Fraser's Magazine Research Articles

Romanticism repackaged: The new faces of “old man” Coleridge in Fraser's Magazine, 1830–35

Romanticism repackaged: The new faces of “old man” Coleridge in Fraser's Magazine, 1830–35

Did You Say Middle Class?: The Question of Taste and the Rise of the Novel

Did You Say Middle Class? The Question of Taste and the Rise of the Novel Robert Mayer The different ways of relating to realities and fictions, of believing in fictions and the realities they simulate, with more or less distance and detachment , are very closely linked to the different possible positions in social space and, consequently, bound up with the systems of dispositions ... characteristic of the different classes and class fractions. Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier.1 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction One of the principal ways that Ian Watt set the terms for exploring the appearance and growing importance of the novel in England in the long eighteenth century was to argue that the novel was made possible by a great shift in the socio-cultural field of early modern Britain, a shift Watt described as an alteration in "the centre of gravity of the reading public sufficient ... to place the middle class as a whole in a dominating position for the first time."2 Watt's argument was not new, and it has, in one 1 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (France, 1979; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), pp. 5-6. References are to this edition. The title of this essay was suggested by the appendix to Bourdieu, "Price Formation and the Anticipation of Profits," Language and Symbolic Power, ed. John B. Thompson, trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), pp. 90-102. 2 Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1957), p. 48. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 12, Number 2-3, January-April 2000 278 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION sense or another, been repeated in much of the scholarship on the novel in the years since he published his study. As early as 1860, a writer in Fraser's Magazine argued that Samuel Richardson's Pamela was aimed at "the class to which its heroine belonged," and Ernest A. Baker, in his History of the English Novel, pointed out that Thomas Deloney (like Daniel Defoe after him) "knew the people whom he portrayed [weavers and clothiers] ... had shared their lot, and was, in fact, writing for them to read." Recently, J. Paul Hunter, examining Watt's '"triple rise' thesis," accepted the latter's "fundamental assumptions about literary origins" and set out to demonstrate "that the newly literate took their needs and desires to other reading materials before there were novels to address them."3 Yet although the idea that the novel is a form engendered by the rise ofthe middle class to prominence and power in England and one that responded to middle-class taste has long been one of the grounding assumptions of discussions of eighteenth-century English fiction, all scholars of the novel have recognized that such assertions raise more questions than they answer. What does it mean to invoke the concept of the middle class in the context of early modern Britain? How does one discern and describe the elusive phenomenon that is "taste"? Are there such things as "class tastes" and how does one specify a class taste?4Watt dealt with the last two sets ofquestions through content analysis and thereby set a pattern that most scholars have followed. He found in the works of Defoe and Richardson in particular the crucial values and beliefs of the newly risen middle class: individualism, capitalism, Puritanism, and a new view of love, sexuality, and gender roles. Hunter continues this tradition with his analyses of "what was new about the novel" and of "what was on the minds of potential readers" in the eighteenth century.5 These discussions and others like them are of 3 W.F.P., "British Novelists—Richardson, Miss Austen, Scott," Fraser's Magazine for Town and Country 61 (Jan.-June 1860), 26; Ernest A. Baker, The History of the English Novel, 10 vols (1936; New York: Barnes and Noble, 1960), 2:171; for a similar assertion about Defoe, see 3:227. J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts ofEighteenth-Century English Fiction (New York: Norton, 1990), pp. 66, 68; the "triple rise thesis" is that...

Galt, ‘Delta’, and <italic>Fraser's Magazine</italic>

Galt, ‘Delta’, and Fraser's Magazine David Groves David Groves Edinburgh Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume 40, Issue 1, March 1993, Page 46, https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/40.1.46 Published: 01 March 1993

A Lion for Love: A Critical Biography of Stendhal (review)

368 biography Vol. 10, No. 4 This red and gold volume is handsomely bound, as befits an item in the thirty-ninevolume facsimile series entitled "The Victorian Muse. Selected Criticism and Parody of the Period," edited by William E. Fredeman, Ira Bruce Nadel, and John F. Stasny. Individual items carry their original periodical paginations, leaving the volume itself unpaged: a minor annoyance. Type faces vary, and some require excellent eyes, or a magnifying glass. The great periodicals of the Victorian era such as Fraser's Magazine, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Temple Bar, and The Quarterly Review were above such trivia. Victorian Biography is a solid contribution to the field of biographical studies. Each essay is worthy of our attention. And from the collection as a whole emerges a portrait not only of modern biography but of the values of the age. Humanism and responsibility are the tonic notes. Life matters. Patricia Morley, Concordia University, Montreal Robert Alter, with the collaboration of Carol Cosman, A Lion for Love: A Critical Biography of Stendhal. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986. 285 pp. $8.95. A quotation from Gérard Genette's Figures II serves as the epigraph to Part III of Robert Alter's sprightly biography of Stendhal: "The two caryatids of the old style of literary studies are called, one may recollect, the man and his work. The exemplary value of the Stendhal phenomenon comes from the way he shakes these two notions by altering their symmetry, by confusing their difference, by deflecting their relations ." Genette's formulation has the value of underlining both the complexity and the importance of the relationship between Henri Beyle and the writing which is now collectively known as the work of Stendhal. It is a relationship that has intrigued and fascinated Stendhal critics since the first global essay on Stendhal by Auguste Bussière in the Revue des Deux-Mondes in 1843, less than a year after Stendhal's death. Robert Alter's work is based on the belief that much of this "man-and-his-works" approach has been unsatisfactory, having frequently become bogged down in attempts to discern biographical sources for fictional representations. Alter's intent, then, was to write "a biography in which the narrative and the interpretive strands would be constantly intertwined" while staying clear of the quagmire of sources and the temptation of psychoanalysis. He has succeeded admirably, creating what is surely the best critical biography of his subject to date. Biographies of Stendhal have not been lacking in either French or English. In France, distinguished stendhaliens such as Albert Collignon (1868), Paul Arbelet (1912), Paul Hazard (1927), Henri Martineau (1953), and Victor Del Litto (1965) have produced competent and increasingly perceptive biographies. Matthew Josephson (1946), Joanna Richardson (1974), and Gita May (1977) have made similar contributions in English. These books have their strengths and weaknesses, but none combines sheer insight into the man, Henri Beyle, with first-rate criticism of Stendhal's work to the extent that Alter's book does. Some of these biographies are also more complete than Alter's. Indeed, a biography that would contain all that is known about Stendhal might well fill three or four substantial volumes. There is a wealth of detail about Stendhal's life that is known to specialists that does not appear in this book. Alter has chosen to concentrate on what is significant to the understanding of the man, and while it might be possible to argue that some of the information he has left REVIEWS 369 out might also help to understand Stendhal, Alter's decision has resulted in a book that is easily read, though never thin in substance or interpretation. As Alter's title suggests, one important facet of Stendhal's life which is followed closely is the importance of love. From his boyhood infatuation for Virginie Kubly to his nearly desperate attempts to find love at the end of his life, Stendhal was an active practitioner and keen observer of sexual politics. Alter deals with the Oedipal drama involved in this quest, but he is also keenly aware of the role that literary models play in Stendhal's amorous adventures (which he sometimes endowed with epic...

Victorian Weekly Reviews and Reviewing after 1860: R. H. Hutton and the 'Spectator'

restrictions in the I85os and 186os (the lifting of the tax on advertisements in 1853, of the stamp duty in 1855, and of the paper tax in 1861). These and other changes, such as advances in production, newsgathering, and information technology, had their most dramatic effect on the daily press in London and the provinces. These changes also affected, however, the weekly 'literary' journal, as they did every specialized periodical: in London alone an astonishing 115 periodicals were launched in 1859.2 Indeed the weekly review was influenced by the publishing trade in general to a far greater extent than was the quarterly review. The literary content of the latter tended to be essayistic, reflective, and not necessarily concerned with contemporary literature or even with the books ostensibly under review. The quarterly reviewer was not above inventing books on subjects to which he wished to address himself.3 The weekly reviewer was directly concerned with those products which the publishing trade thought it worthwhile to issue, even if his indirect concerns were more personal. It is these more indirect concerns which I shall be discussing later. Not only was the press a growth industry in I86o, but it has also provided material for a growing academic industry in more recent years. The notable monument to this interest is the Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, which lists and attributes authors to the contents of selected fortnightly, monthly, and quarterly periodicals (such as the Fortnightly Review, Contemporary Review, Westminster Review, Fraser's Magazine, Cornhill Magazine, and Macmillan's

Political economy, fiction and the language of practical ideology in nineteenth‐century England

Political economy, fiction and the language of practical ideology in nineteenth‐century England

Arnold, Wordsworth, and “Memorial Verses”

ARNOLD, WORDSWORTH, AND “ MEMORIAL VERSES" HARVEY KERPNECK University of Toronto I n the essay on Wordsworth Arnold makes a famous distinction between higher and lower kinds of poetry. He has been working to discriminate the essence of Wordsworth's "superiority" in order that he might save his reputa­ tion for posterity from the ignorant neglect of the mass, on the one hand, and the meaningless idolatry of the "Wordsworthians," on the other. And he remarks that it is "the great and ample body of powerful work" that is left when an editor has pruned Wordsworth's luxuriance (his essay is an introduction to an anthology of selections from Wordsworth) that establishes this superiority. He goes on: Some kinds of poetry are in themselves lower kinds than others. The ballad kind is alower kind; the didactic kind, still more, is alower kind. Poetry of this latter sort counts, too, sometimes, by its biographical interest partly, not by its poetical interest pure and simple, but then this can only be when the poet producing it has the power and importance of Wordsworth.1 Arnold himself is such a poet, of course, and despite his strictures in his 1853 Preface against poetry in which the poet "allegorizes" the state of his own mind, it is a commonplace today that his most interesting poetry is his most subjective, self-concerned didactic poetry, poetry in which he describes more or less straightforwardly his spiritual dilemmas, ascribes causes to them, and prescribes remedies for them or notes analogous ills in his contemporaries. And one can discuss much of his total output in these terms; one can even "do something" with "Sohrab and Rustum" (father-son relationship) or “ The Forsaken Merman" (the buried life), for example. But with "Memorial Ver­ ses," Arnold's funeral tribute to Wordsworth, one should hesitate even to make the attempt. The poem, commissioned by Wordsworth's son-in-law, Edward Quillinan, and published in June 1850 in Fraser's Magazine, is only one of a number of tributes to Wordsworth in Arnold's prose and verse, but in concen­ tration, form, and polish, in intensity, it is the premier one. It does help us to see more clearly the roots of Arnold's view, later fully enunciated, that, as he puts it in his essay on Wordsworth, "poetry is at bottom a criticism of life; that the greatness of a poet lies in his powerful and beautiful application of ideas to English Studies in Can ad a, ii, 2, Summer 1976 life." This view of poetry is implicit in the whole and in each part of "Memorial Verses." But the poem is not didactic in this sense-Arnold is neither expound­ ing a theory of poetry in it nor making an oblique comment on the situation of the poet in the mid-nineteenth century, especially the poet Matthew Arnold. He is attempting, as in the Wordsworth essay, to pay a tribute to Wordsworth which shall be a discriminating assessment, which shall be neither supercilious and condemnatory nor adulatory and fawning. The poem is a remarkable attempt to take a balanced view of Wordsworth in the midst of funeral passion for him (a passion which Arnold shares). And it is an attempt to do so according to those "law s" to which Arnold in his criticism pays so much obeisance, the "laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty."2 In other words, the poem is not didactic in a second sense either, that of being versified polemic almost indistinguishable from prose, as some of Arnold's lesser poetry of this same period is. It "says" a great deal about Wordsworth and Arnold's passion for him, but it does so at least as much by indirection as by direct statement, and it does so by exploiting much of the array of poetic rhetoric available to Arnold. The poem opens with a five-line introduction and general statement of the occasion and an indication of the method Arnold is to employ to assess Wordsworth for the age: Goethe in Weimar sleeps, and Greece, Long since, saw Byron's struggle cease. But one such death remain'd to come; The last poetic voice is dumb...

The Two Voices in Thackeray's Catherine

PUBLISHED SERIALLY in Fraser's Magazine in 1839-40, Catherine can be considered Thackeray's first novel, one he called mistake all through. ' Thackeray's judgment was too harsh, for though the novel may have failed to achieve its author's objectives, it contains virtues best recognized by other, less involved judges. Catherine continues to interest a number of readers who while acknowledging its weaknesses are nevertheless struck by its virtues. Recent studies of Catherine often conclude that Thackeray's developing strengths of characterization and realistic depiction came into conflict with his satirical and moralistic aims.2

Thackeray as Historian: Two Newly Identified Contributions to Fraser's Magazine

Thackeray as Historian: Two Newly Identified Contributions to Fraser's Magazine

Thackeray as Historian: Two Newly Identified Contributions to Fraser's Magazine

Thackeray as Historian: Two Newly Identified Contributions to Fraser's Magazine

Thackeray's Recantation

Very early in his career, Thackeray published his Catherine (1839-40) as part of Fraser's Magazine's campaign against fiction that glamorized criminals and sinners. In a note to Chapter i, he singled out for criticism Bulwer's Ernest Maltravers because it “opens with a seduction; but then it is performed by people of the strictest virtue on both sides; there is so much religion and philosophy in the heart of the seducer, so much tender innocence in the soul of the seduced, that—bless the little dears!—their very peccadilloes make one interested in them; and their naughtiness becomes quite sacred, so deliciously is it described.” In Fraser's, August 1832, Bulwer had been accused of parallel confusions: “having to paint an adulterer, you describe him as belonging to the class of country curates, among whom, perhaps, such a criminal is not met with once in a hundred years.”

"Apparent Symbol of Despotic Command": Melville's Benito Cereno

W HEN Melville metamorphosed the eighteenth chapter of Amasa Delano's Narrative of Voyages and Travels into Benito Cereno, he made only one change in Delano's basic plot: he sent his Benito Cereno into monastic retirement, soon followed by death. Shortly after introducing Cereno, Melville hints of his fate: His manner upon such occasions was, in its degree, not unlike that which might be supposed to have been his imperial countryman's, Charles V., just previous to the anchoritish retirement of that monarch from the throne.' This hint leads to a source of more ultimate significance than Delano's Voyages-William Stirling's Cloister Life of the Emperor Charles the Fifth. Benito Cereno appeared first in Putnam's Monthly Magazine in late 1855. In January of 1855, the Edinburgh Review had apologized for quoting from Stirling's Cloister Life of the Emperor Charles the Fifth: We are not sure whether we ought to quote from a book so well known as that of Mr. Stirling. (p. 83) There was some reason to apologize. Stirling's work had first appeared as two articles, entitled Cloister Life of the Emperor Charles V, in Fraser's Magazine of April and May, 1851. The next year the articles were expanded into a book, and by the year after, the book had run to three editions. The articles themselves were several times reprinted in other magazines, and numerous popular and recondite periodicals continually noticed, reviewed, summarized, and quoted from the book throughout 1853 and 1854. Many of the same periodicals were at the same time noticing, reviewing, summarizing, and quoting from Melville's

The Spirit of the Times and a “New Work by Boz”

In the 1830's and 1840's members of the editorial staffs of certain American periodicals, not satisfied with the common practice of pirating the works of foreign authors, undertook the brazen expedient of writing their own selections and attaching thereto the name of some eminent foreign author. For example, when the Spirit of the Times had reprinted all of Thackeray's Yellowplush Correspondence available in Fraser's Magazine and had found it popular among the subscribers, the editors stated that they had forged for some time thereafter a continuation of the Correspondence that was as good as the original. “Our Yellowplush succeeded him of London,” confessed the journal, “and his letters were considered, in all respects, equal to those of his ‘illustrious predecessor’.” Moreover, this pseudo-continuation was pirated by at least one American periodical in Tennessee which obviously did not know that it was being gulled. The Spirit of the Times regarded the incident with amused indifference rather than indignation, not being in a position to claim copyright protection for a work which it had not called its own.

Who Was Morgan Odoherty?

Morgan Odoherty, the mythical Irishman who contributed to Blackwood's Magazine in its salad days, is usually—and correctly—acknowledged to have been the creation of Captain Thomas Hamilton. Yet he is almost always identified with Dr. William Maginn, the sprightly contributor from Cork who reprinted several Blackwood Odoherty articles as his own and later used the pseudonym in articles for Fraser's Magazine. Maginn has, accordingly, been praised and damned for many an article in which he had no part. The letters which he wrote to William Blackwood prove that he was only one of many who contributed Odoherty-signed articles. And although as years passed he wrote a larger and larger share of them, he never completely preempted the pseudonym.

Fraser's Magazine: “Regina”

Fraser's Magazine: “Regina”

An article on Heine in Fraser's Magazine

Journal Article An article on Heine in Fraser's Magazine Get access Helmut Hirsch Helmut Hirsch 1Paris Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume 172, Issue 3, 16 January 1937, Page 47, https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/172.3.47a Published: 16 January 1937

XXXVI: Charlotte Brontë and George Henry Lewes

When Jane Eyre first appeared (Oct. 16, 1847) the publishers, Smith, Elder & Co., sent a complimentary copy to a young journalist named George Henry Lewes. The compliment had unexpected results. Lewes afterwards wrote Mrs. Gaskell: The enthusiasm with which I read it made me go down to Mr. Parker, and propose to write a review of it for Fraser's Magazine. He would not consent to an unknown novel—for the papers had not yet declared themselves—receiving such importance, but thought it might make one on “Recent Novels: English and French”—which appeared in Fraser, December 1847. Meanwhile I had written to Miss Brontë to tell her the delight with which her book filled me; and seemed to have “sermonized” her, to judge from her reply.

Articles in Fraser's Magazine Attributed to Carlyle

Articles in Fraser's Magazine Attributed to Carlyle

The Medieval Background of Swinburne's The Leper

Among the contents of Swinburne's Poems and Ballads, 1866, few pieces aroused more hostility than The Leper. John Morley and Robert Buchanan, it is true, ignored that poem in their damaging critical notices in The Saturday Review and The Athenæum for August 4, nor did Swinburne mention it in Notes on Poems and Reviews. But The Spectator of September 22, discussing the question of immorality in literature, after citing Swinburne's Faustine as a poem in which artistic treatment justifies the subject, added: “It is entirely otherwise with his Anactoria and Phaedra, and other foul stuff, worst of all, The Leper, which we think no critics can speak worse of than they deserve.” An article in Fraser's Magazine for November, though predominantly favorable to Poems and Ballads, named The Leper among the poems that should be suppressed. The Athenæum for November 3, in a criticism of Notes on Poems and Reviews, remarked: “To our thinking, nothing can be more horribly impure, more utterly loathsome, than the story of the unclean priest [sic] and his leprous mistress [sic].” The Westminster Review for April 1, 1867, mentioned Laus Veneris, The Leper, and Les Noyades as the chief objects of popular clamor.

A Phase of Carlyle's Relation to Fraser's Magazine

A Phase of Carlyle's Relation to Fraser's Magazine