Dickens, Journalism, and Nationhood: Mapping the World in Household Words (review)

Though published in a Major Literary Authors series, Sabine Clemm’s book is not primarily about either Charles Dickens or literary authorship. Instead it studies Household Words (1851–59), Dickens’s mid-career weekly periodical, as a meaning-making entity with “a life and shape of its own” (2). Clemm invokes Benedict Anderson’s contention that newspapers and other periodicals were the crucial sites at which the “imagined communities” of modern nationalities were created, and with that warrant undertakes to show how Household Words in particular constructs the world, especially how it constructs English national identity. Her five main chapters analyze the beliefs about Englishness (and other national and cultural identities) expressed in Household Words and compare them to those of other major contemporary periodicals including the London Times and the magazine’s most direct competitor, Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal. The book’s many close readings are framed by knowledgeable discussions of a historical context that included the Great Exhibition of 1851, the Crimean War (1854–56), and the 1857 Indian Mutiny.

Clemm finds Household Words to have been literally—almost geometrically—Anglocentric, imagining the world in terms of concentric zones defined by increasing physical and cultural distance from London. She introduces the method of her study in the first chapter by analyzing how English and foreign identities were treated in articles about the Great Exhibition, a spectacle Dickens apparently disliked but that was too important for his new magazine to ignore. A crucial second chapter studies articles that specifically treat English or British identity, while chapter 3 goes out one zone farther to show how Household Words constructed the difficult problem of Ireland’s national identity—often by considering its land and resources as British but its people as Others. The fourth chapter analyzes the journal’s relatively nuanced, cosmopolitan construction of Europe, sometimes as a locus of political despotism but often positively as a group of civilizations parallel to England’s, especially contrasted to more exotic cultures. The fifth chapter studies the periodical’s characterization of India and its people, and a short afterword considers the “savage” as the ultimate Other against which Englishness could be defined and valued. At each level Clemm finds that Household Words built its views of national identity out of productive tensions, unexamined assumptions, and discreetly managed contradictions, with Englishness the most unstable and internally inconsistent concept of all.

As this summary suggests, there is an appealing quality of ethnographic inquiry throughout the book. Although the scholarly and theoretical influences Clemm notes include Anderson, Terry Eagleton, Homi Bhabha, Lauren Goodlad, and Catherine Hall rather than Clifford Geertz, Clemm’s method of close observation coupled to careful reconstruction of multiple contexts recalls the thick description of cultural anthropology and ethnography. This approach to the study of a periodical makes Clemm’s book unusual and its analyses particularly interesting. Monographs on individual Victorian periodicals tend to be frankly (and often unreflectively) historicist in their method, focusing on economic and reception histories and on the biographies of publishers, editors, and writers. Clemm is instead almost entirely engaged with the worldview implied by Household Words’s published texts, and the difference in perspective is fascinating. Clemm is a strong close reader, able to tease parallel strands of meaning from different articles and to gather them persuasively into a worldview, and she effectively grounds her analyses in her knowledge of Victorian print culture and political and international history.

Only one feature of these articles is not fully developed: genre. Clemm is so intent on abstracting cultural attitudes from the texts she reads that she pays little attention to their forms, although formal constraints must surely have influenced the worldviews many articles expressed. In chapter 2, for example, she deduces a great deal from the number of articles that ridicule foreign books written about England. While carefully noting the ideological contradictions within these articles, she does not note that the first Household Words contributor who had...