Media and Print Culture Consumption in Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Victorian Reading Experience ed. by Paul Raphael Rooney and Anna Gasperini

Abstract

Reviewed by: Media and Print Culture Consumption in Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Victorian Reading Experience ed. by Paul Raphael Rooney and Anna Gasperini Jennifer Phegley (bio) Paul Raphael Rooney and Anna Gasperini, eds., Media and Print Culture Consumption in Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Victorian Reading Experience (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 241, $99.99 cloth; $69.99 ebook. Reading is the stubbornly resistant element of book history's triumvirate of reading, writing, and publishing. It is notoriously difficult to study and, as a result, has often been neglected or circumvented. Given that most nineteenth-century readers left no trace of their interaction with texts, how do we come to understand their reading practices or responses? Most records of reading come from professional writers whose perspectives are not necessarily representative of the majority. Likewise, our information about who belonged to a particular reading audience comes largely from the potentially biased claims of editors and publishers. Neither of these sources is very effective at enlightening us about the mass reading public. While this is a continuing challenge for scholars, the essays in Media and Print Culture Consumption in Nineteenth-Century Britain, edited by Paul Raphael Rooney and Anna Gasperini, provide new evidence of how readers bought, shared, and responded to written materials. Rooney and Gasperini explain that they hope to offer studies that "turn their attention to the wider nineteenth-century media climate in order to shed light on the ways in which Victorian" readers "were conditioned by contemporaneous contact with cultural content countered in other media" (8). While the editors do not explicitly declare the working-class reader as the focus of the book, the evidence of reading practices offered by many contributors compellingly highlights the common reader. [End Page 825] Isabel Corfe, Anne Humpherys, Ruth Doherty, and Marie Léger-St-Jean devote their attention to deciphering the reading choices of members of what Wilkie Collins famously labelled the "unknown public." Corfe focuses on the lasting power of oral culture in her interrogation of why the consumption of half-penny street ballads remained strong even as the marketplace for higher quality and more diverse penny-press publications thrived. Corfe maintains that while many scholars contend that street ballads were attractive because they were cheaper than newspapers, the archival record shows that ballads remained popular beyond mid-century when the newspaper tax was eliminated. Furthermore, the most popular ballads "were ordinary song sheets rather than sheets pertaining to the gallows," as is often assumed (133). Corfe concludes that ballads were more "portable" as well as more widely available since they were carried to town and country by peddlers. Perhaps most importantly, they remained useful as "songs to be sung" by a semi-literate population looking for a cheap and productive way to spend their free time (140). Humpherys complicates notions of the popular and the canonical in her study of the advertising lists for John Dicks's reprint series. This numbered list of books, including novels priced at sixpence and dramas for a penny, were advertised in all of Dicks's publications including Reynolds's Miscellany (1846–69), Bow Bells (1862–97), and Reynolds's Weekly Newspaper (1850–1967). Humpherys sets out to determine what a "shrewd publisher thought his audience might want access to in cheap reprint editions" by examining the advertising lists (95). She notes that while working-class autobiographies often emphasized highly regarded literary works, Dicks's reprints created a counter-canon "of standard texts, not one organized by the classics, not one organized chronologically, but one of a heterogeneous mixture of all types from all periods" (104). Thus, Humpherys convincingly argues that Dicks offers us a "broader publishing and cultural context" in which to make sense of what the "'unknown public' wanted and would buy" (105). Doherty delves into the genre of the penny dreadful to determine how its narrative form kept readers engaged over an extended period of time, which, in the case of G. W. M. Reynolds's The Mysteries of London, lasted more than a decade (1844–55). Doherty explains that Reynolds kept his massive serial both fresh and familiar by alternating between microscopic and telescopic points of view, which allowed him to "create...