Science, Fiction, and the Fin-de-Siècle Periodical Press by Will Tattersdill (review)

Will Tattersdill's Science, Fiction, and the Fin-de-Siècle Periodical Press is a thoughtful and thought-provoking book that illuminates the crannies and crevices of the genres referenced in its title—science writing, fiction, and serials—and their relation to each other in the late nineteenth century. There are four chapters, each looking at a distinctive thematic group lodged in periodicals and affiliated with what later makes up the literature of science fiction, or SF as it is called throughout. The themes are communication in space, including periodical space; in time; in images, such as photography, x-rays, and drawings; and in a postcolonial setting, in articles and tales of polar exploration. The book is helpfully illustrated. If its primary orientation is to limn the prehistory of science fiction, its interest in serials is a close second, given its location of these texts only in periodicals (most of them so-called popular periodicals) and its argument that these proto-science-fiction narratives share key and formative elements with serials themselves.

There is a single author, H. G. Wells, lurking in the arguments of each chapter. Tattersdill has devised an interesting strategy, then: to avoid an author-centered, or single-author work, while still managing to use works by a recurring author as one of several sinews with which to bind his chapters. That strategy succeeds, with its thick history bound to attract a broad readership of science fiction, media history, print culture, and the history of science. Tattersdill's characteristic method is complex: it is resolutely comparative, so that a number of specific articles and tales from more than one periodical title figure in each chapter; similarly, close readings pepper chapters, sometimes of articles across single issues. At the same time, works by theorists, such as Jürgen Habermas, Bruno Latour, and Pierre Bourdieu, underpin the narrative. Largely, this breadth of reference and focus is successful, if on occasion it resists the centrifugal force of the shaped, progressive narrative. Overall, the effect is like a subtle, complicated recipe: chewy and pleasurable in the eating, and memorable in its outlines.

The serials upon which Tattersdill draws are described as "general" titles, published between 1891 and 1905, characteristic of the new journalism, and identified roughly as "Standard Illustrated Popular Magazines" in Mike Ashley's terminology (Tattersdill 5, Ashley qtd. in Tattersdill 1). Such titles that make up the ground of Tattersdill's sources include Cassell's Family Magazine, the Idler, Pearson's Magazine, the Strand, and the Windsor Magazine. Yet, commendably, he draws heavily upon the Fortnightly Review, which is neither illustrated, popular, nor a magazine, but rather a general review. This does, however, point to other anomalies with respect to the press. Puzzlingly, Matthew Arnold's late charge against the so-called New Journalism is accepted at face value, despite a history of commentary from media historians. Arnold's notion of "feather-brained" is not historicized and critiqued, nor is the term "popular" for a group of titles that hardly takes in the breadth and depth of the truly popular press (Arnold qtd. in Tattersdill 6, Tattersdill 4). Even these are not culpable of the hasty suggestion in the conclusion—that they "gave only seriously stymied expression to women, offered no voice at all to ethnic minorities, were pitched firmly and finally at middle class readers … [and] edited almost exclusively by white male imperialists," and echoed entirely the "segregated cultural space" of American magazines (182). A generalization like this requires argument and evidence; the rush to it is unseemly; and, particularly in a narrative that has been at pains to note the complex hybridity of periodical space, these overdeter-mined criteria are regrettable. This definition of periodicals disappoints because it only includes an analysis of editors and letterpress, while excluding discussions of advertising and the complexity of the classes of readers that comprise the so-called middle class. The clerks, artisanal...