Nineteenth-Century Verse and Technology: Machines of Meter by Jason David Hall (review)

In Nineteenth-Century Verse and Technology, Jason David Hall does something which is, as far as I am aware, unprecedented: he sets out a materialist history of meter in nineteenth-century Britain, a history in which (to paraphrase his description of Victorian views on metrical education) "the modes of producing and reproducing prosodic knowledge" are as important as, if not more important than, "the prosodic subject matter itself" (p. 63). Although this book wears its theoretical commitments lightly, Hall's argument is firmly grounded in cultural materialism, as he asks how the production, circulation, and consumption of meter was transformed by the economic, social, and intellectual conditions of the nineteenth century's "machine culture" (p. 255). Hall squares this theoretical stance with his book's historicist method by turning not to Marxist literary critics but to Marx himself: nineteenth-century understandings of meter, he argues, were shaped by experiences of alienation and estrangement similar to those that Marx identified as the defining characteristics of industrial modernity. This is an ambitious argument, and Hall bases it on a broad definition of "machine culture"; for his purposes, the word "machine" "describes a technology in the sense of a systematic form of knowledge" that "facilitates and determines forms of data management" (p. 5). The machines of meter discussed in this book range from educational methods and psychological theories to systems of metrical notation and laboratory instruments designed to measure the physiological processes involved in reciting poetry. To a greater or lesser extent, Hall contends, each of these technologies emphasized the materiality of meter while also mediating and inhibiting readers' access to the semantic and emotional content of verse.

For the most part, both his argument and his method are persuasive. They are not seen to their best advantage, though, in the book's first chapter, which examines meter's connections to several different nineteenth-century technologies—the railways, telegraphy, agricultural threshing machines, and mechanisms designed to mimic human speech—that have little in common. The chapter does important work, in the context of the book as a whole, by introducing Coventry Patmore's "new prosody," the influential nineteenth-century theory of verse that defined meter as "an abstract system of spacing marked by an immaterial yet mentally perceived beat" (p. 7). Patmore's prosody acts as a counterexample to the mechanistic modes of producing meter discussed in this book, demonstrating the tension between idealism and materialism that, according to Hall, characterized nineteenth-century debates about meter. The first chapter's fragmented structure, though, obscures this argument; the book might have been better served by an introductory chapter focusing exclusively on Pat-more, or on the surprising similarities between his prosody and railway technologies, both of which, Hall points out, depended on and promoted the abstract standardization of time.

The book's remaining chapters are admirably cohesive, each examining a specific technology or machine of meter. The second chapter, "Meter Manufactories," compares two different models of education: the "monitorial" system, developed in the early nineteenth century with the aim of offering an elementary education to large numbers of working-class children; and the teaching of Latin and Greek scansion and composition in Britain's public schools. The two models, Hall argues, were not as dissimilar as they seemed, because an education in classical meter involved the same kind of rote learning that underpinned the monitorial system. Nineteenth-century educational reformers, critical of the unvarying and mechanistic methods used in the teaching of classical verse, identified "the public school as a prison-like mill" or a factory of meter, and the repetitive tasks of its pupils as "a counterpart to estranging wage-labor as conducted in the 'cash-nexus'" (pp. 91–92). Chapter 3 discusses a concrete manifestation of this unexpected link between classical prosody and mechanized industrial work: John Clark's Eureka, an apparatus exhibited in London in 1845, which, on the pull of a lever, automatically generated a line of...