Consuming Ephemera

Through the large-scale digital archives curated by museums, libraries, and commercial publishers within the last two decades, Victorian print ephemera has become more visible than at any time since the end of the nineteenth century. Rather than sinking further into oblivion, ephemeral printed matter such as newspapers, advertisements, and postcards has become increasingly accessible as a resource for academic study, public engagement, and even popular cultural recycling. Moreover, the paradoxical preservation of nineteenth-century print ephemera in seemingly permanent twenty-first-century digital formats has the potential to highlight similarities between the popular media of both periods. Literary critics and cultural historians have shown how many of the practices and technologies associated with our own media era—a preoccupation with celebrity and brand identity, disembodied communication across time and space—originated in the nineteenth century. Susan Zieger’s The Mediated Mind builds on this recent body of critical work on media history, making the central focus of her argument the claim “that nineteenth-century habits of mass print consumption prefigure our own digital moments” (7). Examining mass-cultural formations of the past, she suggests, helps us to understand better our current digital media environment, and may even lead to the reassuring conclusion that “we have seen it all before” (213). The parallels that Zieger draws between print and digital media are suggestive and compelling, though the precise nature of their historical relationship is not fully developed: if, for example, some features of nineteenth-century mass media appear to “prefigure” their twenty-first-century equivalent, is this because the present enables us to construe the past teleologically?

Though, in her Introduction and brief Conclusion, Zieger foregrounds the contemporary resonance and “urgency” of this topic, the five intervening chapters provide detailed explorations of Victorian print culture, with particular attention given to the “pivotal decade” of the 1890s (14). The distinctive and unifying focus of the book lies in its attention to “scenes of ephemeral media consumption” within the nineteenth century (3), which anticipate or parallel later cultural phenomena, rather than developing a sustained comparison between the two media systems. The first chapter examines the mid-nineteenth-century temperance movement as a foundational instance of the mass-mediation of live events through printed ephemera. Though an “improbable origin of mass culture, the temperance movement nonetheless expressed a dialectic central to it, between printed objects”—such as the widely circulated temperance tracts and pledge cards—“and live, mass experience”—the collective gatherings organized by charismatic speakers (24). While the temperance movement officially promoted an “aesthetics of sobriety” (25), both its live events and accompanying print ephemera functioned as substitute objects of “addictive” consumption. The longstanding cultural anxiety about the supposedly addictive properties of mass culture is one of Zieger’s recurring themes and features more centrally in a chapter on “information addiction,” which reads Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories for The Strand Magazine alongside an extensive body of contemporary print ephemera associated with the practice of tobacco smoking. Zieger convincingly demonstrates that smoking was a pervasive “metonym and metaphor for print consumption” during the nineteenth century that reaches its apogee in the figure of Holmes, an iconic smoker, consumer of print culture and information addict (55). The desire to consume and store information is, of course, key to the narrative genre of detective fiction, which famously twins the figure of the detective with the reader. Zieger proceeds to connect this affective, embodied form of reading to the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century popular cultural practice of collecting cigarette cards—the first instance, she contends, of print ephemera produced in order to be collected.

Wilkie Collins’s The Moon-stone (1868) is used to similar effect as an example of longer form detective (or Sensation) fiction in chapter 3, which fascinatingly explores the significance of ink as a material medium of print technology. Arguing that “ink is a crucial, undertheorized element of media history” (105), Zieger ranges from literary representations of aberrant uses...