Inconsistent in the historicization of its characters’ inner lives, uninterested in the implications of world-historical events like the Battle of Waterloo, and unserious in its treatment of the vagaries of life during the Napoleonic Wars, William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair (1847–8) seems to evince a facile or weak historicism in nearly every way. It often goes without saying that Vanity Fair is a far cry from, or a parody of, the historical novel in its rigorous formulation by Georg Lukács as dramatizing paradigmatic changes in the structure of society. Instead, in a typical reading, the novel uses what Harry Shaw has called “history as pastoral,” wherein history provides “an ideological screen onto which” to project its critique of modern life. Thackeray's narrator encour¬ages this reading, using the example of women's clothing—a standard, sexist metaphor for superficial historical difference that belies similarity across time:

With references to George IV and the gigot or leg-of-mutton sleeve, this passage in the novel's second half confirms that the action has moved into the 1820s, while in the same breath it reassures readers of the universality of the manners and amuse¬ments depicted.

‘The Giggle’, the third and final episode of Doctor Who's sixtieth anniversary celebration in 2023, features a dance scene set to the Spice Girls’ ‘Spice Up Your Life’. Dressed in a marching band outfit, Neil Patrick Harris's villainous Toymaker cavorts through the headquarters of military organisation UNIT. He kicks his feet as he dances on the tops of the desks that line the room, he spins rapidly down the aisles, and he shakes his hips in the face of the horrified UNIT staff. Throughout his dance, the Toymaker forces the participation of two unwilling dance partners: he seizes UNIT director Kate Lethbridge-Stewart ( Jemma Redgrave) in a tango that ends with her being pushed into a wall, and spins computer programmer Mel Bush (Bonnie Langford) rapidly until she careens out of control and falls to the floor. The Toymaker evades all of UNIT's attempts to capture him during the sequence, turning adversaries into colourful rubber balls with a tap on the shoulder, and bullets into rose petals with a wave of his hands. The scene thus combines the exuberant sensation of dancing to pop music with a sinister, unsettling feeling of violence. In so doing, it operates simultaneously as a dance scene and a fight scene, and reveals something about how easily these twin forms of choregraphed, relational movement merge into and out of one another.

Philosopher and dancer Erin Manning argues that ‘there is no such thing as a body that is not relational’, calling for attention to the collective patterns of movement across and between bodies, and how relational movement helps construct ideas of time, space and the nation-state.

In 2021, in an article in The Guardian, Sam Wolfson asked: ‘From Gossip Girl to Frasier to Sex and the City: Are Reboots Driven by Nostalgia – or Desperation?’ The article points to the massive success of the pilot episode of the reboot of Roseanne (ABC, 2017–18) which was tweeted about by then-US President Donald Trump and reached a viewership of around 18 million, even in a deeply divided America. The series was soon cancelled due to a racist tweet by Roseanne Barr and shortly afterwards another reboot, called The Conners (ABC, 2018–), this time without Barr, followed. Wolfson argues that, in times of fragmented audiences, it remains rare for any series to draw an audience of 18 million in the US. Thus, while many revivals and other means of recycling culture flop, they represent an ability to ‘cut through the noise’ with existing properties, rather than assume the risk of an original series. The argument is hardly new, just as much as the flood of reboots, remakes, spin-offs or otherwise recycled material since the early 2000s is not. For film, Constantine Verevis summarises the appeal as follows: ‘In a commercial context, remakes are “pre-sold” to their audience because viewers are assumed to have prior experience […] of the original story – an earlier film, literary or other property – before engaging in its particular retelling’ (2006, 3). The many reboots and revivals central to US TV schedules seem to say the same, especially on network TV, which owns many of the original series. Kathleen Loock speculates in relation to Fuller House (Netflix, 2016–20).

In 1990, Thomas Leitch suggested, among other things, that film reboots offer a chance for an ‘update’, a revision of the original film, less at odds with the social politics of the contemporary era. This often affects issues of inclusion (as opposed to equity or equality) and the representations of race, gender (including LGBTQIA+), class and disability. Theorising the reboots of sitcoms Roseanne and One Day at a Time (Netflix, 2017–20), Jessica Ford and Martin Zeller-Jacques argue for the term ‘recuperative reboot’, ‘which refers to a recent kind of television reboot working to update, recuperate, or resituate the politics and situations of its originals for the contemporary moment’ (2022, 275). They specifically discuss series that invest in the updating of the series’ politics in Trump-era America. They discuss series where the original versions were already invested in the project of feminism, so reboots are a much more radical updating of the social politics of the material than in the middlebrow series discussed here. The reboots discussed in this book are invested in a project of supposed political ‘neutrality’, though shifts in what that means today become obvious in the changes made. Thus, unlike the ‘woke reboot’ Ford and Zeller-Jacques describe, their efforts to update social politics are visible, but in many respects mostly pay respect to visual ‘difference’ and express the idea of ‘how far we’ve come’ less via storylines, and more visually, without overtly discussing it.

This chapter and the next are concerned with the processes by which groups are rendered visible but function as visual signifiers of ‘diversity’ rather than representations of the political projects associated with their identity. While processes of nostalgia conceive how middlebrow culture has remained the same, visibility politics is about formulating ‘how far we’ve come’.

Who was Charles Dickens's typist? This is, of course, a trick question. Dickens, who died in 1870, missed the widespread literary use of typewriting by over a decade. But this did not stop a series of newspaper reports that circulated in 1902 and 1903 from pondering the what-ifs of literary history had Dickens collaborated with a specific typist, one of high literary pedigree: ‘Probably if Miss Ethel Dickens, Charles Dickens's granddaughter, had happened to be his daughter instead, the novelist never would have won the reputation which he did for monstrously bad penmanship.’ Snippets about Ethel Dickens, an independent literary typist who owned and operated a typewriting business in London from 1887 to 1936, were relatively regular ‘chips’ of news in Anglophone papers from the late 1880s onward. The cluster of circulating copy from 1902–3 offers a particularly revealing example of how specific obsessions with originality and celebrity, as well as marketplace and generic forces, both illuminated and overshadowed Ethel's life and work as, and in, published texts. In spite of Ethel's many professional and personal connections to the literary- theatrical networks of London at the turn of the twentieth century, and regardless of the instrumental role her acts of reading, interpretation and reproduction played within those networks, the devaluing of Ethel's professional labour as a ‘typewriter’ has allowed her to be nearly forgotten. This cluster of copy, and similar circulations of ‘Ethel Dickens’ over the years, comprise a rich but understudied corner of what has been called ‘the Dickens Industry’.

Every Friday night in the United Kingdom, the television screen becomes a mirror to its audience, offering the opportunity to watch people engaged in the very same activity as themselves – watching television. In Leeds, sisters Ellie and Izzi drink large mugs of tea. In Manchester, Helena knits a brightly coloured garment. In Wiltshire, Mary leaves the living room, retreating into the next room to berate her husband Giles for whistling. In Hull, Jenny leaps to her feet to dance in time to the music coming from the television screen, causing her friend Lee to dissolve into laughter. Gogglebox (Channel 4, 2013–present) depicts households across the United Kingdom watching television from the preceding week, capturing their comments, reactions and observations. Select programmes are chosen for all households to watch together, and each episode presents a range of programmes from the week, intercutting different household reactions with clips from the episodes. The series premiered in March 2013, and its longevity speaks to its continued popular and critical acclaim. Gogglebox is often praised for the (somewhat nostalgic) vision it presents of British national identity. Television executive Peter Bazalgette describes the show as ‘put[ting] its finger on the pulse of the British public like no other programme … the Britain we all want to live in; a country engaged and at ease with it.’ Bazalgette also suggests that ‘even its banalities are profound’, celebrating what it has to tell us about family and community. It is significant that Bazalgette's idealised vision of the United Kingdom is one that so explicitly revolves around shared television viewing, suggesting that Gogglebox's ‘profound banalities’ might also extend to what it tells us about the medium itself.

In the first episode of NBC's Hannibal (2013–2015), Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen) diagnoses protagonist Will Graham (Hugh Dancy) with a pathological empathy disorder.

Will's disordered ability to relate to others fits within a broader trend in contemporary quality drama, in which (largely male) protagonists are positioned somewhere on the autism spectrum in order to give them preternatural investigative abilities. Although Hannibal takes a slightly different approach to other instances of this trope – where most of the detectives that populate television drama struggle to empathise with and understand others, Will feels too much – it continues to reiterate a deep anxiety about the persistence of empathy in the contemporary world.

This anxiety recurs throughout the scholarship on television. Susan Sontag argues that what she calls ‘tele-intimacy’ creates an illusion of closeness and sympathy, obscuring the various political hierarchies that underpin such regimes of relation. For Sontag, the link between ‘faraway sufferers – seen close-up on the television screen – and the privileged viewer … is simply untrue … yet one more mystification of our real relations to power’. Other scholars see the fragmentation of contemporary television as a deterrent to empathy.

This book's method and argument can be sketched in miniature through a brief comparison of three passages. In the first two, Victorian historical writers each use the metaphor of old clothes to illustrate a larger point about historical change. In “The Spirit of the Age” (1831), John Stuart Mill observes, “Mankind have outgrown old institutions and old doctrines, and have not yet acquired new ones. When we say outgrown, we intend to prejudge nothing. A man may not be either better or happier at six-and-twenty, than he was at six years of age: but the same jacket which fitted him then, will not fit him now.” For Mill, the size contrast between the child's jacket and the adult's body reflects the inevitability and the visibility of change over time. Notwithstanding the trajectory of growth seemingly implied by the development from childhood to adulthood, Mill emphasizes that change is at least potentially neutral: “when we say outgrown, we intend to prejudge nothing.” Bagehot's The English Constitution (1867), by contrast, uses clothing to suggest that change over time is not readily visible, observing:

As a man's family go on muttering in his maturity incorrect phrases derived from a just observation of his early youth, so, in the full activ¬ity of a historical constitution, its subjects repeat phrases true in the time of their fathers, but now true no longer. Or, if I may say so, an ancient and never-altering constitution is like an old man who still wears with attached fondness clothes in the fashion of his youth: what you see of him is the same; what you do not see is wholly altered.

My title quotes a phrase, familiar to the ‘reading nation’ of the early nineteenth century, from Oliver Goldsmith's celebrated poem The Deserted Village (1770). A traveller revisits his natal scenes and remembers with regret the homely accoutrements of the village pub, where a humble chest ‘contrived a double debt to pay, / A bed by night, a chest of drawers by day’. Over the next century ‘contriv[ing] a double debt to pay’ became a trusty epithet for anything adapted, through ingenuity, accident or want, to serve more than one function and to accommodate, like the chest, the alternate demands of idleness and purpose. The words tripped off Thomas de Quincey's pen when he described, in Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821), the twin uses of his small drawing room-cum-library in Dove Cottage. They were still circulating in the popular press in the last decades of the century, when, in ‘Does Writing Pay? Confessions of an Author’, an unsigned essay for Belgravia in January 1881, Percy Hetherington Fitzgerald used it to denote another dual purpose: the way one's writing for magazines ‘first passed through the periodical press before appearance in its orthodox coat of two or three volumes’.

According to the essay, navigating the ‘“double debt to pay” principle’ was part of the professed art of the author. As journalist Alexander Innes Shand had noted in an unsigned article on ‘Magazine Writers’ for Blackwood's in 1879, expecting a ‘double profit’ from the consecutive serial and book version of the same work was one of the markers of professional success. Whether one was writing fiction or nonfiction, short- or long-form, one had, in order to maximise returns on one's labour and spread the risk for publishers, to angle one's prose to serve at least two purposes, to fit two formats at a minimum and to engage more than one audience, and all with as little contrivance as possible. By 1880, Percy Fitzgerald was a veteran of this economy of repurposing: in the Welcome Guest and its successor Belgravia under that master recycler John Maxwell, but also under Dickens in Household Words and All the Year Round and for a plethora of other publications and publishers.

In 1995, I felt a thrill of recognition when bellbottom jeans came roaring back into style at my grade school, having seen my mother wear them in an old photograph. I was gravely disappointed to learn that that pair had not survived the 1970s. The clothes that my mother did keep from that period and that roughly fit my growing body—a rust-colored polyester double-knit jacket, a diaphanous blue-gray peasant top—differed in small but troubling ways from the neo-hippie aesthetic I was after. My mother helped me cut a slit up the inseam of my own straight-legged jeans to mimic, imperfectly, the bellbottom shape. Although she assured me that this was a historically authentic practice, it did not look quite right. As a child, I did not recognize that I was living through a reimagination rather than a straightforward return of the fashions of the late 1960s. More recently, I observed with mild alarm one of my students wearing a floral print, tea-length, faux silk dress eerily reminiscent of one I loved in 1997. I wore it for only a year or two after buying it at The Limited Too—a girls’ clothing store and suburban mall fixture whose name reflected its genera¬tional posteriority to the women's apparel parent company The Limited. But the dress has a longer history—my late grandmother Ruth, a midwestern Lutheran pastor's wife, apparently hated that style because it was popular among an older cohort of Midwestern Lutheran pastors’ wives.

The premise of this volume is that nineteenth-century life writing circulated in a market, in material and discursive forms determined substantially by the desires of publishers, readers, editors, printers, booksellers and the many other craftsmen and tradesmen who collaborated in transforming first-person narrative into a commodified thing. It is a simple premise, really – perhaps a self-evident one. But it has not much influenced how scholars of nineteenth-century literature address the genre. Most of us would probably give roughly the same response if we were asked to name the ‘notable’ or ‘important’ English autobiographers of the nineteenth century: Charles Darwin, Thomas De Quincey, Harriet Martineau, John Stuart Mill, John Henry Newman, Margaret Oliphant, John Ruskin and Anthony Trollope, with some stray mentions of canonical outliers such as John Addington Symonds and Harriette Wilson, and chronological ones such as Vera Brittain and Edmund Gosse. However, and at the risk of attributing my own ignorance to others, we would probably be hard pressed to say how well their autobiographies sold, whether they were read widely or whether contemporary readers regarded them then (as we do now) as par-ticularly illustrative or exemplary representations of gender, race, class, sexuality, professional authorship or any of the other identifications and affiliations that have commonly inflected our postmodern assessments of the genre. We would be hard pressed to say, that is, whether we continue to study these autobiographies because they speak meaningfully to our own concerns or rather because they spoke meaningfully to readers in their own time.

Nineteenth-Century and Neo-Victorian Cultures

Series Editors: Ruth Heholt and Joanne Ella Parsons

This interdisciplinary series provides space for full and detailed scholarly discussions on nineteenth-century and Neo-Victorian cultures. Drawing on radical and cutting-edge research, volumes explore and challenge existing discourses, as well as providing an engaging reassessment of the time period. The series encourages debates about decolonising nineteenth-century cultures, histories, and scholarship, as well as raising questions about diversities. Encompassing art, literature, history, performance, theatre studies, film and TV studies, medical and the wider humanities, Nineteenth Century and Neo-Victorian Cultures is dedicated to publishing pioneering research that focuses on the Victorian era in its broadest and most diverse sense.

On 30 March 1997, the UK's fifth terrestrial broadcast channel, Channel 5, launched with a promise to take a game-changing approach to news presentation. Presenter Kirsty Young said that 5 News would be more ‘exciting’ when ‘not simply … a man in a suit sitting behind a desk’. Chris Shaw, the head of Channel 5 News at the time, suggested that the programme would be ‘radical’ and a ‘shock to viewers’. Rather than present the news from behind a desk, Young would deliver the news standing, perched on her desk, or walking around the studio to speak to other correspondents and presenters. The ‘walking talking’ newsreader, as Young was dubbed, was seen as a groundbreaking technique.

Rob Brown, writing for The Independent two days after Channel 5 launched, stated that ‘the jury must still be out on whether [5 News’s] brave new format is going to break the mould of current affairs in this country or become the butt of cruel satire’. At the time, some critics saw the practice as something of a punchline, arguing that it gave a lightweight tone to weighty topics, and that it lead to the ‘dumbing down’ of the news. Kamal Ahmed, writing in The Guardian, somewhat derisively described Channel 5 News as ‘that programme where, goddammit!, the presenter walks around during reports’. Similarly, Ian Parker referred to the programme as a ‘boat with wheels’, lightly mocking the incessant mobility of the newsreader: ‘seen first here, then there; at the control desk, in the canteen’.

This chapter argues that despite its apparent conceptual simplic¬ity, progress proves difficult to theorize or imagine in nineteenth-century history and philosophy of history. Even the most confident Victorian theories of progress are beset by four temporal structures— regress, cyclicality, stasis, and rupture—that appear to oppose progress but that ultimately mutually constitute it. Like progress, regress is smoothly unidirectional, suitable to a grand narrative of transformation—as we see in famous decline narratives like Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–89) or Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind (1987). Both books are premised on an earlier rise, reflecting that cyclicality often presumes periods of progress followed later by stagnation and decline—as in the fourteenth-century North African philos¬opher Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddimah (1377) or Giovanni Arrighi's The Long Twentieth Century (1994). Victorian thinkers, too, con¬fronted the possibility that progress was bounded or encompassed by cyclicality. For example, Duncan Bell notes the “intellectual dex-terity” with which nineteenth-century imperial boosters attempted to exempt the British Empire from the “monitory teaching of the historical record” that “empires followed a predetermined trajec¬tory: they rose, they declined and ultimately they fell.” Likewise, Peter J. Bowler observes a cyclical model of progress embraced in the Liberal Anglican tradition, in which the rise and fall of indi¬vidual civilizations contributes to an overarching divine plan. Whether progress subsumes cyclicality or cyclicality subsumes pro¬gress quickly becomes a speculative matter of scale and perspective.

Theories of progress also rely on stasis—or, in its more posi¬tive construction, continuity—usually in one of two ways. First, theories of smooth, gradual progress sometimes acknowledge that the experience can feel like stasis—on this basis Rebecca Rainof understands mid-life adults as emblematic of the extreme gradual¬ism that progress favors.