UC Riverside UC Riverside Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title The Editor as Producer: Nineteenth-Century British Literary Editors Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6dw3b1qm Author Bartels, Gretchen Christine Publication Date 2013 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE The Editor as Producer: Nineteenth-Century British Literary Editors A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English by Gretchen C. Bartels August 2013 Dissertation Committee: Dr. Joseph Childers, Chairperson Dr. Susan Zieger Dr. Rise Axelrod Copyright by Gretchen C. Bartels 2013 The Dissertation of Gretchen C. Bartels is approved: Committee Chairperson University of California, Riverside ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The generation of a project of this magnitude is only ever possible through networks of support, and I am incredibly thankful for mine. I am deeply indebted to my advisor Dr. Joseph Childers for his guidance and feedback as my project has taken shape. To my committee: Dr. Joseph Childers, Dr. Susan Zieger, and Dr. Rise Axelrod, thank you for sharing ideas and encouraging me as I explored my own. To Tina Feldmann, I am so grateful for your guidance through the administrative portion of bringing this project to fruition. To my colleagues at the University of California, Riverside and California Baptist University, your encouragement through the inevitable ups and downs of my project has been invaluable. I was fortunate to be afforded the opportunity to delve into the archives of the Huntington Library, and for this I am particularly grateful. The solidarity I have felt with the community of scholars pouring over manuscripts and rare books has encouraged my research, and exploring the gardens on the grounds of the Huntington Library has refreshed my soul. I am especially thankful to Dr. Heidi Brayman-Hackel and Dr. Steve Hindle for their encouragement of my archival work. To the baristas at Starbucks who kept me company during many a late-night writing session, thank you. And to you, my friends and my family, there are not words enough to express the depth of my gratitude for your role in seeing me through this project. I am so thankful for the constant support and prayers of my parents, Cheryl and Craig Bartels. To Josh Bartels, thank you for stimulating conversation and hearty encouragement. I have been iv encouraged by the support of Harriett Colby, Jan and Roger Bartels, Dr. Lewis James and Carole Colby, and Caleb and Krissy Bartels. Sarah Malpass and Emily Williams, you astound me with your investment in my research though it is so far afield your own interests, and while you both should know already how amazing you are and how much your support has meant to me, it looks so lovely to mention it again in print. To Tom and Rita Schneider, Kristin Noone and Jon Poblete, Susana Brower, Matthew Goddard, Alan Lovegreen and Rory Moore thank you for listening ears, encouragement, and the occasional moments snatched away from writing to relax and recharge. And to the many others who have supported me through this process, I offer my heartfelt thanks. v To my parents, Craig and Cheryl Bartels, for their constant love and support vi ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION The Editor as Producer: Nineteenth-Century British Literary Editors by Gretchen C. Bartels Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Program in English University of California, Riverside, August 2013 Dr. Joseph Childers, Chairperson To more fully understand nineteenth-century literary production, literary scholars must consider periodical editing as more than biographical footnotes to the lives of famous Victorian authors or secondary details in a text’s publishing history. In The Editor as Producer: Nineteenth-Century British Literary Editors, I seek to render more visible the work of the periodical editor, positing this figure as pivotal to the nineteenth- century literary scene. A single metanarrative of the editorial role is impossible to tell and undesirable insofar as it would necessarily flatten out a rich and varied history of practices and the influences particular men and women have had on literary texts, periodicals, and nineteenth-century print culture; however, critical work on editors has been too fragmented. My approach is to trace the historical trajectory of editorial roles through the nineteenth century but to focus in each period on a pair of editors to explore the editorial trends of professionalization, celebrity author-editorship, and responses to vii new technologies. Pairing Francis Jeffrey of the Edinburgh Review and William Blackwood along with the fictional Christopher North of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, chapter 1 focuses on the struggle for professionalization in literary reviews and magazines during the early nineteenth century. In chapter 2, I draw on the figure of the naked editor to represent the emotional openness and literary intimacy audiences pursued in author- editors. William Makepeace Thackeray’s Cornhill Magazine and Ellen Wood’s Argosy form this chapter’s central set of periodicals. Finally, The Editor as Producer concludes with perhaps the most unlikely pairing: George Newnes’s popular magazine Tit-Bits and Henry Harland and Aubrey Beardsley’s artistic quarterly the Yellow Book. The editors of both periodicals responded to late-century changes in audience and technology, but while Newnes embraced the increased pace of modern life and shorter reader attention span, Harland and Beardsley focused on creating a periodical that was first and foremost an objet d’art. Chapter 3 emphasizes how the fitness of periodicals in their cultural environments was influenced by the editor’s vision. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction………………………………………………………………………………1 Chapter 1: Early Nineteenth-Century Editors: Professionalization in The Edinburgh Review and Blackwood’s Monthly Magazine…………………………………………………23 Chapter 2: Mid-Nineteenth Century Editors: Celebrity and Personal Connection in the Cornhill Magazine and the Argosy……………………………………………………………..91 Chapter 3: Late Nineteenth Century Editors: Technologies of the Press in Tit-Bits and the Yellow Book…………………………………….………………………………………………...149 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………220 Appendix 1: Images from Chapter 3…………………………..………………………..242 ix LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: A page from the third volume of the Edinburgh Review………………….…242 Figure 2: The front page of Tit-Bits……………………………………………………..243 Figure 3: A page from the first volume of the Yellow Book……………………………244 Figure 4: Lolcat entitled “He Doesn't Sound Like a Person I Want to Know”………...245 Figure 5: Lolcat entitled ““I Read Sum Wares Dat Drinkin Is Bad Fur U”……………245 Figure 6: The cover of the first volume of the Yellow Book, designed by Aubrey Beardsley……………………………………………………………………………….246 Figure 7: Cornhill Magazine Vol. V (90-91)…………………………………………..247 Figure 8: Cornhill Magazine Vol. V (1)……………………………………………….248 Figure 9: Leighton’s “A Study”………………………………………………………..249 x Introduction “It is a magazine age: there can be no doubt about that. Other books are but little read in comparison to the monthly or weekly serial.” The Christian Observer, 1865 During the nineteenth-century, the power of the British periodical press was expansive, and the magazine editor was the repository of much of this power. Anthony Trollope satirically represented this influence as divine in his 1855 one-volume novel The Warden. The title of Trollope’s fictionalized version of the Times, the Jupiter, makes explicit the godlike might of the paper that destroys Septimus Harding’s career with a single article. Continuing the comparison, Trollope’s narrator asks, Who has not heard of Mount Olympus—that high abode of all the powers of type, that favoured seat of the great goddess Pica, that wondrous habitation of gods and devils, from whence, with ceaseless hum of steam and never-ending flow of Castilian ink, issue forth eighty thousand nightly edicts for the governance of a subject nation? (160) Trollope, who would himself hold the editorial chair of the St. Pauls Magazine in 1867, paints a bleak picture of literary production. The Jupiter to Trollope’s Olympus is both god and governor in this hellscape of a heaven in which the divine and the demonic, a literalization of the printer’s devil, intermix. With this grandiose description in mind, the Jupiter’s editor, Tom Towers, is a bit underwhelming: “Tom Towers walks quietly along Pall Mall, with his coat buttoned close against the east wind, as though he were a mortal 1 man, and not a god dispensing thunderbolts from Mount Olympus” (163). This description juxtaposes Tom, an unremarkable man struggling against the elements, and the god of thunder and sky. In doing so, Trollope emphasizes the great power of the press, especially its destructive potential, but also undermines that god-like facade by revealing the man behind the proverbial curtain. Juxtaposing the mundane and the extraordinary, Trollope highlights the invisibility of the editor himself and raises concerns about placing so much power in the hands of one individual. Later in the novel, when asked about the article accusing Harding of mismanagement, Towers hides behind the mask of the magazine: “My dear fellow,” he tells John Bold, “I really cannot answer for the Jupiter” (178). In this moment, the connection between editor and periodical is strained. To some extent, Towers has every right and responsibility as editor