors’
(149). Bulwer is unfailingly attentive to the daily ‘flux and reflux’ of the crowd in the
city: ‘[t]his walk was in the evening a favourite resort of the Pompeians, but during
the heat and business of the day was seldom visited, save by some groups of playful
children, some meditative poet, or some disputative philosophers’ (164).116
Days themselves are carefully and repeatedly inventoried: Nydia waters
Glaucus’s flowers noting with curious precision that ‘it is nine days since I visited
them’ (41), and Glaucus later tells Nydia that ‘it is now three days since thou hast
been under the protection of my household gods’ (114). Glaucus complains to
Ione that ‘[f]or five days I have been banished from thy presence’ (118) and
Bulwer records that ‘[o]ne evening’ when the lovers meet was ‘the fifth after their
first meeting at Pompeii’ (45). The hermit-witch visited by the lovers also counts
in days: ‘it is only within the last two days that dull, deep light hath been visible—
what can it portend?’ (224). The effect of day following day is enhanced in the text
by chapters which regularly open with a description of the start of day: ‘[t]he
morning rays entered through rows of small casements’ (40); ‘[t]he morning sun
shone over the small and odorous garden enclosed within the peristyle of the
house of the Athenian’ (112); ‘[d]ays are like years in the love of the young’ (172);
‘[i]t was then the day for Diomed’s banquet’ (236); and Bulwer drops frequent inci-
dental references to diurnal rhythm into the text: ‘[f]ar in the distance, the outline
of the circling hills soared above the vapours, and mingled with the changeful hues
of the morning sky’ (354). Some register noonday: ‘he had slept far into the morn-
ing, and the vertical sun already poured its fervid beams over the sacred place’
(241) and some evening: ‘[t]he evening darkened over the restless city as Apaecides
took his way to the house of the Egyptian’ (68). The effect of the daily sequence is
double. As Paddy Scannell says, ‘[s]tories and days are linear: they have a begin-
ning, a middle, and end: morning, noon and night. Yet each day is succeeded by
another day in an endless cycle of repetition. Cyclical time is reversible time. Each
day is a fresh start, a new beginning, as the ebb and flow of tides washes away all
manmarks on the shoreline and restores its pristine freshness at every tideturn.’117
Against this sequential recurrence though, Bulwer pits the ‘last’ of the ‘last days’
of the title. While dailiness courses on, a cataclysmic terminus is being prepared
that will interrupt this ‘tideturn’. ‘Wreaths on the Tomb of Days | Gone evermore!’
(181), sings Nydia. It is the repetition of the days that produces the event: without
sameness and repetition, difference would be unrecognizable.118
116 ‘[F]lux and reflux’ is Lefebvre’s phrase : Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, p. 35.

117 Scannell, Radio, Television, p. 153.
118 See Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London: Athlone Press, 1994);
French orig. Différence et Répétition (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1968).
174 Serial Forms
Some of the pleasure of the narrative of The Last Days for the reader comes
from its incomplete-immersion technique. Not only is Pompeii frequently com-
pared to modern cities, but ‘the lawyers, active, chattering, joking, and punning’
are ‘as you may find them at this day in Westminster’ (150); the sudatorium at the
Baths ‘answered the purpose of our vapor-baths’ (65); and a dizzying variety of
‘shapes, stew-pans and saucepans, cutters and moulds’ are needed by a cook ‘no
matter whether he be an ancient or a modern’ (237). The descriptions of Pompeii
bristle with anachronism, and the anachronism ensures that the fictionality of the
historical fiction remains self-consciously apparent. In this Bulwer is following
Scott’s example, whom Ann Rigney describes as ‘having extended the life of the
historical imagination to the material world (especially the urban and domestic
worlds of middle-class readers) and to his having integrated memory into every-
day, embodied life—down to the clothes people wore, the upholstery they sat on,
and the games they played’.119 Certainly Bulwer leans on the actual archaeological
finds at Pompeii to underpin and even authorize the busy and cluttered material-
ity of The Last Days. As Richard Maxwell has noticed of the novel, ‘we are seldom
allowed to forget the spatial disposition of Pompeiian remains, skeletons marked
by the heat of lava, the traces of lost bodies in the earth. In the medium of words,
the novel both opposes and repeats the volcano’s act. It reanimates Pompeii, even
while preserving it forever.’120 The reader remains in a pleasurable state of sus-
pense between the City of the Dead and the city of the living.
The story uses the dynamism and forward movement of dailiness to reanimate
these remains. The daily habits of the lovers, Glaucus and Ione, are adumbrated:
‘[i]n the mornings they beguiled the sun with music: in the evenings they forsook
the crowded haunts of the gay for excursions on the water, or along the fertile and
vine-clad plains that lay beneath the fatal mount of Vesuvius’ (173). The unneces-
sary insertion of the word ‘fatal’ here reminds the reader of the already-finished
story that they are still reading. ‘The news! what news?’ asks a slave in the insist-
ent present moment of Bulwer’s Pompeii (189) and The Last Days frames ancient
history as news, and thereby foreshadows the possibility of a global news media.
Bulwer’s novel and all the other Vesuvius shows in these early decades of the
nineteenth century transposed the story of Pompeii from the relentless trajectory
of tragedy to the meaninglessness of disaster. Mary Ann Doane has argued that
the modern sense of catastrophe is ‘ineluctably linked with the idea of Progress’
and that ‘catastrophe does . . . always seem to have something to do with technol-
ogy and its potential collapse’, and she shows how ‘[t]elevisual catastrophe is thus
characterized by everything which it is said not to be—it is expected, predictable,
its presence crucial to television’s operation’.121 The rhythm of dailiness suggests
progress, but the fragility and artificiality of the media-created day leaves it
119 Rigney, Afterlives, p. 53. 120 Maxwell, ‘The Historical Novel’, pp. 85–6.
121 Doane, ‘Information, Crisis, Catastrophe’, pp. 257, 256, 262.
ever-vulnerable to collapse. The media creation of a seriality which is always pre-

paring for the unexpected and the catastrophic reaches back to this moment in
the early nineteenth century, and to the very beginning of a culture of daily news.
Like Fenella’s jump into the crater of Vesuvius at the end of La Muette, the
tragic effect of Nydia’s martyrdom by drowning at the end of the Bulwer’s Last
Days is dissipated and distorted by the generality of the disaster that has preceded
it. The confusion of individual tragedy with mass disaster in this text is an import-
ant generic correction in the face of significant changes in the scale of the audi-
ence for fiction and for classical history in the 1830s. This story does not belong
exclusively to the novel’s protagonists. A mass readership watches the mass of
Pompeians as they are annihilated. Tragedy is not a serial form: it simply cannot
spool endlessly on into an undetermined future but must of necessity meet its
catastrophe.122 Disasters, on the other hand, are interruptions of the serial. They
are the events for which dailiness is always preparing.
The growth of new readerships for what Bulwer identified as a ‘profusion of
amusing, familiar and superficial writings’ in the 1830s is directly connected to
the politicization of the working day and the increasing capitalization of labour in
this period.123 Amusements and entertainments designed for the people, Bulwer’s
novel among them, were active in creating a system of leisure which was silently
dependent upon the discipline of often exploitative work.124 As Arjun Appadurai
has put it, ‘[c]onsumption evolves as the phenomenological marker of time left
over from work. Leisure activities become the very marker of discretionary con-
sumption . . . thus consumption is seen as the required interval between periods of
production.’125 Leisure itself is emerging as a serial phenomenon which occurs at
regular intervals. The politics of consumption in this early period are compli-
cated, but it seems clear from the standpoint of today that a model of disaster
capitalism is already beginning to emerge. Disaster capitalism is ‘only an excep-
tional example of Capitalism’s necessity to accelerate and destroy in order to
maintain its existence’.126 The eruption of Vesuvius at the end of Auber’s La Muette
122 Thinking in similar terms about a later period, Nathan Hensley has discussed the flood at the
end of George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860) as ‘form[ing] the kind of hiatus between then and
now that political theory terms a revolution, and that Victorian geology (which Eliot also studied)
called a catastrophe’: Nathan Hensley, Forms of Empire: The Poetics of Victorian Sovereignty (Oxford:
124 See Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Free Time’, in J. M. Bernstein (ed.), The Culture Industry: Selected Essays
on Mass Culture (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 187–97. Adorno argues that the recreational media
profess to offer escapism whilst preparing individuals for the everyday routines of work. See also
Norbert Elias, The Civilising Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations (New York: Urizen
Books, 1978); Colin Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (Oxford:
Basil Blackwell, 1987), and Chris Rojek, Capitalism and Leisure Theory (London: Tavistock, 1985).
125 Appadurai, Modernity At Large, p. 79.
126 John Preston, Grenfell Tower: Preparedness, Race and Disaster Capitalism (Cham: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2019), p. 55. See also Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: Rise of Disaster Capitalism
(London: Penguin, 2008).
176 Serial Forms
might have suggested revolution in Brussels in 1830, but the sudden catastrophic
ending of Bulwer’s Last Days shifted agency away from its characters to number
them only among the mass of disaster victims. Determinants of disaster were
accruing already in early nineteenth-century Britain: wealth disparity, a big popu-
lation increase, and a shift towards predominantly urbanized living, but also, and
importantly, the development of the ‘emergency imaginary’ of the news media.127
It would be through the figure of ‘disaster’ that revolutionary agency would be
gradually subsumed into a pervasive liberal capitalism which would lay claim to
the future along with everything else. The revolutionary remnant would be
recycled instead into a humanitarian response to disaster. By the 1840s, as I inves-
tigate in Chapter 7, the Irish Famine would elicit not a revolutionary response but
a humanitarian one. Represented as a sudden ‘disaster’, its deep structural and
longstanding biopolitical causes would be ignored, and it would be understood as
(merely) an aberrant interruption in the ongoing serial of historical time.128
Bulwer’s identification of the daily with the historical in Last Days was prescient:
the form of repetitive dailiness under construction in the 1830s will inevitably
bring forth the events which will be mis-identified as ‘disasters’.
127 The phrase is Craig Calhoun’s: Craig Calhoun, ‘The Imperative to Reduce Suffering: Charity,
Progress and Emergencies in the Field of Humanitarian Action’ in M. Barnett and T. G. Weiss (eds),
Humanitarianism in Question: Politics, Power, Ethics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008),
pp. 73–97, p. 82.
128 ‘Where there is a discontinuity, there must be an intervention to restore linearity and predict-
able functioning.’ Calhoun, ‘The Imperative to Reduce’, p. 86.
5
Scalar
Pugin, Carlyle, Dickens
‘We learnt to know the modern by its ability to scale up.’1
In the introduction to a geometry and trigonometry textbook published in 1824,

Thomas Carlyle wrote that ‘[t]he proper mode of treating proportion has given
rise to much controversy among mathematicians; chiefly originating from the dif-
ficulties which occur in the application of its theorems to that class of magnitudes
denominated incommensurable, or having no common measure’.2 By the 1830s
and the 1840s, Carlyle understood that the difficulties of incommensurability
had migrated from mathematics into social life, where the need for a ‘common
measure’ came to represent a political, ethical, and social imperative to some,
while others felt threatened by the implications of standardization. These were the
years of debate over reform of the franchise and the repeal of the Corn Laws, they
were the years of the new Poor Laws and the Irish Famine. New technologies were
changing the scale of industry, and the relatively new discipline of statistics was
enlisted by government to attempt to standardize and tabulate social and political
data, with a view to creating a state machinery in proportion to a slowly democra-
tizing nation. Corporate capital demanded the liberalization of trade regulation
in order to shift business onto a newly visible global scale. Democratization, liber-
alization, capitalization, globalization: all were technologies of upscaling and all
were pushing the limits of the known social world so that, while some distances
shortened between people, other kinds of distance grew exponentially larger. This
chapter examines the role of scale and seriality in the work of three writers who
all grasped that something huge was happening around them.
Dickens and Pugin, both born in 1812, were exact contemporaries (although
politically as far apart as they could be), while Carlyle was an older man, seventeen
years their senior. All three of them created remarkable, immediate, fierce, and
1 Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, ‘Nonscalability’, Common Knowledge 18:3 (2012): 505–24, p. 523. See
also Michael Tavel Clarke and David Wittenberg (eds), Scale in Literature and Culture (Cham: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2017).
2 [Thomas Carlyle], ‘Introduction: On Proportion’, in A. M. Legendre, The Elements of Geometry
and Trigonometry; With Notes, ed. David Brewster (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1824) pp. ix–xvi, p. ix
(italics original).
© Clare Pettitt.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198830429.001.0001
178 Serial Forms
affective responses to this new regime of measurement and to the growth of what
Foucault would much later call ‘governmentality’.3 Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1836)
originally came out as a series of eight anonymous instalments starting in
November 1833 in Fraser’s Magazine, a satiric and fashionable Tory monthly.4
When Ralph Waldo Emerson was sent a bound collection of the monthly parts,
he saw at once the urgent contemporaneity of the work, remarking, ‘the manifest
design of the work . . . is, a Criticism upon the Spirit of the Age,—we had almost
said, of the hour, in which we live’.5 In order to criticize the very hour in which
they lived, all three writers looked back to the past. Working against a serial,
progress-driven model of time, they collapsed conventional sequential narrative,
and they all used manipulations of scale to express either their unease or their
aspirations for reform. All three returned time and again to the evidence of the
London streets. They all taxonomized the advertisements and the signage of com-
merce on the streets: for Carlyle and Pugin the noisy street advertisements stand
for the chaos of an empty and godless commercial world, but for Dickens, they
seem to represent something less disturbing.6 Their positions and perspectives
were all different: Pugin was a Radical conservative, who converted to Catholicism
in 1836, and his mission was to reinstate ‘the true national and catholic style’ of
architecture in England.7 Carlyle’s politics were, at this stage in his career, compli-
cated, as he energetically castigated both Tories and Whig-Liberals in the columns
of the journals. Dickens, much influenced by Carlyle, was young, aspirational,
and had radical sympathies, but he was perhaps the most liberal of the three.
Between them, they performed a variety of responses to the swelling state in the
1830s and 1840s.
In London in 1836, a young and ambitious architect, Augustus Welby Pugin,
privately printed Contrasts; or, A Parallel Between the Noble Edifices of the
Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries and Similar Buildings of the Present Day;
Shewing the Present Decay of Taste: Accompanied by Appropriate Text.8 In the
3 See Michel Foucault, ‘Governmentality’, in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller
(eds), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality with Two Lectures by and an Interview with
Michel Foucault (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), pp. 87–104.
4 Sartor Resartus ran in Fraser’s until August 1834. James A. Secord discusses its first outing in
Fraser’s, remarking that ‘the self-conscious rough-and-tumble of the politics of knowledge in Fraser’s
suited “Sartor” ’: Secord, Visions of Science, p. 230. Mark Parker fully contextualizes its publication in
‘Sartor Resartus in Fraser’s: Toward a Dialectical Politics’, in Mark Parker, Literary Magazines and
British Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 157–81.
5 Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, ed. Kerry McSweeney and Peter Sabor (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1987), p. 241. Emerson’s remarks were reprinted in the Preface to the New England
Edition of Sartor Resartus (Boston, 1835, 1837).
6 For an excellent discussion of public print in America in this period, and a chapter on street signs
and advertising, see Henkin, City Reading.
7 A. W. Pugin, Contrasts; or, a Parallel between the Noble Edifices of the Middle Ages, and
Corresponding Buildings of the Present Day (London: Charles Dolman, 1841), p. 14.
8 Augustus Welby Pugin, Contrasts; or, A Parallel Between the Noble Edifices of the Fourteenth and
Fifteenth Centuries and Similar buildings of the Present Day; Shewing the Present Decay of Taste:
Scalar: Pugin, Carlyle, Dickens 179
same year John Macrone published Charles Dickens’s Sketches by ‘Boz’ in two
duodecimo volumes with forty illustrations by George Cruikshank. The ‘First
Series’ appeared on 8 February 1836 and the ‘Second Series’ of previously uncol-
lected sketches followed on 17 December 1836. In 1843, journalist (and historian
of sorts) Thomas Carlyle published Past and Present, addressing it to ‘idle reader[s]
of Newspapers’ and using an imaginary reporter for the ‘Houndsditch Indicator’ to
ventriloquize some of his opinions.9 In Past and Present, Carlyle contrasted the
prudent management of the large abbey at Bury St Edmunds by Abbot Samson in
the twelfth century with the ‘endless dog-kennels run rabid’ (185) of the institu-
tions of the present day. Pugin’s Contrasts used a technique of image juxtaposition
to make the same point and both these unapologetically polemical works, one
primarily visual, the other literary and rhetorical, seem to work against serial
models of historical time.10 Instead they both fantasize a collapsing of time which
opens up access to an unmediated past. The ‘contrast’ of past and present ultim-
ately rests on an incommensurability of scale: the present is swollen, gigantic, and
monstrous, while the past maintains a ‘human scale’. In both cases scale is linked
to anxieties about modern democracy and excess. Dickens’s response is different.
His modern Londoners are less passive. Rather than being dwarfed by the enor-
mity of their environment, Dickens shows them improvising responses to their
rapidly changing world. Sketches by Boz is about little people in a big city, but it
sees the community memories and popular traditions of the past not as a nostal-
gic ideal, nor as irretrievably lost, but as a valuable apparatus which can be repur-
posed by these little people to build a bigger future for themselves.
All three of these writers had a considerable cultural impact. Carlyle wrote to
John Stuart Mill that he did not know, and could not guess, ‘what or who my
audience is, or whether I have any audience’.11 But he did have one. Despite the
Accompanied by Appropriate Text (London: Printed by the Author, 1836). A second edition of
Contrasts came out in 1841.
9 Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present [1843], ed. Chris R. Vanden Bossche (Berkeley, CA: University
of California Press, 2005), p. 7. All subsequent references are to this edition and given in the text.
Carlyle’s ventriloquisms are discussed in Chris Vanden Bossche, Carlyle and the Search for Authority
(Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1991), p. 109.
10 Rosemary Hill says, ‘Contrasts grew out of a particular tradition of English antiquarian writing
to which its relation has not been discussed . . . Contrasts owes less to French and German theory than
has sometimes been thought and more to Romanticism, to the millenarian religious climate of the
1830s, to the influence of Pugin’s mother, Catherine Welby, and to the popular culture of the day.’
Rosemary Hill, ‘Reformation to Millenium: Pugin’s Contrasts and the History of English Thought’,
Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 58:1 (March 1999): 26–41, p. 26. See also Rosemary
Hill, God’s Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2007). The importance of Pugin’s French background is emphasized by Roderick O’Donnell in
his Introduction to A. W. Pugin, The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture and An
Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture, with an Introduction by Roderick O’Donnell
(Leominster: Gracewing Publishing, 2003).
11 Thomas Carlyle, Carlyle’s Letters to Mill, Sterling, and Browning, ed. Alexander Carlyle (London:
Frederick A. Stokes, 1923), p. 74.
180 Serial Forms
chewy difficulties of his style, the intense engagement with Carlyle’s writing
among self-improving working-class men and women has been well documented.
Mary Smith, for example, born in 1822 the daughter of a shoemaker, became a
governess, and fell upon Carlyle’s writings with relief as ‘a new Bible of blessed-
ness to my eager soul, as they did to thousands beside, who had become weary of
much of the vapid literature of the time’.12 Dickens would soon overtake Carlyle
in terms of sheer popularity and social reach. Pugin was the least well known of
the three during his short lifetime, but his influence would be widely felt through
the built environment and, eventually, would be enormous. As Rosemary Hill
says, ‘[Contrasts] redefined architecture as a moral force, imbued with political
and religious meaning’.13 Architectural historians are only now reassessing the
global importance of Pugin’s reimagination of the ethics of architectural spaces,
and his insistence upon the ‘human scale.’14 Carlyle, Pugin and Dickens belong
together in this chapter because they all, in their different ways, looked backwards
in order to look forwards. In their work of the 1830s and early 1840s, we see them
confronting the paradoxical emergence of the ‘historical present’.
Historicism in the Early Nineteenth Century
History was first serialized in the nineteenth century. Before that, a coherent dia-
chronic sequence of historical periods delivering the world to a synchronic pre-
sent simply did not obtain.15 Of course, nothing is quite this straightforward, but
this statement can just about stand. In reality, some ‘historicist’ ideas had surfaced
well before the nineteenth century, perhaps most importantly those of
Giambattista Vico, whose Principii di una scienza nuova d’intorno all natura delle
nazioni (The Principles of a New Science and of the Common Nature of Nations),
first published in 1725, would be taken up enthusiastically in the early nineteenth
12 Quoted in Rose, The Intellectual Life, p. 45. There are many testimonials to Carlyle’s influence
from artisan and working-class readers: one cabinet maker recalled that ‘I fancied myself a
Teufelsdrockh’: ‘George Acorn’ [pseudonym], One of the Multitude (London: W. Heinemann, 1911),
p. 193. Teufelsdrockh is the narrator of Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus.
13 See Rosemary Hill, ‘Pugin, God’s Architect’, The Guardian (24 February 2012), https://www.the-
guardian.com/books/2012/feb/24/pugin-gothic-architect.
14 For example, see Kenneth Clark’s classic discussion of Contrasts in Kenneth Clark, The Gothic
Revival (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962), pp. 128–33 and, more recently, Timothy Brittain-Catlin,
Jan De Maeyer, and Martin Bressani (eds), Gothic Revival Worldwide: A.W.N. Pugin’s Global Influence
(Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2016).
15 For the concept of ‘history’ before the nineteenth century, see Anthony Grafton, Joseph Scalinger:
A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship, vol. 2: Historical Chronology (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1993); Anthony Grafton, What was History?: The Art of History in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007); Nicholas Popper, Walter Ralegh’s ‘History of the World’ and the
Historical Culture of the Late Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Daniel
Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton, Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline (New York:
Princeton Architectural Press, 2010). There is, of course, a vast literature on the development of his-
toricism in the nineteenth century and I do not pretend to encompass it here.
century by French historian Jules Michelet and the philosophers and social
commentators Auguste Comte and Karl Marx, among others. Vico’s ‘work of daz-
zling prescience’ described an evolutionary approach to ancient culture and a
methodology of historical relativism avant la lettre.16 ‘Long before the classical
scholars and historians of late eighteenth-century England and Germany embarked
on their discovery of the pastness of the past’, explains Anthony Grafton, ‘Vico
was already there’.17 Comte and Marx would both absorb and recycle Vico’s theory
that every society passes through a recognizable series of stages of development.
Vico was also insistent about ‘the terrible creative power of ordinary people’, and
he came eventually to the conclusion that not only could external history be
understood as a series of events, but also ‘the internal nature of the people acting
in history is subject to change. The archaic man sees the world, feels, and even
thinks differently than modern man.’18 Vico’s attention to the experiential lived
and felt effects of what we would now call ‘culture’ remains palpably present in
Marx’s thinking: ‘History does nothing, it possesses no immense wealth, it wages
no battles. It is man, real living man, who does all that, who possesses and fights;
“history” is not, as it were, a person apart, using man as a means to achieve its
own aims, history is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his own aims.’19
Marx argues that men make their own history, but ‘they do not make it just as
they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but
under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past’.20
Derrida dates ‘the teleological ordering of history’ to ‘Romanticism, if some-
thing of the sort can be thus identified’.21 His difficulty in identifying the period
or chronology of ‘Romanticism’ is a result of his own argument that Romanticism
itself invented the concept of periodization, which throws him dizzily into a
‘strange logic’ by which Romanticism invented historical periods and then
invented itself as a historical period.22 The aftermath of the 1789 French
Revolution, ‘which seemed to outstrip all previous experience’, created, in the
16 Anthony Grafton, ‘Introduction’ to Giambattista Vico, New Science, trans. David Marsh
(London: Penguin Classics, 1999) [based on the third edition, 1744], p. xi.
17 Grafton, ‘Introduction’, p. xiii.
18 Grafton, ‘Introduction’, p. xiii. Vittorio Hösle, Vico’s New Science of the Intersubjective World
(Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2016), p. 70.
19 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Holy Family, trans. Richard Dixon and Clemens Dutt
(Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975), p. 110 (emphasis original).
20 Karl Marx, ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels,
Collected Works, vol. 11: 1851–1853 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1979), pp. 99–197, p. 103.
21 Jacques Derrida and Avital Ronell, ‘The Law of Genre’, Critical Inquiry 7:1, On Narrative
(Autumn 1980): 55–81, p. 61, https://www.jstor.org/stable/1343176. See also Jacques Derrida,
‘Signature Event Context’, in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982),
pp. 309–30.
22 Derrida rejects the ‘moment’ of Romanticism because ‘[s]uch a “moment” is no longer a simple
moment in the history and theory of literary genres. To treat it thus would in effect implicate one as
tributary-whence the strange logic--of something that has in itself constituted a certain Romantic
motif, namely, the teleological ordering of history.’ Derrida and Ronell, ‘The Law of Genre’, p. 61.
182 Serial Forms
words of historian Peter Fritzsche, a ‘consciousness of periodicity that distin-

guished historical epochs and characterized social customs, and sequentialized a
view of history as a swift comprehensive process of transformation in which dif-
ferences over time assumed overriding importance’.23 Fritzsche’s work follows
Reinhart Koselleck’s famous exploration of ‘the relation of history and time’ after
the cataclysmic events of 1789. ‘[B]y the time of the failed Restoration of 1815, at
the latest’, Koselleck reckons, ‘the consciousness of a transitional period (Sattelzeit)
had become the common property of the peoples of Europe.’24 The idea of histor-
ical change as a ‘common property’ is critical and central to my argument in this
book. Periodization had been discussed at least since Hesiod posited a succession
of Gold, Silver, Bronze, Heroic and Iron Ages, but a common consciousness of
living in a present that was different from the past, and moving away from that
past at speed, was completely new.25 This was the period in which ‘the expected
otherness of the future’ and an acceleration and ‘alteration of temporal experience’
created a decisive break with the past, and afforded an entirely new perspective
on ‘History’ across Europe.26 A conservative writer in Berlin in 1828 complained
that ‘[e]verything has begun to move, or has been set in motion, and with the
intention or under the pretense of fulfilling and completing everything, every-
thing is placed in question, doubted, and approaches a general transformation’.27
This ceaseless and agonistic movement forward towards completion enacts
Hegel’s ‘work of history’ which is serial and teleological: ‘[w]e must seek a general
23 Koselleck, Futures Past, p. 33. Peter Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the
Melancholy of History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), pp. 17–18. Fritzsche adds
that ‘[i]t is a paradox that this synchronization of historical time rested on a very particular premise,
which was the acknowledgement of diachronic difference’: p. 53.
24 Koselleck, Futures Past, pp. xxi, 251. Christopher Clark cites the following challenges to
Koselleck’s claim that ‘new time’ started in the eighteenth century: Achim Landwehr, Geburt der
Gegenwart: Eine Geschichte der Zeit im 17. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main, 2014); Cornel Zwierlein,
Discorso und Lex Dei: Die Entstehung neuer Denkrahmen im 16. Jahrhundert und die Wahrnehmung
der französischen Religionskriege in Italien und Deutschland (Göttingen, 2006); Max Engemmaire,
L’Ordre du temps: L’invention de la ponctualité au XVIè siècle (Geneva, 2014). Christopher Clark, Time
and Power: Visions of History in German Politics, from the Thirty Years War to the Third Reich
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), pp. 234–5 n. 40. Following the French Revolution
(1789–99), Napoleon became ruler of France until he was defeated in the War of the Sixth Coalition,
which ended the First Empire in 1814 and restored the Bourbon monarchy to the brothers of Louis
XVI. The Bourbon Restoration lasted from c.6 April 1814 until the popular uprisings of the July
Revolution of 1830. There was an interlude in Spring 1815: the ‘hundred days’, when the return of
Napoleon forced the Bourbons to flee France. When Napoleon was again defeated by the Seventh
Coalition they returned to power in July.
25 See Lawrence Besserman, ‘The Challenge of Periodization: Old Paradigms and New Perspectives’,
in Lawrence Besserman (ed.), The Challenge of Periodization: Old Paradigms and New Perspectives
(New York: Garland Publishing, 1996), pp. 5–6.
26 Time and History are not the same thing, although they are connected. Christopher Clark sug-
gests that, ‘historicity and temporality are connected but not identical categories’: Clark, Time and
Power, p. 6.
27 The conservative opinion belongs to F. Ancillon, ‘Über die Pefectibilität der bürgerlichen
Gesellschaft, ihre Bedingungen und Triebfedern’, in Zur Vermittlung der Extreme in den Meinungen
(Berlin, 1828), vol. 1, p. 192, quoted in Koselleck, Futures Past, p. 251.
purpose in history, the ultimate purpose of the world’, Hegel had declared.28 As
Koselleck puts it, ‘[p]rogress and historism [sic], apparently mutually contradictory,
offer the face of Janus, that of the nineteenth century’.29 The paradox of progress
and of history is that both concepts are supposed to represent totality but both are
necessarily always unfinished. Koselleck’s is a brilliant and foundational analysis,
but the shift that he describes from early-modern theological and allegorical
models of time to a new universal historical time is somewhat over-abstracted
and at times seems too smooth and too finished.30 The works of Carlyle, Dickens,
and Pugin discussed in this chapter make it clear how very bumpy this transition
actually felt at the time, even a generation after 1789. Between them, these three
commentators articulate many of the anxieties unleashed by the transition into a
newly calibrated version of social time.
‘Real-Phantasmagory’: Mediation and the Past
To conjure a vanished past requires some sleight of hand, some trickery, and some
special effects. On the one hand, Carlyle is unequivocally candid about the mul-
tiple mediations of the past in Past and Present, declaring that the book is built
out of ‘confused Paper-Masses’ (40).31 The inspiration for the Bury St Edmunds
section in the middle of the book came from an edition of a manuscript printed
by the antiquarian Camden Society in 1840. The manuscript was the twelfth-
century ‘Chronicle’ kept by Jocelin of Brakelond, in which the Benedictine monk
described the career of Abbot Samson and the life of the medieval Abbey in
unusual detail. But despite his ingenuousness about his sources, Carlyle is keen
not to write the kind of ‘History, and Philosophy of History’ which leaves ‘the
human soul . . . wearied and bewildered’ (51), making the past seem ‘all one infin-
ite incredible grey void’ (51). Instead, he several times expresses his intention ‘to
28 Hegel, quoted by Koselleck, Futures Past, p. 128. 29 Koselleck, Futures Past, p. 57.
30 Important landmarks in the theorization of time and history are Emile Durkheim, Elementary
Forms of the Religious Life (1912) on socially constructed and collective time; Maurice Halbwachs, On
Collective Memory (1925) on the social production of memory; Martin Heidegger, Being and Time
(1927); the works of the Annales historians, for example, Fernand Braudel and Jacques Le Goff;
Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (1936) which proposes
that the intellectual systems of the Enlightenment were being dismantled in the late eighteenth cen-
tury; and E. P. Thompson’s ‘Time, Work Discipline’, which suggests that market capitalism affected the
common experience of time. Sebastian Conrad interrogates a model of stadial history in What is
Global History? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016). For transformations of time in the
later nineteenth century see also Peter Galison, Einstein’s Clocks and Poincaré’s Maps: Empires of Time
(New York: W.W. Norton, 2003) and Vanessa Ogle, The Global Transformation of Time 1870–1950
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015).
31 Carlyle says of the medieval text that ‘[after] all accidents of malice and neglect for six centuries
or so, it got into the Harleian Collection,—and has now therefrom, by Mr. Rokewood of the Camden
Society, been deciphered into clear print; and lies before us, a dainty thin quarto, to interest for a few
minutes whomsoever it can.’ Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present, p. 46.
184 Serial Forms
look face to face’(43) on the past, and declares ‘[t]hat it is a fact and no dream,
that we see it there, and gaze into the very eyes of it!’ (66), suggesting the possibility
of a direct and unmediated access to the past. Nevertheless, he is quick to
acknowledge that the Chronicle is ‘an extremely foreign Book . . . now seven cen-
turies old, how remote is it from us; exotic, extraneous; in all ways, coming from
far abroad! The language of it is not foreign only but dead’ (44).32 Carlyle’s strong
sense of the historicity of ‘all our Writing and Printing Functions’ (241) makes
him alert not only to writing as a technology but also to new technologies of
transmission and reception. In this context, his use of an archaeological image to
describe ‘that deep-buried Time’ (52) is significant: ‘the ideas, life-furniture, whole
workings and ways of this worthy Jocelin; [are] covered deeper than Pompeii with
the lava-ashes and inarticulate wreck of seven hundred years!’ (44). Archaeology
was itself an emerging technical practice in this period, generating new informa-
tion about the ancient past and, as we have seen, Pompeii was already prominent
in the contemporary public mind, as representations were shifting from the ‘City
of the Dead’ to a city of living people cut off in the midst of their daily routines.33
Carlyle shows a congruent interest in the daily rituals of life of the Abbey in the
twelfth century: ‘[s]moke rises daily from those culinary chimney-throats; there
are living human beings there, who chant, loud-braying, their matins, nones,
Vespers’ (66). In Past and Present, information transmitted from the deep past
through material and technological means is both ‘inarticulate’ and difficult to
decode but can also provide a powerful face-to-face encounter with that past.
While the past is presented to us on the one hand as unmediated and ‘face-to-
face’, the metaphorical presence of media apparatus and technology in the text
reintroduces mediation and thereby distance to the narrative. Here, Carlyle’s text
borrows from the logic of show culture in early nineteenth-century London. ‘Will
not the reader peep with us into this singular camera lucida, where an extinct
species, though fitfully, can still be seen alive?’ (47).34 ‘[I]f by chance made visible
and audible’, he suggests, ‘[a] veritable Monk of Bury St. Edmunds is worth
attending to . . . Here he is; and in his hand a magical speculum, much gone to rust
32 John M. Ulrich speculates that, ‘Carlyle’s initial meetings with [Richard] Owen in late August
1842, especially his visit to the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons, together with his
direct encounter with relics from the Naseby battlefield just three weeks later’ had a profound effect on
Past and Present: ‘for the first time Carlyle metaphorizes the historian’s task as equivalent to the exca-
vation and articulation of the fossilized remains of extinct animal.’ John M. Ulrich, ‘Thomas Carlyle,
Richard Owen, and the Paleontological Articulation of the Past’, Journal of Victorian Culture 11
(2006): 30–56, pp. 31, 32.
33 Mary Beard tracks the changing interest in Pompeii from the City of the Dead to a city of the
living in her book, Pompeii. See also Jennifer Wallace, Digging the Dirt: The Archaeological Imagination
(London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2004) and Virginia Zimmerman’s Excavating Victorians (Albany,
NY: State University of New York Press, 2008).
34 Carlyle’s reference to ‘peeping’ makes it possible that he mistakes a camera lucida (an apparatus
of mirrors which reflects an image onto a page for artists’ copying) for a camera obscura, which uses
light and mirrors to project a scene. The camera obscura consists of a box or a dark room with a hole
in one side. The viewer would ‘peep’ through the hole to see the projected scene.
indeed, yet in fragments still clear; wherein the marvellous image of his existence
does still shadow itself, though fitfully, and as with an intermittent light!’ (46–7).
The speculum and the camera lucida are both mirror or screen technologies—
speculum is Latin for ‘mirror’. With ‘our strange intermittent magic-mirror’ (48),
Carlyle insists that ‘we do get some glimpses of that deep-buried Time; discern
veritably, though in a fitful intermittent manner, these antique figures and their
life-method, face to face!’ (52). Carlyle implies that these ‘fitful intermittent’
‘glimpses’ on the screen are projections of a material reality, and in showing us
the abbey, he emphasizes both the materiality and the ungraspability of the past:
‘[w]hat a Hall,—not imaginary in the least, but entirely real and indisputable,
though so extremely dim to us; sunk in the deep distances of Night!’ (83). And in
reanimating the Hall, Carlyle uses a method of superimposition which would be
familiar to his readers from the ‘dissolving view’ and magic lantern shows in which
one image was made to melt into another.35 Superimposing the modern remains
of the Abbey over its twelfth-century iteration, he emphasizes its still-visible vast
scale and mass: ‘and on the eastern edge of it, still runs, long, black and massive, a
range of monastic ruins; into the wide internal spaces of which the stranger is
admitted on payment of one shilling. Internal spaces laid out, at present, as a
botanic garden. Here stranger or townsman, sauntering at his leisure amid these
vast grim venerable ruins, may persuade himself that an Abbey of St. Edmundsbury
did once exist; nay there is no doubt of it: see here the ancient massive Gateway’
(50) [my emphases]. But the screen-show ends suddenly: ‘impenetrable Time-
Curtains rush down; in the mind’s eye all is again dark, void; with loud dinning in
the mind’s ear, our real-phantasmagory of St. Edmundsbury plunges into the
bosom of the Twelfth Century again, and all is over. . . vanish[ed] like Mirza’s
Vision; and there is nothing left but a mutilated black Ruin amid green botanic
expanses, and oxen, sheep and dilettanti pasturing in their places’ (126).36
The distance of mediation implied by the metaphoric presence of show and
media technologies is also collapsed by the wider structure of the text, which
places its characters side by side despite a difference of seven centuries: ‘[l]ist, list,
how like men are to one another in all centuries’ (77) concludes Carlyle, bringing
together his twelfth-century monks and his nineteenth-century cotton spinners
as distant contemporaries. The juxtaposition collapses sequential time, whilst
insisting on its traces. If, as Carlyle declares in Past and Present, ‘the Centuries too
are all lineal children of one another’ (43), then he chooses to show little of the
‘lineal’ in his account, preferring rather to fold his timeline upon itself so that the
twelfth and the nineteenth centuries rub directly together. Pugin makes the same
35 On dissolving views see Huhtamo, Illusions in Motion and Altick, Shows of London.
36 Joseph Addison’s ‘The Vision of Mirza’ was published in the Spectator (1 September 1711).
Carlyle is echoing the story’s end here: ‘instead of the rolling tide, the arched bridge, and the happy
islands, I saw nothing but the long valley of Baghdad, with oxen, sheep, and camels grazing upon the
sides of it’.
186 Serial Forms
move: his illustrations ‘tell their own tale at a glance! They speak volumes. What
amazing cleverness is not exhibited in their selection and juxtaposition!’37
For both Carlyle and Pugin this juxtapositional strategy usefully accommo-
dates both radical and conservative positions. It is radical in undermining a serial
narrative of progress, instead making a symmetry between the past and the pre-
sent which allows each period to throw equal light upon the other. It is conserva-
tive in insisting on the retroactive possibilities of inherited tradition. Both Pugin
and Carlyle are boldly self-conscious about their rhetorical purposes. Carlyle
excuses his juxtapositional structure as it will, ‘in a circuitous way, illustrate the
Present and the Future (40) . . . [i]t seems a circuitous way; but it may prove a way
nevertheless’(43) as, after all, ‘a certain latitude of movement grows more and
more becoming for the practical man. Salvation lies not in tight lacing, in these
times’ (43). Pugin argues similarly for juxtaposition: ‘it is only by similar glorious
feelings [like those of medieval times] that similar glorious results can be
obtained’.38 The juxtapositions of Carlyle and Pugin may seem to enact an anti-
serial approach to history, but the rhetorical power of their contrasts rests entirely
on their readers’ growing understanding of the long seriality of periodization.
Without this new public grasp of historical ‘periods’, Pugin and Carlyle could not
play the games they are playing with sequence.
Juxtaposition as a strategy declares meaning while refusing to make that mean-
ing explicit, and both Pugin and Carlyle deliberately produce puzzles, designed to
quiz their readers. Two things placed close together must suggest meanings for
each other, and meanings beyond those that each thing would be permitted alone.
In this, the juxtapositional method of both Carlyle and Pugin shares the structure
of the metaphoric. ‘ “To metaphoricize well,” said Aristotle, “implies an intuitive
perception of the similarity in dissimilars.” ’39 Paul Ricoeur suggests that meta-
phor concerns the ‘disruption of isotopy’, changing the ‘direction’ of the text by
introducing non-compatible concepts or elements, and troubling its coherence.40
Both Pugin and Carlyle are concerned with creating effects of isotopic misdirection.
For example, Carlyle recounts the episode when ‘[c]ertain Heathen Physical-Force
Ultra-Chartists, “Danes” as they were then called, coming into [Abbot Samson’s]
territory with their “five points,” or rather with their five-and-twenty thousand
37 Benjamin Ferrey and Edmund Sheridan Purcell, Recollections of A.N. Welby Pugin and His
Father, Augustus Pugin: With Notices of their Works (London: Edward Stanford, 1861), p. 330.
38 Pugin, Contrasts, p. iii.
39 Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in
Language, trans. Robert Czerny with Kathleen McLaughlin and John Costello SJ (London: Routledge
& Kegan Paul, 1978), p. 4.
40 Ricoeur, Rule of Metaphor, p. 217. Umberto Eco challenges the definition of isotopy which rests
on repetitions, arguing instead that ‘isotopy has become an umbrella term covering diverse semiotic
phenomena generically definable as coherence at the various textual levels’. He adds, ‘[i]sotopy refers
almost always to constancy in going in a direction that a text exhibits when submitted to rules of
interpretative coherence’: Umberto Eco, ‘Two Problems in Textual Interpretation’, Poetics Today 2:1a
(Autumn 1980): 145–61, pp. 147, 153.
points and edges too, of pikes namely and battleaxes; and proposing mere
Heathenism, confiscation, spoliation, and fire and sword’ (57). The juxtaposition
of nineteenth-century Chartists with twelfth-century invading Danes hinges on
the double use of the word ‘point’—meaning here both the clauses of the working
man’s Charter and the tips of the pikes brandished by the Danes.41 It is a juxtapos-
ition that hovers on the brink of metaphoric fusion, but is finally too absurd to
achieve full metaphoric status. Part of the vertiginous experience of reading
Carlyle is caused by the constant tumble down the hermeneutic gaps between
juxtapositions which have not been smoothed either into metaphors, or into tidy
historical sequence. This is an entirely deliberate strategy on Carlyle’s part. His
rendering of contemporary experience depends on creating such hiatus and dis-
connection, forcing his reader into reaching uncomfortably for the possible
meanings of unlikely juxtapositions, and bringing small details into sharp focus
against the enormity of time.42
Past and Present reflects self-consciously on its own metaphoricity: ‘[t]he coldest
word was once a glowing new metaphor’ (130), Carlyle reminds us, a metaphor
of ‘bold questionable originality’ (130).43 As an example he gives ‘ “Thy very
ATTENTION, does it not mean an attentio, a STRETCHING-TO?” ’(130–1). The
transformation of the literal and material into metaphoric usage always creates
‘questionable’ and ‘original’ effects, and Carlyle’s style not only exploits but
depends upon the unpredictability of metaphoric direction, as, for example, when
he discusses Abbot Samson’s reclamation of the Abbey from ruination: ‘[t]o change
combustible decaying reed-thatch into tile or lead, and material, still more, moral
wreck into rain-tight order, what a comfort to Samson!’ (120). In one sentence
weatherproofing becomes a spiritual practice, and ‘renovation’ regains the full
gamut of its meanings. Ricoeur suggests that ‘[t]o affect just one word, the meta-
phor has to disturb a whole network by means of aberrant attribution’, but Carlyle
is not content merely to ‘disturb’: his metaphoricity positively shakes and rattles
41 The 1839 Chartist Petition to Parliament contained five points. The 1842 petition contained
eight points, and the 1848 petition contained six points. See Miles Taylor, ‘The Six Points: Chartism
and The Reform of Parliament’, in Owen R. Ashton, Robert Fyson, and Stephen Roberts (eds), The
Chartist Legacy (Woodbridge: Merlin Press, 1999), pp. 1–23.
42 James Russell Lowell wrote that ‘[Carlyle] sees history, as it were, by flashes of lightning. A single
scene, whether a landscape or an interior, a single figure or a wild mob of men, whatever may be
snatched by the eye in that moment of intense illumination, is minutely photographed upon the
memory. Every tree and stone, almost every blade of grass; every article of furniture in a room; the
attitude of expression, nay, the very buttons and shoe-ties of a principal figure; the gestures of momen-
tary passion in a wild throng,—everything leaps into vision under that sudden glare with a painful
distinctness that leaves the retina quivering. The intervals are absolute darkness.’ James Russell Lowell,
My Study Windows, Low’s Copyright Series of American Authors (London: Sampson Low Son &
Marston, 1871), pp. 102–3.
43 Anne K. Mellor suggests that Carlyle’s ‘private sense of linguistic inadequacy’ motivates some of
his metaphoric excesses: Anne K. Mellor, ‘Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus: A Self-Consuming Artifact’, in
English Romantic Irony (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), pp. 109–34, p. 120.
188 Serial Forms
networks of meanings.44 Ricoeur continues that, taken to its extreme, this hypoth-
esis means ‘that the “metaphoric” that transgresses the categorical order also
begets it’.45 Carlyle understood that metaphor does not merely stretch and redir-
ect language, but can also create new possibilities of meaning, and that he can use
metaphor to bring the past and the immediate present into etymologically start-
ling juxtaposition. This led Emerson to suggest that ‘Carlyle is the first domestica-
tion of the modern system, with its infinity of details, into style’.46 The oddity of
Carlyle’s use of metaphor is designed to highlight the incommensurability of scale
in the modern system with its vast ‘infinity’ of tiny ‘details’ and its contradictory
iterations of small and large.
Scalar transformation is not necessarily strictly indexical, as Carlyle himself
noted in a letter to his friend James Dodd: ‘I find your image of the object sharply
distinct, and just, too, though exaggerated on a larger scale than usual. The scale is
not mathematically important; the distinctness and the justness are alone import-
ant. On the whole, I like that mood of mind very well; a true portrait and a gigan-
tic one . . . there are worse kinds than that.’47 As T. J. Clark has claimed, while size
is literal, and ‘a mere effect of representation’, scale is ‘unabashedly metaphorical’.48
Scale, which articulates both similarity and difference, can effect the transform-
ation of an object so that a thing is rendered gigantic or miniature, until it ‘has
lost its index to use value’.49
Scale in Pugin and Carlyle
In the 1830s, Pugin had made a trip to Westminster Abbey, and ‘was disgusted
beyond measure at perceiving that the chapel of St. Paul had been half filled up
with a huge figure of James Watt, sitting in an armchair on an enormous square
pedestal’.50 When this giant marble statue of one of the inventors of the steam
engine by sculptor Francis Chantrey had been installed in 1825 it had caused
some damage to the fabric of the Abbey: ‘[t]he introduction of this colossal
monument into the little chapel meant that the pedestal had to be divided into
three pieces and was dragged in over the medieval tomb of Sir Lewis Robessart,
44 Ricoeur, Rule of Metaphor, p. 21. 45 Ricoeur, Rule of Metaphor, p. 24.

46 Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Appreciation of Carlyle’s Past and Present’, The Dial: A Magazine for
Literature, Philosophy and Religion 4:1 (July 1843): 96–102, pp. 101–2.
47 Thomas Carlyle to James Dodds (20 May 1843), Carlyle Letters Online, doi: 10.1215/
lt-18430520-TC-JADO-01.
48 T. J. Clark, ‘Pollock’s Smallness’, in Jackson Pollock—New Approaches, ed. Kirk Varnedoe and
Pepe Karmel (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1999), pp. 15–31, p. 16. Susan Stewart links scale to
the index of the human body in On Longing, as does Rachel Wells: ‘While size is a measurement in
relation to the constant of one’s own body, scale distances one’s body to a secondary position.’ Rachel
Wells, Scale in Contemporary Sculpture: Enlargement, Miniaturisation and the Life-Size (Farnham:
Ashgate, 2013), p. 17.
49 Clark, ‘Pollock’s Smallness’, p. 16. 50 Pugin, Contrasts, p. 21.
destroying the ancient coffin lid’.51 Pugin complained that Chantrey should be
crushed under his own oversized pedestal for such bad taste, and sneered that the
work seemed to have been designed for ‘some great terrace-garden’ rather than
for the diminutive medieval chapel.52 Gigantic public sculpture is often produced
at particularly anxious historical moments, and Chantrey’s monumental sculpture
of Watt was undoubtedly part of a political rhetoric which sought to stabilize some
of the turbulence of the accelerating industrial revolution that Watt had played a
large part in kick-starting.53 Pugin certainly understood the scale of the statue in
terms not only of taste but also of politics: for him it provided an eloquent example
of an ugly overbearing mass heedlessly squashing a finer and subtler past.
In Past and Present, Carlyle considers the memory of another hero of the
industrial revolution, Richard Arkwright, speculating that Arkwright ‘too will
have his Monument, a thousand years hence’ (60). But he imagines this monu-
ment not as a gigantic marble statue, but as ‘all Lancashire and Yorkshire, and
how many other shires and countries, with their machineries and industries, for
his monument! A true pyramid or “flame-mountain,” flaming with steam fires
and useful labour over wide continents . . . how much grander than your foolish
Cheops Pyramids or Sakhara clay ones!’ (60) Carlyle sees the legacy of Watt and
Arkwright as still at work, not to be ossified and concluded in gigantic concrete
monuments but represented instead by the metaphor of the ‘grand’ ‘flame-
mountain’ which continues to ‘flam[e]’. The flame-mountain represents a form of
praxis that will change the global landscape of the future, as industry inevitably
naturalizes itself into culture. Ricoeur’s thesis that ‘metaphor allows for the new and
allows for development’ is particularly pertinent to Carlyle’s metaphorical style in
Past and Present: here, his metaphor allows him to suggest the potential scale of
the future.54 For it is growth on an unprecedented scale which is the true subject
of Past and Present: ‘[o]ur little Isle is grown too narrow for us’ (35), he explains,
‘but the world is wide enough yet for another Six Thousand Years. England’s sure
markets will be new Colonies of Englishmen in all quarters of the Globe’ (35–6).
Scale for Carlyle is a more complex matter than for Pugin. Pugin tends to manipu-
late scale in his etchings so that the human figure in the medieval scenes appears
larger and the buildings on a more ‘human scale’ than those in the debased modern
scenes in which buildings of an impersonal classical style dwarf the human actors.
And Pugin’s medieval figures interact harmoniously with their built environment.
In ‘Contrasting Public Conduits’ [Fig. 5.1], the policeman in St Anne’s, Soho is an
out-of-scale giant who towers over a small boy, embodying inhuman state power.
51 www.westminster-abbey.org/our-history/people/james-watt. The statue was removed from the

Chapel in 1960 is now on display at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.
52 Pugin, Contrasts, p. 21.
53 See my own Patent Inventions: Intellectual Property and the Victorian Novel (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2004) for a full discussion of this process.
54 Ricoeur, Rule of Metaphor, p. 190.
190 Serial Forms
Fig. 5.1. A. W. Pugin, ‘Contrasted Public Conduits’, Contrasts; or, a Parallel between
the Noble Edifices of the Middle Ages, and Corresponding Buildings of the Present Day
(London: Charles Dolman, 1841) [reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of
Cambridge University Library Ii.4.8]
Similarly, in Past and Present, Carlyle moves restlessly between large and small,
and between past and present, creating disorientating effects of expansion and
shrinkage, so that he makes the experience of reading his text as vertiginous as
the proliferating and globalizing dynamics of the ‘Machine Age’.
But scale had a more topical and directly political meaning in the early 1840s
too. In February 1842, Carlyle wrote to his mother that ‘[t]he sliding-scale man
will verily, as you say, slide into the scale and be found too light: I often with a real
awe seem to see them sliding thither very fast’.55 The pun is on ‘scale’: Prime
Minister Peel had introduced a sliding scale of corn duties to the House of
Commons on 9 February, and on 24 February, a few days after Carlyle wrote to
his mother and while he was writing Past and Present, the government defeated a
motion for the repeal of the Corn Laws.56 Carlyle was disgusted by the Corn Laws
55 Thomas Carlyle to Jean Carlyle Aitken (21 February 1842); Carlyle Letters On-Line, doi: 10.1215/
lt-18420221-TC-JCA-01.
56 ‘Peel dealt with the Corn Law by providing a new sliding scale, of which the primary object was
to prevent violent fluctuations of price while ensuring a tolerably remunerative minimum. With corn
at fifty shillings a quarter or less there was to be a twenty shilling duty on the foreign import. With
corn at seventy-five shillings or more there was to be no duty. Between these two points there was to
and with what he saw as Peel’s craven efforts to protect them from abolition
with his ‘Sliding Scale’ prevarication. Of Abbot Samson he sardonically reports,
‘[n]either do we ascertain what kind of Corn-bill he passed, or wisely-adjusted
Sliding-scale:—but indeed there were few spinners in those days; and the nuis-
ance of spinning, and other dusty labour, was not yet so glaring a one’ (56).
Later in Past and Present everybody becomes implicated in a sliding-scale
which has now become a metaphor for prevarication and incommensurability
more generally: ‘[m]en and brothers, on your Sliding-scale you seem sliding,
and to have slid,—you little know whither!’ (179). Carlyle creates a metaphor
out of the slippery, out-of-control sliding scale to emphasize the importance of
a government which is properly commensurate to its people: ‘[a] heroic people
chooses heroes, and is happy; a valet or flunkey people chooses sham-heroes,
what are called quacks, thinking them heroes, and is not happy’ (79). There is
no sliding here, but a simple and stable 1:1 representational scale between
Leader and People.
But proportions are not always so simple or stable in Past and Present.
Carlyle returns often to the figure of the giant: ‘giant “Millocracy” so-called, a
real giant, though as yet a blind one and but half-awake’ (142); ‘giant Working
Mammonism’ (148); ‘the Working Aristocracy . . . as yet but an irrational or
semi-rational giant’ (173). Yet the embodied image of the ‘giant’ ultimately
proves inadequate to represent the new giganticism of modernity and what
Carlyle sees as the incoherence of an ‘ever-increasing population’ (184). For it is
not possible to view this giant as a coherent whole: ‘[w]hat are Twenty-seven
Millions, and their unanimity?’ (145), asks a perplexed Carlyle, and the relation-
ship between division and unity becomes a puzzling scalar issue in Past and
Present. Moreover, the surging growth in Past and Present is not only a problem
of scale but also of increasing complexity: ‘[a] Government such as ours [is] . . . a
most complicate entity’ (255), sighs Carlyle, unable to find any vantage point
from which to view the whole. His famous denunciation of the ‘cash nexus’ is
about indexicality and the relation of man to man, which is obscured by the
fungible mediations of commerce. What is at issue is the index of relation: ‘[w]e
have profoundly forgotten everywhere that Cash-payment is not the sole relation
of human beings; we think, nothing doubting, that it absolves and liquidates all
engagements of man’ (149). Money, for Carlyle, represents the most dangerous
form of mediation.
be a graduated reduction of duty as the price rose. A preference was also given, in the form of lower
duties, to colonial as against foreign corn.’ Arthur Donald Innes, A History of the British Nation from
the Earliest Times to the Present Day (London: T.C. & E.C. Jack, 1912), p. 823.
192 Serial Forms
London Streets: Advertising and Scale
‘Huge Democracy, walking the streets everywhere in its Sack Coat, has asserted
so much; irrevocably, brooking no reply!’(247). Democracy itself is a bully-giant
in Carlyle’s retelling, restlessly walking the streets and ‘asserting’: a form of ambu-
lant advertising much like that in Pugin’s etching of the Strand in which a man
carries a placard reading, ‘CHEAP KNOWLEDGE LECTURE MECHANICS’
INSTITUTE MR. GAB ON THE POWER OF THE PEOPLE’. The easy satire of
‘Mr. Gab’ reveals the extent of Pugin’s treatment of the subject, whereas Carlyle is
more serious, seeing Democracy as ‘inevitable’, and understanding the ‘extent
[which] Democracy has now reached, how it advances irresistible with ominous,
ever-increasing speed’ (213). The problem of scale in democracy is the macro
problem of Past and Present, ‘[h]ow, in conjunction with inevitable Democracy,
indispensable Sovereignty is to exist: certainly it is the hugest question ever here-
tofore propounded to Mankind!’ (247), but, with a fractal self-replication, it per-
vades the text at a micro level too. Metaphors of scale abound, such as the
‘[o]ceans of horse-hair’ (14) [my emphasis] and ‘continents of parchment’ (14)
which ‘cannot make unjust just’ (14).57
Pugin’s advertising placard for ‘CHEAP KNOWLEDGE’ appears in one of his
‘parallel’ etchings in Contrasts which shows Robert Smirke’s new entrance build-
ing for King’s College London on the Strand, opened in 1831, in juxtaposition to
the medieval entrance gate of Christ Church, Oxford. [Fig. 5.2]58 Outside Christ
Church, which is pictured full-square, Pugin shows an orderly procession of
scholars in gowns. Outside King’s College London, which is drawn from a per-
spective down the Strand to emphasize the banality of the college entrance gates
interposed in a row of shop fronts, he pictures a man walking up and down with
an advertising placard. Carlyle uses the same figure of the street placard in Past
and Present. ‘[I]n these times,’ he laments, ‘one has to be tolerant of many strange
“Articles,” and of many still stranger “No-articles,” which go about placarding
themselves in a very distracted manner,—the numerous long placard-poles, and
questionable infirm paste-pots, interfering with one’s peaceable thoroughfare
sometimes!’ (223). Indeed, the streets of early nineteenth-century London were
increasingly obstructed by advertisements of all kinds. Advertising bills were
57 Marius Quint and Natalie Rudd have suggested that the artistic exploration of scale is often a
response to technological development, political standardization, and concerns about the allocation of
space. See Marius Quint and Natalie Rudd, Size Matters: Exploring Scale in the Arts Council Collection
(London: Hayward Gallery, 2005).
58 Sue Zemka says that ‘[t]he many illustrations in Contrasts, some done by George Cattermole,
the main illustrator for The Old Curiosity Shop, juxtapose current English architecture with artistic
renderings of medieval buildings, the implication being that the latter facilitated happier and more
“organic” communities’: Sue Zemka, ‘From the Punchmen to Pugin’s Gothics: The Broad Road to a
Sentimental Death in The Old Curiosity Shop’, Nineteenth-Century Literature 48:3 (December 1993):
291–309, p. 301.
Fig. 5.2. A. W. Pugin, ‘Contrasted College Gateways’, Contrasts; or, a Parallel between
the Noble Edifices of the Middle Ages, and Corresponding Buildings of the Present Day
(London: Charles Dolman, 1841) [reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of
Cambridge University Library Ii.4.8]
.
pasted over any available wall or fence and handbills were thrust into the hands of
passers-by. Omnibuses were introduced in London in 1829 with advertisements
plastered around their outsides, and customized advertising vans and carts per-
ambulated the streets on behalf of any number of commodities. In Sketches by Boz
in 1836, Dickens also notices, ‘the unstamped advertisement: an animated sand-
wich, composed of a boy between two boards’.59 A 1797 tax on newspaper adver-
tising had forced advertisers to come up with new and cheaper ways of bringing
their products and services to public attention. And anyway, in this period, news-
paper advertising was simply not reaching enough readers, as we have seen.60
Increasing numbers of people were employed to ‘distribute hand-bills, and bear
placards on their backs or their vans . . . when one is in a hurry they are continu-
ally in the way. Their trade is to be seen, and they will cross your path were it only
merely to make you look at them . . . their stoppages are a terrible and a
59 Charles Dickens, Sketches by Boz ed. Dennis Walder (London: Penguin, 1995), p. 298. All future
references are to this edition and given in the text.
60 John R. Strachan tells us that ‘[p]eripatetic advertisers were common in the London streets,
notably in the forms of the placard-carrier and the sandwich, which was a late Georgian innovation’:
John R. Strachan, Advertising and Satirical Culture in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge
194 Serial Forms
constantly-recurring annoyance.’61 Until 1853, when an Act of Parliament banned

the sandwich boards, placard men, and advertising vehicles, the streets were fast
filling with increasingly elaborate publicity stunts. And even after the Act, these
mobile, ambulant, and ephemeral advertisements proved very difficult to police.
Pugin and Carlyle both exaggerate in order to critique the modern habit of
exaggeration: both texts are replete with satirical references to advertising and
‘puffery’, and both attack fashionable habits of ephemeral consumption. Pugin
particularly lampoons ‘the fashion of the day’: the ephemeral that has no ‘solid
foundation’.62 But their own polemical styles and the emerging rhetoric of adver-
tising veer dangerously close. Pugin in particular, by self-publishing the first edi-
tion of Contrasts, was publicizing his own architectural work as well as launching
a passionate campaign for a return to the gothic style. And despite his desire for
‘philosophical uncommercial language’ (204), Carlyle’s importunate and repeti-
tive tone of address to the reader in Past and Present smacks sometimes of ‘hard
sell’, as Emerson noticed, complaining that ‘the habitual exaggeration of the tone
wearies whilst it stimulates’.63 Emerson was disturbed by ‘a certain disproportion
in the picture’, and James Russell Lowell exclaimed that ‘Mr. Carlyle has no artistic
sense of form or rhythm, scarcely of proportion.’64 As a young man, Carlyle had
written confidently about ‘[t]he proper mode of treating proportion’ in mathem-
atics, but by the end of the 1820s, maths seems to offer no solution to the prob-
lems of proportion revealed by the ‘Age of Machinery’, which has inaugurated a
society where ‘nothing is now done directly, or by hand’.65 Instead, symbolic sys-
tems of paper money, advertising, bureaucracy, and representative votes inter-
vene, so that ‘all is by rule and calculated contrivance’.66 Carlyle sees very clearly
‘how wealth has more and more increased, and at the same time gathered itself
more and more into masses, strangely altering the old relations, and increasing
the distance between the rich and the poor’.67 Carlyle sees democracy and capital-
ism as resting on the same structure, or ‘rule’ of functional equivalence, so that
paper money and election papers now ‘stand in place’ of people, swelling up in
inflationary measure to obscure the ‘old relations’.68
61 [Anon.], ‘A Plea for Advertising Vans’, Our Own Times: Illustrated by George Cruikshank
(Bradbury & Evans, April–July 1846) July 1846, p. 123. Only four issues of this miscellany were pub-
lished, but it was enthusiastically received. It seems that Cruikshank might have fallen out with
Bradbury and Evans.
62 Pugin, Contrasts, p. 32. 63 Emerson, ‘Appreciation’, p. 99.
64 Emerson, ‘Appreciation’, p. 99. James Russell Lowell, My Study Windows, p. 96.
65 Thomas Carlyle, ‘On Proportion’, p. ix. Thomas Carlyle, ‘Signs of the Times’ [1829], in The Works
of Thomas Carlyle, vol. 29: Critical and Miscellaneous Essays II , ed. Henry Duff Traill (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010 [1899]), pp. 56–82, p. 59.
66 Carlyle, ‘Signs of the Times’, p. 59. 67 Carlyle, ‘Signs of the Times’, p. 60.
68 Isobel Armstrong offers an excellent discussion of Carlyle’s punning on ‘movable types’ in which
he uses ‘type’ to mean both characteristic categories and the literal metal type used by typesetters to
set pages of print, thus making a connection between print, capitalism, and democracy, all of which
rely on a principle of interchangeability: Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poets and Politics
(London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 4–7.
Writing in the twentieth century, Theodor Adorno suggested that ‘[o]nly exag-
geration per se today can be the medium of truth’.69 For Adorno, exaggeration
goes beyond truth but is also the sole medium of truth, because exaggeration has
become the only means of attempting to transgress the limits of contemporary
culture. In what Emerson called his ‘great approaches to true contemporary his-
tory’, Carlyle is attempting to out-modern the modern.70 Pugin’s exaggerations
are graphic—the locked public water pump outside the menacingly blank police
station; the signs on the closed church doors that offer architectural fragments of
the medieval church as ‘old material for sale’; the pinched and mean-looking Ely
House, Dover Street, ‘the whole on a scale to combine economy with elegance!!’;
the ugly tomb with banal portrait busts in a row along it as if on a mantelpiece,
with the sign ‘Persons are desired not to walk about and talk during divine ser-
vice, nor to deface the walls’. The ‘Catholic Town of 1440’ is shown in contrast to
the same town in 1840, now disfigured by gasworks, a lunatic asylum, a prison,
and a series of blank-looking dissenting chapels and a ‘Socialist Hall of Science’. A
modern Poor House abuses and underfeeds its inmates and sells their corpses to
medical students for dissection, while the Ancient Poor House gives them whole-
some food and a Christian burial. Architectural historian David Watkin accuses
Pugin of an ‘irresponsible fantasy’ in Contrasts, and Pugin’s insistence on the
comparability of a medieval abbey and a growing industrial city of the nineteenth
century is disingenuous, if rhetorically powerful.71 Certainly there is in both texts
a deliberate overstepping and upsizing, so that Carlyle and Pugin both seem to be
testing the limits of scalability in the early nineteenth century.
Carlyle represents the scale of modern contemporary life as swollen and exces-
sive. Past and Present is peopled with figures of commercial excess, such as ‘Bobus
Higgins, Sausage-maker on the great scale’ (33).72 The overinflated claims of
manufacturers are represented by ‘Morrison’s Pill’ (26), a quack panacea, and
‘[t]he indomitable Plugson . . . of the respected Firm of Plugson, Hunks and
Company, in St. Dolly Undershot’ (189), who understands nothing beyond grow-
ing his business. But the most famous example in Past and Present of a scale that
has surpassed use-value is that of the giant mobile hat [see Fig. 5.3]. John Perring,
a hat-maker on the Strand, built a hat upon wheels which he claimed cost 60
69 Theodor Adorno, ‘The Meaning of Working through the Past’, in Lydia Goehr (ed.), Critical
Models (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), pp. 89–104, p .99.
70 Emerson, ‘Appreciation’, p. 96.
71 David Watkin, Morality and Architecture: The Development of a Theme in Architectural History
and Theory from Gothic Revival to the Modern Movement (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), p. 18.
72 Ford Madox Brown’s 1852–65 painting, Work, includes a reference to the ‘insidious parvenu
sausage-maker, Bobus, a character in Carlyle’s Past and Present’: Kenneth Bendiner, The Art of Ford
Madox Brown (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), p. 93. Bobus’s election
campaign is being advertised by the sandwich-board carriers in Work.
196 Serial Forms
Fig. 5.3. ‘Perring’s Light Hats mobile advertisement’, London, ed. Charles Knight,
vol. 5 (1843) [reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University
Library K.19.16-18]
guineas to make and was driven through the streets of central London every day
to advertise ‘Perring’s Light Hats’:73
Consider, for example, that great Hat seven-feet high, which now perambu-
lates London Streets . . . The Hatter in the Strand of London, instead of making
better felt- hats than another, mounts a huge lath-and-plaster Hat, seven-feet
high, upon wheels; sends a man to drive it through the streets; hoping to be
saved thereby. He has not attempted to make better hats, as he was appointed
by the Universe to do, and as with this ingenuity of his he could very probably
have done; but his whole industry is turned to persuade us that he has made
such! (143–4)
Carlyle takes ‘seven-feet lath-and-plaster hats on wheels’ (143) as a worrying sign

of a more general scalar confusion: ‘[e]xceed your certain quantity, the seven-feet
Hat, and all things upwards . . . begin to reel and flounder’ (145). Noticing how the
cakes and drinks in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1866) with their urgent
labels ‘Eat me!’ and ‘Drink me!’ cause Alice to shrink and grow, art historian
Rachel Wells has commented that ‘enlargement and miniaturisation seem directly
73 Strachan, Advertising and Satirical Culture, p. 276. Clarence Moran gives the Hatter on the
Strand as an example of the newly ‘sensational method of advertising’: Clarence Moran, The Business
of Advertising (London: Methuen, 1905; repr. Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), p. 42. See also http://lon-
donstreetviews.files.wordpress.com and Raymond Williams ‘Advertising: The Magic System’ origi-
nally written as a chapter of The Long Revolution 1961, but only published later as a separate essay;
reprinted in Simon During (ed.), The Cultural Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 410–23.
connected to consumption’.74 Advertisements exploited this connection. In the

early twentieth century, Siegfried Kracauer would describe the effects of advertis-
ing on the subject-self, which becomes ‘a helpless little doll swept away by the
giant colossus in whose ambit it expires’.75 He argues that mass communica-
tions—both entertainment and advertising—represent a weak algorithm which
cannot be translated back out of abstraction, so that what Kracauer calls ‘the mass
ornament’ does not represent ‘the human beings within the mass’ but merely
represents massiveness.76 Carlyle and Pugin early foresee the ways in which
advertising images will manipulate scale and how this representative strategy is
linked to a growth in commodity markets and economic fluctuations, such as
‘Bubble-periods, with their panics and commercial crises ’(266) and ‘gambling
speculation’ (266). Carlyle is particularly alert to the metaphoric move of advertis-
ing, which transforms a simple thing into something else: a desirable commodity.
Raymond Williams agrees that ‘[t]here is no doubt that the Industrial Revolution,
and the associated revolution in communications, fundamentally changed the
nature of advertising. But the change was not simple.’77
In Pugin’s Contrasts the shop front of the ‘Temple of Taste, And Architectural
Repository’ is pictured in the ‘new square style’, a style particularly loathed by
Pugin. In the shop windows are displayed a plethora of advertisements. A collec-
tion of items is advertised as ‘for sale’: ‘A large quantity of Gothic Cornices just
pressed out from 6d per yard’; ‘Buildings of every description altered into
GOTHIC or GRECIAN on moderate terms. Terrace fronts designed’; ‘Mechaniks
Institute. A LECTURE on A New Designing Machine capable of making 1000
changes with the same set of Ornaments by a composition Maker’; ‘A Large
Assortment of Rejected Designs Selling Considerably Under Prime Cost’. And
under ‘Designs Wanted’, ‘A Moorish Fish Market with a Literary room over an
Egyptian Marine Villa’; ‘A Castellated Turnpike Gate; A Gin Temple’ and, with
another shot at Chantrey, ‘A Monument to be Placed in Westminster Abbey
A Colossal Figure. The Hindoo Style Would be Preferred and No Regard Need be
Paid to Locality’. Pugin’s targets are more specific than Carlyle’s, of course, but
both excoriate the early emergence of a culture that Jean-François Lyotard will
later come to diagnose and define differently as ‘post-modernity’ in which he says
that the fallibility of measurement has become a key aspect of ‘postmodern
knowledge’: a kind of knowledge which ‘refines our sensitivity to differences and
74 Wells, Scale in Contemporary Sculpture, p. xiv.

75 Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. and ed. Thomas Y. Levin
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 333.
76 ‘The Ratio that gives rise to the ornament is strong enough to invoke the mass and to expunge all
life from the figures constituting it. It is too weak to find the human beings within the mass and to
render the figures in the ornament transparent to knowledge.’ Kracauer, Mass Ornament, p. 84.
Kracauer’s most famous example of mass ornament is the Tiller Girls, a dance troupe of chorus girls of
the 1890s, which Kraucauer describes as a ‘cluster-girl’ rather than a series of complete women.
77 Williams, ‘Advertising’, p. 413.
198 Serial Forms
reinforces our ability to tolerate the incommensurable’.78 For Carlyle and Pugin,
though, one word summed all this up: ‘sham!’
Past and Present and Contrasts both reveal the extent to which an emerging
culture of shows, news, ephemera, and advertising had embedded itself in the
London of the early 1840s. Both authors find themselves paradoxically employing
exaggeration to expose the exaggerations of their environment. The problem is
that this potentially implicates their own work in the pervasive culture of shoddi-
ness and adulteration that they both diagnose with almost hysterical insistence.
‘[T]hy shoes are vamped up falsely to meet the market’ (221), warns Carlyle:
‘behold, the leather only seemed to be tanned; thy shoes melt under me to rub-
bishy pulp, and are not veritable mud-defying shoes, but plausible vendible simili-
tudes of shoes’ (221); and again, ‘there is “devil’s-dust” in Yorkshire cloth’ (143),
he warns, ‘—why, the very Paper I now write on is made, it seems, partly of
plaster-lime well-smoothed, and obstructs my writing! You are lucky if you can
find now any good Paper,—any work really done’ (143). Rubbishy imitations and
puffery threaten to undermine not only materials such as shoes and paper, but the
institution of literature itself. Carlyle looks back with a sigh to a ‘quiet Literature,
without copyright, or world-celebrity of literary-gazettes’ (106), from the vantage
point of the ‘new’ literary world which celebrates the poem: ‘[t]hough printed,
hot-pressed, reviewed, celebrated, sold to the twentieth edition: what is all that?
The Thing, in philosophical uncommercial language, is still a No-thing, mostly
semblance, and deception of the sight’ (204). Pugin is equally troubled by decep-
tion and lack of discipline in modern architectural practice: ‘[w]e have Swiss cot-
tages in a flat country; Italian villas in the coldest situations; a Turkish kremlin for
a royal residence; Greek temples in crowded lanes; Egyptian auction rooms; and
all kinds of absurdities and incongruities’.79 But ‘incongruity’ is itself one of the
principle rhetorical tools of both writers.
In the historic present tense of the Abbot Samson sections of Past and Present,
Carlyle records that ‘spiritual rubbish is as little tolerated in Samson’s Monastery
as material’ (95). He regrets that the strong leadership, shared faith, and discip-
lined consensus politics of the Abbey are no longer directly imitable in the mod-
ern world, but Carlyle understands that now, ‘[l]iberty requires new definitions’
(211). Past and Present performs the metaphoric splitting open of the word ‘free-
dom’: Carlyle creates a prescient connection between free-market economics and
the ‘freedoms’ of a liberal democracy. Freedom becomes both a social good and
an invitation to ‘shoreless deafening triviality’ (232). The vast new social serial
might deliver nothing more than an upscaling of its own ephemerality: ‘[t]ruly,
your freest utterances are not by any means always the best: they are the worst
78 Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Post Modern Condition: A Report on Knowledge [1979], trans.
G. Bennington and B. Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), p. xxv.
79 Pugin, Contrasts, p. 31.
rather; the feeblest, triviallest; their meaning prompt, but small, ephemeral’ (160).
In Carlyle’s view, the enormity of the emergent democracy does nothing to miti-
gate the smallness and ephemerality of its ideas.
Social Seriality and Sketches by Boz
Dickens’s short miscellaneous sketches of London life in the 1830s did not start
life as a series. As he himself said, ‘their original appearance’ (7) was ‘in different
periodicals’ (7) that reached different readerships on different rhythms: in the dis-
senting, liberal Monthly Magazine (1796–1843); and in the Whig, reformist
London daily Morning Chronicle (1770–1862) and its twice-weekly offshoot, the
Evening Chronicle (1835–55), which reached a more provincial readership.80
Sketches also appeared in the weekly Bell’s Life (1822–86), which ran articles on
sport and commanded a broad cross-class male readership, and in the short-lived
weekly Carlton Chronicle, aimed at a high-class and fashionable reader.81 By the
time that John Macrone published two volumes of the sketches in 1836, Dickens’s
other serial, Pickwick Papers, had become an extraordinary success, and Chapman
and Hall re-issued all the sketches in shilling monthly numbers between
1 November 1837 and 1 June 1839. Chapman and Hall also collected all the sketches,
newly organized into ‘Seven Sketches from Our Parish’, ‘Scenes’, ‘Characters’, and
‘Tales’, in one octavo volume as Sketches by ‘Boz’: Illustrative of Every-day Life and
Every-day People which was published in May 1839.82 There were many other
80 William Hazlitt offers a detailed description of the Morning Chronicle: ‘On the Morning
Chronicle, which is, or was at least, at the head of the new. This paper we have been long used to think
the best, both for amusement and instruction, that issued from the daily press. It is full, but not
crowded; and we have breathing-spaces and openings left to pause upon each subject. We have plenty
and variety. The reader of a morning paper ought not to be crammed to satiety. He ought to rise from
the perusal light and refreshed. Attention is paid to every topic, but none is overdone. There is a liber-
ality and decorum. Every class of readers is accommodated with its favourite articles, served up with
taste, and without sparing for the sharpest sauces. A copy of verses is supplied by one of the popular
poets of the day; a prose essay appears in another page, which, had it been written two hundred years
ago, might still have been read with admiration; a correction of a disputed reading, in a classical
author, is contributed by a learned correspondent. The politician may look profound over a grave dis-
sertation on a point of constitutional history; a lady may smile at a rebus or a charade. Here, Pitt and
Fox, Burke and Sheridan, maintained their nightly combats over again; here Porson criticized, and
Jekyll punned. An appearance of conscious dignity is kept up, even in the Advertisements, where a
principle of proportion and separate grouping is observed; the announcement of a new work is kept
distinct from the hiring of a servant of all-work, or the sailing of a steam-yacht.’ [William Hazlitt],
‘The Periodical Press’, pp. 360–1.
81 Robert Patten tells us that the Evening Chronicle, like all evening papers at the time, catered pri-
marily to a provincial, non-urban readership, whereas Bell’s reached a cross-class and predominantly
male readership. Patten claims that Charles Dickens’s writing is not political between 1833 and 1836.
As my chapter makes clear, I do not agree. Robert L. Patten, Charles Dickens and ‘Boz’: The Birth of the
Industrial Age Author (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 53, 342–3 n. 26.
82 This 1839 text is used by Dennis Walder for his 1995 Penguin edition. For more on other less
well-known early sketches by Dickens, see Paul Schlicke, ‘Dickens’s Early Sketches’, in Paul Schlicke
(ed.), The Oxford Companion to Dickens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 79–91.
200 Serial Forms
unauthorized republications of Sketches and Pickwick ‘in the early days of what
people used to call the “Bozomania”’, and Dickens’s friend Sala remembered that
‘[g]utter-blood publishers pirated the masterpiece of farcical fiction which was
astonishing the English-speaking world, and we had the “Penny-Pickwick” and
the “Posthumous Memoirs of the Pic-Nic Club” in weekly numbers. Even the
more respectable class of cheap periodicals, “Olios”, “Parterres”, “Mirrors”, and the
like, were not ashamed to print extracts, sometimes three or four pages at a time
from each monthly part.’83 The material textual history of the sketches and their
literary and political subjects are therefore entangled: through various stages of
production and reproduction, the miscellaneous was transformed into the serial.
Dickens remembered serial fiction from his childhood as ‘interminable’: ‘cer-
tain interminable novels in that form [shilling numbers], which used, some five-
and-twenty years ago, to be carried about by the country pedlars, and over which
I remember to have shed innumerable tears’.84 His own launch into serial form
with Pickwick Papers was somewhat accidental, but, as Chesterton later reflected,
‘Pickwick, properly speaking, has no end’.85 A similar endlessness is invoked by
Dickens in Sketches by Boz when he exclaims, ‘[w]hat inexhaustible food for
speculation, do the streets of London afford!’ (80). But Sketches by Boz is distin-
guished by a clash of what we might call ‘broadside temporality’ and ‘serial tem-
porality’. As we saw in Chapter 1, broadsides offered an account of a singular
end-stopped event, often an event end-stopped by violent death by murder or
execution. Dickens echoes the broadside form in many of his sketches which ter-
minate in violent death: for example, ‘The Black Veil’, ‘The Drunkard’s Death’, or
‘A Visit to Newgate’.86 Although they were published in serialized magazines and
newspapers, these sketches are singular. Robert Patten admires Dickens’s tech-
nique of post hoc serialization: ‘that Dickens can find a sequel to death is remark-
able enough. That in subsequent republishings the sequel connects to stories
written afterwards marks the skill he is acquiring in unpacking an already-printed
text further.’87 Every-day Life and Every-day People, the subtitle of the ‘First Series’
of collected Sketches, further proclaims the retrospective introduction of serial
83 George Augustus Sala, The Life and Adventures of George Augustus Sala Written by Himself,
2 vols (London, Paris and Melbourne: Cassell and Company Ltd, 1895), vol. 1, p. 88. Sala also remem-
bers that ‘[d]ogs and cats used to be named “Sam” and “Jingle” and “Mrs. Bardell” and “Job Trotter”.
A penny-cigar, presumably of British make, was christened “The Pickwick.”’ Sala, Life and Adventures, p. 88.
84 Patten, Dickens and ‘Boz’, p. 92. These were likely to have been cheap reprints of eighteenth-
century fiction.
85 When the original artist of the caricature series, Seymour, shot himself, another artist, Buss, was
engaged. But Buss was sacked, and at that point, Dickens ‘reconsidered the format’ and decided to
reduce illustrations from four to two per issue and increase letterpress from 24 to 32 pages. Patten,
Dickens and ‘Boz’, p. 103. G. K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens (London: Methuen, 1906), p. 65. Dickens
did briefly revive Pickwick in Master Humphrey’s Clock.
86 Robert Patten has noticed that ‘many of the Sketches end in death or analogous termination’:
Patten, Dickens and ‘Boz’, p. 60.
87 Patten, Dickens and ‘Boz’, p. 73.
logic to the text. It suggests that these are people who are in some way connected
as parts of a larger whole, and who exist in a serial standardized model of time,
the kind of time that can produce the ‘everyday’.88 With this subtitle, the ‘choice
miscellany’ is re-articulated into a series, and its protagonists are drawn together
as contemporaries in a large-scale London. Dickens’s interest in scale and the
practices of standardization and classification makes Sketches a very different
work to Pierce Egan’s, even though the adventures of Tom and Jerry are one of its
many forerunners and influences.89 But Egan uses his three central characters as
the motor of the narrative, making London the ‘panorama’ through which they
move, while Dickens’s project is different—it has more moving parts and is more
various in its scales: it is London itself that is being serialized.90 Boz covers more
ground and is interested in what Jacques Rancière has called ‘the distribution of
the sensible’ (le partage du sensible), exploring what knowledge and power is
available to whom.91 The sketches use the idea of the ‘interminable’ to make
Dickens’s London more inexhaustible and unfinished than Egan’s. The city creates
both confusion and standardization, mess and order for ‘a very numerous class of
people’ whose ‘[o]ld country friends have died or emigrated; former correspond-
ents have become lost, like themselves, in the crowd and turmoil of some busy
city; and they have gradually settled down into mere passive creatures of habit
and endurance’ (251).92 For Dickens, serializing citizens into standard parts is an
effective mechanism for industrial productivity, but it also risks loss, passivity,
and pain. The antidote to the passivity of being a part is to take a part, and to
become socially visible through participation. In Sketches, art, labour, and drama
are deliberately entangled by Dickens in ways which create a live performance out
of the ‘everyday’.
In Sketches by Boz, Dickens himself is engaged in serializing citizens, sorting
people into types, and taxonomizing their urban occupations. At its most basic,
seriality is about the relationship of the part to the whole and the relationship of
the singular to the plural. Seriality has therefore emerged as an important term
for political theories of citizenship both in the nineteenth century and since. A
highly influential social theory of seriality was suggested by Jean-Paul Sartre in
88 Ranajit Guha has argued for the ‘co-temporality of everydayness’, explaining that ‘the phrase
“everyday” stands today . . . for contemporaneity . . . the temporality of everydayness allows the present
to host the past and its forward-looking historicities’: Ranajit Guha, ‘A Colonial City and its Time(s)’,
Indian Economic and Social History Review 54:3 (2008): 329–51, both quotations p. 340.
89 Michael Slater says ‘Dickens had soaked himself in’ the Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon: Michael
Slater, Charles Dickens (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), p. 90. Dickens also read Pierce
Egan and was pleased when Macrone suggested Cruikshank as an illustrator for Sketches by Boz.
90 Martin Meisel says of Egan’s Life in London that ‘[t]he whole seems inclusively panoramic in
intention’: Meisel, Realizations, p. 56. Paul Fyfe suggests that ‘Boz inhabits both the aerial and the
asphalt, the panoramic and the particular’: Paul Fyfe, By Accident Or Design: Writing the Victorian
Metropolis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 75. Audrey Jaffe has argued similarly: Audrey
Jaffe, Vanishing Points: Dickens, Narrative, and the Subject of Omniscience (Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 1991), p. 35.
91 See Rancière, Politics of Aesthetics. 92 Dickens, ‘Thoughts about People’, Sketches, p. 251.
202 Serial Forms
the first volume of his 1960 Critique of Dialectical Reason. Like Dickens, Sartre
takes his view from the city streets, famously using the example of a queue of
people at a bus stop in Paris to think about the rationality of the series (‘La Raison
de la serie’).93 Imagine, he says,
a grouping of people in the Place Saint-Germain. They are waiting for a bus at a
bus stop in front of the church. I use the word ‘grouping’ here in a neutral sense:
we do not yet know whether this gathering is, as such, the inert effect of separate
activities, or whether it is a common reality, regulating everyone’s actions, or
whether it is a conventional or contractual organisation. These people—who
may differ greatly in age, sex, class, and social milieu—realise, within the ordin-
ariness of everyday life, the relation of isolation, of reciprocity and of unification
(and massification) from outside which is characteristic of, for example, the resi-
dents of a big city.94
By the twentieth century, modern mass society has created this kind of anonym-
ous and alienated serialized existence for all its non-subjects. Sartre claims that
‘powerlessness experienced [subie] is the bond [mastic] of seriality’.95 But every so
often—in ways which are perhaps not entirely clear in Sartre’s text—the series can
coalesce around an issue or an idea or a resistance and become a ‘group’: a posi-
tive collective that can participate and interact. Sartre’s big example of group-
formation is the 1789 French Revolution, and particularly the event of the
storming of the Bastille. As Frederic Jameson, in his preface to Sartre’s Critique,
explains it, ‘the group-in-fusion is hardly a social form at all, but rather an emer-
gence and an event, the formation of a guerilla unit, the sudden crystallization of
an “in-group” of any kind’.96 The group will eventually unravel and collapse back
into the anonymity of seriality, but the moments when the group mentality is
achieved break through the anomie of seriality and temporarily redeem it.
Frederic Jameson further explains Sartre’s theory:
[There are, for Sartre] two fundamental forms of collective existence, between
the side-by-side indifference and anonymity of the serial agglomeration [the bus
queue] and the tightly-knit interrelationship of the group-in-fusion. This is an
antithesis that is not merely a classificatory one, for as a principle of social
dynamics and an empirical fact of social history, the group-in-fusion emerges

95 Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique de la raison dialectique, précedé de Questions de méthode (Paris:
Gallimard, 1960), p. 325, missing on p. 277 of English translation; quoted in Thomas R. Flynn, Sartre
and Marxist Existentialism: The Test Case of Collective Responsibility (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1984), p. 96.
96 Jameson, ‘Foreword’, in Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason (new edn, 2004), vol. 1, pp. i–xxxiii,
pp. xxvi–xxvii.
from seriality as a reaction against it, its subsequent development and fate
governed by the danger of its dissolution back into seriality again.97
In fact, there are three forms of collective existence for Sartre: the serial, the
group-in-fusion, and the class.98 But the group-in-fusion could not emerge but for
seriality [the bus-queue] which offers people in the queue the possibility of seeing
and imagining themselves as part of something larger than themselves, which in
turn offers (although by no means guarantees) the possibility for willed political
action. Jameson also claims that ‘the notion of seriality developed . . . [by Sartre] is
the only philosophically satisfactory theory of public opinion, the only genuine
philosophy of the media’ yet put forward.99 Jameson is probably referring here
less to the bus queue than to Sartre’s other example of social seriality: radio listen-
ership, which has a ‘serial relation of absence between the different listeners’,
because they are all separate and passive receivers of the radio transmission.100
Sartre says that this distance and separation characterizes ‘all mass media’.101 In
this respect, Sartre’s theory seems to foreshadow the other significant theorist of
social seriality, Benedict Anderson.102
Arguing that the formation of industrialized nation-states happened through ‘a
logic of the series’, Anderson also thinks about seriality through the media, par-
ticularly the print media.103 In 1983 in Imagined Communities he famously sug-
gested the potential of the newspaper to serialize national identity, as the morning
or evening ritual of reading the newspaper ‘is being replicated simultaneously by
thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence [each separate reader] is
confident, yet of whose identity . . . [he] has not the slightest notion’.104 Later he
further developed these ideas, particularly in his 1998 book The Spectre of
Comparisons, where he sets out to show ‘how basic to the modern imagining of
collectivity seriality always is’.105 Here, he postulated two distinct forms of
97 Jameson, ‘Foreword’, p. xxvi.

98 For a helpful discussion of the forms of collectivity and political action that Sartre suggests can
be generated by the human will out of the ‘practico-inert’ categories of class and series, see Flynn,
Sartre and Marxist Existentialism.
99 Jameson, ‘Foreword’, p. xxviii. In Marxism and Form, Jameson compared Marx’s and Sartre’s ver-
sions of revolutionary potential: ‘we may understand the difference in emphasis inherent in these
models by seeing the Marxist one as relatively more diachronic, in the way in which it evaluates each
moment with respect to its position on the curve of developing capitalism over a long period; while
the Sartrean analysis is more synchronic in the manner in which it permits any given moment to be
resolved back into the lived reality of the class struggle’: Frederic Jameson, ‘Sartre and History’, in
Marxism and Form: 20th-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1971), pp. 206–305, p. 289.
102 Ed White has pointed to ‘strong, unacknowledged echoes . . . [of Sartre’s work] in Anderson’s
work’: White, ‘Early American Nations’, p. 62.
103 Anderson, The Spectre of Comparisons, p. 34.
104 Anderson, Imagined Communities, pp. 35–6.
105 Anderson, The Spectre of Comparisons, p. 40.
204 Serial Forms
seriality. The first is the ‘bound’ seriality of governmentality. His examples of

‘bound seriality’ are the finite totals of enumerable classes of population as pro-
duced by the modern census and the modern electoral systems. The second type
of seriality, though, is ‘unbound’. In his own words, ‘[u]nbound seriality which
has its origins in the print market, especially in newspapers, and in the represen-
tations of popular performance, is exemplified by such open-to-the-world plurals
as nationalists, anarchists, bureaucrats, and workers’.106 Anderson celebrates this
second type of seriality as producing potentially emancipatory international cat-
egories for self-identification and collective action.107 He suggests that categories
such as ‘revolutionary’ or ‘nationalist’ are coded to travel across national bound-
aries as well as within them. Sartre and Anderson produced their social theories
of identity and belonging out of very different contexts, of course, yet both are
essentially preoccupied with the question of how collectivities come into exist-
ence. Judith Butler later questioned the seriality of collective concepts, asking
‘whether or not the presumption of a series of identities or categories (women,
feminism, masculinity, patriarchy, the West), consistent and continuous across
historical periods, and various cultural sites and contexts, can be justified’.108
Butler’s work was foundational in suggesting the contingency and performativity
of the subject in inhabiting such serial categories, so for her the serial is a poten-
tially confining and disciplinary structure. But feminist philosopher Iris Marion
Young directly engaged Sartre’s theory of seriality in her de-essentializing project,
arguing that ‘[a] series reveals itself to everyone when they perceive in themselves
and Others their common inability to eliminate their material differences’:
To be said to be part of the same series it is necessary to identify a set of com-

mon attributes that every member has because their membership is defined not
by something they are but rather by the fact that in their diverse existences and
actions they are oriented around the same objects or practico-inert structures.
Membership in the series does not define one’s identity.109
As is clear, in these theories the serial flips back and forward between its discip-
linary and its emancipatory capacities. And already in Sketches by Boz Dickens is
registering this ambiguity as he witnesses, and participates in, the rapid serializa-
tion of the social order.
106 Anderson, ‘Nationalism, Identity’, p. 117.

107 For a critique of the ‘romanticism’ of Anderson’s celebration, see Partha Chatterjee, ‘Anderson’s
Utopia’, Diacritics 29:4 (Winter 1999): 129–34.
108 Anita Brady and Tony Schirato, Understanding Judith Butler (London: Sage, 2011), p. 5. See
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990).
109 Young, ‘Gender as Seriality’, pp. 727, 728. Young sticks close to Sartre’s idea that ‘[s]ocial life
consists of constant ebbs and flows of groupings out of series; some groups remain and grow into
institutions that produce new serialities, others disperse soon after they are born’: p. 735. http://www.
jstor.org/stable/3174775.
Dickens’s sketches mediate between street spectacle and print page, drawing
the semi-literate culture of the unacknowledged majority of Londoners into the
realm of newspaper literacy. The famous frontispiece drawn by Cruikshank in
which Boz ascends in a balloon is less an illustrated book cover, as we would now
understand that idea, and more a playbill or advertisement for an entertainment
by Boz. Michael Twyman notes the ubiquity of ephemeral promotional print in
this period: ‘bills were produced for popular spectacles, such as balloon ascents,
freak shows, circuses and, in London, for the great pleasure gardens. Sporting
events, mainly horse racing, but prize fights and cricket matches too, were also
advertised through printing.’110 Dickens’s London in Sketches lies just askance of
literary London, encompassing ‘Catherine-street, Strand, the purlieus of the city,
the neighbourhood of Gray’s-inn-lane, or the vicinity of Sadler’s Wells; or . . . some
shabby street, on the Surrey side of Waterloo bridge’ (147). The geography is a
disguised ethnography of the unseen and unregarded who live there, the ‘dirty
boys, low copying-clerks in attorneys’ offices, capacious-headed youths from city
counting-houses, Jews . . . , shop-boys . . . and a choice miscellany of idle vaga-
bonds . . . [including] the ex-scene-painter, a low coffee-house-keeper, a disap-
pointed eighth-rate actor, a retired smuggler, or an uncertificated bankrupt’
(147).111 In Sketches, this ‘choice miscellany’ of characters becomes a print miscel-
lany, and forces its way into visibility and legibility. That G. H. Lewes could claim
in 1837 that ‘all classes, in fact, read Boz’ is more extraordinary and more import-
ant than we have perhaps realized.112 Serialized Boz allowed the vast numbers of
supplementary Londoners (those who were not seen, not acknowledged, and not
taken into political account) not only representation in print but also access to
their own representation, and, therefore, participation in the process of their own
aestheticization.113 If the burning question in the 1820s and 1830s around Reform
was who was to take a part in a community of citizens, then Boz performs
complex work in both representing and enacting a coming into citizenship for
some of those groups, or ‘classes’ in Dickens’s word, previously excluded.114 The
110 Michael Twyman, ‘Printed Ephemera’, in Michael F. Suarez and Michael L. Turner (eds), The
Cambridge History of the Book, vol. 5: 1695–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010),
pp. 66–82, p. 69.
111 This is a description of the typical cast of an amateur play: ‘Private Theatres’, in Sketches by Boz,
pp. 145–52.
112 [?G.H. Lewes], ‘Review of Dickens’s Publications’, National Magazine and Monthly Critic
1 (December 1837): 445–9, repr. in Philip Collins (ed.), Dickens: The Critical Heritage (New York:
Barnes & Noble, 1971), pp. 63–8, p. 64.
113 Jacques Rancière has used the similar argument that ‘[t]he essence of politics consists in inter-
rupting the distribution of the sensible by supplementing it with those who have no part in the per-
ceptual coordinates of the community, therefore modifying the aesthetic-political field of possibility’:
Gabriel Rockhill, ‘Editor’s Introduction: Jacques Rancière’s Politics of Perception’, in Rancière, The
Politics of Aesthetics, pp. viii–xi, p. xiv.
114 From the start, Dickens had exploited serial form to create a close relationship with his readers.
William Thackeray noticed the ‘communion between the writer and the public . . . something contin-
ual, confidential, something like personal affection’ that Dickens’s works created over time.
206 Serial Forms
brilliance of Dickens’s representation is not its documentary accuracy.115 More

importantly, he understands the relationship of yesterday to today, and how urban
time can seem to create ‘a mistake in the almanacks’ (207), which disrupts but
never entirely effaces earlier scales of time, so that the time lag of progress lends
narrative complexity to the sketches. A time lag is not merely a delay. Nor is it
merely an interruption or a pause in delivery. Time lag is both an iterative and a
contingent process rather than an achieved fact. In failing to ‘copy’ instantan-
eously, a message outlives the context of its composition and is stretched and
slowed. Its transit, through space and time, creates a hiatus in which it can be
transformed, appropriated, and even reversed. ‘It is the function of the lag’,
explains Bhabha, ‘to slow down the linear, progressive time of modernity, to
reveal its “gesture” . . . “the pauses and stresses of the whole performance”’.116 Time
lag carries a live and transacting past into the present. Ultimately the lag has the
power to interrupt and undermine liberal fantasies of simultaneity, but such dis-
ruptive gaps can also open up new spaces for creativity and connection.
Dickens seems to know this. He neither dismisses the customs of the people as
outdated vulgarities, nor fetishizes them as antiquarian, but rather sees them as
political and artistic practices in historical transition,‘[a]midst all this change,
and restlessness, and innovation’ (89). He sees that a process of becoming must
necessarily create a bridge between yesterday and today and that this bridging
must take place as a creative performance. Dickens recuperates popular culture
and transforms it into the equipment of a history, because it is only by becoming
historical that his marginalized characters can participate in a shared political
present.117 Nevertheless, there is a degree of ambivalence in the sketches, which
perhaps springs from Dickens’s own unstable social position at the time that he
wrote them, when he was making a precarious living as a parliamentary reporter,
himself a member of the clerk class that Boz follows down the Strand ‘a Sunday or
two ago’ (255) in ‘Thoughts about People’. The title of this sketch is not ‘Thoughts
M. A. T. [William Makepeace Thackeray], ‘A Box of Novels’, Fraser’s Magazine 29:152 (February 1844):
153–69, p. 167.
115 J. Hillis Miller long ago warned against reading Sketches as documentary reportage but advo-
cated instead a post-structuralist reading which I think does not adequately capture the political effect
of the text: J. Hillis Miller and David Borowitz, Charles Dickens and George Cruikshank (Los Angeles:
William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, 1971). Dickens himself rejects an
ethnographic or statistical viewpoint in Sketches. In ‘A Visit to Newgate’ for example, he eschews
measurement: ‘we do not intend to fatigue the reader with any statistical accounts of the prison; they
will be found at length in numerous reports of numerous committees, and a variety of authorities of
equal weight. We took no notes, made no memoranda, measured none of the yards, ascertained the
exact number of inches in no particular room: are unable even to report of how many apartments the
gaol is composed.’ (235).
116 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 364.
117 This stands in contrast to Dickens’s later representation of the circus in Hard Times (1854).
Times had changed by the 1850s, and popular culture no longer offered the transformative potential it
had in the 1830s, although Dickens remained nostalgic for such power.
about the People’, and Dickens stays close to his subjects and does not affect
distance from them: he walks behind them in the street, or he is squashed uncom-
fortably close to them on an omnibus. But his tone is often odd, and the comedy
uneasy, sometimes suddenly retracted or snatched away from the reader, as at the
end of ‘Thoughts about People’ when Dickens abruptly warns that ‘[w]e may
smile at such people as these, but they can never excite our anger’ (255). He strug-
gles to create both affection and respect for the marginalized of London, because
he sees that citizenship is as much a social dispensation as a political one, but he is
wrongfooted sometimes by his own uncertain social position.
Boz’s London clerks and workers are straining towards social literacy and
inclusion in a world newly mediated by print. Sketches is fascinated by the paper
ephemera of which it formed, on its first outing anyway, a part. The Morning
Chronicle, in which some of these sketches first appeared, is one of the news-
papers hawked on the London streets in ‘Early Coaches’: ‘you are assailed on all
sides with shouts of “Times, gen’lm’n, Times,” “Here’s Chron–Chron,” “Herald,
ma’am,” “Highly interesting murder, gen’lm’n,” “Curious case o’ promise, ladies”’
(165).118 Sketches finds print strewn around everywhere it goes, and this is one of
Dickens’s scalar effects, albeit a much gentler one than the febrile exaggerations of
Pugin and Carlyle. But the sheer dispersal of print in Boz’s London is an indica-
tion of the extent of the spread of civic participation, and the ‘distribution of the
sensible’. From the law student’s sitting room in Gray’s-inn-square, with its ‘strange
chaos of dress-gloves, boxing-gloves, caricatures, albums, invitation-cards, foils,
cricket-bats, cardboard drawings, paste, gum, and fifty other miscellaneous
articles’ (440) to one of the women’s wards in Newgate Jail, where ‘[o]ver the fire-
place, was a large sheet of pasteboard, on which were displayed a variety of texts
from Scripture’ (239), paper is discovered everywhere in this text. The presence of
books is always carefully logged, although they are rarely read: they ornament a
pretentious academy for young ladies, in a ‘front parlour . . . filled with books
which no one ever read’ (375) or Boz sees ‘about twenty books—all odd volumes’
stacked on a board in a second-hand shop (211).119 Illustrated material is often
connected to shows and performance, so the ‘errand-boys and chandler’s-
shop-keepers’ sons’ stand ‘for hours’ before a shop-window ‘contemplating a great
staring portrait of Mr. Somebody or other, of the Royal Coburg Theatre’ (212),
and a songbook is decorated with ‘a lithographed semblance’ of a singer ‘with his
mouth wide open as if in the act of singing’ (156).120 It is striking that print does
not necessarily signify reading in Sketches. It carries more complicated meanings.
118 ‘Early Coaches’ was first published in the Evening Chronicle on 19 February 1835.
119 See Leah Price, How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
120 According to Brian Maidment, songbooks remain ‘a totally under-utilised research resource
ranging from the self-consciously genteel three volume Cruikshank illustrated Universal Songster to
miniature Pocket Songsters and touching all points in between’: Maidment, ‘Scraps and Sketches’, p. 4.
208 Serial Forms
Like the older forms of popular print discussed in Chapter 1, this version of print
also refuses straightforward informational status and two-dimensionality.121
Print in Sketches seems entwined with visuality, performance, and presence,
connecting communities horizontally while also mediating their entry into a
wider, historical world. Advertising material of all kinds is recruited into the
noisy everydayness of print in Sketches, from printed political ‘squibs’ skewered
up ‘on conspicuous joints’ of meat on a butcher’s shop-front (38), to the ‘shabby-
genteel’ copy-writer who perhaps writes verses for Warren’s Blacking (95), to the
man who looks like ‘a walking advertisement of Rowlands’ Macassar Oil’ (404), to
the real walking advertisements, such as the ‘unstamped advertisement walking
leisurely down Holborn-hill’ (298) handing out ‘very small card[s]’ (299).122 But
Dickens does not share the moral panic of Carlyle and Pugin. Advertising, with
its offer of novel commodities, does not make much of a dent on the hand-me-
down material world of Sketches, with its second-hand clothes shops, its ‘reviver’
dye for old suits, and its cracked ‘chimney-ornaments’ (306, 211). The people
Dickens writes about appropriate advertising material and incorporate it into
their own performances. The new does not win out over the old, and identities are
not predicated on consumption, but on circulation and use.123
Sketches takes its reader on a tour of the shows of London, from ‘the sawdust of
the circus’ at Astley’s to a ‘half-price visit to the Victoria gallery’ (76), to a ‘concert
in the Rotunda’ (269), to ‘a half-price visit to Drury Lane or Covent Garden, to
see two acts of a five-act play’ (285), to see the ‘temples and saloons and cosmora-
mas and fountains’ (156) and the ‘white bears’ (354) at Vauxhall Gardens, and to
the ‘Somerset-house exhibition’ (425) and ‘the Pall-mall shooting-gallery’ (468).
A barrel-organ is heard, ‘in full force’, on Monmouth-street (104). At Greenwich
Fair, there is an ‘immense booth, with the large stage in front, so brightly illumin-
ated with variegated lamps, and pots of burning fat’ (140–1). This is ‘Richardson’s’,
‘where you have a melodrama (with three murders and a ghost), a pantomime, a
comic song, an overture, and some incidental music, all done in five-and-twenty
minutes’ (141). And at the fair can be seen for a penny ‘a dwarf, a giantess, a living
skeleton, [and] a wild Indian’ (143). Dickens’s insistent staging and restaging of
shows in Sketches brings performance into close relationship with everyday life,
121 Jacques Rancière has noticed how often ‘the surface of signs/forms entered into conflict or
joined forces with the theatrical paradigm of presence’: Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, p. 12.
122 The reference to Warren’s Blacking is one of Dickens’s private jokes about his own traumatic
experience working in a blacking factory. For an account of these references throughout his work, see
Toru Sasaki, ‘Dickens and the Blacking Factory Revisited’, Essays in Criticism 65:4 (2015): 401–20.
Henry Mayhew notes that the London newspaper offices have their own ‘boarders’ (men going about
with boards on their backs) and the standing patterers ‘endeavour to attract attention to their papers,
or more commonly pamphlets, either by means of a board with coloured pictures upon it, illustrative
of the contents of what they sell’: Mayhew, London Labour, vol. 1, p. 232.
123 See David Trotter, Circulation: Defoe, Dickens and the Economies of the Novel (Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1988) and David Trotter, ‘Household Clearances in Victorian Fiction’, 19: Interdisciplinary
Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 6 (2008), doi: 10.16995/ntn.472.
and confers visibility on the poor and middling Londoners who participate in
these events [see Fig. 5.4].124 Often there is little distinction in Sketches between
audience and performer. On a river cruise, a man asks a fellow passenger who has
a harp ‘to play “Dumbledumbdeary,” for “Alick” to dance to’ (127), or Boz settles
down at Astley’s not to watch the performance but rather ‘to watch a regular
Astley’s party in the Easter or Midsummer holidays’ (129), a family with an eldest
Fig. 5.4. George Cruikshank, ‘Greenwich Fair’ from Charles Dickens, Sketches by Boz
(London: Macrone, 1837) 2 vols, vol. 1 [reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics
of Cambridge University Library Lib.7.83.4]
124 Jacques Rancière argues that ‘[t]he aesthetic regime of the arts does not contrast the old with
the new. It contrasts, more profoundly, two regimes of historicity. It is within the mimetic regime that
the old stands in contrast with the new. In the aesthetic regime of art, the future of art, its separation
from the present of non-art, incessantly restages the past.’ Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, p. 20.
210 Serial Forms
son, ‘a boy of fourteen years old, who was evidently trying to look as if he did not
belong to the family’ (130). People in Sketches are often described in theatrical or
performative terms: one speaks ‘tremulously, in a voice like a Punch with a cold’
(332); a dandified draper looks ‘like the lover in a farce’ (82); a man on horseback
looks ‘like an Astley’s supernumerary’ (418); Gobler bursts ‘out of the back
drawing-room, like the dragon at Astley’s’ (359); a spoiled child looks ‘like a
robber in a melodrama, seen through a diminishing glass’ (377); ‘fat mam-
mas . . . looked like the stout people who come on in pantomimes for the sole
purpose of being knocked down’ (381); and a pompous but miserable character
looks like ‘a Hamlet sliding upon a bit of orange-peel’ (414).125 The comedy of
these similes serves a serious political purpose. Punch and Judy, farce and
melodrama, Shakespeare, pantomime, and Astley’s are constantly referenced in
Sketches as belonging to the aesthetic regime that lies just beyond the daily world
of Londoners. Dickens sees a politics in the feedback loop between theatrical
and the everyday, which depend upon one another to create the possibility of
role-changes.126
The performances are changing because the stage is getting larger. The scale of
London is one of the hidden subjects of Sketches, which charts the rapid demoli-
tion and redevelopment of the city, the clearing of ‘dusty old shops’ for ‘spacious
premises’ (214) in an ‘epidemic’ of ‘plate-glass, and a passion for gas-lights and
gilding’ (214).127 Enlargement and growth is signalled by the ‘gigantic black and
white announcements’ (216) in the gin palaces, and the ‘newly-opened oyster-
shop[s], on a magnificent scale’ (286) that are replacing the ‘old public-houses’
and spawning themselves across London (216). These new buildings have ‘roofs
supported by massive pillars; doors knocked into windows, a dozen squares of
glass into one; one shopman into a dozen’ (215–16). One result of the upscaling of
London is the miniaturization of Londoners, and the people in Sketches are often
‘little’, such as Mr Samuel Wilkins, ‘a journeyman carpenter of small dimensions’
(266); or Mrs Tibbs who was a ‘tidy, fidgety, thrifty little personage’; or ‘the small
gentleman’ who will sing (156); the ‘little old landlord’ in a pub not far from the
City-road (272); or ‘Mr. Joseph Tuggs—a little dark-faced man’ (321). The small
‘[t]radesmen and clerks’ (115) lower down the social scale imitate those higher
up, getting up, for example, ‘small assemblies in humble imitation of Almack’s’
(115), or putting on their own productions of Shakespeare’s Macbeth (150) in the
125 In the 1836 Sketches by Boz volume, ‘Horatio looked as handsomely miserable as a Hamlet slid-
ing upon a bit of orange-peel’ but this was taken out from later editions by Dickens.
126 Alan Read says ‘[t]heatre is not this daily domain but an “extra-daily” dimension, beyond the
everyday, but ironically dependent upon the everyday realm’: Alan Read, Theatre and Everyday Life:
An Ethics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993), p. ix.
127 For more on Dickens’s interest in urban redevelopment, see Joanna Hofer-Robinson, Dickens
and Demolition: Literary Afterlives and Mid-Nineteenth-Century Urban Development (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2018).
‘little space’ (152) of a private theatre.128 This play with scale is comic, of course,
but if Boz’s clerks and tradespeople can play their parts on stage, they can play
them in daily life too. And if they can create unrepeatable live performances
which resist mechanical or industrial reproduction, they may be able to impro-
vise a new version of the social in which they will have a significant part to play.
In Sketches by Boz, Dickens gives forensic attention to the ways in which poorer
Londoners participated in print and show culture in their ‘Every-day’ lives. The
rhetoric of the discovery of the ‘territory’ (85) of old Scotland-yard and its mock-
ethnographic description suggests its temporal remoteness despite its inner-city
London location. When the ‘original settlers’ (85) of old Scotland-yard begin to
read the papers, they enter the wider civic conversation, and, while Dickens
exploits the comedy of ‘Improvement’ which ‘began to march with rapid strides’
(88), his sketch itself is also engaged in delivering the pie-maker of Scotland-yard
into a wider world. On 28 June 1838, Dickens visited the Coronation Fair and
found it ‘particularly worthy of notice’ as proof that ‘the many are at least as cap-
able of decent enjoyment as the few’.129 His famous defence of the ‘amusements of
the people’ is often explained as springing from nostalgia for his own childhood,
his anti-Sabbatarianism, or his cultural declinism. Instead, Dickens’s early work
in London, the city with the ‘largest concentration of newly urbanized people in
the world’ at that time, brings into visibility new political possibilities as they
are emerging from old aesthetic forms.130 Dickens understands that the shows,
visual and print culture of the streets that he so carefully records are evidence of
democratic possibilities. His mixing of old and new iconographies in Sketches—
Mr Punch and advertisements for Rowlands’ Macassar Oil, or Columbine and the
bank clerk—demonstrate how ‘several regimes coexist and intermingle’ in any
given moment.131 Through their repeated serializations, the Sketches themselves
would build into a powerful engine for the redistribution of the sensible, and for
the extension of citizenship in the 1830s and 1840s.
Conclusion
As the serial form of a newly historicist culture became more deeply socially
embedded in the 1830s and 1840s, it was also changing scales and altering the
perspective and relative distance of events. Carlyle, Pugin, and Dickens reacted to
128 On smallness in Dickens, see John Carey’s chapter ‘Dickens and Order’, in The Violent Effigy: A
Study of Dickens’s Imagination (London: Faber & Faber, 1973), pp. 30–53. Carey draws attention to
‘the menacing shadows which are cast even by neatness, order and security’: p. 53. ‘The Parlour
Orator’, Sketches, p. 272.
129 [Charles Dickens], ‘The Queen’s Coronation’, Examiner (1 July 1838), p. 403. For more on
Dickens and shows, see Schlicke, Dickens and Popular Entertainment.
130 Dennis Walder, ‘Introduction’, in Sketches by Boz, pp. ix–xxxiv, pp. xvii–xviii.
131 Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, p. 47.
212 Serial Forms
these scalar challenges because they all—in their different ways—understood that
political division and political unity are ultimately connected to the concept of
scale. In 1889, Henri Bergson suggested that the process of division is central to
the formation of perception as we have to divide ‘concrete extensity’ in order to
make sense of the world.132 In other words, we are constantly rescaling the world
even at the level of perception in order to understand it, and we are only able to
understand it through ratios (or ‘rationally’). If scale pertains, as Julie Orlemanski
suggests, ‘to aisthesis, [or] sense perception’, then ‘[i]t is irreducibly a concept of
relation and refers us to our specific capacities for attention, cognition, perception,
and feeling’.133 The derangement of cognition and feeling produced by urbaniza-
tion and rapid population growth in this period is swiftly registered in literary
and artistic projects. The shifting social scale has delivered, if not quite a ‘mass’
public, at least an unprecedentedly numerous and concentrated one. What was
‘human scale’ in this new iteration? Were humans ‘non-scalable’, and if so, what
might be the longer term consequences for labour and survival if the human body
had begun to lose its ‘primacy . . . as the basis of all systems of measurement’?134
For Pugin and Carlyle, representations of democracy seemed to be becoming
inextricably and disastrously entangled with expanding commercial markets, and
free trade and liberal freedoms appeared dangerously interlinked and under-
regulated. Dickens took a different view, quite literally. His scale is different.
Raymond Williams’s comment that Dickens had ‘a way of seeing men and women
that belongs to the street’ works particularly well for Sketches by Boz, where
Dickens’s view does remain at street level, not abstracted or prophetic like the
perspectives of Carlyle and Pugin.135 Dickens sees the ways in which ‘little people’
could disaggregate themselves from the mass and improvise their own lives
through resourceful performance, albeit on a small scale. But even he seems to
acknowledge that this is bricolage, and many of his characters in Sketches by Boz
appear oddly vestigial, as if already half-remaindered by history: the future ruins
that the ever-expanding ‘scalable city’ will inevitably leave in its wake.
132 Henri Bergson, ‘Chapter 2: The Multiplicity of Conscious States; The Idea of Duration’, in Time
and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson (London: George
Allen & Unwin, 1910), pp. 75–139; originally published in 1889.
133 Julie Orlemanski, ‘Scales of Reading’, Exemplaria: Medieval, Early Modern, Theory 26:2–3
(Summer/Fall 2014): 215–33, p. 218.
134 Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, Colossal: Engineering the Suez Canal, Statue of Liberty, Eiffel Tower,
and Panama Canal: Transcontinental Ambition in France and the United States During the Long
Nineteenth Century (Pittsburgh, PA: Periscope Publishing, 2012), p. 27.
135 Williams, Country and the City, p. 155.
6
History in Miniature
‘Thus the minuscule, a narrow gate, opens up an entire world’1
In Chapter 3 of Dickens’s David Copperfield (1850), the child David is sent to

Yarmouth to stay in Mr Peggotty’s upturned-boathouse [Fig. 6.1], where he finds
‘a most beautiful little girl’ of about his own age, who is known to the family as
Little Em’ly. In the evenings during his stay, David and Little Em’ly sit side by side on
a locker ‘which was just large enough for us two, and just fitted into the chimney
corner’. Smiling down at the diminutive pair, the adults ‘had something of the sort
of pleasure in us, I suppose, that they may have had in a pretty toy, or a pocket
model of the Colosseum’.2
It is not entirely clear what Dickens has in mind here.3 Does he mean a pocket
model of the ancient ruin in Rome, the original of which he himself had seen in
1846? Or does he mean a pocket model or a toy version of the modern
Colosseum—the ‘huge neoclassical education complex’ which had opened in
Regent’s Park at the beginning of 1829, and about which he had written a series of
brief articles in the Morning Chronicle in 1835?4 The two buildings were often
confused. Shortly after the 1829 opening of the Regent’s Park Colosseum, noting
that the portico of this ‘huge neoclassical entertainment complex’ had been
‘copied from the portico of the Pantheon at Rome’, the twopenny Mirror had tried
to explain of the rotunda that ‘its popular name, was the Coliseum, evidently a
misnomer, from its distant resemblance to that gigantic work of antiquity [see
Fig. 6.2].The present and more appropriate name is the COLOSSEUM, in allusion
to its colossal dimensions; for it would not show much discernment to erect a
1 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1994),
p. 166; originally published as La Poétique de l’espace (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1958).
2 Dickens, David Copperfield, pp. 30, 36.
3 Nina Burgis makes no comment in the Clarendon Edition. Robert M. Polhemus assumes Dickens
means the Roman ruin: Robert M. Polhemus, ‘John Millais’s Children. Faith and Erotics: The
Woodman’s Daughter (1851)’ in Carol T. Christ and John O. Jordan (eds), Victorian Literature and the
Victorian Visual Imagination (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995): 289–312, p. 297.
Jane Vogel in Allegory in Dickens (Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1977) asks ‘Why, of all odd
things, “a pocket model of the Colosseum,” except in the service of Christian allegory?’: p. 151.
4 The phrase is Ralph O’Connor’s in his The Earth on Show, p. 269. [Charles Dickens], ‘Grand
Colosseum Fete’, Morning Chronicle (10 July 1835). Articles by Dickens on the same subject also
appeared in the paper on 8 July 1835 and 13 October 1835.
© Clare Pettitt.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198830429.001.0001
214 Serial Forms
Fig. 6.1. Hablot Knight Browne [Phiz], ‘I am hospitably received by Mr. Peggotty’, in
Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1849–50) (London: Ward, Lock, Bowden & Co.,
1892) [reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University
Library, 1893.7.711]
Fig. 6.2. ‘The Colosseum, in the Regent’s Park’, Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and
Instruction (31 January 1829), front page [reproduced by kind permission of the
Syndics of Cambridge University Library, Library Storage Facility v.13 (1829)]
History in Miniature 215
building like the Pantheon and call it the Coliseum.’5 Both variants of the spelling
can be found describing both buildings throughout the first half of the nineteenth
century.6 For example, ‘The Colosseum of Rome’—spelt exactly that way—is one
of the four wood engravings that Samuel Palmer produced for Bradbury and
Evans in 1846 to illustrate Dickens’s Pictures in Italy. Furthermore, ‘the Colosseum
in Regent’s Park being made the shape and size of the Pantheon of its real name-
sake’, according to one journalist, ‘aggravated’ the confusion.7 Jokes circulated,
such as the one about ‘the not too cultured cornet in the Blues, who from Rome
wrote to his friend, I see they’ve got a Coliseum here, too; but it is not in such
good repair as that one near our Albany Street Barracks’.8
Indeed, the one colosseum led inevitably to the other as the Regent’s Park
venue exhibited a gigantic panorama of Rome in 1834. From 1845, the ‘Exterior
Promenade’ of the Colosseum incorporated specially built ‘marble columns and
mouldering frescoes of ancient Greece and Rome’.9 William Bradwell had erected
these ‘ruins’, which were intended to remind visitors of the Temple of Vesta, the
Temple of Theseus, and the Arch of Titus in Rome.10 Rome had become, and
remained, a popular subject for panoramic canvases in London after Napoleon’s
defeat and the city’s reopening to foreign tourists. In 1816 the Gentleman’s
Magazine carried the news that ‘a model of the Amphitheatre called the Coliseum,
erected by the emperor Flavius Vespasian, is about to be introduced to the notice
of the publick in the metropolis’.11 At his panorama in Leicester Square, Burford
exhibited at least two panoramas of Rome—one of modern Rome from 1817, and
the other a 360-degree view of the Interior of the Roman Colosseum in 1839,
with paintings developed from sketches made in Rome in 1837. Meanwhile, an
advertisement of 1834 for the Cosmorama on Regent Street explained that it ‘is
intended to present correct delineations of the celebrated remains of antiquity,
5 [Anon.], ‘The Colosseum, in the Regent’s Park’, Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction
13:354 (31 January 1829): 65–6, both quotations, p. 66.
6 [Anon.], A Picturesque Guide to the Regent’s Park; With Accurate Descriptions of the Colosseum,
the Diorama, and the Zoological Gardens (London: John Limbird, 1829), p. 26. ‘Colosseum’ is of
course the Latin spelling; ‘Coliseum’ is the anglicized version.
7 [Anon.], ‘A Journey from Westminster Abbey to St. Peter’s’, Bentley’s Miscellany 34 (1853): 388–94,
p. 388.
8 Edmund Yates, His Recollections and Experiences (London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1885), p. 97.
9 [Anon.], Guide Book to the Regent’s Park Colosseum (London: 1845), p. 14.
10 Ralph Hyde, Panoramania!, pp. 94–5. See also Peter Otto, ‘Artificial Environments, Virtual
Realities, and the Cultivation of Propensity in the London Colosseum’, in Veronica Alfano and
Andrew Stauffer (eds), Virtual Victorians: Networks, Connections, Technologies (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2015), pp. 167–88.
11 [Anon.], ‘Letter’, Gentleman’s Magazine (24 August 1816), p. 136. We are told that ‘[t]he propor-
tion which the model bears to the original is the sixtieth part’: p. 136. On 12 February 1818, shortly
before leaving for Italy for the first time, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, Thomas Love Peacock,
and Claire Clairmont each paid a shilling to visit Henry Aston Barker and Robert Burford’s Panorama
on the Strand which had been showing the ‘View of Rome, Taken from the Tower of the Capitol’ since
August 1817 with ‘reflections on the depredations caused by the French occupying army during the
Napoleonic Wars’: Clara Mary Jane Clairmont, The Journals of Claire Clairmont, ed. Marion Kingston
Stocking (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), p. 83.
216 Serial Forms
and of the most remarkable cities and edifices in every part of the globe. The sub-
jects are changed every two or three months.’12 It seems that the Cosmorama was
undertaking no less a project than the serialization of the world.
But whether the ‘pocket model of the colosseum’ that Dickens imagines delight-
ing the Peggotty family is a miniature of the Flavian amphitheatre at Rome [see
Fig. 6.3], or of the rotunda in Regent’s Park, London, it reminds us of the intriguing
and difficult questions about the experience of distance in early nineteenth-
century culture. Thinking about all these pop-up colosseums, the London
Colosseum and its spectacular topographical panoramas and, by 1845, its ‘sham
ruins and a grotto’, might open an investigation into how places and spaces started
to move around in the nineteenth century and how they shrunk and expanded.13
Novel time–space frames were beginning to be inserted into the common experi-
ence of working-class people in the 1820s and 1830s and Dickens seems to imply
here that Mr Peggotty and Ham would have recognized the Roman Colosseum
even though they had certainly never travelled to Rome.14 Through media such as
models, panoramas, inexpensive toys, dioramas, stage sets and prints, and engrav-
ings and woodcuts in the cheap press, Georgian and early Victorian people were
able to consume the past as never before. Like the toy colosseum, the past was a
novelty, and a novelty that even the likes of the Peggotty family might now own
and enjoy. They could—quite literally—get their hands on things that had long
been out of their reach and outside their ken. In The Savage Mind (La pensée sau-
vage, 1962), Claude Lévi-Strauss suggested that all works of art are really mini-
aturizations: ‘this quantitative transposition extends and diversifies our power
over a homologue of the thing, and by means of it the latter can be grasped,
assessed and apprehended at a glance’.15 For Lévi-Strauss the pleasure of use of the
miniature is primarily visual, but art historian Darcy Grimaldo Grimsby contests
that the miniature is also about literally grasping, and touching ‘something
pressed against warm skin’.16 She claims that ‘an impulse to make colossal things
and an impulse to devise means to shrink the colossus into something hand-held
and portable’ always exist together.17 She gives the example of a ‘[m]iniature Eiffel
Tower to wear at one’s wrist, with a dance-card’, which became a fashionable
accessory in 1889, the year that the colossal tower itself opened in Paris.18
Perhaps because classical culture was so far from the reach of the uneducated
man and woman, the emergent cheap press focused its attention on it, and par-
ticularly on ancient Rome as symbolic of the epitome of the past. Illustrations of
12 Samuel Leigh, New Picture of London (London: Leigh and Son, 1834), p. 300. This was a
Descriptive Catalogue, and cost 6d.
13 Sala, Life and Adventures, vol. 1, p. 79.
14 On places moving around see Mimi Sheller and John Urry, The New Mobilities Paradigm,
Environment and planning A 38 (2006): 207–26, p. 214.
15 Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, p. 23. 16 Grigsby, Colossal, p. 159.
17 Grigsby, Colossal, p. 160. 18 Grigsby, Colossal, picture caption, p. 157.
Fig. 6.3. ‘The Coliseum at Rome’, Mirror of Literature, Amusement and Instruction
(13 September 1823) [reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge
University Library, Library Storage Facility v.2 (1823)]
218 Serial Forms
classical subjects and sites offered in the cheap un-radical periodicals of the early
nineteenth century may have been used and pored over in the tradition of the
almanac and chapbook, repeatedly brooded over, or pinned up on the walls by
people who had little else to look at in this period of exorbitantly priced books,
but they might also have created a new space for an apprehension of a contem-
poraneous present.19 The appearance of a new generation of reproductive tech-
nologies for visual images meant that ‘people came quite literally to see the world
differently’, and these prints, illustrations, toys, and models were fundamental in
making both ‘history’ and ‘the social’ more visible to people who had previously
had little sense of belonging to large social networks, or of inserting themselves
into a long historical past.20 The material remains of the past—the Coliseum, the
Roman Forum, the detritus of daily life in Pompeii—were represented as ‘events’
in a series of events which was being renegotiated and (paradoxically) national-
ized as ‘world history’. Symbols of a national past in the shape of the Tower of
London, the Monument, or Westminster Abbey, for example, were likewise medi-
ated into this virtual historical world alongside the classical past.21 ‘Come, gentle-
folks all’, the raree-showman, poor Dick, cries:
for a penny
All the world you may see, and its wonders are many
Here’s St. Paul’s and the Tower, and Westminster Abbey,
And the Monument too, rather crazy and shabby.
Here’s puppets and Wax Work, and many sights more,
That you’ll ne’er see again, and have ne’er seen before.22
The miniature flat two-dimensional pictures in the peep show are presented as
vast three-dimensional material objects: poor Dick cries ‘Here’s St Paul’s’, not
‘Here’s a very small picture of St Paul’s’. He offers St Paul’s as the experience of
19 By 1859, George Godwin noticed that in London objects and prints which used to decorate
houses of ‘greater pretence’ had begun to appear in the houses of the working poor. He adds, ‘Let us in
a parenthesis, by way of relief from the unpleasantness of the details we are forced to go into, here refer
to the love of ‘art’ which is often exhibited in the most miserable quarters, in the shape of plaster casts
and little prints,—not of a very refined character, it is true, but still agreeable and cheering as evidence
of a striving upwards.’ This leads him to philosophize that ‘[a]rt offers itself as a social bridge of no
ordinary size and strength’: George Godwin, Town Swamps and Social Bridges (London: Cox &
Wyman, 1859), p. 18.
20 Lynn Hunt, ‘Experience of Revolution’, French Historical Studies 32:4 (2009): 671–8, p. 678. Hunt
calls for historians to give more attention to visual materials as both responding to and creating new
social formations during the revolutionary period in France.
21 Richard Altick observes that ‘[n]o matter how vivid a printed account may have been, or detailed
a picture, the realia of a subject . . . were unsurpassed for immediacy’, so that material culture ‘ran
parallel to and sometimes mingled with that of the printed word . . . [and] ministered to the same
widespread impulses and interests to which print also catered’: Altick, Shows of London, pp. 23, 1.
22 ‘Olio, or Scrap Book’, The Madder Album, Cambridge University Library. The poem is spoken by
‘SOLDIER DICK, who once bled in his country’s cause’ and has presumably returned from the
Napoleonic Wars.
seeing, an event rather than a dead and static object. Objects become events
through serial iterations and repetitions, so that the popular understanding of
historicism is fundamentally tied to the understanding of eventfulness and of
seriality. As cultural historian Roger Chartier suggests, ‘above all, the popular
qualifies a kind of relation, a way of using cultural products such as legitimate
ideas and attitudes . . . [we need to look at] the specific ways in which such cultural
sets are appropriated’.23 Understanding nineteenth-century historicism as a series
of material practices, and not as a purely ‘intellectual history’, means that we can
investigate what equipment was newly put within people’s grasp, sometimes quite
literally, and how they chose to use it.
Dickens introduces the ‘Colosseum’ in David Copperfield as like a ‘pretty toy’
just as Bulwer in his Last Days suggests that Pompeii is ‘a toy, a plaything.’ Bulwer’s
novel-show is self-consciously engaged in a miniaturization of the past and offers
us Pompeii deliberately as ‘the miniature of the civilization of that age. Within the
narrow compass of its walls was contained, as it were, a specimen of every gift
which luxury offered to power. In its minute but glittering shops, its tiny palaces,
its baths, its forum, its theatre, its circus . . . you beheld a model of the whole
empire.’(9) A ‘miniature’, ‘minute’, ‘tiny’, ‘a model’: is Bulwer here offering his
readers the ‘panoptic vantage’ that Jon Klancher has suggested they were denied
by the cluttered miscellaneous twopenny magazines such as the Mirror?24
Seriality and Miscellanity: The Mirror

and the Twopenny Magazines
Louis James described the Mirror as ‘a miniature lower-class equivalent of peri-

odicals like Blackwood’s, from which it gleaned most of its matter’.25 But as I have
already argued, the new cheap press in the 1820s did not function as a miniatur-
ization of elite forms for the working class, but was rather participating in the
forging of an altogether new public relationship with history and with time. For
Jon Klancher, the Mirror’s creation of a mass audience ‘displaces all discourses of
political argument, philosophical speculation, and cultural discrimination one
finds in Blackwood’s Magazine or Edinburgh Review. Excluded from the dialogues
of cultural power, the mass reader discovers an allegorical world overcrowded with
signs.’26 But I argue that it was precisely the Mirror’s combination of promiscuous
miscellanity with seriality that allowed it to mediate cultural power in new ways
23 Roger Chartier, ‘Culture as Appropriation: Popular Cultural Uses in Early Modern France’, in
Steven L. Kaplan (ed.), Understanding Popular Culture: Europe from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth
Century (Berlin: Mouton Publishers, 1984), pp. 229–53, p. 233.
24 Jon P. Klancher, Making of English Reading Audiences, p. 79.
25 James, Fiction for the Working Man, p. 12.
26 Klancher, Making of English Reading Audiences, p. 81.
220 Serial Forms
to new constituencies. The Mirror was a kind of print version of the Regent’s Park
Colosseum, with its ‘miscellaneous attractions’.27 I agree with Brian Maidment
that the Mirror is ‘a key periodical for understanding the transitions from polite
to mass culture during these decades’, but I think it does so in hitherto unexam-
ined ways.28 For all that its miscellanity and its illustrations were attractive to
readers with little time to spare, or whose literacy was patchy, so that they could
browse, and nibble on small pieces of information, its seriality was making differ-
ent claims on them, and making new kinds of readers out of them. The Mirror’s
repeated appearance week after week, its time-conscious reporting, and its
increasingly well-established identity in a crowded market, made it closer to a
newspaper than a miscellany. The entrepreneurial publisher of the Mirror, John
Limbird, knew exactly what he was about. Limbird, who probably started his
career as a shop boy at the radical print shop of Thomas Dolby, was thoroughly
immersed in the dense and interlinked network of printshops centred on the
Strand in London, from the polite Literary Gazette to the pornographers and
radicals of Holywell Street [see Fig. 6.4]. Limbird was therefore able to borrow
techniques and marketing tactics from the radical press while imitating the for-
mat of the more polite journals.29 He had witnessed the roaring success of
Cobbett’s Political Register and had learnt by it. The result was the new hybrid
form of the serialized miscellany, and the Mirror represented an important devel-
opment in popular serial print.
When the Mirror was first launched, many retailers refused to sell it, dismiss-
ing it as ‘trash’. Limbird responded with an assertive advertising campaign, and
bills proclaiming ‘Read the Mirror . . . Price 2D’ were posted on walls around
London and in provincial towns [see Fig. 6.5].30 Klancher reads the mix of
information and images in the Mirror, and in the later Penny Magazine and
Saturday Magazine (both launched in 1832), as contentless, and meaningless to a
27 Sala, Life and Adventures, vol. 1, p. 80. 28 Maidment, Into the 1830s, p. 5.
29 I am relying here on an excellent article by Jonathan Topham which excavates the cultural geog-
raphy of print around the Strand: ‘[s]uch a localized archaeology uncovers Limbird’s unsuspected
connections with one of the principal radical pressmen of the postwar period [Thomas Dolby] and
reveals how his new journal drew on both the personnel and the practices of radical publishing’:
Topham, ‘John Limbird, Thomas Byerley’, p. 77. Topham also describes how Limbird took advantage
of the relatively new technology of stereotyping, taking plaster moulds of the set type to produce per-
manent plates. Limbird was successfully sued by John Murray for his pirated edition of the Beauties of
Lord Byron (1827) and was defended by Lord Brougham who pointed out that because all the ‘“offen-
sive matter in the original poems” had been omitted in Limbird’s compilation, the work had not sold
well, and he had lost £75 by it’: p. 95.
30 Topham suggests that Limbird probably employed placard-men to carry such bills through the
streets, too: Topham, ‘John Limbird, Thomas Byerley,’ p. 92. On the Mirror, see also [Anon.], ‘The
Pioneer of Cheap Literature’, Bookseller (30 November 1859): 1326–7; Brougham, Practical
Observations; Charles Brooks Dodson, ‘The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction’, in Alvin
Sullivan (ed.), British Literary Magazines: The Romantic Age, 1789–1836 (Westport, CT: Greenwood
Press, 1986), pp. 308–12; John Timbs, ‘My Autobiography: Incidental Notes and Personal
Recollections’, Leisure Hour (1871): 20–3, 85–8, 181–4, 212–15, 266–9, 293–5, 347–51, 394–8, 420–4,
469–72, 500–3, 596–600, 612–15, 644–8, 685–8, 692–6, 730–3, and 794–9.
Fig. 6.4. Caleb Robert Stanley, The Strand, Looking Eastwards from Exeter Change,
c.1824. The office of the Literary Gazette is visible in the left-hand foreground
[©Museum of London]
readership which could not really touch or possess the cultural knowledge of
which these magazines spoke. But he misses the way in which these publications
were building an alternative knowledge base and building it fast. By their serializa-
tion of historical and cultural information, they create a vehicle which moves the
reader speedily forwards in order to catch up with the culture of modern London.
It is the forward movement of the serial form, as much as the content of the
journals themselves, which creates this effect of being carried into an ongoing
and busy conversation. Brian Maidment has usefully connected the peculiar
juxtapositions of the miscellanies to those of the scrapbook and the comic print
in this early period, suggesting that ‘scraps represent a fantasised urban world in
222 Serial Forms
Fig. 6.5. John Orlando Parry, A London Street Scene (1835). Posters advertising the
‘Destruction of Pompeii Every Evening’ and the ‘Last Days of Pompeii at the Adelphi
Theatre’ jostle with advertisements for John Baldwin Buckstone’s The Christening, a
comic burletta based on Dickens’s story ‘The Bloomsbury Christening’ from the
Monthly Magazine (and subsequently republished in Sketches by Boz). A small bill is
also posted on the lower left of the back wall that reads ‘Read the Mirror! Price 2D’
[Pictures Now/Alamy Stock Photo]
which good humoured comic figures engage each other in a ‘utopian desire’ for
carnivalesque good fellowship’.31 For Maidment, the scrapbook is consolatory:
‘[s]craps brought back to readers an egalitarianism and involvement in the world
of signs and signification that had been largely lost in the world outside’, but I argue
that making scrapbooks, hand-colouring black and white illustrations, construct-
ing and colouring paper theatres, making and playing with puppets and dolls,
making paper sculptures and novelties, and cutting out and displaying images from
the penny papers, were all practices of knowledge which were not necessarily
compensatory so much as formative.32 Both adults and children enjoyed print in
these ways, and the action of cutting, colouring, and pasting was participatory
and tactile, helping to establish ownership of a newly multifarious and exciting
31 Maidment, ‘Scraps and Sketches’, n.p.

32 Maidment, ‘Scraps and Sketches’. See also my ‘Topos, Taxonomy and Travel’ and James A. Secord,
‘Scrapbook Science: Composite Caricatures in Late Georgian England’, in Anne Shteir and
Bernard V. Lightman (eds), Figuring It Out: Science, Gender and Visual Culture (Lebanon, NH:
University Press of New England, 2006), pp. 164–91.
culture. Again, we need to think of print as three-dimensional and pliant,

something to be touched, manipulated, and used to think with. Such creative
readerly involvement ‘allows us to think of audiences as agents of narrative
continuation’.33 People who had been starved of pictures encountered printed
images in this period with an intensity that is now entirely lost to us in our world
of visual saturation. Newly available pictorial material was particularly important
to forming new readerships and helping people to visualize themselves into a
developing civic culture. In an 1847 article complaining about the lack of access
the working people had to the British Museum, William Johnson Fox emphasized
the wide appeal of images: ‘[the ruling classes] never heard of the “picture fud-
dles” of the Whitechapel weavers; as they call a stroll along the Strand and Pall
Mall, to feast their eyes at the print-shop windows’.34 This hunger for images
meant that illustration was hugely important to the success of the new generation
of print serials from the 1820s onwards. Their pictures created quiet spaces and
pauses for contemplation and return in the midst of the rush of words, and they
could engineer affect and attention in a different temporal register from that of
the surrounding text.
Woodcuts and the ‘Active Power of Images’
An article in Dickens’s Household Words takes us back to an imagined childhood

visit to an old relative ‘who sighed when her pet child sat on a little stool beside
her, reading the Almanack’s moralities upon the wicked world, and who shared
all the child’s wonder at the hieroglyphic, and his struggle to discover the inter-
pretation of its mysteries’.35 The yearly almanacs often included a ‘hieroglyphic’
[see Fig. 6.6] The hieroglyphic was an engraving that symbolically predicted the
coming events of the year, creating a kind of spatialized tableau of what might
elsewhere be represented as a timeline of events. The image was offered by Francis
Moore in his Old Moore’s Almanack, ‘[f]or time and the curious to decipher’.36 It
invited the reader to pause, puzzle, return, and interpret as the year unfolded and
it provided a conversation piece, encouraging sociability and reflection among its
readers. The almanac hieroglyphic shared characteristics with the earlier form of
33 Frank Kelleter, ‘From Recursive Progression to Systemic Self-Observation: Elements of a Theory

of Seriality’, Velvet Light Trap 79 (Spring 2017): 99–105, p. 100 (italics original).
34 W. J. Fox,‘The British Museum Closed’, Howitt’s Weekly Journal of Literature and Popular Progress
(16 January 1847): 30–1, p. 30.
35 [Anon.], ‘Francis Moore’, Household Words, p. 197. The Straggling Astrologer [Fig. 6.6] is dis-
cussed by Joscelyn Godwin in The Theosophical Enlightenment (Albany, NY: State University of New
York Press, 1994), pp. 143ff.
36 Francis Moore, Physician, Vox Stellarum; Or, A Loyal Almanack for the Year of Human
Redemption (London: Luke Hansard & Sons, 1826), p. 43. The hieroglyphic disappeared in the middle
of the eighteenth century but returned at the beginning of the nineteenth.
224 Serial Forms
Fig. 6.6. Robert Cross Smith (aka ‘Raphael’), ‘Illustration Number IX: Astrological
Interpretation of the Signs’, in The Astrologer of the Nineteenth Century (London:
Knight & Lacey, 1825) (18), p. 139. Robert Cross Smith published the Straggling
Astrologer, a weekly, every Friday between 1824 and 1825 [reproduced by kind
permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library, RBR Y.17.21]
the emblem. Emblems drew on a stock of images, so that the secular and religious,
mythological, scientific, archaeological, and historical were ‘collapsed together in
a mutually illuminating flash of understanding’.37 In his 1605 Advancement of
Learning Francis Bacon had written that the ‘Embleme reduceth conceits intel-
lectuall to Images sensible, which strike the memory more’.38 While they were
most often encountered in printed books, emblems ‘have always been interme-
dial . . . [and they] were also part of festive pageants and celebrations, theatrical
37 John Manning, The Emblem (London: Reaktion Books, 2002), p. 26.

38 Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, ed. W. A. Wright (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957),
Book 2, Chapter 13, paragraph 3, p. 165.
performances, and architectural adornments’.39 Kristen Whissel has suggested

that we think of the emblem as a ‘dynamic assemblage’ which invites participation
and speculation from the viewer, so that its power is in the ‘the affect and allegor-
ical significance linked to the protagonists’ resistance against or acquiescence to
powerful historical forces; it ties the appearance of the multitude to occulted
pasts, the arrival of apocalypse, and the demand for collective action . . . [and] a
desire . . . to know the past and exercise control over the future’.40 The hieroglyphic
was an image of mediation between immense cosmic forces and individual lives,
between eternity and the predictable agricultural rhythms of the calendrical year.
The old woman and her favourite child talk and puzzle together over this page of
the almanac: as Raymond Williams has reminded us, a rapidly developing print
culture in the early nineteenth century was ‘significantly interactive with a pre-
dominantly oral culture’, and printed images mediated the oral, perhaps particu-
larly for the less literate groups of the elderly and the very young, in ways that
printed words could not.41 The astrological hieroglyphic of the almanac was the
precursor of the pictures in the early illustrated periodicals, and the impact of
those images on their first viewers must have been considerable. The Penny
Magazine was greeted as an extraordinary pictorial phenomenon for ‘its engrav-
ings, at once numerous and excellent: these were not only pleasant to the eye, but
were most useful auxiliaries to the complete illustration of the subjects to which
the letter-press related’.42
As we saw in Chapter 1, the new penny press mocked the ‘superstition’ of the
almanacs and repeatedly announced their extinction, but in truth, those very
twopenny and penny weeklies of the 1820s and 1830s owed as much to the format
of the almanacs as to the newspaper press, or to the Enlightenment miscellany.
And the weeklies may well have been used in similar ways by their working-class
readers.43 Like the almanacs, but unlike the sevenpenny newspapers, some of the
earliest cheap weekly periodicals also provided an illustration as a conversation
piece.44 The genteel and pricey Monthly Magazine started to use a regular leading
39 Whissel, Spectacular Digital Effects, p. 8. Whissel makes the argument that digitally produced
special effects in today’s films operate in a similar way to emblems.
40 Whissel, Spectacular Digital Effects, pp. 172–3.
41 Williams, ‘The Press and Popular Culture’, p. 45.
42 [James Grant], ‘Periodical Literature—The Weekly Journals’, in The Great Metropolis, vol. 2,
pp. 339–60, p. 351.
43 For an extended comparison of the Mirror to the Enlightenment miscellany, see
Jonathan R. Topham, ‘The Mirror of Literature, Amusement and Instruction and Cheap Miscellanies in
Early Nineteenth-Century Britain’, in G. N. Cantor, Gowan Dawson, Graeme Gooday, Richard
Noakes, Sally Shuttleworth, and Jonathan R. Topham, Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical:
Reading the Magazine of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 37–66.
44 For more on illustration, see Patricia Anderson, The Printed Image and the Transformation of
Popular Culture, 1790–1860 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); Brian Maidment, ‘The
Illuminated Magazine and the Triumph of Wood Engraving’, in Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor
(eds), The Lure of Illustration in the Nineteenth Century (London: Palgrave, 2009), pp. 17–39; Celina
Fox, ‘Political Caricature and the Freedom of the Press in Early Nineteenth-Century England in
226 Serial Forms
half-page engraving from 1821, and the cheap weekly Mirror imitated this from
its inception in November 1822, as did the Olio from 1828, boasting of cuts
‘wrought by the skilful pencil of an inimitable Artist, in natural designs and fila-
ments of wood’.45 John Timbs, who took over the editorship of the Mirror in 1827,
remembers that ‘[t]he engravings in the first volume were the Treadmill at
Brixton; the Mermaid, proved to be a fabrication; Mr. Beckford’s Castle in the Air,
Fonthill; Griffith’s Steam Carriage; Robert Owen’s Proposed Village, and other
nine-day wonders’.46 Some of the ‘wonder’ of the almanac hieroglyph has trans-
ferred over into the magazine illustrations. The Penny Magazine, too, used a large
woodcut on its front page, as one of its readers recalled: ‘[t]here would be Lichfield
Cathedral; the cave of Staffa; a picture of Hogarth’s; the Parthenon; the Diana
Belvedere; Sir Walter Scott; the Portland Vase . . . ; the Boy extracting a thorn; a
resting nymph . . . and in fact an indescribable variety of things’.47 Brian Maidment
has noticed of the cheap weeklies that that ‘the double column, centrally located
woodcut, and black-letter type format holds sway. Such a format may derive from
newspaper layout, but it is also the characteristic broadside page.’48 In their very
form, these publications seem to seesaw between the centuries-old typographic
traditions of illustrated street literature and the more up-to-date (and unillus-
trated) form of the newspaper. This hybridization of an early-modern cosmology
of recursive and exemplary histories and an emerging model of seriality produces
a historical culture that rests upon event and spectacle, rather than process. The
memory of ‘occasional’ broadsides lingers on behind the emerging model of the
serial daily newspaper. The twopenny papers represent a kind of hybrid form
between the two. The broadsides are absorbed into these serial, date-stamped,
weekly semi-newspapers. This has a significant and lasting effect on the way that
working-class people came to understand ‘history’ as constituted by event and spec-
tacle, rather than as a process. The print form of these popular early papers, then,
prepares the way for a sensational news press later in the century, which relies on
novelty and celebrity to stand in the place of historical or political process.
It would be very wrong, though, to think of these periodicals as ‘illustrated’ in
any recognizable, modern way—they carried, on the whole, only one large wood-
cut or engraving so that the image was not ‘illustrative’ of the text in a subservient
George Boyce, James Curran, and Pauline Wingate (eds), Newspaper History: From the Seventeenth
Century to the Present Day (London: Constable, 1978), pp. 226–46 and Celina Fox, ‘The Development
of Social Reportage in English Periodical Illustration During the 1840s and Early 1850s’, Past and
Present 74 (February 1977): 90–111.
45 Topham, ‘Mirror of Literature’, p. 53. The Mirror and the Monthly used the same engraver.
‘Preface’, The Olio, or Museum of Entertainment 10 (August 1832–February 1833), p. iii.
46 John Timbs, ‘My Autobiography’, Leisure Hour (30 September 1871): 612–15, p. 614.
47 An Irreconcileable, ‘The Penny Magazine’, St. Pauls Magazine (May 1873): 542–9, p. 544. For the
Parthenon pictured on the front of the Penny Magazine, see Fig. 6.11.
48 Maidment, Into the 1830s, p. 9.
sense, but wielded a high symbolic status, much like the hieroglyphic in the
almanac.49 These singular images encouraged an intense scrutiny. Wordsworth
describes such scrutiny in Book I of The Excursion. He portrays a pedlar ‘born of
lowly race | On Cumbrian hills’ who is avid for the stories and woodcuts in the
chapbooks, the ‘straggling volume[s], torn and incomplete’ that ‘the rustic Vicar’s
shelf supplied’. The pedlar has
attained
An active power to fasten images
Upon his brain, and on their pictured lines
Intensely brooded, even till they acquired
The liveliness of dreams. (ll.39–43; emphasis original)
This model of reading is not about processing information, but more about awe,
terror, and wonder. It is about the uncanny frisson of the image for the illiterate or
semi-literate reader. It was with a similar kind of ‘intense brooding’ that the boy-
reader gazed at the illustrations in the Penny Magazine ‘with a dreamy sense that
some day I should understand them’.50 While the Penny Magazine may have been
scornful of almanacs, consigning them to ‘the days when witches were burnt, and
horoscopes were drawn’, it could not control the ways in which its readers con-
verted ‘useful information’ into ‘wonder’, and incorporated its magazine into the
religious rituals of their lives.51 The boy-reader of the Penny Magazine, for
example, ‘living as I did in the midst of an exceedingly narrow and intense reli-
gious life’ ‘put it under my pillow by night when I had not got a Bible or hymn-
book there’.52 George Sala also remembered the deep impression that these
pictures had made on him as a boy: ‘[o]f the Penny Magazine and the Saturday
Magazine I had been a constant purchaser . . . but what I chiefly prized was a two-
penny weekly with splendidly vigorous woodcut illustrations, drawn, as well as
engraved, by one Samuel Williams. One of these periodicals was called, I think,
the Olio, and another, The Parterre’ [see Fig. 6.7].53
The Saturday Magazine was unillustrated, but it was, ‘abundantly garnished
throughout with small pieces in verse and prose—wherein some fact or precept
worthy of remembrance is conveyed’.54 Like the almanacs, these periodicals create
49 Patricia Anderson argues that until 1832 ‘there remained a vast difference between the pictorial
world of the English worker and the crowded walls of an Academy exhibition’. While this must be
true, she overstates the poverty of visual material available to the working class in this earlier period:
Anderson, The Printed Image, p. 49.
50 An Irreconcileable, ‘Penny Magazine’, p. 547.
51 [Anon.], ‘The British Almanack for 1821’, Athenaeum, pp. 4–5.
52 An Irreconcileable, ‘Penny Magazine’, pp. 544–5.
54 ‘Completion of the Saturday Magazine, and Commencement of Parker’s London Magazine’,
advertisement bound into the back of the Gentleman’s Magazine (July 1844), p. 22. For more on
228 Serial Forms
Fig. 6.7. The Olio returned again and again to ‘splendidly vigorous’ pictures of
knights in armour. Olio (15 March 1828), p. 145 [reproduced by kind permission of
the Syndics of Cambridge University Library, T900.221.1]
what we might call a pattern of coincidence rather than the ‘serial world punctuated
by singular events’ which is created by a news culture.55 While the endlessly renewed
‘newness’ of a daily news cycle ‘is so organised that its basic dynamic emphasises
the perishability of stories’, the cheap periodicals come ‘garnished’ with memor-
able ‘precepts’ and proverbial wisdom, similar in kind to the ‘Wise Saws’ offered
by Poor Robin’s Almanac which include: ‘No roads are so rough as those that have
just been mended; no sinners so intolerant as those that have newly turned
saints.’56 These precepts and proverbs are profoundly anti-serial, in that, by mak-
ing a claim to universal and imperishable wisdom, they resist the temporality of a
sequential narrative of events. The illustrations, too, as we shall see, often stand in
the way of sequential reading rather than facilitating it. It is true that topical art-
icles did appear in the periodicals, such as the report of the shooting of the
Bengali elephant Chunee in the menagerie at the Exeter Royal Exchange in 1826
because the animal had become violent, or the comic poem on a balloon ascent
which Jonathan Topham, making a claim for the ‘newsiness’ of this periodical,
tells us ‘appeared in print within a month of the event’ in the Mirror.57 But topic-
ality stands in an oblique, secondary and retarded relation to news. Topicality
can, perhaps be thought of as the afterglow or penumbra of a news event. Both of
Topham’s examples share the same strange space of coincidence with images from
the recent, remote, or ancient past, and it is to these that the next section turns. If
the death of the menagerie elephant was news, then so was Stonehenge [Fig. 6.12],
the Roman Coliseum, the Parthenon, and the Diana ‘Belvedere’.
Image—Object—Event: Serializing the Ancient

Past in the Mirror and the Penny Magazine
Already in the 1820s the twopenny Mirror was using woodcuts to imitate the
higher-end Monthly Magazine and in the 1830s Charles Knight took up the idea
and became a pioneer of cheap illustrated publications on a much bigger scale.58
‘[H]is fellow men owe no slight obligations to Mr. Charles Knight’, remarked the
Westminster Review, ‘for the great impulse he has given to wood engraving, for
the adaptations he has made of it, and the moral good he has done by it to the
excerption and anthologizing, see Leah Price, The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel (Cambridge:
55 Scannell, Radio, Television, p. 156.

56 Philip Schlesinger, ‘Putting Reality Together’: BBC News (London: Methuen, 1986 [1978]), p. 92;
Collins, ‘Almanacs’, New Quarterly Magazine, p. 422.
57 ‘For instance, a poem by J.B. of Orchard-Street, Hackney, on the balloon ascent of aeronautical
pioneer George Graham, appeared in print within a month of the event’: Topham, ‘Mirror of
Literature’, p. 52.
58 Topham, ‘Mirror of Literature’, p. 53. See also Maidment, Into the 1830s.
230 Serial Forms
poor of the whole civilized world.’59 Stephen Bann has warned that ‘[w]hat people
thought about the past—or Rome as the epitome of past history—in the eighteenth
century and before is a question not easily susceptible to analysis’.60 And the
question remains a thorny one for the nineteenth century, too. Scrutinizing the
‘Correspondence from Readers’ in the penny journals, Wilkie Collins discovers
widespread ignorance of ancient history, citing a letter from a ‘reader . . . who
requires to be told that the histories of Greece and Rome are ancient histories,
and the histories of France and England modern histories’.61 Nevertheless, ancient
Rome was undoubtedly coming into closer view for more and more people from
the late eighteenth century onwards, partly due to the new techniques of viewing
and seeing that were being pioneered by the panoramas, cosmoramas, dioramas,
wax work and model shows, and in the cheap publications and prints produced in
increasing quantities. John Murray’s 1843 Handbook for Travellers to Central Italy
and Rome announced of the Roman Coliseum that ‘[t]here is no monument of
ancient Rome which artists and engravers have made so familiar to readers of all
classes’, and by 1861 The Times was able to declare that ‘every schoolboy’ now
knew the look of the chief buildings in continental cities through cheap illustrated
papers, or through lantern shows.62 But during the Regency, such knowledge was
surely still far from common property. Of course Grand Tour souvenirs had
always included high-end prints and engravings, such as Giuseppe Agostino
Vasi’s series of line engravings Delle Magnificenze di Roma Antica e Moderna
(1747–61), but it was not until the first decades of the nineteenth century that
topographical and architectural images of ancient Rome began to appear—in
increasing numbers—in the newspaper and periodical press.63 Versions of the
ancient world woodcut, modelled, painted, cut from cork [see Fig. 6.8], and
otherwise fabricated, often in several different media at once, began to spring up
in an area of London roughly bordered by Pall Mall, Leicester Square, and the
Strand and extending across the new (1817) Waterloo Bridge to St George’s Fields
and the Surrey Theatre and Astley’s Amphitheatre.64
59 [Anon.], ‘On Wood Engraving’, Westminster Review 61 (July 1838): 145–52, p. 147.
60 Stephen Bann, ‘Envisioning Rome: Granet and Gibbon in Dialogue’, in Catherine Edwards (ed.),
Roman Presences: Receptions of Rome in European Culture, 1789–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999), pp. 35–52, p. 38.
61 Collins, ‘The Unknown Public’, My Miscellanies, pp. 249–64, p. 257.
62 Octavian Blewitt, Hand-Book for Travellers in Central Italy, Including the Papal States, Rome, and
the Cities of Etruria (London: John Murray, 1843), p. 339; The Times (27 December 1861).
63 From 1778 to 1785, Richard Dubourg had exhibited cork models of classical sites at his Classical
Exhibition on Pall Mall. This consisted of large models, cut in cork, of ancient remains in and near
Rome, as well as some important buildings in England. In 1788, Signor Grimani’s ‘Rome and
Venice—a Model’ and a model of the ‘Pantheon’ were displayed. These were ‘polite’ and quite expen-
sive attractions, however, and it was not until the early nineteenth century that working people could
start to become familiar with the topography of ancient Rome.
64 The ten volumes of plates by Piranesi are supposed to have helped in bringing accurate represen-
tations of Roman architecture into circulation in Britain.
Fig. 6.8. ‘Cork Model of the Temple of Poseidon (now thought to be of Zeus) at
Paestum’. Attributed to Domenico Padiglione’s workshop, Naples, Italy, c.1820 [image
courtesy of Thomas Coulborn & Sons Ltd]
Standing on the viewing platform of Barker’s gigantic panorama of the

Colosseum of Rome in Leicester Square, or the ‘View of Rome, Taken from the
Tower of the Capitol’ at the rival Panorama in the Strand, jostling in the pit of the
unlicensed Coburg theatre with ‘Jew-boys, pickpockets, prostitutes, and mounte-
banks’ watching Milner’s Lucius Catiline, the Roman Traitor, a play which promised
‘a faithful picture of the Manners, Warfare, Religious and Civil Ceremonies &c. of
the Ancient Romans’;65 or wandering among the fake classical ruins in Hyde Park;
or watching Andrew Ducrow perform his celebrated poses plastiques équestres as a
Roman gladiator at Astley’s,66 with its distinctive ‘smell of sawdusty horses’;67 or
watching a firework display over a wooden model of the Castel Sant’Angelo on a
lake masquerading as the Tiber, in the Surrey Zoological Gardens at Kennington:
all of these activities must have offered a newly surrogate experience of the past to a
widening public. As an anonymous poet of the period remarked:
There’s a model of Rome; and as round it one struts

One sinks the remembrance of Newington Butts;
65 William Hazlitt, The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 29 vols (London:
J. M. Dent, 1930–4), vol. 18, p. 297. Playbill 11 June 1827, quoted in Moody, Illegitimate Theatre, p. 34.
66 Moody, Illegitimate Theatre, p. 85.
67 Charles Dickens to Clarkson Stanfield (24 August 1844), Letters of Charles Dickens vol. 4,
pp. 182–6, p. 185.
232 Serial Forms
And, having one shilling laid down at the portal,

One fancies oneself in the City Immortal.68
Having published a picture of the Temple of Apollo Epicurius mistakenly titled as

‘The Remains of the Parthenon’ in September 1832 [Fig. 6.9], The Penny Magazine
compensated with ‘The Parthenon’ in October. [Fig. 6.10]69 This was ‘[t]he picture
in Mr. Knight’s magazine of the front of the Parthenon’ that one reader of the
Penny Magazine very clearly remembered encountering as a boy, and he also
remembered feeling it permanently impressed on his memory, or, in his own
words, ‘classified and connected in my mind for future use’.70
When the Penny Magazine printed an illustration of the Roman Forum in 1835,
it did not even feel the need to identify the caption as from Byron’s Childe Harold:
Did the Conquerors heap

Their spoils here?
Yes; and in yon field below,
A thousand years of silenced factions sleep—
The Forum, where the immortal accents glow,
And still the eloquent air breathes—burns with
Cicero! (CHP, IV: cxii)71
The commodification of the past into such ‘bite-sized chunks’ produces a turn to
the present, and to the self-conscious consumption of history.72 The Penny
Magazine concludes, ‘[a] few sad words will describe the current state of the
Roman Forum. It is reduced . . . to the market-place for pigs, sheep and oxen,
being now the Smithfield of Rome.’73 The present time of the reader is staged by
drawing attention to the distance from the past, whilst the past is simultaneously
represented as offering a live challenge to the present: as Byron tell us, now, in the
present moment, in the Roman Forum, ‘still the eloquent air breathes’ with
Cicero’s words. When the Penny Magazine invokes the contemporary Smithfield
68 Anon., quoted in Rendle, Swings and Roundabouts, p. 140.

69 The Penny Magazine was obliged to publish an ‘Erratum’ in September 1832. ‘By the accidental
substitution of one cut for another’, it explained, ‘we gave, in No.28, a view described as the “Remains
of the Parthenon” which is really a representation of the Temple of Apollo Epicurius, near Phygalia,
which was intended to accompany an account of the Phygalian Marbles in the British Museum.
We shall add a view of the Parthenon to the next article on the Elgin Marbles’: Penny Magazine
(29 September 1832), p. 256.
71 [Anon.], ‘The Roman Forum’, Penny Magazine (24 October 1835): 412–15. Under a large wood
engraving of the Forum, the article quotes Canto IV, Stanza CXII of Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
without identifying the poet or the poem: pp. 412–13.
72 See a similar argument in John Urry, ‘Time and Space in Giddens’s Social Theory’, in
Christopher G. A. Bryant and David Jary (eds), Giddens’s Theory of Structuration: A Critical Appreciation
(London: Routledge, 1991): 160–75.
73 [Anon.], ‘The Roman Forum’, Penny Magazine, p. 415.
Fig. 6.9. An image mistitled as ‘The Remains of the Parthenon’ in ‘The British
Museum—No.5. The Elgin Marbles’, Penny Magazine (8 September 1832): 228–9, p. 228
[reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library,
L900.b.69]
234 Serial Forms
Fig. 6.10. ‘The Parthenon’, Penny Magazine (20 October 1832) [reproduced by kind
permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library, L900.b.69]
meat market in London in opposition to the Roman Forum of the past, it is making
a historicist manoeuvre. The incongruity between the ancient civic forum and the
sordid animal market ‘simultaneously engenders the differentiation of a present
from a past time’, in Michel de Certeau’s phrase; at the same time, ‘the figure of
the past keeps its primary value of representing what is lacking. With a material
which in order to be objective is necessarily there, but which connotes a past inso-
far as it refers first of all to an absence, this figure also introduces the rift of a
future.’74 So when Byron suggests that Cicero is both absent and present in the
Roman Forum, he marks the border between past and present, but also suggests a
lack that still needs to be supplied: ‘the locus that it carves for the past is equally a
fashion of making a place for a future’.75 In Byron’s Childe Harold, Cicero’s slum-
bering future potential is revolutionary—he not only ‘breathes’, but ‘burns’ with
the promise of a renewed future for Italy. Remediated through the Penny
Magazine, Byron’s unidentified poem has become part of the equipment of his-
tory offered to the reader.
As we have seen, the news taxes meant that important events of the past often
‘took the place of ’ or ‘stood for’ news in these journals. The majority of the images
are of old buildings or old objects or portraits of the illustrious dead. The
Acropolis, the Parthenon, and the Coliseum are presented in these weeklies as
front-page news, displayed as momentous events, and indeed for many of their
readers they might really have been ‘news’, given the scarcity of printed matter or
formal education available to working people in this period [Fig. 6.11]. William
Chambers, the founder of Chambers’s publishing house, remembered his boy-
hood in Peebles in the early decades of the nineteenth century: ‘apart from three
or four newspapers that were passed from hand to hand until they crumbled,
there were scarcely any books other than chapbooks. A copy of The Works of
Josephus (1720) was read aloud, instalment by instalment, house to house, every
year. “Weel, Tam, what’s the news the nicht?” would old Geordie Murray say,
as Tam entered with his Josephus under his arm, and seated himself at the
family fireside. “Bad news, bad news,” replied Tam, “Titus has begun to besiege
Jerusalem.” ’76 This method of serial reading created breaking news out of the
ancient past, and ‘[t]he protracted and severe famine which was endured by the
74 Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1988), p. 85.
75 This is what Michel de Certeau has described as the ‘historical operation’, which he suggests
consists ‘in classifying the given according to a present law that is distinguished from its “other” (the
past), in assuming a distance in respect to an acquired situation, and thus in marking through a dis-
course the effective change that precipitated this distancing’. De Certeau says this operation has a
double-edged effect. First ‘it historicizes present time’ by staging ‘the present time of a lived situation’.
He explains that ‘[i]t necessitates clarification of the relation of dominant forms of reasoning to a
proper place which, in opposition to a past, becomes the present’: de Certeau, The Writing of History,
p. 85.
76 St Clair, The Reading Nation, p. 242, quoting William Chambers, Memoir of Robert Chambers,
with Autobiographic Reminiscences (Edinburgh: W. & R. Chambers, 1872), p. 29.
236 Serial Forms
Fig. 6.11. ‘The Acropolis at Athens’, Mirror of Literature, Amusement and Instruction
(2 December 1826) [reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge
University Library, Library Storage Facility v.8 (1826)]
besieged Jews, was a theme which kept several families in a state of agony for a
week’.77 The cheap serial magazines were experiments which exploited the poten-
tial of the serial form to imitate the seriality of a history which accumulated over
time. By the 1830s, cheap serialized illustrated histories were appearing, one of
the first produced by Charles Knight. The innately historical form of the serial
was adapted to the sequencing of all kinds of knowledge, not only ‘history’ as
such. Dr Dionysus Lardner’s gargantuan 133-volume Cabinet Cyclopedia (1830–46)
included a ‘Geographical Series’, a ‘Biographical Series’, and a ‘Scientific Series’
which, if collected would constitute a ‘Complete Library’.78 In all, 135 volumes
were announced, so the two final ones were never published, but the drive to
completion is anti-serial, and the tension between continuity and completion was
to lurk beneath all such projects.79 If working-class reading habits were neither
regular nor casual, as seems likely, all series could have been experienced as severely
interrupted, repetitive, or intermittent. The orderly relationship between what the
editor of the Olio called ‘our Numbers, our Parts, and our Anatomical whole’ would
often become confused and muddled once the papers left the press.80 In addition,
the monumental iconicity of such sites and objects as Stonehenge [Fig. 6.12], the
Parthenon and the Coliseum, the Portland Vase, the Diana ‘Belvedere’, and so on
makes them stand symbolically against seriality—they are monolithic traces of the
past whose survival and imperishability solicits pause and awe; their insistent
quiddity does not suggest a morphology of sequence at all. They seem, indeed,
issueless: images of a past supremely unconcerned with the future.
Nevertheless, the seriality of their production as images is important. As we
have seen, the serial form is particularly good at modelling movement through
time and space. Each date-stamped issue supersedes another and a reader does
not have to be in possession of a complete series or to be reading an up-to-date
issue to be aware that to read one number is to experience only one episode of a
larger whole. Traces of the serial’s ongoing movement are on every page.
Continuations of narratives from the last issue, reviews of new books, gossip: the
periodical form loudly insists on its insertion into an ongoing public chronology.
Serial publications were uniquely able to transport their readers, even the least
literate of them, to places and times remote from their present. As one enthusiastic
reader put it, in his ‘Ode to the Mirror’: ‘thou givs’t to our view | Objects as far apart
as night from day: | Vesuvius’ fires from our chairs we gaze on, | The grand Turk’s
turban, the couch he lays on’.81 What did the people, literate or semi-literate, who
77 Chambers, Memoir of Robert Chambers, p. 29.

78 At six shillings a volume, though, this publication seems to have been aimed at the middle-class
reader: see Morse Peckham, ‘Dr. Lardner’s “Cabinet Cyclopaedia” ’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society
of America 45 (1 January 1951): 37–58, p. 42.
79 Advertisement, Athenaeum 615 (6 August 1839), p. 598.
80 ‘Preface’, The Olio, or Museum of Entertainment 10 (August 1832–February 1833), p. iv.
81 W. Corfield, ‘Ode to the “Mirror” ’, Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction 6:158
(3 September 1825), p. 165.
238 Serial Forms
Fig. 6.12. ‘Stonehenge’, Penny Magazine (22 February 1834) [reproduced by kind
permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library, L900.b.69]
came into contact with these images make and create for themselves from them?
De Certeau imagines an enterprising reader who creates a ‘secondary production’
of a ‘repertory of tactics for future use’ from whatever he or she is handed down
by an elite culture: so what ‘future use’ might that boy reader have found for a
hand-me-down Parthenon?82
These illustrations do not represent ‘history’ but rather the equipment of
history. Philosopher Paul Ricoeur has written that ‘[t]he remains of the past, with
their equipment-like character, constitute the leading example of what is world-
historical. In fact, these remains are themselves what seem to be carriers of the
signification “past”’. Ricoeur believes that ‘datable, public, and extensive time are
essential to deciphering the “traces” of the past’ and that ‘the trace . . . projects our
preoccupation, as illustrated by our hunt, search, or inquiry, into public time
which makes our private durations commensurate with one another’.83 Here it is
not the seriality of a linear view of history that matters as much as the ‘hunt, the
search and the inquiry’ itself into history—the ‘historical consciousness’ that
actively and artificially constitutes our sense of being present and living in a
shared present. This present is not only the micro-instant of now, but a created
and furnished space achieved by an elastic form of consensus. When the boy-
reader of the Penny Magazine ‘got excited over the articles about the British
Museum and the woodcuts of beautiful statues and buildings’ and persuaded his
‘savage’ and ‘radical’ father to take him to the museum itself, he and his father
entered as much into this consensual present as they did into the ancient past. So
that while the ‘public time’ of history which is referenced by the Coliseum or the
Parthenon seems remote from the participative community time of seed-sowing
and apple-pressing and bee-swarming, it is nevertheless leading towards a differ-
ent practice of communal time, towards a contemporaneousness which feeds off
the eventfulness of history to create an eventful present. In generating informa-
tion about the past and equipping a new reading public, that public is initiated
not only into the public and global past of ‘world history’ but also into a public
and global present. Unlike the costly engravings of ancient sites and objects in the
antiquarian tradition, these illustrations are not addressed to the private collector,
but to a widening public: they are not intended to be owned as luxury commod-
ities, but to be gathered up for immediate deployment as equipment.84
82 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Every Day Life, trans. Steven F. Rendall (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 1984), pp. xiii, 23.
83 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, p. 124.
84 Niklas Luhmann has observed that for the media the new always displaces (and depends upon
the term) of the old, and that the way round this is to generate ever-new information about the old. He
suggests that the media generates ‘familiarity and its variation from moment to moment’: Luhmann,
Reality of the Mass Media, p. 101. For Luhmann, ‘the mass media provide society with that which is
known to be known—and they provide it not as something essentially given, but rather as a highly
dynamic process’: Hans-Georg Moeller, Luhmann Explained: From Souls to Systems (Peru, IL: Open
Court Publishing Company, 2006), p. 135.
240 Serial Forms
The Penny Magazine was early in using illustrations of historical objects, and
Charles Knight, its publisher, was quick to see the further historical potential of
the illustrated periodical form. His serialized national history The Pictorial
History of England ‘occupied seven years in a regular monthly course of publica-
tion’ from 1837 to 1844.85 But despite his own claim of its ‘regular monthly’
appearance, Knight’s serial history refused to issue in an orderly fashion from the
press. The serial was discontinued at Volume IV as Knight and his chief writer,
Macfarlane, disagreed on the political significance of the French Revolution.
Macfarlane wanted to ‘dwell upon its countless abominations, and say no word
about the mighty changes which it was destined to produce on the condition of
the mass of society’.86 An additional volume, a ‘History of the Peace of 1816–1846’
was later written by Harriet Martineau, and the series continued to spawn when
the publisher Messrs Chambers took over the venture, and edited and reissued the
series in seven volumes, adding more volumes and bringing it up to date in the
1850s with ‘Pictorial Histories of the Russian War and Indian Revolt’.87
The chief attraction of this periodic publication when it first appeared in 1837
was its generous allowance of illustrative woodcuts: there were 524 illustrations in
the first volume alone. Knight was proud of ‘my plan of rendering wood-cuts real
illustrations of the text, instead of fanciful devices—true eye-knowledge, some-
times more instructive than words’.88 The pictures produced some odd contradic-
tions though. In the introduction Craik explained that the illustrations were all
authentic to the times that they represented, except ‘in a few . . . cases, [when] a
drawing of a subsequent period has been made use of where there was reason to
believe that it nevertheless conveyed a sufficiently accurate representation of the
thing spoken of ’.89 But then a footnote to the first large illustration in Volume I of
‘The Round Tower of Donoughmore’, which shows the tower ruined as it appeared
in the nineteenth century, suggests that ‘[i]n most instances the cut of a particular
local object will have reference to its existing state, except when otherwise
expressed’, and indeed the ‘Basilica of St Paul, Rome’ is illustrated ‘after the fire,
1823’.90 And to add to the confusion, ‘[t]he copies of modern historical pictures, it
will of course be understood, have been given for other reasons altogether than
85 Knight, Passages of a Working Life, vol. 2, p. 259.

86 Knight, Passages of a Working Life, vol. 2, p. 261. See also Valerie Gray, Charles Knight: Educator,
Publisher, Writer (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), p. 105.
87 Chambers’s Cyclopaedia of English Literature [8 vols], vol. 7, p. 23. By the 1830s it was possible to
buy ‘reprints of celebrated titles: Edward Gibbon’s History of Rome in ten two-shilling monthly parts,
William Hone’s Every Day Book in shilling monthly parts’, for example: Graham Law and
Robert L. Patten, ‘The Serial Revolution’ in The Cambridge History of the Book, vol. 6, pp. 144–71, p. 145.
88 Knight, Passages of a Working Life, vol. 2, p. 262.
89 George L. Craik and Charles Macfarlane, The Pictorial History of England: Being a History of the
Kingdom Illustrated with Many Hundred Wood-Cuts, 6 vols (London: Charles Knight & Co., 1841),
vol. 1, p. viii. Craik here gives an instance of a thirteenth-century drawing used on p. 566 to illustrate
Norman lands. ‘The Basilica of St Paul, Rome, after the Fire, 1823’ is at p. 311.
90 Craik and Macfarlane, Pictorial History, vol. 1, p. 13, f/n.
their fidelity in regard to costume and other characteristics’, although quite what
those ‘other reasons’ might be is never explained.91 The reviewer for the
Athenaeum noticed something odd right away: ‘in the picture of Boadicea
addressing the Britons, it is clear that the conceptions of the artist were modified
by having seen a candidate harangue from the hustings, or a popular orator
address a multitude’.92 Sniffing out a lurking presentism in some of the images in
Craik’s series, this reviewer drew attention to the larger structural difficulties of
serialized history: the ephemeral present and novelty of the monthly periodical
undoing and undermining the monumentality of history: its form working to
undo its subject. The true reason for the category confusions over images was
probably that Craik was often reusing old blocks and ‘fitting in’ woodcuts of his-
torical paintings as an economical way of keeping his periodical heavily illus-
trated and his costs down. The result is a text that, like Bulwer’s Last Days of
Pompeii discussed in Chapter 4, ricochets between the explicitly mediated recon-
struction and the implicitly unmediated display of the distant past.
Historical Objects as Events
The confusion over time-capture in the images in Knight’s Pictorial History is cru-
cial to understanding the construction of popular historicism in the early decades
of the nineteenth century.93 For in his anxiety about using a ‘drawing of a subse-
quent period’ to give ‘a sufficiently accurate representation of the thing spoken of ’,
Knight unconsciously betrays his own understanding of the shifting historical
meanings of objects. Images of material remains in the cheap serials are not sim-
ply pictures of objects, but pictures of objects that are unreeling, and changing
their signification as objects at the same time as they are reconstituting the sub-
jectivity of their readers. Just as the reports of recent eruptions of Vesuvius col-
lapsed ancient history and modern news together, these images offer a perspective
of the different historical iterations and repetitions of the historical object in a
way that propels the object through time and makes it, in the term of philosopher
91 Craik and Macfarlane, Pictorial History, vol. 1, p. viii. Rosemary Mitchell differentiates between
Craik’s images as ‘metonymic and metaphoric’, but she does not go on to think about how this formal
confusion might affect the sense of the text as a whole: Rosemary Mitchell, Picturing the Past: English
History in Text and Image 1830–1870 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 119. See also Billie
Melman, The Culture of History: English Uses of the Past, 1800–1953 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2006).
92 [Anon.], ‘The Pictorial History of England. Vols I. and II. Knight & Co.’, Athenaeum 593 (9 March
1839), p. 185. The illustration of ‘Boadicea Haranguing the British Tribes’ appears on p. 44 and is
attributed to Stodhard.
93 The argument that ‘visual histories are not simply guides to the times, but guides to time itself ’
has recently been made by Daniela Bleichmar and Vanessa Schwartz, in their ‘Visual History: The Past
in Pictures’, Representations 145 (Winter 2019): 1–31.
242 Serial Forms
Alfred North Whitehead, an ongoing ‘event’.94 And as these historical ‘events’

reached a wider constituency of readers, they were inevitably changed by that
encounter, just as their readers were.
Alfred North Whitehead’s idea of all objects as dynamic events which continue
to vibrate perpetually with ever-changing meanings is useful here:
We are accustomed to associate an event with a certain melodramatic quality. If

a man is run over that is an event comprised within certain spatio-temporal
limits. We are not accustomed to consider the endurance of the great Pyramid
throughout any definite day as an event. But the natural fact which is the great
Pyramid throughout a day, meaning thereby all nature within it, is an event
with the same character as the man’s accident, meaning thereby all nature with
spatio-temporal limitations, so as to include the man and the motor during the
period when they were in contact.95
As well as the example of the Great Pyramid, Whitehead uses that of Cleopatra’s
Needle on the Victoria Embankment in London, explaining that ‘[a]t any given
instant, my encounter with the Needle itself is an event. This encounter might
take the form of my surprise at seeing the Needle for the first time, of my close
scrutiny of its aesthetic features, of my barely conscious recognition of it as I walk
negligently by . . . Each of these encounters is a fresh event and each of the selves to
which it happens is also a fresh event. Perceiving the Needle is not something that
happens to me as an already-constituted subject, but rather something that con-
stitutes me.’96 Ekphrastic representation adds to this ongoing sequence: the
moment that the poet Rilke, viewing the Belvedere torso, announces ‘You must
change your life’ is also a moment when the significance of the Belvedere torso is
changed forever.97 Gilles Deleuze takes up Whitehead’s idea and argues that these
‘object/events’ act to organize the chaos of a long existence in time into a series of
94 Alfred North Whitehead, The Concept of Nature [1920] (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2004).
95 Gilles Deleuze summarizes Whitehead’s ideas in The Fold, agreeing that ‘[a]n event does not just
mean that “a man has been run over.” The great Pyramid is an event.’ Gilles Deleuze, ‘What is
an Event?’, in The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (London: Continuum, 2006),
pp. 76–82, p. 76. ‘What are the conditions that make an event possible? Events are produced in a chaos,
in a chaotic multiplicity, but only under the condition that a sort of screen intervenes . . . How can the
Many become the One? A great screen has to be placed in between them. Like a formless elastic mem-
brane, an electromagnetic field, or the receptacle of the Timaeus, the screen makes something issue from
chaos, and even if this something differs only slightly.’ Deleuze, The Fold, p. 76, Emphasis original.
96 Whitehead, The Concept of Nature, p. 169. The discussion of Whitehead’s version of the ‘event’ is
at pp. 167ff. Steven Shaviro discusses Whitehead and Deleuze’s versions of the ‘event’ in Steven
Shaviro, Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2009), pp. 19–20.
97 Rainer Maria Rilke’s 1908 sonnet on the Belvedere Torso, ‘Archaïscher Torso Apollos’ (‘Archaic
Torso of Apollo’) ends with this line. Jacques Rancière discusses Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s The
History of Ancient Art (1764), in which he writes about the torso, and Rilke’s response in Aisthesis:
Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art, trans. Zakir Paul (London: Verso, 2013), pp. 1–20.
gathered points within a narrative which is recognizable as ‘history’, but which is

mobile, fluctuating, and ongoing. Jon Klancher has suggested that readers of the
Mirror were ‘plunged into anthologies without a panoptic vantage on the textual
whole’.98 But if we agree that the historical logic of seriality delivers ‘a world of
captures instead of closures’ because of its very commitment to an ongoing inves-
tigation, then the form seems much less disorientating for the reader.99 These
texts are engaged in recoding the ruined monuments of the past as ‘events’—
events that are changing their meanings even as they are being represented and
reproduced in new ways to new people and in new places.
If the Great Pyramid and Cleopatra’s Needle are events, then so is the
Parthenon. The printing of these material objects, the Parthenon, the Coliseum
and so on, is after all itself a material practice. As material interventions and rep-
resentations, they occupy the same discursive space as the spectacles at Astley’s
amphitheatre, or the panoramas of Rome and Pompeii, or the displays in the
Egyptian Hall. The knowledge that was transmitted by this newly visual culture
was remarked upon by Joseph Sill, a Philadelphia art collector, who recorded in
his diary twice going to see Burford’s 1837 Panorama of Rome: ‘the illusion is per-
fect and you gain such information in a few minutes, as it would be impossible to
receive by a whole life of reading’.100 The twopenny papers intersected with these
shows in offering ‘eye-knowledge’ alongside textual data. They were less papers
for reading than they were objects of contemplation. Although Klancher is no
doubt right that the legitimate cheap press is pitted ‘[a]gainst the radical writings
of Cobbett, Henry Hetherington, and Ernest Jones’, he perhaps misses how close
to these radical publications the legitimate press also was.101 The potent ways
in which these texts operated were far from conservative. Their readers may be
‘[e]xcluded from the dialogues of cultural power’, which Klancher associates with
the highly conservative Blackwoods and the Edinburgh, but that power is already
shifting in this period and in its preparation for a new politics of liberal consensus,
which will not be fully acknowledged until after 1848, the Mirror is a trail blazer.102
Touching the Past: Toys and Games
By describing Pompeii and the Colosseum as ‘toys’, are Bulwer and Dickens com-
modifying the past for mass consumption? Richard Hoggart coined the phrase
98 Klancher, Making of English Reading Audiences, p. 79. Klancher is here referring to the Mirror
along with other miscellanies of this period.
99 Deleuze, The Fold, p. 81.
100 Joseph Sill, ‘Diaries 1832–54’, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, quoted in
Anne Baker, Heartless Immensity: Literature, Culture and Geography in Antebellum America (Ann
Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2006), p. 64.
244 Serial Forms
‘working-class baroque’ to describe the eclectic clutter of accumulated objects he

found in working-class homes.103 Certainly the Peggottys’ boat-home is crowded
with carefully displayed objects: a mirror framed with oyster shells, ‘a tea-tray
with a painting on it of a lady with a parasol, taking a walk with a military looking
child who was trundling a hoop’, and framed cheap pictures on the wall of the
kind bought from pedlars—‘Abraham in red going to sacrifice Isaac in blue, and
Daniel in yellow cast into a den of green lions’—and over the mantelpiece a pic-
ture of a boat with ‘a real little wooden stern stuck on to it’.104 Hoggart suggests
that the working-class baroque is ‘less an expression of desire for a heavily mater-
ial and possession-laden life than an elementary, allegorical, and brief statement
of a better, fuller life’.105 Jon Klancher diagnoses a case of the working-class
baroque in the Mirror’s crowding of cultural fragments which he thinks betrays a
similar longing and utopian desire.106 Patrick Joyce, too, invoking Hoggart, has
suggested that ‘[e]xisting accounts of popular culture have had too much to say
about labour and ideology, too little to say about poverty, and hardly anything to
say about utopia’.107
But ‘utopian desire’ sounds oddly abstract and disconnected from the daily
experience of the pragmatic working class and from the politics of representation
and identity which were so urgently pressing in this early period. It is not perhaps
a helpful category in this context. It might be more useful to think affectively and
to consider the pleasure of engagement in fantasies of knowledge and cultural
belonging. The ‘toy’ status given to history by Bulwer and Dickens, rather than
evincing a vague desire for social equality, could be making a much bolder sug-
gestion. The version of the past they are offering is for practice and use. Toys offer
tactility and the possibility of shared participation.108 As the Repository of Arts
commented in 1826, ‘[w]hat between steam-boats and panoramic exhibitions, we
are every day not only informed of, but actually brought into contact with, remote
objects’.109 ‘Brought into contact with’ suggests a level of experience which exceeds
both a panoptic view and the passive accumulation of information. Being brought
into contact with remote historical events through toys and shows is not only
being brought into contact with the past, but crucially being brought into contact
103 Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life (London: Chatto & Windus,
1957).
104 Dickens, David Copperfield, pp. 28–9. I have written of the significance of objects in this novel
in Clare Pettitt, ‘Peggotty’s Workbox: Victorian Souvenirs and Material Memory’, RaVon 53 (February
2009), http://www.erudit.org/revue/ravon/2009/v/n53/029896ar.html
105 Hoggart, Uses of Literacy, p. 119.
107 Joyce, Visions of the People, p. 341. Joyce’s period is later than the period under discussion here,
but he has interesting things to say which support my argument about the slowness of the growth of
‘class’ as a self-identifier in Britain and the importance of ‘popular culture’ in the earlier period.
108 See Gerard L’Estrange Turner, ‘Recreational Science’, in Nineteenth-Century Scientific
Instruments (London: Sotheby Publications, 1983), pp. 291–6; also Melanie Keene, ‘From Candles to
Cabinets: “Familiar Chemistry” in Early Victorian Britain’, Ambix 60 (February 2013): 54–77.
109 [Anon.], ‘Panorama of Edinburgh’, Repository of Arts Third Series 5 (1 May 1825): 297–8, p. 297.
with one another, too. Offered as commodities, these are also invitations to play,
and to investigate a culture at an intimate level. The toy demands close attention.
It can be taken to pieces and put back together, it is ‘pocket sized’ and ‘tiny’ and
portable. It can be owned. Gaston Bachelard thinks the non-sense of miniatures
releases people from ‘the obligations of dimensions’.110 The pleasure of inserting
oneself into history, however precariously, is here made newly available to many,
and there is little doubt that these opportunities brought enjoyment with them.
The 1820s saw a swift growth in the production of and market for toys. For
example, David Brewster had patented his kaleidoscope in 1817 and by the 1820s
this was a popular toy in wealthier homes along with novelties such as ‘Elton’s
Miniature Transparent Orrery’ (1817) and the Thaumatrope or ‘Wonder-Turner’
(1827).111 Small toy models of the panoramas, often made from card and paper,
also existed in this period.112 The poor could not afford all these novelties, but
through cheapening print and shows they could start to share in the culture of
novelty and what was called at the time ‘entertaining knowledge’. It seems likely
that the penny-plain and twopenny-coloured paper theatres which were at the
height of their popularity from the 1820s to the 1840s might have come within
the reach of working-class people, particularly as one witness records that ‘the
transpontine houses—the Surrey, the Coburg and Astley’s—furnish the majority
of subjects’ [see Fig. 6.13].113 And in 1830, the Mirror offered an innovative paper
novelty to its readers, ‘a fold-out strip drawing of George IV’s funeral cortege’,
suggesting the beginning of new possibilities for novelties and toys for the work-
ing classes.114
Susan Stewart’s now famous cogitation on the miniature and the gigantic cre-
ates a binary division between the two. In her discussion, ‘[t]he miniature is
considered . . . as a metaphor for the interior space and time of the bourgeois
subject. Analogously, the gigantic is considered as a metaphor for the abstract
authority of the state and the collective, public life’.115 But the power of the
110 Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, p. 173. See particularly Chapter 7, ‘Miniature’.
111 Turner, ‘Recreational Science’, pp. 297, 305, 301.
112 See Ralph Hyde, illustration of toy panorama, no. 172, Panoramania!, p. 151. Hyde also tells us
that in the Passage des Panoramas, Montmartre, Paris, a hand fire-screen incorporating a miniature
panorama was available for sale in the early nineteenth century: p. 124.
113 William Archer, ‘The Drama in Pasteboard’, Art Journal (April 1887): 105–8, p. 106. Mr William
West of Wych Street had the best paper theatres and character sheets in Georgian times, according to
John Oxenford looking back 45 years to his childhood: John Oxenford, ‘The Toy Theatre’, Era
Almanack (January 1871): 67–9. The standard histories are George Speaight, A History of the English
Toy Theatre (London: Studio Vista Ltd, 1969) and Peter Baldwin, Toy Theatres of the World (London:
Zwemmer, 1992). See also Alan Powers, ‘Toy Theatre: The Revival and Survival of an English
Tradition’, in Jeffrey Goldstein, David Buckingham, and Gilles Brougère (eds), Toys, Games and Media
(London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 55–71. Rachel Bryant Davies, ‘Not Classic, but Quite Correct’: The
Trojan War at the Circus’, in Troy, Carthage and the Victorians: The Drama of Classical Ruins in the
Nineteenth-Century Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 125–202; and
Joanna Hofer-Robinson, ‘ “Kaleidoscopes of Changing Pictures”: Representing Nations in Toy Theatre’,
Journal of Victorian Culture 23:1 (2018): 45–63.
114 Altick, Shows of London, p. 232. 115 Stewart, On Longing, p. xii.
246 Serial Forms
Fig. 6.13. John Leech, ‘Further Preparation of the Miller and his Men’, Young
Troublesome; or, Master Jacky’s Holidays [1850] [© The British Library Board: General
Reference Collection 1899.cc.42]
miniaturized histories available to working-class people in the early nineteenth

century is in the way that they blur the divide between the categories of interior
and individual versus the abstract and collective. ‘The miniature does not attach
itself to lived historical time’, asserts Stewart, it rather belongs to the time of
reverie.116 But what if the reverie is about lived historical time? And what if the
miniature is part of material practice, as well as a reverie? Surely then the mini-
ature could become the tool with which the individual could start to negotiate his
or her place in the abstract collective? ‘How well do I remember the glorious
pageant which moved through my mind while I was tracing, sticking on paste-
board, colouring, and cutting out the costume plates in Knight’s “Pictorial
Shakespeare”!’ recalled one boy of making miniature paper characters, and Robert
Louis Stevenson remembered assisting at a paper-theatre production of ‘The
Battle of Waterloo’ in his youth, and how, going into ‘[t]hat shop, which was dark
and smelt of Bibles’ to buy the pristine sheets, ‘there was a physical pleasure in the
sight and touch of them’.117 Miniatures invite fantasy and creativity, and ‘[e]very
sheet we fingered was another lightening glance into obscure, delicious story’.118

117 Archer, ‘The Drama in Pasteboard’, p. 105. Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘A Penny Plain and
Twopence Coloured’, Magazine of Art (January 1884): 227–32, pp. 227, 228. See also Theo Arthur, ‘The
Toy Theatre’, Era Almanack (January 1891): 43–6.
118 Stevenson, ‘A Penny Plain’, p. 228.
Dickens’s friend, George Sala, remembered that ‘we used to “play at” Dickens,
and dramatise his novels on our own private account. . . . Then we set to work
copying as well as we could George Cruikshank’s illustrations to “Oliver,” and
Phiz’s etchings to “Pickwick” and “Nickleby” ’, and he recalls ‘a little old scrap-
book of mine full of imitations in pen-and-ink of the etchings’.119 He and his sib-
lings intervened in Dickens’s serial narratives, dressing up dolls as Dickens
characters: ‘[w]e used to buy twopenny Dutch dolls in a toyshop in a queer little
alley, called, I think, Crown Court, which ran from King Street into Pall Mall;
which puppets my sister used to dress up to represent Mr. Pickwick, the Rev.
Mr. Stiggins, the elder Mr. Weller, Mr. Serjeant Buzfuz, and so on’.120 G. H. Lewes
recognized Dickens’s toy-like appeal to readers of all ages: ‘[g]ive a child a wooden
horse, with hair for mane and tail, and wager spots for colouring, he will never be
disturbed by the fact that this horse does not move its legs . . . the wooden horse is
brought within the range of the child’s emotions, and dramatizing tendencies,
when he can handle and draw it, so Dickens’s figures are brought within the range
of the readers’ interests’.121 Sala remembers handling, drawing, and dramatizing
Dickens: ‘[m]any a time have I enacted Bill Sikes and murdered Nancy—otherwise
my sister, in the back bedroom’. His recollections of ‘reading Dickens’ are memories
of active re-enactment, creative copying and story-making.122
This was very serious fun, though. Walter Benjamin saw that ‘[s]urrounded by
a world of giants, children use play to create a world appropriate to their size’, and,
writing in the decade after the First World War, he suggests that adults have
resorted to the miniature to comfort themselves in the wake of that enormous
and terrible event.123 In the aftermath of another war in the 1820s, the difference
between children and adults was not yet so pronounced, partly because of poor
adult literacy rates, and partly because the ‘child’ was still under construction as
the category it would later become.124 Lewes collapses the reading experience of
119 Sala, Life and Adventures, vol. 1, p. 89. 120 Sala, Life and Adventures, vol. 1, p. 94.
121 G. H. Lewes, ‘Dickens in Relation to Criticism’, Fortnightly Review 11:62 n.s. (February 1872):
141–54, p. 146.
123 Walter Benjamin, ‘“Old Toys”: The Toy Exhibition at the Märkisches Museum (Berlin)’, repr. in
Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 2, Part 1: 1927—1930, trans. Rodney Livingstone and others,
ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999),
pp. 98–102, p. 100 [first published in June 1928 in Die literasche Welt]. In ‘The Cultural History of
Toys’, Benjamin also reminds us that ‘[children] belong to the nation and the class they come from.
This means that their toys cannot bear witness to any autonomous separate existence, but rather are a
silent signifying dialogue between them and their nation.’ ‘The Cultural History of Toys’ repr. in
Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 2, Part 1: 1927–1930, pp. 113–17, p. 117. This essay was first
published in May 1928 in Frankfurter Zeitung as a review of Karl Gröber, Kinderspielzeug aus alter
Zeit: Ein Geschichte des Spielzuegs [Children’s Toys from Olden Times: A History of Toys] (Berlin:
Deutscher Kuntsverlag, 1928).
124 See Carolyn Steedman, Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority,
1780–1930 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995); Carolyn Steedman, Cathy Urwin, and
Valerie Walkerdine (eds), Language, Gender and Childhood (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985);
Paula S. Fass (ed.), The Routledge History of Childhood in the Western World (London: Routledge,
2013); Helen Schwartzman, Transformations: The Anthropology of Children’s Play (New York: Plenum
248 Serial Forms
adults and children: ‘we enjoy [Dickens’s novels] like children at a play, laughing
and crying at the images which pass before us’.125 Benjamin connects this childish
playing with the work of overcoming the terror of the immensity of the world
through habit-building: ‘[h]abit enters life as a game, and in habit, even in its
most sclerotic forms, an element of play survives to the end’.126 This is significant
for my argument about the function of the serial in both emancipating and dis-
ciplining people into a new understanding of civic life. The serial invites partici-
pation and play, but its regularity and predictability also creates habit and
consensus. The serial beats the rhythm of repetitive habit, but it also helps to cre-
ate habitus, or a dwelling-place or home in history.127
Miniatures of all kinds were mediating a gigantic global history for a new
public.128 The paradox of ‘a pocket model of the Colosseum’, a miniature of a
building famous for both its physical vastness and its symbolic power, and
Bulwer’s playfulness in constructing Pompeii as ‘but the miniature, the microcosm
of Rome’ (366) are deliberate and self-conscious challenges to scale. They are not
analogues to bourgeois interiority, they are externalized into material and
manipulable entities through which people can enter into an experience of the
past. Rather than representing a utopian reverie, their manipulations of scale
allow the possibility of other imaginative manipulations of scale, thereby making
it possible for anyone to imagine themselves as being worth as much as anyone
else. The miniature in this period is the equipment with which the people can
start to feel their way, at an appropriate and equivalent scale, into history.
Conclusion: The Scale of History
If the new media of shows, panoramas, cheap illustrated periodicals, and his-
torical fiction in this period created a version of the past which was ‘more richly
Press, 1978); Megan Brandow-Faller (ed.), Childhood by Design: Toys and the Material Culture of
Childhood, 1700–Present (New York: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2018).
125 Lewes, ‘Dickens in Relation to Criticism’, p. 154.

126 Walter Benjamin, ‘Toys and Play’, repr. in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 2, Part 1:
1927—1930, pp. 117–21, p. 120.
127 I use ‘habitus’ here in Bourdieu’s sense, which sees practice as an interaction produced between
‘habitus’ and ‘field’: see Pierre Bourdieu and Loíc J. D. Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992).
128 Since I first wrote this chapter, Melinda Rabb has published on miniatures in the eighteenth
century and our arguments are similar, although the material miniatures that she discusses were
expensive and available to far fewer people. Rabb claims that eighteenth-century miniatures ‘partici-
pate in the effort to overcome the “difficulty getting to grips” with new cognitive demands of global-
ization, changing ideas of the human subject, consumerism, and scientific inquiry.’ I agree with her,
and with her suggestion, ‘that miniaturization served purposes far more public, social, and institu-
tional’ than are allowed for by Stewart’s work. Melinda Rabb, Miniature and the English Imagination:
Literature, Cognition, and Small-Scale Culture, 1650–1765 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2019), pp. 3–4, 8.
variegated and dense’ than before, did this compromise the scale of the present?129
What was the scalar relationship between the present and the past perceived to be
in the early nineteenth century? Or did nineteenth-century historicism perform
the trick of drawing the past closer at the same time as making it more remote
and projecting it further away? Certainly, manipulations of scale in print and
show culture could achieve such contradictions. The miniature could become the
means of mediating the gigantic. The serial form, too, is uniquely able to calibrate
different scales and measures of time, and to project diverse models of space, par-
ticularly when illustrated with visual images.130 If Knight’s Penny Magazine was
about ‘an indescribable variety of things’, its serial form structured their relation-
ship to one another in ways that were complex and inherently scalar.131
John Galt certainly noted a change in scales of newsworthiness at the turn into
the nineteenth century, thinking it ‘very curious’ that ‘as the parish increased in
population, there should have been less cause for matter to record. Things that in
former days would have occasioned great discourse and cogitation, are forgotten,
with the day in which they happen.’132 Galt here seems to represent moderniza-
tion as acceleration. The rush onwards into the next day creates an ephemerality
and forgetting of each day as it passes. It is the future that is always being prepared
for and cared for in dailiness, rather than the day itself. A new relationship between
the day and eventfulness shifts events onto a different scale. But the paradox here
is, of course, in Galt’s defiant insistence on the local doings of the Parish in his
Annals of the Parish. The Annals are part of a portable print culture of locality and
localism which is not contrary to, but rather called forth by, a widening global
culture.133 The scalar relationship between local and global is by no means as sim-
ple as it might seem. Oddly, the local grows as the global shrinks.
Today, we inhabit a ‘massive present, which is “invasive, omnipresent [and] has
no horizon other than itself,” and which is constantly in the business of “manufac-
turing” the past around its own requirements’.134 François Hartog’s analysis of the
129 Will Straw has suggested that new media ‘have consistently rendered the past more richly varie-
gated and dense’: Will Straw, ‘Embedded Memories’, in Charles R. Acland (ed.), Residual Media
(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), pp. 3–15, p. 12.
130 In this I agree with Hopwood, Schaffer, and Secord that the serial ‘is particularly strong in relat-
ing different scales and perceptions of time, as well as arrangements in space’: Nick Hopwood, Simon
Schaffer, and Jim Secord, ‘Seriality and Scientific Objects in the Nineteenth Century’, History of Science
48 (2010): 251–85, p. 278.
132 John Galt, The Annals of the Parish and the Ayrshire Legatees [1801] (Edinburgh: William
Blackwood and Sons, 1841), p. 139.
133 See John Plotz, ‘The Semi-Detached Provincial Novel’, Victorian Studies 53:3 (2011): 405–16
and Josephine McDonagh,‘Rethinking Provincialism in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Fiction: Our
Village to Villette’, Victorian Studies 55: 3 (2013): 399–424.
134 François Hartog, Régimes D’Historicité: Présentisme et Expériences du Temps (Paris: Seuil, 2003).
The translations from Hartog are Patrick Wright’s from his 2009 preface to On Living in an Old
Country (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. xviii. I am grateful to Patrick for drawing my
attention to Hartog’s work.
250 Serial Forms
‘regimes of historicity’ argues that in the late twentieth century the future ceased
to make sense of the present as it had done previously, so that now, in the modern
regime of historicity, ‘light is produced by the present itself, and by it alone’.135
I argue that the political disaffection of the years between 1815 and 1848 produced
a similar, although not identical, form of presentism. A breaking from the past
delivered the equipment of that past as disjecta membra into the hands of a growing
populace, who were then able to stick, paste, play, copy, and imagine themselves
into a historical present.
135 Ibid., p. xviii.

7
Biopolitics of Seriality
‘We mean to run too, and add our share to the heap of increase’1
William and Mary Howitt launched the weekly Howitt’s Journal at the beginning
of 1847 with an address to their readers which stated their intention to ‘run’ and
to add to the ‘heap of increase’. And run they did, at least until the middle of 1848,
when a dispute with another publisher closed the journal. Despite the shortness
of its ‘run’, this chapter uses Howitt’s Journal to consider how seriality was becom-
ing increasingly important to the creation and maintenance of what we might
now call biopolitics. The ‘heap of increase’ that the Howitts were eagerly looking
forward to augmenting with their pages was an increase of ‘the entertainment, the
good, and the advancement of the public’.2 More specifically, though, their new
journal was directed ‘[t]o all the onward and sound movements of the time—a
great and glorious time!—to the cause of peace, of Temperance, of Sanatory [sic]
reform, of Schools for every class—to all the efforts of Free Trade, free opinion; to
abolition of all destructive Monopolies, and the recognition of those great rights
which belong to every individual of the great British people’.3 The increase would
be in happiness and health, but the magazine would also take an energetic interest
in biological increase: in the generation of children and the care of bodies, both
infant and adult. Environmental improvements and intellectual growth should
accompany population growth: the idea of ‘increase’ suggests the promoting,
administering and securing of life.4
1 William and Mary Howitt, ‘William and Mary Howitt’s Address to their Readers’, Howitt’s Weekly
Journal of Literature and Popular Progress 1:1 (2 January 1847), p. 2. Howitt’s Journal is hereafter
referred to in footnotes as ‘HJ’. As Brian Maidment explains: ‘There are considerable difficulties to be
overcome in untangling the complex of magazines which form Howitt’s Journal, The People’s Journal
and The People’s and Howitt’s Journal. These complexities largely derive from a widely publicized dis-
pute between the Howitts and John Saunders, the proprietor of Howitt’s Magazine.’ Like Maidment, in
this chapter, I am defining Howitt’s Journal as the volumes published between 1847 and 1848 variously
by Darnton and Co., William Lovett, and John Saunders under the title of Howitt’s Weekly Journal of
Literature and Popular Progress. ‘The magazine was published weekly and cost 1½d unstamped and
2½d stamped. Each weekly issue comprised 14 pages of the magazine proper, extensively illustrated
with wood engravings, and a two-page supplement called “The Weekly Record” which comprised
news items relevant to the interests of a broadly defined area of “popular progress”.’ Brian E. Maidment,
‘Works in Unbroken Succession’: The Literary Career of Mary Howitt’, in Kay Boardman and Shirley
Jones (eds), Popular Victorian Women Writers (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), pp. 22–45,
p. 42 n. 33.
2 HJ 1:1 (2 January 1847), p. 1. 3 HJ 1:1 (2 January 1847), pp. 1–2.
4 Edmund Burke had been enthusiastic about any institution ‘found to contain a principle
favourable . . . to the increase of mankind’: Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France: and
© Clare Pettitt.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198830429.001.0001
252 Serial Forms
Seriality facilitates the production of the politics of sentiment because a ‘run’

can ‘add to the heap of increase’. The serial offers a model for accumulation. It can
slowly build up a body of information in a way which invites and assumes revisit-
ing and reflection over time, appropriating the diachronic structure of the
ongoing ‘run’ to create pools of sentiment and significance around particular
topics. Seriality can become a means of ‘affective time-keeping’.5 These serial con-
structions take on a sentimental life through reproduction and repetition. Howitt’s
opening ‘Address’ continues, ‘[a]bove all, it shall be our anxious care that not a
word or sentiment shall appear in this journal which the most refined individual
may not read aloud in the family circle, or which we would not freely introduce to
our own children’.6 Reconsidering ‘the family circle’ and the production of the
domestic and the sentimental in the 1840s in biopolitical terms, I suggest that
Howitt’s reveals the fast-changing relationship between ‘family’ and ‘labour’ in the
1840s. In this chapter, I examine the categories of ‘the child’, ‘the Irish’, and ‘the
slave’, all of which are produced in the pages of Howitt’s Journal by seriality itself.
Critics have tended to dismiss Howitt’s Journal as ‘bland’: Peter Mandler
describes it as offering a ‘bland but timely diet of popular uplift’ and Jenny Uglow
says that ‘its varied ingredients [were] boiled down into a rather bland soup with
a dominant flavour of romantic, high-minded reformism, salted by Samuel
Smiles’s self-help’.7 Perhaps it is because the journal did not survive long that it
has been so easily dismissed, but this chapter will argue that it was really very far
from ‘bland’.8 For a start, Mary and William Howitt were not bland people. From
a Quaker background, although latterly Unitarians, and, in Mary’s case, ultimately
Roman Catholic, they were radical reformers, intellectuals, feminists, animal-
rights activists, abolitionists, and prolific writers. When Howitt’s Journal was
launched in 1847, Mary Howitt was already a well-known poet, children’s writer,
and translator. Elizabeth Gaskell, whose first stories would later be published in
Howitt’s, had met her for the first time in Heidelberg in 1840, and was surprised
on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London Relative to that Event, ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), p. 233.
5 The phrase is Dana Luciano’s: Dana Luciano, Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in
Nineteenth-Century America (New York: New York University Press, 2007), p. 5. I am also grateful to
Luciano for a term that I use later in the chapter, ‘chronobiopolitics’: Arranging Grief, p. 9.
6 HJ 1:1 (2 January 1847), p. 2.
7 Peter Mandler, ‘William Howitt (1792–1879)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, https://
doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/13998. Jenny Uglow, Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories (London: Faber &
Faber, 1993), p. 171.
8 Brian Maidment also claims that Howitt’s Journal was ‘in many respects the best conceived and
most ambitiously pitched journal of those which sought to inform, elevate and interest artisan readers’:
Brian E. Maidment, ‘Howitt’s Journal of Literature and Popular Progress (1847–1848)’, in Laurel Brake
and Marysa Demoor (eds), Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland
(Ghent: Academia Press; London: British Library, 2009), pp. 293–4, p. 293. See also E. M. Palmegiano,
‘Howitt’s Journal’, in Perceptions of the Press in Nineteenth-Century British Periodicals: A Bibliography
(London: Anthem Press, 2012), pp. 327–8, doi:10.7135/UPO9781843317562.
Biopolitics of Seriality 253
by her glamour: ‘instead of the simple Quaker I had pictured to myself ’, she
encountered ‘a lady in gay-coloured satin, black satin scarf & leghorn bonnet with
a plume of drooping white feather’.9 William’s numerous non-fiction books were
popular and widely read. A married couple who worked together, they brought
their daughter, Anna Mary, an artist, into the family business as an illustrator.
Brian Maidment has remarked that ‘it is perhaps hardly surprising that the
Victorians, and to some extent subsequent criticism has invented a single author
called “The Howitts” ’.10
If Howitt’s Journal is restored to the context within which it was generated, a rap-
idly shifting political moment in which ‘rights’ and ‘freedom’ were terms coming
under increasing pressure from many directions, it becomes a nodal cultural object
in which radicalism, sentiment, and emergent regimes of the body all intersect.
At its launch in 1847, Howitt’s Journal boasted many innovative features. The
opening ‘Address’ insisted on its internationalist aims, ‘to introduce to our readers
whatever is most delightful in the literature of other nations; of America, and of
Europe, from France and Italy to the very North’, and the Howitts translated and
published texts, particularly from German and from the Scandinavian languages,
including many stories by Hans Christian Andersen, translated from the Danish
by Mary Howitt herself, and extracts from the novels of George Sand, translated
from the French.11 They were also unusual in commissioning many women writers
and artists to work on Howitt’s: Mary Howitt herself was mentor to a whole
generation of aspiring female writers. Brian Maidment has rightly pointed to the
journal’s illustrations, particularly its wood-engravings of famous paintings,
claiming that the Howitts have not ‘been given sufficient credit for their part in
democratising high art images’.12 Maidment recognizes Howitt’s Journal as very
much of its moment in the 1840s, a journal which ‘seeks to translate diversity,
manifested in social class, age, and gender into a single social project’.13 He is
right: by its insistent return to injustice and inequality and its serial repetition of
exemplary narratives of injustice around gender, race, class, and age, Howitt’s
9 Quoted in Uglow, Elizabeth Gaskell, p. 143.

10 Maidment, ‘Works in Unbroken Succession’, p. 29. Howitt’s Journal defined its readership as ‘the
million’, although its readership is elsewhere estimated at 30,000, but its influence continued well into
the 1850s (see Mandler, ‘William Howitt’). In the mid-1850s, the most numerous bound periodicals in
the Huddersfield Female Educational Institute Library were ‘the Penny Magazine (nineteen),
Chambers’s Miscellaneous Tracts (fourteen), Howitťs Journal (twelve), and the Saturday Magazine
(eight)’: Teresa Gerrard and Alexis Weedon, ‘Working-Class Women’s Education in Huddersfield: A
Case Study of the Female Educational Institute Library, 1856–1857’, Information & Culture: A Journal
of History 49:2 (2014): 234–64, p. 249. See also Brian E. Maidment, ‘Magazines of Popular Progress
and the Artisans’, Victorian Periodicals Review 17:3 (Fall 1984): 82–94, https://www.jstor.org/
stable/20082117.
11 HJ 1:1 (2 January 1847), p. 2. 12 Maidment, ‘Works in Unbroken Succession’, p. 39.
13 Maidment, ‘Works in Unbroken Succession’, p. 39.
254 Serial Forms
Journal unconsciously reveals the profound connection between these constructs.14

As Jenny Uglow says, Howitt’s Journal ‘contains every kind of radicalism’.15
But rather than translating these many radical positions into a ‘single social
project’ as Maidment suggests, I think that Howitt’s compartmentalizes them.
Class, age, gender, and race in Howitt’s become entangled only at the level of the
page. In the first issue, for example, sanitary reformer Thomas Southwood Smith
leads with ‘An Address to the Working Classes of the United Kingdom on their
Duty in the Present State of the Sanatory [sic] Question’. Although the article
starts by stating that ‘[t]he artificial distinctions by which the people of a country
are divided into different classes, have no relation to the capacities or endow-
ments of our common nature . . . it is the universal possession of these noble
faculties by the human race, that makes the gift of human life alike a boon to all’,
it swiftly turns to focus on class division and to the ‘annual slaughter’ of the work-
ing classes caused by squalid living conditions and disease unchecked by govern-
mental ‘apathy’, and calls upon the workers to ‘rouse yourselves and show that you
will submit to this dreadful state of things no longer’.16 This is closely followed by
a piece from ‘Silverpen’—aka the feminist Eliza Meteyard—called ‘Life’s Contrasts,
or, New Year’s Eve’, which explicates an accompanying full-page engraving of a
series of vignettes of poverty: a pauper’s funeral, a ‘magdalene’s’ suicide, and a
criminal’s incarceration encircling a central image of a brightly-lit new year’s
party in a comfortable drawing room.17 Between the sentimental descriptions of
poverty and despair are inserted italicized passages in a prophetic register, for
example: ‘Of the fruits of labour the human generations cannot have too large a
harvest’.18 Redemption comes with the ringing in of the new year, and through the
figure of the mother in the last paragraph, ‘whilst humanity lingers in the moth-
er’s heart’.19 The issue closes with ‘Poetry. Lyrics of Life by Mary Howitt. New
Series. No. 1: The Children’: ‘Eloquent the children’s faces - | Poverty’s lean look,
which saith, | Save us! Save us! woe surrounds us; | Little knowledge sore con-
founds us: | Life is but a lingering death!’20 In its first issue, Howitt’s has already
interpellated ‘the industrial working class’, ‘the mother’, ‘the fallen woman’, and
14 Nancy Fraser points out that the contestation of the bourgeois public sphere’s claim to unity and
singularity did not begin, as Habermas implies, in the second half of the nineteenth century, because
there already existed ‘virtually contemporaneous with the bourgeois public sphere . . . a host of com-
peting counterpublics, including nationalist publics, popular peasant publics, elite women’s publics,
and working class publics’: Nancy Fraser, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the
Critique of Actually Existing Democracy’, in Craig Calhoun (ed.), Habermas and the Public Sphere
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), pp. 109–42, p. 116. See also Mary P. Ryan, Women in Public:
Between Banners and Ballots, 1825–1880 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990).
15 Uglow, Elizabeth Gaskell, p. 171.
16 Thomas Southwood Smith, ‘An Address to the Working Classes of the United Kingdom on Their
Duty in the Present State of the Sanatory [sic] Question’, HJ (2 January 1847): 3–4, pp. 3, 4.
17 ‘Silverpen’ [Eliza Meteyard], ‘Life’s Contrasts, or, New Year’s Eve’, HJ (2 January 1847): 4–6, p. 5.
18 ‘Silverpen’, ‘Life’s Contrasts’, p. 6 (emphasis original). 19 ‘Silverpen’, ‘Life’s Contrasts’, p. 6.
20 Mary Howitt, ‘Poetry. Lyrics of Life by Mary Howitt. New Series. No. 1: The Children’ HJ 1:1
(2 January 1847), p. 14.
‘the poor child’, but all fenced into separate spaces, articles, and vignettes. In its
very page layout, Howitt’s Journal is unconsciously reconstructing biosocial (that
is, ‘racial’) divisions within the supposedly ‘universal . . . human race’. From its
inception, Howitt’s Journal unconsciously dramatizes the emergence of a self-
contradiction at the heart of the progressive project which mobilizes humanitar-
ian sentiment and a politics of care as a cure for the social divisions created by
capitalism, industrialization, and urbanization. By its return again and again to
the idea of the ‘generation’ and to the newly emerging meaning of ‘life’, it partici-
pates in a capitalist biopolitical agenda even as it rails against the injustices of a
system that ‘uses up’ the lives of the labouring poor, and which kills their children
by neglect and disease.
‘Generation’ and ‘Life’
When Howitt’s Journal entered the world, the phenomenon of human life was
coming under new scientific and social-scientific scrutiny. By the 1830s, heredity
was emerging as a biological concept and the human sciences were gaining pro-
fessional ground in the 1840s. The word ‘generation’ recurs often in Howitt’s
Journal. Its oldest and established meaning was historical: Immanuel Kant had
imagined history as stadial: ‘an immense series of generations . . . develop, each of
which transmits its enlightenment to the next’.21 And the word is often used his-
torically in Howitt’s: Ebenezer Elliott, the ‘Corn-Law Rhymer’, was born in 1781,
‘in the very thick of this swarming, busy, laborious, yet miserable generation’, for
example, or ‘[h]istory is full of instances in which the successive generations of a
people have been swept away with extraordinary rapidity’, as Southwood Smith
tells the reader.22 Silverpen uses it prophetically—‘Of the fruits of labour the
human generations cannot have too large a harvest’—and the phrase ‘the rising
generation’ occurs frequently, referring to the youth of the present day, as when
John Cowie says ‘for the sake of the rising generation, and for woman’s especial
sake, I hail with joy the formation of the Mechanics’ Institutions’.23 The concept of
‘the generation’ was gaining currency in the 1840s as rapid social growth and
urbanization was making very apparent people’s changing lifestyles, and it was at
this time that the term ‘generation’ began to be used to express a rhythm of
21 Immanuel Kant, ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim’, [1784], trans.
Allen W. Wood, in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant: Anthropology, History and
Education, ed. Günter Zöller and Robert B. Louden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007),
pp. 107–21, p. 110, para. 8.19.
22 William Howitt, ‘Memoir of Ebenezer Elliott’, HJ 1:14 (3 April 1847): 184–6, p. 184.
23 John Cowie, ‘Noble Sentiments on the Influence of Women, from the Introductory Address to
the Edinburgh Mechanics’ Institution, by John Cowie, Working Silversmith’, Weekly Record, HJ 1:11
(13 March 1847), p. 21. In Volume One of HJ (January–June 1847), the ‘rising generation’ is also men-
tioned on pp.108, 109, 120, 154, and 224.
256 Serial Forms
historical development that mapped onto the biological lifespan of humans.24

‘The generation is a dynamic compromise between mass and individual’, says José
Ortega y Gasset, writing in the early twentieth century, adding that it ‘is the most
important conception in history’.25 In his formulation, ‘[c]ommunity of date
and space are . . . the primary attributes of a generation’.26 But sociologist Karl
Mannheim disagrees: ‘[g]eneration as an actuality . . . involves even more than
mere copresence in such a historical and social region . . . [It also requires] partici-
pation in the common destiny of this historical and social unit.’27 He argues that
peasants are therefore not of the same ‘generation’ as educated urban youth, even
if living close by and at the same time, and furthermore that ‘a generation’ does
not have to live in the same region, as, through the very idea of ‘the generation’, ‘it
was possible to unite individuals scattered spatially and otherwise’.28 Mannheim
suggests that it is the groups that ‘consciously experience and emphasize their
character as generation units’ that become particularly important.29
By 1848, the revolutionary Springtime of the Peoples would bring the serial
idea of the generation fully to the forefront of ‘history’, but in 1847 we can see ‘the
generation’ mustering in the pages of Howitt’s Journal which, in an attempt to
create a universal bond of belonging across its readership, reaches for the modish
and quasi-scientific language of demographics and population science. But ‘gen-
eration’ in Howitt’s is also deployed in a slightly different sense, to mean ‘genera-
tive’ or ‘giving life’. The return to the idea of ‘life’ across the run is notable, from
‘Lyrics of Life by Mary Howitt’, to Southwood Smith’s bio-medical recommenda-
tions ‘to prolong the actual duration of life, to physiologist William Carpenter’s
series ‘Physiology for the People’, in which he expounds on ‘The Dependence of
Life’ on heat, light, and air.30 Mary Howitt touches on the rapid growth of popula-
tion in her opening poem ‘The Children’: ‘We are thousands—many thousands! |
Every day our ranks increase’, which carries just the faintest whiff of a threat while
accurately reflecting the vast rate of population growth in Britain since the begin-
ning of the nineteenth century. Between 1831 and 1851, the population would
grow by a third. Howitt’s grapples with various representational strategies to
address the scalar problem of the relationship of the individual to the ‘population’
24 Karl Mannheim also argued that rapid social change is a prerequisite for the generation unit to
emerge, noting that peasants live in societies that change very slowly: Karl Mannheim, ‘What is a
Social Generation?’, in Anthony Esler (ed.), The Youth Revolution: The Conflict of Generations in
Modern History (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath and Co., 1974), pp. 7–14.
25 José Ortega y Gasset, ‘What is a Generation?’, in Esler (ed.), The Youth Revolution, pp. 3–6, p. 3.
26 Ortega y Gasset, ‘What is a Generation?, p. 6.
27 Mannheim, ‘What is a Social Generation?’, pp. 7–8 (emphasis original).
28 Mannheim, ‘What is a Social Generation?’, p. 9.
29 Karl Mannheim, ‘What is a Social Generation?’, p. 14. See also Robert Wohl, The Generation of
1914 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979).
30 Smith, ‘Address to the Working Classes’, p. 3. William B. Carpenter’s nine-part series ‘Physiology
for the People’ commenced in Howitt’s Journal on 20 February 1847, pp. 100–1.
or, in the language of liberalism, the relationship of the responsible subject to the
idea of human life as human capital.31
Michel Foucault famously identified a shift by the early nineteenth century
towards a governmental investment in the maximization of life.32 He posited a
switch from sovereign power to biopower, ‘a power bent on generating forces,
making them grow, and ordering them, rather than one dedicated to impeding
them, making them submit, or destroying them’.33 Capitalism needs ‘bio-capital’,
and bio-capital is not people as such, but the aggregate of directed human energy
necessary to keep everything growing.34 Howitt’s Journal is startlingly radical in
revealing the interconnectedness of different versions of biopower, but by its very
inclusivity as a journal it ends by subsuming and performing the work of bio-
power itself. Its insistence on including the opinions of all its readers, ‘be they
masters or men, be they men or women’, hardens divisions and ringfences
stereotypical identities even as it strains towards universalism and inclusion.35 For
division is the name of the game in a biopolitical regime. In the pages of Howitt’s
we can see the accidental backflip of radically progressive politics into ‘racist
concern with biological purity’ as ‘the prophetic-revolutionary promise becomes
medical-hygienic conformity with the norm’ and a ‘discourse against power is
transformed into a discourse of power.’36 As Foucault puts it, ‘[r]acism is, quite
31 Rachel C. Lee discusses ‘the tripartite scales of biosociality—the scale of the person, the scale of
the microbe, and the scale of the population’: Rachel C. Lee, The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America:
Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Posthuman Ecologies (New York: New York University Press, 2014), p. 30.
32 Michel Foucault’s categorical refusal of reductive linear chronology goes back to Les Mots et les
choses (1966) [The Order of Things] and L’archéologie du savoir (1969) [The Archaeology of Knowledge],
when he introduced what he called his ‘genealogical’ approach, asking ‘[w]hat series of series may be
established? And in what large-scale chronological table may distinct series of events be determined?’
Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (London: Routledge,
2002), p. 4. Foucault was concerned with ‘the descent of practices as a series of events. Unlike the
continuities of a theory of origins, genealogy underscores the jolts and surprises of history, the chance
occurrences, in order to “maintain passing events in their proper dispersion.” To this extent it resem-
bles archaeology.’ Thomas R. Flynn, ‘Foucault’s Mapping of History’ in Gary Gutting (ed.), The
Cambridge Companion to Foucault (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 29–48,
pp. 34–5. The internal quotation here is from Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice:
Selected Essays and Interviews, trans. Donald Buchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
33 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction (New York: Vintage Books,
1980), p. 136.
34 Foucault’s later work on biopolitics hinges on a scalar difference between two different interlock-
ing series: ‘we have two series: the body–organism–discipline–institutions series, and the population–
biological processes–regulatory mechanisms–State’: Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended:
Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David
Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), p. 250. Foucault himself acknowledges that these two series cannot
be kept hygienically apart, and even that their terms continuously re-create one another. The relation-
ships between elements of the two series (the body vs the population, for example, or discipline vs
regulatory mechanisms) are scalar relationships, and the ways in which the smaller terms interact
with the larger, or even how both bring each other into being, is not always clear.
35 Weekly Record, HJ 1:1 (2 January 1847).
36 Thomas Lemke, Biopolitics: An Advanced Introduction, trans. Eric Frederick Trump (New York:
New York University Press, 2011), all quotations p. 44.
258 Serial Forms
literally, revolutionary discourse in an inverted form’.37 Foucault’s deployment of

the term ‘racism’ has been rightly criticized for its Eurocentrism, and he pays no
attention to skin racism, slavery, or the politics of race in imperial and colonial
contexts, but despite the use of this inappropriate term he makes an interesting
move.38 Foucault is thinking of racism in terms of the marking out of particular
socio-biological groups (they could be ‘fallen women’, ‘the elderly’, or ‘the poor’,
etc.) as obstructive to the security, purity, or productive growth of ‘society’.39
He suggests that such categories can become ‘racialized’ by their exclusion
from participation in the polis, even if they still exist within the polis. Foucault
further explains, ‘[i]t is a racism that a society will practice against itself,
against its own elements, against its own products; it is an internal racism—
that of constant purification—which will be one of the fundamental dimensions
of social normalization’.40 The state abrogates the right ‘to make live and let die’
(faire vivre et laisser mourir).41 The Howitts were personal friends of Frederick
Douglass and Howitt’s Journal’s position on racial slavery in America is, predictably,
one of furious and active abolitionism. But it is the juxtaposition of its abolitionism
with its feminism and its championing of artisans’ and children’s rights which
deserves closer analysis in terms of the emergent liberalism of the 1840s and the
entanglement of that liberalism with nineteenth-century racial thinking.42
37 Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, p. 81. He asks, ‘[h]ow can a power such as this kill, if it is
true that its basic function is to improve life, to prolong its duration, to improve its chances, to avoid
accidents, and to compensate for failings? . . . It is . . . at this point that racism intervenes’: Society Must
Be Defended, p. 254.
38 Ann Stoler is right that ‘the issue of racism in [Foucault’s] . . . lectures seems ancillary and oddly
displaced’, and she notes ‘Foucault’s cursory treatment in the 1976 lectures of the relationship between
nation, citizenship, and race’: Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of
Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), pp. 59, 93.
39 Ann Stoler says that ‘Foucault is emphatic that racism is neither his subject nor his primary
concern’, but she notes his Eurocentrism too, finding in his work ‘a focus on racism and an elision of it,
a historiography so locked in Europe and its discursive formations that colonial genocide and narra-
tives about it could only be derivative of the internal dynamics of European states’: Stoler, Race and the
Education, pp. 55, 59–60. Foucault’s theories called out responses from Giorgio Agamben, and from
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. ‘Their respective theories assign a strategic role to demarcation
and delimitation. According to Agamben, it is the basic separation of “bare life”—the form of exist-
ence reduced to biological functions—and political existence that has shaped Western political history
since antiquity. He argues that the constitution of sovereign power requires the production of a biopo-
litical body and that the institutionalization of law is inseparably connected to the exposure of “bare
life.” Hardt and Negri diagnose a new stage of capitalism that is characterized by the dissolution of the
boundaries between economy and politics, production and reproduction. Whereas Agamben criti-
cizes Foucault for neglecting the fact that modern biopolitics rests on the solid basis of a premodern
sovereign power, Hardt and Negri hold that Foucault did not recognize the transformation of modern
into postmodern biopolitics.’ Lemke, ‘Introduction’, in Biopolitics, pp. 1–8, p. 6.
40 Michel Foucault, Difendere la società (Florence: Ponte alle Grazie, 1990), p. 55, quoted in Stoler,
Race and the Education, p. 67.
41 Michel Foucault, ‘Faire vivre et laisser mourir: la naissance du racisme’, Les Temps Modernes
46:535 (February 1991): 37–61, p. 38, quoted in Stoler, Race and the Education, p. 81.
42 For a sustained account of the Howitts’ intellectual, religious, and publishing networks, see
Joanne Shattock, ‘Researching Periodical Networks: William and Mary Howitt’ in Alexis Easley,
Andrew King and John Morton, (eds.), Researching the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press: Case
Studies (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018), pp.60-73.
Nevertheless, there is no ignoring the passion and eloquence of Howitt’s

exposure of the consequences of the conversion of labour into bio-capital. In a
story called ‘Peter Winch: The Man who Always had a Penny’, for example, a
‘[p]oor hard-worked, honest, worn-out daily labourer’ keels over and refuses to
apply for Parish Relief: ‘[h]e did not know that it was premature Old Age who had
come to him’.43 He is literally worn out: ‘[a]ll his vitality had been exclusively
devoted to gravel pits and roads, and every other kind of hard work that fell in his
way’.44 Through his struggle for subsistence he has become the exhausted remain-
der, ‘a living form of human waste’, discarded as no longer productive.45 Certainly,
Howitt’s tells us that Peter Winch ‘had no time for the chance of his mind’s fair
growth’ before he was spent.46 Like Mannheim’s peasant, he belongs to no gener-
ation, and he has no cultural or financial capital to pass to the next generation. He
is even denied the surplus end-life of wise but economically unproductive old
age: he is only labour, and when his labour is exhausted, he dies. Generation is
future-directed and depends on a serial progressive model of identity, growth,
and accrual. Old age presents a problem when it impairs the capacity for labour
and productivity.47 ‘Generation’ is a concept particularly dear to liberal thinking
and Foucault explicitly conceives of ‘liberalism as the general framework of
biopolitics’.48 In his later lectures, though, Foucault also tends to model power as
monolithic, centralized, and governmental, whereas in Britain, in the 1840s
anyway, power was contested and distributed unevenly across state and non-
governmental agencies, churches, and charities: in other words, across a wide
variety of liberal institutions.49
43 R. H. Horne, ‘Peter Winch: The Man who Always had a Penny’, HJ 1:1 (2 January 1847): 10–12,
p. 11.
44 Horne, ‘Peter Winch’, p. 11.
45 The phrase is Melissa Wright’s: Melissa Wright, Disposable Women and Other Myths of Global
Capitalism (New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 2. Neferti X. M. Tadiar has written about the disposability
of some human lives: ‘[i]n contrast to the life as interest-bearing capital . . . that is, life with accumulable
value transmissible across generations (through the augmented cultural and educated capital of their
progeny as well as through inheritable wealth) . . . [this life] is of diminishing value, operating on a
trajectory of consumption and eventual waste . . . [its] value declining irreversibly over time’:
Neferti X. M. Tadiar, ‘Life-Times in Fate-Playing’, South Atlantic Quarterly 111:4 (Fall 2012): 783–802,
p. 787. It is important to note that Tadiar is discussing female, as against male, Mexican factory
labourers in the twenty-first century here. I am arguing that the contours of the biopolitics of global
capital are already emerging in the industrializing England of the nineteenth century.
46 Horne, ‘Peter Winch’, p. 11.
47 As Helen Small has argued, ‘bringing old age to the forefront of the discussion causes difficulties
for a general theory of how we should live, or how we should think about our values, interests, self-
hood’: Helen Small, The Long Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 266.
48 Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–79 (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 22.
49 In her work on nineteenth-century America, Kyla Schuller has usefully complicated this ques-
tion by identifying this range of state and non-governmental interventions as ‘biophilanthropy’:
Schuller, Biopolitics of Feeling, p. 21.
260 Serial Forms
Chronobiopolitics: Family Time, Calendars and Seriality
Howitt’s Journal is full of women, children, and babies. As Elizabeth Maddock

Dillon has pointed out, the question is not whether there are women writers or
women represented in the public sphere in the nineteenth century, because
images of and writing by women have been strongly present in public sphere
since at least the seventeenth century.50 No, the question is rather why that pres-
ence been so persistently and insistently misrecognized as an absence? Not only
are a high percentage of Howitt’s articles and stories authored by women, but rep-
resentations of women and children feature prominently too. Mary Howitt was an
established children’s writer (her 1828 children’s poem about grooming and
entrapment, The Spider and the Fly, is still in print today).51 She was behind the
occasional feature called ‘The Children’s Corner’ which appeared in Howitt’s
Journal with increasing frequency across the run. The spatialized demarcation of
a corner for children perhaps suggests a segregated model of family readership
but children’s literature was frequently reviewed in the adult ‘Literary Notices’
column too, and there is evidence that adult readers, those ‘newly-literate readers
of the Sunday School Penny Magazine and Howitt’s Journal,’ also used Mary
Howitt’s simple children’s books to practise their reading skills.52 ‘We are very
fond of children, and of children’s books’, starts one review which goes on to
advise against religious didacticism, preferring instead to allow children to exer-
cise freely ‘the brightness of the young spirit which comes to us with more affinity
for good than evil . . . as Wordsworth says’.53 Many of the stories in the journal
revolve around an innocent and impressible child, such as Silverpen’s revealingly
named ‘The Canker and the Cure’, a tale about a starving child who is caught
stealing but is taken into service and reclaimed (‘cured’) through kindness and
care.54 In the Autumn of 1847, alongside her work for the journal, Mary Howitt
published The Children’s Year, an account in fictionalized form of her own
children’s thoughts and activities throughout 1845. In the Preface, she explains
that ‘I resolved . . . to try the experiment of keeping for one whole year an exact
chronicle, as it were, of the voluntary occupations and pleasures, and of the senti-
ments and feelings, as far as I would gain an accurate knowledge of them, of my
50 Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, The Gender of Freedom: Fictions of Liberalism and the Literary Public
Sphere (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004).
51 The spider is male and the fly is a vain female. The poem is explicitly addressed as a warning to
‘dear little children’. Mary Howitt contributed to H.M.R. [Hannah Mary Rathbone] (ed.), Childhood,
IIlustrated in a Selection from the Poets (London: Harvey & Darton, 1841), p. v. Charles Dodgson
(Lewis Carroll) parodied the poem brilliantly as ‘The Lobster Quadrille’ in Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland (1865).
52 [Anon.], ‘Literary Notices: Aunt Carry’s Ballads for Children by the Hon. Mrs Norton’, HJ 1:2
(9 January 1847), p. 28. Joanne Shattock, ‘Elizabeth Gaskell and her Readers: From Howitt’s Journal to
the Cornhill’, Gaskell Journal 25 (2011): 77–87, p. 86.
53 [Anon.], ‘Literary Notices: Children’s Books’, HJ 1:14 (3 April 1847): 195–6, p. 195.
54 Silverpen [Eliza Meteyard], ‘The Canker and the Cure’, HJ 1:6 (6 February 1847): 75–6, p. 75.
two youngest children. This little book is the result; everything which it contains
is strictly true’.55 In it, she follows her children in their play, which is purposeful
and directed, training them for disciplined work, as when they tend their little
individual patches of garden: ‘[l]et no dear child be disheartened; let no living,
anxious mother despair; fair flowers will repay cultivation, and weeds, even net-
tles and thistles, with their insinuating roots, maybe plucked out’.56 Children are
to be ‘cultivated’ by ‘anxious’ mothers, and the serial form of the diary can track
both the mother’s efforts and the child’s responses, plotting in written form the
ongoing socialization of the young.
Howitt’s Journal carried the same message about the anxieties and responsibil-
ities of motherhood: ‘fear not, anxious mother, who wouldst that thy child should
be a prodigy of erudition and piety’.57 In this, as in much of its content, it was on
the pulse of its time. Sally Shuttleworth notes that ‘the 1840s . . . saw an extraordin-
ary flowering of the literature of child development, as well as the first steps
towards establishing the child mind as an area of medical investigation’.58 One of
Howitt’s most famous contributors (although she was not yet famous when her
Howitt’s stories came out) was Elizabeth Gaskell, herself a very anxious mother.
Gaskell had read Madame Necker de Saussure’s L’éducation progressif (1828–32),
in which mothers were recommended to keep a baby diary.59 In 1835, when her
first surviving child, Marianne, was six months old, Gaskell started to keep her
own baby diary ‘as a token of her mother’s love, and extreme anxiety in the for-
mation of her little daughter’s character’: extreme anxiety indeed, the diary is a
record of paralysing worry, and Gaskell seems haunted, as Shuttleworth says, ‘by
the concern that by her own mismanagement she might damage her daughter’s
future character’.60 ‘Crying has been a great difficulty with me. Books do so differ’,
worries Gaskell. Marianne’s crying appears to her mother to be the expression of
55 Mary Howitt, ‘Preface’, The Children’s Year (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans,
1847), pp. v–vi, p. v. Linda Peterson suggests that The Children’s Year represents Mary Howitt’s attempt
to reconstruct a collaborative family writing practice after the trauma of the death of her son Claude
in 1844: Linda H. Peterson, ‘Collaborative Life-Writing as Ideology: The Auto/biographies of Mary
Howitt and Her Family’ in Cynthia Huff (ed.), Women’s Life Writing and Imagined Communities
(London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 176–95. In 1849, Mary Howitt published Our Cousins in Ohio, a thinly
fictionalized account of the doings of her sister and her children who had emigrated to America.
56 Mary Howitt, ‘Mary’s Little Lesson about the Garden’, The Children’s Year, pp. 53–7, p. 55. On
functionalist theories of play in the nineteenth century, see Kaiser, World in Play, pp. 106 ff.
57 [Anon.], ‘Literary Notices: Children’s Books’, p. 195.
58 Sally Shuttleworth, The Mind of the Child: Child Development in Literature, Science, and Medicine,
1840–1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 2.
59 Elizabeth Gaskell and Sophia Holland, Private Voices: The Diaries of Elizabeth Gaskell and Sophia
Holland, ed. J. A. V. Chapple and Anita C. Wilson (Keele: Keele University Press, 1996). Madame
Necker de Saussure’s book was translated into English in 1835 by Mrs Willard and Mrs Phelps. It was
published with an Appendix ‘Observations upon an infant during its first year’: a sample baby diary by
one of the translators, Emma Willard.
60 Gaskell’s first baby was a still-born little girl in 1833: see Esther Alice Chadwick, Mrs Gaskell:
Haunts, Homes, and Stories [1913] (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 135.
Shuttleworth, Mind of the Child, p. 222.
262 Serial Forms
a dangerously passionate will which must be controlled to ensure her daughter’s

productive and reproductive future.61
The impressible child is central to biopolitical thinking. As Kyla Schuller puts
it, ‘[t]he impressible body—and the sentimental body—is a biopolitical effect,
constituted by its affective linkages to the other bodies within its milieu’.62 Howitt’s
writing also emphasizes the impressibility of the child: ‘We shall be what you will
make us:– | Make us wise, and make us good!’, and she explicitly reaches for the
image of the press, printing, and impression-making: ‘We, the rising generation, |
Let us stamp the age as ours!’63 Ann Stoler has shown that one of sentimentalism’s
key victories during the mid to late nineteenth century in North America and
Europe was that ‘childhood and children in the mid- and late nineteenth century
became the subjects of legislative attention and were at the center of social policy
as they had never been before’.64 The image of ‘stamping’ and of the impressibility
of the ‘new generation’ is applied not only to children but to class. By the late
1840s, an earlier Evangelical tradition that focused ‘on children’s character as the
basis for reforming society’ had embedded itself in a more secular sentimental
mode.65 Howitt’s Journal figures itself as a ‘stamp’, using the press to exert pres-
sure: as Mary Howitt put it in her Autobiography, in launching the journal ‘we
sought, in an attractive form, to urge the labouring classes . . . to be their own ben-
efactors’.66 Agency is revealingly muddled here, urging independence and self-
care alongside the surveillance and control of these ‘labouring classes’. Another
Howitt’s article warns that it sees ‘a new generation springing up from the plastic
hand of nature, ready to receive any impression that circumstances or education
may stamp upon it, but we find it transmitting still worse deterioration to that
which has to succeed it—stamping physical as well as moral degradation upon
posterity in a downward ratio’.67 In an early issue of Howitt’s a full-page illustration
of ‘The British Museum on a British Holiday’ [Fig. 7.1] showed a long queue of
people being turned away on 26 December from the museum and from the
National Gallery which were both closed.68 ‘Our rulers do not know the people’,
complains an accompanying article: ‘[t]hey are the nursing fathers, and nursing
61 Sally Shuttleworth notes of Elizabeth Gaskell that ‘[i]nterestingly, in light of the subsequent over-
pressure controversy, she decides not to try any form of teaching until the age of 4, since a medical
man had recently informed them that the brain of the infant until the age of 3 “appeared constantly to
be verging on inflammation, which any little excess of excitement might produce” ’: Shuttleworth,
Mind of the Child, p. 222.
62 Schuller, Biopolitics of Feeling, p. 9. 63 Howitt, ‘Poetry. Lyrics of Life’, p. 14.
64 Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002), p. 120.
65 Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle
Class, 1780–1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 343.
66 Quoted in Uglow, Elizabeth Gaskell, pp. 171–2.
67 [Anon.], ‘Thomas Beggs, Three Lectures on the Moral Elevation of the People (London: Brittain,
Paternoster Row, 1847)’, HJ 1:12 (20 March 1847): 166–8, p. 166.
68 ‘The British Museum on a British Holiday’, HJ 1:3 (16 January 1847), p. 29. See Fig. 7.1.
Fig. 7.1. ‘The British Museum on a British Holiday’, Howitt’s Journal (16 January
1847), p. 29 [reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University
Library, L900.c.254.1]
mothers of the nation; and ought to know its wants, and provide for those wants
at the proper time’.69 The people are impressible infants, and the nation’s rulers
have neglected to keep a properly attentive baby diary.
The image of the child is a place-holder for the future in Howitt’s, and in the
political, legislative, and economic culture at large, too. Lee Edelman has claimed that
the child-as-future has only intensified as a cultural obsession since the nineteenth
century, and that ‘[t]hat Child remains the perpetual horizon of every acknowledged
politics, the fantasmatic beneficiary of every political intervention’.70 Liberalism
and globalizing commerce share an investment in the future, a moral investment
in the one case and a monetary one in the other. Both profoundly believe that
growth is synonymous with progress. Both are determined to overcome limits
to growth, be it of the individual or of productivity. Free trade does, as Carlyle
and others early recognized, link to the development other kinds of freedoms,
and it became rapidly quite difficult to identify and differentiate individual
human interests in the entangled ‘cash nexus’. To represent this future-directed
69 The accompanying article suggests that ‘[t]hey [the ruling classes] anticipate a multiplication of
statues with noses broken off, pictures with eyes scratched out, and unique vases smashed to
atoms . . . They forget that artists spring up amongst artisans rather than amongst nobles’: Fox, ‘The
British Museum Closed’, p. 30. Fox suggests artificial light could be installed so the galleries could stay
open into the evenings, allowing working people the chance to visit.
70 Edelman, No Future, p. 3.
264 Serial Forms
commercial world, proper book-keeping was required. Investments and growth

must be tracked.
While his wife tracked their children’s growth and development in her diary of
their year, William Howitt adopted the diary and the calendar form in his work
too. He made his name with The Book of the Seasons, or, The Calendar of Nature
(1831),and subsequently published Rural Life of England (2 vols) (1838), The Boy’s
Country-Book (1839), Homes and Haunts of the Eminent British Poets (1847), and,
in 1850, The Year Book of the Country; or, The Field, The Forest and the Fireside,
which was aimed explicitly at young male adult artisans. When William
announced the upcoming Visits to Remarkable Places (1840 and 1842), Elizabeth
Gaskell wrote to congratulate the Howitts on, ‘their charming descriptions of
natural scenery’, explaining that ‘I was brought up in a country town, and my lot
is now to live in or rather on the borders of a great manufacturing town’.71 In this,
she was a typical Howitt’s reader. William’s repurposing of traditional almanacs
and yearbooks for a new urban readership is cognate with the social project of
Howitt’s Journal in using a backwards-looking rural nostalgia to mark and plot
the forward movement of time and progress. As Gaskell wrote to him, ‘many
poetical beliefs are vanishing with the present generation’, and the Howitts cre-
ated a modern pastoral for urban consumption out of vanishing country lore and
values, all in the service of their commitment to urban improvement.72 As art
historian T. J. Clark has nicely put it, ‘[i]t is never the present that dreams the
future, for the present has no past life with which to make the non-existent real’.73
In July 1849, Gaskell herself would publish an article called ‘The Last Generation
in England’ in the American Sartain’s Union Magazine in which she records some
of the stories she had heard from her aunt and her friends growing up in the small
town of Knutsford, Cheshire.74 Despite its surprising conservatism as a tactic, the
Howitts were producing commercialized ethnographies of the customs of the
people which celebrated what we might now call ‘indigenous knowledge’ while
welcoming social change and progress.
71 Elizabeth Gaskell to William and Mary Howitt (? May 1838), The Letters of Mrs Gaskell, ed.
J. A. V. Chapple and Arthur Pollard (Manchester: Mandolin at Manchester University Press, 1997),
pp. 14–15, p. 14. Subsequently, Gaskell sent William Howitt an account of a visit she had made as a
schoolgirl to Clopton Hall in Warwickshire, which he used in the third chapter of Visits to Remarkable
Places (1840). He then used another letter that she had written to Mary describing old customs in
Knutsford, in the second edition of his The Rural Life of England (1840): Elizabeth Gaskell to Mary
Howitt (18 August 1838), Letters, pp. 28–33. See Alison Booth, ‘William Howitt Arrives at Homes and
Haunts’, in Homes and Haunts: Touring Writers’ Shrines and Countries (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2016), pp. 78–87.
72 Quoted in Uglow, Elizabeth Gaskell, p. 117. 73 Clark, Sight of Death, p. 241.
74 This article was the germ of the Cranford stories that Gaskell was later to publish in Household
Words. Shirley Foster describes Sartain’s as ‘an American periodical which contained sentimental and
moral tales and light sketches, as well as essays on literary subjects’: Shirley Foster, ‘Elizabeth Gaskell’s
Shorter Pieces’, in Jill L. Matus (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Elizabeth Gaskell (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007): 108–30, pp. 109–10.
Every month in Howitt’s Journal, readers were offered a seasonal engraving

from a design by the well-known German artist Wilhelm von Kaulbach, each of
which featured babies and children [see Fig. 7.2].75 January’s illustration shows
children playing around a bonfire with skates and sledges, and an essay on feeling
nature: ‘[b]eing, as most of us are, in towns, or in absorbing avocations, we are apt
to forget what lies, as an offered gift from God, like the sunrise, and the free, sweet
airs of heaven’.76 While the magazine was a weekly, it also beat this monthly sea-
sonal rhythm, perhaps in order to mitigate the darker side of its seriality, its
relentless drive onwards which projects ‘a life that seems perpetually to outpace
those who live it’.77 The Howitts used diary and almanac forms to anchor rapid
periodical time to older countryside rhythms. Their loving backward-looking
nostalgia sentimentalizes a past that they are equally keen to leave behind,
because they recognize that: ‘[t]ime brings hope and amelioration to the many
sorrowed generations of the earth’.78 The invocation of rural communities and
traditions of cooperation among the poor is really a way of looking forwards to ‘a
brighter tomorrow . . . [a] fantas[y that] reproduces the past, through displace-
ment, in the form of the future’.79 In developing this shared popular cultural heri-
tage, the Howitts hoped to inculcate a sense of belonging and community among
their imagined town-dwelling artisan readers.
William Howitt’s The Rural Life of England opens with a quotation from
Coleridge: ‘O, dear Britain, O, my mother isle! | Needs must thou prove a name
most dear and holy, | To me, a son, a brother and a friend, | A husband, and a
father!’80 The multiple familial identifications here make Britain less a mother-
land, than the figure of a whole extended family and community. While the
recurrent figure of the child in Howitt’s does seem to indicate the ‘reproductive
futurism’ of the journal, this is only one element of the journal’s biopolitical
apparatus.81 The family unit tessellates across issues of the journal, on the page in
articles and stories, as the projected domesticity of the Howitt family firm, and as
the journal’s projected readership. While Howitt’s often critiques patriarchal fam-
ily structures, the family never entirely disappears as the monad or discrete unit
75 Wilhelm von Kaulbach was famous in Germany. He worked with the artist Cornelius on the
frescos for King Ludwig I’s Glyptothek in Munich and was one of a socially committed group of
German painters who hoped to elevate the German people through the production of a new national
style.
76 William Howitt, ‘The Month in Prospect: January’, HJ 1:1 (2 January 1847): 9–10, p. 9.
77 Kaiser, World in Play, p. 23. 78 ‘Silverpen’ [Eliza Meteyard], ‘Life’s Contrasts’, p. 4.
79 Edelman, No Future, p. 31. See also Mark W. Turner’s discussion of ‘the role of the pastoral in the
contemporary world’ through his reading of Gaskell’s novella Cousin Phillis as it appeared in four
parts in the Cornhill Magazine between November 1863 and February 1864: Turner, ‘Time,
Periodicals’, p. 315.
80 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Fears in Solitude, Written in April 1798, During the Alarm of an
Invasion’, quoted in William Howitt, The Rural life of England, 2 vols (London: Longman, Orme,
Brown, Green and Longmans, 1838), vol. 1, n.p.
81 Edelman, No Future, p. 4.
266 Serial Forms
Fig. 7.2. Wilhelm von Kaulbach, illustration for William Howitt, ‘The Month in
Prospect: January’, Howitt’s Journal (2 January 1847) [reproduced by kind permission
of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library, L900.c.254.1]
of the social which guarantees futurity and generation. Even the many unortho-
dox families which are represented in Howitt’s Journal, not least by Elizabeth
Gaskell, serve exactly to perpetuate the fantasy of the family-type unit as the
guarantor of continuing productivity. Indeed, the co-option of sentiment and
feeling to the economic project of productivity is particularly marked in these
stories of unorthodox and intimate alliances.82
Interruptible Gaskell
None of the three stories that Gaskell published in Howitt’s Journal ends with
marriage and children.83 The first of them, a three-part serial, ‘Life in Manchester:
Libby Marsh’s Three Eras’, is divided into its ‘Eras’ by traditional working-class
high days and holidays.84 The first part is set on ‘St. Valentine’s Day’, when Libby
sends a little invalid boy across the way a caged canary; in the second part,
‘Whitsuntide’, she accompanies the boy and his mother on a holiday jaunt to
Dunham woods; and at ‘Michaelmas’ she comforts the mother after the boy’s
death and eventually moves in to lodge with her. Like Howitt’s itself, Gaskell’s
sentimental serial pitches the daily grind of work in industrial Manchester against
the older rhythms of the countryside. Young seamstress Libby is introduced as
‘only a single person’ who is displaced and ‘thrown among strangers’ because her
family are all dead, and who dreams of one day being ‘loving and beloved’ and
82 Like the Howitts, William and Elizabeth Gaskell had launched a writing career together, publish-
ing the first of what was intended to be a series of poems ‘rather in the manner of Crabbe’ in
Blackwood’s in January 1837. But ‘Sketches Among the Poor, No.1’ remained ‘one—the only one’ in
this marital collaboration, one of the many abandoned or collapsed serializations that litter the pages
of Victorian periodicals. The poem focuses on a dementing old lady, Mary, who mentally wanders
back to her childhood home in the Lake District and away from the hard industrial life of the city.
Gaskell later revived and rewrote this character as Alice Wilson in Mary Barton. Elizabeth Gaskell to
Mary Howitt (18 August 1838), Letters, pp. 28–33, p. 33.
83 Howitt’s Journal is often only remembered because it published Elizabeth Gaskell’s early work:
‘Libbie Marsh’s Three Eras’ (5, 12, 19 June 1847), ‘The Sexton’s Hero’ (4 September 1847), and
‘Christmas Storms and Sunshine’ (1 January 1848). ‘[P]osterity remembers it chiefly as the medium
for the first publications of Elizabeth Gaskell, whom Howitt had met through his Unitarian contacts’:
Mandler, ‘William Howitt’. For a full account of Gaskell’s publishing history, see Linda K. Hughes and
Michael Lund, Victorian Publishing and Mrs Gaskell’s Work (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of
Virginia, 1999).
84 The second Howitt’s story, ‘The Sexton’s Hero’, ends sadly. It is a tale of a long-ago renunciation
by Gilbert Dawson, who died saving his erstwhile sweetheart and her husband (the Sexton of the title,
and one of the narrators of the tale) from drowning in a fast incoming tide at Morecambe Bay in
Lancashire. The wife, Letty, and her child both die shortly after the rescue. Her husband recalls: ‘[w]e
had a boy, and we named it Gilbert Dawson Knipe; he that’s stoker on the London railway. Our girl
was carried off in teething, and Letty just quietly drooped, and died in less than a six week.’ Cotton
Mather Mills [Elizabeth Gaskell], ‘The Sexton’s Hero’, HJ 2:36 (4 September 1847), pp. 149–52, p. 152.
Stephen Gill notes how ‘strikingly’ Wordsworthian this tale is and links it to Wordsworth’s The
Excursion: Stephen Gill, ‘The Poetry of Humble Life. Elizabeth Gaskell: The Author of Mary Barton’, in
Wordsworth and the Victorians (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), pp. 117–44.
268 Serial Forms
allowed to ‘fulfil a woman’s dearest duties’.85 But the ‘very plain’ Libby does not
marry, and instead moves in with a washerwoman, Margaret Hall, who is recu-
perated into the community by Libby’s sympathy.86 There is a wedding at the end
of the story, that of Libby’s friend Anne Dixon, but it is sidelined in the narrative
by the recent death of the boy, Franky, and Libby does not attend it. ‘Do you ever
read the moral concluding sentence of a story? I never do’, smiles Gaskell at the
end of her tale, ‘but I once (in the year 1811, I think) heard of a deaf old lady liv-
ing by herself, who did’, so she gives it: ‘[Libby] has a purpose in life, and that
purpose is a holy one’.87 Libby’s cohabitation with Margaret Hall creates a pro-
ductive unit, both economically and sentimentally, as the two women each ‘watch
for the other’, helping one other emotionally, sharing the rent, and, crucially, sup-
porting each other’s work, for work must not stop: ‘ “[a]nd I mun go washing, just
as if nothing had happened” sighed forth Mrs. Hall’.88 Caring and sharing is an
important strategy for economic survival. A similar accommodation is reached in
‘Christmas Storms and Sunshine’, another of Gaskell’s Howitt’s tales, which intro-
duces its ‘heroes’ as two newspapermen, but rapidly shifts its focus from male to
female work and onto a quarrel between the two men’s wives at Christmastime,
only resolved, as in ‘Libby Marsh’, by the pathetic illness (a sudden and frighten-
ing attack of the croup) of Mrs Hodgson’s baby, Tom, ‘a poor puny little thing’.89
Unlike little crippled Franky in Libby Marsh, this child survives. ‘When you’re
busy, bring him to me’, the childless Mrs Jenkins ends by saying, ‘Do, now, it will
be a real favour. I know you must have a deal to do, with another coming.’90 The
sentiment that the women are able to share taking ‘the greatest of cares’ over the
child heals the political and class rifts between them. Jenkins is chief compositor
on the Tory Flying Post and Hodgson holds the same job on the Democratic
Examiner, while Mrs Hodgson has been a servant, and Mrs Jenkins has not.91
While Gaskell unashamedly deploys sentiment in her stories, they are also
remarkable for their careful, quiet details of women’s daily work. The description
of Mrs Hodgson trying to get through her day’s housework with a fretful baby to
look after is clearly written by the same hand that anxiously compiled Marianne’s
baby diary. Having no childminder, the mother has to carry the wakeful baby
with her to deliver her husband’s lunch in ‘a bitter wind’, and, when she returns
85 Cotton Mather Mills [Elizabeth Gaskell], ‘Life in Manchester: Libby Marsh’s Three Eras.
St. Valentine’s Day’, HJ 1:23 (5 June 1847): 310–13, pp. 310, 311.
86 [Gaskell], ‘St. Valentine’s Day’, p. 311.
87 Cotton Mather Mills [Elizabeth Gaskell], ‘Life in Manchester: Libby Marsh’s Three Eras.
Michaelmas’, HJ 1:25 (19 June 1847): 345–7, p. 347.
88 [Gaskell], ‘Michaelmas’, p. 346.
89 This account is based on Gaskell’s experience of her daughter, Marianne’s attack of croup at
18 months.
90 Cotton Mather Mills [Elizabeth Gaskell], ‘Christmas Storms and Sunshine’, HJ 3:1 (1 January
1848): 4–7, p. 7.
91 [Gaskell], ‘Christmas Storms’, p. 7.
home, ‘after she had tried to feed baby, and he had fretfully refused to take his
bread and milk, she laid him down as usual on his quilt, surrounded by play-
things, while she sided away and chopped suet for the next day’s pudding’.92 The
welcome offer of help with childcare from Mrs Jenkins means that the story ends
not with a conventional marriage plot, but with cooperation and the sharing of
domestic work between women.
There is never any doubt in Gaskell’s stories that housework and childcare
count as work. She is precise in recording just how much energy and time must
be spent in keeping a house and looking after young children and about the man-
agement skills required to do this well. The conflict between housework and paid
work outside the house is particularly visible in the two serialized stories she
wrote around this time for young readers in the Sunday School Penny Magazine,
‘Hand and Heart’ and ‘Bessy’s Troubles at Home’.93 Bessy’s troubles largely stem
from her neglecting her housekeeping duties to go ‘out charing’ (256), and ‘Hand
and Heart’ is clear about the submission required for waged labour: ‘[i]f you have
to earn money, you must steadily go on doing what you do not like perhaps; such
as working when you would like to be playing’ (214), explains eight-year old
Tom’s mother, adding that she could go out in the evenings and earn ‘a good deal
of money’ (215) as a ‘waiter at ladies’ parties’ (215) but this would mean leaving
him alone at home: ‘I must . . . think which will be most consistent with my other
duties’ (214). A letter that Gaskell wrote later in her life to a young would-be
author and mother of two small children offers some tips on task-management to
clear time for writing: ‘I hope (for instance) you soap & soak your dirty clothes
well for some hours before beginning to wash; and that you understand the com-
fort of preparing a dinner & putting it on to cook slowly, early in the morning, as
well as having always some kind of sewing ready arranged to your hand, so that
you can take it up in any odd minute and do a few stitches . . . Try hard to arrange
your work well. That is a regular piece of head-work and taxes a woman’s powers
92 [Gaskell], ‘Christmas Storms’, p. 5.

93 ‘Hand and Heart’ was published in five parts from July to December 1849. ‘Bessy’s Troubles at
Home’, the second story, was published in four parts, January to April 1852. Travers Madge who edited
the Manchester-based Sunday School Penny Magazine was a prominent Manchester Unitarian and an
active Home Visitor to the Lower Moseley Street Sunday schools with which both Elizabeth and
William Gaskell were involved. Elizabeth Gaskell wrote privately that ‘[t]he Children who like Bessy’s
Troubles are great geese, & no judges at all, which children generally are, for it is complete rubbish I
am sorry to say’: Elizabeth Gaskell to Marianne Gaskell (18 February 1852), Letters, p. 845. But,
equally, she tells an unknown correspondent in 1855 that she is arranging ‘to publish L.M. the Sexton’s
H. & “Xmas Storms & Sunshine”, “Hand & Heart” (I hope you will like that) & “Bessy’s troubles”
(rather good for nothing) in separate little penny or 2d pamphlets. For these stories are all moral &
sensible’ and will do for ‘young people’. She adds, ‘I am glad to hear that these stories are liked by
working-men & women in your parts’, so it seems that these stories were read by adults as well as
children. Elizabeth Gaskell to Unknown (27 July [1855]), The Letters of Mrs Gaskell, p. 365. A cheap
edition of Hand and Heart and Bessy’s Troubles at Home was published by Chapman & Hall in paper
covers in 1855. Quotations in this chapter are taken from ‘Bessy’s Troubles at Home’ and ‘Hand and
Heart’ in Mrs [Elizabeth] Gaskell, The Grey Woman and Other Tales (London: Smith, Elder & Co.,
1865), pp. 240–66 and pp. 213–39 respectively.
270 Serial Forms
of organization; but the reward is immediate and great.’94 The letter ends with a
warning: ‘[t]he exercise of a talent or power is always a great pleasure; but one
should weigh well whether this pleasure may not be obtained by the sacrifice of
some duty. When I had little children I do not think I could have written stories,
because I should have become too much absorbed in my fictitious people to
attend to my real ones.’95 This seems somewhat disingenuous as Gaskell did write
when her children were small, but with more waged domestic help at her disposal
than her correspondent seems to have had.
Gaskell’s writing was sentimentally very effective. In 1850, Matthew Arnold
was caught by his sister Jane reading one of her stories: ‘Matt is stretched at full
length on one sofa, reading a Christmas tale of Mrs. Gaskell’s which moves him to
tears, and the tears to complacent admiration of his own sensibility’.96 As Lauren
Berlant notes, ‘[i]dentification with suffering, the ethical response to the senti-
mental plot, leads to its repetition in the audience and thus to a generally held
view about what transformations would bring the good life into being’.97 Through
the press, sentimental fiction itself performs the work of the impress, stamping its
message of sympathy onto the reader. Matthew Arnold’s response to Gaskell is
somatic and bodily: he cries. Such readerly experiences, and the growing avail-
ability and dominance of the sentimental form in the 1830s and 1840s as the peri-
odical press expanded, meant that sympathetic identification had become a very
powerful tool of social consciousness. The serial form offered the potential for
limitless repetition, and the sentimental technique depends upon repetition for
its effects. Amanpal Garcha has claimed that Gaskell’s work shows her ‘desire to
reject the “maternal drive” that motivates feminine selflessness, not her desire to
replicate it’, and he sets out to expose instead her ‘assert[ion]’ of ‘more individual-
istic ideologies’ and ‘market values’.98 But Gaskell’s work for Howitt’s Journal is
more complicated than it seems in its negotiation of the biopolitical work of sym-
pathy. Her accounts of daily labour and the multiple micro-pressures, both emo-
tional and economic, upon her characters are meticulous. These amount to
exactly that ‘long train of grief, terror, indignation and other affections’, the full
narrative of which David Hume considers crucial to the arousal of sympathy.99
Like Gaskell herself, writing at her dining-room table in the intervals between
94 Elizabeth Gaskell to Unknown (25 September [?1862]), Letters, pp. 693–6, pp. 694.
95 Gaskell, Letters, pp. 694–5.
96 Jane Arnold to her brother, Tom (27 October [1850]) in ‘Fox How After Dr. Arnold’s Death’;
quoted in Park Honan, Matthew Arnold: A Life (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1981), p. 168.
Honan notes that the ‘tale’ may have been ‘The Moorland Cottage’ (1850) as Elsie Duncan-Jones
suggests.
97 Lauren Berlant, ‘Poor Eliza’, American Literature 70:3 (September 1998): 635–68, p. 656.
98 Garcha is discussing Cranford here: Amanpal Garcha, From Sketch to Novel: The Development of
Victorian Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 209, 187, 188. Descriptions in
Gaskell’s texts, he continues, ‘foreground her own style, and, in so doing, the market values of indi-
viduality and asociality’: p. 188.
99 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. E. Mossner (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), p. 418.
potting seedlings, sewing collars, writing letters, and arranging lunch, her charac-
ters, male and female, live in a mixed and unpredictable economy of private and
public labour.100 Gaskell’s literary work was too often interrupted, by the gar-
dener, the cook, her daughters, her husband, her many house guests, and so on,
for her to surrender fully, as Garcha suggests, to a fantasy of ‘distance, abstraction,
and individualism’.101 She certainly found the interruptions difficult, and she
found it taxing to write serial fiction at length.102 But her understanding of the
need for adaptability and flexibility reflect not an unmotherly, hard-nosed com-
mercial ambition in the marketplace, but rather a mature grasp of the permeabil-
ity of private and public life. The sentimental, the motherly, and the sympathetic,
as the run of Howitt’s Journal shows, are reproductive and productive technolo-
gies of human capital which are as essential to the smooth functioning of the
market as adequate financial capitalization.103 Sentimentalism is an engine of
biopower. Gaskell well knows that the mother and the market are not, finally,
opposing categories, as Garcha assumes them to be. Nor does the mother need to
be a biological mother. Deborah Denenholz Morse has argued of ‘Libby Marsh’s
Three Eras’ that ‘this family with two mothers rather than a father and a
mother . . . subverts the middle-class ideal’.104 Yet the investment in feminized sen-
timent in these tales underpins precisely that ‘middle-class’ (commercial) ideal,
and even unorthodox families are still conceived of as aspiring to be families.
Biological kinship is not necessary because, as Kyla Schuller points out, ‘the
impressible body rendered reproduction a social act’.105 In ‘Hand and Heart’,
Tom’s uncle says ‘[a]n orphan is kin to every one’ (230), and the narrator asks
‘[n]ow do you not see how much happier this family are from the one circum-
stance of a little child’s coming among them?’ (239) although this particular little
child is not biologically related to them. Kinship is an elastic category.
100 Nancy Fraser has written of the public sphere that ‘[o]nce the gender blindness of Habermas’s
model is overcome . . . all these connections come into view. It then becomes clear that feminine and
masculine gender identity run like pink and blue threads through the areas of paid work, state admin-
istration and citizenship as well as through the domain of familial and sexual relations. This is to say
that gender identity is lived out in all arenas of life. It is one (if not the) “medium of exchange” among
all of them, a basic element of the social glue that binds them to one another’: Nancy Fraser, ‘What’s
Critical about Critical Theory? The Case of Habermas and Gender’, in Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla
Cornell (eds), Feminism as Critique (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987),
pp. 31–55, pp. 41, 45.
101 Garcha, From Sketch to Novel, p. 218.
102 Joanne Shattock remarks upon ‘her tenacity in the face of the unpalatable demands of serializa-
tion, which she never really conquered’: Shattock, ‘Elizabeth Gaskell and her Readers’, p. 86. The most
famous example is, of course, her disagreements with Dickens over the serialization of North and
South in his Household Words.
103 Lauren Berlant has argued that in a culture lacking a rational political public sphere, manifesta-
tions of a liberal-sentimental consciousness take the place of public culture: Lauren Berlant,
Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004).
104 Deborah Denenholz Morse, ‘Stitching Repentance, Sewing Rebellion: Seamstresses and Fallen
Women in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Fiction’, in Vanessa D. Dickerson (ed.), Keeping the Victorian House
(New York: Garland, 1995), pp. 27–73, p. 33.
105 Schuller, Biopolitics of Feeling, p. 31.
272 Serial Forms
Neither is heterosexual reproduction the sole ideological driver of the ‘future

family’ model. Gender roles in Gaskell’s fictional families are fluid—in ‘Bessy’s
Troubles at Home’ it is Bessy’s brother Jem who helps her with the household
chores, and in ‘Hand and Heart’: ‘I wonder how it is your mother has trained you
up to be so handy, Tom,’ says a neighbour, ‘[y]ou’re as good as a girl— better than
many a girl’ (219) [see Fig. 7.3]. Other forms of reproduction, and not only the
biological-heterosexual, are important to biopower. What a biopolitical regime
most requires is flexibility. Not just the child but the whole population must be
impressible and plastic, ready to be deployed in new directions when required.
Any kind of normativity is temporary, merely a standby position. The future of
biocitizenship is predicated as much on capitalist commodity production as on
biological reproduction.106 In the 1840s, ‘the central importance of consumption’
to creating citizenship is becoming rapidly more visible.107 For liberalism and for
capitalism, as they develop together in this period, normativity must always be
interruptible and dynamic. Elizabeth Maddock Dillon is therefore only half right
in suggesting that ‘[i]n its recourse to biological essentialism, liberalism is all the
more insidious for defining as natural what is in fact a political distribution of
power among those who will count as subjects and those who will not’.108
Liberalism is not, in fact, ‘biologically essentialist’, but rather, as Kyla Schuller
claims, ‘[b]iopower works by situating individuals in dynamic relation and calcu-
lating and regulating how their bodies affect one another within a milieu’, so that
liberalism never ‘fixes’ the body or the race. Just as Foucault suggested in his
lectures, any part of the population can be (in his admittedly problematic terms)
‘racialized’, whenever it might become expedient.109 And such racialization is
powerfully adhesive. A survey of representations of the Irish Famine across the
run of Howitt’s shows this process of racialization in action, as it attaches itself
even to those accounts which are seeking to expose the longstanding biopolitical
causes of this devastating crisis.
Biocitizenship, Race and Howitt’s Journal
Each weekly issue of Howitt’s Journal was delivered with a two-page news supple-
ment called The Weekly Record of Facts and Opinions Connected with General
Interest and Popular Progress.110 The short news items in this section went to press
106 Biocitizenship, according to Nikolas Rose, ‘comprises all those citizenship projects that have
linked their conceptions of citizens to beliefs about the biological existence of human beings, as indi-
viduals, as men and women, as populations and as species’: Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself:
Biomedicine, Power and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2007).
107 Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, p. 29. 108 Dillon, Gender of Freedom, p. 16.
110 This may explain Howitt’s Journal’s double-pricing structure as stamped and unstamped.
Fig. 7.3. George du Maurier, ‘The Cut Finger’, illustration for Elizabeth Gaskell,
‘Hand and Heart’, in Mrs Gaskell, The Grey Woman and Other Tales (London: Smith,
Elder & Co., 1865) [reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge
University Library LE.9.81]
later than the journal copy, and this section was more permeable to its readership,
publishing letters and notices of upcoming events that were sent to the Howitt’s
office. The effect of the two together is of two speeds: news speed and the more
reflective leisurely pace of the journal itself. But the two sections correspond with
one another in their preoccupations and content. The unfolding situation in
274 Serial Forms
Ireland is one concern that migrates between news, fiction, editorial, and illustra-
tion throughout the whole run of Howitt’s, and reveals both the journal’s aware-
ness of racializing biopolitics and its own entanglement in those politics.
The recent Irish famine was reported retrospectively in the first Weekly Record
in January 1847. William Howitt looked back at a crisis averted, diagnosing
‘something wrong in the tenure of land [in Ireland], and in the treatment of the
population by the landholders, which will want investigating . . . if, with every
inauspicious season, we do not mean to expose so large a mass of our fellow-men
to the like evils’.111 Howitt’s language enacts the problematic liberal-biopolitical
seesaw between ‘the population’ or ‘mass’ of Ireland, and ‘our fellow-men’. He
ends by returning the Irish to the list of causes with which the new journal will be
concerned: ‘we intend to draw attention to this important question, as well as to
the treatment of the poor in our workhouses’.112 Howitt makes a calm demand for
an ‘investigation’ of the causes of the famine, which was now presumed at an end.
He was absolutely right that the system of land tenure was unsustainable and that
Irish tenant farmers and labouring peasants relied entirely for their subsistence
on only one crop: the potato. But he was wrong to believe that the famine was
over. Repeated crop failures since 1845 had set in motion a serious famine and
only now, in early January 1847, was this shaping into a massive humanitarian
crisis, just as the Westminster government was deciding that the danger was over
and closing the soup kitchens.113 In mid-January, a letter was published in
Howitt’s which claimed complacently that ‘[t]he ills of Ireland are national, and
perpetual. It is impossible to doubt that famine stalks in Ireland, to a greater or
lesser extent, every year.’114 Such resignation to famine as a natural and unavoid-
able annual event in Ireland was routine in England. But Howitt’s was unusually
open to publishing the contributions of its readers: every week it reminded them
that ‘we solicit the opinions of others of all classes’.115 It did publish unsolicited
111 [Anon.], ‘Subscription of the Society of Friends for the Starving Irish’, Weekly Record, HJ 1:1
(2 January 1847), p. 2.
112 Ibid.
113 One third of the potato crop had failed in 1845, but Peel’s government had opened soup kitchens
in the most affected parts of Ireland and largely managed to avert full famine. The abolition of the
Corn Laws in 1846 did not help Ireland, as wheat prices dropped and Ireland’s exports lost value. By
1847, in Westminster the famine was supposed to be over. Lord John Russell withdrew public relief
funding, but in fact the famine was accelerating and would reach crisis levels in 1848 and 1849. For a
long time, the classic account was Cecil Woodham-Smith, The Great Hunger: Ireland 1845–1849
[1962] (London: Penguin, 1991) but this has since been joined by many other approaches and argu-
ments. See, for example, James S. Donnelly Jr, The Great Irish Potato Famine (Stroud: Sutton, 2001);
James Vernon, Hunger: A Modern History (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2007); Parama Roy,
‘Dearth: Figures of Famine’, in Alimentary Tracts: Appetites, Aversions, and the Postcolonial (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 116–53; and Gordon Bigelow, Fiction, Famine, and the Rise of
Economics in Victorian Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
114 A Well-Wisher, ‘To Mr. and Mrs. William Howitt’, Weekly Record, HJ 1:3 (16 January 1847), p. 5.
115 The phrase occurs on the mast head of the Weekly Record every week and does seem to have
called out some artisan contributions. For example, in March 1847 a poem ‘by A Manchester
Operative’ appeared with an editorial footnote: ‘Our operative is severe, but perhaps his sufferings are,
and for misery we must make ample allowance. At all events, he is a poet, and poets “learn in
contributions, and Charles Kingsley’s fictional tailor-poet Alton Locke gets ‘work
enough, and pay enough, to meet all present difficulties’ writing for ‘a popular
journal of the Howitt and Eliza Cook school’.116 Howitt’s unusual permeability to
its readership, its weekly rhythm, and its radical humanitarian politics allowed it
to be more responsive to news from Ireland than much of the news press in
England in this period.117 At the end of January, the Weekly Reporter printed a
letter from an Irish eye-witness, telling a different story: ‘[y]ou cannot open a
newspaper which does not teem with accounts of new famine victims, and the
frightful half-dead-and-alive condition of the survivors’.118 From this point on,
Howitt’s Journal is full of stories of starvation in Ireland; it seeks out Irish news
and it is exemplary in exposing the miscalculations of the British government. Its
columns are full of humanitarian appeals, such as ‘AN APPEAL for Clothing for
the Naked and Destitute Irish, addressed to all classes, and especially to the
Women of England’, a plea for donations of ‘stout’ clothes ‘of the coarsest and
warmest material’, and it describes the state of the children in Irish cottages, ‘on
the mother’s lap . . . wasted with disease and famine to a skeleton’.119
William Howitt understands that the problem is long-term and systemic:
‘[t]hese landlords have lived amongst their starving neighbours, and on their
starved estates, for ages, without an attempt to improve them and to employ the
people . . . They have done nothing.’120 He sees ‘the people’ as unproductive and
wasted, unexploited natural resources. Ireland needs, he says, ‘an effective Poor
Law’. In later issues of Howitt’s Journal, the famine is represented in poems and
pictures as well as in the news supplement and editorials. Most strikingly, two
full-page engravings of sentimental Irish pictures by Alfred Fripp are published:
‘The Bog-Cabin’ in July 1847 and ‘The Munster Girl’ in January 1848 [Fig. 7.4].121
suffering”.—EDS.’ [Anon.], ‘Just Instinct and Brute Reason by A Manchester Operative’ HJ 1:10
(6 March 1847), p. 132. Brian Maidment draws attention to the ‘controlling mediation’ of this editorial
statement but the poem was, nevertheless, published in its entirety: Maidment, ‘Magazines of Popular
Progress’, p. 91.
116 In Chapter XXIII of Charles Kingsley’s Alton Locke, Alton learns from Mackaye ‘that the editor
of a popular journal of the Howitt and Eliza Cook school, had called on me that morning, and prom-
ised me work enough, and pay enough, to meet all present difficulties . . . I found both the editor and
his periodical, as I should have wished them, temperate and sunny—somewhat clap-trap and senti-
mental, perhaps, and afraid of speaking out as all parties are, but still willing to allow my fancy free
range in light fictions, descriptions of foreign countries, scraps of showy pink-rose morality, and such
like; which, though they had no more power against the raging mass of crime, misery, and discontent
around, than a peacock’s feather against a three-decker, still were all genial, graceful, kindly, humanis-
ing, and soothed my discontented and impatient heart in the work of composition.’ Charles Kingsley,
Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet: An Autobiography (Cambridge: Macmillan and Co., 1862), p. 175.
117 Maidment, ‘Magazines of Popular Progress’, n.p.
118 A Son of Erin, ‘Famine in Ireland’, Weekly Record, HJ 1:4 (23 January 1847), p. 7.
119 [Anon.], ‘AN APPEAL for Clothing for the Naked and Destitute Irish, Addressed to all Classes,
and especially to the Women of England’, HJ 1:5 (30 January 1847), p. 58.
120 William Howitt, ‘Ireland! The Imperative Necessity of a Universal and Energetic Popular
Agitation on its Behalf ’, HJ 1:7 (13 February 1847): 90–1, p. 90.
121 Alfred Fripp, ‘The Bog-Cabin’, HJ 2:27 (3 July 1847), p. 9 and Alfred Fripp, ‘The Munster Girl’,
HJ 3:53 (1 January 1848), p. 9.
276 Serial Forms
Fig. 7.4. Alfred Fripp, ‘The Munster Girl’, Howitt’s Journal (1 January 1848) [courtesy
of Senate House Library, University of London [G.L.] B.847 [Howitt] fol.]
‘The Bog-Cabin’ shows a barefoot female child sitting on the threshold of a miser-
able cabin built of peat slabs, clasping a baby wrapped in a shawl. The child is not
‘a skeleton’, but quite plump, and two unlikely hens peck in the foreground despite
the context of famine. Mary Howitt’s description of ‘our illustration for the pre-
sent week’ is of ‘only a little child, with her half wild, half-savage, but melancholy
countenance—all [Fripp’s watercolours] are full of tenderness, pathos, and true
poetry’.122 Her accompanying poem ‘Erin and her Children’ starts with a senti-
mental feminine personification, ‘A woman’s passionate sob was in the air’, but
not before it is preceded by a short prose announcement that ‘Ireland may be
justly accused of destroying her own children. She has acted like a cruel step-
mother, draining the lifeblood of one portion of her population for the aggrand-
izement of the other. Possessed of immense national resources, she is a pauper
among nations.’123 The labour of growing children and of growing wealth—
reproduction and production—are collapsed together. Mary Howitt places the
122 Mary Howitt, ‘Erin and her Children’, HJ 2:27 (3 July 1847), p. 10.
123 Mary Howitt, ‘Erin and her Children’, p. 10.
blame at Ireland’s and not England’s door, but there is no avoiding her biopolitical
conclusion, which recalls Foucault’s ‘to make live and let die’ (faire vivre et laisser
mourir).124 ‘—And thou hast given our birthright to another, | Hast left us and
our innocent babes to die!’125 Mary Howitt is reading the famine as an inter-class
conflict within Ireland rather than a colonial disaster, but others attribute it
explicitly to British imperial failure: ‘[w]as it a true civilization that, in our own
Empire, had reduced Ireland to its present frightful condition, with famine stalk-
ing amid three millions of half-naked people?’ asks one columnist.126 ‘As the great
outcry regarding the famine in Ireland has ceased, people are apt to believe that
the famine has ceased also’, cries one eye-witness, but by late August 1847 Howitt’s
is reporting worsening famine conditions.127 The headlines become more sensa-
tional, such as ‘Frightful Condition and Prospects of Ireland’.128 It is with disgust
that Lord John Russell is quoted at the end of 1847 as saying ‘he has no funds at
his disposal’ for further relief.129
By January 1848, the tone of the Irish coverage in Howitt’s Journal has changed.
Alfred Fripp’s ‘Munster Girl’ is described as ‘standing at her door in an attitude of
melancholy meditation’. She shares a holiday issue with Gaskell’s ‘Christmas
Storms and Sunshine’, a story which prominently features a comfortable Christmas
dinner with sausages.130 In the text accompanying the image, Ireland is no longer
an adult woman, but an abused child: ‘[t]he conduct of England towards Ireland
is just of a piece with that of other wiseacre nurses, who, when their charges
scream because they are suffering excruciation in their vitals, slap them on the
backs and shake them, to use their own phrase, in penny-pieces, in their anger,
instead of giving them something cordial and soothing’.131 Westminster is
accused, justly, of neglect and ‘the Monster Evil of Ireland is just England and
nothing more’.132 Private and religious philanthropy continued as the crisis grew.
Writing to defend the efforts of the Friends’ Relief Association, Richard D. Webb
explained that ‘it is a matter of excessive difficulty to support an enormous, helpless,
unproductive, semi-civilized population like that which, in the greatest moral and
124 Michel Foucault, ‘Faire vivre et laisser mourir: la naissance du racisme,’ Les Temps Modernes
46:535 (February 1991): 37–61, p. 38 ; quoted in Stoler, Race and the Education, p. 81.
125 Mary Howitt, ‘Erin and her Children’, p. 10. The poem may be referring to Ireland’s continued
export of food, despite the starvation of her own population.
126 [Anon.], ‘Prosperity of the Co-operative Cause’, Weekly Record, HJ 1:2 (9 January 1847), p. 3.
127 A. Nicholson, ‘Ireland at the Present Moment’, HJ 2:35 (28 August 1847): 141–2, p. 141. This
American eyewitness reports ‘that emaciated, desponding, lifeless look of inanity that nothing else but
long starvation can give; and without uttering a syllable, gave us looks which never, never can be
effaced from my memory’.
128 A. Nicholson, ‘Frightful Condition and Prospects of Ireland’, HJ 2:48 (27 November 1847):
339–42, p. 339.
129 Nicholson, ‘Frightful Condition’, p. 341. Maureen O’Rourke Murphy tells the story of the
American Asenath Nicholson in her Compassionate Stranger: Asenath Nicholson and the Great Irish
Famine (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2015).
130 [Anon.], ‘The Greatest Grievance of Ireland’, HJ 3:53 (1 January 1848), p. 8.
131 [Anon.], ‘The Greatest Grievance’, p. 8. 132 Ibid.
278 Serial Forms
physical degradation, swarms on the western coast of Ireland’.133 Again, the

biopolitical seesaw pivots on ‘unproductive’ and ‘semi-civilized’: the Irish—not
people, but a ‘population’—are ‘swarm[ing]’. The de-individualizing and racializing
rhetoric moves away from Alfred Fripp’s attractively melancholic young woman
of Munster, and towards a swarming population, unmanageable, even by the
deployment of the whole arsenal of techniques of liberal sympathy. Whenever
people are described as ‘swarming’, be they defined as poor people, black people,
Irish people, or displaying any combination of racialized characteristics, a biopo-
litical agenda is revealing itself. Swarms are undifferentiated masses and the
swarm cannot look you in the eye.134 Schuller says that ‘[t]he racialized were
assigned the condition of unimpressibility, or the impaired state of throwing off
affects but being incapable of being affected by impressions themselves’.135 They
can seem like automata, and so very much suited to labour. But the unimpressible
starving Irish, with their ‘lifeless look of inanity’, are more ‘suited to’ death than
labour.136 Nathan Hensley has drawn attention to the imperial violence sanc-
tioned by nineteenth-century liberalism, observing that ‘the images we take to
characterize the world’s first liberal empire should include not just the middle-
class hearth or the democratic ballot box but the war zones and boneyards of
England’s global periphery, where mutiny, and its suppression, were all but uni-
versal. Emancipation and death advanced together.’137 Nowhere more so than
Ireland, one of England’s most peripheral neighbours, despite its geographical
proximity. Howitt’s Journal is rhetorically complicit in racializing the Irish poor as
a swarming, semi-civilized population, and eroticizing them with its ‘Munster
Girl’. The voices in its columns switch between castigation and sentimentaliza-
tion, sometimes in the space of one sentence, with a rapidity that unconsciously
reveals the darker side of biopolitical thinking which inhabits even the most lib-
eral reform projects. Its humanitarian agenda is compromised and conflicted, but
Howitt’s Journal did at least keep its journalistic gaze obstinately fixed on the
starving in Ireland from 1847 to 1848, and for that it deserves considerable credit.
When the escaped slave Frederic Douglass had arrived in Ireland from
America in 1845, he was shocked by what he found there: ‘[w]omen, barefooted
and bareheaded, and only covered by rags which seemed to be held together by
the very dirt and filth with which they were covered—many of these had infants
in their arms, whose emaciated forms, sunken eyes and pallid cheeks, told too
133 Richard D. Webb, ‘Awful Condition of the West of Ireland’, HJ 3:64 (18 March 1848): 191–2, p. 192.
134 There is, of course, a large literature on the phenomenon of crowds and the mass. Two excellent
contributions are Mary Fairclough, The Romantic Crowd: Sympathy, Controversy and Print Culture
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013) and John Plotz, The Crowd: British Literature and
Public Politics (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000).
136 Nicholson, ‘Ireland at the Present Moment’, p. 141. 137 Hensley, Forms of Empire, p. 2.
plainly that they had nursed till they had nursed in vain’.138 In Ireland, he felt that
he witnessed the ‘wrongs of the whole human family’.139 Confronting the poverty
and starvation in Ireland, he drew a sentimental humanitarian parallel with aboli-
tionism: ‘[h]e who really and truly feels for the American slave’, he wrote, ‘cannot
steel his heart to the woes of others; and he who thinks himself an abolitionist, yet
cannot enter into the wrongs of others, has yet to find a true foundation for his
anti-slavery faith’.140 And he noticed how the bodies of Irish people had been
‘impressed’ by their oppressive environment, just as the black slaves’ bodies bore
the marks of their oppression in America: ‘[t]he Irishman ignorant and degraded,
compares in form and feature, with the Negro!’141 Douglass spent as much time
in Ireland as in England on this trip and he probably discussed his impressions of
Ireland with the Howitts when he stayed with these ‘literary celebrities’, as he
called them, at their home in Clapton.142 He remembers them fondly: ‘William
and Mary Howitt are among the kindliest people I ever met’, he says: ‘[t]heir
interest in America, and their well-known testimonies against slavery, made me
feel much at home with them’.143 Hans Christian Andersen was staying at the
same time, but Douglass found him strange and ‘singular in his silence’.144 He
further remembers the Howitts as ‘indefatigable writers. Two more industrious
and kind-hearted people did not breathe. With all their literary work, they always
had time to devote to strangers, and to all benevolent efforts to ameliorate the
condition of the poor and needy. Quakers though they were, they took a deep
interest in the Hutchinsons . . . who were much at their house during my stay
138 Frederick Douglass, ‘Thoughts and Recollections of a Tour in Ireland’, AME Church Review 3
(1886): 139–40, p. 140. Douglass had arrived in Liverpool on 28 August 1845 and on 4 April 1847 he
left for Boston from Liverpool on the Cambria. I discuss in detail how Europe helped the American
visitors Douglass, Emerson and Fuller to decouple the mechanisms of oppression from race in my
next book, Serial Revolutions: 1848 (forthcoming).
139 Douglass, ‘Thoughts and Recollections, p. 139.
140 Douglass, ‘Thoughts and Recollections, p. 141. See Patricia Ferreira, ‘All But “A Black Skin and
Wooly Hair”: Frederick Douglass’s Witness of the Irish Famine’, American Studies International 37:2
(June 1999): 69–83.
141 Frederick Douglass, ‘Negro Claims Ethnographically Considered’, in The Life and Writings of
Frederick Douglass, ed. Philip S. Foner (New York: International Publishers, 1950), pp. 289–309,
p. 305. See also Richard Hardack, ‘The Slavery of Romanism: The Casting Out of the Irish in the Work of
Frederick Douglass’, in Alan J. Rice and Martin Crawford (eds), Liberating Sojourn: Frederick Douglass
and Transatlantic Reform (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1999), pp. 115–40. It is important
to remember, though, that Douglass never equated the Irish, however miserable, with slaves: ‘The
Irishman is poor, but he is not a slave. He may be in rags, but he is not a slave.’ Frederick Douglass,
‘The Nature of Slavery’, in Autobiographies: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American
Slave; My Bondage and My Freedom; Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr
(New York: Library of America, 1994), pp. 419–24, pp. 422–3. This was originally an address given at
Rochester, NY on 1 December 1850.
142 Douglass, Life and Times, in Autobiographies, pp. 453–1045, p. 684. Life and Times is the third
and final of Douglass’s autobiographies. Douglass misremembers the location of the Howitt’s home as
‘Clapham’.
143 Douglass, Life and Times, pp. 684–5.
144 Douglass, Life and Times, p. 685. It is possible that Douglass intends to convey Andersen’s dis-
like of his colour.
280 Serial Forms
there.’145 Douglass had met and befriended the Hutchinson family singers on the
crossing from America, as both they and he were heading to Britain on tour.146
Howitt’s Journal tracks Douglass’s progress over its run, starting by noting,
while he is still in Britain in January 1847, that ‘Frederic Douglass no longer a
slave’ and celebrating the fact that ‘[s]everal warm-hearted individuals have pur-
chased the freedom of this truly noble human being’.147 The emphasis on Douglass
as a ‘human being’ is obviously deliberate. Just after Douglass’s departure in April
for America, William Howitt inserts a ‘stop-press’ announcement into the Weekly
Record: ‘[a]t the moment of going to press, we are rejoiced to hear that it is the wish
of the friends of Freedom, to present to Frederick Douglass, on his return to America,
some testimonial of their deep sense of his services to the cause in this country. We
most cordially coincide with the idea shall be glad to support it; and suggest as the
most appropriate gift , that of a STEAM PRESS.’148 Later in April, a poem appeared
entitled ‘Farewell to Frederick Douglass who sailed from England for America
April 4th 1847, Easter Sunday’.149 The poem had been written before he sailed, but
into the Weekly Record section of the same issue is inserted another last-minute
announcement, ‘Outrage to Frederick Douglas, and dishonour to the English
name’.150 Because of his skin colour, and at the request of some white Americans
on board the British steamer, the Cambria, Douglass had apparently not been per-
mitted to enter the saloon during his voyage, despite holding a first-class ticket.
Partly in response to this outrage, Howitt’s goes into full throttle on the testimonial
scheme, calling for contributions for ‘Frederick Douglass and the Steam Press’.151
When Douglass was apprised of the public outcry in Britain against the Cambria’s
captain and crew, and the planned testimonial, he wrote gratefully to Mary Howitt
and his letter was printed in the journal: ‘it is a nation’s press defining a nation’s
position in a question of the greatest importance to my downtrodden and long-
abused race . . . You speak of the printing press, and ask shall I like to have it? I
answer yes, yes! . . . I hope to be able to do good work for my race with it.’152
145 Douglass, Life and Times, pp. 684–5.

146 The Hutchinsons were a celebrated white American singing group from New England who were
famous for their temperance and anti-slavery protest songs.
147 [Anon.], ‘Frederick Douglass no longer a Slave’, Weekly Record, HJ 1:5 (30 January 1847), p. 9
(emphasis original). When, because of his skin, Douglass was not permitted to enter the saloon on the
British steamer Cambria, Howitt’s published the insult immediately: [Anon.], ‘Outrage to Frederick
Douglas, and Dishonour to the English Name’, Weekly Record, HJ 1:16 (17 April 1847), p. 31.
148 W.H., Weekly Record, HJ 1:15 (10 April 1847), p. 30 (emphasis original).
149 [Anon.], ‘Farewell to Frederick Douglass who sailed from England for America April 4th 1847,
Easter Sunday’, HJ 1:16 (17 April 1847), p. 222.
150 [Anon.], ‘Outrage to Frederick Douglas’, p. 31.
151 Subscriptions of one shilling upwards are suggested, so that, with a large enough collected sum,
‘Frederic Douglass would be placed in a situation free from care, to devote his whole life and energies
to the Anti-Slavery cause. A list will lie at our office for signatures.’ [Anon.], ‘Frederick Douglass and
the Steam Press’, Weekly Record, HJ 1:17 (24 April 1847), p. 33 (emphasis original).
152 [Anon.], ‘The Proposed National Testimonial to Frederick Douglass’, Weekly Record, HJ 1:25
(19 June 1847), p. 50. Douglass’s letter is dated 10 May 1847 from Albany, New York state. An editorial
Some delay in Douglass’s newspaper scheme was reported in Howitt’s Journal

as due to the fact that, upon his return to America, he had ‘found that instead of a
newspaper with a coloured editor being a novelty, there were already four in the
field’.153 Another reason, not reported, was that Douglass’s erstwhile ‘manager’ or
agent, William Lloyd Garrison, actively disliked the idea and attempted to dis-
suade Douglass from it, a disagreement which was eventually to lead to Douglass
parting ways with Garrisonian abolitionism altogether.154 By December 1847,
Howitt’s is proudly able to announce that the testimonial has ‘happily eventually
reached £500’.155 Douglass has gratefully received the money and ‘[h]e states that
he is already engaged in the preparation of his newspaper, which is to be called,
“The North Star”, and is to be published at Rochester, in the State of New York. He
has already purchased his press and his printing materials. We wish him every
success.’156 Is it going too far to suggest that Howitt’s reproduced itself on the
other side of the Atlantic in the shape of Douglass’s North Star? Certainly, the
North Star was some kind of relation of Howitt’s Journal: whether a sister, brother,
child, or adopted child.157 Douglass had watched Mary and William plan their
new journal while he was staying with them in Clapton, and the subscription
administered by the Howitts was more than handsome enough for him to
note adds: ‘Received at Howitt’s Journal Office, for the Printing Press to be presented to Frederick
Douglass,—£22 13s 0d. The names of the subscribers will be published shortly.’: p. 50.
153 [Anon.], Weekly Record, HJ 2:34 (21 August 1847), p. 127.

154 This is not reported in Howitt’s Journal and was perhaps not well known at the time. Mary
Howitt was friendly with both men, and had included both Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd
Garrison in her Memoirs of Remarkable Americans, which also included her memoirs of the
Hutchinson Family, Miss Cushman, and Elihu Burritt, and readers of Howitt’s in June 1847 are told
that they ‘will shortly be published in a compact, neat and portable form’: ‘Advertisement’, Weekly
Record, HJ 1:24 (12 June 1847), p. 48.
155 [Anon.], ‘The Douglass Testimonial’, Weekly Record, HJ 2:50 (11 December 1847), p. 384.
156 [Anon.], ‘The Douglass Testimonial’, p. 384. This edition of Howitt’s Journal has a full-page por-
trait of Ralph Waldo Emerson on the front cover, as he had arrived from Boston on 22 October 1847
to give a British lecture tour, and it also carries the anonymous review of Emerson’s lecture on
Swedenborg in Manchester, which Jenny Uglow has attributed to Elizabeth Gaskell. I agree that the
voice is probably Gaskell’s: Uglow, Elizabeth Gaskell, p. 179. Todd Richardson says that Emerson
encouraged Margaret Fuller, in a letter dated 28 February 1847, to ‘write for the Howitts, & Chambers’:
Todd H. Richardson, ‘An Evaluation of the Howitt/Emerson Relationship through “Etherization” ’,
Victorian Periodicals Review 33:4 (Winter 2000): 397–401, p. 398, https://www.jstor.org/stable/
20083760. Carl Woodring notes that Emerson refused biographical materials to Howitt’s Journal
because he ‘regarded Howitt’s as “a sugarplum thrown to a mad bull” ’: Carl Woodring, Victorian
Samplers: William and Mary Howitt (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 1952), p. 102. I discuss
Emerson’s lecture tour in detail in my forthcoming book, Serial Revolutions: 1848.
157 Douglass’s anti-slavery strategy of ‘moral suasion’, social uplift, and education was very close to
that of the ‘moral-force’ Chartists, and the title he chose for the paper that he and Martin Delany set
up, the North Star, echoed that of Feargus O’Connor’s Chartist paper, the Northern Star (1837–52)—
although the ‘North Star’ also referred to Polaris, designated Alpha Ursae Minoris, commonly known
as the North Star or Pole Star, which helped fugitive slaves find their way towards freedom in the
Northern States. The North Star would explicitly align itself with Chartism: ‘[w]e are, if we understand
Chartism, a Chartism; and we are even in favour of more radical reforms than they have yet proposed’.
[Anon.], ‘Chartists of England’, North Star (5 May 1848), p. 2 (unpaginated).
282 Serial Forms
purchase the steam press.158 Douglass was part of the Howitts’ circle, and part,
too, of the Howitt’s circle. Through the first half of 1848, when both journals were
running concurrently, Howitt’s and the North Star published excerpts from one
another’s pages.159 In March 1848, Douglass announced to his readers that ‘we are
to receive regularly in future [Howitt’s Journal]’ and that ‘we shall try to advertise
regularly the monthly arrival of this journal, and state from time to time where it
may be obtained’, and he adds that he cannot resist ‘boasting a little’ that the
Howitts are the ‘personal friends of a despised negro’.160 The North Star bears a
strong resemblance in format, content, and tone of address to Howitt’s Journal,
and without the Howitts it might never have come into existence.161 Like
Howitt’s, Douglass’s paper took an international view, and it reported very fully
on European news. Although Douglass had left before the Irish famine reached
its height, the North Star ran weekly reports on the Irish situation as it worsened,
along with regular bulletins on the revolutions that swept across the continent of
Europe in 1848. In April of that revolutionary year, Howitt’s reported that ‘[w]e
are glad to see with what spirit our friend Douglass proceeds with his editorial
duties. “The North Star” may rank with any American paper, for ability and inter-
est. It is full of buoyancy and variety; and, we trust, is destined to run a long
course in the cause of freedom and progress both for black and white.’162
Douglass is not the only black person who appears in Howitt’s Journal. But his
is the black voice that is heard most directly and forcefully in its pages. The con-
text, of course, is ferociously abolitionist. Other black writing is placed in relation
to Douglass, so that a review of William Wells Brown’s Narrative in June 1848
notes that both he and Douglass had white fathers: ‘[t]he one damning fact, that
Americans sell their own children, renders all argument regarding slavery super-
fluous—and excludes the nation, so long as it persists in it, from the catalogue of
Christian states’.163 The sentimental argument reappears here that parenthood is
not biological. It is scandalous that white Americans sell their own children, but it
is equally scandalous that they sell other people’s children, too. In May 1848,
Howitt’s ran a story called ‘The Famished Hand’. A white passenger on a steamer
finds a stowaway runaway slave, ‘a small mulatto boy’, hidden in a lifeboat on
board. The boy is described as ‘yellow’ and a ‘mulatto’. In an anti-slavery poem in
158 £500 is the equivalent of around £500,000 today. See eh.net (run by the Economic History
Association) which offers comparators that allow the conversion of past values into current values
(and vice versa): http://eh.net/howmuchisthat/.
159 For example, Howitt’s Journal quotes from the North Star: Weekly Record, HJ 3:73 (20 May
1848), p. 334.
160 [Anon.], ‘Howitt’s Journal’, North Star (17 March 1848), p. 2 (unpaginated).
161 I discuss Douglass’s North Star in more detail in my forthcoming Serial Revolutions: 1848.
162 [Anon.], ‘Frederick Douglass’s Paper “The North Star” ’, Weekly Record, HJ 3:70 (29 April 1848),
p. 288.
163 [Anon.], ‘Narrative of William Wells Brown’, HJ 3:75 (3 June 1848), p. 364.
Howitt’s, America is excoriated for the ‘sable millions that ye hold in thrall’.164
Even Frederick Douglass is congratulated by the journal for his work for ‘the
enfranchisement of his sable brethren’.165 ‘Yellow’, ‘mulatto’, or ‘sable’: all these
words are racist and offensive to our ears, but they were carefully chosen by aboli-
tionists in the 1840s. The production of sentiment around racial difference in
Howitt’s is working hard to blur any binary black and white identification. When
the boy is dragged out of his hiding place in ‘The Famished Hand’, the narrator
says ‘[m]y feelings were no longer to be controlled. There stood a child before me,
not more than eleven or twelve years of age, of yellow complexion and a sad coun-
tenance, nearly naked, his back seared with scars, and his flesh wasted to the
bone. I burst into tears.’166 The affect runs both ways, as the boy ‘felt and suffered
as a child of free parents would feel and suffer. His sorrows were touching as those
of a white child would have been.’167 The passenger is ‘touched’ not only by the
spectacle of the child, but by the child’s own feelings. Their bodies ‘feel’ identically
sorrowful. Slavery is the limit-case of biopolitics, a naturalizing of culture into
so-called ‘biology’ and a racialization which exposes the whole biopolitical game
for what it is. The complexity of Howitt’s Journal’s political moment in the 1840s is
that the reform agenda, which demands state and philanthropical intervention
on the provision of clean water, decent housing, medical care, food for the starv-
ing, and so forth, operates on exactly the same biopolitical coding system as
slavery. And, as Foucault theorizes it, that coding system is scaled from the indi-
vidual to the series: ‘[t]wo series, therefore, may be discerned’ he says, ‘the
body–organism–discipline–institution series, and the population–biological
processes–regulatory mechanisms–State’.168 But Foucault points out that these
two ‘series’ are not distinct, but rather define each other and are enmeshed,
particularly in the nineteenth century when ‘[s]tate regulation . . . relied on a range
of institutions in civic society, such as insurance, medical-hygienic institutions,
mutual aid associations, philanthropic societies, and so on’, so that in this period
‘alliances between the two types of power’ or between the two series, appear very
clearly.169 In other words, the body and population are blurred, and the public
and the private are muddled. Indeed, Foucault goes further and argues that the
‘individual’ and the ‘mass’ are not oppositional terms, but rather dynamic terms
which constantly recreate and reconstitute one another in liberal discourse. The
one brings the other into being.
In June 1848, Howitt’s comments that ‘[w]e regret to see by the North Star,
Frederick Douglass’s newspaper, that it is struggling with difficulties . . . we feel
164 Thomas Cooper, ‘Sonnet to the Americans by Thomas Cooper, Author of the Purgatory of
Suicides’, HJ 1:5 (6 February 1847), p. 78.
165 [Anon.], ‘Frederick Douglass and the “North Star” ’, Weekly Record, HJ 3:75 (3 June 1848), p. 366.
166 [Anon.], ‘The Famished Hand’, HJ 3:71 (6 May 1848), p. 298.
167 [Anon.], ‘The Famished Hand’, p. 298. 168 Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, p. 250.
169 Lemke, ‘Michel Foucault’, p. 38.
284 Serial Forms
that every effort should be made by the friends of Negro freedom to support it’.170
Efforts were made, and the North Star would survive until June 1851. But three
weeks after this announcement, Howitt’s has to admit that it is struggling with
difficulties itself: ‘[w]ith this number concludes the third half-yearly volume of
Howitt’s Journal, and from causes now well known . . . it passes into other hands’.171
Howitt’s Journal, which William Howitt once described as a ‘moral steam engine’,
had hit the buffers.172
1848 and Revolution: Conclusion
‘We must consider that these are momentous times, that great changes to be have
already cast forth their shadows, and that Ireland is not the only part of the coun-
try on the eve of a social revolution.’173 Such was the prophecy of Howitt’s Journal
in the summer of 1847, and it was proved right. The series of revolutions that
swept across Europe in 1848 were to prove socially and politically important in
Britain, as well as on the Continent. Howitt’s preoccupations during this revolu-
tionary period are revealing of its liberal agenda. While welcoming Pope Pius IX
in Rome, hailed hopefully as the ‘reforming Pope’, technological innovation is
what really excites Howitt’s: ‘[r]ailroads have conquered even Roman inertia’, they
declare; ‘[w]ith a reforming Pope, and railroads, the very wastes of the campagna
will and must become cultivated and healthy’.174 In early 1848, Howitt’s turned its
attention back to England, and ran a three-part series called ‘A Day and Night at
the General Post Office’.175 The Uniform Penny Post reform of 1840 had made the
postal system accessible to many more people, and Howitt’s was evangelical about
the democratizing potential of national communications networks.176 Its faith in
170 [Anon.],‘Frederick Douglass and the “North Star” ’, p. 366. The article adds, ‘[w]e hear that a
bazaar is already proposed by the ladies’: p. 366.
171 [Anon.], Weekly Record, HJ 3:78 (24 June 1848), p. 412. Todd Richardson explains that ‘William
founded Howitt’s Journal after he was unable to replace John Saunders as editor of the People’s Journal.
The resulting financial disagreements between the two became public and ugly. Both the Howitts and
Saunders went bankrupt within six months of each other, and Willoughby and Company bought and
continued both journals under the name People’s & Howitt’s Journal until 1851.’ Richardson, ‘An
Evaluation’, p. 400 n. 1.
172 Woodring, Victorian Samplers, p. 127.
173 [Anon.], ‘Thoughts on the Present System of Irish Charities’, HJ 1:26 (26 June 1847): 362–3,
p. 363. Howitt’s was not always consistent in considering Ireland to be ‘part of the country’, however.
174 [Anon.], ‘Pope Pius the Ninth’, HJ 1:5 (30 January 1847): 67–8, p. 67. Howitt’s supplied a full-
page portrait of ‘Pope Pius the Ninth’ on p. 57 . Another engraving called ‘The Awakening of Italy’
shows the Pope in the midst of a group of adoring Italians: HJ 3:60 (19 February 1848), p. 113. The
accompanying article predicts that ‘[a] crisis approaches, and in every corner of Europe restless spirits
await the event. Not only Italy, but the world is awaking—and Liberty meditates one of its grand
marches’. [Anon.], ‘The Awakening of Italy’, HJ 3:60 (19 February 1848), p. 114.
175 George Reynolds, ‘A Day and Night at the General Post Office’, HJ 3:53 (1 January 1848): 10–12;
3:54 (8 January 1848): 26–8; 3:55 (15 January 1848): 36–9.
176 Elihu Burritt, one of Mary Howitt’s Remarkable Americans, was a champion of postal reform,
and during his stay in England (1846–53), he campaigned for an international ‘ocean penny post’ with
a reduced cost from one shilling (12 pence) to threepence for transatlantic letters.
infrastructural reform as a defence against revolution is made explicit after the

French Revolution in February, when William Howitt stakes his faith in,
‘Thorough Reform’ as the ‘safeguard against Revolution’.177 And Howitt’s reaction
to the Paris revolution is clearly directed at the English Chartists:
The first French Revolution was the carnage of a people bursting from slavery,
and feeling only their wrongs and the strength of their arms. The second was a
transition fact—half moral, half physical—this is a most magnificent demon-
stration of moral power! It is sublime in the united forbearance and fortitude of
the million. Before the grand and combined demand of the people for their
rights, the iron soul of armies melts, and regal despotism crumbles into dust!178
The appeal is to moral power, and not to violence and ‘carnage’, and the article
continues, ‘Men of England! you now have your duty to perform.’ But this duty
involves no barricade-building; rather, ‘[s]end your congratulations to your
brother people of France. Let them know your joy in their triumph—a triumph
for the whole world.’179 It seems the French have achieved a revolution for all:
‘[t]he French revolution has produced throughout Europe the effect of a miracle;
it has passed through it like the instant thrill of the electric telegraph’.180 But
England was in a bad state. ‘Can it go on forever? Look at the present condition of
things. Taxation increased and increasing instead of diminishing; trade dwin-
dling; manufacture paralyzed; people starving; Ireland perishing of famine.’181
The voice of Howitt’s Journal was stilled forever in the summer of 1848, just as the
‘June Days’ in Paris dampened the initial British enthusiasm for the ‘united for-
bearance’ and ‘moral power’ of the French revolutionary victory in March. And in
the months that followed, history would prove the techno-liberal reformism
championed by Howitt’s to be the real victor across Europe after 1848.
While Howitt’s can be accused of idealizing and romanticizing the marginal-
ized, it can also be commended for locating them at all. Its reform agenda was
often ‘racialized’ in Foucault’s terms, and biopolitical in its investment in reclaim-
ing bio-capital to increase productivity, but it was also campaigning for better
lives for those consigned to misery. Foucault’s (French) twentieth-century state
was more centralized than the British nineteenth-century administration which,
as we have seen, delegated welfare work to philanthropic and religious organiza-
tions, so it is difficult to identify the nineteenth-century state as the sole arbiter of
biopower in the British case.182 It is possible to identify the growing liberalism of
the 1840s as biopolitical, but this liberalism operates across the private and the
177 W.H., ‘The Present Moment’, Weekly Record, HJ 3:64 (18 March 1848), p. 191.
178 [Anon.], ‘Glorious Triumph of the French People’, Weekly Record, HJ 3:62 (4 March 1848), p. 159.
179 [Anon.], ‘Glorious Triumph’, p. 159. 180 W.H., ‘The Present Moment’, p. 191.
181 W.H., ‘The Present Moment’, p. 191.
182 Geoff Eley identifies ‘a focus on voluntary association and associational life as the main medium
for the definition of public commitments’: Geoff Eley, ‘Nations, Publics, and Political Cultures: Placing
286 Serial Forms
public spheres, in a mixed economy of kinship and commerce, as we have seen,

and it would be wrong to underestimate ‘the emancipatory impulse of free asso-
ciational initiative’.183 Michael Lambeck has questioned Foucault’s claim that
biopolitics is ‘specific or unique to the modern state’, arguing instead that ‘[k]inship
is immodern . . . insofar as it exceeds (rather than simply precedes) modernity, [so
that] . . . [a]lthough kinship occurs in a particular nexus of biopolitics, it cannot be
reduced to an effect of biopolitics’.184 William and Mary Howitt knew very well, as
did Elizabeth Gaskell and Frederick Douglass, that ‘[k]in relations are ever rami-
fying and auto-productive’, and that these are community relationships and not
merely biological and familial ties.185 Kinship can, therefore, exceed and chal-
lenge the state’s control. Howitt’s spent its short serial life trying to establish new
forms of political kinship and citizenship across classes, genders, age groups, and
ethnicities. Its hopeful universalism may seem naive and ‘bland’ to us now, but
perhaps we ought to pause to think what our compliance with the biopolitical
agenda of division has produced.186 As liberalism morphed into neoliberalism,
the lie that the market and democracy are synonymous embedded itself ever
more deeply. Since the nineteenth century, the market has worked to segment and
articulate identifiable groups of consumers, and to categorize different kinds of
producers (skilled, non-skilled, gendered, disposable, casual, etc.).187 It grows
division and difference. What seemed to be a deeply felt personal insistence on
diversity and identity, on the atomistic and individual, in truth entailed the drain-
ing of more generous forms of collective. Neoliberalism may not be delivering the
dividends it promised. We have, perhaps, been organizing ourselves, or rather
allowing ourselves to be ordered, into serials that are too small-scale. Howitt’s
Journal and Frederick Douglass’s North Star both saw the dangers of division and
they projected a larger, more inclusive version of the human series.
Habermas in the Nineteenth Century’, in Craig Calhoun (ed.), Habermas and the Public Sphere
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), pp. 289–339, p. 296.
183 Eley, ‘Nations, Publics’, p. 325.

184 Michael Lambeck, ‘Kinship, Modernity and the Immodern’, in Fenella Cannell and Susan
McKinnon (eds), Vital Relations: Modernity and the Persistent Life of Kinship (Santa Fe, NM: SAR
Press, 2013), pp. 241–60, pp. 245, 256.
185 Michael Lambeck says that to imagine that ideas of kinship ‘were ever independent of state or
society, is to start with a Malinowskian, atomistic, rather than a Morganic, holistic, conception of
kinship—that is, to start with the biological family rather than the collective. It is this ideology that
has been so prominent.’ Lambeck, ‘Kinship, Modernity’, pp. 241–60, p. 256.
186 See Andrea Muehlebach on the role of the neoliberal state in inciting certain ideals of citizen-
ship as kinship (or kinship as citizenship) in voluntary acts of care: Andrea Muehlebach, The Moral
Neoliberal: Welfare and Citizenship in Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).
187 For a now classic critique of these developments, see Diane Elson and Ruth Pearson, ‘ “Nimble
Fingers Make Cheap Workers”: An Analysis of Women’s Employment in Third-World Export
Manufacturing’, Feminist Review 7 (Spring 1981): 87–107.
Conclusion
1848 and Serial Revolutions
‘[T]out n’est que feuilleton en ce bas monde, c’est-à-dire morcellement,

succession, fragment, suite au lendemain.’
[Everything is nothing but a serial in this low world, that is to say,
bite-sized, serialised, broken up, to be continued tomorrow.]1
At the start of Serial Forms, we left Elizabeth Barrett greedily reading her way
through all six volumes of Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo in the sweltering
London summer of 1846. Barrett might have been limply reclining on her sofa,
but Dumas’s restless serial novel is about movement, transmission, and speed.2
Travelling with Monte Cristo from Paris to Normandy, the character Albert
Morcerf exclaims ‘I never knew till now the delight of speed’, and compliments
the Count on his alacrity: ‘You are certainly a prodigy; you will soon not only
surpass the railway . . . but even the telegraph.’3 The novel, originally published in
the Journal des débats in eighteen parts from 28 August 1844 to 15 January 1846,
is highly self-conscious about its own seriality, each part closing (or, rather, failing
to close) with the refrain ‘la suite à demain’4 [‘to be continued tomorrow’].
Théophile Gautier noted of the newspaper-feuilleton novels that ‘leur suites et les
suites de suites arrivent à se graver dans les mémoires populaires comme des faits
1 Louis Desnoyer, ‘Un peu d’histoire à propos de roman’, Le Siècle (28 September 1847), p. 147.
Louis Desnoyer published a series of articles on the feuilleton in Le Siècle on 5, 28, and 29 September
1847. They are all reprinted in Lise Dumasy (ed.), La Querelle du roman-feuilleton: littérature, presse et
politique, un débat précurseur 1836–1848 (Grenoble: ELLUG-Université Stendhal, 1999), pp. 120–54,
pp. 127ff.
2 For discussions of speed in The Count of Monte Cristo’, see Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, ‘The
Informatics of Revenge: Telegraphy, Speed and Storage in The Count of Monte Cristo’, Weber Studies:
An Interdisciplinary Humanities Journal 14:1 (Winter 1997), http://www.altx.com/ebr/w(ebr)/essays/
wyoung.html and David F. Bell, ‘Velocities: Precision, Overload (Dumas)’, in Real Time: Accelerating
Narrative from Balzac to Zola (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2004), pp. 103–30. Bell dis-
cusses the significance of the telegraph in the novel at length.
3 Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo, ed. and trans. David Coward (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2008), pp. 840, 839. All further page references are given in parentheses in the text.
This journey takes only eight hours as the Count has many very fast horses at his disposal, so he can
change them every hour.
4 Edmund Birch, ‘“Les suites des suites”: Alexandre Dumas’s Le Comte de Monte-Cristo and the
News’, Dix-Neuf 21:4 (2017): 297–311, p. 299, DOI: 10.1080/14787318.2017.1446319. Birch further
discusses the ways in which the novel references its own seriality and its own place in newspaper
culture.
© Clare Pettitt.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198830429.001.0001
288 Serial Forms
contemporains’5 [‘Their continuations and continuations of continuations are

beginning to etch themselves into popular memory like contemporary facts’]. The
seriality of a narrative unfolding day by day, and juxtaposed to the daily news,
aligned it with the ‘contemporary facts’ in the rest of the newspaper, so that the
form of The Count of Monte Cristo and its plot, which is predicated on cross-
European transport, communications, and mobility, meant that it metonymically
prefigured, and fantasized, the series of revolutions that would start to break out
across Europe only one year later.6 David Bell has written about the ‘jumpiness’ of
the text, noting that ‘Dumas writes in the form of a series of jump cuts’, so that
both the Count and the reader are somewhat magically delivered to the next
dramatic scene, while the intervals of travel and preparation are occluded in the
pauses between episodes.7 Jumping from city to city, horse-stage to horse-stage,
or telegraph station to telegraph station, The Count of Monte Cristo is a narrative
about information mediated through a series of relays.
Dumas is not alone in his interest in speed, relay, and transmission: such subjects
surface in some of the most ‘on-the-pulse’ literature of the mid-1840s. For
example, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett’s soon-to-be-husband, wrote ‘How
they Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix’ in 1844.8 The poem was written
in motion, at sea on a ship bound for Trieste, while sailing between Gibraltar and
Naples. Among other things, it is a poem about the imagined acceleration of news
across countries and continents. And it is also a poem of relay: Browning
describes an express journey of ninety miles, which he himself admitted was an
‘impossible distance’, yet he very carefully marks out the ‘posts’ between Ghent
and Aix: Lokeren; Boom; Duffeld; Mechlem; Aershot; Hasselt; Looz; Tongres;
Dalhem to Aix-la-Chapelle.9 ‘How they Brought the Good News from Ghent to
Aix’ was published in the midst of the railway boom, and John Picker has
5 Théophile Gautier, ‘Théâtres’, La Presse (7 February 1848): 1–2; quoted in Birch, ‘“Les suites des
suites”’, pp. 298–9. On the feuilleton form, see also Edmund Birch, Fictions of the Press in Nineteenth-
Century France (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018); Marie-Françoise Cachin, Diana Cooper-
Richet, Jean-Yves Mollier, and Claire Parfait (eds), Au bonheur du feuilleton: naissance et mutations
d’un genre (Etats-Unis, Grand-Bretagne XVIIIe–XXe siècles) (Paris: Créaphis, 2007), and on the nine-
teenth-century French press more generally, see the substantial work of Marie-Ève Thérenty and her
group, in particular: Marie-Ève Thérenty and Alain Vaillant, 1836. L’An I de l’ère médiatique. Étude lit-
téraire et historique de La Presse d’Émile de Girardin (Paris: Nouveau monde, 2001); Marie-Ève
Thérenty and Alain Vaillant (eds), Presse et Plumes. Littérature et journalisme au XIXe siècle (Paris:
Nouveau monde, 2004); Marie-Ève Thérenty and Alain Vaillant (eds), Presse, nations et mondialisation
au XIXe siècle (Paris: Nouveau monde, 2010) ; and Alain Vaillant, L’Histoire littéraire (Paris: Armand
Colin, 2010).
6 Winthrop-Young says, ‘[w]ithin five years of the completion of the novel, Paris would be instru-
mental in unleashing a series of failed revolutions’: ‘Informatics of Revenge’, n.p. In fact, the ‘1848’
revolutions did not start in Paris, but in Palermo and Naples in 1847, and, as I argue in my forthcom-
ing book, Serial Revolutions: 1848, they did not fail exactly, either.
7 Bell, Real Time, p. 109.
8 First published in Dramatic Romances and Lyrics in 1845, then moved by Browning into Dramatic
Lyrics.
9 Letter from Browning to Mr A. E. Sloan in [Anon.], ‘Literary Gossip’, Athenaeum (9 May 1908):
576–7, p. 577.
described this work as ‘an antiquated transportation poem’ which ‘indirectly

acknowledges . . . the “good news” of the 1843–4 completion of the costly, compli-
cated railway line linking Ghent and Belgium with Aix-la-Chapelle and Prussia’.10
The ‘galloping anapests’ of the versification misdirect us, because the rhythm out-
strips its subject and outgallops the horses to evoke instead a proto-mechanical
rhythm and speed which quite literally overtakes and exhausts the equine model
of transport.11 The cry ‘Good speed!’ and its ringing echo, ‘Speed!’, seem to pursue
the riders with an exigency that accelerates into cruelty when the first horse
expires with a ‘horrible heave of the flank, | As down on her haunches she shud-
dered and sank’. In fact, two horses die and the third, Roland, is in a precarious
condition at the end of the journey. The poem closes oddly not with the success-
ful delivery of the message of ‘Good News’ but instead on the parlous condition of
its medium, insinuating a comparison between the exhausted horse and the tireless
engine which could now perform the journey on the new railway line. Browning
recalled that when he wrote the poem ‘the quantity of galloping was the main
thing in my head’, emphasizing the poem’s themes of speed, effort, and urgency.12
Swinburne was later famously to write of Browning that ‘[h]e never thinks but at
full speed; and the rate of his thought is to that of another man’s as the speed of
the railway to that of a wagon, or the speed of a telegraph to that of a railway’.13 If
Browning is always ahead of the game, Browning’s poems perhaps also always
dramatize the overtaking of the message by the medium. A poet profoundly
interested in mediation and in history, his verse out-gallops events and opens up
the epistemic gap between their happening and their telling.
Both Browning and Dumas are writing about both transport and communica-
tion at the moment when railway networks were expanding exponentially and the
electrical telegraph was on the brink of superseding the mechanical Chappe tele-
graph system. Both are fanstasizing the speed of future transmission. Monte
Cristo’s ‘marvellous rapidity’ (362) leads Geoffrey Winthrop-Young to declare
that ‘The Count of Monte Cristo is one of the first novels to freely indulge in aes-
theticizing speed’, but I would argue that Dumas and Browning are both engaged
10 John M. Picker, ‘Aural Anxieties and the Advent of Modernity’, in Martin Hewitt (ed.), The
Victorian World (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), pp. 603–18, p. 613.
11 ‘Galloping anapaests’ is Yopie Prins’s phrase: Yopie Prins, ‘Robert Browning, Transported by
Meter’, in Meredith L. McGill (ed.), The Traffic in Poems: Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Transatlantic
Exchange (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008), pp. 205–30, p. 216.
12 [Anon.], ‘Literary Gossip’, p. 577.
13 Harold Bloom (ed.), Bloom’s Classic Critical Views: Robert Browning (New York: Infobase
Publishing, 2009) p. 33. Alfred Nettement also speculated that Dumas was producing his works indus-
trially in a factory: ‘Les uns veulent que M. Alexandre Dumas ait, dans quelque quartier reculé, une
manufacture littéraire où des manoeuvres sont employés à équarrir des sujets et à dégrossir ces premi-
ères inspirations qui contiennent le germe confus d’un ouvrage.’ Alfred Nettement, Études critiques sur
le feuilleton-roman, 2 vols (Paris: Perrodil, 1845–6), vol. 2, pp. 305–6. The charge that Dumas had
transformed literary creativity into grimy industrial production was also made by Eugène de
Mirecourt in his Fabrique de romans: Maison Alexandre Dumas et Compagnie (Paris, 1845), a pamph-
let for which de Mirecourt was charged with libel and imprisoned for six months.
290 Serial Forms
in politicizing, rather than aestheticizing, speed.14 Both were self-consciously

political writers in the 1840s: Dumas was a Republican and Browning was a polit-
ical radical.15 The fantasy that drives both ‘How they Brought’ and Monte Cristo is
a fantasy of agency, of being able to get things done in the context of censorship
and authoritarian monarchical governments which seemed to make social pro-
gress of any sort frustratingly slow. Speed becomes, in their work, a form of revo-
lution in itself, a means of overtaking and outrunning the gradualist agendas of
conservative administrations. Writing in 1846, Alfred Nettement wrote about the
delay intrinsic to revolutionary thinking: ‘En temps de révolution, l’arbitraire, la
violence, les proscriptions, la cruauté, c’est toujours aujourd’hui; la liberté, l’ordre, le
repos, le bonheur, le droit commun, c’est toujours demain.’16 [‘In times of revolution,
arbitrariness, violence, censorship, cruelty—is always the order of the day; free-
dom, order, rest, happiness, common law—is always for tomorrow.’] Browning’s
poem insists on the effort, pain, and loss required to deliver something socially
important; the poem dramatizes a ride through the night into the ‘broad sun’
(line 39) of ‘demain’, or tomorrow. It is emphatically not about the ‘good news’, but
about ‘how they brought’ it. In this sense, then, it is a revolutionary poem. David
Bell ends his chapter on Dumas’s Monte Cristo by declaring the novel ‘a portrait of
empire . . . a network of communications that brought together far-reaching and
disparate regions of the globe under the controlling power of nation states’.17 But
this seems proleptic, given that in 1846 most of those nation states did not yet
exist. Dumas’s novel seems more interested in seriality, and in the agency and
energy that the serial can unleash, than in empire.
It is by exploiting serial communications that the Count of Monte Cristo exer-
cises his extraordinary agency and takes his serial revenge on his enemies, one by
one. In a key episode he bribes a telegraph operator, who is also a horticultural
enthusiast, with the promise of ‘a pretty little house with two acres of land’ (618).
Handing the man ‘a paper from his pocket upon which were drawn three signs,
with numbers to indicate the order in which they were to be worked’ (618) he
14 Winthrop-Young, ‘Informatics of Revenge’, n.p.

15 ‘Ce qui fait l’avenir de la République, c’est justement ceci, qu’il lui reste beaucoup à faire dans
l’avenir. Laissez-la donc d’abord être République bourgeoise; puis, avec l’aide des années, elle deviendra
République démocratique; puis, avec l’aide des siècles, elle deviendra République sociale’: Alexandre
Dumas, L’Événement (7 août 1848) [‘What makes the future of the Republic is this: precisely that there
remains a great deal to do in the future. Let it first be a bourgeois republic; then, with the help of years,
it will become a democratic republic; then, with the help of centuries, it will become a Social
Republic.’] Quoted in Alexandre Dumas, 1848: Alexandre Dumas dans la Révolution, ed. Claude
Schopp (Paris: Société des Amis d’Alexandre Dumas, 1998), p. 319. For Browning’s radical politics at
this stage of his life, see John Woolford and Daniel Karlin,‘Politics’, in Robert Browning (London:
Routledge, 2014), pp. 157–86.
16 Alfred Nettement, La Presse parisienne: Moeurs, mystères, intérêts, passions, caractères, lutes et
variations des journaux de Paris (Paris: Dentu, 1846), pp.104–5. Quoted in Birch, ‘“Les suites des
suites”’, p. 308.
17 Bell, Real Time, p. 130. Edmund Birch also considers the influence of the One Thousand and One
Nights on Dumas’s novel and thinks about the place of the orientalized ‘East’ more generally in the
text: Birch, ‘“Les suites des suites”’, pp. 303ff.
asks him to ‘repeat these signs’ (618) on the telegraph, instead of the signs being
transmitted by the preceding telegraph in the relay. He reassures the operator
that, if he does this, ‘you have wronged no man, but on the contrary have benefited
mankind’ (618). As a result of this interception of the communications relay,
Danglars receives fake news, and instantly sells all his Spanish bonds, only to read
next morning in the government paper, Le Messager, of the error: ‘[a] telegraphic
signal, improperly intercepted, owning to the fog, was the cause of this error’ (619).
Danglars, who is now a baron, and a wealthy and unscrupulous banker unhappily
married to an aristocrat, clearly stands in the novel for the bloated and irresponsible
ruling class. He loses a million francs as a result of this misinformation, and the
Count continues to pursue him until he is broken, in prison, and, finally, repentant.
The money the Count has extorted from him is anonymously returned for the
welfare of the people: ‘the 5,000,000 you stole from the hospitals has been restored
to them by an unknown hand’ (1071). The episode shows how, once serial commu-
nications are established, they can be exploited to send revolutionary messages,
messages which divert the course of history, extend social justice, and ‘benefit man-
kind’. The revolutionary practice proposed in the novel is allowed by the pervasive-
ness of serial communication, and by its porosity and its multiple entry points. A
small action at a nodal point, the ‘three added signs’ introduced at the relay, has the
potential to transform the ever-repeating narrative of violence, censorship, and
cruelty into a new and proliferating repetition of progress, freedom, happiness, and
justice. Seriality, Dumas suggests, can be used to change history.
The Count of Monte Cristo is a serial novel that enacts the fantasy of a serial
revolution: ‘all human wisdom is contained in these two words,—“Wait and
Hope”’ (1082). The novel uses seriality, through the hyper-mobility of its ‘jump-
cuts’, to get as close to representing the synchronous as it is able. By engineering
juxtapositions and swift comparisons, the action of the novel draws close to the
relay effect of the 1848 revolutions, a ‘chain’ of events which, according to the
Illustrated London News, ‘spread like an electric shock, and [shook] the whole of
Europe’.18 Fed by the idea of messages travelling at lightning speed, the revolu-
tions happened in anticipation of electric communication, but already under its
sign. Lecturing in America in 1848, for example, Frederick Douglass said that
‘[t]hanks to steam navigation and electric wires . . . a revolution now cannot be
confined to the place or to the people where it may commence, but flashes with
lightening [sic] speed from heart to heart, from land to land, till it has traversed
the globe’. The year 1848 was the moment when the serial media and the serial
historicist mentality that we have been tracing in Serial Forms finally realized its
full pan-European potential in a powerful series of relays.19 Without that new
18 [Anon.], Illustrated London News (1 April 1848).

19 Lecture by Frederic Douglass reported in the North Star (28 April 1848). Benedict Anderson
also discusses the internationalism of ‘nationalism which lives by making comparisons’: Anderson,
292 Serial Forms
international consciousness of interconnectedness and permeability, achieved

through the media, the revolutions of 1848 would never have happened. As Karl
Marx noticed at the time, the revolutions understood themselves as about move-
ment and speed: ‘[f]rom 1848 to 1851 only the ghost of the old revolution wan-
dered about . . . an entire people, which had imagined that by means of a revolution
it had imparted to itself an accelerated power of motion, suddenly finds itself set
back into a defunct epoch’.20 But Marx was wrong to write off 1848 so fast. New
ideas and practices of transnational synchronicity and seriality were to emerge
through the representation of revolution in 1848. Benedict Anderson reminds us
that ‘it was only in 1853, in the immediate aftermath of the European nationalist
upheavals of 1848, that the first International Statistical Congress, held in
Brussels, adopted a resolution establishing the basic “scientific” requirements for
achieving international comparability of census data and the standardization of
census content and techniques’.21 The 1848 revolutions understood themselves in
terms of international communications and evinced a seriality of form that cre-
ated and promulgated a rhetoric of international simultaneity and functional
equivalence which would determine national governments’ social policies for
years to come.
But living in history, like reading a serial novel, means not knowing how things
are going to come out. In early June 1846, as Elizabeth Barrett turned the pages of
The Count of Monte Cristo in her sitting room in Wimpole Street, she did not yet
know that she would soon be caught up in the Italian nationalist revolutions of
1848. That autumn, she would leave Wimpole Street and take off to Continental
Europe with Robert Browning. She married him in London on 12 September
1846 and just one week later the couple secretly left England for Pisa. In 1847,
they moved to Casa Guidi in Florence, where in 1848 they would witness the
efflorescence and the deliquescence of hope as the nationalist revolution in
Tuscany flared and then collapsed into disappointment. Elizabeth Barrett
Browning, as she would by then be called, would write an extraordinary account
of this experience in her long poem Casa Guidi Windows.
All of this was being prepared for by the amplifying beat of seriality in the years
after the Napoleonic wars and running up to 1848. But it would be very wrong to
jump ahead too far and petrify ‘the always moving substance of the past’ into
‘fixed explicit forms’ or ‘formed wholes rather than forming and formative
processes’.22 Serial Forms set out to show the dynamic processes involved in cali-
brating a new form of social time. A growing popular participation in a news
Spectre of Comparisons, p. 229. In Serial Revolutions: 1848 [forthcoming], I argue that the 1848 revolu-
tions were important beyond Europe too.
20 Karl Marx, ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’, p. 105 (emphasis mine).
21 Anderson, ‘Nationalism, Identity’, p. 123.
22 Williams, Marxism and Literature, p. 129. Williams was talking specifically about contemporary
life, but this seems equally applicable to the history of contemporaneity which is being attempted here.
culture which went hand-in-hand with a new experience of historical time was
slowly creating the conditions for social change. The 1848 revolutions were
conceived of as a series. Hannah Arendt reminds us that ‘the term “permanent
revolution”, or even more tellingly révolution en permanence’, was coined by
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in October 1848.23 The serial is both form and process,
and, to stay true to its form, it has to continue. Escaping form just as it is formed,
the serial ‘begins again to begin’.24 Serial Forms has argued that seriality appears
in different but related guises: it can be a form; a genre; a system; a technology;
and it can also be a strategy; a philosophy; a mode. But wherever it appears, a
distinct interrelation of its parts and a recognizable forward movement mark it as
serial. Seriality was the single most important ‘form’ to emerge out of the eight-
eenth century and into the nineteenth. The serial began to beat its rhythm of
open-ended, future-facing time more and more loudly in the 1820s, coming to
mark the time of nineteenth-century modernity. This makes the serial, rather
than the novel, the poem, or the drama, the true generic type of the age.
Seriality’s capacity to hover between cessation and continuance, to pause, and to
return, has made it the model for a peculiarly modern form of subjectivity which
was perhaps most famously articulated by Marcel Proust in À la recherche du temps
perdu (1913–27). Samuel Beckett, writing of Proust, suggests that the self is ‘the
seat of a constant process of decantation, decantation from the vessel containing
the fluid of future time, sluggish, pale and monochrome, to the vessel containing
the fluid of past time, agitated and multicoloured by the phenomena of its hours’.25
The agitation of experience slowly colours the monochrome future, and the pre-
sent becomes the obscure site of this agentless process of decantation and agita-
tion. Habermas wrote that ‘[t]he new time consciousness, which enters philosophy
in the writings of Bergson, does more than express the experience of mobility in
society, of acceleration in history, of discontinuity in everyday life. The new value
placed on the transitory, the elusive and the ephemeral, the very celebration of
dynamism, discloses a longing for an undefiled, immaculate and stable present.’26
But under the regime of seriality, the present can never be stable. For Deleuze, the
modern world is ‘a world of captures instead of closures’.27 Seriality is a technology
of capture: in all senses. It is anti-closure, moving forward in a series of chapters,
frames, views, or scenes; it captures episodes, moments, identities, and moves on.
It creates a holding pattern until such a time as a major reshuffling might occur:
seriality is, in sum, the perfect form for liberalism’s ‘not yet’.28
23 Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (London: Faber & Faber, 1963), p. 44.

24 Derrida uses the phrase ‘beginning again to begin’ about the narrator of Maurice Blanchot’s La
Folie du jour: Derrida, ‘Law of Genre’, p. 70.
25 Samuel Beckett, Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Dethuit (London: John Calder, 1965),
p. 15.
26 Jürgen Habermas, ‘Modernity—An Incomplete Project’ [1980], trans. Seyla Benhabib, in
Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (London: Pluto Press, 1985), pp. 3–15, p. 5.
27 Deleuze, The Fold, p. 81.
28 Dipesh Chakrabarty discusses liberalism’s ‘not yet’ in Provincializing Europe, p. 9.
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Index
Note: Figures are indicated by an italic ‘f ’, respectively, following the page number.
For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on occasion,
appear on only one of those pages.
Abbate, Carolyn 163 Appadurai, Arjun 175–6

Abbotsford 69, 72–5, 78–81, 89–93, 90f Arata, Stephen 91–3, 167–8
abolitionism 143–5, 252–3, 257–8, 278–83 archaeology 183
acceleration, cultural 2–3, 10–11, 18–19, 65–7, Arendt, Hannah 106, 292–3
79–81, 84–9, 165–6, 170–1, 175–6, 181–3, Arkwright, Richard 189–90
249, 288–9, 293 Armfield, Henry 151
Ackermann, Ralph 39–41, 63–4 Armstrong, Isobel 148–51, 195
Acropolis 234f, 235–7 Arnold, Jane 270–1
see also Parthenon Arnold, Matthew 270–1
Addison, Joseph 133–4, 184–5 artifactuality of news events 125–6
Adorno, Theodor 2–3, 131–2, 175–6, 195 Ashton, Rosemary 18–20
advertisement duty 30, 33 Aspinall, Arthur 35–7
advertisements, newspaper 38–9, 107–8, Asquith, Ivon 30
151–2, 192–4 Astley’s Amphitheatre 31–2, 168–9, 208–10,
advertisements, street 177–8, 192–4, 197–8, 222f 229–31, 243, 245
advertising 35–7, 192–9, 208 Athenaeum 61–3, 166–7, 240–1
Aegina 115 Atherstone, Edwin
Aeniad 116 The Last Days of Herculaneum
Agamben, Giorgio 257–8 (poem) 148–51
Ainsworth, William Francis 1–2 Atkinson, David 52–4
Ainsworth, William Harrison 91–3 Auber, Daniel 163
Tower of London 91–3 La Muette de Portici (opera) 159–61,
Ainsworth’s Magazine 1–2 164–5, 175
Albums, see scrapbooks and albums Aurevilly, Barbey, d‘ 120–1
almanacs 23–5, 30, 37–8, 58–67, 70–1, 99–100, Auschwitz 2–3
206–7, 216–18, 223–9, 264–5 Auslander, Philip 139–42
Altick, Richard 43–5, 216–18 Aravamudan, Srinivas 152–3
anachronism
in Scott 70–1, 174 Babbage, Charles 106
in La Muette de Portici 164–5 Bachelard, Gaston 244–5
in Bulwer 174 Bacon, Francis 223–5
anachrony 11–12, 98–9 Badiou, Alain 171
Andersen, Hans Christian 253–4, 278–80 Bagehot, Walter 75–6
Anderson, Benedict 3–5, 21–2, 27–8, 32–3, ballads 23–5, 37–8, 48–57, 65–7, 126
35–7, 203, 291–2 see also Scott, Sir Walter
Imagined Communities 203 Ballantyne, James 81–2
The Spectre of Comparisons 203 Ballantyne, John 100–3
Anderson, Patricia 227 Bann, Stephen 10–11, 229–30
animal rights 252–3 Barker, Henry Aston 123–4, 140–2, 231
annuals 63–4 Barker, Robert 124–5
antiquarianism 79–83, 91–3 Barnes, Julian 133–4
Apollonicon 130–1 Barnum, Phineas Taylor 23–5
336 Index
Barrett, Elizabeth 1–2, 287–8, 292 Brown, William Wells 282–3

see also Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browne, Hablot Knight (Phiz) 91–3, 214f, 247
Barthes, Roland 164 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett 22–3, 292
Barton, Anne 134–5, 142–3 see also Barrett, Elizabeth
Bastille 202 Browning, Robert 1–2, 22–3, 288–90, 292
Bazin, Germain 123–4 Buckland, Adelene 93–5
Bear, Jordan 121–3 Buckstone, John Baldwin
Beard, Mary 183 The Last Days of Pompeii (play) 151
Beaty, Frederick 130–1 Bullock, William 117–20
Beckett, Samuel 293 Bullock’s Museum 117f
Belgian Revolution (1830) 164, 175–6 Bulwer Lytton, Edward 18–19, 45–6,
Bell, Barbara 100–3 244–5, 248
Bell, David 287–8 England and the English 21, 167–8, 175–6
Bell’s Life 52–4, 159–60, 199–200 The Last Days of Pompeii 25–6, 148–51,
Belvedere torso 242–3 166–76, 219, 240–1, 243–4, 248
Benjamin, Walter 247–8 Burford, John 123–4
Bergson, Henri 211–12 Burford, Robert 79, 123–4, 140–2, 148–51,
Berlant, Lauren 270–1 166–7
Bermingham, Ann 126–30 Burgis, Nina 213–15
Bhabha, Homi 29, 165–6, 205–6 Burke, Edmund 133–4, 251
bio-capital 257–9, 285–6 Burritt, Elihu 284–5
biocitizenship 272–84 Burrow, Colin 113–14
biopolitics 6–8, 19–20, 27–8, 145–6, 175–6, Burwick, Frederick 117–20
251–2, 254–5, 257–9, 272–8, 282–3, 285–6 Bury St Edmunds 178–9, 183
biopower 257–8, 272, 285–6 Buss, Robert 200–1
Black, Barbara 42–3 Butler, Judith 203
Blackwood’s Magazine 43–5, 114, 121–3, 152, Buzard, James 123–4
166–7, 219–20, 243, 265–7 Byron, Captain John ‘Foul-Weather
‘Black-Ey’d Susan’ (ballad) 84, 86f Jack’ 117–20
Bleichmar, Daniela 241–2 Byron, Lord 8–10, 25–6, 76–7, 106, 138–9,
Bloch, Ernst 148 142–3, 232–5
Blumenberg, Hans 109–10 exile to Venice 110
Boadicea 240–1 Waterloo battlefield visit 112–13
Bone, Drummond 134–5 refusal to view Vesuvius 148–51
books, cost of 100–3 Beauties of Lord Byron 219–20
Bouchage, Vicomte de 117–20 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage 84, 110, 112–16,
Bourdieu, Pierre 247–8 121–5, 133–4, 137–8, 232
Boyd, Elizabeth French 121–3, 136–7 Don Juan 107–8, 110–12, 116–23,
Bradbury, William 213–15 130–9, 142–3
Bradwell, William 215–16 Sardanapalus 123–4, 166–7
Brake, Laurel 48–50
branding of slaves 5–6 Cabinet Cyclopedia 235–7
Brewster, David 245 cabinet of curiosities 79–81
Bridge of Sighs 123–4 Cadell, Robert 91–3
British Almanac 65–7 Cambria 280
British government 190–1, 274–7 Camden Society 183
British Museum 220–3, 239, 262–3, 263f camera lucida 184–5
broadsides 33–5, 37–8, 48–61, 67, 69–71, 84, 95, camera obscura 184–5
99–100, 200–1, 225–6 Campbell. Timothy 84–9, 93–5
Brontë, Emily capitalism 2–3, 7–8, 21–2, 26, 165–6, 175–6,
Wuthering Heights 59–61 181–3, 194, 203, 254–5, 257–8, 272
Brougham, Lord 219–20 Capp, Bernard 61–3
Brown, Ford Madox Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da 135–6
Work (painting) 195–6 Carlton Chronicle 199–200
Index 337
Carlyle, Thomas 18–19, 26, 177–83, 187–91, Clark, T. J. 132–3, 188, 264
194–5, 207–8, 211–12, 263–4 class (as form of collective existence) 203
The French Revolution 156–7 Cleopatra’s Needle 242–3
Past and Present 178–9, 183–91, 194–9 Clopton Hall (Warwickshire) 264
Sartor Resartus 177–8 Clough, Arthur Hugh 22–3
Carpenter, William 256–7 Cobbett, William 38–9, 156–7, 243
Carroll, Lewis (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) See also Weekly Political Register
Alice in Wonderland 196–7 Coburg Theatre 153, 231, 245
Carter, Thomas 38 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 18–19, 130–1, 146–7,
Castel Sant’Angelo 231 265–7
catastrophism (geology) 157–8 Biographia Literaria 130–1
Catholicism 177–8, 195, 252–3 Coliseum (Rome) 229–30, 235–7, 239, 243
Catnach, James 52–4 see also Colosseum
Cattermole, George 91–3, 192–4 Collins, Mortimer 61–3
censorship 10, 11–12, 30, 42–3, 67–8, Collins, Wilkie 14–15, 229–30
107–8, 289–91 Colosseum 213–18, 231, 243–4
centralization of power 8 see also Regent’s Park Colosseum
Certeau, Michel de 232–5, 237–9 Comet, Great 107–8
Chakrabarty, Dipesh 293 commodification 21, 63–4, 93, 100–3, 139–40,
Chalmers, George 82–3 232–5, 243–5
Chambers, Robert 100–3 commodity markets 196–7
Chambers, William 100–3, 235–7 Comte, Auguste 180–1
Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal 43–5 Constable, Archibald 100–3
Chambers’s publishing house 240, 281–2 contemporaneity 11–12
Chandler, James 14–15, 70–1 Cook, Eliza 274–5
Chantrey, Francis 188–9 copyright infringement 100–3, 138–9, 199–200
chapbooks 48–54, 69, 72–4, 100–3, 216–18, Corinth 115
226–7, 235–7 Corn Laws, repeal 177, 190–1, 274–5
Chapman and Hall (publishers) 199–200 Cornelius, Peter von 265
Chapter Coffee-house 41–2 Coronation Fair 211
Charlesworth, Andrew 10–11 Corréard, Alexandre 117–23
Chartier, Roger 218–19 Cosmorama 130–1, 153, 215–16
Chartism 6, 38–9, 138–9, 186–7, 281–2, Costello, Leo 112–13
284–5 Courier 130–1
Chartist Circular 104–5 Covent Garden 128–30, 159–63, 208–10
Chaumareys, Hugues Duroys de 117–20 Cowie, John 255–6
Cheah, Pheng 21–2 Cowper, William 59–61
Chesterton, Gilbert Keith 200–1 Craik, George Lillee 240–1
Chestney, Eliza 52–4 Crary, Jonathan 109–10, 121–3, 135–6, 146–7
childcare 267–9 Crawford, Robert 74–5
children 27–8, 169–70, 220–3, 247–8, 251, Croll, James 46–7
254–5, 260–4, 269–70, 275–7, 282–3 Crowe, Thomas 132–3
Christ Church, Oxford 192–4 Cruikshank, George 40f, 57–8, 91–3, 178–9,
Christensen, Jerome 106 200–1, 205–6, 209f, 247
chronobiopolitics 252–3, 260–7 Cruikshank, Isaac Robert 57–8
Cicéri, Charles 161–2 cultural acceleration / change 33–5, 39–41,
Cicero 232–5 65–7, 109, 189–90
citizenship 10, 15, 27–8, 30, 100–108, culture
201–2, 205–6, 211 advertising 198
Clairmont, Claire 215–16 ancient / classical 180–1, 216–18
Clapton 278–82 bourgeois 159–60
Clare, John 52–4, 56–7, 64, 123–4 civic 128–30, 220–3
The Shepherd’s Calendar 23–5, 64 club 41–2
Clark, Christopher 10, 181–3 dominant 12–13, 15, 37–8
338 Index
culture (cont.) Sketches by Boz 31–3, 38–41, 48, 52–4, 57–8,

economic 263–4 67–8, 138–9, 178–9, 192–4, 199–202, 204,
elite 237–9 208–11, 209f
emancipatory 28 Somebody’s Luggage 148–51
emergent 31–2, 37–8, 197–8 ‘Street Sketches’ 31–2
European revolutionary 164 Dickinson, Emily 6–7
gentlemen’s clubs 41–2 Difference Engine 106
global 249 Dillon, Elizabeth Maddock 260–1, 272
historicist 165–6, 211–12, 225–6 Diorama, the 130–1, 159–60
legislative 263–4 dioramas 124–5, 131–2, 135–6, 148–51, 161–2
literary 33–5 disaster capitalism 175–6
London 220–3 Doane, Mary Ann 137–8, 174–5
oral 223–5 Dodd, James 188
material 54, 216–18, 220–3 Dolby, Thomas 219–20
political 103–4, 263–4 domestic work 267–9
residual 37–8 Donoughmore Round Tower 240–1
shared 32–3 Douce, Francis 82–3
spectacular 142–3, 145–6, 165–6 Douglas Jerrold’s Shilling Magazine 67–8
urban 140–2 Douglass, Frederick 22–3, 27–8, 257–8, 278–80,
see also news culture, popular culture, 285–6, 291–2
print culture, seriality as emergent culture, see also North Star
show culture, visual culture Doyle, Richard 41f
Drury Lane 130–1, 160–1, 208–10
Dallow, Jessica 89–91 Ducrow, Andrew 168–9
Daly, Nicholas 148, 156–8 Dumas, Alexandre 1–2, 231, 287–8
Dames, Nicholas 21 The Count of Monte Cristo 1–2, 287–92
Dante Alighieri 142–3 du Maurier, George 273f
Darley, Andrew 23–5 Duncan, Ian 72–4, 82–3, 93–5, 100–5
Darnton, Robert 13–14, 55–6, 61–3
Dayell, J. G. Eco, Umberto 3–5, 23–5, 71, 82–3, 104–5, 186–7
Shipwrecks and Disasters at Sea 117–20 Edelman, Lee 263–4
Delacroix, Eugène 132–3 Edgeworth, Maria 63–4
Deleuze, Gilles 3–5, 23–5, 71, 106, 152–3, Edinburgh Review 43–5, 117–23, 134–5,
242, 293 219–20, 243
democracy 192, 194 Egan, Pierce 57–8, 200–1
democratization 11–12, 109, 177 Egyptian Hall 25–6, 76–7, 117–20, 117f, 132–3,
of leisure 165–6 148–51, 243
Derrida, Jacques 107, 125–6, 140–2, 181–3, 292–3 Eidophusikon 124–32, 127f, 148
Desnoyer, Louis 287 Eitner, Lorenz 110
deterritorialization 18–19 Eley, Geoff 285–6
Diana Belvedere 225–9, 235–7 Ellenborough, Lord 29
Dickens, Charles 22–3, 26, 31–2, 148–51, Elliott, Ebenezer 255–6
159–60, 177–83, 200–1, 206–7, 211–12, Ellis, Markman 128–30
231, 247, 270–1 Eliot, George 175
David Copperfield 10–11, 148–51, 213, 214f, The Mill on the Floss 175–6
216, 219, 243–5 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 1–2, 18–19, 22–3,
Dombey and Son 1–2 177–8, 194, 281–2
Hard Times 206–7 engravings 42–3, 49f, 63–4, 72–4, 91–3, 95,
The Haunted Man 14–15 152–3, 213–16, 226–7, 229–30
Household Words 126–8, 223–5, 264, 270–1 ephemera 16–18, 59–61, 67–8, 70–1, 84–9,
Master Humphrey’s Clock 91–3, 200–1 91–3, 95, 116, 192–4, 198, 205–6
Nicholas Nickleby 33, 72–4 Ermath, Elizabeth Deeds 104–5
Pickwick Papers 8–10, 31–2, 57–8, 91–3, Euphonon 130–1
199–200, 247 Eurocentrism 257–8
Index 339
European interconnectedness 10–11 gender 1–5, 27–8, 48–50, 253–5, 272, 285–6
Evangelicalism 262–3 generation 254–9
Evans, Frederick Mullett 213–15 Gentleman’s Magazine 98–9, 215–16
Evening Chronicle 199–200 geological time 157–8
eventfulness 93–5, 152–3, 156–7, 165–6, 169–70 George IV 245
Exeter Royal Exchange 227–9 Géricault, Théodore 25–6, 132–3, 142–5
The Raft of the Medusa [Scène du Naufrage]
Fabian, Johannes 11–12 25–6, 110–12, 111f, 117–23, 131–9, 143–5
Factory Acts 169–70 Gibbon, Edward 113–14, 240
family structure 265–7, 270–1, 285–6 Gill, Stephen 267–9
fashion and dress 84–9 Girardin, Emile de 35–7
Favret, Mary 93–5, 97–8 Gladstone, William 123–4
Felski, Rita 18–19, 23–5 Glennie, Paul 47–8
feminism 3–5, 203–4, 257–8 globalization 10–11, 177, 189–90, 248, 263–4
Fenella (La Muette de Portici) 159–60, 164–5 Glyptothek (Munich) 265–7
Ferris, Ina 70–1, 75–6, 82–3, 105 Godwin, George 216–18
Figaro in London Almanac 59–61 Godwin, William 123–4
Fine Arts, magazine 143–5 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 70–1
Finkelstein, David 100–3 Goodman, Kevis 172
Firat, Oruc 8 Gordon, Catherine 91–3
First World War 247–8 Goldsmith’s Almanac 59–61
Fordism 2–3 gradualism (geology) 157–8
Forget Me Not 63–4 Grafton, Anthony 180–1
Foucault, Michel 3–5, 16–18, 152–3, 177–8, grand opéra 158–9
257–8, 272, 275–7, 282–3, 285–6 Grand Tour 229–30
Fox, William Johnson 220–3 Grant, James 43–5
France 120–1 Greenwich Fair 208–10, 209f
newspapers 35–7 Grigsby, Darcy Grimaldo 135–6, 143–5
franchise reform 177 group formation 202
Frankfurt School 2–3, 18–19 group-in-fusion 203
Fraser, Nancy 253–4, 270–1 Groth, Helen 123–4
Fraser’s Magazine 177–8 Guha, Ranajit 200–1
free trade 251, 263–4 Gunning, Tom 21
French Revolution 114, 156–7, 181–3, 202
French (July) revolution (1830) 8–10, 164 Habermas, Jürgen 28, 253–4, 270–1, 293
Fried, Michael 143–5 Handel, Georg Friedrich 59–61
Friendship’s Offering 63–4 Hardt, Michael 257–8
Fripp, Alfred 275–8, 276f Harris, Neil 23–5
Fritzsche, Peter 181–3 Harrow School 115
Fuller, Margaret 22–3, 281–2 Hartog, François 249–50
Fyfe, Paul 200–1 Haydon, Benjamin 42–3, 42f, 133–4
Hayles, N. Katherine 16–18
Gagging Bill 30 Haymarket 148–51, 160–1
Gainsborough, Thomas 126–8 Haywood, Ian 107–8
Galignani’s Messenger 117–20 Hazlitt, William 8–10, 15, 75–6, 79–82, 98–9,
Galt, John 249 115, 121–3, 199–200
Garcha, Amanpal 270–1 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 18–19, 104–5,
Garrison, William Lloyd 281–2 181–3
Gaskell, Elizabeth 22–3, 45–6, 252–3, 261–2, Heidegger, Martin 3–5
264–71, 281–2, 285–6 Heine, Heinrich 158–9
Mary Barton 265–7 Hensley, Nathan 175, 277–8
The Grey Woman and Other Tales 273f Hesiod 181–3
Gaskell, William 265–7, 269–70 Hetherington, Henry 33–5, 156–7, 243
Gay, John 84 see also Poor Man’s Guardian
340 Index
Hibberd, Sarah 117–20, 159–60 Idler, and Breakfast-Table Companion 157–9

hieroglyphic 223–7 Illustrated London News 91–3
Hill, Rosemary 179–80 illustrations 14–15, 31, 46–7, 56–7, 72–4, 91–3,
Hindley, Charles 52–4 100–3, 138–9, 178–9, 185–6, 192–4, 200–1,
historical consciousness 32–3, 37–8, 91–3, 216–23, 253–4
109–10, 146–7, 165, 181–3, 239 import duties 30
historicism 18–19, 179–83, 218–19, 241–2, inclusivity 257–8, 285–6
248–9 industrial city life 265–9
see also Scott, Sir Walter industrial productivity 200–1
history industrialization 11–12, 188–9, 195–7, 203–4,
perceptions of 225–6, 229–30, 232–5 254–5
and seriality 220–3, 235–7, 240–1 industrializing economy 169–70
and scale 248–50 International Statistical Congress 291–2
Hogarth, Catherine 31–2 Ireland 22–3, 83–4, 121–3, 272–4, 284–5
Hogg, Margaret 95–6 Irish Famine 175–7, 272, 274–8, 281–2
Hoggart, Richard 243–4 Irving, John 81–2
Holywell Street 219–20
Hone, William 107–8, 240 Jacquard, Joseph Marie 106
Hopwood, Nick 15, 248–9 Jacquard machine 106
Hornor, Thomas 139–40 Jaffe, Audrey 200–1
Hotten, John Camden 50–2, 57–8 James, Louis 100–3, 219–20
housework 267–9 Jameson, Frederic 202
Howitt, Anna Mary 252–3 Jeffrey, Francis 114
Howitt, Mary 251, 256–7, 260–1, 275–80, 285–6 Jermy, Isaac 52–4
The Spider and the Fly 260–1 Jocelin of Brakelond 183
The Children’s Year 260–1 Jones, Ernest 243
Autobiography 262–3 Josephus 235–7
Howitt, William 43–5, 251, 274–5, 278–80, Journal des débats, le 117–20
284–6 Joyce, Patrick 10–11, 13–14, 243–4
The Book of the Seasons 264 juxtaposition 186
The Boy’s Country-Book 264
Homes and Haunts of the Eminent British Kaiser, Matthew 117–20
Poets 264 kaleidoscope 245
Rural Life of England 226–7 Kant, Immanuel 133–4
Visits to Remarkable Places 264 Kassell, Lauren 61–3
The Year Book of the Country 264 Kaulbach, Wilhelm von 265, 266f
Howitt’s Journal 27–8, 33–5, 151, 251–71, 263f, Kean, Charles 156–7
266f, 283–6 Kean, Edmund 123–4, 130–1, 160–1
internationalism 253–4 Keats, John 8–10, 117–20
women writers and artists 253–4, 260–1 Kelleter, Frank 23–5
illustrations 253–4 Kelly, Gary 52–4
compartmentalization of social issues 254–5 Kennington 156, 231
Irish famine 272–80 King’s College London 192–4
humanitarian appeals 274–5 King’s Theatre 148–51, 160–1
support for Frederick Douglass 278–84 Kingsley, Charles 274–5
closure 285 kinship 27–8, 285–6
Hugo, Victor 91–3 Kirby, Michael 139–40
Hume, David 113–14, 270–1 Kittler, Friedrich 16–18
Hunt, John 107–8 Klancher, John 43–5, 47–8, 219–23, 242–4
Hunt, Leigh 142–3 Knight, Charles 43–6, 65–7, 166–7, 229–30, 240,
Hunt, Lynn 216–18 248–9
Hutchinson family singers 278–80 The Pictorial History of England 240–2
Hyde, Ralph 245 Pompeii 166–7
Hyde Park 231 see also Penny Magazine
Index 341
Knutsford 264 Ludwig I, King of Bavaria 265

Koselleck, Reinhart 181–3 Luhmann, Niklas 157–8, 239
Kracauer, Siegfried 196–7 Lukás, Georg 104–5
Kramnick, Jonathan 16–18 Lupton, Thomas 42–3
Lyell, Charles 157–8
Lady’s Newspaper 151 Lyotard, Jean-François 197–8
Lake District 265–7
Lambeck, Michael 285–6 McCalman, Iain 48, 128–30
land tenure (Ireland) 274–5 McDowell, Paula 16–18
Lardner, Dionysus 235–7 McEvansoneya, Philip 135–6
Leavis, Q. D. 167–8 Macfarlane, Charles 240
Lee, Rachel C. 257–8 Macrone, John 178–9, 199–200
Leech, John 246f Madder, E. 84
Leerssen, Joep 75–6 see also ‘Olio, or Scrap Book’
Lefebre, Henri 11–12, 156–7, 165–6, 171–3 Madge, Travers 269–70
Leicester Square 11–12, 124–5, 128–30, 140–2, magazines, see penny press, periodicals,
148–51, 215–16, 229–31 twopenny press, Ainsworth’s Magazine,
leisure Blackwood’s Magazine, Douglas Jerrold’s
commodification 21 Shilling Magazine, Fine Arts, Fraser’s
democratization 165–6 Magazine, Gentleman’s Magazine, Monthly
developing leisure industry 170–1 Magazine, Sartain’s Union Magazine,
as serial phenomenon 175–6 Saturday Magazine, Sunday School Penny
Leonard, John 167–8 Magazine
Leopardi, Giacomo 58 magic lantern shows 156
Leroux, Pauline 160–1 Maidment, Brian 57–61, 65–7, 152, 207–8,
Leslie, Charles Robert 139–40 219–23, 225–6, 251–4, 274–5
Levi, Primo 2–3 Manchester 30, 107–8, 267–9, 269–70, 281–2
Levine, Caroline 16–18 Manchester Observer 107–8
Lewald, Fanny 22–3 Mandler, Peter 252–3
Lewes, G. H. 123–4, 205–6, 247 Mannheim, Karl 255–6
liberalism 15, 19–23, 175–6, 198–9, 243, 256–9, Manning, Susan 79–81
263–4, 272, 277–8, 285–6 Marathon, battle of 112–14
Limbird, John 219–20 Marshall, Peter 135–6
Lindelof, Anja Mølle 139–40 Marten, Maria 52–4
literacy 35–7, 43–5, 205–8, 219–20, 247–8 Martin, John
Literary Chronicle 100–3, 152–3 The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum
Literary Gazette 43–5, 219–20 (painting) 148–53
Livesey, Ruth 30 Martineau, Harriet 240
Lockhart, John Gibson 35–7, 69, 79–81 Marx, Karl 27–8, 169–70, 180–1, 291–2
London Das Kapital 169–70
centrality as capital city 10–11 Masaniello (Tommaso Aniello) 159–60
world’s fastest-growing city 12–13 Masaniello (equestrian) 153, 159–60
panoramas of London 140–2, 145–6 Masaniello, ou le Pecheur de Portici
redevelopment 210–11 (ballet) 159–60
see also Holywell Street, Hyde Park, Leicester Masaniello, the Fisherman of Naples
Square, Pall Mall, St George’s Fields, (play) 160–1
St Paul’s Cathedral, Seven Dials, Strand, Mason, Lowell 148–51
West End, Waterloo Bridge mass communication 196–7
London Journal 1–2 massification 3–5, 26, 162–3
London Museum 117–20 Masten, Jeffrey 23–5
Louis XVIII 117–20 Maturin, Charles Robert
Loutherbourg, Philip James de 124–31, 148 Bertram (play) 130–1
Lowell, James Russell 186–7, 194 Maxwell, Richard 91–3, 166–7, 174
Luciano, Dana 252–3 Mayer, Ruth 23–5
342 Index
Mayhew, Henry 33–5, 48–52, 54, 57–61, 208 Monthly Magazine 43–5, 156–7, 199–200, 229–30
London Labour and the London Poor 33–5, Monument 216–18
54, 55f Moore, Francis 223–5
Mechanics’ Institutes 35 Moran, Clarence 195–6
media, varieties of 31 Moran, James 65–7
mediality 16–18 Moretti, Franco 104–5
mediation 6, 16–18, 72–4, 82–3, 91–100, 106, Morgan, William 148–51
111–12, 125–6, 135–6, 138–40, 168–9, Morning Chronicle 35–7, 107–8, 117–20,
183–8, 223–5 199–200, 207–8, 213–15
mediation, technical 128–30 Morning Herald 126–8
mediation as survival 208–10 Morning Journal 139–40
money as mediation 192 Morning Post 117–20, 160–1, 166–7
Meisel, Martin 8–10, 57–8, 200–1 Morse, Deborah Denenholz 270–1
Mellor, Anne K. 187–8 Muehlebach, Andrea 285–6
Melrose Abbey 89 Murray, John 100–3, 107–8, 116, 130–1,
Menai Bridge 56–7 220–3, 229–30
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 131–2 Myrone, Martin 109
Meteyard, Eliza 254–5
mezzotint 42–3, 138–9 Nagel, Alexander 11–12
Michelangelo 135–6 Naples 148–51, 153, 159–60, 166–7
Michelet, Jules 121–3, 180–1 Naples, Bay of 148
middle class 50–4, 63–4, 146–7, 174, 235–7, Napoleon 76–7, 98–9, 181–3, 215–16
270–1, 277–8 Napoleonic wars 8–11, 33, 50–2, 72–4, 76–7,
Mill, John Stuart 6, 179–80 93–7, 114, 218, 292–3
Miller, J. Hillis 205–6 National Gallery 262–3
Milner, Henry M. nationalism 3–5, 8–10, 21–3, 27–8, 203–4,
Lucius Catiline, the Roman Traitor 231 291–2
Masaniello (play) 153, 159–60 nationhood 10–11, 114
miniatures 26–7, 72–4, 78–9, 216, 218–19, Necker de Saussure, Albertine 261–2
244–6, 248 Negri, Antonio 257–8
miniaturization 26 neoliberalism 5–8, 285–6
Mirecourt, Eugène de 288–9 Nersessian, Anahid 16–18
Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Nettement, Alfred 288–9
The 43–5, 72–4, 91–3, 139–40, 152–3, 154f, Neuberg, Victor 52–4
155f, 159f, 167–8, 213–15, 219–23, 225–6, news
229–30, 234f, 237–9, 242–3, 245 fabricated 14–15, 95–7
reprints from annuals 63–4 affordability 39–41, 67–8
extracts from Scott’s works 100–3 as broadsides, chapbooks, ballads 48–50
reprints of Byron 123–4 as concurrent with events 50–2
miscellany 26–7, 32–3, 43–5, 70–1, 74–5, 79–83, time-lag 14–15, 23–5, 29–30, 35–7, 93–5,
192–4, 200–1, 205–6, 219–20 170–1, 205–6
Mitchell, Rosemary 240–1 government tax on news 30, 33–5, 235–7
Mittell, Jason 23–5 up-to-date news in London 39–41
modernism, German 18–19 sharing in clubs 41–2
modernity 2–3, 10, 16–18, 20, 23–6, 28–9, 47–8, of natural events 50–2
93–5, 145–6, 165–6, 169–70, 191, 205–6, old stories as news 50–2, 152–3
285–6, 292–3 historical events as news 26–7, 116, 174–5,
modernization 249 235–7
Mogridge, George relationship with topicality and reality 140–2,
Sergeant Bell, and his Raree-show 72–4, 73f, 227–9
148–51 combined with historical reflection 153
Mole, Tom 72–4, 91–3, 123–4, 139–40 historical objects as events 235–7, 241–2
monad (family) 265–7 news culture 16–18, 46–7, 67, 71, 79–83, 93–5,
Moncrieff, William Thomas 117–20 109, 128–30, 172, 174–5, 198, 227–9,
Shipwreck of the Medusa (drama) 117–20 287–8, 292–3
Index 343
Newspaper Press Directory 48 panoramas 79, 124–5, 130–1, 170–1, 216,

Newspaper Stamp Duties Act 1819 30 229–30, 243
repeal 33 Barker’s panorama of London 124–5
newspapers as participative events 128–30, 145–6
cost 14–15, 33–5 Queen Charlotte’s visit to Spithead 128–30
tax 14–15, 33 mediation of news events 170–1
handed on 29, 33–5 360-degree panorama of London 139–40
London papers 30–2 precursors to television 140–2
United States 35–7 obsolescence 140–2
France 35–7 of Pompeii (Burford) 148, 166–7, 243
and national identity 35–7, 203–4 of Rome 243
Sunday newspapers 35–7, 48 see also Eidophusikon
sharing in clubs 41–2 Pantheon 213–15
rereading 46–7 Paris (1968) 3–5
competition with broadsides 33–5, 50–2, Paris Commune 27–8
65–7 Parker, Mark 177–8
importance of shipping news 126 Parker, Roger 163
reporting of shows and spectacles Parliament 30, 33–5, 38–9, 45–6, 69
139–40, 151 Parry, John
reporting of current events 151–3 ‘A London Street Scene’ (watercolour) 151, 222f
Nichol, John Pringle 157–8 Parry, William 143–5
Nicolson, Benedict 120–1 Parterre 43–5, 91–3, 227
Nietzsche, Friedrich 152–3 Parthenon 225–9, 231f, 232, 233f, 235–9, 243
North Star 27–8, 281–6 participation 3–5, 10–11, 18–19, 23–8, 30, 32–3,
Norwich 52–4 38–9, 42–3, 47–8, 65–7, 71, 91–3, 104–5,
109, 128–30, 134–5, 143–7, 172, 200–2,
O’Connor, Feargus 281–2 205–11, 220–5, 244–5, 247–8, 254–8, 292–3
O’Connor, Ralph 123–4, 140–2 Patent Theatres’ Monopoly 30
O’Keefe, John patriarchy 203–4, 265–7
Omai (pantomime) 128–30 Patten, Robert 199–200
Old Moore’s Almanack 59–61, 64–5, 223–5 Patton, Paul 18–19
Old Scotland Yard 211 Peacock, Thomas Love 215–16
Olio, The 43–5, 59–61, 62f, 63–4, 91–3, 225–7, Pedersen, Susan 52–4
228f, 235–7 Peebles 235–7
reprints of Scott’s novels 100–3 Peel, Sir Robert 190–1, 274–5
‘Olio, or Scrap Book’ 84, 85f, 86f, 87f, 88f, peep show 71–4
91f, 218 Penny Cyclopædia 43–5
Ong, Walter 165 Penny Magazine 43–7, 54, 220–5, 227, 231f,
opera 117–20, 148–51, 150f, 156, 158–9, 164–7 232–5, 233f, 236f, 239–40, 248–9, 252–3
Orlemanski, Julie 211–12 penny post 284–5
orrery 245 penny press 13–15, 21, 33–7, 45–6, 48–50, 52–4,
Ortega y Gasset, José 255–6 59–61, 100–3, 199–200, 220–3, 225–6,
O’Sullivan, Sean 21 229–30
ottava rima 134–5 see also London Journal, Penny Magazine,
Otto, Peter 139–40 Poor Man’s Guardian, twopenny press
Ottoman Empire 114 Percy, Thomas 79–81, 95
Oxenford, John 245 Reliques of Ancient English Poetry 95
periodicals
Pacini, Giovanni and periodization 14–15
L’ultimo giorno di Pompei (opera) 148–51, and national perceptions of history /
159–61, 166–7 time 152, 219–20
Paestum 238f weekly periodicals 14–15, 26–7, 31, 42–8,
Pall Mall 41–2, 117–20, 208–10, 220–3, 65–7, 100–3, 199–200, 225–6, 235–7
229–30, 247 see also magazines, penny press,
Palmer, Samuel 213–15 twopenny press
344 Index
periodization 18–19, 181–3, 186 Rabb, Melinda 248

Peristrephic Panorama 130–1, 134–5 race 27–8, 253–5, 257–8, 272–84
Perkins, Maureen 61–3, 65–7 racialization 257–8, 272–4, 277–8, 282–3, 285–6
Perring, John 195–6 racism 3–7, 257–8, 280, 282–3
Peterloo 14–15, 30, 107–8, 111–12 radical press 13–14, 31, 33–5, 43–5, 107–8,
The Peterloo Massacre 107–8 156–7, 219–20, 243
Peterson, Linda 260–1 radicalism 10–11, 13–14, 219–20, 253–4
Phelan, Peggy 139–40 railways 10–11, 287–9
Phiz (Hablot Knight Browne) 91–3, 214f, 247 Ramsay, Allan
Picker, John 288–9 The Gentle Shepherd (play) 76–7
Piper, Andrew 43–5 Rancière, Jacques 16–18, 47–8, 200–1
Piraeus 115 raree shows 72–4, 73f, 84, 87f, 148–51, 167–8,
pirating, see copyright infringement 216–18
Pitts, John 54 Read, Alan 208–10
Pius IX, Pope 284–5 reading, see newspapers, participation,
Place, Francis 43–5 periodicals, serial reading
Plunkett, John 109 Reason, Matthew 139–40
Pocock, John 65–7 Red Barn Murder 52–4
Polhemus, Robert M. 213–15 Reform Act 1832 30
Pompeii 148, 151–2, 157–8, 161–2, 166–70, Reform movement 41–2
172–4, 183, 216–19, 222f, 243–4, 248 Regency 229–30
Poole, Robert 65–7 Regent Street 156, 215–16
Poor Laws 177 Regent’s Park Colosseum 213–16, 214f, 219–20
Poor Man’s Guardian 33–5, 43–5, 156–7 Rendle, Thomas McDonald
Poor Robin’s Almanac 227–9 recollections of Vesuvius show 158
Poovey, Mary 50–2 Revolutions of 1848 284–5, 291–2
popular culture 10–11, 13–15, 26–7, 70–6, 82–3, Reynolds, Joshua 126–8
99–100, 117–20, 128–30, 178–9, 206–7, Richardson, Todd 281–4
219–20, 243–5 Ricoeur, Paul 63–4, 186–7, 239
population growth 188–9, 211–12, 251, 256–7 Riding, Christine 120–1
pornographers 219–20 Rigney, Ann 72–4, 105, 174
pornography sellers 59–61 Rilke, Rainer Maria 242–3
Porter, Theodore 50–2 Ritson, Joseph 95
Portfolio 91–3, 117–20 Roberts, Robert
Portland Vase 235–7 absence of newspapers in Wales 37–8
post-modernity 197–8 recollection of broadsides 55–6
presentism 240–1, 249–50 Robertson, Fiona 82–3, 105
print culture 11–14, 31, 37–8, 42–3, 57–8, 65–7, Robessart, Sir Lewis (tomb of) 188–9
70–1, 83–4, 152, 165–6, 211, 223–5, 248–9 Romanticism 181–3
prints 31, 57–8, 72–4, 82–3, 100–3, 117–20, Rome 91–3, 135–6, 164, 172, 215–16,
148–51, 216–18 229–31, 243
procedural literacy 23–5 Forum 216–18, 232–5
productivity 200–1, 259, 263–7, 285–6 Rose, Jonathan 14–15, 100–3
Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph 292–3 Rose, Nikolas 272
Proust, Marcel Ross, Kristin 27–8
A la recherche du temps perdu 293 Roud, Steven 52–4
Pugin, Augustus Welby 26, 177–80, 185–7, Royal Dublin Society 135–6
189–90, 196–8, 207–8, 211–12 Rudd, Natalie 192
Contrasts 178–9, 185–6, 188–9, 190f, Rush, James 52–4
192–5, 198 Ruskin, John 123–4
pyramids 189–90, 243 Russell, Lord John 274–7
Quakerism 252–3, 278–80 St Clair, William 37–8, 84–9, 100–3

Quarterly Review 43–5, 81–2, 84 St George’s Fields 229–30
Quint, Marius 192 St Paul’s Cathedral 139–40, 218–19
Index 345
St Peter’s, Rome 91–3 theatrical adaptations 100–3

Sala, Emilio 165 visuality of descriptive writing 91–3
Sala, George Augustus 199–200, 227, 247 Waterloo battlefield visit 76–7, 112–13
Samson, Abbot 178–9, 183, 190–1, 198–9 The Antiquary 69–71, 79–82, 91–103, 105
Sand, George 253–4 Chronicles of the Canongate 100–3
Sanquirico, Alessandro Exploits of Evan Dhu 100–3
set design for L’ultimo giorno di Pompei 150f, The Fair Maid of Perth 74–5, 100–3
161–2 The Fortunes of Nigel 105
Saronic Gulf 115 Guy Mannering 93–5
Sartain’s Union Magazine 264 The Heart of Midlothian 105
Sartre, Jean-Paul 3–5, 29, 201–2 Ivanhoe 78–9
social theory of seriality 3–5 Kenilworth 91–3, 100–3, 167–8
forms of collective existence 203 The Lady of the Lake 100–3
Critique of Dialectical Reason 201–2 Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border 70–1, 93–5
Saturday Magazine 43–5, 91–3, 220–3, 227–9, Penny Chap-books 69
252–3 Peveril of the Peak 100–3, 159–60
Saunders, John 251, 283–4 Provincial Antiquities of Scotland 91–3
Savigny, Henri 117–23 Redgauntlet 100–3
scale Rob Roy 81–2, 100–3
human scale 26, 178–80, 189–90, 211–12 Tales of the Crusaders 100–3, 105
perceptions of scale 109, 130–5 Waverley 29, 81–2, 91–3
and seriality 177 Woodstock; or, The Cavalier 100–3
manipulation of scale 177–8, 196–7, 248 see also Abbotsford
contrast of past and present 178–9 Scottish Enlightenment 70–1
scalar transformation 188, 248–9 scrapbooks and albums 72–4, 82–93, 220–3
and complexity 191 Scribe, Eugène 159–60
and democracy 192 Secord, James 8–10, 67, 177–8, 248–9
exaggeration 195 sentimentalism 252, 267–71
gigantic / miniature 245–6, 248–9 serial fiction 2–3, 14–15, 23–5, 57–8, 74–5,
local / global 249 79–81, 100–4, 106, 200–1, 270–1
relationship of individual to serial history 114, 180–1, 235–7, 240
population 256–7 serial reading 19–20, 71, 235–7
Scannell, Paddy 139–40, 171, 173 seriality
Schaffer, Simon 248–9 theories of 2–6
Schiach, Morag 13–14 and perceptions of time 6
Schudson, Michael 38–9 serial-progressive model 7–8
Schuller, Kyla 143–5, 257–8, 262–3, 270–2, and social visibility 6–7, 19–20
277–8 as urban phenomenon 12–13
Schwartz, Vanessa 13–14, 140–2, 241–2 both random and systematic 12–13
Scotland 72, 93–5 nineteenth century dominant cultural
Scott, Sir Walter 8–10, 23–5, 68, 123–4, 167–8, form 15
174, 225–6 organization and distribution of
anonymity 74–5 information 19–20
as antiquarian 82–3 and the future 20–1
ballad collecting and editing 69, 75–6, 95–6 patterns of consumption 21
childhood 78, 81–2 emancipatory potential 21–2
fashionability 84–9 weekly press 45–6
historicism 70–1, 75–6, 79–83, 97–8, 100–5 visual culture and development of
intertextuality 105 seriality 57–8
modelling and set design 78–9 in Scott 71–5, 79–81, 105
novels as print objects 70–7, 95 seriality opposed to regularity 109–10
productivity 81–2 shipwreck as seriality 109–10
readership 100–3 and restlessness 114, 124–5
as showman 72–4 phantom seriality in history painting 135–6
textual apparatus 79–83 mediation as survival 136–8
346 Index
seriality (cont.) Six Acts 14–15, 30

both separation and sequencing of Slater, Michael 200–1
parts 143–5 Slatin, Sonia 159–60, 164–5
and revolution 164–5 slavery 3–6, 143–5, 257–8, 278–80, 282–3, 285
and repetition 171 Sloane, George and Theresa 50–4
and the unexpected 174–5 Small, Helen 259
periodization 186 Smart, Mary Ann 163
relationship of part to whole 201–2 Smiles, Samuel 252–3
and political theories of citizenship 201–2 Smith, Adam 105
Sartre’s social theory of seriality 201–3 Smith, Emma 23–5
bound / unbound (Anderson) 203–4 Smith, John Thomas 49f
and historicism 218–19 Smith, Mary 179–80
and the cheap press 219–26, 235–9 Smith, Robert Cross (‘Raphael’)
and biopolitics 251–2 Straggling Astrologer 224f
in Howitt’s Journal 265 Smith, Thomas Southwood 254–7
and The Count of Monte Cristo 287–92 Smithfield 232–5
different guises 292–3 Sobchack, Vivian 142–3
as technology of capture 293 social mobility 31, 293
see also serial fiction, serial history, serial social scale 41–2, 48, 67–8, 210–11
reading, serialization social seriality 199–211
serialization 1–7, 12–13, 19–2, 93–5, 100–3, Society for the Diffusion of Useful
107–8, 200–1, 265–7, 270–1 Knowledge 43–5, 54, 65–7
of London 200–1 Somerset House 208–10
of the social order 204 son et lumière 148–51
of the world 215–16 Southey, Robert 133–4
of historical and cultural information 220–3 Spenser, Edmund
Seven Dials 52–4 Spenserian stanza form 113–14
Seymour, Robert 57–61, 91–3, 200–1 Springtime of the Peoples 256–7
Shakespeare, William Stamford Mercury 65
The Tempest 109–10 Stabler, Jane 116
The Winter’s Tale 37–8 Stallybrass, Peter 23–5
Shapiro, Barbara 50–2 standardization 6, 170–1, 177, 192, 200–1, 291–2
Shattock, Joanne 270–1 Stanley, Caleb Robert 221f
Shaw, Harry 104–5 steam power 23, 65–7, 106, 188–90, 280, 291–2
Sheffield Advertiser 29 Stedman Jones, Gareth 33–5
Shelley, Mary 215–16 Steedman, Carolyn 33–5
Shelley, Percy Bysshe 215–16 Sterling, John 18–19
Shepherd, T. H. 80f, 117f Steuer, Jonathan 140–2
Sheridan, Richard Brinsley 33–5 Stevenson, Robert Louis 245–6
Sherman, Stuart 126 Stewart, Susan 89–91, 134–5, 245–6
shipwreck Stoler, Ann 257–8, 262–3
as metaphor 109–10 Stonehenge 227–9, 235–7, 236f
Halsewell Indiaman 126–30 ‘straggling papers’ 48–54, 65–7, 75–6, 226–7
Méduse 109–10 Strand 148, 192–4, 219–23, 221f, 229–30
Titanic 109–10 Strauss, David 19–20
Wager 117–20 Straw, Will 249
show culture 11–14, 31–2, 84–9, 99–100, 126, strawing 59–61
142–3, 146–7, 153, 156, 164, 167–9, 184–5, street-sellers 39–41, 48–50
198, 211, 248–9 street shows 10–11, 130–1, 158–9
shows, see panoramas, street shows, theatres sublime 109, 120–3, 133–4
Shuttleworth, Sally 261–2 Sunday School Penny Magazine 260–1, 269–70
Siegert, Bernhard 3–5, 16–18 Surrey Theatre 153, 159–60, 229–30, 245
Sill, Joseph 243 Surrey Zoological Gardens 148–51, 156–8, 159f,
Simms, Brendan 10–11 167–8, 231
Index 347
Sutherland, Kathryn 98–9 transmission risks 93–5

Swift, Jonathan transpontine theatres 117–20, 130–1, 156, 245
Gulliver’s Travels 106 see also Astley’s Amphitheatre, Coburg
Swinburne, Algernon Charles 288–9 Theatre, Surrey Theatre
synchronicity 19–20, 180–1, 291–2 Trinity College, Cambridge 115
systematization 6 Trojan wars 112–13
Trollope, Anthony 167–8
Tadiar, Neferti X. M. 259 Tucker, Herbert 130–1, 134–5, 137–8
Talfourd, Thomas 81–2 Turner, Joseph Mallord William 112
Taws, Richard 16–18, 143–5 Turner, Mark W. 2–3, 48–50, 265
technological development 23 Tussaud, Mme 76–7
impact on industry 177 twopenny press 13–14, 23–5, 38–9, 43–8, 59–61,
telegraph, electric 48–52, 121–3, 285, 287–92 74–5, 91–3, 99–103, 117–20, 123–4, 152,
teleological view of history 18–19, 23–5, 156–8, 213–15, 219–23, 225–7, 243
114–15, 140–2, 152–3, 181–3 see also penny press, Idler, and Breakfast-Table
temperance 251, 278–80 Companion, Mirror of Literature,
Templeton, Laurence 105 Amusement and Instruction, Olio, Portfolio
temporality 16–18, 20, 32–3, 125–6, 181–3, Twyman, Michael 205–6
200–1, 227–9
see also historical consciousness Uglow, Jenny 252–4
Ten Hours Movement 169–70 Ugolino della Gherardesca 142–3
Tennyson, Alfred 123–4 Ulrich, John M. 183
Terdiman, Richard 35–7 Unitarianism 252–3, 267–70
Thackeray, William Makepeace 41–2, 57–8, United States 22–3
205–6 ‘penny press’ 35–7
Thaumatrope 245 unlicensed theatres, see transpontine theatres
Théâtre de la Monnaie (Brussels) 164 unstamped press 33–5, 156–7
Theatre Royal 130–1, 160–1, 208–10 urbanization 11–12, 31, 170–1, 211–12, 254–6
theatres, see Covent Garden, King’s Theatre,
Theatre Royal, transpontine theatres Van Amburgh, Isaac A. 168–9
Theseus, Temple of 215–16 Vasi, Giuseppe Agostini 229–30
Thompson, E. P. 16–18, 46–7, 170–1 Vauxhall Gardens 148–51, 156, 208–10
Thrift, Nigel 47–8 Vendler, Helen 6–7
Tiller Girls 196–7 Vespasian, Titus Flavius 215–16
Tillotson, Kathleen 71 Vesta, Temple of 215–16
Timbs, John 225–6 Vesuvius, Mount 25–6, 146–7, 241–2
time eruptions 151–2, 156–7, 166–7
as uneven succession 6 Vesuvius shows 148, 152–3, 156–60, 165–7,
identification with democracy / capitalism 6 169–70, 174–5
linear model 14–15 Leicester Square panorama (Burford)
flexibility of experiential time 46–7 148–51
perceptions of time 65–8 as serial event 151–8
relationship of present to historical time Vickers, Nancy 23–5
157–8, 178–9 Vico, Giambattista 180–1
as cyclical 173 Victoria Embankment 242–3
Times, The 43–5, 107–8, 116, 117–20, 128–30, Virilio, Paul 3–5
159–60, 229–30 visual culture 13–14, 23–5, 31–2, 57–8, 67, 82–9,
Titus, Arch of 215–16 95, 211, 243
Topham, Jonathan 29, 219–20, 227–9 Vogel, Jane 213–15
Tories 177–8 volcano
Torre del Greco 152–3 as image of revolution 156–7
toys 26–7, 54, 216–18, 243–5, 247–8
Tower of London 216–18 Wagner, Richard 163–4
trade liberalization 177 Wales 37–8, 56–7
348 Index
Warner, Michael 38–9, 152 woodblocks and woodcuts 14–15, 50–2, 54,
Warsaw uprising (1830) 164 56–7, 59–61, 73f, 84, 117–20, 152–3, 225–7,
Waterloo, battle of 76–7, 83–4, 93–5, 112–14, 229–30, 240–1
121–3, 140–2, 245–6 Woodring, Carl 281–2
Waterloo Bridge 229–30 Wordsworth, William 48–50, 113–14, 123–4,
Watkin, David 195 138–9, 169–70, 226–7, 267–9
Watt, James 188–9 workhouses 274–5
Webb, Richard D. 277–8 working class 14–15, 46–7, 254–5, 262–3
Weekly Political Register 38–9, 156–7, 219–20 press 31, 46–7, 107–8
Weekly Record of Facts And Opinions protestors 107–8
272–4, 280 readership of Byron 138–9
Weekly Reporter 274–5 readership of Carlyle 179–80
West End 156 time–space frames 216, 219–20
Westminster Abbey 188–9, 216–18 readership of weekly press 225–6
Wet Paper Club 41–2 perception of history 225–6, 245–6
Whewell, William 157–8 affordability of toys and novelties 245
Whig-Liberals 177–8 holidays 267–9
Whissel, Kristen 134–5, 223–5 working-class baroque 243–4
Whitehead, Alfred North 241–2 working day 169–70
Wilbred, Jane 50–4 Wright, Melissa 259
Wilkie, David 121–3 Wroe, James 107–8
Williams, Abigail 33–5, 46–7 Wyatt Edgell, Edgell 43–5
Williams, Raymond 12–13, 26–7, 31–2, 37–8,
48, 113–14, 196–7, 211–12, 223–5, 293 Young, Iris Marion 203–4
Winthrop-Young, Geoffrey 289–90
women’s writing 260–1 Zemka, Sue 192–4
Wood, Christopher S. 11–12 Ziter, Edward 10–11
Wood, Gillen D’Arcy 140–2 Žižek, Slajov 109–10

Clare Pettitt - Serial Forms - The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815-1848-Oxford University Press (2020)

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OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 24/04/20, SPi

CLARE PET TIT T

Tanti piccoli gesti

offered invaluable support in different ways, notably Isobel Armstrong, Mary

xvi List of Illustrations

List of Illustrations xvii

Present Day (London: Charles Dolman, 1841) [reproduced by kind

xviii List of Illustrations

charwoman’ who ‘lodged at a snuff-shop’ explained to Dickens’s mother-in-law

16 Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. 1, p. 266.

becomes imbricated in political systems and processes in the nineteenth century.

37 Scott is more widely taught in the US than in the UK.

40 The significance of 1848 is generally better understood by historians in Continental Europe.

internationally interconnected by 1815.42 In these years London is both ahead

News, History, Shows

alternative knowledge-system’.60 Serial Forms suggests that the writing of history

contrary to popular belief, eighteenth-century natural historians mostly did not

Mediality and Materiality

that culture contextualizes and interprets in new representations’.69 The imagination

its instances’, and I share E. P. Thompson’s belief in ‘the ruthless discipline of

into a massive ongoing total of unknown dimensions. Therefore, seriality can

Seriality: Reformatting the Future

Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social

This book is deliberately Eurocentric and metropolitan in its focus on London.

writing. The emergence of a national literary canon in most European states in

The Argument of Serial Forms

through the remediations of the multi-genre productions of ‘The Magician of the

print and performance fashion a new ‘structure of feeling’, in Raymond Williams’s

95 Raymond Williams, ‘Structures of Feeling’, in Literature and Marxism (Oxford: Oxford

state apparatuses and major technological state infrastructures.98 Seriality would

‘Time lag keeps alive the making of the past.’1

Radical publications such as Henry Hetherington’s Poor Man’s Guardian flouted

‘general knowledge’ rather than news, geographical and historical information

Readers wrote in responding enthusiastically to the idea, and old newspapers

23 Terdiman, ‘Newspaper Culture’, p. 120 n. 4. Terdiman is particularly interested in tracking the

28 Arthur Aspinall, ‘Statistical Accounts of the London Newspapers 1800–1836’, in English

Borrowing the News

Sometime in the winter of 1810, a working man, a journeyman tailor, Thomas

a ‘warrant of distress’ to a lady, ‘handing it over as polite as if it was a newspaper

41 ‘Mr. Bung’s Narrative’ in ‘The Broker’s Man’, in Sketches by Boz, p. 50.

Fig. 1.2. Richard Doyle, ‘A Fashionable Club—Four o’Clock p.m.’, in

Weekly Rhythms: Sunday Papers and Twopenny Papers

enormous ‘number of persons . . . who are desirous to acquire information, when

‘Straggling Papers’: Broadsides, Ballads and Chapbooks

73 William Wordsworth to Archdeacon Wrangham, Grasmere (5 June 1808), in The Letters of

on masses of the people’.74 Ballads framed as the last confessions or lamentations

74 Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, vol. 1, p. 220.

only as texts for reading, but as Christmas decorations, conversation pieces,

Each Christmas broad-sheet is headed by a large wood-cut roughly coloured,

106 John Burnett, Destiny Obscure, p. 183.

In serialized fiction, [the material collaboration of pictures and words] . . . includes

Yearly Rhythms: Almanacs

Now, musing o’er the changing scene,

134 Ibid., p. 411.

He’ll turn to next year’s harvest-day,

newspapers is an important reminder of the ways in which the forward-rushing

‘Seriality makes stories playable’1

11 ‘Advertisement’, Sir Walter Scott, The Antiquary, p. 3.

Ballads, Broadsides, and Miscellanies

In a characteristically disguised piece of self-criticism in which he reports an

Fig. 2.1. ‘Frontispiece: Woodcut by Thompson’, [George Mogridge], Sergeant Bell,

dioramas, magic-lantern shows, paintings, engravings, periodical articles, and

Scott’s easy projection of ‘whatever place happened to be uppermost in my imagi-