Advertising, Subjectivity and the Nineteenth-Century Novel: Dickens, Balzac and the Language of the Walls (review)

Advertising, Subjectivity and the Nineteenth-Century Novel calls attention to "the language of the walls"—a phrase coined by James Dawson Burn, who found an obscure "universal language" in the juxtaposition of printed words covering buildings throughout Victorian London (qtd. in Thornton 50). Where historians of commodity culture and spectacle attribute major significance to the rise of the image, Sara Thornton asks us to consider the unprecedented pervasiveness and mobility of text in the nineteenth-century metropolis. Her book explains how writers and readers of the period adapted to a situation we tend to take for granted today: a new textual environment in which print "no longer . . . had to be sought out and paid for dearly; it now sought out the subject . . . and asked to be read" (32).

Thornton's project combines comparative literary and cultural analysis with media theory and contributes to several areas of inquiry. Readers of Thomas Richards's The Commodity Culture of Victorian England (1990) and of Jonathan Crary's Techniques of the Observer (1990) and Suspensions of Perception (2000) will find a pertinent examination here of the place of print in the history of spectatorship. Readers of Kevin McLaughlin's Paperwork (2005) will appreciate this book's account of the peculiar virtuality of Victorian culture and the concerns about mediation that defined what Thomas Carlyle called "the Paper Age" in The French Revolution (1837). Most obviously relevant are Jennifer Wicke's Advertising Fictions (1988) and Daniel Hack's The Material Interests of the Victorian Novel (2005), which similarly place fiction within a commercial context.

What distinguishes this work (apart from its comparatist approach) is its claim that a new mode of subjectivity emerged out of new conditions of reading, print media, and methods of interpellation that literature and advertising pioneered. The serial novel, which included ads and compelled readers to encounter multiple texts simultaneously, is a case in point. Thornton argues that this heterogeneous print form—building, one might add, upon the earlier developments of magazines and periodicals—offered practical instruction in how to inhabit a world saturated with texts, images, and information. The discipline it instilled in readers was not a restriction of focus but something more like what Walter Benjamin would call "reception in a state of distraction" ("The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" in Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt [1968], 240). Reinforcing the kind of distracted reading and viewing now more commonly associated with channel-surfing or the dreaming collective that is Twitter, novelists and advertisers participated in creating a modern mass audience.

The first chapter of Thornton's book describes the "modulability" both of print and of the cityscape whose surfaces it increasingly covered (19); the second and third chapters examine correspondences between fiction and advertising in the novels of Charles Dickens and Honoré de Balzac, respectively. Chapter 1, though somewhat heavy on sociohistorical generalizations about urban life that can seem overstated at times, offers keen insight into the communicative techniques of advertising. Thornton demonstrates how ads systematically produced "units of text and image which have a prêt-à-lire or prêt-à-penser quality" (17). She applies Jean-Jacques Lecercle's "postulate of the encyclopedia" to the language of advertising to show how it relies on a vocabulary of references and associations presumptively shared by readers in general (qtd. in Thornton 18). A sort of standardized conceptual shorthand made it possible to attach the transitory messages of a realm of immediate concerns to the more apparently stable signifiers of cultural knowledge. With quotations from Shakespeare appearing on the sides of buildings to market pens, literature and history were "beginning to reach the population via the walls rather than via the library or the book." If this suggests a democratization of knowledge, Thornton accurately observes that it also marks "the beginning of the commercial sponsorship of high culture" (26).

The interdependence of...