Nineteenth-century Print Research Articles

“We Fervently Pray”: Reading Afro-Protestant Prayer as Genre Intervention in “The Petition of Absalom Jones and Others—People of Colour and Freemen of Philadelphia”

Abstract: While scholars have long documented Christianity’s influence on African American literature and print, few have investigated how specific Afro-Protestant practices inform alternative modes of collective action and writing in the early American republic. This essay follows scholarship’s recent turn by reading Afro-Protestant prayer within discourses of civic and religious petition at the turn of the nineteenth century. Sanders contends that early African American advocates mobilized prayer’s genre flexibility in their public addresses to challenge America’s growing antagonism toward antislavery petitions. These early theorizations of Afro-Protestant prayer as petitionary activism reframe how we understand a tradition of circulated prayers from nineteenth-century print to the present.

The reckoning table, the periodoscope and the shaping of modern pregnancy in nineteenth-century print forms

How did Victorian print forms shape experiences of pregnancy? This article focuses on pregnancy calendars, a form that rose to prominence in nineteenth-century Britain and Europe. Such calendars appeared in...

Periodical Form and Chatterton's Commune, the Atheistic Communistic Scorcher (1884–1895) ‘the most Unique Production of the—Nineteenth Century’

Chatterton's Commune, the Atheistic Communistic Scorcher (1884–1895) was a journal that troubled the boundaries of nineteenth-century print culture. Ostensibly a periodical, with all the associated markers of form and content (from masthead to ‘To Correspondents' column), it might alternatively be considered an expanded broadside, a pamphlet series, or even a proto-zine. This article's close consideration of this publication elaborates upon what the periodical form enabled for Daniel Chatterton—its impoverished editor, sole author, typesetter, printer, and distributor—as a tool of political agitation during the late nineteenth century. Focusing on the publication's materialities of print and production, its resistance to ephemerality (of both print and working-class lives), and Chatterton's aspirations towards radical communality, it argues that by pushing at the limits of freedom of thought Chatterton's Commune brings into focus the perceived power of periodicals at the end of the nineteenth century.

Rewriting Citizenship: Women, Race, and Nineteenth-Century Print Culture

Rewriting Citizenship: Women, Race, and Nineteenth-Century Print Culture

Reconstructing the Castle of Alcantarilla, Utrera, Seville, from the 1864 drawings of John Gardner Wilkinson (1797-1875)

The Castle of Alcantarilla, also known as la Alcantarilla de Alocaz, or even Diego Corrientes after the eighteenth century bandit, is not in fact a castle but a Roman bridge fortified with two towers in the later Middle Ages. While the south tower survives in a lamentably degraded condition, the north tower has been entirely razed. Its history is well-studied by Fernando Bejines Rodríguez, and its general appearance is known from sixteenth and nineteenth century prints. Therefore, in light of this, what is presented here is new research that permits the reconstruction of the Medieval towers, informed by sketches by John Gardner Wilkinson from 1864, which also reveal previously unknown details. This is supported by accounts of other earlier British travellers. An architectural section through both towers is offered as a tool of inquiry to advance the understanding of their internal arrangement.

Fugitive Print: Robert Southey and S. T. Coleridge’s Devil-Ballad

The article examines the print history of Robert Southey and S. T. Coleridge’s co-written but anonymously published ‘The Devil’s Thoughts’ (1799). Over more than three decades, the ballad was transcribed, reprinted, and imitated. Most notably, an illustrated edition of 1830—erroneously ascribed to the classical scholar Richard Porson—enjoyed much popularity in the market for print, allegedly selling fifteen-thousand copies. The satirical poem aims its barbs at lucrative but immoral professions (lawyers, apothecaries, and booksellers), but government policies on prisons and support for war with France are also criticised. The article aims to discuss the poetical and political reasons why the two poets were reluctant to acknowledge the authorship of the satire. Examining the ballad’s various reproductions provides an illuminating case study of how nineteenth-century print culture could exploit popular texts that were placed in the public domain. The discussion will be divided into three sections. The first section will examine the poem’s genesis and unpack its most significant allusions in the context of contemporary print satire. The second section will document the reproduction trajectory of a Romantic-period poem that was dispossessed for most of its popular lifespan. The final section will critically examine how entrepreneurs in the book market cashed in on the popularity of the illustrated version (1830) by publishing several derivative compositions in hasty succession.

Rewriting Citizenship: Women, Race, and Nineteenth-Century Print Culture by Susan J. Stanfield (review)

Rewriting Citizenship: Women, Race, and Nineteenth-Century Print Culture by Susan J. Stanfield (review)

Missionary Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century British Literature

Missionary Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century British Literature

Critical Reassessments: Robert D. Jacobs’s Poe: Journalist and Critic, a Classic in Poe Studies

Abstract In 1969, Robert D. Jacobs broke new ground with Poe: Journalist and Critic, the first truly inclusive study of the critical writings that Edgar Allan Poe produced throughout his career. According to Jacobs, those texts could not be understood apart from the journalistic world in which Poe wrote them and without reference to the principles on which he relied while evaluating literary works. Those laws derived from Common Sense philosophy, and of particular importance to Poe, Jacobs argued, was the notion that three faculties—the reason, the moral sense, and the taste—directed mental life. Responsive to pleasure, the taste allowed a person to appreciate art, so Poe’s insistence on unity was tied to the belief that all the elements within in a work of literature would please if they had a single, focused effect on the reader. Enlightenment-era psychology was, in short, central to Poe’s critical practice, the development of which Jacobs mapped throughout Poe: Journalist and Critic—a work that has become a classic in the field. Attending to Poe’s work as a writer for magazines, Jacobs not only stimulated scholarly interest in Poe’s critical reviews but also encouraged the examination of his writings as products of nineteenth-century print culture. Seminal in Poe studies, Poe: Journalist and Critic remains useful for anyone who wants to know Poe as he was in life rather than legend.

The Sentimental Physician: J. Marion Sims’s Story of My Life

The career of Dr. J. Marion Sims, considered the “father of modern gynecology,” culminated with his autobiography. Story of My Life signals the interdependency of American medicine and nineteenth-century print culture, which furthered the demand for physicians’ life narratives. Published posthumously in 1884, Sims’s autobiography is informed by abolitionist sensationalism and sentimentality. Though his work depended on the exploitation and labour of enslaved women, Sims represents himself and his patients sentimentally, in ways that dismiss his culpability in the violence of slavery while legitimizing his authorial voice. By examining how medicine and sentiment intersect within Sims’s autobiography, this paper demonstrates how Sims’s performative affect, together with nineteenth-century sexual and racial politics, granted him unmitigated access to enslaved women’s bodies. The rhetoric of sentimentality deployed in Story of My Life functions to secure Sims’s authority and innocence as a benevolent physician, erasing the labour and embodied experience of the enslaved women he experimented on.

Robert Seymour and Nineteenth-Century Print Culture: Sketches by Seymour and Comic Illustration by Brian Maidment

Reviewed by: Robert Seymour and Nineteenth-Century Print Culture: Sketches by Seymour and Comic Illustration by Brian Maidment Jo Devereux Brian Maidment, Robert Seymour and Nineteenth-Century Print Culture: Sketches by Seymour and Comic Illustration (London: Routledge, 2021), pp. vii + 191, $128 hardcover, $39.16 e-book. As Brian Maidment points out in the introduction to Robert Seymour and Nineteenth-Century Print Culture, there is no previous book-length study of Seymour other than a fictionalized biography, Stephen Jarvis's Death and Mr. Pickwick (2014). Maidment's excellent book therefore fills a significant gap. This gap is surprising, given the relatively large number of studies of other nineteenth-century caricaturists, such as John Tenniel, John Leech, and Hablot K. Browne. George Cruikshank and Linley Sambourne have also been accorded biographies and critical books, but Seymour has been overlooked and his work overshadowed by his association with Charles Dickens. Indeed, Maidment notes that critics have tended to focus only on The Pickwick Papers (1836–37), ignoring the rest of Seymour's considerable oeuvre. The "miscellaneous" nature of most accounts leaves much to be learned about the artist (14). They also obscure the political aspects of his work, much of which was engaged with radical politics. By contrast, Maidment's book thoughtfully examines the relationship between Seymour's illustrations and Regency print culture. It also looks beyond the narrow scope of Pickwick to consider Seymour's influence on the history of comic illustration and comic journalism, arguing that Seymour was particularly important during the 1820s and 1830s when print culture was undergoing profound change. The chapters that follow usefully divide up Seymour's canon and examine specific publications with an eye to their historical significance. Chapter 1, "Getting to Know Seymour," provides a detailed history of Seymour's career, something which has been missing from the art historical record. Noting that Seymour's caricatures are still used to embody the political and social milieu of the 1830s, Maidment discusses Seymour's move away from wood engraving toward etching and lithography as the more "personally satisfying media" (10). He also traces the economic pressures that Seymour experienced as a jobbing illustrator. Chapter 2 examines Seymour's relationship with his publishers, Knight and Lacey and later William Kidd. This chapter explains the arduous life of jobbing engravers and suggests that Seymour's career was largely shaped by his relationships with the London-based publishers and with other publishers, such as Thomas McLean, William Strange, and Effingham Wilson. The book proves a valuable history of these significant yet often obscure figures who shaped nineteenth-century print culture in profound ways. For one thing, [End Page 142] they were instrumental in the development of illustrated periodicals. This development was driven by commercialism and profit, of course, but it also met the demands of readers for miscellanies and collections of snippets of information, stories, and history. In his career, Seymour proved able to work in various reprographic media. Chapter 3, "Social Satires," considers Seymour's use of lithography and his single-plate graphic satires. In this section of the book, Maidment discusses Seymour's engagement with issues of technological advances and the effects of mechanization on social structures. He examines the ways in which Seymour's illustrations combined political and social caricature, and he notes the fact that Seymour used many mediums for his work, including wood engraving, lithography, and etching. While Seymour had to work within the confines of the political views of his publishers, he still held and expressed clear views on issues such as reform. Focusing on specific images, Maidment analyses such elements as the night soil cart and the absorbed reader: "If the graphic trope of the dangerously absorbed reader was a relatively new one when Seymour adopted it in 1832, the ragged procession that forms the backdrop to the night soil cart incident drew on an older graphic vocabulary" (53). Maidment convincingly argues that Seymour used the trope of the absorbed reader and that of the ragged procession to satirize magazines of the time in a kind of metatextual approach to caricature. Maidment points out that Seymour's satire was not straightforward, even if it sometimes seems reactionary and harsh on the...

Margaret Fuller, Faithful Female Sceptic: The Politics of (Not) Publishing the 1842 "A Credo"

Margaret Fuller, Faithful Female Sceptic:The Politics of (Not) Publishing the 1842 "A Credo" Caitlin Smith (bio) In 1842, Margaret Fuller sent William Channing a text nine years in the making: her personal formulation of belief, "A Credo."1 Building on Fuller's investigation of biblical authority during her 1833–34 Groton retreat, as well as her 1840–41 intensive reading period in Romantic religion, "A Credo" articulates Fuller's own religious beliefs. Fuller explains how she arrived at the "I believe" statements that structure "A Credo." She defines what she is not (a Christian, an irreligious infidel), and embraces an idiomatic definition of religion shaped by Romantic idealism. "A Credo" concludes by staking out a new religious identity for its author. Margaret Fuller would henceforth be a "faithful skeptic."2 But Fuller never publicized either her rejection of institutional Christianity, her self-created Romantic religion (which anticipates the cosmology of American spiritualism), or her new identity as a "faithful sceptic."3 Religious skepticism had been a blurrily defined but much-invoked bugbear in early American political rhetoric since the 1780s.4 Public concern over religious skepticism only increased in the 1810s–40s. Early nineteenth-century print culture documents a consistent anxiety about a vast amount of ambient infidelity. If not properly managed by religious [End Page 383] authorities, this imagined reservoir of doubt could erode shared religious values, thereby destroying the sociable bonds of trust between individual citizens and between citizens and institutions.5 In fact, religious institutions were undergoing significant reorganization in this period, as America's religious marketplace diversified and radically pluralized.6 And political distrust was on the rise, thanks to growing polarization over the morality of the South's "peculiar institution," visible tensions between state and federal orders of governance, and anxiety about economic volatility following the Panics of 1819–21 and 1837. For polemically minded ministers and partisan politicians alike, ambient infidelity provided a powerful rhetorical figure to focus and direct national anxieties. Discussions about skepticism and faith, unbelief and belief, went beyond baldly opportunistic attacks on imagined skepticism. They appeared in published journal debates between opponents termed Christians and Skeptics; theological treatises on the future of specific Christian traditions; new explorations of comparative religion; arguments between moderate, enlightened Deists and reform-minded atheists; and didactic fiction that staged dramatic conversions or deconversions to articulate what true religion meant.7 Transcendentalism emerged from and through these intellectual debates about religion and its future in American life. Though notoriously diverse in terms of philosophy and activism, American Transcendentalism was largely held together by an attempt to reconstitute essential religious sensibilities outside the calcified forms of outmoded creedal Christianity.8 Many of Fuller's male Transcendentalist peers argued that faith and skepticism (or belief and unbelief) were incorrectly construed as opposites and actually worked together to keep religion dynamic and alive. These arguments furnished ammunition to their critics, who (in)famously identified Transcendentalism as "the latest form of infidelity."9 Though Transcendentalist [End Page 384] thinkers disagreed considerably about what was meant by faith and by skepticism, and about the specifics of the merging process, they advanced structurally similar arguments about the nonoppositional nature of faith and skepticism. Given her male Transcendentalist peers' open advocacy of a faith-doubt synthesis, Fuller's decision to keep private her solution to the conflict is telling. "A Credo" embraces elements of the same German Romantic tradition that Ralph Waldo Emerson and Theodore Parker found attractive. Emerson saw skepticism as a temporary obstruction of both individual and universal-historical growth, and argued that overcoming doubt through action could help young men develop courage, valor, and conviction. Fuller's statement elevated obstructive skepticism to half of a mutually constitutive, dialectical dualism. And "A Credo" was not incidental to Fuller's developing thought. As she embraced and redefined gendered antiskepticism, she invented the figure of dynamic polar dualism that would later structure her idea of gender in Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Finally, "A Credo" creates a feminine solution to obstructive skepticism. Fuller advocates an inward turn and mystical awakening over the heroic leap into world action advised by Goethe, Carlyle, and Emerson.10 Though Fuller's private writings record a consistent...

Printing Infidelity: Watson Heston and the Making of the Impressionable Freethinking Subject, 1873–1900

Nineteenth-century print media provided a set of metaphors with which American unbelievers began to articulate an understanding of religious infidelity as something permanent. Ink, paper, pencil, and mechanical printing technologies served as symbols for articulating disbelief as something imprinted indelibly on the mind of the reading or viewing subject. Thus, over the course of the nineteenth century, American nonbelievers began discussing infidelity less in terms of something rationally subscribed to and more in terms of something non-rationally imprinted at a young age. At the same time, the late nineteenth century witnessed an increasing emphasis on a militaristic understanding of missionary activity incumbent upon American infidels—a tendency partially enabled by understandings of the cartoon image as a tool suited to the defeat of believers and the creation of young unbelievers.

We just aim to print well: The University of Sydney Library Printer in Residence

At a time when space in any academic library is at a premium, when we sometimes need to argue for shelf space rather than computers and group work pods, the University of Sydney Library has decided not only to keep and maintain its nineteenth century printing press, but to feature it through a printer in residence program.Now in its third year, the program brings together a printmaker and a letterpress for eight weeks during semester. The intent is to engage with the library and its users, to bring the print workshop to life, to draw inspiration from the library's collection and to create a publication for the Artists’ Book Collection within Rare Books & Special Collections.In an era of instant layout, digital word processing and electronic publishing what does the slow and laborious process of letterpress printing bring to a twenty-first century academic library? This residency demonstrates that understanding the process of making a publication can be just as vital and alive as the content of that publication - one letter at a time.

Textual Authority in the Vita Nova’s Nineteenth-Century Editions

Abstract This article focuses on the nineteenth-century print circulation of Dante’s Vita Nova (1292–94) and especially on the response in print media to the tension between new critical approaches to text editing, on the one hand, and editors’ dependence on the text’s complex history on the other. At the center of this discussion is one of the thorniest aspects of the Vita Nova’s text: the divisions (technical prose of a scholastic nature in which Dante explains the formal structure of his poems). Over the centuries, Dante’s authority over his own text was brought into question on account of the inclusion in the literary text of what readers and editors considered to be commentary. Even though in the second half of the nineteenth century the editors began recognizing the divisions’ rightful place within the libello’s text, they continued—operating within the centuries-long tradition that did not consider them “text” but rather “gloss”—to engage in efforts to differentiate them from the rest of the text in order to point out their different textual nature.

Peering into Prisons, Gazing upon Graves: Early U.S. Missionary Media from Burma

This article examines the nineteenth-century print culture and religious imagination inspired by the imprisonment of an American Baptist missionary to Burma during the First Anglo-Burmese War, 1824–1826, and by the death of his wife and child shortly thereafter. Adoniram Judson had been incarcerated on charges of spying for the British but was eventually released to serve the king of Burma as a translator for the treaty that ended the war. Eight months later, his wife, Ann, and their two-year-old daughter, Maria, died from fevers. Stories of the Judsons’ suffering began to circulate widely after an illustration of Ann’s and Maria’s graves was published in 1839 and an illustration of them visiting Adoniram in prison was published in 1853. These scenes of buried and chained bodies were reproduced, redrawn, and reimagined in the nineteenth-century Protestant press and took on new shape in twentieth-century film and twenty-first-century commemorative displays. This article argues that the multiple iterations of these wrenching scenes created an imagined world of redemptive missionary sacrifice that travelled from the 1830 s through to the twenty-first century along circuitous routes, changing shape and repopulating along the way. Collectively picturing the Judsons’ extreme physical suffering in a foreign land primed generations of Baptist communities to see missionary labor and its domestic support as acts of righteous sacrifice.

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

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...

Colonizing the Past: Mythmaking and Pre-Columbian Whites in Nineteenth-Century American Writing by Edward Watts

Reviewed by: Colonizing the Past: Mythmaking and Pre-Columbian Whites in Nineteenth-Century American Writing by Edward Watts Christen Mucher (bio) Keywords Settler colonialism, Primordialism, Indigenous peoples, Print culture Colonizing the Past: Mythmaking and Pre-Columbian Whites in Nineteenth-Century American Writing. By Edward Watts. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2020. Pp. 292. Cloth, $75.00; paper, $37.50). Edward Watts’s Colonizing the Past is one of the first monographs to apply a settler-colonial analytic to the well-worn materials of early American myth-making. Spanning U.S. literary production from 1780 to 1915, the book is a dazzling survey of the literary construct of “primordialism”— that is, “white fantasies” of the pre-Columbian past that seek to provide U.S. citizens with a whitened ancient history by displacing Indigenous pasts (4, 76). Watts divides his work into five case studies of primordialism, each of which “diminish Indians”: the myths of Welsh Indians, Lost Tribes, Mound Builders, ancient Irish colonists, and the Vikings and Normans of the Norse Revival (7). His texts range from novels and newspaper articles to poetic epics, tracing the iconic primordial figures over the long century. In the tradition of classic American studies per Henry Nash Smith and Leo Marx, Watts places print culture within its specific historical context while also, in the style of Richard Slotkin, Annette Kolodny, John Carlos Rowe, and Amy Kaplan, attending to literary history as a vector of imperial violence.1 Colonizing the Past does not [End Page 491] merely assert that the narratives of “primordial whites” were connected to nation-building: It shows how they were central to it. Watts’s attempt to understand the tangle of racialization, white identity, and settler colonialism in nineteenth-century print culture is a clear, compelling, and original reading of familiar as well as non-canonical texts that “reveals the moral and racial precariousness of the settler nation” (46). While notable recent scholarship has focused on Watts’s broad subject, none has situated the production of ancient pasts in the paradigm of white supremacy and settler triumphalism as clearly and insistently as Watts has here.2 In the connections he draws between marginal texts and canonical writers, Watts also makes clear that the power of primordialism was not confined to the pens of “western” writers or removal apologists. Moreover, Watts’s deep knowledge of the print culture of the early republic and antebellum eras translates into a fascinating and useful guide to U.S. literary history. Watts’s first chapter provides a superb survey of writings on Welsh Indians, by which Watts also displays his unparalleled knowledge of the literary history of early America. Chapter 2 includes a particularly skilled reading of Lydia Sigourney’s 1822 poem Traits of the Aborigines in America and the culture of sentiment, intriguingly casting the New England writer’s anti-removal campaign as motivated not by the abhorrence of violence but rather by millennialism (75, 72). The third chapter is likewise noteworthy for its refreshing reevaluation of the “Mound Builder myth,” [End Page 492] which Watts frames in terms of the rise of industrialism and struggle over western and southern markets. Additionally, his analyses of colonialism and transatlantic folk and nationalist movements provide a thought-provoking reorientation for the immigration debates and anti-Catholic nativism of the mid-nineteenth century. Colonizing the Past is admirable in its forceful assessment of settler triumphalism—Watts boldly indicts, for example, the “genocidal print culture of Jacksonian America”—and for avoiding euphemism or under-statement (94). One of its most compelling, if subtle, arguments is that much of early nineteenth-century literary culture was engaged in developing “fiction[s] of absolution” to excuse white settlers from the theft and murder that enabled U.S. national settlement on Indigenous lands (46, 91, 128). Indeed, the book’s major contribution to the field is its clear-eyed attention to the operations of whiteness, and to the entanglement of racialization and settler colonialism. Moreover, it provides an accessible introduction to settler-colonial theory and delivers a compelling argument for the theory’s applicability to early American literature. The Atlantic orientation of the book, however, is a limitation that frequently led Watts to postcolonial...

Printing as Poison, Printing as Cure: Work and Health in the Nineteenth-Century Printing Office and Asylum

Printing as Poison, Printing as Cure: Work and Health in the Nineteenth-Century Printing Office and Asylum

Printer in the middle: The Copyright Act 1879, the NSW Government Printing Office and legal deposit in nineteenth-century Australia

In The Government and Copyright, John Gilchrist poses the following questions regarding government and the Copyright Act 1968: ‘Should the government have a role as preserver of its own and privately owned copyright material? […] How adequate is the present law to achieve this objective?’ Similar questions could be applied to nineteenth-century Australia. As Government Printer, Thomas Richards oversaw the printing operations of the NSW Government Printing Office (GPO). When the Copyright Act 1879 (NSW) was enacted, Richards was appointed Registrar of Copyright and Office of Copyright Registry was situated at the GPO. Why was the government printer responsible for copyright, not the government or the libraries that oversaw legal deposit? Did Richards have the necessary resources? Was there a conflict of interest? This essay seeks to gauge the relationship between the GPO and the Copyright Act 1879 and the wider implications of copyright for nineteenth-century Australian print culture.