Laurel Brake

Nineteenth-century media and the construction of identities

This collection of research in 19th-century media history represents some salient developments in the field. Taking as its theme the way the media serves to define national, ethnic, professional, gender, and textual identities, the volume addresses serials in the UK, the US, and Australia. High culture rubs shoulders with the popular press, likewise text with image, and feminist periodicals with masculine, gay, and domestic serials.

Time's Turbulence: Mapping Journalism Networks

This article treats the study of journalism networks as a research problem in itself. The origin of the piece lies in the unexpected range of connections that I noted in and across entries for serial titles and journalist entries while editing the DNCJ (Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism) with Marysa Demoor. That is, in the DNCJ journalists typically were associated with a number of diverse and telling titles, often in varied capacities; journal entries likewise named a plethora of journalists; and publisher entries revealed an unexpected diversity of titles. Entries of all types flagged affiliations that did not surface elsewhere in the DNCJ, with the result that vistas of affiliation yawned as one read, prompting curiosity about a ghostly dynamic of interlocking structures, referenced but otherwise invisible. For example, Joseph Bennett was the “chief music critic” of the Daily Telegraph, 1870–1906, but earlier he had worked on the Sunday Times, the Graphic, and the Pall Mall Gazette. 1 He also founded two titles, Concordia and Lute, and was an assistant editor and then acting editor of the Musical World, while he was working on the Telegraph. Flora Shaw began writing for Aunt Judy’s Magazine, became foreign correspondent for the Manchester Guardian and the Pall Mall Gazette, and ended working for the Times in that role, without the proprietor initially being told that his new staff member was female. 2 John Murray’s list of journals, other than his brief proprietorship of the Quarterly Review, includes the Journal of Science and the Arts; a daily (the Representative), which Disraeli edited; the monthly Murray’s Magazine; and the annual Admiralty List. 3 Punch’s list of contributors and editors over its long life included a high proportion of well-known names, both writers and artists who between them were affiliated with a breadth of other print titles, publishers, and genres radiating out from Punch and its table. 4

THE LONGEVITY OF ‘EPHEMERA’

A combination of the practices of the printing industry and social institutions has ensured that some of the nineteenth-century press has survived, inviting us to re-think its status as ephemera, and to examine the history of its survival and the meaning of the formats in which it has been preserved. Most of the centurys newspapers and periodicals available today were bound into annual or semi-annual volumes, produced by publishers precisely for the preservation and purchase of single issues in a more durable format by individual and institutional collectors, for private consumption or public circulating libraries. This article questions the assertion that Victorian serials were among the larger category of Victorian ephemera designed to ‘flare and fade in cultural circulation’, and without aesthetic properties. Comparison of bound volumes of serials with individual issues identifies the material culture of both formats in this instance of re-mediation.

Vernon Lee and the Pater Circle

When it appeared in June 1884, Vernon Lee’s Euphorion, the first of her studies of the Renaissance, was dedicated to Walter Pater.1 Preceding Henry James and following Mary Robinson, Pater is one of a succession of luminaries to whom Vernon Lee strategically dedicated her books in the 1880s, thereby anchoring and authenticating herself in English letters.2 Her relationship with Pater and his circle is integral to an understanding of how she took her place in the English literary scene of her day. The present chapter has two parts: first, a trajectory of the biographical and literary relationship between Lee and Pater, and their London-based, shared ‘set’. Located initially in Bloomsbury and then in Kensington at the Robinsons, it included her dedicatees Henry James and Mary Robinson while, with respect to the Lee-Pater nexus, its core comprised Walter Pater and his sisters Hester and Clara, the Humphry Wards, and Lee.3 The second part of this study scrutinizes a moment in the history of this triangle when, remarkably, Mary Ward, Lee and Walter Pater all published first novels within four months of one another in 1884–5.

Journalism and Modernism, Continued: The Case of W.T. Stead

It is notable that in modernist circles today “Victorian,” “journalism,” and “advertising” often retain, singly or in combination, the pejorative usage to which they were subject by the modernist press itself a century ago. “Victorian” commonly signals, audibly or tacitly, the alternative to modernism, with both terms momentarily reduced to unitary identities, while a press based on patronage is often favorably contrasted with the blight of advertising. Journalism is routinely opposed to Literature, and material in modernist journals is seamlessly termed literature, without noting its status as journalism.

Star Turn? Magazine, Part-issue, and Book Serialisation

Distinctions for the author, publisher, and reader between publication in the forms of part-issue and magazine serial were haunted by the volume and the book. Through comparison rooted in material culture I want to identify and then deploy distinctive characteristics of each format to help understand it and the other; and to invigorate the element of time and the ephemeral with respect to our perception of nineteenth-century discourses of higher journalism such as literature, history, and science. The ‘star turn’ refers to the privileging of different aspects of the commodified text — author, illustrator, editor, publisher, title of individual work, serial title — in part-issue and periodical. In a framework of material culture, I want to treat the wrappers and advertisers that, with the letterpress and illustration, make up part-issues and periodicals, as part of what we designate the ‘text’ to be studied. In this perspective the discourses of higher journalism such as history, literature and science are situated far closer to other commodities in the marketplace than in the reductive and apparently normative high cultural volume forms in which they primarily reach us, as seen in Figure 6.

The Art of the Novel: Pater and Fiction

Walter Pater’s second book was a novel. Issued first in 1885, Marius the Epicurean was his only experiment in this genre to be completed and published in his lifetime. Three years later, chapters of Gaston de Latour, his second novel, appeared serially in five parts as magazine instalments. Conceived of as a sequel to Marius, they seemed a canny bid by Pater and his publisher to reinforce his reputation as a novelist and to augment that of the critic. Gaston was a historical novel, similar in kind to Marius, and the linking of the two projects as parts of a series suggests a commercial eye, with the setting of the second in sixteenth-century France replacing that of the first in Antonine Rome. It is a strategy that twenty-first-century publishers and authors still deploy. During Pater’s lifetime, the commercial success of Marius, which went into a second edition within weeks in 1885, and the truncated publication of Gaston in 1888, are the sum of his public association with the novel form as a practitioner. But Pater’s persistence in novel writing also suggests that he took a writerly pleasure in the freedoms of fiction, and in the possibilities of the novel as a form. In so doing, Pater was participating in an interrogation of the novel that might be said, literarily, to characterize the 1880s. The hypothesis of Pater’s pleasure prompts one of the research questions of this essay: what are the advantages of fiction for Pater, and specifically those of the novel?

Introduction: The Lure of Illustration

By the mid-1840s, as the implications of wood engraving, the Daguerreotype, and the illustrated press were set out by their detractors and champions, feelings ran high, as the epigraphs suggest. Were wood engravings a welcome technique of popular and wholesome education, extending the benefits of beauty and/or usefulness to working-class readers, or did the pictorial press threaten the status of reason and understanding, and return the reader to ‘baby literature’, and ‘a lower stage’ as the Quarterly Review (QR) and Wordsworth aver? That these positions are represented respectively by articles in the Benthamite London Westminster Review (LWR) and the Tory QR indicate the ideological underpinning of the debate at the time.

Rebranding the News of the World: 1891 and After

As long noted, and as Chapter 2 suggests, 1891 was a turning point for the News of the World (NOTW).1 It was then, in mid-May, that George Riddell, a solicitor acting in association with Henry Lascelles Carr, W.J. Bell, and J. E. Gunn among others, first became involved with the newspaper, which had been lagging in circulation and devoid of financial investment for some years. In its obituary for Riddell in 1934, The Times suggested that the NOTW’s circulation had plummeted to as low as 30,000, although in its obituary of Emsley Carr in 1941 the figure given was 40,000 and in 1979 Stafford Summerfield, editor of the NOTW between 1960 and 1970, estimated it was ‘under 50,000’ in 1890 and 51,000 in 1891.2 Whether the figure is 30,000, 40,000 or 50,000, circulation had flatlined in an increasingly crowded market.3 The new personnel of the 1890s were key to the eventually revived fortunes of the early twentieth century, and their good working relationship clearly owed something to their previous connection through the Cardiff Western Mail, of which Lascelles Carr was a co-founder and editor-in-chief and his nephew Emsley Carr, was a journalist, while Riddell was their London-based legal representative. This triumvirate clearly worked well together and proved skilled when it came to overhauling the NOTW.4

Mister Pulitzer and the Spider: Modern News from Realism to the Digital

Germany (in which RIAS played a significant role, seeking to shape the course of events and as a result arousing the ire of the Stasi), and the building of the Berlin Wall. Schlosser shows how RIAS was targeted aggressively by the East German government, not just as a source of threatening propaganda, but also as a perceived centre for espionage. At times, the state persecuted East Germans who listened to the station, and engaged in significant jamming operations. By adopting such counter-measures, the East German state revealed its belief that RIAS was effective, albeit perhaps more as an outpost for spies than as a broadcaster. Schlosser also taps into a rich vein of listener correspondence, which gives us some sense of how East Germans responded to RIAS. This was admittedly a self-selecting group, drawn mainly from those who actively tuned in and provided feedback, and later (after the building of the Berlin Wall) those who defected to the West. Interestingly, many of those who wrote to RIAS were not primarily concerned with discussing programmes. They saw the station fundamentally as a link to the Western bloc, or a diplomatic outpost of the US, and in their letters asked for general help and information. Other contemporary surveys indicated that listeners actively compared RIAS with East German radio, and believed the truth to lie somewhere in the middle. Like Parker, Schlosser is interested in drawing out the responses of those on the receiving end of American information and propaganda activities. However, his use of German sources allows him to show that influence was not a one-way street, with East Germans simply reacting to US broadcasts. Rather ‘RIAS and the broadcasters of the German Democratic Republic were a constant influence upon each other’ (172). This seems a convincing account of the complex to-and-fro influences that radio exerted during the Cold War as a transnational medium of mass communication.