Professor Publishes Book on Information Storage in Victorian Novels

Assistant Professor of English Priyanka Jacob published “The Victorian Novel on File: Secrets, Hoards, and Information Storage” Oct. 8 with Oxford University Press.

Jacob said the idea for the book arose in 2018, after she’d been writing smaller pieces of the topic in the form of articles, expanding on her dissertation. She sent the manuscript out for peer review in 2021.

The book focuses on how novels in Victorian England used paper — referenced as storage vessels for information. At one point in the 19th century, people struggled to know what to do with so much paper information they destroyed “valueless” paper records, but those destructions had to be recorded, creating another paper trail, according to Jacob.

“This is, I argue, a different way of thinking about the novel,” Jacob said. “It’s bringing media and information studies together with a materially grounded look at cultural history in addition to analyzing the form of the novel. That’s, I think, really distinct about my particular scholarly approach.”

Jacob said she’s written about related topics before, including in her doctoral dissertation, which was on material objects in Victorian novels. The book became a separately established idea in 2018.

“It’s been a long road, certainly for writing, fairly early on, and to me that was the really big step of identifying this different framework,” Jacob said. “I had moved into thinking about media and information studies, thinking about the book as a storage medium and thinking about 19th- century information culture and information overwhelm.” 

Jacob said she looks at two main aspects of information in novels — how it’s sometimes mentioned without being revealed, and how it’s collected.

“They might be amassed in strange places like in dust heaps in a Dickens novel or in paper files in sensation novels like ‘Lady Audley’s Secret’ or ‘The Woman in White,’” Jacob said. “Secrets get kind of gathered, accumulated but not necessarily transmitted, revealed, exposed.” 

“The Victorian Novel on File” is Jacob’s first book, and she said she struggled during the pandemic with managing both the book and her young children.

“It was a very long road, and there was a lot to balance along the way,” Jacob said. “I will say that I felt more and more I had more and more faith in my argument and that what I was doing was distinct and interesting and that I wanted to do it. And so that was really heartening because writing can be hard, but I did feel that I was driven to write it.” 

Jacob said Loyola helped her in publishing her book by funding her participation in the National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity, the university’s faculty success program.

Alongside her Victorian 18th and 19th century undergraduate classes, Jacob said she has taught a graduate seminar called “The Paper Trails of Victorian Literature.” The class discusses the material history of paper and information as well as communication technologies in the 19th century.

Jacob said she hopes readers will begin to think about the novel not only as stories but also as objects, opening the door to further discussion on the use of the novel as a form of storage for history.

Fourth-year English major Keira McCarthy said she has taken two of Jacob’s classes — The Novel and Its Secrets and You’ve Got Mail: Epistolary Narrative and Its Afterlife.

“We wrote letters to each other every week, like other students, to sort of get us in the mindset of how these letters were received and how people were writing these letters to other people,” McCarthy said.

Fourth-year graduate student Tori O’Dea has taken Jacob’s graduate class, worked for her as a teaching assistant and is currently doing research for her and said watching the project come together has been interesting.

“It’s been really exciting to kind of see the fruition of a project that she spent years on, and really inspiring to think ‘That’s what I’m hoping to do one day’ so seeing somebody go through that process is really inspiring.”

O’Dea’s dissertation is about letters as literary texts. She said she was influenced to select the topic after taking Jacob’s class.

“I think that she’s definitely bringing together material culture, the novel form narrative and information technology in new ways, helping us look at some of these novels in a new light,” O’Dea said. “I think what she does is really tie in 19th-century ideas kind of into the present day and show how these trends kind of continue through time.”

Suzanne Bost, professor and chair of the English Department, said she read Jacob’s book as part of Jacob’s tenure process, which has yet to be completed. She said she was impressed with how Jacob ties in race and colonialism with the Victorian era — an often overlooked intersection.

“I really value how she’s bringing in ideas of hoarding and storage and saving, which seems to be both contemporary as well as Victorian, and thinking about how archives are made,” Bost said. 

Jasper Cragwall, an associate professor and director of undergraduate programs, said he also read Jacob’s book for her tenure process and said he found it wonderful.

“It’s lyrical and constantly probing,” Cragwall said. “It takes an enormously fresh approach to profoundly conical texts. Sometimes in scholarship, in the humanities, we can go off and find things that nobody’s ever read before and bring them to our attention, and what Priyanka did was to drive at the heart of books that everybody thinks they know really well and resituate them in really interesting and provocative ways.”