Reading Popular Culture in Victorian Print 9780230615212ts01.indd i 9/2/2009 5:45:29 AM Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters Series Editor: Marilyn Gaull The nineteenth century invented major figures: gifted, productive, and influential writers and artists in English, European, and American public life who captured and expressed what Hazlitt called “The Spirit of the Age.” Their achievements summarize, reflect, and shape the cultural traditions they inherited and influence the quality of life that followed. Before radio, film, and journalism deflected the energies of authors and audiences alike, literary forms such as popular verse, song lyrics, biographies, memoirs, letters, novels, reviews, essays, children’s books, and drama generated a golden age of letters incompara- ble in Western history. Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters presents a series of original biographical, critical, and scholarly stud- ies of major figures evoking their energies, achievements, and their impact on the char- acter of this age. Projects to be included range from works on Blake to Hardy, Erasmus Darwin to Charles Darwin, Wordsworth to Yeats, Coleridge and J. S. Mill, Joanna Baillie, Jane Austen, Sir Walter Scott, Byron, Shelley, Keats to Dickens, Tennyson, George Eliot, Browning, Hopkins, Lewis Carroll, Rudyard Kipling, and their contemporaries. The series editor is Marilyn Gaull, PhD from Indiana University. She has served on the faculty at Temple University, New York University, and is now Research Professor at the Editorial Institute at Boston University. She brings to the series decades of experience as editor of books on nineteenth century literature and culture. She is the founder and editor of The Wordsworth Circle, author of English Romanticism: The Human Context, publishes edi- tions, essays, and reviews in numerous journals and lectures internationally on British Romanticism, folklore, and narrative theory. PUBLISHED BY PALGRAVE: Shelley’s German Afterlives, by Susanne Schmid Romantic Literature, Race, and Colonial Encounter, by Peter J. Kitson Coleridge, the Bible, and Religion, by Jeffrey W. Barbeau Byron: Heritage and Legacy, edited by Cheryl A. Wilson The Long and Winding Road from Blake to the Beatles, by Matthew Schneider British Periodicals and Romantic Identity, by Mark Schoenfield Women Writers and Nineteenth-Century Medievalism, by Clare Broome Saunders British Victorian Women’s Periodicals, by Kathryn Ledbetter Romantic Diasporas, by Toby R. Benis Romantic Literary Families, by Scott Krawczyk Victorian Christmas in Print, by Tara Moore Culinary Aesthetics and Practices in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Edited by Monika Elbert and Marie Drews Poetics en passant, by Anne Jamison Reading Popular Culture in Victorian Print, by Alberto Gabriele FORTHCOMING TITLES: Romanticism and the Object, Edited by Larry H. Peer From Song to Print, by Terence Hoagwood Populism, Gender, and Sympathy in the Romantic Novel, by James P. Carson Victorian Medicine and Social Reform, by Louise Penner Byron and the Rhetoric of Italian Nationalism, by Arnold A. Schmidt Gothic Romanticism, by Tom Duggett Regions of Sara Coleridge’s Thought, by Peter Swaab Royal Romances, by Kristin Samuelian The Poetry of Mary Robinson, by Daniel Robinson 9780230615212ts01.indd ii 9/2/2009 5:45:30 AM Reading Popular Culture in Victorian Print BELGRAVIA and Sensationalism Alberto Gabriele 9780230615212ts01.indd iii 9/2/2009 5:45:30 AM READING POPULAR CULTURE IN VICTORIAN PRINT Copyright © Alberto Gabriele, 2009. All rights reserved. First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–61521–2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gabriele, Alberto, 1970– Reading popular culture in Victorian print : Belgravia and sensationalism / Alberto Gabriele. p. cm.—(Nineteenth-century major lives and letters) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–230–61521–2 (alk. paper) 1. Belgravia. 2. English periodicals—History—19th century. 3. Popular culture—Great Britain—History—19th century. 4. Sensationalism in journalism—Great Britain—History— 19th century. I. Title PN5130.B45G33 2009 052.0942Ј109034.—dc22 2009011167 A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: November 2009 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America. 9780230615212ts01.indd iv 9/2/2009 5:45:30 AM To my parents This page intentionally left blank Contents List of Illustrations ix Preface xi Acknowledgments xxv Introduction The Cultural Trope of Sensationalism 1 Chapter 1 The Case of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Belgravia: Research Methodology for a New Intertextual Reading of the Periodical Press 15 Chapter 2 Abstract Order and Fleeting Sensations: The Aesthetics of Fragmentation in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Belgravia 39 Chapter 3 The Redefinition of the Public Sphere in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press: Mary Elizabeth Braddon and the Debate on Anonymity 67 Chapter 4 The Cultural Trope of Sensationalism: Advertising, Industrial Journalism, and Global Trade in Belgravia 81 Chapter 5 Sensationalism and the Early History of Film: From Magic Lantern to the Silent Film Serial Drama of Louis Feuillade 111 Chapter 6 Mary Elizabeth Braddon in Paris: The Cross- Chunnel Relations of Periodical Sensational Literature in the 1870s–1880s 139 Appendix Index to Belgravia 1866–1876 171 Notes 221 Bibliography 247 Index 267 9780230615212ts01.indd vii 9/2/2009 5:45:30 AM This page intentionally left blank List of Illustrations Cover image Firemen to the Rescue. Magic lantern slide. Museo del Precinema of Padua. Collezione Minici Zotti. Figure 1.1 The Belgravia Annual, 1872—Cover. 31 Figure 4.1 The Belgravia Annual Advertiser, 1872. 85 Figure 4.2 Tomas Gray “Awaiting the Conqueror.” Illustrated Poem, Belgravia, 1868. 104 Figure 5.1 Firemen to the rescue. Magic lantern slide. Museo del Precinema of Padua. Collezione Minici Zotti. 121 Figure 5.2 Louis Huard, The Rescue, illustration for Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Fenton’s Quest. Belgravia magazine, 1871. 121 Figure 5.3 Pinelli, La Lanterna Magica (in fact, a mondo niovo/peep-box). Museo del Precinema of Padua. Collezione Minici Zotti. 125 9780230615212ts01.indd ix 9/2/2009 5:45:30 AM This page intentionally left blank Preface Any study of the periodical press mediates between an empirical, inductive approach, based on archival research, and a more deduc- tive one that orders archival findings into a narrative. The empirical approach may be daunting, as the historical traces are so dispersed and fragmented that they may resist narrative. A general view is often the product of an inductive approach, based on the select material included in one’s discussion. In defining a preliminary methodology to approach the periodical press, I looked for a midpoint between empirical description and theoretical view, thus avoiding the mul- tidirectional fragmentation of the many titles, issues, and editions that make the archive of Victorian periodicals. At the same time, I refrained from a purely thematic approach. In my initial study of Belgravia I tipped the scales of the inductive-deductive dichotomy toward the first of the two. I approached Belgravia by reading the whole run of the magazine published under the direction of Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1866–76). My starting interest was the fiction published in it, but reading the novel installments alongside every other item in the magazine made immediately apparent that the material history of serialized editions places fiction not only within the context of the single magazine issue but in the context of the whole run of the magazine. The textual unity that I first put under the lens of a close textual reading, thus, is the whole history of the magazine. Patterns, echoes, and cross-references create an internal web that is, I believe, the foundation for an empirical and inductive analysis that every title in the canon of Victorian periodicals would benefit from. After having assessed the history of the whole magazine, while at the same time allowing the process of interpretation to take notice of these patterns and retain these repetitions in my memory, I pursued a path that is more invisible and harder to chart than traditional tex- tual analysis. I chose to follow two intertwined research paths: first, I studied the discursive formations that circulate in the magazine and 9780230615212ts01.indd xi 9/2/2009 5:45:31 AM xii Preface in the surrounding culture at large. Second, I focused on the status of the reader of periodical fiction in order to trace the changes in the history of reading that a perusal of the periodical text within the sensorium of urban modernity implies. Since the experience of read- ing a periodical title allows several approaches guided by the reader’s interest, memory, and combinatory associations, I shifted focus from the diachronic level of the history of one magazine,