Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815-1848, by Clare Pettitt

Abstract

Reviewed by: Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815–1848 by Clare Pettitt William Lee Hughes (bio) Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815–1848, by Clare Pettitt; pp. xviii + 348. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020, $94.00. Clare Pettitt’s Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815–1848 sets out to develop an interdisciplinary methodology for understanding how ordinary people, particularly the working poor, came to feel like agents of history. This project is the first in a planned series of three books, which draws upon print media studies, affect theory, and nineteenth-century historicism to argue that “seriality is the defining form of modernity” (2). It will be of great interest to scholars of the Victorian period, but it is particularly noteworthy for its closely- and well-researched chapters that cover the Regency and Georgian periods, which are too frequently ignored in nineteenth-century scholarship. The greatest strength of the book is its meticulous research of periodicals, including The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction (1822–49), Penny Magazine (1832–44), Olio; or, Museum of Entertainment (1828–33), Parterre (1834–6), Saturday Magazine (1832–44), Chambers’s Edinburgh Magazine (1832–54), Howitt’s Journal (1847–8), and Frederick Douglass’s North Star (1847–51). In chapter 1, “Yesterday’s News,” Pettitt argues that repressive taxes on print that were passed after Peterloo, especially the Newspaper Stamp Duties Act (one of the Six Acts), created a time-lag in the distribution of news, so that poorer people experienced print not in terms of the ephemera of an empty homogenous time of modernity, but rather as part of a multi-media culture. The repressive taxes encouraged poorer people to purchase chapbooks, broadsides, ballads, and almanacs instead of the costlier newspapers. These older forms of print media provided a different model of time and history, which overlapped with the newer models of time and history created by the daily newspaper. Pettitt shows that these serial rhythms did not synchronize until mid-century, after the repressive taxes had been repealed. Serial Forms opens new directions for the study of nineteenth-century periodicals by thinking of them as media rather than as literature. As media, these texts are not just texts. Rather, they are tools to be actively manipulated and engaged with in various ways that enable the reader or user to imagine themself as a historical agent and to feel like a part of history. Pettitt creates a cogent set of terms for analyzing and theorizing seriality in the period, particularly in her chapters on Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott. While Scott is often read as the progenitor of the historical novel, Pettitt argues that his work is “unbound” by its close relationship to ballads, broadsides, and popular oral, material, and print culture (69). For Pettitt, it is best to “abandon the idea of the novel” to understand Scott’s work. Instead, Scott’s works are “print objects” (71). This term highlights the ways in which the illiterate and semi-literate engaged with print media through illustrations and as toys, for example. The chapter on Byron argues that his work is best understood in terms of serial performance (rather than as plays or poems) in an “immersive media revolution” (123). This performance creates a structure of feeling, “feeling at a distance,” which makes possible the extention of civic culture to the illiterate and semi-literate working poor (129). Readers will notice Pettitt’s engagement with critical theory and with affect theory in particular. Indeed, Serial Forms offers a refreshingly material engagement with affect studies. In Pettitt’s argument, the working class’s increasing access to serial print media renegotiates their place in history and enables them to feel and “imagine themselves into a historical [End Page 697] present” (250). The chapter on Mount Vesuvius argues that “emerging serial news media” created a shared sense of ordinary dailiness for a widening portion of the population (165). This sense of dailiness precipitated a feeling of living in a potentially historical moment in which an event could emerge. Without the feeling of ordinary dailiness, no true historical difference (event) could occur. The chapter on the biopolitics of seriality brings Pettitt’s...