Modulating Narrative Voice: Mary Russell Mitford's Sketches of Rural Character

Abstract

Building on recent work in book history which shows that analyses of the original periodical context of much nineteenth-century writing can generate variant readings of “official” publications in bound volumes, this essay asks what the transposition of Mary Russell Mitford's understudied character sketches from magazine to various book forms tells us about the modulation of narrative voice in different print venues. In the first section, the author examines these sketches—instead of Mitford's more widely studied pieces on rural scenery—synchronically with surrounding copy in the Lady's Magazine in order to show how, in the periodical context, different inflections in Mitford's narrative voice can be discerned from those later marketed in various bound volumes published in the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. In the second section, the author provides a genealogy of the popular construction of Mitford as maternal and beneficent, highlighting the role that paratextual framing played in this process. Broadening the paradigmatic “communications circuit”—as Robert Darnton calls the interrelations of a range of actors in book production (from the author to the publisher, printer and distributor)—to include periodicals, the author traces the history of manufacturing “Mary Russell Mitford” as a cultural commodity.