n
The Victorian Novel on File, Priyanka Anne Jacob conceptualizes
traditionally lengthy nineteenth-century English novels as containers of
information, capable of holding data just as physical storage
boxes hold clutter. By viewing Victorian novels in this way, Jacob, in turn, invites
us to reexamine the Victorian era, notably an age of obsessive
categorization, as one that promoted a dialectical aesthetic of
cluttered precision, or rather, the aim for future precision through the
eventual processing of stored clutter. Jacob's book shows that through
the improved ability to store documents with novel information systems
and print culture, the Victorian era, and, consequently, the Victorian
novel, maintain a striking tension between compulsive accumulation
and deferred processing of data in both literal and material senses.
The Victorian Novel on File is premised on the fact that, in the nineteenth century, information was accessed and stored materially in the form of paper documents and other physical objects. Jacob analyses novelistic representations of these archives, treating Victorian novels as containers and compressors of information about fictional and real worlds. Jacob's book engages with and builds upon recent scholarship on Victorian media and information technologies, object studies, and narrative form by Richard Menke (2008), Elaine Freedgood (2006), Caroline Levine (2015), and others, along with Victorian theorizations of information and aesthetics by nineteenth-century authors such as John Ruskin and Charles Babbage. Although principally focused on novels, the scope of Jacob's book includes newspapers and archives, analyses of which rely on interdisciplinary scholarship by critics such as Anjali Arondekar (2009), Thomas Richards (1993), Sven Spieker (2008), and Jacques Derrida (1996, 2005). The Victorian Novel on File's clear focus on the material nature of information and its carriers also serves to justify the book's notable analytical restriction to novels as vessels of data. "The novel's collection of small, seemingly insignificant, things is a formal response to the information pressures of the age," Jacob writes (1). At the same time, Jacob posits that the bulky form of novels was produced by the Victorian information explosion. Novels worked as stores of larger and more complex levels of data, as she notes: "The longer the book, the more the layers, the deeper the object" (27).
Despite its bulk, however, space in a novel, as in a box, is finite. Jacob's book brilliantly evokes this limit through its analysis of the informational and material overload contained in Victorian novels. A book can be very long, but it must end somewhere, simply by virtue of being a material object meant for circulation and storage; and Victorian novels, Jacob points out, contain "a welter of lingering things, laden with contextual information, metonymic association, and narrative possibility" (12; emphasis original). A book ends, but the information stuffed in it lingers and lies in wait within its finite space, perhaps for future circulation and usage, a phenomenon Jacob terms "activation."
Jacob's notion of narrative possibility is distinct from the idea of narrative open-endedness common to many well-studied Victorian novels including George Eliot's Daniel Deronda (1876), which, along with Eliot's Middlemarch (1871-72) and Romola (1862-63), is a subject of analysis in the third chapter of Jacob's book. Open-endedness, in my view, creates the possibility of narrative outcomes including and beyond the mandates of Victorian social conventions. For example, the narrative arcs of three major female protagonists in Daniel Deronda conclude ambiguously, in ways that subvert the Victorian convention of the domestic wife and mother. Gwendolen Harleth is a childfree widow; Mirah Lapidoth emigrates eastward with the novel's titular character; Lydia Glasher inherits her deceased lover's property as the mother of his illegitimate male heir. These women characters avoid both the Victorian poetic justice of death for immorality, such as Lydia's extramarital affair and illegitimate children or Gwendolen's possible murder of Grandcourt, and the traditional conclusion of a Victorian female bildungsroman, marriage followed by socially legitimate motherhood. This narrative open-endedness, I contend, enables readers to fashion extensions after the narrative through what formally is not, such as a conventional ending (Das 57-58).
In contrast, Jacob theorizes a narrative possibility that enables readers to identify layers of contextual information stored in the text through the readerly re-activation of what materially is, such as an object. Jacob demonstrates this narrative possibility with a detailed historical tracing of the silver clasps, a seemingly ornamental object easily overlooked as narrative clutter, featured in Daniel Deronda. Originally missal clasps, they appear as trinkets for sale in a shop where they are nearly converted to wearable jewelry before being left in storage for future activation in both the diegetic universe and the text of Eliot's novel. As such, they preserve a complex religious and political history of several centuries while being simultaneously "susceptible to mishandling and dismantling" (Jacob 124).
According to Jacob, the fictional storage, in novels, of casual materials from which rich historical information could potentially emerge, relates to the Victorian propensity to hoard documents if there was a chance, however slim, for a future informational payoff. For example, in her book's first chapter, on Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1862), Jacob notes that "the compulsion to store is taken to an extreme in the sensation novel," which is overloaded with concealed information that may never be revealed or utilized, "in a way that explains that genre's formal difference from […] detective fiction" (41). This compulsion to store is also clearly visible in nonfiction. An 1869 newspaper article, Jacob informs in her book's introduction, "lamented the daunting storage challenges libraries faced in a booming print culture" while simultaneously insisting on "comprehensive, undiscriminating storage," due to the possibility of superfluous documents' future usefulness (5-6). For readers familiar with Victorian concerns about superfluity, Jacob's anecdote is certain to recall another 1869 publication, William Rathbone Greg's Why Are Women Redundant?, in which Greg advocated for single (superfluous) British women to emigrate to British colonies, not only to reduce the excess of women in Britain, but also to export British morality and values to colonial domestic spaces as part of the imperial cultural enterprise.
While The Victorian Novel on File does not specifically engage with Greg's treatise or colonial emigration, its argument about the storage, historical value, and activation of information offers two distinct ways to conceptualize "redundant" British women's emigration in the context of imperialism. First, Jacob establishes that in addition to material objects, humans, too, can be literal vessels of information. For example, in her book's second chapter, Jacob describes how the secretive title character Amy in Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit (1857) resists revealing, and in turn, becoming information herself. While Amy voluntarily self-stores the information she carries, Daniel Deronda's superfluous women, Jacob points out, exercise less agency in the literal storage of their persons, as they are "burie[d] [...] in coal country" by the novel's male antagonist Grandcourt (138). This view of Victorian women's self-regulation and agency enables us to conceptualize single British women as "stored" imperial information-bearers awaiting activation in colonial society following emigration, exactly what Greg prescribed in 1869.
Second, Jacob demonstrates the imperialist ideal of information's transport, encryption, and compression by British actors in colonial spaces. In her book's fourth chapter, Jacob posits that Rudyard Kipling's Kim (1901), set in colonial India, "keeps its objects, people, and information in almost relentless motion" (142) and reevaluates disguises and information-gathering, familiar traits of espionage, as encryption and compression. Jacob argues that Kipling's E.23, a British spy first disguised as a Mahratta (military) and then a Saddhu (ascetic), "is encrypted and not merely disguised because he himself has become information." The "transformation of E.23 does not simply involve camouflage or concealment [...] but rather a more fundamental scrambling of identity" (156). Encryption also occurs culturally, for instance, in the narrative's misleading descriptions of Indian food. Incorrect descriptions of colonial cuisine — such as the characterization of kichree, a rice and lentil dish, as vegetable curry — may be all the more successful as code because "their local meanings and uses are often irrelevant to their encryption" (152).
Jacob considers the processing of information in colonial spaces to be a species of compression. Compression can be literal, as demonstrated by Kim's confiscation of some Russian spies' ample kilta (basket) and reduction of its contents into a small wad of necessary documents. Because information compression, argues Jacob, "indicates a shared cultural framework or set of cultural assumptions," it serves as "an imperial tool by which Britishness streamlines and conceals itself and its agents in order to infiltrate spaces" (159-60). This analytical framework allows us to view not only the British spy but also the British woman emigrant as an encrypted and compressed carrier of imperial information, including expansive imperial assumptions of gender, class, and race.
As a scholarly monograph that is also itself a storage-box of ideas, The Victorian Novel on File poses lingering questions that open doors to future scholarship. In this way, Jacob's book fittingly enacts the principles of information transfer and storage that it theorizes. Jacob asserts early in her book that rather than "asking what the objects of Victorian literature mean," it is necessary to "ask what they do" (3; emphases original). Jacob offers detailed analyses of objects interpreted through the lens of stored materials' (in)actions, relaying deep and enduring historical meanings, reshaped through the passage of centuries; the silver clasps in Daniel Deronda are a prime example. But her analysis loses its precision as the book progresses, leaving room for a more granular theoretical distinction between meaning and doing.
Jacob similarly skirts the distinctions between professional and amateur processing of stored data. Although Jacob discusses both the amateur detective and the professional spy and their respective quests for information in fiction, the two might have been more clearly juxtaposed. Hints of professional and institutional processing and suppression of information in busy, urban settings, such as "the closed courts of Little Dorrit's London" in which "even publicly circulating information will be swallowed up" (84), invite deeper exploration of professional information processing— e.g., case-specific document-filing by lawyers, curation conducted by archivists—amid the amateur, ubiquitous accumulation of data.
These caveats aside, The Victorian Novel on File is a treasure trove of information about information as well as a gripping read that guides its readers to conceptualize the reading of Victorian novels as the intellectual processing of stored information in the period under discussion. In its conclusion, Jacob's book offers a strategic presentist reading, to establish a continuity between information hoarding in the Victorian era and in our moment. As Jacob shows, Louisa Hall's dystopian novel Speak (2015), about discarded artificially intelligent robots, portray both virtual information storage and the very material accumulation of discarded virtual data containers, such as old phones and laptops. I could not help but immediately become conscious of the virtual copy of Jacob's book I had been reading, which I was sure to close and store in a folder on my laptop along with other academic PDFs, with a hope of revisiting in the future, not dissimilar to the physical scholarly books I own which remain similarly stored in my bookshelf. This, in fact, made me wonder about whether academics ever discard scholarly works or store all they can access, in both physical and virtual formats, for the deferred possibility of future consultation.
Finally, a review of a book about the storage of information in books will remain incomplete without a reference to its paratexts, which can, after all, reveal the information-gathering mechanisms and contexts of the book itself. The Victorian Novel on File, Jacob writes in her Acknowledgements, is a product of, on the one hand, the authorial transition from doctoral student to early-career faculty member, and, on the other hand, the social transition from early COVID-19 lockdowns to subsequent attempts to restore the in-person status-quo. Coincidentally, both of these contexts echoed my own experience of writing and publishing a first book, along with the third, personal context of childbirth and motherhood. This paratextual information now lies stored, along with Jacob's superb argument, in my computer and my mind, as I look forward to gathering more information from the conversations Jacob's book will engender as it vibrantly circulates in the field of Victorian studies.
Links to Related Material
Bibliography
[Book under review] Jacob, Priyanka Anne. The Victorian Novel on File: Secrets, Hoards, and Information Storage. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024. E-book. 208 pp. Online ISBN 9780198917960. $100.00.
Arondekar, Anjali. For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009.
Das, Riya. Women at Odds: Indifference, Antagonism, and Progress in Late Victorian Literature. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press, 2024.
Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Trans. Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
---. Paper Machine. Trans. Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005.
Freedgood, Elaine. The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.
Greg, W. R. Why Are Women Redundant? London: Trübner, 1869.
Hall, Louisa. Speak. New York: Ecco, 2015.
Levine, Caroline. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015.
Menke, Richard. Telegraphic Realism: Victorian Fiction and Other Information Systems. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008.
Richards, Thomas. The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire. New York: Verso, 1993.
Spieker, Sven. The Big Archive: Art from Bureaucracy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008.
Created 24 November 2025