Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Time, Domesticity and Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain by Maria Damkjær
As a young student of English literature, I was introduced to the works we read as timeless examples of Matthew Arnold’s touchstones. Yet in that old-fashioned Oxford syllabus, Victorian modernity was too dangerous to handle. We read nothing beyond the 1840s. Today, as periodical scholars, we work always within the context of that dangerous modernity. We understand time to be of the essence, even when that may not be our immediate focus. In this elegant study, Maria Damkjær takes the subject full on. Against the argument that the period from 1840 to 1870 saw the triumph of regulated time (ordered directly by factory bells and railway timetables and indirectly by a print culture characterised by serial and periodical forms), she posits the slipperiness of “domestic time,” which constantly eludes regulation.
By domestic time, Damkjær means the time of the middle-class household, which was centred around female labour, practical or emotional. Such time is a “no-time,” always interruptible, a “meantime” in which “work” means needlework which can always be set aside. It depends on the invisible and always unfinished labour of cooking, washing, and scrubbing—usually undertaken by domestic servants. If this seems banal now after decades of feminist scholarship, Damkjær gives this a new and energising turn through a detailed reading of a range of serial and periodical texts. Her pivotal chapter here is chapter 2, titled “Interruption: Periodicals and Realism,” but the whole book offers much to periodical scholars [End Page 510] and those engaged in studying the relationship between nineteenth-century print and time.
In a brief introduction, Damkjær argues that the difficulties of regulating and representing domestic time shape print culture both in advice literature and in realist fiction with its commitment to rendering the stuff of the ordinary. In four substantial and subtly argued chapters, she pursues this argument through the relationship between realist fiction and forms of serial or periodical publication.
The first of these, “Repetition: Making Domestic Time in Bleak House and the Bleak House Advertiser,” situates the publication of Dickens’s novel not only in the context of its monthly issues but also in the reiterated appearance of the advertisement for Dakin and Co., purveyors of tea, which echoes the green-blue cover. It is not simply that “buying practices and reading practices are . . . inextricably linked” but rather that the invocation of the ordinary domestic scene (tea time) in the advertisement both plays against the repetition of the novel’s serial form and also more profoundly points up the struggle to impose domestic regularity (47). This is represented by Esther and her keys as against the headlong rush of the plot. The impossibility of attaining the stasis of exact repetition, like the impossibility of reproducing exactly the texture of ordinary life, haunts the novel in the form of ghostly footsteps, past times which cannot be spoken of but which in the end cannot be contained. Bleak House / Bleak House returns but never as the same same.
In the second chapter, Damkjær draws on a range of theoreticians, including Roland Barthes, and on a variety of periodical genres, including advice literature and didactic fictions from, among other time-aware titles, Mrs. Ellis’ Morning Call, Sunday at Home, and the Leisure Hour. She argues that the periodical press at mid-century not only inserted itself into domestic time as a source of valued reading but also enabled writers to experiment with a series of genres in which entertainment and instruction were suitably mixed. In this eminently interruptible form of reading, domestic time is constantly described and managed while remaining shifting and elusive.
In the third chapter, Damkjær returns to the realist novel through a discussion of the famous row between Dickens and Gaskell over the serial publication of North and South in Household Words. The assumption that domestic time, women’s “work,” is always interruptible structures the novel. I think here of Gaskell’s letters...
