‘The great event of modern history’: The Victorian Press Visualizes its Infrastructure

Abstract

From images of periodical subdivision and recycled papers on the move, to perfect machines, disruptive compositors, strikes and disasters, the press had many different ways of visualizing its infrastructure. Drawing on a wide range of British and Irish sources, including national, local and trade papers, quarterlies, mid-Victorian monthlies, socialist magazines, and the New Journalism of the 1890s, this article asks what was politically at stake when the press put its materiality and mobility on display. Focusing on evolutionary trees, bodies, and machines, on recycling, circuits, and networks, and on protest, disruption, and breakdown, I seek to bring nineteenth- and twenty-first century ways of seeing press infrastructure into dialogue, considering how the metaphors we use can define the object in view. The analysis concludes by linking these debates to the revolutionary collapse of capitalist newspaper production in William Morris’s ‘News from Nowhere’, serialized in the Commonweal (1890), and to the Martian destruction of press infrastructure in H. G. Wells’s Pearson’s Magazine serial ‘The War of the Worlds’ (1897).