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 David E. Latané (bio) Clare Pettitt, Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815–1848 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), pp. xviii + 348, $85/£65 cloth. Serial Forms is one in a line of intriguing, wide-ranging, and often enthralling books that cast the widest nets to reel in the material and intellectual phenomena of nineteenth-century British culture. Works such as Richard Stein’s Victoria’s Year: British Literature and Culture, 1837–1838 (1989), James Chandler’s England in 1819 (1999), or the more recent What the Victorians Made of Romanticism: Material Artifacts, Cultural Practices, and Reception History by Tom Mole (2019) have ignored disciplinary boundaries to freely roam across media and events. Clare Pettitt’s project to complete a trilogy of books showing the birth of the modern to the end of World War I is self-consciously ambitious, along the lines of Peter Gay’s five-volume The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud (1984–98). The book reflects immense study. The bibliography, thirty-five pages of close print, begins with Carolyn Abbate’s A History of Opera (2012) and concludes with Slajov Žižek’s The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989). Footnotes sometimes creep into the top half of the page, allowing for careful consideration of the evolution of scholarship. Gratifyingly, predecessors such as Richard Altick and Brian Maidment are not only cited in the notes but also discussed. Pettitt expertly weaves together various strands to show how the growing infiltration of seriality into every aspect of culture forms “the dynamic processes involved in calibrating a new form of social time” (292). The page-turning and page-anticipating urgencies of the expanding news media are only one aspect of the case for the modern’s emergence. Serial Forms has chapters exploring the intersections of shows, such as the panorama and diorama; theatrical spectacles; exhibited paintings like Géricault’s “Shipwreck of the Medusa” at the Egyptian Hall (1820); canonical works, such as Childe Harold (1812–18), Don Juan (1819–24), and fictions by Sir Walter Scott and Edward Bulwer; and the play of spatial and temporal scale in works by Thomas Carlyle, Augustus Pugin, and Charles Dickens. Pettitt accurately observes that the period 1820–37 “has long been a neglected and arid field in British literary studies” (8). The same cannot be said for periodical studies, as it was the heyday of Blackwood’s, Fraser’s, and the Keepsake craze, not to mention The Times at its thundery best. Amidst the riches of Serial Forms are two chapters especially relevant to periodical scholars. Chapter 6, “History in Miniature,” makes a strong case for the centrality of a group of popular titles that are too often overlooked: the information-oriented non-news weeklies like the Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction (1822–50) and the Penny Magazine [End Page 376] (1832–45). The next chapter, “Biopolitics of Seriality,” uses the short run of the weekly Howitt’s Journal (1847–48) “to consider how seriality was becoming increasingly important to the creation and maintenance of what we might now call biopolitics” (251). “History in Miniature” starts with a remark in David Copperfield (1850) about how the Peggottys take the sort of pleasure they might receive from “a pocket model of the Colosseum” when seeing Little Em’ly and David side-by-side in their boat-house (213). What does a shrunken model of a large Roman ruin mean in this context and to such people? The chapter examines how cheap illustrated periodicals helped cause a seismic shift in attitudes toward the historical past. This shift was abetted, somewhat ironically, by the “taxes on knowledge” that meant a penny paper could not contain news—only knowledge. Pettitt explores how the intersections of “models, panoramas, inexpensive toys, dioramas, stage sets and prints, and engravings and woodcuts in the cheap press” made it possible for society “to consume the past as never before” (216). Perhaps most importantly, “novel time-space frames were beginning to be inserted into the common experience of working class people” (216). The “promiscuous miscellanity” of the cheap papers, she argues, works differently than in...