Fraser's Magazine Research Articles

Between Beethoven and Mendelssohn: Biographical Constructions of Berlioz in the London Press

In 1853 a writer for the London-based periodical Fraser's Magazine remarked that Berlioz's “heroic temperament” could be “read legibly in the noble style of his compositions. His own life forms to these works the most interesting accompaniment and commentary.” The linking of life and work in Berlioz's case is nothing unusual. However, a particular set of circumstances unique to London meant that critics based in that city persistently used Berlioz's biography to further their own agendas while also promoting his music. In this article, I argue that, when writing about Berlioz's London performances, critics employed biographical ideas and narratives that enabled them to use the composer as a means to shape local debates about the future of London's orchestral institutions: the Philharmonic Society and its latest “rival”: the New Philharmonic Society. Biography proved a powerful rhetorical device from which Berlioz profited and is central to our understanding of his critical reception in London. It was used to introduce, to persuade, to simplify, to generate sympathy, admiration, and outrage. However, I reveal that in later visits biographical narratives overshadowed the coverage of Berlioz's music. In some articles, Berlioz was reduced to a rhetorical device to be employed to give strength to criticisms of either the old Philharmonic or the new, with the critic offering little insight into Berlioz's music. Biography had given Berlioz a foothold in musical London, but it could not win him the lasting success he craved.

A Forerunner of “A Descent into the Maelström”

A Forerunner of “A Descent into the Maelström”

‘This dark world’: the blindfold chess-player in Victorian literary and urban culture

ABSTRACTGeorge Walker's March 1840 article for Fraser's Magazine entitled ‘Chess Without the Chess-Board’ outlined the history and method of blindfold chess (or chess-play without sight of the board and pieces). Arriving as chess was becoming increasingly visible within nineteenth-century literary and urban culture, Walker's essay covered familiar issues on the topic concerning spectacle, utility, and bodily and mental damage, as well as furthering his own concerns with the history of the game and the possibility of expanding participation. This assessment of ‘Chess Without the Chess-Board’, part of wider research concerning chess in urban and literary modernity, complements research published in the author's monograph on the cultural chess-player and previously within Sport in History. Prominent themes of Walker's article include the multiple identities of the blindfold chess-player and the game’s ever-changing relationship to standards of respectability. ‘Chess Without the Chess-Board’, offering a lengthy ‘how-to-play’ to the beginning player and outlining the national prestige and celebrity of historical blindfold chess-players, also presents a potentially disreputable reading of practice and player, denying any wider social utility.

Matrimonials in the Morning Post: Literary Wife-Traps in Conservative Contexts

Matrimonials in the Morning Post:Literary Wife-Traps in Conservative Contexts Kellie Holzer (bio) Far from representing an open market for courtship,1 early nineteenth-century matrimonial advertisements were a conservative extension of traditional modes of courtship into the realm of print culture. Matrimonial advertisements circulated in a cultural milieu of disapproving readers. Alarming, and sometimes humorous, warnings against matrimonial advertising alleged its potential for deception, fraud, and danger.2 Female correspondents [End Page 199] were particularly threatened; readers imagined male advertisers as "Heartless, mercenary wretches, who ought to be shunned by all respectable females!" (Y. M. 41). Yet in spite of the public prejudice against them, matrimonial advertisements tended to have socially conservative functions. If we attend more closely to the varying print contexts in which matrimonial advertisements appeared, as well as analyze recurring discursive patterns within the advertisements, we find that matrimonial advertising often functioned to shore up traditional ideas about class, gender, sexuality, and marriage. A survey of matrimonials printed in the Morning Post illustrates how a newspaper's character, reputation, and circulation shaped the content of matrimonial advertising.3 Why the Morning Post? Recent scholarship on matrimonials focuses on their circulation among the aspirational classes.4 Matrimonials for and by members of the upper classes, especially those published prior to the 1870s rise of niche periodicals devoted to matrimonial advertising, have been overlooked, and yet these provide some of the most fervent defences of advertising as a respectable mode of courtship.5 In the Morning Post, matrimonials intermittently appear on the first page, surrounded by advertisements for goods, services, and employment opportunities. The Morning Post was well known for fashionable news and conservative politics. According to Wilfrid Hindle's history, the Morning Post was "recognized as a champion of Conservatism for over a century" (4) and "very much the organ of the leisured classes" (5). The newspaper had a reputation for snobbery in the first half of the nineteenth century. A Punch writer dubbed it the "Fawning Post" for its sycophantic reporting of the Royal family (Hindle 166). Evoking an elite female readership, a contemporary Fraser's Magazine critic described the newspaper as the oracle of the drawing-room, and the soft recorder of ballroom beauties and drawing-room presentations. . . . In all matters interesting to the female world of fashion this paper has always the best information, which it employs in a discreet manner, imparting just as much of private affairs as the public ought to know, and no more. (qtd. in Hindle 165) The conservative tone and fashionable reputation of the Morning Post are reflected in the matrimonials printed between 1820 and 1860. For one thing, advertisers describe themselves as gentlemen of property seeking ladies with matching resources and connections. In contrast to matrimonials included in the notices to correspondents sections of less-fashionable papers, which unapologetically published advertisers' pecuniary problems, there are far fewer matrimonials in the Morning Post that express socio-economic aspirations. The lack of such advertisements complicates the stereotype of the fortune hunter prevalent in public discourse about matrimonials.6 In fact, many of the Morning Post matrimonials explicitly state that "Money is no [End Page 200] consideration" (8 Nov. 1858) or "Whatever fortune the lady may possess will be strictly settled upon herself" (26 May 1860). The few Morning Post matrimonials that do appear to be motivated by economic reasons are genteelly regretful in tone, while still asserting the advertiser's social status. One such 1830 advertisement seeking a "Lady of ample fortune" apologetically explains that the advertiser "possesses at present a comfortable independence, and very considerable expectations hereafter, but being entailed property, it cannot be set apart for the purposes of a marriage settlement, which explains the necessity of this public intimation of his views. He would not, however, desire an union with any Lady not at least his equal in society" (9 April 1831). In reinforcing the class hierarchy and tacit rules for endogamous marriage within the upper social strata, these advertisements, contributed solely by male correspondents looking for wives, are noticeably gendered.7 Advertisements uniformly feature chivalric promises of honour and secrecy that reveal the articulation of gender, sexuality, and class, given that they are as...

"[M]easuring from the Standard": Barnaby Rudge's Post-Enlightenment Reading Geography

"[M]easuring from the Standard":Barnaby Rudge's Post-Enlightenment Reading Geography Jeffrey E. Jackson (bio) "measuring from the Standard . . . or rather from the spot on or near to which the Standard used to be in days of yore." -Charles Dickens, Barnaby Rudge (1841) The opening of his Child's History of England (1851–53) finds Charles Dickens contemplating a map of Britain, devoting particular attention to Scotland: he writes, "The little neighbouring islands, which are so small upon the Map as to be mere dots, are chiefly little bits of Scotland,—broken off . . . in the course of a great length of time, by the power of the restless water" (129). In this paper, I discuss Barnaby Rudge (1841), a historical novel of London's anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of 1780, as Dickens's contribution to what I like to call a post-Enlightenment re-mapping of Britain's reading geography—as Scotland's Enlightenment-era status as the center of British intellectual and publishing work had, itself, broken off in the course of a great length of time. Many have discussed Barnaby Rudge as Dickens's anxious engagement with Scotland's most famous and formidable author, historical novelist Sir Walter Scott. Thus, Kathryn Chittick writes, "to understand Dickens's ambitions in his early manhood is to come round inevitably to Scott" (18). In my essay, however, I read Barnaby Rudge as a larger expression of cultural insecurity. Devised in the 1830s, in the wake of what Chittick summarizes as the "collapse of the Edinburgh publishing scene" (41) and the uncertain, tentative shift of British publishing activities to London, 1841's Rudge is a late contribution to what I think of as a tradition of literary cartography charting England's cultural distance from the world of the Scottish Enlightenment. The distinctiveness of 18th-century Scotland within Britain has long invited commentary. Thus, discussing Edinburgh of the 1700s, historian J. G. A. Pocock notes that in it one could readily find "all the essential elements of an Enlightenment," elements that simply "did not exist" in England at the same time (525). Pocock is arguing here that, unlike the English Enlightenment, the Scottish Enlightenment was embodied in its various institutions: in the universities, debating clubs, and learned societies that so typified the Edinburgh metropolis. These signature material cultures made Scotland what Clifford Siskin has called "the Enlightenment home of philosophical inquiry"—"so much so that . . . [many] routinely [End Page 298] followed the path north from England to the universities of Scotland" (80). Yet, Siskin goes on to note, "by the early nineteenth century, the path no longer seemed so inviting" (80). Thus, an anonymous commentator in Fraser's Magazine laments how "the vaunted Modern Athens [i.e., Edinburgh] is fast dwindling away into a mere spelling book and primer manufactory" (qtd in Chittick 41). I am interested in the terms of the last quotation, which juxtaposes the decline of the Scottish Enlightenment's public sphere with the mass production and distribution of reading matter. The distinctive material cultures of 18th-century Scotland, where publishing and intellectual work had what Jon Klancher calls the quality of "face-to-face relations" (19), yielded ground to what Ina Ferris has called a "less institutionally defined, more stratified and unpredictable readership" (23). The shift, as Patrick Brantlinger notes, in significantly precise wording, raised "the spectre of . . . mass literacy producing the opposite of enlightenment" (2–3, emphasis added). I suggest here that Barnaby Rudge, a Gothic-tinged, London-based novel of urban terrorism and mob violence registers this cultural re-orientation, one I describe in my paper as a shift toward London and away from the onetime standard set by Scotland. I. "Something Very Shocking . . . Will Soon Come Out in London" Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey (1818) finds its heroine Catherine Morland telling Henry and Eleanor Tilney that "something very shocking indeed, will soon come out in London," and she "shall expect murder and every thing of the kind" (77). Henry explains to his confused sister, "Miss Morland has been talking of nothing more dreadful than a new publication which is shortly to come out, in three duo-decimo volumes, two hundred and seventy-six pages in...

How Victorian Periodicals Mourn: Obituaries and Memorial Essays

How Victorian Periodicals Mourn:Obituaries and Memorial Essays April Patrick (bio) In an era when the reigning monarch mourned her husband for nearly forty years, the Victorian preoccupation with death appeared in artifacts ranging from mourning jewellery to post-mortem photography to black-bordered memorial cards. Just as these products for memorializing the dead varied widely, so did literary responses to death, which spanned genres and media. In the month following Charles Dickens's death, on 9 June 1870, written memorials for the beloved author, editor, and publisher filled the pages of magazines and newspapers. Barely twelve hours after Dickens's death, the Times published more than two thousand words on the deceased writer, as did other London daily newspapers, including the Pall Mall Gazette, the Morning Post, and the Standard. Many of the monthly publications printed lengthier responses to the loss in their July 1870 issues, including those by Dickens's friends and colleagues in Macmillan's Magazine, Temple Bar, Fraser's Magazine, New Monthly Magazine, Gentleman's Magazine, and St. Paul's Magazine. Other periodical coverage of the author's death, including reports on the burial and speeches made about the deceased, is excluded here, as it performs a different function from the writings that memorialized Dickens. Additionally, many periodicals also included poetic responses to his death in such forms as the elegy. The obituary in the 10 June 1870 issue of the Times, "Death of Charles Dickens," includes details of Dickens's final illness and death before focusing mostly on his life, publications, and career. With two paragraphs near the end devoted to Dickens's oral readings of his popular works, the article quotes from "his parting speech on the occasion of his last reading at St. James's-hall" as the author's own farewell to his fans: "from these garish lights I vanish now for evermore, with one heartfelt, grateful, respectful, and affectionate farewell" (12). It then concludes with a paragraph of reflection on what made Dickens such a popular writer before a final note on Dickens's father-in-law, "a musical writer of some eminence in his day" (12), a seemingly odd addition but one that supports the news-focused nature of the obituary, which reported any details available. [End Page 196] Many of the weekly papers could not print the news until the following week's issue, though the Examiner and London Review printed a short paragraph in the "Latest Intelligence" section of their 11 June 1870 issue announcing Dickens's death and promising "a detailed notice of the life and labours of the celebrated novelist . . . in our next week's issue" (377). The 18 June 1870 issue fulfills this promise, with a detailed account of Dickens's life and career referencing the same dates and publications as the Times and even quoting the same parting address from Dickens. The article concludes with a series of compliments on Dickens's personality and talents while maintaining a journalistic distance. In both this obituary and the one from the Times, any editorializing describes Dickens's popularity and skill as a writer and performer, hardly debatable or unique positions. In its 18 June 1870 issue, the Athenæum, another weekly paper, also publishes about Dickens's death but does so in a style that, on its surface, diverges from the obituaries discussed above in two ways: first, the page is surrounded by a thick black border, like a memorial card; and, second, it is signed by its author, Henry F. Chorley. Though he begins with a standard discussion of Dickens's works in chronological order, Chorley shifts the focus to acknowledge his personal relationship with the author and note how having "know[n] Charles Dickens in the intimacy of his own home" leads him to "such emotion as almost incapacitates the heart and hand" (804). Chorley continues, praising Dickens for personal attributes such as his friendliness, generosity, and dedication, with specific details that indicate his own observation of them, noting, "Dickens was incomparable" (804). A deep sense of grief pervades the entire article, with Chorley's feeling of loss most apparent in the final sentence: "On a future day, I may endeavour to fill...

Edith Simcox as Biographer of George Eliot in the Periodical Press

Since Gordon S. Haight published his biography of George Eliot in 1968, Eliot's biographers have assumed that Edith Simcox wanted to write Eliot's biography and was jealous that John Walter Cross undertook the task. However, I suggest that Edith Simcox actually wrote her own biography of Eliot through the articles she published in the Academy and the Nineteenth Century, as well as in her personal journal, Autobiography of a Shirtmaker, and in her fictional Episodes in the Lives of Men, Women, and Lovers (1882). Notably, five of these episodes were published in Fraser's Magazine in 1881.

‘A Beautiful Fiction of Law’: Rhetorical Engagements withTerra Nulliusin the British Periodical Press in the 1840s

This paper analyses two critiques of the jurisprudential basis of settler colonialism in Australia published in the early Victorian periodical press. Review articles in the North British Review and Fraser's Magazine in the 1840s deployed claims of legal sophistry to dispute the fiction that Australian colonies were settled, rather than conquered, and that the country was a terra nullius. By examining the politics and rhetoric of each article, the significance of legal ideology for both literature promoting colonization and humanitarian critiques of colonial policy is assessed. Through a combination of discourse analysis and intellectual history, the North British Review article is read as fusing Scottish Enlightenment concepts of social evolution with the rhetoric of sensibility to defend the existence of Indigenous rights to land and to argue for the degenerative implications of colonial social practices. Similarly, the Fraser's Magazine article offers an epitome of the place of law in colonial policy-making by invoking utilitarian and pragmatic approaches to law to rationalize doctrines of sovereignty and jurisdiction, minimizing legal protections for Aborigines while maximizing the legal powers of colonists. By tracing the use of jurisprudential rhetoric in reviews published in two leading metropolitan journals, the paper offers evidence that the literary sphere contributed to the emergent culture of colonial legality.

Reciprocal Investments: John Galt, the Periodical Press, and the Business of North American Emigration

When John Galt resigned from the Canada Company in 1829, he returned to England penniless. This article explores how Fraser's Town and Country Magazine enabled Galt to capitalize on his failure as a businessman by writing about his experiences in Upper Canada. Galt originally imagined his work in the colonial project taking place through a land distribution and emigration company; instead, he promoted emigration through the press. Galt offers a unique perspective on the industry of emigration and the labour found not in the act of emigrating itself but in the largescale apparatus surrounding emigration and the settlement of British colonies, which included the British periodical press.

Victorians in Purgatory: Newman’s Poetics of Conciliation and the Afterlife of the Oxford Movement

Why was John Henry Newman's The Dream of Gerontius so popular with Victorian readers? Our ingrained historicist instincts tell us that this should not necessarily have been case. After all, The Dream is a poetic vision of purgatory, one of most Catholic of subjects, and it was published in 1865, little more than twenty years after Newman caused tremendous upset by proposing possibility of an Anglican purgatory in Tract 90 (1841), most inflammatory document of Oxford Movement. Given outrage that followed, it seemed impossible that a few years later his devotional poem on subject would be warmly embraced rather than hotly disputed. And yet, embraced it was. The Dream of Gerontius, Newman's poem about an old man's journey to afterlife, became one of best-known and, moreover, best-loved Victorian consolation poems about death. Some scholars place it second to Tennyson's In Memoriam. (1) By 1888, indeed, poem's twenty-four published editions had made their way into numerous Victorian households. General Gordon carried it with him on his campaign in Egypt prior to his death in Khartoum and Edward Elgar turned it into a successful choral opera. Poets and professors alike bestowed their stamp of approval. Algernon Charles Swinburne praised its genuine lyric note (2) and Francis Hastings Doyle, Oxford Professor of Poetry, devoted a lecture to poem in which he said it deserved high commendation. (3) Taking his commendation a step further, he urged Oxford community to stop being envenomed by the spirit of these religious differences (p. 123). The piece de resistance is that no one better gratified Doyle's wish than Newman's nemesis, Charles Kingsley, who wrote in a private letter that he read Dream with awe and admiration. However utterly I may differ from entourage in which Dr. Newman's present creed surrounds central idea, I must feel that that central idea is as true as it is noble. (4) These statements, oddly enough, came from same man who had proclaimed Newman worse than dead to Englishmen in Fraser's Magazine a few years earlier. (5) Although Kingsley later tempered his praise with poison in a public review of poem, he still backhandedly admired the wonderful beauty of its poetry, thereby initiating a reviewer tradition of separating poem's from its overt Catholic theology. (6) Although no longer critical favorite that it was in late nineteenth century, The Dream of Gerontius remains of vital relevance in illuminating role devotional poetry played in conflict resolution after Oxford Movement. (7) As poem in recent times is rarely considered outside of its theological and religious-historical interest, it has been bypassed by a contemporary tradition of literary scholarship focusing on political work of Victorian poetry. Newman's prose is often included in considerations of relation between poetry and politics, such as Isobel Armstrong's seminal Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics, which discusses how Newman's sermons and tracts illuminate political concerns of poets like Arthur Hugh Clough and Matthew Arnold, but his poetry is itself overlooked in such studies, (8) Despite The Dream's many potential critical points of interest--including lingering mystery of its success, its controversial content, and political turnaround it helped achieve--Newman's most popular poem has received little literary critical attention in our time. As a result, its popularity has yet to be addressed as a phenomenon firmly enmeshed in Newman's poetics. This essay shows how Newman's devotional poetry shaped public perception of Tractarian Movement, and in particular Tract 90, a generation later. Situating The Dream within context of Victorian theological disputes, it explores often underestimated political potential of devotional poetry and death consolation literature in years following Oxford Movement. …

Poe, the Devil, and Fraser's Magazine

Poe, the Devil, and Fraser's Magazine

The Politics of Translation in Francis Sylvester Mahony's “The Rogueries of Thomas Moore”

This article re-examines the satirical writings of the Irish wit, essayist and journalist, Francis Sylvester Mahony (1804–1866) (“Father Prout”), who in the 1830s authored a series of comic articles for the conservative London periodical, Fraser's Magazine. It focuses on his best-known essay, “The Rogueries of Thomas Moore” (1834), which provides an ironic commentary on the politicization of historical debate in post-Emancipation Ireland. The article looks afresh at his nuanced critique of the patriotic verse of Thomas Moore (1779–1852). The concept of “original translation,” or translation as “transformation,” is explored in relation to Mahony's supposed discovery of foreign-language precursors to Moore's nationalist ballad collection, the Irish Melodies. In addition, the article explores Mahony's parodic upending of Moore's efforts to recreate an authentic Gaelic past in his English-language poetry, as well as Mahony's subtle critique of the role played by translation in the politicized rewriting of Irish history. It also uses critical theory to examine Mahony's ironic conception of textual transformation in his reworked ballads, resituating his comic re-assessment of Moore's poetry in the broader context of the emergence of a post-Romantic literature in 1830s Ireland.

“AWFUL UNKNOWN QUANTITIES”: ADDRESSING THE READERS IN HARD TIMES

Charles Dickens was lionized in the early 1850s for his political powers as a novelist, journalist, and reformer. A December 1850 review of David Copperfield in Fraser's Magazine affirmed that the so-called “Boz” has done more, we verily believe, for the promotion of peace and goodwill between man and man, class and class, nation and nation, than all the congresses under the sun . . . . Boz, and men like Boz, are the true humanizers, and therefore the true pacificators, of the world. They sweep away the prejusdices of class and caste, and disclose the common ground of humanity which lies beneath factitious social and national systems. Such tributes to his political powers must have been gratifying to a writer who had begun his career as a parliamentary reporter. They proclaimed the power of the writer in an age of print, bearing out Thomas Carlyle's sense that “Printing . . . is equivalent to Democracy . . . . Whoever can speak, speaking now to the whole nation, becomes a power, a branch of government, with inalienable weight in law-making.” Fraser's elaborated on this idea by linking Dickens's uncanny ability to “introduce” characters to one another to his ability to “introduce” such characters to readers of different ranks. “Men like Boz,” the reviewer explained, “introduce the peasantry to the peerage” and “the grinder at the mill to the millionaire who owns the grist” (700).

‘Unfurling the banner of reform’: public opinion, nationalism, and Facts and Figures from Italy

This article reconsiders the neglected Italian correspondence of the Cork-born wit, essayist, and journalist, Francis Sylvester Mahony (‘Father Prout’). Re-assessing his traditional reputation as a Tory polemicist, it explores his movement away from the conservative, pro-Union politics of his contributions to Fraser's Magazine in the 1830s, and examines how, despite his continuing rejection of popular O'Connellite nationalism, he came to offer a broadly sympathetic portrait of Young Ireland in the articles he contributed to the London Daily News in the 1840s. It also traces the development of his political thinking at the beginning of the Famine era, focusing, in particular, on the influence of the resurgent nationalist movement in Italy on his reassessment of the Irish question.

THE CHEAP PRESS AND THE ‘READING CROWD’

In his article ‘Half a Crown's Worth of Cheap Knowledge’, published in Fraser's Magazine, W.M. Thackeray invoked an arresting image. Thackeray suggested that reading the weekly penny press – from r...

Thackeray Among the Annuals: Morality, Cultural Authority and the Literary Annual Genre

Thackeray Among the Annuals:Morality, Cultural Authority and the Literary Annual Genre Vanessa Warne (bio) Published in monthly numbers between October 1848 and December 1850, William Makepeace Thackeray's The History of Pendennis depicts the publishing culture of the preceding era. Set in mid-1820s London, the novel's often unflattering portrayal of literary men offended several of Thackeray's contemporaries, notable among them James Forster and John Douglas Cook.1 Thackeray defended himself and his novel in a January 1850 letter to the Morning Chronicle. In it, he explains, "I hope that a comic writer, because he describes an author as improvident, and another as a parasite, may not only be guiltless of a desire to vilify his profession, but may really have its honour at heart."2 As recent criticism on the novel has noted, in addition to being improvident and parasitical, authors in Pendennis are portrayed – perhaps most damningly of all – as paid labourers.3 Employed by profit-oriented publishers and obliged to write for a paying public, Thackeray's men of letters are involved in fundamentally commercial endeavours and are obliged to "work and pay like their neighbours."4 Arthur Pendennis is no exception. Short on money, he takes advantage of a rivalry between two publishers, Bacon and Bungay. Former partners, these men compete in various genres: "no sooner does one bring out a book of travels, or poems, a magazine or periodical, quarterly, or monthly, or weekly, or annual, but the rival is in the field with something similar."5 Pendennis becomes a regular contributor to Bungay's weekly, the Pall Mall Gazette, and eventually manoeuvres Bacon and Bungay into a bidding war over his first novel. He begins his career more modestly, however, by making pseudonymous contributions to a literary annual published by Bacon. Typical of the genre, the Spring Annual is: a beautiful gilt volume ... edited by Lady Violet Lebas, and numbering amongst its [End Page 158] contributors not only the most eminent, but the most fashionable poets of our time. ... The book was daintily illustrated with pictures of reigning beauties, or other prints of a tender and voluptuous character; and, as these plates were prepared long beforehand, requiring much time in engraving, it was the eminent poets who had to write for the plates, and not the painters who illustrated the poems.6 Pendennis writes "The Church Porch," a poem for an engraving, and also contributes a ballad written at an earlier date. Initially elated by Bacon's decision to accept and pay for these pieces, the young writer discovers a downside to publishing-house rivalries when the Spring Annual is reviewed in the Pall Mall Gazette. Unaware of Pendennis's involvement with the annual, Bungay's reviewer "cruelly mauled"7 the book, showing "no more mercy than a bull would have on a parterre."8 More than simply a lesson for an unseasoned author, this episode allows Thackeray to characterize literary annuals as objects of both critical disdain and commercial exchange: having "cut up the volume to his heart's content," the reviewer "sold it to a bookstall, and purchased a pint of brandy with the proceeds."9 Thackeray's depiction of the Spring Annual is drawn from personal experience. Like Pendennis, Thackeray contributed to literary annuals, publishing three poems and two short stories in The Keepsake and Fisher's Drawing-Room Scrapbook.10 However, unlike his fictional hero, Thackeray began contributing to annuals well into his career, starting with "The Anglers" in 1847. The poem, like the vast majority of annual poetry, was written to accompany an engraving; other contributions, such as "Lucy's Birthday," appeared in annuals but were not composed for them. Thackeray also wrote three reviews of literary annuals for Fraser's Magazine and the Times, specifically "A Word on the Annuals" (Fraser's Magazine, December 1837), "The Annuals" (The Times, 2 November 1838) and "Our Annual Execution" (Fraser's Magazine, January 1839), together with several reviews that make passing reference to annuals, notably "A Second Lecture on the Fine Arts, By Michael Angelo Titmarsh, Esquire" (Fraser's Magazine, June 1839), "About a Christmas Book" (Fraser's Magazine, December 1845) and "A Grumble about the Christmas Books...

Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography (review)

Reviewed by: Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography Janice Schroeder (bio) Vineta Colby , Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003), pp. 432, b&w illustrations, $39.50 cloth. In an 1899 letter to Ottoline Cavendish-Bentinck (later the literary hostess Lady Morrell), Vernon Lee wrote, "I have often had a little passing dream of trying to give you the benefit ... of my additional twenty years of reading, thinking, and in practical life. ... I can teach you infinitely less than any person at Oxford, but I think we might think things out together, which is sometimes quite as fruitful." Cavendish-Bentinck declined the offer. Several of the main themes of Vineta Colby's impressive study are expressed in this invitation: Lee's outsider status as a woman intellectual; her confidence in her intellectual prowess; and her lifelong search for female love and companionship through the life of the mind. Before she was twenty Violet Paget adopted the pen name "Vernon Lee" for a series of articles on English novelists for the Italian journal La rivista europea. She did so because she was convinced "no one reads a woman's writing on art, history or aesthetics with anything but unmitigated contempt." Born in France in 1856, Lee was an English national who chose to live in Italy most of her life, feeling it to be her true spiritual and intellectual home. Although she is now known chiefly for her writing on art and aesthetics and for a series of ghost stories published during the1890s, she wrote in nearly every genre but poetry. Taking her cue from Lee's own description of the human psyche as protean, Colby renders Lee a complex, often lonely figure, born "too late to be a Victorian, too early to be a Modernist." Fluent in several languages, Lee wrote mainly for English audiences. Her first article for the English press, "Tuscan Peasant Plays," appeared in Fraser's Magazine in February 1877. According to Colby's calculation, nearly every year from then until 1933 (she died in 1935) saw Lee's work in English, American, or European periodicals. Lee's journalism was stronger than her book publications and her conversation; readers and listeners alike were often alienated by her idiosyncratic prose and pedantic, unceasing talk. She was no stranger to negative, sometimes hostile [End Page 434] reviews, partly owing to her abrasive personality and insensitivity to others' feelings, even those of her friends. In one fascinating chapter Colby describes how Lee incensed much of the literary and artistic establishment with her 1884 novel Miss Brown, dedicated to Henry James (to his chagrin). The novel attacked the aesthetic movement for its moral hedonism, and featured thinly veiled, unflattering characterizations of her peers. Lee's friendship with James ended permanently over her 1892 short story "Lady Tal," in which she crudely caricatured him as the "dainty but frugal bachelor" Jervase Marion. In contrast with her fiction, Colby notes that Lee's journalism was more "lucid and informative." She published on art, literature, history, aesthetics, travel, music, economics, politics, and social issues in such venues as the Fortnightly Review, Contemporary Review, Quarterly Review, North American Review, and New Statesman. Here too she invited controversy. Her pacifist stance during World War I led to a fierce debate with H. G. Wells in 1914 in the Labour Leader and the Nation, spelling the end of their friendship. Although she published broadly, Lee never enjoyed a wide audience. She was esoteric, uncompromising, often quick to conclude, a resolute generalist in a time of increasing specialization. From London in 1893 she wrote to her brother, "At thirty-seven I have no public." This was something of an overstatement on Lee's part. In any case, Lee wrote not for money but for intellectual satisfaction to a small and elite audience. Although Mary Ward had advised her to write literary criticism on new publications more regularly, in order to establish "a clear identity before the public," Lee demurred: "I find that I should have to write on actualities, new books, new editions, at the choice of an Editor. ... I cannot sacrifice all intellectual private life to reading up for articles." Colby's biography opens...

Bookcases, Slipcases, Uncut Leaves: The Anxiety of the Gentleman’s Library

As the age of Victoria drew to its close, the gentleman's private library became an increasingly fraught topos in British and American literature and culture. For while writers like Matthew Arnold had fought to maintain a privileged place for literature within a culture whose reading habits had suddenly become far more practical, many Victorians quickly began to fetishize not literature per se but the physical book itself not the contents but the container. It is by now commonplace to say that in essays like The Study of Poetry Arnold makes fetish objects out of short snatches of verse; a methodology like his use of poetic touchstones makes it possible to conceive of the literary field as coming in small denominations, the loose change of literary capital. On a small scale, this kind of approach results logically in the literary anthology, a compendium or short-cut to culture; on the larger scale, this logic gives us the gentleman's library, stuffed with with their pages uncut on show quite explicitly, everything in its right place. For there was a palpable nervousness about the Victorians' relation to their and thoughtful men and women of the time could sense it. In an 1859 essay in Fraser 's Magazine, an anonymous commentator writes about what he calls books not about furniture or the construction of furni-

From Cornhill to Cairo: Thackeray as Travel-Writer

ABSTRACT This essay examines Thackeray's travel-writing through close attention to his book Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Cairo (1846). It approaches it through Thackeray's other extended piece of travel-writing, The Irish Sketch Book (1843), and through W. A. Kinglake's Eothen (1844), which Thackeray read during his journey to Cairo. The essay explores Thackeray's deployment of an urban, unheroic narrator; his representation of 'the foreign' as 'pictorial spectacle'; and his engagement with the problem of representing places already represented, already textualized. It considers recurrent tropes in the writing and the problem posed by Thackeray's commercial sponsorship. ********** In the period 1841 to 1846, Thackeray was working in London as a freelance journalist, contributing to a range of periodicals including the Foreign Quarterly Review, Fraser's Magazine, the Morning Chronicle, and Punch. This was the period also of his major travel writings. In addition to regular visits to Paris, where his wife was placed under medical supervision in October 1840, Thackeray made a journey to Ireland from June to November 1842, paid a four-week visit to Belgium and Holland in August 1843, and travelled round the Mediterranean in the winter of 1844-45. (1) This last was the most ambitious of his travels. As a freelance journalist, everything was grist to his mill, and he tried to make professional use of his various travel experiences. Thus, from his visits to Paris, he had planned to write Dinner Reminiscences; or, The Young Gormandizer's Guide at Paris (Ray, p. 282), and he made notes on an 1840 visit to Belgium which he combined with his 1843 notes to produce 'Little Travels and Roadside Sketches' (Ray, p. 483). His major works in this period were The Irish Sketch Book (1843) and Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo (1846). (2) Ray suggests that the interest of this genre of travel-writing was not so much in the place itself as in the place as refracted through the character and idiosyncracies of the narrator (Ray, p. 310). (3) Thackeray's narrator is consciously urban and unheroic. In Ray's words: 'Dublin, Belfast, Athens, Jerusalem, and Cairo are in turn tried by West End standards--and usually found wanting' (p. 310). (4) Or, as Thackeray puts it in A Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo, 'My hobby-horse is a quiet beast, suited for Park riding, or a gentle trot to Putney and back to a snug stable' (p. 576). The Irish Sketch Book, which was the more substantial work, focuses on 'the manners and scenery of the country'. Nevertheless, it cannot leave out glimpses of the political and economic state of Ireland on the eve of the Great Famine. Although Thackeray suggests that these are 'miseries that one does not dare to think of ', he cannot miss 'public evidences of the distress of the country' (p. 30). The dominant impression is of shabbiness, poverty, lack of work, and widespread 'popular starvation' (p. 86). Central Dublin is like a deserted city (p. 20); market-day in Carlow, in respect of the meanness of the objects for barter, is compared to market-day in 'a town of African huts and traders on the banks of the Quarra' (p. 41); beggars' houses in Bantry are unfavourably compared, for comfort, with 'a Hottentot kraal' (p. 104), and everywhere he finds signs of neglect and ruin. He notes that the Irish Poor Law Report records 'twelve hundred thousand people in Ireland' with no means of support' (p. 43). And he himself observes 'women pulling weeds and nettles in the hedges, on which dismal sustenance the poor creatures live, having no bread, no potatoes, no work' (p. 30). Thackeray, however, is resistant to the rhetoric of 'English tyranny and suffering Ireland' (p. 244). The Irish Sketchbook records a clockwise circuit of southern Ireland from Dublin to Dublin, and then an anti-clockwise circuit of northern Ireland, ending again at Dublin. In the course of his narrative, Thackeray refers constantly to various guidebooks he is using. …

'Veritable Utterances': Mid-Victorian Interpretations of Emily Brontë's Poems

Once Emily Brontë's identity as a woman becomes widely known in 1850, literary critics begin to reinterpret her 'vigorous poetry' as the work of a woman poet. Three mid-nineteenth century reviews of the poetry published in The Christian Remembrancer in 1851 and 1857, and Fraser's Magazine in 1857, simultaneously disclose their authors' discomfort at the strangeness of her poems for a woman, and their attempt to ascribe feminine traits to the poet through some of these same poems. By focusing on female speakers as they mourn their lovers in verse, for the first time these critics construct Emily Brontë as a woman poet who records sorrowful emotions in 'plaintive' poetry.