Victorian Periodicals Research Articles

The Loudons and the Gardening Press: A Victorian Cultural Industry by Sarah Dewis (review)

Reviewed by: The Loudons and the Gardening Press: A Victorian Cultural Industry by Sarah Dewis Barbara Barrow Sarah Dewis, The Loudons and the Gardening Press: A Victorian Cultural Industry (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), pp. xi + 278. $119.95/£65 cloth. In this volume, Sarah Dewis investigates the work of the husband and wife team John Claudius Loudon and Jane Webb Loudon, both prolific authors whose publications, in Dewis’s words, contributed to “gardening and democratic discourse” in significant and previously unacknowledged ways (1). Dewis conducts new archival work on John Loudon’s Gardener’s Magazine (1826–44) and situates this title in the context of nineteenth-century print media, with sustained attention to the role of illustration and the relation of text to image. Given its extensive attention to print culture, this book will be of interest to scholars working on book and media history and its relationship to urban spaces and landscape design. The origins and publication of the Gardener’s Magazine are the primary focus of the first three chapters. Chapter 1 considers John Loudon’s conceptualization of the gardener’s role in an entry on gardeners’ education that appeared in his Encyclopedia of Gardening (1822). This entry presents the gardener as a “secular saint” who self-educates with the help of a bourgeoning print culture, and it anticipates Loudon’s professionalization of the gardener figure in the Gardener’s Magazine (30). Chapter 2, “John Loudon as Editor,” situates this professionalization in terms of Loudon’s reformist aims and documents his efforts to win a dedicated readership for the Gardener’s Magazine in the face of competition from other horticultural periodicals. The relationship between text and image is the focus of chapter 3. Dewis argues that the diversity of images in the Gardener’s Magazine reflects the class diversity of its readership, and she pays close attention to the economics of image production. Chapter 4 considers [End Page 281] Loudon’s vision of the “Gardenesque,” an alternative to William Gilpin’s notion of the picturesque that sought to shift the terms of an observer’s contemplation from being based on an elite notion of aesthetics to a more democratically imagined foundation in scientific knowledge. Loudon promoted this notion of the Gardenesque in his publications as well as in his landscape and cemetery designs. By using a variety of print formats, Loudon ensured that his democratic ideas would have the “widest possible circulation” (166). This also enabled him to promote his interest in making spaces reserved for the elite more accessible to the general public. Chapters 5 and 6 consider the Loudons’ contributions to periodicals aimed primarily at female readers. Dewis shows how John Loudon’s Suburban Garden and Villa Companion presented scientific and aesthetic knowledge not available in other periodicals aimed at women; in this way, he enabled women to become not only passive consumers but also active producers of this discourse in their homes and gardens (179). Dewis closes chapter 5 by showing how the Loudons’ publications encouraged this active production by women through the inclusion of engravings by Loudon’s sisters Jane and Mary Loudon. Chapter 6 is devoted to the contributions of Jane Webb Loudon, who assisted Loudon with his gardening publications and edited the Ladies’ Companion, at Home and Abroad for six months. While previous scholarship has tended to situate Loudon’s work as firmly entrenched in mid-century class and gender ideology, Dewis convincingly shows how her editorship exposed contradictions in those class and gender expectations and invited women to take part in literary and scientific discourse (195, 235). Each chapter of Dewis’s book provides a helpful introduction and summary of the chapter’s primary argument as well as reproductions of pages, illustrations, and mastheads from the Loudons’ publications; it also features a detailed bibliography of archival material. If, at times, some readers may wish for a more developed thread of argumentation linking the different chapters, many more will welcome the new scholarly avenues opened up by this multidisciplinary study. The Loudons and the Gardening Press is a valuable contribution to scholarship on nineteenth-century print culture. [End Page 282] Barbara Barrow Point Park University Copyright © 2015 The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals...

Technologies of Serendipity

In reckoning with the digital restructuring of the scholarly discourse network circa 2004, Patrick Leary begins with a story. It is a story about how, thanks to web discovery and email contacts, scholarship on Letitia Elizabeth Landon took a major turn. This happened because of the “fortuitous electronic connections” of people and documents facilitated by the internet. 1 And making sense of this experience, rather than detailing specific resources for digital scholarship, becomes Leary’s abiding concern in “Googling the Victorians.” His essay ponders a “profound shift” towards casual discovery, “a serendipity of unexpected connections to both information and people that is becoming increasingly central to the progress of Victorian research.” 2 If, in the subtitle to their 1982 volume The Victorian Periodical Press, Joanne Shattock and Michael Wolff nominate “Samplings and Soundings” as our only reasonable approach, Leary begins to clarify how such casual discoveries should not merely be viewed as symptoms of trying to find specifics amid superabundance, whether in terms of the Victorian archive or networked digital information. 3 Instead, that characteristic research experience has been absorbed into the technological routines of how we work now. In other words, chance discovery is not a bug; it is a feature. It is the very condition of “Googling the Victorians,” as Leary calls it. A decade later, we find ourselves deeper in the networked experience of such unexpected connections, with more perspective that allows us to acknowledge, critique, and perhaps even credit serendipity as scholarly technique. “Googling the Victorians” also reveals the scholar’s reflex to enfold fortuitous discoveries within descriptive explanation. The essay shows a consistent dynamic between the item of scholarly interest, serendipitously found, and the narrative in which the researcher governs the unexpected. In drawing this connection, Leary makes a crucial distinction between serendipity and randomness. If we all have random encounters all the time, serendipity requires recognizing such an encounter for its meaning, requir

Periodical Pedagogy in the Undergraduate Classroom

This essay considers methods for encouraging students at smaller, regional universities to engage in Victorian periodicals research. Even at institutions where access to hardcopy originals and digitized resources is limited, students desire training in research methodology in order to engage with the vast amount of material available to them in the wake of the “digital revolution.” Instructors at these institutions should work to develop teaching collections of hardcopy originals in order to complement digitized resources and to enable students to engage with the materiality of print culture.

Touchstones and Tit-Bits: Extracting Culture in the 1880s

Matthew Arnold attacked the New Journalism, but his insistence on the power of the reprinted extract parallels the importance of the excerpt in late Victorian periodicals such as George Newnes’s Tit-Bits . This essay juxtaposes Arnold’s “The Study of Poetry,” written as the introduction to The English Poets (1880), with Tit-Bits (established 1881). Both turn to the excerpt in response to the prospect of textual overproduction and the expansion of mass readerships in the 1880s, a response that cuts across literature and journalism, high and low culture. Indeed, part of the extract’s value was that it promised to bridge these divisions.

Natural Disasters and Victorian Empire: Famines, Fevers and the Literary Cultures of South Asia by Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee (review)

Reviewed by: Natural Disasters and Victorian Empire: Famines, Fevers and the Literary Cultures of South Asia by Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee Kellie Holzer (bio) Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee, Natural Disasters and Victorian Empire: Famines, Fevers and the Literary Cultures of South Asia (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. vi + 221, $90/£50 cloth. The premise of Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee’s latest book, Natural Disasters and Victorian Empire: Famines, Fevers and the Literary Cultures of South Asia, is simple, far-reaching, and riveting: disasters were crucial to the maintenance of the British Empire’s tropical holdings. Many of these so-called natural disasters had historical causes and consequences (a claim made by contemporaneous Indian scholars, writers, and activists). Still, the management of “natural” disasters became another way for the Victorians to legitimize empire, a rationalization that Mukherjee names “palliative imperialism.” The permanence of these tropical disaster zones yielded formal experiments in the literary realm. In chapter 1, Mukherjee analyzes the appearance of disaster writing in three nonliterary realms: administrative, medical, and journalistic. Writing in all three fields produced the idea of tropical colonies as environments [End Page 650] of inevitable and perpetual disaster (and colonized subjects as victims who were also, inevitably, to blame). Mukherjee explores how debates about the origins of disasters, as well as conflicting ideas about aid and intervention, were common to both imperial and anti-imperial British discourse, a paradox characteristic of liberal imperialism. Thus, administrative or medical discourse prescribed imperial interventions in the form of medical relief, technological solutions, or infrastructural development to ameliorate famines or epidemics. Meanwhile, these recommendations for aid were challenged by the investigative journalism of William Digby and Vaughan Nash, who published sensational exposés of administrative indifference or mismanagement of famine relief efforts as well as scathing critiques of imperial economic policies that contributed to or caused such disasters. In chapters 2 through 5, Mukherjee takes a fresh approach to the usual lineup of Anglo-Indian authors. He argues that the writings of the Eden sisters, Fanny Parks, Philip Meadows Taylor, Rudyard Kipling, and Flora Annie Steel, unassimilable to metropolitan literary aesthetics, developed in the genre-bending ways they did due to the demands of living in environments of perpetual disaster. Among other things, Mukherjee’s readings show how Parks and the Edens revised the conventions of the picturesque to account for famines and epidemics in their travel diaries. Meadows Taylor developed a new novel form, the “bureaucratic romance,” as a stage for the heroic actions of palliative imperialism’s ideal civil servant. And Kipling’s “paranoid journalism” for the Civil and Military Gazette offered autobiographical accounts of tropical illness as well as nightmarish descriptions of unsanitary conditions and chronic disease (141). Throughout these readings, Mukherjee relies on reviews published in metropolitan periodicals to establish the skeptical reception of Anglo-Indian writing emerging from tropical disaster zones. The stakes of Mukherjee’s argument are made quite clear: today’s neo-imperial benevolence vis-à-vis disaster is inherited from Victorian palliative imperialism. Put another way, on a global scale, palliative care remains integral to cultural domination. A former journalist himself, Mukherjee commences his book with critical analysis of the disaster rhetoric in Hurricane Katrina reportage. By the end, Mukherjee persuades us that imperialism created environments of permanent disaster, resulting in the creation of literary mutations to account for the lives—and deaths—there. [End Page 651] Kellie Holzer Virginia Wesleyan College Kellie Holzer Kellie Holzer is Assistant Professor of English at Virginia Wesleyan College, where she teaches courses on South Asian literature and Victorian literature and culture. She has published essays in South Asian Review, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, and Nineteenth-Century Contexts. Copyright © 2014 The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals

RSVP Bibliography, 2011–2013

The RSVP Bibliography catalogues essays, books, master’s theses, and doctoral dissertations published in the field of Victorian periodicals between December 2011 and December 2013. The bibliography focuses on newspapers and magazines published in Great Britain and the British Empire, 1837-1901, with some attention to transnational journalism and the long nineteenth century as they relate to the Victorian press.

Social and Professional Networks in the Victorian Periodical Press

Social and Professional Networks in the Victorian Periodical Press

The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals

The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals

IDENTIFYING ANNE MOZLEY'S CONTRIBUTIONS TO THECHRISTIAN REMEMBRANCER: A COMPUTATIONAL STYLISTIC APPROACH

Over the last thirty years thegrowing academic interest in both Victorian periodicals and women's issues in the nineteenth century has focussed interest on the women journalists who wrote for the serious quarterlies and monthlies published during this period. The part played by such writers as Harriet Martineau, Elizabeth Eastlake, and Frances Power Cobbe in the development of Victorian thought is now well known, while that of less prolific contributors is increasingly attracting scholarly attention. One of the authors gradually being rescued from oblivion is Anne Mozley (1809–1891), with her views on both contemporary literature and debates about the social position of women being seen as of interest.

Time and the Poetess: Violet Fane and Fin-de-Siècle Poetry in Periodicals

The overwhelming variety of discourses, readerships, authors, editors, and paratextual interventions engaged with periodical publications challenges interpretive approaches to poetic taste and cultural value, often discouraging readers who may be further deterred by the temporality, popularity, unapologetic commodification, or perceived lack of discrimination in quality they find in periodicals upon first glance. Poetry published in Victorian periodicals is often overlooked because of dismissive prejudices, past and present, against periodicals as ephemeral, therefore inferior and unimportant. Yet the nineteenth-century periodical genre chronicles modernity through notions of and ephemerality and, as Mark Turner suggests, part of the periodical-ness of the periodical is exploring the various ways that was imagined and experienced by nineteenth-century readers. (1) Turner describes the ways the periodical press both represented about the shifting nature of and participated in creating those anxieties through the cacophony of media time evident in periodicals. (2) When we fail to consider periodicals we erase evidence of intriguing discursive dynamics that can contribute to our understanding of Victorian poetry's cultural relevance and uncover obscure textual nuances that help us interpret the past, as well as the future. The poetry we canonize and explicate for modern readers is traditionally the poetry in volumes, but the practice of valuing volumes over individual publishing instance draws a curtain over the past and limits understanding of Victorian poetry on its own terms. Individual poems published in periodicals vie for attention from readers who are rapidly consuming texts: advertising, miscellaneous reportage of current events, court news, society columns, fashion plates, essays, crossword puzzles, word games, reader correspondence, and other literature by a mixture of anonymous, pseudonymous, obscure, or popular authors. Visual messages from illustrations are enmeshed with all other textual discourses, which include the periodical's personality, branded by paper, columnar style, degree of illustration, intellectual depth, intended readership, miscellaneity, and reputation. Of course, a reader's decision about what to accept and what to ignore is unknowable and perhaps unimportant, but the possibilities for meaning remain on the page, inseparable from the poem as long as the print lasts (and now with digital preservation, perhaps much longer). In many cases, the print of Victorian periodicals lasted longer than the poet's reputation, largely because of the poet's presence in the periodical. Viewing poems by fin-de-siecle poet, novelist, and essayist through the lens of their first publication in Victorian periodicals reveals new ways we may appreciate obscured women writers and understand how they articulate relationships between form and content within the perpetually cyclical format of periodicals. (3) Here Fane's poetry interrogates notions of in thematic modes such as seasons of nature, passages of life from youth to old age and death, suspension of in dream and fantasy, and the dynamic nature of celebrity. Reading Fane's poetry as deeply embedded in her fin-de-siecle print culture suggests not only a literary history of nineteenth-century women s poetry predicated on negotiating literary celebrity's fraught dependence on notions of ephemerality and permanence, but also s self-conscious interventions in women's poetry as her poems thematize the relation between the woman poet and women and time. [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] Violet Fane (fig. 1) was a pseudonym for Mary Montgomerie Lamb Singleton Currie (1843-1905), descendant of a literary, aristocratic family in Sussex who claimed among its ancestors the poet John, Earl of Rochester. She married Irish landowner Henry Sydenham Singleton in 1864 and had four children. When she began her professional career in 1872, adopted a pen name from a fictional character in Benjamin Disraeli's novel Vivian Grey (1826) because her family disapproved of her literary ambitions. …

“Making Poetry” in Good Words : Why Illustration Matters to Periodical Poetry Studies

“Making Poetry” in Good Words:Why Illustration Matters to Periodical Poetry Studies Lorraine Janzen Kooistra (bio) In April 1867, a fifteen-stanza poem by Frances R. Havergal entitled “Making Poetry” appeared in Good Words, accompanied by a full-page illustration by Arthur Boyd Houghton (fig. 1).1 Houghton’s picture gave readers access to an intimate domestic scene inside a comfortable middle-class home. Resting her head against the back of an upholstered armchair, a young woman gazes into space, her hands resting on the book open on her lap. The room is lit by a large window overlooking a treed expanse, but all the views in this carefully staged scene are directed inward. Positioned behind the foregrounded woman with the book, a young boy kneels on the window seat, absorbed in writing on a sheet of paper. Bringing the domestic activities of reading, writing, and contemplation into a single frame, Houghton’s picture not only visualizes Havergal’s accompanying verses, but also highlights some overarching themes about “making poetry” in Good Words. Turning to the poem that shares the picture’s title is instructive, not least because the continuous reading experience is disrupted by the facing full-page image and subsequent page turn. Printed in double columns, the first three stanzas of Havergal’s poem appear at the bottom of the printed page, below an essay “On Some New Forms of Industrial Co-operation.”2 Directly facing Houghton’s illustration, these stanzas initiate an exchange between mother and child: Little one, what are you doing, Sitting on the window-seat?Laughing to yourself, and writing,Some right merry thought inditing, Balancing with swinging feet. In response the child confesses, “’Tis some poetry I’m making,” and formulates a life goal: “I should like to be a poet, [End Page 111] Writing verses every day;Then to you I’d always bring them,You should make a tune and sing them; ’Twould be pleasanter than play.” The twelve remaining stanzas are printed in double columns on the next page, immediately above an essay on “one of the most strange and unexpected phenomena that science has yet disclosed to the human mind,” the discovery of a star on fire.3 Spoken entirely in the voice of the mother, the verses teach son and reader together that poetic expression is as much a part of modern life as knowledge of economic cooperatives and stellar conflagrations. “Poetry is not a trifle, / Lightly thought and lightly made,” she explains, but rather “the essence of existence,” wrought from the common human experiences of “Joy or Sorrow.” Both deeply personal and intensely social, poetry is also, the verses insist, something manufactured and reproduced: its material form constitutes a “copy” or “transcript” of what is “Carved in letters deep and burning / On a heart that long endures.” Taken together, poem, picture, and layout make an argument about the nature and purpose of poetry in Victorian periodicals. First, poetry is a made thing. Expressed in the physical relationships of letterpress, white space, and wood-engraved scene, its material form belongs to the age of mechanical reproduction, when human experience of all kinds is shared through the dissemination of inscribed letters and images impressed into multiple copies. Second, poetry is an essential part of everyday life. Neither a frivolous “trifle” in the capitalist world of getting and spending nor an elite form of high art remote from domestic experience, poetic expression is integral to what it means to be human in the modern world. The verses published in illustrated periodicals have much to tell us about Victorian poetry’s intimate relationship with visual culture and the image, and its place in both domestic space and the public sphere. Popular rather than canonical, with many authors appearing anonymously or pseudonymously, these poems require us to shift our scholarly attention from authors to readers, and from aesthetic/poetic intentions to material effects. Taking Alexander Strahan’s Good Words (1860–1911) as its case study, and arguing that the age of the image is inevitably the age of the reader, this paper examines a selection of pictured poems from the 1860s to show why illustration matters to periodical poetry studies. As one...

Femininity, Crime and Self-Defence in Victorian Literature and Society: From Dagger-Fans to Suffragettes by Emelyne Godfrey (review)

Reviewed by: Femininity, Crime and Self-Defence in Victorian Literature and Society: From Dagger-Fans to Suffragettes by Emelyne Godfrey Caroline Reitz (bio) Emelyne Godfrey, Femininity, Crime and Self-Defence in Victorian Literature and Society: From Dagger-Fans to Suffragettes (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. xiv+192, $85/£50 cloth. Emelyne Godfrey’s Femininity, Crime and Self-Defence in Victorian Literature and Society follows her 2011 study, Masculinity, Crime and Self-Defence in Victorian Literature and Culture. My sense of the first book, which I reviewed for RaVon, was that it read more like a highly informative (indeed, jam-packed) social history of some overlooked late Victorian texts than a comprehensive argument about gender and crime. This is my assessment of this book as well, which provides an in-depth look at H. G. Wells’s Ann Veronica (1909), Mona Caird’s The Wing of Azrael (1889), Elizabeth Robins’s The Convert (1907) and Where Are You Going To . . . ? (1913), and Richard Marsh’s The Adventures of Judith Lee (1916), [End Page 152] which originally appeared as a series of stories in the Strand. Godfrey uses these complex works to address an amazing array of topics, including train travel; suffragettes; hatpins (or the “hatpin-wielding suffragette” [82]); “moral panic” over the “White Slave Trade”; gentlemanliness and its relationship to physiognomy (so that women can assess the threat level of potential suitors); physical fitness (and its relationship to political freedom); and jujitsu (the Japanese martial art adapted by Edward William Barton-Wright and promoted by Edith Garrud and Emily Diana Watts in The Fine Art of Jujutsu [1906]). This is not to say that Godfrey’s book does not make an argument. Godfrey begins her book with a reading of Ruskin’s essay “Of Queens’ Gardens” from Sesame and Lilies, which “echoes through the literature of women’s self-defence” and provides a defining example of how Victorian domestic ideology genders private and public spaces (4). In Ruskin’s formulation, female domestic spaces are associated with peace and male public spaces are fraught with danger. As late nineteenth-century social changes propel women from the garden into the wider world, both real and fictional women navigate the perils and possibilities of these new spaces. Sometimes this involves learning how to use martial arts to protect suffragettes from police and hostile crowds or how to protect oneself from intimate violence in train cars or at home. Godfrey argues convincingly (if a bit hectically) that the capacity to protect herself is a crucial component to a woman’s increasing freedom in public and political arenas. The main interest of the book, other than reminding us of these fascinating yet weird primary texts, is its representation of the eclectic conversation in Victorian periodicals. Godfrey illustrates the diversity of opinion provided in these pages, from the practical perspective of Dinah Mulock Craik, who wrote a series of essays on women’s capacity for self-defense in A Woman’s Thoughts about Women (1858), first published in Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, to the provocations of Eliza Lynn Linton, whose “Out Walking,” published in Temple Bar in 1862, argued that “nine times out of ten” women were at fault if they were pestered in the streets (21). Like the rapidly changing fin de siècle society she chronicles, Godfrey’s book is so fast-paced and packed that it can be a bit disorienting (blink and you might miss the “dagger-fans” of the subtitle, covered hastily in two pages). But the range of her research gives a sense of the dizzying, if dangerous, opportunities of a pivotal historical moment. [End Page 153] Caroline Reitz John Jay College of Criminal Justice/CUNY Caroline Reitz Caroline Reitz is an associate professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice/CUNY. She is the author of Detecting the Nation: Fictions of Detection and the Imperial Venture (2004), as well as articles on Victorian serials, Victorian travel writing, and contemporary female detective fiction. Copyright © 2014 The Research Society for Victorian Periodical

The Poet's Mind: The Psychology of Victorian Poetry, 1830-1870 by Gregory Tate (review)

Reviewed by: The Poet's Mind: The Psychology of Victorian Poetry, 1830-1870 by Gregory Tate Lindsy Lawrence (bio) Gregory Tate , The Poet's Mind: The Psychology of Victorian Poetry, 1830-1870, Oxford English Monographs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. xi + 201, $110/£60 cloth. Gregory Tate's investigation of the ways Victorian poets explored the embodied mind is a finely constructed analysis of the intersection of psychology and poetics. Moving chronologically from the late 1820s through the end of the 1870s, Tate traces the various ways Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, Arthur Clough, Matthew Arnold, George Eliot, and the spasmodic poets fashioned the embodied mind. This study contributes to the field by more fully exploring the ways in which Victorian poets contemplated the mind's processes, physical sensations, and emotive effects. Drawing from the work of Philip Davis on intellectual culture and Isobel Armstrong on poetic theory, Tate argues for the influence of associationist psychology on Victorian poetics—in terms of both content and form. His methodology includes close reading of selected works by the poets in question as well as consideration of the work of nineteenth-century thinkers and writers on associationist psychology, physiology, evolution, and poetics. Of particular interest to readers of VPR will be Tate's use of periodical poetry reviews from a range of journals, including the Athenaeum, Edinburgh Review, Examiner, London Quarterly Review, North British Review, Monthly Repository, and Westminster Review. While this is not a work devoted to periodical study, Tate does more than merely mine the periodical record. The first chapter analyzing Tennyson's and Browning's early works, in particular, uses contemporary periodical reviews to establish how both poets and reviewers drew from Romantic discourse on poetic feeling and early associationist psychology. [End Page 572] Tate also demonstrates how these poets were influenced by the emerging science of psychology through careful attention to print history. In his later chapters on Tennyson, Browning, and Eliot, Tate uses the contents of these writers' libraries to support his claims about their use of psychological theory. This evidence is most compelling in the chapter on Browning's epic psychology in The Ring and the Book. Tate notes two physiological psychology books in the Brownings' collection—Julius Althaus's The Functions of the Brain (1884) and James John Garth Wilkinson's The Human Body and Its Connexion with Man (1851)—arguing that Browning "was aware of the tenets of physiological psychology" (167). While it is an argument of correlation, his later suggestion—that Browning also would have been familiar with James Hinton's two articles on psychology and the physical processes of the brain, published in the Cornhill in 1862, and later George Henry Lewes's "The Heart and the Brain," published in the Fortnightly Review in 1865—is supported by convincing biographical evidence. Browning was asked in March 1862 to edit the Cornhill, and he wrote to Isabella Blagden in August 1865 praising the first installment of Anthony Trollope's The Belton Estate, which appeared in the same issue as Lewes's article. The strength of this evidence adds weight to Tate's close reading of Browning's poem. Overall, this work elegantly explores the intersection of nineteenth-century poetics and psychology. Lindsy Lawrence University of Arkansas, Fort Smith Lindsy Lawrence Lindsy Lawrence is Assistant Professor of English, Rhetoric, and Writing at the University of Arkansas-Fort Smith. She teaches a variety of courses on nineteenth-century British literature, with special attention to publication history, gender roles, and the conventions of serial fiction. She is currently working on a book manuscript examining how domestic serials functioned as part of the editorial voice of the nineteenth-century family literary magazine. She is co-director of the Periodical Poetry Index. Copyright © 2013 The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals

Review of Digitization Panels at the 2013 RSVP Conference

Review of Digitization Panels at the 2013 RSVP Conference Clare Horrocks (bio) Were we required to characterise this age of ours by any single epithet, we should be tempted to call it, not an Heroical, Devotional, Philosophical, or Moral Age, but, above all others, the Mechanical Age. It is the Age of Machinery, in every outward and inward sense of that word. Thomas Carlyle, "Signs of the Times," 1829 A review of the conference schedule for the 45 th annual RSVP conference at the University of Salford would indeed confirm that Victorian research on periodicals has moved into what Thomas Carlyle once called the "mechanical age." We are now in an age where machinery and digital archives are given increased prominence in course syllabi and research. Researchers are increasingly driven from the dusty archive and the hallowed halls of Colindale to more efficient online repositories. Scholars are divided as to whether new methods for data retrieval and analysis can be adapted and embedded within existing practices or whether they threaten to erode and undermine traditional methods. Likewise, as scholars have been quick to point out, creating an alternative canon of resources can at times present more challenges than solutions.1 The papers at this year's RSVP conference were keen to point out that embracing the digital age was not all about speed or replicating existing methods but rather about finding new and exciting ways to access and display data in ways that had not been previously possible, thus advancing, rather than retarding, the field of periodicals research. There were three panels on digitization at the conference: two on digital scholarship and pedagogy and one on digital bibliographic scholarship. Participants included seasoned scholars as well as publishers and post-graduates. Every session was packed to capacity with extra chairs having [End Page 562] to be squeezed in—a testimony to growing scholarly interest in digital pedagogies and research methods. I was fortunate to co-present on the first panel with my colleague Shannon Smith from Queens University, Bader International Study Centre. In this paper, we suggested that scholars must become producers as well as consumers in order to embrace the potential of digital pedagogies. The case study we used to exemplify this idea was the Punch and the Victorian Periodical Press Resource that I have been building at Liverpool John Moores University, which is part of a larger digital project identifying Punch contributors from 1843 to 1919.2 This site is in part focused on sharing links, readings, and examples of good practice in teaching and learning—building learning communities where students' work serves as a model for approaching and analyzing Punch. In the second half of our presentation, Shannon Smith described the process of creating a new digital humanities course. In the final part of this course, Smith brings together scholars who are in the process of developing digital archives to talk to her students about the impact of digital technology on research. Smith's presentation segued well into a paper presented by Seth Cayley from Cengage Learning, who described the process of developing the new Daily Mail Historical Archive, 1896-2004. When discussing this project, Cayley made the processes of production transparent, thereby establishing dialogue between a commercial publisher and the scholarly community—the kind of exchange that has been all too rare in recent years. Cayley's discussion of publishing decisions regarding resolution, formatting, download speed, and functionality of digital databases provided a starting point for engaging conversation among scholars and digital database administrators. The final paper on the panel was delivered by Elizabeth Penner who is studying the Boy's Own Paper, 1879-1913. Penner's presentation demonstrated a method of uniting traditional hard copy research with analysis of digital texts—a methodology Shannon Smith and I had discussed earlier in the panel presentation. The fact that the Boy's Own Paper has been digitized as part of Gale Cengage's periodicals project provided a link to Cayley's presentation as well. Penner argued that the digital archive did not do justice to the complexity of the Boy's Own Paper because it did not promote understanding of the paper's unique form, style, and editorial...

"That inscrutable something": Business in the Periodical Press

The business life of the nation, in its commercial and political ramifications, was the object of intense scrutiny in the pages of Victorian periodicals. Combining quantitative and qualitative methodologies, and using as database the ProQuest digital archive of British periodicals, this essay investigates some aspects of the cultural life of business in the second half of the nineteenth century. The first section of the essay contains an experiment in distant reading which analyses occurrences of three text segments ("man of business," "business habits," and "business life"), looking for collocative meanings and patterns of evaluation. The second part focuses on a selection of articles that explicitly take up the issue of the dignity of business.

Asses and Aesthetes: Ritualism and Aestheticism in Victorian Periodical Illustration

Asses and Aesthetes: Ritualism and Aestheticism in Victorian Periodical Illustration

Victorian Poets, Politics, and Networks: Response

Response Linda H. Peterson (bio) How did Victorian poets and their poetry engage in contemporary debates about pressing social, religious, and political questions? The 2012 conference theme, “Networks,” encouraged poetry specialists to consider the periodical and publishing contexts that featured verse commentary on contemporary issues; the social networks that led poets to develop—or reject—positions taken by fellow writers; and the literary transformations that occurred as verse moved among poets, between continents, and from one publishing venue to another. This emphasis on poetry as embedded in history and, even more, as attempting to alter the course of history signals a notable shift in scholarly attitudes over the past fifty years. When the original editors of the Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals set their criteria for inclusion, they omitted poetry—a decision they believed “readily defensible.” Partly, the defense was practical, citing the sheer quantity of periodical verse they would need to index (over 7,000 items). Mostly, it was evaluative: “To have included verse would have added an enormous number of worthless items to Part A [the title index] and a large number of obscure authors to be identified and then described in Part B [the author index]” (Houghton, Introduction xvi).1 This editorial decision, as Linda K. Hughes has noted, presumed a predominance of sentimental verse in newspapers and magazines and an “association of poetry with ‘filler’” (92). It failed to account for major poems first published in periodicals and for the significance of occasional verse in which poets engaged the questions of their day. Even more, it presumed that prose, however well or poorly written, was the medium for contending with serious social and political issues, whereas poetry was for expressing feelings or offering secondary commentary. All three papers in this cluster take a different view of poetry and political engagement. Alison Chapman’s “Poetry, Network, Nation” [End Page 309] demonstrates how British and American expatriate poets in Italy used periodical verse to endorse Italian Unification (Risorgimento). Concentrating on three women—Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Isa Blagden, and Theodosia Garrow Trollope—who “placed themselves at the center of nation making,” Chapman argues that they “predicated their writing identities on a political poetics that . . . circulated by a complex European and transatlantic print and manuscript culture” (275). What the Wellesley editors might have deemed “filler” verse in The Tuscan Athenaeum—Garrow’s “Aurora Rugiadosa: Lines on Gibson’s recently finished statue of Aurora” (1848)—Chapman reads not just as praise of Gibson’s “forward-moving statue” but, more importantly, as a contribution to Italian political revolution. In ekphrastically (re)creating a “feminized angel of the Second Coming” (282), Garrow used poetry to trumpet the cause and link herself with other liberal, pro-Risorgimento artists. Gibson’s sculpture and Garrow’s “Aurora Rugiadosa” became, in turn, sources for Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, an iconic woman poet expressing her own literary and political agency. While we may today remember only Aurora Leigh (1856), the verse novel that crowns Barrett Browning’s career, Chapman recovers the culture of print, sociability, and politics of which it is a part and thereby enriches our understanding of the literary networks through which women poets worked for political change. Kirstie Blair’s “Transatlantic Tractarians” takes up a different issue in a transnational exchange: the state of High Church Anglicanism in Britain and North America. Oxford Movement writers felt themselves beleaguered at home, disillusioned with the state of the English Church, yet hopeful about possibilities across the Atlantic. In the British Critic of 1839, Newman lamented: “the rest of the Church, either caring nothing for us, or accounting it a point of charity to wish us dead, and the State intruding its well-meant but unamiable blandishments, it is pleasant to look across the western wave, and discern a friendly star breathing peace and shedding benison” (312). Poet-priests of the American Episcopal Church responded to such transatlantic appeals by expressing “honour [to] their nursing mother” but also by asserting the vitality of their native church “in all the vigour of youth, adapting itself to a fresh state of society” (Coxe, Christian Ballads viii). Thus, while American poets learned from their British counterparts, they also produced new...

Swinburne

Swinburne Yisrael Levin (bio) More than a century after his death, for the majority of readers, Swinburne was still considered to be the bad boy of Victorian poetry. On the one hand, this view served Swinburne scholarship as it made him stand out among his poetic contemporaries. On the other hand, however, as is usually the case with bad boys, readers of Victorian poetry tended to dismiss him as poet provocateur who enjoyed shocking his audience for no real purpose. And yet, over the last decade or so, we have seen more and more studies that choose to look beyond Swinburne’s provocations and treat his work as a medium for serious contemplations. The items I review this year adopt this attitude and present Swinburne as an insightful thinker, very much aware of the central debates of his time. Readers of Swinburne have gradually become more interested in his critical writings and, more specifically, in his thoughts on visual art. Swinburne was in fact a subtle and careful commentator on the artistic scene of his days, and his insights, so it seems, are certainly worth further exploration. Last year I reviewed Stefano Evangelista’s “Swinburne’s Galleries” (Yearbook of English [End Page 389] Studies 40, no. 1–2 [2010]: 160–179), which discussed Swinburne’s rather un-orthodox approach to art criticism. This year Julie Codell joins Evangelista in her “The Art Press and Its Parodies: Unraveling Networks in Swinburne’s 1868 Academy Notes” (Victorian Periodicals Review 44, no. 2 [2011]: 165–183), which also discusses Swinburne’s unique approach to the world of Victorian art criticism. Codell’s article focuses on Swinburne’s Notes on the Royal Exhibition (1868). Co-written with William Michael Rossetti, Notes provided Swinburne with an opportunity to parody the Academy Notes, the publication that accompanied the Royal Academy’s annual spring exhibit. As Codell’s writes, “Academy Notes permitted the spectating public to share a catalogue and a discourse that guided aesthetic judgment within regulated cultural norms” (p. 165). In other words, the Academy Notes created a “network,” using Codell’s phrasing, that presented and sustained middle-class Victorian values. Victorian subjects who read the Academy Notes became, therefore, part of an “imagined community of spectators, critics, and artists” (p. 166) who shared similar values and taste. Swinburne, on the other hand, “did not want to educate his readers,” writes Codell. Instead, he wished to “parody the educational function of Academy Notes, a genre that was, after all, informative only in the most cursory way that merely reinforced existing taste” (p. 166). Swinburne parodies the Academy Notes in his own Notes by dedicating them to six Dante Rossetti paintings that have never been presented in the Royal Academy exhibition, and that have never been seen by the public. In doing so, Swinburne implies that “great art was produced outside the network of critics, spectators, Academy, and exhibition system,” thereby “emphasizing the transgressive nature of his critical enterprise” (p. 171). What made his critical heritage so trangressive was his insistence on forsaking Ruskin-esque objectivity and the use of “critical language [that] could only speak a private sensory experience before art, the very experience the old network marginalized or downright condemned” (p. 173). By celebrating the critic’s personal response to a work of art, Swinburne was able to form an alternative network to the one established by the Academy Notes, and in doing so comment not only on Victorian art criticism, but also on Victorian society. Codell’s reading of Swinburne’s Notes is both insightful and illuminating, especially when she weaves into her discussion Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital as a means of explaining the motive behind Swinburne’s resistance to Royal Academy standards and taste. What seems to be missing from her discussion, however, is a broader Swinburnean context. After all, Notes was published the same year as Swinburne’s William Blake, where he vehemently advocates for the idea of art for art’s sake, an idea that informs, in many respects, his approach to art criticism in Notes. Also, many of Swinburne’s republican poems were composed around 1868, which suggests that his resistance to the middle-class values promoted...

RSVP Bibliography: 2009-2011

The RSVP Bibliography catalogues essays, theses, and books published in the field of Victorian periodicals studies from December 2009 through December 2011. It includes entries relevant to newspapers and magazines of Great Britain and the British Empire, 1837-1901.

The January 1861 Quarterly Review as Genre, Media Event, and Research Heuristic

The January 1861 Quarterly Review as Genre, Media Event, and Research Heuristic Linda K. Hughes (bio) Nothing could be duller, alas, than the image of the periodical I have chosen for this forum’s exploration of Victorian media: the January 1861 Quarterly Review. The Illustrated London News, so often identified with modernity itself, had permanently altered newspapers with its first issue in 1842, naturalizing the linking of current news, words, and vibrant images in ways that would forever change readers’ media tableau (Brake and Demoor 2–3; see also Sinnema). Of all this, the Quarterly is innocent. (See fig. 1; ironically, to gauge the Quarterly’s lack of pictures or visual interest, I have provided an image of it here.) The Quarterly adds no headlines or title gracefully set off by white space, as in the contemporaneous Cornhill Magazine, the monthly magazine edited by William Makepeace Thackeray, which had begun a year earlier. Indeed, aside from the omnibus listing of titles at the top, the page shown here could as easily come from a book as from an ephemeral periodical. This was no coincidence. As Joanne Shattock points out, each issue of a quarterly was around 250 pages, with eight to ten articles; a single issue was so expensive (at four to six shillings) that only the affluent could afford it, and once a year’s issues were bound together, the volume more closely resembled a book than ephemera (523). Everything on this Quarterly page, then, glances backward, toward the beginning of the nineteenth century, when the great quarterlies were founded (the Edinburgh Review in 1802, the Quarterly in 1809), and signals a determined avoidance of popular appeal or up-to-date innovations. On one hand, then, the January 1861 Quarterly indicates in its old-fashioned format the unevenness of media history, the persistence of [End Page 23] older media forms amid radical change—just as today, paper newspapers survive, however tenuously, in the era of the Internet and phone apps. On the other hand, popular appeal is precisely what this specific issue had. So voracious was the demand for it that it had to be reprinted five times. According to John North’s Waterloo Directory of English Newspapers and Periodicals: 1800–1900, the circulation of the Quarterly was eight thousand in 1860; if each edition repeated this number, forty thousand copies of this single issue were printed in all. A thousand of these were sent to Mudie’s Circulating Library so that they could be borrowed rather than bought (W. 705). The issue was even reviewed among other current publications, as in the February 1861 Dublin Review (“Essays” 458, 475). Despite its unprepossessing format, then, this issue of the Quarterly was clearly a media event. Why? And what questions does this media event pose for our understanding of Victorian periodicals, described by scholars as the era’s most pervasive medium and characteristic genre (Altick 318; Saintsbury 166)? Click for larger view View full resolution [Wilberforce, Samuel]. “Essays and Reviews.” Quarterly Review 109 (Jan.1861): 248–49. The reason for the issue’s popularity is straightforward—and a salutary reminder of how much questions of religion mattered to middle-class and more affluent Victorian readers. In 1860, seven Anglican clergymen, including Benjamin Jowett of Balliol College, Oxford, drew upon the approaches and methods of higher criticism in Essays and Reviews (1860). Higher criticism, [End Page 24] largely developed in Germany, applied the historical methods developed for classical texts to the Bible and, in doing so, brought attention to many textual inconsistencies (for example, Moses, generally understood to be the author of the Pentateuch, narrates his own death). Though George Eliot had translated David Friedrich Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu in 1846, higher criticism did not affect a wide sector of Victorian Christians until the publication of Essays and Reviews. The effect was electric. As Mark Knight and Emma Mason observe, “The publication of Essays and Reviews had a significant effect on Evangelicals’ consciousness and elicited a far stronger reaction from them than the publication of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species in 1859.” In illustration of the point, they cite the Evangelical Christian Observer: “If the Bible is plainly...