The title of this volume draws an analogy. Elizabeth Carolyn Miller (who teaches English at the University of California, Davis) starts with the solid premise that late Victorian socialists profoundly distrusted the commercialized mass circulation press, known collectively as the “New Journalism.” Therefore (she concludes) they repudiated consumer capitalism by deliberately producing small print projects for small dissident audiences. The most obvious example was William Morris's Kelmscott Press. She calls this “slow print,” equating it with today's “slow food” movement.

The difficulty is that they do not really equate, and this flawed analogy inevitably muddles Miller's argument. Nowadays, artisanal/organic/local food is not a socialist enterprise but a business involving thousands of small capitalists and the occasional big corporation (notably, Whole Foods). It restores a measure of craftsmanship to production but charges a higher price, and it certainly does not represent what Karl Marx had in mind. Miller falls into the habit of conflating anti-industrialism and anti-capitalism, but one does not necessarily go hand in hand with the other. Among affluent socialists, the Kelmscott Press and Fabian literature did strive for aesthetic workmanship, but working-class papers generally did not.

The audiences for most socialist papers were small, not because they aimed at limiting circulation, but because they were tediously sectarian, hectoring, and heavy-handed. They might despise the New Journalism, but only by adopting its methods were radicals able to break out of their ideological ghetto and reach the masses, most effectively in the case of Robert Blatchford's Clarion, Reynolds's News, and T. P. O'Connor's The Star. The last of these provided an apprenticeship for George Bernard Shaw, whose dramatic prefaces clearly bear the marks of the New Journalism: chatty writing, a personal voice, and entertaining polemics broken up by clever subheadings. For all his elitist Fabian socialism, Shaw the playwright clearly aimed to maximize his audiences and his earnings. Likewise, H. G. Wells never had any patience for “slow print”: he produced blockbuster bestsellers like The Outline of History and a big-budget special-effects movie, Things to Come.

Miller tries to rehabilitate Bernard Shaw's early ventures in novel writing, arguing that “An Unsocial Socialist was a hit among the small socialist reading public of the day” (88), but the damning word here is “small.” As a narrative, that book takes off like a rocket but then plummets to earth when the socialist sermonizing begins. Shaw's most successful novel, his prizefighting comedy Cashel Byron's Profession, was also his most entertaining and least political. He redirected his energies to the theater because he could reach a larger audience there, not so much because he was discontented with print culture. After all, the plays were all published, and in a highly novelized form.

Parrying the objection that Kelmscott Press books were an expensive hobby for bourgeois collectors, Miller argues that “their influence extended far beyond those who [could] afford to purchase them” (58). True enough, but the most important example of that was J. M. Dent's Everyman's Library, a wonderfully designed series of cheap classics that was, arguably, the finest hour of mass-market print capitalism.

Slow Print relies much more on literary criticism and theory than on the scholarship of print culture. There are several nods to Fredric Jameson, but there are only passing mentions of recent (and relevant) work on “marketing modernism.” Striving to fit things into a Jamesonian framework, Miller often stretches points until they break. When the typist in Shaw's Candida protests that the Reverend Morrell is talking too fast (“You know I cant do more than ninety words a minute”), Miller finds “an obvious parallel with Marx's critique of dehumanizing labor under industrial capitalism” (135). In fact, Morrell is a social gospelling clergyman of the Church of England, a preindustrial socialist institution, and Shaw was passionately interested in promoting efficient means of production. That is why he supported simplified spelling, not because he wanted to “defamiliarize the print experience for readers” (140). The agitprop poetry in the Marxist journal To-Day may strike us as ploddingly predictable, but Miller insists that that very regularity was an inspired artistic decision, illustrating the inevitability of the revolution. “With few exceptions,” she concludes, “this poetry is a forgotten body of work” (170)—and you begin to see why.

That said, Miller does offer a useful overview of the radical press as it evolved between Victorianism and modernism, and she is right about the preoccupation that united journalists on the Left. In her yet-to-be published dissertation (which I directed), Jenifer Gundry shows that a revulsion against mass-market capitalist publishing was the prime mover behind all of the great turn-of-the-century utopian novels—not only Morris's News from Nowhere but also Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, W. H. Hudson's A Crystal Age, the Altrurian stories of William Dean Howells, and Wells's A Modern Utopia. Even if her exposition of it is strained, Elizabeth Miller's basic insight is on target.