DOCSLIB.ORG

Spiritual Rebellion in Marryat's Fiction

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Spiritual Rebellion in Marryat's Fiction 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 The Regulation of Female Identity in the Novels of Florence Marryat Catherine Pope Doctor of Philosophy University of Sussex January 2014 Declaration I hereby declare that this thesis has not been and will not be, submitted in whole or in part to another University for the award of any other degree. Signature: ……………………………………… Acknowledgements Thank you to Helen Webb from the Research Support Team in the Sussex Library, who helped get me started with my research. Gladstone’s Library in Flintshire provided uninterrupted calm, without which I could never have conquered this thesis, and the London Library kindly gave me a Thomas Carlyle membership and sent many really bad Victorian novels through the post. The staff at the Public Record Office helped me navigate Marryat’s complicated life, and the assistance of the staff of the British Library’s manuscript room, particularly Greg Buzwell, was greatly appreciated. Simone Hull, Florence Marryat’s great-great-great-granddaughter illuminated some murky aspects of her ancestor’s remarkable life, while Donald Bittner contributed useful information on Francis Lean. I am also grateful to the Beinecke Library at Yale University for scanning and sending documents from the Marryat Family Papers. Thank you to Tom Sargant for sharing with me the contents of an Edwardian maid’s suitcase, which concealed a bundle of Marryat novels, and to Juliana Stewart for her boundless enthusiasm (even though most of the time she didn’t have the foggiest idea what I was on about). My supervisor, Jenny Bourne Taylor, repeatedly reminded me this was a good idea and supplied invaluable critical insight and encouragement. Lindsay Smith and Laura Vellacott kept my stress levels to a minimum during the final stages of writing up. Most importantly, thank you to my partner Tanya for her unfailing support and for sharing my belief that a week in a residential library constitutes a holiday. Summary This thesis evaluates the contribution to Victorian literary and cultural debate of Florence Marryat (1833-99) a prolific and varied writer yet to receive sustained critical attention. Specifically, I examine her many fictional representations of the legal, medical, and religious regulation of female identity in novels published between 1865 and 1899. I argue that Marryat goes further than other contemporary writers in subverting gender norms and theorising in fiction a transgressive female. By considering Marryat’s output in relation to comparator authors, I demonstrate how her work represents a uniquely radical protest, anticipating and prefiguring the New Woman writing of the fin de siècle. I also show how Marryat appropriates different styles of rhetoric to expose and challenge various mid-Victorian notions of ‘woman’ constructed for the purposes of regulation. By representing and then challenging the regulation of female identity, Marryat’s novels provide an important insight into how Victorian gender roles were constructed. My research shows that her work constitutes an effective protest against this regulation, evidenced by the critical response which attempted to undermine her reputation and arguments. I examine these criticisms in detail, showing how Marryat’s novels became a space in which she engaged with her critics, thereby pushing literary and gender boundaries. By bringing critical insight and contextual knowledge to close readings of Marryat’s novels, I reveal the feminist meaning hitherto occluded by literary regulation and subsequent superficial interpretations. Through extensive archival research, I also explain how Marryat used her own experiences to educate her readers, often appearing as a character in the novels. I propose that this direct relationship with her audience, presenting feminist ideas in a quasi-polemical style, makes Marryat’s oeuvre distinctive and worthy of further consideration. While Marryat is often considered a writer of ephemeral romances, I establish her as an early feminist who questioned and subverted nineteenth-century notions of femininity. List of Figures 1. The Blessed Damozel by Dante Gabriel Rossetti ……………………………………… 140 2. Daniel Dunglas Home ………………………………………………………………… 154 Contents Introduction ........................................................................................................................................................ 3 The Spectacle of Femininity: Women Sensation Novelists ................................................................... 4 Florence Marryat: The Critical Story So Far .......................................................................................... 11 The Life and Career of Florence Marryat .............................................................................................. 13 A Victorian Feminist? ................................................................................................................................ 25 Regulating Female Identity: A Critical Approach ................................................................................. 26 Chapter One: ‘Is a toad worth painting?’ – The Regulation of Marryat’s Writing ............................... 30 ‘The Illiterate Censorship of a Librarian’: The Power of Mudie ........................................................ 32 ‘A Pen Dipped in Vinegar and Gall’: The Publisher’s Reader ............................................................ 38 ‘A Veil Between Book and Reader’: The Role of the Periodical Reviewer....................................... 44 The Athenaeum: A ‘Mirror of Victorian Culture’ ............................................................................... 48 ‘Moral Earnestness’ and ‘Blameless Sobriety’ in the Spectator ......................................................... 51 Woman Against Woman in the Saturday Review ................................................................................ 54 ‘Intruding Her Own Personality’: Marryat’s Ongoing Relationship with Critics ............................. 56 Chapter Two: ‘The chains that gall them’ – The Legal Regulation of Marryat’s heroines ................. 61 Who pays for the butter? Marryat and Marriage ................................................................................... 63 ‘Entirely Different Creations’: The Matrimonial Causes Act and the Sexual Double Standard ... 66 ‘An Entire Subversion of Domestic Rule’: The Married Women’s Property Acts ......................... 74 ‘Grounded on Force’: Marital Violence in Marryat’s Fiction .............................................................. 82 Chapter Three – ‘Are you going to cut me up?’ – The Regulation of Women’s Bodies .................... 93 The Conflation of Medical and Patriarchal Authority ......................................................................... 94 ‘A bad imitation of a man’: Women Doctors ...................................................................................... 101 ‘The torture of the damned’: Regulating the Vivisector .................................................................... 105 The Pathologisation of Female Sexuality ............................................................................................. 113 2 Chapter Four: ‘Undomesticated and remarkably mobile’ – Spiritual Rebellion in Marryat’s Fiction ......................................................................................................................................................................... 125 Our Mother Who Art in Heaven - The Virgin Mary ......................................................................... 129 The “Divine Mother” in My Own Child ................................................................................................ 131 “A Bitter Penance”: Neglected Spirituality in The Dead Man’s Message ............................................ 138 Spectral Politics: Spiritualism and Power ............................................................................................. 143 “It isn’t all jam to have a medium in the house”: The female authoritative voice in The Strange Transfiguration of Hannah Stubbs ............................................................................................................... 148 Vested Interests: Hyperfemininity and Homosexuality in Open! Sesame! ......................................... 150 Conclusion ..................................................................................................................................................... 157 3 Introduction My thesis evaluates the contribution to Victorian literary and cultural debate of Florence Marryat (1833-99), a prolific and varied writer yet to receive sustained critical attention. Specifically, I examine her many fictional representations of legal, medical, and religious regulation of female identity, arguing that Marryat goes further than other contemporary writers in subverting gender
Load more

Recommended publications
  • The Carlyle Society Papers
    THE CARLYLE SOCIETY SESSION 2011-2012 OCCASIONAL PAPERS 24 • Edinburgh 2011 1 2 President’s Letter With another year’s papers we approach an important landmark in Carlyle studies. A full programme for the Society covers the usual wide range (including our mandated occasional paper on Burns), and we will also make room for one of the most important of Thomas’s texts, the Bible. 2012 sees a milestone in the publication of volume 40 of the Carlyle Letters, whose first volumes appeared in 1970 (though the project was a whole decade older in the making). There will be a conference (10-12 July) of academic Carlyle specialists in Edinburgh to mark the occasion – part of the wider celebrations that the English Literature department will be holding to celebrate its own 250th anniversary of Hugh Blair’s appointment to the chair of Rhetoric, making Edinburgh the first recognisable English department ever. The Carlyle Letters have been an important part of the research activity of the department for nearly half a century, and there will also be a public lecture later in November (when volume 40 itself should have arrived in the country from the publishers in the USA). As part of the conference there will be a Thomas Green lecture, and members of the Society will be warmly invited to attend this and the reception which follows. Details are in active preparation, and the Society will be kept informed as the date draws closer. Meantime work on the Letters is only part of the ongoing activity, on both sides of the Atlantic, to make the works of both Carlyles available, and to maintain the recent burst of criticism which is helping make their importance in the Victorian period more and more obvious.
    [Show full text]
  • George Eliot and the Mill on the Floss
    PART III: George Eliot and The Mill on the Floss 189 CHAPTER EIGHT George Eliot and Her Suitors: the “Hatched Chick” Becomes a Rooster The story of The Mill on the Floss, which is very much a story about the emergence of Marian Evans/George Eliot as a professional author, actually began a few years before the appearance of that pivotal book with the anonymous publication of Eliot’s first novel (really a series of novellas) in the pages of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (Maga). Lewes first submitted Evans’s work to the venerable Scottish publisher, John Blackwood, on 6 November 1856, when Evans was still editing John Chapman’s Westminster Review.1 The submission was “The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton,” the first of three novella-length sketches that would eventually form the whole of Scenes of Clerical Life. Of this first sketch Lewes boasted to Blackwood that “such humour, pathos, vivid presentation and nice observation have not been exhibited (in this style) since the ‘Vicar of Wakefield’— and in consequence of that opinion I feel quite pleased in negotiating the matter with you.”2 During this first interaction on Evans’s behalf, Lewes aimed to convince Blackwood that this unknown author was someone whose work was worth adding to 1 In addition to a long essay entitled “Worldliness and Otherworldliness: the Poet Young,” Eliot would write a segment called “History, Biography, Voyages, and Travels,” as well as her standard “Belles Lettres” section for her final contributions to the Westminster Review, 67 (January 1857). See Letters II, 274, n.
    [Show full text]
  • THE UNIVERSITY of HULL Four Literary Protegees of the Lake
    THE UNIVERSITY OF HULL Four Literary Protegees of the Lake Poets: Caroline Bowles, Maria Gowen Brooks, Sara Coleridge and Maria Jane Jewsbury being a Thesis submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the University of Hull by Dennis Jun-Yu Low, SA (Oxon) March 2003 Therefore, although it be a history Homely and rude, I will relate the same For the delight of a few natural hearts: And, with yet fonder feeling, for the sake Of youthful Poets, who among these hills Will be my second self when I am gone. Wordsworth Contents Contents ......................................................................................................................................... 1 Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................................ 2 List of Abbreviations ....................................................................................................................... 4 Preface ........................................................................................................................................... 5 Chapter 1: The Lake Poets and 'The Era of Accomplished Women' ............................................ 13 Chapter 2: Caroline Bowles .......................................................................................................... 51 Chapter 3: Maria Gowen Brooks ................................................................................................ 100 Chapter 4: Sara Coleridge .........................................................................................................
    [Show full text]
  • Review of Tamara Ketabgian, the Lives of Machines: the Ndui Strial Imaginary in Victorian Literature and Culture
    Bryn Mawr Review of Comparative Literature Volume 10 Article 2 Number 1 Fall 2012 Fall 2012 Review of Tamara Ketabgian, The Lives of Machines: The nduI strial Imaginary in Victorian Literature and Culture. Stella Pratt-Smith University of Oxford Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.brynmawr.edu/bmrcl Let us know how access to this document benefits ouy . Recommended Citation Pratt-Smith, Stella (2012). Review of "Review of Tamara Ketabgian, The Lives of Machines: The ndusI trial Imaginary in Victorian Literature and Culture.," Bryn Mawr Review of Comparative Literature: Vol. 10 : No. 1 Available at: https://repository.brynmawr.edu/bmrcl/vol10/iss1/2 This paper is posted at Scholarship, Research, and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College. https://repository.brynmawr.edu/bmrcl/vol10/iss1/2 For more information, please contact [email protected]. Pratt-Smith: Pratt-Smith on Ketabgian Tamara Ketabgian, The Lives of Machines: The Industrial Imaginary in Victorian Literature and Culture. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011. 252 pp. ISBN 0472051407. Reviewed by Stella Pratt-Smith, University of Oxford There are few more pervasive metaphors in our conceptualizations of the human than the industrial imaginary explored by Tamara Ketabgian in The Lives of Machines. The “fuel” of food saves us from “running out of steam” or becoming “broken” components within an “overheated” economy; these metaphors are akin to Ketabgian’s example from Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley (1849) in which Robert Moore exclaims that “the machinery of all my nature, the whole enginery of this human mill, the boiler which I take to be the heart, is fit to burst” (1).
    [Show full text]
  • Narrative Strategies of the Nineteenth-Century Female Revisionist Amy Criniti Phillips
    Duquesne University Duquesne Scholarship Collection Electronic Theses and Dissertations Spring 2011 Private Reader, Public Redactor: Narrative Strategies of the Nineteenth-Century Female Revisionist Amy Criniti Phillips Follow this and additional works at: https://dsc.duq.edu/etd Recommended Citation Phillips, A. (2011). Private Reader, Public Redactor: Narrative Strategies of the Nineteenth-Century Female Revisionist (Doctoral dissertation, Duquesne University). Retrieved from https://dsc.duq.edu/etd/1043 This Immediate Access is brought to you for free and open access by Duquesne Scholarship Collection. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Duquesne Scholarship Collection. For more information, please contact [email protected]. PRIVATE READER, PUBLIC REDACTOR: NARRATIVE STRATEGIES OF THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY FEMALE REVISIONIST A Dissertation Submitted to the McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts Duquesne University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy By Amy Criniti Phillips May 2011 Copyright by Amy Criniti Phillips 2011 PRIVATE READER, PUBLIC REDACTOR: NARRATIVE STRATEGIES OF THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY FEMALE REVISIONIST By Amy Criniti Phillips Approved March 28, 2011 ________________________________ ________________________________ Laura Callanan, Ph.D. Laura Engel, Ph.D. Associate Professor of English Associate Professor of English Committee Chair Committee Member ________________________________ Daniel P. Watkins, Ph.D. Professor of English Committee Member ________________________________ ________________________________ Christopher M. Duncan, Ph.D. Magali Cornier Michael, Ph.D. Dean, McAnulty College and Chair, Department of English Graduate School of Liberal Arts Professor of English iii ABSTRACT PRIVATE READER, PUBLIC REDACTOR: NARRATIVE STRATEGIES OF THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY FEMALE REVISIONIST By Amy Criniti Phillips May 2011 Dissertation supervised by Laura Callanan, Ph.D.
    [Show full text]
  • VICTORIAN SENSATIONS H&F Fm 3Rd.Qxd 9/15/2006 4:30 PM Page Ii H&F Fm 3Rd.Qxd 9/15/2006 4:30 PM Page Iii
    H&F_fm_3rd.qxd 9/15/2006 4:30 PM Page i VICTORIAN SENSATIONS H&F_fm_3rd.qxd 9/15/2006 4:30 PM Page ii H&F_fm_3rd.qxd 9/15/2006 4:30 PM Page iii ᪑᪑᪑᪑᪑᪑᪑᪑᪑᪑᪑᪑᪑᪑ VICTORIAN SENSATIONS ķ Essays on a Scandalous Genre EDITED BY Kimberly Harrison and Richard Fantina The Ohio State University Press Columbus ᪑᪑᪑᪑᪑᪑᪑᪑᪑᪑᪑᪑᪑᪑ H&F_fm_3rd.qxd 9/15/2006 4:30 PM Page iv Copyright ©2006 by The Ohio State University Press. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Victorian sensations : essays on a scandalous genre / edited by Kimberly Harrison and Richard Fantina. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978–0-8142–1031–4 (alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0–8142–1031–7 (alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978–0-8142–9108–5 (cd-rom) ISBN-10: 0–8142–9108–2 (cd-rom) 1. English fiction—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Sensationalism in litera- ture. I. Harrison, Kimberly, 1969– II. Fantina, Richard. PR878.S44V53 2006 823'.809353—dc22 2006005531 Cover design by Laurence Nozik. Text design by Jennifer Shoffey Forsythe. Type set in Adobe Garamond by Jennifer Shoffey Forsythe. Printed by Thomson Shore, Inc. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48–1992. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 H&F_fm_3rd.qxd 9/15/2006 4:30 PM Page v ᪑᪑᪑᪑᪑᪑᪑᪑᪑᪑᪑᪑᪑᪑ CONTENTS Acknowledgments vii Introduction: Richard Fantina and Kimberly Harrison ix Part One Sensation: Genre, Textuality, and Reception 1.
    [Show full text]
  • Geraldine Who?
    Geraldine Who? 'rMiss Jewsbury, the Well-Known Authoress", her Forgettable Novels and her Memorable Achievement by Goldie G. Weatherhead A Thesis Submiued to the Faculty of Graduate Studies of the University of Manitoba in Partial Fulfr.llment of the Requirements ofthe Degree of Master of Arts @2002 National Library Bibliolhèque nalionale I*t du Canada Acquisitions and Acouisitions el Blbliographic Services services bibliographiques 395 Wel¡inglon Skset 395, rue Wellinglon Ottawa ON KIA 0N4 otlâwa ON K'l A 0N4 Ce¡ada Canada Yo!¡ ¡tlo Vot!ø téhitd1Êt Ou¡ 6te tW. ntléßâ.t The author has granted a non- L'auteur a accordé une licence non exclusive licence allowing the exclusive permettant à la National Library of Canada to Bibliothèque nationale du Canada de reproduce, loan, distribute or sell reproduire, prêter, distribuer ou copies of this thesis in microfo¡m, vendre des copies de cette thèse sous paper or electonic formats. la forme de rnicrofiche/fiJm" de reproduction sur papier ou sur format électonique. The author retains ownership of the L'auteur conserve la propriété du copyrigbt in this thesis. Neither the droit d'auteur qui protège cette thèse. thesis nor substantial extaots from it Ni la thèse ni des extraits substantiels may be printed or otherwise de celle-ci ne doivent ête imprimés reproduced without the author's ou autremetrt reproduits sans son permission, autorisation. 0-612-80079-2 Canadä THE UNIVERSITY OF MANITOBA FACULTY OF GÌADUATE STTJDIES COPYRIGHT PERMISSION PAGE Geraldine Who? "Miss Jewsbury, the Well-Known Authoress',, her Forgettable Novels and her Memorable Achievement BY Goldie G.
    [Show full text]
  • Chapter 4 the Nineteenth Century Visiting Mode and Elizabeth Gaskell’S Fiction
    46 Chapter 4 The Nineteenth Century Visiting Mode and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Fiction Introduction The domestic visit was a component of the short stories of nineteenth-century women’s magazines, of religious and philanthropic periodicals, and in novels, from Austen’s Emma to Eliot’s Middlemarch.1 These accounts, whether they offered the powerfully negative tone of Mrs Pardiggle’s insensitive and blinkered encounters with a London bricklayer of Dickens’ Bleak House, (itself counterposed by the combination of empathy and system embodied in Esther Summerson),2 or the transformative death-bed experience of Mary Brotherton in Frances Trollope’s Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy (1839-40), were repeatedly represented as knowledge transactions and potential moments of learning, and rehearsed the conventional components of the visiting mode narrative. Hence the worldly Manchester novelist Geraldine Jewsbury was not just driven to visiting, but to framing her mid-century novel Marian Withers with an opening scene involving a servant despatched to a ‘back-garden street’ to deliver clothes to two impoverished children, complete with a guide (the ‘pawnbroker’s man), threat from the ‘hulking men’ at the doorways, a dark and enclosed cellar dwelling, leading to the heroine’s vicarious learning of the ‘invisible world’ of the city’s outcast children.3 The traction of the visiting mode as a way of understanding the industrial city is particularly powerfully represented in the work of Elizabeth Gaskell. Gaskell addressed urban society primarily in her two
    [Show full text]
  • Rhoda Broughton, Ouida, and Female Sexuality Caroline E
    Iowa State University Capstones, Theses and Graduate Theses and Dissertations Dissertations 2015 Anticipating the New Woman figure through subversions of feminine identity: Rhoda Broughton, Ouida, and female sexuality Caroline E. Martin Iowa State University Follow this and additional works at: https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/etd Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Martin, Caroline E., "Anticipating the New Woman figure through subversions of feminine identity: Rhoda Broughton, Ouida, and female sexuality" (2015). Graduate Theses and Dissertations. 14479. https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/etd/14479 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Iowa State University Capstones, Theses and Dissertations at Iowa State University Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Graduate Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Iowa State University Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Anticipating the New Woman figure through subversions of feminine identity: Rhoda Broughton, Ouida, and female sexuality by Caroline E. Martin A thesis submitted to the graduate faculty in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS Major: English (Literature) Program of Study Committee: Sean Grass, Major Professor Michèle Schaal Abby Dubisar Iowa State University Ames, Iowa 2015 Copyright © Caroline E. Martin, 2015. All rights reserved. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ......................................................................................
    [Show full text]
  • George Meredith:Woman's Champion?
    Ghent University Faculty of Arts and Philosophy George Meredith: Woman’s Champion? Supervisor: Paper submitted in partial Prof. Dr. Marysa Demoor fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of “Master in de Taal- en Letterkunde: English-Dutch” by Marie Spruyt May 2016 George Meredith: Woman’s Champion? Marie Spruyt TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ...................................................................................................................... 1 1. MEREDITH’S FICTION ................................................................................................ 6 a. THE ORDEAL OF RICHARD FEVEREL (1859) ................................................... 9 b. THE EGOIST (1879) ............................................................................................. 13 c. DIANA OF THE CROSSWAYS (1885) .................................................................. 16 d. LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA (1894) ........................................................ 19 2. MEREDITH’S IDEAS .................................................................................................. 23 a. MARRIAGE AS AN INSTITUTION ................................................................... 24 b. THE DEVELOPING WOMAN ............................................................................ 28 c. THE EDUCATION OF WOMEN ........................................................................ 32 d. SEXUAL RELATIONSHIPS ................................................................................ 35 3. VICTORIAN SOCIETY
    [Show full text]
  • Bbm:978-1-349-26582-4/1.Pdf
    Notes Place of publication is London unless otherwise cited. Introduction I. See for example, Lee Ho\combe, Wives and Property. Reform of the Mar­ ried Women's Property Law in Nineteenth Century England (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1983); Philippa Levine, Victorian Feminism 1850- 1900 (Hutchinson, 1987); Diana Mary Chase Worzala, 'The Langharn Place Circle: The Beginnings of the Organized Women's Movement in England 1854-1870', (PhD thesis, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1982). 2. The principle studies which mention the existence of these early feminists include Olive Banks, Faces of Feminism. A Study of Feminism as a Social Movement (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981), pp. 30-1; Francis E. Mineka, The Dissidence of Dissent. The Monthly Repository 1806-1838 (Chapei Hill: University of North Carolina, 1944), pp. 284-96; Joan Perkin, Women and Marriage in Nineteenth Century England (Routledge, 1989), pp. 212-13; Jane Rendall, The Origins of Modem Feminism: Women in Britain, France and the United States 1780-1860 (Chicago: Lyceum, 1985), pp. 114-16,247, 309-10. 3. Carl Ray Woodring, Victorian Sampiers: William and Mary Howitt (Law­ rence: University of Kansas Press, 1952), p. 115; Richard Garnett, The Life of W. J. Fox. Pub/ic Teacher and Social Reformer, 1786-1864 (lohn Lane, 1909), pp. 118-19, 158-70; F. B. Smith, Radical Artisan. William James Linton 1812-1897 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1973), pp. 11-17. See also Ann Blainey, The Farthing Poet: a Biography of Rich­ ard Hengist Horne 1802-1884. A Lesser Literary Lion (Longman, 1968), pp. 58-68 in particular. J. F. C. Harrison has examined the work of some of these radicals in Learning and Living 1790-1960.
    [Show full text]
  • A Gentlewoman's Profession: the Emergence of Feminized
    A Gentlewoman’s Profession: The Emergence of Feminized Publishing at Richard Bentley and Son, 1858- 1898 by Sarah Joann Lubelski A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Faculty of Information University of Toronto © Copyright by Sarah Joann Lubelski 2019 A Gentlewoman’s Profession: The Emergence of Feminized Publishing at Richard Bentley and Son, 1858-1898 Sarah Joann Lubelski Doctor of Philosophy Faculty of Information University of Toronto 2019 Abstract Publishing has evolved into a feminized profession, with women filling approximately 84 percent of positions under the managerial level. Well into the twentieth century, however, it was men publishers, booksellers and librarians who dominated the book trade. Histories of the publishing industry have not explored this gendered shift in depth. Using the London-based firm of Richard Bentley and Son (1829-1898) as a site of investigation, this dissertation considers the gender identity of publishing processes, organizations, and labour through the history of the firm’s women publisher’s readers. Drawing primarily on archival materials, I explore how the women publisher’s readers gained power and influence over the publishing process and used their positions as gatekeepers to challenge traditional gender ideology. This shift in the gendering of publishing and print materials at Bentley and Son reflects changes within the broader industry, and the evolution of gender ideology within the nineteenth- century social, cultural, political and legal landscapes. Beyond attending to a gap in historical scholarship, this exploration of the feminization of the publishing industry illuminates how gender ideology has shaped women’s entrance into, and movement within, professional environments, and provides a framework for analyzing print production through a gendered lens.
    [Show full text]