Victorian Periodicals Review

On September 30, 1848, London Chartist leader William Cuffay was convicted for conspiring to levy war in connection with his part in the Chartist demonstration of April 10th at Kennington Common. He was convicted by a jury that, as he insisted, was not of his peers, and he was duly sentenced to transportation to Van Diemen's Land. A year after his trial, prior to his embarkation, Cuffay received from his Chartist comrades a compact one-volume copy of the poems of Lord Byron, inscribed to him with great admiration. When Cuffay read that book in his Tasmanian cell, he may have been reassured that his comrades thought him a hero, that his cause had been right, and that, like the Byron of the radical papers, he might someday be vindicated. The volume now resides at the People's History Museum in Manchester, England, as a key Chartist relic. It shows that the context of reading makes meaning, especially for readers severed from everything they have known. [End Page 474]

What such readers make of their reading is the subject of Bill Bell's Crusoe's Books: Readers in the Empire of Print, 1800–1918, an indispensable study in media history twenty years in the making and well worth the wait. The title refers to Robinson Crusoe's salvaged library, "a cultural carapace for the individual against the tyranny of distance" (2–3). Crusoe's library is the most famous modern iteration of a trope that stretches from depictions of St. Jerome in a great deal of fine art to Thomas Selby Cousins's Australian cowherd in the sentimental picture "The Bushman's Dream," published in the Illustrated Sydney News in 1869.

Bell's case studies of "hermeneutic castaways," mostly historical but sometimes fictional, demonstrate the icon once embodied by Jerome "becoming enmeshed in a colonial context" (4). Bell is intrigued by the contents and discernible usage of colonial libraries, which "often go unexamined in accounts of" colonial reading (9). In 1998, Bell coined the term "geography of communications" to articulate, as he puts it in Crusoe's Books, "the means by which discourses travel, proliferate, and are adapted across space" (23). By examining the libraries of a few distinct populations—emigrants to Australia, convicts, Scottish expatriates, and British explorers of the poles—Bell reveals that the nineteenth-century British Empire's "increased mobility … had considerable material, hermeneutic, and cultural consequences for the production of the newly inflected cultures that emerged as a result of the readers' encounters with novel situations" (25). Indeed, imperial reading was ultimately not a "monolithic apparatus for the imposition of ideology" (25). Hermeneutic castaways exhibited considerable agency.

Bell's history of castaway hermeneutics engages with major theorists of media studies, literacy history, and travel and imperialist writing, including Walter Benjamin, Alberto Manguel, and Mary Louise Pratt, and joins recent studies such as Priti Joshi's magnificent The Empire News (2021) in exploring the global contours of Victorian periodical culture. Crusoe's Books is also well worth reading for the fine details of exile reading cultures that Bell unearths. For instance, in 1870s Melbourne, Cole's Book Arcade stocked over two million titles, including used books. This wealth of reading material signals the role that books played in colonial Australians' mechanisms of self-definition.

Crusoe's Books will also help scholars of Victorian periodical literature to explore a neglected aspect of the March of Intellect. Convict literacy rates improved remarkably on board ships to Australia. The firm Chambers, publisher of Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, developed a prefabricated library kit for this purpose, and organizations such as the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge were eager to help Britons supply emigrants with giftbooks. Some previously literate convicts, such as [End Page 475] forgers, contributed to the production of exile periodicals. Some castaways rebelled against the institutions that had exiled them. On Spike Island, Young Ireland leader John Mitchel's contributions to the Jail Journal are "full...