PART I
MONUMENTS IN PRINT
The State as a Publisher
The first report of the Royal Commission on the Employment of Children (1842) prompted outrage. Its depiction of child labor cruelties in mines and collieries shocked Britain. In the United States, John Charles Frémont’s accounts on his first two expeditions to the Rocky Mountains and to California (1842–44) dazzled the public mind and heralded the age of the “Great Reconnaissance.” Free of copyright restrictions, the two documents were reprinted by private publishers looking for a quick profit and then circulated in more than ten thousand copies each. Emigrants riding on the trails to the American West had copies of Frémont’s reports in their wagons. In Britain, the Employment of Children report—probably the most widely read document of its kind—created a sensation, in part because it featured illustrations of half-naked females laboring in dire conditions. As alarming, the document alleged that work encouraged promiscuity and illegitimacy among women, rendering them dangerously unfit for their domestic duties as wives and mothers.
Social investigations and expeditions had much in common, and their similarities did not escape contemporaries. Edwin Chadwick, the famous Victorian reformer, saw in the mines investigation the unearthing of previously unknown human tribes in remote lands. In the Quarterly Review, he enthused that “modes of existence” were revealed to the reading public “as strange and as new as the wildest dreams of fiction.”1 But these distinct enterprises on opposite sides of the Atlantic—western expeditions and social investigations—were even more alike than most Victorian observers realized, and shared much beyond the affinity between natural history and the nascent social sciences. Both projects featured central governments dispatching commissioned investigators to visit lesser-known locales. Both supposedly deployed modern tools with which to devise policy but were actually driven by comparable and rather straightforward political purposes. Through investigation of the employment of children and similar inquiries, the British state defined social problems and specific groups of people as under its national jurisdiction. Extension of a somewhat different kind propelled Frémont’s expeditions. The U.S. government endeavored to study and consequently to Americanize the West, its rocks, mountains, and native peoples. Frémont’s explorations were in fact a ploy of the Democratic Party led by Frémont’s father-in-law, Senator Thomas Hart Benton from Missouri, to justify further expansion anchored in “manifest destiny.” In Britain, a Tory member of parliament, Lord Ashley (later, the Seventh Earl Shaftesbury), initiated the mines inquiry not so much to accumulate new information as to promote the short workday by restricting child labor in industries not covered by previous factory legislation.
Both projects were invested in concurrently discovering and estranging their respective subject matters, rendering them familiar, almost tangible, and at the same time removed and in need of representation. They correspondingly betrayed a sensibility of being on the edge of something formidable. In one of the best-known passages of his first expedition narrative, Frémont described himself standing next to an American flag he had just hoisted on what he mistakenly thought to be the tallest summit in the Rockies. There, he contemplated the sublime while peering over the majestic yet terrifying abyss. The silence was interrupted only by a single bumblebee, which was duly captured and put into a book otherwise used to dry botanic specimens.2 The British royal commissioners crawled in damp tunnels deep into the belly of the earth, risking their own health, gathering chilling stories of little children laboring alone in the abiding darkness of narrow mine shafts. These reports also shared a style that coupled scientific measurements (meteorology, botany, zoology, and geology in one case; pediatric medicine, morphology, and geology, in the other) with anecdotal, on-the-spot experiences of investigators retold in the languages of marvel, terror, and disbelief. Statistics and spectacle worked side by side in these texts. The British report contained unprecedented illustrations of mining procedures and child laborers. Frémont’s accounts featured engravings of novel landscapes and of fossils, plants, and animals. Although Frémont’s main narrative proceeded chronologically, while the mine report was edited thematically, the two documents recorded a continuum of men and environment: miners’ bodies deformed by life in the pit, and people hardened by life in the West. The latter featured Frémont’s colorful entourage, most notably that paradigmatic Rocky Mountain rough Christopher “Kit” Carson (another “discovery” of Frémont’s expeditions) as well as indigenous peoples.
John C. Frémont plants the American flag on top of the Rockies during his 1842 expedition. This heroic rendition of an episode documented in his enormously popular official report appeared in an 1856 campaign biography of Frémont by John Bigelow. That year the soldier-explorer became the nascent Republican Party’s first presidential candidate.
For our discussion, the most significant aspect of these two ventures is that both yielded documents produced by officials assuming the mantle of authorship and by states that sponsored protracted publishing processes. The publication of official documents became part of governance in the nineteenth-century United States and Britain. Publication constituted an arena of action in which the state could demonstrate its might or, alternatively, as we shall see, expose its incompetence. Reporting protocols were essential to the dynamics of commissioning. They completed the field execution of investigation or exploration. Nonetheless, there was never a simple linearity between government actions and the volume or design of its publications. In Britain, the proliferation of blue books certainly exemplified legislative activism and the collateral short bursts of bureaucratic growth. But even there, debates over the publication of official reports displayed a panoply of views concerning the role of the state in the market of information, expectations that exceeded the simple task of official reportage. The comparison between the two national cases further accentuates the point. Despite its steadily growing tasks the federal apparatus remained, until the Civil War and beyond, small and largely nonintrusive in matters of social policy. Yet, the U.S. government invested in lavish publishing projects incommensurable with its size and scope. Compared with Parliament’s dreary and cheaply bound blue books, some of the great exploration reports were exceptionally well-crafted volumes featuring dozens of vividly colored lithographs and woodcuts beside expedition narratives, statistics, and scientific monographs. (In the United States, the term blue book was reserved for registers of government officials.)
The first part of this book explores the intersection of print culture and political culture. The British state (in the early modern period, predominantly the crown) had been involved with printing ever since Caxton set up his press at Westminster in 1476. By the end of the eighteenth century, government sponsored extensive legislation that regulated the work of printers as well as stationers, booksellers, and authors. In the early modern period, the British state maintained as its prerogative the right to issue authorized translations of the Bible, Acts of Parliament, the Book of Common Prayer, almanacs, and more—all profitable workhorses of the book industry that were dispensed by patents and grants to a Byzantine universe of privileged printers. In antebellum America, public printing also became a notorious domain of political patronage. Our discussion, however, presents the state in a new role, not merely as a dispenser of printing assignments or a regulator of print culture but as an actual publisher responsible for much of the document’s life cycle: production, including printing, binding, and sometimes embossing, engraving, and lithographing; promotion; and circulation. The British and American states published printed documents that were often packaged as books and peddled as news or information, in line with other vehicles such as newspapers, magazines, and political pamphlets.
The state’s reinvigorated presence in the arena of books and information was in part due to the entrepreneurial spirit of government officials. But the production itself was largely controlled by the legislature at least until late in the century. Blue books occupied a niche in the vast array of parliamentary documents, and Congress initiated and supervised most federal publications. This is particularly important since in the two countries the labor of the legislature (floor debates as well as committee work) molded public discourse in terms of content and modes of conversation. Communicating details about, and arguing over, parliamentary exchange constituted a key element of the print-based public sphere in Britain. The press assumed much of this task and habitually used state publications as its source. In the United States, a wide diffusion of political information, including news about congressional debates, relied on the privileges Congress conferred on newspapers, supplemented (in the early decades of the century) by circular letters congressmen sent back to their home districts.
The vast distribution of Frémont’s and the Employment of Children’s reports beyond a small group of decision makers served strong evangelical (rather than merely utilitarian) agendas, whether the aim was to draw public attention to the grandeur and promise of the soon-to-be-conquered territories or to the misery of mine work. Circulation of official reports had other objectives as well. In the case of explorations, the conventions of science required publication. Moreover, the printed document, or its consumption, simulated or reproduced the act of discovery itself. Whereas Chadwick compared the effect of factual reports to the power of fiction, Senator Benton made an analogy between the explorer and the reader. In yet another rendition of the archaic “book of nature” metaphor, he wrote that Frémont was anxious to investigate the large terrain between Salt Lake and the Sierra; it was “a sealed book, which he longed to open and read.”3
A few congressional publishing projects had explicit patriotic rationales. These included the “founding fathers’” papers and, by the late 1840s, reports of explorations of western routes, nature, and peoples. National aspirations underlay the desire to record and to appropriate Indian culture as an expression of a distinct American identity. Such motivation was paramount in congressional support for Henry Rowe Schoolcraft’s six volumes on the Indian tribes of America (1851–57) or, to give another example, in the particular details of the American flag that Frémont employed in the Rockies, which featured at the center of its circle of stars an Indian peace pipe. Britain seemed keener on building the state than defining the nation. But the latter task was implicit, ostensibly an effect rather than a driving force in investigative enterprises, and always appeared in some equilibrium with the meticulous effort to contemplate and register the social sphere. In comparison with congressional print products, parliamentary papers were more uniformly executed albeit less elaborate documents. Still, in their enormous size and scope these publications provided a medium of representation as monumental as the famously ostentatious congressional publishing enterprises.
We should also keep in mind that by the nineteenth century print culture was inextricably tied to national cultures. In the eighteenth century, culture emerged as a connecting tissue between the state and its citizens. The idea of an indigenous literature rooted in national languages epitomized this function. By the mid-nineteenth century, the state itself became a cultural force, producing official literature that, in turn, shaped genres of fiction and nonfiction. One example was the affinities between characters and plots that appeared in official blue books and in Victorian novels, especially the genre of the industrial novel, which documented the social upheaval brought about by the new industrial regime. About the now largely forgotten author Charles Reade, it was said rather dismissively that his great gift was to convert parliamentary reports into works of fiction. “No man but he can make a blue-book live and yet, be a blue-book still.”4 Subgenres of print statism thus resonated particularly well with recognizable discourses of national expressions: social novels and political economy in Britain, and the frontier novel and later the “western” in the United States. Similarly, Schoolcraft’s Indian project inspired Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s enormously popular The Song of Hiawatha (1855), while bits of Charles Wilkes’s Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition (1844) found their way into Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, or, The Whale (1851). It was not a coincidence that the federal government’s accelerated production of books and reports occurred during the mid-1840s through the late 1850s, which historian William Charvart labeled “America’s first great literary boom.”5
The steady outpouring of state-originated documentary reports could bolster or configure national sentiment, either by their content, their materiality, or by the virtue of their repetition. This is analogous to the implicit distinction in Benedict Anderson’s analysis in Imagined Communities between the imaginary function directly tied to the discursive particularity of a text, an institution, or a ritual—a specific novel, for instance—and the imaginary work performed by the regularity or repetitiveness of publishing a text or performing a ritual. The paradigm for the latter is the newspaper, which fosters a community of readers by facilitating an affiliation that is renewed each and every day in a manner independent of the content of the paper—but not independent of the boundaries of its circulation, language, format, and readership. Frémont’s report could thus partake in nation building through the celebration of specific views about the American empire in an official report published concurrently by the House of Representative and the Senate and dispatched from the national Capitol to constituents across the land. In addition, it inaugurated a long chain of similar efforts to explore and report the West in what became a defining project for the national government.
The imaginary work of the state’s official print output, however, was polyvalent rather than merely propping up a unified nation as a site of identification. Ironically, making the American West an object of imperial desire awakened sectional rather than national sentiments and expedited the disintegration of the Union. The census, which Anderson regards as emblematic of national self-imagination for its claims to represent the nation as a whole and as one, also fueled the sectional conflict between North and South (especially the controversial 1840 census). Moreover, can anyone claim that the enumeration of African American slaves according to the infamous three-fourths formula could possibly secure them a place in the American national consciousness? In Britain, the documentation of society did not obscure but accentuated and normalized class differences and class hierarchies. In both countries, production of official reports was symptomatic of an increasingly segmented and belligerent political arena. Perhaps, therefore, the community that print statism helped cement was that of its reading public, or the “public sphere” itself, which was now nationalized to a degree (but otherwise comprised of multiple communities or publics) and yet was neither a national “imagined community” of the kind theorized by Anderson, nor the classical bourgeois public sphere depicted by Jürgen Habermas. Dispensing information was also entangled with strong didacticism, which nineteenth-century governments embraced. In the United States, the pedagogical drive paralleled the emergence of the public school system, also supported by the states. In Britain, the notion of instructing the populace had a stronger paternalistic timbre, separating those who could partake in the national decision-making process, including the franchise, from those who were deemed deficient in this regard. In both countries, the complexity of issues that modern legislatures faced necessitated tutoring their members about topics such as the advanced machinery of production in cotton mills or the techniques of building railroads in the West.
The British and American states paid incessant tributes to the informative value of their publications, whether the knowledge released was expected to guide the decision-making process in the national legislature or the choices individual citizens had to make in the marketplace. But the modern concept of information was new to mid-nineteenth-century public discourse. What is information? How should we understand its association with print culture? (Turn of the twenty-first century anxieties over the demise of print culture in the digital bowels of cyberspace appear to invest these questions with novel poignancy.) The linguist Geoffrey Nunberg recently pointed to the role of the state in what he otherwise calls the “phenomenology of information.” Nunberg’s critique of information emphasizes its historicity and, as significantly, its materiality. Information is an impression, an effect that is experienced at the confluence of a routinized form such as the page of a newspaper, its recognizable authoring institutions (e.g., the New York Times), and other encoded daily practices like buying or subscribing to a newspaper. “The material properties of information, then—its morselization, its uniformity, its quantifiability—are the reifications material properties of the documents that inscribe it—their layout, their boundedness, the collective presence that establishes them as fixed places. By contrast the semantic properties that we ascribe to information—its objectivity and autonomy—are the reflexes of the institutions and practices that surround the use of these documents.”6
Institutions and artifacts such as libraries, museums, daily newspapers, and card catalogues impose a specific matrix of registration on their content and concurrently strive for self-effacement. One aspect in the creation of such informational genres was therefore the suppression of explicit authorship in the document (and the suppression of the subject in the language of the document) and its subsequent replacement with institutional or phenomenal authorship. Many of the informational genres recognizable to us today appeared or were radically refashioned in the nineteenth century. Debates over official production and diffusion of documents alluded to information as a guiding principle, although the word information was employed at times in its old sense, to denote education, instruction, or bildung rather than in the ethereal, objective, and ubiquitous sense of the late-twentieth-century, fully blossomed “age of information.” Nevertheless, by the middle of the nineteenth century, the concept of information in its modern use became a feature of public discourse.
The modern state indeed purposefully created important apparatuses to provide mass, uniform, transparent, and authorless facts. Most of the state’s textual output, however, could not generate corresponding material and semantic properties to enable bodiless “information” as characterized by Nunberg. For one, in numerous documents knowledge was not and could not be arranged in any morselized, uniform, and easily accessible template (for instance, long transcripts of interviews). The form/authority nexus fell apart for other reasons as well. The materiality of public documents never ceased to attract notice. Likewise, government sponsorship of texts could never fully suppress either a personal authorship in the document or overt subjective language in the text. In this point the two national cases differ somewhat. The production of knowledge in blue books assumed the consistency of a standardized state project. By contrast, U.S. institutional authorship was weaker and the individuality of authors more pronounced. Observers in both counties contended that individuals exploited the power of the state to fulfill their personal ambitions. At certain moments, the state appeared to dissolve into the subjectivity of office holders and lawmakers, who simply could not resist the opportunity to be authors.
These and other dissonances and cracks in the state’s informational performances occupy the following discussion. Such disjunctures demonstrate that the state’s informational duties were often overwhelmed by its representational ambitions; in other words, the commitment to provide usable, accessible, and governable knowledge often proved incompatible with the state’s desire to represent the populace or the national space, as well as with the penchant of national institutions and public officials to sustain vast public archives in print. As the next three chapters demonstrate, the value and utility of government-made knowledge as information and the separate question of the merit of official publications as books were persistently at issue in Britain and the United States. Early on and before the actual onset of the age of information, there was a lingering impression that state-sponsored knowledge was multiplying at a Malthusian pace, threatening to deluge its consumers. In both countries, official printing was deemed excessive in terms that foreshadowed twentieth-century fears about information explosion.
The problematic of double authorship—one associated with corporate institutions and the other attached to individual subjects—unfolded somewhat differently in distinct branches of government. Individual lawmakers wrote and signed documents (and famously lent their names to reports and pieces of legislation), but as the two episodes with which we began this introduction exemplify, the state official, whether a royal commissioner, inspector, or an officer in the Army Corps of Engineers, had a particular claim to authorship that was closer to the emerging nineteenth-century market understanding of this construct, albeit not similarly protected by law. The state official frequently wrote about his tasks and performance and, by implication, about himself. The degree of independence he enjoyed in the field, where the power of the central government was not entrenched, translated into a measure of autonomy he exercised in crafting a document. Furthermore, the power of the field investigator as an author seemed to parallel his authority as an intermediary between society and its margins.
Authorship as a social, political, and historical construct is among the insights my analysis borrows from the rich scholarship on the history and sociology of the book. The following discussion is also attentive to additional methods and emphases that guide contemporary studies of print culture: first, an awareness of the tangible dimensions of printed texts and how physical attributes generate and occlude meaning (sometimes in correspondence with, in other times in opposition to, the range of meanings that flow from the contents of texts); second, a holistic view of print culture that situates books within circuits of transmission in which authors and readers occupy various links in larger networks of production and consumption; third, a nuanced approach to the practices of actualizing texts (including the rituals and sites of reading) as well as other uses to which books are put, including collecting, recycling, and discarding.
As a subgenre in the history of the book, the report merits extended commentary here. Despite the indiscriminate application of the label report to designate diverse types of collated information, accounts, news, or even gossip, the act of reporting within a hierarchy marks or even determines its asymmetrical structure and the reporter’s position within it. Paradoxically, then, the subjectivity of the official author was to a great extent an effect of his rather modest place in government, that is, his relative lack of authority and the consequent demand that he report to his superiors. Beyond the responsibility and vulnerability shared by all authors of texts, the government emissary’s dual role as a reporter and an author indicated subjugation (reporting to authority) and control (over the text). These incongruent positions became harder to maintain when a report broke the chain of reporting and was interjected into public discourse where authorship was held in high esteem. The public career of Chadwick and Frémont as officials, authors, and official authors evidenced these contradictory paths.
The report, by its very nature, is always already in some kind of movement, changing hands. It was cited on its way to some department, sent to Congress, or presented in the House of Commons where bills were often reported and therefore were in their “report-stage.” (Reporting is also commonly employed in parliamentary parlance to denote an account or a bill made by a segment of the whole, a committee to the entire chamber.) It is not surprising, therefore, that many reports were phrased or framed as letters. The epistolary feature brings the reporter closer to a genre of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century political pamphlets that were crafted as open letters. It also separates the report from modern informational genres. In contrast to the common understanding of information as a multitude of details that reside in inanimate receptacles independent of human exchange, for instance, computers—a perception, which is sustained today by content-blind Information Theory—informative reports, as a genre, are always addressed to institutional or individual recipients. The obligation of an administration or a ministry to report to the legislature was part of intricate power relations between the two branches of government. A prime minister could be caught reporting, too, although the monarch presented documents to the Commons “by command” and the president was often expected to send a “message.” (The president’s annual message epitomized the duty of the head of the executive to report routinely to the legislature and the people.) When a report concluded its travels in the corridors of power, it was moving again, integrated into the relationship between government (i.e., lawmakers and officials) and a host of social institutions, constituents, and the reading public. It was only when it no longer circulated—becoming more like yesterday’s paper rather than the unsold book to which it was often compared—that the report lost most of its value. It was then that the print archive was consigned to the brick-and-mortar archive.
Although this study identifies the report as a form of mediated communication, in a few of its uses report denotes presence, as an officer is ordered to “report for duty,” or employees are expected to “report themselves,” which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as, “to make known to some authority that one has arrived or is present at a certain place.” In one way or another, the report has retained a certain oral surplus. Rather than solely a manifestation of an emerging print culture, it is arguably a vehicle of orature. Orature—a term I borrow from postcolonial aesthetic theory—is a hybrid category that transcends the dichotomy between literature and orality. “[Orature] acknowledges that these modes of communication have produced one another interactively over time and that their historic operations may be usefully examined under the rubric performance.”7 The report is enveloped by a set of performances. The ceremonial air with which major policy reports are submitted to their initiating authority (a president, a secretary, a prime minister, the security council) is familiar today. Importantly, the transmission of the text is now usually accompanied by the presentation of the report to the public, often through the venue of a “press conference” where the authors of the report summarize their findings and recommendations and respond to questions. Presentation of reports included, at times, the public reading of the document or of specific segments. Here we may recognize the enduring influence of parliamentary practices on the culture of official reportage. Regardless of the fusion of print culture and politics, so much of the operation and so many of the traditions of Congress and Parliament had evolved around the spoken word. In the early nineteenth century, political culture on both sides of the Atlantic celebrated eloquence and oratorical flair, albeit in a somewhat different manner. (The British Parliament’s emphasis on orality has been so complete that it all but prohibited reading from prepared notes on its floor.)
Lastly, the centrality of “voice” to the political process and the potential of print statism to serve as a platform of opinion further tied oral expression and print culture. John Stuart Mill’s famous testimony during an 1852 House of Lord’s select committee hearing on India seems to embody the reliance of modern governments on technologies of record keeping. Mill boasted that the East India Company ruled India benevolently through an unsurpassed system of writing and reportage, for “no other [government] probably has a system of recordation so complete.”8 However, for Mill this modern apparatus of writing separated the colonial world from domestic governance. It was merely a necessary but flawed substitute for the kind of open and inherently oral and aural exchange that generated, in his conception, a regime of general public interest and public opinion back home in Britain.