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EDUCATING THE PROPER WOMAN READER: VICTORIAN FAMILY LITERARY MAGAZINES AND THE PROFESSIONALIZATION OF LITERARY CRITICISM

Dissertation

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for

The Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate

School of The Ohio State University

By

Jennifer Phegley, M.A.

*****

The Ohio State University 1999

Dissertation Committee: Approved by Professor Marlene Longenecker, Adviser

Professor Andrea Lunsford

Professor Clare Simmons Adviser Department of English Professor Susan Williams mil Number: 99414C8

UMI Microform 9941408 Copyright 1999, by UMI Company. All rights reserved.

This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code.

UMI 300 North Zeeh Road Ann Arbor, MI 48103 ABSTRACT

In nineteenth-century Britain and America, the popularity of novels and periodicals grew at a staggering rate as more and more readers gained access to a wide variety of inexpensive reading material. The critical response to this unprecedented abundance of print culture was to initiate a discourse that called for the regulation of women's reading in order to ensure the morality of the primary literacy educators of the family, elevate the literary taste of the middle class, and preserve the nation's culture. Many critics—who printed their work in elite literary reviews that catered to a predominantly male audience—saw women as the most susceptible victims of the "disease of reading" that was believed to be a threat to the entire social fabric of the nation. While these critics defined women readers as inherently uncritical and held them responsible for the vulgarization of the nation's literary culture, family literary magazines— commonly referred to as shilling monthlies—emerged in opposition to this criticism to provide an alternative program for the definition of culture and taste aimed at a wider, less educated audience predominantly figured as female.

These magazines thereby established a culture of reading designed to educate rather than exclude women readers.

This project examines the relationship between the debate over women readers in nineteenth-century periodicals and the establishment of the profession 11 of literary criticism by looking at how four family literary magazines— Harper’s, the Cornhill, Seigraim, and Victoria —define the proper woman reader. I illustrate how the concept of the woman reader served as a major defining force behind the divisions between high and low culture, the definitions of literary forms such as realism and sensationalism, and the development of the literary canon. I also uncover the ways in which literary critics elevated their work to the status of a scholarly profession and laid the foundation for twentieth-century critical traditions through their various attempts to dismiss, protect, or educate the woman reader. Thus, this inquiry reveals a vital and heretofore overlooked aspect of Anglo-American literary history that moves women from the margins to the center of nineteenth-century literary culture.

Ill 'Sometimes I hear my voice and it's been here, silent all these years." —Tori Amos

This is for every woman reader who has had the courage to make her voice heard.

IV ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to express my sincere gratitude to Marlene Longenecker, Andrea

Lunsford, Clare Simmons, and Susan Williams who have challenged, questioned, and encouraged me throughout my work on this project.

I am grateful to the Department of English for awarding several fellowships that enabled me to devote extended periods of time to my research and writing. I wish to thank the Graduate School for the Graduate Student

Alumni Research Award that allowed me to travel to the Harry Ransom

Research Center at the University of Texas, Austin and to the Cincinnati Public

Library. I also thank the Department of Women's Studies for providing me with the Elizabeth Gee Award for Research on Women.

Several formal and informal groups of respondents within the English

Department deserve recognition for the valuable insights they contributed to early drafts of this document. I also wish to extend my appreciation to

Interdisciplinary Nineteenth Century Studies, the Research Society for Victorian

Periodicals, and the Victorians Institute for providing lively forums in which to discuss my work.

Finally, I thank my family and loved ones without whose support the completion of this dissertation would not have been possible. VITA

July 13,1970...... Bom - Flint, Michigan

1995...... M.A. in English, The Ohio State University

1993-present...... Graduate Teaching and Research Associate

1995-1996...... First-Year Writing Program Administrator

1997-1998...... University Writing Board Administrator

PUBLICATIONS

"Writing Writing Lives: The Collaborative Production of a Composition Text in a Large First-Year Writing Program" (with Sara Games, et al.). (Re)Visioning Composition Textbooks: Conflicts of Culture, Ideology, and Pedagogy. Eds., Xin Liu Cale and Frederic C. Cale. New York: State University of New York Press, 1999. 249-66.

"Considering Research Methods in Rhetoric and Composition" (with Andrea Lunsford, et al.) Ethics and Representation in Qualitative Studies of Literacy. Eds., Gesa Kirsch and Peter Mortensen. Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English, 1996. vii-xv.

Writing Lives: Exploring Literacy and Community (with Sara Games, et al.). New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996.

FIELDS OF STUDY

Major Field: English

v i TABLE O FC O N TEm s

Page

Dedication...... iv

Acknowledgments...... v

V ita...... vi

List of Figures...... viii

Chapters:

Introduction. The Scene of Women's Reading: Victorian Periodicals, Professional Critics, and the Development of the Family Literary Magazine... 1

1. Making the American Reader British: Transatlantic Literary Taste in Harper's Magazine, 1850-55...... 30

2. Clearing Away "The Briars and Brambles": The Education and Professionalization of the Cornhill tvlagazine's Women Readers, 1860-64 ...... 71

3. (Im)Proper Reading for Women: Belgravia Magazine and the Defense of the Sensation Novel, 1866-71 ...... 109

4. Victoria's Secret: The Woman's Movement from Reader to Writer, 1863-67 ...... 163

Bibliography ...... 208

vii LIST OF FIGURES

Figure Page

1. "The Blind Scholar and his Daughter" ...... 139

2. "Cousin Phillis and Her Book" ...... 140

3. 'Bessy's Spectacles"...... 141

4. "In the Firelight" ...... 142

5. "One Summer Month" ...... 143

6. "Summer Reminiscences" ...... 144

Vlll INTRODUCTION

THE SCENE OF WOMEN'S READING: VICTORIAN PERIODICALS, PROFESSIONAL CRITICS, AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE FAMILY LITERARY MAGAZINE

John Ruskin's emphatic warning to parents to "keep the modem magazine and novel out of your girl's way" (Sesame and Lilies 66) exemplifies the precarious relationship that existed among critics, popular literature, and female readers in the nineteenth century. Critics' concerns about the dangerous effects of print culture on women were intimately linked to the explosion of the periodical industry in the mid-1800s. In Great Britain, between 1824 and 1900, as many as 50,000 periodicals were published in millions of issues surveying every area of human activity. As literacy rates rose, printing technologies improved, and taxes on newspapers were revoked, periodicals began to dominate the nineteenth-century literary field. By mid-century, there were over one thousand magazines devoted primarily to literature (Thompson 3). The development of this mass of periodical literature had such an impact that the eminent Victorian critic George Saintsbury declared in 1896 that

Perhaps there is no single feature of the English literary history of the nineteenth century, not even the enormous popularisation and multiplication of the novel, which is so distinctive and characteristic as the development in it of periodical literature... [Ijt is quite certain that, had.. . reprints [from magazines] not taken place, more than half the most valuable books of the age ... would never have appeared as books at all. (166 )

The critical response to this unprecedented abundance of literary' material was to initiate a new discourse that called for the regulation of women's reading in order to ensure the morality of the primary literacy educators of the family, elevate the literary taste of the middle class, and preserve the nation's culture.

Many critics—who printed their work in elite literary reviews that catered to a predominantly male audience—saw women as the most susceptible victims of the "disease of reading" that was believed to be a threat to the entire social fabric of the nation.' While these critics defined women readers as inherently uncritical and held them responsible for the vulgarization of the nation's literary culture, this project argues that family literary magazines emerged in opposition to this criticism to provide an alternative program for the definition of culture and taste aimed at a wider, less educated audience predominantly figured as female.^

Family literary magazines thereby established a culture of reading designed to educate rather than exclude women readers.

In this study, I explore how literary critics elevated their work to the status of a scholarly profession and built the foundation for twentieth-century critical traditions through their various attempts to dismiss, protect, or educate the woman reader in nineteenth-century periodicals. I examine the relationship between the debate over women readers in nineteenth-century magazines and the establishment of the profession of literary criticism by illustrating how the concept of the woman reader served as a major defining force behind the divisions between high and low culture, the definitions of literary forms such as realism and sensationalism, and the development of the literary canon. To carry

ou» »his inquiry, 1 investigate four major family literary magazines. Harper's, the

Comhill, Belgravia, and Victoria. Each of these magazines focuses on preserving

the nation's culture by including women readers as vital members of its

audience. However, each magazine defines the "proper woman reader"

differently depending on whether its agenda is geared more toward improving

culture, as with Harper's and the Cornhill, or toward improving women's lives, as

in the cases of Belgravia and Victoria.

In Chapter One, I examine the transatlantic cross-fertilization of the family

literary magazine by looking at the ways in which the American Harper's

Magazine first formed itself out of pirated scraps from British periodicals and

then maintained transatlantic relationships that established the family literary

magazine as a viable commodity in both America and England. 1 show how

Harper's promoted the British realist novel as a high cultural text suitable for

middle-class women readers who would instruct their families in proper literary

taste and thereby lay the groundwork for the development of a distinctly

American literature that could rise to the level of superior British works. Chapter

Two focuses on the most famous and influential of the family literary magazines,

the Comhill Magazine. This chapter reveals how the Cornhill actually went

beyond its current critical reputation as a purveyor of primarily entertaining

material aimed at a traditional women reader who would be educated just

enough to be a moral mother and a fit literacy educator for her children. In fact,

it encouraged women's formal education, and to a lesser degree women's

movement into the professions, as a means of assisting the development of the

3 newly defined professional gentlemen who were rising in status as the cultural, economic, and political leaders of the nation. In Chapter Three, I explore the defense of sensation fiction as proper reading for women in Belgravia Magazine which worked to counteract negative images of women readers by providing them with the autonomy to enjoy and learn from what many critics saw as a scandalous fictional form. Finally, Chapter Four delineates Victoria Magazine's establishment of a feminist tradition of literary criticism that promoted women's writing as well as women's reading as it cast women in active roles that allowed them to contribute to the creation as well as the consumption of literary culture.

Together, these chapters argue for the centrality of the figure of the woman reader to Victorian cultural debates that resulted in establishing the profession of literary studies as we know it today. Each of these sites of inquiry contributes to a fuller understanding of the ways in which critics interacted with and defined the proper woman reader as a means of establishing a literary canon worthy of a highly civilized nation. This study uncovers a vital and heretofore overlooked aspect of Anglo-American literary history that moves women from the margins to the center of nineteenth-century literary culture.

Despite the existence of a rich repository of Victorian culture contained within the pages of thousands of periodicals, the field of periodical literature has remained largely unexplored. Although periodicals were read by practically every literate person in the nineteenth century and were often the first sites of publication for the canonical literary texts we read today, until very recently research in periodicals has been a marginalized subdivision of literary studies. According to Laurel Brake, Victorian periodicals are a "subjugated" form in literary studies

not only in their own period where they were prime and highly visible quiddities in a struggle between literature and journalism, but also in the twentieth-century construct of "literature" which is predicated on their defeat, devaluation and invisibility In the desire to establish English as an academic subject, it was attempted to sever links between literature and journalism, and to obscure their intimate material involvement and intertcxtuality in the period. (Subjugated Knowledges xi-xiv)

Twentieth-century scholars have taken their cues from nineteenth-century criticism, usually published in magazines, that effectively elevated the position of the critic to that of a cultural guardian whose job it was to standardize the list of books deemed worthy of literary study and to educate the middle-class about what they should read in order to be culturally literate. In Sesame and Lilies

(1864), for example, John Ruskin makes the distinction between "books of the houri' and "books of all time." Books of the hour, he argues, should not even properly be called books as they are "merely letters or newspapers in good print," whereas books of all time are works of art that express truth (7-9). Ruskin endows the critic with the power to determine which books are "real" and, therefore, belong to the developing canon of high cultural texts. Matthew

Arnold's The Function of Criticism at the Present Time (1864) coincides with and refines Ruskin's view as he attempts to negotiate between professional specialization, the free market commodification of culture, and the rise of the mass reading public. As what T. S. Eliot called a "propagandist for criticism,"

Arnold defines the critic as an unbiased interpreter who presents to the nation

"the best that has been known and thought in the world" and thereby ensures the high quality of the national culture. During the second half of the nineteenth

5 century, many of the attempts to preserve literary culture and professionalize literary criticism were waged in the press as efforts to protect the woman reader from the rampant forces of production-line culture that were corrupting to her, her family, and the nation. Ironically, the very divisions between high and low culture that were formulated in the pages of nineteenth-century magazines have discouraged twentieth-century literary scholars from exploring the "low" and

"ephemeral" form of the periodical. Furthermore, a disciplinary emphasis on individuality and authorship encourages literary scholars to neglect the collaborative form of the periodical that was dominant in the nineteenth century, and a fetishization of the book itself leads critics to ignore the fact that serialized novels in magazines dominated the Victorian literary arena.

Before a critical discourse on periodicals could be fully developed, efforts had to be made to gain bibliographic control over the vast field of deteriorating and uncatalogued materials. The formation of the Research Society for Victorian

Periodicals in 1969 and the establishment of the Research Society for American periodicals in 1991 hastened the development of bibliographic tools that established a map of nineteenth-century periodical literature upon which scholars could begin to chart their own courses of studyIn addition to a handful of studies conducted early in the twentieth century^, Richard Altick's ground-breaking The English Common Reader (1957) lent legitimacy to the study of popular literature and culture, while William Charvat's works—including the posthumously published The Profession of Authorship in America (1968)— paved the way for studies focusing on the effects of the publishing industry on authorship and readership. However, the rise of interdisciplinary, feminist, new

6 historicist, and cultural studies approaches to literature, along with the publication of works such as Victorian Periodicals: A Guide to Research (1978) and

Victorian Periodicals and Victorian Society (1994), edited by J. Don Vann and

Rosemary T. Van Arsdel, and Investigating Victorian journalism (1991), edited by

Laurel Brake, Aled Jones, and Lionel Madden, that describe the field and provide directions for further study, really marked the arrival of periodicals as a valid and valuable scholarly field.

On the basis of this foundation, many new research approaches have emerged, some of which are aimed at legitimizing the study of the periodical as a literary form. Among these attempts to theorize periodical studies are numerous articles devoted to analyzing the physical form of the magazine itself, its randomness, periodicity, variety, multi-vocality, and interactivity.^ Other approaches, such as Innovators and Preachers: The Role of the Editor in Victorian

England (1985), edited by Joel H. Wiener, and Patricia Okker's Our Sister Editors:

Sarah /. Hale and the Tradition ofNineteenth-Centiay American Women Editors (1995), look at the work of the authors, critics, and journalists who managed and produced magazines. And many recent studies have concentrated on the serialization of novels in magazines including John Sutherland's Victorian

Novelists and Publishers (1976), Norman Feltes's Modes of Production of Victorian

Novels (1986), Andrew Blake's Reading Victorian Fiction: The Cultural Context and

Ideological Content of the Nineteenth-Centunj Novel (1989), and Linda Hughes and

Michael Lund's The Victorian Serial (1991). The increase in interest in Victorian periodicals in the past two decades has also spawned major collections of essays in the field, including Joanne Shattock and Michael Wolff's The Victorian

1 Periodical Press: Samplings and Soundings (1982), John O. Jordan and Robert L.

Patten's Literature in the Marketplace (1995), and Kenneth M. Price and Susan

Belasco Smith s Periodical Literature in Nineteenth-Centunj America (1995).

Together, these texts provide a valuable critical context for the study of the

development of professional authorship, editorship, and criticism, the growth of

middle-class reading audiences, the influence of the serialized novel, and the

development of a literary canon; however, none of them directly addresses the

relationship between gender and reading in nineteenth-century periodicals.

This important relationship has been broached in examinations of

domestic periodicals geared specifically toward women, such as Women's Worlds:

Ideology, Femininity, and the Woman's Magazine by Ballaster, Beetham, Frazer, and

Hebron (1991), and A Magazine of Her Own: The Woman's Magazine 1800-1914 by

Margaret Beetham (1996).* Works such as Sally Mitchell's The Fallen Angel:

Chastity, Class, and Women's Reading (1981), Kate Flint's The Woman Reader, 1837-

1914 (1993), Laurel Brake'sSubjugated Knowledges: fournalism. Gender, and

Literature in the Nineteenth Centunj (1994), and Nicola Diane Thompson's

Reviewing Sex: Gender and the Reception of Victorian Novels (1996) interrogate the

effects of Victorian gender assumptions on mainstream periodical literature.

Though Ros Ballaster and her colleagues note that the "connection between

fiction and the female reader was an important element in the development of

the nineteenth-century periodical press, especially in the latter part of the century

with the advent of large numbers of fiction magazines aimed at middle-class

women" (76), no study has been solely devoted to examining the concept of the

woman reader in family literary magazines which invited women to engage in

8 the struggle to define literary culture. Nicola Diane Thompson indicates the lack

of scholarly work on the relationship between women readers and the

development of critical standards in literary magazines when she states that "the

role of gender in the growing split between popular and 'high' art from the 1860s

onwards" deserves a more serious full-length investigation (5). Likewise,

Andrew Blake points to the need for a thorough investigation of the kinds of

literary relationships that can be found in such periodicals when he argues that

"We must ask what relationship existed between fiction and non-fiction [in

magazines]—what other words those who read fiction were reading, and how

they were taught to do so" (38). My project addresses all of these questions as it examines the role of women readers in the discourse of middle-class fiction

magazines and the effect of the idea of the woman reader on editors, reviewers, and the newly emerging professional critics who made it their purpose to protect

their nation's cultural identity.

So how did nineteenth-century middle-class women read the multifarious collection of cultural artifacts contained within the pages of popular monthly magazines? Richard Ohmann suggests one answer to this question in his fictionalized account of an American woman's response to her favorite periodical:

When the morning mail arrives, on a muggy autumn day in 1895, Mrs. Johnson is alone in the house on Cleveland's East 107th street, at work on a new dress. Welcoming the diversion, she comes down from the sewing room and settles for a moment on the porch, where a slight breeze moves the unseasonably warm air. She reads a letter from her sister in Fort Wayne, glances at a couple of bills and puts them aside, and picks up the October issue oiMunsey's Nlagazine [she consults her] favorite departments: "The World of Music," "Literary Chat," "In the Public Eye" . .. and, with more of a sense of duty than of pleasure, "Artists and Their Work." She especially looks forward to the hour she will spend tonight 9 with the final installment of Robert McDonald's "A Princess and a Woman" (dashing Americans now caught up in a Carpathian intrigue). And during the month, she will return to the magazine for other fiction, including a new serial... She will carefully read the article on the Strauss family ... duly noting that "Americans hold Strauss and his music in great esteem."... This kind of information helps her find her bearings in a cultural landscape that she knows mainly through magazines and those friends who belong to it by birth and education. (1-2)

This illustration emphasizes the prominent role magazines played in women's

cultural and literary education in the nineteenth century. In addition to

providing entertainment, magazines were a primary source of the formation of

women's identities as readers: women read to become culturally literate, to

become better literacy instructors for their families, and to become proper middle

class citizens. By fulfilling all of these roles connected to reading women could,

theoretically, advance the cultural value of their nation. Indeed, the act of

reading itself became a form of nation-building.

While women's domestic magazines articulated women's proper roles as

housewives by providing articles on decorating, cooking, and household

management, family literary magazines produced an image of the proper woman reader as a symbol of national health and vitality by presenting readers with serialized fiction and culturally instructive articles. Instead of teaching

women to be proper consumers of products as domestic magazines did, family

magazines taught women how to become proper readers and to represent themselves as tasteful middle-class citizens. While women's magazines wanted to cure women's bodies through products, family magazines wanted to cure women's minds by raising women's knowledge of literary, historical, and current events and by teaching women discriminate reading practices.

10 Who was the proper woman reader and what was her relationship to the identity of the nation? In the Englisfrwoman's Domestic Magazine, the relationship between middle-class domestic femininity and British national identity was made explicit by its editor's statement that "If there is one thing of which an

Englishman has just reasons to be proud, it is the moral and domestic character of his countrywomen" (qtd. in Beetham 63). As Mary Poovey argues, the idea of the proper woman "was critical to the image of the English national character, which hoped to legitimize both England's sense of moral superiority and the imperial ambitions this superiority underwrote" (9). Furthermore, Poovey contends that the Victorian ideal of womanhood—to which the ideal of the proper woman reader was intimately connected—served to depoliticize class differences by focusing on moral and psychological differences between classes and by subsuming all individuals into a representative Englishman or

Englishwoman (9). Family literary magazines became representative models for middle-class women by promoting a particular standard of literary taste that would shape them into proper readers and cultural instructors for their families and their nation. Although women's proper moral and domestic behavior was implicit in the family magazines, the spotlight was on their countrywomen's literary taste and cultural sensibility as a means of justifying the cultural superiority of the nation.

Family literary magazines had to promote a successful view of reading in order to combat the frequent portrayal of improper reading as a disease that was threatening not only to individuals, but to "the entire social fabric" (Mays 165).

This disease of reading was, of course, particularly dangerous for women and

II grew out of fears of low culture, especially popular novels, and of women's

uncritical reading practices, which were believed to lead to the corruption of

feminine virtue and, potentially, the destruction of the family. Fiction reading,

however, had become so prevalent that it could not merely be condemned.

Instead, critics had to direct readers to choose the proper books and read in the

right ways: "Reviewers were to act as cultural custodians of the public, its

welfare, its reading—to act as social, and, as they sometimes referred to

themselves, 'literary philanthropists. " (Machor 65). Frederic Harrison justified

the need for critics like himself to guide readers by declaring that he "could almost reckon the printing press as amongst the scourge of mankind" (5) because

its immense productivity encouraged people to "act as if every book were as good as any other" (10). Therefore, he argued that critics were necessary to teach

"the art of right reading" which "is as long and difficult to learn as the art of

right living" (11). Readers (especially women readers) were positioned as students to be taught by the wise critics who could direct the emphasis of their reading amidst what the arbiters of high culture saw as a terrifying abundance of published texts.

Women were simultaneously considered the moral centers of the family and the most susceptible victims of the disease of reading. Often, reviews of books focused on their effects on women readers, and gender distinctions functioned as a critical shorthand for judging the quality of literature (Flint 135).

Although much of the discourse surrounding the corruptibility of the woman reader was at odds with the popular idea of woman as moral agent, "reviewers were unable to see—or perhaps unwilling to admit—that their ideas about

12 female readers rested on incompatible conceptions of womanhood in the culture

at large" (Machor 68). As Ballaster and her colleagues argue, "the definition of

the female reader of magazines is a contradictory process in which women's

importance is both confirmed and strictly delimited, through which the

'feminine' is both repressed and returns irrepressible" (77). James Machor describes the attempts at regulating women's reading as cynical acts of patriarchal dominance: "Reviewers never really expected women to be truly informed readers capable of making the distinctions advocated as part of the interpretive process"; instead, reviewers marginalized and disempowered

"women by excluding them from full participation in an ultimately phallocentric system of reading" (74). To describe the problem of the woman reader, Henry

James links the "decidedly female" and inherently "irreflective and uncritical" reading public to "the vulgarization of literature in general" (Shaw 199); to solve it, John Ruskin, in Sesame and Lilies "sets himself up to protect women against the potential invasion of the sanctity of their own bodies by unsuitable reading matter" (Flint 74). For Ruskin, James, Arnold, and many others, women readers became the contested ground over which literary culture was defined. Thus, the needs of the nation's women gave critics an important societal function and legitimated the burgeoning profession.

As Kate Flint points out, "The awareness of that discrete category of 'the woman reader,' and the hypothesis about her special characteristics, as well as her presumed needs and interests, affected the composition, distribution, and marketing of literature" (13). I would add to this that women readers influenced the development of professional literary criticism and the estabUslment of family

13 literary magazines which attempted to counter the argument that women were inherently uncritical readers by providing them with the to o ls to read properly on their own. Despite the fact that the very methods of reading encouraged by magazines (skimming, skipping, and leisurely enjoyment) were those that were feared to be corrupting, the family literary magazine emerged from the controversy as the primary site for the regulation of women's reading. The genre succeeded as an acceptable forum for shaping the proper woman reader by balancing education and entertainment, incorporating a didactic editorial voice, and providing its own definition of "high" cultural values. While most of these magazines excluded literary reviews, they provided a program for the definition of culture and taste that was similar to that of the more elite review-oriented weeklies but geared toward a less well-educated audience. Above all, these magazines became a positive reflection of women's character and taste as they emphasized their role in making women better wives, mothers, and, ultimately, better citizens by teaching "right reading."

The new genre of the family literary magazine that exploded in England in the 1860s stood apart from and outsold the weighty political and critical quarterly reviews which had been the primary venue for respectable literary opinions since the eighteenth century. With the drop in demand for the old quarterlies (such as the Edinburgh Review and the Quarterly Review), literary reviewing became the province of literary weeklies like the Athenaeum and The

Saturday Review, conducted by "university men." Within these elite journals, intellectuals became "sages" who "took over the prophetic mantle of the romantic poets" by taking it upon themselves to deliver lay sermons defining the

14 nature and value of literary culture (Farrinder 118). The concomitant push

toward making the university the center of literary authority spawned specialty journals such as the Reader and the Academy which offered to fulfill Arnold's call

for an English counterpart to the French Academy to monitor the nation's

cultural activity and ensure its high quality (Sullivan 20). However, these new journals were aimed at a more highly educated (male) audience than the family

magazines and, as such, they increased the "stratification of literacy" along class

and gender lines "which ultimately solidified and privileged the construction of

a new 'man' of letters and his forms of literate behavior" (Shaw 196). As the

professionalization of this man of letters took hold, critics such as Frederic

Harrison declared their concern about directing the public's reading practices. In

"The Choice of Books" featured in the Fortnightly Review in April 1879, Harrison

claims that: "Systematic reading is but little in favour even amongst studious

men, in a true sense it is hardly possible for women. A comprehensive course of

home study, and a guide to books, fit for the highest education of women, is yet

a blank page remaining to be filled" (4). While the elite literary reviews focused on what John Morley of the Fortnightly Review called the "momentous task of

forming national opinion" by providing education, guidance, and the resolution

of doubt for male audiences (Houghton 7-9), the family literary magazine had

already begun to fill the educational void for women readers. Family literary

magazines, especially the influential Cornhill, followed in the footsteps of

Mudie's Circulating Library, which characterized itself as a surrogate parent who

would choose proper reading material for the family thus easing the worry of actual parents who could rest assured that whatever their family members were

15 reading from Mudie's would be moral and wholesome. The CorrMll was, in a

sense, a bound monthly edition of a select library in itself. However, these

magazines did not merely choose reading material for women; instead, they

instructed women to choose properly for themselves.

It was not only the content of family literary magazines that was

important, but also its physical presence as a decorative object in the home.

Bound volumes of family magazines, seen as guaranteed repositories of

suitability and good taste, were prominently displayed as signs of social status in

middle-class households (Schmidt, "Novelists" 142). In her discussion of the

Comhtll Magazine, Barbara Quinn Schmidt contends that "The reader felt close to

the early Comhill, proud to own it since it conveyed a sense of worth and

importance to its possessor" ("Novelists" 151). Women who purchased such

magazines signified their individual literary taste, their family status, and the

cultural superiority of the nation. It is no coincidence that many of these

magazines such as the Comhill, Temple Bar, Belgravia, St. fames's, and St. Paul's

took the names of particular areas of London. The family literary magazine

became a geographical signifier of the nation's capital of culture and placed the

responsibility for the dissemination of that culture squarely on the shoulders of

the nation's women.

Family literary magazines became educational handbooks of literary taste

for the whole family, and, as women were considered the moral and literary

instructors of the family, any magazine aimed at the family would naturally

address women readers. Furthermore, since the publicly acceptable rationale for women's education was to prepare her to teach her children properly, these

16 magazines took on an instructive persona aimed at women who were learning to

be upwardly mobile and culturally literate middle class subjects. Part of the

great appeal of the family literary magazine was its ability to simultaneously address men and women and upper and lower middle class readers by speaking

instructively to those who needed it and confidingly to those who didn't. In other words, the features of these magazines reinforced the middle-class behavior and values of those who belonged to that class and tutored those who were attempting to move into it by speaking authoritatively on middle-class culture with a few nods and winks to those who already knew the ropes. The editors of family literary magazines addressed their readers as a part of this always already genteel and educated audience while simultaneously emphasizing the need for readers to become genteel through the magazine's instruction. Family literary magazines, of which the Cornhill was the most popular and well-respected, sold themselves as friendly cultural instructors for women and their families. As such, the family literary magazine became an embodiment of its various voices urging the reader toward cultural enlightenment.

Articles featured in the Cornhill best exemplify the emphasis on cultural instruction. According to Thackeray's article "Nil Nisi Bonum," magazines are like a connoisseurs who watch over readers' shoulders, educating them "to admire rightly" because an "uninstructed person in a museum or at a concert may pass without recognizing a picture or a passage of music, which the connoisseur by his side may show him is a masterpiece of harmony, or a wonder of artistic skill" (February 1860,133). These magazines, therefore, saw

17 themselves as interpreters of culture; but they also saw themselves as important

instruments in spread of culture. This cultural mission is stated in an article

on the National Gallery in March 1860 in which the magazine introduces its own

economical plans for a gallery renovation that would present the nation's best «u t

in the most attractive manner and, more importantly, make it accessible to the

greatest number of people, thereby promoting "a taste for art throughout the

kingdom" (355). In articles such as "Amateur Music" (July 1863), the magazine

advocates the "cultivation of music as a recreation" for all classes. This article

tries to show that such public enrichment will benefit the nation as a whole by

allowing culture to thrive: "While striking its roots down lower in the social

scale, its topmost branches have widened and strengthened. The study of music

is not alone more general, it is also better understood" (93). Again, the Cornhill

not only disseminates culture, it interprets it and, in its view, strengthens it.

However, in "The Opera 1833-1863" (September 1863) the magazine also

acknowledges that some loss of prestige and distinction given to the cultural elite

will occur once access to culture has widened. Still, the glory to the nation as a

capitol of culture and the knowledge and appreciation of music (or any other

form of cultural enrichment) provide benefits that outweigh the drawbacks (295).

While the Cornhill recognizes the complexities of the cultural improvement of the

nation, it generally supports the gain in cultural knowledge for a wide audience and promotes itself as the perfect educational tool for those who desire cultural

knowledge. Similarly, Harper's series of articles on American architecture and

landscapes as well as its monthly reports on current cultural events; Belgravia's series on areas and monuments of London; and Victoria's articles on art exhibits,

18 theaters, and other "public entertainments" indicate the importance of cultural

knowledge in each of these magazines. The family literary magazines in this

study show an awareness of the arguments against a wide-spread cultural

education, but continue to support such a mission, especially as it applies to the

improvement of women and the middle classes.

As cultural experiences were made available to a wider (female) audience,

these magazines helped to manufacture middle-class taste. In the Cornhill, the

vast array of articles on taste, when taken in their context alongside numerous

explorations of the British military, parliament, and the strength of the nation,

become nationalistic arguments to improve British culture as a means of

maintaining the nation's position as the greatest country in the world. Articles on etiquette, homes, furniture, fashion, and make-up repeatedly emphasize simplicity and understated elegance as a way to combat the ostentatious display of status, replacing vulgar consumerism with economy and simplicity which are established as the sober and realistic standards of middle-class taste. Prominent among such articles is Richard Doyle's series "Bird's-Eye Views of Society"

(April 1861-October 1862). These humorous commentaries and their accompanying fold-out illustrations are "intended chiefly for the information of country cousins, intelligent foreigners, and other remote persons; also young

ladies and gentlemen growing up, and not yet out" (April 1861 497). These miniature guidebooks expostulate on parties, balls, charity bazaars, art shows, sea side escapades, horse races, and music concerts, reminding readers of proper and improper behavior and attire for such public events. As Andrew Blake argues, the Comhill "celebrated the promotion of the middle class into new

19 influence, and welcomed changes in behavior that accompanied this" (96). These changes in behavior are emphasized by Doyle's instructive combination of conduct book and cartoon that could be taken seriously by those who needed advice (those not yet literally out in good middle-class social circles) and laughed at by those in the know. Likewise, Harper's included such instructional commentary in its editorial sections, Belgravia featured numerous articles on fashion, health, and beauty for the upwardly mobile woman, and Victoria offered alternative ways for women to enter and participate in the male-dominated public sphere. Thus, family literary magazines attempted to initiate new-comers, wink at the old-guard, and prevent ostentatious imitation of the upper classes while defining a new middle-class style.

As a result of its discourse on culture, the Cornhill actually became the embodiment of a cultural taste that signaled the class identities of its upwardly mobile middle-class readers. G.H. Lewes emphasizes the connection between books (or magazines) and cultural status in "Publishers Before the Age of

Printing" (January 1864). Lewes uses the importance of books to the women of

Rome to support the serious reading and education of women in Victorian

England. While Lewes pokes fun at Mudie's Circulating Library readers and at

Bluestockings, he points to women's reading practices as the strongest indicator of what is valued by a culture, thus making women's choices particularly important. On the centrality of books in the Roman home, Lewes argues that while "it is probable that much of this was mere fashion, and that books were regarded in the light of elegant furniture" the existence of such a fashion still

"implies that books were an important element in Roman life" (29). Implicitly,

2 0 then, Lewes claims that the books women read and display in contemporary

society should be chosen carefully because they could determine how British

culture will ultimately be judged in posterity. The Cornhill and magazines of the

same genre, of course, were good starting points for women to improve their

cultural knowledge because within these publications women were explicitly

invited to participate in reading serious texts that reflected favorably on the

nation as a whole.

In suggesting itself as a proper purveyor of culture, the Cornhill defied

many reviewers representing the cultural elite who saw periodical literature as an instigator in the downfall of the nation's literature and as a disseminator of the uncontrolled and uncontrollable "disease of reading" caused primarily by women's unhealthy (i.e. periodic-al) reading practices (Mays 177). To counter tliis negative press, the Cornhill attempts to establish magazines as superior cultural teachers, while promoting itself as the best of the various publications available, in part because of its fair treatment of women readers. The periodical is promoted as a vital historical document in Thackeray's "The Four Georges," in which he claims that reading magazines of the past such as the Spectator and the

Tatler is the best way to learn about the culture of the time: "In the company of that charming guide, we may go to the opera, the comedy, the puppet show, the auction, even the cockpit" of the eighteenth century (July 1860,18). Furthermore, an article entitled "Journalism" goes beyond arguing that magazines are valuable historical artifacts to proclaim their status as literature: "Journalism will, no doubt, occupy the first or one of the first places in any future literary history of the present times" (July 1862,52). And "A Memorial of Thackeray's School

21 Days" provides readers with a chronicle of the importance of periodicals to that

great writer's education as he and his friends pooled together to subscribe to

such magazines as Blackwood's, the New Monthly Magazine, and the London

Magazine:

It is uncertain what college tutors or schoolmasters may think of magazine reading for their pupils; to the set of whom I am now speaking my belief is that it was most advantageous, and that it proved to be a very strong stimulus of literary curiosity and ambition. The constantly fresh monthly and weekly supply of short articles seemed to bring home the fact of literary production, and made it appear, in some degree, within reach. Gan. 1865,126)

Thus, the Cornhill was more than an educator of cultural values; it was the

inspiration for (as well as the instrument of) great cultural productions. Harper's

and Victoria with their unabashed reprints of articles from other magazines and

Belgravia with its strident defense of newspapers and periodicals also contributed

to the elevation of periodical literature as a whole.

Family literary magazines also positioned themselves in opposition to

elite reviews, most notably the Saturday Review, that were condescending to

women readers. In "The Sharpshooters of the Press" (February 1863), the

Comhill goes so far as to blame some male journalists' belief in the innate

inferiority of women on those writers' personal shortcomings: "They cannot

escape their fate—though it is such a hard one—to be unsuccessful with women, and to write as if they were so" (242). The author goes on to argue that such journalists "question the reality of women's virtue, arraign their motives, ridicule

their tastes, and dictate to them in what mode or under what condition they shall be allowed to employ or amuse themselves, and at what season, and in what

fashion they shall perform certain feminine affairs" as a way of controlling and

on belittling women (241). In opposition to the literary reviews, the family literary

magazines make a serious attempt to defend women readers as intellectually

capable members of its reading public.

As cultural documents that could inspire new literary productions and

remedy the indiscriminate reading practices of women, family literary

magazines had a responsibility to urge the development of proper literary taste by contributing to the debate over what constituted high culture. Within the

family literary magazine, this debate centered around the concept of the "realist" novel as the representative of the nation's highest artistic achievement. What was meant by realism, however, varied from one critic to the next. The only constant factor was that the "real" was consistently defined in relation to what was usually conceived of as its opposite: the sensational or the sentimental.

These terms became a critical shorthand for dividing high culture from the low, masculine culture from the feminine. However, while the family literary magazines attempt to follow the high cultural critics by setting up critical binaries, unlike the elite critics, they do not uphold these binaries in practice.

Rather, the critical oppositions serve as a means to articulate cultural authority while the magazines actually convey that the divisions between the high and the low are more permeable, blurred, and mutually constitutive.^ For example.

Harper's starts us out by illustrating how the false binary between realism and sentimentalism (drawn in an effort to teach "literary taste" to its readers) is blurred by the magazine's concomitant desire to please the reading public and to draw a profit from popular sentimental fiction. This blurring of boundaries, in fact, culminates in Harper's focus on Charles Dickens—a writer who represents

23 the intermingling of reason and fancy—as the ultimate exemplar of high literary

culture that can claim to be realistic while also being sentimental. Likewise, in

the Cornhill, William Thackeray sets up a false opposition between fact and

fiction which is collapsed in the magazine's efforts to present factual articles that

hold their readers' interests by including fictional elements such as dream sequences and dialogues and to present fiction as an educational tool that allows readers to arrive at some new understanding of "fact," or real life as it is lived.

In Belgravia Magazine, Mary Elizabeth Braddon departs from the notion of binarisms but is still engaged with them as she attempts to debunk the critical divisions altogether by defending sensationalism as a new and more effective form of realism. Finally, in Emily Faithfull's Victoria Magazine, the strict separation between the high and the low is reinstated in order to establish an authoritative feminist critical voice; however, the magazine redefines realism to include a focus on positive portrayals of female characters that serve as role models for the emerging "new woman." For each of the family literary magazines discussed in this study, realism—whatever its exact definition—becomes a vital critical term used to establish the literary authority of the magazine itself. The critical authority that is gained by these popular magazines, in turn, allows women readers to participate in important literary debates that would determine the standards of high culture for years to come.

George Levine argues that a self-conscious rejection of literature that

"never quite bums all the books" is central to nineteenth-century realism.

Instead of denying fiction, family literary magazines use realism to claim "special authority":

24 Realists take upon themselves a special role as mediator, and assume self­ consciously a moral burden that takes a special form: their responsibility is to a reality that increasingly seems 'unnamable'... [and] to an audience that requires to be weaned or freed from the misnaming literatures past and current. The quest for the world beyond words is deeply moral, suggesting the need to reorganize experience and reinvest it with value for a new audience reading from a new base of economic power. (9-12)

Likewise, George Becker notes that Anglo-.A,merican forms of realism were necessarily limited compared to French and Russian forms due to "an

unwillingness to surrender moral preconceptions" on the part of the English and an underlying optimism and political idealism on the part of the Americans

(Realism in Modern Literatnre 134,182). An article in Lippincott's Magazine for May

1877 highlights this "partial" realist tradition: "The quarrel between the

romanticists and the realists is sufficiently amusing in view of the fact that realism in the Anglo-Saxon literature of the present time is simply impossible.

No novelist among us dares to paint life as it really is" (qtd. in Becker RML 182).

Of course, much of the hesitancy referred to here was attributed by critics to a concern for women readers. Indeed, it would be difficult to name many Anglo-

American novels that fulfill Gustave Flaubert's goal in Madame Baoary to write a book that has "No lyricism, no comments, the author's personality absent. It will make dreary reading; it will contain atrocious things of misery and sordidness" and be presented impartially without a moral purpose or authorial message (qtd. in Becker Documents 90-95). Clearly, the fiction promoted in nineteenth-century family literary magazines did not fit this description, and sensation novels, which Mary Braddon declared most closely matched it, were widely reviled as patently unreal due in large part to their lack of a clear moral purpose.

25 Between 1850 and 1870 Anglo-American realism was more idealistic than

"real" despite the fact that realist novels attempted to represent the details of regular middle-class lives in a manner that would correspond with similar descriptions in non-fiction. In their support of a limited and essentially moral realism that would benefit and instruct their readers, family literary magazines, like the realist novels they promoted, devoted themselves to restoring a moral order that they had disrupted (G. Levine 20). In other words, as realistic novels display subversive elements that are neatly contained at the end, family literary magazines subverted the male-dominated critical arena to include women as important members of their literary community while simultaneously justifying their own authority as arbiters of taste and as moral and intellectual educators in the face of the more sophisticated literary reviews. In addition, the detached and observational quality of realism corresponded to and supported the supposed objectivity of the professional critic so that the critic's praise of the form reinforced his authority (Glazener 110-11). By claiming cultural authority through the use of critical labels like realism, the family literary magazine could simultaneously administer a cultural education to the general (middle-class) public while carving out a legitimate space for the participation of women readers in literary, historical, and sometimes even political debates. These magazines, then, served multiple functions but ultimately empowered women to read in order to learn to make choices about reading for themselves.

Realism thus becomes a vital term for critical debate within the family literary magazines which are not typically thought of as critical forums, but merely as entertaining past-times. Despite the assumption that all the important

26 debates were taking place in the reviews, the family literary magazines contemplate the connection between realism and high culture and participate in defining the same critical terms under discussion in the journals in which criticism was being professionalized. Nancy Glazener argues that critics' definitions of sensationalism and sentimentalism as addictive, feminine, and unprofessional forms that require "masculine-coded restraint" carried out by reviewers establishes realism as a form that is at bottom misogynist, male- dominated, and embroiled "in class hierarchy and the consolidation of white bourgeois cultural privilege" (146). While this holds true to some extent in family literary magazines, the charge of misogyny is complicated by the fact that women are included as participants and not just as objects to be controlled.

Furthermore, women are afforded power as educators of the family and of the nation who must be included in public discourse if they are to successfully carry out their duties. Instead of being the objects to be protected and guided by critics, women become subjects who are initiated into critical discussions. And, in Belgravia and Victoria at least, women readers are empowered by their portrayal as careful readers who can express their own critical voices through writing.

By including women as members of their audience, the family literary magazines perpetuated the centrality of women readers to the continuing debates of elite reviewers and eventually of literary scholars over what should be read and why. While women were in a sense marginalized by the development of a male-dominated literary canon based on the critical terms coined by critics in nineteenth-century periodicals and by the subsequent establishment of literature

27 as a field suitable for scholarly pursuit, it must not be forgotten that critics' responses to women provided a major impetus for many of the divisions between high and low culture that were solidified during the late nineteenth century. The larger purpose of this project, then, is to examine the importance of creating a proper women reader to the profession of literary criticism, the establishment of canons of "right reading," and the eventual development of curricula for the study of English literature at universities. As Kelly J. Mays declares, while "reading may have been forever lost as an art in the nineteenth century, it had been simultaneously gained as both a discipline and a profession"

(185). Those who defined the discipline and the profession were often preoccupied with the effects of literary culture on women readers.

ENDNOTES

* * The use of this term—and others like it—in nineteenth-century magazines is documented by Kelly J. Mays in "The Disease of Reading and Victorian Periodicals."

* Instead of using the more commonly recogmzed term of the shilling monthly, I refer to this genre as the family literary magazine because, in my estimation, it more accurately describes the attributes of the magazine than the simple designation of its cost can imply. Furthermore, this descriptive title makes room for the consideration of American magazines likeHarper's that belong in the same category.

^ The most ambitious bibliographic attempt made thus far is the cataloguing of existing British periodicals in the Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals andWaterloo Directory of Victorian Periodicals (both of which are now available in fully searchable CD-ROM formats), as well as the Union List of Victorian Periodicals. For publication information and thorough descriptions of thousands of magazines, Edward Cheilens'sAmerican Uterary Magazines (1986) and Alvin Sullivan's British Literary Magazines (1983) are invaluable. For historical surveys, Frank Luther Mott's A History of American Magazines (1938) and John Tebble and Mary Ellen Zuckerman'sThe Magazine in America (1991) prove to be the most comprehensive studies on the American front.

■* See, for example, MalcolmElioin's Victorian Wallflowers: A Panoramic Survey of Popular Literary Periodicals (1934), Amy Cruse'sThe Victorians and Their Reading (1935), and .Alvar Ellegard's The Readership of the Periodical Press in Mid-Victorian Britain (1957).

28 * See Margaret Beetham's 'Towards a Theory of the Periodical as a Publishing Genre"; Linda Hughes's "Turbulence in the 'Golden Stream': Chaos Theory and the Study of Periodicals"; Christopher Kent's "Victorian Periodicals and the Constructing of Victorian Reality," and Lynn Pykett's "Reading the Periodical Press: Text and Context."

* Other full-scale studies of nineteenth-century women's magazines include Cynthia L. White's Women's Magazines, 1693-1968 (1970) and Alison Adburgham'sWomen in Print: Writing Women and Women's Magazines from the Accession o f Queen Victoria (1972).

^ In his lecture "On English Prose Fiction as a Rational Amusement, " Anthony Trollope—the editor of his own family literary magazine,St. Paul's—works against high and low cultural boundaries by contending that "according to my view of the matter, a novel is bound to be both sensational and realistic. And I think that if a novel fail in either particular it is, so far, a failure in A rt... .Truth let there be;-truth of description, truth of character, human truth as to men and women, if there be such truth 1 do not know that a novel can be too sensational" (123- 24). Trollope recognizes the critical binaries between realistic and sensational novels but attempts to destroy what he characterizes as false divisions. Trollope also argues that both novels and fiction magazines are beneficial because they provide realistic examples of life that readers can follow. Trollope proclaims that "fiction may be as true as fact" (113) and supports the integrated audiences of family magazines by arguing that "he who condemns the reading of novels for his daughter, should condemn it for his son; and that he who condemns it for his children should condemn it for himself" (107). Trollope also declares that in order to do the work of the "professor" and to teach effectively, the novelist must deal with "the false and the forward, as well as with the good and gracious" (110). By doing so, novels—and, of course, magazines—are able to teach "lessons of life . . . from the first page to the last" (110).

2 9 CHAPTER 1

MAKING THE AMERICAN READER BRITISH: TRANSATLANTIC LITERARY TASTE IN HARPER'S MAGAZINE, 1850-55

That Harper's Nezv Monthly Magazine was strongly influenced by British literature is evident to anyone who skims its pages, which are brimming with articles copied directly from British periodicals and novels written by British authors. ' However, the transatlantic nature of Harper's was more than a one­ way street. Harper's popularized novel serialization in America in a monthly format at the same time Dickens's weekly magazine Household Words was successfully serializing novels in England. While Harper's relied on British literature—particularly on items copied directly from Dickens's famous magazine—because of the lack of international copyright law and what Laurel

Brake has called "a vestigial, high cultural value attached to the ejected imperial power" (106), the magazine also exerted its own influence on the British publishing industry. In fact. Harper's adapted British material to forge a new genre of magazine that would travel back across the Atlantic to become the most popular periodical format of the 1860s, the genre I refer to as the family literary

30 magazine. Harper's promoted a characteristically American democratic view of

its readers, allowing them to rise in status by reading the magazine, while at the

same time clinging to a distinctly Bntish class-consciousness that would

distinguish its readers from the dangerous and unruly masses. As Nancy

Glazener puts it, these magazines fulfilled the "need to secure a wider audience

for high culture who could testify to the worthiness of its controllers' leadership

by submitting to their rules of access and standards of valuation, and the need to

signal that not just anyone was in the position to understand that culture and

enjoy it properly" (35). The intermingling of the ideals of the "self-made man"

and the essentially tasteful reader set the tone for the entire genre of the family

literary magazine which Harper's originated.

In England, Harper's was known by the most prominent British authors of

the period whose works were serialized in its pages as well as by major British

publishers who saw Harper's as an example of the benefits of using an in-house

magazine as an advertising forum for a company's publications. In fact, the explosion of shilling monthlies such as Macmillan's and the Cornhill Magazine, put out by London publishers in the 1860s, followed directly in the footsteps of

Harper's success. Harper's was an apt model for London's family literary magazines that were breaking new ground as they diverged from the accepted

weekly format of Dickens's Household Words and replaced the publication of novels in individual parts with the bargain value of monthly magazine serialization. Harper and Brothers eventually launched a successful British version of the famous magazine in 1880, which led some British publishers to voice fears that the success of Harper and Brothers would put an American

31 company at the head of England's publishing industry (Brake 108). While such

anxieties proved groundless, it was Harper's emphasis on transatlantic

connections that prompted its unprecedented success in America and that gave

birth to the genre of the family literary magazine in both America and England.

Between 1850 and 1855 Harper's was the most successful magazine in

America. Published at the beginning of the American industrial age. Harper's

featured some of the earliest electroplate images in the nation and was produced at one of the country's first steam-powered presses located at Harper and

Brothers headquarters in New York (Allen 5-11). From 1850 to 1856 Harper's was officially edited by Henry J. Raymond, who also founded the New York Daily

Times in September 1851. However, the Harper brothers, James, John, Joseph,

Wesley, and particularly Fletcher, exerted considerable influence over the magazine and insisted on its non-partisanship and suitability for family reading, defining Harper's as "a popular educator of the general public" (Perkins 167).

The broad appeal of the magazine depended on its three-dollar yearly subscription price, its reflection of middle class sensibilities, and its avoidance of political controversy on the eve of the Civil War. All of these factors helped raise the magazine's circulation from its first run of 7,500 copies in June 1850 to 50,000 copies six months later. Between 1850 and 1865 the magazine's sales averaged an astounding 110,000 copies per issue, prompting Harper's competitor Putnam's to proclaim that "probably no magazine in the world was ever so popular or so profitable" (Perkins 166-8; Mott 391). However, the key component to the magazine's success was not its cost or its apolitical tone, but its focus on British literature,

32 At a time when other American magazines were seeking to create a

unique American literary identity out of what many saw as a culturally barren

nation/ the lack of international copyright law allowed Harper's to fill its pages

with selections from British magazines at virtually no cost. Harper's planned to

use its piratical practices "to place within the reach of the great mass of the

American people the unbounded treasures of the periodical literature of the

present day" to be sold "at so low a rate ... that it shall make its way into the

hands or the family circle of every intelligent citizen of the United States"

(Advertisement to Volume I). Another impetus to focus on British fiction came

from the fact that Harper and Brothers had made its fortune publishing

inexpensive copies of British novels in its "Harper's Household Editions/' which were advertised as "uniform, compact, legible, handsome, and cheap" {The

Archives of Harper and Brothers B3). During its first five years, all of Harper's major serials were British novels later published as "Household Editions." Among these showcased gems were Edward Bulwer-Lytton's My Novel, or Varieties in

English Life (October 1850-February 1853), Charles Dickens's Bleak House (April

1852-October 1853), and William M. Thackeray's The Neivcomes (November 1853-

August 1855). Laurel Brake contends that Harper's " transatlantic connection' was first and last economic and commercial" (104). However, Harper's not only benefited from the convenience and profitability of publishing British works that had proven their success across the Atlantic, but also canonized British realist fiction as the most tasteful and educational choice for its readers. Part of the purpose of this chapter, then, will be to examine what aspects of British fiction allowed it to embody taste as well as profit for the magazine's editors.

33 From its inception. Harper's struggled to appeal to a wide range of readers,

to make a healthy profit, to promote high culture, and to sustain a good

reputation within literary circles. The endeavor to unite these often contradictory goals explains the competing voices within the magazine. These voices simultaneously exhorted readers to improve their literary taste by reading British

realist novels that were defined as gentlemanly high cultural texts and to indulge sparingly in sentimental American tales that were overtly criticized as feminine embodiments of low culture. While British realism and American sentimentalism were repeatedly constructed as opposites by Harper's editors, in

practice the magazine successfully combined the two forms to create a popular

repository of cultural authority that worked to transform the mass "American"

reader into an educated "British" reader who would, in turn, raise the standard of literary taste in America. Gender was a key to this formulation, as the editors

used sentimental appeals to encourage American readers, figured as women, to become more sophisticated consumers of truly tasteful literary fare from Britain and thus better participants in the cultural education of their families. Thus,

Harper's succeeded in meeting its competing goals by addressing a proper

woman reader who would learn to balance high and low culture—education and entertainment—by reading the magazine. This proper woman reader would, in

turn, lay the foundation for the development of a strong national cultural

identity that would build off of and even improve on the British imports offered

in Harper's,

In order to explain how and why Harper's constructed women readers as

the rhetorical subjects of its lessons in literary taste, I will first explore the

34 magazine's relationship to its female audience and to the American literary

scene. I will then examine the inherent discrepancies in Harper's elevation of

British realist fiction by exploring its own incorporation of sentimentality in its

editorial appeals to readers and in its short fiction. Next, 1 will analyze the

magazine's relationship to the British and American literary traditions, focusing

on Herman Melville as a casualty of Harper's attempt to canonize British fiction

and on Charles Dickens as its emerging star. Finally, I will investigate how

Charles Dickens's Bleak House exemplifies Harper's desire to blend the realistic

and the sentimental and serves as the ultimate model for an American literary

tradition that would inherit the glory of the British realist novel but temper it

with American sentimentalism.

'THE VESTAL VIRGINS. . . ON THE ALTAR OF THE FINE ARTS": HARPER'S APPEALS TO WOMEN READERS

Harper's claimed as its mission the initiation of readers into the culturally

informed middle class. But, while Harper's wanted to claim a mass audience, it was also concerned about maintaining an image of its readers as educated and

family-oriented. In order to strike this balance and reach the widest possible audience. Harper's became the means by which the common reader would be transformed into the educated reader. The editors therefore proclaimed that they had "no doubt" that they could "present a Monthly Compendium of the periodical productions of the day which no one who has the slightest relish for miscellaneous reading, or the slightest desire to keep himself informed of the

35 progress and results of the literary genius of his own age, would willingly be

without" ("A Word at the Start" 2). Harper's planned to serve as a repository of

useful and entertaining material that was affordable, conveniently packaged, and

available to everyone. Harper's defined itself as a magazinep r the masses, but

not of them; it was an educational guide to reading that would allow the mass

audience to become the intelligent and tasteful reader. Thus, Harper's created

what Ronald Zboray calls "a fictive people," a fictional audience that is invented

as it is described. This audience was encouraged to participate in the pursuit of socio-economic mobility through "self-culture," a strict program of reading that

would not necessarily provide economic improvement but an improvement of

the heart and mind, joining the masses with the educated middle class in a

precarious marriage of sensibility and taste (Zboray 129-30).

In keeping with the conception of women as both the primary readers of fiction and the literacy educators of the family. Harper's frequently represented its audience as feminine.^ Although the magazine was aimed at the education of the entire family. Harper's courted women readers from the start. In its first issue, the magazine showcased at least eight features that primarily concerned women's lives, including articles on the domestic use of hard water; the Duchess of Orleans; the duties of motherhood; and the superiority of married (over single) men, written by one "Miss Bremer." In addition, the standard inclusion of two to three pages of fashion plates along with the substantial number of pieces taken from the Ladies' Companion during the first year indicate that

Harper's catered to the female members of its audience.

36 But the topics aimed at women readers were not solely related to fashion and household duties. Indeed, Harper's women readers were expected to improve their minds so that they could effectively fulfill their roles as wives and mothers. Therefore, the editors announced that they would "seek to combine entertainment with instruction, and to enforce, through channels which attract rather than repel attention, the best and most important lessons of morality and of practical life" (Advertisement to Volume I). The moral and the practical were united in women's roles as guardians of their family's literacy. The fitness of women for the job of dispensing literate and literary knowledge to their families is clearly established in an article on "Woman's Offices and Influence" (October

1851), written by University of Michigan Professor J. H. Agnew. Agnew claims that along with their duties to create a happy home, to soften the effects of public life on their husbands, and to maintain morality and religion within the family, women "are the vestal virgins to watch the fires on the altar of the fine arts" whose obligation it is to "Tell your sons and your sires that there are higher sources of joy. Point them away from earth's sordid gold to the brighter gems of literature. Direct their energies to the intellectual and moral advancement of their age" (555). Thus, Harper's insisted that women had a responsibility to maintain their family's interest in and appreciation of good literature. "Men and

Women" (June 1850), an article signed by "A Young Wife" and copied from The

Lxidies' Companion, reinforces Harper's argument that in addition to their traditional domestic duties, women should play an intellectual role within the family. The article exhorts men to learn "to choose wives among the women who possess [intellectual] qualities" because "The improvement of both sexes

37 must be simultaneous. A 'gentleman's horror' is still a 'blue stocking,' which

unpleasing epithet is invariably bestowed upon all women who have read much, and who are able to think and act for themselves" (89). This article encourages

the development of female intellect but acknowledges that men must be conditioned to accept smart women as a positive influence on their family and

their country. Harper's invited women to participate in and perpetuate the

literary lessons offered by the magazine and asked men to accept the vital role

women could play in disseminating culture.

By feminizing the magazine's readers, the editors adopted an authoritative and sometimes condescending tone that eliminated the need to

negotiate the boundaries of taste with readers of equal status, who, of course, would have been figured as masculine. As James Machor points out, critics and editors used "a strategy of informed reading that was essentially conservationist and ultimately narcissistic" as they "sought to multiply their own images, as cultural incarnations, in modified and well-controlled female replicas" (75). The

ignorant masses were thus represented by the educable and educating American women readers to whom Harper's devoted its literary lessons, lessons that focused on British novels as a means to create tasteful middle-class readers. By marketing British literature to the American masses for educational purposes.

Harper's ostensibly participated in the larger project of eventually preparing

Americans to produce their own literature and establish a national literary identity that was lacking within its own pages. In other words, if readers could gain literary taste and pass it on to their children, they would be producing the literate and literary Americans of the next generation. The need for literate and,

38 especially, tasteful Americans is noted in a statement on America's participation in England's Great Exhibition in the December 1851 "Editor's Easy Chair":

[l]t is quite certain that on the score of taste, we have made a bad show in the palace. It was in bad taste to claim more room than we could fill; it was In bad taste to decorate our comparatively small show, with insignia and lettering so glaring and pretentious; it was in bad taste not to wear a little of the modesty, which conscious strength ought certainly to give. (132)

The lack of taste exemplified by the gaudy ornamentation of the American exhibit emphasized the need for British influence to tame and therefore nurture the growth of American aesthetic sensibilities. Harper's took as its broader mission the improvement of American taste by studying British examples, and women readers—as guardians of the cultural life of the family—became the primary targets for the magazine's lessons in literary influence.

Harper's preoccupation with creating proper women readers and controlling the literary values that would be passed on to the next generation is most apparent when the feminine public seemed out of the control of the critics' efforts to define high cultural taste. For example, when readers—who were notably characterized as women—rushed out in droves to attend Thackeray's lecture tour, they opened themselves up for an attack on the grounds that their tastes were fickle. The January 1853 "Editor's Easy Chair" charts Thackeray's visit to America and satirizes the sudden rage for eighteenth-century British literature spawned by Thackeray's lectures:

At the date of our writing, he is beguiling two evenings a week very pleasantly, for a very large crowd of listeners, in most crisp and pointed talk about Humorists of a century ago in England.... Mr. Thackeray's talk has given start to a Swift, and Congreve, and Addison furor; the booksellers are driving a thrifty trade in forgotten volumes of "Old English Essayists"; the Spectator has found its way again upon parlor- tables... Tristram Shandy even is almost forgiven his lewdness;... and 39 hundreds of Lilliput literary ladies are twitching the mammoth Gulliver's whiskers. (279)

In addition to pointing out the questionable morality of the eighteenth-century

works that Thackeray praised with comments about the "lewdness" of Shandy

and the intimacy of the ladies with Gulliver's whiskers, this examination betrays

a distinct distaste for the ability of the feminized masses to determine literary

trends, an ability that Harper's aimed to control. By exerting such controls.

Harper's could create a demand that only it could fill and ensure that its women

readers would accept the culture the magazine offered. The February 1853 "Easy

Chair" similarly criticizes women readers for jumping on the bandwagon of

popular fads:

Aside from the Henry Esmond and Thackeray fever of the winter, we do not know that we have any particular contagion to speak of. New York ladies are certainly literary the present season ... The taste for German, Hungarian, and music, has yielded to a taste for old English literature; and the number of "British Essayists," and "Addison's Works," and "Gulliver's Travels" ... which have been done up in calf and gilt, and sold for Christmas cadeaux, is, we are told, most surprising; and far exceeds the number for any previous year. (419)

Harper's reasserts its control by poking fun at the crowds who blindly follow

Thackeray's literary suggestions to return to the past and by instructing its

readers to stick to the realist and moralist British works of the nineteenth century

that it promotes as the embodiment of high culture. Of course, less than a year

later the magazine proudly promoted its own Thackeray serial. The Newcames.

These self-contradictory statements then, point to Harper's obsession with both

preventing the spread of disease-like fads that would threaten literary taste and

maintaining its own respectability even while marketing "high" culture to the

masses. Gift books and literary ladies, as symbols of a popular literary consumer

40 culture, threatened the taste Harper's promoted. Even though the system of

literary consumer culture allowed Harper's to exist as another artifact of the

expanding literary market, the magazine attempted to avoid becoming a symbol

of that frivolous market. And, while worn^n readers were afforded the

important responsibility of passing on cultural values, they were also chastised

for participating in literary trends that were beyond the critical authority of the

magazine. Thus, the proper woman reader who followed Harper's lead would,

theoretically, strengthen the nation's cultural identity. However, many of

Harper's rivals questioned how the magazine could improve American literature

when its focus was so clearly British.

HARPER'S AS A "GOOD FOREIGN MAGAZINE": LITERARY PIRACY AND THE BRITISH ORIGINS OF TASTE

The tone was set for Harper's focus on British works when in the first issue

the editors declared their intention to "transfer to its pages as rapidly as they may be issued all the continuous tales of Dickens, Bulwer, Croly, Lever, Warren, and other distinguished contributors to British periodicals" which "enlist and absorb much of the literary talent, the native genius, the scholarly accomplishment of the present age" ("A Word at the Start" 2,1). The editors cite

Blackwood's, Dublin University Magazine, and the Edinburgh Review as sources they will use to provide readers with the "wealth and freshness of the literature of the nineteenth century... embodied in the pages of periodicals" (1). While Harper's

41 avoided the political views of the periodicals it mentioned, it focused on a major

cultural issue debated in the pages of those magazines: literary taste.

The first issue of Harper's included only British writers and, although the

authors were rarely identified, almost all of the selections unabashedly

advertised that they were pirated by citing their British periodical sources

beneath their titles. ■* The contents of Harper's premiere issue represented

material from a cross-section of British magazines,® but the most frequently cited

source was Dickens's Household Words which was lavishly praised in "A Word at

the Start": "Dickens has just established a weekly journal of his own, through

which he is giving to the world some of the most exquisite and delightful

creations that ever came from his magic pen" (1). Eight articles from Household

Words were copied in Harper's first issue alone. During its first year, items from

Household Words dominated Harper's and the July 1850 issue included the highest

number of selections from the magazine, at fourteen. In August 1850, the

"Monthly Record of Current Events" admitted its dependence on Dickens's

magazine when it stated that "The English literary intelligence of the month is

summed up in the Household Narrative, from which mainly we copy" (422).

The importance of Dickens to the establishment of Harper's is apparent. What

deserves further investigation is what Dickens symbolized to Americans and

how his work came to embody tastefulness, despite a newly emerging national

literary culture that included native writers such as Fanny Fern, Nathaniel

Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Later I will turn to this issue as I examine how Dickens's serial Bleak House embodies the particular

42 standard of taste that Harper's promoted, a standard that could not be met by these American authors.

Throughout its first year. Harper's shamelessly pushed its policy of pirating British works by openly admitting its practices and articulating anti­ nationalist literary arguments to create a rationale for its position. For example,

Dublin University Magazine's "American Literature" (June 1850) proclaims that

America's excessive "Liberty, equality, and fraternity" are not "so favorable to the cultivation of elegant tastes as might be imagined" (37). The problem was that America's loose class structure and preoccupation with money as a class marker seemed to decrease the likelihood that the nation would cultivate its own tasteful literature. The novel, in particular, was seen as a form of literature strongly connected to the British nation and its class system; therefore, "if the novel depended profoundly on the class structure for its effects, then American novels could not, or ought not to be, written" (Baym 241-3). The Dublin

University Magazine article also argued that because there was no clear cultural elite to regulate knowledge, literature in America suffered from market value running rampant over aesthetic value.* Yet Harper's did not necessarily see these values as opposed; in fact, the fusion of market value and aesthetic value was the key to Harper's transatlantic character. Harper's was ultimately able to wed American profit with British taste by serializing British novels for the upwardly mobile public.

Rival magazine publishers responded angrily to Harper's privileging of

British works and vociferously attacked its blatant piracies not because they did not follow similar policies in their own magazines but because they had not been

43 as diligent in the practice or as overwhelmingly successful. John Jay, who had

gained exclusive rights to reprint Blackiüood's in America, advised another

publisher in 1851 that "in consequence of the fatal rivalry of eclectic magazines

such as Harper's,” which provide "choice selections from all the British

miscellanies," single magazine reprints were no longer viable (qtd. in Barnes 44).

In addition to such rivalries, reprinting was becoming distasteful as a matter of

principle due to the belief that the reliance on British writers was primarily

responsible for preventing American authors from making a living and America

from creating its own literature.

Amidst the climate of growing American literary nationalism. Harper's

British character was an easy target for criticism by magazines that were

financially strapped by their payments to American writers. These magazines

could not make as much money or sell as many magazines as Harper's, whose

expenses were minimal even when they paid British publishers or authors for

advance sheets. Harper's was conveniently labeled as unpatriotic, and in March

1851 one of its competitors, Gralmm's, described it as "a good foreign magazine"

and predicted that even "the veriest worshipper of the dust of Europe will tire of

the dead level of silly praise of John Bull upon every page" (qtd. in Perkins 168).

Graham's, which paid as much as $1500 an issue for its original contributions by

American writers, was losing its hold on the public largely because of the success

of Harper's cheap reprints. However, the magazine's attacks on Harper's were

futile, and Graham's was pushed out of the market by 1858 (Perkins 167). The

American (Whig) Review, founded on the principle of improving American

literature, publicly blamed Harper's for shirking its national duty and keeping

44 American writers in poverty. The Review claimed that the absence of an international copyright law cut off British writers in

America, and, vice versa, cuts off American writers from all profits in Great Britain. Hence a large publishing house like that of Harper's, wealthy, influential, and anti-American in feeling as concerns literary development and encouragement may easily swell their enormous gains by pampering British writers, (qtd. in Exman 309)^

Due largely to pressure from other magazines and to a changing culture of ethics surrounding copyright issues and reprinting. Harper's blatant piracies declined. After its first year, the magazine eliminated credit lines for its reprinted articles and instated a policy of payment and attribution, especially to major authors like Dickens, who was paid generously for Bleak Hoiise.^ It is interesting to note that the "Editor's Easy Chair" for January 1852—just three months before the serialization of Bleak House began in the magazine—includes a comment on the American publishing industry's neglect of Dickens's remuneration:

We could honor Mr. Dickens with such adulation, and such attention as he never found at home; but when it came to the point of any definite action for the protection of his rights as an author we said to Mr. Dickens, with our hearts in his books, but with our hands away from our pockets, "We are our own law makers and must pay you only in—honor!" (255)

With Harper's piracies from Household Words brushed under the rug, the magazine may already have been negotiating its agreement with Dickens, for which it hoped to be recognized as a prime mover on the copyright issue.^ But

Harper's reputation was not easy to live down. As late as November 12,1870,

Punchinelb—itself an American derivative of Punch—printed a cartoon satirizing Harper's piracies with a scene depicting "the piratical rover, Harpij which has sighted the good ship Author, carrying a rich cargo" (qtd. in Mott 384-

45 5). To set the record straight, in 1876 Joseph Harper publicly proclaimed that the company had paid a quarter of a million dollars to English publishers and authors (Mott 385). Thus, Harper’s slowly initiated editorial practices that would improve its image among American critics, but the magazine maintained the core of its successful format including its canonization of Dickens, albeit without pirating from Household Words.

"A STRICTLY NATIONAL WORK": THE AMERICANIZATION OF HARPER'S

The slowly changing British face of Harper's was marked by a shift in the descriptions of the magazine placed at the front of each bound volume. While the magazine continued its focus on British serial novels, the advertisements increasingly focused on the American character of the magazine. By the second volume (December 1850-May 1851), Harper's opening advertisement tones down its British characterization and claims that "in addition to the choicest productions of the English press, the magazine will be enriched with such original matter as in [the editor's] opinion will enhance its utility and attractiveness." It was announced that the magazine would include "original"

American works if they matched (or exceeded) the quality of the rest of the magazine. The editors pushed this even further in Volume III (June-November

1851), noting that "the best talent of the country has been engaged in writing and illustrating original articles for Harper's pages" and that the magazine would now regularly include "one or more original articles upon some topic of

46 historical or national interest, written by some able and popular writer." By the

fourth volume (December 1851-May 1852), many more American writers and

topics were incorporated, and the opening advertisement declared that "the most

gifted and popular authors of the country write constantly" for Harper's. This

public relations campaign helped to alter Harper's image as a "foreign

magazine," but the claims were nonetheless exaggerated. Despite Harper's

contention in the advertisement to Volume II that it intended to be "a strictly

national work" filled with "patriotism," Bulwer-Lytton, Dickens, and Thackeray continued to dominate the early years of the magazine, holding the coveted

position of featured serial novelists.

Harper's did, however, make some changes that coincided with its advertising claims. For example, in the first issue, the "Monthly Record of

Current Events" is described as "a digest of all Foreign Events, incidents, and opinions that may seem to have either interest or value for the great body of

American readers" (my emphasis, June 1850,122). Only a month later, the

"Monthly Record" informs readers that "THE DOMESTIC EVENTS of the month

(which in accordance with requests from many quarters, this Magazine will hereafter regularly record) have not been numerous or very important" (July

1850,275). While acquiescing to demands for the inclusion of American news.

Harper's still contended that the country's events were insignificant (even though the news report included the invasion of Cuba and a congressional debate on slavery). By Harper's second volume, the events featured in the "Monthly

Record" were organized nationally, with American news listed first, followed by

British and other national events.

47 Harper's maneuvered its way around the nationalistic call for American

literature by increasingly incorporating features on American landscapes and

governmental institutions into its pages. This move is consonant with Meredith

McGill's contention that "Nationalist manifestos customarily began with a

condemnation of American subservience to British literary models, and finished

with a call for a literature commensurate with the majesty of American scenery

and the ideals of Republican institutions" (276). While Harper's did not include

novels that glorified the nation, the magazine began to open with articles on

American history such as Benson J. tossing's "Our National Anniversary" (July

1851) which featured illustrations of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and

Benjamin Franklin and included a facsimile of the signatures on the Declaration

of Independence. Since Americans were "thrilled with the beauty of their

plantations and forests, their prairies, rivers, and mountains They were eager

to read what depicted and interpreted their America" (Exman 305). Harper's thus

increased its nationalism by focusing on the American landscape in articles such as "Sketch of Washington City" (December 1852), "The Landscape of the South"

(May 1853), and "Ibis Shooting in Louisiana" (November 1853). By Volume YD

(June-November 1853), the editors confirmed the success of their strategy by claiming in the advertisement that "No feature of the Magazine has met with more general approval than the series of illustrated articles upon American scenery and History." This emphasis on American themes in non-fiction allowed

Harper's to balance the issue of literary nationalism and competition from more

"American " magazines with their own bookselling profit motive and their program for the education of the literary taste of the reading public.

48 Harper's also began to feature more and more American writers as well, though the most prominent focused on non-fiction and often avoided American themes. The Abbott brothers were the most popular American writers featured in Harper's. John Abbott was famous for writing the longest-running serial in

Harper's history, "Napoleon Bonaparte" (September 1851-February 1855), while

Jacob Abbott wrote exotic travel narratives such as the serial "Memoirs of the

Holy Land." Despite—or possibly because of—their avoidance of fiction and of

American topics, Jacob Abbott opened fourteen and John Abbott opened four of the first forty-two issues of the magazine (Exman 319).'° Although the number and prominence of American writers rose, American novels were consistently overlooked. The magazine's creation of several new editorial departments (the

"Editor's Drawer," the "Editor's Easy Chair," and the "Editor's Table") that showcased American critics such as Donald G. Mitchell and George W. Curtis was one of the most visible signs of Harper's attempt at Americanization.

However, these distinctly American voices were frequent champions of British novels as their editorial commentaries reflected the principles of the magazine more than the values of the writers." Harper's attempts to boost American literary culture by placing these writers at the forefront of the magazine were still overshadowed by the privileging of British fiction for its realism and the marginalization of American fiction for its sentimentality.

49 "THE VIOST SENTIMENTAL PEOPLE IN THE WORLD": HARPER'S CRITIQUE OF FEMININE SENTIMENTALFTY

Harper's editors recommended British literary realism over American sentimentality even though in its short fiction and editorial commentaries the magazine frequently used a sentimental style that evoked emotional responses.

During a period in literary history when critics were just beginning to define realism and sentimentalism, the terms were used as tools to designate the divisions between high and low culture, thus laying the foundation for the construction of a literary canon that would bring power to professional critics and status to the magazines that hired them. For Harper's, realism—the superior literary form—was not solely based on mimesis, but was closely tied to a work's moral message, its ability to provide women with role models who would preserve the proper domestic order, and its connection to British (and therefore gentlemanly, high cultural) novels over American (and therefore feminine, low cultural) works. Realism, as a critical construct, justified literature as socially important and relevant to life; therefore, it allowed the critics who used it as a classification to prove that the service they provided to the reading public was vital and worthy of respect. Realism, then, was also equated with professionalization for both authors and critics. Nancy Glazener argues that

The construction of realism as a non-addictive variety of fiction was probably the most important means by which realism was fitted to be an object of connoisseurship. The emotional discipline that differentiated men's cultural consumption from women's also differentiated the cultural consumption of privileged groups from that of people casually lumped together as "lower." Mhroring the imaginative embourgeoisement of realist readers was the professionalization of realist authors, which was supposed to guarantee that they provided healthy, public-spirited, non- addictive works of fiction. (95)

50 The taste for realism encouraged by Harper's represented sophistication and self-

control for readers and professional respect for authors.

Sentimentalism, on the other hand, was seen as an inferior and addictive

pleasure for readers and an amateur and frivolous endeavor for writers. Harper's

championed realism to establish its cultural authority (and, of course, to turn a

profit on the already successful British novels that it serialized). But, the

magazine simultaneously incorporated sentimentality to please a broad audience

defined as feminine. At first glance, it appears that Harper's was promoting

realism at the expense of sentimentality and, indeed, the magazine openly

criticized the purely sentimental; however. Harper's defied this binary by using

sentimental appeals to advertise its British serials, by featuring sentimental tales

alongside its realist novels, and, most significantly, by incorporating sentiment

into its definition of the most effective mode of realism. This effective

combination of realism and sentimentalism is exemplified most aptly by Charles

Dickens's overwhelming presence in the magazine. In order to understand

Harper's support for Dickens's brand of realism, which integrates the sentimental

and the real, I will first look briefly at the magazine's conflicting messages about

sentimentality to show how it was used to make connections with the magazine's

feminized audience.

Most simply put. Harper's promoted its British realist novelists by making

sentimental appeals to its women readers. The editors encouraged women to join a supportive community of readers who would share the values

promulgated in its fiction and to find in the magazine's British realist serials

exemplars for proper feminine behavior. Harper's also conveyed the idea that

51 reading novels in serial parts would provide women with the values necessary to

carry out their domestic roles effectively. In realist serials, women were offered

an "array of long-suffering female heroines" such as Thackeray's Ethel

Newcome, who proved that domestic virtue was the best weapon against

corruption; furthermore, women were taught endurance, perseverance, loyalty,

and patience as they waited in suspense from month to month to find out what

would happen to their heroes and heroines in the next serial installment

(Hughes/Lund 55,16). As Linda Hughes and Michael Lund argue in The

Victorian Serial, readers who persisted and became "'loyal fans,' lived on

intimate terms with characters of the imagination ... extending a kind of

intimacy ... associated with the home" (16). This use of domestic intimacy to

promote Harper's latest serial, Thackeray's The Newcames, is articulated in the

"Editor's Easy Chair" for May 1854:

It is a great mistake that it is dull to read stories in numbers. You have to take life in numbers. You are compelled to wait patiently until every day is regularly issued. How long are the denouements in coming! How eagerly and delightedly; or how anxiously and sorrowfully, you await the crisis!... Two lovers are married, and go in endless festivity: perhaps you may be one! Or there is a bell tolling—perhaps for you! (840)

The notice equates the process of reading the serial with the experience of daily

life and urges readers to become a part of the fictional community of the novel,

which was expected to enrich their real life experiences. Fictional characters

were also touted as role models and surrogate family members: "You speculate

about the fate of Ethel Newcome—you hope, you fear, you doubt, as you do

about your cousin Jane, or your niece, the gentle Anne" (840). Although many

Americans were separated from their families who were scattered across the

expanding frontier, British realist novels like The Newcames provided a stabilizing 52 force that "linked the state of the individual family to the creation of the nation"

and that made the reading of literature "a national event" (Hughes / Lund 45,

10). In Harper's terms, of course, the national event of reading would be carried out primarily by women. By reading Harper's serials women could share a

common reading experience that would instruct them to pass morality and taste

on to the next generation of Americans who would, presumably, contribute to

the eventual creation of a superior national literature.

Although Harper's promoted realist fiction based on its links to intimate

domestic relationships and delegated the power of cultural dissemination to

women, the magazine often overtly denigrated "feminine" and "sentimental"

American literature. For example, the December 1853 "Editor's Easy Chair"

laments the fact that such a practical people as Americans could also be "the

most sentimental people in the world There is a kind of literature and art

grown up among us, which is weak and unhealthy, and yet the most popular of

all" (132). Harper's rejects women's fiction as the emerging form of American

literature and discourages readers from wasting their time on the sentimentality

of "alliterative ladies" like 'Tabithy Toadstool" when Dickens and Thackeray

"are easy to obtain, and are of an incomparable superiority" (132). Thus, the

editors ridicule both the pseudonyms used by many American women writers and women readers who might be enchanted with such sentimentality.

Despite Harper's contention that British realist fiction is healthy and moral

while American sentimental fiction is unhealthy and weak. Harper's sometimes betrays its smothered desire for sentimentality. For example, the February 1853

"Easy Chair" laments the fact that "old English literature is absolutely driving

53 out of the market Uncle Tom's Cabin" and replacing "fervor, and passion, and strong expression" with "the quiet simplicity" of British gentlemen (419). This sense of remorse over the perceived loss in popularity of Stowe's American

"classic" is emphasized even more directly in a phony literary stock report, included in the same issue, that refers to literary taste as "spasmodic and whimsical" and charts a strong growth in shares of Thackeray and Addison and a decline in "Domestics" such as Stowe (419-20). In addition, the magazine featured many short sentimental tales including the "Story of a Young Mother"

(March 1854) which documents the sorrow of a mother whose child is stolen by

"Death" who comes to her door disguised as a poor old beggar. After chasing

Death down and begging to have her child back, the mother finally and inexplicably declares to God: "'Hear me not when I pray for what is not Thy will—Thy will is always best! Hear me not Lord, hear me not!'... And Death departed, and bore away her child to the Unknown Land" (516). This sentimental story emphasizes the nobility of female sacrifice and the necessity for women to give up their own desires for the good of humanity. Likewise, in

"Fragments from a Young Wife's Diary" (October 1852), we witness the suffering experienced by a newlywed bride when she discovers that her true love—who

"seemed to absorb and inhale [her] whole soul into his, until [she] became like a cloud melting away in sunshine, and vanishing from the face of heaven"

(621)—has a child from a secret marriage to a poor girl who died giving birth.

Adelaide, the young wife, agonizes over her husband's youthful indiscretion, moums over the death of her own child, and ultimately relieves her husband from his shameful secret by adopting the orphan and caring for it as her own.

54 The story concludes with the sentimental exclamation of her husband whose

head gratefully rests on her shoulder: "My wife! My wife who has saved her

husband!" (632). These anonymous sentimental stories clearly support the

magazine's agenda of defining women as the self-sacrificing moral guardians of

the family who must act in ways that will glorify their family and their nation.

However, the tales fail to meet Harper's agenda of making women readers arbiters of high cultural taste. Harper's refuses to defend American sentimental

literature overtly because of its negative cultural connotations. Instead, the

magazine turns to Dickens to reconcile its seemingly conflicting values.

"ASSUREDLY NO BRITISH OFFSHOOT": THE SERIAL SHOWDOWN BETWEEN MELVILLE AND DICKENS

It is useful, I think, to pause here and note that at the same time Harper's was preparing to feature Dickens's Bleak House, it had the opportunity to serialize an American novel that was under publication at its own press. Although

Harper and Brothers owned the rights to Herman Melville's Moby-Dick and may have potentially increased its profits from the novel by first serializing it in their magazine, the company chose not to do so. Instead, Harper's featured only a brief excerpt from Moby-Dick in the October 1851 issue under the title of "The

Town-Ho's Story." This selection was attributed to "Mr. Melville, the author of the new book The Whale, in press at Harper and Brothers and at Bentley's in

London" (658). Melville's book was published a month later, on November 14,

1851, as Moby-Dick; or the Whale (Exman 296). Harper's "Literary Notices" for

55 December of the same year opens with a review that praises the novel for surpassing "the former productions of this highly successful author" and constructing "a romance, a tragedy, and a natural history, not without numerous suggestions on psychology, ethics, and theology" which illustrate "the mystery of human life" (137). The "Literary Notices" for January and April 1852 cite favorable British reviews of the book. The April review quotes the following passage from the London Leader:

Want of originality has long been the just and standing reproach to American literature; the best of its writers were but second-hand Englishmen. Of late some have given evidence of originality; not absolute originality, but such genuine outcoming of the American intellect as can be safely called national. Edgar Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville are assuredly no British offshoots. (711)'^

Although this evidence suggests that Melville was one of Harper and Brothers' most original American writers, they did not choose Harper's as a forum in which to serialize his novel. I do not mean to suggest that Melville's Moby-Dick stands in for American literature as a whole or that it can explain Harper's neglect of

American novels, but merely to highlight the fact that while Harper and Brothers had easy access to Melville's work, they deliberately chose not to feature it in their magazine. Instead, Dickens—obviously the bigger name and the surer profit—won out. So what values, other than financial ones, endeared Dickens to the magazine, and why was Bleak House chosen as Harper's most prominent serial when Melville's Moby Dick was available for serialization at the same time?

Considering Harper's support of realism as a superior literary form, Moby-Dick's metaphysical nature may have caused its editors to disapprove of the novel for their magazine despite its potential popularity as descendants of Melville's better-received works Typee and Omoo. Furthermore, as William Charvat notes, 56 '^ y 1851 women had become the chief consumers of fiction in America, and it

may well be that their mouths may have settled the fate of Moby-Dick. They

could not have failed to notice that... there was no place for women, or that

there was unlikely to be one in a book about whaling" (242). However, a

comprehensive answer to this question is beyond the scope of this project due to

the exceptional nature of Moby-Dick within both Melville's body of work and

American literature as a whole. Still, I hope to shed some light on Harper's

editorial decisions by briefly examining the connections (and disconnections)

between Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener" and Dickens's Bleak House.

Melville wrote "Bartleby, the Scrivener" during the serial run of Bleak

House in Harper's—a magazine to which he subscribed—,and a number of critics

have interpreted the story as both an imitation and a refutation of Dickens's

novel.'"* Melville turned to the more patriotic Putnam's to publish "Bartleby,"

which came out in November 1853, one month after Bleak House had concluded

its serial run in Harper's?^ As early as June 1856 Boston's Daily Evening Traveler

noticed that "Bartleby" was "equal to anything from the pen of Dickens, whose writings it closely resembles, both as to the character of the sketch and the

peculiarity of the style" (qtd. in Foley 241). However, despite their similar characters (law copyists Nemo and Bartleby) and themes (the law, bureaucracy, and inaction), the works diverge in their primary messages. Dickens's novel criticizes societal institutions but offers hope for the nation through the influence of the domestic realm as the problems caused by the Court of Chancery are resolved by the triumphs of private relationships, especially those involving

Esther Summerson, the female narrator. Melville's story, on the other hand,

57 displays a world so devoid of the domestic that Bartleby's private life takes place

in a public law office in which "walls" exist everywhere but fail to provide the space necessary for domestic nurturing. Even co-workers Nippers and Turkey bring their private bodily ills into the office, and Ginger Nut seems reliant on the crumbs of food he eats there. Furthermore, while Bleak House ends

(re)productively with the birth of a promising new generation produced by

Esther, who is the domestic and moral center of the novel, "Bartleby" concludes with death as the only resolution for inaction and alienation. For Harper's,

Dickens's ability to balance the private and the public and to show the relevance and power of the domestic realm over the corrupting forces of the business world made his fiction more appealing. Dickens's emphasis on the power of the feminine, the sentimental, and the domestic, corresponded with Harper's focus on women readers as guardians of the nation's cultural life, which was necessary to temper the corrupting world of masculinity, commerce, and profit.

Weisbuch posits that Melville's story was meant as "an all-out attack on"

Dickens's "cowardly refusal" to "dig for disturbing, obscure truth" by showing that he could delve more deeply into epistemological questions in the space of a few pages than Dickens could in his entire sprawling novel (39-41).’^ Melville may also have wanted to prove that English realism was limited and limiting as it failed to answer the deeper questions that interested him.'^ Thus, the figure of the "copyist" in "Bartleby" may have been directly aimed at the realist writer who in an attempt to imitate life fails to create an artistic vision that moves readers to action. Bartleby's preference not to copy parallels Melville's refusal to write a novel that would please Harper's editors. Thus, Bartleby's previous work

58 in a Dead Letter Office and the narrator's contention in the concluding lines of

the story that "On errands of life these letters speed to death" takes on new

significance as a critique of fiction whose only purpose is to approximate life but

instead results in perpetuating the status quo, acceptance, inaction, and even a

metaphorical death. Sheila Post-Lauria adds another dimension to this

interpretation by pointing out that Melville's story is not only a critique of

Dickensian realism, but also a parody of Harper's sentimental style as the tale

calls into question the narrator's own sentimentality and his resultant inability to

get to the heart of who Bartleby is and why he behaves as he does (183-4).

Whether or not "Bartleby" was written as a critique of the serialization of Bleak

House in Harper's, the British author and the American magazine continued to

thrive by combining realism and sentimentalism to secure their positions as

popular icons of high culture. Melville's denial in "Bartleby" of the healing effects of the domestic realm and of the superiority of the realist writer clearly struck a blow to the heart of Harper's identity, an identity that was best reflected by the values put forth in Dickens's writing.

CHARLES DICKENS'S "EYE OF GENIUS": BLEAK HOUSE AS AN EXEMPLAR OF HARPER'S LITERARY TASTE

So why did selections from Dickens's Household Words dominate the early issues of Harper's, and what was it about the work of Charles Dickens that made him stand out as an exemplary literary figure in the magazine? Dickens's ability to combine the sentimental and the real helped establish his reputation in

59 America even before Harper's adopted his work as its model of high culture. In

December 1844, two years after Dickens's rock star-like tour of America (in part to raise awareness about the need for an international copyright law), the influential critic E. P. Whipple began his own successful lecture tour during which he lauded Dickens as the greatest novelist of the century. Published in the North American Revieio in October 1849, Whipple's analysis of Dickens was reprinted in journals and newspapers all over the country (Gardner 8-10).

"Novels and Novelists; Charles Dickens" summarizes all of the major aspects of

Dickens's work that made him suitable for Harper's, including his combination of realism and sentimentalism, his mild but stirring social critiques, and his educational purpose. Whipple begins by claiming that the genre of the novel is

"one of the most effective, if not most perfect forms of composition, through which a comprehensive mind can communicate itself to the world, exhibiting, as it may, through sentiment, incident, and character, a complete philosophy of life"

(384). Dickens is praised as a poet of practical life whose "perfection of knowledge and insight" give his novels "their naturalness, their freedom of movement, and their value as lessons in human nature as well as consummate representations of actual life" (392). While Dickens's genius is said to be reliant on his depictions of "reality" and "truth," it is clear that he is also valued for his humor and sentimentality:

It is difficult to say whether Dickens is more successful in humor or pathos It is certain that his genius can as readily draw tears as provoke laughter One source of his pathos is the intense and purified conception of moral beauty, that beauty which comes from thoughtful brooding over the most solemn and affecting realities of life. (40^404)

60 Not only does Dickens fulfill both the desire for realistic representations and the desire for emotionalism, but he also derives one from the other. Thus, Whipple deems morality, which is derived in part from sentimental emotion, to be the essence of realism. To conclude, Whipple declares that

we cannot refrain from expressing a regret that we have not a class of novels illustrative of American life and character, which does some justice to both. Novelists we have in perilous abundance ... some of them unexcelled in the art of preparing a dish of fiction by a liberal admixture of the horrible and the sentimental;... The American has heretofore appeared in romance chiefly to be libeled or caricatured. (405-406)

Whipple draws clear distinctions between the sentimentality of so many

American novelists and the pathos of Dickens's works, as well as between the caricature presented in the American Romance and the ability of Dickens's realist fiction to excel "in the exhibition of those minor traits [of character] which the eye of genius alone can detect" (402). Thus, the melding of the realistic with the sentimental is what makes Dickens a "genius." In elevating Dickens, Harper's went along with Whipple's assessment of the state of American literature and chose Bleak House to represent its standard for literary taste which was based on morality, derived from emotion, and represented in a manner that was reasonably mimetic. Dickens was popular with the public and critically sound, he was gentlemanly but professional, sentimental but not feminine, and he presented a social critique that stopped short of social rebellion.

However, with the release of Bleak House, Dickens faced harsh criticism for his exaggeration of both social wrongs and individual characters. In May 1852,

The Knickerbocker anticipated Dickens's new novel with adulation in "On The

Genius of Charles Dickens": "No man knows better how to ... appeal to our best sympathies, and sustain the cause of the suffering poor.... [Dickens's works] 61 shall be admired at some later day ... because they have set forth nothing less

general than the truth of nature, and appeal to all men by a common bond" (430).

However, As George H. Ford points out, the social criticism in Bleak House and

Dickens's subsequent works drove a wedge in the previously solid support

among Dickens's reading public (100). By October 1853, the last month of

Harper's serialization of Bleak House, the North American Review changed its tune

in its review of the novel. The magazine proclaimed that Dickens "is essentially

deficient in the capacity of taking that broad, philosophical view of his subject...

Mr. Dickens is, so to speak, only a caricaturist In point of literary merit, then,

we think that Bleak House is a falling off from its predecessors" (417, 424).

Likewise, in England, the Athenaeum declared that "There is progress in art to be

praised in this book,—and there is progress in exaggeration to be deprecated"

(108), and Bentley's proclaimed that "A book which, Mr. Dickens himself assures

us, has had more readers than any of his former works, is, to a certain extent,

independent of criticism.... [But], in no other work is the tendency to

disagreeable exaggeration so conspicuous as this" (372). Critics on both sides of

the Atlantic were dissatisfied with what they saw as Dickens's caricatures of

characters such as Esther and of institutions such as the Court of Chancery.

Harper's came to Dickens's rescue on both counts in the "Editor's Easy Chair" for

June 1854. In response to "sharp criticisms upon Mr. Dickens's Mrs. Jelly by,"

Harper's proclaims that

As usual, whenever Dickens is censured, we do not agree. We believe that the satire was the result of very shrewd observation and wise consideration The Borrioboola-Gha style of philanthropy is the most fatal blow to real charity. Fictitious feeling exhales in a fancied sympathy, which not only tends to bring actual sympathy into disrepute, but

62 dissipates the action and the charity of those who are truly, but not wisely, generous. (119-20)

For Harper's, Dickens's depictions were essentially real, even if they were satirical

or sentimental, because they carried with them a moral message.

Charles Dickens's Bleak House clearly suited Harper's intent to sustain a

high cultural standard that could be trusted to provide profitable, moral, and

tasteful literary fare by balancing the "real" and the "sentimental." In fact, the dual narrators of Bleak House duplicate the competing voices within Harper's

itself as the "sentimentality and frequent tearfulness" (Monod 18) of Esther

Summerson parallel Harper's appeals to its women readers in its sentimental tales, and the "imperious authority" (Monod 6) of the omniscient narrator coincides with the authoritative voice of Harper's cultural arbiters who advocate realism . These voices compete within Bleak House and serve as contrasting bookends for the narrative which is introduced by the omniscient narrator and concluded by the sentimental Esther. The novel opens by comparing the Court of Chancery, around which the events of the novel revolve, to its surrounding environment of smoke, mud, and fog that symbolize the pollution of the law and the court system:

London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hail. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth... . Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun Fog everywhere Never can there come fog too thick, never can there come mud and mire too deep, to assort with the groping and floundering condition which this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of hoary sinners, holds, this day, in the sight of heaven and earth. (April 1852,649)

63 Just as Harper's critics unflinchingly draw the line between high and low cultural forms, the omniscient narrator of Bleak House passes judgement on an entire institution with an incisive rhetoric that attempts to compel the reader to submit to its own seemingly self-evident conclusion.

The sentimental Esther, on the other hand, has the final word in the novel.

She concludes with a response to her husband's inquiry, "don't you know that you are prettier than you ever were?":

And I did not know that; I am not certain that I know it now. But I know that my dearest little pets are very pretty, and that my darling is very beautiful, and that my husband is very handsome, and that my guardian has the brightest and most benevolent face that ever was seen; and that they can very well do without much beauty in me—even supposing—. (October 1853,686)

Esther's sentiment balances the omniscient narrator's critique of societal institutions with a meditation on her family's beauty as a sign of domestic superiority. Thus, Esther's narrative mirrors Harper's use of sentimentality to emphasize the roles of women as protectors of the family and, thereby, of the nation. Esther also demonstrates the self-deprecating mode that is common among sentimental narrators and that is echoed in "Fragments From a Young

Wife's Diary" by Adelaide who, despite her heroic efforts to save her husband's bastard son, asks; "what am 1? His wife—and no more. Everything in me is only a reflection of him. Sometimes I even marvel that he loved me, so unworthy as I seem" (620). As Jane Tompkins points out, the self-sacrifice of women in the sentimental mode is transformed into a kind of heroic self-control that gives women "a place from which to launch a counter-strategy against their worldly masters" (162). Esther's self-conscious construction of her own sentimentality further emphasizes her use of self-sacrifice as a way of beating the system and 64 getting the husband and home that she desires. Esther's domestic narrative counteracts the omniscient narrative of poverty and legal tyranny and defeats the

"bleak" world with a "bleak house." Therefore, the sentimental domestic form

"wins" the battle of the competing narratives, but remains dependant on the objective realist form to legitimize the relevance of the private sphere to the public realm. Within the context of Harper's, then, women's submission to the magazine's lessons in taste becomes a power that will strengthen their own minds as well as the nation's culture. Perhaps more importantly. Harper's becomes the "critical authority" that supplies and regulates that culture.

In his introduction to Bleak House (which was not included in Harper's),

Dickens presents a defense of himself as a writer whose intent is to explore the fanciful within the limits of reality. Dickens claims that he has "purposely dwelt on the romantic side of familiar things" {Bleak House 43). Dickens also defines himself as a revealer of truth whose purpose is not necessarily to present exact portraits of reality but to present truth and inspire emotion through the distorting form of art (McGowan 102). Esther Summerson embodies Dickens's devotion to the fanciful, the emotional, and the sentimental. However, despite his appeal to the fancy, Dickens intended his novels to "present only incidents that might occur" {Bleak House 43). This desire to record reality faithfully is apparent in the introduction when Dickens defends his negative portrayal of

Chancery Court cases and his use of spontaneous combustion in the novel by citing documented sources as evidence that the events in the novel could actually occur. The omniscient narrator of Bleak House confirms these truth claims by opposing Esther with an objective and authoritative point of view which, like

65 Harper's editorial voice, is able to order and classify everything it embraces.

Dickens's combination of fact and fancy, reality and sentimentality, fit perfectly in a magazine that aimed to appeal to a feminized reading public and promote high cultural tastes.

Just as Harper's confers upon women the power to be the cultural guardians of the nation, Bleak House reveals that women control literate knowledge within the family. Dona Budd illustrates this fact with a scene from the novel in which a literate village bride signs the marriage register with an in deference to her illiterate husband:

The bride avoids a public exhibition of her literacy, her power over language, in order to defer to the patriarchal ideal... On the other hand, the bride is clearly the powerful partner, both because of her literacy and because her words characterize and tell the story of the couple—a story that puts her in charge and covers her with virtue. Her husband's only role is to be the speechless illiterate object of her linguistic clarity. The village bride, like Esther, dances deftly between suppressing her powers of language and releasing them and in the process showcases her own virtue and both meets and challenges the ideal of Victorian womanhood. (198-99)

Likewise, Harper's attempts to co-opt women's voices with its rhetoric of taste that denies women classification as high cultural writers but concurrently allows women the power to pass on literate knowledge to their husbands and children, and in fact, establishes that they are the primary transmitters of literate knowledge who must be educated in literary taste so that all Americans can be educated. Like Dickens's magazine Household Words, Bleak House makes "use of a feminine guise, privileging the intimate, private, and authoritative powers usually associated with women over the social, public, and authoritative powers usually associated with men. But [Dickens] was also disrupting the conventional wisdom that sharply divided the domestic and public spheres [by insisting] on 66 the interpenetration of these realms" (Carr 163). So, while Bleak House and

Harper's have in common the incorporation of the feminine, they interweave this

"household narrative" with a public and authoritative one. Together, these competing voices make clear the relevance of the domestic realm to the success of public culture and begin to allow for the feminine voice, albeit characterized as sentimental, to make larger socio-political claims that are key to the nation's identity. Like the literate woman, and like Esther Summerson who narrates half of Dickens's tale—even though, as she repeatedly tells us, she is not

"clever"— Harper's women readers hold the keys to literary knowledge as well as the keys to the household stores that Esther shakes like little bells to give her hope. For Harper's women readers, these keys represented their hopes to play a role in establishing a literate nation that could be taught to produce its own literature through the literary lessons provided within the pages of Harper's

Magazine.

ENDNOTES

' The magazine was calledHarper's New Monthly Mafflzine from 1850-1900. From 1900- 1925 the name was shortened toHarper's Monthly Magazine, and in 1925 it was changed to its current title Harper's Magazine. For the sake of convenience, I will refer to the magazine by its shortest name. Harper's.

^ Among the most famous commentaries on this theme are Ralph Waldo Emerson's "The American Scholar" (1841), Margaret Fuller's "American Literature" (18^), and Herman Melville's "Hawthorne and his Mosses" (1850).

^ As Zboray illustrates, literacy instruction in nineteenth-century America often fell to women, who were expected to reinforce their children's reading practices at home. This feminization of reading and other literate practices gained strength as women increasingly participated in public institutions that promoted reading such as churches and schools (88).

67 * Although Henry W. Longfellow was the first author to receive an invitation to submit an article toHarper's through a letter announcing the new monthly miscellany, it is likely that this letter was written "more to share ... pride over a new publishing venture than to solicit a contribution." Longfellow was not offered payment or assured that his name would "honor the first issue," but instead was told that the cost of the periodical would be twenty five cents per copy for 160 pages, royal octavo size (Exman 303).

*The featured serial novels for the first issue were Charles Lever'sMaurice Tiemay, Soldier of Fortune from Dublin University Magazine and Anne Marsh'sLettice Arnold from The Ladies' Companion. Other works included the short story "Lizzie Leigh" attributed to Charles Dickens (but actually written by Elizabeth Gaskell for Dickens'sHousehold Words); a biography of Samuel Johnson and an article on George Sand fromBentlet/'s; and an article on William Wordsworth from the Athenaeum.

‘ The widespread concern about the dangers of commerce and majority rule to American literature was reflected in numerous American periodical articles, one of the most notable being Herman Melville's "Hawthorne and his Mosses" published inThe Literary World for August 1850. For an interesting analysis of this article, see chapter three of David T. Gilmore'sAmerican Romanticism and the Marketplace.

' As with Graham's, the popularity ofHarper's quickly helped push the American (Whig)Review to its demise in 1852.

” Dickens received $1,728 for the advance sheets of his novel (Exman 310).

" While authors such as Charles Dickens and Edgar Allan Poe fought for an international copyright agreement, publishers were generally not supportive of the idea and claimed that book prices would rise dangerously, jeopardizing most Americans' access to books and threatening the American book trade abroad (Bames 234-8). As early as 1844, Wesley Harper joined the American Copyright Club, which pushed for more extensive international copyright laws, but this did not seem to interfere with the company's piratical practices (Exman 157). .Apparently, Harper and Brothers' relationship to the push for an international copyright law was precarious: on the one hand, the company wanted to be recognized for its efforts on behalf of authors, but, on the other hand, it did not want to endanger its own profits. The copyright controversy raged on and awareness of the problem grew, but the rights of readers and manufacturers held sway over those of authors until 1891, when an international copyright agreement was finally reached.

These American brothers fared quite well monetarily and their works were consistently attributed to them by name. John Abbott's "The History of Napoleon Bonaparte," was highly profitable for both author and publisher. It was published in two volumes with engravings from the magazine on June 15,1855 (Exman 329). Contracts for "Abbott's Napoleon" of February and March 1852 included in Harper's Archives show that the company agreed to pay John Abbott $100 an article and an advance of $1,000 to travel to Europe to sell the plates and the copyright of "Napoleon" if he split the profits of those sales with Harper and Brothers(Archives A l, 177-79). Jacob Abbott was paid five dollars a page plus expenses not to exceed one additional dollar per page and was promised a 10% royalty should it be "deemed expedient at any future time to publish any portion of said articles"(Archives A -1 ,171).

" Travel writer and essayist Donald G. Mitchell, also known as Ik. Marvell, occupied the "Easy Chair" from its inception in 1851 until som e time in 1853 when George W. Curtis, a young journalist associated with the Brook Farm intellectuals, took over. Curtis was considered the more "literary" as well as the more "political" of the two and he simultaneously worked for Harper's and served as editor of its rival,Putnam's (Fischer 25).

“Harper's wholesale pirating from British periodicals was adapted to the later practice in the "Literary Notices" of quoting lengthy passages from British reviews as confirmation of the 68 worth of an American text. In addition to Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Fanny Fcm, and Harriet Beecher Stowe were praised through quotations of British reviews. In December 1851 the London Critic is quoted as stating that Hawthorne "has few equals among the writers of fiction in the English language" and that he is "beyond measure" the best writer "produced by America" (139). Hawthorne is mentioned again in March 1852 in a quotation from the Athenaeum: "Like all men so richly and specially gifted, he has at last found his public" (571). In December 1853, it is noted that reprints of American books were growing popular with English readers and that "we are told that publications from this side of the ocean are decidedly carrying the day." The article goes on to cite theLxmdon Examiner "which usually shows a severe and discriminating taste" praising several works by American authors including Hawthorne's Tanglewood (140). Furthermore, the "Literary Notices" of September 1854 include a wide variety of British responses to American texts including the Athenaeum's favorable reviews of Fanny Fern's Fern Leaves From Fanny's Portfolio and Harriet Beecher Stowe'sSunny Memories of Foreign Lands. While Harper's hoped to establish some sense of American literary achievement, especially in criticism and non-fiction, the magazine's major allegiance to British fiction was sustained throughout its first five years.

" Nina Baym notes of this particular review that "In mid-nineteenth-century America the work seen by theLondon laader as particularly American would not have been accepted as worthy of the up-and-coming nation, and indeed in allotting work reminiscent of the European Dark Ages to the American mind, the British journal was patronizing" (245). This view could partially account forHarper's rejection of Melville's novel for serialization.

" See Brian Foley, Sheila Post-Lauria, Pearl Chesler Solomon, and Robert Weisbuch. Foley suggests that Melville's purpose in writing "Bartleby" was "to show not just that an American writer can write a Dickensian story as well as Dickens can, but that he can write one better" ( 247), and Weisbuch contends that it was to "propose an American difference, an American literary advantage" (41). Similarly, Michael T. Gilmore argues that Melville deliberately recreates the affectionate familiarity of class relations that were presented as an ideal in novels such as Dickens's A Christmas Carol. However, in this American version, it becomes clear how inadequate and impossible such class relations are under a thriving capitalist democracy (133-134). Also relevant is Weisbuch's account of the similarities between Dickens'sBleak House and Nathaniel Hawthorne's novelsThe House of Seven Gables and The Scarlet letter. He writes that "Melville would have been surprised and delighted to find Dickens, the writer who monopolized contemporary fictional taste more in America than he did in Britain, imitating, to some degree that writer Melville had nominated three years earlier as the American Shakespeare" (38). However, Weisbuch goes on to say that "Dickens had incorporated Hawthorne so that Hawthorne's quavery sense of far and metaphysical significance could be grounded in a social nexus" (38).

“ Melville's May 1854 request thatHarper's print his latest serial,Israel Potter, was denied byHarper's and it also ended up in the pages ofPutnam's. Sheila Post-Lauria suggests that a study of Melville's writing for the two magazines reveals his ability to mold his work to the expectations of each publication. While Melville's stories published inHarper's "treat social issues through sentimental rhetoric that is suggestive, the author's stories forPutnam's criticize sentimental views that soften social and political realities" (Post-Lauria 166). Post-Lauria argues that Melville adapted his writing to suit a more sentimental style in Harper'shis pieces "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids," "Jimmy Rose," and "Cock-a-Doodle-Doo," as his narrators "both chronicle and distance themselves from their tales of the 'unfortunate'. . . [and] support the ideology that poverty and obscurity are ennobling virtues" (169).

“ The fact that "Bartleby" was the first short story published by Melville further emphasizes his attempt to out do Dickens in a much shorter space.

69 Sheila Post-Lauria and Michael T. Gilmore both offer analyses that follow this line of reasoning.

'* In September 1854 Harper's also featured a sonnet to the "moral effect of Dickens's writings" that includes the following lines: thy varied powers Have given to heart and mind a betterbirth.... So doth thy pen delightfully compel The hardest heart to yield unto thysway.... Thou master of most pleasant Humor-wit, Thine is the largest Heart-mind ever writ! (572)

70 CHAPTER 2

CLEARING AWAY "THE BRIARS AND BRAMBLES": THE EDUCATION AND PROFESSIONALIZAHON OF THE CORNHILL MAGAZINE'S WOMEN READERS, 1860-64

The genre of the family literary magazine—commonly referred to as the

shilling monthly—emerged in England during the 1860s with great fanfare. The

Cornhill Magazine was the most popular and influential of this genre with a

premiere issue that sold nearly 110,000 copies.’ Within a year of the Cornhill's

publication, over one hundred family literary magazines were founded, each

hoping to ride the coattails of the new literary phenomenon begun by Harper's a decade earlier in America and perfected in England by the Cornhill. British

publishing houses were eager to adapt the family literary format as a way to

reach a broad middle-class audience and make a large profit. Barbara Quinn

Schmidt points out that "Most [British] publishing houses brought out a magazine during the 1860s and 1870s if they did not already have one"; and, despite the fact that not all of them could rake in high profits, they were considered a good investment. The proprietor of Tinsley's Magazine was losing twenty-five pounds a month but still avowed that there was no cheaper means of advertising the publisher's name and products (Schmidt, "Novelists" 143). The

71 genre of the family literary magazine was a profitable business venture marketed to readers as an embodiment of middle-class culture.

The Cornhill (and other family literary magazines) stood apart from and outsold the elite literary reviews such the Saturdm/ Review and the Reader. These professional journals conducted by "university men" addressed a more highly educated (male) audience than the family magazines and often belittled or overtly excluded women readers by defining women's reading materials

(particularly novels) as mindless and women's reading practices as careless and uncritical. As Merle Mowray Bevington notes, the "masculine world" of the

Saturday Review "confined women to a secondary role" and "assumed as a fact that women were inferior to men" (116). The Saturday Review was generally condescending not only to women readers, but also to the culture of novel- reading perpetuated by family magazines like the Cornhill.^ Elizabeth Gaskell complained about the condescending exclusion of women from the audience of the reviews to her friend and Cornhill publisher George Smith: "With a struggle and a fight I can see all Quarterlies 3 months after they are published; till then they lie on the Portico table, for gentlemen to see. 1 think I will go in for Women's

Rights" (Chappie and Pollard 567). The Cornhill opposed the negative image of women readers presented in the literary reviews by emphasizing the positive effects of women's reading practices that would make women not only better wives and mothers, but, ultimately, better middle-class citizens. Thus, for

Gaskell and others, the Cornhill provided a satisfying alternative delivered directly to the ladies who were invited to imagine themselves as a part of a serious reading audience. According to Spencer Eddy,

72 The caliber of [the Comhill's] contributors and their work encouraged the support of an intelligent audience attentive to those currents—political, historical, social, scientific, literary—which shaped Victorian life in 1860, and cultured enough to find pleasure in the presentation of lucid narrative, stylized critical and familiar essays, and superior fiction. (45)

With its combination of serialized fiction and serious articles, the Cornhill

promoted women's learning, and that learning would begin first and foremost with the monthly delivery of the magazine to the middle-class home, where it

would stand as a symbol of cultural knowledge and authority. As to the magazine's lasting educational value, E. T. Cook declares that "Any collector of the Cornhill who treasured his or her 599 numbers in the original parts was well qualified, 1 dare aver, to graduate in Uteris hnmanioribus." (17). And, as Peter

Smith acknowledges in his 1963 article on the Cornhill: "it is now impossible... to find a magazine which offers the same opportunities to the intelligent non­ specialist to become acquainted with current ideas, whether scientific, literary or sociological" (31). These comments typify the belief in the raw ability of the ultimate Victorian non-specialist, the woman reader, to educate herself in a wide variety of fields by reading the magazine.

The popularity of the Cornhill Magazine is usually attributed to its emphasis on entertainment over education and to its avoidance of controversial issues that might offend women readers. Barbara Quinn Schmidt describes magazines of the Cornhill genre as designed for the "comfortable, ill-educated middle-class who read for entertainment and easy instruction" in order to provide "superficial treatment of current topics in a pleasing maimer with some attempt at education" ("Novelists" 143). Other critics have described the Cornhill as a magazine that, while gentlemanly in character, would strictly avoid

73 offending "the ladies and their daughters" by omitting "political and religious controversy" (P. Smith 29). William Makepeace Thackeray, the Cornhill's editor from January 1860 until May 1862, says as much in his prospectus for the magazine: "There are points on which agreement is impossible, and on these we need not touch. At our social table we shall suppose the ladies and children always present; we shall not set rival politicians by the ears" (qtd. in C. Smith 7).

Likewise, Mark W. Turner argues that

The absence of overtly male subjects such as politics and religion, which were constructed as the domain of the great quarterlies, in effect privileged women readers, and women's reading regulated Cornhill contributions, in so far that anything deemed unsuitable for women would not be published.... Cornhill's version of reality constructed female readers and female reading, and the content of each issue was regulated according to these constructions Cornhill, the most successful of the new monthlies, participated in creating a periodical literature that was gendered female. (229)

These typical accounts of the Cornhill as a magazine that was primarily lightweight, entertaining, and traditionally moralistic equate the feminization of the magazine's audience with the elimination of all controversial issues and the lack of a serious educational agenda. However, despite Thackeray's concern for the sensitivities of "the ladies," the magazine did not completely ignore controversial topics and, in fact, made an effort to cover the important issues of the day as a part of its educational purpose.^

I contend that the Cornhill went beyond offering light-weight entertainment for its female readers and, indeed, provided a more open forum for women, maintaining not only that women were educable, but that they should be educated for the good of the middle-class family and the British nation. In fact, the Cornhill advocated women's formal education—and, to a

74 lesser degree, women's movement into the professions—as a means of assisting the development of the newly defined "professional gentleman" who was emerging as the leader of the British nation. To keep potential wives occupied while upwardly mobile gentlemen established themselves financially, the

Cornhill considered the benefits of educated and even professional women.

Thus, a woman who learned to read "properly" would participate in both self- improvement and nation building as she learned to follow particular codes of conduct that would assure the cultural dominance of the middle-class. For women readers of the Cornhill, the act of reading itself became a form of nation building. As Mary Poovey argues, the idea of the proper woman "was critical to the image of the English national character, which hoped to legitimize both

England's sense of moral superiority and the imperial ambitions this superiority underwrote" (9). Therefore, the Cornhill actually urged the proper woman reader to move into the dangerous public realm and out of the private world of male protection in order to free men of financial responsibility for women and to insure the cultural superiority of the nation's women over those of rival nations like France and America. However, the magazine did not venture into the risky territory of delineating what role the educated, public, or professional woman might play. Instead, the Cornhill maintained its popularity and widespread accessibility by remaining vague about what the educated woman it imagined should do with her new skills.

After tracing the origins of the Cornhill Magazine, 1 will examine how

Thackeray established an educational agenda that included both women readers and women writers as respectable members of its audience. 1 will then shift my

75 focus to the magazine's use of realist fiction serials as educational texts that

would provide women with intellectual role models. Finally, I will explore how

the Cornhill made its argument for the expansion of women's educational and

professional opportunities palatable to its potentially resistant male constituents

by showing how such opportunities would benefit the middle-class gentleman and by using such devices as humor, dream sequences, and fictionalized dialogues to present its case.

'THE LITERARY EVENT OF THE YEAR": THE CORNHILLTAKES OFF

George Smith of Smith Elder Publishers launched the Cornhill Magazine in

January 1860 after determining that:

The existing magazines were few, and when not high-priced were narrow in literary range, and it seemed to me that a shilling magazine which contained, in addition to other first-class literary matter, a serial novel by Thackeray must command a large sale. Thackeray's name was one to conjure with, and according to the plan, as it shaped itself in my mind, the public would have a serial novel by Thackeray, and a good deal else worth reading, for the price they had been accustomed to pay for the monthly numbers of his novels alone.... One morning, just as I had pulled up my horse after a smart gallop, that good genius which has so often helped me whispered into my ear, "Why should not Mr. Thackeray edit the magazine, you yourself doing what is necessary to supplement any want of business qualifications on his part? You know that he has a fine literary judgment, a great reputation as a man of letters as well as with the public, and any writer would be proud to contribute to a periodical under his editorship." (G. Smidi 4-5)^

Thackeray agreed to take the position for an astounding 1,000 pounds per year, an amount that was doubled after the initial stunning success of the magazine.^

Thackeray and Smith paid close attention to choosing a name and cover design for the magazine that would make a positive first impression on readers 76 and bolster the magazine's status as a symbol of middle-class taste. The name

"Cornhill" came from the street in London where the Smith Elder Publishing

Company was located. Ridiculed by some as an undignified name for a

magazine, it set the trend for other urban monthlies such as Belgravm, Temple Bar, and St. Paul's, which became geographical signifiers of the nation's capital of

culture. Inspired by the association of "Cornhill" with wheat and the harvest,

the "pleasing" cover design consisted of "four medallions boldly printed in black on the familiar orange ground" surrounding the simplicity and vigor of "the

ploughman, the sower, the reaper, and the thresher, representative of the seasons

of the year" (Huxley, "Chronicles" 368). WhUe the magazine was synonymous

with London culture, it also portrayed a romanticized pastoral image that would

be attractive to busy Londoners caught up in the hustle and bustle of the city.

The cover was ornate and easily recognizable, and it reflected the "jollity and abundance " that Thackeray liked in the name Cornhill (Eddy 14).* The first issue of the magazine, consisting of 128 single-column octavo sized pages of a high quality paper, appeared just in time for Christmas in December 1859 (Tiemersma

17)/

The combination of respected publisher Smith and editor-novelist

Thackeray was enough to make the magazine the talk of the town. Smith notes that "When the first number appeared in January 1860... it was the literary event of the year. Along Cornhill nothing was to be seen but people carrying bundles of the orange-coloured magazine. Of the first number some 120,000 were sold, a number then without precedent in English serial literature" (G. Smith 9).

The Comhill's popularity was confirmed by the enthusiastic praise of other

77 magazines and newspapers: the Illustrated Times called it "a marvel of elegance

and cheapness"; the Sunday Times claimed that "It is almost impossible to

imagine any further developments, either in quality or quantity, of the periodical

literature of this country"; and the Lady's Newspaper declared that "If the editor

can continue as he has begun, he will soon distance all competition, and reign

supreme in the world of literature" (qtd. in Eddy 46). The Cornhill was an

immediate and smashing success. The only difficulty was sustaining its

popularity amid a steadily growing crowd of similar periodicals.

One Cornhill strategy for outdoing its competitors was to pay contributors,

particularly well-known novelists, outlandish sums of money. According to

Smith's own glowing account, "No pains and no cost were spared to make the

new magazine the best periodical yet known to English literature" (G. Smith 7).

Smith, who was nicknamed "the prince of publishers" for his generosity toward

writers, offered Anthony Trollope 1,000 pounds to write Framley Parsonage

(January-April 1861). This was the greatest payment ever offered to Trollope

until Smith paid him 3,200 pounds for The Small House at Allington (September-

April 1864). As Smith recalls: 'Trollope came to see me and naturally asked

what was my scale of payment. I replied that we had no fixed scale for such

works as his; would he mind telling me what was the largest sum he had ever

received for a novel? When he mentioned 500 pounds, I offered him double the

amount" (qtd. in Huxley, Smith Elder 97). Wilkie Collins was paid 5,000 pounds

for "a work of fiction a little longer than The Woman in White," which, after two years of delay, turned out to be Armadale (November 1864-June 1866). Collins

wrote that "No living novelist (except Dickens) has had such an offer as this for

78 one book" (qtd. in Glynn 143). Topping this sum. Smith proposed a 10,000 pound salary for George Eliot's Romola (January 1862-August 1863). Due to the fact that Eliot refused to write her novel in the specified number of monthly parts, the fee was reduced to 7,000 pounds. However, this amount was still astounding to Eliot's regular publisher, John Blackwood, who wrote: "Hearing of the wild sums that were being offered to writers of a much inferior mark to you,

I thought it highly probable that offers would be made to you, and can readily imagine that you are to receive such a price as I could not make remunerative by any machinery that 1 could resort to" (qtd. in Tiemersma 67). For the August

1862 issue of the magazine alone. Smith paid nearly 2,000 pounds to contributors, and for the first four years the total cost of paying writers and artists ran close to 37,000 pounds. Smith declares in his memoirs that

"Expenditure on this scale for literary work alone was, up to this time, unprecedented in magazine literature" (qtd. in Huxley, Smith Elder, 100).

Richard Tiemersma explains that Smith's "policy of the highest fees in the trade insured a regular flow through the Comhill's pages of much of the best fiction that the age produced, and guaranteed a circulation that, although considerably below that of the first few months, was nevertheless a continuing source of profit to the publisher" (67).^ While the Comhill's featured novels may not have always met Smith's expectations, they allowed the magazine to advertise itself as a signifier of middle-class taste and helped maintain its success as the most eminent magazine of its kind, regardless of slowly declining circulation figures, well into its first decade of publication. Despite the fact that Smith put most of his economic resources toward big name novelists, the magazine's serial fiction

79 was only one part of its focus. Under Thackeray's leadership, the Cornhill endeavored to provide high quality non-fiction articles that would indicate the magazine's commitment to its educational agenda.

"GETTING OUT OF NOVEL-SPINNING AND BACK INTO THE WORLD": THE EDUCATIONAL AGENDA OF THE CORNHILL

Thackeray intended to make the Cornhill educational by balancing novel reading with the contemplation of serious articles on science, law, history, biography, literature, culture, art, and social institutions. Though novel-reading was often considered the main form of instruction that women received in the mid-nineteenth century, the Cornhill offered factual articles along with its fiction to produce its own version of the proper woman reader whose entry into the discussion of the important issues of the day would benefit the middle class family and the cultural status of the nation. Extending such an invitation to women during a period when they were denied educational opportunities made a powerful statement. As Barbara Sicherman points out, an "engagement with books was more than the prescribed behavior of a cultural elite: it was the key to education, employment, and empowerment" for women ("Reading and

Ambition" 75). Instead of prescribing a specific educational and professional agenda for women, Thackeray begins modestly by stating his intent to balance fact and fiction for general educational purposes in his advertisement for the

Cornhill, "A Letter from the Editor to a Friend and Contributor." In this letter, he declares that "fiction of course must form a part, but only a part" of the magazine; "We want, on the other hand, as much reality as possible... [and] 80 invite pleasant and instructed gentlemen and ladies to contribute their share to the conversation [Because] the guests, whatever their rank, age, [or] sex... may like to hear what the world is talking about" (qtd, in G. Smith 6-7). Thus, women were invited to participate in the conversation generated by the magazine as both readers and writers.

Indeed, the Cornhill featured a healthy quantity of women writers.

According to Janice H. Harris, between 1860 and 1900 about twenty percent of the magazine's contributors were women. Moreover, "the percentage of women writers was highest during the magazine's strongest, most successful years.... with the ratio of women contributors in certain issues numbering from 60 to 70 percent" (Harris 385). Harris concludes that "the very character of the magazine continually encouraged [women] to identify with key social issues of their own times" (389) and "allowed women writers to contribute material on topics reflecting their own genuine expertise and knowledge" (392). Thackeray's invitation for women to contribute to the magazine inspired a flood of submissions that made his editorial duties difficult. When Thackeray's congenial persona of openness prompted a rush of amateur writers (many of whom were apparently women) to send manuscripts directly to his home, he was alarmed and overwhelmed. Thackeray openly complained about his bitterness over having to write rejection letters and appealed to readers not to send contributions to his home. In "Thoms in the Cushion" (July 1860), Thackeray requests that manuscripts not be sent to his residence and bemoans the daily barrage of complaints, insults, unwelcome visitors, and letters "put with true female logic" that beg: "'I am poor; I am good; I am ill; I work hard; I have a sick

81 mother and hungry brothers and sisters dependent on me. You can help us if you

will'.... Ah me! We wound where we never intended to strike; we create anger

where we never meant harm; and these thoughts are the Thoms in our Cushion"

(126). In his despair over the large number of desperate women writing to the

magazine, Thackeray argues not only for a cessation of their writing but points to

the dire need for alternative ways for middle class women to become wage-

earning but respectable professionals. The magazine's acceptance of women as a

part of its audience and its encouragement of contributors to write about what

they knew converged to create a situation in which women's experiences were

validated and included in the discourse of the magazine. However, Thackeray

does not want submissions to enter his own domestic space and despairs at his

lack of power to help economically disenfranchised women writers: "Why is this

poor lady to appeal to my pity and bring her poor little ones kneeling to my

bedside, and calling for bread which I can give them if I choose ... Day and

night that sad voice is crying out for help. Thrice it appealed to me yesterday.

Twice this morning it cried to me" (126). The pain Thackeray feels over his rejection of such pleas is clearly linked to his understanding that women have

limited professional opportunities. This realization lays a foundation for the economic basis of the magazine's argument for the education and professionalization of women.

In the first installment of his editorial "Roundabout Papers" (January

1860), Thackeray proposes that the Cornhill serve as an educational tool, in part to assist women readers who want to participate in conversations about the important issues of the day. Thackeray urges his audience to read the entire

82 magazine in order to ensure a balanced diet of reading: "Novels are sweets. All people with healthy literary appetites love them—almost all women;—a vast number of clever, hard-headed men Judges, bishops, chancellors, mathematicians are notorious novel-readers; as well as young boys and sweet girls, and their kind, tender mothers" ("On a Lazy, Idle Boy" 127). However,

Thackeray stresses that readers will get sick if they have too many sweets; therefore, they must "mainly nourish themselves on roast^' (128). Thackeray's desire to provide a forum that was "nourishing" is exemplified in a letter to

Anthony Trollope, in which Thackeray asks Trollope to contribute something other than a novel because "One of our chief objects in this magazine is the getting out of novel-spinning, and back into the world" (Harden 908).’°

Thackeray thereby sets forth the equal consumption of fiction and fact as a focus of the magazine's educational program. Although Thackeray separates and balances the seemingly opposite qualities of fact and fiction, in practice the

Cornhill actually collapses these binaries by showcasing "factual fiction"—its realistic serial novels—and using fictional techniques such as dream sequences and dialogues within its factual articles. Thus, fact and fiction work dialogicaUy within the pages of the magazine as the educational quality of realist fiction is promoted, and the factual articles are made palatable by the incorporation of fictional elements that would entertain as well as instruct readers.

83 'GOOD AND EVIL STRANGELY INTERMINGLED": REALIST FICTION AS A MODEL FOR LIFE

Thackeray's preoccupation with "reality" set an important tone for the early Cornhill that contributed to the magazine's elevation of realistic fiction as tasteful and proper reading for women. The magazine supported its serial fiction primarily as a source of information about societal and individual behavior: "While it was seen as realistic, like the rest of the magazine, it was also seen as didactic Not only was fact provided as well as fiction: both were ordered in the same, ideologically formative, direction" (Blake 96). Through its editorial commentaries in "Our Survey of Literature and Science," written primarily by G. H. Lewes, the Cornhill distinguished between entertaining or sensational fiction such as Wilkie Collins' Cornhill contribution, Armadale, and serious or realistic fiction such as George Eliot's Cornhill serial, Romola. The

Cornhill maintains that reading for entertainment is an acceptable practice, as long as the reader is aware of its purely recreational purpose. This point is made in the magazine's defense of Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Ladi/ Aiidleij's Secret:

Granting, as we must, that works of this class merely appeal to the curiosity—that they do nothing more than amuse the vacant or wearied mind, if they do that, it is something. They may be transitory as fireworks, and raise no loftier emotions. But a frivolous and wearied public demands amusement and the public may be grateful when such amusement leaves behind it no unwholesome sympathy with crimes and criminals.... Its incidents are not simply violations of probability, but are without that congruity which, in a skiUhil romance, makes the improbable credible. ("Our Survey" January 1863,135-36)

While sensational fiction was proclaimed to be acceptable if approached sensibly, the Cornhill actively promoted realistic fiction because it taught readers about real life, served as a model for proper behavior, and, like the factual material

84 contained in the magazine, it made readers better middle-class citizens. Lewes

praises Trollope's fiction for its realistic presentation of "human beings, with

good and evil strangely intermingled" rather than the black and wliite depiction

of angels and devils ("Our Survey " November 1862,703). Lewes wants readers

to understand that they are being taught something more valuable and complex

than the binaries of good and evil; Trollope's realist fiction teaches "a pity for the weakness out of which wickedness springs" and therefore serves as a catalyst for careful thought about the complexity of life (702-3). Lewes lays out a philosophy of novel reading that goes beyond judging actions to analyzing the motivation behind those actions in order to gain a deeper understanding of society. Such a practice of reading ultimately lends sympathy to the plight of many female characters who might otherwise be dismissed as corrupt or immoral because

"When we meet with a noble nature stained by some temporary fall, or weakened by some hereditary vice" instead of gossiping and feeling virtuous in our own indignation, realist fiction educates us to recognize human flaws as

"shadows of a luminous life, which, however dark, do not prevent the life from being luminous" (703).

The characters in the Comhill's novels were considered so realistic that they easily extended beyond the bounds of their novelistic settings to merge with real life. For example. Lord Lufton and Lucy Robarts, characters from Anthony

Trollope's Framley Parsonage, become exemplars of "true love" in an article on

"Falling in Love" by James Campbell Reddie (January 1861). Andrew Blake points out that "There could be no better example of the place of fiction in the literary culture of the time than this direct and casually assumed use of fictional

85 characters as examples of morally correct behavior in an article exhorting good marital practice" (91). However, while this article uses fictional characters as concrete examples of reality, it also acknowledges that factual accounts of the nature of love are a necessary supplement to the evidence offered by the fictional world:

And now, you dark and merry-eyed young lady, who have professed so great an interest in that dear Lucy Robarts, how can you leave the reading of those chapters in which we look to find that poor Lord Lufton has wooed once more and won? Quite so: you deferred that till you had more time, and thought you would but glance at what this paper said about—Exactly! and perhaps you also felt it might touch yourself more closely than a mere story of true lovers. (41)

Thus, the Cornhill suggests that fact and fiction work together to educate its readers about love, life, and society.

In purporting to depict women as they truly are (through realist techniques), many of the Cornhill serials also extended the magazine's educational agenda by broadening the definitions of women's acceptable roles.

By representing educated and independent women in its realist fiction, the magazine

provided a common language and a medium of social exchange that helped women define themselves and formulate responses to the wider world. ... [And] the continuum between fiction and reality gave considerable play to the imagination. Reading [novels] provided both the occasion for self-creation and the narrative form from which [women] might reconstruct themselves. (Sicherman, "Sense and Sensibility" 209-10)

For example, Eliot's Romola (January 1862-August 1863) provided women readers with a lead character who, while not completely likable, is an intelligent and well-educated helpmate to her blind scholar father. Romola eventually ventures into the public realm to serve the community and can, therefore, be seen as "a 'hero' and potential role model for young women" (De Jong 81) as 86 well as "a Victorian lady reformer; serving the general good rather than passively adorning the drawing room" (Booth 115). Although Romola leaves her scoundrel husband and seeks an independent life, she ultimately discovers that she is most useful as a teacher and guide for a makeshift family composed of her husband's mistress and children. Regardless of Romola's final motherly role,

Eliot believed her heroine symbolized the educated woman, and with her fifty pound donation to Girton College she identified herself only as the author of

Romo/fl.”

Another scholarly heroine, the title character of Elizabeth Gaskell's

"Cousin Phillis" (November-February 1864), is diligent in her study of the traditionally masculine subjects of Greek and Latin. Although deserted by the man she loves and left at home to care for her parents, the greatest tragedy for

Phillis is that her learning has no vocational outlet, no professional end. Still,

"Phillis views her education, despite its inutility, as a kind of liberating self- fulfillment" and as a way to "achieve an independent sense of self as an adult woman" (Rogers 31-32). Phillis, like Romola, loses in love but finds fulfillment in learning as well as in nurturing her family.

In contrast to these self-reliant intellectuals who are thwarted in their personal lives is Trollope's Lucy Robarts of Framley Parsonage (fanuary 1860-

April 1861). Loved and admired by her fellow characters as well as by readers and critics, Lucy is not beautiful (she is described as having a brown complexion and no neck) but bookish and intelligent. She is "the cleverest of them all," the kind "exactly cut out for an old maid " (April 1860,452 and 455). However,

Lucy's competition for the affections of Lord Lufton, a man above her station, is

87 Griselda Granlley, undesirable because, while physically as stunning as a goddess, she is "a mere automaton, cold, lifeless, spiritless, and even vapid.

There is ... nothing in her mentally, whatever may be her moral excellences....

To sit still and be admired is all that she desires" (July 1860,56). The intellectual

Lucy, of course, prevails as her strong will and perseverance (along with her willingness to risk her own life nursing others) win over the resistant Lady

Lufton who finally approves of her son's marriage to a middle-class girl.

Trollope remarks in his Autobiograplty that of all his characters Lucy is

"perhaps the most natural, at any rate, of those who have been good girls ...

Indeed, I doubt whether such a character could be made more lifelike" (124).

According to the magazine's own justification for realism, the presence of such

"real" depictions of intellectual heroines within the Cornhill would have strongly suggested to readers that educated women are admirable and attractive even if

(as in the cases of Romola and Phillis) they live on the fringes of society. Above all, these heroines imply that for some women, at least, the life of a single, self- supporting woman may be not only necessary, but desirable. However, the intellectualism of these female characters is tempered by their willingness to selflessly care for others. Lucy Robarts embodies the ideal wife of the traditional family, Phillis remains a dutiful daughter and household servant, and Romola ends up as the matriarch of an unusual family that, nonetheless, functions traditionally. Thus, the Comhill's fiction maintained that the educated woman could still fulfill traditional female roles. The images of educated women presented in the magazine's serials were complemented by its non-fiction articles

88 which formulate a rationale for improving educational and professional opportunities for women.

"KEEPING UP APPEARANCES": DEFINING THE PROFESSIONAL GENTLEMAN AND ERADICATING THE REDUNDANT WOMAN

In its factual articles, the Cornhill was able to justify the practicality of its controversial stance on the education and professionalization of women primarily because of the emergence of two distinctly Victorian characters: the middle-class gentleman and what W. R. Greg referred to in 1862 as the

"redundant" woman who would remain unmarried or marry later in life

(Vicinus 3-4). The magazine's redefinition of the gentleman to include the middle-class professional man necessitated a postponement of marriage to provide the up-and-coming gentleman with more time to make himself financially secure. In turn, middle-class women needed some occupation aside from being wives and mothers, roles that would require immediate marriage. As a result of the needs of the new gentleman, the Cornhill argued for women's education and possible professionalization based on a three-fold rationale: 1) there was a surplus of women for whom husbands could not be found and who needed to have some means of self-subsistence; 2) educated and even professional women would be more beneficial to upwardly mobile gentlemen than women who existed only to rush men into marriage before they could afford to maintain their gentlemanly status; and 3) educated and working women would not necessarily be unfit wives and mothers. As the Cornhill

89 rejected the bom gentleman for a self-made species, new definitions of gentility

for women were also necessary. Thus, the Cornhill went beyond endorsing what

Judith Rowbotham describes as the career of being "a professional good wife and

mother," which "in an age of growing professionalism in careers" became "the

'highest' ambition for a good girl of any social class" (12). Instead, the magazine

promoted women not only as professionals in the home, but in the public sphere

with no negative effect on the Victorian family unit.'^

Professional men fused their striving for income and status with the ideal

of the middle class as the moral, intellectual, and cultural core of the British

nation by recasting gentlemanly behavior as a mark of the professions rather

than of the aristocracy and by bringing "one scale of values—the

gentleman's—to bear upon another—the tradesman's" (Reader 158-9).

Therefore, "Professionalization among middle class men represented a move

toward merit and away from birth that would enable the middle classes to gain

status through work" (Larson 5). As H. Byerley Thomson wrote in 1857, "The

importance of the professions and the professional classes can hardly be

overrated, they form the head of the English middle class, maintain its tone of

independence, keep up to the mark its standard of morality, and direct its

intelligence " (qtd. in Reader I). The Comhill clearly articulated this redefinition

of gentlemanhood, which was the basis of its push for women's education, for its

upwardly mobile middle-class readers.

In "The Four Georges," placed as the opening feature of the magazine

from July to October 1860, Thackeray explores the evolution of the new-style gentleman. He uses the kings, whose lives he outlines as examples of the dead

90 breed of the aristocratic and ostentatious "fine gentleman" who has "almost vanished off the face of the earth" (September 1860, 259), to be replaced with a more common, but ironically more noble gentleman:

What is it to be a gentleman? Is it to have lofty aims, to lead a pure life, to keep your honour virgin; to have the esteem of your fellow citizens, and the love of your fireside; to bear good fortune meekly; to suffer evil with constancy; and through evil or good to maintain truth always? Show me the happy man whose life exhibits these qualities, and him we will salute as a gentleman, whatever his rank may be. (October I860,406)

This description and Thackeray's early idea to call the Cornhill the New

Gentleman's Magazine (Harden 905) highlight the magazine's role in the redefinition of gentlemanhood to include the middle class professional.

According to Schmidt, this was the same professional gentlemanhood that the

Cornhill's founder, George Smith, spent his life struggling to attain: "Like other rising middle class entrepreneurs [Smith] had to surmount the negative impression that his family's business was only a cut above the average shopkeeper. He, typically, sought status through behaving like a gentleman"

("The Cornhill" 54). Comhill articles like Fitzjames Stephen's "Gentlemen"

(March 1862) explain that at one time gentlemen were defined as men from a few particular families, but the "new gentleman" is someone who combines a

"certain" level of social rank and "certain" artistic, moral, and intellectual qualities. In other words, gentlemanhood is not completely innate but can be learned: "The fact that there is no essential difference between the characters of different sections of society, or, at any rate, no difference which is in favour of the higher classes, is nowhere more apparent than in respect of those qualities in which the spirit of gentlemen is supposed to display itself most fully—the qualities of generosity, self-sacrifice, and patriotism" (340). In the Comhill, the 91 term "gentleman" addresses "both members of the traditional 'leisured' classes and those families with working breadwinners [asj Good behavior was itself allowed to be gentlemanly" (Blake 94). Of course, these new definitions were attractive to the middle-class readers of the Cornhill who wanted to place themselves at the head of the British nation morally and culturally as well as politically and economically.

While these redefinitions of the gentleman focus on the abstract qualities of gentlemanhood, the professional man was also preoccupied with earning the money required to maintain an acceptable lifestyle since, as Trollope put it, "A man's daily bread—his own and that of his wife and children,—must be his first consideration" ("Civil Service" 217). Trollope's "The Civil Service as a

Profession" (February 1861) suggests that the new gentleman could combine virtue and money by working for the government: "there is no profession by which a man can earn his bread in these realms, admitting of brighter honesty, a nobler purpose, or of an action more manly or independent" (215). Trollope maintains that the money required to go into the church or the law is no longer necessary because government work carries an acceptable living wage and is an honorable and fulfilling profession that allows the new gentleman to serve the needs of the nation. Inevitably, the Cornhill's revision of gentlemanhood based on moral and financial considerations necessitated a reconsideration of the role of the gentleman's female counterpart.

The rise of the middle class into the gentlemanly professions had a cost: those who wished to enter a profession had to accept the economic and social sacrifices of training in order to "provide recognizably distinct services for

92 exchange on the professional market" (Larson 14-15). The work of professionalization resulted in prolonging men's educations and, therefore, in postponing economic stability. The precarious economic status of many middle- class men rendered early marriage impractical. As a result, the average age of marriage for middle class men between 1840 and 1870 was thirty, and about twenty percent of men postponed marriage until after their thirty-third year

(jalland 132). Further complicating expectations for marriage, the female population in England began to outgrow the male population; census figures from 1851 recorded 104.2 females to every 100 males. Between 1851 and 1901 the number of unmarried women over the age of twenty more than doubled, increasing from 1,444,556 to 2,941,733 (Katz 5). While the population of men decreased due to the higher survival rate among female babies, higher rates of male emigration to the colonies, and the deaths of men who served in the armed forces, there was also an increasing "tendency among men to marry ... late in life to insure greater prosperity for their brides" (Katz 6). Thus, the emergence of professionalization along with other population factors combined to create the problem of "surplus women" that received so much attention in the newspapers and periodicals of the 1850s and 60s. Susan Katz claims that:

Even if the numbers were exaggerated or misleading and the furor out of proportion to the problem, the conspicuousness of women of the middle classes and the alarm their situation caused can also be imputed to the ambiguous social position of the unmarried Victorian woman, which often made her appear to be a misfit Cultivated for the marriage market, deprived of substantive education or vocational training, and sheltered from financial concerns, the ordinary middle-class woman of the nineteenth century was insufficiently equipped to fend for herself in the public sphere.... [T]hey existed, therefore, in an undefined social stratum—a no man's land that wavered somewhere between gentility and poverty. (7-8)

93 In order to create a role for these women that would not be a burden on the

dwindling male population and to strengthen the middle class as a whole, the

Cornhill advocated later marriages for its newly defined middle-class gentlemen

and educational and professional opportunities for its single women.

The Cornhill's advocacy of later marriages is suggested most clearly in

Stephen's "Keeping up Appearances" (September 1861) which points out that

maintaining gentlemanly status and marrying are often incompatible (305).'^

Stephen argues that many middle-class men are forced to forfeit their social rank

when they marry and that a more acceptable decision for all concerned would be

to stay single and keep up gentlemanly appearances, thus preventing miserable

matches with low standards of living: "A married man must be prepared to meet

[his family's) expenses on a constantly increasing scale, or to cut them down at

the expense of converting his wife into a drudge, and allowing his children to

grow up in unwholesome and dirty habits" (310). As Andrew Blake comments,

"The real crux of the article, then, is that while members of the professions can in

themselves claim the title gentleman, those professionals who choose to marry

early will have to forfeit the social rank of a gentleman by living in an extremely

frugal manner"' (92). By mapping out the pitfalls of marrying before one has achieved financial stability, the Cornhill urges men to postpone marriage until

they are professionally and financially secure.

Despite its primary focus on increasing the power of middle-class men,

the Cornhill also attempted to secure the economic independence of the new gentlewoman within marriage, perhaps as a means of enticing the educated and/or professional woman back into the home once her gentleman was ready

94 to be married. In "Marriage Settlements" (December 1863), Stephen emphasizes

the productivity and practicality of French women who are able to maintain their

own identities and finances upon marriage and nationalistically suggests that

English women should have the same rights and opportunities. The Cornhill's

plea for reform in the marriage laws was ridiculed as excessively sentimental by

Stephen's former colleagues at the Saturday Review, and Stephen wrote a spirited

response to this attack in the July 1864 article "Sentimentalism." The author

maintains that his claims about marriage are based on genuinely poor laws, not

sentimentality; "We are called sentimental for objecting to the common law by

which women, upon marriage, lose their personalities" (67). In conjunction with

its arguments to protect the professional gentlemen from premature marriages,

the magazine presents a strong defense of women's financial and personal

independence.

Stephen's article on marriage law reform directly follows an installment of

Trollope's The Small House at Allington (September 1862-April 1864), a novel in

which the heroine, Lily Dale, is jilted and then proudly declares that she will

remain an old maid. With this character, Trollope rejects the view that a

woman's value is determined solely by marriage and supports the idea that

single women can be successful and should be able to control their own property

and their own lives. In fact, Lily goes so far as to claim that she wishes she could

use the letters "OM" after her name as a sign of her intellect and independence just as men use the letters "BA." As Judith Weissman notes, "It is daring simply

for Lily to suggest... that she might get a college degree; it is defiant for her to

claim that the words old maid might have the same connotations of

95 independence as that word bachelor, and that a single woman might deserve the same respect as a single man" (Weissman 23). But, with the number of single women over the age of fifteen rising, "Cultural ideology and economic necessity, which had reinforced each other for so long, were suddenly in conflict. Women required an alternative ideal of femininity that was not maternal as more and more of their numbers remained unmarried" (Balee 202). The Cornhill offered such an alternative in the guise of protecting the interests of the upwardly- mobile middle-class gentleman as it argued for reforms in married women's property laws and presented the single life as an acceptable possibility for some women.''*

"WHAT WOMEN ARE CAPABLE OF": CREATING EDUCATIONAL AND PROFESSIONAL OPPORTUNITIES FOR WOMEN

In addition to imagining positive roles for single women, the Cornhill also began to argue for improvements in women's formal education in part as a way of preparing them for employment and financial self-sufficiency. The magazine is well known for its participation in debates over the status of middle-class boys' education, as it devoted at least thirteen articles to the subject in its first six years. Most of these espoused the need for change in middle-class schools based on the belief that education for the upper and lower classes was superior to that for the middle classes due to a lack of training for teachers and the promotion of mediocrity caused by the examination system (Stephen "Competitive

Examinations," December 1861,698).

96 What has not been recognized is the Cornhill's attenhon to women's education and professionalization. While few actual professions had been available to women (teaching, writing, and acting among them), the opening of women's colleges such as Queen's College (1848), Bedford College (1849), the

North London Collegiate School (1850), and the Ladies' College (1853) allowed women to prove that they could pass competitive examinations. In addition, the

1865 census was the first to separate professionals by sex, although the actual number of female professionals remained low (Reader 172). Martha Vicinus notes that by 1901 a modest 12.1% of unmarried women over twenty—238,510 total women—were involved in professions, holding jobs as teachers, doctors, nurses, scientists, and government employees (28). The Cornhill helped make these gradual changes in women's roles more acceptable to its readers as its prominent and long-running discussion of boy's education spurred the discussion of girl's educational opportunities, most notably in Harriet

Martineau's "Middle-Class Education in England—Girls" (November 1864).'^

Martineau, who remained unmarried herself, argues that government funding for education should be equally divided between boys and girls since so many women who are forced to take care of themselves remain helplessly unable to do so because of their lack of education: "there must be tens of thousands of middle-class women dependent on their own industry: and it can hardly be doubtful, even to the most reluctant eyes, that the workers ought to be properly trained to the business of their lives" (554). Martineau's "Nurses Wanted" (April

1865), echoes this claim: "Any pretense of horror or disgust at women having to work, is a mere affectation in a country and time when half the women must

97 work in order to live" (409). Martineau describes the ideal education for women as one that includes not only basic reading and writing and whatever

"accomplishment" is in fashion at the time, but Greek, Latin, and other serious subjects for which she argues girls are actually better pupils than boys (552). In case it is not enough that education allows "surplus women" greater opportunities, Martineau contends that a balance between serious scholarship and domestic training will produce superior wives and mothers as well.

Furthermore, she argues, the English nation has a patriotic responsibility to educate its girls at least as well as the Americans: "In the United States... the individual goes for more than with us; and it is felt to be desirable that the mothers of the next generation should have a large intelligence and rich culture.

But, there as here, a considerable proportion of the girls will not marry; and these may prepare to be self-supporting" (563). Finally, Martineau boldly declares that

not all the ignorance, the jealousy, the meanness, the prudery, or the profligate selfishness which is to be found from end to end of the middle class, can now reverse the destiny of the English girl, or retard that ennobling of the sex which is a natural consequence of its becoming wiser and more independent, while more accomplished, gracious, and companionable. The briars and brambles are cleared away from women's avenue to the temple of knowledge. Now they have only to knock, and it will be opened to them. (567)

Deirdre David points out that Martineau "manages to reconcile her legitimating functions for the English middle class with her strong-minded sexual politics.... [She] engineers her feminism so that it serves the ideological aims of that same social class for whom she performs her legitimating role" (32).

Martineau's approach is similar to the approaches of other Comhill contributors who forge the magazine's agenda by urging the advancement of women into intellectual and professional areas as a means of supporting the growth and 98 power of the middle class. Articles such as R. Ashe King's "A Tête-à-Tête Social

Science Discussion " (November 1864), Anne Thackeray's 'Toilers and Spinsters"

(March 1861), and E. S. Dixon's "A Vision of Animal Existences" (March 1862) become a part of the Cornhill's central message as they support the middle class, redefine proper roles for women, and merge fact with fiction in an attempt to ease the potentially jarring nature of their proto-feminist rhetoric. The incorporation of techniques such as humor, dream sequences, and fictionalized dialogues in these articles help to buffer the controversial points of view about women's proper roles in society, just as the presentation of fiction as a healthy part of one's reading diet is predicated upon its "factual" nature. Therefore, the magazine's use of "fact" as a tool to promote the morality and tastefulness of its fiction is complimented by the use of "fiction" as a tool to persuade resisting readers to accept the necessity of educated and professional women.

Directly following Martineau's essay, which ends with the hope that the institution of formal education will "confirm that traditional lofty and benign reputation of the womanhood of England" (568), R. Ashe King's "A Tête-à-Tête

Social Science Discussion," opens with the musings of a gentleman on the day of the birth of his ninth daughter. He feels his home is so over run by his wife and daughters that he begins to fantasize about how he might combat the increase in women (both in his home and in society). In an outrageous dream sequence he envisions a mob of "monstrously crinolined women" throwing babies at him instead of his dinner. When he is left starving with nine screaming babies, his friend Croaker comes to the rescue with a pen knife: "the fattest baby's head was thrown back. I turned away in suspense and horror, only to hear one terrible

99 scream, which woke me" (570), Upon awakening, he begins to realize that he is not alone in his feeling of being surrounded by women, as

suddenly flashed upon me some hateful statistics proving the extraordinary numerical predominance of the sex..,. For hours I lay calculating all the evils of a nation of old maids. I watched in thought the tide of women steadily and inevitably setting in; first creeping under the doors of our printing offices, then our dissecting rooms, then sweeping over the bar, and at last, submerging the pulpit. (570)

After a satirical dialogue with Croaker, the misguided bachelor who suggests everything from human sacrifice to polygamy to reduce the female population, the narrator comes to his senses, considers his own daughters, and decides that his solution is to "make women more independent—more capable of self- support ... [to] train them by a wider and more bracing education; strengthen their mind, enlarge their ideas, and perhaps ... awake some power of reasoning" so that women will be better equipped to take their rightful place in the public sphere (574). While encouraging women's education and professional status,

King maintains that educated and professional women would not be "a whit less eligible as wives" (576). Typical of the Cornhill attitude, this article encourages women's betterment and opportunities as a relief for the problems of the financially strapped gentleman. The article's incorporation of the misogynist dream entices and reassures its doubtful male readers who, like Croaker, "don't know what women are capable of—the depth of their character, the breadth of their mind, the strength of their intellect" (576). King works to bring these readers over to his side with the satiric but pedagogical form of the dialogue in which Croaker is taught to set aside his prejudices. In a sense, this becomes a conversion narrative in which the wrong-headedness of the narrator and his friend are finally corrected just as, hopefully, the resistant reader will be 100 reformed. Read together, Martineau and King suggest an educational system

and justify its use in the public sphere for middle-class Englishwomen.

Anne Thackeray's 'Toilers and Spinsters" also links women's education to

the issue of "surplus women." She argues that the main problem for women is a

lack of financial security, not a lack of husbands. For Thackeray, the expansion

of educational and professional opportunities for women is the only viable

solution to their financial worries.'* However, Thackeray begins with a

stereotypical and unflattering depiction of a gloomy old maid who is self-

pitying, helpless, and broken-hearted. By countering the fictionalized comments

of these contemptible spinsters with a series of rhetorical questions, Thackeray

pulls the unsuspecting reader into compliance with her ultimately progressive

message:

Who has forced her to live alone? ... What possible reason can there be to prevent unmarried, anymore than married people from being happy? ... Are unmarried people shut out from all theatres, concerts, picture- galleries, parks, and gardens?... Does Mudie refuse their subscriptions? . .. Then surely it is the want of money, and not of husbands, which brings them to this pass. Husbands, the statistics tell us, it is impossible to provide; money, however, is more easily obtained. (319-20)

Money can only be made, however, if women can be educated and employed.

In support of the efficacy of women's education, Anne Thackeray contends that women can learn faster than men. She cites as proof the example

of art schools in which men and women are educated equally and at which

women frequently excel. Thackeray also encourages women to join communities

that will provide intellectual and professional opportunities such as the Ladies'

Reading Room at 19 Langham Place (which has the added benefit of inexpensive

food, stimulating conversation, and useful reading material including copies of

101 the Cornhill itself), the Society for Promoting the Employment of Women, and the group of working women at Emily FaithfuU's Victoria Press. After investigating these organizations, Thackeray surmises that "It must be less annoying and degrading to be occupied by work, however humble, than to contemplate narrower stintings and economies every day—economies that are incompatible with the very existence of cultivation and refinement" (326). Thackeray's argument is reminiscent of fellow Cornhill contributor Elizabeth Gaskell's

Cranford —published serially in Household Words from December 1851 to May

1853—in which allowances are made for Miss Matty, one member of a community of old maids, to work for a living after a financial disaster. Like the women of Cranford, Thackeray develops a new definition of feminine gentility that coincides with the concept of the professional gentleman and is not compromised by work, but by changes in living standards. As Martineau also points out, only a very small minority of women can be considered genteel if gentility "consists in doing nothing appreciable" ("Nurses Wanted" 409).

Craftily inserting women into the public sphere, Thackeray concludes, "I seem to be wandering all about London ... and have drifted away ever so far from the

Spinsters in whose company I began my paper. But is it so? I think it is they who have been chiefly at work, and taking us along with them all this time; I think it is mostly to their kindly sympathy and honest endeavors that these places owe their existence" (331). Almost without realizing it, the reader has taken a turn through the public—but still feminine—life of educated and professional women.

102 The elimination of single women's redundancy leads to E. S. Dixon's "A

Vision of Animal Existences," a "sci-fi" depiction of a Darwinist future that holds only intellectual and self-sufficient women who have presumably surpassed men intellectually. Appropriately enough, the nightmare/fantasy narrative begins at the local zoo where animals and humans meet face to face. Our narrator's associative daydream is influenced by the sight of a woman, whose countenance he recognizes as that of a professional authoress, reading a volume of Darwin as she rests on a park bench. As the man begins dreaming, the woman is transformed into "Natural Selection, Originator of Species"—the name and title printed on her calling card (313). Joined by her son "Struggle-for-Life," she begins a lecture on Darwin's scientific principles, proving that she can be both a competent professional and a mother. When the dreamer protests against the dominance of brute strength and despairs at the loss of the finer (read feminine) qualities of weakness, modesty, and self-denial, she informs him that nature cannot yield to such human follies. When the narrator awakens, he turns to the real woman to ask her opinion of Darwin. In a well-reasoned manner she responds: "Here we are offered a rational and a logical explanation... it is conscientiously reasoned and has been patiently written. If it be not the truth, I cannot help respecting it as a sincere effort after truth" (318). In contrast to the

(humorous) scene of science fiction horror presented in the dream, the intellectual response to Darwin supplied by the real woman is a comfort to the

Victorian gentleman. Dixon, then, exaggerates the fear of the manly woman who might result from education and public work in order to promote a new gentlewoman who can improve her own and her family's position in society by

103 participating in the important conversations of the day and even by being

independent and self-supporting if it is required to preserve the status of the new

gentlemen around her. Pairing the controversial topics of evolution and

women's education, this article proposes that the educated and professional

woman is an unavoidable part of the future of the English nation.

In opposition to the growing class of specialized literary reviews that

excluded women readers, the Cornhill combined the literary and cultural

instruction of the middle classes with a more controversial agenda of promoting

women's education and entry into the professions. As George Eliot, Elizabeth

Gaskell, and Anthony Trollope create well-educated women who successfully

fulfill maternal roles, Harriet Martineau and Arme Thackeray provide glimpses of women engaged in professional work as nurses, writers, and printers, and R.

Ashe King (comically) depicts women overtaking the fields of medicine, law, and religion, the Cornhill uses both fact and fiction to show that women's traditional roles must be expanded in order to maintain the strength of the middle class.

However, the magazine remains equivocal about the exact ways in which women are supposed to carry out their new roles. The only clear message is that for the cultural health of the nation, women must be educated properly, and a proper education would begin with a subscription to the Cornhill Magazine.

ENDNOTES

* * The ComhUrs own advertisements suggested that initial sales were as high as 120,000, but according to John Sutherland, the exact figure was 109,274. The sales figures for the remaining issues during the first year are as follows: February-March: 100,000; April 92,000; May-

104 June 90,000; July-December 87,500 (Sutherland,"ComhiU's Sales" 106). These numbers are astounding when you consider the 1860 circulation figures for precursors to the Comhill such as Bladcwood's (10,000) and Bentley's (5,000), and for reviews such asFraser's (8,000), and theSaturday Rezhew (10,000) (Ellegard 22, 32). The Cornhill's sales figures remained around 80,000 for the first two years and are recorded as follows by George Smith for December of each subsequent year under consideration here. 1862: 72,500; 1863: 50,000,1864:41,259; 1865:40,000 (Glynn 143).

^ As one Saturday reviewer makes clear in a January 3,1857 article: "It would be hard to mention a single modem English novelist of eminence who has written either as an artist or as a philosopher. They mostly write in the spirit either of pamphleteers, or of tradesmen whose chief object is to sell their goods" (qtd. in Bevington 155). The Saturday Review was particularly opposed to the Comhill Magazine due to bitterness over William Thackeray's successful bid to obtain several ofSaturday's frequent contributors. Fitzjames Stephen, Henry Sumner Maine, and John Ruskin were among the defectors to the Comhill (Bevington 28). In his "Roundabout Papers" (August 1860, October 1860, and July 1861 ) Thackeray made several attacks on the review for its criticism of himself and his publisher, George Smith. The Saturday reciprocated with unfavorable reviews of Thackeray's works (Bevington 173-74) as well as with an attack on Stephen's Comhill campaign for women's economic independence.

^ Thackeray rejected Trollope's story Airs.General Tallboys (Glynn 129) and George Meredith's poem "The Meeting" (Tiemersma 195) due to his fears of offending lady readers. However, when he reluctantly and with profuse apology turned down Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poem "Lord Walter's Wife" on the grounds that "there is an account of unlawful passion felt by a man for a woman" that would be likely to cause "our readers (toj make an outcry" (qtd. in Anne Thackeray, "First Number," 12-13), she replied that"I am deeply convinced that the corruption of our society requires not shut doors and windows, but light and air—and that it is exactly because pure and prosperous women choose to ignore vice, that miserable women suffer wrong by it everywhere" (Harden 1033). Furthermore, it seems that George Smith played a role in tempering Thackeray's moralistic intent. Smith considered the rejection of Barrett Browning's poem an "unnecessary fuss" and insisted on printing articles on public school reform also opposed by Thackeray. These widely debated articles led toComhiU's the emergence as "A triumphant champion of public school reforms" (Glynn 128). Even during Thackeray's tenure as editor, articles on many serious and even controversial subjects made their way into the magazine. TheComhill included articles that covered topics such as the continental wars ("Invasion Panics," February 1860); the Civil War ("The Dissolution of the Union," August 1861 and "Negroes Bond and Free," September 1861); Italian politics ("How I Quitted Naples," August 1860 and "The Dark Church in Vienna," March 1863); liberalism ("Liberalism," January 1862); and industrial reform ("Life and Labour in the Coal Fields," March 1862), as well as numerous articles on British courts, parliament, and laws, particularly those regarding women, criminals, and the insane. Furthermore, the magazine's inclusion of a novel like WUkie Collins's Armadale, which the author felt compelled to defend against "claptrap morality" as a book "daring enough to speak the truth" (qtd. in Schroeder 5), illustrates theComhiU's proclivity to take ris^ , espedally after Thackeray's editorial reign had ended.

Smith originally approached Tom Hughes, author ofTom Brown's Schooldays, to edit the magazine; however Hughes had already made a commitment to be on the staff of the new Macmillan's Ivlagazine. Spencer Eddy contends that if Hughes had accepted the editorship of the Comhill "Smith might later have regretted his choice" because Hughes's political tendencies may not have fit in with the ComhiU's attempt to appeal to a wide variety of readers (10). Smith met William Thackeray in 1849 when he invited the writer to dinner to meet Charlotte Bronte, Smith's chief literary "discovery." A friendship blossomed between the men and Smith subsequently published four of Thackeray's works(The Kickleburys on the Rhine, Henry Esmond, Lectures on the English Humorists, and the most popular of his minor works.The Rose and the Ring ) (Glynn 118-19). Thackeray told Smith of his ambition to edit a magazine, and in 1854, 105 he proposed that they produce a general critical review together (Glynn 121). Although nothing came of that proposal. Smith thought of Thackeray—first as a novelist, then as an editor—when he determined to launch a new shilling monthly magazine

’ In addition, Thackeray was paid generously for his serials. According to Sutherland, Thackeray received the bulk of the magazine's payments to contributors; in September of 1860, for example, he received about 358 of 538 pounds in payments("ComhiU's Sales" 106). Thackeray conducted the magazine from January 18&) until May 1862. Fiom May 1862 until August 1864 the magazine was run by an editorial board consisting of George Smith, Frederick Greenwood and G.H. Lewes. When Lewes resigned in 1864, Greenwood became the sole editor until 1868 when Lewes, Dutton Cook, and Smith took over. Finally, in 1871 Leslie Stephen was hired, giving the magazine a unified editorial identity once again, but with a continued decline in sales (Huxley,Smith Elder 118). Thackeray and Smith agreed that they would have equal veto power over contributions, an arrangement that—coupled with increasing financial worries—may have eventually led to Thackeray's resignation, although the partnership was successful overall. The facts surrounding Thackeray's resignation remain fuzzy. However, the existing letter recording the incident written March 4,1862 states: "I have been thinking over our conversation of yesterday, and it has not improved the gaiety of the work on which I am pretty busy. To-day 1 have taken my friend Sir Charles Taylor into my confidence, and his opinion coincides with mine that I should withdraw from the magazine. To go into bygones now is needless And whether connected with the Cornhill Magazine or not, 1 hope I shall always be your sincere friend" (qtd. in Glynn 132). In fact, Thackeray continued to write for the magazine until his death in December 1863.

* See also Eddy's comparison of theComhill cover with the stodgy Macmillan's cover and his note that the ailing American magazineThe Knickerbocker looked to ComhiU's cover design as an inspiration to spruce up its own image (16-17).

^ Typical of most issues, the premiere number included two fiction serials, one of which opened the magazine— Anthony Trollope'sFramley Parsonage —and one that was inserted amidst the "factual " material—Thackeray'sUroel the Widower. Most issues contained seven serious articles and two or three poems. The January 1860 issue featured the first part of G.H. Lewes's conversational scientific series "Studies in Animal Life," which encouraged the hands-on study of biology among amateurs; John Bcwring's account of his Eastern experience as a British diplomat, including a description of Chinese women and daily life in "The Chinese and the Outer Barbarians"; John Burgoyne's "Our Volunteers," which warned of the dangers of French militarism and the need to bolster the nation's military forces; Thornton Hunt"s biography of his father, Leigh Hunt; excerpts from Allen Young's journal (complete with an elaborate fold-out map) about his search for Sir John Franklin's lost Arctic expedition; the first of Thackeray's "Roundabout Papers"; and the poems "Father Trout's Inaugurative Ode to the Author Vanityo f Fair" a piece glorifying Thackeray as editor by Reverend F. Mahoney, and "The First Morning of 1860, " a wartime poem urging peace by Mrs. Archer Clive. This issue included six, rather than the standard seven articles due to the length of Allen Young's excerpt. Despite this, Peter Smith maintains that the first number has certain qualities which became typical of the magazine: "there is a topicality, not in the sense that it deals with the news, but that it treats o f ideas and facts which are of concern; secondly, there is the variety of subjects considered, and finally, there is the fact that the contributors are all men of authority in their subjects" (P. Smith 31). The intelligent Comhill reader, it was supposed, would be interested in literature, biography, science, the military, and foreign lands (P. Smith 31).

* John Sutherland points out that by December 1862, in the middle ofRomola's serial run, sales of the magazine had dropped by 70,000 to 50,000 copies while expenditures doubled ("ComhiU's Sales" 107).

" Smith's habit of signing authors to write serials before he had seen them and after they had completed their most popular works tended to leave the magazine with authors of great 106 reputation and works of luke-warm popularity (Schmidt, "Novelists" 148). Examples of this are Eliot's Romola as her first production afterMill on the Floss; Collins' Armadale written immediately following The Woman in White; Harriet Beecher Stowe's Agnes of Sorrento, written on the heels of Uncle Tom's Cabin; and Thackeray'sComhill serialsLxmel the Widower and The Adxxniutes of Philip. Only Trollope seemed able to match his previous success and even he failed with his short serial, The Stmggles of Brown, lanes, and Robinson. G. H. Lewes lamented thatRomola has "unfortunately not been so generally popular as 1 hoped and believed its intrinsic beauty would have made it" (qtd. in Glynn 140). Though Romola did not produce more readers, the novel was consistently featured in the honorary opening spot of every issue and included two illustrations by Frederic Leighton per installment—double the usual number—for ten of its twelve parts (Tiemersma 70- 1 ). George Eliot's rare serialization of her work in a British magazine still provided intellectual prestige and dignity for theComhill (Schmidt, "Novelists" 148). Likewise, the sensational ArmaMe saved Harper's Magazine—in which it ran concurrently—from extinction, but only slowed the ComhiU's decline in readership (Glynn 143).

The fact that Thackeray's own fiction serials for Comhill,the including Lovel the Widower and The Adventures of PMlip, were not as well-received as his editorialRoundabout Papers probably reflects his increasing interest in non-fiction. Furthermore, it was George Smith rather than Thackeray who negotiated all the major deals with novelists. Elizabeth Gaskell was even unwilling to communicate with Thackeray about her work due to his lack of encouragement: "My only feeling about not doing any thing you ask me for the magazine is becauseI don't think Thackeray would ever quite like it, & yet you know it would be under his supervision. Please to understand how much I admire him, & how I know that somewhere or another he has got a noble & warm self,—onlyI can't get near it" (Chappie and Pollard 576-77).

" It was also rumored that Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon—co-founder of Cirton College with Emily Davies—was the model for the character of Romola.

" Interestingly, the Comhill argument seems to have disturbed someone at the feminist Victoria Press whose November 1863 article in the English Woman's journal, "The Comhill on Men and Women," complains about what it interprets as theComhiU's crass call for women to belike men. While the English Woman's journal feared that women would lose their moral authority if they became too masculine, thejournal was probably also reacting against the fact that the ComhiU's liberatory project for women was presented primarily as a protection for men rather than as an improvement for women and, as a result, it offered little practical advice for women seeking profeæional opportunities. The journal is specifically offended by the September 1863Comhill article "Anti- Respectability," written by Fitzjames Stephen. This article, which is placed second in the issue immediately following Trollope's The Small House At Allington, argues that women are not inherently more virtuous than men but are only more moral because of the restrictions placed on them by society. Stephen calls for the expansion of women's rights but suggests that once societal restrictions on women's behavior are lifted, women will lose their moral superiority. The journal argues instead for a time when "men and women ... shall reverence and uphold everywhere that virtue which is of no sex—which is the offspring of God's love, not of man's prudence" (181).

Nana Rinehart points out the parallel between Stephen's "Keeping up Appearances" and Trollope's novel He Knew He WasRight as "Hugh Stanbury's rationalization o f an early marriage on a limited income... reads like a point-by-point refutation of the disastrous consequences of early marriage predicted by Fitzjames Stephen" (8). Interestingly, "Keeping up Appearances" immediately precedes the second installment of Trollope'sThe Struggles of Brawn, jones, and Robinson in the September 1861 issue of the Comhill. Although Trollope indicates in The Stmggles that ffnancial setbacks can occurafter marriage, theComhill primarily focuses on preventing marriages thatbegin under financial duress.

107 " The ComhiU's anti-marriage market sentiments are also apparentFramley in Parsonage, in which Trollope declares that "girls should not marry for money A lady who can sell herself for a title or an estate, for ait income or a set of family diamonds, treats herself as a farmer treats his sheep and oxen" (July 1860,54). Of further interest are the poems "Sold" (May 1861) and "A Moral Man" (March 1863) and the anti-marriage and anti-fiction essay "Dignity" (May 1861 ). This essay asserts that novels encourage women to see every man as a potential husband, thereby causing the deterioration of dignity among such readers who begin to view everyone in terms of novelistic stereotypes.

This article is the second part of a series that began with "Middle-Class Education in England—Boys" (October 1864) in which Martineau agrees that boys schools need reform but resists the idea that the government should step in to administer the changes.

Lillian F. Shankman argues that this article by Anne Thackeray (Aunt Anny to Leslie Stephen's children) had a direct influence on the young Virginia Stephen and in many ways inspired Woolf's A Room of One's Own and the development of modem feminism (168-9). In her 1873 revision of the article for a collection of essays of the same title, Thackeray added to her agenda an argument for women's right to vote (Shankman 168).

108 CHAPTERS

(IM)PROPER READING FOR WOMEN: BELGRA VIA MAGAZINE AND THE DEFENSE OF THE SENSATION NOVEL, 1866-71

Founded in 1866 as a partnership between successful publisher John

Maxwell and popular sensation novelist Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Belgravia;

A London Magazine was aimed at what Alvar Ellegard calls "a genteel, middle-class, lady public, of low to fair educational standard" (32).' For this audience, Belgravia offered an abundance of serialized sensation fiction along with poetry, travel narratives, biographies, and essays on fashion, history, science, and the arts accompanied by lavish illustrations, all for the bargain price of a shilling. What Braddon considered a rather snobbish title for her magazine was intended as "bait for the shillings" of upwardly mobile readers who hoped to signify their arrival into the cultural elite by purchasing a magazine named for one of the most fashionable areas of London (Wolff,

"Devoted Disciple" 138). This bait was successful enough to gamer a respectable average circulation of 15,000 in an increasingly crowded field of periodical literature (Scheuerle 31-2). The most powerful aspect of Belgravia's

109 appeal, though, was its sensation fiction, which presented readers with exciting and intricate plots focusing on supposedly respectable middle-class citizens, often women, who were secretly involved in criminal activities such as bigamy, arson, forgery, and even murder.^ The appeal of sensationalism helped the magazine reach a circulation of 18,000 by 1868, thus rivaling the well-respected Cornhill Magazine in sales (Ellegard 32). Against a background of nineteenth-century literary criticism opposing the sensation novel, 1 will examine how Braddon's Belgravia Magazine interacted with and confounded the dominant critical discourse to support this genre as proper reading for women, thereby revising the conception of the relationship of women readers to literary culture and blurring the boundaries between high and low culture that were developed by critics to ensure the perpetuation of a superior national cultural identity.

Specifically, 1 will analyze the ways in which Belgravia counteracted critics' rampant fear of sensation fiction as a sign of an infectious, mass- produced low culture that threatened the literary reputation of the nation and corrupted its women readers. Instead of presenting sensationalism as a threat to the cultural health of the nation, Belgravia allied it with a high cultural tradition descending from Sophocles, Shakespeare, Dickens, and Tennyson and defined sensationalism as a key to sustaining the nation's interest in literature. Furthermore, Belgravia insisted that sensation fiction would increase, rather than decrease, women's abilities to read critically. Thus,

110 Braddon legitimized women's enjoyment of a type of fiction that many critics believed crossed the acceptable boundaries of morality and taste by maintaining that women could read about criminals and adulterers without becoming them; that they could, in fact, become more skilled readers of life and fiction through exposure to a new realism offered by sensational themes.

In fact, the magazine championed the cultural value of a form that many critics saw as non-educational and potentially socially disruptive. According to the critical agenda Braddon put forth in Belgravia, overzealous and biased critics—rather than the authors and readers of sensation novels—were to blame for the controversy over sensationalism.

"BY THE UNTHINKING CROWD SHE IS REGARDED AS A WOMAN OF GENIUS": MARY ELIZABETH BRADDON, FOUNDER OF THE SENSAHON NOVEL

Sensationalism was by far the most contentious literary issue for critics of the 1860s. It was a subset—albeit a dominant and domineering one—of the larger and broader struggle to draw distinct lines of demarcation between high and low culture. This critical debate was led by Matthew Arnold's demands for the nation's attention to be focused on only the glorifying aspects of culture—on sweetness and light and the best that has been known and thought in the world—to be legislated by a body of critics similar to the

French Literary Academy. Arnold's conception endowed literary critics with

111 an unprecedented authority to serve not only as the guardians of culture, but

as moral educators of the public whose duty It was to teach the nation, and

particularly women, what and how to read. For many members of this

growing class of professional critics, sensation fiction became the defining

issue of their careers, a subject on which they could safely take a stand and

make their mark as crusaders whose mission It was to save the nation's culture by separating the good from the bad, the tasteful reflection of a superior civilization from the barbaric trash produced solely for profit.

Sensation fiction was an easy target as an upstart genre that threatened to destroy the already contested respect of the novel, and many saw Braddon as the leader of the pack of sensationalists who would bring the novel and the nation's literary culture to its knees. Henry James was one of the first critics to crown Braddon "the founder of the sensation novel," a title which brought with it more ridicule than accolades.^ With the wild popularity of Lady

Audley's Secret (1861), the "founder" of the embattled genre became the favorite target of outraged critics attempting to combat the threat of the popular to the respectability of literature as a whole.

While the three best-selling novels of the decade were

"sensational"—Wilkie Collins's Woman in White (1860), Ellen Price Wood's

East Lynne (1861), and Braddon's Lady Aiidley —Braddon received the brunt of the critical uproar. The critical focus on Braddon was partly due to a precarious personal life that included a father who failed to provide for his

112 family, a previous career as an actress, and a live-in relationship with her

publisher John Maxwell and his five children while his legal wife was

confined to a mental institution. Braddon and Maxwell had their first child

together in 1862 but were not able to marry legally until 1874 when Maxwell's

wife died. Their socially unacceptable relationship turned even more

scandalous when in 1864 Maxwell leaked false news of their marriage to the

newspaper hoping to put an end to the gossip they had aroused. However,

this news only stoked the fire as counter-reports issued by Maxwell's brother-

in-law revealed that his first wife was, indeed, still living. Robert Lee Wolff

notes that a "sustained barrage of.. . one anonymous critic after another . . .

unlimbered his batteries against [Braddon] personally, accusing her of

immorality: at first in her writing and, as time went on, by less and less veiled

innuendo, in her personal life as well" (Sensational Victorian 188). In the

minds of her critics, Braddon's sensational life and her sensational story lines

were inextricably linked. Braddon's violation of Victorian codes of proper

femininity as an actress, writer, and mistress who was thrust into the

spotlight when thousands of copies of her books began to sell was

compounded when she took on the powerful public position as editor of a

family literary magazine. The intense critical onslaught against Braddon

culminated soon after, and perhaps in response to, the successful founding of

Belgravia which helped to turn Braddon's sensationalistic tendencies into a sustained critical philosophy.^

113 One of the first and most devastating articles devoted solely to

Braddon's body of work was published anonymously in 1865 by W. Fraser Rae in the North British Review.^ A close look at Rae's review exposes the roots of the critical fear of sensationalism and exemplifies critics' attempts to establish themselves as the supreme judges of both morality and culture that began earlier in the century but culminated in the debate over the sensation novel. While Rae sets out to assess Braddon according to a "purely literary standard," he in fact carries out a moralistic attack based on his contention that "That which is In bad taste is usually bad in morals " (181). Upon examining a broad range of Braddon's work in order "to form a comprehensive opinion" (181), Rae concludes that her novels "glitter on the surface, but the substance is base metal. Hence it is that the impartial critic is compelled . . . to unite with the moralist in regarding them as mischievous in their tendency and as one of the abominations of the age. Into uncontaminated minds they will instil [s/c] false views of human conduct" by leading readers "to conclude that the chief end of man is to commit murder, and his highest merit to escape punishment; that women are born to attempt to commit murders, and to succeed in committing bigamy" (203, 202). Rae's goal is to combat the enticing "glitter" offered by Braddon's work by convincing readers that they can be "contaminated" by such base and immoral stories. To accomplish his task, Rae carries out a three-pronged attack on Braddon's novels condemning their lack of realism, their appalling

114 disregard for feminine virtue, and their dangerous popularity that transcended social class.

The issue of realism was important for critics of the period, who often used the undefinable category as a litmus test to determine whether a work could be considered legitimate art or merely "base metal." Patrick Brantlinger points out that

The development of the sensation novel marks a crisis in the history of literary realism. .. . [Sjensationalists were breaking down the conventions of realistic fiction and pointing the way to the emergence of later popular forms and perhaps also to later, more conscious assertions of the need to go beyond realism into all those mysterious areas of life and art that supposedly omniscient narrators often seem not to know. (27)

As is apparent in Harper's and the Cornhill, critics typically categorized a text as "realistic" only if it was judged to set forth a model of proper moral behavior for its readers. So, as Rae confirms, moral and literary judgments were closely entwined for critics of the day. Sensationalism, then, presented a unique problem to critics since, as Winifred Hughes declares, what distinguishes sensationalism from other literary forms at mid-century is

the violent yoking of romance and realism, traditionally the two contradictory modes of literary perception. . . . The subject matter of the sensationalists is at once outrageous and carefully documented, 'wild yet domestic,' extraordinary in intensity and yet confined to the experience of ordinary people operating in familiar settings. The narrative technique combines a melodramatic tendency to abstraction with the precise detail of detective fiction, an unlimited use of suspense and coincidence with an almost scientific concern for accuracy and authenticity. (16)

115 Sensationalism shared many of the qualities of sentimentalism with its

melodramatic plots involving endangered women and villainous men—or,

in the case of sensation tales, villainous women and endangered men—and

its focus on bodily reactions, replacing sentimental tears with sensational fear

and excitement. Sensation fiction was unique, however, in its obsessive

concern with "journalistic" or "photographic" details that meticulously

represented scenery and physical characteristics of people and objects. The

genre, therefore, employed a use of "realism" that was divorced from

morality. The attempts of sensation writers to present scenes that were

"realistic" in the sense of being detail-oriented and technically accurate were sneeringly labeled as unrealistic as a result of their concomitant depiction of

"immoral" characters involved in criminal situations. Rae condemns

Braddon's characters by concluding that while she spends an awful lot of time describing the exact hue and wave of their hair, "not a single personage has any resemblance to the people we meet with in the flesh" (186). To admit that

Braddon's characters were like real people would be to admit that society had a corrupt underbelly hidden by middle-class Victorian respectability, which is exactly what Braddon's fiction set out to prove and what Rae and others refused to concede.

A particular worry for Rae and other critics was the behavior of the female characters in sensation novels. In contrast to the virtuous maidens of domestic realist fiction, sensation heroines such as the seemingly perfect Lady

116 Audley—who was, among other things, a bigamist, arsonist, and attempted murderer—embodied most of the values and behaviors that society hoped to prevent in its women. Sensational tales like Lady Audley's Secret showed readers that immoral women could be dangerously wrapped in the clothing of respectable middle-class wives. Braddon's depiction of Lady Audley leads

Rae to call the novel "one of the most noxious books of all time" (187), and to attack its author's femininity and artistry: "An authoress who could make one of her sex play [such a role], is evidently acquainted with a very low type of female character, or else incapable of depicting what she knows to be true"

(190). Based on his moralistic view of the proper functions of literature and criticism, Rae could only conceive of Braddon as either a depraved woman or a liar. Rae's inability or refusal to find a middle ground was in a large measure due to the sensation novel's participation "in a rewriting of [the] script of the feminine," that allowed its women readers and writers to "self­ consciously [explore] or implicitly [expose] the contradictions of prevailing versions of femininity, or [develop) new styles and modes through which to articulate their own specific sense of the feminine" (Pykett, "Improper"

Feminine 5). Faced with an unstable and shifting definition of middle-class femininity, Rae will not or cannot concede that reading about deceitful and criminal women who are ultimately punished for their actions might teach women readers how not to behave. Instead, he—along with the majority of elite critics—clings to the charge that Braddon is a hack writer incapable of

117 more than conceiving of an eventful plot that hooks her eager readers against

their own better judgment. Rae's critical assumptions precluded the

possibility that popular fiction could be good for readers as he sought to

reinforce and ingrain the boundaries between feminine/popular/low cultural

writing and masculine/artistic/ high cultural works. Rae had to attack

Braddon personally In order to reinforce these gendered critical formulations

that Nicola Diane Thompson claims served as a short-hand for a thumbs- down or thumbs-up critical judgement (20).

The fact that sensational plots attracted a wide spectrum of readers that

crossed class lines was a key to the fear that the genre would lower the level of

British literary culture. Rae was startled that "By the unthinking crowd

[Braddon] is regarded as a woman of genius" (180). This "false" conception, along with Braddon's "bewitching" popularity "succeeded in making the

literature of the Kitchen the favourite reading of the Drawing room" (204).

To combat an unprecedented phenomenon in which the largest reading public ever known seemed to be gaining control over the nation's culture,

Rae fulfilled his critical duty by attempting to educate and reign in the distasteful opinions of the masses that threatened the very roots of high literary culture. Lyn Pykett succinctly summarizes the connection between sensation as a genre and the development of strict divisions between high and low cultural forms:

Mass-produced for mass consumption, the sensation novel was used by some critics to mark the boundary between high art and popular artifact. Unlike the productions of high culture, it was argued, 118 sensation novels were not written to 'satisfy the unconquerable yearnings of an artist's soul', rather they were produced by the market law of supply and demand' and were redolent of the manufactory or the shop'. . . . In short, sensation fiction disturbingly blurred the boundaries between the classes, between high art, low art, and no art (newspapers), between the public and the private, and between the respectable and the low life or demi-monde. (Sensation Novel 9)

Rae's agenda to counteract such a dangerous literary phenomenon and shore up the high cultural domain as a means of raising the tenor of the nation's culture as a whole culminates in a feeble attempt to convince readers that they should simply avoid reading sensation fiction because it is a waste of time: "It is not enough that a work should interest, it must be capable of being perused without the reflecting reader being induced to lament the time he has lost over its pages. No discriminating reader ever laid down these volumes without regretting that he had taken them up, and that their authoress should have so misemployed her undoubted talents as to produce them" (187). However, Rae was all too aware of the fact that Braddon's fiction would bring to any "magazine to which she contributes ... a large circulation" that would "enrich its fortunate proprietors" (Rae 180).

Considering Braddon's hold on the public and the general resistance to female power in the public sphere, the establishment of her very own literary magazine was sure to bring with it a heightened sense of danger among critics who would inevitably turn up the critical heat. As the editor of a major literary magazine, "Braddon commanded much more literary authority—and the option of employing other (male) critics to 'justify her calling' for her,"

119 and, more importantly, she gained for herself "a respectable literary persona and a voice in Victorian critical discourse" (Robinson 110). The founding of her own magazine furnished Braddon and the entire genre of sensation fiction with a major and visible means of defense. With the establishment of

Belgravia, Braddon was provided with a monthly forum in which to respond to charges that she believed were unfair to her, her readers, and the entire genre of sensation fiction. Braddon enlisted her new magazine to defend herself in personal skirmishes as well as to fight the larger battle against the high culture critics who disparaged sensationalism and, whether implicitly or explicitly, its devoted audience of women readers.

DETECTING THE BIRDS OF PREY AND PROTECTING CHARLOTTE'S INHERITANCE: SENSATION FICTION'S CREATION OF ACTIVE READERS

Perhaps most notably, Braddon used her magazine as a showcase for her own and others' sensational fiction. Each issue contained two serialized novels and at least three short stories, many by Braddon and most of a sensational nature. The controversies over realism, gender, and class identified by the critics of sensationalism are clearly at issue in Braddon's most prominent sensation novels featured in Belgravia: Birds of Prey and its sequel Charlotte's Inheritance. This series dominates the magazine's first five years with its almost continuous run from November 1866 to February 1869.

120 Wolff contends that these novels "Intended to be read together .. . made up

[Braddon's) longest sustained narrative, comparable in suspense and intricacy of plot to Wilkie Collins at his very best" (S V 179). Tracing themes of deception, theft, hidden identity, poisoning, and murder, these novels fit the sensational mold set forth by Braddon in her previous best-sellers. In particular, this series expresses the potentially disastrous consequences of middle-class respectability and female passivity, which for Braddon are signs of an unhealthy nation that refuses to look beneath the surface to interrogate the legitimacy of society's values and beliefs. For Braddon, these novels urged readers to think critically about the restrictive nature and devious possibilities that underwrote accepted class behavior and gender roles. Braddon not only sought to give readers life lessons that educated them about the dangers lurking beneath codes of conduct and dress, she also endeavored to raise her exploration of the underbelly of Victorian society to the level of realist art.

In Birds of Prey, Braddon contrasts the appearance with the reality of accepted class and gender roles when she tells the story of the "eminently respectable" Mr. Philip Sheldon who murders Tom Halliday, the husband of his previous girlfriend Georgina, so that he can marry her and gain control of her dead husband's money. After Sheldon slowly poisons his old rival, he quickly marries the ultra-passive widow and receives guardianship of her equally submissive daughter Charlotte. The other "birds of prey" of the novel's title. Captain Horatio Paget and George Sheldon, are only mildly

121 corrupt compared to the murderous Philip Sheldon. Paget is a swindler who

gains access to the rich through lies and deceit, using his former position,

from which he has fallen, to gain access to free dinners and lodging as well as

to enough money in bad credit to make his living. George Sheldon employs

Valentine Hawkehurst to help him search for the heir to a great fortune

which has been unclaimed so that he can profit from someone else's

undiscovered money. The race to discover the heir entices both Philip

Sheldon and Paget to begin their own searches and "when the heir appears to

be Charlotte herself, she and the reader must face together the likelihood that

her stepfather will kill her for the money, as he had killed her father" (Wolff,

S V 180).

Birds of Prey abruptly stops with many loose ends dangling, but the

public is assured in a note from Braddon that Charlotte's tale with its looming storm cloud, a "harbinger of tempest and terror," will be concluded in the

forthcoming sequel, Charlotte's Inheritance (October 1867, 459). Not only did

the two-part serial sustain a healthy readership for Belgravia, it allowed

Braddon to publish and profit from two three-volume novels that would go

from magazine, to Mudie's Circulating Library, to the railway bookstalls,

making more money every step of the way. That audiences were hooked is

indicated by Braddon's apology for a six-month delay between the conclusion of Birds of Prey and the beginning of its highly demanded sequel. To appease

the public, Braddon promised to expand the page limit of her monthly

122 magazine to accommodate Charlotte's Inheritance sooner than she had

planned.*

In the sequel, Philip Sheldon does indeed begin his plan to slowly

poison his step-daughter after he has duped her into taking out a life

insurance plan of her own. Meanwhile, Horatio Paget discovers that the real

heir to the fortune is actually Charlotte's secret French cousin Gustave

Lenoble. Paget introduces Lenoble to his daughter Diana with the hope that

the Frenchman will be overwhelmed by her beauty (which he is) and will

propose to her (which he does) so that he can live out the rest of his life in

comfort on Lenoble's inheritance (unfortunately for him, poetic justice

requires that he die before this happens). Valentine Hawkehurst, who is

engaged to Charlotte, eventually discovers Sheldon's murderous intentions

and, with the help of Diana and those who suspected Sheldon of the earlier

murder, he rescues Charlotte from imminent death by eloping with her, thus eliminating her step-father's control over her finances. Paget belatedly discloses his knowledge of the true heir, and Philip Sheldon escapes to

America only to return completely downtrodden to die in a snow bank in front of his step-daughter's home.

As this brief sketch of the complex plot suggests, one of the major messages of these novels is that extreme respectability and gentlemanliness should not be trusted because they may mask impending danger and deceit.

Despite Philip Sheldon's reprehensible acts, he maintains his public

123 respectability well into the second novel in the series. Based solely on his

appearance, his home, and his position, everyone in the community assumes

that he must be irreproachable: "Of course he was eminently respectable. On

that question no [one] had ever hazarded a doubt. A householder with such a doorstep and such muslin curtains could not be other than the most correct of

mankind" (November 1866, 6). As we see in this example, the narrator, in addition to reporting the exciting twists and turns of the plot, maintains a

running commentary full of misjudgments that must be recognized as ironic to be understood. Thus, readers would have to read carefully in order to

learn the true lesson of the tale, and the requirement of careful reading made critics doubt the moral effectiveness of this subtle form of didacticism. The murder Sheldon commits goes unnoticed primarily because those who suspect him are afraid to come forward against such a "respectable" man; readers are meant to learn to separate themselves from the passive community through the lessons of the novel which teach them to speak up for justice regardless of potential embarrassment. George Sheldon is aware of his brother's murderous plan, but, even though the victim is a long-time friend of his, he fails to act in part because he fears that his word cannot prevail over his brother's reputation. Similarly, the doctor and the maid who attend the ill-fated Halliday are silently forced into compliance with

Sheldon's recommendation that they take no action on the dying man's behalf due to their comparably low status in the community. The passive

124 acceptance of appearances also allows Horatio Paget to swindle wealthy patrons. The narrator conveys a biting criticism of ignorant passivity in the description of Paget as "a gentlemanly vulture, whose suave accents and perfect manners were fatal to the unwary" and as a man involved in "those petty shifts and miserable falsifications whereby the birds of prey thrive upon the flesh and blood of hapless pigeons" (December 1866, 160). Braddon's motley crew of deceivers and criminals exemplifies the dangers of judging individuals based solely on their outward appearances and apparent social positions and encourages the careful discrimination of one's character based on behavior rather than class.

Just as respectability blinds justice, Braddon illustrates that feminine passivity allows evil to reign. Again and again, the narrator's bitter tone drives home to readers that they must develop their own critical insights and avoid the passivity that contributes to the negative portrayal of women readers in the press and could even destroy their lives. In her passivity,

Georgina Halliday actually aids in her husband's murder, and, once she is married to Sheldon, she allows him to control every aspect of her life: "so completely did Mr. Sheldon rule his wife that when he informed her inferentially that she was a very happy woman, she accepted his view of the subject, and was content to believe herself blessed" (January 1867, 279).

Likewise, Paget's wife "was one of those meek, loving creatures who are essentially cowardly.... [she] was afraid of her elegant husband; and she

125 worshipped and waited on him in meek silence, keeping the secret of her

own sorrows" (December 1866, 162). If these women had strong minds and

wills of their own, they could have prevented or at least exposed their

husbands' criminal behavior. Instead, Georgina stands quietly by as her

husband and then her daughter are poisoned, and Mrs. Paget reveals that she

does not even have the will to live when she withers away and leaves her

daughter Diana to be brought up in "the nest of vultures" that "every day . ..

brought its new lesson of trickery and falsehood" (January 1867, 260). While

Charlotte's "respectable" life encourages her to accept blindly her step-father's

guidance to secretly take out a life insurance plan that contributes to her own

demise, Diana Paget's scandalous life strips away her passive femininity and

enables her to become the strongest and most active woman in the series.

Diana is essentially Braddon's model for the proper woman reader:

while she has knowledge of undesirable things which erode her innocence, she is actually better off because she is able to detect the evil around her and is equipped to deal with men such as her father and Philip Sheldon. Thus, women who read sensation novels and are made aware of the possible gap between appearance and reality have a greater chance of detecting and preventing unrespectable behavior. Braddon opposes the assumption that women are more moral if they are kept innocent by pointing out that innocence is merely ignorant vulnerability. Braddon implicitly argues that the education and simulated worldly experience provided by sensation fiction

126 would allow women to become "detectives" as they followed clues and

deciphered messages to become active readers of life and fiction who could

make informed moral choices. By depicting feminine passivity as a naive

and destructive ideal, Braddon encourages women to think for themselves

and implies (with the successful marriage of Diana to the noble French heir)

that they will be rewarded for such behavior. Furthermore, by highlighting

the drawbacks of eminent respectability, Braddon debunks the ideal of innate

gentility, reinforces the concept of earned respectability, and carries on the

fantasy embodied in the title of her magazine. This clears the way for

upwardly mobile readers to create their own positions of "true" respectability.

Furthermore, Braddon's anti-respectability and anti-passivity lay the

groundwork for her questioning of the "respectable" rule of the critics and

enable her to actively carry out a campaign to establish sensationalism as a

new and important form of realism.

"UNVARNISHED REALISM" AS AN ESCAPE FROM DULL "NAMBY-PAMBYISM": SENSATION FICTION AS A BOLD NEW FORM OF HIGH ART

In Birds of Prey and Charlotte's Inheritance, Braddon forges a new form of realistic fiction that moves "beyond the genteel realism of a Trollope or a

Thackeray to unlock the true mysteries of life—those that more proper

Victorians thought should be walled off from the reader" (Brantlinger 12).

127 Upon reading a review of Trollope's Miss Mackenzie in the Saturday Reviezv,

Braddon proclaims in March 1866 that

The realistic school has been written up so perseveringly of late—always to the disparagement of every thing romantic & imaginative—that 1 was beginning to lose all courage, & to bow my head to the idea that the subject of a respectable novel is bound to be all that is trite & commonplace. But 1 find that when these reviewers have made their Gods they turn upon them & rend them—and henceforward 1 refuse to bow the knee to their narrow rule. (Wolff, "DD" 132)

Against what she refers to as the "deification of the commonplace" that characterized the realism of Trollope and others who were praised by the critics (Wolff, "DD" 134), Braddon attempted to establish a new kind of realism akin to the work of French novelists—considered immoral by the

English critics—whom Braddon admired, translated, and sometimes copied.^

Wolff contends that "It was surely her reading of Balzac that suggested to

[Braddon] the raffish group. Birds of Prey, around whom her big double novel

. . . revolved." He takes as evidence that fact that "She even introduced

[Balzac] directly into its dialogue" (Wolff, S V 180-81). In Birds of Prey, Philip

Sheldon classifies supposedly realist novels as "senseless trash" because "he had found that the heroes of them were impracticable beings, who were always talking of honor and chivalry, and always sacrificing their own interests in an utterly preposterous manner" (January 1867, 277). However, once he reads Balzac he is "riveted by the hideous cynicism, the supreme power of penetration into the vilest of wicked hearts; and he had flung the book from him at last with an expression of unmitigated admiration"

128 (January 1867, 277). As Wolff surmises, 'This could easily be taken for

[Braddon's] own opinion; yet if a critic had reproached her for immorality or

cynicism, she could easily have retorted that she had put the words into the

mouth of a murderer, and that they were intended to represent his opinion,

not hers" (SV181).

In her letters to Edward Bulwer-Lytton, her literary mentor, Braddon

carried on a conversation about realism specifically concerning the French

realists Gustave Flaubert and Honore de Balzac. While Braddon is fascinated

by their "unvarnished realism," she fears that such writing is "the very

reverse of poetry" and dangerously peers "into the most hideous sores in the

social body" (Wolff, "DD" 20, 27). Despite Braddon's mixed feelings about an

"unvarnished realism" devoid of morality and the fact that she has her

literary alter ego, Valentine Hawkehurst, proclaim that "There is an odor of

the dissecting-room pervading all my friend Balzac's novels, and I don't think

he was capable of painting a fresh, healthy nature" (March 1867, 9-10),

Braddon persists in her endeavor to forge ahead with "sensational realism."

As she explains to Bulwer-Lytton, "I believe that if I listened to the howling of

the critics and abandoned what they call sensation I should sink into the dullest namby-pambyism" (Wolff, DD 130). In her magazine, Braddon hoped she would be able to legitimize sensation as an acceptable form of realism that did not require the slavish adherence to morality and acceptable class and gender roles that she conceived of as dull "namby-pambyism." This approach

129 to "sensational realism" constituted both her means of pleasing the public and of creating a form that she hoped would be received as high art.

As Solveig Robinson contends, Braddon's editorship of Belgravia provided her with a chance "to elevate herself from the relatively low literary status of a sensation novelist to the more exalted status of a woman of letters"

(109). When Braddon announced the new project to Bulwer-Lytton she was somewhat apologetic about its self-promoting function: "You will wonder after this—if indeed you honour so insignificant a person with yr wonder—to see my name blazoned anon on hoardings & railway stations in connection with a new Magazine—but 1 think that It is not me—but some bolder & busier spirit which worketh/or me" (Wolff, "DD" 136). Indeed, Belgravia prominently showcased the name of its "conductor" on its cover, with the name of her married lover and publisher in a subordinate position, so that the magazine itself became closely allied to the sensationalism that she symbolized. Braddon's concern for her literary status prompted her at first to distance herself from this sensational image as she explained to her mentor that she was "going in for a strong sensation story for 'Belgravia' not because I particularly believe in 'sensation,' but because I think the public shilling can only be extracted by strong measures" (Wolff, "DD" 138-9). With the publication of a new magazine and the culmination of the criticism directed toward her, Braddon expressed concerns about her literary status to Bulwer-

Lytton:

130 I want to serve two masters. I want to be artistic and to please yo ii. I want to be sensational, & to please Mudie's subscribers. Are these two things possible, or is it the stem scriptural dictum not to be got over. Thou canst not serve God and Mammon.' Can the sensational be elevated by art, & redeemed from all it's [sicj coarseness? (Wolff, "DD" 14)

Bulwer-Lytton attempted to ease Braddon's anxiety by declaring that "A great

novel writer must necessarily be a popular writer" (Wolff, "DD" 29). With

her mentor's encouragement, Braddon endeavored to answer her own

question about the viability of producing both artistic and popular novels affirmatively in her magazine by making it her mission to establish the

popular genre of sensation fiction as simultaneously worthy of critical praise.

Belgravia, then, allowed Braddon to create "a critical forum that was friendly"

to sensation fiction and that worked to reform the critical discussion of the genre (Robinson 109).

In Belgravia, Braddon turned on its head the conception of sensation

fiction as either a "failure of realistic representation" or an injudicious

"attempt to extend the domain of fictional representation" and combated the conflicting tendencies to dismiss sensationalism as a feminine form or to censure it as an anti-feminine form (Pykett, IF 33-4). Instead, the magazine capitalized on the idea that women were good at photographically depicting details in writing due to their superior skills of observation and analysis and pointed out that these skills were displayed for decades in the private and respectable form of the letter, which had recently been transformed into the public form of the sensation novel. In Mortimer Collins's "Mrs. Harris"

131 (December 1870), an article about a model letter-writer of nearly a century

earlier, letters are described as conveyors of domestic sensations that are really

no different from those depicted in sensation novels.® Collins contends that

with the decline of women's letter-writing and the advent of the penny-post

and the telegraph, "you are supposed to see everything in the paper. But then

you don't see everything in the paper; journalists are not behind the scenes.

They tell you, rather tardily, that one man has discarded his wife, and that

another has disappointed his creditors; but they fail to furnish the true causes

of such occurrences" (159). The woman letter-writer, then, is the only one

who can truly describe events in detail and offer explanations for the causes of

things, but "publishers have found her out" and she now "devotes herself to

three-volume novels" (159). Even though Collins prefers the old letters to

the current form of women's writing, sensation novels are promoted as more

detailed and comprehensive than the newspapers. According to Belgravia,

sensation fiction provides a realistic analysis of contemporary life that should

be considered as evidence of women's abilities to translate a private art into a

public one.^

132 THE FREEDOM TO CHOOSE THEIR OWN BOOKS AND THEIR OWN STAYS: DISPELLING THE MYTH OF THE DISEASED WOMAN READER

Braddon laid the foundation for her agenda to reshape the critical discourse surrounding sensationalism by creating a positive image of those who were perceived to be sensation's primary victims: women readers,'” In

Belgravia, Braddon championed the idea that women readers "should be empowered to make choices" about what to read, and she set out to educate readers "about literary and critical standards . . . thereby encouraging them to accept responsibility for their role in determining which voices in literature and criticism would prevail" (Robinson 116; 119). The magazine consistently maintained that women's ability to choose their own reading material was beneficial to society. George Augustus Sala, a major figure in Braddon's bevy of sensation promoters, supports Belgravia's conception of the independent woman reader when he argues in "The Cant of Modern Criticism"

(November 1867) that "Novels are written for grown people and not for babes and sucklings"; therefore, grown women should be free to choose whatever reading material they desire. He speculates that if he had a daughter: "When she came to be one and twenty, or got married, I should no more think of dictating to her as to what kinds of books she should read, than as to what kinds of stays she should wear—if she wore any at all" (54). Robinson has stated that

Sala's use of the stays analogy clearly positions Belgravia in a progressive critical camp: just as the rational dress advocates took the 133 position that women should be empowered through education to make choices about their clothing, Belgravia took the critical position that readers . . . should be empowered to make choices about their leisure reading materials. (116)

Under Braddon's leadership, Belgravia went against the notion that critics

were necessary to teach people what to read and instead empowered the

woman reader to be her own critic.

In order to develop their critical skills, Belgravia contended that

women should read sensational fiction. By studying sensational plots and

characters, women would become more, rather than less, skilled at reading

critically. As Kate Flint succinctly puts it, the genre of sensation fiction

mocked

the belief that women read uncritically, unthoughtfully: the very characteristics which their authors were themselves accused of engendering. [Sensation authors] refute the idea that a woman reader is mentally passive and accepting of what she consumes, and emphasize her capacity to act as a rational, rather than as an emotional, being.. .. [T]hey stimulate, simultaneously, their readers' capacity for self- awareness and social analysis and judgment. (15)

To support her point about women's ability to gain critical thinking skills,

Braddon featured T. H. S. Escott's "Vagueness" in the May 1868 issue of

Belgravia. This article spoke out against the charge that women were

uncritical—and therefore corruptible—readers by claiming that the readers

who are most in danger of "a habit of slovenliness . . which is absolutely destructive of all mental improvement or discipline" are not women but critics "who believe they see everything at once and feel they can grasp complexity and think that nothing can be hidden from their view" (412-13).

134 "Vagueness" is that indistinct view of the world caused by technological

advances that produce an overwhelming abundance of literature which has

turned readers into "skimmers" and "skippers" who lack a full

comprehension of what they read: "every morrow brings with it . . . fresh

newspapers to be read, fresh magazines to be skimmed, new works of fiction

or science or politics through which [readers] must gallop at express rate,

without cessation or pause" (410). Since professional readers and writers were

considered just as likely to fall prey to uncritical reading practices under these

harried circumstances, women were acquitted of the slanderous charges

frequently lodged against them and legitimized as readers of the sensation genre. Belgravia simultaneously promoted an image of a proper woman

reader who was free to choose what she read (most likely sensation fiction), to enjoy reading it, and to leam to think critically at the same time.

A comparison of illustrations of women readers included in the

Cornhill and in Belgravia highlights Belgravia's two-fold message concerning the independence and pleasure of women's reading. " In contrast to

Belgravia's images of solitary women who read for their own enjoyment and edification are those in the Cornhill which consistently depict women whose reading is only conducted in relation to men. For example, "The Blind

Scholar and his Daughter" illustrates George Eliot's Romola and depicts the main character conducting academic work in the service of her father who sits clutching a book as she stands patiently by his side, apparently reading to

135 him (Figure I). Similarly, in an illustration to Elizabeth Gaskell's "Cousin

Phillis," the lead character is shown studying a book (presumably by Dante) as

Mr. Holdsworth peers over her shoulder to monitor her activity (Figure 2).

Even more striking is an illustration to William Thackeray's Lovel the

W idow er in which the governess, Bessy, is portrayed standing beside her employer and eventual husband, Mr. Batchelor, with a book dangling in front of her that she cannot read until he returns her glasses (Figure 3). Here Mr.

Batchelor maintains control over Bessy's reading by literally controlling her ability to read the words on the page. Like the Cornhill's verbal arguments that yoke women's education and professionalization with the well-being of men, the magazine's visual representations require that women's reading occurs in proximity to and is monitored by men.’’

In contrast, Belgravia's illustrations consistently depict women who read alone or with other women. This ability to read independently allows the woman reader in "In the Firelight" (Figure 4) to explore her fantasies in a healthy manner through reading as she falls asleep with a book on her lap and the visions of her imagination swirl around her head. Sally Mitchell notes that women's daydreams are pleasurable mental stories that "provide expression, release, or simply indulgence for emotions or needs which are not otherwise satisfied either because of psychological inhibition or because of the social context" ("Sentiment and Suffering" 32). The internalization of feminine duty and the repressive social situation of the governess are

136 apparent in the illustration for "One Summer Month" (Figure 5). In this

picture, an overworked governess acts on her own will instead of someone

else's by escaping from her oppressive duties to read something other than a

lesson-book as she relaxes on the beach. It is interesting to note that this

illustration is in itself a fantasy that counteracts the story it illustrates. Miss

Royes, the self-denying governess, dreams of the self-indulgence of reading a

book of her own choosing but never actually does so. Instead, she remains

devoted to her pupil. Even after falling in love with a man who proposes to

her, she refuses to marry and sacrifices her opportunity by reuniting him with

his first love with whom he had a misunderstanding that destroyed their engagement. Miss Royes's sole pleasure comes from the fantasy of reading

that becomes the only illustration to the story. Finally, in "Summer

Reminiscences" (Figure 6), two women form a communal relationship based on reading as they intimately huddle together over a letter.

Kate Flint's analysis of nineteenth-century paintings of women readers apply equally well to Belgravia's illustrations:

The self-absorption of the readers depicted implies some of the reasons why the private activity of reading tended so persistently to come under scrutiny. It hints of the subject's vulnerability to the textual influence, deaf and blind to other stimuli in her immediate environment. It suggests the potential autonomy of her mind, mirrored in her self-sufficient postures. (4)

The Cornhill's illustrations deny women the self-sufficiency and autonomy allowed in Belgravia by consistently depicting men as regulators of women's reading practices. Belgravia's illustrations, on the other hand, depict middle-

137 class women who exist outside of their domestic duties and display either an individuality or communal feminine identity that empowers them both to think independently and to enjoy themselves while reading. The magazine's message is that while the reading material offered in its pages may have an element of escapism and fantasy, it also encourages women to be

Independent: "Reading, in other words, provided the means not only, on occasion, for the Victorian woman to abnegate the self, to withdraw into the passivity enduced by the opiate of fiction. Far more excitingly, it allowed her to assert her sense of selfhood, and to know that she was not alone in doing so" (Flint 330). In the pages of Belgravia, women saw illustrations that showed them how pleasurable and empowering reading could be if they could make their own choices and develop their own active reading skills that were not reliant on the interpretations of the men around them.

138 Figure 1: The Blind Scholar and his Daughter," Cornhill Magazine (July 1863): 1.

139 Figure 2: "Cousin Phillis and Her Book," C ornhill M agazine (December 1863): 688.

140 Figure 3: "Bessy's Spectacles," Cornhill Magazine (February 1860): 233.

141 Figure 4: "In the Firelight," Belgravia Magazine (March 1868): 67.

142 Figure 5: "One Summer Month," Belgravia Magazine (August 1871): 197.

143 Figure 6: "Summer Reminiscences," Belgravia M agazine (December 1869): 258.

144 "ADVENTUROUS INVESTIGATIONS" AND "DREADFUL CATASTROPHES": THE USE OF SENSATIONALISM IN NON-FICTION

Belgravia's empowering views of women readers of sensation fiction allowed Sala to proclaim triumphantly that "Belgravia is a sensational magazine, and Miss Braddon is a dreadfully sensational novelist" ("On the

Sensational in Literature and Art," February 1868, 457). The sensationalism of

Belgravia, however, was not limited to its fiction; the magazine's non-fiction articles often used sensational techniques in order to articulate the societal benefits that sensationalism could generate. In Belgravia's sensational non­ fiction, societal evils were often exposed and solutions recommended. For example, the article "An Adventurous Investigation" (November 1866) sets the tone for Belgravia's non-fiction by discussing the need to research new treatments for the insane in a sensational dialogue that often obscures its own serious purpose with excitement and adventure. The article opens with a reference to a sensation novel that had been recently serialized in the

Cornhill Magazine, Wilkie Collins's Armadale}^ The narrator and his companion, Smith, examine the exact location where "Wilkie Collins introduced Allan Armadale and Midwinter to the wreck of La Grace de Dieu . .

. . And near to which .. . you may see the veritable cottage where the lunatic was confined whose shriek so horrified the Armadales on that terrible night."

Smith is at first skeptical about his friend's claims; "But that's all nonsense, you know . .. Pooh! The empty creation of a sensation novelist" (57).

145 However, after the narrator's insistence that the actual lunatic in Arm adale

was the subject of a newspaper article that he wrote and that his current

mission is to spend time on the island investigating the causes of mental disease. Smith responds with fear: "Look here; if you, alone and single-

handed, attempt such a mad thing as exploring the ins and outs of this island, and hunting up lunatics by day and night, why, you'll get stuck in a bog, or stabbed, or something else as bad or worse" (57). Despite his companion's anxieties, the narrator persists in pursuing his "adventurous investigation" in order to "stir up the public interest to provide remedies for [lunacy); to alleviate the misery and neglect of such poor unfortunates, to, if possible, ultimately create for them a proper and commodious system" of treatment

(57-8). Thus, Belgravia defends sensationalism and its women readers by reinforcing the connection of the form to real people and places as well as to the news. The article shows how seemingly fictional events that take place in a sensation novel are actually based on real life occurrences and are closely allied to news reports. Therefore, sensation is recast from its immoral reputation into an agent for positive social change. In Belgravia's non-fiction, sensationalism becomes a legitimate motivator of reform that can make the public aware of societal problems that may otherwise be hidden or ignored and can potentially bring about solutions by encouraging research and education.

146 In addition to revealing and repairing societal woes, sensationalism is

used in Belgravia to make serious issues simultaneously entertaining and

thought-provoking. For example, the magazine uncovered the dangers of commonly worn fashions and beauty products in articles such as "Before the

Mirror" (July 1867), "Cosmetics" (December 1867), "Beautiful Forever" (April

1868), and "Cosmetics for the Hair" (May 1868); publicized the hidden causes of coal mining deaths in "The Pitman's Perils" (February 1867); and explored

the implications of Darwinian theory in "The Gorilla as I Found Him"

(August 1867). Most notable for their direct exploitation of sensational

themes are Belgravia's scientific explorations, especially the articles in the series "Sensationalism in Science." This series opens ominously with the claim that

It is often said as a reproach that literature, as a whole, and especially fiction, has become 'sensational'—that it loves to produce excitement by descriptions of imaginary crimes and unnatural incidents. But what are all the startling scenes portrayed in novels—though we question if there is any of them which has not had its counterpart in real life—to the dreadful catastrophes predicted for us and for all creation in the pages of science? (June 1868, 555)

"Sensationalism in Science" freely explores disastrous scientific predictions such as the depletion of the nation's coal supply (June 1868), the death of the sun ("Is the Sun Dying" July 1868), and the existence of life on other planets

("More Worlds Than One" October 1868), thereby exciting readers with the possibility of terrifying phenomena but ultimately either placing faith in modem science to divert such events or dismissing the speculations on the

147 grounds of faulty reasoning.’'' Thus, many of Belgravia's articles justify sensationalism by proclaiming that the full acknowledgment and exploration of the unexpected is beneficial because it maintains a reader's interest and initiates critical thinking. These articles essentially repeat the message used to defend women readers and build a foundation for the magazine's literary criticism. The critical discourse that develops in Belgravia is, however, often more of an "offense" than a "defense" as it attacks those who set up the critical assumptions that plagued sensationalism.

DUMDERHEADED LIBELERS, DOLTS, DULLARDS, AND ENVIOUS BACKBITERS: BEATING THE CRITICS AT THEIR OWN GAME

While Belgravia's non-fiction set forth a rationale for its use of sensational techniques, the strongest justification for the sensation novel came from the literary criticism featured in Belgravia. Much of this criticism was written in direct response to assaults delivered by the likes of Margaret

Oliphant in Blackwood's and Frederick Greenwood in the Pall Mall Gazette.

Oliphant's anonymous article of September 1867 assailed Braddon personally by declaring that she could not know "how young women of good blood and good training feel" (260) and pronouncing that "It is a shame to women so to write; and it is a shame to the women who read and accept as a true representation of themselves and their ways the equivocal talk and fleshly

148 inclinations herein attributed to them" (275). Oliphant s "sermon," as she calls it, was followed up by a smear campaign in the Pall Mall Gazette that effectively turned Braddon's career into a sensational tale in itself. The Pall

Mall's running commentary began with accusations of plagiarism and was followed up with a forged letter of apology purporting to be from Braddon herself and offering to refund money to her injured Belgravia readers who were subjected to second-hand literature passed off as original work. The controversy came to a climax with the printing of evidence—some real and some fabricated—of false advertising for the novel in question, Circe,

Braddon's Belgravia serial that ran from March-September 1867 under the pseudonym of Babington White. All of this controversy was quite distressing to Braddon who confessed to Bulwer-Lytton that she was "most deeply stung" by the "uncalled for and unjustifiable charge" set forth in Blackwood's and that she was selected "as the scape goat for the sins of this generation of second & third rate novelists" by the Pall Mall Gazette who had "at last stung

[her] into a most savage state of mind" (Wolff, "DD" 142-45). Braddon fought back in "A Remonstrance" (November 1867) in the guise of the fictional

Captain Shandon, editor of the Pall Mall Gazette in Thackeray's Pendennis.

In this persona, Braddon maintains the separation of herself from her pseudonym as she shames the originator of the claims against her and

Babington White by declaring that the Gazette went beyond the limits of criticism to "carry on a crusade, not against the writer of the work you dislike.

149 but against the lady who conducts the Magazine in which the work

appeared." Braddon declares Greenwood "guilty of a paltry and cowardly

proceeding, eminently calculated to bring lasting discredit on the journal you

edit" (81). Braddon also contends that Circe was adapted rather than

plagiarized, defends the right of the author to maintain "his" anonymity, and offers a reward for the discovery of the person who forged a letter in her

name, thereby placing her editorship in danger in a very ungentlemanly

manner that is "more characteristic of the disappointed author of two or three

unappreciated novels than of the gentleman editor who writes for gentleman readers" (86). This self-defensive measure reflects the "savage state of mind" that led Braddon to wage war in Belgravia against the high-culture critics by commissioning a barrage of articles to defend herself and the genre of sensation fiction against its vocal attackers. While the magazine's non­ fiction based its defense of sensation on its ability to sustain readers' Interests and its potential to initiate reform by revealing heretofore ignored societal problems, Belgravia's criticism maintained that sensation fiction was, in fact,

"realistic" and belonged to the nation's high literary tradition that had been unfairly disparaged by biased literary critics who were more sensational than the sensationalists themselves.*®

George Augustus Sala's "The Cant of Modem Criticism" led Belgravia's pack of defenders with a direct refutation of Oliphant's famous Blackwood's essay. Sala begins by ridiculing Oliphant's claim that English fiction since

150 Scott is characterized by a tradition of "sanity, wholesomeness, and cleanness"

that is suitable for all members of the family (257) and instead connects Scott

to a counter-tradition of English literature that includes the wild, ghastly, and

immoral elements of such writers as Anne Radcliffe and Monk Lewis. By

doing this. Sala implies that sensation fiction rather than domestic realism is

the true heir to the throne of British literature. To back up his claim. Sala

argues that some of the best novels of the day, including Charlotte Bronte's jane Eyre, George Eliot's Adam Bede, and Braddon's Lady Atidley's Secret, are superior to Oliphant's supposedly wholesome canon because they are novels

of "life and character and adventure" that are "outspoken, realistic, moving,

breathing fiction, which mirrors the passions of the age for which it is

written" (52). Sala opposes Oliphant's contention that sensationalism

presents women unrealistically, that its "intense appreciation of flesh and blood" is falsely presented as "the natural sentiment of English girls" (259).

Instead, Sala claims that sensationalism is a heightened form of realism that

is no more harmful to readers than the daily news: "in all these novels the

people walk and talk and act... like dwellers in the actual, breathing world in

which we live. If we read the newspapers, if we read the police reports ... we shall take no great harm by reading realistic novels of human passion,

weakness, and error" (53). Sala boldly declares that the public deserves such

thrilling and real presentations and that adult readers—even women—can

handle such fiction: "[We] want novels about that which Is, and not about

151 that which never Was and never Will be. We don't want pap, or spoon meat,

or milk-and-water, or curds-and-whey, or Robb's biscuits, or boiled whiting,

or cold boiled veal without salt. We want meat; and this is a strong age, and

we can digest it" (54). Sala thus revises Thackeray's conception of fiction in

the C ornhill by claiming that fiction itself is the main course in a literary diet

(rather than a dessert) and that as such it should be genuine "meat" that is

based on hard fact. Finally, Sala blames the critical attack against Braddon on

"Hatred and jealousy and spite towards one of the most successful novelists

of the age" (55), thereby casting aspersion on critics themselves rather than on

sensation's readers or writers. Furthermore, he disparages the profession of

criticism as a whole for providing legitimacy to "dunderheaded libelerfs]" (55).

With this point-by-point refutation of Oliphant's contemptuous analysis of

Braddon's sensationalism, Sala initiates the critical reprisal that is sustained

throughout Belgravia's early years.

Following Sala's establishment of the major lines of retaliation against

the critics of sensation, a barrage of support poured forth from Belgravia's

contributors. Sala himself focused on the details of the high cultural origins of the genre in "On the Sensational in Literature and Art" (February 1868).

Here Sala proclaims a royal lineage by charting sensation's roots in

Shakespeare, Ruskin, Darwin, Millais, and especially Dickens, who is

characterized as "the most persistently sensational' writer of the age" (454).

The strategy of establishing the relationship of sensation to its respectable

152 ancestors is also employed by Braddon in 'The Mudie Classics" (March and

April 1868), written defiantly under the supposedly plagiarizing

pseudonymous figure of Babington White. The series, which plays off of the

reputations of both Mudie's Circulating Library and sensation novels,

satirically promises to deliver stories modeled on "the highest exemplars of

art," the tales of classical Greece, in deference to those "wise" authorities

whose

critical contempt for all stories of a sensational character has of late become a fact so notorious that the conductor of this magazine would be wanting in deference to those great Teachers who preside over the Literary Journals of this country, if she failed to recognize the necessity of an immediate reform in the class of fiction provided for the indulgent readers of BELGRAVIA. (March 1868,41)

While purporting to agree with the general critical opinion, Braddon's

retellings of Greek tales are deliberately filled with the most sensational events imaginable including bribery, adultery, assassination, matricide, bigamy, and murder (Wolff, S V 217). As Wolff notes, Braddon "proved her

point: indeed, she may have overproved it, since" the series "stopped short after two installments" (S V 217).

Having effectively proven sensationalism's connection to a cultural tradition, Belgravia set out to prove that the genre adhered to most of the tenets of the current critical darling, the domestic realist novel. To accomplish this task, the magazine had to strip realism of its moralistic character to proclaim that the supreme goal of the genre was to copy the details of life without idealism. Belgravian critics thus focused on the fact

153 that the seemingly outrageous occurrences of sensation novels had their basis in real events which were often reported in the daily newspapers. In "Truth is Stranger Than Fiction" (July 1869), the author declares that real life is the

"fountain from which the sensation-writers of the present day draw their inspiration" (104). The author of "A Day in the Telegraph Office" (September

1869) reinforces the idea that sensation is based on real life with the "proof" of his own experience as a telegraph operator: 'T do not suppose that if I were to chronicle the messages of grief, despair, entreaty, telling of crime, remorse, poverty, and death ... that passed before me [at the telegraph office], I should be credited. But there it was, attested to by their signatures and in their own handwriting. Believe me, there is no romance like reality" (318). Likewise,

Sala mentions the Telegraph, the Standard, and the Star as the second component of the sensational heritage that makes the genre as real as it is artistic: "In the opinion of dolts and dullards and envious backbiters, everything is 'sensational' that is vivid, and nervous, and forcible, and graphic, and true" ("On the Sensational" 457). This brutal realism is so vital to the genre that for Sala the elimination of sensation would mean the elimination of experience as well as the end of interest in both literature and life: "Don't let us move, don't let us travel, don't let us hear or see anything . .

. and then let Dullness reign triumphant, and universal Darkness cover all"

(458).

154 As powerful as the arguments are for sensation's heritage and realism,

Belgravia's critical defense saved its most forceful salvos for the genre's unkind critics. J. Campbell Smith's "Literary Criticism" (April 1867) offers a typical Belgravian characterization of the offenders:

Critics are self-elected judges—men who consider themselves endowed with greater discernment, a purer taste, and a judgment superior to the rest of mankind. . . . If criticism were always fair and unbiased, it would exercise a genial and purifying influence upon literature; but when dictated by either favouritism or malice, or when the offspring of ignorance or conceit, it is productive only of evil. (226-227)

The critics who trashed Braddon and the other sensation novelists were thereby declared to be not only biased but malicious and even evil. In

"Literary Bagmanship" (February 1871), T. H. S. Escott reinforces these claims by characterizing critics as mere quacks who have skillessly imitated "the cant jargon of the craft" of literary critidsm and are full of "inflated ignorance and arrogant ability" (508-9). Escott declares that the uneducated and inexperienced "literary bagman of to-day presumes jauntily to pass judgement on men who have devoted their lifetime to authorship" (509). A supreme example of the vengeful, arrogant, and unskilled criticism described in Belgravia was displayed in the Saturday Review's scathing analysis of

Charlotte's Inheritance, which inspired its own counter-attack within

Braddon's magazine.

In an April 1868 review of Charlotte's Inheritance, the Saturday reviewers fulfilled Belgravia's negative expectations of sensation critics when

155 they willfully misinterpreted the comments Braddon made in the novel about Valentine Hawkehurst's literary career. Braddon writes:

And, O, be sure the critics lay in wait to catch the young scribbler tripping! An anachronism here, a secondhand idea there, and the West End Wasp shrieked its war-whoop ., . The critics were not slow to remark that he worked at a white-hot haste, and must needs be a shallow pretender because he was laborious and indefatigable. (September 1868, 475-476)

This jab, intended to disparage critics who had wrongfully accused her of

plagiarism, was instead taken as proof of Valentine's—and by implication

Braddon's own—plagiaristic practices. The Saturday turned Braddon's commentary against her by assuming that her struggling literary "hero" was literally

a professional blackleg, who .. . turns author, and exhibits his predatory propensities by a series of audacious plagiarisms. Miss Braddon shows a wonderful fellow-feeling with this literary freebooter, and is very noisily angry with the imaginary critics who set their faces against him. ... In an ideal state of society, where ignorance reigned supreme, and sensation novels were the highest development of literature, the energy which he displayed in concocting and giving to the world his little hodge-podge of untrustworthy and slip-shod trash would no doubt have received its due recognition from the critics of the day. (459)

Luckily, Braddon and Hawkehurst both had the consolation that, despite being pelted with mud "by nameless assailants hidden behind the hedges," they "found pleasant fellow-travelers and kindly encouragement from an indulgent public" who enabled them "to accept the mud which bespattered

[their] garments in a very placid spirit, and to make light of all obstacles in the great highway" (January 1869, 442). If the metaphorical attack on Braddon

156 through her hero was not enough, the Saturday was sure to strike directly at

the author herself:

Sensation novels have generally an unpleasant tendency to read like parodies, and Charlotte's Inheritance is no exception to the rule.. . no one has done more in educating her admirers, and preparing them by a gradual renunciation of all their critical faculties for the ultimate enthusiastic reception of a thoroughly bad novel. (459)

Presumably this preparation for the loss of critical faculties took place primarily in the pages of Belgravia, which Braddon hoped would do just the opposite by introducing women readers not to improbable events but to the concept of looking beneath the surface for the hidden agendas and identities that lurk below common respectability and morality.

On Braddon's behalf, Edward R. Russell dealt the ultimate blow to the

Saturday Review by announcing that they were the founders of a kind of criticism that had become "as sensational in motive as the most sensational novel" ("'Thorough' in Criticism," November 1868, 39). Russell dubs this a

'thorough' criticism that is unsociable and uncritical and intentionally severe:

"The thoroughness is thorough recklessness; the sensationalism is at the expense of truth. Whether sensation be a good or a bad element in creative literature, it must be dangerous in criticism" (41) and it is only beneficial to readers if it convinces them to "regard as merely entertaining articles which have hitherto been for a great portion of the middle classes absolute canons of literary judgment" (43). With that sensational finale, Belgravia urged its readers to disregard the biased proclamations of the elite reviewers and to

157 instead trust their own judgments. By emphasizing the wrongs of the critics

of sensation, Braddon's magazine effectively shifted the blame for the

corruption of literature from the supposedly uncritical women readers and scandalous women writers to the critics of respected journals.

Belgravia's censure of the practice of criticism in Victorian England encouraged the same sort of critical "disinterestedness" that Matthew Arnold recommended. However, Braddon aimed for a critical assessment that would take sensationalism on its own terms and judge it based on its ability to simultaneously be entertaining, educational, and artistic; to, in Braddon's

words, serve both God and Mammon well. Thus, Belgravia marked a

milestone in periodical literature as it adapted the genre of the family literary magazine to serve as an organ of overt critical debate. The discussion carried out in the magazine was explicitly meant to transform attitudes toward women readers and popular literature by imagining the proper woman reader as independent, free, and informed and by redefining the genre of the sensation novel as realistic, artistic, and instructive. Both of these rhetorical moves attempted to ease women readers and writers into the public and professional realms while maintaining their reputations. While Braddon may not have been the best spokesperson for legitimizing sensationalism for women readers due to her own personal and professional scandals, her voice

158 was an important one that encouraged the blurring and intermingling of the critical boundaries that were just beginning to be imagined by professional critics.

ENDNOTES

' JoKn Maxwell was also the publisher of theHalf-Penny fournal. Temple Bar, St. lames's Magazine, and The Welcome Guest, all of which Braddon had contributed to or worked on for at least five years before gaining the editorship of her own magazine. Braddon conducted Belgravia from 1866 until 1876, when it was sold to another publisher, Chatto and Windus, who replaced Braddon's novels with the works of authors such as Charles Rcade, Wilkie Collins, and Thomas Hardy (Scheuerle 32).

^ Or, as Braddon's son W. B. Maxwell kindly put it, "A quality in [Braddon's] writing at once recognized was its interestingness. One's interest was awakened at the very beginning and it never flagged, was never allowed to flag, until one came to the very end of the story. The story was always new and strong, yet this was far from being all. The characterisation was excellent, and the knowledge of life shown most remarkable" (268-69).

^ While James generally displays a positive regard for Braddon— he affirms that she is an "artist" with a "knowing style" who produces photographs that reflect her "shrewd" observational skills—he reserves for her fellow sensationalist Wilkie Collins "a more respectable name" than founder of the genre (593).

■' W. B. Maxwell had this to say of the evolution of his mother's critical reception: She was the leader of a most dangerous school—the new sensation novelists. She and her followers, if not checked, might undermine the morals of the rising generation. It is difficult to-day to understand what nonsense formed the basis of such charges, or to believe in the honesty of those who launched them. But they fell silent before long. Her popularity instead of waning seemed always to grow bigger. In the phrase of George Meredith, she "had shown them the Medusa head of Success and the critics were frozen into acquiescence." Gradually then the newspapers became kind to her, and softer, and gentle, more appreciative with each passing year, until in the end they gave her nothing but affectionate praise. And this was genuine and no mere submission to a prevailing fashion. She infallibly endeared herself to readers, whether laymen or experts. (285)

* Braddon mentions Rae's article in a letter to Charles Kent who had made himself known to her as a repeat defender of her work inThe Sun. On September 12, 1865, she writes: "My Dear Sir, The Post has this moment brought meThe Sun for this evening in which I discover your most kind, most disinterested, and able defense of me against the furious onslaught of "The North British Review.' I had heard of the latter, but I have been and indeed am still too busy with the finish of my 'Sir Jasper's Tenant" to send for the Review or to trouble my head with an attack at once so virulent and malignant. I have been informed that the criticism in question is written by a novelist whose failure to excite public attention should at least have made him more charitable to a fellow labourer. Pray allow me to assure you that I 159 feel myself utterly unable to express my sense of obligation for your generosity towards my work; and I hope you will do me the justice to believe that 1 place the highest value upon your opinion and hope yet to prove myself worthy of your most kindly encouragement " (Wolff Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin).

* Braddon took this as an opportunity to shower praise on her own publication as she announced that due to public protest thirty-two extra pages would be added to each issue of the magazine to accommodate the additional serial while "At the same time, all the characteristics which have won forBelgravia its recognition as 'the best shilling magazine that England possesses' are preserved in their fullest integrity" thus allowing the magazine to include "the greatest quantity of printed matter ever offered in any monthly magazine, however high its price; and it is hoped that the quality of its literature will sustain the critical opinion—'Briskest of all the magazines isBelgravia"' (April 1868, 244).

^ Braddon's novel The Doctor's Wife (1864) was based on Gustave Flaubert'sMadame Bovary and many of her tales inBelgravia were influenced by French works, including Circe, which she was accused of plagiarizing from Octave Feuillet'sDali la. Braddon also defends French literature in Belgravia articles such as "French Novels" (July 1867), "Glimpses at Foreign Literature" (April 1868), and "Baudelaire " (October 1871).

* Thus, the many illustrations inBelgravia of women reading letters are, in fact, illustrations of women reading sensationalism. See for example, "Happy Tidings" (November 1867), "111 Tidings" (April 1868), "First Down in the Morning" June 1869), and "The Elopement" (July 1869).

’ The difficulties of the public/private split are apparent in Braddon's son's attempts to reshape her career in terms of the private and the domestic in order to counteract the negative conception of her as too public a figure to be respectable. Maxwell first quotes from Braddon's own diary a passage about the financial failure of her early attempts at writing to recast her as more of an artist than a best-selling author who wrote only for money (Maxwell 266-67). Maxwell directly states that she did not write for money, but "because she loved her work. So the untiring hand could not stop" (283). Furthermore, Maxwell is careful to describe his mother's scholarly work to highlight the intellectual and artistic aspects of her fiction writing. He notes that her historical novels especially "demanded a great amount of study and research" for which she learned German, Italian, Spanish, and Latin. (281-82). To further soften his mother's public image. Maxwell domesticates the scene of writing by telling a story of how Braddon could simultaneously attend to her motherly duties and her professional ones: Somebody had given us a toy printing press, and we were busy with it in the nursery ... We had pretended that it would enormously facilitate her work if she had the title [of her recent novel] printed for her; and she sweetly encouraged our pretence, and would come into the nursery asking for further supplies... Everybody went uninvited to her library, we children, the servants, importunate visitors. I don't remember that she ever refused to come away from the quiet dignified room if we asked her. And she never failed to be available as a companion to my father when he wanted her, and no matter for how long. (280-81)

That Braddon was considered both a champion of women readers and a literary authority later in her life is evident in her correspondence with the writer Hall Caine. In November 1901 Braddon w as asked by Caine to serve as an expert witness—as an author "of unquestionable distinction" whose name "would carry weight with the jury"—in a trial to defend her novel. The Eternal City, against charges by Mr. Pearson of "The Lady's Magazine" 160 that it was "likely to corrupt" the magazine's female readers (letter dated November 11, 1901, Wolff Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin). While Braddon declared that she had read and enjoyed the novel herself, "when it comes to the question of what kind of story is suited to a Ladies Magazine I find myself unable to pronounce an opinion. The novelist's scope has widened greatly since I began to write; & subjects which I should not then have dared to approach have now become the common stock of women writers. Your heroine in all her relations ... is grand andpure... Nowhere do you espatiate [sicj upon the seamy side of life, & the one horrible episode of the heroine's fall is treated with severe brevity & with tragic power. So difficult, so impossible, 1 imagine would it be nowadays for even a jury of literary experts to decide where the line in fiction, between the permissible & the unpermissible shd be drawn, that 1 venture to hope this question of fitness of your fine& immensely successful novel for the Ladies Magazine may be left open for literary argument in the future & that you & Mr. Pearson may come to an amicable settlement even at the eleventh hour." (Wolff Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin).

" Belgravia featured at least eight illustrations in its first five years that directly depict women readers, and many more that show women writing, painting, and privately reflecting.

" For similar portrayals of women readers in theCornhill's illustrations, see "A Letter From New York," which depicts a reading scene from William Thackeray'sPhilip that is much like the one I have discussed for "Cousin Phillis" (March 1862, 257), and "Vae Victus!," a picture from Elizabeth Caskell'sWives and Daughters that shows a woman reader who has full control over her book and a quiet place in which to read it, but instead spends her time observing the activities of the men outside her window (October 1864,385).

In September 1864 Braddon explained to Bulwer-Lytton that "My next story is to begin in Temple Bar in January, if 1 live—and is to be sensational for Wilkie Collins in Cornhill will be a most powerful opponent [sic] & 1 can only fight him with his own weapons—mystery, crime, &c. You see 1 am obliged to sink my own inclinations in deference to the interests of the magazine" (Wolff, "DD" 26). In December 1864 Braddon asked her mentor if he had read Collins's latest serial and went on to say "I do not fancy that so far it is anything equal to The Woman in White.' He seems to be too openly & inartistically sensational & he is telling his story rapidly, whereas his peculiar art heretofore has been the slow and gradual development of his plot" (30). A month later, she declares "Wilkie Collins is on the wrong track, isn't he? . . . Three numbers & no female interest—surely a mistake so far as Mr. Mudie's constituency is/are concerned" (31).

Other articles in the series include "Daylight" (August 1868), "Autocracy of the Sun" (November 1868), and "Photospheres" (February 1869). Equally sensational, but not part of the "Sensationalism in Science" series are "Inhabited Planets" (July 1867), "The Cycles of the Worlds" (May 1869), "Does the Earth Grow Sick?" (November 1869), and "Sun Spots" (November 1870).

That Braddon was accustomed to asking George Sala for help fending off criticism is apparent in the following undated letter: "Dear Mr. Sala, I am becoming gradually more & more irritated by a stupid little paragraph wh has gone the rounds of the papers to the effect that Miss Braddon has realised her ambition and madeL 100,000 by herpen... now I cannot imagine any statement more calculated to bring contempt & ridicule on a writer than this. Never have I given the faintest suggestion to anybody of such a sordid ambition on my part—nor of the amount I have earned by my pen which I do not know& which it would give 161 me a great deal of trouble—as it doubtless would yourself—to ascertain. I have written for the love of my work quite as much as for money & my world of shadows has often been my consolation in the hour of trouble & ansdety[sic).... If you wd say a word to exculpate me in yr "Echoes" I should be greatly obliged." (Wolff Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin).

** Belgravia also presents a separate line of defense for so-called hack writers. Articles such as "Literature in the Purple" (May 1868), "Literature on the Line" Oune 1868), and "Writing for Money" Oune 1869) argued that writing for profit constituted professionalism rather than literary prostitution, and maintained that popular writing was just as labour- intensive as other forms and usually more interesting.

162 CHAPTER 4

V/CTORM'S SECRET: THE WOMAN'S MOVEMENT FROM READER TO WRITER, 1863-1867

While Harper's asked American women to read properly in order to live up to and even surpass the standards of British culture, the Cornhill urged women readers to educate themselves in the service of upwardly mobile gentlemen, and Belgravia encouraged women's independence as readers, Victoria

Magazine redefined the woman reader as a woman writer, thus casting women in active roles that allowed them to contribute to the creation as well as the consumption of literary culture. Edited, printed, and published by Emily

Faithfull and the progressive group of working women at Langham Place,

Victoria aimed to provide good literature alongside a moderate feminist social agenda that advocated women's education, employment, and rights. Victoria promoted issues such as women's movement into the professions by arguing that women could maintain their private virtues while entering the public realm.

Victoria was clearly related to the more politically focused Langham Place publications, the English Vloman's fournal and the Englishwoman's Review; however, it had greater literary aspirations and modeled itself after the family literary magazines, especially the successful and respected Cornhill. 163 Due to the prohibitive cost of serializing top-rate novelists, Victoria was

unable to obtain authors with the same status as those who contributed to the

Cornhill. In my analysis of the magazine, I argue that instead of relying on its

fiction for its reputation, Victoria's reviews emerged as the crowning glory of the

magazine that combined its woman's rights and its literary agendas by mapping out a distinctly feminist conception of realism. Within the magazine's critical

formulation, works were lauded as realistic examples of "good" literature based on their depiction of moral, intelligent, and independent female characters who could serve as role models for the "new woman, " while works were defined as sensational or "bad" because of their portrayal of women characters who were

immoral criminals or passive victims of crime. Victoria bought into the high/ low cultural split espoused by the elite critics in order to gain authority for its

feminist critical voice as it made a sustained effort to move women from the

margins to the center of the profession of literary criticism in order to contribute

to the production and definition of the emerging literary canon in a way that would increase the status of both women readers and women writers.

"A HAPPY AUGURY OF VICTORY": THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE VICTORIA PRESS

In "Miss Parkes' Essays on Woman's Work" {Victoria Magazine, May 1865),

Bessie Rayner Parkes, a founding member of the Langham Place Group, is quoted for her summary of the goals of the organization's particular brand of feminism:

164 Let women be thoroughly developed. Let women be thoroughly rational Let women be pious and charitable Let women be properly protected by law. Lei women have fair chances of a livelihood. And lastly, let women have ample access to all stores of learning. (173)

Emerging alongside the family literary magazines, the comparably marginal and

considerably less profitable feminist magazines produced by the members of the

Langham Place Circle were primarily concerned with encouraging action that

would improve women's lives economically, intellectually, and, to a lesser extent, politically. The women who originated these periodicals were not

primarily suffragettes, but were committed to making practical changes in women's lives. While the domesticity associated with middle-class women

lingered in the images and rhetoric of these magazines, they were feminist in

their efforts to move women into professions by allowing them to have access to appropriate training and educational programs. Above, all, the feminist magazines—to which Victoria Magazine was closely related—called for a reformed society in which women could support themselves financially and live independently.’

The English Wotnan's foio'nal (1858-1864) and its descendant the

Englishwoman's Review (1866-1910), both published by the Langham Place Circle's

Victoria Press, are among the most famous of the feminist periodicals. The

Langham Place Group and their publications developed as a result of the first

Married Woman's Property Campaign. In 1855, Barbara Leigh Smith (later

Bodichon) and Bessie Rayner Parkes organized what Sheila Herstein calls the first "group of women [who] met together in England to discuss and organize political action to change the status of the sex" ("Langham Place" 25).‘ When the 165 campaign for property rights failed in 1857, these middle-class women channeled

their frustration in a positive direction by forming the Langham Place Circle.

The organization began the English Woman's Journal and spawned subsidiary

groups such as the National Association for the Promotion of the Social Sciences

(NAPSS), the Society for Promoting the Employment of Women (SPEW), the

Ladies' Sanitation Association, and the Female Middle Class Emigration Society.

As a result of SPEW's efforts to find work for women, Parkes purchased a

printing press with the intention of training women as compositors, and Emily

FaithfuU took charge of the project that she called the Victoria Press in March of

I860.'’

As FaithfuU explains in her article in the English Woman's journal, Victoria

Press was established in

Great Coram Street, Russell Square, which, by judicious expenditure, was rendered fit for printing purposes; I name the locality because we were anxious it should be in a light and airy situation, and in a quiet and respectable neighborhood. We ventured to call it the Victoria Press, after the Sovereign to whose influence English women owe so large a debt of gratitude, and in the hope also that the name would prove a happy augury of victory. 1 have recently had the gratification of receiving an assurance of Her Majesty's interest in the office, and the kind expression of her approbation of all such really useful and practical steps for the opening of new branches of industry for women. ("Victoria Press" 122-23).

FaithfuU worked hard to justify hiring sixteen female compositors by

emphasizing the genteel work atmosphere, which included working a regular

eight hour day; going home for an hour-long lunch break or eating meals in the

specially-designed kitchen; and getting paid adequately for occasional overtime

work during which tea would be served at half past five for an additional break.

To refute the argument that printing was an unhealthy industry for women,

FaithfuU contended that the negative effects arose "in great measure from 166 removable evils" including bad ventilation, the heavy consumption of alcohol,

and the habit of standing all day. Faithfull's press remedied these problems by

maintaining a bright and open work space, forbidding alcoholic beverages, and

designing special stools for her workers ("Victoria Press" 124-25). Maria

Frawley points out that such claims "reveal well the ways that FaithfuU was able

to capitalize on certain features of domestic discourse in her endeavor to control

portions of the print industry Likening the press to a middle-class household,

FaithfuU's rhetoric enabled her to destabilize, even erase, the implied opposition

between public and private—to ensure that her workplace had domestic appeal"

(91-92). In this way, FaithfuU's press embodied the ideal established in her

magazine: that of the genteel working woman whose domesticity remained

intact.

Unfortunately, the hostility of male printers toward the Victoria Press

compositors was so great that there were reports of attempts to sabotage the

equipment and intimidate the women (Stone 57). As for protests by printers'

unions that women workers would decrease wages. Faithful! maintained that

this argument was "also urged against the introduction of machinery, a far more

powerful invader of man's labour than women's hands, but this has faUen before

the test of experience" ("Women Compositors" 38). Furthermore, FaithfuU

asserted that it is "sound common sense" that is in accordance with "the spirit of

Christianity" to train women at a young age for an occupation to prevent "some

unforeseen calamity" from plunging middle-class women into "utter destitution, at an age when it is difficult, 1 had almost said impossible, to acquire new habits

167 of life" ("Women Compositors" 40). The Victoria Press was one possible solution

to what FaithfuU conceived of as a rampant social problem: women's inability to

provide for themselves.

Women's rights to education and work became defining issues for both

Victoria Press and Victoria Magazine. In Victoria's review of Langhamite Jessie

Boucherett's Hints on Self-Help (June 1863), Boucherett is praised for following

the same lines of reasoning that FaithfuU herself set forth in hiring women to

work at Victoria Press:

Miss Boucherett takes into hand the case of women who, having no property of their own, are likely sooner or later to be required to maintain themselves by their labour. She calls to attention the folly and cruelty of parents, who keep their daughters in idleness during the early years which ought to be spent in apprenticeship to some useful calling, and when they are too old to learn a business, throw them upon the world, without means of subsistence, and unable through ignorance, inexperience, and overgrown childishness, to earn a livelihood for themselves. Miss Boucherett speaks with authority, having through her connection with the Society for Promoting the Employment of Women, of which she was the originator, seen much of the evil she deplores. (190-191)

This argument was repeated so often that it became commonplace within the

pages of Victoria, which presented frequent progress reports on women's entry

into higher education, their success in university examinations, and their

attempts to enter the professions.^ However, in addition to the incremental

accomplishments made in advancing women's education and employment, the

great achievement of Victoria Press and Victoria Magazine was, as Solveig

Robinson points out, that it provided "a framework within which Victorian

women of letters could successfully translate feminist politics into a feminist

criticism" (161). And, as I shall show in more detail later, the Victoria Magazine

168 clearly embodied this translation as it attempted to combine the politics of a

feminist magazine with the literary and critical values of a family literary

magazine.

In the face of great opposition, the press was at least able to show that

women could contribute to the successful production of printed material.

Frawley contends that "With the Victoria Press, FaithfuU enacted another kind of

relationship to print culture, one whose symbolic project was to emphasize

women's work as producers ... of print Printing, after all, was literally a

reproductive task; it required resetting in type words already written in ink"

(90). Faithful! hoped metaphorically to suggest that the women of Victoria Press

were able to fulfill their reproductive functions as they gave birth to words by

printing the English Woman's Journal, the yearly reports of NAPSS, and a variety

of pamphlets by Frances Power Cobbe, Mary Taylor, Isa Craig, and other

Langhamites. The woodcut drawing of Victoria Press featured in the London

Illustrated News shows well-dressed women carrying and setting type in a

domestic atmosphere that seemed to confirm FaithfuU's intimations that women

could maintain private dignity in a public work-place. ^ In addition, the

publication of Victoria Regia, a literary anthology edited by Adelaide Proctor and

dedicated to the Queen, indicated that women could produce high quality work.

The beautifully bound book with a decorative gilt and morocco cover was meant

to showcase the skiUs of the women at the press as weU as the literary talent of

the day including Harriet Martineau, Caroline Norton, Alfred Tennyson, William

Thackeray, and Anthony TroUope. In fact, this remarkable gift book won the

prize for exceUent printing at the International Exhibition and consequently led

169 to FaithfuU's appointment as Queen Victoria's official printer and publisher

(Fredeman 153-157). Notwithstanding this success, the English Woman's foiirnal remained the press's best-known publication with an average monthly circulation of 1,000 copies in 1860, matching the figures for the well-established

Westminster Revieiv (Levine 296).

The English Woman's journal, like Victoria Press itself, "gave prominence to articles on new fields of employment for women and on eminent public women, stressing the compatibility of occupational achievement and womanly duty" (Nestor 98). On the basis of the magazine's practical efforts, George Eliot declared the jotirml to be a publication that "must be doing good substantially—stimulating women to useful work and rousing people generally to some consideration of women's needs"; however, Eliot refused to contribute to the magazine, disparaged its literary merit, and urged its editors to attend to the quality of the contributions rather than the sex of the contributors if they wanted to glorify women's work (qtd. in Herstein, EWJ, 66-69). Despite Eliot's reservations about purely feminist journals, the magazine had no trouble establishing an audience within the feminist community. However, maintaining and expanding a steady readership proved to be more problematic. The journal's main problem was paying contributors: despite having 1,000 subscribers in 1862, the magazine was faced with paying writers half of what they could make writing for mainstream periodicals backed by major publishing houses (Rendall

133). Furthermore, as Bessie Rayner Parkes wrote, "the conditions of the periodical market have quite changed ... each journal [is] pitted against the other... [and] at the same time, the trade is very uncertain" (qtd. in Rendall 133).

170 Philippa Levine succinctly explains the financial difficulties faced by magazines like the foumal:

Financial constraint and its corollary, the failure to attract or maintain sufficient long-term subscriptions, was a drain not only on the energy and commitment of the women involved but was also perceived as adversely affecting the quality of contributions payment for work was a means of valuing women's labours, a principle to which they were fundamentally committed, but at the same time it represented a heavy drain on their funds which their returns did not begin to replace. The question of professionalism was a difficult one. The proprietors themselves ... were unpaid and indeed often funded their ventures from their own private means, and yet sought to reward their writers pecuniarily. (297)

When the feminist principle of proper remuneration for women's work could not be sustained in practice by the fourmi, market forces brought the magazine's six- year run to a reluctant conclusion in 1864.

The joiirml briefly merged with the Alexandra Magazine, but this enterprise ended in less than a year. And, despite the establishment of Victoria Magazine in

1863, the Englislttvoman's Reviezv, founded by Jessie Boucherett in 1866, was seen as the only legitimate child of the Journal. As Boucherett wrote in "The Work We

Have to Do," an article featured in the inaugural issue of Review:

It is, indeed, our intention to follow the plan traced out by those who established the EWJ, and if this review shall prove equally effective in calling the attention of the public to the wants and condition of women, we shall be well content; for we believe the favorable change of opinion, and the more respectful tone with regard to women, which may be observed in the literature of the day, to be in no small degree due to the influence of the EWJ. (4-5)

The Reviezv, then, carried on the tradition of the feminist magazine while Victoria attempted something slightly different. Victoria was a hybrid bom of the influences of both the feminist magazine and the family literary magazine.

171 "AS MUCH OF rr AS THEY WILL SWALLOW": VICTORIA MAGAZINE'S FEMINIST AGENDA

Whereas the Joimial and the Revieiu had no intention of competing with the popular monthlies, Victmia hoped to do just that. Victoria Magazine was conceived as a very different feminist project, one that would be "a woman's magazine in every sense, except that it did not define its readers exclusively as women—aiming instead for a general if sympathetic readership" (Beetham 176).

Parkes, a cofounder of the Jourml, had rejected the idea of competing with major commercial journals as "hopeless and absurd, and indeed self-destructive" (qtd. in P. Levine 299). Emily Davies, who had served as editor for the Journal from

September 1862 until April 1863, joined FaithfuU as acting editor of Victoria in

May 1863. Together, Davies and FaithfuU hoped to achieve exactly the combination of the feminist and the mainstream that Parkes feared would compromise a woman' rights agenda. Following a suggestion by the Langham

Place Circle's Anna Jameson that such a journal required "the masculine power—the masculine hand" to attract male readers (qtd. in P. Levine 300),

Victoria featured such writers as Matthew Arnold, Thomas Hood, Nassau Senior, and Thomas Adolphus TroUope to lend respectability to the endeavor. As EmUy

Davies declared, "We mean to employ chiefly men [as contributors] at first & not to press our special subject tiU we have got a character. Then, when we have once gained a hearing, we shaU give the public as much of it as they will swallow"

(qtd. in Robinson 168). Indeed, the first volume avoided stating outright that the magazine was conducted by women: Davies's name was absent, FaithfuU was listed only in her capacity as pubUsher, and the contents did not include the

172 typical direct address from woman editor to woman reader (Robinson 168). The

plan for the magazine emphasized the treatment of "Literature, Art & Science"

with a secondary consideration of "moderate & well-considered opinions on

those questions ... directly bearing on the condition of women" (qtd. in

Robinson 167). Victoria was to be a family literary magazine that appealed not

only to women, but to their husbands and children.

Victoria Magazine was founded with the idea of transcending the bounds

of the traditional feminist magazine audience in order to reach the general

public. So while many of the other family magazines were coming from the

masculine perspective and attempting to include women, Victoria was coming

from a feminist perspective but trying to include the men of the house. The

magazine sought to fulfill its originating purpose by balancing feminist issues

with good literature that would appeal to the entire family. While Victoria, in its

first few years, placed the literary before the socio-political, 1 will begin by

examining its purely feminist agenda and conclude with an analysis of its

literary aspirations and its creation of a feminist literary criticism. It is important

to note that Victoria's attempt to be literary, or, as Davies put it, to carry out a

literary "rivalry with Fraser, Macmillan, and Blackwood" (qtd. in Stone

73)—and, 1 would add, with the Cornhill —was watered down after Davies's

resignation in February 1864 on the grounds that: "I could not edit a light

magazine, nor can I edit one at all, unless I may go to the best writers, and pay them properly" (qtd. in Stone 246). Davies faced the same problems she had encountered at the Journal as financial constraints convinced FaithfuU to economize, in part by lightening the literary offerings and decreasing payments

173 to writers. As a result of FaithfuU's take-over as editor, the magazine shifted more toward its feminist goals and away from its literary agenda. However, it is significant that Victoria was able to generate the beginnings of a feminist literary criticism alongside its feminist socio-political agenda.

FaithfuU's weU-advertised appointment as "Printer and Publisher in

Ordinary to Her Majesty" lent credibility to her desire to achieve material success with a feminist agenda but may also have contributed to what Pauline Nestor calls the magazine's "restrictive moralism" (Nestor 102).^ According to

FaithfuU—who was notorious for shameless self-promotion — Victoria

"forwarded the industrial and educational claims for women,... gradually moulded public opinion and at last led to reforms therein advocated as necessary for the free and harmonious development of women's physical, mental, and moral nature" (qtd. in Stone 76). FaithfuU's intent to link social and economic reform with morality influenced her reliance on the Queen as a unifying figure for her press and her magazine that aUowed her to "negotiate the uneven boundaries between the private and the public that the Queen herself seemed to embody" (Frawley 93). FaithfuU's preface to the Victoria Regia explains the role she hoped the Queen could play in supporting a feminist agenda by referring to her as "a Sovereign who has known how to unite the dignified discharge of pubUc duties with a constant regard for the cares of domestic life; and who has thus borne a noble and enduring testimony to the value of woman's intellect and heart" (qtd. in Frawley 101). Thus, the Queen symbolized the moral

Englishwoman who could participate productively in both the public and private realms without disrupting the order of either.

174 A poem dedicated to the queen, "Victoria Regina," was placed in the honorary position as the opening item in the first volume of Victoria. Despite its designation of the queen in one line as 'True woman, but the more a Queen," for the most part the poem depicts Victoria as a regular woman and implies that all women could live their lives in positions of power while maintaining their domesticity. The poem recognizes both the Queen's public and private lives and ends with a call for her to resume her public role despite the death of her husband:

Once happy wife of noble mate, Victoria! Sacred in wedlock's holy state; Most sacred now, when desolate. Death does thy life's love consecrate, Victoria!... Bid the last cloud of mourning flee, Victoria! The world expectant turns to thee: Thy name itself is Victory; And thou wilt conquer worthily, Victoria! (May 1863 1-2)

The June 1864 opening article "Elizabeth and Victoria from a Woman's Point of

View" further emphasizes the magazine's insistence that Victoria is "every woman." The article urges the public to forgive the Queen for sending relatives to fulfill her public duties because "the life of a nation is not its ceremonial but its moral life" to which she "contributes more than the holding of a hundred drawing rooms" (102). By concluding that "womanhood is higher than queendom " (102) and that the true life of the nation is its moral life, Victoria seems to support the private over the public functions of women. However, the conception of the Queen's real power as essentially feminine allows the magazine to use the Queen as an example of how womanly virtues actually make typical middle-class women suitable for the public roles of education, work, and political action. To support this point, "The Queen as Ruler," which 175 opens the January 1864 issue of the magazine, emphasizes that a woman's ability to unify and strengthen the family can be carried into the workplace and the nation. Despite the turmoil of war and rapid changes in the British Empire, the

Queen has been able to "knit together all ranks and classes in the bonds of common feeling" (194) and "has walked a quarter of a century with steady, unfaltering, and almost or altogether unerring steps" (201). Thus, Victoria allies its feminist project with the nation's monarch, thereby legitimizing one of its major preoccupations: woman's work. ^

Victoria's reflections on the superiority of the Queen worked in the interest of making its feminist agenda acceptable to a broader audience, just as its feminist articles written by male "experts" did. These articles tended toward the kinds of arguments presented in the Cornhill that women should be educated not only for themselves, but for the benefit of their family and their nation. "The

Influence of University Degrees on the Education of Women" (July 1863) argues—along the same lines as the Cornhill —that education will not make women masculine, but instead expose them to higher culture: "A very small proportion of girls would attempt to take [a college degree]; fewer still would succeed; fewer still would take honours; But every school-girl in the land would very soon become aware of the fact, that women might hope and strive for a thorough culture, which has never yet been generally offered to them" (268).

Likewise, a reprinted lecture given by W. B. Hodgson, "The Education of Girls,

Considered in Connexion [sic] with the University Local Examinations" (July

1864), argues that while women are not likely to become Shakespeares, Dantes,

176 or Michelangelos, neither are most men. Hodgson, therefore, calls for women's

access to education on the basis of culture rather than employment:

it is, in truth, the power not to rival, but to understand, and sympathetically to appreciate, that makes all men akin to those great thinkers; and so it is ... that places woman side by side with m an.... It is on the inward community of human nature, not on the outward similarity of employment, that the right to an equal culture is really founded. (251- 252)

Another male "expert," J.G. Fitch, makes an appeal to husbands who want to

improve their marriages in 'The Education of Women" (March 1864). The school inspector explains that in women's education as it currently stands "nothing is required ... but a blind mechanical obedience" to dates, tables, events, and

needlework stitches, to become skilled copyists but not thinkers (436). Fitch suggests that women be allowed to move beyond this mechanical function into higher thought as a means to allow them some fulfillment because "so long as the worthiest thoughts which a man has in his mind are those which his wife cannot share ... his marriage is imperfect, and whatever may be its outward fitness and propriety, must often be unsatisfactory to himself as well as to her"

(442). While Fitch shows how education for women can benefit both sexes, his argument stops short when it comes to altering traditional gender roles: "If women asked for a system of mixed education, for admission to academic lectures, to the bar, the church, or the legislature, the reply to such demands would be very simple. We cannot imperil the social order" (447). Early on,

Victoria follows Emily Davies's plan to employ "chiefly men" as writers and to avoid pressing too firmly on the "special subject" of the magazine until it had

"gained a hearing." After Davies's departure, Victoria's message became increasingly more forceful as it did, indeed, "give the public as much of it as they 177 will swallow" with a series of hard-hitting essays by Mary Taylor, whose book.

The First Duty of Women, was published by Victoria Press in 1870.*

Taylor's essays were prominently featured in the magazine, usually as the

opening item, beginning with "Feminine Honesty" in May of 1867. Signed by

the gender-neutral "T," these articles take on a masculine viewpoint by referring

to women as "they." This, however, is the only attempt to soften the arguments

"whose object was avowedly to inculcate the duty of earning money" and that

"contained much that was startling at the time" (Herstein, "Langham Place" 26).

Taylor forcefully reiterates the major concern of FaithfuU and the Victoria Press

as she repeats, under various headings, that women should be educated and

trained to work so that they can support themselves if necessary. "Feminine

Honesty" begins with the popular assumption that women should be honest and

concludes that if this is so, they must have more control over their sources of

livelihood:

It is dishonest to incur debts which you carmot pay; is it honest, then to know nothing of your means of paying?... It borders on dishonesty to know so little of your future means as to have no assured provision for your future wants;... It is needful therefore to know whence your income arises, to have the power of judging its permanence, and, if it is liable to fail, to be taught some means of replacing it. (7)

Similarly, in "Feminine Work" (September 1867), Taylor works from the

common belief that idleness breeds danger:

It is the pride of well-doing women, and a duty they always urge on those whom they have to educate, never to be idle. It is a wise rule, and experience taught them it But the want of this clear insight into the consequences of their own rules has made them, generally, satisfied with employment that is little better than digging holes and filling them up again. (403)

178 Instead of accepting cliches about women, Taylor uncovers the contradictions that are inherent in the traditional views of women's roles. Over and over,

Taylor argues that Idleness and lack of knowledge make women pitiful beings who leaving "most of their wants and wishes" unsatisfied "have little motive for activity" and "so, doing nothing, they escape doing wrong" ("Feminine

Idleness," November 1867,1). In "Feminine Knowledge" (June 1867), Taylor asserts that women are physically as well as emotionally in danger—from things such as disease, violence, and bad advice—because they are kept ignorant. To emphasize her point, Taylor characteristically begins with a question:

Would any of us choose, if we could have our choice, to belong to that large class of the human race who pass through the world knowing nothing of the causes of their good or evil fortune, and powerless consequently to help or avert it? Who see, for instance, their numbers thinned by small-pox or ague, without knowledge of the help or rescue that may yet be within their reach. (99)

Taylor sees books as women's only comfort because as readers they can absorb knowledge in an unmediated form, without facing censorship or prejudice from others. For Taylor and for Victoria, access to books and the development of critical reading practices become the vital keys to sustaining a culture of women's knowledge that will help bring women to the intellectual level of men and allow them to enter the public realm effectively.

'ESCAPING THE NATURAL DANGER OF HER QUIET HOME LIFE": VICTORIA AS A FAMILY LITERARY MAGAZINE

Although some critics contend that Victoria's "chief value" lies in its chronicling of the events in the woman's movement (Westwater443) and in its 179 "special purpose" of providing women with a successful public forum for two decades (Herstein, "Langham Place" 27), Martha Westwater acknowledges that the magazine had "definite literary pretensions" (443) and Alver EUegard describes Victoria first as "a fiction magazine," adding that it also contained

"some useful information on feminine subjects" (35). I want to focus here on

Victoria as it speaks to the genre of the family literary magazine by examining how its "literary pretensions" reinforced its "special purpose" of furthering women's rights. Victoria melded these two goals by giving birth to a distinctly feminist literary criticism that spoke on behalf of women readers, writers, and characters. The magazine's seventeen-year run from 1863 to 1880 and its competitive circulation of 20,000 in 1865 indicate that it achieved some measure of success in meeting its goals (Ellegard 32). Under the leadership of Emily

Davies, Victoria set out to compete with family literary magazines, especially the well-respected Cornhill Magazine.

Victoria's attempt to emulate the Cornhill is clear in the repeated references to its popular rival. Davies did her best to get Cornhill contributors involved with Victoria. Among the famous contributors Victoria had in common with the

Cornhill were Matthew Arnold ("Marcus Aurelius," November 1863), Margaret

Oliphant ("A Story of a Voice" August and September 1863), and the family name of Trollope with Anthony's brother Thomas Adolphus as the magazine's first serial novelist {Lindisfiim Chase May 1863-August 1864). It soon became clear that Victoria could not financially sustain such high caliber writers and they were largely replaced by Emily FaithfuU's friends who would contribute to the magazine for little to no pay (Stone 74). Instead of hiring Cornhill contributors,

180 then, Victoria was forced to merely make reference to or interact with the Cornhill

by including articles that responded to works or authors featured in that well-

known magazine. Victoria included an essay that refuted Arnold's Cornhill contribution on the positive influence of literary academies (March 1867), a

response to a Cornhill article on the spirit world (May 1863), a poem on William

Thackeray's death (February 1864), and correspondence about a Cornhill article on Female education in Germany (April 1867). Most importantly, Victoria's early

literary reviews were dominated by Cornhill serials including Anne Thackeray's

The Story of Elizabeth (May 1863), George Eliot's Rornola (August 1863), Anthony

Trollope's The Small House at Allington (May 1864), Frederick Greenwood's

Margaret DenziTs History (January 1865), and Matthew Arnold's Essays in

Criticism (March 1865), as well as reviews of works by other Cornhill contributors such as Elizabeth Gaskell and Margaret Oliphant. Victoria became a full-scale

"literary review" in a way the Cornhill was not, in order to make up for the fact that it could not afford the high-quality fiction it would take to make it an equal to its competitor. Victoria indicated its awareness of its rival and established itself as a participant in the broader conversations taking place in the field of periodical literature while carving out it own niche in the emerging profession of literary criticism.

If Victoria set itself up in emulation of the Cornhill, it also followed its worthy predecessor in its opposition to the elitist Saturday Review. The Saturday was frequently featured in the magazine's "Miscellanea" section where its misogynist articles were reprinted alongside pieces copied from other magazines that were closer to Victoria's own agenda such as The Queen, The Spectator, and

181 The Westminster Reviezv.^ Victoria's own agenda and the majority of articles it chose to reprint seem to loom over and ridicule the belittling statements made about women in the Saturday Review. The sole purpose of including reprints from the Saturday, it seems, was to discredit its views and increase Victoria's own critical authority. In a review of The Gentle Life: Essays in Aid of the Formation of

Character, Victoria makes clear its repugnance for the journal:

Essays reprinted from the Saturday Review are expected to be racy, at any rate, if not altogether to our taste. But the peculiar pungency of that unscrupulous periodical is not to be found here. There is scarcely a sentence which could be called smart, and the flatness is not relieved by high qualities of any other sort. The stories are old, the illustrations hackneyed, the quotations misquoted, the misprints numerous, and there is an unscholarly air about the whole performance. (February 1864 383)

Victoria's contempt for the Saturday Review is most strikingly illustrated in its

"Correspondence" section. This section of the magazine made Victoria's goals concrete by transforming the woman reader into a woman writer who is empowered to express her views in a public forum and to interact with the important issues of debate taking place in the male-dominated weeklies and quarterlies. The "Correspondence" section, "Having been requested to admit free discussion on the social questions of the day," operates under the premise that "letters containing various opinions will be freely inserted to give expression to the thoughts of various minds" (December 1865 183).’° An August 1867 letter from a reader named "Henrietta" declares that she "has the misfortune to be ... one of those frivolous beings ... pursued by the Saturday Review "—a young lady:

I confess to being tolerably sentimental; I own to having read novels occasionally before twelve o'clock A.M., and to taking a wicked interest in Tennyson's poetry. But I read something else the other day which was neither exactly a novel or a poem. I took upon me—ambitious task!—to unfold the ample pages of the Times, and to dive into the awful depths of Parliamentary debate" (336). 182 This letter indicates that Victoria helped to empower its women readers not only to engage in political debates, but to write back, and to write themselves into the larger discussion taking place in current literary journals.” Henrietta concludes, in opposition to the Saturday, that "it is impossible for women to be too intellectual.' I think she cannot be too highly educated. Though she were charged with the knowledge of all the world, she would be woman still" (342). The views of Victoria prevail as regular readers enact its tenets by becoming active critics.

Victoria's "Correspondence" section provides a striking example of reader interaction that went far beyond that allowed by other magazines of this class.

Jon Klancher notes that in such interactions "Reading and writing are not fixed functions but performing roles to be exchanged" (22). This exchange in roles culminates in Victoria with the serial article "The Paris Exhibition" that ran from

August to December 1867. Written as a series of letters from a reader to the editor, the article embodied the ideal of the movement from reader to writer suggested but not fully enacted by the Cornhill.

Victoria's willingness to print its reader's responses—not just in the form of questions addressed to the editor or to an advice columnist, as such sections were formulated in other women's magazines, but as genuine contributions to the contemporary debates— indicates the respect Victoria had for its readers and the fluidity of its conception of the woman reader/writer. The magazine's two- part analysis of Ruskin's "Of Queen's Gardens" provides a useful glimpse into

Victoria's attempt to revise contemporary attitudes toward women readers. But before I consider this key article, I would like to comment on the magazine's reprint of an article in its "Miscellanea" section which stresses the importance of 183 reading, especially periodical reading, for women. Reverend Brooke Herford's

"Importance of Newspapers to Women" (December 1866), copied from the

Manchester Guardian, articulates Victoria's attempt to destroy the conception of

reading as a "disease" by defining periodicals not as dangerous threats to women's reading practices, but as a vital resource for "self-culture" that allows women to enter the public realm both virtually and literally. Herford argues that newspaper and magazine reading are "more important to women than to men" because "women in their quiet household life, may go on for weeks hardly hearing a word of what is passing in the great world outside." Herford goes on to blame incompatible marriages on the restriction of women's reading practices; his solution is for women to stop depending on men to explain things to them and instead to "read the newspaper for herself, not merely for half an hour's amusement, but with the definite object of escaping the natural danger of her quiet home life, and keeping an open eye, and an understanding mind, for the passing history of nations, and the great interests which are stirring the heart of the world" (176-177). This article encapsulates Victoria's image of the active woman who reads primarily for her own good and the good of her sex rather than for simple pleasures or to stave off idleness. Within the pages of Victoria, reading—even the reading of literature—is a moral and political good because it allows women to approach men in intellectual status even if they are still prevented from gaining educational, professional, and political equality.

Victoria's challenge to Ruskin clearly articulates its conception of the active woman reader.

184 "Mr. Ruskin on Books and Women," featured in the November and

December 1865 issues of Victoria, "is slightly at issue" with "our teacher" Ruskin on points relating to women readers in Sesame and Lilies (Part 167). In Part I,

Victoria is primarily concerned with Ruskin's perpetuation of the status quo and with his conception of women's reading as passive. After agreeing with Ruskin's division between books of all time and books of the hour and his declaration that people should only read books by those who know more than they do and from whom they can learn, Victoria adds the caveat that people must be open to new ideas in what they read and do more than merely read to find confirmation of their own thoughts. Victoria Insists that an author should not be rejected because he "ruffles the conscience" (68). Likewise, Victoria takes Ruskin on for equivocating on the status of women as intellectual readers:

Mr. Ruskin is teaching us what to read and how to read, so that we may lift ourselves up into higher mental and moral regions; yet, at the same time he tells us that we can never reach them; for if we are to discard all thoughts of our own, it will avail us little to acquire (if indeed it were possible on such condition) all the thoughts of the highest thinkers in the world. The human spirit is not a mere vessel to be filled with good things, but a living organism, the law of whose nature it is to grow, and expand and clothe itself in beauty of its own. (69)

Ruskin implies that reading is only passive, and Victoria again asserts its active components which are especially vital for women who wish to develop into the intellectual rivals of men. The article credits Ruskin with acknowledging that women deserve to be educated, to be "'turned loose' into the library and let alone" and praises him for arguing that a "girl's education should be more earnest, and in the spirit of it more serious, than the boy's," that girls should be treated with reverence and not as inferiors (75-76). Yet, the biggest protest arises, not surprisingly, out of Ruskin's failure to recognize women's need to educate 185 themselves toward professional purposes: '^ut after we drink in with thirsty ear this spirit-stirring draught, and though our hearts swell with gratitude towards the man who can thus nobly conceive and trace out woman's mission, we still feel that the one great urgent question of the day in regard to woman he has left untouched"; Ruskin ignores the fact "which still keeps sounding in our ear... that woman has to work, not only in queen's gardens, but in the busy mart, and for the coarse bread of life; that she is not only the helpmate of man—the dispenser of all that is loveliest in home—but that she has often, alone and unsupported, to live without a home to sweeten, and wander forth in the rough and stony places of the world's highway" (76). Therefore, Victoria points out the limitations of Ruskin's "Queen" in the "Garden" and brings forth a new species that exists but has not yet been catalogued. This middle-class working woman is the active reader who must think independently and be self-educated in order to be self-supporting if it becomes necessary. She is the reader who can become the writer, the angel who transforms herself into the suffragette through books and conversation and, eventually, public reform.

Part n of "Mr. Ruskin on Books and Women" focuses on the flaws in

Ruskin's statements about women's education. First, Victoria attacks the limitations he creates as impracticable: "Girls ought to be highly educated, and their minds fully cultivated ... and yet... their minds are to stop short at certain points, and to present a perfect vacancy on some subjects, in spite of the fact that when a mind is once thoroughly awakened and active, everything which comes before it must be thought about and judged" (131). Victoria refers to Ruskin's contradictory ideal as the root of a charming but inhuman conception of

186 womanhood. Victoria also confronts Ruskin's implication that all women should be prepared for marriage because, the magazine contends, it is clear that there is a surplus of at least half a million women who must not merely be trained to sympathize with a husband's pleasures: "If [a woman} is to be educated with any theory respecting marriage at all, it would be wiser in these days to adopt the very possible contingency of her never marrying" (132). The magazine's conception of the woman reader is not only active and intellectually capable, but possibly single, professional, and, above all, fulfilled and womanly despite not having a husband and children. After taking Ruskin to task and redefining the woman reader, Victoria ultimately expresses gratitude for his recognition that women readers must be acknowledged and discussed and for his "valuable contribution towards the solution of that difficult question—how to turn the powers of women to the best and highest advantage? " (137). Victoria takes as its mission to push women's powers further than Ruskin imagined by creating a public forum for the expression of women's critical reading skills in its literary review section.

"AN EXCELLENT PICTURE OF LIFE": REALISM AND THE CREATION OF A FEMINIST LITERARY CRITICISM

Victoria developed a feminist literary criticism that participated in the literary authority wielded by the elite reviews by tying its feminist perspective to the high cultural value of realism. The magazine made this seemingly precarious bond by basing its definition of realism on character over plot and requiring that 187 "real" characters be morally respectable women who are also intelligent, independent, and worthy of serving as role models for progressive women like those in the Langham Place Group.'^ This critical formulation was conceived by

Emily Davies who established the "Literature of the Month" section, which served as Victoria's attempt to compete with the likes of the Cornltill despite its comparative lack of "respectable" novelists. According to Robinson, Davies took

George Eliot's "Contemporary Literature" section of the Westminster Review as a model for her own reviews, which emphasized "useful information" about each work accompanied by an evaluation of the work's "literary value" (168). In

February 1865, a year after Davies resigned her editorship, there were a few minor changes instituted in the review section, including the shortening of the title to "Literature," an increase in the length of the section, and a decrease in the number of fiction reviews. By November 1867, an even more pronounced shift had taken place as the section title was changed to "Reviews of Books," which indicated its much less literary focus. The "Reviews of Books" contained a greater number of reviews that were shorter in length, less in-depth, and commented much more frequently on non-fiction works that were autobiographical, historical, and political in nature. Multiple factors contributed to this transformation, including FaithfuU's attempts to increase circulation figures, her abandonment of Davies's vision of the magazine, and her vacation of the editorial seat between 1867 and 1873, when she handed control over to

William Wilfred Head, a Langhamite sympathizer. After FaithfuU's departure,

Victoria seems to have gone back to the model of the English Woman's foumal in

188 which most of the reviews focused on non-fiction works on women's issues.

However, before 1867 the majority of Victoria's reviews were of

the kinds of works (and often the same specific works) that were staples of the review sections in the mainstream literary magazines of the period. These reviews of beiletristic works—especially fiction—marked an important development in Victorian literature: the emergence of an avowedly feminist literary criticism... [and] initiated a feminist project of establishing a pantheon of notable women writers, proudly drawing attention to contemporary women's literary achievements ... [and shaping] nearly 40 years of criticism in Victorian women's periodicals. (Robinson 162)

While Victoria's stint as a full-scale literary review tapered off when Davies

resigned and was severely hampered during FaithfuU's absence, the important

role played by the magazine in establishing a feminist critical voice in the

mainstream periodical marketplace is incontrovertible.

Victoria's "beiletristic" reviews were clearly focused on realism as the

primary literary value that defined good literature. Nicola Diane Thompson explains that, "The review, as a genre, has to place the Uterary work in a certain

framework in order to come to terms with it; it has to label, name, and put the work in context before it can proceed to analyze and evaluate it" (10). Victoria labeled works "realistic" if they had a clear moral message, an educational

purpose, and a primary focus on strong characters rather than plot development. But gender played a vital role in the magazine's determination of literary value, as the reviews often focused on the strength of a work's female authors and characters. As Thompson notes, nineteenth-century literary criticism in general produced "a distinctly gendered aesthetics of reception" that reflected the polarized and patriarchal culture by designating male writers as creators of original, inteUectual art and female writers as producers of superficial,

189 domestic, low cultural works (10,20). The gendered aesthetics worked quite differently within the pages of Victoria as the magazine's review section sought to elevate women's literature and to refute the conception that women writers specialized in domestic realism "because it required less imaginative and intellectual effort or strength, allowing them to passively regurgitate the details of life they saw around them" (Thompson 80). Victoria defined realist fiction as a high cultural form and declared that it was beneficial to women readers. While the tradition of the anonymous review caused many "female reviewers to internalize the patriarchal voice" in order to "consolidate their precarious hold on literary authority and respectability, and ... to be taken seriously and accepted as part of the patriarchal establishment" (Thompson 12), Victoria's feminist identity guaranteed that its reviews would not be divorced from feminist concerns. Although the reviews were anonymous and incorporated the critical conceptions of the weightier journals as a means of legitimating its voice in the field of literary criticism, Victoria struck out on its own by consistently including a feminist component to its evaluation of realist texts.

Taking a closer look at some of Victoria's reviews will illustrate the magazine's definition of a feminist realism. While commenting on the importance of verisimilitude and well-developed characters as vital components of good realist works, Victoria's reviews emphasize morality and intellectual strength as they apply to women writers and characters. After mentioning the excitement generated by the release in volume form of a work written by

Thackeray's daughter that had been previously serialized in the Comhill and noting that such a work requires "no external passport to recommend it," Victoria

190 declares that Anne Thackeray's The Story of Elizabeth (May 1863) is "intrinsically one of the most remarkable of our recent novels" (95). The fact that the novel is

remarkable is intimately connected to its verisimilitude: "If we do not actually know of a similar story in real life, we feel that such an one might very easily come within the range of our experience" (95). Even more important than its

plausibility, though, is Thackeray's ability to provide a moral example of a woman working triumphantly within the confines of her role and "strikingly" illustrating "the tone of women's minds at the present moment" (95). The reviewer of Elizabeth Gaskell's A Dark Night's Work (June 1863) highlights the important literary contribution made by its eminent woman author to whose

"masterly hand ... we already owe so much" (190). This work is commended for the "clearness of its moral teaching" (190) and praised because "Not being overcrowded with incident, there is room for the characters to work, and to display a strongly-marked individuality" (190). Finally, Victoria proclaims that

"Even a careless reader can scarcely fail to be struck with the reality of Mrs.

Gaskell's characters. The style of the book is simple though forcible; the persons are too natural to be other than many-sided" (191). Just as Victoria's evaluation of Gaskell stresses the contribution she makes on behalf of her sex, its analysis of

George Eliot's Romola (August 1863), written "in what Mr. Matthew Arnold might call the grand style' of fiction" (383), is singled out for its display of feminine intellectual power. Eliot emerges as the prime example of a woman's literary culture that is of the highest caliber. She "ambitiously" chooses "The highest and most tragic human interests, both in the family and in public life" which "serve to bring out in their richness the intellectual power and the varied

191 gifts which Adam Bede and Silas Mamer had indicated rather than exhausted"

(383). Eliot lays out "A singular wealth of learning ... upon the details of the

narrative, and at first, to say the truth, it encumbers the progress, and is likely to

repel a careless reader"; however, the novel's "conscientious execution" deserves

careful attention. Victoria warns that this novel is for the serious and intellectual

reader and conveys its excitement that such a novel has been written by a

woman. These reviews exemplify Victoria's feminist assessment of the work of

women realist writers, but female characters were also crucial to the magazine's

literary criticism.

Victoria employed gender as an important evaluative criteria for the high cultural realist novel by asking whether or not the female characters in fiction approximated the actual situations and attitudes of the progressive women of the day, thus providing "real" women as feminist role models. Of course, for

Victoria, what counted as a realistic representation of a female character had

much to do with its own feminist conception of womanhood. Thus, the magazine's critical conceptions in this respect diverged dramatically from the evaluations made by most critics of the period and constitute the magazine's distinct contribution to the creation of a feminist literary criticism. Anthony

Trollope's female characters are the most frequent targets for these feminist offensives, regardless of the approval he receives for his realistic reflection of society as a whole. The key to Victoria's laudatory review of Anthony Trollope's

The Small House at Allington (May 1864), for example, lies in its superior ability to teach readers by holding "up to English society a mirror in which its superficial aspect is faithfully reflected" (93). Victoria goes on to note that Trollope shows

192 "the worthlessness of [superficial] success" which is "the moral lesson of the story/' and commends the role characters in general play in Trollope's achievement as "the interest does not depend either on the plot or the leading incidents, but on the gradual working out of the story, the development of the characters, and their mode of thinking and acting under varying circumstances"

(93). Despite this acclamation, Trollope was often cast in a negative light by

Victoria because of his women characters.

As Thompson shows us, Trollope was increasingly characterized as a

"feminine" writer throughout the 1860s for his concentration on the details of everyday life, his popularity as a circulating library success, and his interest in the insights of female characters (81). Instead of equating Trollope with feminine low culture due to his appeal to masses of women readers and his unconventional female characters as other critics did, Victoria complained that his daring women did not go far enough. A case in point is Victoria's critique of

77ie Small House at Allington's "old maid" Lily Dale on the grounds that "the exalted courage with which she meets [rejection by her true love] appears unreal, because no sufficient sustaining motive is disclosed" for her decision to remain single (May 1864,93). Victoria's objection focuses on the fact that while she is an independent woman, she is not given an independent and fulfilling occupation:

We never hear of her doing anything whatever but looking after her clothes, drawing, riding, and playing croquet. These innocent sports may or may not be very well as filling up a few vacant years before marriage, but they can scarcely be regarded as adequate sustenance for a whole life. Still less does it seem possible that these occupations could suffice to fill the terrible void which such a disappointment as Lily's must have caused. She tries to think it enough to live for her mother, and it is very good of her to try, but in the course of nature this can only be a temporary relief, aot a permanent satisfaction of her needs. (93)

193 Two of Trollope's other novels are similarly criticized. In an April 1865 review of

Miss Mackenzie, Trollope is maligned for his depiction of the lead character:

Miss Mackenzie makes our acquaintance as a gentle lady between thirty and forty, who finds herself, after a youth uf self-devotion to a sick brother, alone in the world, with 800 pounds a year. Throughout the first volume it is chiefly in relation to the said 800 pounds a year, that we are induced to think of Miss Mackenzie at all, so very undecided and shadowy Is the lady. (566)

Despite the novel's weak depiction of its female lead, Victoria concludes that "On the whole" it "is an excellent picture of life. We have no right to quarrel with Mr.

Trollope for selecting dull or mean and stupid people for his characters"(566).

And a October 1865 review of Trollope's Can you Forgive Her? complains about the man-hopping Alice Vavason

We cannot forgive her. Mr. Trollope will forgive us, we trust, for a verdict as unhesitating as it is unconditional. He has pleaded his cause well, but has lost it.... Lucy Robartes [sic] had, at least, a show of reason in refusing the young Lord Lufton; but Alice Vavasor alternately jilts John Grey, the worthy man, and George Vavasor, the wild man, without rhyme or reason.... AUce Vavasor is represented as a woman of sense, and do women of sense change lovers as easily as gloves ... ? (574-75)

Trollope's women, while considered daring within the pages of the Cornhill, seemed idle and silly to Victoria which had set a standard in its non-fiction for active and professional single women.

Other novelists were singled out for creating female characters that served as negative role models for women who wanted to challenge their traditional roles in Victorian society. For example, an April 1865 review denounced

Charlotte Yonge's The Clever Woman of the Family for its unpleasant depiction of a strong-minded woman." While it is recognized that the novel portrays many of

Yonge's "well known excellences" these are noted to be sadly "accompanied by exaggerated defects" (573). According to Victoria, the author "has missed a good 194 aim in her delineation of a strong-minded character... she has worked it out clumsily, and has fallen far short of an adequate representation of the follies and mistakes incidental to energy and action as displayed by women, and the real difficulties through which they are likely to pass" (574). In other words, the novel does not instruct strong-minded women how to stay that way while also fitting in to society. It instead gives the impression that "the necessary effect of a cultivated mind was to be overbearing, abrupt, and unpleasant to the last degree" (574). In the end, the main character "attains a satisfactory ideal of weakmindedness" (575) and the novel provides "a feeble protest against what the author oddly conceives to be intellectual and social ambition in women"

(576). This blow to Yonge is really a denunciation of her reputation as an

"appropriate" woman writer who embodied the idealized view of Victorian womanhood that the magazine sought to alter (Thompson 89). As Thompson notes, these qualities in Yonge influenced the positive reception she got from most contemporary critics as a second-string novelist and explains why she has been ignored by twentieth-century critics who, as we can see by this example, have inherited the feminist critical tradition begun in Victoria (89). Likewise, a

September 1863 review of Margaret Stourton implies that the novel is irresponsible in its idealistic depiction of the life of a governess:

It would seem scarcely necessary to point out the glaring unlikeness of this picture to the life it professes to represent The fable is too fabulous to bear the moral appended to it. Half-educated girls engaged in or preparing for governess Üfe, on whom alone the book can be supposed to have any influence, may find in it materials for castle-building. They certainly will not learn from it to respect their work, or to accommodate themselves cheerfully to the real exigencies of their position. (477-478)

195 A key component of realism for Victoria that diverges from the definitions of

realism provided by the literary reviews is that a successful realist novel must

provide a positive and plausible (and therefore feminist) role model. This

important literary value explains Victoria's rejection of sensation fiction—a form

that relies heavily on plot and on female characters who are often either

criminals or victims of crime—despite the fact that it is dominated by women

writers and championed convincingly by Mary Elizabeth Braddon in Belp-avia.

"NOXIOUS AND OFFENSIVE SPECIMEN[S] OF WOMANKIND": SENSATION FICTION AND VICTORIA'S ENTRY INTO ELITIST CRITICISM

Victoria's discussion of Margaret Oliphant's Miss Marjoribanks offers a striking example of the magazine's valuation of character over plot, realism over sensationalism. The June 1866 review provides a "cordial welcome" to the new

novel, declaring that

It is quite an unusual luxury in these days to meet with a story which does not contain a single murder, or one case of bigamy, by an author who is able to make the career of a girl ambitious of becoming a leader of society in a small country town, interesting from the first page to the last of a three volume novel. Not being overcrowded with incident, the characters have room to work, and to display a strongly marked individuality in which the true merit of the story hes. The men and women in it are real people, living and acting in the society of a provincial town, which is pictured vividly, but without exaggeration. (187)"

Thus, the March 1868 article, "Sensational Novels," which made the magazine's most forceful argument against sensationalism, was a logical though outspoken example of the literary values already promoted in the pages of Victoria.

Whether or not the article was a direct result of interim editor W. W. Head's

196 "frequently ... incoherent, reactionary discourses on the decline of contemporary culture" (Robinson 169), the values articulated in "Sensational

Novels" remain consistent with Victoria's elevation of realist characterization and disparagement of "overcrowded incident" and continue the argument that good literature must depict women in positive terms.

Early on in the magazine, sensational writers were criticized for their outrageous plots and characters in consistently brief—usually one or two sentence—reviews that were somewhat dismissive. However, the critiques of women sensationalists like Mary Braddon and Mrs. Henry Wood were quite mild. Braddon's Henry Dunbar was identified in July 1864 as a member of "the sensational school, which is said to be so mischievously exciting, and has the necessary elements of murder and mystery. A reader must, however, be very sensitive indeed to be in any danger of suffering from the gentle strikes administered in Henry Dunbar" (283). Similarly, Wood's Oswald Cray was reviewed in January 1865 as "a spirited story, which will help sustain Mrs.

Wood's reputation as being one of the most rapid producers in the present day of novels with improbable plots" (287).'^ But the attitude toward sensationalism was more pronounced in February 1864 when Charles Reade's Hard Cash was panned despite its positive depiction of a female lead. Victoria declared that

"The select few may be lured from the beginning to the end by an untiring interest in the heroine—as beautiful and lovable as she is clever and original"; however, those who do so "will shut their eyes to a host of impossibilities

(improbabilities is too mild a word), and will pass lightly over many other transgressions of the laws of high art. But to the multitude the transgressions are

197 the attraction" (380). By April 1868, Victoria's hard line against sensationalism

had been fully formed. The novel Little Miss Fairfax was sharply criticized for its

plot about a sensational villain who denounces marriage yet seduces every

woman who crosses his path, plans a thwarted murder by poison, and, worst of

all, remains unpunished. In a comparatively lengthy diatribe, Victoria maps out

its objections:

In this work the author aims at producing effective scenes and striking conversations, by dint of bold colours and hardy words. The lights are rather too strong and the shadows too dark to suit our taste. A little softening and toning down would have been, in our opinion, greatly to the advantage of the book. The public may, however, think differently, as nothing seems too hot or spiced to swallow, while the rush-along style now in fashion precludes the possibility of taking time to note whether harmony exists either in the conversations of the speakers or their actions. If this book, and others of like description, give indeed true pictures of our times, then we are far advanced on the road downwards, and not upwards, as is by some fondly believed. That the work intends to show the evil therein depicted, and to prove that virtue is a reality, is not doubted. Yet there is so much talk against moral and spiritual laws put into the mouth of the hero and others, that is not for a length of time that we are given to understand that this sort of talk is folly, and all wrong. (571)

Despite its acknowledged good intentions, the novel is dismissed as a failure.

The review concludes with a reassertion of the morality and truth of realism, which is the superior literary form, and a request that novelists hold up "vanity, extravagance, and every species of falseness to reprobation, ridicule, and contempt; so that readers may learn to admire the true, and throw glamour and villainy to the winds" (573).

In the negative reviews of sensational works as well as the more laudatory analyses of realist novels, comments about the multitude of vulnerable and careless readers betray the difficulties Victoria faced in attempting to put forth a feminist agenda while also establishing a respectable critical voice within the 198 emerging field of literary criticism. It is largely in comments about uncritical readers—who are notably not identified primarily as women—that Victoria's desire to "consolidate [its) precarious literary authority" (Thompson 12) becomes evident. Victoria conceives of sensation fiction as the most corrupting form of literature for uncritical readers; however, the magazine points to the negative images of female characters in sensationalism as its most dangerous characteristic. This critique maintains Victoria's feminist critical voice as it charges that such images threaten the respectability of womankind.

In "Sensational Novels," Victoria's bias against sensationalism is made explicit. The article focuses on the negative effects that sensation fiction can have on readers in general and on the reputations of women in particular through its representation of immoral female characters who commit criminal acts and often escape punishment. The magazine's championing of realism is also complicated in the article by the acknowledgement that sensation novels are, in a sense, more realistic than realist novels.'* In fact, the article makes it clear that what the critics—both in Victoria and elsewhere—refer to as realism is more aptly designated as a form of idealism because it requires an interpretation that has the semblance of reality with the morality and educational qualities that would make it ideal for a broad base of readers. The article defines authors of sensation fiction in opposition to "writers of both sex of powerful genius, fine taste, and sound principle, who have striven, and not vainly, to raise and benefit mankind" (460). This list of respectable authors includes 'T)ickens, Thackeray,

George Eliot, Miss Mulock and Charlotte Bronte" who produce high art that focuses on "character, reflection, and true feeling," thus making readers "wiser

199 and better" (460,463). After clearly drawing a line of demarcation between sensational and realist writers, Victoria takes the risky step of attacking the motives of the sensation novelists themselves, many of whom were women trying to make a living, a cause the magazine otherwise promotes at all costs:

Instructing and profiting, purifying and ennobling their readers, do not enter into the thoughts, are not the ambition of the writers.... Their highest aim is to write what will be read, and thus secure the golden booty. Ephemeral notoriety and a publisher's solid thanks seem effectually to stifle any disagreeable twinge of conscience, literary prostitution may at times be supposed to give rise to. (456-57)

The accusation of prostitution is a harsh one that seems to belie the motives that drive much of the magazine's campaign for women's work; however, it coincides with the argument concerning female characters in sensation fiction by demanding that women maintain the moral high ground whether they are domestic angels or money-earning professionals.

Even more importantly, sensation authors are held accountable for exerting their power "to the utmost to fascinate us with profound compassion for those unfortunates verging or entered on a career of crime and villainy" (458). In particular, female characters who are "noxious and offensive specimen[s] of womankind, in reality the victim[s) of ignorance, vanity, selfishness" (459) are blamed for damaging the public's respect for women and potentially delaying progress for womankind. Perhaps as a means of saving sensation authors from all of the blame, those at the helm of the literary business are chastised for allowing such representations of women to run rampant:

It is pitiable and surprising no chivalric voice has been raised against such false and misleading delineations, that a brisk and hackneyed commerce has been permitted to literary traders, to traduce, calumniate, and blacken the character of Englishwomen The blush may well mount on the cheek of fair readers, crediting the assertion, they are learning only what is 200 in existence around, and closely allied with their lives, that all other records of maidenly, and wifely virtue and decorum are productions of Idealism, not guaranteed by the genuine stamp of Realism. What, we may ask, will ultimately be the estimate of the other sex, if men put faith in such portraitures? It must rapidly sink to the lowest depth a Sensational author can crawl to, and principle, fidelity, and honour in a woman, will come to be regarded as unattainable. (460-61)

In addition to attacking authors and publishers, the article points out the responsibility of critics to guide their readers to fiction that is beneficial: 'The last quarter century has seen a rapid increase in England's commercial prosperity"—and by implication has greatly increased its access to mass quantities of printed materials; however, "it is doubtful whether there has been a corresponding improvement in our system of education to raise the tone of mind and mode of thought throughout the country generally, and especially in the several ranks of our great middle-class" (455). Victoria lays much of the blame on literary critics who have not done enough to educate the public and have "rather fallen into a servile worship of what is too willingly welcomed and read, and abjectly bowed to the great idol of success ... which has been achieved in raising a clamour at the counters of circulating libraries, and enticing hasty feverish perusal" (455). Since it had already become a critical commonplace in the more elite journals not to bow to the "idol of success," it seems that Victoria uses this strategy more to legitimize its own critical superiority than to chastise other critics. By declaring other critics to be lax in their duties, Victoria raises its own status as an educational tool for the "uncritical and weak readers" who fall prey to sensationalism (460).

Finally, the article redefines the critical terminology used to classify realism and sensationalism in an attempt at greater precision. Defenses of

201 sensationalism (like Braddon's in Belgravia) are the target of Victoria's derision as they confuse the terms by classifying the sensational as realistic. Victoria, therefore, concedes that sensation fiction is real as a photograph is real, but cannot properly be called realist because it is not moral:

Defending themselves against recent severe, but wholesome, criticism representatives of the sensational or realistic school assert that their intention is to portray life as it is, without a tinge of idealism, without seeking to point a moral Here, they say, we lay before you a picture. Do not turn your eyes away from the horrors, ghastly vices, and social depravity we have dissected and unfolded, but answer us—is it accurate or not? If it is, our purpose is fulfilled. You, reader, must draw your own conclusions—and moral, if possible—from it. (457)

It is conceded that sensationalism is "realistic" or "photographic" because its themes are ripped from the daily newspaper headlines and expose evils that exist in society.'^ However, for Victoria, the failure of sensationalism is that it refuses to show readers explicitly what moral or lesson they should take from their reading, leaving open the possibility that readers will draw the wrong conclusions, will come to think that vice is sometimes rewarded instead of virtue, that society is not ordered and controlled. As a concluding salvo, the article carries out an assault on the realist defense of sensationalism provided by

George Sala's Belgravia Magazine article "On the Sensational in Literature and

Art." After accusing Sala of being a wearisome permy-press writer who has gone

"monthly" only to present "much hackneyed information" raked together in a

"cunning specimen of literary patchwork," he is ridiculed for linking Dickens and Shakespeare to sensationalism and for defending his editor Mary Braddon because "If ladies will seek notoriety in an unenviable and vicious province of literature, they have only themselves to thank for well-merited and (it is to be hoped) salutary castigation" (464). Sala's defense is labeled an "angry shriek 202 from the fountainhead" that is "pleasantly indicative of panic" and will not sway sophisticated readers (465).'®

With its forceful attack on sensationalism, Victoria took the final leap in separating itself from the family literary magazines—against which it found it could not compete—by taking an elitist critical stance much more harsh than other magazines of the genre which, like the Cornhill, featured and defended some sensation novels or, like Belgravia, built its market niche by focusing on women and sensation fiction.'^ Victoria moved back toward the English Wotnan's journal and away from the family literary magazines as it simultaneously asserted what Pauline Nestor characterizes as its "restrictive moralism."

Victoria's changing character did not lessen its impact in establishing a feminist literary criticism that enabled the woman reader to become a woman writer; it only guaranteed that the magazine would have strict moral guidelines for women who wrote, guidelines that would ensure that professional women maintained their social acceptability within the existing ideals of Victorian womanhood. Thus, Victoria's feminist moralism follows the model set forth by

FaithfuU's defense of her female compositors at the Victoria Press who would carry out their womanly reproductive and domestic functions within a non- traditional profession as they transferred words onto the printed page to be circulated around the nation, thus spreading culture throughout the British civilization and beyond.

203 ENDNOTES

' In America,Gcdey's Lady's Book is an interesting corollary toVictoria Magazine that relied more heavily on domestic paradigms, but nonetheless challenged ideologies that confined women to private spaces. For an analysis of the feminist philosophyGodey's of editor, Sara J. Hale, as well as many other American women magazine editors who aimed to establish a public space for women. See Patricia Dicker'sOur Sister Editors. For commentary on and selections from more radical feminist periodicals in America such asThe Genius of Liberty, The Woman's Advocate, and The Sibyl, see The Radical Women's Press of the 1850s edited by Ann Russo and Cheris Kramarae.

^ Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, rumored to have been the model for George Eliot's Romola, was the daughter of Benjamin Leigh Smith, a radical MP and Unitarian, and Anne Longden, a milliner's apprentice. She attended the Ladies College, Bedford Square and later established Portman Hail, a co-educational school in which she also taught. Along with Emily Davies (who worked as an editor for both theEnglish Woman's foumal and Victoria Magazine), she established Girton College. She clearly inherited her family's tradition of political activism and was instrumental in the founding of the Women's Suffrage committee in 1866. Bessie Rayner Parkes was the daughter of Joseph Parkes, an activist Unitarian who served as a Birmingham Solicitor, and Elizabeth Priestly, whose father Joseph was a political radical with ties to Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. Parkes wrote books suchRemarks as Upon the Education of Girls (1854) and Essays on Women's Work (1865) and supported married women's property rights as well women's right to vote.

’ Faithfull was bom the youngest daughter of Reverend Ferdinand Faithfull in Headley, Surrey on May 27,1835. She attended boarding school, was presented at court, and lived the life of a typical upper-middle-class girl. FaithfuU's early life is not weU-documented, but she gained much notoriety for her involvement in theCodrington Divorce Case of 1864. The case was one of the most notorious of those made possible by the Divorce Bill of 1857 as Faithfull became a pawn who, it was implied, was either a rape victim or a lesbian. Stone and Fredeman explain the effect of the case on FaithfuU's reputation and her subsequent rejection by most of her Langhamite friends. Faithfull wrote one novel and made several notorious lecture tours of America, resulting in Three Visits to America (1884).

■' These reports were usually featured in the "Social Science" section o f the magazine like the one for April 1864, which documents the percentage of women who passed the University Local Examinations and proclaims that women did better on their first round of exams than men (573). Similar articles include "Lady Doctors" (June 1864); "How a Woman Might Live" (April 1866), which argues for retail careers for middle-class women who have fewer opportunities than those below them and must often rely on charity; and "Dr. Mary Walker, and Dr. Elizabeth BlackweU, and Miss Garrett," which illustrates by real-life example that women can be both feminine and professional.

® See Frawley, Fredeman, and Stone for more on the woodcut illustration of the Victoria Press.

® Stone contends that Nestor's statement is too harsh and dtes Elizabeth Cady Stanton's belief that "No woman's rights library begins to be complete without"Victoria and Mrs. Wilbour's—president of the Sorosis Q ub^tatem ent that "At present 1 know of no paper or magazine that so faithfully reports aU facts of interest connected with women" (76). Even the Queen claimed thatVictoria "always has some claims upon our respect [It] is always sober, if not serious, but intellectual readers will enjoy it... always abounds in that which is instructive and solid.. .always brings wise and sober utterances, and at the same time offers us specimens of a lighter style" (qtd. in Stone 247).

204 ’’ Maria Frawley argues that the magazine's emphasis on the queen shifts from her status as monarch to her essential embodiment of womanhood and finally tapers off altogether only to be replaced with depictions of Emily Faithfull herself as the magazine's "queenly center" (97).

* Sheila Herstein suggests that this series began in 1865 and ran through 1870 (beyond the period studied here); however, the articles signed by "T" that 1 have identified begin in 1867. These include "Feminine Honesty" (May 1867), "Feminine Knowledge " Oune 1867), "Feminine Work" (September 1867), "Feminine Idleness" (November 1867), "Feminine Character" (December 1867), "Marriage" (January 1868), and "Feminine Earnings" (March 1868).

’ For examples of Victoria's interaction with these magazines see the "Miscellanea" and "Correspondence " sections which regularly reprinted selections from or reactions to other important periodicals. See also the October 1865 review ofThe Westminster Review, the April 1866 article "TheContemporary Review on the Education of Women," the May 1866 review of "Female Education" in The Contemporary Ranew, and a summary of articles featured in various periodicals called "Conflicting Opinions on the Franchise for Women" in August 1866.

In fact, Victoria followed through on its policy by including some letters that opposed its own views. In addition to the involvement of women readers encouraged by the "Correspondence" section, the "Social Science" section had from Victorm's inception asked women to actively participate in the issues discussed within the magazine. This section included notices of bills brought forth in parliament, announcements of meetings for organizations such as the Governesses Benevolent Institution, the National Female Emigration Society, and the Society for Promoting the Employment of Women, as well as reprinting lectures given at those meetings for those who could not attend. "Social Science" also included frequent appeals for monetary donations or volunteer work such as the December 1864 plea by Mary Eyre to send donations for the poor or the May 1866 request by Miss Eack to help the cause of providing homes for foreign governesses.

" The correspondent's use of Coventry Patmore's depiction of Honoria in "The Angel of the House" as a reasonable ideal flies against our contemporary evaluations of that poem; While every debt which is due to poetry and idealised womanhood is paid, Honoria herself, the heroine of the simple tale, remains an average woman, neither transcendently gifted in heart or brain.. . . I can imagine Felix and Honoria talking—yes, oh reader—on politics together. .. [and Honoria) registering with her own delicate fingers the vote which gives at once substance to thought, and value to judgement. (340)

“ Victoria's critical agenda established a feminism that foreshadowed the feminist criticism of the 1980s exemplified by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar'sThe Madwoman in the Attic, which judged literary works largely on the strength of their female characters.

Victoria may have also disliked Yonge's novel because it satirized SPEW, the Victoria Press, and feminist magazines.

It is astonishing to note the likeness between the June 1863 comment about Gaskell's work—"Not being overcrowded with incident, there is room for the characters to work, and to display a strongly-marked individuality"—and this June 1866 statement that Oliphant's novel—"Not being overcrowded with incident, the characters have room to work, and to display a strongly marked individuality in which the true merit of the story lies." Either the reviews were recycled or the values were so strongly present in the minds of the reviewers that they became repetitive.

“ The brief reviews of Braddon and WcxDd are quoted in their entirety.

Interestingly, this article is placed between two stories, "A Story of a Scandal" and "Written for my Daughter," that flirt with very sensational themes. However, the magazine's 205 policy of domesticating the sensational holds true in these stories. For more on this, see note 19, below.

In August 1865 an article called "A Plea For Prudence" acknowledges the similarities between the themes and plots of sensation novels and the events presented in recent news reports which have "run a neck-in-neck race with the sensation novelist" (359).Victoria, however, concludes that sensation fiction is irresponsible because its characters do not receive the same punishment as England's criminals who are "no visionary beings, the creation of a lively imagination, [but] are flesh and blood like ourselves, beings with hearts to break, nerves to agonise, and souls to prepare for the great tribunal of justice" (359)

'* That this attack proved too harsh for some readers is indicated in the letter sent by "H.P." included in the "Correspondence" for April 1868. H P. contends that sensation serves a necessary function by providing the thrill of earlier ages that has been driven out by modem science: "Though witches and fairies with all their kith and kin are no more, not even a poor ghost lingering behind, the craving for excitement, the degenerate offspring of wonder, still lives, and, too listless to rise to healthier regions, grovels in the infected marshes of sensationalism" (537).

” Interestingly, despiteVictoria's tirade against sensation fiction, many of the magazine's short stories (which predominate as a fictional form due to the magazine's limited finances) actually incorporated sensational themes. It may well be that stories promising sensationalism were featured to increase readership. However,Victoria stayed true to its critical conceptions by making sure that its sensational storylines were turned into moral lessons that adhered to the magazine's feminist agenda. For example, Margaret Oliphant's "A Story of a Voice" (August and September 1863) and the anonymous "Written for My Daughter" (August and September 1865) could each be considered "realist" texts inVictoria's terms because they offer a strong moral lesson, attempt to depict events that could really happen to fairly well-developed characters, and provide positive images of strong and unconventional women. What is most interesting, however, is the fact that the plots of both stories involve the potentially sensational themes of murder, kidnapping, detection, jilted lovers, and violent attacks; however, these themes are worked out in such a way that the villains are punished, the women are moral, and a lesson is learned by the main character or narrator which is clearly, almost didactically, communicated to the reader. Thus, Victoria's stories tend to adapt the sensational to the ideal, thereby fulfilling the magazine's critical and feminist agendas. Oliphant's highly entertaining and humorously written "A Story of a Voice" traces the events that take place after the stout and lovable old bachelor Mr. Oldham witnesses a murder taking place beneath his window. The only way that Oldham can identify the murderer is by the haunting sound of his "strange, spasmodic voice—a voice which seemed to catch upon special words, and clench the teeth on them" ( August 1863,303). All he knows is that the murderer was a gentleman who struck a deadly blow to a humble man after repeatedly asking where he had put "the child." After this, Oldham is obsessed with finding the murderer and he becomes a sort of anti-detective who knows "nothing of the arts of detectiveism, nor did he understand how to hold his tongue" (September 1863,407). He somehow manages to hide evidence from the police despite the fact that he cannot restrain himself from talking incessantly about what he knows, and searches for his own clues but only finds answers when he stumbles upon them accidentally. He is ridiculed by his friends who think his interest in the case is silly and self-important because he believes that "justice in the world can no longer go on without him " (August 1863, 311) and who joke that he must have had something to do with the murder since he knows so much about it. After meeting with a widow who is convinced that her father-in-law has kidnapped her child, Oldham sets out to locate the address that he found written on a slip of paper in the dead man's pocketbook. Here he meets an "old maid " named Miss Mead, hears the voice of the murderer, and finds the kidnapped child safe and sound living with Miss Mead's maid. The closer Oldham comes to unraveling the mystery, the less interest he has in it because he is captivated by Miss Mead, an "experienced" and "quick-witted" woman of forty with "pretty grey ringlets" that "stirred softly on the sweet bloom of her cheeks" (September 1863,403). Miss Mead saves 206 Oldham from his bumbling detective work with her good advice. She is "the centre of her little society," the manager of the community who makes him see when he returns home "the inferiority of the male portion of the creation altogether" (September 1863,412-13). In the end, Oldham and Miss Mead are married, the child is returned to his mother, and the murderer is punished as a result of their teamwork. Good and evil are clearly delineated, those who commit crimes are punished, and the old maid saves the day and gets the man! In "Written for my Daughter," the seemingly villainous narrator, Margaret Oglevie, tells the secret story of her life to her daughter to be read only after her death. Margaret Oglevie is a self-described "woman of a cool head, but fiery heart" who is "proud, selfish, and self-willed" (August 1865 363, 367). Margaret's desire to strike out on her own can, ironically, only be fulfilled by marriage; therefore, she submits to the first proposal she receives from John Baldwin, a mild-mannered family friend who showers her with admiration. Margaret states that she "had no notion of prematurely resigning my liberty, nor of sinking into my proper place, with regard to him; for, so far, I led and irifluenced him completely" (367). During their extended engagement, Margaret falls in love with Roland Oglevie, a dark, passionate figure who is more of a match for her will. They then decide that despite that fact that she is engaged and Roland had been promised to his cousin—Margaret's frail and angelic boarding school roommate—they will be married. Thus, they begin their lives together "stained with unfaithfulness and dishonour" (370). This seems to be the beginning of a sensational tale in which the evil villains triumph over their weak fiancés. However, the story takes an unexpected twist when Roland and Margaret's true love mellows them both into an ideal loving couple who soon produce a child and seem to be on track to living happily ever after—if not for the wrath of the formerly docile John Baldwin. Despite the couple's remorse and their immense sacrifices as they are forced from their families and friends, they lead a quiet, respectable, and happy life together. Baldwin, however, will not accept that Margaret had left him of her own free will. Baldwin is convinced that Margaret is brainwashed and corrupted by Roland. In fact, her creates his own delusional sensational plot and hounds her for years to try to get her back. Finally, his obsession results in a psychotic rage in which John beats Roland in the face with a whip, blinding him and eventually causing his death. So, the strong-willed woman is in a sense punished for her actions by the tragic end of her romance; however, her choice not to marry John can be seen as a good one since he turns out to be less than what he seemed at first. And, Margaret further redeems herself by passing her moral lesson on to her daughter whom she also attempted to educate in the womb so that she would not be bom with her own "Passionate, headlong disposition" (September 1865,444). Still, we come away feeling that the true moral lesson is that to be a good person and a model wife you do not have to fit the typical mode of the angel in the house. Both of these stories show howVictoria walked the line between sensation and a feminist moralist realism and contributed to the magazine's feminist agenda by presenting daring female characters who ultimately provide moral lessons to their readers.

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