1st Edition
Dickens, Reynolds, and Mayhew on Wellington Street The Print Culture of a Victorian Street
Morning: 'the smallness of the world'. Afternoon: 'dissolute and idle persons'. Evening: 'the showman introduces himself'. Night: 'the compass of the world and they that dwell therein'. Conclusion: 'very curiously brought together' by Bleak House.
Biography
Mary L. Shannon received her BA from the University of Cambridge and her PhD from King’s College London. She is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of English and Creative Writing, University of Roehampton, London. She works on early nineteenth-century print culture and visual culture, with particular interests in literary networks, cultural geography, periodicals, and literature about London.
2016 winner of The Robert and Vineta Colby Scholarly Book Prize
From the Committee: “Mary L. Shannon’s book is an innovate expansion of the current interest in tracing networks into a consideration of the more concrete juxtaposition of bodies and buildings in space. Structured creatively around a day in the life of the street, the book entices us into seeing what would have been obvious to the Victorian eye and ear, but which our standard narratives have occluded. Shannon connects some of the more ephemeral products of the press and the situation of their production with canonical works, such as Bleak House, produced in the same milieu.It’s a book that models new ways to do our business.”
Awarded the Colby Book Prize
'Mary L. Shannon’s informative book offers an entirely new way to think about print culture. In focusing on Wellington Street off the Strand, where important Victorian writers such as Dickens, Mayhew, and Reynolds maintained their offices, she demonstrates the significance of geography for understanding the print networks that developed in midcentury London.' - Anne Humpherys, City University of New York, USA, author of Travels into the Poor Man’s Country: The Work of Henry Mayhew
“Shannon’s exemplary research takes her on a series of errands in order to reconstruct the working practices of Wellington Street in the period under scrutiny: examining metropolitan and borough archives, city guide books, directories, advertisements, maps and playbills, as well as an admirable range of types and genres of literary production.” - John Drew, University of Buckingham, Dickens Quarterly
“This is such a good book. Much of its immediate impact lies in its striking originality, of structure and of method, even if sometimes not all of it comes off. And while the book is risktaking, exploratory, and c
