1 - ‘These Acres of Print': Charles Dickens, the News and the Novel as Pattern

Summary

Over his career Charles Dickens concocted a range of metaphors for newspapers, calling them ‘acres of print’, ‘a storm’, a ‘thundercloud’, and (sarcastically) the ‘master-spirits’ of America. In 1850, he co-wrote an article for Household Words that depicted London newspapers as a chaotic force of meteorological destruction:

[T]he first black fringe of a thunder-cloud of newspapers impending over the Post-Office was discharging itself fitfully by fast degrees as the storm came on harder and harder, until it rained, hailed, snowed, newspapers threatening destruction to the miserable Post Office. All the history of the time, the chronicled births, deaths, and marriages, all the crimes, all the accidents, all the vanities, all the changes, all the realities, of all the civilised earth, heaped up, parceled out, carried about, knocked down, cut, shuffled, dealt, played, fathered up again, and passed from hand to hand, in an apparently interminable and hopeless confusion, but really in a system of admirable order, certainty and simplicity, pursued six nights every week, all through the rolling year!

The extended metaphor emphasises the sheer expansiveness of newspaper coverage, as the miscellaneous jumble threatens to engulf the city of London. The national post office, however, transforms the journalistic chaos into a system of serialised, daily distribution. The article ascribes an Andersonian understanding of serial national time not to the newspaper but to its distribution by the post office, which facilitates a national imaginary while also representing the body politic. The post office becomes a figurative body in its shuffling and knocking down and carrying about of the news.

Dickens is famous for beginning his career as a reporter, so his metaphorical treatments of the newspaper press are telling in terms of his shifting attitudes towards print media. While Anderson has argued that newspapers enable readers to imagine national community, Dickens's writings are attentive to the varying ways that the newspaper press might shape, inhibit or fragment community through its uncontrolled production of miscellaneous content and matter. Just as the post office gives order to what appears to be an avalanche of newspapers and periodicals, Dickens's novels create the appearance of random contingency while also suggesting their patterned interconnection.