Print Culture In Nineteenth-Century Britain Research Articles

Maria Damkjær, Time, Domesticity and Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Maria Damkjær, <i>Time, Domesticity and Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain</i>

Review: Time, Domesticity and Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain by Maria Damkjær

Review: Time, Domesticity and Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain by Maria Damkjær

Time, Domesticity and Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain by Maria Damkjær

Time, Domesticity and Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain by Maria Damkjær

Time, Domesticity and Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain by Maria Damkjær

Time, Domesticity and Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain by Maria Damkjær

Oz Frankel. States of Inquiry: Social Investigations and Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the United States. New Studies in American Intellectual and Cultural History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. Pp. 370. $48.00 (cloth).

Oz Frankel. States of Inquiry: Social Investigations and Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the United States. New Studies in American Intellectual and Cultural History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. Pp. 370. $48.00 (cloth). - Volume 49 Issue 1

Oz Frankel.States of Inquiry: Social Investigations and Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the United States.:States of Inquiry: Social Investigations and Print Culture in Nineteenth‐Century Britain and the United States.(New Studies in American Intellectual and Cultural History.)

Oz Frankel has written a strenuously empirical, theoretically informed study that reaches across a wide range of subjects, geographies, and politics to examine how official knowledge was created in the nineteenth century. It argues that this knowledge project was vitally important to liberal democracies that were replacing older, hierarchal structures of rule with civil societies capable of governing themselves. Frankel's eight chapters explore various efforts to organize the categories of life and so make life more governable. These include the birth of parliamentary commissions in Great Britain (assigned with investigating the plight of the poor, or the use of child labor, or factory conditions, or the system of education), American Congressional reports (including, of course, land surveys), narrative accounts of expeditions of discovery and exploration (that were inseparable from American continental expansion and railroad building), the American Freedmen's Inquiry Commission (seeking to discover a “black subjectivity” that would then become the basis for integrating the former slaves into the body politic), and a burgeoning anthropological interest in Indian life, under the partial aegis of the new Smithsonian Institution and invariably invested in questions of the nation's manifest destiny. These investigations were related to the formal apparatus of government in different ways, but all contributed to the state's redefinition of itself for a liberal age. As such, they addressed political and ontological issues concerning government and population, the “culture of the social fact,” the market's role in the production and dissemination of information, the construction of national memory, the creation of a reading public, and the relationship between authorship and authority, and between publicity and the public.

States of Inquiry: Social Investigations and Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the United States. By Oz Frankel (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006) 370 pp. $48.00

States of Inquiry: Social Investigations and Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the United States. By Oz Frankel (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006) 370 pp. $48.00

States of Inquiry: Social Investigations and Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the United States (review)

States of Inquiry: Social Investigations and Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the United States. By Oz Frankel. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. Pp. 384. Illustrations. Cloth, $48.00.)Reviewed by Thomas AugstHow was the emergence of modern nation-states mediated by the development of culture? Oz Frankel's States of Inquiry explores what it terms statism, the field of communication between the state and its constituencies, in which governments sought to manage and influence public opinion throughout the nineteenth century through the production and dissemination of formal inquiries, social surveys, and reports on a host of issues. Frankel demonstrates how Great Britain and the United States developed a new kind of politics, by which official reportage facilitated the representation of the centralized, modern state to its publics and, in turn, the representation of the nation by (and to) the government itself (2). In the extraordinary detail and breadth of its research, States of Inquiry offers important arguments about the state's role in the transformation of the public sphere and print's role in the imagination of national communities. In its acute discussion of particular cases of social inquiry, it offers a sophisticated model of book-history research.Through nuanced and complex analysis of the material and social dimensions of the government trade in information, Frankel demonstrates how the liberal politics of representation functioned as an aesthetic project. The first part of the book takes up the role of government as a publisher, and examines the physical nature of factual documents through their lifecycle, from printing and binding to promotion and circulation. Houses of Parliament issued a barrage of often unwieldy compendia of investigations called blue books, which they eventually sought to sell to the public. The United States Congress published similarly bulky but elaborately engraved accounts of western explorations, distributing them to congressional district constituents as a form of patronage. Whether establishing archives in print to document parliamentary or investigative processes, or monuments in print to celebrate the ambitions of imperial nationalism, legislatures debated and instituted knowledge policy in ways that brought the value and utility of governmentsponsored information-an emerging concept identified with transparency and objectivity-into conflict with attributes that gave books value in the marketplace: noncorporate, individual authorship, issued in formats that facilitated reading by citizens. Deploying personal journals, statistics, testimonials, illustrations, and social maps, statesponsored reports materialized the social world in printed evidence of authenticity, a body of facts that predated and coexisted with professional norms of social science, corporate authorship, and bureaucratic consolidation that would dominate government inquiry by the turn of the twentieth century.If, in the early part of the twentieth century, the accumulation of social facts was left to the volunteer efforts of doctors, clergy, and reformers, social inquiry would become the institutional business of commissions, committees, and a host of other bodies. The second and third parts of Frankel's book examine how the state institutionalized the gathering of facts in ways that collapsed the meanings of political and aesthetic representation, and that in subtle ways gave objects of inquiry-the working poor, freed slaves, native Americans-voice and agency within an exchange of knowledge. …

States of Inquiry: Social Investigations and Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the United States, by Oz Frankel

Reviewed by: States of Inquiry: Social Investigations and Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the United States Jon Klancher (bio) States of Inquiry: Social Investigations and Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the United States, by Oz Frankel; pp. 370. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006, $48.00, £32.00. While historians of print mainly study the commercial book economy, States of Inquiry turns its attention to an unfamiliar publishing monopoly—the modern state—in a comparative study of British and American government knowledge-production. Oz Frankel focuses on the innumerable investigations, panels of inquiry, and other instruments that mid-nineteenth-century Parliament and Congress used to study populations posing challenges to continuing national order, especially the British poor, freed slaves in the United States, and Native Americans. Frankel compares British and American modes of state publication to investigate the kinds of documents that modern historians still use to reconstruct political and cultural history. Three of his eight case studies focus on the British state publication of "Blue Books" produced by Parliamentary investigations. Five chapters are devoted to American knowledge-gathering and government reporting, especially on its internally colonized populations. Frankel emphasizes that such print governmentality was by no means panoptical in Michel Foucault's sense. He is alert to the ways the state's intentions could often misfire as the information it produced could be used very differently by readers than Parliament or Congress intended. Interestingly, Congress began such government fact-finding and publishing far earlier than the British—Frankel dates it to the 1780s and 1790s, a time when the British government was increasingly trying to suppress the circulation of print about social conditions and was imposing Stamp Taxes and other curbs on news as knowledge of the social and political order took dangerous turns in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Only around 1830, he argues, did Parliament become a major source of information for a reading public (although this claim overlooks the statistical research published since 1806 or so by organized utilitarian methods, which were certainly aligned with forces in government). Overall, it was the state's massive investment in publishing social information that stimulated the well-known Victorian transformation in which "the concept of information gradually replaced the term knowledge" (60). In place of the usual characters who figure in print history—authors, editors, booksellers, reviewers, or readers—the agents of state publication were officials, senators, or other investigators who recruited nameless armies of statisticians, gray writers of official prose, and the occasional maverick student of the social and political motion who might, on the odd occasion, slyly use a device like statistics against the state's own interests. One of Frankel's more interesting cases of governmental intentions going astray is what he calls the defamiliarizing effect that a statistical table could have in certain hands. [End Page 348] Robert Dale Owen—son of the utopian reformer Robert Owen of New Lanark fame—was instrumental in producing the American Freedmen's Inquiry Commission report on the state of the "colored population" after the American Civil War. For his part, Owen estimated in the Commission's report that about three million slaves had died crossing the Atlantic, a statistic vivified by his reminder that this was also the population of the thirteen colonies at the beginning of the American Revolution. Frankel notes that "he also computes—rather speculates—that the number of Africans who were taken as slaves were thirty-one million, which happened to be the size of the U.S. population in the mid 1860s" (216). This and other indications of "contingent similarity (or identity) of size" (216) could turn statistics-in-print into a rhetoric of empathic imagination and thus bridge the gulf between government numbers and a public too bewildered to grasp their human import. Still, Frankel does not overstate the modesty of such adroit subversions of the state's will to control populations. At one point, he differentiates these subtle push-backs in the governmental literature from the bolder acts projected by Michel de Certeau in "Reading as Poaching" (a chapter of The Practice of Everyday Life [1985]). Unlike de Certeau's free-style, nomadic...

States of Inquiry: Social Investigations and Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the United States

States of Inquiry: Social Investigations and Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the United States

States of Inquiry: Social Investigations and Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the United States (review)

States of Inquiry: Social Investigations and Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the United States (review)