Biopolitics of Seriality

Chapter 7, ‘Biopolitics of Seriality’ considers the political possibilities that were released or inaugurated in the 1840s by this structure of seriality. It takes the whole run of Howitt’s Journal as its ‘serial’ case study and uses this liberal journal to think about how seriality was becoming increasingly important to the creation and maintenance of what we might now call biopolitics. Through its serial repetition of exemplary narratives of injustice around gender, race, class and age, Howitt’s Journal unconsciously reveals the profound connection between these constructs. Tracking the representation of children, slaves and the Irish across the run of the journal, partly through its use of work by Elizabeth Gaskell and Frederick Douglass, this chapter suggests that we need to develop a more complex way of thinking about the developing relationship between kinship, citizenship, and biopolitics at this critical historical moment.

Scalar

Chapter 5, ‘Scalar: Pugin, Carlyle, Dickens’, is about scale. It looks in detail at three writers in London who produced very different versions of the ‘modern’ in the late 1830s and early 1840s, but all of whom realized that something very big indeed was happening around them. Across different genres, Augustus Welby Pugin, Thomas Carlyle, and Charles Dickens all chose to represent democracy and reform specifically as a problem of scale. This chapter investigates their understanding of the seriality and scalability of market capitalism and the anxieties and opportunities that this revealed to them. Each took a different view, from Carlyle’s apocalyptic denunciation of a massification which soars vertiginously between the gigantic and the tiny; to Pugin’s insistence on a built and material ethics of the human scale; and Dickens’s cautious optimism about this moment of scalar derangement and the redistribution of the sensible.

Introduction

This introductory chapter suggests that the form of the serial is more pervasive in early nineteenth-century culture than has been recognized. Starting with the growing popularity of print serials, the introduction suggests the category of seriality can be applied beyond print and used more widely to think about an emergent political and social culture in London after the Napoleonic Wars. A survey of theoretical work on seriality from different subject areas is used to show that disciplinization has tended to obscure the extent and depth of the social and political effects of seriality. The introduction suggests that the idea of an ‘historical present’ is created by a growing daily news culture and an emergent popular interest in history which were vitally connected by their serial formats.

Conclusion

The conclusion to Serial Forms looks ahead to the serial European revolutions of 1848. Benedict Anderson argues that ‘nationalism lives by making comparisons,’ and 1848 was the definitive moment for the international comparison of nationalisms. As Karl Marx noticed at the time, these were revolutions that understood themselves in terms of international communications and evinced a seriality of form that suggested an equivalence of scale and a category identity across Europe and beyond. But without the new international consciousness of interconnectedness already brought about by a serial permeability of texts, ideas, and politics, the multiple revolutions of 1848 would never have happened. Seriality would enable the political struggle of the 1840s and would ultimately create a new theoretical understanding of that struggle too. The irony is that after 1848, this same international revolutionary energy would be recycled into national liberal state apparatuses and major technological state infrastructures.

Vesuvius on the Strand

Chapter 4, ‘Vesuvius on the Strand’, continues to explore the idea of seriality and catastrophe through the ‘cross-class obsession’ with Mount Vesuvius. There were numerous displays and shows of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in Naples all over London in this period, and this chapter considers the versions of the ‘real’ past—deep or recent—that they produced and how these might have contributed to a construction of a sense of the present. Bulwer’s phenomenally popular hit of 1834, The Last Days of Pompeii, which was received more as a multi-media show than as a novel, is used here as a test-case for re-thinking conventional literary generic hierarchies through a more nuanced appreciation of the possible uses and pleasures of texts in this period of widening readership and cultural participation.

Yesterday’s News

‘Yesterday’s News’ investigates the overlapping of different kinds of media time in the 1820s and 1830s. It tracks the persistence into modernity of older cultures of print and reading: almanacs, ballads, broadsheets, and miscellanies were all circulating alongside the popular illustrated twopenny papers of the 1820s. Historical descriptions (of the classical past; medieval dress; customs of the Tudors, and such like) became placeholders for ‘news’ in these popular papers. Using John Clare’s The Shepherd’s Calendar (1827) as an important commentary on the intersections of print and different forms of time in the 1820s, this chapter measures the time lag of the news for most Londoners who were unable to afford expensive newspapers and instead relied on out-of-date information, or topical popular publications, and so were struggling to catch up and, in the meanwhile, were encountering history as news.

Live Byron

‘Live Byron’ discusses the ‘live’ and singular performances of shipwrecks by Byron and the painter Géricault in 1819. Reactions to Byron’s treatment of a fatal shipwreck in the first instalment of his serial poem Don Juan are assessed alongside reactions to Géricault’s oil painting The Raft of the Medusa, which was simultaneously on show at the Egyptian Hall in London. The chapter analyses the strong sentiments of disgust elicited by both works, concluding that it is both their reference to a ‘real’ news item and their creation of virtual bodies to represent catastrophic death that triggered such strong critical reactions. Through the experiences of their viewers, panoramas and shows in this early period are reconceptualized as ‘live’ performances which demanded an interactive and participative engagement and which contributed to the formation of a popular consciousness of existing in a simultaneous historic present.

Scott Unbound

‘Scott Unbound’ shows how thinking about print in the 1820s and 1830s in a disaggregated, messy and material way, and seeing it as part of a new media world of performance, text, and image, can help us to think differently about the immense cross-class popularity of Walter Scott’s work. Right from the start, Scott’s powerful Romantic presence as the literary author of books rested on ‘Scott’ as a multimedia phenomenon. Taking the nineteenth-century print serial seriously challenges assumptions about what a ‘book’ might be. By unbinding Scott’s work, this chapter disperses his texts and restores them to their original promiscuous sociability. The Romantic idea of the author is complicated through the remediations of the multi-genre productions of ‘The Magician of the North’ (a.k.a. Walter Scott), and the phenomenon of ‘Scott’ in the early nineteenth century is produced by the generative possibilities of the serial more than has been previously recognized.

History in Miniature

Chapter 6, ‘History in Miniature’, focuses on the weekly illustrated miscellanies of the 1820s and 1830s to see how they presented the past and created a sense of virtual historicity for a new readership. Images of the geographically and historically remote were presented as novelties and ‘news’ and the chapter looks at toys and other miniature representations of historical events too. Did people understand history as a series of singular and spectacular ‘fixed’ events? Or did the gradually embedding seriality of their daily practices create instead a more pliant, plastic, and permeable idea of history as a forming and formative process in which they could participate? This chapter considers the scalar strategies by which popular print and material culture put the past ‘within reach’ and suggests how different forms of miniaturization helped people to negotiate the dizzying possibilities of a global scale.