Call it the nineteenth century print culture sublime: an overpowering miscellany of reprinted and newly-circulated works that included, among many other new kinds of images and genres, works as diverse as religious publications, secular celebrity forms, and fashion plates. British Writers, Popular Literature and New Media Innovation offers the pleasure of confronting that sublime through a series of case studies circumscribed by a particular period, 1820-1845, which Alexis Easley characterizes as one "of new media innovation, an era that produced a wide variety of book, periodical, and newspaper formats that were available to a larger and more diversified reading public than ever before" (1). Its account of innovation is also an account of adaptation, tracing how familiar forms changed shape and how new media forms drew on established ones.

Easley's introduction to the volume is an engaging overview of the many facets of nineteenth-century print culture and an ideal foundational text for studying the period. It contextualizes the new media forms under discussion by referencing industrial changes to artistic production, and it addresses historical social changes that created new readers: "rather than simply harnessing existing audiences, the popular press constructed the mass and niche readerships that would consume print" (5). Innovation "included experimentation with new publication formats, the reinvention and remediation of older forms, and the definition of new kinds of contributors and audiences for print" (6).

Jennie Batchelor's "Keeping 'pace with the growing spirit of the times': The Women's Magazine in Transition" is a particularly clear example of how "innovation" entails both adapting to new popular forms like the literary annual and reviving older elements like reader dialogue and advice columns. She opens with a consideration of The Lady's Magazine, a periodical that both did and did not transform to compete in a radically different marketplace. The essay looks backward, to the periodical's initial innovative appeal to all women, "from the 'house-wife' to the 'peeress'" (160), as a Romantic-era magazine active during the "vibrant decades of the 1820s and 1830s" (172). However, Batchelor's essay also looks forward, describing how The Lady's Magazine evolved an "increasingly close relationship" to literary annuals, both in reprinting content and by "marriage" to The Companion to the Annuals. The essay even draws our attention to an innovation in the distribution of images, in which the Magazine struck a deal with the Parisian fashion magazine Le Follet to reprint fashion plates directly from Paris (169, 170).

A woman in a turban "of Indian muslin wrought in gold" who is both looking at a fashion plate and being one.
"The Court Magazine & Monthly Critic and Lady's Magazine, & Museum of the Belles Lettres, Music, Fine Arts, Drama, Fashions, &c.,"
Court Magazine and Monthly Critic and Lady's Magazine, 1838, 32 v. HathiTrust.

Françoise Baillet's essay, "Invincible Brothers: The Pen and the Press in The Compositors' Chronicle, 1840--43," shows how one consequence of the reduction of the stamp duty in 1836 was "a considerable growth of specialised periodicals and thus a segmentation of reading audiences." Baillet takes up a trade journal that was typical in its format and also aimed at compositors, including puns and in-jokes about printing. Popular literature in the volume includes "so-called 'popular' writers and editors such as Dinah Mulock, Mary Howitt and Charles Knight, who addressed broad readerships" through new media forms--"annuals, trade magazines, Sunday papers, cheap weekly periodicals, and illustrated books and magazines" (7). Brian Maidment considers the development of the ideas of "Mirth" and "Fun" in the comic annual and the "New Graphic Humour" of the 1830s, including the work of Robert Seymour. In "Fauna, Flora and Illustrated Verse in Mary Howitt's Environmental Children's Poetry," Linda K. Hughes argues that Howitt's environmental poetry in the children's gift book, Sketches of Natural History, anticipates an ecocritical decentering of humans.

The volume also includes reflections on canonical writers like Thomas Carlyle, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Letitia Landon, and William Hazlitt (7-8). These figures emerge quite differently when considered through the lens of new media forms. Chris Haffenden's "William Hazlitt and Celebrity Culture: Periodical Portraits in an Age of Public Intimacy" shows how Hazlitt critiqued celebrity culture but also traded in its print forms. Even though Hazlitt refused to include visual portraits in The Spirit of the Age, the gallery of figures includes personal details. In "Literature, Media and the 'Advertising System'," Richard Salmon uses the broader history of advertising in the 1840's to connect the idea of the "cure-all" that appears in Carlyle's Past and Present with advertisements in the Chartist weekly, The Northern Star. Elizabeth Howard considers LEL and EBB on Hemans in the The New Monthly Magazine in 1835 as part of an intertwined women's literary tradition and also as part of the magazine's effort to capitalize on her death. In "Beyond the Literary Annuals: Felicia Hemans, Letitia Elizabeth Landon and Periodical Poetry," Caley Ehnes considers "why reprinted poetry mattered to the editors and readers" of new forms like the family literary periodical emerging in the 1830s and shows how that context "suspends and intensifies the public narratives that grew around [Hemans and Landon] (189, 180).

Two essays connect new print forms with social relations. In "A Familiar Transition: Dinah Mulock Craik's Early Career in Periodicals, 1841--5," Helena Goodwyn gives shape to the idea of new media forms by considering published songs in context of performance--and how Craik "networked, rewrote, reinterpreted, reimagined, translated, performed, and socialised" her way into literary prominence (213). Sara L. Maurer's "The Media System of Charitable Visiting" shows media at work in organized charitable visiting, in which tracts worked like tickets to facilitate communication and "blanks" designed to track the visit allowed print to mediate social relations. Moreover, visitors were imagined as representing the pastor in a disciplined way in order to ensure wise use of resources, in a context in which the poor "complex texts to be read" (259).

In "Paratextual Navigation: Positions of Witnessing in The Anti-Slavery Reporter," Sofia Prado Huggins suggests that footnotes worked to "spatialize" a reader's attention, calling that attention away from Black experience and toward white witness-for example, in the internal challenge to a proslavery petition from London in regard to the West Indies. In "'Collect and Simplify': Serial Miscellaneity and Extraction in the Early Nineteenth Century," Mark Turner considers what he calls "extractive miscellaneity" in the early nineteenth centuries to understand how literary bits might be collected like "scraps" but also as "kernels" or "essential bits" in the context of serial publication and global systems of circulation (19, 26). His discussion of the Australian Magazine; or, Compendium of Religious, Literary, and Miscellaneous Intelligence shows how it connected with and reflected particular global contexts--in relation to the imperial center but also to other colonial sites (31).

British Writers, Popular Literature and New Media Innovation is especially welcome given the cultural publishing context at time of writing, which could be characterized in terms of what New York Magazine has called a "Media Apocalypse." The period of new media innovation it examines was certainly a time of invention and adaptation, but it was also an extinction event. In that time of rapid material and cultural change, cultural producers created new or newly-composite forms that would create readers and make money. This captivating collection of case studies serves as an invitation to further research in its explorations of figures and texts that will be new to many readers, but also in its investigation of the interconnected relations between authors, readers, publishers, and new media forms.

Sarah Allison is Associate Professor of English and Hutchinson Distinguished Professor at Loyola University New Orleans.