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2000 Conference & Annual Meeting
by Robin Taylor Rogers
The 2000 Conference of the Research Society for
Victorian Periodicals, held in London on July 20-22, was entitled "Victorian
Encounters: Publishers, Editors, and Readers." It was jointly sponsored
by the Faculty of Continuing Education, Birkbeck and the RSVP. Conference
attendees were welcomed by RSVP President Julie F. Codell, Arizona State
University, and Laurel Brake, Birkbeck, University of London.
A Plenary Lecture, chaired by Robert L.
Patten, Rice University, featured Michael Slater, Birkbeck, University
of London, reading "From the Illuminated Magazine to Lloyd's Weekly Newspaper:
The Editorial Trajectory of Douglas Jerrold." Following this lecture was
"Electronic Resources for Periodical Research in the 21st Century: A Panel,"
chaired by Laurel Brake. Julie Carroll-Davis, Chadwyck-Healy, opened this
panel with "Digitising our Journal Heritage. Building the Largest Full-text
Journal Archive." Other presenters included Caroline Kimbell, Gale, addressing
"The Times Online and Searchable Nineteenth Century Journals: New and Future
Projects from Gale," Brad Scott, Routledge, on "The Digitalized Wellesley
Index," and John North, Waterloo Academic Press, with "The Open Secret
of Victorian Periodicals: Micro and Macro Researching Strategies when using
The Waterloo Directory of English Newspapers and Periodicals, 1800-1900."
Gowan Dawson, University of Sheffield, closed this panel with a presentation
entitled "University of Sheffield Science Periodicals Database."
An afternoon panel, "Publishers and Editors,"
chaired by Anne Humpherys, City University of New York, featured two presenters.
Louis James, University of Kent, gave a paper entitled "George Stiff: A
'shadow on the wall' in the world of Mid-Victorian Popular Journalism,"
in which he argued that George Stiff (1807-1873) was an important editor
and proprietor, yet almost nothing is known of him; while Stiff's London
Journal (1845-1912) changed the face of the Victorian illustrated penny
periodical and achieved sales approaching half a million, his Bohemian
life kept him teetering between wealth and bankruptcy; he was studiously
ignored by society; and when he died penniless, even his place of death
was misrepresented. Gowan Dawson's "Stranger than Fiction: Spiritualism,
Intertextuality, and W.M. Thackeray's Editorship of the Cornhill Magazine,
1860-62" proposed that while contributors to the Cornhill Magazine were
famously debarred from broaching controversial subjects such as religion,
politics, and sex, William Makepeace Thackeray, in his role as editor,
actively encouraged the discussion of Spiritualism and pieced together
a particular configuration of contributions in which the different implications
would move, intertextually, from article to article. The paper also suggested
that by viewing Thackeray in terms of a Foucauldian "editor function" instead
of the usual emphasis solely on his role as author, new aspects of this
highly canonical Victorian writer are revealed.
The 2000 Michael Wolff Lecture, chaired by Christopher
Kent, University of Saskatchewan, and given by Aled Jones, University of
Wales, Aberystwyth, was entitled "The Dart and the Damning of the Sylvan
Stream: Journalism and Political Culture in the Late Victorian City." The
Dart, a Birmingham satirical weekly (1876-1911), assumed in 1892 a position
highly critical of the city's endorsement of an ambitious water supply
scheme. In doing so, it not only located itself in relation to other regional
periodicals, but also focused attention on the private vs. the collective
in urban culture and on the imperial reach of the Victorian city.
The first session on Friday morning offered
a choice of two panels. "Encounters for New Identities (1)," chaired by
Maria Frawley, University of Delaware, began with a paper by Patricia O'Hara,
Franklin and Marshall College, Pennsylvania, entitled "'Knowing Hodge':
Representing the Rural Labourer in the Late-Victorian Periodical Press."
In "'Preaching to the Ladies': Fashion and Feminism in Florence Fenwick-Miller's
Column in the Illustrated London News," Barbara M. Onslow, University of
Reading, argued that Fenwick-Miller's "Ladies' Column," which ran in the
London Illustrated News from 1886-1917, was amongst the most ingenious
of its genre, combining frivolity with the incisive commentary of a suffragist
in its lively chronicling of "Society doings" and fashion. Karen Steele,
Texas Christian University, closed this panel with her paper "'Editing
out Sectarianism': The Literary and Political Consequences in Ireland's
Shan Van Vocht." Focusing on a collection of romances, and reading them
together with the political projects outlined in the editorials of the
Shan Van Vocht, this paper exposed the political, literary, and commercial
consequences of the paper's gendered imperative--one that sought, unsuccessfully,
to unity nationalists across region, class, sex, and religion.
The second panel in this session was "Foreign
Encounters," chaired by Cheryl Cassidy, Eastern Michigan University. "'Without
free speech, man is not free': The Radical Russian-language Press in Victorian
England," by Helen Williams, Napier University, Edinburgh, focused on one
of the earliest Russian-language periodicals published in Victorian Britain:
Kolokol (The Bell), published between 1857-1868. Its editors succeeded
in maintaining a dialogue with a leadership network within the Russian
Empire. Williams' paper examined the nature of the dialogue and looked
at some published contributions from those readers. Deborah Logan, Western
Kentucky University, followed with a paper entitled "'Fighting a War of
Words': Harriet Martineau and Civil War Journalism." Barbara M. Freeman,
Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, concluded the panel with "'Mother
Britannia, Miss College Girl, and Old Mother Hubbard': Cartoons and Gender
Play in Canadian Victorian Periodicals." Freeman's paper explored the origins
of gendered images of femaleness, how they manifested themselves in cartoons
that appeared in liberal Victorian periodicals in Canada, and the cultural
messages they carried. Their depictions of the mother country, the so-called
New Woman, and even male politicians drawn as old women, played on these
enduring female stereotypes in order to present certain myths about Canada
and its relationships with Britain and the United States.
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The second session of the morning offered two
more panels. The first presentation of the panel entitled "Encounters
for Social Change," chaired by David Roberts, Dartmouth College, was "John
Chapman, the Westminster Review and Marriage and Divorce, 1885-1891," by
Sheila Rosenberg, Independent Scholar. This was a study of how selected
articles, by well-known writers such as Mona Caird and Eleanor Marx, came
to be published in the Westminster Review. It showed the importance of
the networks to which they belonged and the commitment and courage of the
editor in pushing forward the radical debate. The next paper, "Christian
Johnstone and Tait's Edinburgh Magazine," was by Alexis Easley, University
of Alaska Southeast. The last paper in this panel was Laurel Brake's "'Government
by Journalism'?: The Silence of the Star." According to Brake, gender plays
a part in the power of the press (1885-90) in ways unacknowledged in 1886.
By comparing press coverage of the heterosexual "Maiden Tribute" in 1885
with that of a homosexual brothel in "Cleveland Street" in 1889-90, the
limitation of the power of the press emerges clearly, as articulated in
the silence of even the radical Star, as well as the PMG and Truth.
The last panel of the morning, "Editors and Literary
Contacts: Dangerous Waters," chaired by Sally Mitchell, Temple University,
Philadelphia, began with a paper by Jennifer Phegley, University of Missouri-Kansas
City: "William Thackeray, Mary Braddon, and Emily Faithfull: Editors as
Healers of the 'Disease of Reading.'" This paper explored how Thackeray
in the Cornhill, Braddon in Belgravia, and Faithfull in the Victoria opposed
the common view of women readers as the most susceptible victims of the
"disease of reading" by promoting images of women as critical thinkers
who could productively engage in the important discussions of the day.
Caroline Sumpter, University of Leeds, followed with "'I wonder were the
fairies socialists?' Political Appropriations of the Fairy Tale in the
Labour Prophet and Labour Leader." Examining the fusion of politics and
myth in socialist periodicals' children's columns, Sumpter's paper focused
on the dialogic nature of this juvenile reading experience. Exploring published
fantasy fictions and subsequent child correspondence, it engaged with the
ideological re-invention of the fairy tale by Keir Hardie and his politicized
juvenile audience. The last paper of the panel, "Community and Authority
in Eliza Cook's Journal," presented by Johanna M. Smith, University of
Texas, discussed double address in Eliza Cook's Journal. Focusing first
on educational/disciplinary authority in articles on sanitary science and
on women's issues, it then speculated on the sexuality of Cook herself
and of Eliza Meteyard's story "Lucy Dean" in order to suggest a lesbian
community for the Journal.
"Encountering New Identities (2)" was the topic
for the first panel of the afternoon sessions. Chaired by Sheila Rosenberg,
this panel began with a paper by James Gregory, University of Southampton,
entitled "The Vegetarian Press in Britain, 1847-1901: Editors, Publishers,
and Readers." Gregory's paper surveyed the British "food reform" periodicals
produced from 1847 onwards: their characteristics, locations and readership,
and the wider reform context. Supporting material was provided: a listing
of serial titles, including "pro-vegetarian" titles, sample contents of
the periodicals, and notes on the editors and publishers. In "'A Literature
of Its Own': Towards a Morphology of Cheap Reading in the Mid-Victorian
Period," Ian Haywood, Roehampton Institute, London, argued for a "return
to the political turn" in our approach to nineteenth-century periodicals.
He urged a cautious approach to "post-modern permissiveness" and asked
for a renewed attention to class as a primary constituent of reading formations.
The emergence of cheap reading in the nineteenth century is a highly politicized
narrative with particular "peaks" at moments of intense mass agitation.
Anti-radicals used the discourse of sensation to malign both mass politics
and popular reading, but this misrepresents the unique ways in which cheap
periodicals performed an accommodation between the high ideals of "popular
progress" and the cultural politics of melodrama. According to Haywood,
this achievement has been forgotten in the wake of the Victorian repression
of Chartism. Andrew King, Birkbeck, University of London, concluded the
panel with "Au Bonheur des Dames to The Ladies Paradise: Translating Zola
into the British Mass-Market."
Linda Hughes, Texas Christian University, chaired
the panel on "Women Editors and Readers," which featured papers by Andrew
Maunder, University of Hertfordshire, Constance Fulmer, Pepperdine University,
California, and Joanne Shattock, University of Leicester. In his paper
"'I might have done better with it': Helen Mathers, George Bentley and
the Burlington Magazine, 1880-81," Maunder draws on recent work on gender-as-performance
as part of a preliminary examination of the career of the popular novelist,
Helen Mathers (?1850-1920). Drawing on Mathers' letters to her publisher
George Bentley and Helen Black's interview with the novelist which appeared
in the "Ladies' Pictorial" in 1891, he suggested that Mathers' preoccupation
with role playing as woman's real occupation becomes part of the ethos
of her own magazine, The Burlington (1881-82). Fulmer's paper was entitled
"Women Who Practiced What They Preached: The Victorian Periodical Press
as a Pulpit for Advocating Employment for Women." In the 1870s and 1880s,
Edith Simcox cleverly used religious rhetoric in the mainstream periodicals
to mitigate the threat of remunerative work for women and also provided
jobs and better working conditions for women, as did Barbara Bodichon and
Bessie Parkes and their converts Jessie Boucherett and Emily Faithfull
two decades earlier. Shattock concluded the panel with "Amateurs or Professionals:
Women Journalists and the Higher Journalism."
"Images and Audience," a panel chaired by Hélène
Roberts, Independent Scholar, began with a paper by Patricia De Montfort,
University of Glasgow, entitled "The 'Atlas' and the Butterfly: James McNeil
Whistler, Edmund Yates and the World." Mark Turner, University of Surrey,
Roehampton, followed with "Cruising the Yellow Book," and John Plunkett,
Birkbeck University of London, concluded the panel with "Visualizing Victoria:
Illustrated Journalism and the Monarchy," which examined the lavish attention
given to Queen Victoria by journals such as the Illustrated London News
and the Pictorial Times. It argued that the advent of the illustrated press
helped to reinvent the public position of the monarchy.
"Editors and Empire," one of the last panels
of the day, was chaired by J.O. Baylen, Independent Scholar. Dorothy O.
Helly, City University of New York, and Helen Callaway, University of Oxford,
presented their paper, "Constructing South Africa in the British Press,
1890-92: The Pall Mall Gazette, the Daily Graphic, and The Times." Exploring
three series of letters from South Africa by Edmund Garrett, Lord Randolph
Churchill, and Flora Shaw, the authors showed how different segments of
the press constructed an overarching imperial and imperialist view of the
region's mineral wealth, African labor problems, and political tensions
between progressive Britons and retrograde Boers. Angela Schwer, Fairmont
State College, West Virginia, also presented "The Tropes of Missionary
Discourse in Early Nineteenth-Century Missionary Periodicals."
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Margaret Beetham, Manchester Metropolitan
University, chaired one of the first panels Saturday morning: "Encountering
Fiction." Graham Law, Waseda University, Tokyo, presented "Serial Fiction
in Newspapers in the 1840s," and Michael Hancher, University of Minnesota,
presented "'Stealing Dickens's Child': Parley's Illuminated Library and
A Christmas Carol." The last paper of this panel was "Reviewers and Readers:
Dickens in the Athenaeum," by Ellen Miller Casey, University of Scranton,
in which she argued that the lengthy reviews of Dickens's novels in the
weekly Athenaeum reveal the reviewers' sense of his greatness and their
esteem for his morality and expansive sympathy. The frequent and extensive
comments on Dickens embedded in the reviews of other novelists from 1836
to 1900 reinforce and expand these judgments.
Also offered during the first session Saturday
morning was "Encountering Theories," chaired by David Finkelstein, Queen
Margaret University College. This panel began with a paper by Robert L.
Patten entitled "Reconceiving Time: The Victorian Almanack," followed by
Julianne Smith, Pepperdine University, California. Her paper, "'More common
gifts, such as we all possess': Margaret Oliphant and Thomas De Quincey
in Blackwood's Magazine," addressed the Victorian failure to articulate
a coherent masculine rhetoric which opened a rhetorical space where women
writers could flourish. The writings of Thomas De Quincey and Margaret
Oliphant in Blackwood's Magazine reveal ways in which the perceived endangerment
of style or rhetoric brought about by popular print redirected attention
away from formal notions of classical rhetoric and opened the way for women
writers to be shaped by as well as to reshape Victorian rhetoric. The panel
closed with "'Scissors and Paste': Journalism and the Development of Reading
Audiences in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain," by Jonathan Topham, Universities
of Leeds and Sheffield.
"Encountering Empire" was the topic for another
morning panel, this one chaired by Mark Turner. It opened with "The Empire
Writes Back: Native Informant Discourse in the Victorian Press," by Julie
F. Codell. Colonial theories assume that the "Other" was silenced and "spoken
for" by the colonizer. However, after 1840, over 100 articles by 60 authors
from British colonies and non-colonies affected by British imperialism
through foreign policy were published in 17 British periodicals. Aware
of Orientalist discourses, these authorial "native informants" negotiated
Orientalist assumptions, constructed a language of resistance, and suggested
changes to British imperial administration. Their political rhetoric mediated
between their own nationalistic, indigenous subaltern people and the British
public, and they argued from Enlightenment principles and a satiric tone
that applied to "orientalist" traits to the British. They addressed British
readers directly to instigate changes in imperial policies, as well as
to educate them about colonial peoples, cultures, and societies. In "Turning
Defeat into Victory: Victorian Press Interpretations of Monuments to Gordon,"
Jerry N. Smith, Arizona State University, dealt with press interpretations
of the monuments to Charles Gordon by Royal Academicians Edward Onslow
Ford and Hamo Thornycroft. By examining cartoon imagery from Punch, he
demonstrated how Ford's placement of Gordon atop a camel became a call
for the reclamation of Empire, turning Gordon's actual defeat into a symbolic
victory. The panel closed with a paper by Peter Sinnema, University of
Alberta, Edmonton, Canada: "Around the World without a Gaze: Englishness,
Empire, and the Press in Jules Verne."
Barbara Quinn Schmidt, Southern Illinois University
at Edwardsville, chaired the panel on "Readers Writing Back," which featured
papers by Judith Knelman, University of Western Ontario, Kathleen McCormack,
Florida International University, and Thomas J. Tobin, Duquesne University,
Pittsburgh. Knelman's paper, "Marriage on the Agenda," described several
series of letters to the editor of the Daily Telegraph between 1868 and
1898 on changing attitudes to marriage. While it appears that these protracted
correspondences were used to fill the paper when Parliament was not in
session, they now serve as a record to what ordinary people, especially
women, thought about such issues as paid employment for wives and mothers,
the standard of living that it was necessary to offer a wife, and the desirability
of constant social companionship between husband and wife. McCormack followed
with "'Correspondence' in the Mid-Victorian Ladies Companion: Editors,
Readers, and Scornful Rejections." The panel concluded with Tobin's "The
Reader as Editor in John Ruskin's Defense of Pre-Raphaelitism in the Victorian
Press," in which he asserted that John Ruskin, in his defense of Pre-Raphaelitism
in the 1851 London Times, was his own editor. Ruskin subsumed his critics,
making them part of the process of his thinking, thus changes in Ruskin's
thinking are best seen not in his books, but in the week-to-week fluctuation
in his periodical correspondence.
One of the last two panels of the 2000 conference,
"Editors and/as Authors," was chaired by Michael Wolff, University of Massachusetts.
It opened with David Finkelstein's paper entitled "Receipt Acknowledged:
Submissions to Blackwood's Magazine, 1901-1904," followed by "'The Healthy
Fact of Working for One's Bread': George Eliot, Editor and Reviewer," by
Fionnuala Dillane, Trinity College, Dublin. Her paper argued that George
Eliot's own awareness of the market pressures and genre-driven tensions
central to mid-nineteenth-century journalism, as demonstrated in her editorial
correspondence and in her 1956 article "The Natural History of German Life,"
indicates the significant influence of her time as a professional journalist
on her life-long writing career. The panel concluded with "The Reality
of Authorship: The Influence of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine on the Brontë
Juvenilia," by Katherine Frank, University of Washington, which used Charlotte
and Branwell Brontë's juvenile writing, modeled after Blackwood's
Edinburgh Magazine, as a case study for considering the influence of collaboration
and collectivity on Victorian authorship. The siblings' bold and transparent
writing, their literary partnership, and the longevity of their project
all help to show the role that collaboration plays in the genesis of literary
careers.
Michael Harris, Birkbeck, University of London,
chaired "Political Encounters," a panel which opened with "'Fear of Anarchy':
International Terrorism, The Times and The Princess Casamassima," by Christine
DeVine, University of Wisconsin-Madison. In the 1880s, while frightening
its readers with lurid details of bloody assassinations and explosions,
The Times placates its readers by suggesting that working-class revolt
cannot happen in England. DeVine argued that Henry James, in The Princess
Casamassima, contravenes the all-knowing, middle-class voice of The Times.
"'Astonishing Secrets Disclosed to the Well-Informed Mind': The Politics
of Charles Knight's Penny Magazine," by Paul Thomas Murphy, University
of Colorado, Boulder, explored the first (1832) volume of the Penny Magazine
to demonstrate the remarkable consistency and depth of the periodical's
liberal ideology, suggesting that that ideology informs articles on subjects
as diverse as lobster shells, breadfruit, the Pyramids of Egypt, sugar,
and the Thames Tunnel. This panel concluded with the presentation of a
paper by Alex Nalbach, University of Michigan, Flint, entitled "'The Wily
Doctor': Sigmund Englander and the Intrigues of Telegraphic News Gathering,
1850-1900."
University of South Florida
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