Beth Palmer

“DANGEROUS AND FOOLISH WORK”: EVANGELICALISM AND SENSATIONALISM IN ELLEN WOOD'S ARGOSY MAGAZINE

This article examines a little-researched but vitally important aspect of Woods career, her editorship of the Argosy magazine. It argues that as author-editor Wood gave the suspect concepts of sensational “emotion” and “feeling” a moral purpose by appropriating the Christian framework of evangelical discourse within her magazine. In doing so, she not only replied to critics, but made the point that sensation fiction could be conservative and Christian, as well as risqué and transgressive.

Investigating Charles Reade, the Pall Mall Gazette and the ‘Newspaper Novel’

For many critics Charles Reade (1814–1884) has seemed to fulfil Henry Mansels disparaging definition of the ‘newspaper novelist’ as a naive appropriator who takes the ‘outline of his story … ready-made’ from the ‘criminal reports of the daily newspapers’. However, this article argues that Reades use of the press for source material, usually perceived as unsophisticated or plagiarizing, has over-shadowed the other ways in which he operated strategically and innovatively within networks of press production, influencing the press as much as it influenced his fictions and helping to usher in a new form of journalism that would come to be known as investigative. Reade, and particularly his relationship with the Pall Mall Gazette, begins to trouble the idea of the newspaper as a ‘separate and distinct form of printed text’ whose power relies on difference from other print forms. He saw the novel and the press as interdependent. For Reade the novelist had a duty to make private inequities public and to do so h...

ELLA HEPWORTH DIXON AND EDITORSHIP

Ella Hepworth Dixon took on the editorship of the monthly magazine the Englishwoman between March and August 1895 at an exciting moment in the history of womens involvement in the periodical press. This essay seeks to shed as much light as possible on Dixons editorship, seeing the choices she makes about contributors, content and style as fundamentally influenced by her wide-reaching understanding of female roles at the fin de siècle. Throughout her life, both before and after working on the Englishwoman, Dixon was interested in editorship: the methods by which editors worked, the relationships forged with their contributors and the ways in which the editorial role might adapt to changes in publishing conditions. Thinking carefully about editorship—in her magazine and in her fiction—also entailed considering the varying expectations held about womens roles in the periodical press. The six months of Dixons editorship of the Englishwoman gives us a window into late-century female journalistic endeavour that differs markedly from the narrative of drudgery lacking editorial opportunity or authorial autonomy which she had provided in The Story of a Modern Woman the year before.

The Victorian Press and the Fairy Tale (review)

Despite the rich detail of the text, the conclusion is disappointingly vague: at just over one page, it is more a personal reflection of the importance of the project for the author than a conclusion so-called. That Shakespeare is probably not as ubiquitous in today’s culture as it was in Victorian times seems an obvious conclusion to make, and this flat ending rather undermines the scope of the book as a whole. Young’s approach is more thematic than that of other Punch scholars like Patrick Leary, who have analysed the organisation and production of the magazine itself, its market, and its potential readers in more detail. However, Young’s work is part of a return to more in-depth studies of single periodicals, and for this it must be welcomed. It will be as important for scholars seeking to examine Shakespeare’s place in Victorian popular culture as it will be for researchers of Punch. My own research has involved extensive archival work on the Punch collection, now held at the British Library. A little used resource is the Contributor Ledgers from 1843, which in Volume One record authors, artists, and suggestors, and in Volume Two record the work of the salaried members of staff, the Punch Brotherhood. Such ledgers are crucial in identifying the social networks which underpinned the Victorian periodical press, as RSVP’s 2008 conference highlighted. Young’s work demonstrates how to begin embedding the returns from the ledgers into a thematic and applied analysis; each article, where it can be ascribed, is duly referenced. The result is a more cohesive profile of what each writer’s and artist’s contribution to the character of the magazine actually was. In this way, this book demonstrates the potential for further research on Punch, to reassess its popularity and examine the wider social networks of the periodical press in which it operated.