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A University of Sussex DPhil thesis Available online via Sussex Research Online: http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/ This thesis is protected by copyright which belongs to the author. This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the Author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the Author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Please visit Sussex Research Online for more information and further details GEORGE AUGUSTUS SALA: THE PERSONAL STYLE OF A PUBLIC WRITER Peter Blake D.Phil University of Sussex September 2010 Declaration I hereby declare that this thesis has not been and will not be, submitted in whole or part to another University for the award of any other degree. Acknowledgements This thesis has been made possible by the AHRC for granting me a doctoral award and for enabling me to spend four weeks researching the Sala Papers at the Beinecke Library, Yale University. My thanks to all the staff at the Beinecke for their generous help. The School of Humanities Graduate Centre at the University of Sussex have also helped with the costs associated with graduate research. Especial thanks to Prof. Jenny Bourne Taylor at Sussex University for supervising this thesis and for all her support and guidance. I also owe a debt of gratitude to Prof. Norman Vance, Prof. Lindsay Smith and members of the C19th study group at Sussex University. All the conference organisers who have allowed me to disseminate my research to a wider audience and the publishers and academics who have refereed my work and allowed it to be published are to be thanked; particularly Prof. David Paroissien, Dr. Ruth Livesey, Dr. Ella Dzelzainis, Dr. Robert Cook and the editorial board of the London Journal. Without the support of family and friends this project would never have been completed and would have been far less enjoyable. I also thank my mother and father for their support and their belief in me. But the biggest thanks goes to my wife, Anna, and my children Ella, Amber and Saul for their unswerving support and for helping me through this project. I dedicate this thesis to them with all my love. Summary This thesis examines the work of the nineteenth century journalist George Augustus Sala. Previous studies of Sala have focused upon the biographical aspects of his life at the expense of critical analysis of the prolific contributions he made to newspapers and periodicals. This thesis will readdress this imbalance by a close reading of Sala‟s visual and textual output together with an examination of the contemporary debates and issues surrounding his work. In particular it will suggest that Sala‟s journalistic style was a product of the very different mediums he was working in, and how this personal style along with his innovations in form would influence the New Journalism at the end of the century. For so long a misunderstood and neglected figure, this thesis will endeavour to reposition Sala at the centre of nineteenth-century media culture rather than at its margins. My research links Sala‟s role as an engraver, illustrator, and scene-painter to his career as an essayist for Dickens‟s Household Words. It will demonstrate how this in turn influenced his experiments with the form of the novel which would impact on his work as the pre-eminent Special Correspondent of the Daily Telegraph. In an age of rapid press and cultural transformation my research will highlight Sala‟s engagement with theories of urban modernity and commodity culture; gambling, finance capitalism and the uncertainty of modern life; the culture of literary bohemia and the plight of the poor and the oppressed; and the role of the journalist. I will pursue Sala‟s commitment to sensationalism and realism in his novels, and his fluctuating opinions on race, slavery and imperialism in his travel writing. This thesis will also shed light on Sala‟s relationship with some of the most important journalists, authors, and artists of the nineteenth century – Charles Dickens, William Thackeray, Mary Braddon, WP Frith, Henry Vizetelly, Frederick Greenwood and W.T. Stead. Necessarily interdisciplinary in focus, my research draws on critical work by cultural historians and literary theorists like Tim Barringer, P.D. Edwards, Mary Gluck, Lynda Nead, Deborah Nord, Matthew Rubery, Richard Sennett, Ralph Straus, Catherine Waters and Ruth Yeazell, among others. By examining contemporary periodicals, newspapers and letters this thesis will contribute to the burgeoning field of nineteenth- century print culture, while adding to the knowledge and understanding of the man many considered to be the „beau-ideal‟ of a journalist. List of Figures 1. Title-page for Sketches by Boz by George Cruikshank (1837) p. 6 2. Illustration from Pierce Egan’s Life in London by George Cruikshank (1820) p. 10 3. Frontispiece to Alfred Bunn, ‘A Word With Punch’ (1847) illustration by G.A. Sala p. 31 4. The Lady’s Newspaper p. 35 5. Sala’s illustration from Heads of the Headless p. 37 6. Illustration from Sala’s The House that Paxton Built (1850) p. 45 7. Illustration of Alexis Soyer from Sala’s The House that Paxton Built (1850) p. 47 8. W.P. Frith, Ramsgate Sands (1852-4) p. 66 9. W.P. Frith, The Private View of the Royal Academy 1881 (1883) p. 69. Front cover of America Revisited (1882) by G.A. Sala p. 319 George Augustus Sala: The Personal Style of a Public Writer Contents Introduction i-vi 1. A Visual Apprenticeship 1- 71 2. Tales of Two Cities: Part 1 - London 72-130 3. Tales of Two Cities: Part 2 - Paris 131-183 4. Interlude - A Russian Digression 184-210 5. Novelist and Man of Letters 211-261 6. „There really is a world outside Fleet Street‟; Completing the Journalistic Education: Sala as Special Correspondent 262-336 Conclusion 337-350 Bibliography 351-367 i Introduction Two book-length studies of George Augustus Sala appeared in the twentieth century; Ralph Straus‟s Sala: The Portrait of an Eminent Victorian (1942) and P.D. Edwards‟s Dickens’s Young Men: George Augustus Sala, Edmund Yates and the World of Victorian Journalism (1997). The titles and timing of both books are significant. Sala‟s neglect for the first fifty years after his death was no doubt exacerbated by the publication of Lytton Strachey‟s Eminent Victorians in 1918. Strachey‟s work set in motion a tide of anti-Victorianism that seemed to be unstoppable. Ezra Pound‟s coining of the term „Victoriana‟ in the same year was, as John Gardiner has stated, „used to attack rather than to celebrate the past.‟1 But the eminent Victorians Strachey was attacking were the members of the intellectual aristocracy, the grand old families like the Arnolds and the Mannings, establishment figures attached to the universities, the schools and public service. By titling his biography of Sala The Portrait of An Eminent Victorian, Straus was engaged in not only reigniting interest in a Victorian figure who would otherwise have been left to disappear into obscurity, he was also ironically flagging Sala‟s lack of credentials in having ever been such an „eminent Victorian.‟ Sala did not attend a public school, he had no university education, and even worse his mother was, of all things, an actress 1 John Gardiner, „Theme-park Victoriana‟ in Miles Taylor and Michael Wolff (eds) The Victorians Since 1901: Histories, Representations and Revisions (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004) p. 168 ii at a time when to be a female in that profession meant you possessed at best dubious morals, at worst a propensity to prostitution. When writing his own biographical work on Sala at the end of the twentieth century, P.D. Edwards remarked that Straus‟s biography went too far in that it „erred on the side of generosity‟ and over-exaggerated Sala‟s celebrity and his gifts.2 Straus‟s indefatigable research certainly displays a real affection and warmth for its subject and it still remains a remarkable piece of research nearly seventy years after publication. But where Straus was meticulous in the facts and details of Sala‟s life he was not so fastidious in his dissection and analysis of Sala‟s work. Straus would dismiss Sala‟s writing on Europe in this manner; „It will hardly be necessary to give in any detail the story of Sala‟s wanderings over Europe…‟3 On Sala‟s Australian visit Straus remarked that „It is hardly necessary to speak of his Australian tour in any great detail – there are the columns of the Daily Telegraph to be consulted by those who may like to know how the Land of the Golden Fleece appeared to a much-travelled and highly inquisitive Englishman in the „eighties.‟‟4 In fact when looking closely at Sala‟s career, his pronouncements on Australia can be seen as an extension of his interest in democracy and class fluidity, his shifting ideas about race and slavery, and in terms of style they are a culmination of all the different mediums he found himself operating in, a style that would greatly influence the new wave of journalism of the 1880s and 1890s. 2 P.D. Edwards, Dickens’s Young Men: George Augustus Sala, Edmund Yates and the World of Victorian Journalism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997) p.p. 3-4 3 Ralph Straus, Sala: The Portrait of an Eminent Victorian (London: Constable and Co., 1942) p. 179 4 ibid.