Frankel 2009

Frankel, Nicholas. Masking the Text: Essays on Literature and Mediation in the 1890s. Rivendale Press, 2009.

Intro

For considered in terms of its artistic productions, the 1890s was singularly preoccupied with "masking" its texts. "Small details of dress" are apparent on even some of the most prosaic productions of the decade — a decade when virtually no British book came to market without at least some pretensions to embody a designed or "decorated" entity. (22)

As a matter of necessity, the medium with which these writers and artists were most preoccupied was the single volume (often illustrated) book. Writers of later decades would be preoccupied with other kinds of artistic machines — with the typewriter, the movie camera, the radio, with devices for recording spoken sound or music, and ultimately with the computer. But in the 1890s, with the cinema and sound recording still in [23]] their infancy, the printed book was the medium at the center of the most rapid and thoroughgoing changes. By the mid-1890s only the typewriter had emerged to challenge the book and the periodical as an organizing principle for the production and distribution of "literary" writing. On the one hand, the printed book was subject to those rapidly transforming patterns of readership and distribution alluded to in Gissing's New Grub Street: the rise of mass literacy produced not only demands for more popular books but also niche markets in which an artistic avant-garde was able to explore the nature of artistic endeavor as such. On the other hand, books were subject to the incursion of spectacular new technologies of production - photomechanical engraving, new dyes and materials for bookbinding, new means for the production of paper — many of them developed initially in America. Here the demand for the works of British authors, regularized by the passage of international copyright legislation in 1891, was equaled only by the rapidity with which American houses like Harpers and Lippincotts sponsored new, untried technologies for literary production. It is by no means insignificant that one of the works scrutinized in this study (Wildes A House of Pomegranates) was published by an American, James R. Osgood who had arrived in Britain expressly to maximize the opportunities for "Americanizing" British publishing following the passage of the Chace Act in 1891. A House of Pomegranates in its first edition represents arguably the best expression of the incursion of the new "process" printing into the printed work of literature. It is a book whose experimentalism is still apparent in its heavy art paper, its disintegrating bindings, its "invisible" illustrations, and the explosion of colour (now muddied) on its front cover. By contrast, the books produced virtually simultaneously under William Morris's aegis at the Kelmscott Press represent arguably the best expression of indigenous resistance to such incursions. Kelmscott Press books embody Morris's desire to overthrow the entire industrial order and to return readers to a more holistic state (termed an earthly paradise by Morris) according to which books and reading were continuous with the larger environments and activities in and through which reading took place. (22-3)

The idea that literary works come masked, then, flaunting their material features while declaring their radical alterity from themselve, was by no means confined to Wilde's imagination alone. It held firm purchase on the minds of many visual artists, poets, publishers and printers working in Britain in the 1890s, and it is partly responsible for that so-called renaissance of printing which took place, in commercial publishing no less than in private publishing, in the dying years of the nineteenth century. (23)