Slow Print: Literary Radicalism and Late Victorian Print Culture

by Elizabeth Miller

This book explores the literary culture of Britain's radical press from 1880 to 1910, a time that saw a flourishing of radical political activity as well as the emergence of a mass print industry. While Enlightenment radicals and their heirs had seen free print as an agent of revolutionary transformation, socialist, anarchist and other radicals of this later period suspected that a mass public could not exist outside the capitalist system. In response, they purposely reduced the scale of print by appealing to a small, counter-cultural audience. "Slow print," like "slow food" today, actively resisted industrial production and the commercialization of new domains of life. Drawing on under-studied periodicals and archives, this book uncovers a largely forgotten literary-political context. It looks at the extensive debate within the radical press over how to situate radical values within an evolving media ecology, debates that engaged some of the most famous writers of the era (William Morris and George Bernard Shaw), a host of lesser-known figures (theosophical socialist and birth control reformer Annie Besant, gay rights pioneer Edward Carpenter, and proto-modernist editor Alfred Orage), and countless anonymous others.

392 pages, Hardcover

First published January 9, 2013

About the author

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Reviews

[Neil · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an excellent study of socialist newspapers and journals of the late nineteenth century. Miller examines how these journals (many of them with limited audiences) responded to the apparent connections between mass print and capitalism. How do radical newspapers function when the connection between free print and political freedom has become, to a great extent, a myth? Miller discusses a number of writers that readers may not be familiar with, though she also discusses more well-known authors and activists of the period, including William Morris, George Bernard Shaw, and Annie Besant. I found the chapter on print culture and radical drama particularly interesting (chapter 3), while the final chapter on sex radicalism caused me to reconsider my understanding of sexuality in British modernism. This is a very important book that should, I hope, cause many to rethink the ties between late Victorian social movements, the periodical press, and literary modernism. The conclusion is one of the most effective I've read in making clear the stakes and interest of this study.