A glance over the back pages of mid-nineteenth-century newspapers and periodicals published in London reveals that Wellington Street stands out among imprint addresses. Between 1843 and 1853, Household Words, Reynolds's Weekly Newspaper, the Examiner, Punch, the Athenaeum, the Spectator, the Morning Post, and the serial edition of London Labour and the London Poor, to name a few, were all published from this short street off the Strand. Mary L. Shannon identifies, for the first time, the close proximity of the offices of Charles Dickens, G.W.M. Reynolds, and Henry Mayhew, examining the ramifications for the individual authors and for nineteenth-century publishing. What are the implications of Charles Dickens, his arch-competitor the radical publisher G.W.M. Reynolds, and Henry Mayhew being such close neighbours? Given that London was capital of more than Britain alone, what connections does Wellington Street reveal between London print networks and the print culture and networks of the wider empire? How might the editors' experiences make us rethink the ways in which they and others addressed their anonymous readers as 'friends', as if they were part of their immediate social network? As Shannon shows, readers in the London of the 1840s and '50s, despite advances in literacy, print technology, and communications, were not simply an 'imagined community' of individuals who read in silent privacy, but active members of an imagined network that punctured the anonymity of the teeming city and even the empire.
Show moreA glance over the back pages of mid-nineteenth-century newspapers and periodicals published in London reveals that Wellington Street stands out among imprint addresses. Between 1843 and 1853, Household Words, Reynolds's Weekly Newspaper, the Examiner, Punch, the Athenaeum, the Spectator, the Morning Post, and the serial edition of London Labour and the London Poor, to name a few, were all published from this short street off the Strand. Mary L. Shannon identifies, for the first time, the close proximity of the offices of Charles Dickens, G.W.M. Reynolds, and Henry Mayhew, examining the ramifications for the individual authors and for nineteenth-century publishing. What are the implications of Charles Dickens, his arch-competitor the radical publisher G.W.M. Reynolds, and Henry Mayhew being such close neighbours? Given that London was capital of more than Britain alone, what connections does Wellington Street reveal between London print networks and the print culture and networks of the wider empire? How might the editors' experiences make us rethink the ways in which they and others addressed their anonymous readers as 'friends', as if they were part of their immediate social network? As Shannon shows, readers in the London of the 1840s and '50s, despite advances in literacy, print technology, and communications, were not simply an 'imagined community' of individuals who read in silent privacy, but active members of an imagined network that punctured the anonymity of the teeming city and even the empire.
Show moreMorning: 'the smallness of the world'. Afternoon: 'dissolute and idle persons'. Evening: 'the showman introduces himself'. Night: 'the compass of the world and they that dwell therein'. Conclusion: 'very curiously brought together' by Bleak House.
Mary L. Shannon received her BA from the University of Cambridge and her PhD from King’s College London. She is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of English and Creative Writing, University of Roehampton, London. She works on early nineteenth-century print culture and visual culture, with particular interests in literary networks, cultural geography, periodicals, and literature about London.
2016 winner of The Robert and Vineta Colby Scholarly Book PrizeFrom
the Committee: “Mary L. Shannon’s book is an innovate expansion of
the current interest in tracing networks into a consideration of
the more concrete juxtaposition of bodies and buildings in space.
Structured creatively around a day in the life of the street, the
book entices us into seeing what would have been obvious to the
Victorian eye and ear, but which our standard narratives have
occluded. Shannon connects some of the more ephemeral products of
the press and the situation of their production with canonical
works, such as Bleak House, produced in the same milieu.It’s a book
that models new ways to do our business.”Awarded the Colby Book
Prize 'Mary L. Shannon’s informative book offers an entirely new
way to think about print culture. In focusing on Wellington Street
off the Strand, where important Victorian writers such as Dickens,
Mayhew, and Reynolds maintained their offices, she demonstrates the
significance of geography for understanding the print networks that
developed in midcentury London.' - Anne Humpherys, City University
of New York, USA, author of Travels into the Poor Man’s Country:
The Work of Henry Mayhew“Shannon’s exemplary research takes her on
a series of errands in order to reconstruct the working practices
of Wellington Street in the period under scrutiny: examining
metropolitan and borough archives, city guide books, directories,
advertisements, maps and playbills, as well as an admirable range
of types and genres of literary production.” - John Drew,
University of Buckingham, Dickens Quarterly“This is such a good
book. Much of its immediate impact lies in its striking
originality, of structure and of method, even if sometimes not all
of it comes off. And while the book is risktaking, exploratory, and
conspicuous for the breadth of its data, its discourse is largely
traditional and verbal, its readings are ‘close’ and wide but not
distant.” - Laurel Brake, The London Journal“Certainly this is a
book which deserves a wide readership of its own. Like Wellington
Street itself, Shannon’s monograph and the new model of the
literary network that she proposes has the potential for impact far
beyond its apparent compass.” - Jessica Hindes, University of
London“The primary research here – on Melbourne Punch, ‘Orion’
Horne and the influence of Dickens and Sala upon Marcus Clarke’s
night-walking sketches – addresses an important gap in the study of
nineteenth-century Anglo-Australian transnational exchanges to
date. It also extends the range of scholars and readers for whom
this rich and extraordinarily detailed book is likely to be of
interest: not only Dickensians, but those working on Victorian
literary and visual cultures, nineteenth-century periodicals and
newspapers, Melbourne’s Bohemia and anyone interested in the
historical geography of urban space.” - Catherine Waters,
University of Kent
“This, as I hope this review has made clear, is a work of
impressive research … in which intensive and meticulous historical,
biographical and topographical research come together. The result
is to provide us with a valuable addition to our knowledge and
understanding of the way in which certain notable print networks,
both in London and in Melbourne, were operating in the
mid-nineteenth century.” - Michael Slater, Birkbeck, University of
London, UK
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