Technologies of Power in the Victorian Period Print Culture, Huma ...

Early to mid-nineteenth-century Britain did not develop a public educational system to provide solutions for educating the working class. Cheap literature of the period served as a means for the working classes to locate themselves within society. However, the literature of the working class was less a reflection of society and more an instrument for regimenting the behavior of labor and for filtering out self-consciousness from the means and consequences of production. Industrial novels became textual supplements of reality that did not adequately provide substitutes for nonverbal cues used for interpreting figurative meanings, which became vague and susceptible to literal and factual representation.

In the preindustrial age, reading was a mode of social discourse. Through storytelling, memories existed through speech and were represented through the performative act of narration. Through the recitation of stories, individuals acquired a sense of communality, which was itself limited by the choices of “cultural material” and the “number of narratives” available for circulation (Fluck 24). Imagination was unfettered by individual desire and personal interest; rather, speech was used to affirm the traditions of oral culture. Improvements in print technologies enabled mass production in the early eighteenth century, but it was the emergence of the novel as a mode of literary, historical, social, and cultural expression that facilitated mass literacy during the early to mid-nineteenth century and inspired movement away from oratory and toward the private act of silent reading. The availability of literature, once the possession of the privileged few, for middle- and lower-class readers inspired a new literate culture predicated on silent reading, but even novelists who depended so readily on the written word could not avoid writing voice into their works or even engaging in direct dialogue with their readers through the use of narrative voice. It is through the performative act of speech that individuals contribute a verbal