Scale

Her function was … to dole out stamps and postal-orders, weigh letters, answer stupid questions, give difficult change and, more than anything else, count words as numberless as the sands of the sea …

—Henry James, In the Cage ¹

Henry James begins his 1898 novella In the Cage with an anonymous young woman who works in a London post office as a telegrapher. Victorianists have been drawn to the story for its fascinating lessons about telegraphic knowledge, gendered labor, surveillance, and the media ecology of the fin de siècle. Yet the story also offers a prescient glimpse of contemporary problems in humanities research: how to manage, read, and interpret texts at scale. The telegrapher's actual postal scale is just part of her quantitative labor: she deals in the quanta and counting of stamps, change, questions, and words. She also experiences texts in excess of measure: words “numberless as the sands of the sea.” In the Cage not only thematizes the vast scale of textual proliferation which characterized the nineteenth century, it dramatizes the telegrapher's search for meaning in the masses of words beyond counting. In the Cage is an early story of “distant reading,” a reckoning with how scale might require an unfamiliar form of hermeneutics. For Victorian studies, the problems of innumerable things and how to interpret them manifest doubly as a historical phenomenon and a contemporary methodological challenge.

Victorian commentators perceived such a shift in the extraordinary expansion of printed materials which attended industrial printing processes, demographic changes in readership, efficient distribution networks, and increasing literacy, among other factors. Perhaps every historical period claims to be overwhelmed with its own information, but in the nineteenth century, as Elizabeth Miller argues, the “nearly incalculable volume of new print material made for a qualitative, not just quantitative, shift in the identity of print as a medium.”² Victorian commentators newly characterized the printed landscape as a mass phenomenon, amounting to what Linda K. Hughes calls “the first mass-media era.”³ Proliferation and politics mingle in these notions of the masses and how and whether they could be counted, or at what scales perceived. Benjamin Morgan suggests that scale structures perception and clears conceptual space for other cultural projects.⁴ With respect to print, Miller argues that the efforts to convert “a massive, sublimely ungraspable print culture into something more human-scaled” produce other forms of knowledge work, including new genres of literary writing and criticism.⁵

Scale challenged not simply the mechanics but the interpretive coherence of reading, the sense of how a textual medium even worked. Miller points to the Victorian book review as a signature response. In considering global and planetary scales, Morgan argues that decadent writers undertook “acts of imagination that situate the totality of human life in relation to the totality of natural systems,” all “in order to contemplate their shared fate” and thus theorize about the anthropocene.⁶ Anna Henchman identifies the novel as among several “large-scale systems” which variously tried to measure sprawling complexity.⁷ Victorian astronomy, Henchman argues, provided novelists a model for managing perspectives at various scales. To these arguments, I would add the nascent interest in literary stylistics as something to count, measure, and interpret—perhaps first articulated in an 1887 article in Science magazine which charts comparative word lengths in Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist, William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair, and John Stuart Mill's essays on political economy.⁸

“Distant reading” is not solely the purview of computers, but of counting. Ted Underwood traces its genealogy to mid-twentieth century experiments in quantitative methods, but Victorian examples suggest an earlier engagement with its methods and the interpretive problematics at its core.⁹ In their pamphlet A Quantitative Literary History of 2,958 Nineteenth-Century British Novels written for the Stanford Literary Lab, Ryan Heuser and Le-Khac Long put it this way: “The general methodological problem of the digital humanities can be bluntly stated: How do we get from numbers to meaning?”¹⁰ This question has roots in the questions many Victorian writers were asking about how to swim in oceans of textual information in multiply mediated forms.¹¹ In his subsequent preface to In the Cage, James describes his own interest in the telegraph office for its cacophony, having “so much of London to give out, so much of its huge perpetual story to tell.” As James explains, “So had grown up, for speculation … the question of what it might ‘mean.’”¹² In the Cage is among several Victorian examples which explore “the question of what it might ‘mean’” in terms of counting words, quantitative inference, and literary criticism.¹³

The digital has reinvigorated our engagement with Victorian scale. Natalie Houston describes the “large-scale digitization of nineteenth-century books and periodicals” as producing “evidence at new scale,” including historical texts as well as their computational features.¹⁴ Importantly, Houston stresses that scale happens at various sizes, challenging the fallacy of “big data” with an emphasis on carefully curated data sets and interpretive dexterity. Digital methods must be scalable, too. For instance, Ryan Cordell coins the term “‘zoomable reading, in which one moves between levels of perspective.”¹⁵ Michael Witmore goes even further, arguing that approaching texts at variable scales has always been an interpretive possibility: the seeming novelty of large-scale digitized materials just reminds us of the “massive addresseability” of text.¹⁶ As the Victorians apprehended an enormous increase in printed materials, they too struggled with the problems of scale, the question of what it might mean, and the critical opportunities of trying to find out in new ways.