Victorian Studies

The imaginative worlds that emerged and took shape through new habits of mass consumption during the long-nineteenth-century print revolution are complexly yet vividly rendered in Susan Zieger’s Mediated Minds: Affect, Ephemera, and Consumerism in the Nineteenth Century. Such forgotten or overlooked worlds, Zieger claims, are informative precursors to our own digital moment, networked by mobile devices, social media, and unprecedented access to enormous amounts of information. More than analogous, our current immersive experience of digital culture is still profoundly shaped by behaviors, habits, and modes connecting mind and body in unique ways that were developed in the Victorian period. In identifying and tracing the ways in which living with and through early mass culture fostered new embodied (or “mediated”) states of mind, Zieger adds greater nuance and depth to our ongoing critical narrative of modernity.

Zieger’s work contributes to the growing field of media history within Victorian studies and squarely challenges ahistorical assumptions that new media, especially new digital media, lack a past. However, unlike materialist genealogies of particular media forms such as Lisa Gitelman’s Paper Knowledge: Toward a History of Documents (2014), quantitative book history approaches such as Katherine Bode’s Reading by Numbers: Recalibrating the Literary Field (2012), or cultural histories of information and transmission networks such as Richard Menke’s Telegraphic Realism: Victorian Fiction and Other Information Systems (2008), Zieger’s study focuses on what it was like to experience a rapidly changing media-saturated environment long before the term mass media consolidated in the early twentieth century into a concept that would abstract and obscure the richness and diversity of its own origins. Careful attention to the paradoxes and ambivalences of mass culture, Zieger argues, can help us better understand the irreconcilable tension between the [End Page 125] autonomous individualized identity of bourgeois liberalism and the porous social self of shared collective agency. Zieger moreover analyzes the past in dialectical relation to the present, imagining scenes of reading and consuming print, paper, and the mass of emergent ephemera as a springboard to reflect on our current moment of digital saturation.

As a media recovery project, Zieger’s study is wide-ranging and compelling. Her exploration of the ways in which Victorian print ephemera shaped habits of media engagement unearths the significance of a wealth of common, unheeded artifacts, including temperance medals, cigarette cards, inkblot games, cartoons, and a plethora of other materials. These might seem “[t]rivial disposable things,” but in Zieger’s treatment such stuff becomes fascinating; one of the strengths of this book is that recovery is not an end in itself but a means to intervene critically in debates around what constitutes the central objects of literary studies and how we reckon with their effects (2).

Or, rather, with their affects. The originality of Zieger’s approach owes much to the way she combines affect theory with media studies to frame key scenes of apparently passive or absent print media consumption and show the significant cultural work they perform. Zieger thus prefers the term media consumption over that of reading to describe the wide array of practices through which people interacted with the vast quantities of Victorian popular and literary printed material. Attention to the psychological affordances of print reveals the ways Victorians established new mental habits and became self-conscious of them, and also illuminates new hermeneutics of intersubjectivity, collective agency, and shared affect. Zieger shifts emphasis from media interactions, or processes of remediation (after Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s 1999 work, Remediation: Understanding New Media) to a new set of questions regarding how media change their human subjects, how people incorporate media into the quotidian spaces of daily life, and how they actively fashion themselves from mass media materials.

Victorians did more than live in a mass-mediated environment. Mass-mediated material began to dwell in Victorian minds through complex formations epitomized in transitional or intermediate zones of...