“From the Classroom” is a series that features some of the great work and research from students who visit Special Collections and Archives at the University of Iowa Libraries. Below is a blog by Casie Minot from Dr. Jennifer Burek Pierce’s class “Reading Culture History & Research in Media” (SLIS:5600:0EXW).
Minot explores the paratext of the serialized version of Bleak House found in Special Collection and Archives. The novel by English author Charles Dickens follows a family who become embroiled in a long-running lawsuit over a disputed inheritance and is one of the author’s most acclaimed novels.
By the time the serial edition of Charles Dickens’ Bleak House concluded in September of 1853, the Illustrated London News reported that, “‘What do you think of Bleak House?’” was about as regular a question as “‘How are you?’” (Hayward 31). The main difference between the two was that “a great number of people who ask how you do, make a practice of neither waiting for, nor listening to, your reply.… But, on the contrary, those who inquire for your ideas about Bleak House, think of Bleak House; and, if they do not really want to know your opinion, want you to at least listen to theirs” (Hayward 31). Throughout its release, newspapers and readers alike agreed that Bleak House was London’s premiere literary social event.
Yet, one need not be a Victorian reader to experience the Bleak House buzz. By flipping through the original Bleak House serials, current readers can catch a glimpse at how the pamphlets functioned as a town square of sorts, where communities of readers from different class and gender backgrounds shopped through, learned from, and consumed novels and goods alike.
Nineteenth-century readers listened to Dickens’ stories read aloud in social settings, such as amongst family, neighbors, and friends of all sorts of classes. This especially enhanced the reading experiences of lower classes. At one shilling a piece, Dickens’ serials radically made historically expensive novels widely accessible to lower-class readers. Still, a shilling was a full day’s worth of wages for some readers, which led many lower-class families and communities to buy one representative pamphlet and hold communal recitations (Hayward 35). Moreover, literacy levels were low amongst lower class readers, making “listen[ing] to recitals of texts” an especially viable reading option (Lai-Ming 185). The prevalence of recitation even influenced Dickens’ craft: by using phonetic spellings and punctuation to emphasize speech patterns, Dickens’ prose enhanced the oral performance of the “reader-aloud” and catered to the aural entertainment of “reader-listeners” (Lai-Ming). From Dickens’ writing desk to the homes of readers, serialized novels like Bleak House encouraged communities from diverse class and literacy backgrounds to read each monthly installment.
The original 1852 and 1853 serials of Bleak House, a part of the Leigh Hunt collection, further animate how Dickens’ first readers might have participated in this highly social reading process. While the pamphlet’s latter half contains four Bleak House chapters, the first half features a wealth of advertisements, such as funeral services, toupees, pills for ailments, and dress fashions. The array of advertisements encouraged readers to leisurely “loiter” through ad after ad as if readers were window shopping (Andrews 24). One notable advertisement is Marsland, Son, & Co.’s crochet cotton thread. Each monthly advertisement featured one new doily pattern adorned with avian, floral, or even royal motifs. Readers could easily collect the patterns for themselves or offer them to loved ones. Perhaps a reader perfected their stitching while listening to protagonist Esther and her friend, Caddy, perfect theirs in the story. Advertisements like the Marsland, Son, & Co. doily patterns illustrate the “arcade” of leisurely activities at readers’ disposal inside Bleak House serials (Andrews 24).
Bleak House’s advertisements also offer insights into Dickens’ diverse reading demographics. The inclusion of crochet advertisements gestures towards Dickens’ female readership, but many of the advertisements also targeted their respective families, which included a wide variety of socioeconomic classes. On their way to Bleak House, parents and children strolled through advertisements for expensive waterproof overcoats for their family patriarch as well as lists suggesting Christmas gifts for family reading. While such lists feature more costly novels, the overall serials also offer a variety of newspapers and reading lists advertised at cheaper prices.
Not only did the advertisements appeal to women and their families across class boundaries, but they also appealed to women active outside the home. For instance, published one week after Bleak House’s first release in March of 1852, readers saw Harriet Beecher Stowe’s sentimental protest novel against enslavement—Uncle Tom’s Cabin—explode both in popularity and in the number of advertisements. Stowe’s blockbuster novel meant to stir sympathy in its female readership while mobilizing readers to take action to support the Abolitionist movement in the United States, and that stirring rippled to Victorian England (Fekete Trubey 62). Selling one million copies across the pond within its first nine months of publication, the novel inspired English women to organize the “largest-scale, traditionally political mobilization” in the form of the Stafford House Address (Fekete Trubey 64-65). Signed by 563,000 British women and gifted to Stowe herself, the 1853 petition implored American women to take action against enslavement in the United States, where the novel only sold 300,000 copies in its first year (“Stowe’s Global Impact”). However, one wonders what these British women readers experienced when confronted with Bleak House’s Mrs. Jellyby and Mrs. Pardiggle, whose respective portrayals expose their inability to address complex social issues as well as their consequential distractedness from domestic duties, such as the sewing tasks Esther and Caddy perform. Thus, the advertisements of Dickens’ serials appealed to certain demographics, though these demographics, at times, clashed with the social themes of Dickens’ novel.
Contemporary readers can come in today to leisurely peruse through the same avenues of advertisement that entertained readers of the past. Moreover, current readers can indulge in the “arcades” of activities within Bleak House’s narrative (Andrews 24). As a part of the University of Iowa’s Leigh Hunt collection, present-day readers can gawk at Dickens’ defamatory caricature of Leigh Hunt and his decadent lifestyle in the form of Bleak House’s Harold Skimpole. Readers can learn more about the complicated friendship between Hunt and Dickens through this caricature alongside other artifacts within the collection, such as Dickens’ correspondence with Hunt prior to and after Bleak House’s publication. Researchers can also explore the exciting, new avenues of research present in these serials. Each advertisement acts as a window into the past, unlocking new insights into readership demographics and reading practices of Dickens’ time.
The original serialization of Bleak House and its advertisements invites scholars and enthusiastic readers alike to explore the avenues of readership it inspired. In doing so, readers of today can learn more about the endless possible ways readers might have listened to, read aloud, multi-tasked along to, shopped through, gawked at, and tore parts out of arguably Dickens’ best novel.
Works Cited
Andrews, Malcolm. “Dickens and the Serial Flâneur.” The Dickensian, vol. 114, no. 504, 2018, pp. 21-25.
Fekete Trubey, Elizabeth. “‘Success Is Sympathy’: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Woman Reader.” Reading Women: Literary Figures and Cultural Icons from the Victorian Age to the Present, edited by Janet Badia and Jennifer Phegley, University of Toronto Press, 2005, pp. 53–76.
Hayward, Jennifer. Consuming Pleasures: Active Audiences and Serial Fictions from Dickens to Soap Opera, University of Kentucky Press, 1997.
Lai-ming, Tammy Ho. “Reading Aloud in Dickens’ Novels.” Oral Tradition, vol. 23, no. 2, 2008, pp. 185-199.
“Leigh Hunt Online: The Letters – The Brewer-Leigh Hunt Collection at Iowa.” University of Iowa Special Collections and Archives. https://www.lib.uiowa.edu/sc/leighhunt/collection/
“Stowe’s Global Impact.” Harriet Beecher Stowe Center. https://www.harrietbeecherstowecenter.org/harriet-beecher-stowe/her-global-impact/
Further Reading:
Burek-Pierce, Jennifer. “‘Knit and the World Knits with You’: Studying Participatory Culture in the U.S. Newspapers through World War I.” Annual Review of Cultural Heritage Informatics, Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc., 2015, pp. 73-83.
Price, Leah. How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain. Princeton University Press, 2012.
Thornton, Sara. “Reading the Dickens Advertiser: Merging Paratext and Novel.” Advertising, Subjectivity and the Nineteenth-Century Novel, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, pp. 119-171.