Trollope and the Magazines: Gendered Issues in Mid-Victorian Britain

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Trollope and the Magazines Gendered Issues in Mid-Victorian Britain

Mark W. Turner

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

TROLLOPE AND THE MAGAZINES

10.1057/9780230288546 - Trollope and the Magazines, Mark Turner

Also by Mark W. Turner


FROM AUTHOR TO TEXT: Re-reading George Eliot's Romola (co-editor with Caroline Levine)


Gendered Issues in Mid-Victorian Britain Mark W. Turner

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Trollope and the Magazines

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First published in Great Britain 2000 by

MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world

ISBN 0-333-72982-X

First published in the United States of America 2000 by

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ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC., Scholarly and Reference Division, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 ISBN 0-312-22176-2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Turner, Mark W. Trollope and the magazines : gendered issues in mid-Victorian Britain / Mark W. Turner. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-312-22176-2 1. Trollope, Anthony, 1815-1882 —Political and social views. 2. Periodicals, Publishing of—England—History— 19th century. 3. Trollope, Anthony, 1815-1882—Relations with publishers. 4. Literature and society—England—History— 19th century. 5. Literature publishing—England—History— 19th century. 6. Serial publication of books—History — 19th century. 7. Social problems in literature. 8. Sex role in literature. I. Title. PR5688.P6T87 1999 823\8-dc21 98-55438 CIP

© Mark W. Turner 2000 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 0LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. 10 09 08

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 00

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



A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.


For my parents, and in memory of Joe Walsh




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List of Abbreviations

viii

Acknowledgements

ix

List of Illustrations

xi

1 2 3 4

5

Introduction: Trollope in the 1990s

1

Domestic Ideology and Gendered Space in Cornhill Magazine

7

Uncovering Periodical Identities: Good Words and the Rejection of Rachel Ray

48

Launching a Hybrid: The Belton Estate in the Fortnightly Review

92

Transitions: Phineas Finn and Masculinity in Saint Pauls Magazine

141

The Editor as Predator in Saint Pauls Magazine

183

Conclusion: Towards a Cultural Critique of Victorian Periodicals

227

Appendices

241

Bibliography

243

Index

259

vn 10.1057/9780230288546 - Trollope and the Magazines, Mark Turner


Contents

A Letters

Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography The Letters of Anthony Trollope, 2 vols, ed. N. John Hall Wellesley Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, 5 vols, ed. Walter Houghton Full details of these works appear in the Bibliography. Note that I usually refer to Trollope's fiction in its periodical form (novel chapter, periodical volume, and page number) rather than subsequent book editions.

vm 10.1057/9780230288546 - Trollope and the Magazines, Mark Turner


Abbreviations

I was introduced to the fiction of Anthony Trollope by Mary Saunders, under whose tutelage I read through the Barchester novels as an undergraduate. Her enthusiasm became my addiction, for which many thanks. I began this project on Trollope and magazines at Birkbeck College, University of London, working with Laurel Brake, whose research into the nineteenth-century press remains a model for my own and whose tremendously sharp critical eye helped to improve my own thinking about nineteenthcentury cultural production and gendered issues. Thanks to her for her example and friendship. The Postgraduate Theory Seminar at Birkbeck College was important in helping me think through some of the theoretical issues with which my study engages. John Sutherland, Joanne Shattock, and Michael Slater made helpful suggestions, and Linda K. Hughes read parts of several chapters and her comments always led to improvements. The Department of English at Roehampton Institute has been a congenial and supportive place in which to finish the manuscript and to discuss ideas offered here. Jane Pringle and Ishtla Singh at Roehampton were invaluable in offering computing advice when producing the final manuscript. I gratefully acknowledge the many conversations (and cups of coffee) in the company of Caterina Albano, Gill Gregory, Julian Sheather, and Caroline Levine. Caroline, in addition to being a model of intellectual liveliness, is a wonderful colleague and collaborator, and an even more wonderful friend. Other friends who have been supportive over a number of years include Ella Bennett, Tim Burton, Neil Constable, Julian Cowley, Carter Foster, Erik Friedly, Michaela Giebelhausen, Chris Goodhart, Elaine Huxley, Nicole Pohl and Rebecca Wilson. Joe Clement was very important personally in the final stages of this project. This study could not have been completed without the loving support of Corin Bennett, whose generosity and understanding (and proofreading) enabled me throughout. My work was only made viable through the support of my parents, who made this project much less a struggle than it might have been, and to whom this book is happily dedicated. To them my debt is greatest. IX



Acknowledgements

Acknowledgemen ts

I wish to acknowledge the support of a number of institutions, which have helped in different ways. For research materials, I wish to thank the following: Birkbeck College Library, Bodleian Library, British Library, Library of Congress, Michigan State University Library, New York Public Library, Reform Club Library and University of London Library. The Department of English at Birkbeck College, the Department of Literary Studies at University of Luton, and the Research Centre and the Department of English at Roehampton Institute London all provided me with funds to deliver conference papers based on my research. The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals conferences provided a stimulating forum to discuss many of the issues presented here, and a congenial way to tap into the network of others working in the field. My thanks to the British Library for permission to reproduce the illustrations in Chapters 2 and 4. Versions of some of the chapters here have appeared previously in different forms, as articles or chapters in books. My thanks to the publications and editors for permission to reprint from the following: 'Gendered Issues: Intertextuality in The Small House at Allington in Cornhill Magazine, Victorian Periodicals Review 26:4 (Winter 1993), 228-34. 'Towards a Cultural Critique of Victorian Periodicals', Studies in Newspaper and Periodical History, 1995 Annual, 111-26. 'Hybrid Journalism: Women and the Progressive Fortnightly, in Reading Journalism and Literature: New Perspectives on Gender, Modernity and Modernism, ed. Kate Campbell (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming). 'Saint Pauls Magazine and the Project of Masculinity 7 , in NineteenthCentury Media and the Construction of Identities, ed. Laurel Brake, Bill Bell and David Finkelstein (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, forthcoming).



X

1.1 1.2 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 4.1

'Will His Eyes Open?', Cornhill Magazine (July 1863) 'Manoli', Cornhill Magazine (September 1862) Cover of Good Words (January 1860) Advertisement for Good Words (January 1861) Frontispiece to The Leisure Hour Cover of The Christian Guest (May 1859) Cover of Good Words (February 1860) Cover of Good Words (January 1861) Advertisement for Saint Pauls Magazine

XI


32 33 60 61 65 69 82 83 143


Illustrations



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The 1990s in Britain has proved an interesting cultural moment to be studying the work of Anthony Trollope. His novels appear to be more popular now than ever before, and a great deal of interest has been taken in his life. No fewer than four biographies have been published in roughly a decade, each emphasizing various aspects of the popular Victorian's work, each producing a slightly different version of the man. Trollope's entire oeuvre is being republished in a uniform series by Penguin, and other publishers are rushing to print his most popular novels. The large and influential Trollope Society has a project under way to republish all of his novels in hardback form by the year 2000, and their efforts to promote the author have led to a Trollope plaque in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey When the former Prime Minister John Major announced on a popular British radio programme his love of Trollope and especially of Lily Dale (with numerous dutiful ministers following suit), it seemed that Trollope's place as a cultural icon of the establishment was secured. In many ways, Trollope has been taken up for what is loosely termed Victorian values. Just what those values are is difficult to define, as anyone who has seriously studied the period will determine. But it must be acknowledged that, at least popularly, there is a prevalent conservative version of Trollope in the 1990s. Conservative readings of his work fit neatly into a heritage version of Britain which constructs an imaginary past of green hills and rural comfort, an image promulgated in the numerous films and novels in recent years which reconstruct Britain's past in particular ways. It is perhaps not surprising that at a time when rural sporting pastimes such as foxhunting are violently opposed in the Home Counties, Trollope seemingly represents an era when the countryside could manage its own affairs. On the surface, many of Trollope's contemporaries who are still widely read do not offer the same comfortable image of town and country. For example, Dickens's novels do not typically provide the reassurances 1 10.1057/9780230288546 - Trollope and the Magazines, Mark Turner


Introduction: Trollope in the 1990s


of a Trollope text, since Dickens takes pains to articulate the effects of industrialism in cities and in the lower classes. Trollope, for a fin-de-siecle, multi-cultural Britain searching for a coherent national identity, represents a golden age of Victorian optimism. Scholars, however, have not necessarily shared this view of Trollope's conservatism. In 1992, in an article in Literature Interpretation Theory, several authors of important full-length studies of Trollope were asked to consider how they would approach his works now, given 'the newer trends of theory and criticism'. 1 James Kincaid declares that he would 'try to deconstruct the liberal position I took then, the liberal position and its formal extensions into the discussions of the novels' (176). Ruth apRoberts claims she would 'lean on Bakhtin', asserting that 'Trollope is the most Bakhtinian of the Victorians' (178). Robert Polhemus, too, considers that Trollope is 'positively Bakhtinian and even neo-Bakhtinian' (184). Juliet McMaster, recognizing Trollope's nuanced depictions of character, believes 'characters who are so busy constructing themselves almost cry out for deconstruction' (179). Robert Tracy deems Trollope 'a prime candidate for critical attention in terms of the Barthes-Foucault notion of ecriture: writing that attains an impersonal objective existence of its own, ind e p e n d e n t of author or circumstance' (181). John Halperin rejects the usefulness of 'French post-structuralism of the last two decades' but accepts that feminist criticism offers ways of understanding the vexed question of Trollope's position on the single woman. This exercise in returning to the Trollope critics is revealing, not least because they all are eager to engage with contemporary theoretical thinking - deconstruction, feminism, new historicism, Marxism - in re-evaluating an author embraced by a conservative establishment. In the chapters that follow, I engage with a number of theoretical debates while rethinking Trollope's fiction in the context of periodicals. This study is not only (or even primarily) about Trollope; it is not a traditional single author study While Trollope is the figure that in some sense unifies my discussion of middleclass periodicals in the 1860s, I am not concerned to make broad claims about the author's oeuvre. Most full-length studies of Trollope - including those of the critics above - are involved in strictly author-based criticism. Even an estimable study of Trollope's serial fiction, Writing by Numbers by Mary Hamer, narrowly focuses on the author's writing method without considering other ways of



2

3

discussing fiction in parts. 2 By contrast, I use Trollope as a case study which grounds a theoretical consideration of the periodical as a cultural form within the broadly defined fields of literary and cultural criticism. While Trollope studies and our understanding of his fiction are a focus, my work can equally be seen in other discourses around gender, nineteenth-century print culture, media history and current debates about the nature of English studies broadly. One consequence of studying Trollope's serials in the context of periodicals is that the single author often disappears in chapters. However, my remit is to study not the single author or the single work exclusively, rather the relationship between author, serial, periodical and literary culture generally. This requires a certain amount of juggling; therefore, chapters move from discussions of individual serial parts, articles and single periodical issues to discussions of broader cultural issues in other periodicals and texts. Sometimes this creates tensions and gaps in chapters, but such disruptions are in the spirit of periodical literature, in which seams expose the nature of the work. What links (if not unifies) my study of Cornhill, Good Words, the Fortnightly Review, and Saint Pauls, is Trollope, but I am concerned primarily to explore the cultural discourses with which his serializations are engaged and the ways these discourses circulate within the periodical text. Trollope and the Magazines is not a comprehensive overview of literary periodicals in the 1860s, nor is it an attempt to discuss all of the magazines with which Trollope was associated. One of the approaches in periodical studies in the past has been to try to get hold of a stable archive, to provide an encyclopaedic range of knowledge about Victorian periodicals. The results of such work - for example, the invaluable Wellesley Index - have benefited scholars immeasurably. However, I am not writing a history of magazines and I am not concerned to document all of Trollope's interventions in the magazine marketplace; rather, I focus on a range of different periodicals for which he contributed, in order to show the ways cultural debates in and around the magazines enliven and enlighten our reading of his fiction. I borrow from various theoretical methods - from cultural materialist to recent media theories - to indicate the numerous ways in which periodical literature can be fruitfully considered. My point is to open out the study of periodicals, to argue for the



Introduction


richness of this literature as a site for a range of critical thinking, to suggest to readers of Victorian fiction the need to consider the materiality of the text and context. Chapter 1 introduces two different ways of approaching a periodical text. In the first part of the chapter, I look at The Small House at Allington in Cornhill and consider differing conceptions of the domestic ideology of gendered spheres in a single number of the magazine. How is the single woman constructed differently by Trollope and in Cornhill non-fiction? How does it relate to the magazine's manifesto to present non-controversial family reading, and how does it relate to discussions of single women outside the text? I go on to discuss the way that gendered space within the magazine is constructed by the non-fiction, which is written by a core group of men. Chapter 2 considers a serialization that never was. Rachel Ray was intended to be published in the popular monthly Good Words, a magazine that patterned itself on Cornhill but was cheaper and more religious. However, despite widespread advertising heralding Trollope's upcoming serial, Rachel Ray was rejected. I argue that the novel had to be sacrificed because of the difficulty the magazine was having in establishing its own identity. Good Words was not in a strong enough position to hold off the Evangelical protests which accompanied the thought of a Trollope serial in a religious magazine. In Chapter 3, I continue to consider periodical identity in my discussion of the radical Fortnightly Review. The periodical was a hybrid of Review journalism and popular magazine elements. The tone of the magazine was partly defined by the all-male Positivists who largely guided the magazine's nonfiction. I argue that Trollope's serial The Belton Estate was an (unsuccessful) bid for women readers, engaging in women's reform issues which the non-fiction almost completely ignores. I also discuss the magazine's primary legacy to mid-Victorian periodicals - signed journalism - and show how the question 'to sign, or not to sign' (as one periodical put it) can be seen in the context of the rise of the celebrity author, the star. Chapters 4 and 5 examine Saint Pauls Magazine, edited for three years by Trollope at the end of the 1860s. In a competitive shilling monthly market which appeals to the family reader, Trollope seems largely to target male readers. He wanted to edit a political magazine, and his fiction and non-fiction indicate that his focus was on male subjects and male readers. The inaugural serial, Phineas Finn, was Trollope's first overtly parliamentary novel, and I read



4

5

it as a male Bildungsroman; this preoccupation with male subjects continues in the story series, 'An Editor's Tales', and in the supplement, Ralph the Heir. I also consider how Trollope uses the periodical to generate books and how the ambiguous functions of author and editor are negotiated and defined. I have limited my discussion of Trollope and periodicals to the 1860s for a number of reasons. In 1860, Trollope returned to London from Ireland, and his first serialization, Framley Parsonage, launched the Cornhill Magazine. Cornhill essentially defined and opened up a new periodicals market in Britain - the middle-class family market. These readers, together with the circulating-library readers (and the two were not necessarily different), formed the bulk of Trollope's audience. In the 1860s Trollope's position as a market leader continually grew and he perhaps reached his peak of popularity in this decade, publishing in family magazines, political reviews, and religious periodicals. Certainly, in the 1870s, he was earning less money from his serials and was less enthusiastically received by critics. The reasons why Trollope's popularity in the periodicals market declined are worth rethinking, but could form a separate and distinct full-length study At the end of the 1860s, in the context of a saturated shilling monthly market and after numerous years of experience in a variety of periodicals, Trollope edited his own magazine. It was a watershed moment for Trollope, and it was a particularly interesting moment for a new shilling monthly trying to define itself in a glutted market. The 1860s, then, provides a full and varied period in which to consider Trollope's movements in the periodicals market and to explore developments in middle-class periodical culture generally. I pick u p Trollope's story in the network of magazine publishing at a time when he was consolidating his position in the system, and I leave him at the point when his presence in that market (as editor and contributor) was greatest. As I have stressed, Trollope and the Magazines is not simply a study of Trollope. I hope to encourage readers to go back to the periodicals and to consider exactly what it means to read fiction in this specific context. In my conclusion, I pull together a number of the theoretical questions which arise in the study of serial fiction and periodical literature. First, I map out, in a general way, the field of periodical studies, an expanding and exciting interdisciplinary field which borrows from literary criticism, history, media studies and other disciplines. As the title of my conclusion



Introduction


suggests, this book is not presented as the final word on how to study periodical literature. Rather than provide a rigid model for working with Victorian periodicals, I indicate some of the problems I have had to consider and the ways I have sought to address questions around issues such as collective authorship, textual plurality, and cultural production. Part of what makes working with Victorian periodicals so lively and challenging are the difficult questions one must pose - about the nature of reading and production, for example. In my Conclusion, I suggest some of the ways we might consider such questions. One of the joys in writing about Trollope and Victorian magazines in the 1990s has been in watching the field of periodical studies grow into a lively and interdisciplinary field of study. I hope that Trollope and the Magazines complements the interesting work being written on a range of issues in the nineteenth-century press and adds to our understanding of the vast literature of Victorian periodicals.

Notes 1. N. John Hall, James R. Kincaid, Ruth apRoberts, Juliet McMaster, Robert Tracy, Robert M. Polhemus, and John Halperin, 'Trollopians Reduces/ Literature Interpretation Theory 3:3 (1992), 175. Further references to this article are noted parenthetically in the text. 2. Other critics have noted the tendency of Trollope critics to make general claims about the whole of his work. See Walter Kendrick, The NovelMachine: The Theory and Fiction of Anthony Trollope (Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), xi: the usual method of criticizing Trollope involves 'surveying the whole of his work a novel at a time, saying a little about every novel and always too little about each/ Note that some subsequent studies have tried to narrow the focus; for example, see Stephen Wall, Trollope and Character (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1988), which emphasizes the importance of the two series.



6

Domestic Ideology and Gendered Space in Cornhill Magazine One of the ways we can begin to appreciate the complexity of serial literature is to focus on the relationship between the serial novel and the periodical. Such an approach poses its own set of questions: what are some of the ways we might read the fiction both as an integral part of the magazine and as only one element of the single magazine issue rubbing up against all of the other contributions? How do the articles and fiction in a magazine intersect with cultural debates outside the magazine? How does the magazine carve out its own identity - create its niche market - from the other literary magazines and texts continually in circulation? I assume that intertextuality is the most useful methodological approach to help us understand the intersections and overlappings which occur within and across magazines. This suggests that periodicals are essentially dialogic literary texts. Serialization, in which only a small part of a larger text is put into play alongside all sorts of different texts, provides the opportunity to see how debates and discourses within a periodical reverberate in the wider cultural world outside the magazine. In this chapter, I want to consider two ways of reading the periodical which point to the importance of intertextuality in reading magazine literature. Firstly, I read closely a single issue of Cornhill Magazine and consider the ways we might read an instalment of Trollope's The Small House at Allington in relation to other contributions in the same issue, and in relation to other cultural material outside the magazine. Secondly, I focus on the non-fiction contributions in Cornhill during the early years of the magazine in the 1860s, when The Small House was being serialized, and I suggest that the non-fiction, written by a core of male writers, 7 10.1057/9780230288546 - Trollope and the Magazines, Mark Turner


1

8


TROLLOPE IN CORNHILL The Small House at Allington was serialized in Cornhill Magazine between September 1862 and April 1864. Trollope began the manuscript written for the 20-part serial form in May of 1862 and had completed it in February 1863. The serialization appeared six months after his novel The Struggles of Brown, Jones and Robinson, also serialized in Cornhill, and just before the last part-issue of Orley Farm.1 Trollope received £2500 from CornhilVs publisher George Smith, two and a half times what he received for Framley Parsonage only two years before, a mark of both the marketconsecrated a u t h o r ' s popularity and Smith's generosity and business acumen. 2 The Small Llouse continued the mutually beneficial relationship between the author and the periodical begun by Trollope's Framley Parsonage success which inaugurated the magazine in 1860 under Thackeray's editorship. Although not all of Trollope's novels in the early 1860s were equally successful, they remained continually in print. 3 All of Trollope's novels after Framley Parsonage were conceived of and written in serial parts, so his method of writing serials should be integral when considering the publication details of any of his works. His writing habits were first revealed publicly in his posthumously published Autobiography (1883) and have been commented upon extensively ever since. He would write for three hours each morning at a pace of 250 words per quarter-hour, a process which he guessed would produce three full triple-deckers in a year had he not other writing and rereading to slow his pace. As it was, he was able to produce a backlog of at least one novel, sometimes as many as three, awaiting publication (A 272-3). Trollope kept his day job at the Post Office until 1867, but his rapid method of production points to a writer who regarded his art as a full profession open to men, a viewpoint less acceptable for men during the early decades of the century. As Gaye Tuchman argues in Edging Women Out, 'before 1840 at least half of all novelists



speaks largely to a male readership despite the open intentions of the magazine when it was founded. Overall, I am interested in the ways gender is conceptualized by reading an instalment of a novel in a single issue, and in the ways textual space is demarcated by and in the circulating discourses of the magazine.

9

were women; by 1917 most high-culture novelists were men.' 4 She refers to the period 1840-79 as 'the period of invasion' when the novel was revalued by men as a legitimate form of culture. Increasingly throughout this period, as fiction attracted status, more men became novelists, and with new publishing technology controlled by men, the business of the novel was redefined by men (such as Trollope) as a male profession. 5 Trollope's meticulous writing diaries and method of production attest to how seriously he regarded novel writing as a profession, and it was precisely this very businesslike approach to his fiction that led detractors after the publication of the posthumous Autobiography to devalue his writing as unartistic. Like all good realists, Trollope claimed that 'a vast proportion of the teaching of the day' could be found in the pages of novels, and he insisted that novelists appreciate the 'excellence of their calling' (A 217, 220). A professional attitude and writing method place him at the very centre of a publishing industry whose interests in writing were increasingly associated with mass production and mass sales. After all, the phenomenon of serialization in the nineteenth century was partly conceived of as a marketing plan to sell the expensive three-volume novel in large numbers to the circulating libraries: there is a commercial system, then, which links the serial, the book form, the circulating library and the subscriber-reader. Between the covers of all midcentury novels and periodicals lurk the businessmen of the circulating library and publishing giants: fiction and finance were intricately interwoven at mid-century (not for the first time, of course), and Trollope's Autobiography bears witness to the life of a professional writer within a revolutionizing and increasingly competitive culture industry 6 Trollope began using the serial part to organize the production of his novels at the same time that he became associated with Cornhill late in 1859. He published his last Cornhill serialization beginning in 1866 but never abandoned serialization as a creative and organizing principle. During the first half of the 1860s, he was still learning how to manage the constraints and realize the possibilities inherent in serial writing; this decade found him gradually mastering the serial form and enjoying the period of his greatest popularity. 7 The implications of such a situation are significant: he gained control over and managed subtlety in his multi-plot structures, and he satisfied his personal need for public



Domestic Ideology and Gendered Space


acceptance so obvious in the Autobiography. Neither of these would have been possible without the sort of relationship the author enjoyed with Cornhill and its huge readership. The importance of Trollope's association with Cornhill should not be underestimated. He submitted Framley Parsonage at a time when he was planning a move from Ireland back to London, acting on his belief that a novelist 'ought to live within the reach of the publishers, the clubs, and the dinner parties of the metropolis' (A 132). George Smith's jovial, club-like dinners for Cornhill contributors offered an entree into the literary culture which Trollope so coveted. 8 However, Smith had as much reason for thanks as Trollope since it was largely Framley Parsonage which secured the legendary early circulation figures for the magazine. As John Hall recognizes, there was an interdependent relationship between Smith and Trollope in the early years of magazine. 9 In May 1859, three years before the serialization of the Small House, Trollope was regarded as the most popular writer of his day by E.S. Dallas at The Times, who (in something of a backhanded complement) called him 'the most successful author - that is to say, of the circulating library sort.' 10 Orley Farm, Brown, Jones and Robinson, The Small House, North America, Tales of All Countries (second series), Rachel Ray, and Can You Forgive Her? - all of these overlapped either in book or serial form between 1862 and 1864. n Dallas's comment, therefore, might be equally applicable in the autumn of 1862, when the story of Lily Dale was beginning to unfold in Cornhill. Why such a special Trollope-Cornfo'// relationship should appear and the reasons for its popular appeal with the circulating library reader need to be explained. Thackeray's open letter to potential contributors in November 1859 describes what he and Smith had envisioned for the new periodical: . . . fiction of course must form a part, but only a part, of our entertainment. We want, on the other hand, as much reality as possible - discussion and narrative of events interesting to the public, personal adventures and observations, familiar reports of scientific discovery, description of Social Institutions - quicuid agunt homines - a 'Great Eastern/ a battle in China, a RaceCourse, a popular Preacher - there is hardly any subject we don't want to hear about, from lettered and instructed men who are competent to speak on it.12



10

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Thackeray is keen here to emphasize that his literary magazine would not be dominated by fiction, and in a letter to Trollope a few days earlier, he says 'one of our chief objects in this magazine is the getting out of novel spinning, and back into the real world'. 13 The 'real world' is presumed by Thackeray to be defined through the non-fiction articles which were predominantly written by men. But the editor-novelist modifies what is to be Cornhill's construction of reality later in the open letter: If our friends have good manners, a good education, and write in good English, the company, I am sure, will be all the better pleased; and the guests, whatever their rank, age, sex be, will be glad to be addressed by well-educated gentlemen and women. . . . There are points on which agreement is impossible, and on these we need not touch. At our social table, we shall suppose the ladies and children always present; we shall not set u p rival politicians by the ears; we shall listen to every guest who has an apt word to say; and, I hope, induce clergymen of various denominations to say grace in their turn. 14 And Leonard Huxley, writing in the Cornhill in 1922, affirmed how the magazine 'stood aside from current politics, bookreviewing, ephemeral topics, the clash of controversial opinion and such, along with theology'. 1 5 The discussion of reality Thackeray hopes to induce is intended to be void of controversy - no political or religious partisanship - and caters to particular and unmistakably class- and gender-specific assumptions. And it was Thackeray's own Roundabout Papers which set the magazine's gentlemanly tone. 16 Cornhill's 'real world', as denned by Thackeray's open letter to contributors, was limited and specific, and what is absent in the magazine indicates an editorial policy. Reality, then, was a construct within the periodical's pages, defined and regulated by a type of censorship. When Trollope comments in his Autobiography on the virtues of Framley Parsonage it is the lifelike quality of Mary Robarts that he highlights, and, indeed, it was his true-to-life representations that would continually interest his contemporaries. 17 But even Trollope, along with Elizabeth Barrett Browning and John Ruskin, were censured under Cornhill's code of morally sound reality during Thackeray's two and a half years.18 The editorial outlook largely guided the magazine long after Thackeray's resignation in March 1862, although his shadow was





longer than declining circulation figures might merit. 19 Preconceptions in Cornhill contributions, like the particular definition of 'reality', need to be kept in mind when examining closely the contents of a particular issue or the periodical as a whole. On becoming editor in 1871, Leslie Stephen wrote in a letter, 'what can one make of a magazine which excludes the only subjects in which reasonable men take any interest; politics and religion'. 20 Stephen was reacting to the Thackeray legacy of noncontroversial contributions, but his comment also demarcates the boundaries of a magazine defined by constructions of gendered reading. The absence of overtly male subjects like politics and religion in effect privileged women readers, and women's reading regulated Cornhill contributions, in so far as anything deemed unsuitable for women would not be published. Thackeray is explicit in his wish that Cornhill be suitable for women and children 'always present', and thereby a family magazine. Cornhill's version of reality constructed female readers and female reading (along with male readers and reading), and the contents of each issue were restricted accordingly. Choosing Cornhill contributions to suit a female audience, the editors were defining the magazine according to gender, and the exclusion of politics and religion was, in a sense, an emasculation. Although many articles published were specifically aimed at men and written within a male discourse, none approached a serious discussion of theological or political ideas controversial to the reader in the way the heavy quarterlies or even a monthly like Blackwood's might. Cornhill, the most successful of the new shilling monthlies, participated in defining a new periodical literature in Britain - the middle-class family shilling monthly - demarcated by gendered boundaries, but family periodicals were also guided by their role in the larger publishing industry. Cornhill fiction like Trollope's, so popular at Mudie's and the other circulating libraries, was destined for the drawing-room for all eyes to see. However, the prerequisite for drawing-room fiction was morality as defined by men like Mr. Mudie. Reacting to the tyranny of the circulating libraries, George Moore writes in the Pall Mall Gazette in 1884 that at the head . . . of English literature, sits a tradesman, who considers himself qualified to decide the most delicate artistic question that may be raised, and who crushes out of sight any artistic aspiration he may deem pernicious. 21



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Men like Mudie could denounce a new novel, as happened to George Moore, and thereby severely limit its readership and sales. For a publisher to realize a profit on a new three-volume novel, it had to sell large numbers to the circulating libraries, and publishers depended on the libraries to buy the expensive triple-deckers before cheap editions of novels were published. Serialization in magazines like Cornhill was advance advertising for new novels; however, serialized novels destined for the libraries had to adhere to Mudie's moral code. Businessmen like Mudie, at least indirectly, influenced the content of serialized novels in middle-class family magazines aimed at the circulating-library audience. Trollope's Cornhill fiction fits comfortably into such a publishing system, but much of Cornhill's domestic fiction was precisely what writers like Moore and others a generation later would react against so strongly. Again in the Pall Mall article, Moore laments that English literature was so limited in its subjects by the moral imposition of the libraries: 'What is nature but religion and morals? and the circulating library forbids discussion on such subjects.' The subtraction of these two important elements of life throws the reading of fiction into the hands of young girls and widows of sedentary habits; for them political questions have no interest, and it is by this final amputation that humanity becomes headless, trunkless, limbless, and is converted into the pulseless, non-vertebrate jelly-fish sort of thing which . . . is sent from the London depot and scattered t h r o u g h the drawing-rooms of the United Kingdom. 22 Moore genders fiction as female. He believes that men have been cut off, disembodied from literature because serious male subjects had been censored in fiction since at least mid-century. A novel like The Small House might have been objected to a generation later, it could be argued, because its appeal was perceived to have been primarily to female readers. The introduction of gender, then, is central when examining circulating-library fiction at mid-century, partly because the g e n d e r i n g of both magazines and novels defined a middle-class, popular literature that would be fervently opposed by the 1880s. Serialized between 1862-64, The Small House appeared in a periodical which followed the principles of Thackeray's editorial legacy: avoid controversy and assume a female reader. During





this time, George Smith undertook responsibilities as editor, with G.H. Lewes and Frederick Greenwood as sub-editors. 23 The magazine maintained high standards in both fiction and essays, relying on a core of frequent male contributors. Random examinations of Cornhill issues during The Small House serialization show common class and gender positions. For example, the November 1862 issue (which will be discussed at length below) contains instalments of George Eliot's Romola, Trollope's Small House, Anne Ritchie's Story of Elizabeth, in addition to a 'Roundabout Paper', a travel article by Trollope, and non-fiction pieces on the use of tobacco, the life of professional thieves, the supply of Indian cotton, and the sensational case of a female murderer. The fiction is mostly domestic, with courtship and marriage plots; the non-fiction addresses a comfortable middle-class reader, one who would appreciate Trollope's comments about travelling to Holland or Francis Anstie's defence of the male indulgence, tobacco. In the July 1863 issue, we find similar concerns. Both Romola and The Small House continue, and articles range from professional etiquette to stage adaptations of Shakespeare. Another middle-class pleasure, food, is discussed, and we are warned that overeating by the wealthy may be as harmful as undereating among lower classes. There is a description of how amateur music is no longer confined to the upper classes and how performance is becoming part of the middle-class evening routine. The final instalment of The Small House in April 1864, appeared with Thackeray's Denis Duval and Frederick Greenwood's Margaret Denzil's History. One article gossips about royal christenings, another about hunting with the French emperor's hounds. One contributor dismisses biographies which have nothing pleasant to say, while Matthew Arnold distinguishes between pagan and Christian sentiment. The April 1864 issue is less cosy than the earliest Cornhills, but we see Thackeray's non-controversial editorial policy apparent in each issue; a watchful eye is cast to the female reader, and the tone is constructed to please and comfort, almost to pet, the middle classes. The fiction, poetry and non-fiction rarely rebuke the readership, and then only mildly, whereas middle-class ideological assumptions - about leisure, manners, marriage, class - are generally reinforced and perpetuated. Although there is a definite sense of homogeneity of intent in the contents, no periodical (indeed, no literary text) presents a wholly uncomplicated view of society Within the non-fiction and fiction, as we shall see below, there



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READING A SINGLE ISSUE To begin to unpack some of the ideological baggage within the periodical, it is useful first to examine a single periodical issue as text. I am not concerned here to provide a historical reconstruction of the Victorian serial-reading experience, although this method of reading across an issue inevitably raises questions about how contemporary readers would have approached magazines. We cannot presume, for example, that readers started at the beginning and read through an issue, front to back as one would read a book, and some contributions were more likely than others to be read depending upon the reader's gender; simply put, how we understand the larger text changes according to how the issue is read. Considering the arrangement of fiction and non-fiction in the November 1862 issue, we notice how evenly the two are interleaved. Until the turn of the century, and with few exceptions, serial fiction would remain the first entry in all Cornhill issues, even though the magazine was supposedly dominated by nonfiction. The same cannot be said of comparable magazines like Blackwood's and Macmillan's, which led with both fiction and nonfiction. The arrangement of the textual space and the whole physicality of an issue might also influence the reading of it, unlike the book, which generally presents only one way of reading. Although I am less interested in the problems of readers' responses than in the textual possibilities of reading periodicals, it has to be acknowledged that alongside the periodical number is a reader who can alter the text - by choosing what to read and in what order. It is necessary to draw out the implications of reading periodicals to understand how this essentially contextual approach to literature is part of the overall intertextuality within any given periodical issue. 24 Following the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, Julia Kristeva interprets his conception of the 'literary word' as an intersection of textual surfaces rather than a point (a fixed meaning), as a dialogue



was some space for discussion, if not vehement debate, of topical issues. And the role of intertextuality in the scene of periodical reading creates numerous individual readings which challenge any notion of unity in a single issue.

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The interaction between the various components of a given periodical number - whether that interaction creates contradiction, debate, tension, or cohesion - is integral to the way ideology is formed within the periodical press. The function of intertextuality in such a reading also relates to remarks by Michel Foucault pointing to ways we have traditionally delimited our understanding of literature - on approaches to 'the book' and 'the oeuvre'. 26 Using the periodical issue as text decentres traditional literary study, which has focused on reading the novel, for example, in continuum, that is, in book form. Such a tradition has privileged the position that novels are and ought to be read as books. The presumption that to read a novel means to read a book would be, for Foucault, a 'unity of discourse' which needs to be avoided: the frontiers of a book are never clear-cut: beyond the title, the first lines, and the last full stop, beyond its internal configuration and its autonomous form, it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network. 27 This by now familiar (but still provocative) poststructural assertion of the fallibility of the book becomes more significant if we accept that literature, like so many Victorian novels, is not always in the first instance published as a book. The Small House at Allington was gradually unfolding as a serial for two years before its twovolume publication, and the original serialized text ought to be as valid a form of study as the books which followed. But reading literature in magazine requires a different approach to the text. What changes when we look at literature in periodicals are the 'rules of formation' - the conditions of existence - within a given discourse, 28 in this case the single periodical issue. The issue is subject to other textual influences brought to it by the writer, the reader, and historical context. Within the space of the issue, the text becomes a literary collective of interacting components which depend on how the text is read: novel chapters may move into a travel article, a poem, a short story, a science article, etc. And as Bakhtin notes, within a single individual text (in this case, the novel),



among several writings: that of the writer, the addressee (or the character) and the contemporary or earlier cultural context.25

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the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, between literature and non-literature and so forth are not laid up in heaven. Every specific situation is historical. And the growth of literature is not merely development and change within the fixed boundaries of any given definition; the boundaries themselves are constantly changing. 29 In the rest of this chapter and in the chapters that follow, I discuss both the individual text (an article, image, chapter, etc.) and the magazine as text (or, the text within a text), so the changing boundaries Bakhtin describes are especially relevant to the examination of periodical literature. In the end, I want to suggest a range of different approaches we might bring to bear on reading magazine literature. CORNHILL MAGAZINE (NOVEMBER 1862)30 Several critics have already demonstrated how the binary opposition of gendered space - woman/man, inner/outer, private/public, domestic/political, etc. - was constructed in literature from late in the eighteenth century through to the mid-nineteenth century. Nancy Armstrong argues that both male and female writers inscribed in domestic fiction a redefinition of sexual, and therefore social, relations to construct a politically powerful gendered space. 31 Mary Poovey discusses how gendered spheres were constructed ideologically within many discourses 'intimately involved in the development of England's characteristic social institutions, the organization of its most basic economic and legal relations, and in the rationalization of its imperial ambitions'. 32 Marriage was increasingly seen as a moral safeguard and the domestic hearth as the centre of stability. John Ruskin, writing in 1865, called the home 'the place of Peace; the shelter, not only from all injury, but from all terror, doubt and division'. 33 Furthermore, gendered spheres helped delineate class boundaries and create an identity for the middle classes specifically; in this way, the family ideal was used ideologically as a way of consolidating socio-political power. 34 Although there are a number of different, individual voices in the pages of our Cornhill issue, I would argue there is a common conceptualization of issues in terms of gendered spheres. By way of example, examination of





an instalment from The Small House and an article by H.W. Holland can demonstrate how each participates in contemporary constructions of the domestic ideal. The contributions work intertextually within the magazine by supporting the ideologically gendered space, but also by introducing outside texts into the discussion, either directly or indirectly. Chapters 7, 8, and 9 of The Small House at Allington continue the courtship plots between the girls at the small house and the men staying at the great house. Lily Dale has become engaged to Adolphus Crosbie, a London man-about-town staying with his friend and Lily's cousin, Bernard Dale. The November instalment contrasts Lily's total dedication to Crosbie with his uncertainty about deciding to marry a country girl with no guaranteed fortune. Lily's doctrine of marriage is that, as a girl should never show any preference for a man till circumstances should have fully entitled him to such manifestation, so also should she make no drawback on her love, but pour it forth for his benefit with all her strength, when such circumstances had come to exist. But she was ever feeling that she was not acting up to her theory, now that the time for such practice had come. (ch. 7, 669) Lily's conventional view of love places all responsibility for declarations on the man, who is meant to be the initiator of love while the woman remains dormant until such desire is awoken in her. But once that passion has been set free, she may show it through fidelity and dedication. Lily's inability to follow her theory arises from her rightful belief that 'her lover was not all that he should be' (ch. 7, 667) in his attentions to her. Rather than acknowledge that the problem is Crosbie's and not hers, she blames herself in a long passage of self-deprecating doubt: 'I didn't behave well to h i m / she said to herself; 'I never do. I forget how much he is giving up for me; and then, when anything annoys him, I make it worse instead of comforting him.' And upon that she made accusation against herself that she did not love him half enough, - that she did not let him see how thoroughly and perfectly she loved him. (ch. 7, 669)



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Lily tortures herself because she thinks she is not acting as an engaged woman ought to do. She accuses herself when her theory of marriage fails, although the reader knows that it is Crosbie who second-guesses the domestic ideal offered by his engagement to Lily. The instalment opens with Bernard Dale, who hopes to wed Lily's sister Bell according to their uncle's wishes, expressing his total indifference to love and marriage, thereby threatening the code of social cohesion familiar to the Cornhill reader. 35 The following scene shows Crosbie doing the very same thing with regard to Lily; he is only willing to undergo the domestication of marriage if a substantial financial arrangement can be negotiated. Marriage is destructive in Crosbie's eyes, the ruin of his fashionable life as a London bachelor: Was he absolutely about to destroy all the good that he had done for himself throughout the past years of his hitherto successful life? . .. But there was the misery very plain. He must give u p clubs, and his fashion, and all that he had hitherto gained, and be content to live a plain, h u m d r u m , domestic life, with eight hundred a year, and a small house, full of babies. It was not the kind of Elysium for which he had tutored himself. (ch. 7, 668) The implied Cornhill reader coming to such an attack on the virtues of home and family would sympathize with Lily Dale. So taken with Lily's plight were contemporary readers that Trollope mentions how they continually wrote to him begging that Lily marry another suitor (A 179). The serialization of the novel over the following year and a half depicts how jilted Lily rejects the idea of ever marrying, and how Crosbie finds unhappiness in an aristocratic match. The comic resolution of marriage is denied to Lily, and apart from Bell's match with Dr. Crofts, the domestic ideal is continually thwarted. By the third instalment in November, we already see 'the beginning of troubles', announced in the title to Chapter 7. The distinction between city and country, so central in all the Barchester novels, helps delineate gendered spheres: Lily-Country/ Crosbie-City, Country-Private/City-Public. James Kincaid sees the overriding pattern in all of the Barchester novels as an invasion





by the city of the pastoral country, where the family ideal is nowhere stronger in Trollope's fiction.36 Although Trollope did not initially consider The Small House among the Barchester novels, some readers would have connected cameo appearances like Mr Harding's to the earlier texts and to Trollope's moral centre, located in the countryside of Barsetshire. The intertextual relationship between The Small House and its Barchester predecessors, especially the most recent Framley Parsonage, would have comforted the readers who thought they knew exactly what they would be getting. Readers' concern for Lily, who remains unmarried even in The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867), illustrates their unease with the denial of the expected Barchester comic resolution. Contemporary readers would have seen Crosbie's rejection of the domestic ideal in terms of the ongoing debate over the position of unmarried women. In April 1862, W.R. Greg published an article entitled 'Why Are Women Redundant?' which describes society as diseased because of the existence of so many unmarried women. 37 Several ideological forces operate in Greg's essay, but of importance here is how Greg not only universalizes the domestic ideal but also elevates marriage as the raison d'etre in mid-century England. Describing the rules of Nature, he writes that by the sentiments which belong to all healthy and unsophisticated organisations even in our own complicated civilisation, marriage, the union of one man with one woman, is unmistakably indicated as the despotic law of life. This is the rule. We need not waste words in justifying the assumption. 38 For Greg, the real tyranny of nature's despotic law is the constraint of male freedom; similarly, in The Small House Crosbie's fear of the domestic is partly due to the impending loss of a bachelor's life. Greg is especially relevant when considering Lily Dale: he says thousands of women are redundant 'because one abortive love in the past has closed their hearts to every other sentiment'. 39 Compare Greg's statement with Trollope's description of Lily in the Autobiography, and we see that the two are addressing a similar concern: Lily 'became first engaged to a snob; and then, though in truth she loved another man who was hardly good enough, she could not extricate herself sufficiently from the collapse of her first great misfortune' (A 179). The end result of



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both Greg's article and Trollope's narrative is to conceptualize gender in relation to the domestic sphere relegated to women. The novel is ambiguous toward the mores of marriage and it approaches a critique of the domestic ideal, but an acceptable alternative within the framework of the novel is never given. In the Greg article, domesticity is the despotic law of life, and in the novel, domesticity is simply thwarted. The question is w h e t h e r Greg's text would have worked intertextually - either brought in consciously or not by the reader or the author - with the fiction as a point of debate in the topical Woman Question. Greg's article appeared in the National Review, a Unitarian-influenced quarterly read by the educated (male) middle and upper classes.40 Like Cornhill it was available at Mudie's and the two periodicals could well have had an overlapping readership; certainly, Trollope would have been familiar with topical debates in a number of periodicals. But Greg was not alone in addressing the question of redundant women at this time. Early in April 1862, The Times published an exchange of letters to the editor addressing the efforts of Emily Faithfull and others to employ women and to initiate female emigration schemes. 41 'To marry, to bear children, to guide the house, to lodge strangers, to wash the saints' feet, to relieve the afflicted' is how a Saturday Review article in April describes the boundaries of women's work. 42 A week earlier in the Spectator, a writer discussing university exams for women insists that 'we cannot have home happiness endangered for any conceivable improvement to the minds or powers of either sex'.43 The conservative feminist Frances Power Cobbe published 'What Shall We Do With Our Old Maids?' in Eraser's Magazine (November 1862), as a direct response to the Greg article. Cobbe assumes her readers' familiarity with the Greg and mentions that his article was 'quoted as of the soundest common sense'. 44 Therefore, the problem of redundant women or old maids was a prominent element of middle-class public discourse at the time The Small House was being written and serialized. Trollope's writing diaries indicate that he began writing the manuscript in May, a month after the Greg article and the Times letters had appeared, and the third instalment was written mostly at the end of June. 45 The Cobbe article appeared in the same month as the third instalment discussed above. Whether or not Greg's article was directly influential, Trollope and his readers





would have brought to the text pre-understandings about the Woman Question which places the fiction in the wider context of a public, cultural discourse. It is likely that a reader would have connected the detailing of Lily's waste with the public discourse on the Woman Question, which helps explain readers' anxiety in wishing to marry off Lily Dale. Another article in the November Cornhill works similarly by constructing a criminal class in terms of the domestic ideal and with references to outside texts. H.W. Holland's article 'Professional Thieves' 46 is an attempt to consider thieving as an art. He places his piece within a context of at least 30 years of formal study of criminals and their practices, and like so many Victorian sociological studies, his begins with a catalogue of statistics. But Holland's article differs from other studies, notably Henry Mayhew's articles which became London Labour and the London Poor (1862), of which Holland states, 'the nature of its topics excludes it from the family circle' (641). Holland, by writing in Cornhill, has placed the discussion of criminality in the presence of ladies and children, so his report is accordingly ambiguous toward distasteful but significant criminal distinctions. Nancy Armstrong says of Mayhew's well-known and influential study that it 'can be viewed as a blatant attempt by a middle-class intellectual to transform the problem of an impoverished working class by translating this social dilemma into sexual terms'. 47 The Holland article, like Trollope's novel, works by conceptualizing his discussion in terms of the domestic. The thieving population is organized by a familial structure, with actual or pretended parental figures educating children in the art of crime. However, it is the woman who is responsible for the early education of child criminals: Pocket-picking is the boy's first lesson, and he practises on his instructor, and on the woman who may reside with the thief. When he can quickly and quietly pick the pocket of his new friends, the woman takes him out, generally into some crowded shop. . . . The woman has nearly always most to do with the education of the boy. When she has done with him, the man takes him in hand, and they go out together. (644)



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Notice how gendered spheres are constructed: the woman is responsible for the homespun, early initiation before the boy thief is fully accepted in the man's public arena. But the thieving family is a perversion of the domestic ideal because the woman, the moral centre in middle-class homes, is an immoral, unnatural influence in the criminal home. Holland says that the women thieves 'are always connected with male thieves', a way of distinguishing 'between female thieves and another class of vicious women', meaning prostitutes (647). The delicate treatment of prostitution is part of what Jeffrey Weeks has called the Victorian double standard that 'familial ideology was accompanied by, and often relied on, a vast underbelly of prostitution'. 48 Setting up the family model among thieves and perverting the moral influence of woman, the contributor implicitly upholds and reinforces the middle-class domestic ideal by showing the reader a diseased domesticity. The thieving class is, to a large extent, the result of the fallen woman unable morally to safeguard the home. Holland neglects to mention the range of possible economic hardships which encourage a criminal underclass, in the same way that Mayhew concentrates on sexual rather than socio-economic aspects of criminal life.49 By faulting the woman, whose responsibility it is to educate, Holland's article would have resonances with Fitzjames Stephen's piece, 'Circumstantial Evidence - the Case of Jessie M'Lachlan', also in the November Cornhill. Stephen's piece offers a defence of circumstantial evidence, based on the sensational case of a female murderer, and it focuses on the criminal acts and the murderer's deceit. In the Saturday Review of 25 October 1862, a story appeared about Catherine Wilson, the first woman to be executed by the Old Bailey in 14 years. 50 The article describes her 'foulest personal vices', and concludes that 'it was only a woman, with a woman's arts, a woman's insinuating craft, a woman's admittance to sick rooms, and to the sacred confidences of her sister, a woman's womanliness, that could have perpetrated this string of crimes'. 51 The Holland, Stephen, and Saturday Review articles depict the danger of woman when she fails to live up to her position as the moral centre; the articles work intertextually, albeit in varying degrees, to offer a glimpse of the fallen woman. If Trollope's chapters in the third instalment depict the steadfast woman wronged by a man who refuses the family ideal, then the Holland article shows what happens when woman fails





as the angel in the house. Both in different ways use the ideological positioning of gendered spheres, and the domestic ideal in particular, that Cornhill promotes. Read in a different context, either the Trollope or the Holland might not become ideological in the same way, but because Cornhill endorses a specific value system, the text becomes ideologically, and therefore politically, charged. Terry Eagleton usefully suggests that 'you could not decide whether a statement was ideological or not by inspecting it in isolation from its discursive context, any more than you could decide in this way whether a piece of writing was a work of literary art'. 52 The discursive context includes contemporary texts outside of Cornhill which could have directly influenced the reading of an issue, or generally informed the understanding of public discussions. The Small House read with knowledge of the Greg essay or of the Woman Question debate has political implications. Trollope thwarts the domestic at a time when readers were anxious about and sensitive to single women, as seen in letters to The Times and other periodical literature. Reading how women educated thieves at a time when female crimes were sensationalized in the press again makes the middle-class positioning of women all the more poignant. Intertextual readings show explicitly how implications which move from text to text participate in blurring the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction. 53

THE NON-FICTION CLUB: MEMBERS ONLY There is no doubt that on Magazine Day in the early 1860s, the primary attraction of periodicals like Cornhill was the illustrated serial fiction and not the non-fiction articles. It was the next episode in the plight of Lily Dale, and to a far lesser extent that of George Eliot's Romola, which readers eagerly awaited each month, and not articles describing medieval bookselling or the history of sea-fights which were leaved between the novels, stories and poetry. The Economist of 9 March 1861 wrote that Cornhill 'relies for its sale mainly on the fictions it contains', although it adds that the non-fiction articles are 'well-informed and good of their kind'. 54 Although it seems that non-fiction was of secondary importance to readers, the articles did participate in ideological discourses which when examined reveal a complexity within Cornhill that is easy to miss.



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By classifying broadly and comparing the non-fiction contents of a few contemporary magazines, during the serialization of The Small House at Allington, we can gain insight into how Cornhill's interests differed from other periodicals. Unlike Cornhill, Blackwood's is overwhelmingly weighted with articles on foreign affairs which partly give the periodical its imperialist tone. Macmillan's favours foreign-affairs articles but also includes many contributions on science and literature. Cornhill differs from both by publishing many more articles on culture and society, followed by science. There are limits to a crude content classification, but as a preliminary analysis it can indicate the general concerns and ideological presentations of a periodical. For instance, Cornhill's concentration on culture-based articles enforces their overall commitment to non-controversial non-fiction subjects. By avoiding foreign affairs, the American Civil War, political economy 55 and religion and by favouring 'factual' science and middle-class culture, the editors attempted to present an apparently uncomplicated version of the real, non-fiction world of its readers. However, these articles are complex and engaged with ideological discourses both inside and outside the magazine. By limiting the range of acceptable topics, the magazine broadens the range of subjects within culture and society available to be discussed. A glance at the Wellesley Index list of attributions for non-fiction articles indicates the frequency with which Cornhill relied on a core of mostly male contributors. Thackeray's expectation of a diverse number of contributors from the public, as stated in the 1860 announcement of the magazine, only shows how far Cornhill was in 1862 from its initial self-projection. Whereas the fiction is balanced by having serials, stories, and poems by men and women (George Eliot, Anne Ritchie, Elizabeth Gaskell, Trollope, and others), the non-fiction is almost exclusively dominated by middle-class men. But these contributors were not just brilliant amateurs, like the physician and frequent contributor Francis E. Anstie, who earned their livelihoods in other professions. A few of the inner circle of non-fiction contributors are recognizable as professional journalists. Fitzjames Stephen, Cornhill's most frequent occasional non-fiction contributor, wrote 12 articles in this period, mostly about social and moral issues. According to his biographer, Fitzjames Stephen as primary contributor lacked an outlet for more serious non-fiction, and so found himself turning to magazines like Fraser's which would publish articles Cornhill would not. 56





Before his Cornhill t e n u r e , Stephen wrote for the Saturday Review, and he would become the chief leader writer in the late 1860s for another of Smith's ventures, the innovative evening Pall Mall Gazette, where 'he was able to speak out with perfect freedom u p o n the graver topics of the day'. 5 7 Another Cornhill contributor, and one of Smith's co-editors during this period, was Frederick Greenwood, who would be the first editor of the Pall Mall Gazette from 1865. In 1862, George Smith was 35 years old, Frederick Greenwood was 32, and Fitzjames Stephen 33. Thackeray (who was no longer editor) and Trollope, both of whom wrote some non-fiction but represented the genteel side of the magazine's fiction, were 51 and 47 respectively. What is interesting is that many of the younger key players involved in Cornhill would become pioneers in the Pall Mall Gazette's professionalization of journalism later in the decade and into the 1870s. There is a tension within the contents which belies the fact that there were at least two types of male contributor, the middle-aged, gentleman writer and the up-and-coming young professional. Although Cornhill is often identified as the pre-eminent literary magazine of the middle and upper classes, the contents were no less ideologically complicated because of its policy excluding subjects of potential controversy Some articles written by men seem to address women readers; however, within the male-dominated core of nonfiction, contributors produced articles which more often affirm a male reader. It is as if the male writers were trying to maintain their own gendered space within the Cornhill's new fictiondominated, but still hybrid, type of shilling monthly. Those contributions which can be identified as culture and society subjects in Cornhill range from articles about the royals to prison reform, from a travel piece to a discussion of cosmetics. If the spectrum of articles which form the bulk of the magazine's non-fiction offers limited debate on a number of cultural and social issues, it also confirms the middle-class readers' self-satisfaction with their own education, prosperity, temperance and philanthropy. Fitzjames Stephen, using Victor Hugo's Les Miserables as an illustration, concluded in an article entitled 'Society' that '"society"' has no precise meaning at all' and that the basis of society, if one does exist, is the benevolent relations between men. 58 There is an echo of precisely this debate in late twentieth-century British politics, best illustrated by Margaret Thatcher's assertion as Prime Minister in Woman's Own in 1987 that 'there is



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no such thing as Society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.' 59 The Victorian argument over the collective responsibility of communities remains very much with us, and the debates about socially responsible market economies continue to divide the middle-classes in post-Thatcherite, New Labour Britain. Stephen's article discusses society's responsibility to redress social ills by setting in opposition the individualist and the socialist. The socialist, of course, sees society as a corporate body with collective responsibility, but the writer favours the individualist, paradigmatically represented in the form of the prosperous Englishman, whose individual pursuits somehow naturally lead to a good society There's a whiff of Carlyle's Captains of Industry here - trickle-down social reform, we might now call it. Stephen's article, which at first appears to question social evils, is actually a Whiggish liberal defence 60 of middleclass prosperity, an attempt to reassure readers that the human by-products of industrialization and increasing capitalism described in Les Miserables dire best remedied by maintaining the comfort of the middle class. There is no question about the socioeconomics causes of human suffering, only an attempt to reassure the reader that blame cannot be placed on the diligent middle classes by the socialists. The article, by appearing in a middle-class periodical and by being written at all, belies a class anxiety during a time of burgeoning reform campaigns in a number of social areas. As had been conventional since the founding of the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews in the early nineteenth century, non-fiction journalism was linked to book-reviewing, so using fiction as a way into discussing politics, religion, and other serious discourses was common. Les Miserables was widely reviewed in the periodical press, and its subject-matter affords the opportunity to discuss aspects of social reform. 61 Women's education and expatriation, the distress in Lancashire, public-school and university education, the penal system - these were some of the other reform topics which featured prominently in newspapers and periodicals in late 1862. For example, The Times ran 13 leaders from August to December on the treatment of convicts, and throughout 1862 there were no fewer than 51 leaders on the distress and relief efforts in the cotton districts. 62 Elsewhere, as in the reform-minded English Woman's Journal published by Emily Faithfull's Victoria Press, there is an ongoing discussion of the Woman Question. Less well known





today than Faithfull's magazine is The Rose, the Shamrock, and the Thistle, a Scottish m a g a z i n e p u b l i s h e d by the w o m e n - l e d Caledonian Press, which ran many articles on topics related to the Woman Question including a series called 'Our Six Hundred Thousand' in 1862-63. Stephen's argument in his Cornhill article can be read as a defensive response which seeks to allay some of the self-doubt and anxiety of the middle classes, w h o were increasingly being asked in the periodicals to consider and accommodate substantial social change. 'The Working Man's Restaurant' (February 1863) describes efforts around Britain, but specifically the Great Western Cooking Depot in Glasgow, to provide inexpensive food to the struggling working classes. 63 The article takes as its subject a specific social ill, the hardship of the working class, but like Fitzjames Stephen above, it neglects any consideration of the causes of the social inequality. 'The Working Man's Restaurant' supports the philanthropic experiment in Glasgow because it provides clean, attractive eating-halls 'equivalent to elegance', and tasty, filling food, 'quite as much as it is healthful to take with the prospect of an afternoon's active work before us' (254). But the advantages to the working classes do not stop at the culinary delights. The halls are operated as businesses and so instil pride in the guests, who must pay for their food and not have to receive charity. Such establishments provide competition for the pubs and gin-houses frequented by the working classes; no alcohol is served in the halls, which is 'essential when large numbers from the very poorest districts of the city are assembled together' (258). There are reading-rooms with daily papers and a women-only room 'so that timid girls may not have to run the gauntlet through a room full of strangers' (258). The writer recommends that similar eating-halls be established in other cities, especially in the poorer quarters. A number of topical discourses run through 'The Working Man's Restaurant'. Mentioning the no-alcohol policy would almost certainly have brought to mind the temperance hall movement aimed at working-class improvement. As Lilian Shiman has observed in her book on Victorian temperance movements, the working-class family unit suffered from a lack of space and lack of facilities.64 Temperance halls were founded by temperance societies beginning in the 1830s to provide meeting-places and educational classes for struggling families, since the assumption was that the working classes turned to drink as a way of escaping hardships at



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The best cure for the drunkenness of the lower classes is not a Maine Liquor Law - but soup and sausages, pudding and pies; is not to shut the beershops, but to open the poor man's kitchen.66 The specific subject of the food depots was picked up by other periodicals, notably Good Words (December 1862), which reiterated the benefits of the Glasgow experiment. So 'The Working Man's Restaurant' is part of a wider topical debate on the use and abuse of alcohol, and one Cornhill reader (an individualist of whom Stephen would doubtless approve) is shown to be actively involved in a philanthropic experiment aimed at alleviating one social ill of the day. What the writer finds most admirable in the hall are those attempts to create a semblance of middle-class comfort: a bright, almost elegant establishment with reading-rooms and a separate woman-only space. But the writer is most emphatic in conveying the entrepreneurial aspect of the venture; not merely a charitable soup kitchen, this restaurant is a profit-making venture which in turn nurtures working-class pride. 67 The Cornhill article reaffirms a middle-class model of prosperity, and also shows a point of intersection for different discourses which are at least implicitly addressed: the temperance debate, an acceptance of gendered spaces, and the right-headedness of the capitalist businessman. Criminality has always held a sensational value in newspapers and periodicals, and in the early 1860s, when sensation novels were glutting the market and gaining currency with middle-class readers, Cornhill carried several articles aimed at the reader interested in descriptions of crime and punishment. Many of these articles make references to recent sensational crimes, like the execution of Catherine Wilson in October 1862, a case which received wide periodical attention because the criminal was a woman and because she was convicted purely on circumstantial evidence. 68 While Cornhill was not initially known for serializing highly popular sensation novels (unlike Eraser's, say, which at



home. In the 1860s, attempts were made by teetotallers to introduce prohibition legislation, and the virtues and vices of alcohol were much discussed in Cornhill and other periodicals. 65 In fact, we are told that the idea for the restaurant described in the article came from a previous Cornhill article of June 1860, which states:


this time was running Mary Braddon's Aurora Floyd), its links to sensational press reports, generally staples of both the metropolitan and regional newspapers, can be seen in male-dominated non-fiction articles linked to sensational news events. To present itself as a sensational magazine would not have been proper for Cornhill at this time (although Frederick Greenwood's Margaret Denzil's History is pretty sensational), but under the guise of respectable, male non-fiction, sensational events could find their way into Cornhill's discourse. And in such articles, depictions of gender transgression, particularly affronts to conventional femininity, could be more visible than in the fiction. Thus in 'The Medical Evidence of Crime' (March 1863), Francis Anstie begins his discussion by referring to 'the trial of the woman Wilson'.69 Of course nothing as graphic as the Saturday Review's bloodthirsty and misogynistic account of the case (25 October 1863) could ever appear in Cornhill, but a subtle, discreet mention like the one above would be enough to bring the case to the (male) reader's consciousness, and it suggests the reader's familiarity with and interest in the sensational criminal news items of the day. The November 1862 issue carried two articles which approach sensational coverage, those on 'Circumstantial Evidence: The Case of Jessie M'Lachlan' and on 'Professional Thieves'. Jessie M'Lachlan was a woman sentenced to death for murder but who was given a commuted sentence at Her Majesty's pleasure for life by the Home Secretary. The case provided the impetus for the press to discuss judicial reform, capital punishment, and circumstantial evidence, and The Times took particular interest in the case, as shown by the four leaders in October and November devoted to the Home Secretary's decision.70 As discussed in this chapter above, the article on thieves describes the framework of a criminal family as a corrupted domestic ideal. And as in 'The Working Man's Restaurant' we see how different discourses intersect in the nonfiction: we are in the underworld of the professional thief but recognize the language and familial structure associated with the domestic ideal. To an extent, crime is also addressed in Cornhill's fiction, for example through Romola's Tito, who moves between the centre of political power to the margins of treachery. His criminal mind leads him away from the domestic haven offered by Romola to his secret peasant mistress, Tessa. Although his crimes are whitecollar and enmeshed in the volatile political circumstances of



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Renaissance Florence, his deceit and perversion of the domestic ideal are no less poignant than the Victorian professional thief's discussed in the non-fiction. Furthermore, the illustrations to fiction and poetry offered visual images of sensational events. Consider the confrontation between Baldassare and Tito from Romola, illustrated in 'Will His Eyes Open?' in July 1863 (Fig. 1.1), or the drawing accompanying the poem 'Manoli' in September 1862 (Fig. 1.2). Both demonstrate how sensationalism can enter even the most discreet middle-class shilling monthly. In February 1863, Fitzjames Stephen wrote the closest thing to a political reformist article that can be found in Cornhill in the early 1860s. 'The Punishment of Convicts' argues that sentencing reform is necessary to ensure proper punishments for crimes. He asserts that the judicial system spends too long capturing the criminal and pays too little attention to him afterward. Stephen's analogy reveals something about the middle-class men he addresses: A pack of hounds, and a number of men, dogs, and horses will spend hours in hunting a fox, which, when caught, is abandoned to the dogs without an observation. 71 To make his point, he uses a male-bonding analogy that appeals to his reader's sporting sentiments: not punishing convicts properly is like releasing a well-chased fox. And if that fails to hit the mark with some, he appeals a second time to the professional ethics of his reader: failure to sentence convicts consistently would be like a doctor taking the utmost care in diagnosis but ignoring the prescription completely. For Stephen, sentencing reform is a question of responsibility or duty. By making recognizable comparisons to the all-male professional and social lives of the reader, the writer makes his point about reform with greater impact at the same time as he distinguishes the convict as a being separate from the middle-classes. But even in the male space of the nonfiction article, Stephen finds that he must maintain discretion, as when classifying types of crimes. Defining the third type, those odious in nature, he mentions cruelty to animals and 'others on which it is better not to be too explicit',72 which I presume to mean a sexual deviancy or some similar perversity which dare not speak its name, or have its name spoken. Like so many of Cornhill's non-fiction articles, 'The Punishment of Convicts' is part of a wider cultural discourse, in this case the debate over prison




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Fig. 1.2 'Manoli', Cornhill Magazine (September 1862)


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reform; although the Westminster Review's treatment of the topic in January 1863 provides a more thorough analysis of the subject,73 Cornhill in this instance is contributing directly to the debate about a controversial social reform. Middle-class shared knowledge or experience was another area which contributors took every opportunity to mention. References to those things which 'everyone knows', whether a recent murder trial or a scientific publication, helps create a union of readers with similar backgrounds, tastes, and interests. This projected configuration may not be absolutely accurate, but the impression given is one of a large community of readers with equal access to and interest in a number of events, and, of course, the gentleman's club projected precisely this unanimity of experience. In an article about the 32 volumes of the State Trials, a collection of legal trials in England beginning in the reign of Henry I, Fitzjames Stephen wants to illustrate 'the great general interest' which the trials can excite.74 He assumes the reader's familiarity with the most important historical cases: The case of ship money, the impeachment of Lord Strafford, the trial of Charles I, the trials for the Popish plot, the trials for Monmouth's insurrection on the Western Circuit, and the trial of the seven Bishops, are familiar to those who have even the most popular acquaintance with English history. (353) Whether or not readers were well acquainted with the particulars of these and other historical cases may be questioned, but Stephen's projection of his readership unites them under the banner of shared knowledge. The club-like bonding of the article also works because the writer appeals to the w o r k i n g professionalism of readers. Stephen, a lawyer by training, writes from within the respectable, male preserve of the law, and his discourse would have been intimate and familiar to a legal readership. He prefers the legal case histories to political histories because of their professional quality: Men are never so much themselves as when they are actively engaged in the practice of their professions; for, of all the influences by which character is moulded, the influence of a profession is the widest and the most searching. (354)



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Read carefully, Stephen's assertion makes the case that men are at their best when they are with other men, at work. This definition, which links professionalism and manliness, automatically excludes women, who generally were not professionals. It is another way of appealing to the unity of the Cornhill non-fiction reader. The point here is about gendered spaces within periodicals which are predicated upon exclusions. This is not to say that women did not read non-fiction or that men ignored the fiction, rather that the contributions appear, even generically, to be gendered with an ideal or implied male reader in mind. As I understand it, the exclusion at work in the non-fiction was grounded upon exclusions similar to those which defined the allmale club. Stefan Collini's study of the writers of the higher journalism in the nineteenth century shows how the social network of the intellectual journalists centred around club life and around the Athenaeum in particular. 75 Nigel Cross writes of professional journalists that 'the club was the adhesive of Bohemian life. It was more than simply a haven from family life - or lack of it. It provided writers, who by definition have to work alone, with an opportunity to meet together.' 76 Cross constructs a particular version of the isolated writer which I would question, 77 but his point about male writers and clubs is an important one. The social configuration of the men's club and its links to the cultural formation of periodicals informs my readings of periodicals in later chapters, but here it is enough to understand that Cornhill's non-fiction writers were themselves in a similarly unified, professional, all-male circle. Discussing the 'Effect of Railways on Health' in October 1862, G.H. Lewes also targets a professional male reader. His argument revolves around various truths and fallacies about living in the country and commuting to the city for work. Therefore he has defined his audience as those prosperous middle-class members who increasingly left London for the clean air of country living: But it is not the young and healthy we are specially addressing; it is the men whose health is the chief motive for living out of town, and who are, therefore, called upon to consider this one question of health. 78 That those very same commuters may have been reading this article during their morning or evening trip into town further unites the periodical with its male readership. Whereas serial fiction





was often read communally, as in the family circle, non-fiction articles were designed to be personal and digested individually, and periodical literature suited the men's daily commute into town, whether that be London, Liverpool, Manchester or another regional urban centre. The sort of literature pioneered by George Smith in the Pall Mall Gazette a few years later is even more directed to the commuter. Temperance and moderation were highly regarded virtues in the non-fiction, as seen in a series of articles by Francis Anstie on overeating and the effects of alcohol and tobacco. In 'Tobacco: Its Use and Abuse', Anstie refers to 'the young lad', 'a boy', 'the boy-smoker', and 'the men at the universities' who use tobacco, and we immediately understand that the implied reader is male. 79 More interestingly, Anstie positions middle-class moderation between the working classes who need tobacco as the lesser of evils and the upper classes who use it because they are idle: On behalf of the ill-fed, ill-clad, and anxious classes, I feel driven to lift up a protest against the mistaken spirit, as I think it, of philanthropic reform which would drive tobacco completely out of use, or limit its use to the rich and the irredeemably lazy sections of society. The result of my own observations has been the production of the conviction in my mind, that the majority of the poor and anxious classes, in London at any rate, after reaching a certain age, begin to indulge in one of three cheap luxuries - alcohol, opium, or tobacco: and, moreover, in the existing state of things, that it is hopeless to expect them to do anything better than choose the best of these three. 80 The working classes are presented as somewhat pitifully tending toward chemical dependencies of one type or another; the upper classes are practically immoral in their sedentary lifestyles; and somewhere between these social polarities are the Cornhill readers who, Anstie hopes, will prove middle-class superiority by moderating their behaviour unlike the poor and the rich. Note that the magazine masks its own self-interest in maintaining comfort because the article is written on behalf of the underprivileged. Comparing Anstie's assertion that philanthropic reform is futile with the reform-minded, entrepreneurial position in 'The Working Man's Restaurant' (discussed above) suggests that, in terms



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of a single, coherent social ideology, the Cornhill contributors were not necessarily of like mind. In another article by Anstie about 'Overeating and Undereating' the poor and the rich are used as extremes of behaviour which the middle classes ought to avoid.81 Child mortality in poor classes results from poorly nourished, overworked mothers who breastfeed, and the overeating in wealthier classes is caused simply by their own ignorance. Again, the middle classes must find their way through moderation between the extremes of squalor and indulgence seen in the lower and upper classes. Women were suspect of overindulgence as well as men. G.H. Lewes, unusually addressing women readers by writing about the use of cosmetics in Aids to Beauty, Real and Artificial' in March 1863, describes how the improving qualities of cosmetics are most often a false way of covering over Nature's defects. He asserts: Fortunes are made by cosmetics. Large sums, we know, are paid to artists who undertake to 'enamel' the skins of ladies bestowing the radiance of health where nature or disease has set a very different sign. Dear madam, it is all a fiction! Cosmetics are impositions. The credulity of vanity, supported by blank ignorance, may induce you to spend time and money on such appliances to create a 'complexion;' but if you knew how your skin was constructed, how it grew, how it breathed, and how it assumed its 'complexion/ you would as soon think of rendering hieroglyphics legible by whitewashing a monument. 82 Like cosmetics, his perception of the woman reader's attention to fashion also comes under attack: Fashion in all its hideousness is despotic, and can only be rebelled against by very exceptional people. There is, however, a rational and aesthetic obedience no less than an irrational and hideous servility. Perhaps in nothing does the feminine intellect more markedly betray its weakness than in this matter of costume. 83 Lewes's remedy for a clear complexion is a healthy overall body, and he advocates that by the clever use of colours and form in dress to aid beauty, 'the tyranny of fashion would be reduced to moderation'. 84 However, this article does not simply offer advice





to the woman reader; it derides female behaviour and intelligence and promulgates a male critique of femininity. Serial non-fiction is an occasional element in Cornhill, although it appears more frequently in other magazines. In Macmillan's, for example, there are two-part stories on 'Progress in China', 'A Visit to Lutzen in October', and 'Across the Channel', and an article on the American Civil War was practically a monthly feature. Cornhill contained some serial non-fiction - for example, Lewes's 'Notes on Science' and 'Our Survey of Literature and Science' and Thackeray's 'Roundabout Papers' - and such non-fiction unites the reader in a way the serial does, by creating a network of references to other articles which have appeared earlier, a practice which links the magazine's non-fiction and demonstrates the unity of the contributors. The suggestion is not that contributors were consciously and purposefully self-referential (although they may have been), but that by referring back and forth through the issues and volumes, an experience similar to serial reading was produced. Although I have singled out particular contributors, Cornhill's policy of anonymity, as with most periodicals and newspapers at this time, did not privilege the author over the periodical. Anonymity was a genteel tradition which not only put the full weight of a periodical behind an article's ideas but also prevented individual achievement or notoriety. As an article in Blackwood's in 1859 describes it, the 'secresy of its organization' 85 was crucial in the press because it acted as a type of restraint against a total invasion of privacy. The writer defines the recent proliferation of new periodicals by the increase in narrow interests, and 'class' specificity as the character of the English press: To sign or not to sign? - that is the question; but as applied to the English press it is only another form of the question, To be or not to be? The anonymous is the corner-stone of class journalism .. .86 Without anonymity, as the allusion to Hamlet implies, the English press would commit self-slaughter, or at the very least become something rather too resembling American journalism. Cornhill, although formally maintaining a policy of anonymity, was not a completely secret organization. Often, poems were initialled, as were explosive articles such as Ruskin's 'Unto This Last'. Poems



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deserved signature because they were high art, and Ruskin had to be attributed because the magazine needed to distance itself from the ideas he expressed. However, from the start Cornhill was lax about the need for anonymity, and in the very first issue clues to the fiction contributors are given in the editorial note. Also, the trade journal Publishers' Circular often identified both fiction and non-fiction writers in periodicals, and advertisements often named contributors, a point to which I will return in Chapter 4. Cornhill, while not approaching the heterogeneity of, say, the Fortnightly Review a few years later, was not impenetrable in the way the Blackwood's article suggested periodicals needed to be. Still, on balance Cornhill's authority is located in the weight of the magazine and the editor, and not in the individual contributor. I am making two points about the non-fiction articles: first, that they were mostly written by men who carved out a textual space for male readers within the family magazine, and secondly, that they helped promote a unified, continuous reading experience for men. Educated, professional, prosperous, moderate - all of these were ideological constructions in the non-fiction of the middle-class Cornhill reader, and all of these helped gather the reader under one banner. Simply put, non-fiction relied on a core of male writers who wrote with their male peers in mind. The approach reproduces the atmosphere of the gentleman's club, which in many ways galvanized middle-class male aspirations. Laurel Brake has discussed how the network of 'Metaphysical Society' members dominated variously both the Contemporary Review and Nineteenth Century in the 1870s, and how the Nineteenth Century format 'approximates that of the Society'. 87 Mary Ann Clawson, in writing about the development of fraternal organizations in America, observes that fraternalism was offered in opposition to women's domestic sphere. The fraternal organization provided an all-male, morally improving space for men. 88 These observations can be useful in understanding how the Cornhill non-fiction writers were creating their own space and discourse within a domestic, drawing-room magazine. And George Smith's jovial monthly dinners for Cornhill contributors furthered the club-like comradery and network of non-fiction writers. In a Cornhill article in February 1863, on sarcastic, malicious popular journalism, the writer distinguishes this 'other class of writing' by the effeminacy of its practitioners. 89 They are misogynistic because they have no women friends or have been ill-treated





by them, but the further implication is that the writers are not manly. The writer gives the example of Alphonse Karr in France, who, it is coyly suggested, was unsuccessful with the other sex and who was wildly eccentric in his dress; whether Karr is being described in veiled terms as homosexual is uncertain, but what is obvious is that his offensiveness is a consequence of his unmanliness. Karr (1808-90) was best known for his satiric writings in the periodical Les Guepes (The Wasps); the poison of his ink was his eccentric behaviour and dress, described by a contemporary biographer: Bientot la pose devint chez lui une occupation serieuse, une manie, un systeme, un besoin de chaque jour et de chaque heure. II s'appliqua constamment a mettre son individualite en relief et a faire saillir aux yeux du public ce qu'il y a de particulier dans sa personne et dans son caractere. 90 He is further described as 'un feroce original' who greeted editors wearing elaborate turbans and slippers and whose bedroom was painted black.91 The ideological positioning of journalism in the Cornhill article posits Cornhill-style non-fiction at the centre of manly male discourse, while other forms of lesser, bitchy and gossipy journalism are denigrated as effeminate and 'beneath the dignity of men of sense to meddle'. 92 The same article states: In England, a magazine, a periodical, or a journal must represent either an interest or a principle, and in proportion to the breadth and importance of that interest, or the deepness and indestructibility of that principle, will be the extent of the influence enjoyed. 93 But even the spaces within a periodical are directed at particular readers and interests. An article in Temple Bar in 1862, discussing periodicals, fiction and literature, states that 'the literature of Fiction is the literature of Society', 94 and I would claim, the literature of non-fiction was the literature of politics, religion and other serious discourses; it was the literature of men. On the whole, the non-fiction in Cornhill represented the interests and principles of its male readers. It functioned in balance with the domestic fiction and maintained a gendered ideological framework within



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the magazine. Within the scope of acceptable subjects, nonfiction engaged, however subtly and discreetly, in a number of discourses, some of which actually questioned and challenged the types of gender convention upheld in the textual space of the magazine. Transgressive women and effeminate men, for example, both found their way into the early Cornhills; but both enter largely t h r o u g h the male-dominated non-fiction. What remains to be decided, perhaps in another sort of study, is whether anyone actually read the non-fiction in the same huge numbers as enjoyed the fiction, and if not, why not.

Notes 1. Mary Hamer, Writing By Numbers: Trollope's Serial Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). See her appendix, 'The Initial Publication of Trollope's Novels in England', which lists publication details for all his novels, 182-6. 2. Trollope was actually offered three and a half times more, or £3500, but accepted £2500 in order to retain the copyright. See N. John Hall, Trollope: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). 3. For example, in An Autobiography Trollope discusses the lack of success of Brown, Jones, and Robinson: T do not know that I heard any opinion expressed of it, except by the publisher, who kindly remarked that he did not think it was equal to my usual work. Though he had purchased the copyright, he did not republish the story in book form until 1870, and then it passed into the world of letters sub silentio, 161. 4. Gaye Tuchman with Nina E. Fortin, Edging Women Out: Victorian Novelists, Publishers and Social Change (London: Routledge, 1989), 7. 5. Ibid., 7-10. Tuchman makes large claims about the the gendered dimension of novel writing in the nineteenth century, and it should be noted that her conclusions are based on a relatively small archive of material. While more work in this area needs to be undertaken, her conclusions are extremely suggestive about the gendered construction of literature. 6. The best overall discussion of the Victorian publishing system remains J.A. Sutherland, Victorian Novelists and Publishers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976). Tuchman's Edging Women Out introduces gender differentiation in novel writing. Hamer, Writing by Numbers, offers a good overview of the publishing industry with particular attention to the development of serialization. 7. See Hamer, Writing by Numbers, x-xi. 8. Hall, Trollope, 199. 9. Ibid., 197. 10. [E.S. Dallas,] Anthony Trollope , / The Times (23 May 1859), 12. Also quoted in Hall, Trollope, 189.




Trollope and the

Magazines

11. In Writing by Numbers, Hamer notes, 'there was no month between January 1860 and July 1867 which did not see the release of a further instalment of at least one current Trollope novel', 88. 12. Gordon N. Ray, ed., The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray IV (London: Oxford University Press, 1946), 160. 13. Ibid., 158. 14. Ibid., 161. 15. Leonard Huxley, 'Chronicles of "CornhiH"', Cornhill Magazine 52 n.s. (1922), 370. 16. See Barbara Quinn Schmidt, 'In the Shadow of Thackeray: Leslie Stephen as the Editor of the Cornhill Magazine in Joel Wiener, ed., Innovators and Preachers: The Role of Editor in Victorian England (New York: Greenwood Press, 1985), 78, in which she states that Thackeray 'provided a narrator, a man of the world who was able to merge wisdom with nostalgia and mellowness as he would at a dinner party, telling anecdotes, frankly admitting his prejudices, making moral and social pronouncements, and commenting sympathetically on the contradictions and the caprice of everyday life'. 17. For a comprehensive look at reviewers' responses to Trollope's realism and for an overview of their uses of realism, see David Skilton, Anthony Trollope and His Contemporaries (London: Longman, 1972). 18. Thackeray rejected Browning's poem 'Lord Walter's Wife', Trollope's story 'Mrs. General Talboys' and discontinued Ruskin's Unto This Last. Browning's and Trollope's good-natured responses to these censorings are documented in Ray's Letters and Papers. Cornhill, of course, was not unique among periodicals in its censorship. See David Skilton, 'The Trollope Reader', in Jeremy H a w t h o r n , ed., The Nineteenth-Century British Novel (London: Edward Arnold, 1986): 'most authors, editors and publishers were operating a voluntary moral censorship or self-restraint which accorded happily with much middleclass public opinion, and there seems to have been a temporary, though surprisingly broad consensus - morally suffocating though it would later seem - about what should and should not go into a novel', 143. See also my discussion of the censoring of Trollope's Rachel Ray in Chapter 2. 19. Jenifer Glynn, Prince of Publishers: A Biography of George Smith (London: Allison and Busby, 1986) provides a circulation list for Cornhill during the 1860s. By December 1869, circulation was at 27,000 (143). Still, in the early 1860s Cornhill was among the most popular shilling monthlies, and several newer magazines patterned themselves on Cornhill. 20. Quoted in ibid., 144-5. 21. George Moore, 'A New Censorship of Literature', Pall Mall Gazette 40 (10 December 1884), 1-2. 22. Ibid., 1. 23. Glynn, Prince of Publishers, 137. 24. Andrew Blake, Reading Victorian Fiction: The Cultural Context and Ideological Content of the Nineteenth-Century Novel (London: Macmillan, 1989) takes a similar approach in looking at Framley Parsonage in



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25. 26. 27.

28.

29. 30.

31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36.

Ideology and Gendered Space

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Cornhill: 'This novel provides an excellent illustration of the intertextuality of fiction in the periodical press: a mutuality of concern with the rest of the magazine's contents runs throughout its pages', 91. Julia Kristeva, 'Word, Dialogue and Novel' (1966), in Toril Moi, ed., The Kristeva Reader (London: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 36. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), A. M. Sheridan Smith, trans. (1972; reprinted London: Routledge, 1991), especially 21-40. Ibid., 30. In his chapter on the 'unities of discourse', Foucault insists on the need to overcome pre-existent notions like tradition, development, spirit, and influence within the theme of continuity, 21-2. This leads us naturally to rethink the ways in which we define, divide, and group discourses like literature, which, in turn, helps elucidate how vital study of the periodical press can be in challenging traditional methods of literary scholarship. See Foucault's discussion in Archaeology: 'The rules of formation are conditions of existence (but also of coexistence, maintenance, modification, and disappearance) in a given discursive division', 39. M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, trans., and Michael Holquist, ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 33. All Cornhill references are to vol. vi unless otherwise noted parenthetically in the text with a roman numeral to indicate the volume number. Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), especially the Introduction and Chapter 2. Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 2. John Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies (London: Smith, Elder, 1865), 148. Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality Since 1800 (London: Longman, 1981), 29, comments on Ruskin's statement that 'such an elevated tone was obviously not universal. But in all social discourse a stable home was seen both as a microcosm of stable society and a sanctuary from an unstable and rapidly changing one.' See also Walter E. Houghton on Ruskin's passage in The Victorian Frame of Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), 343-4. Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society, 28. Ibid., 37. James Kincaid, The Novels of Anthony Trollope (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977), 92. However, he does call The Small House 'the darkest novel in the series', 96. Raymond Williams's The Country and the City (1973; reprinted London: Hogarth, 1985) compares 'the ease' of Dr. Thome, the third Barchester novel, with 'the disturbance, the unease, the divided construction' of George Eliot's later novels. He says that 'Trollope, in his Barchester novels, is at ease with schemes of inheritance, with the interaction of classes and interests, with the lucky



Domestic

37. 38. 39. 40.

41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

Trollope and the

Magazines

discovery and the successful propertied marriage. His interest is all in how it happens, not how it is done', 174-5. [W.R. Greg,] 'Why Are Women Redundant?' National Review 14 (April 1862), 434-60. Ibid., 438. Ibid., 440. See Alvar Ellegard, The Readership of the Periodical Press in Mid-Victorian Britain (Gothenburg: Goteborg Universitets Arsskrift, 1957), 32. Josef Altholz, The Religious Press in Britain, 1760-1900 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989) says that National Review 'became the most distinguished Unitarian review and something more, fully the equal of the three great quarterlies', 75. Wellesley 3 calls the National Review 'clearly one of the great quarterlies of the Victorian age', 135. 'Sisters, Help Sisters', The Times (3 April 1862), 7, mentions the success of sending women to the colonies, but also stresses the need to find work for women in Britain. See two separate replies by Emily Faithfull and Maria S. Rye, 'The Employment of Women' (7 April 1862), 6, which again call on wealthier ladies to help out and which document efforts to organize emigration procedures for women. A follow-up letter by Maria Rye and Jane E. Lewin, 'Female Middleclass Emigration' (9 April 1862), 12, lists the donors who have contributed to their emigration campaign. However, not all letters were as supportive: Charles Kingsley's response, 'The Emigration of Women' (11 April 1862), 5, doubts Miss Faithfull's employment scheme and women's ability to work in general. He says that woman 'is physically weaker; her health is more uncertain; she is (at least, at present) worse trained at methodical labour; and the power of work ceases at least ten years sooner than the man's, leaving her destitute in old age. But why should she compete with the man? She was not meant to do so. All attempts to employ her in handicraft are but substitutes for that far nobler and more useful work which Nature intends for her - to marry and bear children.' Kingsley does support Rye's emigration fund as a way of marrying off single women. 'The Ladies Sanitary Association', Saturday Review 13 (12 April 1862), 413-14. 'Girl Graduates', The Spectator (5 April 1862), 377. Frances Power Cobbe, 'What Shall We Do With Our Old Maids?' Eraser's Magazine 66 (November 1862), 595. 'The Trollope Papers', Bodleian Library, MSS Don.c.9. [H.W Holland] 'Professional Thieves', Cornhill 6 (November 1862), 640-53, hereafter noted in the text parenthetically by page number. Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction, 180. Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society, 30. Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction, 180-2. 'The Gallows', Saturday Review 14 (25 October 1862), 500-1. Ibid., 500. Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (London: Verso, 1991), 9. The blurring of boundaries between fiction and non-fiction can also



44

54. 55. 56.

57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

66. 67.

68.

69. 70.

45

be seen more directly in the 1860s in sensation fiction which often used real events of murder or scandal as the basis for the narrative. 'General Literature', The Economist (9 March 1861), 260. See also R.R. Tiemersma, 'Fiction in the Cornhill Magazine January 1860-March 1871' (Ph.D. dissertation, Northwestern University, 1962), 90. Cornhill began publishing Ruskin's series Unto This Last, but discontinued it because of its controversial views on political economy. See note 21 above. Leslie Stephen, The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen 1 (2 vols.; London: Smith, Elder, 1895), 183-4. That Leslie Stephen was Fitzjames's brother, and that he later became editor of Cornhill, further attests to the very tight network. Ibid., 214. [Fitzjames Stephen,] 'Society', Cornhill 7 (January 1863), 31-41. Quoted in Hugo Young, One of Us: A Biography of Margaret Thatcher (1989; reprinted London: Pan Books, 1990), 490. Stephen stood for Parliament as a Liberal in 1873 but was defeated. On the links between politics and Reviews, see Joanne Shattock, Politics and Reviewers: The Edinburgh and the Quarterly (London, Leicester, and New York: Leicester University Press, 1989). See the Times Index, 1862. [H. McCroskey,] 'The Working Man's Restaurant', Cornhill 7 (February 1863), 252-8, hereafter noted in the text parenthetically by page number. Lilian Lewis Shiman, Crusade Against Drink in Victorian England (London: Macmillan, 1988). See the chapters on temperance reformation and legal suasion. See [Francis E. Anstie,] 'Is It Food, Medicine, or Poison?' Cornhill 5 (June 1862), 707-16; [Francis E. Anstie,] 'Does Alcohol Act as Food?' Cornhill 5 (September 1862), 319-29; and [William Benjamin Carpenter,] 'Alcohol: What Becomes of It in the Living Body?', Westminster Review 19 n.s. (January 1861), 33-56. [E.S. Dallas,] 'Poor Man's Kitchen', Cornhill 1 (June 1860), 754. Note that 'Cooking Depots for Working People', Good Words 3 (December 1862), 732-5, takes up the issue of whether such enterprises ought to be profit-driven. The proprietor's letter, in which he states that the scheme was 'purely for the public benefit' and not for profit, was published in Good Words 4 (January 1863), 80. See 'Secret Poisoning', Temple Bar 6 (November 1862), 579-84; 'The Gallows', Saturday Review (October 25, 1862), 500-1; 'The Case of Catherine Wilson', London Review 5 (4 October 1862), 296-8; leaders in the Times (29 September and 22 October 1862). [Francis E. Anstie,] 'The Medical Evidence of Crime', Cornhill 7 (March 1863), 338. Leaders in the Times concerning the case of Jessie M'Lachlan can be found on 31 October, and on 4, 10 and 27 November 1862. This type of sensationalism remains very much a part of contemporary media. While there are levels of sensational coverage, from the salacious to the sanguine, subjects such as capital punishment still offer




71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77.

78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90.

Trollope and the Magazines the broadsheets the opportunity to place sensational crimes on the front page under the label of topical, news journalism. In America especially, through tabloid television programmes such as Hard Copy, the links between sensationalism and 'news' are even more pronounced. [Fitzjames Stephen,] 'The Punishment of Convicts', Cornhill 7 (February 1863), 190. Ibid., 196. See [Walter F. Crofton,] 'English Convicts: What Should Be Done With Them', Westminster Review (January 1863), 1-31. [Fitzjames Stephen,] 'The State Trials', Cornhill 6 (September 1862), 351, hereafter noted parenthetically in the text by page number. Stefan Collini, Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1850-1930 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), chapter 1, especially 16 ff. Nigel Cross, The Common Writer: Life in Nineteenth-Century Grub Street (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 107. He notes that the Garrick was founded for writers in 1831. One could look to the collaborative work of John Stuart Mill, Harriet Taylor Mill and Helen Taylor to refute the romantic notion of the lone writer. See Ann P. Robson and John M. Robson, eds., Sexual Equality: Writings by John Stuart Mill, Harriet Taylor Mill and Helen Taylor (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), especially the Introduction. [G.H. Lewes,] 'Effect of Railways on Health', Cornhill 6 (October 1862), 483. [Francis E. Anstie,] 'Tobacco: Its Use and Abuse', Cornhill 6 (November 1862), 605-15. Ibid., 614. [Francis E. Anstie,] 'Overeating and Undereating', Cornhill 8 (July 1863), 391-400. [G.H. Lewes,] 'Aids to Beauty, Real and Artificial', Cornhill 7 (March 1863), 392. Ibid., 399. Ibid., 400. [E.S. Dallas,] 'Popular Literature - The Periodical Press, Part II', Blackwood's Magazine (February 1859), 180. Ibid., 184. Laurel Brake, 'Theories of Formation. The Nineteenth Century: vol. 1, No. 1, March 1877. Monthly. 2/6', Victorian Periodicals Review 25:1 (Spring 1992), 17. Mary Ann Clawson, Constructing Brotherhood: Class, Gender, and Fraternalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), especially the first two chapters. [Coke Richardson,] 'The Sharpshooters of the Press: In England, France, and Germany', Cornhill 7 (February 1863), 238-51. Eugene de Mirecourt, Histoire contemporaine, portraits et silhouettes au XlXeme siecle: Alphonse Karr, no. 38 (Paris: Achille Faure, 1867), 30: 'Posing had become a serious business, a mania, a system, a daily



46

91. 92.

93. 94.

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and hourly need. He constantly threw into relief his individuality and made his peculiar manner and character a public spectacle' (my translation). Karr is perhaps best known for his witty epigrams, such as 'Plus c,a change plus c'est la meme chose', written in 1849 about the recent revolutions. Ibid., 31 ff. [Richardson,] 'Sharpshooters of the Press', 242. A great deal of work remains to be done on the subject of cross-dressing in journalism, e.g. those men who adopted a female pose in writing articles or in editing magazines. Ibid., 238. [Robert W Buchanan,] 'Society's Looking Glass', Temple Bar 6 (August 1862), 131.




Uncovering Periodical Identities: Good Words and the Rejection of Rachel Ray Less than a month after finishing writing the final parts to The Small House at Allington, Trollope began his next serial, Rachel Ray, to be published in the religious monthly Good Words beginning July 1863. Although Trollope completed the commissioned novel and the serialization was advertised, Rachel Ray was never serialized in the magazine, but published in two volumes by Chapman and Hall in October 1863. The editor of Good Words, a Scottish Queen's Chaplain, Dr Norman MacLeod, refused Trollope's novel on the grounds that it would be offensive to his readers. Intensive criticism of Good Words and Trollope from the Evangelical extreme led to the rejection of Rachel Ray. This rejection provides not only an interesting case of serial and book publishing history, but also an example of the difficulty for a purportedly religious magazine such as Good Words to serialize a popular secular novelist such as Trollope. By 1864, Good Words had become the most popular monthly magazine, outselling even Cornhill. What, then, was the conflict between an increasingly popular periodical and perhaps the leading novelist of the circulating libraries? What are the apparently conflicting interests between two types of popular literature, religious and secular? Generally, the cheap religious market in the 1850s and 1860s, as with the cheap secular market, consisted mostly of weeklies whose readership included the lower middle and working classes. But in 1861, after only a year as a weekly, Good Words became a monthly and leaned increasingly towards Cornhill's popular secularism rather than strictly the cheap religious market. In Good Words and his previous periodicals, MacLeod was genuinely committed to redefining cheap religious literature in 48 10.1057/9780230288546 - Trollope and the Magazines, Mark Turner


2

Uncovering Periodical Identities

several ways - by maintaining a non-denominational policy, by extending the range of its quality fiction, and by repositioning Good Words in the monthly market. However, at a particular moment in the process of broadening the scope of cheap religious literature, Rachel Ray was caught in the tension between stasis and change and so did not reach the pages of the periodical press until some years after volume publication.

PURE MORALS Trollope was no stranger to rejection at the time Rachel Ray was refused. A letter to Thackeray in 1860 acknowledges the rejection of the story 'Mrs. General Talboys' for Cornhill: I trust you to believe me when I assure you that I feel no annoyance as against you at the rejection of my story. An impartial Editor must do his duty. Pure morals must be supplied. And the owner of the responsible name must be the index of purity. A writer for a periodical makes himself subject to this judgment by undertaking such a w o r k . . . (Letters 1, 206) Trollope disagreed with Thackeray's judgement, because he maintained the belief that novelists ought to write 'for the best and wisest of English readers; and not mainly for the weakest' (Letters 1, 207). As head of the largest circulating library, Charles Mudie was the overriding figure of importance in considering the morality of a work of fiction. According to Guinivere Griest, 'what Mudie thought good became more and more important as his library flourished and expanded'. 1 However, it is difficult to assess how Mudie's moral code constructed the contents of periodicals, or how Mudie's censorship reflected what many circulating library subscribers wanted to read. Griest believes that, like other institutions of the age, the circulating library extended and emphasized the ideas with which it began, solidifying them until, at the height of its influence, it appeared to be the originator of these ideas, and was so attacked. 2



49


Griest's analysis of this great 'institution of the age' tends to unify the library system in a way which Michel Foucault has called total history, the attempt to present an uncomplicated, coherent version of an historical period. 3 By assuming that Mudie's 'reflected the tastes and attitudes of his readers', 4 Griest's study of Mudie's, while invaluable in providing a portrait of one of the most significant players in the cultural field, tends to ignore the possible conflicts which occurred within the cultural politics of the publishing industry. Whether Mudie was a moral guardian of middle-class literary culture or not, the active agency of individuals like the editor in constructing, not reflecting, readership needs to be examined. Even Griest asserts that Thackeray's Cornhill policy (as described in the previous chapter) was 'even more restrictive than that of the libraries'. 5 In Cornhill the editor constructs the reading audience, determined by the presence of women and children. Relative to other shilling monthlies, Cornhill initially published little highly popular sensational material, which the libraries stocked and which was almost assuredly not familycircle material. Furthermore, there were cases when readers reacted against Mudie's moral code, as in the case of Charles Reade's Cream, which Griest discusses. 6 We cannot assume that Mudie's or the periodicals were passively reflecting what they knew readers wanted; such an approach defuses tensions where they almost certainly existed. Although there were cases of repression by periodicals and libraries, most writers exercised self-censorship as well and it was unusual for most novelists to be banned from a circulating library 7 Writing about literary censorship in the nineteenth century, Donald Thomas asserts that the most important form of moral censorship was one with which the law was not directly concerned. It was a censorship exercised ultimately by booksellers and libraries, penultimately by publishers or editors, and in the first place by authors themselves. And when all this was done, there still remained the individual censorship of the buyer or borrower. 8 The Obscene Publications Act of 1857 attempted to pornographic literature, but the more ambiguous area offensive literature was left to the industry and the Reservations about the circulating library network of


deal with of morally consumer. periodicals


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and triple-deckers began to be expressed vigorously as early as the 1860s, focusing on the popularity of sensation novels by writers such as Mary Braddon. 9 However, Trollope was not a literary rebel, and his fiction was found acceptable by the mass of circulating library readers. The network of moral safeguards described by Thomas above - author, bookseller, publisher, editor, library, consumer - was what George Moore would react against so strongly in Literature at Nurse (1885). Moore protested that 'the librarian rules the roost; he crows, and every chanticleer pitches his note in the same key. He, not the ladies and gentlemen who place their names on the title-pages, is the author of modern English fiction.'10 What, then, happened to Rachel Ray? In fact, the novel is a simple comedy of rural love. Rachel, a young girl who lives with her mother and sister, falls in love with an ambitious young man new to town. A series of obstacles prevents the two from being together. The young man leaves town; the obstacles are overcome; the young man returns and marries Rachel. End of story. There are familiar Trollopian themes woven into the main narrative and thin subplots, such as the pastoral myth of the country, the tension between progress and tradition, and the difficult position for young women whose fate is often determined by others. But none of these things caused Rachel Ray to be rejected by Good Words. It was Trollope's often caustic attacks on the clergy's role as society's moral guardians which forced the magazine's editor to refuse the novel. In fairness to the editor of a religious magazine, it would have been difficult to accept a novel which targets the Low Church and Evangelicals. 11 Robert Polhemus believes that 'Trollope hated Evangelicalism as much as it was in him to hate anything human, and he saw love as a potential influence to counteract its lifedespising mentality'. 12 Rachel's sister, Mrs. Dorothea Prime, is a strictly Low Church widow approaching the important threshold of 30, and a committed member of the local Dorcas Society. Rachel says of the Dorcas women, 'they talk nothing but scandal all the time they are there, and speak any ill they can of the poor young girls whom they talk about'. 13 Trollope's attacks on the Dorcas Society continue throughout the novel, and Miss Pucker the Dorcas hostess is depicted as bitter and spiteful, revelling in Rachel's troubles. The assault on charitable Dorcas women alone would not have been enough to censor the novel, but it is





interesting to note that other contemporary religious magazines were discussing Dorcas Societies in far more exalting tones. The Family Treasury of Sunday Reading, for example, ran a series of occasional articles (from February 1860 to June 1861) entitled 'Our Dorcas Society', 1 4 in which topics include dress, p e r s o n a l appearance, and home duties - the very points which Trollope derides in Baslehurst's Dorcas women. Founded a year before Good Words, the Family Treasury was also edited by a Scotsman, the Reverend Andrew Cameron, and the two periodicals shared some contributors such as Thomas Guthrie. MacLeod could not really have serialized a novel so scathing about Dorcas Societies when religious contemporaries were so clearly sober about them, unless he was prepared to signal that Good Words was definitely refiguring itself within another, less sober magazine market. Mrs Prime is criticized not merely for being a Dorcas woman, but also because 'she had taught herself to believe that cheerfulness was a sin' (4). An opponent of young love (who is considering her own marriage proposal for most of the novel), she moves out of the cottage when her mother condones Rachel's relationship with the young man, Luke, and so shields herself from worldiness. Mrs Prime's zealously Evangelical Reverend and suitor, Mr Prong, fares the worst in the novel because of his Evangelical intolerance: Mr. Prong was an energetic, severe, hardworking, and, I fear, intolerant young man, who bestowed very much laudable care upon his sermons. The care and industry were laudable, but not so the pride with which he thought of them and their results. He spoke much of preaching the Gospel, and was sincere beyond all doubt in his desire to do so; but he allowed himself to be led away into a belief that his brethren in the ministry did not preach the Gospel, - that they were careless shepherds, or shepherds' dogs indifferent to the wolf. . . (51) PD. Edwards believes Trollope's harsh treatment of the Evangelicals is related to class prejudices, and that Trollope and 'his characters patently compound, and confuse, sectarian prejudice'. 15 Much is made of Mr. Prong not being educated at one of the Oxford colleges, and we are reminded 'that sometimes he forgot his "h's"'



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(52). Like Mrs Tappitt at the brewery, who sometimes speaks coarsely and becomes 'a little forgetful of niceties learned somewhat late in life' (224), Mr Prong tries to present himself as someone he is not. These social pretensions in the religious and secular realms form the basis of Trollope's satire. He never really attacks the doctrines of clergymen and refrains from discussing the finer points of dogma. His approach, seen throughout the Barchester novels especially, is to parody what he perceives as the overearnestness and superficial hypocrisy of the clergy. Mr Comfort, Mrs Ray's Low Church Reverend, is more kindly than Prong but he covets worldly things: When he endeavoured to teach his flock that they should despise money, he thought that he despised it himself. When he told the little children that this world should be as nothing to them, he did not remember that he himself enjoyed keenly the good things of this world. If he had a fault it was perhaps this, that he was a hard man at a bargain. He liked to have all his temporalities, and make them go as far as they could be stretched. (62) He condones dancing in private but condemns worldiness from the pulpit on Sundays. As his name implies, Mr. Comfort fails to live up to the standard he vehemently preaches. The High Churchman Dr. Harford, whose appearance is relatively brief, suffers from an inability to change and tolerate new ideas: But, now in his old age, he was discontented and disgusted by the changes which had come upon him; and though some bodily strength for further service remained to him, he no longer had any aptitude for useful work. A man cannot change as men change. (234) The difficulty for MacLeod was not simply in accepting Trollope's severe treatment of the strict Evangelicals, but in finding any redeemable clergyman in the novel at all. Trollope, of course, did not hold his clergymen to the same standard that the editor of a





religious periodical would. A few years later, in Clergymen of the Church of England, Trollope writes that 'it almost seems that something approaching to hypocrisy were a necessary component part of the character of the English parish parson, and yet he is a man always on the alert to be honest'. 16 The rural parish priest must preach sternly but remain mild, walk loudly but carry a soft stick. Dr Harford, Mr Comfort and even Mr Prong mean no harm, however much disturbance they inadvertently cause. Whether MacLeod misjudged his author - especially considering the treatment of the Low Church in, say, Barchester Towers (1857) - or was pressured by external forces is another matter. Implicit in Trollope's criticisms of the clergy in Rachel Ray is the opinion that individuals ought to be able to take responsibility for their own lives, and this is presented in gendered terms. Rachel Ray is partly a novel about female duty, Mrs Prime's fixation, and the tensions arising from the conflict between personal and external forms of authority. This is explicit in the first sentence of the novel which introduces the t h e m e of female dependence: There are women who cannot grow alone as standard trees; for whom the support and warmth of some wall, some paling, some post, is absolutely necessary; - who, in their growth, will bend and incline themselves towards some such prop for their life, creeping with their tendrils along the ground till they reach it when the circumstances of life have brought no such prop within their natural and immediate reach. (i) Mrs Ray's inability to make her own decisions, and her need to be guided by a surrogate husband and master, are immediate causes of disruption and anxiety in the novel. Jane Nardin is correct to argue that Mrs Ray is the 'prototype of the angel in the house', but 'her inability to think and act for herself makes her atypical in the novel and undermines this Victorian ideal of womanhood. 1 7 Had Mrs Ray been confident enough in her own moral strength, she need not have sought advice from Mr Comfort, to 'be guided altogether by his counsel' (61). The narrator states, 'I do not know that a widow, circumstanced as was Mrs Ray, could do better than go to her clergyman for advice' (61), but



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the rest of the novel demonstrates that the need to be guided so exclusively by others is a weakness which potentially threatens the comic resolution. Duty to others, then, entails personal integrity and confidence in one's own moral strength. Even after obtaining Mr Comfort's blessing that Rachel should encourage Luke's advances, Mrs Ray was 'not altogether at ease in her mind as to the question, - what line of moral conduct might best befit a devout Christian' (63). Her confusion betrays a belief that her clergyman's advice is contradictory or misguided. Mrs Ray's indecisiveness and perpetual clinging to others are shown alongside her clergyman's failure to provide sound counsel consistent with his preaching. Even the autocrat Mrs Prime turns to Mr Prong because 'he would tell her in what way she had better live' (113), but such advice as he offers appears uncharitable and rigid. Part of Rachel's attractiveness is her insistence that she will not be guided by anyone other than her mother and eventually Luke, and she absolutely refuses to accept her domineering sister's judgements of her behaviour. There are other gendered issues which intersect in the novel which could have made the first volume an uncomfortable read for MacLeod. For example, Mrs Prime's engagement to Mr Prong raises questions about women's property and marriage, and the solution here is that it is better for a woman to keep her property than relinquish her economic power in marriage. As Mrs Ray indicates to her clergyman, money is more important than marriage for Mrs Prime: 'Do let her look sharp after her money', said Mr Comfort. 'Well, that's just it. She's not a bit inclined to give it up to him, I can tell you.' (243) Independence, finally, outweighs duty for Mrs Prime. Ownership of property as it relates to gender is a perennial concern in Trollope's fiction, as we will see in the following chapter in my discussion of The Belton Estate. Here, it is enough simply to realize that Mrs Prime's worries about her independence echo those being articulated in debates in periodicals about single women generally.





We might also consider that Rachel is described in ways that invoke discourses about the fallen woman. Her sister calls her a 'castaway' (47), a word for fallen women in the mid-nineteenth century. In his Preface to The Vicar of Bullhampton (1870), Trollope calls the fallen woman Carry Brattle a castaway, and in the same year Augusta Webster published her dramatic monologue entitled A Castaway', about an upper-class prostitute. 18 The cultural currency of the word signals Mrs Prime's severity and Rachel's sexual awakening. At the Tappitts' ball, when the joys of physical (sexual) expression are available to her through dancing, Rachel feels 'that her head was sinking beneath the waters' (84), a reference to the drowning woman image implicitly linked to the fallen woman. 19 Later in the novel, Mrs Butler Cornbury links Rachel to mermaids, again connecting water imagery to sexuality (348). That Rachel should be described as a sexualized woman is significant, since, as we shall see later in this chapter, it was sensationalism which formed the basis of objections to Trollope's fiction by strict Evangelicals. The drowning, submerging images serve another purpose, however: to rewrite the symbols of baptism in terms of worldly pleasure. The secularizing of religious imagery also occurs in the figure of the inviting arm in the clouds that Luke shows Rachel in C h a p t e r 3; it is not a religious symbol, as in Michelangelo's God and Adam or in depictions of Christ's outstretched arms, but a sign of earthly love and passion. Discourses about intemperance surround Mr Tappitt, who often finds himself 'detained, by business, in the bar of the Dragon Inn' (296). Mrs Tappitt mixes a strong gin and water to obtain her husband's consent for her extravagances at the ball (70), and his drunkenness after an evening in the Dragon increases her leverage in arguing for his early retirement. His recklessness is linked to his drinking, and there is at least the suggestion that fewer evenings in the Dragon would lead to clearer judgement. After the Tappitts have moved to Torquay, we learn that Tappitt, too, could never again stray away from home with mysterious hints that matters connected with malt and hops must be discussed at places in which beer was consumed. He had no longer left to him any excuse for deviating from the regular course of his life even by a hair's breadth . . .20 (396)



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Tappitt's drinking, which takes him away from the home, weakens his power overall because it demeans his stature as a husband (Mrs Tappitt ultimately ensures the family's security) and blurs his business judgement (Mr Tappitt is shown simply to be wrong). It is at least plausible that a number of discourses which enter the novel - women's property, sexual women, intemperate men - made Rachel Ray uncomfortable for MacLeod at a time of exceptionally intense pressure from Evangelicals. Such cultural discourses, together with the representation of a lax clergy, would have posed a significant problem for the clergyman-editor MacLeod. But at least as meaningful is the indirect assumption that individuals ought to accept responsibility for their own actions, to become their own counsellors, which reduces the position of the clergy as moral guardians in the community. Furthermore, the novel demonstrates that women's reliance on m e n ' s advice and aspirations is m o r e often t h a n not wrongheaded. Recurrently, women are disappointed by men, although in the end Rachel is not. 21 Mr Tappitt is self-deluded in his single-mindedness about Luke, and as in so much Victorian fiction, it is up to the wife, bully though she is, to prevent the ruin of her family. Such subversions of accepted Christian gender roles appearing in a purportedly Evangelical periodical would have been, at the very least, unusual. If we accept that Trollope believed in the educative nature of fiction as he states in the Autobiography (220), then we should also accept that 'the novelist, if he have a conscience, must preach his sermons with the same purpose as the clergyman, and must have his own systems of ethics' (A 222). The novelist becomes the preacher, replacing the clergyman in an increasingly secular society. Rachel Ray demonstrates Trollope's own ethical system in which the need for individuals, and women particularly, to become their own moral guardians is more important than following the strict advice of the pastoral adviser who is probably somewhat hypocritical anyway. Unless he was prepared to promote a value system which undermined the eminence and influence of the clergy, MacLeod had to reject Rachel Ray.




58

Trollope and the Magazines THE PROBLEM OF VISIBLE UNITY

'Good Words' will contain instructive and original Articles on various topics of interest to the Christian Family: such as Expositions of Scripture for Sabbath-evening reading; Devotional Papers; Biographical Sketches of the great and good; Illustrations of the glory of God as displayed in His material works: Papers on Social Duties; Travels in Palestine, illustrative of the Bible, &c, &c. It is unnecessary to add, that 'Good Words' will have no denominational connexion, but is intended to be a medium of communication between writers and readers of every portion of the Church of Christ. . .22 The editor stresses the broad acceptance of Christian faiths, and fiction is conspicuously absent from the list of contents. In December 1860 MacLeod published another editor's note reasserting the exact mission of his Good Words: When I accepted the editorship of this Magazine, my principal motive was the desire to provide a Periodical for all the week, whose articles would be wholly original, and which should not only be written in a Christian spirit, or merely blend 'the religious' with 'the secular', but should also yoke them together without compromise.. . . The tens of thousands who buy the Magazine confirm me in the opinion, that I have not misinterpreted the wishes or the wants of the great mass of our Christian community . . . . .. The faithful exhibition of Evangelical truth shall go handin-hand with every department of a healthy literature. 23 While MacLeod may claim to be interpreting his readers correctly, the need for such a statement of purpose at all, 12 months after the first issue and original mission statement had appeared, indicates that the Good Words message was not being conveyed and needed reinforcing. The statement reads more like a justification for editing a magazine which seeks to blend the secular with the religious, and this identity crisis is one that would remain prob-



On the inside front cover of the first issue in January 1860, MacLeod stated the magazine's original intentions as a religious weekly:

59

lematic for the periodical and its editor, and one which its publisher, Alexander Strahan, was already recognizing. 24 A month later, in January 1861, the magazine changed format. Hitherto, they had relied on the format of the traditional cheap weekly magazine published at a penny or two but also issued in monthly numbers costing usually between five and seven pence. The contents of these magazines were often divided into four sections to indicate the weekly bias, as seen on the January 1860 cover of Good Words (Fig. 2.1). In the changed format, Good Words was bidding for the popular secular monthly market, which did not make distinctions in weekly, let alone Sunday reading. 25 MacLeod may be slightly defensive in the December 1860 issue before he enters the monthly market to compete with mostly non-religious, middle-class, more expensive magazines like Cornhill, and it is interesting to note that he mentions the change in publication, together with a commitment to signature at the end of his editorial note, almost in passing. However, these modifications were momentous and pivotal, especially since an emphasis on individual contributors lessens MacLeod's responsibility for the religious contents, and opens up a space for several denominations to speak independently. An advertisement in January 1861 (Fig. 2.2) confirms the emphasis on named contributors. The move away from the cheap weekly market and the publicizing of individual contributors indicate that Good Words was seeking to combine two 'mass' readerships, the religious and the secular. Eventually seizing on Good Words's unstable identity, and with the prospect of a Trollope serial looming, extreme Evangelical critics would respond harshly in condemning MacLeod's project in 1863. Discussing the culture industry in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer describe the 'unity of opposites' which are the marketplace and independence. 2 6 Although their term is part of a critique of mid-twentieth-century mass culture, it bears considering in relation to Victorian popular literature, and it may be helpful to think of Good Words as trying to negotiate its way between these competing forces. In the case of Good Words there is tension between an essentially commercial publisher (albeit one who believed in the educative power of literature) and his clergyman-editor whose name adorns each page of the magazine: 27 how to negotiate between creating and expanding a 'mass' market while maintaining a theological dedication and broad-mindedness. The earliest years of Good Words




60


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the religious authority particularly of the editor. Beneath MacLeod's name and title is written, 'And illustrated under the superintendence of Dalziel Brothers'. The brothers Dalziel were among the great woodcut printers of the 1860s, and they, along with Swain, did most of Cornhill's highly regarded illustrations. The prominence of the woodcut printers on the cover was also a way to advertise the illustrations, an extremely popular feature in the weeklies but also, after Cornhill, in some monthlies. 'The right of Translating Articles from Good Words is reserved by the Authors' appears at the bottom of the cover, under the price of sixpence (half the price of Cornhill), to indicate the internationalism of the Good Words readership. The price difference between the two leading monthlies indicates the different readerships which each periodical was creating. Cornhill aimed at a more affluent reader, while Good Words maintained its roots in cheap literature and probably had a broader socio-economic range of reader. Since both were family magazines, the readerships would have had a large proportion of women readers, as is partly demonstrated by the prominence of domestic fiction. By 1863, less advertising space on the inside front and the back covers is taken up by Strahan, who hitherto advertised past Good Words volumes or book publications. More precisely, the last regular advertisement for Good Words appearing in the magazine itself is in August 1862, and the last Strahan publishing advertisement two months later. Either Strahan was now attracting more and diverse advertisers and no longer felt the need to promote his own business or, more probably, he needed money. For whatever reason, by 1863 there are advertisements for rollerskates, medical products, stationers, clocks, starch, and, perhaps surprisingly for a religious periodical, whisky. By the end of the year there are also advertisements for wines, sherry, port and champagne, which continue throughout the 1860s. Other religious periodicals, such as Strahan's own Sunday Magazine and the Christian Observer, have very similar advertisements, but none for alcohol. Generally, advertisements in the front and back covers in other religious periodicals promote other religious publications, and the advertisements are less illustrated and more sober than in Good Words. According to a Victorian advertising agent, Henry Sell, the editorial policy of a newspaper or periodical influences how the advertisements are read, and 'Sell finds proof of this in the "extraordinary success" of advertising in the much respected



84

85

religious papers'. 87 Therefore, by virtue of their inclusion in a publication like Good Words, the alcohol advertisements were validated, even consecrated, as acceptable commodities. Like Mr Comfort in Rachel Ray, Good Words was positioned on the fine line between religion and worldliness, but the magazine's advertising base, a large portion of revenue for periodicals even in the 1860s, relied mostly on secular products. By 1864, however, even the emphasis on Good Words as suitable for Sunday reading is removed. The subtitle for the periodical is now An Illustrated Monthly Magazine', and the link between the Dalziel name and MacLeod's name, so close before, has been weakened; the original intention of blending Sabbath and weekday reading has been consumed by the more commercial and unreligious 'illustrated monthly magazine'. It is precisely during this period of identity crisis in the first few volumes - of changing covers, shifting emphasis, and expansion - that MacLeod rejects Rachel Ray for Good Words. It is true that Trollope's novel is critical of the clergy, but the Evangelicals particularly are singled out only slightly more than the other Churchmen. Did the attacks in the Record merely incite Trollope to greater parody rather than temper his teasing irreverence? That he was able to write a wholesome story for Good Words is shown in 'The Widow's Mite'; why he chose not to write about religion in a similar vein in Rachel Ray is another question entirely. Trollope held no grudge against MacLeod or Good Words, and a second tame story, 'The Two Generals', appeared in December 1863. What is more telling of the peculiar position of Good Words is the appearance in 1864 of Mrs Henry Wood's Oswald Cray, the most sensational novel serialized in the periodical in the early 1860s.88 It was advertised as 'by the author of "East Lynne"', Wood's hugely successful sensation novel of 1861, without any anxiety that the wrath of the Recordites would be brought down upon the magazine. If Trollope caused so much trouble, surely Mrs Henry Wood would be seen as equally, if not more, harmful? The central plot in Oswald Cray is a mystery to discover whether a rich old heiress was murdered with chloroform by her heir, a respectable doctor. The novel was universally slated, and the Athenaeum wondered whether the story was so tedious because it 'appeared in the pages of Good Words, a periodical in which a writer of fiction is placed under some limitations'. 89 Compared to Oswald Cray (and almost any other novel), Rachel Ray is gentle domestic





fiction and its rejection appears somewhat unjustified; but, as Srebrnik believes, 'MacLeod seems to have slipped back into the habit of allowing Strahan a free hand'. 90 He was revising rather than editing. By 1864, the transformation of Good Words had been complete, from 'magazine for all the week' to 'an illustrated monthly magazine', and circulation nearly tripled that of Cornhill. Pierre Bourdieu argues of the field of cultural production that, choosing the right place of publication, the right publisher, journal, gallery or magazine is vitally important because for each author, each form of production and product, there is a corresponding natural site in the field of production, and producers or products that are not in their right place are more or less bound to fail. All the homologies which guarantee a receptive audience and sympathetic audience and sympathetic critics for producers who have found their place in the structure work in the opposite way for those who have strayed from their natural site.91 One could have supposed, as Strahan and MacLeod initially did, that Good Words was a 'natural site' for Rachel Ray. But, Trollope was caught in an unenviable position at a particular cultural moment in 1863. As the most popular serial writer of the day, he was asked to contribute to a magazine in the throes of identity crisis. Being attacked by the extreme elements of his readership, as debates about sensationalism raged in the pages of the periodical press, MacLeod had to defend what he maintained was a workable mission for his periodical: the fusion of the religious with the secular. He sacrificed Trollope in the doing. Meanwhile, Strahan was attempting to remodel his periodical and emulate Cornhill, and as the covers show, the position of the magazine was gradually shifting away from its roots as a religious weekly and more towards the secularism so heavily criticised by the Evangelical extreme. Strahan came to realize the difficulty in amalgamating two distinct popular audiences. In such a configuration, the tension in attempting to unite two opposites becomes too strong and one of the competing elements must yield. However, Strahan did not give up his belief that there ought to be a quality Sabbath magazine, and in 1864, as Good Words was becoming more sensational than ever before, he started up the Sunday Magazine.



86

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M a c L e o d r e m a i n e d c o m m i t t e d to his conviction t h a t a b l e n d of t h e secular w i t h t h e religious w a s possible, a n d Trollope s u p p o r t e d his friend's beliefs. Writing in t h e Fortnightly Review in J a n u a r y 1866, Trollope d e f e n d e d a recent speech given by MacLeod w h i c h a s s e r t e d t h a t t h e r i g o u r s of S a b b a t h - d a y practices as dict a t e d b y t h e F o u r t h C o m m a n d m e n t w e r e u n f o u n d e d . By t h e n , however, there was a strong Anti-Sabbatarian m o v e m e n t advocating t h a t a m u s e m e n t o n a S u n d a y w a s n o t i n h e r e n t l y sinful. H a d M a c L e o d b e e n g i v e n Rachel Ray to j u d g e t h e n , p e r h a p s it w o u l d h a v e b e c o m e a Good Words serial, as it w a s originally written a n d i n t e n d e d to b e .

Notes 1. Guinivere Griest, Mudie's Circulating Eibrary and the Victorian Novel (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1970), 35. For a discussion of Mudie's and censorship in the late nineteenth century, see Nicholas Hiley, '"Can't You Find Me Something Nasty?": Circulating Libraries and Literary Censorship in Britain from the 1890s to the 1910s', in Robin Myers and Michael Harris, eds, Censorship and the Control of Print in England and France 1600-1910 (Winchester, UK: St. Paul's Bibliographies, 1992), 123-47. 2. Griest, Mudie's, 37. 3. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), A.M. Sheridan Smith, trans. (1972; reprinted London: Routledge, 1991), 9. 4. Griest, Mudie's, 46. 5. Ibid., 140. 6. Ibid., 141-2. 7. Donald Thomas, A Fong Time Burning: The History of Fiterary Censorship in England (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), 239. 8. Ibid., 239. 9. See Publishers' Circular 26 (1 and 15 May 1863), which responds to the Quarterly Reviews assessment that the circulating library system forces the public to buy what they do not want, specifically sensation literature. 10. George Moore, Fiterature at Nurse, or Circulating Morals (London: Vizetelly and Co., 1885), 20. This pamphlet is a slightly revised form of an article which appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette. 11. The terms 'Low Church' and 'Evangelical' overlap somewhat when discussing the mid-nineteenth century. Generally, I contend that the Evangelicals were more extreme than other Low Church Anglicans, but neither wished to follow the Dissenters in leaving the Church outright. 12. Robert M. Polhemus, The Changing World of Anthony Trollope (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968), 99.



Uncovering

Trollope and the

Magazines

13. Anthony Trollope, Rachel Ray (1863), ed. P.D. Edwards (Oxford: Oxford University Press, World's Classics, 1990), 21. All subsequent references are from this edition and are noted parenthetically in the text. 14. The Family Treasury (1859-79) was monthly, priced 6d., and not illustrated. It was strictly religious and intended for Sabbath reading. The eight articles which constitute 'Our Dorcas Meetings' (signed 'C.C'.) run from Family Treasury 3:2 (February 1860) to 5:6 (June 1861). 15. Edwards, 'Introduction' to Rachel Ray, xv. 16. Anthony Trollope, Clergymen of the Church of England (London: Chapman and Hall, 1866), 63. The articles which make up this volume first appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette in 1865. 17. Jane Nardin, 'Comic Convention in Trollope's Rachel Ray', Papers on Fanguage and Fiterature 22:1 (Winter 1986), 45. Her argument is that the novel is subversive because it undermines the comic plot through the unsatisfactory negotiation of power relations. 18. See Augusta Webster, Portraits (London: Macmillan, 1870), 35-62. My thanks to Gill Gregory for suggesting Webster's poem to me. 19. See Lynda Nead, Myths Of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain (1988; reprinted Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 131. 20. Note that the narrator denies that Mr Tappitt is intemperate (364), but this smokescreen is necessary because he so clearly is a drinker. 21. Nardin, 'Comic Convention', does not believe that the Rachel/Luke match will be a happy one, although I'm not wholly convinced by her argument. 22. Prospectus, Good Words 1 (January 1860), inside front cover. 23. [Norman MacLeod,] 'Note by the Editor', Good Words 1 (December 1860), 796. 24. Patricia Thomas Srebrnik, Alexander Strahan: Victorian Publisher (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1986), 39. There is no full-length study of Good Words, and there are few scholarly articles dedicated to Good Words. Srebrnik's study provides an excellent account of the founding of the magazine, and the relationship between editor and publisher. 25. Even the Family Treasury mentioned above which only published monthly (6d.) makes explicit that the monthly numbers should be read weekly, on Sundays. On the inside front cover, the pages are divided in various weeks, indicating a religious weekly format. Yet another hybrid form. 26. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), John Cumming, trans. (1972; reprinted London: Verso, 1992), 157. 27. This practice changes in June 1865, when across the top of the pages appears 'Good Words' and the date. 28. W.J. Couper, 'A Bibliography of Edinburgh Periodical Literature', Scottish Notes and Queries 3, second series (May 1902), 164. 29. [Norman MacLeod,] 'Note by the Editor', Edinburgh Christian Magazine 3 (March 1852), 380. 30. [Norman MacLeod,] 'Note by the Editor', Edinburgh Christian Magazine 7 (March 1856), 380.



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31. Revd Donald MacLeod, Memoir of Norman MacFeod. D.D. (2 vols.; London: Dalby, Isbister & Co., 1876), hereafter cited as Memoir. See MacLeod's journal entry in the spring of 1863, Memoir 2, 185. 32. Quoted in Alexander Strahan, 'Norman MacLeod', Contemporary Review 20 (July 1872), 295. 33. Memoir 1, 254. 34. Letter to Principal Tulloch of Aberdeen, Memoir 1, 262. 35. Journal entry for September 1846, Memoir 1, 261. 36. See Arnold to Revd Augustus Hare (24 December 1830) (letter 18) in Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, The Fife and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold, D.D. 1 (2 vols.; London: B. Fellows, 1844), 262. 37. Memoir 2, 97. 38. Josef Altholz, The Religious Press in Britain, 1760-1900 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989), 39. 39. 'A Word with Our Readers', Eeisure Hour 1:1 (1 January 1852), 9. 40. 'Address by the Editor', Sunday at Home 1:1 (October 1864), inside front cover. 41. 'Preface', Family Magazine 1 (1830), iii. 42. 'Preface', Family Friend 1 (1849-50), iii. 43. Not all religious periodicals followed the weekly, family-magazine trend. The British Evangelist, for example, was founded in 1858 as a cheap monthly (three pence). The subtitle indicates that the magazine was in no way attempting to attract the more secular market: 'The British Evangelist for promoting Unity, Zeal, and Activity in the Christian Churches, and Advancing the Knowledge and Love of Christ In the World'. 44. Note that the Reader 4 (13 February 1864), 198, reviewed Good Words, Leisure Hour, and Sunday at Home together under the title 'Popular Serials'. 45. Like MacLeod's 'revised by' to indicate his editorial role, Dickens's 'conducted by' was also unusual; however, other magazines, not surprisingly, followed Dickens's lead: the short-lived Robin Goodfellow, inaugurated with Mary Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret in 1861, was 'conducted by Charles MacKay'. 46. Good Words prospectus in the Christian Guest (December 1859), 546, my emphasis. The prospectus also appeared on the inside front cover of the first issue of Good Words, January 1860. 47. Srebrnik, Alexander Strahan, 39. 48. Ibid., 46. 49. Ibid., 46-7. 50. Sally Mitchell, Dinah Mulock Craik (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1983), 59, states that after 1860 (and after John Halifax, Gentleman), Mulock was generally regarded as a women's novelist and was reviewed less seriously than before. Mulock's Mistress and Maid was serialized in Good Words in 1862. 51. Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church 1 (2 vols.; London: Adam & Charles Black, 1966), 440-1. 52. Elisabeth Jay, The Religion of the Heart: Anglican Evangelicalism and the Nineteenth-Century Novel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 7.



Uncovering

Trollope and the

Magazines

53. Ibid., 23. MacLeod recognized the differences within the Evangelical movement; see a letter from MacLeod to Mrs MacLeod, 27 June 1863 in Memoir 2, 154. 54. The Record articles were published as a pamphlet entitled Good Words': The Theology of Its Editor, and of Some of Its Contributors (London: The Record, 1863). Subsequent references to these articles are taken from this Record pamphlet and noted parenthetically in the text. 55. Altholz, Religious Press, 17-19. 56. 'Short Notices', Literary Times, no. 6 (18 April 1863), 74. 57. Srebrnik, Alexander Strahan, 59. 58. 'The Magazines', Illustrated London News 43 (11 July 1863), 43. 59. [H.L. Mansel,] 'Sensation Novels', Quarterly Review 113 (April 1863), 481-514. 60. Herbert Graham, 'Periodical Literature and Its Influences', The Rose, the Shamrock, and the Thistle 3 (June 1863), 137. 61. Ibid., 133. 62. Altholz, Religious Press, 16-17. 63. 'Good Words', Christian Observer 63 (July 1863), 502-3. 64. 'Sensational Literature', Christian Observer 65 (November 1865), 809-13. 65. Ibid., 812. 66. The Patriot articles responding to the Record were also published as a pamphlet, to which all subsequent notes refer: An Exposure of The 'Record' Newspaper in Its Treatment of 'Good Words' (London: Simpkin, Marshall, & Co., 1863). 67. Ibid., 4. 68. 'Short Notices', 74. 69. [Mansel,] 'Sensation Novels', 484. 70. Ibid., 513. 71. Although I focus on the debate about Trollope as a sensationalist, the Record attacks were taken up by other periodicals and discussed in other ways. Specifically, the fact that the Record was also edited by a Presbyterian Scotsman helped to lessen the damage against Good Words. See Srebrnik, Alexander Strahan, 62-3. 72. Review of Rachel Ray review, Athenaeum 1863 II (17 October 1863), 492. See other reviews: Westminster Review 25 n.s. (February 1864), 291-3; Spectator (24 October 1863), 2660-1; Reader (17 October 1863), 437-8; London Review (31 October 1863), 467-8; Times (25 December 1863), 4. 73. Review of Rachel Ray, Illustrated London News 43 (14 November 1863), 502. 74. H.K., 'A Word of Remonstrance with some Novelists', Good Words 4 (July 1863), 525. 75. Review of Rachel Ray, Saturday Review 16 (24 October 1863), 556. 76. Ibid., 555. 77. Merle Mowbray Bevington, The Saturday Review 1855-1868: Representative Educated Opinion in Victorian England (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941), 154. 78. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic, 134. 79. MacLeod to Revd W.F. Stevenson (14 August 1861), Memoir 2, 114.



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80. Quoted in Srebrnik, Alexander Strahan, 59. 81. Ibid., 52. See the details of Strahan's remodelling efforts, 52-3. 82. See Srebrnik on Strahan's business troubles, and Laurel Brake, 'Theories of Formation: The Nineteenth Century: Vol. 1, No. 1, March 1877. Monthly, 2/6', Victorian Periodical Review 25:1 (Spring 1992), 16-20. 83. Good Words advertisement, The Times (28 January 1863), 5. 84. Publishers' Circular 26 (2 February 1863), 56. 85. Srebrnik, Alexander Strahan, 3 and 33. 86. Brake, 'Theories of Formation', 16. 87. Quoted in Diana and Geoffrey Hindley, Advertising in Victorian England 1837-1901 (London: Wayland, 1972), 35. 88. Srebrnik, Alexander Strahan, 64. 89. Review of Oswald Cray, Athenaeum 1864 II (24 December 1864), 859. 90. Srebrnik, Alexander Strahan, 64. 91. Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, Randal Johnson, ed. (Oxford: Polity Press, 1993), 95-6.



Uncovering

Launching a Hybrid: The Belton Estate in the Fortnightly Review In May 1865, Trollope's The Belton Estate launched the Fortnightly Review. In the first part of this chapter, I explore the cultural formation of the Fortnightly and consider the nature of the magazine's liberalism in relation to the network of male writers which defined it. I believe that, for all its radical policies, there is an absence of the female voice in its contents because of what might be termed its Positivist political stance. The Belton Estate (serialized between May 1865 and January 1866) was the second Trollope novel to launch a periodical, but rather than defining the magazine in the way Framley Parsonage seemed to do in the Cornhill, it sits oddly in the Fortnightly under its first editor, G.H. Lewes. The tensions which I think The Belton Estate generates as a bid for women readers are directly related to its context in a hybrid periodical - not quite a traditional review, not quite a popular monthly. In the second part of the chapter, I discuss the question of signature in the context of anxiety over creating what has been called a star system of criticism. Although star journalism had not yet been fully introduced in the mid-1860s, it can be argued that the rise of individual personalities within a burgeoning mass culture had already begun. The Fortnightly was part of the foundation for a middle-class culture which, as the century moved on, became hooked on personality and celebrity. The anonymity debate, then, can be examined not simply for its effect on honesty in writing but also for its contribution to a culture of celebrity.

92 10.1057/9780230288546 - Trollope and the Magazines, Mark Turner


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Launching a Hybrid

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Founded by a collective of proprietors including Trollope, the Fortnightly was avowed in the prospectus to be an experiment. Frequency, signature, non-partisanship, and fiction signalled that the Fortnightly, modelled on the French Revue des Deux Mondes, hoped to break with traditions in English periodical culture. The experimental elements, however, were only variously successful. Twenty months after the Fortnightly began, difficulties with the publishing trade forced the magazine to change its format to the more conventional monthly. Either consumers would not alter their reading habits or distributors would not accommodate the unusual fortnightly pattern. 1 In addition to frequency, signature was revealed implicitly in the prospectus: .. . we propose to remove all those restrictions of party and of editorial 'consistency' which in other journals hamper the full and free expression of opinion; and we shall ask each writer to express his own views and sentiments with all the force of sincerity. He will never be required to express the views of an Editor or of a Party. He will not be asked to repress opinions or sentiments because they are distasteful to an Editor, or inconsistent with what may have formerly appeared in the Review. He will be asked to say what he really thinks and really feels; to say it in his own responsibility, and to leave its appreciation to the public. 2 Discussion concerning anonymous journalism was not new. In the 1830s Edward Lytton Bulwer argued for signed journalism in England and the English, whilst the New and Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal asserted that the mysteriousness of anonymity was its particular appeal. 3 By the 1890s, as the so-called New Journalism was altering the face of the press, signature had become widespread, although anonymous articles still appeared. The Fortnightly's decision to include signature was just one moment, however significant, in a century of debate about the question of anonymous journalism. 4 In addition to signature and fortnightly production, the magazine's prospectus proclaimed, 'the Review will be liberal, and its liberalism so thorough as to include great diversity of individual opinion within its catholic unity of purpose'. Unlike the great quarterlies or even weeklies such as the Saturday



THE MALE CONFIGURATION


Review, the Fortnightly espoused a move away from party politics, 'to further the cause of Progress by illumination from many minds'. While the editor, G.H. Lewes, did wish 'to seek its public amid all parties', one suspects that the continued use of the word 'liberal' in the prospectus ought really to be spelled with a capital L.5 The experiment of a non-partisan open forum style was never realized in full, partly because, as Trollope wryly observed, liberalism, free-thinking, and open inquiry will never object to appear in company with their opposites, because they have the conceit to think that they can quell those opposites; but the opposites will not appear in conjunction with liberalism, free-thinking, and open inquiry. As a natural consequence, our new publication became an organ of liberalism, free-thinking, and open inquiry. (A 190) Trollope drifted away from the Fortnightly and its progressive politics after November 1866, when Lewes resigned owing to poor health. Trollope, James Cotter Morison, Frederic and Edward Chapman, Frederic Flarrison, and E.S. Beesly were among the original allmale company of nine which invested £9000 in founding the Fortnightly with Lewes as editor. The connections between the men are noteworthy: the Chapmans were cousins and Frederic had recently taken over Chapman and Hall after Edward's retirement; Chapman and Hall had already published seven Trollope novels; Morison was a member of the Positivist Society, wellknown as a Saturday Review contributor, and a friend of fellow Positivists and writers including George Meredith (who also became a Fortnightly writer); Lewes, too, was a Positivist and a well-known journalist who had been friends with Trollope at the Cornhill; Harrison and Beesly were both committed Positivists. Such connections impress the fact that middle-class publishing then (as now) was an intricately networked and cosy business, and for the most part a male domain. The social configuration around a range of magazines in the mid-nineteenth century shows similarities in the male network of editors, publishers, and contributors which generally ran the publications. For example, the weekly Punch dinners initiated in



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Here let us sport, Boys, as we sit; Laughter and wit Flashing so free. Life is but short When we are gone, Let them sing on, Round the old tree. 6 Describing the Punch club, one of the original founders of the magazine recalled that 'its object was to form a little society amongst ourselves to talk over and settle upon subjects for the paper of the coming week'. 7 Macmillan's (founded in 1859) originated in Thursday evening gatherings at the firm's Covent Garden branch. Established men such as Tennyson, Huxley, and Kingsley gathered with young up-and-comers such as Edward Dicey and Alfred Ainger to smoke, drink, and talk at what came to be called the 'Tobacco Parliament', 8 a name which resonates with class, leisure, and politics. The Cornhill began a month after Macmillan's and was the brainchild of publisher George Smith and his author Thackeray. At its centre were a half-dozen male contributors who formed the core of the magazine's non-fiction and who gathered with other contributors at Smith's jovial monthly dinners. Many firms involved in publishing periodicals were located at Paternoster Row or more generally in the area running from Fleet Street to Bank, and until the 1980s migration to Wapping this area remained the centre of the newspaper industry in London. The press industry had grown up in an environment of court, church, and crown, especially dominated by male professions around the fields of law and commerce. Publishing offices were places where men might drop in, talk business, drink some tea and perhaps meet others in passing. The area was a focus for men. Punch, Cornhill, Macmillan's, and, as we shall see, the Fortnightly all share a similar social formation: it was in the spirit of the men's club that many periodicals were conceived. The founding of the Fortnightly presents a familiar pattern. A group of well-off men most of whom were friends with social



1841 were well known and immortalized by Thackeray in his playful rhyme, 'Mahogany Tree', so named for the table around which the Punch diners sat:


and business connections, at the very least acquaintances, decided to found a periodical. They had a few meetings and chose an experienced journalist friend to edit, who in turn rounded up an impressive list of friends and acquaintances as contributors to make an impact with the first issue: Walter Bagehot, George Eliot, and Frederic Harrison. The first issue came off smoothly and the periodical was generally well received, its eminent contributors duly remarked. Noticeably innovatory in this periodical's roots is the absence of a publishing house; there is no Smith, no Bentley, no Macmillan, no Blackwood and subsequently no house style. But the all-male, club-like configuration of house journals is replicated in what is avowed in the prospectus to be a radical departure in periodical literature.

COMTE, POSITIVISM AND THE FORTNIGHTEY Although the Fortnightly hoped to achieve an open forum for a number of debates, by the time Lewes left in 1866 it was already known as partisan and Liberal, and Lewes's successor, John Morley, extended the radical base. Lewes had been editor at the Leader in the early 1850s, where he earned his reputation as a liberal and even a radical. In those pages he heralded the virtues of Auguste Comte's Positivism, to which he had been enthusiastically attached since the 1840s. Lewes's recent biographer Rosemary Ashton suggests that during his Leader years, 'Lewes was a Comtist, and Comte placed women squarely in the centre of the home and family'.9 She believes that by 1859, Lewes was 'an emphatic ex-Comtist',10 and Ashton generally follows Gordon Haight's biography of George Eliot in playing down the attachment of Lewes to Comte. However, we must be careful not to read Lewes through Eliot. Whether or not Lewes's attachment to Comte declined, in public discourse he was unequivocally linked to Positivism, as an 1868 Edinburgh Review article on the philosophy suggests: Than Mr. Lewes Positivism has no more earnest, intrepid, or persevering advocate in England. Some are more fanatical in their devotion, and have resigned their reason and judgment more entirely to the thoughts of the great master; others, like Mr. John S. Mill, less affiliated to the system, have expounded it, in our view, with a higher, or at least a more discriminating



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success; but there is no one who has been more faithful to it in his whole mode of thought, or who has more frequently recurred to its characteristic ideas, and explained them with more clearness, comprehension, and force. It has been Mr. Lewes's mission to develope [sic] and spread these ideas in opposition to the old modes of thought, as the destined means of regenerating human knowledge and society.11 The anonymous writer of the article was John Tulloch, a High Anglican Scotsman who would have been opposed to Lewes's devotion to science. Lewes was not the missionary zealot Tulloch suggests, but he had advocated early Comtism in the Fortnightly in its first 18 months. Lewes's connection to Positivist philosophy, if not to Comtist religion, is important to establish here, because it suggests one reason 12 for the near-absence of women contributors and women's issues in the Fortnightly in its first 18 months. Comte was first translated by Harriet Martineau, whose Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte was published by John Chapman in 1852. Her two-volume work was a condensed version of Comte's Cours de la philosophic positive, published in Paris in six volumes from 1830 to 1842. In volume II Martineau discusses the intellectual inferiority and the moral superiority of women and the importance of the family, which were central in Comte's social reorganization. Richard Congreve's translation of Comte's Catechisme, in which a 'submissive woman asks a confident priest to explain' Positivism, appeared in 1858; it was Comte's way of spreading the word to women who would be so necessary for social regeneration. In 1865, Comte's Discours was published in English as A General View of Positivism, translated by J.H. Bridges, himself a dedicated Positivist. Late in the 1870s four more volumes of Comte's work were translated by Bridges, Frederic Harrison, Richard Congreve, and Edward Spencer Beesly. Three of those four men were Fortnightly contributors recruited by Lewes (Bridges came in under Morley), and were friends of Eliot and Lewes and regulars at their Sunday salon. Lewes became familiar with Comtism in the original French and did not need the assistance of later English translations before becoming a follower. He was an acquaintance of Comte and visited him in Paris. A letter from Comte to Lewes in October 1848 acknowledges the Englishman's appreciation of Comte's Positivism:



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Lewes had written a letter to Comte in which he said how much he thought of the Discours, especially the 'chapter on women'. 14 This chapter was translated by Bridges in 1865 as 'The Influence of Positivism on Women'. In Comte's social reorganization, philosophers, women, and the working classes were an important triumvirate who would unite to regenerate society. He advocates the chivalric spirit of medievalism, when women were properly honoured, and finds a model for the treatment of women in the cult of the Virgin. The role of woman is to modify the actions of men through affection and superior morality: Morally, therefore, and apart from all material considerations, she merits always our living veneration, as the purest and simplest impersonation of Humanity, who can never be adequately represented in any masculine form. But these qualities do not involve the possession of political power, which some visionaries have claimed for women, though without their own consent. In that which is the great object of human life, they are superior to him; but in the various means of attaining that object they are undoubtedly inferior. In all kinds of force, whether physical, intellectual, or practical, it is certain that Man surpasses Woman, in accordance with a general law which prevails throughout the animal kingdom.. . . Hence we find it the case in every phase of human society that women's life is essentially domestic, public life being confined to men. 15 Women, whose dedication to the cause is essential to Positivism, are responsible for the early education of children, and their influence on public life is exerted through the institution of the salon. Apart from the salon, the family remains the 'distinctive sphere of work' for women. 16 Theology will be replaced, in a practical way, by the worship of women. Men will kneel down and pray to Woman rather than to God (as Comte himself did in worshipping his dead beloved, Clotilde de Vaux), and the object of Positivist prayer will be Humanity. 1 7 These are the primary points from the chapter on women which Lewes said he found



Je suis charme que mon recent Discours vous ait tant satisfait. C'est d ' u n bon augure p o u r le succes moral et social du positivisme qui, dans votre pays, est encore loin de correspondre a son succes intellectuel. 13

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especially rewarding in his reading of Comte in the late 1840s. T.R. Wright, evaluating the influence of Comte's Positivism in Victorian Britain, asserts that Lewes's 'exposition and dissemination of Comte's ideas were his chief contribution to philosophy and that Positivism imparted clarity, structure and a sense of certainty to his criticism while providing him with what amounted to a religious faith'. 18 There was more to Comte than his views on women, and the reliance of Positivism on science and rationalism as a principle for faith would seem to have been the primary appeal to Lewes. But Lewes did not always champion Comte's cause uncritically, and in the late 1850s his position on Comte was far less enthusiastic than when he wrote for the Eeader several years earlier. However, by the mid-1860s Comte was again on the public agenda, partly because of Bridges's translation and partly because J.S. Mill had written a critique of Comte also published in 1865. Mill essentially accepted the early Comte but diverged from his later speculations. Bridges in 1866 wrote a response to Mill called The Unity of Comte's Life and Doctrine which supported Comte's later writings. These books were taken up by most periodicals of higher journalism, 19 and Lewes responded with two articles in the Fortnightly. In 'Comte and Mill', Lewes criticizes the dogma of later Comte while maintaining a deep respect for his earlier ideas (much like Mill), and he is careful not to detract from the general notion of Comte as a great mind. 20 Lewes's position on Comte is difficult to ascertain. At first he was an enthusiastic Comtist who did much to popularize the philosophy in England. He broke with Comte for reasons that are uncertain, but renewed his interest at the time he began editing the Fortnightly. In his 1857 edition of the Biographical History of Philosophy, Lewes writes of Comte's Cours that it is 'the grandest, because on the whole the truest system which Philosophy has yet produced'. 21 Wright claims that Lewes's Problems of Life and Mind (1874-79) is permeated with Comtism. 22 He also notes that Lewes gave to the Sacerdotal Fund, and he asserts that much Positivism can be seen in George Eliot's works, such as The Spanish Gypsy (which Eliot herself called a 'mass of Positivism'23), Daniel Deronda, Romola and some of the poems. Richard Congreve, who founded the Church of Humanity, and his wife were intimate friends of Eliot and Lewes, whose support of the Congreves comes through in George Eliot's letters. 24 But one cannot be labelled a Comtist because one's friends are. 25 To a greater or lesser degree



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Lewes respected and adhered to the rationalism of some Positivist principles, which can be distinguished from Comtism in its later, more religious formulation. If by the mid-1860s he and George Eliot were not dedicated to Comtism, they certainly moved in Positivist circles and there is support of Positivist views in both of their writings. Discussing the press reaction to Comte and Positivism, Wright believes that 'the Fortnightly Review was the nearest thing to a Positivist periodical before the foundation of the Positivist Review' by Beesly in 1893.26 Christopher Kent has established how the higher journalism was largely the means by which Positivism was disseminated in Britain. 27 Of the several serious journals which reviewed Bridges's translation and Mill's critique, most were negative about the value of Positivism generally. The Fortnightly was the most sympathetic, but others like the Contemporary Review treated the subject with due seriousness. Under Morley, the Fortnightly became increasingly identified as Comtist, so much so that he tried to deny that reputation in public in an article in 1870.28 Whether or not the Fortnightly was Comtist or Positivist, there seems to have been a distinct public feeling, at least among the serious journals, that the magazine identified itself as such. Lewes as the first editor had a great deal to do with the progressive tendency the Fortnightly projected. And it is my contention that his liberalism was informed by a deep respect for and acceptance of Positivism. The cultural formation of the Fortnightly focused around the male-dominated Positivist circle. Richard Congreve, recording a history of Positivists in a private notebook, remembers how he first came upon Positivist thinking: By the publication of Mill's Logic attention had been called to [Comte's] high importance as a thinker, and I can remember in the society in which I then mixed at Oxford [and?] Rugby, that from time to time discussion arose as to the value of his thought. My more intimate personal friends had many of them read parts of his writings, and consequently we talked over his conclusions. 29 Congreve and his friends discussed the intellectual possibilities of Positivism, in much the same way as the Apostles at Cambridge might have gathered earlier in the nineteenth century. Richard Dellamora has considered the gender construction of the Apostles



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and discussed how the homosexual desires shared between the men can be seen in, for example, Tennyson's In Memoriam.30 Similarly, the works of English Positivists were affected by their roots in an all-male intellectual forum, albeit one less formalized than the Apostles, or than a later group such as the Metaphysical Society which dominated the discourse of the Nineteenth Century. As I understand it, the configuration of these male intellectual discussion groups is analogous to that of the gentlemen's clubs venues where men of like minds and the same class meet to talk and to (homo)socialize. Christopher Kent has argued persuasively that the professional network of the class of men who were Positivists (Oxford g r a d u a t e s , often with i n d e p e n d e n t means) strengthened a unified, club mentality. 'Even the profession to which so many of the Comtists belonged', Kent observes, 'was organized like a club: one became a barrister, after all, by eating dinners at one of the Inns of Court.' 31 Of course, many of the Positivists were also club members; Beesly, for example, wrote several letters to Congreve from the Reform Club,32 where several Fortnightly contributors were also members. 33 This is not to say, however, that because the intellectual milieu of the Positivists functioned as an all-male club their thinking was necessarily linked to the Establishment. Quite the contrary: the political mission of Positivism was distinctly anti-Establishment. The political aspect of Positivism was an important part of the project. In his annual lecture-sermon to the Church of Humanity in 1859, Congreve concentrates on China, Italy, and the relation of the labourer to the capitalist. He admits that such political issues are not usually discussed from the pulpit, but the nature of Positivism was to stand 'in lively contrast to' Christian tradition. 34 In 1866 a collection of foreign-relations essays, International Policy, was published by Chapman and Hall (reviewed in the Fortnightly, 15 July 1866). The title-page epigraph is from Comte ('The fundamental doctrine of modern social life is the subordination of Politics to Morals') and the Preface states that 'certain principles are adopted equally by all the contributors, and they are adopted from the political and social system known as Positivism'. 35 Contributors included the usual suspects - Congreve, Harrison, Beesly, and Bridges. At the time of the Franco-Prussian War, Congreve, Beesly, and Bridges published the pamphlet Religion of Humanity, Republic of the West36 which declared the Positivists anti-war stance (although they supported France) and called



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for a united, perhaps federal, Republic comprising France, Italy, Spain, Germany, and England. In the days of Empire, this call for a European Community was indeed radical in its political implications. The Positivists, whose interests in foreign affairs aligned them with the Fortnightly'^ internationalism, had a significant political element in their objective. The group which functioned like other all-male intellectual forums replicated their structures in the Fortnightly.

THE ABSENCE OF WOMEN The cultural and social formation of the contributors - the closeness, shared beliefs, sense of mission, and similar backgrounds around the Fortnightly may go some way to explain the absence of the female voice in the periodical in 1865-66. Of 131 different contributors under Lewes, only four are identified by the Wellesley Index as women. These four women wrote seven contributions in total. Two were critical notices, and five were full-length articles. One article and one notice were by George Eliot and appeared signed in the very first number, to lend prominence to the journal. Catherine Helen Spence helped write an article but was not actually given credit in the magazine, so her contribution is, in effect, silenced, 37 which leaves just three articles after the first number. Two on music were written by Leonora Schmitz and one on housing for the poor was by the reformer Octavia Hill. The articles signed by women (if we include Eliot's in the first issue) account for 1.6 per cent of all the articles written under Lewes's editorship; 38 by comparison, the conservative Edinburgh Review in 1865-66 had three women reviewers accounting for 3.8 per cent of the articles. As would be expected, more miscellaneous magazines published a greater number of articles by and about women. During 1865-66, Macmillan's carried serial fiction by Margaret Oliphant, Charlotte Yonge, and Caroline Norton, in addition to a range of non-fiction by Frances Power Cobbe, Frances Verney, Lucy Duff-Gordon, and others. In Blackwood's, Margaret Oliphant, Anne Mozley, and Elizabeth J. Hassell wrote more than a dozen articles between them, many of which addresses women's issues directly. By comparison, the experimentalism of the Fortnightly did not extend to redressing the gender imbalance in non-fiction.



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Perhaps even more noteworthy than its lack of women contributors is the Fortnightly s poor showing of articles devoted to women. In 1865-66 the quarterly Westminster Review carried one article largely about Frances Power Cobbe and there was one woman contributor, and the Edinburgh's three women contributors included Harriet Martineau. A more popular magazine, Macmillan's, carried fiction by several women, devoted space to women and the arts and to individual women, and included several women contributors. Macmillan's would have had a large number of women readers, and its target audience was presumably different from the Fortnightly, but it shows how other magazines which discussed serious topics included women as target readers and contributors of non-fiction. What we see broadly is that other magazines are at least addressing in some form the woman reader and women's issues directly. Lewes's magazine was comparatively silent about women, considering the amount of space its frequency permitted relative to other magazines. This is directly connected to the Fortnightly's target market, for, as Lewes observes, 'the REVIEW has its special objects, and has to cater for a special public', rather like all magazines. 39 The 'special public' is gendered male, as Lewes make explicit when discussing the periodical's contributors: A glance at the list of our contributors will show that men of high reputation in Letters, Philosophy, and Science - men of position in the world, men of professional and official character, no less than men quite unknown beyond their own immediate circles - have given their countenance to the plan and availed themselves of the opportunity of addressing a cultivated public without thereby incurring the disagreeable and almost inevitable penalty attached to writing anonymously, that of having attributed to them articles which they have not written, and which they would indignantly repudiate. 40 This passage is part of an explanation of the magazine's signature policy, but by emphasizing the gender of the writers, we also see the importance of men as contributors and implicitly as readers within the periodical's own identity. 41 In the first two years of John Morley's editorship (1867-68) of the Fortnightly, articles by and about women were more numerous than under Lewes. Frances Power Cobbe wrote on progress, 42



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Millicent Fawcett on women's education, and R.M. Pankhurst on women's right to vote. There were a couple of critical notices by women as well. With Morley we see a shift in policy, for the absence of women under Lewes may not have been a conscious and articulated policy, so much as the result of a personal bias which excluded women from a public forum.43 Considering Lewes's unconventional 'marriage' to George Eliot and the precarious position in which the relationship put them socially, he perhaps shied away from advocating women's issues too strongly in order not to attract unnecessary attention to his own position. It is speculative, but at least plausible, that as editor he toed the conventional, hegemonic line with regard to women (unlike, for example, the Westminster) for personal reasons. The absence of both women and any official declaration on women's issues can be registered, perhaps, as an outcome of Comtist attitudes alongside more personal considerations. While no full-length articles address women or women's issues directly, other non-fiction such as the reviews do to an extent. For example, John Dennis's review of John Malcolm Ludlow's Woman's Work in the Church asserts that 'it is the mere reiteration of a truism to affirm that a woman's best place is home, that her highest duties are those of a wife and mother', granting, however, that there are numerous single women to whom 'official duties' could be assigned. 44 Not surprisingly, Mary Braddon's sensation novel Only a Clod was reviewed unfavourably by Dennis in July 1865. Volumes II (August-November 1865) and V (MayAugust 1866) of the Fortnightly under Lewes reviewed no books by women, and generally books by women which were reviewed in the first six volumes were not enthusiastically recommended. 45 Certainly the political climate in 1865-66, in the run-up to the Reform Bill debates in 1867, provided ample opportunity to discuss women's issues. Progressive women's periodicals such as the Englishwoman's Review of Social and Industrial Questions and Victoria Magazine kept women's issues in the public domain, and private groups such as Emily Davies's Kensington Society discussed questions such as women's franchise.46 Both were part of the discourse of burgeoning middle-class feminism and were responding to the absence of women's discussion of political issues within the clubland formation of the higher journalism particularly. In June 1866, J.S. Mill presented a petition to Parliament for women's suffrage which went unmentioned in both the 'Public Affairs'



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and 'Causeries' sections. 47 A whole range of women's issues was being discussed elsewhere in public and in private. Morley does enlist well-known women's reformers like Cobbe and Fawcett to discuss women's reform whereas women under Lewes are not given a similar space. The gendering of the Fortnightly is related to its attempt to be both a review and a magazine. The title signals hybridity a Review which appears fortnightly rather than quarterly - and the combination of forms can be seen in in the contents. The 'Public Affairs' section provides news summaries similar to weeklies like the Saturday Review and the fortnightly frequency creates a sense of topicality and news value which the quarterly Reviews clearly did not wish to project. A number of articles in the Fortnightly were based on recent book publications and so were review-like, but the books were not foregrounded at the beginning of the article as they were in the quarterlies. Furthermore, a single book was often reviewed rather than a clutch of books on a single topic, as in the traditional quarterlies. Alongside these review articles were individual pieces on socio-political topics (especially about reform and the franchise) and also pieces more closely resembling magazine articles, for example personal reminiscences. Lewes's 'Causerie' section opened up an informal space for the editor to address readers within a serious journal, and it is possible that the causeries were intended to include women readers. Such hybridity, blending elements of the quarterly, monthly, and weekly periodicals, was part of the Fortnightly's attempt to create a new market, distinct from the market of the other radical magazine of higher journalism, the Westminster Review. Both magazines covered similar topics, although the Westminster dealt more with home politics and the Fortnightly projects internationalism. The Fortnightly's hybrid form was one way to distinguish itself from the radical Westminster, but its hybridity can also be seen as part of its Positivist philosophical position. In Lewes's article on 'Comte and Mill', the editor notes that one primary tenet of Comte's early formulation of Positivism was its emphasis on the relations between phenomena: In the Philosophic Positive. . . [Comte] laid down the rule that no function could be studied except in relation to its organ or its acts; he pointed out the error of separating psychological



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Here, Lewes is discussing the debate about Subjective and Objective Method which Comte's philosophy addresses. But w h a t is noticeable in Lewes's reading of Comte is that hybridity is at the centre of Positivism - an attempt to merge the discourses of philosophy with science and religion. This is what Lewes calls Comte's 'gigantic scheme,' 49 and this totalizing hybrid scheme embracing a range of intellectual discourses - is equally at the centre of the Fortnightly's project. The periodical's Positivism and its hybrid form make it distinctly modern, and the one can be seen as an intellectual basis for the other. Generic distinctions between periodicals would have been significant for readers who consumed shilling monthly magazines, for example, as family entertainment with something for everyone. Reviews, however, were weighty, serious, party political to a large degree and booklike. The Fortnightly - by blending the discourses of 'high' and Tow' culture, by placing a philosophical review article alongside an instalment of a serial novel - would have sent conflicting signals to the periodical reading public: two shillings fortnightly instead of one shilling monthly; fiction alongside serious reviewlike articles. Where was the Fortnightly to be read: in the club, the drawing-room, or the study? The proprietors, in aiming to create a new reading market with a new hybrid journal, blending elements of the popular with high seriousness, were indeed innovative, if not financially successful.

THE BELTON ESTATE: SERIALIZING WOMEN'S ISSUES The serial fiction was one space friendly to women readers, and it further suggests a popular magazine element in the Fortnightly Review. However, the decision to include fiction was not unanimously welcomed by the proprietors. In the Autobiography, Trollope records his doubts about including fiction in the Fortnightly: It had been decided by the Board of Management, somewhat in opposition to my own ideas on the subject, that the Fortnightly Review should always contain a novel. It was of course



phenomena from their connections with other phenomena, and declared that the anatomical p o i n t of view o u g h t to predominate. 48

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natural that I should write the first novel, and I wrote The Belton Estate.

Trollope's opposition probably stems from the belief that the inclusion of fiction implies a particular type of magazine and that it would detract from the journal's more intellectual Review status. Responding to Lewes's suggestion that The Belton Estate ought to be the first entry in an issue, Trollope advises: As to putting Belton E. first in No. 3, do just as you please. I have a strong opinion against putting the novel always first as it indicates an idea that it is our staple; - which indicates the further idea that the remainder is padding. Were I Editor I think I should always give the novel a distinctive place just before the Chronique. But that is a matter of small, or no, moment. (Letters 1, 304) The inclusion of fiction at all was no doubt perceived as a financial necessity by the mid-1860s. Lewes's 'Criticism in Relation to Novels' in the Fortnightly in December 1865 appears to argue against the very sort of fiction his magazine was publishing: Instead of compensating for the inevitable evils of periodical criticism by doing our utmost to keep the standard of public taste, too many of us help to debase it by taking a standard from the Circulating Library, and by a half-contemptuous, halflanguid patronage of what we do not seriously admire. 50 His article argues that higher standards ought to be maintained by reviewers because 'the critic demands a closer adherence to truth and experience' 51 than popular novels often contain. He has in mind sensation novels which can be strong in plot but weak in realism. Ironically, however, in attacking circulating libraries, Lewes attacks Trollope, circulating-library author extraordinaire. While Trollope's fiction is on the whole unsensational (although The Belton Estate's Mrs Askerton has sensational



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coat-and-waistcoat realism, a creeping timidity of invention, moving almost exclusively amid scenes of drawing-room existence, with all the reticences and pettinesses of drawing-room conventions. 52 About the article, Trollope wrote to Lewes: 'It is beautiful, but, oh, so cruel' (Letters 1, 304). Reading an instalment of The Belton Estate in the same issue as Lewes's criticisms of circulating libraries or of drawing-room realism shows explicitly the fissures in the hybrid Fortnightly. Of course, new shilling monthlies were continually cropping up since the success of Cornhill and its imitators, and the power of the quarterlies was on the wane. It could be argued that combining fiction, and circulating-library fiction at that, with serious review articles was a way of attracting readers, especially women in an expanding market. In making such an attempt in Britain, the Fortnightly was indeed innovatory (if not commercially successful), but it was following the lead of the Revue des Deux Mondes. The Fortnightly closely resembles its French model in a number of ways: fortnightly publication; an outward-looking, international emphasis; the promotion of the author; the absence of women's voices; the presence of fiction and poetry. 53 At the time the Fortnightly was launched with The Belton Estate, the Revue des Deux Mondes was serializing George Meredith's The Ordeal of Richard Feverel; Meredith's Vittoria followed Trollope in the British periodical. A successful foreign model was not enough to ensure financial success in England, and the Fortnightly's circulation had not reached above 1500 by the time the proprietors sold it to Chapman and Hall. The hybrid periodical did have its own followers, but the Contemporary Review, founded in 1866 and modelled to an extent on the Fortnightly's open forum, noticeably does not include fiction. The Fortnightly's inaugural novel covers familiar territory for those even slightly acquainted with Trollope's fiction. The author recognized that The Belton Estate is 'similar in its attributes' (^4 196) to Rachel Ray and Miss Mackenzie, which appeared in volume



aspects) and true to Lewes's realist principles, it was largely consumed by the kind of reader Lewes dismisses. Trollope also felt the sting of Lewes's attack on domestic realism, articulated in the second article of the 'Principles and Success of Literature' series, in which Lewes deplores

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form in 1863 and 1865, respectively. We might also notice its affinities with The Small House at Allington (1864) and Can You Forgive Her? (1865). As the Eondon Review put it in a review of the novel, 'it is time . . . that Mr. Trollope should forbear from leading us through the same familiar scenes'. 54 Such scenes depict a spirited, often fortune-less heroine who experiences complicated relations with a lover or two. Even Trollope estimated a decade later that 'it has no particular merits, and will add nothing to my reputation as a novelist', and T seem to remember almost less of it than of any book that I have written' (A 196). The novel did not bring in the intended readers, and the Athenaeum endorsed its own view by asserting that 'the verdict of periodical readers was, we believe, unfavourable'. 55 Allow me to disagree. What is interesting about Trollope's novel is its relation to the rest of a magazine which is otherwise so obviously silent about women's issues. The heroine, Clara Amedroz, without a fortune because of her brother's reckless gambling, is stoically serious in her approach to life. Left with a helpless and self-pitying father after her brother's suicide (all of which is revealed in the opening chapter), Clara perceives that it was her duty to repress both the feeling of shame and the sorrow, as far as they were capable of repression. Her brother had been weak, and in his weakness had sought a coward's escape from the ills of the work around him. She must not also be a coward! Bad as life might be to her henceforth, she must endure it with such fortitude as she could muster. (ch. 1, I, 29) Such a strong-willed woman compensating for the weaknesses of men around her was not new to Trollope readers or fiction readers generally. But such a passage which shows the moral superiority of woman does fit comfortably within the ideal Positivist construction of society. Clara is less endearing when she says, 'I think it would be well if all single women were strangled by the time they are thirty 7 (ch. 8, I, 415). She is reacting to the Woman Question, which sought some solution to the increasing number of unmarried women. 'Having neither father, mother, nor brother; without a home, without a shilling that she could call her own; - with no hope as to her future life' (ch. 21, II,



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513), Clara struggles to accept her attraction to her lovers while resenting her need for a husband to maintain her position. She tries repeatedly to preserve a sense of self-worth by rejecting attempts by her cousin and lover, Will, to give her the Belton Estate, which has fallen to him after her brother's suicide. By rejecting property specifically, she rejects the system upon which male wealth is based. Trollope continually writes of the 'Beltons of Belton' and of the pleasures of ownership to establish the inexorability of the patrilineal discourse. At one point Clara calls Will's plan to give up Belton 'a romantic notion' (ch. 24, II, 665) because it flies in the face of respectable behaviour. But Will links the property with Clara whom he loves, and if he cannot have her, he does not want the estate: . . . he did not wish, in his present mood, to be recognized as the heir. He did not want the property. He would have preferred to rid himself altogether of any of the obligations which the ownership of the estate entailed upon him. It was not permitted to him to have the custody of the old squire's daughter, and therefore he was unwilling to meddle with any of the old squire's concerns. 56 (ch. 20, II, 415) Clara is part of the property, and Will wants all of it or nothing. It is not an accident that Chapter 31, in which Clara finally agrees to marry Will, is called 'Taking Possession'. Raymond Williams has commented on Trollope's ease in dealing with issues of inheritance and property, as opposed to a writer like George Eliot who deals with disturbance. 57 It is true that matters of inheritance are almost always neatly resolved in Trollope, and The Belton Estate is no exception. So often in his fiction, Trollope approaches a critique of patriarchal structures without ever overturning them outright. For him, social change is only ever incremental, never revolutionary, which was (and still is) part of the comfort of his fiction. The discourse around women in the novel is in fact related to discourses on property and law which were circulating in the Fortnightly and elsewhere during the serialization. Reviewing Mill on political economy in June 1865, Frederic Harrison writes



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there is a question which underlies the whole problem [of the cultivation of land], which is the social ground of property and the appropriation of land. No one does, no one can treat this fundamental political principle as a purely economic question. The first thing a rational philosophy has to do is to establish the basis of property; the rights, the duties, the relations of proprietors; the political, social, and moral functions which ownership in land implies. 58 For Harrison, population and property are the two great elements of all economic systems. Property was one subject treated in exchanges about Positivism generally,59 and such discussions of political economy as Harrison's coincided with the debates which led to the 1867 Reform Act. Also in the Fortnightly, Richard Ellerton proposed universal (male) suffrage a m o n t h later, and Thomas Hare put forward his suggestions for electoral reform in October. Significantly, the whole of the second Reform Bill debates centred on questions of land since property was the basis of one's right to vote. Property equalled political power. Discussions about land, population, and suffrage intersect with discourses in the novel and in the broader periodical culture which make more explicit the links between women's rights and property. Accordingly, an anonymous writer reviewing Bessie Rayner Parkes, Anna Swanwick and F.P. Cobbe in the Westminster Review in October 1865, asserts that when the United Kingdom has perhaps 200,000 more women than men, what a stupid as well as unmanly insult it is, to tell women that they must not seek to maintain themselves, but must set their caps to get husbands who will maintain them! 60 This statement affirms the need for women's employment and self-determination, and Clara speaks to the discourse of women's work in her proud response to her aunt's plan to provide for her through Captain Aylmer: '. .. How can I help it that I am not a man and able to work for my bread? But I am not above being a housemaid, and so Captain Aylmer shall find. I'd sooner be a housemaid, with nothing but my wages than take the money which you say he is to give me.' (ch. 8, I, 415)



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The contract of matrimony gives rise to legal consequences so important (especially with regard to the possession and transmission of property), that it is but right that society should establish certain constituted methods of entering into it.61 Part of the discourse in The Belton Estate addresses precisely the connections between land, marriage, and women's independence. Such legal and political economy issues, then, were an element of both the fiction and the non-fiction. It is vital in the novel that Clara challenges assumptions about marriage, property, and inheritance, even if she is not so challenging that she refuses marriage altogether. 'I'm not prepared to alter the ways of the world,' Clara maintains, 'but I feel myself entitled to grumble at them sometimes' (ch. 7, I, 408). Like Trollope's heroine, many women in the 1860s were questioning a whole range of legal issues. In 1865, for example, a group of Manchester feminists were organizing campaigns for property reform and for a mother's custody rights, 62 and I mentioned earlier in this chapter the efforts of women to petition Parliament for suffrage in 1866. The petition's argument was carefully focused upon a single woman's right to own property. If the vote depended on ownership of land, and if women could legally own land, why, then, could they not vote? 63 As Helen Taylor indicates in the Westminster Review in 1867, the petitioners point out that in this country the franchise is d e p e n d e n t u p o n property, and that the acknowledgement of women as sovereigns among us shows that women are not considered disqualified for g o v e r n m e n t . From these two principles, both of which are undoubted parts of the British Constitution as it stands at this day - the representation of property, and government by female sovereigns - the petitioners d r a w the evident inference, that where the female sex is no bar to the higher, it cannot reasonably be to the lower privileges of political life, when those privileges are dependent upon conditions (such as the possession of property) which women actually fulfil.64



A Westminster article in 1864 about marriage laws discusses marriage and property:

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The petition's argument was a clever one, based as it was on a political argument, and it shows how property was a contested site of meaning in the late 1860s. So, Will's insistence that he not accept his inheritance and that he offer Clara the Belton Estate indicates how both men and women could challenge legal precedent and social convention. 65 At the time The Belton Estate was being serialized, these were some of the legal and political debates in circulation. The novel addresses contemporary reform movements which concurrent Fortnightly non-fiction almost never confronts directly, and the discourse of property and marriage which surrounds Clara, Will, and Captain Aylmer highlights the fragility of the gendered issues of political economy and law. The discourse of the sexual woman is also addressed in the fiction. The relationship between Clara and her neighbour on the Belton Estate, Mrs Askerton, is especially significant because it shows two women supporting one another despite the murmurs of society. There is some secret about Mrs Askerton from the beginning of the novel, and Clara knows that 'there had been rumours afloat, and that there might be a mystery' (ch. 5, I, 285). In the middle of the 1860s, with the popularity of sensation novels causing controversy in numerous periodicals, early in the novel such a thinly veiled reference to a woman who is talked about would almost certainly have signalled transgressive sexuality. In the chapter entitled 'Mrs Askerton's Story', this becomes clear when the courageous woman admits to Clara that 'for three years I was a man's mistress, and not his wife' (ch. 18, II, 365-66). Clara's decision at this point is whether to support her friend or damn her as Lady Aylmer, her future mother-in-law, demands: Clara's mind was the more active at the moment, for she was resolving that in this episode of her life she would accept no lesson whatever from Lady Aylmer's teaching; - no, nor any lesson whatever from the teaching of any Aylmer in existence. And as for the world's rules, she would fit herself to them as best she could; but no such fitting should drive her to the unwomanly cruelty of deserting this woman whom she had known and loved, - and whom she now loved with a fervour which she had never before felt towards her. (ch. 18, II, 366)



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Relationships between women in The Belton Estate and in much of Trollope's fiction revolve around how women are judged socially and how women judge each other. We saw this in Rachel Ray, and it is a theme which appears in other of Trollope's novels at this time, including Miss Mackenzie and Can You Forgive Her? Indeed, the friendship with Mrs. Askerton becomes a testingground for Clara's independence, since Captain Aylmer's mother will not permit him to marry unless Clara is willing to forsake and shun her only friend. Mrs. Askerton, who accepts her lot in life, writes to Clara, T do not blame him for demanding that his future wife shall not be intimate with a woman who is supposed to have lost her fitness for the society of women' (ch. 21, II, 520). But Clara refuses to obey society's dictates, represented at their most severe by Lady Aylmer's inflexibility. In accepting the friendship of a fallen woman, Clara does more than grumble about the ways of the world - she absolutely rejects them. Trollope, in portraying a fallen woman sympathetically, challenges the convention in novels that fallen women must either die (as in Gaskell's Ruth) or be mad (as in Braddon's Eady Audley's Secret). He had previously defended the treatment of fallen women in fiction when responding to a clergyman's complaint about Lady Glencora in Can You Forgive Her? (published in monthly parts in 1864-65): The subject of adultery is one very difficult of discussion. You have probably found it so in preaching. It is a sin against which you are called on to inveigh, ( - and I also as I think of my own work,) - but as to which it is difficult to speak because of the incidents to adultery which are not only sinful, but immodest & in some degrees indecent. Of theft, lying, & murder you can speak openly to young & old, but against adultery or fornication you must caution those who are most in danger with baited [sic] breath. That I think is the cause of your letter to me. . .. The education of our daughters is a subject on which at present many of us Englishmen differ greatly. Thinking as I do that ignorance is not innocence I do not avoid, as you would wish me to do, the mention of things which are to me more shocking in their facts than in their names. I do not think that any girl can be injured by reading the character whose thought I have endeavoured to describe in the novel to which you have alluded. (Fetters 1, 316)



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Indeed, the fallen woman was a topic to which Trollope returned sympathetically after The Belton Estate, as in The Vicar of Bullhampton (1870). It may be that the Fortnightly - as a male-dominated, serious magazine - provided an opportunity for Trollope to consider such transgressive sexual behaviour more openly than in popular, shilling monthlies.

THE PLIGHT OF THE MARRIED MAN There is another gendered discourse in The Belton Estate over the status of the bachelor which we have also seen in The Small House at Allington with Adolphus Crosbie.66 Although neither of the lovers remains a bachelor in The Belton Estate, bachelordom is presented as an acceptable option for both men, if not for the novel itself. Captain Aylmer's father, Sir Anthony, takes more than one opportunity to express his view that his son simply does not need to marry. Consider the following passage of advice from Sir Anthony which occurs midway through the serial: 'My dear boy, [your mother has] been nagging at me, as you call it, for forty years. That's her way. The best woman in the world, as we were saying; - but that's her way. And it's the way with most of them. They can do anything if they keep it up; - anything. The best thing is to bear it if you've got it to bear. But why on earth you should go and marry, seeing that you're not the eldest son, and that you've got everything on earth that you want as a bachelor, I can't understand. I can't indeed, Fred. By heaven, I can't!' Then Sir Anthony gave a long sigh, and sat musing awhile, thinking of the club in London to which he belonged, but which he never entered; - of the old days in which he had been master of a bedroom near St. James's Street, - of his old friends whom he never saw now, and of whom he never heard, except as one and another, year after year, shuffled away from their wives to that world in which there is no marrying or giving in marriage. (ch. 17, II, 359) Trollope enters into a real male discourse here; why marry if you don't have to? Marriage is useful only to first sons who must carry on the male line and inherit property. Sir Anthony yearns



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for all-male surroundings - his club and his friends around St James - but such boy's own desires coexist with a pining for sexual freedom. The phrase 'master of a bedroom' is charged with sexual tension and frustration because Sir Anthony makes explicit his loss of power, of mastery over women. Toward the end of the novel, Sir Anthony again repeats his warning: '. . . An eldest son ought to marry, so that the property may have an heir. And poor men should marry, I suppose, as they want wives to do for them. And sometimes, no doubt, a man must marry - when he has got to be very fond of a girl, and has compromised himself, and all that kind of thing. I would never advise any man to sully his honour.' As Sir Anthony said this he raised himself a little with the two sticks and spoke out in a bolder voice. The voice however, sank again as he descended from the realms of honour to those of prudence.. . . Of course marriage is all very well. I married rather early in life, and have always found your mother to be a most excellent woman. A better woman doesn't breathe. I'm as sure of that as I am of anything. But God bless me, - of course you can see. I can't call anything my own. I'm tied down here and I can't move. I've never got a shilling to spend, while all these lazy hounds about the place are eating me up. There isn't a clerk with a hundred a year in London that isn't better off than I am as regards ready money. And what comfort have I in a big house, and no end of gardens, and a place like this? What pleasures do I get out of it? That comes of marrying and keeping one's name in the county respectably! What do I care for the county? D the county! I often wish that I'd been a younger son, - as you are.' (ch. 27, III, 145-6) Sir Anthony's emotive speech, full of questions and exclamations, again describes his own sense of disempowerment and it goes deep into the male psyche. The language - of sadism, of immobility, of victimization, of dispossession - expresses his views on the state of marriage for men. The 'comfort' and 'pleasures' to which he alludes are those of the all-male world in the previous passage. He has had no choice in life because of the cross he carries as eldest son; but he pleads with his son not to relinquish



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a bachelor's life unless absolutely necessary, unless he has 'compromised' himself. A sense of propriety would have prevented Trollope from being any more explicit about the pleasures a man gives up by marrying, but such open proclamations were unnecessary as the discourse of the bachelor circulated in magazines and pamphlets around the time of the serialization of the Belton Estate. Bachelors' Buttons was a monthly periodical of light miscellaneous reading which ran for five numbers from June 1860, before being discontinued. Each issue contained only around 30 pages, so at a price of 6d. it was expensive. But the editor did not have high ambitions ('ours is a whim' he states in an introductory note), and probably the readership came from London's barristers since the editorial offices were at Lincoln's Inn Fields and several contributors indicate a legal readership. A poem in the June issue describes in part the plight of the married man: Oh! what, may Compared to You're bother'd And pestered

I ask, are the pleasures of marriage, what science or literature lend? for money, and dress, and a carriage, to death by your wife's 'dearest friend.'

Your cigar is extinguished, your books you can't read 'em, With dancing attendance upon Mrs. Blank, You must show when you're wanted, a married man's freedom! And for all this enjoyment yourself you've to thank. When the bottle's once broken, the liquor is spilt, When married, to madness or ruin you're driven; And worse still, you are bound till she dies or you're kilt. Young men, take warning: I'm single, thank heaven! 67 Marriage is not value for money and it prevents male pleasures like tobacco (reminding us of the pleasures of the Macmillan's 'Tobacco Parliament'). The husband is 'bound' in the same way that Sir Anthony is 'tied down'. Men are restricted by many things, but one woman, one sexual partner, may be the most severe of regulations. In a later issue, an article entitled 'Spinsters and Bachelors' uses a great-men-of-history argument to assert that men and women are productive in other than familial ways. Through good deeds and labour, a bachelor may be 'alone yet



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not alone, for the good he may do dwells as voices in his home, singing the harmony of angels'.68 However, most discourses around the bachelor do not attempt to justify the single life by good deeds. A similar periodical to Bachelors' Buttons appeared a decade later in 1870. Bachelors' Papers was a Liverpool monthly sold in London in Lombard Street, near to Bank in the City. The editor freely admits that the periodical 'was not instituted as a commercial speculation. Our object was to afford our friends and our friends' friends an opportunity of expressing in print their opinions on various subjects.' 69 Like Bachelors' Buttons, Bachelors' Papers was slim and short-lived but its contents are more serious in tone. In the February issue, in 'A Spinster's Musings', the gauntlet was thrown down: 'Bachelors' Papers! What Next! It really seems as if the ordinary course of things were to be reversed altogether.' 70 Referring to 'these degenerate times', her article attacks bachelors for their narcissism and monetary selfishness, but note how her language resembles both Sir Anthony's and the discourse in Bachelor's Buttons: The young men now must have rooms of their own to pursue their studies (?); they have even formed their plans for amusement so that women are necessarily excluded; and it is well known, that to marry on less than three or four hundred a year is held (in society), to be a sign of something little short of lunacy. The consequence is, that Bachelors and Spinsters are very much on the increase; and I take it that the appearance of this periodical is only the natural consequence of the fact I have just stated. 71 The writer's parenthetical remarks are telling: by the strategic use of a question mark, she deflates the male argument that rooms need to be taken for study, and she connects the folly of bachelors to class and to middle-class society particularly. The study-room she mocks is the bedroom of which Sir Anthony wishes he were still master. But let's be perfectly clear: bedrooms are for sleeping and for having sex. A single life does not mean a celibate life. Unstated but lurking between the lines of bachelor discourses is the knowledge that men can and do procure sex. Michael Slater has written about the Bachelor's Pocket Book for 1851 which catalogued descriptions of some of London's prostitutes. 72



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Married men as well as bachelors would have found such publications useful. Later in 'A Spinster's Musings', the writer asserts that 'clubs, Freemasonry, trips to London and other luxuries thus take the place of what under happier auspices would have been domestic happiness and comfort'. 73 She identifies all-male spaces as being inferior replacements for the only true happiness. 'A Spinster's Musings' did not go unanswered: an exchange of articles occurred in subsequent issues. In 'A "Quid Pro Quo"', a misogynistic bachelor responds by saying that 'ladies must bear the chief of the blame' for bachelorism, because ladies are expensive to keep and, frankly stupid: And if young men have 'rooms and studies' of their own, is it not often because in 'society' the 'amusements and studies' and employments of ladies are to say the least of it, frivolous if fashionable, and alike undignified and wasteful.. . . Hair wandering like 'tangled tow' adown the back now puffed and padded into monstrous shapes and sizes above and behind the head, or rolling like immense waves, at each side thereof; the contemplation of these not unfrequently drives the beholder to the littered and lumbered regions of his own, and to - 'sublime tobacco'. 74 The Gorgon has driven Poseidon out of the house, back into a sea of men. Just as Sir Anthony moaned that 'lazy hounds about the place are eating me up', all men are likely to be devoured in marriage. 'Marriage in Real Life', a more philosophical response to the spinster and published in the same issue as 'A "Quid Pro Quo"', argues that marriage is no longer the sole reason for existence of either men or women, and that happiness for both sexes can be found outside of marriage. 75 In a follow-up piece, the spinster welcomed these responses for drawing attention to the problem, but she maintains her thesis that men are selfish and asserts that a single life is an unnatural one. 76 It takes one to know one. In addition to these bachelors' periodicals, pamphlets and single penny-a-sheet poems circulated discussing the single life in a usually light and joking tone. A London pamphlet measuring two by three inches called Bachelorism Portrayed, 'By a member of the Female society for the extinction of that useless portion Mankind, Old Bachelors', came out probably in 1865, with brief



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sayings and titbits on single men: 'Bachelor's Island', 'Causes of Bachelorism', and a bachelor's 'Thermometer/. It included the poem 'Bachelor's Portrait', also published separately as a penny poem, printed and sold in Manchester. Similarly, the 'Thermometer', which charted each year of a bachelor's life from age 16 to 60, was issued as the poem 'Bachelor's Register', again emanating from Manchester. In the voraciously male Punch, a drawing appeared in December 1865 depicting two women forcing their prayer-books in front of a weary-eyed man. The caption reads: 'Distressing Dilemma For Our Young Bachelor Surgeon!' 77 All of these texts - small poems, pamphlets and periodicals - point to circulating discussions about the bachelor question available to Fortnightly readers around the time of the serialization of The Belton Estate. Sir Anthony's anti-marriage pitch to his son is connected to a whole series of images of and arguments about the bachelor, so that readers would have understood the meanings of Sir Anthony's references. Not surprisingly, then, Captain Aylmer recognises a validity in his father's advice: 'in fitting his father's words to his own case, Captain Aylmer did perceive that a bachelor's life might perhaps be the most suitable to his own peculiar case. Only he would do nothing unhandsome' (ch. 27, III, 147). He resolves that if Clara will only obey his mother, he will consent to marriage. At times it seems that Clara is just a pawn between two men who both want the same thing. It is only when Will thinks Aylmer will succeed that he refocuses on Clara, and vice versa, as if each man desires Clara simply because the other does. In the end, Will marries Clara and Captain Aylmer marries a Lady Emily. Marriage is settled upon as the right economic thing to do for Captain Aylmer, and Will remains a Belton of Belton. However comforting Trollope's tidy conclusion may be, his novel raises gendered issues which complicate the serial's place within the Fortnightly. During the serialization, Trollope's novel is the only place within the magazine that addresses issues about the Woman Question in any extended and considered way. Elsewhere in the periodical's non-fiction, women as subjects and contributors are conspicuous by their relative absence, the effect of which is a silence with regard to women's political and reform topics. In its way, the novel speaks for women and women's issues; Clara's burst of independence and ultimate acceptance of marriage may be indicative of Trollope's own convictions, but engages in a



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particular construction of women in a liberal magazine. The Belton Estate, however, also speaks to men, to the magazine's largely male readership. It articulates male reservations about marriage and sympathizes with the desire of men to be with men. Anything more than such general empathy would go against the grain of Positivism specifically a n d middle-class periodical fiction (circulating-library fiction) generally. For men, The Belton Estate is not just another Trollope novel about young ladies. It is a cultural document which in the context of an all-male Fortnightly expresses a deep anxiety over the roles of men, women, marriage, and property within middle-class culture.

THE DEBATE OVER ANONYMITY: HOW RADICAL WAS SIGNATURE? The Fortnightly'?, policy of total signature was new to periodical culture and to the higher journalism especially, although previously a number of magazines were partially signed and contributors could be revealed in other ways. The great reviews such as the Edinburgh and the Quarterly in the early nineteenth century were unsigned because in the most serious form of journalism it was thought ungentlemanly to introduce personality into criticism. Book reviewing, the basis of the quarterlies, in fact offered an opportunity to discuss important topical political and social questions to public figures who needed to remain anonymous. Of course, given their price, the length of articles and the discourses covered, the reviews were class-based. The concept of the gentleman writer or the brilliant amateur prevailed, and journalism was not regarded seriously as a profession until later in the century. Magazines of different social milieux did introduce signature to varying degrees. Bentley's Miscellany (1837-68), originally edited by Dickens, was about 50 per cent signed by the 1860s, and signature had been frequent for many years before. The prominence of fiction in magazines like Bentley's distinguished them from the weighty journals, so signature was less important. Bentley's purpose was as much optimistic entertainment as instruction, and 'its positive goal was realized mainly in serialized novels and short fiction'. 78 Fiction and poetry were often signed even in magazines which were otherwise a n o n y m o u s . Poetry was



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sometimes signed with initials, or serials with 'by the author of, but the gesture at attribution was there. Literary gossip sections and monthly reviews of the periodicals also provided possible routes by which authorial identity might be made public. In these ways, individuals could be credited without absolute disclosure on a contents page. Only a few years before the Fortnightly began to sign, Macmillan's was already almost fully signed. It carried fiction and poetry, but serious non-fiction on a variety of topics including politics and foreign affairs was also included. The prominence of signature is reinforced by the inclusion in the annual bound volumes of an index listing a number of contributors. The index followed the contents pages and was set off by a different typeface, thereby emphasizing the important place of the contributor within the magazine's configuration. Macmillan's is an interesting case because it follows the tradition of using the name of the publishing house in its title, but the actual authority of the magazine is shared with individual writers. The magazine's contributors were often on Macmillan's book lists, so the periodical was partly a way of selling the firm's authors. Still, Macmillan's was unique in this burgeoning monthly market in its signature policy, for whatever reasons. Contributors could also be credited through advertisements for a single issue of a magazine or for a serialization, and often adverts revealed authorship even when the pages of the periodical did not. Advertisements indicate that no matter what the official policy, editors were willing to announce contributors as bait for readers, at least some of the time. The crediting of authorship through adverts was a way of partially lifting the veil without demystifying the aura of a journal. Furthermore, trade journals like the Publishers' Circular often disclosed otherwise anonymous magazine writers in their literary intelligence sections each fortnight. For the Fortnightly to adopt signature, then, was not as radical as it may seem. Changes in anonymity occurred incrementally in a number of periodicals before the Fortnightly was published. However, by overthrowing anonymity, together with other unconventional moves - fortnightly frequency, fiction alongside review-like journalism, no house style - the proprietors and editor were signalling the experimental nature of the periodical proclaimed in the prospectus. As Laurel Brake has argued, 'the foregrounding of individuals . . . posed a threat to the collective



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identity of the periodicals, an identity fostered by the "house" style, the collective "we", and the circulation of a periodical persona through a sobriquet such as "Maga".' 79 The Fortnightly, then, was threatening conventional publishing practices in a number of ways. We ought to ask, who had most to lose from the Fortnightly's independence? That distributors seem not to have accepted the magazine as a fortnightly after 20 months may be evidence of the industry reasserting its power over the ambitious periodical. Yet several determined articles in the pages of the Fortnightly reinforced the principle of signature: Lewes in his 'Causeries'; Trollope in 'On Anonymous Journalism'; Morley in 'Anonymous Journalism'. George Saintsbury laid out the parameters of the anonymity debate in his history of nineteenth-century literature, published in 1896. He admits that even in the climate of an almost totally anonymous press early in the century, knowledge of authors was 'unofficial', at least by those in the know such as other writers, and members of the publishing industry: 'Even about the editorship of the great periodicals a sort of coquetry of veiling was preserved, and editors' names, though in most cases perfectly well known, seldom or never appeared.' 80 Still, outside the metropolis from which most periodicals emanated, identities of authors could remain unknown without much trouble. An article in the New and Monthly Magazine in 1839 supports this notion by describing the mysteriousness of anonymity as 'the charm of our periodical literature'. 81 This mystery and coquetry were perceived as part of the aura of journalism, perhaps part of the attraction for readers who might enjoy speculating about the identity of particular writers. Resistance to signature focused primarily on two objections, that 'signed criticism diminishes both the responsibility and the authority of the editor' and that 'it encourages the employment of critics, and the reception of what they say, rather for their names than for their competence'. 82 Oscar Maurer, in an important article written in 1948 on the Victorian anonymity debate, suggests four reasons why anonymity was abandoned as a principle for journalism: prominent names could attract a growing reading public; editors saw signature as a responsibility to honesty; 'public curiosity demands names'; and journalism became more respectable so writers could afford to be identified. 83



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As Saintsbury, Maurer, and more recently Brake have recognized, the move away from anonymity was concurrent with an increasing interest in personality. The Fortnightly's policy of signature, in addition to having precedents, occurred within the context of a popular reading culture which began to identify public figures as celebrities. Significantly, several publishers followed the Fortnightly's lead by launching signed periodicals, as with the Contemporary Review and the Argosy. The period during which the Fortnightly began to be published was a transitional one for the industry, just after the taxes on knowledge had been repealed and numerous new periodicals were launched but well before Arnold announced a New Journalism,84 with its particular emphasis on personality. As Lewes put it, readers want either 'an idol or a victim', not a nameless, faceless critic.85 The changing practices heralded a shift in the periodical publishing industry, concerned increasingly with a mass market. The rise of the celebrity, in relation to which signed journalism was elemental, coincided with changes in the industry which could allow for the selling and marketing of personalities. I would argue that stardom - whether in terms of a star system of journalism in the nineteenth century or the Hollywood studio system in the 1930s - is unavoidable once a popular, mass culture can be identified. Although the Fortnightly's circulation was small, popular magazines in the 1860s had shown that a large mass readership (hundreds of thousands of readers instead of tens of thousands) was not only possible, but also eager and available. 86 It is necessary to distinguish between literary celebrity and actual stardom. Andrew Elfenbein, in an excellent study of Byron's celebrity, distinguishes 'the celebrity from merely famous people as a figure whose personality is created, bought, sold, and advertised through capitalist relations of production'. 87 Celebrity at this level, I suggest, is a type of stardom. The distinction between stars and the merely famous is useful when considering, for example, literary lionism, a topic much discussed in the 1830s, which indicates that there were a number of writers who at the time enjoyed a certain amount of fame and popularity. Harriet Martineau addresses the problem of lionism in the London and Westminster Review in 1839. She asserts that celebrity status is 'a tax which a popular author must pay', and that being paraded



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Literary 'lions' have become a class.. .. This testifies to the vast spread of literature among our people. How great a number of readers is required to support, by purchase and by praise, a standing class of original writers! It testifies to the deterioration of literature as a whole. If, at any one time, there is a class of persons to whom the public are grateful for intellectual excitement, how mediocre must be the quality of the intellectual production. 89 Martineau's argument, that a popular readership is an uncritical one (an argument which still exists in many forms today), is based on the binary of Art/Literature and popular entertainment. (For Matthew Arnold, writing in the Cornhill in the late 1860s, the binary between high and low art is presented in the more extreme critical terms of culture and anarchy.) And Martineau interestingly identifies an 'us and them' phenomenon: The crowning evil which arises from the system of Tionism' is, that it cuts off the retreat of literary persons into the great body of human beings. They are marked out as a class, and can no longer take refuge from their toils and their publicity in ordinary life.90 A precondition for lionism, and later for stardom, is the image of being extra-ordinary, different from you and me. Andrew Tudor has theorized this as the star-audience relationship, in which four categories can be classified: emotional affinity, self-identification, imitation, and projection. 91 Martineau accepts that lionizing is in fact a form of showing off, of using literary figures as social objects. The individual author, and not his or her works, becomes a commodity; the audience consumes the star and the image of the star. Also in the 1830s, we could cite as evidence of a personalityfocused journalism the 'Gallery of Literary Characters' which ran in Eraser's Magazine in the 1830s and published one-page descriptions of prominent literary figures such as Wordsworth, Leigh Hunt, Caroline Norton, Letitia Landon, and Harriet Martineau.



around a social gathering to meet a host's friends and neighbours is part of that tax.88 Martineau links the rise of lionism to growing readership, which she denounces roundly, while also betraying her own class fears:


Each entry was accompanied by a drawing - an image - of the literary lion. In the first issue of Punch in 1841, an article on the London theatre bemoaned the 'star system' in drama. Punch argues that the system of paying individuals huge fees means that the rest of the company of actors is underpaid, so that 'men of education are deterred from making the stage a profession, and consequently the scarcity of rising actors is referable to this cause'.92 Leo Lowenthal, writing in the mid-twentieth century about literature and popular culture in America, believes that interest in individuals is 'a kind of mass gossip'. 93 In the 1830s, the gossip is localized by being contained within the drawing-rooms of the middle and upper classes. For the most part, the literary lions of the early nineteenth century (Byron apart) are not actually stars. For one thing, the technological and economic machinery needed to support a late nineteenth- or early twentieth-century national mass culture had not yet been invented. Yet it was in the 1830s that a young literary figure began his ascent into veritable stardom. After the Pickwick Papers, Dickens's popularity was never in jeopardy, and the reputation he earned with Sketches by Boz was 'soon transformed into a phenomenal triumph, a craze which swept across all class - and soon all national - boundaries, and which proved not to be the nine days' wonder that some people predicted'. 9 4 If anyone was a star in mid-nineteenth-century England, it was Dickens. Perhaps no other novelist has since received the same attention, both critically and popularly, and his status in the late twentieth century, rather like that of Shakespeare, approaches myth. As Mary Poovey asserts, Dickens 'expertly used new advertising techniques to produce an iconography of "Dickens" and a market for his books': On the one hand, by its very nature, the successful promotion of a marketable 'name' depended on distinguishing between this writer and all other competitors. But on the other hand, arguments advanced to discriminate a writer's personality so as to enhance the value of his work often referred to his ability to appeal to or represent the taste of all his readers - to be, in other words, like everybody else.95 Then, as now, Dickens and Dickensian trappings were converted into commodities, products to be consumed by a hungry, starstruck public:



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Consumer goods, from chintzes to cigars, were given 'Pickwick' and 'Weller' brand names; the music shops were soon full of 'Pickwick Quadrilles', 'Artful Dodger Galops', ballads such as 'Nelly Gently Sleeps', 'Dolly Varden', and 'God Bless Us Every One'; inadequately protected by copyright, Dickens's novels were soon being imitated, plagiarised and pirated, and, before he had written, let alone published, the endings of his novels, theatrical adapters invented their own endings and put dramatic versions on the stage. 96 The extensive commodification of Dickens, and of literature broadly, occurred within the context of a rapidly expanding capitalism in which the advertising, to use Marx's terms, fetishized commodities. 97 But Dickens was more than the most commodified, marketed popular novelist of his day. His famous readings contributed at least as much to his star status (and to his substantial coffers98) as his fiction. Although there were precedents for the readings, he was the most successful in this medium of entertainment, which served to enhance his celebrity. The taste for public readings was a desire to see virtuoso performers and was 'related to the tastes of Victorian theatre-goers for strong starquality', 99 the sort of star system that Mr Punch complained about in 1841. But the public platform was not open to everyone: women novelists (who could not be displayed in person) and most poets (who perhaps suffered from the Art/Entertainment dichotomy) are noticeably absent. The rise of celebrity can also be documented in other ways. Who's Who, for example, first published in 1849, contained the names of the royal family, aristocracy, government, judges, directors of companies and other important public figures. There were no entries for literary or creative people, and the pocket-size book was designed for reference rather than gossip. The prominence of biography in periodicals (apparent since the eighteenth century) also indicates, among other things, readers' appetite for important names, generally male. Biographical notices of famous men of history and reviews of biographies were a mainstay of periodicals at all levels, from the heavy quarterlies to Chambers' Edinburgh Journal. But there was a shift in interest from the individual to the personality. The cult of personality increased in the final decades of the nineteenth century, as the practices of the New Journalism became more firmly established in the press



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at all levels. In the 1870s Edmund Yates published a series of articles called 'Celebrities at Home' in the World which were reprinted in three volumes. These pieces were short biographies of royalty, aristocracy, literary figures and other well-known people (including Tennyson, Gladstone, Mary Braddon, Darwin, Sarah Bernhardt and the Prince of Wales), and Joel Wiener has argued that Yates's series was instrumental in creating a celebrity culture: . . . among the significant contributions that Yates made to journalism was to link gossip to the public's interest in famous people. He virtually coined the word celebrity in making the 'Celebrities at Home' series in the World one of its popular features for many years. Providing a peek into the lives of well-known people was the essence of personal journalism, as Yates defined it.100 Wiener notes that Trollope refused to be interviewed for the series 'because he disapproved of "society journalism"'. 101 In the 1880s the demand for famous people was so great that periodicals devoted solely to celebrities were launched. Celebrities of the Day: British and Foreign (A Monthly Repertoire of Contemporary Biography) survived to three volumes between 1881 and 1882, publishing at first between 15 and 20 biographical sketches per month; the number dropped to about six per month by the spring of 1882. The entire series included only two women, both actresses. Our Celebrities: A Portrait Gallery (1888-89) ran to 12 issues as planned, with three biographical sketches and accompanying photo portraits in each issue. The quality of the monthly issues is lavish, with photos by Walery, photographer to the Queen, but such luxury was reflected in the hefty price of 2s. 6d. Subjects ranged from aristocrats to notable professionals, but what is interesting is that artists (such as Frederic Leighton) and literary figures (such as Edmund Yates) are included as are several women. T.H. Huxley appears in May 1889, but chooses to write his own profile, complaining at any rate, T could not see what business the public had with my private life'.102 By this time, Huxley's resistance was already part of a losing battle, for a culture of personality was asserting its dominance. Authors in the 1870s and 1880s were raising their status as professionals by taking the marketing of their books into their own hands. The Author's Note Book and Eiterary Gossip, a penny



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monthly which ran only to five issues, purported to provide a space where authors could speak directly to the reading public: 'The present paper is started under the impression that the reading public would not be uninterested in seeing in a brief form, what authors had to say, by way of explanation, of their own productions . . .'103 Times had changed considerably from the day when authorship was either unknown or only coyly admitted in roundabout ways. Here, authors take responsibility for controlling their own images and those of their literary productions for public consumption. At least two articles appeared during the run on the topic of organizing a type of authors' union to provide a support network for writers and to end authorial isolationism. An article entitled 'Slaughter of the Innocents' describes the difficulty of new periodicals to survive in the face of unhelpful retailers: 'The greatest difficulty encountered by the proprietors of new periodicals is to get them exhibited in newsvendors' windows or upon their stalls.'104 The effect of the Author's Note Book is to combat established publishing practices at every turn - in areas of copyright, authorial status, and the distribution of literature. Authors were coming out all over and seeking self-empowerment not possible in a culture of anonymity. All of this is to say that during the 1860s, when the Fortnightly effectively introduced an author-based journal into periodical literature, it was, in fact, participating in a broader cultural shift which was turning individuals, like Dickens, into highly marketable stars. Enter Trollope, whose Hunting Sketches was reviewed in the Illustrated London News in 1865. The reviewer discussing the book form of the occasional Pall Mall Gazette essays enters the fray over the place of literary personality in popular culture: Let all who are in the habit of asking contemptuously, 'What's in a name?' regard this neat little book.. . . [The essays] are just light, pleasant, easy reading, lively enough, and apparently written by one who understands his subject. Had an ordinary man contributed them to any newspaper, they would have probably have been applauded at the time and consigned to oblivion; but they had appended to them the name or Mr. Anthony Trollope. 105 Two things stand out especially from this passage. Firstly, Trollope is not 'ordinary,' which suggests that he is extra-ordinary, someone



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WHAT'S IN A NAME? CAPITALIZING ON 'TROLLOPE' Trollope, one of the most popular novelists at this time, continually in print with overlapping serials and book publications, was a name to be reckoned with . . . or was he? That was the question on his mind when he decided on an experiment to test his own brand-name worth in the serial literature market. In November 1865, just four months after Trollope had argued for signed journalism in the pages of the Fortnightly, he began writing Nina Balatka, which he hoped to publish anonymously. He offered the serial to George Smith, who declined it, but found a publisher in John Blackwood, who for some time had been wanting to publish Trollope.107 Some Trollope reviewers had complained of too much, too similar Trollope in circulation. Attacks with such a tone were most prominent in the reception of The Belton Estate in 1866.108 Publishing Nina Balatka anonymously, Trollope was testing two things in particular: the genuineness of reviewers, and his own saleability as a name. 109 What it did not do was test the publishing industry's likelihood of publishing an unknown author anonymously. Blackwood knew he was publishing Trollope, and was inclined to accept the author's whim with the hope that Trollope might look to Blackwood with a more usual novel of English society; however, he did desire that a second identity could be made to pay, as a letter from Blackwood to J.M. Langford (an acquaintance of Trollope's from the Garrick) makes clear: I am pleased to hear of Trollope's disposition for further relations. When you see him give him my compliments, and say I am quite inclined. 'Author of "Nina Balatka"' may become a very convenient nom de plume, especially for such a very prolific writer as our friend.110 In Nina Balatka, Trollope distances himself from his other fiction by setting the novel in Prague, where he had recently visited. Although a conventional romance with the usual family compli-



whose name matters, someone with a star quality. Secondly, the reviewer asserts that the publisher is actually selling Trollope the name - Trollope the commodity, an 'idol of consumption'. 106

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cations and objections, the story revolves around the love affair of a wealthy Jewish young man and a poor Christian young woman. Will they or won't they marry? is the question throughout, but as always we feel safe in assuming that love will triumph over custom, tradition, even religion. Blackwood paid just £450 for the serial (published in Blackwood's Magazine) and one-volume rights, well below the sum Trollope could have commanded with his name attached. The novel was well received but sold poorly, and Trollope's anonymity was generally maintained. Not content with a one-off experiment and again trying to forge a second writing persona, Trollope offered Blackwood Linda Tressel, to be published anonymously on the same financial terms. Another one-volume novel set in foreign lands (this time Nuremberg), Linda Tressel was less enthusiastically received than Nina Balatka, so again the experiment was unsuccessful. N. John Hall suggests, 'Blackwood probably hoped enough people knew of Trollope's authorship to make the secret an open one.' 111 The publisher indulged the author's whim, hoping to keep him on his list, and Blackwood seems not to have been deluded that the experiment would prove very successful; he only published the novels because they were by Trollope. The irony is that Trollope had to publish a different type of fiction, hence the foreign locations and the brevity of the novels. A novel resembling any of the Barchester series would have been immediately recognizable, as would women-and-marriage novels in the vein of Rachel Ray, Miss Mackenzie, or The Belton Estate.112 Certain types of novel were Trollope territory and any attempt at anonymity would have been futile. Blackwood recognized this and commented of Nina Balatka, 'there is nothing in the Tale to recall the popular painter of Englishwomen in the drawing room on the Lawn' (Letters 1, 337). Why, then, incur the risk? Pierre Bourdieu, in 'The Production of Belief, has addressed the relationships between literary and artistic figures and publishers and galleries. For Bourdieu, the accumulation of 'symbolic capital' is one of the functions of cultural vendors: 'Symbolic capital' is to be understood as economic or political capital that is disavowed, misrecognized and thereby recognized, hence legitimate, a 'credit' which, under certain conditions, and always in the long run, guarantees 'economic' profits.113



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In short, w h e n the only usable, effective capital is the (mis)recognized, legitimate capital called 'prestige' or 'authority', the economic capital that cultural undertakings generally require cannot secure the specific profits by the field - not the 'economic' profits they always imply - unless it is reconverted into symbolic capital. 114 This of course assumes that there is an author that can be consecrated. It is perhaps useful to think of this in relation to avant-garde writers and artists, whose cachet translates into a value not specially economic. Edward Bishop has argued that T.S. Eliot's choosing The Dial for publication of The Wasteland demonstrates how radical art can be absorbed and commodified in a mainstream market, while producing 'economic capital' for the magazine. 115 Bourdieu asks the question, 'who is the true producer of the value of the work - the painter or the dealer, the writer or the publisher, the playwright or the theatre manger?' 116 The authority of the author is not the only source of value, for without the cultural apparatus linked to the author - such as publisher and distributor - the author's name is largely valueless. At the time Blackwood accepted Nina Balatka and Linda Tressel, Trollope was a consecrated author in the serial market. Taken up by Smith in 1860, revalued and upgraded with successive serials, moving between various publishers by the mid-1860s, accepted by critics - Trollope's was a name that publishers wanted on their lists. Blackwood was more than happy to do a favour for a star novelist who might one day bring a real Trollope novel to his firm for publication. But there is a second identity concerned here - the anonymous Trollope. Blackwood seems aware in the letters quoted that it is unlikely that the anonymous novels will actually pay off, but he is hopeful that the 'Author of Nina Balatka' might just catch on. Although the book was not selling, the authorship was still talked about. Blackwood's primary interest may have been in his ability to consecrate another identity for Trollope. In Bourdieu's terms, it is in this struggle to consecrate authors that value is actually found, not in individual persons, single institutions, publications, personalities:



A publisher might endorse an author as 'symbolic capital' rather than as 'economic capital' because the author brings status to the publisher:

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Stardom can be achieved only after the struggle, so that celebrity, one element in the field of production, is really a result of consecration. We need to be careful about using recent theories of media and publishing in order to understand nineteenth-century contexts. It is fair to ask whether mid-Victorian culture lends itself to Bourdieu's late twentieth-century analysis. Some might protest that Victorian publishing was simply too small in scale to warrant an analysis more appropriate to advanced capitalist media. However, we know that numbers of readers were increasing greatly; we know that publishing companies were merging, as were their magazine titles; we know that new printing and paper technologies were revolutionizing production; we know that the author was seeking self-empowerment by professionalising his practices. Victorian publishing still appears parochial in its localism and in its club-like mentality, as described at the beginning of this chapter. Yet, it is precisely the intimacy of the club network that makes Victorian publishing so recognizable to us today. Bourdieu asserts that 'entering the field of literature is not so much like going into religion as getting into a select club: the publisher is one of those prestigious sponsors .. . who effusively recommend their candidate.' 118 The way in which cultural commodities are consecrated now, as then, depends on a hegemonic, intimate network of individuals who have the ability to create value, either through economic or symbolic capital. Although the size of the economy has expanded - global publishing conglomerates, closely linked with other media - one essential structure of the publishing world remains familiar: the clubbiness of the network. Trollope's move to create a second public persona would not be unusual today, and one can think of several writers who use alter egos to write different types of novel. The problem is one of image: stars must maintain an image for public consumption. Any attempt to alter the image threatens the value of the star's quality. Trollope wrote an article arguing for signature by periodical writers; not long afterwards, he hoped to serialize an anonymous novel. We see



it is the field of production, understood as the system of objective relations between these agents or institutions and as the site of the struggles for the monopoly of the power to consecrate, in which the value of works of art and belief in that value are continuously generated. 117


different approaches to fiction and non-fiction, and Trollope's efforts to sign and then not to sign indicate how popular cultural figures rely on the value of their public images. In testing his own star quality and in trying to create a separate cultural identity, with its own cultural currency, Trollope helps us see the intricacies of the 'field of production' where culture is produced and stars are discovered and named.

Notes 1. See A, 190: 'Before we parted with our property we had found that a fortnightly issue was not popular with the trade through whose hands the work must reach the public; and, as our periodical had to become sufficiently popular itself to bear down such opposition, we succumbed, and brought it out once a month.' However, there were precedents for fortnightly magazine publication in other markets, such as the Family Friend, which was launched as a monthly in 1849, but became fortnightly soon after and attained a fortnightly circulation of 80,000 by December 1850. 2. Prospectus, Fortnightly Review 1 (May 15, 1865), inside front cover. 3. 'On the Anonymous in Periodicals', New and Monthly Magazine and Literary lournal 39 (September 1833), 4-5. 4. For an overview of the anonymity debate in the nineteenth century, see Oscar Maurer, Jr, 'Anonymity vs. Signature in Victorian Reviewing', Texas Studies in English 27 (June 1948), 1-27. 5. See the Fortnightly prospectus. 6. Quoted in M.H. Spielmann, The History of 'Punch' (London: Cassell and Company, 1895), 53. 7. Quoted ibid., 93. For a more complete discussion of the Punch dinners and club-like social formation of the magazine, see ibid., chapter 3. 8. Charles Morgan, The House of Macmillan (1843-1943) (London: Macmillan, 1943), 50. 9. Rosemary Ashton, G.H. Lewes: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 101. 10. Ibid., 198. 11. 'The Positive Philosophy of M. Auguste Comte', Edinburgh Review 127 (April 1868), 305. 12. Laurel Brake offers another explanation. See her chapter, 'The "Wicked Westminster", the Fortnightly, and Walter Pater's Renaissance , in John O. Jordan and Robert L. Patten, eds, Literature in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century British Publishing and Reading Practices (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 289-305, in which she argues that the Fortnightly constructs women readers in particular ways through the use of coded language in the articles.



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13. Auguste Comte, Correspondance generate et Confessions, 1846-48 (Paris: Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 1981), 194: T am delighted that my recent Discours has so pleased you. This is a good sign for the moral and social success of positivism, which, in your country, also corresponds to its intellectual success' (my translation). 14. This letter at the Maison Auguste Comte in Paris is quoted in T.R. Wright, The Religion of Humanity: The Impact of Comtean Positivism on Victorian Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 52. 15. Auguste Comte, A General View of Positivism, J.H. Bridges, trans. (London: Trubner, 1865), 225-6. 16. Ibid., 248. 17. Ibid., 277-8 18. Wright, Religion of Humanity, 50. 19. See the following articles on Comte: 'Positive Philosophy of Comte', Edinburgh Review 127 (April 1868), 303-57; William Whewell, 'Comte and Positivism', Macmillan's Magazine 13 (March 1866), 353-62; 'Positivism', North British Review 49 (September 1868), 209-56; W.H. Freemantle, 'M. Auguste Comte and His Disciples on International Policy', Contemporary Review 3 (December 1866), 477-98; Brooke F. Westcott, 'Comte on the Philosophy of the History of Christianity', Contemporary Review 3 (December 1867), 399-421; Brooke F. Westcott, 'Aspects of Positivism in Relation to Christianity', Contemporary Review 8 (July 1868), 371-86. 20. Editor [G.H. Lewes], 'Comte and Mill', Fortnightly Review 6 (1 October 1866), 385-406. See also Lewes's 'Auguste Comte', Fortnightly Review 3 (1 January 1866), 385-410 and his review of Bridges's General View in the Fortnightly Review 1 (1 June 1865), 250-1, in which he accepts Comte's early philosophy but not the later doctrinal religion. As I indicate later in this chapter, another way to regard the Fortnightly's promotion of Positivism is to consider the periodical's relation to radical politics. 21. G.H. Lewes, Biographical History of Philosophy 2 (2 vols; London: John W. Parker, 1857), 662. 22. Wright, Religion of Humanity, 60. 23. Gordon Haight, ed., The George Eliot Letters 4 (9 vols; London: Oxford University Press; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1956), 496. 24. See, for example, the following letters in Haight, ed., George Eliot Letters 4: George Eliot to Mrs Richard Congreve (28 November 1863), 115-16; George Eliot to Mrs Richard Congreve (3 January 1865), 173-74; George Eliot to Mrs Richard Congreve (28 January 1863), 227. 25. Still, we could add to the anecdotal evidence. Interestingly, Raphael's painting of the 'Sistine Madonna' was perhaps George Eliot's favourite painting in the world and on a trip to Dresden in 1858, the couple, in awe, returned repeatedly to the work. It may be merely coincidence, but nonetheless suggestive, that the 'Sistine Madonna' was a 'central symbol of Positivist worship', and a



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26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42.

43.

Trollope and the Magazines reproduction h u n g in the Church of Humanity, Chapel Street. See Wright, Religion of Humanity, 196. Ibid., 129. See Christopher Kent, 'Higher Journalism and the Promotion of Comtism', Victorian Periodicals Review 25:2 (Summer 1992), 51-6. Wright, Religion of Humanity, 128. 'Positivist Papers', British Library, ADD MS 45.259, fos. 1-2. Richard Dellamora, Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), chapter 1. Christopher Kent, Brains and Numbers: Elitism, Comtism, and Democracy in Mid-Victorian England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978), 89. 'Positivist Papers', British Library, ADD MS 45.227, fo. 21. See Kent, Brains and Numbers, who writes, 'most of the Comtists were devoted clubmen', 88. The Reform Club's membership books indicate that in the mid 1860s, the following Fortnightly contributors were members: E.S. Beesly; Sheldon Amos; Robert Bell; James C. Morison; Marmion Savage; Joseph Charles Parkinson; Charles MacKay; Frederic Harrison. See The Rules and Regulations, with an Alphabetical List of the Members of THE REFORM CLUB with Dates of Entrance (Westminster: Thomas Brettel, 1866). My thanks to Mr Simon Blundell, librarian at the Reform Club, for his assistance in tracking down both contributors and Positivists who were club members. Richard Congreve, The Propagation of the Religion of Humanity: A Sermon Preached at South Fields, Wandsworth (London: John Chapman, 1860), 13. International Policy: Essays on the Foreign Relations of England (London: Chapman and Hall, 1866), v, my emphasis. E.S. Beesly, J.H. Bridges, Richard Congreve, Religion of Humanity, Republic of the West: Papers on the War between France and Germany (London: Edward Truelove, 1870). See Wellesley 2, 189. There were 243 articles (not including book notices, the 'Public Affairs' section or the 'Causeries') during Lewes's tenure. Editor [G.H. Lewes], 'Varia', Fortnightly Review 3 (1 January 1866), 512. Ibid., 512-13, my emphasis. This cultural configuration of the press is still with us in the late twentieth century. See Naomi Wolf, 'Are Opinions Male?' New Republic (29 November 1993), on the contents of the Washington Post and New York Times. Trollope had something to do with Cobbe's appearance in the magazine. See his letter to her (18 November 1866) in Letters 1, 359: T should think that a paper from you would be welcome to the Editor of the Fortnightly'. Note that Morley was editor by this time. Dickie A. Spurgeon believes that 'Morley followed Lewes in encouraging women to contribute to the magazine and in publish-



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44. 45.

46. 47.

48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

54. 55. 56.

57. 58.

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ing articles advocating women's rights'; see his entry on the Fortnightly in Alvin Sullivan, British Literary Magazines: The Victorian and Edwardian Age, 1837-1913 (Westport, CT, and London: Greenwood Press, 1984), 132. However, I do not accept this and do not see the evidence for it. John Dennis, review of John Malcolm Ludlow, Woman's Work in the Church, in Fortnightly Review 1 (1 June 1865), 252. See the following reviews in the Fortnightly: John Dennis's review of Mary Braddon, Only a Clod in 1 (1 July 1865), 511-12; A.R. Vardy's review of Amelia B. Edwards, Half a Million of Money in 3 (15 January 1866), 654-5; Robert Buchanan's review of Sarah Tytler's Citoyenne Jacqueline: A Woman's Lot in the Great French Revolution in 3 (1 February 1866), 781-2; John Dennis's review of Elizabeth Cooper's Life and Letters of Lady Arabella Stuart in 4 (15 March 1865), 383. Mary Lyndon Shanley, Feminism, Marriage, and the Law in England, 1850-1895 (London: LB. Tauris, 1989), 50-1. See chapter 2 on the Married Women's Property Act of 1870. Note that Lewes was out of the country in June and July 1866 and that Trollope edited the magazine for those two months. No 'Causerie' appeared in July, August, or the first fortnight of September 1866. Editor [Lewes], 'Comte and Mill', 406. Ibid. Editor [Lewes], 'Criticism in Relation to Novels', Fortnightly Review 3 (15 December 1865), 353. Ibid., 355. Editor [G.H. Lewes], 'The Principles of Success in Literature: The Principle of Vision', Fortnightly Review 1 (1 June 1865), 187. Both the Fortnightly, initially, and the Revue appeared fortnightly. In 1865-66, the Revue published articles on foreign affairs, and a number of articles about England. A serial in 1864 about an English aristocrat was called Austin Elliot, Etude de la Vie Aristocratique Anglaise. The cover of the Revue lists the cities where the periodical could be purchased, emphasizing its internationalist base. The Fortnightly'^ dedication to internationalism can be seen best in Lewes's 'Public Affairs' section which provides an ongoing narrative of events in Europe and America. In addition, the two periodicals also wrote on similar and sometimes the same topics. London Review 12 (3 March 1866), 260. Athenaeum 1866 I (3 February 1866), 166. Trollope's fiction often teases out the tensions between love and money. See, for example, William A. Cohen's provocative chapter ('Trollope's Trollop') on The Eustace Diamonds in his study Sex Scandal: The Private Parts of Victorian Fiction (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1996), 158-90. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (1973; London: Hogarth Press, 1985), 174-5. Frederic Harrison, 'The Limits of Political Economy', Fortnightly Review 1 (15 June 1865), 366-7.



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59. See, for example, the pamphlet Positivist Articles, Reviews, and Letters reprinted from the Bengalee (Calcutta: Bengalee Press, 1870), 105-6. 60. [F.W. Newman,] 'Capacities of Women', Westminster Review 56 n.s. (October 1865), 359. 61. 'The Laws of Marriage and Divorce', Westminster Review 52 n.s. (October 1864), 458. The author is unattributed in Wellesley 3. 62. Shanley, Feminism, 14. 63. See ibid., chapter 2. 64. [Helen Taylor,] 'The Ladies' Petition', Westminster Review 31 n.s. (January 1867), 66, reprinted in Ann P. Robson and John M. Robson, eds, Sexual Equality: Writings by John Stuart Mill, Harriet Taylor Mill and Helen Taylor (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 219. 65. See, for example, The Belton Estate (ch. 24, II, 664-5). We should note, however, that Will's disavowal of the estate is linked inextricably with his relationship with Clara and her relationship with Captain Aylmer. 66. Interestingly, a number of the Fortnightly's Positivists at the time were experiencing, in Christopher Kent's words, a 'prolonged bachelorhood' (see Kent, Brains and Numbers, 101). In 1869-70 this period of 'prolonged bachelorhood' came to an end when Beesly, Bridges, Harrison, and H. Crompton all got married. 67. 'Our Old Bachelors', Bachelors' Buttons (June 1860), 32. 68. 'Spinsters and Bachelors', Bachelors' Buttons (June 1860), 32. 69. Editorial Preface, Bachelors' Papers (November 1870). 70. 'A Spinster's Musings', Bachelors' Papers (February 1871), 95. 71. Ibid., 96. 72. Michael Slater, 'The Bachelor's Pocket Book for 1851', Tennessee Studies in Literature (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1984), 128-40. 73. 'A Spinster's Musings', 98. 74. 'A "Quid Pro Quo"', Bachelors' Papers (April 1871), 149. 75. 'Marriage in Real Life', Bachelors' Papers (April 1871), 157-60. 76. 'A Spinster's Criticisms', Bachelors' Papers (May 1871), 172-6. 77. Punch 49 (16 December 1865), 238. 78. See the entry on Bentley's in Wellesley 4, 7. 79. Laurel Brake, '"The Trepidation of the Spheres": The Serial and the Book in the 19th Century', in Michael Harris and Robin Myers, eds, Serials and Their Readers (Winchester: St. Paul's Bibliographies, 1993), 91. 80. George Saintsbury, A History of Nineteenth Century Literature (London: Macmillan, 1896), 450. 81. See note 3 above. 82. Saintsbury, A History, 451. 83. Maurer, 'Anonymity vs. Signature', 10-11. 84. See Matthew Arnold, 'Up to Easter', Nineteenth Century 21 (May 1887), 638. 85. Editor [Lewes], 'Causerie', Fortnightly Review 4 (1 April 1866), 507. 86. Consider, for example, the early success of Good Words or Cassell's. Of course, working-class Sunday papers such as Reynold's and Lloyd's



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87.

88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95.

96. 97.

98.

99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106.

a Flybrid

139

had circulations in the hundreds of thousands, and readerships many times greater. Andrew Elfenbein, Byron and the Victorians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 47. Elfenbein suggests convincingly that Byron was the model for literary celebrity in the nineteenth century, and that periodicals were largely the means through which public opinion about 'Byron' was constructed and disseminated (see chapter 2, 'The Creation of Byronism'). Harriet Martineau, 'Literary Lionism', reprinted in Harriet Martineau s Autobiography 1 (3 vols; London: Smith, Elder, 1877), 283. Ibid., 276. Ibid., 285. Tudor's argument is summarized in Richard Dyer, Stars (1979; reprinted London: British Film Institute, 1992), 20-1. Dyer's book is an invaluable introduction to the study of 'stars'. 'The Drama', Punch 1 (17 July 1841), 12. Leo Lowenthal, Literature, Popular Culture and Society (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1961), 110. Philip Collins, 'The Popularity of Dickens', Dickensian 70 (January 1974), 6. Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 108. Poovey argues that Dickens came to represent a type of 'national character' which 'implicitly constructed the middle-class male as the norm by obliterating class (and gender) differences', 110. Collins, 'Popularity', 8. See Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851-1914 (London and New York: Verso, 1990), especially the Introduction. Richards makes the point that 'the icons of Victorian commodity culture all originated in middleclass periodicals. Until the very end of the nineteenth century advertising consisted almost entirely of the bourgeoisie talking to itself, 7. Philip Collins, Reading Aloud: A Victorian Metier (Lincoln, UK: Tennyson Society, 1972), 7. Collins's account of the popularity of public readings, lectures, and recitals informs the next few paragraphs. See also Philip Collins, ed., Charles Dickens: The Public Readings (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), xvii-xxx. Collins, Reading Aloud, 25. Joel Wiener, 'Edmund Yates: The Gossip as Editor', in Joel Wiener, ed., Innovators and Preachers: The Role of Editor in Victorian England (Westport, CT, and London: Greenwood Press, 1985), 269. Ibid., 270. See Huxley's entry in Our Celebrities 1 (May 1889), 1. 'First Words', Author's Note Book and Literary Gossip (December 1876), 1. 'Slaughter of the Innocents', Author's Note Book (February 1877), 24. 'Current Literature', Illustrated London News 46 (20 May 1865), 491. Lowenthal's phrase in Literature, Popular Culture, 115.



Launching


107. N. John Hall gives the details of Nina Balatka's publishing history in Trollope: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), 283-9. 108. See for example the London Review 12 (3 March 1866), 260, and Henry James's review in the Nation 2 (4 January 1866), 21-2. 109. See Judith Knelman, 'Trollope's Experiments with Anonymity', Victorian Periodicals Review 14:1 (Spring 1981), 21-4. 110. John Blackwood to J.M. Langford (3 April 1867), quoted in Mrs Gerald Porter, Annals of a Publishing House: John Blackwood (vol. iii of Margaret Oliphant's William Blackwood and His Sons: Their Magazine and Friends) (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1898), 361. See also Blackwood to Langford in Letters 1, 337, note 2: 'There is an individuality about [Nina Balatka] which will make any one who reads it remember it. Whether this is sufficient to make it really popular & stand out from the ruck as the work of an anonymous author is a doubtful point. My own feeling is that it would not produce such an effect in the Magazine or sell to such an extent afterwards as to make it wise for me to offer a large sum for the copyright. 111. Hall, Biography, 304. 112. As it was, some guessed Trollope's identity. See Trollope to John Blackwood (17 August 1866) in Letters 1, 349, and John Blackwood to J.M. Langford (3 April 1867) in Porter, Annals of a Publishing House, 361-2. 113. Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993), 75. 114. Ibid. 115. Edward Bishop, 'Re: Covering Modernism: Format and Function in the Little Magazines,' in Ian Willison, Warwick Gould, and Warren Chernaik, eds, Modernist Writers and the Marketplace (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan Press, 1996), 287-319. 116. Bourdieu, Field of Cultural Production, 76. 117. Ibid., 78. 118. Ibid., 77.



140

Transitions: Phineas Finn and Masculinity in Saint Pauls Magazine TROLLOPE IN TRANSITION The year 1867 was a watershed for Trollope. He had more or less disassociated himself from the increasingly progressive Fortnightly Review. He was at the peak of his powers, publishing in part issues The East Chronicle of Barset, which he regards in the Autobiography as his finest achievement in fiction (A 274), and he remembered 1867 with great nostalgia - the Barchester series was complete and the Palliser novels were well under way. More significantly for his personal life, at least as he later recalls, was the decision to resign from the Post Office. Trollope's deep sense of hurt at having been passed over for promotion in 1865 eventually led to his resignation in autumn 1867. Knowing that his literary work would provide at least as much income as his civil service job, Trollope resigned on 3 October. The publisher James Virtue had for several months discussed a new periodical for Trollope to edit, and with feelings of bitterness towards his beloved Post Office, Saint Pauls Magazine1 was launched in October 1867. Looking back, Trollope believed the years 1867-68 to be the 'busiest in my life' (A 322): he left the Post Office, travelled to America, established Saint Pauls, wrote journalism for the magazine, wrote five novels, hunted three times a week each winter and lost a parliamentary election. Whether or not we accept Trollope's construction of his life as told in the Autobiography, a story of making good through dedication and diligence if ever there was one, 2 it is true that 1867 was a transitional year for him. Virtue had approached Trollope about editing a magazine over a year before Saint Pauls was launched, and by December 1866 141 10.1057/9780230288546 - Trollope and the Magazines, Mark Turner


4


the author had agreed to be editor and plans were under way. Trollope's primary concern was that the first issue be postponed until October 1867.3 Trollope was different from other well-known editors in that he demanded full editorial control in deciding on contributors and their payments, and he was encouraged by Virtue to 'pay the contributors well to get good talent' (Fetters 1, 358). His own salary was £750 per year, 4 and at a pound a page for non-fiction, his rates to contributors were comparable to those of the quarterlies. Fiction (apart from Trollope's own, which earned a higher rate) was paid at the rate of 25 shillings per page, and it is worth noting that the other, lesser-paid serial novelists under Trollope's editorship were all women: Baroness Blaze de Bury, Frances Eleanor Trollope, and Mrs Oliphant. Trollope's place at the head of the magazine, it would seem, was not to be overshadowed by any other more popular novelist. However, his editorial control and generosity 5 were not enough to make the venture lucrative, and he admits in the Autobiography that 'publishers themselves have been the best editors of magazines' (A 288). 'I calculate that a sale of 25,000 would pay,' Virtue wrote to Trollope, 'but I certainly expect a far higher circulation' (Fetters 1, 358). As it was, the circulation never reached above 10,000, and Virtue sold the magazine to Alexander Strahan in May 1869. In January 1870, at the same time Trollope's serial of Ralph the Heir was added as a supplement to the magazine, 6 the authoreditor was informed that the publishers could no longer afford his services. By July he was out and Saint Pauls was left to 'edit itself in the manner of Blackwood's (Letters 1, 495). Four years later, after an unsuccessful intervention from yet another publisher, the magazine came quietly to an end in mid-volume. In the same month in 1867 that Trollope resigned from the Post Office and launched Saint Pauls, his experiment with anonymity continued with Linda Tressel in Blackwood's (as discussed in Chapter 3). Interestingly, while he was testing the power of his 'brand name' with Linda Tressel, advertisements for his own periodical were anything but modest about the attraction of 'Anthony Trollope'. Adverts in September and October clearly use his popularity to sell Saint Pauls. In a full page advertisement which appeared in the Athenaeum and Saturday Review, for example, his proper name and his role as editor are both invoked three times 7 (Fig. 4.1). Virtue had initially wanted Saint Pauls to be called Anthony Trollope's Magazine, but the humble author balked



142

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Trollope and the Magazines: Gendered Issues in Mid-Victorian Britain

Trollope and the Church of England

Designing Magazines

The gendered society

The gendered society

Gendered Discourses

Gendered Discourse in Professional Communication

The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines: Britain and Ireland 1880-1955

Pages from the Past: History and Memory in American Magazines

Gendered Moods: Psychotropics and Society

Oxford Reader's Companion to Trollope

Britain BC: Life in Britain and Ireland Before the Romans

Understanding Women's Magazines: Publishing, Markets and Readership

Writing for Magazines

Reformation in Britain and Ireland

The United States and Britain in Prophecy

The Professional Ideal in the Victorian Novel: The Works of Disraeli, Trollope, Gaskell, and Eliot

The Roman House in Britain

The Roman House in Britain

Working Gendered Boundaries

Turning Pages: Reading And Writing Women's Magazines in Interwar Japan

Gendered Spaces in Contemporary Irish Poetry

The Professional Ideal in the Victorian Novel: The Works of Disraeli, Trollope, Gaskell, and Eliot

Issues in Design and Technology Teaching (Issues in Subject Teaching)

Latin and the Vernacular Languages in Early Medieval Britain (Studies in the Early History of Britain)

Geology And Environment In Britain And Ireland

The Relation: Issues in Complexity and Scale

Issues and Ethics in the Helping Professions

The Professional Ideal in the Victorian Novel: The Works of Disraeli, Trollope, Gaskell, and Eliot

Evangelical Identity and Gendered Family Life

Trollope and the Magazines: Gendered Issues in Mid-Victorian Britain

Trollope and the Church of England

Designing Magazines

The gendered society

The gendered society

Gendered Discourses

Gendered Discourse in Professional Communication

The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines: Britain and Ireland 1880-1955

Pages from the Past: History and Memory in American Magazines

Gendered Moods: Psychotropics and Society

Oxford Reader's Companion to Trollope

Britain BC: Life in Britain and Ireland Before the Romans

Understanding Women's Magazines: Publishing, Markets and Readership

Writing for Magazines

Reformation in Britain and Ireland

The United States and Britain in Prophecy

The Professional Ideal in the Victorian Novel: The Works of Disraeli, Trollope, Gaskell, and Eliot

The Roman House in Britain

The Roman House in Britain

Working Gendered Boundaries

Turning Pages: Reading And Writing Women's Magazines in Interwar Japan

Gendered Spaces in Contemporary Irish Poetry

The Professional Ideal in the Victorian Novel: The Works of Disraeli, Trollope, Gaskell, and Eliot

Issues in Design and Technology Teaching (Issues in Subject Teaching)

Latin and the Vernacular Languages in Early Medieval Britain (Studies in the Early History of Britain)

Geology And Environment In Britain And Ireland

The Relation: Issues in Complexity and Scale

Issues and Ethics in the Helping Professions

The Professional Ideal in the Victorian Novel: The Works of Disraeli, Trollope, Gaskell, and Eliot

Evangelical Identity and Gendered Family Life

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