Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture

General Editor: Joseph Bristow, Professor of English, UCLA

Editorial Advisory Board: Hilary Fraser, Birkbeck College, University of London;
Josephine McDonagh, Linacre College, University of Oxford; Yopie Prins, University
of Michigan; Lindsay Smith, University of Sussex; Margaret D. Stetz, University of
Delaware; Jenny Bourne Taylor, University of Sussex
Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture is a new monograph series
that aims to represent the most innovative research on literary works that were pro-
duced in the English-speaking world from the time of the Napoleonic Wars to the fin
de siècle. Attentive to the historical continuities between ‘Romantic’ and ‘Victorian’,
the series will feature studies that help scholarship to reassess the meaning of these
terms during a century marked by diverse cultural, literary, and political movements.
The main aim of the series is to look at the increasing influence of types of histori-
cism on our understanding of literary forms and genres. It reflects the shift from
critical theory to cultural history that has affected not only the period 1800–1900
but also every field within the discipline of English literature. All titles in the series
seek to offer fresh critical perspectives and challenging readings of both canonical
and non-canonical writings of this era.
Titles include:
Eitan Bar-Yosef and Nadia Valman (editors)
‘THE JEW’ IN LATE-VICTORIAN AND EDWARDIAN CULTURE
Between the East End and East Africa
Heike Bauer
ENGLISH LITERARY SEXOLOGY
Translations of Inversions, 1860–1930
Laurel Brake and Julie F. Codell (editors)
ENCOUNTERS IN THE VICTORIAN PRESS
Editors, Authors, Readers
Colette Colligan
THE TRAFFIC IN OBSCENITY FROM BYRON TO BEARDSLEY
Sexuality and Exoticism in Nineteenth-Century Print Culture
Dennis Denisoff
SEXUAL VISUALITY FROM LITERATURE TO FILM, 1850–1950
Laura E. Franey
VICTORIAN TRAVEL WRITING AND IMPERIAL VIOLENCE
Lawrence Frank
VICTORIAN DETECTIVE FICTION AND THE NATURE OF EVIDENCE
The Scientific Investigations of Poe, Dickens and Doyle
Yvonne Ivory
THE HOMOSEXUAL REVIVAL OF RENAISSANCE STYLE, 1850–1930
Colin Jones, Josephine McDonagh and Jon Mee (editors)
CHARLES DICKENS, A TALE OF TWO CITIES AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
Jarlath Killeen
THE FAITHS OF OSCAR WILDE
Catholicism, Folklore and Ireland
Stephanie Kuduk Weiner
REPUBLICAN POLITICS AND ENGLISH POETRY, 1789–1874
Kirsten MacLeod
FICTIONS OF BRITISH DECADENCE
High Art, Popular Writing and the Fin de Siècle
Diana Maltz
BRITISH AESTHETICISM AND THE URBAN WORKING CLASSES, 1870–1900
Catherine Maxwell and Patricia Pulham (editors)
VERNON LEE
Decadence, Ethics, Aesthetics
Muireann O’Cinneide
ARISTOCRATIC WOMEN AND THE LITERARY NATION, 1832–1867
David Payne
THE REENCHANTMENT OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY FICTION
Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot and Serialization
Julia Reid
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, SCIENCE, AND THE FIN DE SIÈCLE
Anne Stiles (editor)
NEUROLOGY AND LITERATURE, 1860–1920
Caroline Sumpter
THE VICTORIAN PRESS AND THE FAIRY TALE
Sara Thornton
ADVERTISING, SUBJECTIVITY AND THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL
Dickens, Balzac and the Language of the Walls
Ana Parejo Vadillo
WOMEN POETS AND URBAN AESTHETICISM
Passengers of Modernity
Phyllis Weliver
THE MUSICAL CROWD IN ENGLISH FICTION, 1840–1910
Class, Culture and Nation
Paul Young
GLOBALIZATION AND THE GREAT EXHIBITION
The Victorian New World Order

Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture

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Advertising, Subjectivity and
the Nineteenth-Century Novel
Dickens, Balzac and
the Language of the Walls

Sara Thornton

palgrave
macmillan
© Sara Thornton 2009
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First published 2009 by
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This page intentionally left blank
Contents

List of Figures viii

Acknowledgements x

Introduction 1
1 The Language of the Walls:
Spaces, Practices, Subjectivities 4
Thoroughfares for inscription 4
Moving text/motion pictures 8
Montage, mirage and the (mis)behaviour of language 18
Forms of subjection 32
The making of the subject 48
2 Reading the Dickens Advertiser:
Merging Paratext and Novel 63
The floating gaze: The monthly number as cadavre exquis 63
Gothic mechanisms of advertisement and novel:
Hysteria, paranoia and the testimonials 109
3 Balzac’s Revolution of Signs:
Advertisement as Textual Practice 119
The language of the Paris walls 119
The becoming virtual of César Birotteau:
Slogan, catch-phrase, recurrence, return 139
Dissolving literature: Lost illusions or great expectations? 159
Conclusion 172

Notes 174
Bibliography 200
Index 207

vii
Figures

1 ‘Literature being reeled off ready-made’ (‘La littérature sort

toute faite d’un dévidoir’) of 1844. Jean-Ignace-Isidore Gérard
Grandville, Un autre Monde, 1844, 272 10
2 ‘Pictorial Advertisements’, Punch, or the London
Charivari, 27 August 1864 15
3 ‘Drawn from the Bank’, Punch, 28 May 1864 16
4 John Orlando Parry’s A London Street Scene of 1835 22
5 ‘Suggestive Advertisement – Families Supplied in
Casks and Bottles’, Punch, 2 July 1864 28
6 ‘The Billstickers’ Exhibition’, Punch, Saturday, 29 May 1847 34
7 ‘The Lowest Depth’, Punch, 16 April 1864 37
8 ‘Wise precaution’, Punch, 17 December 1864 38
9 ‘Advertising Ingenuity’, Punch, Saturday, 6 February 1847 38
10 Frontispiece to William Smith’s Advertise! How? When? Where?
London: Routledge Warne, and Routledge, 1863 56
11 ‘Mysterious posters’, Illustration from William Smith,
Advertise! How? When? Where? 1863, 123 57
12 ‘In the Court’, Illustration from Edwin Drood from
first monthly number. Personal source 79
13 ‘Under the Trees’, Illustration from Edwin Drood from
first monthly number. Personal source 80
14 Mourning, wig and pipe advertisements from
Our Mutual Friend, No. 1, 1864 85
15 Crinoline and billiard table advertisements from
Our Mutual Friend, No. 6, 1864 86
16 Heart medication advertisement from
Our Mutual Friend, No. 13, 1864 87
17 ‘Anti-Bleak House’ advertisement in first number of
Bleak House, No. 1, 1852 91
18 A caricature from Le Charivari entitled ‘Affichomanie’
[‘Postermania’], July 1836 122
19 Advertisement ‘Maladies secrètes’ as it appeared in
the Journal des Débats in 1844 and Le Tintamarre in
1842 133
20 Advertisement for ‘L’irrigateur’. Journal des Débats,
8 July 1844 134
21 Half page of advertisements from Le Journal des Débats,
18 July 1844 135

viii
 Figures ix

22 Sketch of an advertising pump, ‘Pompe aspirante et refoulante’,

Jean-Ignace-Isidore Gérard Grandville, Un autre
Monde, 1844, 277 158
23 ‘Les noces du Puff et de la Réclame’, Jean-Ignace-Isidore Gérard
Grandville, Un autre Monde, 1844, 241 173
Acknowledgements

The author and publishers wish to thank the British Library and the
Bibliothèque nationale de France for permission to reproduce the images listed
in the ‘List of figures’ whose source is given as ‘British Library’ or ‘Bibliothèque
nationale de France’. I make full acknowledgement to the Alfred Dunhill
Museum and Archive for permission to reproduce John Orlando Parry’s A
London Street Scene of 1835. I thank Anglophonia for permission to use mater-
ial relating to the ‘Anti-Bleak House’ advertisement from my article ‘The
Haunted House of Victorian Advertising: Hysteria, Paranoia, Perversion’,
Anglophonia 15, The Remains of the Gothic: Persistence as Resistance, 2004,
59–73 in chapter 2 of this book.
Every effort has been made to trace rights holders, but if any have been
inadvertently overlooked the publishers would be pleased to make the neces-
sary arrangements at the first opportunity.
I would like to thank Joe Bristow, series editor, for his attentive readings
and excellent suggestions all the way through the writing and production
of this book. My thanks also to Steven Hall at Palgrave for his help and
guidance and to Vidhya Jayaprakash and her team at Newgen Imaging in
Thiruvanmiyur for their careful reading and elegant English. For discussions
over the years and more recent reading and feedback I thank the following
friends and colleagues in France, Britain and America: Neil Badmington,
Catherine Bernard, Fred Botting, Marie-Françoise Cachin, Cornelius
Crowley, Colin Davis, Jean Delabroy, Rebecca Dolinsky, Michael Hollington,
Claire Joubert, Franz Kaltenbeck, Thierry Labica, Catherine Lanone, Jean-
Jacques Lecercle, Karin Lesnik-Oberstein, Kevin McLaughlin, Geneviève
Morel, Jagna Oltarzewska, Annie Ramel, Andrew Rothwell, Simone Rinzler,
Claude Rivière, Jean-Paul Rocchi, Alexis Tadié, Hubert Teyssandier, Tamsin
and Greg Treverton-Jones, Paul Volsik, Andy Williams. I also thank Daniel
Thornton for his suggestions and ideas in the field of sociology.
The following institutions have my particular gratitude: King’s College,
London and the British Institute in Paris for excellent classes on the French
nineteenth century, the department of Lettres, Arts et Cinéma at the University
of Paris 7 (formerly Sciences des texts et des documents) where Julia Kristeva
and Nicole Mozet provided an early encounter with critical theory and with
Balzac, the Ecole Normale Supérieure in the rue d’Ulm where I spent two years
as pensionnaire étrangère and attended lectures on philosophy and literature,
the French Ministry of Education and Conseil National des Universités who
gave me a six month sabbatical, and the LARCA research centre in my own
department of Etudes Anglophones at the University of Paris 7 Denis-Diderot
for their financial help with permissions fees.

x
 Acknowledgements xi

For the houses in which some of these chapters were researched and writ-
ten, my thanks to my mother Mary Kempthorne, Sara and Russell Thornton
in Gloucestershire, Sylvain and Marianna Rappaport in Brittany, Julia and
William Battersby in London, Craig and Pernille Pouncey in Brussels and
Jo and Keith Willey in Barnes. Lastly, my particular thanks to my husband
Eric Leroy du Cardonnoy for his invaluable help and brilliant thoughts and
my sons Louis and Thaddeus for their constant amazement that the book
took so long to write.
Introduction

The expression ‘The Language of the Walls’ comes from an obscure book
written in 1855 by a man named James Dawson Burn, who walks his reader
past the advertising on the walls of London, which he describes as the new
book of the world – a vast library for mankind containing both philosophy
and quackery. If the expression is taken from Burn, it is not exclusive to
his philosophy of the walls but was spoken about in other terms by many
writers and social commentators at the time in France and Britain who were
all referring to the same notion of a newly visible form of representation
which was changing social structures and public and private behaviour. If
advertising was already as old as the hills (there was a History of Advertising
as early as 1874 in Britain and assertions in 1855 that advertising was jaded
and even ‘dead’), it was not yet a mere backdrop, so familiar as to be invis-
ible. At this moment of transition from novelty to banality, advertising was
a looking-glass in which the reader, like Alice, might discover the world and
the self in changed form.
One of the catalysts in writing this book was a conjunction of two seem-
ingly incongruous worlds as I travelled to work on public transport: on
the one hand the nineteenth-century novel I held in my hand and, on the
other, the many advertisements moving past me (as they did past Burn),
sometimes amusing (with their miniature narratives), sometimes aggressive,
often defaced or rewritten with graffiti. The novel I was reading seemed in
comparison a canonical text, safely contained between covers, while all the
twenty-first century text around (not only in adverts but in newspapers,
text messages on mobile phones, internet ads on laptops) was a promiscu-
ous and porous writing of uncertain origin and destination. Visits to the
British Library and Bibliothèque Nationale, however, provided me with evi-
dence that something radical had happened to the subject’s relationship to
text much earlier than the often-posited late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. It had already been noticed by Burn and it had to do with the
new textuality and imagery which was advertising. My own understanding
of the ‘language of the walls’ came as I leafed through the original monthly

1
2 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

numbers of Dickens’s novels with their overwhelming number of pages of

advertisements (sometimes up to seventy pages) sandwiching the serial part
of the novel and often appearing interleaved into those very chapters. These
monthly numbers are strange beyond belief yet also uncannily familiar to
us today. The novels of Balzac in their original parts in the Parisian press,
or the caricatures of Grandville, likewise reveal that our own experience of
textuality today as moving, transiting and transient writing would not be
entirely alien to a city dweller of the 1850s in London or Paris.
In Chapter 1 I demonstrate that from the 1830s to the 1870s increased
spaces for display (from the hoarding to the human body) seemed to bring
in their wake a new understanding of how the subject read and how lan-
guage operated − its lack of predictability, vicissitudes and violence. Urban,
walking readers at that time were capable of theorizing their engagement
with the advert, bearing witness to and commenting upon the creative and
destructive labour of advertising through diverse mediums within the novel
and without. They practised advertising and wrote descriptions of it, rec-
ognizing its violent impact without being silenced by it. Novelists, editors,
and copywriters absorbed and reflected in their productions the random
collage of advertising posters, producing seventy years before T. S. Eliot’s
The Waste Land the startling juxtapositions which we associate today with
an aesthetics of modernism. This backdrop or habitus was a feeding ground
for the subject, who was in part constituted by the world of text around,
hailed by it and relying on it to be in the world. It ‘maketh man’ rather than
breaking him.
Chapters 2 and 3 concern Charles Dickens and Honoré de Balzac, chosen
as two vital figures in the redrawing of the boundaries of literature and
advertising in France and England, both acting within different geograph-
ical, political and economic contingencies but with equal force. Balzac’s
career began slightly earlier than Dickens’s, in a less industrially advanced
country but with a powerful media created by the political energies of the
revolution. Each created his own universe − a vast nexus or web of fictional
characters but also a network of publishing and diffusion of which his
novels were the centre. Both worked as advertisers and publishers, Dickens
a performer and Balzac a printer; each was able to work ‘hands on’ at every
level of the production of their works. In these chapters, I try to gauge the
exact nature of the textual exchange between novel and advert, how each
acknowledged and modified the other. The réclame − the most available and
ubiquitous text in the nineteenth century − claimed the gaze, clamoured
and aggressively ‘re-claimed’ new territory; it also seemed to promise an
engagement with the objective world, with solid things as they increasingly
melted into air. The virtual was already, at this time, a thinkable phenom-
enon – perceived by both Dickens and Balzac as a vital force.
I will be building on the work begun by Jennifer Wicke’s Advertising
Fictions: Literature, Advertisement and Social Reading (1988), which establishes
 Introduction 3

that literature and advertising were born together in the ‘avertissement’

which appeared at the beginning of mediaeval scribal manuscripts and
that literature, far from being the ‘other’ of the demonized low culture of
the advertisement, is its intimate bedfellow. Wicke does not examine any
advertisements, a task which will be central to my own enquiry. Thomas
Richards’s The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and
Spectacle 1851–1914 (1990) shows in its extraordinary first chapter how the
Great Exhibition opened up advertising as a legitimate field of activity, but
concentrates his study of advertising on the late nineteenth century. I will
shift the study back in time.
I have chosen a critical method which combines a historicized approach
to materials with a choice of relevant theoretical perspectives; my research
on how the literary canon evolves within wider contexts of production and
consumption also generates its own theories of language and of reading.
Finally, this book comes at a time of great interest in modern media and the
making of humanity. I hope it will contribute to that debate. One of its aims
is to widen our understanding of media interpellation in the nineteenth
century and show how ‘the language of the walls’ forms the basis of our
own structures and networks of representation.
1
The Language of the Walls:
Spaces, Practices, Subjectivities

Thoroughfares for inscription

In his discussion of the importance of perspective in eighteenth-century art

and literature, Murray Roston speaks of a change in the perceptual stand-
point of the human subject which involved a shift of the gaze away from the
heavens back down to the human panorama.1 What I would like to imagine
in mid-Victorian times is another shift away from the objective view of a
social panorama to an immersion at street level in man’s productions of
signs. The observer now no longer gazes at the social scene directly – the
interactions of his fellow men viewed from a vantage point – but sees these
only through a world of text, the world not created by God but by himself,
in the form of writing on the walls. Thomas Richards, also concerned with
the modern gaze, describes the Great Exhibition of 1851 as the inaugur-
ation of a new way of seeing which created our modern day mythology of
consumerism; this seeing ‘was the product of a new kind of place in which
things could be seen’.2 It was also, as I will argue, the product of a new kind
of space in which things could be read, the topographical and the discursive
generating each other mutually.
The printed matter that an average citizen might see on the streets of
London and Paris grew vertiginously in the mid-nineteenth century,
helped by improved printing technologies, cheaper paper and the thrust
given to the advertising of commodities by the Great Exhibition of 1851,
as well as the lifting of taxes on advertising, newspapers and paper itself.3
This expansion was reliant on physical changes in the city space encour-
aging the increased production and movement of goods. Printed matter,
like the goods it helped circulate, could get around more easily. Surfaces
became increasingly numerous as the cities of London and Paris underwent
‘improvement’ and rationalization. New roads and boulevards meant eas-
ier circulation for traffic and smoother, more streamlined walls on which
to paste adverts as well as clearer thoroughfares down which advertising
vans might be driven and omnibuses might display their advertisements.

4
 The Language of the Walls 5

Movement, light and space were the central aesthetics of Baron Haussmann
and Joseph Bazalgette’s schemes, which were both concerned with display –
the display of the power of a modern capital – and with civil engineering
projects which were in themselves massive architectural advertisements.
One of these was the Thames Embankment, which, Dale Porter tells us, was
‘designed to parallel the river – to channel its flow, carry sewage along its
gradual decline toward the sea, move carriage and omnibus traffic east and
west, and redefine its architecture as befit an imperial capital’.4 Movement
was a question of efficiency but also a sign of the might of a country for
which travel of all sorts was its power – to move around the Empire and
move its wealth from place to place.
Porter explains that, although pollution was the driving force behind
plans for the London Main Drainage, as well as better river navigation, it
soon attracted a host of other discourses and interests: ‘It crystallized the
aspirations of a whole metropolis as if they had been suspended in some con-
ceptual solution, a happy analogue to the “fuliginous matter” in London’s
atmosphere.’5 This ‘conceptual solution’ involved for the most part plans for
clearance and the installation of commercial sites. Lynda Nead, who takes
as her field of study the period from 1855 (when the Metropolitan Board
of Works directed by Bazalgette was founded) to 1870, focuses on how this
era of improvement and modernization reshaped the space of London,
and on how that space was experienced. Like Porter she takes the Thames
Embankment as vital to the re-creation of London and describes the changes
and demolitions as being aimed at producing movement in a congested city.
Strongly supported by Joseph Paxton, ‘the embankment would put an end
to rotting waste on the mud banks of the Thames and would unblock the
traffic congestion in the nearby main streets’ by constructing a new road-
way along the Thames.6 She comments on paintings and engravings at the
time which attempt to convey that sense of flow, such as William Haywood’s
Holborn Viaduct from Farringdon Street of 1869 with its open sky and opti-
mism or John O’Connor’s The Embankment of 1874, with its ‘Canaletto-style’
vision of movement and progress. She comments that the closest Victorian
London came to Baron Haussmann’s miles of straight, wide boulevards were
the eighty or so miles of Bazalgette’s main drainage system.7 And it is to
the many examples of cross-section drawings of the embankment which
appeared in the illustrated press that she turns for a sense of the new desire
.
for dynamism in the city. One article in the Penny Illustrated Paper describes
a city of perpetual movement: omnibuses over bridges, steamers, ferries and
barges on the Thames, trains in underground tunnels, gas, water and sewage
in pipes under the earth, showing the modern city as ‘a world devoted to the
production of constant motion’.8 Another article in The Times of 14 October
1850, entitled ‘The Cities of London and Paris Compared’, describes the find-
ings of a researcher sent to study the effect of macadamized roads in London
on the movement of traffic. The statistics given describe the numbers of
6 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

carriages moving over major bridges and roads per hour in the two metrop-
olises and describes how much space is given over to thoroughfares in each
city. The conclusion is of course that London has over twice as much traffic
as Paris and that this traffic moves faster. The report also contains data on
how much space each citizen can enjoy: ‘in London every inhabitant corre-
sponds to a surface of 100 metres; at Paris to 34 metres.’ The article presents
its data in such a way as to suggest that the city is now a question of potential
space exploitable by the individual (who can enjoy so many square metres of
the city), an exploitation which is reliant on producing flow.
The notions of flow and of clearance were embedded in many discourses
on the changing urban world. If Bazalgette speaks of London as a sick body
in need of treatment, its lungs and arteries in need of scouring, plagued by
blockage and breakdown and accumulated refuse, Haussmann speaks of the
problems of Paris as of a social body afflicted with aneurism.9 Revolution and
the attenuating of the nobility’s property rights meant Haussmann could
set to work to rid Paris of its carrefours, its impasses, and ruelles and to create
straight, wide boulevards in their place or glass-covered passages allowing
communication and exchange between different districts and social classes.
These new spaces were, of course, easier to police. Ancient slums meant
topological disarray, which blocked movement, and, in particular, move-
ment of information. Ignorance was seen to be a by-product of undeveloped
space or at least a plausible excuse for the destruction and redevelopment
of that space: in France the authorities were not able to penetrate with their
own ideologies areas of potential dissidence and so needed Haussman to
create the scopically and gnostically encompassable boulevards. One only
need read Eugène Sue’s Mystères de Paris of 1842–43 or Hugo’s Les Misérables
of 1862 for a sense of the impenetrability of certain districts of Paris and of
their resistance to the penetrating eye of the Law.10 Although advertising is
often represented as a moribund congestion and overcrowding of posters, it
was first seen as part of a new social flow in society – in terms of informa-
tion, commerce, and class. In London as in Paris, the metaphors of light and
air used by urban planners to convey the idea of movement also suggested
free movement of information and the penetration of that information into
the minds of the population. The latter could only happen if there was archi-
tectural encouragement or indeed coercion to participate in commerce.
The call for proposals issued by The Royal Commission in 1861 concern-
ing use of the new Thames-side space elicited many commercial ventures
such as one plan for a ‘Crystal Arcade’: ‘an iron-and-glass pavilion spanning
a solid quay ... filled with shops and galleries like the Crystal Palace itself’, a
Paris Arcade on the river.11 The First Commissioner of Works wrote in 1853
that the embankment, rather than being devoted to parks and esplanades, a
space of ‘urban beauty or recreation’, should be ‘a giant warehouse and busi-
ness office’.12 In the 1860s the desire was for beauty as well as commercial
utility with ‘wide thoroughfares on the Parisian model’ to attract the idler and
 The Language of the Walls 7

visitor.13 The spatial aesthetic of the time is crystallized by Joseph Paxton’s

design for a ‘Great Victorian Way’ – a huge shopping arcade with indoor trains
which was to go all around central London. It was never built but the plans
stand as a monument to the desires and tendencies of the age; a totally artifi-
cial environment with ventilation, filtering impurities of air and impurities of
class (having separate working-class and upper-class districts), it was a space of
social control and ‘protected openness’,14 rather like the present day concept
of the ‘Center Parcs’ company, which combines visibility with isolation from
the outside world – the latter only seen through glass or over a perimeter fence.
What we are seeing here is very much an aesthetics of capital in which archi-
tecture becomes a backdrop for, or symbol of, the commodity; not only goods
but ideals such as pride in Empire were sold to the public in such spaces.15
Advertising also relied on artificial light. Gas light, which had begun
at the beginning of the nineteenth century, was in great demand by the
1850s and turned London night into day, making a theatrical display case
of its streets. Gas light extended the surfaces available for display, helping
to colonize previously unusable darkness. The street became a stage set not
only for the goods of butcher or tailor but also for advertisements, which
would now have double viewing time. The street had thus taken on some
of the traits of the domestic interior since it was lit and arranged for display.
The domestic interior had, as Walter Benjamin once noted, ‘moved outside’:
‘The street becomes room and the room becomes street.’16 It was now a new
space in which to dream, a space of fantasy: ‘All collective architecture of
the nineteenth-century constitutes the house of the dreaming collective’
consisting of ‘Arcades, winter gardens, panoramas, factories, wax museums,
casinos, railroad stations’, and also department stores and apartment
interiors.17 These new exhibition spaces imply a transiting crowd which
viewed the displays as they passed by, or, as with the panorama, a static
crowd past which moves the scene. The thoroughfares were now open to
the public and lined with matter to view. Cities were saturated with images
‘a complex of representations and the place of circulation of representations;
the effects of one always articulating into and reworking the other’.18
The notion of new physical spaces allowing the movement of representa-
tions is an important one in our understanding of the gestation of the urban
world of modernity: through the wider circulation of text and image the
city was increasingly to be viewed as a virtual space. This virtual quality
is apparent when we consider the first Ordnance Survey Map of London,
which was produced in 1851, and which was on sale at time of the Great
Exhibition. Nead points out that this heralded the death of one city and
the birth of another since the ‘connecting, structural links’ of London were
emphasized rather than the aesthetics of the City, and London was repre-
sented as potential process: ‘the surveyor and capitalist were the two creative
forces of the modern map’ which was the child of entrepreneurial, capitalist
expansion.19 The representation of the city was now ‘entirely accurate and
8 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

utterly unrecognisable’, ready for the building of a new social order.20 Once
London was newly mapped in this way, all sorts of special interest maps
could be manufactured (railway, gas, temperance, shopping), which had the
effect of making a city space in which different layers were discernible; in the
minds of the population, one layer could be peeled off, like a sheet of paper,
to reveal another. The City was becoming a space for whatever dream the
population wished to project upon it. One could thus travel along mapped
paths in a virtual journey through the city but also travel from one type of
map to another, from one ‘layer’ or surface to another depending on which
world one wished to pursue. Similarly, advertising which literally layered
the city street became a tangible perpendicular representation of this new
virtuality and of the new simultaneity of existence of different (textual)
worlds in the same space.

Moving text/motion pictures

Text was thus, literally, on the move. This movement was a matter not only
of the textual superposition just mentioned of virtual space on the space
of the city, but of the spaces emerging within these precincts of movement
and light. The hoardings veiling demolition sites as well as the new walls
themselves provided extra space on which to stick bills. The hoardings had
the added advantage of being ephemeral and mobile. New roads meant new
vehicles such as advertisement vans passing the passer-by, and each new cut
in the city (boulevard, embankment or railway) had its crop of new adver-
tisement spaces. The railway system provided a captive audience to read ads
planted along the tracks, while railway timetables and tourist guidebooks,
magazines and monthly novels also provided pages on which to print more
advertisements.
The experience of reading was becoming a matter of having text drift or
rush past the eye: the flicking of pages under the thumb, or the passing of
ads as one gazed from a train or bus, or the leaflets shoved into the hand
as one walked. The latter were often abandoned a few streets later, to lie
on a pavement for someone else to read – perhaps during their perusal of
a magazine in hand, so that one text might overlay and influence another.
These experiences were a result of the quantity of text flying about street,
home and public building. In 1853 Max Schlesinger took his readers on a
series of walks or ‘saunterings’ through London; he commented on the ubi-
quity and motion of the sandwich board or advertising bill (distributed ‘by
the hundred’), and on the fact that ‘the Advertisement is omnipresent’.21
Commentators in France describe a similar plethora of handbills and posters
which led to the anti-bill-posting law of 1881: ‘Défense d’afficher, loi de 1881’.
As well as hoardings, Paris introduced the colonnes Morris in mid-century;
these were circular cylinders in which adverts could be posted behind glass
and which had the passer-by walk around them and which were later able
 The Language of the Walls 9

to turn. William Smith, acting manager of the Adelphi theatre and writer
of a handbook, Advertise! How? When? Where?, emphasizes the import-
ance of advertising which moves: in 1859, in order to publicize the French
Revolution drama Dead Heart, he devised a campaign in which five mil-
lion handbills, one million cards and ten million adhesive labels were sent
out. Touts hurled armfuls of fliers through carriage and omnibus windows.
The handbills and adhesive labels were found in omnibuses, steamers, rail-
way carriages, upon glassware in London pubs and restaurants and even
at Windsor Castle and the Old Bailey. Illustrations in Smith’s book show a
rain of bills terrorizing passengers at a station as well as marching armies of
sandwich men.22 Advertising was best done if it could move past the public
or if the population could move by it.
There are several consequences of such an environment for the way a text
or image is read: small frames pass in front of the eye in quick succession,
which has the effect of reducing text to contiguous units. Such reading is
associated with older reading practices – the perusal of the almanac or the
reading of the Bible – but now becomes a universalized process available to
the urban walker. One begins to see the world not in linear sequence but
in self-contained pieces of text and image which can then be linked up to
subsequent pieces. We might say that the act of reading itself becomes seri-
alized. This is not the same as a turning of the pages of a book in which the
sentences run on; it implies a taking in by the eye of a whole framed space in
one go or gulp before moving on to another. Our eye drifts across a page of
ads from frame to frame, one frame remaining in our vision as the other is
taken in, creating a palimpsestuous merging or superposition of one frame
onto another.23 The effect here is of fragmentation and yet also sequence
and flow. Grandville’s 1844 cartoon ‘Literature being reeled off ready made’,
which shows a roll of print being cut up for sale by a pastry chef (La littéra-
ture sort toute faite d’un dévidoir) [Fig. 1],24 picks up on this bite-size aspect of
new reading practices, as well as on the flow of text past the eye. Baudelaire
describes his own text Le spleen de Paris as a series of infinitely modulable
fragments or slices which can be mixed, matched and moved about like the
vertebrae of a snake. Addressing his publisher he says:

My dear friend, I am sending you a little work of which one cannot say,
without injustice, that it has neither head nor tail, since on the contrary
it is all heads and tails, alternatively and reciprocally. Consider, I pray,
what advantages this combination offers to all of us – to you and I and
the reader. We can make cuts wherever we like – I in my daydream, you
in the manuscript, the reader in his reading. Take away one vertebra, and
the two parts of this tortuous fantasy will join up again easily. Chop it
into many fragments, and you will see that each part can exist alone.
In the hope that some of these slices will be lively enough to please and
amuse you, I take the liberty of dedicating to you the whole serpent.25
10 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

Figure 1 ‘La littérature sort toute faite d’un dévidoir’, Grandville, 1844
Source: Bibliothéque nationale de France.
 The Language of the Walls 11

Both Grandville and Baudelaire are describing in different ways a new

experience of reading in which the sentence has been replaced by the inde-
pendent unit of writing (both imagine slicing up text into chunks). Each
unit can be part of a sequence, but the sequence can be modulated. Text
moves at us and into us, and teaches us to receive it in this fragmented way.
We must as readers be able to organize the units as they come to us.

Moving from frame to frame

We thus find ourselves somewhere between the speeding up of modern
vision as suggested by Jean Clay and the demise of the contemplation of
a static object that Jonathan Crary notices in the early nineteenth cen-
tury.26 If Baudelaire speaks of the independent existence of his units of
text, he also perceives them as being part of a series, part of the ‘whole
snake’, which is an ongoing phenomenon (it goes on from vertebra to verte-
bra). Objects are often described as being in transition, or rather the object
of the gaze appears to be transitory. The reader at this time captures the
existence of a discourse or image only in so far as it implies the yielding
to a successive image or text – this visual object existing both as an end
in itself and as a preliminary or as a consequence. The part is both an
independent part and the preparation or following on from the previous
or future part, pointing to the advent of what we might call the serializa-
tion of perception. It is therefore not surprising that we find the birth and
growing popularity of the comic strip at this time. David Kunzle remarks
that the comic strip became popular as a genre in response to the needs of
the growing lower-middle class, whose precarious status in society sought
expression in a medium in which its members might recognize their situ-
ation. Rodolphe Töpffer drafted the first picture story in 1827 and the genre
would eventually contribute to the birth of the cinema ‘whose form, aims,
and to a degree language were foreshadowed by the comic strip – as public
entertainment’.27 It found its home in the magazine, the latter containing
a heterogeneous mix of texts and which invited the reader to flick through
from page to page or to scan each page from frame to frame. Kunzle remarks
on the reaction of the eye scanning the page, which he describes as ‘rapid,
intense nervous stimuli, like the flickering of the cinema screen or the view
from a train window’.28 We might find a parallel in Friedrich Nietzsche’s
idea of seeing the world from a train: ‘With the tremendous acceleration
of life, mind and eye have become accustomed to seeing and judging par-
tially or inaccurately, and everyone is like the traveller who gets to know
a land and its people from a railway carriage.’29 J. M. W. Turner’s Rain,
Steam and Speed (1844) depicts in an image the acceleration of the gaze as
it attempts to capture the speed of the train and the blur of the passing
landscape. The spectator is moving at great speed in a train (Turner was
in the train to experience speed and light at first hand), and is moving at
the same rate as the oncoming train; there is no static point from which to
12 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

contemplate either passing train or landscape. This lack of a still point of

perception helps us to imagine how the passer-by or passenger in London
or Paris might travel past advertising text which was itself often moving;
the gazer loses the authority and purchase that stillness confers and must
read the transiting sandwich board or omnibus advert from a position of
transience. Relativity takes precedence over hierarchy in terms of both sub-
ject and object.
The increasingly perpendicular nature of text also had an influence in
creating a rapid scanning eye in the city dweller. Writing was displayed
on walls and other surfaces and the habit of reading this matter affected
all areas of reading behaviour. The magazine illustration or comic strip
would often be cut out and pasted on the wall (as Mr Weevle’s room in
Dickens’s Bleak House shows, decorated with prints of ‘beauties’ from penny
magazines), thus showing the increasing habit of reading, not in books,
but from the walls. Illustrations with their explanatory titles or short texts
were prized and destined to be kept and collected and more often than not
pinned up on the wall or framed. 30 Thus if the streets were becoming inte-
riors – rooms to decorate – then interiors were aping the writing and image
on the walls in the street outside. An advertisement for Charles Philipon’s
‘Papier Peint Comique’ (Comic Wallpaper) of the 1860s entitled ‘Family
Reading’ shows a family in their salon admiring a screen covered in text
and image. Gustave Doré mocked this fashion in wallpapers printed with
reading matter in a series of topical pastiches of modern manners called
‘Prophecies for the People of France’ which ran from 1848 to the 1860s. His
cartoon is accompanied by the legend ‘Les papiers peints comiques d’Aubert
continueront à égayer les enfants de tout âge’ (Aubert comic wallpapers will
continue to delight children of all ages).31 It shows an adult standing up on
his bed while his wife sleeps and reading the walls of his bedroom. Here,
the pleasure of reading has moved from the novel or magazine up onto the
wall. In Le Charivari of 1845 there are many such comments on reading
practices; concerning the change in format of the Journal des Débats we find
complaints about outsize newspapers which must now be read like posters.
One cartoon shows a man obliged to lie down on his newspaper to read it
while another pins it to a wall. There are also complaints from wives whose
husbands can take up to nine hours to read this huge journal. These adverts
reveal a habit of reading linked with the scanning of posters with their
highly visual appeal.

Text becomes pictorial

Nead tells us that the advertisement is the ‘ultimate synthesis of the central
themes of the modern metropolis: movement, exchange and the image’.32
We might take these last two terms ‘exchange’ and ‘image’ and ask how the
reader interacts with the perpendicular text and how the image makes that
exchange both powerful and immediate. A look through any magazine or
 The Language of the Walls 13

newspaper in either France or Great Britain between 1830 and 1850 offers
us ample evidence that the image was gaining in popularity as a means
of communication.33 Advertising pages have more image and less text in
the Dickens Advertisers as time goes on. One article designed as an adver-
tisement for, and published in 1851 in, the Illustrated London News, called
‘Speaking to the Eye’, describes the image as the medium par excellence of
modernity and makes the following claim:

Our great authors are now artists. They speak to the eye, and their lan-
guage is fascinating and impressive. The events of the day or week are
illustrated or described by the pencil ... The result is a facility of illustrat-
ing passing events truly and graphically ...34

The article boasts that image had become a universal language and that
we were now living in the age of the image. Technical improvements in
engraving and printing and the cheapness of production were part of the
reason for the explosion in reproduced images but so was the public’s
sensitivity to the graphic line. This universal language was dependent on
the way in which the drawn line constituted a powerful part of educa-
tion in the nineteenth century in both France and Britain. Gerard Curtis,
in his work on ‘visual words’, notices how important the line became in
Victorian Britain, whether drawn or written, constituting ‘a point of meet-
ing for visual and textual systems’, a form, he says, of today’s ‘multimedia
“blending” ’. 35 The training in the making of lines was seen as a vital
part of a child’s education as the many adverts for ‘drawing copybooks’
in the ‘Our Mutual Friend Advertiser’ reveal. Commerce relied on people
who could write: shorthand clerks and copyists (we might think of Nemo
in Bleak House who earns his living as a law copyist and Dickens’s own
career as a shorthand clerk). Curtis underlines that the shared material-
ity of text and image was inherited from mediaeval times and reinforced
in the nineteenth century in the production of Frakturs, embroidery
work, valentines and also monument and tombstone epigrams, ornate
trade-union certificates, the illustrated press and the new genre of comic
strips, which all contributed to what Curtis calls the ‘suturing process’
which reinforced ‘the links between the content of writing and its mater-
ial practice’. 36 In the chapter titled ‘The Hieroglyphic Image’ he looks at
the new relationship between text and graphic media in which ‘reading
and beholding coalesced’. 37 If text becomes in some measure pictorial,
then image also becomes textual. He notices how text is integrated into
panoramic paintings of modern life such as in Ford Madox Brown’s Work
(1852–65) and notices that advertisements ‘capitalized upon the design
potential of both eye-catching imagery and dynamic typography, becom-
ing one of the eventual resting grounds (along with the comic strip) of
the united arts’. 38
14 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

This uniting of the arts is often described in terms of its powerful impact
and is often imagined as becoming coercitive and imperialistic. Walter
Benjamin has described the new verticality of text which showed a graphic
‘eccentric figurativeness’. He saw the shift to the advertising era as mak-
ing the book ‘archaic’ and releasing ‘locust swarms of print ... [that] grow
thicker with each succeeding year’. When he describes ‘a blizzard of chan-
ging, colourful, conflicting letters’ we understand how the written word
has been invested with or taken over by image.39 In Le Charivari of 1845 an
article entitled ‘Les murs illustrés’ (The Illustrated Walls) complains of the
invasion of posters and how they control the reader. The cartoon shows a
passer-by mesmerized by images on a wall which might, the caption says,
‘kill’ writing.
If advertising was quick to exploit this impact of the visual, then jour-
nalists were quick to notice the many ways in which copywriters used the
image. We find an excellent example of this in an article in Punch entitled
‘Pictorial Advertisements’ of 1864 [Fig. 2] which mocks not only the adver-
tisements themselves but also the many pamphlets and books on the sub-
ject of better advertising which should ‘appeal to the Eye’:

A Great Classic has told us ... that there is nothing like appealing to the
Eye, if you wish to secure attention. ... With this exordium ..., we beg to
call attention to the following specimen of a new style of advertising.
In these days of hurry and scramble no appeal can be too emphatic, and
we consider this new means of attracting attention decidedly worthy of
notice.40

Here the journalist parodies those advertisers who (with spurious classical
references) advocate extreme measures to attract attention amidst the flurry
of city life, especially their increasing interest in other areas of visual data –
phrenology, the portrait and the Lamarckian identification of species. The
pleasure for the spectator was that of having quickly identifiable stereotypes
or moulds placed before him or her, for immediate consumption. The art-
icle presents a series of Lamarckian-type portraits to embellish personal
advertisements. One criminal mug-shot of a thief bears the following cap-
tion: ‘MR. LIFTER begs to inform his friends, that his present Address is
Portland, Hampshire, Care of the Governor’. A burglar complete with black
mask ‘WANTS Evening Employment after 6 o’clock – Active, Energetic and
Obliging. For Testimonials, apply to Scotland Yard’, while a large horsewhip
bears the legend ‘THE ABOVE REWARD will be given to the Two Gents (who
insulted the lady in the Railway Carriage), if they will kindly send their
address – Distance not the least object’. This sending up of advertising’s obses-
sion with visual tricks shows an awareness of the increasing use of the image
in both commercial and personal adverts and targets the irritating repetitions
concerning the image of those who give advice on how to advertise.
 The Language of the Walls 15

Figure 2 ‘Pictorial Advertisements’, Punch, 1864

Source: British Library.
16 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

In a similar vein, but functioning more in the fashion of a rebus, we have

a piece entitled ‘Drawn from the Bank’ [Fig. 3] which plays on financial
news on the price of City shares and on typical and oft repeated expressions
such as ‘Pigs dull’ (meaning that the price of pig iron is low). For speed-
ier reading, ‘Pigs dull’ is illustrated by some lethargic-looking swine, while
‘Hides active’ shows a bull jumping a gate. Each illustration and sentence is
laid out as an advertisement might be, and is described by Punch as ‘hiero-
glyphic news’: the signifier is given a new signified in the enunciation ‘Pigs
dull’, which turns the price of pig iron to a bored and lazy animal. Similarly,
mockery is made of old stockbrokers who have seen better days; a dishev-
elled, unwashed and portly man in his night shirt stands in for the vagaries
of products on the stock market: ‘Grey shirtings still unchanged. Soap, no
demand. Lard lively’. The journalist here seems to be playing out Marx’s
maxim that historical events tend to be repeated as farce, a farce which is
shown to be both linguistic and pictorial. An explication of the usefulness
of such advertising practice is given: ‘This hieroglyphic news will be more
read than the present prosy sentences, and while one glance at the sketches
will suffice for the busy merchant, continual amusement will be afforded
by them to his junior clerks.’ Whereas text and numbers remain ‘painfully
correct and stiff’, an illustration affords ‘a little play’. The irony of the tone

Figure 3 ‘Drawn form the Bank’, Punch, 1864

Source: British Library.
 The Language of the Walls 17

targets the keenness of advertisers to render reading a rapid and amusing

act, one of instant and effortless comprehension mixed with pleasure. It
shows that ‘taking in’ information, all at once, in passing, so to speak, is
a strong desire at mid-century emerging in many forms of representation
and practice.41 Interestingly all of the caricatures (severe schoolmaster, thief
and thug), as well as the image of a whip and a Python, contain a certain
violence and threat, as if the cartoonist wished to show that the visual in
advertising is often an imposition of some kind.
The Punch ‘Pictorial Advertisement’ brings us back to the notion men-
tioned earlier in the ‘Speaking to the Eye’ article of image being a ‘universal
language’. It might be useful to consider a theory of iconic literature offered
by Anthony Easthope which will allow us to understand how iconicity makes
writing so consumable. In his discussion of ‘Visual Melodrama’, Easthope
shows that popular culture is doing something different from high culture,
and that in melodrama physical action translates a polar Manichean mor-
ality, part of the ‘repetitive event-centred narrative’ in which all interiority
is evacuated to leave only ‘externalised dramatisation’ – the ‘psychological
absolutes’ and ‘will-to-transparency’ favoured by popular culture.42 The
body is iconically represented in popular culture because non-verbal signs
such as gesture are considered more expressive than words. Easthope says
that the novel Tarzan is iconic in the Peircean sense because, although it
consists of language and therefore is symbolic rather than iconic, ‘its dis-
course effaces the level of the signifier while its signified concentrates on
physical action and external event’. It encourages visualization and ‘gives
an effect like that of the iconic’. Popular culture is dominated by this iconic
effect, which is to do with pleasure and phantasy rather than conscious
thought (in Freud’s terms it is about ‘thing-presentation’ as in the uncon-
scious rather than ‘word-presentation’). Easthope goes on to say that ‘as in
dreams, visual representation withdraws from criticism and allows desire
to elide contradictions’, and so popular cultural discourse is dependent on
visualization and the expressivity of the body and thus linked with wish-
fulfilment rather than duty.43 Wish-fulfilment is the basis of the utopian
drive in popular culture and emerges in the images of power in the ‘Pictorial
Advertisements’ which imagine the possibility of vengeance (the whip),
unchallenged authority (the schoolmaster), or unlicensed theft as being
unchallenged by any reprimanding law.
The author of the Punch parody reveals to the reader the extent to which
city dwellers were growing accustomed to consuming what we might call
ideological units of text and image which have a prêt-à-lire or prêt-à-penser
quality to them, involving pre-packaged and expected meanings. Just as
now the makers of advertising and film select from a gamut of off-the-peg
scenarios (text/speech and image) carrying certain messages which trigger
specific emotional responses, so in the nineteenth century advertisers were
building up a repertoire of codes with which to communicate. The Punch
18 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

spoof illustrates the fact that the image was used in advertising along with
text to express what Grize, referring to oral dialogue, refers to as ‘cultural
pre-construction’ and what Jean-Jacques Lecercle has called the ‘postulate
of the encyclopedia’: ‘[the] encyclopedia is a shared and common know-
ledge ... the participants must not only master this common knowledge, they
must also be aware of the other participants’ mastery of it’.44 Such know-
ledge was sufficiently disseminated in the 1840s to 1860s for advertising to
be able to cash in on its power. Advertising can only function once urban
society reaches a certain stage of cultural sharing – already dependent on its
technological ability to disseminate that pool of common knowledge. Print
culture in general and advertising in particular therefore seems to reinforce
that ‘encyclopedia’.
Easthope describes his own form of this ‘encyclopedia’ in stressing that the
iconic helps us to think about what might be called ‘the narrateme, little scenic
and narrative epitomes such as Clark Gable turning at the door’.45 Popular
cultural discourse, says Easthope, can operate ‘collectively rather than merely
individually’ and opens onto a ‘shared collectivity’ which appears unitary
and universal.46 He goes on to say that it is via such narratemes that popular
culture can sometimes speak what Beckett calls ‘ “the voice of us all on all
sides”, arising from and articulating as little else the intersubjective every-
dayness of life under late capitalism’. Easthope sums up the significance of
this iconicity, and then brings us back to the notion of ‘motion pictures’ in
our title: ‘The Victorians tried for fifty years to invent the cinema – with
their “Zoobiographs” and so on – but without success. As their preference
for melodrama and theatrical spectacle evidences ... they felt the pressure of
popular culture impelling them towards iconic representation’. He stresses
that discourses of popular culture were already iconic and so predisposed for
visual representation. Thus the photograph and cinema picked up the audi-
ence already primed for them by the text and image of popular culture.47
We are seeing the emergence of certain new practices which are in fact rit-
uals of reading which the journalists of various publications are beginning
to describe and parody. Reading has become a practice in which physical
movement and visual effect are paramount. We begin to see an awareness of
these new rituals, as well as an awareness of what these rituals might imply
for the subject. These are commentaries – tentative and experimental – on
the new languages on the walls; they are an attempt, through mockery
and parody, to take account of a phenomenon which was just beginning to
attract the awareness and the critiques of a public which was waking up to
a new communications network.

Montage, mirage and the (mis)behaviour of language

We will now attempt to show that the incongruous juxtapositions and

superpositions of moving text and image within a confused city space, and
 The Language of the Walls 19

the mirages or hallucinations which are created as a result, alter the subject’s
relationship to language. The subject sees language’s maverick and wayward
qualities and comments on these, answering the coercions of advertising
with play.

Promiscuous juxtapositions: New ways of seeing

The problem of seeing the city space and clearly deciphering it is one that
has been explored in both the eighteenth and the early nineteenth-century
novel. But it is in mid-century that this sense of the complexity of the
urban scene intensifies.48 The journalism and literature of the 1860s in par-
ticular offers many discourses concerning the rebuilding of London and
Paris when mud and dust disguised and obscured the most familiar dis-
tricts, and old and new were mixed together to often startling effect. One
article in the Illustrated Times of 1866 emphasises the ‘state of transition’ in
which London found itself and asserts that ‘a week’s absence from town is
enough to make the oldest inhabitant a stranger in his own parish’.49 This
experience of the incongruous is remarked upon by Dickens in Dombey and
Son nearly twenty years before: ‘There were a hundred thousand shapes and
substances of incompleteness, wildly mingled out of their places, upside
down, burrowing in the earth, mouldering in the water, and unintelligible
as any dream.’50 This unintelligible and unsettling quality of the city in
transition brings us back to our earlier assertion that the city becomes a
modulable space in which the surfaces – the very walls – are moveable. The
vision of the uninterrupted disturbance (or undisturbed interruptions) of
the bourgeois epoch in which, Marx says, ‘all that is solid melts into air’
and ‘all relations become antiquated before they can ossify’ helps us to
imagine the unrecognizable quality of an environment which was con-
stantly changing.51 In ‘The Eyes of the Poor’, Baudelaire recognizes this
flux and the mixing of old and new: ‘a new boulevard, still littered with
rubble ... displayed its unfinished splendours’, while in ‘Loss of a Halo’ he
speaks of crossing a boulevard hindered by mud ‘in the midst of a mov-
ing chaos, with death galloping at me from every side’.52 Baudelaire often
speaks of the simultaneity of modern life, of many worlds in the same
space, of heterogeneous classes and architectures pushed together, of super-
position, and transition. These are all features of the dissolving view, the
stereoscope and early forms of photographic montage. One stereoscope pic-
ture of Oliver Wendell Holmes of the 1850s shows a London of juxtaposed
old and new – a wall of advertisements crowned with a hazy dome of Saint
Paul’s – while the paintings of Logsdail much later in the century show a
similar structure inspired by modern technology, for example, St Paul’s and
Ludgate Hill with a faded Saint Paul’s in the background and a train cutting
through the cityscape in the foreground.53 Mirage as an obscured seeing is
the logical result of this violent clashing of realities and is part of a daily
experience: it is expressed here in an article of 1852 which offers a lyrical
20 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

view of the montage of modern seeing:

the pavé ... is our main look-out. How the parasols gleam, and flash, and
glitter in the sunshine! How the eye goes rambling and wandering and is
filled with a confused mirage of forms and colours.54

A surrealist merging of disparate worlds is expressed here and suggests an

aleatory and random gaze which consumes passively since it is ‘filled’ by
the ‘mirage’.
The confused urban scene is the subject of Dickens’s ‘An Unsettled
Neighbourhood’ (1854). In this essay, Dickens describes the changes wrought
in the neighbourhood of Camden by the arrival of the railway. Before its
arrival, this neighbourhood was a poor, semi-rural enclave; the only texts
which reached the inhabitants were ‘summonses for rates and taxes’ which
arrived ‘as if they were circulars’.55 Already the advertising circular was the
sign of the commercial health of an area, the absence of them a sign of stag-
nation. In response to the railway, the houses change their façades as they
transform themselves into hotels and shops and start to advertise for custom
in an attempt to get into the ‘Bradshaw’ railway guide, itself a repository of
many advertisements. Dickens comments on the attempts to turn all shops
into ‘Railway’ shops such as the ‘Railway Bakery’, but points out that it is not
this rash of signs which bothers him but another form of disturbance which
he describes as the deteriorating ‘state of mind’ or ‘moral condition’ of the
neighbourhood: ‘It is unsettled, dissipated, wandering (I believe nomadic is
the crack word for that sort of thing just at present), and don’t know its own
mind for an hour’ (48). Dickens comments here upon a state which might
be described as an ontological disturbance, and which involves less the loss
of any fixed identity than the advent of a newly mobile world of signs. The
shops change their signs from toy-shop to milliner, to stationer and back
and ruin the state of mind of each owner, all of whom are affected by the
movement of ‘Luggage’ constantly hauled along the streets and inducing the
inhabitants to move with it ‘down the line’. This restlessness and transience is
also described by Dickens in connection with Jo the crossing sweeper in Bleak
House, whose position at places of transition (crossings and intersections),
from which he must always ‘move on’, makes of him an empty, anxious crea-
ture. Likewise, the unsettled neighbourhood cannot be ‘less collected in its
intellects’; it needs to produce another form of intellect; one which allows for
superposition, transfer, rapid turnover. Linguistic habits are already shown to
be evolving to fit the new spirit of the times: the advent of the railway encour-
ages children to speak like the Bradshaw railway guide and say ‘Eleven forty’
instead of ‘twenty minutes to twelve’ (49). The texture of speech is thus alter-
ing to admit new precisions in the passing of time, new ways of expressing
units of measurement which will allow for ever faster and minuter transitions
in time and space.
 The Language of the Walls 21

Language allows for new slots of time, while the ever-changing bill boards
outside the shops create new areas of space on which varying messages can
be placed. The landscape is a reflection ‘of our moral state’, and Dickens
uses the words ‘confused’, ‘dissipated’ and ‘giddy’. Walls are built as another
building is erected and are pulled down just as rapidly. All this gives rise
to a series of transient surfaces on which bills can be posted: ‘a wilderness
of houses, pulled down, shored up, broken-headed, crippled, on crutches,
knocked about and mangled in all sorts of ways, and billed with fragments
of all kinds of ideas’ (50). Here we see a clear connection in the mind of the
narrator between an urban scape in various states of demolition and the
colonization of that space by ‘fragments’ of ideas, of pieces of text and ran-
dom messaging akin to Baudelaire’s textual vertebra – not whole and entire
systems of thought. The movement of persons and luggage in imitation of
the trains is accompanied by the locomotion of units of speech and text as
they inhabit the successive spaces of a city in flux. In the preface to Le Spleen
de Paris Baudelaire declares that the city environment will create the need
for a new language, a new kind of writing:

Who has not dreamt in ambitious moments of the miracle of a poetic

prose which is musical without rhythm and without rhyme, flexible
enough and rugged enough to adapt to the lyrical movements of the
soul, to the undulations of reverie, or to the leaps and jolts of conscious-
ness? It is from the frequenting of our huge cities with their endless con-
trasts and interconnections that this obsessive ideal is born.56

We imagine a strange music here of sudden jumps followed by swelling

waves of sound, of stops and starts, blockage and flow akin to the move-
ments of people and signboards in Dickens’s ‘unsettled neighbourhood’. We
see that both Baudelaire and Dickens are describing a modern self whose
only means of survival is to adapt to the ebb and flow of data.
John Orlando Parry’s A London Street Scene of 1835 [Fig. 4] is a painting
which gives an immediate sense of the experience of montage in the modern
city. Parry, Gerard Curtis tells us, chose ‘the overwhelming graphic presence
of advertising text to discourse on contemporary life and its problems’. Here,
text is ‘deliberately placed and layered within the work to give an effect both
narratively temporal and graphically static – one not dissimilar to the later
Cubists’ attempts to take the advertised graphic word and make it a token of
fragmented modernity’. Parry makes a panorama of modern life in which the
panorama is ‘created conceptually through the simulacra of the advertising
text’.57 We become aware that a similar aesthetic is being used by both Dickens
and Parry, namely that text seems to invade and unbalance static integrity and
create dynamism in a still picture, making it an ongoing sentence rather than
a frozen image. To see the urban space was to integrate the movements of text
and image which overlay it, thus altering our reading of that space. Visions of
22 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

Figure 4 John Orlando Parry’s A London Street Scene of 1835

Source: Dunhill Museum.

everyday life were not free from text, which, if not present in actuality, would
be floating on the cornea of the eye of the seer as an after-image. Curtis notices
the way in which St. Paul’s in the background of the painting ‘is hoarded
up and forgotten’ in the consumer metropolis: ‘Advertising hawks instead the
pleasures of theatrical entertainment and spectacle, in a new street literacy.’ He
then points out that Jerusalem has become a ‘Panorama’, and Pompeii suggests
the ‘imminent fall of London itself’.58 London has become a confusing mon-
tage of times, ideologies and matter. The overlapping of one poster on another
creates sentences such as ‘Vote for ... King Arthur’ in which the banality of
democratic suffrage in modern industrial society is humorously juxtaposed
with feudal law and Kingly rights. This overlapping also speaks of the vanity
of both objects and texts as they are pasted over.59
We must ask ourselves here if this new way of reading the world was also
part of a wider issue of seeing and consider for a moment Crary’s influential
thesis on vision and modernity and the place of the observer. Crary seeks
to situate the break with the notion of an unproblematic seeing embodied
in the camera obscura, in which the eye was considered an enabling lens,
an ‘infallible, metaphysical eye’. He challenges the idea that the break with
Renaissance or perspectival seeing occurred in the late nineteenth century
in a rarefied space of modernist representation, and situates the event much
earlier around the 1820s and 1830s in the ‘most dominant and pervasive
 The Language of the Walls 23

modes of seeing’60 – that is, in popular technology and scientific experi-

ment. Crary goes so far as to say that ‘Modernist painting in the 1870s and
1880s and the development of photography after 1839 can be seen as later
symptoms or consequences of this crucial systematic shift, which was well
under way by 1820.’61 He posits an observer who stops being a lens and
starts being productive, since he must deal with disjunct and defamiliar-
ized urban spaces of the sort we have been looking at in our present study.
The eye, as Adorno has said, had to adapt to the order of bourgeois ration-
ality which was one of manufactured things. The scientific community’s
recognition of the part played by physiology in vision complicated matters;
vision came to be seen as a process involving both mind and body in which
retinal after-images, peripheral vision, binocular vision, and thresholds of
attention played their part. Misperception now became possible: seeing
might be prey to illusion, and the senses unreliable. If all of this were so,
then manipulation and derangement were now possible: experience could
be produced for the subject, who was now merely a surface of inscription
on which a whole range of effects could be made. This new observer would
now be competent to consume the vast amount of visual data increasingly
on offer.62
The study of after-images brought in its wake the invention of optical
devices. Initially these were for scientific experiment, but they soon became
popular toys. Crary tells us that they were all based on the notion that per-
ception was not an instantaneous thing but a blending or fusion of images,
especially if these were perceived in quick succession as in the case of the
‘Thaumatrope’, a spinning disc (uniting bald man and hair, horse and rider
or cage and bird).63 Crary speaks of the fabricated and hallucinatory nature
of the image produced as well as of the rupture produced between percep-
tion and its object.64 The panorama and diorama are mentioned and joked
about by the pensionnaires in the Vauqueur boarding house in Balzac’s Le
père Goriot (1834) well before the revolutions in street spectacle which the
Haussmann project would bring. I would suggest that the pedestrian, the
omnibus passenger, the reader of pages of advertisements were subject to
optical effects in their daily round in the city similar to the ones we have
just described. Their eye was already accustomed to these complexities
since London and Paris were full of moving text and image. Crary describes
Baudelaire’s reaction to the kaleidoscope invented in 1815: he saw it as ‘a
machine for the disintegration of a unitary subjectivity and for the scatter-
ing of desire into new shifting and labile arrangements, by fragmenting any
point of iconicity and disrupting stasis’.65
This blending or fusion of images perceived in quick succession was some-
thing experienced every day by the city dweller in London and Paris. We find
traces of this kaleidoscopic seeing in Baudelaire’s as well as in Dickens’s
writing, and in the comic strip, which functions on the running together
of successive images into a global effect. Text and image on the walls and
24 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

in magazines often mirrored in their disjunctive and conglomerate qual-

ity both the city space and the layered seeing created by this daily diet.66
We also find that what the pasted-up adverts did accidentally, the makers
of adverts started doing on purpose. Advertisers absorbed these new ways
of seeing and translated them into the production of advertisements which
were optical effects.
Many articles show sensitivity to the absurd results of this modern ‘after-
imaging’, which lays, for example, indigestion pills over quotations from
Shakespeare. We discover an awareness of this phenomenon in the satir-
ical press, especially in Punch of the 1840s to 1860s where there is a regular
taking of the temperature of the advertising world and its fusions of dis-
parate material. In ‘Curiosities of (advertising) Literature’ [sic], ‘Atrocities of
Advertising Literature’ and ‘A Nation of Advertisers’ the word ‘literature’ is
used in its neutral meaning of ‘writing’ or ‘printed matter’ but at the same
time can also mean great and canonical literature.67 The articles show great
sensitivity to the grotesque effects of advertising in terms of levels of lan-
guage, which is why the titles just quoted all have an oxymoronic feel to
them; advertising being a subversive bedfellow for literature proper. Notice
that in the first title ‘advertising’ is in brackets so as to mark it out from the
more serious ‘literature’.68 This is especially true in 1864, the 300th anniver-
sary of Shakespeare’s birth, in which the bard was used to advertise every-
thing from soap to writing paper and became the subject of many of the
critiques of such advertising in the pages of the press. One article is called
‘Shakespeare and his Assailants’; it mocks the often ludicrous suggestions
for Shakespeare memorials which were also commercial ventures to pro-
mote British design.69 One article in Punch called ‘Another Shakespearian’
deplores what it calls ‘Shakespearianity’ (playing perhaps on ‘inanity’) and
presents an advertising circular written by a hairdresser who discourses on
the nature of poetry being of two kinds: ‘Descriptive and Real’. Speaking of
the descriptive kind, the advertiser tells us: ‘In this kind of beautiful Poetry
SHAKESPEARE, from his indescribable sublimity and charming expres-
sion stands unrivalled.’ The writer then goes onto say that the ‘real Poet’
contributes to the ‘Embellishment of the Human Frame’, and after much
prosy panegyric on the art of cutting hair the advertiser announces that
‘This poetry of the person can be cultivated in every department by visit-
ing “PETER PINDAR’S HAIR-CUTTING AND CURLING ESTABLISHMENT” ’.
The Punch journalist quoting this advert ends his piece by saying: ‘Surely,
surely, MR. PINDAR ought to have been placed on the National Shakespeare
Committee.’70
Literary quotations are thus shown to serve the commodity, bringing
together the sublime and the ridiculous. It is nowhere better done than in
an article entitled ‘The Puff Poetical’ of the 1860s which appears on the same
page as ‘Another Shakespearian’ and invents its own series of advertisements
which play on the same absurdities of juxtaposition. Puffery as the art of
 The Language of the Walls 25

puffing up a product by means of inflated language is here used to create a

spoof advertisement to mock the use of high culture in advertising. It opens
thus:

Compassionating the exceeding dullness of the authors who are kept by

tradesmen to draw up the Puff advertisements and paragraphs by which
the newspapers are vulgarised, Mr. Punch has prepared a few of these art-
icles in the style of the day, but of a more literary and graceful texture.71

The expression ‘the style of the day’ shows how widespread and even banal
the practice had become. Some fourteen quotes from English literature are
taken and used as the opening lines of advertisements. The first one begins
with the sentence ‘THE IMMMORTAL SHAKESPEARE has remarked ...‘
and ends with what Shakespeare ‘might have added’, namely that writing
would be made easier with the new ‘ELECTRIFIED ALBATA SELFCROSSING
TEA AND EYEDOTTING PEN’. Typography and lay out imitate the framed
announcements which were found in many newspapers and posters of the
day. The initial quotation is in capitals, as is the name of the product at the
end of each piece, which heightens the collision (and collusion) of sublime
literature and low commerce. Thus ‘IF MUSIC BE THE FOOD OF LOVE ...‘ is
followed by the announcement that the ‘SLAP-BANGERY REFRESHMENT
ROOMS has secured three Italian organs to perform while dinners are going
on’. Other examples include the following:

WE MET TWAS IN A CROWD, and I had no time to ask his address or tell
him mine, and how foolish in us both not to have gone to COPPERPLATE
AND BITE’S establishment, and had our names and addresses engraved
on a hundred enamelled CARDS for one-and-ninepence.
LOVE ME IF I LIVE, but if I don’t, by reason of any accident to the rail-
way on which I travel, you will find the ticket of the Accidental Insurance
Company in the empty cold cream pot in left-hand drawer of the washing-
stand in my dressing-room, and you will receive the money without any
botheration to add to the natural tears you’ll drop, but wipe them soon.
OLD MAN, ‘TIS NOT SO DIFFICULT TO DIE, says Manfred in LORD
BYRON’s drama. ... His respected Lordship would have said that it was not
only not difficult to dye, whether you are an old man or a young one,
if he had visited SCRATCHUM AND SCIZZORS’ celebrated Hair Cutting
and Dyeing Rooms, Low Holborn.

In a tradition which now continues in publications such as the British

Private Eye with its ‘Pseuds Corner’, this form of parody (with its puns on
words such as ‘die’ and ‘dye’) holds up a contemporary style of discourse
to our scrutiny and critical faculties. For such a parody to appear it is clear
26 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

that this type of ad is part of a daily experience of reading, a widespread,

shared phenomenon which will be easily recognized by readers. This in
itself is interesting since it suggests that by 1864 there was a sufficient cir-
culation of advertisements on walls and in magazines to create a ‘habitus’
(to use Bourdieu’s expression), a background of shared knowledge (slogans,
brand names, images) which circulated among the population and could
be used as collective points of reference. These parodies have a subtext
which declares that this ‘habitus’ is what we all know, is part of our daily
textual bread. Notice that literature is still part of that daily bread but now
‘brought to us’, mediated so to speak (as sporting events and television pro-
grammes are brought to us by different manufacturers and companies) by
the products and places it helps advertise. At this time, then, high culture
was beginning to reach the population via the walls rather than via the
library or the book. This situation heralds the beginning of the commercial
sponsorship of. high culture. Literature lives – is alive – here in this spoof
and might act as an education in literature for the less educated readers; see
how the sources of certain quotations are provided, such as the reference
to Byron above.
Punch’s joke and ‘crocodile’ lamentation is that advertising takes up the
Bard in this the anniversary of his birth and ‘does him to death’ by selling
all manner of product and event, and by pillaging his writing (as it later
would and in some ways already had taken up Dickens and Hugo). The
irreverence of Punch extends here to ‘our great national literature’, now
profane and fallen and flaunting itself on the walls. This breaking open of
literature and the sharing around of its treasures in order to create adver-
tising text and sell goods is obviously now sufficiently widespread, even
banal, in 1864 to warrant such a satiric article.

Misbehaving with language:

‘Families Supplied in Casks and Bottles’
The accidental collage created by one poster partially obscuring another is
something we have already seen in Parry’s painting with the incongruous
enjoinment ‘Vote for – King Arthur’, which shows how chance can bring
suffrage and serfdom into an intimate bond – a false bond of course which
is the joke. Bill posting in this light becomes a form of writing, a game of
‘cadavre exquis’ on the part of players who are ignorant of their involve-
ment in the game. For the reader of advertising there is much game-playing
and pleasure to be experienced in this activity as one journalist in Punch
remarks about the hoardings of advertising posters: ‘there is something pic-
turesque and quaint in their cross-readings’.72 Writing will go its own way
independently of the volition of writer, advertiser and bill poster. The walls
also offer the palimpsest – a bleeding of one discourse into another, literally,
since one poster made wet with rain would allow the one underneath to
show through. In the newspaper or magazine the cheap acidic paper would
 The Language of the Walls 27

allow ink to appear on the other side which often blurred meanings or cre-
ated new ones. Kunzle finds a perfect example from a cartoon of 1858:

In our reproduction from Mr. Wilderspin we make no attempt to mask

out an otherwise unrelated cartoon showing a distraught gambler, ‘his
last card played,’ which has bled through from the other side of the page.
He not only reminds us of the cheapness of the paper the magazines
used in their effort to cut expenses to the bone but also stands as a sym-
bol of the reader’s own sense that life itself was a gamble in which, like
Wilderspin, one invariably got cheated.73

There were constant ‘bleedings’ of this type from one text to another – either
literally like this one or through juxtaposition, quotation, and other forms
of intertextuality. A story was being written on the walls which no one had
begun and no one could end and which delivered up its message intermit-
tently to those who wished to see it and were able to decipher it.
Many Victorians joked about hoardings on which posters had been put
over others to produce amusing messages. E. S. Turner gives examples of
the oddities of fly-posting remarked upon by Victorians: ‘Mr. J. L. Toole
will − PUNCH every Wednesday – the Rev. Dr. Parker.’74 What we find is
that the advertisers themselves picked up on the unpredictable fate of the
physical medium of language – paper and ink and their vulnerability to
weather or to defacement or to the whimsical readings and inattentions of
passers-by – and from this formed an understanding of language’s sliding,
shifting nature and used it to effect in their own copy. Thus we find an
advertisement for Moses the tailors which announces in alarmist fashion,
‘The Duke of Wellington Shot’ only to continue the sentence by adding ‘a
glance of admiration at our hats’.75 This example reveals an appreciation of
the power of chance manipulations, such jokes often providing an échap-
patoire for unacceptable feelings such as violence or sexual desire. Apart
from the montage of sentences, and the fragmentation which this suggests,
certain sentences were left to stand out alone and offer themselves up for
scrutiny. Some advertisers used the technique of fixing high flown intel-
lectual quotations cut up into separate words and left on trees or engraved
on rocks which formed mysterious messages once collected and rearranged.
These interpretations of the language of the walls, the accidental witticisms
of advertising language, as well as the latter’s propensity for punning, is a
regular subject of comment in the writings of journalists.76
In Punch on 2 July 1864 there is a cartoon entitled ‘Suggestive Advertise-
ment – Families Supplied in Casks and Bottles’, which takes a slogan – one
of the thousands printed or painted all over the city – and makes a joke of it
[Fig. 5].77 The cartoon shows mothers, fathers and children all disguised as,
or trapped in, casks and bottles. Some are being bludgeoned on the head to
knock them into bottles; others are being carried off in barrels for delivery.
28 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

Figure 5 ‘Families Supplied in Casks and Bottles’, Punch, 1864

Source: British Library.

All social types are brought together but men and women, children and
adults are separated. The play on the expression ‘supplied in’ is obvious
here. The first meaning (casks and bottles are supplied by us to families who
need them) is replaced by an alternative meaning (families themselves can
be supplied to you placed in casks and bottles). The cartoon demonstrates a
voluntary ‘misunderstanding’ or ‘misinterpretation’ of the sentence in order
to produce a joke in the form of an absurd vision of families packaged and
sold as items.
The first thing we might say here is that this translates a particular urban
experience of language in which the subject is met with written statements
all around, which, because of the way they are gratuitously arranged – often
isolated from a context, or read fleetingly (they are moving or the reader is) –
have become semantically labile or ‘suggestive’ as the journalist intimates
in the title ‘Suggestive Advertisements’. The use of the word ‘suggestive’
to describe the advert points to an awareness of the elasticity of interpret-
ation and its ability to suggest meanings other than the one intended by the
writer. When an advertiser puts his copy out there on a wall or in a page of
advertisements, his language will ‘do its own thing’ and create meanings
never dreamt of by the seller of casks and bottles. Here the joke is based
 The Language of the Walls 29

on syllepsis or the play on identity, phonic or graphic. Syllepsis is close to

antanaclasis, which is a pun in which a word is repeated with a different
meaning, or rather whose meaning alters upon repetition. An example is ‘If
you aren’t fired with enthusiasm, you’ll be fired with enthusiasm’. In syllep-
sis the word only appears once and must be read twice; in our example the
repetition of ‘supplied in’ comes by means of the illustration which obliges
the reader to reread the sentence in a different way.78 We thus see that lan-
guage has become more visible with advertising – that is, language’s func-
tionings are suddenly more obvious since they are pasted up, paraded before
us as if they were chalked up on a blackboard by a teacher. At the same
time, our daily language which we ‘inhabit’ and take for granted becomes
suddenly strange to us. In the reactions to advertising in Punch, we see how
dead metaphors come alive to us once they are on the walls – a concern of
much of the journalism on advertising which suggests that the new ‘per-
pendicular’ writing had done something to our relationship to the written
word. Language is less a purveyor of truth and more a game of endless pro-
liferating half-truths, disseminating way beyond the word of God or the ser-
iousness of the literary canon – a free-for-all in which linguistic play rather
than exegesis is de rigueur.
Secondly, the illustration provides a vision of enslavement. The family
is both a consuming entity (already at this time advertising uses the fam-
ily as a ‘sell’ – one of the key units of commerce) and here a ‘consumed’
or ‘consumable’ one since the family is shown to be ‘goods’ supplied like
so many bottles to those who would buy. People, it tells us, can be bought
and sold and indeed consumed – even eaten, since the cartoon has canni-
balistic overtones (the casks and bottles are containers for food and drink
such as salted hams or beer). The strangeness of the cartoon, its dreamlike
quality (a perfect example of a rebus which might be interpreted back
into a coherent sentence), is perhaps less arbitrary than one might at first
think. The way the cartoonist has chosen to interpret the advertising slo-
gan is to give it a violent twist. The people figured here are prisoners of
their receptacles, some crying and lamenting, others being squashed and
reduced so that they will fit into the bottles. The woman waving goodbye
is to be separated from her husband or father. These are confined people,
powerless commodities to be sold on the market. In the last analysis it is,
of course, just a joke. But the act of joking tells us certain things. The joke
of course is in the sudden absurdity of the vision that a quite ordinary
sentence can throw up if read outside the intentions of the author (who
merely wishes to sell casks and bottles to families), and not in the polit-
ical reading of that absurdity; Punch readers were obviously not meant
to receive a political message from the cartoon. What is interesting here,
however, is that, in sabotaging the sentence, the speaker/writer reveals not
a hidden agenda of the advertising slogan itself but an effect of language,
which is to capture the reader at a certain ideological place. Given Punch’s
30 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

editorial line of social satire we can imagine that the slogan and its inter-
pretation via the cartoon reveal a desire to show us our own imprisonment
not within the confines of society as slaves to capitalism but within the
confines of the sentence – our inevitable capture by it and involvement
in its coercions. This sense of being hailed by advertising and coerced is
expressed in the cartoon. The slogan directs us to the recognition that we
are part of a family and families have the habit of buying casks and bottles
which are ‘supplied’ to them regularly and always (this is the way of the
world and you to whom we address this slogan are part of that ‘family’).
To read the slogan is to be bottled or casked yourself in a certain place in
the sentence, ready for sale.
The joke is a means by which the unthinkable is thought, by which new
realities might come into being: we need only consider E. S. Turner’s comment
on the fact that Punch made a sarcastic joke about advertising on umbrellas
and that ‘the suggestion was gratefully put into practice’.79 Thus does the
virtual, the written, allow the advent of new social mechanisms: in this case
that people are to be packaged henceforth like goods, to be marshalled, to
be separated from their loved ones, to lose their identity, and be placed in
groupings according to age and sex, branded and dispatched. There is an
insidious and sinister subtext to the cartoon which foresees or uncovers the
industrialized processing of human beings – the cartoon thus speaks a truth
about society as it is and offers a nightmarish vision of what it might be.
Thus we see that advertising text can be made to speak against itself, can
be made to come up with values and truths which differ vastly from those
intended. It is a self-subverting system and needs only a certain type of
reader to produce or unravel through interpretation its possible meanings.
There is no act of defacing here or physical sabotage, only an act of read-
ing. The city dweller becomes aware that his reading is paramount in the
transmission of the text and that any act of reading may well amount to
a sabotage or enrichment of the message. What is necessary is an initial
irreverence on the part of a reader who understands and exploits (as the
journalists of Punch so often do) the dependence of the speaker/writer on
the good will of the hearer/reader to ‘understand’ the text. There is little
cooperation on the part of Punch with the writers they lampoon and this is
what made them so entertaining to the public. What they were very good
at – part of the image of the group of fatuous (public) schoolboys which they
cultivated – was answering back. We see the addressee misbehaving and the
reader writing back.80
In his Interpretation as Pragmatics, Lecercle describes in Lacanian terms the
situation of communication which we are studying: ‘the addressee is con-
voked, ascribed a place in dialogue, from which he will have to answer, even
if the object of his answer is to deny that he occupies such a place’.81 This
path of ascription and denial is the one which the Punch cartoonist has fol-
lowed and which allows him to write back by recontextualizing the slogan.
 The Language of the Walls 31

In a series of maxims which accompany his ‘ALTER’ model82 of interpret-

ation, Lecercle brings together a number of concepts which are useful in our
understanding of how advertising slogans are read. The first is ‘indirection’,
which underlines the fact that the speaker has no mastery over her own
discourse and therefore a perfect reconstruction by the hearer is impossible.
The second, close to the first, is ‘vagueness’, while the third, ‘recontextuali-
sation’, is borrowed from Ricoeur and could be given the Derridean name
of ‘iterability’: ‘the text must be capable of de-contextualisation, in order to
be re-contextualised in a new situation, for that is what the act of reading
is about’.83 Punning is an example of this recontextualization; what the
utterer would like to mean is entirely different from what his or her utter-
ance means, since the readers who come after recontextualize it with each
new reading. Derrida’s notion of ‘différance’ comes next;84 this concept says
that there is no iteration without alteration, as in the case of the ‘Families
supplied’, which shows us that author and reader are separated by a tem-
poral gap so that meaning is always deferred. The act of reading involves
an agonistic relationship which is ‘made up of verbal struggles and games
rather than cooperative and irenic’.85 Reading and interpreting are thus acts
more akin to translation and intervention than a direct ‘riddle-solving’ to
discover the truth. We see clearly how the Punch journalist intervenes in the
sentence he reads and reinscribes it. He does not cooperate with the utter-
ance but retranslates it, shouldering intention aside. The last and eighth
maxim involves the way in which ‘L’ (Language) and ‘E’ (Encyclopaedia)
form the conjuncture of each successive act of interpretation influencing
the way the reader will take up a slogan and recontextualize it. It is not by
chance that the cartoonist chose to interpret the sentence as he did, since
history is seeing the universalizing of the notion of the family and its status
as the basic unit of commerce and production – and this notion had mani-
festly already passed into the ‘encyclopedia’.86
Finally, we need to return to the primary motivation of this piece, which
is the making of a joke. Answering back or ‘recontextualising’ is one of
the pleasures and powers involved in the joke. Freud’s study of the ‘Witz’
and Lacan’s rereading of this text stress the pleasure involved in bringing
together signifiers from very distinct semantic fields and thus being able
to make connections which ‘serious’ thought would carefully avoid.87 The
joke allows these pleasurable links to be made in the face of the inhibiting
criticism of logical thought and moral judgement. It is a defence mech-
anism which deflects the force of an utterance and allows room for man-
oeuvre on the part of the hearer, who thereby transforms her or himself
into speaker. It becomes a factor in the empowerment of the subject and
allows recognition of desire which is normally suppressed by the signi-
fier. It is in the failure of the logic of speech, in the halts and stumbles
of its structures that desire appears (in the case of the ‘Families supplied’
cartoon, the desire of the cartoonist to flout the presuppositions which
32 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

the slogan implies). That advertising needs to be answered, to be warded

off, so to speak, brings us on to the problem of its constraining violence.
The consequences of not being able to make a joke or to use a joke in the
defence of one’s person are grave and have been demonstrated in many
psychoanalytic studies.88 Thus the discourse of advertising seems to afford
an opportunity of manipulating language so that it affords new energies,
escape routes and a form of insurrection within language. It is not only
language which is seen to misbehave but also a subject who must misbe-
have within language in order to wrest back some autonomy in the face of
an overwhelming force.89

Forms of subjection

We must now consider how the human subject is talked about and imag-
ined in its relations with advertising and by extension ‘the language of the
walls’. This is a complex relationship since, if we find constant complaints
from individuals who feel they are being violently coerced, we can also read
accounts of how ‘the writing on the walls’ nourishes and indeed builds the
reader of them. To understand the important connection between these two
stances we will first explore the sense of being force-fed which is expressed
by those writing of advertising.

Adverts choose us and pursue us

In the mid-nineteenth century, text was no longer something which had to
be sought out and paid for dearly; it now sought out the subject, moved into
the line of his or her gaze, and asked to be read. This active nature of text is
described by the hero of a recent French detective novel who suddenly real-
izes how the serial killer he is tracking (who is not a literary man) must have
come across the poem which was to become the structuring logic behind
his crimes: ‘All he had to do was take the metro, all he had to do was to sit
down and look around. And have the text fall into his lap, as if destiny were
sending him a personal message ... No, it was the poem that chose him.’90
Victorian commentators express just this sense of being chosen by the text
around them. Chosen as a target, pursued and even physically assaulted.
This constant calling to the individual, this persistent getting of his atten-
tion takes on different degrees of force and violence. Louis Althusser’s
description of the functioning of ideology imagines a policeman calling
out to a passer-by: ‘Hey, you there!’ Althusser suggests that ideology acts or
functions in such a way that it ‘ “recruits” subjects among the individuals ...’.
This notion of recruiting helps us imagine the work of a text or image as
it inveigles or embraces the reader, drawing him into a certain ideological
net. At some level, the articles we will be examining show an awareness of
this. Althusser stresses that ideology recruits all those it touches: ‘(it recruits
them all) ... by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation
 The Language of the Walls 33

or hailing’.91 This hailing takes many forms: Punch in the late 1840s com-
plains of the adverts which ‘lined and stuffed’ omnibuses which were often
ads for medicines accompanied by gory testimonials. The journalist sees
himself and others as being obliged to submit to an aggression of words:

How will you like sitting for an hour opposite to a pleasant list of the
wonderful cures by some Professor’s Ointment? Or how will ladies like
being stared in the face, all the way from Brentford to the Bank, with
an elaborate detail of all the diseases which Old Methusaleh’s Pill pro-
fesses to be a specific for? The testimonials of these gifted gentleman
are as little noted for their delicacy as for their truth, and do not form
the kind of reading we should exactly prescribe to the fairer portion of
the public who patronize the omnibuses ... Do in mercy allow us to ride
for a day’s pleasure to the Bank to receive our dividends without com-
pelling us to sit vis-à-vis to Moses and Son, or having Rowland’s Kalydor
perpetually thrown in our faces. Let us be a nation of shopkeepers as
much as we please but there is no necessity we should become a nation
of advertisers.92

The advert is given active and intelligent status here. It is an aggressor which
‘throws’ information in the face, which corrupts the fair sex and which
threatens to transform those who are obliged to consume it into advertisers
themselves. The vampiric nature of the adverts is hinted at in the last line
in that once bitten the ordinary shopkeeper becomes advertiser. A distinc-
tion is being made between a ‘nation of shopkeepers’ (the affectionate adop-
tion by the British of Napoleon’s famous insult with its connotations of dull,
down-to-earth commercial practice), and the implied decadence and excess of
advertising.93
It is the advert which gazes at the passer-by and encourages the return of
that gaze; ladies are described as being ‘stared in the face’ by the adverts rather
than staring themselves. There are many such descriptions of advertising as
having the capacity to ‘catch’ the eye. Adverts often contain eyes – especially
those for spectacles and telescopes. One cartoon of the time depicts adver-
tising as an ‘Exhibition’ of eyes. It is called ‘The Billstickers’ Exhibition’ and
makes the joke that advertising is the new cultural event, and should print
a daily catalogue for the instruction of passers-by [Fig. 6].94 We are shown a
huge hoarding covered with text and eyes with a group of enthralled onlook-
ers; we are reminded here of the Aleph in Borges’ story and the image of
all-seeing eyes locked into other eyes in never-ending circuits of reflection
and refraction.95 Billsticking is described as a ‘powerful counter-attraction’
to exhibitions of art in official galleries and capable of seducing artists into
joining the ranks of those who draw and write for advertising.
Advertisements which block our vision or our paths and force the gaze
to confront them are shown in cartoons such as one concerning ‘street
34 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

Figure 6 ‘The Billstickers’ Exhibition’, Punch, 1847

Source: British Library.

nuisances’, in which a politician attempts to fight a series of monstrous per-

sonified texts blocking the thoroughfare.96 Another article speaks of ‘letters
six feet long’ and being hemmed in with ‘bold black letter assertion’.97 This
formulation is akin to the expression ‘dictatorial perpendicular’ used by
Benjamin in his study of the printed text in the city, in which he speaks of
the plight of the printed word: ‘Printing, having found in the book a refuge
in which to lead an autonomous existence, is pitilessly dragged out onto the
street by advertisements [that] force the printed word entirely into the dic-
tatorial perpendicular.’98 Boldness and violence are seen as a feature of the
image, especially in illustrations on the covers of magazines, which acted
as advertisements for the magazine itself. One commentator in 1859 made
the following comment: ‘The art employed upon these pictures is proper
to the subject. The effects are broad, bold, and unscrupulous. There is an
appropriate fierceness in the wild cutting and slashing of the block; and the
letter press always falls short of the haggard and ferocious expression of the
engraving.’99 The terms used show an appreciation of the violence of the act
of appeal exercised by the image on the public.
There is a sense in which, wherever the eye roved, a space for inscrip-
tion might be found. Edward Lloyd, the owner of Lloyd’s Newspapers
 The Language of the Walls 35

whose advertisements for Lloyd’s were regularly featured in the Dickens’s

Advertisers, at one time stamped ads onto already minted coins (mutilating
official coinage) and even paid his workers with them so that they might cir-
culate all the faster. He was finally asked to desist from this practice by the
government.100 This example shows us something important concerning the
relationship of advertising to the state: Jennifer Wicke explains that adver-
tising was born alongside literature, as a complement to its needs, advertis-
ing growing as printers had to establish and announce themselves and so
‘articulate a new mode of social production not yet controlled by Church
or State’.101 Yet at the same time the official spaces of inscription of Church
and State were undergoing colonization. If coins could become adverts, so
a butcher’s wife used her husband’s gravestone to advertise the fact that she
was still in the butchering business: the engraved inscription even included
the address of the shop.102 Other sacred surfaces invaded by advertising
included church steeples and public monuments, and in one article titled
‘A Nation of Advertisers’ there is a lament that all areas of national pride or
religious awe were being colonized and that there was no wilderness left
where advertising could not reach – even the North Pole had fallen vic-
tim to it; an illustration is provided of a group of polar bears watching the
posting of bills on a ‘Polar Advertising Station’. The word ‘invasion’ is used
in the accompanying text to describe the activity of advertisements which
have ‘crept under bridges – have planted themselves right in the middle of the
Thames – have usurped the greatest thoroughfares’. These are all terms sug-
gesting an unhealthy and rampant plant which is against nature.103
The fear of the invasion of the public space and of the last wildernesses
on earth is perhaps less acute than that surrounding the invasion of the
private space of the home. The trespass on areas of intimacy – the drawing
room for example – is greatly spoken of in the journalism of the time. The
author of Puffs and Mysteries of 1855 (a commentary on advertising practices
in The Times) describes the appearance of advertising ‘on a dead wall’ but
also in ‘a lively conversation’. He remarks in his preface that advertising
follows us wherever we go and appears in the most intimate places ‘... even
our drawing-rooms are not always free from their intrusion’.104 Advertising
implants itself in our very conversations. In Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and
South (1855), protagonist Margaret Hale notices that the discourse of ladies
around her is charged with the descriptions of commodities:

Why, they took nouns that were signs of things which gave evidence of
wealth – housekeepers, under-gardeners, extent of glass, valuable lace,
diamonds, and all such things; and each one formed her speech so as to
bring them all in, in the prettiest accidental manner possible.105

These are miniature self-advertisements in which words are ‘signs of things’

and designate a world of goods and practices beyond them. The ladies
36 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

transform their speech into billboards, recreating themselves as verbal adver-

tising hoardings. In turn, Margaret experiences the words of these society
women as an imposition in which she herself becomes a surface to receive
their imprint. This is the Victorian version of William Blake’s ‘mind-forged
manacles’ in his poem of 1794, ‘London’: the dictating voices within print
have become restraints on freedom of thought, a form of brainwashing.106
The intrusion into the home via telegraphs (which were normally received
only in emergencies) can be found as early as 1864 in the form of an angry
letter to The Times denouncing this practice and which is recognizable to us
as an early protest against junk mail.107 Thus remaining barricaded in one’s
home did not prevent the city and its advertising coming in. The very pre-
serves of privacy and leisure were sometimes shown to be less safe havens
than places of indoctrination and coercion. This violent hailing takes many
forms and elicits a variety of reactions, yet it is when the body of the indi-
vidual is at stake that we see some of the most powerful responses.

Written on the body

I would like to continue to quote Blake’s ‘London’ and consider for a moment
the poet’s encounter with the faces of the urban crowd on which he sees
‘marks of weakness marks of woe’. These marks – of misery, disease, age – are
carried by the passers-by as emblems of their suffering. The clean and unsul-
lied faces depicted in text and image elsewhere by Blake (in his image Albion
for example and in the ‘Songs of Innocence’), are here written upon, engraved
and etched. Were Blake to perform the same perambulation through London
in the mid-nineteenth century it is certain he would encounter similarly
damaged faces, yet he would also notice new ‘marks’ in the form of writing
on the bodies of those he passed. We are familiar in the twenty-first century,
thanks in great part to the graffiti of anti-advertising groups, to the notions
of being ‘branded’ by ‘brands’. A recent defacing of a trainers advertisement
in the Paris Metro played on the word marque (or brand) and marqué comme un
veau (to be branded like a calf/like cattle). This notion of imprinting was felt as
early as the 1840s (described in many articles in Punch and in Le Charivari in
Paris). The self-turned-ad is a source of humour in Punch, but the keenness of
the degradation of such practices is registered nonetheless. A cartoon of 1864
shows a new form of advertising: a man carrying a paper lamp on his head on
which advertisements are printed. The cartoon is entitled ‘The Lowest Depth’
[Fig. 7]. An old acquaintance asks the humiliated man how he came ‘to this’?
It is a comment on the ease with which the passer-by could be inveigled into
advertising, but also a sign of the way in which the human body was increas-
ingly becoming a prosthesis to advertising. There is the suggestion that our
relationship to advertising does not leave us untouched but enters us and
damages us – it sucks out something and leaves us with less of our human-
ity: cartoons in Punch constantly depict human beings become commodity
or commodities become human as the cartoons of Grandville were doing
 The Language of the Walls 37

Figure 7 ‘The Lowest Depth’, Punch, 1864

Source: British Library.

in France.108 Men’s backs and children’s clothes are seen as so many sites for
exhibition. One cartoon shows a broad-backed man on whose back is writ-
ten ‘Billstickers Beware’. The caption is simply ‘Wise precaution’109 – the idea
being that if you stand still long enough you will be used as an advertising
space [Fig. 8]. Another article headed ‘Juvenile Advertisers’ suggests ‘turning
our juveniles to account, by putting them into pictorial pinafores’ with slo-
gans which will be all the more efficient ‘being conveyed to us through the
agency of unconscious innocence’.110 The tone of the article is to ridicule the
excesses of advertising and its readiness to exploit sections of the population
one might expect to be exempt from such attentions. The violent occupation
of space and the need to preserve areas of unmarked space is explored in art-
icles such as one entitled ‘Advertising’ accompanied by a cartoon depicting
a mass of umbrellas imprinted with brand names and slogans [Fig. 9].111 The
writer, having complained of the invasion of advertising in omnibuses, under
38 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

Figure 8 ‘Wise precaution’, Punch, 1864

Source: British Library.

Figure 9 ‘Advertising Ingenuity’, Punch, 1847

Source: British Library.
 The Language of the Walls 39

bridges, and on perambulating vans, then exclaims that ‘our umbrellas are
still left blank’, and thus are a terrain to be exploited. He facetiously suggests a
system in which passers-by will be remunerated if they agree to walk through
London carrying an advertising umbrella. The figures in the cartoons are
reduced to legs scurrying under the umbrellas. There are no faces. If this sug-
gests the dehumanizing aspects of text carried on the body, it is also a predic-
tion of a commercial practice which is now quite common.
If every area of the human body is colonized as a place of exhibition –
backs, chests, hats and, later in the century, even the tongue112 – then it is the
sandwich man who best exemplifies this sense of the human body enslaved
to advertising and whose plight provokes the most responses. William Smith
comments that sandwich men and their texts were not efficient as advertis-
ing because they appeared abused, down-trodden and ‘seedy-looking’, mere
moveable hoardings or walls.113 Yet, worse than this, their status was that of
the most abject of human figures: the one who carries a message he cannot
read, which is not of his own making and which has been imposed upon
him. There is a certain humiliation in being sandwiched between text which
is interpellating others, which subjugates your person in the eyes of others
but to which you cannot respond. This plight is recorded with humour by
Punch in various poems by and about sandwich men.114 One Punch cartoon
depicts the revenge of the sandwich man: he is following a customer out of
a tailor’s shop and is carrying a board describing the cloth, cut and cost of
the item worn by the customer walking ahead of him. He is enjoying the hil-
arity of passers-by as they laugh at the customer who is unaware he is being
followed by an advertisement for the very clothes he is wearing. The humili-
ation (for once) involves another party. We can also find a poem written in
the style of an ill-educated Sandwich or Board-Man entitled ‘The Sandwiches
Petition’.115 It speaks of the 700 board-men who lost their jobs after an order
of the ‘Police Commissioners’ who were against ‘perambulating advertisers’.
The ill-spelt poem is a plea to retain their employment, however demean-
ing it may be. It is a send-up of the situation but also a strangely poignant
description of the low status of the men. It starts off with ‘Pity the sorrows of
an animated Sandwich’ and continues with a series of puns concerning the
weight of letters and the pain of carrying text:

The Crushers they are down on us, the pavement ‘cos we cumbers,
The world – wus luck, ‘as always found men o’letters in the the way:
And though we’re bound in boards, and keep coming out in numbers,
We’re hanything but pop’lar periodickles of the day …
With a letter of the Halfabet above your shoulders braced,
Just parade the Great Metropolis in Capitals, like we,
Or try a pair of posters a pulling round your waist,
As we do, for a bob, all day, and a deal bored you would be!
40 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

The men ‘keep coming out in numbers’ which is a pun on the serial pro-
duction of sandwich men who are as easily produced as serial publications,
but who are anything but popular since ‘coming out’ in numbers carries
connotations of disease, of coming out in a rash – so that the text they
carry is associated with an infection which breaks out over the whole body.
This brings us back to Blake’s ‘marks’ (suggesting the scars of syphilis or
smallpox as well as those of melancholy and misery). The sandwich men
are distinctly fallen ‘men o’letters’ whose only contact with letters is being
‘bound in boards’ like a book – the word ‘bound’ bringing together the act
of reading with chains and imprisonment. The burdensome ‘letters of the
Halfabet’ are carried painfully ‘above your shoulders braced’ and the gen-
eral sense of being purveyors of writing is one of constriction and discom-
fort. By showing a sandwich man being active in his role or by allowing him
to write a poem – to be a speaker instead of the mute support of text – is a
way of wresting back some autonomy in the face of the text which writes
him, of detaching text from the body in order to rewrite the self.
All of these responses imply that the marking of advertisements on the
human body is not skin deep but is part of a powerful process of the incorp-
oration of certain norms. The individual does not remain untouched by
the words he carries on himself. Like the placards carried by victims of the
auto-da-fé on which their sins were listed for the eyes of all, these writings are
shown to weigh upon the bearer who must bear the names. Text appended
to a human figure without consent is an age-old form of humiliation and
subjugation and persisted in the punitive practices of Victorian educational
establishments: Jane in Jane Eyre and David in David Copperfield are both
forced to wear placards as punishment in their schools. The ‘A’ for ‘adultery’
worn by Hester Prynne in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter is evidence of an
earlier form of social curse or condemnation operated through writing on
the human body – there to be read by others and to silence the wearer.116
Yet in the articles and cartoons we have considered, response is made not
with angry remonstrance but with humour. There are ways of neutralizing
the ubiquity and force of slogans by imagining excesses above and beyond
those already at work in society. The rejoinder is important as a form of
insurrection: ‘Recontextualisation breaks the chain of authority, it allows
the interpellated subject to be displaced, if ever so slightly, from the place
ascribed by interpellation: such is the content of imposture.’117 The body
thus colonized must react, and does react in producing the very cartoons
and writings on the state of the body under capitalism which we have just
seen. These are visions of bodies which are ‘assujettis’ in Althusser’s terms –
that is, captured at a place. Both Jean-Jacques Lecercle and Judith Butler take
the material nature of hailing, the physical power of the hailing voice on
the body seriously: they treat ‘the interpellating speech act as a bodily act
exerting force, in a direct causal relationship, on the bodies of both addres-
sor and addressee’.118 If the lament as a response to advertising is common,
 The Language of the Walls 41

then so too are the jokes we have just considered, which redirect or rather
refract the energies of advertising.

Injury and guilt

If the urban dweller of the mid-nineteenth century was not actually in the
public place looking at advertisements, he or she could read about them.
Dickens’s little-known essay on the posting of bills in London is called quite
simply ‘Bill-Sticking’ and was published in 1851 in his Household Words. It
is a description of an encounter with the man responsible for much of the
billsticking in London (quite literally the gluing of adverts to walls) and of
his attempt to protect himself from the very bills he is responsible for stick-
ing by creating for himself a secret bower, a cocoon quite shut off from the
assault of advertising.
Dickens creates a narrator who is a flâneur and self-styled ‘collector of facts’
who starts the piece by examining the surfaces of the city as he perambu-
lates through it. The interesting element for us in our understanding of how
advertising is seen to subjugate the subject is Dickens’s immediate associ-
ation of advertising with guilt. He opens the piece by saying: ‘If I had an
enemy whom I hated – which God Forbid! – and if I knew of something
which sat heavy on his conscience, I think I would introduce that something
into a Posting-Bill.’ He then says that he would have the posters stuck all
over the city and that he cannot imagine a more terrible revenge: ‘I should
haunt him, by this means, night and day.’119 The narrator comments upon
the fact that adverts are infinitely replaceable, that their message is powerful
since, although not written indelibly in stone in one place, their message can
be read everywhere again and again. Advertising would make a wonderful
instrument of torture for the guilty man; posters could be made with tacit
references to his crime and placed all over the city. A vision of what we would
now call urban paranoia is built up in an enumeration of all the places those
posters might be stuck:

Thus if my enemy passed an uninhabited house, he would see his con-

science glaring down on him from the parapets, and peeping up at him
from the cellars. If he took a dead wall in his walk, it would be alive with
reproaches. If he sought refuge in an omnibus, the panels thereof would
become Belshazzar’s palace to him. If he took boat, in a wild endeavour
to escape, he would see the fatal words lurking under the arches of the
bridges of the Thames. If he walked the streets with downcast eyes, he
would recoil from the very stones of the pavement, made eloquent by
black-lamp lithograph. If he drove or rode, his way would be blocked up
by enormous vans, each proclaiming the same words over and over again
from its whole extent of surface. Until, having gradually grown thinner
and paler, and having at last totally rejected food, would miserably per-
ish, and I should be revenged. (283)
42 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

We discover in this quotation several phenomena which we encountered

earlier: the active gaze of the advertisement which follows our movements
and seeks us out (‘glaring’, ‘peeping’, ‘lurking’, ‘proclaiming’), as well as
the idea of adverts covering all available surfaces, obstructing the passage
of passers-by and reiterating their message. But the thinking behind these
phenomena goes further or at least makes explicit what remains tacit in
the commentaries we have seen latterly: Dickens ironically suggests that
advertising is fatal and can lead to death by interpellation. We cannot turn
away from the Medusa-like gaze of these texts, and even downcast eyes will
only encounter other advertisements. There is an understanding here of
the effect of iteration as a form of brainwashing, but more importantly a
sense of the ‘bad news’ which the walls bring us. The writing on the wall
of Belshazzar’s palace brings news of death during a feast, a divine message
of doom in the middle of a banquet; Dickens’s reference to this episode in
the Bible hints at a sense of death in plenty – or rather that excessive plenty
brings with it its own form of death knell.
Dickens then describes the famous names which appeared regularly in the
advertisement pages of magazines or on walls: Holloway’s Pills, Carburn’s
hair oil, Moses and son gentleman’s suits, Mechi fancy goods, Dakin’s tea,
Du Barry’s constipation medicine and the makers of wigs or hair restorer; he
mentions them in the same random torrent as one sees them in magazines
or on walls but imagines all of them as potential persecutors whose names
follow one in a sinister fashion as if one had slighted them personally in
some way and they were seeking revenge:

Has any man a self-reproachful thought associated with pills, or oint-

ment? What an avenging spirit to that man is PROFESSOR HOLLOWAY!
Have I sinned in oil? CARBURN pursues me. Have I a Dark remembrance
associated with any gentlemanly garments, bespoke or ready made?
MOSES AND SON are on my track. Did I ever aim a blow at a defenceless
fellow-creature’s head? That head eternally being measured for a wig ...
undoes me. Have I no sore places in my mind which MECHI touches –
which NICOLL probes – which no registered article whatever lacerates?
Does no discordant note within me thrill responsive to mysterious watch-
words, as ‘Revalenta Arabica’. (284)

The eye is literally forced to consume the proper name. These names are
emblems for things which are desirable (a veritable banquet of goods), yet
the repetition of the brand names is presented as a mental assault which
is described in terms of a physical attack – a probing and lacerating, a sur-
gical intervention, a literal branding of the brand name upon the brain.
We might evoke Baudelaire’s dream recorded by Benjamin for the Arcades
Project in which things are portrayed as fatal, vicious, violent: Baudelaire
is falling down a shaft (as Alice does in Alice in Wonderland) and goods,
 The Language of the Walls 43

saleable items are falling with him: idols in wood, iron, and gold cut and
bruise him as he falls, the scar on the body echoing a scar on the retina.120
The proper name described by Dickens becomes a violence, both a weapon
which hits out and a door which sucks in, the proper name leading to a
registered article. What he unfolds here is the way in which advertising
lives out a fantasy of naming which is part of the fallen nature of human
language. Benjamin’s essay ‘On Language as Such and on the Language of
Man’ (1916) talks of the melancholy of post-Babel naming in which names
are ‘wilting’: ‘In divine language things have their proper names, but in
human languages they are overnamed – which is the linguistic essence of
guilt and melancholy.’121 What we see here is the proliferation and repeti-
tion of names which have lost their contact with things. The proper name
constitutes a deadliness of repetition: in the Parry painting studied earlier
the poster for ‘The Destruction of Pompeii every evening’ suggests a modern
form of repletion and of simulacra associated with the end of a civilization
in which terrible events are made banal by repetition.122 But, more import-
ant, what Dickens’s text is suggesting is a link between being hailed in the
street by posters and the sense of doom which ensues.
Butler’s rereading of Althusser’s text on interpellation builds on the
moment of hailing that we have been considering. Her idea, following
Althusser, is that the formation of the subject is dependent on power, on
being ‘assujetti’. And indeed she posits that there is no subject without a pas-
sionate attachment to subjection.123 In her chapter entitled ‘Circuits of Bad
Conscience’ she imagines, through a reading of Nietzsche and Freud, that
prohibition of all kinds (such as that imagined by Dickens in the accusations
of the advertising slogans) creates the space of the formation of the subject.
It creates recoil or redoubling, which is a turning back on oneself in which
one becomes conscious of oneself as a subject. In Nietzsche the will turns
back on itself (the ‘instinct for freedom forcibly made latent’124), while in Freud
conscience is formed through this same reflexivity – in relation to paranoia
and narcissism. Nietzsche’s account of ‘Bad Conscience’ in On the Genealogy
of Morals (1887) also involves a sense of violence: ‘If something is to stay in
the memory, it must be burned in; only that which never ceases to hurt stays
in the memory.’125 Butler also evokes the discussions of the relation between
debt and guilt and the way in which the punishment of the debtor presup-
poses the ‘model of the promising animal’ which cannot come into being
without the terror produced by punishment. She formulates from her read-
ing of Nietzsche the idea that ‘the pressure exerted by the walls of society
forces an internalization which culminates in the production of the soul’.126
Her use of the word ‘walls’ to express the pressures and confinement exerted
by society on the individual helps us to formulate a definition of the walls
of advertising: ‘the language of the walls’ is a form of dictatorial power.
The prohibitions of the walls (in our case the walls are the inscribed walls
of advertising) are thus seen in terms of laws which repress and direct. Yet
44 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

these walls also constitute us and procure pleasure, as when the Freudian
libido comes under the censor of the law to emerge as the sustaining affect
of that law, as an attachment to this thwarting of gratification.
Although the constraints of the written walls in some way threaten us, as
Dickens shows, there is a compulsive need to follow them. It is Butler who
attempts to explain such phenomena in her chapter ‘Conscience doth make
Subjects of us All’ in which she goes back to Althusser’s hailing policeman
who is an officer of ‘the Law’. The officer imagined by Althusser makes a
call to which the individual responds by saying ‘Here I am.’ In a similar
way the persecuting adverts of Dickens seem to call out ‘You are guilty’ or,
more generally, ‘You are the one concerned with this hair oil/coat/tea.’ And
to this the individual responds ‘Yes, it is me.’ This pattern Butler calls the
‘appropriation of guilt’. But she asks herself why anyone should turn round
in the first place and that there must already be inscribed in that individual
a desire to turn round. To turn around, as we have already seen, is a turning
back on oneself, which is the movement of conscience. The individual is a
consenting subject already guilty before the reprimand, desiring to be looked
at, to receive the recognition of the name, of any name, false though it may
be. Butler tells us that ‘[i]n “Ideology” guilt and conscience operate impli-
citly in relation to an ideological demand, an animating reprimand, in the
account of subject formation’.127 She underlines the way in which interpel-
lation is figured through the religious example in which subject formation
depends on ‘a passionate pursuit of a recognition which ... is inseparable from
a condemnation’.128 Thus the command of the law becomes a condemnation
which also procures gratification in terms of a response: one is ‘driven by a
love of the law which can only be satisfied by ritual punishment’ and leading
to ‘the passionate pursuit of the reprimanding recognition of the state’.129
This passionate pursuit described by Butler is shown by Dickens to be
both wearing and wearying. Thus the writing on the wall (like that in
Belshazzar’s palace) tells us of our own doom. The piece ends appropri-
ately enough with the narrator sitting upon a doorstep, feeling the worse
for drink but jokingly laying the blame on the advertising bills to which he
has been so close: ‘I refer these unpleasant effects, either to the paste with
which the posters were affixed to the van: which may have contained some
small portion of arsenic; or to the printer’s ink, which may have contained
some equally deleterious ingredient’ (293). The author is drunk with the
experience of proximity to this machine of interpellation. This equating of
text with poison might be placed within the ancient debate on the noxious
nature of writing itself and all its accoutrements. Such ‘poisoned’ ink is dele-
terious to the subject, who must protect himself from it.

Zones of anaesthesia
Dickens’s article also addresses the need to find shelter or respite from such
a situation, to find what Crary has called a ‘zone of anaesthesia’.130 His
 The Language of the Walls 45

reverie on the viciousness of the advert prepares us for his encounter with
the advertising van, inside which the advert-sticking King reclines. The van
that Dickens describes is a version of today’s ad vans but more cumbersome
and drawn by small horses unequal to the task of pulling the two adver-
tisement panels along and regularly causing traffic jams. The sides of the
panels formed a tent-like shape and created an empty centre and it is in this
space that Dickens meets the ‘King of the Bill-Stickers’. He depicts a convoy
of three such vans moving in ‘solemn procession’, the indifference of their
yawning and scratching drivers contrasting with the posters stuck to the
outsides of the ‘awful cars’ which scream ‘Robbery, fire, murder, ruin’, (285)
to sell newspapers. The King of the Bill-stickers is lying stretched upon the
floor and the narrator at first assumes he is a member of the public taken ill
by the violence of the messages displayed by the vans. Then he sees that he
is contentedly idling his time away smoking a pipe or ordering a pint of beer
or rum-and-water at the public house outside which the ‘cavalcade’ stops.
The man introduces himself as the inventor of the advertising van and as
having worked his way up through the billsticking industry. He invites the
narrator into the car and proceeds to give him a history of bills and adver-
tisement space in London and to explain his presence in the very vans he
himself designed. Having reached the top and had to stop, so to speak, the
King can now relax and enjoy a journey through the city without having to
see the products of his labour (the endless rows of advertising posters stuck
to walls), rather like a successful manufacturer who takes a house in the
country or in the suburbs, to avoid the ugliness of his place of industry:

[I]t was a new sensation to be jolting through the tumult of the city in
that secluded Temple, partly open to the sky, surrounded by the roar with-
out, and seeing nothing but the clouds. Occasionally, blows from whips
fell heavily on the Temple’s walls, when by stopping up the road longer
than usual, we irritated carters and coachmen to madness; but they fell
harmless upon us within and disturbed not the serenity of our peaceful
retreat. As I looked upward, I felt, I should imagine, like the Astronomer
Royal. I was enchanted by the contrast between the freezing nature of our
external mission on the blood of the populace, and the perfect compos-
ure reigning within those sacred precincts: where His Majesty, reclining
easily on his left arm, smoked his pipe and drank his rum-and-water from
his own side of the tumbler, which stood impartially between us. As I
looked down from the clouds and caught his royal eye, he understood my
reflections. ‘I have an idea,’ he observed with an upward glance, ‘of train-
ing scarlet runners across in the season, − making an arbour of it, − and
sometimes taking tea in the same according to the song.’ (287–288)

What sort of a sanctuary is being described here? We are in a shelter with

blank walls, an inner sanctum, a holy place or Temple which worships
46 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

the sky and its emptiness. There is a sense of magical protection from the
aggressive environment outside. The narrator evokes a sense of privileged
and peaceful contact with the heavens, quite in contrast to ‘the gigantic
admonitions we were then displaying to the multitude’ (289). Once again
Dickens equates the writing on the walls with the reprimand to which the
urban dweller is prey as he reads the slogans. The van ambles at human
pace, drawn by a horse; there is none of the speed of the train but only the
steady jolt of the stage coach. This adds to the anachronistic time and space
warp which the interior of the advertisement van represents. In the heart
of the storm lies peace. It is a pared-down space, like a domestic interior,
removed from the roar of the signifying city. The space is one of leisure
and not of work, and it has bucolic overtones with its scarlet runners and
handmade objects suggesting what Baudrillard calls the warm zones of the
antique and exotic with their proximity to childhood being quite remote
from the cold abstractions of the market.131
In many ways, the King of the Bills’ retreat fits Susan Stewart’s definition
of the miniature described as ‘a metaphor for the interior space and time
of the bourgeois subject’. It is narrative’s ‘longing for its place of origin’:
a doll’s house which enables the subject to construct a safe and control-
lable world and involves a nostalgia for ‘what has never existed except in
narrative.’132 When we are absorbed in the miniature world, which can be
model, painting or text, the outside world is ‘lost to us’, Stewart tells us. She
also evokes the notion of the closed-off space open to the sky which is part
of the Victorian love of ‘transformed relics of nature’, some often under
glass, and stresses that the function of the miniature is closely linked to a
nostalgia for pre-industrial labour, ‘a nostalgia for craft’.133 Stewart points
out that the Victorians were great miniature makers because it was the time
of ‘the height of a transformation of nature into culture’, of ‘repetition over
skill and part over whole’.134 The ‘Gigantic’, by contrast, is the public space
of the collective and of authority. It is a world of the poster admonishing
us, as Dickens says, from above. It is the world that the King of Bill Posters
has attempted to shut out. Thus we discover the need for an anaesthetic
of some kind, however momentary, to provide a position from which to
recover from such a ‘plague of fantasies’, a base from which either to deflect
or to refract speech – or simply to put the textual world on pause.135
Yet as King Bill shelters, he cannot bear to abandon his mission to create
yet more injunctions. The reference to the scarlet runners is of course ironic,
a jibe at the world which the scarlet flowers really evoke. They are runner
beans of course, whose natural habitat is not arcadia or an exotic island
but the allotment, the suburban garden at best. It is here that the seeming
escape from the world of exchange outside is turned on its head – for the
Sunday gardener with his beans is one who speaks of a respite from the
working week and not a life of primordial contact with the land. This is an
excursion, not a journey. The return to simplicity, to a space of the remaking
 The Language of the Walls 47

of the self after the pollution of commerce, shows itself to be just another
prelude to inscription: the scarlet runners are to be trained over the space
at the top of the van which is empty sky, and might be seen as the begin-
ning of a sentence, the start of a new captioning of space. The King of Bills
is sheltering in a space which is already in the process of commodification:
it is already telling us stories and selling us things. It is selling us the dream
of pre-commodified space distant from us in time: a three-legged stool is its
only furniture, the distant cousin of the milking stool and part of nostalgia
for use-value, the artisanal and unique. It is also selling us the Arabian Nights
(used in many adverts at the time) since the Arabian Prince is lying on the
ground, and the reader can imagine a hookah, not a rum-and-water, shared
by the two men. Social climbing is present in the reference to the tea in the
arbour – a bourgeois dream of gentility to which King Bill might aspire – a
reference already sold to the lower orders in the shape of a popular song
‘Come and Take Tea in the Arbour’.
That King Bill is a mere tourist of emptiness, desirous of getting back to
his mission, is amply illustrated in the King’s further retort:

‘And this is where you repose and think?’ said I. ‘And think,’ said he, ‘of
posters − walls − and hoardings’. We were both silent, contemplating the
vastness of the subject ... and [I] wondered whether this monarch ever
sighed to repair to the great wall of China, and stick bills all over it.136

When one considers that much of King Bill’s tale of advertisement sticking
has been about the struggle for space among the billstickers, this reference
constitutes a Bill Poster’s dream. The Great Wall of China is the wall to
end all walls and evokes the unlimited possibility of filling space, part of
the imperialism of advertising and the vision of a world become one huge
hoarding.
We might conclude here with a reference to Alain Corbin’s study of the
sea coast in nineteenth-century France and England called The Territory of
Emptiness (Le territoire du vide) but translated as The Lure of the Sea. It traces
the fantasies projected onto the space of the sea coast in France and Britain,
and the build-up of inscription on the coast, showing how the wilderness
or ‘territoire du vide’ finally becomes a ‘territoire du plein’, the gaze saturated
by buildings, shops, people, writing. Even the ocean is full of pleasure boats
(often surfaces for advertising) by the mid-nineteenth century. The last wil-
derness is written upon, the last hope of finding a place of emptiness gone.
We have seen how desert and polar waste, monument and fortification were
already being imagined as advertising space as early as the 1840s.
Dickens offers us a solution to this problem of saturation: the only place
of respite available to the modern urban dweller is in the eye of the storm,
in the centre of London, on the ‘inside’ of advertisement space – where one
is literally sandwiched between two adverts. His text offers certain images of
48 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

the way the subject might protect him or herself from advertising and even
live and thrive within advertising. If Dickens’s text here involves a certain
insurrection, a reaction against the advertising message, and a revelation of
the power of guilt within the scene of interpellation, then it also suggests
the way in which a subject might elude the worst excesses of advertising
by being comfortable in the middle of it. Dickens himself was quite com-
fortable as one of the great advertisers of his time. This situation implies
that an empty space, a space of respite from advertising text, is only the
reverse side of advertising, only a temporary cessation of the language of the
walls. That is, any zone of anaesthesia is merely an effect of the language
of the walls. Only through the language of the walls can a space which is
empty of it exist. Our fantasy of a zone without advertising, our dream of
a pre-advertisement space, is already, at this time, understood to be merely
an effect of the text we read; in other words, our reality is an always-already
represented space. Advertising is shown to structure the space we live in,
to create our experiences, and indeed to create us. This is a notion which
appears to be expressed, understood, and accepted by the mid-century and
is the subject of my next section.

The making of the subject

‘The Language of the Walls’:

Being in the world through reading
While understanding the nefarious aspects of advertising, the writings we
will now be considering see the language of the walls as necessary to our
existence: they recognize that writing of all kinds is our means of access to
the world, that our senses, our selves are awakened through acts of reading.
The Quarterly Review of June 1855 says that advertisements are

the very daguerreotypes cast by the age which they exhibit, not done
for effect, but faithful reflections of those insignificant items of life and
things, too small it would seem for the generalizing eye of the historian,
however necessary to clothe and fill in the dry bones of his history.137

Here, advertising is seen to ‘clothe’ and flesh out the skeleton of history. We
might see in the action of the reader who passes along the walls, taking in
the objective world as it presents itself, a Hegelian pattern of incorporation
of what is strange and alien and a transformation of it into the matter of
the self.
James Dawson Burn wrote The Language of the Walls (1855) as an indictment
of the sharp practices of advertisers. The full title reads thus: ‘The Language
of the Walls and A Voice from the Shop Windows, or, The Mirror of Commercial
Roguery by One Who Thinks Aloud’.138 The subtitle ‘by one who thinks aloud’
is an echo of the fact that Burn gives us his thoughts as he walks through
 The Language of the Walls 49

the city looking about him at the advertising. His text is in some way a
stream of consciousness as he reacts to the passing world; his ‘thinking out
loud’ is triggered by his haphazard encounters with writing. It is a politically
engaged text which speaks of the ways in which all sections of society, but
particularly the labouring poor, are put upon by advertisement. His other
publication of the same year was The Autobiography of a Beggar Boy, which
describes his itinerant life of poverty as a child with a drunken father. It
is a text which aligns its author with the underdog and has socialist and
reformist tones.139 In this publication he describes himself as a ‘wandering
vagrant’ who picked up an education from chance encounters with persons
and places but also with dialects (quotations are phonetically spelt in the
text) and any reading matter which he chanced upon. In his preface to the
autobiography, David Vincent insists on the fact that Burn uses many liter-
ary quotations (as he does in The Walls) and was able to transmit a tradition
of oral reminiscence learnt as a child. In a note Vincent remarks that Burn
makes frequent minor errors in his literary quotations and suggests that
this is a sign that ‘he was genuinely quoting from memory and not from
the results of specific literary research’.140 Thus we see that Burn was one
who read the walls, or who read text which passed through his hands in an
ephemeral way, since as a child and a young man buying books would have
been out of the question. He was a student of the walls, and like Dickens
during the deprived years of his childhood in the blacking factory his only
education came from what was available through advertising.
For all its careful uncovering of the vices and roguery behind advertising
which take up most of the book (loan sharks, adulteration of food, medical
quackery and the like), The Language of the Walls also stands as a document
which places advertising at the heart of modern society as its core and
structure. It concerns the recognition of a fundamental shift in the sub-
ject’s engagement with the world in which contact with the world, one’s
sense of being in the world, is seen to pass through the medium of what
is written up and displayed. Burn also wrote advertisements to earn his
living, so he was intimate with the mechanisms of writing for the walls as
well as writing against them. It is worth making a careful reading of Burn’s
introduction in order to appreciate how far his thinking goes on this sub-
ject. The introductory chapter is entitled ‘Modern Reputation – Roguery
Electrotyped with Honesty!’ The title and the chapter posit that, to have
any reputation at all in the world, be you rogue or religious leader (or both),
your existence in the eyes of others depends on electrotyping and other
modern printing technologies which allow you a space on the walls. This
site is a vital one if one hopes to be heard, or rather seen and read, among
the tumult of conflicting voices already clamouring for attention. Thomas
Richards, in the paragraphs he devotes to Burn, describes his attitude to the
walls as an interpreter faced with the Rosetta stone. It is a key to a whole
civilization.141
50 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

Burn’s writing is unremittingly ironic concerning the dishonesty of most

advertising: he uses Biblical language borrowed from Ecclesiastes in order to
transform our vision of the walls into a giant Vanity painting in which there
is nothing new under the sun:

There is nothing in heaven above, in the earth beneath, in the water, or

in the air we breathe, but will be found in the universal Language of the
Walls. If you are in the enjoyment of health and riches, the walls will
inform you where to fly for pleasure, and the names of the persons who
will minister to your enjoyments. If you are a lover of fun, the walls will
lead you to the temple of Momus, and if you wish to be delighted with the
soft strains of music, the walls will direct you to the halls of Apollo. (2)

For those who have indulged too much in pleasure, the walls will furnish
the gazer with elixirs from quack doctors. He treats the cures of these doc-
tors with cynicism as well as humour by underlining the ‘sacrifices’ these
‘benefactors of mankind’ (2) make and providing tales of their treacherous
treatment of clients. He stresses the coercitive nature of advertising:

The Language of the Walls is silent, but often powerful and eloquent –
arresting our attention whether we will or not. There is frequently deep
philosophy in their mute appeals, and they contain upon their surfaces
circulating libraries for the million, with the thoughts and sentiments
of men on every conceivable subject. Now, beacons to apprise us of
approaching danger; now, sirens to allure and destroy. (4)

The walls are active in their hailing of the passer-by: they ‘arrest’ attention,
‘allure’ and make ‘appeals’. The author also notices the way in which social
distinctions of all kinds are neutralized in the great mixing of names and
faces on the walls, reminding us of the humorous juxtapositions in Parry’s
painting. Again, Burn’s irony is clear, for he stresses that this fraternity is only
a virtual one: ‘There is frequently a delightful sociality on the walls. All party
distinctions are cast to the winds, and the little and great fraternize in the
most agreeable harmony’. Bishops find themselves ‘stuck up alongside of the
flaming announcement of a Love Feast’ or next to ‘Kaffirs or the Crowfeet
Indians’ (5).142 Sometimes the juxtaposition is intimate indeed: the manager of
the Adelphi Theatre advertising his autobiography ‘Ups and Downs of the Life
of a Showman’ is seen ‘quietly covering a Noble Lord who was about to preside
at a grand Protection Meeting’ (5). The word ‘covering’ has several meanings:
the covering of one poster by another or the ‘covering’ of a cow by a bull with
its aggressive sexual connotations. Thus does one poster or one social class
(here the entrepreneurial bourgeoisie) dominate another (the nobility).
If social classes find themselves mixed on the walls, then so too do species
of animals: ‘Here you have Scotch Kye, and Irish Bulls, Durham Oxen, and
 The Language of the Walls 51

Clydesdale Horses, Welsh Mutton and Cumberland Bacon, both animate

and inanimate’ (5). Shoved together on the walls, they lose their meaning
as animals and became exchangeable commodities made available to the
buyer. The walls suggest a vanishing of barriers between conflicting social
groups or animals but this is shown to be a sham: the ‘lion and the lamb’
may seem to lie down together on the walls but Burn shows that they too
are fighting for position; they are smiling down upon rival billstickers as
they fight each other for space in a world that is a social jungle and not a
harmonious mixing of the disparate.
Despite these visions of a fiercely competitive and exploitative world, Burn
is quick to tell us that these walls are ‘us’, and therefore a faithful represen-
tation of our dealings with one another:

The Language of the Walls presents us with an epitome of the history

of civilisation – the progress of commerce – a chronicle of passing
events – and a multum in parvo of all things. In it we have the voiceless
echo of the Press, with its attendant genii of good and evil. It enunci-
ates to the gaping crowd the revolutions of kingdoms, and the swear-
ing in of a special constable! The issues of battles, and the market price
of bacon! ... the consequence of the potato blight, and the stability of
the income tax! Napoleon’s veracity and Punch’s influence on the joke
market! (12)

These claims are not minor ones: the historical sweep or world-picture which
is evoked here, the notion of everything being contained upon one surface
which enunciates its truths, has the flavour of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notion
of an ‘inherited background’, ‘against which I distinguish between true and
false’.143 Burn describes a system in which all arguments (or battles) have
their life, in which all questions and answers are anchored. It is a type of
scaffolding or substratum to all belief but consists only of language. Yet,
however groundless our believing is, we rely on this system of language with
its attendant games for our lifeblood.144 The notion of multum in parvo sug-
gests a constraining element in the discourses of the walls. It frames our
world and obliges us to seek information within its confines, to get ‘much’
within ‘little’. Burn is able to capture the sense of closure that is present in
such a vast panorama, the sense in which displayed text controls and directs
discourse, that is, it obliges us to enter a matrix of sayings or aphorisms
rather than to follow a flow of language.145 He helps his reader understand
the power of ‘much in little’ by showing how the Walls are vital mouth-
pieces of the organs of politics and commerce, and that the press itself needs
the walls to advertise its presence. The press is intimately linked and reliant
on the posters up on the walls, which evokes Carlyle’s observation concern-
ing the self-reflecting and self-devouring aspect of all popular literature in
‘Characteristics’. More urgently perhaps, dependency on the Walls for basic
52 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

survival is suggested:

There is frequently high hope and deep expectation in the Language of

the Walls, when a company of poor players have to depend upon the
impression their little demy 8 vo. Sheet will make upon the public for the
realisation of to-morrow’s dinner! (12)

Here Burn suggests that the clever management of print and paper is a key to
survival (advertising and ‘dinner’ are inseparable here) and the Walls become
a sort of motherly matrix offering the possibility of food for her young. The
Walls are also described as a battle field for the polemics of religion or of
politicians, an arena for their interactions much like a present-day ‘chat-room’
on the web. He observes that water companies and gas companies, Magistrates
and Town Councillors ‘betake themselves to the Walls in order to settle their
civic disputes’ (13). The immediacy of the appearance of information is sug-
gested in descriptions of a Wig-maker arriving back from a trip to Paris, to
immediately advertise the new styles he has just encountered: ‘the walls are
instantly inspired with the secrets of his mission’. Burn rather facetiously
adds in Biblical tones: ‘and with trumpet tongues proclaim the vastness of
his capillary emporium’ (14). The mixture of lightness, humour, irony and
cynicism mean that his serious, socially critical intent never becomes a tirade
against advertising but an acceptance of the perennial nature of the Walls as
a nexus of human communication and imagination. Tales told by objects sold
in auction as well as family dramas are linked to the ‘fatal auctioneer’s ham-
mer’ attesting to the fact that the Walls reflect the volatility of life under the
aegis of capital, of its economic vagaries and the speed of change.
Burn offers the reader a vision of the alienation involved in the texts
on the wall (the fact that for many they can never provide the goods that
are needed and that they are an enduring symbol of man’s alienation from
the fruits of his labour). At the same time, he offers the vision of displayed
printed matter as the gateway to the world: without it we are as vulnerable
as the poor who are fleeced by its claims. Not to read, not to engage in some
way with advertisement is to perish. Even the poorest person can satisfy
his thirst for knowledge by reading the Walls and can even search them
for a way of satisfying his hunger. Today questions of the same order are
being debated concerning the internet and digitalization in general: they are
both levellers (theoretically everyone has access to everything) and at the
same time a vehicle of exclusion. This recognition of the exclusion of cer-
tain sections of the population from this utopia of print are voiced by Burn
in his description of the hungry and dispossessed who look to the walls for
help but rarely receive any succour from this giant web of information. The
food and drink it describes are adulterated, the information often errone-
ous or misleading. To return once again to Parry’s painting, A London Street
Scene, we might remember that the people milling about and moving past
 The Language of the Walls 53

the advertisements at the bottom of the picture are of the poorer classes or
the dispossessed, just as they are in Augustus Leopold Egg’s Despair of 1858 or
Arthur Boyd Houghton’s disturbing urban scenes, as if there is a connection
between the two (poverty and advertising) which is never fully elucidated.146
Burn mentions at the end of his expository chapter that the Walls (with their
mention of the auctioneer’s hammer) ‘teach us of the instability of all sub-
lunary things, and the uncertainty of man’s happiness here below’ (15). Thus
does Burn discover a philosophy in the walls, a stoic acceptance of man’s
fate. The Walls themselves are the means by which we learn of this truth of
the world which is ‘an abode of unchanging and unmitigated sorrow to mil-
lions’ (15). The walls then become a wailing or weeping wall, a catalogue of
suffering, but also the means by which one might change that fate.
Interestingly, Burn begins his book by intimating that advertising is noth-
ing new but as old as Methuselah:

Solomon affirmed that there was nothing new under the sun; it is very prob-
able he was quite right, and that passing events quietly glide into oblivion,
again to re-appear like objects on Banvard’s Panorama, to amuse the dupli-
cate generations of mankind. Much in the same way theatrical managers
resuscitate old dramas, and serve them up to the hungry gods as new.
We are not aware whether the ancients were in the habit of advertising
their Lucifer Matches, Steel Pens, Parr’s Pills, and ‘the Secret Infirmities of
Youth,’ through the medium of the town’s bell-man, by making libraries
of their walls, or publishing them in the Damascus Herald, or the Babylon
Morning Advertiser. Puffing appears to have graced the earliest efforts at
commercial literature so far back as the days of Tubal Cain ... It is, there-
fore, evident that commercial puffing is no new invention, however much
it may have been improved by modern ingenuity, or re-constructed upon
scientific principles. Whether passing events be like the dissolving views
on the disk of time, that proceed in an infinite series, or merely nature
repeating herself, it matters little to the present inquiry. We believe the
Language of the Walls to be modern, both in character, and applicability,
and in the following pages it will be our duty to prove its importance,
both in a literary, moral, and commercial point of view. (2)147

In this extract, the idea of an eternal return is brought out with images taken
from modern visual and commercial technology: the panorama and the dis-
solving view (a magic lantern disk that could project advertisements onto
walls in London). A sense of the ephemeral nature of the advertisement,
its duplicate quality, its ability to multiply and reproduce itself is created
in this writing. The duplication and duplicity of advertising in their turn
‘duplicate’ mankind. The suggestion seems to be that advertising creates
its own public and then feeds it − that is, it calls up new subjects (subjects
which have already been called up, or are always-already interpellated, as
54 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

the reference to Tubal-Cain implies), and which then continue to be inter-

pellated. Burn describes to us the never-ending hailing of the subject, who
is brought forth anew and in slightly changed form with each new textual
or technological encounter.148 He evokes these minute and endless forms
of interpellation through ‘puffing’ as being ancient and beyond history, as
well as a part of an unforeseeable future. As each technological change alters
the mode of reception of advertising (from town crier to posters on walls or
in magazines), so the population is altered slightly, that is, it is adapted to
new forms of textual intake. Regenia Gagnier suggests as much when she
says of working-class subjectivity: ‘in the arc of reciprocity the world made
by the metropolitan workers returned to remake their consciousness’.149
Burn is aware of the labour which makes the walls – the printing, the
pasting, and the posting – and the way in which the walls remake those
same workers. Susan Stewart might also help us to understand Gagnier’s ‘arc
of reciprocity’: ‘We continually project the body into the world in order that
its image might return to us: onto the other, the mirror, the animal, and the
machine, and onto the artistic image.’ She suggests that the head, the bust,
the eye, the body, all that we cannot see of ourselves must be displayed so
that we might encounter ourselves.150 We encounter ourselves in the images
in advertisements and gather there the things we do not possess, the fet-
ishized things which stand for parts of the body. Burn’s sense of the utter
acceptance and implication of the human body and psyche in advertising is
expressed in his chapter entitled ‘A New System of Personal Advertising’ in
which he looks forward to the logos which are proudly displayed on cloth-
ing today instead of being concealed (the perennial Gap or Nike labels, for
example). His idea runs thus: ‘We therefore propose that the consumers of
merchandise shall become personal advertisers, and thereby give publicity to
the name and fame of those people they may honour with their patronage’
(386).151 He suggests that the tradesman affix a label ‘say between the shoul-
ders’ with the name of the establishment and the price and even including –
this is a facetious addition on the author’s part – an advertisement for more
workmen: ‘Bought of B. Moses, 98, New Cut, £2. 18s. 6d. West of England. –
N. B. Wanted 100 good workmen’. He also suggests that if the article of dress
is a hat ‘the label could be fixed upon the front side crown like a man’s nose
on his face, it would be both ornament and useful’ (386). The idea of the
advert likened to a natural human feature suggests that this form of adver-
tising might quickly become accepted and seemingly natural – as indeed, in
many ways, it now has. Burn’s joke is both a protest and a recognition of the
path which advertising leads us down: we make it and then it makes us. We
might add that if history is repeated as farce, then farce helps the Victorians
imagine their future – which is our present.
Although the author claims a timeless quality to advertising, on the one
hand, he postulates a ‘modern’ and very particular application of it which
has a particular effect on the consumer, on the other hand. In other words,
 The Language of the Walls 55

he is witnessing a very new and historically determined structure which is

sufficiently new not to have elicited much critical response as yet. His job is
to comment upon this phenomenon as it emerges, at the point at which the
Victorian reader is becoming aware of what it is doing to him or her, and
what it is he or she might be losing as a result of this passage into a new epis-
teme or historical moment. Or indeed what the subject might be gaining in
terms of an awareness of his or her position in history. It is at moments such
as these that the past is invented: a pastoral pre-advertised world surges into
view in novel, magazine and advertisement to be collectively imagined as a
lost point of origin.152
Burn recognizes that he is spoken by the language of the walls; that the
subject is in dialogue with the walls, even to the extent that the walls come
and print themselves upon him or her, that the human body is part of the
walls. The human psyche itself is on the walls and part of the walls and a
place is ascribed for every reader by every advert. Despite this there is a certain
room for manoeuvre: the reader can speak back from that place and inscribe
him or herself differently. One of Burn’s chapters is entitled ‘The Cup that
Enervates and Destroys: Adulteration of Ale, etc.’ (307): this is a twisting of
the slogan ‘The Cup that Cheers’ typically used to sell tea. Thus we see that
he too sends slogans back in changed form in order to counteract their force.
The whole of Burn’s book is a giant counter-interpellation in which he speaks
back to the Walls. At the same time, he accepts his indebtedness to their
coercive power which allows him to take up a position of resistance.

‘Whose Luggage?’: A strange case of interpellation

Paradoxically, one of the most explicit descriptions of a scene of interpellation
which I have come across appears not in a work like Burn’s which is a critique
of advertising, attempting to see behind its façade to the coercions and tricks it
hides, but in a book published eight years later which celebrates and promotes
advertising and gives advice on how to do it. Advertise! How? Where? When? by
William Smith is an unashamedly self-promoting book with colourful wrap-
pers and many illustrations: After the page of ‘Contents’, the reader finds an
illustration of the earth and the moon chasing thousands of leaflets which
are being thrown by an angel sporting a sandwich board with the name of
the book written on it and blasting ‘Advertise! Advertise!’ from a trumpet.
[Fig. 10] Then come eight pages of adverts for various household products and
then the opening chapter, ‘How to Advertise’. He, like Burn, uses Ecclesiastes
but to contradict it and emphasize the perennial nature of novel objects as
being the ‘order of the day’; for him everything is new under the sun. He also
emphasizes the oldness of advertising and uses Shakespeare to illustrate this,
making a burlesque claim that the three Macbeth witches were in fact canny
advertisers.153 He advocates the exploitation of any available surface, includ-
ing the human frame, as a potential area for advertising, covering with serious
intent the very practices lampooned, as we saw earlier, by Punch.154
56 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

Figure 10 Frontispiece to William Smith, Advertise!, 1863

Source: British Library.

Within this unpromising territory for a critical approach to advertising,

we find a lucid account of a new phenomenon. Smith describes the power
of the mysterious messages which were being pasted up around London at
the time and provides an illustration of them [Fig. 11]. He then takes an
article from the Telegraph as his source, quoting it at length. This eloquent
article talks of the ‘graffiti’ on the walls at Pompeii and then describes
how the civilization of the nineteenth century has improved on the ‘wall-
scrawlings of the ancients’:155

But our age has one gigantic advantage over its predecessors; WE ARE
A PEOPLE OF ADVERTISERS. A few graffiti may defy the effacing fin-
gers of Time, whereas millions of such legends are washed away, rubbed
out, or perish with the walls that bear them. A similar fate may await
the monstrous placards, posters and slips which are plastered on the
hoardings and the corner houses of this immense metropolis; but their
indefinite multiplication by means of the printing press prevents their
being involved in a common ruin. Malicious bill-stickers may paste over
the advertisement placard in one district, but it reappears in another.
 The Language of the Walls 57

Figure 11 ‘Mysterious posters’, William Smith, Advertise!, 1863

Source: British Library.

Moreover, in the advertisement columns of the newspapers it is always safe

from outrage, and defies concealment. ... But the modern appetite for ‘sensa-
tion’ is manifest even in advertisements. Brief sentences containing either
abstract propositions of an alarming nature, such as ‘Where’s Eliza?’ have
been in latter days succeeded by simple word-bolts, disjected members
of phrases, without context or sequence, verbal flies in amber, which,
enshrined among business information and unpretending common
sense, make us wonder ‘how the dickens they get there.’ Take for example
the perplexing line, ‘Somebody’s Luggage’ which for so many days has
been a standing enigma to the readers of our advertisement columns as
well as to the peripatetic students who learn Latin from the mottoes to
the undertakers’ hatchments, belles-lettres from the shop windows, fine
arts from the professors who depict mackerel and the rule of three in col-
oured chalk on the pavement, philosophy and ethics from the hoardings
and dead walls. Somebody’s luggage. Who’s luggage? (sic) [whose] Who
was somebody? If anybody, and why should the attention of everybody
who can read have been called to his impedimenta? The announcement
was as artful as it was embarrassing ...
58 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

From the highest to the lowest, we can’t get along without luggage;
we must see to it, think of it, attend to it. The line ‘Somebody’s Luggage’
fell like a warning knell from an anonymous tocsin on the public ear.
Somebody’s luggage might be our luggage. We might be somebody. We
decline to enter the statistics of the letters we have received requesting
enlightenment as to the mysterious advertisement to which we have
eluded; but we may cursorily remark that one provincial correspondent
was firmly convinced that the luggage advertised was his ...156

As the article explains, ‘Somebody’s Luggage’ turns out to be only the

title of a Christmas number of Dickens’s All the Year Round but the frag-
ment was powerful enough to elicit responses from many readers of it.
The ‘provincial correspondent’ even wrote in to claim personal belong-
ings which had not been mentioned on the walls but that he felt he must
have lost. The guilt triggered by the question made him fearful of other
lapses and forgotten ownerships on his part. Let us first consider some of
the language used in this article. The first lines of the piece offers a vision
of writing which has become eternal: ‘Wall scrawlings’ are now infinitely
reproducible since the advent of mechanical reproduction and can no
longer ‘perish’. Their ‘monstrous’ nature is therefore more than a question
of size or inconvenience, but resides in their immortality; like the heads
of the hydra, if one is destroyed another grows in its place and even multi-
plies elsewhere. There is therefore no ‘ruin’ for these adverts, no hope of
extinction, only further life.
In such a context of ubiquity, special tactics must be used to draw attention
to advertising, hence the choice of these ‘abstract propositions’ which titillate
and ‘alarm’. The language used to describe them gives us much material for
an appreciation of their power of solicitation. They are ‘word-bolts’, ‘disjected
members of phrases’, and ‘verbal flies in amber’. These offer a sense of the rapid
ingestion or rapid construction of meaning in the word ‘bolt’ (to bolt down
food, or indeed a bolt as a unit of construction as in ‘nuts and bolts’). We also
find the notion of text become a truncated body or severed limb (disjected
members) which call us to complete them. There is a sense in which penance
must be paid for the error of the uncompleted or unelucidated utterance, or
for the notion of an utterance caught for an instant, unawares, trapped in a
context not its own – a living creature put to death and preserved in amber
and which the new reader, like a palaeontologist, must work to recontextual-
ize. To recreate a context or habitat is to make it whole and thus make sense
of it. There is a direct relationship between the way the inscription hails and
the bodily implications of that hailing: we associate the words around us
with ourselves, with our own bodies and with the need to make those disjecta
membra into a whole, to sew together the ragged pieces of language left lying
about. Should we ignore them, then they will continue to threaten us with
 The Language of the Walls 59

our own dissolution, both linguistic and physical. We place ourselves within
the ‘bolts’ of words and seek to find our place in a whole sentence.
Thus does the journalist describe the reactions of the readers of these
fragments: we are all ‘peripatetic students’ who learn our ‘belles lettres’ and
philosophy from the truncated messages around us (as the pages devoted to
English literature in Punch have shown us in this study). In order to glean
knowledge from what we read, we must retrace and reconnect the language
round us, and therefore find the answers to the oracular enigmas about us.
But the primary task in dealing with such fragments is to discover where we
are in the sentence. From ‘Somebody’ the reader moves on to ‘Whose?’ and
finally to a sense that it must be ‘My Luggage’, which I am guilty of losing/
possessing/never having possessed. The slogan here is an ‘impedimenta’, a
problem or error, a fatal flaw exposed to us. It is important to note that the
writer of the article first offers a study of the emotional implications of the
word luggage for the common person, a sort of ‘encyclopedia’ of common
associations and references surrounding it. He tries to show why it is a word
guaranteed to catch us and implicate us:

There may be hope and bliss, there may be misery and despair, associated
with ‘Somebody’s Luggage’ ... The contemplation of a yawning luggage-van
is a survey of life from the cradle to the grave. There is the trunk that holds
the bride’s trousseau, and next to it a box of baby-linen, and next to that a
bale of paupers clothing. Such thoughts as these may have passed through
the minds of thousands who read the strange advertisement ...157

The word ‘yawning’ has implications of a yawning chasm or the open mouth
of an animal, both implying the threat of being engulfed. The youth and hope
of bride and baby give way to ill luck and the despair of the pauper. Man’s des-
tiny and his inevitable descent to death are contained in his personal effects,
his luggage, as well as his mental ‘baggage’ as the modern expression goes.
The writer brings out the morbid and accusatory undertone beautifully
with the sentence ‘a warning knell from an anonymous tocsin on the public
ear’. The tocsin not only echoes the notion of guilt and injury which we have
seen at work in Dickens’s essay on Bill-posting (as well as the death knell of
our own mortality as Burn suggests in his discussion of the walls), but brings
to mind the emphasis Althusser lays on the religious patterns of ideology. The
anonymous figure of the law calls us to prayer: we must kneel down and pray
in order to believe. And more particularly, we are called from behind (which
is anonymous), as Judith Butler has commented. Once again, the writing on
the wall in Belshazzar’s palace predicting the destruction of a kingdom comes
to mind, and the aura of doom that any printed bill carries: bills (and all avis
à la population) told traditionally of war, plague, famine, taxes and all manner
of ills to come. The attentive reader will place himself within the grammar in
60 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

the place of one who will undergo the consequences of the event or the lack
(here ‘Somebody’s luggage’ is both an event and a warning of a lack).
We see here how the subject is an effect of the structure of the sentence.
Here the provincial reader takes up a position, gives himself a role as a result
of his encounter with the expression ‘Somebody’s Luggage’. In the interpret-
ative dance that follows, we move metonymically from ‘Who was Somebody?’
to ‘Whose luggage?’ to ‘anybody’ to ‘everybody’ to ‘our luggage’ to ‘we might
be somebody’. ‘Somebody’ gradually transforms itself into ‘we’ and ‘me’ (as
the one who acted and indeed failed, the one who acted wrongly). We can-
not but be aware in reading this piece of the theories concerning the subject
as an effect of language, not a source. In psychoanalysis the subject is said
to find its site of emergence in a dialogue between two signs, between two
links in the chain of signifiers, occurring, as linguistics tells us, in a ‘semiotic
entre-deux’.158 Meaning emerges in a dialogue between ‘interpreted text and
the interpretation that reads it’ and the subjects involved, the author and the
reader, ‘are not free but assujettis in Althusserian parlance ... they are effects
of the structure’.159 It is interesting, following this, to see that the author of
the piece mistakenly writes ‘Who’s’ for ‘Whose’, thus introducing the verb
‘to be’ (Who is luggage?). This suggests that on an unconscious level an iden-
tification is formed with the luggage itself, that the reader becomes the lug-
gage (‘is’ the luggage) or that the luggage takes on an identity as human.160
The reader’s identity becomes intimately linked with the object he or she is
accused of having lost. This problematic linguistic encounter, obliges the
reader to situate him-or herself in some way vis-à-vis the luggage, to take up a
position, however fanciful or imagined. We are in the world of the ‘enabling
constraint’ as formulated by Butler, in which the subject takes its bearings
and is thus inaugurated – quite paradoxically – as both instrument of agency
and effect of subordination.161

The Importance of an Atlas of the World

To conclude this chapter I would like to look at an advertisement called ‘The
Importance of an Atlas of the World’ which appeared in the ‘Dombey and
Son Advertiser’ (1848). Dickens’s Dombey and Son is a novel in which goods
from foreign shores are much talked about and this advert is very much
concerned with such commodities. In this full page advertisement of closely
written text, the ‘Atlas of the World’ is firstly described as a vital family
requisite ‘on a Scale sufficiently large for displaying the great distinguishing
points of every country’. Thus the Atlas, which consists of maps and writ-
ten description, is to be shown and displayed and enjoyed by a group rather
than perused alone. It is described as a ‘catalogue’ and an ‘exhibition’ which
seduces and tempts us. The Atlas opens the door to a possession of the goods
that the Empire and the world beyond can offer. But the claims of the advert
go much further, for it posits that access to the ‘world’ – particularly to its
sensual pleasures via the commodities of different countries – can only be
 The Language of the Walls 61

achieved via the act of reading:

Such is the importance of studying correctly a good Atlas of the World,

that, independently of the characters of the earth itself, no one is capable
of duly appreciating the value of history, enjoying a book of travels, or of
talking like a rational being about any of those countless foreign substances
which are now met with as the materials of articles of use or ornament in
almost every house within these kingdoms, without consulting an Atlas
with Geographical, Historical, Commercial and Descriptive Letter-press.
If all persons could once be led to this, it is incalculable to conceive
how much more delightful it would make the world we live in; because it
would enable us to live mentally, and in our mental life consists our real
enjoyment of all the world at once.

Thus the ‘letter-press’ gives access to ‘foreign substances’, to the substance

of the world, for it is our ‘mental life’ which allows us to enjoy the world.
Thanks to the descriptions of the Atlas, each time we taste a substance we
will have the whole experience of its place of origin. These substances are
then described in sensual and poetic detail for some fifteen lines: we might
drink coffee with turbaned Arabs in the groves of the Yemen looking across
to the Red Sea where ‘the waters are literally encumbered with living crea-
tures’, or drink tea with a Chinese mandarin ‘in some fantastic alcove’, or
taste cinnamon and immediately be ‘borne in thought to Ceylon, with its
rich fields of rice; its beautiful copses which furnish this exhilarating spice;
its tangled and swampy woods’ or forests where thousands of apes ‘make
the early morn hideous with their cries’. Thus does the taste of a food, once
mediated by text, offer up another gamut of experiences, all textual in
nature. So seductive is this experience of the world through the Atlas that
the writer brings himself to a halt: ‘But we must stop, for there is no end to
the catalogue, and it is an exhibition of which we must not see too much at
a passing glance, lest it should wile us from our purpose.’ So we see that ‘our
real enjoyment’ is procured through a virtual world of text and not through
the goods themselves, or, rather, it is text (of a very literary sort in this
instance) which allows the release of pleasures from these items. The author
then suggests the superiority of the ‘Atlas’ over the experience of commod-
ities themselves, since the enjoyment is instantaneous and simultaneous:

Now, as we have said, not only might, but should, every commodity of
every region transport us to that region, and make it render up to our
enjoyment all that it possesses; but an Atlas of the World, which has been
duly studied, brings the whole before us the moment we glance at it ...

The author stresses here the immediacy and fullness of the act of read-
ing, which brings forth the pleasures of goods much faster than any real
62 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

encounter might do. Such text is described as a ‘powerful talisman’ and as

‘magic’. Fearing that these assertions make his product sound close to witch-
craft, the advertiser back-pedals a little at this point and effusively assures
the reader that it is but ‘magic of nature’s exhibiting; the effect of infinite
wisdom and goodness, without deception, without anything to mislead ...’
When the author describes access to the world as being as easy as placing
a finger on a page to read, an act in which desire is satisfied as soon as it is
declared, we think of today’s click of the mouse or touch of a finger which
offers up a service or object even before desire for them has been properly
formulated. The finger of the reader becomes a magic wand in the next
extract:

Let, for instance, the conversation be directed to the varieties of the

human race, in appearance and character, and let any one lay his finger
successively upon lands strongly contrasted in this respect; and in what-
ever order he takes them, he will find that the people stand up, as it were,
the instant that his finger touches that country, as if that country were
touched by the hand of a magician.

The expression ‘stand up’ adds to the sense of an obedient people attend-
ing to the desires of an all-powerful reader in a relationship of colonizer to
colonized. The copywriter describes this network or matrix of information
as an ‘artificial memory’: a rhyzomic formation of facts stretching away to
the horizons of knowledge. He declares that although it might not contain
the ‘jewels of knowledge’ the Atlas constitutes a perfect ‘casket’ for infor-
mation of all kinds ‘especially when accompanied by descriptive letter-press, like
“Gilbert’s Modern Atlas” ’. It is a system or network which is being sold. Any
piece of information is ‘found the very instant we require it’, which echoes
the critique that Burn makes of advertising as the ‘multum in parvo of all
things’ – offering everything all at once and in the same space instead of in
succession.
Chapter 1 has explored one of the basic mechanisms of subject formation
in print culture: the taking of an ‘outside’ (the language of the walls) into
an inside, that is the introjection of the world to make the self. The ‘Atlas’
advertisement crystallizes two things related to this ‘taking in’ of the world:
the public was used to the idea that the world was experienced through the
mediums of text and image rather than at first hand, or rather that there
was no possibility of experience without mediation of some sort, and sec-
ondly that navigation through text was closer to the reading of an encyclo-
paedia (one of referencing and moving from level to level rather than linear
reading). This pattern in the structuring of subjectivity will be explored in
the next chapter as we look at the rituals and practices attendant on a new
form of text which combines both advertisement and novel.
2
Reading the Dickens Advertiser:
Merging Paratext and Novel

The floating gaze: The monthly number as cadavre exquis

To open one of the Dickens monthly numbers for the first time is a surprising
experience. One’s first reaction is to compare the novel in the traditional
book form with this more flimsy object which is framed by many pages of
advertisements. The form of the hard-backed volume (the leather or cloth-
bound edition or the sober paperbacks of today with their often ‘highbrow’
classical covers) has been entirely dismantled and, in a gesture similar to
that of postmodernist architecture which places the inner workings of a
building, its pipes and evacuations, on the outside, the structure has been
turned inside out. The green covers (often now blue in appearance) have the
frontispiece on the outside as well as an advertisement on the outside back
cover so that the essence of what lies within is produced for the reader or
passer-by on the outside to be taken in at a glance. The text of the novel has
been reduced to a constant thirty-two pages (some three or four chapters)
sandwiched between numerous pages of advertising. These chapters seem
to be eclipsed amidst the other forms of text which surround them, and
appear almost as an afterthought in the carnival of fonts and images which
outweigh in volume the pages reserved for the Dickens text. How can this
be? How can it be that the serious novels we studied at school were once
presented to the public in this commercial form – so modern to our eyes?
Let us first describe the contents of some of these numbers and the grow-
ing space allocated to advertisements as the months go by. The first monthly
number of Bleak House published between 1852 and 1853 in twenty monthly
parts has a collection of adverts at the beginning which are sewn together
and called ‘The Bleak House Advertiser’ consisting of twenty-four pages,
and then a further four pages of advertising added in at the back. No. 2
has sixteen pages in the Advertiser at the front and eighteen at the back,
while No. 10 has eighteen at the front before the chapter and eighteen after
the chapters at the back. The double number (19 and 20), being the last in
the series, has over forty pages of advertisements shared between the front

63
64 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

and back. The first monthly number of Our Mutual Friend of 1864, eleven
years on, has thirty-two pages of advertisements in the Advertiser at the
front and forty pages after, making a surprising seventy pages of advertise-
ments compared with the mere thirty-two pages of the chapters of the novel
itself. It is the overfull, saturated quality as well as the heterogeneity of
this object which strike the reader most. The overcharged covers depicting
crowds, objects, buildings in a patchwork of scenes from the novel give way
in No. 1 of Bleak House to adverts in the form of a page of small frames in
which spectacles, wigs, face cream, perfume are all advertised along with
Burke’s Peerage, ‘Mudie’s Select Library’, ‘Gowland’s Lotion’ for the skin, ‘Sir
James Murray’s Fluid Magnesia’ for all ills, hair oil, ‘Rowland’s Macassar Oil’,
‘Holloway’s Ointment’, ‘Rodger’s Improved Shirts’, ‘Children’s Frocks, Coats
and Pelisses’ and ‘Parr’s Life-Pills’. These products are very insistent on how
to differentiate the genuine product from copies – often giving the customer
a sign to recognize – words in coloured ink, for example, and a list of stock-
ists of the genuine article. On page 20 of N° 1 of the Bleak House Advertiser
we find advertisements for opera glasses, race glasses, cough lozenges,
insurance, loans, ‘Rimmel’s Toilet Vinegar (as exhibited in the Fountain at
Crystal Palace)’ which is ‘far superior to Eau-de-Cologne’, ‘Binyon’s Patent
Chest Expander’ to cure ‘stooping of the shoulders’ – all displayed together.
There are smaller page inserts such as the flyers for Household Words which
are placed between the illustrations at the start of the Dickens chapters and
the first page of the chapters – so within the space of the novel. A small
brilliant orange flyer is even stuck within the pages of the novel itself in
the first chapter of N° 8 of Our Mutual Friend (between the second and third
pages) which constitutes an intrusion into the world of fiction – ironically
by more fiction. The flyer advertises Mrs Henry Wood’s latest sensation
novel and it is stuck over a page of the novel which describes Wegg’s serial
reading of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire to an illiterate dustman.1
The full page adverts are often in colour, sometimes very decorative, like
the advert for ‘Glenfield Patent Starch’, appearing in the Our Mutual Friend
numbers, which has three colours, or the brilliant yellow ‘Dr. De Jongh’s
Cod Liver Oil’. There are also detachable booklets such as that for the pho-
tographer Mayall (the photographer with whom the painter Turner worked),
or a cartoon-like advertisement for Thorley’s cattle feed consisting of four
pages. In 19 and 20 of Bleak House there is an advertisement for Ransome’s
patent stone filters, a sewn-in booklet of sixteen pages, including six pages
of testimonials which themselves constitute a series of miniature narratives.
In the same number there is a sixteen-page catalogue for the publishers
Cassell with illustrations on the front and back of the booklet to take out
and keep. Although the ‘Advertiser’ itself is made of standardized pages, the
inserts and colour advertisements as well as the booklets are all on differ-
ent sizes and textures of paper, using different typefaces and occasionally
colours. Textures are added to the numbers by the inclusion of a sheet of
 Reading the Dickens Advertiser 65

cork to advertise a hatter, a crochet pattern, a free gift of real wax seals. Each
turn of a page solicits the reader with a new demand on his attention and
his senses.
The complexity of perceptual skills demanded of the reader of such an
architecture is worth dwelling upon. Such demands were being placed
on city dwellers in other scenarios (in the street, for example, as we saw
in Chapter 1), so these were not unique to the monthly number. Yet the
monthly number is a particularly intense and complex version of this new
way of consuming data. The form of attention needed to function in cer-
tain new urban environments has been explored by several critics, one of
whom is Thomas Richards. His discussion of the organization of the space
of Paxton’s Crystal Palace for the Great Exhibition of 1851 (which consti-
tuted ‘the first outburst of the phantasmagoria of commodity culture’)
stresses the birth of a new way of seeing things: human traffic was driven
through the glass house and kept going at ‘a good clip’ which meant that
visitors were ‘forced to acquire a limited attention span’ rather akin to flip-
ping a TV channel.2 Commodities were turned into ‘focal points of aesthetic
and linguistic contemplation’ and the Crystal Palace was able to produce a
space that ‘drove consumers to distraction’.3 Richards stresses the idea that
‘Regardless of what you ultimately fixed your gaze upon, the Crystal Palace
turned you into a dilettante, loitering your way through a phantasmagoria
of commodities.’4 The notion of the dilettante is important especially if we
bring it into closer association with the fixing of the gaze upon something.
The reader of the monthly number can only develop a gaze which grazes
or loiters through the adverts, and indeed, as we shall see later, the chap-
ters themselves. Bernard Darwin describes an advert in N° 16 of the ‘Martin
Chuzzlewit Advertiser’ – a yellow leaflet called ‘the Temple of Fashion’ –
which suggests just the form of loitering which the reader of the number
himself or herself is practising: the Moses and Son’s Aldgate shop declares in
its advert that ‘customers can be conducted through the length and breadth
of the Establishment by a person who has strict injunctions to make no
allusion to the purchasing of articles, unless first questioned by the parties
themselves’.5 Thus the focus of a purchase, of having a particular aim in
sight in the act of reading or walking through a display, cedes the way to the
beginning of a gratuitous viewing and scanning – of browsing or touring
with the eye and being channelled through a space.
Walter Benjamin’s comments on the stream of customers surging around
the commodity in the work of Charles Baudelaire or his descriptions of the
movement through the ‘Passages’ in Paris also help us to imagine the way
the reader of the monthly number is conditioned to read: the flâneur is
greeted at the entrance of the passage or arcade by certain signs which dic-
tate the style of the trip into the precinct – just as the covers of the monthly
number display scenes from the novel randomly juxtaposed like the adver-
tisements themselves. At the entrance to the passages, as at the entrance to
66 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

the monthly number, one must abandon the idea of a specific, practical aim
(the purchase of an object/the reading of a single narrative sequence) and
give oneself up to loitering without intent – a loitering which is at the same
time a particular movement forward through space (one can dwell upon
an object but only as a preliminary to looking at something else). The cus-
tomer or reader is not forced into a particular purchase but is being trained
to become a creature whose eye takes in the commodity quite ‘naturally’, as
a reflex, so to speak; one who is constantly seeking, browsing, gazing. The
operation of such a radar is a way of being, and not a response to specific
needs. We might consider the monthly number as a sort of arcade in itself,
an architecture for the ‘dreaming collective’ passing through.6 Lynda Nead
notices the phenomenon of the crowd’s movement past spectacle in her
study of the Cremorne Gardens in London at its most commercially suc-
cessful (under the management of Edward Tyrell Smith in the 1860s), which
was a ‘mini-metropolis’ and a ‘complex multi-purpose space’: ‘Cremorne
had to orchestrate a broad and occasionally incompatible public, through
a sequence of distinct temporal zones’, making sure that they loitered
around certain attractions but also kept moving.7 Commercial space, be it
the display of advertising in a magazine, a park, or exhibition space, must
encourage a modulable trajectory along which the perceiving public must
be moved. There is, it seems, a pedagogic element in these circuits.
But what exactly is being learnt by the reader? What mechanisms or
reactions does he or she absorb as a result of the architecture of the text?
Althusser, having established the notion that what is represented in ideol-
ogy are not the real relations of individuals to their conditions of exist-
ence but the imaginary relation of those individuals to the real relations in
which they live, goes on to say that this imaginary relation has a material
existence since the individual ‘participates in certain regular practices’.8 It
is through participation in ritual that ideas and belief eventually come − a
scandalous inversion offered to us by Pascal: ‘Kneel down, move your lips
in prayer, and you will believe.’9 Ritual may govern our belief, our ideas and
indeed our language. I wish to consider the reading practices which the
Dickens monthly number might teach the reading subject and what kind
of ‘belief’, what idea of the world or relationship to it, might be instilled as
the pages are turned, scanned, or pulled out. What sort of reading subject
emerges from what has been called ‘the external ritual which materialises
ideology’?10
First, we might consider the idea of attention and the formation of a par-
ticular gaze. Jonathan Crary’s study of attention sees the emergence of a
new way of attending to the world in the late 1860s. He considers the very
recent pathology of ‘attention deficit disorder’ less as a pathology and more
as an integral part of a society ‘founded on the short attention span, the
logic of the non-sequitur, perceptual overload, getting ahead and aggres-
siveness’.11 He recognizes the ‘overwhelming field of perceptual data’ and an
 Reading the Dickens Advertiser 67

undifferentiated mass of information as being part of a ‘modern paradigm

of sensory overload’. In his view, selective attention became necessary as
part of a self-protecting inhibition and anaesthesia in the 1870s and 1880s.12
He also discusses schizophrenia, which might be seen as a damaged capacity
for selective attentiveness. Crary’s work on subjectivity in the 1870s is also
relevant to our period of 1840–70, when the subject was beginning to learn
to select and marshal the data which was arriving in ever greater swathes.
We have already seen how cartoons and parodies concerning advertising
show an awareness of the capacity to deal with this flow of information.
What is implied by this attentiveness (its reverse side, so to speak) is distrac-
tion and reverie, seen by Crary as being central to modernity. For Adorno it
is associated with a certain decay and cultural degeneration since the newly
mechanized subject is incapable of the artisan’s ‘real’ attention. Benjamin,
of course, sees modern reception of the world’s data as being enacted in a
state of distraction, while Crary says that attention and distraction are a
continuum. Attention to newspapers or machines involves a modern man
who is no longer asked to absorb a code but only attend to new messages,
which brings with it what Hannah Arendt has called the ‘destruction of
contemplation’.13
Taking these notions into account, it seems that what is taught to the
reader as he or she engages with the monthly number is the ability not to
be drawn by one object in an act of contemplation, or even, I would sug-
gest, to alternate between extreme forms of absolute attention followed by
distraction, but to practice an amalgamation of attention and distraction.
The reader operates an even or undifferentiated gazing. As a page of ads is
scanned the eye flickers from frame to frame, locus to locus, and settles on
particular features or words; this is quite unlike the oriented and organized
linear reading associated with the novel. From the first monthly issues, this
seepage of the advert into the novel space becomes more and more appar-
ent, as if the increasing numbers of adverts are breaking loose from their
moorings in the advertisement section and infesting the relatively free space
which the pages of the novel constitute. Advertisements and other messages
interrupt the reading of the narrative (such as the message on a thin slip of
paper added onto the first page of the chapter in N° 9 of Bleak House, which
apologizes for a missing illustration – there being two for every number).14
These are a form of multi-messaging like the pop-ups which interrupt our
reading on the net, or the lines of text which run along the bottom of our
television screens.

Reading paths in the monthly number

These considerations prompt the question of how the number was read. Was
it from back to front, were the chapters or the advertisements read first?
There are accounts of how novels and newspapers were read at the time,
often involving a criticism of the absorption and passion of many readers,
68 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

their flitting reading of magazines or the degrading and lowering effect of

newspapers on good literature. But these discourses do not take as their
target a structure as complex as the monthly number. Here we can only
make conjectures as to how the reader would tackle the monthly number,
and how the layout would have influenced that reading. Whereas, in news-
papers, advertisements and stories were often clearly separated from news
items (for example the black line in the Journal des Débats in Paris), in the
monthly number the ads which come after the chapters run on immediately
on the facing page so that there is no pause or ‘no-man’s land’ between the
end of the chapter and the beginning of the adverts. Proximity becomes a
form of endorsement. No title or black line designates the change from one
discourse to another. In N° 15 of Bleak House, for example, we find at the end
of the last page of the chapters a booklet which is in fact an advertisement
disguised as a miniature novel: ‘A DESCRIPTIVE SKETCH by Mrs. S. C. Hall
of the engraving of the Village Pastor from a Picture by W. P. Frith, Esq. RA’.
It consists of eight pages of lyrical, sometimes melodramatic, description of
the engraving for sale:

It is a great and delightful privilege to be able to introduce into our

homes so delicious an episode in genuine English life; to feel, when we
look upon Mr. Frith’s charming picture, that it is no fiction, – and that
although the dresses appertain to a past century, the characters – the
love, and faith, and innocence – are with us still. We pray they may con-
tinue to be so as long as England exists.

Here we see that novel-writing often continues within the advertisements

themselves; like the Dickens novel itself the advert also presents itself as an
‘episode’ in ‘genuine’ English life and suggests that it is not ‘fiction’ but a
true portrait. When one opens out the booklet, the Dickens chapter is still
visible below it along with the other adverts on the facing page. The effect
is of a patchwork of texts laid out before the eye of the reader as well as a
layering of writing of different sorts which echo each other in typeface and
in writing style. In the same way, there are very fluid transitions between
‘Advertiser’ and the illustrations which begin each number and the chapters
themselves. There is no frontispiece, no announcement or title page to her-
ald the commencement of the chapters – just the illustrations and text of
the novel seemingly beginning in medias res. There is a sense that the div-
ision between ads and text is undergoing a process of attenuation.
There is a first possibility that the reader would start at the beginning and
move through in linear fashion to the end – flicking through the adverts
in the Advertiser at the beginning and then tackling the thirty-two pages
of the chapters. In such a configuration N° 1 of Our Mutual Friend offers
the following visual diet: the intertwined drawings of scenes from the
novel on the front cover would be followed on the inside cover by a page
 Reading the Dickens Advertiser 69

of adverts for ‘New Silks’, the promise of a free gift (an authentic portrait of
the Princess of Wales ‘exquisitely engraved on steel’ if the reader buys the
‘London and Paris Magazine of Fashion’), then ‘pure arrowroot as imported’,
followed by an advert with an image of three crinolines. These give way to
the pages of the ‘Our Mutual Friend Advertiser’ which would be read before
arriving at the text itself. On arrival at the first page of the novel in which
Lizzie and her father are trawling for bodies in the Thames, readers have
already trawled through thirty-two pages of advertising; goods float just
below the mind’s surface while bodies are searched for in the river. Fishing
for bodies, which is a recurrent theme in the novel, is a fishing associated
with financial gain and later with the nouveau riche Veneering family, their
social climbing effected both through fishing for well-connected persons
and through the acquisition of commodities.
The presence of free gifts usually placed after the chapters at the end of
the number might suggest a second possible ‘route’ taken by the reader; the
latter would go to the back of the number first to pull out a free crochet pat-
tern (Marsland’s coloured patterns on cotton paper which feels like material
appeared regularly in the advertisement section at the back of the monthly
number) or a set of wax seals.15 In this case there would be no working
through from the beginning but a dipping into the adverts in an anarchic
fashion according to the desires of the reader or the powers of attraction of
each advert or gift. Occasionally the crochet patterns are found within the
chapters, so that the movement through the text might take the reader into
the centre of the chapters first – not in the desire to read the chapters but
to discover the gift. The third possible trajectory is that the reader, avidly
following the Dickens serial, would go first to the first pages of the chapter
to read the instalment and only then begin to discover the other advertis-
ing texts. Even if this were the case, the reader would often encounter an
advert within the chapters which would interrupt and colour the reading
of the narrative.
Turning the monthly number over in one’s hands, one is also struck by
a fourth circuit which the reader might take, and that is to start with the
advert on the inside back cover, which was a prime site for advertisers and
was given over to particularly attractive adverts such as the series of serial
adverts in Bleak House (changing each month) by Moses and Son’s tailors
with their different jokes and allusions to the chapters within that month’s
number. These adverts, which we will be looking at in detail in the next
section, constitute a real space of entertainment and may well have built up
their own clientele of admirers who would have turned to them as a news-
paper reader turns to a favourite column or feature. Whichever reading path
was chosen, the novel chapters would necessarily be overlaid in the mind of
the reader with discourses and images gleaned from the paratext.
The numbers seem destined to have been read in small parts or sec-
tions which were contiguous and successive but also separate. Browsing is
70 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

a familiar form of consumption to us now, and it is clear that, however

dedicated the reader might have been to the Dickens chapters and keen to
read the next sequence in the tale, he or she was getting used to reading in
parts, in a trail of interrupted pieces. The monthly number would create an
expectation that it was normal to move around, to intersperse novel reading
with the reading of advertisements, to read eclectic discourses, one beside
the other. One was no longer expected to read fifty pages of one ‘genre’ at a
sitting but to move about in a gesture which television has perfected in us:
that of zapping or channel changing.16 Even if the reader read the chapters
all the way through, he or she could at any time be waylaid on their jour-
ney by the need to move back to the two illustrations which were always
included at the start of the chapters to check on them for more information
about an event or the appearance of a character. These two illustrations gave
elucidation to key moments of the novel and were prized as objects in their
own right, to pull out and keep or put on the wall, souvenirs of the read-
ing experience. Reading was becoming an act of processing since it meant
a constant building of one’s own personalized reading experience in which
one selects and rejects.
If much contemporary film is geared towards an audience used to chan-
ging channels, so the Dickens chapters are geared towards a public used to
the ‘language of the walls’. Paradoxically, the text simultaneously creates
such reading habits and evolves to adapt to an audience already used to
being solicited by other discourses or images while reading. Dickens recog-
nized and encouraged this habit of seeing by allowing and often actively
choosing ads to be placed within his monthly part. He also included adverts
within the narrative of his own novel (as Thackeray did), for example repro-
ducing the advert of Jenny Wren, the doll’s dressmaker, and Wegg’s adver-
tisement in Our Mutual Friend.17 The illustrations, which were of prime
importance in selling the monthly number (as the apology for a missing
illustration shows), flow on from the adverts, providing a form of interface
between ‘Advertiser’ and novel, since the illustrations resembled the adverts
and were always captioned with a line of text, and sometimes contained
small adverts themselves.18 The illustrations were often drawn by illustra-
tors either also working in advertising or using styles similar to those used
in advertising. The illustrations in advertisements aped the famous illustra-
tions of novels, as the drawings for the Lloyd’s Newspaper advertisements
show; these appeared in Bleak House, and are very similar to Thackeray’s
illustrations of his novels.19 Thus there is a form of homogenization which
would allow the reader to recognize similar features in novel and advert and
so move seamlessly from one form to another.
As this was a relatively new form of publication demanding new read-
ing behaviours, the author periodically felt obliged to elucidate some of
its structures for his readers. During the publication of Our Mutual Friend,
Dickens encountered the problem of keeping secret yet also hinting at John
 Reading the Dickens Advertiser 71

Rokesmith’s identity. Thus he left a message for his readers in the form of
an added slip in the first number: ‘The Reader will understand the use of the
popular phrase Our Mutual Friend, as the title of this book, on arriving at the
Ninth Chapter (page 84)’. Notice that Dickens can provide the exact page in
the ninth number, so tightly planned was each publication. This notice, as
well as the ‘POSTSCRIPT in lieu of preface’ (also appearing in the first num-
ber), gives us a sense of the awareness that what was clear to publisher and
author might seem fragmented and occult to the reader. At once revealing
and concealing, Dickens gives the following explanation:

Its difficulty was much enhanced by the mode of publication; for, it would
be very unreasonable to expect that many readers, pursuing the story in
portions month by month through nineteen months, will, until they
have it before them complete, perceive the relations of its finer threads
to the whole pattern which is always before the eyes of the story-weaver
at his loom.

The ‘story-weaver’ is selling his story in parts or threads (we are reminded
here of the vertebrae of Baudelaire’s textual serpent); he is using added slips,
appended notes and other annexes to explain his serial publication, thereby
using the techniques of advertising which surround the chapters of the
novel to annotate an already piecemeal structure.

Speed, the supplement, and the multiple occupation of space

Speed is one of the salient features of the reading experience of the monthly
number which is quite unlike the savouring of poetry or the rereading of
cherished texts.20 The reader is being encouraged to pass swiftly through a
space which can potentially produce what Richards has called hallucinatory
experiences. In exhibition space, he tells us, static objects were made to seem
active through lighting, display and the manner in which the public was
channelled past them, producing ‘a kinetic environment for inert objects’.21
In the monthly number that ‘kinetic’ environment is created by the flicking
of pages, the need to open or pull out booklets, look under adverts, seek for
free gifts or by the multiple stimulants of competing texts and images. Such a
textual environment, like the comic strip, involves the eye in ‘rapid, intense
nervous stimuli, like the flickering of the cinema screen or the view from a
train window’.22 Likewise, Curtis tells us that Ford Madox Brown’s Work of
1852–65 is akin to the new comic strip which ‘causes the eye to flicker over
the surface, as an extension of a desire to observe life as it actually “presents
itself”, as part of a Victorian culture of observation’.23 Certain paintings
of Memling – those depicting the life of Christ for example – show us that
this visual complexity was nothing new and that hundreds of years earlier
viewers of such pictures had been asked to take in the sequences in front of
them by allowing their eye to shuttle between groups of figures and scenes.
72 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

This flickering of the eye is akin to the movement of the modern eye over
the page of advertisements: present-day advertisers know that the reader
of a magazine rests the eye on an advert for approximately three seconds
before deciding whether to continue to read or to move on. The Western eye
travels the page in a sweeping movement which goes from top right-hand
corner to top left hand corner then sweeps down diagonally when faced
with a page of heterogeneous framed ads; the eye must work quickly to take
in the entirety of the structure. The Dickens adverts also school the reader
in how to look and how to react. In N° 1 of Bleak House of March 1852, there
are seventeen pages of offers of new books whose copy expresses the idea
that time is of the essence. No dinosaur advertising this, but responsive
and quick: publishers’ lists of titles carry the eye-catching captions ‘Nearly
Ready’, ‘Now Ready’ and ‘In Preparation’. New publications offered for sale
by Chapman and Hall − notably by Dickens or Bulwer Lytton − are described
as already available in one volume ‘handsomely bound in cloth’. The adverts
for the tailors Moses and Son flaunt their capacity to respond quickly to
death by placing the capitalized word ‘MOURNING’ next to the promise
‘Ready made at Five Minutes Notice’; the whole suit ‘made to measure’ can
be collected a mere five hours later. There is a cartoon-like sense of objects
being offered up for consumption immediately – but not forever – since the
objects will soon be sold out. The reader must be quick to catch them, active
in choices, reacting to possible fakes and ersatz which the adverts constantly
warn against: the legend ‘Observe the Name’ appears at the bottom of many
adverts as well as the word ‘Caution’ followed by alerts against ‘imposition’
and ‘falsehood’.24
Many of the adverts placed at the back of the monthly number use differ-
ent qualities, thicknesses and sizes of paper. These adverts were often added
at the last minute as extras or supplements, a habit which attests to the flexi-
bility of the advertising machine and the idea that a text can be improved
on and embellished. Copies of the same monthly number sometimes dif-
fer from each other since certain adverts are sewn into one copy and not
into another; this was a response-tactic to sudden growth in sales allowing
expansion of the advertising space. Thus, though the numbers were pre-
planned, they were not a finite thing but a ‘monthly’ object in which author
and editor responded to outside pressure in terms of commercial space and
sometimes plot.25 The advertiser could mould his adverts to the context
in which they appeared to the public and could add new adverts swiftly.
Supplementation and flexibility are part of this effect of rapid evolution in
the monthly number – since the smaller coloured flyers were often added at
the last minute as a form of rogue advertising. This expandable, mouldable
vehicle of communication altered the reader’s reception of the novel.
The modulable aspect of the advertising apparatus is also present in the
structure of the novel itself, which is now capable of absorbing new scenes
as the story is built month by month.26 The most obvious manner in which
 Reading the Dickens Advertiser 73

the text is able to accommodate change is seen in Bleak House, which alter-
nates the darkly ironic chapters narrated by an unknown narrator and the
lighter ‘summery’ chapters narrated by Esther Summerson, which are more
easily accessible to the reader than the twisting and twisted descriptive
passages with which they are juxtaposed. This alternation allows a pen-
dulum swing from one view of the world to another and the introduction
of persons and events from very different spheres – spheres which do not
at first meet but which will later be brought together. The juxtaposition of
Lady Dedlock’s life at Chesney Wold with Krook’s cluttered, filthy shop, or
Esther’s optimism and joy with Tulkinghorn’s death-like grip echo in some
measure the juxtapositions of incongruous advertisements; the placing of
adverts for great works of literature next to adverts for lowly household
goods. Both systems allow the addition of material without destruction of
the global armature. In Dickens’s novels lighter subnarratives can be, and
often are, introduced without deforming the whole.27 It is interesting to note
that the characters within the novels are often shown to practise just this
form of modular reading and reciting. In Our Mutual Friend, for example, the
Golden Dustman is illiterate but desirous of collecting and understanding
works of literature which he receives ‘in parts’: ‘The Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire’ is read to him in instalments by the unscrupulous Wegg,
who takes advantage of his serial readings to add his own inventions and
to compose his own poetic comments upon history. Wegg is able to create
a serial form which allows him to take as many liberties as he wishes with
the main narrative.
Our journey back and forth as readers of the monthly number on a hori-
zontal plane is also accompanied by a vertical descent into other worlds
as advertising booklets are opened and read. On entering booklets such
as those selling Ransome’s Patent Stone Filters, Thorley’s food for Cattle,
Mayall’s Daguerrotype portrait, or Norton’s Camomile Pills, we find many
miniature narratives. The booklets can be detached so that they are worlds
within worlds – at once part of the number but also contiguous to it. 28 Some
are folded in concertina fashion, like the tiny booklet in N° 6 of Bleak House
from ‘The Oak Mutual Life Assurance and Loan Company’, which can be
opened out into a long strip (still attached to the main text) and then folded
back. This adds to the multidimensional aspect of the number and to the
variety of movements both manual and visual which the reader has to per-
form to read all its parts fully. We also discover adverts stuck over other
ads – fixed to the ‘host’ advertisement with a little glue in the centre so that
the advert placed below is still readable. Such multiple occupancy of space
invites comparison with more modern practices such as the Cubist mon-
tage which used textual fragments to express the palimpsestuous nature
of urban living, or the ‘peel-back’ information found on many products
today. In the Victorian period the cross-section in drawings of the city
was used to account for the way in which the city was occupied by many
74 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

worlds in a single space – either the cross-sections of buildings with their

floors inhabited by different social classes (the sweated workers in the cellar,
the bourgeois in his comfortable apartments above), or the sections of the
underground world of London and Paris with its drainage, transportation
and gas pipes. These graphic representations of simultaneous happenings
were a popular medium for critics seeking to spatially represent either social
progress or social injustice. Such a fashion also translates a modern desire
to see all, all at once: a world of the condensed and the conglomerate. That
such a desire is dependent on habits of seeing is confirmed by Benjamin,
who conjectures that the urban dweller sought artistic outlet for this new
capacity to see: ‘Perhaps the daily sight of a moving crowd once presented
the eye with a spectacle to which it first had to adapt. ... Then the assump-
tion is not impossible that, having mastered this task, the eye welcomed
opportunities to confirm its possession of its new ability.’29 The pages of
Edwin Drood provided just such an opportunity.

Edwin Drood: The lay and the liturgical

Albeit a carefully planned commercial enterprise (the fruit of decisions
on the part of Dickens and his editors), the monthly number has some
of the characteristics of surrealist art. We are reminded of the Cabinet of
Curiosities as it was reinterpreted by surrealist artists with its contiguous
miniature displays or of the atelier of André Breton with its collection of
fetishes and masks, photographs and Victorian birds under glass, and of
course of Max Ernst’s collages made from late nineteenth-century and early
twentieth-century magazine illustrations. There are also elements of the
cadavre exquis, a patchwork of scenarios made from heterogeneous parts cre-
ated independently of each other but forming nonetheless a single body
or entity. To consume the whole one must first consume the parts, and to
do this is to be aware of the humour and irony inherent in such strange
juxtapositions. There is promiscuity in the newly perceived proximity of
these spaces and a sense in which the words and images offered to us might
overlap and create a hallucination, a liberating one in which the pressures
of logic and reason are no longer felt. One image or text remembered might
overlay and imprint upon another. This possibility is illustrated in Edwin
Drood in its opening paragraph:

An ancient English Cathedral town? How can the ancient English

Cathedral town be here! The well-known massive grey square tower of
its Cathedral? How can that be here! There is no spike of rusty iron in
the air, between the eye and it, from any point of the real prospect. What
is the spike that intervenes, and who has set it up? Maybe it is set up by
the Sultan’s orders for the impaling of a horde of Turkish robbers, one by
one. It is so, for cymbals clash, and the Sultan goes by to his palace in
long procession. Ten thousand scimitars flash in the sunlight, and thrice
 Reading the Dickens Advertiser 75

ten thousand dancing-girls strew flowers. Then, follow white elephants

caparisoned in countless gorgeous flowers, and infinite in number and
attendants. Still, the Cathedral tower rises in the background, where it
cannot be, and still no writhing figure is on the grim spike. Stay! Is the
spike so low a thing as the rusty spike on the top of an old bedstead that
has tumbled all awry? Some vague period of drowsy laughter must be
devoted to the consideration of this possibility.30

Mr John Jasper, Lay Precentor at Cloisterham Cathedral, is lying in an opium

den in London and slowly emerging from an opium dream.31 The dream
state allows him to have an impossible vision in which the rusty iron spike
of the sordid bed on which he lies is superimposed on the old cathedral
tower of his home town. This distorted seeing illustrates De Quincey’s idea
of the mind as a ‘dread book of account’ which records all data for eternity
and can display conflicting worlds side by side.32 Here we find on the one
hand Jasper’s dull but respectable life in the Church – an ancient and rural
existence based on mediaeval habits of life – and on the other the dissolute
existence he leads in his other life in an urban world of commodification
and change. The former is represented by the noble matter of stone and
the latter by iron – not the noble iron described by Ruskin in his essay ‘The
Work of Iron’, which is a pre-industrial matter, but iron which is fallen, a
now rusty household object, a product of the ‘storm-cloud’ of his vision of
the industrial nineteenth century. One world is described as ‘well-known’
while the other is alien. The iron spike is seen as ‘intervening’ in Jasper’s
vision of the stone tower, thus marring and defacing it. The defacing or
un-facing of the tower, the taking away of its old face and all it represents,
is further exacerbated by an association with an exotic world of fantasy
and excess. Such a world translates a most unchristian desire to consume
figured by the rapacious Sultan and his countless numbers of dancing-girls
and soldiers – an ostentation more in keeping with a fantasy of the riches of
overseas markets. And indeed there are similarities between the ironic and
excessive style in the writing here and that of the style of advertising copy
appearing in the descriptions of goods in the Dickens ‘Advertiser’.
The narrator then informs us that ‘the man whose scattered conscious-
ness has thus fantastically pieced itself together, at length rises’ (37). What
was double or indeed triple has now settled into a single object – a lowly and
laughable bedstead which is ‘all awry’, as was Jasper’s seeing. This moment
of disenchantment leaves the hallucinating subject aware that he is in ‘a
miserable court’ in London which offers no view of a Cathedral, or of any-
thing for that matter, being a dark and closed-off yard. Yet, ironically, this
dingy urban impasse is a passport, an ‘open sesame’ to a plural, exotic, con-
stantly mutating world which saves Jasper from Cathedral life, the ‘cramped
monotony’ of which ‘grinds [him] away by the grain’ (48). The expression
‘to grind away by the grain’ translates the repetitive relentlessness of labour,
76 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

the dullness of which needs an antidote. Gail Houston sees these disjunct-
ive perceptions that are Jasper’s skewed seeing as a means of escape: Jasper’s
solution for his boredom is to return again and again to the opium den
‘where he experiences – in a drug-induced, magnified form – the fragmen-
tary, hallucinatory state that is modern life’.33 Convertibility and exchange-
ability seem to me to be at the root of this modern experience of seeing.
We have before us a space occupied simultaneously by several images or
objects as in the case of Jasper’s multiple perceptions. De Quincey’s vision
of the human brain as a ‘natural and mighty palimpsest’ is revealing here:
‘Everlasting layers of ideas, images, feelings, have fallen upon your brain
softly as light. Each succession has seemed to bury all that went before. And
yet in reality not one has been extinguished.’34 Freud also sought a form of
representation which would adequately describe the superpositions of time
and of space in the human psyche. He took the city of Rome as an example
of the way different architectures survive in the same place but then found
it inadequate since what he was trying to figure was ‘unimaginable and
even absurd’:

If we want to represent historical sequence in spatial terms we can only

do it by juxtaposition in space: the same space cannot have two different
contents. ... It shows us how far we are from mastering the characteristics
of mental life by representing them in pictorial terms.35

He also rejects the developmental stages of the human or animal body as

an adequate model for mental life, since the early glands, tissue and bone of
infancy change beyond all recognition in adulthood. He says that ‘only in
the mind is such a preservation of all the earlier stages alongside the final
form possible’, and that ‘we are not in a position to represent this phenom-
enon in pictorial terms’.36 But if Freud considers it impossible to represent
the phenomenon, Dickens seems to succeed, by offering us a moving image
of Jasper’s mind in which two conflicting spaces and times are present in
the same hallucination. What Freud was looking for in his quest for a model
was the special effects we are now familiar with in film in which several
moving images coexist on the same screen, one over another, blending and
merging but still distinguishable.
The loading of one space with vestiges of past, present, and imagined
found in the extract from Drood is also a feature of the advertising para-
text framing the novel. There is a sense of connection between the differ-
ent objects advertised and the text of the chapters itself. The first page of
the ‘Edwin Drood Advertiser’ consists of an advertisement for a ‘Mourning
Clothes Warehouse’ which appears in each of the six monthly numbers. Its
sober appearance and lack of flowery prose are in harmony with the advert
on the inside of the front cover for Chappel’s Pianoforte, and indeed with the
front cover, which depicts rather lugubrious scenes from Drood as opposed
 Reading the Dickens Advertiser 77

to the light or comic scenes on the cover of David Copperfield. However,

there then follow some of the brightest and most surprising adverts of the
monthly numbers, probably due to the fact that in 1870 a new era in adver-
tising was beginning in which there were increased means to make advertis-
ing spectacular. One advert cries ‘Great Sale of Ladies’ Underclothes!’ while
electroplate, sea salt and anchovy paste jostle with wedding presents and
croquet sets. We find some of the most luxurious and sensual adverts at the
back of the number, such as one for ‘Eau de Vie: Pure Pale Brandy by Henry
Brett and Co.’ appearing in brilliant red, blue and yellow, while next to it
the reader can touch a silky smooth specimen of cork – a small sheet which
has its advert for ‘Cork Hats’ printed upon it. These are followed by a bril-
liant yellow booklet of eight pages and another advert in pink and violet.
As we have seen, ‘mourning’ (the word ‘Mourning’ in bold black type fills
the thick black frame of the ‘Jay’s London General Mourning Warehouse’
advert) starts each of the Drood advertisers. The association of ‘mourning’,
private grief translated into a spiritual and communal grief, with the word
‘warehouse’ with its connotations of mass-produced ‘wares’ and their stor-
age is a surprising one for modern eyes. Before ever the novel begins ‘mourn-
ing’ is drawn into the world of capital, associated with industry37 Likewise,
within the novel mourning for the dead takes on outlandish forms and
is constantly pulled into the world of commerce and greed. In chapter 19,
‘Shadow on the Sun-dial’, Jasper is wearing mourning clothes when he
threatens Rosa in the garden of the girls’ school. He strikes a restrained
pose, leaning on the sun-dial as if he were a respectable man in mourning,
but his words are in wild contrast to this. He calls Rosa ‘sweet witch’ and
talks of her ‘enchanting scorn’ which he wishes to possess. He utters in the
same breath ‘I love you, love you, love you!’ and ‘I would pursue you to the
death.’ (231). If advertising for a mourning warehouse – sober in black let-
tering on a white ground – begins the advertiser, it is superseded by an array
of tantalizing announcements, colours and motifs which must have exerted
a powerful force at a time when colour and image were so little available.
On the reverse side of ‘mourning’ we find an advert for parquet floors with
the legend ‘cost less than Turkey carpets’ written across it and which shows
an oriental floor design which fills the page. In the first five numbers we
move from a piano forte business, to the ‘mourning Warehouse’, then to
the oriental parquet advert (and in N° 3 there is a Mappin and Webb elec-
troplate advertisement showing eastern-looking lamps and amphora). Just
as the first chapters of Edwin Drood slip between an oriental opium den and
the Turkish hallucinations of Jasper, back to the Christian rituals of the
Church, so the adverts take us from formal ‘mourning’ to the twists and
turns of oriental design. In N° 1 on the page facing the ‘Parquet Floors’ we
find an advert for a photographer − ‘Pompeian Studio – Private Portraits –
Stereoscopic company’ − with various testimonials, prices, and mentions of
Royal patronage. This notion of having oneself represented, of possessing
78 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

an image of oneself, is part of an ethic of showing and parading which we

find in both the mourning clothes advert and the showing of the parquet
floor. The secular subject thus exists through the ways he or she appears to
a myriad of others. Jasper is caught between a vocation of exclusivity, reveal-
ing the soul to God alone, and a ‘lay’ desire to relate himself intimately to
others.
In the second monthly number of May 1870 there is a strange and start-
ling advert which literally ‘cashes in’ on Dickens’s use of the girls’ school at
Rochester in the story of Edwin Drood. The advert reads thus:

The Nuns’ House, Seminary for young Ladies at Cloisterham (see ‘The
Mystery of Edwin Drood’).

The Principal of the school then lists her fees and invites potential clients
to write to her. She appears to have no qualms concerning her use of a work
of fiction to promote her establishment and Dickens appears to have had
no objection. This advertisement coming early in the Advertiser creates an
extraordinary breach in the fictional fabric of the story of Drood. One might
even say a tear or a cut, since this is a radical suspension of the suspension
of disbelief. Did Dickens want his fictional worlds to be turned inside out,
to stand forth as pure inventions carried, disseminated and exploited by the
vehicle of advertising – advertising which he as author would also exploit in
his turn? To open up his fictions so that they flowed into the social fabric
and were part of it, is perhaps less the destruction of fiction by commer-
cial reality and more an expression of the possibility that all worlds, all of
the world, are fictions, and that there is a mutual engendering between a
school as it is written about in a novel and a school as it exists in a building.
A school is not merely the building in which it is housed but the collective
fantasy constructed in order for the institution to exist. The fictional text,
rather than preserving itself from the realities of the world beyond, both
opens itself out and pulls that world into itself, displaying the cords which
attach it to it and feed it; the virtual and the real are bound up with and
inseparable from each other. Might there also be a hubristic desire that the
world should become fictional and be created by the virtual – the virtual of
Dickens’s making?
The pages of the novel also seem to point to such imagined worlds. The
cathedral seems to have no more reality for Jasper than a hoard of Turkish
robbers or an iron spike. And this sense of the replacement of a central real-
ity by a series of contiguous fantasies continues throughout the narrative.
The slowness and discomfort of the old world of Cloisterham is contrasted
with the relative speed of forays into the city, which become a drug-like
respite from the crawl of cathedral life. Such respite sometimes colours the
scenes back at Cloisterham with its haze of fog, dim crypt or shadowy cath-
edral so that the reader experiences this world as if under the influence of
 Reading the Dickens Advertiser 79

opium. The two illustrations which are placed just before the opening pas-
sage of the first page of Edwin Drood and after the advertisements also pro-
vide a sense of an oscillation between worlds, a double seeing. The first is an
image entitled ‘In the Court’ [Fig. 12] in which we see bodies lying on the
bed in the opium den reminiscent of a Gustave Doré scene of urban deca-
dence and degradation. The image is almost entirely black. There are two
old iron bedposts sticking up like spikes on the right of the picture and lean-
ing together so that their tips nearly meet and forming what might appear
to a hazy eye a spire or pinnacle. The second illustration depicts a couple
(Edwin Drood and his betrothed) seated on a bench; it is entitled ‘Under the
Trees’ [Fig. 13] and light and order appear to reign. The harsh leaning lines
of the spikes in the first illustration are partially echoed in ‘Under the Trees’
by a straight young sapling on the left of the picture – a strangely corrected
and tidied mirror image of ‘In the Court’. In place of the sagging curves of
the broken bed of the opium den is the straight horizontal line of a wooden
bench, while behind the decorously seated couple appear the windows of
the cathedral. A chair lies fallen with clothes strewn across it in the bottom
left-hand corner of ‘In the Court’, while in ‘Under the trees’ the eye is drawn
down to the utterly straight parasol of the young girl. This latter illustration
looks like an advertisement for a novel of sentiment which one might well
find in the advertising pages accompanying any Dickens novel – or could be
an engraving for sale like ‘Village Pastor’ which we saw earlier. This image

Figure 12 ‘In the Court’ from Edwin Drood, 1870

Source: Personal source.
80 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

Figure 13 ‘Under the Trees’, Edwin Drood, 1870

Source: Personal source.

of a couple in a rural setting contrasts violently with the grotesque image of

entwined bodies in the first image. In one image, the bodies are in a state
of abandonment, merging into yet lost to each other and to themselves,
while in the other the bodies observe distance and suggest social structure
and the law; the couple are separated on the bench and are formally dressed
wearing hats and gloves. ‘In the Court’ suggests a world in which these
considerations no longer have meaning; the faces of those slumped on the
bed or writhing in ecstasy can hardly be seen, offering the anonymous and
fragmented bodies of pornography.
Yet the two illustrations are placed side by side in the first number of Edwin
Drood, lying one on another, and are carefully linked in the narrative. They
are events which succeed each other in the plot and which mutually define
each other. The encounter between Edwin and Rosa symbolizes Jasper’s frus-
tration; their slightly cloying childish attachment represents the world from
which Jasper is cast out. It is this alienation which lies behind the reverse side
of the rural idyll – the tortured, Gothic and murderous inner world of Jasper
represented here by the opium den.38 In chapter 19, ‘Shadow on the Sun-
Dial’, there is an illustration entitled ‘Jasper’s Sacrifices’ showing another
bench in a rural setting by a sun-dial, but this time more enclosed and over-
grown with a menacing Jasper standing and remonstrating with a cowering
Rosa. The figures are leaning, off-balanced and off-centre as if Jasper cannot
fully inhabit such a scene without tipping it into the destabilized world of
the opium den with its excess and despair. Dickens describes his dark outline
 Reading the Dickens Advertiser 81

which sets ‘his black mark on the very face of day’ (228).39 In the description
of the opium scene, Jasper is sharing the bed with a Chinaman, a Lascar
and a haggard woman and he twice says ‘Unintelligible!’ as if the languages
he hears as well as the mixing of images he sees are too disparate to have
meaning. The closeness, even simultaneity, of the two worlds he inhabits is
reinforced when at the end of the chapter we find the following lines:

That same afternoon, the massive grey square tower of an old Cathedral
rises before the sight of the jaded traveller. The bells are going for daily
service, and he must needs attend it, one would say, from his haste to
reach the open cathedral door. The choir are getting on their sullied white
robes, in a hurry, when he arrives among them, gets on his own robe, and
falls into the procession filing in to service. Then the Sacristan locks the
iron-barred gates that divide the sanctuary from the chancel, and all of
the procession having scuttled into their places, hide their faces; and
then the intoned words, ‘WHEN THE WICKED MAN’ rise among groins
of arches and beams of roof, awakening muttered thunder. (39)40

The ‘massive’ tower rises in front of Jasper, a phallic reminder of the sensual
world he has just left and reminiscent of the sexual associations of ecclesi-
astical architecture (found later in William Golding’s The Spire). ‘Groins of
arches’ continue this network of metaphors and hark back to the groins of
the opium takers, which we see clearly in the illustration since the opium-
eaters are lying across the bed, their legs splayed towards the reader. That
the white robes of the choir should be ‘sullied’ suggests both a physical
and a moral staining, while the ‘iron-barred gates’ act as a reference to the
iron spikes of the opium bed as if the opium dream were still exerting its
effect on the perception of the returning Jasper. The animalistic ‘scuttled’
sits strangely within the pomp of a church service and conjures visions of
the animal abandonment seen at the opium den. The ‘muttered thunder’
of the intonation echoes the groans of the opium-eaters and is likewise
‘Unintelligible!’ to Jasper. The idea of the ritual is carried from one world
to another; the taking of opium presided over by a grotesque high priest-
ess leaves its trace in the Evening Prayer of the Anglican Church Liturgy
(and, although this is not a communion service, the administering of wine
and wafer is not far from the reader’s mind). The profane and the sacred
are mixed in the two extracts as they are in the advertisements around
them which echo the Bible: the capitals of the ‘WICKED MAN’ echo the
capitalized bold type of ‘MOURNING’ in the advert which the reader may
have just glanced at. The intoned ‘WHEN THE WICKED MAN’, from Ezekiel
18.27, is repeated at the start of the Morning Prayer and the Evening Prayer
services and asks the wicked man to turn away from sin and save his soul.
We see that Church liturgy has something in common with advertising: it
functions by means of repetition and the constant hailing of the individual.
Jasper feels he is being called to here concerning his own wickedness.
82 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

Thus we see that in Edwin Drood the passages from one world to another
are rapid and seamless, be they geographical or mental, be they from London
to Cloisterham or the schizophrenic oscillations of Jasper between upright
man of the Church, affable uncle and tortured and lascivious predator.
These rapid shifts are reflected in the advertisements in each monthly num-
ber which boast a range of technological goods which do not yet appear in
Our Mutual Friend and Bleak House. There is a preoccupation with technol-
ogy as an agent of change unprecedented in earlier advertising in Dickens’s
novels, as well as a sense of the speeding up of daily life. We find the first
references to ‘fast’ food in an advert for ‘A cup of coffee in One Minute’
or fast acquisition with ‘The Duplex Refrigerator’, a company which also
sells ice safes, washing machines and sewing machines, all of which can
be paid for in ‘monthly instalments’, sometimes with a free ‘month’s trial’.
Being mobile is of central importance especially in terms of social ascen-
sion. ‘Wilcox and Gibbs’, whose slogan is ‘A New World at Home for Busy
People’, sells sewing machines with the promise of the speedy production
of clothes for one’s family who will then rise socially, allow opportunities
to ‘multiply’ and therefore not have to emigrate. This multiplication her-
alds, the copy tells us, the dawning of a new era: ‘When machinery enters
into industrial and domestic life, as it ought, there will be no need to go
abroad for a New World for Working People.’ Thus the machine (delivered
to customers by train) brings opportunities normally far away in space and
time directly into the home. The advertisements, like Drood itself, suggest
the very modern desire of having all our fantasies provided in one place at
one time.

Attention and the cadavre exquis

The ability to take in these influences and counter-influences on our per-
ception relies on a particular form of ‘floating gaze’ or ‘floating attention’.
The term is inspired by the expression ‘attention flottante’, the French trans-
lation of the psychoanalytic term ‘gleichscwebende Aufmerksamkeit’ or ‘evenly
poised attention’. It was used by Freud in his recommendations on ana-
lytic technique in which the analyst is asked to suspend traditional ways of
attending to a discourse (based on logical sequence, presupposition and the
desire to organize the material one hears):

For as soon as anyone deliberately concentrates his attention to a cer-

tain degree, he begins to select from the material before him; one point
will be fixed in his mind with particular clearness and some other will
be correspondingly disregarded, and in making this selection he will
be following his expectations or inclinations. This, however, is pre-
cisely what must not be done. In making the selection, if he follows
his expectations he is in danger of never finding anything but what he
already knows ...41
 Reading the Dickens Advertiser 83

Freud says that what is unconnected and in chaotic disorder seems at first
to be submerged ‘but rises steadily into recollection as soon as the patient
brings up something new to which it can be related and by which it can be
continued’.42 This system of recording without discrimination and the use of
this pool of data to make connections with subsequent information is what
we have been seeing in action in the Dickens monthly number. We have
imagined a reader who has moved through the textual architecture before
him or her and has produced meanings by making connections between
what he or she had read earlier and what he or she is now reading. As Freud
says: ‘It must not be forgotten that the things one hears are for the most
part things whose meaning is only recognized later on.’43 This retrospective
assigning of meaning through connections made on an unconscious level
is the work which the monthly number encourages us, as readers, to carry
out. In a letter to Fliess, Freud describes the stratification of the psyche as it
deals with memory traces: each new circumstance elicits a ‘rearrangement’
or ‘retranscription’ of the old trace, thus creating new translations or registra-
tions of old material. He also points out that ‘Every later transcript inhibits
its predecessor and drains the excitatory process from it.’44 Attenuating the
effect of one memory trace by another might be extrapolated out to the weak-
ening effect of one discourse in the monthly number (be it advertisement or
novel) by a subsequent one. As the reader comes across new solicitations on
his attention the power of capitalized words such as ‘WICKED MAN’ in the
narrative might overlay the word ‘MOURNING’ in an advertisement.
Readers were not necessarily aware of the effects of forms of attention
on the meanings they assigned to a text like Edwin Drood, yet these paths
of attention and attribution of meaning were increasingly becoming the
norm. If Nietzsche, as we saw earlier, describes modern perception in terms
of a traveller viewing the passing world from a train, a view which is both
partial and inaccurate, Freud suggests that a patient must behave like a train
traveller, recounting the passing landscape of his or her mind however par-
tial and inaccurate it may be:

So say whatever goes through your mind. Act as though, for instance,
you were a traveller sitting next to the window of a railway carriage and
describing to someone inside the carriage the changing views which you
see outside.45

We see that in describing the analytic technique Freud has recourse to meta-
phors of modern technology. Here he uses the train but he also used micro-
phones, telephones and electric oscillations as if his description of attention
were somehow aping a mechanism or mechanical system which was not
quite human, or rather, went beyond the human.46
The unnatural or inhuman scape created by advertising was often the
object of attempts to ‘humanize’ and ‘tame’ it by imposing order. Regulation
84 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

of the effect of the montage and mess of advertising hoardings and pages
is discussed by William Smith in 1863 and illustrated by a mesmerizing
collage: ‘Wall-Posting as it is’ – next to a new neatly arranged hoarding –
‘Wall-Posting as it Ought to be’.47 Another attempt to regulate the Babel
of language and image can be seen in The Graphic of 20 February 1875:
illustrations have gone and have been replaced with the name of the prod-
uct in bold type, repeated up to eight times at the beginning of a num-
ber of descriptive sentences. A notice ‘TO OUR READERS’ announces that
the adverts have also been placed in categories: ‘The Advertisements will
be found arranged in the following order:- Amusements, Perfumery and
Toilet, Furniture, Drapers, Milliners and Tailors, Miscellaneous articles,
Books, Comestibles, Music’. The effect is strangely austere and does not
continue in subsequent numbers, which suggests that part of the power of
advertising is its haphazard, anarchic quality mixed with the force of iconic
representation. Advertising takes its seductive power from being unintelli-
gible – a series of random offerings on which we might alight seemingly
by chance. This is part of its magical and unschooled quality, mirroring
the tantalizing world of objects before they are placed within the logic of
a grammar.
If advertising is marshalled and made to ‘mean’, it loses appeal. We might
think here of Benjamin’s study of collections of objects in the arcades, thrust
together as if out of the most incoherent dreams, or of the Dickens Advertiser
offering seemingly severed heads and shoulders selling wigs, adverts selling
crinolines in which the model is flanked by the cages of the crinolines giv-
ing an impression of the female body as a series of detached parts, or human
hearts posted up to sell medicines [Figs. 14, 15, 16]. In other pages there are
adverts for spectacles which depict eyes attached to nothing staring through
floating spectacles. Advertising pages thus display fragments of the human
frame lying in their separate enclosures – an arrangement which would later
be taken up by the Dada artists who created new human forms from the
text and images of advertising. Consider Raoul Hausmann’s self-portrait
of 1920, Selbstportrait des Dadasophen (part of a series of ‘Dolls, Bodies and
Automatons’) in which the formally dressed human figure has a diagram of
a heart stuck over one half of the torso – and a machine-like clock in place of
a face. Max Ernst’s collages of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century
text and image suggest an understanding of these new forms of arrange-
ment and attention: his pictures put into practice the unconscious drive of
the nineteenth century to collage. The Dada movement and Surrealism find
an aesthetics of modernity in their re-readings of the nineteenth century:
elements which are intelligible when read separately become ambivalent
when perceived compositely and simultaneously.48
We will conclude this section by bringing together Jasper’s reaction to
the montage of his opium dream – the ejaculation ‘Unintelligible!’ – with
advertising’s superposition of fantasies. What we have been seeing here is in
 Reading the Dickens Advertiser 85

Figure 14 Mourning, wig and pipe adverts, Our Mutual Friend, 1864
Source: British Library.
86 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

Figure 15 Crinoline and billiard table adverts, Our Mutual Friend, 1864
Source: British Library.

some sense a blind creation of a new object formed from the juxtapositions
of the advertising page and the chapters of a novel; it implies a ritual, a
habit of consumption and production in which meaning is created from
random assemblage just as in the sentence: ‘Le cadavre – exquis – boira – le
vin – nouveau.’ We see that what is ‘unintelligible!’ is not necessarily mean-
ingless and that the reader weaves a different and deferred tale alongside
 Reading the Dickens Advertiser 87

Figure 16 Heart medication advertisement, Our Mutual Friend, 1864

Source: British Library.
88 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

the logic of traditional narrative. The architecture of the monthly number

encourages suspension of the presuppositions and prejudices which nor-
mally guide attention, allowing data to blend and flow together. Thus do
seemingly insignificant paratextual items reveal the monthly number’s
unofficial or unintended messages.

Anti-Bleak House: The advertisement uses the novel

We need to determine how much of the placement of advertisements
was fortuitous and how much the juxtaposition of advert with novel was
planned and prepared. To what extent was Dickens active in making the
monthly number and what ideology if any might underlie such a structure?
The monthly number begins to appear to us as an activity or a ritual rather
than a mere text; it is what Zizek calls ‘the external ritual which materialises
ideology’ and whose effects are far-reaching.49
There are certain advertisements which from their subject matter and
position beg the question of their function in relation to the chapters of the
novel as well as of the role Dickens, author-architect of the whole structure
of the monthly number, played in their placement. We must also ask what
this might mean in terms of his relationship to what Adorno has called the
culture industry. We will concentrate on a series of adverts for the merchant
tailors Moses and Son in the Bleak House monthly numbers of 1852–53.
They were closely linked to the text of the novel of Bleak House, and indeed
use the Dickens text as an inspiration. They were always on the back inside
cover and consisted of a paragraph of writing on a subject from the novel
or sometimes simply a piece in the style of the novel. This was followed by
a list of stock and prices. There were no images. Their titles often speak of
their affinity with the motifs and events of the novel and always to the pass-
ing seasons according to the months in which each number appeared. Here
are the titles as they appeared month by month:

Moses advertisements in the Bleak House Numbers

1. ‘Anti-Bleak House’ March 1852 11. ‘The Story of January 1853

the Season’
2. ‘April Showers’ April 12. ‘A Few Claims’ February
3. ‘May Flowers’ May 13. ‘March Gales’ March
4. ‘A Suit in June 14. ‘Prologue to April
Chancery’ many Changes’
5. ‘New Empire’ July 15. ‘Spring and May
Summer Dress’
6. ‘A Bold Stroke’ August 16. ‘Description’ June
7. ‘What a Stir’ September 17. ‘Table-Moving’ July
8. ‘A Change’ October 18. ‘A Sporting Party’ August
9. ‘Legal November 19. and 20. ‘The Closing September
Expectations’ of the Story’
10. ‘Christmas’ December
 Reading the Dickens Advertiser 89

Moses and Son read Bleak House

Although other advertisers used Dickens’s novels to sell their products, such
as Bett’s French Brandy, who address themselves ‘to the readers of Martin
Chuzzlewit’, or Dakins Tea, whose advert echoes the cover of Bleak House,
Moses and Son started a much more sustained relationship with their ‘host’
novel. There is a serial aspect to these advertisements, since their copy is
inspired by the months of the year. This linear linking is reinforced in num-
bers 2 and 3 by the rhyming of ‘showers’ and ‘flowers’ which encourages
anticipation of the ‘flowers’ of May after the ‘showers’ of April. The titles
sound like the chapter titles of the novel itself and thus add to the idea of
a serialized advertisement: ‘A Suit in Chancery and a Suit out of Chancery’
echoes the title of the first chapter ‘In Chancery’, while ‘A Change’ imitates
titles such as that of chapter 3, ‘A Progress’, or chapter 61, ‘A Discovery’. ‘A
Few Claims’ has affinities with chapter 24, ‘An Appeal Case’, and the final
‘The Closing of the Story’ is a direct borrowing from chapter 67 ‘The Close of
Esther’s Narrative’. The adverts which most closely mirror the language and
concerns of the novel itself are ‘Anti-Bleak House’, ‘A Suit in Chancery’, ‘Legal
Expectations’, ‘A Few Claims’ and ‘The Closing of the Story’. The others often
take emigration as their theme and the need to stock up on new attire for a
new world. The advert entitled ‘Description’ has a literary turn lamenting the
passing of the distinction between highbrow and lowbrow in literary style
but praising the fact that in the world of clothes the distinction still exists.
This comes as an interesting comment on the monthly number itself and its
espousing of popular culture; both the novel and the adverts use high and
low literary styles, neither being afraid of the hybrid. The other paragraphs
mostly focus on word play, such as the idea of ‘table-moving’ in July in which
the image of lovers holding hands under the table is set against table-turning
and the tables of prices which are turned upside down.
This sort of badinage is typical of the Moses style, which was as garish
as its shops. George Augustus Sala describes the ornate, lavish and openly
vulgar and eye-catching Whitechapel establishment of Moses and Son as
a spectacle in itself: ‘Countless stories of immeasurable show-rooms, laden
to repletion with rich garments. Gas everywhere. Seven hundred burn-
ers ... Corinthian columns, enriched cornices, sculptured panels, arabesque
ceilings ...’50 Bernard Darwin notices similar ostentation in his appraisal of
the adverts and he declares that Moses needs a chapter all for himself. In
the ‘Dombey and Son Advertiser’ Moses has pride of place on the back cover
where, according to Darwin, eyes would first turn after a perusal of the front.
Here we find poems such as ‘Moses to A. Bull’ or ‘A Gentleman’. However,
as Darwin points out, when we discover Moses again in Bleak House, he
is no longer on the prized back cover but ‘usurped by Mr. Heal and his
lordly beds, and poor Moses has to put up with a beggarly inside’. Instead of
writing poetry the copywriter has become ‘a mere prose labourer’.51 In the
‘Martin Chuzzlewit Advertiser’, Moses uses the title ‘The Eighth Wonder of
90 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

the World’; the seven wonders are enumerated and then candidates for the
eighth are suggested (among them the Great Wall of China, the Railways
and the Thames Tunnel). It is the Moses Aldgate establishment which wins,
of course, being compared to the Minories with its gilded columns and mar-
bled pillars.52 There is much punning of poor quality in the adverts but the
texts sometimes rise to literary allusion: in one Moses advert a Mr White
gives up the old-fashioned habit of powdering his hair for fear that it would
spoil his Moses suit: ‘He thought and thought till on that very day / His
powder pride and prejudice gave way.’ The allusion to Jane Austen might
have flattered the reader. All levels of literature and allusion were grist for
their mill, their main concern being the attraction of readers to their texts.
‘Anti-Bleak House’ does not fail to do this by choosing a title which immedi-
ately creates a link with its ‘host’ novel and proposes an antidote to the ills
described in the first pages of Bleak House:

No. 1 ANTI-BLEAK HOUSE

A BLEAK HOUSE that is indeed, where the north winds meet to howl an
ignoble concert, and bitter blasts mourn like tortured spirits of rebels, who,
though prisoners, are unsubdued; where the whirlwind and the hurricane
vow their vengeance; and the walls and timbers creak resistance, and, like
wounded gladiators, rise again boldly to defy the antagonist. Woe to the
inhabitant of the Bleak House if he is not armed with the weapons of an
OVERCOAT and a SUIT of FASHIONABLE and substantial Clothing such
as only can be obtained at E. MOSES and SON’s Establishments ... Who
would covet a Bleak House in the month of March, when the old winds
take out a fresh license, and to celebrate their re-commencement in a
roaring trade. ... But the Anti-Bleak House, the establishment whose
inventions can annihilate the effects of biting, pinching, screwing, and
driving bleak winds, is E. MOSES & SON’S; ... garments which no winds
can penetrate, which fit so exactly the person of the wearer, that they
render him secure as if he occupied an Anti-Bleak House, where March
winds having received due notice to quit, dare not remain for fear of
having double rent to pay, by spending their fury without any recom-
pense. ... being prepared specially for March, strong, but neat, fine, but
substantial. ... unprecedented by the lowness of the charge ... the approved
essentials of gentility and durability.53 [Fig. 17]

The fact that the advert refers explicitly to the content of the novel implies
that the copy writer had access to the chapters as they were being written
or that Dickens provided notes which gave an idea of how the chapters
would proceed. Note the way in which the writer takes up the very power-
ful Gothic influence in Bleak House and uses it to provide images of a
hostile environment which need an antidote. The bitter blasts of weather
 Reading the Dickens Advertiser 91

Figure 17 ‘Anti-Bleak House’, Bleak House, 1852

Source: British Library.
92 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

and a deathly struggle against the elements as well as the evocation of

a contrasting world of security and steadiness are all reflections of con-
cerns found in the four chapters which accompany the first monthly num-
ber. Chapters 1 and 2, ‘In Chancery’ and ‘In Fashion’, evoke stagnant and
threatening environments, the legal world of Chancery being a dead world
of fog and mud from which its victims have no escape. The fashionable
world is described as stifling and static, ‘a world wrapped up in too much
jewellers cotton and fine wool’.54 These are the heavy clothes of the old
world and are used by Moses and Son to form a contrast to their own light
and cheering suits. In chapter 3, ‘A Progress’, Esther Summerson will lead
us out of the tomb-like sites of the first two chapters towards the light of
a new world of movement and change − one in which in later chapters
Rouncewell and private capital will solve, in a partial way, the evils of
these sick worlds. And lastly, chapter 4, ‘Telescopic Philanthropy’, under-
lines the need to look to the poor at home in London before seeking those
of other nations. The advert pushes these considerations to their limit and
asks the reader–customer to look very close to home indeed, that is to him-
self, since to exercise his philanthropic tendencies he must ‘arm’ himself
with a coat if he is to survive the urban battlefield of ‘Bleak House’. It is
important to notice that in ‘Anti-Bleak House’ every aspect of the natural
world is commodified, including the wind, which does (presumably, like
Moses and Son’s) ‘a roaring trade’.
The ironic humour, the joke if you will, of this piece hinges on the way in
which one lexical field gives way to another: a hero, a rebel, at one with the
elements, knowing no limits to his action (unsubdued, vengeful, resisting,
rising, defying), cedes the way to a chilly ordinary gent, perhaps a clerk,
walking to work down a London street. The desire to be a warrior–gladiator
is exchanged for a snug, well-tailored coat. The advert is ‘anti’ the bleak-
ness of the system of England (the system called ‘Bleak House’), it is ‘anti’
the Gothic excesses which the text of Bleak House contains but it also needs
them in order to posit its own offer of salvation to those caught in the sys-
tem. The word ‘overcoat’ signals a change in the writing, which until this
point has been literary and romantic; the author starts to enjoin us to be
‘secure’, to seek ‘gentility’ and ‘durability’ and to return to a world ruled by
the economic concerns of supply and demand, by the petty economies of a
modest life. Even the wind is given ‘notice to quit’ and fears paying ‘double
rent’. To ‘spend’ without ‘recompense’ becomes a great fear rather than a
great attraction and replaces the glorious and unchecked ‘spending’ of the
elements in the first half of the text. The figure of the clerk or the city gent
evoked in the text is a castrated creature indeed, since the price he must pay
for the protection of the ‘Anti-Bleak House’ is to confine action to the bour-
geois domestic scene; he must exchange thrust for thrift and leave defiance
to figures in story books. Spending, with its sexual connotations, has been
reduced to purchase.
 Reading the Dickens Advertiser 93

This reflects some of the main structures of the novel of Bleak House, in
which only ‘gentility and durability’ remain after struggles of sublime pro-
portions. The gladiatorial struggles of those caught in the jaws of Chancery,
or of those who are prisoners of the aristocratic system as they fight against
what oppresses them, are silenced at the end of the novel, first by a mar-
riage and secondly by a removal from the urban gothic castle of London.55
Domestic durability obscures any revolutionary change. Desire is evoked
and then silenced. The Gothic is used to evoke another world, the world of
the other (such as the horrors of the slum Tom-all-Alone’s, or the sacrificial
passion of sublime proportions evoked by Lady Dedlock’s secret), but then
stops short of allowing an encounter with that alterity. The advert offers the
reader a grotesque and knowing parody of the mechanisms of the novel but
also of the mechanisms of advertising. It performs the work of the advert
before our eyes, showing how the subject is attracted by the full heat-blast
of images of power and action but offering, in the place of the pleasure and
self-fulfilment that such a space might offer, an ersatz: a good coat is the best
one can expect and the reader must accordingly give up dreams of heroism
and power. In the novel, a good marriage and Jarndyce’s private capital are
the salve or stop-gap which in the end replaces action on a grander scale. In
advertising the object must come in to ‘plug’ a need created by the advert,
but to do this the advertisement (and indeed the novel) must first create
desire beyond that which its ‘goods’ might satisfy.56
The next advert displays similar concerns:

No. 4 A SUIT IN CHANCERY AND A SUIT OUT OF CHANCERY

It is not necessary to talk of frightful monsters – nor of spirits, once
very disturbing to good people’s rest and quiet; a Chancery Suit is justly
enough considered as one of the most frightful apparitions which can
haunt any domicile. We can generally manage pretty well with natural
affairs, and can show courage like Britons at broad daylight; but it is
these shadows and this darkness which renders us so timid, because they
are supernatural: this must be the case with heavy – gloomy – dusty –
mouldy – heartbreaking – brainkilling Chancery Suits. Now the difference
between a Suit in Chancery and a Suit out of Chancery is just this: in
the former a man is every moment tormented, worried, plagued, twisted,
sharpened and threatened, until his very visage becomes like a Chancery
Suit – quite a supernatural affair. But a Suit out of Chancery, especially
a Suit of Summer Dress from the Establishments of E. MOSES & SON is
light, brilliant, heartcheering, and brainreviving; brushing up one’s spirits
with the most gratifying assurances of comfort and pleasure. But a suit in
Chancery is a very different matter, with this precious portion if a gentle-
man has property he is in a fair way of losing it; if he has a good suit he
may wear it out in expectation, and possibly may find it difficult to get
94 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

another. On the other hand, a Suit out of Chancery, from E. MOSES &
SON’s, is the best portion of a Gentleman’s estate, maintained at the least
expense, exceeding the most sanguine expectations – the very essence of
all novel and fascinating styles.

Here, Chancery has become a monster and an apparition and even ‘supernat-
ural’. It is a space in which Gothic gloom, dust and mould terrify and torment
the suitor. The pun on ‘suit’ allows the creation of two contrasting worlds: one
in which a legal suit torments and destroys the suitor and wears out the only
suit he or she might possess, and another ‘out of Chancery’ (which means out-
side of the confines of the old Legal system and in the ‘free’ market), in which
all markets are free to offer ‘suits’ of ‘good’ quality which are good for, that is,
beneficial to, the wearer, being ‘light’ ‘brilliant’ and reviving – the opposite
of the ‘gloomy’ and ‘mouldy’ legal suits. This contrast mirrors the alternation
between the darkness of the omniscient narrator’s pieces and the lightness of
Esther’s narrative, which, like the Moses suits, are ‘heartcheering’ and ‘brain-
reviving’ (Esther is always ‘cheerful’ or endeavours to be, becoming a good
housekeeper who jingles her keys). The two worlds also mirror the contrast in
Bleak House between the lack of substance of the Chancery world which leaves
no substantial goods behind and the world of Esther and Jarndyce in which
objects, houses – wealth of all sorts – are tangible and stable. The chapters
accompanying this number are chapters 11, 12 and 13 – ‘Our Dear Brother’,
‘On the Watch’ (both recounted by the omniscient narrator) and ‘Esther’s
narrative’. Chapter 11, ‘Our Dear Brother’, describes the finding of the corpse
of the law writer in the dingy room over Krook’s overcrowded shop. The law
writer signed himself ‘Nemo’, which means no-one and signifies in the novel
the loss of the character’s place in the symbolic order. He has pawned his
clothes, lost his ‘suit’ and through it his identity. Among his effects are found
‘some worthless articles of clothing’, and various fragments of text: ‘a bundle
of pawnbroker’s duplicates, those turnpike tickets on the road to poverty’,
some scrawled memoranda and ‘a few dirty scraps of newspaper’ (94). These
truncated and disparate writings are the signs of what the advertisement calls
the loss of property and the wearing out of one’s ‘suit’ in the sense of the
wearing out of one’s life – if one imagines that one’s life is a form of legal ‘suit’
in which one presents disparate texts in the hope of making a complete narra-
tive, making sense of it and getting ‘a judgement’ and thus a position. Nemo’s
narrative remains scattered, his messages unfinished: in this light the face of
the dead law writer seen in the glow of Krook’s candle is indeed beyond the
pale, a ‘supernatural affair’.
Chapter 12, ‘On the Watch’, also mentions clothes but this time concern-
ing fashionable society:

These are the ladies and gentlemen of fashion, not so new, but very ele-
gant, who have agreed to put a smooth glaze on the world, and to keep
 Reading the Dickens Advertiser 95

down its realities. For whom everything must be languid and pretty.
Who have found out the perpetual stoppage. Who are to rejoice at noth-
ing, and be sorry for nothing. Who are not to be disturbed by ideas. On
whom even the Fine Arts, attending in powder and walking backward
like the Lord Chamberlain, must array themselves in the milliners’ and
tailors’ patterns of past generations, and be particularly careful not to be
in earnest, or to receive any impress from the moving age. (211)

This reference to the clothes of the past with their connotations of regres-
sion, antiquated custom (walking backward) and to the refusal to move
onwards and accept change are echoed in the words ‘heavy’, ‘dusty’ and
‘mouldy’ in the advertisement. We also see in the word ‘brainkilling’ a refer-
ence to the refusal to be disturbed by ideas, the mental petrification which
is described in the chapter. The advertisement holds up for admiration the
modern, light clothes of Moses and Son which offer revival for the mind
as an alternative to the quagmire of dull tradition described in chapter 12.
The opening up of the closed space described here is performed by means of
the commodity: the suit of clothes as opposed to that of the state, the law
and the establishment. After the dark, slow prose of chapter 12, chapter 13
‘Esther’s Narrative’ brings light and movement to the bleakness of the two
preceding chapters; she attempts to ease the path for Richard’s and Ada’s
engagement, she moves the narrative forward in a first-person narrative
which seeks to elucidate rather than obfuscate.
These three chapters are sandwiched between the Moses advert just quoted
(at the back of the number) and another advert for an overcoat at the front.
The ‘Edmiston’s Pocket Syphonia’ advert which is on the front inside cover
of the first six numbers of Bleak House has a vocabulary reminiscent of that
used both in the novel and in the advertisement by Moses. This Syphonia
or ‘waterproof overcoat’ is described as being able to resist ‘the powerful
heat of the sun and the most violent rains, also obviating the stickiness and
unpleasant smell peculiar to all other waterproofs’. It can deal with ‘very
changeable weather’ and is quite different from the ‘cumbersome greatcoat
or the troublesome umbrella’. The illustration offers a vision of the perfect
prosthesis which frees man from all that is heavy and unwieldy, from what is
troublesome, sticking and sliding like the mud and mire: there are two illus-
trations, side by side, one showing a man struggling with an umbrella, the
other showing a man standing serenely and unhampered with ‘No Umbrella
Required’ written above his head in the shape of a protective arc. Thus is
the customer freed from the heavy and cumbersome effects of his environ-
ment – the very environment described in the pages of Bleak House.

Irony and meaning

If we look at the first paragraphs of the novel and compare them with the
Moses texts, certain similarities of style and of strategy become apparent
96 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

such as the ironic twists of meaning:

LONDON. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting
in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in
the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the
earth, and would it not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet
long, or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke
lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft, black drizzle with
flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes – gone into mourn-
ing, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs indistinguishable
in the mire. Horses scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot
passengers jostling one another’s umbrellas, in a general infection of ill
temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thou-
sands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the
day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon
crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and
accumulating at compound interest.
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river ... fog down the river, where it rolls
defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of
a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex Marshes, fog on the Kentish
heights ...; fog in the stem and bowl of the wrathful skipper, down in his
close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering lit-
tle ‘prentice boy on deck’. (49)

The reader finds himself in London in a circular and insular world from
which there is little chance of escape. The full stop after the word ‘London’
keeps us securely within its confines and the fog allows no view of the
countryside or of France across the channel. Mud covers dogs, horses and
people alike who are associated with an ‘infection’ and with poor visi-
bility ‘adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at
those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound
interest’ (49). Thus mud can multiply like money in the form of geological
deposits, just as the wind in the Moses advert does a ‘roaring trade’ like a
business. As in the caricatures of Grandville in France, the natural world
is borrowed to express the movements and transformations of commerce
and technology. The Moses adverts, like the Dickens text, load words with
several meanings: the foot passengers like the reader slip and slide and
can gain no purchase on their environment, which proliferates as fast as
the mud and fog. The vertiginous slippage from one meaning to another
translates the speed and ubiquity of modern capital as it seeps into every
area of human existence.
The burlesque tone which we have already seen in the Moses adverts is
also present here. Biblical rhythm and syntax link the first paragraph of
Bleak House to both Genesis and the book of Revelations, suggesting both
 Reading the Dickens Advertiser 97

an end and a beginning. ‘London’ with its capital letters and full stop is an
impossible sentence but strikes a note like a bell toll. It is the place, the only
place, both heaven and earth. Yet this is not ‘In the beginning ...’ for the
autumn term is ‘over’, it is winter and something has come to an end; flakes
of soot are like snowflakes ‘gone into mourning, one might imagine, for
the death of the sun’. Thus a sartorial element (mourning clothes) overlays
the description of the weather, while ‘infection of ill temper’ suggests the
disease and plague of the apocalypse. The accumulation of people, things
and laws which is part of the cataloguing of the world carried out in the
King James Bible is evoked by the use of ‘and’ in ‘and, would it not be won-
derful ...’ (49). This reminds us of the ubiquitous Biblical ‘and’ which starts
every verse of Genesis except the last and is the most frequent beginning
of all verses in the Old and New Testaments. The Lord Chancellor is in his
place at the centre of things and the present continuous of ‘sitting’ tells
us that this is how it was, is, and forever shall be. Amen. This is a state of
affairs which is so perennial that it needs no qualifying tense, as indeed is
true of the next statement which is a metaphor: ‘Implacable November wea-
ther.’ The weather, like the Lord Chancellor is implacable, and, like the Old
Testament God, refuses to be placated or pacified, remaining unappeasable,
intractable.
Bad weather is associated with the muddy streets of London but is then
renewed as a metaphor by the addition of the first mud of Genesis when
God asked for the dry land to appear. A joke is then made at the expense of
the Oxford movement or Tractarianism by introducing the dinosaur and
theories of evolution in the form of the Megalosaurus, which clashes with
traditional exegesis. Ruskin’s complaint that at the end of every Bible verse
he heard the clink of the geologist’s hammer is dramatized here. The joke
continues since those hubristic geologists who would glorify the ‘Giants’
of the earth are ridiculed through the prosaic clumsiness of the ‘waddling’
and ‘elephantine lizard’ startled to find itself on Holborn Hill. The bad
weather and mud do not constitute a primal slime in which new organisms
will be born, but veer towards oppression, depression and death. The smoke
‘lowering down’ cancels the ‘up’ movement of the dinosaur and simultan-
eously means ‘overcast and menacing weather’ and ‘to scowl’. The ‘soft
black drizzle’ is, once again, the mourning attire of snowflakes. ‘Let there
be light’ can only lurk behind ‘the death of the sun’. This writing brings
together Genesis and Revelations, popular literature and the Bible; literary
texts come together with more profane fare causing a Babel-like confusion
of languages and therefore a porosity or dialogue between texts. The sacred
divide is no longer a divide but a permeable membrane through which
words pass and re-pass. Thus the oscillations between bleakness and beati-
tude practised in the advertisements of Bleak House are discovered not only
in the changes from one chapter to another but within Dickens’s ironic
prose itself.
98 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

The real thing

We must not lose sight of the fact that the irony used in the advertisements
is there for a very practical reason: to sell goods. The ironic inference we
see in the adverts is geared towards the demonstration that only the house
of Moses can offer ‘real’ goods, things with substance which give a ‘return’.
The following advertisement, while still playing on the punning of words
(as does the advertisement ‘A Few Claims’ which appears in the previous
number), adds to this sense of the evanescence of the world of Chancery:

LEGAL EXPECTATIONS
IN some cases these are perplexing as any emotions a person can endure,
fraught with a thousand casualties, and subject to numberless caprices,
which seem to make everybody the sport of chance, very frequently the
whole struggles, expenses, journeys, &c. of a series of years, with loads of
rusty documents and piles of papers neatly tied with red tape, are in one
moment, for some unlucky word, swept into oblivion for a whole term,
and hope deferred sickens the heart of client and advocate. Happily,
no such circumstance can occur in the LEGAL EXPECTATIONS of the
PUBLIC, as they refer to E. MOSES &SON’S settlement of every SUIT for
the SEASON. In this respect everyone may legally expect the best, the most
novel, and the most substantial DRESS for AUTUMN and WINTER, their
New Styles being the essence of ART, TASTE, and FASHION; compre-
hending a vast array of New Materials, a magnificent exposition of the
Manufacture of every Country in the World – but a triumphant display of
skill in designs for DRESS, which alone can render these materials avail-
able for the season.
WHEREAS, E. MOSES & SON have LEGALLY bought, prior to any
advances in the markets, and for readymoney [sic], the largest, choicest,
and most valuable stock of fabrics specially designed for this season, and
comprising every kind of material, which, from its strength, elegance and
beauty, is worth calling a Novelty; and have liberally remunerated the
best Artistes and workmen for making these into the most fashionable
kinds of AUTUMN and WINTER OVERCOATS, PALETÔTS, WRAPPERS,
CAPES, &c. &c. Prodigious transactions rendering small profits remu-
nerative, and amazing advantages in purchase on the most gigantic
scale, warrant every patron of E. MOSES & SON’s Establishment, and its
Branches, LEGALLY to expect the most fashionable, the best, and the
cheapest Dress ever presented. OUTFITS to all parts of the World cheaper,
better, and more suitable than can be had elsewhere.57

The title ‘Legal Expectations’ makes the present-day reader of Dickens’s

novels think of Great Expectations and the way in which the expression is
used by Pip in his confessional autobiography with hubris at first, then with
 Reading the Dickens Advertiser 99

increasing irony and bitterness and finally with a wistful stoicism marking
his acceptance of the emptiness of ‘expectations’. In Bleak House, eight years
before the publication of Great Expectations, we find a similar lassitude con-
cerning the fruitless ‘expecting’ associated with the legal world. The Moses
text also insists on empty expectation: if the latter speaks of ‘loads of rusty
documents and piles of papers’, it is in response to similar images in the
pages of Bleak House. The narrator sees ‘heavy charges of paper’ issuing forth
from Chancery and being ‘burnt away in a great funeral pyre’ while Esther
describes coming across Richard ‘poring over a table covered with dusty
bundles of paper which seemed to me like dusty mirrors reflecting his own
mind’ (750).58 This sense of futility and circularity is also associated with
the yellowing papers in Miss Flite’s reticule; nothing good or ‘real’ can ever
come of them – only more papers, illusions and empty expectations of a
judgment ‘on the day of Judgement’. In the advertisement, the chance of
‘chancery’ is seen to sweep all hope ‘into oblivion’. Yet Moses counters this
with an offer to ‘settle every suit’, to give satisfaction as the law never can
by providing the client with a tangible suit of clothes. Moses offers us a
detailed apology of capitalism and mass production in the form of a utopia
of well-paid workers, satisfied customers and profit: Moses ‘have LEGALLY
bought, prior to any advances in the markets, and for readymoney’ a huge stock
of cloth and have then ‘liberally remunerated the best Artistes and workmen’.
From this they create their own proverb or theorem: ‘Prodigious transactions
rendering small profits remunerative ...’ means that if you bring prices down
and sell enough coats, you can make a profit and pay your workers well.
Moses wishes to share this utopia with his customers; the magical commod-
ity can satisfy all frustrated suitors by giving them substance − substance
linked to novelty and expansion. Newness and novelty run counter to the
antiquated ‘stoppage’ and eternal return of Chancery which harks back to
the dinosaur age with its ‘struggles’ found in the first page of Bleak House
and to the battles for survival found in the first two Moses advertisements.
If everything melts into air in the Chancery system, in the world of Moses,
there is a counter-fantasy of getting something.
Change and movement are present in Bleak House in the pioneering work
of science (symbolized by Doctor Woodcourt) and in the force of technol-
ogy and capitalism (symbolized by the railway entrepreneur Rouncewell).
The ills of society come not from exploitation at the hands of a Rouncewell
or a even a Moses – Dickens does not show work of this type – but from
the ill effects of social injustice going much further back. The sickness of
England – its unhealthy closed form made of self-perpetuating systems such
as the aristocracy and the legal system – needs the spark of change brought
from abroad. The French maid, Hortense, provides the spark by killing
Tulkinghorn, the latter being a repository of the secrets and therefore of the
power of the aristocracy. The murder opens the path to a new era. Overseas
markets producing foreign substances and goods such as those enumerated
100 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

in the commodities in the advert for Gilbert’s Atlas, discussed in the pre-
vious chapter, and in many other advertisements besides, supplied Moses
with many of his raw materials and allows him to sell to ‘all parts of the
World’. These influences, it is implied, are the gateways to satisfaction.

Emptying of political and moral content

The Moses adverts seem to question the existence of a serious social mes-
sage in Dickens; they imitate and thereby strangely unfold a lack of political
commitment in the Dickens novel. In the following advert entitled ‘What
a Stir’, all political and social stir is telescoped down to the purchasing of
clothes. Moses and Son proclaim themselves to be activists, not political
but commercial. They are like Rouncewell, the entrepreneur in Bleak House,
a force of change which no ‘philanthropy’ can equal. It is Rouncewell and
his business which will change the course of society in Bleak House and not
Mrs. Jellyby and her philanthropic endeavours. We might ask if Dickens
was aware that his reformist writing might do less to change the world than
his activity as a publishing and advertising entrepreneur which boosted
the circulation of text and goods. Moses and Son hi-jack the discourse of
philanthropy in their constant references to paying their workers well.
They become revolutionary heroes who describe themselves as ‘thorough
opponents of wet and damp’, which is an ironic wink at the reformist ten-
dencies of Dickens’s text. When perusing the text below one might easily
imagine them describing themselves as ‘the freedom fighters of GAIN and
PROFIT’.

WHAT A STIR
WHAT A STIR, on the hustings when opposition Candidates are har-
anguing Electors, and hundreds are shouting ‘Hear!’ ‘Hear!’ because
nobody can hear at all. What a stir at the door of a popular Newspaper
Office when a bill has been posted relative to a Revolution at the Antipodes!
News by electric telegraph in almost less than no time, and printed in far
less time still; but what a stir when some important discovery is made
which turns out to everybody’s advantage, and thousands are pushing
to the spot where Gold is abundant, and where industry is well remuner-
ated. No matter how many are going to the land of wealth, E. MOSES
& SON can supply everyone with the best OUTFIT and the CHEAPEST
CLOTHING in the world; their extensive business, their unequalled exer-
tions, and the massive capital they employ for buying in the best markets
when the tide is most favourable for purchasing on their usual large scale,
these and other advantages have given them the highest position in the
world, and these facilities are distributed amongst their patrons in the
superior quality of the goods they sell, and their exceedingly low charges.
What a stir when Sportsmen are moving off to the scene of their sport,
 Reading the Dickens Advertiser 101

with a thorough preparation for every event for wet or dry, for rough or
smooth, for sunshine or storm, but when can they be said to have made
such preparation, except when they have purchased all the necessary
DRESS at E. MOSES & SON’s? A SHOOTING COAT, on a principle entirely
new, giving free exercise to the arms when using the gun; a VEST and
TROUSERS of stylish and waterproof material, displaying the skill of the
first merchant-tailors in the world, in selecting materials the best and
the most suitable, and securing strength and neatness of workmanship;
a PAIR of the celebrated GROUSE BOOTS, made by E. MOSES and SON,
thorough opponents of wet and damp, and the best CAP for sportsmen,
selected from the HAT Department of E. MOSES and SON’s GIGANTIC
ESTABLISHMENT. (my emphasis)

Political, even revolutionary activity, is evoked here by means of the hust-

ings and the news of far-off revolution, and is then used to lead into a dis-
course on sales via a reference to gold digging. The ‘stir’ in society is not that
of social unrest but a stir in business. See how the advert leads from a seem-
ing preoccupation with human activity of potentially cataclysmic force like
that seen in ‘Anti-Bleak House’ only to peter out in a lame reference to
sportsmen moving off to the ‘scene of their sport’. The areas of energy in
the text (elections, revolution, gold digging) are in fact props which allow
Moses to upstage them. Moses and Son are the real actors in the paragraph
and usurp the forces of all the others: they have the highest position, the
greatest energy (‘unequalled exertions’) and the broadest influence (‘exten-
sive business’ and ‘massive capital’). The forces of nature are used to evoke
commercial strength harnessed to the ‘tide’. There is a sense of ‘sending
up’ the excesses of Dickens’s rhetoric concerning social ills, the implica-
tion being that it is the business around the Dickens text rather than the
social message of the text itself which creates a ‘stir’. This sits strangely with
Dickens’s acceptation of these adverts. The adverts function as a check on
the darker aspects of Dickens’s writing: it implies that there is no upheaval
that a good coat won’t put right. This is very similar to present-day adver-
tising which kidnaps and reuses political or civic language to commercial
ends.59 Moses uses Dickens’s text playfully, and that play brings out cer-
tain tensions in the novel, its hidden paradoxes. The chapters of the novel
are thus framed with matter which appears to contrast violently with the
damp, dark world of injustice, but is in fact its implied other side. We might
say that the adverts constitute a counter-interpellation in which the copy-
writer responds to the Dickens chapters by recontextualizing them through
punning and sending them back to Dickens as a playful comment on his
novels. In the last Moses advert accompanying the last two numbers of the
novel, the copywriter felt daring enough – no doubt as a result of so much
proximity to the great writer’s text – to allow himself the pleasure of mak-
ing his implications explicit. Dickens, like Moses, is, he implies, first and
102 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

foremost a salesman:

THE CLOSING OF THE STORY

WHEN an Author has nearly spun out the thread of his narrative, his
descriptions have connected him and the public so long that they have
arrived at a pretty good understanding, and possibly the Author thinks it is
time to look out for some fresh subject to keep up the communication.
The good understanding between E. MOSES & SON and the world’s public,
is the best basis on which Business communications can be established.
The interest excited by their NOVEL Styles of ATTIRE cannot be excelled,
and the comfort enjoyed in the choicest ARTICLES OF DRESS has origi-
nated and long continued an intimate Business acquaintance with them,
their friends, and the public.
Though SEPTEMBER may be considered neither SUMMER nor WINTER,
there is no paucity of seasonable inventions and novel introductions in
articles of ATTIRE, manufactured by E. MOSES & SON. ‘Remaining Stock’
is a phrase they never need employ. Various as the months in the year and
the days in the week are the elegancies and utility of their productions.
A vast amount of BUSINESS prevents the possibility of ‘unsold stock,’ and
immense transactions render small profits remunerative.
DURING the month of SEPTEMBER everyone should inspect an assem-
blage of new Designs and new Articles of ATTIRE, HATS, CAPS, HOSIERY,
BOOTS and SHOES, &c. &c ...

Here novel-writing and coat selling are placed on the same plane. The
Author like the tailor spins a yarn or ‘thread’ (Dickens himself would speak
later of the ‘threads’ of his narrative in his address to the readers of Our
Mutual Friend). The links with their customers are ‘intimate’: the author
has an ‘understanding’ with his reader–customer, mirroring the ‘business
communication’ between tailor and client, and both must come up with
‘novel’ things to keep that transaction open. Novels and articles, narrative
and yarn are intertwined in this writing, in which Dickens’s novels are no
different from coats, since both are quality items for sale. At the same time,
the tailor brings his productions up to the level of acclaimed novels. The
tailor must be just as ‘inventive’ as the author. The emptying out of political
force is paramount here – and constitutes the last (playful) nail in the coffin
of the reformer–writer: the author is a liquidator of stock rather than the
gladiator–warrior of social justice.
The uses of punning which these advertisements depend upon for their
effect have consequences beyond mere entertainment. However light-
hearted and humorous they are (the joke Freud tells us is the site of serious
communication), a powerful effect is produced. In his work on language and
 Reading the Dickens Advertiser 103

interpellation Lecercle turns to Althusser’s Pour Marx and Lire le capital to

find confirmation of the linguistic nature of ideology, or rather its linguistic
workings and the fact that ideology works through extensive punning:

The plight of post-Babel language is not that it offers too many words
for too few ideas, but that it develops too many senses for too few words.
Hence the ideological practice of playing with words: exploitation is
clothed in consent by a punning use of the word ‘freedom’ – the worker
is free to be exploited.60

And of course we think here of Orwell’s essay ‘Politics and the English
Language’ in which war is waged in the name of peace, or more recently of
a spate of books and documentaries which show how war and commerce
are waged in the language of human rights. The punning on ‘expectations’
‘suits’, ‘claims’ we have seen in the Moses texts all lead the reader, as befits
good advertising, back to the commodity as a salve and a salvation. We could
say that the puns make explicit what is buried in the Dickens text, that is, a
reluctance to take action against the dysfunctional system of England, and
only provide a screen for it through capital and the commodity, a commod-
ity which rights all wrongs, expunges all ills for the individual rather than
the collective. The monthly numbers of Bleak House are also, suggests the
Moses advert, a good ‘return’, a substantial thing in the face of the evanes-
cent text of the law suit. Dickens’s creation was a living three-dimensional
object with gifts inside. It was not only a piece of writing, but an object
and a practice and was projected as such to the readers. Thus Bleak House
as a publishing venture is in fact an ‘Anti-Bleak-House’. Like a good suit of
clothes, it is an answer, in the form of a commodity, to the bleakness of the
condition of England.

Dickens as advertiser
Evidence of Dickens’s role in the construction of his monthly numbers
can be found in his letters and in Robert L. Patten’s archive of the corre-
spondence and accounts exchanged between Dickens and his publishers
Chapman and Hall and Bradbury and Evans. The first novel to be published
in monthly numbers was The Pickwick Papers with Chapman and Hall, for
which Dickens wrote his own advertisements ‘as detailed, explicit and entic-
ing as Dickens could make them’.61 By the third number general advertise-
ments were added and this constituted a revolution in publishing in which
Dickens was partner in copyright. Not all his novels were published there-
after in this monthly-number format (Oliver Twist appeared in the maga-
zine Bentley’s Miscellany, The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge in Master
Humphrey’s Clock), but from there on his other major novels favoured the
monthly format.62 There is an experimental feel to much of the negotia-
tion that passed between Dickens and his publisher and to their decisions
104 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

concerning the inclusion of adverts which shows how new and uncharted
these publishing territories were. Dickens and his publishers knew the value
of serial publication but were constantly looking for new ways of enhancing
appeal and increasing circulation.63 This was a time when publishing had
become what Patten describes as ‘a dynamic, high-pressure, increasingly
mechanized, quickly responsive commercial enterprise’ which was trying to
cater for the rapidly expanding reading and book-buying public.64 During
the publication of Little Dorrit in monthly parts, Bradbury and Evans only
wrappered (put covers on) the number of monthly parts they thought they
could sell. The rest were kept unwrappered in case the demand rose or they
were saved to be made into a hardback volume. The ‘Advertiser’ was stitched
in to all the copies of the first print-run, but if the demand was heavy a
certain number of copies might be published without the advertisements in
order to save time. These are examples of the innovations which sought to
make the number a modulable and reactive structure.
What becomes evident in reading much of Dickens’s correspondence is
his involvement at every stage of the making of the number and his sense
of how and when to advertise. There was a huge publicity campaign for
Dombey and Son: 160,000 hand bills and 5,000 posting bills and two more
printings of these which doubled the total. There were 300 cards which
explained terms for advertising, and adverts were put into journals and
magazines. As advance orders from advertisers began to come in Dickens
wrote to his friend Thomas Mitton, telling him that the firm of E. Moses
and Son, whose publicity was noted for its ‘delightful’ verses, ‘has taken
one page of the wrapper, all through’.65 This helps us understand the rela-
tionship Dickens had to his advertisers. He was glad to welcome their
patronage and even flattered by their attention. Similarly, having written
a preface for the new ‘Cheap Edition’ of Oliver Twist, Dickens decided to
use that preface as an advertisement to be placed in the following number
of David Copperfield (N° 12, April 1850). Consulting Bradbury and Evans,
he asked them where they thought the advert should go: ‘Facing the last
page? We ought to keep the place between the illustrations and the first
page, for [advertising] Household Words.’ Two days later he concluded that
‘the Oliver Preface ought decidedly to be a Bill at the end’.66 Looking at the
number today in the British Library, we find the advert in exactly this place
as a separate two-page insertion along with an eight-page Cassell’s insert,
and an advertisement for Kaye’s Wordsell’s and an announcement for the
‘Exhibition of Industry of all Nations’.67
Dickens was a writer who was keenly aware of sales and who exulted in
success: ‘The Dombey sale is BRILLIANT!’,68 he wrote to Forster in 1846.
He kept very detailed accounts of all numbers sold and was knowledgeable
about where to advertise to get maximum publicity for his novels. He was
also aware of the connection between the emotion produced by his texts,
readings or speeches and the sales they generated. In a letter to Collins of
 Reading the Dickens Advertiser 105

6 June 1856 describing a charity speech at the London Tavern he notes: ‘all
the company sat holding their napkins to their eyes with one hand, and
putting the other into their pockets. A hundred or so contributed nine hun-
dred pounds then and there.’69 Extreme sadness, joy or fear creates, it is sug-
gested, an urge to spend. Dickens was sometimes criticized for the way his
novels exploited the death of children such as little Nell, and Robert Patten
mentions the way in which sales reacted to the death of Paul in Dombey and
Son: ‘After Paul’s death in Number V, the press run was increased 1,000 to
33,000; it dropped back to 32,000 five months later, but rose again to 33,000
following Edith’s flight ...’70 Patten then adds in note 14 ‘Paul’s death was
planned months before the first number appeared, and though the event
was subsequently transferred from the fourth to the fifth number, it was
neither conceived nor executed with any eye towards sales.’ This comment
is an interesting one in that it attempts to disculpate Dickens from any
manipulative intention and it also implies a clear boundary between the art
of a writer and any sales that his writing may give rise to. Yet considering
Dickens’s involvement in the sale of his monthly numbers, it is a comment
which strangely misses its mark: Dickens created the monthly numbers as a
whole, not simply as a novel surrounded by adverts and a few illustrations,
but as an amalgamation of those three elements, all of which fed into and
helped create each other. We might conjecture that Dickens had no ‘eye’
on sales because he was totally within sales. His text was so utterly part of a
venture which was based on what we might call a ‘performative’ utterance,
one in which speech and writing constitute and must produce physical
actions, that to separate his writing or speech (and for Dickens his writing
became his speeches and his performances) from his sales becomes very dif-
ficult. Though no text of Dickens produced the rioting of Hugo’s Hernani,
his writings can nevertheless be seen as an incitation to various sorts of
action such as the buying of novels, coats and other goods, the production
of tears, donation to Charity, or campaigning for reforms in parliament.
Changing the world or changing one’s retail habits was already intimately
linked to an ability to manipulate media. This performative writing spurred
by faster technologies of printing, publishing and dissemination was reliant
on a paratext which was far from a mere adjunct to the novels: the monthly
number was a venture rather than a novel surrounded by advertising.
If sales went up according to the events in the story, this meant that adverts
gained more circulation and made more profits. One can surmise that more
coats or worm tablets were sold at the moment of Paul Dombey’s death or
Edith’s flight than at a duller or more prosaic episode. Writing is done here
with the idea of a reaction from a public who in buying the serial also buy
into all the ideologies and the products with which it is sold. No wonder that
Moses and Son started to mention Dickens’s novels in their own advertise-
ments, writing poems to tell the public to buy the novel. The serialization of
the Victorian novel, as Michael Lund tells us (drawing on Hans Robert Jauss,
106 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

Wolgang Iser), left gaps in time which were filled in by the reader’s conjectures
or rehashings of past episodes. Here we see that acts of purchase and invest-
ment would also have been carried out during the intervals between episodes
as a result of the experience of reading the Advertiser with the novel and of
the affective links made, not merely between instalments, but between the
chapters of the instalment and all manner of consumer choices and actions.
The ‘Cheap Edition’ of his novels, which targeted a lower social class than
the monthly numbers, shows us in exaggerated form how Dickens imagined
the involvement of his readers in mental and physical action. Beginning in
April 1847 with Pickwick and ending in September 1852 with the Christmas
Books, it consisted of a sixteen-page booklet, in a format double the size of the
monthly number and with green wrappers. There were no advertisements.
What is particularly striking is the fact that several novels shared each num-
ber and overlapped (Pickwick with Nicholas Nickleby, Nickleby with The Old
Curiosity Shop and so on), and more surprisingly that the text of each novel
stopped abruptly, sometimes in mid-sentence and even mid-word. It was then
continued in the next number. As Patten says: ‘these so-called “numbers”
and “parts” bear no relation to the self-contained units in which his monthly
novels first appeared’.71 They came out in both weekly and monthly num-
bers to suit different pockets and cash-flows (weekly numbers cost 1½ d and
monthly numbers 7 d as opposed to the one shilling of the official monthly
numbers) and were collected by the readers. The lack of ceremony with which
each chapter breaks off – in medias res – suggests that Dickens did not see
his text as a sacred and homogeneous unit but a structure that could, like
Baudelaire’s textual serpent, withstand an unceremonious cutting up. That
his readers should be suspended on a ‘that’ or a ‘with’ for a month or a week
until discovering how the sentence ended did not seem to pose a problem for
him or them. This is text which just flows and stops willy-nilly independently
of grammar or meaning and is dependent solely on units of commerce (one
gets this much text for seven pence). We are in the presence of writing sold by
the yard, of literature being reeled off as in the Grandville caricature which
we looked at in Chapter 1. While one man writes words onto a roll of paper
marked with the word ‘feuilleton’ or ‘serial’, another cuts it up with a knife.
Dickens does not seem to consider his writing as in any way diminished
by such a publishing adventure; he deemed his words precious and his influ-
ence morally uplifting, and associates his work when published in this form
with the words ‘pride’, ‘honour’ and ‘passion’. The motivations behind the
Cheap Edition are revealed in Dickens’s ‘Address’ issued in the Prospectus or
‘advertisement’ for the edition and reprinted with minor alterations inside
the front wrapper of the first monthly part:

It is not for an Author to describe his own books. If they cannot speak
for themselves, he is likely to be of little service by speaking for them. It
is enough to observe of these, that ... their reproduction in a shape which
 Reading the Dickens Advertiser 107

shall render them easily accessible as a possession by all classes of society,

is at least consistent with the spirit in which they have been written, and
is the fulfilment of a desire long entertained.
It had been intended that this CHEAP EDITION, now announced, should
not be undertaken until the books were much older, or the Author was
dead. But the favour with which they have been received, and the extent
to which they have circulated, and continue to circulate, at five times
the proposed price, justify the belief that the living Author may enjoy
the pride and honour of their widest diffusion, and may couple it with
increased personal emolument ...
To become, in his new guise, a permanent inmate of many English homes,
where, in his old shape, he was only known as a guest, or hardly known
at all: to be well thumbed and soiled in a plain suit that will bear a great
deal, by children and grown people, at the fireside and on the journey:
to be hoarded on the humble shelf where there are few books, and to lie
about in libraries like any familiar piece of household stuff that is of easy
replacement: and to see and feel this – not to die first, or grow old and
passionless: must obviously be among the hopes of a living author, ven-
turing on such an enterprise ...72

The format in which the novels are reproduced is directly linked here with
their accessibility for all classes. Interestingly, Dickens imagines his novels
being dressed in a ‘plain suit’, thus anticipating the puns of Moses and Son
concerning both tailored and written legal suits. He is sensitive to the way
in which the form of a text allows it to move around easily or indeed pain-
fully. Notice how he equates the content of the novels (‘the spirit in which
they have been written’) with their wide diffusion, and their manner of
consumption with their layout. The words ‘circulation’ (mentioned twice)
and ‘diffusion’ show an interest in the relationship between movement
and price – the lower the price the faster the circulation (an equation again
worthy of Moses and Son). This is then linked to his own pecuniary gain in
the word ‘emolument’, which is a word originally associated with the pay-
ment one makes to a miller for grinding corn. Dickens’s grinding − the hard
grind − is made beneficial to himself and others by means of the dissemin-
ation of the product. Homage is not being paid to a dead author, but to a live
and productive one who dreams of entering the homes of English people, of
being part of the rush of text into the intimacy of the home. There is a desire
to be a familiar household object that is ‘of easy replacement’. He dreams,
as Thackeray did, of fast turnover and quick substitution – text not writ in
stone or imprisoned behind hard covers but writing to be consumed regu-
larly by a sensual and hungry public – to be kicked about and mistreated but
to be present and indispensable. The capital letters of ‘CHEAP EDITION’,
used twice, are a tactic of advertising and fitting to this discourse.
108 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

Dickens’s dream of being a household word in the mouths of all, and

of being present everywhere, all of the time, is finally best expressed by
Moses and Son themselves, who espoused and paid homage to this under-
lying desire in Dickens. They produced a poem for the ‘David Copperfield
Advertiser’ called ‘The Proper Field of Copperfield’ enjoining customers to
buy the book in order to give it a ‘wondrous circulation’:

It should bedeck the poor man’s board

And swell the volumes of my lord.
This novel merits to be read
Wherever Moses’ fame has spread,
Which like a banner is unfurled
Throughout the habitable world.73

Here we see the patronage of art by industry and the idea of the propaga-
tion of the ‘M’ of Moses as a symbol throughout the world which cannot
but conjure up for us today the ubiquitous ‘M’ of McDonald’s ‘throughout
the habitable world’. The poem also suggests a linkage between the success
of the novel and their own commercial success – as if Moses would create
the necessary climate in which the novel might be received and read – the
commercial air for it to breathe, as it were. This last notion was confirmed
by Dickens himself in a speech in which he linked the dissemination of lit-
erature with the vehicle of industry and commerce:

To the great compact phalanx of the people, by whose industry, persever-

ance, and intelligence, and their result in money-wealth such places as
Birmingham and many others like it have arisen – to that great centre of
support, that comprehensive experience, and that beating heart – Literature
has turned happily from the individual patrons, sometimes munificent,
often sordid, always few, and has found there at once its highest purpose,
its natural range of action, and its best reward. ... From the shame of pur-
chased dedication ..., from the dependent seat on sufferance at my Lord
Duke’s table today, and from the sponging-house and Marshalsea tomor-
row ... from all such evils the people have set Literature free.74

We find admiration for the energy and power of industry with its ‘beating
heart’ and delight in the replacement of the old dusty ways of aristocratic
patronage (‘sordid’, ‘on sufferance at my Lord Duke’s table’) with the speed of
technological change – a notion expressed in the pages of Bleak House and in
many of the Moses and Son advertisements. According to Bill Bell, Dickens is
‘crediting the rise of capitalism with having liberated the professional writer
from the tyranny of patronage’ (even though other constraints fall on the
writer once at the mercy of the laws of supply and demand). The changes
alluded to by Dickens are less, Bell says, the result of the ‘faithfulness of
 Reading the Dickens Advertiser 109

a benevolent readership’ than ‘the increased means by which Literature

was more easily transformed from imaginative creation into mechanically
reproducible mass product’.75 For Dickens it seems clear that the creative
imagination and the reproducible mass product were mutually dependent
and that, if antiquated bureaucratic and aristocratic institutions were the
guilty party, Capital and its coats and novels were the saving grace.

Solutions in parts: An aesthetics of the serial?

Many critics have evoked the unsatisfying or partial nature of the solutions
Dickens offers to the bleak condition of England which his novel evokes.
The social and the collective are often telescoped down to the personal,
to the individual and to the specific need (emotional or pecuniary). Any
individual solution in novel and Advertiser is the spectre of a social system
gone wrong.76 The adverts we have studied tell us that to survive in these
wastelands of mud and fog and spiritual destitution an ersatz is needed, a
replacement object. Thus, the cloying material hardship of the world must
be answered with the notion of the ‘part’; the body must be broken down
into parts, all of which demand a servicing with particular local applica-
tions (a coat, a pill, a pen, an ointment or, in the case of Bleak House, a house
in which to live). The front cover of the monthly parts of Bleak House also
reflects this breaking into parts of the represented world (here, a series of
framed images showing particular episodes in the serial). Consumption of
framed parts reminiscent of the comic strip is an integral part of the series
which deals with specific lacks (of the body, or of the mind). Partial, in part,
serial and incomplete, the publications we have been considering teach a
lesson which is also the lesson of advertising in general: the only way of
moving forward is through a metonymic displacement from part to part.
The monthly number seems to transform the idea of a nation of shopkeep-
ers into that of a nation of shoppers. These individual consumers, imagined
as separate bodies or persons, are simultaneously asked to see themselves
as belonging to a community – a community of readers all consuming the
monthly part at the same time, all beneficiaries of the same misprints or
missing illustrations, or advertising offers. Such is the ‘imagined commu-
nity’ of print culture described by Benedict Anderson within which the
bourgeoisie brought itself into being by writing of its solidarities and com-
munal values.77 Dickens seems to have been able to produce that very mod-
ern and paradoxical idea of a community of separate individuals consuming
individually yet also simultaneously and collectively.

Gothic mechanisms of advertisement and novel:

Hysteria, paranoia and the testimonials

The notion of solutions in parts and by the part is a feature of the Gothic
tale whose influence is felt both in Dickens’s novels and in his advertising.
110 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

The monthly number is a haunted house or haunted arcade in which Gothic

motif and commerce are closely and incongruously linked. The Gothic con-
stitutes a dark, cobwebby place, stagnant and cut off from human inter-
course, while advertising is imagined as shiny, new, and colourful, the
oil in the machinery of commerce. Capital, Marshall Bermann tells us in
connection with Goethe’s Faust, was the very force which blew into the
Gothic house, dealing it a deathblow.78 Yet, perhaps rather than destroying
the Gothic, the forces of change and of capital redevelop it and sell it on
in changed form. Advertising recognizes the Gothic for what it has often
been − a money-spinner − for it helps evoke the fear and destabilization
which sell products. But it also recognizes Gothic as being akin to it since
it is often ‘a standardized, absolutely formulaic system’.79 While a similarity
of mechanism exists, the Gothic also contains something entirely alien to
advertising and which must be suppressed by it. The advertising which we
will turn to now accompanies Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend.

Some topographical and thematic similarities

London in Bleak House is described by Allan Pritchard in his article ‘The Urban
Gothic of Bleak House’ as being ‘gloomy, ruinous and labyrinthine’ and as
being ‘the ultimate Gothic castle’.80 This labyrinthine quality is also stressed
by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who sees the Gothic as pervasively conventional
(that is, faithful to its conventions): ‘discontinuous and involuted, perhaps
incorporating tales within tales, changes of narrators, and such framing
devices as found manuscripts or interpolated histories’.81 As readers entering
the space of the ‘Advertiser’ we find a similar structure. Movement around the
space of the advertiser is a movement through a three-dimensional space; it
offers both a linear trajectory as pages are turned and a physical depth, since
there are pages folded over or stuck onto other pages which need to be peeled
back to gain access to the text beneath.82 It has books within books, a within-
ness, an interiority and an exteriority, and can be viewed as a whole (a thing
to hold) or entered into as a space. The reader’s path can be rhizomic and ran-
dom, leading to secret passages where one can find ‘things’, either represented
in the form of images and text or in the form of real objects to take out and
keep. Esther describes Bleak House as being like an organic growth, delight-
fully irregular and displaying ‘quaint variety’; it is an example of picturesque
gothic, ‘a place of exploration and pleasant surprise for Esther, representing
an ideal balance between freedom and order’.83 This is a haunted house but as
regulated as at a funfair in which surprises are programmed and expected.
Secrets and surprises are also part of what Robert Platzner has called the
‘generic instability’ of Gothic.84 Elizabeth Napier, in similar fashion, makes
the following comment:

In its reliance upon a mixture of genres (fairy tale, romance, Jacobean drama,
and novel of manners), the Gothic novel often contains unintentionally
 Reading the Dickens Advertiser 111

humorous instances of collision, in which the demands of one mode are

brought up – sometimes startlingly – against the exigencies of another.85

Thus sentiment rubs shoulders with adventure in Manfroné, and comedy

with terror in Walpole’s Castle of Otranto. This structurally miscellaneous
‘tonally disjunctive’ aspect displays congruities with Gothic architecture as
described by John Evelyn in 1697:

Gaudy Sculpture, trite and busy Carvings; tis such as rather Gluts the Eye,
than Gratifies and Pleases it with any reasonable Satisfaction ... Cut work
and Crinkle-Crankle. ... Non-sense Insertions of various Marbles impertin-
ently plac’d; Turrets and Pinnacles thick set with Munkies and Chimaeras
(and abundance of buisy Work and other Incongruities) dissipate, and
break the Angels of the Sight, and so Confound it, that one cannot con-
sider it with any Steadiness, where to begin or end ...86

In the pages of adverts accompanying Dickens’s narratives unexpected

things turn up quite as ‘glutting of the eye’ as the munkies and chimeras of
Gothic architecture. We have already seen the severed heads and human
hearts lying in their separate frames as in so many hidden trunks. There
are also the delights of picturesque gothic – an engraving of a valley, a col-
our print of a nymph advertising starch − all waiting to be discovered and
collected. But a great majority of the advertisements accompanying the
Dickens monthly numbers concern potential horrors: contaminated water
and its threat to health, the body suffering from unknown diseases. As in
the pages of Our Mutual Friend where ‘bodies in rivers’, bodies in water, fig-
ure both as events in the narrative and in a network of sinister metaphors,
the pages of the advertiser offer a vision of a threatening world for a fragile
body, be it underwater where microorganisms multiply or in hidden cor-
ners where insects swarm. Things under a microscope, microbes in water,
were offered to a reader already trained in the Gothification of microscope
images: magazines such as Punch often drew organisms in the form of cof-
fins, skeletons and monstrous creatures.87

Hysteria and paranoia in the ‘Testimonials’

The relationship of Gothic and advertising can be explored in a specific area
of medical advertising. Accompanying many adverts there are a great num-
ber of ‘Testimonials’, which were a vital part of the advertising technique
in Victorian Britain and were an integral part of the advert. They constitute
many pages of text which were manifestly read as miniature narratives, often
perhaps more compulsively than the numbers of the novels with which
they were sold. They were in fact examples of ‘cures’ in which an illness and
sometimes its treatment were recounted by satisfied customers. Some were
real, many probably invented. These testimonials offer the reader of the
112 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

Dickens novel miniature narratives which contain certain characteristics of

the hysterical and paranoid discourses found in the Gothic.
A typical set of Testimonials for ‘Du Barry’s Delicious Health-Restoring
Revalenta Arabica Food’ from the ‘Our Mutual Friend Advertiser’ in
November 1864 begins with the statement ‘NO MORE PILLS OR ANY
OTHER MEDICINE’. Capital letters and bold type signal to the reader the
importance of the illocution, as do the framing of the advert and use of
darker ink than that used in the monthly number. A fanfare of lines and
sometimes colours in certain of the adverts suggest to the reader that this is
where attention must be focused – this is where affect must be invested. ‘Du
Barry’s Delicious Health-Restoring Revalenta Arabica Food’ offers the reader
an ‘Extract from 60,000 Cures’, each cure numbered to give it authenticity.
Each cured sufferer has a name and an address on which we can pin their
lists of pain.

Cure No. 58,216, of the Marchioness of Bréhan, Paris, of a fearful liver

complaint, wasting away, with nervous palpitation all over, bad diges-
tion, constant sleeplessness, low spirits, and the most intolerable nervous
agitation, which prevented even her sitting down for hours together, and
which for seven years resisted the careful treatment of the best French and
English medical men. Cure No. 1771: Lord Stuart Decies, Lord-Lieutenant
of the County of Watford of many years dyspepsia. Cure No. 49,842:
‘Fifty fears’ indescribable agony from dyspepsia, nervousness, asthma,
cough, constipation, flatulency, spasms, sickness, and vomiting. – Maria
Joly. Cure No. 47,121: Miss Elizabeth Jacobs, Nazing Vicarage, Waltham
Cross, Herts, of extreme nervousness, indigestion, gatherings, low spirits,
and nervous fancies ...

Although these invalids have now been relieved of their suffering, their
accounts of it offer no glimpse of hope or indeed of any acknowledgement
of a world beyond that of the body in pain. The interesting part for today’s
reader, used to the precision of modern diagnosis, is that the whole body and
mind of the sufferer, and not just one isolated part of the body, are involved
in this all-encompassing mal-être. This is a discourse which does not tend to
resolution but can only repeat and accumulate. The body becomes a series
of functions acting and signifying independently of one another, unruly
and disobedient. The subject is no longer the ruler of these defiant parts.
Be it advertising copy or memoir, we are obviously in the presence of a
performance based on a series of declensions in which, in the first cure for
example, ‘nervous agitation’ is followed by ‘nervous palpitation’. Time is
given giddy proportions starting with ‘hours’ and ‘seven years’ and moving
to a gargantuan ‘fifty years’ to insist on the torture. Adjectives such as ‘fear-
ful’, ‘indescribable’ or ‘intolerable’ place us at the same pitch of linguistic ten-
sion as that found in the Gothic novel. Mysterious and ominous-sounding
 Reading the Dickens Advertiser 113

ailments such as a ‘gathering’ or ‘nervous fancies’ – all echo the unspe-

cific mental unrest of the romantic heroine. The speech of the body here
becomes the text of Gothic romance replete with characters such as the
benighted Marchioness of Bréhan, the ancient Lord Stuart of Decies (whose
name might be (mis)pronounced variously ‘decease’ or ‘disease’, adding a
vampiric touch) and the vulnerable Miss Elizabeth Jacobs of the Vicarage.
The use of the first-person narrative in which the self exposes its relation to
the world is a feature of both the testimonial and the Gothic tale.
Hysterical language both in the ‘Testimonial’ and the Gothic text relies
on a body which speaks of monstrous things. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in The
Coherence of Gothic Conventions has underlined how the ‘self’ becomes mon-
strous in the Gothic, how bodily disarray expresses itself textually. Textual
or linguistic disarray also expresses itself bodily since we seem to be in the
presence of hysteria, in which the flesh begins to tell the story which cannot
be told in words. These testimonials seem to suggest two forms of hysteria as
formulated by Freud: on the one hand ‘conversion hysteria’, in which a psy-
chic conflict symbolizes itself in bodily symptoms but does not necessarily
include anxiety, and on the other ‘anxiety hysteria’, a neurosis whose main
symptom is phobia, anxiety being fixed upon an exterior object, or roving
from object to object.88 The bodies described here are bursting to alleviate
themselves of something. Although no specific phobic object is mentioned,
the outside objective world seems to be an aggressive one which attacks the
body; the body then turns against itself, becoming alien to the subject.
The Gothic, Sedgwick tells us, often stages an individual blocked off from
something it ought to have: ‘the self and whatever it is that is outside have
a proper, natural, necessary connection to each other, but one that the self
is suddenly incapable of making ... [there is] a doubleness where singleness
should be’ and so a constant effort on the part of the subject to ‘reintegrate
the sundered elements’. She goes on to say that the ‘barrier between the self
and what should belong to it can be caused by anything and nothing; but
only violence or magic, and both of a singularly threatening kind, can ever
succeed in joining them again’.89 Both advert and Gothic narrative play
on a longed-for reconciliation of subject and object which can only come
about through the agencies of either a supernatural event or the ‘magical’
commodity for sale. Until these occur there can only be a repetition of
symptoms. David Punter has suggested that ‘Gothic fiction deals with those
moments when we find it impossible, with any degree of hope, for our “case
to be put.” ’ Our ‘Case’, he says, is an insurance against contamination and
against haunting – and in Frankenstein a letter is often the only recourse.90
Yet the testimonials, which are also letters, contain no reasoned plea as in
Frankenstein, but only an excess of distress from the frustrated self. If the
case cannot be heard ‘then it must continue, perhaps endlessly, to utter itself
in private, in the personal spaces, under the cover of crypt, vault, castle,
suburban home ...’91 and in our case in the advertisement. Here we find the
114 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

clamouring of those who cannot, but who wish to, be heard. The body in
testimonial, as in Gothic tale, seems to be under pressure; events are with-
stood by many Gothic heroines, fears remaining unvoiced, yet this attempt
to balance in fact leads to lack of control – obsession, fixation. Denial of the
self, and the repression of drives, are often expressed in the phobia of live
burial. In Sedgwick’s chapter on ‘Language as Live Burial’, which focuses
on Thomas De Quincey, she stresses the ego’s sense of being imprisoned
under the world as if underground or underwater. Immobilization and ter-
rible weight are often evoked as in the ‘twenty Atlantics’ which bury De
Quincey in his dreams: ‘Thousands of years I lived and was buried in stone
coffins, with mummies and sphinxes, in narrow chambers at the heart of
eternal pyramids.’92 Thus the Gothic offers up a buried body but also a nar-
rative buried in a body which is ready to explode; what is held within must
burst out.
Bradley Headstone in Our Mutual Friend provides just such an example of
the intolerable pressure of buried narrative, with his foaming mouth and
body wracked with spasms. The schoolmaster prepares for his first inter-
view with his rival and social superior, Eugene Wrayburn, by insisting that
he will have his say: ‘I WILL be heard, sir.’ He describes how being a good
schoolmaster means ‘watching and repressing himself daily’, but his ‘red and
white heats of rage’ are barely controlled.93 Headstone, whose name speaks
of the death drive inherent in his monomania (a gravestone as well as a head
hitting stone), is described as ‘a bent head hammering at one fixed idea’.
He smoulders and broods and sweats ‘with a curious tight-screwing move-
ment of his right hand in the clenching palm of his left, like the action of
one who was being physically hurt, and was unwilling to cry out’.94 Finally,
what is kept down in terms of words surfaces in the form of violent bleeding
from the nose: Headstone describes how his bodily fluids (here blood) burst
from him unbidden: ‘ “I can’t keep it back. It has happened twice – three
times – four times – I don’t know how many times – since last night. I taste
it, smell it, see it, it chokes me, and then it breaks out like this.” ’95
In Bleak House too, cases are rarely heard, and, like the voices in the ‘testi-
monials’, only a terrible repetition and accumulation results: Lady Dedlock’s
case must be spoken, as must Jo the sweeper’s and others – but instead,
the result of what is unspoken is displaced onto descriptions of the envir-
onment. The streets of London or the landscape at Chesney Wold exhibit
the symptoms of sick bodies − leaking, blocked or terrifyingly overproduc-
tive: mud, fog and accumulated papers congest the streets around Chancery,
while the Dedlock country seat is awash with water or stagnant leaves,
which, like the mud in the London streets, can never be swept away. It is a
journey into the body become a geological scape – even stone ‘breaks out
into a cold sweat’. We shall take just such a journey in the next testimonial,
which is an advert for Morison’s Pills which appeared in the ‘Bleak House
Advertiser’ of 1853.96 It consists of one long testimonial. The advert starts
 Reading the Dickens Advertiser 115

with the mention of ‘BRITISH COLLEGE OF HEALTH, New Road, London’.

The title of the advert is ‘CURE OF FISTULA AND OTHER COMPLAINTS,
WITHOUT CUTTING, BY MORISON’S PILLS’.

To Messrs. Morison, January 12th, 1853.

GENTLEMEN, – I feel great pleasure in making a public acknowledg-
ment of the good I have received from your valuable medicines. I have
been afflicted from childhood with severe attacks of bilious complaint
every five or six weeks; I have suffered dreadfully from spasms, scarce
ever free from them little or much; I have suffered from bad legs these
last twenty years, I have dreaded the approach of winter for they would
be then covered with scaly, bleeding running sores from the knees to the
ankles: I have been afflicted for these last ten years with rheumatism with
repeated attacks of lumbago; I have been troubled from a child with great
quantities of worms, and for these last five years I have suffered from a fis-
tula, which gradually increasing caused great pain and lowness of spirits,
as I continued to September 1851; when my afflictions increased – I was
seized with severe griping pains in the bowels ... Worms made their way
through the wound of the fistula in abundance. Four months I endured
dreadful pains in the chest, I felt as if I were bound round with an iron
bar, I felt dreadful pains across the back and shoulders, my neck became
stiff, my eyes bloodshot, their [sic] appeared a heavy weight on my head,
with a hissing noise like a steam engine, my arms seemed filled with
streams of boiling water. I had every advice within my reach, I had blis-
ters and mustard plasters to my chest in abundance; I had Doctors and
medicines of every description, but all to no use, I gave myself up for
lost ... there was no hope but the hospital, but I dreaded the knife.

Then, on the advice of a friend, the writer starts to take increasing doses of
Morison’s Pills, which have a violently purgative effect – the cure seeming
worse than the ill:

... they made me very bad at first but I persevered ... I found relief, they
stopped the violence of the fistula, they relieved the pains in my chest,
and brought from me frightful quantities of worms ... they were the cause
of my passing five pieces of thick skinny substance the size of the palms
of the hand ... In May the lumbago attacked me violently, in June my legs
broke out worse; I increased the doses 16 each night, they soon got well,
but there was a pain under the ribs of the right side – something appeared
to be gathering there, it got bigger and heavier, till it appeared to be as
big as a pint basin. I increased the doses to 18, it got worse; I increased
the doses to 20 ... I took 10 more, something gave a sudden snap, I was
sick for the first time since the commencement, upwards and downwards
116 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

from me came several pints of slime, blood and corruption, &c – the pills
had done their work ... I am restored to health and strength. I feel ten
years younger, and I thank the Almighty God in putting within my reach
your most valuable medicine; since I began to take your pills I have been
exposed to all weathers, working in a market garden, and I have been laid
up for illness but one day through the whole time.
I remain yours most gratefully, George Holden, aged 45, 14, Devon’s-
road, Bromley, Middlesex.

This testimonial is a frenzy of effects, or rather a frenzy of affects grafted

onto the body of the sufferer. The writing is dense and saturated, a reiter-
ation or listing of ailments which seems less to be an act of communica-
tion than a relief for the speaker in which repetition mesmerizes the reader
rather than informing him. We also find narrative sequence in the form of
a movement from inside to outside. George Holden speaks to us of a gather-
ing, a pressure, an ominous accumulation, followed by a violent ‘snap’ and
a torrent of language to describe the ‘slime and corruption’ which issues
forth. A containment is followed by a purging, an exteriorization. In Poe’s
depiction of the fall of the family home in The Fall of the House of Usher, a
slit or crack or fissure in the wall of the house betrays where pressure has
been building up and where the final collapse will occur. Here, the breaks
and lumps in the skin, the fistula and the swelling serve the same purpose.
In Gothic narrative, something has to give, to give way. The reference
to the ‘hissing noise like a steam-engine’ suggests an imminent release
of pressure, even an explosion, and offers a mirroring of the contents of
the monthly numbers themselves in which bodies are often described as
dysfunctional machines. In Bleak House, Mr. Krook falls victim to ‘spon-
taneous combustion’ − a controversial ‘scientific’ phenomenon at the time
in which the body was supposed literally to explode and catch fire. Krook
is illiterate and cannot understand or express the secret messages which
haunt him and which he writes in fragments on the wall of his shop; he
finally ignites and ‘writes’ himself all over the district he lives in. His body
is converted into slime, which becomes the only ‘writing’ he can manage.
As Sedgwick says of the Gothic, the negotiation between within and with-
out is always violent. This testimonial provides a vision of the struggle of
the subject to express what is within, and in the ‘case’ of George Holden
his entire body involves itself in this endeavour.
If hysteria and paranoia tend to be kept apart in carefully labelled gender
categories − the female hysteric, the male paranoiac – here we see elements
of both forms:

It is as versions of a heroics of embodiment, too, that hysteria and para-

noia can appear most similar to one another. Call, for convenience’s sake,
the heroine of the Gothic a classic hysteric, its hero a classic paranoid.
 Reading the Dickens Advertiser 117

The immobilizing and costly struggle, in the hysteric, to express graph-

ically through her bodily hieroglyphic what cannot come into existence
as narrative, resembles in this the labour of the paranoid subject to fore-
stall being overtaken by the feared/desired other, by himself mimetically
reproducing the perceived or projected desire/threat of the other in tem-
porally paralyzed form.97

The body in our testimonial seems to lose its rigid gender marking and to
navigate or melt between the sexes. See for example the ‘something’, gather-
ing and growing under George Holden’s ribs, something alien, a pregnancy –
both the phantom pregnancy of the hysteric and the imagined invasion by
the other of the paranoid subject. This is part of a making-strange of the self
which is evident in Gothic constructions of character.
David Punter has spoken of strangeness from self and the self as shell
in his work on Gothic pathologies: ‘[we are] filled to the brim with some-
thing that looks like ourselves but is irremediably other ... we ourselves are
cast as the ghost, the revenant ... who can only watch this mysterious body
performing actions below’.98 The narrator of the testimonial also watches
amazed as his body produces ever more elaborate forms of torture − a self
inhabited by what is alien. Freud’s analysis of the text of the President
Schreber also reveals a self who feels he is the victim of an ‘other’, per-
secuted by a God who is changing him into a woman, thus denying his
very existence. Gender, as in the Gothic, bends itself in Schreber’s narrative.
Schreber describes a process of Entmannung or éviration in French, in English
‘unmanning’, which suggests not only the denial of virility, but, according
to Lacan in his commentary on Schreber’s case, the death of the subject.99
Schreber describes himself as the object of the jouissance of an alien pres-
ence, his body possessed by a force which is changing it and slowly killing
him; he gives detailed descriptions of the way in which each of his organs
is subverted in some way and how he is forced to relinquish the control of
his nerves. Something of a similar order is happening in our testimonial
since the ‘other’ is active and industrious; it is gradually annihilating the
subject, as the predications show: ‘I was seized with ... Worms made their
way ... umbago attacked me violently ...’
If paranoia is the paradigm of psychosis, then we might consider the pos-
sible cause of such delirious speech in these testimonials. What has been
unhinged or displaced to produce such textual excess? This testimonial (and
many like it) evinces a fear of a castrating authority, as the references to the
‘knife’ (I dreaded the knife) and to ‘cutting’ show. In the advertisement,
the law of the knife, of surgery, is avoided in favour of the pill, which is a
magical remedy even though its effects are quite as violent as the illnesses
themselves. The pill affords the transformation which purges the subject of
this alienating illness as if by magic − ‘without cutting’. In this testimonial
(and many like it) vengeful Doctors are represented as wishing to cut the
118 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

speaker, to put him or her ‘under the knife’. They are testimony of the desire
to avoid surgery, of a latent denial of the hegemony of the recognized med-
ical profession in favour of the quack remedies such as Morison’s or Kaye’s
Pills.100 This might be seen as a form of foreclosure of castrating authority
(the Victorian surgeon and his knife) and a retreat into a magical world in
which excessive suffering is banished by miracle cures. No authority brings
measure or scale to these texts. A delocalized pleasure of a deathly nature
seems to be in action – there where no law exists to police and organize
the experience of the body. Speech lacking an organizing principle moves
into delirium. Geneviève Morel has stressed the importance for the subject
of being able to subordinate the pains and pleasures of the body to a signi-
fier, in order to allow interpretation: ‘When the subject is unable to do this,
jouissance is fragmented throughout the whole body and the organs “speak”.
It is what Freud called in schizophrenia the language of organs.’101 This lan-
guage of organs also appears in Bleak House, in which bodies which cannot
speak their pain or tell their tale either perform some explosive act − as
Hortense does in killing Tulkinghorn − or expire from the ‘deadlock’ or the
vice of silence they are forced to accept. Chancery, a sick and superabundant
body, houses many other ailing figures. It is only through the attempts to
re-establish authority, to replace the ‘hoary sinner’ of the Lord Chancellor
(obscene whore-father) with a father such as Jarndyce that an escape from
the persecutions of a legal system without law is possible.
In the light of these extremes it is not difficult to see why Lowenthal sug-
gests that Advertising is psychoanalysis in reverse.102 It encourages massive
repression and heightens neurosis to extraordinary pitches. But what is the
relationship between the Gothic content of advertising and the products it
sells? How is this excessive (hysterical, paranoid) Gothic, unchecked by clos-
ure and restraint and ‘away from right reason and the rule of law’, articu-
lated onto the injunction to buy a product?103 Gothic energies are used as
bait promising the giddy pleasures of danger, an antechamber of possibil-
ities, yet we are brought back to world of limits via the gratification of par-
ticular needs. Gothic strategies both horrify and attract as they spell out the
disarray from which the bourgeois subject is always trying to emerge – and
it is here we might ask with David Punter what a bourgeoisie can ever be ‘but
emergent, prone always to states of emergency’.104 That emergency (of the
sick body, of the unclothed body) is then covered over for us, death is neatly
side-stepped, and we leave the haunted castle for the shopping mall.
3
Balzac’s Revolution of Signs:
Advertisement as Textual Practice

The language of the Paris walls

Aux réclames citoyens!1

Our transition to the walls of Paris involves a shift in focus: the community
of shoppers imagined by Dickens must give way to one which had its roots
in another tradition entirely, in which display and consumption of the writ-
ten word were a political rather than a commercial activity. Some of the
irony in the Moses and Son adverts in the Dickens Advertiser is based on a
disparity between meaningful announcement with political intent involv-
ing a desire to change existing social structures and the bathos or relative
paltriness of buying consumer goods. The ‘Anti-Bleak House’ advert offers
the purchase of a coat as an ersatz of emancipated action (the latter rep-
resented by a vocabulary of defiance, rebellion, rising, defying). Similarly,
the humour of the political reference in ‘What a Stir’ mentions ‘Revolution
at the Antipodes!’ to conjure up a world outside Britain of movement and
social change only to telescope such a vision back down to clothes retailing.
The humour functions on a juxtaposition of the sublime and the ridiculous,
the desired perverse effect being the ridiculing of sublime action and the
endorsement of retail and purchase as the only proper activity.
These references are part of a widespread critique of social upheaval on
the continent, often opposed to a more stable mercantile world in Britain;
they also acknowledge the power of the press and bill-posting in the organ-
ization of unrest. Effecting change, fighting against what oppresses one,
was seen as a textual as well as a physical activity; the composing, print-
ing and posting of material being part of the physical activity of politics.
Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution, published in 1837 (the same year as
César Birotteau and the first part of Lost Illusions), consists of three books, of
which Book II is called ‘The Paper Age’. Carlyle argues that the revolution
was based on the effects of paper and print, which created a society with-
out substance, a paper society which paraded itself behind false appear-
ances (and behind false value such as that generated by the revolutionary

119
120 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

paper money or assignats printed in the 1790s). Similarly, in France, Louis

Sébastien Mercier in Le Nouveau Paris: 1789–94 saw the circulation of print
and paper as one of the great generative forces behind the revolution.2
Advertising was thus seen as having its origins in political activity with
its highly performative aspect; it was taken seriously and much power was
attributed to it. Marc Martin, in tracing the history of the word publicité in
French, helps us understand how the revolution created the first mass dis-
tribution networks in the form of posters, flyers, newspapers and periodicals
and how advertising was revolutionary before ever being designated as a
commercial activity:

The revolution, by bringing in a parliamentary regime and by transform-

ing subjects into citizens [citoyens], and thus men to whom the decisions
and debates of assemblies must be made known, founded the word ‘pub-
licité’, which meant the act of making public: it was used in both political
and legal vocabulary.3

The idea of such publicité was institutionalized in 1806 when all civil procedures
had to be published. The word publicité had a much broader meaning than
réclame in that it designated the whole campaign of making something pub-
lic, rather than the idea of one-off claims on the attention from a particular
product.4 It took on commercial connotations only in the 1830s.
The force of advertising during the three revolutions can be gauged by the
number of laws restricting its use, each of which was a reaction to a massive
mobilization of paper and print. The aftermath of the first revolution of
1789 allowed unprecedented freedom for writers and bill-posters of all kinds
and was a hiatus of freedom and potential which boosted the circulation of
print and ideas in a way which would change the face of print culture. If the
decrees of 22 May and 28 June 1791 gave complete freedom to post any bill
without prior declaration and only prohibited anonymous posters, this was
abolished in 1810 under Napoleon. In 1814 a decree made prior submission
of all bills to Police headquarters obligatory and such restrictions contin-
ued into the next decade.5 Despite this, in 1825 Charles Colnet remembers
posters ‘carpeting monuments’ and in a law of 1829 the reactionary political
regime of Charles X regulated the ‘great number of bills’ that ‘confusingly
cover the walls of the capital’ and which threatened ‘the safety of public
passage, causing assemblies of the curious in narrow streets, difficulties
of traffic circulation and possible accidents’.6 These posters also posed the
problem of affronts to public decency or tranquillity. The job of bill-posting
was given dignity and status, and while in London bill-posters were mostly
illiterate – the only requirement being an ability to use their fists to ward off
rival bill-posters – in France they had to be literate, needed proof of domi-
cile, a certificate of good conduct from three witnesses and a reference from
a police superintendent, and had to wear a numbered leather badge.7
 Balzac’s Revolution of Signs 121

The July Monarchy, coming to power with the 1830 revolution, outlawed
political posters but encouraged commercial ones, which was part of Louis-
Philippe’s desire to repress political dissent. In 1830 a distinction was estab-
lished in Parliament between advertising in the press and on the poster in
the street, since the liberty of political advertising implied a recognition
of the right to assemble − to stand in a group around a poster. Haejeong
Hazel Hahn says in this regard that ‘the difference between the right to
publish one’s ideas and the right to post was analogous to that between
the right of speech and action’.8 Thus the poster was considered to be a dir-
ect hailing or incitement of the people and gave rise to laws such as that
of 10 December 1830, which prohibited political posters and made a clear
distinction between political and non-political posters. It also added restric-
tions to what criers might cry, limiting them to apolitical statements, aim-
ing as Hahn notes ‘to suppress aural, as well as visual subversion’.9 This
shows the already acute awareness of the performative powers of the advert:
the fact that adverting people by means of text and image was tantamount
to asking of them some radical physical action.10 The bourgeois monarchy
thus kept the street under surveillance, which caused riots in 1834; they also
clamped down on caricatures in the press with the ‘September laws’ in 1835,
and by 1841 there were strict limitations of when and where bills could be
posted and the need for a stamp on each poster.
After the uprising or ‘June Days’ of 1848 during which several thousand
workers were killed, there was a landslide victory for Louis Napoléon in
the Presidential election of 1848. His election campaign used newspaper
articles, posters, badges, pictures and Napoleonic mementoes to emphasize
the fact that he was nephew to the first Emperor.11 This was a huge publi-
city campaign to build an image using, as Marx has pointed out, the austere
traditions of the Roman republic, which provided ‘the ideals and the art
forms, the self-deceptions that they needed in order to conceal from them-
selves the bourgeois limitations of the content of their struggles’.12 Marx
picks up on the ‘gladiator’ as a figure of heroism and ridicules it much as the
Dickens ‘Anti-Bleak House’ advert does a few years later. After the coup d’état
of December 1851 and the establishment of the Second Empire all forms of
advertising were again restricted (putting a stop to the counter-movement
in the media) and registration of the advertisers’ names and addresses was
used for political purposes, thus controlling public space by recording bill-
posting activities.
Yet it was earlier in the 1830s, when Balzac began his writing career, that
the interface between politics (in its broadest sense of the organization of
the polis) and commerce was consolidated to bring about, through adver-
tising, the metamorphosis of the citizen into citizen–consumer. One of the
earliest forms of the word publicité used in both the sense of making public
and making commercial can be found in an 1830 advert for soap, which
was packaged with accounts of great events in French history and destined
122 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

for sale in France and abroad. The following sentence is used in the advert:
‘Stories of our great national events come with the soap and produce pro-
digious publicity’ [Notice de nos grands événements accompagne et produit une
prodigieuse publicité].13 Hahn points out that the word ‘publicité’ refers to pub-
licizing the nation’s history, rather than the product. If it is still associated
with the conveying of ideas – political and historical – here the promotion
of France as a nation, as a political and ideological entity, is also reliant on a
commercial product. France needs to sell soap to sell itself.
The next step in this transformation – the edging out of the citizen and
the consolidation of the subject as consumer – is crystallized in the follow-
ing caricature. To get around advertising restrictions advertisers had to be
ingenious, an ingenuity which often made the poster into an instrument
of oppression in which the political citizen was obliterated rather than
hailed into existence. A caricature from Le Charivari entitled ‘Affichomanie’
[‘Postermania’] in 1836 shows a building covered by a huge insurance pos-
ter and the bill-posters cutting out the paper and print covering the win-
dows so that the inhabitants might see out [Fig. 18]. We see the literal

Figure 18 ‘Affichomanie’ [‘Postermania’], Le Charivari, 1836

Source: Bibliothéque nationale de France.
 Balzac’s Revolution of Signs 123

covering of a building in an advertisement in which the city has become a

surface for print, for public imagining. What had been a means of expres-
sion is being shown – albeit humorously – as a means of coercion. The
poster is no longer an object to be contemplated on a wall but a covering,
a partition which creates an inside and which can envelop the viewer. It
is all around and more and more difficult to see ‘through’ or see beyond.
While some must pierce the surface to breathe, other folk stare up and take
in the great screen. In this image the political drive to cover the city in
posters has been transformed into a more pervasive drive which speaks of
a new media era.

Media revolution: Time, space and the daily press

The media blueprint for commercial advertising was produced in the context
of a powerful ideological and aesthetic potential created by the revolution of
1789 − the fundamental reimagining of time and space. Innovations in the
representation of time and space helped alter perceptions. The way time was
measured and the names given to these measurements were all changed, not-
ably the months of the Gregorian calendar, which were renamed. This was
part of the ‘empire of images’ imagined by Fabre d’Eglantine (the poet friend
of Danton) and designed to create a new Jacobin culture and republican
cosmology. The map of France was divided into départements and spatially
recreated, this spatial and temporal redistribution designed to break up the
power of the Church and aristocracy.14 All official documents used the new
time and space systems, which impinged upon people’s lives as they came
up against bureaucracy. If certain of these systems were revoked (the new
revolutionary calendar, for example, was withdrawn some ten years after
its inception, although the metric system of measurement still exists today
and has been transported across the globe), the effect of that audacity, and
the reinvention of the world it made possible, were not to be forgotten. Its
residue was the possibility of questioning age-old conventions concerning
the structuring of reality that has remained in certain currents of French
thought to this day. This left the door open for many other changes, and
would accelerate changes in communications, creating a wider media revo-
lution of which Balzac was part. He was caught up in the experiments which
were made during the July Monarchy (1830–48) when the bourgeoisie held
sway and had the heady task of creating their spaces of representation after
the tabula rasa of the revolutions.
Emile de Girardin was the great founding father of French newspaper adver-
tising; his meteoric rise through the creation of newspapers is often likened
to that of Rupert Murdoch or Silvio Berlusconi though his aims were less
exclusively profit-driven.15 He was an international figure who was viewed
from abroad and within France as an architect of the new media created
by political change. France was the arena for the orchestrating of a brave
new world of print culture and was perhaps more open to innovations than
124 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

the more stable constitutional monarchy of Britain; though less industrially

advanced, it attracted the interest of many writers and journalists, including
Thackeray and Dickens. Dickens came to Paris to meet Girardin and dined
with him as well as with the great serial writers of the day such as Alexandre
Dumas and Eugène Sue although there is no evidence that he met Balzac.16
Using advertising, Emile de Girardin was able to reconfigure the time and
space of the newspaper and open up new routes for writers such as Balzac.
For Girardin advertising was not merely a commercial tool but the symptom
of a truly public space in which all voices might be heard. He used the word
publicité in 1835 in a pamphlet on the regeneration of the periodical press
and the necessity of broadening the use of advertising: Marc Martin points
out that, although the word as used by Girardin retains its older meaning
of making public, his usage takes on the added connotations of diffusion to
a wide audience. This was confirmed in 1837 when Balzac used the term in
his novel César Birotteau, in which the young Popinot launches the new hair
product ‘Huile Céphalique’ thanks to a lively advertising campaign [une vive
publicité]. Here, and as it appears in the title of a newspaper La Publicité in
1840, it contains both a commercial and an informational sense and goes
beyond the narrower word réclame.17 The term publicité used in France today,
which corresponds to the word ‘advertising’, triumphed at the end of the
nineteenth century.18
Girardin increased the sway of advertising by using it to revolutionize
the financing of newspapers; advertising, rather than the subscriber, paid
for the production of newspapers, which immediately increased the num-
ber of readers. His paper, La Presse, launched in 1836, reduced the price of
subscription by half (from 80 to 40 francs). This produced a radical change
in the status of the newspaper and the status of advertising. The influence
on other newspapers was great and Martin shows that already established
papers such as Le Journal des Débats and Le Constitutionnel took their lead
from La Presse and augmented their income from advertising.
While many writers and journalists were horrified by the idea that the
press − which once served public opinion in a purely governmental or polit-
ical way − was now to become the mouthpiece of commercial speculation,19
Girardin was quick to draw a direct correlation between advertising space
and distribution; getting the paper to more people, moving it around the
country, was a direct result of advertising and could only be beneficial to the
reading population. In the following quotation from his manifesto, Girardin
sweeps both the Ancien Régime and the world of politics aside to make way
for a new ideological space:

... the newspaper should be popular in all senses of the word, that is to
say, it should represent and defend not the biased opinion of one party,
the dynastic cause of a family or the impracticable theories of a school,
but the true interests of the Nation ...20
 Balzac’s Revolution of Signs 125

The implication is that debate should leave the arena of the political speech
and turn to more concrete forms of expression. Debate and parliamentarian-
ism seemed in some way worn out in the July Monarchy and Girardin’s edi-
torial asks for less talk and more action. If during the Restoration of 1815–30
there was still faith in speeches, be they written or spoken, that faith had
now gone, along with faith in the power of words, which were often locked
into ministry circulars and therefore impotent. Girardin wanted to see La
Presse as an organ of reform, of politics in action, of a social institution in
the making. It was to be a ‘power’, literally a ‘means of government’ which
was independent because financed by advertising. Words should have a
materiality, a physical might to fight the material realities of economics,
politics, society.21
The space of La Presse needed therefore to be one of mobility. One of
Girardin’s earlier papers, Le Voleur (The Thief), is a perfect example of this
new conception since it was literally ‘constructed with a pair of scissors’,
that is, made of already published articles, cut out and fitted into a new
layout.22 Balzac not only helped to wield the scissors but in 1830 contrib-
uted nineteen previously unpublished pieces, his Lettres de Paris. In their
extraordinary study 1836. L’An 1 de l’ère médiatique (the fruit of a collect-
ive research project carried out on the first year of the life of Girardin’s
La Presse) Marie-Eve Thérenty and Alain Vaillant map out an aesthetics of
journalism and journalistic space and insist upon the lack of constraints
which the later La Presse offered to its writers.23 The latter were not confined
by set areas of text, obliged to write to a certain number of words to fill a
column whose size and shape never varied as was the case later and earlier
in the nineteenth century. The space for each rubric – apart from confines
of the four-page sheet – was free to expand or contract as the news or serial
dictated. It was, as Vaillant says, a mouthpiece for Girardin, who needed to
be able to give his opinion as and when he wished:

La Presse, is grosso modo four pages in folio, where it is possible and accept-
able to write what one wants, where one wants, with no constraint in
terms of length or layout – ‘one’ being of course Girardin himself. This
is the most vital and unexpected element for this paper of 1836 which is
entirely modulable and polymorphous and is an extraordinary space of
invention and scriptural freedom ... 24

The newspaper contrasts with the book, whose aesthetic and semiotic
boundaries were so much more fixed. Space in La Presse was also less con-
strained than in the Journal des Débats and was a sign of the times reminding
us of the newly modulable space of the wall of advertisements; like today’s
internet, the openness of the space seemed to expand access to knowledge
and open up the possibility of thought. The newspaper Le Tintamarre − also
from Balzac’s early writing days − had a new format in which advertisements
126 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

were placed in the margins of the texts rather than on the fourth and last
page as was the case with the Journal des Débats; it resembles in this the
advertising on the margins of our screens on the net. Unlike journalists
today, who seek a freedom in the book which writing for a newspaper no
longer affords, the writer in the July Monarchy turned to the newspaper for
a space in which to find a freedom of expression.
Girardin wanted La Presse to be a space of ‘mediation’ and the word is
used in the advert to launch it. These adverts were defaced and torn down
in the street – the rearrangement of financial and spatial expectations being
so radical that there was a violent opposition and defence.25 The idea was to
organize the public space liberated by the revolution of 1830 for material and
moral progress – wealth and knowledge for all – the two being indissociable
for Girardin. The writer and intellectual had a role to play in the new arena:
to comment upon the present and reflect upon the future. The notion of
speech shared was important, as was the move away from personal convic-
tion: the activity of writers must aim not only to express a personal sentiment
or intimate conviction but ‘to seek through participation in the collective
debate the common interest or cause, inventing for this newly shared speech
new rules dictating the very form of writing’.26 This is what Balzac did by
inveigling his reader into a collective memory or system of morality, by sug-
gesting the ubiquity of sentiments and the power of common experience.
This is particularly clear in César Birotteau and Illusions perdues, which are very
much concerned with new organizations of language and space: the space of
the city, as well as the space of printed texts. The Human Comedy itself might
be seen as another example of this newly modular space.
Girardin’s prospectus also contains a citation from Victor Hugo which
calls for a change from the narrowly party political to the broadly social.
On the first page of the first number of La Presse Girardin writes a declar-
ation of intent in which he imagines his paper as a large collective of voices,
in which poets and writers of all kinds come together to make their thoughts
heard by a majority of people. There is a utopian feel to his speech reminis-
cent of the Saint-Simonians and the Fourierists, yet based on a collection of
writers from an intellectual elite who would help the people rise – an edifi-
cation of the masses by the writer. This still carries the weight of a Romantic
ideal which will be shipwrecked later with Flaubert and Baudelaire.
If until this time the newspaper had been a political tool to spread opinion
and rally to a cause, Girardin made it into a communications network which
put the members of the public and their consuming passions at centre stage.
Papers were party political and interested for the most part in the corridors
of power and in recent debate.27 Yet around them change was afoot: liter-
ary revues and satirical papers as well as magasins – inspired by the British
magazine – were changing this scene. The presence of advertisements made
explicit the movement away from pure ideology towards a whole cultural
and economic nexus; the classical ideal of the tribunal in which a single
 Balzac’s Revolution of Signs 127

orator personally addresses the people in his own name is succeeded by a

modern logic of mediation organizing and regulating a different public space
of human exchange. We might say that the configuration of the social space
had moved from the hierarchical organizations of space of the Ancien Régime,
passing through the forum of political debate of the tribunes (an oral arena
of a successive voicing of opinion) to a space of contiguity in which ‘voices’
(now textual) have been placed side by side on the page. Their disparity can
be viewed like a patchwork and the eye of the reader can rove from space to
space very much as James Dawson Burn gazes at the walls of London. There
is a dramatic democratizing of space involved in this new forum of the press
since all voices share the same space and are placed on the same plane: his-
tory next to politics, literature next to advertising. There is no longer a hier-
archy of discourses, since all discourses are accepted as knowledge.
La Presse appears to be both an encyclopaedic cabinet of curiosities and a
work in progress. The articles are not meant to be read as if each new article
erased that of yesterday but as a following-on and development, as if a giant
work were being woven before our eyes. It must read, say Thérenty and Vaillant,
both synchronically as a four-page paper – a whole in which the different art-
icles interact – and also diachronically as if each number were a chapter in an
ongoing work built serially over time. The newspaper is a collective enterprise
and has a public feel to it since articles in La Presse are not signed (excepting
the serial). This is a media space in which there is a ‘complex and polyphonic
system of interlocution’, an ‘information industry’ before its time.28

‘Flow culture’, periodicity, literature as news

We thus see political persuasion being subsumed by communicational ideals
as well as the expansion of the more politically neutral aspects of the paper,
notably, as Martin points out, the feuilleton or literary serial, which would
catch and keep a wider audience. The start of the 40 franc newspaper (La
Presse but also Le Siècle) is the very first example of an editorial policy and
content dictated to by advertising policy.29
One of the major changes in postrevolutionary writing culture was the
way the slower evolutions of nature, religion or family dynasties − allow-
ing the writer a long period of gestation for his work − were replaced with
another temporal matrix: time is seen as a succession of moments, a ‘super-
position of rhythms’ or stretch of different fragmented times. 30 These cycles
were brought in by the new economic and social organizations: politics and
parliament, industry, transport and media. Speech and writing changed
to follow these new rhythms (just as the advent of the railway changed
speech patterns in Britain, as we have seen), and literature began to favour
short forms both in prose and poetry. The periodical dominated the French
media during the July Monarchy and in particular the daily newspaper.
This ‘new culture of periodicity’ or ‘flow culture’ [culture de flot], as Vaillant
and Thérenty call it, means that the newspaper inverted the old order of
128 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

literary creation in which the writer writes and then seeks a place to publish:
the necessity of publication now came before the inspiration to write and
authors were transformed into providers of text [fournisseurs de texte].31 The
writer was now at the service of a continuous flow of text which must not be
interrupted − an image cleverly rendered by Grandville’s image of a pastry
chef cutting up a roll of literature shown in Chapter 1 of this book.
Girardin accordingly strove for an attentive and faithful audience who
would read day after day and follow the news as if it were a serial to be
understood over time, cumulatively rather than successively. There was an
aesthetics of writing which created events – built up daily reportage into
political incident. This use of speculation − of transforming incident into
premonition to pad out a piece of news and create a story – is also the tech-
nique of novel-writing, especially of serial novel-writing which must cre-
ate an event each day. The daily newspaper was the milieu and breeding
ground of the feuilleton and thus akin to it. If the different newspapers at
the time reflected the aspirations of the bourgeoisie, the presence of the
serial brought other less elevated readers to the paper. These new readers
influenced the paper and it is at this moment of serialized literature that we
enter what Lise Queffelec has also called l’ère des médias.32
The day by day swiftness of the unfolding of events in the serial is close
to modern televised serials which occur each evening and must produce
a story which can be given in small and closely following slots. During
the year 1836–37 Balzac’s story La Vieille fille was published in La Presse in
twelve daily instalments between 23 October and 4 November and is said
to be the first ‘roman-feuilleton’. The novel had already been split up and
published in parts – Le Père Goriot, for example, in the Revue de Paris – but
what distinguishes La Vieille fille from these is the rapidity of the daily pub-
lications. Never before had a work of fiction been published in this way. In
Britain there were no such daily serials in the newspaper and the rapidity
of the reader’s experience of the unfolding of the narrative was unknown.
Graham Law uses the expression ‘newspaper novels’ to describe the genre
which began to people the newspapers only in the 1870s and 1880s.33 These
present many of the characteristics of Balzac’s fiction but were never daily.
It is interesting to see that circumstances in France allowed the creation of
a far more politically and commercially powerful form of communication
earlier than in Britain. The effect of such daily serialization meant that pub-
lic reaction was intensified and the novelist’s desire to perform stimulated –
this being one of Delphine de Girardin’s arguments in her defence of the
daily serial. The moment of publication becomes a performance rather like
bringing a play to the stage each night. Thus was the daily paper considered
more dangerous politically by authorities (the most dangerous being the
cheapest), keeping up attention and speaking daily to its readers.34
The daily serial or feuilleton was not always literary and could concern
science, industry or travel – rather like a special feature in a British Sunday
 Balzac’s Revolution of Signs 129

paper but without images. There was much talk of its mission and an insist-
ence that the newspaper should build a community outside of governmen-
tal concerns, produce a cacophony of voices but all following particular
forms of eloquence which were well known already. These were argumen-
tation, conversation, a form of journalistic dialectics, epistolary eloquence,
the anecdote or tale.35 Politics and philosophy also used the serial form:
the Saint-Simonians were able to further their cause by using the press and
feuilleton to capture an audience and recruit new members to their cause,
disseminating their ideas by means of this early culture industry.36 Philippe
Régnier has called the Saint-Simonian project ‘a model of collective enter-
prise in the conquest of an ideological hegemony through the press’, a peri-
odical press which matched the periodical nature of new politics in the
first decades after the 1789 revolution.37 Thus, instead of preferring a per-
fect, finished text which might prefigure the system to come (as did other
utopians such as Charles Fourier), Saint-Simon favoured ephemeral and
illocutionary modes of publication to match the state of ‘definitive incom-
pleteness’ [inachèvement définitif ] of public opinion.38 It was his use of small
consecutive doses which matched the fluctuating tempo of public atten-
tion and opinion that brought him success. The publications of his spiritual
followers were also keen to create a pedagogy of gradual and progressive
assimilation of ideas in a ‘process of immanent progress’.39 Advertising also
captures attention immanently, over time and intermittently.
The most powerful way of capturing an audience through incompleteness
was of course the daily literary serial in the public domain of the newspaper.
This was the place of news which meant that the writer was speaking to a
public interested in the present with its social and economic pressures. The
serial is seductive yet unsettling since fictive and not ‘true’ – yet to gain
readers even documentary pieces had to be romanced.40 Also the story must
seem true, that is, it must be true-seeming. Girardin insisted on authenti-
city and the non-fictional status of the writing in his newspaper; yet, rather
than it being a question of truth or untruth, the serial constituted a particu-
lar poetic form designed for the explaining or rendering of reality. It was
not there to misinform but to inform better, and Thérenty and Vaillant call
this ‘news fiction’ [fiction d’actualité] and see it as being born under the July
Monarchy.41
So must the feuilleton and the Variété section be spatially segregated from
the rest to designate the importance of this space as a workshop for the expli-
cating of the real. What La Presse introduces are fictions of the present, fic-
tions which give us news – the latest – about what’s happening in our society.
This participation in news, in what is happening now, is done by means of
the insertion of dates of real events, real people, of newspaper articles and
advertisements (as in many Balzac novels).42 The placement of the serial at
the bottom of the page – the rez-de-chaussée or ground floor of fiction − has
connotations of an unconscious; the place where the collective can dream
130 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

their situation, relive the news in other ways. It is as if fiction is the working
through of events into ideologies, and the possibility of a playground or arena
in which facts and events (news) are replayed and made intelligible. Once it
is intelligible it can be offered to all and sundry and can constitute an appeal
to act in some way. The bourgeois realist novel is thus a question of actualité
which is also publicité – alerting the population but also interpellating them.
Queffelec describes the feuilleton as being influenced by the novel of
present-day manners, making it ‘a history of the present’, and insists that
from the beginning of the July Monarchy the ideological mould was being
set up to receive it: ‘the novelistic form was by far the best for giving an epic
shape to the constitution of the social fabric ...’43 Thus is the serial embed-
ded – both literally, by its placement, and metaphorically, in the idea of
current affairs. It is inspired by it and sends back a reflection of the news
in changed form. Like the anecdote, says Queffelec, the serial ‘transfigures
meaningless daily banality into full, meaningful, particular [insolite] time’.44
The news feature and the serial share the same interest in crime, and pas-
sion, within the social and the political. The novelistic serial also gradually
pushes out all other types of serial – for the serial was not fictional at the
start but semi-fictional since it consisted of history, travel, tittle-tattle of
high society – all of them comments on the present.

Literature with advertising: A combined event

Literature was also made democratically available by Girardin in Le Musée
des Familles in 1833 – a cheap paper, says Girardin in his opening article – in
which ‘la publicité rendît la littérature populaire’.45 Here publicité is both
‘publicity’ and ‘advertising’ and the message is very similar to Dickens’s idea
that literature was fuelled by new industry and commerce. The romantic
overtones of Girardin’s profession of faith in the first number of La Presse
show how he hoped to save the poet from obscurity: he wished to bring
together and harmonize these ‘men of heady poetry’ who were ‘individu-
alities powerful in themselves’ so that they might be heard regularly and
so that their works would not remain fragments or ruins but be made liv-
ing.46 There was a sense in which Girardin wished to create an event – a
daily event of literature and advertising – and make daily the work that had
already been done by other periodicals, including his own La Mode as well as
the new satirical magazines founded between 1829 and 1836.47 Louis Véron,
founder of the Revue de Paris in 1829, wanted to give literature the advertise-
ment it needed to allow it to exist in more varied forms and lengths:

... to open wide the doors of publicity to all the young talent which is still
in the shadow, as we do to those who are already well known, and at the
same time to guarantee remuneration for literary pieces which need more
than the space of a newspaper article yet do not constitute sufficient mat-
ter for a book.48
 Balzac’s Revolution of Signs 131

It is thus clear that even the nascent culture industry’s fiercest detractors –
Baudelaire in particular – were nonetheless thoroughly compromised by it:
Vaillant points out that Les Fleurs du mal was first published in parts in daily
newspapers, making of Baudelaire ‘a newspaper poet’.49 This vision of the
collusion of literature and journalism is what Sainte-Beuve would increas-
ingly attack in the 1830s and 1840s by calling it littérature industrielle. There
is a sense in which the writing has moved away from the personal produc-
tion, the intimate and particular work of an author to a collective state. An
editor such as Girardin allowed his opinion to pervade La Presse by produ-
cing a house style from his own style and inculcating his writers with it. The
anonymous ‘we’ used throughout the articles helps produce a style which is
a like a seal of workmanship or manufacture.50
Alexandre Dumas employed teams of ghost writers to produce his daily
serials on time; this serial-factory or literary assembly line would produce
text which he would then reread and adjust, placing his ‘signature’ in the
writing. Writers were thus given the credentials to create their own brand,
yet assert the individuality of their writings following a romantic sensibil-
ity. Balzac was his own team of ghost writers; once he had learned to fit in
with a house style as a journalist, so his own works bore some of the imprint
of this. He harmonized his own output, making his own griffe or brand of
writing, and then marketed it as his own special product. He created a sense
of serialization within his serials and within the structures of The Human
Comedy using a singular style but also a media style of integration in which
each novel was a space in which to try out new forms of style and thought
and then make them recur.
The daily event of literature within the press was also increasingly matched
by events around the appearance of each feuilleton. The incredible success
of Les mystères de Paris by Eugène Sue in 1842 was unstintingly admired by
Hugo, Sand, and Dumas while Théophile Gautier said that the dying waited
for the last instalment before quitting the world. Sue (like Dickens) received
letters begging for the salvation of characters, and was even sent money.
As the novel progressed Sue added social tirades in defence of the poor and
became a sort of writer–saviour. Politics tried to appropriate Les mystères
(the conservatives identifying with the moral aspect of the book, the par-
liamentary left endorsing its vision of the poor but at the same time embar-
rassed by its imaginative excess). The socialist Fourier group applauded it
while Marx denounced its paternalism and mystification. Lithographs, cari-
catures, plates, fans and other objects were sold: a paraphernalia which we
also see in Britain with Dickens. Paul Féval, author of Les mystères de Londres,
went as far as to publicize his Le fils du diable, published in 1846 in L’Epoque,
with a carnival procession.51
The impetus given to literature in the press by advertising meant that
by the 1840s advertising was part of literature’s life blood. The processions
and paraphernalia were part of the experience of the daily feuilleton. So too
132 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

were the advertisements printed which appeared with it in the newspaper.

It is the Journal des Débats of 1844 to which I turn – revamped thanks to
the influence of Girardin’s revolution and largely financed by advertising –
to consider the effect on the reader of the co-presence of serial, news and
adverts.52 Balzac’s stories appeared daily in graphic, visual and ideologically
charged environments; in the case of the Journal des Débats (a simple folded
sheet with four sides in which the first three sides are given up to parliamen-
tary debate and news), the last side or back cover was reserved for adverts.
The serial was on the bottom part of the first page of the paper – the fam-
ous rez-de-chaussée or ground floor − often running on to the bottom of the
second page as well.
On the first page at the bottom is the title of Modeste Mignon, then comes
the mention ‘Scènes de la vie Privée’, then ‘H. de Balzac’ and in brackets ‘(La
suite à demain)’: the story is ‘to be continued’ just like the accounts of parlia-
mentary debates printed above it. The drama of Modeste’s existence suggested
in the title ‘Scenes of private life’ acts as a contrast to the ‘public life’ which
takes up most of the newspaper. The reader is invited into a world signed by
‘Balzac’, a proper name designating a private individual and whose fictional
world is that of a woman named ‘Modeste’. The reader surmises that she is a
creature of privacy, or perhaps deprived of a certain public quality she craves.
The title suggests a virginal and demure figure whose prettiness (she is asso-
ciated with the word mignon) signals a certain innocence and vulnerability
which might be violated by the intrusion of public into private space.
When we turn to the fourth and last page we are indeed struck by the
extremely private nature of many of the adverts. The largest and most
noticeable ads concern what are called private parts in English and ‘intimate
parts’ [parties intimes] in French. The reporting of public life (the news and
debate on the second and third pages) is thus sandwiched between ‘Scenes
of Private Life’ on the first page and the very private remedies advertised
on the last, such as ‘Maladies secrètes’ (Secret maladies) offering treatment
for venereal disease. [Fig. 19] There are also medicines for constipation and
vaginal douches. In the same vein, the advert below appears regularly in
the July issues:

Doctor Eguisier’s IRRIGATOR for feminine maladies, FUNCTIONS ON

ITS OWN. Replaces the Clyso-Pump and is indispensable for washing,
injections of fluid, ascending douches, irrigations which one can take
alone in one’s bed without getting wet or having to move.53 [Fig. 20]

There is a picture of a reclining lady (of the romantic sort one might imagine
Modeste to be) alone on her bed with little machinery visible. Yet beneath
this innocent picture we find the legend Injections à double courant (Two-
way fluid injections). On the right there is a drawing of an intimidating
urn with a rubber tube and siphon. Turning from the serial on the front to
 Balzac’s Revolution of Signs 133

Figure 19 ‘Maladies secrètes’, Journal des Débats, 1844

Source: Bibliothéque nationale de France.

these adverts on the back page one is aware of the doubleness of existence –
the idealized romantic heroine and the prosaically bourgeois technology
which sustains her are set side by side. We find ourselves in the presence
of a Balzacian exposition of the underside of appearances of gentility. Here
the vaginal douche seems to underscore the folly of Modeste’s Bovary-like
delusions about herself and her entourage based on her literary reading.
The adverts seem to graphically unveil the bourgeois dream of the romantic
heroine, revealing the lie on which the social circus or comedy − but also
the serial itself − is based. The serial during the July Monarchy often features
seductive or fallen heroes and heroines, mostly of noble extraction, while
the bourgeois figure is mostly ridiculous. Balzac often undoes or unpacks
the romantic heroine in a manner which we associate with later novelists
134 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

Figure 20 ‘L’irrigateur’,. Journal des Débats, 1844

Source: Bibliothéque nationale de France.

such as Flaubert. The advertising here suggests, along with Balzac’s text,
that romantic heroines are ordinary ladies in disguise.54
If we have no evidence (as we do with Dickens) that these adverts were in
any way chosen or placed by Balzac, a look at a typical ‘fourth page’ of the
Journal des Débats offers aesthetic links with the serial. We find a patchwork
of contrasting spaces, often juxtaposing literature with physical ailments.
On 18 July 1844 we find a page with an advert for the great romantic poet
Lamartine, ‘New Edition of the Complete Works of LAMARTINE’, placed
close to an advert promising the treatment of constipation ‘without irriga-
tion, medicines or baths’: ‘LA CONSTIPATION DETRUITE – SANS LAVEMENS
[sic], SANS MEDECINE ET SANS BAINS’. Further down the page is a picture
of false teeth next to an advert for hair removal powder. At the bottom of
the page an editor is offering a serialized work ‘LES ETRANGERS A PARIS’
or ‘Foreigners in Paris’ with ‘400 drawings in 50 parts at 30 centimes each.
Number 30 already on sale.’55 This collection of a series of types (here stran-
gers in Paris) is akin to Balzac’s strategy of offering to the reader all the char-
acters of his time to be collected in parts. As in the Dickens Advertiser we
find the idea of the gathering of parts, be they bodily or literary, to counter
disarray and produce coherence [Fig. 21].
Yet disarray always threatens. Works of fiction (the novels of Walter
Scott) or erudite books such as that on last page of 16 July 1844 (‘MUSEE
DE VERSAILLES’, a book with engravings by Balzac’s publishers Furne), are
placed alongside Maladies secretes and MARIAGE in bold type, which adver-
tises a marriage bureau.56 Fiction, marriage (marrying of girls into genteel
households) and venereal disease are all placed together so that respectable
marriages and the fairy-tale weddings in fiction are dogged by the reminder
of the illicit sexuality which produces venereal disease. What is upfront,
so to speak, also has an area of hidden shadow. Marrying one’s daughter
through a marriage bureau may be seen as a transaction when it is placed by
Figure 21 Half page of advertisements, Le Journal des Débats, 1844
Source: Bibliothéque nationale de France.
136 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

chance next to an advert selling tracts of land in Greece: ‘TERRAINS à vendre

ou à louer en GRECE’.
This page of adverts works like the serial itself: the work was planned before-
hand but written to time. Similarly the ads were prewritten but the layout
done as each edition of the newspaper came out. There are signs of certain
changes in the composition of adverts day by day − presumably a response
both to reader reactions and to the effects of sales and the need to place
new ads. The global effect is of course subliminal in that the juxtapositions
which I have mentioned work on the level of the unconscious and were not
designed as a strategy of awakening or awareness. Queffelec points out that
what interested the surrealists in the daily serial of the nineteenth century
was ‘a liberation of phantasms, an explosion of images and scenes which
seem to speak the language of the unconscious’.57 This is also the case with
advertising, which was also favoured by the surrealists.
Yet regularity and familiarity are also of the essence: the reader must see
the same adverts again and again to be affected by them. The press becomes
a sort of political church service or mass [messe politique] which according to
the Saint-Simonian, Chevalier, was held by journalism, a liturgy open to all
and adapted to the events of the day.58 We might consider extrapolating this
idea out to the idea of an ‘advertising mass’ in which there is a catechism
of the reader by the adverts he reads, much as Henri Mitterrand has consid-
ered the catechism of the reader by conventions of the nineteenth-century
novel. This mechanism is also inscribed within the pages, images, layout
and styles of the cultural object of the newspaper. It was Chevalier who
proposed making journalists into media figures and advertising their pres-
ence – giving them an identity, a name. Régnier sees the Saint-Simonian
vision of the press as being close to Althusser’s theory of Ideological State
Apparatuses.59 The French press was a particularly powerful apparatus and,
like the Dickens monthly number, it encouraged certain rituals of reading,
a shuttling between discourses as well as scope for genuflection before the
objects of consumerism. This regular communion is what creates a mental
landscape designed for more consumption.
Repetitions and hyperbole are part of the stylistic requirements of the ser-
ial as they are of the advertisement: the appearance of both narrative and
advert is only intermittent, and novelist and copywriter must therefore con-
stantly give reminders and pointers. Capturing the attention of the public is
a work of seduction, the need to gain custom and allegiance, to retain and
make faithful the flow of attention of the reader.60

The Human Comedy’s publishing history and capturing attention

Balzac knew how to capture the flows of attention of his readers and his
whole publishing venture was designed to do this. Not only did each part of
his serials promise a sequel ‘to be continued’, but each novel would always
have a follow-on and constitute in itself an episode in the larger pattern of
 Balzac’s Revolution of Signs 137

the Comedy. He was constantly responding to innovation and innovating

himself, drawing on his skills in layout, typography and the placement of
illustrations.61
Balzac started a number of his own newspapers and revues during his
career (all short-lived, as many were at this time) and was sometimes the
sole contributor furnishing the pages with news, literature and polit-
ical commentary. These early years show how printing, journalism and
a career as a man of letters were begun simultaneously − his journalistic
writing for revues and papers informing his literary pieces, which them-
selves were written for the periodical press. His writing was thus never
divorced from the material text which would embody it nor the means
of diffusion which would carry it to his readers. Let us take, for example,
La Peau de chagrin [The Wild Ass’s Skin or The Magic Skin], subtitled roman
philosophique, which was published in August 1831 by Urbain Canel and
Charles Gosselin in two volumes and launched with a very clever adver-
tising campaign. Balzac himself wrote an article full of praise for it in La
Caricature on 11 August under the pseudonym ‘Alexandre de B’. Yet, before
this, parts of the story had already appeared as ‘preoriginal fragments’
[fragments préoriginaux] in La Caricature in December 1830, in the Revue
de Paris and Revue des Deux Mondes in May 1831. These were ‘Le dernier
Napoléon’ (very different from the published text), ‘Le suicide d’un poète’
(with some variations) and ‘Une débauche’ (no changes). In September
there was a second edition with an introduction by Philarète Chasles and
followed by twelve short stories with the new title Romans et contes philos-
ophiques (three volumes). In between times the story was read aloud in lit-
erary salons as a form of advertising. 62 There was a third edition in March
1833 and a fourth in 1835. In 1838 an illustrated edition was published
by Delloye and Lecou with 114 illustrations by the best known illustrators
of the day, and these illustrations, unlike those of the later Furne edition,
were half page and inserted into the text so that a sense of continuum is
felt – the illustrations presented as an integral part of the text. As an ex-
printer he worked with the printers and correctors at Gosselin and Canel,
placing the text above and below illustrations – using his skills as a maker
of posters and advertisements. Already we can see that Balzac’s output was
fast and furious and that his works were often repackaged and relabelled
and sold on in another form.
In 1839 Charpentier brought out another edition, which was followed by
the Furne edition, placing it in The Human Comedy at the start of Tome 1
of the Etudes philosophiques. All the way through Balzac made corrections,
trying to integrate the novel better into the global scheme of The Human
Comedy by improving dialogues (as his knowledge of French high society
grew) or changing names to make more links with other works he had writ-
ten in the meantime and so making the Comedy a more coherent web of
recurring characters (particularly for the Furne edition). As he republished,
138 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

Balzac reworked the writing itself using each edition as a laboratory. Thus
the names of real persons such as Lamartine or Hugo or Scribe which
first appeared in La Peau de chagrin are replaced by fictitious names, while
anonymous speeches at the orgy are given particular attributions to fixed
characters. For the last Furne edition Balzac writes ‘Peau’ with a capital ‘P’
to accentuate its supernatural character and talismanic quality. From these
details we gain a strong sense of Balzac publishing parts of novels as small
pieces in newspapers and magazines and then gradually forming them into
a whole – to be sold to publishers or newspapers who would then publish
them in volume form. A huge edifice was slowly built from all sorts of frag-
ments, written, published, rewritten and published differently. Interestingly,
the existence of his work in volume form did not prevent periodic republish-
ing in fragments or serial form in the periodical press as a form of advertis-
ing for the next edition in volume format.
In 1833 Balzac conceived of the vast plan which would become The
Human Comedy and decided to stop most of his journalistic writing, giv-
ing to the newspapers only the ‘prepublications of his works’.63 The word
prépublication used by Roger Pierrot is a fascinating one since it translates a
writing habit of Balzac and also a marketing strategy which involved con-
stant decompositions and rearrangements, fragmentation followed by inte-
gration. In 1841 Balzac signed with Furne, Hetzel, Dubochet and Paulin
for his Oeuvres completes, and in July 1844 he composed a catalogue for The
Human Comedy (125 works, of which he still had forty to write). In 1847
Balzac sold the rights to many of his novels to the newspapers Le Siècle and
Le Constitutionnel. In 1849 Furne launched The Human Comedy again with
340 livraisons (parts or pieces) at 25 centimes available from February of that
year. This meant that it was sold in relatively cheap parts which could then
be collected up into volumes, thus keeping its feuilleton quality even in its
complete version and therefore reaching a wider audience.
Later the serials were taken up and reprinted in provincial newspapers, or in
weekly newspapers which abridged the serials and replayed them, so to speak.
Many serialized novels also became theatre performances which reached a
more mixed public (cabinets de lectures only had the outer fringes of the popu-
lar classes – those in direct contact with upper echelons such as domestics and
artisans). Nearly all the good feuilletons were played in théâtres de mélodrame
and in vaudeville theatres and even went to the provinces.64 Thus did the ser-
ial touch a larger number of people than we can at first determine from sales,
and literature had literally become an act of making public.
Balzac’s writing was born of its embeddedness within the new media
world; the patterns of serialization (production in parts and through repe-
tition) and of multiplicity (media takes on many different forms) are to be
found not only in his marketing strategies but in the construction of his
sentences, his characters and their subjectivity.
 Balzac’s Revolution of Signs 139

The becoming virtual of César Birotteau:

Slogan, catch-phrase, recurrence, return

Balzac’s novel César Birotteau − the story of a perfumer who launches him-
self into the world of speculation and advertising − is an extraordinary
description of what happens to the subject once projected into the very
media world which we have been describing. It is the world of Girardin and
Balzac and the new spaces they helped create on the walls and within the
press. César Birotteau is also an example of what happens to speech and writ-
ing within these new spaces: Balzac shows how his characters’ language is
modified but he also betrays the capture of his own writing within the new
systems of representation.
César Birotteau was originally a free gift in the newspaper Le Figaro,
which needed a gimmick to sell its subscription. Le Figaro offered Balzac
20,000 Francs to publish the novel in 5,000 copies in two volumes; volume
I dealing neatly with César’s triumph and volume II with his fall or ill luck
(César à son apogée and César aux prises avec le malheur), both to be offered
free to newspaper subscribers. The technique of offering a novel as a gift is a
form of what we call ‘bundling’ today in marketing – selling one product by
putting it with another. A prospectus of 17 December 1837 announced the
appearance of the novel and showed that César Birotteau was also an advert
for La Maison Nucingen (as Balzac’s novels often were – one novel announcing
the next or referring back to others). It was thus a most modern phenom-
enon: a novel published by a newspaper, recounting the world of advertising,
acting as an advert for the newspaper and for the other works of Balzac.
The story was originally divided into sixteen chapters. The titles had a
Hogarthian resonance, since they suggested a Rake’s Progress, or the idea
of the peripeteia of Marivaux’s Le Paysan parvenu [The Upstart Peasant]. The
titles followed a narrative progression which ended in a form of redemption,
thus suggesting a ‘Pilgrim’s’ as well as a rake’s progress.65 What one retains
today is the splendour of the first volume followed by the misery of the
second, of an Icarus flying too near the sun of speculation.

César’s ‘Second Life’ or the dying art of being singular

We considered in Chapter 2 of this book the opening scene of Dickens’s Edwin
Drood in which Mr. John Jasper is having an opium dream. This sequence,
written in 1870, is considered a very modern opening for a Victorian novel,
eschewing a more traditional setting up of spatial and temporal landmarks.
The opening sequence of César Birotteau, written in the early 1830s and first
published in 1837, is also a dream sequence in which Madame Birotteau’s
unconscious is offered to us, just as Jasper’s was. Rather than the geograph-
ical superposition of cathedral spire and opium den bed post, Madame
Birotteau’s dream brings together conflicting times and selves: herself as
140 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

she is now, serving in her husband’s thriving perfumery shop, and a pre-
monitory ragged self who begs at her own door. Like Jasper’s dream, it is an
impossible vision which offers a simultaneity of perception which is also a
splitting of the self (Jasper between two conflicting geographical areas and
lives, Madame Birotteau between present and future).
The first lines provide a powerful induction into the world of commerce.
The ‘great symphony of Parisian noise’ [grande symphonie du tapage parisien]
suggests the grandeur and bathos, the mixité and heterogeneity of the city
space. The background to the oneiric scene is the incessant night-time hub-
bub on the rue Saint-Honoré as market gardeners and cabs clatter back from
balls and theatres over the cobbles. Madame Birotteau sees herself double
[s’était vu double], a double self which horrifies her and crystallizes her fears
concerning her husband’s desire to rise socially. She not only sees a future self
as Scrooge does in A Christmas Carol but sees her present self at the same time
as another self. Thus, she sees herself as more than one, as if through César’s
activities she will have lost the art of being a stable and singular entity.
Waking from the dream and not finding her husband beside her, Madame
Birotteau laments his present agitated state, which makes him leave his bed
in the night. She blames this on his recent entry into public life as deputy
Mayor of the district, which has meant that he is beside himself with excite-
ment, in a state [tout je ne sais comment] (37). He is not himself and beside
himself so more than himself. Madame Birotteau sees business, the mak-
ing of profits from perfumery, as the only necessity and fears the change
brought about by symbolic roles, by ‘public functions’; the conferring of
titles alters not only the name but the very nature of a man. Birotteau is a
Royalist who goes to mass and fears God, who represents the stability of the
Ancien Régime, yet he is also a beneficiary of his times, of the Napoleonic
reconstruction of society and also of the Restoration in which César now
lives and works, which seeks to empower the petite bourgeoisie, offering the
possibility of social mobility. In this context, César sees his wife as limited
and unable to see beyond the possession of static objects. Her fear is that of
losing tomorrow what she holds in her hand today; hers is an ‘unquiet hap-
piness’ [le bonheur inquiet] (49).
César’s scheme is to speculate with a group of others by buying land cheap
without capital and by reselling it at a profit (which will cover initial loans).
It is a venture to make money out of nothing. At the same time he dreams
of launching a new product on the market to cover any losses and to make
their fortune even greater. But his wife persists in seeing the danger of thus
multiplying one’s activities and of the abstraction implied in his commer-
cial ventures: ‘Why triumph over others? Isn’t our fortune enough? When
you are a millionaire will you eat two dinners instead of one? Will you need
more than one wife?’ (50). She thus expresses anxiety over an inflated con-
sumption, a desire to surpass oneself – indeed to surpass one’s own self − to
consume more than the body can and to be more than one is in name and in
 Balzac’s Revolution of Signs 141

flesh. Such concerns tie her to an image of the material body which cannot
‘dine twice’ and does not need two wives; this not only reflects her dream
of seeing herself double – that is, doubled or multiplied by her husband’s
conception of his industry − it also imagines César as becoming (or produ-
cing) a strange other self. It is as if César is beginning to abstract himself
from his concrete existence, to become other, something beyond man, an
Übermensch whose appetites go beyond the biological; this metamorphosis
is suggested in the title of the novel.
The full title of César Birotteau is ‘Histoire de la grandeur et de la déca-
dence de César Birotteau, marchand parfumeur, adjoint au maire du deux-
ième arrondissement de Paris, Chevalier de la légion d’honneur etc.’ It
already situates the reader in a world of historical change and the instabil-
ities of rises and falls (a theme favoured by Balzac and clearly present in
the title of his later novel Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes). César is
a merchant, the title tells us, but also part of the administration put in
place in postrevolutionary France (the system of mairies and arrondisse-
ments, Napoleon the First’s ‘légion d’honneur’ which was brought in to
fix society, to give it a strong administrative base). If we read the title as a
sentence or utterance, César (whose name carries the reader to the decline
and fall of the Roman Empire) will pass through the world of merchant
and administrator from grandeur to fall. These titles – part of the ‘mass
of granite’ with which Napoleon hoped to guy down the heady potential
of postrevolutionary society − cannot fix the trajectory of César, whose
destiny is linked with speculation rather than systems of governance.
His rise is written in his titles, and in his name but also in the abbrevi-
ation ‘etc.’ – which implies other glories not mentioned or perhaps even
thought of. Therefore, before ever the novel begins, César is no longer a
singular entity but a succession of new identities and possibilities; he is an
inscription, a book title, an advertisement but also an epitaph which plots
out the magnificence of possibility as well as the potential wreck of such
pseudonyms.
From the outset, names refuse to stay put, refuse to know their station in
life. His daughter, we discover, is named ‘Césarine’, suggesting the doubling
of César himself, who projects himself into the future through her, placing
her at the centre of his plans for betterment. Names begin to promise the
promotion of the self. This is clearly stated in César’s first intentions: ‘I will
burn our shop sign La Reine des Roses, paint over César Birotteau, merchant
perfumer, successor of Ragon, and put quite simply Parfumeries in big gold
letters’ (42). Thus does César in this imaginary gesture take his business
from the particular name – the family concern patronized by merchants
and nobles known personally to Birotteau – to the general. ‘Perfumes’ are
for the mass, for all – to be readable and consumable on the market. The
substitution of the wooden sign for the big gold letters – for one word –
is more readable to the eye: it involves a form of standardization which
142 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

effaces the personal title with its family connotations (the ‘Queen of Roses’
is fondly imagined to be Césarine herself). Other effacements are also in
preparation, since César tells his wife that the shop will no longer show to
passers-by the work of the preparation of bottles, labels and corks; signs of
work will be hidden away and the goods of the perfumer produced as com-
modities (magical objects springing all created and ready into the world).
This heralds the advent of his factory, painted with great letters ‘FABRIQUE
DE CESAR BIROTTEAU’, making production in series away from the eye of
the consumer possible.
The symbolism of burning in César’s speech – a gesture of tabula rasa
learnt from the radical gestures of the revolution to which César as a
small merchant owes his bourgeois ascension – is keenly felt and feared by
Madame Birotteau. She warns him and says ‘Les grandeurs seraient ta perte’
which might be translated as ‘Greatness will be the undoing of you’ or ‘Your
rise will be your fall’. She takes up the liberating fire used by Birotteau to
designate the sweeping away of all old ‘signs’ and the bringing in of the
new and says that he who puts his hand to a fire gets only flame in return
and that ‘today politics burns’ (43). She thus shows a talent for an aphoristic
form of speech, for slogans which take up common sayings. Her linguistic
innovations are paradoxically linked to what she abhors in her husband:
the creation of new styles of speech and spaces of inscription. Her message,
nevertheless, remains attached to tangible, material wealth and not to the
chimera created by speculation. She advocates the buying of rentes as in
1793 when investment was in real estate – lands and dividends – and when
the income from them was guaranteed. Her dream is to buy the farm near
Chinon which they have always dreamed of rather than entering a scheme
based on the buying of land with borrowed money.
César speculates, however, that loans will not be necessary, since he has
discovered an oil to make hair grow: ‘une Huile Comagène!’. He centres his
hopes on an advertising poster designed to crush his rivals:

I’m planning a poster which will start thus: Down with Wigs! It will have
prodigious effect. Have you not seen how I am always up half the night!
For three months the success of Macassar Oil has stopped me sleeping. I
want to put Macassar out of business! (47)

This is a fixation on another brand name, the English ‘Macassar Oil’ − a

real oil imported by Balzac into his fictional world as was his wont – which
figures in so many of the Dickens advertisers. César’s brand of oil must
triumph and must replace the name of the rival brand. The battle is to
be played out there on the walls and is a question of the substitution of
one word or name by another; it is no longer a question of substituting a
King with a Republic, or with an Emperor – the true battle is now one of
brand names.
 Balzac’s Revolution of Signs 143

Madame Birotteau is sensitive to this truth and all the more suspicious
and mistrustful of this new battle. Her greatest fear is of him losing his
name as anchor (that inscribed over the shop):

To place yourself higher in society, you no longer wish to trade in your

name [être en nom]; you want to get rid of the sign La Reine des Roses, and
you want to go on with your poster and prospectus palaver which will
have César Birotteau on every street corner and on every hoarding on
every building site. (48)

Thus will Birotteau no longer be in one place and no longer trade under one
name. Nor will he continue to use his name − by placing it above his door –
to designate one business, one shop; the name will become associated with
a product, not a place of business. It will thus multiply and appear every-
where. He will be the victim of a name which he no longer controls, for it
will now be out there on the walls. This is the réclame which once called
modestly for attention but has become monstrous in Madame Birotteau’s
eyes since it has taken on the breadth and scope of publicité or the adver-
tising campaign. Birotteau says he will protect himself by creating a filial
company bearing the name of Popinot, his young associate. But for Madame
Birotteau this is again a bewitchment of the idea of business since it has
gone beyond the person and the name.
To calm his wife César returns for a moment to a conception of the
name that he knows his wife will approve of, that is, the name as family
name and part of a familial lineage of honour and respect. He calls her
by all her Christian names and promises that his affairs will be perfectly
respectable:

Rest assured, Constance-Barbe-Joséphine Pillerault, that you will never

see César Birotteau do anything that is not within the strictest probity, or
go against the law, against moral conscience or delicacy. Why it is terrible
that a man established in business for eighteen years should be suspected
of impropriety in his own home! (53)

Ritual is set against reproduction here and family names in business are of
the order of a respectable repetition. César’s wife continues, however, to
see the advertising name as belonging to a subversive re-productivity. She
evokes his original products − Pâte des Sultanes or Eau Carminative − which
were tried and tested inventions, and then proceeds to lament the way he
now puts his hopes on ‘a cut of the cards’. You are a perfumer, she says, so
be what you are ‘be a perfumer and not a real estate promoter’ (54). Madame
Birotteau goes back at this point to her nightmare and says: ‘Oh my horrid
dream! My God! To see one’s own self! [Se voir soi-même!]’ (54). The strange
reflexivity of this statement following on from her injunction to her husband
144 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

to be himself creates a connection for the reader between the proliferation of

the name on walls and the horror of seeing oneself ‘double’ or reproduced.
The self can now be seen projected out into the pages and walls around and
Constance Birotteau declares herself dizzy with his doubleness.
Yet commerce is not the only means by which César projects a ‘second
self’ into the world around him. The expiring Ancien Régime was losing its
tried and tested proper names as the Republic swept them away to replace
them with successive names (a reality which inhabits Balzac’s writing in
the form of recurring characters throughout The Human Comedy). The
Napoleonic era was a time of the erasure of the old and the inscription of
new names (new administrative titles, new nobility). These names needed to
be given authenticity, that is, those who wished to place or position them-
selves needed to do so by using promotional tactics which we might nor-
mally associate with product placement. César gains in the estimation of his
peers by using phrases and expressions in his talk which lend him an air of
authenticity:

[H]is speech was carefully stuffed with commonplaces, sprinkled with

axioms and calculations; all of them put together into rounded sentences.
Gently churned out they sounded to superficial folk like eloquence. (76)

César’s speech is based on iteration; it involves regular production – remind-

ing us of Chadband in Dickens’s Bleak House, who is a veritable oil mill or
factory of words. Like Chadband, César uses the commonplace [le lieu com-
mun] to create a feeling of familiarity and to allow recognition.
The best example of such linguistic marketing of self involves a heroic
incident in which César was wounded as a royalist fighting for the restor-
ation of the king on the steps of Saint-Roch church in the revolutionary
month of Vendémiare.66 He builds the incident into a catch-phrase which he
duly trots out whenever circumstances allow, gradually transforming it into
a sort of slogan which is repeated over ten times during the novel. Going
from the simplest statement of fact – César first tells his wife that the King
was awarding him the Légion d’honneur because he was ‘wounded at Saint-
Roch in Vendémiare’ – it is embroidered upon and slightly transformed each
time. He embellishes the account later by saying that he was fighting ‘for
the Bourbons on the steps of Saint-Roch on the 13th of Vendémiare, where
I was wounded by Napoleon’ (158). The contact with Napoleon becomes
more direct each time the story is told, as when he is condescending to
his apprentice Popinot: ‘at your age I was on the steps of Saint-Roch on the
13th of Vendémiaire; and, upon my life, Napoleon the Emperor, wounded
me!’ (165).67 From the passive ‘I was wounded’ we have moved to a vision of
Napoleon in full action aiming directly at the apprentice. After César’s fall
and final redemption the Procureur Général makes a solemn speech which
tells of César’s life, insisting on the story of his skirmish on the steps of
 Balzac’s Revolution of Signs 145

Saint-Roch; thus, sent out onto the airways as self-promotion, the story effi-
ciently returns as a form of character reference when the bearer can no
longer defend or speak for himself.
The anecdote with its core of unchanging information helps César create
an image of himself in the eyes of others, affirming his status as a player in
the revolutionary years, a selling point, so to speak, on the new social stage
of the 1815–30 Restoration. It is also more than this, since his ‘good name’
thus marketed becomes an avatar or second self which gives him currency
and allows him to circulate within the nexus of names which make up the
society of the Restoration. This trademark or linguistic brand places César
within a legitimate hierarchy, and also allows him to promote himself, to
project himself into a sphere of pure gain and movement – to be in motion
commercially since these early royalist leanings give him the position of
provider of the King’s powder.68 Thus is César’s apogee caught up in this
potent but dangerous potential, which takes him far beyond the ‘arithmet-
ics of bourgeois feeling’ (162) which the narrator tells us is all he knows. The
narrator warns that the humble simplicity of Birotteau (his shopkeepers’
calculations) will not survive the complex virtuality and multiplication of
modernity into which he is about to step: ‘commercial accidents easily over-
come by the strong minded, become irreparable catastrophes for smaller
minds’ (57).

Loss of self: Que suis-je au milieu de cette machine?

This story of a bankruptcy is also a bankruptcy of the self which prompts
Birotteau to ask ‘What am I in this machine?’ (263). The projection of self
and product into a sphere beyond the material world involves an act of
abstraction (the abstraction of language) and a replacement of self by an ava-
tar. When this happens control over one’s fate diminishes. Although multi-
plicity of self and word (seeing double, multiplying the name) can bring
about success − advertising brings Birotteau the means to pay his debts and
to clear his ‘name’ – it is also a form of failure; the family name is annihi-
lated beneath the name of a product and the new names of competitors. The
‘cost’ of rising, of becoming other than one is, is underlined in the last para-
graph of the first part in which César’s follies and extravagancies (his Ball
for example) are shown to be the ‘price’ of ‘the fatal red ribbon placed by the
King in the buttonhole of a perfumer’ (225). Madame Birotteau’s evocation
of a solid and singular self may only be a fantasy but it stands as a powerful
image of what César loses when he enters his ‘Second Life’ and thus moves
from one form of subjectivity to another.
Karine Taveaux-Grandpierre’s study of the production of virtual experi-
ence in the second half of the nineteenth century in France – in which she
borrows the concept of the ‘culture industry’ from Adorno and Horkheimer −
shows that its aesthetic traits are serialization and standardization, which
produce a certain number of cultural norms. Creation is superseded by
146 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

production, and taste by consumption, and the most important effect is ‘the
direct creation of mental states by the production and diffusion of virtual
experiences’. Most importantly, uniformity of thought, the serialization or
standardization of individuals is brought about by the ‘normalisation of cul-
tural products bringing in the reign of pseudo-individuality’.69 The problem
of this ‘pseudo-individuality’ is evoked in Balzac’s novel when César asks
himself what he is in this machine. César feels he has been definitively
cast out of the reality described by his wife in the first pages: a world of the
tangible and the empirical. He and others of his kind cannot bear very much
virtuality − an interesting counterpoint to T. S. Eliot’s ‘human kind cannot
bear very much reality’.70 He is alarmed by the ‘the multiplicity of ideas’ in
advertising and the sense that he now has in his hand ‘more threads than it
was possible for one hand to hold’ (228).
César is described as losing his grip, his hold on his life, in the wave of
writing which hits him. If the bills start rolling in and he has 60,000 Francs
of mémoires (notes from his creditors), he is simultaneously struck by his
own existence on the walls. As César’s shop plummets so does his sister
company, run by A. Popinot, rise ‘radiantly in the oriental flames of suc-
cess’ (257). Although this should be a cause for celebration, the description
is marked with a menacing exotic excess (bringing in the flames feared by
Madame Birotteau). The 2,000 posters which have been placed all over Paris
at strategic points are described as huge and red and strike César’s gaze with
the enormous words (reproduced in capitals in the text) ‘CEPHALIC OIL’
[HUILE CEPHALIQUE]. The narrator insists that no one in Paris could now
avoid finding himself face to face with one of the posters.
Birotteau admires this machine of advertising yet cannot fathom it, for
it is new and alien to him. He knows it is part of an immense révolution
but is baffled by the power and speed of it. In tandem with this growth in
advertising, his own factories have speeded up the rhythm of production;
this speed is detrimental to his health, his whole system weakened by con-
tact with the system of the walls. Popinot tries to explain the workings of
the system, the huge investment in advertising in newspapers and in post-
ers which is necessary, but cannot explain its wider effect on the subject.
César’s friends, the Ragon family, on the other hand, represent another,
slower time and another relationship with space, since they are still living
with the values of the Ancien Régime; they distrust the new way of doing
business but, like Popinot, cannot elucidate its dangers.71 It is the banker
Claperon who first tries to explain to the wondering Birotteau the world
which he has entered; he calls it ‘abstract commerce ... in which profit is
creamed off before it is made ... a new Kabal’ (308). This cabalistic elem-
ent perplexes César, as does Claparon’s composite phraseology. How can
he fathom a world in which posters come before the product, in which
expectations are founded on nothing yet can produce wealth? Molineux,
the money lender, is a better explicator; he simply tells César that there are
 Balzac’s Revolution of Signs 147

no human relations in commerce: ‘Money knows no one; money has no

ears and no heart’ (312). There are no bodies and no souls in the calcula-
tion, says he, and like Madame Birotteau sees it all as wind and emptiness;
he pinpoints a metaphysical trouble here, an ontological disturbance close
to Eliot’s apocalyptic vision of ‘Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold
wind’.72 When César is apprised of his definitive ruin he recites the Lord’s
Prayer, which, printed upon the page, looks strangely like an advert, with
the most important sentence in capitals like a slogan: ‘GIVE US THIS DAY
OUR DAILY BREAD’ (323). Balzac shows that César’s malaise is also the real-
ization that there is no ‘outside’ to this commercial text.
César looks wistfully at other business folk in the novel who refuse
abstraction and yet survive commercially: Madame Madou the nut retailer,
who supplies the nuts for the making of César’s hair oil, refuses all exchange
based on the promissory note. Her business is conducted without writing
and with very few spoken words, her dealings with others being based on a
brutal immediacy. Indeed, congress with customers is limited to the imprint
of her fists on the faces of those who do not pay, or the imprint of coinage
in her palm from those who do. These are the only forms of writing she
engages in. Pillerault’s commerce is similarly concrete – his deals depend on
the simple spoken word with immediate gain or loss and no deferral. There is
no surplus and ‘profit was not indexed on labour’, that is, he refuses the idea
of increasing labour to make more money; in his ironmongery trade objects
have a fixed value and that value is always gained but never increased, since
he trades with a regular and steady zeal.73 For him, the desire to create cap-
ital does not triumph over the value of work.74
César, on the other hand, is spending himself too much or spending too
much of himself, pushing his business to its limits and beyond; his own sys-
tem is a machine which is on overload. Here we find some of Balzac’s own
theories on the human constitution: César is using up ‘more nervous fluid,
more will, than should be daily emitted, thus eating into the capital of exist-
ence’ (284). Balzac sees life as a diminishing ‘capital’ into which one delves,
the reduction of César’s life capital being presented to us like a peau de chagrin
which shrinks as he walks and reads.75 Rather than having the alchemical
and gothic overtones of the skin in the novel La Peau de chagrin which meas-
ures Raphaël de Valentin’s life, César Birotteau’s diminishing existence might
be seen as part of a change in subjectivity brought about by the abstraction
of values in print culture. However, the philosophical and magical element
of that novel is still present in César Birotteau in the form of the new magic of
commodities (the transmutation implied in the shape of bottles, the sound
and look of words); this is the fetishistic creation of value through a system of
written signs. César is no longer a man but a name, ‘a well-publicized label’;
rhetoric replaces substance and self-display becomes paramount.
Pierre Citron describes La Peau de chagrin as a novel of the ‘dissolution of
a being’.76 As in Melmoth réconcilié (1835), in which Balzac shows Melmoth
148 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

aged in a second, Raphaël de Valentin, horrifying to look upon like the

picture of Dorian Gray, expires at the end of the novel. Likewise, when the
magic of capital wears off, the face of death surges in and reveals in César
the wear and tear of so much exposure to signs. Paradoxically, César dies
from the emotion of seeing his world re-established after the humiliations
and privations of bankruptcy – a happiness which is too much for his
organism to bear. Yet his death is also the result of a longer-term trans-
mutation from a simple craftsman and merchant into a businessman and
advertiser. This is the plight of the unhappy bourgeois, which Balzac,
André Wurmser tells us, knew better than he knew music or art. Birotteau
is a bourgeois who is an exemplary victim of the vicissitudes bourgeoises of
his time.77

Balzac, Gaudissart, Finot:

The demise of the writer and birth of the media worker
If César is worn away by the vicissitudes of his time, made ghostly by the
ghostliness of the walls, he is also responsible for adding to that world. His
work, once it moves beyond the making of cosmetic products, is one of pro-
duction of text and the writing of his own advertisements, aided later by the
advertisers and promoters Gaudissart and Finot. If Balzac shows the death-
like contact of the individual in the matrix of communication, he also illus-
trates the life-giving aspect of it – the opening up of the public space of
expression through the press and through advertising. César Birotteau shows
the way in which image and text become available to ordinary folk – avail-
able in a fundamental sense of being reachable and sharable. Balzac as writer
shows himself working with his materials, reaching out for the printed mat-
ter around him and integrating it into his novels, surfing the walls (walls of
advertising, walls of museums and art galleries, surfaces of newspapers) and
plucking material from them.
There is a true sharing of the sensible world, a partage du sensible to use
Rancière’s term, an aesthetics which is also a democratic process.78 Rancière
insists on the fact that the nineteenth-century novel places what is ordin-
ary and common to all at the centre of its aesthetic world. He claims that
an era or a society might read itself in the features, clothes and gestures of
a common person in the novels of Balzac, that a sewer may reveal a whole
civilization in Hugo, that a farmer’s daughter or a banker’s wife may offer
vision and understanding of social and economic systems. And indeed
Balzac’s use of the ordinary social type is one of the ways in which he
makes the society of his time intelligible; these are often conveyed with
the use of the general statement, the present tense of universal truth, and
often combined with an article as in le bourgeois in order to designate a par-
ticular type whose traits are known to all. When describing, for example,
the difference between the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie Balzac speaks
of the ‘heavy solid clothes ... which give to the bourgeois masses a common
 Balzac’s Revolution of Signs 149

aspect’ (216). He also refers to other popular published texts that help create
a network of references which become an ‘encyclopaedia’, to use Lecercle’s
expression already discussed in Chapter 1. Molineux, for example, is lik-
ened to a grotesque landlord from Mercier’s Tableaux de Paris of 1781, a
well-known catalogue of all aspects of Paris, its human flora and fauna
in particular. Molineux is described as a sort of plant specimen like those
drawn by Grandville.
Balzac’s text is thus a workshop of cultural processing revealing the mech-
anisms that transform the lowly matter of everyday life into fiction. It shows
how the raw materials of the walls of Paris offer inspiration not only to
Balzac as writer but also to César Birotteau, Popinot, Finot and Gaudissart.
Through them Balzac speaks of his own productions and aligns himself
with these new media workers as he creates a virtual world through cit-
ation. To embellish Aragon’s saying that the novelist ‘tells lies so truthfully’,
Balzac firstly uses the truth to tell his lies.

We will first consider César’s reading and writing habits. As a member of

the petite bourgeoisie it is not via the belles-lettres that he gains access to cul-
ture, and the reader quickly learns that his vision of the world is not the fruit
of the perusal of books in libraries. We first get to know César by learning of
the works he has failed to read, such as the library of books which his daugh-
ter buys him to mark his social ascension: ‘Bossuet, Racine, Voltaire, Jean-
Jacques Rousseau, Montesquieu, Molière, Buffon, Fénélon, Delille, Bernadin
de Saint-Pierre, La Fontaine, Corneille, Pascal, La Harpe’ are the works which,
Balzac tells us, make up the standard bourgeois library − often purchased but
rarely read and which César indeed ‘would never read’ (206). This is the high
literature from which César is barred, which he will only ever encounter
in vulgarized forms through newspapers like Girardin’s or indeed through
the novel, which brought literary culture to the wider merchant classes.
Birotteau has no education and relies on hearsay to form his opinions: ‘He
necessarily took on the language, the errors and the opinions of the Parisian
bourgeoisie who admire Molière, Voltaire and Rousseau because they are told
they should and who buy their works without ever reading them’ (78).
When César tells Popinot of his idea for ‘Huile Comagène’ hair oil, he
tells him that ‘comagène’ is a word found in the tragedy of Bérénice by
Racine (which he has never read) where a ‘roi de Comagène’ figures. This
information was given to him, he says, by Monsieur Alibert, the King’s
own Doctor. Culture is thus circulated independently of the texts in which
it figures. César also conceives of his ‘Sultan’s Paste’ by browsing through
an oriental book, while his hair oil is the result of an encounter with an
engraving of Héro et Léandre – a woman pouring oil on her lover’s head –
by Laugier, inspired by Girodet’s pupil, Delourme. This classical reference
provided by the popular image market also inspires a ‘line’ or gamme of oil
bottles. César says that, although he admires the engraving of the Vierge
150 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

de Dresde, it is the original of Héro et Léandre he would wish to buy since

the oil bottle in it played such an influential role (149). César also turns for
inspiration to Boileau’s writings on the Ancients as communicated to him
in conversation. It is with the aid of these references from a culture of print
and popular opinion that César projects himself out of his boutique and
onto the walls.
César is a typical example of the bourgeois mind (ces intelligences bour-
geoises) since he ‘reads’ the ambient hearsay, absorbs the public opinion
which circulates orally, the idées reçues which are the fruit of rumour and
legend. He subscribes for example to the notion that writers and artists
regularly died in hospital ‘from the sequels of their originality’ [par suite de
leurs originalités] and were all atheists and should never be invited into one’s
home (149). Similarly he believes the Emperor Napoleon had leather pockets
in his waistcoat to be able to take his tobacco by the fistful and regularly
galloped on his horse up the steps of the Versailles Orangerie.
He also has chance encounters with texts, scanning the walls and news-
papers of his city, much as James Dawson Burn does in London. As he walks
along the banks of the Seine past the booksellers (he is described as a flâneur
parisien) he chances upon a book, that is, ‘his eyes were struck’ by a dusty
yellow cover. It is ‘Abdeker or the art of conserving beauty’ (a real work pub-
lished in 1742) and he finds as he flicks through it inspiration for lotions
and perfumes. From this he makes his Double Pâte and Eau Carminative.
César picks up the fashion for oriental words and his Pâte des Sultanes has
an immediate and ‘magical’ effect on the customers. He then imitates the
posters he sees for theatre performances to promote his products: ‘he was
the first amongst the perfumers to deploy that luxury of posters, advertise-
ments and other publications which we call, perhaps unjustly, charlatan-
ism’ (71). Once they are projected onto yellow, red and blue posters, these
products are described as having a life of their own like actors on a stage:
they are said to ‘perform’ on the stage of advertising. César then passes for
a most superior man, commercially speaking, since ‘he wrote his own pro-
spectus whose main element of success was the ridiculous phraseology’ (72).
Despite the inflated and ridiculous style, Balzac offers the reader the pro-
spectus as a piece of evidence [pièces justificatives] and reproduces it in the
text of the novel – not only the title in capitals but the whole text as written
by César. As readers we discover a complete process of reading: ingestion of
the language of the walls followed by a production of text made from that
raw matter.
Thanks to this adventure in reading, and the writing it engenders, César
is launched. His products sell in perfumery shops all over France. He has
gone from being a taciturn, tranquil shopkeeper to a man in whose mind
different words and expressions jostle for precedence.
Birotteau’s techniques, though often ridiculed throughout the novel, act
as a blueprint for the writing processes at work in Balzac’s own texts. Not
 Balzac’s Revolution of Signs 151

only do adverts feature in the novel, but the reader finds a form of brev-
ity associated with short advertising texts, the ‘many ideas in a few words’
much admired by Balzac’s journalists in Lost Illusions.79 If Balzac is writing
before the telegraph linked London and Paris in 1851 creating a telegraphic
style, we already find forms of succinctness linked to the need for swift
circulation of information in the press and on the walls. Literature and art
are cited by choosing emblematic moments which are easily remembered
and become images or scenes rather than citations. This is succinctness
which relies on a knowledge of other texts and images, on a reading public
which will not necessarily have read or seen them but will know of them
from hearsay and rumour. These are linked, of course, to the commonplace
which we have already seen at work in César’s self-promotion, to the notion
of collectively accessible concepts.80 These are also akin to the ‘narratemes’
mentioned in Chapter 1 of this book.
In Balzac’s text we can see commonplaces in the making, the forging of
images which will then be repeatable in other contexts. In some way, as
each simile or analogy is made it already seems as old as the hills and enters
a pantheon of common sayings. Birotteau imagines a campaign against
Macassar Oil ‘standing on one foot like one of Plutarch’s heroes’ and ask-
ing his apprentice if he feels strong enough to ‘kill Macassar’; Popinot, ‘fire
in his eyes’, says that he will ‘bring it down!’ (111). Here, the idea of the
warlike businessman is set in place with the use of an image from a clas-
sical text. Balzac later describes Birotteau making an Eastern gesture to con-
vey the magic of his commercial ventures ‘worthy of A Thousand and One
Nights’ (120). The heroic and the exotic are drummed into service to create
Birotteau and his narrative; literature (the extraordinary) is used to expli-
cate the ordinary, which thus becomes intelligible. Popinot the crippled
apprentice is made readable to Balzac’s readers (and conceivable as a lover)
by means of the information that Lord Byron, Walter Scott and Monsieur de
Talleyrand were all club-footed. The prosaic apprentice gains status from his
association with romantic literature (and becomes an acceptable and think-
able entity for more literary readers), but at the same time the figure of the
romantic poet becomes readable to the newly literate through that of the
humble apprentice. One might say that this is a workshop of the social and
that Balzac’s text is carrying out a mulching down of social and educational
strata into a more homogeneous form in which the more highly educated
can embrace lower culture and the uneducated can assimilate traditionally
higher arts. No reader therefore remains unchanged by his or her engage-
ment with the novel. The resultant texture of writing is what Sainte-Beuve
was perhaps most afraid of when he used the image of distended threads
and loose weave in discussing style.
Irony is part of such work since it brings into collision conflicting dis-
courses – often the grandiose and the bathetic – and asks us to make links
between the grand sweep of history and the local micro-events which were
152 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

not considered worthy of note. Thus does Balzac’s writing, instead of being
based on rhetorical sequence – an oral rhetoric of argument – become a mat-
ter of chains of images. The grand discourse of decline and fall is used to talk
of the peripeteia of the perfumer’s life. His prime or ‘noon of existence’ [midi
de la vie] is likened to that of great cities, nations, institutions or businesses
‘which like noble races and dynasties are born, rise and fall’ (92). Expressions
such as ‘similar to’ [semblables aux] or ‘like’ create the central simile and offer
a Hegelian image of the cycles and processes of civilizations; the grandness of
the design is reinforced by references to the world [notre globe], and its trajec-
tory. Romantic images of the fall of proud civilizations (Troy, the pyramids
and the Napoleonic empire are evoked) conjure up for readers the crumbling
monument of romantic poetry such as the ruin in Keats’s poem Ozymandias.
Yet all of this is then reduced to a bourgeois scale:

Let this story be the poem of bourgeois vicissitudes which none have yet
thought to give voice to, so denuded of grandeur do they seem. Yet they
are just as immense; we are not talking of a single man here, but of a
whole people and its pain. (93)

Balzac’s novel, like the whole Human Comedy, is a bourgeois tragedy. Plutarch,
Racine, and the great texts of history are deployed in easily assimilable
form in the telling of the humble story of a small merchant. Traditional
or classical sources are shown to be a vast pool of references into which
any reader or writer may dip. Balzac, writing at the beginning of the prêt-
à-porter clothes industry of the bourgeoisie, seems to weave together from
his own references a prêt-à-parler (a ready-to-speak) which is also a prêt-à-lire
(a ready-to-read for novice readers) or prêt-à-écrire (ready-to-write) for other
writers to reuse.
These chains of images also rely on preassimilated references to paint-
ing and the fine arts, making up an ‘encyclopaedia’ of visual references.
Paintings and engravings that could be seen at the time in museums and
collections, particularly the Dutch and Flemish painters, are used by Balzac
to bring out what has been described by André Wurmser in his introduction
to the novel as ‘the quality of reverie’ (38) which any object might inspire in
him. We might say that access to experience is granted through the prerep-
resented world which makes up the texture of The Human Comedy; César’s
daughter Césarine is described in terms of a Rubens painting with her ivory
skin and blue veins, while Constance Birotteau at the age of 37 is described
as resembling the Venus de Milo discovered in 1820 and sent to Paris by the
duc de Rivière in 1821. L’abbé Loraux declares César’s death to be the death
of the just and points to the expired perfumer as resembling a Rembrandt
painting in which Christ calls Lazarus back from the dead. The painting is
used to create a ‘type’ which is also an ideological unit – here the merchant–
martyr or martyr of commerce.81
 Balzac’s Revolution of Signs 153

The description of Pillerault, friend and fellow merchant of Birotteau, also

relies on the medium of paint:

His thin face and hollowed cheeks, severe in tone, in which ochre and bister
were harmoniously mixed, offered a striking resemblance to the heads
given by painters to the figure of Time, but somewhat vulgarized, since the
habits of a life of commerce had lessened the monumental and forbidding
character often exaggerated by painters, sculptors and clock-makers. (141)

The description relies on the filter of painterly techniques, the work of the
mixing and melting of colour and nuance (ochre and bistre); as a writer
Balzac is working not from life, so to speak, but from art, that is, from
Pillerault’s resemblance to already known images. This is a demonstration
not only that life imitates art but that life is always already a question of
representation and even precommodification. Commerce is shown to act
on human flesh, vulgarizing the work of artists and modifying codes of
painterly representation. The extract also shows that ‘art’ – the habits of
painters, statuette and clock-makers – is already a question of vulgarization
since they ‘exaggerate’ the monumental aspect of features and transform
a classical image into a motif. This Baudelairean bringing together of the
classical motif or image and the commercial creates an irony (often insisted
upon by Walter Benjamin) which shows that both novelist and painter are
engaged in creating a vernacular so that figures in novels and paintings are
recognizable and saleable. If painters tend to exaggerate and make monu-
mental, Balzac’s text is engaged in the de-monumentalizing of emblematic
figures, part of a process of embourgeoisement (becoming bourgeois) which
makes the image local and therefore readable by another type of audience
created by newspaper culture. Balzac is also showing that this work of put-
ting certain types before the public is not only the product of recent print
culture but of other much older forms of representation.

Within his own painting of the Parisian scene Balzac engages in other
forms of vulgarization. The reader receives an induction into a world made
familiar with the texts and images seen daily in the streets – the represen-
tations already accepted by the reader as part of a natural decor of print
culture. Pillerault, for example, is introduced as a working man of the
left and a republican, incorporated or assimilated into the bourgeoisie by
the revolution [agrégé à la bourgeoisie] (144). This assimilation, it seems, is
not only due to political event but to the regular interpellations of the
newspapers he reads and the engravings he puts up on his walls; his opin-
ions are also habits of consumption in which his admiration of Manuel,
General Foy, Casimir Perier and Lafayette comes from his reading of papers
such as Victoires et Conquêtes and Soldat Laboureur. In his house the walls are
decorated with engravings such as the Serment des Américains, the portrait
154 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

of Bonaparte as Premier Consul, and the Bataille d’Austerlitz.82 Balzac’s text

thus offers what Wurmser describes as ‘collages of the true’ [collages du vrai]
(10), in which names of well-known cosmetic products of the time (la pâte
Regnauld, la Mixture bréslienne, la pâte des Sultanes) and names of dignitaries
(Vauquelin, a leading chemist, le baron Thibon, sous-gouverneur of the Bank
of France) are used. Documents are reproduced as ‘proof’ and ‘evidence’
[pieces justificatives] with typographical detail − be it Du Tillet’s treacher-
ous letter to Nucingen or the two adverts for César’s hair oil. It is fiction
which not only advertises its link with the real but sucks the real world
into itself.
One of the most striking examples of this are indeed the two adverts
reproduced for the reader in the text, the first written by Birotteau and the
second composed by the professional copywriter Finot ten years later. The
second advertisement, which closes the first part or ‘apogee’ of Birotteau’s
existence, is more elaborate than the first and is offered to the reader as if it
were a real advert ‘as it is received by thousands today’ with the mention in
brackets ‘Another piece of written evidence’ (192). The two sides of the medal
are shown beneath the mention ‘Gold Medal of the 1824 exhibition’ with
‘HUILE CEPHALIQUE’ written in capital letters at the start and throughout
the text. The advert says that no oil can make hair grow and that this new
oil simply follows the habits of the Greeks, Romans and Northern peoples
in keeping the hair protected from outside influences and at a constant tem-
perature. The protective aspects are enumerated and the language becomes
flowery as it describes ‘that shine, that finesse, that lustre which makes the
heads of children so charming’ (194). Instructions are given concerning
how to use the oil and then the address and price, which clearly reproduces
advertising practices of the time.
Balzac is using familiar layout practices and emblems quite different from
the duller first advertisement written by Birotteau himself. The advert is
also shown to be the collective work of Gaudissart and Finot, who together
create the new prospectus and its visual and textual impact. According to
Véronique Bui, the advert is quite literally ‘a materialisation of the progress
made in advertising poetics’.83 If the first ad looks like an annonce-anglaise
with minimal typographical play, the second looks more like an annonce-
affiches and Balzac’s instructions to the printer concerning the second ad
show he had prior knowledge of how to make them and where to find the
polytypages to make the medals.84 The eye is given more scope in the second,
especially with the use of vignettes, which only appeared in 1828. This also
brings out the anachronism on which the novel is based, since it covers
the years 1818 to 1823, when advertising had not reached the stage which
Balzac describes.85 We can thus note that, rather than produce a historic-
ally viable image of advertising, Balzac preferred, or was perhaps obliged,
to offer readers the evidence of their own time. The imperative of modern
advertising – its aesthetic and ideological impact − means that as each new
 Balzac’s Revolution of Signs 155

technique surges into view it tends to wipe out memories of older, cruder
and less visual forms – and Balzac could therefore only speak of advertising
as his readers received it at the time of writing the book. The novel is shown
once again to be a purveyor of ‘news’ as we have seen, of the newest and
the latest.
There is as a consequence a blurring of boundaries between the advertis-
ing inside the novel and that without. The advert which originally launched
César Birotteau in Le Figaro, for example, seems to be written in the same
style as those written by César and Finot within. There is a deliberate simi-
larity in style between the two and between other adverts written by or for
Balzac.86 This further complicates the relationship between advertising and
literature, since advertising for literature is written in the same style as the
literature itself. Balzac imitates in the language he uses the very prospec-
tuses he himself wrote and printed, thus blending fiction and advertising
and creating adverts which function as ‘trailers’ for his fiction. If at the time
adverts were still relegated to the fourth back page of newspapers, Balzac
drags them into the novel itself but also puts the novel back into them; he
thus becomes a practician of publicité in its modern form.
The effect of this borrowing from the world of fine literature, painting
and commerce is to produce a colmatage, to use the expression of Lucien
Dällenbach, for whom the Balzac text is an assemblage or gluing together
of data.87 Alain Vaillant has commented upon this assemblage as being evi-
dence not so much of the ‘bad style’ of Balzac but of his genius in producing
a dialectical movement in which the joins, cracks and halts are more vital
than the ‘false smoothness of the Word’.88 His argument is that this ‘mon-
strously proliferating style’, which has been said to create an entire civil
state in a work of literature, is less concerned with aesthetics than with work
and production, substituting a valeur-esthétique with a valeur-travail. We
might develop this idea and consider Balzac and his writing as hailing from
new media work, producing a text which is always in a state of becoming,
of being continually churned out. His writing is a question of movement
and is part of a powerful desire to speak out or blurt out in writing what is
clamouring for attention in press and on hoardings.
The activities of Finot and Gaudissart in César Birotteau are in a sense the
symbol of this form of circulation and productivity – this textual blurting
out. As characters in the novel they perform or act out what Balzac is doing
as he writes: moving text and image around, that is, taking it off the walls
and out of books and papers and into the sights and minds of new readers. It
is both production and circulation. They are go-betweens, pimps, procurers
[proxenètes], enabling congress, producing intercourse, makers of ‘useful lit-
erature’, that is, literature which speaks to people.89 Finot writes the adverts
while Gaudissart is the advertising agent – a placer and marketer of the
adverts which men such as Finot write. Gaudissart at 22 years old is already
known for his ‘commercial magnetism’ (167). He praises Finot’s capacity to
156 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

enter the minds of merchants and to find the appropriate words to sell their
products but insists upon the reliance of Finot’s work on the advertising
campaign of which he is master. He insists on the idea of the name being
everywhere – on every wall and as a consequence in every mind. If Finot
produces the text, Gaudissart must circulate it:

I’ll go to Italy, Germany, England. I’ll carry with me posters in every lan-
guage, have them stuck everywhere, in villages, on church doors, in all
the best places I know in provincial cities! This oil will shine, will glow,
will be on every head. (169)

He quotes Le Cid to underline the idea of the triumphant oil and, like Finot,
can produce a fund of noble literary and classical references to convince
others. Popinot becomes drunk on Gaudissart’s words and sees in a sort of
hallucination the streets of Paris running with oil, his own hair growing
madly and two angels like those painted on the screen at the melodrama
holding a band on which is written the name of the oil. This is a dream
of abundance and prolixity, but also of wild growth, of which Birotteau
knows the value. The latter declares that if they have the illustrious
Gaudissart they will be millionaires, and, as if in homage to Gaudissart’s
capacity to dynamize advertising and to lead an offensive campaign, he
strikes a pose like ‘Louis XIV welcoming the Maréchal de Villars back from
Denain’ (171).
André Wurmser has noticed that, like Gaudissart, Balzac was his own
advertising agent and that he promoted his own person, be it in mar-
riage or business, with incredible talent: he was his own agent or placier
and resembled Gaudissart more than any other character in his novels.90
Likewise, Finot is called a ‘literary pimp’ [proxénète littéraire] when he first
appears in La Peau de chagrin, a writer who sells his writing and his name:
‘he’s a chemist, a historian, a novelist, an advertiser ... not so much a man
as a name, a well-known label’.91 Finot is known in the various roles he
plays in The Human Comedy as being the maker of writing which gets
everywhere, of ubiquitous text. In La Femme supérieure, serialized in La
Presse in July 1837, we find him writing riddles, rebuses and charades for
sweet wrappers to make ends meet, and thus his writing is like the writ-
ing which gets into every home and becomes a household item, like that
imagined by Dickens when he spoke of his ‘Cheap Edition’. He assails any
free space − the bottoms of the columns of print in the papers where last-
minute advertisement articles could be placed − bribing the print workers
with dinners and drinks to reserve the space for his own text. He also runs
a regular campaign of heady letters of ingratiation to secure other free
space in the press. He is the representative of the centrality of advertising
in the daily press during the July Monarchy. He is also a dream of textual
 Balzac’s Revolution of Signs 157

productivity, an avatar in a second life who succeeds financially where

Balzac himself failed.92
There is a sense in which Balzac’s writing is a cleansing process, a getting
rid of excess – as if the fact of being forced to take in so much matter neces-
sarily implies some form of evacuation. We are given a vision of a mechanical
productivity involving a surge of energy which moves writing about, almost
a physical force of nature, a flow like water in a river. Grandville’s caricatures
in his Un autre Monde (Another World) of 1844 accompanied by the text of
Taxile Delord provide just such an image and it is worth considering the
prevalence and force of such representations at the time. Balzac collaborated
on several projects with Grandville on the strangeness of the modern urban
world – its ‘otherworldliness’ so to speak – and both men shared a desire to
understand the forces at work in this increasingly invasive system of commu-
nication. Un autre Monde relates the marriage of Dr Puff and Lady Réclame in
which media procreates with media to produce yet more media. Grandville’s
interest in the mechanical aspect of society, its output and input, its excesses
and penuries, has already been seen in Chapter 1 of this book in the image
of ‘Literature rolled off ready made’. This image appeared on the page with
the following statements: ‘Thought is now only a machine’, ‘Men are only
automatons’, ‘We write mechanically.’93 The idea is taken to extremes in his
drawing in the same book of an advertising pump which sucks in text and
image then blows it out in the form of prospectuses. [Fig. 22] We see a bliz-
zard of adverts spraying over a crowd – an idea we have already encountered
in British text and image in Chapter 1 and which is a familiar idea in other
Balzac novels.94 We read that it is a suction pump which vacuums in and
then pushes out printed matter, a machine which can ‘flood the largest cap-
ital in less than a second’. It is a literary house or company [entreprise littéraire]
which has the pump built so that ‘nothing goes to waste, everything is trans-
formed’. Grandville pursues this idea of transformation by saying that writ-
ing of all kinds is recycled by this extraordinary machine since other people’s
ideas are ‘refreshed’ or, rather, stolen. The theft of ideas, the narrator tells us
with great irony, is thus ‘universally tolerated and protected’.95
Writing is now taken from several sources and made into a sort of float-
ing pulp. There is a sense in which writing has become a collective effort
which produced fears of an invasion of a literary democracy, part of a wid-
ening of the pool of writers. For Sainte-Beuve this went hand in hand with
a lowering of standards and a certain dull sameness.96 Whatever the criti-
cism aimed at this machine, Grandville’s image translates both the fear and
excitement of an overproductive machine of literature which is insatiable
in its feeding and procreating. César Birotteau as a novel also explores this
‘other world’, that is, the virtual world. Both works touch on a problem of
their own time yet simultaneously offer us the background and beginning
of our own strange encounter with media today. We now rely on jobs which
158 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

Figure 22 Sketch of an advertising pump, Grandville, 1844

Source: Bibliothéque nationale de France.
 Balzac’s Revolution of Signs 159

involve the seeking, bringing together, collaging or collating of already

existing images and texts, on the creation of data banks, image banks, the
manipulation of pre-existing graphics, on writing which is the result of cut
and paste. It is a context in which school and university students find it
increasingly difficult to understand the concept of plagiarism or what the
phrase ‘in your own words’ might mean; if all words are out there in sen-
tences and pre-packaged for all to use, what does authorship now mean?
César Birotteau might be said to begin to formulate such questions. We will
now consider how Lost Illusions begins to answer them.

Dissolving literature:
Lost illusions or great expectations?

The word ‘literature’ is used in this subtitle in its modern English sense of
a canonical literary writing free from the taint of commercial concerns.
This Leavisite sense stands in contrast to the use of the word littérature in
nineteenth-century France, which designates a writing associated with news-
papers and journalism: Gaudissart describes Finot as being ‘in literature’ (as
a trade, as you might be ‘in’ television or publishing) and his adverts are
described as ‘useful literature’. Several sources inspired the use of the word
dissolving: the dissolving book mentioned in Lost Illusions by David Séchard
to describe the poor quality of cotton paper and also the ‘dissolving view’
which was mentioned in Chapter 1, a device for the projection of a succes-
sion of advertisements, each fading out to allow the next to appear.97 Both
offer up the idea of the ephemeral nature of textuality and even of its dispos-
able nature, but more importantly its status as projection or re-presentation –
therefore as constantly dissolving. Writing takes on the status of dream or
fantasy rather than being enshrined in the solid object which is the book.
There is a dissolution of a certain form of high literature, of the notion of
‘Letters’, at the moment of Romanticism. Jacques Rancière uses the word ‘litera-
ture’ to mean a new writing which is no longer that of the formal belles-lettres.
In his book La parole muette. Essai sur les contradictions en littérature he describes
the printed word as a ‘mute’ or ‘dead’ painting of speech [peinture muette, une
peinture morte de la parole] and gives the following description of its action:

... this muteness makes the written word too talkative. No longer guided
by a father who, according to a legitimate protocol, guides it to the place
where it will bear fruit, the written word goes off on its own willy-nilly,
as it pleases. It goes off to speak in its own mute way to whomsoever it
encounters without knowing who is a suitable recipient/interlocutor and
who is not.98

It is this quality of writing which triumphs within the framework of what

Rancière calls the emergence of literature in opposition to the classical and
160 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

normative definition of the belles-lettres. He sees this moment as coinciding

with romanticism, which does away with the hierarchy of genres to replace
it with the equal status of all subjects: the model of speech is replaced with
the model of writing whose only realm, Rancière tells us, is ‘the infinite flow
of ink onto the flat surface of the page, the un-bodied body of the errant
letter which goes off to speak to the faceless multitude of readers of books’.
Romanticism is thus not a new poetics but ‘the entry of poetry and art into
the age of their dissolution’.99
This dissolution is a redistribution of cultural capital and a redefinition
of what it means to have access to a common experience. Be it narrative or
advertising or both, writing is released from the confines of a particular
paper support and is able to move from one to another, to become media. To
reach this stage there is a work of burial of an old world and a construction
of a new one which is the work of Balzac’s Lost Illusions, its first two parts
published in 1837 and 1839 in volume form, the last in 1843 as a daily serial
before becoming a volume in 1844.
Our work in this section will be to understand the nature of the dissol-
ution at work, to understand the nature of the illusions lost but also what
sort of ‘expectations’ might have been gained; we will therefore be referring
to Dickens’s great novel of illusion and expectation as the most akin in tone
to Balzac’s work. To understand this link we might turn briefly to the ending
of Lost Illusions, which has been seen as a new beginning. Gaëton Picon sees
Lucien’s pact with the diabolical Vautrin, who saves the former from suicide,
as much more than a simple dramatic effect – typical of Dumas or Horace de
Saint-Aubin – rather, as a change in Balzac’s own relationship to his writing.
It is a commentary on the act of writing: Carlos alias Vautrin drags Lucien
away from death but does not offer him life in exchange, only a form of sur-
vival, not in the world as such but in a surmonde, a super- or ‘beyond-world’.
The end of illusion is in fact a passage from reality to dream, to a form of
fantastique rêverie.100 For Picon Lost Illusions marks the passage from Balzac’s
realism to a world of the imaginary in which each object or character must
undergo the first condition for any participation in the imaginary: to cease
to live. I would interpret this as the illusion of reality giving way to the
reality of illusion. The loss of illusions, be they political or personal, leaves
the way clear for the main business of the novel, which is to create illusory
spaces which are also spaces of illusion in print. Lucien, like Pip in Great
Expectations, allows us access to this new world. Vautrin’s promise to Lucien
is very like Magwitch’s to Pip – Pip becomes his avatar through whom he can
live vicariously and triumph in a second life. Vautrin alias Carlos says:

You will shine, you will strut and preen, while I remain grubbing in the
muddy foundations on which the brilliant edifice of your future will
rise ... I will always rejoice at the pleasures you enjoy and which are denied
to me. Why, I will be you!101
 Balzac’s Revolution of Signs 161

We can easily hear the voice of Balzac speaking to his character Lucien, who
will live for him, an avatar in a dream world, but we also hear the reader’s
hopes of being somebody else through a Lucien, a Julien Sorel, a Pip. This
emotional and imaginative liberation is akin to that felt on entering today’s
online spaces which offer alternative existences. Balzac helps map a new
social frontier which today is situated in cyberspace.

‘Les deux poètes’: Literary burials, technological births102

The movement of writing and walking often evoked by Balzac, for whom
thought and philosophy followed the rhythm of walking, are two activ-
ities which give cadence to the novel. There is creativity in moving from
place to place but also in the production of writing, and the two are often
linked and are progressive forces unleashed as we traverse the novel with
Lucien. The way in which this movement is operated is through the cen-
trality given to the means of production of writing: print runs across the
page, pages are turned, words stamped onto paper. The rhythm of the print-
ing press is the constant ‘noise’ one hears as one reads the novel. It sets the
rhythm – a movement of shuttling back and forth, a music which Pierre
Citron in describing the three parts of the novel (the first and third part in
the provinces and the second part in Paris) has termed ‘an allegro framed
by two andante’ (29). The movement from dull province to exciting Paris
(the most scintillating depiction of Paris since Diderot’s Le Neveu de Rameau,
says Citron), a journey done partly on foot, partly in carriages, is shadowed
by a movement of ink onto paper and paper through the presses. There is
motility to the narrative – sometimes linear and progressive but also cyclic,
immanent – a printing press which turns on itself and produces ever more
of itself.
The novel begins with the backward printing machines used in the prov-
inces in the early 1800s. The Stanhope press, Balzac tells us, was not yet
in use in France and letters were still pressed down upon the paper rather
than being rolled onto it. He evokes the ‘devouring’ mechanical presses of
modern times. This image of speedy production of text acts as an emblem
of change which guides Lucien’s story: the end of the novel also evokes the
new paper which had been made in France and was feeding the faster, more
efficient presses. The novel, therefore, begins and ends with the insistence
on print and particularly the productivity of print associated with Lucien’s
friend David. Illusions are tied up with it. David’s father Jérôme-Nicholas
Séchard, we are told, was an ours or ‘bear’, a worker who fed the old presses
with ink and whose movement back and forth in front of the press is lik-
ened to the movement of a dancing bear. The human body still imposes its
rhythms on the machine in this description or, rather, machine and man
work together. The narrator tells us that, when other men were sent off to
the wars in 1793, the illiterate Séchard was named Représantant du Peuple
and was helped to open up the press and to print out the decrees of the
162 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

‘Convention’. He was helped by an aristocrat (in hiding from the Terror)

to compose, read and correct the decrees which, paradoxically, threatened
those who hid nobles with the death sentence. These decrees – the adver-
tisements of the Terror − were duly posted up and the two men remained
safe, the aristocrat returning later to his land.
The closed-minded Séchard − given the status of printer because of the
vagaries of history – does not take on the culture of his aristocratic worker
but remains with his old ways, and when his son returns from Paris, where
he has been studying typography, the latter looks with dismay at the old
wooden presses. Old Séchard sets them going and proudly polishes them
like artefacts or relics of another age. He says that the new English presses
are the ‘death of the character’, that the old-fashioned presses on which
manual force is needed to make sheets which are ‘cleanly printed off’ (47)
are superior and adapted to the needs of the provinces. The notion of stamp-
ing and imprinting meant to last is at stake here. Séchard has no vision of
the importance of the words he might be printing but only of their mater-
ial existence as signs.103 Here the presses have a use-value which the new
machines have lost.
The printing presses are not the only obsolete items at the start of the
novel. When the noble but impecunious Lucien de Rubempré is employed
by David, the two form a friendship based on the love of poetry; the descrip-
tion of the two poets in the midst of the printing materials in 1821 is very
like a vanity painting with the light at each end of the room fading into a
penumbra in the centre, the many browned posters on the wall, the piles of
yellowing papers and prospectuses. The description is romantic and paint-
erly of the two young poets – one strong, dark, vigorous, the other blonde,
angelic. The two are still under the sway of the belles illusions de jeunesse (and
by implication the belles-lettres and romantic literature which since the end
of the Napoleonic wars had become available to them): the two men read
Schiller, Goethe, Byron, Scott, Jean-Paul, de Cuvier, Lamartine, and André
de Chénier. Yet the ‘two poets’ are already marked with their aesthetic and
ideological obsolescence; poets are ‘out’ and prose-writers are to be hailed
in. Grandville and Delord in their parody Un autre Monde say clearly that
poetry is no longer de mise and that only prose ‘pays’.104 These two poets will
be swallowed by the culture of print and will later even become actors in the
furthering of that very culture.
The start of the novel also lays out the movement or shifting back and
forth (often on foot) induced by the geographical space of Angoulême.
A paper manufacturing town for three centuries, it also offers a map of
French society at the time, with the nobility in the upper town with the
Church and the Courts while below in the faubourg (L’Houmeau, where
Lucien lives) lies the humbler world of merchants and industry. Though the
commerce and money of the lower town creates more riches than the upper,
the segregation is utter and Lucien’s movement from one space to another
 Balzac’s Revolution of Signs 163

is termed une petite revolution (65). The immobility of the upper echelons
is underlined by Balzac, who sees it as a closed and locked community liv-
ing through repetition, firmly Royalist and pious in ritual if not in belief,
and ‘as immobile as their town and their rock’ (66). This stagnation of the
nobility during the Restoration, clinging to the rock on which their town
is built, is what will be upset by the growth of print and the press. Down in
the faubourg Lucien and David are busy reading and both will contribute to
the change in regime, this social and geographical tension being the base of
narrative tension. The passage into the modern world of print culture will
break down these spatial divisions.
The narrator insists that the Restoration had made the rivalry between the
two parts of the town worse – and that relations had been calmer and less
acute during the Empire of Napoleon. It is at this moment of segregation
that the noble Madame de Bargeton, marooned in the upper town, reads
poetry avidly but also the news and imitates the language she reads, the
tartines in the newspapers, the grandiloquent speech and hyperbole of the
press. She yearns for a twin soul to share her passion for romantic poetry
but also for the literary press to which the society around her − uncultivated
and philistine – is indifferent. Lucien, of noble extraction though son of
an apothecary and working as a printer, offers this outlet. He is invited to a
soirée and recites an ode to Sardanapalus, the chef d’oeuvre of the moment.105
He writes a love letter to Madame de Bargeton in which he talks of the
‘dashed expectations’ [espérances perdues] of his young life, which furthers
Madame de Bargeton’s vision of the poet gained from romantic images of
suffering, isolation, alienation as well as victory and plenitude. Yet the audi-
ence who listen to Lucien (or rather do not) are not versed in the art of
poetry and his readings are misunderstood by a new nobility untrained in
the art of rhetoric. Vaillant has described the disillusionment felt by poets
who had been given expectations during the years of the Jacobin Convention
of an all-powerful speech capable of changing reality: ‘The romantic poet –
and even the most reactionary – saw himself as the inheritor of the orators
of 1793, the printed book replacing the political Tribune, the audience hav-
ing been widened to the whole nation.’106 There was thus huge disappoint-
ment when the limitations of the new nobility and bourgeoisie, the latter
promoted from the richer paysannerie thanks to the revolution, was finally
understood: most had never set foot in the salons of the aristocracy and
had no knowledge of literature and its rhetorical basis. We discover in Lost
Illusions the extent of the effect of the revolution on literature (Vaillant calls
it a séisme) since it destroyed much of the aristocratic network of the Ancien
Régime. Attempts at restoration under the Empire and particularly after 1815
failed to rebuild the social fabric of literary communication in the private
salon and this left the way clear for the public world of print to take over.
Lucien cannot breach the gap between lower and upper town and must
submit to being looked down upon by those he considers his intellectual
164 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

inferiors: like Pip in Great Expectations, he learns to despise himself by

seeing himself through the eyes of more socially elevated women. Just as
Estella makes remarks about Pip’s rough hands and boots and vocabulary
and forces him to hate these traits in himself, so Lucien sees his own fail-
ings in the matter of dress, particularly once in Paris where, like Pip, he
fragments his own person and sees himself through the withering gaze
of Mme de Bargeton: ‘I look like the son of an apothecary, a real shop
boy.’ He becomes, under his own gaze, a series of indifferent parts − badly
cut hair, ugly collar, foul boots, a jacket cut like a sack, gloves like a gen-
darme’s – and he realizes with some sadness that one needs a huge cap-
ital to play the part of a fashionable young man. Back home, he looks
at the inscription above the pharmacy now run by his father’s successor
and feels shame. The inscription is set out on its own on the page as if
to underline its impact, a sign painted in yellow letters on a green back-
ground: ‘Pharmacie de POSTEL, successeur de CHARDON’. The name of his
father thus posted up for all to see exacerbates his sense of being associated
with trade. Similarly does Pip apprehend his father from the inscription
of his name on his tombstone: the father is reduced to a name, a sign – in
Lucien’s case a commercial sign − anchoring him within a particular lin-
eage and class. In both novels the inscription, in the absence of the father,
takes on a physical almost corporeal reality which each protagonist must
resist in order to exist independently: the sign is a limb which must be
seen as separate and removable.
David urges Lucien to consider himself a free agent and to ignore the ties
that no longer need bind him. The inscription above the pharmacy is not
like the inscription which binds David himself. The latter gives the follow-
ing advice to Lucien as he tells him to go to the soirée given by Madame
de Bargeton while he himself remains at home: ‘My own life has stopped,
Lucien. I am David Séchard, printer to the King at Angoulême, and whose
name can be read on every wall at the bottom of every poster’ (96). David
seems to consider himself firmly set within a class and a tradition. Lucien,
however, is placed by David in a different world; he is a movable item, an
element which can still change, not yet permanently inscribed on a sign or
a poster like Lucien’s father or David. He can take on a new status in Law
or diplomacy or administration: ‘You have been neither counted nor listed.
Take advantage of your social virginity’ (96). This virginity is also a virgin-
ity of print. He can rewrite himself and can appear, as yet, anywhere. We
might remember that César Birotteau’s first act is to change the sign of the
family business in order to become part of a mobile world of signs. David,
on the other hand, sees himself as stamped indelibly in his position by the
old presses of his father – hand-printed so to speak. Lucien, like Birotteau,
lives under the sign of the Stanhope press, which can reprint and produce
as fast as society changes. It will shake up the old hierarchies and allow for
the fast renewal and turnover of the self.
 Balzac’s Revolution of Signs 165

David, like Vautrin, will live through Lucien’s triumph, a desire he

expresses in explicit terms: ‘I will have pleasure from all your successes, you
will be a second me’ (96). Once again we find the notion of vicarious living,
of a second self in a second life, allowing David to move, however fleetingly,
beyond the pursuit of regular labour within a sober and slow-changing pro-
vincial world and to live the excitement of vertiginous change. We as read-
ers are also invited to follow Lucien to Paris so that we might explore a world
normally denied to us.
Yet, despite the passive role David allots himself, he is produced for the
reader – far more than Lucien is – as an agent of change, and this through
his own work on the technology of print. He modestly explains that it is
his knowledge of chemistry combined with an observation of commercial
matters which has put him on the road to a ‘lucrative discovery’ and that
he still has some years of work on the industrial procedures. He explains the
problem of paper to Lucien’s sister, Eve: the end of the Napoleonic Empire
has brought in the cheaper ingredient of cotton rather than chanvre or hemp
mixed with linen flax; but this is still too expensive and the great cost of
paper ‘is slowing down the momentum which the French press is necessar-
ily picking up’ (127). There must, therefore, be another ingredient in paper
to replace rags. David thus apprehends and advises the reader of the devour-
ing Leviathan of print production and its presses which is asking for more
and must be fed. Before ever Lucien loses his illusions, David has already
moved into another era and shifts the focus from poetry to print. The narra-
tor tells us that, as David spoke, the idea of a continuous sheet of paper was
still a dream in France, that just as language needed centuries to change and
develop so typography and paper manufacture changed in minute steps.
Yet David’s thought processes often seem like giant leaps, especially those
concerning the durability of paper. Just as cotton shirts are less durable than
linen, so cotton gives inferior paper that is too absorbent. In England, says
David, paper is only made with cotton, with the result that ‘solidity is a
thing of the past’. Well before Lucien’s loss of illusion in Paris publishing,
David shows that the world they are entering is not one of durability; if the
very matter of paper is of short life then the printed word upon it will also
be. Why publish works that last if the material medium cannot? Poetry is
for the world of ancient books, built to last, while prose is churned out by
the kilometre and can be reproduced quickly to replace old texts. David
gives the superb example of a cotton paper book which, when left in water,
will simply dissolve and be reduced to a pulp, whereas linen rag-based paper
means an old book might stay two hours in water and still not be unread-
able. He warns that an alternative to paper based on linen must be found,
for in ten years linen rags will no longer be a viable ingredient; if cotton is
relied upon the world will be a shameful one in which shirts and books will
not last.107 What is needed is an ingredient which will replace the rags and
will also make paper lighter, finer and more compact. David continues his
166 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

story by saying that if the great fortunes of France are gradually being split
up and shared out, however unequally, among the population, people will
want smaller paintings to go in smaller apartments, smaller books to go in
smaller rooms. If a vegetable ingredient is used, as it is in the making of
Chinese paper, then books will be lighter by more than a half: Voltaire will
be 50 pounds instead of 250. This sweeping vision of social and economic
change involves an extraordinary vision of shrinking literature compact-
ing itself to suit the new spaces available to it. Its shrinkage, however, will
enable its circulation and the medium of paper will be made less unwieldy
and obtrusive, a more versatile surface for print.
For this to happen, however, production costs must be cut and David
points out that Chinese labour is cheaper, one day being paid only three
sous. If the reeds of French streams and rivers might replace the bamboo
used in Chinese paper, a machine will be needed to replace the cheap
labour of that country. This discourse stands in sharp contrast to Lucien’s
tale of the soirée of Madame de Bargeton, which has both disappointed him
and fuelled his romantic dreams: his mistress and mentor wishes him to
be as great as, and even triumph over, Lamartine, Scott and Byron and to
accompany her to Paris to ‘communicate at once with the great men who
will represent the nineteenth century’ (158). The irony of the proximity of
these two discourses is powerful: the paper David dreams of will not fur-
ther the cause of poetry to rival that of Byron but bring only its dissolution,
or rather its mutation into industrialized forms.108 It will nurture another
form of writing which is plethoric and ephemeral enough to cover the new
surfaces.

New writing for new paper surfaces:

‘le roman continuel’ or novels without end
Lucien, like Rastignac in Père Goriot, throws down his challenge to Paris
and, having received a ‘cut’ from Madame de Bargeton and her fashionable
friends (like the blade of a guillotine, says the narrator), declares ‘but I will
triumph!’ (199) and vows to ride one day up the Champs-Elysées in the best
of carriages. This the equivalent of Rastignac’s famous words ‘A nous deux
maintenant!’ addressed to the city of Paris from Père Lachaise cemetery at
the end of Le Père Goriot. Yet, although Lucien vows to triumph through
hard work and the noblest forms of writing, when he goes to work at the
Sainte-Geneviève library he is often seduced away from his day’s study by
the colourful theatre posters. When he goes to get his works published he
is similarly mesmerized by all the adverts for books that ‘cover’ the walls.
It is advertising text rather than literature which he encounters most often,
particularly the newly launched ‘Ladvocat’ poster – a piece of advertising
history given by Balzac to his readers − ‘which was then flowering on the
walls for the first time’ (212) and would soon be a source of public revenue.
This is the soon-to-be-world, not quite yet here, which overlays Lucien’s
 Balzac’s Revolution of Signs 167

experiences in Paris. Through the use of such structures as ‘would soon be’
or ‘was about to be’ Balzac creates a strange palimpsest of times in which
Lucien in his experience of text and communications is always on the
brink of another historical conjuncture – that which is about to be born.
Through Lucien, both the reader of that time and the present-day reader
might experience the coming into being of the virtual world that each
knows.
It is the perpendicular, theatrical nature of text – such as the sign of
the booksellers ‘VIDAL ET PORCHON’ reproduced in capital letters in the
text – which helps Lucien understand the commodification of writing.
Books, he discovers, are like cotton caps for hatters, ‘goods to be bought
cheap and sold expensively’ (214). When Lucien meets the writer Daniel
d’Arthez from the Cénacle group of poets the ‘seal of special genius’ that
Lucien sees on his forehead and on those of his fellow poets and that which
D’Arthez says he sees on Lucien’s is an imaginary inscription which cannot
rival the more insistent ‘sceaux’ which clamour from the Paris walls. The
use of the word ‘sceau’, which suggests a sealing off from further inscrip-
tion and has a static quality, might be contrasted with the extraordinary
flow of writing from journalism − what d’Arthez calls ‘a hell, a bottomless
pit of iniquities, of lies, of betrayals, which one cannot cross with impun-
ity nor remain pure after leaving it’ (237). The flowing list helps render the
saturation of space. Writing is also described like a plant needing water –
d’Arthez telling Lucien that his tears must ‘water his genius’. Yet the growth
such a conjunction of talent and weeping might produce cannot rival the
effect of what is often described in the text as the sun and rain of adver-
tising on the literary work. Images of the fecundity of textual production
based on images of plants and growth contrast greatly with the austerity
and restraint of the Cénacle. Thus when Lousteau listens to Lucien read his
sonnets (Les Marguerites) he takes on the fatigued and blasé air of a journal-
ist who has heard it all before:

You know nobody, you have no entry into any newspaper: your Marguerites
will remain chastely folded up just as they are in your hands now: they
will never open out in the sun of advertising, in the meadow of wide
margins, decorated with the flowers produced by the illustrious Dauriat,
publisher of the famous ... My poor child, I came like you, my heart full
of illusions, driven by the love of Art. ... I found only the harsh realities of
the profession ... (251)

In this extract, the literary text is a flower which in order to bloom needs
to be heated up in the false sun of advertising. This very much echoes the
aesthetic of Grandville for whom manufacture was linked to nature or,
rather, became a ‘second nature’: commodities given wings or shown grow-
ing on trees or swimming in streams. It also uses the phraseology found in
168 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

Grandville’s Un autre Monde, which speaks of the effect of l’ondée fécondante

des prospectus on all forms of art:

The talent of actors, the voices of singers, paintings, sculptures, books,

reviews, illustrations, music, dance ... can only open up and be seen if
warmed by the sun of flattery and can only flower in the fertile rain of
advertising leaflets.109

This rain or flow of text is not the romantic flow that is associated with
an outpouring of feeling (Wordsworth’s ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful
feeling’ or Lamartine’s flow of emotion to the natural world) but is the fruit
of a mechanism and the result of an arithmetic. There is a harsh mechanics
in this flow which transforms journalists into ‘convicts condemned to suc-
cess for life’ (353) [forçats condamnés au succèss à perpétuité]. The metaphor
of the natural world is uncannily yoked to images of manufacture. When
Lousteau describes how he makes a living with Finot, writing articles in
praise or condemnation of different cosmetic products on the market – those
in fact which appear in César Birotteau − he describes the mechanics of flow
thus: ‘When the Prospectus comes out in an eruption of thousands, money
flows [entre à flots] into my pockets’ (252). As if to reinforce the truth of this
economics, Lousteau explains the link between literature and prostitution
in his famous speech given as they walk in the grande allée de l’Observatoire
in the Luxembourg Gardens: writing and different types of prostitute are
compared firstly through the figure of the starving girl who refuses the
trade (as is the case with d’Arthez) to the high-class whore like Lousteau
himself who reaps the benefits of her position. Lousteau speaks of the ‘fer-
mentation’ at work, the mud and the swamp created by journalism and the
alarming rank growth that is its consequence.
Dauriat’s book-selling establishment in the Galeries de Bois is the place
where Lucien receives his last instruction concerning this arithmetics of pro-
duction: Dauriat describes himself as one who makes ‘speculations in litera-
ture’ and whose vocation is not to further the cause of great literature but to
make money and give it to already famous men. He hates poetry and verse
of all kinds which ‘devours’ – that is, ruins – the book-selling trade. This
circulation of text might be likened to what Vaillant calls an arithmétique de
la jouissance inspired by Baudelaire’s assertion in 1846 that writers must dis-
tract the bourgeois after his work and make him satisfied, quiet and benevo-
lent.110 Baudelaire speaks of the exact quantity of pleasure necessary [quantité
de jouissances nécessaires] with no surplus since this could perturb the pleas-
ure of consumption: thus are mediocre works deemed better adapted while
superior and surprising works lack the necessary smoothness.111 The writer
does not seem to be emancipated by the industry of print (and by freedom
from aristocratic protection), but, as Louis Blanc complained in 1839, to be
its slave.
 Balzac’s Revolution of Signs 169

When we move back to the provinces in Les souffrances de l’inventeur,

Balzac sets the destinies of Lucien and David, poet and printer, side by side,
as being both contiguous and simultaneous:

Thus, what a strange thing! Just as Lucien was being fed into the great
machine of Journalism, at the risk of finding his honour and his intelligence
in shreds, David Séchard, down in his printing workshop, was working
with developments in the periodical Press and considering their mater-
ial implications. He wanted to give the spirit of the age the means of
fulfilling itself. (461)

Lucien represents the new forces of journalism, politics and publishing that
were increasing the demand for paper, yet Lucien’s debts bring about David’s
ruin, making him into an even more driven inventor. Thus does paper take
centre stage – as a brute matter with brutal consequences yet also as a symbol
of new hope. Paper must be cheaper and flexible enough to be made into long
rolls, as in England, where the machines for making long paper had begun
to function. Yet David lacks the capital to become a paper magnate and must
accept the yoke placed on him by the rival printer Cointet and the lawyer Petit-
Claud. As David is further coerced by his father and by Cérizet, the imperative
to discover a new formula for paper becomes more pressing and he must prove
to his father that he can do it. Old Séchard locks him in an old distillery with
Kolb, his assistant, for the night and brings the ingredients they ask for. David
says delightedly that it is just like a factory and proceeds to reconfigure the
age-old equipment within the crumbling old house of the father to create an
entirely modern product. From this ancient old ruin of a much older regime
and from products of the land (the artichokes, reeds and nettles gathered by
the father) emerges, after a night of toil, the smooth clean paper of a new era.
The old man folds it, crumples it, licks it, and chews it, making of his
own palate ‘a tester of paper’ (527). This physical engagement with paper
is typical of the many scenes devoted to reflections upon and experiments
with pulp and paper. As paper becomes more perfect so the incredulous
touching, smoothing and tasting of human beings intensifies. The trace
of the human interaction banished from the appearance of the paper calls
upon a desire to verify. When Eve and David receive Lucien’s letter telling of
Coralie’s death and asking for money to bury her, Eve notices that the letter
is still wet with tears: both see the inferior quality and texture of the paper,
the effect of water upon it. By contrast, when David writes to Eve from his
exile on his first sheets of paper the beauty of the paper is described in terms
of its lack of permeability and strength, but also flexibility:

... some were of metallic purity, others soft as Chinese paper, and offering
all possible nuances of white. Old Séchard and Cointet’s eyes glittered to
rival those of Jews examining diamonds. (531)
170 Advertising, Subjectivity, Nineteenth-Century Novel

Paper is both venerated and fetishized and, as with all fetishized objects, the
imprint of the human is erased. For economic reasons the process of fabri-
cation must reduce costly manual labour to a minimum. Thus does paper
move symbolically beyond the material presence of labour – eschewing
the imprint of the human (we think here of Marx’s loaf of bread) – and in
the process becoming other-worldly. Interestingly, even ink – the very print
for which the paper is designed – is shown to be a sullying product which
‘blackens’ the white paper, as Lousteau says and which according to David
somehow spoils its purity. This purity is that of the commodity.
Once this alchemical transformation has taken place and the paper is
smooth and light, the narration allows Lucien to make an entrance once
again – not as a poet but transmuted into the embodiment of prose writing.
When the folk of Angoulême hear that Lucien had not killed himself but
was riding in a calèche to Paris, Petit-Claud the lawyer says: ‘What did I tell
you? ... That boy isn’t a poet, he’s a never-ending novel’[un roman continuel]
(610). Lucien, then is not a person, nor indeed, it might be argued, is he a
character. He is a locus of production, a machine of productivity onto which
the machine of paper-making represented by David might be linked up. The
two desiring machines – to use Deleuze and Guattari’s expression − func-
tion together at the end of the novel. Lucien represents a form of desiring
associated with the unfolding sentence, an endless novel, one which recurs,
and reoccurs. He is the creature not of the romantic poem but of the novel
sold in parts – either as a feuilleton or in instalments. He always comes back
since he represents the invention of text produced by the kilometre, and
will always have a following-on, will always be associated with the mention
‘to be continued’ [à suivre] written after the serial in the Journal des Débats.
Lucien is the very matter which will live on the new paper.
Just as David is teetering on the brink of disaster, and the narrative on
the brink of closure, Lucien offers a perfect retournement de situation, the
twist of Oliver Twist typical of the serial: his gift of 15,000 francs arrives
magically in fairytale sacks. With it, Eve buys a property and sets up an
annuity, while David happily renounces any stake in the paper industry
and lives happily ever after. Cointet plans to get a monopoly on supply-
ing paper to the major Parisian papers and is soon sending off thousands
of rolls of paper to Paris. Thus the story is saved from extinction and rolls
forward, becoming in the mind of the reader a continuous roll or, as Petit-
Claud says, ‘un roman continuel’. Balzac can be seen to be engaging in
what we might call chain-writing − lighting a new narrative, like a cigar,
with the one he is still telling and thus assuring the fidelity of his audience.
The last line of the novel tells us of the next episode of Lucien’s adventures
and constitutes an advertisement: ‘As for Lucien, his return to Paris will be
told in Scènes de la vie parisienne’ (625). To Wilkie Collins’s list of ‘Make ‘em
laugh, make ‘em cry, make ‘em wait’ we might add the notion of making a
readership ‘expect’.
 Balzac’s Revolution of Signs 171

We might conclude by examining once again the possible relationship in

Balzac between loss and expectation, of the end of the romantic poet and the
start of the ‘newspaper poet’. The energy of Lost Illusions is in the slam and
clatter of newspaper production and not the more dismal scratch of a poet’s
pen in a garret or in the provinces (we may think here of the detumescent
effect of too great a devotion to high arts imagined by Baudelaire) and it is
this transfer of affect which is at stake in the novel.112 New expectations in
print involve in some measure the evacuation of the ideological hopes asso-
ciated with the revolution and the Napoleonic wars. The yoke of the past
which haunts Balzac’s writing is suggested in the story of Colonel Chabert
(hero of the Napoleonic wars), who describes being buried in a mass grave
amongst corpses – a literalization of Marx’s ‘weight of the dead generations’
pressing upon him. Chabert, a ghost who cannot be integrated into the
project of The Human Comedy, will be replaced by the petit bourgeois hero.
Pierre Gascar says as much when he describes the story as ‘an enterprise of
historical liquidation’ which will allow Balzac to pay homage to the moral
inheritance of the revolution while clearing the ground for a new fictional
world centred on bourgeois concerns.113 Balzac performs this burial of illu-
sions quite clearly in the prefaces to the different parts of Lost Illusions. If
the June 1839 preface to the second part of the novel Un grand homme de
province à Paris laments the stifling of poetry and poetic writing under the
‘depraved influence of the newspaper’ which buries them without a trace
and in silence, four years later in 1844, in the preface to the third part, then
called ‘David Séchard’, Balzac says that the newspaper writer has become
the new voice of the century (the new Tacitus, Luther, Voltaire) and has
replaced governments, history and the book.
The advent of the ‘endless novel’ thus needs as its precondition the end of
the panoramic sweep of history and the birth of the ordinary and personal.
If, as Vaillant points out, the word ‘illusion’ as used by Balzac in 1837 is a
political word meaning an adhesion to collective convictions which create
a cohesive national community (rather than being a question of individual
belief disappearing with the lucidity of age), then the illusions which are
lost are the hope of a true restoration − not of a king but of law and moral-
ity. What is shown to be dissolving is the illusion of history as linear time
in which failure might be rectified. Therefore lost illusions, that is, collect-
ive historical illusions, are swapped for illusory losses (Vaillant’s expression
pertes illusoires) which are individual illusions of personal loss in love, litera-
ture, society.114 We might say that history has ended and media has begun,
that illusory losses rather than lost illusions are the stuff of fiction. Illusions
have to be buried for expectations to be found; absolute value dissolved to
leave the personal and the prosaic of print.
Conclusion

My conclusion is an image. It is the image of a wedding party – the bride

and groom and wedding guests all dressed in clothes made from advertise-
ments and serial novels. Jean-Jacques Grandville is showing us the marriage
of Puff and Réclame – two forms of advertising, one literary, the other com-
mercial − united with a view to procreation. [Fig. 23] The cartoon is part
of his critique of commercial writing, yet also offers a vision of the human
condition in which subjectivity is shown to be bound up with imprinting
which is also clothing. Writers such as Carlyle and Dickens always insisted
upon the closeness of cloth and print; stories are clothes, says Balzac, when
he describes the serial novel as the flounce at the bottom of the skirt of the
newspaper. Advertising fictions – the language of the walls – are the mater-
ial we weave and which clothes us: it forms the texture of our daily lives and
imprints itself upon our selves. Grandville shows that it has usurped the
power of the institutions surrounding marriage (Church and state) and that
it has even taken the place of the persons it clothes. Indeed, the image ges-
tures towards a posthuman world where the subject is a prosthesis or indeed
mere effect of the ambient text and image.
Secondly, Grandville’s wedding party is moving; the text and image are
in motion though the dresses worn by the women are cumbersome – the
paper stiff and heavy. Might we not see in this visual oxymoron a longing
which is also a dream dear to Dickens and Balzac of the disappearance of
the medium, the birth of pure diaphanous projection which needs no mat-
ter to bear it? The smoothness and versatility of the paper described at the
end of Lost Illusions, and the speed of the endless roll of paper, suggest the
gradual superfluity of the idea of medium. Both writers suggest the possi-
bility of a paperless world in which stories and illustrations, text and image,
float and travel, materialize in one place and then evaporate. What might
such a world mean for the subject who inherits it? What are the politics of
this dismantling of the book and dispersal of writing, of this potentially
surface-less and ubiquitous representation? This new language of the walls
suggests the advent of the tyranny of spectacles envisioned by Guy Debord

172
 Conclusion 173

Figure 23 ‘Les noces du Puff et de la Réclame’, Grandville, 1844

Source: Bibliothèque nationale de France.

or Giorgio Agamben, but at the same time the democratization of know-

ledge spoken of by Rancière.1 Perhaps we are witnessing an amalgamation
or sublation of these two stances, a paradoxical third term which, if familiar
to us today, was only just starting to be imaginable in the 1840s.
Notes

1 The Language of the Walls: Spaces, Practices, Subjectivities

1. See Murray Roston, Changing Perspectives in Literature and the Visual Arts,
1650–1820, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990. During Roston’s dis-
cussion of the importance of perspective in the emergence of the novel, he con-
trasts Milton’s use of the telescope in Paradise Lost, which was designed to convey
a sense of the vastness of the cosmos, with Swift’s use of the telescope in Gulliver’s
Travels:
For it is not only Swift’s preference for applying the opposite end of the tele-
scope to his eye, his use of it for purposes of diminution, that distinguishes
him from his Puritan predecessor but also the direction in which he points
the instrument. In his hands the telescope is turned away from the heavens
towards the earth, focussing there upon a new scene, a panorama not of the
cosmos but of the human social fabric (155).
A similarity is found with the viewpoint suggested in Canaletto’s Regatta on the
Grand Canal, which focuses on ‘the city as human habitation, the location of
social activity ...’: the scene is presented from a distant, raised vantage point, as if
scanned through a telescope by an uninvolved spectator. The result is an overview
of a crowded city singularly reminiscent of Gulliver’s first visit to the Lilliputians’
metropolis (159). Roston goes on in the following way: ‘The similarity lies not
merely in the new viewpoint for examining mankind from above, but in the sug-
gestion in both instances of artist or narrator as an objective investigator examin-
ing with curiosity the conduct of the human species in its variegated communal
rites’ (159).
2. Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and
Spectacle 1851–1914, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990, 18.
3. Fuelled by the Great Exhibition whose catalogue boasted 53 pages of tax-free ads,
the duties on advertising began to be lifted (see E. S. Turner, The Shocking History
of Advertising, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965, 78). In 1853 advertising duty was
abolished, then in 1855 the end of newspaper stamp duty, which resulted in a
tremendous expansion of the press and in advertising in general, creating an
increase in the volume of advertising space (see T. R. Nevett, Advertising in Britain:
A History, London: Heinemann, 1982, 67). The last ‘tax upon knowledge’, a duty
on paper, was lifted in 1861. The expression was used in a letter Dickens wrote
to Macready on stamp duty, paper duty and advertising duty. It was the latter
that Dickens found to be ‘a preposterous anomaly’ (Mamie Dickens and Georgina
Hogarth (eds), Letters of Charles Dickens, vol. I, 1833–1856, London: Chapman and
Hall, 1880, 274). See also the change from rag-based paper to the more cheaply
and efficiently produced wood-pulp paper in the 1840s.
4. Dale Porter, The Thames Embankment: Environment, Technology, and Society in
Victorian London, Ohio: The University of Akron Press, 1998, 38.
5. Porter, Thames Embankment, 108.
6. Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in 19thc London, New
Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2000, 53.
7. Nead, Victorian Babylon, 56.

174
 Notes 175

8. Penny Illustrated Paper, 22 September 1856, 182. Nead, Victorian Babylon, 54.
9. A look at the numerous reports, pamphlets and small publications from the
1830s onwards concerning the drainage and remodelling of Paris and London
reveals a vocabulary of sweeping away the congestion of cities whose structures
had become unmanageable. French reports on the state of the London sewer in
1839 lament the antiquated systems of street and sewer and the lack of a sin-
gle system both physically and administratively and the need for a new design
(see M. Mongey, ‘Notice sur les Egouts de Londres’, written in 1839 by an ‘Aspirant-
Ingénieur des Ponts et des Chaussées’, 1839, 47). The artist John Martin (The Day
Of Judgment or Pandemonium, Satan’s City in the Underworld) created a plan for a
new sewage system for London designed like a Greek Temple with airy walkways
for the working classes to take healthy exercise during their moments of leisure
(see also Richard Trench and Ellis Hillman, London Under London, London: John
Murray, 1984, 68–69 and Stephen Halliday, The Great Stink of London, London:
Sutton, 1999, 46–47). One report of 1851 imagines a spontaneous flow, not only of
fresh water but of the lower classes, out of London towards ‘vast barracks of model
houses, rising on healthier soil’ (J. Simon, ‘Medical Officer of Health to the City of
London’, Report on the Sanitary Condition of the City of London for the year 1850–51,
London: C. Dawson, 1851, 38). Bazalgette in 1864 speaks of the main drainage
system as one concerning flows, velocities, pumping stations, intercepting sewers
which carry off the excess productions of the city, to leave the surface streets free of
encumbrance (J. W. Bazalgette, On the Main Drainage of London and the Interception
of the Sewage from the River Thames, Minutes of Proceedings of the Institution of
Civil Engineers, 1864–65, 10). In a report written in 1878, Haussmann is quoted
as describing the city as a human body whose fluids must circulate freely in order
to promote life and health, and without troubling ‘la bonne ordonnance de la
ville’ on the surface (Charles Terrier in Etude sur Les Egouts de Londres, de Bruxelles
et de Paris, Paris: Delahaye, 1878). In the same paper the large collector sewer of
Asnière is described as a miniature Venice below the ground, on which boats glide
through the tunnels with the same effortlessness as traffic through the streets
above. Surplus matter (rubbish and sewage) channelled out of the city by means of
urban improvement was to leave space free for commerce and leisure.
10. See chapter 1 of Les Mystères de Paris, ‘Le tapis-franc’, which describes the district of
the ‘Palais de Justice’ which paradoxically harboured the worst criminals of Paris
11. Porter, Thames Embankment, 121. Porter describes the many previous attempts to
‘embank’ the river from mediaeval times onwards but underlines the fact that
the Victorian project differed from them in terms of the breadth of vision of
metropolitan improvement (107–134), especially movement of traffic. The first
Commons Committee on the Thames Embankment (1860) was charged with
providing for the ‘Increased Traffic of the Metropolis’ (118). Cabs, omnibuses,
underground railways would share the space, and links to the Strand and other
commercial streets would be made.
12. Porter, Thames Embankment, 115.
13. Porter, Thames Embankment, 131.
14. See Richard Sennet, The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities,
London: Faber and Faber, 1991, 108.
15. See Porter, Thames Embankment, 115 and Richards, The Commodity Culture of
Victorian England.
16. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin,
Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,
1999, 406.
176 Notes

17. Benjamin, Arcades Project, 844 and 405 respectively.

18. John Tagg, ‘The Discontinuous City: Picturing and the Discursive Field’ in
Norman Bryson (ed.), Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations, Hanover and
London: Wesleyan University Press, 1994, 85.
19. Nead, Victorian Babylon, 21–22. See also Louis Marin’s account of spatial power in
his Utopiques and his discussion of the panoramic versus the geometric map – the
latter involving both free space and constructed space.
20. Nead, Victorian Babylon, 22.
21. Max Schlesinger, Saunterings in and about London, London: Nathaniel Cooke,
1853, 20 and 23.
22. See William Smith, Advertise! How? When? Where? London: Routledge Warne,
and Routledge, 1863, 72. Thousands of sheets of ‘note-paper’, ‘envelopes’, illus-
trations of scenes from the play and ‘1,000,000 cards the shape of a heart’ were
also used. Smith estimates that 150 million handbills were distributed in London
in an average year in mid-Victorian times.
23. See Gérard Genette’s theory of the palimpseste and coining of the term ‘palimps-
estuous’ in his Palimpsestes, Paris: Seuil, 1982.
24. Jean-Jacques (or Jean-Ignace-Isidore Gérard) Grandville, Un autre Monde, Paris:
H. Fournier, 1844, 272.
25. My translation of Charles Baudelaire, Le spleen de Paris [1869], Œuvres complètes,
Paris: La Pléiade, 1973, vol. 1, 520. French text:
Mon cher ami, je vous envoie un petit ouvrage dont on ne pourrait pas dire,
sans injustice, qu’il n’a ni queue, ni tête, puisque tout, au contraire y est à la
fois tête et queue, alternativement et réciproquement. Considérez, je vous
prie, quelles admirables commodités cette combinaison nous offre à tous, à
vous, à moi et au lecteur. Nous pouvons couper où nous voulons, moi ma rêv-
erie vous le manuscrit, le lecteur sa lecture. Enlevez une vertèbre, et les deux
morceaux de cette tortueuse fantaisie se rejoindront sans peine. Hachez-la
en nombreux fragments, et vous verrez que chacun peut exister à part. Dans
l’espérance que quelques-uns de ces tronçons seront assez vivants pour vous
plaire et vous amuser, j’ose vous dédier l’ensemble du serpent.
Certain pieces in Le spleen de Paris were written in 1850, others in 1860–65.
26. Jean Clay, Le Romantisme, Paris: Hachette, 1980 and Jonathan Crary, Techniques
of the Observer. On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge,
MA and London: October Books, MIT Press, 1992. Jean Clay speaks of the
acceleration of the modern gaze as it appears in Romantic painting. The latter
reflects this speeding up by the use of blurring, of the instantaneous capture of
a moment and the abandonment of the stillness of neoclassical forms. Jonathan
Crary looks at the ways in which seeing was understood to be manipulable, frag-
mented and unreliable as early as the 1820s.
27. David Kunzle, The History of the Comic Strip: The Nineteenth-Century, Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 1990, 1.
28. Kunzle, History of the Comic Strip, 378.
29. In Nietzsche’s Human, All Too Human [1878], trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1986, 132.
30. This is clear when we find small inserted notices in the Dickens monthly num-
bers apologizing to the reader for a missing illustration and promising its appear-
ance in the following number (see Chapter 2).
31. Both references, Kunzle, History of the Comic Strip, 2.
32. Nead, Victorian Babylon, 58.
 Notes 177

33. See Patricia Anderson, The Printed Image, and the Transformation of Popular Culture
1790–1860, Oxford: Clarendon, 1991, 157, 193, 194.
34. ILN, 24 May 1851, 451–452 (reprinted from the Economist). Also quoted in Nead,
Victorian Babylon, 57.
35. Gerard Curtis, Visual Words: Art and the Material Book in Victorian England,
Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002, 9.
36. Curtis, Visual Words, 14, 16.
37. Curtis, Visual Words, 57.
38. Many paintings of the time have themselves a ‘written’ style. William Powell
Frith’s Derby Day (1858) is a good example: people become letters in a sentence
that is woven across the canvas; shadows and dogs are punctuation. Frith had
been inspired by panoramas in the popular press such as ‘Epsom Downs on the
Derby Day’ of 1848 in the Illustrated London News.
39. Walter Benjamin, One Way Street and Other Writings, trans. E. Jephcott and
K. Shorter, London: Verso, 1985, 62.
40. Punch, or the London Charivari, 27 August 1864, 83.
41. See John Urry’s work on modern leisure and travel as being based on a particu-
lar gaze in which places are consumed as visual experiences in a ‘new mode of
urban perception’. Consuming Places, London and New York: Routledge, 1995,
132–133.
42. Anthony Easthope, Literary into Cultural Studies, London and New York: Routledge,
1991, 92–93. Easthope is drawing on the work of Peter Brooks and Mary Anne
Doane here.
43. All three quotations: Easthope, Literary into Cultural Studies, 93.
44. Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Interpretation as Pragmatics, London: Palgrave Macmillan,
1999, 58.
45. Murray Roston’s work on the Victorian period has yielded the image of the fallen
supplicating woman, which might also be seen as just such a narrateme of popu-
lar culture. Victorian Contexts: Literature and the Visual Arts, Basingstoke and
London: Macmillan, 1996.
46. Easthope, Literary into Cultural Studies, 94. Easthope sets popular culture against
the ‘ironic, written plurality’ of high culture which he sees exemplified in
Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and which asks us to find our own path of interpret-
ation. E. R. Burroughs’ Tarzan on the other hand ‘seeks to compel a single read-
ing, literal and denotative’ (95). This produces ‘connotations everyone accedes
to differently at the level of phantasy’. So the unconscious can then provide
many different responses to the ‘popular cultural narrateme’ and is thus ‘being
colonised for commodity production’ (95).
47. Last two quotations: Easthope, Literary into Cultural Studies, 95. Jonathan Crary
in his Techniques of the Observer also comments upon the existence of cinema in
embryonic form in technological forms in the nineteenth century.
48. See Sara Thornton, ‘The Impotent Eye: Seeing the City in the Nineteenth-Century’,
Etudes anglaises, T. 55, 1, janvier-mars 2002, which studies the opacity of the
urban space in Thomas de Quincey and Dickens.
49. ‘Metropolitan Improvements’, Illustrated Times, 2 June 1866, 339. Quoted in
Nead, Victorian Babylon, 29.
50. Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son [1848], Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970,
120–121.
51. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto [1848], Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1985.
178 Notes

52. Baudelaire’s ‘Les yeux des pauvres’ and ‘Perte d’auréole’ from Le spleen de
Paris. Translated this time by Marshall Bermann, All That Is Solid Melts into Air,
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988, 152 and 156.
53. William Logsdail, St Paul’s and Ludgate Hill, Oil on canvas, 1887, Private collec-
tion. There is a similar phenomenon in many illustrations of the cityscape in the
illustrated press of the 1860s. See Railway Works at Blackfriars in Illustrated London
News, 23 April 1864, 385.
54. ‘May in Town’, Illustrated London News, 1 May 1852, 346. Quoted in Nead,
Victorian Babylon, 57.
55. Charles Dickens, ‘An Unsettled Neighbourhood’, Household Words, 11 November
1854, in Selected Journalism, 1850–1870, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997, 46.
Further references appear in the text.
56. My translation. Baudelaire, Le spleen de Paris, 445. Original French:
Quel est celui de nous qui n’a pas, dans ses jours d’ambition, rêvé le miracle
d’une prose poétique, musicale sans rythme et sans rime, assez souple et assez
heurtée pour s’adapter aux mouvements lyriques de l’âme, aux ondulations
de la rêverie, aux soubresauts de la conscience? C’est surtout de la fréquenta-
tion des villes énormes, c’est du croisement de leurs innombrables rapports
que naît cet idéal obsédant.
57. Curtis, Visual Words, 63, 65, 66 respectively.
58. Curtis, Visual Words, 65.
59. In 1854 John Orlando Parry produced the cartoon Ridiculous Things. The genre
of the comic strip in penny magazines would take up the structures initiated by
Parry which show ‘the appeal of the comic strip’s proto-modernist framing and
timing sequences, social criticism and conglomeration of visual events’. Curtis,
Visual Words, 34, 35.
60. Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 48, 4.
61. Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 5.
62. Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 96.
63. Dr John A. Paris, writing in London in 1827, says: ‘the impression made on
the retina by the image, which is delineated on one side of the card, is not
erased before that which is painted on the opposite side is presented to the
eye; and the consequence is that you see both sides at once’. Crary, Techniques
of the Observer, 106.
64. Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 106. In France in the 1830s Joseph Plateau con-
structed the ‘phenakistiscope’ (or ‘deceptive view’) which allowed the eye by
means of turning discs to see a figure go through a sequence of movements.
Models were soon being sold in London as well as similar devices such as the
‘zootrope’. The Diorama (developed by Louis Daguerre) involved a static obser-
ver and a moving platform which moved past a scape so that the observer was
subjected ‘to a predesigned temporal unfolding of optical experience’, while the
panorama was walked past by the observer.
65. Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 113–114. See Charles Baudelaire, ‘Morale du jou-
jou’ (1853), Œuvres complètes, Paris: Gallimard, 1975, vol. I, 581. See also an art-
icle by Georges Didi-Huberman, ‘Connaissance par le kaleidoscope: ‘Morale du
joujou et dialectique de l’image selon Walter Benjamin’, Etudes photographiques,
N °7, mai, 2000.
66. See David Kunzle on the urban context for the comic strip ‘predicated on variety
and disjointedness’, History of the Comic Strip, 6.
67. Punch, 1847 (January–June, vol. 12), 200, 239 and 31 respectively.
 Notes 179

68. The incongruity of modernity’s mixing of high and low culture is constantly cel-
ebrated in articles such as ‘The Fine Arts at Every Station’ (Punch, January–June
1847, vol. 12, 55) which ironically suggests the use of great masters to soothe the
commuters.
69. Punch, 5 March 1864, 93.
70. Punch, 6 February 1864, 53.
71. Punch, 6 February 1864, 53. We see here that, already, books, exhibitions, paint-
ings – our cultural output – were passing into the domain of advertising. Soon
Holloway would quote Dante for his Pills (‘And Time shall see thee cured of
every ill!’) while Turner tells us that in adverts for Eno’s salts the step from ‘the
cloudless peaks of the intellect to the mucous walls of the intestinal canal was
achieved almost in one sentence’ (Turner, Shocking History, 6, 89).
72. Punch, ‘Paint-Pot Advertisements’, 9 January 1864, 19.
73. Kunzle, History of the Comic Strip, 314. In Town Talk, Mr. Wilderspin ran for 23
issues from 1858 to 1859 with 184 drawings: the hero is a railway clerk with
‘ideas above his station’. His career includes an interlude in parliament ‘to
repeal the so-called Taxes on Knowledge’ – the very taxes that raised the costs
of Town Talk – and a period in prison. It contains very Trollopian touches,
since the hero marries a creditor, which is ‘very much consonant with the
“downwardly-upwardly” mobile lower-middle class type, the quintessential
reader of the comic strip’ (314).
74. Turner, Shocking History, 97. Turner notes that in the ‘latter part of the
nineteenth century’ the Victorians had a taste for jokes about fly-posting (the
sticking of new adverts on top of old): They
took an innocent delight in the production of satirical prints showing enor-
mous hoardings on which posters had been pasted, one partly over the other,
in such a way as to produce ‘messages’ ...: ‘Funerals Conducted with Dignity
and Decorum by FUNNY FOLKS EVERY WEDNESDAY with a Band and
Chorus of 700 Performers in A. LYNES AND SONS 13s TROUSERS.’
Turner remarks that ‘the joke was played for all it was worth; sometimes no doubt
juxtapositions little less farcical did appear on unregulated poster stations’ (97).
This is a good example of the surrealist ‘cadavre exquis’ in action.
75. Turner, Shocking History, 60.
76. Turner, Shocking History, 89. There is a recognition that the constant montage of
text created by advertising produced absurd mirages. It is less a question of noth-
ing making sense but more frighteningly that everything ‘makes’ sense, and that
there can never be a message which has a single coherent meaning. See Jean-
Jacques Lecercle, The Philosophy of Nonsense, London and New York: Routledge,
1994, 180. Did the genre of nonsense come about at the time it did stimulated
in part by the juxtapositions of incongruous language on the walls, its constant
punning?
77. Punch, 2 July 1964, 10.
78. Antanaclasis has its origins in oratory performance in which a word is repeated
back to an adversary so as to deform its meaning. Syllepsis is associated with the
witticism. I thank Jean-Jacques Lecercle for these precisions.
79. Turner, Shocking History, 76.
80. See Lecercle in The Violence of Language (Routledge, 1990, 8) on perfect hom-
ophony (antanaclasis) or near homophony (paronomasia): in the first, ‘language
speaks: the paths are well traced’, the second ‘does violence to language instead
of meekly following its call’, ‘I force my way through words’.
180 Notes

81. Lecercle, Interpretation as Pragmatics, 65.

82. In the ‘ALTER’ model the ‘T’ or text is the centre of the structure and is the most
important actant. ‘A’ or Author and ‘R’ ‘Reader’ are effects of the text, and ‘L’
‘Language’ and ‘E’ ‘Encyclopedia’ always filter the relationship between ‘Reader’
and ‘Text’. Lecercle also states that both ‘Reader’ and ‘Author’ are imaginary
spaces: ‘The reader is interpellated by the representation she constructs in the
place of the author; the author is interpellated by the representation of the read-
ers she fantasises’ (75). Lecercle then accompanies this diagram with a number
of maxims which are the rules of the ‘ALTER’ game.
83. P. Ricoeur, Du texte à l’action. Essais d’herméneutique, II, Paris: Seuil, 1986, 111.
84. Jacques Derrida, Marges de la philosophie, Paris: Minuit, 1972, 1–30.
85. Lecercle, Interpretation as Pragmatics, 78.
86. Lecercle, Interpretation as Pragmatics, 76–82. Lecercle shows how every act of
interpretation recontextualizes and how within this process the text gradually
becomes a cliché and enters the encyclopaedia ready for reuse.
87. Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, Livre V. Les formations de l’inconscient, Paris: Seuil,
1999 and Sigmund Freud ‘Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewussten’ in
Studienausgabe, T. IV, S., Francfort: Fischer, 1970.
88. See Franz Kaltenbeck’s study of the joke or witticism in Kafka’s The Verdict, in
which the young Georg tries four times to defend himself against a father who
has become monstrously powerful. The Verdict is the log-book of the failure of
the joke and as a consequence of the failure or loss of the subject. ‘Quand Freud
répond à Kafka’ in Ces enfants qui ne parlent pas: parole et écriture, Bulletin N°6,
ALEPH, octobre 2001.
89. For David Kunzle the nineteenth-century cartoon has just this political aspect in
that it affords the carving out of a space for the underdog who can thereby play-
fully fight the system of which he is a victim. Judith Butler examines hate speech
and how it might be countered by the subject; if the addressor of hate speech
(like the advertiser, as we have seen) is not fully in control of any meaning, then
the hearer can take advantage of this gap, this uncertainty, to reappropriate, to
assign another meaning and then to return it to the addressor: ‘one always risks
meaning something other than one thinks one utters, then one is ... vulnerable
in a specifically linguistic sense to a social life of language that exceeds the pur-
view of the subject who speaks’ (Excitable Speech. A Politics of the Performative,
London and New York, 1997, 87).
90. My translation. Fred Vargas, Sans feu ni lieu, Paris: J’ai Lu, 1997, 243, 245.
91. Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an
Investigation)’, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, New York: Monthly Review
Press, 1979, 174.
92. Punch of 1847, January–June, vol. 12, 31.
93. Napoleon Ist who was familiar with the writings of Adam Smith was using an
expression from Wealth of Nations (1776). Though Smith was the author, it was
Napoleon who popularized the term and brought it to the attention of a general
British public via the French language.
94. ‘The Billstickers’ Exhibition’, Punch, Saturday 29 May 1847.
95. Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph and Other Stories, Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics,
2004.
96. ‘Sibthorpe’s Gallant Attack on Street Nuisances’, Punch, 20, 1851, 189.
97. ‘The Real Street Obstructions’, Punch, 19, 1850, 30. Also cited by Curtis, Visual
Words, 105.
98. Benjamin, One Way Street, 62.
 Notes 181

99. ‘Cheap Literature’, British Quarterly Review, 29: 58 (1 April 1859), 316.
100. See also J. Barrat of Pears soap, who stamped French pennies (accepted as tender
in Britain at the end of the nineteenth century) with the Pears advertisement:
he issued a quarter of a million ten centime coins all over Britain until the
Government had them melted down (Turner, Shocking History, 76 and 115).
101. Jennifer Wicke, Advertising Fictions:Literature, Advertisement and Social Reading,
New York: Columbia University Press, 1988, 4.
102. In his chapter on ‘Handbills and Inscriptions’, a sketch is provided of an ‘adver-
tising tombstone’: ‘Here Lies Jeremy Robbins, An Affectionate Husband and
tender Parent. His Disconsolate Widow in the Hope of a better Meating [sic]
continues to carry on the Long Established TRIPE and TROTTER BUSINESS at
the same place as before her lamented bereavement. Reader pause and notice
the address.’ This was sent to the author from a person living in the North and
saying that it was a stone from a neighbouring Churchyard. Sampson says that
it is ‘an improvement of the opportunity to combine business, not with pleas-
ure, but with mourning’. Henry Sampson, The History of Advertising from the
Earliest Times, London: Chatto and Windus, 1874, 530–532.
103. ‘A Nation of Advertisers’, Punch of 1847 (January–June, vol. 12), 31. My ital-
ics. See also ‘Paint-Pot Advertisements’, 9 January 1864, 19, which laments the
idea of ‘church-towers disfigured like the Pyramids with the names of snobbish
Englishmen’ and imagines St. Paul’s, the Houses of Parliament, the Monument,
Duke of York’s and Nelson’s columns all covered in advertising. At the end of
the century advertisements invaded the white cliffs of Dover, the Norwegian
fjords, the Arctic Circle, boulders in Switzerland and the hills of the Sudan. By
the end of the century we find a sensitivity to the mixing of high and low cul-
ture: ‘At the Royal Academy banquet Lord Rosebery invited his listeners to con-
sider how the illustrious Turner, if he returned to life, would feel on seeing the
luggers and the coasting ships which he had made so glorious in his paintings
converted into media for the advertisement of pills’ (Turner, Shocking History,
109–114). It was at this time that governments began to create regulatory bodies
and France created the ‘Société pour la protection des paysages’.
104. Anonymous, Puffs and Mysteries, or the Romance of Advertising, London: W. Kent
and Co., Paternoster Row, 1855, iv and vi.
105. Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South, first published 1854–55, Oxford: World’s
Classics, 1982, 167.
106. William Blake, ‘Songs of Experience’, The Complete Poems, London: Penguin
Classics, 1978.
107. The Times, 3 June 1864, 13; and The Times, 1 June 1864, 11. Quoted in Sweet,
Inventing the Victorians, London: Faber and Faber, 2002, 38.
108. One cartoon in Punch of Saturday 27 March 1847, titled ‘Protection for British
Quackery’, imagines Parr (of Parr’s Life Pills) as an old man with a beard rather
like an Old Testament prophet speaking to a group of pill jars and boxes all with
legs and arms and all bearing the names and slogans of each product. The text
mentions the terrible truth that ‘The poor people not only consume the patent
medicines but the patent medicines consume the poor people.’
109. Punch, 17 December 1864, 245.
110. Punch, 1847, 129.
111. Punch, Saturday, 6 February 1847, 62.
112. Turner speaks of New Zealand stamps in 1893 on which slogans were printed
onto the gum in mirror writing and would come off onto the tongue the
right way round when they were licked (Unilever House Magazine, March
182 Notes

1953, Turner, Shocking History, 115). For a history of brands see Turner’s over-
view: 1850 saw the start of condensing of beef into paste and in 1867 Liebig
began advertising it as parent company of OXO. Milk was condensed in
Switzerland by Nestlé, and ‘Margarine’ launched in France in 1869, Singer in
1851, Remington 1874 and in 1880 Kodak, mentioned in Dracula. The multi-
nationals of today were coming into being, with Beechams starting the first
pharmaceuticals company in 1859 in Merseyside; Campbell canned soup in
1869 at the same time as Heinz went into pickles. By 1900 Heinz could declare
‘Our field is the world’.
113. Smith, Advertise!, 137.
114. See William Smith’s idea for an improvement of the lot and efficiency of the
abject sandwich man. His illustration shows a sandwich man who carries a
smaller sign which he himself can look down at and read and who is handing
out bills to passers-by, which gives him an active role.
115. Punch, 31 December 1864, 267.
116. Hester is silenced by the embroidered ‘A’ but also in some measure created by
it. She continues to wear it later in life voluntarily as it has become the symbol
of her emancipation from its tyranny and of her acceptance by the community
who once shunned her.
117. Lecercle, Interpretation as Pragmatics, 167. See also the following comment:
‘The ALTER structure is a structure not of communication, but of ascription.
Interpellation is what circulates in the structure; and imposture is the action
through which interpellated subjects segment or invert the flow of interpella-
tion ...’ (151).
118. Lecercle, Interpretation as Pragmatics, 165. Lecercle asks us to consider the psy-
choanalysis of bodily inscription in the work of Serge Leclaire.
119. Charles Dickens, ‘Bill-Sticking’, Household Words, 2 March 1851, in Selected
Journalism 1850–1870, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997, 283. Further references
appear in text.
120. Charles Baudelaire, ‘L’Ecole païenne’, Œuvres complètes, Paris: Pléiade, 1973,
vol. 2, 420–421. Benjamin, Arcades Project, 313–314.
121. Jean-Jacques Lecercle’s description of Benjamin’s thought in Interpretation as
Pragmatics, 20.
122. The making banal of the horrific through repetition is an artistic activity famil-
iar to us today through the use of video, photography and graphic art. Warhol’s
Jackie is a case in point.
123. Judith Butler, Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1997, 67 and 105.
124. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufman, New
York: Random House, 1967, 87; Zur Genealogie der Moral in Nietzsche, Sämtliche
Werke, vol. 5, Berlin: de Gruyter, 1988, 325.
125. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, 61; Zur Genealogie der Moral, 295. Quoted
in Butler, Psychic Life, 73.
126. Butler, Psychic Life, 74 (both quotations).
127. Butler, Psychic Life, 113.
128. Butler, Psychic Life, 113.
129. Butler, Psychic Life, 129.
130. Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture,
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (October Books), 2001, 39.
131. Jean Baudrillard, Le système des objets, Paris: Gallimard, 1978, 106.
 Notes 183

132. Stewart describes this as a ‘return to the utopia of biology and symbol united
within the walled city of the maternal’. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives
of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, Durham and London:
Duke University Press, 1993, 23.
133. Stewart, On Longing, 67–68.
134. Stewart, On Longing, 67–68.
135. The Plague of Fantasies is the title of Slavoj Zizek’s book which considers how
digitalization affects the status of subjectivity, and how the virtual is what now
creates the real (London: Verso, 1997). The ‘Défense d’afficher, loi 1881’ still seen
today in France, and the ‘Bill Posters will be prosecuted’ sign in Britain, were
early attempts to regulate this ‘plague’.
136. Dickens, ‘Bill Stickers’, 288.
137. Quoted in Curtis, Visual Words, 105. Advertising is, as Wicke says, a vital
metadiscourse on the world. Jennifer Wicke, Advertising Fictions, 53.
138. James Dawson Burn, The Language of the Walls, Manchester: Abel Heywood,
1855. All further references appear in text.
139. Burn trained as a hatter and became politically active in the unions in the 1830s
in Glasgow. He worked also as a publican, although without success. His other
publications were Commercial Enterprise and Social Progress (1858) on the changes
in social and industrial life during the first half of the century, Three years among
the Working classes of the United States, during the War (1865) on the materialist
and aggressive society he found there, and A Glimpse at the Social Condition of
the Working Classes of the United Kingdom during the early part of the present century
(1868), which laments the wrecks and revolutions in the labour market which
destroyed so many lives. The book also both lauds and attacks the trade unions
with an ambiguity which is similar to his ambivalent approach to advertising
(seen as both redemption and a scourge). David Vincent in his introduction to
The Autobiography of a Beggar Boy (London: Europa Publications Limited, 1978)
describes The Language of the Walls as containing ‘a genuinely perceptive and
prophetic onslaught on the subject of the book’s title, brand-name advertising,
then in its infancy, which he rightly saw as the new “circulating library for the
million” ’ (26). Burn dedicates his autobiography to Dickens ‘for the services
you have rendered in the cause of Humanity’. The second edition of 1856 is
dedicated to the Queen that she might understand the ‘struggles and difficulties
which beset’ those of her subjects who live ‘on the outskirts of civilisation’ (36).
140. David Vincent (ed.), The Autobiography of a Beggar Boy, 27.
141. Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England, 47.
142. This is very similar to Hugo’s description in Les Misérables of 1862 of the Paris
sewers in which all grandness and social distinction fall away and a Judge’s hat
nestles against the sequined frock of an opera dancer.
143. Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty [1969], Blackwell Publishing: Oxford, 1975,
§ 94, 15e.
144. See On Certainty, § 103, 105, 162, 166, 211, 16e–29e. Wittgenstein undermines
G.E. Moore’s particular sense of truth by saying that ‘It is the truth only inas-
much as it is an unmoving foundation of his language-games’ (§403, 52e). He
says that the language-game is neither reasonable nor unreasonable but it is just
there ‘like our life’. He then says: ‘And the concept of knowing is coupled with
that of the language-game’ (§559 and 560, 73–74e).
145. See Carl Zigrosser, Multum in parvo: An Essay in Poetic Imagination, New York:
George Braziller, 1965 for a study of the ideological systems at work in pastoral
184 Notes

and religious poetry and of the closed systems of cultural meaning from which
the notion of multum in parvo is constructed. Susan Stewart’s own discussion of
the term underlines the notions of absolute closure and the setting of bounds
which aphoristic language suggests. She also underlines the importance of vast-
ness and display:
Like visual multum in parvo, linguistic multum in parvo is best shown in dis-
play mode; hence its place upon home samplers has now been taken over by
posters, cards, bumper stickers, and T-shirts. Within the frame and without
a physical form, the multum in parvo becomes monumental, transcending
any limited context of origin and at the same time neatly containing a uni-
verse. (Stewart, On Longing, 53)
146. See Arthur Boyd Houghton’s Itinerant Singers of 1860, his Holborn in 1861 or
London in 1865.
147. My underlining.
148. In ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ Althusser is quick to suppress
the idea that the individual becomes a subject by a particular or even a series of
acts of hailing; he wishes to suppress the ‘temporal form’ in which he has pre-
sented ideology and says: ‘ideology has always-already interpellated individual
subjects’(175). Jean-Jacques Lecercle makes the following comment:
... we shall adopt following Butler, a Humean concept of the subject as a bun-
dle of interpellations. A sedimentation of texts – this is what the subject is.
A process which has always-already begun (the texts that interpellate a sub-
ject begin before her birth), and which never ends (there is always another
text) ... (Interpretation as Pragmatics, 179).
He goes on to say that ‘Language’ and the ‘Encyclopedia’ produce the sedi-
mented reality from which the subject derives her social being.
149. Regenia Gagnier, Subjectivities: A History of Self-Representation in Britain,
1832–1920, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991, 10–11, 93.
150. Stewart, On Longing, 125.
151. Burn’s italics.
152. Zizek is interesting on this point. He sees the shift as being from precapitalist to
capitalist modes of perception: ‘... the paradox to be fully accepted is that when
a certain historical moment is (mis)perceived as the moment of loss of some
quality, upon closer inspection it becomes clear that the lost quality emerged
only at this very moment of its alleged loss’. He draws on Lacan (the objet petit
a) and Hegel (for whom the object ‘only comes to be through being left behind’)
to conclude that ‘a true historical break does not simply designate the ‘regres-
sive loss’ (or ‘progressive’ gain) of something, but the shift in the very grid which
enables us to measure losses and gains’. He concludes by saying that ‘... emergence
and loss coincide: the properly ‘historical’ is only a moment, even if this moment
is properly unending and goes on for centuries – the moment of passage from
pre-capitalist societies to a capitalist order’ (Zizek, Plague of Fantasies, 12–13;
Zizek’s emphasis).
153. Shakespeare was perfectly correct when he said, ‘the eye must be fed.’ In
fact, that gentleman thoroughly understood the art of publicity; for he made
the witches in Macbeth do the bill-sticking business. In the third scene, Act
I., they exclaim – ‘The weird sisters, hand in hand, / Posters of the sea and
land, / Thus do go about, about.’ Who shall say, viewing these supernat-
ural beings by the light thus afforded us, that the so-called birch-brooms
that witches are supposed to carry, may not be more properly regarded as
 Notes 185

billstickers’ brushes, while the mysterious ceremonies around the witches’

caldron, in order to ‘Make the gruel thick and slab,’ may not be after all,
connected with the process of mixing the paste?.
An illustration shows the three witches brandishing placards. William Smith,
Advertise!, 9.
154. In Smith’s section ‘Where to Advertise?’, the following answer is given:
‘Wherever the Advertiser chooses. He pays his money, he takes his choice’ (114).
The illustrations show clothes with adverts on the back, a coffin painted on
the pavement advertising for an undertaker and a horrified passer-by (135).
Umbrellas, cows, and hats are shown to be good vehicles for advertising.
155. Smith, Advertise!, 121.
156. Smith, Advertise!, 123. No references given for The Times article. The italics
are the authors, the underlining my own. After this section comes a plug for
Mr. Dickens of at least ten lines. He is described as ‘the practised hand’, ‘appreci-
ated by the readers and admirers’ (125). The journalist suggests that this ‘puff-
ery’ is rather a cheap trick to play but says that although rather sensational ‘the
luggage’ which Dickens provides in his Christmas number is full of ‘treasures’
from ‘the genial magician’ (126).
157. Smith, Advertise!, 124.
158. Lecercle, Interpretation as Pragmatics, 79. Lecercle’s fifth maxim relating to his
ALTER model helps us to negotiate and synthesize the work of Lacan on the signi-
fier and Peirce’s triadic theory of signs and concept of interpretant. The pragmatic
conception (illustrated in the concept of the indirect speech-act) shows that mean-
ing is indirect, that author and reader are not in fact subjects in full control of their
utterances, but simply ‘places where actors are interpellated.’ (54).
159. Lecercle, Interpretation as Pragmatics, 80.
160. The rather chilling brand name for the toy barn ‘TOYS “R” US’ might illustrate
part of the problem of hailing we are looking at here. The company plays out in its
name the consumer’s need to be positioned, to be told who he or she is through
his or her consumer affiliations: we are the people who buy toys, we and our chil-
dren identify entirely with the toys sold here. We are indistinguishable from these
items we wish to purchase. The hailed person is asked to imagine that he or she ‘is’
luggage, just as we are asked to imagine that ‘toys are us’. The ‘R’ which faces the
other way in the brand name changes the status of the verb ‘to be’ (the ‘are’) and
seems to suggest that in the world of goods and consumption the very particular
status of being needs a new verb to express it which resembles the old but appears
in a mutant form. Victorian writers describing advertising also examine the new
language which is needed to describe it and seek to create new vocabularies.
161. See Butler, Psychic Life of Power, 10 and Excitable Speech, 30.

2 Reading the Dickens Advertiser:

Merging Paratext and Novel
1. See N°8 of Our Mutual Friend. ‘New Novel by the author of “East Lynne” ... Oswald
Crary ... by Mrs. Henry Wood’ (226, 228). Mr. Wegg’s reads to Mr. Boffin in
parts. The reader reads of the sensational serial reading of The Decline and Fall,
then finds his own serial reading interrupted by an advert for a sensation novel
in three volumes.
2. Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England, 18 and 35.
186 Notes

3. Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England, 31.

4. Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England, 35.
5. Advertisement reproduced in Bernard Darwin, The Dickens Advertiser, London:
Elkin, Mathews and Marrot, 1930, 150.
6. All quotations from Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project, 389. Benjamin imagines
the consumer as part of ‘the dreaming collective, which through the arcades,
communes with its own insides’ or in Buck-Morss’s translation ‘... which in the
arcades sinks into its own innards’. (The Dialectics of Seeing, Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1991, 272). The gazer is now part of what he gazes at and consumes his
own unconscious (innards).
7. Nead, Victorian Babylon, 110. The Sedleys’ trip to Vauxhall Gardens in Vanity Fair
offers a good example of the way the public was asked to consume the experi-
ence. As soon as the four characters settle to one activity they are seduced away
to another.
8. Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, 165 and 167.
9. Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, 168.
10. Zizek, The Plague of Fantasies, 6.
11. Crary, Suspensions of Perception, 36.
12. Crary links attention to a Nietzschean forgetting. Suspensions of Perception, 41
and 42.
13. Arendt quoted by Crary, Suspensions of Perception, 54.
14. We find it on top of the green Household Words advert after the illustrations and
just before the first page of chapter 26, ‘Sharpshooters’. The slip reads: ‘An acci-
dent having happened to the Plate, it has been necessary to cancel one of the
Illustrations to the present Number. It will be supplied in the next monthly part.’
And sure enough there is an extra illustration added in N°10.
15. The Marsland crochet patterns are placed next to the Moses and Son merchant
tailor advertisements on the back inside cover. They are one-third of the size
of the pages of the ‘Advertiser’ and are printed in red, blue or black on a white
or yellow ground, functioning both as a pattern and as an advertisement for
Marsland cottons. The wax seals appear in numbers 19 and 20 of Nicholas
Nickleby.
16. Such reading behaviour is mentioned by Wilkie Collins, who describes reading
from
... five sample copies of five separate journals, all, I repeat, bought accidentally,
just as they happened to catch my attention in the shop windows ... I have
impartially taken my chance. And now, just as impartially, dip into one jour-
nal after another, on the Correspondents’ page, exactly as the five happen to
lie on my desk.
See ‘The Unknown Public’, Household Words, Saturday, 21 August 1858.
17. Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985, 497 and 88.
18. See how in Our Mutual Friend N°12 the illustration ‘The Bibliomania of the Golden
Dustman’ shows the characters looking at stalls and at an advert for ‘Books
Bought’. This illustration is followed by an advertisement for Dickens’s ‘People’s
Pickwick’. Many of the illustrations in Pickwick also contain advertisements.
19. Four illustrations for Lloyd’s adverts bear a striking similarity to Thackeray’s own
illustrations for Vanity Fair of 1848. See Darwin’s comments on these adverts:
‘The date is too late; otherwise I should like to think that the picture represented
Amelia and Becky Sharp going out for a drive in Mr. Sedley’s carriage, under the
escort of Black Sambo’ (The Dickens Advertiser, 117).
 Notes 187

20. See Lee Erickson, The Economy of the Literary Form: English Literature and the
Industrialisation of Publishing 1800–1850, Baltimore, MD and London: The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1996, 10.
21. Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England, 30–31.
22. Kunzle, History of the Comic Strip, 378.
23. Curtis, Visual Words, 94.
24. See, for example, the adverts for Moses and Son in the David Copperfield monthly
numbers.
25. See N. N. Feltes’s thesis around the ‘commodity text’ as a reactive text which
became a ‘two-way information highway’. Both Michael Lund (referring to
Thackeray) and Feltes (referring to Dickens) suggest that events in the novel could
be modified at the last minute, sometimes in response to reader criticism. (N. N.
Feltes, Modes of Production of Victorian Novels, Chicago, IL and London: University
of Chicago Press, 1986, 13–14; Michael Lund, Reading Thackeray, Detroit: Wayne
State University Press, 1988.)
26. Many publications at the time were experimenting with different publication fre-
quencies: Punch was published in monthly parts as well as weekly. The monthly
parts of the 1860s have ‘Published every Saturday in Numbers, price3d. – Stamped
4d. – and Monthly in Parts’ written across the top as an advertisement to attract
the largest variety of readers.
27. Like the advertiser, Dickens’s writing must use techniques which trigger
the work of interpretation. See J. Hillis Miller’s introduction to Bleak House,
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971 for a study of the lateral movement of cross-
referencing which leads the reader through the text.
28. Ransome’s Stone Filters advertisements tell of the infections one might fall vic-
tim to even if one lives in a green and pleasant village. It traces the water sup-
ply back to the infected city downriver and provides illustrations of magnified
bacteria in a drop of water. Thorley’s cattle feed offers a cartoon on the cover
of its booklet in which a farmer listens to the complaints of the milkmaid. The
advertisements on the wall of the shed behind milkmaid and cow all adver-
tise other products, but in the second scene the Thorley advert has pride of
place. This is an advert within an advert within an advert, so a perfect mise en
abyme.
29. Walter Benjamin, ‘Über einige Motive bei Baudelaire’ quoted in Susan Buck-
Morss, Dialectics of Seeing, 269.
30. Edwin Drood, first published 1870, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985, 37. Further
references appear in text.
31. Lay Precentor: a cleric who leads a congregation or choir in the sung parts of the
church service.
32. See Thomas De Quincey, ‘Suspiria de Profundis’, first published 1845, in Grevel
Lindop (ed.), Confessions of an English Opium Eater and Other Writings, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1985, 140.
33. Gail Houston, ‘Dickens’s Construction of the Hallucinatory subject in Edwin
Drood’, paper given at the ‘Ways of Seeing’ conference, University of Nanterre,
Paris, 2000.
34. De Quincey, ‘Suspiria de Profundis’, 140.
35. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, first published 1930, trans. and
ed. James Strachey, with a biographical introduction by Peter Gay, London and
New York, Norton, 1989, 19.
36. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 20.
188 Notes

37. See George Nash, ‘Pomp and Circumstance. Archaeology, Modernity and the
Corporatisation of Death’ in P. M. Graves-Brown, Matter, Materiality and Modern
Culture, London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Nash describes how the new
Victorian bourgeois elite resented old feudal power and reflected this in a change
within the burial system. Cemeteries were starting to be run without the control
of the Church of England; and death became visibly commercial. There was an
‘enculturation’ of death in which death was not allowed to be the great leveller
but on the contrary was to confirm social status: the secular monumentality of
Highgate cemetery is an example of this with its neoclassical (as well as pagan,
Eastern and Egyptian) imagery. Getting rid of the dead out of central London was
part of Bazalgette’s sanitation reforms and it was at this time that the mourning
industry took off: jewellery, accessories, clothes (using new purple dyes), and the
use of new technologies of interment (the London Necropolis at Brookwood had
its own railway to transport corpses).
38. The interrupted narrative of Drood has of course been the subject of much con-
troversy. There is a suggestion that, during one of his dark phases, Jasper turned
from protective uncle to enraged rival and killed his own nephew.
39. The opium scene of the opening pages of the novel exerts its influence on the
scene with Rosa at the Cathedral depicted in the illustration ‘Jasper’s Sacrifices’.
Rosa is drawn to Jasper as if she were under the influence of a powerful drug: ‘... the
old horrible feeling of being compelled by him asserts its hold upon her. She feels
that she would even then go back, but that he draws her feet towards him. She
cannot resist ...’ (Drood, 226).
40. My underlining.
41. Sigmund Freud, ‘Recommendations to Physicians Practising Psycho-Analysis’
[1912], The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,
trans. and ed. James Strachey, vol. XII, London: The Hogarth Press, 1958, 112.
42. Freud, ‘Recommendations’, 112.
43. Freud, ‘Recommendations’, 112.
44. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (trans. and ed.), ‘Periodicity and Self-Analysis’, The
Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess 1887–1904, Cambridge, MA:
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1985, letter of December 6, 1896,
207–208.
45. Freud, ‘Recommendations’, 135.
46. In describing the ‘fundamental rule of psychoanalysis’ in which the patient
must relate ‘everything that his self-observation offers up’ and ‘keep back all
the logical and affective objections that seek to induce him to make a selection’,
Freud says that the analyst too must give up any censorship of his own:
... he must turn his own unconscious like a receptive organ towards the trans-
mitting unconscious of the patient. He must adjust himself to the patient as
a telephone receiver is adjusted to the transmitting microphone. Just as the
receiver converts back into sound-waves the electric oscillations in the tele-
phone line which were set up by sound-waves, so the doctor’s unconscious
is able, from the derivations of the unconscious which are communicated to
him, to reconstruct that unconscious, which has determined the patient’s
free associations. (‘Recommendations’, 115–116)
The analyst, one could add, must also be a reader and maker of ‘cadavres exquis’; he
or she connects elements in the discourse of the patient which the latter is incap-
able of connecting. Hence the floating attention of the analyst and the acquisition
by the analysand, during analysis, of strategies of avoidance or anaesthesia.
 Notes 189

47. See Smith, Advertise!

48. See Werner Spies’s comments on collage in Max Ernst: A Retrospective, London
and Hanover: Te Neues, 1991.
49. Zizek goes on to say that even the subject who maintains a distance from the
ritual does not know that ‘the ritual already dominates him from within’ (The
Plague of Fantasies, 6).
50. George Augustus Sala, Gaslight and Daylight: With Some London Scenes They Shine
Upon, London: Chapman and Hall, 1859, 259–260.
51. Darwin, The Dickens Advertiser, 144. Both quotations. Each firm kept its own
writers at this time, the first copy writers as we know them only appearing at the
end of the century.
52. Broad windows glazed with costly glass
And sashed with rods of solid brass.
And higher still the vision marches,
The eye is met with spreading arches,
Whose lofty height and wide expansion
Might well adorn a regal mansion.
53. The underlining is my own. The ellipses are in the advertisement and do not
signify a cut.
54. Bleak House, 55. Further references appear in text.
55. John Kucich has noticed the use of the fairy-tale ending in the Dickens novel
which anchors the narrative but does not close it, offering a ‘soothing metaphys-
ics of union’ but with an absence of ideological and social content: ‘exceeding
significance by dissolving itself into the pure mechanism of narrative conven-
tion’. (Excess and Restraint in the Novels of Charles Dickens, Athens, GA: University
of Georgia Press, 1981, 247, 253–254.)
56. See Doris-Louise Haineault and Jean-Yves Roy, L’Inconscient qu’on affiche: un essai
psychanalytique sur la fascination publicitaire, Paris: Aubier, 1984. Doris-Louise
Haineault and Jean-Yves Roy seek to understand the mechanisms of advertising by
using psychoanalytic concepts. Their thesis is that advertising exploits our need to
resemble others and to be in accordance with – that is to fit in with – the world. We
wish to produce sameness, ‘produire du même’. A product, a commodity, is used to
paper over the gap, to attenuate a threatening otherness which refuses to be tamed.
We are all alike, says advertising, since aristocrat and worker, man and woman all
consume the same pills and drink the same tea. Advertising can tolerate neither
lack nor difference but only solicits desire with the intention of negating it with an
‘objet-réponse-désaveu’ – an ‘object-answer-denial’ (208). It replaces lack and diffe-
rence with a quasi-delirious image of non-lack – ‘une image quasi-délirante d’un
non-manque ... une cache-béance’ – which is a fetish object. This is the mechanism
of perversion in which all otherness is denied – a refusal to recognize what is differ-
ent and unknown – a system of answers which silences all questions.
57. Author’s italics. My underlining.
58. There is also an illustration showing Richard’s paper-strewn desk entitled ‘Light’
in N°16 of Bleak House.
59. One recent French TV advertisement for a credit card seemed to be evoking the
civic rights of young people and showed all manner of pedestrians helping a
young man in the street, much to the latter’s surprise and pleasure.
60. Lecercle, Interpretation as Pragmatics, 157.
61. Robert L. Patten, Charles Dickens and His Publishers, Oxford: The Clarendon Press,
1975, 65.
190 Notes

62. When Dickens fell out with Chapman and Hall after their collaboration on
American Notes and Martin Chuzzlewit, there ensued a complicated sharing of
publishing between Bradbury and Evans and Chapman and Hall. One company
might appear on the covers but the other would have taken over the advertising
or circulation: ‘Chapman and Hall, using Bradbury and Evans as their printer,
would publish the books they controlled and Bradbury and Evans would do like-
wise for theirs. Thus the series appears under the imprint of both firms, and their
varying methods of keeping records add further confusion.’ (Patten, Charles
Dickens and His Publishers, 255.)
63. Patten tells us:
Over a century of experience with serials of various kinds had taught English
publishers many lessons. Cheapening books enlarged the potential audience
and pool of customers. Serial issue could substantially lower the costs even
of expensive, illustrated works. Periodical issuance of books in progress recir-
culated a publisher’s cash flow: each part financed the next. Advertising was
a key to success, and regularity of publication a key to establishing the cus-
tomer’s all important habit of coming back to his bookseller every week or
month ... Illustrations often more than recouped their cost by inducing read-
ers to buy. ... Magazine fiction became a staple in many households and could
establish the habit of reading early in life. ... Cheap series persuaded many
middle-class households to buy the complete works of the author, even copies
of otherwise uncommercial books. But though these and other lessons had
been learned in specific circumstances, no one had put all of them together
in a form of writing, publishing and distributing that would take full advan-
tage of the potential mass market. (Charles Dickens and His Publishers, 54)
John Carter tells us that ‘The first thirty-five years of the nineteenth-century
introduced more radical changes in book production than the preceding 350.’
See John Carter, Books and Book-Collectors, Cleveland, OH and New York, World
Publishing Co., 1957, 158.
64. Patten, Charles Dickens and His Publishers, 57.
65. The Letters of Charles Dickens, Walter Dexter (ed.), 3 vols, Bloomsbury: Nonesuch
Press, 1938, I, 783. Patten tells us that the sales of Dombey and Son were imme-
diately good; the archives show that the first print run was 25,000. Bradbury
and Evans started selling on 1 October 1846: ‘Within hours, the total stock had
sold out ... Hastily, ten more reams of double demy were bought, machined, pre-
pared, and printed; 5,000 more wrappers were readied; the plates were reprinted;
2,000 more advertising inserts were run off. The whole was stitched together and
issued before the tenth.’ By 7 November 2000 more were printed, and another
batch of the same size before the 21st. ‘The pace was frantic: charges for “Night
and Sunday work” on Part 1 alone suggest that the printers billed at least ninety
hours of overtime.’ (Dickens and His Publishers, 185)
66. Dexter, The Letters of Charles Dickens, II, 211. See also Patten, Charles Dickens and
His Publishers, 212.
67. See N°12 of David Copperfield.
68. John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, in J. W. T. Ley (ed.), New York:
Doubleday, Doran and Co., 1928, VI, 477. Bleak House sold more than any of
Dickens’s novels before. The first printing of 25,000 copies sold out and 5,000
more had to be printed; the charges for extra night work show that staff stayed
well into the night to assemble the texts, wrappers, plates (illustrations) and
‘Advertiser’ (which needed machining in). This was the first number with the
 Notes 191

‘Anti-Bleak House’ Moses and Son advertisement in it. They started N °3 with a
print-run of 34,000 and needed an extra 15,000. On 4 March Dickens replied
to his father-in-law’s praise of his success by saying: ‘It has been a great success
and is blazing away merrily.’ In a letter to de Cerjat on 8 May he writes ‘It is a
most enormous success, all the prestige of Copperfield (which was very great)
falling upon it, and raising its circulation above all my other books.’ This shows
Dickens’s awareness of the preceding serial’s role as an advertisement for the
next. See Dexter, The Letters of Charles Dickens, 382, 394. See Patten, Charles
Dickens and His Publishers, 255.
69. Dickens and Hogarth (eds), Letters of Charles Dickens, 439.
70. Patten, Charles Dickens and His Publishers, 188.
71. Patten, Charles Dickens and His Publishers, 190. I am indebted to Marie-Françoise
Cachin, who first showed me a copy of a Cheap Edition.
72. Introduction to the Cheap Edition reprinted by Patten, Charles Dickens and His
Publishers, 192.
73. Found in the Advertiser for David Copperfield. Reproduced in Darwin, The Dickens
Advertiser, 155.
74. From Charles Dickens, Speeches, K. J. Fielding (ed.), Brighton: Harvester Press,
1988, 156–157. Quoted by Bill Bell, ‘Fiction in the Marketplace: Towards a Study
of the Victorian Serial’ in Serials and Their Readers 1620–1914, Winchester and
New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 1993, 126–127.
75. All quotes from Bell, ‘Fiction in the Marketplace’, 127.
76. Easthope claims that
... the bourgeoisie arrives as a class aiming to disguise its class interests as
universal, in particular by replacing social and historical meanings with a
dramatisation of the ‘individual’ ... The term ‘ideology’ may best be reserved
to describe this strategy for reworking social and ‘objective’ modes as per-
sonal and ‘subjective’. (Literary into Cultural Studies, 132)
77. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism, London and New York: Verso, 1991, 77.
78. Bermann, All that Is Solid Melts into Air, 68.
79. Elizabeth R. Napier, The Failure of Gothic: Problems of Disjunction in an
Eighteenth-Century Literary Form, Oxford: Clarendon, 1987, 29.
80. Allan Pritchard, ‘The Urban Gothic of Bleak House’, Nineteenth-Century Literature,
March 1991, vol. 45, 435.
81. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions, London and New
York: Methuen, 1980, 9.
82. The expression ‘palimpsestuous’, ‘palimpsestueux’ in French, is a coinage by
Gérard Genette, Palimpsestes.
83. Pritchard, ‘The Urban Gothic of Bleak House’, 451.
84. R. L. Platzner and R. D. Hume, ‘ ”Gothic Versus Romantic”: A Rejoinder’, PMLA
lxxxvi (1971), 266–274, 267.
85. Napier, The Failure of Gothic, 67.
86. From his ‘Account of Architects and Architecture’, in R. Fréart, A Parallel of the
Ancient Architecture with the Modern, 2nd edn (London 1707), 9–10, cited by
Napier, The Failure of the Gothic, 71. Evelyn’s emphases.
87. ‘A Drop of LondonWater’ in Punch, 18, 1850, 188.
88. ‘There is a pure conversion hysteria without any anxiety, just as there is a simple
anxiety hysteria which manifests itself in sensations of anxiety and in phobia
without the addition of conversion’. Freud, The Standard Edition, vol. X, 116.
192 Notes

See the pages on hysteria in J. Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis, Vocabulaire de la

Psychanalyse, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967.
89. Sedgwick, Coherence of Gothic Conventions, 13.
90. David Punter, Gothic Pathologies: The Text, the Body, the Law, Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1998, 5–6.
91. Punter, Gothic Pathologies, 11.
92. Thomas De Quincey, The Collected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, 14 vols, David
Masson (ed.), London: A & C. Black, 1896–97, 3, 446, 442 and 443. See Sedgwick,
Coherence of Gothic Conventions, 38–39.
93. Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, 345 and 347.
94. Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, 396 and 400.
95. Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, 704. This speaking on the part of the body with the
materials it possesses is one of the central patterns of hysteria.
96. Serial edition N°13, 14 of the ‘Advertiser’.
97. Sedgwick, Coherence of Gothic Conventions, iv.
98. Punter, Gothic Pathologies, 16.
99. Jacques Lacan, ‘D’une question préliminaire à tout traitement possible de la
psychose’, Ecrits, Paris: Seuil, 1966, 567.
100. Andy Williams in a paper entitled ‘Class Relations in the Frame: Bleak House
and Bourgeois Self-Fashioning’ (paper given at the Third International Marx
Congress, University of Nanterre, 26–29 September 2001), used this advert for
Morison’s pills among other advertisements to demonstrate the parergonal sta-
tus of the adverts in deconstructing the utopian vision of the novel’s closure.
I am indebted to him for introducing me to this advert.
101. Geneviève Morel, Ambiguïtés sexuelles: sexuation et psychose, Paris: Anthropos,
2000, 112.
102. Quoted by Don Slater (without reference) in Consumer Culture and Modernity,
Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997, 127.
103. Punter, Gothic Pathologies, 9.
104. Punter, Gothic Pathologies, 13.

3 Balzac’s Revolution of Signs:

Advertisement as Textual Practice
1. The Marseillaise was a powerful piece of oral advertisement, a series of injunc-
tions to take up arms for the republican cause: ‘Aux armes citoyens!’
2. Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution. A History, London: Chapman and Hall,
1837, and Louis Sébastien Mercier, Le Nouveau Paris [1799], Paris: Mercure de
France, 1994.
3. Marc Martin, Trois siècles de publicité en France, Paris: Odile Jacob, 1992, 13. All
translations of French texts in this chapter (novels and criticism) are my own.
4. The word réclame designated advertising for particular products in the
nineteenth century, now replaced in French by the word publicité (‘La nuit des
publivores’ is an all-night cinema showing of old cinema and television adverts
for enthusiasts and shows how advertising is still a national passion). From the
verb réclamer – to implore help, ask for the indulgence of someone or to ask
insistently like a child calling out for its mother as in réclamer sa mère – it was
used to describe a particular advertisement for a product.
5. See Paul Bernelle, Des Restrictions apportés depuis 1881 à la liberté de l’affichage
(Dissertation, Université de Paris, Faculté du Droit, 1912, 10–12. Archives de la
Préfecture de Paris, Police Ordinances Usuel).
 Notes 193

6. Charles Colnet, L’Hermite du Faubourg Saint Germain, Paris: Pillet, 1825,

vol. 2, 191–193. Law of 28 November 1829, Police Ordinances, Archives de la
Préfecture de Police Usuel. Quoted in Haejeong Hazel Hahn, ‘Street Picturesque:
Advertising in Paris, 1830–1914’, Berkeley, CA: University of California, PhD,
submitted 1997, 12.
7. Hahn, ‘Street Picturesque’, 12.
8. Hahn, ‘Street Picturesque’, 12.
9. Hahn, ‘Street Picturesque’, 12. Hahn’s source is La Grande Encyclopédie, inventaire
raisonné des sciences, des lettres et des arts sous la direction de Berthelot, ‘Affiche’,
Paris, 1885–1902, 685.
10. See Alain Vaillant’s study of the way each revolution in France reactivated an ideal
of literature as discourse and the dream of ‘an absolute performativity’ or efficiency
of speech and writing. The violence of ‘off with their heads!’ is not forgotten but
lives on as eloquence still present in various forms of media. La Crise de la littérature.
Romantisme et modernité, Grenoble: ELLUG Université Stendahl, 2005, 28–31.
11. Keith Randall, France, Monarchy, Republic and Empire 1814–70, London: Edward
Arnold, 1986, 66–70.
12. Karl Marx: Selected Writings, David McLellan (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2000, 330.
13. From La Nouveauté, journal pratique des modes (1830), vol. 4, 94. Cited in Hahn,
‘Street Picturesque’, 204.
14. See M. Bouloiseau, La République jacobine (10 août 1792–9 Thermidor an II), Paris:
Points Seuils, 2004. Simon Schama describes the special commission set up to
reconstruct time in this way as being a mix of literary men (Fabre, Romme,
Chénier) and scientists (Monge and Fourcroy, for example). See Citizens, New
York: Vintage Books, 1989.
15. Girardin was monarchist but rallied to the republican cause in 1848 to support
Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte. He was mainly concerned with the vulgarization of
knowledge for the petite bourgeoisie and created amongst others Le journal des con-
naissances utiles (The Paper for Useful Knowledge) in 1832.
16. See Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens. See in particular Book Fifth, Part VII
‘Three months in Paris (1846–7)’ and Book Seventh ‘Residence in Paris (1855–6)’.
See also A. Jardin and A. J. Tudesq, Nouvelle histoire de la France contemporaine. La
France des notables 1815–1848, Paris: Seuil, 1973, 222–232.
17. As Martin points out les annonces (personal ads) and la réclame can constitute
publicité but the key element for them to do so is the mass communication
network created by the French press in the nineteenth century. He insists also
on the fact that advertising was born with the press: ‘la première gazette est
publié en France en 1631, et la publicité apparaît presque simultanément en
1633’. Martin tells us that under the Ancien Régime there was little advertising
within papers – merely annonces for everyday objects such as books, clothes,
harnesses for horses – but with the revolution newspapers begin to publish
announcements concerning political events as well as real estate concerns.
Trois siècles, 15.
18. The word ‘publicité’ entered the Academy in 1878.
19. Marc Martin describes the fear of revolutionaries like Louis Blanc: ‘le journal-
isme, en un mot, allait devenir le porte-voix de la speculation.’ Trois siècles, 59.
20. Martin, Trois siècles, 60.
21. See Girardin’s editorial in Thérenty and Vaillant (eds), 1836: L’An I de l’ère média-
tique: analyse littéraire et historique de La Presse de Girardin, Paris: Nouveau Monde
Editions, 2001, 133.
194 Notes

22. Thérenty and Vaillant, 1836, 34.

23. Thérenty and Vaillant are literary scholars who envisage a poetics of the com-
mercial. In his preface, Alain Vaillant defends their approach, which is to analyse
a newspaper as if it were a literary text. His desire is to bring out the aesthetics
and ethics behind the writing, layout and general conception of La Presse and
in so doing show that literary movements of the nineteenth century labelled
‘romanticism’ or ‘modernity’ were dependent on new forms of media. 1836, 9.
24. Thérenty and Vaillant, 1836, 19.
25. Giradin was ready to fight his critics and did so physically – killing an adversary
in a duel; the modern press was signed, say Thérenty and Vaillant, by the death
of a journalist.
26. Thérenty and Vaillant, 1836, 41.
27. Subscription was 80 francs (or 421 hours of manual work in the provinces) to
cover heavy overheads imposed on newspapers. The daily press was essentially
for electors at the Chambres des Deputés – bourgeois or aristocratic.
28. Thérenty and Vaillant, 1836, 11–13.
29. Martin, Trois siècles, 60.
30. Thérenty and Vaillant, 1836, 19.
31. Thérenty and Vaillant, 1836, 19.
32. Lise Queffelec, Le Roman-feuilleton français au XIXe siècle, Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1989, 32.
33. See Graham Law, Serializing Fiction in the Victorian Press, Basingstoke and New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000, 4–31, 86. See his discussion of high taxation
during political unrest, taxes on advertisements in the 1830s making London
dailies expensive, the restrictions on publishing fiction at the same time as news
in the same newspaper, especially those aimed at working-class audiences.
34. Thérenty and Vaillant, 1836, 27. Their first chapter ‘An Analysis of a Media
Revolution’ tells us that within six months of its launch on 1 July 1836 La Presse
had a circulation which outstripped Le Constitutionnel and was third behind Le
Journal des Débats and Le Siècle, the largest papers of the Restoration years (1815–30).
Girardin went against the rather staid French political press, which was hampered
by paralysing legislation brought in by the government after an attempt on the life
of the king in 1835; there were constant court cases and closures, fines for drawings
and draconian measures taken against workers’ magazines such as A. Blanqui’s Le
Libérateur, many of which had to close or become weeklies instead of dailies.
35. See Thérenty and Vaillant, 1836, 93–108.
36. Prophets of a form of socialist industrialism, the Saint-Simonians believed that
post-Ancien Régime industrial society would naturally harmonize the interests of
workers and the owners of industry.
37. Philippe Régnier, ‘Pratique et théorie saint-simonienne de la presse’ in Presse et
plumes. Journalisme et littérature au XIXe siècle, Paris: Nouveau Monde éditions,
2005, 224.
38. Régnier, Presse et plumes, 224. See also the discussion of how Le Globe became
the mouthpiece of the movement and editor Michel Chevalier’s statement that
the press was the new government and had replaced other forms of power
since the revolution.
39. Régnier, Presse et plumes, 225. He uses Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau, Saint-Simon ou
la raison en actes, Paris: Payot, 2001, 487–491.
40. Graham Law notices the very elastic sense of the word ‘news’ in most British
newspapers – in that it often strays very far from the notion of a factual account of
 Notes 195

events (‘information concerning recent public occurrences’) and often becomes

fictionalized. See Law, Serializing Fiction, xv.
41. Thérenty and Vaillant, 1836, 233, 239.
42. In her discussion of news-fiction, Thérenty shows the ‘perméabilité’ of the
frontier between news and fiction – between the upper page and ‘ground
floor’ of fiction. See ‘L’Invention de la fiction d’actualité’ in Presse et plumes,
417–419.
43. Queffelec, Roman-feuilleton, 10. Queffelec points out that throughout the
nineteenth century in France serial publication was a rite of passage for all great
novelists. The ‘romantic age of the serial novel’ is seen to go from 1836 to 1866.
Queffelec traces the preparation for this success to Mme de Staël in her Essai
sur les fictions. From the first revolution and into the Restoration, novelists like
Pigault-Lebrun (Miss Crawley’s favourite novelist in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair) and
Ducray-Duminil had great success and were already sold in cheap popular edi-
tions. The Romantics were then inspired by the historical novels of Scott and
Cooper.
44. Queffelec, Roman-feuilleton, 29. Dumas invented in Monte-Cristo a romantic
hero who wished to dominate but also be free of bourgeois society.
45. Thérenty and Vaillant, 1836, 37.
46. Thérenty and Vaillant, 1836, 45.
47. These were La Caricature, Le Charivari, Revue de Paris and Revue des Deux Mondes.
Balzac, Soulier and Dumas all wrote for them: these came out every two to three
months and contained signed pieces to give literature a firmer position, to con-
solidate the idea of intellectual property.
48. Louis Véron, Mémoires d’un bourgeois de Paris, Paris: Gabriel de Gonet éditeur,
1853, 14.
49. Vaillant, La Crise, 10.
50. Thérenty and Vaillant call it a ‘marque de fabrique’, 1836, 54.
51. See Queffelec, Roman-feuilleton, 15–16 and 21–24. Alexandre Dumas published
Les trois mousquétaires daily in Le Siècle from March 14 to July 14. At this time
Balzac could not compete with these writers in terms of popularity; he came
into his own with Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes in 1844 in l’Epoque. This
success continued with La cousine Bette, Le cousin Pons and La dernière incarnation
de Vautrin in La Presse.
52. Balzac’s daily serial Modeste Mignon was published in the Journal des Débats in
1844 from 4 to 18 April then from 17 May to 1 June, and finally from 5 to 21 July.
It went into its first volume form in 1845, coming out in four volumes from
November to January 1845 with a combined group of publishers: Souverain,
Chlendowski et Roux et Cassenet.
53. See, for example, the Journal des Débats of 8 July 1844.
54. See also Queffelec on the bourgeois in the serial: ‘ils sont la froide, la plate réalité en
face de l’idéal ...’, Roman-feuilleton, 28.
55. ‘Les Etrangers à Paris – 400 dessins – 50 livraisons à 30 centimes – La 30 § est en
vente.’
56. ‘Les personnes qui désirent SE MARIER peuvent, en toute confiance, s’adr.
À Mme DE SAINT-MARC; ses relations dans la haute société la mettent à même
de renseigner sur des Dames et Demoiselles ayant dots et fortunes jusqu’à deux
millions: (Affr.) (3384)’. Each advert had a number.
57. Queffelec, Roman-feuilleton, 30.
58. Régnier, Presses et plumes, 229.
196 Notes

59. The Saint-Simonian, Enfantin, said ‘le verbe a pris sa forme multiple’. This
undoes the notion of a single ruling book. The Press is seen to be polyphonic,
the book monovocal. Régnier, Presses et plumes, 232.
60. I am borrowing Taveaux Grandpierre’s superb expression ‘fidéliser les flux
d’attention du public’ in ‘La presse au XIXème siècle: les modes de diffusion d’une
industrie culturelle’ in Presse et plumes, 206.
61. Giving up his early studies in a lawyer’s firm, Balzac was firstly trained as a
printer. He bought his own printer’s business in 1826 and worked to gain his
licence. His business failed in 1828 but he continued to use his skills acquired in
the trade throughout his career.
62. See Pierre Citron’s publishing history in Honoré de Balzac, La Peau de chagrin,
Paris: Gallimard – Bibliothèque de La Pléiade, 1979, 1226–1230.
63. Roger Pierrot, ‘Chronologie de Balzac’, La comédie humaine, Paris: Gallimard –
Bibliothèque de La Pléiade, 1979, XCIV.
64. See Queffelec, Roman-feuilleton, 33.
65. These were ‘Une altercation de ménage’, ‘Antécédents de César Birotteau’, ‘Les
germes du malheur’, ‘Dépenses excessives’, ‘Un vrai philosophe, un grand
chimiste’, ‘Les deux astres’, ‘Le bal’, ‘Quelques éclairs’, ‘Le coup de foudre’, ‘La
Haute Banque’, ‘Un ami’, ‘Le dernier jour d’un failli’, ‘Le dépôt d’un bilan’,
‘Histoire générale des faillites’, ‘Le plus beau spectacle que l’homme puisse offrir
à son semblable’ and ‘Au ciel’. In 1839 Balzac got rid of the chapters and left only
two parts for the publishers, Charpentier. Then Furne took up these changes
in 1844 for their edition. It appeared as the second volume of ‘Scènes de la vie
parisienne’. See appendix in César Birotteau, Paris: Folio, 1975, reprinted 2005,
420. All future references will be to this edition and will appear in the text. All
translations are my own.
66. César is describing the royalist insurrection of the 13 Vendémiare in the year IV
of the revolutionary calendar (corresponding to 5 October 1795). It was directed
against the expiring Convention and energetically suppressed by Bonaparte, who
seized the occasion to reaffirm his own compromised position. The incident
ended with a skirmish on the steps of Saint-Roch church where César played his
part. It is this event, often recounted by Birotteau, that helps create his reputa-
tion and helps him in 1810 to become ‘juge au Tribunal de Commerce’ and thus
become a ‘notable’.
67. Later César invites Roguin to his ball and explains how he got his Légion d’hon-
neur ‘en combatant pour les Bourbons sur les marches ... de Saint Roch, au 13
Vendémiare, où je fus blessé par Napoléon’ (199).
68. We learn that he got his Royalist leanings from his employer, who hated the
revolution for having made the ‘Titus’ hairdo (Napoleon’s cut) fashionable and
thus having ‘suppressed powder’ (62) for wigs. It is commercial resentment rather
than ideological conviction which fuels the politics here.
69. Both quotations from Taveaux-Grandpierre, Presses et plumes, 206. Mass cul-
ture can also be seen as a guarantee of democracy, as A. Mattelart and Jacques
Rancière suggest.
70. T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets [1944], London: Faber and Faber, 2001, 4.
71. See the description of the objects, furniture, materials of the Ragon household
which speak of another relation to time and space respectful of nobility and
Church (287–288).
72. Eliot, Four Quartets, 6.
73. ‘Il n’avait jamais surfait, ni jamais couru après les affaires’ (143).
 Notes 197

74. See André Wurmser’s introduction to this edition of César Birotteau for an
understanding of how the great bourgeois fortunes of the Human Comedy owe
themselves to the first revolution, to speculation and the fleecing of the public
(Goriot, Grandet, Malin de Gondreville, Birotteau). See also the formation of the
great banks of Europe and the ‘dictatorship of money’. Balzac was described by
Hugo as a ‘revolutionary writer’, and was admired by Marx and Lukàcs.
75. Balzac’s La Peau de chagrin, which has as its central symbol a shrinking wild ass’s
skin, explores the idea that the idée fixe can bring about death and that thought
itself can kill.
76. Introduction, La Peau de chagrin: Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1974, 33.
77. André Wurmser, Introduction to César Birotteau, 31.
78. See Jacques Rancière, Le partage du sensible: esthétique et politique, Paris: La
Fabrique-éditions, 2000.
79. Succinctness is also at play in the opening lines of César Birotteau: we are plunged
into the novel via Madame Birotteau’s dream and not via a long spatio-temporal
description as is often the case in the nineteenth-century novel.
80. Corinne Pelta discusses this problem in ‘La presse libérale sous la Restauration:
émergence d’une écriture collective’ in Presse et plumes, 371–378. She sees a growing
understanding of the idea of the collective within the newspaper with its insist-
ence on commonplace (‘lieu commun’). The society of the time of the Restoration
needed the press in order to create a collective writing and thus create a collective
image of themselves. This is similar to Benedict Anderson’s vision of the bour-
geoisie in Britain and its invention of its self in an ‘imagined community’.
81. ‘un martyr de la probité commerciale à décorer de la palme éternelle’ (401).
82. See also the beliefs and reading habits of the bourgeoisie as described during
César’s ball.
83. See Véronique Bui, ‘Comment l’huile céphalique vint à Balzac. Poétique de la
publicité dans le quotidien’ in Presse et plumes, 463.
84. See Bui’s study of Balzac’s instructions to his printers: ‘Mettez en tête les deux
faces de médailles de manière à placer Huile entre les deux polytypages et
céphalique en-dessous’ (464).
85. Balzac recognized early that the ‘civilisation du texte’ would have to engage with
the seduction of the image. The advertisement smith or ‘réclamiste’ is, says Bui,
‘son semblable, son frère’ (465). Bui insists on the fact that the Pâte Regnault and
Mixture brésilienne were not yet household names in the way the novel describes.
The prospectus printed in full compares the oil with other products, which,
although illegal later, was quite current in the July Monarchy and before.
86. See André Wurmser, La comédie inhumaine, Paris: Gallimard, ‘Bibliothèque des
Idées’, 1970. To shed light on these shifting boundaries Stéphane Vachon has
focused on an advert for the complete works of Horace de Saint-Aubin which
occurred in La Presse on Tuesday 5 October 1836 and which contained typic-
ally Balzacian expressions and an analogy which he uses in the first part of
Lost Illusions written just after June 1836. Vachon, ‘Précisions bibliographiques’,
L’Année balzacienne 1991, 297–299.
87. Lucien Dällenbach, ‘Le Tout en morceaux’, Poétique, 1980, no. 42, 160. ‘Coller’ is
to glue, ‘colmater’ to stick together.
88. Vaillant, La Crise, 265–267. My translation.
89. Gaudissart compliments Finot on his work: ‘voilà de la littérature utile’ (194).
90. Gaudissart first appeared in Scènes de la vie de province, which contained Eugénie
Grandet et L’Illustre Gaudissart, first sold in December 1833.
198 Notes

91. La Peau de chagrin, La Comédie humaine, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, t. X, 1979,

165.
92. Finot’s social ascension is meteoric. Thanks to Birotteau’s prospectus he earns a
thousand francs, with which he launches himself in the newspaper trade. Twelve
years later in the time of the Human Comedy he owns several newspapers and mixes
with Bankers. He becomes Conseiller d’Etat in 1831 and has made a fortune.
93. Grandville, Un autre Monde, 272.
94. In Lost Illusions Lousteau talks of the literary world as of a collection of modes
of writing fluttering down to the Seine like paper fledglings.
95. All three quotations: Grandville, Un autre Monde, 276–278.
96. ‘... les journaux s’élargissant, les feuilletons s’essaiment, l’élasticité des phrases a
dû se prêter indéfiniment, ... le style s’est étiré dans tous ses fils comme des étoffes
trop tendues.’ Text is equated with textiles and clothing. Charles Augustin de
Sainte-Beuve, Pour la critique, Paris: Gallimard – Folio, 1999. In his article ‘De la
littérature industrielle’, which first appeared in the Revue des Deux Mondes on
1 September 1839, Sainte-Beuve attacks Balzac and indirectly Girardin as well
as criticizing the cheaper subscription.
97. Kevin McLaughlin dwells on the notion of dissolving paper in his excellent
introduction to Paperwork: Fiction and Mass Mediacy in the Paper Age, Philadelphia,
PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005.
98. Jacques Rancière, La parole muette: Essai sur les contradictions en littérature, Paris:
Hachette, 1998, 82. French text: ‘ce mutisme même rend la lettre écrite trop
bavarde. N’étant pas guidée par un père qui la porte, selon un protocole légi-
time, vers le lieu où elle peut fructifier, la parole écrite s’en va rouler au hasard,
de droite et de gauche. Elle s’en va parler à sa manière muette à n’importe qui
sans pouvoir distinguer ceux auxquels il convient de parler et ceux à qui cela ne
convient pas’.
99. Both quotations: Rancière, La parole, 71: ‘que la coulée infinie de l’encre sur
l’aplat des pages, que le corps incorporel de la lettre errante qui s’en va parler à
la multitude sans visage des lecteurs de livres’.
100. Gaëtan Picon’s preface to Illusions perdues (Paris: Gallimard, 1996, 8) is entitled
‘Les Illusions perdues ou l’espérance retrouvée’, that is, ‘Lost Illusions or Hope
regained’ or ‘Lost Illusions or Expectation Regained’ (the translation of Great
Expectations is ‘De Grandes espérances’).
101. Illusions perdues, Paris: Garnier Flammarion, Introd. Pierre Citron, 1985, 597–598.
Further page references will appear in text. My own translations. French text:
‘Vous brillerez, vous paraderez, pendant que courbé dans la boue des founda-
tions, j’assurerai le brillant edifice de votre fortune ... Je serai toujours heureux
de vos jouissances qui me sont interdites. Enfin, je me ferai vous !’.
102. The three parts of Illusions perdues are ‘Les deux poètes’, ‘Un grand home de
province à Paris’ and ‘Les souffrances de l’inventeur’.
103. Printers and booksellers of the Ancien Régime were repressed and replaced by
manual workers, such as the old Séchard, who offered political allegiance to
the revolutionary power but had no intellectual competence. The profession
was highly regulated after 1810 during the Empire and bogged down in rou-
tine and administration. Vaillant shows that the book-form failed because of
these problems since it could not keep up with the demand of the newly cul-
tivated bourgeoisie of the 1820s. The printers’ crisis around 1830 meant that
book production stagnated through the July Monarchy and provoked criticism
from Balzac, who tried to save the book with his Human Comedy. The newspaper
takes over and prints the roman-feuilleton and poetry. See La Crise, 92–118.
 Notes 199

104. Grandville, Un autre Monde, 276.

105. Byron’s poem came out in 1821 and was translated in 1822 (Eugène Delacroix’s paint-
ing of 1827 La Mort de Sardanapale is often said to be inspired by Byron’s poem).
106. Vaillant, La Crise, 18.
107. ‘Quelle honte pour notre époque de fabriquer des livres sans durée!’ (132).
108. Jean-Pierre Bertrand says that the Petits poèmes en prose of Baudelaire would not
be what they are without the formatting (formatage) they underwent in the space
of the newspaper. The fifty poems were published in fifteen different periodicals
at different times before becoming a book. They appeared, for example, on the
ground floor of La Presse as well as the more noble Revue de Paris and Revue des
Deux Mondes made venerable during the Restoration. Baudelaire invented ‘la
poésie industrielle’, to use Sainte-Beuve’s expression applied to literature. Jean-
Pierre Bertrand, ‘Une lecture médiatique du Spleen de Paris’, in Presse et plumes,
329–330.
109. Grandville, Un autre Monde, 276.
110. Vaillant, La crise, 62.
111. See Salon de 1846 quoted in La crise, 62.
112. Publication meant prostitution for Baudelaire, who talks of the ‘imprimerie’ as
a brothel in which a writer might get a first dose of the clap. Yet this prostitu-
tion is considered more acceptable than the introspective and solitary poet who
loses his virility: ‘Plus l’homme cultive les arts, moins il bande’ (see Mon Coeur
mise à nu quoted in Vaillant, La crise, 73).
113. Le Colonel Chabert, Paris: Gallimard, 1999, 7. My translation. Chabert says that
if he was once buried under the dead, he is now buried under the living, under
the whole of a society ‘qui veut me faire rentrer sous terre’ (49).
114. See Vaillant, La Crise, 275–280.

Conclusion
1. Guy Debord, La société de spéctacle [1967], Paris: Gallimard, 1996. Giorgio
Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt, Minneapolis, MN and
London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
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Index

admonition, advertising and, 46 Comédie Humaine (La), 196 n. 63,

Adorno, Theodor W., 23, 67, 88, 145 198 n. 91
Agamben, Giorgio, 173, 199 n. 1 Human Comedy (The), 126, 136, 137,
Alice in Wonderland, 42 138, 152, 156, 171, 197 n. 74,
Alice Through the Looking-Glass, 1 198 n. 92
alienation, 52, 80, 163 Illusions perdues/Lost Illusions, 119,
ALTER model (Lecercle), 31, 180 n. 82, 126, 151, 159–72,
182 n. 117, 185 n. 158 198 nn. 100,101
Althusser, Louis, 32, 40, 43, 44, 59, 60, Lettres de Paris, 125
66, 103, 136, 180 n. 91, 184 n. 148, Maison Nucingen (La), 139
186 n. 8 Peau de chagrin (La), 137, 138, 147, 149,
Ancien Régime, 124, 127, 140, 144, 146, 156, 196 n. 62, 197 nn. 75,76,
193 n. 17, 194 n. 36, 198 n. 103 198 n. 91
Anderson, Benedict, 109, 191 n. 77, Père Goriot(Le), 23, 128, 166
197 n. 80 Bank of France, 154
Anderson, Patricia, 177 n. 33 Banvard’s Panorama, 53
annonce-affiche, 154 Baudelaire, Charles, 9, 11, 19, 21, 23, 42,
annonce-anglaise, 154 65, 71, 106, 126, 131, 153, 168, 171,
arcade, 6, 7, 65, 66, 84, 110 176 n. 25, 178 nn. 52,56,65, 182 n.
Arcades Project, 42, 175 n. 16, 176 n. 17, 120, 187 n. 29, 199 n. 108
182 n. 120, 186 n. 6 Baudrillard, 46, 182 n. 131
Arendt, Hannah: Bazalgette, Joseph, 5, 6, 175 n. 9,
destruction of contemplation, 67, 188 n. 37
186 n. 13 Beckett, Samuel, 18
attention: Bell, Bill, 108, 191 nn. 74,75
artisan’s real attention, 67 belles-lettres, 57, 149, 159, 160, 162
attention deficit, 66 Benjamin, Walter, 7, 14, 34, 42, 43, 65, 67,
attention spans, 65, 66 74, 84, 153, 175 nn. 16,17, 177 n. 39,
destruction/demise of contemplation, 178 n. 65, 180 n. 98, 182 nn. 120,121,
11, 67 186 n. 6, 187 n. 29
distraction, 65, 67 Bermann, Marshall, 110, 178 n. 52,
fidéliser les flux d’attention (Taveaux 191 n. 78
Grandpierre), 196 n. 60 Bernelle, Paul, 192 n. 5
floating attention, 82, 188 n. 46 Bertrand, Jean-Pierre, 199 n. 108
perceptual overload, 66 Bible:
sensory overload, 67 Babel, 84, 97, post-Babel language,
avatars, 145, 157, 160, 161 43, 103
Babylon, 53, 174 nn. 6,7,8, 176 nn.
bad conscience (Nietzsche), 43 19,20,32, 34, 177 n. 49, 178 n. 54,
Balzac, Honoré de, 2, 23, 119–71, 172 186 n. 7
César Birotteau, 119, 124, 126, 139–59, Belshazzar’s Palace (writing on
168, 196 n. 65, 197 nn. 77,79 the wall), 41, 42, 44, 59
Colonel Chabert (Le), 171, Christ/christian, 71,
199 n. 113 77, 152

207
208 Index

Bible – continued Libault’s ’Irrigateur du Docteur

Ecclesiastes, 50, 55 Eguisier, 134
Ezekiel, 81 Lucifer matches, 53
Genesis, 96, 97 Marsland’s Patterns, 69,
Lazarus, 152 186 n. 15
Revelations, 96, 97 Mayall’s Daguerrotype Portraits,
Solomon, 53 64, 73
Tubal Cain, 53, 54 McDonalds, 108
Blake, William: Mechi Fancy Goods, 42
Albion, 36 Mixture Brésilienne, 197 n. 85
‘London’, 36, 40 Morison’s Pills, 114, 115, 118,
Songs of Innocence and Experience, 192 n. 100
181 n. 106 Moses and Son (gentlemen’s
body (the): outfitters), 27, 33, 42, 54, 65,
flesh, 48, 113, 141, 153 69, 72, 88–108, 119, 186 n. 15,
illness, 116, 117, 187 n. 24, 191 n. 68
132, 133 Mudie’s select library, 64
organs, 117, Nicoll, 42
the language of (Morel), 118 Nike, 54
sickness, 99, 112 Norton Camomile Pills, 73
tongue, 181 n. 112 Oak Mutual Life Assurance, 73
Borges, Jorge Luis, 33, Parr’s Pills, 64, 181 n. 108
180 n. 95 Pâte des Sultanes, 143,
Bouloiseau, M., 193 n. 14 150, 154
Bourdieu, Pierre, 26 Pâte Régnauld, 154,
Bradshaw Railway Guide, 20 197 n. 85
Brand names: Pear’s Soap, 181 n. 100
Binyon’s Chest Expander, 64 Philpott’s SansflectumCrinolines,
Brown’s Perukes, 85 69, 86
Carburn’s Hair Oil, 42 Ransome’s Stone Filters, 64, 73,
Centre Parcs, 7 187 n. 28
Chappel’s Pianoforte, 76 Rimmel’s Toilet Vinegar, 64
Charles Albert traîtement de Rodger’s Shirts, 64
maladies secrètes, 132, 133 Rowland’s Kalydor, 33
De Jongh’s Cod Liver Oil, 64 Rowland’s Macassar Oil, 64
Dr. William’s Phthisan, 87 Steel Pens, 53
Du Barry’s Revalenta Arabica Thorley’s Cattle Feed, 73
medecine, 112 Thurston Billiard Tables, 86
Duplex Refrigerator, 82 Toys ‘R’ Us, 185 n. 160
Eau Carminative, 143, 150 Wilcox and Gibbs Sewing Machines, 82
Gap, 54 Breton, André, 74
Gilbert’s Modern Atlas, 62, 100 British Quarterly Review, 181 n. 99
Glenfield Starch, 64 Brontë, Charlotte, Jane Eyre, 40
Gowland’s Lotion, 64 Brown, Ford Madox, 13, 71
Henry Brett Brandy, 77 Buck-Morss, Susan, 186 n. 6,
Holloway Pills/Ointment, 42, 64, 187 n. 29
179 n. 71 Bui, Véronique, 154, 155,
Inderwick’s Smoking Pipe Tube, 85 197 nn. 83,84, 5
James Murray’s Fluid Magnesia, 64 bundling, 139
Jay’s Mourning Warehouse, 85 Burn, James Dawson, 1, 48–55, 62, 127,
Kaye’s Pills, 118 150, 183 nn. 138,139
 Index 209

Butler, Judith, 40, 43, 44, Darwin, Bernard, 65, 89, 186 nn. 5,19,
59, 60, 180 n. 89, 182 nn. 123, 189 n. 51, 191 n. 73
125–129, 184 n. 148, 185 n. 161 De Girardin, Delphine, 128,
Byron, George Gordon, 25, 26, 151, 193n. 21
162, 166, 199 n. 105 De Girardin, Emile, 123, 124
De Quincey, Thomas, 75, 114, 177 n. 48,
cabinet of curiosities, 74, 127 187 nn. 32,33, 192 n. 92
cadavre exquis, 26, 63, 74, 82, mind as natural and mighty
179 n. 74 palimpsest, 76
Canaletto (alias Giovanni Antonio death, 19, 42, 58, 59, 72, 73, 77, 92, 96,
Canal), 174 n. 1 97, 105, 114, 117, 118, 148, 152, 162,
Carlyle, Thomas, 51, 119, 169, 188 n. 37, 194 n. 25,
172, 192 n. 2 197 n. 75
Carter, John, 190 n. 63 graves, 35,
Charivari (Le), 12, 14, 36, 122, 114, 59, 171
177 n. 40, 195 n. 47 Debord, Guy, 172, 199 n. 1
Chasles, Philarète, 137 definitive incompleteness/inachevèvement
Clay, Jean, 11, 176 n. 26 définitif (Régnier), 129
collage, 2, 26, 74, 84, 154, 189 n. 48 Deleuze and Guattari, 170
collages of the true, 154 democracy
collective writing/écriture collective literary, 157
(Pelta), 197 n. 80 literature as guarantee of, 196 n. 69
Collins, Wilkie, 170, 186 n. 16 Derrida, Jacques, 31,
colmatage, 155 180 n. 84
Colnet, Charles, 120, 193 n. 6 Dexter, Walter, 190, 191
comic strip, 11, 12, 13, 23, 71, 109, dialectics, 129, 173,
176 nn. 27,28,31, 178 nn. 59,66, 186 n. 6, 187 n. 29
179 n. 73, 187 n. 22 Dickens, Charles:
Le Constitutionnel, 124, 138, 194 n. 34 ‘Bill-Sticking’, 41,
contemplation: 182 n. 119, 184 n. 153
aesthetic and linguistic, 65 Bleak House, 12, 13, 63–73, 82,
demise/destruction of, 11, 67 88–100, 109–21, 144, 187 n. 27,
Corbin, Alain, territoire du vide, 47 189 nn. 54,58, 190 n. 68,
Crary, Jonathan, 11, 22, 23, 44, 66, 67, 191 nn. 80,83, 192 n. 100
176 n. 26, 177 n. 47, 178 nn. 60–5, A Christmas Carol, 140
182 n. 130, 185 n. 1, 186 nn. 11–13 David Copperfield, 40, 77, 104, 108,
Cremorne Gardens, 66 187 n. 24, 190 n. 67,
Crystal Palace, 6, 64, 65 191 n. 73
cubism, 21, 73 Dombey and Son, 60, 89, 104,
cultural preconstruction (Grize), 18 177 n. 50, 190 n. 65
culture de flot/flow culture, 127 Great Expectations, 98,
culture industry, 88, 129, 131, 145 99, 159, 164
Curtis, Gerard, 13, 21, 22, 71, Letters of Charles Dickens, 174 n. 3,
177 n. 35–7, 178 n. 57–9, 190 nn. 65,66,
180 n. 97, 183 n. 137, 187 n. 23 191 nn. 68,69
cyberspace, 161 Our Mutual Friend, 13, 64, 68–73, 82,
86, 87, 110, 111, 114, 185 n. 1,
Dada, Dadaism, 84 186 nn. 17,18, 192 n. 93–5
daily serials in newspapers, 128, 136, ‘Unsettled Neighbourhood’, 20, 21,
160, 195 n. 52 178 n. 55
Dällenbach, Lucien, 155, 197 n. 87 digitalization, 52, 183
210 Index

distribution of the sensible/partage du 173, 176 n. 24, 198 nn. 93,95,

sensible (Rancière), 148, 199 nn. 104,109
197 n. 78 Graves-Brown, P. M., 188 n. 37
Doré, Gustave, 12, 79 Great Exhibition, 3, 4, 7, 65
dreaming collective (Benjamin), 7, 66, Great Wall of China, 47, 90
186 n. 6 Gregorian calendar, 123
Dumas, Alexandre, 124, 131, 160, Grize, JB, cultural pre-construction, 18
195 nn. 44,47,51 guilt, 41, 43, 44,
58, 59, 109
Easthope, Anthony, 17, 18, 177 nn.
42,43,46,47, 191 n. 76 habitus, 26
Edwin Drood, 74–83, 139, Hahn, Haejeong Hazel, 121,
187 nn. 30,33, 188 nn. 38,39 122, 193 n. 6–9, 13
Egg, Augustus Leopold, 53 Haineault, Doris-Louise et Roy,
Eliot, T. S., 2, 146, 147, 196 nn. 70,72 Jean-Yves, 189 n. 56
encyclopedia (Lecercle), 18, 31, 59, Halliday, Stephen, 175 n. 9
180 n. 82, 184 n. 148 Hausmann, Raoul (Dada artist), 84
L’Epoque, 131, 195 n. 151 Haussmann, Georges Eugène (Baron), 5,
Erickson, Lee, 187 n. 20 6, 23, 175 n. 9
Ernst, Max, 74, 84, 189 n. 48 Hawthorne, Nathaniel,
The Scarlet Letter, 40
Fabre d’Eglantine, 123 Hogarth, William, 139
Faust, 110 Horkheimer, Max, 145
Feltes, N. N., 187 n. 25 Houghton, Arthur Boyd, 53,
feuilleton, 106, 127, 128–31, 170, 184 n. 146
194 n. 32, 195 nn. 43,44,51,54,57, Household Words, 41, 64, 104, 178 n. 55,
198 nn. 96, 103 182 n. 119, 186 n. 16
Féval, Paul, 131 Houston, Gail, 76, 188
fiction d’actualité/news fiction, 129, Hugo, Victor, 6, 26, 105, 126, 132,
195 n. 42 138, 149, 197 n. 74
Le Figaro, 139, 155 Les Misérables, 6, 183 n. 142
flâneur, 41, 65, 150
Fliess, Wilhelm, 83, 188 n. 44, 193 iconic representation, 17
flow culture/culture de ideology of serial publication, 136
flot (Thérenty et Vaillant), 127 Illustrated London News, 13, 177 n. 38,
Forster, John, 104, 190 n. 68, 193 n. 16 178 n. 54
Fourier, Charles, 126, 129, 131 Illustrated Times, 19, 177 n. 4
Freud, Sigmund, 17, 31, 43, 44, 76, 82, imagined community (Anderson),
83, 102, 113, 117, 118, 180 n. 87, 197 n. 80
187 nn. 35,36, 188 n. 41–6, incompleteness, 19, 129
191 n. 88 industrial literature/littérature industrielle
(Sainte-Beuve), 131, 157, 199 n. 108
Gagnier, Regenia, 54, 184 n. 149 inherited background (Wittgenstein), 51
Gaskell, Elizabeth, 35, 181 n. 105 interpellation, 3, 32, 40, 42–4, 48, 54,
Gautier, Théophile, 131 55, 101, 103, 153, 182 n. 117,
Genette, Gérard, 176 n. 23, 191 n. 82 184 n. 148
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 110, 162 Iser, Wolfgang, 106
Golding, William, 81
Grandville, Jean-Jacques, 2, 9, 11, 36, Jacobin Convention, 163
96, 106, 128, 149, 157, Jacobin culture, 123, 193 n. 14
158, 162, 167, 168, 172, Jardin, A., 193 n. 16
 Index 211

Jauss, Hans Robert, 105 Moussaieff, 188 n. 44

Journal des Débats, 12, 68, 124, 125, multum in parvo, 51, 62,
126, 132, 133–5, 170 183 n. 145
July Monarchy, 121, 123, Musée des Familles (Le), 130
125–7, 130, 133, 156, Mystères de Londres, 131
197 n. 85, 198 n. 103 Mystères de Paris, 6, 131, 175 n. 10
June Days, 121
Napier, 111, 196
Kaltenbeck, Franz, 180 n. 88 Napoleon Bonaparte/Napoléon Premier,
kinetic environment, 71 33, 51, 120, 121, 141, 144, 145, 150,
Kosofsky Sedgwick, Eve, 110, 162, 163, 165, 171,
113, 191 n. 81 180 n. 93, 196 n. 68
Kunzle, David, 11, 27, 176, 178, narrateme, 18
179, 180, 188 Nead, 5, 7, 12, 67, 175, 176,
177, 178, 180, 190
Lacan, Jacques, 30, 31, 117, 180 n. 87, Nevett, 175
184 n. 152, 185 n. 158, 192 n. 99 Nietzsche, 11, 84, 177, 185, 190
Laplanche, J and Pontalis, J. B., On the Genealogy of Morals, 43,
192 n. 88 182 nn. 124,125
Law, Graham, 128, 194 nn. 33,40 North and South, 201
Lecercle, Jean-Jacques, 18, 30, 31, 40, nostalgia, 46, 47
103, 149, 179 nn. 76,78,80, La Nouveauté, journal pratique des modes,
180 nn. 82,86, 182 nn. 117,118, 193 n. 13
184 n. 148, 185 n. 158
Légion d’honneur, 141, 144, 196 n. 67 O’Connor, John, 5
linear reading, 9, 62, 67, 68, 89, 110, 161 optical devices:
Lloyd, Edward, 34, 35, 186 n. 19 camera obscura, 22
Logsdail, William, 19, 178 n. 53 diorama, 23, 178 n. 64
Lowenthal, Leo, 118 kaleidoscope, 23, 178 n. 65
Lund, Michael, 105, 187 n. 25 panorama, 7, 21, 22, 23, 51, 53,
Luther, Martin, 171 174 n. 1, 177 nn. 38,64
phenakistiscope, 178 n. 64
Macbeth, 55, 184 n. 153 stereoscope, 19
Marivaux, thaumatrope, 23
Pierre Carlet de Chamblain, 139 zoobiograph, 18
marketing: zootrope, 178 n. 64
bundling, 139 Ordnance Survey, 7
peel-back information, 73 Orwell, George, 103
Martin, John, 9 Ozymandias (Keats), 152
Martin, Marc, 120, 124, 127, 192 n. 3,
194 n. 29 painterly techniques, 153
Marx, Karl, 16, 19, 103, 121, 131, 170, palimpsest/palimpseste, 9, 26, 73, 76, 82,
171, 177 n. 51, 192 n. 100, 193 n. 12, 167, 176 n. 23, 191 n. 82
197 n. 74 paranoia, 41, 43, 109, 111, 116, 117
McLaughlin, Kevin, 175 n. 16, 198 n. 97 Parry, John Orlando, 21, 22, 26, 43, 50,
Memling, Hans, 71 52, 178 n. 59
Mercier, Louis Sébastien, 120, 149, patronage, 54, 77, 104, 108
192 n. 101 Patten, Robert L., 103, 104, 105, 106,
La Mode, 130 189 n. 61, 190 nn. 62–72
montage, 18–21, 27, 84, 179 n. 76 Paxton, Joseph, 5, 7, 65
Morel, Geneviève, 118, 192 n. 101 peel-back information, 73
212 Index

Peirce, C. S., 17, 185 n. 158 publishers:

Pelta, Corinne, 197 n. 80 Bradbury and Evans, 103, 104,
Penny Illustrated Paper, 5, 175 n. 8 190 nn. 62,65
performative/performativity in Canel et Gosselin, 137
language, 105, 120, 121, 180 n. 89, Chapman and Hall, 72, 103, 174 n. 3,
193 n. 10 189 n. 50, 190 n. 62
periodicity, 188 n. 44 Charpentier, 137, 196 n. 65
culture of, 127 Delloye et Lecou, 137
ideology and, 136 Dubochet, 138
Philipon, Charles, 12 Furne, 134, 137, 138, 196 n. 65
photography, 23, 182 n. 122 Hetzel, 138
Pierrot, Roger, 138, 196 n. 63 Paulin, 138
Pilgrim’s Progress, 139 puff, puffing, 24, 25, 35, 53, 54, 157,
plague of fantasies (Zizek), 46, 172, 181 n. 104, 185 n. 156
183 n. 135, 184 n. 152, 186 n. 10, Punch, 14, 16, 17, 24–31, 33, 36, 39, 51,
189 n. 49 55, 59, 111
Platzner, 110, Punter, David, 113, 117, 118,
191 n. 84, 197 192 nn. 90,91,98, 103–4, 198
polytypages, 154, 197 n. 84
Porter, 5, 175, 176 Queffelec, Lise, 128, 130, 136, 194 n. 32,
poster/affiche, 2, 6, 8, 12, 14, 22, 25–7, 195 nn. 43,44,51,54,57,
39, 41–50, 51, 54, 56, 57, 120–3, 137, 196 n. 64
142, 143, 146, 150, 156, 162, 164,
166, 179 n. 74, 183 n. 135, Rake’s Progress, 139
184 n. 145, 193 n. 9 Rancière, Jacques, 148, 159, 160, 173,
precommodification, 153 196 n. 69, 197 n. 78,
prepublication, 138 198 nn. 98,99
pre-represented world, 153 Randall, Keith, 193 n. 11
Presse (La), 124–31, 193 n. 21, réclame (la), 2, 119, 120, 124, 143, 157,
194 nn. 23,34,37, 195 n. 51, 196 n. 172, 173, 192 n. 4, 193 n. 17
60, 197 nn. 80,86, 199 n. 108 Régnier, Philippe, 130, 138, 194 n. 37–9,
prêt-à-écrire, 152 195 n. 58, 196 n. 59
prêt-à-lire, 152 Rembrandt, 152
prêt-à-parler, 152 reprimand, 17, 44, 46
Pritchard, Allan, 112 Revolutionary calendar, 123,
Private Eye, 25 196 n. 66
psychoanalysis: Revue de Paris, 128, 130,
floating attention, 82, 188 n. 46 195 n. 47, 199 n. 108
hysteria, 109, 111, 113, 116, Revue des Deux Mondes, 137,
191 n. 88, 192 n. 95 195 n. 47, 198 n. 96
jouissance, 117, 118, 168, 198 n. 101 rhyzomic referencing, 62
language of organs, 118 Richards, Thomas, 3, 4, 50, 65, 71,
paranoia, 41, 43, 109, 174 n. 2, 175 n. 15, 185 n. 2,
111, 116, 117 186 nn. 3,4, 187 n. 21
psychoanalysis in reverse Ricoeur, P., 31, 180 n. 83
(Lowenthal), 118 Roston, Murray, 4, 174 n. 1, 177 n. 45
Schreber (President), 117 Rubens, 152
unconscious, 60, 83, 84, 129,
136, 139, 177 n. 46, Sainte-Beuve, 131, 151, 157, 198 n. 96,
186 n. 6, 188 n. 46 199 n. 108
unmanning/entmannung/éviration, 117 Saint Paul’s Cathedral, 19
 Index 213

Saint-Simon, Comte de, 126, 129, Thackeray, William Makepeace, 70,

136, 194 nn. 36,37,39, 107, 124, 186 n. 19, 187 n. 25,
196 n. 59 195 n. 43
Sala, George Augustus, 89, 189 n. 50 Thérenty, Marie-Eve,
Sampson, Henry, 181 n. 102 125, 127, 129
sandwich men, 8, 9, 12, 39, 40, The Times, 5, 35, 36, 181 n. 107,
55, 182 n. 114 185 n. 156
Schama, Simon, 193 n. 14 Töpffer, Rodolphe, 11
Schlesinger, Max, 8, 176 n. 21 Trench, Richard, 175 n. 9
Schreber, President, 117 Turner, E. S., 30, 174 n. 3,
Scott, Walter, 134, 151, 162, 179 nn. 71,74–6,79,
195 n. 43 181 nn. 100,112
Second Life/second lives, 139, 145, 157, Turner, Joseph Mallord William, 11, 27,
160, 165 64, 181 n. 103
Sennet, Richard, 175 n. 14 Tyrell Smith, Edward, 66
Shakespeare, William, 24, 25,
55, 184 n. 153 Un autre Monde, 10, 157, 158, 162, 168,
shopping mall, 7, 8, 118 176 n.24, 198 n. 93, 198 n. 95,
Le Siècle, 127, 138, 199 n. 104, 199 n. 109
194 n. 34, 195 n. 51 Urry, John, 177
Slater, Don, 192 n. 102
Smith, Adam, 180 n. 93 Vaillant, Alain, 125,
Smith, William, 9, 39, 55, 56, 84, 127, 129, 131, 155,
176 n. 22, 182 nn. 113,114, 163, 168, 171
185 nn. 153–7, 189 n. 47, Vachon, Stéphane, 197 n. 86
197 n. 85 vanity, 22
soap, 16, 24, 121, 122, 181 n. 100 painting, 50, 162
Soldat Laboureur, 153 Vauxhall Gardens, 186 n. 7
Spies, Werner, 189 n. 48 Venus de Milo, 152
Stanhope press, 161, 164 Véron, Louis, 130, 195 n. 48
Stewart, Susan, 46, 54, 183 n. 132–4, Victoires et Conquêtes, 153
184 nn. 145,150 virtual worlds, 2, 7, 8, 30, 50, 61, 78, 139, 145,
subjection, 32, 43 146, 149, 156, 157, 167, 183n. 135
sujet assujetti or subjected subject, 60, vision/ways of seeing:
182 n. 123 after-image, 22, 23
sublation (Aufhebung), 173 binocular vision, 23
Sue, Eugène, 124 destruction of contemplation, 67
Mystères de Paris, floating gaze, 63, 82
6, 131 hallucination, 19, 74,
surrealism: 76, 77, 156
André Breton, 74 mirage, 18, 19, 20, 179 n. 76
cabinet of curiosities, 74, 127 misperception, 23
cadavre exquis, 26, 63, 74, 82, peripheral vision, 23
179 n. 74 Voltaire, 149, 166, 171
Max Ernst, 74, 84, 189 n. 48
Wendell Holmes, Oliver, 19
Tacitus, 171 Wicke, Jennifer, 2, 3, 35,
Tagg, John, 176 n. 18 181 n. 101, 183 n. 137
Taveaux Grandpierre, Karine, 145, Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 51,
196 nn. 60,69 183 nn. 143,144
Terrier, Charles, 175 n. 9 der Witz, 31, 180 n. 87
214 Index

writing on the wall, 41, 42, 44, 59 (see Zigrosser, Carl, 183 n. 145
also Belshazzar's Palace) Zizek, Slavoj, 88, 183 n. 135,
Wurmser, André, 148, 184 n. 152, 186 n. 10,
152, 154, 156, 189 n. 49
197 nn. 74,77,86 zone of anaesthesia, 44, 48