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This book examines the outbreak of print in late Victorian Britain. It joins categories that are normally separated: literature/popular culture, books/magazines, publishers/newsagents, and media studies/media history. The approach is through material culture, archival material that is theorised and gendered. Chapters focus on authorship, production, and gender in relation to Dickens, Pater, Ruskin, Eliot, Symons, and James, and serials such as Master Humphrey's Clock , the Westminster Review, Artist and Journal of Home Culture, Publishers' Circular, Yellow Book and Savoy.
Brake surveys British printed matter in the second half of the 19th century. She is careful, even in the title, not to say "Literature". She does not restrict herself to what we now call literature of that period (Dickens, Hardy,...). Rather, she also looks at newspapers and magazines. Why? Because when amassed as a gestalt, a deepening appreciation arises. For example, most novels were not read by most of their audiences in the form of a single printed book. High cost, worsened by a curious custom of publishing a novel in 3 volumes, which priced it out of the reach of many. So to attract readership and add a revenue stream, the book would be serialised in a magazine. That is how people of that time often read their fiction. Of course, this had significant effects on the structure of the Victorian novel. You needed delay and suspense at appropriate intervals; the tendency to converge toward a play-like format of several distinct Acts,... Modern readers may see an analogy with TV miniseries.There is an interesting similarity to early 20th century science fiction that the author does not point out. Prior to World War 2, most SF was also published in magazines ("pulps") as short stories or serialised novels. The advent of the mass paperback only happened after the war. Prior, it was very rare to have an SF novel in hardcover because the market for it was not seen to be large enough to justify the printing. Unless of course the author was already famous, like Wells. It is neat how two different fields of fiction, roughly a century apart, by necessity found the same answer to similar problems.She ends her survey around 1910, as a good proxy for the end of the previous century. Also an excellent choice for another reason. It was the last period when printing was the only form of recorded entertainment. After 1910, cinema, then radio, television and computers arose. Truly a quite different era. The period analysed was the last one where the terms print and recorded entertainment were co-extensive and indeed redundant. A golden age, though of course these can only been seen in retrospect.
