"Humanity invested with a new form": the Post Office and the Hospital in Household Words c.1850
Potter, Jonathan (2021) "Humanity invested with a new form": the Post Office and the Hospital in Household Words c.1850. Romance, Revolution, Reform, 1 (3). ISSN 2517-7850
|
Text
3_Potter_Humanity_Invested_with_a_New_Form.pdf - Published Version Available under License Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial. Download (230kB) |
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.
| Item Type: | Article | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dates: |
|
||||||
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | Household Words; Victorian Periodicals; Division of Labour; Industrialisation; Systemisation; Networks | ||||||
| Subjects: | CAH19 - language and area studies > CAH19-01 - English studies > CAH19-01-01 - English studies (non-specific) CAH20 - historical, philosophical and religious studies > CAH20-01 - history and archaeology > CAH20-01-01 - history |
||||||
| Divisions: | Faculty of Arts, Design and Media > College of English and Media | ||||||
| Depositing User: | Jonathan Potter | ||||||
| Date Deposited: | 19 Jan 2021 09:25 | ||||||
| Last Modified: | 11 Jun 2024 12:08 | ||||||
| URI: | https://www.open-access.bcu.ac.uk/id/eprint/10769 |
Actions (login required)
 |
View Item |
Tools
Tools