The London Journal, 1845-83

Periodicals, Production and Gender

Andrew King

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351886390
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

This book is the first full-length study of one of the most widely read publications of nineteenth-century Britain, the London Journal, over a period when mass-market reading in a modern sense was born. Treating the magazine as a case study, the book maps the Victorian mass-market periodical in general and provides both new bibliographical and theoretical knowledge of this area. Andrew King argues the necessity for an interdisciplinary vision that recognises that periodicals are commodities that occupy specific but constantly unstable places in a dynamic cultural field. He elaborates the sociological work of Pierre Bourdieu to suggest a model of cultural 'zones' where complex issues of power are negotiated through both conscious and unconscious strategies of legitimation and assumption by consumers and producers. He also critically engages with cultural theory as well as traditional scholarship in history, art history, and literature, combining a political economic approach to the commodity with an aesthetic appreciation of the commodity as fetish. Previous commentators have coded the mass market as somehow always 'feminine', and King offers a genealogy of how such a gender identity came about. Fundamentally, however, the author relies on new and extensive primary research to ground the changing ways in which the reading public became consumers of literary commodities on a scale never before seen. Finally, King recontextualizes within the Victorian mass market three key novels of the time - Walter Scott's Ivanhoe (serialised in the London Journal 1859-60), Mary Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1863), and a previously unknown version of Émile Zola's The Ladies' Paradise (1883) - and in so doing he lends them radically new and unexpected meanings.

Part 1

Periodical Discourse

Chapter One

Periodical Questions

Questions of Enquiry

The London Journal. The Encyclopedia Britannica puts the circulation at 170,000 in 1850 (11 ed., [sic] s.v. »Periodicals«); Fox Bourne (2, 228) gives the figure in 1855 as 510,000, which agrees with the Leeds sample and with the estimate of a writer in Household Words (1858, Aug. 21, 218). In 1869, a writer in the St. James’ Magazine (Vol. 3, p.4) put it at 120,000. At first a journal of the Family Herald type, though even more trashy in its contents, it eventually (after 1865) gave more and more prominence to women’s fashions. Readers lower to middle class women, educational standard low.

(Ellegard, 1957: 37)

At a time when many previously unexplored areas of print culture are being charted – the American dime novel, the ‘Other Tradition’ of mass-market American woman writers, the globally-circulating newspaper novel – there is no full-length account of one of the most pervasive print media, the nineteenth- century British penny fiction weekly. This study is concerned to fill this gap by focussing on the first series of the most popular illustrated example, The London Journal and Weekly Record of Literature, Science and Art between 1845 and 1883. I shall treat this magazine not as an isolated entity but as a case study and vantage point from which to explore both the wider field of Victorian periodicals and issues concerning mass-market culture in general.

In recent years, a discipline whose primary educational aim is literacy in present- day media has appeared in the academic firmament with all the apparent suddenness and glamour of a super nova: media studies. Taking literacy to mean ability to use various hermeneutic techniques, it has tended to prioritize theoretical speculation and textual analysis over history, paying the merest lip-service to long-term transformations in its object of study – when they are mentioned at all. On the other hand, and all too often ignoring the theoretical insights of media studies altogether, positivistic histories of print and reading are also burgeoning under the general category of ‘History of the Book’. The present study aims to address both hermeneuts and historians. Those in search of biblio- or biographical descriptions of products and producers will certainly find them here, but those interested in theorization of mass-market media consumption will find that too.

I do not seek an easy synthesis of these different and, to many, antithetical approaches. Rather I use each methodology, the ‘media studies’ and the ‘historical’, to activate and critique the other. As I suggested in the ‘Preface’, it is oscillation between the two that I value, not one side isolated from or prioritized above the other in what is by now a conventional but still emotionally fraught debate. For it is oscillation that enables analysis of how a periodical might operate as a particularly luminous example of what is itself multiple and mobile, the commodity fetish.

Towards the beginning of Capital, Marx commented on how complex and indeed ‘metaphysical’ a commodity is, suggesting that the material alone is inadequate to describe its operation:

A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties … [in the marketplace] it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities.

(Marx, 1887:76-7)

The commodity fetish has then a double nature, as physical ‘product of men’s hands’ and the metaphysical magic we attribute to the product. Even though this orthodox Marxist notion underlies the whole of the present book, I have not found it necessary to take on board Marx’s thought in toto. Indeed, as will become clear, I do not accept the utopian Hegelian division of society into two opposing classes whose conflict will eventually bring about a revolutionary Aufhebung. It seems to me, however, that employing the commodity fetish as a governing concept allows alternation between ‘soft’ media studies and ‘hard’ historical data. While I consider it vital to uncover who produced, sold and bought what, when, where and for how much, this nonetheless does not entirely explain the ‘social relation’ between producer and consumer, or indeed between that pair and the social totality. A fiction periodical such as the London Journal has less obvious use value than the table Marx talks of elsewhere in his chapter. Its use value comprises in fact its stimulation and permission of fantasy of various kinds – ‘the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world’ – even when, as I shall show in Part 3, it is communicating what seem the facts of ‘news’. Its identity as a medium is then precisely equivalent to its status as a commodity fetish indicative of a ‘definite social relation’ between people. It is this varying and complex relation, apparently with a will of its own, independent of the producer but which the producer is constantly trying to control, that I shall explore in my speculations concerning the pleasures of the text, all the while bearing in mind the material conditions of textual production.

As a medium, a periodical is most obviously concerned with communication between writers and readers. But these are not the only elements involved in the periodical as social relation. As Robert Darnton (1990: 111-13) has pointed out, the communication circuit also involves publishers, printers, paper suppliers, shippers, booksellers, binders, and all their workers and variants, not to mention the complexities of legal, cultural and political sanctions and encouragements, and the various intellectual histories, aspirations and competencies of all involved.

In the Preface, I acknowledged my debt to accounts by previous writers of the nineteenth-century mass market. I feel it now necessary to suggest that the reader turn to them for a panoptical historical overview of mass-market reading, for although such a general history is conventional as an introduction in a book of this genre, I shall not offer one here. I am instead more concerned to formulate the questions such studies have provoked. For through their gaps, ironies, refusals and silent assumptions, they have helped me frame the theoretical questions I shall address and which my historical research will seek to answer. Besides the overarching enquiry into the implications of the periodical as commodity fetish, these questions fall under three main heads: the usefulness, nature and role of class, gender and geography as descriptive categories for a study in this area; the nature of reading; and the operation of the cultural status and location of texts.

The necessity of asking these questions is evident in especially concentrated form in the few lines of the epigraph to this chapter. Ellegard’s magisterial description of the London Journal in his much-cited monograph, The Readership of the Victorian Periodical Press, starts with a bare recital of a few circulation figures that indicate the periodical’s mass-market status. He implies through bare juxtaposition that the periodical must perforce be ‘trashy’, the figures acting as ‘proof of his value judgement. His high-culture attitude towards the text is unabashed; his juxtaposition of literary worthlessness with the Tower to middle class’ and with femininity is unproblematized and unconcealed. But were the Journal’s readers simply Tower to middle class’, female and uneducated? And even if they were, what do these terms mean? Is the Tower to middle class’ a unified social grouping? And if so, unified by what? Does it employ the same decoding practices in Leeds as in London? Are all women in that social group alike? Does uneducated inevitably mean stupid and easily led? The remainder of this chapter seeks to refine these lines of enquiry and to sketch out how I shall pursue them in the rest of the book.

Questions of Class, Gender and Geography

Although it is still a commonplace to use the terms working, middle and upper class in work on nineteenth-century media, I regard this terminology as inadequate to describe cultural consumption. Consumers of mass-market products should not be defined by ‘class’ in the strict sense of head-of-household income or place within the means of production, but should be classified mainly by their places within the means of cultural consumption. Louis James realized this in the early 1960s. Discussing readers of mass-market publications in the 1830s and 40s, he queried the idea that they were necessarily ‘working class’.

But what were ‘the working classes’? The factory hand and the miner certainly, but where should one place the small tradesman, or educated and generally respected lower-class men like William Lovett and S.T. Hall? There was a large and growing intermediary class. What was ‘the reading of the lower classes’? Starting with the Poor Man’s Guardian and Cleave’s Penny Gazette we move up the range until with Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal and the Family Herald one realizes that some periodicals span two fields. Then, the young Rossetti read [the penny serial] Ada the Betrayed, while workmen in coffee houses read Blackwood’s. There is no neat definition. Fortunately, the problem is less acute here than it would be even ten years later, for the working classes were closely unified by political and class feeling, and poverty meant that the price of literature largely determined the class of the reader, the poor buying the penny part, the middle classes feeling cheap literature had a social stigma. We are therefore reasonably safe to take as ‘lower class’, literature published at a penny, and some at three half-pence, largely omitting Chambers’s Journal after 1840, and the Family Herald...

(James, 1963: xii)

Clearly of the same thinking as E.P. Thompson (1963) in this passage, James did not want to jettison the political implications of ‘class’ terminology, even while his evidence contests it. Almost three decades later, Sally Mitchell also found a class- based social organization highly problematic when explaining what group magazines such as the London Journal appealed to. ‘[P]eople between the two nations’, ‘the petty bourgeoisie and the labor aristocracy’ characterized by ‘aspiration for respectability’ (Mitchell, 1989: 29, 33, 34) – these are descriptors that fit uneasily a vision of society organized in terms of place in the cycle of production. Later again, Patricia Anderson (1994: 156) wrote that the consumers of penny fiction magazines were ‘a socially diverse cultural formation of women and men, the youthful and the mature, the middle and the working classes. It was in this sense that the mass made itself. Working people had played a large part in this process …’. Like Mitchell and James, then, Anderson continues using the terminology of class even though for her it has become vague and almost detached from a politicized analytic framework.

As Patrick Joyce (1994, 1995) amongst many others has observed, ‘class’ has become increasingly problematic as an explanatory category, even when describing place in production, let alone consumption. This has been brought about in the late twentieth century both by huge shifts from production to consumption in employment and investment patterns in wealthy regions of the world, and, more recently again, by changes in the nature of communications technology. Realization that a much more complex social organization and hierarchy exists in the present than the old tripartite or even binary structure has also enabled us to see the multifariousness and hybridity of nineteenth-century society. Not only income levels and how these were generated, but also gender, geography, ethnicity, religion and attitudes to specific cultural formations were key determinants in their constitution. If we are to concern ourselves with the historical study of the markets of cultural consumption – in other words media history from the point of view of the consumer, reader or audience – then we need to heed the lessons of business studies and social anthropology on the social as comprising mobile overlapping structures. One has only to consider the 54 categories of ACORN neighbourhood segmentation, a sociological mapping much in use for product placement in 2004 and easily available on the Internet. While I am not at all suggesting a simple retrospective application of these 54 or any other categories to the nineteenth century, I do think that either a more precise sociology of consumption is necessary, or, as I do here, at least an attempt to identify the imaginary relations that the product as commodity encourages. Jonathan Rose’s magisterial Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (2001) actually concentrates on the reading habits of a very specific social group, the poor male industrial autodidact, who was much more likely to try to legitimate himself by consuming what he thought high- status texts. Although Teresa Gerrard (1998) and Patricia Anderson (1994) have combed correspondence columns of nineteenth-century penny fiction magazines, material on mass-market textual consumption remains very scarce and unreliable. While I have made use of what there is, I have mainly concentrated on the imaginary, fetishistic, relations that the commodity text encourages.

The London Journal, when it was successful as a mass-market magazine, refused to ally itself with any income group and reached out beyond specific geographical areas. Its complex relation to gender changed as perceived demography and the political landscape mutated. Its readers can instead be characterized in terms both negative – by their non-consumption of the exclusive culture of the quarterlies and other representatives of ‘difficult’ culture – and positive – by their desire for a literary culture that welcomes them. The common term in this opposition is the ambiguous and contested one of ‘culture’, key both for the many nineteenth- century groups who assigned themselves the attributes of either present or desired power, and in the repeated insistence in the late twentieth century on the Journal’s unstable, ambiguous but always median cultural position. ‘Salisbury Square Fiction’ and its non-respectable ilk took on board the techniques of material production from respectable producers of culture, but then used them to broadcast images and narratives that resisted the cultural codes issuing from their respectable ancestors. This resistance, rather than any notion of ‘incompetence’, is what is indicated by the extremely non-naturalistic prints and stylized narratives that James (1963, 1976) and Anderson (1994) reprint and comment on. Consumption of such culture meant rebellion, at least for the duration of the consumption. The Journal, on the other hand, discovered a reader that wanted the exclusivities of neither the resisting nor sanctioned cultures. Obvious as that may be as a general conclusion, its specificities are complex and unexpected, and my analysis has created the necessity for a new terminology that will be introduced and defined in due course. As befits the mobility of the market, this terminology is only local in its explanatory effects and requires constant redefinition if it is to be applied to different areas of the field and to different time periods.

Now in arguing that we move on from the language of class when analysing cultural consumption, I am not suggesting we abandon politics as a social engagement that seeks more equitable distribution of power and resources. On the contrary, my concerns about the many books today that continue to use terms such as ‘middle-class periodicals’ or ‘working-class serials’ lie precisely in the contradiction between the attenuation of such engagement while still clinging on to its language. Employment of the language of class seems an archaism, a residuum of a previous age whose politics have become tame, dutiful, a badge of belonging to specific academic sectors of the arts (cf. Bourdieu, 1988: 66-9). My rejection of the language of class is based not only on its descriptive inadequacy for my purposes, but also on my belief in the urgent necessity for the revival of political intervention in specific and focussed areas.

Just as cla...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• General Editors’ Preface
• Preface
• List of Abbreviations
• Part 1 Periodical Discourse
• Part 2 Periodical Production
• Part 3 Periodical Gender; or, The Metastases of the Reader
• Appendix: The London Journal’s Circulation Figures
• References
• Index