In her sophisticated study, The Ephemeral Eighteenth Century: Print, Sociability, and the Cultures of Collecting, Gillian Russell engages multiple disciplinary frameworks—including literary studies, theater history, textual materialism, book history, and comparative bibliography—to analyze eighteenth-century ephemera as both a concept and a type of material document embedded in day-to-day commercial and cultural interactions. Russell addresses several interrelated questions: How did the linked concepts of ephemerality and the everyday converge and evolve across the period? How was ephemera used to define the changing boundaries of literature and literary value? What, according to commentators and collectors, was the value of printed ephemera, a diverse and capacious media category that includes most everything beyond the codex-form book, from pamphlets to trade cards, tickets, handbills, and watch papers? What forms of knowledge—about politics, society, or the fleeting present—did collections of ephemera capture and preserve?
While some blurred the boundaries between codex-form books and fugitive modes of textuality—Addison's Mr. Spectator, for example, notably declares his compulsion for reading and collecting scraps of printed paper encountered during his rambles, including pages from books and periodicals recycled as tobacco and pie wrappers—most were less generous. Samuel Johnson coined the term ephemera in 1751 to describe fleeting printed artifacts that were destined to expire almost as soon as they flew from the press, unlike the book, which was lauded as the durable, preeminent building block of Enlightenment knowledge making. Ephemera threatened to overwhelm regimes of knowledge and control epitomized by the library, social elites, and the state, but ephemerality, Russell asserts, also constituted a poetics: “an intensified sense of presentness and the evanescence or quickness of time,” an awareness “of the difficulty of holding on to and preserving what we momentarily know and experience” (29).
Organized chronologically, each of Russell's seven main chapters has as its focus different genres and collections of ephemera as they relate to events, entertainments, customs, and literary texts between the mid-seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries. She traces, for instance, the “sense of presentness”—an attention to participating in an event and witnessing it unfold through the medium of print—to the political crises of the seventeenth-century Stuart state, each of which were also print crises marked by the explosive growth of the press. George Thomason, Anthony Wood, and Narcissus Luttrell amassed expansive collections of fugitive print, including newsbooks, newspapers, tracts, broadsides, proclamations, advertisements, and satires, scouring bookseller stalls, coffeehouses, and even their friends’ privies in order to preserve a record of the tumultuous times that also documented their own place within that history. They inaugurated enduring collection practices that influenced later ephemerologists, and the most fascinating chapters of this book are those in which Russell analyzes the diverse and largely overlooked ephemera collections of Sarah Sophia Banks, sister of the celebrated naturalist Sir Joseph Banks.
Making fashionable society her object of study, Sarah Sophia Banks methodically collected the various types of printed ephemera that greased the wheels of later eighteenth-century leisure, friendship, and associational culture, including popular prints, advertisements, trade tokens, playbills, newspapers, and especially visiting cards and tickets. Collecting, labeling, and carefully arranging these artifacts in volumes, Banks elevated the study of polite culture and women's sociability to the level of “legitimate scientific curiosity” (120), on par with more serious systems of Enlightenment knowledge associated with her brother. A second chapter examines Banks's interest in the balloon mania of the 1780s, focusing on the vast archive of tickets, souvenir prints, and newspaper cuttings she collected about hot-air balloon exhibitions. Together these chapters expand understanding of women's collection practices and the types of jobbing print that mediated fashionable sociability; they document wider participation in Enlightenment cultures of science and experimentation; and they reveal contemporary attentiveness to ephemeral textuality and historicity.
The final three chapters focus on the relationship between ephemeral print, discourses of ephemerality, and Romantic-period poetry and fiction. Russell considers how the boundaries between literature and ephemera were delimited within the context of the expanding late-Georgian paper economy and how the poetics of ephemerality—the immediacy of the present, the evanescence of time—was formative within literary Romanticism or remediated for lyric capital, as in William Wordsworth's attention to London's “dead walls” filled with hanging advertisements, ballads, and playbills in Book 7 of The Prelude (1805). Russell argues that Maria Edgeworth, like Sarah Sophia Banks, was attuned to sociable textuality and forms of hospitality rendered through the exchange of ladies’ visiting cards. In an insightful reading of The Absentee (1812), she examines how Edgeworth engaged this medium to conceptualize and critique post-Union Anglo-Irish relations and to make women's “sociability visible as a mode of knowledge” (208). Similarly, Jane Austen captured the affective experience of the fleeting everyday in Persuasion (1815) through attention to advertisements, newsmen, and fugitive print, positioning the novel within—and, in its material durability, apart from—the sphere of printed ephemera and ephemerality.
The Ephemeral Eighteenth Century represents an ambitious undertaking on Russell's part: printed ephemera encompasses so many different kinds of fugitive texts and images that exceeded regulatory systems enacted by eighteenth-century collectors and threaten to overwhelm systematized analysis by modern media historians. Cheap print was essential to social and cultural life and yet disposable, ubiquitous and yet tending toward obsolescence and loss. Russell's labor involved in finding and organizing this material, distributed across various archives and institutions, is impressive. The larger economy of print beyond the codex-form book, Russell demonstrates, significantly influenced and was remediated by later eighteenth-century fiction and poetry, and she suggests how tools of literary interpretation can help scholars analyze ephemeral texts and the accidental readings they enabled. But how did books also influence genres of ephemera and the literacies such media encouraged? Did fugitive commercial appropriations of novels, such as cheap adaptations or small printed images, engraved consumer objects, and wax figures depicting popular characters—Samuel Richardson's Pamela comes to mind here—give rise to new types of ephemera or, through their cultural ubiquity, reshape conceptions of society, sociability, and the present? Ephemera possessed both a poetics and a complex politics, and Russell shows how the material texts undergirding polite sociability were used to exclude the masses and shore up aristocratic hierarchies, how radicals deployed and collected ephemeral print, and how discourses of ephemerality were used to define literary and cultural value. Her book opens up new avenues for research on the political ideologies and cultural literacies made possible via the full spectrum of print as it penetrated daily life, complementing, for instance, recent work on the importance of newspaper advertisements and commercial trade cards to sustaining and making legible imperial expansion, slavery, and racial ideologies. It is also powerful reminder of the women and men behind some of the most important collections of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century print material held at the British Library and British Museum, proof of ephemerologists’ lasting impact on scholarship.
