Early in the 1866 sensation novel, Armadale, middle-aged clergyman Mr Brock reads The Times to his friend and neighbour Mrs Armadale. The narrator emphasises the repetitive habit of their reading:

This introductory scene at first seems to illustrate Benedict Anderson's famous theorisation of the newspaper and its construction of national community. The newspaper reading sessions organise the monotony of Mrs Armadale's mundane life and give her a sense of the outer world that encircles her own changeless reality. The narrator continues,

The structure of this long and meandering sentence underscores the repetitive regularity of their habitual reading and thus crafts a sense of an eternal present.

Yet this time the reading ceremony is suddenly disrupted; Mr Brock sees an advertisement on the front page requesting communication from ‘Allan Armadale’, a boy of the same name as Mrs Armadale's son. The newspaper ceases to invoke an imagined community but calls specifically for someone Mr Brock knows in his ‘little group of characters’. An agitated Mrs Armadale insists that the advertisement's Allan Armadale must be another person: ‘Another family, and other friends… . The person whose name appears in that advertisement is not my son.’ In asserting her son's singularity, Mrs Armadale resists the serial imagining that associates her with the world of the newspaper and its readers. In the meantime, Mr Brock has the uncanny sense that their lives are affected by influences outside his knowledge and control. This is affirmed six years later, after Mrs Armadale's death, when Mr Brock sees another newspaper advertisement for this Allan Armadale, causing him to intuit that events ‘were tending steadily to some unimaginable end’.