Then and Now

I'm reading an absolutely fabulous book: Kathryn Hughes's biography of Mrs. Beeton, who is basically the British Betty Crocker, except that she was originally a real person. This paragraph is talking about the 1840s, but in its description of dramatic change, both in the availability of news and in the predominance of new media, both in content and in form, seems strikingly similar to today, suggesting, perhaps, that we are not quite as new as we think we are, at least structurally. (Just substitute "blogs" for "printed news" at the end of the first sentence, and you'll get what I mean.)

More specifically, these young men had seen at first hand just how the social and political changes of the last few years had been lobbied, debated, modified, and publicized through the burgeoning culture of printed news. Greenwood paying to read a paper every morning from nine to ten, or Sam popping into the Dolphin for the latest edition of the Morning Advertiser were part of a new generation of people who expected to get their information quickly and accurately, rather than picking up third-hand gossip days later around the village pump. On top of this, these young men had seen their changing world refracted in the bold new fiction that was pouring off the presses. Mary Barton, Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre all burst upon the world during the hectic decade that coincided with their apprenticeships. Nor was it just the content of these books--rough, even raw--that was new. The way they were produced, in cheap cardboard formats, sometimes serialized in magazines, or available in multiple volumes from Mr. Mudie's lending library in New Oxford Street or Mr. Smith's railway stands, announced a revolution in reading habits. No wonder that, years later, when writing to his elder son at prep school, a boy who had never known what it was not to have any text he wanted immediately to hand, Sam counselled sadly, "you do not read books enough."