The Victorian Serial and Domestic

SERIALITY AND DOMESTICITY: THE VICTORIAN SERIAL AND DOMESTIC IDEOLOGY IN THE FAMILY LITERARY MAGAZINE by LINDSY M. LAWRENCE Bachelor of Arts, 1999 Schreiner College Kerrville, TX Master of Arts, 2002 Southern Methodist University Dallas, TX Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of AddRan College of Humanities and Social Sciences Texas Christian University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 2008 ii X Table of Contents X Figures iii Tables iv Abbreviations v 1. An Ideal Home: Mrs. Beeton’s Legacy and the Family Literary Magazine 1 2. Gender Play “At Our Social Table”: 60 The New Domesticity in the Cornhill and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters 3. Domesticity and Hybridity in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 114 and Margaret Oliphant’s The Story of Valentine and his Brother 4. Dressing Ambiguities: 166 Portraying Class and Gender in George Du Maurier’s Social Cartoons in Punch and Thomas Hardy’s The Woodlanders in Macmillan’s Magazine 5. Aesthetic Domesticity: 227 Serial Frames, Male Identity, and the House Beautiful in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine Bibliography 282 Appendix A 306 Appendix B 307 Appendix C 308 Appendix D 309 Vita 310 Abstract 311 iii X Figures X Figure1.1: Harrison Weir, The Book of Household Management, Cover page 54 Figure1.2: Godfrey Sykes, The Cornhill Magazine, Cover page 57 Figure 2.1: George Du Maurier, “Væ Victius” 87 Figure 2.2: George Du Maurier, “The New Mama” 94 Figure 2.3: George Du Maurier, “Tu t’en repenitras, Colin” 104 Figure 2.4: Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, Cover page 110 Figure 4.1: A. Chantrey Corbould, “Public Entertainment Puzzle. How to See the Stage?” 178 Figure 4.2: Charles Keene, “Shopping!” 180 Figure 4.3: George Du Maurier, “Happy Thought!” 182 Figure 4.4: J. Priestman Atkinson, “The Hat Difficulty Solved.” 185 Figure 4.5: George Du Maurier, “Feline Amenities” 197 Figure 4.6: George Du Maurier, “Feline Amenities” 199 Figure 4.7: George Du Maurier, “Feline Amenities: Two Cases of Mistaken Identity” 201 Figure 4.8: William James Linton, Macmillan’s Magazine, Cover page 222 Figure 5.1: Edward Linley Sambourne, “Punch’s Fancy Portraits.—No. 37” 240 Figure 5.2: E.T. Reed, “Our Booking-Office” 243 Figure 5.3: Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, Cover Page 252 iv X Tables X Table 2.1: Percentage of the Cornhill Magazine Devoted to Fiction 74 Table 3.1: Number of Women Contributors to Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 123 Table 3.2: Percentage of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine Devoted to Fiction 132 Table 4.1: Percentage of Macmillan’s Magazine Devoted to Fiction 219 v X Abbreviations X BOHM Book of Household Management Blackwood’s Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine Cornhill Cornhill Monthly Magazine EDM Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine ILN Illustrated London News Lippincott’s Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine Maga Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine Macmillan’s Macmillan’s Magazine 1 Chapter One An Ideal Home: Mrs. Beeton’s Legacy and the Family Literary Magazine The merry Homes of England! Around their hearths by night, What gladsome looks of household love Meet in the ruddy light! There woman's voice flows forth in song, Or childhood's tale is told, Or lips move tunefully along Some glorious page of old. ~ Felicia Hemans Pursuing the picture, we may add, that to be a good housewife does not necessarily imply an abandonment of proper pleasures or amusing recreation; and we think it the more necessary to express this, as the performance of the duties of a mistress may, to some minds, perhaps seem to be incompatible with the enjoyment of life. ~ Isabella Beeton1 Mid-nineteenth-century middle-class housewives, desperate for advice about everything from servants to stains to sauces, found comfort and guidance in Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management (BOHM). While the real Isabella Beeton has all but disappeared into the iconic image of Mrs. Beeton, whom Lytton Strachey erroneously envisioned to be a “small tub-like lady in black—rather severe in aspect, strongly resembling Queen Victoria,” her work still guides families today through the intricacies of managing the home (qtd. in Hughes 8).2 Newlywed couples in England even now receive a modernized version of Beeton’s BOHM as a traditional wedding present. Perhaps more than any other 1 From Felicia Hemans, “The Homes of England,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine Apr. 1827: 392, ll. 9-16 and Isabella Beeton, The Book of Household Management 7-8. 2 According to Kathryn Hughes, Strachey’s misconception of what Beeton looked like stems in part from the paucity of biographical data on her and in part from how well her husband, Sam Beeton, and later Ward and Lock managed the image of Mrs. Beeton and the BOHM after her death. There were few notices of her death on 6 February 1865. The Times ran a short obituary, and Sam composed a longer, moving tribute that appeared in the Dictionary of Everyday Cookery. Most readers, however, either assumed that Mrs. Beeton was a construct of the magazine or that she was still alive, dispensing advice from her well-run home. See Hughes 8-9. 2 image, the picture of the middle-class Victorian home, drawn from the pages of the BOHM and other literary and non-fiction texts—crowded with chintz pillows, fans, needlepoint, tables of knick-knacks, flora, fauna, books, and magazines—is the one that endures. Contemporary idealizations of the Victorian home from the cottage industry the BBC has developed in turning canonical Victorian fiction into television serials to the contemporary magazine Victoria (1987-2003, 2007-present) all have their roots in the nineteenth century’s own idealization of the home.3 Kathryn Hughes argues that “By representing ‘Home’—the place we go to be loved and fed—Mrs. Beeton has become part of the fabric of who we feel ourselves to be” (18). Indeed, we nostalgically see the nineteenth-century home as a crucial site of constancy for the Victorians, and possibly for ourselves. The home has seemingly stood against all visible changes, a testament to the work of Mrs. Beeton and other Victorian writers and editors of conduct manuals, cookbooks, literary magazines, and domestic fiction who figured the home as the center of Victorian middle-class life. By the mid-nineteenth century, the middle-classes were rapidly expanding, tripling in size from 1851 to 1871. Anxious to secure their social position, the middle-classes used the home as a model of cultural stability. This ideal home, so nostalgically attractive to us now, was also compelling to the Victorians who created it. Robin Gilmour claims that “more than any previous generation the people we call Victorians were driven to find models of social harmony and personal conduct by means of which they could understand, control, and 3 Among the texts that have been adapted as television serials are Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters (1999), North and South (2004), and Cranford and My Lady Ludlow (2007), George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1994) and Daniel Deronda (2002), Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now (2001), Thomas Hardy’s Under the Greenwood Tree (2006), and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (2006). BBC 4 has even done a two part series on Isabella Beeton called The Secret Life of Mrs. Beeton, first aired on 16 October 2006 and 21 October 2006. Victoria, which ceased publishing in June 2003, has been relaunched by Hoffman Media, with its first issue appearing in November 2007. It advertises itself as a publication for women who yearn for the simple elegance of bygone days, and its homepage rather cloyingly suggests that women will be able to “connect with the sentiment and elegance of times gone by and be pampered with topics close to [their] heart, as [they] take Victoria into the reading room of [their] soul” (Victoria par. 3). 3 develop their rapidly changing world” (20). The home, effortlessly systemized and endlessly reproduced in paintings, illustrations, fiction, and periodicals, proved to be a supple model. Although most middle-class families, particularly those in urban areas, rented rather than owned their homes—or perhaps because of this fact—the home took on ideological significance as the bulwark of social and cultural solidity. It could encapsulate and, in a certain sense, seem to stabilize, other changing models such as the gentleman or the chatelaine. John Ruskin, in his lecture “Of Queens’ Gardens,” avers that the home is a peaceful, sanctifying space, one that keeps the changes of the world just outside the door. For Ruskin, the home “is the place of Peace; the shelter, not only from all injury but from all terror, doubt, and division” (77).4 An ideal home was the best refuge from moral temptation. It was the best defense against the degradations of capitalism though well-provided with consumer spoils. It was the best corrective for a society that seemed to be constantly changing. An ideal home was also extraordinarily difficult to establish and maintain. While it is relatively simple to construct what an ideal home, complete with the tender domestic scene of the family gathered around the hearth, would look like, the process of making this ideal a reality is complex at best. The numerous depictions of the home in periodical culture alone imply that the Victorians, particularly the members of the urban middle-classes who were the target audience for many of these texts, needed continuous guidance on how to make and maintain this model space. Periodical culture responded to this need. Domestic manuals, etiquette guides, periodical essays, and cookbooks all focused on the best way to manage the 4 Thomas Henry Huxley makes a similar argument about the walled garden.

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