ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how ‘spreadable’ nineteenth-century literature is enmeshed in institutional, architectural, and social concerns. A consensus in transmedia research holds that people cannot simply transfer the contemporary situation of media convergence, which gave rise to theorizing transmedia storytelling in the first place, to previous historical periods. George Gissing saw Besant as a literary businessman. An online exhibition at Newcastle University explores Besant as one of the first authors who employed an agent in 1883, while before this time, his collaborator James Rice effectively played the role of unsalaried literary agent. As late as in the 1940s, however, a German edition of The Battle of Dorking was issued to the Wehrmacht under the title Was England Erwartet, to boost the morale of German troops. The pamphlets emerging from The Battle of Dorking are clearly space media rather than time media, but they are a good example of a literary sprawl that has both synchronic and diachronic vectors.
