UCLA UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Victorian Talk: Human Media and Literary Writing in the Age of Mass Print Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3kb3d4xc Author Wong, Amy Ruei Publication Date 2015 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Victorian Talk: Human Media and Literary Writing in the Age of Mass Print A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English by Amy Ruei Wong 2015 © Copyright by Amy Ruei Wong 2015 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Victorian Talk: Human Media and Literary Writing in the Age of Mass Print by Amy Ruei Wong Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Los Angeles, 2015 Professor Jonathan H. Grossman, Co-Chair Professor Joseph E. Bristow, Co-Chair “Victorian Talk: Human Media and Literary Writing in the Age of Mass Print” investigates a mid- to late-Victorian interest in the literary achievements of quotidian forms of talk such as gossip, town talk, idle talk, chatter, and chitchat. I argue that such forms of talk became inseparable from the culture of mass print that had fully emerged by the 1860s. For some, such as Oscar Wilde’s mother, Lady Jane Francesca Wilde, this interdependence between everyday oral culture and “cheap literature” was “destroy[ing] beauty, grace, style, dignity, and the art of conversation,” but for many others, print’s expanded reach was also transforming talk into a far more powerful “media.” Specifically, talk seemed to take on some aspects of print’s capacity to float free from the bodies of individual speakers and endlessly reproduce across previously unimaginable expanses. Yet talk—before the emergence of “talk media” such as the radio— stayed rooted to human bodies for circulation and therefore remained unique from print in other ii ways. Newly visible as strangely hybrid “human media” in this period, talk presented opportunities for literary innovation and experimentation. My chapters explore Charles Dickens’s and William Makepeace Thackeray’s chatty, editorial journalism; town talk and viral publicity in Robert Browning’s poetry; idle talk in Stevenson’s and Mark Twain’s adventure fictions; drawing-room chatter in Ella Hepworth Dixon’s and Oscar Wilde’s Society comedies; and journalistic disfluency in Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford’s collaborative science fiction. iii The dissertation of Amy Ruei Wong is approved. Elinor Ochs Michael A. North Jonathan H. Grossman, Committee Co-Chair Joseph E. Bristow, Committee Co-Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2015 iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1 Chapter One: Dickens, Thackeray, and the Rise of “Mass Talk” 22 Chapter Two: Town Talk and the Cause Célèbre of Robert Browning’s Magnum Opus 70 Chapter Three: The Poetics of Idle Talk and 1880s Adventure Romance 112 Chapter Four: The Aesthetics of Double-Talk in 1890s Drawing-Room Chatter 168 Chapter Five: Disfluency in Conrad and Ford’s “Extravagant Story” 218 Bibliography 257 v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My foremost thanks to Joseph Bristow and Jonathan H. Grossman, co-chairs of my dissertation and consistent mentors for the last seven years. Thanks especially to Joseph for the countless hours of writing assistance, genuine interest in helping me develop a strong project, and personal investment in my growth as a scholar; and to Jonathan for sharp and patient critiques that have greatly improved my thinking and writing, and for supportive guidance through the years. I am grateful to Michael North for his unmatchable intellectual insight and his support of my graduate career and to Elinor Ochs for pointing me to important interdisciplinary perspectives on everyday talk. Numerous other mentors, colleagues, friends, and family have provided indispensible support for my project. In particular, I would like to thank Helen Deutsch for her wisdom, brilliance, and care; Ali Behdad for his encouragement; and the many graduate colleagues that have sustained me with friendship and intellectual companionship through the years, including Julia Callander, Ronjaunee Chatterjee, Daniel Couch, Amanda Hollander, Lisa Mendelman, Alexandra Milsom, Michael Nicholson, Justine Pizzo, Cristina Richieri Griffin, Sina Rahmani, Taly Ravid, Lindsay Wilhelm, and Alexandra Zobel. I would also like to thank the UCLA Nineteenth-Century Group, the peer-reviewers and editors at SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 and Modern Philology, and colleagues at ACLA, VISAWUS, Dickens Universe, NAVSA, and the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals for their helpful engagement with my work. I am most grateful, finally, for the unflagging support, encouragement, and many kindnesses of my partner, Glenn Poppe, and the constant companionship of our dog, Matilda, throughout the process of completing my dissertation. vi *** Portions of Chapter 2 have been accepted for publication to Modern Philology. Portions of Chapter 3 are reprinted with permission from SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 54, no. 4 (Autumn 2014). vii VITA 2006 B.A., History and Literature, cum laude in field Harvard University Cambridge, MA 2008 M. Sc., Education Long Island University Brooklyn, NY 2011 M.A., English University of California, Los Angeles Los Angeles, CA 2012 C. Phil, English University of California, Los Angeles Los Angeles, CA 2015 Assistant Professor of English Dominican University of California San Rafael, CA PUBLICATIONS Wong, Amy R. “The Poetics of Talk in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island.” SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 54, no. 4 (Autumn 2014): 901-22. ——— . “Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘Great New Adventure Story’: Journalism in The Lost World.” Studies in the Novel 47, no. 1 (Spring 2015): 60-79. ——— . “Town Talk and the Cause Célèbre of Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book.” Modern Philology (forthcoming). viii INTRODUCTION The telegraph and the printing-press have converted Great Britain into a vast agora, or assembly of the whole community. —W.T. Stead, in the Contemporary Review (May 1886) I style the orality of a culture totally untouched by any knowledge of writing or print, “primary orality.” It is “primary” by contrast with the “secondary orality” of present-day high-technology culture, in which a new orality is sustained by telephone, radio, television, and other electronic devices that depend for their existence and functioning on writing and print. —Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy (1982) In 1886, W.T. Stead, English newspaper editor and renowned pioneer of the New Journalism—a style both celebrated and criticized for its use of sensationalism to increase the visibility of social causes—had a euphoric vision for the modern-day press. He imagined that Victorian newspaper culture was greatly expanding Western civilization’s most glorified ideal of community participation, the ancient Greek agora. As “a public, open space where people can assemble” for commerce and face-to-face talk, the agora was a marketplace and social center as well as a venue for conducting democratic procedures.1 Stead’s exuberant perspective, in its technophilic embrace of mass print media that had emerged by the end of the nineteenth century, elides an important distinction. Specifically, the “assembly” that print brings together is silent and dispersed, different from the embodied encounters of the agora. In Stead’s description, the co-present world of everyday talk and the anonymized realm of mass print readerships slide each into the other, as if prefiguring media theorist Marshall McLuhan’s similarly technophilic sense of new media as prostheses or “extensions” of the human body: the telegraph and the printing- press extend democratic participation first conducted amid the vocal assemblies of fifth-century 1 “agora, n.1,” OED Online, March 2015, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/4117?rskey=0j12iS&result=1. See also R.K. Sinclair, Democracy and Participation in Athens (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988) on the procedures and spaces of Athenian democracy—such as the Bouleterion, an assembly house to discuss legislation located on the west side of the square, 13-23. 1 Athens.2 In other words, Stead’s elided difference between print and oral media suggests that print readily spreads talk outward into a conversation of the “whole community” that yet maintains, somehow, the embodied presence of face-to-face interactions. Newspapers—in their capacity to circulate far beyond the spatial limits of the human voice—could give heterogeneous bodies the means to participate in a broader national conversation across previously unimaginable distances. “Victorian Talk” argues that popular literary figures of the Victorian period—from Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Robert Browning to Robert Louis Stevenson, Mark Twain, Ella Hepworth Dixon, and Oscar Wilde—were deeply engaged with the complexities of mutual influence between the development of mass print culture and everyday oral culture. While scholarship on the Victorian period has examined the richness of print culture and literary ambivalence around the growth of mass readerships during the second half of the nineteenth century, little attention has been paid to an increased focus, among major Victorian writers, on quotidian and seemingly un-literary forms of talk such as gossip, town talk, idle talk, chatter, or chitchat around the same time. My study contends that the ways in which prominent Victorian authors thought about and theorized the relationship between print media and everyday talk produced a sense of “secondary orality”—usually associated with the advent of radio technologies—long before the twentieth century. The term “secondary orality,” glossed in the second epigraph, comes from Walter J. Ong’s well-known study on the impact of writing technologies on oral language, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (1982). In this influential work, Ong argues that writing and print changes or “technologizes” the nature of everyday speech. Secondary orality, in particular, describes the condition of this “new orality 2 See Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, ed.