‘Serial Publication and the Transatlantic Irish Novel’ focuses on the inextricable link between the flourishing of the Irish novel in the nineteenth century and the development of periodical publication. As the number of novels published in Ireland increased over the century, so too did the trade in books increase, so that by mid century there was an active transatlantic trade in books, with increasing numbers of Irish novels written specifically for American readers. Novels by authors including Mary Anne Sadlier and William Carleton were published on both sides of the Atlantic, and several of them also addressed the concerns of the Irish in North America. This allows us to adjust backwards our timeline for transnationalism, usually considered a late twentieth-century phenomenon. At the same time, it needs to be recognised that this increase in print culture contributed to the development of nationalism, in terms familiar from the work of Benedict Anderson.

This chapter engages with the issue of voice and freedom of expression by interrogating the function of the patient-editor. It explores the stories of the known editors and printers of the unpublished Moon (1882) of the New York City Lunatic Asylum and the first two series of the Gartnavel Gazette (1853–54; 1855), produced and internally circulated in the Glasgow Royal Asylum. The archives associated with these publications offer a glimpse into the relationships that periodical publishing involved. They show that asylum periodicals emerged out of conflict, negotiation, and collaboration – perhaps not unlike other similar publications at the time. This case study reveals that forces other than institutional supervision were at work. The editors’ class-based aesthetics and individual preferences in selecting material for publication, as well as conflicts among patients impacted asylum periodicals. The study of this newspaper also offers evidence that, far from polished records of asylum life, asylum periodicals embodied tensions. Patients’ grievances did find a place in their pages, even if complaints and attacks were softened with humour and irony.

The introduction provides a general description of asylum periodicals and a brief introduction to the publishing and medical contexts within which they emerged. Then it discusses the place of asylum periodicals in the ongoing disputes over the social function of psychiatry and mental institutions. I challenge the suspicion with which historians and literary scholars have approached asylum periodicals due to their dual function of serving both patients and institutions. While scholars have perceived asylum periodicals as defined by censorship and, consequently, inauthenticity and unknowability, I argue that asylum periodicals’ positioning does not compromise their value as historical records but requires different approaches to their study, borrowed from book history and literary and periodical studies. A recognition of asylum periodicals and their producers as agents in wider literary networks enables further consideration of these publications and an acknowledgement of their potential to facilitate the generation of new insight about asylums, their inhabitants, and nineteenth-century print culture.

Peter Ronaldson was an inmate of the Royal Edinburgh Asylum in the 1840s and contributed to the first issue of its Morningside Mirror. Soon after the publication of the periodical, Ronaldson escaped. Tracing Ronaldson’s story in the available records, the conclusion reflects on the difficulty of constructing coherent narratives out of partially preserved complex and fluid institutional experiences. It nevertheless argues that asylum periodicals are invaluable resources for understanding life in nineteenth-century institutions, suggests directions for further research using the publications, and highlights their relevance to mental health and Mad activism.

Asylum periodicals participated in complex exchanges of medical and general print that took place in the nineteenth century. Therapeutic publishing spread in different institutions through networks of physicians, who were keen to stay abreast of the newest developments in their discipline. Asylum periodicals themselves contributed to medical communication, once they were in circulation. When launching and supporting periodical publication, however, physicians were not purely driven by self-interest and the interests of their institutions. As asylum periodicals joined the wider networks of print, they enabled patients’ continuous engagement with literary culture and public life. This function was not secondary to most of the publishing projects, but it was an effect sought by physicians for the benefit of those in their care and to support the provision of healthy recreation, which was an important aspect of the moral treatment. The inception, development, and survival of asylum periodicals depended on the exchanges they facilitated – exchanges that were themselves enabled and often encouraged by physicians.

This chapter turns to the forces of unity that drove patients’ publishing projects, focusing on the role of asylum periodicals in construing and maintaining real and imagined communities within and beyond the asylum. Producing and consuming periodicals brought together various actors with distinct skill sets, enabling, to a degree, transgression of the institutional boundaries that otherwise kept different groups of patients separated. This transgression fed into the representation of the asylum community as a family on the pages of asylum periodicals, reenforcing the institutionally imposed family model, according to which patients were ascribed the role of children under the care and protection of a father-like superintendent and a motherly matron. However, asylum periodicals show not only the manifestation of this framework’s application but patients’ active engagement with these symbols. Finally, the chapter explores former inmates’ continuous involvement in asylum periodicals, suggesting that some patients formed lasting and meaningful connections during their stay in mental institutions and relied on the asylum for support during their reintegration into society.

The chapter completes my discussion of the inception of periodical publishing in asylums, by examining the histories of two of the first asylum periodicals published in America and Britain and their patient-founders: Barber Badger’s Retreat Gazette (Hartford Retreat in Connecticut, 1837) and John Reid Adam’s Chronicles of the Monastery (Glasgow Royal Asylum, 1842). It shows that the histories of early asylum periodicals were tightly intertwined with their founders’ fates, which was the major reason for the publications’ comparatively short runs. Furthermore, these founders were all patients with printing skills or, in the case of Adam, literary aspirations and willingness to learn, and the opportunity to print in the asylum played an important role in their lives and professional careers: for Badger, it was a way to continue providing for his family, while for Adam, institutionalisation constituted an apprenticeship that eventually enabled them to pursue a career in publishing beyond their discharge. Asylum periodicals allowed patients to apply their existing skills or gain new ones in the pursuit of their own aspirations and personal interests.

Chapter 1 delineates the overlapping new paradigms of persuasion elaborated by Thomas De Quincey and William Hazlitt in response to George Campbell and David Hume, and considers their implications for the genre of the periodical essay. Against Campbell’s definition of persuasion as an emotional supplement to rational conviction, De Quincey and Hazlitt, in their essays of the 1820s and 1830s, formulate the alternative of a self-consciously partial and flexible way of holding and forming beliefs. De Quincey’s performance of such persuasion in “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts” makes apparent the problem of anything-goes judgment that leads him, in his “Rhetoric” and “Style” essays, to restrict persuasion to “subjective” domains like rhetoric and poetry. Hazlitt, by contrast, in his late-career essays on belief, opinion, and controversy, endorses malleable persuasion in all domains of dispute and theorizes its unique affinity with imaginative literature.

Chapter 3 focuses on writing about the stage in essays, periodical fiction, and “moveable” books to explore the truism that no eighteenth-century theatrical form was more hyperactive than pantomime. Harlequin’s antics are the epitome of wantonness in that they are reckless and racy and flout the narration of a causal sequence. In response to debates about Garrick’s new hyperkinetic acting style, writers such as Denis Diderot and Arthur Murphy theorized new ways to understand the complex relationships between playwrights, actors, audiences, and at-home readers. Beginning in the 1770s, Sayer’s turn-up harlequinade flipbooks offered a new way to represent Harlequin’s motions on paper. Turn-up books allow the reader to control the plot: they oversee that special sense of wantonness and play that arises from capricious and irreverent action. Harlequin’s hyperactivity becomes in the turn-up book a form of hyper-interactivity, one in which the reader is the prime mover.

Chapter 1 argues that two major changes in the long eighteenth century brought questions about literary sensorimotor imagery to the fore: first, the blending of classical models of rhetoric with modern philosophical theories about how the mind moves; and second, the proliferation of reproducible printed illustrations. In the first case, because the passions were explained by the flow of humours and animal spirits or the vibration of nerves, emotion was motion in essays on criticism. Dennis, Kames, and Johnson promoted sensorimotor models of reading and writing that, even as pamphlets and periodicals increasingly satirized mind-in-motion models, continued to wield enormous explanatory power in theories about human agency and creativity. In the second case, serpentine line illustrations in works by Cavendish, Hogarth, and Sterne demonstrate how printed images were not only visual cues but also embodied proprioceptive prompts inviting readers to imagine their bodies in motion.

The chapter retraces how a collective of Moroccan sociologists in Rabat reconceptualized the meaning of social emancipation in the spaces of the city. The 1965 Casablanca riots and subsequent state repression accelerated the demise of a vision of Moroccan class struggle embodied by Mehdi Ben Barka. This chapter explores how these sociologists departed from class analysis and proposed new new theorizations of Moroccan society as illustrated by Paul Pascon’s notion of the “composite society.” This chapter also tells the story of the periodicals that enabled these debates and such epistemological innovations—BESM, Lamalif and al-Asas— gave them cover to think, but also became sites of insulation. This was illustrated by the coverage of the “youth question” and these sociologists’ gradual struggle to explain younger generations’ discontent. By the late 1970s, these sociologists had unwillingly joined the country’s bourgeoisie. The chapter then ends with sociologist Fatema Mernissi as a counterpoint, who consciously trying to disrupt the boundaries and sought to foreground the voices and agency of subaltern women.

This chapter examines the work of a generation of women poets born in the 1860s whose rural childhood became fundamental in shaping their understandings of the intersections between class, gender and nation. Mary Fullerton, Marie E. J. Pitt and Mary Gilmore combined their socialist ideals with first-wave feminism, and Gilmore could become the first woman member of the Australian Workers, Union and participate in the utopic socialist venture to establish a ‘New Australia’ in South America. The chapter critiques the role of nostalgia in the racial blindspots of their vision of social transformation. It also considers the role of literary clubs, feminist periodicals and women’s magazines in encouraging a subsequent generation of women’s voices. With a critique of the institution of marriage, a growing legitimation of professional women writers and the articulation of female desire, there emerged a New Woman who challenged traditional gender conventions and defied divisions of class. The chapter also considers how this newer generation of women revised traditional poetic forms and embraced free verse, but were still limited by what was deemed acceptable for publication.

The chapter situates children’s poetry within the print culture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and how such poetry provides insights into the shift from a reliance on British practices and literary models to a sense of literary distinctiveness and independence. It discusses how early alphabet books developed literacy as well as inculcated social and political values. It also considers how some children’s verse disseminated the trope of the lost child in the bush, while other verse familiarised children with the Australian environment. It discusses the emergence of fairy and fantasy worlds based on distinctly Australian settings following World War I, and a growing depiction of Australian progress. The chapter discusses the pedagogic role of school readers and their role in mediating continuing connections to Britain and a specifically Australian identity. The chapter also discusses the significance of columns for children in periodicals, and how their encouragement of children to write which led to the rise of a number of child poets.

Michael Holroyd’s claim that science was “unheard of” in Bloomsbury is refuted in this chapter. It begins by asking how “science” and the “scientific” signified in Bloomsbury: how far science was equated with facts, with theories, or with processes of inquiry; how far it was identified with dogmatic attitudes, with rationalism, or with open-mindedness. It then asks what educational experiences shaped the attitudes of Bloomsbury men towards it, with a particular focus on their formative experiences at schools such as Eton College and St Paul’s School, and where Classics dominated the curriculum, and at Clifton College, which was unusually progressive in the seriousness with which it treated science. Finally, it considers how science was treated in two Bloomsbury periodicals, Desmond MacCarthy’s New Quarterly (1907–10) and The Nation and Athenaeum in its Bloomsbury period, 1923–31.

Chapter 4 studies French, Dutch, and German periodicals which engaged closely with the question of women’s rights from a range of ideological perspectives. Under the influence of key texts like Uncle Tom’s Cabin and John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women, memories of antislavery became a diverse resource from which women’s rights advocates reprinted and retold selectively, tracing and reinforcing particular trends in remembrance which were salient to different ideological outlooks on the Woman Question. The chapter seeks to capture the complexity of the transnational conversation and the memory work performed and identifies five commonplaces in the recall of antislavery. These clusters of intensified remembrance and debate appear across national contexts and the chapter explores how the memory work performed in these periodicals presented a usable past for the transnational movement for women’s rights. The chapter finally reflects on what parts of the history of antislavery these commonplaces left out, which is as important as tracing the narratives that were promoted.

The later nineteenth century saw expanded editions of Pepys’s diary by Lord Braybrooke (1848-49), Mynors Bright (1875–79), and Henry Wheatley (1893–99). This chapter surveys the publication of these editions and the responses to them as Pepys’s fame grew. Each new edition was accompanied by swirling rumours about what was left out. The diary inspired parodies, paintings, historical fiction, and articles in children’s magazines. A dominant theme in these creative responses was imagining what the censored texts had omitted, especially about the women in Pepys’s life. By the late nineteenth century, Pepys featured in formal education as a representative of the Restoration, but his name was also shorthand for unorthodox and fun history. The popularity of the comical version of Pepys sparked discussions about the purpose of history, notably via stress on Pepys’s role in naval and imperial history.

This chapter considers poetry of the 1870s in the aftermath of the previous boom decade in magazine verse, with the flowering of shilling monthlies and popular literary weeklies, when periodical publishers became firmly established as the era’s primary poetry publishers, and when most readers accessed poems in ephemeral print. Literary accounts of the Victorian era conventionally consider poetry book publication as defining the era’s poetics, and certainly in the 1870s there were no shortage of prominent poetry volumes. But this decade also saw poetry defined in relation to magazine verse, and the value of poetry was integral to associated issues of ephemerality and modernity. This chapter focuses in particular on the place of poetry in two new periodicals of the 1870s: The Dark Blue and The Nineteenth Century.