Print in Transition, 1850-1910: Studies in Media and Book History

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Print in Transition, 1850–1910

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Also by Laurel Brake INVESTIGATING VICTORIAN JOURNALISM (co-editor with Lionel Madden and Aled Jones) NINETEENTH-CENTURY MEDIA AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF IDENTITIES (co-editor with Bill Bell and David Finkelstein) PATER IN THE 1990s (co-editor with Ian Small) SUBJUGATED KNOWLEDGES THE ENDINGS OF EPOCHS: Essays and Studies (editor) THE YEAR’S WORK IN ENGLISH STUDIES, Volumes 63 to 68 (editor) WALTER PATER

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Print in Transition, 1850–1910 Studies in Media and Book History Laurel Brake Reader in Literature and Print Culture Birkbeck University of London

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© Laurel Brake 2001 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 0LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2001 by PALGRAVE Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE is the new global academic imprint of St. Martin’s Press LLC Scholarly and Reference Division and Palgrave Publishers Ltd (formerly Macmillan Press Ltd). ISBN 0–333–77047–1 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Brake, Laurel, 1941– Print in transition, 1850–1910 : studies in media and book history / Laurel Brake. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–333–77047–1 1. Publishers and publishing—Great Britain—History—19th century. 2. Publishers and publishing—Great Britain—History– –20th century. 3. English periodicals—History—19th century. 4. English periodicals—History—20th century. 5. Sex in mass media—Great Britain—History—19th century. 6. Sex in mass media—Great Britain—History—20th century. 7. Pater, Walter, 1839–1894—Career in publishing. I. Title. Z325 .B738 2000 070.5'0941'09034—dc21 00–055678 10 10

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire

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For Esther and Oscar

Contents List of Figures Acknowledgements Introduction Part I 1

ix xi xiii

Media History: the Serial and the Book

‘Trepidation of the Spheres’: Serials and Books in the Nineteenth Century

3

2

Star Turn? Magazine, Part-issue, and Book Serialisation (i) Sight-reading/finding the rhythm (ii) Serialisation, production and consumption (iii) Star turn: from periodical to part-issue (iv) Format and meaning

27 27 32 45 47

3

The Serialisation of Books: Macmillan’s English Men of Letters Series and the New Biography

52

‘Doing the Biz’: Book-trade and News-trade Periodicals in the 1890s

67

4

Part II 5

6

Journals and Gender

‘Silly Novels’? Gender and the Westminster Review at Mid-century (i) The Westminster in the 1850s (ii) The topicality of gender: brandmarking the Westminster (iii) From the woman question to the homoerotic: the range of gender in the Westminster (iv) Gender in the North British Review: a comparator Gay Space: The Artist and Journal of Home Culture I Magazines and the Construction of Identity (i) The Artist and its readers, 1880–95 (ii) The Artist under Kains-Jackson (iii) Backlash? The complexities of the market II The Artist and the Challenge of Cleveland Street, 1889–90 vii

87 89 94 100 106 110 110 110 119 127 129

viii Contents

(i) (ii)

Columns, leaders, and readers Cleveland Street and The Artist

129 137

7

Gender and the New Journalism: the Yellow Book (i) Gender (ii) Decadence and journalism (iii) The Yellow Book and the New Woman (iv) The New Journalism (v) The New Woman and the New Journalism

145 145 152 155 161 169

8

Marketing Notoriety: Advertising the Savoy

171

Part III 9

Print and Gender: the Publishing Career of Walter Pater, 1866–95

Studies and the Magazines

181

The Politics of Illustration: Ruskin, Pater and the Victorian Art Press

197

11

After Studies: the Cancelled Book

213

12

Appreciations: Aesthetics in the Affray (i) ‘Prose’ and censorship

225 226

13

The Profession of Letters: Pater’s Greek Studies and their Market(s) (i) Journalism and literature (ii) Greek studies (iii) Greek Studies (1895) (iv) The periodicals and Greek studies (v) Text

248 248 249 252 258

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14

Pater, Symons and the Culture of the Fin de Siècle in Britain (i) The subject of Pater in the 1890s (ii) Symons, Pater and Decadence (iii) Pater and French culture (iv) Pater and the fin de siècle

268 268 271 274 280

Afterword

283

Notes

284

Bibliography

306

Index

321

List of Figures 1. Full-page advertisement for new Macmillan books in the publisher’s shilling monthly: Macmillan Magazine Advertiser (Macmillan’s Magazine, 56(1887), 16). 2. Advertisement for Chapman and Hall’s book and serial publications in monthly part-issue: ‘The Drood Advertiser’, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, no. 3 (1870), 8 (British Library, C.144.c.6). 3. Juxtaposed advertisements for travel literature and fiction: W. M. Thackeray, The Newcomes, no. 11 (August 1854), inside cover (British Library, C.58.f.8). 4. Advertisement for sale of secondhand periodicals by Mudie’s circulating library: Catalogue of the Principal Books in Circulation at Mudie’s Select Library (Jan. 1890), unnumbered end page of Part I. 5. Opening from Macmillan’s Magazine Advertiser, juxtaposing an advertisement for secondhand books and journals with that for a current journal: Macmillan’s Magazine Advertiser, Macmillan’s Magazine (April 1890), 12–13 (John Johnson Collection, Bodleian Library, Oxford). 6. Opening from part-issue, juxtaposing commercial graphics of wrapper with graphics of initial letter: W. M. Thackeray, The Newcomes, no. 11 (August 1854), inside front wrapper and p. 321 (British Library, C.58.f.8). 7. Advertisement for the Encyclopædia Britannica in part-issue: W. M. Thackeray, The Newcomes, no. 1 (Oct. 1853), back wrapper verso (British Library, C.58.f.8). 8. Advertisement for The Works and Correspondence of Robert Burns in part-issue: The Works and Correspondence of Robert Burns (Glasgow: William Mackenzie [1866]), Part III, cover, verso (British Library, 11609.i3). 9. Half-leaf advertisement on coloured paper, tipped in by Dickens’s publisher for their weekly journal All the Year Round, in part-issue edition of Edwin Drood: ‘The Drood Advertiser’, The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens, no. 3 (June 1870) (British Library, C.144.c.6). ix

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x List of Figures

10. Advertisement for the new terms of subscription to Bull’s Circulating Library: ‘The Nickleby Advertiser’, Charles Dickens, The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, no. 2 (May 1838) (British Library, C.144.b.4). 11. Thomas Wright’s prospectus for a non-serial biography: ‘Prospectus: The Life of Walter Pater, by Thomas Wright’ (London: Everett & Co., 1906), [1–2]. 12. Advertisement for William Dawson, newsagent/distributor, and publisher of the P.C. Supplement: Publishers’ Circular (14 March 1896), 314 (British Library, PP. 6481). 13. Masthead of P.C. Supplement and advertisement to the newspaper and serial industry for a high print-run, special issue to launch the Daily Mail: P.C. Supplement (4 April 1896), 1 (British Library, PP. 6481). 14. Explanatory leader and articles: Newagents’ Chronicle, I.i (20 June 1896), 3 (British Library, PP. 6481). 15. First number of the Authors’ Circular, addressed to professional journalists: Authors’ Circular, I.i (10 January 1898), 1 (British Library, Colindale). 16. Syllabus for the English School of Journalism: Authors’ Circular, I.i (10 January 1898), 16 (British Library, Colindale). 17. Advertisements for manuscripts for sale, for serialisation: Authors’ Circular, I.i (10 January 1898), 2 (British Library, Colindale). 18. Contents page: Artist and Journal of Home Culture, II (January 1881), 1 (British Library, PP. 1931 pcl). 19. Self-advertisement of The Artist at opening of volume III: Artist and Journal of Home Culture, III (January 1882) (British Library, PP. 1931 pcl). 20. Notice of change of title of The Artist: Artist and Journal of Home Culture, XV (September 1894), 322 (British Library, PP. 1931 pcl). 21. Memorial poem to J. A. Symonds: Artist and Journal of Home Culture, XIV (May 1893), 131 (British Library, PP. 1931 pcl). 22. Vignette, title-page: The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, 2nd edition (London, 1877). 23. Aesthetic embroidery inspired by Walter Pater’s fiction: Phoebe Anna Traquair, ‘The Progress of a Soul: The Victory’ (1899–1902) (Scottish National Portrait Gallery).

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Acknowledgements I want to thank the Society of Authors for welcome support during a period of unpaid leave when times were hard, the British Academy for research and conference funds in connection with a number of chapters in this book which otherwise would have remained undone, and the Research Committees of the Center for Extra-Mural Studies/Faculty of Continuing Education at Birkbeck, the English Department, and Birkbeck College for time and/or money on various occasions when both were in short supply. This book also has a considerable debt of an intellectual nature to the new course ‘The History of the Book’ at the Institute for English Studies in the School of Advanced Studies at the University of London, and to the Research Society of Victorian Periodicals, the conferences, scholars, and publications of which have provided regular stimulus and provocation. I also want to thank individual colleagues and postgraduate students – Isobel Armstrong, Dan Adamski, Margaret Beetham, Bill Bell, Julie Codell, David Finkelstein, Beryl Gray, Michael Harris, Lesley Higgins, Linda Hughes, Anne Humpherys, Aled Jones, Andrew King, Michael Slater, Mark Turner, Moira Vincintelli, and Carol Watts – whose own work, conversation, and example have contributed to these pages. My two ‘home’ libraries, the University of London Library in Senate House, with its rich collection of nineteenth-century periodicals, and the British Library at Bloomsbury/St Pancras and at Colindale have been invaluable in fostering the research presented here; I want to thank their staff for their ingenuity, helpfulness, and flexibility, and especially Mike Mulcay, Shereen Colvin and their colleagues at ULL. This book is also reliant on holdings in other libraries and the help of their librarians: the Lilly Library, Indiana University; Brasenose College Library, Oxford; the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford; the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, UCLA; Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin; and the Angeli-Dennis Collection, University of British Columbia. Lastly, I am grateful to Dr Chris Willis for her expeditious help in preparation of this manuscript for the press, and to Nan Fromer and J. P. Lavigne for their myriad acts of friendship and hospitality during the long gestation of this book. Throughout, the vitality of Jo-Ann and Simon Brake, and the good cheer of Jean Brake have been exemplary, my lights in the dark. xi

xii Acknowledgements

Versions of various chapters have appeared earlier as follows: Chapter 1: Serials and their Readers, 1620–1914, ed. R. Myers and M. Harris (Winchester, 1993), pp. 83–101; Chapter 4: Media History, 4.1 (June 1998), 29–47; Chapter 5: Victorian Periodicals Review, 33.3 (Fall, 2000) 247–72; Chapter 6.I: Nineteenth-Century Media and the Construction of Identity, ed. L. Brake, B. Bell, and D. Finkelstein (Basingstoke, 2000), pp. 271–91; Chapter 6.II: Historical Readers and Historical Readings, ed. M. Beetham and S. Levia, SPIEL 18 (2000) 136–49; Chapter 7: The Endings of Epochs, ed. L. Brake, Essays and Studies 1995 (London, 1995), pp. 38–64; Chapter 9: Literature in the Marketplace, ed. J. Jordan and R. Patten (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 289–305; Chapter 10: Interfaces, 15 (Dijon, 1999), 169–88; Chapter 11: Beauty and the Beast, ed. P. Liebregts and Wim Tigges (Amsterdam, 1996), pp. 115–26; Chapter 12: The Politics of Pleasure, ed. S. Regan (Buckingham and Philadelphia, 1992), pp. 59–86; Chapter 13: The Borders of Journalism, ed. K. Campbell (Edinburgh, 2000), pp. 119–40; Chapter 14: Walter Pater (1839–1894): The Forms of Modernity, ed. Elisa Bizzotto and Franco Marucci (Milan, 1996), pp. 279–97.

Introduction In the idiom of the material that follows, I want to address my readers directly, as Dickens does on the wrappers of his periodical Master Humphrey’s Clock! Over the years that I have researched this book, my subject of study has changed considerably. Where I once saw ‘periodicals’, I now see the wider and deeper category of serials, which includes newspapers and part-issues. Where I saw a contained historical archive, I now see a continuum of journalism and media, all of which are historical. And where I saw a disjunction between periodicals and books in the nineteenth century, I now view series and books as part of the same economy, both culturally and specifically within the period’s publishing industry. Lastly, I have enlarged the frame of the text that I examine. Where formerly I largely confined myself to the ‘editorial’ matter, however holistically and interactively, I now treat advertisements and wrappers as ‘text’. This is the case not only in those sites, such as the Yellow Book, where wrapper equivalent and advertising survive routinely, through its book binding and enhancement of the cover through the journal’s emphasis on art. I have tried to locate instances of survival among the vast majority of books, journals, and part-issues which carried advertisements and, in the case of journals, were accompanied by wrappers and advertising supplements. Due attention to these parts of ‘text’ both enhance our sense of the commodification of print in the period, and specifically strip away the aura of neutral disinterestedness from what is now defined as the high culture of its day. Middlemarch and The Newcomes read differently in their wrappers, and in cheap editions. In this connection I have found the work of Jerome McGann and N. N. Feltes invaluable. The potential field of study is vast, and provides a dramatic case for what scholars term ‘bibliographical control’. The studies here are sites, bore holes, through which sociologies of texts are explored. Despite the apparent diversity of my subjects, they are closely related, parts of a shared moment of conception in which I have been thinking through the nature of serialisation and serials. The first part, on ‘Media History’, explores relations among different forms of serials – part-issue, magazine serialisation, journals and newspapers, and relations between serials and books. It suggests that nineteenth-century books shared xiii

xiv Introduction

rhythms of serialisation with serials. ‘Magazine Day’ functioned culturally, and in the industry, for book lists and book distribution as well as for monthly magazines and part-issues. While the first two chapters are more purely theoretical and wide-ranging than those that follow, I have tried throughout the book to strike a balance between specific, material culture and archive research, and broader issues in the field. Gender is one of the most prominent of these issues. Having earlier come to the view that all periodical space was gendered, 1 I have been learning over the years how to read that space. The second part of Print in Transition addresses these problems in a variety of settings. Chapter 5 probes mid-century, higher journalism in connection with the Westminster and primarily, but not exclusively, the ‘woman question’. Chapter 6 treats gay space in a different kind of journal, a trade magazine, of a different period, the late 1880s and early 1890s. Chapters 7 and 8 consider magazines of the 1890s, one misogynist if decadent, and the other aggressively heterosexual. The final part, on the publishing career of Walter Pater, is a case study which brings together the implication of periodical with book publishing in the period, the dominant rhythms of serialisation, and the play of gender in the print culture of the day. Pater’s negotiation of authorship, gender and gender politics, and literature and journalism proves to be a rich and varied subject for my purposes. Print is, of course, always, in transition, of which at the beginning of the twenty-first century we are particularly aware. I am writing this on a screen, but far more radically I can also access news on the Internet – not normally newspapers in their paper format, but isolated news stories or information, without the layout, juxtapositions, and miscellany that newspaper reading involves. Like the twentieth-century librarians and publishers before them, providers of Internet news normally also delete the advertisements and other material deemed ‘ephemera’, including ‘unimportant’ stories. Certainly, the ‘transition’ we are undergoing from knowledge to information is every bit as important as the transition between the ‘old’ and ‘new’ journalism that took place in the latter half of the nineteenth century. In this case it replicates nineteenth-century patterns of retrospective distribution and storage. This brings me to my last point. It concerns that deracination of the study of media from its histories that has become a defining characteristic of the field of media studies and the training of journalists. Any attentive reading of print journalism today indicates a high degree of reflexivity in the genre: obituaries, leaders, news coverage, and features all frequently pertain to journalism itself. This discourse would be

Introduction xv

agreeably enhanced were more of its writers (and readers) familiar with media history before 1950. Few other writers are in this position. It is analogous to ignorance of the novel by contemporary novelists, as though Martin Amis had never read Fielding or Toni Morrison The Scarlet Letter. I have tried, therefore, to write Print in Transition conscious of both the historical nature of the archive and my own subject position within twenty-first-century discourse and media, and to keep the traffic moving between them. Media studies and media history need to ‘talk’ more than they do. London

L. B.

Part I Media History: the Serial and the Book

1 ‘Trepidation of the Spheres’:1 Serials and Books in the Nineteenth Century

The definition of the history of the nineteenth-century book, and the implication of the newspaper and periodical press in it are my subject. In the spirit of the new history of the book, with its emphasis on the history of reading, I want to suggest that, throughout the period, changes in the spheres of the serial and the book were interdependent, and that the apparent separateness of the two spheres is mitigated by a profound interrelatedness: the novel from the 1830s habitually fragments into part-issue; the monthly magazines over time ‘passed volumes and libraries of volumes through [their] pages’ (Shand 1879b: 227), and each issue of the Yellow Book in the 1890s appears as a bound volume. We also know that readers read and reread some periodical articles in the same way they were accustomed to read and reach for volumes of books: Mark Pattison notes in his diary of 1878, ‘Read for 5th or 6th time article on English Poetry in L.R. Oct. 1861’ 2 (Pattison 1878: f. 40 verso). Many newspapers and periodicals were customarily issued as annual and semi-annual bound volumes. How do the position of these ‘spheres’ and their characteristics change in relation to each other in the period? I want to begin by making four main points. (1) The origins of a significant tranche of periodicals throughout the period were contingent on books and the book trade; for example, the early nineteenth-century quarterlies called Reviews consisted allegedly of long essay/reviews of books. Their authority was predicated on their link with books; by their overall length, their aspiration to authority, and their leisurely frequency, they replicated the weightiness of books, which, together with their outbreaks of frenetic irascibility, managed to produce a balance of the stately and the topical. (2) In turn, authors and publishers of books alike came to view the periodical press as an extension of their sphere, 3

4 Media History

as shown in Figure 1. John Sutherland comments on Henry Colburn as an early nineteenth-century example: Colburn was quicker than his contemporaries to understand the interdependence of various book-trade sectors; notably the mutual interest of the publisher, the lending library and the opinionforming journal. One of his more controversial initiatives was to secure these links, by using his magazines to push his books to the library purchaser. His motives were low. But in this early form of diversified book-trade operation (he was variously library-owner, retail bookseller, magazine-proprietor, publisher) Colburn anticipated what is now termed synergistic patterns of publishing. (Sutherland 1986: 80) (3) Serials – part-issue and periodicals – were an important factor in forcing the reduction of the price of books during the period, in ending the expensive three-decker system in the 1890s, and with it the circulating libraries’ monopoly of the book market for the middle-class reader.3 (4) The growth and embedding of the newspaper sector of the nineteenth-century press were important catalysts in the fostering of reading – the professionalisation of journalism, literature and authorship, and the separation of journalism from ‘literature’ in its most general sense. Between December 1878 and October 1879 Innes Shand contributed anonymously an eight-part, serial article on ‘Contemporary Literature’ to Blackwood’s Magazine; or should I have written ‘Blackwood’s Magazine published an eight-part, serial article’, etc.? I want to pause over this because the phenomenon of the article initially published anonymously but now attributed, highlights characteristics of certain periodicals that both link them to and distinguish them from books. Dating from 1817, Blackwood’s was founded in a period when the influence of the anonymous quarterlies was at its peak, and Maga4 likewise adopted a policy of anonymity which, it may be argued, supports the corporate identity of the journal as a journal, and mitigates the differences of its individual contributors. In this respect, such periodicals – despite their multi-authorship and distinct fragmentation into articles on different subjects – present themselves to the reader as a whole, as a book does. Attribution deconstructs this illusion of homogeneity and splinters the text into a multitude of authors who are themselves constructed in our time as authors for our bibliographies, biographies, and catalogues, by virtue of a newly revealed oeuvre. The periodical, a casualty of the

‘Trepidation of the Spheres’ 5

1. Full-page (free) advertisement with quotations from other periodicals, for Macmillan books, by an established Macmillan author, in Advertising Supplement of Macmillan’s Magazine (1887).

6 Media History

process, is easily discarded, a husk whose kernels have been removed and eaten. The example of Innes Shand (and all the other contributors to periodicals whose names are unrecognisable to us) indicates the multivalence of nineteenth-century authorship then and now. Even when we learn that Alexander Innes Shand was a novelist, journalist, and critic,5 we are not much the wiser and, short of reading the oeuvre, will use our knowledge of the magazine not the author, Maga rather than Innes Shand, to inform our reading of his articles. In fact, Shand’s posture in these articles is that of an anonymous individual and a spokesperson for Maga; he uses the editorial ‘we’ and writes as a veteran contributor, using the Tory politics of the magazine to justify an excrescence of an attack on Gladstone, and a defence of Maga’s increasingly archaic policy of anonymity. In both cases, he seems to be writing simultaneously in two personae, as an individual and for the corporate entity of a collective and successive project which Blackwood’s represents. Shand’s ‘Contemporary Literature’ is a document in the history of reading, a contemporary construction of the professions of ‘literature’ and ‘journalism’. Written by a Tory and a journalist, it is a ‘reading’, and both individual and collective. It is striking that half of Shand’s instalments on ‘Contemporary Literature’ pertain fully to the newspaper and periodical press, and that the first three, about authors for serial publication, on ‘Journalists’, ‘Journalists and Magazine Writers’, and ‘Magazine Writers’, precede the following three about authors of books – ‘Novelists’, ‘Biography, Travel and Sport’, and ‘French Novels’ before finishing with ‘Readers’ and ‘Newspaper Offices’. Shand’s perception of the ‘literary profession’ makes clear his reason for giving journalism priority: for Shand journalism is the career path in the literary profession; writing books – and here significantly fiction occupies that entire sphere – is left to women: Novel-writing nowadays may be all very well, either for a George Eliot or a Mrs Oliphant, or for the active-minded female who has literary longings with social ambitions, and who would sooner be writing romances than reading them. But those [males] who devote themselves earnestly to the literary profession, whether for the sake of a livelihood or with the idea of influencing opinions, will naturally turn towards the journals or periodicals. In either case, and in the latter perhaps rather than the former, they may hope for exceedingly liberal remuneration; for the leading organs have abundance

‘Trepidation of the Spheres’ 7

of good work that must be regularly done by those who are competent to undertake it. ([Shand] 1878: 646) It is interesting to note that by this date, 1878, Shand is able to construct a detailed spectrum of the structure of the profession: There is scrambling in these quarters as everywhere else, and the best or most showy men must come to the front; but at all events there is abundance of consolation-stakes. … There is the broadest possible range of occupation and appointments, from the editors and chief contributors of the commanding oracles of opinion, down to the versatile utility-gentleman in the provinces who undertakes any department indifferently; or the industrious penny-a-liner in the city who hunts up stray scraps of sensation. ([Shand] 1878: 646) The feminisation of the novel as a subject in the Victorian period has been discussed in Edging Women Out by Gaye Tuchman (Tuchman 1989) and in Sexual Anarchy by Elaine Showalter (Showalter 1991), and in the 1880s and 1890s George Moore, Thomas Hardy, and other male novelists gendered their remarks about the constraints on the novel at the time: ‘Literature at Nurse’ was the title of Moore’s pamphlet in 1885. But, gender aside, in the Contemporary Review in 1891, Edmund Gosse erects a similar barrier between writers of fiction and journalism. His reason for the separation is not primarily based on gender, but on the total exclusion of journalism from the category of the profession of literature: ‘the novel, in short, tends more and more to become the only professional branch of literature’ (Gosse 1891: 534). At the same time, he also thinks little of fiction as a genre, contrasting it with ‘pure letters’, and lamenting the pecuniary success of the ‘vapid and lady-like novel’ title. By 1891 then, the conceptual separation of literature from journalism is clear on both sides, not only from the newspaper press (which had become more inclusive of literary news and reviews) but within the ranks of the army of part-time writers for the periodical press whom Shand called ‘the brilliant half-amateurs’ ([Shand] 1878: 650). Gosse was one of these, and George Gissing expressed a very similar view at this time in his novel New Grub Street. By 1891 two principal characteristics of nineteenth-century print culture are perceived – the ubiquity of fiction and the ubiquity of the press. In 1896 George Saintsbury reiterates, ‘Perhaps there is no single feature of the English literary history of the nineteenth century, not even the enormous popularisation and multiplication of the novel,

8 Media History

which is so distinctive and characteristic as the development in it of periodical literature’ (Saintsbury 1896: 166), but whereas Saintsbury goes on to connect the history of the century’s literature with the press, Gosse and Gissing conceptualise the two spheres in the 1890s as mutually exclusive. These two burgeoning facets of the development of print in the nineteenth century joined forces, for a limited period only, in their shared growth; fiction was precisely the genre which indissolubly linked the fortunes of the Victorian serial with those of the Victorian book (as shown in Figure 2), although links between the serial and the book preceded and exceeded the province of fiction. The number of serial titles between 1800 and 1900 increased exponentially from the fresh crop of quarterlies at the beginning of the century to the new annuals, monthlies, weeklies, thrice weeklies, Sundays, and dailies; the longevity of some (such as the Edinburgh, the Westminster, Blackwood’s; the Athenaeum, the Spectator, and Punch; The Times and the Morning Post) and the brilliance of others more shortlived (such as the Examiner, the Penny Magazine and the Northern Star) show the staying power of serials, the market for ‘intelligence’, and the quality on offer. The range of serial formats (from ‘Libraries’ to partissue to daily) and of functions (from the dissemination of news to the reviewing, advertising, and circulation of fiction) was flexible and politically and culturally powerful. The phenomenon of serials – their number, their range, their ubiquity – increased access to reading, the habit of reading, and the market for cheap books at a time when the standard price per volume stood at 10s 6d. It is noteworthy that the establishment of the system of the high-priced three-volume novel in 1815 was shortly followed in 1817 by the creation of Blackwood’s Monthly Magazine, which offered monthly instalments of novels, later to appear in volume form. Also in the wake of the expensive threedecker, Dickens’ success with the part-issue of Pickwick reintroduced a format which he and others used profitably and successfully to reach a wider audience than the circulating libraries or the booksellers of the 1830s served. From the 1840s, in addition to serial publications, various means of circumventing the high price of books stand out, involving publishers, retailers, and entrepreneurial distributors of books. The projects of circulating libraries and single-volume reprint series thrived, and cheap editions of ‘railway novels’ began to appear exclusively in stations from 1848, as shown in Figure 3. It is the period after the removal of the stamp and paper taxes in 1855 and 1861 respectively that I shall examine in detail. The metropolitan dailies and provincial

‘Trepidation of the Spheres’ 9

2. Chapman and Hall’s (free) advertisement for its firm’s book and periodical titles in Advertising Supplement of part-issue of Edwin Drood (no. 3, 1870), published by the firm.

10 Media History

3. The link between (railway) travel, touring, and reading in the nineteenth century is indicated by this wrapper for Thackeray’s The Newcomes (1854).

weeklies multiplied and the provincial dailies appeared, the older weeklies (such as the Athenaeum and the Spectator) were challenged by the Saturday Review, and the monopoly of the expensive Blackwood’s and Fraser’s by the new shilling monthlies such as Cornhill and Macmillan’s. While the frequency of these ‘lighter’ and family month-

‘Trepidation of the Spheres’ 11

lies caught out the quarterlies, their reign and authority were more profoundly affected by the new ‘heavy’ monthlies such as the Fortnightly Review in 1865, the Contemporary Review in 1866 and eventually the Nineteenth Century in 1877. One effect on the book of this prodigious accumulation of serial publications over the century pertains to the perception of time in relation to print culture. It may be noted from the account above that the new serials named appeared at intervals of increasing frequency, moving from quarterlies to monthlies to weeklies, to more than once a week, to dailies and to evening dailies. By the end of the century the ‘busy’ reader is the target of the New Journalism in the Review of Reviews. Even in 1879 Shand ponders the question of the ‘lasting vitality’ of the quarterlies ‘in these days when everybody is living so fast, that a quarter seems much the same thing as a century’ ([Shand] 1879a: 90). He decides wryly that their durability is related to their high rates of pay. Nor does Shand stop there; he notes that quarterly articles ‘almost inevitably’ are ‘behind the news’ and cites ‘the blots which have escaped the hasty correction of the thoughtful author’ ([Shand] 1879a: 92). At the same time he outlines the roles of the serials vis à vis books according to their frequency, and reserves the right of monthlies to ‘sit as judge in appeal on the more hasty opinions of the daily and weekly press’ whose respective functions are to ‘treat current literature as current news’ and to review widely ([Shand] 1879b: 242). Shand’s vacillation between hasty and thoughtful reviewing, in the dailies and quarterlies, leaves the monthly – the position from which he is writing – as the centre of judicious criticism. Shand is registering the regular, insistent, and cacophonous rhythms of the serial press: morning and evening, weekly, Sundays, monthly, and quarterly. The periodical press of the last two categories (and perhaps monthly part-issues?) also contributed emphatically to this noise and rhythm in their Magazine Day, when Paternoster Row worked flat-out to supply the retailers’ orders. The regularity and public nature of these issue days created numerous and large communities of readers, all of whom were reading the same publications at roughly the same time all over the country (see Figure 4).6 It was in the interest of book publishers to participate in this quickening rhythm induced by the proliferation of serial publications on a large and national scale. Book publishers bought into this rhythm and these communal readings, through copious advertisements in the press of their lists, which were issued monthly, and through creation of their own series of volumes – analogous to serials – organised variously

12 Media History

4. Periodicals as well as books were stocked and lent by Mudie’s, which offers annual subscriptions to secondhand periodicals in this advertisement of January 1890 from their Catalogue.

‘Trepidation of the Spheres’ 13

around topics (such as travel, biographies7) or publishing status (‘standard’ novels or classics, ‘railway’ fiction, an authorial edition, or a ‘popular’ edition); these ran and ran.8 But the ubiquity of the serial did mean that the non-serialised or non-series book title, by a new or unproved author, was a commercial risk. Publishers and authors preferred to rely on a system of pre-volume publication in the magazine or in part-issue, in which system book publication then ‘culminated’ the serial rhythm, often with the appearance of the book edition simultaneous with the last number in part-issue or in the magazine. Publishers and authors also relied on the huge purchases of the circulating libraries that provided a guarantee of sales and a means of distribution of both the serial and the volume forms. Shand, in an explanation of the advantages of pre-publication in Maga, defends Blackwood’s longstanding policy of the publication of serialised fiction (a genre which the weighty quarterlies excluded in favour of non-fiction) with the argument that serial fiction makes a better book than serialised nonfiction! Essayists and reviewers like Jeffrey and Sydney Smith, and, subsequently, like Southey and Hayward, might collect and reprint their articles; but it was in the shape of a miscellany of the fragmentary and fugitive pieces that were rescued from unmerited and unfortunate neglect. Each individual article had to stand on its merits; it was a stone cast at random, as it were, on the cairn which was to serve as a monument to the memory of the writer. By inserting the publication of works in serial form, ‘Blackwood’ passed volumes and libraries of volumes through his pages. A book that might have been ignored had it been brought out anonymously, or merely introduced by some slightly-known name, was there sure of extensive perusal and something more than dispassionate consideration. The subscribers to the Magazine had come to feel something of self-pride in the growing success and popularity they contributed to. At all events, they were predisposed to look kindly on the protégés whom Maga vouched for as worth an introduction. It was for the more general public afterwards to confirm or reverse the verdict. The débutant had the encouragement of knowing that he addressed himself in the first place to a friendly audience. ([Shand] 1879b: 227) Shand puts forward his view of the advantages of serial publication rather avuncularly here. Elsewhere, he is more frank in attributing the origin of some new periodicals to successful serial authors: ‘Unless each

14 Media History

of his stories is ushered in through the pages of a magazine, it seems to him that they have scarcely been creditably introduced; and, moreover, he expects a double profit’ ([Shand] 1879b: 244). This double profit was shared by publishers such as Macmillan and George Smith, who also created periodicals to bolster book publication. By attracting new and established authors to their highly paying and prestigious journals, the publishers aimed to secure authors for their firms’ lists. Moreover, house periodicals supplied free publicity for house book lists through their advertisements, and helped pay for themselves by the sale of advertisements to outside firms, such as the circulating libraries, some of which purchased and circulated house books. Thus the Cornhill carried ‘free’ advertisements for Smith’s list and paid advertisements for various other magazines and circulating libraries. Reviews were yet another form of publicity for books in the periodicals. Shand was quite critical about the adverse effects on book sales of the irregularity of the periodicals’ reviews and their haphazard reviewing policies, but he seems certain that a good review of a book enhanced its demand and reputation: Monthlies authors get unequal measure; and there are rising men who may fairly complain of being ignored; while some rival of similar, though inferior, pretensions, has the honours and the profit of general notice. The fact being, that, so far as authors are concerned, it is very much matter of luck, and partly matter of fashion. The name of the lion of a London season is naturally in people’s mouths; there is a run on his book at the circulating libraries; he has the art of making a thrilling narrative of adventurous travel or exploration; he has unearthed a race of anthropophagi in primeval forests, or has stumbled over a buried city or the traces of the lost tribes; or he may have broached some new and startling revelation, social, political, or religious, and be making a host of admiring proselytes. His book, for one cause or another, recommends itself to the handling of some clever contributor, who sees in it the materials for an article which shall be vigorous or original. Several writers are struck by the idea: two or three interesting papers make their appearance simultaneously, and others follow suit in due course. The subject of their praises has cause for congratulation; and if he has been brought so conspicuously before the public, he may have deserved it by superior literary talent and the graceful charm of his style. ([Shand] 1879b: 242)

‘Trepidation of the Spheres’ 15

Those periodicals which carried reviews (the majority of which were anonymous) could employ their authors in yet another capacity which was a concealed form of publicity, in reviewing favourably house publications or works by friends of the reviewer or publisher. Henry Colburn’s journals were well-known for this practice, and the weekly Athenaeum, famous for its hostility to puffing from its inception in 1828, in the last quarter of the century can clearly be seen to prop up the publishing world: almost all of its (anonymous) reviews of Swinburne’s prose and poetry were written by Swinburne’s close friend and house mate, Watts-Dunton, a regular reviewer for the Athenaeum at this time.9 Pausing for a moment over anonymity and signature, I want to explore briefly the relationship between the press and books in respect to authorship. For the first half of the nineteenth century anonymity was the rule for the majority of newspapers and periodicals, but while anonymous books did appear in this period, signature of some kind was the more common characteristic of this form of publication. By this time in Britain it was safe and even socially acceptable on the whole to be known in the public sphere as an author – but for men only; this respectability was gendered and excluded women. More prone to publish (and even write) anonymously, women may have sought freedom from discrimination in the overwhelmingly male world of publishing, but they also sought respectability – which did not extend to women who worked for wages or risked the taint of the public sphere. Between 1859 and 1865 signature made a breakthrough, in the publication of new monthly magazines – Macmillan’s and Cornhill, and the Fortnightly Review. But signature did not become universal by any means, with quarterlies and newspapers remaining resolutely anonymous longest. Newspaper bylines appeared late in the century, preceded by ‘Our Own Correspondent’ or in the case of columns, pseudonyms or initials. In the periodicals, reviews and political articles also tended to appear unsigned, with exceptions, through the century. This permitted both the ‘log-rolling’ found in the late period of the Athenaeum and the employment of women and unknowns. Out of this précis comes my point: many newspaper and periodical writers entered the social formation of ‘authorship’ with book publication of anonymous copy which had appeared in the press; an early and renowned example of this is Francis Jeffrey’s publication of Contributions to the Edinburgh Review in 1844, culled from his long career of anonymous pieces in the prestigious quarterly, where

16 Media History

anonymity was carefully preserved. The periodicals nurtured anonymous authors whose ‘names’ were then revealed and commodified in book publication; later in the century subsequent work by named authors was then reintroduced into periodicals with a signature (such as the Nineteenth Century), which attracted readers through ‘stars’, as seen in Figure 5. This in turn enhanced the value of ‘names’ so that sales of their books increased through the recognition of authors by readers and consumers. This cycle of serial and book publication is clearly a principal model of authorship in nineteenth-century Britain for most writers of essays, some longer works of non-fiction, and fiction of all kinds. If the project of authorship prospered under this cultural formation, the case of the periodicals themselves is more mixed. The foregrounding of individuals – named contributors – posed a threat to the collective identity of the periodical, an identity fostered by the ‘house’ style, the collective ‘we’, and the circulation of a periodical persona through a sobriquet such as ‘Maga’. In defending the anonymity of Blackwood’s late in the century, Shand cites the prestige which emanates from the collective force of intertextuality, and worries about its erosion, which, in his view, undermines the degree to which a periodical may ‘direct’ its readers: We have always preferred to leave each separate article to be commended or condemned for itself, or, at all events, with the reflected prestige of the company in which it chances to find itself. We believe our [anonymous] practice to be a safe one, even in the case of writers of name and experience. ([Shand] 1879b: 237) The casting about for distinguished names in all quarters has another consequence. Since these gentlemen hold most contradictory opinions, they must have an almost absolute latitude permitted them; and while the editor in great measure relieves himself from responsibility, he is proportionately deprived of control. There can be no question that his teams are powerful and showy, but they are ‘straggling all over the place’; and while his leaders are heading in one direction, his wheelers are backing in another … our predilection for the system which bands contributors together on common principles has been confirmed by long experience … it should be the object of a leading magazine to influence opinion for definite purposes … not merely to enlighten the public, but to direct them. ([Shand] 1879b: 240, 241)

5. W. H. Smith advertises secondhand books as well as periodical subscriptions, while on the opposite page the current number of the Nineteenth Century is touted, accompanied by a list of famous contributors, whose reputations were made from books.

17

18 Media History

Shand’s attention to the collectivity of journals – both single issues and the run through time – is apposite. Authorship as constructed in serials is collective, or at the very least it is not individualist; intertextuality and editing ensure this, and authors themselves write within codes of discourse, of the kind of piece they are writing – news, features, short story, novel – and of the particular journal they are writing for. In Maga, for example, Shand writes as a contributor to monthly magazines, a veteran author of Blackwood’s, and as a Blackwood’s Tory. Arthur Galton, an experienced journalist of the 1890s, writing in 1913 after signature had become more common in the wake of the New Journalism’s cultivation of the personal, reflects on the conflicting claims of collectivity and the rights of contributors under anonymity and signature: Editors very often give themselves a license which would not be tolerated in any other sphere of business. … I have always maintained that signed articles should not be touched, after the author’s final revision, or without his knowledge and his definite sanction for any change. It is unfair both to himself and to his readers that opinions which are practically not his, but the editor’s, should be given to the public with his name and responsibility attached to them. On the other hand, if work is to be published anonymously, I have always felt that it belongs of right to the editor who buys it. He pays his price, the responsibility for what is published is his, and for both reasons he is within his right if he alters an article in any way that suits him … the author has no legitimate or tangible grievance; for he has sold his work, and as it is not issued in his name he has no responsibility for either the substance or the form, until he reissues it on his own account. (Galton 1913: 5–6) Writing twenty years after Shand, Galton also insists on a distinction between the effects of anonymous and signed journalism, but significantly from the position of the [rights of the] author rather than that of the collectivity and authority of the periodical. It is a change in perspective in the wake of the founding of the Society of Authors in 1884, the securing of international copyright in 1891, and the star system developed by the New Journalism. Book publication, as Galton implies in his last phrase quoted above, is predicated on named author(s); the ‘translation’ of periodical material (signed or anonymous) to book form reconstructs collectively constructed work as individual work. It literally constructs and enforces the notion of the individual author, and addresses the public thirst for

‘Trepidation of the Spheres’ 19

the named individual that nineteenth-century reader/consumers exhibit. Writing in 1866 in the early years of the Fortnightly Review, which adopted a policy of signature, George Lewes, a professional editor and contributor, feels the burden of anonymity in the face of a readership eager for individual named authors: The evils of anonymous criticism mostly fall upon authors and the public. If they pressed as heavily on the critics, anonymity would long ago have been relinquished, but one does not look for lawreforms from practising lawyers. Yet some evils also fall upon the critics, and one of these is the facility with which a writer known (or rumoured) to be a contributor to a particular journal gets credited for any clever or objectionable criticism that may appear in the journal. Whenever people’s minds are roused to admiration or stung to indignation, they are impatient of doubt as to the individuality of the writer. The pale abstraction ‘we’ passes unchallenged before their minds so long as the article does not move them; but the ‘we’ becomes intolerable directly they are moved. They must have an idol or a victim. ([Lewis] 1866: 507) Lastly, on this question of authorship, serials and books, I want to suggest that the differences in the nature of authorship in nineteenthcentury serials and books – the collectivism of the serial as a cultural form and the individualism of the book – are significant in the relative status of the two spheres in our own period: the privileging of books and the marginalisation of serials by our author-oriented system of cultural value. I now want to consider two forms of the circulation of print in the nineteenth century which participate in a system of highly-priced first publication of books that discourages, if it does not prohibit, individual purchase: part-issue undermined this system while circulating libraries both sustained and negotiated it. It is the way serial publication of fiction increased access to reading and to books from the mid-1830s that I want to look at, and a latterday review of this format in 1866. First Shand, who is insistent on the link between part-issue and increased access to texts: And the success of the green and yellow covers of ‘Vanity Fair’ and ‘Martin Chuzzlewit’ – indicated a most extraordinary advance in the influence of popular patronage. … Thousands and tens of thousands of people were spending their shillings every month, half-committing themselves to a costly course of subscriptions, whose fathers

20 Media History

had bought nothing from the cradle to the grave but a Bible, a drawing-room annual, or a cookery-book. … Literature has become cheapened and popularised, and everybody has become something of a reader. ([Shand] 1878: 644) For Shand, part-issue is significant not primarily because of its implication in the histories of individual authorship, but by virtue of the relation between a form of publication and the growth of a reading public. The nature of his interest is characteristic of a period pre-dating the widespread academic study of English literature, a period when reviews, occasional review articles, and even more occasional essays, obituaries, or biographies were the principal forms of publication of criticism of individual authors. In our century, when English literature flourishes as an examination and university subject, and scholarly monographs, introductory handbooks, and literary biography are common types of publication, the definition of the subject is overwhelmingly authorial (for example, ‘Dickens’ or ‘the Brontës’). Midtwentieth-century attempts to make visible and undermine this organisation of knowledge, by Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and postmodernists such as Italo Calvino are a measure of its normalisation and entrenchment in our own day. Late in the life of part-issue, the Publishers’ Circular of 1866 had occasion to assess the advantage of part-issue and magazine serialisation when Trollope announced that he would issue his next novel in weekly parts. The writer speculates on the fortunes of serialisation as a project in light of changed circumstances since the success of the form in the 1830s. One difference is the shilling monthlies: New and vastly more numerous generations of book readers and book buyers have arisen. Shilling monthlies have attained an immense circulation; twopenny and threepenny weeklies, in which fiction is the chief element, are well established; but only actual experiment can perhaps determine whether the admirers of a popular author will give a weekly sixpence for an illustrated portion of a new novel from his [Trollope’s] pen. (Anon. 1866: 650) This sceptical, anonymous writer makes interesting points about the reading of weekly and monthly serial parts, and about part-issue versus magazines as a whole: The plan of serial publication of novels has manifestly many advantages. It may perhaps be said that no buyer of a magazine feels an

‘Trepidation of the Spheres’ 21

interest in all the subjects of its articles. Many notoriously buy a periodical only for the sake of some story in it by a favourite author, and are wholly indifferent to the remainder of its contents. The purchaser of an instalment of a story, on the other hand, necessarily gets nothing but what he desires to have. The weekly issue must also have peculiar advantages; for who is not familiar with the complaint that the reader of monthly serials has lost the thread of a story before it is taken up again in the next number? Whether Mr Trollope’s Last Chronicle of Barset … is destined to inaugurate a new fashion in the publication of serial fiction, we will not venture to prophesy. (Anon. 1866: 650) In the first flush of the new generation of shilling monthlies, the critic testifies to the ubiquity and dominance of the interest in fiction, as well as the highly selective practice of magazine reading. Nor does the article support our notion that the intervals between parts were occupied by repeated readings, as the ease of remembering the plot is adduced as a strong advantage of weeklies over monthlies. Despite this author’s testimony that the mnemonic devices deployed by Victorian serial novelists had only a limited success, I do want to flag the profound effects that part- and serial-issue of fiction had on the nature of the Victorian novel, which Linda Hughes and Michael Lund have examined in the book The Victorian Serial: for example, the necessary emphasis on the structure of the instalment, its start, finish, and middle; the heightened importance of delay and suspense; the necessity to bring characters forward regularly, lest they be forgotten altogether, or to render their absence significant; the interplay between parts of fictions by different authors which appear simultaneously, perhaps even in the same volume. This relation alone, of the parts and the whole, the effect of the ways fiction was issued on the end-product, bonds the Victorian serial and the Victorian book theoretically, formally, and historically. In 1879 Shand has only praise for the circulating library, that other principal means of distribution of new work. For him the libraries, which kept ‘their original sets of volumes in incessant circulation, till the pages began to wear with industrious thumbing’ ([Shand] 1878: 644), increased access to books in the expected manner: ‘These lending and circulating libraries have gone far towards altering everything. Nowadays a man who can afford a moderate subscription has such opportunities as the richer of our grandfathers never hoped for; and even students in the humblest ranks of society are generally within reach of some literary institute’ ([Shand] 1879c: 251). He claims with

22 Media History

satisfaction that even the discarding of the circulating library book is a form of circulation: ‘and the volumes from the libraries in the leading cities gradually find their way into the country towns and villages, till, now that paper-lined trunks have been superseded by portmanteaus, they pass in process of time into the hands of the housemaids’ ([Shand] 1878: 645). An additional wry note pertains to the other increase that the libraries system produces: ‘The system cannot be favourable to quality of work, but it is admirably fitted to give a fillip to production’ ([Shand] 1878: 645). This is the sole allusion to the key role of the circulating libraries in maintaining the high price of new work in volume form. Edmund Gosse, in a signed article in the Contemporary Review in 1891, registers the fin de siècle disillusion with the libraries – that the guarantee of ‘selectivity’ by the libraries to their subscribers amounts to censorship of books and serials alike, and in the spirit of the popularising New Journalism, Gosse names it, the disease which we might call Mudieitis, the inflammation produced by the fear that what you are inspired to say, and know you ought to say, will be unpalatable to the circulating libraries, that ‘the wife of a country incumbent,’ that terror before which Messrs. Smith fall prone upon their faces, may write up to headquarters and expostulate. In all these cases, without doubt, we have instances of the direct influence of democracy upon literature, and that of a deleterious kind. (Gosse 1891: 529) Gosse is writing in the midst of a campaign by authors in the 1880s and early 1890s against constraints on fiction imposed by publishers, editors, and libraries in the name of the sensibility of reader/consumers. In 1890, Thomas Hardy, one of three contributors to a symposium on ‘Candour in English Fiction’ in the New Review, links the censorship of the libraries with that of the magazines, and indicts them both: ‘the magazine in particular and the circulating library in general do not foster the growth of the novel which reflects and reveals life. They directly tend to exterminate it by monopolising all literary space’ (Hardy 1890: 17). Hardy’s perception of connections between the distributors of books, the editors of magazines and, by implication, the publishers, in the censorship of the novel puts a case for viewing these institutions, networks, and individuals as part of a single cultural formation, to which serials and books and their production and distribution alike belong.

‘Trepidation of the Spheres’ 23

With the gradual collapse of the three-decker format from 1894 and the intervention of the one-volume ‘well made’ novel, the price of much new high and middle zone fiction was reduced by at least twothirds. This and an increasing number of popularly priced reprints undermined the dominance of the circulating libraries, and their imposition of themselves between the bookseller and the reader. With the reduction of the high price of books, the yoking of serial production with that of literature and books became less important for publishers and authors. They might now rely far more on sales in the first instance to an audience exponentially increased by their access to cheap serial literature in the course of the nineteenth century. Increasingly, fiction reverted to its debut in volume form, which was bought or borrowed. Part-issue and serial fiction gradually subsided. I want to end by looking briefly at the newspaper press, which Gosse called ‘the most democratic of all vehicles of thought’ (Gosse 1891: 532). With its emphasis on ‘news’ and politics, its perception as an agent of ‘democracy’, its brevity of style, and its inhospitality to rumination, many early and mid-nineteenth-century newspapers marginalised books of all kinds. Frances Power Cobbe, writing in 1867 in the Fortnightly, an organ of the ‘higher journalism’, makes what I think is a commonplace juxtaposition at the time between books and the newspaper press: The extension of the Literature of England, especially since the repeal of the paper duty [in 1861], is very great in point of bulk. There were 4,204 books published in England in 1866, out of which 849 were on religious subjects. Yet it is an extension rather too much in keeping with the rest of our progress. The pyramid grows wide, rather than high. Newspapers, and that special new invention, ‘Railway Literature,’ have so increased that not the vault under the synagogue in Jerusalem where old books are religiously buried … would contain all the papers which are printed in a few years. … But the English book of original and creative genius, written since 1851 – where is it? (Cobbe: 1867: 369) Gosse, writing retrospectively in 1891 on democracy and print in the Contemporary Review allows that the attitude of newspapers toward books has changed since then: A few years ago, the London newspapers were singularly indifferent to the claims of books and of the men who wrote them. An occasional

24 Media History

stately column of the Times represented almost all the notice which a daily paper would take of a volume. The provincial press was still worse provided; it afforded no light at all for such of its clients as were groping their way in the darkness of the book-market. All this is now changed. One or two of the evening newspapers of London deserve great commendation for having dared to treat literary subjects, in distinction from mere reviews of books, as of immediate public interest. Their example has at length quickened some of the morning papers, and has spread into the provinces to such a signal degree that several of the great newspapers of the North of England are now served with literary matter of a quality and a fulness not to be matched in a single London daily twenty years ago. When an eminent man of letters dies, the comments which the London and country press make upon his career and the nature of his work are often quite astonishing in their fulness; space being dedicated to these notices such as, but a few years ago, would have been grudged to a politician or to a prize fighter. The newspapers are the most democratic of all vehicles of thought, and the prominence of literary discussion in their columns does not look as though the democracy was anxious to be thought indifferent or hostile to literature. (Gosse 1891: 532) With the development of Sunday papers, of weeklies such as the Saturday Review, and of evening papers such as the pioneering Pall Mall Gazette, which modelled itself on magazines and reviews (the Cornhill, the Saturday Review, and the Anti-Jacobin), the newspaper press came round to features, rumination, and reviewing, but the quiddity of newspapers remained ‘news’ or ephemera. The prospectus of the review-like Examiner of 1808, a weekly newspaper, makes its criteria for inclusion clear: even it will make way for literature, philosophy, and fine arts only in the ‘absence of temporary matter’. In an effort to map interrelations among spheres, this long-lived criterion helps clarify a difference of orientation in the newspaper and the periodical press. It shows in relief the alliances between the book trade and significant elements of the periodical press – publishers, authors, style, knowledges, and distribution (through circulating libraries and clubs as well as personal subscription, in which news is not paramount). The distinct origins of the newspaper press (in printers and later politicians) and its overwhelming, almost exclusive, concern in the early part of the century with domestic and foreign politics, government, finance, and law would appear to separate it from the book

‘Trepidation of the Spheres’ 25

trade. But at a time when book borrowing was the form in which most books were circulated in the middle classes, from 1855 cheap newspapers were bought by a wider range of readers and read (or heard) by still more. As well as circulating ‘intelligence’, newspapers developed and fostered the habit of reading. Shand connects the onset of the newspaper and this habit: The ferment of thought, the restless craving for intellectual excitement of some kind, have been stimulated; till now, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, we are being driven along at high-pressure pace; and it is impossible for any one who is recalcitrant to stop himself. If you do not read for yourself, you are constrained to listen; and there is no getting beyond the reach of the press, unless you should be cast away, like Crusoe, upon some desert island. The penny papers of yesterday are to be found in the parlour of each back-of-the-world alehouse; and there is generally some intelligent rustic, more advanced than the rest, who volunteers to spell them out and comment on them for the benefit of the circle of gaping smokers. Localities, interests, and trades have their special organs; and the broadsheets of the ‘Police News’ with kindred publications circulate freely among the criminals and roughs of our cities. ([Shand] 1879c: 238–9) Nothing, perhaps, is more significant of the thirst for sensation, and of the indifference to the trifling cost at which it may be gratified, than a glance into the carriages of one of the suburban trains that has run into a city terminus before morning business-hours. Floors and cushions are covered with the penny papers that have been roughly torn open and hurriedly skimmed; acquaintances have exchanged the ‘Standard’ for the ‘Telegraph’; there have been extensive orders for the ‘Daily News,’ if Cape letters are looked for from Mr Archibald Forbes; and there is a liberal sprinkling of the ‘Sportsman’ and ‘Sporting News’ left by gentlemen who, as a matter of business, are interested in the latest odds. The railway servants gather so rich a harvest that they can afford to become generous benefactors in their turn, of the cabman on the rank and the patients in the hospitals. ([Shand] 1879c: 242) These two accounts of the process of newspaper reading in 1879 and of newspaper networks of distribution testify to Shand’s perception of the ubiquity of reading among working and middle-class urban and

26 Media History

country people. Shand goes on to single out and characterise English travellers as readers, unlike French and German: For, as a rule, an Englishman who is going any distance seems to think it as much a matter of course to lay in reading of some sort as to take a wrapper in winter or a ticket at all times. And the bookstall, like poverty or a third class carriage, introduces a man to a strange medley of companions. ([Shand] 1879c: 244) It is my contention that the links between the companionable bookstall and the republic of reading, figured here by the rich diversity of ‘poverty or a third class carriage’, were forged by the Victorian serial – the part-issues, the magazines, and the newspapers – and that in the nineteenth century the spheres of the book and the serial inhabited one and the same galaxy. In the next chapter I shall explore relations between serial and book publication through examination of part-issue and magazine serialisation.

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

(i)

Sight-reading/finding the rhythm

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. If the periodical text is defined in terms of material culture, so as to include coloured wrappers, customised advertisers, title pages, indices, illustrations, and juxtaposed and sequential editorial matter, that format (and the part-issue format which imitates it) may be taken as a model of textual heteroglossia. In post-structuralist terms, these forms of serialisation are part of a popular pre-history of many of the canonical nineteenth-century book texts which have been disciplined and stripped out to resemble the comparatively austere volume form of 27

28 Media History

6. The combination of commerce and literature characteristic of serial publication in the period is underlined by the juxtaposition of the basic graphics of the advertisement and the delicate cut of the initial letter; but also note the congruity between the fox logo and the moose opposite! In Thackeray’s The Newcomes, no. 11, August 1854.

reading material of the lettered and traditionally conservative upper classes. This ‘timeless’ format of the volume text has been normalised institutionally by nineteenth- and twentieth-century publishers, libraries, universities and schools. In our own period a valid analogy to the publishing conditions of much nineteenth-century serial material is television – as though the discourse of the higher journalism and part-issue zones of nineteenth-century letters was published/broadcast surrounded by the hurly-burly of the adverts, soaps, garish sets, quiz and talk shows, bimbos/hunks, and hygenicised news. The position of knowledges on the web offers another analogy of our time with the

Star Turn? 29

text of nineteenth-century periodicals and part-issues: the reliability of the ‘information’ is variable, the range catholic and unregulated, and the commodification text – the advertisements – distracting, ubiquitous and informative, commanding attention in its own right. But just as with the electronic media of ‘TV’ and ‘Web’, the elusiveness and unrecoverability of full nineteenth-century part-issue and periodical texts hamper study. Relatively few wrappers and even fewer advertising supplements have survived the stripping, disciplining and institutionalisation of the texts, and I do not know at this moment whether all or most higher journalism or part-issues carried advertising, nor have I seen many of the wrappers of well-known journals and parts. Even where wrappers have been conserved, for example in a British Library copy of the parts of Middlemarch, the advertiser is missing, an advertiser and spine that I will argue are germane to the meanings of ‘Middlemarch’. Nor is there a Union list of serials with wrappers and advertisers in Canadian, British or UK libraries, the catalogues of which do not consistently note the existence or absence of such textual matter. Even runs of particular periodicals which have been pieced together from various sources by libraries may vary in the presence or absence of advertisers; thus, in a single library, the Athenaeums of the 1860s may include these vital pages, but those from 1870 onwards do not. The unavailability of this information itself is part of the normative process which has resulted in the omnipresence of the volume in our libraries, and in our scholarship. Nevertheless, a body of impressive work on serialisation in Britain in the nineteenth century has appeared in the 1990s, notably Linda Hughes and Michael Lund’s book on The Victorian Serial (1991), Carol Martin on George Eliot’s Serial Fiction (1994), Myers and Harris’s volume on Serials and their Readers (1993) and John Sutherland’s Victorian Fiction in 1995; Aled Jones on the press in Wales, and on nineteenthcentury politics and the press; Margaret Beetham’s A Magazine of Her Own? in 1996, Peter Sinnema’s Dynamics of the Pictured Page in 1998; and Mark Turner’s Trollope and the Magazines (2000). Certainly since 1957, the year of Richard Altick’s The English Common Reader, the ubiquity of serial publication in nineteenth-century Britain has been tackled as well by an increasing number of scholars who have produced reference works crucial to the development of the field, such as The Wellesley Index, the Waterloo Directories, and British Literary Magazines; dedicated periodicals such as the Victorian Periodical Review and the Journal of/Studies of Newspaper and Periodical History/Media History; and bibliographies such as the M.L.A.A. guides to Victorian

30 Media History

periodicals by Vann and Van Arsdel (1978, 1989). Thus, in the second half of the twentieth century, tools for study of nineteenth-century serials have proliferated, and a sound research base has developed. By serials I mean newspapers, periodicals, part-issues, and serial parts within periodicals which are dated and appear successively at regular intervals over time, normally no less frequently than annually, and usually quarterly, monthly, weekly or daily. In ‘Trepidation of the Spheres’ I suggested that this cacophony of printed serials rivalled the incidence of the book in the period. But it is a mistake to construct the nineteenth-century book as a stand-alone commodity. First publication in volume form was often part of a staged process which may have begun with serialisation and went on to a succession of editions, normally but not exclusively from expensive to cheap. Texts judged to have sales potential were issued in a proliferation of series, of different formats and prices, over the short and medium term to maximise a stratified readership; publishing histories of individual texts themselves may thus be said to participate in the paradigm of the timespan of the series which marked the period. An advertisement on the back wrapper of a serial part of Daniel Deronda in 1876, for example, shows that various editions of George Eliot’s texts are or will be simultaneously available from the same publisher: a Library edition of 4 volumes for a guinea, a Cheap Edition at 7/6, and a stereotype edition at 3/6. Serial publication was also echoed and replicated in the book trade by the numerous popular ‘Series’ of Parlour Poets, or biographical series such as the English Men of Letters, or the various ‘Library’ series such as that of Chapman and Hall’s ‘Selected Library of Fiction’. Standard or Collected Editions of the works of single authors – which were issued serially – may be seen as part of this larger pattern of series which links the book trade with the regular, successive patterns of publication of the contemporary newspapers and periodicals. The nineteenth-century phenomenon of Magazine Day marks the culture with the monthly rhythm of the publishing industry’s serials and series, the day when many monthly journals were published, along with most part-issues, and new books, all of which were distributed to the public, the libraries, and the booksellers on that day, in anticipation of the first of the month (Smith 1857: passim). This litany of periodicity in the mid- and late nineteenth century is rehearsed in an advertisement for Punch tipped into the advertiser of another periodical from the Punch offices, George Cruikshank’s Table Book of 1845: Punch is ‘Published weekly, price 3d or stamped, 4d. … A Part is Published Every Month, And a Volume every Six months. All back

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numbers, parts and volumes always kept on sale. Eight volumes are already published. The Ninth Volume will be Published in December, price 8s’ And there we have it: weekly numbers, monthly parts, bi-annual volumes echoing and reinforcing the regularity of time, the passing of which itself creates the material and desire for another number. To balance the prospective market which the rhythm intimates, there is the retrospective, constant availability of years of volumes, parts, and numbers to ‘complete’ the series backwards. The promise of acquisition of origins is part of the illusion of the attainability of closure, as are the volume editions. The notion of an ordered library, in which the ‘collected’ series rests, masks an equal scurry, fostered by the publishing industry, to keep up, in a market cleverly predicated on the assumption that it will never end: there is always the next number to consume, to collect. It is an optimistic, saturation model of an expanding market of readers and potential purchasers, seen for example in the cover illustration of the short-lived Table Book where the breadth of readers is figured as an extended family of grandmother, grandfather, young men, young women, parents, girl and boy children, and lovers, each peering at a copy of the title in question. The image of the provision of lifelong reading material and engagement with serials is unmistakable. Although fiction is deployed to illustrate my argument here, fiction does not have a monopoly on serial formats in the period. Fiction and non-fiction may be found in both forms: extended works of reference such as the New [Oxford] English Dictionary (1884–1928), and the Dictionary of National Biography (1886–1900), popular reference works such as Chambers’ Cyclopedia of English Literature (1858) and Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1859), scholarly texts such as Chaucer’s ‘The Corpus MS’ (1868), and religious texts such as that of the Bible and Newman’s Apologia (1864) all appeared in part-issue for example, as well as novels by Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope and George Eliot. Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy was serialised in early numbers of the Cornhill beside Thackeray’s Lovel the Widower, and various works by G. H. Lewes were serialised in the magazines, including his handbook Principles of Success in Literature (Fortnightly Review, 1865) and Studies in Animal Life (1860). Nor is literature (with a small ‘l’) singular or necessarily even dominant among categories of print to appear in these forms; it is clear from advertisements that lithographs (of Royal Navy Ships, for example, or Finden’s Royal Gallery of British Art) were often in part-issue in the late 1830s. More generally, illustration of all kinds seems linked with serialisation throughout the century. Holdings in the British Library in

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part-issue include illustrated scientific texts such as one on Locomotive Engineering, illustrated dictionaries, books on fine art and architecture, and biography including portraits, such as Men of Mark: a Gallery. The association of pictorial matter with expanded audiences of the periodical press had been established early in the century by Charles Knight’s illustrated Penny Magazine, and in the same decade as Knight’s venture the serialisation/part-issue of fiction with illustration re-appeared as a profitable format, targeted at enabling ordinary readers direct access to new work of quality, and making a link with wider audiences similar to that of the Penny Magazine. The impetus of part-issue particularly is as much the economic argument to maximise distribution through cheap access as it is the pressure of news events and time. This is also true of certain forms of magazines, especially magazines carrying fiction, which were spurred on after 1860 by the shilling monthlies. In the case of part-issue and periodical serialisation alike the economy of serialisation avoided high, up-front expenditure for the consumer. It divided the cost over time into moderate sums for middle-class and often working-class purchasers, thus multiplying sales and profits for authors and publishers, as well as enhancing recognition of publishers’ products by trailing them weekly or monthly, and providing regularly free and copious advertising space. Where I have been able to see advertisements and wrappers, both in part-issue and in periodicals, the respective publishers of the serial in question never fail to publicise their current lists, often in both advertiser and wrapper, as default filler when space is unsold, and by design.

(ii)

Serialisation, production and consumption

What follows is an attempt to begin to map dominant forms of serialisation excluding the daily. It is a meditation on the sociology of texts rather than readings of the impact of serialisation on specific texts defined by and as literature, history or theology. I shall make a number of hypotheses, go on to consider the categories of part-issue and periodical serialisation with respect to some case studies, look at a particularly hybrid example, and then draw some conclusions. First, serialisation in the nineteenth-century appertains to both the history of the book and media studies, though neither party seems very comfortable with it, book history because at worst it treats ‘volumes’, and media studies because, oriented as it is to the present, it avoids media history. Yet I shall argue that both nineteenth-century part-issue and magazine serialisation are characteristically hybrid: part-issue –

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date stamped, numbered, prominently priced, usually illustrated, and prone to use its wrapper sensationally to attract readers through colour, design and badging – looks on the one hand to the ephemeral newspaper and periodical press, and on the other hand to books, imitating their privileging of named and often ‘star’ authors, and their distribution by publisher, booksellers, and libraries rather than by newsmen or news vendors. Nineteenth-century periodicals, by contrast, resemble the newspaper press in their orientation to ‘news’, new books for review, and the topical, while revealing their links to publishers of books in their advertisers and wrappers, and in their letterpress, much of which is turned into books. Like the newspaper press, most of the periodicals were marked by apparent anonymity, at least until 1859 and the advent of Macmillan’s Magazine. If any name at all appears on the wrapper, it is normally that of the editor rather than that of any single author. Thus Dickens is named as the ‘conductor’ of Household Words in the 1850s, David Masson as the editor of Macmillan’s from 1859, and James Knowles as editor of the Nineteenth Century from 1877. But by this latter date the upmarket Nineteenth Century, which calls itself ‘a review’ and is expensive at half a crown, eschews popularist illustration on its wrapper and publishes instead its contents accompanied by the names of the contributors whose star qualities bastion that of its editor, well-known primarily among journalists as late editor of the Contemporary Review. We might conclude this comparison of the common but distinctive hybridity of both forms of serialisation by noting that the presence (or absence) of advertisers links them respectively with either the daily press, in which advertisements have functioned as an important source of income from some of the earliest printed newspapers in the UK, or the published volume, often characterised by the absence of advertisements, or where these are present, the overwhelming dominance of the letterpress. Of all the serials I examined, only Newman’s Apologia, published in eight parts, lacked advertisements even on the (extant) wrappers. This absence of advertising undoubtedly gave the serial an enhanced gravitas, and at the same time marked it out as less commodified, and more personally controlled. Given this set of hybridities, I want to suggest that what tends to be treated gingerly, as separate subjects – book history and media studies, and media studies and media history – conjoins in this instance and in aspects of this period more generally; there is a collapse of barriers between what is now the high culture of book history and what is deemed the popular culture of ephemera.

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Serialisation in the nineteenth century may be seen as part of a variety of formats, indeed a proliferation of formats, to accommodate a market which publishers treated as highly segmented. For example, in a weekly 1d serial called ‘Beeton’s Book of Birds’ (1864), a wrapper advert (recto) for a new serialised cookery book, costing 3d a month, presents the new venture, ‘All About It. Mrs Beeton’s Dictionary of Everyday Cookery’, as a response to readers’ requests for a volume of recipes in cookery between the 7/6 price of Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management and the shilling cookery book: ‘And so that nobody wishing to have in their possession a book of this kind may be hindered by the difficulty of price, the work will be issued in Threepenny Monthly Parts. Each Part will contain, sewed in a wrapper, Thirty-two Pages in Double Columns of type. The whole book will contain about four hundred pages, and will be completed in exactly Twelve Parts.’ Its issue date, ‘ready with the April Magazines’, makes a link which I contend is a common one between these forms of serial publication, part-issue and Magazine Day. Other evidence of the segmentation of the market is evident in an article in Macmillan’s, ‘Universal Information and The English Encyclopædia’ by ‘The Editor’, also in the 1860s. David Masson notes the stigma of the penny part for the intellectual reaches of Macmillan’s readership and contributors. The proliferation of the late nineteenth-century periodical and its markets is implicit here: The work is, so far as that might be, a reissue of the old ‘Penny Cyclopædia,’ published between 1833 and 1843, under the able and scholarly editorship of Mr George Long, and the great merits of which are well known, and would have been more loudly proclaimed by those that had reason to know them best, but for a cowardly shame at acknowledging obligations to a work of reference which had the unfortunate word ‘Penny’ as part of its name. What author, not a paragon of conscientiousness, could venture to cite the ‘Penny Cyclopaedia’ in the text of a book as his authority for a statement, or to let the words ‘Penny Cyc.’ figure among his footnotes. … And yet, as people do not hesitate to sponge secretly on honest and well-to-do men, they would not be seen walking with, so there were large transactions in private by many a book-making magnate with the convenient bank of the ‘Penny Cyc.’ This is remedied now; and in its new form of The English Cyclopædia, a really great and trustworthy work of reference will have more justice done to it. ([Masson] 1862: 367–8)

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Given the proclivity to serialisation, this new edition is published in volumes which themselves contain reshuffled entries and are grouped into parts which form a series that makes a whole, which Masson advises his readers to buy. ‘There is now a subdivision of the total work into four parts, any one of which may be purchased separately – Arts and Sciences, in eight volumes; Natural History, in four volumes; Biography, in six volumes; and Geography, in four volumes’ ([Masson] 1862: 368). But if serialisation, in part-issue and periodicals, served publishers particularly well in marketing their products in affordable and variable forms, it was not to the taste of all writers. Seeking relief from the pressure and regularity of monthly part-issues, Dickens began Master Humphrey’s Clock as a miscellany, but in ending the weekly periodical Dickens confided to his readers the unpalatable conditions which weekly serialisation imposed on its producers: ‘I have found this form of publication most anxious, perplexing and difficult. I cannot bear these jerking confidences which are no sooner begun than ended, and no sooner ended than begun again.’ This is part of a fascinating discussion of cultural production in which the monthly is returned to with relief, but it is also pertinent for my argument about the definition of the text when I tell you that Dickens’ letter to his readers appears on the verso of the front wrapper for number 80 (Master Humphrey’s Clock, 9 Oct. 1841). Marian Evans and then George Eliot were fairly aware of the exigencies of serial publication of fiction. Evans’ first published fiction took the form of a series of three linked stories yoked by a single title in parallel with the individual titles; they fitted into both the periodical span and space which Blackwood’s Magazine commonly allocated to novels, and together made up a book published by Blackwood in a novel format. But when it came to publishing Middlemarch Eliot and Lewes devised with Blackwood a format of bi-monthly publication in parts which would not tie George Eliot down to monthly deadlines; it would also yield four lucrative volumes rather than the standard three on publication of the book. Moreover, the page size was small, and the paper was by design weighty, to which was added an Advertiser to pad it out. George Eliot did not wish to be confined to production of numbers of uniform length, and in the event part 4 is 377 pages long while part 5 is only 191. Nor did the work appear so closely allied with the periodical press as did other part-issues. The parts were called ‘Books’, and look like thick little volumes. While the wrapper was coloured and illustrated to attract attention as other part-issue wrappers were, it had

36 Media History

little of the kind of information which identified part-issues with the world of journalism and periodicity. There was no date on the wrapper, only the ‘Book’ number; nor did the price appear on the front wrapper, but only on the spine, which, like a book, sported the title and author, as well as the price. The price was high at five shillings per number, in order to make up £2 for the whole novel, which high price1 Lewes was certain could only be extracted from the public serially, over time, through part publication. The haunting of part-issue by magazine serialisation may be seen in the model of Blackwood’s Magazine, as the other space in which George Eliot could have placed her novel, which is implied by Lewes when he points out to Blackwood that the price of five shillings per part is the same price as Blackwood’s Magazine, the implication being that Blackwood would be profiting in addition to Blackwood’s Magazine, and that at the same time the part-issue Middlemarch would not be undercutting Blackwood’s Magazine. Though Lewes and Blackwood shared a desire to circumvent the circulating libraries, and make the public buy instead of borrowing (Carroll 1986: xxxiii), they seemed to be wholly engaged with profitable sales rather than making the work available at a price the ordinary reader could afford. I noted that the date was missing on the wrappers, but it was implicit in the text, as each number I have seen had a small tipped-in advertising slip between the end of the Book and the back Advertiser giving the date, two months hence, of the next Book/part, with its title. It is noteworthy that Eliot’s novel is responsive to the form in which she published insofar as she provided each ‘Book’ with a new title of its own to run parallel with the generic and repeated title of Middlemarch, thus stoking anticipation in readers in order to manage the two-month interval before the next instalment. As Lewes notes to Blackwood, ‘Each part would have a certain unity and completeness in itself with separate title’ (Carroll 1986: xxxiii). The other move the triumvirate made for the market was to publish the last two Books monthly, in November and December (instead of December and February) in order to maximise sales in the Christmas market. In the four parts with wrappers I’ve seen, the length of the Advertiser varied from 16 pages for Book 1 (issued in December 1871) to 8 pages for Books 4, 5, and 6; it may be that the Advertisers for Books 7 and 8 swelled with the 1872 Christmas season. I mentioned earlier the generic range of serialisation, which stretches far beyond fiction. In my investigation of part-issue holdings in the British Library, I found reference works such as dictionaries and encyclopaedias, the length of which would warrant so high a price as to

Star Turn? 37

prohibit purchase by most consumers. For publishers such as Cassell, serialisation of foreign-language dictionaries, such as Cassell’s German Pronouncing Dictionary of 1853, put the work within reach of readers who could spread their payment of 3d per week over six months or 26 parts. On the inside wrapper, Cassell’s Library was advertised; this could be bought in 26 monthly volumes bound in paper, at 7d each, or complete and cloth-bound for 19/6, or arranged in a Library Box at 25 shillings; these collected volumes were also available separately at various prices. One title, The History of England by Robert Ferguson, could be purchased in four volumes at 7d each, or two double volumes bound in cloth at 1/6 each; or the whole bound together in one thick volume, 3s, or on fine paper with the portrait of the Author, 3/6; or with gilt edges, 4s. Links between serials and books could not be suggested more graphically. Similarly the eighth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica is advertised in 1853 on the wrapper of a part-issue of Thackeray’s The Newcomes. Issued in monthly parts at 8 shillings, it is also available in quarterly volumes at 24 shillings (see Figure 7). A more popular encyclopaedia, The Historical Educator, is featured in the Advertiser of Cassell’s German Pronouncing Dictionary of the same year; this modest encyclopaedia of Cassell’s is issued weekly at 2d and monthly at 9d or 11d depending on the length of the month. This in turn is ‘uniform’ with and piggy-backed on The Popular Educator, with a similar structure of price and periodicity, with the two series making up a ‘set’ on the shelf. Smith Elder’s The Dictionary of National Biography (DNB) appeared from 1884 every quarter day, in parts (volumes) at 15 shillings bound in cloth. Issuing a Prospectus in 1892 in medias res, after publication of 30 of the 50 projected parts, the publishers sought to increase their sales at this juncture by tackling the problem of shelf space that such a multi-part serial poses. The last page of the Prospectus is devoted to an advertisement and illustration of a revolving book stand from Maples for ‘intending purchasers … who have been deterred from obtaining it by a consideration of the space the complete work would occupy.’ Poetry also appeared in part-issue. In 1870 an edition of the complete works of Robert Burns was issued in 17 monthly parts at one shilling each (see Figure 8). While the publisher William Mackenzie is London-based he cites two offices in Scotland where the bulk of his market may be. However, he also appends a sizeable glossary of Scottish dialect to the 500 pages of promised text, presumably for his English and Lowland readers. This edition is the antithesis of the upmarket part-issue edition of Middlemarch. The text is cut mid-poem

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7. Advertisement for serial publication of the Encyclopædia Britannica in monthly parts. This appeared in Thackeray’s The Newcomes, no. 1 (October 1853).

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8. Description of complete works of Robert Burns, with glossary, published in 17 parts at a shilling each: no. 3 (1866).

40 Media History

between volumes, a common practice in popular periodicals in the serialisation of fiction, and the somewhat garish coloured wrapper carries a baroque design aimed at claiming an authority for Burns’s poetry as well as playing on its Scottish identity. Between the poles of the Historical Educator at 2d per week or 9d to 11d per month, and Burns at a shilling per month, and the more expensive Britannica at 8/– monthly or 24/– per quarter, and the DNB, quarterly only, at 15/– we can begin to see the permeation of the market by serialisation, and this is part-issue alone. The last characteristic of part-issue to be examined is the accommodation of change in a form in which necessarily more adjustments are exposed than in magazine serialisation. John Newman’s eloquent autobiography is an example of a theological work produced in parts by Longman from 1864, announced at a shilling each. Responding to a pamphlet (Kingsley 1864), Newman seems to be attempting to address the same readers who may have read the initial challenge. In examining the parts it is notable that Newman takes full formal advantage of the units of the part to shape his polemics with effective beginnings and endings, much as a writer of fiction might. Apart from the absence of advertising, the salient aspect here for us is the degree of flexibility in this format which Newman’s serial exemplifies. Beginning with a plan, published on the back wrapper (verso), for five parts at a shilling each, the plan switches by the third number to eight parts plus higher and differently priced parts. The number of parts devoted to ‘History of My Religious Opinions’ is doubled from 2 to 4, and the cost of Parts 4 and 5 is also raised from one shilling to two shillings each, and of Part 6 to 2/6. Apart from the alteration of the announcement on the back wrapper, there is no other comment on this radical transformation of the parts both as commodities (in the price) and as text (the number plans and balance). Unlike Dickens, who effects an equally radical change in a periodical (Master Humphrey’s Clock), Newman does not descend from the impersonal to explain himself. I shall discuss Dickens’ management of change of plan when I address the unusual dual form of that periodical/part-issue at length below. Newman’s sustained polemic and eloquent self-justification in the letterpress Apologia atypically features no Advertiser or illustrations, but the austerity of this part-issue text is anomalous; usually illustration is a feature, often of importance, of part-issue, which is essentially associated with widening access. In Sooner or Later, a novel by Shirley Brooks serialised monthly in shilling parts, where parallel billing with the author is given to the illustrator George Du Maurier,

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the name of the illustrator is in turn interrupted by a logo of the publisher, Bradbury and Evans, whose imprint appears just below. Illustrators are often credited on the wrappers of part-issues, as are engravers, but this intervention of the publisher’s logo serves to remind us that part-issue wrappers, along with the accompanying Advertisers, also create name recognition for the publisher along with the author, title, illustrator, and engraver; the publisher’s business becomes a ‘star’ in its own right. Apart from those periodicals which bear a publisher’s name – e.g. Macmillan’s, Cassell’s Family Illustrated Magazine, Longman’s – neither author, publisher, illustrator or engraver feature so frequently or prominently on periodical wrappers, which tend to promulgate the name of the periodical and perhaps its editor, along with the details of date, price, volume, number and publisher which journalism dictates. Sooner or Later also shifts quite late from being a 14-part plan, to one of 16 parts, a change which a parallel periodical might not be able to accommodate easily because of pressure of other material. While part-issue is likely to cope with change better than the periodical press, owing to the isolation of the text and the singular control of the author and/or publisher over it, change is also far more exposed and visible than in the magazine serial where any anomaly may be overlooked among the range of articles on offer, or filled in by other materials. If the range of serialisation generically is wide, so is the variety of serial formats found within individual numbers or parts. Macmillan’s Magazine, for example, at the height of its competition in 1860–1 with Cornhill, which was fiction rich, did two things: it changed its cover from cream to pale pink in No. 7, and emboldened the design so as to compete with Cornhill’s sumptuous gold and baroque cover. Additionally it began carrying two novels in January 1861, adding a second to that by Thomas Hughes, itself a sequel to Tom Brown’s Schooldays. Then some months after Tom Brown at Oxford ended, a long poem by Coventry Patmore ‘The Victories of Love’ was serialised for three numbers, October–December 1861, running simultaneously with the second novel, which had not yet finished. The issues for both December 1861 and January 1862 had short stories in chapters, the latter spreading over three issues, and in February 1862 there was another, overlapping, three-issue serial, ‘A Quiet Nook’. Here we have long and short serials, of poetry, short fiction, and novels. An interesting point about Macmillan’s mode of signature, which practice they were trying to revive and feature, is that they commonly supplied both the name of the author and the names of his or her works, which, with

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the legacy of anonymity, might well have been more familiar to readers than the names of the authors themselves. Whereas by 1860 in part-issues the ‘star’ names of authors who could command readers on the basis of their very renown were well known and standard form on wrappers, in periodicals, at least formally, works were often still anonymous, as in the daily press, and readers were far more likely to recognise the names of works by authors of more modest fame than the authors’ names themselves. The other point about variety of serialisation is its timing in the circuit of communication. While some material starts as serials in magazines or part-issues, some doesn’t, but in both cases it is possible that after volume publication, serialisation in both periodicals and part-issue may form part of the publisher’s plan to make the work widely and cheaply available. Thus Blackwood publishes the series ‘The Novels and Tales of George Eliot’ in an illustrated paperback edition in 6d monthly numbers, the texts of which end in the middle of chapters. As in the later part-issue of Middlemarch, there are no dates on the front cover, only the number of the part and the price. The date of No. I, the beginning of Adam Bede, has to be gleaned by the scholar from the British Museum stamp of accession: 1867. But it is clear that without a date, the volumes of the edition have a longer shelf life, and in that sense aspire to the status of books and eschew the generic markings of the press. This hybridity, common to part-issue and magazine serialisation, is particularly evident generically in weeklies such as the Spectator, which describes itself in an Advertiser of the Fortnightly Review in May 1867 as an ‘Independent Liberal Newspaper’ (my emphasis), and its descriptive sales pitch below emphasises both that ‘like a newspaper it commands the best sources of information’ and that notwithstanding, its main business is the interpretation of news: ‘its object, however, is not so much to supply news as to express the feeling of the educated classes on the news, and correct that vagueness and bewilderment of thought which the constant receipt of news in little morsels has such a tendency to produce’ (p. 1, Advertiser). So it is both a newspaper and yet not beset with these alleged limitations of the dailies. But if we note the date of the advertisement, it is clear that the evening daily the Pall Mall Gazette had been making, from 1865, just these inroads on the morning dailies from within the ranks of daily newspapers. However, appealing to readers of the Fortnightly Review, the Spectator’s advert goes on to claim qualities such as ‘original papers’ of which the Pall Mall Gazette also boasts to distinguish it from the

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extant dailies. What is also interesting is that at this early date, the Spectator is using rhetoric that W. T. Stead and others deploy in the 1880s and 1890s to characterise the new readers of the New Journalism: ‘The News of the current week is compressed into an animated narrative, which the laziest or busiest may read, without missing the life or import of the events’ (Fortnightly Review Advertiser 1867: 1, my italics). And true to the orientation of many weeklies to news and the newspaper press, literature, however strongly treated in the Spectator under Hutton’s direction, is clearly secondary to politics: it is mentioned in the advert only in a single last paragraph which emphasises coverage of new books – ‘every important work’. But I want to argue that this self-representation of the Spectator is also determined by the Fortnightly Advertiser in which it is located. This Advertiser document is preserved in the British Library independently of the periodical in which it appeared because it publishes the prospectus for the ‘Charles Dickens’ Edition of Dickens’ works. However, it helps construct the meaning of the periodical to which it was originally attached as well as of those it advertises. The Advertiser is remarkably customised, so that the apparent disjunction between advertisements and letterpress (which is perhaps the most glaring sign of the hybridity of these forms of serialisation) is clearly accompanied, or subverted, by consanguinity between the commercial and the ‘original’ papers. Echoing the advertisement in the Advertiser for the Spectator as an ‘Independent Liberal Newspaper’ is one just below it for The Day, a new morning paper, which also has a first-line strap designating its political affiliation, and its position within Liberalism – ‘The Organ of Constitutional Liberalism’. This uniform political emphasis that suggests the house style of the Advertiser also helps us read the Fortnightly itself: to situate this monthly review squarely in the political press and to distinguish it at this date from other monthlies which are less politically oriented. The third advertisement on the page is for The People’s Magazine, 6d monthly, published by the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge (SPCK), an organisation and a periodical rather unexpected in the Fortnightly Review because of the zone of the SPCK publication, indicated by its low price, its populist contents and religious framework. Its contents, in giving detailed information about illustration, bear out its populist character, and in including pieces such as ‘My Garden: Third Article’, ‘Domestic Service’, and ‘The Songster in the Chimney’, suggest it and the Fortnightly are aimed at women readers among others. Strahan’s list on page 3 also suggests this: it features

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romances and religious books, as well as titles more in keeping with the Fortnightly’s contents such as Lives of Indian Officers by the civil servant J. W. Kaye. My point here is that many of the advertisements in both wrappers and Advertisers are gendered – those for christening gowns, textiles and mourning accessories are directed at women readers/consumers and those for umbrellas and hunting dress primarily at men. I found much that was suggestive here. Gender analysis of the advertisements in part-issues and these general, higher journalism periodicals may play some part in future work on the construction of nineteenth-century readership. Other advertisements include works that both echo and extend our understanding of the reading community of the Fortnightly. I will only note the inevitable advertisements from Chapman and Hall, its publisher, which demonstrate in the current list a catholic range, including, for example, works relating to rival periodicals of a different political cast (Studies in Conduct: Short essays from the Saturday Review), but the same zone. Chapman and Hall’s new edition of Dickens, ‘The “Charles Dickens” Edition’, is a ‘Series Issued Monthly’ at 3 shillings or 3/6, which is described as both cheap and aesthetic, qualities which appeal at once to upmarket readers of the Fortnightly and the larger and poorer general public. Promising ‘Legibility, Durability, Beauty and Cheapness’, the Prospectus instructs the reader in the economy of print, with its boast of ‘running heads’, ‘a flowing, open page, free from the objection of having double columns’, and ‘the Editor’s watchfulness over his own Edition’. It also reveals the great age (twenty years) and implied corruption of the stereotype plates used for earlier cheap editions. This Advertiser, then, brings to bear multiple knowledges on the letterpress to which it is attached and to which it refers. Its added value is not confined to this. For readers of each number at the time, the advertisements were part of the ‘information’ and entertainment that the periodical offered. Like a listing magazine, the Advertiser kept regular readers up to date on the latest issues of the magazines – with details of their contents; the newest books, series, and part-issues; and new entrants in the field such as The Day. An academic analogy lies with the advertisements in PMLA. or Victorian Studies. What about the relations of wrappers to letterpress? In the part-issue of The Newcomes held by the British Library the juxtaposition between the crude graphics of the advertisements on the verso of the front wrapper and the fine initial letters of the opening of the letterpress produces a dramatic contrast, part after part (this is in the absence of potentially intervening Advertisers for these parts). But there are strik-

Star Turn? 45

ing continuities as well, as in the example of Daniel Deronda, which was also published initially in part-issue as a succession of ‘Books’ like Middlemarch. Here too the Advertiser is missing in the British Library copy. But as it stands, the ending of Book VIII, ‘She was found in this, crushed on the floor. Such grief seemed natural in a poor lady whose husband had been drowned in her presence’ (Eliot Nov. 1876: Book VIII, 162) is juxtaposed with an advert on the back wrapper (recto) for the Scottish Widow’s Fund. This chance parallel between the letterpress and the advertisements underlines the consanguinity of the discourses of commerce and culture, the heteroglossia of these hybrid texts which serially produce regular, pervasive dialogue.

(iii)

Star turn: from periodical to part-issue

Dickens’ early magazine, Master Humphrey’s Clock, exemplifies a remarkable consanguinity between wrappers and letterpress. Additionally, it manifests a degree of flexibility (to the point of ambiguity and ambivalence) which, in moderation, is characteristic of serialisation: due to the intimate relation between serialisation and process, this form affords us an intimate view of the anatomy of texts as they materialise. Master Humphrey’s Clock, a 3d weekly serial produced by Dickens, breathtakingly veers between periodical miscellany and partissue, especially but not only at its outset. In this experiment of the early 1840s (April 1840–November 1841) Dickens set out from the start playfully, silently imitating the previous century’s Tatler, Spectator, and Goldsmith’s Bee: while it appeared to be a periodical, it was anomalously for its day to be entirely authored ‘By Boz’ (my emphasis) rather than edited. Generically, for nineteenth-century readers, it straddled disparate forms of serial publication, part-issue and magazine. This attribution of authorship is highlighted on the wrapper by boldface type and centrality of position on the page, as is ‘With Illustrations’, all of which is characteristic of fiction part-issue. Nevertheless, some of the readership of Master Humphrey’s Clock who were treated to depiction of its fictional conductor in its opening numbers were convinced of its periodical identity as late as No. 8, for in No. 9 Boz inserted a notice to alleged readers who had mistaken its genre: Mr. Dickens begs to inform all those Ladies and Gentlemen who have tendered him contributions for this work, and all those who may now or at any future time have it in contemplation to do so,

46 Media History

that he cannot avail himself of their obliging offers, as it is written solely by himself, and cannot possibly include any productions from other hands. (Master Humphrey’s Clock 9, 1840: cover verso) This direct address to his readers is repeated several times in the course of the periodical, and all such communications appear on the wrappers. Earlier, in No. 8 he had apologised for the exclusion of an illustration, explaining informatively that owing to the large print run, one of the blocks for a woodcut was ‘injured in the press’, and rendered ‘unfit for use’, and on the wrapper of No. 80 (9 October 1841), in a letter to readers, he shares his frustrations about weekly parts, his plan to end the Master Humphrey’s Clock experiment, and his return to monthly part-issue publication ‘under the old green cover, in the old size and form, and at the old price’ (front wrapper verso). Clearly for Dickens, in this text, the wrapper was intimately connected with the letterpress, and part of the text he produced. In the early issues of Master Humphrey’s Clock we see various strategies to engage readers who came to Boz and his illustrators Cattermole and Hablot Browne on the strength of Boz’s previous success in Pickwick Papers and Nicholas Nickleby, editions of which are advertised on the wrappers of the new venture. In No. 4 Dickens tentatively begins a story, ‘The Old Curiosity Shop’, the first chapter of which is then left off in No. 5 when Mr Pickwick enters as ‘Master Humphrey’s Visitor’. In the same number in which he begins the ‘little story’, which becomes a novel that soon threatens to transform the weekly periodical into weekly part-issue, Dickens confusingly adds a ‘Correspondence’ department to the number, re-enforcing its periodical genre. This illusion is enhanced by the pursuit of Pickwick, through a contribution of ‘his’ tale, so that ‘The Old Curiosity Shop’ is only resumed with a second chapter in No. 7, three weeks later; it fully occupies No. 8, but No. 9 is heterogeneous, containing some ‘Old Curiosity Shop’ chapters, but also ‘Mr. Weller’s Watch’. Unsure of his sales, Dickens is keeping Mr Pickwick and the Wellers in view, lest the new story not hold his readers. From No. 10 numbers consist wholly of ‘The Old Curiosity Shop’ (as his rejection of external contributors in No. 9 anticipates), but the title on the wrapper remains that of the periodical. When a volume is issued it is of the whole periodical text to date, part of which, it is advertised, constitutes the first 38 chapters of the new novel. The Preface to the first volume, which appears in No. 26 with the title page, frontispiece and dedication, provides an extraordinary and laboured explanation of

Star Turn? 47

how Dickens moved from a periodical with fiction to a single fiction. Both the second volume, which includes the remainder of The Old Curiosity Shop, and Volume III, which comprises Barnaby Rudge and other, periodical-related narratives, are issued under the name of the periodical, although with the advent of the second novel, the wrapper design of the parts is adjusted to include for the first time the title of the novel as well as the title of the periodical. It is also the case that Dickens and Chapman and Hall did not issue The Old Curiosity Shop separately as a novel after it was completed in Volume II, but waited until after the demise of the periodical in November 1841 when they issued for the Christmas market, on December 14, Volume III of the periodical (an outsize volume at the expensive price of 10/6), and single-volume editions of both novels at 13/– each. Within the format of a weekly periodical, the various authorial personae – ‘Charles Dickens’ the signatory of the wrapper letters, ‘Boz’ the author/‘editor’ of the cover, and Master Humphrey, the conductor within – dazzlingly multiplied the voices of the periodical, moving generically in and out of serial formats.

(iv)

Format and meaning

I want to turn now from these ‘thick’ analyses of text to an outline synopsis of the two forms. First, part-issue: this format tends to be author-identified and marked, even if by pseudonym. There is more authorial control and independence, and it is more entrepreneurial than magazine serialisation. The number of parts, interval, and length of parts are variable. It stands alone, with no accompanying, rival texts or contexts except illustrations and advertisements. The cover and often the advertisements bear customised relation to the author and individual text as well as to the readership and publisher (see Figure 9). The breadth of the class of readers of part-issues is indicated by the reiteration of advertisements for cheap editions of popular works, and also for other sites and organisation of reading through Book Societies, which are addressed in advertisements from the Libraries, such as Bull’s, Mudie’s, and Churton’s (see Figure 10). There is direct interaction with the audience, and the route to volume format is also technically quite direct: the parts are bound, with the title page and table of contents supplied in the last numbers, and the advertisements and covers of part-issues are scrapped. Magazine serial parts have characteristic differences which for much of the century normally tend to occlude authorship. Authors need to

48 Media History

9. Tipped in to a part-issue Advertiser of Dickens’s novel Edwin Drood (1870), a brightly coloured half-page notice by Dickens’s publisher draws readers’ attention to forthcoming attractions of another of their joint enterprises, the weekly magazine All the Year Round.

Star Turn? 49

10. These borrowing regulations for both serials and books in Bull’s Library appear in ‘The Nickleby Advertiser’ in an early part-issue by Dickens, in May 1838 in the second number of Nicholas Nickleby.

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pass through an editorial gateway for publication. The contribution is often anonymous, and even at best not singularly marked by authorship; there is a rival marker of the periodical’s title and identity, as in Blackwood’s where serialised fiction appeared anonymously for the greater part of the century, and Cornhill whose authority as a magazine similarly marked its fiction as much as did the rumours or information of its authors’ names. Serials in magazines enjoy a guaranteed audience in the first instance, that of the periodical and its other contributions; risk is shared. Indeed, the magazine serial work addresses another, already constituted market, and such a serial is often written with the periodical and its readership firmly in mind. It is adjusted to the market in its inception, and perhaps further adjusted or censored by the author and editor. It is also subject to other conditions of the periodical: its frequency; its policy regarding illustration,2 the pressure on its space from other copy, and the ‘room’ it allocates for fiction in each issue. Thus the length of the part may be subject to editing and even exclusion as well as censorship: Culture and Anarchy in Cornhill is only one example of serials that have been discontinued before completion as ‘unsuitable’. The competition for attention among single texts in a periodical’s sequence of texts which make up an issue means that readers of magazines make a choice of whether to read serials or not, a choice that is made in part-issues at the point of borrowing or purchase. That is, once borrowed or bought, it is likely that the part-issue text will be read, whereas for the magazine serial there is a further stage of selection, with rival texts to hand and in view. Moreover, it could be argued that magazine serials may be read more critically, as the bases for comparison are near to hand. For example, the Cornhill reader of the 1860s was likely to have two serialised novels in each number. Magazines such as the Cornhill could be said to have tutored their readers in how to read critically by offering them parallel narratives for comparison. In any case, the impact on the magazine serial of other articles in the issue, and in previous and subsequent issues of the periodical, does arise, as individual articles in periodicals are part of a sequence within each issue, and each issue is part of a sequence of issues which is strategically designed to be read as part of a continuum. Serialisation from issue to issue is part of that strategy, as are articles which are presented as ‘replies’ to earlier pieces. Lastly, magazine serialisation may be more supportive to irregular serials; authors are less exposed when a part is missed, or the author cannot keep up the pace, or even gives up entirely: the magazine continues to appear and the absence of the part

Star Turn? 51

is countered by the ‘presence’ of other letterpress and likely not to be mentioned.3 Moreover, it might be argued that the termination of completed magazine serials and the ‘loss’ of characters, world, and plot which ends with the serial are mitigated in magazine serialisation by the continuation of the periodical in which the serial appeared, and by the periodical’s supply of a new fictional world for immediate consumption by the bereaved reader. In conclusion, the topic here has been kinds of serials and serialisation in the nineteenth century: part-issue, magazine serial, and book publication. I have been contending that these elements of Victorian print show a propensity to forms of periodic publication as well as periodicals and newspapers. Literature is not alone in adopting these forms, but shares them with graphic art, history, science, art criticism, music, theology, and reference works of all kinds. I have further explored distinctions between part-issue and magazine serialisation, the high status, marketability, and visibility of part-issue publication of either the Author (Dickens, George Eliot, Newman) or the project (the DNB, the New English Dictionary), while magazines are free to absorb into the wake of their title anonymity, as well as works by neophytes, writers of middling familiarity, and the famous. Both types of texts are stripped of their ‘inter’ texts when reissued in volume form. Sheared from advertisements and covers, part-issue is absorbed into highculture volumes for domestic consumption or the Libraries, or on the other hand, without advertisements and covers, resides as a periodical volume, a pale trace of its ephemeral form. The fate of both types of ephemera is inscribed in the process by which in the final number of the part-issue, its form is lost in the seamless achievement of the Table of Contents pages which occlude its serial structure and the gaps between parts, its extension over time, and do not accommodate the advertising or the tell-tale covers, date stamped as they tend to be. The multiple serialised forms of material print culture in the nineteenth century patently construct different texts with differing potentials for meaning, carefully geared to an expanding if segmented market for commodity texts.

3 The Serialisation of Books: Macmillan’s English Men of Letters Series and the New Biography

This is a chapter about the effect of a specific production format – a uniform series – on a genre such as biography, on the author function, and on the biographical subject. It is comparative, and the study is enhanced because the authors in question and their texts are interactive, with publisher, authors, and texts reflexive. Matthew Arnold introduced the term ‘New Journalism’ in 1887, to refer retrospectively to qualities he detected and denounced in journalism of the 1880s as typified by the evening daily the Pall Mall Gazette. Edited by W. T. Stead at the time, the Pall Mall Gazette had survived from its inception through its investigative journalism, and in 1887 was fresh from the wars of Stead’s campaign against child prostitution, ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’. 1 In 1886 Stead had written ‘Government by Journalism’ for the Contemporary Review while serving a prison sentence for procurement and kidnapping in connection with the Pall Mall Gazette story. Stead’s insistence on linking the campaign with the more general point of the usurpation of government from Parliament to the press, on the basis of the latter’s superior representation of ‘the people’, was crucial for Arnold. A veteran journalist by this time, Arnold regretted the professionalising and commercialising of the sector, and the increasing separation of authors from journalists, of literature from journalism. 2 The combination of Stead’s personal flamboyance and arrogance on behalf of the press, the sensationalism of the Pall Mall Gazette, and the paper’s support for Irish Home Rule were quite enough to prompt Arnold’s attack. However, among later critics the term ‘New Journalism’ has long been seen as prescient rather than retrospective,3 anticipating as it does the development of mass media in the 1890s, such as the Daily Mail. But Arnold was perspicacious in linking Stead with a journalism that had designs on a new 52

Macmillan’s EML Series 53

readership, and the expansion of the market in the name of democracy. When in 1890 Stead left the Pall Mall Gazette and founded another journal, it was a monthly digest of information, the Review of Reviews, for a readership described in advertisements as ‘the Million’ (1895) and ‘Busy Men, … Busy Women’ (1892). The cultural history of Macmillan’s English Men of Letters (EML) biographies spanned the same period, that of the growth of the New Journalism. Its first series of 39 volumes appeared between 1878 and 1892 and its second from 1902. The appeal of the series to the growing consumer appetite for the ‘personal’ that the New Journalism both created and satiated, its keynote of succinctness, and its pricing toward the middle of the market all identify it as a venture of the same period. It targets a similarly broad spectrum of consumer, from the highly literate who kept abreast of politics, literature and the periodical and newspaper press to those who read the EML Lives and the Review of Reviews instead. Moreover, John Morley, the first editor of the series of biographies, and W. T. Stead, of the PMG, are linked. In originating the series in 1877 Morley also invoked the busy world of its potential readers (Morley 1917: I.92 quoted Kijinski 1991: 206). Soon after, in 1880, Morley was editing the Pall Mall Gazette with Stead as his assistant. By common consent the quality of the biographies in the series is variable, but because of the limitations on length, the series could be dismissed as negligible, unscholarly, and lightweight by critics. At the same time it was valued by the same constituency for the alternative it offered to the obligatory ‘Life’, described witheringly in 1901 in an upmarket monthly associated with a university readership and staff, the Academy: ‘A biography was felt to be a want of the market; and within one year, or perhaps it was eighteen months, a volume weighing 3 –21 lbs. avoirdupois was written, delivered and Mudied’ (Anon. 1901: 167). This articulates a widespread distaste or, in terms of class, fear on the part of the cultural elite, about the threats posed to them by biography, with its potential investigations and detective methods. Henry James’s reiterated vilification of biographers and biographies during this period is an instance. John Kijinski draws attention to the values of the first EML series under John Morley’s editorship. With its origins in Carlyle’s earlier project of the Man of Letters as Hero, 4 the EML subjects were to function as exemplary figures for the creation of a national literature with a defined canon, the texts and standards of which, authors of the EML volumes were respectively to name and supply. The rendering of the biographical subject as respectable and manly (Kijinski 1991: 214, 220)

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was a reiterated practice among authors of the first series. Kijinski, writing as a cultural critic of literature, notes EML’s biographical approach to literature. I also want to emphasise the foregrounding of ‘Letters’ in the title of the series; these were significantly critical biographies, where readings of the author’s works were integrated with biographical elements. As a cultural critic of publishing and biography, I prefer to remark on the series’ literary approach to biography. The other significant way in which men of letters figure in EML is as writing subjects: the biographers as well as the biographees are selected from the same group of well-known, established men with, normally, some considerable achievement behind them. There were no women biographers or biographees in the first series; the second, in 1902, opened with Leslie Stephen’s life of George Eliot. I shall be looking at A. C. Benson’s contributions to this second series, when Morley was acting as an adviser rather than editor, and in particular at A. C. Benson’s Life of Walter Pater published in 1906, which had been preceded by Benson’s volumes on D. G. Rossetti (1904) and Edward FitzGerald (1905). In comparison with Benson’s Pater, I want to offer Thomas Wright’s ‘independent’ Life of Pater, published a year later; in describing it as ‘independent’ I am referring to its one-off, non-series publishing status. This is significant with respect to the cultural production of the two Pater Lives. That Benson’s Life was part of a series published by Macmillan, Pater’s publisher, was as much a constraint on its author as the more general conventions of the EML series. By publishing a Life of Pater in the EML series, and an account of Pater which they could oversee, Macmillan were acting to ensure a continuing market for editions of Pater in print and to come, as well as to produce a new EML volume. As Victorian publishers routinely used their periodicals to trail works of authors on their lists, so Benson’s biography helped create demand for the Library edition of Pater’s work Macmillan published shortly afterward, in 1910. The production of a succession of works about and by Pater is a form of good property management through advertising – keeping the product’s name visible. There is also a sense in which we can view both of these volumes, Benson’s EML Life in 1906 and Wright’s in 1907, as parts of series, one of a publisher’s series in which the badge of Macmillan and the series override the authorial signature, and the other of a series primarily consisting of successive works by an author. While this last is a condition of production common to all authors of multiple works, its meanings have been construed by diverse theoretical systems; seen by new critics for example, successive volumes by a single author became the

Macmillan’s EML Series 55

oeuvre of great authors, subject to notions of ‘development’, ‘progress’ and ‘organic unity’, while post-structuralists who prefer the horizontal, synchronic, ahistorical context of texts view the very notion of ‘the oeuvre’ as a category of ‘the author function’. My approach to Wright’s Pater is a variant of the latter tack, as in this case Wright undertakes much of what commonly pertains to ‘the publisher function’. This arises not only out of the absence of a single, formative publisher’s series for his Lives, but from the absence of a connection between Wright and any one publisher; in this case Wright and his (choice of) subjects provide the principal contexts. Thomas Wright had also published two analogous volumes before his Life of Pater, one on Edward FitzGerald in 1904 and one on Richard Burton in 1906, so both ‘series’ had their own formats. The EML Lives were one-volume books, at the cheap end of the list of a reputable publisher such as Macmillan, for the middle and upper classes. In the advertisement placed for Macmillan books in the Athenaeum of 12 May 1906 when Benson’s Life first appeared, it took up the least space in the Macmillan list. It was priced at a mere 2 shillings, compared with a new novel at 6 shillings, a Memoir at 12/6, and another biography (of Edward Burne-Jones) in two volumes with photographs, at 30 shillings, all of which had greater prominence. The Wright Lives were published by smaller publishers, Grant Richards (FitzGerald) and Everett & Co.; they were normally two volumes lavishly illustrated with photographs (78 plates in the Pater Life), with extensive indexes, and a high price: the Pater volumes were 24 shillings. The positions of the two publishers of the Lives of Pater in relation to each other are reproduced in the class relation of their respective authors. A. C. Benson wrote from privileged positions, initially as a master at Eton, and then as a Cambridge academic, a Fellow of Magdalene; as the son of an Anglican bishop, Benson had attended as well as taught at Eton, leaving his job there in part in order to work on his edition of the letters of Queen Victoria, then only recently dead. Benson was a poet and novelist as well as a biographer before embarking on the three EML volumes, but he was best known at that time for his two-volume Life (1899) of his father, Edward White Benson, who had become Archbishop of Canterbury. As a schoolmaster and then Fellow, Benson explains in letters to Macmillan, he found that time ‘lay on his hands’, and for that reason he repeatedly offered to write successive EML volumes on nineteenth-century writers. Benson, like his publisher, by this time had ‘good’

56 Media History

connections. Thomas Wright (1859–1936), Benson’s contemporary (1862–1925), was a local schoolmaster, having attended Buxton College, Forest Gate as an articled pupil; he founded his own Cowper School at Olney in Buckinghamshire where he lived for the whole of his adult life. He was not a gentleman of letters writing about his fellows but a socially mobile schoolmaster writing multi-volume biographical lives, an author–producer in the commercial market. His text and practice show awareness of the New Journalism, more like those of Morley and Stead. The subject of Pater was not the first topic of investigation in which Thomas Wright had preceded Benson, a circumstance that indicates the role of the market in determining the production of specific commodities for consumption. Because Wright had recently published a life of FitzGerald when Benson began work on his EML FitzGerald, Benson conferred with George Macmillan, his publisher, about the propriety and advisability of availing himself of Wright’s research. The exchange of letters in the Macmillan archives in the British Library offers a panorama of Victorian publishing, from the establishment, gentleman academic, man of letters to the gentleman publisher in trade to the lower middle-class, transgressive and investigatory, schoolmaster/biographer. The gentleman publisher cannot contain his contempt for Thomas Wright, who has requested a fee of five guineas from Benson for the FitzGerald information. In a ‘Private and Confidential’ letter of 4 July 1894 George Macmillan writes to Benson: Mr Thomas Wright is a man of a very different order [than Aldis Wright5] – a bookmaker rather than a man of letters – and I think it is rather a pity that you communicated with him at all. Mr Aldis Wright I know did his best to keep him at arm’s length, and had a very poor opinion of the book when it came out. The same man is now trying to get his hands on to Walter Pater, and all his friends dread the consequences. We have ourselves warned Pater’s sisters to have as little to do with him as possible. T.W. had no proper access to new material for FitzGerald except such as he was able to scrape up in all sorts of corners and back alleys. It is of course for you to judge whether you should pay him a fee of five guineas for the right to pick about in his dust heap, but personally I should greatly doubt if it is worth your while. I have spoken somewhat freely as I feel bound to do, but these remarks are of course intended only for your own eye. I return Mr Thomas Wright’s letter. (G. Macmillan, 4 July 1904)

Macmillan’s EML Series 57

George Macmillan’s remarks about the ‘dust heap’ of Wright’s sources which had been assembled from the ‘corners and back alleys’ are his considered opinion of the procedures and outcomes of investigative biography, which is juxtaposed in this letter with ‘proper access’. That term refers to what Benson had in connection with the Pater biography, access to ‘connections’ – friends, family, and possibly, but not necessarily, letters and unpublished material. George Macmillan’s model is that of the ‘old’ biography as practised by ‘gentlemen’, a discourse which allegedly does not avail itself of any of the methods of the ‘new journalism’ or address the appetite of the newspaper and periodical press for the ‘personal’, a dimension of reporting and biography that had been developing since the 1880s. While Benson does not himself use these methods, he does want to use Wright’s material and to pay him. In his reply of 5 July 1904 to George Macmillan, he robustly defends Wright’s work on FitzGerald and recognises the value of investigative methods: ‘it is a book that no biography of FitzGerald can afford to neglect. He has followed F’s movements; he has persistently questioned everyone that could have known anything of F. The result is a Boswellian collection of material most of which is important from a biographical point of view’ (Benson, 1904). Moreover, he flatly accuses George Macmillan of not having read Wright’s book. This exchange between publisher and author enables us to map a corner of the cultural field of biography in Britain at the time, and to assess how the two Lives, and the series of which they are respectively a part, stand in relation to each other. Thomas Wright’s papers, scattered though they are – at Austin, Texas, Bloomington, Indiana, Brasenose, Aylesbury and Dickens House – attest to his assiduous gathering of materials, from books, the press, letters, and family and friends of the subject. In the prefaces to his books, he repeatedly emphasises the variety and number of his sources, signalling his alliances with the ‘new’ investigative biography and journalism. In the preface to the Life of Burton the sources are listed: they include 200 unpublished letters between Burton and Lady Burton, interviews, letters from family and friends, Burton collections, unpublished MSS of Burton’s friends, Church Registers at Elstree, and genealogical tables of Burtons, as well as ‘50 new anecdotes’. This range of sources should be compared with Benson’s analogous statement in the EML Pater volume, where Benson seeks to deny the existence of ‘external events’ in his subject’s life; instead, he adopts a plan entirely in keeping with the literary orientation of the EML series:

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I have thought it best in this study of a life marked by so few external events, to follow as far as possible the chronological order of Pater’s writings, for this reason: that though he revealed in conversation and social intercourse scarcely anything of the workings and progress of his mind, yet his writings constitute a remarkable selfrevelation of a character. (Benson 1906: 27) The Table of Contents of the EML Life bears out this strategy; it alternates biographical chapters headed by the most general of titles (‘Early Life’, ‘Oxford Life’) with those on Pater’s work; of seven chapters, half are based explicitly on the writing, and Pater’s articles and books also suffuse those chapters on the ‘Life’. By contrast, Wright’s Table of Contents is largely composed of specifics relating to persons, places and events. Much of Wright’s achievement in the Pater volumes pertains to his location of two sources. J. R. McQueen, a close school friend of Pater’s, supplied photos, memories, leads to others, copies of Pater’s early poems, correspondence of the day, and much about the King’s School and Canterbury. Richard C. Jackson, an alleged companion of Pater in London, was the second source. He proved a difficult as well as a fortunate find. Jackson, who believed he was the original of one of Pater’s most famous characters, often signed himself Marius the Epicurean; his claims of intimacy with Pater and others in his past life seem larded with fantasy. Jackson has been discussed by Samuel Wright (Wright 1971: 149–50, and 1975);6 my interest here is confined to Jackson as an unreliable source who ended by plaguing Thomas Wright as well (perhaps) as the text of his biography. But Jackson’s influence over the text may more usefully be seen as part of the larger problem of sources for an investigative biographer; the Jackson material alone would not have permeated Wright’s volumes as it does, had Pater’s family and friends not boycotted Wright’s project entirely: Pater’s sisters even prevented Wright from using their names, and he scrupulously abided by their wishes. It is the combination of the presence of McQueen and Jackson, and the absence of the Pater circle that undermines the success of Wright’s investigative method, and makes the biography (arguably) unacceptable to Paterians and scholars ever since. Although both of these writers were institutionally based (in education), Benson wrote as a gentleman whose publisher guaranteed a market in the series in which the work appeared: the book was advertised as part of the Macmillan house list, and distributed to wholesalers and booksellers as part of the firm’s network. The imprimatur of the

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series and the publisher, and the low price, sold the book. The connections of both publisher and author made reviews in the press likely. By the time the book appeared Benson said he had forgotten it. Wright was, by necessity, a far more commercial author, whose entrepreneurial talents were evident, not only in his pre- and post-publication marketing of the Pater volumes (it would appear that his publisher did none of this), but also in the very subjects for biography he selected, the sensationalism of his revelations, the narrative mode – of detection – that he adopts, and his investigative methods. By 1903, when Thomas Wright lit on Pater, he already favoured biographical subjects to which sensation or mystery attached. 7 It may be that the recurring lurid element of Wright’s biographies stems from the wish to sell, on the model of sensation fiction, and/or the ‘yellow’ journalism which flourished at that period; or, is it possible that the method of biography he adopted – research and investigation – determined a revelatory outcome, the premise of such a method being the existence of secrets to be discovered? In his autobiography, Thomas Wright of Olney, Wright admits to an interest in the love situation of artists.8 His most well-known find was Ellen Ternan and her relationship with Charles Dickens, on which he had been working since 1893. By 1904 Wright was ready to publish, having decided to give priority to the Life of Dickens over that of Pater. In the event, Grant Richards, the publishing firm with whom Wright was to publish the Dickens Life, was bought out and Wright agreed to defer publication until vulnerable members of the family had died; the result was that The Life of Charles Dickens did not appear until 1935. Lives of Burton and Pater, Wright’s remaining biographical subjects at this period, which did appear in 1906 and 1907 were of men well-known to possess secrets which attached to their work as well as to their person. Mrs Wright, in the course of defending her husband’s Life of Dickens after Wright’s death, insists that Wright ‘did not start to write with any intention to debunk. He had a fresh and startling fact, and felt entitled, in due time, to publish it’ (Wright 1943: 115), but this claim does not address the unswerving and reiterated direction of Wright’s biographical narratives. The lubriciousness of this discourse may be seen directly in his pre-publication publicity. In an Everett & Co. catalogue announcing the Burton volumes, their content is described as follows: There were sides to Burton’s character of which Lady Burton knew little or nothing – and this subject will be dealt with. Again, there was much about Burton that Lady Burton knew and was unwilling

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to tell. These facts – as there is now no reason for concealment – will be told. While an enthusiastic admirer of Sir Richard Burton, Mr Wright will endeavour to produce an absolutely unbiassed work. (B. A. Everett & Co. Catalogue of Books) Having hinted at his willingness to dispense with the widow’s pieties, Wright claims to have had co-operation from ‘several members of the Burton Family who have placed the letters and other materials in his hands’ to establish his access to private material; he has also elicited help from ‘the finest Arabic scholars’, to attract the many male readers of Burton’s exotica, published privately by subscription in Burton’s lifetime. In support Wright adds ‘the work will possess an interesting appendix’ (B. A. Everett & Co. Catalogue of Books). This innuendo, invoking, for those in a position to know, Burton’s choice ‘Epilogue’ on pederasty, which he appended to his edition of the Arabian Nights, let alone the kind of Appendix to which Wright refers, falls outside the exemplary discourse to which a Life in the EML series was expected to conform. Apart from the allegedly ‘unbiased’ reporting of Wright’s research, his private purpose for undertaking the biography of Burton was his conviction that Burton had appropriated without acknowledgement threequarters of John Payne’s translation of the Arabian Nights. The unmasking of Burton as a mere annotator and editor rather than a great translator is part of a brash preface which briskly enumerates sources, names and unreliable forerunners, and justifies its own practices. Simply to open the book and read this preface is to enter the biographical lists. A similar if embryonic format may be seen in the preface to Wright’s earlier Life of Edward FitzGerald, the translator and editor of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Here Wright touts unpublished letters, manuscripts, illustrations, and ‘thirty new anecdotes’, to the effect that FitzGerald had a number of unremarked and close friendships with men whose companionship he far preferred to that of women. The problems posed for publishers by Wright’s ‘indefatigability in research’ (Wright 1906b, 1 verso) and dedication to revelations are shown by an account of the editing of his Life of FitzGerald by a publisher’s reader whose task was to extricate offensive passages. It took a fortnight of discussion between Wright and T. W. H. Crosland, 9 who was working on behalf of Grant Richards: On the Wednesday morning we sat down to it, the question continually before us being ‘How will the critics take this or that statement?’ ‘You are quite right, no doubt,’ he would say, ‘but how will

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the Omar Khayyam gang receive it?’, meaning Clement Shorter and his associates of the Omar Khayyam Club. Of course Crosland could tell me nothing about the subject. His ignorance of everything relating to FitzGerald was colossal, whereas I, who had spent years in the study of it, probably knew more about it than any other living man; and sometimes he made ridiculous suggestions. Occasionally I fell in with his ideas, and sometimes he admitted the force of my arguments. Indeed, he looked upon the matter entirely from the business standpoint. He was interested in the book, anxious for its welfare, and in parts it benefited by his criticism. (Wright 1936: 86) This account of negotiated censorship is one of the more detailed we have from the period, and clearly shows editing as a process of the socialisation of text which is always already mediated, contingent. In 1906 Wright published an explanation of the cultural conditions regarding gender in which he was writing the Life of Richard Burton. Its tensions express vividly the epistemic space and pressures in which early twentieth-century biographies were produced outside of the specific confines of prescriptive series such as EML. Of those of his works which are erotic in the true sense of the word I have given a sufficient account, and one with which I am convinced even the most captious will not find fault. When necessity has obliged me to touch upon the subject to which Sir Richard devoted his last lustrum,10 I have been as brief as possible, and have written in a way that only scholars could understand. In short I have kept steadily in view the fact that this work is one which will lie on drawing-room tables and be within the reach of everyone. I have nowhere mentioned the subject by name, but I do not see how I could possibly have avoided all allusion to it. I have dwelt on Burton’s bravery, his tenderness … but the picture would not have been a true one had I entirely overpassed the monomania of his last days. … As regards Burton’s letters I have ruthlessly struck out every sentence that might give offence … of consideration for Catholics I have suppressed a number of passages. (Wright 1906a: xvii–xviii, my emphases) This is the text of both a serious investigative biographer attempting to deal adequately with knowledge and discourse which are normally, in the period, kept from public view and reserved for initiates, and a

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sensationalist writer who wishes to titillate consumers and prompt them to purchase, all the while proclaiming his good faith. The credibility of the latter is also undermined by Wright’s attack on Lady Burton. Her behaviour chimes with the allusion to the domestic ‘drawing room’, which echoes the commonplace location of the necessity for censorship on a construction of women whose intellectual position allies them with children, an argument which new women had been contesting for over a decade. Still, it would appear that serious commentary on homosexuality in 1906 was largely in practice confined to the specialist studies of contemporary sexologists such as Havelock Ellis and Edward Carpenter. And the catalogue of counts on which Wright had to censor his text is also genuinely doleful and dire as well as titillating, ranging from the erotic, through pedarasty, to blasphemy. They articulate the battlefield which life-writing had become. The prospectus for Wright’s life of Pater (see Figure 11) is similarly worded, and invokes the revelatory mode of Wright’s previous works. We are promised ‘an exhaustive account of Walter Pater himself, and the complete history of his long and intimate friendships … concerning which no previous writer has recorded a single word. … The book will be even more fruitful of surprises for the public than were his biographies of Sir Richard Burton and Edward FitzGerald’ (Wright 1906b, 1 verso, 2 recto). A slur on unnamed other biographies coupled with an assurance of the kindliness of his own goes on to attempt to attract readers through both titillation and creditable interest in Pater, whom the sub-title in the Prospectus calls ‘England’s Greatest Prose Stylist’ (ibid.: 1 verso): ‘Although giving the true story of Pater’s life, and correcting the amazing errors with which other accounts of Pater abound, Mr. Wright’s book is written in the kindliest possible manner, and there will not be found in his pages a single sentence capable of hurting the feelings of any living person’ (Wright 1906b: 2 recto). In his autobiography, Thomas Wright of Olney, where Wright admits to being ‘a close student of Casanova’ (Wright 1936: 189), his selfappraisal contentedly locates this taste in his proclivity in his biographies for ‘love experiences, regular or irregular, of men of genius’ (Wright 1936: 181). Pater’s life and Wright’s interest in sexual secrets are both part of the same cultural matrix in which discourses of male sexuality and male sexuality itself, routinely obscured or even denied in the public sphere, circulated covertly in ways accessible to men largely through male networks and male interpretative communities. Where sexuality surfaced – contagious diseases, prostitution, ‘fallen’ women – it was principally gendered as female, or alternatively as

11. The prose of Thomas Wright’s 1906 prospectus for his 1907 biography of Walter Pater is aimed at attracting pre-publication subscribers. Without the capital and distribution networks of a big publisher such as Macmillan, and without contributing to a popular series (such as EML) to prepare the way, Wright has to take on himself many of the publisher’s functions and market his own book vigorously.

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‘manliness’. On the whole, male biographers – such as Benson and Wright – bonded together and acceded to the suppression of male sexuality in their work, except in so far as it might be excavated by privileged male readers. These biographies articulate the tension between the ‘reporting’ of male sexuality and its suppression in their own narratives and in the life of their subjects. I want to turn to the modes of advertising deployed by Wright in the absence of a wealthy, mainstream publisher such as Macmillan who advertises in the Athenaeum weekly, and who can count on regular attention by reviewers to the new works, however unsensational their contents. It is unmistakably Wright’s voice that speaks in the Everett & Co. catalogue cited earlier, and we find Wright, unlike Benson, making strenuous efforts to create an audience for his book on Pater. Wright, who does not pay for advertising, submits publicity to magazines and newspapers, perhaps to stake out a claim for his subject as he seems to be doing in a notice in The Sphere as early as 28 November 1903 (p. 184), only eleven months after he began work on Pater. But he defers the book, preferring to do the Life of Richard Burton first. There is a sense that Wright decides to treat the EML Pater as an opportunity, using its publicity about Pater to create an audience and market for his own book. For example, he announces on 12 March 1906 in the Westminster Gazette that his book will appear after the appearance in May of the EML life. In August, after Benson’s volume appears, Wright circulates the prospectus for his life and solicits subscriptions through alluding to the inadequacy of the Benson book in terms of a claim that ‘no previous writer’ has even touched on his own revelations (Wright 1906b: 2 recto). Wright works on the reader’s curiosity to learn more, to stimulate subscription to his biography. This note is struck in the preface to the volume where, again, Wright enhances the sensationalism of his book by attacking Benson far more openly and virulently. Wright takes steps to keep his name and project before the public to create anticipation for his book. He bastions this with waves of letters sent to Pater’s circle, asking them each in a personalised letter if they wish to purchase the book at a slightly discounted rate; in the case of Oscar Browning he follows a first unsuccessful letter with a second, offering a further discount. Any of Pater’s circle who aided Benson would find Benson’s access to them turned on its head in Wright’s preface: ‘We are quite sure that these friends did not wittingly mislead Mr. Benson, and equally sure that Mr. Benson put down nothing which he believed to be incorrect’ (Wright 1907: I. x); he goes on to dismiss the EML volume as ‘chiefly a

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book of criticism’ which ‘will, after the revision which it so much needs, go into many editions’ (Wright 1907: I. x). No less than twelve ‘errors’ of the EML book are listed. When Wright’s two volumes do appear, in February 1907, the print run of 1000 is sold out and, like the EML volume they seem to have been reprinted once soon after their initial publication, in this case in the following month, in time to take advantage of the inclusion of the title in the Athenaeum’s free listing of new books. No advertisements for Everett & Co. appear in the Athenaeum at this period. The main strategic mode of sales and distribution adopted by Wright and his publisher – that of subscription – seems to some considerable extent a function of the nature of the publisher, the lack of a series to carry it, and perhaps the slightly scurrilous and suggestive matter Wright characteristically trails before his readers at all stages of the publication of the biographies. However, a letter from an Oxford bookseller of 106 High Street suggests that the sale of new books is problematic; W. H. Wheeler writes to Everett & Co. on 3 November 1906: I have to acknowledge rect of parcel of prospectuses etc of ‘Life of W. Pater’ – sent at Mr. Jackson’s request. But I am sorry I have no system of distribution. Though so old a bookseller – I have long found the sale of new books scarcely ever worth the speculation of buying them. As I have written – and told Mr. Jackson – I do not expect to sell a single copy – so cannot order. And it is only fair to tell you this at once. (Wheeler 1906) Whereas Benson was able to sit back and ‘forget’ his Pater Life, while Macmillan – large and networked – managed the publishing and distribution on the back of the EML series and the rest of the Macmillan list, Wright is anxiously involved at every stage of publication and distribution of his volumes. He even waits to ride the crest of the EML wave. The boasts surrounding the contents of his biographies, and the whiff of sensationalism and combativeness in the prospectuses and volumes alike, may be seen as part of a stand-alone format which requires aggressive sales techniques and reiterated approaches. These characteristics also extend to his investigative methods of research, as compared with Benson’s more gentlemanly mode of inquiry, with its tacit agreement to concentrate on the work rather than the life, and to code revelations so that only the already informed might understand. In Subjugated Knowledges (Brake 1994a) I considered these two biographies authorially, and textually, and traced, for example, the intricacies

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of the personal process of writing for A. C. Benson, his voice in the narrative, and his personal relations with his primary sources which are represented in his diary. Here, I have made a case for an approach not through the biographer as an individual, or through the text, but through a comparison of modes of cultural production associated with series and stand-alone biographies. Just as we may understand Wright’s investigative methods and revelatory narrative to align his work with the new character of the fourth estate, so the EML volume is participating in developing cultural formations of high culture such as that of a national literature and exemplary writers, and writing to constitute it.

4 ‘Doing the Biz’: Book-trade and News-trade Periodicals in the 1890s

This chapter examines trade papers about the publishing industry itself, in the period in which The Daily Mail entered the market in May 1896. Trade journals are part of a larger category named in the period ‘class’ periodicals, to designate titles that cater for special interest groups of readers. To put it normatively, class newspapers and periodicals do not have ‘general’ remits which accord with a particular mix of historically and culturally determined miscellaneous topics, including many categories that we recognise from our own dailies, including news of politics and crime, Parliament and the courts, and finance, for example. The category of ‘class’ papers is useful here because it so clearly articulates the hegemonic sway – the existence, strength, and identity – of a ‘default’ position, that of the ‘general’ paper. What this study shows is a seismic shift in the categories of classification within the publishing industry, at a moment when distributors and newsagents take over some of the responsibilities of booksellers and publishers. In the mid-1890s periodical and newspaper publishing appeared set for unlimited growth, and the book industry and libraries were adjusting to the shift from expensive, three-volume to cheaper, one-volume new fiction. 1 Various groups in the industry were forming or professionalising themselves to add to the publishers/booksellers, whose journals The Publishers’ Circular and the Bookseller had been established since 1837 and 1858 respectively.2 Diverse groups of this culture industry come into clearer definition from 1880, and the rights and interests of authors, newsagents, readers, journalists, magazine and newspaper editors, and literary agents constitute the rich discourse of representation in the periodicals in question.3 Most of these present themselves as addressing a single group, a 67

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strategy which is both self-defining and market-oriented. Thus we have the fledglings of the period such as the Author (‘literary’ authors), the Authors’ Circular (journalists and other authors), the Review of Reviews (‘busy’ readers), the Bookman (‘literary readers’), and the Newsagents’ Chronicle (distributors) to supplement the more generic and established Publishers’ Circular and Bookseller. Certain common features of this class of serial indicate the nature of the market at the time – that is the (monthly) periodicity of trade periodicals, at the moment when the daily was set to establish its dominance; the (cheap) cover price and its relation to advertising; the treatment of ‘news’; and a tendency to specialise and define themselves through a process of splitting, and multiplying, readerships. Except for the Publishers’ Circular, all of these periodicals were cheap 6d monthlies, although they did not all appear at the same time, on Magazine Day at the end of the month.4 Some, notably the Bookseller (which set the precedent), the Review of Reviews, and the Author, appeared on the 10th, 15th, and 20th of the month respectively in order to enhance their timeliness and to include records of the current month, as the Review of Reviews explains: At present, owing to the difficulty of producing the REVIEW before the 15th, the value of the Index, which occupies nearly sixteen pages of the current number, is half lost. My original idea when the REVIEW was projected was to bring it out as near the first of the month as possible, so that the tables of Contents of the Magazines might be a guide to the reader as to what magazines he should purchase. The great increase in the circulation rendered it necessary to publish on the 15th, and this delay, although it did not impair the value of the other contents of the REVIEW, reduced by at least onehalf the utility of the index pages. I have therefore determined to separate them, so that subscribers of the ‘Monthly Index’ may have the tables of the Contents of the Magazines within a day or two of the beginning of the month. … Editors and publishers of periodicals are requested to facilitate the early production and greater completeness of this Index by forwarding me copies of their magazines and reviews with as little delay as possible. (Review of Reviews 11, Feb. 1895: 107) Others appeared on the 1st or in anticipation of it. There is also the point that by avoiding the 1st, periodicals were not in competition with other monthlies which appeared on ‘Magazine Day’.

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The Publishers’ Circular, the exception to the monthly periodicity and the oldest of the papers discussed here, was a weekly, and cost three ha’pence, a price which over four weeks amounted to 6d, the cost of the monthlies. The case of the Publishers’ Circular illustrates the balance between a cheap cover price and the income derived from advertising, a proportion which was bound to be highly favourable to advertising in a trade periodical in which advertisements function within the industry as a form of news. The standard fare of advertising in the Circular – the contents and length of rival publications and publishers’ lists, new technology on the market, 5 services,6 and MSS on offer for publication or syndication from literary agents – constitutes information, ‘news’, and they are typical of adverts in this category of publication; these are in turn analogous with items in the ubiquitous ‘gossip’ departments – common to all of these journals – which normally take the form of the ‘Occasional Notes’ developed by the Pall Mall Gazette since 1865: successive, mostly unrelated paragraphs of information, speculation, opinion, and interpretation separated only by leading or a rule, not by a header. For example, under ‘Notes and Announcements’ in the Circular appears the following news byte: ‘We understand that the World has changed hands for the substantial consideration of £35,000. Mr Clement Scott is named as the new editor’ (Publishers’ Circular, 5 Jan. 1895: 5). Of the weekly Publishers’ Circular, of 24 pages, 16 pages are adverts, in a form suitable to the trade, giving technical detail such as size, pagination, the price of books, and the contents of periodicals. 7 But there are no trade prices, it being explained subsequently that ‘We make it a rule not to quote trade prices for obvious reasons’ (Newsagents’ Chronicle, 28 June 1896: 3); it is envisaged by editors that their readers may not be confined to members of the publishing trade. Announcing on its masthead that it was established in 1837 ‘by the Publishers of London’, the full title of the Publishers’ Circular also testifies to the closer relation of publishers and booksellers earlier in the century: the Publishers’ Circular and Booksellers’ Record of British and Foreign Literature. Thus it lists Publications of the Week, by author and title in one sequence, and, like several of its successors, includes a list of second-hand ‘Books Wanted to Purchase’, a feature addressed to its bookseller readership. These second-hand titles are only partly paid advertisement and represent a kind of hybrid space which serves a number of functions: to access a market; to induce dealers and booksellers to advertise and subscribe, and private readers to purchase or borrow; and to raise a modest amount of advertising revenue for the

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journal itself. While other journals provided annual subscribers with free insertions in similar listings of a given number of items per issue,8 the well-established Circular only offers three lines per issue, with extra lines at 4d each (Publishers’ Circular, 20 July 1895: 68). This is only one of various features of these ‘class periodicals’ that are geared to the commercial functions of their specific reading community. If ‘Books Wanted’ and perhaps the alphabetical list of new publications are ‘for’ the booksellers, then the reviews, which are arranged by publisher, are primarily ‘for’ the publishers, who were by 1895 quite distinct from the booksellers. Thus most publishers are represented by one book in the weekly Review section, although larger houses such as Macmillan may merit two or more on occasion. While the full title of the Publishers’ Circular of January 1895, the Publishers’ Circular and Booksellers’ Record, suggests the targeting of publishers and booksellers, two divergent groups of readers connected to the book trade, a month later it was to court a third group which brought it much closer to the expanding market of the daily newspaper press. The target is the newsagent, that distributor parallel to the bookseller, who handled the serial market. It is perhaps apposite here to note that both of the older trade periodicals, the weekly Publishers’ Circular and the monthly Bookseller, looked like newspapers, and used that word on their masthead. The Publishers’ Circular is ‘Registered as a weekly newspaper’ while the Bookseller describes itself as ‘A Newspaper’, and goes on to echo the Publishers’ Circular, ‘of British and Foreign Literature with which is incorporated Bentley’s Literary Advertiser’. A threecolumn Index to Advertisers takes up the remainder of its front page. Founded twenty years after the Publishers’ Circular, the Bookseller is an explicit competitor for the Circular’s bookseller readers, whose interests appear, it might be observed, only as an appendage in the title of the older publication. Like those of the Circular, the contents of the Bookseller are diverse, including authoritative listings or records of ‘Publications of the Month’, here listed for booksellers under ‘type of book’ (e.g. Illustrated Gift books, Theology, etc.), and a news-filled Gazette department which lists Receiving Orders, Meeting of Creditors, Appointment of Trustee, Dissolutions of Partnerships, Winding Up of Public Companies, and Distributions of Assets. Although the Gazette copy is in small type, occupying only half a page out of a prodigious 108, it is important enough a department for the January 1896 number to include an annual index to the Gazette of 1895. The Bookseller also publishes Obituaries, Trade and Literary Gossip, an extensive review section which includes sections of longer reviews and shorter notices

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in smaller type, and 68 pages of advertisements. Thus both titles continued to call themselves newspapers and retained a news profile despite the proliferation of dailies after 1855. Forty years after the founding of its most powerful rival, in February 1895, the Publishers’ Circular makes a signal attempt to update and expand its market. It begins to publish a fortnightly supplement to its 24-page issues, entitled the Publishers’ Circular Newspaper, Magazine and Periodical Supplement (the P. C. Supplement for short),9 which was free to Circular subscribers, but was ‘published separately’ at a ha’penny by another publisher, one William Dawson and Sons, whom adverts in the Supplement identify as ‘Wholesale Home & Export Newspaper Agents and Booksellers’ (see Figure 12). The 16-page P. C. Supplement was targeting newsagents, and in the Dawson advert of 14 March 1896 the many links of newsagents (rather than booksellers) with publishers are detailed: ‘Every attention given to the prompt and punctual delivery of Newspapers, Books, &c;’ ‘MAGAZINES & PERIODICALS INCLOSED WITH THE DAILIES’; and ‘American, Foreign, and Colonial Books and Periodicals promptly supplied’ (Publishers’ Circular, 14 March 1896: 314). Many publishers, who from the mid-nineteenth century were as likely to publish periodicals as books, were increasingly dependent on agent–distributors to move large numbers of copies quickly. To the Author, a smaller house journal of the Society of Authors, which was smarting from publishers’ fees which reduced authors’ profits, these agent–distributors were the ‘real publishers’ while the middle men were now merely ‘“new” publishers’, without capital or equipment, who provided no necessary services to authors. They were ‘men who rented two rooms somewhere, and without machinery of any visible kind, and almost without visible capital, carried on noisy and apparently unprofitable businesses by the sole help of the great and powerful distributing agencies’ (Author 6, July 1895: 33). The Dawson advert offers a vivid glimpse of the range and centrality of these distribution services: timely delivery of ‘parcels’ to stations, advertising, and nationwide and international services. Two months after its inception, on 4 April 1896, in a half-page advertisement on the first page the P. C. Supplement announced to advertisers a special issue ‘exclusively reserved for Advertisements of Magazines, Newspapers, and Publications of a serial character’ of which 10,000 copies would be printed – ‘guaranteed’ – on 18 April 1896; the scope of its reach may be gauged by the claim that ‘AN ADVERTISEMENT IN THIS NUMBER WILL BE SEEN BY THE TRADE IN ALL PARTS OF THE WORLD’ (Publishers’ Circular, 4 April 1896: 1; see Figure 13). On 18 April the

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12. The increasing and multiple functions of the wholesale newsagent are indicated in this advertisement of March 1896 for William Dawson, whose functions as a newsagent/distributor have been extended to publisher of the P. C. Supplement, soon to be retitled the Newsagents’ Chronicle.

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13. This announcement, to advertisers in the industry, of a special number with a high print-run in a March 1896 P.C. Supplement is part of the gearing up to the production of the mass media: in the event, the number carried advertisements for the first publication of the Daily Mail in May.

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P. C. Supplement carried a full-page advertisement on its back page for a new ha’penny, morning daily due to appear on 4 May, and on its front page a half-page advertisement for a second morning daily, at a penny, due on 23 April. The half-penny title, from Messrs Harmsworth, was the Daily Mail, and the penny paper, from Sir George Newnes, the Daily Courier.10 The Supplement duly featured an interview with Earl Hodgson, editor of the Daily Courier, in that same number (P. C. Supplement, 18 April 1896: 5–6),11 and reviewed both papers favourably on its next appearance, on 9 May, praising the innovative headlines (‘Clarendon headings’) of the Courier, which make one ‘able to “spot” at once the item that interests one in a daily newspaper’ (P. C. Supplement, 9 May 1896: 3), and the advanced printing technology and concept of the Mail, in a ‘review’ which reads like paid paragraphs or a press release. Rather than lamenting the prodigious growth of the newspaper press as George Gissing did in New Grub Street in 1891, the Supplement celebrated it as a potential creator of great wealth (quoting T. P. O’Connor), and a reinforcement of literacy in ‘Un-Newspapered London’ (quoting the Westminster Gazette): ‘The demand for ephemeral literature would appear to be well-nigh insatiable’, it chortles in the same leader, ‘judging by the number of newspapers and periodicals which have recently found a footing, to say nothing of those which have not, but which, during their short duration, have served to keep up a floating supply’ (P. C. Supplement, 9 May 1896: 3). Apart from the two adverts for the Courier and the Mail, neither the size, number or nature of the other adverts carried in the 18 April Supplement warrant a distribution of 10,000. It seems likely that Dawson’s print run was in part funded by Newnes and Harmsworth as advertising copy. Six weeks after the first appearance of the Daily Mail, on 20 June 1896, the P. C. Supplement changed its title to the Newsagents’ Chronicle, while retaining its distribution link with the Publishers’ Circular (see Figure 14). The proximity in time of the creation of a P. C. Supplement targeted at newsagents and the founding of two daily newspapers, one of which was to establish a ‘mass’-reading public, is noteworthy, indicating how the rise of the popular press was achieved by the gearing up of an entire cultural industry – the ‘newstrade’ – in the mid-1890s. Likewise, the subsequent change of title of the Supplement to the Newsagents’ Chronicle after the founding of the Daily Mail is another detail in this complex, extended process. It should be noted that as well as anticipating, advertising, and reporting on contemporary developments in the news trade, the Supplement fos-

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14. This leader page from the first number of the Newsagents’ Chronicle in June 1896 explains the new title’s aims and market niche; for its history, see ‘Ourselves’, top right.

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tered the identity of journalists as journalists by creating a history of journalism; thus, for example, an early number of the Supplement carried an interview with Mr Wellsman, publisher of the current, Jubilee issue of [Mitchell’s] Newspaper Press Directory and Mitchell’s step-son and co-worker on the first, 1846 edition of the Directory, the production of which is described in some detail (P. C. Supplement, 6 Apr. 1895: 5–6). The splitting of the subject ‘publisher’ into bookseller and newsagent that we see in the succession of the Publishers’ Circular to the Bookseller to the Newsagents’ Chronicle, in a mix of formats and strategies including supplement and new publication, is echoed in the proliferation of specialised trade journals in the news and book trades in the late nineteenth century more generally. Thus we get the Author (from 1890) and the Authors’ Circular (1898); the Journalist (1886–1909) and Journalism (1887–9); the Book World (1890–9), Bookman (from 1891), and Bookselling (1895–6), which changes to Books and Bookselling in January 1897 before ceasing publication in December, perhaps pinched by the Booksellers’ Review whose butterfly life lasted only from March 1897 to January 1898. It took the ‘nous’ of W. T. Stead to launch in 1890 a unique and one-off monthly, the Review of Reviews, which successfully addressed both the trade and the ‘busy’ reader. Using the hybridity principle of the two older journals, Stead too planned for ‘editorial’ contents (partly ‘provided’ by the contents of the periodicals trade itself), adverts, and listings, but here the list, an Index to Periodicals, was primarily addressed to the readers, whom Stead specified were to include librarians, journalists, clergymen, and authors as well as booksellers: ‘It is universally admitted to be the best work in its line ever published, and “an absolutely indispensable work of reference” for LIBRARIANS, BOOKSELLERS, JOURNALISTS, CLERGYMEN and all CONTRIBUTORS to the literature of our time’ (Review of Reviews 11, January–June 1895: [viii]). In March 1895 Stead, echoing the creation of the P. C. Supplement in the previous month, moved from monthly indices included in the main body of his periodical to separate, monthly publication of a penny record, described still as ‘a Supplement to the Review of Reviews’, which included an index of periodicals for the present month, a list of all books published in the previous month by subject, and another retrospective list of the more important Blue Books. With the proliferation of the periodical press, and of its consumers along with its producers, Stead provides a separate monthly publication to facilitate access to what is now redefined as ‘information’ by the Index. With his Index the contents of periodicals are vouchsafed the status of topical ‘news’, to be

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accessed immediately for purposes of information, research, and record just like newspapers, by general readers, and by those within the news, publishing, and book trades, and professionals outside.12 By looking at smaller, specialised journals such as the Newsagents’ Chronicle, the Author, and the Authors’ Circular (from 16 to 32 pages monthly), specialist perspectives, unexpected by the scholar, may be found. Thus the Newsagents’ Chronicle of 19 September 1896 alerts its readers to developments in sports periodicals which may influence sales, and to the ways in which the ‘cycling mania’ has stopped former periodical readers from purchasing their favourite titles: they are either saving their money to purchase bicycles, or lack the time to read the periodicals because they are cycling! Moreover, ‘The river has for instance lost its charm’ and disappeared as a pastime, and with it the ‘half-holiday … spent in a boat among cushions and periodicals or lounging at the seaside under similar circumstances’ (Newsagents’ Chronicle, 19 Sept. 1896: 3, my italics). Winter is welcomed as a time when the weather will deter the pursuit of ‘out-door recreations’. However, another, commercially favourable aspect to the phenomenon of cycling emerges in the Supplement, in adverts, illustrations and paragraph puffs for three sports titles, the Lady Cyclist: A Weekly Journal for Wheelwomen, the Cycling World, and the Cycle, for which there are now new readers as well as regular promotional adverts. Likewise, the Author carries a sanguine view of the 6 shilling novel (see ‘Literary Property IV: The Six Shilling Novel and the Trade’, Author, July 1896: 28–9) which it reprints from the Newsagents’ and Booksellers’ Review. Claiming that booksellers have found the new format a ‘boom and a blessing’, it notes that libraries and their subscribers also find it a ‘great Godsend’, there being now ‘no accumulation of unsaleable stock’; used copies may be sold at 3/– and 2/6, and country libraries can stock new novels immediately instead of waiting for tardy supplies from Mudie HQ. The Authors’ Circular (January–April 1898 only) is perhaps the most tantalising, due to its short life and its bid for a position between the Publishers’ Circular and the Author. This new monthly attempts to redefine that multivalent word ‘author’, immediately announcing itself as ‘The Official Organ of the English School of Journalism’ (see Figure 15). The full-page advertisement on its back cover (see Figure 16) for the School near the Strand consists of a highly informative cultural document which outlines the syllabuses of students who wish to prepare for the exams of the Institute of Journalists. A literary bias is still discernible, with ‘Composition and English Language’, and ‘English Literature’ the first two items to appear, only followed by

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15. Small ads on p. 1 of the first issue of the Authors’ Circular in January 1898 illustrate the business of print media in the 1890s; notably the nomenclature of high culture, ‘authors’ is appropriated here to refer to journalists.

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16. This syllabus of the English School of Journalism in the Authors’ Circular of January 1898 is informative of early attempts to professionalise journalism in the UK through technical training off the job, not least in its still prominent inclusion of English literature, second only to composition.

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‘Constitutional History’ and ‘Reporting’. But the periodical itself makes a strong claim to journalistic primacy in its model for the ‘ideal magazine’, which will run with but a small stock of accepted copy, and be ready to seize upon the latest, most attractive topic, and handle it at the psychological moment even as a newspaper does, but more fully and deliberately than is possible in a daily or weekly paper. It will be, in fact, a companion to the newspaper, an illustrator and amplifier of current events. (Authors’ Circular, 10 January 1898: 6, my italics) This caveat is observed in its opening announcement: ‘the Staff of The Authors’ Circular is complete, and Miscellaneous Articles are not solicited’ (Authors’ Circular, 10 January 1898: 3). This is another example in the period of the overlay of news on periodicals, and of the projection of continuities between the newspaper serial and the periodical; the implications are similar to those of Stead’s indices. Notwithstanding its origins in journalism, the ‘Foreword’ of the Authors’ Circular makes its bid for the readership of the Author clear: ‘The Authors’ Circular is founded for the purpose of facilitating the acquisition and disposal of literary property’ (10 January 1898: 3). 13 However, whereas the Author as a house journal of a Society is dedicated narrowly to fostering authors’ professionalism and rights, 14 the ‘primary function [of the Authors’ Circular] is not to safeguard the interests of authors and publishers, but to foster business relations between those who write and those who publish. … The commercial side of Literature is the aspect with which the editor of the Authors’ Circular is concerned’ (Authors’ Circular, 10 January 1898: 3, my emphases), as shown in Figure 17. On perusing its rival, it is clear that the Author is far more limited in scope and more amateur than any of the other professional journals examined. Costing 6d, it is free to members of the Society of Authors, who are nevertheless strenuously urged to pay the 6d. The writing is dull, didactic, and decidedly not ‘bright’, beginning as it does monthly with dour ‘Warnings and Advice’. Its design is neither commercial nor inviting. It is unsurprising that Charles Norris, the journalistically oriented ‘author/editor’ of the Authors’ Circular, saw a niche in the market. The advantage of the position the Authors’ Circular adopts, that of the journalist who is less interested in Literature than ‘the author’, is evident in a spirited defence of novels as a type of copy which is popular with readers. In a recurrent department of the magazine called

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17. Advertisements of manuscripts for sale for magazine serialisation, through a fairly early example of an agency, in Authors’ Circular (1898). Curryer was the founder of the English School of Journalism and a backer of the Circular.

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‘In Plain English’ and signed ‘Broad-Nib’ there is a series of four separate paragraphs on ‘the domination of the novel,’ which represents the tensions among literature, journalism, and fiction. There is no quarter given here to ‘standards’ in Literature; the criterion is the market: The domination of the novel is a sore point with many writers who profess a regard for literature. They treat the art of fiction in a stepmotherly fashion, and want the ‘imp’ kept in an inferior position. It is an old grumble. … The novelists treat it with contempt, and rightly so. Still, the efforts of the literary men interested in the ‘legitimate’ are pitiable. They shunt notices of the novel into out-of-theway corners of periodicals they control; all cackle as loudly over a moderate collection of essays or a bit of rewritten history as an old hen over a soft-shelled egg. They do not know their own business. If they placed the most popular reviews in the most prominent places, their papers would have a larger circulation. (Authors’ Circular, 10 Jan. 98: 10) For students of media history, English, and cultural studies this is a remarkably rich representation of competing ideologies, around the sites of ‘literature’ and journals of different generations and kinds. As we move further into the electronic age, the history and theory of the years of ‘print’ produced by the press have also loomed into view. These diverse journals of the 1890s, both within and about the industry, together enact the struggles for meaning over shared vocabulary, discourses and issues. I want to recommend this group of ‘class’ papers as rich cultural texts and a form in their own right, and to suggest that there is much to be learned from studying periodicals, and indeed print, horizontally and intertextually. Books, newspapers and periodicals; booksellers and publishers; authors, journalists, agents, distributors; and the economies of finance and time, usefully dissolve momentarily the hypotheses of vertical studies of single titles, editors and writers, and enable us to glimpse the topography and discourses of a nineteenth-century cultural formation at work. In this section on media history then, I have tried to rethink some of the basic assumptions of our retrospective configurations of the history of nineteenth-century publishing – the precedence of books over serials both in numbers and cultural value, which I question; the separation of the publishing institutions and processes of book and serial production, which I find to be intertwined; and the notion that authorship

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was the sole and hegemonic brand mark of literary production, when anonymity supplemented by serial title seems just as common. I have compared kinds of constraint that book series and their publishers may exert on genre and authors accompanied by the comforts of publication by a major firm, with the freedom from constraint available to independent authors yoked to the exigencies of distribution and publicity they incur. This provides insight into differences between publishers – the well-established with a reputation to maintain, such as Macmillan, and smaller, financially vulnerable houses such as Grant Richards and Everett & Co. It also maps different experiences of authorship, cushioned like Benson’s or entrepreneurial and risky like Wright’s. Lastly, looking to the cultural formation of booksellerspublishers late in the century, I construe a moment of transition, when the newsagent enters the configuration, in company with the infant Daily Mail. Together, these chapters attempt to gloss keywords in the writing of media history.

Part II Journals and Gender

5 ‘Silly Novels’? Gender and the Westminster Review at Mid-century

The editor of the Westminster is a sort of fence who takes not stolen goods precisely but contraband opinions & pays nothing for them wh. I suppose is his mode of protesting against questionable doctrines! (Geraldine Jewsbury to Joseph Neuberg, 22 Dec. [1849]; Howe 1935: 227) The appearance of Woman in the field of literature is a significant fact. It is the correlate of her position in society. … It is very true that ink on the thumb is no ornament; but we have yet to learn that stains upon the blouse or the dissecting sleeves are ornamental; few incidents of work are. ([Lewes] 1852, ‘The Lady Novelists’, Westminster Review 58: 129) We think it an immense mistake to maintain that there is no sex in literature. Science has no sex … But in art and literature, which imply the action of the entire being … woman has something specific to contribute. … A certain amount of psychological difference between man and woman necessarily arises out of the difference of sex, and instead of being destined to vanish before a complete development of woman’s intellectual and moral nature, will be a permanent source of variety and beauty. ([Evans] 1854, ‘Woman in France’, Westminster Review 62: 449)1 Cultural criticism of our own period often takes ‘gender’ to denote ‘women’ and the woman question in the nineteenth century. I shall argue here that the ‘contraband’ contents of the Westminster Review between 1850 and 1865 address the subject of gender at its most 87

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inclusive. I suggest that this is only in part due to the Westminster’s well-known affiliations with progressives such as the Philosophical Radicals, and that its adherence to the topical – the domestic, political ‘news’ of the day, in which gender figured repeatedly 2 – is the other principal factor, irrespective of any characteristic ‘set pattern’ of kinds of articles successive issues reproduce. 3 In a period in which gender is inscribed in a telling variety of discourses in print culture generally – from In Memoriam to Men and Women, homosocial to straight, the Westminster is no exception: where articles on ‘Prostitution’ and ‘Enfranchisement of Women’ appear in the early 1850s, those on Aurora Leigh and the Divorce Bill appear later in the decade. So, various sexual and gender questions were regularly scrutinised in the Westminster and other periodicals and newspapers of the time, as they were in Parliament, in literature, and among the people. Recurring issues include male sexual orientation, masculinity and femininity, heterosexual relations including marriage and prostitution, women’s stake in the public sphere and the state, and issues of art, gender, and genius. Thus comparison of the Westminster with 43 other contemporary periodicals included in The Wellesley Index, shows the Westminster to be only one of several with a significant proportion of main articles (excluding serialised fiction) with gender-specific titles between 1845 and 1870.4 Others include Blackwood’s, the North British Review, Macmillan’s Magazine (from 1859) and the Contemporary Review (from 1866). Bentley’s Miscellany and Fraser’s enter the lists, but largely through one thread of gender articles, on men, as in ‘men of letters’ and ‘great men’.5 As my epigraphs indicate, the presence of gender in the Westminster takes a number of forms: the choice of contributors, the choice of subjects, and the gender politics it publishes and fosters. Geraldine Jewsbury, for example, writes for the Westminster as a female professional writer about to contribute an unpaid, anonymous piece on a controversial subject in theology, ‘Religious Faith and Modern Scepticism’, a sphere of knowledge perceived at the time as male; G. H. Lewes, a progressive and experienced journalist, literary editor of a political weekly at the time, a seasoned contributor to the Westminster, and committed to radical exploration of gender relations in his private life, begins ‘The Lady Novelists’ more auspiciously than readers of his complex and fascinating map of gender issues may judge it continues after reading it through; and Marian Evans, writing ‘Woman in France’ anonymously as an apprentice journalist and editor of the Westminster

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itself, offers a reading of all literary discourse as gendered – as female if not by default male. Evans’ admiration for women’s writing in France provides an informative context for her renowned critique of English novelists in ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’, published in the Westminster in 1856 after she left her editorial position. It is this latter anonymous article – catapulted to fame retrospectively through the canonisation of the novels of ‘George Eliot’ – which I propose to contextualise. Instead of treating it primarily authorially, as a throat-clearing apprentice piece of a named author in the sequence of her oeuvre, I want to read it as one of the most visible manifestations of a diverse discourse of gender which may be found at the time, not only in this single piece by a (now) named author but more generally in the Westminister and in the wider press. I want to argue that Evans’ article is part of a nuanced and extensive discourse involving gender which permeates the culture and politics of the 1850s and 1860s. I shall look first at the Westminster generally, go on to consider ‘Silly Novels’ more specifically as part of that periodical’s contribution to the gender debates of the 1850s and 1860s, and then briefly indicate the nature and extent of interventions in another journal of the day, the North British Review.

(i)

The Westminster in the 1850s

Like the Edinburgh and Quarterly, its Scottish models from the first part of the century, the Westminster had begun, and remained in the 1850s, a high-priced, bulky and quarterly review; and despite its (in)frequency, which appeared to inhibit topicality increasingly as the century wore on, the Westminster deployed virtually all of its pages to consider topical issues of the day, only one of which was gender. As a quarterly in the fifties,6 the achievement of topicality always involved a battle against the constraints of production, frequency and format, particularly the length and nature of the articles, many of which involved research, analysis, and accretive thought. Notably, the Westminster of this period is alert to the time lag between the topical and printed books, as well as to the absence of suitable new books on a given subject, as it resorts frequently to review articles on pamphlets, parliamentary reports, and on occasion, specific issues of newspapers.7 This type of review enhances the appearance of links between the more ephemeral (i.e. frequent) publications that record and produce ‘news’ and the book-like quarterly reviews. In this it is not alone.8

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In 1855 the pressure of topicality and news on the Westminster and the other quarterlies was to mount appreciably when the stamp duty on newspapers was removed, the immediate effect of which was to decrease the intervals between the serial production of news countrywide. Local and provincial weeklies proliferated as well as a new generation of metropolitan weeklies such as the lively Saturday Review, and twice- and thrice-weeklies in provincial centres became cheap dailies; new metropolitan dailies such as The Telegraph appeared. ‘Time’ sped up, ‘news’ moved on and off more quickly, displaced by the ‘latest’.9 Indeed, in May 1887 after Chapman, who had been commuting to London from Paris to edit the Review from 1875, sold the journal to a company in which he retained shares, the pressure of the increasingly rapid circulation of news resulted in the transformation of the Westminster Review to a monthly magazine. While the fame of its contributors (‘obscure’) and the quality of its contents (‘journalistic’) in this period are described disapprovingly by the editors of Wellesley, it was a move which was commendably alert to the changing markets of the day. Certainly, the attention to gender in the 1850s in the Westminster represents not only an aspect of progressive political interest but also increased competition for readers from news-rich sources. The year immediately following the removal of the stamp duty, 1856, shows enhanced attention to gender issues in the Westminster. The frequency and radical nature of its commentary on gender would serve to distinguish this progressive quarterly from old and new competitors, and keep it in the arena of topical public debate. Thus a sober article on the sensational subject10 of the Divorce Bill appears in April 1856, contemporaneous with the preparation of the Bill, which was to be passed in 1857. The next, October, number features both an apparently lighthearted literary piece denouncing, against expectations, ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’, and a polemic on the Married Women’s Property Act which calls for a change in the law, publishes the text of the national petition to Parliament, and names some of its more illustrious signatories. This represents a quarter of the main articles in the number, two out of eight. Favourable reviews of works by famous women such as Margaret Fuller and Harriet Beecher Stowe appear in the January and October numbers respectively. Only the July issue of 1856 hides its orientation to gender by publishing anonymously two main articles by Harriet Martineau and Marian Evans on apparently neutral (male) topics, Christian missions and German life. Neither of these is written in a manner which would identify the gender of their author as other than male. But the article on ‘German Wit: Heinrich Heine’ which appears in January 1856 does

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let the gender of its author permeate the anonymity. Whereas Heine could be expected to fall within those subjects of the day designated as male because of the unheroic and sexually explicit nature of some of his writing, the Westminster article goes out of its way to take issue with just these characteristics: We do not see why Heine’s satire of the blunders and foibles of his fellow-countrymen should be denounced as the crime of lèse-patrie, any more than the political caricatures of any other satirist. The real offences of Heine are his occasional coarseness and his unscrupulous personalities which are reprehensible, not because they are directed against his fellow-countrymen, but because they are personalities. That these offences have their precedents in men whose memory the world delights to honour does not remove their turpitude, but it is a fact which should modify our condemnation in a particular case. … On this ground of coarseness and personality, a true bill may be found against Heine. ([Evans] 1856b/Westminster Review 65: 26) It is likely that this article – which attacks the morality of Heine in the secular Westminster – would be read as the work of a woman rather than a clergyman; indeed, the periodical might expect to accrue a certain notoriety for having invited (or permitted) a woman contributor to review such material. More generally, the Westminster includes material by women which constructs the author through argument, tone, and occasionally the definition of the subject as female (as here), as male (as ‘Woman in France’ and ‘Silly Novels’ could be alleged to do), and as gender-neutral and thus assumed male. In its egregious and notorious misogyny, it could be argued that the Saturday Review, new in 1856, followed a similar strategy to the Westminster; as in the Westminster, its attention to gender was part of the larger political brand mark of the journal, which was nicknamed ‘The Saturday Reviler’, women being only one of its habitual victims. In October 1857, the Westminster reviewer of Aurora Leigh referred glancingly11 to the sexism of the weekly which studiously took the trouble, for example, in 1858, to notice the debut of Parkes and Bodichon’s new periodical, The English Woman’s Journal, in order to stage a vehement attack on its commitment to furthering the employment opportunities of middle-class women outside the home.12 But it should be noted that if gender appears in various permutations of presence in the Westminster and other of its contemporaries, often it

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is absent with respect to subjects that, from our point of view, most raise it. Thus, for example, there is no discussion of the education of girls in articles on ‘Educational Movements’ in January 1851, on ‘Educational Institutions in the United States’ in April 1853, 13 or on ‘Medical Education’ in September 1868. Perhaps most surprising is the bland review of ‘Sesame and Lilies’ which, having resolved to praise rather than blame, contents itself with a passing reference to Ruskin’s ‘curious views about paternal government’ (Westminster Review 84: 574) and the inclusion of a long passage from Ruskin about women, quoted perhaps ironically, and left without comment. So, in addition to the diversity of practice of writers’ negotiation of their authorial persona with respect to gender, there is an unevenness of treatment, where the presence of gender perspectives is paralleled by their absence. Other aspects of interest in this period of the Westminster are its transition from the end of one editorial stint of some length (by W. E. Hickson, the last of the direct links with the Benthamites) to the beginning of another sustained editorial reign (by John Chapman), and the London apprenticeship it offered Marian Evans (only later George Eliot), who arrived from the provinces in 1851 in the way apprentice journalists did. Beginning auspiciously with her canny advice, Chapman’s Westminster benefited considerably from her editing from 1852 through 1854, and her regular contributions of reviews and mainstream articles until 1857. The anomaly of her situation upon arrival in 1851 as a woman journalist may be gauged by observing that no other woman editor existed at the time in the UK,14 and by the following consideration of professions open to women at the time, by the anonymous writer of a shorter review15 of Histoire Morale des Femmes in the ‘Foreign Literature’ section of the July 1850 number: We should not, however, have thought of mentioning the stage as a profession, but that it forms, we believe, the only instance in which the sexes are entirely on a level; or, if there be a difference, the scale may preponderate a little on the feminine side. Of literature it is scarcely possible to speak as a profession, either for man or woman … it is so obviously impossible to calculate beforehand who will possess the kind of talent required, that it would, not without reason, be thought a kind of insanity deliberately to bring up either son or daughter to make letters a profession. … There is, indeed, one branch of the literary profession, namely, that of the newspaper press that … does afford a tolerably steady and permanent support, and this is precisely the one from which women are by custom excluded. We must

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own we cannot see why many of its departments, as well as the humbler employments of clerks and bookkeepers, should not be thrown open to them; but … many of our readers will probably consider these suggestions very absurd. (‘Foreign Literature’, Westminster Review 53, 1850: 521–2; my italics)16 As a career for men and women alike, literature was chancy and understandably dependent on talent; journalism – here viewed as it is to be nearly until the end of the century, as a subset of ‘letters’ and ‘literature’ – is deemed suitable, if closed, to women, at least in its most professionalised form, the daily newspaper, which offered concerted and steady work. Even in the offices of periodicals, there were few if any women to be found in the early 1850s.17 But it remains the case that the high incidence of gender as a pervasive category of interest in the Westminster yokes rather than divides the reigns of Hickson and Chapman; attention to gender is not editorspecific in this instance. The openness of the Westminster to a woman editor in the office and at the heart of its operations seems to stem both from the radical tradition of the journal and its editors, as well as from the conflation of Chapman’s position as publisher and editor with his role as landlord: his home doubled as a boarding house, in which Marian Evans lodged. Indeed, it is indicative of the maleness of the profession that even she constructs herself as a male persona in some of her Westminster pieces written during her editorial tenure, and in ‘Woman in France’ (1854), colludes in associating the reading as well as the writing of the proliferating journalism with men: journalism tends more and more to divert information from the channel of conversation into the channel of the Press: no one is satisfied with a more circumscribed audience than that very indeterminate abstraction ‘the public’ and men find a vent for their opinions not in talk but in ‘copy.’ We read the ‘Athenaeum’ askance at the tea-table, and take notes from the ‘Philosophical Journal’ at a soirée; we invite our friends that we may thrust a book into their hands, and presuppose an exclusive desire in the ‘ladies’ to discuss their own matters, ‘that we may crackle the Times’ at our ease. ([Evans] 1854/Westminster Review 62: 455) Harriet Taylor and J. S. Mill’s dissection of the phenomenon of ‘the literary woman’ in the article ‘Enfranchisement of Women’ in 1851 may be apposite here: ‘Successful literary women are just as unlikely to

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prefer the cause of women to their own social consideration. They depend on men’s opinion for their literary as well as for their feminine success’ ([Taylor and Mill] 1851/Westminster Review 55: 310). Despite this disdain by the political for the literary, the male character of journalism at the time endorses the truth of this view, and helps explain Marian Evans’ strategy, even when she writes anonymously, and, once signature is adopted, her choice of the male sobriquet ‘George Eliot’.

(ii) The topicality of gender: brandmarking the Westminster The bantering scepticism of ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’ cannot be said to be the characteristic note of the Westminster on gender questions in the 1850s, nor is literature the Westminster’s principal arena of gender inquiry. While G. H. Lewes, Marian Evans and others produce a trail of articles exploring gender and literature, 18 which is widened by reviews in the ‘Belles Lettres’ and ‘Foreign Literature’ sections undertaken by Evans and Lewes respectively, 19 the more common occasion of articles which address gender issues in the Westminster is current affairs, whether events in Parliament or forms of print media. Such pieces are evident in Hickson’s Westminster in 1850–1, notably a frank article on the ‘painful and perplexing’ subject of ‘Prostitution’ (by W. R. Greg) along with a long and eloquent review of Histoire Morale des Femmes, both in the same 1850 issue, and [Harriet Taylor’s and J. S. Mill’s] powerful ‘Enfranchisement of Women’ in 1851; moreover, within these eight numbers additionally appear pieces on ‘Woman’s Mission’ and ‘Marriage with a Deceased Wife’s Sister’. Following Chapman’s takeover in 1852, articles in the fifties stemming from current affairs include Chapman’s ‘Position of Women in Barbarism and among the Ancients’ (October 1855), which examines the subject in anticipation of forthcoming legislation; two pieces in 1856, John Paget’s (?) ‘The English Law of Divorce’ in April and Caroline Cornwallis’s ‘Property of Married Women’ in October,20 and the same author’s ‘The Capabilities and Disabilities of Women’ in the following issue of January 1857; this in turn is followed by a piece on ‘Female Dress in 1857’ by Harriet Martineau, which is positioned prominently as Article 1 in the October 1857 number and paralleled with a main article on Aurora Leigh by John Nichol. Taken together, the incidence of literature and current affairs-based reviews shows that in this sample, from the end of 1855 to the end of 1857, the Westminster may be seen to treat gender as a calculated part of its radical campaign, with

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gender arising in a range of settings – literature, divorce, property, fashion, education. Both in the horizontal ‘run’ through time of the periodical, and in depth, in occasional individual issues (the two axes on which serials are situated), the Westminster of this sample does corroborate the claims of the Wellesley editors (III, 544, 551) that ‘the Review reflected the growing concern for women’s rights’, but it is also clear that the discussion of the ‘woman question’ is part of a larger interest in gender issues including masculinity, male education, and the homosocial.21 In a review of Thoughts on Self Culture, addressed to Women in January 1851 which might be deemed characteristic of the journal in this period, the reviewer will not allow that women are ‘peculiarly deficient in education’ (Westminster Review 54: 544): ‘the laws of divorce, the impossibility of married women holding private property, and the frivolities of fashionable life, are all condemnations of the state of education amongst men, who find such abominations pleasing in their eyes, or they would take care that they were reformed’ (Westminster Review 54: 545). The ubiquity of gender issues in the period and their tendency to surface are indicated by the emergence of reflexive self-censorship by a Westminster contributor in 1858 whose article otherwise has no explicit gender content. What we are permitted to see is the gendered institutional framework in publishing and reading practices, usually invisible in so far as it tends to reside in practices rather than pronouncements at this time.22 The article is ‘Realism in Art: Recent German Fiction’, and the remarks come at the end of the piece where the writer wants to recommend a novella, ‘Romeo and Juliet auf dem Dorfe’, but only to male readers. Were our space less circumscribed, we would translate the whole of the description of this lovers’ Sunday; but its length is too great, and an abstract would spoil it. We must therefore content ourselves with referring our male readers to the original, which they will find quite a bit of genius – a free poetic fancy in the conception, and a thorough realism presiding over the execution. Indeed, the realism is, in one respect, carried too far. We have already hinted that it is our male readers to whom we recommend the original, and it is vexatious to think that a man of genius should write a story which, because of a few sentences that might perfectly well have been omitted without destroying the interest or reality of the picture, cannot be read aloud in the family circle. The story ends tragically.

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… The lovers are intensely happy during one long summer day, and rather than part on the morrow they seek union in death. ([Lewes] 1858/Westminster Review 70: 517–18) It is surprising that this caveat appears in a space such as the Westminster, with its relatively few and enlightened female readers accustomed to its habitually strong intellectual menu, and its male readers not subscribing to such patronising and bourgeois constructions of women. That a progressive journalist such as Lewes is uncritical of the convention of censorship for family reading even in a Westminster setting23 and suggests that the author of the tale internalise this market condition and act to censor his own work himself is also unexpected. While Greg apologises in his 1851 article for the necessity to discuss prostitution, he does go ahead and do just that, perhaps letting the throat-clearing serve as a warning to any readers who would find the material offensive – if the bald title of the piece had not done that already. It seems to me that what Lewes’s warning suggests is that in this period the Westminster had more female readers than its exclusion of fiction and its political and international orientations would suggest to us, or at least that Lewes and/or the editors think it has. And with good reason, given the run of gender articles between 1855 and 1857. Still, it is likely that women readers who were attracted to the Westminster by such coverage would scoff at its ‘protective’ stance. This position appears particularly inept at this time, in October 1858, when Bessie Rayner Parkes and Barbara Leigh Bodichon earlier in the year had begun to publish The English Woman’s Journal, the first of the Langham Place feminist serials (Rendall 1987: passim; and Lacey 1987: 1–16). Although the Journal’s circulation was modest like the Westminster’s,24 it was a monthly, and its women readers were bound to overlap with those of the Westminster. Its advent may have helped to prompt a Westminster article on ‘Women Artists’ (December 1858) in the number following Lewes’s caveat in October, which addresses the question of the rarity of women artists, in a review of art in Germany. However, it is not until well into the next decade, from the mid-1860s, that the combination of agitation about reform, the development of secondary education and higher education for women, J. S. Mill’s unsuccessful parliamentary bid to extend suffrage to women in the 1867 Reform Act Bill, and publication of The Subjection of Women prods the periodicals into more clusters of articles in which gender is a primary organising principle.

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Another contributing factor to the incidence of such material is the increased number of periodicals, notably, with respect to gender, Macmillan’s Magazine,25 the Fortnightly Review,26 and the Contemporary Review,27 founded respectively in 1859, 1865, and 1866; this new, vibrant critical mass in the market niche of ‘higher journalism’ helped to circulate gender and produce it as newsworthy. In one of these later clusters in the 1860s, in the Westminster, male writers (John Chapman and F. W. Newman) of a piece on the ‘Capacities of Women’ refer to their own and their fellow-reviewers’ attitudes to works by women. They can be seen to be writing self-consciously in a community of reviewers some of whom are in a process of grappling with the language of criticism and the grammar of thought to achieve a more disinterested critique. The review is of diverse writing by three women authors, Essays on Women’s Work by Bessie Rayner Parkes, translations of Aeschylus by Anna Swanwick, and nine titles by Frances Power Cobbe. It begins by assuring readers that the article is not about the rights and wrongs of women and, in defining its subject selfconsciously, reveals the pitfalls for contemporary journalists of writing such a review: We will not call them representative women, as though collectively they could suffice to exhibit what, in their present cultivation, English women can achieve; yet at least they will show how much their talents and their sound accomplishments deserve respect: how unjust and how superficial is that tone of disparagement, so easily (we had almost said, so naturally) assumed by an anonymous reviewer, whose task is to write down a woman, or the cause. ([Chapman and Newman] 1865/Westminster Review 84: 353) So, upon reaching Parkes’ publication on women’s work, a subject which cuts right to the heart of the period’s primary identity of women as embedded in the domestic sphere, the writers steel themselves to be impartial and distinguish themselves from their fellow reviewers: ‘Miss Bessie Rayner Parkes has met, we are sorry to say, with rudeness from anonymous male writers, who seem to imagine that she is bent on unsexing women, or is unalive to the essential necessity of some feminine virtues. The small book before us … appears to us a model of good sound sense, and keeps eminently aloof from extreme views’ ([Chapman and Newman] 1865/Westminster Review 84: 356). By the time Cobbe’s title on related matters is addressed, however, patience for the ‘cause’ has run out: Pursuits of Women is politely, if generically,

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dismissed, in favour of Italy, which merits nearly two subsequent pages of review space: Among Miss Cobbe’s less-noticed works are her volume on the ‘Pursuits of Women’ and that on ‘Italy’. … The character of the former book assimilates it to the writings of Miss Parkes, Madame Bodichon, Miss Nightingale, Miss Elliot, and other estimable ladies. It did not give room for Miss Cobbe’s more characteristic powers: yet it is not the less valuable, as her contribution to great, difficult questions, urgent on every philanthropist and every patriot; and she has evidently worked out her problems with great zeal and conscientiousness, never neglecting statistics and practical fact under any attractions of theory. But her book on ‘Italy’ seems to need here more particular notice. ([Chapman and Newman] 1865/ Westminster Review 84: 378) Despite efforts to avoid prejudice, the pitfalls of ideology are clearly inscribed here. Those figures grouped as similarly disposed to the woman question are diverse from each other and at the same time distinct from Frances Power Cobbe. Nor could the boredom of the writers with the subject (and only possibly the book) be better expressed than in their mincing epithets of praise, ‘zeal’ and ‘conscientiousness’, and the bemused acknowledgement of the ubiquity of fact and the absence of theory. It is perhaps in order to keep the interest of male readers and to avoid a response like this that Marian Evans adopts an ironic form of criticism when she writes about contemporary English women writers in ‘Silly Novels’, which appears now as much a critique of one zone of reading (the popular) by another (higher journalism) as it is an exposition of the case for realism. But with respect to the question of ‘woman’, Evans dares here to distinguish among women and to reserve the right to criticise some – unlike Chapman and Newman – in a periodical which is predisposed to the Cause throughout the 1850s and 1860s. And while she gestures toward satisfactory English woman novelists in the conclusion of ‘Silly Novels’, where she honours the periodical’s stance,28 her greatest enthusiasm for fiction by women was reserved for the French novel, as she explained two years before in ‘Woman in France’. Faced with rescuing books of a library of ‘works written by women, in various languages’, ‘for our own part, most of those we should care to rescue would be the works of French women. With a few remarkable exceptions our own feminine literature is made

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up of books which could have been better written by men … when not a feeble imitation, they are usually an absurd exaggeration of the masculine style’ ([Evans] 1854/Westminster Review 62: 448). In this article too Evans tweaks her piece, at its conclusion, to the position of the journal. In the last paragraph it is argued that the example of French women may be applied to the improvement of English women’s position in contemporary Britain: ‘Women become superior in France by being admitted to a common fund of ideas, to common objects of interest with men; and this must ever be the essential condition at once of true womanly culture and of true social well-being.’ This is contrasted acerbically with the present state of separate spheres: ‘We have no faith in feminine conversazioni, where ladies are eloquent on Apollo and Mars; though we sympathize with the yearning activity of faculties which, deprived of their proper material, waste themselves in weaving fabrics out of cobwebs.’ It ends with a gesture toward the promised land: ‘Let the whole field of reality be laid open to woman as well as to man, and then that which is peculiar in her mental modification, instead of being, as it is now, a source of discord and repulsion between the sexes, will be found to be a necessary complement to the truth and beauty of life. Then we shall have that marriage of minds’ ([Evans] 1854/Westminster Review 62: 472–3).29 Other articles in the Westminster in the later 1860s – such as ‘Winckelmann’ in January 1867, ‘Spiritual Wives’ in April 1868,30 ‘The Suppressed Sex’ and ‘Poems by William Morris’ in October 1868, and ‘Prostitution in Relation to the National Health’ in July 1869 – are frank and unembarrassed, suggesting that Lewes’s view of censorship of the previous decade is no longer shared by colleagues, nor by the editor who contributes the article on prostitution. In fact, that and the still anonymous piece on ‘Spiritual Wives’ are remarkably explicit, including respectively, details of communal sexual life, and naturalistic descriptions of sexually transmitted disease. This makes the elaborated case for parental control of their daughters’ reading by the anonymous writer of ‘Spiritual Wives’ in 1868 noteworthy. The censorship finally advocated, for parents of daughters to exercise discretion in their access to books, represents a slight improvement over Lewes’s earlier position – in that rather than withholding controversial material, the reviewer proceeds to write explicitly after this pronouncement: this functions doubly as a sign of periodical discourse, to woman readers in the act of reading, of the nature of the material to follow and as a more general proposition about cultural management of information. But its admonition that ‘the unreserved circulation of

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books dealing freely with the relations of the sexes is liable to produce great mischief’ is categorical, given the regrettable ‘existing notions of female propriety’ (Anon. 1868/Westminster Review 89: 457). That this solution arises out of the expression of a wish that closely resembles Lewes’s a decade before – ‘We regret, however, that our author has diminished the value of his work by encumbering it with much that can be regarded only as the ravings of insane women and the devices of licentious men’ (Anon. 1868/Westminster Review 89: 457) – marks the shift. In ‘The Suppressed Sex’, the Westminster can be seen to continue the effort shown by Lewes and Newman’s ‘Capacities of Women’ to keep up with current developments on gender, reviewing, as it does, a paper by Lydia Becker presented at the British Association, ‘On some supposed differences in the minds of men and women with reference to educational necessities’. The last item of this review is the Macmillan’s Magazine piece on ‘Women Physicians’, revealing the Westminster’s bid for not only the specialist cutting edge but a wider topicality and popular dialogue.

(iii) From the woman question to the homoerotic: the range of gender in the Westminster I want briefly to single out some articles for particular elements they contribute to the discourses of gender in the Westminster of these years. While some pieces such as ‘Enfranchisement of Women’ or ‘Woman in France’ are well known because of their prominence in other narratives – such as history, literature, philosophy, or authorship – they will be considered here primarily in relation to the periodical in which they appeared, both as stand-alone contributions, and as recurring interventions in the Westminster’s ongoing part in the gender debate of the period. Taylor and Mill’s ‘Enfranchisement of Women’ is prominently situated by Hickson as the opening article of the July 1851 number, partly because of the distinction of its supposed author, J. S. Mill, 31 whose eminence ensured that his long connection with the quarterly was well known to habitual Westminster Review readers, despite the longstanding practice of anonymity; in addition, the radical nature of the topic and the cogency of its arguments in 1851 were calculated to call attention to the July number, which was appearing in the midst of an event that distracted attention from troubling domestic politics around reform – the self-congratulatory national pride and heightened

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national identity associated with the Great Exhibition which had opened in May. The Westminster was drawing attention to another form of public event, ‘new, and even unheard of … public meetings and practical political action’ reported in the New York press around female suffrage. This signal of the entry of American women into the sphere of political meetings and public political discourse has implications for the Westminster as well. The article stresses the agency of women, which is to take material form in the many articles by women on political questions that the Westminster will publish in the following decades: It will add to the surprise with which many will receive this intelligence, that the agitation which has commenced is not a pleading by male writers and orators for women, those who are professedly to be benefitted remaining either indifferent or ostensibly hostile: it is a political movement, practical in its objects, carried on in a form which denotes an intention to persevere. And it is a movement, not merely for women, but by them. ([Taylor and Mill] 1851/ Westminster Review 55: 289) The hardhitting and radical polemic of this piece has ample precedent in the Westminster, and with respect to gender issues. In his widely-ranging and explorative 58-page article on prostitution, W. R. Greg in July of the previous year startled his readers by drawing a parallel between prostitution and the economy of the marriage market: ‘For one woman who thus, of deliberate choice, sells herself to a lover, ten sell themselves to a husband’ ([Greg] 1850/Westminster Review 53: 458). Greg’s article is remarkably loathe to condemn ‘prostitution’ as a unitary subject; mapping it in detail, he firmly includes men in the frame, and distinguishes sharply between ‘fornication’ (buying sex alone), which is denounced, and ‘sexual indulgence’ (involving love outside marriage), which is tolerated and not condemned: ‘sexual indulgence, however guilty in its circumstances, however tragic in its results, is, when accompanied by love, a sin according to nature; fornication is a sin against nature’ ([Greg] 1850/Westminster Review 53: 449–50). This public, tempered position is extended to a muted defence of bachelor life before marriage: ‘Into the question of the possibility of men in general leading a chaste life before marriage, where marriage is so long deferred as providence and justice require it to be in England, under actual social arrangements – we must at present decline entering’ ([Greg] 1850/Westminster Review 53: 479).

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His solution is to brand ‘Deserters’ ‘with the same disapprobation as gambler, coward or cheat’. When this happens, seduction will become more rare because of the responsibility it entails. But he is unrepentant in his defence of seducers who stay, and thus defends both women and men in these liaisons: ‘Mere seduction will never be visited with extreme severity among men of the world, however correct and refined may be their general tone of morals; for they will always make large allowance on the score of youthful passions, favouring circumstances, and excited feeling’ ([Greg] 1850/Westminster Review 53: 504). He is an advocate of extending the welcome given to the return of the prodigal son to the prodigal daughter, and castigates the public ‘whose views make it impossible for newly fallen women to return to respectability instead of being driven to prostitution’ ([Greg] 1850/Westminster Review 53: 471). The article explores in considerable detail a spectrum of gender issues around masculinity, discipline, sexuality and its relations with culture as well as the premium on virginity and ways ‘back’ as an alternative to punishment. Realigning the definitions of the problem, he includes men more problematically in the debate, and insists that premarital or extramarital relations can yoke sex with love as well as more carnal pleasure. Greg’s masculinist ruminations on prostitution are echoed to an extent in Lewes’s thoughtful opening paragraphs in ‘The Lady Novelists’ in July 1852, which similarly look at male responses to what is designated ‘the woman question’. He reminds male readers of their insecurities in the face of learned women, continuing the epigraph above wryly: ‘Moreover we confess it is very awkward and uncomfortable to hear a woman venture on Greek, when you don’t know Greek, or to quote from a philosophical treatise which would give you headache; and something of this feeling doubtless lies at the core of much of the opposition to “learned women”; the men are “put out” by it. The enormity seems equivalent to the domestic partner of your joys assuming the privilege of a latch-key’ ([Lewes] 1852/Westminster Review 58: 129). It is a cunning and ironic build-up from the mildness of being “put out” to the enormity of the latch-key! But Lewes goes on to say more momentous things about gender, when he argues that literature consists not of an ‘expression of society’ but of an ‘expression of emotion’, that the conventional ascription of emotion to women makes them especially adept at fiction, and that creative men have precisely this feminine characteristic: ‘In poets, artists, and men of letters, par excellence, we observe this feminine trait, that their intellect habitually moves in alliance with their emotions’ ([Lewes] 1852/Westminster

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Review 58: 132). Lewes makes the arguments for difference between the sexes, but on a ground of equality: ‘inasmuch as women necessarily take part in these things [emotions], they ought to give them their expression … the advent of female literature promises woman’s view of life, women’s experience in other words, a new element’ ([Lewes] 1852/Westminster Review 58: 131).32 I have already mentioned a strain of homosocial discourse which appears in the Westminster of these years as found in reviews of In Memoriam (1850), Euphranor (1851), ‘Winckelmann’ (1867), and Poems by William Morris (1868). Rather than look at the first two, that are brief paragraphs, or the last two, that are chronologically at the margins of the period, I shall focus on ‘The Sonnets of Shakespeare’ (July 1857). This piece by a critic who remains anonymous in Wellesley suggests, by its public subject and argument, which valorise male friendship, and by its lexical structures and its pattern of quotation, that the love it discusses is that between men. Like Greg’s and Lewes’s pieces, it is written from a male position of shared knowledges which include the everyday sexual histories of middle-class males. It identifies its discourse to discerning readers by numerous signs, including reference to names associated with the homosocial (here ‘Mr. Hallam’), the quotation of Greek in relation to male love, glancing reference to whipping and bruising, an ecstatic recommendation of male friendship, and the implicit preference for love for youths over that for women. Quotations from the sonnets and the value placed on them bear these covert signs out, finally ‘the most beautiful of them all’ being 104, ‘To me, fair friend, you never can grow old’ (Anon. 1857/Westminster Review 68: 136): ‘They deal with our deepest sympathies’ (Anon. 1857/Westminster Review 68: 134). The pattern of concepts in which Shakespeare is framed is largely ‘vices and faults’, and the link of guilt, indulgence, and the illicit with beauty is unmistakable. Moreover, the sonnets are viewed transparently, claiming to offer views of behaviour and Shakespeare’s life: the plays showing, it is claimed, Shakespeare the poet, the sonnets reveal Shakespeare the man. Images of masturbation and orgasm proliferate: Adversity is like the cold March wind which shakes the trees, bending them to the dust, breaking of times their groaning boughs, but which loosens the earth at the roots, so that the sap ascends, and the green buds blossom forth. Even vice itself, like a stinking stagnant cesspool, breathing out pollution, breeding plague, and

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pestilence, and death, if put to proper account, may turn, by divine alchemy into sweet flora and fruits. (Anon. 1857/Westminster Review 68: 129) The commentary on Sonnet 116 (‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds’), which makes extravagant claims for this male friendship, has all the signs of an enthusiasm: the pure disinterested love for his friend is separable from the rest. … All other love compared to this [116] is poor and finite. This one short sonnet is, perhaps, the finest essay upon friendship ever written. The picture that he gives of himself in his happiest moments is that of a deeply contemplative mind, full of affection. (Anon. 1857/Westminster Review 68: 124) I wanted to draw this element of the Westminster’s gendered writing to attention partly to show the range of the discussion of gender in the periodical at the time, partly to provide a context for the more explicit homosocial articles in the 1860s such as ‘Winckelmann’, and partly to suggest that some of the public prints of the nineteenth century did circulate such material, quite publicly, and that it was not all under the dispensation of the permitted space for such material, ‘the classics’. Moreover, in a period, a circle, and a periodical where George Sand’s life and work were respectively renowned and admired,33 it is not surprising to find Marian Evans making a good deal of the affection between women of the précieuses and comparing it with heterosexual love. In ‘Woman in France’, which appeared in October 1854, three years before ‘Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, she writes at length of these female friendships: There is no evidence, except the untrustworthy assertion of Tellemant de Reaux, that Madame de Sable had any other liaison than this [with the Duc de Montmorency]; and the probability of the negative is increased by the ardour of her friendships. The strongest of these was formed early in life with Mademoiselle Dona d’Attichy, afterwards Comtesse de Maure; it survived the effervescence of youth and the closest intimacy of middle age, and was only terminated by the death of the latter in 1663. ([Evans] 1854/ Westminster Review 62: 458) It speaks strongly for the charm of Madame de Sable’s nature that she was able to retain so susceptible a friend as Mademoiselle

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d’Attichy in spite of numerous other friendships, some of which, especially that with Madame de Longueville, were far from lukewarm – in spite too of a tendency in herself to distrust the affection of others toward her, and to wait for advances rather than to make them. We find many traces of this tendency in the affectionate remonstrances addressed to her by Madame de Longueville, now for shutting herself up from her friends, now for doubting that her letters are acceptable. ([Evans] 1854/Westminster Review 62: 459) This language of rivalry, insecurity, jealousy, retention, advances and passivity indicates the homosocial bonding that is perceived here, represented by the nineteenth-century reviewer as well as by the letter-writers of the seventeenth century. Again, reference is coded and the contemporary context [of Sand] in which such relationships might be located is never explicitly stated though it is available through inference to a readership as alert to the codes as any periodical’s audience of the period. To sum up, the incidence of gender perspectives in the Westminster at mid-century is high, and the settings variable. Some of the known contributors to the Westminster are women – Caroline Cornwallis, who by this time is in her 70s; Geraldine Jewsbury, Harriet Martineau, Harriet Taylor Mill; and the apprentice Marian Evans, by far the most frequent participant, whose numerous contributions stand out, the only other female multiple contributor being Caroline Cornwallis with two. Also, a large and significant number of works reviewed are by women authors, such as Lydia Becker, Barbara Bodichon, Frances Power Cobbe, Elizabeth Garrett, Maria Grey and Emily Shireff, Anna Jameson, Caroline Norton, Margaret Fuller Ossoli, and Bessie Rayner Parkes, as well as novelists and poets including Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, E. B. Browning, Elizabeth Gaskell, Geraldine Jewsbury, George Sand, and Harriet Stowe. The bulk of known writers on gender and gender reform in the Westminster, however, are male, which accords with the overall gender balance of contributors, including Chapman, Conway, Greg, Hickson, Lewes, Nichol, Mill(?), Paget(?),34 and Pater; while two of these are editors, and another two (Lewes and Greg) are regular contributors at the time, it is the case that a significant amount of the cultural work on gender in the Westminster is by male journalists. Of articles that raise homosocial issues, known authors of those on gay male bonding are men, and the one reference to female friendship is by a woman. A proportion of outspoken pieces on gender issues remains anonymous even now, including the review of Histoire Morale des Femmes, ‘Spiritual Wives’, and ‘The Sonnets of Shakespeare’. This dearth of

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attribution does yield some meanings: that the writers are amateurs or simply that their pieces were not reprinted in book form with signature or have not been found; and/or that they were unpaid and do not appear in extant account books; and/or that for some reason (their gender, their opinions) they themselves conspired to prevent attribution by destroying records or not reprinting. In any case, these three particular articles remind us, through their range of ‘subject’ and varied strategies of approach, of how central gender issues were at this time on radical agendas, and the degree of their permeation in discourse and culture as represented in the Westminster – with respect not only to marriage but to bachelors and independent women, authorship, education, employment, fashion, friendship, inheritance, journalism, law, religion, readership, suffrage, and writing.

(iv)

Gender in the North British Review: a comparator

I want to finish by glancing at a sample of dedicated articles on gender35 in the 1850s and 1860s in a comparable quarterly, the North British Review, that will serve as a comparison with the Westminster. Both periodical titles identify themselves geographically with respect to two polar centres of periodical journalism and print in nineteenthcentury Britain, the North British Review originating in 1844 (and remaining until 1869) in Edinburgh, when the older quarterlies were gravitating inevitably to London. One distinctive characteristic of this periodical in comparison with the Westminster is its religious orientation; Wellesley (I, 663) quotes W. G. Blaikie, an editor of the 1860s, who described it as both ‘liberal in politics and Christian in tone’ rather than either one or the other. My sense is that in comparing it with the Westminster both its Scottishness and its Christianity are factors to be borne in mind: for example, its contributors surprisingly, given the contents of their articles, do not overlap with those of the Westminster. I note in particular J. W. Kaye, the author of three outstandingly feisty articles in 1855–7 on the employment of women, battering, and the Divorce Act, and one-off articles by two women contributors, Dora Greenwell the poet, then living in Durham, who writes ‘On Single Women’ in 1862, and Louisa Merivale who reviews ‘Three Women of Letters’ in 1865. The radical tenor of the Westminster stable of writers and its avowed secularism are perhaps most exposed by North British Review’s choice36 of Coventry Patmore to review ‘The Social Position of Women’ in February 1851, which appeared six months before [Taylor and Mill’s]

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‘Enfranchisement of Women’ in the Westminster.37 Patmore extols ‘the high calling’ of ‘the manifold and living interests of domestic government’ which for him constitutes women’s position, one of ‘complete moral equality’ with men, but not social or political equality ([Patmore] 1851/North British Review 14: 522). However, at the outset, the position of the article is more transparently conservative and confrontational: the ‘enobling responsibility as chief’ is man’s, and the ‘excellent privilege of subordination’ is woman’s ([Patmore] 1851/North British Review 14: 515). While Patmore contributes regularly one to three times a year to North British Review from 1847 and throughout the 1850s, this defence of patriarchy is paralleled from February 1850 by a steady flow of more liberal pieces on a variety of subjects by recruits of a new editor, the philosopher A. C. Fraser.38 Between 1855 and 1857, the three vehement calls for reform and redefinition of the situation of women by Kaye 39 appeared, all presented journalistically to readers by eye-catching titles: ‘The NonExistence of Women’ (Aug. 1855), ‘Outrages on Women’ (May 1856), and ‘The Employment of Women’ (Feb. 1857). The first robustly addresses the divorce law and the proposed bill, through a review of Caroline Norton’s ‘Letter to the Queen’ and her ‘bulky pamphlet’ ‘privately circulated among her friends’, on ‘English Laws for Women in the Nineteenth Century’ ([Kaye] 1855/North British Review 23: 536). The charge of the ‘bad taste’ of Mrs Norton for ‘obtruding matrimonial quarrels on the public’ is rejected by Kaye as ‘simply to talk as a dolt or petit mâitre’ ([Kaye] 1855/North British Review 23: 537). A year later in a piece about physical abuse of women, also occasioned by a bill before Parliament, Kaye suggests that should opportunities for ‘honest employment’ of women increase their independence, then fewer will need to marry: ‘it will not be long before wife beating and other outrages on women sensibly diminish’ ([Kaye] 1856/North British Review 25: 256) he placidly reasons! He promises a follow-up on women’s employment, which appears the following February. The authors and works under review appear retrospectively to include key topics and texts, and a slew of notable women such as Mrs Jameson, Margaret Fuller, Mary Howitt, and Bessie Rayner Parkes as well as texts by men – sermons and pamphlets – on the public function and the wishes of women. Moreover Kaye immediately signals the significance of the high proportion of texts by women under review: ‘It is very meet and right that women should write on the “woman’s question.” It is a necessity that they should write of it with much diversity of expression’ ([Kaye] 1857a/North British Review 26: 291). Kaye’s last

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contributions to the North British Review in the 1850s appear six months later in August, one of which is another piece on marriage and divorce legislation. Kaye’s sustained focus on gender issues over three years, and the vigour and tenor of these articles, stand out in their day. They both echo the conviction of Harriet Taylor and J. S. Mill in the Westminster Review of 1851 and anticipate the imminent appearance of The English Woman’s Journal early in 1858. They brand the North British Review of these years as a radical space, comparable to the Westminster Review on these issues, although its coverage is not so frequent or varied, its contributors not so numerous, and its context not so consistently radical. Nor is there a female editor/contributor at the heart of the journal like Marian Evans; the difference is notable.40 In the 1860s, after Fraser’s departure, two women contributors publish in North British Review in a renewed period of ‘enlightened editorship’ (of J. W. Blaikie, Nov. 1860–Aug. 1863, and David Douglas, Nov. 1863–July 1869), again on dramatically titled subjects. Dora Greenwell, the Christian poet, writing on ‘Our Single Women’ in February 1862 and invoking Nature’s ‘print’ on women, advocates training for unpaid voluntary female labour in Church Work, through formal sisterhoods which might stimulate and exact ‘heroic sacrifice’ from their members. The books reviewed here again suggest that the North British Review is alive to the latest writing: Mrs Jameson on Sisters of Charity and the Communion of Labour, the Englishwoman’s Journal Office’s Thoughts on some Questions relating to Women, and the Transactions of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science. While this subject was timely, 41 following the result of the 1861 census, which showed a superfluity of women, its interest in sisterhoods as an alternative to paid work for women was already in general circulation as the books under review show, and may be thought to accord with the position of the North British Review at this period, as liberal and religious. A piece in May 1865 by Louisa Merivale (1819–85), a writer whom Wellesley shows to be a regular contributor to periodicals of the day, is more positive, and even celebratory in its detailed attention to ‘female authorship’, which is dignified here in the title ‘Three Women of Letters’ (my italics). Merivale creates a pantheon of suitable figures by reviewing together works by Lucy Aitkin, Joanna Baillie, and Caroline Frances Cornwallis, rather like John Chapman and F. W. Newman will do six months later in the Wesminster’s ‘Capacities of Women’; Cornwallis, a contributor to the Westminster in the 1850s who died in 1858, is the

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favoured figure in the North British Review piece. Certainly Merivale’s sympathy for all three of her authors makes an interesting point of comparison with Marian Evans’ attack on Lady Novelists in ‘Silly Novels’ in the Westminster nine years before, and the three narrative Lives in North British Review may also be taken as types of the Lives of women which, had Leslie Stephen and his successors been more open to women subjects in the DNB, might have enhanced that late nineteenth-century serial. Cornwallis, who apparently was unknown until her letters (reviewed here) were published after her death, is limned in heroic terms: The other was entirely unknown to the world till death cancelled the obligation of secrecy, and revealed her as the writer of some anonymous works of more original thought and more varied range of matter than even clever women have in general proved themselves able to command – a recluse shrinking from observation, not possessing any influential connexion in the world of letters, working patiently, earnestly, with deep convictions, against the surface-current of her times, taking up a place with the pioneers of new thought, even when old ties and associations beckoned her powerfully backwards; most reluctant to display, yet proudly conscious of possessing capacities of insight and of reasoning far beyond the limits usually assigned to her sex. ([Merivale] 1865/North British Review 42: 330) While this example – shrinking from public life, embracing the journalistic convention of anonymity, hard-working, modest, highly competent, and in short, unobtrusively outstanding – is presented as praiseworthy, it is a model which negotiates the dilemma of being a competent female writer/journalist in mid-century without confrontation, through ‘passing’ as conventional and unskilled. That this is a model whose day was done is shown by the frequency, depth and variety of the interrogations of gender in the Westminster and the North British Review. As Foucault argued with respect to sex, the discourses of these mid-nineteenth-century periodicals show the presence rather than the absence of the subject of gender, which, as constituted here, is many-faceted, openly anatomised, frequently interrogated, full of fissures, and written by self-consciously gendered men and women writers.

6 Gay Space: The Artist and Journal of Home Culture

I

MAGAZINES AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF IDENTITY No distich in the Greek anthology is quite so full of Hellenic simplicity and Hellenic sentiment as Plato’s famous two lines on Agathon: ‘As I was kissing Agathon I felt my soul upon my lips even as though it were about to depart.’ (Anon. 1889b, The Artist (July): 195) Guessed you but how I loved you, watched your smile Hungered to see the love-light in your eyes – That ne’er can wake for me – Would wild surprise Or sheer disgust at passion you deem vile Be your response? … In all this world this thing can never come … You shall not hear me even breathe your name. (‘G.G.’ 1890, The Artist (April): 113)1

(i)

The Artist and its readers, 1880–95

In The Artist, a 6d monthly published between 1880 and 1902, may be seen a profile of a late Victorian periodical which addresses a telling succession of dominant reader groups, in which gender and diverse categories of ‘artist’ are primary variables. The profile has emerged from the identification of one ‘centre’ at a specific period (1888?–1894), 2 under a particular editor, in which the journal seeks to integrate and establish a visible gay discourse, a gay tradition, and a gay interpretative community of readers before 1895 and the Wilde trials. Although 110

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The Artist is distinctive among nineteenth-century sites of homosexual discourse, editor-led as it is, it is not unique. Early numbers of The Studio, for example, under the editorship of Gleeson White,3 are similarly oriented, but author-led (and dispersed) gay periodical discourse such as that by John Addington Symonds and Walter Pater4 is far more common in the thirty years 1865–95. Scrutiny of the publishing history of named authors shows clearly that a number of mainstream periodicals accepted for publication and circulation gender-marked, homosocial and even homoerotic ‘gay discourse’. Pater and Symonds thus publish both coded, and fairly explicit, same-sex material in the Contemporary Review, the Fortnightly, Macmillan’s Magazine, the New Review, the Westminster Review, and even Cornhill5 and Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. These reviews and magazines offer a range of contents characteristically ‘general’, including arts, politics, science, religion, history and philosophy. By contrast, The Artist falls into a category of the nineteenth-century press designated ‘class journalism’, so named because of the specialist nature of its contents and the appeal of its titles to a specific niche of readers, here ‘artists’.6 The Artist’s inclusion of gay discourse and journalists of the ‘new culture’ – such as Lord Alfred Douglas, John Gray, J. G. Nicholson, Andre Raffalovich, Fr. Rolfe, J. A. Symonds, Gleeson White, and Theodore Wratislaw – figures amid a more general exposition of ‘Decadence’ found in its pages between 1888 and 1894. Its distinction among class journals was that this particular group of consumers was not publicly acknowledged as a ‘class’ readership, unlike women for example. 7 But under Kains-Jackson, a gay audience was an important backup to its dominant address to its ‘artist’ readers. More generally, the preponderance of other types of (‘straight’) discourse in The Artist made it a typical example of art journalism: it takes its place beside other art periodicals of the day such as the Magazine of Art, the Art Journal, and Studio, with one other exception: it is not illustrated until late in 1894. That unexpected characteristic of a magazine of the visual arts, and the nature of its layout and contents, attest to its close links with categories of the press other than that of the art or ‘class’ magazine, to wit the general weekly, in particular the Athenaeum from which, generically, it appears an outgrowth. From the outset and in the early years it was clear that the gender of potential readers had been configured to include women so as to maximise readership. The first number carried a report of the ‘Female School of Art’ in Queen Square (January 1880: 3), and lady artists figure in several departments including the letters (January 1880: 9). In the

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leader of No. 2 the topical issue of art education for women is lodged in one of The Artist’s recurring attacks on the Royal Academy, and a new section is introduced, ‘Art in the House’, with the explanation that ‘No feature of the late reawakening to the beautiful in England, we think, is more encouraging than the fact that our art is getting more and more domestic’ (14 February 1880: 34). By March 15, the gendered element of ‘Art in the House’ – which appears on page 1 – is explicitly stated: ‘It is intended to be, in a measure, the Ladies’ Column of the paper’ (15 March 1880: 65). Its remit will include ‘the minor developments of Art and Taste, such as Dress, Furnishing, Art Needlework, Tapestry, Artistic Stationery, Jewellery, Articles of Domestic Ornament, Fancy Goods, Design in Wall Papers, Painting on Textile Fabrics, &c’ (ibid). This element is further promoted in January 1881, when the sub-title Journal of Home Culture is added to the masthead (see Figures 18 and 19). It is accompanied on the front page by ‘A Picturesque Dining Room’, the third article in a series of ‘Outline Sketches for Furnishing’ (1 January 1881: 1). The formal incorporation of this element of domestic art legitimates features of the journal distinct from visual art, such as a monthly music department that in this case directly echoes its original publisher’s trade in sheet music. William Reeves, manufacturer of fine art materials, also printed and published music and art prints as well as The Artist. As other nineteenth-century publishers used their magazines as a source of free advertising for their monthly book lists, so Reeves placed whole-page adverts for paint boxes and fine art prints in The Artist.8 Other advertisers of products for ‘home culture’ might similarly be attracted. The sub-title also extends the breadth of The Artist’s appeal to women consumers, beyond art practitioners to that broader group of middle-class women interested in aesthetic domestic culture more generally. These decisive signals to women, which address them as part of the art industry and as potential consumers of The Artist, abate in the course of the 1880s. There is a change in the gender mix of the reading community that the journal defines, addresses, and creates. By 1888 when Charles Kains-Jackson comes to be associated visibly with the journal, the address to women readers and artists has nearly disappeared; areas of domestic art such as dress and interior design tend to be associated with men rather than women, with figures such as Oscar Wilde, Frederic Leighton, and Aubrey Beardsley. ‘Art in Dress’ for example, in September 1890, stages a discussion of the male body and bathing costumes in a ‘review article’ of Cassell’s Book of the Household.

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18. Front page of an early number of the Artist and Journal of Home Culture (1881), including a prominent column on domestic furnishing, editorial back-up for the change of title’s bid for women readers, crafts workers included.

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19. Self-advertisement of The Artist in 1882, showing reviews after its first two years and the breadth of its bid for readers, from the ‘Art World’ to the ‘cultivated Household’.

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While the female body is invoked glancingly (in terms of the representation of the relation of shoulders to waist), male flesh is evocatively detailed: a man in well fitting clothes suited to the heat or cold of the day can and does easily forget the accident of clothing so far as he himself is concerned. What brings home to him the degradation of modern clothing is the hideous spectacle that his fellow men present. The light and tender colour of flesh, the graceful curves of the body, the exquisite unity between it and the limbs, these facts of which every morning’s bath reminds him and which every night’s undressing tells him are the real facts of one’s nature, these graces and harmonies for which the soul has a natural appreciation and a perpetual yearning, are taken from him violently in the dress of every person he meets. (‘Quill’ 1890: 259) This is a piece in which dress 9 is demonised, as part of a call for more representation of the nude in contemporary art. While the case is presented formally and technically, a homoerotic element is clear. In the period of Kains-Jackson’s editorship (ca. 1888?–1894), the address to gay men is a distinctive and reiterated discursive strain, in among the preponderance of copy addressed to the practising male artist who is now, by implication, defined as ‘straight’. The curve of the shift of address over the run of the periodical – from a readership which includes women as a recognised minority in a primarily male readership through one which principally comprises straight and gay men to one which excludes gay men and reinstates women – is signalled formally in October 1894 when there is a change of title to THE ARTIST: Photographer & Decorator. An Illustrated Monthly Journal of Applied Art, as well as that of format and publisher. The original sub-title foregrounding ‘home culture’ is displaced by wording which subsumes the new main nouns – Artist, Photographer, and Decorator – into the category of ‘Applied Art’,10 an apparently scientific and professional nomenclature which seems to exclude the domestic woman at home – the amateur – and to welcome professional practitioners. However, the simultaneous addition of illustration undermines this apparent exclusion of the non-professional, marking as it does an attempt to attract the more general art magazine readership, which includes spectators. Moreover, these shifts of format, title and publisher in 1894 signal an abrupt change of definition of the imagined community of male readers: the address to masculinity lurches from a mixture

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of heterosexual and homosexual to heterosexual and homophobic. Retrospectively, it appears that in April 1894 The Artist underwent the kind of homophobic purge suffered by the Yellow Book in April 1895 in the wake of the Wilde trials. If Kains-Jackson was ejected for writing a specific article,11 while Beardsley was sacked to eliminate the suspicion of the ‘mob’ (both in-house and external), the effect on the two periodicals was comparable: neither recovered. The parallel suggests that before the trials – the alleged defining moment when male homosexuality entered the cultural consciousness of nineteenth-century Britain – such defining discourse was registered, circulating, consumed publicly, and eventually stopped, not exclusively by the courts, but through selfcensorship by the press itself in the name of the market. The lurching transformations of The Artist between May and October 1894 suggest that crises of both finance and identity were provoked by the sacking of its editor. Initially Kains-Jackson was replaced with no explanation other than the addition of a strap headline12 added to an abbreviated masthead in May: ‘Edited by Viscount Mountmorres’.13 Nor is it announced at this point that there has been a change of publisher, although the address of the periodical office is altered to 14 Parliament Street, the premises of Cassell. The substance of ‘A PRELIMINARY TRUMPET-BLAST BLOWN BY OURSELVES’ on the same page is a cosmetic attempt to adjust to the altered state of New (periodical) Journalism, largely in terms of higher production standards – more pages, stiff cover, large type, better paper and printing. The Trumpet-Blast also signals The Artist’s turn towards applied art, and promises to notice, but not at this point include, illustrations. The tacit adjustment, which is nowhere explicit, is the transformation of the nature of the copy, which not only excludes all manifestations of the homosocial and homoerotic, but includes sporadic swipes at Wilde and Beardsley which intensify during and after the Wilde trials. These signal the utter transformation of gender discourse that The Artist is undergoing. The important point in this context is the continuum between the pre-trial measures and the post-trial scourge; they are undoubtedly the result of the same phenomenon, homophobia. The other material changes to The Artist, implemented over the summer months of 1894, take effect in the October issue. They are explained in September in an anguished prospectus which articulates the full measure of the purge. In addition to the new title, the list of new features is a catalogue of the characteristics of the new journalism: illustrations, photographs, enlargement, interviews, and prizes (Anon.

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1894e: 322; see also Figure 20). Of these the most pervasive articulation is the change of culture from the ‘beach’/‘opium’/‘valleys’ to the ‘rage’ of the ‘regions of money and trade’ (Anon. 1894e: 323). The new project – ‘It awakes to business’ – is associated with the city, the market, and a battle for survival: ‘Henceforth will THE ARTIST push, and crowd, and hustle its way through the tumultuous herd of practicality and monetary values’ (ibid.). Mountmorres too is sacked: buried in the gossip paragraphs of ‘Studio and Personal’ is the information that ‘THE ARTIST has once more changed hands, and, owing to the character of the paper being materially altered, the new proprietors have to seek a new Editor (September 1894: 338). The anonymous author of the emotional, gendered prospectus remains unknown, but his pessimism and distaste for the new project mark the profundity of its difference from the past. The prospectus ends with a long riff that likens the history of the journal to a piece of music that ends with a climax: A crashing, hideous discord; a flare of staring colours; a mad whirling round and round: after that a monotonous wail, a livid greeny white, a nauseous falling headlong downwards. Then the silent, black, still unconsciousness. Lastly comes the deadly, bitter, unwelcomed return to life and reality, and you rise and set out to haggle and barter in the crowded mart. Such is THE ARTIST’s awakening. It has passed to new hands and will henceforth preach of textiles, and applied art, and house decoration. (Anon. 1894e: 324) This anguished end to an ill-judged prospectus completes the narrative of unravelling in The Artist begun by the sacking of Kains-Jackson. However, if the boast is that ‘THE ARTIST will be an ART TRADES’ PAPER without commercial puffery’ (Anon. 1894e: 322), the misgivings of this conclusion supply a sub-text which in the event the revamped, illustrated Artist echoes; genteel and up-market, it seems geared to the sitting-room browser as well as to the studio practitioner. These final iterations of fear that fine art will give way to applied, the male artist to the commercial designer of whatever gender, and a specialist male audience to women at home to which the new Artist will ‘preach’ are borne out by the glossy page and the poor reproduction of the illustrations. As in the parallel debate about the censorship of fiction in 1894, which resulted in the diminution of the three-volume/circulatinglibrary system of distribution of first editions, the trope of fear is that

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20. Notice of change of title of the The Artist in September 1894, during the upheaval following Kains-Jackson’s departure as editor.

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of feminisation, not ‘literature at nurse’ which was George Moore’s phrase, but fine art.

(ii)

The Artist under Kains-Jackson

I want to look at The Artist in the period 1888–94 under Kains-Jackson, who deploys a series of strategies to accommodate gay discourse, which any editor in political journalism would recognise. Utilising extant departments of the periodical such as ‘Art Literature’, ‘Local Art Notes’, the leader column ‘From Month to Month’, reports of exhibitions, and the gossip of paragraphs of ‘Studio News’ to insert gay material, he also commissioned articles or wrote them himself. Anonymity and pseudonyms typify some of this material, though in keeping with the explicit nature of much of the copy and the attempt to situate the periodical as a defining centre of a gay community of readers and discourse, signature and initials are frequently supplied in the text.14 These are supplemented interestingly by additional attributions in the full, topically arranged annual Index, where it is available.15 Kains-Jackson’s strategies are informative more generally of the ways particular interests, of whatever kind – party political, trade, or sexual orientation – can ‘construct’ news and its discourses; what is notable in this period is both the impunity with which Kains-Jackson constructed and circulated a pink paper within the ‘artist’ community and the evidence, provided by the intensity and multi-vocality of the discourse, of a community of self-identifying ‘gay’ readers and writers in dialogue in public. Few reading The Artist regularly in these years could remain unaware of this strain in the periodical, due to its explicitness and level of permeation, and this must include the proprietor.16 That it was not illustrated seems crucial to its survival for over five years in this phase of its existence. While the alleged ‘blindness’ of the public to the possibility of male homosexuality, which is judged to have played a central role in the Wilde trials in 1895, is improbable in the cluster of producers and consumers of The Artist in this period just before the trials, the presence of (homo)erotic illustration might well have attracted unwelcome attention from a censorious public which could not be ignored. It may be remembered that in the manifesto of 1880 William Reeves described the new journal as a ‘literary organ’ and the literary nature of the project, despite the visual subject, is further enhanced by the absence of illustration. Kains-Jackson’s conduct of The Artist exploits this space for literature and the literary. Most visibly, the number of poems per issue increases markedly as he moves into the editorship. By their

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number, authorship, subject matter and quality, it is clear that unlike those in many Victorian periodicals, poems in The Artist do not function primarily as filler. Many figures of the Decadence are identifiable as authors of poems here, including Horatio Brown, Alfred Douglas, John Gray, Laurence Housman, J. G. Nicholson, A. Raffalovich, Fr. Rolfe, Edward Sayle, J. A. Symonds, H. S. Tuke, and Gleeson White. There is a decided preponderance of subjects central to gay discourse, such as bathers, boys at play, classical figures such as Hyacinthus, Christian saints such as Sebastian, male dress, renunciation, and artists and authors such as Michelangelo, Tuke, Walter Pater and J. A. Symonds, whose life and/or work had same-sex associations. One anonymous, seasonal ‘Ballade’ for example, dedicated to G.W. (Gleeson White), begins Sing us a song of young lads’ faces Sing us a song of the morning row, Down to the sandy bathing places. It continues in stanza three: Sing us a song of the feints and chases Feet found nimble and limbs not slow, Lithe sweet forms, and budding graces Of manly beauty at youth’s full flow; Hellas never had braver show, Nay, or Theocritus’ Sicily,17 Sing us a song ‘ere August go, A ballade of boys by a southern sea. (Anon. 1890a: 255) In October of that year an anonymous sonnet on St Sebastian permits a celebration of the representation of the wounded male body: This is the ultimate flower of perfect art Wherein consummate beauty of body and soul Is blended evermore, wherein the whole Of life is perfected; Love bids depart By martyrs’ way. (Anon. 1890b: 303) The path by which such matter is introduced into the pages of The Artist is characteristic of this particular department of this magazine.

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The sonnet is attached to a painting named, ‘On the St. Sebastian of Francia (No. 277 Hampton Court Gallery.)’, which legitimates its inclusion. There are countless other poems on such themes. 18 One that is notable for the combination of explicitness and signature is Theodore Wratislaw’s ‘To a Sicilian Boy’, which appears, again somewhat topically, in August 1893.19 It begins Love, I adore the contours of thy shape Thine exquisite breasts and arms adorable; and ends Ah let me in thy bosom still enjoy Oblivion of the past, divinist boy, And the dull ennui of a woman’s kiss! (Wratislaw 1893: 229) But the other literary space that Kains-Jackson exploits spectacularly is the section called, curiously, ‘Art Literature’.20 This is the site of some of the most ingenious manoeuvring in order to introduce books he wishes to draw to the attention of gay readers. Works featured here range from the appropriate Journal of Hellenic Studies to a novel by Vernon Lee, Euphorion, whose ‘brutality of language’ is both castigated and then quoted, and whose links with the Greek, the Platonic, and J. A. Symonds are noted (April 1886: 125). 21 In this department KainsJackson hails and extols Shannon and Ricketts’s Dial, Wilde’s Woman’s World, and uses the occasion of a review of Harper’s [New] Monthly Magazine to reprint in full a long poem, ‘Giton’ by C. W. Coleman, from the July Harper’s, which begins ‘Beautiful boy, the world is old’ (August 1889: 249). Four similarly suggestive poems by Charles Lefroy are reprinted on the occasion of a review of J. A. Symonds’ In the Key of Blue, which contains an essay on Lefroy, who is identified by Kains-Jackson as an author of interest to readers of gay discourse: His sympathy with youthful strength and beauty, his keen interest in boyish games and the athletic sports of young men, seem to have kept his nature always fresh and wholesome. These qualities were connected in a remarkable way with Hellenic instincts and an almost pagan delight in nature. But Lefroy’s temperament assimilated from the Christian and the Greek ideals only what is really

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admirable in both: discarding the asceticism of the one and the sensuousness of the other. (Anon. 1892: 122) J. A. Symonds’ two-volume life of Michelangelo, although listed first in ‘Art Literature’, is reviewed separately, and accorded mammoth amounts of attention, being treated serially over two issues (December 1892: 360–1 and February 1893: 39–40). Moreover, a further ‘short series of articles on the actual life and work of Michael Angelo as revealed to us by Mr. Symonds’ is promised in December but never materialises, it being explained in February that space does not permit this. In case the reader misses the point of the massive coverage, Symonds’ chapters in which Michelangelo’s relations with Vittoria Colonna and Tommaso are, respectively, denied and confirmed as sexual are singled out (February 1893: 38). The painter is described favourably as ‘the first man of the Renaissance who was also in many ways the first decadent’ (December 1892: 361). Symonds’ book is trailed in November, the month before it is initially reviewed, and in another department of the February 1893 number, ‘Studio and Personal Notes’, the work is said, in a single sentence reference, ‘already [to be selling] at two and a half times its published price!’ (February 1893: 55). One typical way in which Kains-Jackson further hones his book reviews to the remit of the journal is to comment on the design and production of books. In Part I of this review, the Michael Angelo volumes published by Nimmo are discussed and recommended on this account. When books of poems by one of Kains-Jackson’s favoured authors, with no relation to ‘art’, are imported into ‘Art Literature’ they are often legitimised by treatment of their design and production. Salome, for example, is reviewed twice, once in terms of Beardsley’s illustrations (April 1894: 100–1), and once as Wilde’s drama (April 1893: 120). Charles Sayle’s volume of poems, Erotidea, which is not favourably reviewed, is nevertheless brought to notice on the strength of its production: ‘Daintily bound in white buckram, and printed on paper which leaves nothing to desire, the chaste little volume now before us…’ (Anon. 1889a: 169). Other departmental spaces serve Kains-Jackson’s interest in gay discourses; one is the selection of artists to feature in reviews of exhibitions and in the art gossip pages, and another is the choice of features. There are many examples of visual artists whose work, journeys, houses, projects, friends, parties, and books recur regularly in these pages, among them, predictably, Leighton, Ricketts, Shannon, Beardsley, and H. S. Tuke. Tuke especially is a recurring name.22 The comments of ‘Critias’

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on ‘The Bathers’, in an article on the New English Art Club in May 1889, provide an illustration of the context for numerous shorter allusions to Tuke that typify the visual arts departments. The picture is represented by markers of coded homosocial discourse – boys, the nautical, swimming, flesh, and classical Greece: ‘The Bathers,’ by H. S. Tuke, is wonderfully full of light and air, and is excellent in tone. Three boys on the deck of an old barge form the subject; one is preparing to plunge. It is doubtful if barge decks are often painted this beautiful celadon colour which forms such a perfect contrast with the flesh tones and so perfect a harmony with the colour of the sea. It is also, perhaps, to be wished that the artist had found a plunger of somewhat less boeotian face. However, the whole tableau is one which Pindar might have celebrated and which Pericles would probably have bought. (‘Critias’ 1889: 128) Comparison of The Artist’s persistent attention to Tuke with other reviews of this exhibition, in the Saturday Review for example, shows this picture to be referred to parenthetically if admiringly in one review in the Saturday (4 May 1889: 530) and not otherwise mentioned in the entire volume. Certain feature articles unmistakably constitute gay discourse. These are pieces outside any regular department but they are nevertheless often serialised, to keep the reader coming back month after month. One such serialised piece, in July and October 1889, is almost entirely dedicated to inscribing the classical homoerotic tradition; it is included in the pages of The Artist by naming it ‘Subjects for Pictures’! This adumbrates a whole cast of suitable characters and themes, including Perseus and Andromeda (with the emphasis on ‘the enterprise of a brave, adventurous youth in the rescue of the dedicated victim’ (Anon. 1889b: 194); Hyacinthus and Apollo; Narcissus; Plato and Agathon (Plato’s kiss); Alecytyron (Mars’ boyfriend who is changed to a cock); Tenes (a Phrygian youth); Iolas (Hercules’ favourite); and Diana Orthea. Of this last, it is explained that the annual whipping of Spartan youths for the festival of the goddess is a privilege reserved to Spartan lads of the best class. Their parents frequently, their lovers always, attended them to the altar of trial, and those who bore the lash – which was applied till the blood was drawn – without uttering a cry, received a handsome award. A painting … would have to show us a lad grasping the top of the altar and facing us. The expression of steady and determined

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endurance under pain in a young face would, however, task the talent of the artist sorely, as would the complex emotions of pride, compassion and love in that of the father, elder brother or lover who would be the lad’s natural aid or attendant at the sacrifice. (Anon. 1889b: 196) A comparable serialised feature is ‘Realism in Poetry and Fiction’ (September – November 1889), the third part of which is entirely confined to salacious examples from classical literature of Greece and Rome. In October 1890 another anonymous feature article, ‘“Les Decadents” No. I’, begins typically with a short introduction on contemporary Decadence but then takes the opportunity to discuss Decadence in ancient Greece. It starts with the present: ‘We have not, through the entire summer, been able to escape for a single week from this new enquiry which in public and in private, friends and correspondents keep addressing to us, “Who are the Decadents?” and what is the meaning in art and letters of “the Decadence?” (Anon. 1890c: 292). However, it is a clear example of the use of a topical issue to introduce yet another piece on ancient Greek art and culture, which is what this article turns out to be. By 1893 there is a detectable boldness and permeation of material which might be counted as gay discourse or contain reference to it, as shown in Figure 21. Under ‘Local Art Notes’ in June 1893, for example, two books of poems, ‘apropos’ of ‘Oxford’ and ‘Rugby’, are noticed in language that merely insinuates same-sex love. Under ‘Oxford’ appears ‘the little volume just published by Mr. Blackwell for a young poet who has many friends up here. “Love in a Mist” is a quaint little square paper covered book of a hundred pages’ (Anon. 1893b: 191), and under ‘Rugby’, ‘The recherché little press of Overs which has already given us the minor masterpieces of Charles Sayle and of Norman Gale has just put forth a fresh flower of youthful verse’ (ibid.). From the Oxford book The Artist publishes ‘To-day he loves me’ and from the Rugby book, ‘Reminiscence’, a sonnet addressed to a lover of otherwise undisclosed gender. However, in December 1893 Kains-Jackson publishes a splenetic attack on his own editorial policy. Cyril M. Drew’s piece on Theodore Wratislaw denigrates ‘the new [homosexual] cult, i.e., a small body of unimportant and self-opinionated young gentlemen who fancy that they can invent Nature, and the human passions’ (Drew 1893: 363). Citing with disgust Wratislaw’s line, ‘the dull ennui of a woman’s kiss’ from ‘To a Sicilian Boy’ (August 1893: 229), Drew reverses the sentiment: ‘For one man to kiss the lips of another is a positively repellent

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21. Explicit memorial poem for J. A. Symonds, ‘Lover of Art and Nature and Youth’ (stanza 5), published and perhaps written by Kains-Jackson in the Artist in May 1893.

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idea, but for a lover to kiss the lips of his beloved is the purest and most natural means of expressing his love’ (2 December 1893: 363). By publishing this explicit denunciation, Kains-Jackson appropriates it as a reverse discourse that defines and publicises what it condemns, while advertising the identification of The Artist with ‘the new cult’. That The Artist is, by this time, so identified is indicated by the nature and number of pieces on these themes published in 1892 which are undistinguished, whether by quality or authorship, 23 and appear to be selected from unsolicited submissions. It has perhaps been difficult to glean any sense of the frequency or intensity of gay discourse in any one number from the topical way I have discussed the run. 24 Clearly the intensity varies from number to number, but at its fullest (as, for example, in February 1893) the articulation of the sexual orientation of The Artist is clear. This one number of February 1893 contains three items that explicitly introduce homosexual authors, artists, and discourse. The number reviews two books by J. A. Symonds, separately and at length, and also contains a poem by him. Besides endorsing Symonds’ view of Michelangelo’s sexuality (see above), the reviewer provides explicit details of the censorship of the sonnets addressed to men ‘wherein the male is altered to the female’ (February 1893: 38). This is followed by a ‘Roundel’, ‘In the Key of Blue’, which is followed in turn by a review of Symonds’ collection of prose and poetry, In the Key of Blue, from which the poem is taken. Symonds’ eclectic volume contains a homoerotic autobiographical essay, ‘Clifton and a Boy’s Love’, which the review singles out for attention, quoting a lyric by Symonds (‘He was all beautiful’) and an analogous example from ancient Greece, when ‘Critobulus spoke thus eloquently of Cleinias, and [at] an age when he too might have been an Oxford undergraduate from Harrow’ (February 1893: 40),25 to make visible to readers the tradition of which Symonds’ essay is a part. How and why then was Kains-Jackson ousted in April 1894, a year before the trials? His authorship and publication in April of a particularly explicit article undoubtedly provoked the termination of the editor’s contract. ‘The New Chivalry’, signed with initials, was part of a current debate on ‘The New Hedonism’ prompted by Grant Allen’s piece in the Fortnightly Review in March.26 ‘P.C.’27 argued in The Artist that since over-population rather than under-population was now the problem, same-sex social bonds were to be preferred on a number of counts to heterosexual coupling; the Greek model was then explained and recommended. However, the publication of ‘The New Chivalry’ might best be viewed as the occasion for the eradication of gay dis-

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course in The Artist by its proprietors, as the publication of this article faithfully represents cumulative editorial policy under Kains-Jackson, rather than any new departure. Moreover, there may have been other, non-editorial, commercial reasons that contributed to Kains-Jackson’s departure.

(iii)

Backlash? The complexities of the market

By April 1894 the proprietors of The Artist would have been uncomfortably aware of the success of The Studio, a new, equally cheap, but illustrated rival monthly edited by Gleeson White, one of The Artist’s own and regular contributors. It is notable in this connection that the early numbers of The Studio, which coincided with White’s editorship (1893/4) and immediately preceded Kains-Jackson’s dismissal from The Artist, directly competed for the pink market niche. They include generously illustrated pieces on Leighton’s clay modelling of the (largely male) nude, the (male) nude in photography illustrated with sumptuous photographs by Rolfe and Wilhelm von Gloeden 28 of Sicilian youths, and a pioneering piece on Beardsley’s art. So there was market pressure to abandon the non-illustrated format of The Artist, while at the same time maintaining its twin orientation to heterosexual and homosocial masculinities. However, the break with Kains-Jackson over sexual politics meant that the changes that The Artist was to undergo were fuelled by the magazine’s internal politics and ghosts as well as by the external market. By October The Artist became an illustrated monthly of applied art, like The Studio, and in the new year it changed its format to folio, like The Studio. It is indeed possible that the personal risk Kains-Jackson took in not only publishing ‘The New Chivalry’ but also writing it himself was in part prompted by the commercial rivalry between the two monthlies for an important sector of their common market. His piece and his dismissal are in some ways analogous to the Wilde trials; they confirm, and semiotically sign and own, the gay discourse and community of consenting readers which had characterized The Artist between 1888 and 1894, and of which Kains-Jackson’s piece is a part. Gay discourse was not halted, however, even in the years immediately following the trials: one has only to look at the literary and pictorial contents of Gleeson White’s and Charles Shannon’s first number of the annual The Pageant, of December 1896, to see that.29 For The Artist however, the break with the homosocial, homoeroticism and Decadence after April 1894 is signalled but erratic, which is

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not surprising given the nature of its main competition. In August, Beardsley is attacked in a notice of Vol. 2 of the Yellow Book for ‘diluting his bitter morbidness with sickly commonplace’ (August 1894: 275), but in 1895 in January and February, perhaps in fear of losing their former readers, illustrations from Michelangelo’s Sketch Book appear, and in April a Beardsley frontispiece is published, accompanied by only mild, implied disapproval. But the same number, alert to the contemporaneous Wilde trials, also dismisses William Morris and Wilde in a triumphant article, ‘The Decay of the Decadence’ (April 1895: 169–71). After the verdict however, in the numbers of May, July and August, the tone is one of homophobic denunciation without any mention of the trials. In May, Beardsley’s ‘Black Coffee’ is ‘a stupid insipidity’ (May 1895: 188), and in August The Artist takes advantage of a misprint in a daily’s comment on the Yellow Book to emphasise their new position on Decadence: ‘Everyone must by this time be familiar with our attitude towards this decadent publication, but in our most irritated mood we never called it “stinking,” whatever we may have thought’ (August 1895: 321). A July review of a re-designed, illustrated periodical, the Evergreen, affords an opportunity to deny the ethos of ‘The New Chivalry’ most strongly, and to clarify the new position of The Artist: There is nothing of the decadence about ‘The Evergreen,’ for truths and evergreens are perpetual. … That faith may be had still in the friendliness of fellows; that the love of country is not a lost cause; that the love of women is the way of life; and that in the eternal newness of every child is an undying promise for the race. (July 1895: 271) With its eye on The Studio, however, this is accompanied by a prominent, Beardsleyesque illustration of ‘Apollo’s School-Days’ which depicts a pre-pubescent, naked Apollo splayed on the lap of a lascivious Satyr who is teaching the youth how to play the pipes. The years of the run of The Artist make it a useful vantage point from which to consider the debates of our own period about the history of gay subjectivity. Echoing Foucault in historicising the homosexual, some queer theory seeks to deny that homosexuals, as the term is used now by critics – people with same-sex preferences and ‘personality’ – are an appropriate category of sexuality at all, or that such identity was not available in the nineteenth century until after the transformations in public perception and ideology brought about by the Wilde trials in

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1895. Thus, it is claimed by some that there is no publicly visible ‘gay discourse’ before 1895 in the absence of gay subjectivity as a signifying mark of gender identity. However, in an impressive range of readings of effeminacy, faultlines and fissures, and silences, the contours of representation, repression, and denial have been mapped by critics who include Joe Bristow, Ed Cohen and Alan Sinfield. It is in this context that I offer the profile of The Artist in the years before the Wilde trials, and particularly between 1888? and 1894 under Charles Philip Castle Kains-Jackson/Philip Castle, P.C./P.K.J., [anon], Kains-Jackson or any other of his multiple identities. It is a semiotics that goes with the turf, whether it is that of the editor function, gay discourse, or the new journalism of personality and signature.

II (i)

THE ARTIST AND THE CHALLENGE OF CLEVELAND STREET, 1889–90 Columns, leaders and readers

Reliable information on ‘real’ or individual historical readers of ephemera such as the newspaper and periodical press is remarkably elusive, and even at present typical readers are studied through the creation of ‘focus groups’. What follows is an attempt to find and deploy a methodology to identify an historical community of readers – homosocial and homosexual men – and the limits of gay discourse in 1889–90 through examining the editorial coverage of a domestic news item with a gender component in a specific monthly magazine. When I examined the content of the leaders of The Artist, I found them particularly litigious at the time of the Cleveland Street affair, a set of events which came into the public domain between September 1889 and May 1890 through trials and parliamentary debates which were widely reported in the press. I shall be arguing that in 1889–90, before the trials of Oscar Wilde in 1895, there existed an historical readership of homosocial men for a monthly magazine of mixed audience which carried in each issue a sufficient amount of homosexually-oriented copy to retain them as readers. Within this context The Artist, unlike other papers of its day, found a way to open public discourse to consideration of the substantive sexual issues attaching to the widely reported public scandal surrounding a male brothel in Cleveland Street in

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central London. The context of the article in question will be seen to function crucially here in the production of meaning. I shall show how other public formations – the mainstream newspaper press and Parliament – displaced the (homo)sexual issues arising from the scandal, unspeakable in their contexts, to pursue discourses of class and party politics which are similarly characteristic of their formations and consumers. The coverage of Cleveland Street, in 1889–90, falls towards the middle of the period 1887–94 in which homosexual material is steadily carried in The Artist. I shall argue that in this instance the homosocial male component of the historical readership of The Artist is maintained and uniquely addressed by the ingenious coverage of Cleveland Street that the magazine provides. In this sense, the events around Cleveland Street provided me with a test case of my hypothesis of a homosocial and homosexual readership which is consistently addressed in The Artist of these years. I decided to look for responses to Cleveland Street in The Artist on the basis that if it was a gendered space, it had a legitimate interest in this story on behalf of a cohort of its readers. Moreover, I hypothesised that its editor, on the evidence of proven editorial ingenuity, would professionally as a solicitor and as an editor regard the publication of a response to Cleveland Street as a challenge and an opportunity. To address this topic at all, The Artist was without the cover of ‘objective’ discourses that the daily and weekly press afforded, such as general news, court and parliamentary reporting; its remit was firmly within the constraints of art-related topics. How could The Artist manage to cover an event such as the discovery of a male brothel at Cleveland Street, and the ensuing press coverage, court trials, and parliamentary debate? What methodology could I devise to locate such coverage, if any? Because Cleveland Street did not fall into the category of art news, I decided to examine the most free and explicitly non-news space of The Artist, space which was identifiably ‘editorial’, discursive, and more regularised than the news bytes elsewhere in the magazine; this consisted of its leaders titled ‘From Month to Month’, and a column or series called ‘Letters to Living Artists’, which ran regularly from September 1889 to November 1890. I complemented this horizontal reading of the leaders and columns through a run of monthly issues, with vertical reading of single issues in the Cleveland Street period; that way I could assess the density of homosocial copy other than columns and leaders in individual issues, and the topics of such copy. Perhaps like some of its original readers, I read the variety of textual areas in which homosocial material was introduced at first as editorial

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fingerprints, which mapped the presence of the editor’s hand in constructing this aspect of the journal. At the same time, the diversity of the material and its sources allowed him to remain behind the text: in most cases he let his contributors or his own anonymous or pseudonymous personae take the credit or blame. 30 Together, the sum of these many instances of homosocial discourse in The Artist amounts to a polemic, but it is only one strain in this monthly which bristles with news and reviews of fine art, musical events, and ‘home culture’ such as craft and interior design. So, there is another reason to examine the non-news space of the leader or column. I was interested in seeing more of the textual ‘body’ of this editor whose ‘prints’ were everywhere. The leader is a more explicitly and dedicated polemical space which is notionally (if not always) by the editor, in which the authority of the editorial ‘we’ is exercised. By contrast, a regular column or series which appears monthly is apparently by a contributor, similarly endowed with a regular, parallel right to express opinion without the constraints of news. However, the columnist expresses him/herself as an individual writing from a particular ‘position’ which may extend to polemics, rather than from the alleged neutrality of ‘objective’ news reporting, or the weightiness of the editorial ‘we’. Within the single issue, and within the confines of The Artist, the column ‘Letters to Living Artists’ may therefore be used to view the leader through comparison, but the result is not the contrast I hypothesised, between the polemical leaders and the more disinterested column or serial. Both are polemical, and often provocative, although the mode (and perhaps strategy) of address of these two departments of The Artist differs considerably: the leaders are often hortatory and rhetorical, while the narrative of the ‘Letters’ is compromised by their named, living, artist-subjects into a kind of winsome reason. Moreover, there is some ambiguity about the status of the ‘Letters’ as columns. On the one hand they look like regular columns: they appear topical and established, and they are prominently positioned, often as first articles which balance ‘the middle’ where the leader is found. In short, they read as a regular feature of the journal. With the typeface of their heading in large capital letters, they appear to contrast with the more catch-all Departments of the journal – such as Exhibitions, Local Art Notes, Obituaries, Academy and Art School News, Studio and Personal Notes, Drama, Music, Art in the Home, Art Abroad,31 or Architecture, Decoration, Art Sales, Art Literature, Photographic Notes, and Correspondence – which have headings in a Gothic bold font.

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But they also have characteristics of serial parts. They are numbered, like serial parts, and indeed, two years later, in 1891, Elkin Mathew published 25 copies of a volume called ‘Letters to Living Artists’ by ‘L.P.’, who is possibly Lisle March Phillipps. 32 In this (retrospective) reading then, they are parts of a serial that ends. So, although they are prominently placed like fixtures, and appear ‘in house’ rather than bought in, the ‘Letters’ are not a column, at least as read retrospectively. The ‘Letters’ are also in contrast with the leader (and other Departments) in so far as they are always signed, by ‘Pasquin, Junior’.33 This supplies a generic, pseudonymous signature to these public ‘letters’, in some ghostly reference to the formats of private correspondence, and perhaps to the outspoken, pseudonymous Letters of ‘Junius’ that appeared in the Public Advertiser between 1769 and 1772.34 All of these forms – leaders, columns, and serials – exemplify varieties of what Michel Foucault called ‘the author function’, 35 which defines authorship in terms of its changing functions in culture, history, and varieties of text and readership, rather than in terms of individual historical writers. In the case of homosocial discourse in this period, Roland Barthes’ notion of the death of the author and the allsufficiency of text and reader are plainly enacted. 36 The election of anonymity and pseudonyms here in the face of increasing signature in the surrounding New Journalism is especially noteworthy and important, not so much with respect to the law but with reference to social constraints such as ‘reputation’ and implications for employment. It is particularly interesting therefore that several sets of initials appeared regularly in The Artist, presumably of those who wanted to be publicly associated with ‘the new culture’ and identified by readers as the author of a succession of specific homosocial works, such as Gleeson White. It was left for the active reader to produce meanings, as Barthes envisages, from these open, ‘writerly’ texts. I was interested not only in the context of such material within The Artist, but in the context of The Artist in the larger world of print media. For external comparison I examined coverage of the Cleveland Street affair in the daily press and another appropriate art periodical of the day. Scrutiny of verbatim accounts of the trials in the Public Record Office helped me to ascertain what the mainstream press and public speakers censored when they referred to material which was ‘too vicious’ to print or ‘unspeakable’. Unlike the reporting of the Wilde trials in 1895, where homosocial readers were (inadvertently) catered for by the widespread coverage in the mainstream press of the sexual element of the charges, in the Cleveland Street affair the reporting

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interests of this cohort of historical readers were met by the North London Press, the weekly newspaper edited by the jailed journalist who dared to print the names of those members of the aristocracy named in the courts as suspected clients of the brothel, and The Artist, which even attempted a defence of the individual’s right to form his or her own view of what constitutes sexual morality. Uniquely, The Artist, edited by Charles Philip Kains-Jackson, 37 did venture indirectly to consider rather than denounce the sexual politics implicit in the Cleveland Street affair. As a trade monthly it was targeted primarily at readers in the arts trades, consisting of the widest possible range of makers of art and arts-related industries to maximise readership, and only secondarily to art lovers. Such periodicals tended to be cheap, and compared with other, glossier art magazines of the day which were competing for connoisseur readers with each other, The Artist cost less, was cheaply produced, and not illustrated. The Artist published art news – of the galleries, art publishers and printers, artists, and craftspeople, in so far as it published news at all. Normally news appeared in the form of ‘Notes’, gossip, feature articles, reviews, or items on a ‘Kalendar’, rather than as news reports. The majority of the monthly covered the art world, including art politics and art education, in these formats. The gender politics most explicitly in view was steady coverage of women artists and craftspeople (especially between 1880 and 1886), a lively critique of art education with respect to women, and attention to ‘home culture’, which mainly referred to interior decor and music. In addition, there was a pronounced strain of articles about homosocial aspects of art. Clearly this kind of monthly magazine had no remit to ‘report’ events in the courts, the press, or in Parliament about Cleveland Street. Indeed, nearly all of the gay discourse carried in The Artist was ostensibly (if opportunistically) related to the visual arts and crafts. It favoured, for example, ‘reports’ and reviews of the work of the artist Henry Scott Tuke who painted pictures of male youths, and of the ‘Newlyn school’ of artists in Cornwall to which he belonged, around which other homosocial men gathered. The physical characteristics of this trade journal at the turn of the decade were on the whole typical of such trade publications: the January 1889 number was 32 pages and quarto in size. Priced at 6d, it appeared monthly, surviving as a non-illustrated art journal with the exception of a cover of elaborate graphics. It was published by Wells, Gardner, Darnton & Co., but printed by Reeves,38 whose address served for all editorial and business correspondence. It carried advertisements on three sides of its coloured paper cover, and more adverts on pages 1

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and 32 inside. That it is a trade magazine is borne out by the high proportion of advertisements for ‘Art Stores’ described as ‘Artists’ Colourmen’. Two other recurring adverts are for George Allen’s fine editions of Ruskin, which would appeal to the artist readers as well as to the connoisseur readers, and for the London Library. Moreover, there was an additional page of advertisements opposite the leader, the rates for which were 1–12 times the normal rates. This high financial valuation of proximity to the leader bears out my impression on reading successive numbers of the journal that The Artist, as a trade monthly, is unlike the Cornhill, Westminster, and Macmillan’s, general monthly magazines which normally had no leaders. The leader of The Artist is placed at or near its centre, providing an intellectual focus for its specialised reading community and an organisational centre for its editor, shaping the periodical materially. In the prominence of its leaders The Artist resembles both political weeklies such as the Saturday Review, and monthly house journals such as the Author whose polemical leaders seem designed to foster professional identity, and to create professional authors out of readers through shared vigilance as well as information. In this sense The Artist is distinguishable from the general monthlies not only in its ‘class’ or specialist readership but in its orientation to news, however disguised, and to politics, but to art news and art politics. Characteristically, in The Artist this coverage included a gendered account of art news and politics, in which from 1880, as I have suggested, women featured prominently. From 1887 the pronounced thread of coverage of gay male art politics and news coincides with a diminution of the coverage of women, but not extinction, while in the wider world of general culture and its newspaper and periodical press, the ‘woman question’ continued to be newsworthy, and to command attention and excite controversy. The Artist’s coverage of gender, then, was in keeping with the press of its day and part of its bid for readers in an increasingly competitive market. In our terms, women generally, feminists, and gay men were all accounted for in the market’s bid for the expanding readership. Comparisons with other periodicals of the day show that in the high culture monthlies, such as the Fortnightly Review, the Westminster, and the Nineteenth Century, women, feminists, and gay men were addressed in articles on marriage, employment for women, married women’s property, and the Greek and Roman classics as well as in much of the fiction carried in the huge range of fiction magazines. So, the coverage of gender by this trade monthly, particularly of male homosexual topics, is distinctive among art periodicals in

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the 1880s and early 1890s, but not in comparison with the wider world of the periodical press. Details of the kind of coverage of these topics in The Artist will emerge below, where I treat this copy as the context of the leaders and columns I examine in connection with the commentary on Cleveland Street. But first I want to say something about columns and leaders more generally, in relation to their function as badges of identity of the paper for nineteenth-century readers. What the leaders of The Artist consistently show is a political consciousness about all aspects of the art industry. It is not surprising to find a prescient piece on ‘Politics in Art’ by H. H. La Thangue39 which begins dryly ‘The conjunction of Politics and Art will doubtless be distasteful to many, in fact to most. And indeed with reason … when one realises how much of politics there is, one is apt to be disgusted’ (April 1889: 97). When the topics of the leaders in 1889 are examined, beside the articles placed to bastion them, it is plain that the three to five columns of the leaders are usually designed to maximise topicality and provocation. For example, in the April 1889 issue, appearing just before the London social ‘season’ begins, the leader attacks the Exhibition system: Even now exhibitions as a class exist less for the good of art than art for the convenience of exhibitions. Our artists … cannot devote themselves simply to putting into pictorial form the creations of their own imaginations; they have to be troubling themselves about how their work will look on the walls of the Royal Academy, or in the red room at the Grosvenor. (Anon. 1889c: 109–10) And earlier in the number, in the piece on ‘Politics in Art’ the knotty issue is the election of selectors from the Royal Academy, just after the controversial selections for the summer art shows have taken place. As is evident from these examples, one of the prime targets of The Artist is the Royal Academy. This is a perspective that would attract the vast number of potential artist-readers whose works were either rejected by this powerful institution of the establishment, or ineligible. When the summer show opens in May, the leader targets the abbreviated press view which obliges critics ‘to compress into a few hours work that would be severe even when spread over several days’, it being impossible to ‘pass … off mere description as criticism’. ‘Critics [need] proper facilities for forming correct opinions’ (May 1889: 142). We can see how as a trade paper The Artist brings art journalists as well as artists into the fold of its constituency and, optimally, into its

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readership. In the same number, prominently placed as the first article, is a critique of the principal alternative to the Academy, the New English Art Club (‘Critias’ 1889: 127–9). In June and July, the leaders treat the Chantrey Fund of the RA, with which it purchases pictures; in June the choices for purchase are castigated, in July they are praised. But while the Royal Academy is the most common cause around which to group the anti-establishment values which The Artist purveys, it is not the only institution criticised or even attacked in the leaders by any means. In September 1889 it is the turn of the Royal Scottish Academy, in November 1890 that of the Grosvenor Gallery. In February 1889 ‘From Month to Month’ carpets Liverpool Corporation for being guilty of a breach of contract to an artist whose work had been selected for purchase by the Arts Committee, and then vetoed by the Corporation. The incident is generalised to one that commonly affects readers of The Artist, identifying them as part of a single social group of ‘art workers’ who, like other workers, need an income: It is not quite apparent why … the not unnatural unwillingness of art workers to appeal to the law courts to enforce the fulfilment of contracts made with them should be construed into an admission that their commercial rights are not worth defending. It is only by the existence of some such perverted tradition as this that we can account for the too frequent breaches of faith by which artists so constantly find works left on their hands and rendered practically unsaleable. (Anon. 1889a: 49) ‘Art workers’ as a category is further glossed in The Artist by the inclusion of women. The rights of women students at the Academy to draw from the nude is robustly defended in January 1890, as a prominent part of the annual review of ‘The Year’ in the January ‘From Month to Month’. Also at this time, one of the recurring Departments of the magazine is ‘Art in the Home’, which is sometimes accompanied by a sub-head, ‘The Ladies’ Column’. In January 1889 an article, ‘Beauty’s Measurements’ in the ‘Art in the Home’ department, is allegedly for women readers but clearly aimed at men as well. Picking up on the tight-lacing corset controversy on the pretext that it had recently been addressed by the British Association, The Artist ingeniously juxtaposes current measurements for small waists by wholesale and retail British shops with the healthier dimensions of the Venus of Melos. The covert prurience of this article links it with the homoerotic discourse else-

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where in the run, which suggests that in addition to a readership of women, The Artist was also addressing heterosexual and homosexual men. If the leaders of The Artist attack the galleries and the Academy, they are also prone to attack the public, who are presented as agents of the marginalisation of potential reader/artists. ‘From Month to Month’ in March 1889 is sub-titled ‘Art for the Masses’. Its target ranges from the bourgeois, respectable Philistine to the would-be amateur. It clarifies through a process of elimination, the position from which it is written – the alliance of art with Bohemian subject positions for the artist. By attacking the largest share of the Victorian art market, The Artist would seem to be consolidating and flattering its readers, who are defined in terms of what the Philistines are not: Art of all kinds is in this country less loved and believed in than tolerated. The average Briton rather prides himself than otherwise upon his inaccessibility to any aesthetic emotion. To him art is a fallacy and a mistake. … He looks upon the practice of art in any form, as a somewhat disreputable proceeding, and he considers all professional artists as being immeasurably below him in the social scale. (Anon. 1889b: 79) The attack continues: ‘The inner world of art is to the mass of the community a terra incognita, a place into which their own blindness and stupid self-sufficiency have always kept them from penetrating. As they have little need of the products of art, and care nothing for art itself, they have never thought of finding a way into those circles where it lives and flourishes’ (ibid.). Contempt for those hostile to or ignorant of art surfaces again in November 1890 in a piece about the demise of the Grosvenor, which is allegedly due in part to the ‘unaesthetic personage’ among the public (Nov. 1890: 334). The implicit contrast is with the aesthetically sound readership of The Artist.

(ii)

Cleveland Street and The Artist

The Artist’s impatience with the Philistine British public, its proven interest in gay life and art, and a knowledge of the legal system come together to inspire leaders and back up articles which respond obliquely to the Cleveland Street affair. This began on 4 July 1889 when a male brothel at 19 Cleveland Street, Fitzroy Square, in central London, was raided by the police, and extends through 28 February

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1890 when Labouchere asked a question in the House of Commons about a cover up to another trial in May. The event and its aftermath involved men of all classes, stretching from telegraph boys to the aristocracy, the government, and even the monarchy. 40 Arrests, court cases, and jail sentences followed for some, while others were permitted to escape, all of which was reported within hygienicised discourses of ‘news’, court and parliamentary reports. Opinion in the form of denunciation was plentiful: in the radical press such as the Star and the North London Press, it was favouritism that was exposed, whereby aristocrat-clients such as Lord Henry Somerset were permitted to escape to the Continent and the landlord of the brothel to the United States. The Times, on the other hand, castigated the ‘radical’ newspapers which publicly named the aristocrats implicated. Comment on male homosexuality itself was rare, except for the ubiquitous rhetorical condemnation of ‘vicious’, unpublishable and unnamed crimes. The climate of the public sphere was constrained by political and social pressure, and by the law, specifically the new Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, which rendered illegal all ‘indecent’ acts between men of any age in public or in private. Predictably therefore, the issue of homosexuality raised by the Cleveland Street affair was completely displaced in representations in the press and Parliament, by issues of class privilege, party politics, and irresponsible journalism. The outcome articulated these discourses of class, press-bashing, government, and sexual purity: those found guilty and jailed comprised the hired pimp but not the proprietor, a post boy but not his noble clients, a solicitor but not his escaped client, and a journalist, for libel! There were four trials, 11 September 1889, 23 December 1889, 15 January 1890 and 16 May 1890. Most of the press coverage appeared in the first six months of 1890: in January Lord Euston, one of the named nobility, sued Ernest Parke, a radical journalist, for libel and won: Parke, unwilling to divulge his sources, was jailed; in May when Lord Somerset’s solicitor, Arthur Newton, was charged with abetting his escape, he too was imprisoned – for six weeks; and in July Parke was released six months early. The trials were covered by the press as ‘scandal’,41 in The Times, the Star, the North London Press, Truth, the Telegraph, the Saturday Review, the Echo, and the Pall Mall Gazette among others. However, the coverage was guarded with respect to the nature of the crime, and appeared as unembellished ‘news’, court reports, and allegations of cover up, with little explicit reference to the nature of the brothel. Unless the reader of these newspaper reports was

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relatively well-informed about the full range of sexual practice and orientation, it is unlikely that s/he would register the homosexual framework of the affair. From the intermittent coverage – variously appearing as unmarked paragraphs of court reports, occasional news, and parliamentary reports – it would be possible for a casual and/or unwitting reader to read Cleveland Street hegemonically as a commonplace, heterosexual brothel. The gender of the reader is an important factor here in the production of meaning and access to it, just as it is throughout nineteenthcentury print culture. While women readers constituted a significant part of the periodical market by this time, men still made up by far the majority of daily newspaper readers. In 1890, for example, W. T. Stead, with an eye to a new market, immediately raises this as a problem in the Review of Reviews, his new monthly: creating a competition to foster the development of female journalists and readership, he requires mastery specifically of the sections of the paper covering (domestic and foreign) politics.42 The censorship of periodicals and fiction by publishers, editors, and circulating libraries in the name of (the protection of) ‘woman’ and ‘family’ readers was widespread and publicly debated,43 but daily newspapers in 1890 still attracted an overwhelmingly male readership. Nevertheless, it is this press which was literally unwilling to publicly represent the sexual realities of Cleveland Street, which suggests that the nineteenth-century taboo on public disclosure of contemporary homosexuality was not attributable alone to the patriarchal ‘protection’/construction of ‘woman’. Rather it is an articulation of male anxiety about masculinity by a male press in a heterosexual male space. In the leader space of The Artist in November 1889 the ingenious Kains-Jackson found a way to comment indirectly on the ethics of the Cleveland Street prosecutions, which for him, as well as his opponents Stead, Labouchere, and T. P. O’Connor, represented a testing ground of the Labouchere amendment of 1885. The gender of this space in The Artist was constituted differently from that of the daily press, as was that of its readership; it included a significant portion of women as well as men of a range of sexual orientations, a fact which though true of the daily press remained unacknowledged. For his November 1889 leader, Kains-Jackson finds a court case about art, one which is suitable for The Artist. Through it he launches an attack on the same Puritan morality which is at issue in the Labouchere amendment used to prosecute defendants in the Cleveland Street trials. The right of the court to act to uphold public morality

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through the confiscation of drawings is denied on the basis that ‘indecency’ is culturally determined, variable, and immune to legislation: Indecency is not, as he and many others would seem to believe, a tangible and definite matter that can be destroyed and blotted out once and for all. It is on the contrary a matter of opinion, an absolutely undefinable and altogether variable condition. It is largely the outcome of habit and the result of social convention. It varies according to the customs and manners of the people who are conscious of it. It is a mental affair in short, and depends almost for its existence upon thoughts and fancies. (Anon. 1889f: 333–4) The leader suggests that the ‘cure’ for ‘indecency’ is education of the ignorant rather than punishment of the ‘indecent’: That this prevalence of indecency of which they are so apt to complain should be to a large extent a kind of delusion born of their own lack of proper judgment, and caused by their own inability to enlarge the too restricted limits of their range of thought, is a thing which never enters their heads. … The starting point in such a system of education would be the dogma that there can be no indecency in anything which is aesthetically admirable. (Anon. 1889f: 334) That the leader is indeed addressing issues around indecency raised by Cleveland Street is signalled in the first paragraph, which calls readers’ attention to ‘the present moment’: Just at this time when there are signs of a revival of something of the old Puritan intolerance, and when there are clear evidences of a tendency in certain quarters to encourage restrictions that are both injudicious and unnecessary, it is needful that all who believe that liberty of taste is not incompatible with social purity should do their utmost to combat the attempts which are being made to deprive them of the right of judging for themselves. (Anon. 1889f: 333) Further on, the leader returns to the dangers of the present moment, ‘most emphatically one when it is important that the claims of aestheticism should be stated plainly. Puritanism pure and simple has been tried, and has failed lamentably, and miserably. Its short-lived influence served indeed, but as a prelude to a vast increase of immoral-

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ity’ (Anon. 1889f: 334). It is clear that this ‘moment’ of Cleveland Street is the reiterated framework of the leader. This oblique discussion of some of the questions raised by the Cleveland Street affair by people who were thinking about gender – questions of morality, the state, and the courts – is supported by the homosocial discourse of the surrounding text of The Artist. These make the allusion of the leader to Cleveland Street more resonant. A few pages earlier, in the same November issue, is a short piece on ‘The Glory that was Greece’, which culminates with an apostrophe to The Youth, whose glory is the unshadowed perfection of the man … the purely physical attainment, the absolute perfection of the outward form, allied with the highest expression of intellectual and moral qualities. (Anon. 1889g: 326) Quoting (flamboyantly) from a now famous letter from Charles Kingsley about ‘a butcher’s nephew playing cricket … whom I would have walked ten miles to see. In spite of the hideous English dress one looked forward with delight to what he would be in the Resurrection’, the article goes on, ‘This type … is the beauty we seek’ in order to find an analogy to ‘the Hellenic … idea’ for ‘the contemporaries of Praxitiles’ (Anon. 1889g: 326–7). This provides a context and an interpretative key to the adjacent leader. Two months later in February 1890, in the midst of the Cleveland Street trials, The Artist carries a similar piece on handsome men which it has copied from the New York Sun, which begins ‘In many cases the handsomest men do not care for the admiration of women’ (Anon. 1890a: 53), and, after discussing some male actors, it ends by explicitly drawing an analogy between this contemporary American example and that of classical, homosexual Athens: ‘As Americans do not read the classics, it is a curious coincidence that Plato makes something very like these reflections on Charmides, the Beauty of Athens in the days of Critias’ (ibid.). Given that the deadline for copy of The Artist (the 20th of the month at this time) immediately follows the date of the January trial, the effect of this reprint on readers of The Artist is defiance of the Puritanism of the courts. After the Cleveland Street affair had subsided, at the end of 1890, Jackson took another opportunity to denounce the authority and judgement of the judicial system on issues of obscenity by characteristically absorbing them into the realm of aesthetics. ‘From Month to Month’ featured a negative example of a judge who decides some

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illustrations of Rabelais on public show should be destroyed. This is attacked with the comment, ‘The possibility that the ordinary police court decision, or the verdict of an average jury should be recognised as an adequate pronouncement upon disputed aesthetics questions is a really alarming one’ (Anon. 1890e: 366). Not silenced by Cleveland Street and still attempting to limit the powers of the judiciary in such matters, The Artist suggests a system of ‘artistic assessors in artistic cases’ (Anon. 1890e: 366). Additionally it attacks those supporting social purity and those within that movement, such as contemporary editors W. T. Stead, late editor of the daily Pall Mall Gazette, and Labouchere, the MP, editor of the weekly Truth, and mover of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 under which the Cleveland Street prosecutions had been brought: there exists among us a so-called society which arrogates to itself the control of public morals and which presumes to dictate to the world at large concerning duties and recreations. This society, acting through its representative, made a descent upon the gallery containing these pictures, and having invoked the aid of the police carried off a selection of M. Garnier’s productions and proceeded with the assistance of a magistrate and a police court to decide upon their moral character. The magistrate, whose earlier career we may not unreasonably assume had not been passed in a studio and among artists, and whose notions of what constitutes a work of art were probably derived from occasional flying visits to the Royal Academy, decided that the pictures should be destroyed. (Anon. 1890e: 365) This instance of Kains-Jackson’s techniques of imbrication of topical items, of interest to homosocial and homosexual readers among others, into the format of his trade monthly dates from after Cleveland Street, while a short tale, ‘The Eighth Day of Creation’, by ‘P.C.’ [the editor],15 which culminates in the creation of ‘the Hermaphrodite’, appears beforehand in February 1889. Together these indicate the homosexual culture of The Artist from which litigious leaders on related issues arose, and into which they subsided. They show both the pressure of such news on the leaders of The Artist and the editor’s ingenious method of displacement of the unspeakable in 1889/90 by an acceptable vehicle of utterance. This is a strategy Kains-Jackson used throughout his tenure as editor at The Artist. In this way he could regularly carry homosexual material and keep the homosocial reader on board without offending his male and female heterosexual readers.

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By comparison, the Art Review,45 an illustrated monthly welcomed by The Artist at its launch, likewise published favourable pieces on Whitman, Melville, and Ibsen, and sexually explicit poems by Fr. Rolfe (‘Ballade of Boys Bathing’) and Arthur Symons (‘At the Montagnes Russes’); but it ventured no such comment on Cleveland Street, however oblique, unless we view its anonymous attack on the masses in February 1890 (‘Art for the Masses’) as a denunciation of the public sphere during the Cleveland Street affair: ‘A crusade to bring the masses to Art … must needs end in bringing Art to the level of the masses’ (Feb. 1890: 40). Meanwhile, from September 1889 in the opening pages of each number of The Artist, appeared a counterweight to the leaders, the ‘Letters to Living Artists’. This discursive space which launched individual numbers was far more inviting than the leaders; hinting at spoof and satire, it interleaved fine writing and wit with acerbic and, at times, blunt chunks of critique. The high style of the letter to the living artist Alma Tadema ends with the judgement ‘he would be bold, indeed, who ventured to inscribe your name among the Great Masters’ (February 1890: 37). Even Whistler, with whom the critic has more sympathy (‘you alone are new’, March 1890: 69), is criticised: his search for aphorisms gives way to the flat ‘reality’ of his ‘splendid promise, kept indeed, but in a desultory and accidental fashion’ (March 1890: 69). These hybrid, discursive columns exemplify the New Journalism. They heighten the personality – of the critic through his signature of ‘Pasquin, Junior’ and through the reiterated appearance of the column or serial, and that of the addressee, through use of the second person ‘you’ and ‘your’. The column takes a risky tack for a trade magazine and, unlike the leaders, attacks not the establishment but its own artist–readers. Perhaps by this means it is attempting to increase circulation through introducing the characteristically ‘New Journalism’ ingredient of ‘personality’ and the personal. Enhancing the danger and daring of the periodical’s reach, the ‘Letters’ engage the readers’ desire for entertainment as well as their critical acumen. Like the leader writer in November, and in the midst of the affair, the columnist shows his critical hand, despite and perhaps in response to Cleveland Street: The nude form so dear to the Greek beauty-lovers has rarely tempted you. The splendid forms of the athletes, the noble figures of their fighting men are less to your taste than the jeunesse dorée of Hellas, or the curled darlings of Rome. (Pasquin Junior, February 1890: 36)

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This note is echoed in the same number by the squib on ‘Handsome Men’ on page 53. Without illustrations to attract readers,46 and more like a weekly newspaper than a monthly magazine, The Artist fought in a period of intense competition to keep its heterogeneous readership – an uncommonly wide diversity of gender in comparison with the daily, and most of the weekly, middle-class press – through a balance of bytes of news for which the many ‘Departments’ catered, and the more discursive spaces of the leader and the column. It is the invention and provocation of The Artist in 1889/90, in relation to Cleveland Street and a particular group of its readers, that I have attempted to map, and from which its complex landscape of politics, art and gender clamours to emerge.

7 Gender and the New Journalism: the Yellow Book

(i)

Gender ‘in the age we live in one gets lost among the genders’ (Henry James, ‘The Death of the Lion’, Yellow Book I, 1894: 44)

The notion of gender, re-introduced into general discourse in the late 1960s by the revived feminist critique of culture, has come to characterise our episteme, just as surely as tropes of revolution, democracy, class, capital, and culture produced and inhabited discourses from other epistemes. If the last decades of the nineteenth century were always already perceived as decadent by older Salvationists such as Arnold and Ruskin, younger contemporaries such as Yeats and Nordau supplied epithets – ‘tragic’ and ‘degeneration’ – which resonate in our own estimates a century later. Elaine Showalter’s approach to the cultural matrix of these decades as years of ‘sexual anarchy’ (Showalter 1991) at once conflates the apocalyptic teleology of millenarianism, in which anarchy is positive and purgative, with the anti-democratic politics appropriated by Arnold, who based the maintenance of ‘culture’ and civic order on the obliteration of anarchic elements. However, as rereadings emerge from critics and readers writing self-consciously within the category of gender, the reinscriptions of Victorian writing ‘find’, throughout the century, a preoccupation of discourse with gender, from the Wordsworths, the Carlyles, and Tennyson and Hallam onwards (Dellamora 1990a; Poovey 1988, Tuchman 1989, Walkowitz 1992). Schoolboys, bachelors, friends, cads, lovers, protectors, guardians, adventurers, heroes, dandies, husbands, rakes, lechers, authors and narrators are alike reinscribed in gendered spaces, as are schoolgirls, friends, 145

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companions, heroines, intellectuals, new, fallen, and independent women, wives, dependants, aunts, spinsters, mothers, sisters, gossips, governesses, seamstresses, and activists. Whereas the latter decades of the nineteenth century had been seen as outstanding for their ‘decadence’, a critique of gender categories and sexuality in discourse (which the nineteenth-century apothegm ‘decadence’ both hints at and occludes) was, it now ‘appears’, manifesting itself throughout the period. In the ‘takes’ on the subject of gendered discourse in the 1890s periodical press that follow, I frame the periodical rather than authors or single articles. At moments the frame narrows to focus on articles, or widens to include other debates about and within gendered discourse in other periodicals, and in related cultural formations such as the book trade, and the publishing and newspaper industries. I want to move discussion of these periodicals from the backroom of apparently apolitical discourse about aestheticised, ‘decadent’, self-referring exotica into proximity with the gendered discourse and sexual politics of more general contemporary periodicals and books. These include the Fortnightly Review, the Humanitarian, the New Review, The Artist and Journal of Home Culture, the Westminster Review, and the Westminster Gazette. My comparisons suggest that although the Yellow Book and its offspring the Savoy distinguished themselves from many other serials of their day through their apparent exclusion of politics in favour of a proclaimed focus on literature and visual art, their ‘aesthetic’ discourses of naturalism, symbolism, nihilism, erotica and graphics cohabit with insistent discourses of gender, with sexual as well as cultural politics. The Savoy is comprised of a range of aggressively male and in the main heterosexual discourses, with the notable exception of Beardsley’s contributions. The early Yellow Book, despite its deployment of Ella d’Arcy in an editorial capacity and its regular contributions by women, is so suffused with male discourses of gender, in work by women and men, that these male discourses characterise the early volumes of the journal as much as its ‘aestheticism’. Two pieces in Volume I, the homage to the prostitute in Arthur Symons’ poem ‘Stella Maris’ and Ella d’Arcy’s vituperative portrait of an ‘irremediable’ marriage between a vacuous working-class bride and her despairing middle-class husband, suggest the parameters of such discourses. Part of the politics ostensibly disavowed in the name of disinterestedness in the Prospectus, the Yellow Book’s diverse and often metaphysical discourses of gender largely avoid the sensual voyeurism prevalent in the Savoy with its comparative preponderance of male contributors.1 Readers of all periods identified and reacted to the ‘sex’ in the

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Yellow Book, but whereas in the 1890s the issue was its presence, its constructions occupy later analysts. This particular moment in the nineteenth-century discourses of gender, of the Yellow Book and the Savoy, is bifurcated and determined by the trials of Oscar Wilde, themselves the occasion for articulation of a great range of address to issues of gender. But while the barely established Yellow Book, a year old, allegedly ‘turned grey overnight’ in April 1895 after it purged Beardsley, and although the brief life of the Savoy (January–December 1896) resulted from this purge, neither periodical ever published or even mentioned Wilde or the trials. Nor did they explicitly link their own inscriptions of gender (for example, Henry Harland’s ‘A Responsibility’ (Yellow Book II) – a sad tale of failed male bonding – which appeared before the trials) with the discourses of homophobia and homosexuality revealed and provoked by the widely reported trials. However ‘avant-garde’ these magazines are, and however permeated with gender inscriptions, they articulate too the homophobia of their period, and indicate the extent of anxiety attaching to gender as a subject and the constraints on its discourses. Scrutiny of the wider periodical press in the 1890s brings into view other cultural formations and discourses which pertain to gender in the aesthetic press. Within journalism, these include the literary formation of male novelists who blame women readers and writers, and institutions they associate with them (such as the circulating libraries), for the constraints on English fiction, and who wish to reclaim the novel from such an orientation; the social purity campaign, fired by the work of Josephine Butler and W. T. Stead; women writers, feminist and non-feminist; writers whose base is science, comprising Darwinists, sexologists, psychologists, and behind them medical discourse; publishers and publishing, of both books and serials; journalism, journalists, and the ‘New Journalism’; and the ‘new ([homosexual]) culture’ which takes in practitioners of literature, visual art, and criticism. These formations are overwhelmingly male, some exclusively. Women are in the main perceived as ‘other’, even within formations which include them such as journalism: it inscribes them, for example, as ‘women journalists’. To set beside the discourses of the Yellow Book and the Savoy, I want to move into view the Society of Women Journalists, which in 1895–6 was chaired by John Oliver Hobbes [Mrs Craigie], a contributor to the Yellow Book; journalism by women; and the existence in the 1890s of a range of women’s newspapers. 2 In November 1894, during the short heyday of the Yellow Book, the Fortnightly Review, edited then by Frank Harris, ran an article on

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‘Women’s Newspapers’ which lists and discusses an array of titles, and concludes that Britain’s weekly women’s press is unique in its diversity, generality of coverage, and capacity for seriousness: Whatever be their shortcoming, there are no women’s papers the least like these in any other country. Those which have a wide circulation in America are sensible and useful, with a strong religious tone, but are principally calculated for young girls, and compare on more equal terms with the Girl’s Own Paper or the Young Woman … those published in Australia and New Zealand are of the same kind, but not so good. There are excellent French and German domestic papers, confining themselves purely to dress and housewifery, and recognising little change in women’s views. All bring out suffrage papers, but these are confined to a small circle, and the majority of those of general interest published in other countries are really extremely poor. It may be, and has been said, that it is a mistake for women to sever themselves from men, thereby setting up a different standard; and we are told that Frenchwomen, for example, avoid the danger. No doubt the intellectual woman will habitually turn for her news to the ordinary papers, but the diverse subjects with which she is now specially connected in this country, demand a fuller treatment than the ordinary paper will give them. For instance, when the Women Workers’ Conference takes place in the autumn, an event of deep interest to hundreds, if not thousands, of women, the general papers scarcely touch upon it. (March Phillipps 1894b: 669) Phillipps’ argument that the ‘ordinary [male] paper’ cannot be relied upon by women for full coverage of women-related news has a dimension only implicit in the Fortnightly: while this progressive monthly addresses the woman question, it cannot be relied upon by new women readers to support basic elements of the cause. This may be seen in the Fortnightly’s practice in 1894. If in November it published March Phillipps’ celebratory piece on women’s newspapers and journalists in Britain, earlier, in March, it had carried an article on ‘The New Hedonism3 by Grant Allen. He was the author of an 1889 Fortnightly piece, ‘Plain Words on the Woman Question’, which had defined women overwhelmingly in terms of their biology. The March 1894 article and the debate that it stimulated in the press between August and October afford us a view of positions on gender to parallel those in the ‘Decadent’ press.

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The new hedonism In many respects, the arguments of Allen’s ‘The New Hedonism’ can be seen to harmonise with the reputation of the Fortnightly, as edited by Frank Harris, for publication of advanced and progressive views. These are typified by Harris’s publication of Wilde’s aphorisms ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’ and ‘A Preface to Dorian Gray’ in February and March 1891. Allen’s defence of the ‘New Hedonism’ is presented as an attack on asceticism and theology. Flamboyantly libertine, it is couched in advocacy of beauty and of ‘self-development’ rather than ‘self-sacrifice’. It calls to mind both Walter Pater’s ‘Conclusion’ to The Renaissance and its corrective the ‘new Cyrenaism’ of Marius the Epicurean, together with its outgrowth, the ‘new culture’ of homosexuality which the undergraduate magazine the Spirit Lamp promulgated in 1893 under the editorship of Alfred Douglas. The depletion of the unstinting pursuit of self-development recommended by Allen is modelled palpably on Pater’s ‘Conclusion’, and the rhetoric of aestheticism is appropriated: And what is thus true of the body corporeal is true also of the body spiritual, intellectual, aesthetic. It is the duty of everyone among us to develop himself and herself to the highest possible point, freely, in every direction. It is our duty to think as far as we can think; to get rid of all dogmas, preconceptions, and prejudices; to make sure we are not tied by false fears or vague terrors; to examine all faiths, all fancies, all shibboleths, political, religious, social, moral. … It is our duty to search and probe into all these things; taking nothing for granted, accepting nothing on authority, testing all we are told by teacher or preacher, by priest or savant, by moralist or schoolmaster. We should each of us arrive at a consistent theory of the universe for ourselves, and of our own place in it. (Allen 1894a: 381)4 So too with culture. Every unit of gain in the aesthetic sense, every diffusion of a wide taste for poetry, for art, for music, for decoration, is to the good for humanity. (Allen 1894a: 382) Allen’s rationalist, secularist address to ‘the sexual relation’ as an explicit subject in the remainder of the article chimes with its centrality in the contemporary Yellow Book and Savoy: ‘everything high and ennobling in our nature springs directly out of the sexual instinct. … To it we owe the entire existence of aesthetic sense, which is, in the last resort, a secondary sexual attribute’ (Allen 1894a: 384). It is a measure of

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difference from the conditions in which Pater’s oblique if suggestive final paragraphs from the ‘Conclusion’ first appeared twenty-five years before, in an anonymous review of another’s work, from which the reviewer’s positions in the conclusion appeared to arise. A second element significantly distinguishes Allen’s ‘The New Hedonism’ from Pater’s ‘Conclusion’ and much of the contents of the Yellow Book and the Savoy: its commitment to a heterosexuality linked with social purity, which emerges over time and in the main retrospectively, in what was presented as a serialised extension of the original article as an authorial reply in the ensuing debate. ‘About the New Hedonism’ appeared in September in another periodical, the Humanitarian. A Monthly Review of Sociological Science, a shilling monthly publication of the Humanitarian League, edited by Victoria Woodhull (1838–1927), journalist, orator and suffragist. In 1890 Woodhull and her sister had co-authored a book called The Human Body: The Temple of God, and as a younger journalist in the US she was imprisoned with her sister for obscenity pertaining to an article on Henry Ward Beecher’s alleged double life. Both sisters subsequently moved to Britain. While the London-based Humanitarian (1892–1901) like the Fortnightly was prepared to publish a range of views, it seems from this ‘New Hedonism’ sample that the grounding of the Humanitarian in gender politics freed two contributors who were outside the dominant discourse – Allen, a secularist ‘social purity’ sexologist, and Ives, a gay man – to be more explicit in the articulation of their views than the mainstream Fortnightly or the chary, eclectic Yellow Book could permit. Allen’s disclosure of his ‘social purity’ position, which accords with one strand of feminism (cf. Sarah Grand), may be thought to suit the political space in which it appears, but his explicit rejection of homosexual love seems gratuitous; social purity does not demand such a ban, as Grand’s Heavenly Twins shows; nor does the Humanitarian, which publishes a defence of Greek love by George Ives as part of the New Hedonism debate. Certainly, the second tranche of Allen’s New Hedonism manifesto narrows markedly the sexual spectrum implied in the Fortnightly’s version of the argument, which seemed to advocate sexual expression within and outside of marriage and not to rule out Greek love: ‘The loveliest object our art can represent … is the nude male or female figure. … Man is beautiful, woman is beautiful; both are most beautiful in the budding period and plenitude of their reproductive power’ (Allen 1894a: 388). Like Symons, Sickert, Wedmore, Yeats and other male contributors to the Yellow Book and the Savoy, Allen celebrates the women of the

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theatre and music hall, but explicitly in relation to their bodies: ‘We go to the theatre, in part to see and hear handsome men and winning women. The addition of ballet serves to accentuate this element in the enjoyment of theatrical entertainment. Take away sex, and the play were nothing’ (Allen 1894a: 389). And the hint of the homosocial is borne out in a subsequent juxtaposition between British Asceticism (‘it teaches the money-grubbing and narrow-minded middle class … that love is a thing to be got over once for all in early life, and relegated to the back parlour of existence’) and the example of Greece: ‘Hellas knew better. The free Greek was not ashamed of sex, not ashamed of his own body, and its component members’ (Allen 1894a: 390). Where the first parts of the Fortnightly article defined the ‘New Hedonism’ in terms of its freedom – in reaction to the constraints of asceticism – the remainder attempts to delimit it: His object will always be so to use these functions as not to abuse them, either by enforced abstinence or by acquiescence in a hateful regime of vice, disease, and practical slavery for a large body of women. He knows that to be pure is not to be an anchorite, and that chastity means a profound disinclination to give the body where the heart is not given in unison. (Allen 1894a: 391) However, as may be seen from this passage, the arguments are tantalisingly pluralist, with both abstinence and prostitution debarred, and purity allied with a chastity that is defined not legally, but simply as a union of sex and love. He offers a similarly fissured programme for responsible parenthood; tinctured with eugenics, it includes a mysterious declaration, ‘We will not doom to forced celibacy half our finest mothers’ (Allen 1894a, 392), which points in its generality to freeunion or same-sex relations, both inexplicit, even in Harris’ Fortnightly. That my own mystification concerning Allen’s position was shared may be seen in two articles which appeared in the Humanitarian in August and September 1894, one by the Rev. Professor T. G. Bonney, attacking it from a Christian position and exposing its ambiguities (and ambivalences), and one by Allen himself in which he ridicules Bonney and pities ‘poor Christianity’ (Allen 1894b: 181) but also clarifies one strand of his argument by coming out as an ally of Josephine Butler and W. T. Stead, ‘I am a Social Purity man’ (Allen 1894b: 184). In parallel, his advocacy of the body and of sexuality in line with the younger generation of sexologists such as Edward Carpenter, and Havelock Ellis who wrote for the Savoy, still stands.

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Homosexuality, the last aspect of the gender spectrum of the day aired in the Humanitarian’s portion of the New Hedonism debate, is found in George Ives’ ‘The New Hedonism Controversy’, published the following month in October 1894. This is one of the most open and sustained public defences of love between men in the press of the period, and it is noteworthy that the Humanitarian published it. Moreover, it is signed. Ives immediately aligns himself with ‘those of the New Morality’ (Ives 1894: 292), and takes advantage of the space Allen opens up by his use of the term ‘hedonism’, and his reference to Greek love. Ives predictably bases his defence of ‘the New Morality’ on the authority of classical culture: ‘It could have been no mean and unworthy ideal of love which was followed by so many of the master minds, by Solon and Demosthenes, by Alexander and Epaminondas, by Pindar and by Sophocles’ (Ives 1894: 295). However, he also claims a modern tradition which includes Whitman, George Grote, Pater and Symonds. How, Ives asks bravely, can Hedonists logically denounce particular phases of sensuality? One answer lies in the danger of personal repercussions: in April a case for the homosocial had been put pseudonymously in The Artist in ‘The New Chivalry’, and its editor and author was forced to resign.5 The New Hedonism debate of March–October 1894, simultaneous also with the first issues of the Yellow Book, maps a terrain in which both sexuality and gender feature. Allen, initiator of the debate, never contributed to the new quarterly, but his publisher John Lane, and his illustrator, Beardsley, implicate him in the cultural formation to which it belonged. Lane’s ‘Hill-Top series’ in which Allen’s The Woman Who Did (1895) appeared the following year was one which ‘raises a protest in favour of purity’, and Allen’s best-selling if uneasy intervention in the genre of New Woman fiction was contested by feminists such as Millicent Fawcett.6 The array of 1890s texts and positions in the New Hedonism debate together with the New Woman fiction of the 1890s by women and men indicate the cultural formations and the discourse of gender into which the Yellow Book and the Savoy move.

(ii)

Decadence and journalism And a weird word has been invented to explain the whole business. Decadence, decadence: you are all decadent nowadays. (Yellow Book II, 1894: 266)

By the time Hubert Crackanthorpe wrote these words in the second issue of the Yellow Book, Decadence had a history; denounced by

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Richard Le Gallienne earlier in the decade, the phenomenon was also attacked ‘in house’ in the opening number’s ‘Reticence in Literature’ written by Arthur Waugh. Crackanthorpe’s ‘Roundabout Remarks’ were a reply to Waugh, part of a structure of contestation devised by the editors, by which Vol. II contained critiques of Vol. I. The terms in which this debate is conducted in the Yellow Book are as instructive as they are unexpected in a periodical whose name and design were calculated to buy into the cultural aura of jaune – provocative French fiction and down-market British railway novels. What Waugh calls for in this yellow book is reticence in fiction, an alliance between art and morality. What he denounces and what Crackanthorpe defends is realism in fiction, which Crackanthorpe terms the move back to Nature. It is this principle, and only secondarily the styles or artifice by which we tend to define Decadence, which serves Crackanthorpe in selecting his examples: Ibsen, Degas, the New English Art Club; Zola, Oscar Wilde, and the Second Mrs Tanqueray. ‘Mr Richard Le Gallienne is hoist with his own petard; even the British playwright has not escaped the taint’ (Crackanthorpe 1894: 266). In the same number Max Beerbohm settles for Artifice as the sign of Decadence and celebrates it slyly: There are signs that our English literature has reached that point, when, like the literatures of all the nations that have been, it must fall at length into the hands of the decadents. The qualities that I tried in my essay to travesty – paradox and marivaudage, lassitude, a love of horror and all unusual things, a love of argot and archaism and the mysteries of style – are not all these displayed, some by one, some by another of les jeunesécrivains? Who knows but that Artifice is in truth at our gates and that soon she may pass through our streets? Already the windows of Grub Street are crowded with watchful, evil faces. They are ready, the men of Grub Street, to pelt her, as they have pelted all that came before her. Let them come down while there is still time, and hang their houses with colours, and strew the road with flowers. Will they not, for once, do homage to a new queen? (Beerbohm 1894b: 284) Evidence shows that the term ‘decadence’ is unstable. Arthur Symons, Yellow Book stalwart and Savoy editor, was one of its earliest explicators. In November 1893, six months before the Yellow Book was published, his ‘The Decadent Movement in Literature’ appeared in Harper’s, but by 1898 when he published The Symbolist Movement in Literature he had subsumed it into symbolism, or deemed it overtaken. 7 The construc-

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tions of decadence since – by Holbrook Jackson, G. K. Thornton, Ian Fletcher, Elaine Showalter and John Stokes, to name but a few – share a common desire to clarify its meanings and a diversity of emphases. The defining mode of Symons’ timely essay, the accessibility and the multivalence of ‘yellow’, and the discourse and structures of the magazine itself (Waugh’s ‘Reticence’ was followed in Volume I by Crackanthorpe’s ‘Modern Melodrama’8) indicate the extent to which the Yellow Book was a self-conscious player in the performance of Decadence. The Yellow Book was a hard-covered quarterly periodical which ran for thirteen numbers between April 1894 and April 1897. It was initially edited by Henry Harland (letterpress) and Aubrey Beardsley (art) and, just as crucially, published by John Lane, 9 renowned for the aesthetic design and fine production of his list, which featured prominently in the quarterly’s advertisements at the back. Its first five volumes published the work of a number of visual artists and writers associated with that hybrid formation called ‘Decadence’, among them younger figures such as Ella d’Arcy, Aubrey Beardsley, Max Beerbohm, A. C. Benson, Hubert Crackanthorpe, John Davidson, George Egerton, Will Rothenstein, Evelyn Sharp, Arthur Symons and Netta Syrett, more established ones such as Henry Harland, Walter Sickert and P. Wilson Steer, and public figures such as Edmund Gosse, George Moore and Frederic Leighton. Impressionism, feminism, naturalism, dandyism, symbolism, and classicism all participate in the politics of Decadence in the 1890s, and in the Yellow Book. In April 1895 Beardsley was dramatically extirpated from the periodical by Lane during the committal of Oscar Wilde, who was mistakenly associated with the periodical by the public. The yellow book Wilde was observed to be carrying was a French novel, and the contributors to the Yellow Book had never included Wilde.10 In the event Beardsley’s departure proved doubly harmful. By January 1896 Beardsley and Arthur Symons published the Savoy, a rival which was cheaper, better produced, and livelier than its competitor. Without Beardsley, and a number of his friends who transferred to the Savoy, the quality of the Yellow Book was different, safer if not worse, and it ceased publication without warning or explanation two years later, one number after the demise of its rival. I would suggest that the textual politics of the Yellow Book were eclectic from the outset, looking back to the reign of the quarterlies and invoking high Art and Literature, but at the same time participating in the discourses of the New Journalism, the New Woman, the new culture, and the new art. The orientation of the journal – recuperating

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the cultural values and production of the first half of the century, or adopting the present cultures of the ‘new’ – was contested in its pages, in both the letterpress and art. To resist the present (as do James and Arthur Waugh), or to embrace it – through appropriation (Beardsley), critique (d’Arcy), or celebration (Hubert Crackanthorpe) – these are reiterated positions which mark the first four numbers of the Yellow Book. The exclusion of Beardsley in April 1895 and the capitulation to the ‘readers’,11 represent the rise to dominance of certain conservative discourses of the Yellow Book there from the start: these involve the politics of literature, art, journalism, and gender. In important ways, the project of the Yellow Book looked back to prereform Britain and the great quarterly reviews: it was quarterly at a moment when timeliness, topicality and the news were paramount; and it looked like a book when the ephemeral periodical was at its apogee. At the same time, it looked forward to the success of the New (and illustrated) Journalism with its millions of new readers. The resultant appeal of the magazine to different, targeted groups of consumer was in part the result of the publisher’s projection of potential readership. That in April 1895, the Yellow Book attempted to resolve these tensions by excising the ‘new’ not only helps to explain its failure to survive, but illuminates the fragilities of nineties Decadence, and the transgressiveness of the ‘aesthetic’ even at the end of the century. In the history of ‘New Journalism’ in the 1890s the short life of the Yellow Book, poised as it was between the old and the new, may be set beside other radical serials (such as T. P. O’Connor’s daily, the Star) which were also forced by the nature of the new market, the ‘demos’, to abandon radical politics (Goodbody 1988). In the case of the Yellow Book the hysterical homophobia of ‘readers’ was shared by the periodical’s contributors, some of whom were equally convinced and vociferous that the publication must be visibly purged of any association with Wildean Decadence.

(iii)

The Yellow Book and the New Woman

I want to consider the Yellow Book, not as it is often viewed, as part of the avant-garde, ‘non-commercial’ art press, but in terms of the New Journalism, the New Woman, and the ‘new culture’, subjects which obsess its contributors, pervade its discourses, and determine its modes of production, its circulation, and its readership. First published in 1894, between the naming of the New Journalism by Matthew Arnold in 1887 and the appearance of the Daily News in 1896, the Yellow Book

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both reacts against and appropriates aspects of the ‘New Journalism’. And appearing in the precise year that Ann Ardis (1990: 12) identifies with a shift in attention from the social phenomenon of the New Woman to its literary form in the New Women novel, the Yellow Book is timed to articulate the anxieties of its culture about the subjects of Woman and the Woman Writer. From its first piece in its first number, in which a character notes nervously ‘in the age we live in one gets lost among the genders’ (James 1894: 44), to the voicing of male panic in Volume III: Every bush and every bug grows its own specialist, and yet we, the patient and long-suffering public, are left to endure both the fogs that make of London one murky pit, and the redundant female birth rate which threatens more revolutions than all the forces of the Anarchists in active combination. (‘A Woman’ 1894: 15) the Yellow Book addresses the subject of Woman. These inscriptions are interactive within the magazine and with writing outside it, part of a male and misogynist discourse of wit around the subject of the Woman Writer. The first appears in Henry James’s ‘The Death of the Lion’, the lead item in Volume I, which refers to a literary culture in which the phenomenon of women writers with male pseudonyms is extended satirically to male novelists taking female names. 12 The second appears in a parallel keynote article in Volume III, ‘Woman – Wives or Mothers? By a Woman’, attributed generically to a female author but written in fact by a man, Frederic Greenwood, an experienced and now a conservative journalist who had most recently founded the Anti-Jacobin, a journal like the Oldie, predicated on a reactionary position.13 Thus, the Yellow Book realised James’s ridiculous projection of a male author taking a female pseudonym and, still echoing James, alluded by this attribution to the spectacle of the anti-New Woman woman, an object of male gaze calculated to assuage male panic. At the same time, the article blatantly celebrates the sexualised woman – with the division of ‘wives’ and ‘mothers’ a domesticated reiteration of the Magdalene–Mary model; this position is such a familiar construct in the period that the article identifies its genre, satire, if not its gender through the extremity of its ‘modest proposal[s]’. It also covertly displaces the female writer with the male, usurping the female authority it claims, and reproduces structures of male power through the imposition of a male gaze and discourse.

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By contrast, a female satire of 1890s male fantasies about the woman writer may be seen in Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins; it appeared just before the Yellow Book which carried adverts for the publication of its 35th 1000. Like James, Grand links the New Woman with the popular press, but unlike him she validates the power of the female writer by figuring her as the victim of male physical abuse, rather than the female perpetrator of socio/cultural violence against the male artist: now, if you hit a woman, she’ll put you in Punch, or revile you in the Dailies. Magazine you; write you down an ass in a novel; blackguard you in choice language from a public platform; or paint a picture of you which will make you wish you had never been born. Ridicule! They ridicule you. That’s the worst of it. (Grand 1992: 273) There is no question, as Fraser Harrison notes, that Woman is one of the great subjects of the Yellow Book. From its immediate visual and commodified appeal as a coffee-table book, and the prominence of its drawings of the female subject – Beardsley’s poster-art partygoer on the cover of the first volume and piano player on the title-page complemented by draped neo-classical figures of Frederic Leighton’s – these Yellow Book illustrations ushered in the female reader to Henry James’s short story ‘The Death of the Lion’. It, in turn, might be said to construct that reader as perpetrator–associate of the women readers in the tale, who lionise, domesticate and then kill the caged, male, author–artist forcibly separated from the nurturing wild. That the harm lies in the female gaze itself is indicated by Fanny Hurter, the woman in the story who remains innocent of this Medusa role. Her capacity to hurt is turned on herself: she obediently eradicates her desire to look at and reify the male artist, and accepts the passive role of absence. This includes, significantly, denial of proximity to the Author, and the substitution of the austerity of the impersonal ‘oeuvre’. No male character in James’s story is similarly kept out of view of the male object. Male readers in the text have more productive and/or active roles to choose from: nurturer–protector, journalist–attacker, and of course victim– creative artist. But the women and their domesticity are the reader–killers, and the narrator–protector who vies unsuccessfully with the female lion-tamers/menagerie keepers is male: I had a battle with Mrs. Wimbush over the artist she protected, and another over the question of a certain week, at the end of July, that

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Mr. Paraday appeared to have contracted to spend with her in the country. I protested against this visit; I intimated that he was too unwell for hospitality without a nuance, for caresses without imagination; I begged he might rather take the time in some restorative way. A sultry air of promises, of reminders hung over his August, and he would greatly profit by the interval of rest. He had not told me he was ill again – that he had had a warning; but I had not needed this, and I found his reticence his worst symptom. The only thing he said to me was that he believed a comfortable attack of something or other would set him up: it would put out of the question everything but the exemptions he prized. I am afraid I shall have presented him as a martyr in a very small cause if I fail to explain that he surrendered himself much more liberally than I surrendered him. He filled his lungs, for the most part, with the comedy of his queer fate: the tragedy was in the spectacles through which I chose to look. (James 1894: 38) Aspects of this configuration of relations between the sexes recur elsewhere in the first volume of the Yellow Book, in the two dramas for example, in Ella d’Arcy’s short story ‘Irremediable’, in Arthur Waugh’s critical article ‘Reticence in Literature’, and in the young Max Beerbohm’s frolic ‘A Defence of Cosmetics’. ‘Irremediable’, for example, is a tale of a chance meeting and ill-judged marriage between a literate, reading, urban clerk and an illiterate country girl; it is married life which quickly becomes intolerable by virtue of their educational and intellectual inequality to which the title refers. In ‘Reticence’ Waugh winds up his assault on realism with an attack on the woman writer: But the latest development of literary frankness is, I think, the most insidious and fraught with the greatest danger to art. A new school has arisen which combines the characteristics of effeminacy and brutality. In its effeminate aspect it plays with the subtler emotions of sensual pleasure, on its brutal side it has developed into that class of fiction which for want of a better word I must call chirurgical. … In fiction it infects its heroines with acquired diseases of names unmentionable, and has debased the beauty of maternity by analysis of the process of gestation. Surely the inartistic temperament can scarcely abuse literature further. I own I can conceive nothing less beautiful. … We are told that this is a part of the revolt of woman, and certainly our women-writers are chiefly to blame. It is out of

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date, no doubt, to clamour for modesty; but the woman who describes the sensations of childbirth does so, it is to be presumed – not as the writer of advice to a wife – but as an artist producing literature for art’s sake. And so one may fairly ask her: How is art served by all this? What has she told us that we did not all know, or could not learn from medical manuals? and what impression has she left us over and above the memory of her unpalatable details? (Waugh 1894b: 217–18) If the first number of the new quarterly begins with James’s onslaught on women readers, it ends with the first act of a play, ‘The Fool’s Hour’, co-authored by John Oliver Hobbes [Mrs Craigie] and George Moore. This mounts an attack on the dullness and constraints of marriage (that of the Doldrummonds), and a paean to the delights of bachelor life as lived by their son. In the opening scene Lord Doldrummond greets his old friend with the confidence that ‘the existence which my wife enjoys, and which I have learnt to endure, would not suit every one’ (Hobbes and Moore 1894: 254) and then exhorts him: Ah, thank heaven every night and morning, my dear Digby, that you are a bachelor. Praying for sinners and breeding them would seem the whole duty of man. I was no sooner born than my parents were filled with uneasiness lest I should not live to marry and beget an heir of my own. Now I have an heir, his mother will never know peace until she has found him a wife! (Hobbes and Moore 1894: 255) As their son Cyril leaves for the theatre, in anticipation of his plan to set up chambers in town, he echoes his father in his explanation: ‘I cannot see much of the world through my mother’s embroidery.’ This is the last scene of the act. These by no means exhaust the forms misogyny takes in the Yellow Book, nor is misogyny the only gender marker of the magazine. Homosocial and erotic discourse are inscribed in Edmund Gosse’s poem dedicated to another contributor, A. C. B[enson], as well as in James’s first story and in Beerbohm’s ‘Defence of Cosmetics’, in which ‘Max’ takes the opportunity to note those ‘countless gentlemen who walk about town … artificially bronzed’ and men ‘who make themselves up, seemingly with an aesthetic purpose’ (Beerbohm 1894a: 78). The naturalism which characterises stories in the Yellow Book by Ella d’Arcy and Hubert Crackanthorpe and informs Arthur Symons’ poem

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‘Stella Maris’ also foregrounds male as well as female (hetero)sexuality, and reiterates a pattern of sexual relations between upper-class men and working-class, ‘fallen’, or theatrical women. Beardsley’s drawings of actresses and prostitutes (e.g. ‘Mrs Patrick Campbell’ and ‘Night Piece’ in Vol. I) display women and their bodies as objects of the gaze of the (implied) male spectator, in profile for example, or in telling contrast to each other (‘L’Education Sentimentale’), or as objects of leering male (and sometimes female) creatures. The representation of sexuality and a full spectrum of gender are pervasive in Beardsley’s visual and verbal work. By contrast with Beardsley’s (and Beerbohm’s) appropriation of theatricality for Decadence, Sickert’s ‘The Old Oxford Music Hall’ takes a gendered if characteristic subject – the music hall (see especially Arthur Symons’ ‘At the Alhambra’ and Frederick Wedmore’s ‘Nancy’ stories in the Savoy, and Lautrec’s poster art) – and treats it as a vast architectural study, with its depiction of the music-hall artiste, the close-up object of Symons, Wedmore and Lautrec, so distanced as to be dwarfed and only broadly suggested, if central to the male gaze of newspaper-reading spectators.14 Certainly, Sickert’s is one of a number of pictures in the Yellow Book, in which the discourse of gender is muted or absent, but that discourse nevertheless remains the most reiterated in pictures and letterpress in the early volumes. I want to indicate briefly how the subject of women was constructed in the period in which the Yellow Book first appeared. In January 1894 the Nineteenth Century, which habitually fostered debate through its symposium structures, initiated a series of articles, ‘The Revolt of the Daughters’, which ran monthly to March. The first contributor was Blanche Crackanthorpe,15 who offered qualified support for the young New Women. She was followed in February by a dialogue, ‘Mothers and Daughters’, which developed her case. Signed Mrs Frederic Harrison, the format of the piece echoes Mr Frederic Harrison’s renowned ‘Culture: a Dialogue’. In March, mothers (Crackanthorpe and Mary Haweis) were at it again, and only then were two daughters (Alys Pearsall Smith and Kathleen Cuffe) permitted to publish their own defence. Also in March, two fresh series of articles began, stimulated by pieces which raised related issues: Sarah Grand’s ‘The New Aspects of the Woman Question’, which appeared in the North American Review, and Grant Allen’s ‘The New Hedonism’. As detailed above, the New Hedonism debate shifted to the Humanitarian where it ran from August to October, while Ouida, replying to Sarah Grand in the May North American Review, seems to have capitalised the phrase New Woman for the first time (Ardis 1990:

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11). And November’s Fortnightly, perhaps to win over its progressive women readers who had objected to Allen’s ‘New Hedonism’, carried ‘Women’s Newspapers’ by Evelyn March Phillipps, cited above. Preceding this flurry of 1894 debate were three volumes of fiction dealing with the woman question in 1893 – George Egerton’s [Mary Dunne’s] short stories, Keynotes, published by John Lane and trailed by the renowned Keynote series; Sarah Grand’s multi-edition best-seller The Heavenly Twins (Grant Richards’ 3 volume edition and then an edition by Heinemann); and George Gissing’s The Odd Women. In 1895 during the run of the Yellow Book, Lane’s list included two novels by Allen, The British Barbarians and the best-seller The Woman Who Did. When Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure appeared serially in 1894–5, with its New Woman figure of Sue Bridehead and its discussion of divorce, responses were so vituperative that Hardy vowed to desist from writing fiction again. In every field of contemporary writing, in newspapers and magazines, in short fiction and the novel, in John Lane’s list, and thus unsurprisingly in the Yellow Book itself, the woman question and the New Woman, and questions of gender more generally, were among the impinging subjectivites of the day.

(iv)

The New Journalism

I now turn to a second formative discourse and cultural formation of the period in which the Yellow Book participated, and that is the New Journalism. As it happens, there is a journal closely linked with the Yellow Book which, prior to the declaration of a new series, undertook public self-scrutiny and an economically induced remodelling in January and February 1894, just in the period of the run up to the first volume of the Yellow Book. It was the monthly New Review (1889–97), a periodical which shares a number of contributors including James, Crackanthorpe, Gosse, Benson, Saintsbury, Le Gallienne, R. Garnett, and Symons with the Yellow Book. But the most obvious link between the two publications is Yellow Book regular Arthur Waugh, writer of ‘Reticence in Literature’ in Vol. I, who functioned as deputy editor of the New Review in 1894, helping Archibald Grove through his final year as editor. Their announcements to their readers in the January and February numbers provide an excellent view of the periodical market and the New Journalism at a time when both publications were attempting to consolidate their positions. There are a number of salient points of comparison. It should be said that from the first, in 1889, the New Review saw itself as tapping a new

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readership associated with the New Journalism, and this was reflected in its attempt to rival the Nineteenth Century and the Fortnightly Review by matching their weightiness at a fraction of their price. By 1894 it was setting its sights at the Review of Reviews, W. T. Stead’s 1890s project, and proposing to introduce quality illustrations. In its remarks about its new design, its address to the staple projection of the New Journalism audience, the railway traveller, and to the visually discerning reader are notable, and anticipate the Yellow Book’s similar attention to design and quality: ‘The general get-up will be improved both as regards the paper and the cover, and in order to facilitate the reading of the magazine for those who are travelling, the edges will be cut’ (Anon. 1894b: [128]). In the quotations that follow, reference to the archaic status of quarterlies, the potential educated audience, the deployment of the short story as the genre of modernity and the guarantor of ‘select’ fiction, and the strategy of quality illustrations as distinct from popular fodder all have resonance in relation to the Yellow Book: The New Review will be the first review which will be regularly illustrated – in no way competing with any existing magazines, not being merely a series of interviews sandwiched between fiction, but a serious review, in which the illustrations will form an actual integral part, – a really illustrative accompaniment to the articles included. For that reason, naturally, the part devoted to fiction cannot be illustrated. … The New Review in no way becomes an illustrated magazine, but remains what it has been hitherto, – a Review devoted to the great problems of to-day. (Anon. 1894a: [ii–iii]) It is true that with the easy methods of transmission through the post office, railroads, etc., the old quarterlies have been in a great way replaced by monthly reviews. But they have been, for the most part, too expensive, frequently too ‘special,’ and only occasionally sufficiently attractive to appeal to the enormous reading public that has grown up out of a liberal legislation in educational matters. That the mere ‘interview’ and personal gossip sandwiched between ephemeral fiction, and illustrated by cheap process, would not permanently and entirely satisfy this growing and intelligent audience, soon became manifest, and the avidity with which the Review of Reviews was taken up at the outset, proved that there were hundreds and thousands who were eager to inform themselves on all the topics discussed in those severer organs. (Anon. 1894b: [127])

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The last point of comparison is also telling, the plan of the Review to introduce every month ‘one very carefully selected short story’, in addition to the illustrations, thus ‘distinguish[ing] it from any existing periodical’ (Anon. 1894a: [i]). With its introduction of the short story, of quality illustration, of improved production, and its address to a newly educated audience, the New Review’s project represents the market at the moment of the Yellow Book’s intervention. ‘The Death of the Lion’, Henry James’s Yellow Book story in April 1894, could be said to parallel Gissing’s New Grub Street (1891) in its pitting of art and literature against the New Journalism; its satiric element attaches grimly to the editors, reporters, and their organs – Mr Deedy, Mr Pinhorn, Mr Morrow, and the Empire, and much of the imagery of debasement and de-valuation, stems from the rhetoric of the press: The big blundering newspaper had discovered him, and now he was proclaimed and anointed and crowned. … The article was a date; he had taken rank at a bound. … When Neil Paraday should come out of the house he would come out a contemporary. That was what had happened – the poor man was to be squeezed into his horrible age. (James 1894: 16–17) Contempt for the New Journalism and its contrast to literature are formally inscribed by transferring the vocabulary attaching to the journalistic commodity to the author himself: ‘His book sold but moderately, though the article in The Empire had done unwonted wonders for it; but he circulated in person in a manner that the libraries might well have envied’ (James 1894: 25). This figure of circulation functions as a motif in the novella, moving from the writer himself, to a hilarious account of his two-volume novel at a house party (James 1894: 41), to the dissonant account of the fatal loss of a unique manuscript which ‘circulates’ from the author to his hostess to a guest to a maid to a valet to Lord Doriment who leaves it on a train. Circulation of his book at the house is as follows: There is supposed to be a copy of his last book in the house, and in the hall I come upon ladies, in attitudes, bending gracefully over the first volume. I discreetly avert my eyes, and when I next look round the precarious joy has been superseded by the book of life. There is a sociable circle or a confidential couple, and the relinquished volume lies open on its face, as if it had been dropped under extreme

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coercion. Somebody else present finds it and transfers it, with its air of momentary desolation, to another piece of furniture. Every one is asking every one about it all day, and every one is telling every one where they put it last. I’m sure it’s rather smudgy about the twentieth page. I have a strong impression too that the second volume is lost – has been packed in the bag of some departing guest; and yet everybody has the impression that somebody else has read to the end. You see therefore that the beautiful book plays a great part in our conversation. (James 1894: 41) On the circulation of the manuscript, the narrator comments, ‘One would think it was some thrilling number of The Family Budget’ (James 1894: 47). But despite the elements of the ridiculous and the comic, the accounts of circulation build ominously until the loss of the manuscript is paralleled by nothing less than the death of the famous author. James’s short story itself has characteristics of the New Journalism, its fragmentation into bite-size parts for example, to increase accessibility. But immediately upon opening the Yellow Book, James’s story alerts us to consciousness of the proximity of the New Journalism and its construction as an irresistible enemy. Many other elements of the Yellow Book relate to the New Journalism. Perhaps, the most obvious relation is a negative one, in the publisher’s and editors’ choice of the archaic format of the quarterly, at the very moment in the history of journalism when topicality and upto-dateness seemed paramount. Designed to remove the periodical from the affray for the ‘busy reader’ of W. T. Stead’s publications such as the Review of Reviews, the quarterly Yellow Book was apparently endorsing the values of James’s narrator in denying the topical, the personal, the interview, and the mass appeal of the vulgar and commodified writing in which terms the New Journalism was constructed. Arthur Waugh, soon to be a prominent contributor to Volume I, writing for the Critic in advance announced the new project in its earliest stage as follows: It has yet to be proved that the public will buy literature for its own sake: the timely and journalistic contents of our monthly reviews show how keenly editors appreciate the necessity for the interest of the passing hour. And the present moment … is the one thing which will not be consulted in The Yellow Book. (Quoted in Mix 1960: 71; Waugh 1894a: 43)

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And when it appeared in April, its format attracted attention: ‘The first volume of the Yellow Book (Mathews and Lane), an illustrated quarterly, evidently aims at novelty’, but significantly the Athenaeum singles out its illustrations and links it to gift annuals, a highly commodified if long established form: ‘and yet it is not unlike in appearance the annual volumes of Chatterbox and other periodicals for young people’ (Anon. 1894c: 509). The Saturday Review makes a similar point, but introduces an additional association of illustration – with women, which makes a link with the attempt by the New Journalism to widen readership and in particular to provide for women readers. The element of ‘pictures’ independent of letterpress, and thus not illustration, has perhaps drawn our attention to the alliance of the Yellow Book with the Fine Art press, and away from the popular illustrated magazine. However, as contemporary criticism shows, the latter association was uppermost at the time: The new illustrated quarterly, The Yellow Book (Mathews & Lane), if not precisely the book of beauty and the beautiful book we had been led to anticipate, comprises certain good matters that will engage the discriminating taste. … The illustrations of The Yellow Book are, like woman’s love, a thing apart, and certainly do not justify its existence, while the get-up of the book is curiously unlovely, and like the children’s Christmas picture-books in appearance. (Anon. 1894d: 455) From the robustly male-reader position of the Saturday Review critic, the ‘get-up of the book’ feminises and even infantilises the project, increasing its accessibility beyond male generic comfort to those whom Sarah Grand identifies among periodical readers as ‘the shy little girls in the old-fashioned houses, who never looked at anything in the magazines but the pictures and the poetry’ (Grand 1992: 366). While therefore the subject of women in the Yellow Book is fraught with anxiety and misogyny, female readers seem to be among the audience addressed by its ‘get-up’ and illustrated format, if not the contents of many of the illustrations. At the same time the critic signals to male connoisseurs that Volume I does cater for them to some extent, that it ‘comprises certain good matters’ for the ‘discriminating taste’. It is perhaps the disappointment of expectations of male connoisseurs of both Art and the erotic that is inscribed in these critiques of the first number of the Yellow Book.

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The address of many of these illustrations, Beardsley’s especially, and of much of the letterpress is also a function of perhaps the most castigated aspect of the New Journalism, sensationalism. March Phillipps dramatises its importance in a contemporary article on the New Journalism in the New Review: ‘An editor of considerable standing said lately to a contributor, “I don’t want wit, I don’t want fancy, I don’t even want grammar. Give me sensation”’ (March Phillipps 1894a: 188). Although the name of the Yellow Book, its subjectivities, and its illustrations have most often been associated with what numerous contributors to the Yellow Book, from Arthur Waugh (1894b: 216) to Hubert Crackanthorpe have called Decadent, these same elements of the production of the Yellow Book are in keeping with the rhetoric of sensation, designed to create large readerships seeking titillation through writing, which is commodified as ‘news’ through its notoriety. Despite its attempt to give itself weight and distance through its quarterly (in)frequency, and despite its claim to publish Literature and Art rather than journalism, much of the Yellow Book avails itself of the rhetoric of sensationalism, including its name, its poster-art cover, and its decision to publish in one volume such provocative pieces as Arthur Symons’ ‘Stella Maris’, Beerbohm’s spoof on cosmetics, Waugh’s diatribe on reticence, and Beardsley’s drawings ‘L’Education Sentimentale’ and ‘Night Piece’. Even its name may have carried greater notoriety to male connoisseurs than a generic reference to French yellow-back and railway fiction may suggest. For those who had read Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray, the specific allusion would be to the passage on the ‘poisonous book’, which begins ‘His eye fell on the yellow book that Lord Henry had sent him’ (Wilde 1981: 125). Part of the sensationalism of the Yellow Book functions in the marketplace as a New Journalism technique of enhancing sales among the bourgeois readers whom it is designed to titillate and attract. The price of the Yellow Book too looks to the old and to the new readers and markets. By this time in the century, when monthly reviews for the middle-class educated reader were selling for about 2 shillings to 2s 6d, magazines for 1 shilling, and old (expensive) quarterlies for 6 shillings, the 5 shillings of the Yellow Book is toward the upper end of the market for periodicals. However, as a cloth-bound book, it was priced at a shilling less than cloth-bound, one-volume novels at 6 shillings. Neither the old quarterlies nor the one-volume novels were likely to be copiously illustrated, and if they were, neither the quality or quantity of their illustrations were likely to match those of the Yellow Book. Poised between the periodical press and the book as

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the Yellow Book was, it may not have appeared costly to its targeted readership, although it should be noted that after the Savoy appeared in January 1895, in paper covers but quarterly at 2s 6d, the Yellow Book’s attachment to the book format may have begun to appear inflexible and retrograde, which in some respects it was. I have argued that a conservative strain of Yellow Book politics and contributors is there from the outset, and Henry James’s and Arthur Waugh’s pejorative juxtaposition of literature and journalism, books and periodicals is echoed; while writing in the latter they prefer the former. Even the undergraduate Max Beerbohm denigrated journalism in his tongue-in-cheek riposte to critics of his ‘Defence of Cosmetics’: ‘how far is it [criticism] reformatory? Personally, I cannot conceive how any artist can be hurt by remarks dropped from a garret into a gutter’ (Beerbohm 1894b: 282). However, Beardsley dissents. From his art it is clear that Beardsley’s cultural politics looked far more appreciatively to the commodity culture associated with the New Journalism. In July 1894’s New Review he contributes a celebration of advertisements to a forum on that 1890s art form, ‘The Art of the Hoarding’: ‘London will soon be resplendent with advertisements, and against a leaden sky skysigns will trace their formal arabesque. Beauty has laid siege to the city, and telegraph wires shall no longer be the sole joy of our aesthetic perceptions’ (Beardsley 1894: 54). It is significant of the Yellow Book’s view of itself as a commodity participating in the market that it carried advertisements, like the Savoy. Volume I ended with a substantial section of publishers’ adverts, made up of ‘The Yellow Book Advertisements’, which comprised 18 pages of copy from 17 publishers other than Mathews and Lane, and a second section of 17 pages devoted exclusively to the Mathews and Lane list, flanked by quotations from the press attesting to the beauty of their books. After the first volume however, the number of other publishers buying space diminished greatly, with six in Volume II and five in Volume III. That this continued fall in advertising was an index to the Yellow Book’s decreasing respectability is borne out by a critic in an unknown periodical, referring to the contrast between the censored Volume V denuded of its Beardsleys, and what preceded it: Volume V of the mustard-coated quarterly, which comes to us with the lilac and laburnum, is amazingly proper. The ‘Philerote’ who gets his reading like his milk, in carts, may order it from Mudie’s with confidence. The omniscient young person of this age of decadence need not blush to see it in the hands of her mother. Nay,

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more, it is so proper that it might, without seeming impropriety, be taken up the river in a boat and read, yellow and unashamed, beneath some overhanging willow, or on some riverside lawn. (Anon. 1895) Beerbohm’s ‘Letter to the Editor’ in Volume II was one of the ways the editors of the Yellow Book created serial formats which stressed continuities in a periodical that looked like a one-off book and appeared infrequently. Two other pieces in Volume II ‘reviewed’ Volume I, Hubert Crackanthorpe’s rewriting of the issue of ‘reticence’ in literature as a reply to Waugh in Volume I, and Philip G. Hamerton’s formal critique of the ‘Literature’ and the ‘Illustrations’. One of the genres for which the Yellow Book became renowned was the short story, and this is partly a function of its quarterly (in)frequency, disallowing serial fiction, which the monthlies exploited as a strategy of serialisation. So, the Yellow Book had to create suspense and interest in its potential readership through means other than serial fiction. Beardsley’s art, and works by other recurring authors and artists who constituted a core ‘circle’, helped create the serial identity of the journal, luring readers and purchasers to return to the Yellow Book after a three-month interval. Women readers, journalists and contributors were all addressed, constructed, and wooed by the New Journalism, and it is unsurprising that the Yellow Book developed the writing career of Ella d’Arcy and published Charlotte Mew, George Egerton, John Oliver Hobbes, Olive Custance, Victoria Cross, E. Nesbit, Evelyn Sharp, Leila Macdonald, and Netta Syrett. Although the founders of the Yellow Book were all male, Ella d’Arcy did come, as an initially unknown contributor, to occupy a seat at the editorial centre. It is of some interest that in the various accounts of d’Arcy’s career, however summary and brief, her personal (love) life invariably figures, as though implicitly to explain her editorial position at the Yellow Book. There is no doubt however that Ella d’Arcy did function for a period as deputy editor of the Yellow Book. Alan Anderson’s selection of her letters to Lane shows the considerable power she had on occasion. It is arguable that Ella d’Arcy’s role as a journalist and editor on the Yellow Book relates to the culture of journalism, the New Woman, and the New Journalism rather than to any simply individual history of personal life. March Phillipps’ piece on ‘Women’s Newspapers’ provides a timely overview of what by the 1890s is a history of women in journalism for 50 years, and the unmistakable address of W. T. Stead to women readers and potential journal-

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ists in the Review of Reviews in the 1890s is the context of d’Arcy’s position. In November 1894 Victoria Woodhull’s Humanitarian carried a piece on ‘Another Woman Editor’ in its leader section, ‘Notes and Comments’: The fact that Mrs Frederick Arthur Beer has assumed the editorship of the Sunday Times, a journal of which she is the proprietor, adds one more to the list of women’s successes in journalism. 16 This is one of the most striking instances on this side of the Atlantic [i.e. Britain], the Sunday Times being the only general newspaper that has a woman at its head. Mrs Crawford, the Paris correspondent of the Daily News, is a name well known in journalism, and quite recently ‘Tasma,’ Madame Couvreur, has been appointed Belgian correspondent to the Times, a post rendered vacant by the death of her husband. So far as we can judge of recent issues, the Sunday Times is already improving in tone and news, and has added many fresh features of interest. (Anon. 1894f: 401)17

(v)

The New Woman and the New Journalism

How do the New Journalism and the New Woman as subjects conjoin in the Yellow Book? James gives the lead in ‘The Death of the Lion’ where Literature is explicitly linked to and dependent on a world free of women, and the act of literary creation is sexualised and takes place between men: it is ‘an amorous plan’ (James 1894: 13) to be carried out in the protective ‘encircling medium, tepid enough’ (James 1894: 14) of the artist’s male companion, a convert from the New Journalism. The female keepers of the menagerie on the other hand, the women who tame and kill the lion, are repeatedly, even insistently linked to the New Journalism; their leader, Mrs Weeks Wimbush, ‘was a blind, violent force, to which I could attach no more idea of responsibility than to the hum of a spinning-top. It was difficult to say what she conduced to but to circulation’ (James 1894: 26). She is portrayed as an irresponsible organiser of puffing in the press, with her voracious manipulation of Art and Literature for social purposes linked to the commodification of Art and Literature by the press: She played her victims against each other with admirable ingenuity, and her establishment was a huge machine in which the tiniest and the biggest wheels went round to the same treadle. I had a scene with her in which I tried to express that the function of such a man

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was to exercise his genius – not to serve as a hoarding for pictorial posters. The people I was perhaps angriest with were the editors of magazines who had introduced what they called new features, so aware were they that the newest feature of all would be to make him grind their axes by contributing his views on vital topics and taking part in the periodical prattle about the future of fiction. (James 1894, 37–8) The positions of women in the Yellow Book, as contributors, editors, and subjects, are likewise a function of the complex interaction of topical issues of gender, decadence, and the New Journalism in the mid-1890s.

8 Marketing Notoriety: Advertising the Savoy

This foray into advertising is an outgrowth of earlier work on the Yellow Book and the Savoy that was confined to analysis of gendered discourse and the New Journalism in the twin ‘contents’ of these distinctively Literature and Art projects. 1 My neglect of advertising stemmed from the self-proclaimed category of these periodicals. Identifying themselves as belonging to the art press, they positioned themselves in contradistinction to the alleged ‘vulgarity’ (and frequencies) of the burgeoning popular press of the day. Examining them again, I saw that my readings had not taken into account a third element of their format, their advertising supplements, a feature that they unexpectedly shared with high-circulation and popular titles such as Cornhill and the Strand Magazine. I shall explore here, as earlier, the degree of participation of these little magazines in the New Journalism’s quest for larger, more extensive markets, and the commodification of the press in the 1890s, even of such a journal allegedly at the end of the commercial spectrum. The identification of the Savoy as a male space is as articulated in its advertising as it is by its Art and Literary contents. From its inception the Savoy was in a competitive market, emerging as a genie out of the magic lamp of the Yellow Book, as a contemporary cartoon in Northern Figaro showed. Published first in January 1896, the Savoy appeared when its rival the Yellow Book was still recovering from its destructive self-censorship. Having stripped itself free of the ‘taint’ of Wilde for economic as well as artistic reasons in April 1895,2 in the following January the Yellow Book faced in the Savoy the excluded Beardsley (as the main art contributor), his fellow ex-contributor Arthur Symons (as editor), and a rival publisher, Leonard Smithers. 3 Certainly the Savoy targeted the same (quarterly) market niche as the 171

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Yellow Book, with many of the same authors, and at half the price. It also replicated its rival in its publication of an advertising supplement in a Decadent magazine.4 However, after the summer of 1895 when the Savoy was planned in Dieppe, Symons and Beardsley were, with respect to advertising, in the happy position of learning retrospectively from John Lane’s adverse experience with the Supplement of the Yellow Book. Lane had begun his Supplement with high entrepreneurial hope: its first number in April 1894 had a separate title-page announcing an ‘Index to Publishers’ Announcements’ and listing the advertisers, 17 in all. A second title-page for Mathews and Lane’s own ‘Belle Lettres’ list for 1894 followed, and on the verso and on the penultimate page of the 16-page catalogue were multiple quotations from the press, praising the production quality of Mathews and Lane’s books. But in Volume II after the character of the early Yellow Book was manifest, 13 advertisers were lost5 and the Index was down to six names, and in Volume III to five. Though the number of advertisers was up to 12 in January 1895 (perhaps seasonally), they fell to four in April when Lane scrapped the now incriminating Index title-page. In April too he excluded the four Wilde titles and one Symons volume on his own list, but continued to include the numerous items which involved Beardsley, who, as a designer as well as an author, was closely associated with Lane’s books. It was not Lane’s practice to adduce quotations in relation to the Yellow Book itself, but there are occasional lines from reviews of other titles in his ‘Belles Lettres Catalogue’, overwhelmingly in praise. However, in Volume IV (January 1895) Lane prints anomalously a sensationally acrimonious judgement, designed to foreground the Decadent qualities of George Egerton’s collection of short stories, Discords, in order to sell copies to a particular kind of customer. He appropriates the critique as a reverse discourse: It will be called immoral, it may even be preached against in actual pulpits … but here it is, and must be scanned, a lurid picture of the seamy side, painted in colours mixed with tears and blood. Realm (Yellow Book Supplement, IV January 1895: 14)6 Examination of the Savoy shows that it is both similar and different. Smithers also gathers press cuttings of reviews of his list, from which he routinely selects quotations for advertisement purposes. The density of critical testament and the space it occupies are certainly a notable feature of his catalogues that are bound into each number of the Savoy.

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However, he avoids Lane’s mistake: there is no boastful Index to this Supplement. Moreover, the strategy in the Savoy of marketing notoriety – by appropriating negative reviews to the credit of the publication in question – may be indebted to the example in the Yellow Book. However, what is rare in the Yellow Book’s advertising Supplement is common in the Savoy’s, revealing a habit of assiduous collection and invocation of reviews. Just as Lane sells Discords by a sensational exposure of its notoriety, Smithers attempts to attract new readers and to tempt existing readers of the Savoy through the same means. This appeal is targeted, I suggest, primarily at male readers, and perhaps the most ‘advanced’ of the New Women as well. But at what class of male reader? Are they to be found upmarket among the connoisseurs and/or downmarket among the populous readers of the New Journalism? The relatively low (quarterly) cover price of 2/6 prompts the suggestion that the popular audience were targeted as potential readers of the Savoy. Smithers’ advertising strategy, as seen in his deployment of quotations and pricing to gain more readers and higher circulation, is echoed in the letterpress by Arthur Symons, the editor, who transfers this strategy from the commercial space of the Supplement to the editorial matter of the journal. Initially, Symons seems to endorse the publisher’s plan, construing it intellectually, as an opportunity for interaction between readers and editor, while alluding ironically to a link between notoriety and sales: In presenting to the public the second number of ‘THE SAVOY,’ I wish to thank the critics of the press for the flattering reception which they have given to No. 1. That reception has been none the less flattering because it has been for the most part unfavourable. Any new endeavour lends itself, alike by its merits and by its defects, to the disapproval of the larger number of people. And it is always possible to learn from any vigorously expressed denunciation, not, perhaps what the utterer of that denunciation intended should be learnt. I confess cheerfully that I have learnt much from the newspaper criticisms of the first number. … It is with confidence that I anticipate no less instruction from the criticisms which I shall have the pleasure of reading on the number now issued. (Symons 1896a: 5) But if Symons was ironically complicit with Smithers’ attempt to address ‘the larger number of people’ as readers in No. 2, by No. 8 his scepticism of the New Journalism project has overtaken him: the low

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price, the increase of frequency from quarterly to monthly (with its promise of serialised fiction), and the outré copy were all mistakes. But most significantly, the belief in the compatibility of a popular audience and high quality was misplaced: We are obliged to retire from existence, on account of the too meagre support of our friends. Our first mistake was in giving so much for so little money; our second, in abandoning a quarterly for a monthly issue.7 The action of Messrs. Smith and Son in refusing to place ‘The Savoy’ on their bookstalls, on account of the reproduction of a drawing by Blake, was another misfortune. 8 And then, worst of all, we assumed that there were very many people in the world who really cared for art… The more I consider it, the more I realise that this is not the case … it is for their faults that any really artistic productions become popular: art cannot appeal to the multitude. It is wise when it does not attempt to: when it goes contentedly along a narrow path, knowing, and caring only to know, in what direction it is moving. Well, we were unwise in hoping, for a moment, that the happy accident of popularity was going to befall us. It was never in my original scheme to allow for such an accident … in our next venture we are going to make no attempt to be popular. We shall make our appearance twice only in the year; our volumes will be larger in size, better produced, and they will cost more. In this way we shall be able to appeal to that limited public which cares for the things we care for; which cares for art, really for art’s sake. (Symons 1896b: 91–2; my italics)9 Whereas in the second issue, Symons seemed to lend himself to the idea of the porousness of series publication, whereby contents are justifiably a product of negotiation with the critic/reader, here he dismisses the possibility of such negotiation with a market derogated as ‘the multitude’. It is clear from the Advertising Supplement that Smithers was addressing the market throughout the lifetime of the Savoy, rather than Symons’ notion of ‘readers’. The decision by the Savoy in the spring of 1896 to abandon the coterie market of quarterly readers built up by the Yellow Book was equally an attempt to enter a potential mass market of monthly magazine readers, in which the high production costs of high-quality, illustrated magazine would be offset by numerous sales.

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Examination of the Savoy’s Supplement affords a good idea of how integrated a part of a small publisher’s list a journal was. In the case of Smithers, the Savoy provided a vehicle of regular, frequent (quarterly, then monthly) circulation of his firm’s catalogues. These were carefully and laboriously constructed with selected quotations to attract the ripe readers of the Savoy to the delectations of his book list, many stars of which they would have just been reading in the magazine: there was more Theodore Wratislaw, more Beardsley, and more Symons in the List. Smithers also used the Supplement to sell the Savoy itself: even in the final number he informs its present readers of the availability of ‘artistic blue cloth cases, with elaborate cover design in gold by Aubrey Beardsley’ to bind the individual numbers collected by readers. He also advertises a new edition, consisting of a complete set, ‘bound in three volumes, in blue cloth as above’ for new readers or investors. This edition might also appeal to private collectors of the erotica that pervaded Smithers’ list and business. This Advertising Supplement makes clear, by its successive advertisements for book titles, binders, and cloth editions of the journal, that the end of the Savoy is not the end of the firm. In this cultural economy, as throughout, Symons, Beardsley and Smithers, editors and publisher, are in different positions that remain discrete, however they overlap. Symons and Beardsley define the Savoy as an artistic project, and Smithers, as a commercial one. The pecuniary character of the enterprise may be glimpsed in a ‘news’ report in April of a court appearance of Symons and Max Beerbohm with Smithers. The publisher was being sued for £2/10s by Will Rothenstein, then a young artist, over a specially discounted fee Rothenstein had been offered for the rights to reproduce two drawings in the Savoy for the price of one. Accordingly, he was incensed when Smithers, having reproduced one drawing only, offered him half the fee (Anon. 1896b: 185). I want to look briefly at the culture of advertising for the Savoy itself which is found in the Supplement. First of all, I was interested in the range of periodicals from which Smithers published quotations. With respect to journals, there is a preponderance of daily and weekly papers, apart from one title of a trade monthly called Bookselling. These suggest that Smithers was targeting a general market of newspaper readers, as well as specialist readers in the book trade who might value fine printing when they saw it. As publisher of ‘An Illustrated Quarterly’, Smithers includes illustrated papers such as Punch and the Northern Figaro, and for the letterpress he relies on upmarket papers such as the Academy, the Saturday Review, and The Times. Additionally,

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he seems to have some notion of geographical range, in order to create a national market. In the second number he only draws on London papers. In the third he quotes at length in French from the Courrier Français but concentrates on Scottish titles, quoting no less than five, one from Edinburgh, one from Aberdeen, and three from Glasgow. In the fourth (first monthly) number, he includes the Birmingham Gazette. I decided to test the selectivity of his publicity paragraphs, and attempted to locate the originals to determine whether Smithers was inclined to deft removal of misleading but useful phrases, or accurate transcription of a critic’s point of view. From what I have seen, he is normally accurate, though he is not above truncating the odd qualifying phrase (in italic type below), as he does in the quotation from Northern Figaro, a penny weekly from Aberdeen: Unequalled originality, magnificence, and beauty of design and brilliance of execution, all these has Mr. Beardsley got, and would-be imitators would do well to bear in mind his other qualifications in addition to that of originality of conception, bordering on eccentricity. There are several beautiful samples of his work in this issue, notably – ‘The Rape of the Loch’ and one of the illustrations to his extraordinary story, ‘Under the Hill’, on which I dare not yet, express an opinion. (Anon. 1896d: 17, phrases in italics are omitted in the Savoy) These qualifications are reinforced in the rest of the original, which Smithers does not reprint. The unnamed reviewer alludes approvingly to masculinist tales by Symons and Frederick Wedmore, but the piece he quotes, misleadingly, is ‘The Love of the Poor’ by Lelia Macdonald, in an appeal to the popular and sentimental taste of his readers. Ending with resounding praise of the publisher, this review seems unmistakably to be a puff, so I looked at the whole run of Bookselling, a 6d monthly ‘Journal of Information for Publishers, Booksellers, Writers and Readers’, for 1896, to see if there was evidence of how these quotations were produced. What I found was innumerable traces of Smithers and his list in the run, which afford us a good idea of the intensive marketing process that produced reviews and sales of the Savoy. Only two numbers of the Savoy were actually reviewed in Bookselling Numbers 1 and 2. However, like the anonymous reviewer from Northern Figaro, Bookselling tempered its initial reservations so that it produces the terse, anodyne remarks that Smithers gratefully quotes: ‘The second number of The Savoy reaches us

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in a more worthy and attractive guise than did the first. The paper is better, while the printing bears the hall-mark of the Chiswick Press. The contents also are good. Quite a galaxy of really excellent writers’ (Anon. 1896c: 235). This represents a remarkable shift from the apprehensions the reviewer articulates in the feature on the first number of the Savoy, which appears in the January number of Bookselling: [W]ho is there, knowing that they are Mr Aubrey Beardsley and Mr Arthur Symons who sound the music, who would not be roused to an anxious curiosity as to the contents of this chamber into which they invite us to enter? The voice is as the voice of Jacob, and yet the outer covering convinces us of the hairy neck of Esau. (Anon. 1896a: 25) Frederick Wedmore’s work ‘The Deterioration of Nancy’ is pronounced ‘not Literature’ (ibid.: 28) while Symons’ contributions and editorial items keep Smithers’ name in view. In January the Savoy is noted briefly in ‘Book Talk’ (ibid.: 8) as well as later in the full-length feature (ibid.: 25–9). In April Rothenstein’s day in court is reported, with Smithers, Symons and Beerbohm named as present (Anon 1896b: 184–5); This wry account of the court hearing, which is reproduced from the Pall Mall Gazette, includes a suggestion by the judge that ‘a counter action [by the Savoy] to recover the second drawing on the eve of the next issue might be an advertisement worth considering’ (ibid.). In May, the second issue is briefly reviewed. Clearly, Smithers has bombarded this journal with press releases for inclusion in literary gossip and intelligence columns, along with review copies whose outré contents the editor is invited to peruse and keep, and backed these up with a copious number of lucrative, full-page advertisements. Grudging and sometimes ill-tempered reviews result, and puff or trailer paragraphs are embedded in the editorial matter. Disapproval is largely muted and what is printed articulates the seduction of this erotic material and the complicity it creates, and gestures of distaste and warning. The position into which Smithers manoeuvred editors by such techniques may be seen in the response of the Academy10 – whose guarded approval Smithers had quoted twice in his adverts for the journal – when the pressure to praise is removed. With no future advertising at risk, this is the Academy’s review of the last number of the Savoy: Looking back on The Savoy, we cannot consider it a very remarkable literary or artistic feat. From avowed decadents, however, one must

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not expect much that is vital. The Savoy has given its readers some sound criticism – Mr Yeats, we remember, wrote finely of Blake – but it has done little constructively. The ideal of beauty set up by the editor for worship was a little over-weary from the first. Mr Beardsley never, we think, has been at his best in The Savoy. The texture of the paper was out of sympathy with his delicate line, and his hand has lost much of its grace. In this the last number he is now and then hideous – nothing less. There is no reason why Mr Beardsley should not make such a drawing as that entitled ‘Erda’ if he likes; but there is every reason why the editor of a magazine avowedly artistic should decline to publish it. (Anon. 1896g: 590) Smithers may be seen in the Savoy as a publisher making a concerted effort to market his Decadent list, of which the periodical is shown to be an integral part. In 1896 the Savoy is clearly represented in the adverts as the flagship of his list, successfully keeping his name and those of his authors before the public. In addition, the Savoy itself is a vehicle of Smithers’ marketing, carrying as it does in each number an announcement of his entire public list. In the quotations Smithers has prompted, in order to recycle them as advertising for the periodical in that periodical, we can trace the laborious process of advertising practice in the mid-1890s. In this way editors and reviewers are seriously implicated in the commercial production circuit of communication, and the Advertising Supplement, discursive in its own right with its copious recycling of ‘quotations’, serves as a parallel discourse in the Savoy to the letterpress and the art. For purposes of methodology in the study of the press, the examples of the Savoy and the Yellow Book produce general points. For contemporary advertisers and readers, as well as ourselves, the amount of advertising in any Supplement to a journal is a good indication of the sales and reputation of its host. The fluctuations in the Advertising Supplement of the Yellow Book thus are good indications of its reputation and prospects. Researchers may be able to identify parallel or rival journals from Supplements, and clarify the periodical and publishing context of the host: here, the Pageant, with its similarly Decadent contents, reinforces the Decadent character of the Savoy by echoing it. Moreover, Supplements may lead us and contemporary readers to other, unfamiliar, journals of the day (such as Bookselling), provide indication of specific dates of advertised books and periodicals, offer access to publishers’ catalogues which are otherwise unrecoverable, and introduce the twenty-first-century reader to unfamiliar cultural

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institutions. Here we find Cedric Chivers’ The Library Bureau, which appears repeatedly in the Savoy Supplement, as the purveyor of repoussé books for ‘the wedding present difficulty.’ Remarkably, The Library Bureau reappears in a lengthy feature on Chivers and his new exhibition space in Bookselling in June,11 showing another link between the two journals. Similarly, it is the regular appearance of advertisements for Naumann in the Supplement which identifies the firm of art engravers who prepare the Savoy’s illustrations. Inadvertently, Smithers’ advertising campaign for the Savoy began by the marketing of notoriety, as Beardsley’s first design for the Prospectus showed a figure in a state of sexual arousal. And, as the critic in Bookselling avers, readers were expecting notoriety from the infamous editors, late of the Yellow Book. With few exceptions the letterpress and the art obliged. Smithers’ appropriation of negative reviews to advertise the Savoy in the Supplement circulate notoriety, and reinforce the move to draw male readers from an expanded group of new consumers of the press, which even then, from May 1896, the Daily Mail was beginning to identify and tap

Part III Print and Gender: the Publishing Career of Walter Pater, 1866–95

9 Studies and the Magazines

As I have been arguing, the book form in the Victorian period was only one of the dominant forms in which literature appeared. Books were heavily dependent in all manner of ways on periodicals: economically, for advertisements, for trailers, and for first whetting and then reinforcing the appetite of the reading audience for reading itself; for specific genres (for example, the serial novel); and for work by authors which had its origins in periodical publication, and only latterly was published in book form.1 The career of Walter Pater exemplifies the complicated interdependency between these forms of publishing in the nineteenth century. From the onset of his career he regularly and characteristically moved from fragmentary periodical publication to books, which normally represented the collection (and selection) of periodical pieces. In this chapter I argue that in the case of Pater’s earliest published work, in the Westminster Review and the Fortnightly, the character of the two journals, and what appeared in them at the time Pater was contributing, significantly affected the nature of the pieces that he wrote, and then recirculated in Studies of the History of the Renaissance (hereafter Studies) which appeared in 1873. Such distinctive periodical characteristics include differences of format (review versus article, quarterly versus monthly, anonymity versus signature), of politics (radical versus liberal) and of dominant discourses (philosophical, polemical, literary). George Saintsbury, in his 1896 History of Nineteenth Century Literature, written from the ‘inside’ of the period and publishing industry, is quite explicit about this particular relation of the periodical and book forms in the period: though there is still a certain conventional decency in apologizing for reprints from periodicals, it is quite certain that, had such 183

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reprints not taken place, more than half the most valuable books of the age in some departments, and a considerable minority of the most valuable in others, would never have appeared as books at all. (Saintsbury 1896: 166) If I begin with the book and the named author here, it is because that form, with its authority of format and authorship, is where ‘Eng. Lit.’ normally starts, and that is the discourse in which Pater’s Studies has been primarily circulated. This first published book of Pater’s, which appeared in 1873, had its conceptual and material origins in the periodical press in which the bulk of it first appeared. Studies is comprised of essays with two types of publishing history: those (six) written for and previously published in periodicals and those (four) written in 1872 exclusively for the Renaissance volume. The periodical essays in turn are distinguished from each other by the origin of the periodical in which they appeared. Two, the boldest and arguably the most weighty, are reviews. Appearing anonymously in the Westminster Review in 1867 and 1868, they were identified as Pater’s only by their appearance in the signed Studies, and proved the most controversial for reviewers of the volume. The later periodical essays, published in the Fortnightly Review between 1869 and 1871 and free from the constraints of the review form, treated linked subjects determined by Pater’s choice rather than the vagaries of book publication at a particular time. It may also be argued that the Fortnightly’s policy of signature elicited more discreet and possibly more conventional signed essays from Pater, on Leonardo, Botticelli, Michelangelo, and Pico della Mirandola.2 In 1873, the ‘conventional decency in apologizing for reprints from periodicals’, noted by Saintsbury in 1896, took a more inhibited form. Pater’s book produces the transformation of ‘journalism’ into ‘art’ tacitly, without any explicit admission. The nature of the embarrassment in the journalistic origins of the aesthetic book may be gauged from its author’s concern with the detail of the appearance of the book – the quality of the paper and the colour and material of the binding – in the correspondence with Macmillan’s. The book is meant to look and feel quite distinct from a journalistic and serialised commodity. That said, the two periodicals nurtured this young author, and in turn left their imprint on his work. Implicated in the intertextuality that the Renaissance and two periodicals share are the occasional dimension of these essays, the dominant discourses of the periodicals, the different sequences in which the texts appear, and the different audiences they address. The juxtapositions and disjunctions of the 1873 Renaissance

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text, commented on by some reviews, are due in part to distinct forms of literary production and the inscriptions of the suppressed ‘voices’ and texts of the Westminster Review and the Fortnightly. The author in question was a young and new classics fellow at Brasenose College, Oxford, and something of a rarity in so far as he held a non-clerical fellowship; that is, unlike the great preponderance of his colleagues, he had not taken holy orders. This decided and outstanding secularism was to distinguish his periodical work in the 1860s and to be one of the bases of his contributions to the Westminster and the Fortnightly, renowned for their freedom from the yoke of theology and for their commitment to rationalism. None of the essays Pater published in the 1860s would have been welcome to editors or readers working within an Anglican framework. John Morley, editor of the Fortnightly at the time Pater published there, unashamedly reviewed the Renaissance in 1873, and he makes plain the Fortnightly’s stance on theology and on Pater: But here is Mr. Pater courageously saying that the love of art for art’s sake has most of the true wisdom that makes life full. The fact that such a saying is possible in the mouth of an able and shrewd-witted man of wide culture and knowledge, and that a serious writer should thus raise aesthetic interest to the throne lately filled by religion, only shows how void the old theologies have become. (Morley 1873: 476) There is one other point about Pater’s periodical writing in the 1860s. It appeared to have very little to do with his formal university work in classics, and the divergence is significant. In twentieth-century terms Pater had two careers in this early period, one in the university and one as a journalist, writer, and eventually ‘author’. English literature was not yet a degree subject, nor was art history. While the world of contemporary writing, then as now, included a significant proportion of university staff, the divergence between topics of teaching and those of writing was often far greater than at present, as the syllabuses of the oldest universities were so restricted. But there is a covert link, one that was to be publicly alleged by censorious colleagues and critics in the aftermath of book publication. I want to turn now to the Westminster Review, which in the early 1860s was in the position of appearing with a frequency (quarterly), in a format (the review), and at a price that were soon to be supplanted as the dominant periodical form by competition from the new, cheaper

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monthly magazines typified, after 1860, by the Cornhill and Macmillan’s. However, John Chapman, unlike the editors of the other quarterlies, had brought new intellectual vigour to the quarterly in the 1850s in the wide range and non-partisan scope of the Westminster’s reformist articles and in the emphasis it placed on both foreign and contemporary literature, which had discrete, sizeable sections each quarter, written by erudite, if anonymous, contributors. Such was the value Chapman placed on this latter category that he paid two guineas more per sheet (twelve guineas rather than ten) to authors of this section. That was at the beginning, however. Chapman proved an atrocious businessman, quickly, and at least twice he had to sell off portions of the business and borrow money to keep afloat, before he had to sell out entirely. By 1866, when Pater began publishing there, Chapman was paying existing contributors only £5 per sheet and new contributors like J. A. Symonds (and Pater) nothing. It could be argued, as James Sully does in his Life, that this omission of pay ‘gave more than one beginner a chance of publicity which might otherwise have been missed’ (Sully 1918: 136); but there is good reason to believe that under these conditions Chapman had difficulty attracting new writers of renown to his journal. Given the anonymity of contributions, the dearth of copy from the famous might well be made up by unattributed material from neophytes such as Pater – willing, even grateful to be published without pay. So Pater, as an unpublished young writer, took the opening the Westminster afforded, but unsurprisingly, when the new Fortnightly Review was transformed by a change of editor and Pater’s work became publishable there, he left the Westminster and never returned. However, the work Pater published in the Westminster bears its inscription indelibly: the expansiveness and outspoken nature of ‘Winckelmann’ and ‘Poems by William Morris’ engendered by the discourse of the Westminster were to haunt Pater’s subsequent career as a writer and university lecturer. These two essays are the earliest included in the Renaissance volume, and they represent a selection from the three pieces Pater published in the periodical between January 1866 and October 1868, all of which can be seen to address contemporary literature and culture directly. All three articles are topical reviews of current publications, and tied into the contemporary book trade as quarterlies generically were. Of the three, two treated modern, nineteenth-century work, the first in January 1866 – on ‘Coleridge’s Writings’ (Pater 1866: 106–32), and the last in October 1868 – on ‘Poems by William Morris’ (Pater 1868: 300–12). Coleridge had died only some thirty years before

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in 1834, and Morris was alive. The middle essay in January 1867 – on ‘Winckelmann’ (Pater 1867: 80–110), the eighteenth-century German classicist and writer on aesthetics – though apparently the most scholarly and antiquarian, is arguably the most committed, and as oriented to the contemporary reader as the Morris essay. These two characteristics – commitment and contemporaneity, which are so distinctive in all of Pater’s Westminster pieces – derive, I want to suggest, from the discourse of the periodical in which they appeared. Although with the advent of John Chapman’s reign as editor in 1851, all connections with the Philosophical Radicals and Benthamite origins of the Westminster Review were severed (Houghton 1966–89: vol. 3, 546), Chapman’s support of freethinking and scepticism did not falter (ibid.: 551). From the outset, the Wellesley Index claims (ibid.: 547), Chapman’s deployment of able and advanced thinkers made the Westminster as preeminent in the 1850s among its fellows as it had been under John Stuart Mill. Throughout the 1850s and 1860s Chapman published an array of bold, groundbreaking articles that attest to this, and Pater’s pieces, on a number of counts, are among them. For a new and young writer, the conditions of publication in the Westminster and its discourses were empowering in a number of ways. First of all, whatever Pater wrote, he was relatively (and certainly formally) safe under the system of anonymity that the Westminster offered as an older periodical, unlike many of its younger, cheaper competitors; in particular, the fledgling Fortnightly (beginning in May 1865) was to make its name on the platform of signature, and to induce many others in the next decade to follow it. The safety of the anonymity afforded by the Westminster is shown by the denunciations in print and in the pulpit that greeted the Westminster portions of Studies in and after 1873.3 Secondly, the reformist, freethinking, and radical posture of the Westminster offered a non-clerical fellow, interested in intellectual growth and self-exploration, friendly and open space. In the event, the Westminster allowed Pater to publish robustly expressed anti-Christian and profane notions with provocative juxtapositions between Christian and pagan in favour of the latter. Moreover, particularly but not only in ‘Winckelmann’, he utilised the opportunity the periodical vouchsafed him to proselytise the philosophy of Greek love and (male) beauty and friendship, and to attempt and to polish a homosexual discourse. This element of Pater’s Westminster essays may be compared with the numerous articles there in the 1860s in support of improvement of the position of women; 4 that is, the subject of gender and a gender discourse in connection with women were carried in this

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quarterly simultaneously with Pater’s exploration of male culture and male discourse. I know of no other mainstream, nineteenth-century periodical of comparable profile at the time that carried such explicit material on gender across the board, unless it was to denounce it.5 Lastly, the Westminster countenanced a model of reform outside the positions and power bases of the two dominant political parties, and repeatedly published exemplars of discourses that were both philosophical and proselytising. Thus the endings of the essays on Winckelmann and Morris, which are at once formally discrete in their generality – from what precedes them – and so lengthy as to be unapologetically more than mere conclusions, are expansive (and dangerous) statements of conviction about the nature of life and art that come very near to instruction. In this they echo, for example, the endings of the two essays that precede and follow ‘Winckelmann’. These two essays are informative about the nature of the Westminster in the late 1860s in relation to their subject as well as their discourses. They are blatantly political and reformist. The sequence of articles6 in the October 1868 number, in which the Morris essay appears, exemplifies these characteristics of Chapman’s Westminster in the 1860s. It includes two articles on the position of women and three on sensitive political questions such as middle-class schools, civil-service reform, and land tenure. The article preceding ‘Winckelmann’ in the January 1867 number, which treats ‘The Ladies’ Petition’ (that petition of 1500 signatures asking for voting rights for women property owners), includes in its final paragraphs: ‘But, in fact, as we have already pointed out, it is too late to be afraid of letting Englishwomen share in the life of Englishmen. We cannot shut up our women in harems, and devote them to the cultivation of their beauty and of their children’ ([Taylor] 1867: 79). The last paragraph of ‘Irish University Education’, the piece following ‘Winckelmann’, announces: ‘Here then we have a counterproposition to the plan of the late Government – the idea of which is eminently clear, logical, and complete, the operation of which would satisfy all just demands’ ([Wilson] 1867: 132). A Westminster Review article on ‘Church and State’ that appeared in July 1868, the number before the Morris review was published, has an uncompromising initial paragraph that Pater could well be echoing and reinforcing in his Morris essay in the following number. ‘Doubt is the parent of certainty, the precursor of knowledge,’ it reads in part: Those who accept theories upon trust and as traditions, without doubting and testing and inquiring, can never attain to truth. And

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this is the case not only in physical science, but in morals, in politics, in religion. It is the most hopeful sign of our time that the sceptical and critical spirit, which has accomplished so much in the field of speculative labour, has begun to leaven the heavy inanimate irrational mass of political theory. We have worshipped constitutional fetishes too long; we are asked to give a reason for our faith; and so we are led first to doubt, then to test and examine, to prove, to reject, to modify, to recreate. ([Amos?] 1868: 151) As part of such a series of articles, the exhortations in the conclusions of ‘Winckelmann’ and ‘Poems by William Morris’, to follow the model of ‘passionate coldness’ ([Pater] 1867: 109) for example, or to pursue joy or ‘an equivalent for the sense of freedom’ ([Pater] 1868: 312), appear unexceptionable and no more outré in their contents than the enfranchising of women property owners or the brisk resolution of the unrest in Ireland. The clear reformist element of these Westminster articles arises in part out of the close relation between readers and text that pertained in Victorian serial publication. Transferred to the pages of a bound and attributed book that was to be reviewed, these conclusions may well have proved inflammatory. Moreover, the hardy, seasoned, and habitual readers of the Westminster Review were predictably more likely to tolerate material of this nature than the readers and reviewers of Studies in the History of the Renaissance, who were ill-prepared for the contents of the book, which appeared from its title to be uncontentious and to pertain to history or art history. So despite the small readership of the first edition of the book – 1250 copies of Studies were printed in 1873 (Wright 1975: 60) compared with the Westminster’s circulation of 4000 in the 1860s (Ellegård 1957: 27) – transplantation of the Westminster essays to Studies was bound to be risky because of the different if overlapping readership groups, and perhaps the high price of the book format. There is one other factor that contributed to the extreme visibility that book publication conferred on the Westminster essays. These, the earliest writings in the collection, were grouped together at the end of Studies, forming a double conclusion. The general (and extreme) statement treating the philosophy of life and art that appears at the end of the Morris essay in the Westminster reappears in Studies as the conclusion to the entire book; separated from its initial link with Morris’s notion of an earthly paradise, the conclusion’s valorisation of heightened experience over all else 7 is very exposed. Likewise the

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‘Winckelmann’ essay, only tenuously linked with the Renaissance of the title through its neo-classicism, may be read in the book as primarily oriented to problems of modern life, in parallel with the ‘Conclusion’ that follows. Its advocacy of male friendship and homosexual love, to say nothing of its approval of Winckelmann’s conversion to Catholicism, a conversion of convenience, speak directly to nineteenth-century readers, their memory of Newman’s conversion, and the preoccupations of their period – which brings me to the review format of these Westminster essays. When the essays were published in the periodical the titles of the books reviewed appeared as a headnote. Pater utilises this convention differently in the Winckelmann and Morris essays. In the former, earlier essay he hardly defers to the biography he is ostensibly reviewing, or the translation of Winckelmann’s work also listed. But the article carries a number of footnotes, from Goethe, Hegel, Quinet, Hermann, and Palgrave. These, and the format of biography, provide the author with an authority, a front, for the introduction of morally sensitive material, as do citations from Winckelmann’s writings on Greek statuary. In the Morris review the successive books of poetry are more foregrounded and function similarly, as a blind to the authorial voice.8 This suppression of the authorial voice, its assumption into the form, except in the conclusion to each piece, is a technique that Pater was to develop assiduously. Pater’s later capacity to absorb others’ work seamlessly (and invisibly) into his own prose, and to inform quotations from other scholars with his own unacknowledged emendations or gloss, would worry later scholars, particularly those of our own period imbued with scholastic criteria of attribution and accuracy of quotation and allusion. These Westminster pieces, with their review format, permitted, even encouraged, fluid movement between the text ‘reviewed’ and the new, review text. I want to turn now to the Fortnightly Review and Pater’s essays that appeared there and subsequently in Studies. I think there were several reasons why Pater transferred his work from the Westminster to the Fortnightly in 1869. From its first number in May 1865, the Fortnightly appeared decidedly more literary than the contemporaneous Westminster. The Fortnightly included a serialised novel by Trollope, an article by George Eliot, a review of Swinburne’s Atalanta in Calydon, a serialised manual on success in literature by the editor, and signed reviews by the art critic F. T. Palgrave and George Eliot, among others, while the April 1865 Westminster allocated only one of its six articles to literature, in a long piece on ‘Modern Novelists: Sir Edward Bulwer-

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Lytton’, and reviewed no fiction in the contemporary literature section of that number. For Pater, however, there was a hitch: G. H. Lewes, the first editor, though an early defender of realism in literature and a frequent reviewer of fiction, seems to have shared George Eliot’s distaste for aestheticism. Some features of Lewes’s Fortnightly suggest a view of literature inimical to Pater’s work, while others, such as the intensity of the literary and visual art coverage, might appear promising. Although Swinburne’s poems were not published by Lewes, two reviews of his work appeared, one of Atalanta in Calydon by J. Leicester Warren in the first number in May 1865 (Warren 1865: 75–80) and another of Chastelard by Swinburne’s friend Lord Houghton in April 1866 (Houghton 1866: 533–43). It is notable that Lewes inserted the phrase ‘minor poet’ into Warren’s review of Atalanta9 and that Houghton’s review is full of caveats (also stemming from the editor?) that dominate the onset of the review essay. Since the journal carried fiction, the following prominent and coded warnings seem addressed to the women who might be counted among the readership: ‘The public to which Mr. Swinburne appeals will consist exclusively of those readers who enjoy a work of art for its own sake, and who care more for the power of the representation than for any worth in what is represented; and these will always be few’ (Houghton 1866: 535) and ‘a wilful complicity of intellectual artifice and sensuous desires repels and shocks beyond the real demerits of the artist’ (Houghton 1866: 537). Six months later, in October 1866, a similar early warning to women readers appeared in Moncure Conway’s article on Whitman (Conway 1866: 538–48), which begins with anecdotal allusions to attempts to read the poem aloud in mixed company and continues ‘The plainness of speech in “Leaves of Grass” is indeed biblical; there is, too, a startling priapism running through it’ (Conway 1866: 539). Lewes’s Fortnightly inscribes tensions of gender in the period, which Turner (2000b: 81) connects interestingly with its generic hybridity. As the male editor of a new and ‘progressive’ periodical carrying the gendered (and male) discourse of such a formation, he is forced to take women as well as male readers into some account. Having widened the remit of the new journal beyond that of the older serious (quarterly) periodicals to include fiction and to attract women readers, Lewes had to contend with them as readers of non-fiction as well. This he did, interestingly, not by excluding subjects deemed inappropriate to women (religion, philosophy, politics) as the Cornhill did beginning in 1860, but by inserting prominent warnings into articles on dangerous topics ‘unsuitable’ for respectable women readers. The maleness of the

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dominant discourse in Lewes’s Fortnightly was maintained and identified by these coded notices to women to ‘keep out’. With the articles on Winckelmann and Morris behind him, Pater might both welcome the demarcation of gendered space and note the proximity of women readers. Other features of Lewes’s Fortnightly may have signalled to Pater the ambiguities of the periodical’s position. On the plus side, in addition to the two review articles on Swinburne, whom Pater knew in this period, there were also two full-length pieces on the poetry of Arnold, Morris, Clough, and on Whitman, and two lengthy essays on theory. Moreover, Pater’s friend Oscar Browning published an article in February 1866 (Browning 1866: 70–86) in the same volume in which Houghton, Swinburne’s friend, published his review of Chastelard. The periodical not only touched on Pater’s immediate interests – theory, visual art, poetry, the poems of Morris, and the homosexual poetry of Whitman – but it also intersected Pater’s literary circle – Swinburne, J. A. Symonds, Oscar Browning, William Morris, and F. T. Palgrave. On the negative side was Lewes’s commitment to morality in art, a position that is aired, if not advocated, in both the articles on art theory that appear between May 1865 and December 1867, when Lewes relinquished the editorship. P. G. Hamerton’s ‘The Artistic Spirit’, in the third number, appears scientific by its division into nine topics that are rationally considered in turn, but it proves to be the effort of a professional artist but amateur critic, who hedges his bets and proceeds with extreme caution. Mildly defending art from the inroads of commercialism, religion, morality, and the bourgeois, military and intellectual spirits, he contemplates the dangers of ‘[t]he principle of art for art’ (Hamerton 1865: 341) while embracing the artist’s commitment to it: A pernicious principle in one way, that it tends to deprive painting of much of its influence over the public by directing its efforts to aims in which the public cannot possibly take any interest, and yet a principle which has always had great weight with artists, which regulates the admission of pictures to exhibitions, and has more influence than any other consideration in determining the rank which an artist’s name must ultimately hold in the catalogue of masters. (Hamerton 1865: 341) If this empirical defence of art for art would not have satisfied Pater’s philosophical mind, the limitations of Hamerton’s theoretical position

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for Pater are explicit in Hamerton’s intolerance of criticism and intellect: ‘The unfeigned contempt which almost all artists feel for critics – even for the best of them – is partly explicable by the fact that the artistic spirit can neither appreciate nor follow intellectual methods’ (Hamerton 1865: 340). Hamerton published seven articles in Lewes’s twenty-month reign, and only three after Morley took over, one (appearing in the February 1867 issue) almost certainly commissioned by Lewes. The other arts theorist of Lewes’s Fortnightly was Robert Buchanan, whose frequent appearances as poet, critic and reviewer in the Lewes years identify him as an object of the editor’s patronage. Buchanan, who vehemently attacked Swinburne, Rossetti, the Pre-Raphaelites, and the aesthetes, in ‘The Fleshly School of Poetry’ in the Contemporary Review in October 1871 ([Buchanan] 1871: 334–50), shows his early critical colours in one of his numerous contributions to the early Fortnightly, ‘Immorality in Authorship’, which appeared in September 1866. Its intemperance increases as the author gets into his stride: ‘It is fortunate that few females read Mrs Behn; filth on a woman’s lips shocks us infinitely more than filth on the lips of a man. No woman can utter a “gaudriole” and keep her soul feminine: she becomes a raving and sexless Atys’ ([Buchanan] 1866: 297). The argument moves from a position that links morality with sincerity, and denies that morality is bigotry, to the argument that immoral books must be winkled out of their wilful obscurity and exposed: ‘It requires an occult judgment nowadays to find out immoral books. … A shower of immoral books pours out yearly; many of them are read by religious societies and praised by Bishops, and by far the larger number of them find favour with Mr. Mudie’ ([Buchanan] 1866: 297). Published in September 1866 just before Morley’s editorship, this was the last item Buchanan published in the Fortnightly, and Morley contested its assertion of the link between morality and literature at his first opportunity in the ‘Causeries’ (Morley 1867: 100–3) he contributed to his first number as editor in January 1867. Using a critic from the Pall Mall Gazette as his apparent addressee, he denied the relevance of morality to art and displaced it with an aesthetic emphasis on the centrality of the Beautiful. In a series of categoric rebuttals of Buchanan’s position, Morley signalled and prepared for the about-face of the Fortnightly from a journal antipathetic to aestheticism to one that was to foster it in its subsequent defence and publication of Swinburne and Pater. ‘Morality’, he claimed, ‘is not the aim and goal of fine art, any more than it is an aim or measure of cobbling or the art

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of physic. Art has for its end the Beautiful, and the Beautiful only. Morality, so far from being of the essence of it, has nothing to do with it at all (Morley 1867: 101). It seems clear from the intensification of this argument that he was attacking not only the critic on the Pall Mall Gazette and Buchanan in the Fortnightly in the preceding quotation but Hamerton in the following: It would be a great improvement if we could all learn to enjoy the multiform Beauty which it is the business of the artist to reach and to represent, as an end in itself, without insisting on dwarfing it to the condition of being a mere motive to conduct. Why may I not enjoy Doré’s conception of Mr. Tennyson’s landscape 10 without feeling my moral pulse every moment, to see how my passions are faring? The moral hypochondriac is becoming a serious bore. (Morley 1867: 102) Besides publishing a higher proportion of articles on art and literature than his predecessor, Morley defended a different aesthetic. In June 1868, at the time in which Pater may have been writing his review of Morris’s poems for the Westminster, Morley himself published and wrote a favourable review of Morris’s work in the Fortnightly ([Morley] 1868: 713–15). Moreover, in the first numbers of Morley’s Fortnightly, Swinburne appears to have been the object of Morley’s patronage,11 as Buchanan was for Lewes. After Morley became editor in January 1867, numerous poems and articles by Swinburne were published, including Swinburne’s review of Morris’s ‘Jason’ (July 1867), Swinburne’s poem dedicated to Baudelaire, ‘Ave Atque Vale’ (January 1868), and ‘Notes on Designs of the Old Masters at Florence’ (July 1868). Both the topics and the language of these pieces by Swinburne are echoed in Pater’s subsequent writing. It is a commonplace of criticism that Pater’s early essays are heavily indebted to Swinburne’s prose; even Swinburne remarked on it tartly at the time.12 But there are two points I want to make. Swinburne’s contributions to the Fortnightly, which signalled that periodical’s change of editor and its accompanying change of literary politics, may well have been a factor in attracting Pater to the Fortnightly, with its new conditions of publishing – which included signature. Secondly, Pater’s indebtedness to Swinburne is shown by the Fortnightly interchanges to include the poems as well as the prose. For example, stanzas 7 and 17 of ‘Ave Atque Vale’ seem to inform ‘Notes on Leonardo da Vinci’ (Pater 1869: 494–508), Pater’s first contribution to the Fortnightly, and it seems apropos that

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Pater’s essay in that November 1869 issue is immediately followed by Swinburne’s poem ‘Intercession’. Nor is the dialogue one way; the February 1870 number carries Swinburne’s poem ‘The Complaint of Monna Lisa’, which alludes to the language of Pater’s impressionist portrait of Leonardo’s painting in the November issue. It begins: There is no woman living that draws breath So sad as I, though all things sadden her. There is not one upon life’s weariest way Who is weary as I am weary of all but death. (Swinburne 1870: 176) Another and final reason why Pater may have been drawn to the Fortnightly is that by this time, with the confidence of an author with a modicum of experience, he may well have sought payment, the recognition that signature offers, and freedom from the constraints of the review format. In November 1869 Pater entered the monthly periodical form with ‘Notes on Leonardo da Vinci’, a topic of his own choice, not dependent on the current publishing list. 13 The freedom that the Fortnightly offered on this count may be seen in the coherence of the four articles on Leonardo, Botticelli, Pico, and Michelangelo that Pater published between November 1869 and November 1871. All treat Renaissance artists,14 unlike the ragbag of the Westminster pieces on Coleridge’s conversation and theology, Morris’s poetry, and Winckelmann’s life. It appears that once Pater had the freedom of choosing his own subject, the link between journalism and book publication was forged. While Pater was able to use, uneasily, two of the three Westminster essays in his first book, Studies was conceived and born in the pages of the Fortnightly. That said, in the signed Fortnightly essays the author did not append conclusions to his essays in his own voice. The dramatised ‘biographies’ of his Renaissance subjects are more distanced and ‘historical’ in treatment than his Westminster subjects, and ‘descriptions’ of the life and artistic work tend to carry the burden of the aesthetic ideology in the Fortnightly essays. While the distinctive and dominant note of Studies is undoubtedly sounded and struck in the Fortnightly pieces, it is significantly the anonymous Westminster essays that made Studies in the History of the Renaissance controversial upon its publication in 1873, and its author notorious, as in book form ‘Winckelmann’ and the ‘Conclusion’ were scrutinised by the press that had spawned them, and widely denounced.

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This instance of the character of the Westminster Review, which T. H. Huxley dubbed ‘wicked’,15 suggests a category of Victorian periodical that is defined not through its party or class affiliations, but in writerly terms, through its freedom from censorship. It includes those periodicals, such as the Westminster under Chapman, the Fortnightly under John Morley and Frank Harris, and the Nineteenth Century under James Knowles, to which authors could resort to publish material toward which other editors and audiences were censorious and intolerant. The libertine character of Studies in part derives from its periodical origins, and from the circumstances of the production of the periodical material that comprises it. It is not only textual critics who should be looking at periodical versions of Victorian literature, but all critics who study the subject whose interests include the dissemination and circulation of print and of ideas, different and multiple reading audiences, and publishing networks.

10 The Politics of Illustration: Ruskin, Pater and the Victorian Art Press

The cause that Mr Whistler has at heart is the absolute suppression and extinction of the art-critic and his function. According to Mr Whistler the art-critic is an impertinence, a nuisance, a monstrosity – and usually into the bargain, an arrant fool. ([H. James] 1879: 119) In this chapter I consider the phenomenon of illustration in volumes of Victorian art criticism in relation to both the politics of the press and the politics of theory – aesthetic, cultural, and gender – through consideration of early volumes by John Ruskin and Walter Pater. Illustration and graphic design were key elements in the increased accessibility of print journalism throughout the nineteenth century in Britain, culminating in the ‘New Journalism’ which gave rise to massmarket dailies, while the connoisseur/elite press deployed art to signal its modernist, anti-democratic and in some cases non-commodified texts.1 I also explore how the absence (and subsequent presence) of illustration in editions of Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance functions in the circulation of homosocial discourse ca. 1866–77, and note the presence of pictorial prose (ekphrasis), akin to portraiture, in Pater’s non-illustrated text. John Ruskin’s splenetic remarks on a painting by Whistler in the summer of 1878 in which Ruskin alleged that the genius and craft of painting were replaced in this instance by impersonal laws of gravity, and Whistler’s decision to sue him, were not, as it may appear, moves in an anomalous duel between two individuals but part of a larger debate concerning the ‘critic’, whose numbers and visibility expanded with the growth of the press during and after the relaxation of the 197

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newspaper taxes in Britain between 1833 and 1861. In 1864 Matthew Arnold published an influential article in the National Review, ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’, which claimed for criticism and critics, a salvationary role in the moral life of the nation: in the wake of the demise of religious authority, the secular, critical, and often periodical text was to supplant the biblical. Arnold’s book Essays in Criticism soon followed in 1865, a collection of periodical writing now elevated to ‘criticism’, headed by the manifesto for criticism which the ‘Function’ essay provided. Thus in 1866 it is not surprising to find that William Michael Rossetti in the Fine Arts Quarterly Review is anxious to ascertain how ‘ex cathedra’ authority may be achieved, by distinction between the ‘professional’ critic and the amateur. Critics on any art involving a good deal of technique, such as painting and sculpture, may with some rough completeness be divided into the practical and the non-practical – or … the professional and unprofessional. For our part … we suspect that the only criticism of much use in the long run is that by professional men; … this knowledge of technicalities is a powerful sedative to the whole range of opinion upon art, and enables a man to say clearly and almost ex cathedrâ what attempts in art are desirable to be made, compatibly with the limits of technical attainment. … Next after well-qualified professionals, we incline to think that the most useful and effective critics are to be found among men in whom mere accuracy of critical insight is not the main quality, but rather some vividness of personal perception, or fervour of mind, or brilliancy or discursiveness of illustrative power. Thus by far the most moving and dominant critic of our own time and country has been Mr. Ruskin … because he has evinced an overwhelming superiority in those other faculties of perception, fervour, and eloquence, constituting a vigorous original individualism, and initiating force. Other critics have to keep house (so to speak) with much less imposing mental furniture. (Rossetti 1866: 304–5) Since Ruskin is today perhaps the most well-known nineteenthcentury critic in Britain, it is of note that he is relegated to the amateur here, but if one takes a snapshot of English art-critics among whom Ruskin’s work figures – Anna Jameson, Sir Charles Eastlake, F. T. Palgrave, W. M. Rossetti, A. Swinburne, Walter Pater, J. A. Symonds, Elizabeth Rigby, and Emilia F. Strong – only Eastlake, as a recognised artist, president of the Royal Academy and director of the National Gallery, seems to

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meet Rossetti’s criteria. Thirteen years later, in 1879, Henry James too, citing Whistler, places Ruskin among the amateurs, but with less approval than Rossetti: for Whistler ‘does not attempt to make out a case in detail against the great commentator of pictures; it is enough for Mr. Whistler that he is a “littérateur”, and that a littérateur should concern himself with his own business’ ([James] 1879: 119).2 In the Magazine of Art the year before, another anonymous critic had defined the domain of professional art criticism somewhat differently, requiring the mastery of an alleged technical vocabulary by a would-be critic. The great works of great masters, though simple, are not easy to understand. Their language must be studied as carefully as the language of Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare. Many men of great attainments in other respects … judge of art with the minds of children … The criticism of art, indeed, has grown into a special province of literature, with technical terms, almost a language of its own. And if we are right that great masters express themselves in characters only to be understood by study and experience, we cannot wonder if descriptions and decisions are often unsound and clothed in words borrowed but not mastered. (Anon. 1878: 4) The problem lurking in these various formulations of specialisation between 1866 and 1879 is that although everyone posits a binary field and a principle of exclusion – a division between the amateur and the professional – they do not seem to agree, nor are they clear about the kind of ‘experience’ or practice that makes a professional who will produce authoritative criticism. Whistler and James seem to imply that only artists are authorised critics; Rossetti fudges this point (at least for us) by taking the terms ‘practical’ and ‘non-practical’ and then translating them into ‘professional’ and ‘non-professional’. At the narrowest, Rossetti too is implying that artists make the best critics by virtue of their technical knowledge, and he excludes Ruskin from this category, but like Anon. in the Magazine of Art, Rossetti’s term ‘professional’ seems to allow for knowledge of techniques and materials, without necessarily requiring the professional critic to be a professional artist. What Anon. posits is the notion of a professional critic of art who has mastered a discursive and critical language, rather than a practitioner of art who turned to criticism in his or her spare time. Ruskin himself did not agree with Rossetti’s location of himself and his art criticism among the amateurs, however generous and fulsome Rossetti’s tribute to Ruskin had been. Even as early as 1843 in the

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Preface to the first edition of the first volume of Modern Painters, Ruskin claimed that ‘a Graduate of Oxford’, its anonymous author, ‘is no mere theorist, but has been devoted from his youth to the laborious study of practical art’ (Ruskin 1843: x). Moreover, as one of the many nineteenth-century critics of journalism from Carlyle before him to Arnold afterward, Ruskin denigrates not only the ignorance of the periodical critics of the 1840s – ‘the shallow and false criticisms’ having provoked him into writing for ‘instant remedy’ (Ruskin 1843: xi), but also the more knowledgeable, ‘the ordinary connoisseurs’ to whom his ‘opinions … will sound heretical’ (Ruskin 1843: vii). It is important to note that although the first two volumes of Modern Painters (1843, 1846) were not illustrated, in the Preface to Volume I, Ruskin staked his claims for critical authority on his first-hand knowledge of the craft of art and, by means of an epigraph from Wordsworth, Nature and Truth. Ruskin’s partial organisation of Modern Painters by visual categories such as ‘Clouds’ keeps his ‘eye’ constantly before the reader, showing its function as a lens through which all knowledge of the text passes. It may be said that the absence of illustration in the first volumes of Modern Painters haunts and shapes the text; this is manifest as soon as Volume II appears in 1846 as its page size has been enlarged from that of Volume I in anticipation of illustrations in Volume III, which only appeared a decade later in 1856. By that date Ruskin had already published two more illustrated works with Smith, Elder – The Seven Lamps of Architecture in 1849 at one guinea, and The Stones of Venice in 1851 at two guineas. Volumes III and IV of Modern Painters in 1856 cost £1 18s and £2 10s in contrast with the unillustrated Volume I over a decade before, which cost a mere 12 shillings. While it has been observed by Brian Maidment (1981: 196–7) that these are the only three works by Ruskin that were conceived and published as volumes, it is clear that these illustrated books are an upmarket commodity, the costly production of which Smith, Elder undertook only in conjunction with a high cover price. It is notable that when J. A. Symonds undertakes his multi-volume project Renaissance in Italy in 1875, it too is not illustrated; the parallel with the first volumes of Modern Painters is clear when one notes that Symonds’ book appears from Smith, Elder, the same publisher as Modern Painters, and that Symonds like Ruskin claims first-hand experience of art in the Preface to Volume III, the one on the ‘Fine Arts’: In this part of my work I feel that I owe less to reading than to observation. I am not aware of having mentioned any important

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building, statue, or picture which I have not had the opportunity of studying. What I have written in this volume … has always been first noted face to face with the originals, and afterwards corrected, modified, or confirmed in the course of subsequent journeys to Italy. (Symonds 1877: vii) Publishing his work nearly 35 years after Modern Painters, when the illustrated press had come into its own, Symonds had more reason to feel the absence of illustration in this particular volume of his series and subsequently. Once Ruskin began to publish illustrated texts, the illustrations – all of which were either his own or that of artists directed by him – functioned both to underpin his polemic, as exemplars, and, remembering Rossetti’s criterion for the professional, as an imprimatur of his authority. In a work such as the first edition of The Stones of Venice, from 1851 onwards, lavish as it is with tinted engravings and drawings by the ‘critic’, the volume becomes an art object itself, economically and culturally valuable in much the same way as the subjects of its discourse. Ruskin was self-consciously engaged with the production, format and text of his publications, and exploited the burgeoning possibilities of the period that technology and patterns of sales, distribution and reading created.3 Wealthy but imprudent with disposable capital, Ruskin undertook in 1871 the control of the publication of his collected writing, which he attempted to market as a commodity, which assured him and George Allen, his assistant, now publisher, as well as the booksellers a ‘reasonable’ and guaranteed profit. Ruskin’s ‘politics’ include his intervention into a publishing market in which illustration figured at a number of levels from cheap papers to fine printing for connoisseur collectors to none at all. In the 1870s in the course of his publication of his collected Works, he lectured on wood and metal engraving between 1873 and 1875, and appended an essay, ‘Notes on the Present State of Engraving in England’, to Ariadne Florentina (Ruskin 1873–6: 229–66) in which he virulently attacked the cheap end of the market for the illustrated press in its most popular forms. His examples were the illustrations for Dickens’ Barnaby Rudge, which had appeared initially in a periodical in 1841, and an ornamental ‘T’ in the current number of the illustrated Cornhill Magazine of July 1876, the highly successful, middle-class, shilling monthly, product of his former publisher George Smith who had produced his three early art titles. Complaining generally that ‘The cheap woodcutting and etching of popular illustrated books have been

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endlessly mischievous to public taste’ (Ruskin 1876: 232), his view of Dickens was that the ‘filthy mass of the story’ allows only ‘the ugly ones [to be] illustrated. The cheap popular art cannot draw for you beauty, or sense, or honesty. … But every species of distorted folly and vice … are pictured for your honourable pleasure in every page, with clumsy caricature’ (Ruskin 1873–6: 236). By 1876 Ruskin is irascible about the readers of this material, whom he characterises as part of the urban proletariat, in his telling phrase ‘the Cockney reader’s itch for loathesomeness’ (ibid.). In contradistinction to Marx and Engels’s revolutionary workers, Ruskin’s are nonindustrialised artisan-yeomen. The voracious popular market for illustration which Charles Knight and the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge had first tapped between 1832 and 1845 in the illustrated Penny Magazine, was followed by the founding of the more middle-class Punch (1841), the Illustrated London News in 1842, and the lavishly funded and illustrated Cornhill Magazine in 1860. However, it is clear that these had little lure for Ruskin the art critic, despite his interest in work and the working man, and despite his later practice of affordable forms of publication – such as the cheaper serial formats of Time and Tide, Fors Clavigera, and indeed Ariadne Florentina itself.4 The link between the technology of illustration in the nineteenth century and the art press and art criticism of which Ruskin’s texts are a part is indicated by the significant amount of art copy in the Penny Magazine (1832–45), which equated art with ‘intellectual and moral elevation and advanced civilization, and artists with virtue and industriousness’ (Anderson 1991: 67 and n. 26). Within the confines of a year, the weekly Penny Magazine published an eighteen-part serial by one (anonymous) art critic alone: Anna Jameson, one of the most prolific in mid-century, published her illustrated ‘Essays on the Lives of Remarkable Painters’ between January and December 1843, in the same year that the first, unillustrated edition of Modern Painters began to appear from Smith, Elder. Both the comparative novelty of cheap periodical and book illustration at this time when Punch and the Illustrated London News were just beginning, and the link of illustration with the market and producers of art (engravers as well as fine artists), are evident from this juxtaposition of texts in different market sectors. A second example may be found in the links between one of the most popular periodicals of the art press, the Magazine of Art, and the mass market for images occasioned by the Great Exhibition of 1851, which acted as a spur generally to the illustrated press, and to the Magazine of Art in particular.5

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At the other end of the market for illustration in the nineteenth century was John Murray, publisher of numerous travel guides; it was to Murray’s that the Ruskins had initially taken Modern Painters but upon learning that Murray would prefer to read the manuscript once it was set up in type, they approached Smith, Elder (Holman 1997). The links of art criticism in the period with a number of upmarket publishing genres such as the travel guide, scholarship, and art ‘news’, and with distinct reading communities – such as connoisseur/collectors, contemporary artists, and the middle-class spectator/consumer, results in a hybridity in illustrated texts of which Murray’s publication of J. A. Crowe and G. B. Cavalcassele’s A New History of Painting in Italy in two volumes in 1864 is an instructive example. In addition to 40 monochrome illustrations in Volume I and 28 in Volume II, the text of A New History is divided into three other fields: large, double-spaced type which is the norm for the letterpress, smaller type more closely spaced for descriptions of specific artefacts such as frescoes, paintings and crucifixes, and copious footnotes on the page, divided from the main text by a rule, and into columns with another, and into paragraphs by superscript numbers. This influential and widely disseminated book functions as a travel guide, a record and aide-mémoire, and a commentary for a number of different categories of reader, and incorporates a range of genres. Moreover, there is a lavish ‘Index by Name and Subject’, which under a Name entry supplies the ‘life’ events in great detail, and in Subject entries such as ‘Arezzo’ allows the traveller to view quickly what may be visited. This canny, commodified text was launched for the Christmas market and received by the British Museum on 2 December 1864. A hybridity similar to that of Crowe and Cavalcaselle may be found in The Stones of Venice. An Advertisement in Volume II promises that the third and final volume will feature an Index: ‘in alphabetical order, a brief account of all the buildings in Venice, or references to the places where they are mentioned in the text, will be found a convenient guide for the traveller’ (Ruskin 1853: [iii]). It goes on to link the illustrations with the necessities of art tourism: ‘In order to make it more serviceable, I have introduced some notices of the pictures which I think most interesting in the various churches, and in the Scuola di San Rocco’ (ibid., my emphasis). The Indices of Volume III are indeed ‘convenient’, comprising as they do some 26 pages for a ‘Personal Index’, a ‘Local Index’, and a ‘Topical Index’, and devoting the rest of the 105 pages to a ‘Venetian Index’ with long, informative paragraphs of annotation for many entries. Ruskin’s sense of the multifaceted

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market for his work, of which the illustrations are part, may also be gauged by his inclusion of an Appendix in Volume II on ‘The Gondolier’s Cry’, which seems clearly directed to the tourist-reader – either armchair or actual. These early art volumes of Ruskin’s are object-oriented, whether it be the paintings of Turner, Venice and its cultural capital, or exemplary buildings; that is why illustration is so desired by the earliest texts, which are deprived of them, and why it is so useful: etchings can function variously, as a materialisation of the object of the discourse, as a vehicle of critical authority, and as a feature of added value which not only costs more to produce but enhances the commodity value of the book. It is not only a text for reading, but one to be collected by the wealthy connoisseur who in turn constitutes, through successive purchases of this serialised material, a member of a potential community of (Ruskin) readers. Given Ruskin’s technical knowledge gained through art practice and observation, given his positivistic framework of objects in these early books, and given the prolific ‘fall’ of works from his pen at the time, there is little to support Rossetti’s assertion that Ruskin’s art-criticism is any more ‘amateur’ than that of his more scholarly contemporaries. Walter Pater’s first book Studies in the History of the Renaissance appeared thirty years after Modern Painters, in 1873, and about twenty years after The Stones of Venice. Published at 7/6 by Macmillan, Studies was a single-volume, allegedly historical work without illustrations, with four essays on Renaissance artists (Leonardo, Botticelli, Michelangelo, and Luca della Robbia) at its core. Pater was 33 when it appeared. While not part of a serialised sequence of volumes like Modern Painters and Stones of Venice, Studies too participated in the serialisation process which marked this period’s mode of production. It had been compiled from a series of articles published in the previous seven years in two prominent periodicals of the day, the Westminster Review and the Fortnightly. Like Pater’s publisher, Macmillan, whose list was renowned for its high intellectual quality, these periodicals were, at the time, at the cutting edge of serious writing, of what was called the ‘higher criticism’, to be distinguished from popular illustrated books or papers. Unlike Ruskin, Pater was not a wealthy man, and he was in employment, as a tutor, Fellow, and university lecturer at Oxford. Most of Pater’s Renaissance essays were written, and published, while Ruskin was resident at the University, and delivering his first lectures as the new Slade Professor of Art. Clearly, Ruskin, whose work Pater had read as a young man, was both an intellectual and now a physical presence for the young don.

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A brief comparison of Pater’s Studies with Ruskin’s early art writing seems to locate Ruskin closer to the domain of the professional critic than the amateur. Comparison also confirms Ruskin’s work as firmly lodged in a more positivist art criticism than Pater’s, one which ultimately always turns back to the material object or work, and to what Ruskin calls its Truth. In Studies, Pater reads as a ‘general’ critic, whose primary preoccupation is the discursive critical text – the writing, his prose – rather than any external referent or subject that emerges. Pater’s Studies are not ‘amateur’ criticism tout court but ‘amateur’ art criticism in William Michael Rossetti’s sense, and quite different from Ruskin’s, which does base itself in art practice, his own as well as his subjects’. By contrast, Pater’s articles and reviews are now ‘essays in criticism’ in their volume format; gathered and ordered into a succession of his own pieces (as opposed to the multi-author series of their original, periodical, format), they resemble a Vasari-like series of Lives of artists. On the whole they do not start from the art object; rather they are biographies in which artistic work is a part. Secondly, in an adept move in the second paragraph of the Preface to Studies, Pater subverts Matthew Arnold’s dictum of Truth, ‘to see the object as in itself it really is’, and in restating and rephrasing it, shifts the focus from the object to the impression it makes on the critic: ‘“To see the object as it really is” has been justly said to be the aim of all true criticism whatever; and in aesthetic criticism the first step towards seeing one’s object as it really is, is to know one’s own impression as it really is, to discriminate it, to realise it distinctly’ (Pater 1873: viii). Here is the same claim to authority through first-hand observation seen in Ruskin and Symonds, but the emphasis is not on the accurate transmission of the object to the reader but on the cultivation of the perceiving subject, the critic: What is this song or picture, this engaging personality presented in life or in a book, to me? What effect does it really produce on me? Does it give me pleasure? and if so, what sort or degree of pleasure? How is my nature modified by its presence and under its influence? The answers to these questions are the original facts with which the aesthetic critic has to do; and, as in the study of light, of morals, of number, one must realise such primary data for oneself or not at all. (Pater 1873: viii) For Pater, education is primarily a matter of inner cultivation: ‘Education grows in proportion as one’s susceptibility to these impressions increases in depth and variety’ (Pater 1873: ix), which is neither

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abstract nor wholly intellectual: ‘What is important, then, is not that the critic should possess a correct abstract definition of beauty for the intellect, but a certain kind of temperament, the power of being deeply moved by the presence of beautiful objects’ (Pater 1873: x). Pater glosses this with a quotation from Sainte-Beuve in which he characterises the relation of critics to any single art object as one of consumption, taking selective nourishment, feeding on these things as exquisite amateurs, accomplished humanists:6 ‘De se borner à connaître de près les belles choses, et à s’en nourrir en exquis amateurs, en humanistes accomplis’ (Pater 1873: ix). Pater then, at this early moment in his career, locates his project for the ‘aesthetic critic’ in the realm of the spectator (‘De se borner’) rather than the practitioner; in the terms of the period Pater’s critic resembles Baudelaire’s dandified and male consumer of culture, the flâneur.7 For Pater ‘amateur’ is a badge of honour, marking those who value art ‘for art’s sake’ alone. It separates art from the vulgarity of usefulness and the aesthetic critic from the ‘professional’; it allies him crucially, in respect to class, with gentlemen, who have the power (education, money, leisure) to cultivate ‘taste’. For Pater this involves the near disappearance of the object as the ‘subject’ of criticism. In this respect, illustrations in Pater’s text would be distracting. Pater’s treatment of ‘the subject’ in Studies – whether it be a character or an artistic work – subsumes it to the composition of the prose and the narrative, shaping it imaginatively like paint or clay. In Pater’s prose the representation of ‘the subject’ is fragmented and worked, as in the post-impressionism of the period, pointing to the abstract, non-figurative work to come, what Pater calls in the Botticelli ‘essay’, ‘the medium of abstract painting’ (Pater 1873: 41). This aspect of Pater’s prose in Studies may be seen in a passage towards the end of the ‘essay’ on Michelangelo, where ‘the new body’ is represented as losing its material form and fragmenting. This is a particularly graphic and succinct example of what I regard as a mode of seeing which pervades these ‘Studies’ of Pater’s. Michelangelo is so ignorant of the spiritual world, of the new body and its laws, that he does not surely know whether the consecrated host may not be the body of Christ. And of all that range of sentiment he is the poet, a poet still alive and in possession of our inmost thoughts … at last, far off, thin and vague, yet not more vague than the most definite thoughts men have had through three centuries on a matter that has been so near their hearts – the new body; a passing light, a mere intangible, external effect over those too rigid or too formless faces; a dream that lingers a moment,

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retreating in the dawn, incomplete, aimless, helpless; a thing with faint hearing, faint memory, faint power of touch; a breath, a flame in the doorway, a feather in the wind. (Pater 1873: 87–8) Even the ‘life’/biographical framework that marks these essays conforms more to the dictates of fiction than to history, and Pater develops a genre of the short story later in the decade which he calls ‘the imaginary portrait’.8 Pater’s absorption of ‘content’ to ‘form’ has an analogue in the writing of art history, which, originating in antiquity in Greek rhetoric and found in the Iliad and the Aeneid, survived in the Byzantine Middle Ages and was manifest in the West in the Renaissance. It is ekphrasis – ‘an extended description of a rhetorical nature’ ‘intended to bring the subject before the mind’s eye of the listener’, which through skill with words, generally attempted to convey the visual impression and the emotional responses evoked by the painting or building, not to leave a detailed factual account (Webb 1996: 128). Favoured by Renaissance artists and patrons, ekphrasis functioned partly as a means of re-creating classical art; Isabella d’Este and her brother Duke Alfonso of Ferrara, for example, commissioned paintings based on ‘scenes’ from the Imagines of the Philostrati, and Botticelli’s Calumny of Apelles stemmed from Lucian’s ‘On Calumny’. Pater in his turn used the same rhetorical technique to re-create Renaissance art such as ‘La Gioconda’. It is pertinent too that the descriptions of paintings in Vasari’s Lives of the Artists, to which Pater refers frequently in Studies and to which Pater is indebted for its biographical format, are considered by some critics to be examples of ekphrasis (Webb 1996: 130). Another element of Studies which links it to traditions of ekphrasis is its tendency to a criticism of praise, not blame. As Renaissance ekphrasis was often commissioned for special occasions, artists tended not to criticise. On the whole, Pater’s criticisms are oblique, even in his youth; it is his enthusiasms and praise which tend to land him in difficulties with his readers. The many set pieces in Studies such as those on Botticelli’s Madonnas or the Birth of Venus seem to fall within the Renaissance period’s practice of ekphrasis as described by Webb. One characterisitic of classical ekphrasis – the freedom not to confine oneself to the specific moment depicted, but to discuss the general context, referring both forwards and backwards in time, ‘to imagine what characters might be feeling or saying’ (Webb 1996: 128) – is also seen in the Madonna passage: For with Botticelli she too, though she holds in her hands the ‘Desire of all nations,’ is one of those who are neither for God nor for his

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enemies; and her choice is on her face. The white light on it is cast up hard and cheerless from below, as when snow lies upon the ground, and the children look up with surprise at the strange whiteness of the ceiling. Her trouble is in the very caress of the mysterious child, whose gaze is always far from her, and who has already that sweet look of devotion which men have never been able altogether to love, and which still makes the born saint an object almost of suspicion to his earthly brethren. Once, indeed, he guides her hand to transcribe in a book the words of her exaltation, the Ave, and the Magnificat, and the Gaude Maria, and the young angels, glad to rouse her for a moment from her dejection are eager to hold the inkhorn and support the book; but the pen almost drops from her hand, and the high cold words have no meaning for her, and her true children are those others, in the midst of whom, in her rude home the intolerable honour came to her, with that look of wistful inquiry on their irregular faces which you see in startled animals – gipsy children, such as those who, in Apennine villages, still hold out their long brown arms to beg of you, but on Sundays become ‘enfants du choeur’, with their thick black hair nicely combed and fair white linen on their sun-burnt throats. (Pater 1873: 46–7, my emphases) Ekphrasis seems predicated on the absence of illustration of an object, which would only confine the rhetoric of the writer/critic. In 1877 for the second edition of Studies, retitled The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, the volume was illustrated, but marginally and cheaply. Instead of an engraving which was identified as that of one of the art objects discussed, the single illustration was a frontispiece of a favourite drawing of Pater’s from the Louvre by one of Leonardo’s school, engraved by Charles Jeens (see Figure 22). While Pater and Pater scholars 9 make the link between the vignette and the textual attention in the Leonardo essay to ‘a little red chalk drawing’ of ‘a face of doubtful sex’, there is no alteration at all in the text of the second edition to suggest that the prose passage refers to the illustration. Not explicitly didactic or exemplary, the illustration remained anonymous in the volume, an emblematic portrait of a beautiful boy echoing visually and silently those adumbrated discursively throughout the text. This small drawing, which Pater acknowledges to Macmillan ‘has no recognised name’ (Evans 1970: 22), figures crucially in the letterpress as a verbal text: it launches a paragraph which adumbrates an unmistakably homosocial tradition of Renaissance Leonardoesque art, and culminates in a second paragraph on what may

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22. Walter Pater’s unique and mischievous deployment of illustration, the Leonardoesque vignette of a youth in the second edition of The Renaissance (1877), the same edition from which he had obligingly removed the ‘Conclusion’ to placate critics of its morality and homosocial character.

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‘well be the likeness of Salaino, beloved of Lionardo for his curled and waving hair … and afterwards his favourite pupil and servant’ (Pater 1873: 109–10). The ‘little red chalk drawing’ is magnified through exposition and generalisation as part of a discussion of the alleged replication, visible in visual art of the Renaissance, of the classical Greek tradition of education whereby mentors and boys are paired. Pater’s prose deploys numerous characteristics of ekphrasis: Take again another head, still more full of sentiment, but of a different kind, a little red chalk drawing which every one remembers who has seen the drawings at the Louvre. It is a face of doubtful sex, set in the shadow of its own hair, the cheekline in high light against it, with something voluptuous and full in the eyelids and the lips. Another drawing might pass for the same face in childhood, with parched and feverish lips, but with much sweetness in the loose, short-waisted, childish dress, with necklace and bulla, and the daintily bound hair. We might take the thread of suggestion, which these two drawings offer, thus set side by side, and following it through the drawings at Florence, Venice, and Milan, construct a sort of series, illustrating better than anything else Lionardo’s type of womanly beauty. Daughters of Herodias, with their fantastic headdresses knotted and folded so strangely, to leave the dainty oval of the face disengaged, they are not of the Christian family, or of Raffaelle’s. They are the clairvoyants… (Pater 1873: 108–9, my emphases) In addition to the characteristic rhetoric of ekphrasis here, the slippage of gender from boys of ‘doubtful sex’ to ‘womanly beauty’ to ‘daughters of Herodias’ is both bold and oblique; that Pater is referring to boys and men as ‘womanly’ and ‘daughters’ of Herodias (like the murderous Salome) seems clear when this passage is compared with ‘Diaphaneite’, a then unpublished essay which invokes a transparent ideal type based on Pater’s pupil and friend Charles Lancelot Shadwell. Written five years before ‘Lionardo’ was first published, and regarded as one of Pater’s earliest extant works, ‘Diaphaneite’ similarly emphasises the refinement, the faintness, and the function of transmission of a type which I take to be, like ‘the clairvoyants’, Pater’s attempt to limn the ‘homosexual’ character: It does not take the eye by breadth of colour; rather it is that fine edge of light, where the elements of our moral nature refine them-

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selves to the burning point. It crosses rather than follows the main current of the world’s life. The world has no sense fine enough for those evanescent shades, which fill up the blanks between contrasted types of character – delicate provision in the organisation of the moral world for the transmission to every part of it of the life quickened at single points! For this nature there is no place ready in its affections. This colourless, unclassified purity of life it can neither use for its service, nor contemplate as an ideal. (Pater 1895b: 248). ‘Diaphaneite’ is a prose portrait which has no ‘origin’ in visual art; it is now often read as a prototype of his later ‘imaginary portraits’, the type of the Paterian short story. In the ‘Lionardo’ essay the ‘Diaphaneite’ type is reconfigured in terms of current theories of animal magnetism – ‘the clairvoyants, through whom, as through delicate instruments, one becomes aware of the subtler forces of nature, and the modes of their action, all that is magnetic in it, all those finer conditions wherein material things rise to that subtlety of operation which constitutes them spiritual, where only the finer nerve and the keener touch can follow’ (Pater 1873: 109), but there is a similar emphasis as well on their rarity, their perception only by an elite, and their special access to ‘a chain of secret influences’. In contrast with the prose text of Studies, Pater’s use of pictorial illustration in the second edition, The Renaissance, differs markedly from Ruskin’s, in its scarcity, its physical isolation from the letterpress, and its apparent refusal to ‘illustrate’ anything else except in the oblique and non-verbal ways in which emblems communicate meanings, visually, succinctly, accessibly, and memorably. It is interesting, however, that Pater was willing to use the addition of the vignette to the second edition to publicise the volume as illustrated, perhaps to attract owners of Studies (1873) as well as new readers to purchase the volume. It was also only in the text of advertisements that the vignette was identified as ‘after Leonardo da Vinci, engraved by Jeens’, and Pater goes on in a letter to Macmillan to discuss orchestration of word-of-mouth publicity for the book: ‘and in any gossip on the subject it might be described as being from a favourite drawing by L. da V. in the Louvre’ (Evans 1970: 22).10 Studies was attacked on the basis that it wasn’t history, 11 and Pater changed the title of the second and subsequent editions in acknowledgement of this. But ekphrasis, without graphic illustration, did leave Pater space for the implicit interest in the text in a homosexual history of art – a tradition of ‘Renaissance’ artists and critics from Leonardo to

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Winckelmann. The material conditions of production of author and text facilitate the encryption of this history. It served Pater not to work within the confines of an illustrated text: he was more free to pursue his interest in the homosexual in Renaissance art and culture. The absence of an explicit connection between the single illustration in The Renaissance (1877) and the passage in the letterpress to which it relates bears this out. A decade later The Artist and Journal of Home Culture, an unillustrated monthly under an editor similarly dedicated to the project of writing homosexual discourse on art, was also able to circulate without censure, in part due to the absence of illustration, a format not otherwise suitable or commercially advisable for art journals at the time.12 Whereas Pater’s agenda in this respect was both secret and gendered, Ruskin’s was spectacularly explicit and profusely, perhaps defensively, ‘manly’.

11 After Studies: the Cancelled Book

It had long been argued by scholars that the period of the 1870s, after the appearance of Studies in the History of the Renaissance in 1873, was one of retrenchment for Walter Pater, a decent reaction to the decorous unease (the British equivalent to roars of disapproval) which greeted the book from the pulpit, the university, and some sections of the press. It is this theory and period that I attempt to rethink in this chapter. The retrospective retrenchment theory was based heavily on the record of Pater’s publications – book publication – with a dozen years separating the first book (Studies, 1873) from the second (Marius the Epicurean, 1885), and on the removal of the ‘Conclusion’ of Studies from the second edition of 1877, accompanied by a change of title to The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry. Moreover, bibliographical and biographical work in the last thirty years, by Lawrence Evans and Billie Inman, has seemed to substantiate the retrenchment construction, with the revelation of a cancelled book in 1878 in Evans’ edition of Pater’s letters, and a compromising involvement of Pater with an undergraduate in 1874 in a revelatory piece of research by Billie Inman (Inman: 1991). A dissenter was Richard Dellamora (later of Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism, 1990), who early on claimed that Pater’s revisions to the remaining text of the 1877 edition balanced the loss of the ‘Conclusion’ and strengthened the homoerotic content (Dellamora 1983). I want to try and build on this work, by mapping certain aspects of the homophobic environment in which Pater was working, construing the eclectic character of his writing after The Renaissance, and exploring permutations of the cancelled book. Later elements of this trajectory include a second suppression of the essay on William Morris (from which the ‘Conclusion’ had been 213

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extricated) in Appreciations (1890), and the publication of Greek Studies posthumously in 1895, all of which took place in the context of what was a mined terrain, a war zone. In terms of information, little of what I am working with is new, regarding the nineteenth century. What is new is our twenty-first-century vantage point. Among scholars outside the gay community, the reading of canonical writing as gay discourse still remains controversial. Pater scholars are no exception, and there is increasingly a politics of Pater studies which wishes to preserve Pater from the depredations of gender criticism, and in varying degrees from the death of the author, the birth of the reader, and the fissures of textuality that the new generation of theory, from structuralism to postmodernism, has posited. The challenge that post-structuralism poses to the category of the aesthetic and to aestheticism is visible in high relief in the debates around the contemporary constructions of Pater. The Beast, the ‘other’ in Pater’s writing is denied, its various definitions (homoeroticism, sadomasochism, coded language, and above all fragmentation, discontinuity, irresolution) ‘overcome’ (and often as not, not even dignified/ named by discussion) by classical models of resolution and unification, whether Hegelian, Kantian, Christian, or any other model which results in the preservation of aesthetic form, unity, and above all, of Beauty. Played out in Pater studies is the argument about the unified subject of humanism or the split, fragmented (and multiple) subject of the postmodern – the postmodern, which after all does offer its own model for ‘art’, which permits the fragmentations of Pater’s texts and his ‘periodical’ mode of cultural production. The publishing record shows us that, with very few exceptions (Marius being the most substantial), almost all of Pater’s work appeared initially in periodicals as articles or lectures. My reading of Pater’s writing after Studies is of texts that persist in the exploration of English Romanticism in the face of Arnold’s preferred model, Greek classicism; insist on a classicism which itself contains important strains of romanticism; and persist in exploring the possibilities of what may be called ‘gay’ discourse and what was variously named in the period as inversion, Uranian, Greek. There has been an attempt by scholars to appropriate the 1870s material as part of the case for retrenchment, and my first section addresses this issue by briefly examining ‘Wordsworth’ and the Greek articles of 1876. I shall go on to consider various constructions of authorship that the three models of the cancelled book generate, and to offer another hypothesis about the conditions which led to cancellation. And lastly,

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I want to glance at what I choose to see as the real and ghostly progeny of the cancelled book – Appreciations, Three Short Stories (another cancelled book, according to William Shuter1 and Greek Studies – and their moments and strategies of publication. I will not rehearse here the reception of Studies after it appeared in the spring of 1873. Many of the reviews are available in Robert Seiler’s Walter Pater: The Critical Heritage (Seiler 1980), and a number of other relevant documents are quoted or cited by Billie Inman in Walter Pater’s Reading (Inman, 1981). There were unfavourable (as well as favourable) reviews, denunciatory sermons (one by Pater’s ex-tutor), and disapproving letters from one-time friends such as John Wordsworth, Pater’s colleague at Brasenose College. What made matters worse was that in February 1874, only ten months after Studies appeared, letters between Pater and a young man, an Oxford undergraduate, were passed to Benjamin Jowett at Balliol, and allegedly the two were found embracing on a college stairwell as well. It appeared that the various textual examples of the nuanced ‘unease’ of reviewers, colleagues, and churchmen (in this Victorian context these categories overlap!) now had a basis in life. I will not treat here the culpability or possible victimisation of Pater by Jowett.2 It is likely that as a result, immediately, Pater was denied his right through seniority to a vacant Proctorship. His career prospects within the University were stunted, and never recovered. After February 1874 Pater was particularly vulnerable, in what was a more general atmosphere of policed sexuality within a still all-male University, where all the students were men until 1879, and where the great number of staff were clerics and unmarried. Both married Fellows and non-clerical Fellows were just making inroads on Oxford in 1874. A rundown of Pater’s contemporaries and acquaintances shows evidence of the ubiquity of both homosocial and homoerotic bonds. It also brings into view the anxious disciplining of homosexuality, privately, in educational institutions. J. A. Symonds (Oxford), Oscar Browning (Eton), and William Cory (Eton) all quietly lose their posts, and Simeon Solomon and Oscar Wilde are tried in court, publicly. Homophobia was an anxiety that frequently surfaced, in sermons about masturbation, and in rhetoric about manliness, for example. The incident of Pater and William Money Hardinge was just that, an ‘incident’ in a succession of like incidents of late nineteenth-century British culture. Pater’s successful negotiation as a gay man and a gay writer throughout his life, but particularly in the 1870s, attests to a canniness and strategy which prevented him from losing his post. This would

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have been intolerable to a man like Pater, with two sisters to support at that time, and very little private income. Nor did he become embroiled with the law, like Wilde who had been his student, or Simeon Solomon, the painter, his friend. Nor did he feel forced to leave the country to lead his life, like John Addington Symonds. Lastly, he avoided marriage unlike countless nineteenth-century gay men (including Symonds, William Cory, and Wilde), who married to banish both the outlawed desire and the public suspicion. The attacks on Pater and Studies continued into 1876 with W. H. Mallock’s depiction of Pater as Mr Rose in The New Republic, a serialised novel, in Belgravia between July and December. In March 1877 the Rev. Richard Tyrwhitt’s attack on Symonds and ‘The Greek Spirit in Modern Literature’ in the Contemporary Review resulted in both Symonds and Pater withdrawing their candidature for the Professorship of Poetry at the University. It is in this climate that Pater was writing, and to which he responded by withdrawing the offending ‘Conclusion’ from Studies in 1877, but with some dignity, without explanation; and by abandoning any claim to history, and withdrawing to ‘art and poetry’ in his change of title. Both the strategy of the professorship and the book took place in 1877. The withdrawal of the various permutations of the new book project occurred between March 1877 and November 1878. But beside this catalogue of withdrawals, I want to set some acts of assertion. First of all, throughout the 1870s Pater continued writing for the progressive Fortnightly Review, edited at that time by John Morley, which was printing in 1875, for example, cutting-edge aesthetic writing – Swinburne on Shakespeare, Symonds on classical texts, Edward Dowden on Wordsworth, and George Saintsbury on Baudelaire; it was the periodical from which several of Pater’s Renaissance essays had stemmed. Secondly, in the very teeth of his revisions, both of omission and commission, to the second edition of The Renaissance, Pater wrote to Alexander Macmillan, his publisher, in March 1877, that he wished to ‘finish and print’ (Evans 1970: 21; Inman 1990: 357) his four pieces on Greek literature, three of which had recently appeared in the Fortnightly. This wish and nascent plan to publish these essays in book form, which risked their further scrutiny and visibility by book reviewers, also draws to our attention Pater’s decision to begin in 1875 a series of essays on classical Greek art, artifacts, and texts. This resulted in fervent production, three essays on classical subjects published in the Fortnightly in January, February, and December of 1876. They were on

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the Greek myths of Demeter and Persephone (January and February) and Dionysus (December). The second part of the Dionysus piece, its structure echoing the two-part ‘Demeter and Persephone’, although written by October 1878 when it was set in type by Macmillan, was not published until 1889. If Pater’s reason for halting the publication had any basis in the explanation he supplied to Macmillan – dissatisfaction with his work – the eleven-year gap between 1878 and 1889 suggests that in this essay lies a partial explanation. In the climate I have described, Pater seems to have been confident that he could use the status of classics within the University, and its virtual confinement to male readers of his own class (since education for women and for working-class men commonly excluded classical languages), to ‘carry’ and acceptably screen his range of interests in Greek culture.3 While it has been suggested by Inman that Pater’s articles on Greek subjects go some way to upholding Victorian religion and domestic values (Inman 1990: 384), I want to suggest that the balance of interest in them is overwhelmingly toward writing the sexualised body, both of women in ‘Demeter and Persephone’, and the male body in the first part of ‘Dionysus’. Dionysus is identified as the male counterpart to Demeter; to the extent that he is characterised as a male generator of Life, he is placed in the position of women: ‘the whole productive power of the earth is in him’ (Pater: 1876c: 754). And the paragraph in the first part of ‘Demeter and Persephone’ on Demeter, Thesmophoros, the description of ‘the guardian of married life, the deity of the discretion of wives’, is short and terse. It consists of three sentences: the second the thudding ‘She is therefore the founder of civilised order’ (Pater 1876a: 94); the third sentence is more expansive. Another sentence on her role as ‘patron of travellers’ (Pater 1876; 94), and the tour of duty is finished. The main body of the ‘Demeter and Persephone’ essay is on the goddesses of ‘true mythology’ (Pater 1876a: 88), which Pater develops ultimately into an attack on the unattributed (Arnoldian) argument of representing Greek religion as characterised by ‘cheerfulness’. Interestingly, this paragraph appears only after death (in 1888), in the posthumous publication of the article in Greek Studies in 1895: The ‘worship of sorrow,’ as Goethe called it, is sometimes supposed to have had almost no place in the religion of the Greeks. Their religion has been represented as a religion of mere cheerfulness, the worship by an untroubled, unreflecting humanity, conscious of no deeper needs, of the embodiments of its own joyous activity. It

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helped to hide out of their sight those traces of decay and weariness, of which the Greeks were constitutionally shy, to keep them from peeping too curiously into certain shadowy places, appropriate enough to the gloomy imagination of the middle age; and it hardly proposed to itself to give consolation to people who, in truth, were never ‘sick or sorry.’ But this familiar view of Greek religion is based on a consideration of a part only of what is known concerning it, and really involves a misconception … (Pater 1895a: 110–11) This ‘misconception’ denies the romantic element in Greek poetry and art, and leads to a ‘wearisome calm’ (Pater 1895a: 111). Pater argues that the worship of sorrow functions positively.4 Much of what is designated in this passage as ‘painful’ and ‘strange’ is turned to repeatedly and adeptly in the text, as in this example, which juxtaposes images of violence with the tale of the Sleeping Beauty: [Persephone’s] story is but the story, in an intense form, of Adonis, of Hyacinth, of Adrastus, the king’s blooming son, fated, in the story of Herodotus, to be wounded to death with an iron spear, of Linus, a fair child who is torn to pieces by hounds every spring-time – of the Sleeping Beauty. (Pater 1876a: 94) At places in the essay, the conjoining of Demeter and Persephone (‘twin-named’) as ‘venerable, or awful goddesses’ (Pater 1876: 94, 93) results in a range of roles and personae which is both promiscuous in its multiplicity and carnivalesque, that is parodic in a Bakhtinian sense (see, for example, Pater 1876a: 93–4). This topos and aptitude are also evident in ‘A Study of Dionysus’ in a passage which makes a claim – sentimental, grotesque, and sexual alike – for the pathos (!) of Satyrs: But the best spirits have found in them also a certain human pathos, as in displaced beings, coming even nearer to most men, in their very roughness, than the noble and delicate person of the vine; dubious creatures, half-way between the animal and human kinds, speculating wistfully on their being, because not wholly understanding themselves and their place in nature … in some happiest moments Praxiteles conceived a model, often repeated, which concentrates this sentiment of true humour concerning them; a model of dainty natural ease in posture, but with the legs slightly crossed, as only lowly bred gods are used to carry them, and with some puzzled trouble of youth, you might wish for a moment to

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smooth away, puckering the forehead a little, between the pointed ears, on which the goodly hair of his animal strength grows low. Little by little, the signs of brute nature are subordinated, or disappear; and at last, Robetta, a humble Italian engraver of the fifteenth century … has expressed it in its most exquisite form. … The pucknoses have grown delicate, so that, with Plato’s infatuated lover, you may call them winsome, if you please; and no one would wish those hairy little shanks away, with which one of the small Pans walks at her [Ceres’] side, grasping her skirt stoutly; while the other, the sick or weary one, rides in the arms of Ceres herself, who in graceful Italian dress, and decked airily with fruit and corn, steps across a country of cut sheaves, pressing it closely to her, with a child’s peevish trouble in its face, and its small goat-legs and tiny hoofs folded over together, precisely after the manner of a little child. (Pater 1876c: 755–6) At several points in this and the other Greek essays of 1876, the depiction of the Mona Lisa as a femme fatale in The Renaissance is echoed, repeated, as in this portrait of the ‘older’ myths of Demeter. Pater pursues his Studies style and strategy in these signed Fortnightly articles, even while he abandons the ‘Conclusion’: The worship of Demeter belongs to that older religion, nearer to the earth. … She is the goddess of dark caves, and is not wholly free from monstrous form. She gave men the first fig in one place, the first poppy in another. … She is the mother of the vine also; and the assumed name, by which she called herself in her wanderings, is Dôs, a gift. … She knows the magic powers of certain plants, cut from her bosom, to bane or bless; and, under one of her epithets, herself presides over the springs, as also coming from the secret places of the earth. (Pater 1876a: 92) One may compare the stylistic strategy used here to one in an earlier passage (Pater 1895a: 95–100) which likens the alleged Romanticism of the Classical age to its counterpart in Wordsworth, ‘the [great] modern pantheist’ (Pater 1876a: 90] [1895a: 97]), and Blake. These are counterblasts to the Arnoldian rendition of ancient Greek culture and texts, and to Arnold’s early suspicion of English Romanticism which ‘did not know enough’; and again the more emphatic response is inserted after Arnold’s death. So, in addition to pursuing the project of exploring the possibilities of gay discourse, in its fixation on the

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power and potential for evil of the femme fatale and the body of the animal/youths, the text engages with the question of the nature of ancient Greek culture, and the cultural value attached to Romanticism in relation to ‘modernity’. All of these issues – gay discourse, and the nature of Classicism and of Romanticism – were prominent in Studies, and show Pater to be adhering to his critical interests afterward, despite homophobic pressures to desist. Likewise, the Wordsworth essay, published two years before in 1874 in the Fortnightly Review, continues the textual critique found in Studies, defending Romanticism, situating Wordsworth in a radical tradition (including Shelley, George Sand and Gautier), and claiming for Wordsworth the greatness Arnold claimed for the ancients. If selfcensorship and invisibility were conceded on some fronts, much of what Pater produced and did publish in this period may be counted, not among the concessions, but as vital and engaged discursive acts. As well as absence, there is presence; and silence, as Foucault reminds us, is an eloquent counter-discourse. It also should be noted that in the 1870s Pater had his defenders, and that in the very issue of the Fortnightly in which the second part of ‘Demeter and Persephone’ appears, the editor places a defence of Pater by George Saintsbury immediately before it. Saintsbury singles out Pater as a younger writer to note, in his piece on ‘Modern English Prose’. The qualities which Saintsbury praises prove to be those which critics castigate, the nature of his prose; simply glancing at ‘the merely picturesque beauty of … Studies’, Saintsbury goes on to make a claim for the ‘possibilities of modern English prose’ which he alleges that Pater sets out in a prose of formal rigour and austerity: The important point for us is the purely formal or regular merit of this style … the subordinate and yet independent beauty of the sentences when taken separately from the paragraph. … A bungler would have depended, after the fashion of the day, upon strongly coloured epithets, upon complicated and quasi-poetic cadences of phrase, at least upon an obtrusively voluptuous softness of thought and a cumbrous protraction of sentence. Not so Mr Pater. There is not to be discovered in his work the least sacrifice of the phrase to the word, of the clause to the phrase, of the sentence to the clause, of the paragraph to the sentence. Each holds its own proper place and dignity while contributing duly to the dignity and place of its superior in the hierarchy. … There is no surer mark of the highest style than this separate and yet subordinate finish. In the words of

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Mr Ruskin, it is ‘so modulated that every square inch is a perfect composition’. (Saintsbury 1876: 257) I suspect there are two forces working in Pater’s favour here: his editor John Morley who, by juxtaposing this article with Pater’s in one issue, is backing up Pater as part of the Fortnightly’s literary property; and the contributor, George Saintsbury, who met Pater through mutual friends in Oxford in the late 1860s, and in later years continued to be a great defender of Pater’s prose. I want to turn now to the non-unitary subject of the cancelled book proposals, which locate Pater’s work in a variety of discourses: first, in March 1877 (Evans 1970: 21), the suggestion seemed to be to publish the four Greek essays separately, which would have facilitated Pater’s entry into the classical lists, confronting the cultural criticism of Matthew Arnold, but also classical scholarship, and the discourses of the new social science of anthropology with its interest in myth. There was also the possibility that Pater’s projected book would take its place beside works primarily characterised by their discourses of gender, homoerotic works such as J. A. Symonds’ Greek Poets (1875) or William Cory’s Ionica (1858) – poems similarly ‘Greek’, as Tyrwhitt was even then pointing out in the Contemporary Review. This plan, for reasons unknown, but imaginable (too short; too dangerous on a number of counts – Arnold, gender, scholarship), was dropped. Then in October 1878 (Evans 1970: 32), Pater proposed a second, expanded collection containing more of his Fortnightly essays, with the addition of one from Macmillan’s Magazine. The title now suggested was ‘The School of Giorgione’ and Other Studies. Whereas the contents of the first proposal seemed to signal that the author of The Renaissance/Studies had turned to a new kind of work – Greek studies as opposed to Renaissance art history – this second title suggests continuities with the Renaissance volume, both in its foregrounding of Italian Renaissance art and in its echo of the word ‘Studies’. Its Greek character was now diluted or screened, first by the focus on a single title relating to an article on Renaissance art which had been published recently, in October 1877, in the Fortnightly Review, just after the second edition of The Renaissance appeared in May; secondly by three articles on nineteenth-century Romanticism – one called ‘Romanticism’, and pieces on Wordsworth and Charles Lamb; and finally by two essays on Shakespeare which had appeared in the Fortnightly and Macmillan’s. These last five articles were to form the core of Appreciations, Pater’s volume on English literature published over a decade later, in 1889.5

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Retrospectively, it seems that by foregrounding Giorgione, this proposal looked backwards to Pater’s early interest in Renaissance art rather than forward to what emerged as his abiding interests – in modernity with Romanticism as its mode, and the Classics, specifically Greek studies. What is notable is the eclectic nature of this Giorgione collection, and the facets and diversity of Pater’s interests in this decade. These were to remain apparently diverse, particularly in light of academic disciplines then current: art history, ‘English’, modern languages – none of which were degree subjects at Oxford at the time – and Classics. Rather, what it did reflect was the miscellany, and nonspecialised nature, of the periodical press for which he produced his writing. This diversity, it should be noted, was masked by the fiction he soon afterwards began to write, by the next book he did publish, in 1885 – Marius the Epicurean, a novel which drew on all of these subjects. But as it is, the proposed Giorgione collection constructs Pater a belle lettriste, in keeping with the authorial persona of the second edition of Studies entitled The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry. Some reviewers of the first edition of Studies in the History of the Renaissance expected and demanded an historian.6 It is significant, however, that a month later, in a letter to Macmillan of November 1878 (Evans 1970: 33–4), as printing of Giorgione and Other Studies was under way, Pater suggested another title to Macmillan, Dionysus and Other Studies, which foregrounded the Greek studies again; these did after all constitute one of the two main bodies of work in the volume. However, by 30 November, having read proofs, Pater decided that he was dissatisfied with his work, and instructed Macmillan to abandon the book. Eventually the type was broken up. Given the controversial nature of Pater’s writing, the climate of the 1870s, and his vulnerability as a University teacher known to be, or recognised or ‘addressed’ as, a gay man, decisions to publish at particular times are likely to be contingent. Just as the withdrawal of the ‘Conclusion’ in 1877 is related to the pressure of institutional Oxford, so the withdrawal of Dionysus, with its visible Greek material, seems likely to be effected by the vituperative and widely reported debate about aestheticism and criticism at the libel trial of Whistler versus Ruskin, which took place on 25 and 26 November, just before Pater withdrew the book on the 30th. Ruskin had, intemperately and publicly, and from a position which yoked art with morality in a counterdiscourse to aestheticism, denied Whistler’s painting the status of art, and Whistler’s ‘damages’ of a farthing amounted to defeat. From Pater’s position, it might well appear that in addition to Ruskin, in

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such a climate, W. H. Mallock and the Rev. Tyrwhitt might welcome the opportunity, should it arise, to fulminate against Dionysus and Other Studies, which would appear in the wake of the trial. These Greek essays and a number of others on Greek topics were never collected in Pater’s lifetime. It was left to C. L. Shadwell, Pater’s long-time friend and Literary Executor, to gather them and other Greek studies, immediately after Pater’s death in July 1894, and to edit and publish them in January 1895, in what emerged as a window between Pater’s death and the Wilde trials in April of that year. Had they not appeared then, it is unlikely that Shadwell would have been able to publish them as a collection for some years. William Shuter notes that a later piece, ‘Hippolytus Veiled’, included in the posthumous Greek Studies, was advertised to appear in a volume of Pater’s stories projected in 1892, called Three Short Stories. That too had not been published. These suppressed Greek essays of Pater’s might usefully be compared with the University lectures on Plato and Platonism that Pater did collect and publish in 1893. Conceived for public discourse, and fit for undergraduates, with the imprimatur of the academy, these treatments of Greek material could be safely published and circulated beyond the readership of the Fortnightly Review where the suppressed articles had appeared. As for those from the cancelled volume of 1878 which did appear in Pater’s lifetime, in Appreciations, it should be noted that by the time of Appreciations in 1889, Pater may be seen to be reaching far into his past – as far back as 1868 – in order to make up this ‘English’ volume, which excluded the Greek articles and was carried and flagged by his new piece on ‘Style’. This volume too was dogged by accusatory reviews, even after the peace-making project of Marius. In the second edition of Appreciations, published almost immediately in 1890, ‘Poems by William Morris’ (from which the withdrawn ‘Conclusion’ had been extricated) was again excluded and replaced by another essay. Pater had never risked collecting this part of the Morris essay before, and he had taken the precaution of renaming it ‘Aesthetic Poetry’. 7 However, even late in his career, this now established author chose to manage his reputation through self-censorship, even in the wake of having ‘restored’ the ‘Conclusion’ to The Renaissance’s third edition with a triumphant explanation, the previous year in 1888. Many late nineteenth-century writers in Britain worked under and with such constraints. Whether self-imposed or required by an editor, censorship was a commonplace for authors such as George Moore, J. A. Symonds, Wilde, Gosse, and Hardy. The heterosexual members of this

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group – Moore, Gosse, and Hardy – had complained publicly about the tyranny of ‘Mrs Grundy’ in New Review critics’ forums in 1891 and after. More explicit, erotic writing was privately circulated, as may be seen in the correspondence of Symonds and Swinburne; subscription or private publication (such as Richard Burton’s of the Arabian Nights in 1885) were the forms some such printed works took; some were circulated in manuscript. Pater continued throughout his life to develop what we now call ‘gay discourse’ in a range of fictional and non-fictional settings and periods, but not under the banner of Greek Studies and not, as far as is known, in the gay press, such as the Spirit Lamp, The Artist and Journal of Home Culture, or the Chameleon. Preferring the screen of the Fortnightly and Macmillan’s (or even once Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, a family journal), Pater commonly addressed a largely male readership, not on the whole differentiated into ‘straight’ and ‘gay’, whose interest in the spectrum of gender ranged from the heterosexual to the homoerotic. Just as Hardy in the mid-1890s abandoned the novel for poetry, a form of publication less exposed than the novel, and which harboured his ideas more safely, so Pater in 1878 eschewed the exposure of longevity and book publication for his Greeks Studies of the 1870s, which he left to the ephemeral, higher journalism of the Fortnightly Review.

12 Appreciations: Aesthetics in the Affray

Even imagination is the slave of stolid circumstance. (Hardy 1890: 15) The year is 1889, and Walter Pater, at the age of 50, publishes his first and only book of ‘literary’ criticism. Culled from writings of twenty years, Appreciations is Pater’s first critical book since Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) and represents a project deferred. Resonant with debates of the recent past, it re-contextualises and reviews them in the present. Appearing just after Matthew Arnold’s death and the publication of Essays in Criticism: Second Series in 1888, and in the midst of debate about English as a degree subject, Appreciations is a responsive collection, addressing itself to English Literature and the romantic tradition. Other indicators of its historicity may be read in its presentation of gender as connected with scholarship, authorship and readers, and with its own writing practice and critical discourse. Looking backward, Appreciations undermines Arnold’s effort to establish English on the bedrock of C/classicism; looking forward, it is liberated by the presence of the steady circulation of gay discourse as well as by Arnold’s death. In compiling Appreciations Pater is adopting the model of collecting essays from periodicals into book form which was pioneered by Francis Jeffrey (who first published his anonymous pieces from the Edinburgh Review in 1844) and echoed by Arnold in 1865 in Essays in Criticism. Constructed of articles and fragments from diverse periodicals published between 1866 and 1888, Appreciations is visibly discontinuous. Its paste-up character is signalled in the jarring dates appended to each article, though the periodical origins are nowhere mentioned. Unity is not attempted through chronological ordering of authors. But if 225

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Appreciations is eclectic, it is also laboriously structured, with sequence, balance, weight, and de-selection palpable elements of the signifying practice. It begins and ends with essays on theoretical problems, of style and R/romanticism. ‘Style’, the first, flagship essay, featured in the book’s title and was perhaps composed in 1888 with the book in mind,1 and ‘Romanticism’ (1876b) was functionally renamed ‘Postscript’ to end the volume. Following the first essay and preceding the last are pairs of reviews of named poets – Wordsworth and Coleridge, and Morris and Rossetti – with the review element of the originals obscured, in a variety of ways. Although the word ‘Romanticism’ is suppressed by the word ‘Postscript’, the concept of romanticism is repeatedly trailed and explored in that essay and in the volume, and it is into that category that the pieces on the Lake School poets, and Morris and Rossetti, are swept. In a reverse move, the volume displaces Morris’s name to introduce prominently the concept of ‘Aesthetic Poetry’. The volume thus treats work both from the historical English Romantic movement and from the aesthetic movement, a particular form of contemporary romantic writing which produces the volume’s pervasive writing practice of ‘aesthetic criticism’. This double valence of R/romanticism is one argument of the book’s ‘Postscript’, and the text of Appreciations inscribes it. Between these wedges of nineteenth-century English Romanticism is found a slab of essays on earlier English literature which move chronologically backwards to form a core in three essays on Shakespearean drama. Less predictable are the other earlier texts by two authors of non-fictional prose, Charles Lamb and Sir Thomas Browne. An interest in prose as a genre is announced in the introductory essay on ‘Style’, and these essays find a place in this volume as much out of a commitment to prose as out of the Englishness of their subjects and their ripeness for reprinting.

(i)

‘Prose’ and censorship

As significant as the presence of these essays on prose is the absence of any essays on prose fiction. However, Appreciations is not anomalous in this respect, for the English novel was struggling for its freedom from crippling constraints and for recognition as a serious literary genre as late as 1889, although the finished work of George Eliot, Dickens and Thackeray was in circulation. Thomas Hardy argues that the cultural formations, the very institutions of literary production, are implicated:

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‘The magazine in particular and the circulating library in general do not foster the growth of the novel which reflects and reveals life. They directly tend to exterminate it by monopolising all literary space’ (Hardy 1890: 17). The ways that Appreciations negotiates the thorny and topical question of the current status of fiction in Britain show that question to be at once one of the principal subjects of the volume, and one of the conditions which produces a volume which obscures this subject. Hardy was writing in a forum on ‘Candour in English Fiction’ in the January 1890 number of the New Review, which articulates that debate six weeks after the publication of Appreciations on 15 November. The three contributors unanimously state outright what is implicit in ‘Style’ in particular: that the recent constraints on English fiction (and even on fiction in English) have produced and circulated inferior fiction in which ‘a dignité de la pensée’ (Hardy 1890: 21) is suppressed through censorship. The same author writes of ‘“the fearful price” that he [the true artist] has to pay for the privilege of writing in the English language – no less a price than the complete extinction, in the mind of every mature and penetrating reader, of sympathetic belief in his personages’ (Hardy 1890: 19). It is the similarity of the elements of the analysis of this problem in the New Review with the preoccupations of Appreciations which reveals the framework in which Pater’s discussions of prose, fiction, the status of literature, and romanticism take place. It is perhaps astonishing to twenty-first-century readers, to whom the novel is a dominant if not the dominant form in literature, that a critic like Pater, an author of fiction and writing regularly for the periodicals from 1866, reviewed only two English novels in his lifetime, Robert Elsmere in 1888 and The Picture of Dorian Gray in 1891.2 Both of the authors of these books were personally known to him, and both reviews constituted a form of puffing: the review of Mary Ward’s Elsmere was anonymous and the Wilde review, though signed, seems to have been very reluctantly undertaken as repayment for a favourable review of Appreciations by Wilde. A relatively small number of wellknown mid-century English critics regularly reviewed English fiction, with E. S. Dallas, R. H. Hutton, Geraldine Jewsbury, George Henry Lewes and Margaret Oliphant the most prominent among them. Pater’s bleak record is not atypical, and although he, like his peers, clearly read English novels, his silence on English fiction, as a critic, is pronounced.3 A second forum, on ‘The Science of Criticism’, which appeared in the New Review eighteen months after Appreciations, in May 1891,

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indicates two factors that help to produce this silence: the low status of fiction, and the status of the activity of reviewing itself. All of the critics – Henry James, Andrew Lang and Edmund Gosse – construct criticism as qualitatively divided, but the terms of James’s division are ‘reviewing’ versus ‘criticism’, with reviewing an object of contempt. Lang, in an evaluation of the usefulness of criticism, places the novel review at the bottom of his pyramid of cultural value: Occasionally modern reviews are essays worth reading. If the reviewer be a student and competent, he can hang a charming article on the revival of an old play or the success or failure of a new play. Even the review of a novel may show good manners, wit, knowledge, a happy knack of bringing ideas together, and of elucidating the grounds of liking and disliking. (Lang 1891: 406) This notion of the commonness of the novel – how it is distinct from art – points to its perceived alliance with the market, and audience of mass journalism, and paid work. In June 1888 another periodical put this more positively: ‘The writing of novels is in England more nearly a profession than any other work in literature.’ R. R. Bowker’s terms of praise for the English novel in Harper’s, an American periodical (Bowker 1888: 3), may have impressed American readers, but professionalism was still too close to ‘trade’ in late nineteenth-century Britain for the association to escape altogether a pejorative reading. When Hardy wrote of ‘“the fearful price” … of writing in the English language’ (Hardy 1890: 19), he was alluding to the tantalising proximity of French fiction, which was more free to include naturalistic detail. In the same forum, Besant’s blustering ‘The modern Elephantis may continue to write in French’ (Besant 1890: 9) is more explicit. In a long disquisition in ‘The Science of Criticism’ a year later, Henry James also registers the immanence of French literature at the time, arguing that French criticism is finer: ‘The custom of rough and ready reviewing is, among the French, much less rooted than with us, and the dignity of criticism is, to my perception, in consequence much higher’ (James 1891: 400). So, it is not altogether surprising that most of the fiction which Pater does review is French. In Appreciations, French literature is a pervasive, if uneasy, presence, and for the second edition, some six months after the first, it actually invades this book on English literature. It would seem that Pater saw the irony of the vociferous defence of ‘imaginative prose’ with which Appreciations begins, and the absence, in the volume of any subsequent

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essay on prose fiction. When ‘Aesthetic Poetry’ is rapidly removed for the second edition in May 1890, it is replaced with a previously published review of a novel: Feuillet’s La Morte. That Pater introduces in 1890 an article on a French novel into his otherwise ‘English’ volume is indicative of the current status of the French novel, of English fiction – fit only for the nursery and women according to the critics in the New Review – and of his dearth of choice (he had published only one review of English fiction to date). But the ‘Englishness’ of the 1889 volume was already defensive and precarious, achieved in part by suppression of the origins of ‘Style’ in reviews of Flaubert’s correspondence, and the refashioning of the subject from characteristics of French fiction to that of English style. While Matthew Arnold, and later George Moore and Arthur Symons, publicly extolled French culture and authors, many Victorian readers, of French fiction in particular, shared Pater’s wish to hide this taste from full view. Strategies vary, depending on gender, class and situation: from the proverbial woman reader stuffing the novel under a cushion when visitors call, to unsigned reviews by authors of both genders. French literature seems to command widespread intellectual respectability and general social disapproval. E. Lynn Linton in the New Review makes this point clear when she praises Balzac as ‘the greatest master of analytical fiction and the boldest handler of themes’ (Linton 1890: 13), and then observes: But an English Balzac would be hunted out of social life as well as out of literary existence, and his success would be only of the surreptitious hole-and-corner kind which includes shame as well as secresy – shame to both author and reader alike. The thousand and one life-like touches which make Balzac’s portraits real would be impossible in an English novel. (Linton 1890: 13) That ‘literary existence’ is the province of the adult male, and the ‘social life’ that of women and children, are allegations which make this paradox intelligible. In Blackwood’s, renowned for its fiction, its consequent female readership, and its high Tory moral ground, their reviewer of Appreciations disapprovingly unmasks the book’s affinities with French literature: ‘his models of style are all French. That is, we think a great mistake’ ([Oliphant] 1890: 144). The Spectator, noting with approval that the criticism in Appreciations is, on the whole, selfrestrained and ‘more manly’, nevertheless judges that Pater’s ‘effort to acclimatise a Gallicism’ in the book’s title ‘smacks of affectation’

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([Graves] 1889: 887, 888). Arthur Symons, male, and a connoisseur of French writing, in the more gentlemanly Athenaeum, was able to savour the French connotation of the volume’s title: ‘a word occurring very often in the essays, and used, evidently, in the sense of the French appreciation, a weighing, a valuing, more even than in the general English sense of valuing highly’ ([Symons] 1889: 813). So did another man, a friend of Pater’s and a poet, writing in an avant-grade little magazine, the Century Guild Hobby Horse, one of the sumptuous periodicals associated with the aesthetic and decadent literature and art of the late 1880s and 1890s. Edited by Herbert Home, its exotic content and its consequently largely male readership overlapped with that of the Yellow Book. Addressing his particular readers, Lionel Johnson constructs an aesthetic provenance for the French word, and identifies Pater and the volume with the introduction of this French word into English: In the French tongue of our day, that word has come to mean no more than Essays or Studies; critical estimates. But to our English the word, I think, is new: and we may fancy in it a meaning something more delicate and subtile; it would seem to promise a quality of reserve, a judgment very personal, a fine tolerance towards the reader. (Johnson 1890: 36) What is equally significant, perhaps, is that although the French element of Appreciations is noted by a number of reviews, which construct it as ‘foreign’ (whether approving or disapproving), its address to the project of English literature is hardly recognised or commented upon, except for comments on individual essays. Only Blackwood’s invokes Englishness outright. It would seem that French literature as a literature had a higher profile at this time than English, which was only just emerging as a subject in the older universities. In Appreciations (1889) French literature serves to decentre the subject, and its reiterated presence undermines the nationalist enterprise of English literature in which Pater’s book seems implicated. ‘Style’, the title of the lead essay, suppresses the name of Gustave Flaubert, in a manner analogous to the displacement of William Morris by the title ‘Aesthetic Poetry’ later in the volume. While the new titles signal the changed form and function of recycled material, they also obscure controversial subjects. The controversy surrounding the Morris essay pertains to the intertextuality of Pater’s text, its hedonism rather than Morris’s, on the occasion of the initial

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appropriation of part of the 1868 review as the ‘Conclusion’ to Studies in 1873. Removed from the second (1877) edition of that book, it was restored to the third edition in 1888. A year later, a different fragment of the 1868 Morris text is introduced into Appreciations, and in a second act of self-censorship it is withdrawn in the second edition of Appreciations in 1890. It is a testimony to the strength of the hegemonic, that a mature writer such as Pater is sufficiently wary in 1890 of charges of ‘foppery’ against ‘the Patristic school’ in the Spectator, which associate ‘Aesthetic Poetry’ with degeneracy, ‘fantastic rhapsodising’ and ‘affectation’ ([Graves] 1889: 888) to withdraw an essay from the public domain, material from the same essay he removed twelve years earlier, as a younger and less established author. But the controversy over Flaubert was different from that concerning Morris: the former attached to Pater’s subject itself. From 1857 Madame Bovary attracted charges of ‘indecency’, for which its author was tried in a French court, and the general category of French realism which it heralded had, by 1889, mutated into naturalism and the work of Zola. Both were problematic in Britain. A reference to the ‘brutal frankness of Zolaesque truth’ (Linton 1890: 11) in ‘Candour in English Fiction’ illustrates the perception of Zola’s work by writers at the time. Inscribed in Appreciations are the destabilising notions of a modern international literature on the one hand, and French literary realism, on the other, with its attendant moral tolerance. Both notions are part of other, related debates in late Victorian Britain in which Pater and his fellows participated: the project of a Modern Languages degree at Oxford emerged simultaneously with the campaign for English, and the debate about moral purity was waged variously by W. T. Stead in the Pall Mall Gazette, George Moore in Literature at Nurse, and the circulating libraries of Mudie and W. H. Smith, which refused to distribute books portraying aspects of sexuality or belief of which Average Opinion disapproved (Besant 1890: 8). That the campaigns for Modern Languages and moral purity palpably impinge on, even crowd, the subject of English may be read in the unease of Appreciations. I want to go on now to some critical questions raised in Appreciations by its announced project of aesthetic criticism. They include the question of style and its relation to censorship; the attempt to establish the romantic tradition as the ‘ground’ of English literature; gender in literary discourse and culture; and the literary production of the aesthetic critic: the aesthetic book and its relation to the articles of which it is composed. Some of these ‘questions’ (of style, romanticism, gender,

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literature) are foregrounded in the text. In them contemporary culture may be seen to interrogate itself, but it should be noted that the culture in question is not static or unified, but various and differentiated over time. The questions in Appreciations are posed over the twenty odd years in which its writings were produced, as well as in the year 1889 in which it first appeared as a single text. Moreover some of these questions are those which preoccupy critical writing in our own time, gender for example, and defining literature and defending criticism. Of the remaining questions, some are addressed far more indirectly in the text, such as the canon and university English, and the relation of the book to the periodical press. The identification of these questions as subjects derives from the position of this text, the one you are reading, in history. The historicity of the subject of this essay, aesthetics and Appreciations, is a complex matrix of time ranging from about 1790 to the present, and of readings from positions of positions: Aestheticism on Romanticism, contemporary classicism, and itself; twenty-first century cultural materialism on Aestheticism, late Victorian cultural production and gendered discourse. So the ‘affray’ of the title is constituted not only in the moment of production of Appreciations in 1889, but in the processes by which that text and this text produce meanings. In a period such as the nineteenth century, when literature is linked publicly with responsibility for national morality and salvation, attempts to establish literary space outside of these constraints may come from a number of directions. Hardy and Moore ask, directly, for the link to be abandoned: concurring with the censors, they view the problem as one of subjectivity, and demand that censored issues – adultery, sexuality – be permitted to loom into view, irrespective of the effect on national morality. Pater takes a different tack, which addresses the problem obliquely, and avoids confrontation. Instead, he, and others arguing from the aesthetic position, put forward formalist claims which minimise the question of subjectivity at which the censorship is directed. Proffering style as a subject is part of this strategy of resistance; it permits Pater, for example, in his essay on style, to address the question of subjectivity only glancingly and tokenly, at the last moment possible. So style, whatever its positive values, is effectively a displacement of subjectivity in response to the demands on literature to articulate national and hegemonic morality. Pater’s exclusion of the English novel in the essay (and in the book) also helps keep his critique implicit. The defence of imaginative prose in ‘Style’ does not emerge as a defence of the novel. It is an invitation to treat such prose – liberated

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from fact and the prosaic, and allied with the imagination – on an equal footing with imaginative poetry, which is not necessarily intrinsically distinct from prose or at the apex of cultural value. The assault on extrinsic fact with which Pater supports this argument is part of a belief in the inferiority of the experiential world. This was articulated early in his work, in the ‘Preface’ to Studies, when he appropriated Arnold’s classical dictum by rewriting and transforming it to the romantic proposition, ‘What is this song or picture to me?’ In ‘Style’ the artistic quality of prose is made dependent on its ‘imaginative sense of fact’, truth lying with the former rather than the latter half of the phrase. Beauty is not qualitatively different from truth, but constitutes its extreme form, ‘the finer accommodation of speech to that vision within’ (Pater 1889c: 6). If much is made of ‘truth’ here (later in the essay it is rendered as ‘vrai vérité’, Pater 1889c: 32), Pater makes it quite clear, through repetition, that ‘truth’ is subjective, relative and a function of language and readership. Where the relation between signifier and ‘what it signifies’ (Pater 1889c: 19) is discussed, the signified remains within the realm of ideas – the initiatory apprehension or view’ (Pater 1889c: 19), in a mediated relation to the external world and in a transparent relation with language. With an eye to the hegemonic constraints on fiction, ‘Style’ insists on the capaciousness of good literature, the ‘eclectic’ nature of the principle of ‘vrai vérité’: ‘how many kinds of style it covers, explains, justifies and at the same time safeguards! Scott’s facility, Flaubert’s deeply pondered evocation of “the phrase”, are equally good art’ (Pater 1889c: 32). This tolerance is evident too in the explanation of ‘literary architecture’, the image in ‘Style’ which most directly invokes the work of John Ruskin, one of those whose moral programme for art Pater is opposing. Like Ruskin, Pater welcomes variety in architectural design – ‘an entire, perhaps very intricate, composition, which shall be austere, ornate, argumentative, fanciful’ (Pater 1889c: 20). But instead of these diverse qualities attesting to formally anarchic and socially organic individualism, Pater with Flaubert requires ‘a single, almost visual image, vigorously forming an entire, perhaps very intricate, composition’ (Pater 1889c: 20). Here the substitution of the formal for the social/spiritual criterion for art is explicit. Formalism after Marx, in a post-structuralist and postmodernist present, does not seem to have much to recommend it. But if the strategies of ‘Style’ are regarded as part of the discourse of resistance to the censorship of literature enforced by the institutions of the period, then the meaning of the advocacy of style may be enlarged to

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comprise not only formalist ends, which establish the autonomy of art from culture. ‘Style’ may be viewed as an intervention in the literary politics of the day, which allies itself with an alternative culture to the hegemonic culture – with realism and naturalism, with George Moore and Thomas Hardy, and with the liberation of what Hardy terms the ‘monopolising’ of ‘literary space’ (Hardy 1890: 17). ‘Style’ is part of a collective attempt in the late 1880s and early 1890s to topple certain cultural institutions and cultural values. Nor does ‘Style’ limit itself to formalism. In the last paragraph of the essay, subjectivity appears in order to distinguish great art from good art. Formalist criteria pertain, in Pater’s scheme, to good art, the great bulk of literature within print culture, which properly appears in the domain of circulating libraries and magazines. But in glancingly adumbrating criteria for the greatest art, Pater momentarily joins Hardy and Moore in a direct advocacy of an enhanced subjectivity, a ‘greater dignity of its interests’: ‘It is on the quality of the matter it informs or controls, its compass, its variety, its alliance to great ends, or the depth of the note of revolt, or the largeness of hope in it, that the greatness of literary art depends’ (Pater 1889c: 36). The only novel on Pater’s list of the greatest literature is French, Les Misérables. Overall, the list of four works – The Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost, the Hugo, and the English Bible – is catholic, European rather than English, and divided equally between poetry and prose. While it is not offered as exhaustive but as exemplary, it is noteworthy that its historical range includes contemporary literature, and that the contemporary form is prose, and fiction. In its exclusion of classical Greek and Latin texts, it fulfils its function as the opening of a book on ‘modern’ and English literature, but in terms of the project of English, it is significant that it excludes Shakespeare and all drama; the absence of Shakespeare’s work in the list contrasts with the attention to his work in the structure of Appreciations, in which he is the sole author whose works are treated singly, and the only author accorded three essays, which appear at the core of the structure. One of many disjunctions in the volume, this double focus is the inscription of writing from divergent periods and discourses. This last paragraph of ‘Style’, which roots great art in cultures, histories and politics, has been regretted by formalists, but neglected by materialists. Rather than seeing it as an inexplicable volte face on Pater’s part, or worse, a capitulation to the hegemonic, I want to suggest that the two positions in ‘Style’ – the formalism that makes up its bulk and the conclusion which enhances subjectivity – are both part of a strategy of resistance to the censorship of the novel in the period, a subject itself suppressed in Appreciations.4

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This question of the nature of the novel is part of a contemporary preoccupation with the nature of literature more generally. In Raymond Williams’ discussion of the changing definition of literature, in Keywords, he notes the movement of the word away from an inclusive definition which takes in all print culture, to one which locates literature in the more elitist domain of writing to distinguish it from journalism. A preoccupation with the definition of literature is unmistakable in Appreciations, and on the whole Pater’s conception is elitist not in terms of class per se, but in terms of education. It is elitist or, in another light, specialised, self-consciously and contingently. That is, he claims no universal, essentialist character for literature (‘Different classes of persons, at different times, make, of course, very various demands upon literature’, Pater 1889c: 14), but adumbrates a particular class of readership, author and temperament for the definition he proffers. The author and reader are scholarly, attentive, susceptible and grave, the work possesses ‘intellectual beauty’ (Pater 1889c: 27), and is characterised by a dearth of ornament (pace Ruskin) which derives from a ‘tact of omission’ (Pater 1889c: 15). The analogy is with ‘fine art’ (Pater 1889c: 27) free from ‘vulgar decoration’ (Pater 1889c: 15). This structure of opposition between literary refinement and vulgarity is repeated in an image of opposition between ‘a sort of cloistral refuge’ afforded by literature from ‘a certain vulgarity in the actual world’ (Pater 1889c: 15). All of this corroborates Raymond Williams’ hypothesis of an attempt in this period to locate literature outside the commercial sphere of journalism and publishing. But Pater’s definition is tentative, consciously specialised, from an articulated position within higher education. Moreover, Pater notes the limitations of this perception of literature on two counts, both I think attaching to gender. The first registration of the limits of the specialised kind of literature he advocates occurs early in ‘Style’ where he notes that the scholarly author or reader excludes most women ‘under a system of education which still to so large an extent limits real scholarship to men’ (Pater 1889c: 8). Debarred from access to education, most women are debarred entry to Pater’s categories of author or reader: ‘In his selfcriticism, he [the (male) author] supposes always that sort of reader who will go (full of eyes) warily, considerately, though without consideration for him, over the ground which the female conscience traverses so lightly, so amiably’ (Pater 1889c: 8). This is the division of readership, between male and female, alleged by James, Hardy and Besant in the New Review. However, instead of resolving the problem by solutions which separate out ‘realistic’ fiction for male readers

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alone, Pater analyses it as one of culture rather than resorting to essentialism, or a unitary construction of woman. Pater’s intervention is informed and topical; in the late 1880s the movement in Oxford for higher education for women was engaged in managing its success, as the first Halls for women, Somerville and Lady Margaret Hall, had opened in 1879. Clara Pater, one of the two sisters with whom Pater shared a house, had a long association with the movement, and served as Resident Tutor at Somerville from 1886 to 1894. Her activities, and those of a number of his contemporary (male) Fellows, would have alerted Pater to the adverse position of women who sought higher education. There is another gloss on gender in ‘Style’, which pertains to sexuality as an unacceptable subject of writing. Embedded in two other safe discourses in play, it is effectively obscured, except to those (largely male) readers alive to the codes of gendered discourse. Intertextuality is a key factor here, both in our reading and in the writing. Where ‘Style’ alludes to the self-censorship of writing in nineteenth-century Britain – which Walter Besant actually advocates in the New Review in his contribution to ‘Candour in English Fiction’ – it is in the discourses of theology and critical theory. Blustering and bloody-minded, Besant simply demands self-censorship from British writers in his rousing concluding paragraph, and consigns sexuality in literature to the French language: The author, however, must recognise in his work the fact that such Love is outside the social pale and is destructive of the very basis of society. He must. This is not a law laid down by that great authority, Average Opinion, but by Art herself, who will not allow the creation of impossible figures moving in an unnatural atmosphere. Those writers who yearn to treat of the adulteress and the courtesan because they love to dwell on images of lust are best kept in check by existing discouragements. The modern Elephantis may continue to write in French. (Besant 1890: 9) ‘Style’ both defies this interdiction in its writing practice and addresses the issue of ‘what can never be uttered’ (Pater 1889c: 24) so circumspectly that self-censorship is articulated. In the text a theological mind–soul dichotomy is developed patiently, over a number of paragraphs (Pater 1889c: 22–4), with soul the presence of ‘the altar-fire’ (Pater 1889c: 23) in language. Beginning in theological discourse, the text moves explicitly to a discourse which is secular: ‘But something of the same kind acts with similar power in certain writers of quite than theological literature, on behalf of some wholly personal and peculiar

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sense of theirs’ (Pater 1889c: 23). This secular discourse is apparently that of criticism, whose ‘prophet’–writer’s ‘soul’ works through ‘electric affinity’. The discourse becomes that of love, friendship, affinity – signalled by the substitution of the word ‘perfume’ for the word ‘colour’ (Pater 1889c: 23) – for a few explanatory culminating sentences, which begin ‘There are some to whom nothing has any real interest, or real meaning, except as operative in a given person’ (Pater 1889c: 24). Although ‘soul’ in writing is validated in this text through the laboured pursuit of the mind–soul opposition, the argument ends by positing the opacity and unutterability of soul due to the nature of language. Leading directly to that part of ‘Style’ in which Flaubert is introduced as ‘the martyr of literary style’ (Pater 1889c: 24), it ends in the contestation by Flaubert of the discourse of sexuality with that of literary criticism. So the text moves from the discourse of theology to that of literary criticism, and from an insistent introduction of the notion of ‘soul’ in literature to an allegation of its partial eclipse: ‘it is still a characteristic of soul, in this sense of the word, that it does but suggest what can never be uttered, not as being different from, or more obscure than, what actually gets said, but as containing that plenary substance of which there is only one phase or facet in what is there expressed’ (Pater 1889c: 24). This gloss on ‘soul’ – ‘what can never be uttered’ – appears just before Flaubert and the text of his letters are introduced. That the discourse in which this gloss appears is gendered and sexual is clear not only from its position in the text and from the juxtaposition with Flaubert which follows, but also from another form of intertextuality, the provenance of the passage. The passage containing the parallel between the influence of art on the individual and that between living persons recalls ‘Winckelmann’, and other early essays published eventually in Studies (1873). Versions of these appear in Appreciations, such as ‘Coleridge’s Writings’ and ‘Poems by William Morris’, in which the living-persons part of the equation is constructed as a passionate friendship between a male mentor and a younger male pupil or companion. It seems clear that the definition of literature put forward in ‘Style’ is self-conscious, provisional, and contingent on what are viewed as the conditions of nineteenth-century culture and language; while it is largely written by men for men, it can only ‘suggest what can never be uttered’ (Pater 1889c: 24). Pater’s intervention in the censorship debate is written from a homosexual position which is never explicitly rendered visible in the argument. If the intervention of ‘Style’ in

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that debate is oblique compared with the visibility of those by George Moore, Besant, Hardy and Lynn Linton, the key lies in the relation of sexual politics, the discourse of gender and aesthetic questions, and in the construction of homosexuality and heterosexuality in the period. The four essays on the modern poets, Wordsworth, Coleridge, William Morris and D. G. Rossetti, frame the collection after ‘Style’. They comprise an historical critique of what is put forward as the English romantic tradition, with its first and second waves of Romanticism and Aestheticism. This construct engages with other contestants for dominance in the ‘tradition’ or discourse of English literature then being forged – notably, a ‘salvationary’ classical discourse authorised by the ancients as recommended by Matthew Arnold, and a ‘moral’ romantic discourse authorised by medieval Christianity, advocated by John Ruskin. The ‘grounding’ of Appreciations in romanticism is reinforced by the concluding essay, ‘Postscript’. Here opposition between ‘classical’ and ‘romantic’ is collapsed much in the way that difference between prose and poetry is tempered in ‘Style’: as the ‘poetic’ is brought into the remit of prose in ‘Style’, so the ‘classical’ is lodged on a continuum with the ‘romantic’ in ‘Postscript’. Characteristically, Pater’s tack is to avoid confrontation: to note difference, but to entertain its play, rather than deplore and eradicate it. This crafty, cheeky, sleight of hand works by subversion and the undermining of rational argument rather than by the direct confrontations which can characterise Arnold’s essays, strewn with surnames. The play of the text is one quality that distinguishes the discourses of Appreciations from those of Arnold and Ruskin.5 Another can be identified in connection with the Rossetti essay. I have suggested that the discourse of gender is found throughout Appreciations, in ‘Style’, and in a particular and common form in the early essays included here. It takes yet another form in ‘Rossetti’ (1883), a later essay, and that is a defence of the ‘fleshly’. Andrew Leng (1989) has suggested that the provenance of this piece, written when Rossetti’s death permitted his inclusion in T. H. Ward’s anthology The English Poets, is part of Pater’s longstanding contestation of Ruskin’s views; Pater’s strategy is construed as a claim of Rossetti for the Aesthetes just as Ruskin rejects him as a realist. What interests me here is the language of Pater’s appropriation, which introduces obliquely another, by now notorious, text into ‘Rossetti’, the pseudonymous piece by ‘Thomas Maitland’ (Robert Buchanan) in the Contemporary Review in 1871 called ‘The Fleshly School of Poetry’, of which Rossetti’s work was the occasion and

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principal subject. While Buchanan’s piece appeared over a decade before ‘Rossetti’ was written, it had been re-invoked in 1882 in obituaries of Rossetti. Pater also had particular reason to remember the article, which virulently attacked the work of members of his circle – in particular the pictures and prose of Simeon Solomon, a close friend of Pater’s in 1871, who was arrested in 1873 for homosexual offences, and subsequently ended his life as a vagrant and destitute. Additionally, ‘The Fleshly School of Poetry’ took as its subject of attack precisely the romantic discourse and tradition in English literature which Appreciations advocates: English society of one kind purchases the Day’s Doings. English society of another kind goes into ecstasy over Mr. Solomon’s pictures – pretty pieces of morality such as ‘Love dying by the breath of Lust.’ There is not much to choose between the two objects of admiration, except that painters like Mr. Solomon lend actual genius to worthless subjects, and thereby produce veritable monsters – like the lonely devils that danced round Saint Anthony. Mr. Rossetti owes his so-called success to the same causes … the man … parades his private sensations before a coarse public … the fleshly feeling is everywhere. ([Buchanan] 1871: 338–9) This part of the attack identifies Rossetti and Solomon as two of its objects, specifies a charge of sexual immorality, alleges it to be a ubiquitous cultural malaise, and valorises Christian orthodoxy as the alternative position. If James Knowles’s Contemporary Review in 1871 had a policy of open exploration of all aspects of a question, the cultural formation of the Contemporary is nevertheless within the religious press: the Christian orientation of the ‘Fleshly School’ is endorsed by the authority of the journal. Another discourse here is that of cultural, intellectual and economic elitism, whereby the work of Rossetti and Solomon is slurred by association with the coarse ‘public’ masses by way of the ubiquity of the malaise, the parallel with the Day’s Doings, and the allegation of trivia or ‘worthless subjects’ ([Buchanan] 1871: 339). It is this last phrase which suggests to me that Buchanan’s text figures in the intertextuality of ‘Style’ as well as ‘Dante Gabriel Rossetti’. Where Pater’s ‘Rossetti’ essay addresses the charge of fleshliness (by embracing it), ‘Style’ turns the body–soul/expression–thought argument in Buchanan, exemplified here, on its head: The fleshliness of [Tennyson’s] ‘Vivien’ may indeed be described as the distinct quality held in common by all the members of the last

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sub-Tennysonian school, and it is a quality which becomes unwholesome when there is no moral or intellectual quality to temper and control it. Fully conscious of this themselves, the fleshly gentlemen have bound themselves … to extol fleshliness as the distinct and supreme end of poetic and pictorial art; to aver that poetic expression is greater than poetic thought, and by inference that the body is greater than the soul, and sound superior to sense; and that the poet, properly to develop his poetic faculty, must be an intellectual hermaphrodite, to whom the very facts of day and night are lost in a whirl of aesthetic terminology … they are creedless. ([Buchanan] 1871: 335) Again, Christianity is valorised and abnormal sexuality alleged, but the body–mind, expression–thought dualities are additionally adduced, under the aegis of the ‘aesthetic’. In Pater’s ‘Dante Gabriel Rossetti’, in a passage which may be taken to invoke and reply to Buchanan without once naming him, the terms of the dualities are collapsed: a tradition is constructed on the authority of Dante, whom Rossetti and Pater himself are then shown to follow: In our actual concrete experience, the two trains of phenomena which the words matter and spirit do but roughly distinguish, play inextricably into each other. Practically, the church of the Middle Age by its aesthetic worship, its sacramentalism, its real faith in the resurrection of the flesh, had set itself against that Manichean opposition of spirit and matter, and its results in men’s way of taking life; and in this, Dante is the central representative of its spirit. To him, in the vehement and the impassioned heat of his conceptions, the material and the spiritual are fused and blent. … And here again, by force of instinct, Rossetti is one with him. His chosen type of beauty is one, ‘Whose speech Truth knows not from her thought, Nor Love her body from her soul.’ Like Dante, he knows no region of spirit which shall not be sensuous also, or material. (Pater 1889c: 236) All the terms of the Buchanan passage are here (in italics), contested in the new text, apparently in connection with Rossetti’s work. But that work, the subjectivity of ‘Dante Gabriel Rossetti’, is another, second

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site of intertextuality: the essay may be seen to appropriate its apparent referent to its own textuality. The notion of passionate friendship invoked in ‘Style’ and other essays in Appreciations is attributed to Rossetti, as it is elsewhere to Coleridge, Wordsworth and Morris: ‘For Rossetti, then, the great affections of persons to each other, swayed and determined, in the case of his highly pictorial genius, mainly by that so-called material loveliness, formed the great undeniable reality in things, the solid resisting substance’ (Pater 1889c: 237). Buchanan’s charge against aesthetic poetry and painting ‘Fleshliness’, the celebration of the body, the sensuous, the material – is taken on board in ‘Dante Gabriel Rossetti’, and acknowledged as a key characteristic of the aesthetic phase of the romantic tradition constructed here. Inscribed in Appreciations is a materialist discourse of gender in which corporeal sexuality – both homosexual and heterosexual – is a defended constituent. Buchanan’s disingenuous castigation of Solomon and Rossetti’s ‘private sensations’ as ‘worthless subjects’ ([Buchanan] 1871: 339) is another charge registered by Appreciations. It is addressed in ‘Dante Gabriel Rossetti’, where the poet’s ‘serious purpose’ and ‘serious beauty’ (Pater 1889c: 234) are likewise praised: ‘Here was one, who had a matter to present to his readers, to himself at least, in the first instance, so valuable, so real and definite, that his primary aim, as regards form or expression in his verse, would be but its exact equivalence to those data within’ (Pater 1889c: 229). It is also addressed in ‘Style’ where its obverse, the worth of a subject, is singled out as an important determining factor in evaluating the greatness of literature. But the list of works associated with this category, including as it does Les Misérables and Esmond, clearly exemplifies a romantic tradition. In the debate about the duality of mind and soul in art, ‘Style’ foregrounds the expression/soul side of the equation where Buchanan champions the ‘moral or intellectual quality to temper and control it’ ([Buchanan] 1871: 335), or mind. If the profile of English literature in Appreciations gives generic pride of place to poetry, through its four essays on Romantic and Aesthetic verse, and denies the English novel, it does include prose and drama. But these five essays at the core of the volume are notably lighter and shorter than the framing essays at its outer limits, in which the weight and real engagements of Appreciations reside. A model for disengagement is offered in several of the core essays. It is ‘the humourist’, a word that figured prominently in the original title of ‘Charles Lamb’, which appeared in the Fortnightly in 1878 as ‘The Character of the

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Humourist: Charles Lamb’. It reappears in ‘Sir Thomas Browne’ (Pater 1889c: 131), where it is defined as one to whom all the world is but a spectacle in which nothing is really alien from himself, who has hardly a sense of the distinction between great and little among things that are at all, and whose half-pitying, half-amused sympathy is called out especially by the seemingly small interests and traits of character in the things or the people around him. Certainly, in an age stirred by great causes … that is not a type to which one would wish to reduce all men of letters. Still, in an age apt also to become severe, or even cruel … the character of the humourist may well find its proper influence, through that serene power, and the leisure it has for conceiving second thoughts, on the tendencies, conscious or unconscious, of the fierce wills around it. (Pater 1889c: 131–2) It is clear that the three pieces on Shakespeare’s plays largely take up this position of amused observation. Two – on ‘Love’s Labours Lost’ and ‘Shakspere’s English Kings’ – are characterised by a discourse in which beautiful (Richard II) or fashionable (Biron) males, whose links with homosexual culture are glancingly indicated, occupy centre stage. While exotic and morbid elements surface persistently in all of these compositions, they are inscribed in a disengaged, comedic discourse in which the aesthetic (in Lamb), the poetic (in Browne), the fashionable and the fop (in ‘Love’s Labours Lost’), poetic form (in ‘Measure for Measure’ and ‘Shakspere’s English Kings’), and personal beauty (in ‘Shakspere’s English Kings’) prevail. This discourse functions in a very similar manner to the way in which I suggested the emphasis on style functions in the context of late Victorian censorship, as an evasion of engagement with the question of the morality of the subject. However, in ‘Measure for Measure’, the most serious essay of this core group and the earliest, the ethical and abstract question of the morality of art is raised materially, by means of intertextuality, through the morality play. To address the Victorian demand for morality in art in this oblique manner is a clever move. Rendered strange and crude, morality in art is viewed disadvantageously in relation to a distant historical period, and materially, through a literary form: ‘The old “moralities” exemplified most often some rough and ready lesson’ (Pater 1889c: 189). With the same sleight of hand, the claims of form over matter are positioned parenthetically rather than argued, and the ways in which morality is complicated by contingency are foregrounded.

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This 1874 essay makes a case entirely compatible with the position of 1888/9 in ‘Style’, though without participation in the larger, public censorship debate of the 1880s and 1890s, which contributed to the ways in which this essay would be read in 1889 when it (re-)appeared in Appreciations. The link made here between style and the evasion of the demand for morality is very explicit: This ethical interest, though it can escape no attentive reader, yet, in accordance with that artistic law which demands the predominance of form everywhere over the mere matter or subject handled, is not to be wholly separated from the special circumstances, necessities, embarrassments, of these particular dramatic persons. (Pater 1889c: 188–9) Morality is shown to be contingent, and the justice with which the play resolves this ethical element is termed ‘poetic’: it is a function of soul rather than mind. Shakespeare too is corralled into the humourist category: the poetry of this play is full of the peculiarities of Shakspere’s poetry, so in its ethics it is an epitome of Shakspere’s moral judgments. They are the moral judgments of an observer, of one who sits as a spectator, and knows how the threads in the design before him hold together under the surface: they are the judgments of the humourist also, who follows with a half-amused but always pitiful sympathy, the various ways of human disposition, and sees less distance than ordinary men between what are called respectively great and little things. It is not always that poetry can be the exponent of morality; but it is this aspect of morals which it represents most naturally. (Pater 1889c: 190–1) As discrete pieces of work, these core essays are shapely and engaging, but as parts of a cumulative outline of the canon or scope of an English literature they disappoint. Appreciations has none of the conviction or programme concerning English literature that is found in Hippolyte Taine’s history for example, though it is Pater’s only collection of essays on English literature. We know from Pater’s library borrowings that he knew of Taine’s work from 1874 and, in 1886, three years before Appreciations appeared, Pater specifically addressed the question of English literature. At the height of the debate about the introduction of Modern Languages and English into degree status at

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Oxford, Pater, like many of his peers, published work on this question. In February he contributed an anonymous review of ‘Four Books for Students of English Literature’ to the Guardian, an Anglican weekly (17 February: 246–7). In November his statement on ‘English at the Universities’ in the Pall Mall Gazette (27 November: 1–2) showed him to be anxious to protect Classics. While cautiously welcoming the study of not only English but also modern European literature, the basis of his approval is that literary (rather than philological) work in these modern literatures could aid students in their classical studies. It is at best a tepid endorsement, qualified by the complexity of the position from which it is written: Classical Fellow, reader and reviewer of modern European literature, and English author. I have already shown the ways in which French literature and fiction impinge on the Englishness of Appreciations, and I want also to suggest now that Appreciations represents a displacement of classical literature as well, a repression which is significantly more successful and ruthless. After the painful aftermath of the publication of Pater’s first book in 1873, traces of a number of projected books have survived. In late 1874 the Academy alerts readers to a series of essays on Shakespeare to follow ‘Measure for Measure’; from this, and from the preponderance of English literature in the books Pater borrowed from libraries in the mid-1870s, Billie Inman argues that, initially, Pater’s second book was to treat ‘British authors, primarily Shakespeare’ (Inman 1990: xxvi–vii). In 1878 plans for a collection successively titled The School of Giorgione and Other Studies and then Dionysus and Other Studies are put to Macmillan, who produces proofs, but the book is withdrawn before final printing.6 How do the English, visual-art, and classical orientations of these successive projects relate to Appreciations, which could be said to represent the deferral of these aborted plans? The 1878 proposal does contain a number of the English essays of the 1889 volume: ‘Wordsworth’, the Lamb essay, and the two early Shakespeare pieces on Love’s Labours Lost and Measure for Measure, but it is far more eclectic than Appreciations, as it also has ‘The School of Giorgione’ (which looks back to the first book on Renaissance art) and four essays on Greek myths, two on Demeter and two on Dionysus. In addition it contains ‘Romanticism’, also in Appreciations, which is preponderantly about European literary culture. What happens to these essays? The piece on Giorgione is viewed as a postscript to the visual arts work and added to the third edition of The Renaissance, published in January 1888, almost two years before

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Appreciations appeared in November 1889. The Shakespeare essays are built on, and ‘Shakespere’s English Kings’ is written for Appreciations and published separately abroad, in Scribner’s in April 1889, while Appreciations is in the press. The Wordsworth essay is utilised as the kernel of what becomes the English romanticism element of the volume, developed by the inclusion of the Coleridge, Morris and Rossetti essays. Lamb, the primary romantic writer of English prose, is bastioned by the addition of ‘Style’ and ‘Sir Thomas Browne’. Only the essays on Greek mythology are unaccommodated, and they remain unpublished in book form for the duration of their author’s lifetime. It is a significant suppression, one that attests to the power of the hegemonic between 1878 and 1894, the fear it engendered, and the self-censorship that resulted. While the fight for literary expression of heterosexual sexuality was publicly waged by the late 1880s in Britain, implicit expression of homosexuality was still guarded, covert, and fraught; explicit defence of homosexuality in public was illegal and impossible, even in 1895 by Wilde, who had conducted his life relatively flamboyantly. Greek culture in this period became a byword for homosexuality (Tyrwhitt 1877) and Pater, much of whose work was manifestly sensuous, bold and risk-taking, would not leave himself open to such predictable censure. Appreciations, in fact, inscribes the position on English literature Pater takes in 1886. European literature is yapping at its heels, and in so far as English literature – denuded of fiction – is hegemonic and ‘easier’ (that is, less dangerous and more accessible) than classics (Pater 1886c: 1), it does displace the classical in Pater’s selection of work for Appreciations. Despite these measures, however, the Blackwood’s reviewer of the volume is ominously percipient, identifying the classical and the French literatures behind the façade of the English volume: ‘Greek as Mr. Pater is in soul, his models of style are all French’ ([Oliphant] 1890: 144). While the nature of this barbed remark inscribes the culture and politics of Blackwood’s Magazine, that of a Tory periodical renowned for its fiction and which attracts in consequence a high percentage of female readers, it also offers a vantage point on Appreciations. Literature in English, the vernacular language, possessed gender and class qualities in the 1880s. Among the literature, it was those deprived of access to higher, classical education, women and working men, who were among the most avid readers of English literature, and while working men largely read science and social science, the women largely read fiction. By treating English literature, Appreciations itself moves into the sphere of female readership, for women in the 1880s probably consti-

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tuted the majority of formal students of English literature (through Extension and other lectures), and also, through the circulating libraries, a significant portion of the general readership of fiction. By excluding English fiction from his book on English literature, Pater signals not only the censorship which results in the educated person’s apparent preference for French fiction and the low esteem of the English novel in comparison, but also the maleness of his book. Its male vision of English literature accords with that of educated male readers who engage with the classical genres of English literature, poetry and non-fictional prose, which were viewed as more weighty than the novel. In its concentration on male perceptions of subjectivity, Appreciations resembles the contemporary periodical addressed to a male readership, the Nineteenth Century, which barred fiction and included just those subjects (religion and philosophy) excluded by Cornhill as unsuitable for a family readership. Margaret Oliphant, the anonymous Blackwood’s reviewer, is registering the female territory that Appreciations appears to occupy in its map of English literature when she identifies its underlying French and classical elements as culpable. I want to end with another reviewer’s identification of disjunctions in Appreciations. William Sharp in the Glasgow Herald (28 November 1889) prominently poses the question whether Appreciations is a crude commercial venture, ‘composed simply of reprints’ ([Sharp] 1889: 9), or an aesthetic book possessing ‘infinite … charm of an exquisitely refined style, of a thoroughly trained critical faculty, of an exceptionally acute and delicate insight’ ([Sharp] 1889: 9). As an anonymous reviewer writing a puff for his friend’s book, Sharp is in no doubt that Appreciations belongs in the latter category. What is interesting is not his judgement, but his view of literary production and the models which he juxtaposes – that of mass readership served by the ‘mass of periodical literature’ from which Pater’s essays ‘stood out in bold relief’ ([Sharp] 1889: 9), and the beautiful book for the delicate, refined, educated, rare sensibility. The review is at pains to distinguish Pater’s book from its origins in the periodical press, and this is achieved by repeatedly noting the care, revisions and amplifications that the periodical texts have undergone before being consigned to the aesthetic book. The anxiety attaching to the danger posed by journalism to literature is manifest in the excessive claim that ‘the book is as essentially one work as though the separate essays were but sectional parts for the reader’s convenience: a unity of aim animates it throughout’ ([Sharp] 1889: 9). While acknowledging the expanse of years over which the essays were written, Sharp

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steadily attributes to the book the qualities of art and literature rather than those of journalism: unity, coherence, universality, refinement, and not publishing to occasion, diversity, topicality and spontaneity. He also mistakenly identifies as ‘new’ the essay ‘Aesthetic Poetry’ and the ‘Postscript’, which older (or sharper) readers will recognise as reprints as well. What is of interest is that Pater’s collection of critical essays on aesthetic questions is reviewed in the late 1880s in terms of material and cultural production, even if these dimensions are denied and categorically suppressed in favour of an oppositional highculture, art model. I have read Appreciations as the cultural inscription of a highly specific period, the late 1880s and the late 1990s. Aesthetics may be seen to be a contingent order of knowledge, implicated here in the institutionalisation of knowledge, sexual politics and gendered discourse.

13 The Profession of Letters: Pater’s Greek Studies and their Markets

(i)

Journalism and literature Let us face the matter boldly. Do you not by Literature – forgive me if I hurt you – do you not perhaps mean Journalism? There is a good deal of airy talking nowadays about the difference between Literature and Journalism; and there is no easier or more effective way of depreciating a friend’s work than to praise it for very good Journalism, but hardly Literature. But in truth the line is not easy to draw: one is conscious of a difference, but the two really melt almost indistinguishably into each other; and to lay your finger on the precise point where the one ends and the other begins would have puzzled that great maker of definitions, Samuel Johnson himself. … But if by Journalism you mean only the daily effusions of the newspapers, admirable as for their purpose they so often are, they cannot rightly be included under the head of Literature, though possibly a little more of the latter element might do them no great harm. ([Morris] 1887: 305) But, setting politics … and religion aside, there are many other subjects capable of treatment to which it seems to me somewhat arbitrary to refuse the name of Literature because it is published in a quarterly or monthly magazine. I grant you that often, too often, what you will read in such journals does not deserve that name; but that is not due to the inevitable laws of its manufacture. Not to mention the great essayists of the last century, consider how many famous names in Literature have within this century of ours worked in this way. Scott and Southey, Hazlitt 248

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and Lamb, Coleridge and De Quincey, Carlyle and Macaulay, Thackeray and Dickens. ([Morris] 1887: 307) This anonymous account of the relationship between literature and journalism is unsurprisingly that of an editor of a monthly periodical, Mowbray Morris, who contributes a series of three articles on ‘The Profession of Letters’ to his own periodical, Macmillan’s Magazine between August 1887 and March 1888. It was Morris who published the vast majority of Pater’s contributions to Macmillan’s, the house journal of the publisher of Pater’s books, which, with one exception, largely consisted of pieces previously published in periodicals. In Pater’s career, like that of many of his contemporary writers after midcentury,1 material which appeared in journals routinely reappeared to constitute his books; the transfer of format from periodical to book – a difference of cultural ‘manufacture’ – was the means by which Pater’s journalism became literature, and ephemera permanent. The traffic between periodicals and books, and journalism and literature, is the subject of a wider contemporary discourse of reiterated anxiety about the threat of the ‘other’ on the part of journalists and authors alike. Mowbray Morris’s assertion of the porousness of literature and its compatibility with journalism are, for example, bitterly contested by George Gissing in New Grub Street in 1891, and by much other writing. In this debate about the relation of popular literature to Art, issues included the socio-economic class of journalists, authors, and audience; the alleged conditions of production; and criteria for quality. For Morris, and for the period, the article/essay was far more prominent in the galaxy of Literature than it is today, and this strengthened the overlap between literature and journalism. Half of the literary authors Morris quotes – Scott, Southey, Hazlitt, Lamb, Coleridge, De Quincey, Carlyle, Macaulay, and Thackeray and Dickens – are, like Pater, essayists (a literary term) or writers of articles (the journalistic term); moreover, the ‘novelists’ (Scott, Dickens, Thackeray) and ‘poets’ (Southey, Coleridge) each served as founder and editor of more than one periodical, and as a contributor of articles and reviews as well as poetry or fiction.

(ii)

Greek studies

Pater’s Greek studies largely comprise articles/essays pertaining to classical texts, art and architecture; if in the nineteenth century they fell

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into that period’s capacious category of literature, in the twenty-first they might be as easily claimed by art history, archaeology (Farnell 1934: 76–7, and Wright 1975: 99) and classics as by English. They appeared in three monthly periodicals and eventually in two books, Plato and Platonism and Greek Studies, the first initiated by the author in 1893, and the second by the author’s literary executor in 1895. I want to make visible the processes of production of this body of prose – lectures, articles, essays, chapters – as it was shaped, variously, for different audiences for different textual occasions at different periods. I am particularly interested in why the essays on classical subjects in Plato and Platonism were published in volume form by Pater while the articles in Greek Studies, almost all of which were written and published earlier, were not. The cultural production of these texts is, like that of all texts, related to their subject and how it is constituted; Greek studies in the 1890s as a field and a discourse is thick with gender markers, and Pater’s texts are often transgressive,2 for example in their celebration of the male youth and his body, their focus on myths of incest and ecstasy, and their pleasure in violence and the bestial grotesque. My assumption throughout, which I have argued elsewhere (Brake 1994b), is that Pater is pursuing a self-conscious and sustained project: the creation of a concerted opus of discourse which, drawing as it does on same-sex traditions of masculinity within western culture, I deem ‘gay’. The permissiveness of the periodicals and publishers with respect to these pieces is notable, particularly in comparison with the censorship of prose fiction by periodical editors, circulating libraries, and publishers of the day. The maleness of the audience and authors of classical studies3 and the inclusion of women among the audience for fiction seem crucial in accounting for the gendered space (Brake 1997a: 104) which Pater’s work on classical studies was allowed. Greek studies was a field that, after an article of March 1877, was explicitly gender marked among the audiences Pater’s work addressed; it was liable to be associated with the covert circulation of discourse about male sexual preferences and practices, which are labelled ‘unnatural’ by Richard St John Tyrwhitt: These pages are a rebellion against nature as she is here, in the name of nature as described in Athens. (Tyrwhitt 1877: 557) Socrates’ purity, and indeed his asceticism of life are freely and fully vindicated elsewhere by Plato, and will never be disputed here. The

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expressions put in his mouth are, no doubt, typically Hellenic. But they are not natural: and it is well known that Greek love of nature and beauty went frequently against nature. (Tyrwhitt 1877: 557) This gloss on the field of Classics appeared in an upmarket monthly magazine, the Contemporary Review, in 1877, just after it had purged itself of a liberal editor and refashioned itself as more explicitly Christian. This March number was the first under the new regime; Tyrwhitt’s attack on the writings of J. A. Symonds and on his candidature for the post of Professor of Poetry at Oxford served as a launch pad for a more general censure of ‘The Greek Spirit in Modern Literature’. Tyrwhitt was Rector of St Mary Magdalen in the city of Oxford when ‘The Greek Spirit’ appeared, and the combined forces of the Contemporary and Tyrwhitt caused Symonds to withdraw his candidature (Grosskurth 1964: 171–2). These events affected Pater too, who also withdrew from the competition at Oxford. His first edition of Studies in the History of the Renaissance had been attacked in 1873 on moral grounds; the second edition, with its title altered to take account of criticism and its ‘Conclusion’ safely removed, appeared three months after Tyrwhitt’s onslaught.4 That, and Ruskin’s moral victory over Whistler and Impressionism in court in November 1878, probably combined with other factors to convince Pater that it was not safe or desirable to publish his proposed volume, Dionysus and Other Studies;5 that was the first time Pater cancelled the book publication of his Greek studies, two of which had already been published by 1878 in the Fortnightly Review. Pater did not, however, stop writing classical studies, his subject at Oxford. That he could continue to place such pieces in the periodicals apparently with impunity and without undue censorship, even after Tyrwhitt’s warning, is remarkable since many of Pater’s articles pushed the limits of straight readers’ tolerance, and confirm Tyrwhitt’s worstcase allegation of the alliance of the ‘Greek spirit’ with the homosocial. All of the editors Pater dealt with in connection with the publication of these studies were Oxbridge men – John Morley, editor of the Fortnightly 1863–82; Percy Bunting, editor of the Contemporary Review 1882–1911; and Mowbray Morris of Macmillan’s Magazine 1885–1907 – who by virtue of their educations in the mid-Victorian period had been initiated into classical texts as schoolboys, and studied Greek and Latin routinely at secondary and university levels. This male, university Oxbridge network constituted a significant portion of the readership of

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the periodicals in which Pater published as well; together with the authority and status of Classics as a subject,6 they allowed the kinds of publishing spaces afforded Pater – by family firms such as Macmillan’s, family periodicals such as Macmillan’s Magazine, Christian periodicals such as the Contemporary, as well as more liberal periodicals such as the Fortnightly.

(iii)

Greek Studies (1895)

The history of the articles collected to make up Greek Studies shows three clusters of periodical publication: 1876 (three articles); 1880 (three articles),7 and 1889 (two articles). Only ‘The Age of Athletic Prizemen’ appeared on its own, in February 1894 in the Contemporary Review. The 1876 group, on the myths of Demeter and Persephone, and on Dionysus, and the 1880 cluster, on Greek sculpture, were both published in the Fortnightly, while the 1889 pair treated Greek drama in Macmillan’s Magazine. Pater’s death in July 1894 and illness just before probably prevented any finished successor to the ‘Prizemen’ essay, but among Pater’s literary remains were found several manuscripts relating to Greek studies, including a draft ‘Introduction to Greek Studies’, which could mean that he had planned at some time to publish a collection of his work in this field. This surmise is substantiated by Shadwell’s account of the state of his copy texts in the ‘Preface’ to Greek Studies, in which he explains that both of the twopart essays (‘Demeter and Persephone’ and ‘The Beginnings of Greek Sculpture’) had been revised ‘with the intention, apparently, of publishing them collectively in a volume’ (Shadwell 1895: vi–vii) and that ‘Hippolytus Veiled’, one of the drama essays, was likewise rewritten after publication ‘with a view, probably, of republishing it with other essays’ (Shadwell 1895: vii). He identifies the essays on Greek sculpture as what ‘remain of a[nother] series which, if Mr. Pater had lived, would, probably, have grown into a still more important work’ (Shadwell 1895: vii).8 It is to this projection of an apparently separate volume on Greek art that Shadwell attaches the manuscript ‘Introduction to Greek Studies’. If we look at ‘Hippolytus Veiled’ and its publishing history, some of the links between periodical work and the authoring of books in the nineteenth century may be seen. This article appeared first in Macmillan’s Magazine in tandem with another, like most of the other articles which go to comprise Greek Studies. If this series dimension was unique in Pater’s work, or even in this volume, it might go un-

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remarked, but this clustering of articles is common to the structure of periodicals and the structures of Pater’s books. Periodicals by nature are series, which function as individual issues and as parts of an ongoing serial, and embedded in issues are serial articles, fiction, and features which both originate before and continue after the issue to hand. These function as devices to create appetite and expectation in the reader to read the magazine serially, to return, to subscribe. Ideally, serial parts follow monthly, as did the two parts of Pater’s ‘The myth of Demeter and Persephone’ and ‘The beginnings of Greek sculpture’. Although from the periodical editors’ point of view these serialised pieces are optimally published in successive issues, Pater was not a full-time periodical journalist, and he more commonly produced looser clusters of related work, which for non-fiction was an acceptable form.9 Thus, ‘Hippolytus Veiled’ was paired with ‘The Bacchanals of Euripides’, which appeared in the same periodical three months before, in May 1889. They were linked by the sub-title Pater appended to the August article, ‘A study from Euripides’, and of course by signature, Macmillan’s being one of the Victorian periodicals in which even non-fiction normally carried a signature. What is telling about this particular pairing is how clear it is, retrospectively, that it is artificial, constructed for the requirements of its particular form of publication, to foster the appearance of continuity between numbers, or the serial nature of serials. So far I have foregrounded the ways in which serialisation serves the demands of the periodical as a form, but the other part of this negotiation between article and essay, periodical and book, journalism and literature, is how the author of the book utilises the periodical to sustain her or his completion over time of a book-length manuscript. In the periodical the link between ‘Hippolytus Veiled’ and the ‘Bacchanals of Euripides’ appears to be the dramatist. But in this case the contemporaneous publication of these two articles and the drama link belie the writing history and the destination of these pieces. According to Shadwell in the ‘Preface’ of Greek Studies, the piece on the Bacchanals was written ‘long before’ it was published in 1889, probably ‘as a sequel to the “study of Dionysus”’ which appeared in December 1876, both being listed in Pater’s letter of 1878 stating his intention ‘of publishing them collectively in a volume’ (Shadwell 1895: vi, and Evans 1970: 32). When ‘A Study of Dionysus’ was printed in the Fortnightly in 1876 it began with a number and sub-title, ‘I. The Spiritual Form of Fire and Dew’, and ended ‘(to be continued)’, and in the letter of 1878 ‘The

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Bacchanals of Euripides’ is clearly listed as Part 2 of ‘The Myth of Dionysus’, but neither the volume nor the essay was published in the late 1870s (Wright 1975: 12; Evans 1970: 32, and Chapter 11 above). Indeed, Pater’s dissatisfaction with the proofs of the volume, which impelled him to have the type broken up, was most likely to have been occasioned by the Bacchanals essay, which only appeared in print eleven years later. Regarded as an essay of 1877/8, its similarities of subject and style with the essay on ‘Dionysus’ are striking. This is not news to readers of Pater’s work after 1895 when Greek Studies appeared with its explanatory Preface; however, the earliest readers of the articles in Macmillan’s in 1889 were positively encouraged to view the ‘Bacchanals’ as one of two studies from Euripides and as contemporaneous in date and type. The identification of the Bacchanals essay with the missing second part of the Fortnightly’s ‘A Study of Dionysus’ published over a decade before was obscured by the author, in the interests of the new series of which the Bacchanals article was a part. But Pater’s longer-term writing agenda and publishing plans also figure in this equation. The pairing of these articles in Macmillan’s also implied that their genre is identical – critical articles on classical drama. But there is reason to suppose that Pater regarded ‘Hippolytus Veiled’, the genuinely later essay in Macmillan’s, as one of his fictional ‘imaginary portraits’: in a letter to Arthur Symons of December [1888] Pater describes it as ‘a new Portrait’ (Evans 1970: 90). What we have here is Pater’s manipulation of the structural unit of the periodical form, a short piece – irrespective of whether it is an article, a short story, or a chapter of a novel – to accommodate both the changed direction of his work and the serial dimension of periodical publication. Moreover, in the same month, August of 1889, he makes precisely the same manoeuvre in the Fortnightly, where he publishes part of his unfinished novel Gaston de Latour disguised as a historical article entitled ‘Giordano Bruno’. 10 Although this is unprecedented in Pater’s periodical work, the hybridity is characteristic. It may be argued that, from the first, the overlap between Pater’s ‘articles’ on historical figures such as Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Botticelli with elements of fictional narrative was considerable, and that his intensive experiment with fiction in the 1880s – in which he attempted two novels and two volumes of ‘imaginary portraits’ – was a foreseeable outcome of his previous work. His sleights of hand in August 1889, in which he presents fiction as criticism and history, inscribe this generic doubling, and indicate the kind of accommoda-

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tion Pater was prepared to make to the exigencies of periodical journalism. ‘This article’, he writes privately about ‘Giordano Bruno’, ‘is really a chapter from an unfinished work, and had to be cut about for insertion in the Review’ (Evans 1970: 102). Indeed, his creation and pursuit of the ‘imaginary portrait’ itself may be regarded in part as a response to the voracious market for the short story which the late nineteenthcentury periodical presented to would-be contributors (Brake 1997b). However, in ordering the posthumous collection of the Greek studies, Shadwell reunites ‘The Myth of Dionysus’ with ‘The Bacchanals of Euripides’ without making them explicitly part of the same historical project. Honouring Pater’s last version of the aborted 1878 book,11 Shadwell situates the Dionysus piece as the opening essay, although it is not chronologically the earliest, and follows it with ‘The Bacchanals of Euripides’, which, still carrying its ambiguous reference to the Euripidean drama, is left to be construed as drama criticism. But ‘The Bacchanals’ is then separated from ‘Hippolytus Veiled’, with which it appeared in Macmillan’s, by the two-part ‘Myth of Demeter and Persephone’ (1876). Greek Studies thus realises the plan for Dionysus and Other Studies. The remainder of the articles revert to chronology. While the volume makes an attempt at restitution of the project and contents that Pater was unable to realise in 1878, by abrogating the publishing history of the periodical articles, Shadwell does not ‘restore’ ‘Hippolytus Veiled’ to the status of fiction although he does separate it from the Bacchanals. This is perhaps because ‘Hippolytus Veiled’ is the only imaginary portrait he collects in Greek Studies, leaving the other two published but uncollected pieces – ‘The Child in the House’ and ‘Emerald Uthwart’ – to make up Miscellaneous Studies, which appeared ten months later. The remainder of Greek Studies is devoted to essays on Greek art. Shadwell is complicit with Pater in masking hybridity in a volume which unites, under the term ‘Greek studies’, three separate projects of Pater’s: the Dionysus book, a second volume of imaginary portraits, and a book on Greek art. Although Shadwell makes a point of announcing that his copy texts for these early Dionysus essays are revised versions of the periodical texts and thus more finished than ‘journalism’ might imply, Greek Studies bears the marks of Pater’s trafficking in the rich marketplace of the press. The structure of generic interchange in which these two pieces are implicated attaches to other of Pater’s Greek studies, for example those articles such as the two on the myth of Demeter and Persephone that began as lectures (to the Birmingham and Midland Institute); and the

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whole of Plato and Platonism has its origins in Pater’s lectures to the University. In the latter case, instead of transforming one kind of series into another, and obscuring the lecture origins of the ‘chapters’, Pater and his publisher advertised the volume as a series of lectures, and used the authority of the university lecture to validate the book’s transgressive contents (Shuter 1989: 524). The periodical articles from Plato and Platonism, like the relation of ‘Giordano Bruno’ to Gaston de Latour, are a spin-off from a larger project, involving book publication of a series of chapters (of fiction) or essays; but unlike ‘Bruno’, they are not written backward into periodical versions, but ‘forward’, from lectures to be heard, into versions of lectures to be read. Interestingly, what emerges on this occasion is the distinction Pater makes between the reading audiences of the periodical press and of the book. Pater’s labours in this regard are detailed clearly in an unusually fulsome correspondence in the Letters around a publishing project (Evans 1970: 124–35); Pater writes both to the editor of the Contemporary Review and more especially to his assistant (Percy Bunting and William Canton respectively), about editorial revisions to his academic lectures on Plato, whom he claims to have ‘treated … in as popular a manner as I could’ (Evans 1970: 124), to adjust them to the tolerances and expectations of a general reader. He agrees to break up long paragraphs on the prompting of the editors (Evans 1970: 129), and to ‘lighten and popularise my paper, at all points’ (Evans 1970: 133). But the attempt to make the graduated transition from lecture to periodical article to book chapter does not succeed to Pater’s satisfaction with ‘The Doctrine of Plato’, which finally appeared only as chapter 7 of Plato and Platonism. After examining the proofs from the Contemporary Review, Pater dithered and eventually decided against periodical publication – first withdrawing, then relenting, but finally declining – although both Bunting and Canton seem to have wanted it for the monthly. This was the last essay Pater submitted to Bunting from the ‘Plato and Platonism’ series, and the portion of the volume published on 9 February 1893 which had appeared previously in the press was unusually small – less than a third. I can offer no conclusive explanation of this anomaly, except to observe that for the writing of this book Pater was in the unique position of having a freshly considered and completed draft to hand, consisting of a coherent group of manuscripts of a recently delivered lecture series. The time involved in preparation of this material for volume publication was singularly brief, perhaps a year. The thought

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and preparation that had gone into the academic series was transferable to the publishing project, unlike, for example, the compilation of Appreciations in 1888. There the principle of selection of the book, from a broad range of uncollected pieces written over twenty years, and the reconceptualising of review material into ‘Style’ for example, typified a more amorphous and daunting task, shaping a work – an essay or a book – out of an eclectic range of materials. The reason Pater gave Bunting on 1 November [1892] for his final decision against publication of ‘The Doctrine of Plato’ was its intractable length. What is surprising is his association in this letter between the ‘average readers’ of the periodical whom ‘it might prejudice [against] both my volume and your review’ (Evans 1970: 134) and the potential readership for his book. Clearly for Pater, whose book was to appear in three months, there was an overlap between these two reading publics as well as a distinction. Pater was implying that the context of a piece changes its perception: the same average reader would see a long article as distended in a periodical but not in a book of ‘lectures’. If Pater is alert here to a calibration of print in the public sphere, he is also alert to the taste and sales-potential of his audience in ways which echo the New Journalism, with its canny enthusiasm for the new market of the ‘millions’. The periodical publication of the three Plato essays in the year preceding the publication of the book served the author and publisher of the projected book in a number of ways: first, as a concrete incentive to the author to work up his lectures into written, publishable form gradually over time; secondly, as a means of the author keeping his name in view of the potential readership of his book; thirdly, as a trailer for the book, by spreading the essays over two periodicals and a fivemonth period – February (Contemporary Review), May (Macmillan’s Magazine), and June (Contemporary Review) of 1892; and lastly as a source of additional income. The fluidity of Pater’s texts, which this generic indeterminacy implies, is echoed in the collection of Pater’s manuscripts at Harvard, in which a number of extensive if unfinished fragments seem to indicate a degree of uncertainty about their destinations. A different way of putting this might be to emphasise the openness or porousness of Pater’s published and unpublished texts. Bill Shuter’s essay on Plato and Platonism, in which he discusses numerous instances where Pater has ‘reshuffled’ images and fragments from earlier work to imbricate in his later work, bears this out. One example shows Pater quarrying ideas and wording from the as yet uncollected Greek study ‘The Marbles of

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Aegina’ (Fortnightly Review, 1880) for chapter 4 (‘Plato and the Sophists’) of the 1893 volume. 12 The point here is not only the aesthetic one – that Pater returned again and again to familiar ideas to rework them, or to relocate them verbatim in different contexts. It is also the materialist one, that this is a textual and commercial economy whereby certain discarded texts are reintroduced into the textual and commercial economy to accrue added value.

(iv)

The periodicals and Greek studies

I want to go on to explore the three periodicals in which these Greek studies appeared – the Fortnightly Review of the 1870s, Macmillan’s Magazine of the 1880s, and the Contemporary Review of the 1890s – and how Pater’s contributions fitted in with the discourses of these titles at the time in which the articles appeared. Plato and Platonism, although the earlier volume, contains more preponderantly later work in terms of periodical publication, so I shall treat it last. Greek Studies includes a majority of essays from the decade 1870–80, seven in all, and they are all from the Fortnightly, in which period Pater published eleven essays in total. If largely political, and responsive to parliamentary and foreign news, John Morley’s Fortnightly did publish critical essays on literature, art, philosophy and Classics by risky authors, such as Swinburne and John Addington Symonds, on risky subjects such as Baudelaire and Gautier. While the mix of articles in the Fortnightly in 1871–80 regularly offers some openings for the educated woman reader of the late nineteenth century, the dominance of current political and economic affairs and the sparseness of fiction suggest that the principal and targeted audience was educated men. It is evident, however, that Morley’s Fortnightly does make some address to women readers at this period. Nearly every issue contains articles pertaining to areas of cultural life which include women, and some issues print articles by women which address, to varying degrees, the woman question. Maria G. Grey writes Part I of ‘Men and Women’ in November 1879, and in May 1880 Edith Simcox publishes ‘Ideas of Feminine Usefulness’. But, as can be seen when one looks at the contents lists of single issues, the articles comfortably open to women readers are embedded in predominantly male space. 13 In this context, these articles by Pater appear appropriate reading for women interested in travel, art, and the new museum culture. That is, in the context of the Fortnightly, Pater’s pieces on Greek art had a different, cross-gendered readership than they later, in the mid-1890s, were likely to

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attract in a volume dedicated to the announced, gendered topic of Greek Studies. Pater’s two pieces on the Bacchanals and ‘Hippolytus Veiled’ appear far more out of place in Mowbray Morris’s Macmillan’s Magazine in 1889. Pater was a Macmillan author, and if the Fortnightly was the dominant single title for Pater’s publications in the 1870s, Macmillan’s Magazine held that position in the 1880s. But all of Pater’s publications in Macmillan’s pertained to fiction, either his own or book reviews; he placed both the four imaginary portraits and five parts of Gaston there in the 1880s.14 This identification of Pater with literature in Macmillan’s reinforces the way that these two pieces are framed as literary studies of Euripidean drama, whereas they might likewise be construed and presented quite differently in a different context: the ‘Bacchanals’ as allied with Pater’s studies of Greek myth published in the mid-1870s in the Fortnightly and ‘Hippolytus Veiled’ as a lone imaginary portrait, heralding a new series. These are the implications of Shadwell’s wording and ordering in Greek Studies. But despite the packaging, the contents of these two articles make them seem anomalous in the gilt-edged parameters of the house magazine of Macmillan’s, a firm which was a byword in the trade for quality publishing. The contents of the two numbers in which Pater’s articles appear make clear the distinction between Morley’s Fortnightly, with its quantity of demanding reading, and Macmillan’s fare, larded with popular fiction at this period, and otherwise stocked with travelogues, memoirs, belles lettres, poetry, and the very occasional critical or political essay. May and August 1889, the two numbers which carry Pater’s articles, are very similar in this respect, except that the August issue carries two serialised novels rather than one: May offers Marooned by W. Clark, and August, Marooned and Kirsteen by Mrs Oliphant. If the character of Macmillan’s Magazine seems to require some special explanation of the publication of these essays by Pater, so does the character of Mowbray Morris, the editor who agreed to publish them. According to Charles Morgan, the official historian of the firm, Morris’s adverse and violent opinions as a Reader for the firm – on works by Hardy, Yeats, and Meredith, all of whom were or became Macmillan authors – were indicative of ‘a closed mind’ (Morgan 1943: 144). Likewise, by Morris’s own account in ‘The Profession of Letters’, one might expect him to have made a shrewd estimate of the nature of his readership, and to satisfy it in his selection of material for the magazine: Literature, you must always remember, is in the eyes of nearly all editors, and must be, before all things a commercial speculation.

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They are not the patrons but the clients of the public taste; and the dictates of that taste, though they may sigh as critics, they must as editors obey. (Morris 1887: 309) Given the construction of the readership that the contents of Macmillan’s implies, and given Morris’s view of the editor’s position, it seems that characteristics of the presentation of Pater’s pieces would successfully prevent their being read by readers who might be offended by them. This might be some combination of Pater’s signature, the generic topic of classical drama, or the specific references to Bacchus and Hippolytus which, to more knowing readers of Macmillan’s, might signal potentially licentious material, fit for (male) readers of the Classics. Of course, all of the Greek studies that appeared in the periodicals were signed, but the signifier ‘Walter Pater’ in the Fortnightly of the 1870s, Macmillan’s of the 1880s, and the Contemporary of the 1890s produced different meanings among different kinds of readership. However, the ‘Hippolytus’ essay in Macmillan’s, which treats incest and the rapacious sexuality of a female protagonist, seems to me to have pushed the limits of the magazine; this is the reason, I would suggest, that Pater published nothing there again for nearly three years. When he does, it is ‘A Chapter on Plato’, which, as Greek philosophy, carries clear gender markers, so that female readers were likely to be culturally aware of the risks they would be taking in reading Pater on Plato. Moreover, Pater’s treatment of Plato here is (silently) sanitised to some extent by its origin in public, university lectures. It was, however, the last of Pater’s publications in Macmillan’s, and was itself only published after a considerable gap in time. In the 1890s, Pater turned to a number of new periodical outlets such as the New Review, the Contemporary Review, and the Nineteenth Century, all of which were more intellectually adventurous than Macmillan’s. His publication pattern was more eclectic than in any other decade, but again there is a dominant title, Percy Bunting’s Contemporary Review, the third magazine involved in the publication of Pater’s Greek studies. Although from its inception the Contemporary had a theological remit, which persisted with variable intensity throughout the century, Pater’s three articles on Greek topics were part of an abiding interest it took in all aspects of Classics, and in particular the excavations of the remains at Troy.15 The other characteristic of the Contemporary which might be seen to harbour Pater’s Greek studies was its implication in the free debating structures of the Metaphysical Society, which James Knowles, its first editor, structurally embedded in

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the Review in the form of symposia, in which various positions on a single subject were explored by a number of renowned or expert contributors. Knowles’s disinterestedness also took other forms, structurally less visible but equally strenuous. Percy Bunting who became editor in 1882, seems to have retained the journal’s openness to most subjects and extremes of opinion, which permitted him to print the risky ‘Lacedaemon’ in June 1892, one of Pater’s most outspoken explorations of love between men and the culture of the male body in ancient Greece. And the willingness of Bunting’s Contemporary to publish discussion of the homosocial was repeated just after Pater’s death, when his friend Edmund Gosse selected it as the most suitable place of publication for his frank obituary article, which made plain the degree of Pater’s commitment to ‘Apollo’ (Gosse 1894). But, again, this open-forum policy cut both ways in the Contemporary: vituperative, homophobic articles appeared throughout its history, such as those by Robert Buchanan and Richard Tyrwhitt, which scourged the ‘Fleshly School’ (1871) and the ‘Greek Spirit’ (1878) respectively. Indeed, it is likely that publication of these two articles helps explain the late date of Pater’s first contribution to the Contemporary, long after Bunting had mollified the evangelical strain of Strahan’s Review, and ownership had passed from Strahan and Co. to Ibister. The Contemporary’s liveliness throughout its run is notable. Of course, any single number of a periodical can only tell us a limited amount about a series, but the salient character of the Contemporary – its commitment to structured controversy and topical questions of the day – may be gleaned from the contents of the number in June 1892 which included ‘Lacedaemon’. As a social reformer and journalist, Bunting produces an issue which balances a symposium on women’s suffrage with an article on the male field of Greek studies. If the symposium attracted women readers or put off male traditionalists, ‘Lacedaemon’ – with its focus on male–male bonding, and its allusions to what in 1893 Alfred Douglas was to call ‘the new culture16 – provided scholarly clerics and classicists with equally controversial male discourse. It may seem odd that the lecture status of this essay was not invoked to bolster its institutional authority, but it had been a longstanding policy of the Contemporary under Knowles that it did not publish lectures. If Percy Bunting was not aware initially that Pater’s proffered list of potential contributions stemmed from his lectures, as Bill Shuter observes (Shuter 1989: 524), his assistant William Canton is unself-

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consciously informed by Pater in January and March 1892 first that they are ‘parts of a book’ and then, with the returned proof, that ‘Lacedaemon’ ‘was written for delivery as a lecture’ (Evans 1970: 126 and 129).17 That this did not stop Bunting and Canton from urging Pater to publish a third lecture, ‘The Doctrine of Plato’, in October, suggests that Knowles’s interdict was no longer in force, and casts doubt on any efforts by Pater to hide the origins of the articles from the editors. That they were hidden from the readers is likely to have been part of the popularising that Pater was undertaking through revision for the press. It is notable that Pater’s three contributions to the Contemporary are confined to the 1890s18 and to classical Greece. Only two of them were published in Plato and Platonism in February 1893, with the third and last – ‘The Age of Athletic Prizemen’ – appearing a year later in February 1894. There it formed part of an irregular series constituted thematically as well as authorially and initiated by Pater’s earlier articles of 1891 and 1892. It also functioned as a follow-up to Pater’s book of 1893. Thus, it figured in the publishing timetable of both the journal and the author/journalist as part of the Plato and Platonism series. However, its sub-title – ‘A chapter in Greek art’ – identified it to Shadwell as part of Pater’s alleged plan for a book on Greek art, a project which Shadwell went on to construct in Greek Studies. He printed the ‘chapter’ as the last part of the series of three essays on Greek sculpture, which Pater had published in the Fortnightly fifteen years before. Here the units of prose are construed to produce different generic meanings according to the requirements of two mediums (the periodical and the book), two discourses (journalism and literature), and two time scales.

(v)

Text

The capacity of the periodical press primarily, but also of the Macmillan volumes, to publish the kind of homosocial and homoerotic discourse found in this work by Pater, in a period allegedly prudish in which publishers, distributors, editors, legislators and readers are significantly preoccupied with policing print, may seem remarkable. It is, but I want to discuss some exemplary passages to show the power of Classics as a field to command space which is successfully ring-fenced. Defying censorship and prohibition, and evoking no criticism beyond sniping, the field survives as the hegemonic sign of educated male authority, even in family periodicals such as Macmillan’s and within the theological remit of the Contemporary, as well as in the more open Fortnightly.

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Though the reader of ‘The Bacchanals of Euripides’ in Greek Studies is prepared for its violence, sadism, and homoeroticism by the essays preceding it in the volume, the prose is so heated and intense and the episodes so grotesque that the essay is none the less disturbing and haunting. In the context of Macmillan’s, an unwitting reader might well find it unexpected and offensive. Early in the essay Pater makes the twin nature of his subject clear: it is the god himself as well as his female followers: ‘Himself a woman-like god, – it was on women and feminine souls that his power mainly fell’ (Pater 1895a: 53). In his selection of this play of Euripides, Pater creates an opportunity to write what is now called gay discourse, invoking text and events from Euripides and myths around Dionysus to validate his own textual tastes. Selecting episodes and phrases for translation, he creates an exotic narrative, which derives its authority and apparently its voice from ‘the object of study’. This is characteristic of Pater’s positioning of himself as a writing subject, as a ventriloquist for some authoritative referent outside the text, normally another text. The extended erotic introduction that Pater affords Dionysus for example, forcibly calls to mind Aubrey Beardsley’s drawings of Pater’s period as well as Homer and Euripides: In the course of his long progress from land to land, the gold, the flowers, the incense of the East, have attached themselves deeply to him: their effect and expression rest now upon his flesh like the gleaming of that old ambrosial ointment of which Homer speaks as resting ever on the persons of the gods, and cling to his clothing – the mitre binding his perfumed yellow hair – the long tunic down to the white feet, somewhat womanly, and the fawn-skin, with its rich spots, wrapped about the shoulders. As the door opens to admit him, the scented air of the vineyards (for the vine-blossom has an exquisite perfume) blows through; while the convolvulus on his mystic rod represents all wreathing flowery things whatever, with or without fruit … (Pater 1895a: 58–9) The sexual suggestiveness of Pater’s rendering of the ‘darker stain’ of the myth is unmistakable as the sensuous description above is reinforced: Yet, from the first, amid all this floweriness, a touch or trace of that gloom is discernible. The fawn-skin, composed now so daintily over the shoulders, may be worn with the whole coat of the animal made

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up, the hoofs gilded and tied together over the right shoulder, to leave the right arm disengaged to strike, its head clothing the human head within, as Alexander, on some of his coins, looks out from the elephant’s scalp, and Hercules out of the jaws of a lion, on the coins of Camarina. Those diminutive golden horns attached to the forehead, represent not fecundity merely, nor merely the crisp tossing of the waves of streams, but horns of offence. And our fingers must beware of the thyrsus, tossed about so wantonly by himself and his chorus. The pine-cone at its top does but cover a spear-point; and the thing is a weapon – the sharp spear of the hunter Zagreus – though hidden now by the fresh leaves, and that button of pine-cone. (Pater 1895a: 60) It is clear from these passages that the classical figure of Dionysus gives Pater permission to write the phallus, erotically and playfully, and to limn the titillating characteristics of a male who is both fecund and dangerous, the homme fatal. Pater hardly disguises his glee at the scope the events and language of Euripides’ drama offer him: The singular, somewhat sinister beauty of this speech, and a similar one subsequent – a fair description of morning on the mountaintops, with the Bacchic women sleeping, which turns suddenly to a hard, coarse picture of animals cruelly rent – is one of the special curiosities which distinguish this play; and, as it is wholly narrative, I shall give it in English prose, abbreviating here and there, some details which seem to have but a metrical value … (Pater 1895a: 68) This is followed by over two pages of translation which culminate in a scene in which the Maenads wildly attack some grazing animals, tearing them apart with their bare hands, ‘with knifeless fingers’, and Pater goes on to assure us ‘A grotesque scene follows’ (Pater 1895a: 71), which he does not resist describing: Full of wild, coarse, revolting details, of course not without pathetic touches, and with the loveliness of the serving Maenads, and of their mountain solitudes – their trees and water – never quite forgotten, it describes how, venturing as a spy too near the sacred circle, Pentheus [who is dressed as a woman] was fallen upon, like a wild beast, by the mystic huntresses and torn to pieces, his mother being the first to begin ‘the sacred rites of slaughter’. (Pater 1895a: 73–4)

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It is perhaps clear from this small sample of the heated prose of ‘The Bacchanals of Euripides’ why Pater hesitated to publish it in 1878 in periodical or book form, but it is as interesting if less clear how by 1889 he felt it both safe and suitable to submit it to Macmillan’s Magazine. Now although I have been quoting from the book, none of these passages I have quoted, nor the many comparable that I have not, has been censored in Macmillan’s. That has to be deemed remarkable in a period when, for example, Hardy’s novels involving heterosexual explicitness were promptly (and routinely) cut for periodical publication, on the assumption that readers of periodicals were buying a title which they could rely on to guarantee the respectability of the contents through selection and editing. Buyers of books, however, were their own agents. I think we can venture several propositions from the presence of these uncensored pieces of Pater’s in Macmillan’s Magazine. First, Classics was a protected, and gendered, area, which meant that homosexual discourse might be fairly freely circulated within the normal reading locations of educated men, notably the reviews and magazines; secondly, Victorian women readers of Macmillan’s Magazine did have access to material that, should they risk reading it, would make them far more informed about masculine sexuality than most Victorianists acknowledge such nineteenth-century middle-class women readers to be. And ‘Hippolytus Veiled’, with its treatment of incestuous love between stepmother and son, and its unmistakable depiction of female desire, may have been closer to the experience of female readers than ‘The Bacchanals’, and thus more accessible to them.19 These Greek studies of Pater’s might have exemplified a fault line between journalism and literature, in so far as they were censored by the editor or self-censored for periodical publication, to be restored in the book edition. But they were not, and we may conclude, curiously, that whereas ‘Aesthetic Poetry’ and the ‘Conclusion’ (both originally part of ‘Poems by William Morris’) were removed from books by Pater in an act of self-censorship, such extremes were not required by the Greek studies, because the field of Classics to which they belonged was largely protected and validated in ways that the study of contemporary and English literature was not. But it is of course true that Pater made a distinction between periodical and book publication for the Greek studies essays, having never republished them in his lifetime. Because principal weeklies – such as the Athenaeum and the Saturday Review – were not reviewing the monthlies as a matter of course in 1889 when ‘The Bacchanals’ and ‘Hippolytus Veiled’ appeared, Pater could hope

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that any notices might appear in smaller, ‘class’ periodicals out of sight of the wider public. The profound overlap between Pater’s journalism and book publication, and the consanguinity of his work as a lecturer, journalist and author, were dependent to a considerable degree on both the general character of a certain class of mid- and late Victorian monthlies and the nascent state of specialisation in the universities, in journalism, and in the culture more generally. That such a space as these journals afforded was coming to an end in 1891 is seen in an American journalist’s attempt to exclude them from ‘journalism proper’. ‘It is necessary’, W. J. Stillman writes in the Atlantic Monthly, ‘to distinguish between journals’: They divide themselves specifically into three classes; the daily newspaper, the journal of culture (including periodicals other than daily, and incorrectly called journals), and the paper devoted to moral reforms, like The Liberator of William Lloyd Garrison. … As the journal of culture leads to scholarship and the sounder and broader general education of the public, its work passes under the classification of science and out of journalism proper; it is a branch and continuation of the university. (Stillman 1891: 689, my italics) Stillman’s professional anxiety as a journalist is inscribed here in his efforts to strip journalism of the taint not only of periodicals associated with ‘the university’ but also of ‘class’ journals such as The Liberator – which he decides to ‘leave out of consideration’. What is at issue is the definition of the word ‘culture’ as well as the category of journalism. We are witness to the painful split of high culture from popular culture that was dramatically accelerated by ‘the New Journalism’, a development that Matthew Arnold recognised even as he denounced it in 1887. By 1943 in The House of Macmillan Charles Morgan positions ‘the journal of culture’ as a subject for nostalgia, and regrets its passing. Assessing Macmillan’s Magazine he writes: that the list is not to be organized into groups and movements, that the great critics – Arnold, Pater, Symonds, Whibley – are all there with the theologians, the preachers, the men of science, the historians, the Laureate, the young lions, the great story-tellers and the good story-tellers, reveals a catholic prospect closed to us since we allowed Austin Harrison’s English Review and Squire’s London Mercury

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to perish. A magazine in this liberal tradition, seeing literature as a wisdom and a delight … is a civilized asset of which we have strangely deprived ourselves. Macmillan’s is gone, Cornhill is gone, Scribner’s is gone. We have specialized in this as in all else. (Morgan 1943: 61) Pater’s publishing years, the period between 1866 and 1894, precisely correspond with the existence of such journalistic space, augmented prodigiously and updated following the removal of the stamp duty in 1855, a period which saw the founding of the shilling monthly in Macmillan’s Magazine in 1859, the origins of the Fortnightly Review and the Pall Mall Gazette in 1865, and the creation of the Contemporary a year later. The confluence of journalism and literature in Pater’s case is entirely a product of this epistemic moment in the latter part of the nineteenth century, which permitted journalism to beckon Pater and many other university men into a productive contact with the larger and more heterogeneous world, the ‘millions’ as Stead called them. Pater’s work on Greek studies furthered the move of the subject out of the schools, academy, and scholarly volumes into the public sphere, into greater visibility and scrutiny. There is evidence that he attempted to make his classical studies publishable in a form that the broader audience of the periodical press would find accessible. It was the confluence too of the general character of the periodicals in question and the inclusive spectrum of Greek studies that resulted in the dissemination of homosocial and homosexual discourse to reaches of Victorian readers, women as well as men, who might never otherwise have had first-hand knowledge of such writing.

14 Pater, Symons and the Culture of the Fin de Siècle in Britain

(i)

The subject of Pater in the 1890s

The ‘subject’ of Pater in the 1890s may be constituted in a variety of ways: via the texts and subjects circulated and suppressed by the author; the ways and locations in which Pater is inscribed in Decadence by contemporaries; and in terms of discourse and its cultural contexts, gendered and homoerotic for example. I want to take a brief look at Pater’s part in the production of 1890s Decadence, his presence and absence. On the eve of the 1890s Walter Pater was 50;1 in July 1894, less than half way through the decade and just months before the Wilde trials, he was dead. He was twenty-five years older than Yeats and Arthur Symons, and their young male contemporaries (such as Beardsley, Beerbohm, John Davidson, Ernest Dowson, Herbert Home, Lionel Johnson, Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon, along with the somewhat older Selwyn Image and Wilde) who, as a generation, had helped produce the greater part of the texts identified with the male Decadent culture of the decade.2 Pater was essentially of the previous generation, and although all four of his earlier works – Appreciations, Imaginary Portraits, Marius, and The Renaissance – were circulating, reissued in new editions in the 1890s,3 the only new book he published was Plato and Platonism, a series of Oxford undergraduate lectures! These attracted acclaim from academics rather than attention from aesthetes or their detractors, although they are, I suggest, a straitened intervention in the homoerotic discourse of Greek studies.4 As Higgins claims: In Walter Benjamin’s terms, Pater’s task as ‘translator’ was to provide Plato’s writings with a transgressive ‘afterlife’. Consistently, he tried to restore Plato to an un-Arnoldian Hellenistic vision, and 268

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literally and figuratively endeavored to re-embody Platonic theory. … Accordingly, Pater stressed the pagan-ness of Plato and ancient Greece, reinscribing Plato within what he perceived to be the same Hellenic, intensely homoerotic milieu as the poetry of Pindar, the myth of Hyacinthus, the life of ancient Sparta, and the sculpture of Myron. (Higgins 1993: 52–3) That Pater viewed the academic, periodical, and book readership as different, with distinctive requisites for Plato and Platonism, the book, and its constituent periodical pieces, is clear from his correspondence with editors of the Contemporary Review in October and November 1892 (see above, p. 256). Whereas a chapter was appropriate for the forthcoming book, as an article it was, in his judgement, too long heavy, and recondite for the shilling monthly, which in 1891 was associated with ‘broad, evangelical, semi-socialistic Liberalism’ (Review of Reviews 1891: 10). It is of interest that, towards the end of his life, Pater continues to struggle to make his work available both to the more general, periodical reader as well as to the more academic or intellectual reader of his books. If there is any great difference of dissemination and frequency between the periodical and book forms of Pater’s texts in the 1860s, and early 1870s essays, the advantage lies with their periodical forms. However, by the 1890s the periodical market had burgeoned, in the wake of the shilling monthlies and their yoking of fiction with this sector of the periodical press, and with the advent of the ‘New Journalism’ with its ambition for millions of daily and weekly readers. A larger, popular readership affected the discourse of even the highest zone of journals. In the case of the Plato and Platonism lectures, the academic reaches of the book market are visibly splitting away from the common reader of the generalist periodical. Gissing’s articulation of pain, and resistance to this split, takes a different form in the same year in New Grub Street, in which journalism is villified and literature idealised and victimised. That this fissure for Pater occurs around the subject of Classics, which had until recently kept literate working men and most women out of the universities, is an inscription of the episteme which Hardy reiterates in Jude the Obscure shortly afterward.5 Pater’s desire to invoke and address an educated reading public as a unified subject in the 1890s may be read as a re-staging of conditions which prevailed at the start of his career, when the hypothesis of such a market, retrospectively, may be understood to have been in its last throes in the 1860s, with the full impact of the removal of the newspaper and paper taxes yet to come.

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Although the year of Pater’s first publication coincided with the birth of the monthly Contemporary Review, the location of ‘Coleridge’s Writings’ in an older quarterly (the Westminster), with its concomitant anonymity, shows Pater’s article to be an example of the ‘old’ and ‘higher journalism’ of its day. In this model, undoubtedly dating from Pater’s earliest practice as an author, resided the advantage of double economic remuneration with the possibility of the text moving transparently and without extensive rewriting from periodical to book. However, between 1860 and 1890 the distance between literature/criticism and journalism, and between the academy and the press, had widened substantially. Although Pater, in dealing with the Contemporary in the 1890s, had selected a periodical accustomed to philosophical and religious discourse and thus more compatible with lectures on Plato than most, the differences between academic and periodical discourse loomed large enough to make ‘The Doctrine of Plato’ untranslatable, in his view, into what was increasingly popular discourse under pressure from the New Journalism.6 Apart from Marius, no part of which ever appeared previous to book publication, the number and the proportion of new material in Plato and Platonism – not previously published – was the highest of all Pater’s collected works. Seven out of ten essays were new, over two-thirds, with only three easily rendered suitable for periodical publication. Their intractability inscribes the increasing fragmentation of the reading audience in the 1890s under the pressure of the Education Act, the gathering of modern languages and literature into the academic syllabus, and the growing industrialisation and proliferation of the press; discourse was approaching polarisation into literature and journalism. Meanwhile, however, in the periodicals, Pater is publishing a plethora of arresting free-standing pieces, more flamboyant in topic and in style than the lectures. They range from reviews of Dorian Gray and French fiction, through articles on French poetry and architecture, to a violent homoerotic tale set in France. They include an autobiographical imaginary portrait, and late essays on Italian art and literature.7 If there is foregrounded ‘decadent’ discourse here, and there is, it appears that Pater declined to publish in the avant-garde magazines of the 1880s and 1890s, such as the Albemarle, the Century Guild Hobby Horse, the Dial, the Chameleon, the Spirit Lamp, The Artist and Journal of Home Culture, and the Yellow Book.8 He was dead before the Savoy appeared. Pater’s presence in these magazines is confined to writing about him.9 At the same time, the ‘register’ of the sites of Pater’s published periodical writing in the 1890s may be characterised as varied,

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and to some extent adventurous and outward looking. He selected established titles in which his writing had appeared before (the Fortnightly, the Nineteenth Century, Macmillan’s, the Guardian) as well as periodicals new to him (the Contemporary), new ones (the New Review and the Bookman), and a newspaper (the Daily Chronicle). Most unlikely10 and perhaps most well-paid, was the American family magazine Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, in which ‘Apollo in Picardy’, the bloody erotic tale, appeared.

(ii)

Symons, Pater and Decadence

My attempt to construct models of Pater’s work in terms of this decade was prompted by a dramatic curve of inclusion and exclusion of Pater in a series of related works by Arthur Symons which span and overspill the 1890s. Symons, a poet, critic, contributor to the Yellow Book, and editor of the Savoy, was also a protégé of Pater’s. In the same number of Harper’s in November 1893 in which Pater’s ‘Apollo in Picardy’ appeared, Symons notably inserts Pater, and what was percipiently hailed as English decadence, into a version of Decadence which is predominantly presented as a French cultural formation. This title, ‘The Decadent Movement in Literature’, next surfaces three years later, in December 1896, in an advertisement in the last number of the Savoy, by Leonard Smithers, its publisher, as the title of a book ‘in preparation’ (Smithers 1896). If the 1893 article was a cheeky rejoinder to Richard Le Gallienne’s impatient snipes at Decadence, then the projected book of 1896 analogously may be a response to Max Nordau’s attacks in Degeneration, which had appeared in the previous year. Two years after Pater’s death, in the wake of the Wilde trials, the contents list of the projected Decadent Movement in Literature, as listed in the Savoy advert, already excludes Pater and any indication of allusions to English literature, confining itself to five Continental authors, four of them French.11 Symons’ Pater material appears on this page of advertisements in a neutralised context disassociated from Decadence, in Symons’ Studies in Two Literatures, ‘Ready’ 5 February 1897, in a section called ‘Studies in Contemporary Literature’, and in a sequence in which ‘Walter Pater’ is flanked by Coventry Patmore, an article on ‘Modernity in Verse’, and a disapproving essay on ‘Zola’s Method’. Perhaps more to the point, Symons’ essay on Pater advertised in the Savoy is not placed in the sections of ‘Notes and Impressions’, which comprise essays on French and English writers, including J. A. Symonds, the well-known advocate of homosocial culture, Huysmans, and Gautier. This is in

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keeping with Symons’ efforts to heroise Pater and sanitise his reputation in his ‘Walter Pater. Some Characteristics’, which appeared in the same number of the Savoy as the adverts. When Symons’ projected book was finally published in 1899, it deleted, again percipiently, the focus on Decadence, having displaced it by Symbolism in what now appeared as The Symbolist Movement in Literature.12 When in 1912 the parent article ‘The Decadent Movement in Literature’ was reprinted, it too excluded Pater. Symons’ decoupling of Pater and Decadence was complete. However, simultaneously and for rather different ends, until 1895, Oscar Wilde was also appropriating and naming Pater.13 As I have argued, Pater’s inscription in the decade and in the alternative periodical press of the 1890s was a presence which resulted largely from writing about – rather than by – him. The presence of Pater’s work pervades the Century Guild Hobby Horse, by way of review articles and regular allusions to Pater’s writing for example. This magazine (1884–94), a journal interested in craft, as well as Decadence, was published by Elkin Mathews and John Lane, who at its demise initiated the Yellow Book. Century Guild Hobby Horse contributors such as Lionel Johnson, Selwyn Image and J. A. Symonds consistently brought the absent Pater to the attention of its readers. In the Albemarle (1892), a short-lived, alternative magazine printed by the Women’s Printing Society and edited by Hubert Crackanthorpe and W. H. Wilkins, Zola is compared with Pater in a bold, quickly notorious piece on ‘Realism in France and in England. An Interview with M. Emile Zola’: ‘Yet, after all, it is still the same short, thick-set figure, the heavy gait, which is characteristic of another famous “littérateur” – Mr. Walter Pater – the complexion a strange, dull yellow, the eyes small and keen’ ([Crackanthorpe] 1892: 39). Symons’ Harper’s article, which makes the parallel between Pater’s work and French Decadence explicit, is a typical example of this kind of inscription of Pater in 1890s Decadence while Pater was alive. The obituaries and articles after his death afforded other opportunities. The same 1896 number of the Savoy which carried Smithers’ advertisement for the truncated book on the Decadent Movement was the periodical’s last, and the whole issue was produced by its two editors, Symons producing the letterpress and Beardsley the illustrations. Having removed Pater from his book, Symons turns to Pater afresh in the letterpress. ‘Walter Pater: Some Characteristics’ is a late tribute to Pater which brings Pater centrally into the pages of the Savoy and links his work not only with that of the periodical and English figures such as Swinburne, Rossetti and Burne-Jones, but also with ‘French soil’ and specifically with Baudelaire:

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Here is a writer who, like Baudelaire, would better nature; and in this goldsmith’s work of his prose he too has ‘rêvé le miracle d’une prose poétique, musicale sans rhythme et sans rime’. (Symons 1896c: 34) Singling out the most heated, and Greek, study among the Imaginary Portraits, ‘Denys l’Auxerrois’, Symons calls it ‘the most wonderful … poem’ (Symons 1896c: 36). Sandwiched between sets of louche Beardsley drawings, Symons’ piece is a series of appreciations of Pater’s works in turn, all in the superlative: The Renaissance ‘seems to me sometimes to be the most beautiful book of prose in our literature. Nothing in it is left to inspiration: but it is all inspired’ (Symons 1896c: 34) while the style of Imaginary Portraits is ‘the ripest, the most varied and flawless, their art the most assured and masterly, of any of Pater’s books’ (Symons 1896c: 36). Situated as the article is in the last issue of the Savoy, the high profile accorded Pater’s work, the heightened praise, the link with French literature, and the exclusive appeal to aesthetic criteria, indelibly associate Pater with the radical project of the Savoy, which set out after the Wilde trials to withstand the pressure on culture and the Yellow Book to close down all sexual discourse concerning men. Symons’ defiant construction of Pater as a ‘pure man’ in the face of the Wilde trials may be seen as comparable to Hardy’s pre-trial portrait of Tess as a ‘pure woman’ in the face of the attempt by the circulating libraries and publishers to police sexuality in fiction. The boldness of the Savoy may also be seen in its eloquent defence of Jude the Obscure (Ellis 1896) in the face of what Michael Millgate terms its ‘exceptionally and unreasonably hostile’ reception (Millgate 1982: 371). The Savoy takes its stand more generally on the twin peaks of the autonomy/supremacy of art and the masculine assertion of sexuality, from aggressive heterosexuality to the homosocial. These baseline criteria of the editorial position of the Savoy may be seen in a parallel commemoration of the death of Millais which Symons contributed to Number 6. ‘The Lesson of Millais’ is an outspoken condemnation of the painter’s betrayal of ‘an aristocracy’ of art for the middle-class respectability of Mammon. Then, in a dramatic comparison, Symons contrasts Millais’s ‘art’ unfavourably with that of an unnamed outcast: ‘a painter, also a man of genius, whose virtues were all given up to his art, and who is now living in a destitute and unhonoured obscurity’ (Symons 1896d: 58). This is, in all probability, a reference to Simeon Solomon (1840–1905), the homosexual artist barred

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from London galleries after he was jailed for indecent exposure in February 1873, who thereafter lived a life of poverty, dereliction and drink, at times on the street. This coded reference to Solomon enhances the parallel between Symons’ contrasting commemorations of Millais and Pater. Solomon and Pater were close friends from the late 1860s until the time of the painter’s arrest.14 Symons’ final condemnation of Millais by contrast with Solomon adds to the boldness of the Savoy’s position: It has seemed to me that there, in that immaculate devotion to art, I find the true morality of the artist; while in the respectability of Millais I see nothing to honour, for its observance of the letter I take to have been a desecration of the spirit. (Symons 1896d: 58) Symons’ approbation of Pater is based on ‘the immaculate devotion to art’ attributed here to the nameless Solomon. It is a quality which elsewhere in his ‘Literary Causerie[s]’ in the Savoy, Symons ascribes to other ‘decadent’ figures such as Verlaine and the Goncourt brothers (Symons 1896e: 88–90, 1896f: 85–7).

(iii)

Pater and French culture

Soon after Appreciations, with an Essay on Style appeared in November 1889, a Blackwood’s reviewer detected the pressure of French (and Greek) books on this volume of Pater’s on English literature: ‘Greek as Mr. Pater is in soul, his models of style are all French’ ([Oliphant] 1890: 144). ‘Style’, as Blackwood’s seems to know, was based on Pater’s review of Flaubert’s correspondence, which appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette six months before. Typically of Pater in the 1880s, his work on French literature, with one exception, is located in anonymous reviews, or in the case of the Pall Mall Gazette, with signature, in the ephemera of the daily press. In the 1890s Pater published more openly on aspects of French culture. He moves an 1886 anonymous review, on Feuillet’s La Morte, into the second edition of Appreciations (1890), giving credence to Blackwood’s insistence on the French dimension of that volume. In the same year he publishes prominently, in the Fortnightly Review, a piece on ‘Prosper Mérimée’. In 1893–4 there is another burst: ‘Mr. George Moore as an Art Critic’, Pater’s signed review of Moore’s Modern Painting in the Daily Chronicle (10 June 1893), takes Ingres and Moore’s treatment of French painting more generally, for its subject; ‘Apollo in Picardy’, an imaginary portrait set

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in medieval France, appears in Harper’s in November 1893, and in 1894 a series on French churches is initiated, two of which are published in March and June in the Nineteenth Century. The proximity of France to Britain, the vitality of French literature and art in the nineteenth century, and the centrality of Paris as a centre of culture in nineteenth-century Europe, made France a particularly palpable influence on British culture, with realism, naturalism, impressionism, and symbolism adopted, adapted, and contested. Pater’s work is typical of its period and zone in its dialogues with French discourses. It is clear from Pater’s writing, reading, and borrowing over the 30 years between 1864 and 1894 that French literature remained an abiding interest. His work is littered with allusions to it, some of which, as Patricia Clements points out with reference to Baudelaire, he deleted in subsequent editions. The records of Oxford libraries reveal Pater to have borrowed works in French frequently, at times after the early 1880s nearly as often as in English.15 If Pater’s taste for French literature survived, so did a hegemonic conviction of the danger to Britain of French fiction and morality. The element of French culture in the fin de siècle counterculture of the 1890s in Britain functions as a sign of the transgressive claim of the counterculture. Its double force – declarative and defiant – is visible in the common invocation of French art and literature in the Yellow Book, named to invoke French yellowback fiction, and the Savoy, whose links with France are explicit both textually and geographically, conceived as it was in Dieppe. In the second volume of the Yellow Book (July 1894) Hubert Crackanthorpe attests both to a greater incidence of publication of ‘realistic’ fiction in the early 1890s, and to more and visible support for such work: A sound, organised opinion of men of letters is being acquired; and in the little bouts with the bourgeois – … no one has to fight singlehanded. … Books are published, stories are printed, in oldestablished reviews, which would never have been tolerated a few years ago. (Crackanthorpe 1894: 262) His list of contemporary objects denounced by the ‘moral ogre’ of the day makes the tacky status of French culture clear: ‘Parisian novels’ are coupled with ‘express trains, evening newspapers’ and ‘the first number of the Yellow Book’ (Crackanthorpe 1894: 266). So, Pater’s 1890s practice of writing about France more openly may be seen as both a utilisation of the space for the subject of French

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culture which fin de siècle culture was in the course of creating, and participation in a different, more visible form of transgressive culture, to replace the low-profile reviewing and journalism in which his work on French material tended to be embedded in the 1880s. It seems clear that in signed essays and fiction by Pater in which French culture is prominent, it largely appears in a mediated form, distanced from nineteenth-century French and British culture by period, myth, fiction, and in ‘Style’, apparently embedded in the subject of English Literature. But the case of ‘Prosper Mérimée’, which appeared in 1890, calls attention to another cultural formation which informs Pater’s production of public work on French subjects, and that is the growth of modern languages as a potential academic subject for study at degree level. Unlike other fin de siècle writers and artists such as Symons, Beardsley, Yeats, Johnson and Wilde, Pater wrote from a paid position within the academy, and it is important to note that his only book on a Greek subject (Plato and Platonism) and his principal treatment of nineteenth-century French literature (‘Mérimée’) have origins in lectures in the academy, and are published with the imprimatur of this validating cultural formation. Pater was a longstanding supporter of the Taylor Institution at Oxford, which housed a modern languages library from which Pater borrowed copiously, and Pater’s lecture on Prosper Mérimée was the second of the annual Taylorian Lecture series which began in 1889; he also delivered it at the London Institutes. In the 1890s Pater used his institutional base and its discourses as validating structures for his work on monitored and policed subjects of the day. When compared with the decorum of lectures today, the Mérimée lecture is transgressive. Its rhetoric is elaborate and dramatic; its savour of violence is reiterated; the ethics it explores are not ‘acceptable’ (Pater 1890: 862; Pater 1895b: 33). Its claim – at the close of the nineteenth century – that French is the superior literary language seems provocative and noteworthy, even for a Taylorian audience. Mérimée, he writes, shines especially in these brief compositions which, like a minute intaglio, reveal at a glance his wonderful faculty of design and proportion in the treatment of his work, in which there is not a touch but counts. That is an art of which there are few examples in English, our somewhat diffuse, or slipshod, literary language hardly lending itself to the concentration of thought and expression, which are the essence of such writing. It is otherwise in French … (Pater 1890: 861–2; 1895b: 23)

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In the wake of ‘Style’ and in the absence of academic status for English – which appeared in the face of classical and modern languages as the floodgates of access for the unlettered, this position is not unexpected, but it indicates the extent to which fiction in English could be undervalued, even in 1890; this oblique call for short fiction in English, analogous to Mérimée’s in French, was answered by Pater himself (in his imaginary portraits) and by the market for the short story that the little magazines of the 1890s, as well as the Strand (from 1891), fostered. Moreover, ‘Prosper Mérimée’ is plainly a text which circulates the notion of decadence; it begins by linking Mérimée’s gestation in the French post-revolutionary period of disillusion and ennui with the late nineteenth-century world where ‘fundamental belief [is] gone’ (Pater 1890: 853; Pater 1895b: 5). In a complicated textual strategy, the text locates decadence in the present (Mérimée, who died in 1870, is appropriated for the 1890s). However, it characterises the present as flaccid, and transfers tropes of exquisite violence to the implicitly vital past; this strain of violence, of homosocial sado-masochism, pervades Pater’s text as it does Mérimée’s, its apparent occasion: Comparing that favourite century of the French Renaissance with our own, he notes a decadence of the more energetic passions in the interest of general tranquillity, and perhaps (only perhaps!) of general happiness. ‘Assassination,’ he observes, as if with regret, ‘is no longer a part of our manners.’ In fact, the duel, and the whole morality of the duel, which does but enforce a certain regularity on assassination, what has been well called le sentiment du fer, the sentiment of deadly steel, had then the disposition of refined existence. (Pater 1890: 857; 1895b: 12–13) Now, the last sentence is not a quotation, and indeed the text calls attention to its own intervention and advocacy in the following sentence, ‘It was, indeed, very different, and is, in Mérimée’s romance’ (Pater 1890: 857; 1895b: 13). This material, fodder for certain erotic strains in the fin de siècle, is articulated in the lecture and circulated more widely by its publication in the Fortnightly Review the following month (and the repetition of the lecture in London). Textually, both the distance and slippages of intertextuality are repeatedly exploited, as in this tantalising typical example, which is a gloss on Mérimée’s ‘prose ballads’ with their ‘vampire tribe’ (Pater 1890: 861; 1895b: 22). In truth, Mérimée was the unconscious parent of much we may think of dubious significance in later French literature. It’s as if there

278 Print and Gender: Pater

were nothing to tell of in this world but various forms of hatred, and a love that is like lunacy; and the only other world, a world of maliciously active, hideous, dead bodies. (Pater 1890: 861; 1895b: 22–3) Concepts worked up (though not initiated) in the writing of the 1890s, such as that of masks and impersonality,16 are both utilised, and in a typical Paterian move, ultimately critiqued, leaving the reader uncertain of the status of the greater part of the preceding portrait. Declaring ‘impersonality was, in literary art, Mérimée’s central aim’ (Pater 1890: 864; 1895b: 28), it continues: Mérimée’s superb self-effacement, his impersonality, is itself but an effective personal trait, and, transferred to art, becomes a markedly peculiar quality of literary beauty. … [He] had … nothing of what we call soul in literature … as if, in theological language, he were incapable of grace. He has none of those subjectivities, colourings, peculiarities of mental refraction, which necessitate varieties of style – could we spare such? – and render the perfections of it no merely negative qualities. (Pater 1890: 864; 1895b: 29) This lecture then ends, having detailed Mérimée’s patenting of decadence at length, with the implication that the ‘subject’ of Mérimée be/has been displaced: ‘There are masters of French prose whose art has begun where the art of Mérimée leaves off.’ We see here the entertaining of both impersonality and subjectivities, that characteristic yoking of science and expression found in continental naturalism and impressionism. From 1834 Mérimée worked actively, in his capacity as Inspector General of Historical Monuments, for the preservation of buildings, and reading these French essays of the 1890s successively shows that Pater’s attention to architecture in ‘Prosper Mérimée’ extends to ‘Apollo in Picardy’, with its ‘monastic barn’ and its ancient bell tower, as well as to the pieces on French churches. In ‘Apollo’, architecture additionally figures two of the principal strains of the story. ‘A sort of music made visible’ (Pater 1893: 952; 1895b: 152), it is a trope of the seductiveness of the primitive past seen in Apollyon with his lyre. It also signals the efflorescence of the homoerotic, sado-masochist motifs visible only through presence in the Mérimée lecture: ‘And is not the human body, too, a building, with architectural laws, a structure, tending by the very forces which primarily held it together to drop asunder in time?’ (Pater 1893: 952; 1895b: 153).

Pater and the Fin de Siècle 279

Of the three characters in the all male triangle of ‘Apollo in Picardy’ Prior Saint-Jean is confined and constructed as a lunatic, suspected of murder. Apollyon flees, apparently having committed a second murder; and Hyacinthus, the acolyte, in the midst of a game of naked youths, has his head pierced by a flying discus ‘sawing through the boy’s face, uplifted in the dark to trace it, crushing in the tender skull upon the brain’ (Pater 1893: 956; 1895b: 167). This episode, with its ‘immense cry’, the ‘cry of pain’, the ‘abundant rain’ mixing with the ‘copious purple’ of the blood, the supine, savoured corpse (Pater 1893: 956–7; 1895b: 167–8), and the immense Apollyon ‘reduced in the morning light to his smaller self’ (Pater 1893: 957; 1895b: 168), is a homoerotic, sado-masochistic fable of a sexual act. Convincing and detailed readings of this version of the classical myth of Apollo’s accidental murder of his lover/son in a game of quoits have appeared, most recently by Richard Dellamora in Masculine Desire and Linda Dowling in Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford. Recognising this myth, and the figure of Hyacinth more generally, as a recurring subject in homosocial discourse, both writers read the tale in terms of homoerotic themes, with Dellamora offering real insights in his scrutiny of Pater’s depiction of ‘the frustrated and destructive career of desire’ and of ‘the subject position of a man who self-consciously quells his sexual and emotional attraction to other males’ (Dellamora 1990: 186, and 1994: 65–82). Dowling focuses powerfully on the analogies between the competing ideologies within the tale and within the University, ‘the doubtful fate of the Uranian love that had been bred out of Oxford Hellenism’ and ‘the great significance of the pedagogical scene between the prior and Apollyon’ (Dowling 1994: 138). It is clear for all commentators on this tale that what is of interest here is not merely that Pater is writing yet another narrative of returned gods, or that the plot is derived from myth, but that this material is selected, and how it is inscribed. 17 Here, I want to place ‘Apollo in Picardy’ more generically, as Pater’s production of a fiction in part inspired by the nouvelles of Mérimée, but rendered explicitly homosocial. Here in this late piece, openly treating what is called ‘contemporary’ French literature, Pater, along with Wilde, Douglas, Symonds and Beardsley, develops the homosexual discourse of Decadence as a counter to the aggressive heterosexuality of those such as Arthur Symons. It is a strain of French literature that surfaced repeatedly in earlier allusions in Pater’s writing to the work of Baudelaire, only to be the occasion of self-censorship.

280 Print and Gender: Pater

The circulation in Britain of this strain of Pater’s work may be seen in the embroidery work of Phoebe Anna Traquair (1852–1936), an Irish-born Edinburgh-based artist whose four panels (conceived in 1893 and executed 1895–1902), entitled ‘The Progress of a Soul’, are inspired by ‘Denys l’Auxerrois’. Each of the panels shows an exotic, troubled and androgynous youth whose path into evil is imaged, in Panels 2 and 3 by the presence of an increasingly encircling snake; the homoeroticism of the last panel is unmistakable in the embrace between the victorious protagonist, rendered exquisitely passive by his labours, and an assertive angel whose strong and exposed forearms imply that its uncertain gender is also male (Cumming 1993: 65–6): see Figure 23.

(iv)

Pater and the fin de siècle

In section iii on Pater’s writing in the 1890s, I have commented on some of his pieces on French subjects, in order to explore the relations of his work with that of the Continent, but other of his 1890s publications helped determine the representation of his part in fin de siècle culture, most notably ‘Lacedaemon’ (Pater 1892a), the lecture on Sparta and the Doric in Plato and Platonism, and the autobiographical imaginary portrait ‘Emerald Uthwart’ (Pater 1892b). Though late and cautious, his signed review of The Picture of Dorian Gray (Pater 1891) may also be seen as supportive of Wilde’s work, not least because Pater was one of the few reviewers willing to critique the novel seriously, without denouncing it. This review was the publication which followed that of ‘Prosper Mérimée’, preceding ‘Apollo in Picardy’ by two years. The contrast is sharp between Pater’s treatment of writing associated with France – the explicit homoeroticism of the fiction and transgression in the lecture – and the straitened conduct of his review of Wilde’s English novel of Decadence. Moreover, ‘Apollo in Picardy’ (like The Picture of Dorian Gray) was initially published in an American periodical, these being available in Britain, but without quite the accessibility of the indigenous periodicals. Pater died nine months before the Wilde trials, but it is clear that he took his own cautionary measures, textually, in his strategic management of his publication topics and locations, and in his deployment of anonymity and signature. In addition to the posthumous circulation of Greek Studies (from 1895), ‘Apollo in Picardy’ was reprinted in Shadwell’s second collection of Pater’s periodical essays, Miscellaneous Studies, in October 1895. But Pater’s reputation was heavily policed by Shadwell and Pater’s family, and friends, none of whom published a Life. It seems very likely that

Pater and the Fin de Siècle 281

23. This embroidered panel of 1899–1902 by the artist Phoebe Anna Traquair of the Edinburgh School is ‘The Victory’, one of four in a series, ‘The Progress of a Soul’, inspired by Pater’s short story ‘Denys l’Auxerrois’ (1886), which appeared in Imaginary Portraits (1887).

282 Print and Gender: Pater

letters were destroyed, and no substantial biographies appeared until a dozen years after his death. The coincidence of Pater’s death and the Wilde trials is one of the constituting factors of Pater’s ‘place’ in fin de siècle culture and its histories. Just as Wilde’s plays were removed from the West End theatres, Pater’s homosocial life and discourses became dangerous to expose. Because of the gender dimension of Pater’s prose, its inscription in the 1890s, in the main, has been constrained by homophobia for nearly a century. Pater’s guarded and ambivalent participation in fin de siècle culture is reproduced with variations by his contemporaries in their constructions of Pater as author, and of the 1890s. Both Pater’s decision to write openly and repeatedly on French subjects in the first part of the decade and the displacement of English Decadence by French Symbolism as Symons’ project in the latter part attest to the dangers of indigenous Decadence as a subject in Britain, both before and after the Wilde trials, for different though related reasons. These pertain to the history of culture, of the subject position(s), and the writing subject.

Afterword In conclusion, I want to tout the value of archival research in the study of the press; not only does it enhance our readings of the nineteenthcentury media, but it is an invaluable aid in interpretation of our own journalism and publishing industries. It articulates continuities as well as difference. With respect to methodology, I have tried to show the value of an approach which prominently takes into account material culture, the processes and forms of production, distribution and consumption of print materials in the period. This has produced a view of print in the nineteenth-century distinctive from that which has emerged from those most interested in literature or media history and journalism, in that it links literature and journalism, and books, periodicals and newspapers, via the serial, rather than divides them. It is a view which takes account of the position of the industry and of the consumer of popular print materials, into which literature falls in this period of serials and partissue. Lastly, I have tried to show the richness of readings of an author (such as Walter Pater) yielded by an approach which has been called the ‘sociology of texts’. The publications of even an author like Pater, an ‘aesthete’ and don, which might be expected to exist in isolation from such considerations, are significantly implicated. So is our understanding of the conduct of authorship in a period in which certain forms of production are fostered by the ubiquity of the serial. Writing this in a period in which the guardians of material culture, the national library depositories, are under scrutiny for discarding paper copies in favour of electronic or film archives is a forcible reminder of the transition of print in our own time. Machine searchable text has many advantages for researchers, and is to be welcomed, unreservedly. But so do hard copies. These archival forms, paper and film or electronic, ideally may be used in tandem. And in any case, with respect to early newspapers and periodicals, there has been an untimely haste and stealth in the formation and implementation of these policies, before full-text electronic resources have been produced. The term for this process used by British librarians – ‘weeding’ – signifies the process whereby contemporary ‘under use’ or desperation for shelf space forestall revaluation by future historians, and result in identification of ‘old’ serials as undesirable and out of place, and their sale – at best to individual collectors or entrepreneurs, and at worst for 283

284 Afterword

pulping. Unless our national depositories are prevailed upon to desist from this heedless abandoning of material press archives, study of the sociology of texts and material culture of the publishing industries will be prematurely cut off from one of its greatest resources. The paper will crumble soon enough, and conservation is a different if related matter.

Notes Note to the Introduction 1. See ‘Oscar Wilde and the Woman’s World’ in Brake (1994a), pp. 122–47.

Notes to Chapter 1: ‘Trepidation of the Spheres’ 1. John Donne, ‘A Valediction Forbidding Mourning’. 2. L. R. is the London Review and Weekly of Politics, Art and Society, which appeared between July 1860 and March 1869. 3. For more on the circulating libraries during this period, see Hiley (1992). 4. ‘Maga’ was the nickname given to Blackwood’s Magazine. 5. Alexander Innes Shand published two novels (Against Time in 1870, Fortune’s Wheel in 1886); a number of cookery books in the 1890s; travel books, some reprinted from The Times, in the 1880s; a biography of a military man, and three volumes of reminiscences. 6. It should be noted that according to the terms of Mudie’s subscriptions, country subscribers could borrow current numbers of periodicals from Mudie’s only a month after their initial issue to city borrowers. 7. See Chapter 3. 8. See Chapter 2. 9. According to the marked copy of the Athenaeum at City University, for example. Watts reviewed work by Swinburne on 31 January and 22 May 1880, and 2 June 1894.

Notes to Chapter 2: Star Turn? 1. New novels published in three volumes normally cost 1–12 guineas. Novels in 1/– monthly part-issue in this zone at this date, which appeared in 20 parts over 19 months, would normally cost £1. 2. For example, Cornhill tended to illustrate its fiction; some others did not. 3. When Walter Pater discontinued his novel Gaston de Latour in Macmillan’s Magazine, in the November 1888 issue (in which the expected next chapter did not appear), there was no comment; nor was a subsequent chapter identified as such when it appeared as an historical portrait, and not fictional, in the Fortnightly nine months later in August 1889.

Notes to Chapter 3: Macmillan’s English Men of Letters Series 1. For the early years of the Pall Mall Gazette (PMG) see Robertson Scott 1950. For more on Stead, see Schults (1972), and for critique of the ‘Maiden 285

286 Notes to pp. 52–69

2.

3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8.

9.

10.

Tribute’ campaign, see Walkowitz (1992), chapters 3 and 4, and Bland (1995). For a literary representation of a similarly conservative view of the literature–journalism split, see George Gissing’s New Grub Street (1891), which appeared four years later. For example, see ‘The Old Journalism and the New’ in Brake (1994a), pp. 83–103. On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History first appeared in 1841, having originated as a series of lectures in 1840. Aldis Wright (1831–1914) was a Renaissance scholar who had edited the Globe edition of the works of Shakespeare (1864, 1904), the poetry of Milton (1903), and the letters of FitzGerald (1889, 1894) as well as the Rubaiyat in 1899. Samuel Wright is the author of the standard bibliography of Pater’s works, and no relation to Thomas or Aldis. Wright had published lives of Cowper (1892) and Defoe (1894); he was working on lives of Dickens, FitzGerald, and Richard Burton. ‘Biography’, he writes, ‘has always been my passion and I have been especially interested in the love experiences, regular or irregular, of men of genius, e.g. Tchehov, Rozanov, Dostoyevsky, Ogarev, and Herzen’ (Wright 1936: 181). It is noteworthy that he does not cite the men whose biographies he did write. Crosland was also known to be a contributor to Outlook (1898–1928), the continuation of the New Review (1889–97), which had been edited by Archibald Grove from 1889 and subsequently by W. E. Henley. Until Dec. 1894 the New Review was published by Longmans, and from 1894 to Dec. 1897, by Heinemann. I.e. pederasty.

Notes to Chapter 4: ‘Doing the Biz’ 1. For a canny analysis of the diminution of the three-volume novel, see Eliot (1995). 2. See Eliot (1994), pp. 26–42, 46–55, 63–74, 122–5, 134–45, for quantitative analyses of these two publications. 3. I have not considered the printers’ journals which burgeoned earlier, in the 1860s; they are numerous and a subject in their own right. In an advert for the Linotype Composing Machine in the P.C. (Publishers’ Circular) Supplement of 30 November 1895, no less than ten trade journals are quoted, eight of them allied to the printing trades: British Printer, Printing World, British and Colonial Printer and Stationer, Printers’ Register, Stationery World, Press News, Book and News Trade Gazette, and Paper Exchange News. 4. The appearance of publications on Magazine Day at the end of the month anticipated the forthcoming month whose date they carried. 5. For example, full-page adverts for Linotype machines appeared in November 1895 in the P.C. Supplement, including a listing of the London, provincial, and some of the 3000 American papers deploying the new technology. See P.C. Supplement, November 1895: 30.

Notes to pp. 69–87 287 6. For example, a large illustrated advert for The Newspaper Distributing Agency, Limited, showing its ten vans, appeared in the P.C. Supplement, 14 December 1895: 7. 7. For a wide-ranging discussion of ‘Literature, Advertising, and Social Reading’ see Wicke (1988). 8. For example, the Bookman of October 1893 offers six free listings to regular subscribers (p. 32). 9. The graphics of the supplement’s masthead underlined, emboldened, and enlarged the words the P.C. Supplement, making clear the secondary, descriptive status of ‘Newspaper, Magazine and Periodical’ which appeared between P.C. and Supplement to make up the complete long title. 10. Newnes (1851–1910) was the founder and publisher of the highly successful Tit-Bits in 1881, the Strand Magazine in 1890, and the evening daily the Westminster Gazette in 1893. The Daily Courier, however, was not a success and closed within months. 11. It is interesting that at the same time that the Daily Mail experimented with the targeting of women readers, the editor of the Daily Courier is asked: ‘There is an impression abroad that the Daily Courier will be devoted mainly to the interest of women. Will that be the case?’ ‘Certainly not. No doubt there will be many things in the paper which will interest ladies exceedingly, but how anybody can imagine that Sir George Newnes would …’ (‘The Daily Courier’, P.C. Supplement, 18 April 1895: 5). 12. Four volumes of Stead’s Review of Reviews Annual Index and Guide to the Periodicals of the World had already appeared for 1890–3 when he began publishing separate monthly indices in March 1895. The supplementation of the annual, retrospective index with the monthly, prospective index indicates Stead’s business acumen, in a period when the amount of periodical publication was climbing steeply and the value of news and the speed of its circulation were rising. Poole had been publishing his annual, retrospective index since 1882, but Stead’s was both more selective in its details, and broader – international – in its scope. For more on Stead in his role as editor of the Review of Reviews, see Baylen (1979). 13. The protection of literary property was an important aim for the Society of Authors and the Author. For this, and more on the relation of the journal to the Society, see Colby who writes ‘“Proputty, proputty, proputty” might have made a fitting motto on the masthead of the Author’ (Colby 1990: 112). 14. According to Colby (Colby 1990: 113), the Bookseller called the Society of Authors ‘the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Authors’.

Notes to Chapter 5: ‘Silly Novels’? 1. For a countervailing view, and perhaps a response two issues later, see [J. W. Kaye’s] ‘The “Non-Existence” of Women’ ([Kaye] 1855/North British Review 23: 539), ‘there is some difficulty in arguing such a question as this [marriage laws] in a perfectly unprejudiced and dispassionate manner. The man will take the man’s view of the question, the woman will take the woman’s. Reviewers, however, are of no sex. They are collective and epicæne; of many-

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2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

sided vision and catholic sympathies – judges, and not advocates’ (my italics). Areas of domestic news in which gender figures in the 1850s include debates about married women’s property, (sexually transmitted) contagious diseases, prostitution, the census, the extension of suffrage, women’s employment, marriage with a deceased wife’s sister, and education. See Shattock (1977), p. 131: ‘Most quarterlies had a set pattern for each issue, one article on current creative literature, novels or poetry, one on current political affairs, one on … social questions, one on science …, one or two on biography or memories, possibly one on books of travel or a new historical work, and another on art or architecture.’ This is a fairly crude measure of identification of articles on gender. While the CD Rom edition of the Wellesley Index permits subject searches of the Index for the first time, it is only by title words and not contents. For example, Walter Pater’s explicit (and anonymous) exploration of male homosexual culture in ‘Winckelmann’ in the January 1867 issue of the Westminster would not be found by searching under such categories as men, women, ladies, the sex, male, female, homosocial, homosexual, or inversion, nor would his later article ‘Poems by William Morris’ in the October 1868 number, which included what was later published in Studies in the History of the Renaissance in 1873 as the ‘Conclusion’. For other articles in the Westminster on male youth and male friendships which would similarly elude such searches, see the editor W. E. Hickson’s brief review of In Memoriam in July 1850 (53: 572) and an anonymous review of Euphranor, a Dialogue on Youth in April 1851 (55: 260–3). See Palmegiano (1976) for a list which indexes more periodicals than Wellesley, but only with respect to the category ‘woman’ at its most inclusive. See Shattock (1977), p. 131, who reports that in 1851 the new editor of the quarterly North British Review ‘reflected gloomily in his journal that the era of the quarterlies was soon to come to an end’. See the opening article for July 1850 on the ‘Enfranchisement of Women’; the first item under review is The New York Tribune for Europe for 23 Oct. 1850, which includes a report of agitation by and for women in the United States. Similarly, in the previous issue of April 1850, ‘Marriage with a Deceased Wife’s Sister’ reviews the Parliamentary debates in the Lords, and two pamphlets. For example, the North British Review in Article VIII, ‘Outrages on Women’, in May 1856, lists as items reviewed ‘The Times’, ‘The Morning Post’, and ‘The Leader Weekly Journal’, and in Article IX, ‘Peace and its Principal Duties’ and ‘Newspapers for March and April 1856’. The strain of the quarterlies’ pace is seen in a review in the ‘Belles Letters’ section of the Westminster in July 1858 to which an asterisked note is appended with reference to John Foster: ‘*Written before the death of this distinguished man, which happened on the 10th of June’ (‘Belles Letters’, Westminster Review 70: 299), and the North British Review affords several examples, in this period, of the same phenomenon; ‘The Prohibited Degrees in Marriage’ (February 1850), the last article of a number, begins ‘Before this article appears in print, notice may very probably have been given in

Notes to pp. 90–4 289

10.

11. 12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

Parliament of a renewed motion to legalize marriage with a deceased wife’s sister’ (North British Review 12: 532), and in ‘Outrages on Women’ in May 1856 the writer quotes a ‘report of a women’s meeting in a provincial town, published in the ‘Morning Post’ whilst this article was going through the press’ (North British Review 25: 256). The anonymous author writes of the ‘monstrous evils in the administration of the law as it now exists’ ([Paget?] 1856: 355). It is of interest that he is reviewing among others one of his own publications. See Westminster Review 68: 403, ‘Did our survey cease here, we should not be so unfair as the Saturday Review.’ The reviewer is John Nichol. See Saturday Review, 10 April 1858: 369–70. It is interesting that because of its review format and quarterly frequency, the Westminster of this period seldom dedicated main articles to new periodicals or single issues of contemporary journals; it did however review pamphlets and books by the editors, contributors and backers of the English Woman’s Journal. This article of April 1853 does suggest that the right to vote, ‘suffrage’, might be better based on education (attendance and proficiency) rather than on ownership of property, but without mentioning explicitly any gender implications of this reform. The women of Langham Place in London – Bessie Rayner Parkes, Barbara Bodichon, Emily Davies – began their series of periodicals in 1858, and Isabella Beeton first contributed to the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine in 1857 and took on its editorship in 1860. From 1852 Harriet Martineau, an established working journalist, began writing regular leaders and articles for the Daily News. Earlier Mary Howitt had edited with her husband Howitt’s Journal, 1847–8; and Christian Johnston had been at the helm of Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine between 1836 and 1846. The shorter anonymous reviews printed in smaller type at the back of each issue, in variously named ‘Foreign Literature’ and ‘Contemporary Literature’ sections, often include explicitly gendered material such as this. On the whole, Wellesley has been less successful in attributing these to named authors than main articles. This review remains unattributed in Wellesley. There is reason to suggest that Harriet Taylor may be its author, as both it and the later ‘Enfranchisement of Women’, which appeared in the July 1851 number, refer to Condorcet. Its polemical commitment to the women’s cause including rights to higher education and suffrage seems to rule out Jewsbury and Lewes, and Harriet Martineau was not writing for the Westminster Review at the time. Rosemary Ashton notes the anomaly in 1851 of Marian Evans’ presence – ‘the only woman’ – at a meeting of ‘Westminster Review writers, with the addition of Dickens and some other great men’ (Ashton 1991: 128); their aim was to resist the booksellers and maximise the free trade of books. These include ‘The Lady Novelists’ (Lewes, July 1852), ‘Woman in France: Madame de Sablé’ (Marian Evans, Oct. 1854), ‘German Wit: Heinrich Heine’ (Marian Evans, Jan. 1856), ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’ (Marian Evans, Oct. 1856), and ‘The Sonnets of Shakespeare’ (Anon., July 1857). See, for example, Evans on Stowe’s Dred and Fuller Ossoli’s Women of the Nineteenth Century.

290 Notes to pp. 94–7 20. This October 1856 issue, which may be perceived by its readers to make a feature of gender, also includes Marian Evans’ main article ‘Silly Novels’ and her highly favourable review of Stowe’s Dred in the ‘Belles Letters’ section. There are other numbers in the history of the Westminster in the 1850s which similarly include more than one dedicated article on gender issues (e.g. January 1850, which follows up ‘Prostitution’ with the review of Histoire Morale des Femmes). These suggest the degree to which commissioning editors of the Westminster drew on a body of contributors interested in such matters, but also the degree to which editors shaped numbers around themes. There is abundant later evidence of thematic and/or shaped numbers in formalised systems of a spectrum of views on a single topic in a single issue and/or ‘replies’ in succeeding numbers; see the symposia devised by James Knowles in the Contemporary Review and the Nineteenth Century. 21. For this term see Sedgwick 1985. 22. When the Cornhill Magazine is founded a year later, Thackeray gives new life to the bowdlerisation in the name of women that took root in the late eighteenth century. Given the intended family audience of the Cornhill, Thackeray outlaws political, religious, and philosophical controversy in its pages. Objections by male novelists to censorship of their work ostensibly to ‘protect’ the family and satisfy ‘Mrs Grundy’ erupted into print in 1884–5 with George Moore’s letters to the press and Literature at Nurse, and was followed up by a symposium in the New Review in Jan. 1890 called ‘Candour in English Fiction’ to which Hardy and Eliza Lynn Linton contributed, among others. See Brake (1994a), pp. 75–6, 114. 23. Lewes was not a gentleman amateur who ‘contributed’ to the press. His profession was journalism, and from the late 1830s he published (some contemporaries felt promiscuously) in a range of papers including incompatible titles such as the Edinburgh Review and Blackwood’s and Fraser’s; and the Cornhill and the Leader and the Westminster. Like most freelance journalists, whose work commonly involved such tensions, Lewes routinely fitted his copy to the various journals’ formats, characters, and requirements. Chapman’s charge in 1851 that Lewes was a ‘bread scholar’ shows the ambivalence toward (professional) journalists at mid-century when the gentleman/scholar contributor was still the respectable position, and neither were journalists respectable nor journalism a profession; on Lewes’s reputation for varied and prodigious journalism, see Brake (1994a), pp. 27–8. 24. See Rendall (1987), p. 132. Rendall suggests that the circulation moved from 400 in January 1859 to 700 in November, and reached its peak at 1000 in January 1860. 25. See Broomfield (1990), passim. Between 1864 and 1870, Macmillan’s published the following on women alone: F. T. Palgrave’s ‘Women and the Fine Arts’ (1865; two parts), Archibald Maclaren on ‘Girls’ Schools’ (1864), Helen Taylor on ‘Women and Criticism’ (1866), Millicent Fawcett’s ‘Education of Women of the Middle Upper Classes’ (1867), Rev. J. Llewelyn Davies’s ‘A New College for Women’ (1868), Elizabeth Garrett’s ‘Women Physicians’ (1868), C. Kingsley’s ‘Women and Politics’ (1869), and Eliza Lynn Linton’s ‘The Modern Revolt [of Women]’ (1870). Details may be found in Wellesley.

Notes to pp. 97–9 291 26. The Fortnightly Review published at least five pieces, one by Richard M. Pankhurst, two by Millicent Fawcett, one by Arthur Hobhouse, and John Morley’s translation of Condorcet’s ‘Plea for the Citizenship of Women’. 27. Between 1867 and 1870 the Contemporary published at least ten articles, five by men and five by women. Among them are pieces by Jessie Bourcherett, Emily Davies, Lydia Becker, Josephine Butler, Emily Shirreff, and Thomas Markby. 28. In the conclusion of ‘Silly Novels’ Harriet Martineau, Currer Bell, and Mrs Gaskell figure approvingly if glancingly as examples of excellent women writers who ‘have been treated as cavalierly as if they had been men’. Evans goes on to defend her own practice in the article: ‘And every critic who forms a high estimate of the share women may ultimately take in literature, will, on principle, abstain from any exceptional indulgence towards the productions of literary women’ ([Evans] 1856c/Westminster Review 66: 460, my italics), and this echoes her review of Geraldine Jewsbury’s novel Constance Herbert in July 1855 (Westminster Review 64: 294). ‘Silly Novels’ is an article which definitely reminds us that, for Evans, the achievement of women in English fiction was all to come. In the last paragraph, however, she does categorically assert that ‘Fiction is a department of literature in which women can, after their kind, fully equal men. A cluster of great names, both living and dead, rush to our memories in evidence that women can produce novels not only fine, but among the very finest; – novels, too, that have a precious speciality, lying quite apart from masculine aptitudes and experience’ ([Evans]) 1856c/Westminster Review 66: 461). But the paragraph and the article end with a long exposition about the deficiencies of novels by women. See ‘Woman in France’ two years earlier where she writes, ‘In France alone woman has had a vital influence on the development of literature; in France alone the mind of woman has passed like an electric current through the language, making crisp and definite what is elsewhere heavy and blurred; in France alone, if the writings of women were swept away, a serious gap would be made in the national history’ ([Evans] 1854/ Westminster Review 62: 449). 29. Many periodicals of the mid-nineteenth century had social formations closely linked to editorial groups, policy making, and production: the Punch Table, the Fraserians, and the later Metaphysical Society are well documented instances of journalists gathering on a regular basis variously to select copy, discuss policy, and/or to produce copy. Given that these meetings routinely took place in rooms in public houses or eateries and involved drinking, women were routinely excluded, as they were generally in Britain from most public meetings of any kind. Even at the early meetings of the Social Science Congress, papers by women were read to the meeting by male colleagues. One reason why Lewes may have refused to join the Metaphysical Society was that it excluded George Eliot. For the Metaphysical Society, see Brown (1947), passim, and Brake (1994a), pp. 53–4. 30. Interestingly, nineteenth-century feminist exploration of women’s religious communities or sisterhoods includes an interest in celibate living. See Rendall (1987), p. 129, and Vicinus (1985), chapter 2.

292 Notes to pp. 100–7 31. Contemporary Mill scholars such as Ann P. Robson and the late John M. Robson now ascribe this article wholly to Harriet Taylor Mill (Robson and Robson 1994: 178), but when Hickson was sent the article by J. S. Mill, Mill implied that it was his own work, perhaps to ensure its publication. 32. Readers may notice an echo of this position in Marian Evans’ ‘Silly Novels’ later in the decade, which suggests that Evans’ piece is in part a reply to Lewes’s as Beryl Gray avers in her article in the special issue of Victorian Periodicals Review on the Westminster Review (Fall 2000). 33. Lewes was an admirer of Sand and wrote about her repeatedly in the 1840s. His 1852 Westminster review of ‘The Lady Novelists’ includes an edition of her works, and in the guise of biography (Westminster Review 68: 135–6), he makes clear her sexual orientation without stating it. Recording that she was raised and educated as a boy, and commending her experience as unmatched by any other woman writer, he obligingly names the novel which in his view is the most biographical. 34. If the article on divorce is by John Paget (1811–98), it is his only contribution to the Westminster. By profession, he was a police magistrate, and among the bulk of his writing in Wellesley, which appears in Blackwood’s, a number of articles pertain to the criminal justice system. 35. These are, here, largely about aspects of the woman question. 36. See Shattock (1977). p. 134, who reports that ‘Patmore’s articles were put off time and again [by A. C. Fraser] with lame excuses until he finally snapped that he was not publishing enough to maintain any “line” of criticism.’ 37. Patmore, whose subsequent sequence of poems, ‘The Angel in the House’ (from 1854), celebrated his marriage of 1847 to his first wife Emily, emerges retrospectively through this widely circulated title as one of the main conservative purveyors of the ideals of married love and the domestic woman. On the strength of the publication of his first volume of poems in 1844, he was taken up by the Pre-Raphaelites, and their short-lived journal The Germ included his work. 38. See Wellesley, I, pp. 663–4, which suggests that Fraser was forced to resign in Feb. 1857 for publishing an article that was deemed too liberal by a proponent of the Free Church of Scotland, William Cunningham. Wellesley regards the Fraser years (1850–7) as ‘the peak’ of North British Review. But Weinstein (1984), pp. 276–7 notes that although Fraser’s North British Review was liberal on some questions, it was not on others; he cites adverse reviews of Mayhew and Kingsley, Mill’s ‘On Liberty’, and Darwin. See also Shattock (1977), p. 135, who suggests that North British Review was ‘Liberal in politics, reasonably advanced in regard to social reform, conservative in theory.’ 39. John William Kaye (1814–76) began to edit a periodical and write fiction in the mid-1840s in India, having resigned from the Bengal artillery in 1841; he returned to the UK circa 1845, and from 1856 to 1871 worked in the Home Civil Service of the East India Company office, and succeeded John Stuart Mill as Secretary for the Political and Secret Dept of the India Office. It is largely in the window of Fraser’s editorship that Kaye contributes articles on wider social questions, having previously published five pieces there between 1846 and February 1850 exclusively on his areas of expertise, India

Notes to pp. 107–11 293 and the military. After Fraser’s departure from North British Review Kaye appears, from Wellesley, to transfer his regular periodical contributions first to the liberal Edinburgh Review (1857 only), then to the Tory Blackwood’s (February 1858–July 1861), and then to the new Cornhill Magazine (July 1860–January 1875). It might be said that, during the Fraser years, the extent to which the remit of North British Review was liberal, in part, prompted these pieces on the woman question, a series which could only have appeared in the 1850s in such editorial climates as North British Review and Westminster Review afforded. There is no mention of Kaye’s notable defence of women in the entry on Kaye in the Dictionary of National Biography. 40. In August 1852 Shattock reports that David Masson ‘insisted that the Westminster could not compete with the North British, not even in “what the Westminster vaunts most – freedom and thought”’ (Shattock 1982: 154). Certainly the two quarterlies are comparable, although as Chapman and Evans get into their stride and in so far as they are unencumbered by the Free Church of Scotland like the North British Review or any comparable constraint, the Westminster Review is able to continue relatively unchecked while the North British Review founders on ideological questions, sacks Fraser, and fails to publish its May 1857 number. For more on the supportive radical context of this gender material in Westminster Review see Rosenberg (2000) and Turner (2000) in the special issue of Victorian Periodicals Review on the Westminster (Fall 2000). 41. It was quick off the mark for a quarterly and preceded W. R. Greg’s infamous response ‘Why are women redundant?’ in April 1862 in the National Review, also a quarterly.

Notes to Chapter 6 (I): Magazines and the Construction of Identity 1. ‘To W.J.M.’ is signed ‘G.G.’ [George Gillett, 1873–1948]. Gillett, an undergraduate at Keble from October 1892, contributes to The Artist from December 1889, and his work is also found in the Spirit Lamp, the Oxford University undergraduate magazine which, from December 1892 to 1893, was edited by Alfred Douglas; see d’Arch Smith (1970), p. 52, where S. E. Cottam is quoted as alleging that at the time of publication of the later Spirit Lamp poem ‘In Memoriam, E.B.F.’ the initials (and the loss) were known to be fictitious. Given the gist of ‘To W.J.M.’ coupled with Gillett’s alleged practice in the Spirit Lamp, it is unlikely that the initials of the earlier title are attributable. Gillett, the son of a clergyman, was a Westminster school scholar when he entered Oxford in 1892. 2. It is uncertain when Charles Kains-Jackson began to edit The Artist; 1888 is the date usually given (e.g. d’Arch Smith (1970), and Fletcher (1979)), but its provenance is unclear. The archives of William Reeves, the first publisher of the journal, in the British Library show that as early as April 1886, ‘CKJ’ received, with ‘Crowdy’, 81 copies out of a print run of 1500. 3. See, for example, Emmanuel Cooper, ‘The Love that Dare Not Speak its Name’, and Stephen Calloway, ‘The Dandyism of the Senses’ in Spens (1993), pp. 48–53 and 55–63 respectively.

294 Notes to pp. 111–19 4. For Symonds see Grosskurth (1964), and for Pater see, for example, works by Brake, Inman, and Shuter. 5. Cornhill was well known as a family magazine, with a recipe of contents that included several serial novels per issue, and normally excluded articles on politics, religion, and philosophy. Symonds’ unlikely spate of contributions to Cornhill includes a remarkable two-part article on ‘Antinous’ in February and March 1879, of which the following is characteristic of Part I, which is, as a whole, especially explicit: ‘Hadrian had loved Antinous with a Greek passion in his lifetime. The Roman Emperor was half a god. He remembered how Zeus had loved Ganymede, and raised him to Olympus. … He, Hadrian, would do the like’ (Symonds 1879: 210). For recent work on Cornhill, see Victorian Periodicals Review 1999 and 2000, beginning with a special issue (32.3, Fall 1999). 6. Punch, for example, in 1887 is placed by Fox Bourne in the category of ‘class journalism’ as both a comic and an illustrated paper. See Bourne, vol. II, pp. 117–18, 298. It is notable that even the Athenaeum, which prints ‘culture’ news but not political news, is placed in this category in Bourne. 7. For the category of the woman reader, see Beetham (1996), Flint (1993), and Leckie (1999). 8. See 1 January 1889: front cover (verso), and December 1890: 380. 9. This piece is ‘apropos’ of the advice in Cassell’s Book that dark bathing costumes are best. 10. It is important to note that The Studio also used the phrase ‘applied art’ in its sub-title. If publishers and editors of The Artist were conscious of competition, it was from the new Studio rather than from the stalwarts, the Art Journal (folio, illustrated, monthly, at 1s. 6d. in 1894) or the Magazine of Art (folio, illustrated, monthly, at 1s. 4d. in 1894). 11. ‘The New Chivalry’ appeared in The Artist 15.172 (April 1894): 102–4. 12. Neither Kains-Jackson nor any other editor of The Artist had been named before in the journal, in this way or any other. 13. Mountmorres was William Geoffrey Bouchard (b. September 1872), part of the Irish peerage. He was 21 when he stepped in to edit The Artist for five months between May and September of 1894, having attended Balliol in 1890–1. He married in September of 1893, became a member of the London County Council for Mile End in 1895, and served as Metropolitan and Provincial Secretary of the Primrose League in 1895–6. 14. Kains-Jackson himself writes under a number of signatures, as Philip Castle, as P.C., as Charles Kains-Jackson, and as C.K.J. His full name was Charles Philip Castle Kains-Jackson. 15. Unfortunately these are not always bound in to extant copies. The British Library run includes annotations with queries to the effect that some of the missing annual Indices were ‘not published’. 16. That William Reeves’ list included from 1898 to 1960 Flagellation and the Flagellants. A History of the Rod by ‘William M. Cooper’ [James Glass Bertram], shows that the firm was open to publication of gender-specific and erotic material. The title was first published by Hotten from 1870. Correspondence and ledger books in the Reeves archive in the British Library indicate the tenacity of the firm with respect to this title, and glimpses of its publication history. One would-be blackmailer of the firm on

Notes to pp. 119–26 295 3 August 1935 suggested that Reeves had made a good deal of money from the publication: ‘Finding an old volume which had a reasonable chance of passing the British censors, he speculated in the copyright and issued a new edition. At first the book was offered with discression [sic] but, as no complaint was made, sales became more and more open and the book is now displayed prominently in most book shops.’ 17. Theocritus, in whose work same-sex love between men figures was a common Classical allusion in gay discourse of this period. See J. A. Symonds’ translation of Theocritus’ second idyll in the Fortnightly Review in February 1891: Delphis Loves: be it girl or boy for whom he pines in his passion, Surely, she could not say. (April 1891: 551) 18. Another St Sebastian poem, ‘On a Picture’, is published in February of the same year. Stanza 2 begins ‘Stripped we behold thee, beautiful / As youthful pagan gods of yore’, and the poem goes on, ‘See in thy suave and tender side / The arrows tremble, as athirst / They drink, as little mouths not wide, / The life blood where the heart has burst’ (Feb. 1892: 50); its alliance with AngloCatholicism is indicated by an inscription of a date in the following form: ‘20th January 1892, FEST. S. SEBASTIAN.’ For an analysis of the Victorian discourse of Decadence associated with St. Sebastian, see Kaye (1999). 19. It is topical because of the season, but also because photographs of Sicilian boys by Corvo and W. Gloeden had appeared in the June 1893 number of The Studio, and at exhibitions held in the Egyptian Hall and Pall Mall. D’Arch Smith complains (1970, p. 64) that Kains-Jackson doesn’t mention the show, but the oblique reference of this poem is typical of KainsJackson’s methods as an editor on occasion. 20. While the oxymoron of ‘Art Literature’ may decidedly grate in our twentyfirst-century ears, ‘literature’ at the time lacked a dominant association with the narrowly ‘literary’, and retained strong connotations of print in general. 21. This article antedates the alleged date on which Kains-Jackson became editor of the magazine. He contributes signed articles in 1887, so it is known that he was about before 1888. This review (from 1886) is anonymous. 22. For apposite commentary on this aspect of Tuke, see Saville (1999). 23. See, for example, two poems which appeared in August and September 1892 (227, 277), ‘The Last Secret’ by E. Bonney Steyne, which begins ‘From young Greek lips a whisper fell’, and ‘On Edward FitzGerald’ (anon.), which includes the couplet ‘Hurrah for him who dared to say / “We want no more Aurora Leighs”’ and goes on ‘We would recall the Persian’s lay / Shrined in FitzGerald’s cadences.’ 24. For a general overview of such contents, see d’Arch Smith’s indicative Appendix (1970: 235–9), ‘Chronological List of “Uranian” Contributions to the Artist and Journal of Home Culture (1888–94)’. 25. See Xenophon’s The Dinner-Party, pp. 241–4. Clinias (sic) is represented as the object of Critobolus’s obsessive love in a discussion of the value of good looks (‘I would rather be blind to everything else than to this one person, Clinias’). According to Waterfield, Clinias is the son of Axiochus and the

296 Notes to pp. 126–32

26.

27.

28. 29.

cousin of Alcibides; he also appears in Plato’s Euthydemus (p. 241, n. 2). I am indebted to Professor Jim Coulter of Columbia University for help with this reference. Kains-Jackson’s was one of the earliest responses. Three more articles appeared in The Humanitarian, in August, September and October 1894: Reverend Bonney’s was highly critical; Grant Allen’s was a riposte to Bonney in which he closed a loophole in his Fortnightly piece and repudiated same-sex relationships; and George Ives’s defended the homosexual and the ‘new culture’. For more on this debate, see Chapter 7. We know independently from letters in the William Andrews Clark Library that Kains-Jackson was the author of ‘The New Chivalry’ under the guise of P.C. For Gloeden see Aldrich (1993), pp. 143–52, and d’Arch Smith (1970), pp. 62–4. The contents of The Pageant include Laurence Housman’s beautiful and homoerotic drawing ‘Death and the Bather’ as well as a number of literary texts and art works produced by contributors such as Ricketts, Shannon, Verlaine, and John Gray, formerly part of Kains-Jackson’s and Gleeson White’s network of Decadents, as well as contributors such as Yeats, Max Beerbohm, and Lionel Johnson from the Yellow Book, Frederick Wedmore from the Savoy, and Michael Field.

Notes to Chapter 6 (II): The Artist and the Challenge of Cleveland Street 30. Kains-Jackson published anonymously, and under a number of sobriquets and initials, in The Artist. See Chapter 6, Part I, n. 14, p. 293. 31. These all appeared in the January 1889 number. 32. Lisle March Phillipps (1863–1917), who would have been about 26 at the time, is described in Wellesley as a ‘writer on art’ on the basis of an article (not on art) in the National Review in 1898. In 1915 Lisle March Phillipps published Form and Colour. But equally relevant, ‘L.P.’ – whoever it is – is also the editor of The Inheritance of the Saints: Collected Chiefly from English Writers in 1891, the same year in which ‘Letters to Living Artists’ was published by Elkin Mathews, who was eventually to publish the Yellow Book with John Lane in 1894. L.P.’s associations with the nineties’ Decadence are not confined to this. The Inheritance of the Saints, which L.P. edited, has a preface by Henry Scott Holland, an exquisite high Anglican of Christ Church, Oxford, where he had been a Senior Student. Scott Holland was a close friend of the equally flamboyant high Anglican Charles Gore who, with Bishop Westcott and Holland, formed a branch of the Christian Socialist Union at Oxford in 1889; Gore delivered the Bampton Lectures in 1891, the same year in which he published a controversial new preface to the 10th edition of Lux Mundi (1889), the anthology of the ‘new Catholics’ or ‘Holy Party’. Holland himself became a Canon of St Paul’s. 33. ‘Pasquin’ was a pseudonym used by Henry Fielding, the novelist. It derives from Pasquinade, a lampoon or political satire, with ridicule as its object, which in turn derives from Pasquino, an Italian tailor of the fifteenth

Notes to pp. 132–47 297

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46.

century known for his wit. After his death a damaged statue on a classical theme was dug up and erected opposite his house, resulting in its being named ‘Pasquin’, and functioning as a depository of contemporary satires. Responses to these were attached to another statue called Marforio, in the Capitol. For more, see Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (1894). I am indebted to Shereen Colvin of the University of London Library for this reference. The authorship of these raspish, political letters has never been identified with certainty. See Ellegård (1962). See Foucault 84 (1984). See Barthes (1968). For more on Kains-Jackson, see d’Arch Smith (1970), pp. 59–66 especially. William Reeves sold art supplies, published music as well as books, and was a former publisher of The Artist. Henry Herbert La Thangue published The Mental Outlook in Painting: Colour in Painting, Lectures to the Students of the Royal Academy of Art, in 1915. For more on the Cleveland Street affair, in which Prince Eddy, a son of the Prince of Wales, was understood to be implicated, see Chester, Leitch and Simpson (1976), Hyde (1976), Lees-Milne (1986) and Aronson (1994). For an excellent exploration of the phenomenon of ‘scandal’, see Cohen (1998), chapter 1. See Review of Reviews (1890, 1891). For more on censorship in the period, see Brake (1994a), pp. 104–24, and Hiley (1992). ‘P.C.’ was one of Charles Philip Castle Kains-Jackson’s signatures in The Artist. Originating in Glasgow as Scottish Art Review in June 1888, with James Mavor listed as editor from April 1889, it moved to London in January 1890 as The Art Review: A Monthly Illustrated Magazine of Art, Music and Letters, and lasted until August 1890. In some respects, including some of its contributors and its targeting of homosocial and homosexual readers, it overlaps with The Artist, but it is more glossy, genteel and expensive (at a shilling) than a trade magazine. It might be argued that the absence of illustration served Kains-Jackson and The Artist well. The dearth of illustration may have tended to discourage more bourgeois readers outside the art-related industries who may well have taken offence at the contents of The Artist. The confinement to words also avoided any pressure to publish images in concert with the homosocial and homosexual discourse of The Artist, such as that attempted by The Studio in its early years, competition from which may likewise have resulted in curtailment of Kains-Jackson’s project.

Notes to Chapter 7: Gender and the New Journalism 1. For the Savoy, see Stokes (1989 and 1990), and ‘The Savoy: 1896. Gender in Crisis?’ in Brake (1994a), pp. 148–65. 2. Recent publications have begun to map the identity and work of women journalists. See Demoor (2000) and Onslow (2000). The Society of Women Journalists, in their annual reports from 1897 in the British Library, make

298 Notes to pp. 147–69

3.

4.

5.

6. 7. 8.

9.

10. 11.

12.

13.

14. 15.

16.

clear that their membership consists of ‘the actual professional woman journalist’ rather than the amateur. Membership is reserved for those ‘who have worked in the literary or artistic department of any recognised journal or magazine as paid contributors for a period of two years’ (Fifth Annual Report, 1898–9). Allen is alluding to Wilde who used this phrase and developed the idea in The Picture of Dorian Gray in 1891 (Wilde 1981: 22); Murray notes Wilde’s debt, in this passage, to Pater’s ‘Conclusion’ (Wilde 1981: 226). Allen’s last sentence here is distinct from Pater’s position in the ‘Conclusion’ where he rejects all theories, metaphysics, and consistency, advocating instead a sturdy empiricism which adjusts to the exigencies of the moment. Letters of spring 1894 in the Clark Library from Arthur Douglas to KainsJackson confirm the latter as author of ‘The New Chivalry’. See, for example, Douglas to Kains-Jackson, Autograph Letter, 16 May 1894. For more on The Artist see Chapter 6 above, d’Arch Smith (1970), especially pp. 59–63 and 235–9, Fletcher (1979), pp. 188–91, and Pittock (1993), p. 168. See, for example, Fawcett (1895). For a detailed consideration of this article, see Bristow (1995). ‘Modern Melodrama’ is a sordid tale set in a bedroom at the moment of diagnosis of fatal consumption of a prostitute/actress; also present are her Cockney maid who has long expository speeches in dialect, and her current swell. After the first two numbers, which were published by the partners Elkin Mathews and John Lane, the partnership broke up, with Lane remaining in Vigo Street as The Bodley Head, the new imprint of the Yellow Book. Wilde had been barred from the beginning on Beardsley’s request. These readers were and are variously constructed, as ‘the mob’; as middleclass, homophobic contributors in a moment of (national) male panic; as ‘Mrs Grundy’, the gendered typology of the respectable middle-class reader/consumer and the butt of male writers’ critique since 1885, when George Moore’s Literature at Nurse appeared. In his story Henry James parodies in ‘Guy Walsingham’ one of Lane’s most famous authors, George Egerton (Mary Dunne), who in the preceding year had published a best-selling collection of short stories, Keynotes, on which Lane had built a series of books. James’s ‘Dora Forbes’ (a male author) is his rococo reversal of the male pseudonym phenomenon. Toward the beginning of his career in 1865, Greenwood helped found the Pall Mall Gazette, which was modelled on a late eighteenth-century journal called the Anti-Jacobin. For a detailed discussion of the prose by Symons and Wedmore, see Brake (1994a), pp. 152–8. Hubert Crackanthorpe, author of naturalist fiction in the Yellow Book and other 1890s magazines, was Blanche Crackanthorpe’s son. For more on Crackanthorpe see Towheed (2000). Rachel Beer owned and edited the Sunday Times from 1893 to 1897, during which period she also wrote for the Observer, its rival which her husband, Frederick Beer owned. For more on Rachel Beer see Hobson, Knightley and Russell (1972), 51–8.

Notes to pp. 169–87 299 17. As this is the leader, and the only unattributed article on the wrapper which plainly identifies ‘Victoria Woodhull Martin’ as the editor, ‘Anon’ is likely to be VWM.

Notes to Chapter 8: Marketing Notoriety 1. See Brake (1994a), pp. 148–65, and Chapter 7 above. 2. Both his own contributors and public protests combined to convince the publisher of the Yellow Book, John Lane, to extirpate its art editor Beardsley as the visible symbol of ‘Wilde’ in the journal. See Mix (1960), pp. 136–47 for a detailed account. More recent commentary may be found in Calloway (1998), pp. 122–7, Sturgis (1998), pp. 233–43, and Zatlin (1998), pp. 59–67. 3. For Smithers, see Nelson (1997), pp. 3–12, and Nelson’s new biography of Smithers (2000). 4. The Pageant (1896, 1897), an annual of Decadents’ art and letterpress, also had an advertising supplement. 5. The respectability of those presses which defected is telling; the list includes Clarendon Press, Bentley & Sons, Kegan Paul & Co., John Murray, Sampson Low, Longmans & Co., Blackwood & Sons, and Osgood, McIlvane & Co. 6. Lane is not the only publisher among the advertisers in Yellow Book IV to provide quotations. The Studio is advertised (Yellow Book Supplement, p. 13) through (positive) quotations, in French as well as in English. 7. The Savoy was quarterly for its first three numbers, and monthly thereafter, ending in December 1896. There were eight issues in all. The three quarterly numbers seemed cheap at two shillings and six pence (2/6) each, and the monthly numbers more dear at two shillings (2/–) a copy. 8. This was in connection with the September issue. 9. No new form of the Savoy project ever appeared, perhaps because Hugh Crackanthorpe, who was mooted as editor, died in the Seine on Christmas Day, 1896. See Crackanthorpe (1977) and Towheed (2000). 10. Founded in 1869, the Academy was an upmarket, intellectual monthly largely written by contributors from the universities. For more on this periodical see Brake (1994a), pp. 36–50. 11. Anon. (1896e), pp. 293–8.

Notes to Chapter 9: Studies and the Magazines 1. For more on this point see Chapter 1. 2. See ‘Notes on Leonardo da Vinci’, Fortnightly Review 6, n.s. (November 1869), pp. 494–508; ‘A Fragment on Sandro Botticelli’, Fortnightly Review 8, n.s. (August 1870), pp. 155–60; ‘The Poetry of Michelangelo’, Fortnightly Review 10, n.s. (November 1871), pp. 559–70, and ‘Pico della Mirandola’, Fortnightly Review 10, n.s. (October 1871), pp. 377–86. 3. Three sermons were preached in Oxford against the ‘message’ of the ‘Conclusion’ and ‘Winckelmann’ by William Capes (Pater’s undergraduate tutor), John Wordsworth (Pater’s colleague and friend at Brasenose), and John Fielder Mackarness. The response to the volume was so hostile that Pater removed the ‘Conclusion’ in the 1877 edition and took pains to

300 Notes to pp. 187–96

4. 5. 6.

7.

8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14.

15.

explain his meaning in his next book, a two-volume novel published over a decade later. In 1894 obituaries of Pater were still objecting to this first volume. See, for example, Taylor 1867. For example, Punch. The sequence of articles in the October 1868 Westminster is as follows: ‘Landed Tenure in the Highlands’, ‘Poems by William Morris’, ‘Reform of Our Civil Procedure’, ‘Spielhagen’s Novels’, ‘The Property of Married Women’, ‘China’, ‘The Suppressed Sex’, ‘Sea-Sickness’ (this includes a review of the editor’s book on the subject), and ‘Middle Class Schools’. It was only by cutting the conclusion loose from the contemporary Morris material that Pater could accommodate it in Studies. That its register was read in the volume as contemporary rather than historical is not surprising. See Sussman (1995), who is very interesting on the voice in the Morris review. See The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, vol. II, p. 184. P. G. Hamerton published ‘Gustave Doré’s Bible’, Fortnightly Review 4 (1 May 1866), pp. 669–81. Two poems by Swinburne appeared in Morley’s first volume in the new series, a Pre-Raphaelite ballad, ‘Child’s Song in Winter’, in the first number in January 1867, and ‘Of the Insurrection in Candia’ two months later in March. In July and October of that year Morley published two review articles by Swinburne, one on Morris’s poems and one on Arnold’s. See ‘Child’s Song in Winter’, Fortnightly Review 1, n.s. (January 1867), pp. 19–26; ‘Ode on the Insurrection in Candia’, Fortnightly Review 1, n.s. (March 1867), pp. 284–9; A. C. Swinburne, ‘Morris’s Life and Death of Jason’, Fortnightly Review 2, n.s. (July 1867), pp. 19–28; ‘Mr. Arnold’s New Poems’, Fortnightly Review 2, n.s. (October 1867), pp. 414–45. It should be noted that Morley’s patronage of Swinburne is not visible in Wellesley, owing to its policy of not including poems in the itemised listings. The prominence and the existence of Swinburne’s long ballad as the second item in the January 1867 Fortnightly is only implicit in Wellesley, in the gap between the recorded pagination of the first and third articles. See, for example, Starzyk (1999) and Morgan (1996) who interestingly compares Swinburne and Pater on gender. While the Fortnightly freed Pater from the constraints of the review form, Pater drew on recent books for a number of his Fortnightly essays. While the Fortnightly covered contemporary art assiduously, Swinburne’s article in July 1868, ‘Notes on Designs of the Old Masters at Florence’, was the first to treat Renaissance work; Pater’s series began in November of the next year, and initially follows Swinburne’s model of ‘Notes’. Pater wrote ‘notes’ on Leonardo in 1869, a ‘fragment’ on Botticelli in 1870, and ‘studies’ in Renaissance history in 1873. See ‘Notes on Leonardo da Vinci’ (November 1869), pp. 494–508; ‘A Fragment on Sandro Botticelli’ (August 1870), pp. 155–60; and Studies in the History of the Renaissance (London, 1873). Sidney Colvin adopted the same genre: see Sidney Colvin, ‘Notes on Albert Durer’, Fortnightly Review 7, n.s. (March 1870), pp. 333–47. Huxley Collection: 19.191, Imperial College, London.

Notes to pp. 197–208 301

Notes to Chapter 10: The Politics of Illustration 1. I have in mind some of the more irregular or short-lived little magazines, such as Shannon and Ricketts’ Dial, the Pageant, the Century Guild Hobby Horse, and the Dome. 2. In an earlier paragraph in the Nation James is more frank about his view of Ruskin’s verbal recklessness, presumably for the weekly’s American readers who might not otherwise have been apprised of Ruskin’s track record: ‘Mr Ruskin’s language quite transgresses the decencies of criticism, and he has been laying about him for some years past with such promiscuous violence that it gratifies one’s sense of justice to see him brought up as a disorderly character. On the other hand, he is a chartered libertine – he has possessed himself by prescription of the function of a general scold. His literary bad manners are recognized, and many of his contemporaries have suffered from them without complaining. It would very possibly, therefore, have been much wiser on Mr Whistler’s part to feign indifference’ ([James] 1878, p. 385). I am grateful to Luisa Villa for bringing the relation of James to Ruskin to my attention: see Luisa Villa (2000). 3. Brian Maidment has written extensively on this subject. See, for example, in addition to Maidment (1981), Maidment (1971, 1979 and 1982). His unpublished dissertation is ‘John Ruskin and George Allen’ (University of Leicester, 1973). 4. The British Library copy of the 1876 edition of Ariadne Florentina published by George Allen is made up of six lectures delivered at Michaelmas 1872 and printed separately at diverse dates between 1873 and 1875, plus an appendix dated 1876. Each lecture has its own title-page. A cover of the first lecture gives a price of 1 shilling for the 32-page pamphlet. 5. John Cassell, who was to become among publishers the foremost imprint of popular images of art, transformed the Illustrated Exhibitor – a downmarket, 2d weekly guide to the Great Exhibition, and a cheaper alternative to the Illustrated London News (6d) in 1851, claiming a circulation of 100,000 during the Exhibition, into the Illustrated Exhibitor and Magazine of Art in Vol. 2, 1852, which became in turn the Illustrated Magazine of Art (1853–4). In 1878 Cassell, Petter and Galpin relaunched the Magazine of Art, having deployed illustration in a prodigious number of settings in their periodical and book publications in the interim. 6. See Donald Hill’s interesting note on this passage; its context in SainteBeuve’s second essay on Du Bellay shows its original referent to be historical, to humanist criticism, ‘something almost no longer permitted today’ (Pater 1980, pp. 298–9). 7. For informed commentary on this phenomenon in late nineteenth-century Britain, see Walkowitz (1992), especially the chapter on ‘Urban Spectatorship’, pp. 15–39. 8. Imaginary Portraits, 1: ‘The Child in the House’ appeared in Macmillan’s Magazine in August 1878. 9. See Pater (1980), pp. 231, 283 and 372–3, and Evans (1970), Letters 27, 29, 32 and 33. For Pater and Macmillan, see Seiler (1999), and for an interesting contextualisation of the image, see Bullen (1998), pp. 182–94.

302 Notes to pp. 211–27 10. This oral gossip originating with the publisher might end up in print, in, for example, the ‘Literary Gossip’ columns of the Athenaeum, portions of which had their origin in paragraphs sent by publishers for the purpose; today they would be called press releases. 11. See [E. F. Strong Pattison] (1873), pp. 639–41. 12. For more on The Artist, see Chapter 6.

Notes to Chapter 11: After Studies 1. William F. Shuter, personal communication, Pater Colloquium, Eastern Michigan University, July 1994. 2. Jowett seemed to deal more indulgently with his aberrant undergraduate, who was affectionately known as ‘the Balliol bugger’, than with his colleague, Pater. 3. Linda Dowling’s Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (1994), suggests ways in which ‘classics’ in Oxford accommodated a number of different discourses, including the homoerotic and homosocial. 4. For a comparative assessment of the association of the Proserpine myth with pessimism, see Louis (1999). 5. Four of these essays were published in the 1870s, but that on ‘Love’s Labours Lost’ only appeared in 1885 in Macmillan’s though Pater listed it in his letter to Macmillan of 1878. 6. For an interesting gloss on Pater and ‘history’, see Wallen (1999). 7. For more on Appreciations, see Chapter 12.

Notes to Chapter 12: Appreciations 1. The first mention of the book project in Evans’ collection of Pater’s letters, in a letter to Macmillan’s printers in June 1889(?), includes ‘Style’ in the proposed title: On Style, With Other Studies in Literature (Evans 1970: 97). ‘Style’ however was characteristically published in a periodical – the Fortnightly – in December 1888, almost a year before Appreciations appeared in November 1889. It, in turn, draws heavily on a review of Flaubert’s correspondence, which Pater published earlier in 1888, in the Pall Mall Gazette 48 (25 August), pp. 1–2. 2. By my count, Pater published 27 reviews out of 78 published items. Of these, two treated English fiction and five, French fiction. Including articles, imaginary portraits and reviews, Pater published far more on English literature – twenty-one items – than on French – eleven items. With eighteen publications on classical literature and art, including his only novel, Marius, and with three unfinished essays on classical subjects at the Houghton Library at Harvard, Classics and English equally occupied his attention. But it also should be noted that seven or eight of the Classics essays, those in Plato and Platonism, came out of his University work, and in his other work, as yet counted in the profile, a number of his fictional portraits treated classical revivals, mainly in Provençal France, and they combine the separate categories above.

Notes to pp. 227–55 303 3. Thackeray’s Esmond figures in ‘Style’ as one of the examples of greater ‘literary art’ but does not quite make it into the list of ‘great art’, which includes The Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost, the English Bible and a French novel, Les Misérables. 4. See Williams (1997), an eloquent piece on ‘Style’, history, and lateness. 5. Links between Pater’s ‘Wordsworth’ (originally 1874) and Arnold’s views on English Romanticism, and between Pater and Ruskin, have long since been claimed by scholars. 6. For more on this book, see Chapter 11.

Notes to Chapter 13: The Profession of Letters 1. Francis Jeffrey first collected his Edinburgh Review essays in 1844. 2. This term relates to the concept of the carnivalesque as developed by Mikhail Bakhtin. See Stallybrass and White (1986), pp. 6–16. 3. For public debate about the suitability of the study of Classics by women, see the correspondence columns of the Guardian in the spring of 1884, of which the following is typical: ‘we think that even the general study of the classics, such is required for Moderations Honours alone, is most undesirable for women. You cannot possibly restrict their reading for this school; and what sort of an introduction to female life the process of breathing the foul atmosphere of the heathen world will be for most of those who are to move in it must be obvious. It is bad enough for men. We all know what controversies have raged over the classics as a means of education on this very account. But these controversies did not include women, who were supposed to be excluded by the nature of the case’ (Guardian, 19 March 1884, p. 427). 4. The edition and revisions had been planned since November 1876, well before Tyrwhitt’s article in March: see Evans (1970), pp. 17–24. 5. See Chapter 11. 6. Dowling (1994) links the constitution of Hellenism as a subject specifically with the tradition of Classics in Oxford where Pater lived and worked, and explains the homosocial parameters of Oxford Greek studies. 7. Pater repeats the same pattern as in 1876: two essays, one with two parts, but this time in successive months. 8. Unfortunately, Shadwell does not comment on the state of his copy texts of these pieces. The strongest evidence for concluding that Pater had again considered collecting some or all of the Greek studies since his first attempt in 1878 (which could account for the revisions of the three 1876 essays) is Shadwell’s claim that ‘Hippolytus Veiled’ was ‘rewritten’ after its publication in 1889. 9. It is significant that the one attempt Pater made to sustain publication over consecutive months ended abruptly after five parts, with no explanation. His novel Gaston de Latour appeared in Macmillan’s Magazine between June and October 1888. See Brake (1997b). 10. It appeared as chapter 7, ‘The Lower Pantheism’, in the posthumous edition of the novel prepared by Shadwell. See Brake (1997b) and Pater (1996). 11. Pater’s second title was Dionysus and Other Studies (Evans 1970, p. 34).

304 Notes to pp. 258–70 12. See Shuter (1989), p. 504. 13. See February and April 1880, for example. 14. The last published serialised part, on Giordano Bruno, appeared in the Fortnightly. See Brake (1997b), p. 22. 15. See, for example, the Contemporary Review, April 1877–February 1879, when no less than ten articles on Greek studies appeared, including pieces by Gladstone, Edward Freeman, J. P. Mahaffy, and R. S. Poole. 16. In 1893 Alfred Douglas uses the term both in correspondence with KainsJackson and in the May ‘Prospectus’ to the Spirit Lamp. 17. Evans (1970), 22 January and 17 May, pp. 126, 129. 18. Pater’s late turn to the Contemporary may be due to a number of factors – the hostility of some of its 1870s contents, his own concentration on fiction in the 1880s, the degree to which the periodical had been associated with Matthew Arnold, largely under Knowles, and its allegedly religious remit. In placing some of his Greek pieces there, Pater was marrying his preoccupations with theirs. 19. Pater touches here on the feminist issue of social purity at the centre of Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins (1893), with a characteristic twist. While feminists advocated their own celibacy as the answer to their husbands’ culpable ‘pasts’, in ‘Hippolytus Veiled’ Pater attributes to Phedre a desire to meet lust with lust: ‘King Theseus, as she knew, had had at least two earlier loves; for once she would be a first love; felt at moments that with this one passion once indulged, it might be happiness thereafter to remain chaste for ever’ (Pater 1895a: 181).

Notes to Chapter 14: Pater, Symons and the Culture of the Fin de Siècle in Britain 1. Pater was 50 on 4 August 1889. 2. The youthfulness of the inner circle of the Yellow Book is evident from the account of the inaugural dinner on the occasion of the publication of Volume I. See Mix (1960), p. 82. 3. Second editions of both Appreciations and Imaginary Portraits appeared in March 1890; the third edition of Marius was published on 10 August 1892, and the fourth edition of The Renaissance in December 1893. Plato and Platonism: A Series of Lectures was issued on 9 February 1893. 4. See Higgins (1993), in which she locates Plato and Platonism as one of the texts where Pater reinscribed Plato in contradistinction to Arnold’s essay and Jowett’s translations. Also see Dowling (1994). 5. Hearts Insurgent, an abbreviated form of Jude the Obscure, appeared in monthly parts in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine between December 1894 and November 1895. 6. For more on the religious character of the post-1877 Contemporary Review, and more on the New Journalism, see Brake (1994a), pp. 51–62 and 83–103. 7. Wright (1975) lists the following as Pater’s periodical publications between 1890 and his death in 1894: [Review] Tales of a Hundred Years Since, by Auguste Filon, Guardian [Anglican Weekly] 16 July 1890, [Review] On Viol

Notes to pp. 270–2 305

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

and Flute, by E. Gosse, Guardian, 29 Oct. 1890, [Essay] ‘Art Notes in North Italy’, New Review, October 1890; [Essay] ‘Prosper Mérimée’, Fortnightly Review, December 1890; [Review] ‘A Novel by Mr Oscar Wilde’, Bookman, November 1891; [Essay] ‘The Genius of Plato’, Contemporary Review, December 1891; [Essay] ‘A Chapter on Plato’, Macmillan’s Magazine, January 1892; [Essay] ‘Lacedaemon’, Contemporary Review, May 1892; [Imaginary Portrait] ‘Emerald Uthwart’, New Review, June, July 1892; [Essay] ‘Raphael’, Fortnightly Review, October 1892; [Review] ‘Mr George Moore as an Art Critic’, Daily Chronicle; 10 June 1893; [Short story] ‘Apollo in Picardy’, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, November 1893; [Essay] ‘The Age of Athletic Prizemen: A Chapter in Greek Art’, Contemporary Review, February 1894; [Essay] ‘Some Great Churches in France, 1. Notre-Dame d’Amiens’, Nineteenth Century, January 1894; [Essay] ‘Some Great Churches in France, 2. Vézelay’, Nineteenth Century, May 1894. Pater was on the list of would-be contributors to the Yellow Book published in anticipation of its first appearance, but in the event he produced nothing for Volumes I and II, which appeared in April and July of 1894. Other factors than disinclination must figure here: Pater was ill for much of the spring. Allusions to and articles on Pater in the avant-garde periodical press include the following: the Albemarle: anon. [H. Crackanthorpe], ‘Realism in France and in England. An Interview with M. Emile Zola’, I (February 1892), pp. 39–43; the Century Guild Hobby Horse: Selwyn Image, ‘In November Last at the London Institution, and Covent Garden Opera House’, 6 (January 1891), pp. 29–32; L. Johnson, [review of] Appreciations, 5 (1890), pp. 36–40; C. Kegan Paul, ‘On English Prose Style’, 4 (January 1889), pp. 11–26; Arthur Galton, ‘An Examination of Certain Schools and Tendencies in Contemporary Literature’, 4 (June 1889), pp. 98–108; Selwyn Image, ‘Two Critical Notices: Mr Pater’s Imaginary Portraits’, 3 (January 1888), pp. 14–18; J. A. Symonds, ‘Is Music the Type or Measure of All Arts’, 3 (April 1888), pp. 42–51. Given the incidence of two ‘decadent’ contributors to Harper’s November 1893 number, it is likely that Pater and Symons were invited to contribute. See Brake (1994a), pp. 104–24. The contents of the book listed in the Savoy advertisement comprised ‘Introduction, Paul Verlaine, The Goncourts, J. K. Huysmans, Villiers de l’lsle-Adam, Maurice Maeterlinck, Conclusion’. The Goncourts, Huysmans, Verlaine, and Maeterlinck figure prominently in the Harper’s article, on which this projection of the book seems likely to have been based; in Harper’s, Pater’s prose and Henley’s verse represented Britain. The contents of The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899) comprises eight essays on authors, and an introduction and conclusion. Four of the five authors from the projected The Decadent Movement in Literature make up half of the later volume, and essays on de Nerval, Rimbaud, Laforgue, and Mallarmé are added to the original four. Like Pater his mentor, Symons made his book out of previously published work, and seven out of the eight essays had appeared independently between 1895 and 1898. The Goncourts, listed for the projected volume, featured in the revised edition of 1919.

306 Notes to pp. 272–9 13. See Moran (1997). 14. It is interesting to note that the English writers and artists with whom Symons links Pater in 1896 are precisely those whom Robert Ross associates with Solomon in an obituary of Solomon in 1905; echoing Symons’ regrets, Ross writes: ‘The friend of Burne Jones, Walter Pater, and Mr Swinburne became the associate of thieves and Blackmailers’ (Ross 1905, p. 2). 15. For Pater’s library borrowings, see Inman 1981 and 1990; for Pater’s interaction with French literature more generally, see Conlon 1982. 16. See, for example, Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Truth of Masks’, which first appeared in 1885 and then in Intentions in 1891, which also included ‘The Decay of Lying’. 17. Beside these readings, Denis Donoghue’s clearly uncomfortable textual explication is barely gendered, with its meanings nearly displaced by quotation from Pater. According to Donoghue what is at issue is the extent to which ‘aesthetic criticism’ refuses to convert ‘our violence within’ (Donoghue 1995, p. 178).

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316 Bibliography Pater, Walter (1996), Gaston de Latour, ed. Gerald Monsman (Greensboro, NC). [Patmore, Coventry] (1851), ‘The Social Position of Women’, North British Review, 14 (February), 515–40. Patmore, Coventry (1861), ‘The Victories of Love’, Macmillan’s Magazine, 4 (Oct–Dec.), 436–48, 23–37, 109–19. Pattison, E. F. Strong (1873), ‘Contemporary Literature’, Westminster Review, 43 n.s. (April), 639–41. Pattison, Mark (1878), MS Diary, 30 [July], Bodleian Library, Pattison MS 131. Pittock, Murray (1993), Spectrum of Decadence: The Literature of the 1890s (London and New York). Poovey, Mary (1988), Uneven Developments (Chicago). ‘Quill, John’ (1890), ‘On Art in Dress’, The Artist, 11 (1 September), 258–9. Rendall, Jane (1987), ‘“A Moral Engine”? Feminism, Liberalism and the English Woman’s Journal’, in Equal or Different? Women’s Politics 1800–1914, ed. J. Rendall (Oxford), pp. 112–38. Robertson Scott, J. W. (1950), The Story of the Pall Mall Gazette (London). Robson, Ann P. and John M. Robson (eds) (1994), Sexual Equality: Writings by John Stuart Mill, Harriet Taylor Mill, and Helen Taylor (Toronto, Buffalo, London). Rosenberg, Sheila (1982), ‘The Financing of Radical Opinion: John Chapman and the Westminster Review’, in The Victorian Periodical Press: Samplings and Soundings, ed. J. Shattock and M. Wolff (Leicester and Toronto), 167–92. Rosenberg, Sheila (2000) ‘The “wicked Westminster”’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 33.3 (Fall), 225–46. Ross, Robert (1905), ‘A Note on Simeon Solomon’, Westminster Gazette, 26 (24 August), 2. Rossetti, William Michael (1866), ‘Essays on Art. By Francis Turner Palgrave’, Fine Arts Quarterly Review, 1 n.s. (October), 302–11. [Ruskin, John] ‘A Graduate of Oxford’ (1843), Modern Painters (London). Ruskin, John (1853), The Sea Stories: The Stones of Venice, vol. II (London). Ruskin, John (1876), The Works of John Ruskin, vol. VII: Ariadne Florentina (Orpington, Kent). Saintsbury, George (1876), ‘Modern English Prose’, Fortnightly Review, 19 n.s. (February), 243–59. Saintsbury, George (1896), A History of Nineteenth Century Literature (London). Saville, Julia F. (1999) ‘The Romance of Boys Bathing’, in Victorian Sexual Dissidence, ed. R. Dellamora (Chicago and London), pp. 253–77. Schults, Raymond L. (1972), Crusader in Babylon: W. T. Stead and the Pall Mall Gazette (Lincoln, Nebraska). Sedgwick, Eve K. (1985), Between Men (New York). Seiler, Robert (ed.) (1980), Walter Pater: The Critical Heritage (London, Boston, Henley). Seiler, Robert (ed.) (1999), The Book Beautiful (London and New Brunswick). Shadwell, C. L. (1895), ‘Preface’, Greek Studies, by Walter Pater (London), pp. v–ix. [Shand, Innes] (1878), ‘Contemporary Literature, I. Journalists’, Blackwood’s Magazine, 124 (December), 641–62. [Shand, Innes] (1879a), ‘Contemporary Literature, II. Journalists and Magazine Writers’, Blackwood’s Magazine, 125 (January), 69–92.

Bibliography 317 [Shand, Innes] (1879b), ‘Contemporary Literature, III. Magazine-Writers’, Blackwood’s Magazine, 125 (February), 225–47. [Shand, Innes] (1879c), ‘Contemporary Literature, VII. Readers’, Blackwood’s Magazine, 126 (August), 235–56. [Sharp, William] (1889), Review of Appreciations, Glasgow Herald (18 November), 9. Shattock, Joanne (1977), ‘Editorial Policy and the Quarterlies: the Case of The North British Review’, Victorian Periodicals Newsletter, 10 (September), 130–9. Shattock, Joanne (1982), ‘Problems of Parentage: the North British Review and the Free Church of Scotland’, in The Victorian Periodical Press: Samplings and Soundings, ed. J. Shattock and M. Wolff (Leicester and Toronto), pp. 145–66. Showalter, Elaine (1991), Sexual Anarchy (London). Shuter, William (1989), ‘Pater’s Reshuffled Text’, Nineteenth Century Literature, 43, 500–25. Shuter, William (1994), ‘The Outing of Walter Pater’, Nineteenth Century Literature, 48: 4, 480–506. Sinnema, Peter (1998), Dynamics of the Pictured Page: Representing the Nation in the Illustrated London News, 1842–1892 (Aldershot). Smith, Manby (1857), The Little World of London (London). Smithers, Leonard (1896), ‘Mr. Leonard Smithers’ List of Publications’, Savoy, 8 (December), 93. Spens, Michael (ed.) (1993), High Art and Low Life: ‘The Studio’ and the ‘fin de siècle’, Studio International, Special Centenary Number, 201: 1022/1023 (London). Stallybrass, P. and A. White (1986), The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (London). Starzyk, Lawrence (1999), ‘Swinburne’s “Notes on Designs of the old Masters at Florence”’, Victorian Newsletter, 96 (Fall), 15–21. Stead, W. T. (1885), ‘The Maiden Tribute to Modern Babylon’, Pall Mall Gazette (6, 7, 8, 10 July). Stead, W. T. (1886), ‘Government by Journalism’, Contemporary Review, 49 (May), 653–74. Stillman, W. J. (1891), ‘Journalism and Literature’, Atlantic Monthly, 68 (November) 687–95. Stokes, John (1989), In the Nineties (London). Stokes, John (1990), ‘Dieppe: 1895’, Essays and Poems in Memory of Ian Fletcher (Greensboro, NC), pp. 11–23. Sturgis, Matthew (1998), Aubrey Beardsley: A Biography (London). Sullivan, Alvin (1983), British Literary Magazines: The Romantic Age, 1789–1836 (Westport, CT, and London). Sullivan, Alvin (1984), British Literary Magazines: The Victorian and Edwardian Age, 1837–1913 (Westport, CT, and London). Sully, James (1918), My Life & Friends (London). Sussman, Herbert (1995), ‘Masculinity Transformed’, in Victorian Masculinities (Cambridge). Sutherland, John (1986), ‘Henry Colburn: Publisher’, Publishing History, 19, 59–81. Sutherland, John (1995), Victorian Fiction: Writers, Publishers, Readers (Basingstoke).

318 Bibliography Swinburne, A. C. (1867), ‘Morris’s Life and Death of Jason’, Fortnightly Review, 2 n.s. (July), 19–28. Swinburne, A. C. (1868a), ‘Ave Atque Vale’, Fortnightly Review, 3 n.s. (January), 71–6. Swinburne, A. C. (1868b), ‘Notes on Designs of the Old Masters at Florence’, Fortnightly Review, 4 n.s. (July), 16–40. Swinburne, A. C. (1870), ‘The Complaint of Monna Lisa’, Fortnightly Review, 7 n.s. (February), 176–9. Symonds, J. A. (1873–6), Studies of the Greek Poets, 2 vols (London). Symonds, J. A. (1877), The Fine Arts: Renaissance in Italy, vol. III (London). Symonds, J. A. (1879), ‘Antinous’, Cornhill Magazine, 39 (February, March), 200–12, 343–58. Symonds, J. A. (translator) (1891), ‘The Second Idyll of Theocritus. “Incantations”’, Fortnightly Review 49 n.s. (April), 545–52. [Symons, A.] (1889), ‘Literature, [review of] Appreciations: with an Essay on style’, Athenaeum (14 December), 813–14. Symons, A. (1896a), ‘Editorial Note’, Savoy, 2 (April), 5. Symons, A. (1896b), ‘A Literary Causerie, by way of an Epilogue’, Savoy, 8 (December), 91–2. Symons, A. (1896c), ‘Walter Pater: Some Characteristics’, Savoy, 8 (December), 33–50. Symons, A. (1896d), ‘The Lesson of Millais’, Savoy, 6 (October), 57–9. Symons, A. (1896e), ‘A Literary Causerie: On the “Invectives” of Verlaine’, Savoy, 7 (November), 88–90. Symons, A. (1896f), ‘A Literary Causerie: On Edmund de Goncourt’, Savoy, 5 (September), 85–7. [Taylor, Harriet, and J. S. Mill] (1851), ‘Enfranchisement of Women’, Westminster Review, 55 (July), 289–311. [Taylor, Helen] (1867), ‘The Ladies’ Petition’, Westminster Review, 31 n.s. (January), 63–79. Towheed, Shafquat (2000), ‘Reading the Life and Art of Hubert Crackanthorpe’, ELT, 43.1, 51–65. Tuchman, G. (1989), Edging Women Out (London). Turner, Mark (2000a), Trollope and the Magazines: Gendered Issues in Mid-Victorian Britain (Basingstoke). Turner, Mark (2000b), ‘Hybrid Journalism: Women and the Progressive Fortnightly’, Journalism, Literature and Modernity, ed. Kate Campbell, (Edinburgh), pp. 73–90. Turner, Mark (2000c) ‘Defining Discourses: the Westminster Review, Fortnightly Review, and Comte’s Positivism’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 33.3 (Fall), 283–316. Tyrwhitt, Richard St John (1877), ‘The Greek Spirit in Modern Literature’, Contemporary Review, 29 (March), 552–66. Vann, J. Don, and R. Van Arsdel, (eds) (1978, 1989), Victorian Periodicals: A Guide to Research, 2 vols (New York). Vicinus, Martha (1985), Independent Women (London). Villa, Luisa (2000) ‘James and Ruskin: Intergenerational Frictions’, in Ruskin and Modernism, ed. Giovanni Cianci and Peter Nicholls (Basingstoke). Walkowitz, Judith (1992), City of Dreadful Delight (London). Wallen, Jeffrey (1999), ‘Alive in the Grave: Walter Pater’s Renaissance’, ELH 66 (Winter), 1033–51.

Bibliography 319 Warren, J. Leicester [Baron de Tabley] (1865), ‘Atalanta in Calydon’, Fortnightly Review, 1 (15 May), 75–80. Waugh, Arthur (1894a), ‘London Letter’, Critic, 21 (20 January), 42–3. Waugh, Arthur (1894b), ‘Reticence in Literature’, Yellow Book I (April), 201–19. Webb, Ruth (1996), ‘Ekphrasis’, in Dictionary of Art, ed. Jane Turner (London), vol. X, pp. 128–31. Weinstein, Mark A. (1984), ‘The North British Review’, in British Literary Magazines, ed. A. Sullivan (Westport, CT, and London), pp. 275–81. Wheeler, H. W. (1906), MS letter to Everett & Co. (3 November), Harry Ransom Research Library, Austín, Texas. Whitefield, G. C. (ed.) (1876–83), Men of Mark (London). Wicke, Jennifer (1988), Advertising Fictions (New York). Wilde, Oscar (1981 [1891]), The Picture of Dorian Gray, ed. Isobel Murray (Oxford). Williams, Carolyn (1997), ‘On Pater’s Late Style’, Nineteenth-Century Studies, 24.2 (Fall), 143–60. [Wilson, E. D. J.] (1867), ‘Irish University Education’, Westminster Review, 31 n.s. (January), 111–32. [Wise, John R. de C.] (1865), ‘Belles Lettres’ review of Sesame and Lilies’, Westminster Review, 28 n.s. (October), 574–5. Wratislaw, Theodore (1893), ‘To a Sicilian Boy’, The Artist (August), 229. Wright, Angelina (1943), ‘Thomas Wright and Dickens’, Notes and Queries, 184, (14 August), 115. Wright, Samuel (1971), ‘Richard Charles Jackson’, Antigonish Review, I (Winter), 81–92. Wright, Samuel (1975), A Bibliography of the Writings of Walter H. Pater (New York and London). Wright, Thomas (1904), Edward FitzGerald, 2 vols (London). Wright, Thomas (1906a), Richard Burton, 2 vols (London). Wright, Thomas (1906b), Prospectus for The Life of Walter Pater. Wright, Thomas (1907), The Life of Walter Pater, 2 vols (London). Wright, Thomas (1936), Thomas Wright of Olney (London). Xenophon (1990), ‘The Dinner-Party’, Conversations of Socrates, trans. Hugh Tredennick and Robin Waterfield, ed. R. Waterfield (Harmondsworth), pp. 219–67. Zatlin, Linda (1998), ‘Aubrey Beardsley, John Lane, The Yellow Book, and Archival Material’, in The Death of Pierrot: A Beardsley Miscellany, ed. Steven Halliwell and Matthew Sturgis (Arncott, Bicester), pp. 59–67.

Periodicals cited Art Journal Artist and Journal of Home Culture Athenaeum Author Authors’ Circular Belgravia Blackwood’s Magazine

320 Bibliography

Bookman Bookseller Bookselling (Books and Bookselling from January 1897) Book World Cassell’s Family Illustrated Magazine Century Guild Hobby Horse Contemporary Review Cornhill Magazine Dial Fortnightly Review George Cruikshank’s Table Book Harper’s New Monthly Magazine Household Words Humanitarian Journal of/Studies of Newspaper and Periodical History/Media History Journalism Journalist Longman’s Magazine Macmillan’s Magazine Magazine of Art Master Humphrey’s Clock New Review Newsagents’ Chronicle Nineteenth Century North British Review Pall Mall Magazine Penny Magazine Publishers’ Circular Publishers’ Circular Newspaper, Magazine and Periodical Supplement Punch Review of Reviews Saturday Review Savoy Strand Magazine Studio Victorian Periodicals Review Westminster Gazette Westminster Review Woman’s World Yellow Book

Index academic syllabuses see university study Academy, 53, 175, 177–8 advertisements as guide to sales and reputation, 178 as text, xiii, 27 book publishers, 11, 13, 14 difficulty of locating examples, 29 for EML Lives, 55 gendering of, 43–4 in trade journals, 68, 69 juxtaposition with text, 28(caption) Macmillan, 5 The Newcomes, 10, 28 presence/absence in serials, 33 purpose, 44 Wright’s, 64 YB, 167 advertising supplements All the Year Round, 48 Chapman and Hall, 9 customisation, 43 independent archiving of, 43 MM, 5 Savoy, 171–9 YB, 172, 173, 178 see also Publishers’ Circular Newspaper, Magazine and Periodical Supplement (subsequently Newsagents’ Chronicle) aesthetic book, 231 aesthetic criticism project, Pater, 231–2 aestheticism, 191, 206, 238 Aitkin, Lucy, 108 Albemarle, 272, 304n14.9 Aldrich, Robert, 295n6(I).28 All the Year Round: advertiser for, 48 Allen, George, 201

Allen, Grant, 126, 148, 161, 295n6(I).26 and the New Hedonism, 148, 149–51, 152, 160 Altick, Richard, 29 Amos, Sheldon, 189 Anderson, Alan, 168 anonymity and recognition by readers, 42 and reviewing, 15 The Artist, 119, 132 Blackwood’s Magazine, 4, 6 Pater’s articles, 184, 187 periodicals, 33 revelation of authorship, 15–16 Shand on, 16 vs signature, 4, 15 Anti-Jacobin, 24, 156, 297n7.13 archival research, value, 283 Ardis, Ann, 156, 160 Arnold, Matthew, 52–3, 145, 192, 205, 219, 220, 221, 225, 238, 266, 303n13.19, 303n14.4 and French fiction, 229 on function of criticism, 198 serialisation of works, 31 Aronson, Theo, 296n6(II).11 art education in, Pater, 205–6 gender and, 88 art critics see criticism, art Art Journal, 111 ‘art literature’, 294n6(I).20 art periodicals, 111 Art Review, 143 The Artist and Journal of Home Culture, 110–19, 113, 114, 118, 146, 152, 212 and Cleveland Street affair, 129–30, 132–3, 137–44 anonymity, 119, 132

321

322 Index The Artist and Journal of Home Culture (continued) ‘art literature’, 121 changes of title and focus, 112, 115–16, 117, 118, 127–8 competition from The Studio, 127 concentration on design and production, 122 denunciation of homosexuality, 124, 126 focus on male, 112, 115 ‘From Month to Month’ (leaders), 130, 131, 136, 137, 141–2 homophobic purge, 116 index, additional information on contributors, 119 Kains-Jackson’s editorship, 119–27 leaders, 129–37; characteristics, 135–6; importance, 134; subjects of attack, 135–7 ‘Letters to Living Artists’, 130, 131–2, 143–4 physical characteristics, 133–4 politics and news, 134 sub-title of Journal of Home Culture added, 112, 113 Ashton, Rosemary, 288n5.17 Athenaeum, 8, 29, 293n6(I).6, 301n10.10 advertisement for EML Lives, 55 The Artist and, 111 on the YB, 165 Pater review, 230 reviews and book sales, 15 Atlantic Monthly, 266 attribution see authorship Austen, Jane, 105 Author, 68, 71, 76, 77, 80, 134 purpose, 80 see also Society of Authors authors and constraints against fiction, 22 and periodical press, 3–4 female, 6–7 journalists as, 77 respectability, 15 rights and interests, 67–8 Author’s Circular, 68, 76, 77, 78, 80, 81 purpose, 80

authors’ rights, 18 authorship 19th century model, 16, 19 and move from periodical to book format, 18–19 and recognition by readers, 42 attribution of, Master Humphrey’s Clock, 45 ‘author function’ (Foucault), 132 present-day, 19 professionalisation, 4 relationship between press and books and, 15 revelation of, 15–16 see also anonymity; signature avant-garde magazines, Pater and, 270 Baillie, Joanna, 108 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 218, 302n13.2 Balzac, Honoré de, 229 Barthes, Roland, 20, 132, 296n6(II).7 Baudelaire, Charles, 258, 272–3 Beardsley, Aubrey, 116, 127, 152, 263, 279, 298n8.2 and The Artist, 112, 122 and the Savoy, 146, 171, 172, 175, 178, 179, 272, 273 and the YB, 128, 147, 154, 155, 157, 160, 166 on advertising art, 167 Becker, Lydia, 100, 105, 290n5.27 Beecher, Harriet Ward, 150 Beer, Rachel, 297n7.16 Beerbohm, Max, 153, 154, 158, 159, 166, 167, 168, 295n6(I).29 Beetham, Margaret, 29, 293n6(I).7 Beeton, Isabella, 31, 34, 288n5.14 Belgravia, 216 Benson, A. C. and the New Review, 161 and the YB, 154, 159 background, 55–6 Life of Walter Pater, 54–9, 64–5 nature of authorship, 58–9 use of Wright’s material, 56–7 working methods, 57–8 Bentley’s Miscellany, gender-specific articles, 88

Index 323 Besant, Walter, 228, 231, 235, 238 Bible English, 234 serial format, 31 bibliographies, modern-day studies, 29–30 biography, 30 distaste for, 53 investigative see investigative biography see also English Men of Letters Birmingham Gazette, 176 Blackwood’s Magazine, 4, 8 anonymity policy, 4, 50 gender-specific articles, 88 monopoly challenged, 10 publication of serialised fiction, 13, 35, 36 review of Pater’s Appreciations, 229, 230, 245, 246, 274 Blaikie, W. R., 106, 108 Blake, William, Pater on, 219 Bland, Lucy, 285n3, 1 Bodichon, Barbara Leigh, 91, 96, 105, 288n5.14 Bodley Head, 297n7.9 Bonney, Revd Professor T. G., 151, 295n6(I).26 book sales reviews to boost, 15 secondhand, 17 Wright’s methods, 65 book trade alliance with periodical press, 24 specialist journals, 67–83 Book World, 76 Bookman, 68, 76, 271, 286n4.8 books and newspaper press, 23–4 and series, xiii as commercial risk, 13 book, relation to periodical press, 232, 249, 252–3 cost see pricing of books cycle of serial and book publication, 16 dependence on periodicals, 183–4 first publication in book form, 30

journalistic origins, Pater, 184 link with serials, 37 pre-volume publication, 13 relationship to serials, 3, 30 role, Shand on, 11 single-volume reprint, 8 stand-alone format, 65 variation in format, 30 volume text, normalisation, 27–8 writing as womens’ work, 6 Books and Bookselling, 76 Bookseller, 67, 68, 70–1 as newspaper, 70 Gazette, 70 booksellers and Publishers’ Circular, 69–70 new role, 67 Booksellers’ Review, 76 Bookselling, 76, 175, 176–7, 179 Bouchard, William Geoffrey, Viscount Mountmorres, 116, 117, 293n6(I).13 Bourcherett, Jessie, 290n5.27 Bowker, R. R., 228 Bradbury and Evans (publishers), 41 Bristow, Joe, 297n7.7 Bristow, Joe (critic), 129 Brontë, Charlotte, 105 Brooks, Shirley, 40–1 Broomfield, Andrea, 289n5.25 Brown, Alan Willard, 290n5.29 Brown, Horatio, 120 Browne, Hablot, (illustrator), 46 Browne, Sir Thomas, Pater on, 226, 242, 244 Browning, E. B., 105 Browning, Oscar, 192, 215 Buchanan, Robert, 193, 238–41, 261 Bullen, J. B., 300n10.9 Bull’s Library, borrowing regulations, in Nickleby Advertiser, 49 Bunting, Percy, 251, 256, 257, 260, 261, 262 Burns, Robert, part-issue of poetry, 37, 39, 40 Burton, Richard biography by Wright, 55, 57, 59–60, 61–2 private publication, 224

324 Index Butler, Josephine, 147, 151, 290n5.27 Calloway, Stephen, 292n6(I).3, 298n8.2 Calvino, Italo, 20 canon, Pater on, 232 Canton, William, 256, 261–2 Capes, William, 298n9.3 Carlyle, Thomas, 53, 249 Carpenter, Edward, 62, 151 Carroll, David, 36 Cassell, John, 300n10.5 Cassell publishers, 37, 116 serialisation of works, 37 Castle, Philip see Kains-Jackson, Charles Philip Castle Cattermole, George (illustrator), 46 Cavalcassele, G. B., 203 censorship and ‘prose’, 226–47 and style, 231 classical subjects and, 265 for family reading, 95–6, 99–100, 139 late 19th-century authors, 223–4 objections to, 289n5.22 of the novel, 22 Pater on, 232, 237–9 self-censorship, 236; Pater, 223 sonnets addressed to men, 126 Wright’s biography of Burton, 61–2 Century Guild Hobby Horse, 230, 272, 300n10.1, 304n14.9 Chambers’ Cyclopedia of English Literature, 31 Chapman and Hall Advertising Supplement, 9 and Dickens’ works, 47 Library series, 30 range of list, 44 see also Fortnightly Review Chapman, John, 92, 93, 94, 97–8, 105, 186, 187, 196, 292n5.40 Chaucer, ‘The Corpus MS’, 31 Chester, D., 296n6(II).11 Chivers, Cedric, The Library Bureau, 179 circulating libraries, 8 pricing and, 23

reliance of book publishers on, 13 resistance to, 36 Shand on, 21–2 ‘class’ periodicals, 67 The Artist as, 111 classical subjects acceptability, 251–2, 262 Pater and, 244–5, 249–62 see also Greek culture Clements, Patricia, 275 Cleveland Street affair, 129–30, 132–3, 137–44 nature of reports, 138–9 Clough, Arthur Hugh, 192 Cobbe, Frances Power, 23, 97–8, 105 Cohen, Ed (critic), 129 Cohen, William, 296n6(II).12 Colburn, Henry, 4, 15 Colby, Robert, 286n4.13, 14 Coleman, C. W., 121 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 249 Pater on, 226, 237, 238, 270 collective authorship, periodicals, 16, 18 columns, function in 19th-century periodicals, 135 Colvin, Shereen, 295–6n6(II).4 Colvin, Sidney, 299n9.14 Conlon, J. J., 305n14.15 Contemporary Review, 7, 11, 22, 24–5, 52, 97, 221, 251–2, 267, 303n13.15, 19 articles on women, 290n5.27 attack on Symonds, 216, 251 character, 261 ‘The Fleshly School of Poetry’, 193, 238–41 gender-specific articles, 88 on Classics, 250–1, 262 Pater and, 256, 257, 260, 261–2, 271, 303n13.19 publishing of lectures, 261–2 same-sex material, 111 controversy, in CR, 261 Conway, Moncure D., 105, 191 Cooper, Emmanuel, 292n6(I).3 copyright, influence on authors’ rights, 18

Index 325 Cornhill Magazine, 10, 24, 41, 201, 202, 246, 289n5.22 same-sex material, 111 signature and, 15, 50 Cornwallis, Caroline Frances, 94, 105, 108–9 Corvo, Baron see Rolfe, Fr. Cory, William, 215, 216, 221 Cottam, S. E., 292n6(I).1 Coulter, Jim, 294–5n5.25 Courrier Français, 176 CR see Contemporary Review Crackanthorpe, Blanche, 160 Crackanthorpe, David, 298n8.9 Crackanthorpe, Hubert, 152, 153, 154, 155, 159–60, 161, 168, 175, 272, 298n8.9 Craigie, Pearl see Hobbes, John Oliver Criminal Law Amendment Act, 138, 142 Critic, 164 criticism anonymous, effects of, 15, 19 artfunction, debate concerning, 197–8; increase in number of critics, 197–8; link with other genres, 203; ‘professional’ vs amateur critics, 198–9, 206; readership, 203; Ruskin vs Pater, 205–6 function, Arnold on, 198 James on, 228 monthlies and, 11 New Review article, 227–8 vs reviewing, 228 see also reviews Crosland, T. W. H., 60–1 Cross, Victoria, 168 Crowe, J. A. and Cavalcassele, A New History of Painting in Italy, 203 Cuffe, Kathleen, 160 Cumming, E., 280 current affairs, gendered, in WR, 94 Curryer and Baynes, 81(caption) Custance, Olive, 168 cycling mania, 77 dailies and trade periodicals, 68

Shand on, 11 Daily Chronicle, 271 Daily Courier, 74, 286n4.10, 11 Daily Mail, 52, 67, 73(caption), 74 daily newspapers, 8, 10–11 Dallas, E. S., 227 Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, 234 d’Arch Smith, Timothy, 292n6(I).1, 2, 294n6(I).19, 24, 295n6(I).28, 296n6(II).8, 297n7.5 d’Arcy, Ella, 146, 154, 155, 158, 159–60, 168 Davidson, John, 154 Davies, Emily, 288n5.14, 290n5.27 Dawson, Wm and Sons, 71, 72 The Day, advertisement for, 43 De Quincey, Thomas, 249 ‘Decadence,’ 152–4 Crackenthorpe’s examples, 153 in The Artist, 111, 120, 124, 128 in the YB, 154, 155, 166 Pater and, 268, 270, 272, 277, 279 Symons and, 271–2 Dellamora, Richard, 145, 213, 279 democracy and print, 23 effect on literature, 22 Demoor, Marysa, 296n7.2 design and production, The Artist, 122 Dial, 121, 171, 300n10.1 Dickens, Charles advertisement for works, 9, 43, 44 illustrations, Ruskin on, 202 literature and journalism and, 249 on serialisation, 35 part-issues, 8, 31 Wright’s life of, 59 and Household Words, 33 Barnaby Rudge, 47, 201 Edwin Drood, Advertiser in, 48 Nicholas Nickleby, Advertiser in, 49 The Old Curiosity Shop, 46–7 Pickwick Papers, 8 see also Master Humphrey’s Clock dictionaries see reference works Dictionary of National Biography, 31, 37 part-issue, 37, 40

326 Index distribution, by subscription, 65 distributors new role, 67 see also newsagents Divorce Bill, WR articles on, 90, 94, 107, 108 Dome, 300n10.1 Donoghue, Denis, 305n14.17 Douglas, Lord Alfred, 111, 120, 149, 261, 279, 297n7.5 Douglas, David, 108 Dowden, Edward, 216 Dowling, Linda, 279, 301n11.3, 302n13.6 Drew, Cyril M., 124, 126 Du Maurier, George, 40–1 Dunne, Mary see Egerton, George Eastlake, Sir Charles, 198–9 Echo, 138 Edinburgh Review, 8, 225 anonymous contributions, 15–16 editing censorship and, 61 signed vs anonymous articles, 18 editors constraints on fiction by, 22 rights and interests, 67–8 women, 92–3, 288n5.14 education, in art, Pater, 205–6 Education Act, 270 education of women, 92, 100, 236 art education, 112 Egerton, George (Mary Dunne), 154, 161, 168, 172, 297n7.12 Keynotes, 161, 297n7.12 ekphrasis, Pater, 197, 207–8, 210, 211–12 Eliot, George advertisements on wrappers, 29, 30 and restrictions of serialisation, 35–6 EML biography, 54 part-issues of works, 31 serialisation, 42 Daniel Deronda, 30, 44–5 Middlemarch, 29, 35–6 Eliot, Simon, 285n4.1, 2

Ellegärd, Alvar, 189, 296n6(II).5 Ellis, Havelock, 62, 151 EML see English Men of Letters (EML) biographies Encyclopaedia Britannica advertisement for, 37, 38 part-issues, 38, 40 encyclopaedias see reference works English literature as subject of study see university study, of English literature class and gender qualities, 245–6 male vision, 246 English Men of Letters (EML) biographies, 53–66 characteristics, 54–5 readership, 55 see also series English Romanticism, Pater on, 219 English School of Journalism, 77 syllabus, 79 see also Authors’ Circular The English Woman’s Journal, 91, 96, 108, 288n5, 12 Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, 288n5.14 ephemera, importance, xiv erotic discourse in the YB, 159 private circulation, 224 see also homoeroticism Euston, Lord, 138 Evans, Laurence, 208, 211, 213, 216, 221, 253, 254, 255, 256, 257, 262, 288n5.19, 290n5.28, 300n10.9, 301n12.1, 302n13.11 Evans, Marian, 35, 87, 88–9, 292n5.40 adoption of male persona, 93–4 apprenticeship in WR, 92 comparison with Merivale, 109 male persona, 93 on female friendships, 104–5 ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’, 89, 90, 94, 98–9 WR articles, 89, 90–1, 94, 104–5 see also Eliot, George Everett & Co. (publishers), 55, 59–60, 64, 65

Index 327 Evergreen, 128 Examiner, 8 prospectus, 24 Farnell, Lewis R., 250 Fawcett, Millicent, 152, 289n5.25, 290n5.26, 297n7.6 feminist serials, 96 fiction as genre, 7 as link between serial and book, 8 constraints against, 22 interest in, 21 low esteem, 246 reviews, 227 serialisation, restrictions, 35 serialised, 31–2; Shand on, 13; with illustration, 32 status, 227, 228, 277 see also novel Field, Michael, 295n6(I).29 Fielding, Henry (‘Pasquin’), 132, 295–6n6(II).4 fin de siècle culture French influence, 275–6 Pater and, 280, 282 Fine Arts Quarterly Review, 198 FitzGerald, Edward, biographies, 54, 55, 56, 60 Flaubert, Gustave, 233, 237, 274, 301n12.1 Madame Bovary, 231 ‘fleshly’, defence of, 238–41 Fletcher, Ian, 153–4, 292n6(I).2, 297n7.5 flexibility, serialisation, 40, 45 Flint, Kate, 293n6(I).7 formalism, Pater on, 233–4 formats books, stand-alone, 65 move from periodical to book, 18–19 publishers’ range, 37 serials, 8, 31, 41 YB, 165 Fortnightly Review, 11, 19, 23, 42–4, 97, 126, 146, 147–9, 196, 267, 290n5.26, 298n9.2, 299n9.11, 14

advertisement for, 9 Advertiser document, 42–4 articles on gender issues, 134, 161 articles on women, 290n5.26 classics, acceptance of, 262 literary character, 190 Pater’s articles, 184, 185, 186, 190, 216–24, 241–2, 251–2, 252, 253–4, 257–8, 258–9, 260, 271, 274 readership, 258–9; women readers, 191–2, 258 same-sex material, 111 signature and, 15, 187 see also Chapman and Hall Foucault, Michel, 20, 109, 128, 132, 220, 296n6(II).6 FR see Fortnightly Review Fraser, A. C., 107, 291n5.38 Fraser’s Magazine, 10 gender-specific articles, 88 French culture, Pater and, 274–80 French literature compared to English, 228 Pater on, 239–40, 274 Pater’s work compared to, 272–3 frequency of periodicals Magazine Day and, 11 periodicity, 30–1 print culture and, 11 Fuller, Margaret see Ossoli, Margaret Fuller Galton, Arthur, on collectivity and signature, 18 Garnett, R., 161 Garrett, Elizabeth, 105, 290n5.26 Gaskell, Elizabeth, 105 Gautier, Théophile, 220, 258, 271–2 gay discourse The Artist, 110–19; under KainsJackson, 119–27 canonical writing as, 214 Pater, 224, 250, 263 see also homoeroticism; homosexuality; queer theory gay press, Pater and, 224

328 Index gay subjectivity, queer theory and, 128–9 gender current affairs, 94 FR gendered space, 191–2 gendering of advertisements, 43–4 literary discourse and culture, 231, 232 literary profession, 6–7 male responses to ‘the woman question’, 102–3 Pater’s Appreciations, 245–6 periodicals, gender-specific titles, 88 topicality, 94–100 WR and, 87–109 WR contributors, 105–6 Wright’s life of Burton, 61–2 see also men; women gender, xiv, 145–6, 299n9.12 Gillett, George 110, 292n6(I).1 Gissing, George, 8 New Grub Street, 7, 74, 163, 249, 269, 285n3.2 The Odd Woman, 161 Glasgow Herald, 246 Gloeden, Wilhelm von, 127, 294n6(I).19 Goodbody, John, 155 Gore, Charles, 295n6(II).3 Gosse, Edmund, 7, 8, 22, 23, 154, 159, 161, 223–4, 228 obituary of Pater, 261 on newspaper press, 23 Grand, Sarah, 150, 157, 160, 161, 165, 303n13.20 Grant Richards (publishers), 55, 59, 60–1, 161 Graves, C. L., 230, 231 Gray, Beryl, 291n5.32 Gray, John, 111, 120, 295n6(I).29 Great Exhibition, effect on illustration, 202 greatest literature, Pater’s list, 234 Greek culture link with homosexuality, 245 Pater on, 244–5, 249–62, 267 see also classical subjects

Greenwell, Dora, 106, 108 Greenwood, Frederic, 156 Greg, W. R., 94, 96, 101–2, 105, 292n5.41 Grey, Maria G., 105, 258 Grosskurth, Phyllis, 293n6(I).4 Grosvenor Gallery, 136, 137 Grote, George, 152 Grove, Archibald, 161 Guardian, 244, 271, 302n13.3 Hamerton, Philip G., 168, 192–3, 194 Hardinge, William Money, 215 Hardy, Thomas, 161, 223–4, 232, 234, 235, 238, 269, 273, 289n5.22 censorship for periodicals, 265 on censorship by libraries, 22, 271 on the novel, 7, 226–7, 228 Harland, Henry, 154 Harmsworth (publishers), 74 Harper’s New Monthly Magazine article on decadence, 153 on English novel, 228 Pater’s article, 224, 271, 274–5 same-sex material, 111, 121 Symons article, 271, 272 Harris, Frank, 147–8, 149, 196 Harris, Michael, 2 Harrison, Fraser, 157 Harrison, Frederic, 160 Hazlitt, William, 249 hedonism see New Hedonism Heine, Heinrich, WR article on, 90–1 Heinemann publishers, 161 heterosexual relations as theme, 8 in the YB, 159–60 Hickson, W. E., 92, 93, 94, 105 Higgins, Lesley, 268–9, 303n14.4 Hiley, Nicholas, 284n1.3, 296n6(II).14 Hill, Donald, 300n10.6 Historical Educator, 37, 40 Hobbes, John Oliver (Mrs Craigie), 147, 159, 168 Hobhouse, Arthur, 290n5.26 Hobson, Harold, 297n7.16 Hodgson, Earl, 74

Index 329 Holman, Valerie, 203 Home, Herbert, 230 homoeroticism in The Artist, 115 Pater, 279, 280 periodical press’s acceptance, 262 see also erotic discourse; gay discourse; homosexuality homophobia in The Artist, 116 in CR, 216, 238–41, 251, 261 late 19th-century, 215 reflection in periodicals, 147 YB, 155 homosexuality and Allen, 150 and Wright’s Life of Burton, 62 The Artist’s denunciation of, 124, 126 educational institutions, 215 Greek culture and, 245, 251–2, 262 Ives on, 152 Pater and, 152, 190, 210–12, 215–16, 245 Symonds and, 152 taboo on public disclosure, 139 see also Cleveland Street affair; gay discourse; homoeroticism; queer theory homosocial discourse and Pater’s Studies, 197, 208, 210 in the YB, 159 periodical press’s acceptance, 262 WR, 103–5 Houghton, Lord, 187 Houghton, Lord (Richard Monckton Milnes), 187, 191 ‘house’ style, 16 Household Words, 33 Housman, Laurence, 120, 295n6(I).29 Howe, Susanne, 87 Howitt, Mary, 107, 288n5.14 Hughes, Linda, 21, 29 Hughes, Thomas, 41 Hugo, Victor, Les Misérables, 234 Humanitarian, 146, 150, 151, 152, 160, 169 ‘humourist’, Pater’s use of, 241–2

Hutton, Richard Holt, 43, 227 Huysmans, J.-K., 271 Hyde, H. Montgomery, 296n6(II).11 Ibister (publishers), 261 identity periodical, 16, 18, 50 see also authorship; signature Illustrated London News, 202 illustration and The Artist, 111, 116, 117, 119 and serialisation, 31–2 books of art criticism, 200–1, 204 hybridity in illustrated texts, 203 in books of Victorian art criticism, 197–212 Pater and, 197, 204, 206, 211 Ruskin on, 201–2 YB, 165–6 illustrators, crediting of, 41 Image, Selwyn, 268, 272 imaginative prose, Pater on, 232–3 indecency, Kains-Jackson on, 139–40 indexes Review of Reviews Index to Periodicals, 76–7 timing, trade journals, 68 Inman, Billie, 213, 215, 216, 217, 244, 293n6(I).4, 305n14.15 investigative biography characteristics, 58, 59, 60 Wright, 57, 58, 60, 65 Ives, George, 150, 152, 295n6(I).26 Jackson, Holbrook, 153–4 Jackson, Richard C., and Wright’s Pater biography, 58 James, Henry, 155, 156, 161, 235 and New Journalism, 163–4 and the YB, 156, 167 fiction reviews, 228 on art critics, 199 on biography, 53 on criticism, 228 on Ruskin, 300n10.2 on Whistler, 197, 199 ‘The Death of the Lion’, 156, 157–8, 163–4, 169–70

330 Index Jameson, Anna, 105, 107, 108, 198, 202 Jeens, Charles, 208, 211 Jeffrey, Francis, 225 publication of anonymous articles, 15–16 Jewsbury, Geraldine, 87, 88, 105, 227 Johnson, Lionel, 230, 268, 272, 295n6(I).29 Johnston, Christine, 288n5.14 Jones, Aled, 29 Journalism, 76 journalism and authorship, 77 and literature, 248–9 as career for women, 92–4 as literary career path, 6 as threat to literature, 246–7 culture split, 266 English School of Journalism, 77, 79 gender and, 147 history created, 76 professionalisation, 4 separation from literature, 7 Society of Women Journalists, 147 women, 147–8, 168–9 Journalist, 76 journalists, rights and interests, 67–8 Jowett, Benjamin, 215 Kains-Jackson, Charles Philip Castle, 111, 112, 115, 116 as editor of The Artist, 119–27, 133, 139–42 dismissal as editor of The Artist, 126–7 ‘The New Chivalry’, 295n6(I).27, 297n7.5 Kaye, J. W., 44, 106, 107–8, 286–7n5. 1, 291–2n5.39, 294n6(I).18 Kijinski, John, 53–4 Kingsley, Charles, 40, 141, 290n5.26 Knight, Charles, 32, 202 Knightly, Phillip, 297n7.16 Knowles, James, 33, 196, 260–1, 262, 289n5.20 La Thangue, H. H., 135

Labouchere, Henry du Pré, 137–8, 139, 142 Lacey, Candida Ann, 96 Lamb, Charles, 249 Pater on, 221, 226, 241–2, 244, 245 Lane, John, 152, 154, 161, 172, 272, 298n8.2 Lang, Andrew, fiction reviews, 228 Le Gallienne, Richard, 152–3, 161, 271 leaders, function in 19th-century periodicals, 135 Leckie, B., 293n6(I).7 Lees-Milne, James, 296n6(II).11 Lefroy, Charles, 121–2 Leighton, Frederic, 112, 122, 127, 154, 157 Leitch, D., 296n6(II).11 Leng, Andrew, 238 Lewes, G. H., 289n5.23 and FR, 191–3 and serialisation of Middlemarch, 35–6 distaste for aestheticism, 191 fiction reviews, 227 on anonymity, 19 on women in literature, 87, 88 serialisation of works, 31 WR articles, 94, 95–6, 99–100, 102–3, 105 libraries constraints on fiction by, 22 see also circulating libraries ‘Library’ series, 30 Linton, Eliza Lynn, 229, 231, 238, 289n5.22, 290n5.26 literary agents, rights and interests, 67–8 literary profession, 4, 6–7 literary subjects, in newspapers, 23–4 literature and journalism, 248–9 definition, Pater, 235 greatest, Pater on, 234 journalism as threat, 246–7 professionalisation, 4 separation from journalism, 7 lithographs, part-issues, 31 Llewellyn Davies, Revd J., 290n5.26

Index 331 Long, George, 34 Longman publishers, 40 Louis, Margot, 301n11.4 ‘L. P.’, 132, 295n6(II).3 Lund, Michael, 21, 29 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 249 Macdonald, Leila, 168, 176 Mackarness, John Fielder, 298n9.3 Mackenzie, William (publisher), 37 Maclaren, Archibald, 289n5.25 Macmillan, Alexander, 216 Macmillan, George, 56–7 Macmillan publishers, 14, 204, 216–17, 259 advertisements, 5 and Benson, 55, 56 and EML biographies, 54, 58–9, 65 correspondence with Pater, 184 promotion of Pater’s works by EML biography, 54 see also English Men of Letters (EML) biographies Macmillan’s Magazine, 10, 33, 34, 97, 100, 251–2, 266–7 Advertising Supplement, 5 articles on women, 289n5.25 change in formats, 41 classics, acceptance of, 262, 263, 265 gender-specific articles, 88 Pater’s articles, 221, 224, 252–3, 253, 254, 257, 259–60, 271 ‘The Profession of Letters’, 48–9 same-sex material, 111 signature and, 15, 41–2 McQueen, J. R., 58 ‘Maga’ as periodical persona, 16 see also Blackwood’s Magazine Magazine Day link with serial and part-issue publication, 34 trade journals and, 68 ‘Magazine Day’, xiv, 11, 300 Magazine of Art, 111, 199, 202 magazines magazine serials see serials reading habits, 21

secondhand, 12 see also periodicals Maidment, Brian, 200, 300n10.3 ‘Maitland, Thomas’ (Robert Buchanan), 238–41 male audience, WR articles, 95–6 male responses to ‘the woman question’, 102 male sexual orientation, as theme, 8 male sexuality creative men, 102–3 homosocial discourse, 103–4 Wright and, 62, 64 Mallock, W. H., 216 manuscripts, sale of, advertisements for, 81 March Phillipps, Evelyn, 148, 161, 166, 168 March Phillipps, Lisle, 132, 295n6(II).3 Markby, Thomas, 290n5.27 Martin, Carol, 29 Martin, Victoria Woodhull see Woodhull Victoria Martineau, Harriet, 288n5.14 WR articles, 90–1, 94, 105 mass media and New Journalism, 52 see also popular press Masson, David, 33, 34–5, 292n5.40 Master Humphrey’s Clock, 35, 40, 45–7 Mathews and Lane publishers, 165, 172 see also Lane, John Mathews, Elkin, 132, 272, 295n6(II).3 Mavor, James, 296n6(II).16 men female pseudonyms, satire of, 156 feminine characteristics, 102 Mérimée, Prosper, 274, 276–8, 279 Merivale, Louisa, 106, 108–9 Metaphysical Society, 260–1, 289n5.29 Mew, Charlotte, 168 Michelangelo as gay subject, 120, 122, 128 Pater on, 206–7 Mill, J. S., 93–4, 94, 96, 100–1, 105

332 Index Millais, J. E., Symons on, 273–4 Millgate, Michael, 273 Milton, John, Paradise Lost, 234 misogyny, in the YB, 159 Mix, Katherine, 164, 298n8.2, 303n14.2 MM see Macmillan’s Magazine Modern languages as subject of study see university study, of Modern Languages monthlies challenge to established titles, 10–11 Shand on, 11 shilling monthlies, 20–1 trade periodicals, 68 vs weeklies, 21 Moore, George, 154, 159, 223–4, 231, 232, 234, 238, 289n5.22 and French fiction, 229 on the novel, 7 Pater on, 274 morality and literature, 193, 231 morality in art FR, 192, 193–4 Pater and, 242–3 Moran, Maureen, 305n14.13 Morgan, Charles, 259, 266 Morgan, Thais, 299 Morley, John, 53, 185, 193–4, 290n5.26 as editor of FR, 194, 196, 216, 221, 251, 258 Morning Post, 8 Morris, Mowbray, 251, 259–60 on literature vs journalism, 248–9 Morris, William, Pater on, 128, 186–7, 188, 189, 190, 192, 194, 213–14, 223, 226, 230–1, 238 Mountmorres, Viscount (W. G. Bouchard), 116, 117, 293n6(I).13 Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management, 31, 34 Mudie’s Select Library, 12, 12, 231 Murray, John (publisher), 203 Myers, Robin, 29 naming of authors see anonymity; signature

Naumann, 179 NBR see North British Review Nelson, James, 298n8.3 Nesbit, E., 168 ‘The New Chivalry’, 295n6(I).27, 297n7.5 New English Art Club, 136 ‘New Hedonism’ Allen on, 148, 149–51 Ives on, 152 New Journalism, 43, 52, 161–9 and The Artist, 116–17, 143 and ‘busy’ reader, 11 and circulating libraries, 22 and Pater, 257 and the New Woman, 169–70 and the YB, 155–6, 164, 169–70 and Wright, 56 culture split, 266 EML biographies and, 53 investigative biography and, 57 James and, 163, 164 star system, 18 vs literature, 163 New [Oxford] English Dictionary, 31 New Review, 22, 146, 161, 167, 224, 227, 229, 235, 289n5.22 and the YB, 161–3 ‘Candour in English Fiction’, 227, 231, 236 Pater and, 260, 271 same-sex material, 111 ‘The Science of Criticism’, 227–8 New Woman and New Journalism, 169–70 and the YB, 155–6 first use of term, 160 ‘Newlyn school’, 133 Newman, F. W., 97–8, 100 Newman, J. H., Apologia pro vita, 31, 33, 40 Newnes, Sir George, 74 newsagents and P. C. Supplement, 71 as target of Publishers’ Circular, 70, 71 new role, 67 rights and interests, 67–8 see also distributors

Index 333 Newsagents’ Chronicle (previously P. C. Supplement), 68, 69, 74, 75 newspaper press books and, 23–4, 77 growth, P. C. Supplement and, 74 influence on reading, 25 reviewing by, 23–4 see also periodicals Newspaper Press Directory, 76 newspapers as serials, xiii signature and, 15 trade journals as, 70 Newton, Arthur, 138 Nichol, John, 94, 105, 288nn5.11 Nicholson, J. G., 111, 120 Nimmo (publishers), 122 Nineteenth Century, 11, 33, 196 advertisement for, 17 articles on gender issues, 134 male readership, 246 Pater and, 260, 271, 275 signature and, 16 women as subject, 160 non-fiction, serialised, 13 Nordau, Max, 145, 271 Norris, Charles, 80 North British Review, 287–8n5.6, 8, 9, 291n5.38, 291–2n5.39, 292n5.40 comparison with WR, 106–9 gender-specific articles, 88, 106–9 North London Press, 132–3, 138 Northern Figaro, 175, 176 Northern Star, 8 Norton, Caroline, 105, 107 novel Authors’ Circular defence, 80, 82 effects of part- and serial-issue on, 21 Evans on English female novelists, 89 feminisation, 6–7 French vs English, 228–9 nature of, 235 Pater and, 227 six shilling, Author on, 77 status, 228 struggle for recognition, 226 see also fiction

O’Connor, T. P., 74, 139, 155 Oliphant, Margaret, review of Pater’s Appreciations, 227, 229, 245, 246, 274 Onslow, Barbara, 296n7.2 Ossoli, Margaret Fuller, 105, 107, 288n5.19 Ouida, 160 Overs press, 124 The Pageant, 127, 178, 298n8.4, 300n10.1 Paget, John, 94, 105, 291n5.33 Palgrave, F. T., 192, 198, 289n5.25 Pall Mall Gazette, 24, 42–3, 52–3, 69, 138, 177, 193–4, 231, 244, 267, 274, 297n7.13 Palmegiano, E. M., 287n5.5 Pankhurst, Richard M., 290n5.26 paper taxes, removal, 8 Parke, Ernest, 138 Parkes, Bessie Rayner, 91, 96, 97, 105, 107, 288n5.14 part-issues accommodation of change, 40, 41 advantages, 20–1 as serials, xiii characteristics, 32–3, 47 decline, 23 effect on nature of Victorian novel, 21 impetus, 32 link with Magazine Day, 34 Shand on, 19–20 see also serials ‘Pasquin’ (Henry Fielding), 132, 295–6n6(II).4 Pater, Clara, 236 Pater, Walter, 198, 300n10.9 and French culture, 274–80 and Symons, 271–4 and the New Hedonism, 149, 150–1 as academic, 185 as ‘subject’ in 1890s, 268–71 as WR contributor, 105 biographies, comparison, 54–9 books, characteristics, 270 cancelled book, 221–4, 251 career stunted, 215

334 Index Pater, Walter (continued) change from WR to FR, 190, 194–5 classical subjects, 244–5 comparison with Ruskin, 205, 211, 238 ekphrasis tradition, 207–8 essays on Greek culture, 216–19 fiction, 254–5, 259 FR articles, 184, 185, 186, 190, 216–24, 299n9.14 French literature reviews, 228–9 gay periodical discourse, 111, 120, 187 Greek studies, 248–67 homosexuality and, 152, 190, 210–11, 215–16 illustration of volumes, 197 imaginary portraits, 254–5, 259, 268 influence of periodicals on writing, 183, 184–5 lectures, 276; as basis for articles, 255–6, 261–2 male audience, 246 on degree study of English Literature, 243–4 overlap of activities, 266 periodical writing, 185, 303–4n14.7 periodicals, characteristics, 270 projected books, 244 review format of articles, 190 reviews, 301n12.2 Saintsbury on, 220–1 secularism, 185 selection of periodicals for articles, 170–1 studies of, 214 Swinburne’s influence, 194–5 WR articles, 184, 185–7 Wright’s biography, 62 Wright’s use of EML Pater, 64–5 works: ‘The Age of Athletic Prizemen’, 262 ‘Apollo in Picardy’, 271, 274–5, 278–9, 280 Appreciations, 213–14, 221, 223, 225–47, 268

‘The Bacchanals of Euripides’ (Pater), 253, 254, 255, 259, 263–4 ‘A Chapter on Plato’, 260 ‘The Child in the House’, 255, 300n10.8 ‘Coleridge’s Writings’, 186–7 ‘Denys l’Auxerrois’, 273, 280 ‘Diaphaneite’, 210–11 Dionysus and Other Studies, 222, 244, 251, 255, 302n13.11 ‘The Doctrine of Plato’, 256, 257, 262, 270 ‘Emerald Uthwart’, 255, 280 Gaston de Latour, 254, 259, 284n2.3, 302n13.9 ‘Giordano Bruno’, 254, 255, 303n13.14 Greek Studies, 214, 217–18, 223, 250, 252–8, 258, 262, 280 ‘Hippolytus Veiled’, 252–3, 254, 255, 259, 260, 265, 302n13.8 Imaginary Portraits, 268, 273 ‘Lacedaemon’, 261–2, 280 Letters, 256 ‘The Marbles of Aegina’, 257–8 Marius the Epicurean, 222, 268 Miscellaneous Studies, 255, 280 ‘Myth of Demeter and Persephone’, 255–6 ‘The Myth of Dionysus’, 255 ‘Notes on Leonardo da Vinci’, 195 Plato and Platonism, 250, 256, 257, 258, 262, 268–9, 270, 276, 280, 303n14.3 ‘Plato and the Sophists’, 258 ‘Poems by William Morris’, 2, 186–7, 188, 189, 190, 213–14, 223, 226, 230–1, 237 ‘Prosper Mérimée’, 274, 276–8 The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, 208, 211, 213, 251, 268, 273 The School of Giorgione and Other Studies, 221–2, 244 Studies in the History of the Renaissance, 183, 184–5, 186, 187, 189, 195, 196, 204, 205, 207, 251; Giorgione essay

Index 335 added to third edition, 244–5; reception, 213, 215, 216; role of illustration, 197, 204, 206, 208, 209, 211 ‘A Study of Dionysus’, 253–4 Three Short Stories, 215, 223 ‘Winckelmann’, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 195 Patmore, Coventry, 41, 106–7, 271 Pattison, E. F. Strong, 301n10.11 Pattison, Mark, quoted, 3 Payne, John, translation of the Arabian Nights, 60 P. C. see Kains-Jackson, Charles Philip Castle P. C. Supplement see Publishers’ Circular Newspaper, Magazine and Periodical Supplement Penny Magazine, 8, 32, 202 penny parts, stigma of, 34 The People’s Magazine, 43 periodicals authored, 45–6 characteristics, 33 collective identity, 16, 18, 50 creation to boost book publication, 14 dependence of books on, 183–4 distinction from serials, xiii diversity of groups involved, 67–8 division into types, 266 journal of culture, 266–7 origin, and serial authors, 13–14 periodical press, alliance with book trade, 24 readers’ tolerance, 251 relation to the book, 232, 249, 252–3, 256–7, 270 Review of Reviews index to periodicals, 76–7 reviews as publicity, 14–15 rights of contributors, 18 secondhand, 12 signature and, 15 see also magazines; newspaper press; serials Phillipps see March Phillipps pictorial matter, serialised, 31–2 Pittock, Murray, 297n7.5

P. K. J. see Kains-Jackson, Charles Philip Castle poetry in The Artist, 119–21 part-issues, 37, 40 poetry series, 30 political issues, gendered, in WR, 94, 96, 101 Poovey, Mary, 145 popular press rise of, 74 see also mass media postmodernists, and authorship, 20 pre-publication, advantages, 13 pricing of books circulating libraries and, 23 double profit, 14 in serial form, 36 influence of serials, 4, 8, 32 methods of reducing, 8 novels, 284n2.1 part-issues and, 36–7 three-deckers and, 8, 23 pricing of periodicals Savoy, 173 YB, 166–7 printers’ journals, 285n4.3 ‘prose’, and censorship, 226–47 prostitution, Greg on, 94, 96, 101–2 provincial newspapers, 8, 10–11 pseudonymity, The Artist, 132 publicity, Wright’s methods, 64 publishers and booksellers, 69–70 and periodical press, 3–4 constraints on fiction by, 22 influence of serial publication on, 11, 13–14 new role, 67 range of formats, 37 reliance on journals, 175 Publishers’ Circular and Booksellers’ Record of British and Foreign Literature, 20, 67, 68, 69–71, 72 expansion of market, 71 Publishers’ Circular Newspaper, Magazine and Periodical

336 Index Supplement (subsequently Newsagents’ Chronicle), 3, 71, 74 high print run, 74 Punch, 8, 175, 202, 293n6(I).6, 299n9.5 advertisement for, 30–1 Puritanism, The Artist’s attack on, 140–1 quarterlies challenge from monthlies, 10–11 Shand on, 11 signature and, 15 YB as, 155 queer theory interpretation of 19th-century same-sex preferences, 128–9 see also gay discourse; homosexuality ‘Quill, John’, 115 Raffalovich, Andre, 111, 120 ‘railway novels’, 8, 23 re-reading, 3 readers rights and interests, 67–8 women see women readers readership art criticism, 203 The Artist, 111–12 division between male and female, 235 English literature, 245–6 gendered, 95–6, 139, 189 homosocial, 129–37 Pater’s articles, 189, 246, 269 periodicals vs books, Pater, 256–7 Savoy, 173, 175 reading habits and serials, 8, 19–20, 23, 26, 50–1 exemplified by Advertiser documents, 42–4 lifelong reading material, 31 magazine reading, 21 newspapers’ influence, 4, 25–6 re-reading of periodical articles, 3 readers’ communities, 11, 31 travel and, 10(caption), 26 Reeves, William, 112, 119, 133, 293–4n6(I).16 reference works

in serial form, 31 on Victorian serials, 29 part-issues, 36–7 religion Pater’s article on Winckelmann, 190 WR and, 187, 188–9 Rendall, Jane, 96, 289n5.24, 290n5.30 reprints, effect on pricing, 23 Review of Reviews, 11, 53, 68, 76, 139, 162, 269 index of periodicals, 76–7 reviewing, vs criticism, James, 228 reviews as publicity for books, 14–15 in newspapers, 23–4 signature and, 15, 19 see also criticism Ricketts, Charles, 121, 122, 295n6(I).29, 300n10.1 Rigby, Elizabeth, 198 rights of contributors to periodicals, 18 Robertson Scott, J. W., 284n3.1 Robson, Ann P., 291n5.31 Robson, John M., 291n5.31 Rolfe, Fr. (Baron Corvo), 111, 120, 127, 143, 294n6(I).18 romantic tradition, as ‘ground’ of English literature, 231, 238 R/romanticism, Pater on, 219–20, 226, 238 Rosenberg, Sheila, 292n5.40 Rossetti, D. G., Pater on, 226, 238–41 Rossetti, William Michael, 198, 199, 204, 205 Rothenstein, Will, 154, 175, 177 Royal Academy, as target of The Artist, 135–6 Ruskin, John, 92, 134, 145, 198, 199, 238 as amateur critic, 198–200 collected works, 201 comparison with Pater, 205, 211, 238 illustration of volumes, 197, 200, 201 James on, 300n10.2 Whistler and, 197, 222, 251

Index 337 Ariadne Florentina, 201, 202, 300n10.4 Fors Clavigera, 202 Modern Painters, 200, 203 The Stones of Venice, 200, 201, 203 Time and Tide, 202 Russell, Leonard, 297n7.16 sado-masochism, Pater, 279 Saintsbury, George, 7–8, 161, 183–4, 216 on Pater, 220–1 sales see book sales Sand, George, 104, 105, 220, 291n5.33 satire female on male fantasies, 157 men with female pseudonyms, 156 Saturday Review, 10, 24, 90, 134, 138, 165, 175, 288n5, 12 misogyny, 91 Saville, Julia F., 294n6(I).22 Savoy, 146, 154, 167, 171–9, 272–3 advertisement for Symons book, 271 advertising Supplement, 172–9 French art and literature in, 275 geographical range of advertising, 175–6 Sayle, Charles, 122 Sayle, Edward, 120 ‘scandal’, 296n6(II).12 Schults, Raymond L., 284n3.1 Scott Holland, Henry, 295n6(II).3 Scott, Sir Walter, 249 Scribner’s, 245 secondhand titles advertisements for, 69–70 sale of, 12, 17 Sedgwick, Eve K., 289n5.21 Seiler, Robert, 215, 300n10.9 sensationalism and the YB, 166 New Journalism and, 166 Wright, 59 serialisation advantages, 13–14, 20–1 after book publication, 42 cycle of serial and book publication, 16

decline, 23 economy of, 32 effect on nature of Victorian novel, 21 exigencies, 35 fiction vs non-fiction, 13 flexibility, 40, 45 modern-day studies, 29–30 nature of, 34 periodical into book, 253 style and form, 40 timing, 42 undated issues, 42 serials 19th–century increase, 8 and reading habits, 8, 19–20, 23, 26 characteristics, 47, 50 definition, 30 distinction from periodicals, xiii fiction, 31 formats, 31; range, 8, 41 link with books, 37 link with Magazine Day, 34 non-book materials, 31–2 non-fiction, 31 overlapping, 41 present-day analogies, 28–9 relationship to the book, 3 role, Shand on, 11 series and, 11, 13 series, 30 and books, xiii biographies, 54–5 book publishers, 11, 13, 30 serials and, 11, 13 uniform series, effect on biography, 52–66 see also English Men of Letters (EML) biographies sex in periodical literature (quote), 87, 88 sexuality and biography, 62, 64 and the New Hedonism, 149–51 and the Savoy, 273 as subject of writing, 236 corporeal, Pater, 241 Greg on, 101–2 moral purity, 231 see also male sexuality

338 Index Shadwell, Charles Lencelot, 210, 223, 252, 253, 255, 259, 262, 280, 302n13.8, 10 Shakespeare, William, Pater on, 221, 226, 234, 242–3, 244, 245 Shand, Alexander Innes, 6 ‘Contemporary Literature’ article, 4, 6–7 modes of authorship, 18 on access to reading and serial publication, 19–20 on circulating libraries, 21 on influence of newspapers on reading, 25–6 on periodical authorship, 16, 18 on pre-publication, 13 on quarterlies, 11 on reviews and book production, 14 on serialization, 13–14 on writers for periodical press, 7 quoted, 3 Shannon, Charles, 121, 122, 127, 295n6(I).29, 300n10.1 Sharp, Evelyn, 154, 168 Sharp, William, 246 Shattock, Joanne, 287n5.3, 287n5.6, 291n5.36, 291n5.38, 292n5.40 Shelley, P. B., 220 shilling monthlies, 201 Shirreff, Emily, 105, 290n5.27 short story, 277 Showalter, Elaine, 7, 145, 153–4 Shuter, William, 215, 223, 257, 261–2, 293n6(I).4, 301n11.1, 303n13.12, 17 Sickert, Walter, 150–1, 154, 160 signature and recognition by readers, 42 MM, 41–2 vs anonymity, 4, 15 Simcox, Edith, 258 Simpson, C., 296n6(II).11 Sinfield, Alan (critic), 129 Sinnema, Peter, 29 Smith, Alys Pearsall, 160

Smith, Elder (publishers), 37, 200, 202, 203 Smith, George (publisher), 14, 30, 201 Smith, W. H. advertisement, 17 moral purity debate, 231 Smithers, Leonard, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 177, 271 marketing of the Savoy, 175–8 ‘social purity’, Allen, 150, 151 Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, 202 Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge (SPUK), 43 Society of Authors, 286n4.13, 14 and authors’ rights, 18 see also Author Society of Women Journalists, 147, 296–7n7.2 Solomon, Simeon, 215, 216, 239, 273–4, 305n14.14 Somerset, Henry, Lord, 138 Southey, Robert, 249 special interest group periodicals see ‘class’ periodicals Spectator, 8, 42–3, 229–30, 231 The Sphere, Wright’s publicity in, 64 Spirit Lamp, 149 Stallybrass, P., 302n13.2 stamp taxes, removal, effects, 8, 90, 267 Star, 138, 155 star system, effects, 18 Starzyk, Lawrence, 299n9.12 Stead, W. T., 43, 52–3, 76, 139, 142, 147, 151, 162, 168–9, 231 Steer, P. Wilson, 154 Stephen, Leslie, 54 Steyne, E. Bonney, 294n6(I).23 Stillman, W. J., 266 Stokes, John, 153–4 Stowe, Harriet, 105 Strahan & Co., 43–4, 261 Strand, 277 Strong, Emilia F., 198 The Studio, 111, 127, 128, 293n6(I).10, 298n8.6

Index 339 study see university study Sturgis, Matthew, 298n8.2 ‘style’ censorship and, 231 in fiction, 227, 232 Pater on, 226, 230–7 subscription, as mode of distribution and sales, 65 Sully, James, 186 Sunday Times, 169, 297n7.16 Sussman, Herbert, 299n9.8 Sutherland, John, 4, 29 Swanwick, Anna, 97 Swinburne, A. C., 15, 191, 192, 194, 198, 216, 224, 258, 299n9.11, 14 influence on Pater, 194–5 Symbolism, Decadence displaced by, Symons, 272 Symonds, John Addington, 198, 200–1, 215, 216, 221, 223, 224, 258, 271, 272, 279 and symbolism, 272, 304n14.12 gay periodical discourse, 111, 120, 121, 126, 193 homosexuality and, 152 life of Michelangelo, 122 memorial poem, 125 Symons, Arthur, 143, 146, 154, 159–60, 161, 166, 175 and French fiction, 229 and Pater, 271–4, 272–3 and the Savoy, 171, 172, 173–4, 176, 177, 272 on decadence, 153–4, 271–4 on Pater’s Appreciations, 230 Studies in Two Literatures, 271 Syrett, Netta, 154, 168 Table Book, 31 Taine, Hippolyte, 243 Taylor, Harriet, 93–4, 94, 100–1, 105, 288n5.16 Taylor, Helen, 188, 289n5.25, 299n9.4 The Telegraph, 90, 138 Ternan, Ellen, 59 text, definition, xiii

Thackeray, W. M., 249, 289n5.22 part-issues of works, 31 Esmond, 302n12, 3 The Newcomes: advertisements in, 10, 28, 37, 38; wrappers, 44–5 Thornton, G. K., 153–4 three-deckers, pricing and, 8, 23 time see frequency The Times, 8, 24, 138, 175 Towheed, Shafquat, 297n7.15, 298n8.9 trade papers, 67–83 characteristics, 68 Traquair, Phoebe Anna, embroidery, 280, 281 Trollope, Anthony, serialisation of works, 20–1, 31 Truth, 138, 142 Tuchman, Gaye, 7, 145 Tuke, Henry Scott, 120, 122–3, 133 Turner, Mark, 29, 191, 292n5.40 Tyrwhitt, Richard St John, 216, 221, 245, 250–1, 261 uniform series see series university study of English literature, 231, 243–4, 277; and authorship, 20; Pater on, 232; Victorian serials, 29–30, 32 of modern languages, 231, 243–4, 270, 276 Van Arsdel, R., 30 Vann, J. Don, 30 Vasari, Giorgio, Lives of the Artists, 207 Vicinus, Martha, 290n5.30 Villa, Luisa, 300n10.2 volume text see books Walkowitz, Judith, 145, 285n3.1, 300n10.7 Wallen, Jeffrey, 301n11.6 Ward, Mary, 227 Warren, J. Leicester, 191 Watts-Dunton, Theodore, 15

340 Index Waugh, Arthur, 153, 154, 155, 158–9, 161, 164, 166, 167 Webb, Ruth, 207 Wedmore, Frederick, 150–1, 160, 176, 177, 295n6(I).29 weeklies challenge to established titles, 10 hybridity, 42 serialisation in, 21 Shand on, 11 vs monthlies, 21 Weinstein, Mark A., 291n5.38 The Wellesley Index, searching, 287n5.4 Wells, Gardner, Darnton & Co., 133 Wellsman, Mr, 76 Westminster Gazette, 74, 146 Wright’s publicity in, 64 Westminster Review, 8, 87–106, 146, 185–6, 196, 287n5.9, 288n5.12, 292n5.40 anonymous articles, 105–6, 184, 187 articles on gender issues, 105–6, 134, 187–8 articles relevant to women, 90, 100–6 change to monthly publication, 90 character, 89, 90–1, 190–1, 196 choice of gendered subjects, 91–2 conditions of publication, 187 ‘Enfranchisement of Women’, 100–1 female readership, 96 ‘The Lady Novelists’, 102–3 North British Review, comparison with, 106–9 Pater’s articles, 184, 185–7, 195, 196, 270 reformist stance, 188–9 same-sex material, 111 ‘The Sonnets of Shakespeare’, 103–4 woman as editor, 92–3 Wheeler, W. H., 65 Whistler, James McNeill, 143, 197, 199 Ruskin and, 197, 222, 251 White, A., 302n13.2 White, Gleeson, 111, 120, 127, 132

Whitman, Walt, 152, 191192 Wicke, Jennifer, 286n4.7 Wilde, Oscar, 112, 116, 122, 153, 166, 215, 216, 223, 279, 297n7.3, 305n14.16 effect of trial, 147, 154; on The Artist, 116, 119, 128 Pater named by, 272 publication in FR, 149 The Picture of Dorian Gray, Pater’s review, 227, 280 Woman’s World, 121 Wilkins, W. H., 272 William Dawson and Sons, 71 advertisement, 72 Williams, Carolyn, 302n12.4 Williams, Raymond, 235 Wilson, John, 188 ‘woman question’ in WR, 95, 102 novels on, 161 Woman’s World, 121 women articles relevant to, 90 as journalists, 92–4, 147–8, 168–9 as subjects and readers, 160; The Artist, 111–12, 115, 134, 136 as YB subject, 157 employment of, 107 exclusion by education, 235 homosocial discourse, 104–5 illustration associated with, 165 male pseudonyms, 156 MM articles, 289n5.25 NBR articles, 106–7 status, as theme, 88 WR articles, 90, 100–6, 187–8 see also gender; New Woman women readers The Artist, 111–12, 115, 134, 136 FR, 191–2, 258 magazines for, 43 of English literature, 245–6 women’s writing, 6–7, 15 French authors, 98–9 WR reviews, 97–8 Woodhull, Victoria, 150, 169, 298n7.17 Wordsworth, John, 298n9.3

Index 341 Wordsworth, William, Pater on, 219, 220, 221, 226, 238, 244, 245 WR see Westminster Review wrappers advertisements on, 10, 44–5 as text, xiii, 27 autobiography, 59 communications to readers on, 46 difficulty of locating examples, 29 relationship to letterpress, 44–5, 46 Wratislaw, Theodore, 111, 121, 124, 126, 175 Wright, Aldis, 56 Wright, Samuel, 58, 189, 250, 254, 302n14.7 Wright, Thomas and New Journalism, 56 autobiography, 59, 62 background, 56 form of biography, 58 function as publisher, 55 investigative biography, 57, 58, 60, 65 Life of Burton, 57, 59–60 Life of Pater, 54–9, 64–5 Macmillan on, 56–7

nature of authorship, 59 prospectus for Pater biography, 63 publicity for Pater biography, 64–5 research methods, 57 Xenophon, The Dinner-Party, 294–5n5.25 YB see Yellow Book Yeats, W. B., 145, 150–1, 295n6(I).29 Yellow Book, 116, 128, 145, 146–7, 152, 154–5, 272 advertising supplement, 172, 173 and decadence, 153–4 and New Journalism, 164 and New Review, 161–3 and the New Woman, 155–61 format, 165 French art and literature in, 275 pricing, 166–7 serial identity, 168 textual politics, 154–5 Zatlin, Linda, 298n8.2 Zola, Emile, 153, 231, 271, 272