Afterword

Abstract

In conclusion, I want to tout the value of archival research in the study of the press; not only does it enhance our readings of the nineteenth-century media, but it is an invaluable aid in interpretation of our own journalism and publishing industries. It articulates continuities as well as difference. With respect to methodology, I have tried to show the value of an approach which prominently takes into account material culture, the processes and forms of production, distribution and consumption of print materials in the period. This has produced a view of print in the nineteenth-century distinctive from that which has emerged from those most interested in literature or media history and journalism, in that it links literature and journalism, and books, periodicals and newspapers, via the serial, rather than divides them. It is a view which takes account of the position of the industry and of the consumer of popular print materials, into which literature falls in this period of serials and part-issue. Lastly, I have tried to show the richness of readings of an author (such as Walter Pater) yielded by an approach which has been called the ‘sociology of texts’. The publications of even an author like Pater, an ‘aesthete’ and don, which might be expected to exist in isolation from such considerations, are significantly implicated. So is our understanding of the conduct of authorship in a period in which certain forms of production are fostered by the ubiquity of the serial.