The Remediated Mayhew: Reading and Representing Victorian Print Culture in the Digital Age

This hybrid dissertation, The Remediated Mayhew, forges a new direction in studies of London Labour and the London Poor (1849-1865), a monumental series of texts compiled by and attributed to the journalist Henry Mayhew (1812-1887).The print and performative mediums through which London Labour was disseminated, its magnitude, polyvocality, and its contradictions mean that it is a difficult text to enter and understand.The dissertation weds print culture and digital media in ways that, like the works that it studies, defy simple classification, linear reading, and traditional literary studies research methodology.I argue for an understanding of London Labour as a series of works subject to remediation throughout its print history and as texts that anticipate digital modes of nonlinear navigation, information management, and participatory reading culture.By reading and representing London Labour through the lens of remediation and digital representation we gain new ways to interpret and experience this text and other works of Victorian print culture.The Remediated Mayhew puts remediation into practice by producing the first scholarly, selected digital edition of London Labour and the London Poor.This digital project, under construction at the Collaborative Organization for Virtual Education (COVE), comprises 138 annotated selections from the London Labour project.The edition foregrounds the serial publication and textual recycling of London Labour's history.Its components include a comprehensive study of the publication history of London Labour, geospatial representation of the edition's contents, and scholarly annotations.Alongside the digital edition are three other chapters: first, a critical commentary on the digital edition in connection with the labour and politics of producing iii digital humanities projects as doctoral work; and second, two scholarly interventions studying the networks of collaborators and readers who shaped the development of London Labour at the mid-nineteenth century.These chapters offer a new analysis of the production, circulation, and reception of London Labour.Drawing on frameworks and practices from Victorian studies, Book History, and the Digital Humanities, The Remediated Mayhew offers critical insight into London Labour and presents a model for future studies and digital representation of complex works of Victorian print culture.Journal of Victorian Culture (2021), examines the collaborative relationships that shaped the development and remediation of London Labour, between Mayhew, his collaborators, and his informants (Chapter 3).The second article, originally published in Book History (2022), examines reader responses to London Labour in connection to contemporary crowd-funding campaigns on social media (Chapter 4).These studies collectively offer new insights into interpreting London Labour in both its historical context and its contemporary significance.By exploring new readings of Mayhew and London Labour, the articles and the digital edition present new ways of remediating and interpreting Victorian print culture texts using the frameworks and practices of digital media.The Remediated Mayhew argues that London Labour anticipates contemporary modes of digital reading and nonlinear hypertext navigation.By harnessing the digital, we are able to study publication history across multiple mediums and unravel the histories of collaboration and authorship that shape London Labour and other works of Victorian print.The digital edition puts into practice these arguments and connections while the articles build a foundation for analyzing the collaborative history of London Labour.The significance of London Labour as an important work of Victorian print culture is reiterated throughout this dissertation.London Labour is a monumental series of texts compiled and attributed to the nineteenth-century journalist and writer Henry Mayhew (1812-1887) as well as to other journalists who contributed to different iterations of the project.Mayhew's survey is the first study of urban poverty explored through the voices of the poor themselves.The text numbers hundreds of distinct articles and inquiries, and it transcends different audiences and cultural meanings.Though the moniker London Labour and the London Poor is typically understood as the four in this chapter and in the Appendices presents the edition's components.Phase 1 will be published in Spring 2023, with 26 primary text selections from London Labour, as a proof of concept of the edition that will undergo peer review.Phase 2, with 138 selections, will add more material to the edition and revise the edition according to feedback from Phase 1.

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