Dickens, Reynolds, and Mayhew on Wellington Street: The Print Culture of a Victorian Street by Mary L. Shannon (review)

Anybody who has worked on the journalism of early Victorian London has been struck by what an intimate world it was, with the offices of dozens upon dozens of newspapers and periodicals clustered together on and near the Strand and Fleet Street, their occupants constantly jostling one another in nearby theatres, pubs, clubs, and the streets themselves. Until now, however, no one has made this spatial intimacy the main focus of scholarly attention. In her deeply researched book, which has won RSVP’s Robert and Vineta Colby Prize, Mary Shannon takes us inside this crowded world and explores what difference that intimacy made in the literature that emerged from it.

Shannon’s narrowing of her object of study to one street lends her book a powerful persuasiveness right from the beginning. Wellington Street, we soon learn, was home to an extraordinary number of publishing enterprises. Between 1843 and 1853, more than twenty newspapers, miscellanies, and periodicals, together with thirteen booksellers and publishers, had their offices on one of its three short sections. The most important page of the book is page 28: the map of Wellington Street showing the offices of Household Words, All the Year Round, Reynolds’ Miscellany, Douglas Jerrold’s Weekly, Punch, the Examiner, the Athenaeum, Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, and Lacy’s theatrical bookshop. Even this wonderfully informative map necessarily leaves out a few features discussed in the text, such as Hunt’s and Lewes’s Leader at 10 and then 17 Wellington Street south.

The peculiar geographical density of London journalism was such a long-standing and constant daily feature of its participants’ lives that they left few direct observations about it. They had never known it to be any other way. As a result, thick descriptions of this feature of the literary and publishing environment can be somewhat difficult to come by, and so it is to Shannon’s credit that she has unearthed some particularly evocative ones. A newspaper report of a fire in 1854 describes the masses of spectators owing to the “densely-populated character of the neighborhood” and recounts how the printers next door at the Morning Post heroically stayed at their machines, with Dickens, at the Household Words office, calling encouragement to the firemen (55). Here is John Hollingshead recalling the nearby Exeter Exchange as “full of little shops which sold nothing to nobody, with the printed words ‘To Let’ in every dusty window. … Here literary Bohemia of forty years ago and more ‘squatted’ … and succeeded in getting a few ‘backers’—printers who thought they might ‘strike’ a catchpenny reef of periodical wealth. … The writers, when they were not frying sprats in the back parlours, were ‘publishing’ these fly-sheets across the counters, and when the day’s work was over they often slept under those counters” (33).

Given the rarity of such explicit commentary, there is of necessity a speculative cast to Shannon’s descriptions. Her text is sprinkled with “must haves” and “would have beens”—Dickens must have passed Reynolds and Mayhew on the street in the mornings, Reynolds would have looked out upon the windows of the Athenaeum, street noise must have intruded into the offices through the big bow windows of Household Words, and so on—speculations which are plausible, even if their significance is not obvious. But the counterweight to that vagueness is the enormous specificity of detail that Shannon brings to the task of showing how closely populated these networks of rivalries and allegiances were. Although Dickens, Reynolds, and Mayhew are the main foci of her analysis, she is at pains to trace many of the connections between and among other players in this drama, from prominent figures like Douglas Jerrold and John Forster to such lesser known names as William Tweedie, Angus B. Reach, Shirley Brooks, Montagu Williams, and T. H. Lacy. In this thickly peopled literary...