The Mediated Mind: Affect, Ephemera, and Consumerism in the Nineteenth Century
256
The Mediated Mind: Affect, Ephemera, and Consumerism in the Nineteenth Century
256Paperback
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780823279838 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Fordham University Press |
| Publication date: | 06/05/2018 |
| Pages: | 256 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d) |
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CHAPTER 1
Temperate Media: Ephemera and Performance in the Making of Mass Culture
One [sailor] followed me half a mile to return a temperance Tract, which among others I had left on board his vessel; thus showing his enmity to the cause.
— ANONYMOUS COLPORTEUR "Shipping Committee," Ninth Annual Report of the New York Tract Society, 1836
Has anyone ever actually read a temperance tract? Of all the copious material suddenly printed at the turn of the nineteenth century, temperance ephemera seems the most ubiquitous, but the least desirable. The number of tracts distributed is impressive. Beginning in 1795 and running through 1817, Hannah More's Cheap Repository Tracts of moral fables warning against drinking in gin-shops, gambling, and rioting sold millions, competing with chapbooks and broadside ballads. The Religious Tract Society gave away millions of copies of "Tom Toper's Tale over His Jug of Ale," "The Fortune-Teller's Conjuring Cap," and others, rivaling major publishers by the 1840s. Between 1831 and 1834, the British and Foreign Temperance Society printed and distributed over 2 million temperance tracts in Britain; between its inception in 1825 and 1851, the American Tract Society disseminated 5 million. Temperance tracts focused broader efforts at moral reform on getting readers to moderately use alcohol or abstain altogether from it. In their efforts to reform society one person at a time by placing such messages in everyone's hands, the tract societies implemented the financial and distribution networks of modern mass print media. In "sowing the seed" of their message, they first imagined the "broadcasting" central to mass communication. Yet the tracts are a counterintuitive origin of the mass print medium. Given away or priced cheaply, they were not produced in response to market demand. Indeed, their didacticism certainly grated on potential readers, such as the sailor who did his part to reverse their tide by restoring the colporteur's giveaway. Temperance tracts are thus paradoxical documents of the new mass culture of print: They make print ubiquitous, but many seem to have gone unread.
Temperance tracts are more productively considered as media objects than literary ones. Their circulation, along with other ephemeral material and events such as pledge cards, medals, and performances, created affects that unified and mobilized temperance's base toward its political goals — and alienated almost everyone else. As this chapter shows, the movement's aesthetics of sobriety, positioned against the figurative intoxication of ordinary, market-driven literary consumption, were imagined to facilitate a kind of rational recreation. But these aesthetics were most effective when tracts and printed objects interacted with performance to produce a special kind of affect in mass audiences — the feeling of the presence of freedom that was otherwise elusive within political culture. Temperance ephemera may not have been widely and deeply studied or absorbed, but it helped shape modern mass culture.
As a later instance of the explosion of printing beginning at the end of the eighteenth century, which detonated conservative fears of revolution, temperance and especially teetotal tracts were viewed warily by those who still believed that the people should not read. In his classic account Richard Altick observed, "The widespread belief that printed exhortations to 'sedition' and 'atheism' found their way into every calloused hand in the kingdom was nothing short of a nightmare." In response, regressive taxes on printed material, as well as windows, helped stifle the circulation of ideas. Temperance, which advocated restricting the use of alcohol, and teetotalism, which favored total abstention from it, struck many in a traditional drinking culture as outlandish. The ideal of sobriety also had a politically radical edge: Chartist booklets such as William Lovett and John Collins' Chartism (1840) made it central to the case for workers' rights, demonstrating the affinity between two radical movements for the improvement of the people. Confronting their opponents' charge that the drunken masses could not be entrusted with the right to vote, they hinted "that the majority of drunken and vicious characters are ... already in possession of the franchise." To them, established British institutions and classes were already deranged by alcohol. The temperance movement's association with nonconformist religions such as Methodism, marked by adaptable, populist practices and dangerous "enthusiasm," also declared its progressivism. Temperance and teetotalism's share in mass print sparked anxiety and outrage among the conservative middle class. Yet the essential reason and Christian morality of their advocacy of sobriety also proved difficult to assail. Moreover, temperance could also function far less radically: The Cheap Repository Tracts had included temperance narratives and messages as part of the effort to overwhelm the broadside and ballad market, and strengthen the moral fiber of the populace in order to quell rather than enflame their radical political desires. As we shall see, the tracts also reflected an aspirational drive: Saving money and achieving respectability by ceasing to drink could elevate a man's class status, without fundamentally changing social and economic relations. Although temperance was viewed skeptically by many, its politics and media policy were more complex than either its advocates or opponents acknowledged.
As political documents, temperance tracts found receptive audiences among fellow reformers such as workers, suffragists, abolitionists, and anti-colonialists. Temperance tried to subvert unthinking norms of sociable drinking, the medical prescription of spirits, the religious distribution of communion wine, and the use of alcohol for basic nutrition. Defying powerful pub owners, brewers, and distilleries who profited from excessive drinking, the movement opened alternative recreational activities to male semiskilled, unskilled, and casual workers who might otherwise spend their wages at the pub. It made visible the violence, starvation, and neglect suffered by many of their wives and children. In the United States, Black temperance groups performed the then-progressive political task of proving the sobriety, reason, and morality of their members to racist and proslavery whites. Temperance ephemera attests to the affective and memorial rituals and practices of self-consciously marginalized groups. The pledge not to drink, performed at a meeting or rally, was supported afterward by the card or medal that helped oath-takers, in dangerous moments of temptation, to hew to their commitments, which were regarded as extreme by mainstream, middle-class readers. Likewise, the material presence of temperance ephemera in public spaces, and its circulation from hand to hand as gifts, exerted subtle social obligations that helped build alternative, sober communities. The tracts indexed living communities that struggled, witnessed, listened, took oaths, sang, entertained, and feasted together at their meetings, including their famous mass tea parties in Britain and, in the United States, their reappropriated Fourth of July celebrations. Temperance ephemera were signs and traces of a publicly performed and viscerally felt politics. The slowly evanescing presence of the live performance remains or builds as a trace in the printed medal, ribbon, card, or tract.
For many tormented by drink or habitual drunkards, such ephemera functioned as maps to survival spaces — temperance halls and coffeehouses, hotels and restaurants, doctors' offices and ships — where sobriety was the norm. Many of these spaces catered to the genteel. But the movement also sheltered the workers, the indigent, immigrants, and women and children who effected the massive historical transition from agricultural to industrial life. Many either used alcohol to blunt the damage this change wrought within and upon them or were affected by others' use. Thus the movement's media policy focused on matching the ubiquity of alcohol: At the World's Temperance Convention in London in 1846, the governing committee planned to counter opposition by "employing more extensively and more efficiently the press. That is the lever to lift every abuse. Our books and publications should be in every house, in every workshop, and in every library."
An improbable origin of mass culture, the temperance movement nonetheless expressed a dialectic central to it, between printed objects and live, mass experience. This dialectic helps us reimagine what liberal individualist ideology has seen as a transition from popular culture, understood to be participatory, interactive, and unmediated, to mass culture, often depicted as passive consumption of media. As the chapter will show, teetotalism's grassroots "experience" meetings, in which attendees took turns narrating their stories, grew in scale, becoming mass events with professional temperance performers such as John B. Gough, advertised and reviewed in the mainstream press. Print assisted this metamorphosis: Media accounts of Gough emphasize their inability to convey the powerful immediacy of his live performance — and thus helped construct it. Although framed by print, this immediacy conveyed feelings of freedom within the massed audience, as they approached the experience of being present together as a body politic. Rooted in the body, affects have been defined as visceral forces beyond cognition and emotion that can propel and extend people into relation to the world and to others, or equally, suspend those relations.
In Ireland from 1839 through 1841 the Capuchin friar Father Mathew, held mass temperance rallies like the ones Gough held in England and the United States. Father Mathew gave away medals that became controversial symbols of his political power to mobilize millions. Such printed tokens — along with the cards and ribbons — exposed the enigma at the heart of ephemera, the disposable, trivial printed material of everyday life that is paradoxically collected or kept as a document of community. Critics disparaged temperance medals as crutches or supplements to individuals' wills, which should have operated without rewards; from this perspective, the medals were superficial mass media items that weakened autonomy and encouraged delusive superstitions. Yet the medals, and the aesthetics of sobriety informing them, also moved potent affects to articulation and action. Temperance ephemera and meetings created communal feelings of unmediated presence that outlasted temperance's political demise, remaining central to mass culture. Because this auratic presence informed Walter Benjamin's assessment of the political efficacy of intoxication, in the chapter's coda I trace this opposing aesthetic from its Baudelairean roots, displaying its surprising affinities with temperance discourse.
Temperance Tracts and Sober Reading
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, Sermons in stones, and good in every thing.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, As You Like It
Temperance writing introduces to modern culture the aesthetics of sobriety, which features premodern, pastoral, and natural settings, and especially, the life-giving force of water. In the typical temperance song "The Farmer May Boast," singers call for water: "The farmer may boast of his acres so fine, / His barley that smiles o'er the lea; / But I will rejoice in the course so divine, / I love to be sober and free / ... Then give me beautiful water / ... Bright water for me, bright water for me, bright water, bright water for me." Retreating from an unnatural modernity associated with drunkenness, an artificial state of poisoned mind, temperance aesthetics favor water's brightness and lucidity as emblems of Enlightenment and freedom. In this countercultural position, they align with Romanticism's rejection of urban modernity and belief in human potential. Their pastoral streak can be seen in lines from As You Like It that form the epigraph of this section and which were reprinted in temperance and other reform writings. The notion that stones speak sermons and brooks contain books conveys the point that the wisdom of nature is self-evident. But its language also installed mass print media in natural formations, refiguring the wild environment into a comfortable bourgeois library or chapel. In its mid-nineteenth-century cultural function, the passage articulates an idealized wholesome relationship to nature, available to all by virtue of human affinity with God's creation. Yet this direct connection to spiritualized wisdom is simultaneously undone by the figures of mediation required to convey it: tongues, books, and sermons. The tension plays out in the movement's aesthetic valorization of water as the icon of sobriety and the antidote to alcohol. Against the grim realities of its modern, urban contamination, temperance advocates positioned water as the fountain of life, God's gift, and the essence of nature. People were meant to be drawn to it instinctively, yet — as in the Shakespearean quotation — they needed intermediaries to remind them. The spiritualized reason that rendered water's superiority self-evident nonetheless needed supplementation from tracts, songs, sermons, and other ephemera.
The aesthetics of sobriety central to temperance helped effect the mid-nineteenth-century transformation of broadcasting, from agricultural metaphor to the vanguard's use of media to convey its politics to wider audiences. The movements' systematic saturation of public and private spaces with tracts rewrote the Christian idea of sowing the word as a seed by strewing it indiscriminately on the ground. Since not every seed would grow, grace depended on providence, or, to the secular-minded, chance. Accordingly, the temperance movement widely distributed its tracts, translated them extensively, and measured their success in anecdotes of their seemingly miraculous efficacy. In T. S. Arthur's story "The Temperance Tract," a zealous advocate hands an innkeeper a tract; when the recipient becomes irate, the proselytizer despairs and throws his batch of tracts away. When the wind spreads them around, one of them reaches a man who considers giving up drinking; another finds a different publican, disillusioned with his business, and the two meet and strike a temperance bargain: "If you'll quit selling, I'll quit drinking." The scene of psychological conversion possesses the decontextualized simplicity of a fairy tale: "I found a piece of paper on the road as I walked along just now and it had something printed on it that has set me to thinking." In this media dream, the trashed tract beams up from the road, effecting conversion without seeming to be read. Freed from the competing distractions of a print marketplace cluttered with desirable material, the temperance message also directly connects consumer and producer, who then withdraw from their roles. The hero of a tale of spiritualized Enlightenment reform, the broadcast temperance message forges a bond unachievable by commodified printed material, which makes no real demands on its readers. These were not mere fantasies. The temperance advocate Edward C. Delavan recalled his introduction to the movement "after reading a temperance tract placed under my plate by an unknown hand"; he then makes "a mental resolution" to try abstaining for a month. Delavan's conversion could never have happened through the ordinary reading of individual choice, because the encounter with the radical, unfashionable temperance message must be an act of providence. Delavan's chance discovery inspired him to great feats of broadcasting: He sent a temperance tract to every household in New York State, and one to every Union soldier in the Civil War.
Such anecdotes elide acts of reading and contemplation in favor of sudden resolutions. With a similar implausibility, within the movement's ideology of sobriety, consuming temperance ephemera straightforwardly substitutes for drinking alcohol. The abundant anecdotes attesting to the tracts' efficacy establish their interchangeability: "Only a few days since, we were told how a little temperance tract, coming into the hands of a confirmed sot, finally wrought his redemption from the degradation into which he had sunk, and restored him to his family and to society, sober and industrious." The drunkard simply swaps the bottle for the tract, betraying an odd failure to imagine the challenging transition to a non-drinking life. Temperance writers often naively proposed reading as an easy alternative to tippling: "You can find time to sit and smoke your pipe, to go to the 'Cross Keys' or 'Lord Nelson'; suppose you change this habit for a reading habit." In this bourgeois ideology of "rational recreation" described by Peter Bailey, the relaxation, conviviality, and community life associated with working-class pubs are supposed to be blithely renounced for solitary study aimed at self-improvement. Unwilling to credit the human need for social gathering or acknowledge alcohol's age-old facilitation of it, much temperance discourse reflected the top-down wishes of its middle-class leaders. Since More began writing the Cheap Repository Tracts, their reformist principles had set themselves squarely against working-class collectivity, which they feared might easily devolve into riot or revolution. This paternalistic rhetoric differed from the grassroots style of teetotalism, which also disseminated tracts, but emphasized meetings at which drunkards themselves shared their stories. By contrast, rational recreation emphasized the instant, almost magic ability of its message to change worldviews and behaviors, supporting the broadcasting policy.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
Introduction: From Paper to Pixel1. Temperate Media: Ephemera and Performance in the Making of Mass Culture
2. Tobacco Papers, Holmes’ Pipe, and Information Addiction
3. Ink, Mass Culture, and the Unconscious
4. “Dreaming True”: Playback, Immediacy, and “Du Maurierness"
5. “A Form of Reverie, A Malady of Dreaming: Dorian Gray and Mass Culture”
Conclusion: Unknown Publics
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index