Movable Types: Roving Creative Printers of the Victorian World

by David Finkelstein

This is a study of international print networks developed across the English-speaking world over a significant part of the long nineteenth century. The first study of its kind, it draws on unique sources from Australasia, North America, South Africa, the British Isles, and Ireland, to explore how printers interacted and shared trade and cultural identities across international boundaries during the period 1830-1914. Morality, mobility, mobilisation, and solidarity were central to how compositors and print trade workers defined themselves during this period. These themes are addressed in case studies on roving printers, striking printers, and creative printers. The case studies explore the cultural values and trade skills transmitted and embedded by such actors, the global networks that enabled print workers to travel across continents in search of work and experience, the trade actions reliant on mobilization and information-sharing across the printing world, and the creative
ideas that printers shared through such means as memoirs, poetry, prose, and trade news contributions to print trade journals and other public outlets.

208 pages, Hardcover

Published September 17, 2018

About the author

Professor David Finkelstein (BA, PhD, FEA, FRHistS, FRSA) is the Executive Dean of the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Business at the University of Plymouth.

He has published over 70 published books, essays and refereed journal articles in areas related to nineteenth-century cultural history, print culture and media history, several of which have won awards.

His most recent work includes Movable Types: Roving Creative Printers of the Victorian World (Oxford University Press, 2018), and the 850 page edited Edinburgh History of the British and Irish Press, Volume 2: Expansion and Evolution, 1800 - 1900 (Edinburgh University Press, 2020).

Reviews

[Kelly Blanchard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Movable Types: Roving Creative Printers of the Victorian World is a quietly ambitious and deeply illuminating study of how labor, creativity, and mobility shaped the international printing world of the long nineteenth century.

What makes this work exceptional is its transnational lens. Drawing from sources across Australasia, North America, South Africa, the British Isles, and Ireland, David Finkelstein reconstructs a living network of printers whose identities were forged not only in workshops, but through movement, solidarity, and shared moral codes. The book makes clear that compositors were not passive tradesmen they were cultural carriers, activists, and authors in their own right.

The case studies on roving, striking, and creative printers are especially compelling. Through them, the book reveals how trade skills, political consciousness, and artistic expression traveled alongside people, embedded in memoirs, poetry, trade journals, and informal knowledge exchanges. These printers emerge as agents of both material production and intellectual circulation.

This is a rigorous yet engaging contribution to print history, labor history, and cultural studies. By foregrounding mobility and connection, Movable Types reframes Victorian print culture as a global, collaborative enterprise one built as much on shared values as on ink and type.