Slow Print: Literary Radicalism and Late Victorian Print Culture by Elizabeth Carolyn Miller (review)

The entry on "Socialist Newspapers" in Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor's Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism (2007) tells us that approximately 250 socialist periodicals appeared in the years 1880 to 1900. Although many of these publications were "infrequent and irregular," this impressive output is testimony to the socialist revival of the late Victorian period and its radical faith in the power of print culture. This wave of literary production represented the latest stage in a tradition of revolutionary print politics that originated in the pamphleteering of the English Civil War and that nourished the democratic struggles of the proceeding centuries. As seen in the unstamped press of the 1830s and the Chartist movement that succeeded it, the free press became both the vehicle and symbol of freedom.

However, as Miller shows in her compendious new study of fin de siècle literary radicalism, this unshakeable faith in print enlightenment took a very serious knock at the end of the nineteenth century. Partly the victim of its own campaigns against legal and economic restrictions on freedom of expression (political and religious censorship, the stamp duty, and other "taxes on knowledge"), radical print culture found itself questioning and resisting the mass-circulation press and popular literary culture that had emerged in the last decades of the Victorian period. Far from producing the social, economic, and political emancipation of the British people, it seemed to many socialists and labour-movement leaders that the "free" press had simply become a powerful cultural tool of industrial-capitalist ideology and reprehensible modernity. The image of the world portrayed in the mass-produced press was nothing less than a fast-food diet of illusory consumerist freedoms, dubious sensationalism, and superficial knowledge. For those wanting a complete break with this dominant ideology (and whose critique of cultural debasement would be remarkably durable on the political left), the answer was no longer to try to outgun the mainstream press but instead to retreat to a position of "slow print," Miller's coinage for a new aesthetic of niche publication that literary history usually associates with elitist modernism. From this marginal yet righteous cultural base, socialist print culture could marshal its own troops and (in Engels's words) attempt to "unsettle the optimism of the bourgeois world" by proposing an alternative vision of "reality" both within and beyond literature. For Miller, the paradox of an anti-print print culture was enabling rather than obstructive, as it inspired socialist editors and writers to find ways to transcend the limitations of commercialization, atomization, and alienation. One response to this dilemma—the utopianism and aestheticism associated with William Morris—is of course very well known, but the virtue of Miller's book is its focus on the largely forgotten context of socialist print culture from which Morris and other familiar writers such as George Bernard Shaw emerged.

It is no surprise to find that Morris is the subject of the first chapter, as this can most convincingly showcase Miller's methodology. Shaw's socialist fiction and drama occupy chapters 2 and 3; chapter 4 looks at some of the poetry that appeared in the periodicals; chapter 5 delves into the mystical world of theosophy; and the final chapter argues that "sex radicalism" became the new marker of liberty. Other themes and case studies could have been chosen from the mass of periodicals under review (whole chapters could have been devoted to Clarion and Justice), but this is work for future scholars. (Deborah Mutch's English Socialist Periodicals, 1880-1900: A Reference Source [2007] is the obvious starting point for all forays into this region.) The discussion of Morris provides some striking examples of new insights to be gleaned from Miller's approach: few modern readers of News from Nowhere are likely to know that the original story appeared in Morris's journal Commonweal interleaved with engravings by Walter Crane, the "artist of socialism." As...