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Women's Literary Publishing in Canadian Newspapers, 1850-1900

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Women's Literary Publishing in Canadian Newspapers, 1850-1900 Poetry and the Press: Women’s Literary Publishing in Canadian Newspapers, 1850-1900 By Ceilidh Allison Hart A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English University of Toronto © Copyright by Ceilidh Hart 2012 Abstract Poetry and the Press: Women’s Literary Publishing in Canadian Newspapers, 1850-1900 Doctor of Philosophy, 2012 Ceilidh Allison Hart Graduate Department of English, University of Toronto This dissertation explores the important role the nineteenth-century newspaper played as a vehicle through which literary women could participate in public life, and specifically how women poets used this textual space as a forum for the exercise of rhetorical power. The newspaper was a space where women writers could speak with authority on the issues that concerned and affected them – a space where they could contribute to the dialogue in which the newspaper participated and, in doing so, claim a place for themselves as authors. The poetry sections of the daily newspapers in Canada were thus far from politically neutral, and they are deserving of attention, I argue, because they illustrate the extent and complexity of women’s involvement in nineteenth- century literary culture in Canada. In each of my three chapters I consider the rhetorical strategies women used to assert themselves in the political – and the literary – worlds. Chapter One focuses on the Halifax Acadian Recorder between 1850 and 1870 and the ways women used sentimentality in their writing as a pedagogical tool, in terms of content and form, to teach their readers appropriate modes of compassionate response to the world around them. I suggest that sentimentalism’s seeming indulgence in emotion proved a method ii by which women could extend themselves beyond the confines of the domestic spaces that were their ostensible focus. Chapter Two focuses on the Montreal Star’s Sunday Reading section between 1871 and 1888 to show how women co-opted the language of religion, and specifically the language used to describe Christ, in order to link feminine moral authority to God’s spiritual authority, thereby suggesting the female poet’s message was sanctioned by God. Finally, Chapter Three focuses on the Toronto Evening Telegram between 1880 and 1900 and writers’ significant shift away from earlier models of feminine morality as they embraced the persona of the poet as spokesperson for the city, taking on municipal politics and urban affairs more explicitly towards the end of the nineteenth century than ever before. As they reached beyond the subjects that had previously defined their work, these authors also reached beyond definitions of authorship that reinforced those boundaries. Although we can see significant change over the course of the fifty years that shape my project, throughout this period the newspaper remained an essential part not just of how women accessed their audiences but how they inserted themselves into Canadian life broadly as interested and invested participants, and as authors. iii Acknowledgments I would like to acknowledge the funding provided by the Ontario Graduate Scholarship Program in 2006-7, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada between 2006 and 2009, and the School of Graduate Studies’ Doctoral Completion Award in 2011-12. I would also like to acknowledge the Department of English at the University of Toronto for the many ways they invested in me and in my research. My supervisor, Professor Heather Murray, was incredibly supportive while I worked on this project. She offered clear direction and insight, but more importantly she consistently modeled careful and intelligent scholarship. She has been a wonderful teacher and mentor. I am also very grateful to the two other members of my supervisory committee, Professor Nick Mount and Professor Colin Hill. They were generous critics and consistently challenged me toward thoughtful analysis. Over the course of graduate school I have learned from, leaned on, and been inspired by many friends and teachers and I am grateful for the opportunity to thank some of them here: Gerald Lynch, Marlene Goldman, Janice Fiamengo, Sarah Caskey, Laura Stenberg, Emily Simmons, Marybeth Curtin, Katherine McLeod. There is no way I would have succeeded at graduate school without the help of my family, especially my parents, Judy and Des Gibb. They were (are) unfailing in their support – a support that took so many forms and expressed itself in so many ways over the past seven years I am amazed that it hasn’t left them exhausted. I hope they realize how much of what I have accomplished comes from them. I would also like to thank my mother and father-in-law, Ann and Bob Hart, whose kindness and good humour helped to hold me up, not just as I launched myself into a Ph.D. programme, but also as I simultaneously fumbled my way through the first years of motherhood. For Mark, whose love and patience appear to be boundless, and who was more involved in this project than I think he ever dreamed he would be, and for Anelieke, and for Theadora: I’m so grateful to come home to you at the end of it all. iv Table of Contents Introduction: Reading Women’s Writing in the Newspaper Press………………………..1 Chapter One: Sentimentalism and the Acadian Recorder, 1850-1870…………………..21 Chapter Two: Sunday Reading and the Montreal Star, 1871-1888……………………...71 Chapter Three: Speaking for the City in the Evening Telegram, 1880-1900…………..120 Conclusion: Change, Consistency and Community…………………………………….165 Works Consulted………………………………………………………………………..173 Appendix A: Selected Poems Printed in the Acadian Recorder………………………..183 Appendix B: Selected Poems Printed in the Montreal Star…………………………….191 Appendix C: Selected Poems Printed in the Toronto Evening Telegram……………....198 v List of Appendices Appendix A: Selected Poems Printed in the Acadian Recorder Appendix B: Selected Poems Printed in the Montreal Star Appendix C: Selected Poems Printed in the Toronto Evening Telegram vi Introduction: Reading Women’s Writing in the Newspaper Press On Thursday May 7, 1895 the Toronto newspaper the Evening Telegram printed a poem called “The Poet’s Confession,” by an author named Judy who unabashedly describes her mercenary approach to her craft this way: With my nose to the grindstone of duty, I sing you a song for a fee, And though it may not be a beauty, ‘Twill make little matter to me. For I sing for the sake of the money, And not for the sake of the art, And though the songs may not be funny, ‘Twill still make an editor “part.” (1-8) Within the context of nineteenth-century women’s writing in Canada, “The Poet’s Confession” is striking both for the author’s explicit rejection of Victorian models of femininity and for her transparent interest in money-matters, an interest underscored by the presence of the newspaper as the venue in which the poem is published. Read against the sentimental and didactic poetry that was also published in newspapers by her literary predecessors fifty years earlier, Judy’s poem illustrates just how transformative the years between 1850 and 1900 were for women writing in Canada: it is evidence of the remarkable shifts this period saw not just in the topics women chose to write about, but also the ways they presented themselves to the reading public. This is a study of those changes as represented in three Canadian newspapers: the Halifax Acadian Recorder, the 7 Montreal Star and the Toronto Evening Telegram. These papers, largely representative of the typical Canadian newspaper in the second half of the nineteenth century, offer insight into the various ways women positioned themselves as poets and the various methods they used to contribute, through their creative writing, to public discourse in Canada. Throughout, I want to emphasize the newspaper itself not just as an incidental backdrop to the poetry women were writing, but as importantly constitutive of the public engagement women achieved in publishing their work here. The connection between women’s rising presence on the literary scene and their involvement in public life, including organized social reform movements, has been well documented by critics such as Janice Fiamengo, Heather Murray, and Mariana Valverde, but the extent to which women’s literary efforts coalesced around the newspaper has yet to be fully examined outside of this study. The late nineteenth century in particular, beginning with the 1880s, has received substantial attention with regard to women’s writing and women’s professionalism. Indeed, most considerations of women’s involvement in writing as a profession focus on this time period, and rightly so – it was the 1880s that saw a relative proliferation of successful women authors on the literary scene who defined themselves as professionals: Pauline Johnson, Sara Jeanette Duncan, Agnes Maule Machar, Susan Harrison, Isabella Valancy Crawford, among others. These are the women whose names remain familiar to students and scholars of Canadian literature and whose works maintain prominence in the literary canon of early Canada. Jennifer Chambers, Misao Dean, Cecily Devereux, Carole Gerson, Sabine Milz, Veronica Strong-Boag and others have done important work piecing together the oeuvres and reconstructing the careers of these and other individual authors. Much of the work done 8 on early women’s writing in Canada has also focused on women’s monograph publishing or on their publishing in the literary magazines that were a precarious but formative part of literary culture at the time. When the newspaper has been considered as a publishing venue for women, it has most often been considered in light of journalism and women’s non-fiction prose.1 Although this study also includes the 1880s and 1890s, overall I am interested in the trajectory of women writers’ experiences from 1850 and with the newspaper press exclusively.
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