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Issue 3: Autumn 2006 Literature and the Press: 1800 / 1900 Click here	This issue, guest edited by Jo McDonagh and Anna Vaninskaya opens up some of the questions that periodicals pose across the long nineteenth century. Contributors: Matthew Beaumont, Luisa Calè, Anne Humpherys, Felicity James, Laura Marcus, Carol Peaker
Issue 2: Spring 2006 The Long Nineteenth Century Click here	This issue, offers papers originating from a conference organised by the Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies at Birkbeck in 2005 which considered the question of the Long Nineteenth Century. Contributors: Adriana Craciun, Ella Dzelzainis, David Feldman, Margot Finn, Iwan Morus and Elizabeth Prettejohn
Issue 1: Autumn 2005 Interdisciplinarity Click here	This issue builds on a conference on the theme of The Moving Subject: Interdisciplinarities in Nineteenth-Century Studies held at the Institute for English Studies, London. Contributors: Michael Allis, Patrizia di Bello, Regenia Gagnier, Anne Humpherys, Rohan McWilliam, Jim Mussell and Suzanne Paylor

 

Issue 3 - Autumn 2006

Literature and the Press: 1800 / 1900

 

Introduction

Josephine McDonagh and Anna Vaninskaya

Periodicals had a crucial role in defining literary culture, disseminating ideas and information, and providing a dynamic context for lively debate across the long nineteenth century. But the periodical press was also a source of anxiety: it was perceived as a symptom of the expanding and newly democratising world of print, and was thought to have a distracting, or – worse - corrupting influence on the reading public. The satirist James Gillray, in the cartoon discussed by Luisa Calè in the lead article of this issue, presents a compelling image of the dangers of the press in his ‘cornucopia of ignorance': an expanding pile of magazines, the detritus of new-fangled and radical ideas littering the ground beneath a crowd of very unruly readers.

The status of periodicals in literary history has been equally uncertain: they have been studied as authoritative sources of particular literary works, often attributed primacy as the place of first publication, or as the medium of dissemination of scientific and political ideas; but they are also treated as secondary and ephemeral productions that precede and defer to more substantial forms of publication, primarily the book. Attending to the culture of periodicals opens up a whole new set of questions that unsettle some of the most important terms in literary and cultural study – questions to do with the nature of authorship, the integrity of the text as a work of art, the relationship between works of literature and other forms of writing, and between word and image. The polyphonous, or dialogic form of the periodical challenges the authority that tends to be bestowed on individual authors, suggests complex and collaborative modes of production and consumption, and useful ways of analyzing writing in its varied historical contexts.

The essays in this issue had their first airing at a symposium held in Oxford in the summer of 2005, in which we set out to open up some of the questions that periodicals pose across the long nineteenth century. The topic is a huge one, so in order to provide some focus we decided to concentrate attention at either end of the period. The idea was not to trace lines of development or identify points of rupture in an ongoing tradition, but rather to examine two discrete moments in their own terms, and see what areas of comparison and contrast emerged. In this issue, Luisa Calè and Felicity James look at Unitarian periodicals at the end of the eighteenth century – among the most important and influential titles of the time. Calè analyses what she calls ‘periodical personae', the theatrical and self-conscious performance of different identities in the context of the press, which as she says, ‘questions the universal abstract subjectivity' required in a Habermasian public sphere. James also considers the complex and conflicted nature of the trans-authorial periodical voice in the Monthly Magazine, and demonstrates the degree to which the periodical, even in its most literary aspects, presents a forum for contestation and dispute, appropriating and putting pressure on Unitarian ideals of sociability. Reading poetry in its periodical contexts, James argues, exposes the ways in which even the Romantic poetic voice is constituted responsively in the context of literary and political argument – less a singular voice, than part of an intense and sometimes overheated conversation.

Essays by Anne Humpherys, Matthew Beaumont, and Carol Peaker reveal the particularities of the press in the later period: the readership is wider and more socially diverse, but the topics and, consequently, the audiences are more specialized and segmented. From magazines published by Russian émigrés, to feminist organs aimed at lower middle class women, and reviews dedicated to the ‘sexual problem', the studies here demonstrate the wide range of fin de siècle periodical activity. But certain continuities with the magazines of a hundred years earlier will be readily observable. The theatrical and performative aspects of authorship are still very much a feature of the magazine – taken to an extreme, as Humpherys writes, in the persons of George Aston Singer and Roland de Villiers, two pseudonyms of a German émigré and petty criminal named Ferdinand Springmuhl, who edited the University Magazine and Free Review in the 1890s. Each of the magazines also continues to address an ‘imagined community', or ‘virtual community,' of readers, just as those of the earlier period had done. In the case of Shafts , Matthew Beaumont observes, the network of readers that constitutes the community is intriguingly underpinned by the magazine's interest in telepathic communication, and the contagion of germs – as though the metaphors of the corruption spread by print culture that were evoked by Gillray in the 1790s were now realized in embodied form. But there are other signs that the nature of address and the formation of readerships is changing in this period. In the case of the Russian émigré press, for instance, as discussed by Carol Peaker, the periodical aims to represent a particular community to a more general public, explicitly taking up and adapting the ambassadorial function that is latent in the other more or less propagandistic publications considered in these essays. Peaker analyses the different strategies of political self-presentation, and by highlighting the editors' use of literary fiction as the most effective means of manipulating the reader, she touches on the issue at the very heart of the relations between literature and the press.

	Periodical Personae: Pseudonyms, Authorship and the Imagined Community of Joseph Priestley's Theological Repository Luisa Calé Anonymous and pseudonymous publication suggest that the freedom of expression and circulation of ideas depends on the ‘negation of persons in public discourse' (William Warner). Like anonymity, pseudonymity suspends the referential anchoring which ties an utterance to a person or place. Yet rather than negating the personal identity of authors, pseudonyms shield them through fictional identities which project them into alternative imagined communities. In this paper I analyse the use of pseudonyms in a dissenting periodical publication, Joseph Priestley's Theological Repository (1769-1771, 1784-1788, rpt 1795). By resisting biographical forms of identification and accountability, the journal explored, anticipated and projected its own reception. Download full text (This requires Acrobat - Download free copy here)
From Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Charlotte Turner Smith. Elegiac sonnets, and other poems, by Charlotte Smith. Vol.I. The eighth edition. Illustration accompanying Sonnet IV in the collection, ‘Queen of the Silver Bow', p. 4.	Writing in Dissent: Coleridge and the Poetry of the Monthly Magazine Felicity James This essay explores the relationship between the individual author and the wider identity of the periodical, using as a case study Coleridge's contributions to the Monthly Magazine . I align the complicated dynamic of the individual participating in the collective enterprise to other debates of the time pursued in the pages and the poetry of the Monthly , focussing particularly on the dialectic of private affection versus wider benevolence, and, closely related to this, retirement versus social engagement. The poems of the Monthly , such as Coleridge's ‘Reflections on Entering into Active Life', and works by Lamb and Barbauld, strenuously participate in these debates; so too, I argue, do Coleridge's series of parodic sonnets published in 1797 under the name Nehemiah Higginbottom, which I re-read in the context of the Monthly and alongside the wider concept of the place of parody in the periodical. Download full text (This requires Acrobat - Download free copy here)
	Influential Force: Shafts and the Diffusion of Knowledge at the Fin de Siècle Matthew Beaumont The feminist journal Shafts , which ran from 1892 to 1899, edited by Margaret Shurmer Sibthorp, was an important forum for the discussion of women's oppression and liberation at the fin de siècle - though it has received comparatively little scholarly attention. In this article I outline the significance of Shafts' sometimes contradictory contribution to the social and political debates of the period, focusing in particular on the convergence of enlightenment and anti-enlightenment discourses in its pages. The relationship of these discourses is knotted together around the concept of ‘influential force', which is of signal importance to the argument of the opening article of the journal's inaugural issue, entitled ‘Shafts of Thought'. I contend that, to the main contributors of Shafts, the metaphorical significance of the notion of ‘influential force', which draws on contemporaneous scientific and spiritualist theories, lies in its capacity for reconceptualising the social and intellectual relations that obtain, at the end of the nineteenth century, among the readers of a progressive periodical. Download full text (This requires Acrobat - Download free copy here)
	The Journals that Did: Writing about Sex in the late 1890s Anne Humpherys This essay describes a ‘virtual community' of radical writers about ‘the sexual problem' in the half decade between the Oscar Wilde and George Bedborough trials (1895-1899), focusing on three journals: the Westminster , The Adult , and the University Magazine and Free Review . The article identifies a number of writers and editors who wrote for all three journals and also surveys the various discussions about monogamy, evolution, prostitution, marriage, free love, men and women's sex drives, and Oscar Wilde. It concludes with a discussion of the history of the University Magazine and Free Review and its scandalous owner and editor, who had an important role in first publishing Havelock Ellis and in keeping other radical social and psychological texts in print. Download full text (This requires Acrobat - Download free copy here)
	We are not Barbarians: Literature and the Russian Émigré Press in England, 1890–1905 Carol Peaker If any single factor militated against late Victorian support for a Russian revolution, it was the entrenched belief that Russians were barbarians, incapable of governing themselves, a race of ‘besotted savages utterly unfit for civilisation'. Yet during the last years of the nineteenth century, England faced a challenge to her conception of the Russian race. Educated and cultured Russian exiles toured up and down the country lecturing on Russian themes; they also published propaganda aimed at winning English hearts over to the Russian revolution. This paper examines two émigré magazines – the pro-Nihilist Free Russia (1890–1914) and its ostensibly less radical rival, The Anglo-Russian (1897–1914). Specifically, it explores how they used fiction, commentaries on Russian literature, and descriptions of Russian literary culture to advertise the race's creative and spiritual potential and its readiness for self-government. Download full text (This requires Acrobat - Download free copy here)
	Literature and the Press: Afterword. Laura Marcus In this afterword Laura Marcus draws together the papers collected for this issue and looks at what conclusions we might be able to draw on the impact that periodical publishing had 'around 1800' and 'around 1900' in terms of the role of the periodical press in cultural and political life and the importance of press and publishing history to an understanding of literary texts and formations. Download full text (This requires Acrobat - Download free copy here)
	Notes on contributors

Issue 2 (Spring 2006): The Long Nineteenth Century

Welcome from Dr David Feldman

Welcome to the second number of the first online journal of nineteenth-century studies!

Some broadly drawn but well-known and well-established paths mark the field of Victorian studies: the novel from Dickens through Eliot to Hardy, poetry from Tennyson to Swinburne, political history from the 1832 Reform Act to the Boer War, and, following the interdisciplinary impulse that has so often animated the field, studies of the Victorian city, from the Manchester of Kay and Engels to the London of Morrison and Booth. Yet these conventions of periodization have never been settled. In the field of history there has long been a powerful alternative narrative – one that can be traced back to Toynbee and the Hammonds – that emphasises the long-term transformations wrought by the industrial revolution and so traces Victorian reform and urbanism to more fundamental processes inaugurated in the last decades of the eighteenth century. In literary studies, the phenomenal growth of interest in the fin de siecle has had a disruptive effect on the established contours of Victorianism. The attraction of the moment in part lies in the way that it is Victorian yet in important ways anticipates modernism.

More recently, the field of Victorian studies has encountered diverse disruptive influences. The revolt from grand narrative and the increasing interest in the particularities of moments have brought into question the very practice of periodization. Where an interest in periodization persists the decades unproblematically available to Victorianists has come under question. The voracious appetite of scholars committed to a long eighteenth century means that that field now encompasses a large part of the nineteenth century as well as the eighteenth and chunks of the seventeenth centuries. The impact of diligent studies of literary modernism and of twentieth-century histories that sensibly trace their origins to the late nineteenth century has had a similar effect. Moreover, it is interesting to speculate on the impact of the twenty-first century on the field. The interposition of another century between the nineteenth century and the present means that the casual claims that the Victorians disclose the origins of the present are less immediately plausible than once they were. More important, perhaps, is that scholars have asked questions and pursued issues that clearly extend beyond the boundaries of the Victorian period. Most obviously, the growing interest in representations of race and difference, in national identities, and in histories of empire, bring into focus a field of research that has vast implications for Victorianists but that also bursts the boundaries of conventional periodization.

It is in this context, in which the idea of the Victorian is in question, that in November 2005 the Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies at Birkbeck organised a conference on the idea of the long nineteenth century. The papers gathered here, with the exception of Ella Dzelzainis's, were among those presented at the conference. Our starting point was not one of partisanship but a desire to interrogate this alternative periodization. The papers approach the idea of the long nineteenth century in two different ways. Margot Finn and Iwan Morus assess the value of the concept from particular disciplinary perspectives: history and history of science respectively. The papers by Adriana Craciun, Ella Dzelzainis and Elizabeth Prettejohn, open to question the boundaries of the Victorian by connecting that period to the legacy of the 1790s (Craciun and Dzelzainis) and to the early twentieth-century. (Prettejohn) Read together, the papers appear to offer a qualified confirmation of the heuristic value of the long nineteenth century. At the same time, the papers are self-consciously provisional. They are not meant to a represent a coherent line, least of all are they a bid to create a new orthodoxy, rather we hope that they will stimulate further reflection and debate, not least within the (virtual) pages of “19”.

 

 

Rossetti, Ecce Ancilla Domini! 1849-50, Tate. Image Courtesy of ARC, Art Renewal Center.	From Aestheticism to Modernism, and Back Again Elizabeth Prettejohn This paper argues that the conventional art-historical periodization, in which Modernism inexorably supersedes Aestheticism, and the year 1900 marks a radical break in the history of art, is seriously flawed: not only historiographically naïve, it is also tinged with misogyny and homophobia. In a long perspective, it clearly makes sense to divide Victorian Aestheticism from twentieth-century Modernism. But in the shorter time frame of the very end of the Victorian period and the first few years of the twentieth century (the end of the `long nineteenth century`), the divide is not one of period. Aestheticism and Modernism overlap at this historical moment, and both of them involve serious exploration of basic problems in aesthetics and art theory. The difference between them is not a matter of chronology; instead it is a question of art-historical valuation, of what will count (in Clive Bell's term) as `significant` in modern art. The paper compares Aestheticist and Modernist paintings to argue that the similarities between them may be as important as the differences, and that this observation may change our evaluations on both sides. Download full text (This requires Acrobat - Download free copy here)
	Replacing Victoria's Scientific Culture Iwan Morus Traditional views of nineteenth century science has viewed it in terms of a largely unproblematic institutional consolidation. More recently, the consensus view of the century as a period of leisurely progress towards scientific professionalization has been decisively broken. In particular the issues of what counted as science at all and what sorts of spaces counted as scientific have been rigorously contested. A variety of new accounts of Victorian science have now emerged, built around new sets of questions concerning science's place in culture and the emergence of new strategies of self-fashioning and legitimation. In this overview I survey promising trends in the cultural history of nineteenth-century science with a view to assessing the possibility of resurrecting a new grand narrative. I suggest in conclusion that the possibility of reconstructing such a big picture as an explicitly political account might be improved by rethinking the category of Victorian science and reorienting our understanding around the French Revolution and its immediate aftermath. Download full text (This requires Acrobat - Download free copy here)
	Revolution, Romanticism and the Long Nineteenth Century Adriana Craciun In order to consider the future of Victorian literary studies within the long nineteenth century, we must go back to that earlier “period” of the nineteenth century, and the French Revolution of 1789. Drawing on the aesthetic and political innovations of 1790s women's writings, this essay argues that we need to reconceive of nineteenth-century literary studies beyond the period boundaries of Romantic and Victorian. The sexualization of revolutionary Terror, and particularly of Robespierre, in Romantic-era writings by women like Helen Maria Williams, Mary Robinson and Fanny Burney, offers surprising precedents for the feminization of Terror associated with the retrospectives of Victorian writers like Carlyle and Dickens. In this respect, and given many other aesthetic continuities (for example, the crossgender and cross-period appeal of the “poetess” figure), the “Victorian period” appears increasingly unsatisfactory when compared to the merits of a long nineteenth-century model for literary studies. Download full text (This requires Acrobat - Download free copy here)
	Reason vs Revelation: Feminism, Malthus, and the New Poor Law in Narratives by Harriet Martineau and Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna Ella Dzelzainis My article examines the profoundly influential presence of eighteenth-century stadial or ‘four stages' theory in industrial fiction of the early Victorian period. Axiomatic within this Enlightenment theory was the assumption that the treatment of women was a reliable index to the civilized status of any society. The two women writers studied here, Harriet Martineau (1802-76) and Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna (1790-1846), took opposing sides in the debate over Malthusian political economy and interpreted stadial theory in correspondingly different ways. Martineau's enthusiastic Malthusianism in the Illustrations of Political Economy (1832-4) foresaw a feminist future brought about by illimitable progress and the spread of reason. With the deliberate aim of countering Martineau's views, the pre-Millenarian Evangelical Tonna asserted the truth of revelation in The Wrongs of Woman (1843-4) and positioned women's domestic subordination as integral to England's continued pre-eminence as a commercial nation. This essay examines the religious, social and political grounds on which these two adversaries staked their arguments, and does so through an analysis of their fictional accounts of the status, role, and treatment of working women in an industrializing society.   Download full text (This requires Acrobat - Download free copy here)
	When Was the Nineteenth Century Where? Whither Victorian Studies? Margot Finn Whilst acknowledging the usefulness of the descriptor ‘Victorian' to the work of social historians, this essay argues that a proper account of modernity, and of the Victorians' positioning within it, can only be apprehended by taking a longer view, be it within the framework of a long nineteenth or a long twentieth century. Finally, though, Finn argues that chronology is less important than the disciplinary and geographical boundaries of the field. The question should not be ‘when was the Victorian era?' but also ‘ where was it?' Interdisciplinarity, Britain's place in Europe, and the problems of empire are the three issues that Finn deems should be at the forefront of Victorian Studies in the twenty-first century. Download full text (This requires Acrobat - Download free copy here)
	REVIEWS The Album as Museum? A Response to Patrizia di Bello on an Interdisciplinary Approach to Mrs Birkbeck's Album Vicky Mills, Birkbeck This review develops Patrizia di Bello's model of the album as female collection outlined in her article ‘Mrs Birkbeck's Album: The hand-written and the Printed in Early Nineteenth-Century Feminine Culture'. The review explores the practice of Victorian women's album-making in the context of ideas about collecting and the nineteenth-century museum. It argues that such albums both appropriate and subvert aspects of museum practice. Mrs Birkbeck's album challenges the idea of a traditional, chronological display but it utilises the juxtapositional elements inherent in museum exhibition to great interpretive effect.   Download full text (This requires Acrobat - Download free copy here)
	Notes on Contributors
Issue 1 (Autumn 2005): Interdisciplinarity
	Welcome to the first number of the first online journal of nineteenth-century studies! Launched at Birkbeck, University of London on 1 October 2005, 19 is a new electronic publishing initiative designed to achieve two main aims: to publicise and disseminate the research activities carried out under the auspices of Birkbeck's interdisciplinary Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies; and to provide practical research and professional development opportunities for the large and active body of postgraduate students currently undertaking research degrees in nineteenth-century studies at the College. read more...
	Cultural Philanthropy, Gypsies and Interdisciplinary Scholars: Dream of a Common Language Regenia Gagnier, University of Exeter Although he was a major force in fin-de-siecle cultural philanthropy in both North America and Britain, Charles Godfrey Leland is today known mainly through Occult websites on the Internet. This essay retrieves his research on the gypsies, revealing an unexplored source of Victorian philanthropy, and scrutinizes it from the perspectives of disciplines different from his own, philology: history, demography, ethnic studies, ethics, and politics. The essay is in four parts: I. Victorian Cultural Philanthropy: People Making People, and Some People Making Things II. Gypsy Lorists: The Non-Christian Roots of Philanthropy, III. Philanthropy's Other: The Persecution of the Gypsies, IV. Interdisciplinarity as Collectivity. Download full text (This requires Acrobat - Download free copy here)
	What is Interdisciplinary about Victorian History today? Rohan McWilliam, Anglia Polytechnic University This article examines the way demands for interdisciplinarity have shaped the writing of Victorian history in recent years. It briefly explores the writing of Victorian history since the 1930s (arguing that the interdisciplinary impulse is nothing new) so as to consider the peculiarities of the post-1980 historiography. A range of works by cultural historians (such as Judith Walkowitz and Peter Bailey) who made a distinctive contribution to debates about the Victorians in the late twentieth century are assessed in order to understand the current state of the academic conversation. The article discusses both the strengths and weaknesses of recent approaches. It argues that interdisciplinary cultural history has so far resisted attempts to create a new synthesis and ponders ways in which such a synthesis might be achieved. Download full text (This requires Acrobat - Download free copy here)
	Mrs Birkbeck's Album: The Hand-written and the Printed in Early Nineteenth Century Feminine Culture Patrizia di Bello Mrs Birkbeck's Album, collected between 1825 and 1847 by the wife of the founder of the College, contains poems, songs and other texts, as well as drawings and watercolours by famous women and men of her time. Like the collections that aristocratic women were able to spread over galleries and libraries, the album formed and displayed her taste, showcasing her husband's reputation and the cultural and political circles in which the couple moved. Several contributors to her album also worked for annuals, fashionable publications associated with a debased, commercialised feminine culture. Unlike these mechanically produced pages, Mrs Birkbeck's album, marked by individual hands rather than by printing presses, is the result of gift exchanges, removed from the world of commodified culture, even as it partakes of its glamour. Recent publications have explored the emergence of women's magazines, but little consideration has been given to album making. In this paper I explore the social meanings of Mrs Birkbeck's interest in albums. To facilitate a close reading of its individual pages, I am working towards digitising the album, in collaboration with Birkbeck Library and the Vasari Lab in the School of History of Art, Film and Visual Media. Download full text (This requires Acrobat - Download free copy here) There is a reply to this article in Issue 2 by Vicky Mills
	Shared Concerns: Thoughts on British Literature and British Music in the Long Nineteenth Century Michael Allis, Royal Academy of Music As part of the growth of interdisciplinary studies, a number of recent writings have focused upon links between music and literature in the long nineteenth century. In addition to the general significance of music in the work of individual authors and poets, scholars have highlighted particular imagery used in the literary representation of music (charting its effect on narrative and characterisation), and explored the literary reception of several composers. Within this growing body of literature, references to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British music are significant by their absence. This article therefore aims to redress the balance by suggesting that there are connections between British music and literature in this period, and that these connections are significant. A number of approaches are discussed to highlight their potential, including composer-author affinities, collaborations, generic parallels, hidden narratives, and the suggestion that musical settings of texts can represent critical ‘readings' of those texts. A range of examples (with musical illustrations and sound clips) suggest how this particular interdisciplinary focus can lead to the reassessment of individual musical and literary works, and help to explore wider cultural connections within the Victorian and Edwardian era. Download full text (This requires Acrobat - Download free copy here)
	Mapping the "Mighty Maze": Nineteenth Century Serials Edition James Mussell and Suzanne Paylor This paper reflects on attempts, past and present, to map the mighty maze of periodical literature. The Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition Project (ncse), seeks to achieve two key objectives. First the ncse project responds to the pressing need to preserve fragile printed items in ways which maintain their integrity as historical material objects. Electronic editions offer to new opportunities to re-present such material in a way that is, for the first time, comprehensive and freely available. ncse will create an electronic edition of six nineteenth--century periodicals. Second, ncse, aims to formulate and implement new ways of realising our current scholarly conceptualisation of these materials in electronic form. At a time when new digital editions promise to revolutionise the way resource users across the humanities work with their materials this paper explores timely questions about the role of the scholar in this process. Download full text (This requires Acrobat - Download free copy here)
	Putting Women in the Boat in The Idler (1892-1898) and TO-DAY (1893-1897) Anne Humpherys In this essay I show how the monthly illustrated journal, The Idler (1892-1898), under the editorship of Jerome K. Jerome, despite its insistent masculinist tone and viewpoint, becomes multidisciplinary in both content and voice through the introduction of women contributors and the use of illustrations of women on its covers, title pages, and its fiction and articles. Both the women's contributions, especially to the popular department ‘The Idler's Club', and the illustrations result in a journal that can be defined as a conversation between masculine and feminine perspectives on issues of culture during the 1890s. Download full text (This requires Acrobat - Download free copy here)
	Notes on Contributors

Also in this issue

	Linking to the nineteenth century Mugshots from a Welsh archive, Oscar Wilde paper dolls, movie special effects from 1902... We've trawled the web and found some of the best, most interesting and downright weird materials from and about the long nineteenth century. Check them out here...