‘ALLOW ME TO INTRODUCE MYSELF — FIRST, NEGATIVELY’: CHARLES DICKENS, ANTHONY TROLLOPE, WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY AND FIRST-PERSON JOURNALISM IN THE 1860S FAMILY MAGAZINE HAZEL MACKENZIE PHD THE UNIVERSITY OF YORK DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH AND RELATED LITERATURE SEPTEMBER 2010 ABSTRACT This thesis examines the editorial contributions of W.M. Thackeray, Charles Dickens and Anthony Trollope to the Cornhill Magazine, All the Year Round and Saint Pauls Magazine, analyzing their cultivation of a familiar or personal style of journalism in the context of the 1860s family magazine and its rhetoric of intimacy. Focusing on their first-person journalistic series, it argues that these writers/editors used these contributions as a means of establishing a seemingly intimate and personal relationship with their readers, and considers the various techniques that they used to develop that relationship, including their use of first-person narration, autobiography, the anecdote, dream sequences and memory. It contends that those same contributions questioned and critiqued the depiction of reader-writer relations which they simultaneously propagated, highlighting the distinction between this portrayal and the realities of the industrialized and commercialized world of periodical journalism. It places this within the context of the discourse of family that was integral to the identity of these magazines, demonstrating how these series both held up and complicated the idealized image of Victorian domesticity that was promoted by the mainstream periodical culture of the day, maintaining that this was a standard feature of family magazine journalism and theorizing that this was in fact a large part of its popular appeal to the family market. The introductory chapter examines the discourse of family that dominated the mid-range magazines of the 1860s and how this ties in with the series’ rhetoric of intimacy. Chapter One looks at Thackeray’s ‘Roundabout Papers’, examining the manner in which Thackeray establishes a sense of familiarity between his editorial persona and the reader, only to consistently undermine his own efforts, viewing this within the context of Thackeray’s realist aesthetic. Chapter Two turns to Dickens’s ‘The Uncommercial Traveller’, and traces the relationship between Dickens’s use of the personal, his concept of the ‘Uncommercial’ in the series and his preoccupation with the forces of commercialism and Utilitarianism, which it reads as ultimately concerned with his own sense of complicity in the commercialization of literature. Chapter Three studies ‘An Editor’s Tales’ within the context of its publication during the last months of Trollope’s editorship of Saint Pauls and reads the ambivalent relationship of the series to the personal and its unconventional treatment of the family in relation to this, viewing the series as a part of Trollope’s reaction to the failure of the experiment he undertook with Saint Pauls. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ii Acknowledgements iv List of Abbreviations v Author’s Declaration iv INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1 Thackeray’s ‘Roundabout Papers’ and the Cornhill Magazine 38 CHAPTER 2 Dickens’s ‘The Uncommercial Traveller’ and All the Year Round 99 CHAPTER 3 Trollope’s ‘An Editor’s Tales’ and Saint Pauls Magazine 166 AFTERWORD 227 BIBLIOGRAPHY 236 iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank first of all my supervisor, Professor John Bowen, for his support throughout the years and for the many interesting and challenging conversations that helped to shape this thesis. I would also like to thank my second supervisor, Dr Trev Broughton, whose insights and ideas were invaluable. I am grateful to Dr Sarah Edwards of the University of Strathclyde, Dr Thomas Munck of the University of Glasgow, and all the staff of the Department of Central and Eastern European Studies at the University of Glasgow, most particularly Ms. Sarah Lennon, who have all helped and supported me in this endeavour in different ways. I would particularly like to thank my examiners, Professor Jenny Bourne Taylor and Professor Jane Moody, not only for taking the trouble to read and comment on my thesis, but for making my viva such a rewarding and enjoyable experience. Most of all, however, I would like to thank my friends and family without whom I would never have been able to even consider writing this thesis, let alone complete it. I would like to thank my parents for always encouraging me in everything that I do and for their sanguine if sometimes false belief that I will always succeed, for instilling in me a love of literature at an early age and the importance of education for its own sake. I would like to thank my brother, as unlikely a source for study advice as he might be, for his words of wisdom, which have served me well over the past four years, and to his girlfriend Jessica likewise for sheltering me from such words whenever possible. Thank you, Jess, I am most grateful. To Meesha for the sorbet and many, many trips to Betty’s, to Neil for being willing to read it if I would let him, to Stephen for always being there even if he doesn’t have a clue what any of it is about, to Colin, Chris and especially Lauren for putting up with it all and to Tania and Valerie for being there every step of the way, through the tears and the laughter, through application forms, seminar series, trips to the NLS, lunches at the Crypt, anxiety attacks and colonoscopies. Finally, thanks to Jeff, who has taught me more than I think I ever cared to know, and without whom I would be a very different person today. iv LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS RP Roundabout Papers UCT The Uncommercial Traveller AET An Editor’s Tales v AUTHOR’S DECLARATION I declare that the work in this dissertation is original except where indicated by special reference in the text and no part of the dissertation has been submitted for any other degree. Any views expressed in the dissertation are those of the author and in no way represent those of the University of York. The dissertation has not been presented to any other University for examination either in the United Kingdom or overseas. vi INTRODUCTION ‘Allow me to introduce myself—first, negatively’1: Charles Dickens’s opening line to the first article in his quasi-fictional, semi-autobiographical series, ‘The Uncommercial Traveller’, encapsulates two of the most important elements of that series, namely, the familiarity and intimacy of the narrative voice, and its irony. Designed as a medium through which Dickens could establish a closer relationship with the readers of All the Year Round, the weekly magazine he established in 1859, the series’ emphasis on the personal and the familial both as a mode of address and as an ideal for reader-writer relations was balanced by a healthy sense of irony, which while it added to the series’ comedic value and the sense of a camaraderie between the producers and their public, nonetheless challenged its own rhetoric by questioning its own use of the personal and the relationship of magazine journalism to the personal and the familial in general. As Hilary Fraser, Judith Johnston and Stephanie Green write, ‘Showcase editors had a particular effect on the journals they edited, including creating an identity and a community through the magazine’.2 This thesis looks at Dickens’s ‘The Uncommercial Traveller’, William Makepeace Thackeray’s ‘Roundabout Papers’ and Anthony Trollope’s ‘An Editor’s Tales’, written for the Cornhill Magazine and Saint Pauls Magazine respectively, and examines their ambivalent relationship to their own rhetoric within the context of the family magazines within which they were published and the discourse of ‘family’ literature which was prevalent at the time. Semi-autobiographical and written in the first-person, this thesis argues that while these series sought to establish a seemingly 1 Charles Dickens, ‘His General Line of Business’, The Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens’ Journalism: The Uncommercial Traveller and Other Papers, 1859-70, ed. by Michael Slater and John Drew (London: J.M. Dent, 2000), p. 28. Further references to this work will be made in the text. 2 Hilary Fraser, Stephanie Green and Judith Johnston, Gender and the Victorian Periodical (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 18. 1 intimate relationship with their readers, at the same time they questioned both that relationship and their means of establishing it, along with several other significant tenets of what constituted respectable family reading at this time. In this, it views these texts as examples of the paradoxical nature of periodical literature, which can be seen as both open and closed, and of the rich and complex nature of Victorian family literature, which can be simultaneously seen as both subversive and hegemonic. The Victorian Family Magazine in the 1860s The 1860s saw the rapid expansion of the periodical marketplace, and particularly of the number of magazines published. In part the result of the repeal of the last of the taxes on knowledge and a reduction in the paper duty, this sudden proliferation can also be accounted for by the growing proportion of the literate public that was catered to by neither the popular penny press nor by the high-brow quarterlies and reviews that were the two main options for Victorian readers of the periodical press. Publications such as Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country and Dickens’s Household Words were joined in 1859 by Macmillan’s Magazine, and then in 1860 by the Cornhill and a slew of imitators. By 1867 the publisher William Tinsley was complaining that there were ‘more magazines in the wretched field than there were blades of grass to support them’.3 Carrying one or two serial novels and a selection of poetry, short stories, travel sketches and light but informative articles, a large number of these new magazines were aimed at the lucrative family market.