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 Pete Orford (bio) Clare Pettitt. Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815–1848. Oxford UP, 2020. Pp. xviii + 348. £65.00. ISBN 978-0-19-883042-9 (hb). The temptation when reviewing a book for Dickens Quarterly is to focus solely on the parts of the book that mention Dickens. But what Clare Pettitt's work on serialization offers is a much wider context, and a good thing, too. Frequently, as Dickens scholars, we celebrate the importance of serialization to his works, and the frequency with which we do so often leads to the implicit inference that Dickens is as central to serialization as serialization was to him; what Pettitt's book offers is a broader view of serialization that explores a much larger trend across several authors and generations. "At its most basic, seriality is about the relationship of the part to the whole and the relationship of the singular to the plural," Pettitt tells us; "seriality has therefore emerged as an important term for political theories of citizenship in the nineteenth century and since" (201). The book is the first of three planned monographs, aiming to examine serialization from 1818 through to 1918. While Pettitt acknowledges her book is "deliberately Eurocentric and metropolitan" her subsequent books will aim to expand to "Continental Europe and then to the technologically networked empire towards the end of the century" (22). In doing so, Pettitt is keen to explore serialization in its broadest sense, not limited to literature [End Page 209] but also in its wider social functions. In the introduction, for example, she points towards serialization as "a dangerously … flexible form," which "can be emancipatory, but it can also be regulatory and repressive" (6), pointing to its darkest form in the numbering of prisoners at concentration camps, which forcefully highlights how far serialization can differ from the cheery numbers of Pickwick. Though I've noted the broader range of this book beyond Dickens, that is not to say that Dickens does not make regular appearances. Sketches by Boz is his most referenced work in Pettitt's book, first alluded to frequently in the opening chapter, "Yesterday's News," in which the veracious devouring of the news by nineteenth-century readers as described is akin to modern day consumption of social media. A particularly illuminating chapter called "Scott Unbound" follows, in which Walter Scott – frequently upheld as the antithesis to serialization and the penny dreadfuls – is explored as a fragmented author through his various ballads and poems, subsequently collected. Pettitt uses the disparate nature of Scott's poetry and the illusion of cohesion in its bound form to segue into discussing "the importance of the scrapbook and the album in understanding nineteenth-century print culture" (83). The next chapter, "Live Byron," considers how Don Juan and Childe Harold intersect with contemporary news, and aims "to think about forms of performance that made innovative claims to 'liveness'" (109). This is then followed by a fascinating chapter, "Vesuvius on the Strand," which looks at how Pompeii and its neighboring volcano featured prominently in English print in the 1820s to become a familiar and omnipresent sight: "It must have been difficult to ignore the insistent process of Mount Vesuvius in London from the 1820s onwards. The volcano would pop up all over the place and erupt, often several times a day, in multimedia shows, spectacles, and plays across the city" (148). In this chapter and others, Pettitt argues persuasively for the background noise of print that has so often been ignored in our championing of Victorian novels, showing how something apparently distant such as Vesuvius can become a firm presence in nineteenth-century England through the repeated minor (and major) references occurring in the peripheral vision of the reader. This is something that needs further exploration in Dickens's work as we pay more attention to the paratexts around his monthly and weekly instalments, to better understand the wider context his readers were experiencing as they navigated through his stories via several pages of advertisements, competing serialized fiction and shorter articles. The next chapter devotes itself more fully to Dickens...