Richard Salmon

‘A Simulacrum of Power’: Intimacy and Abstraction in the Rhetoric of the New Journalism

In his autobiography, published in 1884, Edmund Yates, then editor of The World, claimed to have invented ‘that style of “personal” journalism which is so very much to be deprecated and so enormously popular’ (Yates 1884, 1 278). The date given for this event is precise — 30 June 1855 — as is its location, in an article for Henry Vizetelly’s Illustrated Times, entitled ‘The Lounger at The Clubs’. However one might judge the accuracy of Yates’s (characteristically self-promotional) claim, it serves to introduce both a significant shift in the history of journalistic practices and the terms in which this shift was commonly understood. By his use of the phrase ‘“personal” journalism’, Yates offers a means of characterizing a form of popular journalistic discourse which extended, with a certain continuity, from the mid-nineteenth century to the ‘New Journalism’ of the 1880s and beyond.1 Conversely, when recalling a later moment in his career, he accounts for the refusal of J. T. Delane, the editor of The Times, to be interviewed for his series ‘Celebrities At Home’ by invoking ‘the old-fashioned theory that the editor of a newspaper should be an impersonal myth’ (Yates 1884, II 168). While such oppositions between ‘personal’ and ‘impersonal’ modes of journalism are no doubt familiar to most historians of the nineteenth-century press, however, the normative (or ideological) function served by these terms has received little attention. In this chapter, I attempt to reassess the project of the New Journalism by focusing upon a number of contemporary debates in which the conceptual basis of journalistic rhetoric was directly addressed.

The Literature of Labour: Collective Biography and Working-Class Authorship, 1830–1859

This chapter examines the role of collective biography, a genre comprising brief didactic and inspirational sketches, in the narrative construction of working-class authorship during the mid-nineteenth century. In the three decades separating G. L. Craik’s The Pursuit of Knowledge Under Difficulties (1830) from Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help (1859), collective biographies of writers (chiefly poets) affiliated to the ‘labouring class’ flourished. Focusing especially on the work of Edwin Paxton Hood (1820–85), whose books include The Literature of Labour and Genius and Industry, the chapter assesses the ways in which these biographical compendia challenge prevailing assumptions about the division between manual and mental work, yielding new insights into the labour of literature.

‘What the World Says’: Henry James’ The Reverberator, Celebrity Journalism and Global Space

Abstract This essay examines the influence of late nineteenth-century transatlantic celebrity journalism on the conception of Henry James’ novel The Reverberator (1888). A relatively neglected work in James’ canon, The Reverberator is known for its satirical treatment of the ‘mania for publicity’, but the depth of its engagement in contemporary debates on the ‘New Journalism’ in Britain and equivalent journalistic practices in America has not been fully recognized. Inspired by two documented cases of transatlantic controversy generated by Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, The Reverberator explores the mass mediation of cultural conflicts in an age of telecommunication and the incipient globalization of geographical space. The essay focuses in particular on James’ response to the furore surrounding Julian Hawthorne’s purported ‘interview’ with James Russell Lowell, published in October 1886: an example of the type of celebrity culture often associated with the New Journalism and inscribed in such textual forms as the interview, gossip column and cable news report.

The Subverting Vision of Bulwer Lytton: Bicentenary Reflections (review)

VICTORIAN STUDIES reviews and critical essays about the developing area of books for children. Written entirely (as far as can be ascertained) by Trimmer during the years 1802–06, when children’s books of every kind and quality were flooding the market, The Guardian shaped the development of children’s literature. Grenby shows Trimmer to be more radical and less censorious than she is often made out to be (usually because of her denunciation of fairy tales), and he argues persuasively that her efforts were instrumental in making writing for children a responsible, respected, and economically viable area of literature. Myers’s work was not exclusively concerned with children’s literature, but it is in this arena that she made her best-known contributions. Culturing the Child is both a significant book in its own right and a fitting tribute to a scholar who believed that, from its earliest days, writing for children was—and needed to be—concerned with fundamental moral questions: “how shall I live my life, what’s important, what values do I embrace?” (vi). These were the questions she regularly put to herself, and they engendered generous, original, and enduring contributions to scholarship, both her own and those of others who have been influenced by her. Kimberley Reynolds University of Newcastle

The Right to Privacy/The Will to Knowledge: Henry James and the Ethics of Biographical Enquiry

Throughout his literary career, Henry James was a strident critic of the prevailing forms of biographical enquiry. This aspect of James’s thought is no doubt familiar to readers of such fictional texts as ‘The Aspern Papers’ (1888) and ‘The Figure in the Carpet’ (1896), or of his numerous critical commentaries on writers as diverse as Robert Louis Stevenson, George Sand, Gustave Flaubert, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Yet in spite of the ubiquity of such references to biography and other forms of biographical representation within his writings, James’s apparently excessive and agonistic concern with the preservation of an authorial ‘right to privacy’ has rarely been taken seriously by his critics. On the one hand, this concern is often subjected to the very act of biographical reading which it aimed to forestall: following a logic which he himself often dramatised, James’s endeavour to frustrate the desire for biographical knowledge is used as evidence to support the existence of such knowledge. Thus, James’s most influential biographer, Leon Edel, found little difficulty in accommodating his subject’s resistance to enquiry without otherwise disturbing the hermeneutic assumptions of his own biographical practice.2 On the other hand, James’s habitual defence of the value of ‘privacy’ has also been viewed as symptomatic of an essentially conservative mode of cultural criticism, one which is designed to occlude the legitimate, democratic demand for openness or transparency in the field of biographical and journalistic discourse.3