Margaret Oliphant and the Changing World of Victorian Journalism

Abstract

This essay examines the range and variety of Margaret Oliphant's articles and reviews written over a period of more than forty years. The obituary in Blackwood's Magazine described her as 'the most accomplished periodical writer of her day', as distinct from a journalist, an accolade that would have pleased her in view of her scepticism of the professionalization of journalism that she witnessed at the end of her career. She tried her hand at the new shorter articles that became the norm at the end of the nineteenth century, but preferred the expansive essays and ‘miscellaneous articles’ that John Blackwood encouraged her to write for his house magazine. She was critical of the fashion for collecting periodical essays and reviews into books, declaring the magazine ‘a halfway house between the ephemeral and the permanent’ and looked back at the end of her writing life to the middle decades of the century when she had flourished as a ‘person of letters’.