An Index to the Scale of Modernity: Big Data Compilations and the Review of Reviews

Kingstone, Helen

doi:10.1007/978-3-031-15684-7_6

Helen Kingstone³

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture ((PNWC))

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Abstract

This chapter outlines the key issues involved in big data compilations, showing how previous projects, from Enlightenment and Romantic encyclopaedias to proto-sociological surveys by Henry Mayhew and Charles Booth, navigated between panoramic and compilatory models of overview. Late-nineteenth-century compilers tried to use what Daston and Galison have termed “mechanical objectivity”, but in practice needed to combine that with human judgement.

This chapter shows how these compilation projects drew on an equivalent of big data, but undermined twenty-first-century assumptions about the relationship between the whole and the parts. Unlike statistical projects, these compilations refused to aggregate: the reader must engage with the individual mosaic pieces.

The chapter’s second half examines W. T. Stead’s Review of Reviews (founded 1890), which aimed to digest a wide spread of periodicals into a manageable overview. Stead used innovative methods to offer his meta-periodical as a very first draft of contemporary history, and to use indexes and compiled photographs to go further than previous compilers.

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Notes

1.
On the OED, see K. M. Elisabeth Murray, Caught in the Web of Words: James A.H. Murray and the “Oxford English Dictionary” (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977); Lynda Mugglestone, Lost for Words: The Hidden History of the Oxford English Dictionary (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005); Sarah Ogilvie, Words of the World: A Global History of the Oxford English Dictionary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Kelly Kistner, “‘A Word Factory Was Wanted’: Organizational Objectivity in the Making of the ‘Oxford English Dictionary,’” Social Studies of Science 43, no. 6 (2013): 801–28; Charlotte Brewer, Treasure-House of the Language (London; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014); Peter Gilliver, The Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
2.
The movement’s premier historian describes it as having aimed to produce a “systematic […] archival base for the future”: Edwards, The Camera as Historian: Amateur Photographers and Historical Imagination, 1885–1918, 2.
3.
Leah Price, The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel: From Richardson to George Eliot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
4.
G. W. F. Hegel qtd. in Tilottama Rajan, “The Encyclopedia and the University of Theory: Idealism and the Organization of Knowledge,” Textual Practice 21, no. 2 (June 1, 2007): 338.
5.
Rajan, 338.
6.
Rajan, 336.
7.
Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination 1830–1880, 147; Tatiana Holway, A Capital Idea: Dickens, Speculation, and the Victorian Economies of Representation, Dissertation (Columbia University, 2002).
8.
Audrey Jaffe, “On the Great Exhibition,” BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History (blog), March 2012, http://www.branchcollective.org/?ps_articles=audrey-jaffe-on-the-great-exhibition.
9.
“Grand Panorama Of The Great Exhibition. No. I. South-East Portion Of The Nave,” Illustrated London News, November 22, 1851, British Newspaper Archive; Rawlins, “Lane’s Telescopic View of the Ceremony of Her Majesty Opening the Great Exhibition of All Nations” (C. A. Lane, 1851), Johns Hopkins University Special Collections, https://www.flickr.com/photos/hopkinsarchives/4683027062/in/album-72157624065550315/.
10.
Henry Mayhew, “Labour and The Poor,” Morning Chronicle, April 11, 1850, 5, British Newspaper Archive. Qtd. Henry Mayhew, The Unknown Mayhew: Selections from the Morning Chronicle 1849–50, ed. E. P. Thompson and Eileen Yeo (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 114–15.
11.
Mayhew, The Unknown Mayhew, 195–96. Passage originally from Letter 11 in Morning Chronicle, November 23, 1849.
12.
Henry Mayhew, “Labour and The Poor,” Morning Chronicle, October 26, 1849, 5, British Newspaper Archive. Also qtd. Eileen Yeo, “Mayhew as a Social Investigator,” in The Unknown Mayhew: Selections from the Morning Chronicle 1849–50, ed. E. P. Thompson and Eileen Yeo (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 62.
13.
Yeo, “Mayhew as a Social Investigator,” 63, 77.
14.
Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor: A Cyclopaedia of the Condition and Earnings of Those That Will Work, Those That Cannot Work, and Those That Will Not Work, vol. 1 (London: G. Newbold, 1851), iii, http://archive.org/details/b20415606_001; George Dodd, Knight’s Cyclopædia of the Industry of All Nations (London: C. Knight, 1851), http://archive.org/details/knightscyclopd00doddrich.
15.
Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, 1:iii.
16.
Mayhew, The Unknown Mayhew, 352, 339, 257. The passages are, respectively, drawn from Letters 38, 37 and 16 in Morning Chronicle, from February 25, 1850; February 21, 1850; December 11, 1849.
17.
Bertrand Taithe, The Essential Mayhew: Representing and Communicating the Poor (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1996). See also Sarah Roddy, Julie-Marie Strange, and Bertrand Taithe, “Henry Mayhew at 200—the ‘Other’ Victorian Bicentenary,” Journal of Victorian Culture 19, no. 4 (December 1, 2014): 481–96.
18.
Bernard Lightman, Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 222.
19.
Bernard Lightman, 222–23.
20.
Daston and Galison, Objectivity, 15, 11.
21.
Daston and Galison, 228–31.
22.
Theodore M. Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820–1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986); Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Theodore M. Porter, “Statistics and the Career of Public Reason: Engagement and Detachment in a Quantified World,” in Statistics and the Public Sphere: Numbers and the People in Modern Britain, c. 1800–2000, ed. Thomas H. Crook and Glen O’Hara (London: Routledge, 2010), 32–47.
23.
Charles Booth, Labour and Life of the People, vol. 1 (London, 1889), 4–5, http://archive.org/details/labourlifeofpeop01bootuoft.
24.
Booth, 1:6.
25.
Thomas R. C. Gibson-Brydon, The Moral Mapping of Victorian and Edwardian London: Charles Booth, Christian Charity, and the Poor-but-Respectable, ed. Hillary Kaell and Brian Lewis (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2016), 4.
26.
Booth, Labour and Life of the People, 1:142. Italics in original.
27.
Charles Booth to Beatrice Potter, 27 July 1886. The British Library of Political and Economic Science, London School of Economics, Passfield Papers, II.i.(II), 8. Qtd. Rosemary O’Day and David Englander, Mr Charles Booth’s Inquiry: Life and Labour of the People in London Reconsidered (London: Hambledon Press, 1993), 35.
28.
O’Day and Englander, 22, 24.
29.
Goldman, Victorians and Numbers, xxiii–xxiv.
30.
Booth, Labour and Life of the People, 1:162–63.
31.
Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel, 1800–1900 (London; New York: Verso, 1999), 78.
32.
Noel Annan, Leslie Stephen: The Godless Victorian (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1984), 84. Leslie Stephen, contract for C. L. Kingsford to complete specified entries for DNB, 19 November 1889, University of London Special Collections MS900/5.
33.
Sidney Lee, contract for C. L. Kingsford to complete specified entries for DNB by 20 December 1891, University of London Special Collections MS900/6.
34.
Daston and Galison, Objectivity, 18, 312.
35.
Aronova, Oertzen, and Sepkoski, “Introduction.”
36.
Dan Bouk, “The History and Political Economy of Personal Data over the Last Two Centuries in Three Acts,” Osiris 32, no. 1 (September 2017): 87, https://doi.org/10.1086/693400. The term “data double” was coined by Kevin D. Haggerty and Richard V. Ericson, “The Surveillant Assemblage,” British Journal of Sociology 51, no. 4 (2000): 605–22.
37.
Maeve Adams, “Numbers and Narratives: Epistemologies of Aggregation in British Statistics and Social Realism, c. 1790–1880,” in Statistics and the Public Sphere: Numbers and the People in Modern Britain, c. 1800–2000, ed. Thomas H. Crook and Glen O’Hara (London: Routledge, 2010), 104.
38.
Daston and Galison, Objectivity, 26.
39.
Jardine and Drage, “The Total Archive,” 10. They refer back to Jay, Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas, 21.
40.
A firm believer in a federated commonwealth, Stead went on to found an American Review of Reviews in 1891, and an Australian edition in 1892.
41.
Jardine and Drage, “The Total Archive,” 10.
42.
Joanne Shattock, Politics and Reviewers: The Edinburgh and the Quarterly in the Early Victorian Age (London; New York: Leicester University Press, 1989), 4.
43.
Michie, Enlightenment Tory in Victorian Scotland, 7.
44.
Tony Nicholson, “The Provincial Stead,” in W. T. Stead: Newspaper Revolutionary, ed. Laurel Brake et al. (London: British Library, 2012), 11.
45.
W. T. Stead, “Programme,” Review of Reviews 1, no. 1 (January 1890): 14.
46.
W. T. Stead, “Our Australian Edition and Its Cover,” Review of Reviews 5, no. 30 (June 1892): 608. A proposed cover illustration featuring this crucible distillation is shown a few pages later (610).
47.
On this, see Kingstone, Victorian Narratives of the Recent Past, 39.
48.
Stead, “Programme.”
49.
Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, ed. John Dover Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935), 70. On Stead vs. Arnold (and the way that Stead used Arnold’s vocal hostility as useful publicity), see Nicholson, “The Provincial Stead,” 8, 16–17.
50.
Owen Mulpetre, “W. T. Stead and the New Journalism” (University of Teesside, 2010), 4–5.
51.
Richard Menke, “Touchstones and Tit-Bits: Extracting Culture in the 1880s,” Victorian Periodicals Review 47, no. 4 (2014): 568. On the difference between Newnes and Stead, see Graham Law and Matthew Sterenberg, “Old v. New Journalism and the Public Sphere; or, Habermas Encounters Dallas and Stead,” 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, no. 16 (March 22, 2013): pt. IV paragraph 1, https://doi.org/10.16995/ntn.657.
52.
W. T. Stead, “Government by Journalism,” Contemporary Review 49 (May 1886): 654, 664. On his long search for a life mission, see W. T. Stead, “Journal Entry (July 4, 1875),” The W.T. Stead Resource Site, accessed March 15, 2021, https://attackingthedevil.co.uk/letters/journal2.php. Journal entry also quoted in J. W. Robertson Scott, The Life and Death of a Newspaper; an Account of the Temperaments, Perturbations and Achievements of John Morley, W. T. Stead, E. T. Cook, Harry Cust, J. L. Garvin, and Three Other Editors of the Pall Mall Gazette (London: Methuen, 1952), 102–3.
53.
Margaret Beetham, “Time: Periodicals and the Time of the Now,” Victorian Periodicals Review 48, no. 3 (2015): 333. See Julia Kristeva, “Women’s Time,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 7, no. 1 (1981): 13–35.
54.
W. T. Stead, “Character Sketch: January. Alexander III., Tsar of All the Russias,” Review of Reviews 5, no. 25 (January 1892): 27.
55.
W. T. Stead, “The Progress of the World,” Review of Reviews 5, no. 26 (February 1892): 113–20.
56.
W. T. Stead, ed., “The Progress of the World,” Review of Reviews 6, no. 32 (August 1892): 106.
57.
On the female staff, see Alexis Easley, “W. T. Stead, Late Victorian Feminism, and the Review of Reviews,” in W.T. Stead: Newspaper Revolutionary, ed. Laurel Brake et al. (London: British Library, 2012), 37–58. On Francis Stead’s temporary editorship, see Gowan Dawson, “The Review of Reviews and the New Journalism in Late-Victorian Britain,” in Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical: Reading the Magazine of Nature, ed. Geoffrey Cantor et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 175.
58.
Hale, “2014 VanArsdel Prize Essay.” For the longer-term use of this model, see J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990); Markovits, “Rushing Into Print.”
59.
W. T. Stead, “A Practical Suggestion.,” Review of Reviews 1, no. 1 (January 1890): 76; W. T. Stead, “The Suggested Magazine Exchange,” Review of Reviews 1, no. 2 (February 1890): 99. On uptake, see W. T. Stead, “The Response to ‘A Practical Suggestion,’” Review of Reviews 1, no. 2 (February 1890): 108; W. T. Stead, “After Five Years: To Our Readers,” Review of Reviews, January 1895, 3. Stead nonetheless launched more such initiatives that same year. See “Circulating Libraries for Villages,” Review of Reviews, April 1895, 353; “The Masterpiece Library - Preliminary Announcement,” Review of Reviews, April 1895, 386. On the latter initiative, see Tom Lockwood, “W. T. Stead’s ‘Penny Poets’: Beyond Baylen,” 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, no. 16 (April 23, 2013), https://doi.org/10.16995/ntn.655.
60.
W. T. Stead, “The Scholarship of Contemporary History,” Review of Reviews 3, no. 14 (February 1891): 140.
61.
W. T. Stead, “The Scholarship for [sic] Contemporary History: The Award,” The Review of Reviews 3, no. 17 (May 1891): 440; W. T. Stead, “The Scholarship of Contemporary History. Some Account of the Successful Competitors,” The Review of Reviews 3, no. 18 (June 1891): 546–47. The two winners were Blanche Oram (a writer who adopted the pseudonym Roma White) and Helen Bayes (a teacher).
62.
James Mussell and Suzanne Paylor, “Mapping the ‘Mighty Maze’: Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition,” 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, no. 1 (October 1, 2005): 1, https://doi.org/10.16995/ntn.437.
63.
Laurel Brake, “Revolutions in Journalism: W. T. Stead, Indexing, and ‘Searching,’” in Nineteenth-Century Radical Traditions, ed. Joseph Bristow and Josephine McDonagh (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 172; Laurel Brake, “Stead Alone: Journalist, Proprietor and Publisher, 1890–1903,” in W.T. Stead: Newspaper Revolutionary, ed. Laurel Brake et al. (London: British Library, 2012), 78.
64.
Helena Goodwyn, The Americanisation of W. T. Stead (in preparation), ch. 2.
65.
Goodwyn, Introduction.
66.
“Diary for June,” Review of Reviews 2, no. 7 (July 1890): 13.
67.
“Diary for June,” Review of Reviews 6, no. 31 (July 1892): 10.
68.
“Diary for June,” 11.
69.
W. T. Stead, “The Progress of the World,” Review of Reviews 6, no. 31 (July 1892): 3.
70.
Kate Jackson, George Newnes and the New Journalism in Britain, 1880–1910 : Culture and Profit (London: Routledge, 2001), 116.
71.
Brake, “Stead Alone: Journalist, Proprietor and Publisher, 1890–1903,” 83.
72.
These included “Progress of the World,” “Diary” of the previous month, “Caricatures of the Month” and “Character Sketch.”
73.
W. T. Stead, “Some Notable Articles,” Review of Reviews 5, no. 29 (May 1892): 496.
74.
“A Plea for Housekeeping Schools,” Review of Reviews 6, no. 34 (October 1892): 366; “Against Compulsory Motherhood,” Review of Reviews, April 1895, 328. women’s rights campaigner Lady Henry Somerset
75.
“Is It Ever Right to Get Married? No, by Count Tolstoi,” Review of Reviews 2, no. 7 (July 1890): 30; “Do Americans Hate England? No! By Mr Andrew Carnegie,” Review of Reviews 2, no. 7 (July 1890): 34.
76.
W. T. Stead, “Contents of the Leading Reviews,” Review of Reviews 1, no. 1 (January 1890): 28.
77.
The feature had a two-month hiatus in May–June 1890 when Stead experimented with devoting more space instead to continental European periodicals, before it returned in July 1890 with ad hoc row-dividers. There was another brief absence in August 1891, before the three-column format from September 1891. In this format it became increasingly lengthy (8 pages by January 1892), under the title of “The Contents of Reviews and Magazines at Home and Abroad.”
78.
Matthew Philpotts, “Dimension: Fractal Forms and Periodical Texture,” Victorian Periodicals Review 48, no. 3 (October 2, 2015): 403–27, https://doi.org/10.1353/vpr.2015.0035.
79.
Linda Hughes, “Turbulence in the ‘Golden Stream’: Chaos Theory and the Study of Periodicals,” Victorian Periodicals Review 22, no. 3 (1989): 119.
80.
W. T. Stead, ed., “Contents of the Leading Reviews,” Review of Reviews 1, no. 2 (February 1890): 109.
81.
Nicholas Dames, “On Not Close Reading: The Prolonged Excerpt as Victorian Critical Protocol,” in The Feeling of Reading, ed. Rachel Ablow (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 11–26.
82.
Price, The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel.
83.
W. T. Stead, “Culture and Current Orthodoxy,” Review of Reviews 2, no. 7 (July 1890): 43. The incident is discussed by Dawson, “The Review of Reviews and the New Journalism in Late-Victorian Britain,” 179.
84.
W. T. Stead, ed., “A Key to the Realm of All Knowledge. Wanted–A College of Indexers,” Review of Reviews 6, no. 34 (October 1892): 397.
85.
W. T. Stead, ed., “An Office of Indexers,” Review of Reviews 6, no. 33 (September 1892): 250; Stead, “A Key to the Realm of All Knowledge. Wanted–A College of Indexers.”
86.
Brake, “Revolutions in Journalism,” 169, 172.
87.
For the first volume (on 1890, published 1891), the team included Snowden Ward leading on the photographic index, and Reverend D. Price. On Stead’s determined employment of a primarily female team of editorial assistants, on the same conditions as men, see Easley, “W. T. Stead, Late Victorian Feminism, and the Review of Reviews.”
88.
William Thomas Stead, ed., “Index to Periodicals.,” Review of Reviews 1, no. 1 (January 1890): 82.
89.
W. T. Stead, ed., “Announcements. The Monthly Index,” Review of Reviews, February 1895, 107.
90.
These took varying titles: the first volume was entitled “The Annual Index of Review of Reviews,” while the second was called variously “Index to the Periodicals of the World” (on its front cover) and (on its title page) “Index to the Periodical Literature of the World,” even though Stead had in fact been obliged to leave out international periodicals after the first year.
91.
In this sense it pre-empts works such as Laurel Brake, Marysa Demoor, and Margaret Beetham, eds., Dictionary of Nineteenth Century Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland (Gent; Academia Press; London: British Library, 2009).
92.
W. T. Stead, “Preface,” Index to the Periodical Literature of the World 2 (1892): 6; Brake, “Revolutions in Journalism,” 173.
93.
Brake, “Revolutions in Journalism,” 171; James Mussell, “‘Of the Making of Magazines There Is No End’: W.T. Stead, Newness, and the Archival Imagination,” ESC: English Studies in Canada 41, no. 1 (2015): 85, https://doi.org/10.1353/esc.2015.0002.
94.
Brake, “Revolutions in Journalism,” 171.
95.
W. T. Stead, ed., “The Photographs of the Month,” Review of Reviews 1, no. 8 (August 1890): 189.
96.
W. T. Stead, ed., “The Photographs of the Month. An Index to Standard Photographs - Notice to the Trade,” Review of Reviews 1, no. 9 (September 1890): 293.
97.
Stead, 293.
98.
Stead, 293.
99.
Brake, “Revolutions in Journalism,” 173.
100.
“A Photographic Panorama of the World,” Review of Reviews, February 1895, 208.
101.
“Specimen Page of the Photographic Art Album,” Review of Reviews, February 1895, plate facing 200.
102.
W. T. Stead, ed., “The Composite Photograph of the Cabinet,” Review of Reviews 6, no. 34 (October 1892): 316–17. In the November 1892 issue he also published the four intermediate composite images (each of four cabinet members, then combined with Gladstone’s) from which the final image had been produced.
103.
See Gavan Tredoux, “Francis Galton and Composite Portraiture,” accessed May 4, 2021, https://galton.org/composite.htm; Christopher Morton, “Collecting Portraits, Exhibiting Race: Augustus Pitt-Rivers’s Cartes de Visite at the South Kensington Museum,” in Photographs, Museums, Collections: Between Art and Information, ed. Elizabeth Edwards and Christopher Morton (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 111–12.
104.
W. T. Stead, ed., “The Composite Photograph of the Cabinet,” Review of Reviews 6, no. 35 (November 1892): 427.

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Department of English, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, UK
Helen Kingstone

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Kingstone, H. (2022). An Index to the Scale of Modernity: Big Data Compilations and the Review of Reviews. In: Panoramas and Compilations in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15684-7_6

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