Children of the Ghetto was published in 1892, just one year after George Gissing's New Grub Street (1891) and five years before Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897). These contemporaneous novels offer widely divergent accounts of the newspaper and emerging new media. New Grub Street presents a stark portrayal of the 1880s literary marketplace, where hack writers flourish at the expense of serious literature. The capitalist marketplace and literary production are so intermingled that characters are warped by the pressure to generate literary outputs. Marian Yule, for instance, describes the constant production of text as a ‘desert of print’, one that robs her of personhood and the potential for self-actualisation. The literary marketplace renders publishers, writers and readers into bits and pieces valued only for their use value. People become fragments of text, rather like the short blurbs that the fictional Chit Chat – based on the weekly magazine Tit-Bits founded in 1881 – supplies for the ‘reading multitude’. Published just a few years later, Dracula, by contrast, presents the potential for an integrated information system. Mina collects and collates journals, newspaper clippings, letters and phonograph recordings to craft a readily accessible portfolio of information about Dracula, thereby enabling the group to collaborate on the best way to defeat him. In Mina Harker, Dracula conceives the writer not as an artist but as a collator of information. Her transcriptions draw upon a wide array of text and new media, such that the novel invokes a larger information system crossing national boundaries. She memorises information, including European train times, to enable the group's pursuit of the vampire. Dracula envisions the world as an interconnected system of trade, information and media.

Thus, Dracula suggests the possibility of a modern information system connecting the globe while also fostering a British, European and American alliance, while New Grub Street emphasises the capacity of the print media to divide, impoverish and fracture individuals and their communities.

These three novels, published in the same decade, reveal widely divergent visions of print and new media. Plotting the News has argued that nineteenth-century novels responded to changes in the newspaper press through its incorporation into narrative, metaphor and other formal qualities.