The Victoria Press Circle

Miranda Marraccini

mcm5@princeton.edu

Princeton University, United States of America

The Victoria Press began as an outgrowth of SPEW (Society for Promoting the
Employment of Women), a group of Victorian feminists who sought to provide new
avenues for women’s work in the printing industry. SPEW activists, led by Emily
Faithfull, set up a Press where women worked as compositors (Tusan, 2004;
Fredeman, 1974). Presswomen printed anthologies, tracts, and feminist
periodicals, including the monthly English Woman’s Journal (1858-1864), which
published mainly contributions by women. Publication of the English Woman’s
Journal (EWJ) spanned “the period between the failed attempt to reform
legislation that prevented married women holding property in 1857 and the
equally unsuccessful attempt to win female suffrage in 1867” (Mussell, 2008).
Articles in the EWJ promoted both of these reform measures and advocated for
female employment in different fields, as well as other contemporary feminist
causes. My use of the term “feminist,” though anachronistic to the movement,
has been accepted by other scholars writing about the period, who choose the
word to demonstrate an active and purposeful engagement with the
continuous struggle for women’s rights (see Phegley, 2004; Mussell, 2012;
Frawley, 1999).

My digital project, The Victoria Press Circle, funded by Princeton’s Center for
Digital Humanities, offers open-access network visualizations of the women
and men involved in the Victoria Press, based on contents of the EWJ and three
anthologies printed at the Press between 1861 and 1863. The Victoria Press
Circle’s first aim is reconstruction: the project helps to establish the
history of the Victoria Press, since there is no existing archive. This is
especially important since the EWJ includes a high percentage of
unsigned contributions (about 40 percent). None of the women who published in
the EWJ currently have significant digital representation. Identifying them as
individuals combats the critical undervaluing of texts in female-produced
periodicals, and studying them as a group highlights authors who may not
receive attention individually.

Furthermore, this project demonstrates collaboration. A network-focused
approach is particularly appropriate because the Victoria Press was constructed
on a material model of collaborative female labor. Its founders explicitly
attempted to build a hub of social interaction around the Press,
creating venues to promote women’s rights. SPEW members saw their office as a
meeting place for women advocating for female employment:

It is also the intention of the Society to render their office a depot for
information of every kind relating to the employment of women. Curious and
interesting facts will be collected. Extracts from newspapers, pamphlets, and
speeches on the subject, will be gathered together, and kept for the inspection
of members of the Society (EWJ, 1859).

In creating network graphs, I am reconstructing how the Presswomen built a
social network for themselves, not imposing intentionality on their project
(Weingart, 2013). All of my data will be freely available and downloadable in
.csv format for other researchers to access and use.

Ultimately, The Victoria Press Circle’s open-access website will display at
least three network visualizations, constructed in Cytoscape, of those involved
in the Press: one composite graph for the three anthologies; one graph for the
EWJ; and one combined visualization for all the publications. Cytoscape, though
a tool designed for biomolecular analysis, is more flexible than Gephi for
social network analysis, especially for specific functions of filtering based
on node and edge attributes and on network statistics (see Shannon, 2003).

In addition to literary contributors, my visualizations include compositors,
engravers, printers, editors, and paper manufacturers. Marianne Van Remoortel
(2015) has helped in identifying names of compositors from newspaper reports
and census data. While the individual model of many digital archives privileges
authors and minimizes others involved in literary production, the women of the
Press were working at every level of print culture to advance their social
aims. By valuing all types of contributions equally, my visualizations
illustrate their collaborative effort. The Presswomen’s project echoes
through current debates in digital humanities about the necessity of learning
to code for engagement in DH work (Dinsman, 2016). I believe that
programming can be a feminist act for scholars, just as involvement in print
culture was a feminist act for Victorian female authors. The artisan practice
of printing is analogous to the artisan practice of coding, and both are
affected by experiences of gender, race, class, and sexuality. I hope to use my
project to show how women worked with their hands and their pens in tandem, and
how I’m continuing that work today.

Weingart, S. (2013). “Networks Demystified 8: When Networks Are Inappropriate,”
The Scottbot Irregular. https://scottbot.net/
networks-demystified-8-when-networks-are-inappropriate/ (accessed 15
October 2016).