The Lure of Illustration in the Nineteenth Century: Picture and Press

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The Lure of Illustration in the Nineteenth Century

Also by Laurel Brake NINETEENTH-CENTURY SERIALS EDITION ENCOUNTERS IN THE VICTORIAN PRESS: Editors, Authors, Readers (co-editor with Julie Codell) WALTER PATER: Transparencies of Desire (co-editor with Lesley Higgins and Carolyn Williams) PRINT IN TRANSITION: Studies in Media and Book History NINETEENTH-CENTURY MEDIA AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF IDENTITIES (co-editor with Bill Bell and David Finkelstein) THE ENDING OF EPOCHS (editor) WALTER PATER SUBJUGATED KNOWLEDGES: Journalism, Gender and Literature PATER IN THE 1990S (co-editor with Ian Small) INVESTIGATING VICTORIAN JOURNALISM (co-editor with Aled Jones & Lionel Madden)

Also by Marysa Demoor THEIR FAIR SHARE: Women, Power and Criticism in the Athenaeum, from Millicent Garrett Fawcett to Katherine Mansfield, 1870–1920 MARKETING THE AUTHOR: Authorial Personae, Narrative Selves and Self-Fashioning, 1880–1930 (editor) CHARLES V IN CONTEXT: The Making of a European Identity (co-editor with Marc Boone) EDITING THE TEXT (co-editor with Geert Lernout & Sylvia Van Peteghem) DEAR STEVENSON: The Letters of Andrew Lang to Robert Louis Stevenson (editor)

The Lure of Illustration in the Nineteenth Century Picture and Press

Edited by

Laurel Brake and

Marysa Demoor

Introduction, selection and editorial matter © Laurel Brake & Marysa Demoor 2009 Individual chapters © contributors 2009 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion 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, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin's Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–21731–7 hardback ISBN-10: 0–230–21731–1 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The lure of illustration in the nineteenth century : picture and press / edited by Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–230–21731–7 1. Magazine illustration – England – History – 19th century. I. Brake, Laurel, 1941– II. Demoor, Marysa. NC978.L87 2009 741.695094109034—dc22 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

2008030137

To the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts for their many-faceted support of Belgo-British collaboration

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Contents List of Illustrations

ix

Notes on Contributors

xiii

Chronology

xvi

Introduction: The Lure of Illustration Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor

1

Part I 1800–1840s: Images in Diverse Textual Environments 1

2

3

4

The Illuminated Magazine and the Triumph of Wood Engraving Brian Maidment Accurate Dreams or Illustrations of Desire: Image and Text in the Gardener’s Magazine (1826–44) Edited by John Claudius Loudon Sarah Dewis

17

40

Alaric ‘Attila’ Watts, the Fraser’s Portrait Gallery, and William Maginn David E. Latané, Jr.

60

‘The Original to the Life’: Portraiture and the Northern Star Malcolm Chase

76

Part II Mid-Century Graphics: Fiction, Fashion, Labour and Layout 5

6

Man and Dog: Text and Illustration in Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop Beryl Gray Elizabeth Gaskell: Journalism and Letters Joanne Shattock

vii

97

119

viii

7

8

9

10

Contents

Among the Unknown Public: Household Words, All the Year Round and the Mass-Market Weekly Periodical in the Mid-Nineteenth Century Lorna Huett Often Taken Where a Tract Is Refused: T.B. Smithies, the British Workman, and the Popularisation of the Religious and Temperance Message Frank Murray Seductive Visual Studies: Scientific Focus and Editorial Control in The Woman in White and All the Year Round Laurie Garrison Depicting Gentlemen’s Fashions in the Tailor and Cutter, 1866–1900 Christopher Kent

128

149

168

184

Part III The 1890s: Changing Faces, Changing Technologies 11 Science and the Timeliness of Reproduced Photographs in the Late Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press James Mussell 12

Aestheticism on the Cheap: Decorative Art, Art Criticism, and Cheap Paper in the 1890s Linda K. Hughes

13 Putting Women in the Boat in the Idler (1892–1898) and TO-DAY (1893–1897) Anne Humpherys 14

Images of Englishness: The Daily Chronicle and ‘Proposed Laureates’ to Succeed Tennyson Edward H. Cohen

203

220

234

251

Bibliography

264

Index

275

Illustrations Figures 0.1 Theodore Maurisset, La Daguerreotypomanie, La Caricature, December 1839 1.1 Three coloured wood engraved title page to the Illuminated Magazine vol. 1, 1843 1.2 John Leech. Engraved illustration to ‘Tom Houlaghan’s Guardian Sprite’, the Illuminated Magazine vol. II, March 1844, 241 1.3 Ebenezer Landells. Wood engraved title page to a monthly issue of the Illuminated Magazine vol. II, December 1843, 55 1.4 W.H. Prior. Wood engraved illustration to ‘Broad Lea Farm’, the Illuminated Magazine vol. IV, January 1845, 125 1.5 Kenny Meadows. Wood engraved illustration to ‘The Philosophy of the Pistol’, the Illuminated Magazine, vol. 1, July 1843, 173 1.6 H.G. Hine. Wood engraved illustration to ‘The Monster City’, the Illuminated Magazine, vol. III, September 1844, 286 1.7 Kenny Meadows. Wood engraved illustration to ‘Death and the Drawing Room’, the Illuminated Magazine, vol. I, June 1843, 97 2.1 Front page, Gardener’s Magazine, 15 December 1839, 633. © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved. BL GM pp. 2200 2.2 ‘View from the Drawingroom Window at Cheshunt Cottage, looking to the Left’, Gardener’s Magazine, 15 December 1839, 634. © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved. BL GM pp. 2200 2.3 Work areas plan of Cheshunt Cottage, Gardener’s Magazine, 15 December 1839, 642–43. © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved. BL GM pp. 2200 2.4 Estate plan of Cheshunt Cottage, Gardener’s Magazine, 15 December 1839, 656–57. © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved. BL GM pp. 2200 2.5 ‘General View of the Hot-houses, as seen across the American Garden’, Gardener’s Magazine, 15 December 1839, 646. © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved. BL GM pp. 2200 2.6 ‘Rustic Covered Seat of Woodwork’, ‘Elevation of the Back’, elevation of ‘part of the front’ of a hothouse, and cross section ‘through the middle of one of the ridges of the roof’, ix

3 24

25 26 32

34 35

37 44

46

48–49

50–51

54

x

Illustrations

3.1 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 5.1

5.2

5.3

5.4

5.5

5.6

5.7

8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5 9.1

9.2

Gardener’s Magazine, 15 December 1839, 660–61. © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved. BL GM pp. 2200 ‘Alaric A. Watts: The Editor of “The Literary Souvenir”’. Fraser’s Magazine, June 1835, 653 Feargus O’Connor, Northern Star, December 1840 John Frost, Northern Star, September–November 1839 Richard Oastler, Northern Star, February 1840 Peter McDouall, Northern Star, Autumn 1840 Woodcut of Peter McDouall from the Charter, 7 April 1839 Hablot Knight Browne, [‘Quilp mocking the dog’]: The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–41). Reproduced by permission of the Charles Dickens Museum Hablot Knight Browne (Phiz), [‘Quilp assails the effigy’]: The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–41). Reproduced by permission of the Charles Dickens Museum George Cattermole, [‘The Sandboys chimney corner’]: The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–41). Reproduced by permission of the Charles Dickens Museum Hablot Knight Browne (Phiz), [‘Jerry and his dogs’]: The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–41). Reproduced by permission of the Charles Dickens Museum George Cruikshank, ‘Sikes attempting to destroy his dog’: Oliver Twist (1837–39). Reproduced by permission of the Charles Dickens Museum Hablot Knight Browne (Phiz), Frontispiece for Master Humphrey’s Clock vol. II (1840–41). Reproduced by permission of the Charles Dickens Museum Hablot Knight Browne (Phiz), [‘Quilp at the tavern window’]: The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–41). Reproduced by permission of the Charles Dickens Museum The British Workman and Friend of the Sons of Toil, No. 1 February 1855, 1 The British Workman and Friend of the Sons of Toil, No. 34 October 1857, 133 The British Workman, No. 269 May 1877, 13 The Cottager and Artisan, No. 217 January 1879, 1 The British Workwoman, Out and at Home No. 316 January 1890, 25 Opening page of The Woman in White, All the Year Round (November 1859). Reproduced with permission from the British Library Postscript by a sincere friend. All the Year Round (April 1860). Reproduced with permission from the British Library

56–57 62 77 79 81 82 87

100

102

106

107

108

111

113 157 158 163 164 165

170 174

Illustrations

9.3

10.1 10.2 10.3 10.4 11.1

11.2

11.3

11.4

11.5 12.1 12.2 12.3 12.4 12.5

13.1 13.2 13.3 13.4 13.5 14.1

Jane Morris seated, leading forward. Albumen print by Emery Walker from the photograph by John Robert Parsons. Reproduced with permission from Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery James Mundella M.P. (l.) Thomas Hughes M.P. (r) Tailor and Cutter, 14 July 1871 Highly patterned double-breasted reefer jacket with high cutaway and dittoes. Tailor and Cutter, 7 July 1871 H.R.H. the Prince of Wales wearing a double-breasted frock coat. Tailor and Cutter, 13 June 1895 Patterned waistcoat with lapels. Tailor and Cutter, 6 June 1895 ‘Region of the Milky Way to the South-west of the Trifid Nebula’, Knowledge, 13 July 1890, facing p. 174. By permission of the British Library, pp. 1447.bb ‘Domestic Pests: the Common Flea (pulex irritanis)’, from an original by the Direct Photo Eng. Co. Ltd, in Knowledge, 13 January 1890, facing 41. By permission of the British Library, pp. 1447.bb ‘Lord Kelvin’, ‘Portraits of Celebrities at Different Times of their Lives’, Strand Magazine, 5 June 1893, p. 590. Special Collections, Senate House Library, University of London Page from ‘Illustrated Interviews’, Strand Magazine, 12 October 1896, p. 381. University of Birmingham Main Library Page from ‘Curiosities’, Strand Magazine, 12 July 1896, p. 240. University of Birmingham Main Library Graham R. Tomson, ‘Henry Muhrman’, Scottish Art Review, July 1889: 37. National Library of Scotland Cover, Art Weekly, 10 May 1890. National Library of Scotland ‘Art Gossip’, Morning Leader, 8 October 1892, 3 (detail) ‘Art Gossip’, Morning Leader, 8 October 1892, 3 (detail) Oscar Wilde, ‘The Unity of the Arts: A Lecture and “a Five O’Clock,”’ Pall Mall Gazette, 12 December 1887, 13. National Library of Scotland ‘The Idler’s Club’, Idler, vol. 1 (February 1892) ‘The Man of the Future’, Idler, vol. 6 (September 1894) ‘An Idler’, Idler, vol. 10 (August 1896) Volume Title Page, Idler, vol. 11 (February–July 1897) Cover after sale to J.M. Dent, Idler (August 1898) ‘The Late Lord Tennyson’, London Daily Chronicle, 8 October 1892, 3. © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved. BL 07F00283P

xi

177 190 192 195 199

208

210

212

215 216 223 225 228 229

231 235 241 244 245 247

252

xii Illustrations

14.2

‘Proposed Laureates’, London Daily Chronicle, 7 November 1892, 3. © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved. BL 07F00283P

254

Tables 7.1

Circulation of periodicals within the period 1800–1870, as applicable 7.2 A survey of periodicals of the year 1850 (or nearest available date), based on format, efficiency and the printed area of each sheet

135

140

Contributors Laurel Brake is Emeritus Professor at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research interests are in print culture, gender, computing in the humanities, and Walter Pater. With Marysa Demoor, she has edited the Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism (DNCJ, 2008). Other publications include the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (www.ncse.ac.uk) with Jim Mussell, Suzanne Paylor, and Mark Turner (2008), Print in Transition (2001), and Subjugated Knowledges (1994). Malcolm Chase is Reader in Labour History at the University of Leeds. He has published widely on the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century social history. His books include Early Trade Unionism: Fraternity, Skill and the Politics of Labour (2000) and Chartism: A New History (2007). Edward H. Cohen, who serves on the editorial board of Victorian Periodicals Review, is the William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of English at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida. His most recent articles have appeared in Prose Studies, Victorian Studies, and The Book Collector. Marysa Demoor is Professor of English Literature at Ghent University, Belgium and Life Member of Clare Hall, Cambridge. She has mainly published on late-Victorian and modernist culture. Recent publications include Their Fair Share: Women, Power and Criticism in the Athenaeum, from Millicent Garrett Fawcett to Katherine Mansfield, 1870–1920 (2000) and Marketing the Author: Authorial Personae, Narrative Selves and Self-Fashioning, 1880–1930 (2004). Sarah Dewis is currently completing her PhD at Birbeck College, University of London. A study based on a selection of the publications of John and Jane Webb Loudon between 1825 and 1850, Sarah has brought her experience as an award winning graphic designer with BBC television to the materiality of nineteenth century periodicals. Laurie Garrison researches various aspects of nineteenth-century literary, visual and theatrical culture. She has published in Victorian Literature and Culture, Literature Compass and a number of collections on nineteenthcentury culture. She is currently writing a book about science, sexuality and sensation novels of the 1860s. Beryl Gray taught for many years for the Faculty of Continuing Education, Birkbeck, University of London. She is the author of George Eliot and Music (1989), and has contributed articles to a wide range of publications including The Oxford Reader’s Companion to George Eliot, The Dickensian, and Carlyle xiii

xiv Contributors

Studies Annual. She is the co-editor with John Rignall of The George Eliot Review, and is at present working on a book-length study of the dog in Dickensian society. Lorna Huett holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge; her research focused on nineteenth-century historical bibliography and author-publisher relations, with specific reference to Charles Dickens’s Household Words, and contributions to the periodical by certain women writers. She is currently an archivist, and is working on an edition of the Tennyson brothers’ poetic juvenilia. Linda K. Hughes, Addie Levy Professor of Literature at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, Texas, specializes in Victorian literature and publishing history. Author, co-author, or editor of eight books, she has recently completed a study of Victorian poetry in the context of print culture. Anne Humpherys is a Professor of English at Lehman College and The Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is the author of Travels into the Poor Man’s Country: The Work of Henry Mayhew and various articles on the Victorian press and popular culture, Victorian marriage and divorce, as well as Tennyson, Dickens and G.W.M. Reynolds. Her most recent publication is G.W.M. Reynolds: Fiction, Politics and the Press, which she co-edited with Louis James. Christopher Kent is a professor of history at the University of Saskatchewan. He is currently engaged on three projects – a biography of the AngloAmerican popular artist Matt Morgan, a study of the relations between Victorian gentlemen and their tailors, and a history of gentlemen’s clubs in Victorian London. David E. Latané, Jr. teaches British literature at Virginia Commonwealth University; He is editor in chief of Victorians Institute Journal, and associate editor of Stand Magazine. Brian Maidment is Research Professor in the History of Print at Salford University. He has published widely on nineteenth century topics, especially writing by working men and women, visual culture and periodicals. His latest book is Dusty Bob – A Cultural History of Dustmen 1780–1870 (2007). Frank Murray is an independent researcher. Awarded PhD at University of Salford 2008. Previously Head of a successful Art Department in large secondary school, retired after 35 years to pursue research interests. Currently working on C19 wood engraving and illustrated temperance/ religious periodicals. Contributor to NDNB, Thompson Gale periodicals database, and forthcoming DNCJ.

Contributors

xv

James Mussell is lecturer in English at the University of Birmingham. He was one of the editors of the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (ncse) <www.ncse.ac.uk> (2008) and is the author of Science, Time and Space in the Late Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press (Aldershot: Ashgate 2007). Joanne Shattock is Professor of Victorian Literature and Director of the Victorian Studies Centre at the University of Leicester. She is the general editor of The Works of Elizabeth Gaskell (Pickering & Chatto 2005–6), and editor of volume one on Gaskell’s Journalism, Early Fiction and Personal Writings.

Chronology 1822–47 1823–72

1832 1833–34 1834–36 1836

1841 1842

1842

1842 1842–43

1843–January 48 1843–45 1843

1844 1845

Mirror of Literature, Amusement and Instruction Limbird’s early, cheap, illustrated weekly. Mechanic’s Magazine Iron 1873ff. Illustrated, popular science weekly (also issued monthly) with engravings, maps diagrams and portraits. Penny Magazine. National Standard, included Thackeray’s first drawing; edited by F.W.N Bayley. Unstamped broadsheet. [Cleave’s] Weekly Police Gazette 1d, 2d, 3.5d. 18 September. Weekly Chronicle. Prop. F. Mariott, illustrated news a special feature; Observer, like Weekly Chronicle, had intermittent illustrations. Article Henry Cole: LWR Wood Engraving. Daguerreotypomania cartoon published in La Caricature, in France. Punch (nb: Mark Lemon as ed. of Punch, also private secy to Ingram). Illustrated London News May (nb: Ingram planned ILN with Mariott from Weekly Chronicle and ed. Bayley from National Standard). 27 November. Lloyd’s began as an illustrated paper (#1–7), so real rival to ILN, but required to carry stamp; refurbished and re-commenced without illustrations. December Family Herald or, Useful Information and Amusement for the Million 1d. Articles: Illustrated London News Vol. 1 preface and May 1842 #1 Address Article. Quarterly Review objection to ‘Illustrated Books’. Pictorial Times. Founded by Vizetelly when row with Ingram. Illuminated Magazine (ed. Douglas Jerrold). Illustrated Weekly Times Founded by Stiff, foreman of ILN engravers; foundered quickly; Stiff London Journal. Article: Blackwood’s. [Catherine Gore]’s objection to illustration, ‘The New Art of Printing’. London Journal (Stiff owner then Ingram). xvi

Chronology xvii

1847 1853

1855–72 1860 1861–1907 1861 Nov 1869

1872; 1876

1874 1874

1885 1890 1899

Article: Douglas Jerrold’s Shilling Magazine ‘Place of Fine Arts’ engravings as democratising high culture fine art. December. Cassell’s Illustrated Family Paper founded (physically like ILN, but shorter [8pp], mainly fiction not news, and cheaper [1d]). Illustrated Times Weekly 2d/3d (cheap rival to ILN) Vizetelly ed.; Yates, Sala, Greewood are contributors. Ingram dies. Penny Illustrated Paper (cheaper rival to ILN). Article: Bookseller ‘Illustrated Periodical Literature’. Graphic 6d (although more expensive than ILN, quality justified higher price) Formed from many of the ILN literary staff. Lecture and Article. Ruskin’s ‘Ariadne Florentina’. Denunciation of even the best of illustration in journals, Barnaby Rudge and Cornhill, because of taste of popular readership to which ‘art industry’ caters. Pictorial World 3d; once bought 1882, became more notable imitator of Graphic; rival to Graphic (Williamson 396). The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News Founded by journalist from Bell’s Life (John Osborne) and Bryan Webber and bought by ILN eventually. Rival to Graphic. Book. Mason Jackson, The Pictorial Press (much of it published in ILN). Article: Magazine of Art ‘Illustrated Journalism in England’ C.N. Williamson. Article: Contemporary Review: ‘Illustrated Journalism’ Clement K Shorter. This article (finally) involved in defending place of art/wood engraving in journalism as against photography 60 years after satiric/panic print Daguerreotypomania. Shorter concedes the death of wood engraving in journalism’s process engraving. Ends with photography as ‘lower stage’ (c.f. Wordsworth sonnet in epigraph).


Introduction: The Lure of Illustration Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor

The great end of the whole art of engraving is to render the spirit and genius of a great artist accessible to the thousands, or the millions, by embodying them in cheap and portable forms ... So completely did the ‘Penny Magazine’ bring the art of engraving on wood into general notice, that a certain young lord is reported to have said, wood engraving was invented with the ‘Penny Magazine.’ ([Henry Cole] ‘Modern Wood Engraving’, London and Westminster Review (1838), 268–69) The improvements in the art of wood-cutting, or of embellishment in relief, have been followed by their natural consequence – a great increase in the demand, greater means of supply, a lower price for ‘the article,’ and a corresponding increase in the ‘factories,’ some masters employing from twenty to thirty, or even more hands ... A natural effect of all this is, that those means, which at first were in to aid, now bid fair to supersede much of descriptive writing: certainly they render the text of many books subsidiary to their socalled illustrations. In this partial return to baby literature – to a second childhood of learning – the eye is often appealed to instead of the understanding ... a low utilitarian wish to give and receive the greatest possible amount of knowledge at the least possible expense of time, trouble, money, and we may add, of intellect. Verily it is a superficial knowledge which now pervades the country ... One publisher has put forth a ‘Pictorial Bible,’ a ‘Pictorial Shakespere,’ and a ‘Pictorial’ History of England. The Napoleon Museum is advertised as an ‘Illustrated’ History of Europe. The hoards in the streets are placarded with puffs of some refuse of American literature (?) called Peter Parley’s ‘illustrated’ Histories, written we suppose, by ‘drab-coloured’ Philadelphians, and savouring of democracy and repudiation of honest debts. We have a Weekly ‘Illustrated News,’ 1

2 Introduction: The Lure of Illustration

and a ‘Pictorial Times;’ besides scores and scores of baser newspapers ‘illustrated’ but unstamped. ([John Holmes] ‘Illustrated Books’, Quarterly Review [1844] 170–71) Avaunt this vile abuse of pictured page! Must eyes be all in all, the tongue and ear Nothing? Heaven keep us from a lower stage! (William Wordsworth, ‘Illustrated Books and Newspapers’, 1846) By the mid-1840s, as the implications of wood engraving, the Daguerreotype, and the illustrated press were set out by their detractors and champions, feelings ran high, as the epigraphs suggest. Were wood engravings a welcome technique of popular and wholesome education, extending the benefits of beauty and/or usefulness to working-class readers, or did the pictorial press threaten the status of reason and understanding, and return the reader to ‘baby literature’, and ‘a lower stage’ as the Quarterly Review (QR) and Wordsworth aver? That these positions are represented respectively by articles in the Benthamite London Westminster Review (LWR) and the Tory QR indicate the ideological underpinning of the debate at the time. From the 1830s, a shift from ubiquitous freestanding prints and crudely illustrated broadsheets, for middle-class and working-class consumers respectively, to bound serials is discernible. Media history affords multiple examples of titles of illustrated serials before 1842,1 among them the Mirror of Literature (1822ff), the Mechanic’s Magazine (1823ff), and the Penny Magazine (1832ff), before the establishment of Punch and the Illustrated London News (ILN), the title that first successfully yoked news and pictures in a sustainable and enduring publication in Britain. But despite a leading and upbeat article on wood engraving and woodcuts in the LWR in 1838, before the success of these two titles,2 this mode of illustration was not so ubiquitous, well respected or even established at the time that its longevity was not threatened by developments in photography, then in its infancy. When Theodore Maurisset’s ‘Daguerrotypomanie’ appeared in La Caricature in December 1839 (see Fig. 0.1) depicting engravers hanging themselves in the face of the popular enthusiasm for the Daguerreotype, the heyday of woodcuts to come and the elaborate illustrations in Cornhill and Good Words in the 1860s seemed unimaginable. An engraver himself, Maurisset was understandably sensitive to current developments. So, hard upon the LWR piece (August 1838) extolling wood engraving came Maurisset’s prediction of its demise. However, photography itself, described in an early volume of ILN as associated with portraiture rather than news, remained freestanding and detached from the press in Britain for another 40 years, while the double breakthrough into the upmarket quality press of Herbert Ingram’s ILN and Punch assured the development of the woodcut and its persistence as the

Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor

3

Figure 0.1 Theodore Maurisset, La Daguerreotypomanie, La Caricature, December 1839. Source: Private archive of the editors.

favoured mode of illustration for news and amusement in British serials until late in the century. The word ‘press’ however, obscures distinctions that subsequent historians and critical theorists of illustration and journalism tend to make between the newspaper press, magazines and books. That is, among newspaper historians such as James Grant, Fox Bourne, Williamson, and Mason Jackson, it is the ILN that establishes the pictorial press in the nineteenth century, largely because of its link between news and illustration.3 From its launch in 1842 they argue, a gaggle of illustrated weekly newspapers follow that culminate in the Graphic, weekly and then daily. However, illustrated magazines such as the London Journal, Cornhill, Once a Week and Good Words represent another genre of the press to which the deployment of woodcuts in the earlier Penny Magazine, and Figaro in London and Punch led. To these illustrated journals, supporting instruction and satire respectively must be added serialised part-issues of fiction, dating from Pickwick Papers 1836–37, and serialised magazine fiction, each part or instalment of which often included an illustration. Together, this clutch of magazines and part-issues account for the varied functions of subsequent illustrations in the periodical press as distinct from the link of illustration with news. But a common characteristic united these illustrations, despite the variety of rhetoric or


location, an association of illustration with art and aesthetics, in addition to diverse claims for ‘illustrated news’, usefulness, ornament, ‘truth to life’, and/or record. For much of its duration in the nineteenth century, then, illustrated journalism retained a primary association with fine art prints and the art of the engraver who produced it, and prints from titles – especially those of the ILN – were produced as collectable rather than disposable items. With the exception of Malcolm Chase’s piece on supplementary illustrations to the Northern Star, the Chartist weekly newspaper, and Ed Cohen’s on the Daily Chronicle and the laureateship, the serials treated in The Lure of Illustration appear in what we call magazines, although at the inception of the ILN, in a period when most newspapers were weekly, it confidently described itself as ‘an illustrated newspaper’ (‘Preface’, ILN (1843), Vol. 1, iii). Several titles treated here deploy illustration with respect to fact, if not news, in connection, for example, with gardening, celebrity portraiture, scientific experiment, and fashion, while chapters on dickens’s Household Words and All the Year Round assess what visual copy offers letterpress fiction. Graphic and other visual elements of the press, such as mastheads, layout, and paper are studied in a range of magazine types, including a labour periodical of the 1840s, a family magazine of the 1850s, and a decadent periodical of the 1890s. The collection as a whole, then examines illustration in a variety of modes and serial types and from a number of perspectives. Its distinction and its value lie in its attempt to examine discursively the trajectory of illustrated journalism across the century, rather than within a single period or title as modern critics such as Patricia Anderson, Celina Fox, Ian Haywood, Andrew King, Martina Lauster, Brian Maidment and Peter Sinnema have done so well.4 Likewise, whereas book illustration and illustration of literature have been singled out by recent collections,5 dedicated attention to illustrated journalism is rare. As is the case in the history of publishing, textual and paratextual change often involve technological and cultural developments. With respect to woodcuts and engraving, the impetus of Bewick’s art and their widespread deployment in vernacular and vulgar print forms were coupled with economic advantages associated with this medium. These arose from the longevity of wood blocks as compared with steel engravings in the printing process, the relative speed in which they could be produced by breaking up the image into small blocks on which many engravers could work simultaneously, their relative cheapness of production compared with metal engraving, and their gradual assimilation to stereotyping (a plaster mould) or polytyping (a metal mould). Much of this is in place by 1838, and described by Cole in the LWR, where he also charts the development of a workforce of wood engraver artisans. The demise of the medium is just as clearly registered in 1899, in Shorter’s piece in the Contemporary Review (CR). Looking back nostalgically on the efflorescence of the wood-engraving


5

industry mid-century, he mourns its passing, while detailing the now cheaper technologies of process engraving, whether for line drawings or photographs. The debates around nineteenth-century illustrated journalism invoke two separate rhetorics early in the period, that of illustration and that of journalism. In so far as illustration was connected to high culture and fine art prints, its defenders could position cheap prints as the export of high culture to the working classes in the name of health, education, altruism, and for Cole, Christianity.6 For detractors from illustrated journalism, such as John Ruskin, even the best of the magazines printing woodcuts, Master Humphrey’s Clock and Cornhill, were guilty of falling short of the high art of engraving, as a result of the cheap and industrial production processes which, for him, were overdetermined to fail given their ‘lower class’ target readership. A second basis of attack was premised on widespread prejudice against visual representation itself on a number of possible counts: that it was either frivolous/ornamental and distracting from ‘higher’ matters (a position associated with non-conformist and evangelical arguments), that it involved ‘emotional’ rather than intellectual perception (a rationalist, utilitarian position), or in an evolutionary biological expression of this last argument, that it involved a reversion to babyish perception. In a review of illustrated bibles, novels, annuals, and periodicals, the fulminations of the QR critic include the charge of ‘baby literature’ (QR (1844) 171), and Wordsworth invokes this memorably in 1846, linking an alleged primitivism of childhood – its ‘lower stage’ – with social class, the implied lower-rank consumers of illustrated papers, this ‘dumb Art’. At the same time, in the face of this multi-vocal opposition, there was a popular appetite for illustration, testified even by a detractor such like John Holmes in the QR who refers to the ‘rage’ for ornamented, illustrated or pictorial books, and an enthusiast like Douglas Jerrold, who welcomes the successful circulation of fine art in the cheap and popular market as the democratising of the formerly connoisseur culture (Shilling Magazine (1847) 77). Amidst the arguments between detractors and supporters is the heightened rhetoric of the claims for the popularity and good of illustration in the ILN in its launch number and volume in May 1842 and 1843 respectively. Its ‘Address’ in #1 begins with a paean to illustration, alleging its empowerment of periodical literature in the previous decade: For the past ten years we have watched with admiration and enthusiasm the progress of illustrative art, and the vast revolution which it has wrought in the world of publication ... To the wonderful march of periodical literature it has given an impetus and rapidity almost coequal with the gigantic power of steam. It has converted blocks into wisdom, and given wings and spirit to ponderous and senseless wood. [woodcuts] It has in its turn adorned, golded, reflected, and interpreted nearly every


form of thought ... Art – as now fostered, and redundant in the peculiar and facile department of wood engraving – has, in fact, become the bride of literature; genius has taken her as its handmaid; and popularity has crowned her with laurels ... ‘Our Address’, ILN 1.1 (14 May 1842), [1]. Six months later, in the throes of proven success, the first Volume of collected numbers of the ILN is able to replicate this heightened rhetoric in a ‘Preface’ which contains a ‘Dedication Sonnet’. Perhaps Wordsworth remembered these extravagant claims when writing his denunciation of illustration in 1846. The triumphal tone of the ILN’s effort is congruent with the rest of the Preface: outlining the benefits of illustration to the past, present and future, it goes on to assess its achievement in verse: To the great public – that gigantic soul Which lends the nation’s body life and light ... – we this muster roll Of all the deeds that pass neath its controul Do dedicate. – The page of simple news Is here adorned and filled with pictured life, Coloured with thousand tints – the rainbow strife Of all the world’s emotions – all the hues Of war – peace – commerce; – agriculture rife With budding plenty that doth life infuse And fair domestic joy – all – all are here To gild the new, and from the bygone year Present a gift to take – to cherish and to use. (ILN, I (1843) iv) The hyperbole of these exalted claims for illustration and its link with news in the ILN may be more understandable if the low status of the press at the time is recalled. This brings us to the second discourse attached to the phrase ‘illustrated journalism’, that of journalism itself. In a piece on ‘The Social Status of Journalists at the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century’, Aspinall highlights on the one hand the pejorative link between the common people and the newspaper press in the early 19C, and on the other, the newspapers’ responsibility for their bad reputation – abuses of anonymous journalism, and the established institution of blackmail or hush money paid to dailies by the victims of scurrilous paragraphs (Aspinall, Review of English Studies, July 1945, 219–20). Suggesting also that at the end of the 18C pamphlets were ‘the only medium for reputable political discussion’ (224), and that periodicals were on the whole not to be seen in the homes of common people (220), he makes an important distinction between the low status of the newspaper press and other forms of serials. So, the strenuous attempts by its defenders to link the pictorial press with Fine Art and hard news, and to emphasise its


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positive social functions – from Charles Knight’s Penny Magazine and the SDUK (Society for the Diffusion of Useful knowledge) onwards – may be seen as compensatory strategies to overcome the low status of journalism. From the 1830s the concentration of the group of publishers, editors and artists associated with the burgeoning of pictorial journalism is clearly visible through the interrelatedness of many of the illustrated titles, with F.W.N Bayley, the first editor of the ILN the former editor of the intermittently illustrated National Standard (1833ff), and the proprietor of the Weekly Chronicle (1836ff), Frederick Marriott, was a co-planner with Herbert Ingram of the ILN. Ingram and Mark Lemon were both associated with Punch and the ILN; George Stiff with the ILN, the Illustrated Weekly Times, and the London Journal; and Vizetelly with ILN and its rivals the Pictorial Times and the Illustrated Times. W.J. Linton, the chief engraver at ILN (in 1847–48) turns up as the Art and Literary Editor of Pen and Pencil, a short-lived ‘Illustrated Family Paper’ in 1855. The founder of the highly successful Graphic, W.L. Thomas, whose brother had been a member of the ILN staff, poached many of ILN’s literary staff for his new title which, though a 1d dearer, nevertheless flourished on the basis of its superior quality. Mason Jackson, author of The Pictorial Press (1885), was head of the Art Dept at ILN at its inception. Ingram and his successors at the ILN eventually bought up many of the new imitator/rivals including the Illustrated Times, the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, and the Penny Illustrated Paper. However, highly successful family papers such as the Family Herald (1842ff) founded by George Biggs and edited by J.E. Smith initially, and Cassell’s Illustrated Family Paper (1853 ff), both initially 1d and in a different market niche than the ILN, thrived in parallel to the ILN and the Graphic, the news-rich seam of Victorian pictorial journalism. Other cheap illustrated papers, equivalent to tabloids and tied to news, such as the Police Gazettes also co-existed with the ILN and Graphic which were at the upper reaches of the illustrated serial market. Clement Shorter’s piece, in 1899, wearily acknowledges the triumph of photography – ‘Will the public get tired of photographs? I think not – while they are able to convey with such intense reality many of the incidents of the hour’ (Shorter, CR [April 1899] 492). He notes the demise of wood engraving (‘all but dead’ [491]), noting that the first half-tone process blocks had been used 15 years earlier, in 1883 and 1884 in the ILN and the Graphic respectively. However, Shorter, a working journalist at the time, born in 1857 and raised during the height of the wood-engraving industry in the 1860s and 1870s, subbed for the Penny Illustrated Paper as a young man; from 1891 he edited the ILN and the English Illustrated Magazine for Ingram’s son William, and in 1893 Ingram and Shorter found the weekly Sketch, which Shorter edited until 1900, ending up as editor of the Sphere. In his 1899 piece for the CR, he is still the journalist interested in the future of the industry. With respect to dailies and illustration, he notes that ‘everything waits on


the [new technology of the] printing press’ to accommodate rapid printing of mass circulation illustrated dailies. As for weeklies, he envisages Sunday supplements in the near future, ‘about the size of the ILN, less excellently printed and on inferior paper it is true, and well-nigh entirely composed of photographs’, ‘the journalism of the supplement’ he calls it (493). Meanwhile, by the turn of the century, the technology of the camera and the skills of the snapshot are quickly developing. It took twentieth-century research in nineteenth-century periodicals surprisingly long to focus on illustrations in journals and newspapers, considering the ubiquity of image in that medium. One reason may have been the slow acceptance of print media as a valuable research subject by historians and literary scholars. Another may have been the common twentieth-century assumption that images in newspapers and periodicals are a sign of low culture as reflected, for instance, in the different cultural status of tabloid and broadsheet. Students of Victorian print media may therefore have wanted to secure a place for their subject among regular literary studies first by concentrating on genre, readership, authorship, serialisation, materiality and periodicity. With the advent of the visual turn in literary studies, however, it seemed inevitable that the issue of visuality and Victorian periodicals would be addressed as well. Yet in spite of the publication of a few influential monographs on the visual aspect of periodicals and the conviction of many Victorian scholars that images were central to the Victorian mass media, there is still much work to be done. The editors of this volume have invited some of the most eminent scholars in the field of Victorian periodicals to configure the visual in nineteenth- century print media. The three sections are arranged chronologically to reflect the rise and diversity of the image in the course of the century. ‘Images in Diverse Textual Environments’ begins with Brian Maidment’s focus on Douglas Jerrold’s Illuminated Magazine (1843–45), whose role in the history of the press was significant both on account of its innovative use of wood engraving and its propagation of reformist political beliefs. The journal likewise functioned as the site of apprenticeships for a trio of the most successful wood engravers. If Landells, John Leech and Linton at first represented different traditions within wood engraving, in the Illuminated Magazine (IllumM) they combined their different training and skills, thus preparing the ground for the more sophisticated illustrations one associates with the later pictorial papers. The IllumM emerges as a crucial player in the transformation of the cultural market place in the 1840s in its attempts to reach and influence a larger readership through illustration, by trying to transform the model of the Gentleman’s Magazine to suit a mass audience. Sarah Dewis looks at a more scientific environment for wood engravings in an adjacent and just overlapping period. She shows how J C Loudon, through a deft combination of text and image in the Gardener’s Magazine


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(1825–44), turned a specialist title somewhere between a gentleman’s and a trade magazine into a vehicle of scientific knowledge, making it ‘the first periodical in Britain to bring together scientific discoveries, technological improvements and horticulture’. Driven by ideas of the Scottish enlightenment, Loudon was an idealist Victorian editor who wanted to impart knowledge to artisanal and middle-class readers of magazines: Dewis argues that Loudon risked alienating gentleman amateur gardeners by showing his appreciation for the skilled gardeners whom they employed. David Latané turns to yet other forms of ‘illustration’ – discursive and visual portraiture – in a mainstream monthly of the same period. He both treats and deploys portraiture in his investigation of a famous feud of the 1830s in Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country. Painting individual discursive portraits of William Maginn, editor of Fraser’s, and Alaric Watts, poet and journalist, through their vituperative use of portraits, Latané follows the duel between these two Victorian figures, with Maginn as the prince of invisibility and anonymity and Watts as the ‘visual creature of visual culture’. The editor won by exploiting visual culture in a dialogue of text and image in his ‘Gallery of Illustrious Literary Characters’ (Fraser’s, June 1835), which exposed Watts for what he was: a literary entrepreneur but a poetic humbug. Celebrity portraiture of the rich, powerful or famous which adorned the pages of many journals from the 1830s through the 1890s, catered to a voyeuristic streak in the readership. Steel engraved portraits that appeared decades earlier, however, in the Chartist Northern Star were used, Malcolm Chase avers, in an ideological struggle for respectability and political mainstreaming, while they also proved a successful attempt at creating a kind of corporate identity. However, if the marketing ploy of issuing freestanding illustrations to regular subscribers led to this paper’s enormous popularity, with more than 50,000 copies sold per issue in 1839, their success resulted paradoxically in placing the paper under great strain, in terms of production. In ‘Mid-Century Graphics’, visual aspects of Dickens’s publications are predictably prominent. The 1850s and 1860s were the heyday of wood engraving, with Dickens’s fiction and journalism assuming a pivotal place in its development. Two pieces in this book (chapters 5 and 7) study visual aspects of Dickens’s weekly periodicals in relationship to fiction. Beryl Gray’s ‘Man and Dog’ treats the relationship between engravings and textual imagery in The Old Curiosity Shop, which initially appeared in Master Humphrey’s Clock. Characterising Quilp and the master of dogs Jerry, as ‘visual correlative[s] for the more energized or bizarre emanations of [Dickens’s] fancy’ (37), Gray claims that Hablot K. Browne’s clever visualisation of Quilp as the doglike creature pictured and imagined by Dickens turns this collaboration between author and illustrator into a well rehearsed pas-de-deux.


Lorna Huett’s exploration of the get-up and graphics as well as the contents of Household Words, demonstrates how Dickens’s weekly functioned in the mid-nineteenth-century periodical market. Addressing Wilkie Collins’s and Dickens’s anxiety about mass audiences in a close analysis of ‘The Unknown Public’ (1858), she argues that the format, price, advertising and contents of Household Words were designed to compete with downmarket, popular weeklies for a niche audience. She concludes that Dickens’s journal is true to the ideology of his fiction: in Household Words he presented the lower and respectable middle-class with value for money, thus securing a place ‘in the vanguard of the explosion of inexpensive, novel-carrying papers which was to occur in succeeding decades’. In an analysis of discursive portraits that chimes with pieces on portraits by David Latané and Ed Cohen across the period, Joanne Shattock juxtaposes discursive personae in Elizabeth Gaskell’s letters, magazine fiction, and reviews. Scrutinizing the Self portrayed by Gaskell in stories she contributed to periodicals, in comparison with the ‘I’ projected in her letters, Shattock avers that the Self in the letters was as much of a construction as the fictional heroines depicted in her fiction. Similarly, the persona of Gaskell’s periodical reviews change, depending on the subject treated and the readership addressed. If they are, in general, female voices, the register Gaskell deploys varies according to the journal: her reviews in Household Words are clearly less dependent on implied foreknowledge than those in the Athenaeum or Reader. With Frank Murray’s chapter on the British Workman, a visually handsome temperance paper edited by T.B. Smithies, we directly tackle one of the central issues of nineteenth-century print culture that was habitually coupled with graphic journalism: the emergence of a new, semi-literate and aspiring readership which, economically as well as ideologically, motivated groups were eager to influence. Launched in 1855 and dedicated to ‘the supply of healthy material’, the British Workman soon became, with the receipt of sporadic grants, the first mass publication of its genre distributed free by the London City Mission, an alliance that boosted ordinary subscriptions. Adjustments of the size and quality of its wood engravings turned this muted message of temperance into a much coveted commodity and gift. The paper henceforth set the standard and influenced the appearance of other religious and temperance papers. Laurie Garrison’s ‘Seductive Visual Studies’, reads The Woman in White in terms of its proclivity for ‘visual records’ in the form of ‘overwritten passages’ that form scientific evidence in this detective novel, and All the Year Round as the context of its serialisation. Exploring how surrounding articles informed Collins’s novel, Garrison wants to prove that through and in the serialization of the story, Collins critiqued Dickens’s editing practices: there is a constant dialogue between the narrative and other contents of All the Year Round, especially with respect to the nature of vision.


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Chris Kent’s chapter is, like that on the Gardener’s Magazine, dedicated to a trade paper, but his is a later example, with shared as well as separate characteristics and problems. His identification of artisan subscribers to Tailor and Cutter (1866ff) is similar to the readership of professional gardeners identified by Dewis, and to the tension between themselves and the amateurs, but Kent finds additional issues of gender and visual culture. Fashion, Kent reminds us, is normally gendered as feminine in the nineteenth century. An important task of a trade journal like Tailor and Cutter therefore was to reassure its artisan and male tailor- readers of their powerful position visà-vis their customers. Part Three focuses on facets of ‘The 1890s’, with its new journalism, celebrity culture and new technologies. James Mussell compares photographic reproduction of scientific phenomena in three, generically dissimilar, 6d monthlies, Science-Gossip, Knowledge and the Strand Magazine. Seldom used to illustrate fiction, photographs accompanying articles and interviews were deployed as a technological novelty at the time to enhance the value of individual titles. Mussell identifies the new and varying spatial and temporal possibilities that the introduction of photographs offered in their different settings, and the ways in which these allowed for a kind of ‘visual tourism’. Linda Hughes examines a different press topic – fine art criticism – in which similar tensions among editorial matter, cheap production, and a popular audience arise. In a study of the uneasy relationship between aestheticism and fin de siècle commodity culture, she treats the art reviews of Rosamund Marriott Watson for the Art Weekly and the daily Morning Leader, paying particular attention to the juxtaposition of aesthetic principles and commercialism, in the form, for instance, of adverts. Hughes highlights the oxymoron that these cheap magazines hoped to educate their public, teaching them how to read fine art. In the penultimate chapter in ‘The 1890s’ Anne Humpherys turns to the higher incidence in the 1890s of women in the workforce involved in the production of periodicals. How did they leave their mark on artwork and letterpress? Humpherys notes the signs of the advent of women writers and illustrators in the pages of Jerome K. Jerome’s Idler (1892–98), explaining the ways in which this affected its appearance. She observes that although women aspired to keep a low profile in the magazine – with female illustrators refusing to distinguish their drawings from those of male colleagues, and the denial of ‘Advanced women’ interviewees that they were advanced – a result of these women joining the team was that the Idler ceased to be ‘an exclusive male club’, since the introduction of the women entailed ‘a change of tone’, and a gender change in the masthead. The last chapter of this book deals with the embattled image of Englishness that was reflected in the pages of a number of periodicals in 1892, following the death of Tennyson, the Poet Laureate. Edward Cohen


discusses specifically a series of biographical articles published in the Daily Chronicle on the merits of seven candidates for the laureateship. He analyses each portrait of Englishness, and the ways in which these texts imbricate, define, and value images of nationhood. At the very beginning of her monograph The Victorian and the Visual Imagination, Kate Flint claims that the ‘Victorians were fascinated with the act of seeing, with the question of the reliability – or otherwise – of the human eye, and with the problems of interpreting what they saw’. (Flint 1) Yet seeing and interpreting what they saw did not make the Victorians any different from previous generations. What changed for them, as Flint too acknowledges, was the sheer number of images with which they were being bombarded. The advances in technology as a result of which images were being produced and reproduced more rapidly, more sophisticatedly and in hitherto unequalled numbers turned image, in the course of the century, into an invaluable accessory to text, and the mark of a whole new genre, the pictorial paper. Text and image, text alongside image, text as image – these are the combinations one is confronted with when one studies nineteenth-century print media and the rise of consumer culture. The Victorians explored and exploited all possible juxtapositions of text and image, and were very much aware of the potential power of images in their lives and their media. For them, as for us now, illustrations in all sorts of forms lured potential consumers into buying and reading illustrated periodical texts.

Notes 1. Other titles include the National Standard, Cleave’s Police Gazette and Cleave’s London Satirist. 2. Henry Cole’s informative piece on ‘Modern Wood Engraving’ appeared in LWR in August 1838. 3. Notably the less reputable Cleave’s Weekly Police Gazette (1834–36) is omitted in this connection. 4. Paul Goldman’s Victorian Illustration (1996, 2004) which encompasses the period includes magazine illustration among other types, as does Brian Maidment’s Reading Popular Prints, 1790–1870 (2001). While Martina Lauster’s new study of verbal and visual sketches focuses on a period of 20 years (1830–50), it has the rare merit of treating the breadth of journalism in continental Europe alongside that of Britain. 5. See The Victorian Illustrated Book, ed. Richard Maxwell, Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 2002 and Literature and the Visual Media, ed. David Seed. Cambridge: Brewer 2005. 6. Cole writes: Engraving is an offshoot of Christianity. It comes from that great change in the manners of men by which, for the first time in the history of the world ... all the thoughtful men in Europe were made solitary students instead of social inquirers, readers in silent cells instead of debaters in groves and gardens. The


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poet and philosopher of old, in Greece and Rome, addressed popular audiences, and not as now, readers in privacy ... the rich light of the stained glass from his gothic window falling on his large oak-bound volume, and the spread pages of bright black letters embellished all round with radiantly-coloured figures. The progress of books is also the progress of engraving which embellishes them. (LWR [1838] p. 272).


Part I 1800–1840s: Images in Diverse Textual Environments


1 The Illuminated Magazine and the Triumph of Wood Engraving Brian Maidment

I The Illuminated Magazine was one among the many illustrated 1s monthly magazines which characterised the nascent entrepreneurship and rapid development of the periodical idea in the 1830s and 1840s. It was short lived, running to three volumes between 1843 and 1844 under its first editor, the playwright, journalist and progressive thinker Douglas Jerrold, before slipping into oblivion after two further, increasingly eccentric volumes under the guidance of the engraver, poet and political activist W J Linton, who wound up the project after printing his doggerel epic ‘The Poorhouse Fugitives’ in the fifth and final volume in 1845. Each 64-page monthly issue used the squarish, double column page popularised by Punch, a conspicuously versatile shape for a publication containing a wide variety of illustrations.1 And illustrations were, as its title suggests, central to the Illuminated Magazine. The magazine continued to use the single page etchings and engravings which characterised the publication of fiction in the 1830s and 1840s, but also incorporated into the text a large number of wood-engraved images which might be called ‘vignettes’ were it not for the energy and boldness with which they commandeer space within the double column page, often shaping themselves into complex geometric forms very different to the soft-edged rounded shapes usually associated with end-grain wood-engraved vignettes. Nor can these illustrations properly be called ‘small’, as many of them bully the circumambient text into secondary importance. These wood-engraved images were used variously as column headings, as capital letters, as borders or as endpieces much in the style of eighteenth-century steel or copper engraved flourishes. The magazine’s title, the Illuminated Magazine, while partly a reference to the intensity of illustration employed, nonetheless had wider resonances. ‘Illumination’ was of course a reference to medieval manuscripts which represented a form of craft or artisanal production increasingly threatened by early Victorian technical innovation, not least in the field of magazine 17

18 The Triumph of Wood Engraving

and book production. Unlike the Penny Magazine, which famously incorporated a triumphant narrative of its own technologically advanced production methods into its text, the Illuminated Magazine appeared under a title which insisted on its continuity with honest or even Godly craftsmanship, an insistence made even more emphatic by its use of one of the first mass produced colour title pages. But even here, the exploitation of technological innovation was offset against a retrospective insistence on the hand made – the multi-colour title page was built up using a sequence of three different coloured wood-engraved blocks which had to be superimposed on each other to form the resplendent image, a considerable feat of artisanal skill. ‘Illuminated’ in this context also had another meaning, making reference to the idea of throwing (metaphorical) light on issues, problems, or events. Given that both Jerrold and Linton had progressive and reformist political beliefs, and were especially interested in the development of print culture as a mode of socio-political encouragement to the aspiring working classes, the chosen title of the Illuminated Magazine implicitly spoke of an advanced political agenda – nothing less than the political and cultural ‘illumination’ of the nation. The contents of the Illuminated Magazine, when briefly summarised, seem to conform to the expected template for such monthlies, comprising a mixture of fanciful or whimsical sketches, historical anecdotes and legends, travel pieces, social commentary and investigation, poems and stories and, to a limited extent, reviews. But, as we shall see, the Illuminated Magazine often did manage to redefine this mixture as something more progressive in its central endeavour to translate the ambitions of the genteel monthly into something more usefully and progressively ‘popular’. In the words of the editorial Preface to the first volume of the journal, ‘It has been the wish of the Proprietors of this work, to speak to the MASSES of the people; and whilst sympathizing with their deeper and sterner wants, to offer to them those graces of art and literature which have too long been held the exclusive right of those of happier fortunes.’2 It is the nature of this project to democratise those traditionally genteel literary and artistic ‘graces’ and combine them with a more socio-political interest in ‘deeper and sterner wants’ that forms the substance of this essay.

II Such scholarly attention as the Illuminated Magazine has enjoyed is largely the result of biographical interest in the varied and complicated careers of its multi-talented editors, Douglas Jerrold and William James Linton, and of a recognition of the quality of its stable of artists which included John Leech, Kenny Meadows and H.G. Hine under the direction of the entrepreneur and engraver Ebenezer Landells and Linton himself.3 Put unflatteringly, a lot of interesting and significant literary and artistic figures assembled themselves

Brian Maidment

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temporarily round the Illuminated Magazine, which came to represent a brief interlude in extended and prominent careers expressed elsewhere. As Michael Slater has so carefully shown in his recent biography of Jerrold, the magazine was set up by Herbert Ingram,4 the publisher of the phenomenally successful Illustrated London News, partly to win back several of his key writers and artists who had been increasingly contributing to The Pictorial Times, the upstart rival to the Illustrated London News.5 These included Mark Lemon, the editor of Punch, whose duties did not allow him to take on another editorial role, and the group of artists – Kenny Meadows, H.G. Hine, Ebenezer Landells and John Leech – who became the mainstay of the Illuminated Magazine. Slater’s account of the magazine’s genesis suggests it was built by a clique out of a combination of rivalries, grudges and opportunism. Its progressive politics may have proceeded from a response to the conservatism of the Pictorial Times under its owners, the printer Edward Spottiswoode and Henry Vizetelly, the wood engraver who had been central to the launch of Ingram’s Illustrated London News in 1842 but who had subsequently fallen out with Ingram. Landells, too, one of Punch’s original owners but subsequently rather acrimoniously bought out by Bradbury and Evans, had reasons to look for a new and prestigious project.6 Thus, while the Illuminated Magazine could boast of an experienced, able and well established staff already hugely experienced in the increasingly complex patterns of periodical literature, its launch was not underpinned by any particular purpose or vision beyond a dislike of the conservatism of the Pictorial Times and a wish on its owners’ part to pull a group of errant staff back into their employ. While the miscellaneous nature of the journal, implicit in the contingent nature of its founding, pleased some reviewers, and, as Slater notes, ‘Jerrold’s name was a powerful talisman’,7 on the whole the Illuminated Magazine seems to have been a project that sagged right from the start. Certainly, by the time Linton took over as editor in 1844, there was some substance in Smith’s comments that it was an ‘ailing’ or even a ‘dying’ magazine,8 although Smith, as I’ll argue later, is unduly influenced by a sense that the Illuminated Magazine betrayed Linton’s radical political sympathies. The comparative failure of the Illuminated Magazine might be shrugged off by circumstantial evidence, particularly the preoccupation of its founding editor with other projects and the considerable competition from betterresourced magazines. But its failures were also exemplary ones born out of the tensions and complexities of periodical publishing in the 1840s, and it is worth spending some time considering them. If the largely hostile comments of both its contemporaries and the views of recent critics like Smith, Slater and Lovett are assembled, the perceived failings of the Illuminated Magazine might be summarised in the following ways. First of all, it failed to be Punch – the Punch, that is, of the first few volumes from the early 1840s with their bohemian/radical politics, their visual experimentation, their preoccupation with Regency caricature tropes,


especially the grotesque human body, and their roots in the collective bonhomie of a male coterie. Smith comments witheringly that the Illuminated Magazine ‘was modelled on Punch, but pretended to superior literary and artistic standards and less radical politics’.9 In short, his judgement is that the journal was just not good enough in comparison with its immediate rivals. Slater notes, in relation to Jerrold’s serial publication ‘The Chronicles of Clovernook’, that the modern reader will find it full of ‘relentless sexism, which is very much in the established Punch tradition’10, the implication being that, as a pale shadow of Punch, Jerrold had even copied the weaknesses of his model. Linked to a general belief that the Illuminated Magazine was feebly derivative was a widespread view that it was solely the product of a masculine clique brought together not just by Punch but also by working together on the Illustrated London News and the Pictorial Times. Slater quotes contemporary reviews that inveighed against a magazine ‘evidently got up by a clique’11 and notes that several contemporaries concentrated their response on what was perceived as the narrow range of contributors. Given the origins of the Illuminated Magazine such criticism was inevitable, and might be made of the illustrators as well as the writers. Jerrold had already collaborated with Kenny Meadows on the separate volume publication of Punch’s Letters to His Son12, and Linton and Meadows had worked together for many years on various projects, including Meadows’s 1840 Portraits of the English which Linton had engraved. H.G. Hine, despite his origins as a landscape painter, had been brought in to work for Punch by Landells, a role that had advertised his fluidity and ease as a comic artist.13 Indeed, given the centrality of Landells in the development of the London wood engraving trade and the interconnections created by many of the major illustrated projects of the early 1840s, it would have been extraordinary if the artists employed by Landells and then Linton to work for the Illuminated Magazine hadn’t been a clique. Yet, as I want to suggest later, to see this group of artists and writers as homogenous and narrowly focussed is far from fair – as Slater notes, the introduction of Wilkie Collins and Richard Hengist Horne as contributors to the Illuminated was an important change of focus despite the continuing presence of such long time cronies as Mark Lemon and Laman Blanchard.14 In many ways more surprising than the accusation of cliqueyness was a persistent sense that the Illuminated Magazine fell short of its ambitions to be visually spectacular and innovative. Jerrold himself put the blame largely on the shortcomings of his printers – ‘No enthusiastic lamplighter was ever more deceived by cotton-wicks and train-oil, than I by the printer. However, I hope in another month we shall be able to burn gas’.15 Slater adds that ‘the ... colour printing never did amount to much’, and it is true that it was, under Jerrold’s editorship, confined to a few rather smudgy if spectacular title pages.16 Jerrold, dependent on the contribution of Landells as his art editor, clearly considered illustration to be more of a necessary element in

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selling his magazine than a major opportunity for innovation and experimentation – ‘I share your horror of all illustrations’ he commented to Laman Blanchard in 1843.17 Yet I believe that it is the illustration of the Illuminated Magazine that forms its greatest claim on our attention largely because the journal acted as a focus, perhaps even a synthesis, of available graphic resources and brought together in one place the remarkably varied potential of the wood engraving as an illustrative medium. The most substantial criticisms to be made of the Illuminated Magazine, however, concern its fascination with whimsy and its political caution. Whimsy reveals itself in both the texts and the illustrations to the journal, and it is damaging to the more serious elements elsewhere. The main culprit was Jerrold’s own serial ‘Chronicles of Clovernook’, described accurately and perhaps even sympathetically, by Slater as a ‘sentimental-Radical vision of a hierarchical but wholly benevolent society, a glorified mirror image of contemporary England’ but dismissed by a contemporary as ‘fancy run riot like honeysuckle’.18 Yet elsewhere there is plenty of sentimental reminiscence and drollery along the lines of R B Peake’s ‘Dogs’ Tales’. In one of these (Vol. 1, October 1843, 335–59) a startlingly literary dog tells the sad story of his master, a writer of comic plays who ‘wrote himself blind’ and ended his life a pauper, thus causing his dog to be banished to the streets. Compilations of sentimental anecdotes of this kind were a stock in trade of the magazine, and sat oddly alongside hard-edged reports like the one on the south Staffordshire colliers that appears in the same monthly issue. There was plenty of visual fantasy to set alongside the verbal – again in the same issue the text of a poem called ‘A Vision in Pan’s Dell’ is intertwined by a sinuous forest scene by Kenny Meadows. The sentimentality and whimsy of the Illuminated Magazine may well have been another aspect of Jerrold’s need to please, a means of cajoling his readers through the tougher reportage and politics elsewhere in the journal, but it creates not just dissonance within the text, but also a widespread sense of miscellaneity and lack of editorial direction. The concessionary politics of the Illuminated Magazine come as a disappointment not just to those who would have expected a more radical position from an ex-firebrand like Linton but even to those who quickly became disillusioned with Punch’s concurrent drawing back from strongly progressive positions. F B Smith, in his biography of Linton, views his shift from overt Chartist activism on through the cautious progressivism of his own short-lived journal aimed at artisans – The National (1839) – to the cautious meliorism and muted social anger of the Illuminated Magazine with something approaching contempt. Although Smith talks of Linton’s ‘individualistic, undiscriminating editorial courage’ in contrast to Jerrold’s ‘mildly radical’ editorial policy and gives due acknowledgement to the bolder of his editorial decisions, he also talks of a ‘softening’ of Linton’s views for a ‘different, middle-class family audience’ characterised by Linton’s

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The Triumph of Wood Engraving

acceptance, as a considerable employer, of a market economy and a refusal to tackle controversial domestic issues.19 But Smith’s biography is postulated on a narrative of Linton’s career that depends on ideas of retirement and retreat, and at least one more recent commentator has argued that Linton took a more consistent and sustained political position throughout his working career built out of a dialogue between public engagement and the necessity to maintain some degree of aesthetic detachment.20 The main focus of this essay is not primarily ideological, but it is nonetheless important to acknowledge here that under both Jerrold and Linton, the address and content of the Illuminated Magazine was largely structured by a perception of the interests and needs of a wide range of potential readers rather than by any reformist or advanced political agenda. Given the journal’s declared intention to meet the needs of ‘THE MASSES’ this conciliatory tone is something of a disappointment, but it is important to remember that Jerrold’s original Preface stressed the cultural progressivism of the journal at least as strongly as he underlined its political stance. The democratic elements of the magazine are more to be found in its opening up of the interests, values and aesthetic pleasures of the traditionally genteel to the gaze of a wider reading public than in the adoption of any particular political position.

III The conventional scholarly narrative about the Illuminated Magazine, then, positions it as a predictable if exemplary failure, the victim of its origins in the turf wars of competing entrepreneurs at a moment of expansion and volatility in the magazine market, of its editor’s wish to please everyone, and its failure to meet the expectations of its readers who had plenty of alternatives to look to. But there are other ways to read the history of this journal which focus on its central place in one of the key projects of early Victorian journalism, that of translating the interests, aesthetic concerns and intellectual sophistication of the genteel into the idioms and discourses of the democratic. In its negotiation between the progressive and the bourgeois, the Illuminated Magazine epitomises that strand of periodical literature which had sought to re-invent the Gentleman’s Magazine for a mass reading public in the early Victorian period without compromising intellectual or aesthetic aspirations. Central to this re-invention of the genteel periodical was the wood engraving, brilliantly appropriated as both a decorative and informative medium by the Mirror of Literature in the 1820s from its vernacular roots in broadsides, tracts and songbooks on the one hand and from its aesthetic ambitions under Bewick’s tutelage on the other. Closely associated with the ideological battles over the ‘march of intellect’ and the knowledge wars of the 1830s, wood engraving had established itself in the 1840s as a London trade which formed the launch pad for Punch and the Illustrated London News

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among many other projects. It was no accident that so many of the artists who worked for the Illuminated Magazine, most notably Landells and Linton, had worked for the Mirror of Literature early in their careers, and had thus been central to the establishment of wood engraving as a new medium for periodical illustration. Such a recognition of the origins of the wood engraving in a variety of artistic traditions and a willingness to exploit these traditions as a mechanism for the democratisation of complex ideas to my mind gives the Illuminated Magazine a particular claim on our attention. The immediate visual impact of the Illuminated Magazine is built out of the variety, profusion and scale of its illustrations. Certainly, when compared to fiction led contemporary monthlies like Ainsworth’s Magazine or Bentley’s Miscellany which subsisted on a diet of single page etchings or engravings, the Illuminated Magazine created an extremely highly elaborated visual statement. The modal diversity of its images has already been noted. The three colour wood-engraved emblematic title page, despite Slater’s rather sniffy remark, remains a pioneering attempt to put new printing technology, especially technology that translated the effects of expensive hand craft production, into mass market products (Fig. 1.1). Jerrold and Landells also retained the established tradition of large single page engravings familiar from serialised fiction and the fiction led journals, initially using a full page of wood-engraved images, but soon shifting to spectacular coloured engravings by Leech, like the fanciful ‘Tom Houlaghan’s Guardian Sprite’ in March 1844 (Vol. 2, 241) (Fig. 1.2). Here the large double columned Punch derived page gives these images a scale and impact missing from the smaller single column fiction monthlies. Many of these plates must have been cut out and displayed separately as they form powerful visual images quite apart from their circumambient text. Beyond these spectacular graphic elements which depended on a separation out of text and image, the text pages of the Illuminated Magazine were strewn with a variety of wood-engraved images. Some of these were clearly attempts to translate the typographical and decorative traditions of eighteenth-century printing to the new mass market. The monthly contents page, for example, featured at its top a cherub holding up an ‘illuminating’ candle from a nest among assorted decorative shrubbery, and a decorative basket of flowers and leaves below (Fig. 1.3) The insistence here on a tradition of emblematic visual content – the faint but certain rays of the magazine’s ‘illuminative’ purpose and its profusion of decorative tendrils – was taken up broadly elsewhere in the magazine, thus mediating between the decorative and the educative functions of the assembled images. In December 1843, for instance, between a rambling piece on ‘England Sixty Years go’ and a poem called ‘Reverie’, appeared a vignette tailpiece of a quill pen lying through a wreath of olive branches which served no obvious illustrative function but which acted as an independent prompt to thoughtfulness as well as a decorative space filler (Vol. 2, December 1843, 81).


Figure 1.1 Three coloured wood engraved title page to the Illuminated Magazine vol. 1, 1843.

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Figure 1.2 John Leech. Engraved illustration to ‘Tom Houlaghan’s Guardian Sprite’, the Illuminated Magazine vol. II, March 1844, 241.


Figure 1.3 Ebenezer Landells. Wood engraved title page to a monthly issue of the Illuminated Magazine vol. II, December 1843, 55.

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But most of the illustrations dropped into the text were wood-engraved illustrative vignettes of various shapes and sizes. Put simply, the Illuminated Magazine constructed a page that recognised early and fully the potential of the dialogue between word and image which resulted from the ability of wood-engraved images to be incorporated into circumambient letterpress. Magazines from the previous decade from entirely various traditions and with entirely differing readerships, such as, say, the Penny Novelist, the Mechanic’s Magazine, or even the Mirror of Literature itself had incorporated wood-engraved vignettes within their double columned page, thus exploiting the convenience of locating image alongside or immediately above its related letterpress. But few magazines, not even pioneers of wood-engraved illustration like the Penny Magazine or the Illustrated London News, had tried to structure entire pages round the protean shapes that wood engraving could accommodate and exploit.21 In this respect the Illuminated Magazine looked forward to the complex pages that could be built out of photoreprographic techniques, especially in Linton’s final volume in which he and Thomas Sibson developed complex patterns of text and image to illustrate Linton’s doggerel epic ‘The Poorhouse Fugitives’. It is, of course, possible to argue that such a range and diversity of visual content in the Illuminated Magazine was essentially a sign of confusion and conservatism, part of Jerrold’s misjudged attempt to give as many people as possible as many different satisfactions as could be crammed into a single periodical. Indiscriminate eclecticism, however virtuously conceived, is not the same thing as the purposive democratisation of visual information, and there are moments when the Illuminated Magazine does look overburdened with images drawn from competing traditions that only serve to illustrate contradictory discourses. But I think the progressive elements outweigh the evident anxieties. Of these progressive elements, the title page, smudged and unsophisticated as it may have been in its red, blue and golden splendour, has already been discussed as an early venture into colour printing technology. The use of an art editor, too, was an innovation that looked forward to the work of the Dalziel brothers on Good Words, and to other later Victorian journals like Once A Week which became renowned and collected for their art work. Jerrold was clear enough about the importance of Landells’s contribution to sanction a prominent notice on each monthly title page of the Illuminated Magazine to the effect that ‘the whole of the Engravings [were] under the superintendence of Ebenezer Landells’. But the truly progressive element in the illustration of the Illuminated Magazine came from the range and quality of its text based wood engravings. It is all too easy to assume that wood engravings are alike, and derive from a single tradition which allows for little difference in technique, construction or allusion to aesthetic predecessors. The narrative history of end-grain wood engraving as a dominant mode of early nineteenth century image making derives so particularly from the work of Thomas Bewick and from

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the diaspora formed by his pupils and apprentices as they made their way to London to work for the new illustrated journals that it becomes hard to acknowledge the range and variety of the medium in the first half of the nineteenth century. Of the illustrators who worked for the Illuminated Magazine, Landells had been taught by Bewick and by Bewick’s apprentice Nicholson22, and John Leech had worked for John Orrin Smith, who had been taught by Harvey, another Bewick pupil. Linton, on the other hand, represented the tradition of London-based black line wood engraving handed on by Thurston and Branston, who had been his immediate teacher. Thomas Sibson was a protégé of Linton. So the magazine’s illustrators derived their skills and understanding of tradition from the apprenticeship system that had led to the rapid and successful evolution of the medium. They form a direct and immediate line of descent from its first generation of masters. Essentially linear, despite the tonal complexities wrought by Bewick and his colleagues, wood engraving became so quickly normalised in the Penny Magazine, the Saturday Magazine, the Illustrated London News and Punch (to say nothing of penny fiction) that it is hard to remember the self-transformation and conceptual shifts that artist/engravers like Landells or Linton had to undergo before they worked at ease in the new medium. Even a talented draughtsman like Robert Buss had to learn entirely new technical processes to undertake work for Dickens on Pickwick Papers only to be more or less immediately sacked because the idiom of his work looked too firmly back to the grotesqueries of Regency caricature. Interestingly, Engen says that Buss ‘began his career as a draughtsman on wood for Charles Knight’s publications’ in the early 1840s, but long before this he had worked as an etcher within a caricature tradition.23 Although the illustrators who worked on Jerrold’s magazine were established figures in the London wood engraving world it is important not to forget the variety of influences and traditions that underlay their early professional careers and still influenced the images that they made in the early 1840s. Accordingly, the illustrations to the Illuminated Magazine derive from a variety of different potentialities available within the traditions of wood engraving. As already suggested, some of the images, especially decorative tailpieces and endpieces, are direct translations of eighteenth-century copper engraved motifs into the new medium of wood engraving. Others used the nervy lines and graphic tropes of eighteenth-century caricature, a tradition mediated into early Victorian consciousness through the illustrated songbooks, comic annuals and play texts which formed the dominant sites where, in the 1830s, the traditionally vernacular mode of wood engraving began to engage with the sophisticated graphic idioms of caricature. It is precisely this transformation, or perhaps translation, of the sophisticated genteel discourses of single plate engraved caricature into a variety of literary genres and graphic modes, many of them dependent on the serial idea, aimed at a new range of consumers that sustained the

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development of wood engraving as a comic medium. It is in texts like, to take an obvious example, the three volumes of The Universal Songster (1825– 1828), illustrated entirely by wood-engraved vignettes drawn by the Cruikshank brothers, dropped into the text (apart from the large multipanelled title pages), the vivacity and linear energy of caricature is applied to a range of songs drawn from the saloons, concert rooms, theatres and oral occasions of the circumambient vernacular culture. The Illuminated Magazine, like the emergent Punch, was quick to acknowledge the importance of this new version of the caricature tradition. In volume 1, for example, a whimsical piece by Gilbert A’Beckett about his schoolboy fantasies of Napoleon, is illustrated by three of Leech’s vignettes all of which redraw and domesticate earlier caricature versions of the demonic Napoleon in the new wood-engraved comic idiom. The first of these, ‘Miss Frounce and the Boy’ (I, 23, May 1843) uses the vignette medium in a particularly self-conscious way with the shape of the end-grain wood block clearly circumscribing the borders of the image and the free, almost casual, use of the graphic characteristics of the rapidly drawn wood-engraved line. The aim is to create an image that is both sophisticated and simple at the same time. While suggesting the rapidity of its own making and using the small scale of the wood-engraved vignette, nonetheless the image refers back to the complex iconography and structure of large-scale eighteenth-century caricature especially in the comically brooding Napoleon with his devil’s tail neatly following the shape of the left side of the image. The familiarity that early volumes of Punch and the subsequent work of the Victorian wood-engraved comic illustrators like Leech, Browne and Tenniel have given to images of this kind rather conceals the significance of the entry of the comic or caricature wood-engraved vignette (invariably laid into the surrounding text) into the illustrational mainstream in the early 1840s. It is equally easy to assume that such well established early Victorian illustrators as Kenny Meadows had worked exclusively in the new modes and genres of wood engraving of the 1830s and 1840s. Engen, for example, following the traditional view of Meadows handed on by Everett and Houfe, characterises Kenny Meadows, one of Jerrold’s key contributors, as ‘one of the first illustrators whose work recommended wood engraving to publishers ... and the list of Meadows’ illustrations grew to encompass most of the mid-century wood-engraved publications.’24 But Meadows had collaborated with the Cruikshank brothers in the early 1830s on metal engraved periodical caricature illustrations, and had later contributed on wood to Bell’s Life in London, an early and important example of a comic periodical making use of a profusion of wood-engraved comic vignettes. So, for all his close identification in both public affection and scholarly memory with the new wood engraving of the 1840s, Meadows had his roots back in the caricature traditions of the previous decades, and had made the transition to wood engraving after establishing himself in a variety of different modes.


Similarly, Thomas Sibson, who contributed extensively to the last volume of the Illuminated Magazine as a protégé of Linton, had begun his career with etched extra illustrations to Pickwick Papers and Master Humphrey’s Clock which, in their grotesquerie and thin lined nervous energy, looked firmly back to previous generations of comic illustration and certainly offer a different version of Dickens than Hablot Browne’s less confrontational, more sentimental images. Again in Sibson’s case the shift from metal engraving and etching to wood engraving was accompanied with an acknowledgement that the new dominance of wood engraving inevitably limited opportunities for the political boldness and sometimes scabrous exaggerations of eighteenth-century caricature. Nonetheless, some elements of that tradition do persist in the 1840s, and they are represented in the Illuminated Magazine alongside newer, more conciliatory illustrative genres and modes. But if one underlying purpose of the wood-engraved illustrations to the Illuminated Magazine was to popularise, render accessible, and preserve the inheritance derived from engraved caricature, the magazine was even more fundamentally concerned with making considerable claims for both the aesthetic and documentary resourcefulness of the medium. Such claims derived their credibility not just from the quality of the images published by Jerrold and Landells but also from the use of artists who had been deeply involved in a series of major projects which had fought hard to give the wood engraving a new, enhanced status as not just a linear medium for diagrammatic explanations or simplified naturalism but as a tonally complex expressive medium on a par with other longer-established graphic modes like mezzotint or stipple engraving. Again Kenny Meadows was a key figure, and his serialised Shakespeare (1839–1843), issued in multi-volume form in 1843, showed both an ambitiousness for the aesthetic possibilities of the wood engraving and a willingness to experiment with the text/image relationship of the printed page that show how widely the potential of the medium was being explored during this period. It is particularly important to note Meadows’s contribution to the development of the medium because, as all his critics have noted, he was more a competent jobbing artist than a naturally gifted comic genius.25 While Everitt notes that the Shakespeare ‘was considered by himself ... as his masterpiece’ he also offers uncharacteristically hostile judgments on its ‘strange conceptions’ and ‘preposterous ideas’ as well as on Meadows’s ability to draw figures.26 Thus Meadows is perhaps more a representative figure, someone responding to the zeitgeist, than an originator or an innovator. Notwithstanding these reluctant evaluations of his artistic achievement, the pages of Meadows’s Shakespeare show the kind of riotous use of the irregularity and protean nature of the wood engraving that characterises the Illuminated Magazine. Each play in the Shakespeare has a separately printed single image frontispiece, but within the text itself there is a startling tension between the formality of the doubleruled border and double columned text and the wide variety of wood

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engravings dropped into text. This tension is particularly powerfully rendered on the title pages, where the cast lists are topped by cursive lettering, accompanied by weirdly shaped vignettes, and footnoted by tiny figures which combine characters with the capital letters of their names. While the artistic effect of these experimental pages is not always well integrated, nonetheless it is entirely possible to see that Landells and Linton have available to them new kinds of printed pages where visual variety and graphic energy clamour for the reader’s attention. More aesthetically successful precedents were also available from other ambitious multi-volume projects in the same period. One of these was an edition of Walter Scott’s works published by Robert Cadell in the early 1840s and clearly intended to be a rival to the great illustrated books of the late eighteenth century. The format again comprised separately printed frontispieces (steel engravings in this instance), highly decorated emblematic title pages and a text strewn with wood-engraved vignettes, headpieces and tailpieces of varying shapes and sizes. The artists assembled for this project, with Landells as their guiding spirit, represented a roll-call not just of the new generation of wood engraver/artists but also of established painters like Turner, Clarkson Stanfield and Gilbert whose work could be translated into the new medium through the artisanal skills of the engravers. All the images – which comprised historical scenes, topographical views, and dramatic incidents as well as emblems – were finished to an extremely high level and suggested the tonal potential and artistic pretensions of the woodengraved medium. Nearly all the Illuminated Magazine artists contributed to this project, many of them as major figures – Hablot Browne, Landells, Meadows and even the youthful Sibson. What is of particular interest in the whole project is the way in which a range of artists who would become almost entirely associated with comic illustration – artists, for example, like Robert Buss who had engraved some early Pickwick plates for Dickens – turned their hand to ambitious naturalistic historical and landscape images. With this broad spectrum of skill and talent to draw on, it is not surprising that Landells and later Linton filled many pages of the Illuminated Magazine with superbly finished and accomplished wood engravings that continued to claim attention for the new found confidence of the medium as something beyond a comic or expository genre. William Henry Prior’s elaborate title illustration to James Smith’s ‘Broad Lea Farm’ serves as an obvious example (Vol. IV, January 1845, 125) (Fig. 1.4), especially as it represents an obvious reworking of an illustrated page from the Cadell Scott extended and elaborated for the larger and more experimental pages of the Illuminated Magazine. Such unabashed borrowings from other work suggest the extent to which the genres and modes of illustration interconnected in the 1840s. Prior, a close associate of Charles Knight in his major publications, a pupil of William


Figure 1.4 W.H. Prior. Wood engraved illustration to ‘Broad Lea Farm’, the Illuminated Magazine vol. IV, January 1845, 125.

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Harvey, and wedded to Harvey’s slightly staid and heavily worked style, here combined a conventional pastoral idyll with an architectural image which recalls the baroque versions of buildings that George Cattermole contributed to Dickens’s Master Humphrey’s Clock. But Prior, clearly taking his cue from Landells’s willingness to experiment with unusual page layouts, bends his image round the text into a fan-shaped illustration, thus pulling the figure at the left and the cattle at the right down into the text and allowing the title to form a rustic arch under the placid duck pond. The composition is an extremely dynamic one despite the serenity of the rural scene which it depicts, with firm tonal contrasts that depend on the strong side light being rendered in large white areas of the page. This image looks forward to the kinds of bucolic fantasies, often with the signature of Miles Birket Foster under them, so frequently to be found in the illustrated anthologies and gift books which proved such a market staple in the later Victorian period, but it is, for all its conventionality, a very impressive and ambitious composition. The technical achievement of the image is publicised by its unusual shape, its remarkably fine detail and its vigorous tonality, all accomplishments that had become the trademarks of the newly ambitious genre of wood engraving, which had striven to rival the steel engraved vignettes that Turner had contributed to Rogers’s Poems and Italy a decade before. It would not be at all difficult to add many other similar images to this discussion, see for example, H.G. Hine’s title illustration to James Smith’s ‘The Wayfaring Tree’ (Vol. III, August 1844, 227) for a similarly inventive revision of conventional pastoral motifs, or the same artist’s finely textured and beautifully drawn illustration to ‘The Two Yew Trees’ from the same year (Vol. III, September 1844, 269). Part of the substantial editorial policy of the Illuminated Magazine, both under Jerrold and Linton, had been to display the most accomplished and ambitious outcomes of the London-based trade in wood-engraved images, images with a range and quality that could rival metal engraving but which could also, crucially, be printed alongside, within or around letterpress to form a newly vigorous and attractive integrated page. While many of these kinds of highly finished vignettes of rural or urban scenery form a major element in the visual quality of the Illuminated Magazine, and exploit the wood engraving as both a naturalistic and an aesthetically ambitious medium, it is the less naturalistic, emblematic or expressionistic images which seem to me the most impressive and progressive kinds of illustration used by the magazine. Typical of these are H.G. Hine’s title illustration to Wilkie Collins’s first venture into print, ‘The Last Stage Coachman’ (Vol. I, August 1843, 209), Kenny Meadows’s opening image to Robert Postans’s ‘The Philosophy of the Pistol’ (Vol. I, July 1843, 173) (Fig. 1.5), Hine’s superbly cropped and ominous cityscape for ‘The Monster City’ (Vol. III, September 1844, 286) (Fig. 1.6) and, in another image which rather belies the charge of his lack of inventiveness,

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Figure 1.5 Kenny Meadows. Wood engraved illustration to ‘The Philosophy of the Pistol’, the Illuminated Magazine, vol. 1, July 1843, 173.

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Figure 1.6 H.G. Hine. Wood engraved illustration to ‘The Monster City’, the Illuminated Magazine, vol. III, September 1844, 286.


Meadows’s magnificent drawing for A B Reach’s ‘The Last Hour of a Suicide’ (Vol. III, August 1844, 161). Here Meadows combined a spectrally triumphant death’s head and bridge arch with an incisively delineated foreground image of a draped body on a slab, the material reality of the corpse monstrously threatened by the gathering clouds of imagined images of death. But easily the most confrontational and shocking of these images is another of Meadows’s carefully shaped engravings – the half skeleton, half fashionably dressed seamstress holding a hat box which prefaces an article on ‘Death in the Drawing Room, or, the Young Dressmakers of England’ (Vol. I, June 1843, 97) (Fig. 1.7). Although Punch was printing similarly shocking images at this time, nonetheless I think it is the sustained ability of the Illuminated Magazine’s artists to find a graphic equivalent for social and political anxieties outside the naturalistic idiom that is so impressive here. A carefully managed contrast between highly finished and naturalistically rendered details and less firmly delineated, softer lined abstractions and symbols is one technique the artists used in these images, a graphic method particularly well suited to the characteristics of wood engraving. There is not room here to trace the symbolic content of these images, which represent a shift towards the sustained emblematic narratives, built on carefully rendered naturalistic details, that structured so many Victorian genre and narrative paintings. Nonetheless these kinds of emblematic images in the Illuminated Magazine, built out of a dialogue between the literal and the symbolic, seem to me some of the most interesting and affecting renderings of socio-political issues within the graphic culture of early Victorian Britain. Other graphic elements in the Illuminated Magazine are less successful. The reliance on whimsy – goblins, fairies and other genial imaginaries – has already been mentioned, and is typified by Kenny Meadows’s spirited but ultimately trivialising bonhomie for a Christmas piece by Angus Bethune Reach (Vol. IV, January 1845, 145). Meadows’s attempts at a series of exemplary ‘boys’ to accompany a series of London ‘types’ by Mark Lemon, despite his reputation for ‘character’, seem sketchy and attenuated when compared with the resonance of his more ambitious images (Vol. 1, 1843, 36, 80, 140, 258). While it is interesting to see Lemon building on the emergent tradition of investigative journalism in these articles, and recognising the significance of illustration in this context, nonetheless Meadows seems here to abandon the detailed naturalism required for a less fully realised sketchiness. Yet overall the Illuminated Magazine represents a characteristic, and possibly even a triumphant, moment in the move from large and sophisticated metal engraved images, often with textual elements subsumed into the image, into the vignette form characteristic of wood engraving. While acknowledging the vernacular origins of the wood engraving in broadsides, tracts and songbooks, nonetheless the new generation of wood engravers were beginning to be able to assert their medium as both aesthetically

Brian Maidment

37

Figure 1.7 Kenny Meadows. Wood engraved illustration to ‘Death and the Drawing Room’, the Illuminated Magazine, vol. I, June 1843, 97.

38


complex and highly expressive. Even relatively ordinary talents like Meadows, given the run of the page and the freedom offered by a sympathetic editor, blossomed into work which approached the experimental and the adventurous, and his work has deliberately formed the central strand of this commentary in order to suggest both the varying success and versatility of the illustrations in the Illuminated Magazine. While many of the magazine’s illustrations suggested the turn that wood engraving was to take towards joviality and whimsicality on the one hand and idealised bucolic fantasies on the other, to say nothing of the wood engraving’s central Victorian role as a medium of exposition and explanation, nonetheless the Illuminated Magazine also contained images of rare power in delineating both the textures of contemporary experience and the socio-psychological anxieties of early Victorian Britain. More formally experimental than the Illustrated London News, more complex and confrontational than Punch and without the didactic or sectarian purposefulness of the Penny or the Saturday, the illustrations in the Illuminated Magazine, under the direction of two pioneering art editors, suggested a moment when wood engraving represented both a high level of achievement and an almost unlimited potential for further development. Just as the magazine more widely attempted to re-present genteel culture to a more democratically assembled reading public and progressive ideas to an unenlightened broad readership, so the illustrations sought to convince early Victorian society of the range and depth of images becoming available through the emergent virtuosity of wood engravers and their work.

Notes 1. F.B. Smith states categorically that the Illuminated Magazine was ‘modelled on Punch’, but, while this would hardly be surprising given Jerrold’s many links with Punch, I think the format of The Illuminated Magazine is in fact built out of many elements available in literature of the time. [Smith p. 62]. 2. Illuminated Magazine vol. 1, 1 (May 1843) Preface. All further references to the Illuminated Magazine will be in brackets in the text. 3. The key biographical sources for accounts of the Illuminated Magazine are Blanchard Jerrold (1859); F.B. Smith (1973); and M Slater (2002). 4. Spielmann, in The History of Punch, gives the full list of proprietors as Herbert Ingram, Ebenezer Landells, N. Cooke, T. Roberts, W. Little and R. Palmer (Spielmann p. 35). 5. Slater pp. 141–143. 6. Spielmann pp. 33–35. Spielmann notes that Jerrold at this time described Landells as ‘that engraving Jonah’ yet ‘was glad enough to take advantage of [his] influence the following year.’ 7. Slater p. 145. Slater very usefully prints a range of reactions to the magazine drawn from cuttings in the Moran Collection in the British Museum. 8. Smith p. 62. 9. Smith p. 62.

Brian Maidment 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

39

Slater p. 151. Slater p. 146. Douglas Jerrold Punch’s Letters to his Son (W S Orr 1843). For Hine’s career see R K Engen pp. 121–122. Slater p. 146. Slater p. 145. Slater p. 145. Slater p. 147. Slater p. 149. Smith pp. 63–65. Lovett p. 2003. The Illustrated London News with its multi-columned page and extremely large paper size might have been expected to show more interest in building its pages into shapes less constrained by the geometry of its columns. For a useful recent discussion of the relationship between image, text and page in Victorian periodicals see Sinnema. There is considerable dispute about how long Landells was actually a member of Bewick’s workshop – see Engen p. 149. Engen p. 38. Engen p. 179. Everitt pp. 355–363; Engen pp. 178–179; Houfe pp. 387. Everitt pp. 360–361.

2 Accurate Dreams or Illustrations of Desire: Image and Text in the Gardener’s Magazine (1826–44) Edited by John Claudius Loudon Sarah Dewis

The heterogeneity of the images (visual representations on the page), and their unevenness in quality and execution in the Gardener’s Magazine, have been perceived as a sign of failure: The Gardener’s Magazine, which was so outspoken about the quality of the plates in other horticultural magazines, is not noted for its own illustrations, many of which are merely practical diagrams of horticultural buildings and equipment [...] An exception is its wood engraved views of landscapes and gardens now imbued with period charm.1 In this chapter I will place the magazine in a print media context, and argue that the heterogeneity of the images, which was the result of technological advances that Loudon exploited, is a reflection, and product of, the diversity of his reading audience. My focus on an article from the magazine containing both image and text will demonstrate the tensions amongst this audience and the potential for fragmentation realised after the Reform Act of 1832. John Claudius Loudon (1783–43), son of a farmer, was born in Lanarkshire, Scotland, and attended Edinburgh University from 1798 to 1802, while apprentice to a market gardener. On his arrival in London in 1803, he was introduced to Jeremy Bentham, and consequently much of his work appears to have been driven by the Scottish Enlightenment’s anti-aristocratic ideal of scientific knowledge and Bentham’s utilitarian philosophy. He began his career as a landscape designer and farmer and having acquired considerable wealth before the age of 30, he went on a tour of Europe. The organisation of local governments and cities that he visited influenced the development 40

Sarah Dewis 41

of his ideas. Writing became his main occupation after his money was lost in speculation and progressive rheumatism led to the amputation of his right arm in 1825. Through monthly, bi-monthly, annual and ‘completed’ publications, which reduced costs and ensured that his work reached diverse audiences, Loudon augmented and codified professional knowledge in landscape gardening, horticulture and botany.2 Apart from the Gardener’s Magazine, he established and edited the Architectural Magazine and the Magazine of Natural History.3 His part in the development of the science of horticulture has not yet been fully documented, but his influence on the shaping of domestic ideology through gardens and architecture, exemplified in his Suburban Gardener and Villa Companion,4 has been debated by the historians Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall (1987), and the garden historian Heath Schenker (2002).5 The Gardener’s Magazine, and Register of Rural and Domestic Improvement (1826–44) was a new quarterly 5s periodical for gardeners first issued in January 1826.6 Initially published by Longman, Loudon was the proprietor and editor of the magazine, transforming it the following year into a bi-monthly whose price was reduced to 3s 6d.7 In 1831 it became a monthly and in 1834 the price was further reduced from 2s 6d to 1s 6d.8 Originally a periodical of over 125 pages, becoming 50 pages in its monthly form, it was the first in Britain to combine science with the aesthetics of gardens, and contained a mix of articles on horticulture, landscape, new scientific discoveries, history, and social and political issues. The intended reading audience, the ‘Gardener’s’, of the title, was a diverse one which ranged from professional gardeners at the top of their careers, land stewards, landscape gardeners, practical gardeners as well as ‘young’ gardeners starting out, to wealthy land-owners and philanthropists, and amateur practitioners, including middle-class owners or renters of gardens and male or female family members. The magazine would have been read or borrowed from the private library of the wealthier reader, but it was also available to the working man through myriad ‘library’ systems which allowed the poorer reader access to books. Coffee houses of urban areas and pubs around the country supplied reading material, and from 1827, Loudon campaigned through his magazine to establish garden libraries in parallel with urban libraries of the Mechanic’s Institutes, some of which held copies of it.9 The presence of images within the magazine allies it with the culture of scientific or technical publications which were generally illustrated, and contrasts with the dearth of images displayed in the ‘literary’ magazines of similar price, due to editorial policy that privileged written text because of the association of images with the less literate culture of the poor and of children. The production values of the images within scientific publications, however, varied. The Transactions of the Horticultural Society (1807–48), an elite and irregularly printed horticultural publication,

42 Image and Text in Loudon’s Gardener’s Magazine

contained engravings of copper, and a few of steel.10 A fine sharp tool, or burin, used to incise the copper, was similar to that used to engrave against the grain of the hard boxwood of the wood engravings which predominate in the Gardener’s Magazine.11 These displayed greater variation of light and shade than was possible in the woodcuts of handbills and cheaper publications such as the Mechanic’s Magazine (1823–29) as they were carved with broad-nibbed knives which followed the grain of the soft-wood traditionally used.12 The image of both woodcut and wood engraving, however, was carved in relief, with the areas to be printed raised up from lower-lying areas which remained white, so that it could be reproduced with type on the same page, in contrast to copper and steel plates in which the incisions followed the line of the drawing and filled with ink.13 The overall integration of text with image made possible by wood engraving marked a turning point in periodical production in 1826 when the Gardener’s Magazine (GM) first started. The relative cheapness of the process enabled a greater number of images to be printed, allowing Loudon to reduce the price of his magazine and gain a broader readership. He points out: ‘Though our articles are not ornamented by coloured plates, or engravings from copper or steel, yet they are illustrated by a greater number of engravings from wood, sufficiently intelligible for all useful purposes’ (GM, 2, March 1827, 438).14 His argument is that the function of the image in the Gardener’s Magazine is not to delight the eye but to explain process. The average proportion of image to text within the pages of the Gardener’s Magazine is not easy to estimate as the number of images varied considerably from month to month and from year to year. However, it is reasonable to conclude that there was a rise in proportion of image to text from 5 per cent in 1826 to a high of over 20 per cent by 1839, with fluctuations in the intervening years, followed by a steady decline towards the final volumes, down to an average of 3 per cent in 1842.15 The decline in number of images coincides with a rise in simple single line images and reflects the increasing financial precariousness of the magazine, as a result of the debts accrued through the production of another of Loudon’s publications, as well as declining circulation. As the budget for the Gardener’s Magazine diminished, he trained members of his family to draw plants and make wood engravings. Between 1838 and 1840, a series of articles under the title of ‘Descriptive Notices of select Suburban Residences, with Remarks on each; intending to illustrate the Principles and Practice of Landscape-Gardening’ appeared in the Gardener’s Magazine. The articles were mostly researched and written by Loudon, with images especially produced in some cases, and were positioned, generally, as the leading item of each number. The title of the series recalled the work of Humphry Repton, whose Observations on the Theory and Practice of Landscape first published in 1803, made recommendations on the

Sarah Dewis 43

aesthetics and construction of landscape and architecture for the landed gentry. Loudon’s series on suburban homes of several decades later, may have been part of his editorial strategy to maintain a metropolitan, less wealthy, middle-class and female audience, as some articles were also printed in his Suburban Gardener and Villa Companion which was intended ‘more particularly for the use of ladies’.16 At the same time, cheaper publications such as the Gardener’s Gazette, established in 1837, and the first horticultural newspaper, was diverting the readership of professional gardeners. My focus is the small seven-acre Cheshunt estate of Mr Harrison featured in December 1839 (GM, 15, December 1839, 633–74).17 It is, Loudon claims, exemplary of the Gardenesque (670), an aesthetic of planting he developed based on science. More suited to the modest acreage of the middle classes, it did not depend for its effect on the broader canvas of the picturesque derived from the composition of the paintings of Claude, or the re-creation of ‘natural’ landscape produced by Capability Brown on aristocratic estates to enhance and disguise economic productivity. As Schenker has argued in her essay on the contribution of Loudon and his wife, Jane Webb Loudon, to the development of the domestic garden, the Gardenesque can be more clearly understood in a social context, rather than within an aesthetic narrative of garden history.18 The plurality of forms of image with which the house and its land are represented in the Cheshunt text, would have been recognised by its readers. Frank Howard, whose, Sketcher’s Manual or the Whole Art of Picture Making, was reviewed by Loudon in the Gardener’s Magazine a few months previously, states: ‘The term Picture here is used in a general sense, as meaning an agreeable object, or combination of objects, for contemplation; and Pictorial Effect is the term applied to that which distinguishes a Picture from a diagram or map.’19 Howard differentiates between the polite, aesthetic discourse of the picture, and the scientific or technical discourse of the diagram or plan. The combined presence in the Cheshunt article of these diverse genre of image supports the disparate elements of the text which range from lists derived from the plans, and vocabulary of scientific treatise characteristic of scientific discourse, to the aesthetic discourse of a narrative of travel, or garden tour. My argument is that these images and texts compete for the readers’ attention, to the extent that the reader’s status is continually shifting between that of ‘spectator’ and ‘young gardener’. This creates a specific political dynamic which may have alienated the wealthier reader. Despite its proximity to London, the rusticity of Cheshunt is clearly established on the journey through ‘numerous little interesting lanes’ which are ‘very rural and umbrageous’ (GM, 15, December 1839, 631), and with the first engraving of the Cheshunt cottage itself (Fig. 2.1). Loudon addresses the ‘spectator’ (639), the ‘citizen’ (635), the ‘amateur’ (637) and the ‘stranger’ (641), who are of similar rank, but with a variety of interests, and who might all aspire to live in a house, or ‘cottage’ (632),


Figure 2.1 Front page, Gardener’s Magazine, 15 December 1839, 633. © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved. BL GM pp. 2200.

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which is ‘replete with every description of accommodation and convenience requisite for the enjoyment of all the comforts and luxuries that a man of taste can desire for himself and his friends’ (637). The spectator is set apart from the world of work, has the wealth and leisure to look beyond his or her own life, and observe works of art and other countries and cultures. His or her province might be derived from the ‘picturesque eye’ suggested by the once influential William Gilpin in his Three Essays on Picturesque Beauty of 1792, which is to ‘survey nature; not to anatomise matter’, and which ‘examines parts, but never descends to particles’.20 We shall see, however, that because the Gardener’s Magazine involves the reader in the means of production of the garden, his/her status shifts between polite spectator and producer/gardener. The reader/viewer as spectator is signalled in both captions of two large full-page vignettes in the opening pages, ‘View from the Drawingroom Window at Cheshunt Cottage, looking to the Left’ (Fig. 2.2), and ‘View from the Drawingroom Window at Cheshunt Cottage looking to the Right’ (not shown). The ‘view’ here identifies the leisured readers who might make sketches of the surrounding landscape (a figure of a woman sketching is portrayed on the left-hand edge of Fig. 2.2), or, who, as readers of Howard or Gilpin, were interested in sketching as a fashionable activity and were accustomed to looking at images of landscape. Furthermore, the indeterminate edge of the form of the vignette itself, makes it, as Ruskin suggested at the time, a vehicle of the aesthetic imagination: ‘All harshness is thus avoided, and we feel as if we might see more if we chose, beyond the dreamy and undecided limit, but we have no desire to move the eye from its indicated place of rest’.21 The effect of the women represented in Figure 2.2, and of the woman and child in the view from ‘the Right’ (not shown), naturalises their place in the garden. Different kinds of trees and shrubs are dotted across the flat plain, and Loudon warns his readers that ‘the beauties of the place, to a stranger at his first glance, appear of the quiet and melancholy kind’ (GM, 15, December 1939, 635). He implies that appreciation of his Gardenesque style of planting, achieved at Cheshunt through the efforts of Mr Harrison, the proprietor, and Mr Pratt, the head gardener, depends on ‘nearer examination’ (Ibid) of the vegetation, and knowledge of it. Whilst Loudon claimed that the Gardenesque could be combined with a variety of gardening styles, at Cheshunt the trees are scattered singly, both to break up the view and to encourage them to grow to their ‘natural shape’ (607). A list of the plants on the lawn depicted in the drawing room views, towards the end of the text (over 30 pages after the vignette) may have been part of Loudon’s strategy to engage the ‘spectator’ or garden visitor for the first part, leaving the scientist and practical gardener to persevere to the end. Through the darkness of the pine, the starkness of ‘naked’ poplars, the contrast of leaf size, variety of form, and the varied colours with

Figure 2.2 ‘View from the Drawingroom Window at Cheshunt Cottage, looking to the Left’, Gardener’s Magazine, 15 December 1839, 634. © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved. BL GM pp. 2200.

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‘green-barked shoots’, ‘yellowish leaves’, and the ‘purple’ of the beech and hazel, culminating in the ‘scarlet’ arbutus (670), Loudon builds up an impression of abundance and diversity which is less clearly conveyed by the vignette. The differing forms, textures and colours of the ‘Montpelier maple’, the ‘American oaks’, the ‘Kentucky coffee tree’, the ‘Oriental plane’, and the ‘Nepal Sorbus’ (Ibid), also exemplify the Gardenesque as the product of, and a contributing factor towards, the expansion of empire. The vignettes ‘from the Drawingroom Window’ then, represent an outdoor laboratory, whose value lies in identification of species. Their accuracy is suggested by the precision of the captions ‘looking to the left’ and ‘looking to the right’. These remind the reader of the authenticity of the material, and the effort that has gone into the creation of the image at a time when copies of paintings and standard cuts (c.f. Bewick) and borrowings from other publications were common illustrative devices. The value of the place and moment at which the drawing has been made has more in common with Loudon’s use of the term ‘sketch’ which he referred to in his ‘Garden Calls’. These consisted of notes on gardens visited, and were placed at the back of each number. He comments: ‘We looked over the premises and made sketches’ (GM, 5, December 1829, 674). The results were small 20cm square, single line images of farm implements, including a ‘daisy rake’, and a ‘cast iron frame for a grindstone’ (Ibid). His use of the term fits with that given in the OED as ‘a rough drawing or delineation of something, giving the outlines or prominent features without the detail’. Loudon retains for science the idea of the sketch as something incomplete, which provides an accurate assessment, whilst also suggesting journalistic modesty. Martina Lauster, in her discussion of the sketch in nineteenth-century journalism, has referred to it as ‘an essentially rhetorical form which seeks to persuade the viewer or reader that less is more, while allowing a whole range of ideological agendas to work beneath the surface of the spontaneous imagination’.22 It might be that that the economy of method of production of Loudon’s vignettes of Cheshunt, which suggest the topography as it might be experienced by the tourist visiting the garden, affirm, via a literal reading, the benefits of property, consumption and family. Other forms of visual representation, the plans and diagrams, suggest alternative agendas, and, as the opening vignettes are succeeded by a series of plans of the house and its surrounding land, the reader’s status shifts, as they enable her/him to understand structure. The linear plan of the house shows numerous room and passages, including a library and museum confirming that ‘Cheshunt Cottage’ is the residence of a gentleman. Female readers might be interested in the plans, particularly of the house, as historians have shown that the maintenance of the home of the less than aristocratic, involved the house as well as duties on the surrounding land, because so much housekeeping was still linked up with husbandry in the early nineteenth century. 23

48

Image and Text in Loudon’s Gardener’s Magazine

The buildings represented on the plan of the working areas (Fig. 2.3.A & B), which succeed the house plan, are linear in order that the letters on them, indicating their function, can be clearly seen. The vegetation is tonally represented but without the projected shadow of the final plan which displays the whole of the estate, the house and offices,

A Figure 2.3 Work areas plan of Cheshunt Cottage, Gardener’s Magazine, 15 December 1839, 642–43. © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved. BL GM pp. 2200.

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B


the farm, and the pleasure grounds, and is placed towards the end of the text (Fig. 2.4.A). The shadow of trees and the rendering of the architecture of the estate plan, is a more three dimensional, polite, view, representing the extent of

A Figure 2.4 Estate plan of Cheshunt Cottage, Gardener’s Magazine, 15 December 1839, 656–57. © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved. BL GM pp. 2200.

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the property, which would have been useful in legal disputes involving ownership and property boundaries. The simpler style of the working plan (Fig. 2.4.B) clarifies instead the different areas within the estate and the communities that serve them, showing how they co-exist in a healthy and efficient way. The visibility of the servants here questions the assumption of

B

52

Image and Text in Loudon’s Gardener’s Magazine

every rank in its place as the house of Mr Harrison, the proprietor, is off limits (it would be at the bottom left), and the privy of Mr Pratt the head gardener, is just off the centre of the page, suggestive of his primary role in the running of the estate. The privies of other servants are indicated on the plan (next to ‘23’ and ‘29’, Fig. 2.3.B) and are listed in the text, whilst those of the proprietors and house servants are indicated on the house plan. Their presence on the page is indicative of Loudon’s concern with the spread of disease; sanitary drainage and avoidance of smell are important elements of his architectural discourse.24 The reader is informed about methods of wafting unpleasant smells away from the spectator, whether from the privy, the boiling of meat for dogs, or from the heating of pitch (‘27’, Fig. 2.3.B). Loudon posits the privy here, in relation to ‘you’, the reader. This reflects the professional status of some of Loudon’s readers who as gardeners and servants might be the ‘other’. Sanitary drainage and health were issues articulated in treatises by interested individuals, government papers and some newspapers. In response to fears generated by the epidemic of Cholera in Europe of 1831, correspondents to The Times had argued for a ‘proper and complete drainage’ for London.25 In the Monthly Magazine four years later, a town in which ‘no alternative is left to the inhabitants, therefore, but fouling the streets with all kinds of excrementitious matter’ is described in relation to the ‘manufacturing population’, who are not, however, the readers themselves.26 The vignette ‘View from the Chinese Temple’ (not shown), returns to the spectator’s journey. The aesthetic of exploration is sustained by the image of dappled light and water framed within Chinese style architecture. However, immediately below this vignette, the text refers to the maintenance of rabbits and the prevention ‘of boys or idle persons getting into the rabbit-house’ (GM, 15, December 1839, 651). This is part of a list (not shown) that links to the working plan (Fig. 2.3), and makes the reader aware of the co-existence of servants, their work and their families on the estate; No. 51 is a ‘Court for enclosing the coachman’s children’; 52, the ‘Lobby to the dairy’; 53, the ‘Lobby to Mr Pratt’s brewhouse’; 54, ‘Cellar’; 55, ‘Chickenyard’; 56, ‘Farmer’s yard’; 58, ‘Place for slaughtering in’. No. 60, ‘Shed for compost’ (650) leads to an account of the production of manure. The effect on the reader of the integration of text with image on the same page, as well as the different forms of visual representation, is to make her/him conscious of the ceaseless activity of the servants who maintain the suburban residence and of the cycles of fermentation, rotting and feeding that maintain the luxuriant vegetation portrayed in the vignettes. Beyond the bushes framing the vignette, then, lies not a Chinese mountain, but a noisy, smelly, working farm. At the centre of the working plan of the estate (Fig. 2.3), lie the farm buildings, nos. ‘18’–‘26’ and it is here that the livestock are kept. Number ‘26’ indicates the tank containing food for the pigs and this gives rise to an

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explanation on the advantages of fermenting food that Loudon has adapted from the Quarterly Journal of Agriculture: According to the doctrine there laid down, the globules of meal, or farinaceous matter of the roots and seeds of plants, lie closely compacted together, within membranes so exquisitely thin and transparent, that their texture is scarcely to be discerned with the most powerful microscope. Each farinaceous particle is, therefore, considered as enveloped in a vesicle, which it is necessary to burst, in order to allow the soluble or nutritious parts to escape. This bursting is effected by boiling, or other modes of cookery [...] but it is also effected by the heat and decomposition produced by fermentation [...] Plants are nourished by the ultimate particles of manure, in the same way that animals are nourished by the ultimate particles of food; and hence fermentation is as essential to the dunghill as cookery to food. The young gardener, as well as the young farmer, may learn from this the vast importance of fermentation, in preparing food for both plants and animals’. (GM, 15, December 1839, 648) From the singular detail and delicacy of the membranes of meal and plant seeds which are only just visible to the ‘most powerful microscope’, the energy of the process of fermentation is described as the particles ‘escape’ and ‘burst’. The comparison of the process with that of cookery to food, highlights the connection of human beings to the feeding of plants and animals. The effect of the ‘vast importance’ of microscopic detail on the reader might be to marginalise divine purpose. I quote this passage at length in order to show that the aesthetic narrative of the tour of the opening pages has been displaced by an account of science, and that the identity of the reader as ‘spectator’ (639) or ‘stranger’ (641), has also shifted to that of producer – the ‘young farmer’ or ‘young gardener’ (648), whose chief interest lies in ‘ultimate particles’. The caption to Figure 2.5, a full-page vignette of ‘General View of the Hot-houses, as seen across the American garden’ (areas ‘3’–‘15’ on the estate plan, Fig. 2.4), reflects once more, the aesthetic of exploration. The ‘American’ of the caption refers to the origin of the plants. The buildings, whose weather vane might suggest a church spire, are surrounded by vegetation, through which the spectator or explorer may wander at peace. The text opposite the vignette animates the view (or renders it superfluous) because it draws attention to those who work in and around the hothouse. Loudon has ‘transcribed’ (647) a series of rules applying to ‘all persons working on these premises, masters and men’. The fines grow from 3d for minor offences such as not cleaning the tools or failing to return them to their correct place, to 6d for ‘bad language’, and one shilling for drunken behaviour, which, in relation to a journeyman

Figure 2.5 ‘General View of the Hot-houses, as seen across the American Garden’, Gardener’s Magazine, 15 December 1839, 646. © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved. BL GM pp. 2200.

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gardener’s pay of less than ‘10s or 12s a week’ (GM, 8, 1832, iv), and even less for the semi-skilled gardener, constituted severe punishment. The focus on bad language and drunken behaviour indicates its prevalence amongst the people who worked on the estate, while the size of the fine imposed suggests the danger that their disorderliness posed to the employer. The text then, belies the tranquillity of the view. It is also open to alternative readings. Mr Harrison’s comments that the system of fines has been effective in ‘preventing all slovenly practises, which he considers as thus purchased at a very cheap rate’ (GM, 15 December 1839, 647), might suggest a way for the reader as spectator to deal with servants. For the reader as ‘young gardener’ the masterly status of Mr Pratt, who collects the fines, and who is responsible for both men and tools, might suggest a profession to aspire to. Towards the end of the account Loudon summarises ‘the principal sources of professional instruction which the young gardener may derive from examining this place’ (659). Figure 2.6.A and B displays on a double spread, the mix of diagram and vignette which up to this point have appeared sequentially. Loudon’s use of the term ‘diagram’ is based on a kinetic process applied mainly to man-made objects, here representing the back elevation of the ‘Rustic Covered seat of woodwork’, and ‘the manner in which the barked poles’ of the seat of the vignette above ‘are arranged’ (658). This might inform the ‘young gardener’ or ‘young designer’ (659), who could construct a similar garden structure, but its proximity to the vignette competes with the illusion of leisure and the garden tour that the empty seat suggests. The diagram opposite represents the walls and roof of the hothouse. Based on the ‘ridge and furrow’ principle, Loudon had experimented with this form of hothouse or ‘botanic stove’ that his younger rival Joseph Paxton had subsequently developed to greater effect at Chatsworth. The result was a ‘pleating’ of the glass which could bear the weight of greater amounts of snow and was therefore more stable than a smooth roof, as well as increasing the amount of exposure to daylight and heat. The uneven surface (shown clearly in the diagram) facilitated the cultivation of tropical plants such as the Brugmansia suaveolens (Datura arborea L.), a native plant of India and South America, which Loudon is awed by: There is a plant of [...] 15ft. high, with a head 13ft. in diameter. When we saw it, August 10th, 277 blossoms were expanded at once, producing an effect upon the spectator under the tree, when looking up, which no language can describe. Last year it produced successions of blossoms, in one of which 600 were fully expanded at one time. This year it has had five successions of blossoms, and another is now coming out as the plant expands in growth. (645)


A Figure 2.6 ‘Rustic Covered Seat of Woodwork’, ‘Elevation of the Back’, elevation of ‘part of the front’ of a hothouse, and cross section ‘through the middle of one of the ridges of the roof’, Gardener’s Magazine, 15 December 1839, 660–61. © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved. BL GM pp. 2200.

Sarah Dewis 57

B


The number of blossoms, the size and the frequency of blooming, of the Brugmansia in Cheshunt is the product of the gardener’s labour and developments in the technology of glass. Loudon’s fascination with productivity, labour and science is confirmed through the heterogeneity of images featured in Fig. 2.6.A and B, suggesting the displacement of aesthetics by science, along with the marginalisation of the ‘spectator’ reader within the pages of the magazine. The diagram might also indicate the transformation of the hothouse as ‘orangery’ and part of an elite household where citrus fruits could be kept warm in winter, to the ‘conservatory’, that was becoming the property of the middle classes.27 We have seen how the Cheshunt text shifts from the discursiveness of the opening, and an account of the journey through and around the house and grounds of Cheshunt Cottage, to a series of lists attached to the plans, part of which is a scientific discourse on fermentation, and which is punctuated by varied forms of visual representation. The process of wood engraving, then allows Loudon great fluidity in the representation of his subject, and a multi-faceted exploration of the Gardenesque in which science, production and labour are the predominant factors in comparison with aesthetics and consumption. He pays his respects to Mr Harrison, the proprietor, whom he credits as the architect and designer of the estate, and he notes that servants need to be kept in order. However, Loudon’s intention was to professionalise the body of gardening knowledge and raise the status of practical gardeners. The labour of servants, exemplified by the responsibilities and creative power of the head gardener, Mr Pratt, whom, Loudon reassures his spectator readers, is a ‘singularly modest and unassuming man’ (674), is fore-grounded in this account. The effect of the visibility of Mr Pratt’s intelligence and competence on the reader might be to question inordinate differences of wealth, and the justice of the 1832 Reform Act which had denied the majority of working men the right to vote with the £10 a year householder qualification. Cheshunt cottage was part of a series whose ‘wood engraved views’ may have been intended to attract those who might own or rent suburban properties.28 In addressing all gardeners therefore, and the ‘young gardener’ in particular, Loudon risked alienating the gentlemanly reader and the female spectators portrayed in the view from the drawing room window of Fig. 2.2.

Notes 1. Desmond pp. 95–6. 2. Schenker p. 342; Taylor pp. 17–67. 3. The Architectural Magazine and Journal of Improvement in Architecture, Building and Furnishing (London: Longman, 1834–39); The Magazine of Natural History, and Journal of Zoology, Botany, Mineralogy, Geology, and Meteorology (London: Longman, 1828–36).

Sarah Dewis 59 4. The Suburban Gardener and Villa Companion: Comprising the Choice of a Suburban or Villa Residence, or of a Situation on Which to Form One (London: printed for the author, sold by Longman; Edinburgh, sold by W. Black, 1838). Henceforth to be referred to as The Suburban Gardener. 5. Davidoff and Hall pp. 180–92. 6. The Gardener’s Magazine, and Register of Rural and Domestic Improvement, 19 vols (London: Longman, 1826–44). Henceforth to be referred to as GM in endnotes and brackets. The final number of January 1844, is not included in every edition of the bound annual volumes of no. 19 (1843). 7. Longman published on commission from Loudon, with an initial agreement of 2/5 in 1826, reduced to 1/10 in 1834. In 1839 Longman ceased to publish on commission and retained distribution only. 8. Price given in an advert at the back of Loudon’s Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Farm and Villa Architecture, 1835 edition; Desmond, pp. 79–103 (p. 94). Alternatively, in 1834 the price was reduced to 1s 2d. See Brent Elliott (2004) ‘Loudon, John Claudius (1783–1843)’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/17031> [accessed 29 October 2007]. 9. For example, the Manchester Mechanic’s Institute. 10. The price was fixed a £1 per number in 1818 for members and at £1 1s 6d for the public. Women were not allowed to become members until 1830. 11. Desmond pp. 79–103 (p. 94). 12. The Mechanic’s Magazine contained woodcuts and wood engravings. 13. Lauster p. 35. See also Henry Cole, ‘Modern Wood Engraving’, London and Westminster Review, 29 (August 1839), pp. 265–80. 14. Desmond pp. 79–103 (p. 80). 15. These figures are based on my calculations of space covered by image in relation to total pagination of selected volumes; 1826 GM, 1; 1829 GM, 5; 1834 GM, 10; 1839 GM, 15; 1842 GM, 18. 16. Loudon, The Suburban Gardener (Frontispiece). 17. A ‘suburban’ garden ranged from one perch to a hundred acres. Loudon, The Suburban Gardener (Frontispiece; p. 622). 18. Schenker pp. 337–60 (p. 337). 19. Frank Howard (1837) The Sketcher’s Manual, or the Whole Art of Picture Making Reduced to Simplest Principles (London: Darton and Clark), pp. viii–ix; GM, 15 (August 1838), p. 470. 20. Gilpin p. 26; Bermingham p. 93. 21. Ruskin quoted by Loudon p. 37. 22. Lauster (p. 2), with reference to Richard Sha. 23. Vickery pp. 127–60. 24. ‘He was publishing designs for water closets a full generation before they were standard even in urban houses’, Mercer. 25. Times Digital Archive, Tuesday 25 October 1831, p. 3 < http://infotrac.galegroup. com> [accessed 18 January 2008]. 26. Monthly Magazine, 19 (January 1835), p. 51. 27. At the time of publication the term ‘hothouse’ was the generic term for a range of specialised greenhouses. 28. Desmond p. 96.

3 Alaric ‘Attila’ Watts, the Fraser’s Portrait Gallery, and William Maginn David E. Latané, Jr.

The Fraser’s ‘Gallery of Illustrious Literary Characters’ ran from 1830 to 1838 and influenced subsequent generations’ views of the early Victorian milieu.1 Some recent critics, especially those concerned with the representation of women writers, treat the Gallery as representative or typical of the attitudes of the age.2 It is easy to do so, in part, because the eccentric and forceful originator of the series, William Maginn, generally avoided literary celebrity (for himself), even while writing a personality-filled portrait each month. (The letterpress for his own portrait, written by his friend John Gibson Lockhart, refers to him only as ‘The Doctor’ and never mentions his name – though it is given in facsimile signature under Maclise’s drawing.) One of the keys to understanding the series, however, is to probe Maginn’s atypical concerns, especially his paradoxical championing of literary ‘personality.’ Margaret Russett has argued that ‘[t]he virulence of magazine personalities symptomatizes both the subversion of proper identity and the commodification of fame as (sheer) personality that became increasingly exaggerated in the world of periodical print’ (1997, 133). Maginn was keenly aware of both parts of this formula. Blackwood’s famously inaugurated a new era of magazining when William Blackwood in 1817 sacked his editors James Pringle and Thomas Cleghorn after the first six issues, took the reins himself, and began publishing violent personal attacks on Whigs and others by John Wilson, John Gibson Lockhart, and (in 1819) an anonymous Cork correspondent, ‘R.T.S.’ (Maginn). Maginn’s early contributions had served up spicy dishes of Cork notables, but when he arrived in London in early 1824 he found greater pressure to make bland his cookery. What was amusing when told about the Cork Philosophical Society became ‘blackguardism’ when written about Members of Parliament. One result was that Maginn wrote, to the dismay (real or feigned) of his Edinburgh friends, in ‘low’ periodicals such as the John Bull Magazine and the Telescope. For Blackwood, once a solid 60

David E. Latané, Jr. 61

subscription base existed then the worry about maintenance began. Beginning in the mid-1820s, while he encouraged Maginn to renew his flow of contributions to his ‘Maga’, he discouraged ‘personalities’.3 Fraser’s was founded in part because William Maginn was determined to activate a venue that would sustain the free-wheeling modes of the early years of Blackwood’s, and bring a personal castigation to those whom he considered the prime humbugs of the age: the commodifiers of their own fame. Maginn conceived of Fraser’s as a sort of supercharged, metropolitan Blackwood’s, doing for the big stage of London what ‘Maga’ had done in its first years for Edinburgh – fictionalizing its notable personalities through a series of carnivalesque depictions. Where Blackwood’s had its pithy ‘Chaldee Manuscript’ (September 1817), Maginn produced a lengthy ‘Election of the Editor for Fraser’s Magazine’ (May and July, 1830), which names about 160 individuals. The ‘Gallery’ deepened this nominal frame by combining Maginn’s text with lithographs by ‘Alfred Croquis’ (Daniel Maclise), seemingly drawn by stealth, that engage in dialogue with the text. The originality of the ‘Gallery’ is chiefly in this dialogue. The tradition of freestanding pictorial satire from Hogarth to Gilray to the Cruikshanks combined in the 1820s with text in such works as Charles Molloy Westmacott’s the English Spy (1825), but its pictures chastised types, and the text concealed names with dashes and asterisks. Another mode can be found in periodicals such as the Literary Speculum (1821–23), which featured a portrait each month to accompany a critical assessment, but its stiff woodcuts are invariably head and shoulder portraits, with elaborate framing, and the text does not comment on the image. Maginn and Maclise combined the sauciness and movement of the satiric print tradition with the verbal ‘personalities’ inherited from Blackwood. Maginn was not, however, interested solely in satire. He also delighted in the inside joke, the frisson of privacy half-revealed, and many of the men and women chosen for the ‘Gallery’ were friends or acquaintances – or he was the recipient of gossip from those who were. Distortions and fabrications, like those Robert Patten complains about in the entry for George Cruikshank (1992, 386, 388), were I suspect not so much made from ignorance but rather part of the fun. The ‘Gallery’ made Fraser’s a success. In the June 1835 ‘Gallery’, Maginn and his fellow Corkman Maclise pushed the boundaries of personality too far, resulting in the chief lawsuit for libel brought against the magazine during his tenure. This involved, perhaps surprisingly, the minor poet, giftbook editor, and veteran Tory newspaperman Alaric Alexander Watts (Fig. 3.1). The case of ‘Watts versus Fraser and Moyes’ was heard before the King’s Bench on 5 December 1835. The affair was illustrated in the next issue of Fraser’s by an anecdote of William Cobbett’s about two countrymen fighting with fists until the instigator, now losing, decides to pull a knife, and in turn is thrashed with a stick (‘Mr. Alaric Alexander Watts’, 1836, 129). The

62 Watts, Fraser’s Portrait Gallery & William Maginn

Figure 3.1 ‘Alaric A. Watts: The Editor of “The Literary Souvenir”’. Fraser's Magazine, June 1835, 653.


‘Gallery’ portrait, it is implied, was Fraser’s stick, and Watts had started the fight. As newspapermen, Maginn and Watts were Tory mainstays; as men of letters, however, they represent two distinct types, and to understand the case it is necessary to trace their relationship. Fraser’s explained the origins of the animosity in its post-trial commentary: It happened that Mr. Watts, for reasons which existed long antecedent to the establishment of this Magazine, thought proper to conceive a violent dislike (we hope the word is not libellous) of a gentleman long known in the world of newspapers and magazines, Dr. Maginn; and this feeling he extended towards every person and thing with which the Doctor was supposed, whether justly or not, to be connected. We have been told, perhaps erroneously, that the pique originated in some newspaper arrangements of a strictly private kind; and we are sure that Dr. Maginn did not give himself the trouble of reciprocating the ill-will of which he was the object. (‘Mr. Alaric Alexander Watts’, 1836, 130) It is well to remember that claims around lawsuits often consist of partial narratives of hotly disputed events, but Maginn’s defense is supported by plenty of evidence from the previous decade of Watts’s splenetic character. They began their literary careers at the same time and in the same place – the pages of William Jerdan’s Literary Gazette circa 1819 – and their lives, works, and relationships were intertwined to an unusual extent. Both were deeply involved in the ‘low’ but lucrative world of the newspapers, but Watts was much more concerned about his status as a gentleman and his literary ‘name’ than Maginn. He published several volumes of poetry, and was very careful to send copies, fulsomely inscribed, to as many prominent writers as possible.4 His giftbook, the Literary Souvenir, appeared with ‘Alaric A. Watts’ prominent on title page and in the table of contents of each issue. As a measure of his egotism, when he edited Men of the Time in the 1850s he gave himself three times the space of Tennyson. Maginn, to the contrary, began his career with an exceptional concern with invisibility. His creed was that only a goose would acknowledge or deny authorship to the public, and he tried to avoid having any of his numerous pseudonyms become a nom de plume. He often wrote collaboratively, and in the midst of company, and it wasn’t until 1836 that he began signing some of his magazine pieces. After his death when influential friends tried to raise a fund for his family, they were hampered by his lack of name recognition.5 Watts, one might say, was a visible creature of visual culture, of the culture of commodity. His name resonates through the age, branding giftbook, periodical, volumes of poems, and so on. Maginn’s friend, the Irish novelist Gerald Griffin, described Watts in a letter to his sister in 1829 ‘reposing amid all the glorious litter of a literary lion-monger – sofas, silk cushions, paintings, portfolios, and so on. He is a little fellow, very smart

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Watts, Fraser’s Portrait Gallery & William Maginn

and bustling, with about as much sentiment as you have of bravery – I mean bloody field of battle bravery’ (qtd in Mannin 71). His observation about Watts’s lack of sentiment argues that Watts’s own very sentimental poems were just another form of literary entrepreneurship, that he was a poetic humbug. For Watts, ‘A.A. Watts’ was a trademark associated with things, rather than thoughts or positions. The change of the name of his giftbook in 1835 from The Literary Souvenir to the The Cabinet of Modern Art emphasises his quest for thingness, as he desires his book to be ‘a complete epitome, graphical and literary, of Modern Art’ (‘Preface’, 1836, vii). Maginn, to the contrary, wanted influence via anonymous and amorphous circulation of discourse that couldn’t be reified or depicted. Lockhart’s ‘Gallery’ sketch of Maginn emphasises versatility of instrument: High Church and State doctrines should be seriously adopted, and manfully maintained. Whigs, Papists, Radicals [...] should be exposed, insulted, stabbed, crucified, impaled, drawn, and quartered – in Essay, Disquisition, Review, Romance, Ballad, Squib, Pasquinade, and Epigram – in Greek, in Hebrew, in Latin, in Irish, in Italian, in English, and in Slang: but no interference with the calm pursuits of the scholar, or the graceful amenities of the gentleman. (1831, 716) Fame as an ‘author’ was not part of the programme, and in Fraser’s he boasted that ‘we who write this article in all publicity of anonymous writing, we, we say, never wrote a book ourselves’ (‘An Apology’, 1831, 2). Personalities were, however, legitimate against persons for whom authorship was a goal, and Watts certainly fit the bill. Maginn and Watts may have met through William Jerdan on one of Maginn’s summer visits to London in the early 1820s, as Maginn’s introductions in London came partly through Jerdan. Maginn was also at the time firmly ensconced in William Blackwood’s inner circle, and Watts was campaigning to be part of that group. From his lodgings in Brompton Watts posted a closely written 16-page memorandum of London literary gossip, hoping to curry favor with the Scottish publication; Maginn used the notes in an article, and when accosted by Colburn he told Blackwood ‘I of course denied everything plump. Never wrote anything for anybody’ (Oliphant, Vol. I, 496–98). Watts fed Blackwood and Maginn shop details about his former employer Colburn’s establishment for the ‘Noctes Ambrosianæ’ colloquia and later inserted (unasked) puffs about Maga in the Leeds Intelligencer (Gordon 283). Maginn seems to have trusted Watts in these years; about 1825 he sounded Watts out about the possibility of Hurst (the publisher of the Literary Souvenir) bringing out Maginn’s translations of Beranger, in a tone that implies mutual professionalism and regard (JRL MS 380/1313).6


Watts, however, was dishing Maginn behind his back to Blackwood, and in general showing signs of tetchiness, evidenced in his odd prefaces to the Literary Souvenir, and in the hounding of Benjamin Disraeli over Vivian Grey in his magazine the Literary Magnet.7 Maginn has gone down in literary history for his alcoholism, but the abstemious Watts could have used a drink to steady his nerves. A rival editor characterised Watts at this time as ‘splenetic and envious,’ and given to ‘paltry insinuations and spiteful observations’ (‘Saturnalia’, 1827, 56). Watts, according to one commentator, ‘had a special faculty for annoying his literary contemporaries’ (Ellis, Vol. I, 96). In the 1820s his violent quarrel with the teenage Ainsworth, his fellow Mancunian, left the latter fuming in private letters about the ‘kakodemon Watts’ (Ellis Vol. I, 128). His own son, in Alaric Watts: A Narrative of His Life, devotes a separate chapter to ‘Temper’ (1884, Vol. II, 78–86), in which he admits that his father seemed to suffer from ‘some obscure form of disease more or less akin to hysteria’ (77). Maginn, along with Wilson and Lockhart, initially found Watts more ridiculous than annoying, and impossible not to ridicule; Watts, I believe, couldn’t understand how Maginn got away with being Maginn. The origin of serious animosity arises from their joint employment in 1827 on the new Tory evening paper the Standard. The ‘arrangements’ mentioned in the ‘Defense’ were obviously with regard to the Standard, from which Watts boasted, according to testimony at the trial, ‘he could displace him [Maginn] at any time’ (‘Libel’, Times, 1835, 4). Watts was hired first and Maginn more or less usurped his place, which turned into a lucrative and influential employment. Watts and Maginn had a violent dispute in the paper’s Shoe Lane offices in June of 1827, and shortly afterwards Watts resigned, and – not coincidentally I believe – Prime Minister Canning received an anonymous letter informing him that much of the slander in prose and verse against your Administration which fills the Standard and other London newspapers is written by an unprincipled Irishman named MAGINN, who styles himself Doctor, who is protegé and friend of Mr John Wilson Croker. Doctor M. is also at the bottom of all the abuse poured out against you in Blackwood. (Aspinall, 268) Although Maginn contributed two of his best tales to Watts’ Literary Souvenirs of 1828 and 1829 (‘A Vision of Purgatory’ and ‘Jochonan in the City of Demons’), further quarrels were inevitable, and in the 1830 volume Watts unnecessarily printed a note that ‘several articles intended for the present volume reached him too late for insertion, and among others prose sketches from pens of the Author of Holland-tide [Gerald Griffin] and Dr. Maginn’ (qtd. in Mannin 72). Maginn was busy as Watts’s deadline approached (in

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the Fall of 1829) hatching Fraser’s Magazine, but Watts’s gratuitous mention of his missed deadline was surely a deliberate insult. It is hard to pinpoint, however, exactly where and when serious hostilities began in print. Maginn’s critical tomahawkings and squabashings, in the jocular phraseology of Maga, were mostly in the rough spirit of the Munster lampooning he had grown up with. As Gerald Griffin notes, Maginn ‘imagines that those he attacks think as little of the affair as himself [...]. The other day he attacked Campbell’s Ritter Bann most happily, and at the same time cuttingly, and afterwards wanted Jerdan to get up a dinner and bring Campbell and him together’ (qtd. in ‘Doctor Maginn’, 1852, 612). Watts seems to have turned from his output of sentimental poetry and silvery annuals to the satiric lash purely out of temper and malingering personal resentments. Ironically Watts, unlike Bulwer and Montgomery (and the usual Whig crew of Moore, Rogers, Campbell, et alia), was not one of Fraser’s first targets. The first mention of him, in a list in the ‘Election of the Editor’ is benign, and it isn’t until ‘Symposiac the First’ (November 1830) that, via a complicated dramatic situation, one symposiac takes a Poke at Alaric. I don’t like that Alaric Attila Watts! Whose verses are just like the pans and the pots, Shining on shelves in a cottager’s kitchen, Polish’d and prim. Now a greyhound bitch in The corner, a cat, and some empty bottles, A chubby-faced boy, and the Lord knows what else; All taken together’s a picture, which in My humble opinion is just as rich in Domestic detail, without the ‘what nots’ That smooth down the verses of Alaric Watts. Outroarious laughter followed this; and Jesse, like the rogue he is, kept it up by saying – ‘pray, Alaric Attila, where do you find those fine names – your own and Zilla Madonna? I’m told you hope to supply posterity with sugar-plums, and that they’ll say the sweet, sweet Watts was the very one worth all the rest. Tush, man, never frown – your verses in the Souvenir say all this, only in much more mystificatory language.’ ‘Mr. Jesse,’ said Alaric Attila, ‘the Tales of the Dead.’ – ‘De mortuis nil nisi bonum,’ cried O’Doherty, looking fiercely at the Souvenir, who suddenly lost his recollection, and asked for a coach. This was brought and he departed, as he always does, and dying will do, to the great joy of everyone near him. (492–93)8 The ‘Poke’ significantly presents Watts’s verses as calculated utensils for cooking sentiment, whereas the genre picture preferred (‘a greyhound bitch


in/The corner, a cat, and some empty bottles’) has the randomness and roughness of life. This bit of tomfoolery, to Watts’s delightfully understandable annoyance, also launched into wide circulation a deadpan joke of Lockhart’s that the ‘A’ of Watts’s middle initial stood for the fierce ‘Attila’ rather than the correct ‘Alexander’ (see Quarterly, 37, January 1828, 88). But the criticism that Watts aimed to ‘supply posterity with sugar-plums’ is fair enough – and accords with Griffin’s private comment about Watts’s lack of true sentiment. Watts, Fraser’s argues, marketed false poetic pictures. In the next issue’s article on ‘The Annuals’ the Literary Souvenir is generously ranked among the best, though Watts and his wife are criticized for spreading themselves too thin in the launching of multiple annuals, reusing plates, and egotistically printing too many of their own poems. It concludes: ‘We recommend him to concentrate his forces, and strike as boldly as he can; in which case we promise him our good word, and the good word of every other impartial critic’ (1830, 553). Fair words – but words directed to Alaric Attila Watts. Watts now begin inserting slurs on a number of Fraser’s writers in his newspapers, and the Fraserians answered in both newspapers and in Regina. A comical tempest in an ink-pot ensued. In August 1831 ‘A Word on Attila Watts’ (inside front cover) claims that Fraser’s had pulled its punches because an anonymous letter had pointed out that his financial position was precarious and his unoffending family was in need of the receipts from the Souvenir that might be affected by the quarrel. Whether the letter existed or was an invention, it is an accurate enough assessment. Significantly, Maginn charges Watts, ‘the principal fribble among the namby-pambies of the annuals,’ with traducing in his prefaces to the Souvenir ‘every person who appears to have had at any time the misfortune of his acquaintance,’ and with constantly dragging his wife’s name into print. This warning makes Watts’s decision to print a lengthy verse satire attacking the Fraserians in the Literary Souvenir for 1832 all the more extraordinary, since no young Miss wanted a giftbook full of grubstreet spleen. Journals influential in this market – such as La Belle Assemblée – took immediate notice of the poem as a strange anomaly.9 The ‘Conversazione’ begins typically enough, by heaping praise on such stalwarts of the annuals (including Watts’s own) as L.E.L. and Hemans, turns to some mild swipes at Blackwoods, makes a point (taken right from Fraser’s!) about the excessive puffing of Robert Montgomery’s poetry, mentions Watts’s ongoing squabbles with Colburn, and then aims at his main targets: And near to them, from Cork’s gay city, Two funny rogues who do the witty, Inspired by gin and true ‘potheen,’ For Mister Fraser’s Magazine; (235)

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These were Maginn and the inoffensive Crofton Croker, who while a close friend of Maginn steered clear of controversies and stuck to his job in the Admiralty and to the collecting of Irish folklore. (Watts may have thought that Croker, an amateur draftsman, drew the illustrations in the ‘Gallery,’ rather than their younger Cork friend Daniel Maclise.) The verses that follow give a picture of Maginn in his prime that only a hired counsel could (and in fact did) dispute as totally inaccurate, and is worth quoting in full: And, cheek-by-jowl, his brother twin, In all but dulness, Pat Maginn; Who though he write the LL.D. After his name, will never be A whit the graver than he is – Less fond of drunken ‘deevilries;’ Less ready for a vulgar hoax; Addicted less to pot-house jokes; And all the rough, plebian horse-play, He will so oft without remorse play! Give him a glass or two of whiskey, And in a trice he grows so frisky, So full of frolic, fun, and satire, So ready dirt around to scatter; And so impartial in his blows, They fall alike on friends and foes; Nay, rather than his humour balk His mother’s son he’d tomahawk! And so he can but set once more His boon companions ‘in a roar,’ Will scruple not, good-natured elf, To libel his illustrious self! A task so difficult, I own It can be done by him alone! And yet, to give the devil his due, He’d neither slander me nor you, From any abstract love of malice, But only in his humorous sallies; For of his friends, he’d lose the best, Much rather than his vilest jest! (236–37) Other Fraserians came off much worse – Watts is particularly bitter towards a ‘parasitic fish’ whom he evidently believed to be William Fraser, though apparently he confuses him with Hugh Fraser, and ascribes to him the writings of James Churchill (!). His collective judgment is that the Fraserians


are a mud-flinging ‘knot of blackguard boys/Collected in a public street,/To run-a-muck at all they meet’ (240). Needless to say the ‘conversation’ continued, with offenses on both sides, though Watts’s print libels are buried in the pages of his newspapers. Maginn’s comments are as often frank as satirical: ‘Mr. Watts fancies himself too much a genius. In his own estimation he can manage two or three kinds of “Annuals,” newspapers, and magazines, at the same moment, and with equal felicity. He is deceiving himself; he cannot do so’ (‘The Annuals’, 663). I think it is possible, however, that the central cause for Maginn training Fraser’s guns on Watts in 1834–35 was not the ‘Conversazione,’ but that Watts was spreading rumors about Letitia Landon that charged her with having affairs with both Maginn and Daniel Maclise. Macready confided to his diary in November of 1835 that John Forster, Landon’s former fiancée, had told him how ‘rumors and stories pressed upon him that he was forced to demand explanations from one of the reported narrators or circulators, Mr. A.A. Watts – that his denial was positive and circumstantial’ (1, 262). It is unclear from Macready’s entry whether Watts denied the truth of the stories, or that he was the circulator of them, or both. There is no doubt, however, that if Forster heard Watts was spreading the rumors, then Maginn would have heard as well. If the rumors began earlier in the year then they probably triggered the unusually hostile ‘Gallery’ portrait, with its claim that Watts was a backstabber. Maginn easily forgave attacks on what he had written, but zealously guarded his private life. Which brings us back to the lawsuit. Against the strong advice of his friends, Watts went to law by bringing suit against Fraser and Moyes (the printer), rather than attempting to target Maginn. Given the fact that Maginn was deeply in debt and intermittently hiding from bailiffs, and Watts recently had been involved in a number of costly suits, including a squabble with his partner in the United Service Gazette and a suit and countersuit with the publisher Colburn, this seems to have been a decision to go for the deep pockets.10 The first charge was for damages caused by an omnibus article on the annuals by Maginn and others published in November of 1834. In this piece, The Literary Souvenir and Watts’s poetry were broadly parodied – but Watts’s attorney Francis Pollock argued that the parodies had been accepted as real excerpts from the not-yet-published Souvenir, and reprinted by gullible country newspaper editors, thus hurting the sales of the annual. His example was a poem supposedly by a Polish poet writing in Magyar (!) named ‘Quaffypunchovics.’11 Fraser’s attorney Erle countered by calling witnesses to show that the Souvenir was decreasing in sales prior to this spoof, that none of the other annual proprietors had complained though given the same treatment, and that believing ‘Quaffypunchovics’ was a real poet stretched credulity. The jury sided with him and found that no libel had occurred, and awarded no damages.12


The second, more serious, count concerned the ‘Gallery of Literary Characters’ for June 1835. In some ways it is a sign of forbearance that Maginn waited until the 61th of the series to sketch ‘Mr. Alaric Attila Watts.’ When he did it unhinged his rival, and even the republication of it with the others in the gallery 50 years later caused conniptions in Watts’s son.13 It is surely the combination of verbal and visual that makes this attack so devastating, compared with those purely verbal shafts which preceded it. Neil Flax summarises the eighteenth-century aesthetic debate over verbal versus visual semiosis thusly: Pictorial signs have the virtue of sensory immediacy, clarity, and universality but the limitation of having to resemble slavishly the mere physical aspect of their referents. Verbal signs can deal with abstract ideas and concepts and can freely combine and disconnect the data of the physical world. But they suffer in their lack of sensate, material presence and in their consecutiveness. Since words must occur one at a time in a sequence and cannot enter the consciousness all at once, they do not provide that instantaneous, global, all-encompassing cognition that truth needs to convey. (187) Turning the page in the magazine, the instant apprehension of Watts’ image is then processed by Maginn’s text, which then prompts another look at the picture. In the cycling back and forth Watts is forever fixed – like the process of washing the developer over the photographic plate. Maclise’s lithograph, the likeness based on a Henry Howard portrait of Watts exhibited that year at the Royal Academy (Watts, 1884, 1974, Vol. II, 88, 196) shows Watts at the foot of a stairway with framed portraits under his arms, a miniature tucked into his hat, and a rolled up drawing in his coat. Maginn begins by disavowing any notion of what the artist meant by sketching Watts ‘flying down stairs with a picture under either arm, and a countenance indicative of caution’ (652) – but the implication is that he is stealing the pictures.14 There had recently been an arrest for such theft of another man involved with the annuals, and the insinuation hits Watts hard not in his character as a (gentle)man-of-letters, but in his profitable sideline of picture dealing. One might see it this way: in the midst of an ordinary literary mud-sling, Watts fingers Maginn for sleeping with Letty Landon; Maginn cries ‘Stop thief!’ Maclise’s portrait also deprives Watts of the cherished iconography of writing by this choice – he isn’t pictured with book and pen, important in his own study (a pose common to many writers in the series), and his cherished connoisseurship is reduced to the snatching of commodities. In the letterpress, the deadpan Maginn discusses how Watts in his own spat with ‘Satan’ Montgomery made word-play with an author’s name, and how Montgomery had in turn claimed ‘Alaric’ was entirely bogus-Byronic


and that Watts’s real name was ‘Andrew.’15 Noting Watts’s wife’s literary signature, he concludes, ‘We feel bound to add, however, that it is not very likely, in the usual chance of events, that such names as Alaric Attila Watts should have met in matrimony with those of Zillah Madonna Wiffen; and an unkind world may suspect a mystification somewhere.’16 He then goes on to trace Watts’s literary career from his attempt in the Literary Gazette to expose Byron as plagiarist, to his campaign to insinuate himself into Maga, his work at the Leeds Intelligencer and his editing of the Souvenir, concluding ‘he is now head nurse of an hospital of rickety newspaperlings, which breathe but to die.’ This account, while caustic enough, is also relatively true – Watts wasn’t above personal satire on other’s names in print (hence no right to complain about ‘Attila’), and some of his 20 or so newspapers were so rickety they haven’t even survived in the newspaper library at Colindale. But it is the conclusion that sent Watts to law: There is not a man to whom he has been under an obligation, from Jerdan to Lockhart, from Theodore Hook to Westmacott, from Andrews to Whittaker, from Crofton Croker to Carter Hall, from Wordsworth to Byron, from Scott to Southey, from Landseer to Wilkie, from the man who has fed him from charity to the man who has from equal charity supported his literary repute, whom he has not in his poor way libeled. His Souvenir has lately, for, we doubt not, very good reasons, been subjected to changes; and, as mutability and mortality are yoke-fellows, may ere long, it is probable, undergo the final one. In such a case, we little anticipate its immortality elsewhere. The memories committed to its keeping, we are afraid, have a too-fair chance of perishing. Would it not have been better for him to have avoided slander, gossip, ill-nature, libel, and scandal, and gone through the world as quietly as we have? Perhaps he may yet mend. (Maginn 1836, 652) Watts’s credibility as one of the literati – and an editor dependent on contributions from famous pens and brushes – is at stake here. But the blow struck hardest against his vanity. Was it, though, untrue? Maginn had worked alongside Watts at the Standard and had known him for almost 15 years. If Watts did talk about these men behind their backs he was in a very good position to know. Certainly the reams of gossip Watts sent to William Blackwood in 1821–27 would have supported the defense if it could have been obtained from Scotland – and Maginn was privy to this stream of communication that, as Oliphant describes it, cast ‘a keen eye on the smallnesses of the great, and those mean details into which [...] the largest transaction may be brought down’ (Oliphant, Vol. I, 508). Closing the article, however, he urges Watts to follow his own example of a quiet avoidance of controversy, and thus ironically claims kinship with him; as the ‘Gallery’ demonstrated to friend,


acquaintance, and enemy alike, Maginn’s efforts to avoid ‘slander, gossip, ill-nature, libel, and scandal’ had hardly met with success. Watts took the extraordinary step of collecting testimonial letters not only from those named by Maginn but also from everyone he had every come in contact with; he treated the trial, in short, like an academic tenure case. In October he grandly claimed to have 50 of them, and to be ready to call 100 witnesses in order to astronomically drive up the court costs and put Fraser out of business, after which he would print all the letters and the text of the trial (letter to Robert Blackwood, 5 October 1835; Oliphant, Vol. II, 174). The selection of replies printed by his son are an odd miscellany, from Hook’s droll ‘So far from authorizing or participating in the attack upon you to which you refer, I have not seen it. I can only assure you that if I had seen it, it would not in the slightest degree have altered the high opinion I have been taught to form of you’ (Watts 1884, Vol. II, 90), to Wordsworth’s and Southey’s solemn and stodgy disavowals, and Landseer’s annoyed ‘It is absurd in you to suppose for a moment that I could have anything to do with it’ (92). The trial, however, was not to be such a grand affair. Fraser’s case depended not on proving the truth of the assertions, but on demonstrating that the world of literary free-for-all was beyond the usual reach of the libel laws when engaged in by both parties. Maginn over and over defended the absolute freedom of the press to mock the press. Erle attempted to introduce numerous attacks on Maginn and Fraser’s which he claimed had been authored or authorised by Watts. Under the law of the time, however, Erle had not only to tie the libels to Watts, but also to prove that they had been ‘published.’ The way this was done was by having a third party swear to having purchased at a public venue the book, newspaper, or magazine. Thus Watts’s lawyer produced a medical student named Richard Harris to testify that he had bought the issues of Fraser’s in question at the Regent Street bookshop. Erle, however, while producing copies of various publications courtesy of Richard Allen of the Stamp-office, failed to produce witnesses to swear to their purchase, and his entire defense was disallowed. Watts was awarded by the jury a settlement of a meager £150. Fraser appealed, won a new trial, and again lost on the same technicality. Watts also won, presumably, a respite from Fraser’s attacks. ‘We therefore decline,’ it announces in the next number, ‘a controversy which our opponent proposes to carry on through the medium of barristers and juries’ (‘Mr. Alaric Alexander Watts’ 1836, 130). The opening of the same issue, however, contains a mock ‘Parliamentary Report ... to Inquire into the Conduct and to Regulate the Future Management of Fraser’s Magazine’ in which the ‘Goth’ Alaric ‘Attilla’ Watts makes a curtain call, whining, cringing, and presenting the next issue of the Literary Souvenir for Oliver Yorke’s judgment. The excerpts chosen, to drive home Watts’s failure to prove damage from ‘Quaffypunchovics,’ are parodies of poems by ‘Zillah Madonna’


and ‘Alaric Attila’ Watts. Zillah sings a song which points to the incongruity of the sentimental poetess’s subject matter and her daily life: Oh! do not call it idleness, if, at morn’s dewy prime, I think a pigmy poet the reverse of the sublime. Though I ‘neither toil nor spin,’ Belov’d, then unto me is given, A cup of coffee and a rusk at half-past six or seven. Oh! do not call it idleness, if, at day’s highest noon, I look in vain to find the little woodman in the moon; Or watch perchance a mazy dance, or listen to the voice Of the printer’s devil, talking of brevier or of bourgeois. Oh! do not call it idleness, if, when the day is done, At tea-time I enjoy the treat of chat and buttered bun: That hour recalls the sainted dead – forgive the shades of gloom! But the lamp ill-trimmed requires a lighted pastile in the room. (1836, 12) Her husband presents ‘The Lament of BOBADIL EL CHICK HO, the last of the Goths, after being defeated on the first count in the trial of FRASER’S MAGAZINE,’ and is sentenced to be flogged, though predictably ‘he howled before he was hurt’ (Fraser’s, 1836, 14). In July 1842, after the death of James Fraser, Watts wrote the new publisher of Fraser’s with an attempt to bury the hatchet – chiefly in the dying Maginn’s back. He asserted that he was ‘compelled’ to go to court because of ‘much unprovoked and scurrilous attacks on me’ by a ‘most unprincipled person’ (Watts, 1884, 1974, Vol. 2, 95). But the attacks, as we have seen, were not unprovoked – they were instead part of the conversation of lampoon that Maginn was determined to save from extinction. This gallery portrait, as well as many of the others, can be placed in a complex web of mostly anonymous discourse, verbal and pictorial. Behind every picture is a story.

Notes 1. The influence of the ‘Gallery’ was cemented in 1873 when William Bates, a classics Professor at Queen’s College, Birmingham, reprinted the originals with added commentary. Subsequent versions simply titled ‘The Maclise Portrait Gallery’ deleted the original letterpress, and were sold in more economical editions. D.G. Rossetti had commended the plates in the Academy a few years earlier (Thrall p. 21). 2. The drawings have also been seen as representative: ‘Incisive, elegant and economical, Maclise’s drawings for Fraser’s not only capture particular personalities, but a whole period and milieu’ (Ormond p. 686). 3. In a letter of 12 November 1826, William Blackwood answers Maginn’s criticisms of Blackwood’s tame nature in an angry fashion: I cannot see that the old and original vein of the magazine has been given up but most certainly I can have no desire or gain to see articles inserted in a


4.

5.

6. 7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

reckless fashion, merely to cost me a thousand pounds in the Jury-Court, or involve all my friends in trouble & botheration. (NLS MS 30309, f. 464) Watts’s Specimens of the Living Poets in three volumes was advertised in the Literary Gazette (16 February 1822, p. 110) with a large type ‘By ALARIC A. WATTS,’ though at that time he was almost completely unknown. This edition, furthermore, was never published. In the same year Maginn, conducting the family school in Cork, exhibited the most casual and unprofessional attitude towards his prolific contributions to Blackwood’s, for which he refused both payment and credit. Lockhart, for instance, wrote John Blackwood that he was ‘astonished to find how little his name was known outside of certain very limited (and not rich) classes’ (NLS MS 4061, f. 273). The translation never appeared, though several of the individual songs were worked into later ‘Noctes Ambrosianæ’ in Maga. See Ted R. Ellis 1883. Once at the reins, Watts filled the Literary Magnet with personalities and puffs, many for himself and the Literary Souvenir, leading off with L.E.L.’s ‘Lines to Alaric A. Watts, Esq.’; he devotes much space to the attack on Disraeli in the monthly ‘Chit-Chat; Literary and Miscellaneous,’ as well several separate articles accusing Disraeli of dishonesty, stealing into Robert Ward’s house to steal his diary, etc. A sample: Mr. Colburn intends publishing a supplement to Vivian Grey in the course of the ensuing season. Another work is announced, which is expected to make a ‘great sensation’ in the fashionable world. It is to be entitled ‘The Complete Picklock,’ or how to gain access to the Private Diaries of your Friends. By Solomon Prig, Ishmaelite; with a running commentary, by a man of great refinement. (‘Chit-Chat,’ n.s. 2 (1826): p. 251) The 16-year-old John Heneage Jesse published The Tales of the Dead: and Other Poems with Murray in 1830. John Minter Morgan’s The Reproof of Brutus, a verse commentary on social conditions, was published in the same year. I do not know whether Morgan actually wrote the ‘Poke at Attila’ or not; one suspects not. In its survey ‘The Annuals’ (December 1832) Fraser’s remarks that the verses ‘damaged the character of the his book, and disgusted the gentlemanly firm that published it’ (663); after the trial Fraser’s returns to the point, noting that ‘who but such an unsavoury personage as that now wincing before us could have thought of placing a production reeking of pothouse revelry and blackguard allusions into the hands of the “unoffending female?”‘ (‘Parliamentary Report’ 1836, p. 13). A useful tonic to Watts’s son’s account of an innocent upright citizen reluctantly driven to the law is the fact that Watts was in the Courts with much greater frequency than either Fraser or Maginn. At the time of this case, he was being sued for libel himself by Henry Dundas Perrett who brought charges on five counts against Watts for an article in the United Service Gazette. This case was tried on 11 December 1835 and, though ably defended by Serjeant Talfourd, Watts lost on four of the five counts. Fraser’s gleefully noted that Watts ‘walked out of court, after a very pleasant week’s work, minus at least two hundred pounds, on the balance of the two actions’ (‘Mr. Alaric Alexander Watts’ 1836, p. 129). The Times report (11 December 1835, p. 2) of this trial states Watts’ middle name as ‘Attila’! This joke name had been deployed in Fraser’s controversy with Bowring’s translations of Magyar poetry in 1830. See Fraser’s Magazine, May 1830, p. 440.

David E. Latané, Jr. 75 12. As an indication of the partial distortions that make an accurate record of literary quarrels so difficult, when the American author N.P. Willis was savaged for his gossipy Pencillings by the Way in Fraser’s, he rallied the North American Review to his defense, which then reported that Watts had won heavy damages for Fraser’s ‘fraudulent attack on his literary reputation. The attack was no more or less than a forgery, printed in that journal as the production of Mr. Watts’ (‘Willis’s Writings,’ North American Review 43, 1836, p. 410). 13. He protests the republication of ‘base and filthy buffoonery’ and gives the text of his letter in the Athenæum protesting the ‘gross violation of public decency involved in the revival, in the name of “literature,” of such obsolete stercoracities’ (1884: 2, p. 97). 14. In 1833 the Age charged that the Souvenir didn’t pay at that Watts ‘has no other subsistence except what he may pick up from occasional picture dealing’ (‘Presentation of the Annuals,’ 3 November 1833, p. 250). 15. Watts repeated the claim that Montgomery had added the prefix ‘Mon’ and that he was, in fact, the son of a clown from Bath with the surname ‘Gomery.’ The Oxford DNB claims this is true, though I have my doubts. 16. Her name was in fact Priscilla Maden Wiffen, though known as Zillah. The ‘Madonna’ seems to have been a joke. Watts’s attorney in the libel case claimed that these sentences libeled her as an unchaste woman, but this stretcher was not seriously considered. At the trial Erle argued somewhat ingeniously that the picture showed Watts in his suburban villa having been surprised by visitors and gathering up the artwork intended for his annual lest it should be trampled!

4 ‘The Original to the Life’: Portraiture and the Northern Star Malcolm Chase

The weekly Northern Star was central to the Chartist movement but it is not generally appreciated that it had a graphic dimension. In nearly 800 issues it included barely 12 illustrations of any note. However, especially in its earliest phase (1837–39), the paper depended heavily upon gifts and special offers to build a base of regular subscribers. They alone among readers received illustrative items – usually specially commissioned portraits such as Feargus O’Connor (Fig. 4.1), the greatest and most controversial Chartist leader (and the paper’s proprietor). A complete list of these engravings is given in the appendix. Of the 34 listed, no less than 27 were portraits, all but five of them contemporary personalities. Fourteen were Chartist leaders. The majority appeared between 1837 and 1842, the years of the paper’s greatest circulation and influence – during 1839 the Star outsold even The Times. This chapter explores the role of these engravings in establishing the particular identity of the newspaper and of the Chartist movement generally, and it considers to what extent they constituted an innovation in periodical publishing. These portraits were a powerful medium through which readers acquired a sense of the movement and thus of themselves as Chartists. Within ‘polite’ society the eighteenth century had been notable, as Horace Walpole observed, for ‘the rage ... for prints of English portraits’. As Marcia Pointon has suggested, this proved an important medium for promoting a shared understanding of the public and the national: ‘the head – and above all the face – with its cognitive and physiognomical particularities, stands in metonymic relation to the body as a whole. ... The collection of “Heads” is thus an epistemology that can be understood as ordering society and making visible the body politic’.1 In a similar way, the systematic commissioning and dissemination of the Star’s pantheon made visible the Chartist body politic or, rather, O’Connor’s vision of what it should be. What these pictures were not is as significant as what they were. The Star turned its back on the satirical tradition that had been so central to the graphical dimension of British radicalism. The paper hardly ever used 76

Malcolm Chase 77

Figure 4.1

Feargus O’Connor, Northern Star, December 1840.

78

Portraiture and the Northern Star

graphic satire in its pages. Conspicuously substituting conventional portraiture in satire’s place, the Star made important claims for Chartism to be seen as respectable, disassociating it from frivolity and gratuitous insult. This was in marked contrast both to radical journals of the mid-1830s and to the Northern Liberator, the only other Chartist newspaper with pretensions to national coverage, whose occasional graphical content was rooted in Regency-style depiction of ‘old corruption’. However, there was growing contemporary popular interest in fine art, most obvious in Knight’s Penny Magazine. While portraiture was declining in prestige, relative to landscape painting, in the sphere of high art, among the popular audience there was no abatement in interest in the genre. The Star was therefore appealing to an established taste: however, the size and quality of its engravings sought to lift portraiture beyond the decorative or iconographic to an almost totemic status. Its portraits were also a graphic riposte to the simultaneous elevation of Queen Victoria as a national icon. Periodicals played a strategic role in this process, as one aggrieved street vendor told Henry Mayhew: There’s so many ‘fine portraits of Her Majesty’, or the others, given away with the first number of this or of that, that people’s overstocked. If a working-man can buy a newspaper or a number, why of course he may as well have a picture with it. They gave away glasses of gin at the opening of that baker’s shop there, and it’s the same doctrine.2 More than 50 different prints of Victoria were available by early 1839. The Star’s publication of portraits can only be fully understood in this context. Its most explicit engagement with the craze came in December 1840 when it announced a portrait of the new-born Princess Royal, subsequently revealing it as a hoax: an engraving of Richard Oastler ‘the factory reform King’ appeared instead (Fig. 4.2).3 However, the expansion of graphic culture that helped create the first media monarch, benefited Chartism too. The Star was a pioneering force in the manipulation of circulation through offering additional inducements to purchasers; and the medium it chose for the purpose was a precisely timed response to developments elsewhere on the political stage. The Star also made a moral and political claim by emphasising the quality of their offerings. This was not merely promotional hyperbole, but rather a facet of that tradition in British radicalism ‘concerned not only with structural shifts of economic and political power but with the very quality and excellence of all dimensions of human existence’. Not for Chartism crude woodcuts like those accompanying broadside ballads printed, as one contemporary remarked, on paper ‘in quality ... so vile that no decent shopkeeper would condescend to use it to wrap copper change’.4 Devoid though they were of overt political imagery, the engravings were

Malcolm Chase 79

Figure 4.2

John Frost, Northern Star, September–November 1839.

80


profoundly political statements: in this sense they connect directly with the aspirations of William Morris and Walter Crane (who served his apprenticeship to W.J. Linton, the Chartist poet and engraver) to create popular art of the highest quality. The series also emphasised the vitality of Chartism. The movement was projected as occupying a dynamic present without need of historical precedent. Subjects we might expect to see are conspicuously absent, for example Thomas Paine or (Marvell excepted) any seventeenth-century parliamentarian. Nor is there a portrait of King Alfred, Wat Tyler or Shakespeare. There were no engravings of historical scenes at all: the Leeds Cloth Hall Meeting of 1832 was very recent history. Of the five posthumous subjects two – the veteran radicals William Cobbett and Henry Hunt – had died only in 1835. It was not simply the choice of portraiture over other genres that made a bid for respectability; the depiction of subjects was uniformly sober and, arguably, bordered on the anodyne. Nineteen of the British and Irish subjects had at some point been imprisoned, yet none were depicted in gaol. Indeed only two, the Chartist Peter McDouall (Fig. 4.3) and the charismatic Irish rebel Robert Emmet, were shown at their trials. Even then any tendency to depict a martyr was resisted. Domestic interiors were preferred. Especially striking is the inclusion of opulent soft furnishing and ionic columns. Standard features of seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury elite portraiture, they were a visual trope to which radicalism clung on. An ionic column and soft furnishings are much evident in the portrait of John Frost, engraved prior to the Newport Rising of November 1839 with which his name is most closely associated (Fig. 4.4). The background to the radical MP, Thomas Slingsby Duncombe, includes a screen of imposing trees, echoing the portrait landscape of aristocratic convention.5 A similar landscape is invoked – beyond yet another column – behind Ernest Jones. Other conventional visual tropes include the extended right hand of openness and friendship and the man of intellect and business snatching a moment from more pressing affairs. The subjects are never given to grand rhetorical gestures. At the risk of stating the obvious, the subjects were exclusively male. By privileging portraiture over allegory, mythology and historical subjects, women were completely eliminated from the pantheon. Despite – or indeed because of – the ‘modernity’ these engravings projected, Chartism was depicted as a wholly masculine realm, rooted in masculine traditions of political activism. For all their importance in promoting identity and national awareness, then, these portraits had a limiting function. They were narrow, too, in terms of the social classes depicted. This, too, had a profoundly limiting effect: its impact is most apparent when these engravings are compared with the crude woodcuts of working men that very occasionally

Malcolm Chase 81

Figure 4.3

Richard Oastler, Northern Star, February 1840.

82 Portraiture and the Northern Star

Figure 4.4

Peter McDouall, Northern Star, Autumn 1840.

Malcolm Chase 83

appeared in the paper. Of the presentation portraits only the Birmingham Chartist and prisoner John Collins, a shoemaker, was a working man. Overall, these portraits project a strong attachment to the cult of the gentleman leader, for so long a feature of British popular radicalism.6 This is most obvious in the profound resonance between Duncombe’s portrait and an 1810 depiction of Sir Francis Burdett, where the similarity is so great that it can only be the result of conscious imitation.7 These engravings also reinforced the centripetal influence of the Star, a hugely significant function in a movement wherein local and regional identities and particularisms carried such force. The exact choice of subjects was highly significant. The inclusion of a portrait in the series signalled the status of the subject. Feargus O’Connor was Chartism’s only truly national leader and he used his ownership of the newspaper, and role as patron of the series, both to promote his own reputation and that of others. The Star was the only national Chartist periodical that managed to sustain its circulation beyond a few years. However, when the Northern Star and Leeds General Advertiser, to give it its full title, first appeared in November 1837 it almost entirely depended upon a circulation in the northern textile districts, O’Connor’s powerbase at that time. For all his reputation as one of the most powerful platform orators of the age, the Star was the medium upon which he primarily depended to establish a national standing. It was no accident, then, that his portrait was the first to appear, as early as issue five (16 December 1837). And O’Connor was almost unique in appearing twice in the series – only Oastler was awarded a similar accolade. A further significant element in this process was the inclusion at an early stage of an engraving of his uncle Arthur (1763–1852), formerly an MP in the Irish House of Commons and a leading United Irishman. In his self-imposed French exile he had also served in Napoleon’s army. Through this portrait, Feargus both emphasised his radical pedigree and associated himself with a romantic revolutionary whose roots, nonetheless, lay in constitutional politics. O’Connor used the portraits to promote his version of a Chartist ‘apostolic succession’. Hunt and Cobbett’s inclusion speaks for itself. That of Oastler and the Poor Law campaigner J.R. Stephens, heroes without parallel within northern radicalism in the late 1830s, was highly desirable both in terms of building a circulation and symbolically incorporating them into the Chartist movement. Marvell, the only truly historical subject, qualified as a Yorkshire MP and republican. The other three portraits presented in the paper’s first year were Sir William Molesworth, Thomas Attwood and Bronterre O’Brien. The first was a tactical inclusion. At the 1837 general election, Molesworth had abandoned his Cornish constituency in favour of Leeds. O’Connor intended to flatter the radical baronet into supporting Chartism though their courtship was as brief as it was one-sided. By including Attwood and O’Brien, the Star was grounding Chartism explicitly in the


earlier traditions of, respectively, the Reform agitation and the unstamped press, consciously appealing to a Midlands and metropolitan readership and acknowledging the role of both men in the movement’s formative period. On the other hand, this portrait gallery is as interesting for those it excluded, as it is for those it depicted. The absence of certain Chartist leaders who were critical of O’Connor is eloquent. William Lovett and Henry Vincent were conspicuously missing: portraits of both were announced but never issued. An engraving of Vincent, the one orator who – Stephens aside – came closest to rivalling O’Connor in the movement nationally, was announced in February 1840 but quietly sunk without trace. Lovett’s had a rather more chequered career, details of which illustrate the deteriorating relationship between him and O’Connor. It was announced as ‘in preparation’ within a few weeks of his imprisonment in 1839. A second notice in February the following year confirmed Lovett’s inclusion was ‘intended’. Lovett was released from prison in July but of the portrait there was no sign. In December the Lovett engraving was billed tersely as ‘to follow’, but the same issue confirmed that a second, long-awaited full-length portrait of Feargus O’Connor would be ready the next week. This appeared as scheduled (Fig. 4.1) but Lovett never did.

I Aesthetically and politically, the conscious choice of contemporary portraiture over other graphic possibilities was highly significant. It is important to register, however, that technical considerations were also central in determining the graphic dimension of the Star. Portraits were easier and quicker to engrave compared to the more-complicated depiction of historical or contemporary events. Much of the background could be formulaic and supplied using a machine. In building a mass-circulation newspaper economy and speed of production were critical considerations. Yet at the same time the promotion of gifts and offers to readers required that the product be as of high a quality as possible. It might be asked why O’Connor embarked on this strategy rather than including illustrations within the paper and make a promotional virtue of doing so. At the time it was not possible to include steel engravings alongside letterpress. Wood blocks could be integrated, via stereotyped founded blocks, into letterpress printing yet even this presented technical challenges. As a broadsheet newspaper, Northern Star could not be printed using the cylinder process, so effectively exploited from the early 1830s by the smaller format Penny Magazine and its imitators. Their inclusion of small, coarse wood engravings revolutionised graphic journalism, even if readers did have to cut these illustrations out. It was not yet technically possible, however, for

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the larger broadsheet formats (which required the print to be laid flat to the page) extensively to incorporate woodcuts. On one of the very few occasions the Star attempted this, the first two editions appeared with the front page bearing a blank where the picture should have been, accompanied by an explanation that the engraving was incomplete when the paper went to press. This was all the more embarrassing because it occurred in the middle of the 1842 ‘general strike’ when accurate news of events was at a premium in the movement.8 Nor, in the late 1830s, had techniques of mass production wood engraving approached the level of sophistication or verisimilitude that the Illustrated London News was to achieve in the mid-1840s. Widespread unease surrounded the accuracy of graphic news reportage. Trumpeting its coverage of the royal marriage in 1840, the Observer nonetheless felt obliged to caution its readers that illustrations were less than faithful, while Dickens lampooned ‘the artist of a picture newspaper, with a foreground and figures ready drawn for everything’.9 Even the Illustrated London News achievements were open to question: production of its graphic reportage was divided among teams of engravers, each working on a small area of the total print from sketches that were necessarily approximate. Punch lampooned its pretensions to accuracy with a cartoon depicting an artist, palate and brushes in hand, adjusting the pose of revolutionaries manning a continental barricade.10 Significantly when, in January 1843, the Illustrated London News sought to reward readers’ loyalty at the end of its first six months, it did so through the presentation of a large freestanding engraving.11 By continuing to hold its line with regard to the exclusion of illustration, the Star both signalled that it occupied the journalistic high ground, and conceded it was stuck in a technological cleft stick. It was essential to the paper’s ambitions that it maintained a broadsheet format and it was unique among Chartist papers for doing so. In journalism format was itself a graphic statement about a paper’s purpose. The Northern Star staked a claim to gravitas that bore comparison with the Leeds Mercury, Manchester Guardian or The Times. There was no surer sign of irretrievable decline than when, in August 1852, the Star of Freedom (as the paper had become) assumed a ‘tabloid’ format. Including wood engraving would not have permitted large scale, quality graphic depiction, but it would have complicated and slowed down the Star’s production: as a mass-circulation broadsheet, producing several editions of each issue to accommodate regional nuances as well as breaking news, extensive use of illustration was not an available option. Supplementing the paper, however, with freestanding illustrations enabled significantly higher graphic standards than those of contemporary wood engraving. Having rejected run-of-press wood blocks, the choice for

86


O’Connor was forced by technical considerations: copper engraving was superior and relatively quick, but plates wore-out rapidly; lithographs were cheap to produce but relatively crude and the unwieldy printing process of the time made them unsuitable for long print-runs. Only steel engraving could provide the print-runs O’Connor needed, but preparation took three times as long as copper and was unpopular with engravers: this was probably why some ambitious initial proposals were abandoned in favour of simpler engravings. The Star made a virtue of lengthy production time: dates on which readers in each region could expect delivery of engravings were published well in advance, distribution being staggered over several weeks to spread the burden of production.12 By limiting these gifts to regular subscribers, the paper had a powerful tool with which to build its circulation. This was a strategy it effectively pioneered. It was not the first periodical to make such gifts: that accolade probably belongs to the Gentleman’s and Lady’s Magazines which gave away patriotic engravings of Wellington after Waterloo.13 These, however, were in a small format and their publication was an occasional gesture rather than a sustained circulation strategy. Periodicals’ gifts of portraits of Victoria fell into the same category. So when within five weeks of its launch the paper began issuing engravings it was embarking on an innovation that marked it out from its competitors which, if they had a graphic dimension at all, used only run-of-press woodcuts. The latter, though not negligible, only served to sharpen the quality of O’Connor’s initiative, as the contrast between the woodcut of McDouall from the Charter newspaper and Star portrait of the same subject show (Figs. 4.3 and 4.5).14 It is important to register the significance of the Star’s initiative in a culture and movement wherein non-verbal communication was highly important. In a society whose print media offered limited access to pictorial illustration, access to good quality graphic imagery was at a premium. Popular taste had long celebrated portrait prints, as Bewick recalled of his childhood.15 Then, and later, popular portraits were overwhelmingly of ‘emminent men’. The concerted promotion of Chartist portraiture therefore subverted popular deference, while the formality of depiction laid claim for parity with aristocratic and bourgeois portraiture. The Star recognised readers’ hunger for good quality art and never passed up an opportunity to stress the worth of its offerings. Thus the portrait of Irish revolutionary William Smith O’Brien was described as taken by the most eminent artist, and engraved in the most superior style ... this Portrait we unhesitatingly assert, is as perfect a likeness as art could supply, and is a superior thing to any ever given with a Newspaper. The friends of the original, who have seen it, declare that it is the original to the life.16

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Figure 4.5

Woodcut of Peter McDouall from the Charter, 7 April 1839.


A portrait in oils of Oastler (commissioned as the basis for the engraving, Fig. 4.3) toured Chartist localities, heralded with as much clamour by the paper as if it had been the man himself. A most masterly painting of RICHARD OASTLER executed by Mr Garside for Mr O’Connor now lies at Mr Taylor’s of Ashton, for inspection, and is daily visited by thousands, one and all of whom express their unbounded admiration of the performance. It shall be sent to Huddersfield, to Mr Pitkethly, for one week, where the unflinching friends of the original will have the opportunity of seeing the Old King almost alive. ... We now promise to our Subscribers a Portrait every 3 months, of 14 inches by 11. ... [E]ngravings of so expensive a character are not given with newspapers, and, their [i.e. readers’] much indulgence is due.17 Several dealers advertised frames specially made for these pictures.18 They became ‘the invariable ornaments of most working men’s houses’, according to one Lancashire observer.19 Another, from the Potteries, described workers’ homes decorated with ‘engravings of some Chartist or Radical leader belonging to the political school of the pater familias’. Emmet’s portrait hung in ‘hundreds’ of homes ‘throughout ... democratic Yorkshire’. A former Chartist handloom weaver recalled in 1889 that ‘among the many portraits that were given with the Northern Star none was more popular than that of Robert Emmet. ... I had one of these portraits myself, which, after being framed by my own hand, served for years to adorn the wall of my bedroom’.20 A contemporary social investigator was alarmed by ‘pictures of Frost ... found in many of the cottages, [which] display too closely their sympathy with rebellion’.21 ‘One of the pictures that I longest remembered’, recollected the grandson of a Cheltenham washerwoman, ‘it stood alongside samplers and stenciled drawings, and not far from a china statuette of George Washington – was a portrait of John Frost. ... I had been familiar with the picture since childhood, and cherish it as a memento of stirring times’.22 J.R. Stephens was bemused to learn of ‘an old Dragoon Guard ... so much did he respect him that he carried his portrait under the flap of his saddle bags “that he might think of me whenever he buckled them on” ’.23 These engravings were not solely household or private artefacts. They were ‘consumed’ in collective as well as domestic settings. The selection of subjects was debated in the letters’ page of the paper. Often decorated with evergreens and illuminated by gaslight, portraits would flank banners at political meetings; and they were carried, framed, in processions. The uses to which portraits were put could be almost theatrical (interestingly, O’Connor himself used the term ‘performance’ to describe the Oastler portrait). Most theatrical of all were public burnings of Stephens’ portrait, following his renunciation of Chartism at his trial for sedition in December 1839. 24

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It is impossible to estimate how far the engravings contributed to sales, but rivals certainly claimed they unfairly boosted circulation. One newsagent claimed portraits doubled sales, another that they depressed those of other radical papers.25 However, as for any innovator, O’Connor’s experience was not without problems. It was difficult to regulate the production of engravings in the quantities the paper quickly came to require. Northern Star had established a massive readership and the promise of regular presentations of engravings, initially made when its circulation was in the low thousands, was by mid-1839 placing huge strains on a paper selling up to 50,000 copies per issue. Criticisms of late or non-delivery appeared frequently; so too did explanations and rebuttals by the paper: Some of our Readers seem to have a very erroneous impression respecting the process of Copper or Steel printing. They imagine it can be done as easily, and as quickly, as a power loom weaves calico pieces – or as a letterpress printing machine turns out Newspapers. The fact is, the process is the most tedious; one requiring the greatest care, of any operation I know of ... Men are working night and day. In future we will not fix a day for distribution until the whole requisite number has been printed.26 The following month readers were reminded that, ‘after all the clamour, we shall, within a period of less than ten months, have presented our Subscribers with six Portraits, worth more than five guineas, if purchased singly, and as good as the art can furnish’.27 Thereafter both commissions and the standard of engraving were simplified and O’Connor was careful not to promise more in artistic terms than the paper could deliver. Between late 1841 and June 1846 only three engravings were presented. They were now an occasional reward for loyalty rather than a sustained strategy to build circulation. (The readership had stabilized around 13,000, significantly lower than its peak in 1839.) Yet these portraits remained a powerful form of political communication. The inclusion of the Dublin Chartist, Patrick O’Higgins, in 1846 was a tactic to woo Irish support for Chartism; and in 1848 that of Ernest Jones, a newcomer to Chartism, sealed his appointment as de facto lieutenant to Feargus O’Connor. Towards the end of 1848, O’Connor resumed a regular programme of engravings. The subjects reveal a change in thinking: the addition of the European revolutionaries Blanc and Kossuth sought to locate Chartism more explicitly in an international perspective. Meagher, Mitchell and Smith O’Brien (along with two other Irish rebels subsequently dropped) constituted a belated tactical recognition that Chartism’s greatest chance of political success rested on close co-ordination with Irish nationalism. At the same time these engravings evaded the controversy that surrounded the rejection of Chartism’s third mass petition in April 1848, and the arrests and trials of large numbers of Chartist activists that followed. Although the


decline of Chartism after this date has often been exaggerated, the times were not propitious for a mass-circulation radical broadsheet. The choice of subject matter for the final presentations, especially the late Sir Robert Peel, leader of the Conservatives, and the two views of the 1851 Exhibition (to which Northern Star itself was implacably opposed) is a graphic indicator of a loss of political momentum.

II One of the themes of this volume is how should periodical illustrations be ‘read’? Were they primarily ornamental, or at most a reinforcement of information and sentiments derived from the printed word? Much more likely is that they were integral, even special, to the processes by which people thought about the world around them. ‘One cannot underestimate the scale and intensity of the politics of sight, or the power these forms of communication afforded to the individuals who used them’.28 These portraits were powerful visual statements in terms of technological accomplishment and aesthetic quality. They were powerful, too, for the information they conveyed about the movement’s leadership and its cohesion around the personality of O’Connor. It would be a mistake to see them as fulfilling a decorative function alone, or simply as vectors of physiognomic information about a leadership otherwise visually remote from most of the movement. While publicity emphasised their verisimilitude, these engravings also had considerable symbolic value. Even in our own society and culture, portraits retain a powerful talismanic function. What a portrait signifies, Pointon argues, is ‘often connotative rather than denotative’.29 In other words, portraits are as important as the vectors of values as they are of factual graphic information. There is about the Star engravings an air of understated self-assurance and an absence of rhetorical flourish which suggests they were anchored in a profoundly confident mindset, one which looked forward to the successful outcome of the Chartist movement under a leadership that was fully prepared to take its place in the Westminster arena. More problematically, however, the cumulative effect of these portraits is to homogenise their subjects. Hardly any offered specific geographical context. The gaze of these portraits is a nationalised gaze, and that accentuated the difference and distance between the collective subjects and their intended viewers. The portraits sharpened the contrast between the Chartist ‘front bench’, to the construction of which they so effectively contributed, and the movement at large. Mass open-air meetings gave Chartism so much of its social and political potency, and the Star was indefatigable in its coverage of them: yet its portrait gallery exudes an air of indoor respectability. These were portraits of an anticipated near future, a pantheon of Chartist MPs to whom would be transferred the political authority presently enjoyed by the traditional elite. Thus the subjects were depicted amidst some of the

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trappings of that elite, while the manner of their portrayal anticipates something of the deference they might expect to enjoy. The near-cessation of the series after the rejection of the 1842 Petition until 1848 is highly significant in this respect. Ostensibly, if ever there was a point when the Star needed to act to stem a fall in circulation this was it. Instead there was a hiatus, suggestive of a deep-rooted loss of assurance. The subjects chosen for the resumed series, after the rejection of a further mass petition in 1848, reflected attempts to rethink and even relaunch Chartism as a movement more in tune with Irish and continental nationalisms. It was an attempt that failed, as the final four engravings bear witness.

Appendix: Engravings Presented by Northern Star Subject

Issued

FEARGUS O’CONNOR [small]

December 1837

ANDREW MARVELL ARTHUR O’CONNOR RICHARD OASTLER [small] HENRY HUNT SIR WILLIAM MOLESWORTH WILLIAM COBBETT THOMAS ATTWOOD BRONTERRE O’BRIEN LEEDS CLOTH HALL MEETING, 1832 1839 CONVENTION JOHN FROST J.R. STEPHENS RICHARD OASTLER [large] JOHN COLLINS PETER MCDOUALL FEARGUS O’CONNOR [large] ROBERT EMMET TRIAL OF NEWPORT PRISONERS 1842 PETITION T.S. DUNCOMBE W.P. ROBERTS

February 1838 February 1838 March/April 1838 June 1838 August 1838 September 1838 November 1838 December 1838 January 1839 May 1839 September–November 1839 (Fig. 4.4) November 1839 February 1840 (Fig. 4.2) Autumn 1840 Autumn 1840 (Fig. 4.3) December 1840 (Fig. 4.1) July 1841 July/August 1841 July/August 1842 November 1842 September 1843

PATRICK O’HIGGINS

June 1846

O’CONNORVILLE (the first Chartist land colony) ERNEST JONES JOHN MITCHELL LOUIS BLANC WILLIAM SMITH O’BRIEN TF MEAGHER

January 1847 January 1848 November 1848 Spring 1848 February 1849 June 1849

92


KOSSUTH ROBERT PEEL PRESIDENTS of USA GREAT EXHIBITION (conjectural) GREAT EXHIBITION (actual)

September 1849 July 1850 September 1850 December 1850 April 1851

Announced but never issued: William Lovett (1839–40), Henry Vincent (1840), the Royal Lying-in (1841), Washington and the Declaration of Independence (1841), Father Matthew (1841), James Duffy (1848), Pope Pius IXth (1848), Richard O’Gorman (1848).

Notes This is based on my chapter ‘The politics of sight’, in Owen Ashton and Joan Allen (eds), Papers for the People: A Study of the Chartist Press, 2005. I am grateful to the editors and publisher, Merlin Press, for permission to publish this abridgement. 1. Walpole quoted in Donald p. 58. 2. H. Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor ... Volume 1: London Street-Folk, p. 329. 3. N[orthern] S[tar] 12 December 1840, 2 January and 6 March 1841. 4. Yeo pp. 107–08; Charles Manby Smith, The Little World of London, p. 265. 5. Roberts and Thompson p. 61. Other engravings discussed here and reproduced in this volume are the first depicting O’Connor (p. 29), O’Brien (p. 30), Collins (p. 34), Roberts (p. 67), O’Higgins (p. 84) and Jones (p. 101). 6. J. Belchem and J.A. Epstein, ‘The Nineteenth-Century Gentleman Leader Revisited’, Social History 22/2 (May 1997). For an illuminating case study of the centrality of portraiture for the social construction of identity, see Jordanova pp. 101–15. 7. 1810 portrait drawn and engraved by William Williams (in possession of the author), depicting him standing alongside a table on which lays the text of Magna Carta. 8. NS 20 August 1842. 9. Plunkett p. 209; C. Dickens, Bleak House (1853), chapter 33. 10. Punch vol. 15 (1848), p. 39. 11. Wolff and Fox pp. 560–61. 12. NS 7 March, 4 July, 5 December 1840. 13. I am grateful to Belinda Beaton for this information. 14. Portraits of Frost and McDouall appeared in a series in the Charter in 1839: see reproductions of a selection in Roberts & Thompson. 15. Bewick p. 192. 16. NS 11 November 1848. 17. NS 1 June 1839. 18. NS 12 May 1838, 6 July and 1 August 1839 and 10 April 1841; see also Regenerator and Advocate for the Unrepresented, 3 November 1839. 19. Unpublished diary entry, quoted in Jones p. 147. 20. Farish p. 50. 21. Sinclair p. 57.

Malcolm Chase 93 22. Adams pp. 163–63. 23. Goddard p. 158. 24. NS 21 December 1839, Bradford Observer 19 December 1839 and Halifax Guardian 21 December 1839. 25. NS 5 January 1839; J.A. Epstein, ‘Feargus O’Connor and the Northern Star’, International Review of Social History, p. 75. 26. NS 2 November 1839. 27. NS 7 December 1839. 28. Vernon pp. 107–08; c.f. Porter 1988 p. 187. 29. Pointon p. 5.


Part II Mid-Century Graphics: Fiction, Fashion, Labour and Layout


5 Man and Dog: Text and Illustration in Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop Beryl Gray

The Old Curiosity Shop evolved as a serial in Dickens’s own threepenny weekly miscellany, Master Humphrey’s Clock, the pages of which it entirely took over from its ninth chapter until its completion.1 From the outset, a crucial element in Dickens’s vision for his periodical was that it should be enhanced by ‘woodcuts dropped into the text’,2 an idea to which he remained committed when the Clock became solely a vehicle first for the Shop, and then for Barnaby Rudge, with which it ended its run. Accordingly, 75 wood engravings (as they in fact were) were integrated with the text of the first story, and 76 with the second. George Cattermole produced 14 illustrations for the Shop, and 17 for Rudge, while Daniel Maclise and Samuel Williams provided just one apiece for the Shop, each featuring Nell, but Hablot K. Browne (Phiz) designed no fewer than 59 for each novel. He also drew every one of the periodical’s illuminated capital letters. Although it was over Cattermole’s essentially still, architectural scenes that Dickens tended to rhapsodize, he routinely left it to Browne to create a visual correlative for the more energized or bizarre emanations of his fancy. As the story outgrew the frame of the miscellany, Browne responded with a series of drawings that – as John Harvey has shown – increasingly reveal his extraordinary ability both to penetrate, and to conspire with, Dickens’s imagination.3 Furthermore, he developed ways of using the exigencies of instalment publication to complement Dickens’s narrative. This collaboration of artist with author is exemplified in Browne’s acclaimed representations of Quilp; but it is also demonstrated in his depictions of Jerry, who, though less prominent and certainly less fantastic, is the dwarf’s moral counterpart. One is conceived by Dickens as a kind of dog, the other is a master of dogs. Quilp has clear and widely-acknowledged affinities with a range of fairy-tale monsters or lawless vice figures, pre-eminently Punch.4 Brutal, preternaturally frenetic, and as gleeful in destroying others’ well-being as 97

98 Man and Dog: Text and Illustration in The Old Curiosity Shop

Punch is in despatching his fellow puppets, Quilp – like Punch – is nevertheless a great comic creation. Unlike Punch, however, his tyranny is charged with a potent animalism that both repels and compels. While Punch is amorous, Quilp is licentious. He is also a devouring, imbibing, fume-exuding, bodily organism, which Punch, manifestly, is not. With his surreal appetites and manner of indulging, displaying, and inflicting them, Quilp is a grotesquely self-exaggerating, overwhelming life-force; and it is this force from which his evil – as distinct from Punch’s entertaining anarchy – draws its potency. To whatever extent he owes his origin to Punch, then, the source of his animality is not the puppet, whose body can only dangle ‘all loose and limp and shapeless’ (131) when it is not being manipulated by his exhibiter. With an extensive range of creatures from the ferret and the hawk to the lion and the monkey contributing, as their only function in the novel, the defining characteristics of their genera to the creation of his singularity, exceptional among them is the dog – the creature to which, as Paul Schlicke has pointed out, Quilp is ‘systematically linked’.5 However, it is not merely the connection itself, but the ways in which it is developed and exploited, that most reveal the nature of Quilp’s vital peculiarity. It is through specifically canine metaphor and canine mimesis that, paradoxically, Quilp fascinates as both humanly credible and superhumanly fanciful. The chief mannerism to identify him as belonging to the canine species – the habitual ‘ghastly smile’ (as distinct from Punch’s ‘usual equable smile’ [128]) that exposes the ‘few discolored fangs6 that were yet scattered in his mouth, and gave him the aspect of a panting dog’ – is registered with his first entry into the story, which occurs in the opening paragraph of chapter 3 (Clock, VIII), the chapter in which Master Humphrey detaches himself from the narrative ‘to leave those who have prominent and necessary parts in it to speak and act for themselves’ (33). Expressly ‘dog-like’ by chapter 4; maintained as Quilp smokes and drinks throughout the night while forcing his meek wife to sit sleepless throughout the night as punishment for daring to participate in her mother’s tea-party; and called up ‘in full force’ when he hears that mother, Mrs Jiniwin, denounce him as ‘a little hunchy villain and a monster’ (45), the smile becomes associated with an ever-extending range of canine performances and impressions. These include shaking himself in a ‘very doglike manner’ (45); coiling himself into Nell’s little bed; rolling himself onto his feet; leaping out of his hammock ‘not with his legs first, or his head first, or his arms first, but bodily – altogether’ (467); his snarling threat to bite his wife in chapter 4; the ferocity with which he eats and drinks and chews (which prefigures the criminal’s voracity in chapter 18 of Barnaby Rudge, which in turn prefigures Magwitch’s attack on the food and drink Pip brings him in chapter 3 of Great Expectations);7 and his capacity for ‘entertaining himself with a melodious howl, intended for a song, but bearing not the faintest resemblance to any scrap of any piece of

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music ... ever invented by man’ (379). The looking-glass image in chapter 5 that conveys to Mrs Jiniwin ‘the reflection of a horribly grotesque and distorted face with the tongue lolling out’ (45) – the tongue an inspired afterthought inserted into the manuscript8 – retains its influence as Quilp’s pursuit of Nell evokes the behaviour of a scent-aroused cur. Unclean,9 he is also, by implication, malodorous. From the outset, Browne’s depictions of Quilp eagerly corroborate the dwarf’s foulness, but it is not until chapter 21 (Clock, XVIII) that he has the opportunity to do full justice to his understanding of the nature of Dickens’s conception. In this chapter, Quilp – who reflexively denigrates other males as dogs, particularly his wharf boy Tom Scott10 and Kit Nubbles – takes Dick Swiveller to the hut rotting by the Thames mud, and persuades him that he can become a rich ‘lucky dog’ by marrying Nell. Swiveller’s gullibility obliges Quilp to withdraw from the hut in order to throw himself onto the ground and roll about – absolutely like a dog – in a frenzy of delight. His behaviour educes his spiritual double: In the height of his ecstacy, Mr Quilp had like to have met with a disagreeable check, for, rolling very near a broken dog-kennel, there leapt forth a large fierce dog, who, but that his chain was of the shortest, would have given him a disagreeable salute. As it was, the dwarf remained upon his back in perfect safety, taunting the dog with hideous faces, and triumphing over him in his inability to advance another inch, though there were not a couple of feet between them. ‘Why don’t you come and bite me, why don’t you come and tear me to pieces, you coward?’ said Quilp, hissing and worrying the animal till he was nearly mad. ‘You’re afraid, you bully, you’re afraid, you know you are.’ The dog tore and strained at his chain with starting eyes and furious bark, but there the dwarf lay, snapping his fingers with gestures of defiance and contempt. When he had sufficiently recovered from his delight, he rose, and with his arms a-kimbo, achieved a kind of demon-dance round the kennel, just without the limits of the chain, driving the dog quite wild. Having by this means composed his spirits and put himself in a pleasant train, he returned to his unsuspicious companion, whom he found looking at the tide with exceeding gravity, and thinking of that same gold and silver which Mr Quilp had mentioned. (169–70) It is significant that Quilp responds to the dog’s frustrated ‘salute’ as though he were indeed one of his own kind, and shared his language, but the characteristics he attributes to the animal are solely his. While the captive dog’s savageness is instinctive, and accounted for by his office and his ill use (evidenced by the broken kennel, the too-short chain), Quilp’s sadism is calculated: the facial contortions and gestures that he practises in close (though safe) proximity to the dog, and at the dog’s level, show him as the


more cowardly animal. Fittingly, he is actually even lower than the unfortunate beast; for as the natural dog strains after his tormentor, Quilp remains on his back in bizarre imaging of the evil hybrid his nature suggests,11 until he is sated, and – in a grotesque role-reversing parody of the no less grotesque spectacle of bull-, bear-, or lion-baiting (with dogs) – ready to perform his goading devil-dance around the tethered animal. Although this behaviour does recall Punch’s fight with Toby, it is not (pace Paul Schlicke) ‘straight from’12 the puppet play, in which Toby seizes Punch’s nose, and Punch beats the dog (or Punch beats Toby, who then seizes Punch’s nose). In Dickens’s scene, there is – necessarily – no physical contact between Quilp and his foiled attacker. Rather, his encounter with the dog fans his hysterical delight into demonic malignancy, projecting his performance beyond the uninhibited antics of the puppet. Browne’s responsive dropped-in illustration presents the opposed figures face to face as an almost matching pair (see Figure 5.1).

Figure 5.1 Hablot Knight Browne, [‘Quilp mocking the dog’]: The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–41). Reproduced by permission of the Charles Dickens Museum.

Beryl Gray 101

The dog’s frenzy as he stands on his hind legs, straining against the chain as he impotently claws the air, is perfectly captured. His attitude and shape are reflected by Quilp, whose legs – one higher than the other – wave in the air as though in mimicry of the dog’s fore-legs, while his backward-pointing tufts of hair both resemble the dog’s short, pointed, flattened ears, and suggest the devil’s horns. Despite the flawlessness of the depictions so far, however, there are significant discrepancies between the text and its illustration. Dickens stresses that the dwarf’s ‘head and face were large enough for the body of a giant’ (27). Browne’s Quilp’s head is less disproportionately large – less monstrous – than Dickens’s Quilp’s, while the illustration’s perspective somewhat flatters the length of Quilp’s legs. Nor is the dog large enough to accord with Dickens’s description. With Quilp on his backside rather than on his back, Browne’s modifications tend to render him slightly less grotesque than his original creator does, and – the noose-like coil of rope suspended above the fiend’s head (astutely developed from the gallowsgame symbols deeply scored on the table at which Quilp has left Swiveller) notwithstanding13 – to detract from both Dickens’s and his own presentation of him as inherently more base than his figurative kin.14 Perhaps Browne’s restraint was the consequence of Thackeray’s advice to ‘think more and exaggerate less’,15 though here exaggeration would hardly have been possible. If Swiveller’s gullibility in the early stages of the novel induces irrepressible ecstasy in Quilp, Kit’s virtue provokes his murderous frenzy towards the end of it, in chapter 62 (Clock, XXXIX). Watched by Sampson Brass, his attorney, he batters the face of the monstrous figurehead he has dragged into his lair crying, ‘Is it like Kit – is it his picture, his image, his very self? ... Is it the exact model and counterpart of the dog – is it – is it – is it?’ (479). Nell’s ethereal purity being the opposite of Quilp’s rankly virile malevolence, Kit, as the staunch champion of the one, is the natural and recognized foe of the other. But, erected as Kit’s representative, the effigy is more nearly an inflated representation of Quilp himself (the terrified Brass has not been able to decide whether Quilp sees it as a family portrait, or the likeness of an enemy). Sawn off at the waist so that it can be forced to fit into the counting-house, its head is thereby proportionately enlarged, and it looms above Quilp (described as ‘goblin-like’ in chapter 4) ‘like a goblin or hideous idol whom the dwarf worshipped’ (477). Although lambasting it as the counterpart of the ‘dog’ Kit, in effect he is (characteristically) lambasting a projection of his evil genius.16 Browne’s accompanying illustration depicts Quilp in violent simian, rather than canine, mode (see Figure 5.2). His facial expression is certainly vicious, but the head is – again – too small, so that the balance between the ratios of each figure is forfeited. However, Browne compensates by equipping the effigy with goggling eyes, to one of which the reader’s own eyes are irresistibly drawn as it stares fixedly down at the assailant, who points

102

Man and Dog: Text and Illustration in The Old Curiosity Shop

Figure 5.2 Hablot Knight Browne (Phiz), [‘Quilp assails the effigy’]: The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–41). Reproduced by permission of the Charles Dickens Museum.

upwards towards it. These eyes endorse the perception that, in essence, the image returns that of the dwarf, for they faithfully accord with their textual description while also evoking the ‘great goggle eyes’ (376) that an upsidedown Quilp had trained on Kit’s terrified mother from the roof of the stagecoach fourteen chapters earlier. Into the eyes of the effigy – now ‘the dog’ (479) in its own right – the self-attacking Quilp has already been sticking forks. Having further authenticated the image (no longer ‘it’, but ‘him’) as connoting himself by cutting his own name on it, he intends ultimately to consign it to the fire to which he is himself seemingly impervious,17 but for which he is inevitably destined.18 Manifested beyond confrontations such as these, Quilp’s canine associations reinforce his connection with the novel’s itinerant entertainers: Codlin and Short, the Punch and Judy showmen; Vuffin, who exhibits giants and dwarfs;19 and – pre-eminently – Jerry, the master of the performing dogs. These travellers gather at their social nexus, the Jolly Sandboys (to which Short has also guided Nell and her grandfather), during chapters 18 and 19 (Clock, XVI and XVII).

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As Schlicke has shown, the Shop was written at a time when such travelling show-people were under considerable pressure, and finding it ever more difficult to make a living.20 All the novel’s exhibitors seem to be experiencing diminishing returns, and the competition for audiences is keen: Codlin and Short, for example, are anxious to leave the Jolly Sandboys early in the morning ‘because unless we get the start of the dogs and the conjuror, the villages won’t be worth a penny’ (154). On the face of it, Jerry’s behaviour might indicate that he is also feeling the pinch. His arrival is anticipated by the unaccompanied appearance of his four bedraggled, ‘very dismal’ (148) dogs when they make their pre-supper entrance at the Jolly Sandboys. Significantly, the dogs are introduced not as accessories, but as protagonists, with their collective and individual demeanours, trained attitudes, and costumes described in telling detail: indeed, Short is to acknowledge the dogs’ status as fellow entertainers when he points to their dresses and says to Jerry, ‘Your people don’t usually travel in character, do they? ... It must come expensive if they do?’ (149) But our concern for the demands on Jerry’s purse is undermined by the attention that has already been drawn to the ‘small whip wherewith to awe his company of comedians’ (149) that he retained as he otherwise disencumbered himself and approached the fire. It is the dogs’ plight – especially that of the ‘old bandy dog of particularly mournful aspect’ (148) – that touches us. This old trouper, ‘stopping when the last of his followers had got as far as the door, erected himself upon his hind legs and looked round at his companions, who immediately stood upon their hind legs, in a grave and melancholy row’ (148). Tarnished and discoloured with rain and dirt, the spangled gaudiness of the dogs’ apparel loses all semblance of gaiety on the backs of its equally besmirched wearers, one of whom has been made also to wear a cap ‘tied very carefully under his chin, which had fallen down upon his nose and completely obscured one eye’ (148). The balance between the pathetic and the comic in this passage admits pity while reserving indignation. Little dogs dressed as humans were familiar show figures. Implicitly acknowledging their attraction as performers in his own presentation of them, Dickens exposes – without recourse to scolding rhetoric – the exploitation and canine misery underlying their appeal as they stand ‘patiently winking and gaping and looking extremely hard at the boiling pot’ (148) as it emits its enticing aroma of blended meats, new potatoes, and other vegetables. All the same, through the activation of our imaginative sympathies, we have become deprecating spectators even before their master’s entrance gives them the cue to drop down and walk about like dogs again (but still dogs whose natural posture remains compromised by their costumes). If we are not immediately directed to denounce Jerry, we are certainly not invited to approve of him; and when we are told that Pedro,

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the cap-wearing dog, ‘a new member of the company and not quite certain of his duty, kept his unobscured eye anxiously on his master, and was perpetually starting upon his hind legs when there was no occasion, and falling down again’ (149), the sense that the animals’ training depends not on their eagerness to please, but on their fear of displeasing, is confirmed. But if Dickens has refrained from overt moralizing up to this point, the reader’s sensibilities have been sufficiently worked upon for them to be readily outraged at the scene’s finale, which is also the finale both to the chapter, and to the sixteenth number of the Clock. When the odoriferous contents of the supper cauldron have been transferred to the tureen, the ‘poor dogs’ (150) – who have been watching the proceedings ‘with terrible eagerness’ (150) – all stand on their hind legs again. Nell’s pitying impulse is to throw them some food before even taking any herself, but is stopped by their master: ‘No my dear, no, not an atom from anybody’s hand but mine if you please. That dog’ said Jerry, pointing out the old leader of the troop, and speaking in a terrible voice, ‘lost a halfpenny to-day. He goes without his supper.’ The unfortunate creature dropped upon his fore-legs directly, wagged his tail, and looked imploringly at his master. ‘You must be more careful Sir’ said Jerry, walking coolly to the chair where he had placed his organ, and setting the stop. ‘Come here. Now Sir, you play away at that, while we have supper, and leave off if you dare.’ The dog immediately began to grind most mournful music. His master having shown him the whip resumed his seat and called up the others, who, at his directions, formed in a row, standing upright as a file of soldiers. ‘Now gentlemen’ said Jerry, looking at them attentively. ‘The dog whose name’s called, eats. The dogs whose names an’t called, keep quiet. Carlo!’ The lucky individual whose name was called, snapped up the morsel thrown towards him, but none of the others moved a muscle. In this manner they were fed at the discretion of their master. Meanwhile the dog in disgrace ground hard at the organ, sometimes in quick time, sometimes in slow, but never leaving off for an instant. When the knives and forks rattled very much, or any of his fellows got an unusually large piece of fat, he accompanied the music with a short howl, but he immediately checked it on his master looking round, and applied himself with increased diligence to the Old Hundredth. (150) Although every halfpenny would undoubtedly have counted, there is no indication in the scene that the loss of one would make a significant difference to Jerry. Not only is he a regular at the hospitable inn, but he

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expresses no urgency about setting off in the morning (Codlin and Short will leave him snoring), and has been able to provide his ‘people’ with complete new wardrobes – representing a substantial outlay – for them to ‘come out’ (149) in the next day at the races: by his own admission, he has just not bothered to remove their defunct wet garments.21 Convivially at his ease in his own velveteen coat, there is in fact nothing about him to suggest imminent poverty; nothing to suggest that his twofold punishment of the senior dog is justified, even if we suppose that the creature could possibly be expected to associate his delayed punishment with his offence.22 As the aged and acknowledged leader of the troupe – Jerry’s deputy, in effect – it is he who should be deemed above all the others to need and to have earned his comforts; certainly his food. By depriving him of his supper, forcing him to labour while his companions are fed morsel by morsel, showing him the whip, and looking round threateningly every time the dog voices his anguished protest, the feasting Jerry entirely forfeits our goodwill. It is, as Q.D. Leavis says, ‘the most touching and pregnant scene in the book’. 23 But, as so often in Dickens, here pathos is made to contend with humour. All the elements of a popular kind of street or fairground entertainment are represented. Not only do the dressed-up dogs perform engagingly (or so many reader-observers would have found) on their master’s commands and their leader’s signal, or from instilled habit, but barrel organ and canine howling join in conceivably amusing cacophony. The Old Hundredth – the time-honoured (and still well-known) tune to the metrical version of Psalm 100, ‘All people that on earth do dwell’ – would have been familiar to Dickens’s Protestant contemporaries, to whose minds the words would instantly have sprung. 24 Exhorting worshippers to ‘Sing to the Lord with cheerful voice’, and praising Him for his goodness and everlasting mercy, the hymn includes the lines ‘The Lord, ye know, is God indeed, /.../ We are His flock, He doth us feed’. Mechanically ground out by the be- costumed, unfed animal in the presence of his own, merciless, lord, the Old Hundredth provides a wonderfully ironic, if incipiently comic, accompaniment to the Sandboys supper. With every potential for entertainment allowed, then, it is not the fact that the dogs have been trained to perform that the episode encourages us to deplore, but the inhumane methods adopted, as by Divine Right, of the trainer. 25 Dickens makes us feel the dejection, hunger, and anxiety of all the dogs; but in a scene where appetite and (in Codlin’s case) greed are stimulated through sight and smell in readiness for the satisfactions of the chapter’s (and the issue’s) culminating meal, the old dog’s protracted punishment of food deprivation is strikingly cruel and, given the lapse of time since his mistake, arbitrary. Nell’s impulse would be the reader’s too: our indictment of Jerry is reinforced by the fact that, of all the characters, it is she who is made to stay an act of kindness.

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Cattermole’s dropped-in wood engraving shows Codlin ensconced in the Sandboys chimney corner, his hands raised in ecstasy as the landlord lifts the lid of the stew-pot for the delectation of his guest, who is almost enveloped by the steam (see Figure 5.3). Dickens’s emphasis on fireside hospitality and on Codlin’s devotion to olfactory and gastronomic pleasure, is therefore visually endorsed. But the figures of Jerry and the dogs are left entirely to the power of the written word. Since – as Joan Stevens observes – ‘insets are given on their first entry not only to all the main personages, but to lesser ones’,26 this is remarkable: so absolutely do the dogs and their manager take possession of the chapter once they have entered it, that they seem to demand an illustration. However, perhaps because their images are so strongly impressed on the mind of the reader that a picture would be superfluous – even distracting – at this point, the demand is not met until nineteen chapters later. Browne’s engraving of the group – ‘unambitious but on the right lines’, as Mrs Leavis somewhat patronizingly judges27 – appears as the tailpiece to chapter 37 (Clock XXV), the chapter in which Short tells the single gentleman (in an interview illustrated by Browne) that a man ‘wot

Figure 5.3 George Cattermole, [‘The Sandboys chimney corner’]: The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–41). Reproduced by permission of the Charles Dickens Museum.

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Figure 5.4 Hablot Knight Browne (Phiz), [‘Jerry and his dogs’]: The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–41). Reproduced by permission of the Charles Dickens Museum.

keeps a company of dancing-dogs’ (291) had reported seeing Nell and her grandfather with a travelling wax-work exhibition. Given no specific event to depict, Browne’s composition shows Jerry and his group on the open road. In the background are appropriately insubstantial, receding images of Nell and her grandfather walking with bowed heads beside Mrs Jarley’s horse-drawn caravan (see Figure 5.4). As can be seen, only three dogs are dressed (though none should be, since they do not normally travel ‘in character’, and their old stained costumes will have been replaced). The exceptionally melancholy, bandy bulldog in the foreground – heavily clad as John Bull – apparently portrays the leader. The dog privileged to be on Jerry’s back and to be wearing only a collar is presumably the fourth member of the company since he is too large to be the little terrier – formerly Short’s Toby dog – produced from Jerry’s pocket at the Jolly Sandboys, and who is represented by the indeterminate object Browne shows protruding from that receptacle. Aptly, Browne has made Jerry himself look like a close – though less desperate – relation of Bull’seye’s master, the murderer Bill Sikes, in Cruikshank’s illustration to chapter 48 of Oliver Twist (1837) see Figure 5.5. 28


Figure 5.5 George Cruikshank, ‘Sikes attempting to destroy his dog’: Oliver Twist (1837–39). Reproduced by permission of the Charles Dickens Museum.

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The weekly numbers of Master Humphrey’s Clock were available as collected monthly Parts. As Stevens has argued, it is not until the sixth Part (Numbers 22–26, chapters 29–37), that Dickens seems to have settled upon a standard procedure by which the woodcuts mark off the physical identity of the monthly set. This [Part], which concludes Volume I of the Clock, opens with a headpiece and initial and ends with a tailpiece. After this, with two exceptions only, each [Part] carries a headpiece with initial on its opening recto but nowhere else, while most have a tailpiece or inset on the final verso. 29 As Stevens goes on to suggest, ‘the physical image presented by the final verso of an issue, and its usefulness for concluding a theme, or confirming a mood, with the display of a memorable illustration’ was of consequence to Dickens. ‘In the forty issues which carry OCS, seventeen final versos offer illustrations; seven are issue tailpieces, the rest half page insets. Both types mark moments of significance in narrative or theme’,30 while the ‘[t]ailpieces for issues are ... striking’.31 Curiously, however, Stevens devotes no part of her discussion to the vignette of Jerry and his dogs, despite the fact that it is a tailpiece not only for a weekly Number, but for the sixth monthly Part – the Part that, as she says, establishes the functional pattern of image in relation to text that the remaining issues of the Clock are to follow. Furthermore, it is the final verso of the periodical’s first volume, the completion of which was momentous enough to warrant a celebration dinner to which Dickens invited everyone who had contributed directly to the Clock’s workings. Apart from the novel’s final tailpiece, in which Cattermole depicts Nell being carried up to heaven by angels – it could hardly have been allotted a more significant place. Dickens’s inclusion of it among the 32 engravings he selected from the original 75 for the two-volume1861 Illustrated Library Edition of the novel, where it again appears as the last plate in the first volume, confirms its significance to him. It is even one of the eight – of which five are disproportionately selected from Cattermole’s original contributions – reproduced as plates in the 1868 Charles Dickens edition, though there brought forward from chapter 37 to chapter 20, a chapter in which there is no reference whatsoever to the canine performers, but where the illustration remains sufficiently distanced from the Jolly Sandboys scene to preclude competition with the effect of Dickens’s text.32 In the place originally assigned it, the engraving both upholds what Short recounts but has not witnessed, and re-establishes Jerry – identified by the single gentleman as ‘this man of the dogs’ (313) – as a figure of consequence: undoubtedly suitably remunerated, it is after all he who is brought to the single gentleman to tell him where to find Nell and her grandfather. 33 Furthermore, by

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juxtaposing the two dissociated groups – Jerry and his dogs in the foreground; Nell with her grandfather alongside Mrs Jarley’s caravan in the background – Browne brilliantly captures something of the transitory nature of the contact between the novel’s perpetually travelling sets of entertainers, and between those nevertheless purposeful professionals and the two wanderers. The crowning verification (if verification is needed) of the group’s functional importance is provided by Browne in his wonderfully fanciful, rarely reproduced, frontispiece for the second volume of the three-volume edition of the Clock.34 Dominated by the giant hourglass,35 and with a reversed rendition of Nell’s deathbed (over which Browne has wittily made Cattermolian angels to hover expectantly) forming its apex, the plate alludes to events both in the later chapters of the Shop, and in Barnaby Rudge. Tiny representations of characters from the earlier novel have fallen through the narrow channel of the glass, or are being forced through by the crush of jumbled, equally tiny images destined to meet the same fate. The figure lying at the bottom of the lower chamber must be Quilp’s carcass, while Tom Scott can be discerned characteristically standing on his hands. But the larger figures in the panel opposite the hourglass (and the grieving figure kneeling on top of it) are sharply defined and clearly recognizable. Below Dick Swiveller proposing to the Marchioness, and above the figure of the ‘stranger’ galloping past the wounded Edward Chester, Jerry stands with his dogs at the edge of the plate, gazing inwards towards the extraordinary dream-medley of animated objects that follow Short in pursuit of Codlin who rushes with the Punch booth towards the margin of the page. Faintly outlined behind the running suit of Curiosity Shop armour, but also about to leave the picture, is Mrs Jarley’s caravan. Jerry is now accompanied by only three dogs: there is no sign of the bulldog featured in the tailpiece to Volume I (the illustration which the reader would most recently have seen), but the little dog wearing a plumed hat and carrying a fan, and who is standing disregarded on its hind legs, is clearly the same little fan-carrying creature that can be seen in that vignette. Particularly noteworthy is the fact that Browne has invented a new accomplishment (and a new costume) for the dog seen performing a precarious balancing act on the end of a rod. Either the dog’s tail has been made to taper and merge into one of the plate’s decorative tendrils in order to suggest an image of a whip, or the rod is actually part of a whip. Whichever Browne intended, this central section of the panel encapsulates what we have already learnt about the itinerant showman. With his figure combining with those of the little dog he holds aloft and the curly-tailed dog standing beside him to define the edge of the plate, the importance of the group’s function in the novel is graphically reaffirmed.36

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Figure 5.6 Hablot Knight Browne (Phiz), Frontispiece for Master Humphrey’s Clock vol. II (1840–41). Reproduced by permission of the Charles Dickens Museum.

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Jerry’s subjugation of his dogs – of his leader in particular – exemplifies above all man’s capacity for terrorizing those over whom he holds dominion, as does the treatment of his wife and mother-in-law of that ‘small lord of the creation’ (42) Quilp.37 Joint oppressors, Quilp (as exhibited dwarf, ogre, goblin, and quasi-Punch) and Jerry (as performing-dog exhibitor) further connect as inhabitants of the Shop’s entertainment world, a world that is both allusive fancy and commercial reality. Within this world, even the career of the tiny terrier kept in Jerry’s pocket is a link. This little dog, who had once belonged to Short, demonstrates his enthusiasm for his former role as the puppeteer’s Toby38 by barking furiously at the box containing the pasteboard nose that it had once been his part to seize.39 Possession of him thus connects Jerry to Punch, who points to Quilp. They are associated even in Nell’s subconscious mind after the terrifying sight of the dwarf emerging from the midnight darkness of an ancient town gateway. As she lies in her little made-up bed on Mrs Jarley’s caravan floor, the last of a series of perturbed dream-images with which Quilp becomes somehow merged, is (Jerry’s) barrel organ (217). Despite the distinctive featuring of actual and figurative dogs in The Old Curiosity Shop, no explicit, sustained, canine biography comparable to, say, Bull’s-eyes’s in Oliver Twist, is woven into the narrative.40 Although the dancing dogs are not forgotten after their first appearance, except by Browne there is no development of, or closure to, their particular stories, which stand the more emblematically as the stories of a host of performing dogs. Such a story might have detracted from Quilp’s pre-eminence in the novel’s canine scheme of things, a pre-eminence that is sustained by his incessant, reflexive, self-defining denigration of others as dogs. With his fate heralded by distant barking (the last sound he hears apart from the banging on the gates that he has locked against his own salvation), it is fitting that he should drown like a dog – a proverbial dog, whose ascribed characteristics in fact define the worst of mankind.41 Quilp’s facial expressions, vocalizations, predilections, and bodily habits, proclaim him dog, but his irresistible inventiveness and repellent bestiality define him man. This moral hybridity is wonderfully conveyed in the illustration dropped into chapter 60 (Clock, XXXVIII), the chapter in which Kit is arrested and thrust into a coach to be taken to the notary’s office. Kit is in a dream-like state of shock when he suddenly sees ‘as though it had been conjured up by magic’ (463) Quilp’s face leering from a tavern window. The perspective is Kit’s, but after the dwarf has sated himself with taunting the boy, and has sent him on his way, the reader remains to witness him once again ‘roll[ing] upon the ground in an ecstacy of enjoyment’ (464). The legend advertising the tavern’s ability to provide ACCO[MMODATION FOR] MAN [&] BEAST that Browne was inspired to inscribe on the wall beside Quilp’s image has, as others have noted, the effect of describing the image itself – particularly as the larger, denser, clearer, and only complete words are ‘MAN’ and

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Figure 5.7 Hablot Knight Browne (Phiz), [‘Quilp at the tavern window’]: The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–41). Reproduced by permission of the Charles Dickens Museum.

‘BEAST’. The beast most readily associated with and accommodated to man is, of course, the dog.

Notes This essay first appeared in the Dickensian, No. 472 (Summer, 2007). 1. Originally intended to be a short tale, The Old Curiosity Shop ran from 25 April 1840 to 6 February 1841 (Master Humphrey’s Clock 4–45). The weekly Numbers of the Clock were collected in monthly Parts, and the entire miscellany was assembled in three very slim, separately published volumes (October 1840; April 1941; December 1841). For accounts of the evolution of the novel from its original conception as a short tale within the framework of Master Humphrey’s Clock to its status as the periodical’s only narrative, see Malcolm Andrews, ‘Introducing Master Humphrey’, Dickensian, 67 (1971), pp. 70–86; and Elizabeth M. Brennan’s (1997) Introduction to her edition of The Old Curiosity Shop (Oxford: Clarendon Press), pp. xxv–xli. Unless otherwise stated, my references to the novel will be to this edition. The manuscript of The Old Curiosity Shop is in the Forster Collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum (Forster 48 A 4).

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2. The Pilgrim Edition (1965–2002) of The Letters of Charles Dickens, ed. Madeline House, Graham Storey, Kathleen Tillotson, et al. (Oxford: Clarendon Press); II, p. 8. 3. In his important Victorian Novelists and their Illustrators, John Harvey devotes two chapters (5 and 6) to a study of the partnership between Dickens and Browne. 4. Toby A. Olshin (1970) for example, draws some interesting parallels between the Yellow Dwarf figure and Quilp, and between the Mother Bunch fairy-story itself and the Quilp-Little Nell element in Dickens’s novel. See ‘ “The Yellow Dwarf” and The Old Curiosity Shop’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, vol. 25, pp. 96–99. Paul Schlicke’s (1985) well-supported view is that, of all the possible sources for Quilp, ‘Punch is by far the most rewarding to consider’ 125; cited hereafter as Schlicke. 5. Schlicke 1985, p. 125. Warrington Winters (The Old Curiosity Shop: A consummation devoutly to be wished’, the Dickensian LXIII [Winter, 1967], p. 176–80) also stresses the significance of the dog imagery associated with Quilp. 6. These fangs replace in the manuscript the less savage teeth he was initially furnished with (see Clarendon edition, 27, n. 4). 7. In Barnaby Rudge, the stranger consumes the food and brandy he has demanded ‘like a famished hound’, while Magwitch’s manner of devouring his is expressly ‘dog-like’. Of course, the behaviour of both criminals is the consequence of desperate hunger. 8. See Sucksmith 264 (the insertion is not noted as such in the Clarendon edition). 9. Originally, Dickens had Quilp take a shower-bath (see Clarendon edition, Appendix A, 578). The omission of these ablutions from the printed text avoids interference with the effect of Quilp’s act of ‘smear[ing] his countenance with a damp towel of very unwholesome appearance’. 10. In Dickens and the Grotesque, Michael Hollington notes that ‘Quilp is not only compared to a dog but treats others as dogs as well (it’s his constant name for Tom Scott, for instance)’ (84–85), but not does not develop the observation. 11. In his (to Dickens, highly gratifying) review of Volume 1 of Master Humphrey’s Clock, Thomas Hood devotes ten column inches to a description and psychological analysis of Quilp. Defining him as ‘a sort of human Caliban ... with the wanton malice of a monkey’, who is furthermore ‘as disproportionately savage and vicious as the Norway Rat’, Hood finally brings him perceptively forth as a ‘cursing and curst ... perfect Lycanthrope’ (Athenaeum, No. 680 [7 November 1840], pp. 887–88). Since wolves are predatory canine animals, there is no conflict between the perception of Quilp as a werewolf, or man-wolf, or man who thinks himself a wolf, and a perception of him as a dog-man hybrid. While many of Quilp’s attributes are expressly dog-like, a (wicked, fairy-tale) wolf origin or connection does seem to suggest itself. 12. Schlicke. 13. The image also conjures the gallows from which Punch is meant to hang (but from which the hangman is hanged instead). Imagery and allusion signal the villain’s fate that awaits Quilp: although he is destined to drown, not hang, his body is appropriately cast up on the swamp ‘where pirates had swung in chains’ (510) – a reference to the bodies of pirates who had been hanged at Execution

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14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

Dock, Wapping (on the south side of the river), and then suspended in chains from gibbets. This reading of the illustration is in sympathy with that of Q.D. Leavis, who finds that Browne ‘emphasizes Dickens’s idea – the animal nature of Quilp’s face and body-attitude in goading the chained dog opposite him brings out the inferiority of the animal to the human in ferocity and malice’ (‘The Dickens Illustrations: Their Function’ in Leavis, F.R. and Q.D. Leavis, Dickens the Novelist (London: Chatto & Windus, 1970 p. 245)). Mrs Leavis’s argument does not take all the illustration’s aspects into account, however. [William Makepeace Thackeray] (1839) ‘Parisian Caricatures’, London and Westminster Review, 32 (April, pp. 282–305); p. 304. In her Charles Dickens and His Original Illustrators, Jane R. Cohen suggests that ‘as he moved through the book, Dickens stressed Quilp’s innate malformations over his external ones’, and that Browne’s later illustrations ‘[capture] Quilp’s real deformity – his moral hideousness – more subtly, by increasing the brutality of his face and figure’ (75). However, this illustration – occurring comparatively early in the serial (chapter 21) – conveys the brutality of Quilp’s face strongly enough, if not his figure. In chapter 49, Quilp hides behind a door to eaves-drop on Brass and Mrs Jiniwin (who think he is dead) discussing his physical attributes. When Mrs Jiniwin declares that the deceased’s nose was flat, Quilp thrusts in his head ‘striking the feature with his fist. “Aquiline, you hag. Do you see it? Do you call this flat? Do you? Eh?”’ In his Introduction to the novel, G.K. Chesterton sees in this gesture the ‘perfect symbol’ of the character’s ‘brutal exuberance’, ‘for Quilp is always fighting himself for want of anybody else’ (G.K. Chesterton p. 64). Quilp’s performance here is also psychologically reminiscent of Bill Sikes’s maltreatment of his dog-shadow in Oliver Twist – especially in chapter 15, when he suddenly commands the utterly silent dog at his feet to ‘Keep quiet!’, and sends it with a kick and a curse to the other side of the room. Bull’s-eye, however, ‘having faults of temper in common with his master’, retaliates, and a protracted, vicious contest ensues. In chapter 23, Swiveller first calls Quilp an ‘artful dog’, but then – on the admissible evidence of his smoking – defines him as a Salamander, thus extending his mythological genealogy and association with the world of popular entertainment: fire-eaters – showmen whose acts consisted of consuming flaming objects – were known as salamanders (mythical fire-inhabitants). According to the fire-king interviewed by Mayhew, the fumes from the sulphur used would ‘get up your head, and reg’lar confuse you’ – which might explain why Swiveller found himself unintentionally confiding in Quilp. See Mayhew, Vol. III, pp. 123–27. The everlasting fire that awaits Quilp is prefigured by the ‘hundred fires that [dance] before his eyes’ just before he drowns. Under a sky ‘red with flame’, the reflection of the glare of the blazing counting-house on the face of his carcass suggests that Quilp is already in hell. Browne’s headpiece to chapter 19 (Clock, XVII), which gives prominence to Vuffin’s anecdote about the dwarfs kept by his off-stage associate, Maunders, recognizes the connection. Maunders’s dwarfs are shown dining in disarray while demoted giants wait on them. The malicious old figure shown apparently kicking a giant’s legs relates to the ‘elderly and wicious’ (153) dwarf

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20.

21.

22.

23. 24.

25.

26. 27.

Man and Dog: Text and Illustration in The Old Curiosity Shop who stuck pins into his giant’s legs when he wasn’t served quickly enough. Vuffin assures his fellow-guests at the Jolly Sandboys that, unlike a giant, a dwarf increases in value the older and greyer and more wrinkled he gets. Quilp is ‘elderly’ (26), his throat is ‘wiry’, and his hair is ‘grizzled black’ (27). Joan Stevens describes this wood engraving as featuring the inn’s ‘chaotic meal table’, seeing it as one of the illustrations ‘serv[ing] to link together successive issues’ pp. 113–33; 119. In fact, none of the characters who arrive at the Jolly Sandboys is depicted in the headpiece, while the inn’s host would certainly have been outraged by the suggestion that his supper table was disorderly. Schlicke argues that the suppression in 1840 of Bartholomew Fair – the ‘foremost gathering-place in England for itinerant performers and the greatest annual festivity for the common people in London’ (Schlicke 1999, p. 95) – is indicative of this situation. Schlicke concludes that there were ‘two distinct categories’ of dog acts: ‘the highly trained animals who performed in theatres and circuses, sometimes earning a fortune for their proprietors; and straggling street shows, such as Jerry’s, which eked out an existence in pennies – hence Jerry’s displeasure with the culprit who “lost a halfpenny to-day”’ (The Old Curiosity Shop, ed. Paul Schlicke [London: J.M. Dent, 1995], p. 589, n. 4). It is true that Jerry’s show belongs more to the second than the first of these categories, but – even without taking into account their off-page acts – the accomplishments exhibited by his dogs in this scene suggest that different degrees of complexity and ingenuity were to be found within the category. The 73-year-old Italian who had exhibited his dancing dogs for years in the streets of London, for example, purportedly told Mayhew that his animals performed nothing more than ‘un danse [like dogs], un valse [like ladies], un jomp a de stick and troo de hoop’ (London Labour, III, 191), though he later added that they stood on their hind legs like gentlemen. The range of what is expected of Jerry’s four is considerably greater, and might have been rewarded by spectators accordingly. The circus horses belonging to Philip Astley may indeed have learned that no work meant no corn (Schlicke 1999, 112), but they were perhaps in a position to associate the effect more directly with the cause. Leavis and Leavis p. 346. The words – by William Kethe (d.c. 1608) – date from 1561. The first time the melody, of ancient origin, appears as the setting for this version of the psalm is in Daye’s 1563 edition of [Thomas] Sternhold and [John] Hopkins’s The Whole Booke of Psalmes. Mayhew’s Italian is adamant that no whip is needed when teaching dogs: ‘Non, non – pas du tout! I did not never beat ma dogs; dare is a way to learn de dogs without no vip’ (London Labour, III, 191). Another dog exhibiter, Abel Smith, whose act with two Newfoundlands was a draw at Sadler’s Wells for some considerable time, insisted that his animals were not only ‘wonderful’ and ‘clever’, but that they deserved respect: ‘I shall never stand silent by while the respectability of my dogs is called into question’, he is reported as telling the proprietor of a penny theatre. ‘They are noble animals’. (James Grant, Sketches in London (London: W.S. Orr, 1838), 185–86). Stevens p. 121. Leavis p. 346.

Beryl Gray 117 28. Browne seems to have enjoyed evoking or parodying Cruikshank: for other comparisons see Lester pp. 86–87; 165. 29. Stevens p. 116. Stevens describes the weekly Numbers of Master Humphrey’s Clock as issues, and the monthly Parts as Numbers. 30. Stevens p. 119. 31. Stevens p. 120. 32. Following the publication of Percy Fitzgerald’s article, ‘Dickens’s Dogs; or, the Landseer of Fiction’ which reproduces among Walter Crane’s illustrations an affecting line-up of the four performers (without their master), the inclusion of Jerry and his dogs in the 1868 edition of the novel can also be said to reclaim the group for Browne. 33. Jerry’s consequentiality is reaffirmed by the decision of the publishers of the Oxford Illustrated edition of the novel (1951) to reproduce the detail of Jerry with the dog on his back as a title-page vignette. Elizabeth Brennan’s suggestion in the Clarendon edition that the original illustration ‘shows what the single gentleman learnt from Short: that Jerry had seen the fugitives with Jarley’s Wax Works’ (Introduction p. l) puts Jerry less directly in contact with the single gentleman – who pays Codlin and Short ‘a sovereign a-piece’ (284) to bring Jerry to him – than the text indicates. 34. This Frontispiece was originally to have been designed by Cattermole, who was prevented by illness from executing it. The block was delivered to Browne ‘at the eleventh hour’ (Browne, quoted in F.G. Kitton p. 83, and in Pilgrim, Vol. II, 218n). The six ‘extra illustrations’ reproduced in the Clarendon edition of the novel include Cattermole’s frontispiece for Volume I of Master Humphrey’s Clock, but not Browne’s for Volume II. 35. Dickens was very keen on this motif. His request to Maclise to ‘put on some shelf or nook, an old broken hour glass’ (Pilgrim, Vol. II, 146) in his illustration for chapter 55 (depicting Nell and the sexton) not having been met, he suggested to Cattermole that ‘an hour-glass running out’ (Pilgrim, Vol. II, 172) might be included in the illustration to chapter 72, in which old Trent is seen waiting in the church for his already-buried granddaughter to return to him. Cattermole placed it by Nell instead. 36. In their description of this Frontispiece, the only figures not mentioned by the editors of the Pilgrim Letters as appearing above and to the left of the hourglass are those of Jerry and the dogs (see Vol. II, 219 n.). Kitton recognizes the larger figures as ‘representations of ... prominent persons’ (F.G. Kitton p. 82), but does not identify any of them. 37. One form of control Quilp enjoys exercising over the old lady – who is fond of cards and spirits – is to exclude her from a game of cribbage while making her replenish the players’ glasses with the rum she is herself forbidden to taste (182). 38. Codlin and Short evidently no longer include a dog in their version of the Punch and Judy drama. There is no indication of a live animal accompanying them on their travels, nor is there a dog among the itemized figures – seemingly the entire cast – scattered on the ground or jumbled in the showmen’s box in Browne’s depiction of the churchyard scene (chapter 16). 39. Rachel Bennett astutely connects this Toby with the chained dog Quilp torments, which she describes as ‘another Toby unable to reach another Punch’ (429). 40. The Garlands’ self-willed, idiosyncratic and indulged pony, Whisker, however, lives long enough to condescend to play with his owners’ grandchildren, and to ‘run up and down the little paddock with them like a dog’ (567).

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41. In the Bible, dogs are presented as disgusting pariahs whose habit is to return to their own vomit. In the last chapter of the Revelation of St John the Divine, they are bracketed with the ‘sorcerers, and whoremongers, and murderers, and idolaters’, and liars (XXII, 15) who will be prevented from passing through the gates into the holy city.

6 Elizabeth Gaskell: Journalism and Letters Joanne Shattock

‘My Dear’ she said to me ‘how is it that women who don’t write books write always so much nicer letters than those who do?’ – I told her – It was, I supposed, because they did not write in the valley of the shadow of their possible future biographer – but wrote what they had to say frankly and naturally. That comment in a letter by Jane Carlyle,1 quoting in turn her friend the novelist Geraldine Jewsbury, contains a number of ironies. Jane, the acknowledged superior letter writer was to become posthumously a celebrated victim of her biographers, although not technically an author. Her ‘frank and natural’ letters, on the other hand, have been published in collected and selected editions regularly since 1883, and the correspondence of Thomas and Jane Carlyle is the subject of the Duke-Edinburgh edition, on going since 1970 and now in its 33rd volume.2 The quotation is interesting for other reasons. It confirms the almost institutionalized distrust if not fear of biography that beset so many nineteenth-century writers, and women writers in particular. It raises theoretical issues about letter writing, a literary genre that has lagged behind autobiography and diaries in terms of the academic scrutiny and theorizing to which it has been subjected. For whom is a letter written – is it an intimate document intended for one recipient, part of an exchange, written speech, a long distance conversation? How ‘frank and natural’ can the letter writer be assumed to be? How much is the self as presented in a letter a construct, a fiction? As one scholar of the letter as a genre has suggested, ‘Like the diary and the autobiography ... the “I” of the letter is to some extent a fabrication or “fiction”, not necessarily identical to its author’. There is, he suggests, ‘an internal contradiction between the letter’s implied spontaneity, naturalness and originality, and the inevitable artifice of its form’.3 For writer and recipient, as Mireille Bossis has observed, ‘the letter is above all an extension of daily life’. As such an author’s correspondence, then, is treated as ‘a gold mine of biographical information, taking on a fixed and 119

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univocal value’. The documents are used, she points out, ‘without having passed through any critical filter; as such they are taken literally, “by the letter”. It is assumed that they “tell the truth” – unlike novels, which weave fictions’.4 Biographers of writers in particular regard letters unproblematically as revelatory of the ‘real’ person behind the books. Hence Nina Kennard’s preface to her 1885 biography of the actress Rachel, ‘We fall back on her letters as the true key to this extraordinary woman’s character’, and Helen Zimmern’s confidence, in the preface to her biography of Maria Edgeworth (1883) in the same series, that the availability of her subject’s letters would enable her to present an ‘authentic’ biography.5 Rosemarie Bodenheimer, in her book The Real Life of Mary Ann Evans (1994) was one of the first to question this assumption, and to argue in George Eliot’s case that the representations of the self in her letters were as much of a construct as her fictional heroines. Bodenheimer goes on to argue that Eliot’s letters should be read in tandem with her novels and that together they are revelatory of the author’s ‘real life’. How can we gauge whether a letter is written, as Jane Carlyle implies, with a biographer or even a possible editor in mind? Does the publication of letters, written at different times, and to different correspondents significantly alter the way in which they are viewed? Janet Altman argues that a single letter when it is dispatched ‘projects an image of its author at a given point in time and negotiates a relationship with a particular reader. It is to some extent autobiographically undressed’, offering insight into the author’s private life and rhetorically addressed (constituted as a speech act to have an effect on a specific addressee on a particular day). When it is reinscribed in a book for publication, however, the letter is readdressed to a new readership and offered redressed (corrected, revised, truncated, contextualised), by the publisher ... who negotiates a new, more perdurable relationship between the letters and the reading public for whom the correspondence is now intended.6 What, you might be asking does all this have to do with Elizabeth Gaskell’s journalism. As it happens, quite a lot. Gaskell, like George Eliot, disapproved of biographical notices and ‘brief lives’ of living figures, of the kind that were in circulation by mid-century, such as Bogue’s Men and Women of the Time, which eventually became Who’s Who. ‘I disapprove so entirely of the plan of writing “notices” or “memoirs” of living people, that I must send you on the answer I have already sent to many others; namely an entire refusal to sanction what is to me so objectionable & indelicate a practice, by furnishing a single fact with regard to myself’, she wrote to the compiler of one such publication. ‘I may add’, she continued ‘that every printed account of myself that I have seen have [sic] been laughably inaccurate. Pray leave me out altogether’. (Letters, 761–62).

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Gaskell had reason to be wary of biography and biographers, or so the conventional argument runs, after her experiences following the publication of her Life of Charlotte Brontë in 1857. But even before that event she was wary of her letters being kept by their recipients. ‘Pray burn any letters’, she writes to her daughter Marianne. ‘I am always afraid of writing much to you, you are so careless about letters’. (Letters, 274). She was an inveterate letter writer. She wrote daily to her children when she was away from home, and also, one assumes, to her husband when they were apart, although none of her letters to him survive. She had a wide circle of friends and associates, through her writing, her philanthropic work and her family’s extensive connections, to whom she also wrote. She sometimes enclosed parcels of letters she received to her friends for their amusement. ‘Don’t you like reading letters?’ she wrote to John Forster, in 1854. ‘I do, so much’. And to reinforce her point she ‘pops in’ ‘2 clever letters from an old Parisian friend of mine \Madame Mohl/’ and a letter from Charlotte Brontë in which she announces her forthcoming marriage to Arthur Bell Nicholls. Gaskell asks, of course, that Forster return these after reading them. In the same letter she gossips about the Ruskins’s marital crisis, having known Effie Grey as a school girl, and about Patrick Brontë’s response to Charlotte’s engagement. This is possibly the reason, later in the letter, that she adds ‘Oh! Mr. Forster if you don’t burn my \own/ letters as you read them I will never forgive you!’ (Letters, 289–90). While writing the Life of Charlotte Brontë two years later, and anticipating that Brontë’s publisher George Smith might be inclined to add her letters to his archive she indicated those which she was not averse to his keeping: Now to business; only please when I write a letter beginning with a star like this on its front [drawing of a star], you may treasure up my letter; otherwise please burn them, & don’t send them to the terrible warehouse where the 20000 letters a year are kept. It is like a nightmare to think of it. (Letters, 426) Like Jane Carlyle’s, Gaskell’s letters are full of domestic incident, home life at Plymouth Grove, filtered through with literary and cultural events and visitors. She does not have Jane Carlyle’s ability of capturing an individual’s character or appearance with a telling detail, nor her acerbic wit. What she does present is a seemingly breathless flow of anecdote, observation, gossip, and what could be described as ‘sketches’.7 She quite consciously distinguished her letter writing from other writing. Writing to F.J. Furnivall in December 1853 about the difficulty she felt in speaking out on questions about which she felt strongly, she insisted, It is different when speaking as the character in a {s} story – or even as the author of a book. Do you think I cd say or write in a letter (except one


that I was sure wd be regarded as private by some dear friend) what I have said in both MB & Ruth? It may seem strange & I can’t myself account for it, – but it is so. (Letters, 255) At the end of a long letter to her friend Catherine Winkworth, written from Lea Hurst, the Nightingale summer home near Matlock, where she was completing North and South, she wrote: ‘I must go to my real writing now; but I hope I have earned a letter from you’ (Letters, 310). The question of just what constitutes Gaskell’s ‘real writing’ is the subject of this paper. And the answer is connected to her letters, and their history. Her aversion to biography was transmitted to her family, so that at her death Meta and Julia, her two unmarried daughters, assumed the role of literary executors, protective of their mother’s memory, but not above bestowing favours as the fancy took them. Family letters and other papers were burned at Plymouth Grove in the 1880s, and were thought to have included her prolific correspondence with Catherine Winkworth. As has been mentioned, none of Gaskell’s letters to her husband survive. Her letters to her eldest married daughter Marianne Holland however, were preserved. A.W. Ward, later Professor Sir A.W. Ward, who succeeded William Gaskell at Owens College Manchester and became a family friend, was given sight of sufficient material to enable him to write her entry in the Dictionary of National Biography. On the basis of that he later wrote his ‘Biographical Introduction’ to the Knutsford edition of her works (1906), an account which was, in effect, the first biography. Later biographers, including Mrs. Ellis H. Chadwick, author of Mrs Gaskell: Haunts, Homes and Stories (1910) were given sight of letters by Meta and Julia but not permitted to quote from them directly. Clement Shorter, the editor of the World’s Classics edition (1906–1919) was commissioned to write the volume on Gaskell in the second tranche of the English Men of Letters series, a significant commission in that so few women writers had up to that point been included.8 The book was never published, but the materials assembled by Shorter were then used by Jane Coolidge for a biography which was prepared, but again not published. Two volumes of typescript materials were placed with the Shorter papers in the Brotherton collection at the University of Leeds. Meta Gaskell’s death in 1914 was followed by a house sale and the dispersal of the remainder of the contents of Plymouth Grove. And there the matter rested until the 1960s. The biographers who followed Ward and Shorter variously reflect in their work the ‘hands off’ policy of the Gaskell daughters, and the dubious state of the typescript copies of letters that they were permitted to see. Mrs. Chadwick, who wrote before Meta’s death, noted in her introduction that ‘the same winsomeness shines through her letters which is to be found in her stories’. That link between the letters and Gaskell’s periodical writing was to prove crucial. The stories, together with sketches, essays, poems, and

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book reviews were published in periodicals ranging from Blackwood’s, Howitt’s Journal, the Sunday School Penny Magazine, Sartain’s Union Magazine, Harper’s New Monthly, the Athenaeum, Fraser’s, Macmillan’s and the Reader as well as the three major outlets, Household Words, All the Year Round and the Cornhill. If Meta and Julia Gaskell were the guardians of their mother’s life and letters Ward was the architect of her twentieth-century reputation by virtue of the organization of the Knutsford edition. The edition, which until now has remained the standard one, is incomplete. As well as omitting The Life of Charlotte Brontë, the eight volumes were highly selective in the shorter works they included. The focus was on the five novels, Mary Barton, Ruth, North and South, Sylvia’s Lovers and Wives and Daughters, each of which comprised a title volume in the edition. The remaining three volumes were entitled Cranford and other Tales, Round the Sofa and other Tales, and Cousin Phillis and other Tales, and these novellas, together with the five full-length novels, formed in effect the Gaskell canon. The shorter works and the journalism were added selectively, out of chronological order, their inclusion determined by the space remaining in each of the volumes. Early biographers like E.S. Haldane (Mrs Gaskell and her Friends 1930) took their cue from the arrangement of the Knutsford edition. Gaskell’s ‘journalistic efforts’ so called had been a strain on her nerves; it had been a pity that she had consented to it, rather than devoting herself to the full-length realist novels which had crowned her career – Sylvia’s Lovers and Wives and Daughters being the prime examples of this trajectory (Haldane, 5, 208). Gaskell’s letters were not published until 1966, and even then they were not complete. The Further Letters were published in 2000, and an augmented edition of those in 2003. Their impact on our reading of Gaskell has been remarkable. For a start the trajectory of the writing life is quite different to that presented by the Knutsford edition. In her letter refusing to submit biographical material for a current directory, Gaskell included this sentence: ‘I do not see why the public have any more to do with me than to buy or reject the wares I supply to them’. It might have been deliberately arch, but the notion of a writer who was aware of the literary marketplace has been picked up by later critics.9 The letters reveal Gaskell in receipt of constant solicitations from publishers and journal editors and proprietors after the publication of Mary Barton. Eliza Cook invited her to contribute to her forthcoming Journal in 1849. The editors of Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal were in pursuit in the 1840s. The flattering invitation from Dickens in 1850 to contribute to Household Words is well known, as is her exasperated declaration following the serialization of North and South, ‘I will never write for H. W. again’ (Further Letters, 123), which she rescinded within a few months. The editors of the Further Letters probably correctly see the move from


Chapman and Hall’s All the Year Round to George Smith and the Cornhill in 1860 as indicative of Gaskell’s own sense that she had moved from the literature of social improvement to the literature of the middle classes in whose midst she felt herself located. Offers from American publishers, including the publisher of the Atlantic Monthly, and her slight connections with Harper’s New Monthly Magazine reinforce the sense of a new middleclass base. Her polite refusal of Fanny Mayne’s invitation to contribute to the evangelical penny weekly the True Briton in 1853 is even more understandable in the circumstances (Further Letters, 107). What the letters reveal more subtly is the point made by Winifred Gérin, the first biographer to have access to them – the close links between the letters and her published work. ‘Strangely enough,’ she wrote, the style of Cranford resembles far more the style of her letters than any of her other fictions; because in her letters she was herself – and it must be remembered that she was an educated woman expressing herself with ease and humour when writing to her friends – and not concerned with pleasing the public. Similarly in Cranford, written under no professional or personal pressures, she was herself in holiday mood ... It was as though Elizabeth Gaskell had said, ‘Let me tell you about this dear delightful oddity of a place, practicing idiotic but old world courtesies, because before long it won’t exist any longer.’ With all the resources of memory at her command, and the fresh vision supplied by her recent visit, she was able to do just that.10 The same could be said of much of her non-fictional writing for Household Words, for Fraser’s Magazine, for Macmillan’s. The argument about how much the ‘I’ of the letters is or was transparently ‘Elizabeth Gaskell’, and how much was a fiction, a construct, takes us back to the theoretical debates about letters I referred to earlier. What is interesting is the similarity and overlap between these non-fictional essays – and I am using the term essay very loosely – and the letters. One of her very first ‘publications’ was a letter, an account of a schoolgirl visit to Clopton Hall in Warwickshire, which she wrote to William Howitt and which he published verbatim in his Visits to Remarkable Places (1840). Others letters were similarly extracted by Howitt in his other books.11 The letter-writing style evolves from the earliest works in the 1840s through the Household Words material in the 1850s to her last pieces in Fraser’s and Macmillan’s in the 1860s. ‘You can hardly live in Manchester without having some idea of your personal appearance’, the narrator in ‘Libbie Marsh’s Three Eras’ (1847) remarks, the factory lads and lasses take good care of that, and if you meet them at the hours when they are pouring out of the mills, you are sure to hear a

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good number of truths, some of them combined with such a spirit of impudent fun, that you can scarcely keep from laughing even at the joke against yourself’. It could be an extract from one of her letters. An early story, ‘Martha Preston’, published in Sartain’s Union Magazine (1850), begins: ‘Within the last few years I have been twice at the Lakes. There is a road leading to Grasmere, on the least known side of Loughrigg’ – the voice of the story teller is indistinguishable from that of the letter writer. Compare it with the opening of ‘Cumberland Sheep-Shearers’ (Household Words 22 January 1853): ‘Three or four years ago we spent part of a summer in one of the dales in the neighbourhood of Keswick. We lodged at the house of a small Statesman ... ’ or with the first sentence of ‘French Life’ in Fraser’s April 1864: We went to-day along the Boulevard Sévastopol, Rive Gauche, to pay a call. I knew the district well about six years ago, when it was a network of narrow tortuous streets ... I used to have much difficulty in winding my way to certain points in the Quartier Latin from the Faubourg St.Germain, where I was staying ... The voices of story teller, diarist, and letter writer blend in these pieces. Grevel Lindop, in his General Introduction to The Works of Thomas De Quincey, says of his writing, Although throughout his career De Quincey (and his publishers) exploited his sobriquet of ‘The English Opium-Eater’, the name did not carry with it the obligation to adopt any particular voice. De Quincey allowed himself to be as humorous, solemn, sentimental or dry as he chose or as his matter dictated. The qualities which remained constant were those of De Quincey, not of an artfully-constructed ‘Opium-Eater’. He goes on to contrast De Quincey with ‘the impulsive, driven confessional manner of Hazlitt’, but points to a crucial difference: ‘for where Hazlitt assumed that the self was the self, surveying his own character and memories as if through a transparent medium, De Quincey (informed by his reading of Kant and the mystics) perpetually questions the nature and continuity of the self’ (vol 1, 2000, xix). Gaskell, like De Quincey wrote for a range of periodicals. She had no sobriquet – most of her work was unsigned – but she too feels little obligation to adopt any particular voice. And like Hazlitt, one feels, she comfortably assumed that the self was the self. The voice does modulate according to the periodical. For the most part it is a female voice. ‘I do not know if you have ever noticed it’, the narrator of ‘Martha Preston’ interjects, ‘but it strikes me that a very active mother does not always make a very active daughter ...’ – again, it could be a line from


one of her letters. At other times the voice is ungendered. Here is the opening of ‘Disappearances’ (Household Words 7 June 1851): ‘I am not in the habit of seeing the “Household Words” regularly; but a friend, who lately sent me some of the back numbers, recommended me to read “all the papers relating to the Detective and Protective Police” ’ in which she presents a more public and formal persona, of indeterminate gender. Her non-fictional pieces for Household Words were in an improving, informative vein, but the voice is recognizable: ‘I have always been interested in the conversation of any one who could tell me anything about the Huguenots; and, little by little, I have picked up many fragments of information respecting them’ (‘Traits and Stories of the Huguenots’ 10 December 1853). ‘I have lately met with a French book which has interested me much; and, as it is now out of print, and was never very extensively known, I imagine some account of it may not be displeasing to the readers of Household Words’ (‘Modern Greek Songs’ 25 February 1854). The facts of the following narration were communicated to me by Mr. Burton, the head gardener at Teddesley Park, in Staffordshire. I had previously been told that he had been for a year or two in the service of the Schah of Persia ... I was so much interested in the details he gave me, that I made notes at the time, which have enabled me to draw up the following account. (‘The Schah’s English Gardener’ 19 June 1852) Only occasionally does she adopt a masculine persona. In an article entitled ‘Shams’, written for Fraser’s Magazine (February 1863), she affects the voice of a male observer of fashion: ‘being as ready to admire a pretty ankle as any man living’. The writer later includes himself among those whose shins have been bruised by crinolines and who are shocked by the introduction of paper shirt collars. But as the article proceeds, the masculine pretence is abandoned, and the voice becomes a recognizably Gaskellian one, asserting the importance of teaching young girls and even ‘ladies’ the value of household management and protesting against the extravagance, the wasted energy, and the pretence of middle-class entertaining. The short pieces like ‘Shams’, the signed article in Macmillan’s on Robert Gould Shaw, the leader of a black American regiment (December 1863), and the longer articles on ‘French Life’ (Fraser’s February–April 1864) do subtly alter their register in acknowledgement of a middle-class audience. The reviews in the Athenaeum and the Reader similarly differ from the reviews in Household Words, in acknowledgement of an educated readership. Yet when explaining to Charles Eliot Norton why she could not write for the Atlantic Monthly she perhaps disingenuously remarked, I quite understand an Editor’s desire to please his readers, but ... I can not (it is not will not) write at all if I ever think of my readers, & what

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impression I am making on them. ‘If they don’t like me, they must lump me’ to use a Lancashire proverb. It is from no despising my readers. I am sure I don’t do that, but if I ever let the thought or consciousness of them come between me & my subject I could not write at all. (Letters, 503) As a result of reading her letters it is clear that Gaskell was an astute judge of the literary marketplace, one who did not necessarily tailor her work to a particular readership or who was overly concerned about the status of the periodicals in which her work was published, but who nonetheless regarded the periodical press as a key element in her writing life. Her published letters, I would argue, have had two important effects. They demonstrate that the two strands of her writing, the novels and the shorter works which include her journalism, were much more integrated than had been previously thought, that her work was a much more seamless and coherent achievement than had been recognized. Sixty years on they overturned the view of the canon as presented in the Knutsford edition. Even more importantly the letters unlock the Gaskell of the journalism, and raise interesting questions about the links between the supposedly constructed public persona of the periodical writer and the supposedly unselfconscious persona of the letters.

Notes 1. Jane Carlyle: Newly Selected Letters, ed. K.J. Fielding and David R. Sorenson, p. 194. 2. The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, ed. C.R. Sanders, K.J. Fielding, C. de L. Ryals, et al. 3. Porter 1986, p. 1. 4. Bossis pp. 64–65. 5. Mrs. Arthur Kennard, Rachel, Eminent Women series (London: W.H. Allen, 1885); Helen Zimmern, Maria Edgeworth, Eminent Women series (London: W.H. Allen, 1883). 6. Altman pp. 18–19. 7. See her letter to W.S. Landor, 22 May 1854 and another to Eliza (Tottie) Fox, [?Summer 1854], Letters, pp. 291–93, 301–02, for examples of her characteristic blend of anecdote and autobiography. 8. There were no female biographical subjects in the first series, begun in 1877, and only four in the second, begun in 1902: George Eliot, Fanny Burney, Maria Edgeworth, and Jane Austen. 9. These include Hilary M. Schor, Scheherezade in the Marketplace: Elizabeth Gaskell and the Victorian Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), and Linda K. Hughes and Michael Lund, Victorian Publishing and Mrs. Gaskell’s Work (Charlotteville: University Press of Virginia, 1999). 10. Gérin p. 124. 11. See Martin pp. 94–100.

7 Among the Unknown Public: Household Words, All the Year Round and the Mass-Market Weekly Periodical in the Mid-Nineteenth Century Lorna Huett

A cheap literature, hideous and ignoble of aspect, like the tawdry novels which flare in the book-shelves of our railway stations … is not what is wanted. A sense of beauty and fitness ought to be satisfied in the form and aspect of the books we read, as well as by their contents. (Saunders, 1992, 122) My eye! What a lot of print for the money! (Collins, 1858, 219) On 21 August 1858, an article entitled ‘The Unknown Public’ appeared on the front page of Charles Dickens’s journal Household Words. Although the reader of this largely anonymous publication might not have been aware of the fact, the author of the piece was the young aspiring novelist Wilkie Collins, then one of Dickens’s closest personal and professional associates. Collins (1858, 217) adopts a clearly rhetorical stance, claiming to be amazed at his discovery of a lower-class, fiction-consuming reading public ‘… an Unknown Public; a public to be counted by millions; the mysterious, the unfathomable, the universal public of the penny-novel Journals.’ While Collins initially appears to be writing from a privileged position of smug superiority, as staff writer on a successful, respectable journal conducted by one of the most celebrated literary men of the day, there is an inherent ambivalence in his article. This ambivalence in turn comments on the nature of Household Words itself, and calls into question the stable, superior identity Collins is so eager to construct for the journal. Rather than engaging 128

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in an anthropological enquiry into the nature of the reading public, the author is in fact employed in simultaneously addressing and creating a middle-class audience for the journal. Margaret Beetham (1990, 20) has written that ‘a periodical is not a window on to the past or even a mirror of it. Each article, each periodical number, was and is part of a complex process in which writers, editors, publishers and readers engaged in trying to understand themselves and their society’. Her argument is entirely apposite: a struggle for self-definition and for meaning was an inherent part of the writing, editing, design and marketing of every journal. It affected elements of the publication as seemingly-unrelated as format, printing, illustration and advertising. Collins’s article is a part of this complex process of negotiation and identification: his characterisation of the Unknown Public has highly-significant implications for an understanding of the identity and nature of Household Words as a whole.1 It is worth paying close attention to Collins’s article in order to analyse the peculiarities of Household Words’s circumstances of publication, and by extension the specific identity encoded in the pages of Household Words. Initially, he appears to delineate the Unknown Public as ignorant, naïve and little more than a source of satire. He devotes an entire page to a rehearsal of extracts from ‘answers to correspondents’ sections of these penny papers, focussing on the trivial, the prosaic and the uninformed: Two readers respectively unawares, until the editor has enlightened them, that the author of Robinson Crusoe was Daniel Defoe, and the author of the Irish Melodies Thomas Moore. Another reader, a trifle denser, who requires to be told that the histories of Greece and Rome are ancient histories, and the histories of France and England modern histories … A reader who wants to know the right hour of the day at which to visit a newly-married couple. A reader who wants to know a receipt for liquid blacking … Two lady readers who require lovers, and wish the editor to provide them. Two timid girls, who are respectively afraid of a French invasion and dragon-flies. (220) Subsequently, the correspondents degenerate further into mere types or humours: they are characterised as ‘a natty reader’, ‘a virtuous reader’ and so on, with the tale of adjectives becoming ever more absurd and laughable. ‘Readers’ are variously ‘guilty (female)’, ‘pale-faced’, ‘undecided’, ‘bashful’, ‘speculative’, ‘scorbutic’, ‘pimply’ and ‘jilted’. Editorial advice is represented as being of the most inane kind: Collins compiles a list of ‘ten editorial statements … pronounced at the express request of correspondents’, which begins with the advice that ‘all months are lucky to marry in, when your union is hallowed by love’, and ends with the sage pronouncement that ‘a collier will not better himself by going to Prussia’ (220). The tone of the

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article does, however, become more serious as it progresses, and Collins ends with an appeal to society in general: An immense public has been discovered: the next thing to be done is, in a literary sense, to teach that public how to read … it is perhaps hardly too much to say, that the future of English fiction may rest with this Unknown Public, which is now waiting to be taught the difference between a good book and a bad … The largest audience for periodical literature, in this age of periodicals, must obey the universal law of progress, and must, sooner or later, learn to discriminate. (222) This is more than a little reminiscent of Dickens’s own ideological statement, ‘The Amusements of the People’, published in the early numbers of the journal, in which he argued the profound and undeniable importance of good-quality, affordable entertainment for a working-class audience.2 Collins’s emphatic ‘must’ and his reference to ‘the universal law of progress’ do not, however, seem entirely convincing. At a period where increasing wealth and social status for some was counterbalanced by abject poverty for others, when prostitution, corruption and disease were rife, and when London was both one of the foremost cities of the world and the Great Wen, this ‘universal law’ would by no means have seemed inviolable, and the idea of ‘progress’ would have been distinctly double-edged. The implicit threat here is that the Unknown Public might not learn to ‘discriminate’, and that periodical literature as a whole might fall prey to debasement and atavism as a result of the demands of this seething mass of supposedly-ignorant lower-class readers. Collins claims that nothing he describes ‘is exaggerated for the sake of a joke; nothing is invented, or misquoted, to serve the purpose of any pet theory of my own’ (220). There is, however, a distinct sense throughout much of the article that exaggeration and invention are at work in spite of Collins’s protestations to the contrary. The potential menace to the ‘known’ reading and writing public adumbrated in the final paragraphs is matched by the seedy world Collins describes in the opening passage, in which he recounts his discovery of the existence of the Unknown Public: I made my first approaches to it [the discovery], in walking about London, more especially in the second and third rate neighbourhoods. At such times, whenever I passed a small stationer’s or small tobacconist’s shop, I became conscious, mechanically as it were, of certain publications which invariably occupied the windows. These publications all appeared to be of the same small quarto size; they seemed to consist merely of a few unbound pages; each one of them had a picture on the upper half of the front leaf, and a quantity of small print on the under. (217)


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The reference to ‘second and third rate neighbourhoods’, and the insistent repetition of ‘small’ as a catch-all adjective for buildings and articles pertaining to such neighbourhoods, suggests a passage into a dingy, petty world beyond the ken of the implied typical Household Words reader. In this way, Collins resolutely casts the penny papers as a sort of literary Other, an impression which is heightened by his later satire. The consumer of Household Words, it is implied, will look upon these cheap productions with a sort of amused curiosity. Later in the article, though, the penny papers have acquired a degree of menace. Apparently endowed with sentience and locomotive ability, they ‘follow’ and ‘haunt’ the writer, until he is overwhelmed by them and his need to purchase one comes to resemble an addiction: Wherever the speculative daring of one man could open a shop … there, as it appeared to me, the unbound picture quarto instantly entered, set itself up obtrusively in the window, and insisted on being looked at by everybody. ‘Buy me, borrow me, stare at me, steal me – do anything, O inattentive stranger, except contemptuously pass me by!’ (217) This is close to a discourse of prostitution. The dangerous seductiveness of the penny papers, taken in conjunction with their baseness and apparent omnipresence, undercuts the comic aspects of Collins’s essay. Despite his assertion that there exists ‘an intense in-dwelling respectability in their dulness [sic]’ (221), they press menacingly against the eye of the consumer, and are obtained by means of a picaresque descent into a literary underworld of dingy shops and stalls. There is a deep-seated ambivalence in Collins’s essay: his eagerness to characterise the process of reading the cheap periodical as an illicit, guilty, addictive pleasure jars with his somewhat supercilious mockery of the prosaic nature of the ‘answers to correspondents’ pages. Collins tries rather too hard to satirise these papers, and this obvious effort combined with the contradictions in his article serve more to draw attention to the odd standpoint he has adopted. The reader begins inevitably to question why the varied attraction and repulsion of the cheap press should be of such significance. This question is fundamental to the nature of Household Words itself: ‘The Unknown Public’ forms a key to the meanings encoded within the pages of the periodical in which it was published. Collins’s anxiety about audiences, and his evident desire to differentiate the middle-class readership of Household Words from the lower-class one of the cheap press is of central importance to an understanding of the manner in which the journal functioned within the marketplace. I argue that Household Words’s proximity to the format of the cheap journal, combined with the vision and nature of its conductor, enabled it to reach beyond Collins’s Unknown Public and to create a new sort of middleclass audience. Using data gathered from a study of a range of periodicals, I shall analyse the significance of Household Words within the sphere of

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nineteenth-century publishing, and trace the techniques it employed to effect this creation of audience.

The periodical marketplace at mid-century Georg Lukács (18) has written that the evolution of a literary genre is not an arbitrary event, but rather that these genres ‘grow out of the concrete determinacy of the particular social and historical conditions’ in which they are published. Lukács’s words are of particular significance in a consideration of the periodical genre. While other literary forms may relate more tangentially to the socio-historic phase (as, for example, the growth of the popular novel reflects the expansion and democratisation of the reading public), the development of periodical literature occurs as a direct corollary of certain historical conditions and technological advancements: dramatic growth in the cloth trade, which indirectly supplied the rags which were the raw material for paper-making, developments in printing and the paper-trade, and on the changing structures of the working day and the emergence of a concept of leisure time. As periodical literature grew to pre-eminence, a conflict arose between the older and more established reviews, and the cheap press, which was perceived as a potentially dangerous destabilising radical influence. During the 1830s and 40s, political anxieties about the Chartist Press were paralleled by another, equally pervasive sense of concern centred on the flood of cheap journals pouring out of the disreputable presses of Salisbury Square, under the control of enterprising publishers like Edward Lloyd. These new magazines, containing a mixture of fiction, crime reporting, news and comment, grew out of the eighteenth-century broadside and ‘gallows confession’ genres. They were aimed specifically at the increasingly literate working classes, who could afford little more than the 1d cover price of the periodicals. Marked by a commitment to fiction publishing, these periodicals cannibalised the Gothic novel format to produce fiction filled with violence, murder, abduction and the supernatural. In the wake of Dickens’s success with serials like Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist, plagiarisms of his novels also began to appear: the first, and possibly the most influential of these was The Posthumorous Notes of the Pickwick Club (1837–39), also called The Penny Pickwick, which was published under the pseudonym of ‘Bos’ and probably written by the prolific hack Thomas Peckett Prest (Smith, 2002b, 31).3 Prest’s serial was published by Lloyd in booklet form in imitation of Dickens and Chapman and Hall’s original, but Lloyd made the important decision to issue the work not in shilling monthly parts, but rather in penny weekly numbers. As The Penny Pickwick proved popular with the lower-class reading public, the format became general: the weekly part-issue novel or fiction-carrying magazines, typically illustrated with graphic, violent or exciting woodcuts, came to be known as penny bloods, and later as penny dreadfuls.4


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The dramatically escalating popularity of cheap fiction had a startling effect on the broader sphere of periodical publishing. The penny papers were seen as a potential irruption of the lower classes into society at large, and thus as a threat to the reading public in general. Anxiety focussed particularly on the publishing of novels and extended tales within the pages of these papers: it is on this that Collins concentrates in ‘The Unknown Public’. While he attacks the fiction largely on the grounds of dullness and poor writing, he notes gratefully that ‘there is, I honestly believe, no man, woman, or child in England, not a member of the Unknown Public, who could be got to read them’ (221). A sense of contagion began to hang around the weekly serial, and it fell noticeably out of favour as a medium for the publishing of goodquality fiction aimed at a readership more discerning than that of the bloods. This trend can be traced throughout the first half of the century: the case of Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal (later Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, and subsequently Chambers’s Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and the Arts), which began publication in 1832, comments interestingly on this. William Chambers established his periodical’s commitment to fiction publishing in his preliminary address to his readers ‘I shall make a point of [including] every week, if I can find room, a nice amusing tale, either original, or selected from the best modern authors …’ (1832, 2). Chambers consciously attempted to keep the Journal at the upper end of the cheap magazine market. The fiction published within its pages consciously steered away from the popular gothicised horror and crime narratives, and much was reprinted from previously-published classics. However, as Sue Thomas (2) notes, ‘relatively little fiction was published in the first two series [1832–53], one of the prime aims of the proprietors having been to revive the eighteenth-century art of the essay’. Thomas notes that the periodical’s change of title in 1854, to Chambers’s Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and the Arts, marked a change in editorial direction, as more fiction began to appear. The increase was still slow: between 7 January and 24 June 1854, the Journal published only one long piece of fiction and three short stories. By the time the Journal moved into its fourth series in 1864, the proportion of fiction had increased, but it must be borne in mind that the publishing market had also changed substantially by this point. Chambers’s evident reluctance to print original fiction within his cheap weekly periodical was reflected elsewhere in the marketplace: Graham Law (2) notes that the Illustrated London News’s initial forays into fiction serialisation during the 1840s soon petered out, and did not seriously recommence until the latter quarter of the century. Law’s explanation for the steady diminution of the Illustrated London News’s fictional output is equally applicable to the case of ‘respectable’ weekly magazines like Chambers’s: One reason was undoubtedly that the weekly serial was becoming associated with the lower depths of the proletarian market. By this time ‘penny

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bloods’ were emerging en masse from the notorious ‘Salisbury Square’ publishers, in penny weekly parts, in penny weekly miscellanies, and even in unstamped penny Sunday newspapers, all of which assumed the form of miniaturized, plagiarized, parodic versions of their bourgeois equivalents. (3) The weekly serialisation of fiction was thus clearly a socio-politically inflected activity: an editorial decision on this matter would seal the fate of a particular periodical as either suitable for middle-class consumption, or as consigned to the readership of the lower classes alone. An essential part of the creation of an audience for a periodical is the ability of the reader to characterise themselves as part of a particular social or political group, and therefore to define themselves against other groups. This insistent demarcation of one section of the reading public from another hindered apparent attempts of various periodicals to ‘civilize’ the weekly serialisation of fiction: G.W.M. Reynolds (16) claimed, in his address ‘To our Readers’ in the first number of Reynolds’s Magazine of Romance, General Literature, Science, and Art that his object was ‘to steer the middle course’ between the ‘light matter’ of ‘certain Cheap Publications’, and the overly-serious contents of others. It is of course questionable how far Reynolds’s avowed aim corresponded with his actual intention: notably, the first item on the front page of his new magazine was the opening instalment of his overtly sensational novel Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf. Altick (346) comments that the popularity of Reynolds’s Magazine, or Reynolds’s Miscellany as it became, ‘did not give conspicuous comfort to those who … had felt that the welcome given the Penny Magazine and Chambers’s Journal was a sure sign that the reading tastes of the masses were improving’. However, Reynolds was evidently perceptive enough to recognize that a substantial portion of the reading public wanted to consume good-quality fiction and journalism in the weekly format, and to construct his journal in such a way that it appeared, superficially at least, to fulfil this need. The Sunday Times, too, had serialised fiction during the 1840s, notably Leman Rede’s The Royal Rake [1842] Harrison Ainsworth’s The Lancashire Witches [1848]. As in the case of Reynolds’s periodical, though, the question of audience is significant: not to be confused with the broadsheet The Times, the Sunday Times was at this time a rather tawdry publication. Beginning publication on 20 October 1822, it was the new incarnation of the Independent Observer (1 April 1821–13 October 1822), which in turn had replaced the short-lived New Observer (18 February 1821–25 March 1825). In the 1840s and 1850s, it cost between 5d and 6d, and had an enviable circulation of around 20,000 copies per week. Though it gradually became more conservative in inclination, it was at this time full of shocking crime reporting, including long running investigations such as that into the ‘Horrible Murder and Mutilation of a Female at


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Table 7.1 Circulation of periodicals within the period 1800–1870, as applicable Periodical All the Year Round Bentley’s Miscellany

Initial circulation Average circulation Peak circulation 125,000

100,000

300,000

6,000

4,600

8,500

Chambers’ Journal (all series within period)

50,000

65,000

80,000

Cornhill Magazine

10,000

15,000

20,000

Edinburgh Review

2,500

8,850

20,000–13,500

English Woman’s Journal

500, but readership probably much higher

Frasers’ Magazine

8,700

5,800

8,700

Household Words

100,000

40,000

1,000

41,000

77,000

110,000

Illustrated London News London Journal

100,000

221,000

510,000

Once a Week

570,000

250,000 (35,000 after 1865)

570,000

Penny Magazine

200,000

112,500

200,000

14,000

11,000

14,000

Quarterly Review Reynolds’s Magazine Westminster Review

30,000 2,000

2,200

3,000

Sources: R.D. Altick, The English Common Reader: a Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900 (1957); John North, ed. The Waterloo Directory of English Newspapers and Periodicals, 1800–1900 (1997).

Roehampton’, which occupied several column inches in April 1842. Pages not taken up with such gruesome material were generally filled with sports news. As such, it not only assumed a bloodthirsty reader but also a masculine one, in contrast to the family readership aimed at by Reynolds, and other weeklies like the London Journal and the Family Herald. Like Reynolds’s Miscellany, the London Journal and the Family Herald were aimed at a low-class audience, and purported to provide their readers with fiction and essays somewhat more respectable than that peddled by the penny bloods. Again, like Reynolds’s Miscellany, neither succeeded in being seen as particularly respectable. Nonetheless they were enormously popular: their combined circulation in the 1850s was around ¾ million copies per week (see Table 7.1). The role of Household Words in this debate is of paramount importance. When it began publication in 1850, it was the only publication to offer respectable, good-quality serialised fiction to a middle-class audience, at a

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low price, under the aegis of a celebrated novelist known in part for his depictions of idealised domesticity. The fact that the magazine published only original fiction was one of the keys both to its success and to its differentiation from the mass of weekly miscellanies already in existence. It is important here to remember William Chambers’s promise to his readers, that his Journal would contain fiction ‘either original, or selected from the best modern authors’ (2).5 Sue Thomas (2) confirms that, in the early stages of the Journal’s existence, ‘much reprinted material was published’: this dependence on previously-approved ‘classics’ marked Chambers’s reticence to equate his Journal with the productions of Reynolds, Lloyd, and others like them. In a marketplace in which, as I have established, the weekly serialisation of original fiction was inflected with disrepute or contamination, Household Words’s commitment to publication in this mode was both daring and noteworthy. A further difference between Household Words and other weeklies centres on the question of audience. As I have established, the penny press was generally aimed at the lower classes. Even Chambers’s, with its elevated concern for reasoned argument and preference for the essay form over fictional narrative, was aimed at a working-class audience. In the address to his readers cited above, Chambers identifies his audience as including ‘the poorest labourer in the country’. Much of the content of the Journal was marked for the attention of ‘the poor man’, who is even given advice on how to emigrate.6 Overall, the implied reader of the Journal was evidently not seen as a discerning and educated man of taste, but rather as a willing consumer of the ‘useful and agreeable mental instruction’ dispensed by the magazine. While the approach taken by Chambers’s had some success, it did not have Household Words’s breadth of readership, nor did it gain a comparable foothold in the middle-class drawing room. At the less-respectable end of the penny press, authors like Rede and Ainsworth of the Sunday Times may have been popular, but their productions were not far above the penny bloods turned out interminably by Thomas Peckett Prest, James Malcolm Rymer and their like, and devoured in vast quantities by city clerks. The names of these authors carried neither the cachet nor the civilizing potential of that of Dickens. Household Words was an oddity: a cheap publication welcomed into the drawing rooms of the middle classes, and into the reading rooms of such reputable institutions as the first public library in the country, the Manchester Free Library.7 Its fiction was composed by some of the most respected and celebrated authors of the day: Dickens, Gaskell, William Howitt, Harriet Martineau, Eliza Lynn Linton and others. The force which instigated this dramatic change in the image and reception of the cheap periodical was the identity of the celebrated Conductor himself. He drove Household Words to occupy a disproportionally influential position in the public imagination: the reader who wished to enjoy A Child’s History of England or Hard Times as they appeared, not to mention any of the 185 short articles Dickens


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published in his journal would be forced to turn, regardless of class status, to this low-priced periodical. Household Words, therefore, was to a great extent responsible for inverting views of the cheap press: rather than being an organ of sedition and revolution, the twopenny paper became an acceptable way for the middle classes to consume the products of the leading authors of the day. Altick (347) comments that ‘… through the excellence of its contents and the prestige of Dickens’s name [Household Words] helped break down further the still powerful upper- and middle-class prejudice against cheap papers.’ It is interesting, and somewhat puzzling to note that more critical attention has been paid to the role of All the Year Round in this process than that of Household Words. So, in an article published in The Times, E.S. Dallas (1861, 6) wrote Dickens’s 1860–61 All the Year Round serial Great Expectations: What are we to say of the new experiment which is now being tried of publishing good novels week by week? Hitherto the weekly issue of fiction has been connected with publications of the lowest class – small penny and halfpenny serials that found in the multitude some compensation for the degradation of their readers. Dallas does not take Household Words’s role in the development of the weekly form of publication into account, but his article does encapsulate the prevailing view of the serialisation of original fiction in the cheap press in the first half of the century. He continues (6): Lust was the alpha and murder the omega of these tales. When the attempt was made to introduce the readers of the penny journals to better authors and to a more wholesome species of fiction, it was an ignominious failure … Mr Dickens has tried another experiment. The periodical which he conducts is addressed to a much higher class of readers than any which the penny journals would reach, and he has spread before them novel after novel specially adapted to their tastes … His success was so great as to warrant the conclusion … that the weekly form of publication is not incompatible with a very high order of fiction. It is not clear why Dallas chooses to ignore the importance of Household Words to this debate: it is true that All the Year Round carried more novellength fiction than its predecessor, but it must be remembered that, without Dickens’s dispute with Bradbury and Evans over his separation from his wife, Household Words would have continued uninterrupted into the 1860s. Additionally, Dickens’s editorial approach in Household Words became increasingly innovative: over a number of years he developed the popular and much-imitated Christmas number format from an initial collection of

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disparate sketches to a complementary set of narratives from different authors, contained within a cohesive framework. Leaving this inconsistency in Dallas’s argument aside, though, his characterisation of the potential consumers of All the Year Round is highly significant. The periodical was priced at 2d, and the substantial nature of the 1d difference in price between it and the penny bloods, for the less-wealthy reader at any rate, should not be underestimated. However, it seems implausible that this increase in cover price should, as Dallas suggests, have put the periodical beyond the pockets of supposedly-undesirable readers of penny fiction. There is no reason why two or more interested parties could not have brought a copy together, as Altick (336) claims happened in the case of Chambers’s.8 Dallas’s argument about the interrelatedness of cover price and audience is similar to that propounded by Collins in ‘The Unknown Public’: both authors are engaged in attempting to maintain a sort of cordon sanitaire between the bloods and the new, respectable twopenny novel journals. They attempt not so much to give an accurate picture of the periodical marketplace, as to address, and reassure, the new middle-class readership which Household Words was engaged in creating. However, Dallas’s final observation, that Dickens’s periodicals cleared the way for the publication of ‘a very high order of fiction’ in the weeklies, is certainly substantiated: Household Words, and its successor All the Year Round, were not only instrumental in shaping public culture, but also in changing the way that people read, wrote, thought about and published journals in the 1850s and 1860s. While the weekly miscellany format had been employed over the preceding two decades by Chambers, Knight, Reynolds and others, it had never achieved the respectable status that Household Words attained. Dickens’s periodical catered to the growing middle-class market who desired good literature for family reading, but were reluctant to pay high prices for the same. Richard Altick comments that, ‘at 2d it was a remarkable bargain’, and continues (347) ‘The fiction was something more than the customary circumspect “family” narrative, whose perfunctory morality did not conceal a yawning emptiness of ideas.’ Dickens had succeeded in improved upon Chambers’s model, and, in doing so, had opened up wide new markets for the weekly serial.

Format: Penny bloods for the middle classes? The precise format of both Household Words and All the Year Round was unusual, and distinct from that of the majority of middle-class periodicals. Dickens deliberately shaped his periodical in opposition to the older, more established, highbrow monthly and quarterly reviews, which represented the literary tastes, reading practices and social rhythms of an earlier generation, and of a more leisured and secure upper class. Household Words actively engaged in creating and addressing a new middle-class audience. In order


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fully to understand the peculiar nature of Household Words and its successor All the Year Round, though, it is necessary first to examine a representative selection of the various weeklies, monthlies and quarterlies alongside which it appeared.9 Broadly characterised, the monthlies and quarterlies, which tended to appeal to wealthier or better-educated readers, were small in format and physically rather substantial, containing many pages of printed matter. The paper used was thick, clean, and suggested expense and luxury. Type was generally arranged in a single column, and illustrations, if any, were typically included in the volume as high-quality plates. Their length would have necessitated a substantial amount of time for perusal; this fact combined with their cost marked them as designed for the leisured, moneyed consumer. Everything about such publications was designed to construct them as enduring books rather than ephemeral pamphlets. Indeed, numbers would have been sold bound in paper covers and containing a separate advertising section, exactly as individual parts of monthly-serialised novels would have been. Laurel Brake has written on the interrelatedness of the book and high-class periodical formats in this period, and notes that in the case of the quarterly reviews, this interrelatedness led to the journals implicitly assuming the weight and authority of the tomes they were criticising. She also suggests (83) that the act of reading such a periodical could effectively blur into the act of reading a book: 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 Addison notes in his diary of 1878 ‘Read for 5th or 6th time the article on English Poetry in L.R. Oct 1861’. Many newspapers and periodicals were customarily issued as annual and semi-annual bound volumes. The potentially ephemeral periodical thus enjoyed both an honorific treatment and a prolonged lifespan by being encased between the protective covers of the library volume. By contrast, the penny and halfpenny weeklies were not generally designed to resemble books, but instead were rather closer to the format of the newspaper. They were printed on thin, marked paper whose quality varied from below average to very poor. Text was divided into two columns, with some larger-format productions like the London Journal, the People’s Periodical and Family Library, and the first series of Chambers’ laid out in three columns. Cheap periodicals were not necessarily illustrated, but those that were tended to devote the majority of the front page to a large woodcut. Successive illustrations were likely to consist of further woodcuts of varying quality, inserted directly into the text, and frequently spanning columns in an L-shaped block. As can be seen from Table 7.2, these periodicals

Table 7.2 A survey of periodicals of the year 1850 (or nearest available date), based on format, efficiency and the printed area of each sheet Pages/ number (average)

Sheets/ number (average)

108

7 (4pp blank)

328.9

198.79

60.4

39.6

area page (cm2)

area text (cm2)

% Blank Text as % (waste) of page space

Periodical

Frequency

Size

Bentley’s Miscellany

Monthly

Royal 8vo

Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal

Weekly

Double Crown 4to

8

1

777.4

612

78.7

21.3

Chambers’s Edinburgh Weekly Journal (New Series)

Double Crown 8vo

16

1

402.61

315

78.2

21.8

Chambers’s Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Arts

Weekly

Double Crown 8vo

16

1

420

315

75

25

Cornhill Magazine

Monthly

Royal 8vo

128

8

312.2

202.65

64.9

35.1

Edinburgh Review

Quarterly

Royal 8vo

289

18.25 (3pp blank)

303.6

183.6

60.5

39.5

English Woman’s Journal

Monthly

Royal 8vo

72

4.5

294.3

174.6

59.3

40.7

Frasers’ Magazine

Monthly

Royal 8vo

123

8 (5pp blank)

302.77

197.6

65.3

34.7

Household Words

Weekly

Quad crown 12mo

24

1

374.46

280.34

74.9

25.1

Lloyds’ Entertaining Journal

Weekly

Royal 8vo

16

1

340.75

288.61

84.7

15.3

London Journal

Weekly

Quad demy 8vo

16

1

889.2

566

63.7

36.3

Penny Magazine (early)

Weekly

Double foolscap 4to

8

1

523.38

388.62

74.3

25.7

Penny Magazine (late)

Weekly

Double foolscap 4to

8

1

440.32

315.36

71.6

28.4

People’s Periodical and Family Library

Weekly

Double demy 8vo

16

1

569.25

443.92

78

22

Quarterly Review

Quarterly

Royal 8vo

290

18.25, 2pp blank

293.29

183.6

62.6

37.4

Reynolds’s Magazine

Weekly

Double crown 8vo

1

411.6

298.35

72.5

27.5

Westminster Review

Quarterly

Royal 8vo

18.25, 2pp blank

298.85

182.31

61

39

16 290

Sources: Own research with some reference to John North, ed. The Waterloo Directory of English Newspapers and Periodicals, 1800–1900 (1997).

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invariably consisted of a single sheet, which was generally folded quarto or octavo to give an eight or sixteen page booklet. These individual numbers would have been sold uncut and without covers; presumably they would also have been published without advertising, as the lack of a cover would have meant that there was no opportunity to bind in a separate advertising supplement. Reissues tended to be by the month rather than by the halfyear or year; in this case the collected numbers were bound in a protective coloured cover, with advertising printed on the inner sides. Perhaps the most notable difference between the weeklies and the more respectable reviews, though, was that of physical size. As Table 7.2 demonstrates, all of the reviews surveyed were produced in royal octavo format. In other words, a number of one of these journals would consist of several sheets of royal paper, each one folded three times into octavo format, stitched together. By contrast, and with the sole exception of Lloyd’s Entertaining Journal, the weeklies were printed on larger sheets of poor quality paper. When folded, these periodicals naturally had pages noticeably larger than those of their more exclusive contemporaries.10 At this point I would like to remind the reader that the terms ‘quarto’, ‘octavo’, ‘duodecimo’ and so on refer not to the physical size of the edition, but to the number of times a single sheet has been folded in each gathering. The size of the finished book depends on both the folding pattern, and the size of the original sheet used (Sadleir 9; McKerrow 164). Michael Sadleir (9) has complained of the lack of rigorous bibliographic inquiry into texts of the machine-press period: his argument, that mechanization does not necessarily entail standardization, is of much relevance here. The evidence already presented here emphasises the fact that an attentive study of format is highly significant in the case of Household Words and All the Year Round, and that physical form is of paramount importance to an understanding of the periodical as literary and social text. What is certain is that the physical dimensions of a volume were in some way linked to its public image and reception. This is abundantly clear when we consider the decision of Robert Chambers, in 1844, to change the shape of the Edinburgh Journal after it had appeared for 12 years in the large format of double crown quarto.11 In an address to the reader, Chambers (1844, 16) explains his motives ‘Throughout the twelve years’ existence of the work, its large size was the subject of constant complaint, which increased latterly in force, as the inconvenience of such bulky volumes in a library was more and more felt.’ He goes on to claim that the Journal is now a royal octavo volume, and assures the reader that, despite the new, smaller format, the periodical will contain no less material. This marketing technique is, incidentally, rather reminiscent of the advertising slogan recently used for the new, tabloid-size Independent introduced by Simon Kelner: though physically diminished, the paper is to be ‘no less independent/Independent’. There is, however, an


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inconsistency in Chambers’s reasoning: Philip Gaskell notes that the dimensions of a sheet of royal paper were 63.5cm by 50.8cm. Working from my own measurements of Chambers’s, I estimate that a single unfolded number of the periodical must have been printed on a sheet measuring at least 65.2cm by 49.4cm.12 Clearly, then, the Journal must have been printed on a larger sheet than Chambers claimed he had used: I suggest that he in fact used the same double crown size paper previously employed in quarto format for the first series of the publication, but began folding it octavo to give an end result close to that of royal octavo. This does make good business sense, as the publisher presumably had either a stockpile of paper to use up, or else a regular supplier. It is notable, though, that the Journal is still being printed on the same size sheet well into the 1850s.13 Whatever the economic reasons for the publisher’s decision, it is clear that he is attempting to secure for his journal a certain status and weight; this is reinforced by his suggestion that the smaller-format volumes will be more suitable for inclusion in a scholarly library. The earlier incarnation of the Journal, its large pages and three columns of type reminiscent both of publications like the SDUK’s Penny Magazine and the London Journal, effectively doomed itself to appear inelegant and plebeian in the eyes of its more aspirational readers. Household Words and All the Year Round employed a combination of the publishing practices from both ends of the marketplace. Numbers were initially published weekly, but were subsequently reissued both as semi-annual indexed volumes, and as paper covered monthly parts. Weekly numbers of Household Words contained no advertising whatsoever, though the blue paper covers of the monthly reissue had printed advertisements on the insides.14 All the Year Round only began to include advertising in the mid 1860s, when the numbers began to be bound in paper covers. The most significant differences between the case of Chambers’s periodical and that of Dickens’s related to the audiences they chose to address: with its cover price ½d above that of Chambers’s, and making use of the undeniably attractive power of Dickens’s name, Household Words appealed to a middle-class readership in a way in which the Journal could not. It is worth paying particular attention to precise questions of advertising and format in the cases of Household Words and All the Year Round, as their physical form is of paramount importance to an understanding of their natures as publications. By the time All the Year Round began to appear with paper covers, the number contained not only printed advertisements inside the front and back covers, but also included The All the Year Round Advertiser. This was an eight to ten page monochrome supplement bound at the front of the volume; three or four coloured advertising inserts were bound in at the end of the number. At this point, All the Year Round appears to be moving into a position which is more in line with Dickens’s part-issued novels, which from the time of Pickwick included not only copious advertising before and after the letterpress, but also a specific supplement taking its title from that of the

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novel itself, such as The David Copperfield Advertiser. Though this development suggests a move to bring the weekly number of the periodical back into line with the monthly numbers of Dickens’s novels, the fact that advertising in Household Words and much of All the Year Round was conspicuous by its absence suggests that the conductor was trying to differentiate his magazines from his part-issued fiction. Indeed, the motivation for excluding advertising cannot have been economic: as early as 1838, an insertion of eight lines would have cost the advertiser ten shillings and sixpence, while the price for half a column rose to two guineas, a whole column three pounds ten and a full page six guineas (Schlicke 1999, 5–6).15 The obvious formal proximity of Dickens’s magazines to the cheap press and the penny blood is strengthened by a less apparent closeness which can be discovered through bibliographic investigation. Table 7.2 is a survey of 14 periodicals, all of which were in publication in or around 1850, the year of the inception of Household Words. Some are aimed at a leisured, literate, upper-class audience, while others are intended for the lowermiddle or working classes. It is interesting to observe that, while some periodicals (notably the cheaper weeklies, but also the Cornhill Magazine) were printed on a regular number of complete sheets of paper each week or month, the more expensive, highbrow quarterlies and monthlies did not appear to have any principle of regularity underlying their structure.16 The average number of the Westminster Review, for example, took up 18 entire sheets and one quarter sheet of royal paper, leaving two pages blank. The Westminster Review’s practice would have been both wasteful in terms of paper, and profligate as regarded the time taken to set one number: in particular, the use of the quarter sheet would have made the business of setting type unnecessarily complicated. Similarly, the percentage of blank, and thus wasted space in each number of Household Words was significantly lower than that of the monthlies and quarterlies: 25.1 per cent as compared to 39.6 per cent in Bentley’s Miscellany and 40.7 per cent in the English Woman’s Journal, two of the most profligate magazines in terms of mise-en-page. Indeed the percentage of wastage in Household Words is low compared to that of the other surveyed periodicals. Aside from the aspirational Chambers’s, the only magazines to make more efficient use of their single weekly sheet than Household Words are two Salisbury Square productions, Lloyds’ Entertaining Journal and the People’s Periodical and Family Library. The question of paper size, like that of wastage, reaches beyond finance into literary ideology. As noted above, the cheaper periodicals surveyed tended to print one week’s number on a single sheet: the need to squeeze as much material as possible into the space afforded by that single sheet led to the general practice of using large sheets of paper. I have, above, explored the way in which productions printed on these larger sheets were automatically inflected with a sense of contemptibility, and the manner in which the


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new series of Chambers’s tried to rid itself of these associations. Household Words corresponds almost exactly in size to the established reviews, but the fact that there are 24 pages in each number belies the suggestion that it too might be a royal octavo publication. The paper quality of Household Words and cheaper weeklies like Lloyd’s and the London Journal is markedly poor: pages are thinner and rougher, and the paper is more marked and stained. With this in mind, and remembering that both were printed on larger sheets than the quarterlies and monthlies, it is reasonable to assume, that large sheets of cheap paper were produced specifically for use in the penny and twopenny press.17 Thus it can be deduced that Dickens’s periodical was printed on a similar size and type of paper as the penny blood, and those publications aimed at working-class readers. The duodecimo format of Household Words rendered it almost the same size as the more costly octavo weeklies and quarterlies, though it was printed on much larger sheets. Consisting as it did of this single folded sheet, the journal would physically have resembled either a penny blood or a miniaturised newspaper, though its lack of illustration would have made it visually distinct from either of these.18 Unique among contemporary periodicals, it was in fact one kind of publication masquerading as another. Household Words must have been printed on quad crown paper (101.6cm × 76.2cm); while the London Journal, for example, could not have been accommodated on that size of paper, it would have been printed on similarly large sheets of quad demy (114.3cm × 88.9cm).19 The SDUK’s Penny Magazine, too, was printed on large sheets of low quality paper, further reinforcing the impression that the cheap press, regardless of its moral or intellectual intent and content, was demarcated by the paper on which it was printed.20 With these circumstances in mind, a distinct ambiguity in the nature of Dickens’s periodicals emerges: on one hand they were given an honorific treatment at their publication in semi-annual volume form, ready for inclusion in the most respectable library; on the other, they rubbed shoulders with the most disreputable forms of cheap literature while appearing in penny weekly numbers. This was evidently a deliberate choice on Dickens’s part: throughout his career he was always most concerned with finding the most cost-efficient form of publication for his novels. His wish that his writings should be available for purchase to as many readers as possible must have had an economic motive, but there was also a strong moral dimension to his thinking, as is evinced by the perpetual calls in his work for cheap, instructive entertainment for all. Those editions published throughout his lifetime were marked by a pronounced austerity of form, and by the same unattractive but space-saving format which was to characterise the pages of his journals. It is natural that his concern with the affordability of his novels extended to his periodicals, a circumstance which accounts for the superficially unappealing, yet economical format of Household Words and All the Year Round.

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In conclusion, it is important to remember precisely the details of Wilkie Collins’s essay, ‘The Unknown Public’, and most particularly the surprising virulence of his attack on ‘the limp unbound picture quarto’. These magazines, with their pages crammed full of close print (Collins quotes a shopkeeper who celebrates his wares purely for the amount of words they can fit on the page, and exclaims, ‘all good pennorths! … My eye! What a lot of print for the money!’ [219]), and their ‘limp’ pages evidently folded into a rough booklet from a single printed sheet, bear an uncanny resemblance to Household Words itself. Despite Collins’s ambivalence, the significance of Dickens’s editorial decision is clear: in adopting the publishing and printing practices of the cheap educational magazines and the bloods, yet at the same time producing a journal which outwardly resembled the highbrow reviews, he deliberately trod a fine line between genres. The hybridity which characterised his journal’s contents was also the defining characteristic of its structure and thus of its identity as a publication. Being in the vanguard of the explosion of inexpensive, novel-carrying papers which was to occur in succeeding decades, Household Words took on the base aspect of the penny press in order to rehabilitate the weekly serialisation of fiction from within. Dickens’s journals exemplify in physical form the ideologies of his novels, and, impelled by the force of his vision and apparently boundless energy, they did much to reinvent the periodical of the mid-nineteenth century. In a sense, the true Unknown Public were not Collins’s workers, but a set of readers scarcely acknowledged by the press of the 1850s: the respectable middle-class consumers of cheap fiction.

Notes This article was first published in Victorian Periodicals Review 38 (1), 2005, pp. 61–82. 1. I shall make more reference to Household Words than to All the Year Round, though the work properly concerns both publications. This is neither an oversight, nor intended to be reductive. Household Words was properly the more innovative and genre-defining of the two publications, whereas All the Year Round merely carried on the work of its predecessor under another name. Indeed, had Dickens’s dispute with Bradbury and Evans over his separation from Catherine Dickens not taken place, it is unlikely that All the Year Round would have come into existence. 2. The two installments of this article were published in the numbers of the journal for 30 March 1850 and 13 April 1850. 3. Smith notes that Prest published further Dickens plagiarisms under such titles as Barnaby Budge, The Life and Adventures of Oliver Twiss, the Workhouse Boy, Mister Humfries’ Clock, Nickelas Nickelbery and Sam Weller’s Budget of Recitations. Many of Prest’s serials were imitations of successful works by well-known or popular authors: his Black-Eyed Susan and Richard Parker; or, The Mutiny at the Nore Adapt dramatic works by Douglas Jerrold, while A Legend of Old St Paul’s and A Legend of the Tower of London, published pseudonymously as ‘by J.H. Hainsforth’ parodied novels by Harrison Ainsworth.


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4. Helen Smith (2002a, 1) distinguishes between the two terms: ‘Bloods’ and ‘penny dreadfuls’ have been almost interchangeably used to describe the sensational penny fiction written for the working classes between about 1830 and 1910. However the terms can best be employed to distinguish the two main periods of such publication: ‘bloods’ denoting material aimed at adult readers from the 1830s to about 1870, and ‘penny dreadfuls’, the later fiction, primarily written for boys. As the material I discuss falls within the period 1830–70, and is typically aimed at the adult reader, I use the terms ‘blood’ and ‘penny blood’ throughout. 5. My emphasis. 6. Chambers’s emphasis. 7. The Free Library, Manchester, later moved from Campfield to a new site in St Peter’s Fields, becoming the Central Library. The collection contains first editions of Household Words in 1850s binding. Dickens was in fact one of the principal speakers at the ceremonial opening of the Free Library in September 1852; other prominent guests included Thackeray, Bulwer-Lytton, Monckton Milnes and Gaskell. 8. One anecdote of such corporate purchase is as follows: ‘In a Cambridgeshire village, five poor boys clubbed together to get a communal copy of the Journal every week: three contributed a halfpenny each … and the other two walked seven miles to the nearest bookseller to get the paper’. 9. Refer throughout to the data provided in Table 7.2. 10. The precise sizes of the sheets referred to in Table 7.2 are given in Gaskell (1972) 224. 11. Robert Chambers took on the editorship of the Journal in 1837, following four years of collaboration with his brother William. 12. If anything, my measurement might slightly underestimate the size of the finished sheet, as I have only been able to work from tightly bound volumes. 13. See Table 7.2. 14. I have been able to confirm this through the kind assistance of Dr Graham Law, of Waseda University, Tokyo; Dr Law has generously shared information gathered from his research in the nineteenth-century periodical collections of Andrew Gasson and Paul Lewis. 15. For the source of these statistics, see Paul Schlicke ed. (1999) 5–6. 16. In the case of the Cornhill, it might be reasonable to assume that the standardisation of numbers of pages, and the increased cost-efficiency that this brought, was copied from or inspired by the production practices of Household Words. 17. The thinness, fragility, and generally poor condition of the paper is due to insufficient washing during the course of production: the fact that bleaches and other chemicals were employed to treat the rags used to produce pulp meant that the paper produced had to be washed thoroughly during the finishing process. As this precaution cost both time and money, the majority of cheap paper was only partially washed; it thus remained acidic and prone to decay. 18. In G.H. Lewes’s novel Ranthorpe [1847], a description of the hero’s reading of his first journalistic efforts sheds light on the manner in which newspapers reached the consumer: ‘Every Sunday morning the paper lay upon his breakfast-table, and made him feel that he was “somebody”, as he cut the leaves and eagerly read over his own contributions’ (Lewes, 1974 p. 38). My italics. 19. Unbound and uncut copies of Household Words are to be found in the collection of Brian Lake at Jarndyce, 46 Great Russell Street, Bloomsbury, London

148 Lorna Huett WC1B 3PA, and in the St Bride Printing Library, Bride Lane, Fleet St, London EC4Y 8EE. 20. With this in mind, it is something of a surprise to note that Lloyd’s Entertaining Journal appears to have been a royal octavo. The magazine was, however, also printed on thin, poor quality paper, and was thus aligned with its penny blood brothers in spite of its format.

8 Often Taken Where a Tract Is Refused: T.B. Smithies, the British Workman, and the Popularisation of the Religious and Temperance Message Frank Murray

Your committee believe that the tracts were never read to anything like the same extent as now. This has partly arisen from broadsheet tracts such as the British Workman, of a very superior order in their illustration, and written (a want so greatly felt in tracts) to meet the especial thoughts and habits of the working classes ... The gift of a publication illustrated and written as the British Workman, is felt by British workmen to be a gift which is too valuable to be refused, and to obtain it they consent to receive, even into their workshops and their places of amusement, as well as in the public house, the messenger who brings the gift, who thus, in a large number of instances, obtains his entrance where great difficulties beset a missionary’s visit. (Annual Report, London City Mission, 1862, 15–16) By the time that this optimistic assessment of the relative state of tract publishing, distribution, and reception was presented, the London City Mission (LCM) had been in the business of distributing authorised temperance and religious tracts, and Gospels to the poor working classes of the capital for over 25 years. However, the observation that ‘tracts were never read to the same extent as now’ gives a clear indication that those communities served by the city missionaries had not always been so receptive to such literary matter. Furthermore, that the British Workman was perceived as being a ‘superior’ tract, ‘written to meet the especial thoughts and habits of the working classes’ suggests that those attributes ascribed to the British Workman were not commonplace in tract publishing prior to that time. This 149

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paper, therefore, seeks to explore the circumstances that led to the publication of the British Workman, and examine the factors that determined it should become the most popular periodical of its genre (Altick 395; Harrison 142) a leader in the field of temperance and religious periodicals publishing for more than a quarter of a century, and a model on which subsequent titles were to base themselves. Additionally, a close analysis of two specific numbers of this important periodical highlights how texts and images can establish periodical identities and audience expectations, and be manipulated in order to accommodate changing circumstances within the marketplace. During the 1840s there was a significant increase in the availability of cheap, entertaining periodicals. The London Journal, Family Herald, Lloyd’s Weekly, and Reynolds’s Miscellany, quickly established extensive circulations and a wide readership among the lower middle classes and the increasingly literate working classes. By mid century the London Journal and Family Herald were each circulating in excess of 170,000 copies per week and just a few years later, at the peak of their popularity, these figures had risen to 510,000 (King 53) and 240,000 (Ellegård 21) respectively. In calling for a concerted effort on behalf of religious organisations to counter the threat to the moral well being of society posed by the proliferation of a ‘press ... either directly or indirectly opposed to vital religion’, William Oakey, challenged the various Bible and tract societies to meet the needs of the masses by improving the quality and quantity of religious literature (Oakey 4–5). In order to illustrate the gravity of the situation Oakey produced statistics to show that in 1846, the London issue alone of ‘manifestly pernicious literature’, amounted to 28,862,000 items, while the number of religious publications produced nationally, only totalled 24,418,620 (1847, 14).1 By 1853, it was claimed that the number of ‘infidel’ publications produced annually, totalled over 42 millions (Ranyard 370).2 This was a matter of great concern to many contemporary commentators, and it was widely held that such ‘pernicious’ literature was detracting from religious observance, and contributing to an increased incidence of immorality, and criminality among the lower classes. However, religious publishing accounted for about 17.6 per cent of the total number of publications issued between 1841 and 1851 (excluding newspapers), with a rise of 56 per cent in the number of titles issued during the decade, although some were quite short lived.3 According to Josef Altholz, the ready availability of cheap publications, and the expansion of working class reading during the 1840s, prompted the publication of a number of religious periodicals in the hope of attracting the working-class consumer to a more elevating type of literature. The tracts, pamphlets, sermons, and fly-leaves published by the Religious Tract Society (RTS), the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK), and others, constituted the main output from the religious press (apart from Bibles,

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Testaments, and Gospels), and although widely distributed, these tracts were largely ignored by the majority of the urban working classes. There is also evidence to suggest that there were many within the working classes for whom even the staple products of the religious press, the Bibles, Testaments, and Gospels, either held little attraction, or were beyond their reach. For example, in 1850, the Clerkenwell Auxiliary of The British and Foreign Bible Society closed after having sold seventeen Bibles during 1849 in a district with an estimated population of over 60,000. New, cheap, religious periodicals were published, the Friendly Visitor, Cottager’s Monthly Visitor, Cottager’s Friend, and the Cottage Magazine, but failed to make much impact among the lower classes. Altholz notes that, as the titles suggest, these publications were out of step with the realities of urban existence, looking backwards to an outdated pre-industrial value system with little relevance to modern industrial society. Altholz and Louis Billington both argue that, at best, these periodicals sold only a few thousand copies per issue, limited as they were by their narrowly pious and denominational character (Altholz 136; Billington 126–27). Similarly, temperance literature, in the form of pamphlets, tracts and periodicals, was distributed widely, and it too, had little impact on the attention of those working classes below the ranks of the artisan elite. Catering principally to the memberships of the various temperance organisations, The British Temperance Advocate, the Alliance Weekly News, and the National Temperance Chronicle, were primarily ‘in house’ publications with a predominantly middle-class readership (Neissen 260–63). From within the temperance movement as a whole there was little in the way of literature, other than propaganda, published for widespread distribution to the working classes and, regarding the effectiveness of the temperance movement, John Dunlop had to concede, ‘... we have done little with respect to what may be regarded as the dregs of society ... they probably drink even more than they did ten years ago.’ (see Harrison 133–34). Religious and temperance issues were intimately connected and Christian and lay agencies distributed tracts (including cheap, morally improving periodicals), intended to address concerns of religious non-observance, and intemperance. For example, the Ipswich Temperance Tracts issued by R.D. Alexander, Esq., emanated from the pens of members of the clergy, and respected lay authors4 and, by mid century, the clergy were also well represented in the main temperance associations. Tract distribution was an integral part of the work of religious and temperance organisations and publishing and distributing them consumed a great deal of time and money, consequently efforts in this field were meticulously recorded and regularly reported upon. (Annual Report, London City Mission 1841, 17; Annual Report Religious Tract Society 1848, 37; Mayhew Vol. 4 1861/68, xxii–xxiii). Complementing the practice of home visits, and public meetings, the tract served as a focus for public readings, a text to be re-read by


the recipient in the absence of the district visitor, or as an offering that could serve as an introduction, and an opportunity to establish new contacts. Although the number of tracts issued continued to increase steadily, they were becoming increasingly perceived as irrelevant in the lives of many of the working classes, consequently being left to ‘eddy about in odd corners only to wither and die’. One critic was prompted to declare, ‘If a man wishes to see rubbish in its most concentrated form, let him read a tract’ (Dallas 1859, 516–17). As Oakey had complained in 1847, religious tract writing had failed to keep pace with the growing intelligence of the reading public, and failed to capture public interest (Oakey 1847, 4), and Martin Hewitt argues that, in Manchester at least, similar complaints were voiced up to the early 1870s (221). To complicate matters further, by mid century the processes of tract and pamphlet distribution were themselves becoming less effective. By the early 1850s the number of religious tract sellers said to be working in London had fallen to around 50, the majority of them being foreigners with little sympathy for, or understanding of, either the medium or the message. The fact that, in many instances, tract selling was considered to be a pretext for begging further undermined the wider perceptions of the value of religious tracts (Mayhew Vol 1 1861/1968, 241–42).5 It was observed by some commentators that the middle classes increasingly sought to distance themselves from the urban masses, physically and geographically, moving out to the suburbs in increasing numbers with some parishes being ‘denuded of their middle-class inhabitants’ (Hewitt 212).6 Additionally there was a growing reluctance, within some sections of the philanthropic community, to support the idea of lady visitors coming into too close contact with the poorer inhabitants of the congested urban centres particularly as they were perceived to be a threat, as the areas they inhabited were ‘loathsome haunts of crime and fever’.7 Some of the alternative strategies adopted for the distribution of tracts abandoned the personal transaction between the donor and the recipient, often resulting in a more casual, and less effective, process. In Ford Madox Brown’s contemporary painting, Work (1852–63), a female tract distributor is portrayed ‘flinging’ a copy of the ‘Hodman’s Haven, or drink for thirsty souls’ (Golby 115) into the cavernous hole excavated by the navvies, a depiction which, perhaps, suggests Madox Brown’s attitude towards tract distribution rather than that of Thomas Plint, the ardent temperance supporter at whose request the motif was included.8 The idea of having old ladies dropping monotonous fly-leaves into pockets, or throwing them into cabs, was a source of amusement for some; as was the spectacle of a ‘... cat-footed, crane-necked, whispering ... race of pewopeners’, hanging around theatre doorways, handing out tracts to those bound for the bottomless pit (Dallas 1859, 515). One tract distributor declared, ‘I have often traversed at night different parts of several large

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cities ... and thrown tracts in at the doors and down the areas of houses, and thus quietly introduced these faithful monitors into habitations into which by any more open method they never would have found access ...’ (Christian Monitor 1864/65, 276). What was required was a radically different approach to the publication of religious and temperance literature, combined with a re-establishment of a direct and personal contact between the evangelicals and the lower classes. T.B. Smithies, for one, saw that, ‘with the spreading ability to read, it was becoming more and more urgently necessary that the supply of healthy reading material should be enlarged and improved.’ (Stringer Rowe 1884, 134). Thomas Bywater Smithies, editor of the British Workman, was not only an executive member of the National Temperance Society, a committed Wesleyan Methodist, and an unswerving Sabbatarian, he was an ‘efficient and zealous’ Sunday-school teacher and advocate of advancing the spiritual and moral education of the working classes. As a prison visitor at York City Gaol he became convinced of the need to combine religious instruction and the temperance message so that, ‘... no child should pass under [his] oversight, as a teacher, without [his] advising the adoption of entire abstinence ...’ (Green 1850, 4). Smithies’ own thinking on such temperance and religious matters, and his recognition of the educational value of pictures, established the basic pattern for all his publications. While his personal beliefs directed his efforts in periodical and tract production, it was widely recognised that his publications were non-partisan, and that his ‘catholicity of spirit’ manifested itself in the cordial support that he gave to every religious and benevolent organisation (Band of Hope Chronicle September 1883, 135). His children’s temperance paper, the Band of Hope Review, with its disinterested mix of temperance, religious, and humanitarian principles, was to achieve the largest circulation for any periodical of its type, and afford him the opportunity to attempt a similar paper for adults. As the mission statement on the front page of the first number stated, the British Workman and Friend of the Sons of Toil, was commenced in February 1855, with the express intention of improving the ‘health, wealth, and happiness of the working classes’. Radically different from all other religious or temperance tracts and periodicals, the British Workman and Friend of the Sons of Toil was a lavishly illustrated, four page, penny, broadsheet publication, offering a miscellany of spiritually and morally uplifting pictures and short articles covering temperance, religion, thrift, kindness to animals, industry and peace. It was well printed on high quality paper, noted for the superior quality of images and letterpress. However, as Mountjoy noted, whereas Smithies’ temperance paper for juveniles succeeded in part because of the early support it received from the Sundayschool Union and the Band of Hope movement (Mountjoy 47), the British Workman and Friend of the Sons of Toil, did not initially benefit from the support of such national networks. Although it was well endorsed and attracted

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a significant amount of praise in the press, it was not an immediate commercial success. Members of the Established Church, the legislature, the aristocracy, and the main temperance associations (see British Temperance Advocate April 1855, 44–45), were quick to praise the British Workman and Friend of the Sons of Toil. Lord Albemarle, himself a subscriber, declared that, ‘The artistic taste with which it is got up, and its excellent moral tendency, make it eminently calculated to produce an elevating and beneficial effect on the labouring classes of England’ (British Workman March 1856, 60). That such prominent supporters vouched for the respectability of the British Workman and testified to the quality and appropriateness of the illustrations and letterpress, is a clear indication of the perceived uniqueness and worth of the paper. It was a publication ‘admirably suited to its purpose ... got up in a style far superior to its price’ (British Workman May 1855, 20). For Shaftesbury it was ‘... calculated to produce the best effects among all the operative classes’ and so appropriate for distribution by masters to their men (British Workman February 1855, 7). While the Mayor of Romsey, declared that the paper was also intended to counteract the influence of ‘infidel and immoral publications’, asserting that the low cost allowed for widespread distribution by the clergy and the laity in order to contribute to the general improvement of the masses (British Workman February 1858, 152). Despite an initial projection of only two numbers as ‘an experiment’, and early circulation figures that would have warranted the closure of any other periodical publication, Smithies persevered with his paper. As a committed teetotaller, and executive member of the National Temperance Society, he enjoyed the support of temperance and religious organisations, employers, and enthusiastic individuals from across all strata of society at a time when temperance affiliations invested one with personal attributes of integrity and respectability. More significantly a network of influential philanthropic friends and associates, with a common interest in improving the condition of the working classes, recognised the usefulness of the British Workman in the prosecution of their work (Harrison 141–42). These friends and colleagues supported Smithies through his financial difficulties and purchased large quantities of the paper for free distribution. It was one such purchase that marked a fundamental turning point in the trajectory of the British Workman in terms of the presentation and content of the paper and the nature of the readership. Several of Smithies’ closest allies and supporters, Shaftesbury, Arthur Kinnaird, M.P. (later Lord Kinnaird), Henry Ford Barclay, Esq., George Moore, Esq., Samuel Morley, Esq., and Joseph Hoare, Esq., Rev. J.B. Owen, were also intimately connected with the work of the LCM either as officers or major fundraisers. The LCM was the largest single distributor of tracts to the poor working classes of London and the official involvement of this Society in distributing copies of the British Workman was to provide the

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impetus that projected the paper towards the mass-circulations of the early 1860s. By February 1857, circulation had only reached about 85,000 (although Smithies was more optimistic about the future potential of his paper), but around this time steps were being taken to secure the future of the paper. Preparations were under way to accommodate a large grant of 200,000 copies the British Workman to the LCM, for free distribution, financed by ‘four warm hearted friends’. The involvement of the LCM and its missionaries in distributing the number for October 1857 appears to have been the catalyst for sustained advances in circulation to the extent that figures reached over 250,000 copies per month by 1862 establishing the British Workman as the mass circulation periodical of its genre. Although the largest, the grant of 1857 was not the only occasion on which large numbers of the paper were supplied to the LCM. Along with other large free grants of the paper, £120 was donated by ‘one gentleman’ for its purchase, in 1859 (London City Mission Magazine June 1859, 159), further funds totalling £240 were allocated to purchase copies (approximately 72,000), in 1860, and, in 1863, 100,000 copies of the paper were granted, along with the same number of copies of the Band of Hope Review.9 In order that the Committee of the LCM might accept the periodical for widespread distribution, negotiations had to take place to ensure that the British Workman was best suited to the needs of the Society. The outcome was the careful adaptation and special printing of the October 1857 issue.10 The evidence suggests that this ‘adaptation’ involved significant and permanent alterations to the title under which the paper was projected, impacting directly on the way in which those concerned with the involvement of the LCM perceived the publication. The large page size (affording a print area 38cm × 28cm) serves to highlight the uniqueness of the British Workman within the religious publishing genre of the mid 1850s. The size of the paper sets it apart from those mass circulation titles of the London Journal and Family Herald ilk, denounced by some evangelicals as infidel or pernicious, and defined to a certain degree by their quarto format (King 83). The page size also locates the paper within the ‘traditional’ space occupied by the more respectable broadsheets, and suggests an affinity of sorts with Cassell’s Illustrated Family Paper, published as a rival to the London Journal (King 52), and the prestigious Illustrated London News. At the same time, the British Workman challenged existing concepts of the religious and temperance tract, transforming the usual pocket-sized intended for personal contemplation, into a publication designed to encourage public display and consumption either in the home, the workplace, or the public waiting room. For the first 26 numbers, February 1855 to February 1857, the paper was titled the British Workman and Friend of the Sons of Toil, headed by a complex and ornately embellished masthead executed by Henry Anelay (Fig. 8.1).11 The central motif of the original masthead depicts an array of working men,

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including engineers, mechanics, bricklayers, and navvies, set against a backdrop of the Crystal Palace and other representations of Britain’s industrial greatness, the railways, and giant factories. The workmen represented are arranged in quasi-classical poses, creating a form reminiscent of an imposing pediment from the façade of grand architectural structure, echoing the imagery used on ornate membership cards from the beginning of the century, or the certificates of the newly amalgamated trades unions, established during the revival following on from the demise of Chartism. Membership cards and certificates such as those of the London Tin Plate Workers (1805) (Gorman 1986, 69) or the Amalgamated Society of Engineers (1851) (Leeson 22), for example, could well have provided some of the inspiration for Henry Anelay’s masthead. This type of imagery, with the additional motifs would not only have located the British Workman and Friend of the Sons of Toil within the newly emerging, organised, elite of the working classes, and trades union movement, but also confirm its allegiance to the central authority of the Crown (and, by association, the Church), and the dominating force of middle class, industrial power. Such identifications would not have gone unnoticed by those enthusiastic supporters of the periodical such as Shaftesbury, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Albemarle, and other representatives of the Establishment. It is evident that from its inception, the British Workman and Friend of the Sons of Toil was intended to circulate widely among those involved in established, organised, respectable employment, at both employer and employee level, and that the paper was to promote industrial harmony through its images and letterpress consistent with the ideals of middle-class manufacturers and employers, and the newly amalgamated representative bodies of labour that promoted processes of arbitration and negotiation rather than the confrontational, and destructive, strikes such as those by the engineers (1852), and the cotton operatives of Lancashire (1854). Superficially the paper underwent only cosmetic changes in the adaptation for distribution by the LCM. The alterations to the masthead did not affect the overall balance of text and image presented to readers on the important first page of the issue, and the text identifying the periodical as the ‘British Workman’ remained unaltered. However, the modifications represented a significant shift of emphasis in the way that the temperance message in particular was projected. (Figs. 8.1 & 8.2) George Cruikshank’s illustration to Joseph Livesey’s ‘The Loaf Lecture’, which adorns the front page of the first number (Fig. 8.1), unambiguously confirms the temperance credentials of the British Workman with the image being an obvious reworking of the first plate of Cruikshank’s popular The Bottle, 1847. The Livesey connection suggests a close association with the more uncompromising ‘northern’ brand of temperance agitation, most popular in Leeds, Bradford, and Manchester (where, it was claimed the paper obtained its highest circulations among the operative). However, combined

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Figure 8.1 The British Workman and Friend of the Sons of Toil, No. 1 February 1855, 1.


Figure 8.2 The British Workman and Friend of the Sons of Toil, No. 34 October 1857, 133.

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with the original, illustrated masthead, including the words ‘and Friend of the Sons of Toil’ the overall message, as projected, might have been considered exclusive, and, therefore, less appropriate, for those sections of the community regularly visited by the London city missionaries. Smithies was, at one time (13 June 1861), occasioned to write to Mrs. Cruikshank enquiring about any letterpress that might help missionaries give an address or lecture on the plates of the ‘Bottle’ (Smithies 1861). The October 1857 number, while visually very similar to the first number, is far more persuasive in tone and less dependent on the pedagogical lecturing style. The temperance leader in the British Workman amended for the LCM approaches the subject in a completely different way (Fig. 8.2). Under the ‘British Workman’ banner, the new masthead comprises an illustration reminiscent of a ‘Hogarthian’ progress in which a workman is depicted through a sequence of six cameo images, purchasing goods at a number of shops, which are subsequently delivered to the surprised wife at home. This graphic form invokes the comic strip/picture book style of Topffer (1827). In the earliest forms, nineteenth-century comic strip narratives were predominantly and, ‘directly religious, moral and politically didactic or propagandist’, a graphic imagery intended to extend its appeal to the ‘lower class’ audience (Kunzle 1–7). Unlike the first number in which the texts take the form of a stern lecture, and the image depicts the consequences of intemperance, imprudence, and poverty, the dominant images and texts in the modified issue serve to illustrate, and highlight, the rewards and benefits of temperance in a positive way. The Annual Reports of the LCM, and the pages of the London City Mission Magazine, from 1857 onwards, are replete with positive comments about the British Workman, the benefits and advantages it afforded the missionaries and the Society. Missionaries distributing the paper were able to gain access to workshops, and places of amusement otherwise barred to them, and it was felt that there was a more positive attitude towards both the messenger and the message. ‘... often taken where a tract is refused’ (Annual Report London City Mission 1860, 21) ‘The gift of a publication illustrated and written as the British Workman is felt ... to be a gift too valuable to refuse’ (Annual Report London City Mission 1863, 15–16). This has mainly rendered the British Workman so eminently popular among the classes visited by the Society, and secured for it a perusal more general than has ever yet been obtained by any other publication circulated ... [it does not contain] that large amount of doctrinal instruction which is ordinarily to be met with in the tracts of the RTS ... [it has] paved the way for such tracts to be read. (London City Mission Annual Report 1864, 13) While it has to be acknowledged that such reports would tend to have a distinct bias towards serving the purpose of the Society and the missionaries


themselves, the regularity and consistency of the positive nature of the statements over a period of 25 years and more, are indicative of a genuine response. Similar comments can be found in the reports and magazines produced by the Manchester City Mission (MCM), throughout the late 1850s and early 60s. Records of the missionaries there confirmed that the British Workman was an excellent tool that helped, ‘to open the door of entrance among a fresh company of men’ (Manchester City Mission Magazine January 1859, 7); and that it was, ‘not only well received by the people, but often asked for by them,’ The Curate of All Saints, Derby, remarked how the British Workman was accepted where a tract would be ‘insultingly refused’ (British Workman November 1863, 427). Also, hundreds of those visited became subscribers in their own right; and it was believed that the introduction of the British Workman improved the reading taste of the people, displacing titles such as the London Journal, Reynolds’s Miscellany, and the Parlour Journal, and encouraging the acceptance of ‘other periodicals of a religious or a high moral tone.’ (Manchester City Mission Magazine April 1861, 5). The perception that British Workman offered a more palatable combination of temperance and religious content, along with excellent wood engravings, is supported in the testimonies of many prominent individuals, in the support and encouragement given by a wide range of philanthropic agencies, and countless individuals and groups nationwide. The full page report in the Society’s magazine that followed the initial grant, acknowledging the usefulness and special qualities of the paper, demonstrates just how potentially valuable the committee believed such a high quality publication might be in support of their work among the working classes (London City Mission Magazine November 1857, 312). Furthermore, the response from both city missionaries and members of the poor communities within which they worked, and the unprecedented circulations achieved and sustained, confirm a widespread acceptance cutting across class boundaries. To further facilitate the wider dissemination of religious and temperance principles Smithies produced a considerable range of illustrated matter including, low cost handbills printed on paper made from straw; tracts, fly sheets, wall-papers, and almanacs, offering in a more condensed form texts and images from both the Band of Hope Review and the British Workman. As well as these more ephemeral forms, Smithies’ periodicals were available in a number of bound formats, yearly parts, five, eight, and ten, year volumes, bound for distribution as personal gifts, or donated to institutions such as railway and shipping companies, police stations and workhouses.12 Additionally, the paper was printed in a number of different languages so that Smithies might capitalise on its usefulness as a missionary tract (British Workman January 1892, 4). As such it was distributed among foreign nationals in the United Kingdom, particularly sailors visiting London docks, as well as being used to promote the Christian message abroad.

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What is particularly important is the way in which distributing the British Workman created the opportunity for missionaries to more readily gain access into the homes and lives of the poor. City missionaries, and the recently established network of Ranyard’s Bible women, used the British Workman as a means of re-establishing home visiting, providing the ‘missing link’ (Ranyard 1850) between the lower classes and the ‘establishment’. Distribution of the British Workman to the poor helped to promote a wider dissemination, and acceptance, of the religious and temperance message, as other tracts and publications, often issued in conjunction with it. The committee of the LCM, thankful for regular large donations of the British Workman for gratuitous distribution, noted it had been instrumental in paving the way for more deeply religious teaching and a greater acceptance of those tracts issued by the RTS (Annual Report London City Mission 1864 13). Perhaps more significantly, the huge popularity of the British Workman determined that other publishers of religious and temperance literature were given cause to look to their own publications and reassess their relevance for a working-class reader. During the early 1850s the SPCK and the RTS had introduced their own new penny papers, The Home Friend (1852), the Leisure Hour (1852), and Sunday at Home (1854), in an attempt to entice the working-class reader away from their preferred ‘corrupting’ reading matter and to promote Sunday reading of appropriate religious matter. The records of the LCM do not suggest that these new family-oriented papers were distributed widely among the poor in London, although it was reported by the MCM, that the distribution of the British Workman, in that town, had encouraged a wider acceptance of these RTS periodicals among those visited (Manchester City Mission Magazine April 1858: 8). The British Workman helped to stimulate a new enthusiasm for tract distribution, tract production and tract reading, and it is of particular importance that, to a large degree, representatives of the working classes themselves were keen to become increasingly involved in promoting its distribution. While the established practices of home visits, charitable work, and tract distribution continued to be predominantly organised and conducted by middle-class females in areas where it was still considered appropriate, it was working-class men and women who were elected to work among the very disadvantaged. Evidence suggests that Smithies’ set standards of taste and style that influenced the format and visual appearance of a number of other periodicals, and that the success of the British Workman, in particular, encouraged others to follow his lead. The new periodicals issued by the RTS and the SPCK during the 1850s, The Home Friend, Leisure Hour and Sunday at Home were generally aimed at the middle-class family despite the publishers’ aspirations to attract a wide readership from ‘the tenant of the lowliest cottage’ (Preface, Home Friend Vol 1. 1852, iii). In 1861, however, the RTS issued a new title echoing the ‘cottager’ titles of the early decades of the nineteenth


century. The Cottager and Artisan (1861–1919), a large format, lavishly illustrated, eight-page, paper very similar in style to the British Workman but more overtly religious in content. More obviously designed to attract the working-class reader, the larger format page allowed for much bigger images, and less dense letterpress interspersed with wood engravings and other embellishments. On each page the letterpress was arranged in three columns (rather than two as in their earlier periodicals), and articles were usually much shorter and more varied. There are close stylistic links between the design of the title pages for the British Workman and the Cottager and Artisan as incorporated into the yearly parts. The fact that illustrations to some numbers of the British Workman and The Cottager and Artisan were executed by the same artists further emphasises the visual similarity between the two papers (Figs. 8.3 & 8.4).13 In commending the equal quality of the illustrative matter in the British Workman and the Cottager and Artisan, Vincent van Gogh, for one, was of the opinion that they emanated from the same source, the London Tract Society (Van Gogh 1882). As Mountjoy argues, Arthur Hall’s British Workwoman Out and at Home (1863–1913), closely resembles the British Workman. The choice of title, the visual presentation, and the high moral tone of the contents, along with the illustrations by Henry Anelay (a long time contributor to Smithies publications), serve to highlight the similarities. The imposing masthead and the bold symmetry of the page layout owe a lot to Smithies, and later modifications made to the masthead of the British Workwoman, with the transition to an unassuming though clear title, the double ruled border, the striking full page illustrations, and the wholesomeness of the images, further emphasise the debt owed to Smithies’ pioneering work (Fig. 8.5). While the evidence suggests that Smithies’ periodical had a great influence on the appearance and format of ‘improving’ periodicals published in the United Kingdom from the beginning of the 1860s, there are also strong indications that foreign publishers were also occasioned to follow his example. The Norwegian worker’s paper Den Norske Arbeider (The Norwegian Worker), published during the 1870s, was claimed to be a ‘mirror’ of the British Workman, incorporating some of the same images using copies of plates provided by Smithies. Peter Haerems, the publisher, stated that, owing largely to the quality of the images, and the letterpress, Den Norske Arbeider, enjoyed circulation figures similar to those of the British Workman (Haerem 34). While it is evident that Smithies’ contribution to a more palatable and acceptable form of religious and temperance periodical was both original in conception, and influential in terms of the future development of the genre, the extent to which the British Workman was effective in meeting the objectives and aspirations of those evangelical philanthropists who recognised the needs it met and the potential it offered are as difficult to measure as the

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Figure 8.3 The British Workman, No. 269 May 1877, 13.


Figure 8.4

The Cottager and Artisan, No. 217 January 1879, 1.

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Figure 8.5 The British Workwoman Out and at Home, No. 316 January 1890, 25.


overall success of the work it supported. How great was the impact of the religious and temperance press on the moral improvement of the working classes? The optimism and enthusiasm projected in official reports, and missionary journals, was not always an accurate assessment of what happened at grass roots level. The frustration and disappointment experienced during home visits, for example, is all too apparent, and the numbers of souls saved and drunkards reclaimed, although presented with a positive gloss, are not overwhelming (Hewitt 223–24). What emerges from an examination of the available material, however, is just how important Smithies’ paper was perceived to be at the time, and how much it affected the work of the city missionaries, and the aspirations of a great number of the working classes at home and abroad. His personal creed, his consistency and ‘catholicity’ of spirit, maintained throughout his 32 years in periodicals publishing, were significant contributory factors which determined that his papers would attract a network of friends and supporters from across the political, social, and cultural spectra. By adapting his publication to meet the needs of the full spectrum of the workingclass population, maintaining the integrity of his stated manifesto while modifying, and tempering, the way in which readers’ and supporters’ expectations might be accommodated, Smithies managed to establish, and sustain, unprecedented circulations. The success and popularity of the British Workman prompted others to follow his lead in presenting a more visually attractive and persuasive face to religious and temperance publications, directed more considerately at the working classes.

Notes 1. By way of comparison the1846 grant of RTS amounted to 2,062,841 small tracts and handbills. 2. Ranyard, Ellen, The Book and its Story, pp. 370–71. John Cassell cited Oakey’s figures when giving evidence to the Select Committee on Newspaper Stamps, 1851. 3. These figures are based on results obtained from Altholz’s original analysis of information extracted from the Waterloo Directory, and further information gleaned from the enlarged database. 4. The Catalogue of Ipswich Temperance Publications lists among its tract contributors, Rev. T. Spencer, Rev. Hugh Stowell, J. Burns D.D., Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Clara Lucas Balfour. Of the 50 officers and vice presidents of the United Kingdom Alliance 13 were member of the clergy. Similarly 12 of the 50 officials of the National Temperance Society were from the clergy. 5. The inability of some of the foreign tract sellers to communicate in English diminished the value of such methods of disseminating religious matter almost to a level of complete pointlessness. 6. See also Frederick Engels, The Condition of the Working Classes in England in 1844 (1844), Golby pp. 279–80; and Sargant pp. 216–17 concerning the middle-class

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7.

8.

9. 10.

11. 12.

13.

exodus from urban centres and the effects of demographic changes on urban environments. For matters concerning the appropriateness, and effectiveness, of middle-class lady visitors and tract distributors, see Ranyard Vol. iv, 1853 p. 45; Quarterly Review, Vol. 108: 6, & Vol. 97: 444. See also Prochaska p. 126 and concerns raised in relation to lady visitors to the poor in Elliott pp. 116–122. Madox Brown’s own comments relating to this section of his picture, offer an enlightening viewpoint on the process of tract distribution at mid century. See Golby p. 115. The £240 was made up of £120 from H.F. Barclay, matched ‘cheerfully’ by the LCM committee. See LCM Annual Report 1861, p. 20; LCM Annual Report 1864, p. 13. Smithies was quite prepared to adapt his publication in order to extend its readership. By 1857 ‘special numbers’ had been a regular occurrence and he had previously produced a ‘special adaptation’ (British Workman, December 1855) for the committee of the Leeds Temperance Society who took steps to circulate it among the operatives of the town. See The British Temperance Advocate, 19 January 1856. For a more detailed discussion of the complex role of the masthead in establishing the identity of a periodical, see King 2000, pp. 97–111; Wagner p. 25. See, for example, S.W. Partridge’s catalogue of illustrated publications (1879) for a more complete picture of the publication of the British Workman in various forms. A number of influential artists regularly contributed to both the British Workman and the Cottager and Artisan, including Harrison Weir, Robert Barnes, and the portrait specialist Thomas Scott.

9 Seductive Visual Studies: Scientific Focus and Editorial Control in The Woman in White and All the Year Round Laurie Garrison

The Woman in White is a text saturated with problematic desire. Walter Hartright’s desire for Laura Fairlie is forbidden due to their class difference. Marian Halcombe and Laura feel a mutual desire that is unsettled as it is extended to a triangulation that first includes Walter and then Sir Percival. Both Marian and Walter find that their fascination with Count Fosco – their simultaneous attraction to and repulsion by him – leads to a questioning of their own previously secure understanding of desire. Particularly in the case of Fosco’s effect on Marian and Walter, it is very often the visual study of another’s physical appearance that leads to these unsettling revelations about sexual desire. In The Woman in White, such visual studies take the form of over-written passages, obsessed with recording every detail the eye can absorb. These visual records hold an affinity with narratives of scientific investigation that purposely seek to unsettle previously accepted knowledge. Walter Hartright’s amateur detective work seeks to mimic the effect of such narratives as he compiles his evidence against Percival and the Count. The plot of the novel is indeed driven by Walter’s transformation from a poor detective, or poor observer of evidence, to a capable one. Early in the narrative, Walter is incapable of seeing the obvious meaning of Laura and Anne Catherick’s resemblance – that one of the two women must be the illegitimate product of adultery. He is also disoriented by his attraction to and repulsion by Marian’s unusual appearance – a disorientation that he attempts to transform into a conventional male desire for a woman living under enforced submissiveness. As Walter’s skill develops, his ability to observe and express what the evidence shows transforms into a simultaneous scientific and editorial mastery over the text of The Woman in White. Walter attempts to show that he has come to master the visual experience, deriving power and agency from all of its associations with masculine 168

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scientific classification and control. This is not to say, however, that Wilkie Collins advocates the primacy of the male observer sought by Walter Hartright. Rather, the supremacy Walter attains is continually undermined throughout The Woman in White by Collins’s constant reminders that such control is an artificial construction of a masculine realm of science and technical expertise that cannot remain stable. This article will address the ways that the visual image is represented in the written texts of The Woman in White and All the Year Round with specific reference to the surrounding contents of All the Year Round that inform the reading of The Woman in White (serialised from November 1859 to August 1860). All the Year Round was not an illustrated journal, but its contents, and especially The Woman in White, reveal a dominant interest in visual representation (See Fig. 9.1). Charles Dickens, founder and ‘conductor’ of All the Year Round, has been studied as an author particularly interested in representing and interrogating various modes of expressing sexuality.1 Given Dickens’s interest in this area, and the fact that he authored many of the contributions to All the Year Round, it is not surprising that the contents of the periodical including and apart from the novels are a rich field for the study of gender and sexuality. The Woman in White and the surrounding contents of All the Year Round therefore are deeply intertwined in an exchange of discourses of sexuality, in my view most prominently in terms of the relationship between sexuality and the sense of vision. But the significance of this exchange is much wider than its position as an example of the shared interests between Collins and Dickens. In the serialisation of The Woman in White, Collins enacts a project of critiquing the relationship between the writer and the editor, presumably intended also to critique Dickens’s editing practices.2 In nineteenth-century descriptions of the visual experience – particularly those where a scientist observes a visual image produced by a form of optical technology – a gendered relationship emerges where the dominant, masculine viewer scrutinizes a passive, female object. Within these descriptions of scientific work, there is often an element of sexual desire implied in the visual experience, intended to function as a metaphor for the intensity of the author’s passion for new discoveries and new knowledge.3 Such a relationship is easily transferable from the scientist and the object of study to the editor and the author’s writing. As I will show, the nature of Walter’s position as compiler of the narratives that form The Woman in White is continually at issue in the novel.4 The sexualized element of these visual experiences is easily transferable to the act of editing an author’s work, and Collins exploits this possibility as the narrative traces the progression toward Walter’s sexual and professional development. In a novel obsessed with representing and interrogating multiple forms of sexual desire as well as the promiscuous relations of power between the objects of desire and their observers, it is no wonder that the scrutiny of the editor is imbued with

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Figure 9.1 Opening page of The Woman in White, All the Year Round (November 1859). Reproduced with permission from the British Library.

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desire. The figure of Walter as editor comes to represent a revolt against this power relationship – the very power relationship that determined the parameters for Collins’s writing of The Woman in White. In Techniques of the Observer, Jonathan Crary traces the way in which human vision in the nineteenth century became nearly impossible to theorize without engaging with the scientific and technological influences that helped shape the nineteenth-century understanding of the nature of vision. Crary argues that an epistemic shift at the beginning of the nineteenth century institutes an understanding of the visual experience that dislocates the senses into distinct receptors to be codified and normalized by science for industrial exploitation. Physiological studies of the limitations of human vision revealed exactly how efficient human labour could be in industrial production and the pleasures associated with optical devices were exploited on the commodity market to develop and sustain markets for such devices. For Crary, the ‘separation of the senses ... enabled the new objects of vision (whether commodities, photographs, or the act of perception itself) to assume a mystified and abstract identity, sundered from any relation to the observer’s position within a cognitively unified field’ (Crary 19). In the use of a device that focused on a single sense – vision in this case – the typical cognitive process, simultaneously reliant on a number of senses working in conjunction and the subject’s previously accepted knowledge, was unsettled. This provided a distorted perception that might seem to suggest the inadequacy of the more typical, unified process of perception. The result for the viewer was that the act of seeing through technology opened a space of communication where selected strategies of normalization could be inserted into the viewer’s subconscious. Walter Benjamin has described a similar process in his ‘Short History of Photography,’ arguing that the perceived precision of photography in the nineteenth century helps to uncover what he has termed ‘the optical unconscious’ (Benjamin 7). However, Benjamin polarizes the scientific or technological aspects of photography and the ‘magic’ of photography (8). Benjamin writes, ‘It is indeed a different nature that speaks to the camera from the one which addresses the eye; different above all in the sense that instead of a space worked through by a human consciousness, there appears one which is affected unconsciously’ (7). The effect is to reveal ‘physiognomic aspects of pictorial worlds which live in the smallest things, perceptible yet covert enough to find shelter in daydreams’ (7–8). Unaffected and previously invisible urges, desires and thoughts can be uncovered in photography. But for Benjamin, such a process holds much more of an affinity with the work of science and technology than with the mysticism of magic or the unconscious: ‘Structural qualities, cellular tissues, which form the natural business of technology and medicine are all much more closely related to the camera than to the atmospheric landscape or the expressive portrait’ (7). According to Benjamin, the magical or unconscious effects of photography

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that serve to develop the sense that it is a mystical process are a fiction of the power of technology. These elements will collapse into the realm of science and technology when they are revealed to be a product of the same: technology only appears magical when it is employed by those who do not understand its mechanism. I would argue however, that this form of magic is more significant than Benjamin suggests. The communication with the unconscious in the act of seeing as described by Crary and Benjamin suggests that there may be a subversive counterpart to the industrial exploitation and mechanization of sight; certain aspects of seeing resist scientific classification and control. Such a confrontation takes place in the text of The Woman in White as Walter’s understanding of his own gender and sexual identity is subverted by unsettling desires inspired by visual studies. He responds by seeking to expand the larger limits of his professional experience and agency. The narrative of The Woman in White begins with Walter’s attainment of a position as a drawing tutor for a wealthy young woman in a country house. Although experienced in the visual techniques of painting and drawing, Walter’s early persona is naïve, effeminate and lacking in the technical knowledge that comes to represent legitimate masculinity for him. When Walter unexpectedly encounters Marian standing at the opposite side of a room, her unusual appearance disorients him to the point that he begins to question the truths and assumptions he relies on to define his gender and sexual identity. The moment is expanded in narrative time as Walter obsessively catalogues every detail with the scrutiny of a scientist or an editor. The narrative follows the path of his eye as he examines Marian from behind and then traces her movement toward him. When viewing her from behind, Walter is ‘struck by the rare beauty of her form’ and particularly interested in her waist, which is ‘perfection in the eyes of a man, for it occupied its natural place, it filled out its natural circle, it was visibly and delightfully undeformed by stays’ (Collins 1859–60, 118).5 The moment of her approach lengthens as he hesitates in his narration: She left the window – and I said to myself, The lady is dark. She moved forward a few steps – and I said to myself, The lady is young. She approached nearer – and I said to myself (with a sense of surprise which words fail me to express), The lady is ugly! (118) A possible explanation for Walter’s shock and repulsion might lie in the fact that Marian exhibits the unusual form of beauty favored by the PreRaphaelites, a group of painters much more technologically adept than Walter Hartright at this point. The looseness of Marian’s clothing and the voluptuousness of her figure (‘comely and well-developed, yet not fat’) are reminiscent of Pre-Raphaelite depictions of women (118). Furthermore, Marian’s ‘complexion was almost swarthy, and the dark down on her upper

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lip was almost a moustache. She had a large, firm, masculine mouth and jaw; prominent, piercing, resolute brown eyes; and thick, coal-black hair, growing unusually low down on her forehead.’ (118). This physical description of Marian in fact suggests that her appearance may well have been directly based on models for the Pre-Raphaelites and the resemblance of her features to those of Jane Morris is striking (See Fig. 9.2).6 While Pre-Raphaelite painting effectively combines the aesthetics of traditional painting and innovative art forms such as photography and spectroscopy,7 Walter’s inability to appreciate the unusual look exhibited by Marian signals a rather limited knowledge of new aesthetic forms. Marian’s physical appearance is also a combination of masculine as well as feminine qualities and it serves as a visual marker of her bisexuality. Her appearance, and Walter’s experience of viewing it belong to a realm of the visual that defies the current limits of Walter’s knowledge and control, although Walter will later seek to include this experience within his realm of control. The text of The Woman in White is in dialogue with the other contents of All the Year Round throughout its serialisation, but early in the narrative these strands of dialogue are more random than they will appear later in the serialisation. One of the articles about optical technologies published early in the serialisation shares several similarities with Walter’s experience of examining Marian. Walter’s implied resistance to the use of innovative technologies in the production of works of art is echoed in the article, titled ‘Since This Old Cap Was New.’ The author laments the popularity of photography and particularly ‘those semi-ribald stereoscopes’ that transform photographic models into poor wretches ... picking up sorry crumbs ... sitting as models for the personages in those stereoscopic slides which look so curiously like life, and so hideously unlike it, showing their bleared faces and crinolines and legs, and playing their miserable antics for a penny wage. (‘Since This Old Cap’ 1859, 79) The anxiety over these images lies in the author’s distaste for the way that ‘bleared faces and crinolines and legs’ can appear ‘so curiously like life.’ For this writer, the stereoscope becomes an affront to the idea of truthful representation of ‘humanity’ as models are ‘tortured into the similitude of an ape, or caricatured into sham angels and sham ghosts’ (79). Elements of the natural world are manipulated as the stereoscope enacts a ‘wresting of sunbeams’ in order ‘to irradiate dust-heaps and sewers’ (79). The author’s easy slippage from the discussion of stereoscopic photography in general to its more racy applications is not unusual given the developing association of the use of the stereoscope with pornography from the mid- to late-nineteenth century. However, the concern with the truthfulness of the representation, the way stereoscopic slides can ‘look so curiously like

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Figure 9.2 Postscript by a sincere friend. All the Year Round (April 1860). Reproduced with permission from the British Library.

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life,’ reveals that the danger of the stereoscope is that it might influence the viewer into seeing pornographic slides as realistic representations of human sexuality. While the use of photography for objective scientific documentation might be an obvious application of the technology, the representations offered by the stereoscope defy accepted classifications of the natural world. Marian’s appearance poses a similar problem for Walter. While contemplating Marian’s unusual look – a masculine face paired with a feminine body – Walter observes, ‘Never was the old conventional maxim, that Nature cannot err, more flatly contradicted’ (Collins 1859–60, 118). Walter’s reference to an ‘old conventional maxim’ is no accident, as Marian defies a variety of conventions, challenging Walter’s naïve understanding of visual representation as well as his notion of the conventions of gender and sexual identity. The unusual look Marian exhibits, the type so often exploited by the Pre-Raphaelites, is one associated with the PreRaphaelites’ innovative use of combinations of traditional method and new technology, as her sexual identity is also a combination of a variety of desires, defying easy classification. Like the image presented by the stereoscope, the fluid nature of Marian’s sexual identity remains beyond the reach of a calculating and quantifying masculine science – a problem that Walter will seek to rectify. Because Marian poses a threat to Walter’s understanding of gender and sexual identity, she becomes a tool in his project of restructuring his masculine identity that most clearly takes shape after his return from Central America. At once an unsettling visual object and more skilled than Walter in reading visual meaning, Marian is a formidable rival to him and she is subject to a rather harsh editorial treatment. The most significant example of Marian’s skill in reading physical appearances exists in her long description of Count Fosco. Marian spends several pages of her journal describing the ‘strangely original man’: ‘It absolutely startles me, now he is in my mind, to find how plainly I see him!’ (386, 384). Like the afterimage produced by many optical toys of the period, Fosco haunts Marian, but at this point she maintains control over his effect on her. In describing his enormous size, Marian writes that she has ‘always especially disliked corpulent humanity’ (384), but it is Fosco’s overpowering fleshiness, his open and overwhelming sensuality that appear to seduce everyone around him. The Count’s facial features resemble Napoleon in their ‘magnificent regularity,’ his ‘look’ when speaking to women is one of ‘pleased, attentive interest [which] none of us can resist’ (384). Even with the limitations of his enormous size, Fosco’s ‘movements are astonishingly light and easy,’ but ‘with all his look of unmistakable mental firmness and power, he is as nervously sensitive’ as the ‘weakest’ woman (384). Marian does not recoil from the Count’s effeminacy but rather expresses curiosity about his childish love of his pet animals, fine clothing, tarts and flowers. When confronted with a man whose sexuality is so openly exhibited and so strikingly unusual, Marian calmly and astutely

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records it, aware of the complexity of her ‘strange, half-willing, half-unwilling liking’ for him as well as the danger he may represent (386). Significantly, Marian is fascinated by the fact that the Count is ‘one of the first experimental chemists living’ and has created many ‘wonderful inventions’ (385). Given the Count’s technical expertise in a number of areas and his uncanny ability to slip unnoticed into any sort of society, observing and judging his movements require a high level of technical skill. Marian possesses a natural ability, unlike Walter, to confront the difficult revelations incited by such intense examinations, particularly when concerning sexuality. Such ability allows her to read the Count as the embodiment of a form of masculinity that successfully fuses his feminine mannerisms with his authoritative profession, drawing his powerful agency from his transgressive adaptability. Although at this point Marian successfully and safely observes the Count from a distance, he will be the cause of her narrative breakdown when he enacts his abuse of her through his chemistry and his editorial ravishing of her diary. As Walter would have it, the masculine realm of science and technology will overcome Marian’s feminine predisposition for reading the visual. However, the fact that the Count’s assault on Marian is enacted through a form of editing, brings Walter’s influence as the editor of the text of The Woman in White into question in this incident. The Count’s violent editorial insertion into Marian’s diary takes place within a complicated set of layers of editing. Marian’s diary has been written by Collins writing as Marian, added to if not edited by Fosco, edited and united with the rest of the narrative of The Woman in White by Walter Hartright, and published in the periodical All the Year Round, edited by Charles Dickens. On the surface, it would appear that the gendered relationship between editors and authors as well as observers and subjects is returned to order when Fosco steals and amends Marian’s diary. Her position of superiority over Walter is overpowered by this editorial act that strikes at the source of her agency. Marian’s confidence in reading her own and others’ sexuality is completely undermined. D.A. Miller has read Fosco’s theft and addition to Marian’s diary as a ‘powerful shock’ for the reader that functions as a metaphorical rape stemming from ‘homosexual panic and heterosexual violence’ (1988: 164). Such a reading seems appropriate given the sudden appearance of a break in the text and the insertion of the Count’s ‘Postscript by a Sincere Friend’ as well as Marian’s breathless, struggling state in her last diary entry (See Fig. 9.3). Given the Count’s penchant for adapting his identity to fit into any sort of society, it is not difficult to imagine his transformation into a rapist punishing Marian for her trangressions across the divide of gender. Furthermore, in keeping with Walter’s valorization of masculine technical knowledge, Marian’s natural ability to read the physical appearances of others and confront unusual sexual practice is completely disarmed by the Count’s more formally perfected skills in chemistry as

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Figure 9.3 Jane Morris seated, leading forward. Albumen print by Emery Walker from the photograph by John Robert Parsons. Reproduced with permission from Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery.

well as editing. During Marian’s illness, Fosco claims, his ‘sentiments’ for Marian ‘have induced me to offer’ Marian’s physician ‘my vast knowledge of chemistry, and my luminous experience of the more subtle resources which medical and magnetic science have placed at the disposal of mankind’ (Collins 1859–60, 26). Masculine scientific knowledge ensures Fosco’s superiority over both Marian and the professional physician hired to treat her.

178 Seductive Visual Studies: Scientific Focus and Editorial Control

Furthermore, the editorial insertion validates the gendered relationship between authors and editors. Fosco’s postscipt offers the appearance of his having maintained control over events in the house regardless of Marian’s shocking discoveries about him and Percival. This is a structure similar to that of an editor of a text who appears to have maintained control over its writing by influencing the final product. Fosco’s unreserved confidence in Marian’s ‘masterly ... presentation of my own character’ offers the sense that her narrative has never been a threat (26). We are left wondering how reliable Marian’s narrative may now be, given the Count’s opportunity for tampering with her writing. Marian may have succeeded in transgressing her gendered role, but the violence of Fosco’s entry in her diary brings masculine superiority back into power and suggests that the balance of power was never truly upset. The potentially unsympathetic and tyrannical power of the editor is also brought to light in Walter’s decision to retain Fosco’s ‘Postscript by a Sincere Friend’ in precisely the same way it was discovered, a fact that is brought to our attention in the editorial notes. If the Count has maintained an omniscient, editorial control over the domestic setting of Blackwater Park and Marian’s diary, then Walter as editor appears to hold a similar position, at least retrospectively, watching over the Count watching over the diary. At this point then, Walter’s editorial position takes on a rather sinister tone as he witnesses the Count’s violation of Marian, allowing his abuse to stand so clearly unpunished. The question here then is whether the intention is to reveal just how cruel and dangerous the Count is, to complete Marian’s downfall from a position of masculine agency, or to portray just how formidable a foe Fosco will be for Walter when he returns. A major shift in the development of Walter’s character and in the plot of the novel occurs between Walter’s early and later narratives. When Walter’s early narrative ends and Marian’s begins, his weakness and effeminacy is sharply contrasted with her strength and agency – particularly evident in her early and astute observations of Count Fosco’s character. When Walter returns, however, Marian’s voice is eliminated from the narrative and Walter reappears as ‘a changed man’ (127). Transformed from the effeminate artist, dependent on the fashion for teaching wealthy young ladies to draw, Walter now provides for the women whose good will he once depended on, supporting them ‘by drawing and engraving on wood for cheap periodicals’ (145). Walter suddenly possesses the dominance and agency of a middle-class man more secure in his gender and sexual identity; something or several significant things have occurred offstage. While distanced from the main narrative, Walter has been adventuring in Central America and All the Year Round supplies examples of what he may have experienced. A number of exploration and adventure articles coloured with problematic desire are published throughout Marian’s narrative, which

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encompasses Walter’s entire series of adventures in Central America. A number of articles about Englishmen travelling in the East, titled ‘Lunacy in Constantinople,’ ‘Eastern Lunacy, and Something More,’ and ‘Turkish Burial Grounds,’ construct the native as sensual and transgressive – a strategy that distances the white male travellers from them and aids in the construction of a close companionship. These articles also represent the East as a place where transgression is possible for the white male traveller, perhaps even invited. In ‘Eastern Lunacy, and Something More,’ the narrator pays ‘peculiar attention that morning to the purified Church service’ and then attends another service. At this second service, the ‘kneeling,’ ‘stripping off gowns’ and ‘defiling past the sheikhs’ of a ‘chain of men, tossing their heads in cadence to and fro, jerking forward and backward their mad bodies, and then coming down all together with the roaring “Hoo!” intermingled with shouts of “Allah!”’ (1860, 340–44). In all of this undulating action, there is a threat of danger as the narrator observes a ‘possessed man ... wraggling about like a machine’ with a look ‘such as no automaton could assume’: Right, left, backward, forward, regular as a pendulum, his little legs bandied as if by perpetual oscillation. Thrust a bit of opium in that man’s mouth, thought I, tie a sabre in his idiotic hand, craze him with half an hour of this howling ... and he would rush out and slay a dozen Christians, or brain the Sultan himself, if the sheikh bade him. (344) As in Walter’s description of Marian, this narrative also obsessively catalogues every detail and the observer/object relationship is heightened by the cultural divide between the participants. An arguably scientific framework of the study of other cultures serves to cloak the rather disturbing pleasure the traveller might experience in viewing this scene. The danger and excitement of this setting causes the travellers to cling to their own cultural identity with what appears to be a justified fervour, as in the narrator’s ‘peculiar attention’ paid to the church service. But the sensuality implied in such studies, as well as the suggestion of further transgressive possibilities where the surveillance of British society is not available, certainly would not be lost on the Victorian reader. The suggestion is that experiences such as these are a component of Walter’s visual training. This at once hints toward the nature of Walter’s attainment of sexual and intellectual maturity and relegates the narration of the process to a position safely distanced from the main narrative and from the reader’s direct view. The figure of Walter the editor, newly confident and capable on his return from Central America, is permitted to protect this new demeanour while it is simultaneously subtly undermined by material selected by Dickens the editor.

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Walter’s returning narrative opens with an explanation for his transformation that indicates his adventures have helped him to move beyond the effeminate adolescence of his early narrative: In the waters of a new life, I had tempered my nature afresh. In the stern school of extremity and danger my will had learnt to be strong, my heart to be resolute, my mind to rely on itself. I had gone out to fly from my own future. I came back to face it, as a man should. To face it with that inevitable suppression of myself, which I knew it would demand from me. (Collins 1859–60, 127) According to Walter, his adventures in Central America have led him to return to England purged of his weakness and effeminacy. That Walter will now ‘face’ his future, sharply called to attention by the repetition of this phrase, is significant in its suggestion that he will no longer recoil from the visual experiences that have so often disoriented him. We may doubt that Walter has succeeded in purging his transgressive desires, but he is in control of them, ready to face their ‘inevitable suppression’ when required. Walter’s previous distaste for Marian has also disappeared, evidenced by their new habits of frequent pressing of hands and stolen kisses, as if his new-found knowledge has influenced his view of her Pre-Raphaelite beauty.8 The umbrella of Walter’s knowledge now includes an intimate knowledge of male sexuality, the technical skills necessary for periodical engraving as well as the editorial manipulation of texts. The climax of the narrative and Walter’s final affirmation of his newfound dominance occurs in his confrontation with Count Fosco – an event that requires the use of Walter’s newly developed visual skills as well as his editorial expertise. In preparation, Walter finds it ‘necessary to see for myself what sort of man I had to deal with’ (413). He no longer recoils from the unusual appearance of the Count, but rather closely examines all of his effeminate and ‘ostentatious’ habits (413). As in the first meeting with Marian, the Count’s appearance signals a fluid, unclassifiable sexuality and, as in the first meeting with Marian, Walter is attracted and repelled: ‘Sincerely as I loathed the man, the prodigious strength of his character, even in its most trivial aspects, impressed me in spite of myself’ (438). At this point in the narrative Walter calmly and coolly assembles his evidence, in control of any self-questioning or unusual desires the Count might inspire. When the confrontation occurs, Walter’s victory depends on his knowledge of Fosco’s membership in the homoerotic Brotherhood that serves as evidence for Count’s transgressive sexuality.9 Walter brings the mysteries of the Count’s identity and his sexuality under the umbrella of his knowledge by forcing the Count to enact an authorial performance where Walter is the spectator. Walter simultaneously asserts his editorial power over the Count and the text of The Woman in White by demanding that

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Fosco supply missing evidence. Walter is again attracted to and repelled by Count Fosco’s ‘horrible freshness and cheerfulness and vitality’ (413), but he carefully compiles all the details of the Count’s writing habits, unaffected by his eccentricities: He scattered the pens about the table, so that they might lie ready in all directions to be taken up when wanted, and then cut the paper into a heap of narrow slips, of the form used by professional writers for the press ... Each slip as he finished it, was paged, and tossed over his shoulder, out of his way, on the floor. When his first pen was worn out, that went over his shoulder too; and he pounced on a second from a supply scattered about the table. Slip after slip, by dozens, by fifties, by hundreds, flew over his shoulders on either side of him till he had snowed himself up in paper all around his chair. (438–39) One of the mysteries of the Count is already dispelled by Walter’s observations; he is a professional writer and therefore a powerful opponent to Walter the editor. Walter, however, takes pleasure in this scene as the Count will now be subject to his scrutiny for a specifically calculated period and his professional techniques will become part of Walter’s store of knowledge. As in narratives of scientific discovery, the events unfold with an immediacy that suggests they occur as the reader’s eye crosses the page. Although Walter dominates the Count in this scene, his overwhelming sexuality is not contained until his death under circumstances coloured by editorial influence. While pursuing a periodical illustrating opportunity in Paris, Walter comes upon Fosco’s enormous, nude, dead body in the Paris morgue. Fosco’s brand of the Brotherhood, a nameless ‘device’ branded in a ‘bright blood-red color’ on his arm (417), has been violently scored by ‘two deep cuts in the shape of the letter T’ (467). The hand of an editor transforms the appearance of the Count’s tattoo into a visual symbol for ‘traitor.’ The final scene of the narrative of The Woman in White with the restoration of Marian, Laura, Walter and their child in Limmeridge House is at best a moment of uneasy resolution. Walter is responsible for the continuation of the Fairlie line, now the Hartright line, and as Marian affirms, his child is now ‘one of the landed gentry of England’ (468). Walter has coupled his authority derived through technical expertise with legitimacy of name. However, there has been no resolution to the sexual tensions experienced between Laura and Marian or Walter and Marian. On the surface, Walter and Laura’s relationship is recognized by law, and Marian’s position as poor dependant relation is far from unusual. Under closer examination, however, The Woman in White suggests that multiple pairings might occur within the household in a fluid exchange of desire under the guise of a legitimate, middle-class domestic arrangement. Walter has managed to assert his masculinity by bringing the mysterious margins of sexuality, the visual

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image and several editorial tricks within his realm of knowledge and control, but in this final scene, the surface appearance does not match the deeper content. Marian’s unusual composition of a contradictory appearance and contradictory desires as well as Walter’s and Laura’s attraction to her resist inclusion in the resolution of the narrative of Walter’s attainment of masculine power. Walter’s progressive development of an inclusive, scientific and calculated knowledge is revealed to have been limited. Like the unconscious influences of optical technology as described by Benjamin and Crary, Marian’s appearance continues to threaten orthodox relationships between the observer and object of study as well as the gendered power structures implied in such relationships. We might imagine the difference between the surface appearance of the final scene of The Woman in White and its hidden depths to be similar to the difference between the photograph and the stereoscope. Presumably objective, scientific and calculated, the photograph fails to capture the magical hidden depths of the stereoscopic image that are capable of subverting the knowledge science seeks to reinforce. The serialisation of The Woman in White functions in much the same manner as the surrounding contents of All the Year Round reveal hidden depths of meaning otherwise invisible to the reader. Such a process might suggest that the editor possesses a widereaching and authoritative vision like that of the scientist, but Collins undermines this possibility with the figure of Walter who never completely succeeds in establishing a masculine dominance or editorial control over the text. The suggestion remains therefore that Collins’s authorial sleights of hand where surrounding articles in All the Year Round come to inform the reading of The Woman in White may well have gone unnoticed by Dickens, revealing the extent to which the periodical as a genre can offer opportunities for expression between the lines and in the margins of its pages.

Notes 1. See Sedgwick and Cohen (1996) for detailed discussions of the way sexuality is expressed in Dickens’s novels. Anne Schwan and Holly Furneaux have also recently edited a special issue of Critical Survey on the issue of sexuality in Dickens’s novels. See Critical Survey 17.2 (2005). 2. For a more detailed account of Dickens’s editorship of All The Year Round see Drew 105ff. 3. See especially Armstrong’s reading of George Henry Lewes’ work. 4. For discussions of Walter as editor of the text of The Woman in White see Stave and Williams. 5. All page numbers for The Woman in White refer to the serial text in All the Year Round. 6. Nina Auerbach has also noted this resemblance and argues that as a ‘physical type,’ Marian is similar to the ‘Pre-Raphaelite “stunner” whose image would possess the 1860s: the swarthy, Italianate Jane Morris’ (Auerback 1982, p. 137). Auerbach lists Marian’s hair, mouth and jaw as attributes that link her with ‘Jane

Laurie Garrison 183 Morris’ un-English and unorthodox magnetism, though this similarly uncorseted Pre-Raphaelite idol would no doubt appall a drawing-master like Walter, who sees and works by the rules’ (137). 7. See Smith for a full discussion of Pre-Raphaelite interest in technology and representation. 8. Shirley Stave has substantially discussed the desire Marian appears to feel for Walter but she argues that this is an editorial technique on Walter’s part, purposely revealing Marian’s attraction to him without commenting on it as a way of affirming his masculinity, empowering himself as the ‘attractive, desirable hero, at the same time that he appears both innocent and honourable in not speaking of what it obvious’ (292). 9. Nemesvari has extensively discussed the homoerotic desire among men in The Woman in White as well as the implications of membership in The Brotherhood, but he has not addressed the homoerotic implications of Walter’s Central American adventuring, straightforwardly seeing Walter’s heterosexual identity as ‘confirmed/created’ by the experience (625).

10 Depicting Gentlemen’s Fashions in the Tailor and Cutter, 1866–1900 Christopher Kent

Masculinity and fashion are awkward companions. The very phrase ‘men’s fashions’ verges on oxymoron since fashion has long been gendered feminine. Fashion connotes instability, irrationality, and willing submission to the dictates of its mysterious and arbitrary authorities. These are hardly characteristics one associates with conventional notions of manliness, least of all during the Victorian period when gender definitions were particularly polarized. We all have a vivid mental image of the hyperdifferentiated gender distinctions of Victorian dress – women’s colourfully curvaceous with the aid of crinoline and corsetry, men’s drably linear from stove-pipe hat to spats. Thorstein Veblen famously based his economic theory of conspicuous consumption on the excesses of Victorian women’s fashion. The curves and colours varied; waistline and necklines fluctuated, but the demands it made on quantities of costly fabric, and on the time of both maker and wearer, remained symbolically high so as to advertise the status of the woman who wore and the man who paid for its excess. In contrast, men’s dress particularly after the era of the Dandy ended around 1840 is generally thought of as being fairly stable in appearance, conveying the impression of seriousness and sobriety appropriate to the bourgeois male while emphasising the functionality and mobility of the arms and legs as opposed to the immobilizing implications of women’s dress. Men were not expected to give much thought to their dress. To do so, or to dress as though one did, implied insufficient attention to more important matters. The ‘best dressed man,’ according to that notable authority on Victorian manliness, Thomas Hughes, ‘is he whose attire sits on him with careless and apparently unstudied simplicity.’ (Hughes 1885, 179) Advice on dress in men’s conduct books consistently placed greatest emphasis on neatness and above all cleanliness, particularly at the extremities – clean gloves, clean shoes, immaculate collar and cuffs, well brushed hat. Cleanliness was both acceptably functional for its associations with good health, and an effective status signal given the costs of maintaining it amidst the 184

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manure-strewn streets and smoke-laden skies of a horse-drawn, coal-burning civilization. While warning his readers that whoever paid too much attention to dress would become ‘the laughing stock of his own sex,’ Hughes saw fit to devote 15 pages of his handbook to the subject of men’s dress. It is evident that like him many Victorian men paid considerable attention to dress. That they did so was vitally important to the livelihood of the tailoring trade. Reconciling fashion with the ideology of masculinity was central to its prosperity. How it did so is the subject of this chapter, which focuses on Tailor and Cutter, the leading journal of the tailoring trade. Tailor and Cutter commenced publication in 1866 as the Tailor, a news sheet serving as a national clearing house for information concerning trade practices, local scales of time required for piece work (known as the ‘log’), labour disputes and agreements in various parts of Britain. The Cutter and Index of Fashion began in 1868 as a separate paper directed towards the trade’s elite, the specialists who make up the customer’s pattern according to his measurements and then cut the cloth by that pattern for journeyman tailors to sew up. The two papers amalgamated officially with the 9 October 1869 number and continued as a weekly under the name of Tailor and Cutter until May 1936. It also came out as a monthly under several different titles during its 69 year existence. As an ‘insider’s’ publication, it takes fashion for granted to a certain degree and is by no means hostile to it. Nonetheless it demonstrates an awareness of the problematics of men’s fashion, offering strategies that position the tailor-reader, the beneficiary of fashion, as an honest broker between fashion’s mystified origins and his suspicious customers. One of the first things to impress the attentive reader of Tailor and Cutter may well be the surprising variety of Victorian gentlemen’s clothing, and the inadequacy of John Flugel’s often-quoted summary of it as ‘the great masculine renunciation’ – a retreat from the manly panache of Dandyism into the oppressive conformity of the subfusc suit. To be sure, the variations in Victorian men’s fashion are less dramatic than those in women’s, but compared to the limited range through which men’s formal, semi-formal and business fashions differ today, its variety was remarkable. But much of that variety turned on nuances and details which do not necessarily leap off the page and capture the uneducated eye. Students of Sherlock Holmes will recall how closely the great detective scrutinized the minutiae of dress that revealed so much about a man. [Longhurst 60] There was indeed much minutiae to scrutinize. Going from the top down, the detachable collar allowed great variety in collar height and style, quite apart from the lateVictorian advent of the fold-over collar and the softer, unstarched collar. Tie widths varied considerably as did the variety of knots, with rather more of the bow type than today. Tie patterns varied less since much less tie was exposed given the universality of the waistcoat, which had to be fully buttoned. The waistcoat itself, however, was the field of greatest opportunity for variety of colour and pattern.

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The central item of dress was the coat: to remove it was to make a very meaningful declaration of informality, or intimacy. The three main types of coat were the nearly knee-length frock coat which was the garb of serious urban daytime activity for gentlemen, the tail coat for formal non-business occasions of ceremony, entertainment or leisure, and the short jacket ending just below the hips, variously called the shooting or smoking jacket, or reefer. The latter was generally associated with the country, sport and leisure, including riding and boating which required greater freedom for the limbs. Its steady rise to dominance over the other two types was one of the main themes of Victorian fashion and is part of the largest narrative of modern men’s fashion – the continuing tendency of sport/casual/country styles to drive out business/formal/urban styles. Men’s pants saw the final and so far permanent demise of knee-breeches (excepting the elite sporting taste for baggy plus fours or knickerbockers). The fly-front replaced the fall-front around the 1860s and thereafter the triumphant full-length men’s trouser varied mainly in leg width, ringing the changes on peg, bell, or straight outlines. There were however interesting subplots in the trouser story, notably the emergence of the crease, at first variously side-to-side or frontto-back until the latter completely routed the former, and initially soft, then overwhelmingly hard or sharp. Trouser turn-ups or cuffs were a late innovation, as J. Alfred Prufrock’s hesitancy tells us. The coverings of the two extremities, hats and boots, are disregarded here as not being part of the tailor’s remit. A major source of variety in Victorian gentlemen’s clothing was contrast, particularly between coat and trousers. Suits entirely made from the same fabric were usually called dittos – the name deriving from the tailor’s order book in which the fabric of the coat would be specified, with ditto marks for the trousers. Full acceptance of dittos came fairly late: they had to overcome the handicap of being considered a bourgeois mark of sartorial timidity and of probable reliance on a ready-made tailor. Our image of Victorian men’s dress relies heavily on the black and white illustrations of contemporary periodicals and books which often fail to convey differences in texture, pattern, and shade that provided contrast between jacket and trousers, though in fact fashion generally preferred considerable contrast between darker jacket and lighter trousers. The variety of fabrics available to Victorian tailors is also inadequately appreciated. The pages of Tailor and Cutter are full of references to cheviots, angolas, meltons, moscows, venetians, lambskins, worsteds, West of Englands, tweeds, cords, twills, velours and kashmirs. Tailors worked mainly with woolens, though there was also linen and silk, usually mixed with wool, and for summer casual wear, cotton duck. The fabrics were generally heavier and more highly textured than today’s. The coat or jacket provided the main theatre for men’s fashion. Although many of today’s standard points of variation can be identified, they showed wider variation then than now. Lapel width and shape offered greater scope,

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while the more difficult to tailor – and fabric-consuming – double-breasted style was much more prevalent especially in the frock coat. The amount of cutaway and degree of rounding at the skirt points indicated the region where either dash or discretion could be suggested by the extent of upper trouser display in single-breasted styles. Similarly, buttoning, particularly for the frock, ranged from one to five or more with significant implications for both the coat’s outline and the extent of the decolletage which determined the field of display for tie and waistcoat (as well as the watch chain with its related trinketry). As with cutaway, the semiotics of wider and deeper breast openings invite obvious speculation. Buttons varied more than today in size. They were usually discreetly covered with matching cloth in formal jackets but could be quite exuberant and expensive in colour and workmanship when of carved horn and ivory or engraved metal. The number, placing and angle of pockets, flapped or flapless, patch or let-in (usually the latter), were also less standardized than now. Further scope for variety could be found in the trimmings, nowadays confined mainly to formal wear. Seams and fabric edges were often corded or bound with strips of different fabric and of different or even contrasting colour. Braid was frequently sewn on above the cuffs or along the outside trouser seam. Elaborate frogging might be deployed for fastenings on men’s overcoats and smoking jackets. Jackets were sometimes faced with a different, smoother fabric, particularly at the collar and lapels where velvet or silk might be used (and still is in some formal men’s dress.) All such forms of decoration gestured towards military uniforms, which reached a peak of peacockery in Europe during the nineteenth century. Covert flamboyance could be indulged by linings of pink, crimson or sky blue silk inside sober jackets or coats. All such variations of course involved additional expense in materials and labour. An example of labour-intensive detail, still to be found on some men’s custom-made jackets, was cuff buttons that actually buttoned. Here was a test for the Holmesian eye (unless the wearer crudely advertised the detail by unbuttoning his cuffs). But the variations that mattered most, for which tailors themselves had the sharpest eyes, were those of fit and fabric quality. The tailor-gentleman relationship was notoriously fraught. Tailors were among labour’s elite, traditionally standing at or near the top of the artisan hierarchy. Their work was clean, sedentary and indoor, requiring dexterity rather than strength, performed with a fairly high level of autonomy and usually paid on piecework. They prided themselves on being a sort of working-class intelligentsia and Tailor and Cutter clearly considered itself the mouthpiece of this tailoring consciousness (which the Marxist would consider false consciousness in its most flagrant form), noting that a tailor had even become President of the United States (sadly, it was the not unimpeachable Andrew Johnson) and reminding its readers of other Tailors Who Had Risen. However the journal also acknowledged that their trade did not

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rank high on the index of working-class masculinity. The popular saying ‘It takes nine tailors to make a man’ was not a tribute to their importance in the construction of masculinity: it implied rather that a tailor was only one ninth of a man. A tailor’s work was, after all, really woman’s work – the unmanly task of plying the needle. On the other hand, the tailor was placed in an ambiguously close relationship with his gentleman customer. Dress being so important an indicator of social status, the tailor’s intimate knowledge of the arcana of gentlemen’s dress, and of the bodily defects it concealed, implicitly conferred power on him. A mutual if unacknowledged awareness of that power bred anxiety in the customer, which had to be allayed by an elaborate show of deference from the tailor and a display of status and authority from the customer. The taking of measurements, especially the notoriously delicate inside leg measurement, and the conduct of the fittings, were among the most difficult moments in this negotiation. And then there was the matter of price, and payment. It was a crucial mark of gentlemanly status to expect, and receive credit. Slow or non-payment of his tailor’s bill was the traditional way for the gentleman to revenge himself for the humiliation of having to submit his body to the mercy of a social inferior. Overcharging was the tailor’s defence against the risks of credit. On all such matters Tailor and Cutter had advice for its professional readership. The matter of fashion was no less sensitive. Fashion generates trade by stimulating demand. From the standpoint of economic determinism, this could be seen as its ‘real’ function. If such demand is deemed artificial, it could be viewed as an affront to the presumed rationalism of masculinity. Thomas Hughes approached men’s fashion with suspicion, lamenting that Englishmen were ‘less sensible’ than the Japanese, ‘whose dress for 2500 years remained the same for all ranks.’ Fortunately, he continued, men’s fashions in England varied little: if one avoided extremes, ‘last year’s coat or a garment of an even earlier epoch will not betray its age or cut.’ Compromising with reality, Hughes asserted: ‘If there is one thing worse than being quite out of the fashion, it is being ultra-fashionable. Your dress and character should be in complete contrast – the one neutral, half-tinted, indeterminate, the other bold, well coloured and sharply defined.’ (Hughes 184) Hughes subscribed to the conventional counter-Darwinian view of male dress, according to which among the human species at least, outward display was properly the female function. In this he was representative of the gentleman customer whose prickly attitude toward fashion a tailor had to keep in mind. For Hughes the correct masculine style was what has been called the ‘no-style style.’ Anthony Trollope was another who believed that a well-dressed man was one whose dress went unnoticed. Endlessly preoccupied in his novels with that great Victorian question ‘What is a gentleman?’ Trollope considered it among their defining characteristics that gentlemen were ‘at home in their clothes’ and did not let their appearance be determined by others (Letwin 114). It was a constant theme of

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advice to men on matters of dress that their clothing should not compromise their personal autonomy. As the author of The Glass of Fashion put it, ‘Let your dress become you, not you become your dress. Dress so that anybody shall feel that you are well dressed without being able to explain why.’ (1881, 298) If it was plainly in the interests of tailors to uphold the idea that clothing was central to the gentlemanly identity, it was equally in their interests to deny the apparent corollary – that tailors had any authority over its definition. Not being gentlemen by definition, how could they? And how could any gentleman ‘follow fashion’? How could he allow his appearance to be influenced by the caprice of ‘Dame Fashion’? Tailor and Cutter offers a discourse of fashion that addressed these delicate questions. There was for instance the matter of the fashion plate itself. Such plates were a well-established feature of women’s magazines and had come to be associated with them. They were also published for men’s fashions by firms such as Minister and Womack as coloured sheets illustrating seasonal fashions. These were sold to tailors for display, and other tailoring journals such as the West End Gazette of Gentlemen’s Fashions also offered them. Indeed, ‘fashion plate’ was already in use as a slightly disparaging term for the man who dressed with a bit too much care and attention. From the beginning it was a regular practice of Tailor and Cutter to depict identifiable gentlemen of position in its plates which were usually issued monthly. Thus for instance its August, 1871 plate shows two prominent Liberal members of Parliament, A.J. Mundella and Tom Hughes (Fig. 10.1). Typically, the accompanying text gives a detailed description of Mundella’s coat directed to the tailor-reader and picking out the particular features that make them distinctive. trouser than the straight form, to accompany the coat we have described, and the class of gentleman who is supposed to wear them. Our aim is to represent dress as it is daily worn by English gentlemen, and in this instance, our special artist has succeeded in realising our ambition by faithfully representing one of the neatest and suitable costume for the season and such as really worn by business men. (Typically too, the text illustrates the precarious grammar that distinguishes the journal.) Hughes, a barrister, is shown dressed in keeping with his profession, ‘more showy and stylish than would become the man who has to do with the stern realities of commercial life,’ in a style of coat that ‘being open, will shew a fancy silk and wool vest to advantage.’ The commentary ends with characteristic ambiguity as to how fashion was established: ‘The last tour of inspection we took among the lions of the West End, the style of dress represented on Mr Hughes struck us as the most fashionable of the type’ (14 July 1871, 404). Tailor and Cutter never claimed to set fashion, but only to report it, not without reservations about the term itself: ‘To those who are practically

190 Gentlemen’s Fashions in the Tailor and Cutter

Figure 10.1 James Mundella M.P. (l.) Thomas Hughes M.P. (r) Tailor and Cutter, 14 July 1871.

engaged in the Tailor trade, we need not say that there does not exist, in the common acceptation of the term, such a thing as fashion’ – that ‘common acceptation’ being ‘slavish adherence to a particular type of dress.’ (17 March 1871, Supplement). Its chosen subtitle was ‘An Index of Trade and Fashion.’ The persistent message of the journal was that the styles worn by gentlemen were determined mainly by the gentlemen themselves, which was why it

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liked to put identifiable faces on its models. These were not of course posed, or most likely even consented to, by their subjects. Rather the artist would put a well-known face, readily available from carte de visite photo portraits, on a suitably dressed figure. After all, no one would accuse Tom Hughes of slavish adherence to fashion. Even when the clothing depicted was being worn by a generic figure, the journal emphasised that the styles shown were those that were actually being worn in London, rather than the fantasies of some French artist – a dig at some of its fashion plate rivals (Fig. 10.2). Yet having commenced with good quality woodcut engravings done in England, Tailor and Cutter soon turned to lithography in order to get colour, and as it stated, the best lithographic artists and printers were to be found in France. Still it guaranteed the Englishness of its styles. London was, after all, the world’s fashion capital for gentlemen’s clothing as the journal never tired of reminding its readers. Its editorial persona stationed himself in Hyde Park’s Rotten Row, where the cream of London Society went daily during the Season to see and be seen on horseback or in carriages. He scanned the main streets of Clubland, Piccadilly, Pall Mall and St. James’s Street, walked the Embankment, and penetrated the lobbies of Parliament to find out and report what gentlemen were actually wearing. He also visited the leading West End tailoring firms to interview the head cutters and find out who was ordering what. Disavowing the label for his own journal, he declared that ‘Magazines of fashion have no influence in the West End; it is a rule to itself – it may be copied, but never copies.’ Contrary to the opinion that common rules and practices were to be found among them, ‘we discover that each is a rule to itself, and would scorn to be influenced in either cut, trimming or making up by any other.’ (26 June 1869) Tailor and Cutter regularly celebrated the variety of men’s fashion choices, often with an implicit reference to masculine superiority. The stern sex are now quite unfettered in their judgement about the clothing they shall wear, good taste and well-made clothes being the only conditions imposed. There is no rule absolute of fashion compelling people to wear a garment of a certain shape, and it is by no means an uncommon thing for a gentleman to wear a shooting suit until dinner. (June 1877, 207) The journal’s plates usually depicted several versions of the type of garment illustrated and described. To encourage such variety was very much in the interests of the high-end tailor whose trade was wholly made-to-measure. The great number of minor variations in detail available to the customer for bespoke tailoring in ordering his clothes enabled him to express his manly individuality: ‘It is but natural for men of taste and judgement to differ in their opinions regarding the style of a particular garment; their decision is influenced by temperament and mental tendency, and not dictated by


Figure 10.2 Highly patterned double-breasted reefer jacket with high cutaway and dittoes. Tailor and Cutter, 7 July 1871.

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servility to any other agency than their own judgement.’ (22 September 1871, 509) Nevertheless it was important for the tailor to be aware of current fashion trends. Although ‘Dress with the sterner sex is not liable to the sudden changes it is the delight of ladies to indulge in’ (14 August 1874) nevertheless collar heights, lapel shapes, breast openings, coat lengths and trouser widths moved in mysterious ways. These were reported in such a way as to suggest a somewhat enigmatic provenance: ‘Judging from what we see being worn by gentlemen in Rotten Row, tight trousers have had their day.’ (July 1870) ‘We observe that our West End swells have taken to wearing vests of bright coloured cloth in a variety of colours, blue, scarlet, white, etc.’ (April 1881, 102) ‘The progress of the Season has developed a taste for diagonal coatings to such a degree as to almost entirely supersede meltons.’ (11 July 1868) In all these pronouncements one can imagine the voice of the tailor-reader knowingly yet deferentially imparting this wisdom to his customers. While Tailor and Cutter never suggests that it is in any way responsible for the ordaining of fashion, it would sometimes cautiously predict it. Such predictions often related to fabric styles. Here at least one can identify an important source of fashion. The journal regularly reviewed the fabrics offered by the major woolens warehouses for the autumn/winter and spring/ summer seasons. The purchasing decisions made by these wholesalers, in conjunction with the manufacturers, were a significant determinant of fashion, though the mechanism in question was a combination of inspired guesswork as to what would catch on, and determined marketing to ensure that those guesses did catch on. After inspecting the ‘Goods for the Coming Season’ the Editor remarks Surely our merchants are entitled to credit for the spirit they show in speculating to such an extent, in buying so largely, and by shewing such anxiety to please their customers and for laying before them such an immense variety of materials from which the most eccentric cannot fail to meet with something to please his taste. An extensive description of some of the new colours and patterns available ends with an editorial warning to tailors to be very careful in their fabric selections, keeping in mind the fate of the recently fashionable large stripes and checks that are now ‘doomed’ and can only be gotten rid of at half price, if at all. Tailors themselves participated in speculating on fashion to the extent that they were tempted by discounts for larger purchases and thereby became invested in pushing certain fabrics as being particularly in fashion. (18 August 1871, 460) Another identifiable source of fashion, one whose authority most gentleman would be more willing to acknowledge than that of Manchester warehousemen, was the Prince of Wales. During his 60-year wait to succeed to the throne he devoted considerable time and


attention – not to mention money – to his dress, much to the satisfaction of the tailoring trade. Because unlike his mother he was comfortable with being a public figure, his choice of clothing was widely noted, not least by Tailor and Cutter. He took very seriously his role as fashion leader and ‘regenerator of masculine costume.’ (see Fig. 10.3). Yet not even his sartorial clout was sufficient to overcome certain customary practices in gentlemen’s dress. The journal recalled that some years previously he had tried to ‘do away with the present monstrous form of men’s evening dress’ by wearing a ‘loose black velvet coat’ instead of a tail coat. ‘He was unsuccessful, and to this day it is not always easy to distinguish the guests from the servants.’ One might think that facilitating such a distinction would have been a useful service to Society. Perhaps he erred in his choice of fabric, velvet having certain Bohemian connotations. Another attempt to serve Society was more successful – his bold move to replace the three-stud shirt front with one stud apparently caught on (October 1877, 303) The Prince’s less radical fashion initiatives were usually taken up by the gentlemen around him, and even those not of his circle could at least partake of his aura by emulating his taste to the extent of their means, even if only by leaving the bottom button of their waistcoats undone as a tribute to his embonpoint. Perhaps out of deference, he was rarely depicted in the journal, however the 1895 Summer Fashions issue shows him in a form-flattering double-breasted frock coat (13 June 1895). Shortly before this it published an article defending his extensive wardrobe, said to have included 70 military uniforms. In Dress suits he is supposed to be particularly extravagant – but this is not really the case. Any man about town has five or six Dress suits a year. The Prince may have a dozen, but the story told in a contemporary recently that he had one a week is pure nonsense. (14 May 1895) The journal kept a close eye on the Prince’s latest orders for clothes through its West End tailoring contacts and never tired of praising his dress sense: ‘His Royal Highness, although always dressed in perfect taste is anything but a dandy, and to this circumstance in some measure may be ascribed the fact that simplicity in dress is the proper thing at present.’ (June 1877, 207) Although Tailor and Cutter was too respectful to refer directly to the Prince’s famously full figure, it regularly addressed the problems of clothing the male body in all its varieties and deformities. An illustration of the leading Radical MP John Bright was accompanied by a discussion of the need for restraint in the clothing of ‘stout’ men. It was accompanied by an illustration of his brother Jacob, also an MP, whose more slender body gave greater scope for displaying ‘taste and fashion.’ (20 August 1870) Depicting another Liberal statesman, Sir William Harcourt, in all his ‘capacious proportions’ the journal maintained ‘It is a mistake to be always aiming at

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Figure 10.3 H.R.H. the Prince of Wales wearing a double-breasted frock coat. Tailor and Cutter, 13 June 1895.


the representation of Apollo in fashion plates when probably not one in twenty of a tailor’s customers come near it.’ Corpulence and prosperity were still closely associated at this time, the more so given the example of the Prince of Wales. Consequently the high-class tailor was likely to see more than his share of ‘English gentlemen of the John Bull order’ of whom Harcourt offered a ‘fine type.’ (6 February 1890) Here, after all, was the central skill of tailoring – although not ‘skill,’ but rather ‘art’ and ‘science’ were the journal’s favoured terms in discussing such matters. The journal presented itself as the professional voice of tailoring at the highest level and was much concerned with cultivating its readers’ self esteem. Measuring men properly was ‘about fifty times as difficult as learning to write an average quality of magazine poetry.’ The difference between a high-class cutter and a ‘cloth carpenter’ was ‘brains.’ (27 June 1895) Small wonder the journal’s owner-editor, John Williamson F.R.H.S., paraded the status-conferring letters he appended to his name thanks to the Royal Historical Society, an organization whose qualifications for a fellowship were evidently not too stringent. Williamson also operated the Tailor and Cutter Cutting Academy which shared the journal’s premises in London’s Drury Lane and offered instruction in various specialized aspects of cutting at rates ranging from 10s 6d for a half-day lesson to 20 pounds for a six month course. An 1895 advertisement in the journal shows 38 of the season’s students seated in front of the premises. Most of the journal’s copy pages (over a third of its pages were advertising, which suggests that the journal was highly profitable) were devoted to technical matters of tailoring. The journal regularly provided model patterns for the fashions that it illustrated. These were usually reduced to its tabloid page size, but were sometimes printed full size on a folded page that was tipped in. This pattern service emphasised the fact that the fashions depicted in the journal were not just an artist’s fancies, but practical realities. The figures tended to be shown in rather wooden poses which made few demands on the artist’s skill but had the advantage of showing very clearly for both tailor and customer the significant fashion details of the garment being illustrated. Another service offered by the journal was that for set fees its pattern department would provide full-sized paper patterns for its fashions, custom cut to the measurements provided by the tailor who wasn’t confident of his own cutting skills. At a time when ready-to-wear clothing made according to standardized body sizes was increasingly eroding its territory, the custom trade had to give increasing attention to justifying its more costly services. Its chief claim to superiority was in the matter of fit. The pages of Tailor and Cutter are full of disquisitions and debates concerning the numerous individual ‘systems’ and ‘theories’ claimed by different cutters, writing under such pen-names as ‘Research,’ and ‘Darwin Scotus,’ to provide the best fit. A pretentiously inflated style replete with references to Leonardo, Burke, and of course Carlyle, tends to characterise this discourse, flirting with ridicule in its desire to exalt the intellectual demands of the cutter’s craft. Here is the

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eloquent Editor intervening in the perennial debate over ‘the art or science of Trousers Cutting’: It is quite true and admitted that we have an infinite number of systems and supposed improvements in the form of trousers, and it is very amusing to notice the avidity with which a large section of theorists glut anything that bears a resemblance to plausibility or introduced in the dazzling glare of infallibility! Of late years the trade has had to stand gushing torrents of long pent-up theoretic phantoms such as the ‘plumb lines,’ ‘central balance,’ sideral basis’ ... It is true that there are many who, in the magnitude of their own arrogance, will have the impertinence to assert that they have surmounted all difficulties and attained the goal of their ambition – perfection in Trousers Cutting. (22 December 1871, 124) The Editor was of the view that cutting was chiefly an art, and that ‘the intellectual cutter’ needed an alert eye for the ways in which the individual body departed from the presumed standard. Elsewhere, the study of drawing, painting and sculpture were deemed even more vital than anatomy to the proper education of a cutter in the mysteries of not only fit, but also ‘taste’ – a recurring term (May 1881, 113). Given the elevated attributes of the high-class tailor, one might expect some reference to the self-restraint presumably necessary in dealing with customers deficient in taste and judgement. He must not set up his knowledge against the imagination of the customer: he is only a tailor and in the presumptuous opinion of those who employ him is often looked upon as incapable because cannot comprehend or give effect to unreasonable whims and requirements. This is the first difficulty, and quite enough to school him into the weak creature he is held to be. (11 September 1874, 596) Fortunately Britain’s ruling elite, led by the heir to the throne, provided sound examples to whose dress tailors could confidently refer their customers, with the help of Tailor and Cutter’s plates. Not that all who were in positions of authority met the journal’s sartorial standards. Following a visit to the lobby of the House of Commons its editor offered some critical comments on the dress of several members. Of the famously dapper Joseph Chamberlain it noted that he ‘is not a model figure to fit, but his collar might have been made a trifle lower and shoulders built-up a little: this would greatly improve the appearance of his figure.’ On the other hand, Herbert Gladstone, son of the prime minister, was described as ‘one of the neatest dressed men I saw in the lobby.’ He improved on his father’s celebrated taste for high collars by wearing a ‘Shakespeare or Polo shape that gives great freedom to the neck and is cool and easy looking.’ It was particularly gratifying to the editor that he could report that one of the few working-class MPs, John Burns, wore a double-breasted reefer suit of durable blue serge that was an ‘excellent fit,’ having been cut by a


former student of the journal’s Cutting Academy (23 May 1895, 205–06). The young prime minister Lord Rosebery, on whom fortune conferred both an Apollo-like figure and vast wealth, became a particular favourite of Tailor and Cutter. He was commended both for his excellent taste in dress and his concern for the prosperity of the tailoring trade (17 April 1890, 130). The future of bespoke tailoring was a matter of growing concern for the journal as the nineteenth century drew to a close. Sweatshops exploiting female and immigrant labour, and mechanized factory production were driving down prices. Tailor and Cutter frankly admitted that ‘very excellently got-up and finished’ clothing could be bought ready-made for a third the price of custom-made (4 April 1895, 145–46). It became all the more important for high-class tailors to make their clothes and services more distinctive. This meant using fittings or ‘try-ons’ as a selling point. The fitting was in a sense a slight to the skills of the cutter, who should be able to get the garment right first time, but it gave the customer an opportunity to fuss and assert his self-importance (May 1881, 102). A cutter who had worked at Poole’s, the leading West End tailoring firm, expressed surprise that customers were often given two fittings for trousers (1 February 1892, 55). Another strategy for distinction was to resist the spreading American fashion for square shoulders artificially built-up with padding instead of carefully shaped for a more natural, ‘English’ look. A closely watched barometer of the fortunes of high-end gentlemen’s clothing was the persistence of the frock coat. This more expensive, and some would argue more dignified and graceful, long jacket extending to just above the knee was clearly in retreat even among the upper-class, yet Tailor and Cutter obsessively sought evidence of its continued popularity in its regular surveys of who was wearing what in fashionable circles, and attempted to promote it, particularly by pushing for a greater range of colours, such as olive and light blue, instead of the traditional black and grey (13 June 1895, 236). Another point of tension in the high-class trade lay in the traditional argument that high quality made-to-measure clothing lasted longer and was therefore not really that much more expensive. The problem with that argument, of course, is that it ran counter to one of fashion’s main purposes – that of making older clothing obsolete in the consumer mind. Pushing the latter point too hard threatened the delicate ideology of masculine independence upon which the relationship of tailor and client was poised. Commenting on its fashion plate of the Earl Cowper, ‘a perfect type of a British gentleman,’ the journal noted that ‘Gentlemen as a rule – as we know too well – do not very hastily adopt new styles of garments and we have before expressed the opinion that tailors themselves are in large part to blame for new styles not being more frequently adopted.’ It therefore called for ‘a little less jealousy and more concerted action among leading bespoke tailors’ in promoting ‘really good’ styles (27 March 1890, 105) (Fig. 10.4). Elsewhere it called for a twice yearly conference of high-class

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Figure 10.4

Patterned waistcoat with lapels. Tailor and Cutter, 6 June 1895.

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firms to ‘ordain new fashions’ and generate ‘more incentive for gentlemen to order new spring and summer dress,’ while of course ‘avoiding extremes and sudden changes.’ (14 March 1895, 104) Particularly to be avoided was anything that smacked of ‘Dandyism,’ always a Carlylian pejorative in the journal’s vocabulary. But the century ended with the Prince of Wales, increasingly bulky but ever-fashionable, at last ascending to the throne to preside over that Edwardian afternoon that was golden at least for those gentlemen and tailors whose interests Tailor and Cutter so zealously guarded.

Part III The 1890s: Changing Faces, Changing Technologies


11 Science and the Timeliness of Reproduced Photographs in the Late Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press James Mussell

Mary Howarth’s short story ‘The Telegram,’ published in the Pall Mall Magazine in 1896, is unusual as it is a piece of fiction illustrated by a series of photographs that were interspersed with the letterpress. The story begins with two friends by a cosy fireside: Horace Keith, whose father owns the (fictional) radical daily the Meteor; and Laurence Morris, a painter who is about to depart on a commission to paint a portrait of the Prime Minister. The portrait has been delayed as the Prime Minister has been ill and Keith asks Morris to telegram him immediately should the Prime Minister die so the Meteor can run the exclusive. Keith’s father, the owner of the paper, is the Prime Minister’s estranged half brother and, by coincidence, is also in Brighton having just finished a rather spiteful obituary of the Prime Minister before leaving London. Horace Keith receives the telegram from his artist friend Morris saying the Prime Minister is dead and so runs the obituary by his father in a special edition. However, the telegram has been mistranscribed and the Prime Minister and Keith’s father are at that moment resolving their differences in Brighton. Laurence Morris, having finished his portrait, returns to London and, seeing the notices of the Prime Minister’s death, quickly realises the error. When the news of the Prime Minister’s supposed death reaches Brighton, Horace Keith’s father realises that his spiteful obituary of his brother will have been published and, feeling that he has betrayed him, rushes back to the Prime Minister’s hotel. Luckily, the Prime Minister died shortly after Keith’s father had departed, and so passed away oblivious to the debacle.1 Howarth’s story illustrates the new temporal and spatial configurations created by late nineteenth-century socialization of information technology. The telegraph offered the potential for the instant transmission of linguistic information. Whereas before, Brighton would always be a few hours train 203

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journey from London, the telegraph enabled Brighton time and London time almost to co-exist. However, as the story indicates, the points of translation, where words become electric signals and then words once more, was not a completely reliable process. In the newspaper office Barton, the experienced ‘working secretary,’ warns against using telegrams without getting them repeated. For Barton (and indeed Keith’s father), the chain that links the telegram to its source is not stable, but for Horace Keith, a mercurial representative of the next generation, ‘all the laws of sequence are against its being inaccurate.’2 It is the failure of the process to function fluently that produces the curious situation where the Prime Minister is dead in London but alive in Brighton. This temporal disjunction, violating the laws of sequential linear time, does not last for long: as the story unfolds, and news begins to reach Brighton, the Prime Minister actually does die, bringing the two temporalities together once more. The choice of photographs to illustrate the story was both apt and unusual. Just as the instant transmission of information by the telegraph signalled the co-presence of distant spaces, so the photograph captured in a mobile, reproducible form a moment when the camera and scene photographed were brought together in time and space. Howarth’s ‘The Telegram’ brings both of these conceits together: the story tells of what might happen should information be communicated inaccurately, creating a disjunction between two spaces at the same time; the photographs appear to show the events actually happening, positing a documentary record of them that can also be recovered at the moment of reading. As the story is manifestly fictional – it is presented as a short story; its prose style is fictive; and although readers might accept the existence of Keith, Morris and the Meteor, they certainly knew the Prime Minister had not died – these photographs do not show the events happening, but rather a simulation of them. The role of the photographs is the same as they still gesture to precise events in space and time, it is just that these space-times, and the events occurring within them, are fictional. What is unusual about ‘The Telegram’ is that it used photography at all. The success of the Strand Magazine in 1891 had demonstrated both the practical advantages of using photographic methods in the press and the demand for photographs among readers.3 Although the Pall Mall Magazine, at 1s 6d, was three times the price of the Strand, it was clearly based upon the older monthly for its form. From its launch in 1893 the Pall Mall Magazine exploited a similar combination of serial articles and high-quality illustration, but attempted to market its miscellany to a more niche, highart market. As an imaging technology, photographs were common throughout the century in a variety of forms; however, it was only in the 1890s with the co-emergence of photographic reproductive technologies and cheap sources of high-quality paper that their use proliferated in the periodical press.4 Both the Strand and the Pall Mall Magazine employed half

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tone photographic reproduction to bring images in a range of media onto the page.5 The pages of these magazines thus offered readers a rich repertoire of techniques, mixing line drawings with engravings and photographs. As each method of imaging had its own history and politics, as well as practical demands in production, they tended to be used for specific purposes. For instance, each number of the Strand would open with a high-quality engraving, often depicting a dramatic episode from a series of short stories currently running; however, the stories themselves tended to be illustrated with cruder engravings or pen and ink illustrations. Photographs were rarely used for fiction because of their claims to authenticity: although they were not necessarily considered realistic because of their well-recognized partiality (i.e., they capture an image from one specific place at one specific moment and rendered colour monotone), photographs insisted upon the presence of the camera alongside the scene that it recorded. This necessary co-presence in time and space made photography impractical for fiction and, as the mechanical and chemical aspects of photography were stressed, it became increasingly understood as a medium that operated with minimal human intervention.6 By the late nineteenth century photography was well established as a scientific instrument in its own right and skill with the camera was predicated on the same terms as any other scientific instrument: that is the operator should only act to allow the phenomena or event to record itself.7 This mediated sense of objectivity, in which human agency was elided in deference to mechanical action, meant photographs were employed in the press to grant the reader access to an event that had happened in the (recent) past, leaving older imaging techniques to signal the imaginary and the old. This chapter investigates the relationship between photography, science and time in the late nineteenth-century periodical press. Using examples drawn from popular scientific and non-scientific monthlies, I argue that both science and photography were used to invoke a sense of simultaneity that, in turn, structured an imagined present. Not only did science and photography offer access to otherwise distant and inaccessible realms, but photography also provided an alternative way of visualizing scientific phenomena, providing access to things that were usually the preserve of those privileged enough to have advanced instruments and specialist knowledges. Equally, scientific figures and events could be enrolled as part of narratives of progress that posited the present as the culmination of the past. Although the status of science was often a contested subject, especially when compared to the progress of science in rival nations, photographs of scientific phenomena and events were widely used to celebrate achievements.8 The modernity of photography and science, brought together in the publication of scientific photographs and photographs of science, was thus a key resource through which periodicals could market the present.

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I Periodicals, as Margaret Beetham amongst others has stressed, are objects that consist of heterogeneous components.9 They are necessarily fragmentary, with all their various parts gesturing to a range of times and spaces. As Beetham writes, the ‘reader is addressed as an individual but is positioned as a member of certain overlapping sets of social groups; class, gender, region, age, political persuasion or religious denomination – to name only the most important.’10 However, to simply deploy a politics of identity was not enough: publishers and editors targeted the spaces and times of reading as a way to subdivide and open up new audiences. Readers did not just purchase according to their social position, but rather according to the various cultural roles that they performed (or wished that they performed) throughout their daily lives. Readers might perceive of themselves as part of the imagined mass of the New Journalism while travelling to work, before reconceiving of themselves as part of another social configuration within domestic space in the evening. Mark Turner suggests that media historians need to ‘find out exactly for whom particular temporalities are meaningful, and this needs to be undertaken by considering a range of cultural determinants – social position and gender most obviously, but also important differences which emerge according to location.’11 Just as readers are figured as actors in specific spatialtemporal and discursive zones, so too periodicals, as mobile objects in their own right, offer themselves as suitable reading for specific spaces and times. Despite the abundance of spatial-temporal references in the periodical text, the overriding temporality was the present.12 This is perhaps unsurprising: as each periodical was marked with a date, the current number demarcated a temporal space in which it remained relevant before being inevitably succeeded by the subsequent number and so archived as part of the title’s past. This present, which was constructed by the periodical text with reference to the quotidian lives of readers, was offered as a shared experience in order to cohere them as audience. Of course, the way the present was signalled varied between titles and was experienced differently by readers; but as the present was primarily a gap between numbers, periodicity played a crucial determining role.13 Weekly periodicals, because they appeared more often, could create a sense of the present in the interval between numbers which was interpenetrated with recent events. Monthlies, with more ‘time to pause, reflect and remember,’ constructed a more distanced conception of the present through retrospective surveys and reviews that posited a sense of communal past.14 Although these are generalizations, and there were a number of weekly and monthly rhythms to which late nineteenth-century periodicals adhered themselves, the persistent focus and construction of the present remained an important generic feature of the periodical.15 The photograph, which seemed to posit an unmediated link from the page to the moment in which the image was captured, not only played a

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crucial role in representing the present but its novelty in the late nineteenth century press marked it as a fetishized object and so lended further value to any publication that it appeared within. Although photographs themselves were common in the late nineteenth century they had only appeared sporadically in the press prior to the appearance of the Strand in 1891. As I have mentioned above, this publication demonstrated that it was technically possible to utilize photographic reproduction to pack far more images – including photographs – into a relatively cheap monthly. However, the demands of this process, coupled with the novelty of seeing such densely and diversely illustrated publications, meant that photographs remained more or less restricted to the monthlies throughout the 1890s. Although weeklies such as the Graphic and Illustrated London News used photographs, they were often restricted in number and differentiated from their usual visual repertoire. It was not until the relaunch of the Daily Mirror as the Daily Illustrated Mirror in 1904 that the possibility of basing a daily newspaper around photographs was demonstrated.16 Photographs, for readers of the periodical press in the 1890s, were a rarity and, if you encountered a photograph, you were likely to be reading a monthly. Images of science and technology participated in the market for such images: not only was there a large extant readership for science in the late nineteenth century; but scientific subjects also provided a striking range of interesting, dramatic, and often uncanny images for the general reader. The editor of Knowledge, Arthur Cowper Ranyard, exploited high-quality collotype reproductions in order to bring images of rare or exclusive phenomena to a wide readership. Knowledge, like the Strand, was a 6d monthly and the advertisements on the blue wrapper suggest a leisured, book-buying readership who also were consumers of scientific instruments. Ranyard succeeded the founder of Knowledge, the prolific popular science writer Richard Anthony Proctor, after his death in 1888, and had inherited his sizable readership for astronomy. Ranyard, a barrister by profession, was also an astronomer and had achieved substantial respect for his editorship of the 1879 eclipse edition of the Memoirs of the Royal Astronomical Society. This included illustrated accounts of all solar eclipses from 1715 to 1871 and, as all the original images were in a range of formats, entailed a complex negotiation between reproductive techniques to produce what Alex Soojung-Kim Pang describes as ‘one of the few volumes that could serve as a tool for scientific research.’17 Ranyard, on assuming the editorship of Knowledge, immediately began experimenting with photographic reproduction and, by March 1889 was including two high-quality collotypes, usually of astronomical subjects, in each number.18 These were full-page, printed on unpaginated fine paper, and included within the monthly price of the magazine. Ranyard often appropriated the images as the subjects of his astronomical articles, reversing the usual hierarchies between text and image. Rather than illustrate the letterpress, these photographs displaced the phenomena under discussion, instead offering themselves as spectacle.

208 Science and the Timeliness of Reproduced Photographs

When such textual strategies are applied to observational sciences such as astronomy there is a shift between structures of authority. Whereas arguments about distant phenomena relied upon the way the traces of that phenomena were recorded and communicated, the reproducibility of the photograph, as well as its seemingly mechanistic mode of production, displaced the site of such arguments from the observatory to the page. When Ranyard reproduced E.E. Barnard’s acclaimed photograph of the Milky Way, taken at the Lick Observatory in July 1890 (Fig. 11.1) he made such a displacement explicit: They are well worthy of close examination, for they afford the reading public an opportunity of studying the structure of certain rich portions of the Milky Way, such as only the possessors of the largest telescopes have hitherto enjoyed. Indeed, I am probably right in saying that that these plates show more of the structure of the milky way than can be seen by the eye with any telescope, for the gradations of brightness are accentuated, if smaller stars are not shown, and the eye can never grasp at one time, in the eye-piece of a telescope, as wide an area as that presented in these photographs.19

Figure 11.1 ‘Region of the Milky Way to the South-west of the Trifid Nebula’, Knowledge, 13 July 1890, facing p. 174. By permission of the British Library, pp. 1447.bb.

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The photograph, as printed in Knowledge, surpassed the telescope as an instrument of scientific knowledge. The camera was considered a ‘chemical retina’ which gathered light (via the telescope) from the cosmos and stored it upon the negative. The distances involved entailed long exposure times (Barnard’s images were exposed for four hours) and accurate driving clocks in order to capture the subtle traces of light as the earth rotated. The Lick Observatory had, at the time, the largest refracting telescope in the world. Barnard’s photographs were not taken with this telescope, however, but with a much smaller six inch portrait glass. By confusing the distinction between Barnard’s negatives and his reproductions, while insisting that Barnard’s images surpass even those created with the mighty Lick refractor, Ranyard offered his readers the opportunity to experience vast, distant galactic structures, as existed a long time in the past, at once and in the present.20 Such temporal and spatial dislocations also operated through the microscopic but, in this disciplinary context, the photographic reproductions were presented slightly differently. Figure 11.2 is a collotype reproduction from a magic lantern slide published to illustrate E.A. Butler’s serial, ‘The Common Flea’ in Knowledge for January 1890.21 The image confronts the reader with an object that is both familiar and slightly strange: microscopic images, like all photographs, rarely appeared in the periodical press before the late nineteenth century; however, they were commonly exhibited – as indeed this one originally was – as lantern slides to accompany lectures or reproduced as woodcuts or lithographs in periodicals and monographs. Like the reproductions of astronomical photographs, the camera’s ‘unadorned realism’ operated to disconcert by temporal and spatial translation: the image is too transparent, too flat, and yet its overwhelming reality both revolts and compels us.22 Isobel Armstrong has discussed the voyeuristic pleasures that such technologies afforded the viewer: the mediating instrument is elided as the viewer is propelled into strange proximity to these uncannily still objects.23 Naturalists fully recognized the pleasures of microscopy and its potential to open new temporal and spatial realms. Edward H. Robertson, writing in a rival publication to Knowledge, ScienceGossip, claimed the microscopist may: wander through Nature’s unbounded realm, gleaning in every sweet field, and even from the most neglected corners and arid deserts, marvels of beauty to call forth his admiration and delight. Imprison him in a lonely cell and leave him but his microscope, and I trow [sic] he will have no cause to lament a lack of beauty within even its narrow confines. Nay, more, remove from its case the work of that triumph of human skill and contrivance, a watch, and tell him to accomplish the seemingly impossible of task of filling its empty compass with a store of marvels that would require a life-time to examine, and it shall be done.24

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Figure 11.2 ‘Domestic Pests: the Common Flea (pulex irritanis)’, from an original by the Direct Photo Eng. Co. Ltd, in Knowledge, 13 January 1890, facing 41. By permission of the British Library, pp. 1447.bb.

The capacity for the naturalist to lose himself – and the naturalist was always imagined as male, despite the presence of women authors elsewhere in the magazine – was fully dependent on the microscope.25 This position is carefully regulated in Butler’s article. The very use of photographic reproduction and enlargement not only displaces the mediating instrument, but also – just as in the astronomical photographs – displaces the use of the instrument itself. This located the viewer in fixed scopic site, preventing him or her from zooming in or out. Whereas Ranyard insisted his reproductions of Barnard’s images ‘will bear examining with a hand magnifier’, empowering the reader to manipulate the image, Butler’s letterpress presented the image as merely an illustration of what he has to say.26 H.G. Wells, writing in Nature in 1894, claimed that a scientific paper for popular reading, ‘may and should have an orderly progression and development’ and that ‘that scientific exponents who wish to be taken seriously should not only be precise and explicit, but also absolutely serious in style.’27 This emphasis on order and seriousness acted in two ways. Firstly it granted the author a degree of gravitas, allowing him or her to claim simultaneously both objectivity and authority through a sleight of hand that masked their teleological control of the material. Secondly it regulated the pleasure that both authors and readers could take in the observation of scientific objects. Robertson’s anecdotal and anachronistic style clearly contravened Wells’s advice; as a microscopist writing for an existing community of naturalists he did not need to adopt the serious tone necessary for educating the general reader and so instead used an archaic diction more akin to literary writing in order to mark his discourse. Butler’s account, as part of a much longer narrative, did not quite fulfil Wells’s strictures either, but did guide the reader around the flea in ways that mirrored the

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politics and erotics of the reproduced photograph.28 Details such as ‘[t]he dark stains on linen, that indicate where fleas have been, consist of their dried excrement’ referred to things not in the photograph but still revelled in the grotesque of the new material world into which the reader was thrust.29 In both his letterpress and the accompanying illustrations Butler accounted for the differences between this new way of encountering the flea and the reader’s own everyday experience. Just as he explained the digestive system of the flea, so too does he explain why his images look like they do (the sample has been flattened, and parts of its internal anatomy have been dissolved out to render it transparent). In accounting for these differences, Butler guides the reader through this now unfamiliar world, providing access to the elicit pleasures that it provides on the condition that it is regulated through his narration. As well as providing a source of regulated voyeuristic pleasure, images of scientific or technological objects could demonstrate the ingenuity of the scientist while also providing evidence of industrial endeavour and national achievement. Equally, portraits of scientists circulated alongside authors, actors, musicians, representatives of the clergy and nobility, and politicians as part of late nineteenth-century celebrity culture further established science as a respectable liberal enterprise. The Strand Magazine incorporated scientific images in order to do all of these things, but it did so to emphasise the importance of the contemporary. Kate Jackson, following Reginald Pound, suggests that because all copy for the magazine had to be ready four weeks in advance, it presented a peculiar, ahistorical contemporaneity.30 This is not to suggest that the Strand did not respond to the world around it, but rather that its representation of the past and the passing moment were rendered part of a stable, constant and coherent present that buttressed that of its readers. Its long-running serials ‘Portraits of Celebrities from Different Times of Their Lives’ and ‘Illustrated Interviews’ both deployed reproductive technologies to render images in ways that supported this temporality. ‘Portraits of Celebrities’ featured a series of portraits accompanied by a brief biography. The source portraits were labelled as to their original form, usually an oil painting or photograph, but were engraved to be included in the Strand. The serial thus arranged time spatially: as the portraits were all engraved prior to their publication, they were differentiated from their source images – whatever they were – and made to appear similar. This then effaced any visual differences between media (while still gesturing towards them through the captions) and established a progression based upon the changing features of the sitter. As the celebrities were usually chosen according to their contemporary fame, the final portrait provided the totalized image of their past in this context. Scientists were part of this, but often for their position in public life rather than for their science. The portraits of Lord Kelvin (Fig. 11.3) are accompanied by a biography that counters his scientific activity with both his public achievements (he recently became

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Figure 11.3 ‘Lord Kelvin’, ‘Portraits of Celebrities at Different Times of their Lives’, Strand Magazine, 5 June 1893, p. 590. Special Collections, Senate House Library, University of London.

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Lord Kelvin) and his private hobbies.31 This careful balance was characteristic of late nineteenth-century celebrity culture: it was public achievements that granted them an appearance in the series; while it was the private details – whether previously unseen portraits from their youth or details of their hobbies – that promised intimacy with otherwise inaccessible public figures. This mediation between the public and the private was also enacted in the ‘Illustrated Interviews.’ Each consisted of a chatty extended interview conducted by Harry How with the celebrity in their home accompanied by choice photographs of their rooms. Jackson sees the ‘Illustrated Interview’ as ‘a rejoinder to concerns about the disjunction between the private lives of the middle and upper classes and the values which they advocated in public’ as the private text, as read in the domestic surroundings of the interviewee, was rendered to the reader as ratification of that person’s prominence.32 They therefore operated in a similar way to the ‘Portraits of Celebrities’, but instead offered private spaces in the present, as proof of public worth rather than private details from the past. The photographs, which particularly emphasised the works of art, bric-à-brac, and curiosities that filled the rooms of the interviewee, made the reader complicit in the intrusion along with the interviewer as he or she was invited to judge and admire the possessions of the celebrity. Often the interviewee’s artworks were photographically reproduced, increasing the cultural value of the text of the Strand Magazine by making the unique work of art available to its readers, while simultaneously reaffirming its spatial and temporal location in the contemporaneous possession of the interviewee. However, when the well-known optical-glass maker Sir Howard Grubb was interviewed in 1896, a much wider range of images were published.33 Grubb’s firm was well established as one of the best in the world, and was currently enjoying a great deal of acclaim after installing a 26’ photographic telescope at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich. The interview itself begins with Grubb’s humble origins, before relating his life up to this recent success. However, the interview is contextualized within a larger narrative of telescope manufacture, and it is this, along with images of Grubb’s staff at work, that constitutes the illustrative material. After an image of Grubb’s son inserting the wires onto the micrometer, Sir Howard is barely mentioned for the last four pages, as the narrative recounts anecdotes about famous telescopes. After a discussion of the Lick refractor, accompanied by a photograph, the article turns to the Yerkes refractor, which had recently surpassed the Lick for size on its completion in 1896. Grubb had failed to get the contract for the Lick 36’ refractor, although some of his ideas were employed for the elevating floor, and had even less to do with the Yerkes 40’ refractor. Grubb, in fact, has become entirely displaced by this history of telescope size, and the resulting images seem to present a progressive series, much like ‘Portraits of Celebrities,’ with photographs of telescopes replacing engravings

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of notable public figures. The use of photographs for the images of telescopes was acceptable as they could all still co-exist in the present without disrupting the narrative of progress.34 The final image, however, is a sketch of Grubb’s proposed telescope of the future (Fig. 11.4). Positioned immediately below the photograph of the Yerkes refractor (then, and now, the largest refracting telescope in the world), the different media of the sketch enforces a distinction between present and future that holds out the possibility of Grubb’s re-entrance into this narrative while simultaneously asserting the superiority of the present. It is suggestive that the treatment of both Kelvin and Grubb dwelt upon technological objects (and in Kelvin’s case public achievements and private hobbies) rather than science itself. The Strand Magazine, as ostensibly diverting rather than instructive reading, used science to amuse rather than to educate. For instance another Fitzgerald piece in volume 12 of the Strand, ‘Some Wonders of the Microscope,’ used reproduced microscopic photographs solely in order to entertain the reader. Unlike Butler’s account in Knowledge, Fitzgerald gleefully emphasised the contiguity between the microscopic world and the world of the readers. Commenting on an image of a fly’s foot, Fitzgerald asks the reader to ‘fancy this awful looking thing being laid lightly on your face at all hours of the day.’35 It was not just Fitzgerald who exploited photographs in this way. In the same volume Alfred Porter, a physicist at University College London, provided a similar description to accompany photographic reproductions of X-rays.36 Referred to as the ‘new photography,’ these images, like the microscopic photographs, presented familiar objects in strange ways. Even when Porter writes that the medical aspect of the images ‘is more suited to the pages of a medical journal – we prefer not to look on ghastly things’ he proceeds to reproduce and discuss them.37 Science in the Strand Magazine thus occupied an uneasy space between the delightfully strange and strident progress.38 These contradictory aspects were brought together in the Strand’s regular ‘Curiosities’ department. Figure 11.5 juxtaposes a potato shaped like a cockatoo’s head (‘a curious freak of Nature’), the grave of a Congo chief, some poisonous darts, and a scrap of David Livingstone’s library. The photographs signal the co-existence of these bizarre objects; but they are not markedly different from the celebration of telescope size, or the weird realms that are presented to the viewer through the distorting combination of camera and laboratory. The written descriptions that accompany each photograph relate them to the world of the reader: the photograph of the potato is from Banbury and was taken by a Strand photographer; the grave of the Congo chief is offered as evidence of the savagery of his race (although it does so on the basis that the tribes engage in commerce and drink, practices hardly restricted to Africa); the darts are related to Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four, which, although not published in the Strand, would remind readers of the Adventures of Sherlock

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Figure 11.4 Page from ‘Illustrated Interviews’, Strand Magazine, 12 October 1896, p. 381. University of Birmingham Main Library.

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Figure 11.5 Page from ‘Curiosities’, Strand Magazine, 12 July 1896, p. 240. University of Birmingham Main Library.

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Holmes that were; and Livingstone’s diary entry is presented as a vindication of his motives that also seems to be a justification of the Imperial mission. Although the objects themselves existed in a range of times and spaces, the photographs suggest their simultaneous presence in time (the objects exist in the present) while allowing their co-presence within the text of the Strand. It was the photograph that brought the strange into the pages of the Strand by insisting that the objects and scenes represented also existed beyond its pages; the discourse of the text as a whole organized them so that they offered a stabilized contrast against which to posit the familiar. The title of the department, ‘Curiosities’, summarised the Strand’s attitude to both science and the role of photography in the production of images. These things were curious because they were real, and the photographs provided evidence of their presence in the world. The visual tourism of such articles was an extension of the much older tradition of travel writing. However, just as improved transport and communication networks precipitated actual domestic and international travel, so the publishing of photographs in the periodical press brought these different spaces closer to the reader in the present. The various technologies of photographic reproduction presented a wider visual repertoire into the periodical press. The novelty of reproduced photographs, after a lengthy period in which they were inscribed with a powerful rhetoric of transparency, reconfigured the temporalities of the older imaging techniques. Whereas a common medium might provide images for fiction and nonfiction, history and portraiture, the existence of images that elided the human hands that manipulated them (while exposing the artifice of engraving or lithography) provided a pathway that led the viewer to the moment of imaging. As Julie Codell suggests, viewers were well-skilled in ‘reading’ an engraving to locate the original in time and space; however, photographic reproduction offered to mobilize that original, and present it upon the page while simultaneously reaffirming its location.39 The common practice of labelling a reproduced image as to its source clearly demonstrated the need to identify some sort of ‘original’ and affirm the social differences between genres. Although there was still discussion over the photograph’s claim to realism in the nineteenth century,40 its clear acceptance as both an automatic imaging and automatic reproductive technology threatened distinctions established through temporal and spatial boundaries, and gestured instead to the multiple co-existences of objects and their contexts, providing them for readers to be consumed as part of an evocation of the present crucial for the commodification of single issues of periodical texts.

Notes 1. Mary Howarth, ‘The Telegram’, Pall Mall Magazine, 6, July 1895, pp. 355–64. 2. Howarth 1895, p. 357.

218 Science and the Timeliness of Reproduced Photographs 3. For the Strand Magazine see Reginald Pound, The Strand Magazine 1891–1950 (London: Heinemann 1966) and Kate Jackson, George Newnes and the New Journalism in Britain 1880–1910 (Aldershot: Ashgate 2001). 4. See David Reed, The Popular Magazine in Britain and the United States, 1880–1960 (London: British Library 1997). 5. See George Newnes’s account of this in the Strand: anonymous, ‘A Description of the Offices of the Strand Magazine’, 4 December 1892, pp. 594–606. 6. See Jennifer Tucker, Nature Exposed: Photography as Eyewitness in Victorian Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 2005). 7. See my Science, Time and Space in the Late Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press (Aldershot: Ashgate 2007), especially pp. 27–60. 8. For instance see Roy M. MacLeod, ‘The “Bankruptcy of Science” Debate: the “Creed of Science” and Its Critics, 1885–1900’, Science, Technology and Human Values, 7, 1982, pp. 2–15. 9. Margaret Beetham, ‘Towards a Theory of the Periodical as a Publishing Genre’, in Investigating Victorian Journalism, ed. by Laurel Brake, Aled Jones and Lionel Madden (London: Macmillan 1990), pp. 19–32. 10. Margaret Beetham, ‘Open and Closed: the Periodical as a Publishing Genre’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 22, 1989, p. 99. 11. Mark Turner, ‘Periodical Time in the Nineteenth Century’, Media History, 8, 2002, p. 191. 12. For the notion of abundance see Ronald Schleiffer, Modernism and Time: the Logic of Abundance in Literature, Science, and Culture, 1880–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2000). 13. Turner 2002, p. 193 and Laurel Brake, Print in Transition, 1850–1910 (London: Palgrave 2001), pp. 11–26. 14. Turner 2002, p. 193. 15. Brake 2001, p. 11; Turner 2002, pp. 186, 188–89. 16. See for instance Jeff Wright, ‘The Myth of the Mirror’, British Journalism Review, 14, 2003, pp. 59–66. 17. Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, ‘Victorian Observing Practices, Printing Technology, and Representations of the Solar Corona (I): the 1860s and 1870s’, Journal of the History of Astronomy, 25, 1994, p. 267. 18. Collotypes use glass plates coated with a film of bichromated albumen and chromated gelatin. The plate is exposed to the negative, the gel hardens in proportion to exposure and, after moistening, takes ink accordingly. See A.C. Ranyard, ‘The Collotype Process and Photo-Engraving’, Knowledge, 1890, pp. 12, 71–72. Pang 1994, p. 256. 19. A.C. Ranyard, ‘On the Distribution of the Stars in the Milky Way’, Knowledge, 13 July 1890, pp. 174–75. 20. This was controversial. See Mussell 2007, pp. 42–55 and William Sheehan, The Immortal Fire Within: The Life and Work of Edward Emerson Barnard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1995). 21. E.A. Butler, ‘The Common Flea. II’, Knowledge, 13 January 1890, p. 41–43. 22. John Plunkett, ‘Celebrity and Community: The Poetics of the Carte-de-visite’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 8, 2003, p. 68. 23. Isobel Armstrong, ‘The Microscope: Mediations of the Sub-Visible World’, in Transactions and Encounters: Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century, ed. by Roger Luckhurst and Josephine McDonagh (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2002), pp. 30–54.

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24. Edward H. Robertson, ‘Gossip about Foraminifera’, Science-Gossip, 25 January 1889, p. 13. 25. Mary B. Morris, ‘Jottings Concerning Certain Fruit Trees. Part VI – The Chestnut Tree’, Science-Gossip, 26, April 1890, p. 80. 26. Ranyard 1890, p. 174. He repeats this claim when he returns to the subject the following year. See A.C. Ranyard, ‘The Milky Way in the Southern Hemisphere’, Knowledge, 14, 1891, p. 50. 27. H.G. Wells, ‘Popularising Science’, Nature, 50, 26 July 1894, p. 301. For a similar argument using the same language see Karl Pearson, The Grammar of Science (London: Walter Scott 1892), pp. 9–15. 28. Butler later published the serial as a whole, accompanied by his others from Knowledge, as Our Household Insects (London: Longmans, Green and Co. 1893). 29. Butler 1890, p. 41. 30. Kate Jackson, George Newnes and the New Journalism in Britain 1880–1910 (London: Ashgate 2001), p. 116 and Reginald Pound, The Strand Magazine 1891–1950 (London: Heinemann 1966), p. 64. 31. Anonymous, ‘Portraits of Celebrities’, Strand, 5 June 1893, p. 590. 32. Jackson 2001, p. 113. 33. William G. FitzGerald, ‘Illustrated Interviews. No. 1. Sir Howard Grubb, FRS, FRAS, Etc, Etc’, Strand Magazine, 12 October 1896, pp. 369–81. 34. There is also a photographic reproduction of an ‘old print’ of the Blanchini telescope and a photo-engraving of a sketch of workers in Grubb’s workshop – the latter presumably because of the difficulties in photographing near the furnaces. 35. William G. Fitzgerald, ‘Some Wonders of the Microscope’, Strand, 12, August 1896, p. 210. 36. Alfred W. Porter, B.Sc., ‘The New Photography’, Strand, 12 July 1896, pp. 107–117. 37. Porter 1896, p. 112. 38. For more detail about this uneasy space see Mussell 2007, pp. 61–84. 39. Julie F. Codell, ‘The Aura of Mechanical Reproduction: Victorian Art and the Press’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 24, 1991, p. 6. 40. Especially in portraiture, as much of the late nineteenth-century photographic press will reveal. See for instance John Werge, ‘Three Aspects of Photography. Part 3. The Future’, The Practical Photographer, 4, December 1893, p. 312.

12 Aestheticism on the Cheap: Decorative Art, Art Criticism, and Cheap Paper in the 1890s Linda K. Hughes

The interdependence of art and art journalism, particularly gallery reviews, was entrenched by the middle-nineteenth century as a result of the influential writings of John Ruskin – which claimed a vital role for the visual arts in British culture – and the founding of periodicals ranging from the Athenaeum in 1828 and Art Journal in 1839 to the Illustrated London News in 1842, which featured lavishly illustrated coverage of Royal Academy exhibitions in the form of engravings.1 With the emergence of aestheticism rather than Ruskinian moral principles as the standard applied to the visual arts, the relation of word to text, and of art to writing about art, altered because the relation of decorative to ‘high’ art also changed. Decorative arts were now seen on a continuum with painting, sculpture, and architecture, whether in a manifesto like William Morris’s Hopes and Fears for Art (1882), in the larger Arts and Crafts movement that Morris did so much to influence,2 or in the bold interventions of James McNeill Whistler (discussed below). This new role for decorative art spurred attempts to create total aesthetic environments and also abetted the explosion in cultural industries ranging from furnishings and gardening to the book arts. The Kelmscott Press was one result, and fin-de-siècle periodicals were another, whether the Scots Observer and Scottish Art Review, given high production values by printer Walter B. Blaikie (Connell 138–40, Mavor Vol. I, 235), or the Yellow Book, which was likewise dedicated to printing as a fine art and gave equal billing (and hence stature) to its letter and art press rather than subordinating art to an illustrative function (Mix 73). But the relation of aestheticism to the cheap press was uneasy even when contributors expressed sympathy with its principles, in part because high production values (including lavish use of white space and high quality illustration) were unaffordable, in part because the more rapid use-cycle of a cheap paper (designed for quick perusal and discarding) meant that the paper would not be kept long enough for its graphic design to be 220

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contemplated, much less appreciated. Moreover, to the degree that a cheap paper could circulate central tenets of aestheticism in its letterpress columns – that is, through logocentric argument alone – the paper simultaneously undercut aestheticism by demonstrating the supremacy of word over image. To probe the vexed contradictoriness of ‘aestheticism on the cheap’ (in cheap papers), I want to examine two case histories of downmarket production values used to circulate aesthetic principles; both case histories also shed further light on the role of women art critics at the fin de siècle. The connecting link between Art Weekly, a penny weekly founded by members of the New English Art Club, and the Morning Leader, a spin off of the Star evening paper, was Graham R. Tomson (1860–1911), poet, editor, critic (of literature, art, fashion, furnishings, and book arts), and sibling as well as spouse of practising painters. Art Weekly was a niche-market title that never quite found its niche. By November 1889 Francis Bate, secretary of the New English Art Club, and Arthur Tomson, who joined the group that year, determined to found a weekly paper directed at professional artists. Tomson was a close personal friend of Elizabeth and Joseph Pennell, who were privy to the plans from the beginning. Elizabeth was a successful art critic of the 1890s3 and Joseph was a prominent black-and-white artist who may be best known today for introducing Aubrey Beardsley to the art world in the debut issue of Studio magazine (April 1893) and for the important Whistler biography he co-authored with his wife. Elizabeth Pennell’s diary entry for 20 November 1889 summarised the intended aims of Art Weekly: It is to be a weekly paper for artists – a real trade journal – written by artists. It is to be catholic and not merely the organ of one set or school. R.A.’s, crafty artists, impressionists, all alike will be asked to work for it, and they are anxious to have J[oseph Pennell] among their contributors. (Waltman 404–05) Though it was originally agreed that Bate and Arthur Tomson would co-edit the paper, Bate’s wife died in late December 1889 or early January, leaving him unable to complete his share of editorial duties. Bate’s role was henceforth confined to business arrangements and Tomson’s wife, Graham R. (whose legal name was Rosamond Tomson), now joined Arthur as co-editor. This new arrangement was based on more than nepotism. Graham R. had grown up in a family of amateur and professional artists and had hoped to attend art school until parental opposition halted her plans. Born Rosamond Ball, she was the daughter of a bank secretary, bibliophile, and amateur poet; and two of her brothers exhibited paintings at the Royal Society of British Artists in the 1870s and 1880s. Wilfrid Ball (1853–1917) in fact enjoyed a prosperous career for a quarter century as an etcher and watercolorist after leaving the accounting profession. In the early 1880s Whistler

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praised some of his etchings of Thames views, and through Ball’s membership in Ye Sette of Odd Volumes, the dining club founded by publisher Bernard Quaritch in 1877, he became a close friend to John Lane, the publisher so pre-eminently allied with aestheticism, decadence, and blackand-white art. Not coincidentally, Lane was also the publisher of Ball’s sister from 1894 until the end of her life (Hughes 8–9). Graham R. had debuted as an art critic in the February 1889 Scottish Art Review with a three-page, signed review of the Burlington House Winter Exhibition of old masters and modern British paintings. The Scottish Art Review began its two-year run in June 1888 and was closely associated with the Glasgow School of impressionists (the ‘Glasgow Boys’), who had founded the monthly review in conjunction with the 1888 Glasgow International Art Exhibition. Graham R.’s initial review was clearly the work of a critic closely aligned with aestheticism and the impressionist school: she emphasised colour; the integral harmony of subject, expression, and technique; and the collaboration of subject and artist in the best portrait painting. In a subsequent July 1889 Scottish Art Review essay she championed American painter Henry Muhrman, who was then exhibiting with the New English Art Club, as an outsider of rare honesty and originality. Both her essay and its layout – words and text – signaled advanced decorative and aesthetic principles (see Fig. 12.1). The white space around reproductions (sometimes lavish) mirrored the avant garde exhibition principles innovated by the Grosvenor Gallery (Denney 9–57) and by Whistler, which shifted attention away from the commodified spectacle of art works chock-a-bloc from floor to ceiling on display at the Royal Academy. Instead, more progressive galleries hung art works at eye level and created sufficient space around them to enable viewers to experience, and complete, an active aesthetic experience; these hanging techniques also worked to foreground, and privilege, the artist and his (or more rarely her) vision in contrast to the Royal Academy emphasis on massive productivity that paralleled industrial mass production. In Tomson’s essay on Muhrman, reproductions were also placed near relevant sections of text, effectively balancing word and image as allied arts and drawing attention to language not just as semantic content but also as graphic image. As Peter Stansky points out, in 1888 Emery Walker had lectured on printing and argued for the necessary balance and harmony between type and decoration, a lecture that played a formative role in the founding of the Kelmscott Press (225).4 Though typeface is not self-evidently at stake in the Scottish Art Review essay on Muhrman, the magazine’s sensitivity to the visuality of print is, and the essay’s layout accords with the progressive ideas enunciated by Whistler, the Grosvenor Gallery, and the Arts and Crafts movement. Tomson further balanced the claims of word and image by quoting a familiar Christina Rossetti poem (‘Up-hill’) to characterise the price Murhman had paid as a visual artist for his

Linda K. Hughes 223

Figure 12.1 Graham R. Tomson, ‘Henry Muhrman’, Scottish Art Review, July 1889: 37. National Library of Scotland.

224 Aestheticism on the Cheap: Art Criticism, and Cheap Paper

originality: ‘Mr. Muhrman’s path has not been a smooth one. If descent be easy, how proportionately steep must be the road which leads “uphill all the way – yes, to the very end.”’ The production values of her text extended this enactment of aestheticism and its endorsement of the allied arts. But Graham R. Tomson was unable to follow up on such work because the Scottish Art Review folded in the summer of 1890. Art Weekly, sold at a penny a copy to a niche market of working artists, could afford no illustrations but did strive for aesthetically-pleasing layout of type on its cheap paper, as the front page of its 10 May 1890 issue demonstrates (Fig. 12.2). If the journal began with the aim of catholic views, it quickly became an organ for the New English Art Club (NEAC) during its brief five-month run from 22 February–26 July 1890, which explains the publication of a two-part review of the Royal Academy by Walter Sickert, the principal reason that Art Weekly retains a tenuous hold on cultural memory today. Sickert was the student and ‘right hand man’ of Whistler, and Whistler’s decorative principles for mounting exhibitions strongly influenced gallery reviews in Art Weekly. If the Grosvenor Gallery, which opened in 1877, revised contemporary gallery displays by limiting the numbers of paintings displayed and grouping a single artist’s work to emphasise the ‘artist as creator’ rather than commodity (Denney 25), Whistler conceived the exhibition as a total artwork itself, albeit a transient one. Declaring that a picture ‘must be hung so it can be seen with plenty of wall-space around it, and in a room made beautiful by color, by sculpture judiciously placed, by flowers, by furniture and hangings and decorations in harmony’ (Bendix 212), Whistler named his 1883 one-man show Arrangement in White & Yellow and his even more influential 1884 exhibition Arrangement in Flesh Colour & Grey (Myers 10, 13). For these shows he carefully selected the hangings, colour scheme, lighting, and flowers in vases while also encouraging women to come dressed in fashions that harmonized with the gallery’s colour-scheme (Myers 19, 21). Whistler, significantly, also exhibited his work at NEAC shows on and off from 1889–1894 (Bendix 246–47), years in which Arthur Tomson was also an active member and Graham R. Tomson was regularly publishing art journalism, including unsigned work in Art Weekly. In the debut issue of Art Weekly, one notice possibly written by Graham R. complained that ‘Hanging pictures with some regard to the decorative effect of the walls, and looking solely to artistic quality in the choice of what shall be placed there, is regarded as a counsel of perfection unattainable in these days of Academic reputations and Philistine patronage of the dear and nasty’ (22 February, 3). A note by an ‘Idler’ in the 29 March issue praised the current NEAC show for its good hanging principles, to wit, ‘no crowding, ... no eye-traps, [consideration of] the structure and colour of the room,’ and the elimination of ‘skying’ (44). If the decorative principles of exhibitions were considered crucial, the journal also disclosed its larger aesthetic aims in the

Linda K. Hughes 225

Figure 12.2

Cover, Art Weekly, 10 May 1890. National Library of Scotland.

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literary contributions that Graham R. solicited as a fit complement and counterpart to discussion of the visual arts. The debut issue featured a poem by W.E. Henley attractively laid out next to an essay asserting the equal importance of literature and illustration signed by Joseph Pennell (though in fact co-written with Elizabeth Pennell).5 The essay sneered at poets’ jealousy of the illustrator and of the attention the latter attracts to himself. And it is this jealousy on the part of a certain class of literary men and women, who, unfortunately, control at the present time all the critical journals of the English-speaking world, that illustration has been patronized and patted on the back by people who have not the knowledge to criticize the drawings, to say nothing of their being unable to produce them. (3) A practice counteracted by the juxtaposition of Henley’s and Pennell’s contributions within a paper that privileged the visual artist. The relation of letterpress and of print as visual artifact in Art Weekly accorded with the workaday professionalism of the journal. Its paper was cheap and excluded illustrations, but a strong aesthetic sensibility guided the clear, direct, and visually pleasing layout on the cover and inside. Graham R. Tomson’s art reviews in the Morning Leader, like her contributions to Art Weekly, were anonymous, but the column was exclusively her own and provides the fullest account of her aesthetic principles and practice. The Morning Leader came into being when proprietors of the Star (for which the Pennells, Le Gallienne, and Shaw respectively served as art, literary, and music critics) decided to found a morning paper that could share overhead costs with the Star while earning additional profits. The Morning Leader began on 22 May 1892; and if its staff members have been forgotten today – music critic C.W. Veats, dramatic critic J.R. Geard, and literary critic D.P. Saunders – J.W. Scott Robertson nonetheless asserts that ‘The Star and Morning Leader were both remarkable for the appeal that their zest, wit and quality made to a cultivated as well as a popular public’ (174, 172). Graham R. debuted on 24 May under the pseudonym of N.E. Vermind. Her aesthetic criteria remained those of the NEAC (which she mentioned often): she derided inaccuracy of representation but also banal realism that strove merely to record a subject’s every detail rather than creating an impression distinctive in style and poetic in its unity of effect; she rejected the subordination of painting to literary content (rather than pursuit of painterly qualities and effects); and everywhere she also registered her authority as an aesthete, commenting on topics ranging from paintings to photographs, from tapestries to the book arts. She also took care to notice the work of women artists. Her 11 February 1893 column pointed out work by three women painters at the Dudley Gallery, for example, while her 18 February 1893 column criticized her friend Alice Meynell for errors in the

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introduction to a Fine Arts Society catalogue and discussed in detail the urban impressionism of watercolorist Rosa Barton, recently made an Associate of the Water-Colour Society.6 More to the point of the present argument, her Morning Leader columns, like Art Weekly, applauded the decorative principles of exhibitions pioneered by Whistler. As she said of the NEAC show on 19 November 1892, The most salient impression that strikes you on entering the Dudley Gallery is a keen sense of harmony: here are pictures most admirably selected, and admirably arranged on the walls. Indeed, so skilfully put together is this exhibition that the manifold schemes of colour to be found therein are made (by force of ingenious juxtaposition) to fit into one big scheme that is both pictorial and refreshing. (3) Far more than in Art Weekly, moreover, Graham R. devoted considerable attention to book arts and to the quality of illustrations in periodicals. She was particularly harsh on the new Pall Mall Magazine, which, she acidly observed, was spending a great deal of money on mediocre illustration despite the availability of good artists in black and white (11 July, 31 July 1893). Her interests in periodical illustration had been heightened by her own appointment as editor of Sylvia’s Journal (December 1892–April 1894), in which role she recruited black-and-white art from NEAC member R. Anning Bell. In her 8 October 1892 column she reviewed three illustrated books, singling out the illustrations of Bernard Partridge in F. Anstey’s Voces Populi, which had first been published in Punch: ‘his technique is interesting and suggestive, while his power of observation (and of recording what he has seen) is quite marvellous. This artist, unlike most of the contributors to our comic papers, is no slave to any particular type or tradition’ (3). If literary content could hardly be dismissed in illustrations for a journal like Punch, she treated visual technique as having equal weight, once again balancing (though not entirely distinguishing) visual art and literary content. She also reviewed a book as itself a work of art in the same column: Messrs. George Bell and Sons have just issued a little volume which strikes me as being a very dainty work of art from cover to cover. It is clad in peach-colored buckram, whereon is traced a golden design that has been considered in the proper decorative spirit. The head-pieces to each chapter (subtly suggestive of the contents), are from the pen of Mr. Alan Wright; they are, moreover, agreeably fanciful, and excellently well suited to their purpose. (3) Yet she urged these points to readers on a printed page characterised by its jangling discordances and crowded print laid out on cheap paper. On one side of the column (Fig. 12.3) were crude illustrations depicting singers at


Figure 12.3

‘Art Gossip’, Morning Leader, 8 October 1892, 3 (detail).

Linda K. Hughes 229

the Leeds Festival of music (though the notice of Sir Arthur Sullivan’s In Memoriam overture and a Bach Mass supported the larger aesthetic agenda of the page in terms of content). On the other side were, at the top, a directory of merchants from dealers in coal and tobacco to funeral furnishers; and next to Graham R.’s pseudonym at the bottom (Fig. 12.4), reports of illness and cholera deaths. What are the theoretical and semiotic implications of these intersecting verbal and visual discourses in such a medium? Oscar Wilde, as usual, has something to say about the matter, or at least his artist Basil Hallward does in the opening chapter of Picture of Dorian Gray; here Hallward asserts the discord between aesthetic quality and cheap art journalism when he mentions a successful picture of his that ‘had been chattered about in the penny newspapers, which is the nineteenth-century standard of immortality’ (22). Wilde, as Josephine Guy and Ian Small detail (14–49, 285–97), was also working as a journalist in the 1880s, contributing aesthetic writing on bookbinding, fashion, and Whistler to the Pall Mall Gazette (PMG), which itself sold for a penny. This paper was designed for evening reading in men’s clubs and marked its more genteel aspirations in its large double-column format, which avoided the blatantly utilitarian layout of the Morning Leader that

Figure 12.4

‘Art Gossip’, Morning Leader, 8 October 1892, 3 (detail).


everywhere announced its cheap production. Even in the PMG, however, aestheticism was constantly in danger of being upended by the juxtapositions (including crude adverts) that resulted from the paper’s imperative to generate income (Fig. 12.5). Art criticism that extolled aestheticism and juxtaposed notices of the decorative arts of printing, illustration, and book design with reviews of painting and sculpture – the high arts – in a format entirely at odds with its own arguments is one more instance of the contradictory terms on which fin-de-siècle aestheticism was pursued. As Kathy Psomiades in Beauty’s Body and Jonathan Freedman in Professions of Taste demonstrate, aestheticism’s aspirations to an autotelic realm of art were impossible when art was embroiled in and so often advanced by a commercial marketplace. The commodification of culture is particularly clear in the Morning Leader, not only because advanced art principles were bundled and sold for a halfpenny but also because of the alignment of crass advertisements and the discourse of art and music. This alignment also sacrificed aesthetes’ claims to the avant garde because it recalled mid-Victorian practices, most famously the surrounding of Dickens’s and other novelists’ serial parts with cluttered, lengthy sections of advertising (see, e.g., Curtis 106–16). But aestheticism’s collusion with utilitarianism in the form of cheap, inartistic production also enabled high art principles to be disseminated to a wider audience. Pragmatically and economically, there was every reason for these aesthetic theories to find such down-market material embodiment, even if at the very site at which the art critic strove to be most progressive – theory and aesthetic practice – the column unraveled both. Indeed, the NEAC and Whistlerian premise that art should not be subordinated to literature or narrative was entirely belied by the column, since its layout announced that ideas, the contents of words, were more important than their visual embodiment. Here, linguistic referentiality was posited as a force that could transcend language’s material embodiment. I would like to suggest that the Morning Leader format also had a dual purpose as a class marker. On one hand, the format of the Morning Leader arts page marked it as a bourgeois site, a page reflecting a desire for distinction, gentility, and the refinement of rough commercialism without relinquishing the purchaser’s desire for affordable products and culture available in units that could be quickly consumed (see Bourdieu passim). But the format also marked a professional discursive formation – for its other readers were the professional artists and friends of the critic who looked at the column not to be instructed but to see how their work was being reviewed and the fortunes or misfortunes of their colleagues. For them, too, the words were more important than layout; in addition, however, they brought to the reading process a lively, thoroughgoing commitment to the prestige and pre-eminence of the visual arts.

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Figure 12.5 Oscar Wilde, ‘The Unity of the Arts: A Lecture and “a Five O'Clock,”’ Pall Mall Gazette, 12 December 1887, 13. National Library of Scotland.


Aestheticism on the cheap, then, belied the continuum of decorative and high art principles despite the critic’s avowals, and exposed to the naked eye aestheticism’s contradictory partnership with utilitarianism and commodity culture. In this context, one of the literary contributions to Art Weekly, a humorous short story by Barry Pain, serves as a trope for high art criticism printed on cheap paper. ‘At the Window’ (12 April 1890, 59–60) concerned a fat utilitarian fly in dialogue with a slender aesthetic fly; at the end the aesthetic fly is squashed by a particularly nasty child for the sake of the act’s entertainment value, and the utilitarian fly lives on.

Notes 1. For a concise overview of art periodicals (and art coverage in Victorian periodicals), see Shattock 93–94 and Roberts 58–66. 2. See, for example, Peter Stansky, Redesigning the World: William Morris, the 1880s, and the Arts and Crafts (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1985). 3. See the chapter devoted to Elizabeth Robins Pennell (1855–1936) in Clarke. 4. As Gerard Curtis points out, audience awareness of typography as graphic image was evident even earlier, a result of the sister arts tradition as well as advertisements in which visual and verbal ‘lines’ converged. According to Curtis, Victorians were keenly aware that the act of reading involved an acknowledgment of the visual value and semiotics of material signifiers: print (typography) and the book itself. In the development of new trades like copywriting and advertising design there emerged a new typographic awareness, in which writing was seen as an industrial product existing between ‘literature and technology’. This ‘appropriation’ of typography, and the use of the graphic word and visual image in advertising, was part and parcel of a larger Victorian perception of the importance of text, evident in the revival of interest in illuminated lettering and the art of bookbinding. (104) Aestheticism appropriated such intersections of typography and visuality for the decorative arts, not just commercial production and sales. 5. Elizabeth Pennell’s authorship is verified by her diary entry dated 3 February 1890 (Elizabeth Pennell Diaries, Joseph Pennell Papers, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas). 6. Both her 4 June 1892 and 2 May 1893 columns discussed painting couples and in both cases preferred the work of the wife. As she said of the show of oil and water-colors by M. and Madame L’Aubinière, ‘Madame’ (the former Georgina Steeples) ‘is responsible for the aquarelles, and her husband is the producer of the oil paintings. For my part I prefer the lady’s pictures’ (4 June 1892, p. 3). Similarly, she mocked ‘Mr. Alma Tadema’ (whom she considered merely a commercial painter, in contrast to Albert Moore), who has this year been beaten at his own game by his wife, for on comparing his portrait of Mrs. Wylie with Mrs. Tadema’s ‘Many Stitches, Many Thoughts,’ one finds in the latter work a finer grip of the subject, a more complete realisation of the ends in view. In fact the finesse of Mrs. Tadema’s figure stitching near a window is admirable, while the planes in Mrs. Wylie’s face have obviously lacked study. (2 May 1893, p. 3)

Linda K. Hughes 233 Her spirited defense of working wives and their potentially superior gifts relative to husbands was not, of course, entirely disinterested, though it accorded with the political principles evident in her New Woman poems (e.g., ‘Marpessa’) and her editorship of Sylvia’s Journal, which opened with a Christmas feature entitled ‘Women Workers in Many Fields.’ This last profiled stateswomen (viz., the Queen), painters, poets, archaeologists, athletes, and more.

13 Putting Women in the Boat in the Idler (1892–1898) and TO-DAY (1893–1897) Anne Humpherys

Picture the scene, a group of men gathered around the fire with a good supply of punch and cigars. They have nothing in particular to do but talk and enjoy themselves. They put a high premium on witty remarks and in their desultory conversations there is a great deal of laughter over subjects that range from the theater to fashion and food, from gentlemanly sports to the foibles of women (Fig. 13.1). This was the gendered structure of a popular nineteenth-century monthly journal, the Idler, during the six years it was edited by Jerome K. Jerome, who is remembered today almost exclusively as the author of Three Men in a Boat – to Say Nothing of the Dog (1889) though he had a four decades long career as journalist, playwright, and novelist, publishing some eight volumes of essays (almost all originally published in various periodicals), six novels, over 16 plays, and an autobiography. This masculinist approach continued in Jerome’s weekly ‘newspaper magazine’ TO-DAY, founded in the wake of the financial success of the Idler. However, the insistent male-club atmosphere of both journals was constructed in the midst of a raft of contributions by women and an insistent use of illustrations of women figures as well as an advertising section devoted to women readers as consumers. This essay thus will analyse how the male agenda is infiltrated by women as writers, images, and consumers and the ‘gender conversations’ that result. The Idler (1892–98), a six-penny and then a shilling monthly, was originally the idea of Robert Barr, who had made considerable money as editor of the English edition of the Detroit Free Press. He provided the initial funding and was for the first three years (1892–95) co-editor.1 He had considered Rudyard Kipling for the editorship but finally chose Jerome, whose Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886), a collection of essays originally published in Home Chimes, provided the title and the format for the new magazine. 234

Anne Humpherys 235

Figure 13.1

‘The Idler’s Club’, Idler, vol. 1 (February 1892).

Barr and Jerome’s targeted audience for the magazine was the young male ‘suburban’ world of upwardly mobile clerks and other wage-earners (like Jerome himself at the time he wrote Three Men in a Boat). The Idler was instantly successful: its ‘liberal, casually sophisticated ... irreverent, and sentimental’ (Cox 17) tone and the quality, number, and nature of its illustrations were all praised. After seven volumes and three years, Barr sold the Idler to Jerome who became sole editor, marking the change with an expanded size and even more lavish use of illustrations. A magazine of an average of 120 to 150 pages, the Idler was a combination of fiction, both serial and single pieces, poetry, articles on the theater, books, celebrities (particularly writers and artists), travel, history and culture, including interviews with celebrities, educational essays on natural history, foreign countries and alien cultures as well as tours of historical buildings. The fiction from the beginning included detective and adventure stories, but also a good number of more or less sentimental stories of love and romance. The journal provided illustrations of both the texts and as standalone cartoons and fine art reproductions. The mode of illustration ranged from cartoons to fully finished engravings to small line drawings. There were also photographs. The financial success Jerome achieved with the Idler encouraged him to fulfill a dream he had long had, according to his autobiography:2 he started a weekly two-column tabloid in January 1893 with an average of 32 pages each issue in which he hoped to combine some of the successful magazine

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elements of the Idler with those of a newspaper. Jerome named this new two-penny weekly journal TO-DAY, calling attention to it as ‘an up-to-date, plain-speaking weekly newspaper’3 as he said in his advertisements, de-emphasising not to say ignoring the magazine qualities of the journal which consisted mainly of fiction, frequently serialised,4 and the use of illustrations, similar to those of the Idler though less frequent and lacking any high art reproductions. The first page of TO-DAY marks it as a newspaper. Half of the front page is masthead and the other half is advertising with no images. The news was in the form at the beginning of a ‘Topic of the Week’,5 which was soon dropped in favour of a series of one-paragraph ‘Topics of TO-DAY’. These short paragraph items took up, after early issues, two to three pages, and included a miscellany of subjects from the Employers Liability Law to fortune-telling to Italy and the triple alliance to mistreatment of cab horses (a favourite issue for Jerome). These pieces are always written in the first person6 and are usually mildly ironic. The opening page of this news department evolved toward the look of a newspaper leader page. This newspaper magazine also included many of the standard departments: books, theater, men and women’s columns, though with magazine titles, that is ‘Club Chatter’ for the men’s column. These departments were either unsigned or signed pseudonymously; Jerome said in the initial number of November 1898 that everything unsigned was written by him (which is one reason the journal did not survive his being forced to sell it).7 It also had, later in its life, a growing amount of material about sports, mainly cycling and football and eventually an extensive ‘Answers to Correspondents’. In the beginning each department had its own pictorial logo. After three years, the department logos disappeared, and Jerome inserted display advertisements, appropriate to the department (boot blacking for men, cocoa for women) onto the same page. Jerome was committed from the beginning to introducing as much highquality illustration into both his journals as he could.8 He actually sued his printer after the first issue of TO-DAY for the poor quality of reproduction of the illustrated material, and in issue number eight altered the form of the journal ‘to enable half the paper to be printed on what is technically called “the flat.” By this means sketches can be produced more easily’ (30 December 1893, 19). TO-DAY was advertised by a famous poster of a fashionably dressed young woman designed by the well-known illustrator Dudley Hardy, which Jerome referred to as ‘the yellow girl’ poster. The illustrations in TO-DAY are by what Jerome called ‘the leading black-and-white men of the day’ (TO-DAY, 24 March 1894, 211). Occasionally there are full-page cartoons, sometimes political. There were no illustrations on the pages of ‘Topics of the Day’ other than an evolving logo of a fashionably dressed woman, a version of the yellow girl poster.

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The Idler, on the other hand, was lavishly illustrated . When Jerome took over as sole owner and editor in 1895 he said that much greater attention will be paid to the Art Department. ... The size of the magazine has been increased, we having found it impossible to give our artists fair representation within the former limited size of our pages. ... We are making arrangements with artists, both English and foreign, and with engraving firms, that will enable us eventually to render every illustration a work of art in itself. (August 1895, 98–99) Though Jerome said he wished ‘to make [the Idler] a magazine that will be almost a need to thinking men and women’ (August 1895, 98), both it and TO-DAY were, if not strictly men’s magazines, nonetheless masculinist in their interests, their tone, and many of their subjects. TO-DAY was the most unabashed in its appeal to male readers, for except for a regular women’s department, nearly all the writers and illustrators were men, and readers of ‘Topics of Today’ were clearly gendered male. Jerome did tell a correspondent that ‘Don’t run away with the idea that TO-DAY is intended to be a man’s a paper only’ (1 February 1896, 403), but his view of women nonetheless excluded them from ‘the news’: I have, perhaps, an exaggerated respect for woman, in her proper place, which I take to be the home circle; but I have always felt that, as a class, she could never be broad-minded enough to look at questions of public policy from an impersonal standpoint, and that, therefore, her interference with them was necessarily harmful.9 In the Idler, the very concept of the magazine was male. Jerome’s notion of idling, which constructs the journal, is different from Walter Benjamin’s flaneur, that iconic figure of modernist voyeurism. Jerome’s Idler is implicitly positioned against a life of ‘working’, that is, he is not so much a man who has the leisure to roam the modern city streets observing the flow of human lives and activities, as a figure momentarily freed from work for a day or weekend who chooses to sit in front of a fire with his male friends talking about a desultory range of general topics, eschewing seriousness and treating all subjects lightly and humorously. The ‘headpiece’ in Figure 13.1 represents this concept exactly. The place in The Idler where the masculinist idling mentality is most clearly articulated was in its most popular department, usually the last feature: a collection of random short signed musings on a set topic, grouped together under the title ‘The Idler’s Club’. In the beginning The Idler’s Club has as its headpiece the five leisurely young men around the fireplace encased in cigars’ smoke (Fig. 13.1). Gradually other logos appear, charting

238 Putting Women in the Boat in the Idler and TO-DAY

a lessening gendered image, though the five men headpiece never disappears and remains the defining image for The Idler’s Club.10 After six months and just before the entry of women into the male bastion of The Idler’s Club in April 1892, the logo changes for the first time, to a pub sign. After another six months, this logo is replaced by a table and high-backed empty bench. Another change introduces a design with pitcher, a Japanese fan, and a vase with stylized flowers combined with Chinese clay pipes and what seems to be a tobacco canister. This image, like others I’ll mention later, emblematises a complex relationship between male and female images in the journal. The feminized design and the flowers rest easily against the male pipes and tobacco. Beginning with the September 1894 number, which has as a topic ‘How to Court the New Woman’, The Idler’s Club begins an alternate tradition of introducing targeted logos, the one for this number being an Aubrey Beardsley drawing of a bare-headed woman contemplating her hat. Jerome repeatedly called on his friends and their friends for contributions to both his journals, resulting in what one commentator has called ‘clique journalism’.11 The contributors were for the most part men, and, in fact, a reason for the initial success of the Idler was the group of well-known male writers Jerome and Barr managed to get as contributors (many of them also contributed to TO-DAY): Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle, George Bernard Shaw, Andrew Lang, Barry Pain, James Payn, Israel Zangwell, Rider Haggard, Hall Caine, George R. Sims, R.M. Ballantyne, Richard Le Gallienne, Bret Harte, H.G. Wells, R.L. Stevenson as well as Jerome himself. While some of these writers are clustered in the early numbers, Jerome managed to attract known names to both of his publications throughout the life of the journals. But women were, nonetheless, a significant presence in the Idler and to a lesser extent TO-DAY, though their influence was indirect. Though many of the illustrations were of women (more about that later), there were few illustrations by women.12 More importantly as the months go on, women writers begin to appear (women never contributed as much to TO-DAY). In the fifth number of the Idler (May 1892) the first woman writer appeared, Mabel E. Wotton, whom Margaret Stetz positions in opposition to George Gissing.13 Wotton contributes a story about a father who gives up his life to save his son’s silly wife from eloping with a married man (‘Suicide’).14 Ironically, the greatest number of contributions by women to the journal is to the most insistently masculine section, the Idler’s Club. Israel Zangwill, a frequent contributor to both of Jerome’s journals and a close friend of his, in an Idler’s Club contribution on ‘Most Awkward Predicaments’ complained ironically about this. The intrusion of the ladies [into the Idler’s Club] has spoilt everything. Once we sat with our feet on the mantelpiece smoking ... Now we never

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smoke: Angelina [the first woman contributor to the Idler’s Club] won’t permit it. Tea replaces the whiskey of yore,15 and the horizon is bounded by thin bread and butter. We are expected to stick to one predetermined subject doubtless for fear we might wander off into the improper and we are almost encouraged to bring our sewing. No more we enjoy those delightful excursions to everywhere interrupting one another ..., and capping an appreciation of Wagner with an anecdote about a mad turtle. ... I think someone ought to tell the editors that they are simply ruining the club. I shudder to think what will become of it in five years’ time, when nobody will belong to it but ladies and parsons’. (April 1893, page 358) Though this typically light humored piece involves conventional complaints against women, it also expresses perfectly the male ambiance the journal strove for. The female contributors to the Idler’s Club included women writers who in other contexts represented a range of perspectives. The largest number came from Eliza Lynn Linton with nine, followed closely by Evelyn Sharp with seven. While Lynn Linton’s generally conservative position about women makes her perhaps a likely candidate for the masculinist agenda of the Club, Evelyn Sharp, who was attached to the Yellow Book crowd, a member of the Anti-Sweating League, and active in the suffrage movement, is another matter. Other ‘feminist’ contributors included Ella Hepworth Dixon, author of The Story of a Modern Woman, with three Idler Club items; Nora Vynne, who wrote an important tract Women; Under the Factory Act in 1903, with five; and Mabel Beardsley, the sister of Aubrey, with two. On the one hand these names indicate that Jerome was as diligent in getting the best women writers for his enterprise as he was the men.16 On the other hand, these women tend to pull their potential feminist punches when they write for this journal. At best, when they don’t support the overt agenda, they adopt an ironic stance towards it but do not directly challenge it. There does not seem to have been any obvious pattern to the introduction of women contributors to the Idler’s Club. Some apparently male-gendered topics like ‘Duels and Duelling’ (March 1894) or ‘Are Clever Women or Stupid the More Attractive?’ (August 1895) seem to justify all male contributors. However, there doesn’t seem to be any obvious reason why women could not contribute to ‘January’ (January 1894) or ‘Animal Anecdotes’ (August 1894) or even ‘Who is the Greatest Living English Actress – and Why?’ (November 1895). It would certainly have been interesting to have a woman’s contribution to ‘Are Honeymoons a Success?’ (September 1893), or ‘Advantages and Disadvantages of Being Good Looking’ (August 1898). But by the same token there is no particular reason why five out of ten of the contributors to ‘The Artistic Temperament’ (May 1893) or six out of nine contributions to ‘How I Bring up My Parents’ (October 1895) should be

240


women.17 Without knowing how the solicitations and assignments for contributions to the Idler’s Club were made, however, it is impossible to ascribe intent to any of these configurations. The subject of the New Woman provides an example of the way in which women writers seem to understand their role in the male bastion of the Idler’s Club. The Idler’s interest in the subject of the New Woman is almost exclusively one of ridicule. The one extended and direct approach to the topic is by an all woman panel of respondents to the question of ‘How to Court the Advanced Woman’ (September 1894). Evidence that the fix is in comes when we see that this very same number contains a poem ‘To an “Advanced Woman” ’ written and illustrated by F. Mabelle Pearse which seems to praise the subject but in fact says that woman’s advancement is a ‘pastime’ while Woman’s great task is to ‘To proclaim to Man salvation,/ Through Woman’s mediation’ (140–41). Further, the opening contribution to the Idler’s Club discussion is a ‘history’ of ‘The Development of the “Emancipated” ’ by Angus Evan Abbott, which concludes that though ‘advanced women’ are the inevitable product of history ‘they are women for whom Man will not risk his life, whom Man will not buy, whom Man will not take as a gift, nor Man be bribed to receive’ (194). And as if that were not enough, following the Idler’s Club discussion of the Advanced Woman, there is a full-page illustration, one of a satiric series called ‘People I Have Never Met’, this one entitled ‘The Man of the Future’ who is being pummeled by The Yellow Aster, The Heavenly Twins, The Superfluous Woman and a volume by George Egerton. The infantilized man promises ‘I will be good! Oh, I will be good’18 (Fig. 13.2). That the Idler should address the ‘woman question’ and ‘the marriage question’ by an Idler’s Club on how to court the Advanced Woman is indicative of the masculinist agenda of the magazine. However, the eight women who contribute to the Idler’s Club on courting the Advanced Woman are among the best-known women writers of the period and the magazine gives a photograph of each contributor along with a photograph of her most famous work. So we have George Egerton and Keynotes; Mrs. Mannington Caffyn ‘Iota’ and A Yellow Aster; John Oliver Hobbes and A Study in Temptation; Lady Greville and That Hated Saxon; Sarah Grand and The Heavenly Twins; Mary L. Pendered and Dust and Laurel: A Study in 19th Century Womanhood; Ella Hepworth Dixon and The Story of a Modern Woman; and Dr. Arabella Keneally19 and Dr. Janet of Harley Street. The inclusion of these women and the celebration of them and their works by illustrations certainly proclaims both their importance and that of the subject of the Advanced Woman. But the contributors for the most part refuse to take up that challenge. They deny that they are advanced women. They either undercut or berate the ‘advanced woman’ no one more vitriolically than Sarah Grand. Iota looks forward to the new girl who will not need to be so strident and John Oliver Hobbes argues that women need men’s

Anne Humpherys 241

Figure 13.2

‘The Man of the Future’, Idler, vol. 6 (September 1894).

superior strength. Lady Greville is confused but is sure the Advanced Woman is not a good thing. Mary L. Pendered thinks ‘deferential domination’ is what men should use. Sarah Grand is incensed: ‘The cry of the miscalled “Advanced Woman” is, in most cases, dictated by intense selfishness, egotism, and vanity; the really “Advanced Woman” is the one who says little, and is constantly, yet unobtrusively ameliorating the condition of her fellow mortals, be they men or women’ (204).


There is, however, an indirect subversion of this seemingly universal denial of the Advanced Woman through an adoption of the main rhetorical device of the male writers’ irony. Ella Hepworth Dixon in her contribution ironically remarks that ‘As an average – a very average – woman, I am filled with amazement that the editors of the Idler should concern themselves with so fantastic, so remote, a possibility as that which is at the moment disturbing the masculine serenity of the Club’ (207). And George Egerton says similarly Surely the fact of my having written a little book, for the love of writing it, not with a view to usher in a revolt, or preach a propaganda, merely to strike a few notes on phases of female character I know to exist, hardly qualifies me to have an opinion. or present it to the average young man. Though she continues by asserting that ‘The divinest fibre of [woman’s] nature is her maternal instinct’ (194). Dr. Arabella Keneally ends the entries by declaring that ‘it is time indeed that the Advanced Woman came’ (205).20 Through these gentle comments, the woman’s voice is inserted into the male agenda. As the journal evolves, woman’s voices become stronger though the masculinist agenda never disappears. Another all woman Idler Club three years after ‘How to Court the Advanced Woman’ is on a much more significant topic titled ‘Should Women Vote?’ (March 1897). This Idler’s Club has a more affirmative feminist voice, though the main device is still irony as opposed to affirmative statement. Lynn Linton and Florence Hayward are virulently opposed to women voting, but the rest of the seven entries are variously supportive. Mrs. Robert Leighton argues for women’s stake in the nation while Nora Vynne thinks women will vote on the same bases as men, for better or worse. Mrs. Oscar Beringer thinks women ought to represent women, and as usual Dr Arabella Kineally takes pleasure in eviscerating all arguments against women’s suffrage. Thus, though the journal constructs its reader as male, and though the women writers do seem to cut their suits to fit the cloth of the journal’s masculinist agenda, their presence in the journal does in fact change the tone of the magazine and the expectations of the readers no matter what the women writers in fact say directly in their contributions. G.B. Burgin, a regular contributor to the Idler, follows his article ‘How Writers Work’ (the original discussed only male writers) a few months later with ‘How Women Writers Work’, claiming (in the usual Idler style of light irony about women) that he was forced to write this piece because he was berated by an ‘old lady in the country’ who asked ‘Weren’t [the ladies] Authors?’ (September 1896, 204) Thus, Jerome in the Idler, by overtly recognizing the abilities of women writers and the desirability of presenting their voices if not always their

Anne Humpherys 243

concerns, actually creates a magazine for the most part written by and for men which finds the best voice is the male voice inflected by the female. Moreover when one turns to the illustrative material of Jerome’s journals, as opposed to the letter press, one finds additional infiltration of women with further qualification of the gender expectations set up overtly in the Idler and emblemized by the five idle young men. For despite the insistence of this logo, a good deal of the rest of the illustrations and especially the covers, the volume title pages, and the opening pages of the individual numbers are of women. Consider as an example the opening pages of the May 1892 number. The lead fiction in this number is ‘Novel Notes’ by Jerome, a humorous tale about the bad results that can come from taking advice from friends. The story is not really gendered in its events, but its lead illustrations are. The subject of the images is not the central concern of the story – taking advice from friends – but rather the opening scene in which the narrator tells his wife he is going to write a novel in collaboration with his friends. On the left page of the opening of the number is a version of the five young men, this time four – ‘My Three Collaborators’ lounging in front of the fireplace, one leaning on the mantel. Facing this illustration is one of the young man’s wife seated alone with her feet resting on the fireplace fender and a book in her hand. The caption under this illustration is ‘I’m sure you could write one’, that line being her supportive response until she learns he is going to collaborate with his friends during one of their ‘pipe nights’ after which she cools to the project. These facing illustrations of two differently gendered figures in front of a similar setting (the fireplace) create a contrast of masculine homosocial conviviality and feminine solitary seriousness. The insistent male ‘idling’ agenda on the left thus is juxtaposed to a gendered but gentle critique. This same juxtaposition and the same result appear in a later number in a stand-alone full-page drawing of a single woman with an umbrella sitting on a rock reading a book. The caption is ‘An Idler’ (Hounsom Byle, August 1896, 127) (Fig. 13.3). This image through its caption ‘Idler’ inevitably invokes the magazine’s five idling young men in front of the fire and juxtaposes it to an alternate feminine image of a solitary woman reading a book. The juxtaposition is not so much a critique as a conversation, but there is no doubt that the contrast widens the remit of the ‘Idling’ concept of the journal. The covers and title pages of the Idler do similar work.21 I don’t know what the covers of the first eight volumes looked like. But beginning with volume nine, the cover is salmon coloured with a small drawing of a woman (taken from full-page illustrations of the months, always women, in the text) on the left. The woman’s image changes each issue (in volume February 1897 the image becomes a larger headshot; see Fig. 13.4) but the design stays the same. Thus as the journal develops, it not only brings in women writers but identifies itself on its cover with a woman in what seems a deliberate contrast


Figure 13.3

‘An Idler’, Idler, vol. 10 (August 1896).

to the iconic five young men logo. A similar move towards the insertion of beautifully designed images of women into the masculine space is found in TO-DAY. Its first page logo was originally only type graphics, but became in its third volume a version of its famous poster of the ‘yellow girl’ this woman leaning on a banner with the title of the journal inscribed within. This logo changes towards the end of 1897 to another drawing of a beautifully dressed woman. Similarly, at the start of the Idler, its bound volume title page contains no illustration. But after ten volumes, in 1897, a beautifully designed volume title page of a young woman in formal attire replaces the unillustrated original (Fig. 13.4). This image is followed by another fine illustration for

Anne Humpherys 245

Figure 13.4

Volume Title Page, Idler, vol. 11 (February–July 1897).

246


the opening page of the number. These title page illustrations had featured since July 1896 and are themselves faced by additional full-page illustrations of a text inside the number, usually of a woman. What does this repeated introduction of images of women do? They could be construed as an exploitative fulfillment of a male fantasy. But I would argue that the sheer number of these images in their impact if not their intent creates an alternate female space that both complements and reinforces the space carved out by women writers in the letter press. It is not a matter of the masculinist agenda being feminized. These journals are not an example of blurred gender. The spheres remain determinedly separate, as emblematized by the men’s and women’s departments of TO-DAY or the previously discussed facing pages of ‘Novel Notes’. Male readers can stay on the male side – take in the illustrations as enticements to slightly eroticized daydreams and they can enjoy the exclusively masculine ‘idling’ of the letter press with its ironic condescension to women and class elevating gossip and information about culture. Women can stay on the female side with the idealized images of women reinforcing their own internalized sense of beauty (even as today’s fashion magazines work for their women readers), and enjoy the romantic and sentimental fiction, and the woman’s department in TO-DAY with its advice on issues domestic management. They can also peruse the one insistently feminized space in the Idler, the shopping column by Laura which is embedded in the back of the number among the display ads.22 Thus, the spheres meet and converse in the illustrative material even as the women contributors to the Idler’s Club ‘converse’ with the men about male-inflected topics. As a female correspondent quoted by Jerome in ‘Answers to Correspondents’ said, TO-DAY is ‘a man’s paper, and ... therefore it is a paper for women, because it enables them better to understand man, and she thinks TO-DAY may widen their thinking’ (21 December 1895, 211). The ambiguity of the referent to ‘their’ in this sentence – widen men’s thinking or women’s? – expresses the tension exactly. Another way of expressing this is to ask what would a totally malegendered journal look like? Consider the cover which replaced Jerome’s female headshots when he had to sell the Idler and J.M. Dent took over publication from Chatto and Windus (Fig. 13.5). Not only is this cover unabashedly male but it is archaically so. The design and the print are heavy and blunt. With its representation of an eighteenth-century male pedant as a logo, it refers back to a mythical time empty of women. Is it too much to claim that this shift to an archaically male world absent of women under the joint editorship of a hack writer Arthur Lawrence and a suddenly wealthy caricaturist Sidney Sime was part of the reason for the journal’s decline? Jerome, for all his conservatism, had in spite of himself recognized the need to put women in the boat, and as a result, his journals should be seen as prescient as well as conservative.

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Figure 13.5

Cover after sale to J.M. Dent, Idler (August 1898).

248


Notes I wish to thank my research assistant at The Graduate Center, CUNY, Tanya Radford, for the research she contributed to this chapter. I also wish to thank the Leverhulme Trust and Birkbeck College UCL for awarding me a Visiting Professorship January through June 2005 which enabled me to complete the research. The chapter was published as an essay in Birkbeck’s online journal 19 in 2005. See www.19.bbk.ac.uk. I am grateful for permission from 19’s editors to reprint the essay here slightly changed. An earlier version of this essay was given at the annual conference of the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals in July 2004. 1. Jerome and Barr edited volumes 1–7 (February 1892–July 1895); Jerome edited volumes 8–14 (August 1895–January 1899). Volumes 15–21 (February 1899– January 1902) were edited by Arthur Lawrence and Sidney Sime. Volumes 22–38 (February 1902–March 1911) were edited once again by Barr. Jerome was forced to sell the Idler as the result of a law suit. In TO-DAY, Jerome had introduced a department, ‘In the City’, in April 1894 in ‘an attempt ... for the first time, to place before the general public a bald statement of the discreditable methods by which the majority of joint-stock companies are floated’ (21 April 1894, p. 17). This led to disaster when TO-DAY was sued for libel by one of the companies discussed. After a complicated legal case, in order to pay his costs, Jerome had to sell both the Idler and TO-DAY and sever his connection with them. Neither journal survived his departure in its original shape. 2. ‘I had the plan in my mind of a new weekly paper that should be a combination of magazine and journal. I put my own money into it, and got together the rest’. Jerome p. 176. 3. The journal was published on Thursday and so available on Friday. Jerome wanted it to be a Saturday journal so he could have access to the full week of news for its TO-DAY section, but he did not achieve this, ironically and sadly, until just at the point (May 1897) at which he lost control of his publications. ‘I have, from the beginning’, he wrote, been of the opinion that TO-DAY was essentially a Saturday paper, but there are difficulties connected with publishing on a Saturday that it is almost impossible for a paper to overcome until it has established for itself a position. By these arrangements I hope to make the paper more closely up-to-date. (1 May 1897, p. 182) 4. Jerome bragged that ‘there is more original literary matter in TO-DAY than in any weekly paper published at any price’ and that ‘no weekly journal issued at any price has ever paid such large sums for literary matter as TO-DAY is now paying to all the leading English writers for sole and exclusive rights’ (6 January 1894, p. 23). Indeed, the contributors of fiction include George Gissing, Arthur Conan Doyle, Mary Braddon, R.L. Stevenson, Israel Zangwill, Morley Roberts, Barry Pain, Mary Pendered, Rudyard Kipling, Ambrose Bierce, and Sarah Grand. 5. The first one was ‘The British Mission at Kabul’ by Louis Tracy (11 November 1893) and three weeks later Edward Aveling contributed ‘How to Become an Anarchist’ (9 December 1893). 6. For example ‘I have always taken pessimistic views of sanitary improvements ... The only advantage that I can see in the modern rage for drains is that it affords occupation for two large, and generally speaking, deserving classes of the community – namely, plumbers and doctors’ (2 December 1893, p. 19). 7. The departments underwent various name changes, but these are typical: ‘Club Chatter’ (men’s affairs, mainly sports and fashionable dress), ‘The Diary of a

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8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13. 14.

Bookseller’; ‘Private View’ (art galleries); ‘The Bauble Shop’ (the week in Parliament); ‘Stageland’ (interviews with theater people). From the beginning there was a woman’s department, mainly about fashion, though including recipes and sewing tips; again later, issues of domestic economy were introduced. ‘Our headings were designed by Mr. Edgar Wilson, an artist who is considered to be the very best man for this sort of work. You will see much of his work in PickMe-Up, the Sketch, and others’ TO-DAY (31 March 1894, p. 243). TO-DAY 2 December 1893, p. 17. To be fair, Jerome said about a year later, in one of the Topics of TO-DAY that ‘The time has come round again for woman as God meant her; man’s helpmeet, neither his slave nor his perpetual monitor’ 1 September 1894, p. 114. In February 1896 the woman’s department became ‘On Many Matters’ by Mrs. Humphrey (who wrote as Madge for Truth): ‘The Editor has asked me to make this page as useful as possible to young and inexperienced wives who have to keep house on limited allowance and maintain an appearance suitable to their position in what may be called the upper middle classes’ (16 February 1896, p. 119). The previous column ‘Feminine Affairs’ disappeared for a few weeks on the appearance of this new department. Sadly, during the last months of Jerome’s control over the journal, he prints what he claims was an unsolicited series of eleven letters from an anonymous source (‘Paterfamilias’) entitled ‘Domestic Blunders of Women’ which taken together constitute a vitriolic attack on women’s bad household management asserting that any man can do it better. Jerome has a jocular response to the series claiming that it was good business for the journal but bad for him personally since he was assaulted by women friends wherever he went. ‘Womankind does not take to criticism kindly’ (26 December 1896, p. 226). Its last appearance under Jerome’s editorship is November 1896. For the most part when this headpiece is used, the topic is gendered masculine that is ‘A Substitute for Swearing’ in July 1894; ‘Is Corrupt Government better than an Honest One?’ in March 1895; ‘Who is the Handsomest Woman in England?’ May 1896. Watkins p. 416. Another take on this world, sometimes called in its own time the world of the ‘new humourists’, is that of Tom Stoppard in The Invention of Love. He is very tough on Jerome, who, sitting in a boat with George Chesterton and Frank Harris, declares that Oscar Wilde’s ‘work won’t last ... Decadence was a blind alley in English life and letters. Wholesome humour has always been our strength. Wholesome humour and rattling good yarn’, p. 88. Both Stoppard’s condescension toward the goals of the Idler and the contrary valorizing of decadence as the key to modernism express neatly the position of a journal like the Idler in our sense of the culture of the 1890s. Jerome’s journals provide a counter view to the dominant critical narrative about modernism. The woman illustrator with the most contributions was Gertrude Hammond, but her contributions essentially end with volume IV (the last six months of 1893). After Jerome takes over the sole responsibility of the Idler, women illustrators essentially disappear from the magazine though the number of women writers slightly increases. Stetz 21–45. Stetz discusses Wotton’s story ‘The Fifth Edition’ on page 38. The majority of women contributors of articles and fiction to the Idler appear only once. Those with the most contributions of either fiction or articles over the years of Jerome’s editorship are Marie Belloc, daughter of Elizabeth Rayner Parkes Belloc and sister of Hillaire, and Mrs. Humphrey (who wrote as ‘Madge’ for the Lebouchere weekly Truth) with six each followed by Mary Pendered, a journalist and romantic novelist whose most well-known work at the time was The Truth


15. 16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

about Men, by a Spinster (which was serialised in Woman’s Realm) with five. Two of the best-known women writers who appear several times are Marie Corelli and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, who contribute to the series ‘My First Book’, which recounts their first writing experiences (February1893 and October 1893). Jerome and the Idler staff hosted convivial tea parties in the journal’s offices every Friday for contributors and friends. One number (April 1898) bound in with the copy of The Idler which I used appears to be an informal ledger of the amount of money given for each illustration and each story or article. From this it appears that each contributor to the Idler’s Club was paid a guinea, a very good price, and there is no difference in payment to men and women contributors. The articles seem to have been paid by the word (the text is counted off by slashes). The Baronness Von Zedlitz received three guineas for a five-page piece called ‘Only a Ball Dress’ while the illustrator of that piece received seven guineas for three full-page illustrations. There are five topics that have only women contributors: ‘How to Court the Advanced Woman?’ (September 1894); ‘Men’s Pet Vanities’ (July 1895), ‘The Man in Love’ (February 1896). ‘At What Age is Man Most Attractive?’ (August 1897) and ‘Should Women Vote?’ (March 1897). Three have a majority of women contributors: ‘How I Bring Up My Parents’ (October 1895); ‘Is Society a Pleasure or a Bore?’ (July 1896), and ‘Early Marriages – Should They be Encouraged – Or Abolished?’ (October 1897). This masculinist stance toward the New Woman continues for another year, when on the opening page in April 1895, another poem, this one by Spencer Jerome (‘The New Woman’), concludes that ‘woman’s subtle power is lost save when/By comfort of her love, she rules o’er men’ (15). Arabella Keneally was the daughter of Edward Keneally (1819–80) junior counsel for the defense of William Palmer and more notoriously the counsel for the Tichborne claimant. He behaved badly, apparently, and was disbarred. His daughter wrote a memoir of him in 1908. As with Ella Hepworth Dixon’s ironic comment above, consider how even Eliza Lynn Linton can use irony in a parenthetical comment responding to an Idler’s Club topic ‘Is Love a Practical Reality or a Passing Fiction?’: ‘There was one man I knew down in a village, and he fell in love with a pretty girl – they mostly do that – but she would have nothing to say to him’ (February 1893, 112). As anyone working with nineteenth-century periodicals knows, our access to covers and advertising of journals we now read in bound volume form is uncertain at best. The bound copy of the Idler which I own has no volume title pages, no covers, and no advertisements; the copy in Senate House Library UCL has volume title pages but no covers, and the British Library copy has volume title pages, but covers only after Jerome enlarged the size of the journal and enhanced the illustrations. The only run of the Idler that I have seen that contains the advertising column by Laura is in the British Library. Jerome was quite innovative in the advertising pages of both his journals, at least as far as I can tell from what has survived in the copies I have seen. There are the usual display ads on the covers, but in the Idler maybe beginning in May 1897, Jerome institutes the ‘column’ called ‘Anecdotes and Incidents’ by ‘Laura’. This column, full of gossip, puffs, jokes, and short paragraphs of information about products, is integrated into display ads. Probably the reason the British Library bound these pages into their volumes of The Idler (though at the back, separated from their numbers) is because of the difficulty in determining whether this section (numbered separately) was letter press or advertising.

14 Images of Englishness: The Daily Chronicle and ‘Proposed Laureates’ to Succeed Tennyson Edward H. Cohen

Ever since Roland Barthes asserted that the ‘image of literature to be found in ordinary culture is tyrannically centered on the author, his person, his life,’ literary criticism has embraced the author’s putative entry ‘into his own death’ (143). We would do well to remember, however, that for nineteenth-century critics there was a powerful connection between life and work, image and text. The figure of the author played a prominent role in the construction of moral and aesthetic considerations in Victorian criticism.

I When Wordsworth died in 1850, after writing no poem connected with his position as poet laureate, there was little discussion in the periodical press of candidates to succeed him. Indeed, in the most prominent editorials, The Times was arguing for the office to end (Russel 1981, 6). But when Tennyson died in 1892, press speculation was rampant (Fig. 14.1). The front runners were Swinburne and William Morris. Others frequently mentioned included Kipling, Henley, Edwin Arnold, Lewis Morris, William Watson, William Sharp, and Austin Dobson. ‘Singular indeed,’ wrote an anonymous reviewer in the Critic, ‘is the competition for the Laureateship which Tennyson’s death leaves vacant. ... No one name stands out: no one writer of verse is clearly designated as his successor in the vacant official post’ (November 1892, 255). Others disagreed. The Idler surveyed the most notable literary figures of the day, and, of the 22 who responded, ‘thirteen named Swinburne as the logical choice’ (Crowell 1955, 42). John Davidson replied that ‘Swinburne is the greatest poet in England. If he refuses the Laureateship, or has refused it, as the powers that be are not 251

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Images of Englishness: The Daily Chronicle and ‘Proposed Laureates’

fools they will not make an appointment at all’ (404). And Oscar Wilde quipped: ‘Mr. Swinburne is already the Poet Laureate. The fact that his appointment to this high post has not been degraded by official confirmation renders his position all the more unassailable’ (412). Swinburne’s republicanism and atheism, of course, weighed heavily against his selection. And the socialism of William Morris, the second choice, was considered an insuperable barrier. Although some papers asserted that the laureateship had become outmoded, most acknowledged that Tennyson had elevated the post to an

Figure 14.1 ‘The Late Lord Tennyson’, London Daily Chronicle, 8 October 1892, 3. © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved. BL 07F00283P.

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unprecedented height and supported the Queen’s intention to extend the tradition. Six months before Tennyson’s death, the Fortnightly Review had cautioned that the laureateship, if preserved at all, must continue to be the titular symbol of a real and just poetical primacy; real in the sense of being in fact accepted by the republic of English letters, just in the sense of being confirmed by the weight of opinion among specially competent judges. (623) Now, in words less measured, the London Daily Chronicle embraced the Queen’s desire to continue the laureateship and affirmed her right to name the successor but endorsed a candidate of its own: ‘All the more important is it, therefore, that the Laureateship, having been held in turn by Southey, Wordsworth, and Tennyson, should descend to a singer of the great poetic repute of Mr. Swinburne’ (11 October 1892, 3).

II Of the many constructions of nationhood in Victorian England, few were more powerful than the laureateship. In this study I examine a little-known series of essays commissioned by the Daily Chronicle on ‘Proposed Laureates’ to succeed Tennyson. Published between 7 November 1892 and 2 January 1893, the seven essays on seven contemporary poets consider how each subject reflects the nation’s expectations of the laureateship (Fig. 14.2). The boundaries between image and text are blurred in these portraits. Poets and their poems coalesce, and their works are treated as the products of their lives. The conventional moral and aesthetic considerations of Victorian literary analysis, moreover, are occasionally subverted by the political. Appointments to the laureateship, freighted with political implications, had long been subject to second-guessing by the public and the press. But at the end of the nineteenth century, with the rise of the new liberalism and the new journalism, the literary papers were especially eager to participate in the cultural debate. As early as the day after Tennyson’s death, the Daily Chronicle was weighing in ‘on the question of Tennyson’s successor to the laureateship’: Only two names of living Englishmen can for one moment be mentioned in the same breath with his. The first is that of Mr Swinburne, the second that of Mr William Morris. ... Time was when Mr Swinburne stood, as Mr Morris stands, too far outside – shall we say? – the intellectual and social conventionalities of English life to accept from his countrymen a

254 Images of Englishness: The Daily Chronicle and ‘Proposed Laureates’

formal poet’s crown. That time is past. The laureateship is a State office which need not be vulgarized, though unquestionably it has been conventionalized. (7 October 1892, 4) In the second half of the nineteenth century, Peter Goodall asserts, ‘the expansion of the middle class created by an industrialized society enlarged the reading audience, but for the first time divided and stratified it, creating

Figure 14.2 ‘Proposed Laureates’, London Daily Chronicle, 7 November 1892, 3. © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved. BL 07F00283P.

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in effect a high culture and a popular culture’ (xvi). For a paper like the Daily Chronicle, committed to narrowing the gap between the traditional culture of the established order and the emerging culture of a growing popular audience, the issue was whether the appointment was to be based upon the quality of a candidate’s poetry or upon the record of his or her sympathies with ideologically official England. In the last two decades of the century – led by journalists like W.T. Stead, T.P. O’Connor, Henry Massingham, and others – there was considerable interaction between the ‘new’ liberalism and the ‘new’ journalism. In the critical weeklies, such as the Speaker and the Nation, and in some of the dailies, especially the Star, the Chronicle, and the News, one finds London press organs that not only articulated cultural issues but also played mediating roles between the minority and majority cultures. In the 1880s the Daily Chronicle competed chiefly with the Daily Telegraph, and its eight pages were filled with advertisements and with news of a local and sensational bent. But at the beginning of 1891, coincidental with the appointment of Massingham as a leader-writer, the Chronicle developed a lively commitment to literature. A two-page supplement – ‘The Daily Chronicle Literary Supplement’ – appeared on Wednesdays and was devoted entirely to book reviews and advertisements for publishers. From 30 November 1891 further changes occurred. The paper increased to ten pages every day, and the book section became a daily feature. These daily reviews covered three to five columns – a considerable amount over a week – and were augmented by a section called ‘Literary Notes.’ The reviews and the notes alike reflect the Chronicle’s reputation for influencing ‘the taste and ideas of the middle and lower classes’ (Havighurst 1974, 60) and, more broadly, ‘the new journalism’s aim of developing an active relationship between paper and reader’ (Macleod 2000, 75).

III In announcing its series of proposed laureates, on 7 November 1892, the Daily Chronicle wrote: When Tennyson died the English-speaking world of letters looked anxiously round the horizon for his successor under the bay. ... Any Englishman should be very proud to be selected as the singer who may be expected to voice the sentiments of his country on great national occasions. ... This becomes therefore a matter peculiarly suitable for the expression of popular opinion: the people should say who is to be the people’s poet. But few readers know the characteristics of all the possible candidates; each man as a rule has his own favourite whom he knows best, and he might unwittingly do less than justice to the claims of others. We propose, therefore, to pass rapidly in review during the next few


weeks the works and promises of a few men and women eligible for the position without either an insult to the art of poetry or a reduction of the Laureateship to a laughingstock. (3)

1 Mr. Swinburne (7 November 1892, 3) The first essay – signed ‘N’ – was written by Henry Norman, who would become Massingham’s assistant editor and literary editor. ‘Beyond all possible comparison or criticism,’ he begins: our foremost remaining poet is Mr. Swinburne. In the quantity of his work of high quality, in his marvelous command of our language as a vehicle of poetic art, in the daring and masterful originality of many of his forms, and in the perfect beauty of his most conspicuous successes, he is not only our greatest living poet, but also one well placed among the poets of all time. It only remains, therefore, to consider whether his triumphs have been achieved along lines which do not in themselves impose any serious obstacle to the invitation which is undoubtedly his by virtue of ability. Norman pauses here to present a brief biographical sketch and a commentary on the earliest verses. Then he continues: The publication of ‘Poems and Ballads’ in 1866 roused one of the fiercest literary wars of the century ... and the very name of Swinburne became one of Mrs. Grundy’s favourite bogies. In many English circles he is still more or less outlawed, but the general literary tolerance of the time has grown more pronounced since then, and verses which were greeted with denunciation would nowadays be dismissed with a palliative ‘fin de siècle.’ In style ‘Poems and Ballads’ was even better than his previous work had led his admirers to expect, but in content it was far more exuberantly Gothic than restrainedly Greek. ... Audacity of language and voluptuousness of imagery such as appeared in this small green volume, which is now one of the most valued of modern first editions, had never been seen on this side of the channel. Norman notes the continuing critical attacks on Swinburne, especially Buchanan’s essay on ‘The Fleshly School of Poetry,’ but asserts: There is a more important matter to be considered in a discussion of him as a possible Laureate than the ‘fleshiness’ or otherwise of his poems. We refer, of course, to the attitude taken by him on political and politicopersonal topics. ... So long as we live under a Sovereign, it will probably follow that the Laureate will not be a man who has denounced the principles and the personalities of monarchies. If Great Britain were a

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Republic, as Mr. Swinburne so ardently desires it to be, then, no doubt, he would make an ideal Laureate. Norman concludes that Swinburne, though assuredly: the greatest living poet, will not be invited to succeed Lord Tennyson. His name, even by those who admire him most, may on reflection be struck out of the list. He must remain content with his own private rank and poetical status, and Ministers and people must look elsewhere for their Laureate.

2 Mr. Coventry Patmore (14 November 1892, 3) The second proposed laureate was Coventry Patmore, and comparison with an essay that she published in 1896 suggests that the author of the portrait (signed ‘M’) was Alice Meynell. It is not a favorable review. Mr. Patmore’s poetic world lies, like some old eighteenth-century garden, closely hemmed in by hedges of box and yew, furnished with delicate retreats for dainty souls, pure if rather stiff in form, and never far removed from the sound of church bells. A Catholic, a mystic, a fanciful and delicate rather than robust writer, Mr. Patmore would make an admirable Laureate of England were it the kind of place that appears in his poetry. Agreeing with The Tablet, which was strenuously promoting his candidacy, she acknowledges ‘that it is not possible to dismiss lightly Mr. Patmore’s claim,’ that ‘he recalls the musing metaphysical strain of writers like Vaughan and Herbert,’ and that ‘he touches the mystical side of life much more suggestively than any other modern poet save Browning, Newman, and Tennyson.’ Meynell would later edit an edition of ‘The Angel in the House,’ but here she characterises that poem as one whose ‘subject is nought – the happy courtship of a well-to-do young man and a well-to-do young woman.’ Meynell concludes that: nearly all of Mr. Patmore’s poetry wants the note of world-interest, for he is nothing if not domestic, and his aristocratic temper, high Tory views, and habit of seeing life through the glasses worn by men and women who own land and keep carriages limit his delicate vision, and show him curiously isolated from some of the master tendencies of his age.

3

Christina Rossetti (21 November 1892, 3)

The Chronicle’s third proposed laureate was Christina Rossetti. The portrait – signed ‘D’ – may be an uncollected essay by John Davidson, with whom

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Massingham had a number of connections. ‘If there is not a taint attaching to the laureateship,’ he begins: it has, at any rate, associations which even Tennyson was unable completely to idealise – associations which would make us resent the letters P. L. after the name of Christina Rossetti, as we should have resented P. R. A. after that of her brother. It may be partly because she is a woman, partly because she is of the Pre-Raphaelite stock, partly because she is religious in a deeper than the ordinary sense, but mainly because she belongs to that class of pure and delicate poets whose ‘secret sacred names’ are familiar to those only with whom they have a certain affinity. ‘In thinking of the laureateship,’ he continues, it is hard to banish from our memories the picture by Dosso Dossi, in the National Gallery, where the Court Poet is looking complacently into himself, decked with a sprig of the poetic jasmine in his ear, with the consciousness that his facile and popular gifts put him far beyond those hard ways through which the Muse draws those whom she would inspire. Davidson notices a Dantean mood of melancholy in Rossetti’s poems, but praises a poem like ‘Goblin Market’ as a ‘piece of pure imagination’ that ‘takes us into a region which no other poet had discovered.’ Rather than return to the question of the laureateship, he simply concludes that ‘Miss Rossetti’s religion makes her the representative of the ecclesiastical movement of the time’ and suggests that her belief is ‘the secret which kept from despair a life troubled with bad health and dim eyesight, with more sorrows than it is the lot of most men to undergo.’ Even as the series of essays unfolded, notes and letters appeared almost daily in the Chronicle in support of one candidate or another. Welsh readers were praising Lewis Morris, and Irish correspondents were puffing Aubrey de Vere. Gladstone was said to have expressed his appreciation for William Watson’s poetry. One day the paper reported: ‘We understand that Mr. William Morris has been offered the Laureateship, and has declined it’ (29 October 1892, 4). Two days later Morris wrote to the Editor: ‘Will you kindly contradict the report that I have been offered the Laureateship, as it is not true?’ (31 October 1892, 4). From the outset it was agreed by all the papers that, after Swinburne, Morris was the most deserving candidate, but that his ‘social views would stand between him and the laureateship.’ Nevertheless, the Chronicle conveyed with obvious relish that ‘with working-class readers of poetry Mr. William Morris is the favourite’ (19 October 1892, 3).

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4 Mr. George Meredith (28 November 1892, 3) The fourth essay, signed ‘G,’ was written by Edmund Gosse, who begins by acknowledging that Meredith’s popularity rests on his fiction rather than his poetry. Mr. Meredith has written six volumes of verse, which – with the single exception of ‘Modern Love’ – are still to be had from the publishers in first editions. ... Perhaps that instinctive distrust in a proseman’s verse, which widely exists, may account for the neglect. A second fame is always slow of growth. Mr. Meredith has at last won his fame as a novelist. To realise him as a poet as well – though the very significance of his prose is that it is the prose of a poet – takes time. Yet Browning considered ‘Modern Love’ a finer achievement than any of the novels, a dictum by no means without supporters. Indeed, for Gosse, ‘Modern Love’ ranks shoulder to shoulder with any great poem of our time: by the seriousness of its subject matter, its subtle psychology, its almost terrible imaginative power, and its masculine dignity and beauty of expression, it is certainly the most ‘modern’ poem we possess, both in treatment as in theme. Gosse concludes: The three tests of greatness in poetry (as apart from mere distinction) may perhaps be described as Beauty, Universality, Faith. Mr. Meredith’s poetry, though comparatively small in bulk, possesses all three. ... But the offer of the Laureateship could hardly seem to him other than an anachronism or an anomaly: for Mr. Meredith has had no great reason to believe in a ‘national’ interest in literature. It is unlikely that the honour will be offered to him, though if any great writer ever merited some such honourable compensation for years of neglect it is he. There can be little doubt, however, that since Tennyson’s death Mr. Meredith remains the greatest figure in modern English letters.

5

Mr. W.E. Henley (5 December 1892, 3)

In the fifth essay – signed ‘A’ – William Archer writes: The death of Tennyson has quite naturally set us to reckoning up the poetic forces that remain; and in such a reckoning the talent of William Ernest Henley must certainly count for much. ... He is a voice, not an echo;


he has given poetic form to moods, scenes, and experiences hitherto unrecorded in verse. He is a voice, not an echo; he has given poetic form to moods, scenes, and experiences hitherto unrecorded in verse. The work that Archer praises here is Henley’s hospital sequence – ‘twentynine little etchings in verse recording as many phases of life in the old Edinburgh Infirmary.’ He admires Henley’s ‘masculine, concise, and reticent’ treatment of his subject, and he describes Henley as a poet who is ‘a romantic in sentiment, a realist in matter, a classic in form.’ ‘One qualification for the Laureateship Mr. Henley undoubtedly possesses,’ Archer observes, in the shape of a robust and vocal – I had almost said vociferous – patriotism. ‘My country, right or wrong!’ is the burden of his politico-poetics, and that, I take it, is the most convenient creed for a Laureate. I do not think Mr. Henley’s martial moods are, from the literary point of view, his happiest, but they are, no doubt, temperamental and sincere. ... Frankly, I think Mr. Henley handles the etching needle better than he brandishes the glaive.

6

Mr. Austin Dobson (20 December 1892, 7)

The sixth essay in the series, on Austin Dobson, was like the essay on Meredith signed ‘G’ and contributed by Gosse. He begins by situating his subject among his poetic predecessors: Herrick, Prior, Gay, Praed, Hood, and ‘the delicate influences of Provence.’ ‘It is a mistake,’ he cautions: ‘to think of Mr. Dobson as a mere writer of vers de société, as a dilettante of ‘the French forms.’ He is both, but much more. His bric-à-brac is always but a peg on which to hang deep human interest, and his success with rondeau, chant-royal, and villanelle has been in his power to make them the vehicles not merely of dainty fancy, but of deep thought and poignant emotion. ‘No one, of course, would claim for Mr. Dobson “a mighty line” or a Goethelike breadth of theme,’ Gosse concludes. But if he is not broad, he is at least deep enough to touch the heart; and if he is not great, he is at least a poet of very rare distinction and charm. ... Little has been said here of his wit and fancy, but those are the qualities with which he is readily credited; it has seemed best here to indicate the less suspected human nature of his muse. As for Mr. Dobson as Laureate, one might describe him among the candidates as easily Captain of the Second Eleven.

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7 Mr. Robert Bridges (2 January 1893, 3) The last study in the series of proposed laureates is a portrait of Robert Bridges, who would indeed become the court poet, but not until 1913. The essay – signed by ‘C’ – may be attributed to William John Courthope, professor of poetry at Oxford during 1895–1901. ‘Many poets have been named in this place with praise not undeserved,’ he begins: but there is one so far unnamed whom, perhaps, the Muses would have chosen before them all; and yet he will be probably sincerely sorry that he should be named at all. Robert Bridges, though his devotion to his art is more sincere than is often to be found in the courts of the latter-day Parnassus, is a man who takes more trouble to remain unknown than others take to press into the ranks of fame. ... He persists in printing his poems privately or in limited and infrequent editions; and if poetry were appraised by weight, he would fare badly. Nevertheless, Courthope asserts, ‘if the writer had written no more, he would have made his mark in the history of English poetry.’ A classicist, Courthope had made his mark as an editor of Pope, and he admired particularly in Bridges ‘the wealth of his literary culture and the deftness of his craftsmanship.’ Indeed, he remarks, ‘there is in all the work of Mr. Bridges an unmistakable mark of quality. Much of it has that same distinction which belongs to a Greek or a French medal. It is, within the limits of its design, made perfect – clear-cut, harmonious, and true.’ Praising Bridges’s ‘modesty’ but faulting his ‘lack of assurance,’ Courthope concludes: No poet should be ranked till he is dead for at least a generation. But if the violence done in even naming Bridges among a list of proposed Laureates shall serve to make some know him to whom he was unknown, and to lead some who have seen his books to know him better, a little good will have been done.

IV Several elements thread themselves through these ‘Proposed Laureates.’ One has to do with the relationship between the office of Laureate and Englishness itself. Norman notes that Swinburne was ‘born in London’ and traces the poet’s ‘aristocratic’ lineage. Meynell cites a ‘delightful sense of the charm of an English country-side’ in Patmore’s verse. Davidson draws parallels between ‘the two Brownings’ and Christina Rossetti and her brother; Coulthorpe refers to Bridges’s ‘Oxford days’ and compares him favorably with Tennyson as ‘an accurate lover of the living facts of Nature’; and Gosse situates Dobson as a poet who ‘has blended the lyric freshness of the

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Elizabethans ... with the style and point’ of the Augustans.’ Archer praises Henley’s ‘strenuous and purposeful’ sketches of London. Gosse, again, describes Meredith as ‘the greatest figure in modern English letters.’ Implicit in these constructions of Englishess is the suggestion that the Sovereign’s ministers set aside political considerations and – as the Daily Chronicle repeated – pass ‘the torch of English poetry to hands worthy to hold it before the world’ (8 October 1892, 4). Moreover, the Daily Chronicle’s campaign to support a worthy successor to Tennyson represents a case study in the history of the new journalism. Each essay is distinguished by the candor that marked the liberal press at the end of the nineteenth century. Norman acknowledges, in his essay on Swinburne, that it would be impossible for England’s rulers ‘to select for the post of highest national poetic honour a writer who has deliberately justified the assassination of the monarch of a friendly State.’ Meynell grants Patmore’s ‘title to the great name of poet’ but fails to find ‘an outpouring of the Muse comparable in volume and strength with that of his living rivals.’ Archer commends the sincerity and restraint of Henley’s hospital lyrics but condemns the ‘strain of the Berserk’ in his patriotic verses. And Gosse notes that some of Dobson’s critics have decided ‘that he has no real relation to his age, no “message”; that he is merely a laureate of toys.’ Finally, the seven ‘Proposed Laureates’ stand – like a little gallery of portraits – as a brief chapter in the history of literary criticism in lateVictorian England. Each essay endeavored to capture the essence of its subject and to assert his or her claim to serious consideration. Thus, the ‘keen-eyed quality’ of Bridges’s nature poems reflects his ‘pleasant retirement at Yattendon.’ ‘The aesthetic and reflective faculties are characteristically blended ... in the work and worship of Christina Rossetti.’ And Henley’s ‘dignified stoicism’ – in ‘Invictus’ – owes much to his personal ordeal as a patient in the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh. What strikes the modern reader is the extent to which these essays used the poets’ lives to map their works – to construct a critical system that balances moral, aesthetic, and political considerations. Poised at the intersection between text and image, the studies of Swinburne, Coventry Patmore, Christina Rossetti, George Meredith, William Ernest Henley, Austin Dobson, and Robert Bridges assessed each poet’s ability to address the state of the nation. For these were times (as John Lucas has written) when ‘poetry was a national issue’ and when ‘its practitioners were expected to uphold orthodox views’ (288). Within a year of his joining the staff, Massingham described the Daily Chronicle as ‘the most influential paper in England’ (1). But this was the time, Alan Lee argues, when ‘the accord between liberal theory and liberal achievement in the press’ had run its course and ‘party and press seemed locked in parallel decline’ (15). More than three years would elapse between the death of Tennyson and notice of the imminent appointment of one of

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England’s dullest rhymesters. On 5 December 1895 the Daily Chronicle reported: ‘We are solemnly assured that Mr. Alfred Austin is to be Poet Laureate. Of course we do not believe it’ (3). Within a month, however, the wreath did pass from Alfred the Great to Alfred the Little. And having spent its influence, London’s leading paper fell silent on the selection.

Bibliography Manuscripts John Rylands Library, Manchester, JRL MS 380/1313. William Maginn to A.A. Watts, 1825(?). MS 380/1313. National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh, Blackwood’s papers, MS 20309, f. 464. William Blackwood to William Maginn, 12 November 1826. NLS MS 30309, f. 464. National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh, Blackwood’s papers, NLS MS 4061, f. 273. John Gibson Lockhart to John Blackwood, Fall, 1842. MS 4061, f. 273. Smithies,T.B., Letter to Eliza Cruikshank, 13 June 1861, Princeton University Library, Dept. Rare Books and Special Collections, New Jersey, Cruikshank Papers, CO256 Bx 26, f. 31.

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Index Note: Pages featuring illustrations marked in bold

advertising, 143–4, 228 aestheticism, 11, 220–2, 224, 230, 232 Africa, 214, 216, 217 Ainsworth, William Harrison, 79, 134, 136, 146n. 3 Ainsworth’s Magazine, 23 All the Year Round, 4, 10, 123, 124, 135, 137, 138–9, 142, 143–4, 145, 146n. 1, 169–70, 173–4, 178, 182 see also Collins, Wilkie; Dickens, Charles Alma Tadema, Lawrence, 232n. 6 Archer, William, 259–60 Arnold, Edwin, 251 art criticism, 25, 220–32 Art Journal, 220 Art Weekly, 221, 224, 225, 227, 232 Scottish Art Review, 220, 222, 223–4 see also New English Art Club; Tomson, Graham R. Athenaeum, 114n. 1, 123, 126, 220 Atlantic Monthly, 124 Attwood, Thomas, 83, 91 Austin, Alfred, 263 Ballantyne, R. M., 238 Band of Hope Review, 153, 160 see also temperance Barr, Robert, 234 Barthes, Roland, 251 Bate, Francis, 221 see also New English Art Club Bayley, F. W. N., 7 see also Illustrated London News Beardsley, Aubrey, 221, 238 Beardsley, Mabel, 239 Belloc, Marie, 249n. 14 Bell’s Life in London, 29 Benjamin, Walter, 171–2, 237 Bentham, Jeremy, 40 Bentley’s Miscellany, 23, 135, 140, 144

Bewick, Thomas, 4, 22, 27–8, 39n. 22, 47, 86 see also engraving Bierce, Ambrose, 248n. 4 biography, 119–27 Blackwood, William 60, 64, 71, 73n. 3, 74n. 4 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 61 Blaikie, Walter, 220 Braddon, Mary Elizabeth, 248n. 4, 250n. 14 Bridges, Robert, 261, 262 Bright, John, 194 British Workman and the Friends of the Sons of Toil, 10, 149–50, 153–66 Brown, Ford Madox, 152 Work, 152 Browne, Hablot Knight [‘Phiz’], 10, 30, 31, 97–8, 100–1, 102, 106, 107, 111, 113 Buchanan, Robert, 256 Burgin, G. B., 242 Buss, Robert, 28, 31 Caffyn, Mrs Kathleen Mannington, 240 caricature, 19–20, 28–9, 30 see also Punch Carlyle, Jane, 119 Cassell’s Illustrated Family Paper, 7, 155 Cattermole, George, 33, 97, 106, 109 celebrity, 9, 60–1, 78, 85, 213–14 Chamberlain, Joseph, 197 Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, 133, 135, 140, 142–3 Robert Chambers, 142, 147n. 11 William Chambers, 133, 136, 138 Chartism, 76, 78, 80, 82, 83, 86, 88–9, 132 see also Northern Star; O’Connor, Feargus Chesterton, G. K., 115n. 16, 248n. 11 Cobbett, William, 61, 80, 91 275

276 Index Cole, Henry, 2, 11n. 2, 11n. 6 Collins, Wilkie, 9, 10, 20, 33, 128–31, 133, 146, 169, 182 ‘The Unknown Public’, 128–31, 133, 146 The Woman in White, 10, 168–72, 174–83 see also All the Year Round; Dickens, Charles colour printing, 18, 20, 23, 24, 27, 42, 191 Conan Doyle, Arthur 214, 238, 248n. 4 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, 214–15 The Sign of Four, 214 Corelli, Marie, 250n. 14 Cornhill Magazine, 2, 4, 5, 124, 135, 140 Courthope, William John, 261 Cruikshank, George, 29, 107, 108, 156 see also Oliver Twist

Eliot, George, 120 Emmet, Robert, 80, 91 English Woman’s Journal, 135, 140, 144 engraving copper 28, 42, 86 steel 31, 86, 98, 100 wood 1–2, 4–6, 7, 9, 12n. 6, 17, 20–1, 22–38, 42, 84–6, 160, 162, 178 see also lithographs

Daguerreotypes, 2–3 Daily Chronicle, 4, 11, 252, 253, 254, 255–63 Daily Mirror, 207 see also photography Daily Telegraph, 255 Davidson, John, 251, 257, 261 De Quincey, Thomas, 125 de Vere, Aubrey, 258 Dickens, Charles, 4, 9, 10, 97–106, 109, 114n.9, 114n. 11, 117n. 35, 123, 128, 130, 132, 136–8, 143, 144, 145, 169, 178, 230 Barnaby Rudge, 97, 110 Great Expectations, 98, 137 Master Humphrey’s Clock, 5, 10, 30, 33, 97, 109, 111 The Old Curiosity Shop, 10, 97–107, 113 Oliver Twist, 107, 108, 112, 132 Pickwick Papers 3, 4, 28, 30, 31, 132 see also All the Year Round; Browne, Hablot Knight; Household Words Disraeli, Benjamin, 65, 74n. 7 Dixon, Ella Hepworth, 239, 240, 242 Dobson, Austin, 251, 260, 262

Gardener’s Magazine, 8–9, 40, 41–2, 43–58 see also Loudon, John Claudius gardening, 40–58 Gaskell, Elizabeth, 120, 121–7, 136 Cranford, 124 in Household Words, 124, 125, 126 Life of Charlotte Brontë, 121 North and South, 123 Gentleman’s Magazine, 8, 22, 86 gift books, 33 Gissing, George, 238, 248n. 4 Gladstone, William Ewart, 258 Gladstone, Herbert, 197 Good Words, 2, 4, 27 Gosse, Edmund, 259, 260, 261, 262 Grand, Sarah, 240, 248n. 4 Graphic, 4, 7, 207 Grubb, Sir Howard, 213–14

Edinburgh Review, 135, 140, 142 editorship, see periodicals Egerton, George, 240, 242

Family Herald, 135, 150, 155 fashion, 184, 185–8, 190, 192, 195, 199 fiction, 20, 28, 97–113, 122–3, 132–4, 136, 137–8, 143–6, 168–82, 203–4, 205 Fortnightly Review, 253 Fraser’s Magazine, 9, 61, 63, 66, 67–73, 135, 140 Frost, John, 79, 80, 88, 91

Hall Caine, 238 Harcourt, William Sir, 194–5 Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 124 Harte, Bret, 238 Hazlitt, William, 125 Henley, W. E., 226, 251, 259–60, 262 Hine, H. G., 18, 19, 33, 35 Hobbes, John Oliver, 240 Horne, Richard Hengist, 20

Index 277 Household Words, 9, 123, 124, 126, 128, 131, 135, 136–9, 140, 142–5, 146n. 1, 147n. 19 see also Dickens, Charles; Gaskell, Elizabeth Howarth, Mary, 203 ‘The Telegram’, 203 Howitt, William, 124, 136 Hughes, Thomas, 184, 188, 189, 190, 191 Idler, 11, 234, 235, 237, 240, 244, 245, 247–50, 252 see also Jerome, Jerome K. Illuminated Magazine, 8, 17–38, 24–6 Illustrated London News, 2–8, 85, 133, 135, 207, 220 illustration diagrams, 40, 47–52, 55–8 innovation in, 17–18, 30, 40, 42, 84–5, 89, 203–4, 205, 207–8 opposition to, 1–2, 5, 85 popularity of, 5–7, 86 sketching, 45–7 techniques of, 22–3, 27–31, 33, 41–2, 89, 139, 227 with text, 70, 97–113, 222–4 see also engraving; illustrators; lithographs; photography illustrators, see Beardsley, Aubrey; Buss, Robert; Cattermole, George; Cruikshank, George; Hine, H. G.; Landells, Ebenezer; Lemon, Mark; Linton, W(illiam) J(ames); Maclise, Daniel; Partridge, Bernard; Sibson, Thomas Ingram, Herbert, 19 Ireland, 60, 67–8, 80, 83, 86, 89, 91 J. M. Dent, 246, 247 Jerome, Jerome K., 11, 234–50 Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, 234 see also Idler; TO-DAY Jerrold, Douglas, 5, 8, 17, 18, 20, 21 ‘Chronicles of Clovernook’, 21 Kelmscott Press, 220, 222 see also Morris, William Kelvin, Lord, 212–14 Keneally, Dr. Arabella, 240, 242, 250n. 19

Kipling, Rudyard, 234, 238, 248n. 4, 251 Knight, Charles, 7, 28, 31, 138 see also Penny Magazine Knowledge, 11, 207, 208, 210 see also Ranyard, Arthur Cowper Landells, Ebenezer, 18, 19, 20, 26, 28, 30, 31 Landon, Letitia, 69 Lane, John, 222 Lang, Andrew, 238 Lawrence, Arthur, 246, 248n. 1 Le Galliene, Richard, 226, 238 Leech, John, 18, 19, 23, 25, 28 Lemon, Mark, 7, 19, 20, 36 libel, 61–73 Linton, Eliza Lynn, 136, 239, 242 Linton, W(illiam) J(ames), 7, 17, 18, 21, 80 Literary Gazette, 63 lithographs, 61, 70, 86, 191, 209, 217 Lloyds’ Entertaining Journal, 140, 142, 144, 145, 148n. 20 Lloyds’ Weekly, 150 Lockhart, John Gibson, 60, 74n. 5 London Journal, 135, 139, 140, 145, 150, 155, 160 Lovett, William, 84 Loudon, John Claudius, 8, 40–1, 42 Gardenesque 43, 45, 47 see also Gardener’s Magazine Lukàcs, Georg, 132 Maclise, Daniel, 60, 61, 68, 69, 70, 73n. 1, 73n. 2, 97, 117n. 35 Maginn, William, 9, 60–1, 63–73 Martineau, Harriet, 136 Marvell, Andrew, 83, 91 masculinity, 80–1, 168–82, 184–200, 234–46 Massingham, Henry, 255–6, 258, 262 McDouall, Peter, 80, 82, 87, 91 Meadows, Kenny, 18, 19, 20, 29, 30, 33, 34, 36, 37 Mechanic’s Magazine, 27, 42 Meredith, George, 259, 262 Meynell, Alice, 226–7, 257, 261, 262 Mirror of Literature, 27 Molesworth, Sir William, 83, 91 Moore, Albert, 232n. 6

278

Index

Morning Leader, 11, 221, 226, 227, 228, 229, 230 Morris, Jane, 177, 182n. 6 Morris, Lewis, 251, 258 Morris, William, 80, 220, 251, 252, 253, 258 Muhrman, Henry, 222, 223 New English Art Club, 221, 224, 226, 227, 230 ‘New Journalism’, 206, 253, 255 ‘New Woman’, 238, 240, 250n. 18 newspapers, 3–4, 76–92, 262–3 Northern Liberator, 78 Northern Star and Leeds General Advertiser, 76–92 Norton, Charles Eliot, 126–7 Oakey, William, 150, 152 Oastler, Richard, 81, 83, 88, 91 O’Brien, Bronterre, 83, 91 O’Connor, Feargus, 76, 77, 83, 84, 88–9, 91 see also Chartism; Northern Star and Leeds General Advertiser O’Connor, T(homas) P(ower), 255 Oliver Twist, see Dickens, Charles Once A Week, 27, 135 Pain, Barry, 232, 238, 248n. 4 Pall Mall Gazette, 229, 231 Pall Mall Magazine, 203, 204, 227 Partridge, Bernard, 227 Patmore, Coventry, 257, 261, 262 Payn, James, 238 Pendered, Mary L., 240, 248n. 4, 249n. 14 Pennell, Elizabeth and Joseph, 221, 226 penny bloods, 132, 144, 145, 147n. 4 Penny Magazine, 2, 3, 7, 18, 38, 78, 135, 141, 143, 145 Penny Novelist, 27 People’s Periodical and Family Library, 141, 144 periodicals cheap periodicals, 131, 133, 150–1 circulation, 76, 89, 90, 135 editorship, 17, 19, 20, 41, 60–1, 63–73, 133, 153–4, 169–71, 177–82, 235–46

layout, 140–1, 162, 227–30 paper size, 144–5, 146, 226 production, 85–6, 89, 139–44, 220–1 see also All the Year Round; Household Words; trade papers photography 8, 11, 171, 173, 203–5, 206–7, 208, 211, 217, 235 collotypes 207, 218n. 18 ‘Phiz’, see Browne, Hablot Knight Pictorial Times, 19, 20 poetry, 27, 251–63 politics Radical, 78–91 portraiture, 9, 61–3, 70, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 84, 211, 212 Pre-Raphaelite painting, 173–5 Prest, Thomas Peckett, 132, 136 Prior, William Henry, 31–3 Punch, 2, 3, 7, 17, 19–20, 21, 22, 29, 36, 38, 85, 227 Quarterly Review, 135, 141 Ranyard, Arthur Cowper, 207, 208, 209, 210 see also Knowledge readership mass, 9, 38, 128–32 middle-class, 21, 41, 43, 131, 135–6, 138–9, 143, 146, 156 working-class, 5, 41, 132, 144, 145, 149, 150, 151, 153, 258 Reform Act (1832), 40, 58 religion, 10, 149–52 Reynolds, G. M. W., 134, 138 Reynolds’s Magazine, 134, 135, 141 Reynolds’s Miscellany, 150, 160 Rider Haggard, H. 238 Roberts, Morley, 248n. 4 Rossetti, Christina, 222, 257–8, 261 Ruskin, John, 5, 45 satire, 61, 66, 67, 73, 76, 78 science, 41, 43, 53, 171–2, 182, 203–17 Science-Gossip, 11, 209 scholarship on Victorian print media, 4, 8 Scots Observer, 220 Scott, Walter, 31 Scottish Art Review, see art criticism

Index 279 sexuality, 169–81 see also masculinity Sharp, Evelyn, 239 Sharp, William, 251 Shaw, George Bernard, 226, 238 Sibson, Thomas, 28, 30, 31 Sickert, Walter, 224 Sime, Sidney, 246, 248n. 1 Sims, George R., 238 Smithies, Thomas Bywater, 10, 153–66 social reform, 18, 22, 38, 78, 149–67 SPCK (Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge), 150, 161 Standard, 65 Star, 226 Stead, W. T., 255 stereoscopes, 173–4 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 238, 248n. 4 Stoppard, Tom, 249n. 11 Strand Magazine, 11, 204, 211, 212, 215, 216, 217 Sunday Times, 134, 136 Swinburne, A. C., 251, 252, 253, 256–7, 258, 262 Tailor and Cutter: An Index of Trade and Fashion, 11, 185–200 telegraphs, 203–4 telescopes, see Grubb, Sir Howard temperance, 10, 150, 151, 153, 154, 159–66 Tennyson, Alfred Lord 11, 63, 251, 252, 255–61 Thackeray, W. M., 101 TO-DAY, 234, 236–7, 246, 248nn. 1–7, 249n. 8, 249n. 9, 250 see also Jerome, Jerome K. Tomson, Graham R., 221–7 trade papers, 40–58, 185–200

Transactions of the Horticultural Society, 41 Trollope, Anthony, 188–9 typography, 232n. 4 Victoria, Queen of Great Britain, 78, 253 Vincent, Henry, 84 visual culture, 78, 86, 169–72 Vizetelly, Henry, 7, 19 Vynne, Nora, 239, 242 Watson, Rosamund Marriott, see Tomson, Graham R. Watson, William, 251, 258 Watts, Alaric, 9, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66–73 Wells, H. G., 210, 238 Westminster Review, 135, 141, 144 Whistler, James McNeill, 220, 221, 222, 224, 227, 230 Wilde, Oscar 229, 231, 249n. 11 Picture of Dorian Gray, The, 229 Williams, Samuel 97 women artists, 226–7 illustrators, 249n. 12 readers, 43, 47 writers, 11, 60, 119, 238–9, 240, 241, 249n. 14 woodcuts, see engraving Wordsworth, William, 2, 6, 251, 253 working-class, see readership X-rays, 214 Yellow Book, 220, 239 Zangwill, Israel, 238, 248n. 4

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