Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900: Many Inventions 1108492940, 9781108492942

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Series information
Title page
Copyright information
Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Inventing Media and Their Meanings
The Phonautograph and Nineteenth-Century Media
Media beyond Writing
Thinking about Media in the Late Nineteenth Century
Toward an Archaeology of Media Systems
From Intermediality to Vernacular Media Theory
Chapter 1 A Message on All Channels: The Unification of Humanity
The Truth
The Removal
Bulletin, Bullet, and Bell
The National Interest
Sobbing Bells
Chapter 2 Fictions of the Victorian Telephone: The Medium Is the Media
A Tangle of Other Voices
A Novel on the Old Lines
A Line in the Telephone
Chapter 3 New Media, New Journalism, New Grub Street: Unsanctified Typography
Media Material
A Few Tit-Bits in Connection with Grub Street
Chapter 4 The Sinking of the Triple-Decker: Format Wars
The Three-Volume Standard
A New Order on the Eve of Establishment
Chapter 5 Writers of Books: The Unmediated Novel
The Novel Resanctified
The Novel Unwritten
Chapter 6 Words Fail: Occulting Media into Information
Unreality Effects
Information Vampires
Chapter 7 A Connecticut Yankee's Media Wars: Orality and Obliteracy
These Animals Didn't Reason
Typesetting 2.0
Cold Type, Hot Lead
After Words: The End of the Book
Bibliography
Notes
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
After Words
Index

Citation preview

LITERATURE, PRINT CULTURE, AND MEDIA TECHNOLOGIES, –

From telephones and transoceanic telegraphy to typewriters and phonographs, the era of Bell and Edison brought an array of wondrous new technologies for recording and communication. At the same time, print was becoming a mass medium, as works from newspapers to novels exploited new markets and innovations in publishing to address expanded readerships. Amid the accelerated movements of inventions and language, questions about media change became a transatlantic topic, connecting writers from Whitman to Kipling, Mark Twain to Bram Stoker and Marie Corelli. Media multiplicity seemed either to unite societies or bring division and conflict, to emphasize the material nature of communication or its transcendent side, to highlight distinctions between media or to let them be ignored. Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, – analyzes this ferment as authors sought to understand the places of printed writing in the late nineteenth century’s emerging media cultures.   is an associate professor of English at the University of Georgia. He is the author of Telegraphic Realism: Victorian Fiction and Other Information Systems () and a three-time recipient of essay prizes from the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts.

   -   

General Editor Gillian Beer, University of Cambridge Editorial Board Isobel Armstrong, Birkbeck, University of London Kate Flint, University of Southern California Catherine Gallagher, University of California, Berkeley D. A. Miller, University of California, Berkeley J. Hillis Miller, University of California, Irvine Daniel Pick, Birkbeck, University of London Mary Poovey, New York University Sally Shuttleworth, University of Oxford Herbert Tucker, University of Virginia Nineteenth-century British literature and culture have been rich fields for interdisciplinary studies. Since the turn of the twentieth century, scholars and critics have tracked the intersections and tensions between Victorian literature and the visual arts, politics, social organization, economic life, technical innovations, scientific thought – in short, culture in its broadest sense. In recent years, theoretical challenges and historiographical shifts have unsettled the assumptions of previous scholarly synthesis and called into question the terms of older debates. Whereas the tendency in much past literary critical interpretation was to use the metaphor of culture as ‘background’, feminist, Foucauldian, and other analyses have employed more dynamic models that raise questions of power and of circulation. Such developments have reanimated the field. This series aims to accommodate and promote the most interesting work being undertaken on the frontiers of the field of nineteenth-century literary studies: work which intersects fruitfully with other fields of study such as history, or literary theory, or the history of science. Comparative as well as interdisciplinary approaches are welcomed. A complete list of titles published will be found at the end of the book.

LITERATURE, PRINT CULTURE, AND MEDIA TECHNOLOGIES, – Many Inventions

RICHARD MENKE University of Georgia

University Printing House, Cambridge  , United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, th Floor, New York,  , USA  Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne,  , Australia –, rd Floor, Plot , Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – , India  Anson Road, #–/, Singapore  Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/ : ./ © Richard Menke  This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published  Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ International Ltd. Padstow Cornwall A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data : Menke, Richard, author. : Literature, print culture, and media technologies, – : many inventions / Richard Menke. : Cambridge ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, . | Series: Cambridge studies in nineteenth-century literature and culture | Includes bibliographical references and index. :   |   (hardback : alk. paper) | : : Printing–Social aspects–History–th century. | Mass media–Social aspects–History–th century. | Printing–Technological innovations–History–th century. | Mass media–Technological innovations–History–th century. :   .  |  ./–dc LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/  ---- Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgments

page vi viii

Introduction: Inventing Media and Their Meanings





A Message on All Channels: The Unification of Humanity





Fictions of the Victorian Telephone: The Medium Is the Media





New Media, New Journalism, New Grub Street: Unsanctified Typography





The Sinking of the Triple-Decker: Format Wars





Writers of Books: The Unmediated Novel





Words Fail: Occulting Media into Information





A Connecticut Yankee’s Media Wars: Orality and Obliteracy



After Words: The End of the Book



Bibliography Notes Index

  

v

Figures

. Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville’s phonautograph. Ganot, Elementary Treatise on Physics (). Courtesy of University of Georgia Libraries. page  . Scott, “No.  – Au Clair de la Lune” (). Firstsounds.org.  . Telautograph receiver. William Maver, Jr., “Professor Gray’s New Telautograph,” Engineering Magazine  (), –. Courtesy of University of Georgia Libraries.  . Posting Garfield’s medical bulletins under the electric arc lamps of Broadway. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (September , ). Special Collections, University of Virginia Library.  . Diagram of the induction balance and the other components of Bell’s detector. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (August , ). Special Collections, University of Virginia Library.  . Bell listens for the bullet. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (August , ). Special Collections, University of Virginia Library.  . Chart showing Garfield’s temperature, pulse, and respiration. Ridpath, Life and Work of James A. Garfield (). Collection of the author.  . Long-distance transmission without a telegraphic code: handwritten Chinese via telautograph. William Maver, Jr., “Professor Gray’s New Telautograph,” Engineering Magazine  (), –. Courtesy of University of Georgia Libraries.  . Mediating heterosexual connections: young women at the switchboards. “The Telephone Exchange in London,” The Graphic (September , ). Collection of the author.  . “A Few Incidents in Connection with Tit-Bits.” Tit-Bits  (). ©The British Library Board / The Image Works.  vi

List of Figures . “A Modern Correspondence Department” as media system. Promotional postcard (). Courtesy of Schreibmaschinenmuseum Peter Mitterhofer. . Beard, “The stranger’s story.” Twain, A Connecticut Yankee. Courtesy of University of Georgia Libraries. . Beard, “Beginnings of civilization.” Twain, A Connecticut Yankee. Courtesy of University of Georgia Libraries. . Patent complexity: the Paige Compositor. U.S. Patent , (). . Little crudities of a mechanical sort. Twain, A Connecticut Yankee. Courtesy of University of Georgia Libraries. . Robida, the author’s voice. Uzanne, “The End of Books,” Scribner’s Magazine (August ). Courtesy of University of Georgia Libraries. . Mark Twain in Nikola Tesla’s laboratory. Century Magazine (April ). Courtesy of University of Georgia Libraries.

vii

      

Acknowledgments

Having written a book that tracks printed writing and media systems in the late nineteenth century, I find it a particular pleasure to acknowledge the systems of collaboration and support that have made this work possible in the early twenty-first. Parts of this book began in a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar with Katherine Hayles many years ago; I’m thankful to Kate and my fellow seminarians for their encouragement. That work also benefitted from fellowships from the Provost’s Office and the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts at the University of Georgia (UGA), gratefully acknowledged here. My department heads in the English Department – Doug Anderson, Mike Moran, Jed Rasula, and Michelle Ballif – also supported my research; Jed even helped me rearrange my teaching schedule in order to complete a first draft of the manuscript. This work has gained greatly from discussions with current and former colleagues, including Kris Boudreau and Roxanne Eberle, as well as from the intellectual conviviality provided by UGA’s Colloquium for Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Literature. I especially appreciate the feedback from a lively colloquium workshop attended by Casie Legette, Tricia Lootens, Elizabeth Kraft, Chris Pizzino, Teresa Saxton, Nancee Reeves, Sara Steger, and my late, dearly missed colleague Christy Desmet. Thanks as well to Lindsey Harding and Elizabeth Davis for organizing retreats at which academic writing was nurtured and fed. I have benefitted from the support of two writers’ groups: while Rachel Ablow, Danny Hack, Ivan Kreilkamp, and Rachel Teukolsky provided camaraderie via shared drafts and critique, Eleanor Courtemanche, Brad Deane, Deanna Kreisel, Scott MacKenzie, and Patricia Tilburg offered daily encouragement without sharing any writing at all. It was also helpful to exchange work individually with Rachel Teukolsky, Susan Zieger, Doug Anderson, and Leslie Simon. This book reflects many conversations (in person and online) about media with interlocutors such as Susan Zieger, viii

Acknowledgments

ix

Christopher Keep, Elaine Hadley, Hilary Schor, Elaine Freedgood, Paul Fyfe, and Jay Clayton, as well as exchanges with Troy Bassett and Nathan Hensley about the three-volume novel. I am particularly grateful for invitations to present parts of this book at workshops that took place at Temple University, the University of Michigan, and the University of Colorado during –; many thanks to the organizers and attendees, especially Rachel Buurma, Peter Logan, Kate Thomas, Adela Pinch, Danny Hack, and Sue Zemka. I’d also like to thank Matt Rubery and my other, anonymous reader at Cambridge University Press, as well as my editors there, first Linda Bree and now Bethany Thomas, and Cambridge’s series editor Dame Gillian Beer for criticisms, questions, and encouragement. Finally, I’m grateful to my family, especially Sujata, Kavya, and Kartik, for enduring the long invention of this book, which is for them. I gratefully acknowledge permission to incorporate material here that’s been published elsewhere in different forms. An early version of Chapter  appeared as “Media in America, : Garfield, Guiteau, Bell, Whitman,” Critical Inquiry . (Spring ), –, while Chapter  greatly expands “The Medium Is the Media: Fictions of the Telephone in the s,” Victorian Studies . (Winter ), –. Chapter  incorporates material from “The End of the Three-Volume Novel System,  June ,” included in the online BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History project, as well as from “The ThreeVolume Novel (Triple-Decker),” in the Blackwell Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature, ed. Linda K. Hughes, Pamela K. Gilbert, and Dino Felluga (Chichester, West Sussex; Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, ). I am also indebted to these pieces’ editors and readers for their valuable comments and suggestions.

Introduction Inventing Media and Their Meanings

Away with old romance! Away with novels, plots and plays of foreign courts, Away with love-verses sugar’d in rhyme, the intrigues, amours of idlers. . . . . .. . .. . .. . .. . . Mark the spirit of invention everywhere. . .

—Whitman, “Song of the Exposition” ()

The Phonautograph and Nineteenth-Century Media Returning to an obsolete media technology in a different media environment, reviving an old medium through a newer one, reveals the connections between past and present but also the gaps between them. As the mediated past comes to uncanny life, those discontinuities can become palpable, perceivable, even audible. In March , a forgotten nineteenth-century medium briefly became minor news on a variety of twenty-first-century media, as the First Sounds project announced that its members had pushed back the history of recorded sound by nearly a generation, replaying sounds unheard since the mid-nineteenth century. The project had uncovered no unknown pioneer of phonography, no mute inglorious Edison. Rather, its researchers had returned to the nineteenth-century archive, to the work of the Frenchman Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, long recognized as an important figure in the history of sound recording. Translating and adapting that work, they recreated sound from a medium that had previously been silent. In the s, Scott invented a remarkable machine he called a phonautograph, a device that responded to sound by etching a wavy line on a blackened sheet of paper (Figure ., Figure .). The resulting phonautograms were a marvel of what’s been called “incunabular recorded sound”: they took the ephemeral phenomenon of sound and froze it, 



Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900

Figure .

Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville’s phonautograph.

Source: Ganot, Elementary Treatise on Physics  (). Courtesy of University of Georgia Libraries

objectified it, rendered it in a visual medium without resorting to human symbols. But they were created only to translate sound to the page so that it could be examined as a discrete, stable entity. The sound patterns on a phonautogram were never meant to be heard again. Indeed, they were set down without any idea of a future in which machines would be able to record sounds and play them back. Eerily, intrusively, the First Sounds project used twenty-first-century technologies to retrieve sounds from a time before the notion of audio playback even existed, a past when a sound seemed the very definition of transience, a singular event on its way to dissipating forever from the first moment it was heard. The phonautograph and its successors were a landmark in the study of sound. But their inventor Léon Scott was no scientist or engineer. Rather, he came to imagine a machine for capturing sound because of his desire to optimize and automate the great medium of writing. As a printer and typesetter in an age of industrial acceleration, Scott became obsessed with the problem of setting down words and speech as rapidly and accurately as possible. His Histoire de la Sténographie () opens by celebrating the search for a method of transcribing words or sound in real time, “a means that would allow the poet, the dramatist, the novelist, to fix at will their brilliant inspirations, which are always so fleeting.” Even in an age of the steel pen, a faster way of writing seemed necessary. From composing media history, Scott moved to creating media devices. In the next decade, he developed the phonautograph to explore the possibilities of a mechanized stenography. The fugitive inspirations of the poet, playwright, or

 Figure .

Scott, “No.  – Au Clair de la Lune” () Source: Firstsounds.org.



Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900

novelist: the putative gap between the literary imagination and the material practice of writing was part of his primary rationale. As its name suggests, Scott hoped the phonautograph would let sound write itself. A machine for listening, his device was supposed to mimic the human ear (its collecting chamber and artificial tympanic membrane were modeled on anatomical diagrams) and then to act as an automatized hand, turning sound into sight. Sound is motion, the vibration of pressure waves through a medium. Its precondition, the passage of time, also demands its perpetual vanishing. Sound can’t stand still. But as Scott’s phonautograph transformed the phases of a fleeting sound pattern into a single, persistent image, it converted the passage of time from the guarantor of a sound’s evanescence into the horizontal timeline that gave it continuity and visual unity. Imagining a better stenography, Scott created the phonautograph as a form of mechanized writing that could instantly, faithfully, and durably render the contours of sound on paper. “This new writing [cette nouvelle graphie],” he proudly described his phonautograms in a handwritten  patent application; the emphasis is his. Even the analogy to the capture of light via “photographic processes” inspired Scott not to consider how sound might be copied from life and technically recreated but to imagine how it could be permanently translated to a flat surface in black and white. Unspooled from the machine’s cylinder, flattened into the shape of other documents, a phonautogram could enter nineteenth-century archives oriented around the storage of paper media. Scott even set up the phonautograph to produce its output “by analogy with the familiar conventions of [European] alphabetic writing,” usually arranging the machine so that as a sheet of paper rotated on its cylinder, the stylus inscribed it from top to bottom, left to right. A new medium created to capture human speech, Scott’s phonautograph was nonetheless defined by its relationship to the dominant medium of writing – from its stenographic conception, to its serial inscription on paper, to its destination in the archive. Scott’s choice of sample spoken texts sustains this association: the opening of Tasso’s Aminta, a passage from Jean-François Ducis’s adaptation of Othello. Taking great plays as scripts for vocal performance, Scott celebrates their conversion back to writing, describing the Othello phonautogram as a “declamation written by the voice itself.” On his phonautograms, literary works join vocal scales and folk songs as testing protocols for a new medium. From its technical specifications to a significant part of its content, then, the phonautograph epitomized the assumption that even new, experimental inscription devices

Inventing Media and Their Meanings



would function as forms of writing – a testament to writing’s conceptual preeminence in an age when every new inscription technology seemed to claim a status as a something-graph that made something-grams, as the newest -graphy. But by the final decades of the century, this assumption no longer held sway. The development of new media technologies beyond telegraphy or photography, and the prospect of continued invention and change, helped dislodge writing as the inevitable reference point and printed literature as the test case for every new medium. Matthew Rubery notes the use of nursery rhymes and familiar poems in the earliest phonograph demonstrations in order to cue audiences to understand the tinny voice coming from the speaker, but his account also documents the consistent breakdown of recorded verse recitations into shouts, animal sounds, and other “playful noises” meant “to flaunt the machine’s acoustic versatility.” The contrast between the phonautograph in the s and Edison’s phonograph a generation later encapsulates an epistemic break. This book analyzes the meanings that emerged from the late nineteenth-century’s encounters between print literature and other media, encounters that no longer presupposed the primacy of writing. Scott eventually recognized that the phonautograph couldn’t produce the “natural stenography” or visible language he wanted, but he still hoped that looking at the inscrutable lines it generated would help us understand sound, taking for granted that the reader of this mysterious script would necessarily be a human being. Nearly  years later, Thomas Edison would replace the paper on the phonautograph’s rotating cylinder with tinfoil (later upgraded to wax). Instead of a line on a flat surface to guide the human eye, Edison’s machine produced an indented groove to guide the needle on a mechanical device. Scott imagined a machine that could listen and write. In contrast, Edison’s great insight was to realize that patterns produced by a machine might also be read by one. Whereas Scott hoped to let sound write itself, Edison wanted to let “wax cylinders speak for themselves.” His development of the phonograph emerged from his work encoding telegrams for high-speed replay and transmission, an experience that helped him imagine the possibility of recording signals for machine-reading. For his part, Scott grumbled not just that Edison’s phonograph derived from Scott’s expired patents but that the new device was deficient (and misnamed) because the grooves with which it stored sound were not really written “graphs” but only cryptic “glyphs” inaccessible to the human eye. An ageing Scott still viewed the playback of sound as less important than its transcription, audio reproduction as secondary to



Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900

writing. And of course, he assumed that his own phonautograms were fundamentally unplayable. Yet nearly a century and a half after Scott’s phonautograph first etched the motions of the air onto paper, the First Sounds group began to turn those mechanical transcriptions into audio. Working from a phonautogram dated “April , ,” its researchers digitally scanned the image at high resolution. Then they converted the image’s lines into a digital sound file that could be edited and restored by sound engineers, allowing a computer to read it as sound via a “virtual stylus” or (in a later iteration) by processing it with software originally designed to convert the optical soundtracks of motion pictures. Finally, they had an audio file for playing a voice from before the age of sound recording, eerily singing the first lines of “Au Clair de la Lune,” badly muffled but recognizable: “Au claire de la lune / mon ami Pierrot / prête moi—,” the earliest recognizable recording of the human voice in history. After experimentation with the playback speed – the centrality of the time axis defines what’s been called the “sonicity” of sound signals – a man’s voice emerged, probably Scott’s. It sings in Second-Empire unconsciousness, not simply the fact that his own words would ever be heard again but that mechanically playing back the sound of a moment or a day ago – to say nothing of a sound from an earlier century – could ever become possible by any means. Songs, speech, and tuning tones emerged as First Sounds converted Scott’s other phonautograms into playable sound, although in some recordings, the attempts at restoration failed (perhaps the machine had been unevenly cranked or poorly calibrated). It’s a ghostly sensation, listening to these sounds retrieved from a nineteenth-century archive in which they had rested for so long, reclaimed from a silence assumed to be inherent and eternal. Suddenly, as listeners, we were eavesdropping on a past whose sounds it had never been possible to hear, listening to vibrations set down at a time when Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, and Emile Berliner were children. This recovery work suggests a further break between the nineteenth century and the twenty-first. Even if Scott had come up with the idea of playing back a recorded sound, he would have lacked the means to replay it from wave patterns on paper. What permitted their playback is a system of media oriented neither around writing (as in the mid-nineteenth century) nor around the multiplicity of analogue media (as in the Edison era) but around the computer. The First Sound group’s digital image-scans rendered a phonautogram as a set of numbers, making it available for algorithmic manipulation. Spatial marks on archived paper could now

Inventing Media and Their Meanings



become cues for the mathematical generation of sound. Place a digital file in the proper format, and an obliging computer can be made to render it as audio. With the change of a piece of metadata such as a file extension, we are freed from the kind of ontological incommensurability that twentiethcentury media theorists often attributed to different sensory modalities such as sight and sound. As an audio file, the digitized phonautogram could be systematically adjusted and expertly fine-tuned in order to compensate for the defects of the original process of recording, the shortcomings of its physical preservation, or the effects of digital conversion itself. Finally, the encoded sound files could be digitally published on the Internet in a standard format to enter our own mediascape, since publishing too has escaped the necessity of writing in the nineteenthcentury sense, no longer requiring that we reproduce durable marks on a surface for physical distribution. The interest aroused by digital restorations of Scott’s phonautograms both encouraged and was reinforced by the easy availability of the resulting clips as brief MPs for streaming, downloading, even copying and adaptation. Rather than a repository that preserves materials by removing them from circulation and filing them away, the digital archive becomes an instrument of interlinking and transmission, one that preserves its materials by maximizing their accessibility and circulation. In contrast to the traditional archive, “electronic memories become more permanent the more they are constantly refreshed.” Moreover, as Jason Camlot has pointed out with particular reference to recorded sound, the digital archive is less “a preservation medium” than “a transformation medium that opens texts and material artefacts to new contexts, new interpretations, and new transformative uses.” The rise of increasingly ubiquitous and interlinked digital media has helped compel rethinking not only of publishing and the archive but also of recording, liveness, broadcast, and any number of media properties and protocols. Without forcing the parallel, this book will argue that the late nineteenth century was also a period in which developments in media and culture drove widespread discussion of technologies of communication and inscription – about how they aligned with one another and about how they mediated human experience. New inventions didn’t make print and writing obsolete. Rather, they prompted new ways of understanding various modes of writing in relation to other media. From the perspective of our own media environment, an earlier era of multiplying technologies and media change can begin to speak to us – like one of Scott’s



Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900

phonautograms – in ways its original creators, users, and theorists couldn’t have foreseen.

Media beyond Writing Scott’s phonautograph could only record a few seconds of sound at a time, but the lines of “Au Claire de la Lune” that would have followed this epochal recording were implicit in the whole exercise: “prête-moi ta plume / pour écrire un mot”; lend me your pen / to write a word. But by the age of Edison, Scott was falling behind the times. As this book will argue, late nineteenth-century writers were less likely to treat new media as writing than to view print and writing in terms of newer media. Furthermore, by the s and s, authors concerned with the status and the future of print often treated some forms of writing and print as more like new media technologies than others. Until the century’s final decades, as I’ve suggested, comparisons between writing and new media usually moved in the opposite direction. Electric telegraph, photograph, phonograph: like Scott’s phonautograph, all of these -graphic technologies reflexively assert a connection to writing or inscription in their very names. This connection is hardly intrinsic. The most popular electric telegraphs transmitted a real-time message with needles, bells, or clicking levers that left no physical mark but depended on transcription by a clerk. Heliography or photography literally meant writing by the sun or by light. Both names emphasize the inscribing agency of the light source, not the technical or aesthetic work of the photographer, the chemical sensitivity of the surface, or the appearance of the strange monochrome images yielded by the process. As if following out the idea that the photograph was essentially a mode of writing, William Henry Fox Talbot strove to become its Gutenberg, working to make photography into a technology for reproducing copies of an image on paper, as opposed to the daguerreotype’s one-of-a-kind pictures on metal. Taking this effort to its logical conclusion, as early as the s, Constance Talbot worked with her husband to “print” texts via photography, chemically transferring letter-images onto paper without a press. Perhaps in order to explain their function and make them seem more familiar, the electric telegraph and phonograph each took its name from a technically unrelated forerunner that used physical symbols for visual reading. The optical telegraph of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century allowed speedy long-distance signaling via a network of towers, at least on clear days. And since the s, Isaac Pitman had

Inventing Media and Their Meanings

Figure .



Telautograph receiver.

Source: William Maver, Jr., “Professor Gray’s New Telautograph,” Engineering Magazine (). Courtesy of University of Georgia Libraries

described and marketed his shorthand system as “phonography,” a connection that helped inspire fantasies that Edison’s phonograph might eventually replace particular print forms, especially as a means of preserving and circulating orally performed texts such as sermons or speeches. Some nineteenth-century new media seemed to arrogate certain functions of writing, while others seemed to create hybrids between writing and something else: the “telautograph” transmitted the movements of a writer’s pen to a stylus across the electric wires to supply a long-distance facsimile of handwriting (Figure .), while the typewriter allowed an operator’s fingers to tap out documents that resembled print. But other nineteenthcentury media technologies promised to bypass inscription altogether. While a telegram might seem to communicate its messages immaterially, through fugitive pulses of electricity, usually it at least began with a paper form and ended with a written (later a typewritten) slip. By comparison, the telephone attenuated the place of writing in electric communication, converting not symbols but soundwaves into electrical patterns and back again. As its name made clear, the telephone wasn’t a -graphic technology at all. Storage, communication, reproduction: in the final decades of the nineteenth century, new technologies broke up the functions united in writing or print. They encouraged new ways of understanding nontextual media, beyond their promises to extend, improve upon, or incorporate writing. A “telephonic message differs as widely from an ordinary telegraphic message as a highly finished oil-painting differs from a page of print,” averred an early account of the telephone:

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 In the one you have only black and white – black symbols on a white ground – the symbols being limited in number, and recurring again and again with mere differences of order. The painting, on the other hand, discloses every variety of color and arrangement. No sharp lines of discontinuity offend the eye; on the contrary, the tints shade off gradually and softly into each other, presenting tone and depth in endless variety. The page of print is unintelligible without the aid of a key; the painting tells its story pliantly enough to anyone who has eyes to see.

In this description, the telegram and the printed page feature as monochromatic, serial, repetitious, discrete, and coded, while the phone call and the oil painting are continuous, heterogeneous, user friendly. We might also add that the printed page and the telegram are perfectly repeatable, while the painting and the telephone conversation, however generic either may seem, are singular and one of a kind. The technical affiliation between two electric communication technologies subsists here alongside a suite of differences encapsulated by contrasts between two older media. The so-called second industrial revolution of the late nineteenth century – with its systematic application of science to industrial production, its emphasis on transport and communication technologies, and its new uses for electricity – made the development, marketing, and adoption of new media almost routine. Earlier in the century, it had taken decades for media technologies such as photography or telegraphy to become familiar. But now the cycle of production, commercialization, and refinement became part of the cultural understanding of new technologies. Media that had existed largely as industrial prototypes (mechanized typesetting) or scientific toys (stereoscopes) began to be more aggressively exploited, marketed, and refined. For a decade after its creation, the phonograph was a lecture-hall curiosity, until Edison’s engineers went to work to find a more durable recording medium than metal foil – and to create a new consumer product. The Remington Company achieved enough success with the Sholes and Glidden capitals-only typewriter (Mark Twain bought one) to suggest that a new machine with lower-case letters might do even better. The adoption and spread of new technologies became part of modern life; Walt Whitman and other nineteenth-century writers could “mark the spirit of invention everywhere.” Rapid innovation made it easier to think of emerging media in terms of other new technologies. Alexander Graham Bell’s initial work on the telephone began as experimentation with “harmonic telegraphy”; Bell’s telephones soon inspired Edison to go to work on the phonograph; Christopher Latham Sholes’s earliest model for what

Inventing Media and Their Meanings

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would become the first mass-produced typewriter “consisted of a single bar of type connected to a telegraph key.” The era also unleashed the general project of imagining not only new or improved real media but also fictitious ones. By , the biblical phrase Rudyard Kipling chose as the title for his latest collection of stories, “many inventions,” must have seemed both an immodest description of the book’s contents and a slightly world-weary characterization of the age itself. My own title incorporates Kipling’s to emphasize these connections between technological creativity and the literary imagination, even as the era’s “vicious patent wars” and debates over international copyright raised questions about the nature of originality and ownership. What’s modern about media in the late nineteenth century isn’t simply the arrival of particular new technologies but the fact that all forms of media, old and new, now enter a world in which they will converge, contrast, ally with, or distinguish themselves from others. Scholarship on the Victorians and their media has begun to uncover the deep connections between literature and photography, electrical communication networks, and sound reproduction. But such studies have paid more attention to writers’ responses to particular media than to how print literature becomes part of a media-rich world, and how this new reality shapes the forms and content of imaginative writing. By the final decades of the nineteenth century, media technologies appeared as part of larger systems of affiliation and alignment, spontaneous or lasting configurations that included forms of print. Text made with a typewriter might seem too brusque for a personal letter – a trait that Mark Twain would gleefully exploit. But typewritten text could seem perfect for the compressed message of a telegram, since the physical appearance of a typewritten telegram reinforced its ostensible status as the product of a machine that minimized human intervention. (Never mind the human beings who actually wrote the original message, transmitted it as a set of signals, transcribed those signals at the other end of the wire, and typed up the results.) The telautograph actually was a mode of writing, a stylus allowing the hand to move a pen situated far away on the other end of the wire. But for observers in the s it represented less an extension of handwriting than a modification of existing electric media. The relationship between its transmitter and receiver made it “analogous” to the organization of the telephone (an analogy that ignored the telautograph’s lack of a double coupling to allow conversation). Or the telautograph would remedy the defects of both the telegraph (its need for expert operators, its impersonal output, its restriction to alphanumeric signs)

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 and the telephone (its articulation was “provokingly indistinct,” and it left no permanent record). Likewise, the pianola or player piano, which scrolled through a perforated paper roll to press down the piano’s keys and play music, technically resembled a Jacquard loom more closely than it did a phonograph or gramophone. Yet at the turn of the century, it came together with those quite different audio technologies in discussions – and in United States legislation – about musical reproduction, performances, and audiences.

Thinking about Media in the Late Nineteenth Century Perhaps in some sense different media have existed as long as human communication itself, thanks to our bodies’ modalities of voice, face, and gesture. But the late nineteenth century’s literary and media cultures suggest the kinds of thinking that a society could do with multiple old and new media technologies. Moreover, the era brought the inescapable prospect of more and newer media tomorrow, the intimation that modern media environments were inherently changeable and provisional. This impression of living not simply in history but in media history contributed to a modern sense of time and historical consciousness. Actor–network theory, thing theory, object-oriented ontology: over the past generation of scholarship, movements in fields from sociology and cultural studies to philosophy have not merely placed things and objects at the center of their analyses but also argued for decentering the human as a locus of meaning and value. Such claims for the status or agency of objects might be controversial when it comes to social theory or metaphysics, but they can hardly be so when it comes to media. Media provide not just forums but forms for human cognition, imagination, and action. Furthermore, as if recognizing the agentic materiality of media objects, users often endow them with a sense of not entirely vicarious life. Our readiness to attribute such qualities to our media surely reflects the metaphysical privilege awarded to objects closely identified with human thought and expression. This book will be less interested in countering that privilege than in seeing how the identification of media with human thought goes both ways. In keeping with the recent artifactual turn, scholarship on nineteenthcentury literature has drawn our attention to the ideas in things, the cultural knowledge embedded in objects and textual references to them. As it has done with the phonautograph, this book will track the ideas in technological objects: an overcharged phonograph, a London telephone, a

Inventing Media and Their Meanings



Gatling gun. But it will also focus on the things in ideas, on how material objects become scaffolds for human imagination and understanding. In a culture so energetically engaged in transmitting and storing itself via a growing array of technologies, the things that help crystallize ideas are often media objects. An induction balance (an early metal detector connected to a telephone receiver) reifies a search for national unity in a period of sudden crisis; a phonograph stands for the mechanical replay of the shibboleths of the past; a typewriter makes texts into information. Media are good to think with. The media proliferation that characterizes the late nineteenth century could draw new attention to different modes of representation itself. Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotics, with its classification of signs along various lines – most famously, the distinctions among icon, index, and symbol – is a product of this era and its media multiplicity. While the electric telegraph operated symbolically, translating writing into another kind of alphabet, the phonautograph, phonograph, and photograph worked indexically, producing traces of their contact with the sights or sounds around them. Yet in the cases of the photograph or of phonographic playback, the products of this technological indexing could also function as icons, as patterns that physically resemble the things they represent. Peirce’s multiple revisions to his analysis during these years, including changes in terminology and increasingly complex typologies of the sign, further suggest his project’s relationship to a culture that foregrounded convergences and differences in modes of representation. New media place pressure on the cultural functions and representational claims of existing ones. By seeing one medium in systematic relations to others, writers could make sense of new technologies of inscription and communication. A new medium could seem to fracture an older one, drawing particular genres into its ambit so that newspapers might seem to resemble telephones and phonographs more than they did books. In this way, the relationships between print, writing, and newer media technologies could exacerbate various fissures in print cultures around the end of the nineteenth century. The expansion of literacy, the growth of reading across social classes, and the continuing explosion in the sheer amount of printed matter meant that audiences could seem both vastly larger and paradoxically narrower, print-forms becoming at once more specialized and more massified – more suited to a large audience primed to consume varied media alongside other commodities. Traditional literary histories have sometimes singled out the end of the nineteenth century for its “confusion and uncertainty,” a condition that

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 united authors, publishers, distributors, and audiences, even when little else did. Newspapers and magazines seemed on the ascendant, while forms of book publishing and distribution that recently appeared popular and profitable (subscription publishing in the United States, three-volume novels in Great Britain) collapsed. In the United States, Samuel Clemens prepared for a transition from authorship and live performances as Mark Twain to media magnate and investor, only to end in bankruptcy. In England a few years later, Henry James tried giving up writing long novels for magazine-friendly short stories and the scripted liveness of plays. James eventually returned to producing novels, only to give up physically writing them in favor of dictating them live to a typist. A few issues into its run, the American journal The Author (“a monthly magazine to interest and help all literary workers”) surveyed several dozen well-known authors about their use of writing technologies. Their responses include diverse theories: that only “pen and ink” would do because “fast writing cannot be good writing” (James Parton), that typing creates a close connection between “the nerves of the arm” and “the brain and spine . . . thus perhaps assisting thought” (E. D. E. N. Southworth), that “the phonograph” would soon become “the greatest boon ever given to original thinkers” (John Boyle O’Reilly). In light of technological changes, not only writers and publishers but also typesetters, printing engineers, and others responsible for print’s technical side could experience uncertainty about the prospects for their work, although this situation receives less attention from literary historians. This book analyzes such ideas and uncertainties amid the shifting relationships between the era’s cultures of print and its emergent mass and technological media. By “the later nineteenth century,” notes John Guillory in his genealogy of media as a concept, “the development of new technical media perplexed thereafter the relation between the traditional arts and media of any kind.” The invention of new media helps account for the dynamics of late nineteenth-century literary history, but literature in turn helped to invent meanings for these media. Print literature responds to a culture mediated by multiple new technologies, sometimes presenting itself as the alternative to a world of media, sometimes identifying itself with that world. After all, in the late nineteenth century, “with the cinema and sound recording still in their infancy, the printed book was the medium at the center of the most rapid and thoroughgoing changes” in its production and distribution. Indeed, “major innovations were introduced in every facet of the printing operation: typecasting, composition, inking, impression, and binding.” In the nexus between print and newer

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

media, works of literature could appear at the vanguard, the rearguard, or sometimes both. All printed texts are media, of course. Since the eighteenth century, it had been routine, if pompous, to refer to a newspaper as a medium. “Legal questions can only be answered through the medium of our paper,” warned the weekly late Victorian miscellany Tit-Bits – a media-savvy periodical I’ll discuss at length – in its column of legal information, forestalling the possibility of a personal response. The concept and phrase mass media was only formulated in a later mediascape, amidst the stream of consumer media after the Great War: motion pictures, pressed gramophone records, and – perhaps above all – radio broadcast. Yet the late nineteenth century’s rapid invention and commercialization of new media technologies encouraged a kind of informal, heuristic sense that some print forms were more like the new nonprint media than others. For one thing, the production of periodicals tended to drive innovations in printing, with printers and publishers of books adopting new technologies more slowly. But even books could seem more medium-like when they constituted components of a workaday media system. Newspapers, serial fiction, and ultimately even the sturdy British three-volume novel: in the s and s, these print-forms seemed to go over to the media. The pioneers of late nineteenth-century journalism sometimes embraced the vision of the periodical press as new medium. “The Press is at once the eye and the ear and the tongue of the people,” exulted the great editor W. T. Stead, a founder of Britain’s so-called New Journalism, in . For Stead, the newspaper press “is the visible speech if not the voice of the democracy. It is the phonograph of the world . . . A great speech is now delivered in the hearing of all the nation.” Claims for mass mediatic representation converge here with claims about political representation. Stead’s metaphors for the centrality of the modern newspaper make it a medium that, within the space of a few sentences, shifts from phonautograph (“visible speech”) to “phonograph” to telephone or even to some form of mass aural broadcast that did not yet exist in the s. If today the idea of media makes us think of electronic devices or periodical journalism before we consider novels or Leaves of Grass, it was the literature and journalism of this era that helped foster this habit of mind. Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, – traces the relationships between the histories of mediums (as an array of technologies) and of the media (as a consolidated entity chiefly permitting one-way communication) in the late nineteenth century, contributing to the larger effort to analyze the history of mediation. It focuses in particular on how

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 literature could help readers imagine both media technologies and mass discourse. The point isn’t simply to read the impact of new technologies on literature. Rather, this book brings a variety of topics – mass journalism, the history of book-forms and publishing, New Woman writing, turn-of-the-century fascination with the occult, racial and imperial discourse – more firmly within the compass of media history, in order to see how printed texts treat these phenomena as media issues. The focus on literary works reflects my belief that fiction and poetry offer writers and readers some of the most wide-ranging and resonant ways of imagining old and new media, as print culture writes its collaborators and rivals. To analyze the interplay between mediums and the media, between print and other media forms, and between the ideologies and technics of media, I have drawn on a cluster of approaches and concepts, including the loose-knit, interdisciplinary field of media archaeology, the idea of media systems, and the dynamics of intermediality or relations between media. These approaches and ideas have helped me understand and analyze the period’s rich vernacular media theory.

Toward an Archaeology of Media Systems In examining the media of the past as well as their afterlives in the present, my study takes inspiration from media archaeology, a poststructuralist approach to media influenced by the work of the literary theorist and media historian Friedrich Kittler as well as by contemporary creative work in art, technology, and media curation. Media archaeology examines media “in a perspective more informed by physics and engineering” than by history or cultural studies. At its most stringent, media archaeology sets a “cold,” procedural emphasis on the properties of technological artifacts against the phenomenological bias of media history, against approaches based on analyzing discourses and “telling media stories.” In contrast to humanistic media histories, media archaeology sometimes professes to treat media as primarily physical and functional rather than as expressive: for instance, how Scott’s phonautograph worked, how its very technics encoded an understanding of the physics of sound and the nature of recording, how the phonautograms it produced have now come to function in our own media environment. Such an archaeological perspective has much to offer scholars of media: its alignments of critical analysis with the examination and repair of real devices, and of new media art with old archives; its alertness to the material differences that different

Inventing Media and Their Meanings

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technologies make; the attention it gives to forgotten, failed, weird, or imaginary media, as well as to famous or successful ones; its emphasis on historical breaks rather than continuities. Against the Whiggish “idea of inexorable, quasi-natural, technical progress,” media archaeology pursues more freewheeling trajectories through the conjunction of aesthetics, communication, and technology that we have come to call media; in place of a unified field, it proposes “a variantology of the media.” With its focus on literature, on narrative, on the cultural roles media assume and the ideas they provoke, this book takes a humanistic approach. It discusses devices alongside discourses, centering on authors, inventors, audiences, and texts rather than on the impersonal archaeotechnics of machines. Yet I’ve found media archaeology a useful complement and challenge to literary scholarship. Its openness to oddball media and temporal breaks reminds us that the media environment of the past is never simply a stable training ground for the present. And its steampunk fascination with gear helps us notice that the technical specifics often make a material difference in media stories: the mechanics of a detector made by Alexander Graham Bell to search for a bullet in a dying president; the understandings of print physically expressed in the Paige Compositor (bankrolled by Samuel Clemens) and in its rival the Linotype; the novel printed in three volumes, in one volume, or as part of a serial publication. As Scott’s graphocentric phonautograph confirms, when it comes to nineteenth-century media, the procedural or technical isn’t necessarily distinct from the discursive. The invention of media in the late nineteenth century supported the tendency to link them in diverse ways, to align media into systems. This propensity links creative projects as disparate as the poetry of public mourning, fictions of the telephone, novels about the literary marketplace, or a fantasia of tracking monsters via media. By media systems, I mean the ways that media could be aligned in consistent relationships to one another, and the effects that seemed to follow from these alignments. Rather than simply discussing references to technology or journalism in literary texts, I have approached the nexus of literature and media more broadly, seeing print and nonprint media as linked by ideas about media that were deeply bound up with changing technologies and practices. Poised between examples and general precepts, between accounting for observations and generating hypotheses, systems arose and spread in an Enlightenment culture in which “the printed word was the proliferating technology.” The proliferation of other mediating technologies in the

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 late nineteenth century provoked new attempts at systematic thinking not just in print but also about print. Over the long term, a system represents the “stabilization of technical evolution around previous acquisitions and structural tendencies determined by a play of interdependencies and inventions complementing one another,” in Bernhard Stiegler’s description. But the media systems I discuss are sometimes more impromptu. To write about new communication technologies and older ones meant to see them in a variety of relationships that grew from technological, ideological, or economic connections or contrasts but took on their own logic. “The introduction of new media . . . is never entirely revolutionary,” notes Lisa Gitelman; “new media are less points of epistemic rupture than they are socially embedded sites for the ongoing negotiation of meaning.” By postulating and interpreting systematic relationships between media, nineteenth-century writers map out and interpret an emerging culture of invention, mass discourse, and technological change. What does a media system look like or sound like at the end of the nineteenth century, an era recognized for its general “fascination with systems”? How do you represent one? A system might sound abstract and general, but I’ve found that media systems are often represented in terms of highly specific images or events. In the works I will discuss, a media system can take shape as a universal heartbeat, a telephone call, a novel written for the newspaper, or a phonograph hooked up to a typesetting machine. It may be personified as a neglectful nanny with bad taste in fiction, as information empire or information vampire, even as the devil himself. Writers in this era come to terms with new media and media systems by building on the critical and ideological tools at hand, so media also become matters of class, nation, gender, race, citizenship, and cultural values. As with scientific invention itself, or the work of imaginative writing, the effort to understand a mediated world reveals creativity and improvisation rather than suggesting any simple technological determinism. This book analyzes late nineteenth-century media and media systems in relation to both the discursive logic and the technics that underlay them. In the essay that has become critical theory’s most celebrated exploration of the twentieth-century mediascape, Walter Benjamin declared that “the history of every art form has critical periods in which the particular form strains after effects which can be easily achieved only with a changed technical standard.” A backwards-looking media history might focus on the anticipatory dimension of such art forms, while a device-driven

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media archaeology might highlight the technical changes. What I hope to emphasize is the strain – especially the strain between print literature and an expanding world of print and nonprint media with different technical standards. Media systems under practical and ideological stress inspire works in which the material conditions and properties of those systems appear as themes and problems. This central claim means that my book will often need to examine print and nonprint media with a media-archaeological sense of their technical particularities. Driving media systems to the limits of their operational tolerance, the slow-motion, fast-update Garfield assassination in the United States, or the ossified British three-volume novel in its final years help illuminate the media systems in which they were enmeshed. And viewing media in systems sheds new light on even familiar topics in late nineteenth-century literature: Dracula’s transcription technologies, New Grub Street’s accounts of authorship, A Connecticut Yankee’s technophilia.

From Intermediality to Vernacular Media Theory The term intermedia, whose clunky Internet-age feel is belied by its dual origins in nineteenth-century literature (Samuel Taylor Coleridge) and twentieth-century art (Fluxus artist Dick Higgins), offers an apt name for the intimate connections between media, as they appropriate, copy, and critique one another, sometimes in ways that are even richer and more anarchic than the kinds of mimicry and competition that Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin call “remediation.” Borrowing from other media, a written text could investigate their material and ideological properties. Again, technics converge with discourse, the procedural with the phenomenological. Intermediality becomes rich as it moves from citation or incorporation to transformation, as one medium’s treatment of another medium allows critical reflection on both. By the era of Bell and Edison, print texts could also appropriate other media to foreground how print worked, and how it might work otherwise. The late nineteenth century offers a rich domain for the comparative study of textual media, but these comparisons frequently bring in media that aren’t textual at all. Intermedial engagements could encourage a sense of connections across media. Yet they might also support the idea that each medium had its own distinctive technical logic. When these contrasting tendencies converged, even an aesthete might come to sound like a media archaeologist. Arguing in “The School of Giorgione” () that “all art constantly aspires

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 towards the condition of music,” Walter Pater demotes the importance of representational content, foregrounding technics over discourse. Already we seem to inhabit a different world from Scott; for him, speech and song naturally aspired to the condition of writing. Pater wasn’t suggesting that the arts were different versions of the same thing. Art does not aspire to resemble music in any literal way; indeed, the essay’s first lines inveigh against the “mistake” of viewing all the arts as “forms of poetry,” against treating “poetry, music, and painting . . . as but translations into different languages of one and the same fixed quantity of imaginative thought, supplemented by certain technical qualities.” On the contrary, “the opposite principle – that the sensuous material of each art brings with it a special phase or quality of beauty, untranslateable into the forms of any other, an order of impressions distinct in kind, is the beginning of all true aesthetic criticism” (SG, ). The “technical qualities” come first. Pater’s reference to “impressions” tightens up the turn to consciousness enacted most famously by his “Preface” and “Conclusion” to The Renaissance (). Here, “impressions” are not hazy, internal, subjective responses but sense-specific media effects. Yet, in a mysterious turn of phrase, Pater claims that “in its special mode of handling its given material, each art may be observed to pass into the condition of some other art, by what German critics term an Andersstreben – a partial alienation from its own limitations, through which the arts are able, not indeed to supply the place of each other, but reciprocally to lend each other new forces” (SG, ). Even as they pursue their own logic, the arts gain leverage on their material via intermedial connections. As an instance of this interplay, Pater hails the Giorgionesque The Concert (now attributed to Titian) as a work in which the painter “has caught the waves of wandering sound, and fixed them on the lips and hands for ever” (SG, ). A flat surface sings, while the fleeting sonic waves of music become fixed and permanent without any turn to writing. Pater’s essay appeared just a month before Edison announced the invention of his tinfoil phonograph, a device that partially alienated sound from its own material limitations, that caught concerts and fixed them forever. In “The School of Giorgione,” the arts have become media, and “aesthetic criticism” reveals itself as a branch of media theory and history. But by Pater’s time, even less self-consciously philosophical writers often end up theorizing media. Partially alienated from itself by intermedial connections in an expanding media ecology, late nineteenth-century writing about art, about culture, about history, about news, or about writing itself often ends up making sense of media in relation to one

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another and to the rest of culture; it becomes vernacular media theory. The era’s theories will most often revolve around three broad, related dialectical possibilities that emerge from its ferment of media: the development of new mass and technological media increases the distinctions between media or erodes them; it highlights the material properties of media or points to ways of transcending them; it drives a culture toward unity and convergence, or promotes conflict, fragmentation, or supersession. Thanks to their ubiquity, cultural centrality (however precarious), and capacity to allow critical examination, printed texts are the nineteenth century’s great media for thinking about media, often even when other topics are at hand. Because of its aptness to discover patterns in human experience, to take shape around new and unresolved cultural questions, and to test the possibilities of its own medium, imaginative writing provides some of the most suggestive and wide-ranging responses to a world of technological mediums and mass media.

Interlacing literary history with media history, each chapter of this study brings out a conclusion about media that emerges from media systems and practices, from the alignments and misalignments between print and nonprint media, as writers create art from the medial conditions they encounter and the medial prospects they envision. This roster of late nineteenth-century theories about media isn’t meant to be exhaustive. Indeed, I hope that this book will help stimulate scholarship tracing out other ideas and ideologies that emerged from the nexus of old and new media. In a period of transoceanic telegraphy and the arrival of international copyright, thinking about media systems becomes a way to think about the things that unite or divide nations, cultures, audiences, empires. Media systems encourage international amity, cultural rivalries, or grumbling about how telephones, newspapers, or novels operate better somewhere else. Marveling at Edison’s telephone and the other inventions on display at the  Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, Sir William Thomson credited the superior American patent system; a few years later, after legislative reforms partly inspired by the American model, the number of patents per capita in the United Kingdom rose to match the level that had prevailed in the United States since the s. Americans shocked by Jay Gould’s takeover of Western Union could look to Britain for a model of government telegraphy, while British editors seeking a model for the New

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 Journalism’s engagement of a mass audience explicitly turned to American newspapers. Countries could be united via intercontinental telegraph cables but still divided by different approaches to media. For that reason, this study juxtaposes the literary imaginations of media systems in Great Britain and the United States, taking advantage of the comparatist energies of a transatlantic analysis. Although the core of the book focuses on British writing, I have deliberately framed it with examinations of media and nation by authors across the Atlantic. In Chapter , an expanding media system produces a unity that seems to exceed the bounds of the nation and prompt a rapprochement across the oceans and around the globe; in the last chapter (Chapter ), media systems become figures for violent intercultural rivalry between Yankee innovation and British traditionalism. Furthermore, the chapters adjacent to these both reinforce their international concerns by examining the ways that British literary works could view media from a comparative perspective. Chapter  examines the discussions and practices of media surrounding the assassination and death of President James Garfield in , events that provoked a wave of thinking about media. As writers in the United States sought to make sense of a live event that seemed to monopolize all cultural channels, they interpreted the properties of an emerging national and international media ecology as the unification of all humanity. But, as Chapter  shows, the connections between electric media and daily print could also suggest less harmonious possibilities, highlighting international differences and intermedial conflicts. Analyzing fictions of the telephone in Britain, where its development lagged the United States and many European countries, reveals a pattern in which a particular media technology could stand in for an entire system: the medium is the media. The telephone, an electrical medium seldom associated with a mass audience, comes to stand for a complex of contemporary print and nonprint media viewed as mass distraction – and as obstacles to literary production. This chapter focuses on literary treatments of a single medium in order to make a crucial and paradoxical point: by the final decades of the nineteenth century, the arrival of a new medium takes place in an environment of multifaceted media change and inevitably ends up being triangulated through an array of print and nonprint media. My examination of specific media thus offers some of the strongest support for my claims about the importance of considering media multiplicity and media systems. The opposition between fiction and print forms aligned with mass media helps introduce a triptych of chapters on changing ideas and

Inventing Media and Their Meanings



practices of the novel in Britain. Together these chapters trace out the media history of an event much examined by book historians, the decline and fall of the three-volume novel. Rather than taking issue with recent accounts of the long-term economic factors behind what struck many Victorian readers as a sudden collapse, I examine the triple-decker and its disappearance as a literary event that was shaped by, and which foregrounded, questions about both the media of the novel and the novel’s relationships to other media. Like the slow crisis of Garfield’s suffering and death, the lingering and demise of the triple-decker inspired new analyses of the media systems in which it was embroiled. I begin in Chapter  with a reinterpretation of the most famous literary account of the production of Victorian multivolume fiction, George Gissing’s New Grub Street (). Critics have long recognized the novel for its bleak vision of literary life and for its treatment of the economic and sociological conditions of its own possibility. But as I will show, Gissing also treats the triple-decker as part of a new world of media that sets the terms for modern authorship. In this world, print literature might appear as just another medium, as unsanctified typography. The triple-decker was coming under cultural as well as economic pressure, leading to the format wars in the history of the novel, which are the subject of Chapter . Afterwards, in the immediate wake of the triple-decker’s fall, novelists could treat single-volume fiction as an alternative to the mediation of triple-deckers or the mass address of other print and nonprint media. Single-volume works as different as a bestselling supernatural romance by Marie Corelli and a New Woman novel by George Paston imagine something that remained a repressed possibility in the three-volume New Grub Street: the unmediated novel, the topic of Chapter . Chapter  considers Bram Stoker’s Dracula (), picking up these questions of the novel’s mediation and bringing the turn-of-the-century fascination with paranormal communication and psychic channeling more explicitly into my accounts of technology, literature, and journalism. At the margins of communication, occult mediums join media technologies as phenomena that limn the psychological power of recording and transfer. Dracula’s frenzied presentation of itself as a mosaic of different media has made it the most recognized Victorian fiction about media today. But, for all its attention to multiple media, and to what’s lost in the movement between them, the novel finally seems ready to jettison media in their specificity in favor of something more powerful. The occulting of media creates uncanny effects but also allows media multiplicity to give way to that crucial modern invention, demediated information.

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 From the power and coherence of a total media system in my first chapter, to media differences as war: the final Chapter  bookends the study with another American view of media systems and national culture. Yet in contrast to the stories generated in the wake of the Garfield assassination, media in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court () stand not for global interconnection but for cultural conflict and supersession. The encounter between a skilled Yankee mechanic and Twain’s mocked-up Middle Ages becomes a confrontation between America and Britain, progress and stasis, oral and literate cultures. In the novel’s chilling final scene, such rivalries expand into warfare and mass annihilation, from orality to obliteracy – a dénouement decisively shaped by Twain’s own experiences as a would-be new media magnate. This study sets off from the arrival of novel communication technologies oriented toward consumers and businesses: telephones, typewriters, phonographs. It ends as experiments in wireless transmission presaged a new phase in the ubiquity of media (a situation already vividly explored in  by Kipling’s story “Wireless”). In a coda, I consider fin-de-siècle fantasies about the end of books, visions that live on in our own era of media change. For more than a century, print and books have outlasted the prophets of their doom. In fact, imaginative printed writing has provided critical resources for working out the relationships between established and emerging media, with their welter of technical variations and their address to different audiences. With its alignments and misalignments between media, and its competing theories about what they meant, the late nineteenth century might justify its association with uncertainty and confusion. But from another angle, an era of intellectual tumult also appears an era of creativity. As this book shows, the medial imagination of those who developed and promoted new technologies was rivaled in inventiveness by the writers and the public who worked to make sense of them.

 

A Message on All Channels The Unification of Humanity

Distance, estrangement, isolation, have been overcome by the recent amazing growth in the means of intercommunication. For political and industrial purposes, California and Massachusetts are nearer neighbors to-day than were Philadelphia and Boston in the days of the Revolution . . . It was distance, isolation, ignorance of separate parts, that broke the cohesive force of the great empires of antiquity. Public affairs are now more public, and private less private, than in former ages. The railroad, the telegraph, and the press have virtually brought our citizens, with their opinions and industries, face to face; and they live almost in each other’s sight. —James Garfield, “The Future of the Republic” ()

On July , , the US President James Abram Garfield was shot in the back by Charles Guiteau at a train station in Washington, DC. Usually described as a disappointed office-seeker, Guiteau was in fact a madman who had come to identify with a disgruntled wing of the Republican party after his deranged fantasies of winning a post from the new administration had come to nothing. Far from dying of his wound immediately, the President lingered for two and a half excruciating months, finally killed less by the bullet itself than by his doctors’ unsanitary attempts to locate it in his midsection. While the President lived, the nation kept up with every response of his ailing body; courtesy of transcontinental telegraphy, daily reports on his temperature, diet, and emissions became a staple of national life. When Garfield died, accounts of his death proclaimed a shared paroxysm of grief such as the world had never known. In analyzing this half-remembered episode from Gilded Age history, I will be interested less in the individual stories of Garfield and Guiteau than in the entanglement of their fatal intersection in late nineteenthcentury media (telegraph, telephone, wire-based periodical press) and the emerging conceptions of instantaneity, publicity, and technological unity they helped to inspire and circulate. In this chapter, I argue that – thanks 

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 to its players, its domination of media channels, and its combination of long duration and possible urgent developments – the Garfield assassination powerfully limns the psychic and social effects of precisely the communication revolution that Garfield had noted in the epigraph above. The assassination of the American President will bring a media system into view, a system in which print and nonprint media seemed at least temporarily to form a giant, undifferentiated discourse network. From newspaper reports and hastily written presidential biographies to ponderous reflections on the moral force of information technology, the representation of Garfield’s plight in the media revealed a network whose meanings emerge in the intersections and interstices of telegraph wires, magnetic induction coils, and columns of type. The discourses initiated by the Garfield assassination suggest an informatic feedback loop that turned a set of events into something more: in the discourse networks of , the assassination of President Garfield became an unwitting cultural reflection upon the logic and the psychodynamics of the late nineteenth-century media ecology. To trace that logic, this chapter will work outward from the vernacular media theories of Garfield and Guiteau themselves, to the events of , and to the inventions of Alexander Graham Bell and Walt Whitman in response to the crisis. Across a range of fields and media, the outlines of a conceptual array emerge: technology had made concurrent, communal access to information virtually universal; shared, simultaneous experience could harmonize far-flung elements; a total modern media system could channel not only national unity but also global amity. Reading the Garfield murder in its media ecology suggests the new power of saturation across media to evoke feelings of vicarious involvement and social unity while making a sensational event seem to exceed history – to have a global and even cosmic significance.

The Truth Contemporary accounts of the encounter between Garfield and Guiteau treated the pair as types of virtue and depravity. The martyr and the murderer became the war hero and the unrepentant killer, the self-made man and the huckster, the family man and the divorced libertine whose brother blamed his mental illness on chronic masturbation. Such antitheses obscure a surprising and unnoticed similarity: the fact that each was both a writer and a vernacular media theorist. An age of media invention could inspire national paragon and crazed murderer alike.

The Unification of Humanity



A former member of the polygamous, millenarian Oneida Community in New York, Guiteau had written or plagiarized a set of theological lectures in the s (The Truth), which he later reprinted alongside his record of the assassination (The Removal). In The Truth, Guiteau’s interpretation of history and Revelation leads him to consider the question of last things: When will this earth end? We answer, when the Gospel has been preached to all men. The exploits of Livingston [sic] and Stanley show that the light of this century is beginning to shine even in benighted Africa, and the time must be near, with the electric flash encircling the globe, when it can be said that the Gospel has been preached to all men. Then, according to Christ, the end will come.

“We live in a fast age; in an age of steam, electricity, and printing,” he affirms. “Edison and his co-workers descend upon us like a tornado”; their “discoveries” will hasten the Final Judgment (TR, ). Along with imperial expansion, communication by “the electric flash” would soon cast God’s word so broadly that a technologically united world could now reach its last days. Telegraphy provokes teleology; electricity becomes eschatology. Guiteau did more than acknowledge the power of nineteenth-century media systems in theory. Although The Truth inveighs against newspapers for cultivating interest “in horse-races, foot-races, and other demoralizing shows” (TR, ), Guiteau himself was supposedly “a great reader of daily literature,” one with such a tendency to incorporate himself into the news that he often “claimed to be the personal friend of many prominent officials” by virtue of having read the papers. As a young man he had dreamed of establishing an international chain of “great theocratic dailies,” newspapers that would “controll [sic] public opinion and extend the practical dominion of Christ on the earth,” becoming a “spiritual medium” for the “breakfast table” (US, : ; italics original). The Guiteau news network would “supersede” the old religious medium of “pulpit oratory” and at last “reconcile the conflicting interests of individuals, of classes, of churches, of states, of nations . . . thus presenting a magnificent exhibition of unity, and finally a true Christian nation” (US, : , ). Even long after abandoning the vision of a theocratic newspaper company, Guiteau fantasized about becoming a media mogul. Years after Simon Phelps had dismissed him as a law clerk, Guiteau reappeared before his old boss with a fanciful “scheme to buy out the Chicago Inter-Ocean [newspaper] for $,.” According to Phelps, Guiteau believed that

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 by “controlling the policy of that paper” he would “run the politics of the entire country.” Phelps rejected Guiteau’s grandiose plans, but he later felt “certain” Guiteau had worked as “a newspaper man” in the s. If the epoch of electricity and printing was going to end human history and bring the Judgment Day, Charles Guiteau would help it along. James Garfield’s views on the era’s new communication media were more conventional but only slightly less fervid than his assassin’s. Eulogizing Samuel Morse in , Garfield pronounced the electric telegraph the “most wonderful” achievement of “discovery and invention” in human history. With its creation, the “mighty spirit” of electricity found a “body” and a “voice.” And, whatever else it happened to be saying, that ghostly voice bespoke a new communicational unity not of tongue but coding system, an idea worthy of the age of Esperanto or Volapu¨k (both artificial languages were developed during the late s): “throughout the world, whatever the language or the dialect of those who use it, the telegraph speaks a language whose first element is the alphabet of Morse . . . The world is only beginning to spell out the lesson, whose meaning the future will read.” A former college president, Garfield reputedly entertained friends with his ability to write simultaneously in Greek with one hand and Latin with the other. But such linguistic dexterity might mean less in the new age of this electrical Esperanto, a system based on hearing code, not on writing it down. In “The Future of the Republic,” a speech delivered a few months after his eulogy on Morse, Garfield affirmed the new power of communication to unify a nation so recently riven by civil war. “The railroad, the telegraph, and the press” (Garfield’s triad closely paraphrases Guiteau’s trinity of “steam, electricity, and printing”) had created an environment in which “few men can now live isolated lives” (FR, , ). In contrast to Guiteau, Garfield was reputedly “not a great newspaper reader.” Even so, he recognized that a new world of rapid movement and instant communication made Americans part of a polity that was also a simultaneous mass readership: The leading political, social, and industrial events of this day will be reported and discussed at more than two millions of American breakfasttables to-morrow morning. Public opinion . . . may be wrong; it may be tyrannical; but it is all-pervading, and constitutes more than ever before a strong bond of nationality. (FR, –)

Like Guiteau, Garfield presents “public opinion” as a product of the private, domestic digestion of mass-distributed news; we are at the tail-end of Ju¨rgen

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Habermas’s notorious transformation of the public sphere. Habermas bemoans its displacement by a “pseudo-public or sham-private world of culture consumption,” but we might also view the change in Régis Debray’s terms, as part of the larger reformulation of the “graphosphere” of print in light of an emergent “videosphere” of electric media. For Garfield, the railroad and the telegraph had inaugurated a “revolution” “more radical” than any during the past three centuries (FR, –). Its next stage would begin when Bell patented the telephone in . Appropriately enough, given his recognition of the impact of electric communication, Garfield would be the first President to move into a White House with a phone. As if fulfilling the contract behind this installation, the telephone’s creator would soon arrive for a desperate service call: to use a telephonic device to listen for the bullet in the President’s body. Unfortunately for Garfield, Bell’s call could not be completed.

The Removal During the spoils-system era of political patronage, the inauguration of an American President initiated a kind of job fair during which ranks of men streamed into Washington to press their claims for employment. Maintaining that a speech of his had clinched Garfield’s campaign in the state of New York, Guiteau came to the capital with the rest. Guiteau’s speech had originally been written about the rival candidate, Ulysses S. Grant, and its passages about Garfield were a clumsy addendum. Moreover, Guiteau had tried to recite the speech in public only once and had stopped after only a few sentences. Yet on its strength, Guiteau hoped to be appointed consul-general to France or to a diplomatic post in Vienna. After months of visits to the White House and State Department and rounds of unread letters to Garfield and his Secretary of State, James Blaine, Guiteau had no success. Always addicted to printed business cards and letterhead stationery, especially when they featured his own name, Guiteau attracted the attention of staffers not only for his deluded persistence but also for his insatiable appetite for White House stationery. Meanwhile, Garfield was having troubles of his own. His elevation of members of the Republican party’s “Half-Breed” wing, including Blaine, had infuriated the party’s powerful “Stalwart” faction. At the same moment, this matter became personal for Guiteau when he found himself rebuffed by an exasperated Secretary Blaine. “Gradually, as the result of reading the newspapers,” Guiteau would recall, he concluded that Garfield was plotting against all

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 Stalwarts and threatening the Republic, and he decided to kill the President in order to save the nation – and to place the Stalwart Vice President Chester Arthur in power. George Beard’s sensationalist American Nervousness () warns of the dangerous “excitement and disappointment” of democratic politics (in particular, the “late election” of , in which one of his patients was prostrated by Garfield’s narrow defeat of Winfield Hancock). Among the other causes of modern nervousness, Beard prominently cites both “the periodical press” and the electric telegraph, a device that creates and transmits “continual fluctuation[s]” – of voltage, of prices, of knowledge – “in every part of the world” (AN, ). More recently, “the experiments, inventions, and discoveries of Edison alone have made and are now making constant and exhausting draughts on the nervous forces of America and Europe” (AN, , ). Indeed, “Edison’s electric light” illustrated the workings of “the nervous system of man”: add more and more lamps “to the circuit, as modern civilization is constantly requiring us to do,” and soon they will begin to shine intermittently or not at all (AN, –). The example of Guiteau would soon support Beard’s claim that a turbulent modern democracy had particular need of treatment for the insane; the publicity-loving Beard would not only arrive to testify in Guiteau’s insanity defense but also publish a book and articles about the case. After following Garfield around Washington for weeks, Guiteau read in the papers that the President would be leaving town from the Baltimore and Potomac railway station on July , beginning a trip that would include a visit to the transatlantic telegraph magnate Cyrus Field. Garfield never made it onto the train. As he walked through the station, Guiteau shot him. When Guiteau was arrested, his pockets were found stuffed with “some forty or fifty” incendiary newspaper clippings about the intraparty feud (US, : ). “The Deity inspired me [to kill Garfield] and the newspapers confirmed the inspiration,” he would testify (US, : ). In turn, at a newsstand Guiteau had left packets of papers explaining his deed to journalists and “the American People” (US, : –). Brandishing letters addressed to various authorities when he surrendered himself (one was “written on the back of a telegraph blank”), Guiteau demonstrated that he had planned the murder in part as a means of disseminating his writing: “reporters can copy [the documents], if they wish to, in manifold” (on duplicating paper) (US, : , ). “I am clear in my purpose to remove the President,” he had written to himself days earlier, “It will save the Republic, and create a demand for my book” (US, : ).

The Unification of Humanity

Figure .



Posting Garfield’s medical bulletins under the electric arc lamps of Broadway.

Source: Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (September , ). Special Collections, University of Virginia Library

The man who was transfixed by seeing his name in print had already sent out The Truth for a new edition.

Bulletin, Bullet, and Bell Thanks to the telegraph press and its adjunct, the town bulletin board, cascading reports of the attack spread at lightning speed. At one moment, Garfield is not expected to survive the night; at the next, his physicians are predicting a full recovery. Newspapers printed, and biographies soon reprinted, stories detailing the “marvelous spectacle” of “unanimous” feeling: crowds awaiting the latest bulletin, catalogues of foreign dignitaries wiring their prayers, enough “words of sympathy . . . on the wings of the wires” to fill “volumes.” As the President lingered, the multiple daily reports on his condition – his pulse and temperature, ingestions and excretions, responses to his wife’s comments and his doctors’ nutritive enemas – became part of everyday life (Figure .). One posthumous

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 biography presents its chapter on Garfield’s medical treatment as “The Story of the Bulletins,” as if the President’s plight had been displaced by the official updates about it. In fact, the bulletins were fraudulently optimistic, intended perhaps to reassure Garfield himself, who often had the newspapers read to him and thus joined the mass audience for his own unfolding story. At first, the “white wings of the newspapers from all parts of the land” and “the electric wire stretching a thousand leagues under the sea” filled with expressions of shock and sympathy from around the nation and the world. The newspapers and the telegraph wires united in their impression of rapid movement and universal reach. As Horatio Alger put it, “there was scarcely a portion of the globe in which the hearts of the people were not deeply stirred by the daily bulletins that came from the sick couch of the patient sufferer.” Before long, the columns and the cables also began to carry schemes for treatment – in particular, for finding and removing the bullet lodged in Garfield’s midsection. Its mysterious resting place had become an obsession of the presidential physicians, and it quickly became a fixation for the public as well. Soon after the attack on Garfield, the mathematician and astronomer Simon Newcomb suggested that it might be possible to locate the presidential bullet through its electrical or magnetic properties. Newcomb was angry when journalists began discussing his proposal – prematurely, he thought. But dissemination in the press allowed Alexander Graham Bell to learn of Newcomb’s ideas. Several years before, while studying interference in telephone lines, Bell had noted that a piece of metal would disturb the magnetic “balance” between two wire coils that had been positioned so as to render an attached telephone receiver silent; when metal was nearby, the receiver would emit a tone: Bell had created an early metal detector. Now he began a new set of experiments. In telegraphic communication with Newcomb, Bell spent July at work on a new induction balance to locate the presidential bullet (Figure .). Bell tested the device on Garfield twice. Both trials failed, the first because the machine’s components had been incorrectly wired, the second for more mystifying reasons: when moved over Garfield’s body, the device emitted a continuous sound instead of the localized clicks produced in the lab (Figure .). Although Bell discovered that Garfield’s bed had steel springs, in follow-up experiments, similar beds didn’t stop the probe from working correctly. The official bulletins and newspapers treated Bell’s experiments as a success, and Bell would publish his findings as “A Successful

The Unification of Humanity

Figure .



Diagram of the induction balance and the other components of Bell’s detector.

Source: Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (August , ). Special Collections, University of Virginia Library

Form of Induction Balance for the Painless Detection of Metallic Masses in the Human Body.” Yet even without mishaps, his exertions would probably have fallen short. As Bell realized after learning the results of Garfield’s autopsy, he had been looking in the wrong place; like Garfield’s doctors, he was investigating not the path of the bullet but the pus-filled canal created by the President’s physicians themselves in their repeated attempts to explore his wound with probes and dirty fingers. As August wore on, it became clear that Garfield was dying; infection from the injury would kill him within weeks. By , Bell had become the Bill Gates or Steve Jobs of the telephone age, admired for his innovations but also known for his company’s aggressive defense of its technologies against rival firms and inventors. In the late s and early s, Bell faced court battles and public complaints over the Bell Telephone Company’s efforts to maintain its control of the telephone and its networks. In , when the “hostility of rival claimants to the telephone was at its peak,” the “blunder of the steel spring was a weapon in their hand to discredit and lampoon Bell”; Bell’s detractors could greet his efforts to locate the bullet as a failed publicity stunt. “I feel that now the finger of scorn will be pointed at the Induction Balance and at me,” Bell wrote as the President’s corpse lay in state in the Capitol; “I shall look with anxiety for the unsparing denunciations that will doubtless appear shortly in the newspaper.” As one early Garfield biographer would acidly conclude, “it would not appear that the Induction Balance . . . is an instrument calculated to improve the reputation of science or scientific men.”

 Figure .

Bell listens for the bullet.

Source: Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (August , ). Special Collections, University of Virginia Library

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

The National Interest As the crisis persisted, the popular concern for the President and the unrelenting interest in his condition became stories in themselves. Noting the widespread fixation on the telegraphic dispatches about the President’s fluctuating condition, commentators began to read this response as a sign of a reinvigorated national unity that was healing the political, sectional, and racial rifts of the Civil War and Reconstruction. In the wake of the assault on Garfield, “the South and North were at last as one”; the whole nation was “united, as if by magic.” As journalistic coverage begot metacoverage, Garfield’s body came to offer a figure for the reconstructed American nation. “The moment that assassin’s ball pierced the President’s body, the nation felt the ball pierced its own body politic.” As one posthumous biography would soon put it, “the register of the state of [Garfield’s] pulse and temperature from day to day was the register at the same time of the pulse and temperature of the Nation and the world.” If so, it was a readout that was graphically available in the many charts that plotted his daily or hourly condition (Figure .). Since the medium of telegraphic news allowed sudden, frequent updates, the widely noted public sense of “alternating dread and trust,” “anxious alternations,” or “intense fluctuations of hope and fear” not only reproduced the state of the President’s health according to the bulletins but also reiterated the very form of telegraphic transmission, as George Beard could have pointed out: terse, instantaneous, sequential, fluctuating, temporary information. Enumerating “Some Lessons of the Crisis” as it was in progress, the journal The Nation pointed to new harmony in the Republican party, between North and South, and in the country as a whole. Garfield’s doctors might debate about whether he was suffering from pyæmia (inflammation caused by “absorption into the blood of the disunited elements of broken down pus” – it was soon blamed for his death), but the popular reaction showed that the social body of the nation had contracted no analogous illness. Indeed, the nation’s response to the Garfield attack demonstrated that the “extent” of any “social pyæmia” in America had “been much exaggerated”: It is most reassuring to find that no organized body or group among us, however revolutionary in theory, has uttered any other sentiment than that of detestation of Guiteau, and that no individual has been allowed to express satisfaction at the deed without exposing himself to social reprobation if not bodily chastisement at the hands of his nearest neighbors. General Garfield represents for the time being social order in America . . .

 Figure .

Chart showing Garfield’s temperature, pulse, and respiration.

Source: Ridpath, Life and Work of James A. Garfield (). Collection of the author

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If there were any body of opinion among us bent on assailing the institutions of the country, and of sufficient magnitude to be worth a moment’s attention it would have shown itself by its indifference to the President’s fate, if by nothing more positive.

Compare the logic of this “lesson” to the working of Bell’s induction balance. With Bell’s device, the bullet would reveal itself when it interrupted the balance between magnetic fields and produced a sound on the telephone receiver, the signal of a dangerous interference in the President’s body; for The Nation’s commentator, the crisis itself becomes a version of Bell’s machine, a detector that would disclose any fundamental threat as an imbalance in the body of the nation. A brief article in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper about the “representatives of Communism, Nihilism, and the terrible Red” who inhabit Justus Schwab’s Lower East Side saloon follows similar lines. These “men of evil and desperate countenance . . . who gesticulate and foam at the mouth” offer “toast after toast . . . to the destruction of all in power,” but even here, in the country’s most notorious center of political radicalism, “sympathy with the attack on President Garfield [i]s disavowed.” “Whatever may be true of other nations,” concluded one sermonizer, “the American Republic, though noisy and quarrelsome on the surface, is, at heart, as the heart of one man.” But as gratifying as it was, the spontaneous outpouring of heartfelt national unity sometimes required a little prompting. The Charleston News and Courier celebrated the “outburst of sympathy and condemnation . . . universal in its manifestation, affectionate in its tone, and National in spirit” among South Carolinians, “nowhere . . . more evident than in the columns of the state press.” Sectional animosity had been overstated. “It needed only the threat of a common misfortune to give shape and voice to the recreate but sturdy love of the Republic” in the South. Only one group stood apart, the paper claimed, supposedly maintaining just the unconcern about which The Nation warned; the News and Courier condemned the “marked indifference which characterizes the conduct of our colored citizens” with respect to the President’s plight. In reply, black churches in Charleston and other towns passed resolutions affirming the sympathy and concern of their parishioners. Here and elsewhere, the recurrent scrutiny of African Americans’ responses to the daily news about Garfield staged questions of their place in the national polity between the end of Reconstruction and the consolidation of Jim Crow and racial exclusion. The Nation soon criticized the Charleston paper for coercing such avowals. Yet on another level, the

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 congruence of a race-baiting Southern newspaper and an organ of Yankee liberalism suggests a more fundamental agreement outside racial and sectional politics, an unspoken consensus about the necessity of unanimous reception of news about Garfield. The publicized crises in the President’s condition encouraged a sense of vicarious mass participation in his plight as “the nation’s heart, like a might pendulum, oscillat[ed] between . . . hope and . . . despair.” In late July, Harper’s Weekly wrote that “the whole country seemed to watch at his bedside . . . The heart of a great people beat with a single pulse.” By midSeptember, it found that “[a] shadow has lain across the threshold of every home in the land, as if a beloved inmate were mortally stricken.” And the journalists at Harper’s were far from the only ones to offer images of a mass virtual vigil over Garfield. “By the everyday miracles of the telegraph and the printing-press working together the whole mass of the people have been admitted” to his sickroom; thanks to “the telegraph and the newspaper,” it was “as if the Nation were sitting at the bedside . . . counting his pulses, noting his temperature and breathing, and listening for every whispered word.” “The whole world watched by his bed-side,” recalled Bell, as if the communal, virtual observation of the President were a more vivid experience than his own real one. Over the course of the summer of , as the nation watched at the presidential sickbed, Guiteau’s media-fed fantasies of teleparticipation in the news went from psychopathology to cliché. Only weeks after The Nation declared that Garfield represented American “social order,” he was dead. Late on the night of September , , the news flew “on the wings of the lightning.” As Garfield sickened and died, the contrast between his collapse and the nation’s news-fueled concord grew into a widely proclaimed sense of a unity that exceeded even the bounds of the nation. “There was never a mourning in all the world like unto this,” declared the eulogist at his funeral, citing “calculations” that “not less that ,, of the human race” took part in the day’s sorrows. After the President’s death, Scientific American hailed the outpouring of worldwide telegraphic sympathy as “a spectacle unparall [el]ed in history”: the civilized world gathered as one family around a common sick bed, hope and fear alternately fluctuating in unison the whole world over as hopeful or alarming bulletins passed with electric pulsations over the continents and under the seas.

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The experience seemed to herald a “day when science shall have so blended, interwoven, and unified human thoughts and interests that the feeling of universal kinship shall be . . . constant and controlling.” “Science and invention” having “brought all nations into something like instantaneous communication,” at the President’s demise “the touch of the telegraph key. . . welded human sympathy and made possible its manifestation in a common, universal, simultaneous heart throb.” From science writing to sermons, account after account shared this sense of the event’s singular significance: Imperial England, crafty Germany, autocratic Russia, volatile France, continental empires, far off Japan, land of the sun rising, how from each and all the words of sympathy come singing along the wire over the land and under the sea . . . The old dream of the brotherhood of men marches to its fulfilment.

During his trial, Guiteau would cite such proclamations of blessed unity as confirmation that the assassination had been divinely ordained (US, : , –). Simultaneous mourning among “the nations of the civilized world, without regard to differences of race, religion, forms of government, customs or manners”: this was “an event unparalleled in recorded history.” Across genres and media (periodicals, biographies, sermons and orations, poems), contemporary treatments of Garfield’s plight and the response it provoked produce what virtually amount to permutations of a single message, a sentence about novelty, unity, sublimity, spectacle, and the heart: The exhibition of a grief so world-wide was a sublime event, and something new in the world’s history. Nothing in our history is more beautiful that the chastened tenderness of the universal feeling. An event which affects every individual citizen so powerfully and beneficially can not be lost upon the country. The sympathy with the sufferer was well nigh universal . . . from the islands of the sea, from the north and south, east and west, from the cabins of the poor, and from the palaces of empires, came the words of sympathy which revealed the heartbeats of the world . . . There was a most sincere and universal sense of personal bereavement. The feeling in every house was as if some one of the family was in the valley of the shadow of death. Never in the history of the world did countless millions so watch at the bedside of a stricken man. The nations of the earth were moved by a common sympathy never before experienced.

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 The telegraph has united the continents . . . In all the records of the generations of men there has been no such spectacle. The people everywhere forgot their divisions, and melted into a tender and growing anxiety, which deepened hour by hour during the long, fluctuating, and heroic struggle of our President with death, until . . . it culminated in a sorrow so universal and so sublime as to be almost without a parallel in history.

Garfield’s curtailed presidency had accomplished little, but the momentous response to his suffering and death would be a true legacy. “Nothing that Mr. Garfield ever did will mark so grand an issue, or contribute so much to emphasize the new era upon which humanity has entered, as his dying,” Scientific American affirmed. In this claim, science was at one with religion. From one of the thousands of pulpits at which simultaneous memorials were offered on the Sunday following his death: The stroke of General Garfield’s pulse at any given moment, was simultaneously observed by the entire circle of the populations of the globe – and this sense in all men’s minds that they were sitting together, at the same moment, over the same sufferer, watching the swell and ebb of his life, greatly assisted their interflow of emotion, and unified them in a manner truly wonderful. And certainly that is a good thing.

United we stand: the media of  turned the world into a global sickroom. And this unprecedented sense of unity would ensure that Garfield’s tale would “become one of the nation’s household stories,” “treasured and kept warm in the hearts of millions for generations.” “Four names in the line of presidents will stand conspicuous in history – Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Garfield.” A “leader in the files of time” (a phrase from Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall” has been recast for an age of news-bureau journalism), Garfield would always be remembered: The country is united in one common sympathy. The petty impulses that have sometimes parted us seem lost forever in the presence of death . . . never will the people cease to cherish the memory of President GARFIELD.

Sobbing Bells In the s, friends of Walt Whitman recalled his response to the death of Garfield, which occurred while Whitman was in Boston overseeing the latest edition of Leaves of Grass. According to the journalist Sylvester Baxter, the analogy to Lincoln’s death, which had affected [Whitman] so profoundly and which he had celebrated with one of the noblest odes in the

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English tongue, seemed to bring it peculiarly near the poet. The next day, when it was mentioned, he simply said that he had heard the bells in the night.

This sensory datum would soon become the central image of “The Sobbing of the Bells,” Whitman’s poem on the death of Garfield. Whitman’s fellow poet Joaquin Miller claimed that Whitman refused a Boston publisher’s one-hundred dollar offer to write a memorial poem, saying: “Yes, I’m sorry as the sorriest; sympathize with the great broken heart of the world over this dead sovereign citizen. But I’ve nothing to say.” Perhaps Whitman changed his mind, or perhaps the sound of the bells proved poetically resonant, for “The Sobbing of the Bells” appeared a week later in the Boston Daily Globe and again soon afterwards in The Poets’ Tributes to Garfield (). Notwithstanding the reticence his friends noted, Whitman managed to write a poem on the President’s death, yet it would be one marked by the dynamics of having nothing to say other than having heard the bells, part of that “almost universal” “tolling of the bells in every city, town, and village throughout the country [which] announced” Garfield’s death. For more conventional versifiers, the long virtual deathwatch offered time for the most dilatory muse to set to work. And when Garfield died, “the greatest poets of the world vied with each other in tribute.” “The Sobbing of the Bells” took its place alongside the sheaves of poetry on Garfield’s demise. But in several ways Whitman’s poem is unusual, marked by what it doesn’t have to say. The shortest of the nearly  poems included in The Poets’ Tributes to Garfield – it was also hastily inserted into the  Leaves of Grass – “The Sobbing of the Bells” is first of all not a tribute to Garfield. Whitman’s reserve and his poem’s avoidance of elegy might seem surprising. He had known and liked Garfield, whom he had first met in Washington during the Civil War; years later, the poet recalled that Garfield would greet him by playfully exclaiming “after all not to create only,” the opening words and original title of Whitman’s  “Song of the Exposition,” a hymn to technology, industry, and invention. Thanks to his wartime hospital work, Whitman had even been a friend of Dr. Bliss, the physician in charge of Garfield’s disastrous treatment. And Whitman’s famous threnodies on Lincoln, whom he had admired but never known personally, demonstrate his ability to consider the assassination of an American President in an acutely personal register. The great elegy “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” deploys

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 the balance between the elegist’s sense of emotional – indeed, erotic – proximity and distance from the “love” who is also the presidential martyr as a powerful way of figuring individual and national loss. In contrast, Whitman’s poem on the death of Garfield says nothing about the speaker’s grief, nothing about any relation to the lost leader, and – almost shockingly, in the context of the fulsome poetic eulogies alongside it in The Poets’ Tributes – absolutely nothing about Garfield: The Sobbing of the Bells (Midnight, Sept. –, ) The sobbing of the bells, the sudden death-news everywhere, The slumberers rouse, the rapport of the People, (Full well they know that message in the darkness, Full well return, respond within their breasts, their brains, the sad reverberations,) The passionate toll and clang—city to city, joining, sounding, passing, Those heart-beats of a Nation in the night.

In “The Sobbing of the Bells,” after the long vigil played out in newspapers and billboards courtesy of the telegraph, awareness of Garfield’s death is instantly ubiquitous thanks to the bells; the news may be “sudden,” yet it is so effortlessly understood that the poem does not even need to mention what it is. In an age of media systems, poetry may be heard, but news is overheard. Between its title and the opening phrase that repeats it like a chime, the poem parenthetically supplies an exact date and time but no particular place, so that we like the news are “everywhere” in space at a highly specific moment in time. Benedict Anderson has identified something like this conjunction as a feature of modern nationalism: that it imagines the nation as a social “organism moving calendrically through . . . time.” If novels and newspapers help generate this vision, as Anderson claims, the social simultaneity evoked by media such as the telegraph press decisively materializes the concept of a nation: as a group of people whom instantaneous communication systems have united in a shared relationship to the march of calendar time (“Midnight, Sept. –, ”). As Garfield had recognized, technologies such as the railway and the telegraph turned the day’s news into a national bond, even in a republic that sprawled across a continent. In Whitman’s poem, the “Nation” at the intersection of generic national space and specific time becomes at once the medium and the recipient of the information. “The sobbing of the bells, the sudden deathnews everywhere,/ The slumberers rouse, the rapport of the People”: with the phrases of the poem’s opening lines we have an implied parataxis that

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wavers between a sequence of events listed chronologically and a series of appositions renaming what the poem has just said. The lines embody as a syntactic ambiguity the tensions in the very form of the live crisis in a media-rich society, the question of what constitutes an update and what amounts to another version of the already known, the paradox of instantaneous transmission of urgent news that will almost as instantly seem familiar. In the poem, this gambit works to collapse the distinction between sequence and simultaneity, as if we were receiving the full news the instant its transfer began: suddenly, at midnight, it’s mourning in America. The indefinite appositions in these lines also initiate the poem’s conflation of the listeners with the bells: are the bells themselves the material and technological “rapport of the People,” or do they simply awaken the People’s psychic or metaphysical interconnection? Are the bells a metaphor for national consciousness or a metonym? The bells’ acoustic “message” instantly provokes a reciprocation within the “brains” and bodies of the unseen listeners, a reaction as automatic as the resonance after a bell rings. Equally referable to the bells’ pealing or to the human grief it instigates, the “sad reverberations” dangle at a line break, accompanied by a terminal parenthesis that graphically echoes the curve of a bell, the ripple of its vibrations. The human response seems immediate and communal, yet it is invisible and silent; transmitting the message, the bells also bear the emotion. Carriers that “join” cities together in the “sounding” of shared sentiment, the bells sob on behalf of the people, who “well return” the feeling but only “respond” inwardly. The people’s feelings are literally central to the poem but parenthetical; the rest of the poem belongs to the bells. Alongside other poetic effusions on Garfield, Whitman’s poem looks almost imagistic, but it is an imagism of the sound-image. A poem about “sounding” and sound, it takes place exclusively “in the darkness.” Unlike vision, which may encourage feelings of separation from what we perceive, sound goes through us, includes us whether we wish it or not (like the news, or like a nation): we may look away from what we do not wish to see, but we can never listen away from what we do not wish to hear. The sobbing bells become the unanimous, inclusive heartbeat of the nation even as they incorporate its citizens into Scientific American’s “universal, simultaneous heart throb.” Peter Coviello has analyzed Whitman’s quest “to describe the unifying intimacies of national life,” his search for a “coherence” linking far-flung Americans anonymously and outside the state’s machinery. Coviello considers the treatment of race (in the

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900  Leaves of Grass) and sex (in the  Calamus poems) as forms of such attachment. But by the s, Whitman could find analogous possibilities in modes of instantaneous communication so ubiquitous as to have become nearly subconscious, a connection that happens practically as we sleep. In “The Sobbing of the Bells,” we can also recognize one side of what Bolter and Grusin term “remediation”: the way in which new media become defined “as refashioned and improved versions” of older ones. The poem never mentions any technology newer than the bell, yet it takes the immersion of “the People” in a national framework for simultaneous knowledge as a premise that – like the news – goes without saying. Not only are the church bells an old interface grafted onto a newer network of electrical interconnection; the phrase “the sobbing of the bells” itself is taken from Poe’s “The Bells,” published more than  years earlier. In fact, one of Whitman’s friends scolded him for having borrowed the poem’s title and opening phrase, an especially awkward appropriation when reviewers singled them out for praise. But in contrast to Poe’s bells – which become in turn sleigh bells, wedding bells, alarm bells, and death tolls – Whitman’s bells are Alexander-Graham-Bells, acoustic transmitters of an electric message sent along a wire. Within  minutes of Garfield’s death, telegraphic word had reached not only Boston but also San Francisco and the small town of Seattle in the distant Washington Territory, where the bells also rang. At midnight, between September  and , , Whitman’s sobbing bells have formed a bell system, a national network that not only conveys information but also confirms or constitutes the unity of a “Nation” whose public discourses had been celebrating its unified response since July . The nation, like the President who was transformed into dots and dashes and data points, has become a public body electric. By the end of the poem, the ringing of the bells turns out to be not only a medium for transmitting the “heart-beats of a Nation” but the palpitations themselves, the external, acoustic embodiment of a communal feeling that is otherwise internal and silent. The poem’s last and shortest line provides an austere conclusion, as the poem’s free verse consummates its flirtation with a pulsing iambic pentameter. Whitman’s sestet not only thematizes the great national heartbeat but finally makes it stethoscopically audible. In his editorials for the Brooklyn Daily Times in the late s, Whitman had celebrated the laying of the first, short-lived transatlantic

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telegraph cable as conveying “a sentiment of union that makes the popular heart beat and quiver.” Years later, saying what he could about Garfield’s death, he rearranged those terms for the late nineteenth-century media ecology: now instantaneous telecommunication is the unified heartbeat of popular sentiment. For Whitman, the mediated but immediate experience of hearing the “death-news” has rendered the poet’s memorializing function obsolete. We are not in the world of “Lycidas,” In Memoriam A.H.H., or “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” so much as the neighborhood of Marshall McLuhan, who claimed in a telegraphic style that [s]imultaneity compels sharp focus on the effect of thing made. Simultaneity is the form of the press in dealing with Earth City. . . Simultaneity is related to telegraph, as the telegraph to math and physics.

In “The Sobbing of the Bells,” the traditional town bells conveying the news have become extensions of a synchronized network transmitting the news “everywhere” at once, a simultaneously mystical and technological “rapport of the People” creating national unity at the moment of mourning. Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz’s influential account of the late twentiethcentury media event analyzes it as one that preempts normal media and social routines for “monopolistic” “live” coverage on “all channels.” As a social ritual, they note, the media event stages “reconciliation,” generates accounts marked by “reverence and ceremony,” and “electrif [ies] very large audiences – a nation, several nations, or the world” (ME, , , ). With their “rare realization of the full potential of electronic media technology,” media events “integrate societies in a collective heartbeat” (ME, , ; italics original). Dayan and Katz assume that the media event only became possible amidst twentieth-century broadcast technologies. Yet as we have seen, their image of the “collective heartbeat,” a metaphor that condenses the ideas of unity, simultaneity, sound, and sentiment, is also the central image in responses to Garfield’s death. Dayan and Katz notwithstanding, was the death of Garfield the first American media event? It monopolized the media; it called forth reverent proclamations of unity; it revealed the full potential of “the wires that form a sympathetic cord uniting the continents,” the everyday miracle of the discourse networks of . And, thanks perhaps to telegraphers’ advance preparations, it came as close as then possible to live status, that sense of vicarious immediacy ultimately traceable to the “contingency” of “the mortal body itself” – in this case, Garfield’s. Courtesy of networked print and nonprint media, the live

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 media event invests the news cycle itself with a sense of the lyric fullness of the moment. More generally, and contra treatments of modern media as sui generis, Neil Postman identifies the late nineteenth-century telegraph press as the precursor of the entertainment culture of the twentieth-century United States. Like television, he asserts, “telegraphic discourse permitted no time for historical perspectives.” In light of the discourse around Garfield’s death, we must modify that claim. Again and again, the telegraph press and other media sought to view the event in historical terms, grasping for a sense of the ultimate significance of the Garfield assassination and the “sudden universal outbursting of latent sensibilities” it unleashed. Yet, endlessly assessed in the media systems of , the event seemed to exceed historical perspective, “to appear quite outside the range of history,” to require superlatives of singularity, omnipresence, harmony, sublimity, since “no mourning was ever before so universal, so heartfelt, so spontaneous, so lasting.” “The Sobbing of the Bells” may be most remarkable in its avoidance of the tropes of noncomparison that were suddenly everywhere by September –, . Yet by confining itself to the present tense, the tense of immediacy but also of timelessness, Whitman’s poem too suggests a reformulation of the experience of time under modernity, one that – in Stephen Kern’s account – emphasizes not only “simultaneity” but also the sense of a “thickened present” saturated with information and meaning. Apart from Whitman’s reserve, we might note the remarkable loss of precedent that accompanied the death of the President, especially in light of Lincoln’s murder less than two decades earlier. We should characterize this also as a property of media systems’ transmission on all channels. Every live media event may demand to be the first, may translate synchronic coverage on every channel into diachronic singularity, may claim a psychic monopoly that coopts attempts at historical thinking into a perverse corroboration of the predominance of the present day. From the history of Guiteau’s derangement to the reverberations of Whitman’s bells, Garfield’s assassination was caught in a web of technologies for producing, organizing, and transmitting information: an assassin’s dreams of making the papers, Bell’s telephonic search for the bullet, news about Garfield’s condition, an instant surge of national mourning and international sympathy after his death. The assassination of James Garfield has proved not merely an example of what happened to a news event once it entered the discourse networks of , the media system that included telegraph press, induction balance, and free verse poem; as we have seen,

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the assassination stimulated – indeed, its representation often amounted to – a strangely acute reflection on the dynamics of the system itself. With every transfer of information about the event, each translation from electrical impulse to printer’s stereotype, this unwitting metacommentary seemed to make itself more apparent. Under the strain of the twoand-a-half-month-long Garfield assassination, a media system that linked dissemination, technology, and social discourse began to register its own properties ever more emphatically, its feedback overwhelming the melancholy signal. The “brotherhood of men marches to its fulfilment” – the rhetoric is worthy of a theocratic daily. A feeling “so universal and so sublime as to be almost without a parallel in history”: as they celebrated this media-generated sentiment of a simultaneous, shared response, the innumerable commentators on Garfield’s death misread an emergent national and global media ecology – with its potential for media convergence on all channels – as the sentimental unification of all humanity. The journalists, eulogists, and hack biographers of  may have misinterpreted the response to Garfield’s assassination, but they fully recognized its profundity. In the aftermath of the President’s death, writers predicted that his personal history and last months would endure forever in the nation’s collective memory. They were wrong. Even by the time Guiteau came to trial in late , forgetfulness seemed to be setting in. Punctuated by Guiteau’s theatrical outbursts, statements to the press, and deluded appeals to a public he regarded as thoroughly sympathetic, the trial was widely treated as a ghastly burlesque whose outcome – a death sentence after the rejection of an insanity plea – was seldom in doubt. “Newspaper men are going to hell as a matter of course,” Guiteau concluded in a final letter to the Washington Star before his  hanging. Garfield’s bullet-pierced vertebrae had appeared as courtroom evidence, but Guiteau’s body fared worse, as the previous year’s massmediated unity gave way to vindictive dismemberment. At Guiteau’s autopsy, his body parts were “inconsiderately handled and hacked to pieces and scattered indiscriminately,” admitted one of the physicians who was present. Despite abundant assurances of his “deathless fame,” Garfield had nearly been forgotten.

But the unification of all humanity is not the only way to represent a media system. In fact, this hyperbolic celebration of a moment of unity suggests that intermedial amity is the exception rather than the rule.

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 Chapter  analyzes how fiction could treat the imagined union of popular daily print-forms and new media technologies as a threat to the production of print literature. This the case for a cluster of works of fiction as they characterize a technological medium that hardly has a mass audience at all. Nevertheless, in an apparent blow to literary production, mass media and media technologies become balefully allied in British fictions of the telephone.

 

Fictions of the Victorian Telephone The Medium Is the Media

I heard “To be or not to be . . . . . . there’s the rub,” through an electric telegraph wire; but scorning monosyllables, the electric articulation rose to higher flights, and gave me passages taken at random from the New-York newspapers.

—Sir William Thomson, Report to the British Association for the Advancement of Science on the telephone, September 

Patented by the Scotsman Alexander Graham Bell in the United States in  and eagerly promoted by him in England the next year, the electric telephone soon became an object of fascination to the Victorians. Working for Bell as one of its early promoters in Britain, the American journalist Kate Field helped demonstrate the device by speaking and singing to Queen Victoria in early , and showed it to Field’s friends George Eliot and G. H. Lewes a few months later. After her special private tour of Bell’s new London office, Eliot declared the telephone “very wonderful, very useful . . . what marvellous inventions you Americans have!” In a fragment written soon afterwards as the opening for a new novel, Eliot returned from the modern, cosmopolitan milieu of Daniel Deronda () to her fiction’s favored setting of the English Midlands at the turn of the nineteenth century, but she framed her narrative by pairing an old technology of enhanced vision with this cutting-edge technology for extended hearing; the “story . . . is a telescope you may look through, a telephone you may put your ear to.” Despite Eliot’s preliminary (and unpublished) suggestion of the telephone’s potential literary significance, the device would remain uncommon in British fiction for many years. Despite the occasional live media event, in the late nineteenth century media don’t always come together. Shortly after Field’s employment by Bell, the young George Bernard Shaw briefly went to work as a promoter for the rival Edison Telephone Company, an episode he would wryly call his final attempt “to earn an honest living.” Even years later, Shaw took pride in his knowledge of the 

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 telephone, complacently describing himself as “the only person in the entire establishment who knew the current scientific explanation of telephony” (IK, x). Shaw soon drew upon his self-proclaimed expertise to write The Irrational Knot, a novel about an electrician who marries above his class. Completed in , the work remained unpublished until a quarter-century later – another failed connection in the telephone’s literary history. As the story opens, Shaw’s hero, having shown off his mellifluous baritone while singing on a telephone as he installs “some electrical machinery” in a nobleman’s private laboratory, finds himself taken up by a group of ladies and gentlemen whose amateur musical performances are meant to edify an audience of workingmen (IK, ). Yet although it serves as the accidental spur to the protagonist’s social mobility, the telephone makes no appearance in the rest of the book, which emphasizes more oldfashioned difficulties of communication. When Shaw reflected on his own history, he found the device similarly incidental to his career, for all his interest in spoken dialects, phonetic writing, and miscommunication. The author opens the possibility of interchange between literary history and telephony only to turn it into a joke, noting with studied immodesty that during its short lifespan, the Edison company (soon merged into the United Telephone Company) had “ma[de] a place for itself in the history of literature, quite unintentionally, by providing me with a job” (IK, ix). The histories of Victorian telephony and literature offer other failed connections, as well. For instance, the telephone plays an oddly minimal role in Sherlock Holmes’s adventures in detection and informationgathering. Holmes is no technophobe; Watson famously observes that the great detective “has never been known to write where a telegram would serve.” Yet by one reckoning, the telegraph figures in “at least thirty-nine” of Holmes’s cases but the telephone in only five. A painstaking analysis of telephony in the Holmes canon concludes that the telephone only arrives in B Baker Street on or about July  (in a short story actually written in the s) and is treated by Holmes “as little more than a new toy”; even with a phone available, Holmes retains his taste for telegrams. Late Victorian literature’s neglect of the telephone might have a sociological and institutional origin. Despite the efforts of Field, Shaw, and their employers, Britain took up the telephone much more slowly than the United States or many European nations did, as both Britons and foreign visitors often noted. (Not all Americans were early adopters, however; in , the year before his death, Walt Whitman reported that he had never used a telephone and “ha[d]n’t any idea of its manipulation.”) New communication technologies might promise human unity, but they often

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delivered more mundane forms of cultural divergence, from competing technical formats to different means of capitalization and rates of development. Several factors delayed the progress of the telephone in Great Britain. When it nationalized the domestic telegraph industry and brought it under the control of the Post Office in , the British state had committed itself to cheap, convenient telegram service. Indeed, the prices of telegrams had been set so low that the postal telegraph service was losing money. Telegraph service already competed unsuccessfully with Britain’s speedy, efficient, and profitable Penny Post, and the telephone seemed to represent a rival technology. Although some postal officials sought to increase the government’s involvement in telephony, a penny-pinching Treasury Department consistently blocked their initiatives. Other factors may also have exacerbated the country’s lag in telephony: the early complications presented by a patchwork of local telephone companies with different equipment and charges, the complacent quasi-monopoly that eventually replaced it (criticized for its “policy of stagnation and utter disregard of modern discoveries and improvements in telephony”), the employment of servants and messenger boys, who could transact household affairs and convey business messages, which was more common in Britain than in the United States, and even a supposed British tendency for taciturnity and reserve. Shaw himself hints at this last obstacle, recalling that the Edison equipment performed its business with “such stentorian efficiency that it bellowed your most private communications all over the house instead of whispering them with some sort of discretion” – “not what the British stockbroker wanted” (IK, ix). By the s, telephone service had been available in Great Britain for more than a decade. But the British telephone industry still struck its many critics as “backward and exclusive.” Other countries had cheaper services and many more telephone subscribers, which in turn made having a telephone more useful. The “telephone business in America” had become a “huge undertaking long before it became a concern of any magnitude in Britain,” which seemed “behind . . . perhaps any other country in Europe” when it came to telephony. The “inferiority of the domestic system in comparison to those of other nations” became virtually a “leitmotif in press comments on the telephone.” In , a Parliamentary committee concluded that the British telephone system did not benefit the country. The disparity between general knowledge of the telephone and widespread adoption of it in Great Britain meant that the telephone didn’t automatically have a role in contributing to the realism of fictional household dramas, for example, the way a letter or telegram or photograph might.

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 The literary impact of a new device or medium doesn’t depend on authors’ or audiences’ intimate acquaintance with it; indeed, the connections between the technological and literary imagination may be most exciting and suggestive when a technology is new and unfamiliar. But this is not quite the case with the telephone in late Victorian Britain, a technology that had become familiar without becoming ubiquitous. When fiction finally takes up the telephone, it tends to treat the device as an instance of new media as usual, of the invention and adoption of media technologies as a routine aspect of the modern world. Scholarship and critical theory have analyzed the telephone under a variety of headings: the “secondary orality” produced by sound reproduction in a literate culture, a gendered network, schizophrenia. But the representations examined in this chapter ultimately help elucidate less the particular meanings of the phone than a more general logic of late nineteenth-century media systems, how they could encourage a sense of realignments and rivalries between high technology and modes of print. In the s, three works of fiction about young writers – Rudyard Kipling’s “The Finest Story in the World” (), Ella Hepworth Dixon’s The Story of a Modern Woman (), and George Paston’s A Writer of Books () – invoke the telephone at key moments in their characters’ stories. But these works don’t feature scenes of urgent phone calls, lovers connecting by telephone, or garbled or phony messages on the line, even though analogous plot points had often appeared in fiction about the electric telegraph. In none of these works do readers encounter both sides of a conversation between two far-flung voices, a staple of comic sketches about telephonic miscommunication. Rather, in each of these stories – despite their different thematic interests – the telephone becomes a device for representing an entire daily complex of print and other communication modes. The medium represents the media. In order to appreciate the distinctiveness of these representations, and their underlying coherence, it may be helpful to recall the Victorian telephone’s actual function and rationale. The telephone was created to convey live human speech. Working between a set of fixed points, it converted sound patterns into an electrical signal, transmitted that signal across a distance via wire, and then turned it back to sound again. Its use left no material trace, no needle-groove inscription or telegraphic transcription. The telephone could operate over a private, closed loop (say, between office and shop floor). But it was most flexible when it formed part of a system in which operators at a central switchboard could create temporary circuits between networked telephone lines. Building the

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structure of spoken interchange into its reciprocal loop (from one user’s transmitter to the other’s receiver), the telephone extended the intimacy of conversation, allowing dialogue without physical presence. Eventually, these technical properties would provide a rich scaffolding for the twentieth-century literary imagination, from Proust and Kafka to Nicholson Baker. But in the s, because it was neither a common domestic item nor an important mass-cultural medium, the telephone could offer British authors something of a blank slate – or an open circuit – for imaging the logic of an emerging media system. In William Thomson’s inaugural account of the telephone, random newspaper passages outsoar “to be or not to be”: the telephone seemed to align more readily with daily discourse than with transcendent literature. Just a few days after helping to introduce Queen Victoria to the telephone, Kate Field “hosted . . . one of the earliest press conferences in journalism history – a Matinée Telephonique” for members of the press and political, social, and literary celebrities. Field also wrote anonymous articles (essentially press releases) to help promote Bell’s telephones in a variety of periodicals – and then “edited” a hastily produced book about the telephone which consisted largely of her own press clippings. Inventing a role for herself as technological publicist, Field spearheaded the association between telephony and modern print commerce. Other writers and journalists speculated on the telephone’s future use for sound broadcast, and journalists reported every experiment to transmit live events on the device, such the plans of the London Electrophone Company (founded in ) to bring “music, religious sermons, and news to paying subscribers.” Before the modern idea of the telephone as a technology oriented around private two-way conversation had displaced a wider sense of its possibilities, British representations of the telephone could emphasize its potential to “democratize” the pleasure of consuming sound. And the telephone did find some limited application as a medium to transmit news or entertainment to subscribers in the era before radio broadcast. But the s fictions I will discuss go far beyond these early ideas about the telephone as a potential vehicle for shared audio content. Assigning the telephone a minor but exemplary role in a new late nineteenth-century media system, they all deal with content-producers rather than with the operators or technicians who actually oversaw telephony. In each of these texts about would-be writers, the telephone forms part of a modern media system that presents obstacles to modern literary production. It does so not primarily through its technical properties but by epitomizing an idea that will be called the media a generation

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 later: a system composed of nonprint technologies as well as print-forms created for a mass audience. Fictionalizing the late Victorian telephone means aligning it with a complex that includes not only new media technologies but also print media seeking new audiences and new ubiquity, a complex that these fictional works polemically oppose to literary production. The fictions I discuss invoke the telephone as an incidental medium, as a reference point in a single scene, and they treat it in divergent ways: as a sound-simile, an office technology, or a journalistic eponym. Insofar as these works touch upon the actual properties of telephony, they invoke its features to indict the press and to emphasize its analogous properties: the incoherent or contradictory juxtaposition of different conversations or content, the cultivation of intimacy on a public network, the likeliness that a signal will be overwhelmed by noise. In these works, the telephone becomes a kind of imaginative switchboard, a way of connecting new technologies to a set of print-forms – and of distinguishing fiction from both.

A Tangle of Other Voices In Kipling’s “The Finest Story in the World,” a young clerk’s feeble literary attempts are eclipsed by his fragmentary memories of what he cannot recognize as his real past lives. First published in the Contemporary Review in , the tale would also appear, appropriately, as one of Kipling’s Many Inventions two years later. Critics have often read the story as one of Kipling’s tales of the occult and otherworldly, but it is also a fantasy about literary creation. For all his love of the down-to-earth occupational knowledge of men at work, Kipling tended to view artistic production in mystical terms. Disclaiming his friend H. R. Haggard’s praise of his literary achievements, for instance, Kipling insisted that the two of them were really “only telephone wires” when it came to their most successful writing, instruments to convey words from some more mysterious realm. Indeed, Kipling frequently linked authorship to the supernatural, often via media devices, in a vernacular theory of literary inspiration. “The Finest Story in the World” centers on the writing of a short story. A characteristic form of both late nineteenth-century literary culture in general and Kipling’s literary career in particular, the short story aims at a striking and unified aesthetic impression but also responds to and joins a world of modern distractions. Taking its place amid the calendrical march of periodicals, acceding to short attention spans and disjointed media

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consumption, the short story seeks the heightened attention of its readers but agrees to do so only briefly, offering to be read not merely in a single issue or the pages of a single volume but during a single sitting. Kipling’s tale highlights problems of sustained attention and distraction in a world of media consumption. As “The Finest Story” begins, the nameless narrator – a man of letters himself – has met and befriended a -year-old bank clerk named Charlie Mears. Kipling starts from the separation between Charlie’s day-job in the world of business and money, and his adolescent dreams of becoming a writer. As the opening sentence informs us, Charlie “com[es] into the City every day to work in a bank,” but he also “suffer[s] from aspirations,” and his “aspirations . . . were all literary.” In the opening scene, the callow but earnest Charlie arrives on the narrator’s doorstep one night, begging to sit quietly and write, his head filled with an idea for “the most splendid story that was ever written” (FSW, ). “For half an hour the pen scratched without stopping” – already the story has begun to explore literary productivity as an automatized, mechanical process – but then the writing slows and ceases; “the finest story in the world would not come forth” (FSW, ). How can his writing look like “such awful rot now,” laments Charlie, when it seemed so wonderful in his head (FSW, )? When Charlie reads his writing aloud, slowing to emphasize “the specially turgid sentences,” the narrator responds diplomatically that “it needs compression” (FSW, , ) – a property of his own style that Kipling would later playfully attribute to writing terse, manly dispatches for “the telegraph system.” Still, “it reads better aloud than when I was writing it,” contends Charlie (FSW, ). The claim is surely overoptimistic, but it signals the triangulation among orality, writing, and real-time production that the tale will highlight. The narrator ascribes Charlie’s failure to the usual factors: the fading coal of inspiration, compounded by a lack of talent. But what a surprise when the narrator asks Charlie to complete the return to orality, to put away his clumsy text and “tell . . . the story as it lies in [his] head”: “Charlie told, and in the telling there was everything that his ignorance had so carefully prevented from escaping into the written word” (FSW, ). The narrator recognizes Charlie’s idea as extraordinary, but he winces when Charlie moves from the spontaneous, oral “current of pure fancy” to some “samples of horrible sentences that he purposed to use” (FSW, ), the story emphasizing the split not just between inspired idea and failed execution but between speech and writing – the same rift that once inspired Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. “It’s as real as anything to me until I try to write it down,” complains Charlie (FSW, ).

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 Charlie offers to give the narrator the idea for his own writerly use, but the narrator insists on buying it instead, “to salve my conscience before . . . possess[ing] myself of Charlie’s thought” (the phrase makes the transfer of literary property seem nearly telepathic) – and pointing out to Charlie that the “fiver” he receives might be spent on cheap books (FSW, ). “Do do something to the notion soon,” urges Charlie, “I should like to see it written and printed” – naively treating print as simply a latter phase of the act of writing (FSW, ). The bargain complete, at last readers receive Charlie’s idea as well, as if the narrator had been waiting until he owned the idea to pass it on: the life of a galley slave on an ancient trireme, a life Charlie describes in the present tense and in meticulous but offhand detail – even though he has hardly visited the sea himself and has never been aboard a ship. Moreover, the narrator has begun to recognize Charlie’s “notion” as not the bold imaginative vision of a would-be writer but the thrilling fragments of Charlie’s own previous life, sensory impressions of a past reality which are “absolutely and literally true” (FSW, ). A material inscription clinches it: a “single line of scratches” made by Charlie on “a sheet of notepaper” (FSW, ). In contrast to his pride at his florid sentences, Charlie shows off this “nonsense” apologetically, scarcely able to discern it as writing at all (FSW, ). And in contrast to his attempts to translate his other life into English, this text arrives without translation, a literal copy made by the mindless movements of the hand. Charlie’s long-distance transmission of the self is not confined to expression via a limited, pregiven set of modern alphabetic characters like the telegraph; the narrator finds an expert who disdainfully identifies the inscription as “an attempt to write extremely corrupt Greek . . . on the part . . . of an extremely illiterate – ah – person” (FSW, ). With this automatic writing of bad demotic Greek, Charlie has become an instrument like Elisha Gray’s telautograph, a device singled out as especially suitable for transmitting messages in character systems that were difficult to encode via Morse (Figure .). But as with his fragmented writing of ancient Greek, so with his disjointed memories of this other life: Charlie can neither fully recognize them as real nor shape them into literature. Yet if the savvy narrator can only wring this true “material” from Charlie and set it down as his own imaginary tale, “the world” will surely “hail it as an impudent and vamped fiction” (FSW, ). Vamping as poesis: literary creation becomes bricolage, a form of patching together or renovation (as in revamping) or of constrained improvisation on a pre-given theme (as with vamping in music). But of course, the point here is that the world

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Figure .



Long-distance transmission without a telegraphic code: handwritten Chinese via telautograph.

Source: William Maver, Jr., “Professor Gray’s New Telautograph,” Engineering Magazine  (), –. Courtesy of University of Georgia Libraries

will be wrong; the finest story will be no bold fiction but a paranormally obtained record of absolute fact, not a masterly elaboration of a theme but a transcript of Charlie’s spontaneous oral remembrances. Still, the obstacles to transcribing those recollections prove hard to overcome. And “The Finest Story” consistently represents them in terms of the late nineteenth century’s new media – media understood not as astonishing technological marvels but as figures for distortion, constraint, and memory loss. Strikingly, this media system has even come to incorporate the off-copyright works of the poets, a paradigm Kipling would explore at greater length with the Keatsian radio transmissions of “Wireless” (). Having spent his fiver on books of reprinted poetry, Charlie arrives at the narrator’s house “as useless as a surcharged phonograph – drunk on Byron, Shelley, or Keats” (FSW, ). The word surcharged describes acoustic reproduction driven beyond its operational tolerance into noise or incoherence, a description soon elaborated with a second media reference. Seeking Charlie’s live voice among the reproduced noise of dead poets, the narrator finds that the plastic mind of the bank-clerk had been overlaid, coloured, and distorted by that which he had read, and the result as delivered was a confused tangle of other voices most like the mutter and hum through a City telephone in the busiest part of the day. (FSW, )

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 Here are new media as electrical interference, random polyphony, financial buzz, noise. As Susan Zieger has noted, recording devices such as the phonograph inspired cultural fantasies of the brain as a “media storage device,” part of the era’s larger vision of what Zieger calls “the mediated mind.” But the treatment of Charlie as strained phonograph and humming telephone emphasizes not merely mental storage but the mediated self as an unfolding real-time performance on an overtaxed medium. The resemblance between Charlie’s confused, contaminated speech and the telephone is represented as “most like,” ambiguously suspended between poetic simile and sonic duplication, the kind of resemblance an oscillograph might objectively confirm. This theoretical capacity for physical identity between sound and its reproduction leads Friedrich Kittler to conclude that late Victorian acoustic technologies such as the gramophone and phonograph granted their users an epoch-making access to the order of the real, in which language itself registers not as symbol but as vocal physiology and noise. But in Kipling’s account, noise itself arises from the babble of “other voices” traversing an overloaded psychic switchboard. That is, the noise of the network is measurably, acoustically real. Yet it is also a wholly technological artifact, a byproduct of juxtaposed electrical signals: this interference and encroachment is the sound of a media system. As such, it drowns out any particular message, obstructing access to the kind of individualized reality we might make into a fine story. The situation is metaphysically telephonic, the narrator trying to interrogate a distant, past-life subjectivity through Charlie’s local, present, speaking self. With its crossed circuits and tinny, strained receiver, the human telephone that is Charlie Mears has revealed an entire network of other voices and selves. Intrusively audible, this network subsumes the individual voice of a unique past life. Now the “medium” of Longfellow’s “Saga of King Olaf” impinges on Charlie’s psyche enough to revive his later memories of life as a Viking rather than his recollections of the ancient Mediterranean, although soon Charlie is answering the narrator’s questions “as assuredly as though all his knowledge lay before him on the printed page” (FSW, , ). While new media stand for unreliability, polyvocality, and interference, print on the page provides the reference point for clarity, stability, certitude. Yet as the desperate narrator tries to wrest the finest story from Charlie’s mind, it becomes clear that print-forms too have entered the ambit of modern media. Charlie cannot “tell” his tales as long as there is the distraction of “a three-and-sixpenny Bohn volume within his reach” (the

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Bohn’s Libraries series printed cheap editions of the modern classics), and he dreams of sending a piece to the popular weekly newspaper “Tit-Bits, and get[ting] the guinea prize” for its readers’ best contribution (FSW, , ). Matthew Arnold and others worried that “cheap” “old books,” even “good” ones, might crowd out new ones, a paradigm wildly realized here. Gissing’s New Grub Street () satirizes Tit-Bits as Chit-Chat, taking its assemblage of light factoids, reprints, and contests as representative of print culture in an era of mass audiences and new media – a treatment analyzed in Chapter . But “The Finest Story” won’t be appearing in Tit-Bits. The problem isn’t just that Charlie becomes a medium providing inconsistent access to otherworldly data, a mystical telephone to the past. As many critical accounts note, the nineteenth century’s mediumistic imaginary often corresponds with its technical media. (Some attendees referred to Kate Field’s exhibitions as “Telephone Séances.”) Rather, in becoming a late Victorian medium, Charlie has become part of a media system that registers its properties most acutely by making audible the hum of its own workings, threatening to turn all content into cultural noise. New contraptions and magazine prizes might seem like disparate obstacles to literature, but they converge as the narrator frets that he will have to “piece out what he had told me with my own poor inventions while Charlie wr[ites] of the ways of bank-clerks” for Tit-Bits (FSW, ). And just as writing for Tit-Bits reduces Charlie from channeling transcendent stories to writing about being a clerk, the line on the “City telephone” reconnects his mystified reproduction of other voices to his prosaic day-job. Silently pleading for the chance to turn Charlie’s tale into a text, the narrator mentally offers a series of pacts to the “Great Powers” that govern human knowledge. All of these deals promise to purify writing by stripping it away from the accouterments of authorship and publication, decoupling the affiliation between writing and print that Charlie had so blithely assumed. First, he offers to disclaim “all profit” from writing up Charlie’s recollections; then he promises to forgo the glory of authorship by publishing them “anonymously” (FSW, ). Finally, the narrator proposes only to “write” Charlie’s story in the strictest, most literal sense, never to publish it or even to preserve it for the eye of a single reader, including the narrator himself: Only let me know, let me write, the story with sure knowledge that I wrote the truth, and I would burn the manuscript as a solemn sacrifice. Five

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 minutes after the last line was written I would destroy it all. But I must be allowed to write it with absolute certainty. (FSW, )

Proposing to eliminate first material gain and then material inscription, the narrator would ultimately nullify the features of printed writing that differentiate it from telephony: its potential for durable inscription and for dissemination to a large audience that’s dispersed in space and time. Nevertheless, except as a pure, intransitive gerund – a process rather than a product – even writing itself finally appears as a profaning medium. The gesture is futile. As “The Finest Story” wryly imagines more media entering Charlie’s psychic system, the obstacles to producing the story prove insuperable. One day Charlie arrives to show off some new media of his own: first a poem he has written and then a photograph of the figure who has inspired it: “a tobacconist’s assistant with a weakness for pretty dress,” the woman with whom he has just fallen in love (FSW, ). Soon enough, Charlie has lost his past-life memories. The narrator blames the loss on love, but we might also attribute it to a media system that, having subsumed writing in the prosaic buzz of modern business, bypasses authorship altogether. Now “the finest story in the world would never be written” – in any sense (FSW, ).

A Novel on the Old Lines In Kipling’s tale, Charlie’s private, semiconscious recollections – distorted by their contact with journalistic gimmicks, buzzing with media noise – never become literary production. The split is mystified and hyperbolic: Tit-Bits and telephones versus a putative mode of writing so transcendent that it might defy any material inscription. Yet this is the same split imagined only a few years later, in a more matter-of-fact and critical mode, by Ella Hepworth Dixon’s The Story of a Modern Woman as well as by a novel that would develop Dixon’s themes and plotlines, George Paston’s A Writer of Books. In these New Woman novels, the encounter between fiction and journalism is even clearer – appropriately so, since New Woman discourse itself took shape via exchanges between journalism and the novel: novelists writing essays in journals, journalists debating fictional representations of young women, novels about journalists written for magazines. A successful journalist, short story writer, and magazine editor, Dixon first published The Story of a Modern Woman as a weekly serial in The Lady’s Pictorial and then as a single volume.

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Like her author, the heroine of The Story of a Modern Woman makes her way from painting to journalism and fiction in order to support herself. Yet Mary Erle tackles a project that Dixon herself seems to have avoided: a three-volume novel, the peculiarly British form that typified a certain respectable mode of address to a prosperous adult readership. Although Mary is an inexperienced and somewhat accidental author, she wryly recognizes the triple-decker as restricted by a set of predetermined plotlines that reiterate its preset material form: I have been given a commission to do a three-volume novel on the old lines – a dying man in a hospital and a forged will in the first volume; a ball and a picnic in the second; and an elopement, which must, of course, be prevented at the last moment by the opportune death of the wife, or the husband – I forget which it is to be – in the last.

Describing the triple-decker as a “novel on the old lines,” Mary offhandedly treats it as a residual literary form, and Dixon correctly hints at its imminent obsolescence – a development I will consider at greater length in later chapters. Dixon’s mocking account characterizes the three-volume novel as clunky and outworn, so blandly familiar that its most pivotal plot details are unmemorable even to its prospective author. Yet the old-fashioned triple-decker novel has now also become part of a print complex that includes the very up-to-date proliferation of periodicals that incorporated fiction. In fact, the man who enlists Mary Erle to write this novel is a newspaper editor commissioning the work for serialization in its columns; the publication of the work between three sets of covers seems secondary to its immediate use in the paper. The triple-decker thus appears as fixed by both its origins as a form identified with its material medium (the preset plot mapped onto the tripartite division into volumes) and its larger place within a media system that includes periodical publication. In what is at once a corroboration and a significant refinement of McLuhan’s precept that the content of a medium is always another medium, the three-volume novel has internalized its central media format even when it is destined primarily to provide content for a periodical’s columns. But when Mary Erle faithfully completes her made-to-order novel, the editor returns it as unusable. “Why, I’ve written it just as you told me,” she protests. “There’s a forged will in the first volume, a picnic in the second.” But one subplot also includes a scene in which “a young man mak[es] love to his friend’s wife.” In real life, far more shocking scandals fill the paper’s “columns of unedifying matter” as news, but they would be utterly

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 inadmissible in novels, the editor assures her; “Remember that you write chiefly for healthy English homes” (SMW, ). By the time of the New Woman controversies, arguments over sexual frankness in fiction were familiar, but Dixon highlights the centrality of genre in the “candour” debate, even when novels and news occupy adjacent columns. “I thought . . . That the public would take anything – in a newspaper,” ventures Mary Erle. “Not in fiction – not in fiction,” her editor replies (SMW, ). Suddenly, in the midst of his attacks on sexual frankness in fiction, the editor stands up and “put[s] his mouth to the telephone,” although the text gives no sign that it has rung. He grabs the phone not in order to end this discussion of a novel on the old lines, but to conduct an interpolated conversation about the news along modern ones. The juxtaposition is stark and schematic, as the editor’s telephonic directives to an unseen reporter invert all of the instructions he’s just given the novelist face to face: “Hullo! Richards! No. Yes, yes, of course. Not got the portrait of Lady Blaythewaite? What? Spoiled? Take another kodak into court, then. See that it’s a good likeness. All the co-respondents for this week’s issue. And see that they’re touched up.” (SMW, )

On her way to meet her editor that morning, Mary Erle heard the newsboys shouting the latest details of the Blaythewaite divorce trial, “served red hot” for consumption “in columns of close print, at the breakfast-table” (SMW, , ). Now the same editor who has rejected her novel interrupts their meeting to ensure his paper’s maximal coverage of the divorce, complete with photographs of the brazen Lady Blaythewaite and “all” her lovers. As a counterpoint to these pictures, the editor hangs up the phone and tells Mary to add more love scenes between her wholesome fictional protagonists, since “they illustrate so well” (SMW, ). As the newspaper is to the old-style novel, so the juicy snapshot is to the mawkish engraving. Associated with the orality of the telephone and the newsboys’ shouts (“Extra spesh-shul! The great divorce case!”), the news becomes hot, massmediated gossip – a connection confirmed by its recirculation in the mouths and ears of the public (SMW, ). Thanks to the papers, the “Blaythewaite scandal” “form[s] the one subject of conversation wherever people me[e]t . . . in public houses and at street corners . . . in drawingrooms and clubs” (SMW, ). The crying of the news, the sudden scandal everywhere: the somber updates we encountered in Chapter  find their counterpart in the trivial, tawdry coverage that is just as readily broadcast

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by the same media systems, the same combination of technology, street media, and daily print. As Garfield himself observed, public affairs become more public, and private ones less private. As a genre, the realist novel may be guilty of a constitutive disavowal of the same gossipiness about private lives on which it depends. But now even conversation has become part of a larger media network that shapes its tone and content; no wonder Dixon turns to the telephone as the material embodiment of this modern situation. Furthermore, in conjunction with the portable Kodak camera – introduced just a few years earlier – the telephone’s appearance in The Story of a Modern Woman presents journalism as part of a media system that also includes pedestrian novels. “I did like that chapter,” remarks Mary about the episode she must cut in order to achieve what her editor considers the proper “tone” for fiction; “I took so much trouble over it. It was a little bit of real observation” (SMW, ). With the telephone call, Dixon turns a communication network into a representation of a media system that defines workaday fiction against the daily news. Indeed, the device allows her to juxtapose the concurrent conversations, dramatizing the publishing system that commissions salacious news and prim triple-deckers yet maintains their separation, treating them like departments in the same newspaper. A “telephone line holds together what it separates.” As in “The Finest Story in the World,” the telephone becomes a sign of the confrontation between media and fiction, especially fiction that seeks to capture something of reality and to escape from norms that are set in advance. Indeed, the telephone encapsulates the very complex that hems in novels along the old lines, even as journalism and other media go far along new ones. Dixon bestows a trenchant name on the newspaper that refuses Mary Erle’s tepid fiction while crying up a real-life sex scandal: “Illustrations” (SMW, ). An eponym for a fictitious journal helps Dixon encapsulate the logic of a media culture that is no longer simply a culture of printed writing. Like so many features of The Story of a Modern Woman, this trope will be taken up and elaborated in A Writer of Books, a later novel about the New Woman as writer, by George Paston (the pen name of Emily Morse Symonds). Yet Paston’s novel, written and published after the demise of the old triple-decker, also suggests that the complex of media technologies, journalism, and mediated fiction has also left an alternative space for the development of the novel. For Paston, the telephone will again help delineate the modern media complex in which writers work and books take shape.

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900

A Line in the Telephone The title of Paston’s A Writer of Books identifies its heroine with books from the beginning. In a famous petition to Parliament in support of authorial copyright, Thomas Carlyle had called himself as “a writer of books,” a modest job description belied by Carlyle’s assertion of his writing’s economic value and social worth. Borrowing that self-depiction as its title, Paston’s novel forthrightly announces the ambitions of its protagonist, while perhaps hinting at the obstacles she will face in being recognized and rewarded for the value of her work. When the death of her father, the head of a small public library, leaves the book-obsessed Cosima Chudleigh a bit of money and few other ties, she boldly decides to bundle up the manuscript of her first novel, appropriately entitled A ’Prentice Hand, and to move to a boardinghouse in London, calculating how long her small inheritance will last as she tries to make a living from writing. But Cosima also comes to the city seeking sheer experience, convinced that a quiet childhood in books will not suffice for a novelist who wants to write about real life. Cosima approaches the quest for life experience with great earnestness. In one early scene, she is followed on her way home from an evening concert by an anonymous young man and – surprising both him and herself – permits him not only to walk with her but also to take her to dinner in one of the “little foreign restaurants in or near the Haymarket, the doors of which she had occasionally passed with curious eyes.” In undertaking such an adventure, Cosima’s interests are neither amorous nor gustatory. Nor does she simply wish to flout the rules of introductions and chaperoning that were supposed to delimit the relations between young, unmarried middle-class men and women – and which were a frequent subject in discussions of the New Woman as a daughter in revolt. Instead, much to her oversexed companion’s dismay, she simply wishes to gather experience and knowledge for potential use in future fiction. What if “some day” she needed “to send her hero to such a place” as a cheap theatre-district restaurant (WB, )? And what kinds of things happen when, as “in a lower rank of life . . . young men and women of unassailable respectability ma[k]e each other’s acquaintance in public places” rather than complying with the middle-class system of chaperones and introductions? As she considers such questions, Cosima’s “literary curiosity [i]s fairly aflame” (WB, ). Sure enough, after dining with the young man, she feels “genuine gratitude for the information he had given her” via glimpses of his slightly

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seamy but ordinary life: “The uncomfortable bachelor lodgings, the conventional circle of acquaintance, the ‘fooling’ of the other fellows, the agreeable variety, sentiment or sensuality apart, of unchaperoned feminine society” (WB, ). The term information accurately highlights Cosima’s emphasis on impersonal factuality. But as she crisply bids farewell to the man, his reaction presents a funny and revealing moment in the novel’s discourse of contemporary media – by invoking the telephone: “Oh, but I say,” he expostulated. “You’re not going off like that? You’ll let me see you again. Any time you want an outing, just put a line in the Telephone, the agony column, you know. Address W.S., will you? But what will you sign yourself?” “Oh, I’ll think it over,” she replied, with one foot upon the step of the omnibus. “You’ll have to guess which I am out of all your Telephone correspondents. Good-bye.” (WB, )

A semi-anonymous, public encounter might continue in the semianonymous publicity of a newspaper’s “agony column” (the personal advertisement section). Such pages of closely printed advertisements could be a main attraction of newspapers, and the items in agony columns, which might include “covert notes between lovers” or “conspiratorial messages between criminals,” invited readers to speculate about the stories behind them. As with Cosima’s random dinner date, the agony column could offer an impersonal yet fascinating glimpse into the intimate realities of more or less anonymous others. And like speech on a telephone, an intimate note in the agony column represents part of a dialogue, although a bystander will only encounter one side of the conversation. Indeed, in an overview of London’s daily papers, the New Journalist and editor Henry William Massingham confirms “the conception of the newspaper as a kind of literary telephone” in the s, thanks to its profusion of classified advertising. But we should note Paston’s very pointed naming of a column “in the Telephone” as the printed site where a hapless young man might reestablish a missed connection. The name echoes the real practice of naming newspapers after other media, a convention represented in the s by the well-established Daily Telegraph and the new and hugely successful Daily Mail. Yet calling the print organ of the proposed advertisement “the Telephone” makes clear the modernity of the incident, as well as its mediation by vehicles that promise to extend freewheeling sociability into a sense of mass intimacy – here of public sexuality. A “line in the Telephone”: Paston punningly implies that the dynamics of advertising to a potential lover might echo the structure of Victorian telephony, with its

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 switchboard of connections between private parties on a public network. “The telephone, organized as a medium, facilitated intimately private connection because it was a massive network of connections,” points out Jonathan Sterne. Moreover, by the s telephone switchboards were staffed by a cadre of young, unmarried female operators who remained anonymous to the telephone’s users but were instructed to cater deferentially to their needs. After early problems with rowdy switchboard boys, by the late s telephone companies in the United States and Britain had moved to a policy of hiring female operators (Figure .). Chosen from a pool of “educated women from middle-class and aspiring workingclass families,” operators had to be not only well spoken but also “young and unmarried.” These are precisely the attractions – class, refinement, and potential availability – that W. S. finds in Cosima as she goes about her work. Cosima’s response to the young man (“You’ll have to guess which I am”) wittily suggests the fantasies of mediated access, semi-anonymity, and promiscuity that the telephone and The Telephone might offer a young bachelor on the make. But in broader terms, Paston has deftly aligned the more dubious possibilities of the contemporary press with a newer technological medium to create a mini-satire on the sensibility of that press and its readership – here represented as lonely young men desperate for female company. There are no actual telephones in evidence in A Writer of Books, yet the novel registers the structure and logic of that medium by using it as a way of understanding the modern periodical press. For Dixon’s The Story of a Modern Woman, the telephone materializes the separation between old three-volume novels and the sensationalism of modern journalism. In Paston’s A Writer of Books, the telephone as a modern medium now represents late Victorian print journalism itself. Moreover, one of the occupants of Cosima’s London boardinghouse turns out to be “Mr Carlton, the literary critic of the Phonograph” – another fictional journal named after another late nineteenth-century media invention (WB, ). This technology does not feature in the novel’s plot or settings either, only in its mocking language for the world of serial print. The daughter of Cosima’s landlady breathlessly asserts that Carlton is a “very distinguished man . . . [of] great influence in literary circles” (WB, ). But others disagree. A disdainful fellow boarder dismisses Carlton’s reviews as “sheer unadulterated pap” rooted in nostalgic adulation of “Dickens,” “sentimental gush” mindlessly rehashed to delight the journal’s “lower middle-class readers” (WB, , ). Here too Paston draws on the material properties of modern media to lampoon the sensibilities of

 Figure .

Mediating heterosexual connections: young women at the switchboards. “The Telephone Exchange in London,” The Graphic (September , ). Collection of the author

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 the press. For the Phonograph seems to play differently from the Telephone, offering not a matrix of semi-private connections but an endless, mechanical replay of the dictums of the past. “I am rather conservative in my tastes,” Mr. Carlton warns her, with a point-by-point dismissal of most of the fictional genres in the ascendant during the s, including New Woman fiction: “I don’t admire the modern realistic school, and I can’t stand the psychological, analytical, problem and sex novels” (WB, ). As he explains, “the heart of the public always responds to the appeal of genuine feeling; it never loses its interest in the fate of true lovers, or its sympathy for their woes” (WB, ). But this timeless literary advice is merely the lead-up to something equally predictable. After this middle-aged and married book reviewer makes several grotesque passes at Cosima with talk of protecting her delicate young womanhood, Cosima recognizes the kind of mindless repetition that can invest writing with the unwanted aurality of a broken record: “‘I seem to have heard something like that before . . . Or rather I have read it in the Daily Phonograph’” (WB, ). Sound recording highlights the press’s ability to repeat itself to please readers who are already familiar with what it says – and suggests why it earns the scorn of a young author who wants to think and write for herself. In the era of replay via wax cylinders and pressed gramophone disks, even an idle reference to “literary circles” takes on a new significance. Outside the pages of Paston’s book, a real reviewer’s conservative response to the fiction of the s confirms the association between the phonograph and the repetition of the watchwords of the past. Writing in the evangelical magazine Good Words, Katie Magnus decries the disparity between the novels of an earlier age and modern fiction, reflections triggered by reading an enthusiastic review of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion from . Lady Magnus regrets that the reviewer’s and the novelist’s shared emphasis on decency, elegance, and good sense has been lost amid the surge of polemical or salacious late nineteenth-century novels: “poor old reviewer. He was more or less articulate in . He sounds sadly phonographic in .” The confrontation between Cosima and Carlton highlights sexual harassment and paternalistic hypocrisy, but it also represents the confrontation between new fiction and journalism. Absent in any literal sense from the scenes of A Writer of Books, the telephone and phonograph provide the titles for the printed periodicals that wryly stage this encounter. A line in the Telephone, repeated words from the Phonograph: what we might call these medianyms for print periodicals identify tawdry or shopworn

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journalism with the material properties of newer media. Their technoHellenic names function as synecdoches for the late Victorian media ecology in which Paston places her female book-writer. Going further than “The Finest Story” or The Story of a Modern Woman, A Writer of Books classifies rival print modes as media devices in order to assert their predetermined conformity for a mass readership primed to consume modern media. As Cosima is sexually harassed by the Phonograph’s hapless male reviewer and sought out as a chance sexual pick-up by a bachelor who reads the Telephone, the novel’s media theory merges with its manifest feminist awareness. But the novel’s harshest words about late Victorian journalism and its public come from the actress Bess Heywood, the novel’s most outspoken feminist and most caustic media critic. After Bess’s sensational stabbing of the very bachelor who begged Cosima for a Telephone line briefly makes her a box-office sensation, she concludes to Cosima that “The great heart of the British public dearly loves a horror. It is all of a piece with the shocking murders, fatal fires, and double suicides that sell the special editions of the evening papers. Fancy if the contents-list were to announce, ‘New novel by George Meredith. Full review by W. E. Henley,’ or ‘Mr Pinero’s new play. Important notice by William Archer.’ I wonder if that would charm a halfpenny out of the pocket of the man in the street.” (WB, –)

Literature is what doesn’t sell papers. In contrast, Bess Heywood herself seems destined for the newsman’s sensational contents list, even beyond her lethal connection to the Telephone man. She lives in “a gloomy-looking abode, the sort of place that is usually associated with the romantic suicides and mysterious murders that form the staple of London’s evening news” (WB, ). Even without a “speaking part,” Bess looks so striking that her onstage debut causes “a sensation” and “her portrait” is soon “published in most of the illustrated papers” (WB, ). In this media system, the play’s authorship, words, and plot are equally irrelevant to charming halfpennies from the man in the street. The novel associates Bess with lurid journalistic sensation rather than gushing sentiment, but it’s no accident that her words about the “heart of the British public” should explicitly echo Carlton’s – and the simultaneous collective heartbeat endlessly invoked in American responses to the plight of President Garfield. Earnestly or cynically, all are describing the audience for journalism. Bess is more up-to-date than the stale Mr. Carlton; her attack singles out the “new,” “flourish[ing] . . . popular press” epitomized

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 by the halfpenny evening papers, a press in which (as a contemporary account puts it) the “great worlds of art, literature, fashion, and diplomacy” remain “but as distant and faintly understood murmurs in the ears of ‘the masses’” (LDP, ). For this press’s mass readership, caught up in the pulse of daily emotion, high culture is like the sound of far-off, incomprehensible speech. Even with no machine or wires in evidence, the relationship between high culture and mass media remains telephonic. Not only the supposed tastes of its audience but also its “rapid production,” which requires devices such as telegraphs and telephones in the editorial office and “first-class machinery” in the printing department, align the daily mass press with a larger media system (LDP, , ). At least according to the theory of one press journalist in the s, fast production and audience preferences come together to prompt the mass press’s daily quest for lurid news: “It is, indeed, haste which is the moral and material rule of the evening newspaper” – “haste and a love of mere scandal and sensation” (LDP, , ).

In real life, telephony would be more associated with dialogue than with mass experience, with individual conversations rather than with consolidated audiences. But Kipling, Dixon, and Paston all place the telephone where the Victorians’ new media technologies intersect with what will later be termed mass media. For these authors imagining the stories of young writers in the contemporary world, the telephone functions less as a piece of technology than as a device for imagining what will eventually be called the media: a consolidated entity, a system associated with technology, mass audiences, and the peculiarly modern combination of repetition and amnesia that we have already seen at work in the all-channel media event. The medium is the media. The fictions I have considered in this chapter do not simply help to conceive of this entity, part of the vernacular media theory of an age of new communication technologies, institutions, and infrastructures. Rather, all of these works position this system against original literary production, especially the production of fiction. How then did novels imagine the enterprise of literary production itself in this emerging age of media? In Chapter , I examine late Victorian fiction’s most famous account of its own generation, George Gissing’s New Grub Street. At least after a crucial early speech, Gissing’s novel rarely invokes media technologies newer than the printing press. Yet its account of literary production places it squarely in the media environment of the

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s and s, which raised new issues about the distinction and the materiality of print. New Grub Street also responds to the cheap popular journalism that, as this chapter has shown, could be treated as an adjunct or an outpost of a rising world of media. For all its influence on critical accounts of the late Victorian writing trade, however, New Grub Street was by no means the last fictional word on late Victorian literary production. Indeed, only three years after its publication, the collapse of the three-volume novel system would render its media-inflected portrait of literary production partially obsolete. Chapter  will return to Paston’s A Writer of Books as a feminist rejoinder to New Grub Street. As it will show, Paston’s novel treats the end of the tripledecker novel, that distinctive and persistent Victorian print-form, as the opportunity to reimagine the novel against the culture of media that we have seen called up via telephone.

 

New Media, New Journalism, New Grub Street Unsanctified Typography

The really extraordinary thing is that the most appalling fictions are not actually so popular as that literature which deals with the most undisputed and depressing facts . . . The enormous mass of fatuous and useless truth which fills the most widely-circulated papers, such as Tit-Bits, Science Siftings, and many of the illustrated magazines, is certainly one of the most extraordinary kinds of emotional and mental pabulum on which man ever fed. It is almost incredible that these preposterous statistics should actually be more popular than the most blood-curdling mysteries and the most luxurious debauches of sentiment. To imagine it is like imagining the humorous passages in Bradshaw’s Railway Guide read aloud on winter evenings. —G. K. Chesterton, “A Defence of Useful Information” ()

When they all seemed to be working in harmony, late nineteenth-century media systems could appear virtually transcendent, as the Americans noted in . But Victorian fictions of the telephone suggest less exalted forms of intermediality, presenting a world in which imaginative writing struggles with mass and technical media. In Chapter , works of fiction could crystallize an entire system of print and nonprint media via references to the telephone. By setting the production of literature amid a larger complex of media, writers treated that complex not simply as part of the modernizing or vulgarizing of print culture but also as a way of discussing fiction’s own forms, media, and creation. This chapter analyzes the place of new print and nonprint media in George Gissing’s novel New Grub Street (), late Victorian fiction’s most famous account of what Adrian Poole calls “the total industrialization of writing.” New Grub Street demystifies publishing both by treating it as what today would be called a media industry and by emphasizing its relationship to the material production of printed texts. Crucial to this scheme will be the novel’s treatment of media as bywords for the material aspects of literary production, as well as Gissing’s satire on the rise of mass 

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journalism, the means by which the novel dramatizes what a historian of journalism has described as the “transition from a public of readers to a market of readers . . . the single most important historical event in the history of the British press in the last two hundred years.” New Grub Street makes the issue of media materiality a crucial marker in this cultural transition, for modern media technologies with their different functions and affordances offer a way of emphasizing the material side of a medium. Just behind New Grub Street’s stories of starving writers is a multigenerational tale of a family’s changing attempts to make money from selling paper, a tale that operates as a material substrate to the novel’s dramas of the writing life. But the relationship between the writing trade and the materiality of the medium runs through the novel. In its final chapters, media materiality comes together with mass journalism in the novel’s account of the creation of the newspaper Chit-Chat, a parody of George Newnes’s real-life Tit-Bits, as the story of a new media format created to accommodate disjected pieces of light information. In fact, TitBits too fully evinced a New Grub Street-esque self-consciousness about the state of print in a nascent media age – with the key difference that Tit-Bits embraces the mechanics of its materiality, the sign that this print work has unabashedly gone over to the media.

Media Material Marshall and Eric McLuhan’s “laws” of media analyze them according to four effects: how they extend particular human capacities, cultural practices, or other media; how they obsolesce others; how they retrieve cultural elements from the past; and how they threaten to reverse, to undo their own capabilities. But as New Grub Street treats the work of print in an age of technological media, it points to an intermedial effect outside the McLuhan tetrad: in the novel, the arrival of newer media technologies materializes other media, emphasizing their particular physical properties and affordances. In New Grub Street, this focus on media and materiality contributes to the novel’s self-consciousness about its own aesthetic form as a three-volume novel, as well as to its sense of presaging literary developments that were just on the horizon in  – even beyond the coming demise of the triple-decker novel. If later readers have sensed New Grub Street’s nebulous connections to modernism, despite Gissing’s steadfast adherence to the techniques of nineteenth-century realist fiction, the novel’s combination of formal consciousness and a focus on alienated literary intellectuals helps justify this

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 impression. But accounts of the novel haven’t noted that New Grub Street articulates its formal and aesthetic concerns through its discourse of media – a discourse introduced in its opening scene by a speech that bluntly announces the work’s central themes. The novel begins with a character’s analysis of the publishing norms of the s, an analysis that postulates the transformation of the writing trade by its contact with newer media; print has become part of a media system. The cheerfully opportunistic Jasper Milvain complains to his sister about the lack of business savvy shown by his friend, the young novelist Edwin Reardon: “Now, look you: if I had been in Reardon’s place, I’d have made four hundred at least out of ‘The Optimist’; I should have gone shrewdly to work with magazines and newspapers and foreign publishers, and – all sorts of people. Reardon can’t do that kind of thing, he’s behind his age; he sells a manuscript as if he lived in Sam Johnson’s Grub Street. But our Grub Street of to-day is quite a different place: it is supplied with telegraphic communication, it knows what literary fare is in demand in every part of the world, its inhabitants are men of business, however seedy.” “It sounds ignoble,” said Maud.

Just pages into the text, this passage gives New Grub Street its very name – at least once it’s been streamlined into a slick modern catchphrase. The new Grub Street joins “the new fiction and the new journalism” as well as “the new socialism, the new imperialism” and “the New Woman” as part of “that concatenation of cultural novelties which manifested itself in the s and s.” As Maud Milvain’s response reminds us, the point here is less to endorse Jasper’s responses to the state of late Victorian writing and publishing than to initiate the disagreements and dialogues that complement the novel’s stories of authors and editors. By presenting this speech so far in advance of the story, Gissing offers the novel’s plotlines as test-cases for the claims laid out here. In Jasper’s speech, what defines the Grub Street of today isn’t simply the hackwork of selling words, which was already summed up in the Grub Street of Johnson. And Jasper’s account – like Gissing’s novel – doesn’t emphasize some of the most controversial developments in the publishing trade, such as interviews with celebrity writers, the rise of the literary agent, or the royalty system for paying authors. Rather, Jasper points to the rise of a larger system of multiformat and international publishing, signs of the simultaneous consolidation and fracturing associated with a burgeoning mass audience. Readers may demand various sorts of “literary fare,” but Milvain suggests that as many of them as possible should have been offered The Optimist in various formats and national editions.

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Jasper’s list of publishing partners trails off (“magazines and newspapers and foreign publishers, and – all sorts of people”), a reminder that his knowledge of the system remains as yet somewhat abstract and theoretical. But he soon comes up with a device for encapsulating the mediascape of modern publishing. In his speech, “telegraphic communication” sums up the globalization of literary production, distribution, and consumption, and it crystallizes the status of the modern literary system as a “business.” The ambiguous “supplied with” confirms the looseness of Jasper’s pronouncement; is the point that today’s Grub Street has telegraphs for making long-distance deals, that telegraphs help supply it with material about distant events, that telegraphs could be used to transmit the texts of books (in fact they weren’t – this would have been prohibitively expensive)? As part of a growing focus on the history of media and information, recent scholarship has drawn attention to the connections between the medium of electric telegraphy and Victorian literature. Yet this quip about their relationship would be puzzling if we imagined it pointing to a direct relationship between literature and telegraphy in the novel. In any literal sense, the telegraph is hardly in evidence in Gissing’s story. When telegrams do appear later in the plotlines of New Grub Street, they’re associated with sudden family crises rather than with foreign commerce. The novel even seems to resist the kind of simultaneity offered by telegraphy, delaying the delivery of its telegraphic news by “five chapters” including “the divide between volumes two and three.” For that matter, little in the novel seems to hinge on international publishing. But for Jasper in this speech, global “demand” stands in for a sociological focus on the tastes and habits of new audiences, and “telegraphic communication” somehow represents the reduction of published writing to its salable medium. The name of a technological medium serves to highlight the “seedy” side of the trade in letters by emphasizing the conjunction of materiality, naked commerce, and an audience demanding fare to consume – a combination it associates with media understood as media. For all its powers of dissemination, the electric telegraph is not a mechanism for literary publication. But it provides the vehicle for a metaphor that helps introduce an entire discursive nexus about writing and other media. Once again, a modern medium is the media. By connecting the business of modern literature to the telegraph, Jasper suggests that even novel-writing has become part of a far-flung media system and that nothing exempts the older medium of print from reduction to the affordances of its material, vendible medium. “What on earth is

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 there in typography to make everything it deals with sacred?” he demands (NGS, ). Devices such as Léon Scott’s phonautograph had once epitomized the tendency to treat new media as variations on writing, as the newest -graphy. But amid a panoply of media, that relationship has now reversed: in Jasper’s unsparing formulation, literature becomes typography, just one more late nineteenth-century inscriptive medium, even down to its techno-Hellenic name. Print authorship takes its place as part of the technical process of arranging type in certain patterns. Dispelling any lingering idea of print literature’s distinctive, even consecrated status as an art form, Jasper demotes print to another medium in an age of media by stressing the mechanics of its production and appearance. Jasper’s hyperconsciousness about the system of publication and writing is unique even in New Grub Street. But his contraction of literature to a material medium is the same process that has the foundering Edwin Reardon filling up volumes instead of imagining stories. Before the novel opens, having achieved some minor success as a novelist, Reardon married Amy Yule and set up a household with her. But The Optimist, his next book, has proved “practically a failure” (NGS, ). The adverb practically, with its simultaneous sense of friendly palliation and a pragmatic focus on results, is Jasper’s; when the dejected Reardon describes his novel’s fate, he omits it (NGS, ). As the narrative of New Grub Street begins, Reardon finds himself with a desperate case of writer’s block, exacerbated by his knowledge that he is falling far short of his wife’s social ambitions. “In mere writing, I have done enough to make much more than three volumes” – the long-standard format for much Victorian fiction – but he has destroyed these false starts and fragments (NGS, ). Disclaiming any material motives, the narrator of “The Finest Story in the World” prays to be allowed to write in a sense that is as intransitive as possible, vowing to destroy the story as soon as he jots it down. This is just what poor Reardon is doing. New Grub Street might remind us that producing writing that leaves no material trace is a privilege restricted to authors who already have a good income. A focus on materiality unites “the monetary and the mechanical ordering of literature,” a conjunction that Rachel Bowlby identifies “throughout” the novel. When inspiration fails, Reardon must make his peace with profane typography. “I shall try to manufacture two volumes,” he proposes, since writing the requisite three seems too daunting. His tone is forlorn, but his calculations are precise. The volumes “needn’t run to more than about

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two hundred and seventy pages, and those well spaced out” (NGS, ). From manuscript to manufacture: the language of material production matches the focus on the material properties of the book. The number of volumes that make up a novel, the pages that make up those volumes, the margins and spacing that structure the page: this is what writing looks like in terms of New Grub Street’s discourse of material media, the novel as unsanctified typography. Along similar lines, as Aaron Matz points out, Gissing “never forgets to remind us that books in New Grub Street, whatever their value, simply take up space.” Characters such as Jasper or Whelpdale, the novel’s accidental pioneer of mass journalism, eventually prosper under a view of printed writing’s material dimensions; Bowlby notes that Reardon’s methods of production aren’t far different from Jasper’s – or Gissing’s. As Mark Goble has argued, a world of everyday media could point the way to a modernism that takes the contours of the medium as the basis for aesthetic expression – or, in Goble’s revisionist account, to one that treats media and mediation as vehicles of human interconnection and pleasure. But for a suffering late Victorian author, the logic of material media promises to turn a writer into a language-producing machine. Reardon’s daily routine describes a stultifying media archaeology of late Victorian authorship. Even the writer’s individual “hand” becomes part of a routinized modern workflow as Reardon tick[s] off his stipulated quantum of manuscript each four-and-twenty hours. He wrote a very small hand; sixty written slips of the kind of paper he habitually used would represent – thanks to the astonishing system which prevails in such matters: large type, wide spacing, frequency of blank pages – a passable three-hundred-page volume. On an average he could write four such slips a day; so here we have fifteen days for the volume, and forty-five for the completed book. (NGS, –)

As the son of a photographer, Reardon might seem well prepared to embrace the mechanical side of cultural production in an age of new media technologies. But his attempts at the regimented manufacture of volumes ultimately prepare him not for rigorously productive authorship in the vein of Anthony Trollope but for social retreat to employment as a clerk, the reductio of routine writing. Indeed, Reardon’s conversion into writing device continues when he abandons authorship for the office, becoming “a machine for earning so much money a week . . . [who] would at least give faithful work for his wages until the day of final breakdown” (NGS, ).

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 Over the course of New Grub Street, the hardworking but exhausted Marian Yule never shares a scene with Edwin Reardon, yet she still lives out the same paradigm of writing as media manufacture. As dutiful literary assistant to her father, Marian inhabits a gendered interstice between authorship and clerkship; for all her skill and knowledge, she has come to view herself as “not a woman, but a mere machine for reading and writing” (NGS, ). In one of the novel’s signature passages, that mechanical status seems ratified when Marian’s “startled eye” catches an advertisement in the newspaper, headed “Literary Machine”; had it then been invented at last, some automaton to supply the place of such poor creatures as herself to turn out books and articles? Alas! the machine was only one for holding volumes conveniently, that the work of literary manufacture might be physically lightened. But surely before long some Edison would make the true automaton; the problem must be comparatively such a simple one. Only to throw in a given number of old books, and have them reduced, blended, modernised into a single one for to-day’s consumption. (NGS, )

A “‘Machine’ . . . to turn out . . . articles”: the wordplay incisively captures the generic side of daily writing in this media system, of the latest crop of published essays as just so many widgets. For Marian Yule, print culture has become a system of media manufacture, unsacredly typographic, nothing more than a temporary recombination of pre-given elements. In Marian’s vision, literary composition merges with page compositing, authorship linking up with the kind of automation of publishing we will see Samuel Clemens pursuing at just this time. Willfully adding to the oversupply of print is “ignoble,” Marian concludes, an echo of Maud Milvain’s response to her brother, and a hint of trouble to the potential romance between Marian and Jasper (NGS, ). But as she works in the British Museum Reading Room under “the sputtering whiteness of the electric light, and its ceaseless hum” (another effect of new technology on literary production and consumption), Marian tries to fight off a headache and force herself to think of the task at hand; “a machine has no business to refuse its duty” (NGS, ). For both Edwin Reardon and Marian Yule, writing itself becomes associated with a kind of proletarianized, machinic affect. Late in New Grub Street, the narrative finds Marian still doing “her best . . . to convert herself into the literary machine which it [is] her hope would some day be invented for construction in a less sensitive material than human tissue” (NGS, ). In the action of the novel, Marian expresses these thoughts to no one. Instead, Gissing consistently casts Marian’s identification with the

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machine in psycho-narration and in free indirect discourse, that technique in which a character’s thoughts become notoriously difficult to disentangle from the narrative voice. This strategy effectively creates a sense of psychological intimacy just as Marian reaches her maximum identification with the literary machinery of the narrative itself. These moments of affect and insight thus also offer a reminder that, strictly speaking, the fictional character named “Marian Yule” is already constructed typographically, part of a literary assemblage in ink and paper. Marian’s cousin Amy Reardon, on the contrary, considers literary matters in terms that resemble less her husband Edwin’s than Jasper’s, a foretoken of their eventual union. As if to ratify her incipient identification with the material side of authorship, matter functions as Amy’s byword from the beginning. “What’s the matter? Can’t you do anything?” are her first words in the novel (NGS, ). She follows them up by asking Edwin more emphatically “What is the matter? . . . Why can’t you get on with the story?” a page later, and then by trying to explain the “fact of the matter” to him – twice in the same conversation (NGS, , ). She soon summarizes their financial straits to Jasper, “One goes on saying, ‘What does a pound or two matter?’ – but it begins at length to matter a great deal” (NGS, ). Indeed, from the moment of her first meeting with Edwin Reardon before the novel opens, matter seems to have sealed their fate: “As for the poor author himself, well, he merely fell in love with Miss Yule at first sight, and there was an end of the matter” (NGS, ). A larger view of the entire story of New Grub Street confirms how much materiality matters to its whole sequence of events. The novel’s commitment to mapping divergent positions within the late Victorian literary system is so unshakeable that its characters become at once naturalistic figures and symbolic strands in what Fredric Jameson calls its structure of “echoing subplots”; “the protagonists . . . offer a combinatoire of the objective variants still possible in this increasingly closed universe” – an efficient literary machine in itself, and perhaps another translation of the combinatorial logic of typography. Yet one set of alternative positions in Gissing’s careful design is easy to overlook: the material history of literary production embodied in the family history of the Yules. The sons of a stationer from a provincial town, the Yule triumvirate represents the writing business from content-creation down to the physical medium. Alfred Yule, whose career now depends on the drudgery of his daughter Marian, is a man of letters who approaches the literary field as a forum for insider gossip, pedantry, and spite. Edmund Yule, Amy’s father,

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 has died before the novel opens, but was a stationer like his father, a middleman who distributed many forms of printed and unprinted paper. John Yule, the eldest brother, began his career with brief stints working for a London newspaper and selling books but finally abandoned content and distribution alike in favor of the production of the medium itself. Invested in “a small paper-mill in Hertfordshire,” he soon became “a thriving manufacturer” of paper (NGS, ). Although he has grown rich producing a material medium for writing, John despises literature; he reads only the news and maintains that the principal subject of the new Board Schools mandated by Parliament should be physical education. “I should like to see the business of literature abolished,” he growls to Alfred and Jasper: Who is it that reads most of the stuff that’s poured out daily by the ton from the printing-press? Just the men and women who ought to spend their leisure hours in open-air exercise . . . Your Board schools, your popular press, your spread of education! Machinery for ruining the country, that’s what I call it. (NGS, )

Indeed, John exults that his company’s signature product is neither paper for printing nor authors’ writing paper but “a special kind of whiteybrown, used by shopkeepers” (NGS, ). His specialty represents paper as mere substance, a thin weave of dried organic fibers useful for wrapping goods at their place of sale, a product so purely material that it has virtually ceased to be a medium at all. Here in the background of New Grub Street lies a generational narrative of the trade in paper: from a stationer in the first generation, to the second generation’s contrasting poles of content production and material manufacture, to the next generation represented by Marian and her cousin Amy. Even Amy’s status-conscious mother is “the daughter of a law-stationer” (NGS, ). Marian has reluctantly agreed to be the literary handmaiden of her father Alfred, but her cousin Amy’s desire for a stable middle-class life will lead to estrangement from her content-producing husband Edwin Reardon. The generational gender-change of the House of Yule, from paperbusiness patriarchy to dual daughters, is also significant, for the childless Uncle John’s bequest to his nieces becomes a crucial turning point in the plot of New Grub Street. The final redistribution of a literature-hater’s paper fortune to women whose husbands or fathers are men of letters will provide the novel’s denouement, as well as helping to prompt Jasper’s ultimate abandonment of Marian in favor of Amy. This paradoxical development deftly reminds us that most of New Grub Street’s characters

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are trying to do more or less what old John Yule did: to make a living by selling bundles of paper. Strictly speaking, Jasper’s opening comments about telegraphy and the publishing trade are wrong. But they point to a broader logic by which fiction can treat newer media as part of a system that fuses the specter of a mass audience with specific attention to the external properties of media as media. For late Victorian writers, new media become less rivals in the information ecology than a way to think about cultural consumption in a nascent media age. When it comes to Gissing, the “dark side of [his] enduring love of the book as a physical object, with its apparent classical permanency, is his fear and loathing of the modern periodical, whose evident transitoriness seems to threaten the stability of knowledge and thought themselves.” That loathing, coupled with a note of sardonic appreciation, will be expressed above all in New Grub Street’s treatment of the newspaper Chit-Chat. Chit-Chat represents a parodic but easily recognizable version of George Newnes’s Tit-Bits, a weekly “digest of information and . . . entertainment” whose “unprecedented sales . . . changed the landscape of British publishing.” Like New Grub Street, Tit-Bits too pays frequent attention to the state of print culture and the conditions of its own cultural production. Indeed, what’s most surprising about its account of the state of literature in a rising world of media is how much it resembles Gissing’s. By the time New Grub Street appeared in , with its fictional treatment of a class of impoverished writers, its characters’ difficulties would already have been familiar to any reader of Tit-Bits.

A Few Tit-Bits in Connection with Grub Street New Grub Street presents the plan and rationale for Chit-Chat as part of the novel’s denouement, immediately after the death of the former novelist Reardon, making the journal’s rise the counterpoint to his fall. In a cruel swipe at the real Tit-Bits and its proprietor, Gissing makes Chit-Chat’s inventor, Whelpdale, a failed novelist who ekes out a meager living as a “dealer in literary advice,” a paid counselor to even less promising wouldbe authors (NGS, ). When his final novel, made up of “nothing but a series of conversations between two people,” fails to find a publisher, Whelpdale at least manages to return to print by publishing (naturally) a writer’s manual, an increasingly popular enterprise in the s, if one that might in itself help to unsanctify authorship (NGS, ). “It isn’t all rubbish, by any means,” Jasper magnanimously concedes after reading the handbook; “In the chapter on writing for magazines, there are one or two

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 very good hints” (NGS, ). Whelpdale’s move from publishing a manual to writing an advice column seems like a natural next step. “A man I know has just been made sub-editor of Chat,” Whelpdale informs Jasper. “He has half promised to let me do a column of answers to correspondents . . . the general information column” (NGS, ). In the final chapters of New Grub Street, Whelpdale comes up with some hints for running a magazine, if he can find an investor willing to help. Altering the name of Chat to Chit-Chat, he would fill it with “chitchatty information – bits of stories, bits of description, bits of scandal, bits of jokes, bits of statistics, bits of foolery” (NGS, ). The anaphoric insistence on the conversion of content into atomized “bits” makes clear the particular target of Gissing’s parody. Indeed, Whelpdale’s program goes even further than Tit-Bits’ actual practice, since he insists that “no article” in Chit-Chat “measure more than two inches in length,” and even that each of those two “inch[es] must be broken into at least two paragraphs” (NGS, ). A new medium to be built on speed, compression, and fragmentation: this is the logic of telegraphy in weekly printed form. In real life, before George Newnes founded Tit-Bits in , he had been a Manchester businessman and the proprietor of a vegetarian restaurant, not a man of letters at all. But as Whelpdale moves from answer-man to journalistic visionary, armed with his semi-expertise on modern magazines and printed conversations, his dubious transition mockingly reverses Newnes’s own career at Tit-Bits. One of Tit-Bits’ “most popular features” in the s and s was an “Answers to Correspondents” section, apparently written by Newnes. What’s more, Newnes’s column included not just general advice and information (“‘Will you be so good as to inform me, through the medium of your invaluable paper, what was the exact area devastated by the Great Fire of London?’ – that kind of thing, you know,” in Whelpdale’s synopsis) but also guidance for would-be contributors, the very topic of Whelpdale’s manual (NGS, ). Readers of Tit-Bits had special reason to follow such tips for magazine writers; the journal was famous for prize competitions that encouraged them to supply both original content and interesting or amusing “tit-bits” for reprinting, mobilizing them as potential writers and editorial assistants. One contributor, Alfred Harmsworth, soon established the weekly Answers to Correspondence as a rival to Tit-Bits itself. Along with his brother Harold, he would later establish the Daily Mail, a newspaper that incorporated plenty of “competitions, prizes and promotional gimmicks” of its own. Charlie Mears’s dreams of winning the Tit-Bits prize for an essay on bank clerks might have led to bigger things.

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New Grub Street gives its readers a sense that they are glimpsing the world behind printed texts, of producers revealing the rules of the system. Yet this sense of inside knowledge doesn’t take us far from Tit-Bits. For Tit-Bits didn’t just recruit its readers as writers and editors; it also supplied them with information about the processes, issues, and innovations behind its own editing and production. Tit-Bits’ first “Answers to Correspondents” column includes not only tips about what kinds of material to submit for the weekly prize but also “Statistics” on the cost of the journal to street vendors. Highlighting the mechanics of Tit-Bits’ own assembly, printing, and distribution reinforces the more general sense of jolly camaraderie and inclusion that the journal cultivated through its editorial voice and marketing practices. The next week’s column combined this impression of transparency and inclusiveness with the journal’s fascination with new technology, offering technical information on the “very ingenious” machinery used to fold each copy of the journal – just the kind of bland information that Chesterton would decry. More explicitly than New Grub Street, Tit-Bits extends its interest in the material story of media to the very medium in its readers’ hands. Compared to the mechanics of industrial paper-folding, typography seems positively literary. Had Gissing needed a model for a contemporary print work that selfconsciously turned the material and institutional conditions of its production into its subject matter, he could have found one in Tit-Bits itself. Early issues of the journal rarely include images, which heightens the impact of a two-page spread called “A Few Incidents in Connection with Tit-Bits,” published in its  Christmas issue (Figure .). A self-celebrating tableau, this holiday gift to readers depicts scenes in the history of a TitBits issue, from its writing and editing to its compositing, printing, and distribution to its audience, a customized, convivial image of Robert Darnton’s famous communication circuit. Appropriately enough, the image is organized as a juxtaposition of discontinuous scenes, applying the logic of the tit-bit to the task of envisioning the paper’s production, circulation, and consumption. The only figures in the image who are writing (or at least scratching their heads over blank pages) are the “comic paragraphists at work”: turning out scattered bits of text has become a job description. The “prudent family” in the lower right corner bears multiple copies of the newspaper, since the journal promised £ to the heirs of any victims of a railway accident who died while carrying the current issue. Brilliantly, blatantly, the famous “Tit-Bits System of Insurance” treated the journal as a physical medium of temporary value. What is there in typography to make everything it touches sacred? In James Joyce’s

 Figure . “A Few Incidents in Connection with Tit-Bits.” Tit-Bits  (). ©The British Library Board / The Image Works

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Ulysses (), after reading a copy of the journal in an outdoor toilet, Leopold Bloom uses the prize tit-bit to wipe himself – the ultimate reduction of the journal to the raw materiality of paper. Tit-Bits’ ostensible transparency also doubled as self-promotion. In the upper left-hand corner of “A Few Incidents,” the “printing machine throw[s] off copies . . . at the rate of , an hour,” attesting to the paper’s popularity. When Newnes decided to include the first advertisements in Tit-Bits, wrapping the journal in a green cover filled with commercial appeals, he proudly commissioned “a new machine, the largest of its kind” to apply the covers, ever ready to hype the journal via its production techniques. Seizing upon the informative possibilities of another medium, Newnes later assembled and distributed an educational lecture with magic lantern slides called “How Popular Periodicals are Produced”; with the interpolated phrase and Unpopular Novels, its name could practically be a subtitle for New Grub Street. Once again, placing its audience behind the scenes combines education with marketing; after the success of Tit-Bits, Newnes had founded the more literary Strand Magazine, and his slide lecture included a section touting the “discover[y]” of its most notable denizen, Sherlock Holmes. From its first columns, Tit-Bits not only fused self-explanation with selfpromotion but also invited readers to view its own form and content in the framework of late nineteenth-century print culture. Gissing casts ChitChat as a mediocre man’s makeover of a middle-of-the-road print organ. But far from being an overhaul of an existing print organ, Tit-Bits proudly declares its novelty on the front of its  inaugural issue, even as it places itself in the wider context of contemporary print culture. Tit-Bits may reprint excerpts from other print sources, but, for all its use of old texts, it will be a new medium. With a Milvain-like rhetoric of honestly avowing and exploiting a state of affairs that others profess to deplore, the first issue of Tit-Bits propounds its scheme: There is no paper in the world conducted on the lines which will be followed in Tit-Bits. It will be a production of all that is most interesting in books, periodicals, and newspapers . . . Opinions may differ as to whether it is fair for newspapers to use other people’s writings so extensively as has now become the practice. Whatever fault may be found by some with this wholesale abstracting, in the case of Tit-Bits it is at any rate done openly and avowedly, and no attempt is made to pass off extracts as original compositions. There is scarcely a newspaper which does not give some extracts.

A claim for demystification becomes a marketing strategy.

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 The opening column further elucidates the conditions of literary production and consumption that have culminated in the invention of Tit-Bits: It is impossible for any man at the busy time of the present to even glance at any large number of the immense variety of books and papers which have gone on accumulating until now their number is fabulous. It will be the business of the conductors of Tit-Bits to find out from this immense field of literature the best things that have ever been said or written, and weekly to place them before the public for one penny.

Matthew Arnold defined culture as the search for “the best which has been thought and said in the world”; Tit-Bits updates this vision for an age of information overload. Furthermore, it has converted this search into an assurance not of intellectual worth so much as of consumer value for the busy man of today. With a promise to scan and extract the best bits from “all the most interesting papers and books of England, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, America, Australia, and the Indies,” Tit-Bits echoes Arnold’s cultural cosmopolitism, even if it also manifests a literal “faith in machinery” that is the opposite of Arnoldian. Arnold’s lofty aspirations for culture make this connection unexpected. Moreover, he would condemn the “New Journalism” of the s, a phrase popularized by his attack, viewing it as opposed to the mission of culture to provide sweetness and light in a fractured and fractious, democratizing society. A “fierce stimulant” for the classes that were just beginning to gain the rights to education and enfranchisement, mass journalism might be “full of ability, novelty, variety, sensation,” but Arnold denounced it as essentially “feather-brained.” Such new journalism was epitomized for Arnold by the crusading work of the “clever and energetic” journalist and editor W. T. Stead, a friend and former schoolmate of George Newnes; in , they would co-found the monthly Review of Reviews, launching it as a sort of collection of longer tit-bits. Stead does not seem to have held a grudge. In its own inaugural issue, the Review of Reviews explains itself by invoking Arnold and his view of culture even more explicitly than had the more modest Tit-Bits. Like Tit-Bits, New Grub Street recognizes the proliferation of printed writing, as the immensity of the publishing field comes to seem Malthusian, characterized by overproduction and increasing competition for the finite resources of money and attention. Gissing closely links the “overpopulation of writers” to “the overproduction of journals and books,” notes Patrick Brantlinger. Awash in writing and filled with writers

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producing more of it, the British Museum Reading Room makes this situation concrete, looming over the novel as “the valley of the shadow of books” (NGS, ). If “A Few Incidents in Connection with Tit-Bits” visualize the life history of a print vehicle by breaking it up, part of the horror of the Reading Room is its presentation of a single unbroken scene of production, consumption, and further accumulation. Its most frequent inhabitant, the ill-starred Marian Yule, is haunted by the unceasing fecundity of late Victorian print production, by the cycle of consuming print to produce more of it, and by her own minor part in the enterprise: When already there was more good literature in the world than any mortal could cope with in his lifetime, here was she exhausting herself in the manufacture of printed stuff which no one even pretended to be more than a commodity for the day’s market. What unspeakable folly! To write – was not that the joy and the privilege of one who had an urgent message for the world? (NGS, –)

This conception of the author as passionate visionary is far different from what Marian sees around her in the workaday world of writers and editors in the s: Her father, she knew well, had no such message; he had abandoned all thought of original production, and only wrote about writing . . . And all these people about her, what aim had they save to make new books out of those already existing, that yet newer books might in turn be made out of theirs? This huge library, growing into unwieldiness, threatening to become a trackless desert of print – how intolerably it weighed upon the spirit! (NGS, )

In Marian’s conception, the excess of print beyond anyone’s ability to read it paradoxically becomes a wasteland, a void. But she has aptly identified the conditions that gave rise to Tit-Bits, at least in the later accounts of its founder. Newnes traced its genesis to an evening when he distractedly trawled through a dull newspaper full of commonplaces – until he found a single interesting story, the Ur-tit-bit. In Marian’s theory of print media, the manufacture of new books from scraps of old ones leads to the problem of print’s superabundance. For Newnes and Tit-Bits, on the contrary, generating a new publication out of bits of other ones was the solution. Tit-Bits doesn’t merely commence with a self-conscious glance at the contemporary state of the larger field of published writing; it maintains this focus throughout its first years of publication. Early issues include collections of tit-bits drawn from single novelists as well as many columns with statistics about the earnings of

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 famous nineteenth-century authors – the “Profits of Authorship.” It also offers jokily condensed versions of real poems or of generic plots for novels, often with a facetious nod to the necessity of concision, summary, or selection in busy modern times – the supposed need that justified the journal’s very existence. The tit-bits of information the paper assembles about contemporary publishing and writing go far beyond tips for aspiring magazine writers. Pieces discuss topics such as the writing style of news journalists, printing processes and terminology, proofreading and compositing, the readers hired by presses to evaluate book manuscripts. In the s, readers of Tit-Bits could learn about editors’ hatred of rolled-up manuscripts, about the foibles of compositors, about the disposal of unsold books as remainders. In Tit-Bits a would-be author would have read about many issues current on late Victorian Grub Street: the economics of the three-volume novel and the circulating libraries that paid for them and lent them out; the “half profits system” for books, under which publishers purchased a manuscript’s copyright and agreed to split any profits remaining after they had subtracted (and perhaps inflated) their production and marketing expenses; the importance of press syndicates and the growing market for serializing British novels abroad – the kind of thing that even Jasper Milvain seems know about in theory more than in practice. One “Tit-Bit of General Information” even giddily quantifies the grounds for Marian Yule’s anxieties in the Reading Room: by the mids, the number of books in “the British Museum Library [wa]s increasing at the rate of more than  volumes a day.” For Tit-Bits, the modern flood of reading matter meant not oversupply but more raw material for content-aggregation. Marian’s vision of a literary machine resembles less her own mode of literary production than an automated Tit-Bits. New Grub Street treats Whelpdale as an idiot savant of modern journalism who, after bumbling his way across American and British print culture, manages to suggest a new format and rationale that successfully capture not just a large readership but also the spirit of the age. The light, disconnected factoids that fill Chit-Chat or Tit-Bits might seem the furthest thing from New Grub Street’s self-consciousness about the production of published texts. But in the s and early s, one of the most recurrent topics of the real Tit-Bits was in fact the current state of authorship and publishing and the possibilities for those who wished to make a living as writers, to inhabit new Grub Street:

Unsanctified Typography



The outside world, as a whole, thinks, and, in spite of all that can be said, will continue to think, that when it sees a man’s name on the title pages of one or two books and at the head of a few magazine articles, he must be earning a comfortable income. The supply of writers is greater than the demand . . . The struggling author works hard, and most of his work goes for nothing. . . Let him be ever so clever, if he have no name, or no regular engagement on a journal, he cannot make a living . . . If his pen fail him, what can he do? Only some luminous idea, or lucky chance, can save him from starvation . . . For a three-volume novel, which no man can invent and write in less than six months, he will get thirty pounds perhaps. It is a melancholy fact that the novel-writing business is quite overdone nowadays. To the literary man who has no regular engagement, and who lives from hand to mouth . . . a man’s household gods are a source of considerable uneasiness . . . These are facts. There is no harder career than letters . . . Dissappointment [sic], despair, and starvation are all that await the poor author. He is one of the most pitiable figures in the pathetic group of the unseen poor. His higher talent and greater sensitiveness make him suffer the more keenly. Let no man, however talented, think to earn a living by writing alone. If he must earn a living by letters, let him rather be a postman.

New Grub Street provides a mordant prospectus for a Tit-Bits-like journal, yet over the course of its first decade, dozens of extracts in the real Tit-Bits had already offered virtually a running prospectus for New Grub Street, down to an article that sounds like a sexist gloss on the conflict between the Reardons: “Are Wives and Children Impediments to Authorship?” In a tit-bit from , a self-identified “literary sweater” (a better term than “hack,” since in a manufacturing industry, sweaters are “the people who do all the hard work of which others receive the benefits”) offers a firsthand account of life as a proletarian literary laborer. The writer ends up in the same state as Marian Yule or Edwin Reardon: If I were to tell all I know about hard work and poor pay, I could fill a volume. Those of my calling will know what I mean when I talk of hard work. It means driving your pen all day long, week by week, month by month, until you feel turned into a machine.

A later piece in the journal fleshes out the details of such a life, as well as its larger economic context, by describing a situation straight out of New Grub Street: “What does it matter if . . . when the cold weather comes on, we have to take our work to the British Museum, being unable to afford a

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 fire at home? The public must have cheap books, publishers must make their profits, and if one or two poor scribblers should die in the struggle for existence, well, there are plenty more to do their work.” The Grub Street of the eighteenth century lives on, notes an article TitBits published two years before Gissing’s novel. This piece, titled simply “Grub Street,” quotes and adapts an account written by the journalist and editor Henry Curwen: try for four or five years only to make a self-supporting livelihood as “a writer of books,” and if you do not drift for a while into a very actual Grub Street yourself, you are pretty sure to know a dozen men to whom . . . dinner and lodging are as uncertain day by day now as to any Goldsmith or Savage long ago. It is difficult to imagine a crueller career than this for those who live by it; difficult to invent a fiction fuller of pathos and heroism for those who merely read of it as a story.

In the original passage, Curwen is introducing a collection of sketches about the struggles of real writers. But by lifting his words from their context, by turning them into a disconnected tit-bit, Tit-Bits has brought out the latent implication that a realistic account of writers’ struggles on the modern Grub Street could make for striking fiction. Literary sweating “could fill a volume” – or three. In Tit-Bits, these views of hardscrabble late Victorian authorship coexist with more optimistic treatments of the economics of writing and publishing, in particular an attention to the money paid to famous authors, part of the journal’s focus on celebrities of print. The conjunction of different perspectives on the literary marketplace suits Tit-Bits’ ideal of offering scraps of information without editorializing. But it also returns us to New Grub Street. After all, one of Gissing’s great achievements in that novel is to cultivate a kind of Olympian perspective as it inquires into the cultural and economic preconditions of its own production, distribution, and reception: the state of the still-dominant three-decker novel in the years just before it was swept away, the perilous class position of novelists, the difficulty of making a reputation as a writer. I am not arguing that Gissing derived his arguments about the state of late Victorian writing and publishing from the pages of Tit-Bits. Many of the journal’s bits of information and opinion were reprinted pieces to begin with – and by  Gissing hardly needed secondhand insight into the difficulties facing contemporary writers. But the prominence of this subject in a popular, nonspecialized venue might have suggested that a novel set completely in the world of struggling writers, editors, and their families could find a receptive audience beyond that world. If Tit-Bits

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

functioned to recruit its readers as new writers via contests and the like, New Grub Street treats print authorship as a contest in which the prize is unwinnable or hardly worth the winning. Nevertheless, their convergence on a multisided account of the state of authorship and publishing helps to confirm that the conditions that helped make it possible for Gissing to write New Grub Street, and for the novel to gain Gissing his largest readership to date, also helped generate Tit-Bits and spur its success. From the “comic paragraphists” in “A Few Incidents in Connection with Tit-Bits” to the rising or falling writers of today’s Grub Street: the common ground between George Newnes and George Gissing suggests that the attention their work pays to the materials and conditions of their production grows out of more general encounters between genres and institutions of print and other media in the late nineteenth century. The era’s media transitions prompted wide cultural attention to the mechanics of media systems and mediation. For Gissing’s Jasper Milvain at least, that scrutiny inspires a theory of print literature as typography, an approach that we will see echoed, elaborated, or deliberately reversed in my subsequent chapters. But the differences in Tit-Bits and New Grub Street are also, strictly speaking, material. As Gissing and Newnes both recognize, Tit-Bits represents print that has gone over to the media – energetically celebrating the mechanics and technologies of modern media, including its own unsanctified typography. While New Grub Street offers sustained dramas of the writing life, the reprinted excerpts in Tit-Bits point toward Marian Yule’s grim fantasy of automated literature, of recycled texts and content aggregation. Merrily recruiting its readers as freelance comic paragraphists, TitBits nevertheless seems to point to the prospect of writing without writers.

Chit-Chat’s focus on scraps of light “information,” prophetically called “bits,” hints at the wider phenomenon of the shifting media ecology in which the “procrustean system” of three-volume novels such as New Grub Street itself now had to map out their place (NGS, , ). For its part, Tit-Bits noted the novelist and magazine writer Alexander Innes Shand’s advocacy of “a cheap one-volume system [for novels], as carried out in France,” but it also printed an expert’s claim that “more money can be made out of a limited sale to the circulating libraries of a three-volume novel published at thirty-one shillings and sixpence than out of a much larger sale of a one-volume story sold at six shillings.” In New Grub

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 Street, Reardon’s inability to produce a three-volume novel epitomizes his dawning failure, while Jasper Milvain “is always saying that the long novel has had its day, and that in future people will write shilling books” (NGS, ). Significantly, this prediction conflates one material description of the book (its length) with another material consideration (its price). As Chapter  will discuss, Tit-Bits, Jasper, and Gissing were joining a wider debate on the status and fate of the Victorian three-volume novel as an old print format in a rising world of media.

 

The Sinking of the Triple-Decker Format Wars

There are three institutions in this country which pass the understanding of the American[:] . . . the House of Lords, the Established Church, and the Three Volume Novel.

—Walter Besant, “The Rise and Fall of the ‘Three Decker’” ()

Modern scholars of literature and media often treat the classic European novel as a form that borrows the shape of the printed book – with its norms of unity and development from page to page – as a paradigm for literature. “The codex format is remarkably congruent” with the novel’s narrative form, observes one writer in this vein. After all, the novel has a certain scope (a book must have at least forty-nine pages to be recognized as such according to UNESCO’s criteria), and a readily identifiable beginning, middle, and end. There is also a similarity in terms of the virtual space created by the novel, which is a closed world, like the book, and whose plot unfolds at the same time pages are turned . . . It is thus not surprising that in common usage the novel is seen as the epitome of the book.

Fiction in the form of a printed codex with a beginning, middle, and end: this might seem like the most blandly generic description of the nineteenth century’s signature literary form. Yet, apart from several particular genres, when new novels intended for a general middle-class readership were first published in Victorian Britain, they usually appeared in multiple volumes, in serial, or both. Indeed, in a broader sense, the route of British novels to their domestic readership was heavily mediated by institutions that offered them in formats other than the single book. The most notable or notorious of these formats was the three-volume novel. “Anybody can write a three-volume novel,” Oscar Wilde affirmed in , when the format seemed unshakably entrenched: “it merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature.” But by the time of The Importance of Being Earnest (), Wilde could treat the format as not 

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 merely a joke but a reminder of the foibles of the past. The play’s denouement hinges on a third-act revelation:  years before its action, the governess Miss Prism absentmindedly swapped the manuscript of her unpublished triple-decker novel for the infant Jack Worthing. In a burlesque of the clichéd plotlines of standardized novels, “a three-volume novel of more than usually revolting sentimentality” (in Lady Bracknell’s withering phrase) precipitates the kind of generic foundling or hidden identity plot beloved by many novelists. Just as Wilde was beginning work on Earnest in the summer of , the curtain was falling for the three-volume novel. In fact, inspiration for the switched-baby-and-novel plot must have struck him just as the fate of the form was being widely discussed. On June , , Mudie’s Select Library and W. H. Smith’s, the largest of the private circulating libraries that provided many middle- and upper-class Victorians with their reading material, issued simultaneous announcements specifying the new terms on which they would buy novels from publishers, beginning in the next year. First of all, they would pay no more than four shillings per volume, a reduction of the discount they already received on volumes that bore a nominal price of ten-and-a-half shillings apiece. Furthermore, they would insist that no cheaper edition of a novel appear until a full year after its first appearance in pricy multivolume form. “We do not know whether those who make the suggestion realise precisely what it means,” fretted a writer in The Publishers’ Circular, calling the situation a “crisis.” “Broadly speaking, it would mean, if complied with, a revolution in literature – at any rate so far as fiction is concerned.” Several publishers tried following the new guidelines. But as the circulating libraries’ directors probably anticipated, most found the terms unworkable, and the three-volume novel – “an artificially priced format unique to Britain,” but a dominant one for most of the century – died a speedy death. After decades of defining the mainstream market for novels in book form, and after various attempts by individual publishers to circumvent the system and sell new fiction directly to readers, the threevolume novel system swiftly came to an end, dispatched by the circulating libraries themselves, which no longer found it sufficiently profitable. As the head of Mudie’s confirmed in a private letter to the publisher George Bentley, “the Three Volume novel does not suit us at any price so well as the One vol.” The three-volume format for novels didn’t come to an end because novelists felt aesthetically constrained by it, or because they complained about it in public, or because dissatisfied readers rejected it. But its

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disappearance had important implications for the form and content of fiction and for late nineteenth-century fiction’s relationships to its own media and to other ones. Building upon the work of the book historians who have told the story of the three-volume format and its fall, this chapter examines the three-volume novel in a different way: as part of a media system that linked private libraries to publishers, tied the distribution of fiction to its material form, and aligned novels with other print genres. This chapter begins with a history and analysis of “the standard three volumes,” from the format’s position in a larger media empire to its typical features as exemplified in the form and content of a more-or-less standard late Victorian three-volume novel such as John Berwick Harwood’s Sir Robert Shirley, Bart. () – chosen here because it was the first tripledecker I happened to find on the shelf. “Format denotes a whole range of decisions that affect the look, feel, experience, and workings of a medium,” notes Jonathan Sterne. A format “specifies the protocols by which a medium will operate.” When it comes to print formats, media archaeology meets the history of books and publishing: the three-volume system attests to the power and importance of material formats in literary and cultural history, but formats considered not merely in physical terms, not formally or ahistorically or in isolation from other media. On the contrary, the very physical makeup of media formats is tied to institutions, temporalities, economics, and audiences, as the triple-decker confirms. The chapter’s second half focuses on the three-volume novel’s final years and on its rapid abandonment in the s. Mudie and Smith’s  ultimatum led to the end of the threevolume novel, but, before it did, it precipitated widespread discussion of fiction and its formats. Writing about the three-volume novel and its fate meant writing about late nineteenth-century fiction’s relationships to its own media, and about how the formats of Victorian novels aligned them with or distinguished them from other media and media systems.

The Three-Volume Standard Victorians read fiction in many print formats. The three-volume configuration was neither used for all kinds of novels nor available to – or intended for – all novel readers. Indeed, the three-volume system coexisted with a number of other important formats for extended prose fiction: the paperbound serial parts associated with Dickens and Thackeray in the century’s middle decades, or with the longer “books” that made up George Eliot’s great novels of the s; serial publication in magazines and newspapers,

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 which became increasingly ubiquitous as the number of periodicals increased in the last decades of the century; inexpensive one-volume reprints of novels, published after their three-volume debut; juvenile, religious, and adventure fiction, all customarily published in one-volume form; cheap editions of off-copyright classic works; foreign novels published in Britain and British novels published abroad by Tauchnitz and other firms. For decades, the three-volume format and library borrowing became the Victorian middle-class public’s most prominent mode of access to new secular, adult novels printed as books. But novelty and secularity, an adult middle-class readership, the codex book form: these were hardly the only varieties of Victorian novels, their formats, or their audiences. And while some novels seem to play off their volume division (the first volume of Charlotte Brontë’s Villette [] ends with its reticent and selfcontrolled heroine falling into a dramatic swoon), in the content of many more it hardly seems to register; after all, many three-volume novels were first published in serial, and a successful three-volume novel would probably reappear as a single volume. Novels could also arrive in two volumes or (less commonly) in four. Yet the three-volume format garnered an outsized share of attention from Victorians as well as from later scholars. Why so much fuss about a single format? Simply because by the late Victorian era the three-volume novel had come to represent the norms of workaday British fiction. As a byword or a target, the “procrustean system” of the three-volume novel conflated issues of fiction’s aesthetics, economics, and physical form. As I will show, some writers also saw the three-volume system as working in tandem with serial publication in periodicals to limit the artistic and thematic possibilities of British novels. In a larger sense, by the end of its heyday, a variety of writers associate the three-volume novel with what seem like the values of a caricatured mid-Victorian middle class: conventionality, regularity, propriety, and dubious pretensions to endurance or monumentality. As Wilde’s animadversions on the form indicate, by the s, writing about the three-volume format and its fate often looks like a proxy for writing about those values themselves. The Victorian three-volume novel or triple-decker (this nickname suggests an analogy to sturdy warships) had roots as a prestige form. Even the unit of its pricing asserted the format’s pretensions. Walter Scott’s Waverley () was hardly the first three-volume novel, but it provided a pivotal model for the format, a model that was complete when Scott and his publisher Archibald Constable raised the price of the three-volume Kenilworth () to an exorbitant guinea and a half ( shillings and sixpence),

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where it would long remain. Scott and Constable couldn’t have known that they had helped establish what would remain one of the major formats for new novels for nearly three quarters of a century. The most crucial aspect of the Victorian three-volume novel followed from its high cost: it wasn’t priced for sale to general readers at all. Rather, the main buyers of novels in this expensive format were the private circulating libraries that came to dominate the trade in new fiction, especially Mudie’s (which began lending books in ) and W. H. Smith’s (which added a subscription service to its railway bookstalls in ). The first British circulating libraries had been established in the eighteenth century, but Victorian innovations in transport and communication allowed newer libraries such as Mudie’s and Smith’s to exist on a different scale. “Centralising, cheapening, and expanding service, Mudie may be seen as literature’s Rowland Hill,” as a Victorian innovator who, like the famous postal reformer, reconstructed an existing media distribution paradigm to favor efficiency, standardization, and sheer scale. Purchasing “library editions” at a steep discount from their publishers, the great Victorian circulating libraries offered them to subscribers, whose payment of an annual fee allowed them to borrow a specified number of volumes at a time. Once the volumes were no longer in high demand, the large libraries could resell them to smaller regional libraries, which depended on second-hand stock from Mudie and Smith. “For this reason,” urges the most eminent historian of this complex, “we need to think of the post- circulating libraries not as individual units but as part of an interdependent system.” A library subscription, with its promise of both wide entry to a universe of respectable reading and exclusive access to three-volume novels upon their first publication as books, represented a kind of everyday luxury. The basic annual fee of one guinea at Mudie’s (for checking out one volume at a time) was less than the nominal price of a single triple-decker, and a cheaper semiannual subscription was also available. Other circulating libraries had similar charges. These fees were enough to ensure that library membership was only available to readers ready to prepay for admission into a “select” domain of Victorian print culture. At Mudie’s, many subscribers purchased more expensive subscriptions, which allowed them to have multiple volumes out at once. In , the Spectator estimated that out of the . million families in Great Britain, no more than , could have afforded to subscribe to a private library; Mudie’s had about , subscribers in  and Smith’s about , a few years later. Fiction in three volumes might have appeared in periodicals beforehand; if

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 a novel succeeded as a triple-decker, it might appear in a single volume later. But in its three-volume form, it addressed itself not to a vast, vague readership, but to a small, well-defined one. In fact, the three-volume format functioned to delay or even prevent the circulation of the novel to a mass audience. In an influential article published in Dickens’s Household Words in , Wilkie Collins contrasted what he called the “unknown public,” the mass readership of penny journals, with the much smaller “known” public: “subscribers to this journal, the customers at the eminent publishing-houses, the members of book-clubs and circulating libraries, and the purchasers and borrowers of [middle-class] newspapers and reviews.” In the Punch cartoon “Light Reading with a Vengeance,” a patron refuses to accept the one-volume edition of the triple-decker she’s reading when she learns that the third volume is already checked out from the circulating library: “Oh, that won’t do! How on Earth am I to find my Place in it?” This “Young Lady” seems confused about the correspondence between a three-volume novel and its single-volume edition, but perhaps she intuits that the distinction between them helped readers “find” their social “place” within print culture. The circulating libraries stocked many print genres, not only fiction. A typical catalogue from Mudie’s () promises “Works of HISTORY, BIOGRAPHY, RELIGION, PHILOSOPHY, TRAVEL, and the HIGHER CLASS of FICTION” as well as “the leading Periodicals,” with a stern warning that “Cheap Reprints, Serials, Costly Books of Plates, Works of merely Professional or Local Interest, and Novels of objectionable character or inferior ability, are almost invariably excluded.” The list of exclusions points to the interlinked economic, aesthetic, and literary evaluations that endowed triple-deckers with value as a “higher class of fiction”: they were not cheap, they were full of not expensive illustrations to be gawked at but text to be read, they were not morally objectionable or stylistically inferior, and they were ostensibly general in their appeal. A novel published in three volumes, produced for purchase and distribution by the circulating libraries, implicitly announced that it had submitted to evaluation in these terms. Its physical makeup asserted that it would withstand such judgment. With the private circulating libraries buying the bulk of the stock, print runs of three-volume novels tended to be small and stable (typically around  copies), lacking bestsellers in the modern sense but sustaining a dependable market for titles both by new authors and by reliably productive novelists with familiar names. The most prolific authors – writers such as G. P. R. James ( three-volume novels from  to ),

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Margaret Oliphant ( between  and ), or Florence Marryat ( between  and ) – managed to produce two or three tripledeckers nearly every year. Mediating between authors, publishers, and the vagaries of a popular taste that they helped shape, the libraries could usually be relied upon to buy hundreds of copies of a familiar novelist’s latest book. At least by the system’s final decades, three-volume editions regularly lost money for their publishers. But they could still function as a means of testing a novel’s popularity and of promoting the work before a cheaper onevolume edition was produced. Long novels borrowed by the volume might also be evaluated one volume at a time. Readers could easily sample a novel by starting with the first volume – and end there, as well, if reading it didn’t inspire them to request the next. Or, on the contrary, they could hold onto the book and pass it around, perhaps using a multivolume library subscription to share different volumes of the same novel among family members or friends. As one writer summarized the three-volume system on the eve of its collapse, “The book arrives and is looked at. If it is impossible, it straightway returns ‘to the place from whence it came’; and if it happens to succeed, it runs through the household, and the library has to take fresh copies, because while you are recommending it to all your friends you refuse to send it back.” The economics of the system also aligned with the specific, material properties of the three-volume format. Lending out triple-deckers by the volume meant that the libraries could circulate a single “copy” of a novel among three subscribers at once. And, although in practice the format could be quite flexible, the circulating libraries depended on maintaining the norm of long novels that called for slow reading. Short novels might be rapidly read and exchanged for others, allowing subscribers to consume many more individual works for their subscription fee. Multivolume novels also encouraged library customers to purchase more expensive multivolume subscriptions. The form and scale of Victorian fiction, then – with its multiple plotlines and rhythms of introduction, complication, and resolution (including the notorious weakness of second volumes) – were intimately tied to the economics of its standardized format for distribution and consumption. Some triple-deckers mesh the kinds of formulaic plotting deftly parodied by Wilde with their equally predetermined and conventional volume structure. A standard late Victorian novel in three volumes, John Berwick Harwood’s Sir Robert Shirley, Bart. () is a representative work by a typically productive but undistinguished novelist. Faithful to the social

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 pretensions of its format, it opens with a scene in which the consumption of cheap fiction kills a working-class consumer and initiates the entire action of the plot. Engrossed in reading “one of those gaudily-bound twoshilling works of fiction that one sees on railway bookstalls,” a nursemaid at the Yorkshire seaside loses first a wandering little boy and then her own life as the tide rises and drowns her. The lost child, too young to communicate his identity, is adopted by a hardscrabble troop of coastal gemstone miners. Yet somehow as he grows into manhood, he seems meant for other things, a diamond in the rough. The last words of the first volume clumsily work toward suspense by prefiguring his romance with a lady who finds his manly appeal strangely out of tune with his low class status. It takes the entire length of a slow, perhaps satisfyingly predictable three-volume novel to restore the social distinction that cheap reading has lost. In the work’s final volume, the missing heir at last reestablishes his aristocratic identity, comes into the fortune that awaits him, and marries the lady who finds him so attractive. It might be a stretch to claim that the three-volume format predisposes novels to thematize the “experience of belonging” or the “sense of an exclusive collectivity” that bound together their readership of affluent private library subscribers. But Sir Robert Shirley, Bart., as a blandly typical example of the triple-decker, confirms that narrative form and class ideology can readily come together with the novel’s material format, as the organization and cultural distinction of the three-volume form unite with the mechanics of its plot. As part of the audience for a triple-decker, “one sees” gaudy books of cheap railway fiction; one does not read them. No wonder that an apparently neutral bibliographic description – “the three-volume novel” – could function not simply as the name of a literary format or genre but also as a description of a cultural sensibility, even a synecdoche for an entire media system anchored by access to the current crop of expensive triple-deckers. Moreover, for most of the Victorian era, the viable strategies for producing more affordable fiction (publication in parts or in serial, for instance) largely complemented the expensive triple-decker without threatening its status or its profits, “creating an interdependence of expensive and cheaper forms.” But the three-volume system also meant that novelists had to negotiate multiple gatekeepers; their fiction had to satisfy not only a publisher but also the circulating libraries. As the name of Mudie’s Select Library promised, the private libraries were willing to exercise their power as purchasers to ensure that new novels met their standards for literary

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competence and family suitability. While much of the censorship of fiction was probably undertaken preemptively by publishing houses or by novelists themselves, authors could certainly find their fiction banned by the libraries, as an outraged George Moore learned when Mudie’s rejected the racy A Modern Lover () and shunned his subsequent novels. Perhaps because of their connections to respectable recreation in the home, threevolume novels were associated in particular with a female readership – as Moore made clear with his attacks on the subscription-company “librarian” as a prudish nurse attempting to protect the “nursery” and “drawingroom” from “viril[e]” modern novels. As maintained by Mudie’s, Smith, and their smaller counterparts, and by the practices of publishers and authors whose output came within their purview, the system that included the triple-decker and the private circulating library proved remarkably durable. Indeed, its comparative stability suggests that we should understand this system as what Tim Wu calls an “information empire.” In such an empire, dominant media firms create a closed system that maintains their financial interests but stifles technical or economic innovation. Such arrangements may be supported by government policies or just by formal and informal networks of mutual interest and control, as with the private circulating libraries. In the s, David Finkelstein has documented, an overextended Mudie’s Library ended up on the verge of bankruptcy. A cabal of major publishers, fearful of having to write off the vast sums Mudie’s already owed them, secretly agreed to help keep the company afloat. Ultimately, when Mudie’s Library became a limited liability company in , several publishers consented to accept shares in the new company as payment for Mudie’s debts. This created a tight complex of ownership and payment in the production and distribution of books. The great circulating libraries and the large publishing houses dealt in many genres besides novels. But the three-volume novel, as a genre perpetuated in its distinctive format wholly by the predominance of this interlocked complex, readily offered a symbol for the system itself. The division of novels into volumes embodied an economic and cultural system that rigorously divided the address of printed works between an elite and a mass readership. Wilde’s jibe at the triple-decker, as a thing produced in hermetic isolation from both life and literature, aptly conveys the sense of a text that exists purely as part of a closed media system. Later, with The Importance of Being Earnest’s orphaned, unpublished, nearly forgotten three-volume novel, Wilde would mockingly suggest the fate of such works once this format had finally reached its terminus.

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900

A New Order on the Eve of Establishment In , Matthew Arnold worried that as the “love of reading” spread, the system which keeps up the present exorbitant price of new books in England, the system of lending-libraries from which books are hired, will be seen to be, as it is, eccentric, artificial, and unsatisfactory in the highest degree. It is a machinery for the multiplication and protection of bad literature.

Arnold was right – at least about the fate of this “system.” By the final decades of the century, the system in which Victorian fiction was produced, circulated, and read – the “machinery” both symbolized and epitomized by the three-volume novel – was coming under pressure. One form of this pressure, the struggle of novelists such as Moore and Thomas Hardy over censorship and sexual frankness in British fiction, is well known. In his contribution to an  magazine forum about the problem of modern British fiction and “candour,” Hardy objected to the restraints placed on novels in the name of “what is called household reading,” the kind of reasoning we saw Dixon’s Story of a Modern Woman satirizing in Chapter , with Mary Erle’s editor imploring her to write novels for “healthy English homes” at the same moment he orders up more photographs to go with the news of a sex scandal. More pointedly, Hardy presents these hindrances to the novel’s rise to adult seriousness as growing not simply from prudery or double standards but from the specific print-forms and routes by which late Victorian fiction reached its audiences, from the novel’s relationships to media systems: “The popular vehicles for the introduction of a novel to the public have grown to be . . . the magazine and the circulating library; and the object of the magazine and circulating library is not upward advance but lateral advance.” Moving upwards or sideways: Hardy’s contrast attributes novels’ stifled ambitions to a divergence in the orientation of different print formats and institutions. Periodicals or library patronage assume an indefinite “lateral” continuance from issue to issue or loan to loan, even in the case of unexpected news or a new novel that subscribers suddenly want to read. Their model is routinized daily reading or subscription, modes of consumption based on the combination of familiarity with temporary novelty. In , Mudie himself had confirmed the triple-decker’s dependence on momentary interest, privately complaining to the publisher George Bentley about the “ephemeral” lives of the three-volume novels on his shelves.

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In contrast, fiction in Hardy’s account orients itself not laterally for the sake of an indefinite continuity but toward self-development, narrative fulfillment, and ascent. Hardy imagines a novelist beginning to serialize an ambitious new work before being stymied by the demands of the format and venue: “The opening scenes of the would-be great story may, in a rash moment, have been printed in some popular magazine before the remainder is written; as it advances month by month the situations develop, and the writer asks himself, what will his characters do next?” – until, writing to fill the pages of a magazine or of a volume for a lending library the writer must betray such development by “arranging . . . [an] unreal and meretricious” conclusion (CEF, –). “That the magazine and library have arrogated to themselves the dispensation of fiction is not the fault of the authors, but of circumstances over which they, as representatives of Grub Street, have no control” (CEF, ). “The magazine in particular and the circulating library in general do not foster the growth of the novel which reflects and reveals life,” Hardy complains. “They directly tend to exterminate it by monopolising all literary space” (CEF, ). In this metaphor, the media system of magazine and library becomes a physical constraint to the development of the novel. Hardy was far from the only one to characterize the fiction of the era as largely stuck and stagnant. “The novelists have been as busy as ever,” sighed The Dial in a survey of the British and American literature of , “but nothing very startling is to be found among their productions.” As Hardy’s comments suggest, late Victorian debates about the content of novels and the development of fiction as an art form intersected with questions about the vehicles and physical form of prose narrative. As they considered such questions, novelists, critics, and readers became vernacular theorists of the novel and its media, thematizing and thinking out the unstable relations of novels to their material forms in an era of media transitions – an era that would include, at last, the surprisingly sudden demise of the three-decker system. After many attempts by individual publishers to circumvent the system and sell cheaper books directly to readers, the circulating library/three-volume system finally broke down in  when the libraries issued their memoranda demanding lower prices and a longer embargo on cheaper one-volume reissues. Troy Bassett’s invaluable database of multivolume Victorian novels lists  threevolume works published in  but only two in ; it’s poignant to see that one of the final practitioners of the form is Algernon Gissing, George’s hapless younger brother. The serialization of long fiction in

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 periodicals remained common, and long novels might still appear in two physical volumes. Nevertheless, at this moment the British novel begins to become centrally and materially a book – a single codex – in a way that wasn’t true in the era of Scott, Dickens, or George Eliot. A number of factors were making the three-volume format less dominant and less profitable: the difficulty of disposing of previous years’ crops of triple-deckers; the establishment of free public libraries; the growth of cheaper book formats, and the increasing popularity of genres that didn’t employ the format at all. With their affiliations to juvenile or adventure fiction, for instance, Rider Haggard and Robert Louis Stevenson could escape the pull of the three-volume system, as could Rudyard Kipling with his verse and short stories. As with European editions, colonial editions of novels provided a model for affordable, single-volume first issues. Inexpensive, one-volume “railway fiction” – softbound yellowbacks perfect for use while traveling – was nearly as old as the railways themselves. But in the late Victorian era, portable formats were becoming less and less synonymous with penny dreadfuls and stray reprints of older works, the disreputable novels on display at the station. “By the s at the latest, the [three-volume] system was clearly no longer in the best interests of either Mudie’s or Smith’s” – paradoxically, since they were still widely blamed for maintaining it. Well produced, carefully bound, and with large type and ample margins (especially when the text of the novel was a little scanty and had to be typographically augmented), the triple-decker might have seemed to assert its permanence and endurance even in its material form. But in fact, these brawny three volumes were only the temporary form occupied by novels when they were first bound in covers and essentially unavailable to readers who lacked library subscriptions. Matters only became more uncomfortable for the circulating libraries when publishers pushed their cheaper reprints of novels close to their debuts in three volumes, reducing the term during which the libraries could offer exclusive access. The “Catacombs” under Mudie’s splendid New Oxford Street premises were crowded with heavy, unwanted triple-deckers from previous seasons. “Nearly all” the works there were novels, noted a journalist in , so that the shelves groaned with “many tons” of “light literature.” The ephemeral demand for three-volume novels deepened their affiliation with serial print-forms that also provided regular rounds of minor novelty in a pre-given format. Within a few years of their publication, the typical threevolume novel was in little demand from library subscribers, as forgotten as yesterday’s newspaper.

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Like the telephone, the Victorian triple-decker was not actually much of a mass medium; in its three physical volumes, it addressed only a limited set of readers. But the triple-decker’s conspicuous, preset physical format had come to mark its place in a larger system of regularized media consumption as well as its surrender of aesthetics to material convention and moral constraint. To adapt Raymond Williams’s maxim about “the masses,” perhaps there are actually no mass media – only ways of seeing media as mass media and their users as mass audiences. By the end of its reign, the format of the three-volume novel made it seem ossified by its material affordances and its place in a media empire, directed to an audience of the moralistic or the timid. At once too elitist and too banal, it seemed ill suited to the needs and habits of modern audiences. As late Victorian writers frequently noted, modern fiction in France and the United States was sold in single volumes and priced for sale to readers; public attention to the anomalous British triple-decker could both reflect and exacerbate frustration with the format and the publishing system it embodied. In New Grub Street, Jasper Milvain’s prediction of a coming age of shorter, cheaper novels is typically savvy. But it’s striking to note that when it comes to the format of British fiction, the forecast of the opportunistic Milvain converges with the practice of New Grub Street’s sole exemplar of the novelist as self-conscious artist. Milvain’s antithesis in nearly every way, the unworldly Harold Biffen writes his tediously realistic novel “slowly, lovingly”; it will be “one volume, of course; the length of the ordinary French novel.” Biffen’s “of course” poignantly suggests both the purity of his artistic vision and its utter disregard of the existing marketplace for fiction. (His publishers must have other ideas; they bring out his novel in more than one volume after Biffen’s suicide.) Part of the genius of Gissing’s novel is to link the sociological, institutional, and formal aspects of literary production, and to do so through the basic novelistic elements of plot, character, and setting: whereas Edwin Reardon dies of an infection amid agonized fever-dreams of bulking out his too-short novels, Amy and Jasper resume their acquaintance after a chance meeting at Mudie’s on New Oxford Street. The heft and the stable, standardized format of the three-decker embodied and gratified a mid-Victorian sense of taste that prized the massive or monumental as a sign of worth, a taste amply confirmed by the era’s furniture, architecture, and industrial design. But later in the century, an interest in lightness or craftedness in aesthetics coincided with an acceptance of the kind of punctuated attention suited to briefer reading, the kind of reading that might be done on public transport or between

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 tasks. In , the National Observer complained that a three-volume novel was like a mediocre Royal Academy picture stuck into an imposing frame: “What the respectable gold frame is to the Academic pot-boiler, that also is the smug binding, thrice repeated, to the slab of commercial fiction.” Hardy treated the triple-decker and the periodical as parts of the same media system, but as Gissing intimates, a three-volume novel might seem terminally slow and stodgy in the age of Tit-Bits. Reviewing a sprightly single-volume novel in , Wilde looked forward to the decline of the “very tedious” three-volume novel, with a hope that “the influence of Mudie on literature, the baneful influence of the circulating library” was “on the wane.” As we have seen, on the eve of triple-decker’s demise, Wilde was not the only writer to treat it as an obsolete form. In Dixon’s Story of a Modern Woman, by calling her triple-decker a “novel on the old lines,” Mary Erle both marks its belatedness and suggests the prospect of writing novels along newer ones. Still, in The Story of a Modern Woman the triple-decker remains powerful enough to define even fiction primarily intended for newspaper serialization. Like Hardy, Dixon treats the three-volume novel and serialization in periodicals as joint factors in the aesthetic constraint of fiction. In contrast to George Moore’s sexist attacks on the emasculation of the British novel in the name of family reading, Dixon’s critique takes on a feminist edge when Mary Erle’s condescending editor proclaims that “with practice [Mary] may be able to write stories which other young ladies like to read.” Nonetheless, Dixon correctly intuits the imminent obsolescence of the three-volume form; The Story of a Modern Woman appeared in serial early in  and as a single volume in May of that year, just a month before Mudie and Smith publicly pronounced the current arrangements for publishing triple-deckers untenable. Soon after The Story of a Modern Woman, novels would no longer be accepted on the old lines at all. After the libraries’ announcement, the fate of the three-volume novel system became a subject of much speculation in both the general and the trade press. From July into the autumn of , the columns of The Publishers’ Circular, The Bookseller, and The Author (published by Walter Besant’s Society of Authors) – their titles encapsulate some of the main parties concerned – closely tracked different responses to the three-volume novel question. Mainstream monthly journals and daily papers, including The Times, also weighed in. With a sudden sense of urgency and selfconsciousness, British authors and critics came to recognize the format’s significance and properties. As we saw in the United States of , a

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media system under stress can move quickly into metadiscourse that reflects on the system itself. An essayist in the Saturday Review dryly but perceptively pointed out the material “advantages” of the “three-volume system”: the borrowed physical volumes. “A volume of an ordinary three-volume novel is, physically speaking, incomparably the pleasantest thing to read that human ingenuity has yet invented. It is light to hold; the print is large and well spaced; the paper, generally speaking, is extremely good, and the novel-reader, in fact, reads in the utmost luxury.” The material composition of a triple-decker confirms its status as an everyday luxury good for a reader who appreciates fine objects. But this apologia for the three-volume novel echoes the skeptical treatment of it as a format that emphasized the predetermined physical properties of the novel over its contents, standardization over innovation or distinction. For the Saturday Review’s writer, the ascendance of physical format over content also makes the three-volume system amenable to work by new or obscure novelists. Because readers encountered uniform goods in a pleasant, standard format, and because they could sample volumes without buying, “it is on the unknown author principally that the constant novelreader stays his (or her) monstrous appetite.” In the essayist’s account, however, the pleasure of a triple-decker’s physical construction and appearance is only the prelude to the ultimate delight it offers: its disappearance after use. Here is “perhaps, the crowning luxury of them all. When you have read the book somebody comes and fetches it away, and you need never see it again.” For the circulating libraries, the ephemerality of the triple-decker was a burden, and for Hardy, it epitomized the British novel’s ties to the lateral media systems that suppressed its ambitions. For novelreaders more interested in reading the season’s novels than in owning them indefinitely, it could offer a great advantage, as sumptuous monumentality meets the ultimate modern luxury of disposability. In any case, it soon became clear that the format’s lifespan was drawing to a close. By early July, William Heinemann was already placing an advertisement in The Bookseller that highlighted the publisher’s “new,” “original” one-volume novels, several of them explicitly “modern in treatment and subject.” Heinemann’s roster includes The Story of a Modern Woman, but its foremost attraction appears first, in large, bold type: “Mr. HALL CAINE’S New Novel, ‘THE MANXMAN,’ will be issued on July , in One Volume . . . price s . . . THERE WILL BE NO EDITION IN THREE VOLS.” This warning was really an enticement; book-dealers were usually “very little concerned in three-volume novels,” unless they

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 also happened to run a local circulating library. The Manxman ultimately sold nearly , copies (under the older system, Jasper Milvain’s hypothetical sales figure for a “trash[y]” novel that becomes a runaway bestseller is “fifty thousand”). In August, Sampson Low’s advertisement in The Publishers’ Circular proclaims a “New Departure in Publishing Novels”: having found it “not quite practicable to comply” with Mudie and Smith’s ultimatum, the publisher will issue R. D. Blackmore’s new novel Perlycross in a single six-shilling volume, even though a three-volume edition, having already been printed, would appear simultaneously. The Bookseller soon hoped that “the success of several novels recently issued in single volume forms may . . . be taken as a hopeful augury for those which are to follow.” For the most part, critics and readers seemed prepared for the end of the triple-decker and surprised only that it was the circulating libraries that had helped dispatch it. Punch initially mourned the “rash reform.” But by the end of the summer, a mocking piece in the journal presents the experience of a first-time author whose manuscript novel bears the portentous title Douglas the Doomed One. Assured by The Author that publishers are always searching for new talent, she shows it to a firm that immediately agrees to accept the novel without having read it, since it is “sufficiently long to make the regulation three volumes. That was all that was necessary.” Her publishers mean simply to harvest the modest but predictable returns from issuing the novel on the notorious “half profits” system. But in the end even Douglas the Doomed One finds its audience. Delivered in an indiscriminate “box of books from a metropolitan [public] library” – perhaps part of a bulk purchase of unwanted, leftover works – it saves the life of a chronic insomniac by putting him to sleep after a single volume. The long, generic triple-decker: unreadable or unread, reduced here to a stray volume cast off by an obsolete media system – and doomed in its dotage to become a sleep aid. Mudie’s and Smith’s circulating libraries would survive well into the twentieth century; indeed, they would soon face new competition from private libraries run by Boots, The Times, and Harrods. But the rise of the one-volume novel as first book issue, the end of the circulating libraries’ control over readers’ access to new books of fiction, the disappearance of the triple-decker: these developments in the story of British print media also constitute a divide in literary history. For by the final years of the triple-decker, many novelists, publishers, and readers were well prepared to take advantage of the new possibilities that emerged from the shake-up of an information empire. The demise of the three-volume novel helped

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support emerging developments in fin-de-siècle fiction: the success of wild bestsellers but also of genres and subgenres for particular audiences, dual symptoms of an expanding and diversifying reading public. George du Maurier’s Trilby (), published in the waning months of the triple-decker era, has often been considered a quintessential bestseller, although some observers felt it made less of an impression in its initial British three-volume format than it did in the splashy, well-illustrated single volume first sold in the United States – or as a serial in Harper’s Monthly. New Woman fiction hardly began with the death of the threevolume novel; Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins () and Iota’s A Yellow Aster (), for instance, both appeared in that format. But the rise of the single-volume novel emphasized the possibility of shorter works that could explore less conventional plotlines – or could generate new conventions – and which could find a more direct route to interested readers. New novels could now appear in formats that would until recently have been used chiefly for other kinds of works. The success of George Egerton’s notorious Keynotes (), a collection of stories in one volume (like books of poetry, short story collections fell outside the threevolume norm), inspired her publisher John Lane to produce an entire “Keynotes” series of slim, inexpensive, single-volume books. The series included novels as well as story collections, many with controversial or selfconsciously decadent themes. Some writers recognized the passing of the three-volume novel in terms that were less derisive than Wilde’s or Punch’s. With a typical combination of wry acceptance and unnerving percipience, Kipling published “The Old Three-Decker” in the Saturday Review in July , only weeks after the three-volume novel had effectively been scuttled. Taking as his conceit the idea of the novel as sailing ship, Kipling adeptly connects the vehicle of the triple-decker to its contents, as well as to the supposed fixity of its itinerary: Full thirty foot she towered from waterline to rail— It cost a watch to steer her and a week to shorten sail; But, spite all modern notions, I found her first and best— The only certain packet for the Islands of the Blest. Fair held the Trade behind us, ’twas warm with lovers’ prayers. We’d stolen wills for ballast and a crew of missing heirs. They shipped as Able Bastards till the Wicked Nurse confessed, And they worked the old Three-Decker to the Islands of the Blest.

Lovers, heirs, and confessing nurses as the prototypical cargo of a tripledecker: Kipling’s catalogue elaborates the trenchant generic logic by which

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 Wilde would soon make a lost three-volume novel serve as liber ex machina in The Importance of Being Earnest. Except that the neglectful nurse in Harwood’s novel dies in the opening scene, the lines also offer a remarkably efficient precis of Sir Robert Shirley, Bart. In Wilde’s drama, in Kipling’s poem, in Harwood’s novel, and even in George Moore’s polemic on Mudie, it has been the role of the vilified nurse to initiate the action that allows the handsome foundling of questionable parentage – the threevolume novel itself? – to reveal itself as the heir who is secretly qualified for a lady’s affection. With the impetus of “the Trade” (wind), the course of the mighty craft seems sure, if intractably slow. (A few years later, once the trade was no longer behind the triple-decker, Kipling altered “the Trade” to “the breeze.”) But as the poem’s past-tense verbs confirm, the literary age of “steamers” is underway, and these new, swifter vessels take a different route. The “modern notions” of turn-of-the-century realism, scientism, or aestheticism that can propel fiction’s speedier new vehicles might make novels on the old lines seem outmoded, but the poem finally affirms the oldfangled consolations of the three-decker: Her crew are babes and madmen? Her port is still to make? You’re manned by Truth and Science, and you steam for steaming’s sake? Well; tinker up your engines. You know your business best, She’s taking tired people to the Islands of the Blest!

The endorsement of the three-decker’s comforts seems warm, if also droll and self-aware. Yet Kipling’s defense of the novel as a solace for the tired nevertheless recalls the fate of Douglas the Doomed as well as quite serious claims that the three-decker’s generous typography and slow pace made it well suited to comfort and distract the infirm. As originally printed in the summer of , when Kipling’s poem was part of the press’s general discussion of the fate of the form, it began with the epigraph “And the three-volume novel is doomed,” attributing this observation to a generic “Daily Paper.” A modern medium marks the downfall of a legacy format. When Kipling collected the poem in The Seven Seas (), he trimmed its title to “The Three-Decker”; the adjective old had already become redundant. Kipling also revised the poem’s epigraph to “The three-volume novel is extinct.” The poem now presents these italicized words as a fact that needs no attribution. The three-decker format was permanently moored in the Islands of the Blest.

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“There is a new spirit astir,” exulted Arthur Waugh in  as he hailed the libraries’ “suppression of the three-volume novel”: “a new order is on the eve of establishment; and fiction will probably undergo, during the next few months, as wholesome a weeding-out and re-arrangement as it has ever received in the history of letters.” As it turned out, the results of the change were not so millennial; Waugh wrongly predicted both the end of the “boom” in “the novel of feminine sensation” and the decline of trashy fiction. But as Chapter  will show, novelists could respond to the abandonment of the triple-decker as the opportunity to reconceive the novel’s relationships to media systems and mediation, to imagine the meaning of the novel as fiction in the form of a single codex book. For Marie Corelli and George Paston, this meaning is intimately bound up with the very issues of gender and sensation so blithely dismissed by Waugh.

 

Writers of Books The Unmediated Novel

I have always tried to write straight from my own heart to the hearts of others. . . No one sees my manuscript before it goes to press. . . I have been asked to state whether, in my arrangements for publishing, I employ a “literary agent” or use a “type-writer.” I do not.

—Marie Corelli, “My First Book” ()

As a print medium, the Victorian three-volume novel helped link a demographically narrow circle of privileged users, perhaps a bit like the Victorian telephone. Also like the telephone, the triple-decker could represent the conflict between an interlocked media system and the development of British fiction as an art. The three-volume novel system helped encourage the idea that the British novel’s “upward advance,” as Thomas Hardy put it, was being restrained by a media system that mandated the form of long fiction and even its content, that the novel as art was being stifled by the novel as usual. For all its social elitism, then, the three-volume novel had also come to stand for pedestrian daily media in thrall to their material format and to the infrastructure of their production, distribution, and use. The abandonment of the triple-decker in the middle of the s compelled writers to reassess the relationships between fiction, its material forms, and other print and nonprint media. These reassessments would become especially urgent, and especially compelling, for two novelists who treat the novel itself – that is, now the single-volume novel – as a potential vehicle of liberation from a media system that they in different ways identify with male power and privilege. For Marie Corelli (the pen name of the author born Mary Mackay), the single-volume norm freed the novel into bestsellerdom as a consumer good but also gave the sanctified woman author unmediated communication with her adoring readers. For George Paston (Emily Morse Symonds), it would liberate the novel into a new 

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kind of personal art, into feminist autobiography, or perhaps into something still newer and less defined. In most respects, these two novelists are dramatic opposites, figures who limn the diversity of late Victorian women who wrote about writing women. Even their chosen pseudonyms suggest the distance between Corelli’s florid, Romantic, girlish persona and Paston’s self-alignment with the passionate intellection of George Sand and George Eliot, if also perhaps with her contemporary George Egerton’s tales of women’s sexual liberation. As the inexpensive one-volume novel became the standard format for new fiction, Marie Corelli wrote some of the era’s first bestsellers; the popularity of her works became a sensation in itself, prompting various men of letters to voice their concern about the taste of the literary public. Paston had nothing like Corelli’s readership, and as we have seen, she wrote fiction about women’s independence and sexual choice, the kind of New Woman fiction that Corelli condemned. Yet when reviewers noticed her work, Paston received the kind of literary respect that eluded Corelli so thoroughly that at times the latter imagined a conspiracy of male critics against her. The divergences between Corelli and Paston confirm the significance of their parallel responses to the state of the novel. In their fiction about writers in the wake of the triple-decker, Corelli and Paston again present problems of the novel and its audience as problems of the novel’s materiality and its relationship to a powerful complex of media. Writing for a mass audience of book buyers, Corelli seeks to resanctify typography, bitterly renouncing both the New Woman and the corrupt male cabal that publishes and puffs the books that will be in request at Mudie’s this season. Writing a different kind of novel, and writing with a sense of a selective readership rather than an expansive one, Paston searches for a future for women’s fiction by working through not just the split between hackery and narrative art but also the conventions of New Woman writing itself. In their treatment of women and the business of writing, Corelli’s The Sorrows of Satan () and Paston’s A Writer of Books () might differ in nearly every other way. But together, they suggest that in the wake of the three-volume novel, the problem of the novel’s relationship to media systems could be approached as a problem of how and whether the novel mediates. Writing as the New Woman or writing against her, female novelists in both works must circumvent or overcome a network of materiality, materialism, and mediation run by men. This pattern becomes even clearer when viewed against the treatment of media systems in Corelli’s and Paston’s first novels, multivolume works from a

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 just-vanished era, A Romance of Two Worlds () and A Modern Amazon ().

The Novel Resanctified “A very singular change . . . has come over popular taste in England during the past two or three years,” complained Edmund Gosse in , fretting about what strikes him as the rapid cycle of the literary marketplace and the “extraordinary domination of the novel.” What constitutes this cultural domination is not simply the publishing or reviewing of so many novels, not their effects on other print genres, but their “‘sales’” (the word appears in standoffish quotation marks). Gosse is tacitly responding to the end of the triple-decker, treating a material change in the publishing of fiction – from borrowing triple-deckers to buying their one-volume successors – as an issue of taste and aesthetics. “In the decay of taste, everything seems a masterpiece for a moment,” he complains. But “the books so hastily praised are not less hastily forgotten, and immortals cross the field and disappear for ever as continuously as figures cross the disk of the magic lantern,” that favorite medium for representing the phantasmagoria of fleeting modern impressions. Gosse treats the New Woman writers with bile, but he is more generally “appalled” by the sales of the most successful British novelists of the new single-volume era, writers such as Hall Caine and the New Woman-hating Marie Corelli. In , as the three-volume novel was reaching the island of the blessed, Corelli took advantage of its departure to imagine a new kind of connection between a novelist and her readership, in a book that became an early bestseller of the new age. With Barabbas (), Corelli had left her well-established publisher George Bentley for the newer Methuen. In fact, the ailing Bentley and his company would barely outlive the three-volume novel. George Bentley died in , and – after some attempts by his son to bring out threevolume novels through the next year – the floundering House of Bentley was bought by Macmillan in . In contrast, Methuen published its final triple-decker in  and quickly embraced the new format. Corelli’s The Sorrows of Satan () debuted in a single volume at the price of six shillings – and soon achieved “an initial sale greater than any other previous English novel,” becoming not simply “the first modern bestseller” but perhaps “the nineteenth century’s best-selling work of fiction.” The publication and reception of The Sorrows of Satan make it an event in the history of the British novel as a mass form. More than that, Corelli’s novel delineates a distinctive approach to turn-of-the-century media

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systems in the wake of the three-volume novel. Published the year after the triple-decker was scuttled, The Sorrows of Satan represents a transitional moment when novels’ different material forms might still readily be mapped onto their relationships to larger systems of print media. As we have seen with the death of Garfield and with Kipling’s unwritable story, late nineteenth-century views of media can readily slide over into the domain of mediums, of mysterious and ineffable connections. The Sorrows of Satan figures print media as a world of supernatural “romance” (in the book’s accurate generic self-description). Never doubting her creative powers, Corelli wrote many kinds of fiction, but the supernatural romance was her signature genre. With her combination of extravagant plotting and moralizing Christian spiritualism, Corelli might resemble a late Victorian amalgamation of Jackie Collins and Deepak Chopra. But more importantly for her art, Corelli treats romance as a potentially “democratic,” woman -friendly alternative to realism. Corelli’s first novel, A Romance of Two Worlds, tells the story of a pianist whose nervous collapse is resolved when a mysterious figure named Heliobas helps her discover the “Electric Creed” or “Electric Principles of Christianity.” Early in the novel, an electrical “network” resembling a small telegraph system figures the psychic disruption of the heroine’s psyche, the disturbance of that wondrous piece of human machinery, the nervous system; that intricate and delicate network of fine threads – electric wires on which run the messages of thought, impulse, affection, emotion. If these threads or wires become, from any subtle cause, entangled, the skill of the mere medical practitioner is of no avail to undo the injurious knot, or to unravel the confused skein. (RTW, )

This mental telegraph network is purely internal, confined to the body and mind of the heroine. Yet, in parallel with the newer realities of intercontinental telegraphy, the same image later allows the novel to postulate electrical links from an individual nervous system to realms more distant than any physical connection could reach, as if by a new transoceanic cable on the telepath network: “Granting human electricity to exist, why should not a communication be established, like a sort of spiritual Atlantic cable, between man and the beings of other spheres and other solar systems?” (RTW, ). As Roger Luckhurst notes, in the late nineteenth century “telepathy was inevitably theorized in relation to the coincident emergence of tele-technologies” based on electricity. But the “Electric Creed” announced by Heliobas goes further, claiming that

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 Jesus himself was “an Embodied Electric Spirit,” so that “Christ’s death was not a sacrifice” but simply a means of ensuring more direct communication with God (RTW, , ). Now “every thought and word of every habitant on every planet is reflected in lightning language before the Creator’s eyes as easily as we receive telegrams” (RTW, , original emphasis). In A Romance of Two Worlds, all of creation is a vast but invisible electric network pulsing with messages, and God occupies the central telegraph office. Corelli would continue to pursue the mystical possibilities of electrical communication in two subsequent novels featuring Heliobas. But The Sorrows of Satan, Corelli’s first novel of the single-volume era, goes beyond the electric telepath network of her earlier works. Rather than championing a spiritual system modeled on advanced media technologies, it determinedly applies the kind of dematerialized contact Corelli associated with electrical communication to writing and publishing – and, ultimately, to the single-volume novel itself. Geoffrey Tempest, Corelli’s obtuse protagonist, is a young, starving author, a sort of unmarried, university-educated Edwin Reardon or Jasper Milvain. The novel’s opening chapter resembles a castoff from New Grub Street that has been rewritten as a melodramatic first-person narrative: Whoever seeks to live by brain and pen alone is, at the beginning of such a career, treated as a sort of social pariah. Nobody wants him, – everybody despises him. His efforts are derided, his manuscripts are flung back to him unread . . . I took both kicks and blows in sullen silence and lived on, – not for the love of life, but simply because I scorned the cowardice of selfdestruction. I was young enough not to part with hope too easily; – the vague idea I had that my turn would come, – that the ever-circling wheel of Fortune would perchance lift me up some day as it now crushed me down, kept me just wearily capable of continuing existence, – though it was merely a continuance and no more.

Geoffrey manages to scrape together a precarious living as a writer of fashionably cutting reviews of novels, until he thoughtlessly publishes a eulogy of a novel he can’t help admiring – a novel by one of his editor’s literary enemies. Meanwhile, his own novel is refused by every publisher, one of whom good-naturedly warns him that “high-class fiction doesn’t sell . . . What goes down . . . is a bit of sensational realism told in terse newspaper English. Literary English – Addisonian English – is a mistake” (SS, ). In the s, the idea of the eighteenth century’s supposedly simpler, more literary print culture – a culture without electric telegraphs, as Jasper Milvain suggests – provides a characteristic reference point for

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British writing about publishing. Never mind the fact that Addison’s Spectator itself was a daily newspaper: here is Corelli’s version of a familiar opposition, between a debased fiction associated with inexpensive, disposable serial print-forms, and the kind of fiction that is “high-class,” “literary,” even “Addisonian.” At his lowest point one evening, Geoffrey receives three letters. Delivering them in such a precisely coordinated way, the postal system might be in league with the devil. For the first letter is from an old classmate who recommends the friendship of a wealthy man of his acquaintance, someone who can “pull the wires” in the “world of letters,” who “knows everybody, and is up to all the dodges of editorial management and newspaper cliques” (SS, ). The second comes from a law firm, announcing that Geoffrey has inherited a fortune from a man he never knew; at a stroke, the starving writer becomes a millionaire. And the third is a personal introduction from the rich man with the power to pull the literary wires, Prince Lucio Rimânez who (as every reader will realize hundreds of pages before Geoffrey does) is actually Satan himself. In A Romance of Two Worlds, the metaphysical communication network was divine. Here it is satanic. Charming, mysteriously world-weary, devilishly handsome, Lucio soon becomes Geoffrey’s best friend, as well as taking on the management of his prospective career as a famous writer. “A modest enough campaign,” Lucio declares, with some disappointment (SS, ). He duly connects Geoffrey with “an Agency for the circulation of paragraphs” as well as with “a ‘literary agent’” (SS, ). The quotation marks signal the novelty of an occupation that was the subject of controversy throughout the period. Publishers grumbled about dealing with intermediaries, and writers might wonder whether agents’ services were worth the money they took for selling writing that they neither produced nor published. But the literary agent was a sign of modern commerce and modern mediation on Grub Street. Few but Corelli might have suggested that literary agents literally did the devil’s work, but Lucio’s familiarity with the term and the profession confirms his advanced perspective on the business of print in the late nineteenth century. Indeed, Lucio himself functions as something of a literary agent for Geoffrey and seems well qualified for the role, even claiming to have been “an editor once myself” (SS, ). Geoffrey’s book, and his brilliant career as a novelist, are accordingly “launch[ed] . . . in the most modern and approved style”: he pays off one of the publishers who had previously rejected his manuscript, lays out more money to have his work “extensively advertised,” hires the busy paragraphists at the agency, and bribes a well-known reviewer with the assistance of

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 Lucio (SS, , ). Geoffrey readily consents to these diabolical tactics, although he is taken aback by the extent to which Corelli’s Grub Street turns out to be a network of brazen logrolling, puffery, and mendacity. His publisher explains to Geoffrey his plans to print a tiny first edition, give it away to the right people, and then announce that a second edition is already demanded. “And so on, and so on, till we get to the sixth or seventh edition . . . in three volumes; perhaps we can by skilful management work it up to a tenth” (later, they “will arrive at the one-volume issue, which will require different handling”) (SS, ). Geoffrey’s publisher is “a ‘new’ man, with new ways, and a good stock of new push and impudence” who has “secured the favour of a certain portion of the press, many of the dailies and weeklies always giving special prominence to his publications” (SS, ). All of this handling, managing, and pushing works well enough: Geoffrey Tempest’s triple-decker novel briefly becomes the talk of literary London. But Geoffrey is distressed to find that success even via diabolical access to this tidily interlocked media system only goes so far. His book is puffed by critics, “boomed” by advertisements, and circulated by the libraries – but its success is limited to this network itself (SS, ). The literary “London” that talks and writes of his book also turns out to be a London of library subscribers, the readership that demands the latest book but then promptly forgets about it: The “upper ten” subscribed to the circulating libraries, and these admirable institutions made a two or three hundred copies [sic] do for all demands, by the simple expedient of keeping subscribers waiting five or six weeks till they grew tired of asking for the book, and forgot all about it. Apart from the libraries, the public did not take me up. From the glowing criticisms that appeared in all the papers, it might have been supposed that “everybody who was anybody” was reading my “wonderful” production. Such however was not the case . . . I whose money, combined with the resistless influence of Rimânez, had started the favourable criticisms that flooded the press, found out that the majority of the public never read criticisms at all. (SS, –)

After the boom comes the bust. “Slowly and almost imperceptibly,” the book “drop[s] out of notice” (SS, ). The devil’s literary agency only goes so far: he can get Geoffrey’s book talked about in the press, but he cannot make it popular – or even ensure that it is read any more than its rapturous “criticisms” are. Once more, a routine media system produces amnesia.

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As he arranges Geoffrey’s literary career, Lucio also helps broker the entry into the social world that will support Geoffrey’s appearance as a soon-to-be famous writer. Through him, the author meets the impoverished Earl of Elton and his daughter Sibyl, a beautiful but corrupt aristocrat who will agree to marry Geoffrey for the sake of his fortune; as in New Grub Street, the writer’s professional and marital fortunes are closely intertwined. The earliest sign of her corruption emerges in their first meeting, as they watch a play that – in Corelli’s puritanical formulation – modishly celebrates the “purity” of its unchaste heroine. Geoffrey is shocked, but Sibyl takes it with more equanimity, explaining that “I have read so many novels on just the same theme!” (SS, ). The era’s New Woman fiction provides Corelli with a recurrent target (“a pure woman” is Hardy’s notorious subtitle for Tess of the d’Durbervilles), but the novel presents Sibyl’s knowledge of these novels as merely a pathology of her general reading habits. When the Eltons learn that Geoffrey himself has written a novel, they politely announce their plans to read it, but Sibyl’s quietly withering response suggests its place in the contemporary literary field, even as it reveals her own readerly relationships to contemporary print culture: “We must get it, we must certainly get it,” said Lord Elton, assuming interest, – “Sibyl, you must put it down on your library list.” She assented though, as I thought, a trifle indifferently. “On the contrary you must allow me to present it to you,” I said – “It will be a pleasure to me which I hope you will not deny.” “You are very kind,” she answered, lifting her beautiful eyes to mine as she spoke – “But the librarian at Mudie’s is sure to send it – he knows I read everything. Though I confess I never buy any books except those by Mavis Clare.” (SS, )

Even in his overstated enthusiasm, Lord Elton envisions Geoffrey Tempest’s book added to their list at Mudie’s; it is merely another item for their use, a three-volume novel to be consumed and sent back as usual. Sibyl goes still further than this, refusing the offer of the book straight from its author and choosing to trust that Mudie’s will send it to her without any prompting, as part of her regular, indiscriminate reading of the latest volumes. Her treatment of Geoffrey’s book as simply another production of the press parallels her indifference to him as a suitor; just as she reads any book that reaches her from Mudie’s, so she is prepared to accept any bachelor millionaire who shows up with a marriage proposal. In fact, reading “everything,” including New Woman fiction, is what depraves and ultimately destroys Sibyl, as she will confess in the lengthy suicide note

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 she leaves a few months into their unhappy marriage. The devil can broker society marriages or puff a book into one of Gosse’s momentary masterpieces, but his powers stop short of creating either conjugal love or readerly passion. In contrast to Sibyl’s indifference about most of her promiscuous reading, she singles out the works of a single author for purchase and ownership rather than for routine borrowing from Mudie’s: Mavis Clare. “As this name was uttered, a sort of hush fell on our party as though an ‘Angelus’ had rung”: from its first mention of her a few pages earlier, the novel treats this novelist with a reverence so extreme that it verges on inadvertent comedy (SS, ). Mavis Clare’s girlish looks, large readership, traducement by envious critics, and initials mark her out as a deliriously transparent ego-ideal for the author herself (some of Corelli’s books even featured an MC monogram on their covers), as Corelli’s critics gleefully noted. In this novel that features Satan roaming the earth as a literary dealmaker, Corelli makes Mavis Clare a repository not simply of artistic merit but ultimately of spiritual, even quasi-religious value. Matthew Arnold predicted that great poetry would take over the cultural functions of religion; Corelli awards this role to the popular novel. As in Andreas Huyssen’s account of mass culture as woman, a female reader represents the hapless consumer of a pathological mass culture. But for Corelli, the great alternative to indiscriminate media consumption is the better mass culture embodied by a bestselling woman romancewriter, not an elitist male modernism or a less passionate approach to aesthetic pleasure. Corelli’s Ruskinian views of feminine purity help justify her claims for the woman author as moral authority. As W. T. Stead wryly noted of the novel, “in the new cosmogony that is revealed to us in this interesting and remarkable romance, the two representatives of the principle of good and evil are the Devil on one side and Marie Corelli on the other.” Geoffrey Tempest must secure literary fame via an array of mediations – middlemen, publishing networks, an elaborate multimedia blitz – and still the process only takes him so far. In contrast, Mavis Clare’s bestsellers garner barely a mention in the newspapers. But as a bookstore clerk informs Geoffrey, “Miss Clare is too popular to need reviews. Besides, a large number of the critics, – the ‘log-rollers’ especially, are mad against her for her success, and the public know it” (SS, ). The critics vituperate her work because she is outside their homosocial system of sensual novels and mutual puffery. The envious Geoffrey buys her most recent novel and publishes a scathing review. But when he meets Mavis, she tells him that

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she earnestly pities the critics, magnanimously forgiving their impotent abuse and his own. When Geoffrey complains to Lucio that Mavis Clare’s latest book has sold more than thirty thousand copies while his own has languished, the devil draws a contrast between their modes of literary success. Moreover, he presents their careers as the product of a structural division within publishing and reception: “Mr Tempest, you are not the only writer who has been ‘boomed’ by the press and who nevertheless does not sell . . . I sympathize with you in the matter heartily, but I am not to blame. At any rate the reviewers are all with you – their praise has been almost unanimous. Now Mavis Clare’s ‘Differences,’ though to my thinking a very brilliant and powerful book, has been literally cut to pieces whenever it has been noticed at all – and yet the public go for her and don’t go for you. It isn’t my fault. You see people have got Compulsory Education now, and I’m afraid they begin to mistrust criticism, preferring to form their own independent opinions.” (SS, –)

Corelli’s literally may be stylistically clumsy, but it also suggests that this media system chews even the most “brilliant” novels into meaningless fragments of disjunct matter for daily consumption, into tit-bits. “Many authors would not care so much for the public approval,” sniffs Satan; “the applause of cultured journalism such as you have obtained, would be more than sufficient for them” (SS, ). Thanks to Lucio, Geoffrey attracts praise from the intermediaries, but only from them. In The Sorrows of Satan, the taste of “the public” lies “entire beyond” the “publisher’s” – or the devil’s – “control or calculation” (SS, ). For Gissing, the extension of literacy helps to bring about a mass media system epitomized by Chit-Chat’s placement of light information in a materially constrained form. Corelli shifts the relationships between these elements and imagines things differently. As in Hardy’s formulation, periodical culture and the circulating libraries still support ephemeral fiction, lateral movement instead of artistic ascent. In The Sorrows of Satan, this media system sends a set of books to be puffed by reviewers and advertisements, requested for borrowing, read (or not), and forgotten by the time the next crop arrives. Yet, in contrast to Gissing or Hardy, the books that benefit from this system in The Sorrows of Satan are the “cultured” works, the critical darlings, the works of a coterie of men. The bribed reviewer of Geoffrey’s book, “a Scotchman” named David McWhing who has “his finger in every pie,” is Corelli’s bitter caricature of Andrew Lang, a writer, editor, and critic who has recently been analyzed as a something like a human embodiment of the late Victorian publishing

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 network itself (SS, ). As a hack reviewer turned novelist, Geoffrey has merely assumed a different role in the same system. Thanks to Lucio, Geoffrey Tempest has become a writer’s writer – and not a reader’s. But what’s most revealing about this interlinked system is Corelli’s insistence that this literary racket is ultimately best understood less in terms of sexism, elitism, or aesthetics than as sheer mediation. In the media system that includes Geoffrey’s novel, the former editor Satan is the ultimate go-between, an intermediary who helps coordinate noisy but temporary promotion by publishers, goosed-up book reviews in periodicals, and requests at the circulating libraries for the latest book or the next volume. As a library patron who reads “everything” the librarian sends, Sibyl Elton eventually falls in adulterous love with Lucio, the diabolical embodiment of mediation. In contrast, Mavis Clare staunchly rebuffs Lucio’s editorial advances. Hailing her “genius” and “personal grace,” he offers to make her “slanderers” into her “slaves” and to grant her “such farreaching influence as no woman has possessed in this century” (SS, ). But Mavis is not tempted by Lucio’s promises to broker power, critical praise, or romantic love. After all, she tells him, “many people love my books, and through my books love me – I feel their love, though I may never see or know them personally” (SS, ). Mavis is above temptation, and, in distinction to Geoffrey’s novel, her books are above mediation itself. (In line with this general suspicion of mediation is the unwavering anticlericalism Corelli expresses in The Sorrows of Satan and elsewhere. For his part, Lucio proclaims his great fondness for clergymen.) In Pierre Bourdieu’s account of the modern hierarchy of aesthetic goods, high-cultural prestige tends to accrue to works oriented toward a limited audience of fellow producers – the poet whose work is read largely by poets – not to works produced for a mass market. Corelli transvalues this hierarchy in a way that combines populism with authorial self-regard and with her brand of moralizing mysticism. Whitman’s bells sounded the unity of humanity via an interlinked media system. But in The Sorrows of Satan, the church bells that ring out the “Angelus” after Mavis Clare’s name are silent and virtual, which fits with the implication that her connection to her audience eliminates the need for any actual media system at all. Even a Heliobas would be superfluous here. In this novel, mass readership means not the dissolution of literary culture into tit-bits but the elimination of the mediation between populist author and popular audience altogether. The novel shows us Geoffrey Tempest’s publishers but never Mavis Clare’s, since Mavis does not depend on mediation. As the novel regularly points out, the invented name Mavis, from the French

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mauvis, means “thrush,” while her last name emphasizes the clarity of her moral stance and voice. With The Sorrows of Satan, a bestseller aspires to the unmediated condition of birdsong. Because Mavis Clare doesn’t need the elaborate, masculine media system harnessed by Satan, the system and its beneficiaries are unremittingly hostile to her. But Mavis Clare takes little offense. Freed from a system that locks fiction into the lateral motions of serialization and library subscription, her fiction ascends not merely to popularity but to sanctity. As she wrote and published The Sorrows of Satan, Corelli was living out a more prosaic version of Mavis Clare’s situation, although she found it difficult to treat her harsh reviews with such aplomb. Corelli “employed no literary agent in her relations either with Bentley or with Methuen.” Indeed, in a postscript to a brief memoir and publicity sketch about her first book, she curtly answers the questions “whether . . . I employ a ‘literary agent’ or use a ‘type-writer’”: “I do not.” Those questions are linked in her mind; an agent, like a typist or a typing machine (the word “type-writer” could refer to either) is just another form of literary mediation. For Corelli, authorship must come directly from her hands, with neither mechanical nor professional mediation. “No one sees my manuscript before it goes to press,” she insisted, not even her publisher’s readers. Her books do not, must not, pass through agents, typewriters, presses’ readers – or literary critics. Her break with Bentley was provoked by his refusal to publish The Silver Domino (), a satire on publishing and journalism, without having read it first. Like Mavis Clare, Marie Corelli faced a system of reviews and male reviewers that often treated her work derisively. The first edition of The Sorrows of Satan included a pointed notice: NO COPIES OF THIS BOOK ARE SENT OUT FOR REVIEW Members of the press will therefore obtain it (should they wish to do so) in the usual way with the rest of the public, i.e., through the Booksellers and Libraries.

Corelli probably meant to spite the reviewers. But with the policy announced here, she also refuses to recognize their special status as mediators, turning them instead into members of the buying “public” that consumed her novels so energetically. With The Sorrows of Satan, Corelli forced her critics to buy or borrow her novel, and she ended up with one of the great bestsellers of the age. In reality, Corelli herself could be quite savvy about publishing and publicity, refusing interviews and having her authorial photographs

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 carefully retouched to maintain her image. And indeed, The Sorrows of Satan achieved its success in part through the very advertising tactics the book so mercilessly critiques. But for Mavis Clare and Marie Corelli alike, book sales offer the framework for an unmediated connection between author and audience. In the novel’s account, the good taste of the reading public responds to the moral earnestness and “Addisonian English” of Corelli or Clare, but what really enables the spiritual connection between the author and her audience is the purchased book, as if it had ceased to be a physical medium for words at all and become a channel to the author. Geoffrey too comes to experience Mavis’s books as a mystical channel to her. Indeed, for this experience of rapture, it is wholly unnecessary that he actually read them: While we yet lingered over our wine, a man came in alone, and sat down at the table next to ours; he had with him a book, which, after giving his orders for luncheon, he at once opened at a marked place and began to read with absorbed attention – I recognised the cover of the volume and knew it to be Mavis Clare’s “Differences.” A haze floated before my sight – a sensation of rising tears was in my throat, I saw the fair face, earnest eyes, and sweet smile of Mavis – that woman-wearer of the laurel-crown – that keeper of the lilies of purity and peace. (SS, )

Delegating the handling of the medium to this random stranger, Geoffrey resembles a modern consumer of celluloid images read by a film projector or of sounds retraced by a gramophone needle; the vicarious performance of reading transports him, giving him the virtual experience of an absent thing. Yet in the novel’s economy of media consumption, mediation via the mass-market book and its anonymous reader doesn’t actually count as mediation at all. To suit the orientation of her works toward a mass marketplace, and to minimize their sense of material mediation, Mavis Clare apparently publishes her novels in single volumes, as did Corelli herself with The Sorrows of Satan. (In fact, Corelli claimed to have originally written even A Romance of Two Worlds as a “railway volume,” an inexpensive single-volume format meant to find its way to consumers looking for something to read on the train.) With its “stylish s title,” Mavis’s novel Differences recalls some of the era’s most notorious and controversial books: “Keynotes, Discords, Silverpoints, Caprices” – all of them collections of short stories or poetry in a single volume. But the title also signals Mavis Clare’s own differences from them, as well as her book’s divergence from the media system so effortlessly harnessed by Satan.

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Liberated from critics and libraries into bestsellerdom, Mavis Clare’s books ascend to become divine consumer goods. Meanwhile, Geoffrey Tempest’s triple-decker is weighed down by its material enmeshment in a media system based on puffing and swapping interchangeable volumes. But redemption is always possible, especially when every copy of Mavis Clare’s book offers direct access to the author-saint. Publicly defrauded of his Faustian fortune, Geoffrey becomes the butt of the jokes in the newspapers. A writer from “one of the leading journals” even exhumes his long-forgotten book from the store of dead triple-deckers in “Mudie’s underground cellar” to permit a gratuitous attack by the infernal media system that has cast him out (SS, ). And then a literary miracle occurs: the public made a rush for my neglected literary offspring, – they took it up, handled it tenderly, read it lingeringly, found something in it that pleased them, and finally bought it by thousands! . . . [my] publisher . . . wrote to me in wonder and congratulation, enclosing a cheque for a hundred pounds on “royalties,” and promising more in due course, should the “run” continue. (SS, )

As a writer, Geoffrey is on the royalty system favored by new authors seeking sales, rather than on the older system under which novelists sold their work outright and didn’t directly benefit from selling more copies. Lucio may be the Prince of Evil, but he is also an up-to-date agent and has done his job well. “I felt a King of independence!” Geoffrey exults, freed from the media system of three-volume novels into a world in which readers buy “thousands” of copies of the single-volume novels that please them (SS, ). Fresh from the publication of yet another “electrif[ying]” bestseller, Mavis writes to congratulate him on the triumph of his “clever book . . . after its interval of probation” (SS, , ). A period of probation: the span of Geoffrey’s spiritual trials precisely coincides with the mandated embargo on the single-volume edition of his novel. Just as his soul eludes eternal damnation, so his book escapes from the three-volume purgatory of Mudie’s catacombs into popular success, from a hermetic system of periodicals and circulating libraries into the hearts of the buying public. Like many of Corelli’s critics during and after her time, Stead found The Sorrows of Satan powerful but marred by the author’s rage against the literary world. “It is as if the book were printed in capitals, and illuminated from cover to cover with the most garish colours of the pyrotechnic artist.” As Gissing suggested, seeing printed texts as typography, as intrusively turned into their material medium, might make it difficult to regard them as aesthetically or culturally consecrated. But what seemed like

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 crudeness to Stead perhaps seemed like urgency and immersiveness to Corelli’s thousands of readers. Embracing the marketplace in which they find their literary success in defiance of the critics, Mavis Clare, Geoffrey Tempest, and Marie Corelli resanctify the novel by imagining it as a singlevolume vehicle for communion between author and rapt consumer. The devil may roam the earth tempting men and women, but in Corelli’s account, he quietly sorrows all the while, despairing at the inability of so many mortals to withstand the charms of mediation. Satan should be gratified by the unmediated popularity of these bestselling authors.

The Novel Unwritten Corelli loathed the New Woman, but she sanctified the figure of the woman novelist for her ability to reach a mass readership of book buyers – as well as for her potential to redeem an erring man of letters trapped on the mid-list. In contrast to Corelli, George Paston never had and probably never cultivated such a readership, and she did not treat an author’s sales as a sign of her blessed ability to reach a public without mediation. As Chapter  showed, Paston’s  A Writer of Books outlines a telephonic split between the novel and a media system supposed to comprise both new technologies and modern journalism. As I will suggest here, like The Sorrows of Satan, it views this differentiation between the novel and media in the wake of material changes in the format of long fiction, changes that emerge between the publication of Paston’s first novel and A Writer of Books, her last. The rise of woman journalists, artists, and entertainers was the starting point for the emergence of the New Woman as a topic of discourse in the s. Like many of the female authors and protagonists of New Woman novels, Paston “entered the public sphere” at a time when “the exploding mass media at the end of the nineteenth century” created new possibilities for women as workers and cultural producers. A Modern Amazon, Paston’s debut as a novelist, represents a dexterous first assay at linking the professional and marital fortunes of a young heroine and the business of writing, from “Fleet Street” to “Grub Street.” In the summer of , by publishing a novel about an independent, unorthodox heroine, Paston joined a larger conversation about how and where print culture might represent New Women. Just a few months earlier, articles in the periodical press, especially a set of much-discussed essays by the novelists Sarah Grand and Ouida in the North American Review, had touched off a flurry of journalistic discussion of “the New Woman”: were New Women

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insisting on the domestic virtues or defying them? Were they prim sexual reformers, obdurate spinsters, or (as Corelli had it) licentious proponents of erotic freedom? Were they real or fictitious, women to be encountered on bicycles and omnibuses or only in journals and novels? Shifting claims and representations moved the New Woman across print genres and media: some writers attempted to unmask her as a figure from fiction that only resembled social reportage, or as something like a self-sustaining meme developed within late Victorian journalism itself. Absorbing these debates into its form and conception, A Modern Amazon treats its heroine as once a realistic figure and the vehicle for an experiment on the relationships between plot, material form, and ideologies of sexuality and gender in fiction. Regina Haughton is a journalist who works for “that popular sixpenny weekly, Men and Women,” a fictional newspaper that “combine[s] the functions of a society and literary journal” (MA : , ). The novel’s treatment of the growing importance of “female clerks, secretaries, type-writers, and journalists” in publishing is both satirical and savvy (MA, : ); before taking the pen name “George Paston,” Emily Symonds had worked for the publisher John Murray. Her heroine’s occupation as a journalist, with particular responsibilities for Men and Women’s ladies’ departments and “feminine readers,” suggests that Paston is both responding to contemporary debates on the New Woman and pointedly drawing the discussion from periodicals back into the orbit of the print genre that had helped generate it: the novel, with its capacity to imagine hypothetical lives by working outward from real social conditions (MA, : ). A contemporary reviewer praised A Modern Amazon as “at once scientific and interesting.” It is also rigorously thought out. When we learn that Men and Women’s louche male editor originally selected Regina as an assistant from among nearly three hundred applicants on the basis of both her prose and her photograph, the back-story simultaneously highlights the sexism of her employment conditions and justifies Regina’s impressive complement of beauty, industry, and wit. Forestalling the familiar complaints about the implausible heroines who generally populate novels, Paston craftily provides a background that prescreens her protagonist for the role, even while also casting a keen eye on sexual inequity in the workplace. A wry treatment of gender on the level of the plot addresses both the norms of the novel as a genre and the situation of women in late nineteenth-century print culture. Perhaps “few” New Woman novelists “explicitly theorized art or their own writing in any consistent manner,” but such artful and efficient doubling between social concerns and

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 attention to fiction’s forms and conventions typifies Paston’s novels. It is part of what makes them worthy of greater critical attention than they have yet received, but also what makes them particularly responsive to the relationships between print genres and modern media. Regina occasionally decries her status as a “humble unit in the great army of women workers,” too aware of the divide that separates the society girl and the woman of letters: “She knew herself to be as young, as pretty, as capable of giving and receiving enjoyment as any of those spoiled darlings of society. It seemed hard that she should be condemned to pass the long summer days between a newspaper-office and the Museum reading-room” (MA, : , ). Yet like Men and Women or Paston’s fiction itself, Regina is also adept at merging the language and manners of polite society and those of publishing. Conferring with her employer, she asserts her claims as an author by seamlessly pivoting from the vocabulary of page layout to the idiom of flirtation and snubbing, from literary journal to society journal. “You must allow me two columns, please. And if you cut a single word, I will cut you the next time I meet you in Piccadilly” (MA, : ). From cutting behavior to cutting words: as with the female telegraphist who reads greasy novels “in fine print and all about fine folks” in Henry James’s In the Cage (), the trope of antanaclasis – using the same word in dramatically opposed senses – lets Regina Haughton move archly between the material dimensions of a medium and the social argot of class and gender. A Modern Amazon’s awareness of the material dimensions of literary expression extends into the novel’s scheme. If one of the tasks of New Woman fiction was to rewrite the nineteenth-century novel’s treatment of marriage and sexuality, Paston’s novel incorporates this project not merely thematically but in its very form and physical organization. In particular, A Modern Amazon exploits its somewhat unfashionable two-volume format. At the end of its first volume, Regina agrees to marry a man whom she values as a friend but does not love – but only on the condition that their relations remain platonic. Ingeniously, Paston has synthesized her main plotline from two competing representations of the New Woman, one that championed her steadfast sexual purity (Sarah Grand’s emphasis in her controversial The Heavenly Twins []) and another that posed her as a threat to the conventions of marriage (soon to be associated above all with Grant Allen’s The Woman Who Did []). Regina upends marital relations by remaining chaste. Furthermore, Paston has dramatically rearranged the elements of the courtship novel, placing the volume division itself between marriage and closure – formal, ideological, and

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heterosexual – which opens up the entire second volume for critique and experimentation. Over the course of that volume, Regina struggles to square her writing life and her chaste marriage. It’s not easy. Wanting to produce “a successful novel” but fearing that she will not be able to write passionate scenes that will “suit the taste of the ultra-sentimental British public” for romance, Regina takes on her oversexed former boss and editor as a collaborator – a step that leads to estrangement and separation from her jealous husband. But once she angrily rejects her co-writer’s advances, Regina and her husband can reunite. In the novel’s last pages, Regina tells him that she “ha[s] wanted [him] all this time” as they embrace (MA, : ). Paston thus splits apart the nineteenth-century novel’s traditional resolutions of a heroine’s story by precisely the length of a single codex volume, placing matrimony at the end of volume one but reserving romantic love and imminent consummation for the conclusion of volume two. With Regina happily married, A Modern Amazon may end up being a New Woman novel that resorts to an old-fashioned style of resolution. But thanks to its experiment with the multivolume form, the novel has also created a space for its modern heroine to articulate her erotic desire, licensed by her marriage but made according to the social and sexual terms that she has set. On the way to closure, the novel has audaciously reconfigured gender and genre, recalibrating the relationship between the marriage plot and the novel as a material book – or rather as material books. In contrast to A Modern Amazon, whose witty heroine is ready to abandon journalism for marriage and (after a volume of wedded celibacy) sexual love, A Writer of Books is a portrait of the artist as a young woman. Yet it too represents the aim of reimagining women’s stories as deeply intertwined with both journalism and the status of the novel as a medium. A review of the novel praises Paston’s “pictures of the feminine side of New Grub Street” – Gissing’s title has already given a name to the contemporary milieu of writers and publishers. While recognizing the work as a female “‘emancipation novel’” full of “interest and cleverness,” the reviewer only regrets “that this brilliant writer cannot find it in her heart or her conscience to take a happier view of the possibilities of married life.” In fact, A Writer of Books may be one of the most optimistic of the decade’s novels of female liberation, but as I will argue, it saves its sense of happy possibility for a domain entirely different from marriage. Cosima Chudleigh is the child of a library that has little resemblance to Mudie’s. Her father, a widower, works as the librarian for a small provincial public library and has bequeathed to Cosima a love of books. Indeed,

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 the two of them actually live in rooms above the library, which becomes “the motherless girl’s nursery, school-room, and boudoir” (WB, ). Thus “in time books became for her the realities of life,” a foretaste of her future confusions between writing and reality (WB, ). While her father’s bibliomania centers on “books or pamphlets dealing with . . . the French Revolution,” Cosima loves fiction and approaches it as a craft to be honed and developed, even when she is a child (WB, ). A born storyteller, in the novel’s first line she ruthlessly kills off all the characters of her improvised “first romance” to begin planning a “next story” that will be better, a quest to invent and improve her art that will deeply shape Cosima’s own tale (WB, , ). The library building houses not only the bookish Chudleighs but also a town museum and its curator, an architectural split that correlates with the supposed difference between printed paper and all other physical objects one might collect, curate, and access – the consecration of typography translated into institutional form. As if to confirm this opposition, Cosima’s father and the museum’s curator maintain an enmity as permanent as the clash between the stuffed monkey and boa constrictor whose “death struggle in a glass case” is the museum’s principal attraction (WB, ). Even the curator’s son Tom, Cosima’s only childhood friend, corroborates the division between literary creativity and the world of objects. Unafraid of “wasps and spiders,” skillful at doing “cunning things with tin-tacks and gum,” Tom is “absolutely incapable of inventing games or making up stories” and so becomes the audience for Cosima’s infant fictions (WB, –). As Chapter  suggested, Cosima’s disinterested professional desire for life experience and “information” that she might turn into fiction is the novel’s great donnée and its best joke, an acute response to issues of realism that could become especially pressing when its came to imagining lives for unorthodox late Victorian heroines. It also becomes the stuff of catastrophe, or at least of “a squalid kind of tragedy” (WB, ). Cosima’s awkward dinner date with the reader of the Telephone, that figure for an entire world of media consumption, is a rehearsal for less comic developments. When the grown-up Tom suddenly proposes marriage, Cosima is tempted by her desire for “an experience that must be valuable to any woman, and practically indispensable for a novelist” (WB, ). Although she recognizes that “of course, it would be unfair to marry a man merely for the sake of gaining ‘copy,’” she indeed ends up consenting to wed him, a man she suspects she cannot love, with a rueful awareness that “suffering [is] said to be the most stimulating of all experiences” and that bad

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marriages can make good novels (WB, , ). A Modern Amazon gives its heroine an entire volume of wedded chastity to acclimate herself to marriage and her husband, but the single-volume A Writer of Books offers no such accommodation. More explicitly than Gissing, Paston builds an economy of print prestige from a discourse of media mechanics. During a trip to the British Museum Reading Room, a woman journalist who is Cosima’s housemate gives her an impromptu lesson on the content and form of freelance journalism. First, “you try to get up subjects that are being talked about”: “Kamschatka,” perhaps, “or the prospects of sugar or leather”; in the absence of any such pressing subjects, “you fake up an article on old hats or old boots . . . and try it on one of the illustrated monthlies” (WB, , ). From that point, a writer of articles must be prepared to make her way down the field of journalistic production, with formal alterations at every step, literally cutting her work to pieces, as Corelli might say. “If it comes back, you cut it down, and send it to one of the weeklies. If they won’t have it, you chop it into ‘pars,’ and think yourself lucky if you can get it into one of the scrappy papers” (WB, ). The loss of textual integrity corroborates the loss of writerly integrity, as the manufactured article falls from wholeness into abridgment and finally into paragraph-long scraps that might suit Tit-Bits. But Cosima has no desire to become a “hack journalist”; instead, she hurries home to begin writing a new novel (WB, ). On her first day in London, Cosima passes through Fleet Street without stopping, seeking “the sanctuary of Pasternoster Row,” the seat of England’s trade in book publishing. The manuscript of her first novel in hand, she feels that “for once her illusions ha[ve] been realised” (WB, ). In undertaking this journey, she precisely reverses Alfred Harmsworth’s  removal of his magazine Answers (offpsring and rival of Tit-Bits) from “quaint old premises” in Paternoster Row to Fleet Street, where he would establish the mass-circulation Daily Mail in . Cosima’s trajectory though London is a declaration of allegiance. But she soon finds that her “illusions” are out of date, the relics of an earlier print era. As a novelist, Cosima cherishes “eighteenth-century”-style “digression” and “moralisings,” but sadly, these are hallmarks of a long-vanished form: “eight-volume novels,” monstrous antiques, the products of “a largely leisured age” (WB, ). The publisher who eventually accepts her first novel tells her patly that such digressions are the elements she must excise, just as Cosima’s journalist friend prunes her essays for the weeklies or chops them up for the scrappies. “Cut out twenty or thirty thousand

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 words,” he instructs; “it shouldn’t take you long, seeing that it’s nothing but cutting and joining” (WB, ). Here is the language of material production, of craftsman’s work on a physical medium, as if words and manuscripts were little different from tin-tacks and gum. Cosima reluctantly complies, even agreeing to supply the happy ending he stipulates. Initially, she “enjoy[s] the delightful sensation of seeing her own thoughts in print,” as if her first set of proofs sustained the authorial fantasy of a seamless movement from mental contents to published matter. But after slogging through rounds of proofreading, Cosima finds that “the bound book, when it issues from the press, seems scarcely less stale and tedious than the hacked and blotted manuscript” (WB, , ). With typical economy, Paston lets the physical description of the holograph stand in for the mortification of the penwoman. Too late – after she has married Tom without passion or affection – Cosima comes to love the quiet and cultured man of letters Quentin Mallory, who spends five years on a volume of his historical writing as he polishes every sentence. Appropriately, he arranges for Cosima to write an article on “the eighteenth century magazines,” a project that lets her escape “the fret and fever of the nineteenth century for . . . the leisured calm of the eighteenth” – “for a few hours at least” (WB, ). But as Cosima looks back at an earlier literary culture, she also considers the fate of her just-published second novel in the fevered fin-de-siècle present. The product of her attempt to write as her mechanically minded publisher recommends, this novel has “like its predecessor . . . expired at the end of the usual two or three months’ torpid existence” (WB, ). Now “any inclination to literary vanity on her part [is] sternly checked by the recognition . . . that her calling was beyond comparison more useless, and her creations more ephemeral, than those of the man who builds substantial houses, or makes solid armchairs” (WB, ). All the cutting and joining in the world will not turn Cosima’s work into carpentry. Yet here perhaps is a kind of paradoxical aesthetic comfort: that the needlessness and inconsequence of novels might be rehabilitated in the service of a fiction whose properties are not so materially predetermined. The novel’s denouement artfully winds up its interwoven stories of gender, writing, and realism. After a year of marital strain and a harrowing stillbirth, Cosima recurs to her old theory of turning experience into novels, reflecting with some bitterness that “she had learnt sharp lessons in the book of life during the past year, and they would make useful copy; that is all that they were good for” (WB, ). But once she falls in love with Quentin Mallory, “the book of life l[ies] open before her, new worlds

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sw[i]m into her ken” (WB, ). Here A Writer of Books proffers its best irony and provokes our wildest surmise: that Cosima wasn’t wrong to think that greater experience would change and enrich her fiction. Having known love firsthand, she discovers that she must now rewrite her almostcomplete novel. Yet even as she rejoices in her reciprocated love for Quentin, Cosima also comes to feel that a woman’s love differs from a man’s, that her “passion is spiritual rather than material in its essence” (WB, ). The distinction may seem conventionally mid-Victorian, even Corellian, but it takes on new significance here. An echo of the earliest dichotomy between young Cosima with her stories in the library and the Tom with his tin-tacks in the museum, this contrast once again defines not simply feminine against masculine but the imaginative novelist against materiality. Cosima prepares for a life of chaste and hidden love, maintaining her sexual fidelity to the irritating Tom – until her friend Bess Heywood reveals the stack of love-letters Tom has secretly been sending her, despite Bess’s disgusted refusals. With knowledge of Tom’s betrayal, Cosima finally reveals the situation to both men, but she ends up with neither. While Quentin’s Augustan restraint prevents him from casting Cosima into social disgrace through an extramarital partnership, Tom’s hypocritical pride makes him balk at living with a wife who loves another man. Cosima thereby evades the facile closure of heterosexual union, whether married or adulterous, happy or unhappy. But she also escapes from the literary outlooks embodied by both men. In the novel’s representational scheme, as Quentin personifies the rational calm of the eighteenth century, so the philistine Tom personifies the mass culture of the late nineteenth. Tom reads only “detective stories,” the down-market evening papers, and “his weekly favourites”: “Tit-bits,” naturally, as well as Harmsworth’s “Answers” (WB, , , ). The romantic plot and the writer’s story track each other as closely here as they do in New Grub Street; looking at Tom’s incriminating letters, Cosima notes that his attempts to woo Bess were most intense at the time when he was urging his wife to write “a more popular style of fiction” (WB, ). Leaving both men behind, Cosima escapes the literary alternatives of retreat into the belletristic past or capitulation to the media system of the present – a system Paston associates here as elsewhere with male sexual hypocrisy. But what’s left? For Corelli, the woman novelist’s spiritual bond with the mass public allowed her to sidestep a hermetic system of male puffery. A Writer of Books too emphasizes the work of the woman novelist in defiance of a masculine media system, but Paston’s commitment to realism

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 permits no such recourse to spiritual transmission via boughten book. By the end of the novel, Cosima has come to reject the writing of “popular” “machine-made novels” unworthy of “grown-up people,” in favor of writing for its own sake, writing to please herself (WB, ). Her next novel, she vows, will contain “no mechanical plot, no sensational carpentering” (WB, ). In reality, of course, every published novel is “machine made,” a product of building type into words, pressing paper onto inked formes or plates, cutting sheets of paper into pages, joining pages between covers. But by aligning workaday fiction with the industrial machinery that produces it rather than with the author who scripts it, Cosima suggests that for such novels, the process of manufacture spills over into their plots, their characters, and their address to an audience ready to consume them mechanically. The writer-protagonist of Dixon’s The Story of a Modern Woman wryly noted the predetermined plots of the old three-volume novel, but by , New Woman fiction too had developed a set of conventional plot possibilities. At the end of A Writer of Books, Paston has rejected the marriage plot, the husband’s-sexual-betrayal plot, the free-romantic-union plot, and the death-of-the-heroine plot. Now its final pages furnish a happy ending that self-consciously rejects the replayed, phoned-in narrative closures of either chastened resignation or joyous coupling. Cosima has given up the man she loves and left the husband she does not, but when she “mechanically” takes up “the Dial,” she sees a “two-column review” of her recent novel, a review in which a famous critic recognizes the aims of her book and offers fair-minded praise and critique (WB, ). Here is Paston’s version of Geoffrey Tempest’s reprint sales, the unexpected fate of a book as denouement. Reading these columns by “the English Sainte Beuve,” Cosima sees the kind of writer she might become. This is the wishfulfillment of the novel’s conclusion: not merely that Cosima’s work finds acknowledgment, but that it comes via an elevated literary journalism that has scarcely been in evidence until now. Such an experience is “rare,” yet even such uncommon journalism can only go so far (WB, ). For A Writer of Books is about to deflect mechanical closure altogether, even the closure of turning its last page and closing the cover. In the opening lines of A Writer of Books, Cosima dispatched her first characters in order to begin another story. In its last lines too, she prepares to begin again, to plan for the better book, for the novel unwritten, for a work that is not defined in advance by convention or format or medium. “The new work was going to be the book, the flawless masterpiece that every author is always going to write” (WB, ; emphasis original). Even the “new pen,”

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“full bottle of ink,” and the “paper, big paper” she requests from a female friend become more than simply material tools; they are what “minister[s] to [her] necessities,” binding “her wounds,” and becoming her “materials of war” (WB, , ). As Cosima sits down to begin a new novel that can only exist outside the last page of the novel in our hands, Paston points to the transformation of those materials into a book beyond the physical confines of this book or of any book at all. Like A Modern Amazon, A Writer of Books defers fulfillment until the second volume, but the fulfillment is aesthetic and not marital – and this novel has no second physical volume. By imaginatively delineating the work of modern novelists, charting their paths through a cultural field in which the novel hovers between art and medium, writerly fictions in the age of the triple-decker’s decline represented not simply a changing media environment but the emerging idea of modern media itself. With the demise of the three-volume system came greater opportunities for the novel to distinguish itself from cultural forms that were supposedly more circumscribed by the materials of their media. The rise of the six-shilling novel, the end of the circulating libraries’ control over readers’ access to new fiction, the disappearance of the triple-decker: these developments in the history of British literature also constitute a moment in the history of media. The opportunity to make a case for fiction as an alternative to modern mediation especially suited novelists writing about authors in the print-form we could call the codex novel, with its promise to map its characters’ progress onto the march of prose, cover to cover, in the seamless and naturalized form of the physical book. Both Corelli’s romance and Paston’s realism treat the book as something that’s capable of becoming hardly a medium at all. It is the codex form that names the vocation of the liberated Cosima, thanks to the self-description that Paston has borrowed from Carlyle and retooled for a nascent age of media: a writer of books. Paston treats the alignment between the British novel and the codex form as a necessary condition for the integrity of fiction against a complex of other print and nonprint media: telephone, phonograph, Tit-Bits. But as it hails an unwritten fiction beyond modern media, A Writer of Books provides a conditional and precarious closure. Its ending may even point from the one-volume novel to the no-volume novel. After A Writer of Books, her best novel, Emily Morse Symonds stopped publishing fiction altogether, partly in favor of writing nonfiction about eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century books and writers, as if George Paston had finally decided to become Quentin Mallory. There is no book beyond media.

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 The novel against media and mediation: for Corelli, the one-volume novel could transcend a system of private libraries and magazine critics to consecrate the good taste of paying readers, while for Paston the novel ultimately remains private, prospective, in need of escape from even its own material medium. The novel’s enmeshment in a media system brings the prospect of eternal damnation or pointless hackery. Yet identifying modern media with their material can also emphasize not their unity as a system but their specific physical properties, the technical differences between them and the incommensurability of what they record or how they channel. Trying to bring together disparate media in a unified system can be an uncanny experience. But Bram Stoker’s Dracula will suggest that one name for what remains after the loss of material media in all their distinctness is information.

 

Words Fail Occulting Media into Information

How these papers have been placed in sequence will be made manifest in the reading of them. All needless matters have been eliminated, so that a history almost at variance with the possibilities of later-day belief may stand forth as simple fact. There is throughout no statement of past things wherein memory may err, for all the records chosen are exactly contemporary, given from the standpoints and within the range of knowledge of those who made them.

—Bram Stoker, Dracula ()

In these fin-de-siècle days, in this hurly-burly of scientific and mechanical development, this era of startling achievements and wonderful inventions, this time of radical newness and the evolution of latterday cults . . . while the curtain is being rung up on the coming woman, what about the coming typewriter?

—W. L. Wardell, “The Coming Typewriter,” from The Stenographer ()

Mavis Clare and Marie Corelli escape a satanic system of mediation by imagining the transcendent connection between a writer of single-volume books and the public that buys them. Two years later, Dracula offers another demonic figure with his own dark systems of mediation and control. In sharp contrast to Corelli, however, Bram Stoker presents his novel as a collage of modern mediation, an alternative media system that has been flattened for the sake of entering the Gutenberg galaxy. In its opening note, Dracula draws attention to the connection between the novel’s unbelievable plot and its elaborate mosaic form, its ostensible construction out of multiple “records” that have been organized not simply to tell the story but to produce knowledge. Metanarrative self-consciousness is nothing new for a tale of gothic horror. From their first appearance in the late eighteenth century, gothic novels have often drawn attention to their frame stories; this convention, with the narrative awareness that follows from it, has been a constitutive 

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 and meaningful feature of the genre. But in Dracula, an older concern with framing the main gothic narrative has fractured into a preoccupation with the origin and medium of every fragment of text that appears after the opening note, every last tit-bit. The “records chosen” for the narrative all bear explicit fictional metadata pointing to their sources, tags identifying their dates and a riot of s media: diaries in shorthand or longhand, personal letters and business correspondence, telegrams, phonograph cylinders, newspaper clippings. Perhaps only the note that opens the text is sourceless, its voice coming from somewhere beyond the narrative’s array of multimedia – from a place that will turn out to be the demediated textual space of the novel itself. Critics have construed the gothic horrors of Dracula as expressing a welter of subterranean late Victorian fears: of New Women, female sexuality, or male homosexuality; of the prospects of the reverse colonization of Britain; of the capitalist as bloodsucking parasite. Yet as its readers have noted since , the novel also draws obsessive attention to “the phonograph diaries, typewriters, and so on” that are supposed to document the predations of the vampire and the efforts of his foes. Indeed, if the canon of late nineteenth-century literature in English has single full-length novel now understood to be somehow about media, that novel is surely Dracula, an understanding that originated in powerful interpretations of the novel advanced a generation ago. But I will read the media systems imaginatively constructed, delineated, and subsumed by Dracula with a different emphasis, drawing attention to how the novel treats the relationships among media. In Dracula, these relationships themselves become a source of affect and meaning, connecting the gothic story to the media mechanics that make it “nineteenth century up-to-date with a vengeance” (D, ). Dracula will not simply narrate the encounter with the vampire; it will also tell the simultaneous and strangely parallel story that frames and establishes that encounter: the tale of the collection and collation of “these papers,” offering a supernatural romance not of authorship but of generating and managing information. Yet the media systems of Dracula reveal an imaginative dynamic only imperfectly accounted for by twentiethcentury media theories. The text emphasizes the losses and failures of translation between media, making intermediality a realm of hauntings and gaps. At once traversing these gaps and permanently recording them comes the voracious parasite who emerges as the perverse protagonist of the novel as information narrative: not the vampire but the typewriter. Examining media multiplicity in Dracula suggests that Stoker’s novel might not actually care much about media in themselves, that is, media

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in their materiality or specificity. Steadily tapping away behind the novel’s sex, gore, and terror, the typewriter allows Dracula to imagine how media diversity yields that homogeneous and apparently demediated substance, modern information.

Unreality Effects As this study has argued, late nineteenth-century cultures of print are haunted by the specter of the era’s emergent media multiplicity. But, like Kipling’s “The Finest Story in the World,” Dracula shows that this multiplicity also offers late Victorian print a way of generating specters. Media mechanics in these texts function differently from the relationships between media analyzed by later generations of media theorists. Writing in the middle of the twentieth century, Marshall McLuhan claimed that the content of a medium was always another medium. Accordingly, McLuhan drew our attention to the properties of the outer medium while discouraging us from being too distracted by its overt content, which was just a displaced or demoted version of a second medium, in any case. More recently, Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin have analyzed the relationships between media along the lines of remediation, their term for the dynamics of competition and borrowing across media. Neither model gives us great purchase on Dracula’s fiction of hypermediated content collapsed into a codex volume. Friedrich Kittler contrasts the issue of translation between media as it appeared in the discourse networks of  and , taking us at least nearer to the paradigm of Dracula. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, he claims, an ideal of universal, naturalized writing meant that all kinds of inscription were already a continuous translation from the book of nature, the primal source underwriting art, poetry, and the soul. Translation between languages or between media was “im-possible” because the movement of meaning between different forms of expression hardly counted as translation at all. But by the century’s end, Kittler claims, the turn to new, technological media had broken up the functions once united in writing, distributing them among his triad of gramophone, film, and typewriter. Translation now becomes impossible in a stricter sense. In a discourse network that emphasized the specific properties of technical media, there could be only “arbitrary” “transposition” between media, not translation at all. In this respect as in others, argues Kittler, “there is no difference between occult and technical media” around .

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 Yet turn-of-the-century paranormal fictions actually suggest different models for the relations between media in a multimedia world. Staging the conflict between bestsellers and Beelzebub, Corelli’s Sorrows of Satan identifies the dark powers with the hidden force of mediation. Other works achieve uncannier effects by emphasizing less a media system’s aspirations to demonic comprehensiveness than the failures of any such aspirations, as different material affordances bedevil the movements across media. Rather than insisting on wholesale untranslatability, these texts treat intermediality as the domain of occult media effects: echoes, absences, and alterations that are mystical and occluding, the sign of alien logics, unbridgeable gaps, displaced influences. The uncanny emerges from the margins of mediation itself. The other side of the Garfieldian fantasy of mediated unity on all channels is the unease that can emerge as mediation produces not uniformity but gaps and losses. Kipling’s “The Finest Story in the World” has offered one version of the uncanny as media profusion and noise. Obliviously channeling his own past lives, Charlie Mears became a kind of spirit medium granted access not to messages from another realm, from ghosts or from angels, but to the deep time of his soul itself. There is no suggestion that Charlie’s unrecognized memories are fantasies or hallucinations, or that multiple spirits inhabit Charlie’s mind; what afflicts Charlie is not madness, not telephonic schizophrenia, not the haunting of media by virtual presence. On the contrary, the past is real, and the self is somehow metaphysically continuous over time and identity, a palimpsest whose traces of past engrams might be retrievable with the right technical procedures. The drama of the story surrounds the narrator’s attempts to have Charlie replay those traces so that they might be translated into the more stable form of writing. As the project falters, Kipling represents its failure as phonography or telephony pushed so far that its limits as a medium become audible. Media translation may not technically be impossible. But, in informatic terms, it is lossy – a loss made complete by the end of the story. The paranormal or occult inheres in the buzz across the media network, in the story that can’t quite be written, in what’s lost via the movement across media. Stoker’s gothic adventure tale may have little else in common with Kipling’s wry exploration of the dramatic past lives of a banking clerk, but it too represents the lossy movement between media as paranormal. Invoked and diegetically incorporated, Dracula’s media become simultaneously modes of fictional documentation and figures for the novel’s own thematics of textuality, transmission, and knowledge. In Barthes’s account of nineteenth-century narratives’ reality effect, an extraneous physical

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detail sustains the impression of a whole “concrete” world waiting to be described. But Dracula suggests an unreality effect created by treating media as imperfectly transferable, by the loss of detail from one physical medium to another. From the beginning, Dracula both marks the differences between media and incompletely cancels them out. Jonathan Harker’s shorthand diary, which makes up the first chapters of the novel, comes to us fully spelled out in Roman type, although initially with a few conspicuous abbreviations such as the “Mem.” that explicitly marks the externalization of memory in a medium. “There is something about the shorthand symbols that makes them different from writing,” notes Mina, but that difference is just out of view in the printed novel we possess (D, ). Perhaps the first and most explicit question about the status of a medium in the novel is Jonathan’s musing on the crucifix he is given by an old woman. Does its power come from the object, or does it channel something else? Is it that there is something in the essence of the thing itself, or that it is a medium, a tangible help, in conveying memories of sympathy and comfort? Some time, if it may be, I must examine this matter and try to make up my mind about it. In the meantime I must find out all I can about Count Dracula, as it may help me to understand. Tonight he may talk of himself, if I turn the conversation that way. (D, )

Jonathan contrasts the essential power of a “thing” with its status as merely “a medium” for “memories” in a novel that frequently warns that human memory is untrustworthy. But the thing about a medium is that it is a thing as well as a medium; its material properties help determine its affordances – which is what makes its content only imperfectly transferable. Jonathan gives up on the question, and his words set up the next diary entry, which will delineate one of his several late-night discussions with the Count. Yet Jonathan immediately discovers the problem of the medium again, even when it comes to the Count’s conversation. “I wish I could put down all he said, exactly as he said it” (D, ). As in Kipling’s story, an awareness of the slippage between media comes to haunt even the elemental movement from speech to writing – indeed to shorthand, a mode of writing explicitly created to capture speech in near-real time. Perhaps Jonathan could borrow a recording device from Léon Scott or Thomas Edison. But in fact, this intermedial slippage also disturbs the sections of the novel supposed to derive from “Dr Seward’s Diary (KEPT IN PHONOGRAPH.)” (D, ). The earliest words imputed to that diary read less like a transcription of recorded speech than like jottings from the

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 listless and lovelorn: “Ebb tide in appetite today. Cannot eat, cannot rest, so diary instead. Since my rebuff of yesterday I have a sort of empty feeling. Nothing in the world seems of sufficient importance to be worth the doing” (D, ). The confusion between oral dictation and written notetaking persists: “Let all be put down exactly,” Seward later commands himself or his machine (D, ). As a phonographic injunction, duly set down, these words are surely a pointless illocution. But they echo the phonautographic fantasy of lossless exactitude that Jonathan only wishes he could uphold with his shorthand journal. Would the Count’s voice even register or replay on a phonograph? Stoker’s notes for the novel include the hypothesis that “painters c[ould]n’t reproduce” the vampire and that one “could not codak him [sic].” In Stoker’s conception, something about Dracula would systemically elude the media of visual reproduction at least; his notes also raise the possibility that a painter’s “likenesses” of Dracula would “always” end up looking “like some one else” or that photographs of the Count might “come out black or like a skeleton corpse.” The final scenario perhaps represents an astonishingly up-to-date riff on Wilhelm Röntgen’s x‑ray photography. The material properties and limitations of Seward’s medium of phonography become clearest to him when Mina Harker asks to hear the phonograph speak: he realizes that his archive of sound recordings lacks that crucial paratext, an index. Seward has been putting everything down exactly with no regard for how and why he might replay his words, how he might ever scan his journal entries or look up (listen up?) something on a series of wax cylinders. Mina offers to “copy it out” via typewriter, blithely confident that she will “learn something pleasant” as she listens to Seward’s account of his rejection by Lucy and her sufferings as Dracula’s victim (D, ). But when she does, Mina finds herself typing through her tears. As she tells Seward, “That is a wonderful machine, but it is cruelly true” (D, ). The events covered by these cylinders stop before the terrible last days of Lucy Westenra. Still, the machine makes an extraordinary impression on Mina, less for its content than for its faithful replay: “It told me, in its very tones, the anguish of your heart. It was like a soul crying out to Almighty God. No one must hear them spoken ever again! See, I have tried to be useful. I have copied out the words on my typewriter, and none other need now hear your heart beat, as I did.” (D, )

Mina’s typescript makes the words of Dr. Seward’s diary available for indexing, for collating with other sources, and for distribution, and she briskly informs him that they must be circulated among the Van Helsing

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group. “We have here much data,” Van Helsing will soon confirm (D, ). But the cruel, medium-specific truth of the wonderful machine is left behind on its “hollow cylinders of metal covered with dark wax” (D, ). Indeed, preserving the verbal content of the cylinders without the “very tones” of the voice’s sound patterns, is the express purpose of Mina’s enterprise. Rather than universalizing an agonized heart-throb, repetition on another medium will silence it. No one needs to hear those tones again – and in the novel, no one ever does. The sounds of the soul remain “kept in phonograph” but nowhere else. With the keys of her typewriter, the useful Mina has silenced a heartbeat almost as effectively as the vampire hunters will. Laying out a set of vividly spoken words as arid monospaced graphemes on a page, a typescript of emotional speech is a little like a skeleton corpse. The typist holds an uncanny position, working at the interstices between media. Mina Harker herself eventually becomes an unwilling spirit medium, linked to the Count by a gruesome feedback loop. Hypnotically channeling data relayed from Dracula’s senses, Mina “use[s] the same tone” she maintains “when reading her shorthand notes” aloud (D, ). The vampire hunters take this media system as truthful; their main worry is that this Minaphone is a two-way system. But they almost immediately note that Mina’s medial status also brings troubling hesitations and “silences” from “poor Mrs. Harker” when she tries to speak (D, ). Lacunae, absences, and losses mark the split between all kinds of media. The vampiric mediatization of Mina Harker drives Dr. Seward and his phonograph diary to the limits of their technopsychic affordances. After witnessing Jonathan preemptively read the burial service to his semiundead wife, Seward becomes overwrought. He describes the scene, twice in fact, but finally breaks off: “I—I cannot go on—words—and v-voice— f-fail m-me!” (D, ). The punctuation and orthography here encode pauses, breaks, failures both of “words” and “v-voice,” of signs as well as sound. This will be Seward’s final journal entry via phonograph. But these breaks also recur now when Mina attempts to write. Even in her own shorthand journal, she involuntarily pauses and repeats before writing out Dracula’s possible doom, jotting down the fact that Jonathan has left her in order to “destroy the. . . the. . . the. . . Vampire. (Why did I hesitate to write the word?)” (D, ). This passage goes awkwardly out of its way to remind us that these odd, faltering lines – transcribed like stuttering or forgetful speech – are supposedly written in a journal. In the ordinary run of textual production, a writerly pause shouldn’t register at all. As it defies

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 the norms of writing, this hesitation suggests aphasic blocks on live, real-time language circuits, haunting the text with the occulting that represents vampiric mediation. In this paradigm of lossy intermediality, media transmit or record truthfully in their way – Dracula seems largely uninterested in the possibilities of fraud or fakery that late nineteenth-century writers could associate with even the flashiest new media technologies. But the breaks, omissions, or failures in transferring content between media suggest realities that only register within a penumbra of media specificity: part of the sound doesn’t come through in the alphabetic text; an impression is not fully convertible into speech or writing. To borrow a description of Renfield’s psychic connection to Dracula, media have “indexy” relationships to one another (D, ). (It’s appropriate that Mina’s typewriter goes to work when phonography needs an index.) Media-specific processes help underwrite their truth. But these processes also mean that media will imperfectly track one another. The zone of partial loss, of media incommensurability, is the novel’s space for the psychic and occult. The occulting of media translation allows late nineteenth-century culture to use its vaunted technological advances in a paradoxical way: to create a template for representing the mystical or supernatural, the imperfectly knowable. The intermedial becomes a model for the paranormal. Walter Benjamin traced the aura of the traditional artwork, its sense of presence and power, to its origins in religion and “ritual.” With its lossy media transitions, Dracula relocates such mysticism to the “mediaura,” Samuel Weber’s suggestive term for the “auratic flashes and shadows” that can adhere at “the interstices of . . . reproduction and . . . recording” in an era of new media technologies. “The handwritten diary, as soon as it is hooked up to phonographs and typewriters, autopsies and newspaper reports, will kill the Lord of the East and the Night, leaving him only the miserable immortality granted the hero of a novel,” argues Kittler. But media connections and transitions in Dracula are not actually so smooth. After the eradication of the undead, the novel comes full circle with another note on the status of the text, this one expressly ascribed to Jonathan Harker. The opening lines of the novel asserted that the book would be a story about how these papers were brought together, but these last reflections confirm that the narrative of gathering these materials has also been a story of loss. Many chapters earlier, moments after being caught in flagrante setting up his feedback loop with Mina, Dracula had dashed to the study to burn all of the group’s original “manuscript” and “cylinders,” leaving only Mina’s typescript

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copies of them, locked in a safe (D, ). By the end of the book, the confident rhetoric of documentation that began the novel has disintegrated as thoroughly as the body of the Count. As Jonathan laments: We were struck with the fact, that in all the mass of material of which the record is composed, there is hardly one authentic document. Nothing but a mass of typewriting, except the later notebooks of Mina and Seward and myself, and Van Helsing’s memorandum. We could hardly ask any one, even did we wish to, to accept these as proofs of so wild a story. (D, –)

Dracula begins with such an acute fear of taking things at secondhand that even individual memory seems like a dubious and roundabout form of knowledge. But, thanks to the work of the typist and the violence of the vampire, now the text itself is presented as thoroughly mediated and vicarious. The textual history imagined by the novel would presumably culminate in the transition from mass of typescript to bound pages of typography in the form of the book at hand; Dracula poses as a media mosaic or scrapbook but actually arrives as a single volume of uniform alphabetic text. The very appearance and form of the novel attest to the loss of the notes and documents that were supposed to let an unbelievable story stand forth as fact. For Dracula, the greatest example of the occulting of media translation becomes the haunted power of the text itself. In this ultimate translation, the heroine who turns authentic documents into typing has effectively colluded with the vampire who destroys them. But this subterranean collaboration is highly fruitful: it not only provides the uncanny sense of haunting, inaccessible realities but also treats the processing of media multiplicity as a formula for producing modern information.

Information Vampires Words can fail in other ways, too, in Dracula. On holiday with Lucy Westenra on the eve of Dracula’s arrival in England, Mina “work[s]” at her stenographic journal in “a big graveyard, full of tombstones . . . to my mind the nicest spot in Whitby,” where she listens to the conversations of chatty old locals (D, ). Mr. Swales, the cynical chieftain of the group, gives the visitors “a sort of sermon” against Whitby’s local legends (D, ). “I must try to remember it and put it down,” declares Mina; his Yorkshire accent and dialect words would offer an advanced exercise in shorthand (D, ). In Mr. Swales’s account, stories of ghosts and hauntings represent not links to the authenticity of an oral folk culture but just the

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 opposite: “These bans an’ wafts an’ boh-ghosts an’ bar-guests an’ bogles . . . an’ all grims an’ signs an’ warnin’s, be all invented by parsons an’ illsome beuk-bodies an’ railway touters to skeer an’ scunner hafflin’s” (D, ). Clergymen, scholars, and railway hucksters – ostentatious literates and moderns – have “invented” and spread such tales to frighten the credulous. In transmitting dubious legends to gullible “bairns an’ dizzy women” who may pass them on in turn, the “book-bodies” as well as Mr. Swales rely on a literate person’s stereotype of oral cultures (a topic to which I will return in Chapter ). But Swales insists that the literate authorities also transmit lies about the past and the dead through a more enduring medium: “Why, it’s them that, not content with printin’ lies on paper an’ preachin’ them out of pulpits, does want to be cuttin’ them on the tombstones. Look here all around you in what airt ye will; all them steans, holdin’ up their heads as well as they can out of their pride, is acant – simply tumblin’ down with the weight o’ the lies wrote on them, ‘Here lies the body’ or ‘Sacred to the memory’ wrote on all of them, an’ yet in nigh half of them there bean’t no bodies at all; an’ the memories of them bean’t cared a pinch of snuff about, much less sacred. Lies all of them, nothin’ but lies of one kind or another!” (D, –)

The gravestones mark the last resting places of those who were really lost far away at sea, and inscriptions hail the “dearly beloved” who were neither dear nor beloved: carved into this medium, the falsehoods merely look more impressive (D, ). With equal gusto, Mr. Swales debunks the histories and truth-claims encapsulated in spoken legends, personal memories, and imposing gravestones alike. In the context of the novel, this incident suggests a morbidly frank approach to superstition and death, a backdrop to the novel’s roving undead as well as a counterpoint to its scenes of hysteria and sentimentality (almost always involving male characters). But the episode’s real media history reveals its deeper ties to Dracula’s dynamics of intermediality. Stoker’s extensive research notes include ten pages of transcriptions made from the actual gravestones at the Church of St. Mary in Whitby, the site of Mina’s encounter (described in his notes as “Tombstones. Whitby Churchyard on Cliff”). This sheaf of typewriting, the longest section of typescript in Stoker’s surviving notes, includes epitaphs that end up inserted in the novel nearly verbatim. Mina reads “Edward Spencelagh, master mariner, murdered by pirates off the coast of Andres, April, , æt. ” from one grave marker, essentially a re-transcription of an entry from the seventh page of Stoker’s graveyard notes (D, –). The entries even contain the name of a centenarian named “Ann Swales” – oddly,

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the only female name included in Stoker’s list – so that the voice of grizzled skepticism itself seems to emerge from a real grave-marker, an undead effect in its own right. The epitaphs quoted in Dracula are not fictional inventions, then, but renderings of actual, site-specific media objects as recorded firsthand by Stoker during his travels to Whitby, where he began planning the novel and taking notes; the real-life provenance of these inserted texts is gratuitously perfect. But these are also the very inscriptions that the scene methodically undermines: texts with no bodies behind them. The novel’s narrative frame directs us back to a collection of source-documents as a font of both “simple fact” and inauthenticity. The Whitby churchyard scene reiterates the media mechanics in the novel’s internal narrative of its assembly: carefully stockpiling an archive of media objects directly from contemporary records, translating them into piles of typewriting, eliminating extraneous material – and then pointing out that the stories they outline are unbelievable and their media unverifiable. In their typescript preservation, Stoker’s real Whitby epitaphs intersect with Mina’s fictional mass of typewriting, the haunted double of the printed novel. In the vernacular media theory forwarded by Dracula, the typewriter preserves and propagates other forms of media while simultaneously hollowing them out. Over the course of the novel, no typewriter ever functions as a tool for original writing. Typing does not seem to create a single original text, only copies that can be rapidly read, sorted, collated, and indexed. (Even “Mina Harker’s Memorandum,” the crucial memo that deduces the Count’s return itinerary, is carefully identified as “   ” and thus handwritten stenographically [D, .]) The typewriter dramatically increases the availability and outward uniformity of media content, unifying a collage of contemporary mediaforms into stacks of typed paper. But it does so at the cost of separating words from their places, their histories, and their material production. In Dracula, the typewriter is a strangely all-embracing device. A “metatechnology” (as Leanne Page calls it) or a tool for “the neutralizing of discourses” (Kittler), it “disrupt[s] the . . . circuit of meaning and intention” and expression that seemed to inhere in writing by hand. In Stoker’s novel, typescript is the medium into which all other media flow on their way to providing copy for the single, printed codex – a form that we have seen emerging from the British novel’s format wars as ostensibly the most neutral and self-contained of late nineteenth-century print formats. Revealingly, Mina’s typewriter does not process any passages taken from printed books, as if the move from print to typescript would be

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 redundant or retrogressive. The very neutrality and universality of typewriting in Dracula make it not just a medium like any other but something that happens to other media, from shorthand and wax cylinder recordings, to telegrams and newspaper stories. Typewriting is both a medial condition and a practice that propagates itself, that colonizes or converts whatever it encounters. In this and other respects, it will turn out closely to resemble vampirism, another practice of reproduction via transmutation. From the Whitby churchyard to Castle Dracula, graves are emptied, bodies decrypted. The vampire and the typewriter seem fated to converge. At the beginning of the novel, just as Dracula prepares to leave backwards Transylvania for modern London, Mina Murray is getting ready to leave the schoolroom for marriage, and to leave teaching for typewriting, both coordinating their plans around Jonathan Harker. Giving up her position of “assistant schoolmistress,” Mina studies stenography and typing in order to help Jonathan in his work as a solicitor (D, ); Stoker has evaded or accommodated cultural anxieties about the “type-writer girl’s” potential defiance of female “domesticity,” monogamy, and “spiritual purity.” The novel insists upon Mina’s brisk, efficient professionalism as well as her feminine sympathy and warmth. For other celebrity media couples as well, training in information technology doubles as preparation for marriage: Thomas Edison was said to have taught Morse code to his second wife, another Mina M., in order to let them communicate privately during their courtship. Even the personal journal Mina keeps in shorthand “is really an exercise book,” an attempt “to do what I see lady journalists do: interviewing and writing descriptions and trying to remember conversations” (D, ). Dracula’s alignment between media technology, copying, and journalism echoes the connections between new media and mass discourse we have traced across late nineteenth-century writing, but Stoker clusters them around the figure of the secretary-heroine at the typewriter. Indeed, Jennifer Wicke has read Mina Harker’s typewriter as the point of contact in the novel between mass mediation and the vampire’s ability to produce hungry new consumers. In Wicke’s argument, a mass of typewriting provides the content for mass reading. In fact, the relationship between the typewriter and the Count will turn out to be still more intimate, systematic, and technical. Like vampirism, typewriting in Dracula goes to work on existing entities, giving them an indefinite, twilight existence at the cost of their individual distinctiveness and integrity.

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If an age supplied with so many means of communication makes the materiality of media into an issue – as New Grub Street, “The Finest Story,” the last days of the triple-decker, and A Writer of Books have all made clear – one response is to imagine jettisoning the material altogether. The first page of Dracula boasts about eliminating “needless matters” to let the story “stand forth,” but the final pages of the novel ruefully recognize that what has also been liquidated is media matter itself, leaving only typewriting. Typed paper is a physical object, a medium as material as any other, but Dracula hardly treats it as one. Neutralized typewriter copy, the fictional source and imaginary double for the real codex book, supplants an array of “authentic documents” in their original media of inscription. What remains in the form of Mina’s typescript is supposed to be a collage of disparate materials distilled into uniformity, a sheaf of transcriptions separated from the material marks of authorship and authenticity. Many of the personal documents treat private matters – Jonathan’s journals describe his “wicked, burning desire” to be kissed by red-lipped vamps, Lucy’s letters outline her love-life, Seward’s monologues record romantic rejection and grief (D, ). Some were never meant for the eyes or ears of another person at all. But other documents are simply business letters, receipts, or invoices. And there are newspaper clippings: the Pall Mall Gazette interviews a crusty zookeeper about an escaped wolf; the Westminster Gazette (in real life another paper owned by Newnes) publishes an odd story about the young children lured from Hampstead Heath by a “bloofer lady” (D, ); the Dailygraph – Stoker has whittled down the Daily Telegraph into a medianym that encapsulates the newspaper as day-to-day writing – records the strange arrival of the derelict Demeter. The typewriter turns all these media – public and private, personal and impersonal – into a formally identical output that’s optimized for sorting, rereading, and further reprocessing. Abstracting such disparate materials into a unitary sequence of letters and numbers, Mina strips knowledge from its knowers, texts from their contexts. “Did you write all this, Mrs. Harker?” asks Arthur when she hands him the typescript (D, ). Mina nods. Yet “typewriting both de-individualizes the graphic mark and places it at a distance from the subject”; it separates the hand and eye of the typist from the act of inscription and makes “authorship” seem like “a collective enterprise,” even an “assembly line.” As Franco Moretti notes, the hunt for Dracula can only begin once the characters’ local, individual points of view have been amalgamated and the work of collation has begun. Within the circle of vampire hunters, the dilemma of Mina’s knowledge

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 rehearses gendered questions about the work of clerks and secretaries. But it also touches on the issue of depersonalized information itself. At her typewriter, Mina processes an elaborate multimedia system to create what I have elsewhere called “dislocated, dematerialized” modern information, that bland and fungible yet mysterious quantity that is supposed to result from the supposed transcendence of space and time, of matter and medium. During the second half of the novel, the part that commences with Mina’s decision to type her husband’s diary to make his experience generally available, the protagonists often seek “information” by name. Most frequently, the term refers to some bit of commercial or legal fact that will help them trace the machinations or movements of the count. But in a larger sense, the novel offers what Katherine Hayles calls an “information narrative,” a text shaped by problems about the nature and transfer of information at the level of plot, theme, and form. As Hayles points out, “information narratives include . . . an emphasis on mutation and transformation as a central thematic for bodies within the text as well as for bodies of texts.” In Dracula, these processes run parallel: the typewriter transforms media into information, while the Count revamps human beings into undead creatures. Quincey Morris boasts about the power of the blood of “strong men,” whereas the aristocrat Arthur Holmwood’s blood is “so pure that we need not defibrinate it” (D, , ). Yet all of this blood flows from the men of Dracula into the exsanguinated Lucy only to end up pooled and undifferentiated in the vampire’s undiscriminating gullet. Is there something in the essence of each character’s blood, or is the blood just a medium? The novel’s confusion over the distinctiveness and materiality of bodies is fully reiterated in its ambivalence about the status of mediatexts and documents. Moreover, dark, atavistic vampirism rivals modern media systems in its transformative logic. Mina’s ravenous typewriter archives daily journals, personal letters, business correspondence, phonograph diaries, newspaper articles, and all the rest in a manner that parallels the preservation and destruction that happens when Count Dracula archives Lucy among the undead. Dr. Seward’s lament, “Lucy Westenra, but yet how changed,” might also be said for Seward’s cylinders or Jonathan’s shorthand (D, ). As if following Charles Guiteau’s tip for journalists, Mina uses “manifold” to make “three copies” of her typescript at once, so that her records, like the vamps of Castle Dracula, appear in triplicate (D, ).

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At the fin de siècle, the vampire could offer a decadent figure of aesthetic detachment, representing “the body without substance or ‘lived’ reality, detached from actuality and sensuous presence” – a figure we might also recognize in the neutrality of typescript and detached information. While Mina is a “train fiend” who enjoys memorizing timetables, Jonathan spots Dracula “lying on the sofa, reading, of all things in the world, an English Bradshaw’s Guide” (D, , ) – G. K. Chesterton’s figure for the defeat of “blood-curdling mysteries” by vapid information within popular print culture. (Stoker, however, neglects the chance to show either Mina or Dracula chuckling over “the humorous passages.”) In its capacity for abstraction and proliferating replication, the manufacture of modern information becomes as occult and mystified as anything out of Transylvania. The parallel between Mina’s work and Dracula’s culminates sensationally in the destruction of the original documents, when as if through an unwitting collaboration, Dracula and Mina effectively replace the original media materials with typescript copies. No wonder Dracula seems to recognize Mina as a counterpart and not merely a victim. Most of the protagonists who survive the events of Dracula are keen recordkeepers, obsessive producers of the cylinders and manuscripts that the Count furiously attempts to obliterate. The drive to document and preserve meets the drive to destroy the archive, the condition that Jacques Derrida calls “archive fever.” Yet the archive documents its own destruction and loss in the secondhandedness of its stored media. As the device that encapsulates the novel’s own frantic archive fever, the typewriter jettisons the past at the moment it preserves it for the future. Like the vampire, the typewriter feeds on the essence of the original in order to produce what can never amount to anything more than a secondhand version. Secreted in the safe, Mina’s typewritten copy corresponds to the “nightmare of Lucy” archived in a burial vault (D, ). The party of grimly exulting men who break into the crypt to destroy her bears a certain resemblance to the Count, who will soon enact his own retaliatory violence on cylinders, documents, and the typist herself. But if Mina’s typing parallels the insidious work of the vampire by turning matter into information, it also exceeds or even inverts that work. Dracula converts the material he consumes, yet vampires remain stubbornly tied to their original matter; they are not replicas or transcripts of living beings but corpses animated into hungry un-death. The three female vampires of Castle Dracula are not duplicates of a single human original. An impudent and vamped-up Lucy is a “foul Thing” in “Lucy’s shape

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 without her soul,” “her body and yet not it” (D, ). Dracula performs a suite of uncanny tricks that emphasize his ability to bend the rules that usually govern matter. He changes shape (one of Stoker’s additions to the vampire mythos), climbs down walls, even materializes from swirling dust in the dark, like the image from a magic lantern or early cinema show (D, n). But vampirism still centers on the physical materiality of bodies, “on corporeal rather than technological connections”: the undead corpses, the elaborate protocols for Dracula’s movement, the gouts of blood. Worst of all, Dracula depends on that basal form of terrestrial matter, earth. He needs daily access to the soil of Transylvania, now imported to England via “great wooden boxes filled with mould” (D, ). Dracula is “at his weakest” when “in his purely material shape,” resting in his box of humus (D, ). The Count’s very aura – attested by his pride in his aristocratic provenance, his sense of authentic personal and historical identity, his more than metaphorical connections to his native soil – helps confirm that Dracula remains firmly tethered to the realm of unique objects, places, and matter, the world of ritual rather than of the technological reproducibility and bloodless information promised by the coming typewriter. No wonder his efforts at conducting international business never “advance beyond handwritten letters.” Arriving on the eve of St. George’s Day and subjected to an elaborate ritual of approach, Jonathan visits an entity who is “embedded in the context of tradition,” to quote Benjamin; as he plans his departure for England, Dracula might be said to be trying to meet his audience “halfway.” Still, in an era of electrical information flows, the Count is busy managing the logistics of dirt. Expressly seeking out and paying for “information” about Dracula’s boxes, the team tracks the vampire and methodically destroys his physical network and places of refuge (D, ). For the vampire-hunters, collecting and organizing information is the necessary prologue to neutralizing the Count’s material infrastructure: “when we get the information which we seek there will be no time to lose. We must sterilize all the imported earth between sunrise and sunset” (D, ). To sterilize, the word Van Helsing and company insist upon, is to prevent soil from supporting life, to disinfect, or to make reproduction impossible. An “awful creature,” “a filthy leech” (D, ), Dracula is a parasite, that figure identified by Michel Serres as “being and nonbeing at the same time,” which is to say, undead. Amid the sciences’ “general undertaking of pumping out and capturing information,” Serres notes something vampiric in our modern systems of knowledge and communication,

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something we can recognize not only in the practices of the vampire but also in the information technologies of his hunters. In Serres’s account, the parasite embodies both the fantasy of perfect channeling and the real effects of mediation, the noise in the communication circuit, the medial condition. The Count simply destroys physical media, a confirmation of his focus on the material substrate. But the typewriter at once neutralizes their material forms and processes their content. The typewriter parasitizes Dracula’s panoply of media as it extracts its information – vampiric typewriting (in Wicke’s phrase) with a vengeance. Typescript refuses the alternative Jonathan proposes with respect to the crucifix, of the medium as essence or as memory-channel; it goes beyond McLuhan’s model of media containing one another like Russian dolls or Bolter and Grusin’s dynamics of remediation. Rather, the typewriter translates the essence of the thing, destroying the aura of the authentic original to produce modern information. In attacking Mina, Dracula coopts a rival network’s most crucial node, promising interception and interference via the vampiric network that makes the typist into an occult medium. The physical inscription of the body and the circulation of the blood create a psychic connection that mimics the vampire-hunters’ technological flows of information. But the team has devised a superior organizational structure to suit the processing of modern information. “ October,  p.m. – Our meeting for report. Present: Professor Van Helsing, Lord Godalming, Dr Seward, Mr Quincey Morris, Jonathan Harker, Mina Harker”: Dracula’s enemies respond to his attack with a most vigorous program of committee meetings, with Mina taking notes (D, ). Their miniature bureaucracy delegates tasks, pools resources, and most of all deals with information, systematically organizing, copying, and disseminating it within the group. It also rigorously manages to keep things within the purview of this private corporate body: “what is to be done is not for police or of the customs. It must be done by us alone and in our own way” (D, ). The commercial image of “A Modern Correspondence Department with Edison Dictating Machines” suggests how the information topology pioneered by Stoker’s heroes would soon be generalized as the model of the turn-of-the-century office (Figure .). A middle-aged man and a younger one speak into the mouthpieces of phonographs, while a young man at the back attends to another piece of office equipment. On the other side, a young woman has “put the forked metal to [her] ears” to listen to a recording and transcribe (D, ). Here are the pictures of Van Helsing, Seward, Jonathan, and Mina at work. In an inset image, the disembodied,

 Figure . “A Modern Correspondence Department” as media system. Source: Promotional postcard (). Courtesy of Schreibmaschinenmuseum Peter Mitterhofer

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serious face of Edison presides benignly over the scene. Dracula is “the written account of our bureaucratization,” concludes Kittler. “Anyone is free to call this a horror novel as well.” In contrast to the collective information processing of the modern office, with the typewriter as its endpoint and origin, the organizational structure of vampiredom seems hopeless. Dracula has no apparent contact with the undead Lucy, and his interaction with the vamps of Castle Dracula seems limited to squabbling with them over Jonathan. Only with Mina does he achieve any kind of persistent communication channel. But Mina is providing notes about the Count. Under hypnosis, she produces a special kind of knowledge: knowledge without place or context, knowledge not subject to the usual constraints of physical movement, knowledge removed from its knower. “Where are you?” The answer came in a neutral way: – “I do not know. Sleep has no place it can call its own.” For several minutes there was silence . . . [T]he Professor spoke again: – “Where are you now?” The answer came dreamily, but with intention; it were as though she were interpreting something. I have heard her use the same tone when reading her shorthand notes. “I do not know. It is all strange to me!” “What do you see?” “I can see nothing; it is all dark.” “What do you hear?” I could detect the strain in the Professor’s patient voice. “The lapping of water. It is gurgling by, and little waves leap. I can hear them on the outside.” “Then you are on a ship?” (D, )

True, “neutral” data from a long way off, vicarious knowledge with “no place” of its own: this sound is the flow of modern information. Mina and her allies will discover to their horror that Dracula is receiving reciprocal transmissions from her. But in contrast to the Count, the vampire-hunters know how to manage the information they have, how to put it to use. Finally, as if reenacting Dracula’s attack on their documents, they destroy his material body and place his information in their files. The media of the first part of the novel are reduced to “ashes”; Dracula has “crumbled into dust” (D, , ). Even as they track the Count back to his castle, grimly retracing Jonathan’s pilgrimage, Mina has been using her “‘Traveller’s’ typewriter” “to enter everything up to the moment” (D, ). The typewriter – the typist, the machine – has circulated information and dispatched Dracula’s matter. The end of aura

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 leaves no way back for the timeless original, the Eastern dictator with his talk of blood and soil. The future belongs to those who turn dictation – and everything else – into information. The typewriter produces information that makes material media into pieces of typed metadata, that circulates knowledge at the expense of authenticity, that flows smoothly into the supposedly demediated form of the codex book. Yet a fugitive authenticity still seems to cling to the vampire as it circulates uncannily across our media: urbane and sordid, parasitic yet auratic, dangerously generative but murderously barren. In , Pater argued that all art aspired toward the condition of music, toward sensuous expression along the lines of its particular medium. Twenty years later, Dracula intuits that modern information management secretly colludes to reduce all media to the condition of typewriting, which is to say, of information. A novel that might seem to fetishize media has ended up imagining their destruction as its own origin story. The vampire’s afterlives in so many altered forms suggest that the vampire haunts us with its mediaura because there’s something undead about our media. An overheard “click of the typewriter” exposes our paranormal romance with the power and the strangeness of immaterial information (D, ).

In this book I have tried to avoid making simplistic claims about relationships between the media systems of the late nineteenth century and the twenty-first. But, given Dracula’s account of information and its investment of a single media device with the power to assimilate an array of media, it’s hard to avoid a sense of genealogical connection at least when tracking the real story of the novel’s own disinterred typescript. Unexpectedly unearthed under mysterious circumstances from a barn in darkest Pennsylvania in the s, a -page typed draft of Dracula was eventually purchased by its present owner: Paul Allen, the cofounder of Microsoft. Presumably, Allen keeps this auratic mass of typewriting in a fireproof safe. Stoker’s early handwritten notes for the novel indicate that the character who becomes Quincey P. Morris actually begins as “Brutus M. Marix,” “An American Inventor from Texas,” an explicit half-connection between Dracula and the modern figure of the technologist and entrepreneur. It’s possible that this character took inspiration from a novel about another energetic American inventor who confronts the Old World’s archaic

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horrors: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, the subject of my final chapter. Even as his friend Bram Stoker worked on Dracula, Samuel Clemens was busy recruiting investors – including Stoker himself – for the new media technology that he was trying to launch, a machine that would connect typing even more closely to printing than Stoker did. But by the time Stoker sent the Count into the world, the machine had failed and Clemens was bankrupt.

 

A Connecticut Yankee’s Media Wars Orality and Obliteracy

There is not a material marvel of this marvelous age in which we live whose fatherhood cannot be traced back to a single point, a single remote germ, a single primal source—the movable types of Gutenberg and Faust. That invention, of  years ago, was the second supreme event in the globe’s creative history; for by an unstrained metaphor one may say that on that day God said again, Let there be light—and there was light. —Mark Twain, draft of a speech to an association of master printers ()

Struck on the head during an altercation in the factory where he works, Hank Morgan finds himself transported to an Arthurian Britain that at first seems bizarrely foreign, save in its physical violence. Yet several patterns soon emerge to define the consistent relationships between Mark Twain’s not-very-historical Middle Ages and the industrial-age America that Hank seeks to recreate or pre-create in King Arthur’s realm. To begin with, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court presents Hank’s reaction to ancient Britain as the tetchy response of a proudly ethnocentric nineteenth-century literate to a largely oral culture. The seriocomic disparities between speech and the written word are a recurrent object of Twain’s attention throughout his career, as one might expect from a figure famous for his avowed care in representing dialect, for his live readings and performances, and for the sense of voice his writing conveys. But in A Connecticut Yankee, Twain goes further, drawing the contrast between spoken and written words into a system of quasi-anthropological differences between nations and cultures. This chapter begins by analyzing A Connecticut Yankee’s staging of the confrontations between speaking and writing, and between oral and literate cultures. Perhaps “Twain did not have a theory of orality” – at least not 

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a consistent or carefully reasoned one. But as I will show, A Connecticut Yankee’s treatment of the Arthurians’ mindset echoes late nineteenthcentury anthropology and anticipates soberer analyses of orality and literacy by twentieth-century scholars such as Jack Goody and Walter Ong. The main point of my juxtaposition of Twain’s novel with theories about oral and literate cultures is neither to argue for the prescience of Twain’s vernacular media theory nor to affirm the gulf between orality and literacy. Rather, I mean to show how the novel places media competition and media differences at the center of cultural development, Yankee entrepreneurship, and social conflict. As a writer whose life and career “spanned rural orality . . . the development of national printing and mass marketing . . . and the development of electric communication technologies,” Twain was well situated to contribute to the literary invention of media systems – and to imagine the ultimate tendencies of techno-cultural conflict. For, going beyond the rift between an oral culture and the world of writing and print, A Connecticut Yankee presents a vision of media innovation as rivalry and even warfare. At once the origin and the telos of Hank’s one-man colonization plans, industrial-age modernity inspires a model of culture as an arena of technological conflict and ruthless supersession. Media differences and rivalries underlie the humor and satire of the novel’s opening chapters just as much as they do the horror and brutality of its final scenes. Cultural contrast and technological conflict come together in the novel’s final, ghastly confrontation between the medieval and the nineteenth-century modern. The second section of this chapter analyzes Samuel Clemens’s own fascination with technological change, competition, and obsolescence – and his notorious failures as a would-be new-media tycoon, as he bankrolled James W. Paige’s mechanical type compositor, a project that took shape during the long and difficult writing of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. The novel’s giddily terrifying climax, its representation of machine-made slaughter, is thoroughly mediated by Twain’s vision of annihilative industrial media. A Connecticut Yankee never employs the term technology, a word whose full modern sense – not just mechanical knowledge or applied science but the machinery and methods developed from them – was only just emerging. But its attention to media systems allows the novel to construct a story of many inventions in which technical knowhow exemplifies both cultural advancement and cultural annihilation, the kind of story that would only become more familiar in the following century.

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900

Figure . Beard, “The stranger’s story.” Twain, A Connecticut Yankee. Source: Courtesy of University of Georgia Libraries

These Animals Didn’t Reason Hank arrives in Arthur’s Britain mysteriously and leaves nearly as unexpectedly. A Connecticut Yankee’s readers follow him there less traumatically by means of a frame narrative, “A Word of Explanation,” whose title incisively conflates the printed book’s account of itself with Hank’s ostensibly spoken narrative. Visiting Warwick Castle on a tramp abroad, the frame’s narrator (“M.T.”) meets a stranger whose flowing talk of “Sir Launcelot of the Lake, Sir Galahad, and all the other great names of the Table Round” weaves “such a spell” that the narrator feels as if he “move[d] among the spectres and shadows and dust and mold of a gray antiquity, holding speech with a relic of it!” That night, after M.T. has taken up a copy of Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur to set the proper mood, the stranger reappears to tell his tale, the main story of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. This section graphically enacts the coming separation between speech and writing. In one of the first of Dan Beard’s extraordinary illustrations, “The Stranger’s Story,” Hank Morgan’s oral storytelling opens up a visual gap between the printed words (Figure .). It flows upwards from the

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lower margin – against the flow of type – from an image of Hank and M.T. conversing and smoking, through a stylized dragon formed of their oral exhalations, to generic images drawn from Hank’s stories. In the page’s layout, Beard’s image obtrudes precisely at the passage in which Hank describes being struck on the head and waking up in another time and place, mapping the sudden violence of the blow onto the disruption of print by the combination of antique storytelling and sophisticated late nineteenth-century mise en page. Positioned directly above this irruption, the running title (“A Word of Explanation”) operates as something like an extra caption to the image, reinforcing the idea that the storyteller’s spoken, explanatory “word” has burst through the lines of movable print. This moment stages the shift from speech to writing, but it also points beyond this shift, to the elaborately printed modern volume in our hands. But soon the flow of his speech ceases, the lines of print close ranks again on the page, and with “one of those pathetic obsolete smiles of his,” the exhausted stranger gives up talking (CY, ). Instead, he offers M.T. the “book” he has written, a handwritten “manuscript” on yellow parchment (CY, ). In this origin story, a fictitious manuscript (a “palimpsest” bearing “traces . . . [of] Latin words and sentences”) provides the source for a real, typographically complex, printed book (CY, ). As artisan and traveller, the defeated, medievalized Hank Morgan corresponds to Walter Benjamin’s famous figure of the traditional storyteller. He also bears out Benjamin’s claim that in the great age of print exemplified by the novel, “the art of storytelling is coming to an end.” The turn to the stranger’s manuscript takes us from the novel’s explanatory “word” to the first “chapter,” a division only relevant to written discourse. It also takes us, conversely, from the literate world of the nineteenth century, the world that made Hank Morgan, to a realm in which oral communication is culturally central, while reading and writing are specialized technical skills confined largely to scribes and clerks, of little relevance to most people’s lives. In the novel’s famous first set piece, the newly arrived Hank uses his advance knowledge of a solar eclipse to astonish and terrify the Arthurians. Hank takes advantage of this feat to secure a place as a magician advising the king, the only role this culture can imagine for a literate technocrat, although Hank prefers the title “Boss.” Yet his triumph is only possible because “just by luck” he happens to have memorized this piece of disconnected fact, the exact date and time of “the only total eclipse of the sun in the first half of the sixth century,” presumably from an almanac or other reference book – the embodiment of the bookish treatment of knowledge as externalized, abstract, calendrical,

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 separate from the knower but available for consultation and reference (CY, ). Ong’s Orality and Literacy argues that the cultural shift summarized in its title can only happen one way. But here is Orality and Literacy in reverse, an inverted media history to suit a tale of travel back in time; having internalized a random, isolated, pointless written datum, Hank reconnects it to a lifeworld that is performative and agonistic, the world of Ong’s orality. Twain insisted that Hank Morgan was no “college” man but a toughminded industrial artisan; “he is boss of a machine shop; he can build a locomotive or a Colt’s revolver,” Twain told Beard, “he can put up and run a telegraph line, but he’s an ignoramus, nevertheless.” Yet the fact that Hank has so fully internalized the norms and assumptions of industrial-age literacy suggests how they have become a basic orientation, taken for granted even by ignoramuses. Only when Hank confronts a culture oriented around the spoken word do his assumptions as a literate come into focus. He is surprised by Arthurian bias in favor of oral testimony over written documents and by the absence of maps, to say nothing of the lack of “books, pens, paper, or ink” (CY, , ). At first he cannot understand why, although “the whole country” seems fascinated by him, “nobody had asked for an autograph. I spoke to Clarence about it. By George! I had to explain to him what it was” (CY, , ). Hank is sometimes puzzled by what seems to him the credulousness of the medievals, their emphasis on oaths and boasting, their tendency to take words for deeds; “they were a childlike and innocent lot,” he shallowly concludes (CY, ). But all of these traits simply characterize an oral culture from a literate perspective. Notwithstanding its sprinkling of literate monks and clerks, King Arthur’s realm is a recognizably oral culture and exemplifies Ong’s catalogue of orality’s “psychodynamics.” (Ong provides the most detailed and familiar twentieth-century roster of supposed oral and literate cultural traits, but as I will suggest, this distinction already had a firm place in late nineteenth-century ethnographic theory.) For one thing, as Ong would put it, the Arthurians’ use of language is formulaic and mnemonic, since it depends on oral repetition rather than on writing to facilitate recollection and preserve knowledge. Early on, Hank suffers through the tedious stories of Merlin (telling “that same old weary tale that he hath told a thousand times”) and the “wormeaten jokes” of Sir Dinadin the Humorist (CY, , ). In their responses to one another’s speech, the medieval Sandy and the modern Hank confirm her culture’s orientation toward repetition and recall. Impressed by Hank’s unfamiliar expression “where do they hang out?” Sandy resolves

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to “repeat it anon and anon in mine idlesse, whereby I may peradventure learn it” (CY, , ). Less broadmindedly, Hank complains of Sandy’s formulaic tales of knightly contests that “the fights are all alike: a couple of people come together with great random . . . and a spear is brast, and one party brake his shield and the other one goes down, horse and man, over his horse-tail and brake his neck, and then the next candidate comes randoming in, and brast his spear, and the other man brast his shield, and down he goes, horse and man, over his horse-tail, and brake his neck, and then there’s another elected, and another and another and still another, till the material is all used up. . .” (CY, )

Hank thinks of these stories not as recollections but as “material” – the literate’s term for reified knowledge – and the “pelting sing-song” of her oral-formulaic storytelling reminds him of the repeated announcements to passengers on a train (CY, ). “The talk of these meek people had a strange enough sound in a formerly American ear”; in contrast, the schools Hank establishes teach their students a “neat modern English” (CY, , ). In Ong’s account, an oral culture’s approach to language is additive rather than subordinative, as well as aggregative rather than analytic, producing discourse that agglomerates preset elements rather than precisely laying out the relationships between them. Consider all the work done by connective ands in Merlin’s oft-told tale, for instance: “That is the Lady of the lake. . . and within that lake is a rock, and therein is as fair a place as any on earth, and richly beseen, and this damsel will come to you anon, and then speak ye fair to her that she will give you that sword” (CY, , emphasis added). As this passage confirms, the Arthurians’ style tends to be what Ong calls redundant or copious, deliberately cultivating “fluency, fulsomeness, volubility” – as Hank learns when he tries asking Sandy for a few facts. Twain uses a particular authorial gimmick to capture the formulaic, additive, copious style of his medievals – and to help fill out the long format of the printed book itself: he interpolates lengthy stretches of Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, usually verbatim (as in Merlin’s tale). Twain and others later traced the origin of A Connecticut Yankee to the writer’s own fascination with Malory’s text and language, a fascination that extended to extraliterary exercises such as sending a telegram written in jarringly fulsome faux-Malory. Composing the novel, Twain transcribed passages from the Globe edition of Morte d’Arthur – or, more commonly, added notes telling his typist which passages to insert into the typescript – a

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 practice that gives the novel itself something of a palimpsestic feel, even as it hints at the dispersal of authorship and authenticity represented by Dracula’s typewriter. A Connecticut Yankee imports swaths of Malory’s prose as characters’ speech and as medieval attempts at news-reporting, contexts that make it appear especially ungainly and inflated. As Ong remarks, the oral paradigm of verbal copia long endured as a convention of medieval and Renaissance writing, but it often seems “annoyingly redundant by modern standards” – a trait that a copious telegram or chivalric news story makes amusingly clear. Courtesy of extended verbatim quotation, a quintessentially literate practice, A Connecticut Yankee gives us the style of King Arthur’s court. But it counterpoints Malory’s orally inflected writing with Hank’s laconic late nineteenth-century American style; for the literate Hank, oral language is essentially casual. Twain has pulled a literate trick: reciting long sections of Malory makes Merlin and Sandy seem lost in their wordy monologues, comically oblivious to their tedium. For theorists of the divide, the putative differences between primarily oral and literate cultures go far beyond discursive style, and these larger divergences too characterize Hank’s confrontation with King Arthur’s realm. Ong describes oral cultures as agonistically toned, a trait epitomized by the boasts and formal challenges of the Arthurian court. For Hank, these challenges culminate in his much-delayed clash with Sir Sagramour. “Many a time I had seen a couple of boys, strangers, meet by chance, and say simultaneously, ‘I can lick you,’ and go at it on the spot; but I had always imagined until now that that sort of thing belonged to children only,” Hank somewhat hypocritically complains (CY, ). Orality is also supposed to favor situational over abstract reason, pragmatically keeping ideas close to the human lifeworld. Ong cites the Soviet psychologist Alexander Luria’s fieldwork with the nonliterate and semiliterate as evidence of this orientation. Subjected to intelligence tests designed for literates, Luria’s nonliterate interviewees identify geometric figure with everyday objects (“a plate”) rather than with abstract shapes (“a circle”); they prefer to group objects together by possible contexts rather than according to their more abstract categorical identity (as tools, for instance); they staunchly deny the neutral, self-contained logic of a syllogism, not only refusing to generate a conclusion but even treating the formal premises as nonsensical claims about the real world. Hank Morgan administers a similar, literate-style test for the new army he is organizing, with parallel results. A well-read candidate, thoroughly educated at Hank’s new “West Point,” gives a lecture on “the science of war” – “battle and siege, . . . supply, transportation, mining and countermining, grand tactics,

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big strategy and little strategy, signal service, infantry, cavalry, artillery, and all about siege guns, field guns, gatling guns” – complete with “mathematical nightmares” chalked up on the blackboard (CY, , ). In contrast, his aristocratic competitor cannot read or write (“Takest me for a clerk?” he protests) or multiply six by nine; “having had no need to know this thing,” he points out, “I abide barren of the knowledge” (CY, ). Asked to analyze a comically complex question of arithmetic, accounting, and business law, he mistakes a hypothetical case for a real dispute and urges that its fictitious parties be left to resolve the problem among themselves. The competitive examination also confirms the oral trait (as Ong and company would have it) of the Arthurian realm that causes the most problems for Hank: it is conservative and traditionalist. “For a man, in those days, to have had an idea that his ancestors hadn’t had, would have brought him under suspicion of being illegitimate,” Hank cynically affirms (CY, ). Despite an impressive performance, Hank’s officer candidate loses thanks to the rule that all officers must have noble ancestry. However educated he may be, the West Point graduate is only the son of a humble weaver called “Webster.” “Webster—Webster. Hm—I—my memory faileth to recal [sic] the name,” intones an official (CY, ); the novel pays wry tribute to Twain’s own Webster Publishing Company as well as to the pioneer of American lexicography (Noah Webster was another modernizing Connecticut Yankee). For his part, Hank regularly manages to best the Arthurians by infusing his oral performances with the resources afforded by nineteenth-century print literacy, as with his knowledge of the eclipse. He mounts technological spectacles and thunders out German compound words to stun the natives and impress the reader; the novel lays out his German in huge blackletter type, print mimicking and superseding medieval script to provide a typographic correlate for electrical effects that the book cannot transmit. Camelot is a place of participation and performance, from its knightly challenges to the Barnum-like spectacles arranged by Hank. By the final section of the novel, Sandy and Hank have married and produced a daughter, “Hello-Central.” Inspired by Hank’s dreamy invocations of a telephone operator whose voice he liked, Hello-Central’s name points even beyond print literacy, to the marriage of speech and technology that Ong calls “secondary orality.” For Ong, “this new orality has striking resemblances to the old in its participatory mystique . . . its concentration in the present moment . . . But it is essentially a more deliberate and self-conscious orality, based permanently on the use of writing and print.” As a technology that demanded new protocols for

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 spoken performance, the telephone in particular epitomizes the encounter between orality and the nineteenth century’s cutting-edge media in A Connecticut Yankee. Hello-Central is the offspring of high technology and old-school chattering. Imagining the cultural Other for Yankee modernity, Twain pictured it trapped in nonliteracy and destined for supersession by media change. He wasn’t the only one. “Twain shared in his era’s tremendous valuing of literacy as a prerequisite of a community’s civilization . . . and of an individual’s social power,” notes Gavin Jones. Moreover, as Brian Hochman has shown, the pioneering American anthropologists of the era often held similar views about cultural development, making their work a forebear of North American orality and media theory in the next century. Lewis Henry Morgan traced the evolution of societies from savagery to barbarism to civilization, treating “the use of writing” as the test of progress. Morgan’s views were soon taken up by Twain’s contemporary John Wesley Powell. In Powell’s work, “language is the glue that binds together cultures,” but the medium matters; as Hochman summarizes, “to be savage and primitive is to be without writing, without media. To be modern is to be lettered.” These positions emerged in part from white Americans’ ethnological attempts to analyze Native American cultures and their prospects amid a white, European-American modernity that seemed destined to overwhelm them. Hank Morgan – Lewis Henry Morgan’s namesake – compares his medievals to American Indians, denouncing the Arthurians as “just a sort of polished-up court of Comanches,” “merely modified savages” (CY, , ). Even Hank’s initial eclipse gambit is inspired by a recollection of “how Columbus, or Cortez, or one of those people, played an eclipse as a saving trump once, on some savages” (CY, ). But the most sustained comparison for Twain’s medieval Britain is the American South, with its brutalized slaves and its unfree “freemen” (Hank is after all a Yankee). The southern writer George Washington Cable, whom Hochman singles out for his efforts to reproduce the speech of AfroCreole New Orleans, was the friend of Twain whose gift of a copy of Morte d’Arthur helped suggest the novel in the first place. From Morgan and Powell to southern dialects and Malory on the telegraph: what binds these reference points together is that they imagine the confrontation between an oral culture and technological literacy. Conflating a number of primary or residually oral cultures, Twain generates a model for his syncretic, composite version of early medieval society. It is a model as ahistorical as nineteenth-century anthropology’s vision of stagnant, unchanging indigenous cultures. As Sterne points out, “the concept of

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orality denies coevalness to different cultures,” treating oral cultures as if they existed outside the modern time of the literate observer. Indeed, A Connecticut Yankee makes this paradigm literal, plotting cultural conflict as temporal displacement. Even the novel’s use of its mock Middle Ages to skewer contemporary financiers or aristocrats (a theme emphasized in Beard’s illustrations) grows out of its treatment of social inequalities as at once outmoded and strangely timeless. What’s notable about the novel’s grab bag of cultural references is more than their mixture of egalitarianism and bigotry. Strikingly, the novel deploys them not merely to criticize the injustices of the Arthurian world but also to attack its cognitive style. The stoicism of medieval prisoners, for instance, is the result not of “mental training, intellectual fortitude, reasoning” but of “mere animal training; they are white Indians” (CY, ). The newly arrived Hank worries at first that his own obvious helplessness will contradict his bluff that he is actually a powerful magician – until he surmises “that these animals didn’t reason; that they never put this and that together” (CY, ). Moreover, he draws this conclusion precisely on the basis of their oral discourse: “all their talk showed that they didn’t know a discrepancy when they saw it” (CY, , emphasis added). In Hank’s supercilious account, differences in communication become cognitive difference, historical difference, ethnic difference, even species difference. Like many of the nineteenth century’s real imperialisms, Hank’s attempts to change the Arthurian world entail not simply political control but also the attempt to remake educational, religious, and economic systems in a far-off land: I saw that I was just another Robinson Crusoe cast away on an uninhabited island, with no society but some more or less tame animals, and if I wanted to make life bearable I must do as he did—invent, contrive, create, reorganize things; set brain and hand to work, and keep them busy. Well, that was in my line. (CY, )

However breathtaking its rhetorical annihilation of the entire human populace, the Crusoe reference hyperbolically captures the colonial project of overwriting this culture with his own. But his plans involve a step that would have been irrelevant in Defoe’s novel: “the very first official thing I did, in my administration—and it was on the very first day of it, too— was to start a patent office” (CY, ). The institutionalizing of invention begins Hank’s fight against conservatism and tradition, since “a country without a patent office and good patent laws” is “just a crab,” unable to move ahead but only able to go “sideways or backwards” (CY, ).

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900

Figure .

Beard, “Beginnings of civilization.” Twain, A Connecticut Yankee. Source: Courtesy of University of Georgia Libraries

The following chapter, “Beginnings of Civilization,” illustrates its title by showing a medieval lineman stringing a tangle of electrical wires on a pole (CY, ) (Figure .). With a jaunty feather in his cap, he personifies Yankee Doodle as technologist. In fact, Twain’s text describes only “ground wires” (since poles “would attract too much inquiry”) (CY, ). But the chapter’s title has perhaps inspired Beard to furnish a workaday version of the technological muse who strings telegraph wires from sea to sea in John Gast’s iconic American Progress (). The t-shape of Beard’s telegraph pole (a pictogram of the t of telegraph and telephone) comes together with the “T” of the chapter’s decorated initial capital – a convergence of the medieval illuminated manuscript, the complex typography of modern printing, and electric technologies that transmit without leaving a material trace. The late nineteenth-century book forges the link between post- and pre-Gutenberg words and worlds. While the lineman in Beard’s image installs a network, the page’s layout builds a media system. For the Connecticut Yankee, technological advancement is the key to historical development and power, a paradigm that has encouraged treatments of Twain’s novel as a fable of progress as well as a harbinger of a distinctly American imperialism. At times Samuel Clemens seems to have shared Hank’s enthusiasm for innovation, applying for and receiving

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patents of his own as well as sponsoring others’ inventions – especially those that promised to transform the production of print media. But Clemens’s own experiences suggest that the pursuit of late nineteenthcentury invention could be as agonistic as anything Hank finds in the realm of King Arthur. From orality to literacy to technologies of the industrial age, communication differences and media innovation produce conflict and supersession – for Twain as well as for his Yankee technophile. This paradigm is particularly striking in the case of the most notorious of Clemens’s ventures into patents and technology, the Paige Compositor.

Typesetting . In a set of notes from about , half entrepreneurial daydream and half advertising copy, Clemens extols the revolutionary power of James W. Paige’s marvelous invention: To begin, then, the operator makes a dart at the keys with both hands; a word instantly appears in the raceway before him; it came from the channels under the glass, but too quickly for anyone to see how it was done. The machine takes the measure of that word, automatically, & then passes it along . . . it measures the next word & the next . . . & so on & so on, stringing the words along the raceway about three inches apart until the operator touches the justifying bar; by this time the machine has exactly determined what kind of spaces are required in that line, & as the procession moves past the space-sash, the proper spaces emerge & take their places between the words, the completed line is then gently transferred to the galley by automatic mechanisms, & the thing regarded for four centuries & a half as an impossibility is accomplished. And no spacing by hand could be so regular, no justifying by hand could be so perfect

Today, this mechanical typesetting machine is most famous for its immense weight and expense, its astonishing complexity, and the fact that it would help bankrupt Clemens and embitter the last decades of his life. Yet the Paige Compositor, and its ultimate failure to compete with rival systems such as Ottmar Mergenthaler’s Linotype, also represent a critical stage in the history of the printed word. Clemens’s spiraling, doomed involvement with the Paige Compositor is well known. But I want to consider the project of creating and profiting from mechanical typesetting, as well as Clemens’s part in the task and his imaginative response to it, in the context of late nineteenth-century media history, and of new ideas about technological supersession and competition in the era of Bell and Edison. Far from merely confirming the biographical matrix of one writer’s work, I want to suggest how the

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 convergence of the technological, entrepreneurial, and literary imagination illuminates a wider late nineteenth-century understanding of media innovation. In particular, I will argue for the connections between the Paige Compositor, the era’s mediascape, and the treatment of technology in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court – the novel that Clemens was writing as he became deeply involved with the Paige project. The idea of a typesetting machine that could replace the work of hand compositing wasn’t new. Even as the adolescent Sam Clemens was learning the printing trade in the s, inventors were patenting simple devices that used buttons or levers to select pieces of type from compartments and gravity to drop them into place. More important in these years were innovations in the action of printing itself: powered rotary presses for newspapers and bed-and-platen presses for books. As a young man, Clemens was struck by the contrast between Benjamin Franklin’s hand press, which he saw in the U.S. Patent Office Museum, and the modern, multi-cylinder newspaper presses made by the Hoe Company. “What vast progress has been made in the art of printing!” he exulted, comparing Franklin’s  sheets an hour to the Hoe press’s ,. The final decades of the nineteenth century brought more multifarious attempts to apply new technologies to the publishing process. Crucial for the history of compositing – and for the media history of Mark Twain – was the typewriter, as a media device that allowed a single operator at a keyboard quickly to produce mechanized, quasi-typographical documents. In “The First Writing-Machines,” Twain recalls purchasing a typewriter in the early s after seeing it demonstrated by a “type-girl” in a shop who could achieve the impressive rate of  words a minute. “If the machine survived,” he recalls thinking, other operators might achieve even faster speeds (FWM, ); in a typewritten letter from the time, he speculates that his own adolescent training as “a compositor” would give him an advantage. But as Twain tells the story, his disappointment with the machine begins as soon as he takes it back to his hotel and discovers that all the type-slips the “girl” had produced actually contain the same words, the preset phrase that she learned in order to maximize her speed. Still, Twain ends up emulating her practice and using the typewriter as a tool not for composition but for personal mass production: At home I played with the toy, repeating and repeating and repeating “The Boy stood on the Burning Deck,” until I could turn that boy’s adventure out at the rate of twelve words a minute; then I resumed the pen, for

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business, and only worked the machine to astonish inquiring visitors. They carried off many reams of the boy and his burning deck. (FWM, )

As with Léon Scott’s phonautograph, literature serves as the sample input for a new medium, but the mindless reuse of the opening of the poem “Casabianca” now seems to parody the use of memorized poetry as a test case for new media. Like Mina Harker’s production of typescript in manifold, Twain’s anecdote of mass production at the typewriter suggests the device’s potential as a duplication tool, the opportunity it provided for turning a solitary operator at a keyboard into a publisher, even if all it published were souvenir slips of “Casabianca.” In the s, W. L. Wardell identified the typewriter as “a form of printing press” and predicted that it would soon develop into “a fixture or an article of furniture” to be used not for private writing or business documents but for “presswork.” Twain soon loses faith in the machine, with its output of “ugly” “Gothic capitals” (Remington’s first commercial machine couldn’t produce lowercase type), and amusingly recalls trying to foist the unloved typewriter onto various friends, including William Dean Howells (FWM, ). Nevertheless, he proudly portrays himself as an innovator for having hired “a woman” to type up his newest book before he sent it to his publisher (FWM, ). In the contrary fashion that typifies his persona, Twain presents himself as both media skeptic and pioneering early adopter; the Remington Company would cite his animadversions in its advertisements. Before he retired his type-machine, Twain reports, he used it rather spitefully to send off a note – complete with ugly, typewritten, capitalized “signature and all” – to a boy hoping for a letter with his autograph (FWM, ). Hank Morgan misses autograph seekers in Camelot; Mark Twain thwarts them in America. Twain also brags about having been one of the first home customers for the telephone after its commercial introduction; indeed, he links the telephone and typewriter, claiming both to have been “the first person in the world that ever had a telephone in the house for practical purposes” as well as “the first person in the world to apply the type-machine to literature” (FWM, , original emphasis). Twain was not simply a technophile in an age of invention; he regularly explores the literary possibilities of new technologies, writing, for instance, one of the first short stories to hinge on conversation by telephone (“The Loves of Alonzo Fitz Clarence and Rosannah Ethelton,” ) and an early comic sketch about telephonic miscommunication (“A Telephonic Conversation,” ). His interest in

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 applying technologies to the writing process persisted after his disappointment with the typewriter. At one point, he had hoped to compose A Connecticut Yankee via recording phonograph, a process he actually attempted with The American Claimant () before disappointedly abandoning the experiment, with the inevitable grumbling to Howells. (None of Twain’s phonographic recordings seem to have survived.) In the s, Twain consulted with Edison about the phonograph and explored the possibility of publishing a book written by the inventor; by the end of the decade, he had befriended and invested money with Edison’s great rival, Nikola Tesla. Biographers have frequently noted Clemens’s aspirations to move from successful writer to business tycoon, to strike it rich in the Gilded Age to which he gave a name. The first phase of Mark Twain’s career took him from compositing others’ words in a print shop to writing his own. Next, as a successful writer in the s and s, he regularly attempted a second move, into the roles of investor, business owner, and capitalist. He not only bankrolled a variety of new technologies but also regularly generated his own ideas for inventions, devices, and medicines, sometimes taking out patents on them. Part entrepreneur, part huckster, part visionary, the inventor offered a resonant figure for the artist in Twain’s America – perhaps even an aspirational one in a country where, in dramatic contrast to Great Britain and Europe, the patent rights of “technicians” seemed more securely protected than the copyrights associated with “literary elites.” Still, many of Clemens’s plans for businesses and inventions centered on the field of textual production. First came his investments in the Buffalo Express newspaper and the “Kaolatype” engraving process, which used clay as a coating for steel printing plates. Clemens bought the Kaolatype patent in  and sanguinely hoped that “this invention” would “utterly annihilate & sweep out of existence one of the minor industries of civilization, & take its place—an industry which has existed for  years.” Clemens treats media innovation as a realm of industrial rivalry, obsolescence, annihilation. Charles Webster, the husband of Clemens’s niece Annie, soon convinced him that the Kaolotype’s inventor was a fraud and the invention likely to fail. In the end, it saw use only for the cover image of the American first edition of The Prince and the Pauper (), Twain’s earlier foray into historical fiction. A few years later, Clemens established the Webster Publishing Company, initially managed by Charles Webster himself as something of a reward for his efforts on the author’s behalf. The company began by handling Twain’s work but achieved its greatest success

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publishing the memoirs of the former President Ulysses S. Grant – before overly ambitious projects, mediocre sales, the decline of subscription bookpublishing, and the trade depression of  drove it into bankruptcy. With increasing urgency and desperation, Clemens also became entangled with the funding and fate of James Paige’s Compositor, one of several contemporary projects to replace hand-compositing with a new machine that had a typewriter-style interface. The associations between mass publication and new media technologies must have made such a development seem inevitable, as preordained as the centuries of progress between Camelot and Connecticut. Starting with an investment of $ in , Clemens became the project’s major backer, not only sinking his money into the machine but also working to recruit other investors, eventually including Bram Stoker. In , having already invested $, in the device, Clemens committed himself to continue bankrolling the invention in exchange for half-ownership of the prospective company that would develop and market the machine. By the end of the next year, the cumulative amount of Clemens’s funding had reached $,, which included a generous salary for Paige himself. Caught up in his business ventures, Clemens often found it difficult to write during this time. But the novel on which he was working fitfully – he began thinking about the incidents of A Connecticut Yankee in  and wrote the book between  and  – suggests how Clemens’s projects as entrepreneur and author, his industrial and fictional attempts to apply new machines to literature, were bound up with ways of understanding technological competition and obsolescence in the late nineteenth century. The compositor and the composition of A Connecticut Yankee were linked in Twain’s mind, as biographers and critics have noted; at one point, he even hoped to finish his manuscript on the same day that Paige completed the machine once and for all. Clemens had begun his career as a printer’s devil, a young apprentice at a newspaper and print shop, working his way up to becoming first a journeyman printer, then a journalist and author. Years later, Paige’s device precisely replicated the labor of Clemens’s adolescence, performing the tasks that a human compositor had done since the age of Gutenberg. First it selected individual characters from cases of sorted type and set them into words. Next it incorporated those words into a line and added the spacing necessary to justify the line. Then it placed each line into a galley. Finally, and most astonishingly, after the set type had been printed from, the machine broke up this so-called dead matter in order to separate and re-sort its components (individual letters, punctuation, even spacers) and

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 return them to the machine’s compartments for reuse, just as a bored printer or printer’s devil would have returned bits of type to their cases – the most tedious part of the process. In a speech from the s, Twain recalls “put[ting] the good type in [the printer’s] case and the broken ones among the ‘hell matter’ . . . if [the printer] wasn’t there to see, I dumped it all with the ‘pi’ [jumbled type] on the imposing stone.” James Paige was first inspired with the idea of a mechanical typesetting machine in the early s. But he tinkered for years with setting, justifying, and distributing mechanisms before achieving his goal, a machine that combined all of these functions, in  – although there always seemed to be further refinements to make. The problem of dead matter was especially challenging, and perfecting the mechanism for breaking up lines and sorting type became a special focus of Paige’s slow work. In the end, his machine could even detect and remove broken type, inverted type, and special characters. But the pace of Paige’s improvements, and his treatment of the machine as an intellectual challenge more than a chance to strike it rich, exasperated Clemens and probably helped doom the project. Still, the Paige Compositor represented media invention on an epic scale:  feet long, weighing about  pounds, it included more than , individual parts (Figure .). Paige’s patent application was one of the longest that the U.S. Patent Office had ever handled. After eight years of review, it finally yielded three patents, the longest of which included  pages of textual specifications covering  claims, as well as  pages of technical drawings. Yet by going sequentially through the Paige Compositor’s ability to set type, justify lines, and distribute dead matter for reuse, the preceding paragraphs have offered a misleading description. For its signature innovation wasn’t simply to undertake all of these steps but to perform them all at the same time, its operations coordinated by their connection to a central camshaft. Even years later, Paige’s former assistant still bragged about the machine: “The Paige compositor has been pronounced by competent engineers to be the foremost example of cam mechanism ever produced in the United States, if not in the whole world, and to have performed by positive mechanical devices the largest amount of brain labour ever undertaken” (TPS, ). For other observers too, the Paige Compositor seemed almost an intellectual entity. Watching the machine in action, William Dean Howells had the impression that it could do “everything but walk and talk.” When Clemens had first seen it at the Colt Firearms factory in Hartford, his reaction was even more intense: he felt that “the machine . . . appeared to be able to think.” After all, the Paige Compositor could read

Orality and Obliteracy

Figure .



Patent complexity: the Paige Compositor.

Source: U.S. Patent , ()

type via scoring patterns that allowed it to differentiate between typographic elements for sorting, and Hank Morgan assumes that reading is the key to reason, just the capacity that the “animals” of Camelot lack. Even an “eminent mechanical engineer” was reported to have exclaimed “when he saw the machine in operation: ‘This is thought crystallized. . .’” (TPS, ). With its thousands of parts and hundreds of cam mechanisms, the Paige Compositor simulated the actions of an entire team of human printers and apprentices, mimicking and replacing not simply their hands but their eyes and brains as they set and sorted type. It “marked a nineteenth-century highpoint in the attempt to represent human actions in metal,” notes Walter Benn Michaels. When he saw Paige’s dead-matter distributor working properly at last, an exultant “Clemens said one day: ‘We only need one more thing, a phonograph on the distributor to yell, “Where in H—— is the printer’s devil, I want more type”’” (TPS, ). In fact, thanks to the machine’s all-in-one design, it would have been simple to

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 connect a phonograph to the camshaft, to upgrade this industrial printing machine with secondary orality. In a larger sense, the quip confirms Clemens’s vision that Paige’s device would bring print into an age of media inventions by translating the entire compositing process into high technology as directly as possible, replacing workers with a high-tech media system. As a faster and more efficient version of human labor, the Paige machine would make the hand compositor into the handloom weaver of print’s new age, annihilating and sweeping out of existence another centuries-old skilled trade. “This type-setter does not get drunk,” Clemens crowed to himself; “he does not join the Printers’ Union.” In his notes, Twain drafted a rather duplicitous assurance to printers that they would keep their jobs and wages as their work became not just faster but clean enough to “be done in a drawing room.” As “well instructed men,” printers already “know the history of labor saving and speed-enhancing inventions, & they know that no hostility in the world can stop such a machine from coming into use, or even notably delay it.” Only an ignorant savage would try to delay the march of progress. In the s, a number of inventors were at work on technologies that would supersede hand-compositing. Paige’s machine was immensely complex, huge, and finicky, but it could work, at least intermittently. Eventually, in speed tests at the Chicago Herald in , the Paige Compositor proved able to outcompete any individual one of the paper’s  Linotype machines (TPS, ). But this was part of the problem: by the s, the paper already owned several dozen Linotypes. Not only had Mergenthaler’s Linotype machines already come onto the market (they were first put to work at the New York Tribune in , a year before Paige had managed to assemble his first complete working model), but they were also smaller, less complex, and more reliable. Despite later claims by Clemens and his early biographer Albert Paine, it seems unlikely that Clemens ever received an offer from the Linotype group to merge their interests before the machines entered the market. Moreover, the machines exemplified fundamentally different approaches to the technical reproducibility of print. Both the Paige Compositor and the Linotype had keyboard interfaces and produced lines of justified type, but the similarities ended there. Paige’s device was created to handle type with as much finesse as a shop of hand compositors. As Clemens recognized with his phonograph quip, the Paige Compositor was an entire printshop on a camshaft: setting pieces of type, spacing out words to make columns, breaking it all down and

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returning the elements to their proper compartments. In contrast, Mergenthaler’s Linotype didn’t assemble type at all. It wasn’t a mechanical compositing device but a “slug-casting” machine, lining up the components of a mold that would be used to create a whole line of type in hot metal at once – a long lead slug, not a string of individual typographic elements. The Linotype didn’t automate the printshop; it eliminated it, putting the Linotype operator in charge of a miniature, on-the-fly type foundry. Its answer to the challenge of sorting dead matter, the difficulty over which Paige had labored for so long, was brutally simple. Once a line of type had been used, it was simply melted into hot metal again to create future rounds of customized, temporary typographic lines. The Paige Compositor accelerated movable type; the Linotype liquidated it. Mergenthaler’s device replaced the old conception of type as something valuable enough to be collected and reused with type-casting on demand. Slug-casting machines like the Linotype treated print not as an assemblage of units with the potential to recombine in meaningful ways but as a disposable gestalt created by the temporary need to place content within the dimensions of a page or column. And while Clemens reveled in the perfection of the Paige’s pages, the Linotype’s output was comparatively crude. In contrast even to the slightly later Monotype slug-caster, a Linotype prevented not only the correction of individual words or characters but also fine-tuning such as kerning. It was more readily adopted for printing newspapers than for books—basic, disposable type for an age of disposable daily literature. Promotional materials fancifully imagined authors freed from “the drudgery and cramp of writing or revising manuscripts . . . by the entertaining pastime of playing out their thoughts, pianoforte fashion, on the .” But there was nothing in this short-lived typography to sanctify what it touched. On a philosophical as well as a practical level, the Linotype bore out the emergent technological principles of its era. In The Control Revolution, James Beniger describes how a late nineteenth-century crisis of information management pushed industrial capitalism to pursue an ideal of controlled flow – and thus became the starting point for a nascent information economy. The Paige Compositor and the Linotype both incorporate controlled flow as an idea and a design principle but they do so in critically different ways. Whereas the Paige Compositor runs the assembly and disassembly of type concurrently through a single, unified machine, the Linotype simply melts down old slugs for new ones, a process that parallels the analog flows of information on electric telegraph cables or telephone wires. The Linotype doesn’t mechanize the Gutenbergian art of

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 type-compositing; it abolishes it. Supplanting movable type with meltable type, slug-casting machines reimagine print itself as an evanescent, streamlined, flowing medium suited to an emergent understanding of fungible information.

Cold Type, Hot Lead The clash of cultures and chronologies in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court makes its satire of sixth-century Europe simultaneously a study of the late nineteenth century’s mediated imagination. But, introducing himself, Hank identifies a more specific origin for his abilities and outlook. He recalls “the great Colt arms-factory” in Hartford as the place where he learned his “real trade,” learned all there was to it; learned to make everything; guns, revolvers, cannon, boilers, engines, all sorts of labor-saving machinery. Why, I could make anything a body wanted—anything in the world, it didn’t make any difference what; and if there wasn’t any quick new-fangled way to make a thing, I could invent one—and do it as easy as rolling off a log. I became head superintendent; had a couple of thousand men working under me. (CY, )

The Colt factory in Hartford, the factory where Paige worked on the compositor, has also produced Hank Morgan the inventor and sent him into the world. Even Hank’s odd mix of occupations – he is a “worker” and a “manager,” an “inventive mechanic” but also an “entrepreneurialcapitalist businessman” without capital of his own – echoes the distinctive “inside contract” system of Colt and other factories in the Connecticut River Valley. Clemens too had made Hartford the site of his ventures and innovations. Visiting the city for the first time in , he had the opportunity to tour its factories, including “the last, and greatest, the Colt’s revolver manufactory . . . a Hartford institution.” Twain revels in its “tangled forest of rods, bars, pulleys, wheels, and all the imaginable and unimaginable forms of mechanism,” taking “a living interest in that birth-place of sixshooters, because I had seen so many graceful specimens of their performances in the deadfalls of Washoe and California.” By the s, Clemens had become a Hartford institution himself, a producer and would-be capitalist who was part of the city’s character. Chauvinists of literacy, Samuel Clemens and Hank Morgan are also the products of an advanced print culture that has used the model of

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alphabetic print as a paradigm for mass production, for uniform products and interchangeable parts. Putting a print shop on a camshaft, creating a machine with thousands of replaceable parts, extends the basic logic of the print shop itself. This is the sense in which, as Hank claims, “the creators of this world [are]—after God—Gutenberg, Watt, Arkwright, Morse, Stephenson, Bell” (CY, ). Hank’s list begins with print and concludes with telephony. The creation of the world, or at least the history of culture, becomes a sequence of technical upgrades. Once he installs himself as Boss, Hank attempts to create a new cadre of young experts who will leapfrog more than a thousand years of techno-cultural history. Thorough literacy is “the first thing” taught in the educational “Factory” where Hank “turns groping and grubbing automata” – the animalized medievals – into “men” (CY, , ). Hank boasts of his ability to find a way to make anything; here he trusts that his “noble civilization-factories” will massproduce his own copies, modern men who share Hank’s mindset as a late nineteenth-century engineer, inventor, and industrial foreman. The Boss’s earliest and most steadfast ally in this confrontation is the page. In his real-world business dealings, Clemens invariably misspelled James Paige’s name, conflating the inventor with the surface his invention would inscribe. Hank Morgan’s partner in modernization really is a page, “an airy slim boy in shrimp-colored tights”: By his look, he was good-natured; by his gait, he was satisfied with himself. He was pretty enough to frame. He arrived, looked me over with a smiling and impudent curiosity; said he had come for me, and informed me that he was a page. “Go ’long,” I said; “you ain’t more than a paragraph.” (CY, )

Given a new name, Crusoe-style, by Hank, Clarence is a page as gorgeous, informative, and prospectively modern as the ones the Compositor was supposed to produce. (The name Clarence also figures in Twain’s early tale of the telephone.) The novel represents the task of remaking a culture in multiple, overlapping ways: as a colonization project; as a reconstruction of a cruelly hierarchical society based on what the novel pointedly treats as chattel slavery; as a Whiggish fantasy of historical progress that finally veers into a startling sequence of Kurtzian genocide. Introductions of new technologies occasion both the apex of the fantasy and the climax of the bloodshed. Halfway through the novel, Hank begins his descent into the underworld, his quest “to scour the country” – to examine it methodically is to cleanse it – “and familiarize [him]self with the humble life of the people” by going

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 incognito as a “petty freeman” (CY, ) – and later, to his horror, as a slave. But as he awaits King Arthur, who naively decides to join him, Hank is roused by a wonderful sound, a secular angelus: outside there rang clear as a clarion a note that enchanted my soul and tumbled thirteen worthless centuries about my ears: “Camelot Weekly Hosannah and Literary Volcano!—latest irruption—only two cents . . .” One greater than kings had arrived—the newsboy. But I was the only person in all that throng who knew the meaning of this mighty birth, and what this imperial magician was come into the world to do. (CY, )

Buying a copy from the “Adam newsboy of the world,” Hank finds it “delicious to see a newspaper again” but feels “conscious of a secret shock when [his] eye fell upon the first batch of display head-lines.” New media as shock: as he explains, “I had lived in a clammy atmosphere of reverence, respect, deference, so long that they sent a quivery little cold wave through me” (CY, ). Hank’s response to the newspaper conflates journalistic style with newspaper’s layout: both are “too loud” and “discordant” (CY, , ). In an extreme parody of hand-compositing, exactly the trade that Clemens was trying to abolish, the images of columns from the paper include virtually an anthology of basic printing errors: “misspellings, wrong fonts, inverted type, broken type, faulty alignments, uneven inking, and nearly everything else that could go wrong in setting up and printing off a sheet of news in a primordial shop” – a visual counterpoint to the sophistication of Twain’s printed novel itself, as Bruce Michelson notes (Figure .). Hank’s phlegmatic reaction heightens the comedy: “Little crudities of a mechanical sort were observable here and there, but there were not enough of them to amount to anything” (CY, ). Against the polish of the printed Connecticut Yankee, the Weekly Hosannah registers the material history of the compositing process supposed to have produced it. A faux-Arthurian incunabulum becomes a modern illustration, an embedded moment of media archaeology. A group of monks interrupts Hank’s reading to ask what he is holding, barely able to recognize its columns of print as writing at all. Paper, print, a “public journal”: Hank knows that none of these terms will mean anything to even the era’s most literate class (CY, ). But he stops to emphasize the speed and mass production that are the essence of newspaper publication: “A thousand of these sheets have been made, and all exactly like this, in every minute detail—they can’t be told apart.” Then they all broke out with exclamations of surprise and admiration:

Orality and Obliteracy

Figure .



Little crudities of a mechanical sort. Twain, A Connecticut Yankee. Source: Courtesy of University of Georgia Libraries

“A thousand! Verily a mighty work—a year’s work for many men.” “No—merely a day’s work for a man and a boy.” They crossed themselves, and whiffed out a protective prayer or two. “Ah-h—a miracle, a wonder! Dark work of enchantment.” I let it go at that. (CY, –)

As the monks handle this new medium in “tranced adoration,” Hank feels a pride that he can only describe as supremely maternal; “there is no other satisfied ambition, whether of king, conqueror or poet, that even reaches half way to that serene far summit”: “Yes, this was heaven” (CY, ). A print revolution and Hank’s debut as media mogul provide the high point of the narrative. A year before the publication of A Connecticut Yankee, John Wesley Powell also considered the historical “evolution” of societies through the lens of technological competition and replacement, including the “invention” of the newspaper: If we review the history of the human race . . . the arts of civilization and all the arts that have passed away by being superseded from age to age by better inventions . . . , we may comprehend that there is some good reason why the inventor of the electric light is superior to the inventor of the torch; why the inventor of the telegraph is superior to the inventor of the smoke-signal; why the inventor of the machine-shop is superior to the inventor of the flint-factory; why the inventor of the railroad is superior to the inventor of

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 the dog-sled; why the inventor of the newspaper is superior to the inventor of a picture-writing on a bone. By human endeavor man has created speech by which he may express his thought . . . And in all linguistic inventions through the coining of words and devising of grammatic methods and the invention of alphabets and of printing and of telegraphs and of telephones, invention has struggled with invention for existence, and the many have been sacrificed so that the few— the best—might remain.

Media innovation brings cultural advancement but also quasi-Darwinian technological conflict. In his nostalgic mode, Twain could lament “the triple curse of railways, telegraphs, & newspapers” (the very triad hailed by both James Garfield and his assassin) that seemed destined to spoil the sleepy Bermuda of , however eager he might have been to join the march of invention himself. But Hank Morgan, like Powell, regards the sacrifice of the many for the success of the modernizing few as the necessary price of progress. Inventions cannot struggle on their own. The Paige Compositor bears no grudge against the Linotype: the conflict between inventions is a conflict between people. In this vernacular media theory, innovation provokes not just awe but rivalry, discord, the annihilation of the old order – conflict on a far greater scale than Ong’s oral agonism. The novel’s denouement brings a campaign of destruction along these lines. The personal interchanges of the medieval tournament, even the everyday brutalities of serfdom – these bear little resemblance to the mass violence of industrialized warfare, the machines that lay waste to the garden. Already, Hank has held off five hundred knights by shooting Sir Sagramour and killing nine others with his dragoon revolvers, copies of one of Colt’s signature weapons. “The day was mine. Knight-errantry was a doomed institution. The march of civilization was begun,” he exults (CY, ). As Richard Slotkin points out, Hank’s weapons are precisely those wielded “against ‘Indians’ – a cowboy’s lariat hung from a western saddlehorn, and a pair of Colt’s revolvers.” With Hank, a culture of print literacy and mass production squares off against a rival it finds unworthy of survival. The final pages of A Connecticut Yankee describe an even more lopsided confrontation, one featuring an industrial weapon that had already been used against Native Americans. Britain lies under the Church’s “interdict,” a condemnation via interposed speech. The king is dead, the telegraph poles cut down, the electric light outlawed. But Clarence the Page has prepared a technological fortress, an outpost where, assisted by  specially educated teenage boys – ranged like upper and lower cases of

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the  English letters? – Hank will take a last stand against the priests and knights of Arthurian Britain. In a grim “battle” that is actually a preplanned massacre, an act of genocide, Hank and his assistants blow up thousands of knights with explosives. “Of course we could not count the dead, because they did not exist as individuals, but merely as homogeneous protoplasm, with alloys of iron and buttons” (CY, ). Hank Morgan’s march of invention takes the Middle Ages from orality to obliteracy. The explosive mines might vaguely resemble gruesome Linotypes, liquidating the knights into an undifferentiated mix in order to make tomorrow’s news out of yesterday’s dead matter. But the novel’s final weapons have a more direct relationship to mechanical typesetting and the history of media invention it typifies. After charging up the electric fence, Hank and his boys activate a final technology of industrialized mass murder: the Gatling guns. Clemens’s own connection to this weapon went back two decades – as long as his connection to Hartford. Writing for the Daily Alta California during his first visit to the city, Twain notes the presence of “Sharp’s Rifle company,” as well as “the heaviest subscription publication houses in the land,” and the great insurance companies “whose gorgeous chromo-[l]ithographic show-cards” have given him “delight” (Hank Morgan is also a fan of the medium). A trip to the Colt Firearms Factory leaves him gawking at the industrial machinery, at all the machines that produce “the various parts of a pistol.” But he saves his most exhilarated appreciation for an encounter with Colt’s remarkable new product: They showed us the new battery gun on wheels—the Gatling gun, or rather, it is a cluster of six to ten savage tubes that carry great conical pellets of lead, with unerring accuracy, a distance of two and a half miles. It feeds itself with cartridges, and you work it with a crank like a hand organ; you can fire it faster than four men can count. When fired rapidly, the reports blend together like the clattering of a watchman’s rattle. It can be discharged four hundred times in a minute! I liked it very much, and went on grinding it as long as they could afford cartridges for the amusement.

With its stream of bullets, the Gatling gun struck military authorities as so murderously unsportsmanlike that until the twentieth century it was seldom employed in conflicts between Western armies. Instead, its main uses were to intimidate striking workers in the metropole (industrial laborers who joined the union) and to quash rebellions at the frontier or in the colonies. As a tool for massacring natives, the machine gun seemed to confirm the superiority of the white men who wielded it; it was “a weapon . . . specially adapted to terrify a barbarous or semi-civilised foe”

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 (as the Army and Navy Journal put it), ideal for use against “Hereros or Hottentots.” Not until the Great War would the Gatling’s successors be fully unleashed on European armies. But Twain’s brutal vision was prescient: in real life as in A Connecticut Yankee, the machine gun proved fatal to any residual chivalry. Dropping bullets rapidly and precisely into each rotating barrel, one after another, without the need of human hands to load them, the Gatling gun is the Paige Compositor of modern weaponry, death on a single cam. Its great innovation was the use of gravity as a reloading mechanism, a feature it shared with the Compositor. Taking advantage of recent advances in machine tooling, it was the first weapon to use “a method of camming that ensured positive action and certainty of fire” – more traits that aligned it with Paige’s machine. Like the Compositor, the Gatling Gun allowed a relatively unskilled operator to spit out calibrated pieces of metal at an unprecedented rate, a rate that Clemens measured in terms of the gun’s ability to outpace the orality of speech (“faster than four men can count”). Furthermore, Colt’s Patent Firearms Manufacturing Company had bought Richard Gatling’s patents, so in real life the guns themselves were made in Hartford, Connecticut, in the very factory where Samuel Clemens saw the Paige Compositor at work – and from which Mark Twain launched Hank Morgan into the Middle Ages. In a draft of an  speech to an association of master printers, Twain declared that every “marvel of this marvelous age” ultimately sprang from “the movable types of Gutenberg and [Johannes] Faust.” At the head of his list of modern marvels come “implements of war so changed that an army corps of today, with its Gatling guns, and bombs, and rifled cannon and other deadly things would hold a field against the combined armies of Europe of Gutenberg’s time.” Only movable type itself has been left behind, claims Twain, but he “controls one of the hundred and one devices and inventions” that will soon remediate that backwardness. The unseemly note of advertisement here, and the technological threat to the Gutenberg army that would be his audience, would amply justify Twain’s decision to reject and redraft this speech. But the vision here of industrial warfare driving media innovation is worthy of Paul Virilio. Twentieth-century media theory often turned to the Greek myth of King Cadmus as a fable of literacy. The king gives the alphabet to the Greeks but also sows dragon’s teeth and harvests warriors: writing is the start of military organization, and rows of letters correspond to the ranks of soldiers they help coordinate. At the beginning of A Connecticut Yankee, Hank inverts media history to startle an oral-scribal culture; turning the

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kind of pointless factoid that characterizes an era of print literacy into an oral, performative magical utterance, he threatens the Arthurians with annihilation via almanac. Now, in a second historical confrontation that grotesquely parallels the first, the Gatling gun drops its dragon’s teeth into place to destroy the last of , armed knights, mass producing violent death. Dark work of enchantment: the knights are utterly swept out of existence by machines that spit out slugs of lead with unprecedented speed. The flipside to technological progress is rivalry, violence, supersession. The Colt Firearms Factory produced both guns and printing presses; Twain’s refractory typewriter was made by E. Remington & Sons, soon to be reorganized as the Remington Arms Company; Hank’s new West Point has taught his cadre of clerks both to read and to kill. The boy on the burning deck dies with every tapped-out typescript. Yet even with this grotesque final explosion into mechanized, late nineteenth-century mass murder, Hank’s story turns out to make little difference to the Middle Ages and not to alter the course of history at all. Moving sideways or backwards, an oral culture remains as stable and “homeostatic” as Ong postulates – or perhaps history follows the lines already written down and set in print between the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century. Mechanically accelerating an older human process by trying to move everything forward at once: this strategy, the Paige approach applied to the history of civilization, has been a formula for failure. Stabbed by a knight and enchanted by a vengeful Merlin, Hank sleeps through the centuries and awakens in his own time, his transit across the Arthurian age as anomalous, dramatic, and fruitless as a solar eclipse. Hank’s story, too, ends in obliteracy. While his tale survives on a faded parchment manuscript, he dies with the telling of it, fading away like Benjamin’s oral storyteller.

The nexus of print, progress, and power would continue to haunt Twain even after he wrapped up the Paige venture at a complete loss during his  bankruptcy. He would revisit it most notably in his unfinished manuscript for No. , the Mysterious Stranger. In an Austrian printworks at the dawn of the Gutenberg era, another young stranger suddenly materializes, a printer’s devil who magically automates the press: “there before our eyes the press was whirling our printed sheets faster than a person could count them . . . yet there wasn’t a human creature in sight anywhere! ” The workers even see the “dead matter” “move across the

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 room and pause above a case and go to scattering itself like lightning into the boxes,” as if sorted by an invisible Paige Compositor or a demonic printer’s devil. “It made you dizzy to see these incredible things, these impossible things.” Outpacing orality like the Gatling gun, replacing workers with ultra-efficient duplicates of themselves, the time-traveling stranger No.  has melded Morgan with Merlin, performing a form of magic sufficiently advanced to be indistinguishable from technology.

After Words The End of the Book

“A friend of mine reads a little, but not as much as he should,” said a budding Cincinnati literary genius the other day. “Why?” was asked. “Well, not long ago I was in his room and the talk turned on books. ‘Have you a mechanical turn of mind?’ he asked, taking a volume of Kipling’s ‘Many Inventions’ from his table. ‘If you have, take this and read it; I don’t know where I got it. I haven’t any taste for machinery of any kind—don’t understand that sort of thing.’”

—Filler item in American newspapers, 

The melding of technology and print culture in the late nineteenth century was seldom seamless. In this anecdote from a daily newspaper, the confusion between a literary work and modern machinery leaves Kipling’s book unread. Neither mechanically inclined nor sufficiently well read to recognize the author’s name or the title’s allusion, the friend of the Cincinnati literary genius enters print culture as a jokey tit-bit for the daily papers. Other writers at the turn of the century imagined more direct technological threats to the book and to reading – and sometimes to readers themselves. With the calamitous events that conclude A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, a codex book’s story of historical media revolutions and rivalries culminates in remorseless, efficient murder via technology. Other turn-of-the-century works imagine books bearing witness to more intimate scenes of intermedial bloodshed. In Richard Marsh’s The Goddess: A Demon (), the body of a man is found in an apartment, mutilated beyond recognition. A “revolving bookcase” nearby has been pushed against the fireplace, suggesting “that a desperate struggle had taken place.” “On the woodwork were gouts of blood. There was a blotch on the back of one of the books – a volume of Kipling’s ‘Many Inventions.’” The somewhat redundant “volume” emphasizes the bookishness of this book standing idly by, while the invocation of Kipling’s title sardonically anticipates the gruesomely inventive story behind the crime. As the denouement 

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 of Marsh’s horror novel reveals, the murderer – or the weapon? – that killed the book’s owner was a mechanical Indian idol, a life-size female automaton equipped with dozens of flashing clockwork knives. India, gynophobia, fascination with complex machines: Marsh’s summary of Kiplingiana in this bizarre murder is mercilessly trenchant. At once the virgin and the dynamo, and up-to-date with a vengeance, Marsh’s mechanical Eastern goddess resembles a darker, orientalized version of the female android in Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s L’Ève Future (), who is created by a fictional Edison from wire, electric fluid, and phonograph recordings on gold foil. As we’ve seen, at the turn of the century it’s not unusual for books to magnify or to demonize technology – sometimes at the same time. In the summer of , as other writers considered the fate of the threevolume novel, the French author, editor, and bibliophile Octave Uzanne envisioned a technological extermination less grisly than the attacks of Marsh’s mechanized goddess: “the question of ‘the end of books’ and their transformation into something quite different,” thanks to the continued refinement and adoption of the era’s new technologies. The phrase “the end of books” comes wrapped in quotation marks, as if even in  the piece’s translator or editor already suspected that Uzanne was invoking a cliché or coining one. An English-language version of what would become one of Uzanne’s Contes pour les bibliophiles (), “The End of Books” appeared in the American Scribner’s Magazine, but the piece itself is set in England, ample testimony to the status of vernacular media theory and prognostication as a transnational topic at the fin de siècle. The essay begins with a group of male friends attending a Royal Society lecture at which our early telephone appreciator Sir William Thomson, “universally known for the part he took in the laying of the first transatlantic cable,” builds on the solar theories of Hermann von Helmholtz to predict the death of the sun. Over supper at their London club, their heads spinning over the immensity of deep time and perhaps from their champagne, the friends consider the political and moral destinies of humanity, as well as the future of art and literature. From the end of the world to the end of books: fin des livres, fin du globe. However extravagant, the essay’s trajectory anticipates recent media-archaeological attempts to place our media in the perspective of geology and deep time, to write “a media history of matter.” Uzanne’s mischievous but insistent piece highlights the connections between technical procedures and media aesthetics. Now that copying both nature and visual art has “become simply a question of a vast diversity

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of mechanical processes,” the aesthete in Uzanne’s group anticipates that in the future a tiny elite of true artists will produce “abstract art” for a clique of enthusiasts, while “photography in colors, photogravure, illustrated books, will suffice for the gratification of the masses” (EB, ). To encourage aesthetic innovation, and to speed up the separation of true art from the mere manufacture of copies, this proto-modernist makes the Marinetti-esque suggestion that the most advanced nations burn down the museums – another move from technological supersession to physical annihilation in the name of cultural progress. Writing in the first person as the “Bibliophile” of the group, Uzanne spends most of his time considering “the destiny of books” as humanity enters an era of improved and ubiquitous acoustic and electrical media, the prospects of print and reading “a hundred years hence” (EB, ). As befits his own age of varied media modalities and affordances, the Bibliophile carefully specifies the material format at stake, as if casting about for a retronym such as “print books” or “books on paper”; “If by books you are to be understood as referring to our innumerable collections of paper, printed, sewed, and bound in a cover announcing the title of the work, I own to you frankly that I do not believe (and the progress of electricity and modern mechanism forbids me to believe) that Gutenberg’s invention can do otherwise than sooner or later fall into desuetude as a means of current interpretations of our mental products.” (EB, –)

Dusty old books may survive as antiques, but – in a pun that Uzanne’s translator might have found irresistible – they are no longer “current” in an age of electricity and of media machines able to unspool sounds and moving images in real time. As a book expert, the Bibliophile willingly concedes the many improvements in printing since the time of Gutenberg. But even the recent invention of “composing-machines, easy to run, and furnishing new characters freshly moulded in movable matrices” cannot save printing from having become a “somewhat antiquated process” (EB, ). The casual dismissal of even the cutting-edge Linotype compositor gives further resonance to the dramas of technological supersession in A Connecticut Yankee, confirming that we can read Twain’s novel as another early token of the anxiety of obsolescence, to borrow Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s incisive phrase for the state of fiction in the television age. “Printing, which Rivarol so judiciously called the artillery of thought” – this description would gratify Hank Morgan – is now itself caught in a battle it cannot win, asserts Uzanne’s Bibliophile: “printing, which since

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900  has reigned despotically over the mind of man, is . . . threatened with death by the various devices for registering sound which have lately been invented, and which little by little will go on to perfection” (EB, ). In the middle of the nineteenth century, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville sought to capture even fleeting sound as writing on paper. In the twentieth, predicts Uzanne, captured sound will displace writing on paper altogether. Audio will kill the typography star and sound the death knell of print; the libraries need not even be set alight. His audience erupts in indignation: “astonished ‘oh’s!’ ironical ‘ah’s!’ doubtful ‘eh! eh’s!” – a phonetic “murmur of denial” that itself illustrates the representational limits of the printed writing that his shocked companions are rushing to defend (EB, ). But the Bibliophile points out that in an age of increasing “leisure,” reading a big book full of pages to be cut or even a newspaper with large sheets that must be opened, folded, and refolded might seem like physical labor, fatiguing and exhausting the reader (EB, ). Fortunately, invention marches on. Print is heavy work, but phonography will become ever easier and lighter as the ungainly machines of the day capitulate to light, portable models with better sound and longer playing times. One of the accompanying images by Albert Robida (best known today as an early science-fiction novelist and illustrator) shows a bearded man in knickerbockers listening through earpieces in an outdoor scene; the audio device hanging from them is slightly smaller than a modern paperback book. It could easily be a Walkman from the s, a Discman from the s, an iPod or an iPhone. Uzanne unabashedly embraces the historiography of media as a Powellesque tale of competition and replacement. “Books will be forsaken by all the dwellers upon this globe, and printing will absolutely pass out of use” except for its limited service for “commerce and private relations,” functions for which a “writing-machine” (a typewriter) will “probably suffice” (EB, ). Instead of being writers, the eminent novelists of tomorrow will be celebrity “Narrators” or “Teller[s]” whose voices thrill the “ladies” with “heart-rending accents of love,” avers Uzanne; they will “patent” their voices as they now copyright their texts (EB, ). Authorship enters the sound archive as a protected invention (Figure .). “Phonographophiles” will collect cylinders too rare to be found in the “phonostereoteks” that will replace book-libraries (EB, , ). Every morning, the household’s servants will put the day’s “phonographic journal” on the cylinder so that the household can awaken to the news (EB, ). Illustrations will be provided by the “Kinetograph of Thomas Edison,” which the Bibliophile

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Figure . Robida, the author’s voice.

Source: Uzanne, “The End of Books,” Scribner’s Magazine (August ). Courtesy of University of Georgia Libraries

like Uzanne has actually seen firsthand (along with a room full of phonographs) during a visit to Edison’s laboratory in New Jersey. And so on. As with the news on paper, the book as a bound, ordered collection of printed pages may be gone, but in the Bibliophile’s confident predictions, it also lives on in an altered form; Uzanne wryly imagines a new culture of listening that is in large part a translation of the late nineteenth-century’s culture of reading into the acoustic realm. The future listener’s ears will even perform the physiologically impossible, “dilat[ing] with interest” at especially gripping passages (EB, ). Scott studied the human ear as a model for sound recording, and Bell even built a phonautograph with an eardrum from a corpse, but Uzanne has reengineered hearing into a secondary visuality, the ear into an eye. Another of Robida’s illustrations depicts a too-avid listener consulting an audiologist. But the final words of the essay suggest the darker spirit animating its cheerful vision of our future without books: “Either the books must go, or they must swallow us up. I calculate that, take the whole world over, from eighty to one hundred thousand books appear every year; at an average of a thousand copies, this makes more than a hundred millions of books . . . what happiness not to be obliged to read them, and to be able at last to close our eyes upon the annihilation of printed things!” (EB, –)

Underlying this vision of media change is another vision of “annihilation.” The books go, or we do. The late nineteenth century’s contrasting visions of an “overbooked” or a “bookless” future may actually express the same anxieties.

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900 Many of Uzanne’s ideas survive in later generations of “obituaries for the bound book,” points out Priscilla Coit Murphy – whether the book is to be killed by moving pictures (), radio broadcast (), television (), hypertext (, when Robert Coover’s much-read essay on the hypertextual future, “The End of Books,” replicated Uzanne’s title), the electronic age (Sven Birkerts in ) or digital dependency and distraction (Birkerts in ), the internet, social media, streaming media, smartphones. As Murphy notes, rarely do these paradigms weigh the social, economic, and institutional mesh of media and their audiences. Going further, we can observe that these modern-day vernacular media theories often recall the late nineteenth century not only in their visions of intermedial competition but also in their fantasies about the liquidation of material media in favor of flows of imponderable information. In a recent analysis of the “inevitable” “technology forces that will shape our future,” the digital futurist Kevin Kelly suggests that the miniaturization of our media is actually part of a larger trend toward “dematerialization” across modern society over the past decades. Dematerialization creates “better stuff using fewer materials,” from tin cans and automobiles to streaming video and (some say, at least) networked ebooks offering access to “all texts – past and present in all languages” on a single piece of electronic paper. The late nineteenth-century’s questions of media materiality suggest the resilience of this grand narrative: from the triple-decker to the single-volume novel, from authentic but flammable records to transcendent typescript, from the heavy book to a streamlined media device that delivers weightless content. At least outside the realms of clairvoyance and telepathy, every medium is a material one. But again and again, we’ve seen how the turn to a second medium encourages a new focus on the physical makeup of the first. Often it has also made the second medium appear as lighter, more transparent, and somehow liberating. Even the contrast between the ponderous old orality of Camelot (or of Transylvania) and the airy, up-to-date slang of the moderns echoes this story. As the authors of a recent study of print in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century have argued, “the concept of print culture” is certainly “flawed . . . if it gives the impression that print superseded other earlier media, or that it operated in isolation from other media, or to the exclusion of other media.” But we should also recognize how ideas about the march of media obsolescence or about print’s special self-containment were promoted in nineteenth-century print-works themselves as they treated the codex book in opposition to other media, whether in its supposed transparency or its intrusive materiality, its imminent

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obsolescence or its power to annihilate and render obsolete. Bringing a little book history and media archaeology to our prognostications would support a more multisided comparison. A focus on formats, for instance, would remind us of the different ways that print-forms could work for their producers and audiences. We might begin thinking less about the book as a unitary object, or about books as the universal test-case for stories of media supersession, and more about a variantology that includes print media and print cultures, emphasizing the persistence and preservation of media as well as the diverse and shifting intermedial relationships between them.

The book of Ecclesiastes proclaims that “God hath made man upright; but they have sought out many inventions” (:). A few lines before Ecclesiastes itself comes to a close, the text also offers a piece of worldweary meta-commentary: “of making many books there is no end” (:). Recent data suggest that more than two million titles are now published across the globe every year, although apparently even UNESCO has stopped trying to keep count. The tally is complicated by the status of ebooks and print-on-demand technology: what is a book, and what counts as publication? In the twenty-first-century book trade, a truly geological assemblage of stored electromagnetic patterns and printed matter, the United States remains a top market and the United Kingdom still plays an outsized role. So far, we’re still making many books amid many inventions. As my own book has pointed out, media systems under stress tend to generate vernacular media theories, and those theories often end up imaginatively transferring the properties and problems of the system itself into another register. For more than a century now, our vernacular media theories have often treated other media as what books are not. That perspective encourages our old-fashioned tendency to treat newfangled media as the twilight of the books. Marshall McLuhan’s opposition between the Gutenberg galaxy and the “electric” technologies of the early s is the starting point for The Shallows, Nicholas Carr’s much-praised account of the state of reading and thinking in the Internet age. Of writing books about the end of books there is no end. Rather than picturing the fin of books, placing print-forms in the contexts of our media environments offers us opportunities to consider the ends of books in a different sense: their different functions within changing media systems.

 Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900

Figure .

Mark Twain in Nikola Tesla’s laboratory.

Source: Century Magazine (April ). Courtesy of University of Georgia Libraries

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A famous time-lapse photograph shows Mark Twain in Nikola Tesla’s laboratory, assisting with Tesla’s experiments in wireless lighting – or at least with the inventor’s experiments in publicity. Twain holds a fluorescing globe that lights up the writer’s face as Tesla hovers in the background (Figure .). Even by the late nineteenth century, the electric light was already on its way to becoming an icon and exemplum of modern creativity. Let there be light, and there is: with its appearance in the Century Magazine, the picture provides a radiant image of a late nineteenth-century media system, of the literary imagination as it is illuminated by the connections between high technology and print culture.

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Turner, Arlin. Mark Twain and George W. Cable: The Record of a Literary Friendship. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, . Tusan, Michelle Elizabeth. “Inventing the New Woman: Print Culture and Identity Politics during the Fin-de-Siecle.” Victorian Periodicals Review  (), –. Twain, Mark [Samuel Clemens]. “The Compositor.” []. In Mark Twain Speaking. Ed. Paul Fatout. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, . –. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. []. New York: Webster, . A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court []. Ed. Bernard L. Stein. Vol.  of the Works of Mark Twain. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press-Iowa Center for Textual Studies, . “The First Writing-Machines.” In The Complete Essays of Mark Twain. Ed. Charles Neider. New York: Da Capo, . –. Mark Twain’s Notebooks and Journals, Vol. , –. Eds. Robert Pack Browning, Michael B. Frank, and Lin Salamo. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, . “Mark Twain on His Travels.” Daily Alta California (March , ), –. No. , The Mysterious Stranger. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, . [Rejected Version of Typothetae Speech, ]. In Mark Twain Speaking. Ed. Paul Fatout. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, . –. “SLC to Orion Clemens,  Dec , Hartford, Conn. (UCCL ).” In Mark Twain’s Letters, –. Eds. Michael B. Frank and Harriet Elinor Smith. Mark Twain Project Online. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. , . www.marktwainproject.org/xtf/view?docId= letters/UCCL.xml;style=letter (accessed November , ). “SLC to Orion Clemens,  Feb , Hartford, Conn. (UCCL ).” In Mark Twain’s Letters, –. Eds. Michael B. Frank and Harriet Elinor Smith. Mark Twain Project Online. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, , . www.marktwainproject.org/xtf/view?docId= letters/UCCL.xml;style=letter (accessed November , ). The United States vs. Charles J. Guiteau: Indicted for Murder of James A. Garfield, Twentieth President of the United States. [].  vols. New York: Arno, . Uzanne, Octave. “The End of Books.” Scribner’s Magazine  (August ), –. Uzanne, Octave, and A. Robida. Contes pour les Bibliophiles. Paris: LibrairiesImprimeries Réunies, . Vandendorpe, Christian. From Papyrus to Hypertext: Toward the Universal Digital Library. []. Trans. Phyllis Aronoff and Howard Scott. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, . Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, [Jean Marie Mathias Philippe Auguste]. L’Ève Future. []. N.p.: José Corti, .

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Bibliography

Virilio, Paul. The Information Bomb. Trans. Chris Turner. London: Verso, . Wardell, W. L. “The Coming Typewriter.” The Stenographer  (September ), –. Waugh, Arthur. “The Coming Book Season (–): Fiction.” The New Review  (), –. Weber, Samuel. Mass Mediauras: Form, Technics, Media. Ed. Alan Cholodenko. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, . “The Week.” The Nation (August , ), –. Wershler-Henry, Darren. The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, . Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. Eds. Harold W. Blodgett and Sculley Bradley. New York: New York University Press, . “The Sobbing of the Bells.” []. Feinberg Whitman Collection, Library of Congress. Wicke, Jennifer. “Vampiric Typewriting: Dracula and Its Media.” ELH  (), –. Wiener, Joel H. The Americanization of the British Press, s–: Speed in the Age of Transatlantic Journalism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, . Wilde, Oscar. “The Critic as Artist.” []. In The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde. Ed. Richard Ellman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, . –. The Importance of Being Earnest. [/]. Ed. Michael Patrick Gillespie. New York: Norton, . The Importance of Being Earnest: A Trivial Comedy for Serious People, in Four Acts as Originally Written by Oscar Wilde. Ed. Sarah Augusta Dickson. New York: New York Public Library, . Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society –. London: Chatto; New York: Columbia University Press, . Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Rev. ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, . Winthrop-Young, Geoffrey. “Undead Networks: Information Processing and Media Boundary Conflicts in Dracula.” In Literature and Science. Eds. Donald Bruce and Anthony Purdy. Amsterdam: Rodopi, . –. Wu, Tim. The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires. New York: Knopf, . Young, Paul. The Cinema Dreams Its Rivals: Media Fantasy Films from Radio to the Internet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, . Zieger, Susan. The Mediated Mind: Affect, Ephemera, and Consumerism in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Fordham University Press, . Zielinksi, Siegfried. Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means. Trans. Gloria Custance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, . Zlatic, Thomas D. “‘I don’t know A from B’: Mark Twain and Orality.” In A Companion to Mark Twain. Eds. Peter Messent and Louis J. Budd. Malden: Blackwell, MA, . –.

Notes

Introduction  Walt Whitman, “Song of the Exposition,” in Leaves of Grass, eds. Harold W. Blodgett and Sculley Bradley (New York: New York University Press, ), –, ll. –, .  Patrick Feaster, “Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville: An Annotated Discography,” ARSC Journal  (), .  “Un moyen qui permettrait au poëte, au dramatiste, au romancier, de fixer à volonté ses inspirations brillantes, mais toujours si fugitives.” Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, Histoire de la Sténographie: Depuis les Temps Anciens jusqu’à Nos Jours (Paris: Tondeur, ), .  On the speed of literary “genius” versus the slowness of writing, see Susan Zieger, The Mediated Mind: Affect, Ephemera, and Consumerism in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Fordham University Press, ), .  Thomas L. Hankins and Robert J. Silverman, Instruments and the Imagination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), . Sterne considers the crucial turn to the ear as a model for studying sound in the nineteenth century; see Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ), –.  See Sterne, Audible Past, –. For an extensive consideration of the history of shorthand as a context for the invention and reception of sound recording, see Lisa Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, ).  Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, The Phonautographic Manuscripts of Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, ed. and trans. Patrick Feaster (Bloomington, IN: FirstSounds.org, ), .  Ibid., .  Feaster, “Edouard-Léon Scott de Martinville,” . The phonautograph produced “a continuous calligraphy” analogous to “cursive script”; Paul DeMarinis, “Erased Dots and Rotten Dashes, or How to Wire Your Head for a Preservation,” in Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications, eds. Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, ), .





Notes on pages –

 Une “déclamation écrite par la voix meme”; Feaster, “Edouard-Léon Scott de Martinville,” .  Matthew Rubery, “Thomas Edison’s Poetry Machine,” : Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century  (), , http://doi.org/ ./ntn. (accessed November , ).  Hankins and Silverman, Instruments and the Imagination, .  Richard Osborne, Vinyl: A History of the Analogue Record (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, ), –. On Scott’s “monomaniacal focus on writing,” see Sterne, Audible Past, .  Thomas Edison, “The Perfected Phonograph,” North American Review  (June ), .  Hankins and Silverman, Instruments and the Imagination, .  Ernst coins “sonicity” to encapsulate the nature of sound “as oscillatory events” in “the frequency domain”; sound “recording . . . is a time operation.” Wolfgang Ernst, Sonic Time Machines: Explicit Sound, Sirenic Voices, and Implicit Sonicity (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, ), .  See Feaster, “Edouard-Léon Scott de Martinville.” Press releases and audio files created by the First Sounds Project are available at (accessed November , ).  Sterne and Akiyama discuss the transcoding and replay of phonautograms in the context of the twenty-first-century “sonification” of data; Jonathan Sterne and Mitchell Akiyama, “The Recording that Never Wanted to Be Heard and Other Stories of Sonification,” in The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies, eds. Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –.  Wolfgang Ernst, “Cultural Archive versus Technomathematical Storage,” in The Archive in Motion, ed. Eivind Røssaak (Oslo: Novus, ), . Ernst views early sound recording as a paradigm for the working of the archive in a digital age, as “frozen voices, confined to analog and long-forgotten storage media, wait for their (digital) unfreezing, their ‘redemption’”; Wolfgang Ernst, Digital Memory and the Archive, ed. Jussi Parikka (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), .  Jason Camlot, “Historicist Audio Forensics: The Archive of Voices as Repository of Material and Conceptual Artefacts,” : Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century  (), , http://doi.org/./ntn. (accessed November , ).  On Talbot, photogravure, and “the drive to translate photography into printer’s ink,” see Larry J. Schaaf, “‘The Caxton of Photography’: Talbot’s Etchings of Light,” in William Henry Fox Talbot beyond Photography, eds. Mirjam Brusius, Katrina Dean, and Chitra Ramalingam (New Haven: Yale Center for British Art/Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, ), .  See Roger Taylor, Impressed by Light: British Photographs from Paper Negatives, – (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art; Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art; New Haven: Yale University, ), ;

Notes on pages –

        

     



 



H. J. P. Arnold, William Henry Fox Talbot: Pioneer of Photography and Man of Science (London: Hutchinson Benham, ), . See Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, –. “The Telephone,” Westminster Review n.s.  (), . Darren Wershler-Henry, The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ), . Clare Pettit, Patent Inventions: Intellectual Property and the Victorian Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), . William Maver, Jr., “Professor Gray’s New Telautograph,” Engineering Magazine  (), . “The Telautograph,” All the Year Round rd ser.  (August , ), . David Suisman, “Sound, Knowledge, and the ‘Immanence of Human Failure’: Rethinking Musical Mechanization through the Phonograph, the PlayerPiano, and the Piano,” Social Text  (Spring ), . See Elaine Freedgood, The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ). Deledalle reads Peirce in dialogue with McLuhan, suggesting that Peirce’s work points to a “semiotics of media”; Gérard Deledalle, Charles S. Pierce’s Philosophy of Signs: Essays in Comparative Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ), . For an accessible collection of Peirce’s semiotic writing, see Charles S. Peirce, Peirce on Signs: Writings on Semiotic by Charles Sanders Peirce, ed. James Hoopes (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ). Peter Keating, The Haunted Study: A Social History of the English Novel, – (London: Secker, ), . “How Authors Write,” Author (Boston)  (May ), , , , . John Guillory, “Genesis of the Media Concept,” Critical Inquiry  (), –. Nicholas Frankel, Masking the Text: Essays on Literature and Mediation in the s (High Wycombe: Rivendale, ), –. Nicole Howard, The Book: The Life Story of a Technology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ), . “Tit-Bits of Legal Information,” Tit-Bits  (November , ), . For a compact historical overview of the use of the word media, see Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), . Howard, The Book, . For a rich analysis of the rivalry and emulation between fiction and newspapers, see Matthew Rubery, The Novelty of Newspapers: Victorian Fiction after the Invention of the News (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). W. T. Stead, “Government by Journalism,” Contemporary Review  (May ), . I adapt this description from a fascinating study of cinematic fantasies about other media: Paul Young, The Cinema Dreams Its Rivals: Media Fantasy Films from Radio to the Internet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ).



Notes on pages –

 For a useful and expansive introduction to media archaeology, see Jussi Parikka, What Is Media Archaeology? (Cambridge: Polity, ).  Michael Goddard, “Opening up the Black Boxes: Media Archaeology, ‘Anarchaeology’ and Media Materiality,” New Media and Society  (), .  Ernst, Digital Memory, , .  On weird and imaginary media, see Parikka, What Is Media Archaeology?, –; Erkki Huhtamo, “On the Archaeology of Imaginary Media,” in Media Archaeology, ed. Huhtamo and Parikka, –.  Siegfried Zielinksi, Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means, trans. Gloria Custance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, ), , .  Other scholars of nineteenth-century literature have begun to take up this challenge as well. See Andrew Burkett, Romantic Mediations: Media Theory and British Romanticism (Albany: State University of New York Press, ).  My discussion of media systems differs from Luhmann’s systems-theory approach to media. Characterizing the twentieth century’s mass media as an abstract autopoietic system, Luhmann analyzes how this system produces reality by differentiating between information and noninformation and by regulating the flow of novelty; Niklas Luhmann, The Reality of the Mass Media, trans. Kathleen Cross (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, ). For an overview of his account of mass media’s social function, see Gotthard Bechmann and Nico Stehr, “Niklas Luhmann’s Theory of the Mass Media,” Society  (), –. Luhmann is uninterested in particular technologies or in media change.  I consider this approach compatible with what Purdon calls technography, “an exploration of the mutual mediation of technology and literature” that emphasizes “the dialectic of technological and textual production”; James Purdon, “Literature—Technology—Media: Towards a New Technography,” Literature Compass, https://doi.org/./lic. (accessed November , ).  Clifford Siskin, System: The Shaping of Modern Knowledge (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, ), .  Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, : The Fault of Epimetheus (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, ), . Stiegler derives this definition from the work of Bertrand Gille.  Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, ), .  Jennifer L. Lieberman, Power Lines: Electricity in American Life and Letters, – (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, ), .  Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version,” in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, eds. Michael W. Jennings et al., trans. Edmund Jephcott et al. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap-Harvard University Press, ), .

Notes on pages –



 Jay David Bolter and Richard A. Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, ).  Jens Schröter, “Four Models of Intermediality,” in Travels in Intermedia[lity], ed. Bernd Herzogenrath (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, ), . Schröter concludes that what he calls “transformational intermediality” (one medium’s representation of another) is always on the verge of sliding into a more self-conscious “ontological intermediality” (, ).  See N. Katherine Hayles and Jessica Pressman, “Introduction: Making, Critique: A Media Framework,” in Comparative Textual Media: Transforming the Humanities in the Postprint Era, ed. Hayles and Pressman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), vii–xxxiii.  Walter H. Pater, “The School of Giorgione,” Fortnightly Review n.s.  (October ), . Subsequently cited parenthetically in the text as SG.  On sound, music, and aesthetic autonomy in Pater’s essay, see Andrew Eastham, “Walter Pater’s Acoustic Space: ‘The School of Giorgione,’ Dionysian ‘Anders-streben,’ and the Politics of Soundscape,” Yearbook of English Studies  (), –.  Against the eighteenth century’s orthodoxy about the sister arts, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s groundbreaking Laocoön () began to distinguish between the aesthetics of poetry and the plastic arts on the basis of their physical properties. Treating the “technical” distinction of each medium as the beginning of aesthetics, Pater brings Laocoön into an age of new media (SG, ).  Starr tracks the cultural and legal development of the media in America via comparisons to Europe; Paul Starr, The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications (New York: Basic, ).  B. Zorina Khan, The Democratization of Invention: Patents and Copyrights in American Economic Development (Cambridge: National Bureau of Economic Research and Cambridge University Press, ), , –.  Starr, Creation of the Media, , . See also Joel H. Wiener, The Americanization of the British Press, s–: Speed in the Age of Transatlantic Journalism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, ).  See Richard Menke, Telegraphic Realism: Victorian Fiction and Other Information Systems (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, ), –. Chapter   James Abram Garfield, “The Future of the Republic: Its Dangers and Its Hopes,” in The Works of James Abram Garfield, ed. Burke A. Hinsdale (Boston: Osgood, ), : . Subsequently cited parenthetically in the text as FR.  James C. Clark, The Murder of James A. Garfield: The President’s Last Days and the Trial and Execution of His Assassin (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, ), . For useful, engaging histories of Garfield and Guiteau, see also Kenneth D. Ackerman, Dark Horse: The Surprise Election and Political Murder of





      

  

 

Notes on pages –

President James A. Garfield (New York: Carroll and Graf, ); Allan Peskin, Garfield (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, ); Charles E. Rosenberg, The Trial of the Assassin Guiteau: Psychiatry and Law in the Gilded Age (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, ). The sections of this chapter on Guiteau and his attack draw on their accounts and on the published transcript of Guiteau’s trial, The United States vs. Charles J. Guiteau: Indicted for Murder of James A. Garfield, Twentieth President of the United States (New York: Arno, []). This transcript is subsequently cited in the text as US. Charles Guiteau, The Truth, and the Removal (Washington, DC: [“published . . . by the author”], ), –. Hereafter cited in the text as TR. On Stanley’s meeting with Livingstone as “one of the first major [news] stories to be told simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic,” as well as a turning point in the colonization of Africa, see Matthew Rubery, “On Henry Morton Stanley’s Search for Dr. Livingstone, –,” Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History (BRANCH), www.branchcollective.org/?ps_art icles=matthew-rubery-on-henry-morton-stanleys-search-for-dr-livingstone- (accessed November , ). J. S. Ogilvie, History of the Attempted Assassination of President Garfield (New York: Ogilvie, []), . Ibid., ; see also Rosenberg, Trial of the Assassin, . Ogilvie, History of the Attempted Assassination, ; see also US, : . James Abram Garfield, “Dr. Samuel F. B. Morse,” in Works of James Abram Garfield, : , , . Stewart M. Brooks, Our Murdered Presidents: The Medical Story (New York: Fell, ), . E. V. Smalley, “Characteristics of President Garfield,” Century Magazine  (December ), . Ju¨rgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,  []), ; Régis Debray, Media Manifestos: On the Technological Transmission of Cultural Forms, trans. Eric Rauth (London: Verso,  []), –. Ralph E. Mooney, Events in Telephone History (New York: AT&T Public Relations Dept., []), . See Peskin, Garfield, –; Ackerman, Dark Horse, . Alfred Trumble, Guiteau’s Crime: Full History of the Murder of Pres. Jas. A. Garfield with Complete Secret Biography of the Assassin (New York: Fox, ), –. On Guiteau’s fondness for stationery, see Rosenberg, Trial of the Assassin, , –; Clark, Murder of James A. Garfield, –. Quoted in Peskin, Garfield, . For a fuller account of the feud between the Stalwarts and Half-Breeds, see Ackerman, Dark Horse. George M. Beard, American Nervousness: Its Causes and Consequences (New York: Arno,  []), , . Subsequently cited parenthetically as AN.

Notes on pages –



 George M. Beard, The Psychology of the Salem Witchcraft Excitement of , and Its Practical Application to Our Own Time (Stratford, CT: Edwards,  []); Rosenberg, Trial of the Assassin, . See also US, : –.  William Ralston Balch [James Sanks Brisbin], The Life of James Abram Garfield, Late President of the United States (Philadelphia: Hubbard, ), .  Ibid., –. For a day-by-day collation of many of the bulletins on Garfield’s condition, see John Clark Ridpath, The Life and Work of James A. Garfield (Cincinnati: Jones, ), –. Imber identifies the official reports on Garfield’s health as “the first ‘medical bulletins’ in America”; Jonathan B. Imber, “Medical Publicity before Bioethics: Nineteenth-Century Illustrations of Twentieth-Century Dilemmas,” in Bioethics in Society: Constructing the Ethical Enterprise, eds. Raymond De Vries and Janardan Subedi (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, ), .  Clark, Murder of James A. Garfield, ; Brooks, Our Murdered Presidents, , . On contemporary suspicions that the bulletins were misleading, see Clark, Murder of James A. Garfield, –; Ridpath, Life and Work, –.  Edward S. Atwood, Lessons of the Hour: A Discourse on the Assassination of President Garfield, Delivered in the South Church, Salem, Mass., July ,  (Salem, MA: Observer, ), –. For the sake of economy, I discuss no more than a representative handful of “the more than  eulogies” delivered and published upon Garfield’s death; even his bibliographer furnishes only a “sampling.” See Robert O. Rupp, James A. Garfield: A Bibliography (Westport and London: Greenwood, ), . For a useful selection, see J. B. McClure, ed., The World’s Eulogies on President Garfield (Chicago: Rhodes and McClure, ).  Horatio Alger, From Canal Boy to President: or, The Boyhood and Manhood of James A. Garfield (New York: Anderson, ), .  Robert V. Bruce, Bell: Alexander Graham Bell and the Conquest of Solitude (Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown, ), .  Alexander Graham Bell, Upon the Electrical Experiments to Determine the Location of the Bullet in the Body of the Late President Garfield, and Upon a Successful Form of Induction Balance for the Painless Detection of Metallic Masses in the Human Body (Washington, DC: Gibson, ), .  Bruce, Bell, .  Clark, Murder of James A. Garfield, –, .  See Bruce, Bell, –.  Catherine Mackenzie, Alexander Graham Bell: The Man Who Contracted Space (New York: Grossett and Dunlap, ), .  Alexander Graham Bell, Letter to Mabel Hubbard Bell, [September ?, ], Alexander Graham Bell Papers, Library of Congress.  Ridpath, Life and Work, .  Ibid., ; J. M. Bundy, The Nation’s Hero, in Memoriam: The Life of James A. Garfield (New York: Barnes, ), –.



Notes on pages –

 George Dana Boardman, An Address in Commemoration of President James Abram Garfield, President of the United States, Delivered in the Meeting House of the First Baptist Church of Philadelphia on the Day of His Funeral at Cleveland, Ohio, September ,  (Philadelphia: Chandler, ), .  F. M. Green, A Royal Life: Or the Eventful History of James A. Garfield (Chicago: Central, ), .  Boardman, Address in Commemoration, ; Alger, From Canal Boy to President, ; Nathaniel J. Burton, An Address in Memory of James A. Garfield, Late President of the United States (Hartford: Case, ), .  Ridpath, Life and Work, .  “Some Lessons of the Crisis,” The Nation (September , ), –.  “‘International’ Headquarters in New York,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (August , ), .  Atwood, Lessons of the Hour, .  “South Carolina and the President,” News and Courier (Charleston, SC) (July , ), . The paper complained of “the general immobility of the colored people” since the attack on Garfield; “The Negroes and the Assassination,” News and Courier (Charleston, SC) (July , ),   “The Week,” The Nation (August , ), . The News and Courier remained skeptical; see “The Colored People, the South and Democracy,” News and Courier (Charleston, SC) (August , ), .  For instance, see “At Rest,” San Francisco Chronicle (September , ), , as well as racial representations in illustrations: “Guard Receiving Flowers from Little Colored Girl,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (July , ), ; “A Crowd Awaiting the Posting of Bulletin at the Gates of the White House Ground,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (September , ), ; “Around a Bulletin Board, Richmond Virginia,” Harper’s Weekly (July , ), . Early on, one paper reported a rumor (via telegram) “that  negroes were preparing to lynch Guiteau”; “Bulletins Still Eagerly Watched,” New York Tribune (July , ), .  Boardman, Address in Commemoration, –.  “The President,” Harper’s Weekly (July , ), .  “Secretary Blaine’s Bulletins,” Harper’s Weekly (September , ), .  “A Nation in Suspense,” New York Tribune (July , ), ; Edward S. Atwood, Light on the Cloud: A Discourse on the Death of President Garfield, Delivered in the South Church, Salem, Mass., September ,  (Salem, MA: Observer, ), .  Bell, Upon the Electrical Experiments, .  Balch, Life of James Abram Garfield, ; Ridpath, Life and Work, .  Isaac Errett, “A Grand Life and its Great Lessons,” in McClure, World’s Eulogies on President Garfield, .  “The Moral Influence of the Telegraph,” Scientific American (October , ), . For an analysis of the symbolic rapprochement born of “the outpouring of British sentiment which accompanied Garfield’s demise (and

Notes on pages –

              

 



American reactions to British sympathy),” see Mike Sewell, “‘All the EnglishSpeaking Race Is in Mourning’: The Assassination of President Garfield and Anglo-American Relations,” Historical Journal  (), . Sewell points out that the transatlantic telegraph “encouraged . . . a sense of shared experience in two nations whose news could be communicated and understood unmediated by translation and was often extracted directly from the other’s press” (). He notes that news of Lincoln’s death took nearly two weeks to appear in British papers, while news about Garfield arrived and provoked responses within hours. Atwood, Lessons of the Hour, . Frederick O Prince, “Address of His Honor the Mayor,” in City of Boston, A Memorial of James Abram Garfield (Boston: City Council, ), . Russell H. Conwell, The Life, Speeches and Public Services of James A. Garfield, Twentieth President of the United States (Portland, ME: Stinson, ), . “Secretary Blaine’s Bulletins,” . Green, Royal Life, , . Henry E. Highton, “Garfield,” in Two Orations (San Francisco: Bacon, ), . “The Lesson of Mr. Garfield’s Youth,” Scientific American (October , ), . Burton, Address in Memory, –. Chauncey M. Depew, Address at the Memorial Services of James A. Garfield by the Grand Army of the Republic at Chickering Hall, New York, September ,  (Albany: Press Co., ), , . Henry Ward Beecher, “The Crown of Martyrdom,” in McClure, World’s Eulogies on President Garfield, . R. Stockett Mathews, “Garfield’s Life and Death,” in McClure, World’s Eulogies on President Garfield, . Eugene Lawrence, “The President’s Mother,” Harper’s Weekly (October , ), . Sylvester Baxter, “Walt Whitman in Boston,” in Whitman in His Own Time, ed. Joel Myerson, expanded ed. (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, ), . Joaquin Miller, The Complete Poetical Works of Joaquin Miller (New York: Arno, []), n. J. A. and R. A. Reid, Garfield’s Career: From the Tow-Path to the White House (Providence: Reid, ), ; E. E. Brown, The Life and Public Services of James A. Garfield, Twentieth President of the United States (Boston: Guernsey, ), . Conwell, Life, Speeches and Public Services, . Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden: An Electronic Edition, ed. Matt Cohen, : , http://whitmanarchive.org/criticism/disciples/traubel/ index.html (accessed November , ). See also Gay Wilson Allen, The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman (New York: Macmillan, ), . On “Song of the Exposition” and Whitman’s bursts of



   



 

 

Notes on pages –

technophilia, see David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography (New York: Knopf, ), –. Allen, Solitary Singer, . Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, eds. Harold W. Blodgett and Sculley Bradley (New York: New York University Press, ), . Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, []), . Peter Coviello, “Intimate Nationality: Anonymity and Attachment in Whitman,” American Literature  (), . Along similar lines, we could read the poem as imagining a mediatized version of Whitman’s “democratic social space,” a space “identical from place to place,” “unbounded,” “transparent,” and without “outsiders”; Philip Fisher, “Democratic Social Space: Whitman, Melville, and the Promise of American Transparency,” Representations  (Fall ), , . Compare the analysis of soporific democracy in Whitman’s poem “The Sleepers” in Fisher, “Democratic Social Space,” –, . In a heavily revised manuscript draft of the poem, Whitman has at first written “the sleepers” but then replaced it with “the slumberers,” suggesting that the allusion to his earlier poem was once explicit; Walt Whitman, “The Sobbing of the Bells,” Feinberg Whitman Collection, Library of Congress. This earliest manuscript is written on the back of a letter, an uncanny cultural verso to Guiteau’s letters on telegraph slips. Jay David Bolter and Richard A. Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, ), . Jerome Loving, Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, ), . Whitman’s antagonists liked “The Sobbing of the Bells” better than his friends did. The Nation predicted that Whitman was “likely to leave scarcely a complete work that will be remembered; only here and there a phrase, and epithet, a fine note—as when the midnight tolling for General Garfield is called ‘The sobbing of the bells’”; T. W. Higginson, “Recent Poetry,” The Nation (December , ), –, repr. in Walt Whitman: The Contemporary Reviews, ed. Kenneth M. Price (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), . The Examiner was equally hostile, with the same acknowledgment of Whitman’s gift for phrase-making: “in all the poetry written about the death of Garfield, has there been a phrase so peculiarly happy as ‘the sobbing of the bells . . . those heartbeats of a Nation in the night?”; “The Poetry of the Future,” Examiner (New York) (January , ), , repr. in Walt Whitman: The Contemporary Reviews, ed. Price, . “At Rest,” ; Greg Lange, “President Garfield Dies on September , , and Seattle Mourns on September , ,” http://www.historylink.org/ File/ (accessed November , ). Quoted in Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America, . On the first cable between Europe and North America, see John Steele Gordon, A Thread across

Notes on pages –

       

  



the Ocean: The Heroic Story of the Transatlantic Cable (New York: Harper Perennial, ), –, as well as the skeptical account in Menahem Blondheim, News over the Wires: The Telegraph and the Flow of Public Information in America, – (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ), –. Marshall McLuhan, “Explorations,” in Essential McLuhan, eds. Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone (New York: Basic, ), . Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz, Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ), . Hereafter cited in the text as ME. City of Boston, Memorial (Boston: City Council, ), . John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air: A Cultural History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), –. Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York: Viking, ), . Boardman, Address in Commemoration, . Ridpath, Life and Work, , . Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space – (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ), . Whitman converted “roused” to “rouse” in manuscript, turning history into an eternal moment; Whitman, “Sobbing of the Bells,” Feinberg Whitman Collection. Quoted in Rosenberg, Trial of the Assassin, . Quoted in ibid., . Nathaniel P. Banks, “Eulogy,” in City of Boston, Memorial, . Chapter 

 William Thomson, “Mathematics and Physics,” in “Notices and Abstracts of Miscellaneous Communications to the Sections,” Report of the Forty-Sixth Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Held at Glasgow in September  (London: Murray, ), . Thomson had first tried Bell’s telephone at the  Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, presiding over a prize panel that awarded it a gold medal. In his award report, he describes the same primal scene of telephony: hearing first the “simple monosyllables, ‘To be or not to be,’” followed by newspaper passages; Silvanus P. Thompson, The Life of William Thomson, Baron Kelvin of Largs (London: Macmillan, ), : .  I describe Bell’s role in the development of the telephone advisedly. Elisha Gray of Western Electric had been working along similar lines and had filed a patent caveat (a notice of intention to apply for a patent) on the same day that Bell submitted his own application. Within a few weeks, Bell’s evolving design for the telephone incorporated the kind of liquid receiver described in Gray’s supposedly confidential filing. For the case against Bell, see Seth Shulman, The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell’s Secret (New York: Norton, ); Burton H. Baker, The Gray Matter: The Forgotten Story of the





 



  

 



Notes on pages –

Telephone (St. Joseph, MI: Telepress, ); A. Edward Evenson, The Telephone Patent Conspiracy of : The Elisha Gray-Alexander Bell Controversy and Its Many Players (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, ). Robert V. Bruce, Bell: Alexander Graham Bell and the Conquest of Solitude (Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown, ), ; Gary Scharnhorst, Kate Field: The Many Lives of a Nineteenth-Century American Journalist (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, ), –. Field, quoted in George Eliot, The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, –), : n.. William Baker, “A New George Eliot Manuscript,” in George Eliot: Centenary Essays and an Unpublished Fragment, ed. Anne Smith (London: Vision, ), . In one of the few explorations of the telephone’s Victorian literary history, Picker insightfully connects this passage to Eliot’s interest in sound, “aural intimacy,” and acoustic technologies, especially in the pre-telephonic Daniel Deronda (–), her last completed novel; John Picker, Victorian Soundscapes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –. George Bernard Shaw, The Irrational Knot, vol.  of The Works of Bernard Shaw (London: Constable, – []), vii. Subsequently cited in the text as IK. See also “Bernard Shaw in the Electrical Field,” Electrical World  (January , ), –. Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot,” The Strand Magazine  (December ), . Gar Donnelson, “Please Give the Yard a Call, Watson” (London: Telecom Technology Showcase, []), . E. Ennalls Berl, “Sherlock Holmes and the Telephone,” Baker Street Journal  (October ), . Another Holmesian playfully marshals evidence to suggest that Holmes avoids the telephone because he knows that Moriarty secretly controls its network; Robert E. Robinson, “Exit James Moriatry – Enter the Telephone Company,” Baker Street Journal  (March ), –. Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden: An Electronic Edition, ed. Matt Cohen, : , Whitman Archive http://whitmanarchive.org/criticism/ disciples/traubel/index.html (accessed November , ). Charles R. Perry, “The Rise and Fall of Government Telegraphy in Britain,” Business and Economic History  (), –. The most useful overview of the British lag in telephony is provided by Perry in “The British Experience –: The Impact of the Telephone During the Years of Delay,” in The Social Impact of the Telephone, ed. Ithiel de Sola Pool (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, ), –. For additional context, see Jill Hills, “Back to the Future: Britain’s th Century Telecommunications Policy,” Telecommunications Policy . (April ), –; Charles R. Perry, The Victorian Post Office: The Growth of a Bureaucracy (Woodbridge: Royal Historical Society; Rochester, NY: Boydell, ). F. G. C. Baldwin, The History of the Telephone in the United Kingdom (London: Chapman & Hall, ), .

Notes on pages –



 Ibid., .  Ithiel de Sola Pool, et al., “Foresight and Hindsight: The Case of the Telephone,” in Pool, Social Impact of the Telephone, ; Baldwin, History of the Telephone, .  Alfred R. Bennett, The Telephone Question (London: Biggs, ), .  Baldwin, History of the Telephone, , . On the comparative development of the telephone in the United States, Britain, and the rest of Europe, see also Paul Starr, The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications (New York: Basic, ), , , , .  Perry, Victorian Post Office, .  Ibid., .  On secondary orality, see Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Routledge, ), –. For the gender politics of the telephone network, see Jill Galvan, The Sympathetic Medium: Feminine Channeling, the Occult, and Communication Technologies, – (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ), –, –. Ronell analyzes the telephone as a schizophrenic technology; Avital Ronell, The Telephone Book: Literature, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, ).  Scharnhorst, Kate Field, .  Jessica Kuskey, “Listening to the Victorian Telephone: Class, Periodicals, and the Social Construction of Technology,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts  (), .  Ibid., .  Asa Briggs, “The Pleasure Telephone: A Chapter in the Prehistory of Media,” in Pool, Social Impact of the Telephone, . See also Carolyn Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking about Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, ), –; Kuskey, “Listening to the Victorian Telephone.”  Quoted in Rudyard Kipling to Rider Haggard: The Record of a Friendship, ed. Morton Cohen (London: Hutchinson, ), . For an extended consideration of this paradigm in relation to Kipling’s “‘Wireless’” (), another paranormal tale of literary noncreativity in a rising age of media, see Richard Menke, Telegraphic Realism: Victorian Fiction and Other Information Systems (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, ), .  Rudyard Kipling, “The Finest Story in the World,” in Many Inventions (New York: Appleton,  []), –. Subsequently cited in the text as FSW.  Rudyard Kipling, The Letters of Rudyard Kipling, ed. Thomas Pinney (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, –), : ; see also Menke, Telegraphic Realism, –.  “The Telautograph,” All the Year Round rd ser.  (August , ), .  Susan Zieger, The Mediated Mind: Affect, Ephemera, and Consumerism in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Fordham University Press, ), .



Notes on pages –

 See Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks /, trans. Michael Metteer with Chris Cullens (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, []), ; Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, ), .  Matthew Arnold, “Copyright,” in The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, –), : .  See Galvan, Sympathetic Medium, –; Kittler, Discourse Networks, –; Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ), –; Roger Luckhurst, The Invention of Telepathy, – (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –; Pam Thurschwell, Literature, Technology, and Magical Thinking, – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –.  Scharnhorst, Kate Field, .  Ella Hepworth Dixon, The Story of a Modern Woman, ed. Steve Farmer (Peterborough, ON: Broadview,  []), . Subsequently cited in the text as SMW.  Peter Keating, The Haunted Study: A Social History of the English Novel, – (London: Secker, ), –.  Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,  []), .  See Ned Schantz, Gossip, Letters, Phones: The Scandal of Female Networks in Film and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), esp. –. Schantz compares novels’ “female networks” of gossip to films’ representation of the telephone.  Ronell, Telephone Book, .  George Paston, A Writer of Books (Chicago: Academy Chicago,  []), . Subsequently cited in the text as WB.  See, for instance, B. A. Crackanthorpe, “The Revolt of the Daughters,” Nineteenth-Century  (January ), –, repr. in A New Woman Reader: Fiction, Articles, and Drama of the s, ed. Carolyn Christensen Nelson (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, ), ; May Jeune, “The Revolt of the Daughters,” Fortnightly Review  (February ), –, repr. in Nelson, New Woman Reader, ; Gertrude Hemery, “The Revolt of the Daughters: An Answer – by One of Them,” Westminster Review  (June ), –, repr. in Nelson, New Woman Reader, –.  Matthew Rubery, The Novelty of Newspapers: Victorian Fiction after the Invention of the News (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), .  H. W. Massingham, London Daily Press (London: Religious Tract Society, ), . Subsequently cited in the text as LDP.  Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ), .

Notes on pages –



 Operators were to be “white, genteel, and virtuous young women who would be attentive to callers’ preferences and moods” – a mode of sympathy that assumed their gendered capacity to mediate unobtrusively between media technologies and their end-users; Galvan, Sympathetic Medium, .  Baldwin, “History of the Telephone,” , . On the historical associations between the telephone and women’s speech, see Lana F. Rakow, “Women and the Telephone: The Gendering of a Communications Technology,” in Technology and Women’s Voices: Keeping in Touch, ed. Cheris Kramarae (New York: Routledge, ), –.  Kenneth Lopartito, “When Women Were Switches: Technology, Work, and Gender in the Telephone Industry, –,” American Historical Review  (), , .  Lady Magnus, “Modern Novels,” Good Words  (), . Chapter   G. K. Chesterton, “A Defence of Useful Information,” in The Defendant (London: Dent, ), –.  Adrian Poole, Gissing in Context (Totowa, NJ: Rowan and Littlefield, ), . On the treatment of Gissing’s novel as a definitive account of the writing of English fiction in the s, despite its comparative neglect of women writers, see Margaret Diane Stetz, “New Grub Street and the Woman Writer of the s,” in Transforming Genres: New Approaches to British Fiction of the s, eds. Nikki Lee Manos and Meri-Jane Rochelson (New York: St. Martin’s, ), –.  Jean K. Chalaby, The Invention of Journalism (London: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin’s, ), .  Marshall and Eric McLuhan, Laws of Media: The New Science (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, ).  See Martin Ryle, “‘To Show a Man of Letters’: Gissing, Cultural Authority, and Literary Modernism,” in George Gissing: Voices of the Unclassed, eds. Martin Ryle and Jenny Bourne Taylor (Aldershot, Hants.: Ashgate, ), –; Christina Lupton and Tilman Reitz, “New Grub Street’s SelfConsciousness,” in George Gissing, ed. Ryle and Taylor, –.  George Gissing, New Grub Street, ed. John Goode (Oxford: World’s ClassicsOxford University Press,  []), , emphasis added. Subsequently cited parenthetically in the text as NGS.  Sally Ledger, The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle (Manchester: Manchester University Press, ), .  On the place of telegraphy in the growing international book trade at the end of the nineteenth century, see Alison Rukavina, The Development of the International Book Trade, –: Tangled Networks (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, ), –, .  Nicholas Dames, The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), .



Notes on pages –

 Jasper’s claims here anticipate a state of affairs that would have been clearer when the novel was being written than in the s, when it is set. Like Jasper, Amy Reardon, more business minded than her husband Edwin, is precociously concerned with “questions such as international copyright” (NGS, ). It wasn’t until , the year of New Grub Street’s publication, that Gissing himself began “to take a great interest in foreign rights sales,” a change that reflects both his increasing success as a novelist and the growing reach of international copyright agreements; Frederick N. Nesta, “George Gissing, International Copyright and Late Victorian Publishing,” Gissing Journal . (), .  Rachel Bowlby, Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing, and Zola (New York: Methuen, ), .  Dames offers a striking consideration of Gissing’s own fiction in relation to physiological recommendations for type design and to the changing formats for Victorian fiction in the s; Physiology of the Novel, –.  Aaron Matz, Satire in an Age of Realism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), .  Bowlby, Just Looking, –.  See Mark Goble, Beautiful Circuits: Modernism and the Mediated Life (New York: Columbia University Press, ).  On the broader intertwining of machinery and emotion in nineteenth-century literature and culture, see Tamara Ketabgian, The Lives of Machines: The Industrial Imaginary in Victorian Literature and Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press/University of Michigan Library, ).  Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, or, Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ), .  For an analysis of the relationship between the history of industrial paper and New Grub Street, including this family story, see Richard Menke, “New Grub Street’s Ecologies of Paper,” Victorian Studies  (): –.  Graham Law, “‘A Vile Way of Publishing’: Gissing and Serials,” Victorian Review  (), –.  Margaret Diane Stetz, “Publishing Industries and Practices,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Fin de Siècle, ed. Gail Marshall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), .  See Nigel Cross, The Common Writer: Life in Nineteenth-Century Grub Street (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –.  Hulda Friederichs, The Life of Sir George Newnes, Baronet (London: Hodder and Stoughton, ), –.  Paul Manning, News and News Sources: A Critical Introduction (London: Sage, ), .  Kate Jackson, George Newnes and the New Journalism in Britain, –: Culture and Profit (Aldershot, Hants.: Ashgate, ), –, .  “Answers to Correspondents,” Tit-Bits  (December , ): .  See Jackson, George Newnes, –.  “Answers to Correspondents,” Tit-Bits  (December , ): .

Notes on pages –



 See Robert Darnton, “What Is the History of Books?” Daedalus . (Summer ), .  Jackson, George Newnes, –.  Friederichs, Life of Sir George Newnes, . See also “Enlargement of ‘TitBits,’” Tit-Bits  (May , ), .  Jackson, George Newnes, .  “Pitman’s Metropolitan School of Shorthand,” Phonetic Journal  (December , ), .  “Tit-Bits,” Tit-Bits  (October , ), .  Ibid.; emphasis added.  Matthew Arnold, “Culture and Anarchy”, in The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, –), : .  “Tit-Bits”; Arnold, “Culture and Anarchy”, : .  Matthew Arnold, “Up to Easter,” in Complete Prose Works, ed. Super, : , ; emphasis in original.  Ibid., : .  “Programme,” Review of Reviews  (January ), . On the connections between Tit-Bits and Arnold, see Richard Menke, “Touchstones and Tit-bits: Extracting Culture in the s,” Victorian Periodicals Review  (), –.  Patrick Brantlinger, The Reading Lesson: The Threat of Mass Literacy in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ), .  Friederichs, Life of Sir George Newnes, .  See “Profits of Authorship,” Tit-Bits  (April , ), .  See for instance “Potted Poetry,” Tit-Bits  (April , ), ; “A Novel Condensed,” Tit-Bits  (June , ), ; “A Novel in a Paragraph,” TitBits  (August , ), .  “Does Novel Writing Pay?” Tit-Bits  (June , ), ; “Confessions of a Publisher’s Reader,” Tit-Bits  (March , ), .  “Authors and Publishers,” Tit-Bits  (July , ), .  “Newspaper Syndicates,” Tit-Bits  (October , ), .  “Increase of the British Museum Library,” in “Tit-Bits of General Information,” Tit-Bits  (January , ), .  “The Shady Side of Authorship,” Tit-Bits  (July , ), .  “Literature, Art, and Music as a Career,” Tit-Bits  (December , ), .  “AC,” Tit-Bits  (March , ), .  “Are Wives and Children Impediments to Authorship?” Tit-Bits  (October , ), .  “Literature, Art, and Music,” .  “Are Wives and Children Impediments,” .  “The Troubles of a Literary Sweater,” Tit-Bits  (July , ), .  “Shady Side of Authorship,” .



Notes on pages –

 “Grub Street,” Tit-Bits  (August , ), .  See Henry Curwen, Sorrow and Song: Studies of Literary Struggle (London: King, ), : xi.  “Does Novel Writing Pay?” ; “Confessions of a Publisher’s Reader,” .  Jasper’s prediction (or Gissing’s) is astute but hardly uncanny. As Bassett documents, even by the mid-s “more publishers [were] by-passing the three-volume format in favor of the inexpensive one-volume formats,” making triple-deckers “a smaller segment of fiction production”; Troy J. Bassett, “The Production of Three-Volume Novels, –,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America  (), . Chapter   Walter Besant, “The Rise and Fall of the ‘Three Decker,’” The Dial  (October , ), .  Christian Vandendorpe, From Papyrus to Hypertext: Toward the Universal Digital Library, trans. Phyllis Aronoff and Howard Scott (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,  []), –. See also Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Routledge, ), , –.  Oscar Wilde, “The Critic as Artist,” in The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde, ed. Richard Ellman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,  []), .  Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, ed. Michael Patrick Gillespie (New York: Norton,  [/]), .  In July , Wilde outlined the unwritten play to the actor and theatre manager George Alexander, mentioning Miss Prism but not the switch between baby in perambulator and novel in handbag. In the four-act version circulated in September  (Alexander would insist on cutting the play to three acts), Lady Bracknell is “Lady Brancaster,” but the switch and the abuse of Miss Prism’s manuscript are firmly in place. See Peter Raby, “The Genesis of the Play,” in Wilde, Importance, ed. Gillespie, –; Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest: A Trivial Comedy for Serious People, in Four Acts as Originally Written by Oscar Wilde, ed. Sarah Augusta Dickson (New York: New York Public Library, ).  Leading Article, Publishers’ Circular  (July , ), .  Frederick N. Nesta, “The Myth of the ‘Triple-Headed Monster’: The Economics of the Three-Volume Novel,” Publishing History  (), .  Royal A. Gettman, A Victorian Publisher: A Study of the Bentley Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), . Original emphasis.  The most influential account of the end of the three-volume novel is probably still Guinevere L. Griest, Mudie’s Circulating Library and the Victorian Novel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ), –. My discussion draws on her work as well as on the more recent research of scholars such as

Notes on pages –

                   





Troy Bassett, Simon Eliot, David Finkelstein, Frederick Nesta, Joanne Shattock, and John Sutherland, cited throughout this chapter. Jonathan Sterne, MP: The Meaning of a Format (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ), , . George Gissing, New Grub Street, ed. John Goode (Oxford: World’s ClassicsOxford University Press,  []), . Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, – (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), . J. A. Sutherland, Victorian Novelists and Publishers (London: Athlone, ), . Simon Eliot, “Circulating Libraries in the Victorian Age and After,” in The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, vol. , – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), . Nesta, “Myth of the ‘Triple-Headed Monster,’” , . Griest, Mudie’s Circulating Library, . Wilkie Collins, “The Unknown Public,” Household Words  (August , ), . “Light Reading with a Vengeance,” Punch  (January , ), . Her comical objection to the single-volume edition may even be justified, since these editions often cut text from the original triple-deckers. Mudie’s Select Library, Catalogue of New and Standard Works in Circulation at Mudie’s Select Library (London: Charles Edward Mudie, ), n.p. Original emphasis. Troy J. Bassett, At the Circulating Library: A Database of Victorian Fiction, –, Victorian Research Web www.victorianresearch.org/atcl (accessed November , ). See Nesta, “Myth of the ‘Triple-Headed Monster,’” –. “The Three Decker,” Saturday Review  (July , ), . Nicholas Dames, The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –. Nesta, “Myth of the ‘Triple-Headed Monster,’” . “That Sad Second Volume,” Spectator  (May , ): –. John Berwick Harwood, Sir Robert Shirley, Bart. (London: Hurst and Blackett, ), : . This is the argument of N. N. Feltes, Modes of Production of Victorian Novels (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), . Sutherland, Victorian Novelists, . George Moore, “Literature at Nurse, or, Circulating Morals,” in Literature at Nurse, or, Circulating Morals: A Polemic on Victorian Censorship, ed. Pierre Coustillas (Sussex: Harvester; Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities,  []), Part : . Tim Wu, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires (New York: Knopf, ), . In Feltes’s controversial interpretation, the three-volume novel represented the survival of “simple petty-commodity production” in Victorian book



      

  

    

Notes on pages –

publishing, a situation that reached a crisis in the s and s, when it was replaced by “a new kind of structure, suited to, demanded, and provided by the larger structures of emergent monopoly capitalism”; Feltes, Modes of Production, , –. Finkelstein’s later revelation of the networks of collusion and ownership that underlay the circulating library system offers empirical complications for this argument; see David Finkelstein, “‘The Secret’: British Publishers and Mudie’s Struggle for Economic Survival –,” Publishing History  (), –. Finkelstein, “‘The Secret,’” . Matthew Arnold, “Copyright,” in Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, –), : . Thomas Hardy, “Candour in English Fiction,” in Thomas Hardy’s Personal Writings: Prefaces, Literary Opinions, Reminiscences, ed. Harold Orel (New York: St. Martin’s, []), . Subsequently cited in the text as CEF. Griest, Mudie’s Circulating Library, . “The Literary Year in Retrospect,” The Dial  (January , ), . Bassett, At the Circulating Library. On the circulating libraries’ dependence on reselling books see Simon Eliot, “Bookselling by the Backdoor: Circulating Libraries, Booksellers, and Book Clubs –,” in A Genius for Letters: Booksellers and Bookselling from the th to the th Century, eds. Robin Myers and Michael Harris (Winchester: St. Paul’s Bibliographies; New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll, ), –. On the diminishing proportion of triple-deckers among the fiction of s and s, see Troy J. Bassett, “The Production of Three-Volume Novels, –,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America  (), –, . Paul Eggert, “Robbery under Arms: The Colonial Market, Imperial Publishers, and the Demise of the Three-Decker Novel,” Book History  (), –. Eliot, “Bookselling by the Backdoor,” . Even in the s, Eliot finds examples of cheap editions of novels being issued much less than a year after their library editions; Simon Eliot, “The Three-Decker Novel and Its First Cheap Reprint, –,” The Library th ser.,  (), –. Eliot, “Bookselling by the Backdoor,” , . William C. Preston, “Mudie’s Library,” Good Words  (October ), . Raymond Williams, Culture and Society – (London: Chatto; New York: Columbia University Press, ), . Gissing, New Grub Street, . On the close relationships between attention and distraction across late nineteenth-century visual experience, philosophy, and culture, see Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, ). For the relationships between attention,

Notes on pages –

  

            

     



distraction, and Victorian theories of fiction, see Dames, Physiology of the Novel. “The Decay of Fiction,” cited in Peter D. McDonald, British Literary Culture and Publishing Practice – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), . Quoted in Joseph Donohue with Ruth Berggren, Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest: A Reconstructive Critical Edition of the Text of the First Production (Gerrards Cross, Bucks.: Colin Smythe, ), . On the publication of novels in individual newspapers and (beginning in the s) via newspaper syndicates, see Nigel Cross, The Common Writer: Life in Nineteenth-Century Grub Street (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –. Ella Hepworth Dixon, The Story of a Modern Woman. ed. Steve Farmer (Peterborough, ON: Broadview,  []), . “Three Decker,” , . Ibid., . Ibid. William Heinemann, “Mr. Wm. Heinemann’s New List,” advertisement, Bookseller  (July , ), . Original emphasis. “The Three-Volume Novel,” Bookseller  (August , ), . John St John, William Heinemann: A Century of Publishing (London: Heinemann, ), ; Gissing, New Grub Street, . Sampson Low, Marston, and Co., “The New Departure in Publishing Novels: Special Notice to the Trade,” advertisement, Publishers’ Circular  (August , ), . “Prospects of the Season,” Bookseller  (October , ), . “A Ballade of Three Volumes,” Punch  (July ,), . “In Three Volumes,” Punch  (September , ), . “Book Talk and Tattle,” American Bookmaker  (November ), . These innovations hardly meant that such works couldn’t sell. Bassett and Walter find New Woman novels amply represented in fin-de-siècle bestseller lists; Troy J. Bassett and Christina M. Walter, “Booksellers and Bestsellers: British Book Sales as Documented by The Bookman, –,” Book History  (), . Wendell V. Harris, “John Lane’s Keynotes Series and the Fiction of the s,” PMLA  (), –. Rudyard Kipling, “The Old Three-Decker,” Saturday Review  (July , ), . See Dames, Physiology of the Novel, –; Griest, Mudie’s Circulating Library, , . Rudyard Kipling, “The Three-Decker,” in The Seven Seas (London: Methuen, ), . Arthur Waugh, “The Coming Book Season (–): Fiction,” New Review  (), . Ibid., .



Notes on pages – Chapter 

 Marie Corelli, “My First Book,” Idler  (), , , .  Edmund Gosse, “The Decay of Literary Taste,” North American Review  (July ), , .  Ibid., .  Ann Thwaite, Edmund Gosse: A Literary Landscape, – (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), . On Gosse’s complaints about New Woman fiction, see also Ann L. Ardis, New Women, New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, ), ; Ann Heilmann, New Woman Fiction: Women Writing First-Wave Feminism (Basingstoke: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin’s, ), .  Annette R. Federico, Idol of Suburbia: Marie Corelli and Late Victorian Literary Culture (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, ), ; Simon J. James, “Marie Corelli and the Value of Literary Self-Consciousness: The Sorrows of Satan, Popular Fiction, and the Fin-de-Siècle Canon,” Journal of Victorian Culture  (), .  In this section I am indebted to McCann’s brilliant account of popular fictions of the occult in fin–de–siècle Britain, which demonstrates that writers such as Corelli, George du Maurier, Rosa Praed, and Arthur Machen could turn to the supernatural as a way to imagine authors and audiences in an age of rationalized authorship and a nascent mass media. See Andrew McCann, Popular Literature, Authorship, and the Occult in Late Victorian Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ).  Mary Hammond, Reading, Publishing and the Formation of Literary Taste in England, – (Aldershot: Ashgate, ), .  Marie Corelli, A Romance of Two Worlds (n.p.: Prime Classics,  []), . Subsequently cited parenthetically in the text as RTW. On Corelli and psychic communication, see Jill Galvan, The Sympathetic Medium: Feminine Channeling, the Occult, and Communication Technologies, – (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ), –, –.  Roger Luckhurst, The Invention of Telepathy, – (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), .  Marie Corelli, The Sorrows of Satan, Or, the Strange Experience of One Geoffrey Tempest, Millionaire: A Romance, ed. Peter Keating (Oxford: Oxford University Press,  []), . Hereafter cited in the text as SS.  On the cultural context of the rise of the professional literary agent in the s and s, see Mary Ann Gillies, The Professional Literary Agent in Britain, – (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, ), –.  In , the London Post Office Directory listed only six literary agents (ibid., ).  On Corelli’s attack on the New Woman in The Sorrows of Satan, see Federico, Idol of Suburbia, –.  For Corelli, “the exemplary fictional text supersedes the Bible or Christ as the object of devotion, and the female novelist becomes the priest or ‘ministrant’

Notes on pages –

 



 

          



who oversees the ceremony of reading that leads to true spiritual education”; Christine Gannon, “Marie Corelli’s The Sorrows of Satan: Literary Professionalism and the Female Author as Priest,” English Literature in Transition, –  (), . See Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ), –. Huyssen highlights the contrast between a feminized mass culture and the “real authentic culture” supposedly embodied by a masculine modernism; Huyssen, After the Great Divide, . Felski suggests that the problem is less what the reader consumes than the unthinking pleasure and identification she is thought to experience in consuming it; Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ), –. See R. B. Kershner, “Modernism’s Mirror: The Sorrows of Marie Corelli,” in Transforming Genres: New Approaches to British Fiction of the s, ed. Nikki Lee Manos and Meri-Jane Rochelson (New York: St. Martin’s, ), –. W. T. Stead, “The Book of the Month: ‘The Sorrows of Satan’ – and of Marie Corelli,” Review of Reviews  (), . See Nathan Hensley, and Molly Clark Hillard, eds., “The Andrew Lang Effect: Network, Discipline, Method,” special issue of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net  (October ), www.erudit.org/revue/ravon/ /v/n/ (accessed November , ). Pierre Bourdieu, “The Field of Cultural Production, or: The Economic World Reversed,” in The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, ), –. N. N. Feltes, Literary Capital and the Late Victorian Novel (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, ), . Corelli, “My First Book,” . Perhaps later Corelli rethought her stance. By  she was consulting with the pioneering professional literary agent A. P. Watt; Gillies, Professional Literary Agent, . Corelli, “My First Book,” . Brian Masters, Now Barabbas Was a Rotter: The Extraordinary Life of Marie Corelli (London: Hamish Hamilton, ), –. Ibid., . Federico’s fascinating account of Corelli’s relationship to photography includes reproductions of her retouched and unretouched photographs; Federico, Idol of Suburbia, –. For an account of the novel’s advertising and sales, see Feltes, Literary Capital, . In turn, Corelli’s critics have been able to condemn her writing as “effusive,” “unmediated” “outpourings” of melodrama or sentiment; Felski, Gender of Modernity, . Corelli, “My First Book,” . Federico, Idol of Suburbia, .



Notes on pages –

 On the slow move to the royalty system in the s and s, see Royal A. Gettman, A Victorian Publisher: A Study of the Bentley Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –.  Stead, “Book of the Month,” .  Sally Ledger, The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle (Manchester: Manchester University Press, ), .  Paston, A Modern Amazon (London: Osgood, ), : , . Subsequently cited in the text (by volume and chapter) as MA.  On the fictionalization of the New Woman in Sarah Grand’s and Ouida’s essays, see Talia Shaffer, “‘Nothing but Foolscap and Ink’: Inventing the New Woman,” in The New Woman in Fiction and in Fact: Fin-de-siècle Feminisms, ed. Angelique Richardson and Chris Willis (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, ), –. In Ardis’s influential account, commentators after Ouida quickly drew on the surge of New Woman novels to deflect the controversy from “a social debate” into a “literary one”; Ardis, New Women, . Contesting treatment of the New Woman as primarily “a literary invention,” Tusan traces the idea of the New Woman from feminist periodicals in the early s to mainstream journalism, where it was quickly redefined, vociferously contested, and finally – following the standard rhythm of journalistic controversies – dropped altogether; Michelle Elizabeth Tusan, “Inventing the New Woman: Print Culture and Identity Politics during the Fin-de-Siecle,” Victorian Periodicals Review  (), .  Jason Stanley Little, “New Novels,” Academy  (July , ), .  Heilmann, New Woman Fiction, .  Henry James, “In the Cage”, in Complete Stories, – (New York: Library of America, ), ; emphasis added.  On the sexual “contradictions” of “the New Woman as a concept,” see Ledger, New Woman, . As Ledger notes, “the institution of marriage” was a “preoccupation” for both New Woman writers and their critics throughout the s; New Woman novels often include marriages early on to allow for their “dissection” (, ).  “Novels of the Week,” Spectator  (October , ), .  As Martino points out, Paston is contributing to the wider “debate over realism which had occupied British writers and critics for the past decade” but also connecting this general issue to more specific questions about women writers; Maria Carla Martino, “Woman as Writer/Writer as Woman: George Paston’s A Writer of Books,” Victorian Literature and Culture  (), . Ledger observes that “the male advocates of the ‘new realism’ were appalled by feminism’s appropriation of their avowedly masculine aesthetic”; Ledger, New Woman, . For extended discussions of New Woman fiction in the context of the late nineteenth-century debate over fictional realism, see Ardis, New Women, –; Jane Eldridge Miller, Rebel Women: Feminism, Modernism, and the Edwardian Novel (London: Virago; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), –.

Notes on pages –



 Harmsworth, quoted in Asa Briggs, “Communications and Culture, –: A Tale of Two Centuries,” in Serious Pursuits: Communication and Education, vol.  of The Collected Essays of Asa Briggs (London: Harvester, ), .  By the late s pessimistic endings had become nearly as conventional in New Woman fiction as happy romantic unions were in more orthodox novels; Martino, “Woman as Writer,” –. Chapter   Bram Stoker, Dracula, eds. Nina Auerback and David J. Skal (New York: Norton,  []), . I have corrected a misprint in the passage – a reminder of print miscommunication fortuitously supplied by Norton’s edition. Subsequently cited parenthetically in the text as D.  W. L. Wardell, “The Coming Typewriter,” The Stenographer  (September ), .  See Clayton Carlyle Tarr, Gothic Stories within Stories: Frame Narratives and Realism in the Genre, – (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, ).  For influential versions of these interpretations, see respectively Carol A. Senf, “Dracula: Stoker’s Response to the New Woman,” Victorian Studies  (), –; Phyllis A. Roth, “Suddenly Sexual Women in Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” Literature and Psychology  (), –; Christopher Craft, “‘Kiss Me with those Red Lips’: Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” Representations  (Autumn ), –, and Talia Shaffer, “‘A Wild(e) Desire Took Me’: The Homoerotic History of Dracula,” ELH  (), –; Stephen Arata, “The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization,” Victorian Studies  (), –; Franco Moretti, “Dialectic of Fear,” in Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms (London: Verso, ), –.  “Recent Novels,” Spectator  (July , ), .  See especially Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks /, trans. Michael Metteer with Chris Cullens (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,  []), –, and “Dracula’s Legacy,” in Literature, Media, Information Systems, ed. John Johnston (Amsterdam: G+B Arts,  []), –; Jennifer Wicke, “Vampiric Typewriting: Dracula and Its Media,” ELH  (), –.  Kittler, Discourse Networks, .  Ibid., . See also Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, ).  Kittler, Discourse Networks, .  On media and madness at the end of the nineteenth century, see Kittler, Discourse Networks, –; on schizophrenia and electric voices, see Avital Ronell, The Telephone Book: Literature, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, ); on the occult possibilities of telepresence



    



      

 



Notes on pages –

from the telegraph to the twentieth century, see Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ). Roland Barthes, “The Reality Effect,” in French Literary Theory Today: A Reader, ed. Tzvetan Todorov, trans. R. Carter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), . Bram Stoker, Bram Stoker’s Notes for Dracula: A Facsimile Edition, eds. Robert Eighteen-Bisang and Elizabeth Miller (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, ), –, –. Ibid., –. See Richard Menke, Telegraphic Realism: Victorian Fiction and Other Information Systems (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, ), , –. Page notes the duality of technology in Dracula: it “epitomises the scientific and rational in terms of its capacity for high performance, but it is also disruptive and uncanny, as exemplified by the numerous failed performances of technology in the novel”; Leanne Page, “Phonograph, Shorthand, Typewriter: High Performance Technologies in Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” Victorian Network . (Winter ), , www.victoriannetwork.org/index.php/vn/ issue/view/ (accessed November , ). Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version,” in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, eds. Michael W. Jennings, et al., trans. Edmund Jephcott et al. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap-Harvard University Press, ), . Samuel Weber, Mass Mediauras: Form, Technics, Media, ed. Alan Cholodenko (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, ), , . Kittler, “Dracula’s Legacy,” . Stoker, Bram Stoker’s Notes, . Ibid., –. Ibid., –. Barbara Belford, Bram Stoker: A Biography of the Author of Dracula (New York: Knopf, ), –. Page, “Phonograph, Shorthand, Typewriter,” ; Kittler, “Dracula’s Legacy,” ; Katherine Biers, “The Typewriter’s Truth,” in Kittler Now: Current Perspectives in Kittler Studies, ed. Stephen Sale and Laura Salisbury (Cambridge, MA: Polity, ), . Christopher Keep, “The Cultural Work of the Typewriter-Girl,” Victorian Studies  (), . On Mina’s “chimerical combination” of what Van Helsing calls “man’s brain . . . and woman’s heart” (D, ), see Jill Galvan, The Sympathetic Medium: Feminine Channeling, the Occult, and Communication Technologies, – (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ), . Maury Klein, The Power Makers: Steam, Electricity, and the Men Who Invented Modern America (New York: Bloomsbury, ), .

Notes on pages –



 Wicke, “Vampiric Typewriting.”  Christopher Keep, “Blinded by the Type: Gender and Information Technology at the Turn of the Century,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts  (), ; Darren Wershler-Henry, The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ), , .  Moretti, “Dialectic of Fear,” –.  Jennifer L. Fleissner, “Dictation Anxiety: The Stenographer’s Stake in Dracula,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts  (), .  Menke, Telegraphic Realism, . On the tendency to ignore the material nature of information, see also N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), –, .  Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, .  Andrew Eastham, “Aesthetic Vampirism: Pater, Wilde, and the Concept of Irony,” in Art and Life in Aestheticism, ed. Kelly Comfort (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, ), .  G. K. Chesterton, “A Defence of Useful Information,” in The Defendant (London: Dent, ), .  As Galvan notes, the vampire hunters consistently replicate and appropriate the powers the novel associates with a poorly defined and expansive “Orient”; Jill Galvan, “Occult Networks and the Legacy of the Indian Rebellion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” History of Religions  (), –.  Like a synthesis of Dracula and the novels of female Grub Street, W. L. Alden’s “A Modern Vampire” () imagines an analogous paradigm without even a hint of blood-bibbing. In this brief tale, a young woman writer unknowingly vampirizes the writing of her male mentor, unconsciously draining his creativity, his brain, and ultimately his life; W. L. Alden, “A Modern Vampire,” Cassell’s Family Magazine  (March ), –.  Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), .  As Derrida might put it, the “prosthetic experience of its technical substrate” confirms that “the structure of the archive is spectral”; ibid., , .  On Dracula’s phantasmagoric cues and its connections to magic lantern slides and shows, see David J. Jones, Sexuality and the Gothic Magic Lantern: Desire, Eroticism, and Literary Visibilities from Byron to Bram Stoker (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, ), –. For a suggestive account of Dracula’s connections to early cinema and fin-de-siècle technologies for visualizing moving bodies, see Daniel Martin, “Some Trick of the Moonlight: Seduction and the Moving Image in Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” Victorian Literature and Culture  (), –. Thomas reads Dracula’s connections to cinema from the s to the late twentieth century; Ronald R. Thomas, “Specters of the Novel: Dracula and the Cinematic Afterlife of the Victorian Novel,” in Victorian Afterlife: Postmodern Culture Rewrites the Nineteenth Century, ed. John Kucich and Dianne F. Sadoff (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), –.



Notes on pages –

 Laura Otis, Networking: Communicating with Bodies and Machines in the Nineteenth Century (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, ), .  Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, “Undead Networks: Information Processing and Media Boundary Conflicts in Dracula,” in Literature and Science, eds. Donald Bruce and Anthony Purdy (Amsterdam: Rodopi, ), .  Benjamin, “Work of Art,” , .  On the novel’s opposition between information (technological, bureaucratic) and evolution (auratic, historical, associated with embodiment and memory), see Regenia Gagnier, “Evolution and Information, or Eroticism and Everyday Life, in Dracula and Late Victorian Aestheticism,” in Sex and Death in Victorian Literature, ed. Regina Barreca (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ), –.  Michel Serres, The Parasite, trans. Lawrence R. Schehr (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ), . On Dracula as Serresian parasite, see also Otis, Networking, .  Serres, The Parasite, .  Ibid., .  See Otis, Networking, –. I depart from Otis’s suggestion, however, that in Dracula technological and corporeal networks ultimately function in the same way.  Kittler, “Dracula’s Legacy,” . Indeed, Daly reads the novel as not a fearful tale of anxiety about erotic or exotic others but a confident assertion that a team of modern male professionals and experts will leap into action to defeat any such threat; Nicholas Daly, “Incorporated Bodies: Dracula and the Rise of Professionalism,” Texas Studies in Language and Literature  (), –.  On Dracula and the capacity of mass technological narratives to replay the loss of Benjaminian aura, see Gagnier, “Evolution and Information,” –, –.  Leslie Klinger, ed., The New Annotated Dracula, by Bram Stoker (New York: Norton, ), .  Stoker, Bram Stoker’s Notes, –. Senf points out Stoker’s tendency to associate America and Americans with progress and “technological sophistication,” if also with “occasional cruelty and boorishness”; Carol A. Senf, Science and Social Science in Bram Stoker’s Fiction (Westport, CT: Greenwood, ), . Chapter   Mark Twain, [Rejected Version of Typothetae Speech, ], in Mark Twain Speaking, ed. Paul Fatout (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, ), .  Drawing on the work of Walter Ong, Kleiman reads Huckleberry Finn – and, by extension, Twain’s persona and art – as “a weaving and stitching together of voice and text”; Ed Kleiman, “Mark Twain’s ‘Rhapsody’: Printing and the Oral Tradition in Huckleberry Finn,” University of Toronto Quarterly 

Notes on pages –

  



 



     



(), . In fact, his analysis suggests tension and confrontation more than harmonious intertwining. Thomas D. Zlatic, “‘I don’t know A from B’: Mark Twain and Orality,” in A Companion to Mark Twain, eds. Peter Messent and Louis J. Budd (Malden: Blackwell, ), . Ibid. See Jennifer L. Lieberman, Power Lines: Electricity in American Life and Letters, – (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, ), –. Although I depart from Lieberman’s claim that this observation vitiates critical discussions of “technology” in the novel, I agree with her complaint about the “paucity of critical terms available to describe the interplay” of “discourses, practices, and artifacts (old and newly invented)” (). One critical term I would offer is media systems. Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, ed. Bernard L. Stein, vol.  of The Works of Mark Twain (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press-Iowa Center for Textual Studies,  []), . Subsequently cited parenthetically as CY. Figures are taken from the first American edition, by Twain’s own Webster publishing company, thus preserving the original layout of the book’s printed words and images. Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Work of Nikolai Leskov,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, ), . On almanacs and reference works, see Neil Rhodes, “Articulate Networks: The Self, the World, and the Book,” in The Renaissance Computer: Knowledge Technology in the First Age of Print, ed. Neil Rhodes and Jonathan Sawday (New York: Routledge, ), –; Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Routledge, ), –. On Hank’s own vigorous performances of speech, see Marie Nelson, “The Authority of the Spoken Word: Speech Acts in Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,” Oral Tradition  (), –. I take “orality” as an attempt to cluster ideas about nonliterate peoples from the perspective of literacy, to treat divergent cultures as structured by a technology that they lack or do without. For a trenchant appraisal of “orality” as formulated by writers such as Ong, McLuhan, and Goody, see Jonathan Sterne, “The Theology of Sound: A Critique of Orality,” Canadian Journal of Communication  (), –. Sterne characterizes orality theory as a covert theology based on deterministic ideas about the physiology of sound. Albert Bigelow Paine, Mark Twain: A Biography (New York: Harper, ), : –. On the “oral” preference for testimony from memory as evidence, see Ong, Orality and Literacy, . Ibid., . Ibid., –. Ibid., –. Henry Nash Smith, Introduction, in Twain, Connecticut Yankee, ed. Stein, .

           

  

 

Notes on pages –

Ong, Orality and Literacy, . Ibid., . Ibid., , . Ibid., . On the larger significance of the German language in A Connecticut Yankee, see Matthew Giancarlo, “Mark Twain and the Critique of Philology,” ELH  (), –. Ong, Orality and Literacy, . See Seth Lerer, “Hello, Dude: Philology, Performance, and Technology in Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee,” American Literary History  (), –. Gavin Jones, “Twain, Language, and the Southern Humorists,” in A Companion to Mark Twain, eds. Peter Messent and Louis J. Budd (Malden: Blackwell, ), . Quoted in Brian Hochman, Savage Preservation: The Ethnographic Origins of Modern Media Technology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), . Ibid., . On Twain’s research and writing about Native Americans, before and during the writing of A Connecticut Yankee, see Richard Slotkin, “Mark Twain’s Frontier, Hank Morgan’s Last Stand,” in Mark Twain: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Eric J. Sundquist (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, ), –. See Arlin Turner, Mark Twain and George W. Cable: The Record of a Literary Friendship (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, ), –. On the orality of the American South, see Clay Morton, The Oral Character of American Southern Literature (Lewiston, NY: Mellen, ). Examining Twain’s marginal notes on books he read as research for the novel, Fulton points out the parallels he drew between “primitive” Scots and native Americans; Joe B. Fulton, Mark Twain in the Margins: The Quarry Farm Marginalia and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, ), –. As Fulton observes, nineteenthcentury anthropology tended to treat tribal people everywhere as images of the European past. Sterne, “Theology of Sound,” . On the denial of coevalness in anthropology, see Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, ). For Smith, the novel is “a philosophical fable which sets for a theory of capitalism an interpretation of the historical process which has brought it into being”; Henry Nash Smith, Mark Twain’s Fable of Progress: Political and Economic Ideas in “A Connecticut Yankee” (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, ), . Rowe connects the novel to Twain’s later critiques of European imperialism; John Carlos Rowe, “How the Boss Played the Game: Twain’s Critique of Imperialism in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,” in The Cambridge Companion to Mark Twain, ed. Forrest

Notes on pages –



 





 





G. Robinson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –. Most recently, Spanos has read A Connecticut Yankee in relation to the myth of American exceptionalism; William V. Spanos, Shock and Awe: American Exceptionalism and the Imperatives of the Spectacle in Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, ). Cited in Bruce Michelson, Printer’s Devil: Mark Twain and the American Publishing Revolution (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press), . Michelson provides the most extensive consideration of Twain’s art and career in the context of print history. My account of the Paige Compositor draws on his work as well as on Lucien Alphonse Legros and John Cameron Grant, Typographical Printing-Surfaces: The Technology and Mechanism of Their Production (London: Longmans, ), –, and on Justin Kaplan, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography (New York: Simon and Schuster, ), –. Michelson, Printer’s Devil, . Mark Twain, “The First Writing-Machines,” in The Complete Essays of Mark Twain, ed. Charles Neider (New York: Da Capo, ), . Hereafter cited parenthetically as FWM. On Twain’s fraught history with the typewriter, see also Darren Wershler-Henry, The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ), –. Mark Twain, “SLC to Orion Clemens,  Dec , Hartford, Conn. (UCCL ),” in Mark Twain’s Letters, –, eds. Michael B. Frank and Harriet Elinor Smith, Mark Twain Project Online (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. , ), http://www.marktwainproject.org/xtf/view? docId=letters/UCCL.xml;style=letter (accessed November , ). On Felicia Hemans’s “Casabianca” as a favorite piece for memorization and recitation in Great Britain, the British Empire, and Anglophone North America – as well as in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer – see Catherine Robson, “Standing on the Burning Deck: Poetry, Performance, History,” PMLA  (), –. The recitation of memorized poems was a mainstay of late nineteenth-century school examinations, a classic exercise in the oral performance of print literacy. W. L. Wardell, “The Coming Typewriter,” The Stenographer  (September ), . Twain reports that his letter scolded the “boy” for seeking a free specimen of writing from a professional author. Improbably, this boy was Edward Bok, the future editor of the Ladies Home Journal. Bok’s Pulitzer Prize-winning autobiography would reprint Twain’s letter – presumably without any payment to the Clemens estate, but also with no mention of its generation via typewriter; Edward Bok, The Americanization of Edward Bok: The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After (New York: Scribner’s, ), –. Mark Twain, Mark Twain’s Notebooks and Journals, Volume III, –, ed. Robert Pack Browning, et al. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, ), –n, n.



Notes on pages –

 Ibid., –, –n, .  See Kaplan, Mr. Clemens, .  B. Zorina Khan, The Democratization of Invention: Patents and Copyrights in American Economic Development (Cambridge: National Bureau of Economic Research and Cambridge University Press, ), .  Mark Twain, “SLC to Orion Clemens,  Feb , Hartford, Conn. (UCCL ),” in Mark Twain’s Letters, –, eds. Michael B. Frank and Harriet Elinor Smith, Mark Twain Project Online (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, , ), www.marktwainproject.org/xtf/view? docId=letters/UCCL.xml;style=letter (accessed November , ).  Charles H. Gold, “Hatching Ruin,” or Mark Twain’s Road to Bankruptcy (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, ), –.  James M. Cox, “A Connecticut Yankee: The Machinery of Self-Preservation,” Yale Review  (), ; Kaplan, Mr. Clemens, –.  Mark Twain, “The Compositor” [], in Mark Twain Speaking, ed. Paul Fatout (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, ), .  Legros and Grant, Typographical Printing-Surfaces, . Subsequently cited parenthetically as TPS.  See J. L. Paige, “Machine for Distributing, Setting, and Justifying Type,” patent no. , (United States Patent Office, October , ).  Cited in Gold, “Hatching Ruin,” .  Ibid., .  Walter Benn Michaels, “An American Tragedy, or the Promise of American Life,” Representations  (Winter ), .  Twain, Mark Twain’s Notebooks, : .  Ibid., : .  Paine, Mark Twain, : . Pointing out that “no scrap of substantiating documentation has ever turned up” among the papers of Clemens or his company, Gold finds the story “almost certainly apocryphal”; Gold, “Hatching Ruin,” . Clemens met with members of the Mergenthaler group and at one point hoped that their products might coexist on the market: “Both machines are needed, I judge”; Twain, Mark Twain’s Notebooks, : .  “A Shareholder,” The Linotype Composing Machine: A Retrospect and a Prospect (London: Witherby, ), .  See James R. Beniger, The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ).  Earl F. Briden, “Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee and the Matter of Colt,” American Notes and Queries .– (Nov./Dec. ), –.  Mark Twain, “Mark Twain on His Travels,” Daily Alta California  March , .  Gold, “Hatching Ruin,” .  On Clarence and on Hank Morgan’s desired for clarity and clairvoyance, see Ann Gelder, “Justifying the Page,” Qui Parle . (Fall ), –.  Michelson, Printer’s Devil, .

Notes on pages –



 J. W. Powell, “Competition as a Factor in Human Evolution,” American Anthropologist  (), .  Ibid., .  Donald Hoffmann, Mark Twain in Paradise: His Voyages to Bermuda (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, ), .  Slotkin, “Mark Twain’s Frontier,” .  Julia Keller, Mr. Gatling’s Terrible Marvel: The Gun That Changed Everything and the Misunderstood Genius Who Invented It (New York: Viking, ), –.  Twain, “Mark Twain on His Travels,” .  John Ellis, The Social History of the Machine Gun (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,  []), , .  See Keller, Mr. Gatling’s, –.  Ellis, Social History, .  Twain, [Rejected Version of Typothetae Speech], .  Ibid., .  See for instance Paul Virilio, The Information Bomb, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, ).  See Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,  []), –.  “The Charter Oak City,” Scribner’s Monthly  (November ), .  Ong, Orality and Literacy, .  Mark Twain, No. , The Mysterious Stranger (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), ; italics original.  Ibid., . After Words  “The Irony of Fame,” Indianapolis Journal (January , ), . Credited to the Cincinnati Tribune, this item appeared widely in American newspapers in early .  Richard Marsh, The Goddess: A Demon (London: White, ), .  See Jean Marie Mathias Philippe Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, L’Ève Future (n.p.: José Corti,  []).  Octave Uzanne, “The End of Books,” Scribner’s Magazine  (August ), . Subsequently cited within the text as EB.  Jussi Parikka, A Geology of Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), .  Kathleen Fitzpatrick, The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, ).  Willa Z. Silverman, The New Bibliopolis: French Book Collectors and the Culture of Print, – (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, ), .  On the ear phonautograph and its place in the history of sound recording, see Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ), –.



Notes on pages –

 Patrick Brantlinger, The Reading Lesson: The Threat of Mass Literacy in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ), ff.  Priscilla Coit Murphy, “Books Are Dead, Long Live Books,” in Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition, ed. David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, ), . See also Robert Coover, “The End of Books,” New York Times Book Review (June , ), , –; Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (New York: Fawcett Columbine, ); Sven Birkerts, Changing the Subject: Art and Attention in the Internet Age (Minneapolis: Graywolf, ).  Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the Twelve Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future (New York: Viking, ), , .  Multigraph Collective, Interacting with Print: Elements of Reading in the Age of Print Saturation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), .  Peggy Johnson, Fundamentals of Collection Development and Management, rd ed. (Chicago: American Library Association, ), .  Allison Flood, “UK Publishes More Books Per Capita Than Any Other Country, Report Shows,” The Guardian (October , ), www.theguardian .com/books//oct//uk-publishes-more-books-per-capita-million-report (accessed November , ).  Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: Norton, ).

Index

African Americans and US national unity,  agents, literary,  and Corelli,  in The Sorrows of Satan,  Alger, Horatio,  Allen, Grant,  Allen, Paul and manuscript of Dracula,  American Nervousness (Beard),  American Progress (Gast),  Anderson, Benedict,  anthropology, nineteenth-century and media theory,  archive Derrida on,  digital, – on paper,  of recorded sound, ,  and typewriter in Dracula,  Arnold, Matthew, ,  and Tit-Bits,  aura,  of Count Dracula,  liquidated by typewriter in Dracula,  The Author (US journal),  authorship, , , –, –,  automation of,  as creating typographical arrangements,  and the Linotype,  manuals,  and mediation,  in The Sorrows of Satan,  of three-volume novels,  in Tit-Bits,  and the typewriter, ,  will give way to audio narration,  Barthes, Roland,  Bassett, Troy, 

Beard, Dan,  illustrations to A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, , – Beard, George,  Bell Telephone Company,  Bell, Alexander Graham, , , ,  as public figure,  uses induction balance to search for bullet in Garfield, – Beniger, James,  Benjamin, Walter, , ,  on the storyteller,  See also aura Bentley, George, , ,  bestsellers, ,  The Manxman,  The Sorrows of Satan, ,  Trilby,  Birkerts, Sven,  blood as medium in Dracula,  Bohn’s Libraries series,  Bolter, Jay David, , , ,  book Gissing’s love for,  innovations in publishing,  materiality of,  as media system in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, ,  and mediation, in A Writer of Books,  and mediation, in The Sorrows of Satan,  of nature,  obituaries for,  as obsolete, – presents knowledge as external and abstract,  as proliferating, –, ,  for sale or for borrowing,  simulates media effects in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, ,  technical definition, ,  See also codex





Index

Bourdieu, Pierre,  Bowlby, Rachel, – Bradshaw’s Guide, ,  Brantlinger, Patrick,  British Museum Reading Room,  in New Grub Street,  bureaucracy in Dracula, – Cable, George Washington,  Caine, Hall,  camera see photography Camlot, Jason,  Carlyle, Thomas,  Carr, Nicholas,  “Casabianca” (Hemans) Twain types lines from,  character, fictional as typographic assemblage,  Chesterton, G. K.,  on insipid information,  circulating library, , , ,  Matthew Arnold on,  as part of information empire,  as stifling the novel,  and the three-volume novel, – Clemens, Samuel see Twain, Mark codex and form of the novel,  as neutral print form,  treated as different from other media, ,  See also book Collins, Wilkie on known and unknown reading audiences,  Colt Firearms factory and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,  links Paige Compositor to Gatling gun,  and Paige Compositor,  Twain visits for first time,  where Twain fires Gatling gun,  communication circuit in Tit-Bits,  computer and nineteenth-century media, – A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (Twain), – orality in, – technological progress in, – warfare and cultural conflict in, – Coover, Robert,  Corelli, Marie as “Mavis Clare,”  maintains public persona, , 

A Romance of Two Worlds, – The Sorrows of Satan, – Coviello, Peter,  culture in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,  Arnold’s view of,  media,  oral and literate, , – progress via annihilation,  as sequence of technical upgrades,  See also mass culture, orality, print culture Curwen, Henry,  Daily Telegraph,  Dayan, Daniel, – Debray, Régis,  decadence of the vampire,  dematerialization of media,  Derrida, Jacques,  on archive fever,  Dixon, Ella Hepworth, –,  Dracula (Stoker), – incorporates Stoker’s research notes,  manuscript found in Pennsylvania,  tags the origin and medium of every narrative fragment,  du Maurier, George,  ebook, – Edison, Thomas, –, ,  communicates with fiancée via Morse code,  consults with Twain,  inventions cause nervousness,  office machines,  See also electric light, kinetograph, phonograph Egerton, George,  electric light as altering human nervous system,  as image of modern creativity,  in New Grub Street,  Eliot, George on the telephone,  “The End of Books” (Coover),  “The End of Books” (Uzanne), – fiction, railway, , ,  Field, Kate, , ,  “The Finest Story in the World” (Kipling), –, ,  Finkelstein, David, 

Index First Sounds project,  “The First Writing-Machines” (Twain),  Fitzpatrick, Kathleen,  flow incorporated as principle of Linotype and Paige Compositor,  of information,  format, ,  codex as,  and content of novels,  Garfield, James Abram acquaintance with Walt Whitman,  assassination of, – Bell scans for bullet in, – death of, ,  health bulletins about,  national interest in health of,  political problems,  prepares to visit telegraph magnate,  shot by Charles Guiteau,  undying fame predicted,  as vernacular media theorist, – Gast, John,  Gatling gun, – Gissing, George New Grub Street, –, –, –,  Gitelman, Lisa,  Goble, Mark,  The Goddess, A Demon (Marsh), – Goody, Jack and orality in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,  Gosse, Edmund,  gothic in Dracula,  and narrative framing,  gramophone,  See also phonograph Grand, Sarah,  Grusin, Richard, , , ,  Guillory, John,  Guiteau, Charles, ,  love of stationery,  shoots James Garfield,  trial and execution of,  as vernacular media theorist, – Habermas, Ju¨rgen,  Hardy, Thomas on institutions of the novel, –,  Harmsworth, Alfred,  Harwood, John Berwick, ,  Hayles, N. Katherine, 



The Heavenly Twins (Grand),  Heinemann, William, – Hochman, Brian,  Hoe Press,  Howells, William Dean, – on Paige Compositor,  Huyssen, Andreas, ,  hypnosis produces information in Dracula,  imperialism in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,  The Importance of Being Earnest (Wilde), , ,  induction balance, –,  information, , ,  and bureaucracy, – as demediated,  and hypnosis in Dracula,  as impersonal,  as imponderable flow,  and Linotype,  narratives of,  as parasite,  production in Dracula, , ,  and technological reproduction,  as vampire,  intermediality, –, , , – and aesthetics,  and composition of Dracula,  as creating occult media effects, ,  in Dracula, ,  as full of gaps, ,  as lossy, ,  of the typist in Dracula,  as unifying,  The Irrational Knot (Shaw),  James, Henry,  Jameson, Fredric,  Jones, Gavin,  journalism, ,  audience for,  in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, , – in Dracula,  and media consumption,  in A Modern Amazon,  in New Grub Street,  and the novel,  part of a media system,  in A Writer of Books, ,  Joyce, James, 



Index

Kaolatype engraving process,  Katz, Elihu, – Kelly, Kevin,  “Keynotes” book series,  Kern, Stephen,  kinetograph,  Kipling, Rudyard “The Finest Story in the World,” –,  Many Inventions, , ,  Marsh trenchantly summarizes themes of,  and telegraph,  on the three-volume novel, – views authorship in terms of media,  Kittler, Friedrich, , , ,  on the gramophone,  on translation between media, – L’Ève Future (Villiers de l’Isle-Adam),  Lang, Andrew,  Linotype, ,  and Paige Compositor, –,  literacy in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, –,  in Dracula,  growth of, ,  as modernity,  in nineteenth-century anthropology,  literature contrast with journalism,  deconsecration of,  and ideas about media, ,  media as obstacles to producing,  and new media,  as test for new media, – as typography,  London Electrophone Company,  Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth,  Luckhurst, Roger,  Luria, Alexander,  machines to automate literary production, – Magnus, Lady Katie,  Malory, Thomas,  The Manxman (Caine),  Many Inventions (Kipling), , ,  marriage as novelistic closure,  as topic to write about,  as union of orality and literacy in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,  and volume format of A Modern Amazon,  Marsh, Richard, –

mass culture,  in A Writer of Books,  mass media, , ,  mass production,  printing as model for,  mass readership as model for US polity,  in The Sorrows of Satan,  materiality of the arts,  of books, ,  of literary production, ,  of media, , , , –, , , ,  of media systems,  in New Grub Street,  of paper, ,  of print, ,  of the novel, ,  of the novel in three volumes,  of vampires,  in A Writer of Books,  Matz, Aaron,  McLuhan, Eric,  McLuhan, Marshall, , , , ,  on media content,  media and cognition,  change as progress,  competition and replacement,  concept of,  as consolidated entity, ,  in Dracula,  invention and adoption, ,  as material objects, ,  and modernity,  See also mass media, new media, and specific media by name media archaeology, –, , ,  of authorship,  in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,  media consumption, , , , ,  media event Garfield’s death as, – properties of,  media systems, , , –, –, , –, , , ,  as divisive,  Dracula flattens,  and the Garfield assassination, , – identified by women novelists with male power and hypocrisy, , ,  at their limits, , , , ,  in New Grub Street, –, 

Index in The Sorrows of Satan, , ,  as stifling the novel, – and the three-volume novel, – Twain plans to replace print workers with,  as unifying,  yield information in Dracula,  media theory, , ,  and King Cadmus myth,  See also vernacular media theory mediation in Dracula,  history of,  and the market,  as noisy,  and novels,  in The Sorrows of Satan, –,  and uncanny effects,  mediaura,  of vampires,  mediums occult,  spirit, , , ,  Mergenthaler, Ottmar,  metadata in Dracula,  Michaels, Walter Benn,  Michelson, Bruce,  Miller, Joaquin,  A Modern Amazon (Paston), – modernism, ,  and media,  modernity in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and nineteenth-century anthropology,  defined in contrast to Native American cultures,  as literacy, – Monotype versus Linotype,  Moore, George, ,  and Mudie’s Select Library,  Moretti, Franco,  Morgan, Lewis Henry,  Morse, Samuel,  Morte d’Arthur (Malory) quoted verbatim in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,  Mudie’s Select Library, , , ,  catalogue,  rejects George Moore’s novels,  saddled and unwanted three-volume novels,  secretly rescued by publishers,  underground storage of three-volume novels, ,  Murphy, Priscilla Coit, 



narrative, information Dracula as,  The Nation (US journal), – nationalism and print culture,  Native Americans in nineteenth-century anthropology and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,  New Grub Street (Gissing), –, ,  self-consciousness of,  and Tit-Bits, – New Journalism, , ,  Arnold on,  new media in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,  as obstacle to literature,  New Woman writing, , , ,  conventions of, ,  and Dracula,  and A Modern Amazon,  and George Paston,  and print culture,  and sexual frankness,  and The Sorrows of Satan,  and A Writer of Books,  Newcomb, Simon,  Newnes, George, –, – newspapers, , , , ,  agony columns in,  in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, – evening,  Garfield reads,  Guiteau reads and collects,  Guiteau’s plans for,  and Linotype,  as literary telephone,  and the nation,  and the three-volume novel, – No. , the Mysterious Stranger (Twain),  novel as alternative to media system, ,  cheap reprint,  and codex book form, , , ,  debate about “candour” in, ,  domination of print culture,  as ephemeral,  and journalism,  as mass form,  materiality and closure,  and media history,  at Mudie’s Select Library,  and the New Woman, 



Index

novel (cont.) as part of media systems,  and realism, – as typography,  unwritten,  will be replaced by audio narrative,  novel, single-volume, , , , ,  and bestsellers,  The Sorrows of Satan as, , ,  A Writer of Books as,  See also codex novel, three-volume, , , – associated with women readers,  demise of, ,  economics of,  as ephemeral, ,  fate widely discussed,  as luxury good, ,  as monumental,  as obsolete, ,  origin of format,  as part of a media system, , – as part of information empire,  and plots of Victorian fiction,  and private circulating libraries, – readership of,  and serial formats,  Sir Robert Shirley, Bart. as typical,  as sleep aid,  in The Sorrows of Satan,  as a standard format,  office and information processing,  “The Old Three-Decker” (Kipling), – Ong, Walter and orality in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, , –,  orality in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, – and denial of coevalness,  in Dracula,  in “The Finest Story in the World” (Kipling),  in nineteenth-century anthropology,  and Twain,  orality, secondary, ,  in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,  Page, Leanne,  Paige Compositor, –, – compared to Gatling gun, – and Linotype, –,  “reads” type, 

replicates work of entire printshop, ,  Twain links to modern weaponry,  Paige, James W., , –, ,  paper and archives,  in New Grub Street,  parasite information as,  typewriter as,  vampire as,  Paston, George A Modern Amazon, – as New Woman writer,  stops writing fiction,  A Writer of Books, –, – patents, ,  in America versus Great Britain and Europe,  for Paige Compositor,  in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,  for voices of great audio narrators in the future,  Pater, Walter, – Peirce, Charles Sanders,  periodicals, –,  Gissing’s dislike of,  names of, , , ,  and new media,  as part of a media system, – and short story,  as stifling the novel,  See also journalism, newspapers phonautograph, –, , –,  and lossless transcription,  phonograph, , , –,  in Dracula, ,  in “The Finest Story in the World” (Kipling),  as office technology,  as rendering print forms obsolete, ,  periodical press as,  Twain attempts to use as tool for literary composition,  Twain suggests adding to Paige Compositor,  in A Writer of Books, – photography, , , , – and Corelli,  and Dracula,  as modeled on print,  photography, x-ray and Dracula,  pianola,  The Poets’ Tributes to Garfield, 

Index Poole, Adrian,  Postman, Neil,  Powell, John Wesley, ,  print,  on demand,  as different from other objects,  as disrupted on the page of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,  in “The Finest Story in the World” (Kipling),  formats,  and mechanical compositing,  and other media, , –, , ,  print culture, , –, ,  as dominated by novel,  in the eighteenth century, ,  as media manufacture,  and the New Woman,  and rise of information,  and social hierarchy,  in Tit-Bits,  war on old order in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,  in A Writer of Books,  printing of books,  compositing errors,  as doomed by rise of recorded sound,  history of,  and mechanical compositing, – of newspapers,  of novels,  via photography,  technological changes in, ,  typewriter and, ,  See also Paige Compositor publishing, , ,  international,  as media industry,  in Tit-Bits,  Punch (UK journal),  on three-volume novel,  reading performed by media devices, ,  realism, –, ,  reality effect,  Reconstruction, after US Civil War,  remediation, , , ,  Remington Company,  Review of Reviews,  Robida, Albert, – romance of information in Dracula,  supernatural, 



A Romance of Two Worlds (Corelli), – Röntgen, Wilhelm,  Rubery, Matthew, , ,  “The School of Giorgione” (Pater), – Scott de Martinville, Édouard-Léon, –, ,  Scott, Sit Walter and the three-volume novel,  secretary as heroine in Dracula,  Serres, Michel on parasite,  sexual harassment,  The Shallows (Carr),  Shand, Alexander Innes,  Shaw, George Bernard on the telephone, – Sholes, Christopher Latham,  short stories and late nineteenth-century literary culture,  shorthand in Dracula, , – See also stenography simultaneity, , , ,  Sir Robert Shirley, Bart. (Harwood), –,  Slotkin, Richard,  “The Sobbing of the Bells” (Whitman), – sonicity,  The Sorrows of Satan (Corelli), – published with notice to reviewers,  South, U.S. in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,  and Garfield’s plight, – Stead, W. T., ,  on The Sorrows of Satan, ,  stenography, – as “phonography,”  See also shorthand Sterne, Jonathan, , ,  Stiegler, Bernhard,  Stoker, Bram Dracula, – friendship with Mark Twain,  research for Dracula,  The Story of a Modern Woman (Dixon), –,  and A Writer of Books,  switchboards staffed by unmarried women,  Symonds, Emily Morse see Paston, George Talbot, Constance and William Henry Fox,  telautograph, , , 



Index

telegraph, , , , , ,  in Britain,  as cause of nervousness,  compared to Linotype,  in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,  and fragmented information,  James Garfield’s views of, – and historical perspective,  and Kipling,  as model for phonograph,  as model for telepathy, – in New Grub Street, – news via,  optical,  and Sherlock Holmes,  sympathy via,  Twain sends Malory-esque messages on,  versus telephone,  Whitman and transatlantic cable,  telepathy modeled on electric telegraph, – telephone, ,  and Bell’s induction balance,  in Britain, – for business, ,  compared to Linotype,  in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, ,  in “The Finest Story in the World” (Kipling), – and George Eliot,  and journalism,  and mass media,  mechanics of,  network,  and newspapers,  as representing a media system, , , – as sexual switchboard, – and Shaw, – and Sherlock Holmes,  in The Story of a Modern Woman, – Twain uses and writes about,  in US,  versus telegraph,  in A Writer of Books, – Tesla, Nikola friendship with Twain,  Twain visits lab of,  Thomson, Sir William, ,  on the telephone, ,  Tit-Bits, , , ,  and New Grub Street, , – system of insurance, 

translation between media, – Trilby (du Maurier) published in different formats,  Twain, Mark,  attempts to use phonograph as writing tool,  buys typewriter, ,  A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, –, – declares bankruptcy, ,  friendship with Stoker,  friendship with Tesla, ,  laments coming of modern technologies to Bermuda,  links Paige Compositor to modern weaponry,  No. , the Mysterious Stranger,  and orality,  and Paige Compositor, –, – and technological competition,  as technophile,  view of media innovation,  wants to become business tycoon,  work as printer’s devil,  writes A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court intermittently during involvement with Paige Compositor,  typesetting, mechanical see Linotype, Paige Compositor typewriter, –, ,  and authorship,  and composition of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,  and Corelli,  destroys aura, – in Dracula, –, , – and gender,  as interface for mechanical compositors,  as metatechnology,  kills Dracula,  as parasite, ,  as printing press,  and Remington Arms Company,  and Stoker’s research notes,  as tool for mass production,  Twain experiments with, – as vampire, ,  typography in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, , , ,  and the Linotype,  as the medium of literature, 

Index Ulysses (Joyce),  uncanny as intermedial,  as media profusion and noise,  as mediation,  unreality effect of media translation,  Uzanne, Octave, – vampire and materiality of bodies,  vernacular media theory, ,  about speech versus writing,  of the book’s obsolescence,  defining media as what books are not,  of Charles Guiteau,  of cultural progress,  of James Garfield, – of the novel,  of print,  of the typewriter in Dracula,  in A Writer of Books,  Victoria, Queen,  Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Auguste, 



Wardell, W. L.,  Waugh, Arthur,  Weber, Samuel,  Webster Publishing Company, ,  Webster, Charles,  Webster, Noah,  Whitman, Walt, , – and the telephone,  Wicke, Jennifer,  Wilde, Oscar, , , ,  Williams, Raymond,  The Woman Who Did (Allen),  A Writer of Books (Paston), –, – telephone in, – writing as dominant medium, – as a form of manufacture,  and newer media, – as pedestrian daily practice,  properties split up by late nineteenth-century media,  without writers,  Wu, Tim,  Zieger, Susan, 

CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE AND CULTURE

General editor  , University of Cambridge Titles published . The Sickroom in Victorian Fiction: The Art of Being Ill  , Washington University . Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age edited by  . , California State University, Northridge . Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in Early Victorian Literature and Art  , Northeastern University, Boston . Byron and the Victorians  , University of Minnesota . Literature in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century British Publishing and the Circulation of Books edited by  . , University of California, Santa Cruz and Robert L. Patten, Rice University, Houston . Victorian Photography, Painting and Poetry  , University of Sussex . Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology  , University of Sheffield . The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle  , University of Colorado at Boulder . Rereading Walter Pater  . , Eastern Michigan University . Remaking Queen Victoria edited by  , Yale University and Adrienne Munich, State University of New York, Stony Brook . Disease, Desire, and the Body in Victorian Women’s Popular Novels  . , University of Florida . Realism, Representation, and the Arts in Nineteenth-Century Literature  , Middlebury College, Vermont . Literary Culture and the Pacific  , University of Sydney

. Professional Domesticity in the Victorian Novel Women, Work and Home  .  . Victorian Renovations of the Novel: Narrative Annexes and the Boundaries of Representation  , Washington and Lee University, Virginia . Actresses on the Victorian Stage: Feminine Performance and the Galatea Myth  , University of Leeds . Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud: Victorian Fiction and the Anxiety of Origin  , Vanderbilt University, Tennessee . Ancestry and Narrative in Nineteenth-Century British Literature: Blood Relations from Edgeworth to Hardy  , Royal Holloway, University of London . Dickens, Novel Reading, and the Victorian Popular Theatre   . After Dickens: Reading, Adaptation and Performance  , Georgetown University, Washington DC . Victorian Women Writers and the Woman Question edited by   , Kingston University, London . Rhythm and Will in Victorian Poetry  , University of Sheffield . Gender, Race, and the Writing of Empire: Public Discourse and the Boer War  . , Wheaton College, Massachusetts . Ruskin’s God  , University of Southampton . Dickens and the Daughter of the House  . , University of Southern California . Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science  . , Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut . Testimony and Advocacy in Victorian Law, Literature, and Theology - , Trinity Hall, Cambridge . Victorian Writing about Risk: Imagining a Safe England in a Dangerous World  , University of Pennsylvania . Physiognomy and the Meaning of Expression in Nineteenth-Century Culture  , University of Southampton

. The Victorian Parlour: A Cultural Study  , Rice University, Houston . Aestheticism and Sexual Parody –  , Ryerson University, Toronto . Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, –  , University College London . Fairies in Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature  , Birkbeck, University of London . George Eliot and the British Empire   The State University of New York, Binghamton . Women’s Poetry and Religion in Victorian England: Jewish Identity and Christian Culture  , Mills College, California . Victorian Literature and the Anorexic Body   , Mercer University, Georgia . Eavesdropping in the Novel from Austen to Proust  , Yale University . Missionary Writing and Empire, –  , University of Tasmania . London and the Culture of Homosexuality, –  , Keele University . Fiction, Famine, and the Rise of Economics in Victorian Britain and Ireland  , Rhodes College, Tennessee . Gender and the Victorian Periodical  , Birkbeck, University of London Judith Johnston and Stephanie Green, University of Western Australia . The Victorian Supernatural edited by  , Birkbeck College, London Carolyn Burdett, London Metropolitan University and Pamela Thurschwell, University College London . The Indian Mutiny and the British Imagination  , University of Delhi . The Revolution in Popular Literature: Print, Politics and the People  , Roehampton University of Surrey . Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical: Reading the Magazine of Nature  , University of Leeds Gowan Dawson, University of Leicester Graeme Gooday, University of Leeds Richard Noakes, University of Cambridge

Sally Shuttleworth, University of Sheffield and Jonathan R. Topham, University of Leeds . Literature and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Britain from Mary Shelley to George Eliot   , Wake Forest University . The Child Writer from Austen to Woolf edited by  , University of New South Wales and Juliet McMaster, University of Alberta . From Dickens to Dracula: Gothic, Economics, and Victorian Fiction   , University of New Mexico . Voice and the Victorian Storyteller  , University of Indiana . Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture  , University of Michigan-Dearborn . Catholicism, Sexual Deviance, and Victorian Gothic Culture  . ’, Georgetown University . Epic and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Britain  , University of Gloucestershire . Victorian Honeymoons: Journeys to the Conjugal  , Rice University . The Jewess in Nineteenth-Century British Literary Culture  , University of Southampton . Ireland, India and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Literature  , Dalhousie University . Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination  , Birkbeck, University of London . Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability  , University of Leicester . ‘Michael Field’: Poetry, Aestheticism and the Fin de Siècle  , University of Birmingham . Colonies, Cults and Evolution: Literature, Science and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Writing  , Keele University . Realism, Photography and Nineteenth-Century Fiction  . , Lousiana State University

. Caribbean Culture and British Fiction in the Atlantic World, –  , University of Miami . The Poetry of Chartism: Aesthetics, Politics, History  , University of Manchester . Literature and Dance in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Jane Austen to the New Woman  , Indiana University . Shakespeare and Victorian Women  , Oxford Brookes University . The Tragi-Comedy of Victorian Fatherhood  , University of Hull . Darwin and the Memory of the Human: Evolution, Savages, and South America  , University of Toronto . From Sketch to Novel: The Development of Victorian Fiction  , Ohio State University . The Crimean War and the British Imagination  , Yale University . Shock, Memory and the Unconscious in Victorian Fiction  . , University of Toronto . Sensation and Modernity in the s  , University College Dublin . Ghost-Seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists: Theories of Vision in Victorian Literature and Science  ć, Furman University . Satire in an Age of Realism  , Scripps College, California . Thinking About Other People in Nineteenth-Century British Writing  , University of Michigan . Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagination  , University of Ulster, Coleraine . Urban Realism and the Cosmopolitan Imagination in the Nineteenth Century: Visible City, Invisible World  , Hunter College, City University of New York . Women, Literature, and the Domesticated Landscape: England’s Disciples of Flora, –  . , University of Florida Elise L. Smith, Millsaps College, Mississippi

. Time and the Moment in Victorian Literature and Society  , University of Colorado . Popular Fiction and Brain Science in the Late Nineteenth Century  , Washington State University . Picturing Reform in Victorian Britain  , Yale University . Atonement and Self-Sacrifice in Nineteenth-Century Narrative - , University of Cambridge . The Silver Fork Novel: Fashionable Fiction in the Age of Reform  , Pomona College, California . Oscar Wilde and Ancient Greece  , Colchester Royal Grammar School . The Poetry of Victorian Scientists: Style, Science and Nonsense  , University of Southampton . Moral Authority, Men of Science, and the Victorian Novel  , Princeton Writing Program . China and the Victorian Imagination: Empires Entwined  . , University of Warwick . Dickens’s Style  , University of Oxford . The Formation of the Victorian Literary Profession  , University of Leeds . Before George Eliot: Marian Evans and the Periodical Press  , University College Dublin . The Victorian Novel and the Space of Art: Fictional Form on Display  , California Institute of Technology . George Eliot and Money: Economics, Ethics and Literature  , Independent Scholar . Masculinity and the New Imperialism: Rewriting Manhood in British Popular Literature, –  , University of Minnesota . Evolution and Victorian Culture edited by  , York University, Toronto and Bennett Zon, University of Durham . Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination  , University of Texas, Austin

. Popular Literature, Authorship and the Occult in Late Victorian Britain  , Dartmouth College, New Hampshire . Women Writing Art History in the Nineteenth Century: Looking Like a Woman   Birkbeck, University of London . Relics of Death in Victorian Literature and Culture  , Long Island University, C. W. Post Campus . The Demographic Imagination and the Nineteenth-Century City: Paris, London, New York  , University College Dublin . Dickens and the Business of Death  , University of York . Translation as Transformation in Victorian Poetry  , Queens College, City University of New York . The Bigamy Plot: Sensation and Convention in the Victorian Novel  , Boston College, Massachusetts . English Fiction and the Evolution of Language, –  , University of Oxford . The Racial Hand in the Victorian Imagination  , Bowdoin College, Maine . Evolution and Imagination in Victorian Children’s Literature  , University of Utah . Writing Arctic Disaster: Authorship and Exploration  , University of California, Riverside . Science, Fiction, and the Fin-de-Siècle Periodical Press  , University of Birmingham . Democratising Beauty in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Art and the Politics of Public Life  , University of Michigan . Everyday Words and the Character of Prose in Nineteenth-Century Britain  , Seton Hall University, New Jersey . Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Poetry of Religious Experience  , University of Newcastle upon Tyne . Blindness and Writing: From Wordsworth to Gissing  , Birkbeck College, University of London

. An Underground History of Early Victorian Fiction: Chartism, Radical Print Culture, and the Social Problem Novel  , New York University . Automatism and Creative Acts in the Age of New Psychology  . , Oklahoma State University . Idleness and Aesthetic Consciousness, –  , University of Sussex . Poetry, Media, and the Material Body: Autopoetics in Nineteenth-Century Britain  , Albion College, Michigan . Malaria and Victorian Fictions of Empire  , Texas A&M University . The Brontës and the Idea of the Human  , University of Aberdeen . The Political Lives of Victorian Animals  , University of Hawai’i-Manoa. . The Divine in the Commonplace  , St John’s University, New York . Plagiarizing the Victorian Novel: Imitation, Parody, Aftertext  , Virginia Commonwealth University . Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, –: Many Inventions  , University of Georgia