The Periodical Time of Literary Weather

Nineteenth-century literary climates made themselves continuously felt in the repetitions and cycles of the periodicals increasingly dominating print production. Of the nearly 12 billion books, pamphlets, and periodicals... [ view full abstract ]

Nineteenth-century literary climates made themselves continuously felt in the repetitions and cycles of the periodicals increasingly dominating print production. Of the nearly 12 billion books, pamphlets, and periodicals turned out annually by printers at the end of the century, periodicals accounted for 99 percent. Periodicals were the nineteenth century’s literary weather. But if weather has its days, nights, and seasons, what were the rhythms of periodical time in nineteenth-century America? Answers to this question have largely focussed on periodical circulation, and on the writing and reading of serial novels. This paper develops a model of periodical time rooted in the labor of periodical manufacture and production. For brevity’s sake, it concentrates on two indicative figures: William Dean Howells, who grew up in the exigencies of the newspaper trades and worked as a typesetter before he became a successful editor and writer; and Theodore Low De Vinne, the typographer and printer who founded the Grolier Club and printed Century magazine. The paper draws on evidence in Howells’s case from A Hazard of New Fortunes and his autobiographical writing, and in De Vinne’s case from his dedication to finding the printing machine best suited to high-quality illustration. It makes the argument that, for both figures, the experience of their periodical labor foreshadowed two paradoxes that beset periodicals more generally: how to reconcile the twin satisfactions of continuity and completeness in each issue; and how to provide familiarity’s comforts through repetition while avoiding the tedium of repetitiousness.