Victorian Periodicals Review

Claire Pettitt's Serial Forms (2020) was the opening volume of a trilogy of books which aims to reorient the historiography of the long nineteenth century around the concept of seriality. This second volume, Serial Revolutions, uses the revolutions of 1848 as a focal point but ranges widely, both temporally and spatially. The forthcoming third volume promises to track the rise of the digital, found in embryo in the electric telegraph in 1848, up to the ominous year 1914. As opposed to other totalizing frames (such as the rise of the middle class, the movement of peoples to cities and industries, and nationalism), seriality is more abstract and less amenable to straight narrative or statistical analysis. Pettitt's method is to use "group biography and life writing to capture the experiential dimensions of the revolutions as they were happening across Europe" (38). Her "restlessly [End Page 136] mobile people" are mostly literary Britons and Americans: Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Arthur Hugh Clough, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Elizabeth Gaskell, among others (38). Many surface in multiple contexts as the revolutions and reverberations of 1848 are experienced either in person or from afar. Their serial activities—writing letters, diaries, newspaper articles, or novel parts; delivering lectures; travelling; regularly going to the window to look out—are the core of the book. Individual chapters take up, along with much else, Britons and Americans who travelled as tourists to witness Europe's revolutions; the impact of illustrated papers; representations of the ragged class; international novels; writers who witnessed the follow-on sieges in Italy; public lecture series; Emerson, Douglass, slavery, and citizenship; Browning's Casa Guidi Windows (1851); Margaret Fuller's journalism and Florentine painters; and Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities (1859). An afterword looks at Gustave Flaubert. Readers looking for an historical survey of the events of 1848 should look elsewhere.

The most celebrated, though not the first, of the revolutions of 1848 occurred in Paris. After a lengthy and helpful introduction, the book opens by tracking a set of "revolutionary tourists"—men and women such as Clough, Emerson, and Fuller who rushed to Paris to witness the events in a quest that would ultimately fail, since "revolutions cannot be understood as events, but only experienced as a feeling of scalar immensity" (69). The tourists expect to witness history enacted, but they arrive in the obscurity of "mid-performance" and spend time listening to debates imperfectly understood or debating amongst themselves which restaurant to go to (61). They attend the theatre to hear the celebrity actress Rachel sing "La Marseillaise"—a reminder that a revolution in Paris is necessarily a series: 1789, 1830, 1848, 1870, 1968. The revolutionary tourists cannot help but stand apart, "never quite inhabiting this present moment" (66).

"That 1848 was a failure," Pettitt notes, "remained the consensus view throughout the twentieth century, and to some extent it still persists" (12). Serial Revolutions makes numerous arguments for its lasting and mostly positive successes. Pettitt traces the negative judgment back to Karl Marx and accuses the philosopher of "blindness to the social movement around the edges, the mobility of the marginal, the improvised life of the streets" as well as to the roles of women, who are always "invisible" to him (135). She argues that Marx makes a mistake in thinking a revolution can only arise from class struggle and sees risings in 1848 as "the powerful response to a remarkable cross-class diagnosis of the political failure of governments across Europe" (4). Chapter 3, "The Ragged of Europe," might be called "The Making of the European Lumpenproletariat." One of Pettitt's achievements is to show how seriality makes the ragged visible to themselves and makes social class more important during and after 1848 [End Page 137] than Marx imagined. Her focus centers on the transnational "mysteries" of pulp literature, beginning with the "mobile serial format" of Eugène Sue's Les Mystèries de Paris (1842–43) and imitators such as G. W. M. Reynolds's The Mysteries of London (1844–48) (152). "Many of Reynolds's first British readers," she argues, "felt passionately in 1848 that they were part of the ragged series of Europe" (157).

In chapter 5, "Under Siege," Pettitt juxtaposes the experiences and written responses of the poet Clough and journalist Fuller during the siege of Rome by the French. She includes a telling quotation from Clough: "Our grandfathers read and wrote books: our fathers reviews: and we newspapers; will our children and grandchildren read our old newspapers?" (226). The chapter of Serial Revolutions of greatest interest to scholars of old newspapers is "Moving Pictures" (chapter 2). Pettitt discusses the way in which news spread in 1848, in contrast with communication at the time of the French Revolution, and cautions that the statements about lightning-like speed (electric telegraphy) are mostly aspirational or metaphoric. She then "homes in on the images which were starting to appear in an important new media: the illustrated news press" (71). The Illustrated London News (ILN) has been well studied by scholars, but the European perspective here is a welcome addition to our understanding. Pettitt looks at the production and recirculation of specific engraved and lithographic images that were printed in numerous ILN knockoffs. She provides a thorough and amply illustrated discussion of how these images traveled across borders and contexts.

Serial Revolutions also provides strong interpretations of texts that are often left in the silos of literary criticism and literary history, notably Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton (1848), Clough's Amours de Voyage (1849), Browning's Casa Guidi Windows, and Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities. She is most impressive in her treatment of the life, writings, and lectures of Frederick Douglass in "Serially Speaking" (chapter 6) and "Slavery and Citizenship" (chapter 7). One of the successes that Marx fails to acknowledge is the way 1848 advanced the acceptance of universal human rights, and in Serial Revolutions Douglass is lifted out of his usual place in the American story.

The ten chapters of Serial Revolutions are rich in detail and original in argument; several could plausibly be extended into separate monographs. As brilliant as the book is, it may be a bit overstuffed. Some topics, such as the discussion of the Italian Macchiaioli painters in chapter 9, seem tangential. The afterword takes up a new text—Flaubert's L'Éducation sentimentale (1869)—but a more general wrapping up would have been appreciated by this reader. It is possible, though, that Pettitt's seriality, like the revolutions of 1848, is a scalar topic impossible to package and neatly label. [End Page 138]