SIDEWAYS!: Navigating the Material(ity) of Print Culture

This essay conceptualizes the massive materiality of Victorian print culture both as a counterpart to the modern city (dynamic, multi-centered, unpredictable, rife with local formations) and as a discursive web. Lateral “sideways” navigation across genres, texts, and successive pages or issues helps to uncover print’s spatio-temporal convergences. Illustrative examples include adverts for Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend across the publishing titles he controlled, notices or silences about Dickens’s and Gaskell’s serial fiction in Sunday papers, and the mutually reinforcing fame of Hood’s “The Song of the Shirt” and Dickens’s Christmas Carol .