Caroline Sumpter

THE CHEAP PRESS AND THE ‘READING CROWD’

The image of the cultured classes buffeted by the mass, a speck within and alienated from the reading crowd, is familiar from both fin-de-siècle and Modernist accounts of mass culture. Thackeray, however, was writing in 1838, two years after the stamp duty had been lowered to a penny, when a significant number of cheap commercial papers began to emerge. It was not, of course, just in the late nineteenth century that cheap print could seem to evoke the complexities of modernity, revealing shifting relationships between the individual and the mass, between class and culture, and between culture and democracy. For Thackeray in the 1830s, such mass reading was already symbolic of urban experience an experience that could seem as elusive as the city crowds themselves. This article explores the evolution of a metaphor that shapes a diversity of writings on the press, from Thackeray to Conrad: the curious image of the ‘reading crowd’. Contextualizing its changing meanings not only enables us to see the way theories of group behaviour shaped a model of serial consumption, but might offer valuable insights into the nature of anxieties about both. Victorian debates about the rationality of newspaper readers have already been touched upon in a number of contexts. Aled Jones has offered a fascinating account of the influence of hypnotic and other theories of mental process on mid-Victorian constructions of newspaper consumption (73 97), while Dallas Liddle has argued that fears of irrational ‘mob’ readerships shaped mid-century debates over signed and anonymous journalism (31 68). Mark Hampton has claimed that faith in the British press’s role as an educational agent a function that assumed the rationality of readers was on the wane from the 1880s onwards (‘Liberalism’ 72 92; Visions 75 105). Yet within these accounts, the metaphor of the ‘reading crowd’ with its links to wider cultural theories of group contagion and hysteria has received no sustained attention. Touched upon by John Carey and D.L. LeMahieu in the context of fin de siècle and twentieth-century constructions of mass culture, its evolving historical meanings throughout the Victorian period particularly as applied to the readers of the cheap press have yet to be fully explored.

Anthropology, Socialist Prediction and William Morris’s Commonweal

ABSTRACT In the late nineteenth century a number of writers turned to anthropology to predict a socialist future. They included prominent revolutionary socialists such as Friedrich Engels, William Morris and members of the Socialist League. Contextualizing the appropriation of the anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan by such writers, this article also pays particular attention to socialist popularizations of anthropology, particularly those by Morris and his fellow writers in his penny weekly, the Commonweal. Focusing on Morriss articles on ancient society helps to illuminate his own understanding of history, art and socialism. It also sheds new light on his predictive fiction News from Nowhere, which was originally read alongside Commonweal non-fiction. Both, I will argue, encouraged readers to see the future in the struggles of the ancient past.

‘I wonder were the fairies Socialists?’: The Politics of the Fairy Tale in the 1890s Labour Press

In Keir Hardie’s 1895 fairy tale, ‘Jack Clearhead’, the reader first encounters the maiden ‘Social-Ism’ imprisoned within a dungeon, with the ‘Press Curs’ attempting to tear a piece out of her dress. As the tale’s publication in the Labour Leader demonstrates, however, such movements were developing a media voice of their own: the 1890s, key years in the genesis of British socialism, was also a seminal period in the development of the labour press. As Oscar Wilde published his fairy tales for middle-class and coterie audiences, the Labour Leader, the Clarion and the Labour Prophet were also rewriting this genre. The afterlives of these texts could hardly be more different. Wilde’s fictions remain familiar to twenty-first-century audiences, while Keir Hardie’s fairy tales are neglected curiosities even within labour history.

No Artist has Ethical Sympathies: Oscar Wilde, Aesthetics, and Moral Evolution

“ There is no mode of action , no form of emotion, that we do not share with the lower animals” (137). This evolutionary claim is not attributable to Darwin, but to Oscar Wilde, who allows Gilbert to voice this bold assertion in “The True Function of Criticism.” While critics have long wrestled with the ethical stance and coherence of Wildes writings, they have overlooked a significant influence on his work: debates concerning the evolution of morality that animated the periodicals in which he was writing. Wilde was fascinated by the proposition that complex human behaviours, including moral and aesthetic responses, might be traced back to evolutionary impulses. Significantly, he also wrote for a readership already engaged with these controversies.

Machiavelli Writes the Future: History and Progress in Richard Jefferies's After London

Writing in Scrutiny in 1938, Q. D. Leavis suggested that Richard Jefferies “was one of those comprehensive geniuses from whose work you can take whatever you are inclined to find” (203). One early reader who was certainly inclined to see his own political hopes in Jefferies’s writing was William Morris. En route to an 1885 meeting with Yorkshire socialists, Morris famously became engrossed in one of Jefferies’s novels. In his autobiography, Edward Carpenter recalled:

History and politics

If Hegels famous definition, Weltseele zu Pfer? de, can be applied without fear of hyperbole to a historical figure, it can surely be applied to Alexander the Great. True, the German philoso? pher coined this epithet for Napoleon, whom he had glimpsed on horseback after the battle of Jena, and indeed it also fits the empereur, too, for without his actions, and the reactions they caused, modern Europe is inconceivable. In the same way the Hellenistic oikumene and its offshoots, the universality of the Roman Empire and Christianity, are in the end inconceivable without Alexanders revolutionary impact in many fields. It was a revolution ? as momentous for subsequent life and thought as the discovery of America and the demonstration that our universe is not geocentric... ? (Moses Hadas). The fact is that few exceptional personalities belonging to mankinds past have aroused such enthusiasm in biographers and historians as Alexan? der, the son of another figure of historical stature, Philip of Macedon. Witness the famous Einleitung, having all the character of a fervent hymn, that precedes the Geschichte Alexanders des Grossen by J.G. Droysen (1835), a book which, though superseded in many of its details, still stands out as a memorable historical exposition and above all a work of art, overshadowing many subsequent monographs which appear feeble and often pedantic in comparison. This is true, for instance, if only partially so, of the picture of this age and leader drawn by K.J. Beloch (Griechische Geschichte, 2nd ed., vols. III and IV, 1922-1927). According to this author, Alexander was neither a great statesman nor a great strategist, for it is argued that the bulk of his political successes are to be attributed to his father, Philip, and that his three decisive victories over the Persians are really due to the strategical genius of Parmenion. Yet despite these evident prejudices, stemming from a rationalistic ? professorial? aversion to that brilliance that transcends all ?normal? human standards, we are indebted to Belochs sober criticism for having clarified many details. Above all, he placed the incisive historical role of Philip, heralding the achievements of his son and heir, in true perspective, and pointed to the essential part the above-mentioned Macedonian general had in the military feats of the young king during the first half of his rule.

Serialising Scheherazade: An Alternative History of the Fairy Tale

‘The custom, in periodicals, of sustaining interest by happily-conceived divisions of the plot, may perhaps be traced to this subtle artifice of Scheherazade’, James Mew observes in the Cornhill Magazine in 1875.1 Mew was not the first writer to make the analogy between the skills of the fairytale narrator and those of the magazine novelist: for Dickens, Mrs Gaskell was famously ‘my Scheherazade’, spinning artfully rationed weekly instalments for the readers of Household Words.2 In fact, both echoed enterprising editors from the previous century, who made literal links between Scheherazade and serialisation. While the first English novel serialised in a newspaper, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, was still running in the Original London Post, the Churchman’s Last Shift was entertaining its readers with ‘The Voyages of Sinbad’. Three years later, in 1723, the Arabian Nights began appearing thrice-weekly in Parker’s London News. Making good use of its heroine’s mastery of pleasurable postponement, the serialisation took over three years to come to completion.3

Myths of Origin: Folktale Scholarship and Fictional Invention in Magazines for Children

‘As the “boy is the father of the man,” it may not be amiss to draw the attention of our young readers to the boyhood, if we may so term it, of England’, the Boys of England announces in 1866. Picturing a liberal history of continual ascent, the author marvels ‘What magic has transformed the howling young savage of the wilderness — the wolf-hunter of English woods and hills — into the brave yet refined, muscular yet withal gentle boy reader of this Journal?’3 It was not just cheap boys’ weeklies that presented English youth as the apex of evolutionary development, and marvelled at the process that had brought them there. Many juvenile magazines were fascinated by that same quest for origins — with tracing national, racial, cultural and linguistic roots.

‘All art is at once surface and symbol’: Fairy Tales and fin-de-siècle Little Magazines

Referring to his second collection of fairy tales, Oscar Wilde famously claimed that ‘in building this House of Pomegranates I had about as much intention of pleasing the British child as I had of pleasing the British public’.3 Wilde’s comment is arch, but is also commercially shrewd, a knowing attempt to capitalise on a lucrative niche market. Expensive, sexually explicit fairy-tale editions, including Sir Richard Burton’s The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, had already circulated among connoisseurs of erotica. In the wake of Wilde’s collections, Aubrey Beardsley was inspired by Cinderella in the Yellow Book, while fairy tales were written by his fellow contributors Evelyn Sharp, Vernon Lee and Max Beerbohm.4

Conclusion: Myth in the Marketplace

My epigraphs may already seem familiar. The fairy tale is the truest form of storytelling: not just because it is the first literature of childhood, but because it is a vital form that recapitulates the childhood of mankind. Among storytelling’s destroyers is the newspaper, the agent of a distorted information age that has killed folk culture, cheapened experience and engendered a loss of moral value. This is not W. B. Yeats, writing in the 1890s, but Walter Benjamin, writing of the transfigured mental landscape after the Great War in his 1936 article ‘The Storyteller’. While fairy tales speak in distinctive ways to each political moment, nineteenth-century constructions of the genre have left their mark: not only in the twentieth century, but also in our own.