The 19^th-century mass print culture studied by scholars today exists due to new technologies and the skilled workers who labored to produce print and images in newspapers, periodicals, books, and pamphlets. But who were these workers, and how did new technologies shape their work practices, lived experiences, and subjectivities? If they enabled others’ authorship, they rarely turned author themselves, leaving this essential human dimension of publishing little known. The Research Society of Victorian Periodicals (RSVP) proposes a special session of three panelists and presider that explores new research methods to make visible those so often marginalized in historical cultural studies: the workers and working conditions that produced texts and images, our very objects of study. In keeping with the presidential theme, the session also seeks to promote greater awareness within and beyond periodical studies of those who enable publication of our contemporary scholarship, laborers so often hidden due to signature practices, underlying academic structures, and power asymmetries.

Building upon prior scholarship, this international panel proposes fresh methods of seeing the hands that ran the presses, set the type, and created the illustrations of nineteenth-century print. Book history and periodical scholars have increasingly researched press workers (and their global counterparts today who digitize periodical content). Advances in image production have been made by Lorraine Janzen Kooistra and others, so that besides artists, the engravers and artisans who cut designs into wood blocks for printing are better known.[1] Paul Fyfe underscores the anonymous workers, including many of color in the Global South, who digitize periodicals formerly microfilmed by earlier anonymous female workers.[2] The identities of 19^th-century press workers involved in periodicals’ material production remain little known despite their urgent relevance: just as technology has enabled and produced oppressive burdens for classroom teaching during the pandemic, so did new 19^th-century technologies (e.g., steam printing presses) speed up production and lower costs, often benefitting mass print consumers at the expense of displaced workers. Telegraphy and new transportation technologies rendered print production global, transmitted across oceans and land from parts of the British empire to the metropole and vice versa, generating revenue but also contingent workers.

This session’s interrelated papers on press work and working conditions in Britain and India suggest new scholarly pathways. Jon Klancher adopts an 1833 illustrated series on print production in Charles Knight’s Penny Magazine to excavate printers’ positioning early in the publishing revolution between hand- and steam-driven presses. He integrates ethnic analysis of the magazine’s visualization of laborers transforming “rags of ethnic Europeans” into “the whiteness of machine produced papers.” This focus suggests, he argues, a potential new model of media-cultural studies centered on the totality of production and textual materiality of cheap print that, Clare Pettitt recently argues,[3] shaped new apprehensions of serial time from the 1830s forward.

Françoise Baillet examines compositors’ working conditions in the 1840s via an early professional journal, The Compositors’ Chronicle, a periodical collaboratively produced and read by those who set type. At a moment when many compositors already faced unemployment, they particularly feared the new pianotype, a typesetting machine operated like a piano that let the printing characters fall into the composing stick at the touch of a keypad (invented by Scottish businessman James Hadden Young and French industrialist Adrien Delcambre). The journal’s letters, opinion pieces, and reader comments illuminate actual workers facing potential job losses generated by the new technologies at a time of scarcity.

Priti Joshi takes up the production of images at another historical crux, the aftermath of the 1857 First War of Indian Independence (the “Indian Mutiny”). Her new research has uncovered the labor and laborers involved in transmitting images of Nana Sahib, considered a principal villain of the uprising by the British, from India to London, which were then remediated in the pages of the Illustrated London News, Illustrated News, and other print venues. She thus explores the “industrialized, alienated, and disaggregated process of nineteenth-century production of illustrations for the press” and presents new methods that other scholars can adopt.

The session as a whole underscores the imperatives of looking at those marginalized in past (and present) print publication, moving from the 1830s to late 1850s, from curated images of workers in a penny magazine to press workers’ collaborative writing about their working conditions, to laborers in image production in Britain and the Global South.

[1] https://1890s.ca/about/

[2] “An Archeology of Victorian Newspapers,” Victorian Periodicals Review 49.4 (2016), 546-77.

[3] Serial Forms (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 2020.