"Humanity invested with a new form": the Post Office and the hospital in household words c.1850
"Humanity invested with a new form": the Post Office and the hospital in household words c.1850
This essay explores some of the techniques employed to present new infrastructural formations to a general reading public through close examination of writings about the postal system and the hospital in Dickens’s popular general interest magazine, Household Words. Reading these articles against Marc Augé’s account of late twentieth-century ‘supermodernity’, I argue that the newly extended reach of such systems is presented as a way out of chaotic overabundances of detail, especially in busy urban environments, as well as a means to acquire a greater mastery over the world. Yet at the same time, these articles also seek to reform the role of the individual in relation to these systems, subjugating individual agency to the primacy of systemic control. This essay aims to deepen our understanding of the reception and portrayal of infrastructural industrialisation in Household Words specifically, and the periodical press more broadly, in the years immediately following the Great Exhibition.
Household Words, Victorian Periodicals, division of labour, industrialisation, Systemisation, Networks
36-56
Potter, Jonathan
ebaa743a-53e4-4a3c-b6c9-5dc68f1611f3
14 January 2021
Potter, Jonathan
ebaa743a-53e4-4a3c-b6c9-5dc68f1611f3
Potter, Jonathan
(2021)
"Humanity invested with a new form": the Post Office and the hospital in household words c.1850.
Romance, Revolution and Reform, (3), , [3].
Abstract
This essay explores some of the techniques employed to present new infrastructural formations to a general reading public through close examination of writings about the postal system and the hospital in Dickens’s popular general interest magazine, Household Words. Reading these articles against Marc Augé’s account of late twentieth-century ‘supermodernity’, I argue that the newly extended reach of such systems is presented as a way out of chaotic overabundances of detail, especially in busy urban environments, as well as a means to acquire a greater mastery over the world. Yet at the same time, these articles also seek to reform the role of the individual in relation to these systems, subjugating individual agency to the primacy of systemic control. This essay aims to deepen our understanding of the reception and portrayal of infrastructural industrialisation in Household Words specifically, and the periodical press more broadly, in the years immediately following the Great Exhibition.
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3_Potter_Humanity_Invested_with_a_New_Form
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Published date: 14 January 2021
Keywords:
Household Words, Victorian Periodicals, division of labour, industrialisation, Systemisation, Networks
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Local EPrints ID: 446558
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/446558
ISSN: 2517-7850
PURE UUID: 03ef1a20-61c1-4604-9f49-610f94a80b10
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Date deposited: 15 Feb 2021 17:31
Last modified: 16 Mar 2024 11:01
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Author:
Jonathan Potter
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