Paper Pellets: British Literary Culture after Waterloo (review)

The critical scholarship on periodicals and their impact on nineteenth-century literature has reached a new zenith with Richard Cronin’s latest book, Paper Pellets. Back in 1989 Lynn Pykett, in an article published in Victorian Periodicals Review entitled ‘Reading the Periodical Press: Text and Context’, felt obliged to caution aspiring scholars about the interdisciplinary and potentially infinite nature of periodical research. Building upon a seminal essay by Michael Wolff, Pykett observed that a truly informed study of periodicals would require familiarity with various temporal forms of publication, the many individual series within those subcategories, the miscellaneous content in each issue and the writers, editors and publishers of these publications as well as their circulation and audience – in sum, a mandate that, as Pykett notes, verges so close on ‘totality, mastery and control’ that anyone less than a ‘super-scholar’ might ‘sink under the burden of their pursuit of the periodicals equivalent of the “key to mythologies”’. Yet despite the seeming impossibility of these requirements, the two decades since Pykett’s observations have seen a number of impressive publications beginning to attain such goals. Jon Klancher’s seminal The Making of English Reading Audiences (1987) was one path-breaking example of the ‘awesome erudition’ that Pykett described. With Paper Pellets, Cronin offers a comparable feat, focusing (like Klancher) on the 1820s, when magazines were the dominant form in the literary landscape and when, according to Cronin, even major authors such as Scott and Byron could not escape assimilating aspects of the format into their own writing.

Subtitled ‘British Literary Culture after Waterloo’, Paper Pellets aims to define some of the major trends of this rich, but often misunderstood, period. It is a book about thresholds, such as the eroding class distinction between gentlemen and authors, the fluid boundaries between local allusions and appeals to national audience, the many different genres and discourses found in magazines and their effect on other literary forms, the surprisingly fine line between sentimentalism and the overly masculine, often heartless forms of ad hominem writing and the difference between the fictionalised personalities peddled in contemporary publications and the actual personalities that may have been plagued by those representations (to name just some of the topics comprising the book’s dozen chapters). Cronin’s focus is the symbiosis of these contradictions and conflicts, which, according to Cronin, paradoxically energised writing by inspiring authors but also antagonised aspects of those conflicts that they identified, or felt insecure about, in themselves. The supercharged consequences of these literary antagonisms are nowhere more evident, Cronin suggests, than in the two duels that ended the lives of John Scott (first editor of the London) and Sir Alexander Boswell (a poet and son of Johnson’s biographer). In the tragic and entirely unnecessary deaths of these self-consciously modern, nineteenth-century writers, who strangely chose to defend their reputations according to the hoary traditions of the eighteenth-century gentleman, Cronin illustrates the frictive and occasionally illogical tensions that shaped literary culture in the dynamic post-Waterloo period.

As in Romantic Victorians, Cronin’s valuable 2002 study of prominent authors heralding Victorian culture, the critical approach in Paper Pellets is largely cultural and biographical, and unveiled through a disarmingly readable prose that can seem more like literary biography than the theory-laden and painstaking close readings that one might expect from this kind of critical work. Indeed, readers will be hard pressed to find any sustained close readings in the book. Despite Cronin’s insistence that this was an era in which ‘experience is authenticated only insofar as it is […] printed and published’, his own commitment to conveying the vast and dynamic conversation of the 1820s can sometimes seem more focused on behaviours and actions than words and texts, and sustained discussion of any single author or career often falls by the wayside to make room for dizzyingly intertextual discussions that may move between multiple magazines and individual publications within a single paragraph (such...