The Unsocialist Socialists

Professor Elizabeth Miller’s SLOW PRINT is a brilliantly conceived book and the sort of deeply researched study in brick-and-mortar libraries that today’s digitizing of documents is replacing. Up to a point, and that’s the point. To her credit, Miller cites many documents that are likely candidates for not being digitized before they disintegrate, as some of that sort already have, documents that reveal a major historical reversal, the development in the nineteenth century of an at first approving, then ambivalent, and eventually hostile attitude by “literary radicals” toward the industrialization and commercializing of printing. This development accompanied a change in the meaning of the word “radical,” which early in the century referred to political thinking that was anti- or limited-government, but that later evolved to viewing capitalism rather than government as the root cause of social injustice; and so whatever commonality the often disagreeing radical groups had by the end of the century was largely in this change of heart toward mass print as a capitalist tool (while yet being envious of its accomplishments).

First, we’re reminded that the word “radical” covers a broad spectrum of reformist or revolutionary-minded people, the socialists among them, and the variety of disagreements among them on many fronts naturally included debate as well on the issue of how radicals involved in the use and dissemination of liberating and enlightening information should feel about the modernizing of print and presses. And that is why while Shaw figures prominently in two chapters (2 and 3), in the others he mainly just provides occasional context for and comparison to other kinds of radicals; for this book is not about Shaw, primarily, but about a fascinating cultural transformation the entire late Victorian world underwent. And in which, as usual, Shaw was anomalous in some ways, often in ways that were innovative and mediating as well.

One of this book’s most valuable features is its providing an historical overview demonstrating the changes in attitudes toward print. Many radicals were, in the first half of the nineteenth century, accepting of and encouraged by the explosion of what might be called “fast printing” (think “fast food” and McDonald’s “Over a zillion sold!”), the sort of industrialized printing in which larger and larger and faster and faster presses turned out more and cheaper books, magazines, newspapers, pamphlets, and so on, which was generally thought admirable then because such publishing made such items more widely available for the education and enlightenment of the exploited masses. But the tide turned against this general approval when it began to strike many radicals in the latter decades of the century that such printing for the masses was actually serving capitalist ends a lot more than reformist or revolutionary causes. Because such print was characterized by counter-reform advertising, excessive profit making to the benefit of the privileged few, standardization at the lowest level of quality, degradation of aesthetic values, commodification of life, and political manipulation of the masses, among other reasons. Many radicals became downright unfriendly toward the profit-oriented capitalist press, and thus my ironic title, “The Unsocialist Socialists,” refers to Miller’s principal point that many socialists, in turning away from the democratizing, mass-marketing capitalist press, became elitists, seemingly an “unsocialist” thing to do. Quite a joke, in fact, which was made richer because their elitism put them in bed with the elitist modernists who wrote not for the masses but for each other, the knowing class! The modernists may have been as anticapitalist as the political radicals, but they were also largely antidemocratic, so discovering themselves in bed with the modernists brought consternation to some of the socialists.

Miller makes the point that “the radical literary countermove to print mass production was as much about scale as it was about speed. The print community that emerged in British radical circles during these years directed itself … to a small-scale audience, a political and aesthetic counterculture, a public...