"It's Out o' Sight Out o' Mind wi' You": Seriality, Compartmentalization, and North and South

Abstract

Abstract: This essay reconsiders the sometimes utopian claims made for the socially binding aspects of Victorian seriality, arguing instead that gaps in serial publication may have fostered a variety of cultural compartmentalization. In this light, I reevaluate Elizabeth Gaskell's ambivalent participation in the serialization of North and South (1854–55), seeing it as a form of resistance to the atomizing potential of seriality. Serialization taught Victorian readers a (new) way to contain their affective and political investments in particular narratives and hold them off to the side as they attended to other print and lived experience. North and South lays bare the stakes of compartmentalization—even as it ultimately stages the very effect it critiques.