GEORGE AUGUSTUS SALA AND THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY PERIODICAL PRESS This page has been left blank intentionally George Augustus Sala and the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press The Personal Style of a Public Writer PETER BLAKE University of Brighton, UK First published 2015 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © Peter Blake 2015 Peter Blake has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Blake, Peter. George Augustus Sala and the nineteenth-century periodical press : the personal style of a public writer / by Peter Blake. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4724-1607-0 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Sala, George Augustus, 1828–1895—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Sala, George Augustus, 1828–1895—Knowledge—Journalism. 3. Journalism—Great Britain— History—19th century. I. Title. PR5299.S2Z65 2015 070.92—dc23 2014039893 ISBN: 9781472416070 (hbk) ISBN: 9781315584522 (ebk) Contents List of Figures vii Acknowledgements ix Introduction 1 1 A Visual Apprenticeship 17 2 Tales of Two Cities: Part 1 – London 65 3 Tales of Two Cities: Part 2 – Paris 103 4 Interlude – A Russian Digression 135 5 Novelist and Man of Letters 151 6 ‘There really is a world outside Fleet Street’: Completing the Journalistic Education: Sala as Special Correspondent 181 7 ‘The flogging to be efficacious must be severe’: Sala and Flagellant Pornography 225 Conclusion 257 Bibliography 265 Index 279 This page has been left blank intentionally List of Figures 1.1 Frontispiece to Charles Dickens, Sketches by Boz by George Cruikshank (1837). Source: British Library © The British Library Board 102642.n.204. 21 1.2 Sala’s illustrated frontispiece to Alfred Bunn’s pamphlet A Word With Punch (1847). Source: British Library © The British Library Board 10860.bb.3 p. 59. 36 1.3 Sala’s illustration from Heads of the Headless (1847). Source: British Library © The British Library Board 10860.bb.3, p. 56. 40 1.4 Illustration from Sala’s panorama The House that Paxton Built (1850). Source: British Library © The British Library Board 012331.de.83. 45 1.5 Illustration by Sala of Alexis Soyer from Sala’s panorama The House that Paxton Built (1850). Source: British Library © The British Library Board 012331.de.83. 47 1.6 W.P. Frith, Ramsgate Sands (1852–1854). Source: Royal Collection Trust © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2014. 59 1.7 W.P. Frith, The Private View of the Royal Academy, 1881 (1883). Source: Bridgeman Images © Pope Family Trust. 61 7.1 Illustration from Sala’s panorama The House that Paxton Built (1850). Source: British Library © The British Library Board 012331.de.83. 235 This page has been left blank intentionally Acknowledgements I would like to thank the librarians and staff of the following libraries; British Library at St. Pancras and at Colindale, Senate House Library of the University of London, Guildhall Library, London, National Portrait Gallery, London, John Rylands Library, University of Manchester, Brighton History Centre, Brighton Museum, Beinecke Library of Yale University, Brotherton Collection, Leeds University Library. Special thanks to my colleagues and friends Paul Jordan, Shona Milton, Kate Elms and Kevin Bacon at the Brighton History Centre. My colleagues at the University of Sussex and the University of Brighton deserve special thanks for their support and help and for putting up with my ramblings about an obscure nineteenth-century writer…in particular thanks go to Jenny Bourne-Taylor and Norman Vance at Sussex and Richard Jacobs, Katy Shaw, Kate Aughterson, Deborah Philips, Vedrana Velickovic, Dora Carpenter- Latiri, Jess Moriarty, John Wrighton and Andrew Hammond at Brighton. Thanks also to Paddy McGuire and the CRD (Centre for Research and Development) at Brighton for allowing me time away from teaching in order to complete the manuscript. Thanks also to those students who had to endure lectures about Sala and the periodical press and pornography but offered valuable insights into both. Part of Chapter 1 was first published in Journal of Victorian Culture, Peter Blake, ‘George Augustus Sala: A Visual Apprenticeship’ Vol. 40 Issue 02 Sep 2012 and is reprinted with permission © Journal of Victorian Culture. Part of Chapter 2 was first published inDickens Quarterly, Peter Blake ‘Charles Dickens, George Augustus Sala and Household Words’ Vol. 26 No. 1, March 2009 and is reproduced with the permission of the Dickens Society. Part of Chapter 6 was first published in 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 8 (Autumn, 2009) Special Issue: Transatlanticism, Identities and Exchange. www.19.bbk.ac.uk. Peter Blake ‘George Augustus Sala and the English Middle-Class View of America’ and is reprinted with permission © 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century. My enduring gratitude goes to my family who have helped me and supported me with their love throughout the writing of this book. In particular my wife Anna and my children Ella, Amber and Saul for the joy and love they have brought me. This book is dedicated to you. This page has been left blank intentionally Introduction George Augustus Sala divided opinions. Although his career began in the visual arts as an illustrator and engraver, he would find his metier as a journalist and would go on to write for some of the most important and influential newspapers and periodicals of the nineteenth century, including Charles Dickens’s Household Words, the Illustrated London News, Illustrated Times, Cornhill and the Daily Telegraph. The latter was particularly noted for its ‘roaring young lions’ who created a new journalistic style, a ‘telegraphese’, that played a significant role in the history of journalism, but was held up to ridicule by its detractors. Sala became the editor of a shilling monthly, Temple Bar, and turned to writing novels and plays before becoming one of the first Special Correspondents when in 1863 the Telegraph sent him to America to report on the Civil War. He would provide copy on foreign countries and cultures for the newspaper for the next 25 years. His initials, GAS, signed after an article or a column became known throughout the English-speaking world and Sala came to represent the Fleet Street journalist. He successfully cultivated an image of journalistic and literary Bohemia, of a freedom from society’s conventions with a motto of ‘no method, no system, no management, no earnest purpose.’1 As his career progressed, however, he found himself hobnobbing with some of the most respectable members of the Victorian establishment and P.H. Muir, the editor of Book Collector, described Sala as ‘not only one of the pioneers of modern journalism but a complete apotheosis of his profession.’2 But he was also the subject of malicious, negative critical reviews and was accused of philistinism and of single-handedly ruining the English language. He was involved in high-profile arguments, literary back-biting and journalistic in- fighting which sometimes led to libel and often led to his being withdrawn from the staff of a periodical or the serialisation of a novel. His bohemian lifestyle was put in the spotlight and questioned and he was known to have been involved in drunken brawls and for serving a spell in debtors’ prison. His pornographic productions and his appetite for flagellation were hidden from the public during his lifetime but he could never quite shrug off his affiliation with Bohemia, and rumours abounded that there was something not quite right about Sala, that he could never be a true gentleman. His followers, however, found a freshness in his writing style, free from what they considered the tortured syntax, pompousness, and verbosity of his journalistic forebears and contemporaries. They avidly devoured his leaders for the Daily Telegraph and his weekly column ‘Echoes of the Week’ in the Illustrated London News with an almost religious devotion. 1 Joel Weiner, The Americanization of the British Press 1830s–1914 (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) 225. 2 P.H. Muir, ‘Ralph Straus’s Sala library,’ TLS, 25 November 1939. 2 George Augustus Sala and the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press As a sign of the esteem in which he was held in the year of his death, and of his continuing financial woes, Lord Rosebery, then Prime Minister, obtained for him a civil list pension of £100 per annum. Sala’s artistic prowess was praised by the renowned Victorian artist W.P. Frith, who claimed that ‘if he [Sala] had devoted himself to art instead of literature he would have scored a success equal to that he has secured in letters.’3 Dickens was so impressed with Sala’s first essay for his Household Words magazine,